Alexander Weinstein Post-Industrial Love

Her mascara was streaked with tears. "Where's the coat rack?" she asked as I gave her a kiss. "I'm sorry, Roger didn't give me his." "Roger's a jerk! Look at my coat!"

I picked her coat from the floor and hung it over my arm. It looked pathetic hanging like

that.

"Why weren't you here on time?" "I'm sorry, some men came and destroyed my car this morning." "Oh my God." "It's okay, they were from the city." "Oh." She wiped her tears with a tissue. "Well, I brought you something from Denver." She picked up a small plastic pet carrier from the floor. Inside I could make out the black and white fur of a small cat. "Hi, kitty," I said poking my finger through the wire door. "Get your finger out of there! It's a Tasmanian Devil. They can bite through bone in seconds."

I pulled my finger back out. "I thought you might want to name him Lou." "That's my name," I said. "I know. I thought you could learn something from him."

It was then I realized something had changed in my fiance. She was acting too sweet. Never had she brought me back presents from a trip and here she was suddenly giving me a Tasmanian Devil. On the shuttle ride home it came out. "I like Denver," she told me. She turned towards me. "I'm tired of being together with you. I want to live somewhere that has more homeless people." "There are homeless people by the co-op," I said. "The co-op has an awful hot bar."

I couldn't argue with that. Sometimes they try to expand their choices from rice, beans, sauteed vegetable, and grilled tempeh, but it's true, it's really pretty boring. I promised I'd put in a comment card. "Jeez, Lou, you just don't get it do you?" she said. And I didn't. But for a moment, as the shuttle drove us down the highway, the billboards going by behind her, I saw my fiance as I always wanted to remember her: Her face highlighted by the fluorescent lights of the shuttle, the sound of Lou crunching through the buffalo wings we'd bought him, and the fleeting phrase, "Ask What Geico Can Do For You" speeding past on a billboard.

Atlantis

Joshua Vasquez

Clipping tumbles of unwavering rain come in Morse code dots and dashes against the aquarium like windows banding the people sitting in pairs, alone, strange fish or sunken senates, waiting for planes to be called, departing, arriving, a dreamy undercurrent of impossible flight.

Sitting at the bar, I watched a woman sing to a man and laugh, filled with recollections and slow panic, casually reaching out for her drink like a lantern as it got darker there, the storm moving in to give backdrop to the murmuring legion of mounted televisions whispering about

wars and elegant accomplishments, ships and space, the ailing leaks of history, the black folding sail of promise buckled into tourniquets and flags of surrender, mementos of unsounded grief, her girlish song, though, a submerged lament ringing fathoms down, heard even here in this basined envelope, sunken port now almost a myth.