open road
Issue 2 ✷ July 2020
Lighthouse
“Lighthouse” is the featured artwork for our July issue of 2020, “Open Road.”
Scylla and the Albatross
Aya and her friends are not the only ones on the island. Something is there with them. And it wants her.
The Conditions of Love
The past is a different country. They do things differently there. For an exile, the saying is doubly true.
Where Memory Meets the Waves
“The first thing you must always remember,” her grandmother once told her, “is that the sea never forgets. The second is that which belongs to the sea, will always return to it. Always.”
Aloha
Everyone Annie knew—siblings, parents, friends—had tried to talk her out of doing this. It was crazy, they said. It was going to be too difficult for her. She was going on the honeymoon for a canceled wedding, and people don’t do that, for very good reasons.
“But I do,” she had declared, “I do that. And it’s not a honeymoon, it’s an ‘alone-y moon’.”
Underneath her bravado, though, she was scared. Until now, she had been certain about where she was going in life, and who she was going with; but that certainty had vanished.
East of Greene
It couldn’t be clearer he’s from someplace else. Cassie can’t remember the last time someone from someplace else stumbled into this diner— though after living all of her twenty-four years in this part of Indiana she’s familiar enough with the types who come through for the university to recognize one when she sees them.
The Boiling Point
That’s the great thing about handsome strangers. You know you’ll never see them again.
An island girl and a tourist meet one hot summer afternoon. But this island is no paradise, and there are consequences to staying.
The Last Witch
Elle March thinks that she is the last witch—except that maybe she is not. Elle March thinks that she’ll cast a love spell for her sister, and then she’ll be able to go back to her quiet life—except that maybe she won’t.