Jabber
Robert Burkenhare
When you’ve been eating nothing but shit sandwiches, baloney tastes good. And man, what a lot of baloney lately that’s being praised as coq au vin.
by J. Billings
As the parent of a special needs child. As the parent of a special needs child. I need to say that again for it to resonate. My son is speaking to himself in a language I can’t understand.
Think of the person who makes excuses. The person who thinks they’re clever. The guy at the next table. The kid snapping her gum. The girl who’s smarter than you’ll ever be and she’s not even 13. Your doctor too tired to hide their contempt for your lifestyle. The asshole in the next bed. The horrorshow you went home with. Bosses. Landlords. God.
by Sophie Amado
Sonder (n): the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own; populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.
by Samantha Hackett
Cups of coffee: 64. Within: two spoonfuls of sugar. Of those 128 spoonfuls of sugar, 42 we may classify as heaping. No cream or oat milk or anything like that. “Black as night, strong as hate, sweet as love.”
by Robert Burkenhare
There was this woman got rid of her kid the old-fashioned way. Too gruesome to go into. Suffice to say, she had no choice because there was none provided because these other people decided she should have no choice. But there’s always a choice. She cut out the middle-man. If you know what I mean.
by Alyssa Stilley
The first time I drank a glass of cabernet was to impress a man. I was standing on the first floor of the restaurant we worked at, the warm wood floors and yellow incandescent lights reflecting off of the rows and rows of bottles in a room holding all the wine. The air outside was cool for a July night, and it was clear enough to see the stars through the stained-glass windows. It was hard not to feel watched by the walls and the paint.
by Patrick T. Reardon
A decade ago, a basketball friend of mine mentioned, on the sidelines between games, that he was preparing an art show about Chicago alleys. Like a flipped switch, I went into my spiel about how much I liked alleys and the concept of alleys and how I had written a lot about alleys when I was still working for the Chicago Tribune. Would I like to write something to go on a blank wall in the exhibit space? Well, sure.