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Telling Time at the Tick Tock by Leigh Kirkland
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I'd wipe the ice bucket on the vanity by the sink and never look in the motel mirror, because I didn't want to know what I looked like in that place. For a while those walls were beautiful, protection, not prison. Even though by this morning, that curve in the road looked a long way off, I went room to room with my loop of numbered keys, scrubbing toilets, cleaning ashtrays and vacuuming under beds, changing sheets, and wrapping plastic cups in the sanitized bags Mrs. Kemp ordered from the hotel-motel supply.
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What Raggedy Ann Said by Elizabeth Rollins
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A week later the package arrives. It's in a padded envelope. I tear it open. Inside is Raggedy's head and a little piece of fabric torn from her chest that says in a red ink heart, I love you. Both the head and the torn fabric are in a ziplock freezer bag.
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Missing Parts by Janice J. Heiss
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I was fourteen when I first saw Amy's stump when her skirt flew up. Her thigh hung down: a mutant, engorged tit. Metal hinges connected it to the fake bottom half of her leg. I looked away when Amy looked at me to see if I had seen it. But not before I saw her masking eyes.
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Contract by Nicky Hoult
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Yesterday I thought about leaving. I woke up and the first thought in my head was to run. I'd been dreaming about gear. I was at an old flat back home. Just scored. Vein pumping. Shot ready.
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Connecting by Josh Capps
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She ignored the advice, shrugging her shoulders and sticking her tongue out, and she said, "Well, I fucking remember." She said, "How about January? Do you remember January? 'Rent out a motel room and we can work things out, right?' What in the hell? . . The couple in that story probably killed each other after it was over. Cheaters!"
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Aforementioned by Kelly Elayne
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It was a made-up piece. Fiction fashioned from derangement; he had been shoving it into a clay tunnel scored with tracks to resemble the skin of a screw stem. It was no wonder it did not fit. The clay tunnel was at the center of an astounding assemblage of debris filling the cellar. Fictional parts, fictional connections, fictional plan, it was all made-up; a construction of madness, Sidney's Frankenstein, his Ford model T, his time machine.
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Notes on contributors
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