Honorable Mentions

Work Life Balance

By Cathy Borders

“I need a minute,” she says, hands in her hair, wringing, pulling, digging her nails into the soft dandruff.

He leans against a maple, “Take your time.”

At this she runs inside. 

“You can’t run away from your feelings!” he bellows. 

She jumps the couch, slides on polka dot socks into the kitchen. 

“I love you!”

Suddenly, he’s covered in snow. 

No, potassium bicarbonate. 

“Cool thyself!” 

“What the? What was I talking about?”

Coquettishly, she laughs and laughs as she slides down the wall and crumples into herself onto the floor. 

“You sprayed me with the fire extinguisher!” he says, wiping what looks like whipped cream from his chest onto the floor in clots. 

She once filled a pie tin with cream she beat herself into stiff peaks, whispering into the lactose, “You will not.”

But that was a long time ago. 

“You’re too hot for me! Get it? Cool thyself? I put out your fire…”

“You could never put out this fire, baby.”

She rolls her eyes so that he could see, so that it hurt. 

“I’m sorry I love my wife.”

“I’m not your wife, I’m a witch!” Now she’s in tears again. Sobbing, she bursts into a dozen bats. All of them skitter through his thinning hair. He catches one, and smears potassium bicarbonate all over its leather wings. 

“Now you can’t leave.”

She comes to, white foam in her hair.  “I’ll put the kids to bed,” she says, resigned, defeated. 

“I have that email to write,” he offers, she knows. 

“It’s fine, really.”

He draws a heart with his pointer finger in the foam on his chest. 

She reads the children a story about a magic fish who gives all of her friends one of her rainbow scales, so they can all feel as pretty as the fish once did. The mother cries in the shower, thinks about burning the book. She might be having a mental breakdown. 

He’s on the couch digging through the bucket of Halloween candy that’s nearly been picked clean.

“Any Snickers?”

“Ha! No.”

“I don’t even like Snickers.”

She puts her foot in his lap and he takes it in his hand and starts to massage her tender spots, but before he can switch to her other foot he turns back into a frog.

Stairwell Talk

By Nathan Hill

I find you sitting at the top of the stairs, cradling the building’s fire extinguisher in your lap. You must have heard me coming—I’d taken the stairs the whole way, floor after floor, feeling every step in those places where work makes itself known to the body. Despite this, I refuse the elevator. The night feels more complete this way, a long end to a long day. You look me up and down.

“Good shift?”

No. But you already know that. “You’re usually not awake right now. What’s going on?”

You shrug. The fire extinguisher rolls back and forth in your lap with the touch of your fingertips. “Just thinking.”

“And your friend there in your lap, that’s helping you think?” I take a few more steps up. We’re only a few feet apart. 

“Well, that’s what I’m thinking about,” you explain. I raise my eyebrows, and you press on. “Couldn’t sleep. So I knock on your door so we can hang out or whatever, but your little roommate Matt comes to the door instead and says you’re still at work—very rude of you, by the way—and Matt’s eating that disgusting soup, the one he eats out of the can, you know what I’m talking about?”

“Clam chowder.”

“Yes!” Your eyes widen. “Yeah, it’s clam chowder and he doesn't even slop it out into a bowl. Like, first of all, clam chowder is gross—”

“Wrong,” I interject.

“Shut up. It is. And he still has it in the stupid can, and I know that shit isn’t evenly heated. Awful! What was I talking about?”

“Fire extinguisher.”

“Right. So you’re not home, whatever, I’m wandering the halls because you’ve abandoned me, and I see the fire extinguisher, so I was going to do an experiment.”

“What kind of experiment?”

“What do you think would happen if I tossed this down the stairs?”

I laugh. “I don’t know. World might end.”

You lean forward. “We could find out.”

A half smile plays across your lips. The buzzy white of the fluorescents glares a halo around you. You expect me to say no—maybe that’s why you stayed up, for me to find you, take the canister from you, walk you to your door. But I don’t know, I think I’m tired of being reasonable. I think I want to surprise you.

“Alright.”

Your face lights up.

We hold the extinguisher between us, hands over hands, as we stand at the top of the stairs. “Ready?” you huff. “Okay—one, two, release!”

