Author: Heavy Feather

Guffy Bergman: Three Poems for Bad Survivalist

Opening Holes of Escape in the Tight Fabric[1] Dirt settles into mounds around our feet,brown hard-contrasting with the boom-pinkcolor we imagine for our bones—yes,it’s like that, images standing innot for the thought but that thought’s tenor,jackrabbits twitching at the entranceto the hutch, taking wordless breaks, and the great blue herons, commonin the creek, flash their…
“Our Mutual Friend”: A Short Story for Haunted Passages by Stephen Langlois

My daughter Arabelle, she was the first to hear them. They woke her Thursday night before last, tapping on her window. Maybe not tapping so much as clinking. I heard the same sound since. Right here in the kitchen and elsewhere, too. A quick, sharp, hollow sorta sound. The sound of digits what ain’t designed…
“The Shapes in the Carpet”: A Short Story for Bad Survivalist by Stephen Piccarella

Both of my parents are dead. I live with Zeke, my older half-brother, and we take care of each other. We grew up together in the house we live in now, a one room unit like a truck with no wheels, out in the middle of the woods. The house is flat on every side…
Andrew Farkas on L.M. Rainer’s Pelekinesis essay collection How to Behave

There’s an exchange at the end of Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People” that encapsulates L.M. Rainer’s style in her collection of essays, How to Behave: Mrs. Hopewell: He was so simple, but I guess the world would be better off if we were all that simple. Mrs. Freeman: Some can’t be that simple. I know…
“Debt,” a Flavor Town USA nonfiction essay by Christopher Bowen

Are you hungry the way I used to be? When I was a culinary student, I was always hungry and thought people will need to eat, too. They will always need me here for that and I’d always have a job because of that. I wrote and traveled, too. These were a few of the…
Haunted Passages: “Business Travelers,” a short story by Bernard Reed

Foster was in town again. We took a cab together and had a late lunch in an empty little restaurant, after meeting in the lobby of the La— Hotel when my shift there was over. It was his second visit that month. He was staying in a hotel called the Gw—, a swanky new one…
Bad Survivalist Short Story: “Along the South Shoreline” by Josie Tolin

Lorna scanned her reflection in a full-length mirror, sucking in her stomach as she forced the button through the hole. The skirt hadn’t always fit this way. When she exhaled, her belly spilled over the waistband, and Lorna smacked her hands against her abdomen and watched the skin quiver like Jell-O. Her mom called it…
Haunted Passages: “Dear Becca,” a short story by Kate St. Germain

Dear Becca, I’ve wanted to write you for a long time. But on the last episode, GO FOR IT, you told us to go for what we want. So that’s what I’ll do. My grandma died almost 2 months ago. I had been taking care of her, actually I never moved out of our house.…
Emma Aylor: “Ossuary,” a poem for Haunted Passages

On the farm, our border collie lab killedsmall animals. I’d tell people they died from Joy. Once a groundhogjust next to its burrow, head open to skimmed winter sky and the pinkof its brain blurred and scraped at the edges; twice our hens, bodies stretchedin the cage corner, eyelids purpled and closed. Some she could…