Easter Sunday

Through the window, the sun beams against my face. It’s Easter Sunday and the family will be arriving this evening. I haven’t seen my cousins since the Covid-19 quarantine and we’re all nervous. Do we need to wear masks to avoid breathing on each other, I wonder? We didn’t discuss it, so my husband and I will take our chances.

The food is prepared and cooking on the stove. The lamb and spices fill the room with a delectable aroma and I’m leaning against the counter sipping wine.

I drop my glass when the doorbell rings. I can’t do it.

From Guest Contributor Lisa M. Scuderi-Burkimsher

Wavestar Bang

He lost her, but not as he thought: not to the cancer, or a car accident, or to some art student.

She was dancing alone to Wavestar in the dark, only the nightlight of the stove touching her naked toes, her knees, her swishing hips. She spun, hair whipping, neck caning, hands flying like children playing through the twilight air of the highway with the windows down, wrists like autumn leaves whose time had come.

She became transparent, translucent, spinning faster and faster, and glitter evaporated from the feet up, a tornado of silver steam.

He fell right through her.

From Guest Contributor Brook Bhagat

After graduating with a BA in English from Vassar College, Brook landed her first paid writing job as a reporter for a small-town Colorado newspaper. She left it to travel to India, where she fell in love, got married and canceled her ticket home. She and her husband Gaurav write freelance articles for dozens of publications, including Outpost, Ecoworld and Little India. In 2013, they launched www.BluePlanetJournal.com, which she edits and writes for. She also teaches writing at a community college, is earning her MFA in Writing at Lindenwood University, and is writing a novel.

What We Might Deserve

The snarling saw cuts off and the groaning fir drunk on gravity takes its first step. A full ocean is born in the soughing fall and over four centuries whumps the earth like a five-dollar moll on a sprung stained mattress. And you stand there, hands numb and belly tight and you wonder why something so old saves its final words for someone like you. Someone who knows the glass bite of gin straight from the bottle while slouched at the tilt kitchen table as rain plunks a pan on the floor near the hot squat stove in the corner.

From Guest Contributor Casey Hampton