Issue 18 Fiction
Louanne's Baby
by Jacqueline Doyle
"hey lady, wanna buy a baby?"
He lurched forward outside Walmart, tall and bony, with large hands and a prominent Adam's apple. There was a sprinkling of snow on his shock of brown hair and worn flannel shirt. He shifted from foot to foot, looking around furtively, and repeated, "Wanna buy a baby?"
Louanne wondered if it was so obvious that she didn't have one, whether she looked too homely, too old to hope for a baby of her own. "Louanne, Louanne, she ain't never gonna git no man," her cousin Mae used to taunt her, and it was true, she was 42 and still alone.
Moth
by Zoë Miller
i used to sketch inside my notebook with colored pencil. Sketches of the Pacolet River, Mama cutting hair, Nana slipping open a boiled peanut with her gnarled hands. But now, I collect everything I can get my hands on—old newspapers, pieces of cardboard, bottle wrappers, wire. Now, I turn my notebook into collage.
*
Most of the girls I go to school with have more money than me, but that ain't saying much. They go on vacations with their families to Myrtle Beach on the weekends, coming back to school on Monday carrying plastic containers filled with hermit crabs, their shells decorated in neon puffy paint. One time, this girl, Evelyn, gave me one when we were alone in the bathroom, right before Algebra. It was smaller than the other ones, and the painted flower on its shell looked smudged. I carried it in my lunch bag all day, and when I got home, I put it in a yogurt container filled with leaves. It died a few days later.
