Amy first realized something was amiss in the third grade. There she was one minute, staring out of the window, thinking about the blueness of her classmate Jonah’s eyes, when suddenly a week had passed.
It always happened like that. She would lose herself in a daydream and then lose herself in real life. She’d imagine a comet hurtling towards the earth, laying waste to the school, then wake up a day later
Evan Lavender-Smith's previous work for The Butter can be found here. Tell your mother the roast is overdone. Tell your father he can start cooking for himself, if he likes. Tell your father he didn’t fix the ice maker right. Tell your mother I’m not a plumber. Tell your mother the laundry’s dry. Tell your father I’m not his maid.
After all, perhaps it is we who need saving. Perhaps we are the abnormal ones. – Eugene Ionesco Bob finished it first. Stop everything, he told them, and get to your nearest e-book store. Paul found a PDF online. He clicked to download. Thirty-three minutes, it said. They waited. What did you like about it? Frank asked. It was… Bob began. He scanned his shelves, wooden and wall-length, full of books he’d actually read,…
Three doctors confirmed I suffered from some sort of emotional herpes and they suggested I stop fucking everyone. No more but I was bored, but he was cute, but she was cute, but they were bored and cute; just close up that trap of myself. The thought of doing so flung me into the pursed lips of the pastor and I couldn’t help wondering if his lips were as tight as his asshole. And if…
All the children had been given away, and now Darcus Mullins found herself driving the curving road up toward Isaban to look again at the burning slag heap. Along the way, she would pass the house where Leonard had been sent, and she would slow the car to a crawl so she could peer down into Hatfield Bottom where he sat playing in the mud with his new foster sisters, patting pies into shape and…
Previously by Kendra Fortmeyer: Mermaids at the End of the Universe: A Short Story She has one job, and it is to offer the hero a flower. She says, “Would you like to buy a flower?” and if he says yes, she says, “That’ll be 1 p,” and if he says no, then she says nothing. She is lucky to have options. Her…
Previously by Mia Hooper: Wolfbian: A Short Story Fatma is first among her friends to rent one of the new Effuelux apartments on the edge of the business district. No roommates, no guests, no pets. Not even any outside furniture. Built for efficiency, the advertising says, and the modern lifestyle. The advertising has said this for ages. It began as a billboard in midtown; Fatma saw it from the window of the 22 bus, or…
It’s 4 a.m. in Zagreb, Croatia, and you’re wide-awake. You and your husband are on your honeymoon. While he sleeps, you admire his black curly hair and thin nose, envious of his ability to rest. As he rotates to his side, you wonder what images are crossing his unconscious and whether he’s ferried a phantom of you into his dreams. Jet lag has left your body disoriented, so you mime resting poses. You feel like…
The waves heaved with foam and the sun illuminated everything until it was so bright the edges of objects seemed to be drawn in black. Claire leaned forward and spit up into the bushes that dotted the perimeter of the beach. But it was more than spit-up. It turned out it was a whole stream of purple. She’d been drinking wine cooler all afternoon, and now the beautiful color of it came out and landed…
My ex-neighbor Bill comes over to my place on Thursdays to stare at his ex-wife Janine through my window blinds. There’s a restraining order that says Bill has to stay five hundred feet away from Janine, but he pays me ten bucks an hour because I can get him to thirty feet without anyone knowing shit. Bill always brings his binoculars and a six-pack of beer. Sometimes we order pizza. Bill sits in my recliner…
Vanessa Willoughby's previous work for The Toast can be found here.
I trusted her because she had big eyes that sparked up like little bugs convulsing in bright claps of electricity. She smelled like rosewater. Before our interview, she’d sloppily applied the finishing notes of her makeup in her rented car, a basic sedan on loan until the autobody shop completed the repairs to the passenger side of her Volvo. She’d forgotten
Previously by Kendra Fortmeyer: Mermaids at the End of the Universe. What you do not know is this: in the final hours of the doomed city of Pompeii, the gods came down from the smoke-choked skies and said, Okay. We found you a place. The village elders raised their faces from their hands. Yes, anywhere, please! they cried. They had tried everything. The construction of moats, the last-minute sacrifice of a lamb who didn’t…
The cousin’s freckled arms reach out to the visitor. The cousin says she recognized her instantly from old family photos. There is glee and awkwardness, memories of what cannot possibly be remembered: playing as cherubs in the park across the street from their grandmother’s house, catfish caught with hand-held lines in the river behind the house.
They fill in what cannot be talked about. It’s been fine, yes, except
He earned his first star (gold) for designing and hanging up his sticker chart. That evening he earned another star (gold) for watching a movie with his children without complaining about it. Later that evening he earned another star (gold) for getting his children in bed without complaining about it. And later that evening he earned a star (red) for an undisclosed reason. The next morning he earned a star (gold) for getting his…
So we sent our kids to the bilingual school. It was Mrs. Eagle’s idea. She’d found it on her morning walk. Turned down Milwood Ave. instead of cutting across Crescent Ct., looked up from her steaming cup of Starbucks, and there it was, a school inside a tall blue fence. On the fence were bright paintings of charming and childish things: airplanes, flowers, tigers. “L’école bilingue,” read the sign above the doorway. “English and French.”…
