Author: Qu Literary Magazine
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Troubled
A one act play Setting A camp for troubled teens. Present day. Or close enough. Characters JESS, 16. Queer. Puts up walls and burns down bridges (and towns). WENDY, late 40s or early 50s. A shell of (self) hatred. Head counselor at the camp. RAYLEIGH, 17. Weaker than she looks. Stronger than she feels. CONNOR,…
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Monument
A Play in Ten Minutes (The lights rise on SCOTT staring up at a roof while smoking a cigarette. HE wears dirty jeans, T-shirt and work boots, and one of his hands has a rag wrapped tightly around it.) (After a moment, PAUL enters. HE is dressed business casual and has a laptop in…
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The Blender
We found it behind our school, in the alley the four of us liked to roam late into the night, after I dared Jesper to leap into a blue dumpster. “Fine,” he said, boosting himself up, jumping in. He landed with a squishy splash. “Sometimes people find things in dumpsters.” “We have better things to…
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Bloody Mary
The house sat on the shore of the lake with a bald, open face. It was wide and white with a black front door and blacker windows, two gaping eyes on the second story that blinked with the flutter of pink lace curtains. The roof lumbered to a lazy gambrel peak and the siding was…
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Uncanny Eye Candy: The disfiguring of domestic life
When I was in eighth grade, I spent one afternoon each week with an elderly woman named Raisie who lived a block down from my mother’s house. She paid me to do an unhelpful job of helping her with non-essential tasks. I took a shovel to the weeds in her lush backyard while she supervised…
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A Spoonful of Loving Knives
The turtles in the pond have been decaying since I got here. Since before I got here. I wonder how many soulmates each of them have had. If they feel more than pain, fear, and joy. Surely turtles can love, but in the haze of my confusion I recall that rabbits are the ones who…
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Laura Bernstein-Machlay
Laura Bernstein-Machlay teaches creative writing and literature at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, Michigan. Her poems and essays have appeared in The American Scholar, Fourth Genre, The Georgia Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Michigan Quarterly Review, North American Review, and others. Her collection of creative nonfiction essays, Travelers, was published in 2018.
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Kristen Field
Kristen Field is a queer, non-binary playwright originally from Melbourne, Australia. She earned her MFA in Writing for the Screen and Stage from Northwestern University, and her scripts have been published by Hayden’s Ferry Review, Feels Blind Literary, and Concord Theatricals. Her full-length play, sex/work, was recently a finalist in Playhouse on the Square’s NewWorks@TheWorks…