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My father used to recite Robert Frost's poem "Fire and Ice" to me when I was a little boy. He'd mimic Frost's nasal, staccato voice and pronounce the poet's preferences for global destruction. I would laugh at him, but my mother never liked to hear my father do this, and she'd chide him from the kitchen.

I never gave it much thought, it was just my father being silly. But one night, years later, when he was very old, he called me to his bedside. "It ended in fire," he said. The words came out of him like a chill from under a door. "We watched it. We watched the whole world burn through our windows. The flames rolled over the planet, leaving ember and char—the whole world dead in minutes. We were in our pods horrified, pressing against the windows, looking at the world's burned, black hull, finding ourselves floating over everything and nothing."

It was too hard to see the cold, dead earth, so they left to find a new world, trying to forget everything they loved, saying all they every really loved was each other. I was born on the new world, so I never knew what a blue sky was really like, or what birds sang in the morning, or what rain felt like on your bare head. "We didn't have time for those things," my father whispered. His voice came from deep inside where he couldn't carry rain and birdsongs, and covered it all with a poem instead.

-Benjamin Chandler

It began with forms. Pages to sign: releases, disclaimers, cover-their-ass documents that proved you knew what you were getting into. Volunteering isn't always easy.

Yes, I understand. Initial here. Yes, yes, I give you permission. Initial here. No, I don't have any pins in me. Initial here.

9 Teslas. I hadn't known what a Tesla was before this. Or probably I had known once, but long since forgotten such information. 9 Teslas was highly experimental. Those forms weren't for nothing.

"Don't worry. I've done it" the technician smiled, "everyone in the lab has."

I had to lay down on the table while they strapped my head into a sort of vice-like contraption and then reassure them once again that I didn't have any pins holding my joints together. And, yes, I'd removed all my jewelry. You don't mess with 9 Teslas.

"You might get dizzy" he told me as they wheeled me into the room and maneuvered my head into the machine. "Some people taste pennies in their mouth." Weird tricks of the brain - what do you expect when you shoot 9 Teslas of magnetic power at it so all its molecules line up to point north? Literally. And don't ask what happens if there is any metal nearby.

Dizzy was an understatement. I heard a clanking and all of the sudden it was as if the earth had tilted and was trying to drop me off of it. I came to the firm realization that the earth must, indeed, be flat. Maybe fanciful convictions were a side effect too - they never mentioned that. My mouth had pennies in it.

Finally the feeling of freefalling ended and I heard voices talking at me. "Can you hear us?" "We'll be here the whole time." "We can play music for you if you like." Their voices were right in my ear but seemed so far off. It felt as though I were in a tomb. Kind of relaxing actually, until the machine would start to thunk again. Faster and faster the noise would get (apparently noise has speed when in a magnetic field), pounding in my ear, and then suddenly......it would all drop off. And I was alone again in my contemplative silence, pointing north.

-Elisabeth Long

When they used the echocardiogram, the screen had the same gray and black areas as a weatherman's radar, as if the chambers of my heart were high and low pressure systems, pushing thin masses of clouds in a broken rhythm.

The attendant moved the sensor on my chest and the shapes on the screen rushed, swirling for seconds until the machine focused again on a point inside me. The clouds returned to the screen, pulsing like nothing I saw in the sky. It seemed more like fish in a dark pool. Or the ghosts of fish.

The sensor shifted again and the screen filled with a new formation. This one with a small area where gray wisps flitted, like twin tails on a kite or the wings on an injured bird.

"See that?" the attendant said, almost nonchalantly. "That's your valve." I watched the screen, but I really didn't know what he was referring to. "It shouldn't do that," he continued. It looked like static—like the UHF channels I could barely tune into on late summer nights. The channels where shadows spoke in familiar voices and I envisioned the signals shivering over the curve of the earth. Laying in bed back then, I would squint to see characters in the static, clinging to the phantom station until it faded into hisses and television snow.

There, in the dark room, the signals shivered onto a small screen and the attendant pointed out the destroyed valve. I watched the broken heart until he moved the sensor away from my body, and the screen went black.

