A. Fletcher
N. BoydLeo
wet work on the long porch pine, the owner of the harbor’s general store shook her head and couldn’t help a smile as he rode up bareback, barefooted, 
and bare-grinned showing through to the heart of him. He sat the horse and the horse’s head dipped and shook as Dyl’n overtook the horse and trotted up the porch steps, her tail clapping against the pine as she lay across the proprietor’s feet. 
Leo dismounted the horse, bounded up the steps, and apologized for his dog’s soiling the shopkeeper’s work. She shrugged it off with a smile,her fingers lost in the dog’s long belly fur, and asked about his latest build. He explained a challenge encountered in the imbrication
of the mansard roof—incorporated late in the design as the client decided against an attic in favor of a usable third floor. She was game for the conversation, 
having experience in maritime design and boat building, and they talked for some time and she was unsurprised to learn his architectural business was flourishing. Eventually they fell upon the subject of his
photography and she retrieved the film he had ordered from the east. He settled his debt and placed another order for a set of French curves and she laughed and speculated he keeps 
these open orders simply for an excuse to visit her. His face flushed slightly and he 
called to Dyl’n who had wandered down the block. He used the porch to mount the horse, tipped his hat to the shopkeep, and turned the horse down harbor. She leaned against the door frame and watched fishermen and merchants down the road lift their heads and hands in a roll of warm greeting to the rider and his dog.
Lil’ Sar Six-Guns
of the olive, swollen and crisp with cool, fought off the day’s blood already shed by mid-morning. She forgot all of them. The begging,
the wet trousers, a taste of liquor. The collection of gin in the corners of her palette, 
the smell of gunsmoke pouring skyward as the rigor of her aim, an oak branch, never shook in the wake of the blast. The thin andfrozen surface of her
drink, so delicate, like the falling eyes of the doomed before death. After the yelling, the street outside grew quiet 
and she swallowed the last of her courage in the cool of the bar and set her glass down in the company of her Macbook, walked the length of the bar. 
Her eyes danced ahead, grinning. 
Two men at the entrance holding their oily hats thanked her, her hand resting fondly on her pistol that bore the name “STU.”
Madeleine, gracias a dios
speckled red and brown with spice, drifted about the surface of the broth like the slow wandering of planets through the heavens.
She twisted the spoon, cutting a gentle wake through the soup, the oils colliding and reconstituting in larger forms and separating again with centrifugal pressure against the ceramic keep. 
With each revolution the pale cliffs of tripe were too transformed and she focused on the colors of the soup while she worked. 
She thought of his hands, all day in the red-brown earth to be soon stained with red-brown soup, and so
anticipated the door but did not turn to it when it creaked open and let briefly in the sound of tires across gravel. She smiled to
the soup and listened to him inhale the room. “Art,” he exhaled. “You abandoned the recipe?” She did not answer, did not turn. “Of course,” he 
said. “La evolución es sofocada por la instrucción.” He stood behind her and bowed his forehead to rest between her shoulder 
blades. “Gracias, Madeleine. Por todos.”
Zoé Omaha
the dune and sat on her heels and began to unpack the meal her mother had prepared for her. She picked at the wax paper around the cheese and furrowed her brow in the attempt to get her newly trimmed fingernails under an edge and thought of how she wanted grown-up hands that worked better. She had said as much to her father the nightbefore as he clipped her nails and he said that all children want to be bigger and that’s why they grow. She sat and ate the buttery cheese with crackers and watched the emerald sea rise up in low jade walls and tumble white over itself. She watched the waves and thought of the waves watching her and wondered how old the waves were. She wondered at the age of all the things around her and remembered her parents telling of young people not much older than her who came to this beach without having ever seen it or anyone who lived near it to save it and the people near it from bad people and that many of the young people died before the bad people left. Her parents said to remember these young people for they had died on this beach for this beach and so one day two people from opposite sides of the world could meet and start a family just like theirs and that without the sacrifice of these young people their family would not be and many other things would not be. The girl rocked gently back and forth on her heels and felt the tops of her feet pressing against the dune and watched wave meet beach, wave meet beach.
