Tag: Edited by Molly Green

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Editing Adulthood

By Yash Seyedbagheri

‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎‎‏‏‎Home during quarantine, I rearrange my bedroom.

‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎‎‏‎I’m an editor.

‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎‎‎First, I line up my computer. Pull up edits marked in sharp navy

blue. Pepper the desk with half a dozen Diet Pepsis.

‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎‎‏I strip my bed of soft moon-themed sheets. Take out the old

train set with switch tracks and the power to crash without

consequence.

‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎‎Laughter rises in my mind, squeaky, unfiltered.

‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ I remove Goosebumps splayed across my desk, smile thinking of

psychopathic piano instructors and time-traveling cuckoo clocks.

‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎‎‏‏‎I carry each item to the closet. Drape blankets over everything.

Tuck edges with tenderness.

‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎‎‏‏Blankets aren’t big enough.

Yash Seyedbagheri is a graduate of Colorado State University’s MFA program in fiction. His stories, “Soon,” “How To Be A Good Episcopalian,” and “Tales From A Communion Line,” were nominated for Pushcarts. Yash’s work has been published or is forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Write City Magazine, and Ariel Chart, among others.

Mahmet

By: Elissa Russell

I couldn’t recognize your accent as foreign any more than I could my own. Each muddy ‘R,’ each forced vowel we produced hung in the air unacknowledged, suspended like mobiles in the damp atmosphere.

It was your eyes that first betrayed you—those flame-gold eyes, the color of honey exactly, fixed always toward the East.

We met at a neighborhood party over hard punch and galettes and too many glasses of Muscadet. Rain swelled the clouds overhead as the fluid language swirled around us. I was dizzy, drunk, still ticking on Central Standard Time. The Atlantic-soaked air had long ago swept my pride and my verb conjugations out to sea.

You commiserated with each awkward ​bisou​, heard each garbled syllable, pulled me aside:

“Yolaine and I met twenty years ago,” you told me in her language: smooth, yet biting. “​Elle est ma marie​,” you emphasized, the bitter ‘R’ accentuating the phrase’s harshest word. You paused, downed the contents of your glass in one sharp gulp. The closer you drew in, the faster my heart beat. “I hate this rain, this place. I want to learn English. I must. It’s so… beautiful.” Flickering amber eyes, now locked on my blue ones. “Let me walk you home. It’s dark.” You squeezed my bare knee, hard, and stood. The walk home was neither dark nor far, but you knew that. You’d been here now for eleven years, after all.

Upon reaching the yellow house with the blue door, you braced my shoulders and brought your nose within an inch from my own. “Sweet dreams,” you exhaled at me in English, your breath forming a sea-salt cocktail with the night as I dumbly watched you stumble back up the path.

I fished out an ornate house key, which seemed to belong more to the Victorian era than in my Jansport. I winced as it turned loudly in the heavy door, fearing to wake the members of this house, this family that was not mine.

From the peephole, I glimpsed your brown peacoat. You disappeared past the stone wall, back toward your home, where your wife was washing our dinner plates.

Elissa Russell holds an English degree from the University of Texas at Austin. After graduating, she worked as an English teacher in Calais, France. A theatre educator and administrator, she now lives in Colorado, where she continues to explore her passion for writing.