Art By Jason Scheier

I wished every day was summer when I was a little girl. No school time, just bikes on the pavement. Sun chasing our shadows, never quite able to keep up. Sweat collected on my forehead like a tribe of parents watching me worried as I popped wheelies with no helmet on. The wind brushed my hair wild. I wished every day was summer when I was a little girl. But I’m a woman now, and the sun has caught up to me in the shape of fluorescent bulbs. It has taken my shadow. I swivel in my office chair and lean back to feel childhood’s wind-

I feel nothing.

Create as you would breath, constantly, to live and not to impress. It’s there in your vital honesty you’ll find what it is you’re seeking, there sitting softly in your calloused hands.

In defense of the comic, whose characters are foolish but whose mind is not. I see her brilliance in the whites of the audience’s smiles, in the wit and the quickness of her responses. I know many serious men with the mask of intelligence hiding a simple and plain nature. I find the opposite quite riveting.

-Confessions of a Ticket Sales Clerk

What is left for me, impaled on the hills I’ve chosen to die on.

My cat didn’t like me much. I saved his life when he wasn’t more than two days old, but I never was his favorite person. He’d meow at me all angry like whenever I got near him, so I left him be. He’d let me pet him once in a blue moon and I treasured that. But he got sick. The sort of sick you don’t get better from. And even though he avoided me most of his life, and I respected his wishes, deep down he remembered what I did for him. His last days alive he came and sat with me. Maybe asking me again, save me. I know you can. You did it before. And with everything in me I wish I could have. I would have saved him a thousand times over even if it meant he stayed in rooms I wasn’t in, and preferred people other than me. I would give everything for him to dislike me a lifetime’s worth. But I only got four years.

I feel the grating fingernails of progress on my tender skin, and wonder how it lead us here. To desolation, destruction. We were supposed to be better, stronger, kinder. But instead we are are weaker, crueler and so poignantly and horribly worse.

How disappointing that evolution does not promise improvement, only difference.

Facism is a blade we carry, we are born with it in our hands. We are all capable of using it, rallying behind it, bleeding our brothers and sisters with its tip. It is up to us to drop it, to refuse violence against our fellow man, and to instead offer an open palm. An opportunity for peace, and prosperity without the boot of a dictator on the neck of a people.

It took three. The first killed her parents, in the home they used to share. The second took her legs, leaving only her arms to hold her. The third took her life. It took three bombs for Israel to murder a little girl. But it only takes the death of one child to devastate a world.

I want to change.

You can.

But I am afraid.

You ought to be.

I can't change.

Yes you can.

My legs are shaking. My feet are stuck in the ground.

Unstick them. Walk. Move. Change. Now!

Now?

Now.

Before she swims to me, I catch her scent in the water. Like bath pearls popping in the laps of purple water against the yellow sand, I inhale euphoria, and I am intoxicated, immovable from the shoreline. I melt into the mud, and I am eaten alive, transfixed, infatuated with the shape of teeth boring holes in my skin.

-Diary of a Siren