The night had been cold. The heat was not working properly in the bedroom, and when Joe awoke he discovered that the comforter was on the floor and that his hands were missing. He looked down at where his hands had been for more than thirty years and instead saw two bloody stumps. At first, he thought that his two cats (who he had forgotten to feed for the past two days) sitting at the foot of the bed might have gnawed them off, but there wasn’t any blood on their fur or whiskers. He looked under the bed for his hands. He looked behind the busted-up, broken-down, rusted radiator. He even looked in the bathroom, for he remembered having relieved himself during the night, and they may have fallen in the toilet. He looked at the blinking, orange glow of the alarm clock. The forsaken thing had never been trustworthy. Over the past few months, Joe had been late to work more than a dozen times, and his supervisor told him that if there were one more infraction, his tardiness would be grounds for dismissal. He tried to remove his boxer shorts and undershirt only to no avail, then he jumped into the bathtub, but he could not properly regulate the water with his feet, scalding his chest.

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Home, Stinky Home

Day 33 of the Gulf Coast oil spill and it’s still a horrible mess. We may not have been old enough to process the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl disasters, but we do remember the panic and remorse brought upon by the Exxon Valdez spill. How’s that saying go? Oh yeah, history repeats itself. Anyway, our home city is located in a similarly ecologically rich system with miles and miles and acres and acres of wetlands that serve as a filter and wildlife habitat. The sulfuric smell of plough mud might stink to some, but to us, it is a welcomed aroma. Reading can’t erase this from our minds, but we’ll try. Roddy Doyle completes his Henry Smart trilogy. Paul Guest gives us his memoir of life as a quadriplegic. On the topic of historical events, Norman Stone has a history of the Cold War and the formation of NATO. Slant Magazine has a review of Welcome. We finish up with an excerpt from Sloane Crosley’s new book, How Did You Get This Number. All of us, let’s build wind farms. — Andrew Geer

I first fell in love with Myfanwy Collins’s writing when I read her flash, “I am Holding Your Hand,” in The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction (originally published in Monkeybicycle).

I have since read all of Myfanwy’s work available online and hold her in the highest regard. “I am Holding Your Hand” epitomizes just why: Myfanwy writes with such precision and compassion. Every sentence, every sentence, makes me feel something. Her writing is exceptional, large-hearted, and gracious. And everything I know about her suggests that Myfanwy Collins is the same in life.

Check out what today’s “Spotlight” revealed.

– Ethel Rohan

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Supramolecular Assembly

by Brooks Sterritt

Bile milkshake. Audiometric falafels to the face. Two sticky handshakes. A friend said that to lose weight one must picture maggots in mucus at all times. Cropcircle rin tin tinnitus. Hairball lemonade floats. Cough syrup binge-wagon.

Tantric coin-operated Kylie Minogue pleather wax museum diaphragm diagrams. Notable individuals with medically unexplained hyperactive anechoic chamber saliva-production phantom-sound-phantom-limb clinical depression, quiet homemade background noise syndrome fuckwads to the face.

Homeostatic response to Oreos and previous Preakness and Triple Crown gutshot mules with horse DNA and auditory input loss/test noises exceeding 700 decibels and gradual amphibious, non-obtrusive, long-term, general, local, presidential charismatic christ on a pogo hop-along stick/permanent conditions requiring gamma knife radiosurgery, come with me come with me we’ll travel to infinity using ginkgo biloba, lidocaine, caffeine, nicotine, salt, shielding of cochlea by teflon implant, melatonin meals, and electrical, magnetic stimulation, simulation, etc.

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Brooks Sterritt lives in Boston where he is the fiction editor of Redivider. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Barrelhouse, Wigleaf, and Titular. Find him online at www.magicmonads.com.

I keep his heart hidden in the freezer
tucked under TV dinners
next to the half-empty trays of ice cubes

I pull it out every couple of hours
hold it in my hand, heating
each little ventricle and patch of muscle

I squeeze it long enough to see
flakes of melting ice fall to the floor
drops of his frozen coating shrink into beads

My toes touch each tiny puddle
as I nestle him back into the corner
cold steam wraps its arms around him

I stick my hand against the freezer door
feel the last throbs of his heart beat fading,
comforted knowing I have his heart forever.

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Heather Cox is a Texas-born, Arkansas-raised writer currently living in Chicago. In 2009, she was the recipient of The Margot Trietel Award for Excellence in Creative Writing. She has most recently published poems in Ceremony. When she’s not reading or writing poetry, she can be found cooking spicy foods or continuing her quest to the find the world’s best raspberry margarita. Her blog is A Disheveled Soul.