We draw back and let it sail. It wobbles through the air and lands with a dull clunk, clunk, clunk, before rolling to a stop. We’re out of breath.

“That was disappointing,” you say. We’re shoulder to shoulder.

“A little.” I look over. You don’t look disappointed—you’re wearing an easy grin. I’m grinning too. There’s a moment where we’re very still, shoulder to shoulder, face to face. Then, you wink.

“Walk me to my door?”

“Always.”

In a Basement in Utah

By Karly Marshall

Gabriel is sitting on an uncomfortable couch nestled in the gut of somebody else’s house. It’s crowded; swatches of human technicolour dance in laggy movements around him and if he focuses on them for too long he feels ill. He’s thinking about the space heater. It’s too warm in the basement and it smells of sweat and three distinct types of burning: cigarettes, marijuana, and something sharper, electrical. The space heater, if Gabriel had to guess. It’s somewhere in the opposite corner and, though his vision is too blurred to see clearly from where he sits, he imagines the heater snarling in protest to its overuse, like something from a cartoon. It makes him laugh. He worries the thing will burn the house down. 

Despite the bustle of his fellow party-goers, Gabriel is lonely. He’s also more than a little drunk, and the indistinguishable little pill one of his buddies gave him an hour ago is beginning to take effect. He sinks further into the cushions and feels the springs poke into his spine. His movement reveals something, or rather someone new to his left; a girl, blurry as she is, is leaning against the wall and watching him with wide, dark eyes. The skin of her face is pale-white and stark against the candy-red of her long hair. She’s pretty, Gabriel thinks. 

He waves, the motion a stuttered blur in his peripheral vision. 

The girl doesn’t wave back. 

She smiles, though, her thin lips stretching. Though those lips don’t seem to part, he hears her whisper something. Her voice is beautiful and so quiet, caressed by the melody of whatever strange song carries through the booming stereo. 

“I’m Gabe,” he says. “It’s, like, nice to meet you.”

The girl doesn’t say anything. Her lips stretch wide in another smile. 

“Do you go to the Arts Academy?” Gabriel asks, quirking a brow. He thinks he sees her give a small nod. “Makes sense. You look like the artsy type.” 

He gestures vaguely at the crown of her head. “I like your hair clip thing.” It’s silver and oddly shaped. She probably made it, if she’s an artist—he means to ask her but the weight of her beauty distracts him. He’s never seen a girl with such bright red hair before. 

Gabriel shakes the fog from his head, laughs. “What was I talking about?” Whatever it was whisks itself away. 

She’s whispering again, something hushed and confessional and leaning forward—or maybe he’s leaning forward, or maybe they both are—Gabriel can’t tell. They talk forever. She’s shy and declines Gabriel’s invite to sit beside him on the couch. She whispers all her secrets and he whispers all of his. The party thins, the music fades and Gabriel finds himself sitting in comfortable silence with a strange, quiet girl he may be half-way in love with. 

All the while, huddled around the space heater in the opposite corner, Gabriel’s friends trade theories as to why he’s making eyes at the wall-mounted fire extinguisher.

An Exercise in Silence

By Lydia Osborn

The first time I met Milo DuPont he kissed me and I hit him over the head with a fire extinguisher. Unfortunately, due to the human brain being a squishy meat sack floating around in soup, his concussion was rather severe. I can’t say I felt particularly bad about it – men who don’t ask before kissing someone don’t stir much sympathy in me – but he apologized profusely for misreading me and he looked so pathetic lying in that hospital bed and it’s not like I had anything better to do, so I spent weeks with him at his flat helping the bruising on his brain go down. Instead of being angry or resentful of our meeting, he was kind. Initially I wrote it off as confusion, but we’ve been together for three years now and I’ve begun to wonder if he was ever confused at all. 

Our first real date was to a cinema to see a cute animated movie about a cat living through the apocalypse. There was no dialogue, but I remember watching those big yellow eyes navigate the world and marveling at how I understood the cat simply by observing. 

“I kept waiting for the cat to talk,” Milo said at the end. 

