This week’s feature…
Animal Husbandry by Chris Cottom
My parents do not attend the ceremony. Daddy bangs around upstairs, packing for another trip. After he whizzes off, Mummy tells us they’re getting a divorce. None of my schoolfriends have parents who’ve got divorces and I worry they’ll need to be told, that the headmaster might announce it at Assembly, after the Lord’s Prayer…
Keep readingMicro Monday features brief fiction, cnf, and poetry. It’s like a shot of literary adrenaline to jump start your week.
Previous features:
First Date at a Greenhouse by Costantino Toth
If nature, however, begets only nature, such that our tending and lining and sucking are natural, as are the noisy babies and tools, then so are the four hundred and fifty–five kilotons wearing exhaust like a wedding band, poking out of the sea—
read
Thirteen Black by Sanum Patel
The dealer shot the ball, rippling up and down the wheel. Red, black, red, black. The odd green swirling in. Every roll held a blissful future — the world collapsing into nothing or blooming under my palms. It wasn’t a fool’s bet. It was the opposite of marriage…
read
Brumation by Melissa N. Vincel
We hold each other before meals from then on, one sleeve each grasped by my hand and his, a circle of human flesh and wool. We tell my mother’s coat about the day, fill her pockets with plastic dinosaurs, and sniff air around the notched collar…
read
At the Printer’s During Election Season by Cheryl Dyer
When I mention artwork, I see you soften, like, I really see your shoulders relax and you lean
forward as I pull out a piece from the portfolio that shimmers with speckles of patent gold….
read
You Ask Your Husband if He’d Do it All Over Again by Victoria Melekian
You spend the day making lists—reasons to stay, reasons to go. You try to keep them even, but staying is losing and that’s when you know. The man’s been leaving for months and you—too slow to see. You’ve got the dog, an orange cat in a sunny windowsill, and three miscarriages…
read
Letter I Wish My Mother Wrote from Virginia by Daniel Lurie
I can’t lift my head to see, so Ivy painted birds onto the glass in acrylics. She made it look like the scene from our backyard in Montana, down to the green paint flaking from the old feeder. It has the bluebird duo, the towhee with its demon eyes, the rafter of turkeys, the tanager…
read
The Mother Tree by Georgene Smith Goodin
She insisted on doing it herself and I followed her, carrying her IV bag because its pole couldn’t glide across the mat of dead grass our backyard had become. That watering was the closest she got to prayer…
read
Homestead by Brad Anderson
My great-grandfather was a homesteader. President Chester Arthur signed his deed in eighteen eighty-three. By that time he had lived there five years, carved a small farm out of open prairie and started a young family…
read
Love Fish to Wander by Jack Phillips
2 This celestial portal reflexively opens into the primal waters of your favorite pond as the refractive bend of your paddle reveals. Turtles, certain crustaceans and quite so fish other ovaline creatures (polliwog clams waterbeetle leaches) slip easily through. Show us the way that is, when not preoccupied with rolling ashore the astral egg from…
read
Witch’s Butter by Clif Mason
Yellow brain fungus curls & coils on wind-toppled, black-dappled, decaying white birch boles. Look closer…
read
The Softness I Owe by Joemario Umana
Where they taught me to shut the door, flowers pressed through the hinges, bloomed and held it wide open. Look, I know how to hold a butterfly and not tear its wings. I know how to water a flower without drowning it. I know how to cradle ache and not mistake it for the end.…
read
She tells us how we feel and we agree. The therapist we didn’t hire. Her misremembered facts become our story. She trades in gossip: who has an addiction, a love affair. No lovers allowed. She’ll be our only love. She leans…
read
Valentine’s Night in County Clare by Dan Thompson
“the crashing Atlantic forever tackling the rocks below the village – it wasn’t the cold that froze me there or anything else that might have prepared me for what I saw when I looked up…
read
House Party by Dory Rousos Moore
When her new boyfriend’s black Grand Am swerves into our complex, she jumps up, her drink spilling over the edge. The way she falls in love is with a whoosh, like she’s being sucked into a vacuum, and the way I fall in love is by pretending not to…
read
The Taste of Absence by Bethany Bruno
My father drank black Maxwell House from a repurposed Big Gulp cup, the kind with a faded NASCAR logo and a plastic straw he never used. Every morning, long before the world stirred, he filled it to the brim and cradled it between his knees as he drove to work. No cream. No sugar. Just…
readSomething went wrong. Please refresh the page and/or try again.
For all the latest from TGLR visit the Buzz.
Subscribe to get The Buzz ~ Micro Monday delivered directly to your inbox…
submissions:
We are currently open for all genres plus artwork! We nominate for Pushcart and Best of the Net and are a paying market.
The Good Life Review is seeking previously unpublished work by writers from all walks of life. Please read submission guidelines and when you’re ready, head over to Submittable to submit your work.
Issue #10 Cover Art: Scarred Beauty by Gerburg Garmann
