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Issue 113

January 2025 · 32 pieces

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Suspended in air

January 2025 | fiction

Fiction · Issue 113At home, we are preparing to paint the living room walls pale yellow. Its summer. The heat is oppressive. There are cobwebs in every corner of the walls. The spiders have weaved their webby homes in our spacious one. They are in clusters, like spools of grey cotton thread dangling from the walls. I see the spiders suspended in the air, unfazed by the height, and drop to the floor. I am scared of heights. Of falling from the rooftops of restaurants we often visit. I am even terrified about diving from the diving pool in our club swimming pool. I am trying to understand why. I usually dream about falling and wake up screaming loudly. Why does it happen only to me? My husband thinks it's irrational. My kids laugh at me. I am afraid for these eight-legged creatures. The mere thought of them falling and dying gives me shivers. Why can't they build their homes in the shrubs or trees outside? The ferocious summer heat drives them indoors. Perhaps the pungent paint smell will drive them out. Seasons will change. In the meantime, I see the spiders continuing to spin, suspended in mid-air. The sight is scary as I watch them with bated breaths, their delicate movements adding to my unease.

Dinner parties

January 2025 | fiction

Fiction · Issue 113She lived to host dinner parties. It was a need, a compulsion, to fulfill it she would look for the most absurd reasons. Like the time she bought a purse and messaged our group: Guess what it’s dinner party time. I just bought a purse. Or when she had a fight with her parents over not hurrying to marry a nice boy and having his babies before her biological clock froze. Then there was one where her blind date stood her up. Soon, the reason to hold dinner parties gained as much popularity as the dinner party itself. Her friends couldn’t fault her since her hostessing skills were flawless. She was an extraordinary cook with a knack for chopping her feelings and emotions into itty-bitty pieces and adding them to her dishes. She preferred the food to tell us stories and hold all the intimate conversations while she  laughed, twirled her hair, and talked about anything and everything except what she felt

Nesting

January 2025 | fiction

Fiction · Issue 113There is something very large building a nest in the parkway by the house I grew up in. The house where my father still lives. He takes walks in this parkway. It makes me nervous. I guess I first noticed it after my mother died. It looked like a large pile of brush in the clearing. Maybe from a storm or from the efforts to rid the area of an invasive species like buckthorn or thistles or the contents of my mother’s hospice supplies. But it was in a perfect circle.

Espadrilles

January 2025 | nonfiction

Nonfiction · Issue 113In the Guadalajara market, I bought a pair of straw espadrilles. When they fell apart months later, I realized the soles were made out of car tires. I fed the tops to a goat at the side of a dusty road. Years later in Friuli near Venice, I bought a pair of velvet espadrilles at the base of the Rialto Bridge. That pair lasted two months longer than the first. I recycled those at our local dump. The boys, both times, didn’t last much longer.

Julien Griswold

January 2025 | poetry

Poetry · Issue 113I invent a time machine to go back and witness the moment before my birth certificate signing, my parents’ silent prayer before clicking the penWhat if your name was Antoine or Rebecca or Augustine or Vicky or Beatrice or Walter? Or Ishmael or Clark or Bianca or Dixie or Shauna or Joey or Thaddeus or Milton? Or world-eater, snail-chaser, big walrus, weak handshake, smoke break, sweet manger, good morrow, high heaven, smug winker, long freight car, old matchbox, big sister, door greeter, worm hooker, over-easy, glossy nightville, snooze daily, toast burning, smell-licker, wet shellac, deer herder, my snowman, hot reminder, the shake-up, boy howdy, listen closest, beggar breadbasket, pigeon spikes, gloveless finger, ugly watch guard, open present, pushing wedlock, a gardenia, child’s shadow, castle drawstring, axe in-motion, mother’s comfort, one toe showing, fish-in-ziplock, dear old fellow, the grand lady, hemline feather, long-lost tabby, “Dad, I love you,” the day after mourning, the night before morning, small star one, dancing creased shoes, how to hold you, someone’s baby, street dog drinking.

Night Drive

January 2025 | nonfiction

Nonfiction · Issue 113Steam rises in swirls, wisps, moves like a candle snuffed out, then smoke curling. This road on a Wednesday night in the middle of Italy is dark except for the headlights that cut through the fog, barely, and the city of Macerata in the distance. I know this land. I left an entire country for it and now I have it mapped on my palm, penned out in ink, twenty years -- the up and down, the hills that move, shift, medieval towns that cluster and roll to the Adriatic Sea. The soft grain, fields of sunflowers like matches lit, crimson poppies that carry the wind on June afternoons. It is a homeland perhaps, and for years now I've been pretending it's mine.
Burningword

Burningword Literary Journal publishes poetry, fiction, nonfiction and visual art three times a year, in January, April and October, on the web and in print. Established 2001.

ISSN 2161-8992 (print) · ISSN 2157-7366 (online)

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