“No!” I protested. “It would have ruined it. Sometimes you have to meet the characters in their own world.”

“Nightcap at mine?” he offered, his fingers threaded through mine. 

“Just a nightcap,” I insisted. 

He looked a bit guilty at that and part of me wanted to run, but maybe this time would be different. 

“That wasn’t a joke,” I continued. “I don’t do “nightcaps”, not the kind that you’re thinking of.”

He chuckled and asked why. The dreaded question. I pulled my hand away from his. It was easier to explain when I wasn’t touching someone, to avoid mixed signals.

“I’m not wired like that. I don’t feel in that way,” I said. I hoped he would end it there. I knew he wouldn't. 

“Ah, so that’s why you’re so cold,” he murmured.

“No,” I said sharply.

Startled, he asked, “You don’t think you’re cold?”   

“No, I am, but not because of that,” I said. I wanted to laugh, to hear his comment as a 

joke, but I couldn’t quite make myself. 

“I have a great jacket collection,” he said lightly. “Might help with the cold.” 

“It’s not a disease,” I snapped. 

“Not any more than wanting sex is a disease, no,” he said, grinning. That time I laughed easily. For once I wasn’t the joke or the robot that replaces sex with world domination.

“Isn’t that a relationship? What you’re talking about,” I asked warily. 

“That’s up to you. What was I talking about?” he countered. 

A life, I hoped. Love, despite everything. It’s been three years, and he still jokes about me being cold, but he listens to the cold, and understands it, and has stopped offering me jackets to stave it off.

Hamish and Judith

By Michał Przywara

Judith looked up from her crossword when the old man sauntered into the rec room and proclaimed, “Rejoice! I am arrived!”

Not a second later, a younger man and one of the nurses hustled in.

“Dad!” said the younger. “You need your walker!”

“Bah! Looks better on you.”

Judith allowed the faintest grin. The man was unusually lively, for this dreary place.

“Oh?” said the man, approaching her. “And who do we have here?”

Judith rolled her eyes and returned to her crossword.

“What a lovely young lady.”

In this place, it was the lamest, most clichéd, completely worn out flirt there could possibly be. And also, the most welcome.

“My name’s Hamish.” He held out his hand.

“Judith.” She didn’t shake.

“Well, I think I might like it here after all, Judy.”

“Judith.”

She picked up her crossword and left.

At lunch some days later, he sat down with her and Mabel. They talked civilly of civil disobedience, but that led Hamish to threaten, “I’ll go on strike! The state of this pancake is unacceptable. This place is horrid!”

“It’s not so bad,” Judith said. “Although, it used to be quiet.”

“Nonsense.” He pointed across the room. “See that fire extinguisher? Bet you it doesn’t even work.”

Hamish clomped to it and turned it on, spraying foam everywhere. The room erupted in shock and laughter, and the poor overworked staff rushed in to fix things.

It was most certainly not funny, Judith thought, hiding her chuckle behind her hand.

Tragedy struck a week later, when Albert Greenberg’s heart gave out. Judith and her friends sat on the rec room couches, and commiserated about it, but then–

Oh no, she thought, as Hamish approached. This somber moment was no time for antics.

But he sat and commiserated too, and when he offered up a story of his own passed away wife, it opened the door for everyone to share stories of their departed loved ones.

It was a touching send off for Albert.

A few days later, the morning sun shone so welcomingly that Judith simply had to go for a walk. A small park sat beside their home, and with any luck there’d be ducks on the pond.

Alas, she didn’t make it fifty feet before Hamish called out to her, following.

“Mind if I tag along?”

“Would you listen if I said yes?”

“Perfect.”

“And without your walker. Won’t your son be mad?”

“I won’t tell if you won’t. Besides, there’s something I wanted to tell you. It’s important. Listen–ooh!” Hamish interrupted himself, pointing to the lake. “Look at those ducks!”

The birds got him walking down memory lane, and he told her of one lovely summer many years ago, where he’d go feeding ducks with his grandson every day.

“Oh, but I get distracted so easily,” he said. “What was I talking about?”

“You were about to tell me I have beautiful eyes.”

“Right, Judith!”

She took his hand.

“Call me Judy.”