She first notices him at the far end of the room, lean, rugged, rough around the edges, wearing dark-wash jeans and a grey hoodie under a brown leather jacket. He has short-cropped coppery-red hair and two days’ worth of reddish scruff. He rubs leisurely at the side of his face while pondering a watercolor on bark paper, an evocative rendering of a lonely fishing boat tied to a weather-beaten dock in murky water. He steps back, slightly tilting his head. He can feel her attentive gaze, but pretends not to notice. When the moment is right, he sneaks a peek and likes what he sees. Her dress is just tight enough, a navy-blue number with white trim and matching high heels. She has chestnut brown hair that’s shoulder length and silky smooth, piercing green eyes…
“Juneteenth: Remember That Time” by Derrick R. Lafayette
I remember in mid-march 2015, Kendrick Lamar’s second album debuted. One of my closest friends, who is white, had played it for his wife, who is also white. Needless to say, the first thirty seconds is a sample from Boris Gardiner’s “Every ____ is a star.” She promptly told him to turn it off. She was uncomfortable, and I understand. The first fourteen years of my life were a heavy combination of daily reminders and academic study into the bloated, complicated, and emotionally traumatizing history of slavery. My elementary school had taught me “Lift Every Voice and Sing” when I was four years old. Some people don’t know that there’s a Black National Anthem. I’d seen Roots, The Color Purple, Shaka Zulu, Panther, Rosewood, and Malcolm X by the time I was in seventh grade….
“Ideology as a Way of Life,” Poetry by Tali Shabtai
“Ideology as a Way of Life” Women like me, yes have been added over the years to overshadow what preceded us that is mostly not in line with our agenda. The accepted wording is not what will satisfy our desires – Desires? Ours? Well then, I write in the female first person plural so as not to sound as one who sins with pretension as an individual woman, however I do not have many female friends for this journey and those who have already passed through a station or two according to the fixed rules of society A woman like me tries to stay free from society and at the same time to be in it with boycotts in double-digit ages until the arrival of the adolescence age and beyond I bear this bitter insult…
“Virtual Math,” A Short Story by David Rogers
I meditated on this lost and perhaps mythical labyrinth . . . on the secret summit of some mountain . . . I imagined it infinite, . . . a sinuous, ever-growing maze which would take in both past and future and would somehow involve the stars. —Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths” “I did it,” Professor Radiant announced. “I’ve solved the problem of faster-than-light travel.” Radiant was the most senior member of La Mancha University’s Department of Mathematics, but no one listened to him. He was well known for his quixotic quests to solve problems like the Riemann hypothesis or to show Pi did, in fact, have a last digit. Of course these efforts never ended well. Thus, not until Professor Radiant made his claim about the secret of FTL travel…
“Depth Perception,” A Short Story by David Patten
Depth Perception