[ Download Digital Edition | Print Edition SOLD OUT ] There are hundreds of ways for worlds to end. In this apocalypse-themed issue of Neon we explore just a few of them, from the collapse of Stanley Kubrick’s elaborate city within a film set, to a plague of uncontrollable floating. We move from the small…
Tag: Apocalypse
Our Trailer in the Woods
Our trailer in the woods was held up by trailing ivy that fed on the rust. It had a flat roof and slatted panes that trapped droplets of water between them when it got warm. Orange and brown chintz curtains swayed at the windows. The door was always open in the spring so that the…
The History of New Venice
1. Stanley Kubrick, old and mottled, wakes late at night, alone. He envisions a film about Venice, its beginning, its middle, its end. Compelled, he begins. * 2. The year is 2093 and the real Venice is gone. It is the Atlantis of that time. In April, Kubrick starts scripting. He plasters his study with…
Raw Vegetables on the Go
Previously published in The Golden Key We’d been in the kitchen a long time and the food was all gone. Burckhardt found me in the corner where I’d appropriated a chair and was defending it with my life. His lips were raw steak below blueberry eyes. “You always do this,” he told me. “Pretend you’re…
The Big One
On the fourth floor of the humanities buildingin the redwood and eucalyptus forestof my university, the ground rolls uplike a steadily building Pacific wave –one of those pounding Ocean Beach in earshot of this classroom. Levelor blinds slash like daggers across the windows.Those of us raised here dive for deskstoo small for book bags.Twelve on…
Lies We Believe About Ourselves
Adolescence wasn’t that big a dealit was the apocryphal apocalypsethe big bang that wasn’t It was the hot rush of hope and thelingering melancholy of schoolfingering everything that moves It was turning to my first love to saythe rest of my life is a long timeI don’t want to spend it with you William Breden…
An Ending
I finally told Allison I loved her yesterday after they told us the world was going to end. I meant it. She told me she loved me too, but I think she just told me that because they told us the world was going to end. She hesitated a second too long between the syllables….
Sweepers
Manhattan. They bought the island for beads and built it up into a forest of steel and glass. I used to spit in executives’ cobb salads at the cafeteria, listen to them talk about eating little companies, and look out over their shoulders at all the buildings spiking up, gray, white, and shining, like they…
The Year Our Children Left
This was the way our children left, in the year they left us behind. They got all–how shall we put it–self-righteous and accusatory, the way children can get when they come to understand that nearly everything they’ve been told is some form of a lie. They said to us, how dare you? How dare you…
An Hour, Maybe Two
It’s coming, hurting things along the way. It throttled Mrs Lanford’s self-esteem,and left her lodger, Nigel, with tortured thoughts.Mr Kumar’s dreams suddenly turned sourand he closed his shop. Rumour is he’s torched it but I’m too afraid to look. My next door neighbour, Sharon, killed her cat;my own stays out of reach. They warned us,…