Category: Issues

                            Joshua Young is the author of six collections, most recently, Psalms for the Wreckage (Plays Inverse, 2017) and the chapbook, Weekends of Sound: 764-Hero Mixtape (Madhouse Press, 2020). His novella, Little Galaxies, is forthcoming from Los Galesburg Press in 2020. Joshua…

The Tale    At Ali’Shan we witness what’s left of skeletal rare red cypress  Nippon clear-cut an aeon ago.

I am writing to tell you what it was like for me the days I sat beside you, holding the phone on speaker

I went out front and found my father drinking vodka and Mountain Dew and haphazardly watering the lawn with a hose. He had already had a couple, I guessed, as he was spraying water everywhere and laughing. He kept on laughing when he noticed me.

Gifford had been attending a management conference out West when he came across the mannequins posing in black leather underpants. As he checked his bag through to Atlanta, he became nervous and imagined overzealous security agents laughing when they plucked the new briefs from his suitcase.

The neighborhood has gone mad. During the night, a rolling cavalry of invasive ivy–on the move all summer, growing a foot each day—surged onto the back porch and made for the door. At first light Millicent is up, out of bed, dressed and at the ready.

All you have to do is spit into a plastic vial and put it in the mail and send it off somewhere, and then in a couple of weeks you’ll get the results, and these are going to tell you who you are.

Both men plodded down the hallway, ignoring the clean linen they knocked off service carts. They found her in a freshly bleached room, just before the barricaded emergency exit. She was working coins from the bedside table into her apron.