Brumal

“I often find myself laying still in bed with the ceiling fan on and windows cracked. I’ll wait for the cold air to shrink the tissue in my joints, for my nerve endings to cool, and to feel the agony of hypothermia even though I am perturbed by all things cold; snow, door knobs, the hands of people with poor circulation. I am fazed by freezers; and those stainless steel stretchers that will latch the cold onto my body.

I don’t think I’ll mind dying as much as I’ll mind sleeping in a freezer—my brumal body boxed beside strangers.”

From Guest Contributor Shanique Carmichael

Basic Behavior

All I could say to my mother as she stood haggard over the sunken sink and washed the dishes; rattled the stainless steel pots trying to make some type of noise to fill up space that the silence had long held ransom was, “I don’t mean to be sad.” I gripped at the air as I said the words; tried to catch eloquence and understanding in my palms. I wanted to give her a better answer, a better reason. I wanted to appease. “I don’t mean to be sad,” again. Basic. All I could be…everything I could say. “I’m sorry.”

From Guest Contributor Endya Goliday

Endya is a fiction writer and playwright who resides in Saint Louis, Missouri.