-Benjamin Chandler

The sentence: Somehow, the day before, she must have been co-opted into one of Anna’s schemes.

“Thursday. I just hate Thursdays - never any good in any way at all.” Darra was talking to herself in the clear spot that she had smudged on the steamy bathroom mirror. She was hung-over, her hair was a tornado, one eye was swollen shut, the tile floor was cold, and it was snowing a blizzard out.

“Why even bother?”, she asked herself. “It can only get worse.”

She poked at her swollen eye; it didn’t hurt. “Not a bruise from a fight or a fall. Maybe an allergic reaction; but I’m not allergic to anything.”

Darra turned away from her reflection and shuffled across the cold tile, feet scratching on loose grout, damp towel dragging behind her. She pushed through the door into the bedroom.

It was to bright, too dusty, too – not her bedroom. Darra stood with her towel, still dripping from the shower, in the midst of heaps of unrecognizable stuff. She realized that she was in the basement of the junk shop. Somehow, the day before, she must have been co-opted into one of Anna’s schemes.

“Put some cloths on! How’s your eye?” Anna asked.

Darra was confused.

“Go back through the bathroom and out the other door, your things are right there where you left them.”

-Stephen DeSantis

When it was warm out, he would watch the men come with their fishing poles, pass his window through the alley, and head for the river. And then he decided to join them. And then he went to the store—he had no pole—and bought the cheapest, bare minimum fishing pole—just a bamboo rod with a line tied to the end. And then he routed in his sister's garden, pulling nightcrawlers out of the soil. And then he would watch them writhe in his hand and then he would feel a little disgusted. And then he went to the river, just three blocks from his house. And then he found a spot by a birch tree and sat down. And then, while the wind hissed through the birch leaves, he tried to push the worm onto the hook. And then the worm curled painfully around the barb. And then he just threw the worm and hook into the water just so that he wouldn't have to look at it anymore. And then he waited. And then he watched the man across the river catch a fish.

-Benjamin Chandler

I can’t go back to that conversation. Red beans and a rain storm. We passed up the doorway and walked in it. Art after art. After. Just like us to keep going.

He says that’s where it all broke—the ceiling caved in, the shelf pulled from the wall, the table tipped, the knife hit the plate, the plant blew over. After art. After. I can’t go. Only forward.

He says that’s where you let go. The pile toppled, the chair broke, the coat snagged. The stopping happened, it happened to us after the frame cracked, the door slammed, the wall shook, the shoe tripped.

I say that’s when we were lengthened, loosened, let out. When we live. That risk there and nothing wrong. Nothing ever. This is something under the frame, the mortar, between the cracks and you can cross the threshold, the property line, but can’t go back.

Nothing after nothing ever and always shook free.

-April Sheridan

Andrew
Laughter poured from her like water from a glass pitcher. And I gladly let it flow into my ears. The last time we spoke, I heard it. It came through the phone once more. We hung up and silence surrounded me. It blinded and deafened me. And I sat there. Dead phone held. Numb, still. Alone.

Allison
He liked to talk about fish with me at night. We lay nude over covers, hands fidgeting between legs. He described schools moving, undulating with the water. Then we moved, undulating with each other. In stillness before morning, I awoke. The bed yawning an ocean. He slept so deeply. Slept so distant. Without me. Awake.

Amandine
"This world has no perfect unions," he told me once. Then added quietly, "That's what heaven will be for." He brought down his worn copy of Dante. And we looked at engravings from Paradisio. Angels and souls spiraled in galaxy. Unified in some pellucid eternity. And I wondered aloud. "I have to wait?" He nodded silently. Shutting Dante. Awaiting.

Anson
Somehow, each of her kisses seemed to linger on me. All her experiences were saturated with meaning, and savored. She told me she was all she had—Even after I said I loved her. I wondered if she felt alone, Housed in one-thousand memories. A pile of Hatian coins. A spine-broken journal. Three bird tattoos. Polaroid albums. Awhirl.

-Benjamin Chandler