Fractured Vignettes

by Arleigh Rodgers

I. Spectator

The house on Specter Street hasn’t had an owner for at least fifty years, the rumors say, and a lot of the kids on the next street over say it’s haunted, like any kids would say when a house hasn’t been lived in for at least fifty years. The window panes have been obliterated by rocks and their laughter. Sometimes after school the kids will throw eggs at the house or knock on its door and run away quickly, as if an angry ghost would swoop out from under the dusty floorboards and hold them hostage with the dirt and grime and rusty door hinges. The kids who live in the neighborhood next year will do the same reckless things, and the kids after them will do it too, until every kid in the neighborhood has encountered the house on Specter, waiting for the ghost to emerge and swallow them up just like how the shadows of the trees in the backyard swallow up the lawn.

Corn by Maddie Lowe

II. Wishbone

Every Monday morning I walk to work and I see a man pushing a small stroller and walking his dog. He’s always far enough ahead of me that I’ve never seen his face, and if I do get close enough, he’ll turn a corner, or I will, and we miss each other. Today, the sky is so white with clouds, the blueness is hardly visible and I think, I’m walking fast enough to walk next to the man, and maybe I can finally see his face. But my turn comes too quickly. I’ll be late if I linger. I hope he turns before me so I can keep following him, watching his bald head in hopes I’ll see the other side. But he keeps on walking, my wish ungranted, and he takes the wider of the two streets back to his home or his dog’s home or his daughter’s or maybe all three. I take a right. 

III. Changes

Ships by Bejin Philip Benny

Piss probably tastes similar to the coffees I get in the morning. Watered-down urine with coconut milk in a glass jar. It never seems to stop raining. Everything is gray, including the sparse foliage. The leaves have jumped from green to death. And the crunch of fallen, rotten leaves permeates the wet silence of my morning walk to class. 

I can’t stop writing nonsense. I can’t pick up a book. 

Winter is an icicle waiting to slip loose from the edge of a roof. 

Seconds will go by before, soundlessly, the water statue will crash into the pavement below. Snap, crash. The Icicle Cometh. Death is all around. I start wearing my winter jacket.