Fiction
The Audrey Me by Frankie Drayus
"I’m contagious until Wednesday but I don’t know that. Or that’s what I’ll tell you later. Mumps is passed through saliva so that means you can get it if somebody sneezes on you. Or kisses you. Or shares your fork over dessert in a café."
"She keeps "The Big Book of Cancer Symptoms" on the coffee table. You can't fathom her guests happily leafing through it as she flies off to blend margaritas, yet there it sits, dwarfing ``Rocky Mountain Sunsets: Complete with Poetry,'' the book you gave her."
"The map, as it turns out, is little help. Few of the streets and alleys are marked. They find it only by chance, following ancient, well-honed instincts for ferreting out a trashy dive no matter how obscure. And besides, it would have been unthinkable to return home without at least one good story."
My Dead Partner by Antonios Maltezos
"In a dream, she’d come out of the bathroom limping, favouring her right side. She’d given herself a breast exam, only this time she’d known what she’d find so there was not much surprise, much dread because she still needed to call a doctor -- in the dream and in real life, but not much surprise."
"Your mother thinks of her former boss, a self-proclaimed “career woman” who had sworn off children and husbands, too. Thinks of her decision to stay at home until the kids are grown. She thinks of this big house that they could afford more easily if she were still working, and the work they could have done on the bathrooms, the wallpaper, and the stair top balcony with its horrid iron railing."
"He understood the reasons for what was happening to him, but he was still too angry to think straight about it. The house had been condemned because of the shape it was in, and the city was widening the road. He looked around him and saw the sagging ceilings, the walls bowing in or out, depending on which wall you were looking at."
© 2005-2008 Per Contra: The International Journal of the Arts, Literature and Ideas