*Rule Number One is that you gotta have fun. But when you’re done, you gotta be the first torun.” “Rule Number two, just don’t get attached to somebody you could lose.” “Two to a bunker each, and don’t forget your registered wristband!” Emerald could feel her heart pounding in her chest as she followed her […]
Leo hated taking flag down fares; it was the sheer unpredictability of how the ride could turn out that made him anxious. This was not New York, where a partition separated driver from customer. This was PVD, where because of simple proximity, a fare was privy to your world, and vice versa, for however long […]
Everyone in Providence knows about Piazza di Amore, the small Italian restaurant tucked away on a side street off Federal Hill. It’s not one of the big places with valet parking and red neon signs promising “authentic” pasta. It doesn’t even have a sign outside — just a single old-fashioned style lantern, twinkling above a […]
Evie’s friends had bailed on her, so she drank alone. Ned was bartending, but his heady personality required a buffer to manage his conspiratorial rants. Evie didn’t have the energy. A conversation with Ned would only compound her sense of abandonment. She wasn’t ready to discuss the physics of his recent obsession: An earth-killing meteor […]
Merciless1 I think I understand Victor Frankenstein now that I am older He was lonely and so created his monster for companionship without knowing it was going to appear monstrous. I, too, did the same thing but with myself to cover my own loneliness without knowing that I too now appear monstrous There was this […]
Paul-C’s granddaughter turned 12 years old on December 21st. At her birthday party, after she blew out all the candles on her cake and opened all the presents her family got her, he pulled her off to the side of the yard underneath the giant oak tree his older sister had planted years ago. And […]
THREE BODY PROBLEM1 “…My resolution is fixed. I shall be free.” …at that moment he was free, at least in spirit. The future gleamed brightly before him, and his fetters lay broken at his feet. – The Heroic Slave (1852) “As to the moral and social influences of pictures, it would hardly be extravagant to […]
By the time the final flurry had fallen, a towering twenty-three inches of snow blanketed the city of Providence in a vast sea of white. The winter of 2005 came a close second to the state’s largest blizzard. The only past occurrence even comparable was the blizzard of ‘78, when a record-breaking twenty-eight inches had […]
I worked for Flor all through my teenage years. She paid me well too, for the mundane errands, like delivering groceries, but also for the Santeria work that I had come to admire and respect; not for its sound reason or logic, but for its rejection of societal norms. The imagery and the lore behind […]
The following is a sequel to the author’s piece, Bruja, from the last issue. I first bonded with my mysterious neighbor, Flor, over our communal care for local stray cats. The decrepit garage we kept them in became a shared point of contact and a sacred space where we would cross paths at feeding times […]