Heeled Sandals

by Naomi Washer

(She may be married now, but I still can’t see her as a wife.) Underneath a similar skin, our sisterblood runs through veins visible between shoe straps, but I prefer flats. As she comes to the door she falters — slips slightly on the rain-soaked front step — and quickly grasps the door frame. Her rings make a tiny clink against the wood. For all her youthfulness, in this brief moment I have watched her age. Briefly, she is an old woman, with fragile wrists and ankles — defiant, proud, and married — but never a wife.

6S

Naomi Washer is pursuing a B.A. in Dance from Bennington College, where she also studies writing and social sciences. (She likes that when spoken out loud, "6S" sounds like "success.") Her writing can be found here.

Oh Jesus

by Chloe Caldwell

This morning my three year old cousin dropped his cup of apple juice and spilled it all over the green ottoman. "Oh Jesus," he said. I cringed and cracked up, because his inflection showed that he got that from me and I knew that I got it from my ex-lover. "Oh Jesus, are you kidding me with those tits?" or "Oh Jesus, your pussy is so tight." Those were my favorites. How badly I wished I were fucking instead of refilling a sippy cup.

6S

Chloe Caldwell is a writer living in Seattle, WA. Her first published piece can be read here.

Winter

by Harry B. Sanderford

An untended Ferris wheel turns slowly against a smoke streaked sunset. The tattered sails of beached sailing ships wave cheerless gray and brown party flags over soldiers of every stripe. Ragged throngs too weary to separate by uniform sit on their helmets rolling tobacco or passing unlabeled bottles, the bitter local spoils of a global contest no longer possible to score. Some drink greedily thankful for another day, others drink just as fiercely regretting the very same thing. One soldier considers a childhood memory of snow falling on a boardwalk that no longer exists. The snow he knows will still fall, but this cannot be my life he thinks, to melt into a puddle, swirling in the gutter like so much dirty snow.

6S

Harry B. Sanderford, author of Bananas, is a Central Florida surfing cowboy who'd sooner spin yarns than mend fences.

Forever Loving Blues

by James Vest

My face transitioned from autumn’s fevered leaves to the silent, angelic pale of winter’s loss. I found you in the trash, this old photograph, a picture of you I had made my own, and put alongside my family and our smiling faces, and we loved you. This tiny still is all that remains of ourselves, our colossal portraits since taken down, replaced with piles of miniature snapshots, black and white memories unframed, heavy in its collective weight, edges worn from handling, details fogged by time. All I have left is this image, haunted by the specter of embarrassment, and emotion’s wasted effort, like the unread novelist, whose belittled words were buried in long, silent rows. And you in my hands again, I can see my warm, slow breaths drop frozen from the air, kisses falling short, vanishing along with the whispers of things I have already said, failing to breathe life back into your mystery. I left you there among the rubbish alone, hoping the season’s first snow would be the official end of a very long and treacherous fall.

6S

James Vest is a writer and artist based in Chicago.

The Kitten

by Juliet Cook

A laugh track inexplicably punctuated with hisses is like a vampire-fanged kitten. Those are the only teeth it has. The Rape-aXe is inserted like a female condom. It has inward-facing barbs. Don’t worry it can’t turn inside out, which is probably why the audience isn’t laughing now. Don’t worry this is just a warm up routine for a whole litany of foreign objects.

6S

Juliet Cook's poetry has recently been published or is forthcoming in Abjective, Action Yes, Diagram, Diode, Oranges & Sardines, Robot Melon and many other online and print sources. Feel free to visit her website here.

So Many Things Happened Last Night

by Matthew Mahaney

I started to forget the idea I had about the plastic city. A city made entirely of plastic. I forgot what I was going to call it, which meant that I also forgot what the people living there would be called. I couldn’t remember whether it would be land-locked or on the ocean. I even forgot the things I hadn’t decided on yet, like how many people it would hold. Whether the animals would stay away, and if not, where they would sleep.

6S

Matthew Mahaney is currently in the MFA program at The University of Alabama, and editor of the online magazine Double Shiny.