AB INTRA

Mother told me once that my father died on the day I was born. This detail, along with the heroic swamp business, was all she would say, and eventually I grew weary of asking. But, oh, that night rescue mission—that was mine, and in childhood, in that drifty free-floating state just before sleep, I played it out on an endless, murky reel. – Dawna Kemper

The problem with air-purifying gas masks is that any leak in the respirator due to a poor fit between the mask and your face makes the whole thing ineffective. Supplied-air gas masks, while using the same cartridge, solve the problem by connecting the filter to a battery-operated canister. The advantage is that purified air escapes from the canister rather than the respirator, not allowing contaminated air from the environment to enter the mask. The disadvantage is that if the batteries die, so do you. – Gilad Elbom

The woman I left had cats and the one I found, birds. Germane? You might not think so. Some things are a given. Relationships can be that way. We hunt, we root for happiness, but it’s a crowded field. Turn over a square foot of Mother Earth where’er you please, you’ll see what I mean. – Jack Garrett

I would stand up on the O-2 level nights and watch the orange flame flicker and ignite, and then the catapult would release and the plane would shoot off, propelling itself mercilessly into the purple-dark landscape of the southern sky. The plane long gone, the night having sucked it up, I would follow the ashen trail left in its wake as it danced about and looked like dust slowly settling among the stars. Then, I was wanting so much to become a man. – Blake Cass

Tell your mother that Mr. Franz Cough-kuh hated himself for “wasting so much time.” Four days and I have written five words: “buy stockings for the concubine.” Best Friend bully knocks me down and says, “Why bother? Fifteen years of daily work on that book and have you sold it? Why put your hope in stockings?” – Matthew Crain

Is it better for the animals like Toto to be put to sleep permanently, Stephen wonders, as the elevator shudders to a stop on Four South, or just intermittently, at unpredictable intervals? It’s a new variant of the question that always seems to crop up with his patients: how awake does one need to be to qualify as living? – Leila Mansouri

The first time she took the gaff in hand, she didn’t look as she struck, missing the fish by a whole foot and making a clean, round mark on the white fiberglass deck. She handed over the gaff and turned away toward the water, wincing as she heard the wood come down upon the fish, a decisive thwack and then two swift flaps of the fish’s feathery tail before it knew it was dead. – Tracy Chait

The pig moved as the people tore away at it, and Nady tried to reach for a moist parcel of meat. The mesh wire was cut open, displaying its haunches, and steam swirled over its marbleized flesh. People used plastic forks to pull it apart. Everybody ate, and when it was over everyone but Nady went home on motorcycles. – Nina Dutkevitch

I started to hate the work, I could hear those dogs from Presque Isle in their pens down below by the once-stately main house, sometimes barking, sometimes chorally howling, and I doubt they even slept much, their sturdy haunches and dirty claws and their snarling dagger-sharp fangs encased in bared drooling lips as black as licorice, and, oh, need I say it again, those amber eyes, the dogs were just waiting to sniff out some more of such writing, find more quarterlies and journals,… – Peter LaSalle

The vast cloak came gliding from beyond Kilimanjaro, graying all that was spectral in color, somehow leaving a dazzling rubicund rainbow in its wake. Baily’s Beads danced around the black circumference like pearls aflame—the wild Einstein hair of the corona stretched out millions of miles into space. It was the Eye of God winking. – Steve De Jarnatt