| Recipient of a Wallace Stegner and NEA Creative Writing Fellowships, Hugh Behm-Steinberg is the author of two collections of poetry, Shy Green Fields (No Tell Books, 2007) and The Opposite of Work (JackLeg Press, 2012; 2nd edition by Doubleback Books, 2020). In 2015 his short story “Taylor Swift” won the Barthelme Prize for short fiction, and his story “Goodwill” was picked as one of the Wigleaf Top Fifty Very Short Fictions of 2018. His most recent book, Animal Children, a collection of prose poems and micro-fiction, was published by Nomadic Press in 2020. He teaches writing and literature at California College of the Arts, where he is currently the Chief Steward of the Adjunct Faculty Union at CCA, SEIU 1021. Goodwill I die and have to go back to retrieve my birth clothes. They’re in a pile, warm, like they just came out of the drier. I fold them carefully, awestruck by how small I used to be. I put them in a wicker basket, which I hoist onto my shoulder because I have to walk a very long way, to the only Goodwill store for miles around. The store is calm in its solitude, like a horse sleeping, surrounded by fields and lawns, trees, parkland and wilderness, gardens. I go inside and there’s all these people shopping, clothes of all sorts hang from racks, books, cups and dish sets, some brown furniture, nothing remarkable, the same things you’d find at a Goodwill anywhere else.I go to the back with my birth clothes; I hand them to the lady, so grateful I don’t have to sell them. They’re still warm. The lady smiles at me, as she examines each piece for tears. “Look at this,” she says as she shows me the collar of a tiny undershirt, so worn and soft it’s almost transparent, a little blank label. “There’s room there for you to write something,” she says, “for the next person who’s going to wear your clothes.” There’s so much I want to say, and there’s so little room in which to say it. My hands are trembling so much I keep dropping the pen. “That’s ok,” the lady says, and she writes what she always writes, in letters too small for anyone to read. First appeared in Jellyfish Review |
| Lucy Corin is the author of the short story collections One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses (McSweeney’s Books) and The Entire Predicament (Tin House Books) as well as a novel, Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls (FC2). Writings have appeared in American Short Fiction, Conjunctions, Harper’s Magazine, Ploughshares, Bomb, Tin House Magazine, and the most recent New American Stories anthology from Vintage. She was an American Academy of Arts and Letters Rome Prize winner and an NEA fellow in literature. The Swank Hotel, her second novel, is forthcoming from Graywolf. She lives in Berkeley, California. Mirror Two days since the apocalypse and freckles rise in the skin around my mouth. I am very close to my face, looking. Green funnels of what were pastures whirl and spit in the background. The last bits of cities are like comets and pass behind my head as if I am shooting myself repeatedly, as if I shoot myself and the fireballs go in one ear and out the other. It’s riveting. It’s hypnotic. My face contains more colors than are left in the universe. I watched Miranda’s teeth panic and run away. I watched Amber buckle. Now, in he mirror, there is no comparison. It’s me, and everything, and that’s all. |
