Carve Magazine

Weather Girls by Marylou Fusco

You were the girl with the good head on her shoulders, the good sport, the good pal. You spent entire classes chewing the ends of your hair, tasting styling gel while recalling chorus practice, the quaver in your voice on that final high note.

Poetry by Dionne Irving

In high school get pissed off at everyone and everything. Stay pissed off. This is what makes you a poet. Know that good poetry, the best poetry, comes from being angry. Write poems about violence, sex and death. Read lots of Nietzsche. God is dead. Cut your hair short and spiky in the front, keep it long in the back, and keep it stiff with a combination of Dippity-do and toothpaste. Ignore your parents when they ask you what you�re trying to prove.

One Way to Cook an Eel by Emily Bromfield

Step 1: Skin and clean the eel. Ensure all scales are removed She lived in my bathtub. About 80cm in length, speckled mud brown skin, a yellow-white underbelly and pearl black eyes. I found her slapping around in a puddle next to Regents Canal one morning, was only out to buy milk and bacon for breakfast, my Lotto Dream Numbers for that weekend'ss draw. When I stopped to look at her, bent down right close, she went very still except for a tiny flick of the tail. Should have tossed her back in, but there were these school boys coming up behind me who wouldn'st have been kind, who would have used her as a plaything. So I wrapped carrier bags meant for my shopping round both hands, picked her up all soft and warm, fist tight round the mouth and off we went home. I gave her a bit of pipe to sleep in. She fitted perfectly head to tail. When I needed to wash, she went in a blue plastic bucket and both of us slapped about contentedly.

Horses by Stacy Elaine Dacheux

"They measure horses in hands. We measure ourselves in feet." The Actor told me that the first time we met, high up in the hills of Los Angeles, as we walked towards the stable where the horses were kept. We were not friends. We were not lovers. We were simply trying to get over our own abusive nature together. We, meaning The Actor and I, were pretty much strangers who both enrolled in something professionals call Equine-Related Therapy.

The Dead Kid by Gillian King

Frankie Thomas was a kid we all knew, a kid we all picked on at recess because he was slow and fat and lousy at kickball. He lived on the same street as me and my very best friend Jean. Our street was like this: my house, the mean boys's, the Thomas'ss, Jean'ss. The mean boys were Jimmer and Ted, eleven and thirteen. They were the kind of kids who always looked dirty. They smoked, swore, shot bottle rockets at me and Jean, and always tried to look up our skirts and down our shirts, even before there was anything to see. I pretended I wasn'st afraid of them, but Jean and I made wide arches to the other side of the street when we went back and forth between our houses, that was if we could keep ourselves from breaking into a sprint. Jimmer and Ted chased people sometimes, and when they wanted to catch someone, they did. They always caught Frankie.

The Candy House of Roscoe, New York by Meagan Cass

They woke in the night, in their childhood homes, with a strange, mawkish hunger, a sprain in the chest, a clench of the gut, a small, dull-toothed animal stirring. The girl lived upstate, the boy lived downstate, and they did not know each other, had just taken degrees at different universities. Yet at one, two, three in the morning they each crept into their parents's kitchens to find that nothing edible satisfied them. They took to sampling fistfuls of dirt from potted plants like pregnant women, to biting at their own cheeks, to sucking the briny copper of pennies but still, they could not sleep.

The Last Hours of Pompeii by Marc Nieson

And then the ground becomes sky. Just like that. This great grey column of rage mushrooming before our eyes. The streets riddled and swimming with rubble. Glimpses of neighbors scrambling past with pillows overhead and children under arm. Everything reduced to the next breath. The next blink. Quick, run for your lives. The sky is falling, the sky is falling!

Mourning the Departed by L. Annette Binder

She looked over his shoulder at the streamers and balloons that hung from the ceiling tiles. "It's strange having balloons at a funeral." "Maybe that's how they do it down in Mexico. Maybe they like it festive," he said. "I went to this funeral once where they had sparklers and firecrackers and a bar with champagne."

Used to Be by Elizabeth Baines

Well also, she says, laughing, we'd outstayed our visas, though but actually we outstayed them ages before, but the cops, see, they were our mates, once a week they rounded us up and stuck us in the cell for an hour and then came for a drink! And she gives a loud crack: whenever she laughs she throws her head back - eyes off the road - and when she talks she always shouts; and now she flings her skinny bare arm out, she's driving one-handed, and in the hand she's flailing she's holding a nut bar, she's eating too.

Limits by Sung J. Woo

Chuck had call waiting and I didn't. Chuck had a lot of things that I didn't have. Was that the real reason for this little joke of mine, good old jealousy? Jealous of him, of his parents, of his house, of the fact that he would without question get into MIT and every other school he applied to, while I would be lucky enough to get waitlisted at Boston University?

Cooling by Julie Eill

I hit her. So does Kevin. We take turns with the bat. In the face, on the head, about the legs. "Yah, Yah," we say, like cowboys. I think, get out of here baby deer, get out, until I look down and see she can't even move.

Indelible Ink by Elizabeth Corcoran

The congregation of the Greater Nashville Baptist Church wants everyone to know "Jesus Loves You." This church is the size of a regional high school, maybe bigger. Its message board, announcing services and events in addition to the fact that Jesus loves us and any other sinners in the Greater Nashville area, looks like a movie marquee. It's sprawled on the side of the Briley Parkway and it has tennis courts. Claustrophobia wriggles up my spine.

The Seagull by Rhea DeRose-Weiss

The seagull peers in my direction, first out of one eye and then the other, turning his shrewd head from side to side. I look around to see if there is someone else who he might be giving the eye, but there is no one. I do believe this seagull is in love with me. It's possible that he is actually considering an attack-it's a fine line, sometimes-but I prefer to call it love.

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