Fiction
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Pocket God
by T.J. Martinson
art by Odilon Redon, 1882
Your Pocket God stopped eating last week. For the first few days, it was easy enough to excuse the way it pushed away each offering of raisins like a fussy toddler, but now, eight days later, excuses are hard to come by. Still you try.
“It’s probably just a spiritual fast,” you tell your dad during breakfast as you anxiously hold your starving, gaunt Pocket God, watching it turn over weakly in your palm.
You hope your father will agree that there’s nothing to worry about,
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Sand Wall
By Laura Schadler
art by Caspar David Friedrich, 1817
I.
The woman’s recurring dream found her online dating, tapping ineffectually through a glitchy and pixelated app. In each subsequent dream, she feared it had been too long to respond to a message from the previous night.
The woman had married at a strange in-between time when almost no one online dated.
In a second dream, a small panther prowled along with that sultry shoulder swivel, as if on its way to kill something. She often woke distraught.
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New! LIT Monthly Writing Prompt: April Edition
Happy poetry month everyone!
Here at LIT we are starting a new series of monthly writing prompts. This month’s prompt is from our nonfiction editor Vicky Oliver:
Write about a time when you were lost and how you found your way home.
The hero’s journey is sometimes a parable on the transformation of being: old habits and emotional reactions that are shed out of necessity as they become stumbling blocks to the journey. The old ways are replaced by new strengths or new ideas that have been germinating out of sight, waiting to come into play as fresh discoveries in a moment of crisis,
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Watch and Wait
image curtesy of Public Domain Review
by Lucy McBee
My name is Elizabeth Holmes.
But I’m not the one you’re thinking of.
I’m not a Stanford dropout.
I’ve never been on the cover of Fortune.
A former Secretary of State has never sided with me over his own grandson.
I can’t speak Mandarin.
I’ve only worn blood red lipstick once, to a Halloween party. I went as Elvira (and was mistaken for Morticia Addams, I suppose because I lacked the requisite cleavage),
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Traveling With a Door
image Lorenz Stoer (1567), from The Public Domain Review
by Sandra Hunter
The girl watches the woman—green beret, yellow balloon pants, blue shoe, white shoe, ripped red scarf around one wrist—an eight-foot slab of wood across her back, bending her into prayer. The woman prays and curses across the road in front of cars stunned into stillness. When she reaches the curb, she unloads against a telephone pole the slab, nestling wood to wood. She breathes heavily, head down, drags her scarfed wrist across her face and neck, looks up to the sky, stretches her arms wide,
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Horde’s Oeuvre
image detail from Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights - Public Domain Review
by Ian Power-Luetscher
A fucking gryphon got our mayor last night and now everybody in Pod24 is just losing their shit.
I hear the news on the community feed, during the “rise and shine” talk block. We’re in the kitchen and I’m pouring juice for Lydia when someone yells, “Kenny Staples got picked off by a gryphon outside of the bank. You can see it on securityCam8.” And then the feed goes bonkers, and I knock over the OJ carton.
