Issue: Summer 2020

by Wayne Rapp             I am the Director of Photography for a large Midwestern film and video production company, and how am I spending my time? Not that you’d have reason to know, but I’m redesigning the crew section of our budget forms. And this for the second time in the last quarter. I should […]

Though we’d known about each other over twenty years, we didn’t meet until that afternoon in the hospital when Alice burst into the room and dropped into the chair opposite mine. On the bed between us lay my husband, Frank. His jaw hung open and his breath was raspy. “Why are you here?” I asked. […]

for Jerry and Ruth Ann Jimmy lived and breathed Rotary in Augusta, Georgia. That’s how he’d met his wife, Virginia. She was a Miss Georgia contestant, and once a year they paraded the young ladies through the club, partly to increase ticket sales to the beauty pageant among the wealthiest men in Augusta. Their parading […]

As I rinse my paintbrushes in the bathroom sink, I make a forlorn James Dean face in the mirror and try to recall when 3-day stubble became my signature look. Seriously though, at what point did I become so mired in angst that I succumbed to this half-assed grunge aesthetic? I don’t recall it ever […]

I’m suddenly a housewife like my mother, procuring groceries at different markets, cleaning dog hair off the kitchen floor, and promptly serving dinner weeknights at 6:00 pm. At first, I welcome the busyness, but as three weeks roll into four and six and eight, my patience wears thin. I’m doing what my mother trained me […]

In the spring of 2019, my good friend, Nicholas, texts me: Come to a cool party.With cool women? I text back.You’ll see. I’m known as Jay. I share an apartment with a friend in Oceanside, California, and I’m twenty-eight years old. I have a long face and a short black beard. Two years ago, I moved […]