Dear Reader:
Last year, Barrelhouse got to wondering: What would happen if a literary magazine said, instead of Send Us Your Best Work, Send Us Work You Love?
We opened the following submissions call for three and a half days. There was no advance notice or soliciting.
You’re a writer, and you have this....Something. It’s short. It’s weird. It’s scary. It’s powerful. It’s hilarious. It’s something you love, but have no idea who in the hell would publish it. Maybe you’ve agonized over it with others. Maybe you’ve kept it all to yourself. Maybe you think of it all the time. Maybe you try to forget it. Barrelhouse Online wants you to go find your...Something, give it one last look, and send it to us. Right now.
We guessed we would receive somewhere between 125 to 150 submissions. We received over 430. Reading all of them and making decisions was challenging, but so many Somethings were a profound reminder that writers aren’t quite as alone as we sometimes think.
It turns out that the powers of risk, exploration, fear, humor, memory, and especially trust all step forward in writing that its creators love. We believe this experiment offers solid proof. But mostly, we just hope you read the Something Issue and find as much to love as we did.
Something always,
Erin Fitzgerald, Online Editor
Team Barrelhouse Online
Also in this issue:
by Caroljean Gavin
I’m not like the other girls. The other girls know things I don’t know. The other girls know the rules.
Tangerine’s whipping eyeliner all over her face. She started with her eyes, but she drew the lines all the way out to her ears. She didn’t stop there. She’s drawing lines from one side of her forehead to the other, covering her whole face like that. …
by Sarah Shotland
The feet,
though they disturb some of the local residents,
are immaculately manicured.
by Justin Greene
You go to shake my hand but you don’t because I’ve bled. My nails are dark in random corners but they are not random, these corners, the state of things. I am meticulous. …
by Danielle Pafunda
unbleached demeters stand in line and I'm beside a demeter loudly sobbing she says: each day this belief must contain / us /…
by Matt Muilenburg
Ingredients (required):
Tiny Crucifixes (the ones without Jesus; His presence ups the price considerably)
1,000 Eggs (the plastic kind, obvs.)
Sheep (metaphorically-speaking)
…
by Gaynor Jones
So then Marcia peels back her collar to show us the two white marks on her neck, like we haven’t seen them every year, these two faded knots in a parallel line glaring out from her store-bought tan and as she strokes them she makes a sucking, slobbering sound and the girls all shriek then keel over laughing so hard that Erica spills her drink and then …
by Caroll Sun Yang
Niggling. Is the feeling, the right word. The sensation is Belladonna Blue. Like a Ford Falcon tilting on a muted roadside, dusky Oleander petals slide across the dash, one she loves me/ two she loves me still. An itch that can’t be located is the aura, lapping my hot skin.
by Kim Young
Maybe it’s not so bad to be promiscuous says my mom over Indian food that day we had lunch now that she’s 70 and her body has created phantom pain. It’s just a theory, really, this phantom pain, and I have a lot of theories. Here are the observable facts: