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One Night Only

December 3, 2021/ Brett Biebel

[fiction]     

The neighbor had a few trees removed, and they had to leave the trunks out on the lawn overnight. The sun went down, or the truck was full, or else I guess they maybe just needed a break. They were ash trees, I think. Diseased. I called Rachel, and we went over to look at them, and they’d all fallen at some pretty weird angles. One of them was perched on the cut branches of another, and we slid underneath and then just laid there in the dark for a while. We couldn’t get our arms around the wood. Every so often, we’d try to push it, and it wouldn’t budge, and the ground was slick and wet, and so our bodies made these little outlines in the dirt while we talked about cremation. Like, the virtues of getting turned to smoke versus buried down deep. “There’s something about the skeleton,” I said, and what I meant was how I couldn’t imagine losing even your bones. We were drinking from thermoses filled with coffee and her mother’s cheap peppermint schnapps. It tasted like Christmas. Like mint toothpaste gone bad.  One of the trees must have had 150 rings, and another had forty-seven, and that was the only one we counted specifically because the rest just seemed like way too much work. “Jesus Christ,” she said, and “It was practically a fucking baby,” and I told her how even the oldest one was like maybe our age at the very most. “It’s different for trees,” I said. “The scale, I mean, and I guess time is relative, and it all depends on, like, your particular angle in space.”  

We were both pretty drunk, but I swear the neighbor was watching us through the window. The TV was on. You could see the blue light. Sometimes it would shift to different shades, and from the pattern I figured it must have been a baseball game or maybe a cop show, and it didn’t matter because you could feel the guy staring all the same. “He’s waiting for us to kiss,” I said, and I didn’t mean anything by it. It was more like a running joke. I bet she thought I was serious, though. She kind of arched her back and peered toward the window, and, “Fuck him,” she said, and I think I probably understood her. Even the stumps would be gone and disappeared gone.

Brett Biebel, Author Headshot

Brett Biebel teaches writing and literature at Augustana College in Rock Island, IL. His (mostly very) short fiction has appeared in Hobart, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Masters Review, Wigleaf, and elsewhere. It’s  also been chosen for Best Small Fictions and as part of Wigleaf’s annual Top 50 Very Short Stories. 48 Blitz, his debut story collection, is available from Split/Lip Press.

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Genre Archive

  • Creative Nonfiction
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Friday Lunch Blog

Friday Lunch! A serving of contemporary essays published every Friday.

Today’s course:

Where Are You From?

August 5, 2022/in Blog / Majella Pinto
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The Old Folks’ Home

July 22, 2022/in Blog / Karen Gaul Schulman
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Peace, Love, and a lot of Loud Rock & Roll

June 17, 2022/in A Transfer, Blog / Sunee Lyn Foley
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Midnight Snack

A destination for all your late night obsessions.

Tonight’s bites:

QVC-land

May 6, 2022/in A Transfer, Midnight Snack / D. E. Hardy
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Escape Artists at the End of the World

April 29, 2022/in A Transfer, Midnight Snack / Lisa Levy
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The House in the Middle

April 15, 2022/in A Transfer, Midnight Snack / Megan Vasquez
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More coming soon!

Amuse-Bouche

Little bites every Monday to whet your appetite!

Today’s plate:

My Mother’s Hands

August 8, 2022/in Amuse-Bouche / Annie Marhefka
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Defy Gravity

August 1, 2022/in Amuse-Bouche / Megan Peck
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Little Shrimp

July 25, 2022/in Amuse-Bouche / Karen Poppy
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School Lunch

An occasional Wednesday series dishing up today’s best youth writers.

Today’s slice:

I’ve Stayed in the Front Yard

May 12, 2021/in School Lunch, School Lunch 2021 / Brendan Nurczyk
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A Communal Announcement

April 28, 2021/in School Lunch, School Lunch 2021 / Isabella Dail
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Seventeen

April 14, 2021/in School Lunch, School Lunch 2021 / Abigail E. Calimaran
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Word From the Editor

The variety in this issue speaks not only to the eclectic world we inhabit but to the power of the human spirit. We live in an uncertain world. In the U.S., we’re seeing mass shootings daily. Across the world, we’re still very much in a pandemic, some being trapped in their homes for weeks on end, others struggling to stay alive in hospitals. War continues to wage in Ukraine. Iran and North Korea are working diligently to make nuclear weapons. The list goes on. Still, we have artists who are willing and able to be vulnerable with one another, to share stories and art to help us try and make sense of our world.

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