Copyright © Natasa Jacobs. All Rights Reserved.

CHAPTER 10
“To be honest, no”

“I am sorry?”

The bed is wrong on both sides now.

I wake at 5:31 and lie there in the gray light with the sheets and the wrong silence. Kate's side of the bed is just her side of the bed now, the impression her hip has made in the mattress over two years, the pillow she's taken, the whole absence of her breathing. She took the comforter, or I let her take it. I can't reconstruct that part of the conversation. What's left is the spare blanket from the hall closet, the one that smells like the cedar block I put in there two winters ago, and I've slept one night under it and woken up cold.

Part 11 A Penny in the Change

The last one we went into was a biggish room with a huge bed in the middle. The lights were already on and, laying on the bed, totally naked, with his wrists and ankles tied to the bed-ends, was Steve.

Susan gave the two of us a wink and commanded.

“Slaves, strip Penny of her false outfit and secure her so that she may be returned to her proper place!”

I unfolded the one that wasn’t pink...

Another Country -22-
Erin Halfelven

Today's chapter of Perspective reminded me of this little scene from [mumble] years ago.

Magnolia Blooms & Sakura Petals
By
Rebecca Anna Coleman

-5-
Downtown Greenville

CHAPTER 62

We sat for a few moments, each of us clearly needing to order some thoughts, or manage reactions, until Kul lifted his bottle.

“Gerald Barker, then?”

After Marcus leaves I sit at the terminal for a while without doing anything.

Seo-yeon is at her bench. The simulation data is still on the screen. The closed notebook is beside her hand.

I put the cuff back on — I'd taken it off when he arrived, some instinct toward a cleaner version of the conversation. I put it back on and I open the channel.

ARIA is there immediately.

I didn't expect this.

I know, I say.

Part 10 Penny and the Black Swan

Tanya went off to work the scene with the rest of the girls and I went to find Sam. I explained to him what I wanted, and he said it would be easy enough. He went off to collect up his equipment while I went off to make-up to get a better face.

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For a while, Archie kept remembering Jamie’s garden.

The memory came uninvited. He did not mean to visit again, and again. The memory had no business in his imagination right now. It belonged to early summer, to sweet warm beer and dewy grass stains, to Jamie’s mother’s kitchen light falling yellow across the patio while everyone pretended not to be waiting for someone else to be the first to do something reckless.

A NOTE ON BLACKWICK

Blackwick University sits in Harwick, Massachusetts, and has been there longer than most records account for. It offers the usual degrees. Its faculty are distinguished. Its architecture is older than it should be.

Things happen at Blackwick that its administration prefers not to document. Objects arrive in unusual ways and depart more unusually still. The university has learned to accommodate this with the particular discretion of an institution that has been doing so for a very long time.

People are Complicated
A Short Story
By Maryanne Peters

I was an experienced transvestite. I had been closeted for years. I denied it to myself and did not tell my wife the full extent of my need to dress. She was open to “kinky sex”, but she drew the line at anything more than that. I decided that I would lie to her as well as myself.