Read Magazine — Download the .pdf
A Legend Is Born, Calvin Celebuski
“The year was 1923. Jazz was still young and so was Jo Jones. With no prior experience, he walked into a rehearsal of the Al Allen Big Band and said to them ‘If you don’t fire your drummer and hire me I will kill each and every last one of you.'”
These Things—They Just Happen, Devin Taylor
“I go into a store and buy a zucchini / because it whispers to me: I’m happy. / I buy some toothpicks and also a knife.”
Creaturehood in Contra Costa County, T. S. McAdams
“Dobhar was mostly Newfoundland with some Rottweiler, taller and heavier than most humans, the scariest dog you’d ever meet. That’s why we got the assignment. Dog cops have no authority two steps off the reservation, and Darwin forbid we threaten citizens, but they tended to answer questions in the hope Dob would go away. I’m a shepherd-mastiff mix, nearly as large as Dobhar, but not so angry.”
Lar-a-bowl, Gary Moshimer
“She speeds down the mountain, no brakes. I think I will die with this old woman, that my old man will never forgive himself for not sending someone for me. But she’s an excellent driver. Deer leap out and she swerves expertly and yells, ‘Fuck you all, nature! I’ll burn your ass with my ass torch!’ I’m thinking this is going to be a great night.”
Stardumb, Alex Pickens
“Later we’ll get loose and hang from Orion’s belt / And make wishes and flick coins into black holes / Watch them stretch while we down another moonshine”
That Buzzing in Your Ear, Terry Tierney
“Imagine a cloud of insects descending around you, flying into your nose and ears, crawling on your skin, biting and licking, adding your DNA to their distributed database, a super computer swarming around the earth like atmosphere, with billions of transistors, diodes, resistors and other discrete components, and each component type an insect species connecting to one another like a wireless mesh.”