Transits by Jaime Forsythe

couldn't handle it the one time she saw me after I got back. My one eye is fucked and I got a major scar down one cheek. She looked down a lot while she asked me to sign off on Angel's cut of the film we shot. And to credit him as director.
    I bumped into Shelley, the AD, once too. She's still with Shoot Now. She let it slip that Angel and Cindy are living together now. I told her to chill.
    They were amazing at the hospital though. If you go to Cuba for this, and you're unlucky enough to get sick or bashed in the head by some psychotic guy, keep the Hospital
Clinico Quirúgíco Freyre de Andrades
in mind, okay? And tell them Steve says hi.

every other love that is happening to you right now is not this big
    by Stacey May Fowles
    For Thomas
    Another clichéd, long-distance love story told via a collection of disorganized details, frustrating inner monologues and techno-dialogues. Including, for good measure, futile directions for an inevitably jaded reader
    His and Her Prologue:
    Before we begin, let us for a moment think about the rampant cliché of modern love.
    Take note of the precarious nature of this kind of love. The kind of love made immediate by the promise of technology. Love that involves distance, love that involves lies, love that involves the promise of new beginnings, and then involves the bottom of a pint glass.
    When you ask them later, will have a rather detailed and dramatic diatribe on the topic of them meeting. He will ramble on endlessly, if you let him (especially if he is drinking, which sadly is more often than not now).
    He will use words like “destiny” and speak of “plans.” He will remember exactly what was wearing, what she said in what he would later refer to as “her endearing Canadian accent,” and how he plotted to ensure he had the majority of her attentions in the few weeks that followed. He will actually describe her as “the end of his road.”
     will not remember things this way; she will instead blush when you ask her, despite (or perhaps because of) the number of drinks she has had.
    She will relay fuzzy and vague recollections of what she will call “falling quickly” or “getting lost.” She will describe, in pointless detail, how she bought her plane ticket from Toronto to St. Petersburg, booked the time off work from her pointless, ass-grabbing bar job, and never once thought of what it would be like
away
, instead thinking only of the escape.
    She will bore you. She will talk to you about how she made lists of things to do that she carefully dismembered until the day she left, how these carefully constructed lists littered her apartment, were pinned to her walls and filled the face of her empty fridge until the day the car came and picked her up.
    You will likely want her to speed up her story, caring little for lists and more about love. Everyone wants to hear about love.
     will remember it occurring to her on the first leg of the flight to Russia that she never once considered what her time there would be like, never actually read the guidebook she had purchased and then crossed off one of her many lists. She will tell you that withher face pressed against the window of seat thirty-two A, she finally realized that it was too late to have expectations, that instead it was for the best that she did not, and that she would simply fall out of her reality and see where she landed when she did.
    And when she tells you her story over a couple of martinis, she will recall laughing more than she had ever laughed in her known life, yet will never be able to describe exactly what it was she was laughing at. She will recall the lie—or maybe the truth—they told each other while drinking endless cans of beer in beer gardens over endless hours without sunset, will distinctly remember forgetting her old life until it faded into a pale list of details she would have rather