Working Theory

He has a fear of hot Danish. When the bakery shop opens its accusing awning in the morning, he retreats to avoid notice by the shop’s pastries. Open-air breakfast shops infuriate him. In his infrequent sleep, he is haunted by the idea of smothering icing, steam welling into a wall of baker’s avenging anger. The syrup run-off loitering in the pan. He wakes with his cheeks and tongue burning, the rift of his nose aflame, a gooey lump of heat assaulting his eyes from the backside. He tells himself: they will cool. When they do, he will conquer them all.

From Guest Contributor Ken Poyner

Applesauce

Her family loves apples so despite the fight she carted off in a cardboard box the tree’s fruit. My family has applesauce in its veins, was what she told me. When I saw her there were cores littering her countertops, a pan boiling on the woodstove. Did she see the metaphor? Those gnarled branches over her head. I took her coring knife, though cut fruit was a present I would not be offering, not to my relations. Beside me she sliced another tree-gift. By stovelight our wrists flashed, the lines in them crisscrossing as we worked, tangling and yet not.

From Guest Contributor Colleen Addison

On Being A Man

HUBRIS CONTEST:

His backhand caused her body to pirouette grotesquely before landing face down on the coffee table.

Wincing, she rolled off the table, and sat up, mopping blood futilely from her mouth with the back of her right hand.

“Aren’t ya proud o’ me, workin’ all night?” he whined.

Unblinking, she nodded.

Then, the boy, who’d learned what a man was from his father, brought the cast iron pan onto the back of his father’s head with a sound like a loud wet kiss.

The man slid to the ground gracefully.

Beaming at her son, she said, “Now that’s a man!”

From Guest Contributor Jody Lehrer