D.T. Robbins

It’s Not A House, It’s A Home


All my friends are famous – Pitchfork princesses and Seattle nomads, dusty heirs and golden-mannequin puppeteers. Everyone is sprawled out like Persian rugs in the living room. Eyes on me, they ask questions they’re dying to know the answer to. The sun swaddles our bodies; we’re newborns. We sip our wine and our whiskeys, gin and Mezcal. I’ve got the perfect buzz. Someone hands me my guitar: a 1967 Silvertone Bobkat. It crackles like prison electricity. They ask me to sing to them, anything with a little jangle and reverb in it. I’m Jeff Buckley. They bring me buckets of tears, release their holy spirits from cages, watch them fly through the open windows of the house. Not a house, no – a home. They shake my hand and say, we never knew until now. They thank me for sharing this truth with them, because now they can see it. Truly see it. I hold each one’s heart, weigh it against my own. Everyone talks, laughs, makes out on my sofa.

The women with velvet hair want to sleep with me. Men with chicken grease abs, too. But I’m staring at the one I love most in the world. We’re dancing, smiling with lemons in our mouths. She hears my thoughts and laughs at my jokes and cries when I treat her badly. We have seventeen children, grown organically, grass-fed and free range. People say they look like the perfect combination of both of us. The kids have her creativity; they have my student loan debt. In her eyes I can see the future: we’re still dancing in this house (home). She whispers, I like it better in here. She asks, can we stay forever? I promise her.

Each room has a different creature, some with eyes for ears and some with no shape at all. They’re my brothers and my sisters. Mom and Dad share a bed. They never divorced. Never married, either. I introduced them. A skeleton plays the trombone on my marble staircase, asks me for a cigarette. I hand over a dollar. In my office, the demons play the angels in chess, loser buys next round. I meditate with Jesus and make taffy with the Tooth Fairy.

This isn’t real, the mirror tells me. You don’t belong here, it says. It slurps coffee from a paper cup, sounds like someone taking a plunger to a toilet.

I live here, I say. This is my home. The bathroom lights flicker honkytonk neon.

Consider yourself evicted, the mirror tells me.

My famous friends, my children, my monsters, Mom and Dad, the woman I love hurricane at the door. We need you, they shout.

The sink spews black water. I wash my face and brush my teeth. Outside, the air smells like rotten fruit and pennies. The windows won’t close. I eat a tablespoon of salted butter and drink flat beer, spill some on my clothes. A bird sings its song somewhere, past the building blocking the sun.

I wait for the world to explode.

D.T. Robbins is a writer living in Rancho Cucamonga, California. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Hobart, Spelk, Headway Quarterly, Bending Genres, and others. He’s also editor of the new literary journal, Rejection Letters. Sometimes he tweets at @dt_robbins and it could be worse. 

Erika Veurink

Two Seater Salvation


I was lonely, so I prayed to be haunted. I opened my palms and tried to lure a ghost out with clicking cat noises. My stomach screamed like a lobster. Before I was lonely, I was softer. On my own, I didn’t need food to survive. I could make it until four pm without eating. I drank a measuring cup of gin and took my empty stomach for a walk. My body wrapped around itself like an embrace. My ribs came up for oxygen. It was swimming lessons all over again. 

He left me as we were eating plain bagels on the park bench overlooking the empty baseball fields. We waited all year for them to reopen in April. That morning was foggy and he told me I was a bad vegetarian because I ate lox. I said he was a bad boyfriend because he never kissed me on the street. We hissed out of respect for the other’s soft animal. We were fawns or kittens. We were new to living and soft to the touch. But when we left that bench we became yellow-eyed with killer instincts.

He left because the lease was up. He lied about getting a fellowship in Budapest. I said “Bon voyage, bitch,” and he said, “Wrong country.” Other than the sofa, everything was his. The sofa was my liferaft and the floor was lava and I left the front door unlocked so the delivery men could set steaming paper bags afloat toward the ship.

I could imagine feeling that immobile forever. I thought about ripping open the cushions and taking up residency between the springs. The roof turned out to be my first step toward eternal life. There, Tuesday afternoon, in the humidity and among the pigeons, I offered a sacrifice. “Save my life, sofa,” I said, as I shoved the two seater from my fourth floor roof to a third floor roof. The landing was brilliant, two legs on the ground, an avant garde angle of the back. Inside the empty apartment, showered, I laid on my camping mat. I felt resurrected. But even reborn, I missed everything, starting with him and ending with the sofa. I ran back up to the roof in only a towel. There it was, my very own salvation, turned right side up, occupied by a beautiful, young couple projecting Mamma Mia on the side of another four story building.

No one warned me that mourning would stop and what would come next would buzz like a razor. I wanted the heartbreak to keep on exploding. Being sucker punched had its charms. Instead, I was praying. I was conjuring. I was in an inflatable bed with a ghost like a bird in a nest like a sofa in midair like a lobster slipping out of a pot--never even there.

Erika Veurink is a writer living in Brooklyn by way of Iowa. She is receiving her MFA from Bennington College. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Entropy, Hobart, Tiny Molecules, and x-r-a-y.

Zach Murphy

Spiders on Goodrich Avenue


A fine mist lingered as Dao went for an early morning run on Goodrich Avenue. The only problem about running before the sunrise is that she was the first person to brush into all the spiderwebs that formed overnight. It isn’t a particularly comfortable feeling — sticky strings clinging to your face when you’re going full speed. Dao didn’t fault the spiders, though. In fact, she admired their ways. How did they spin such stunning webs of intricate beauty?

On the way back to her small art studio full of vivid acrylic paintings and meticulous clay sculptures, Dao noticed that one of her shoes became untied. After tying the laces in a tightly crafted knot, Dao popped back up and gazed upon an imposing mansion. The thing looked more like a castle than a home. Ambitious vines sprawled across the bricks, as if wanting to smother the enormous structure into oblivion. Dao stood there and wondered how much it would cost just to heat the inside of the place, especially if the people living there had cold hearts.

Just then, an elderly man who was wearing a painfully obvious wig and a bitter scowl on his face poked his head outside of the lumbering front door and yelled “Do you have a problem, miss?”

“No,” Dao answered, quietly.

“Then why are you standing there staring at my house?” the old man asked.

Dao paused. 

“It’s ugly,” she said.

Dao sped off with a satisfied smirk on her face. I am a spider, she thought to herself.

Zach Murphy is a Hawaii-born, multi-faceted writer who somehow ended up in the charming but often chilly land of St. Paul, Minnesota. His stories have appeared in Haute Dish, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, WINK, and The Wayne Literary Review. He lives with his wonderful wife Kelly and loves cats and movies.