Sharon Goldberg

April 2026 | nonfiction

Dreamscape

Trailing behind my partner Arnie and friend Tom, I ski toward Dreamscape lift down Déjà vu, an intermediate Park City run well within my skill set; I’m 69 with 35 years of experience under my parka although certainly not an expert. The air is afternoon crisp but my hands and toes are toasty thanks to my heated gloves and boots. I carve turn after turn after turn and hear my edges digging into the hard pack. The snow is slick. My mind wanders for a moment, a daydream maybe, and I miscalculate a turn. OHHH SHIIIIIIIT! I veer off the groomed terrain, impale my skis in a mogul, flip out of the bindings, catapult airborne, then land on my stomach and slide twenty feet down the hill. Somewhere along the way I hear a muffled crack. I let go of my ski poles, still oddly clenched in my hands, and roll over onto my back. I shake, shake, shake in shock. My right leg feels limp. Tom yells from below, “Can you get up or should I call ski patrol?” “Ski patrol,” I yell back. Pain begins to throb deep in my leg. The metallic taste of fear coats the inside of my mouth. Will my knee still bend? I don’t dare test it. I shake, shake, shake and I can’t make it stop! “Breathe,” I tell myself. “Breathe.” A panic attack will not help. I try to steel myself—such a weird expression. I think about Arnie who is likely at the lift and wondering where I am. Did she take a little tumble and have trouble getting up? Soon, the ski patrol will arrive with their tools and toboggan. I’ve watched them rescue other skiers after crashes and wipeouts and felt grateful I was upright. Now I will be their cargo, one of the fallen, wrapped in a blanket and ferried down the hill. I close my eyes and I wait, wishing, wishing, wishing this was all a dream.

Sharon Goldberg

Sharon Goldberg is a Seattle writer whose work has appeared/is forthcoming in The Gettysburg Review, The Citron Review, New Letters, The Louisville Review, Cold Mountain Review, River Teeth, Green Mountains Review, The Southern Indiana Review, The Lost Balloon, Best Small Fictions, and elsewhere. Sharon won second place in the On the Premises 2012 Humor Contest and Fiction Attic Press’s 2013 Flash in the Attic Contest. She is an avid but cautious skier and enthusiastic world traveler.

Dara Goodale

April 2026 | nonfiction

Relief Valve

It’s February and the power company is working on our building’s main heating line. We sit in our living room with big sweaters and pants and socks and sip tea, watching our breaths merge with the steam until we can’t tell which is which. Maybe it doesn’t matter—we’re all burning inside, anyways, while oxygen slowly combusts in our lungs. Sometimes I hear it crackle if the room is silent, but that’s only at 2am, when the metro stops running and the highway quiets. When all the people get to wherever they’re going. To wherever home is. I think people are always trying to get home however they can, the businessmen on the train and the junkies in the street, we’re all the same. We all take whatever bus comes first.

We live on the top floor of an 80-year-old apartment building. I didn’t know this before, but in old apartments, when they do work on the central heating, air pressure builds up at the tops of the pipes. They have to let it out with a tiny key that they twist into the gut of our radiator until water spurts like they hit an artery. I hover in the hallway while they clean up the mess and wonder whether I should ask them if they want something to drink. I’m not quick enough—they nod and head out, and then we have heat again. At least for a while. I’ve been finding comfort in things like these since you left: awkward interactions with handymen, not having heat, having heat again. Sometimes I’ll even smoke with the window wide open—but that’s nothing new, you’d say.

We turn the heat all the way up and finish our tea and sweat through our sweaters. The radiator burns if you touch it with the fleshy part of your palm, like I did to see if it was on. To check that they hadn’t only pretended to fix something that couldn’t be fixed. These aren’t metaphors—I think life just has a funny way of sticking the same thing under your nose over and over again, as if to say “look, this is what I meant.” I keep telling life “I understood you the first time,” but it’s no use. Life is busy going home and I’m getting older and you’re still dead. It’s too hot in our apartment. But listen: outside, it’s starting to snow.

Dara Goodale

Dara Goodale (they/them) is a Romanian-American queer multigenre writer and university student living in Lausanne, Switzerland. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, the American Poetry Journal, ANMLY, Cleaver Magazine, Thimble Literary Magazine, Sky Island Journal, and more. Dara is a Pushcart nominee and was a finalist for the Gasher Press 2025 Bennett Nieberg Transpoetic Broadside Prize. You can find them on Instagram @daragoodale and online at daragoodale.com