Sockeye

By JR Fenn

We moved the cabin from Anchor Point to Homer, thirty miles on winding roads, up Diamond Ridge and down the bluff; but it wasn’t, technically, us who moved it—it was Mike, with his flatbed truck and winch (a flatbed big enough to fit a 12x20 cabin, lifted off its cinderblocks with its tidy white windows and red walls flying through the air, the windows where we had once lit candles in the dark, no longer a fishing shack by the Anchor River, now carted along the road to be hoisted into the air once more and set down by the slough, where the grasses waved in salt water and the gulls and murres circled overhead), though it wasn’t the moving of the cabin I remembered later, not the groaning of the timbers as the structure strained against gravity, not its undercarriage exposed, floating high above the ground, its roof outlined against the greenery of the ridge, not how it settled beside the 80-foot spruce, its porch looking out to sea like a face aghast at the volcanic peaks across the bay, their tops covered in snow against the still blue of the sky—no, what I remembered was taking the check to Mike a month later (half down, half after delivery and a few phone messages reminding us of the balance due; it’d been a cash-poor summer) when he was cleaning fish caught that day, dipnetting on the Kasilof—what stuck in my mind, emblazoned in fire once I’d taken it in, was the way he stood in his Carhartts by the tailgate of his flatbed and turned a fish belly-up to slit it from chin to gonads, holding the lips of the cut wide so I could see the deep red of the flesh, the blue and purple of the organs nestled inside tight and compact as gems—“A woman’s purse,” he said, echoing the metaphor beginning to shape itself on my tongue—before he sliced off a translucent piece of flesh, so thin it could be a veil for a glittering sun seen from far underwater, or the cold petal of a tidal flower, and held it out to me, the fish open in his hand, all it had grown and miraculously brought back home quivering on the tip of the blade.

JR Fenn's work has appeared in Boston Review, Gulf Coast, Diagram, Flash, and Versal, among other places; she teaches Environmental Writing at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry and lives in Western New York with her family.

Art by Melissa Warp.

Curio: a Relief

By Jace Brittain

That word: Fortune being relative, I was made to understand Mr. Sonnabend had spent more than he could afford on the thing: “Well, it is, uh,” he said, “I, look, I mean, you, listen,” and I was just passenger to: he holds up a, he says, human horn, and he says, “I can’t make heads or tails of—" and I stopped him right there because I won’t let someone make a mockery of human anatomy, its delicate or dim damp illusory curves and casts, where light loses ground at the inner ear, and said: “That thing is a projection, external, unusual,” while, after all, my grandfather, who kept alive so long a tusked rabbit, regretted it, we thought, later, when he died, so Mr. Sonnabend, flustered, dropped it under the table, when I hunkered down there to find him: hands and knees, elbows propped and arms encircling, a collection of such oddities: the electric lamp between his teeth beamed at the tilt flitting from object to object as if he thought a curiosity might save him, however, however, however, however,

Jace Brittain, the author of Sorcererer (Schism Neuronics), has published writing in Annulet, Grotto Journal, ANMLY, dadakuku, and elsewhere.

Art by Jace Brittain.

Things I've Had Removed From My Body

By Rachel Holbrook

When I was a little girl, it was simple things like a splinter in the plump meat of my palm, slid beneath the skin like a dagger when I couldn’t resist the appeal of a weather worn fence rail, looking warm and smooth in the summer sun, but unaware that even the soft things bite sometimes, requiring Papaw to pull out his pocket knife, wiping the blade on his blue jeans and holding my small hand in his large, brown, veiny one, twisting it toward the light, so he could ease the sharp tip just under the topmost layer of skin, easing out the foreign object; not unlike the small shards of glass embedded in feet and toes, from dropped and shattered light bulbs or broken bottles tossed aside and waiting in pieces at the bottom of the river shoals where I placed tender steps while going in deeper; and, as I got older, but, let’s be honest, not very much older, the blades were pressed in deeper, separating layers of skin and fat and muscle, until out she came, waxy and screaming, it’s a girl, and there she was, no longer inside of me but not unlike a splinter in that with her departure from my inside there came a relief; and maybe it was the same desire to touch things that shine in the sunlight, that promise warmth and satisfaction that led to the son, and the second son, and the daughter, all pulled screaming from the safety of me, all taking parts of me on their way out; and I can’t forget the little one, like the splinter, that burrowed much deeper in the wrong place, and how I cried when they took her out of me, promising me relief would come, and how I knew they were lying; how I knew she wasn’t like the wisdom teeth or the appendix that I never needed in the first place; but, yes, there was an ending when the bleeding stopped and the pain ebbed away, and I hate them for being right that relief did eventually come.

Rachel Holbrook is a proud Appalachian, a queer woman, an Army wife, and a mother of six, who writes from her home in Knoxville, TN.

Art by Jay Baker, an artist from Colorado living in Oregon; he records music as Tom Foe.