Hello again, friends and readers and people who stumbled here accidentally, to the August 2020 issue of Defenestration!
We were all expecting our lives to be back to normal by now, but here we are, thoroughly abnormal. Normal isn’t a thing anymore. Normal is a historical blip, a tone box in a textbook from 2031, an event you get to talk to your grandchildren about on that one time each year they’re forced to visit you at the nursing home. But that’s okay. Things might be strange and even scary these days, but there’s still a place for humor, and we’re here to help you out.
Eileen and I don’t typically choose content for each issues based on a theme, but themes sometimes appear after we’ve made our final decisions. You might think we purposely built this month’s issue around weird relationships–weird dates, weird neighbors, weird families, weird friends, weird former lovers. Those things are all definitely here, but we didn’t plan it that way. A happy accident, perhaps.
Normally I’d use this space to give you a taste of some of the topics you’ll read about this month, but I think you’ve got enough to go on now.
As usual, I’ve posted the table of contents below, with links to all the short stories and poems, as well as a PDF version of the entire issue. If you like what you see, why not send us something funny of your own? Our inbox is again open to poetry and short stories , with our December 2020 issue in sight!
—Andrew Kaye, Editor-in-Chief
Short Stories:
Raymond Lane, “An Unopened Letter to Shirley”
Sarah Boisvert, “The Donation”
Karen Schauber, “What a Babe”
Jeffrey Kulik, “Backdoor Pilot”
Stephanie Gibbon, “On the Needles”
Karen Walker, “Dead Match”
Joy Kennedy-O’Neill, “The Mistake Hoarder”
Daniel Winn, “Freshman Year Did Not Go Well”
Poetry:
Anna Pisarka, “Pajak”
Neil Fulwood, Two Poems
E. Laura Goldberg, “Substitution”
Riley Wood, “The Sample Man”
Kathryn Pratt Russell, “Cures for the 1918 Flu”
Chester Onion, “Rated R”
Carla Sarett, Two Poems
Downloadable Copy: