Recommended Reading From Online Magazines

Our couch is hungry. We found a message on its center cushion similar to the “Help Me” on Linda Blair’s sweaty tummy in The Exorcist. Here’s what it said:

I’m starved. I want ass. When y’all read this, plop your asses on me.  It’s not my fault.  I’m hungry, and I’m a couch, and y’all brought me up this way. I’m willing to pay. Dig into my folds for some loose change. It’s not much, but it’s your asses I want, not your souls, so it should be enough.

COUCH

We don’t want this to happen to you. We want to make sure you keep your couch happy. Take your laptop to your couch now, please, and feed the poor wretch. Snuggle in while you read our picks, take your time. Time enough to broaden your mind. Time for your couch to feast on your derriere and never complain again.

–Robert Paul Moreira

– With every heel-to-toe step, my Starbury sneaks stuck to and then peeled off the popcorn-butter layered floor. With each step it seemed more likely that I would leave the sole of my shoe behind. This was as clear a sign as ever that we weren’t welcome here, that we should have stayed home. Tate, my big brother, my only brother, shoved me in the back: “Hurry up!” We wore bent-brimmed baseball caps, and Tate donned an old pair of eyeglasses with the lenses popped out. — Mike Duncan in The Scrambler

– From 6th until 7th grade, I was best friends for ever with a girl named Alexan dra. Most of the kids in our neigh bor hood went to pub lic school, and so the two of us nat u rally grav i tated to each other since sis ters of mercy car ry ing yard sticks told us that pub lic school kids were more likely to be in league with the Dark One. She lived five doors down, and we filled our days with most of the same things: TV, junk food, and going out side until haloed street lamps turned on at dusk. — Kevin Carter in Divine Dirt Quarterly

– Shack squeezes her eyes shut until she sees little coloured lights floating inside them. The damp ground is cold against her back; her front is hot from the sun. She thinks about the ocean being here where she is lying right now. The enormous water, cold and heavy like a slab of iron bigger than a truck, bigger than a train that’s so big she can’t reach the first step. Cold and heavy, and alive with swimming things. Fish that slip past faster than she can notice them — she is only aware of their tails switching into the cold gloom. This saves her from having to imagine them in detail; Shack doesn’t know much about fish. She knows what sharks look like. There are sharks in here too, but she is afraid of them so she imagines them far away. So far away they can’t even eat the fish she can’t really imagine. — Elise Moser in Broken Pencil

– We found a dog some time ago. We’d heard its yelps and howls. An old grandmother’s mutterings. Just so on the wind. That sudden anger, its desperation, pulled out and long as evening shadows. Things we’d been doing. Staring out with our jaws open and slack, hanging as they do. The low throbbing rumble of cloud and thunder, a lone plane glinting in the sky, death and life, pining on, giving into, my brother washing dander and blood off of his hands off the side of the house—waving his hand for the flies, wind like a woman’s voice at night, what was her name? — Edmund Sandoval in Waccamaw

– You walk into the Agency decked out in a knockoff Burberry shirt, Calvin Clean jeans, and a pair of black Reeboks, ready to make a splash in the world. The space is eggshell white. A few photographs of famous landmarks interrupt the sparseness. Your eyes are drawn to the magazines highlighting the Louvre, Oktoberfest, Argentine steaks, and the Empire State Building. You take a number and look up at the flashing red digits on the screen above the service counters. It must be a slow day; there are only fifty-five students ahead of you. — Mateo Jarrín Cuvi in Shipwrights