The Brief Story of Sunday by Daniel Lev Shkolnik

Red saw a different girl each day of the week. Murder brewed between them all. He would take them back into his room and screw the black bulb into the lamp. They opened their chests and let him eat—flinching without a sound. A new Day came along who thought, like all the others, she could become an era. But with the black bulb in its socket and her heart held in his teeth, he mumbled the name of another girl. Drops of whiskey slid down her cheeks. “I love you too,” she said. And wished she hadn’t.

Daniel Lev Shkolnik owns a Yale sweater he will never wear. In Istanbul, he learned to read the future in his coffee grinds. Despite the omens he repeatedly finds at the bottom of his morning joe, Daniel continues to write. As a journalist, he’s reported on Spain, Morocco, Turkey, and the U.S. His fiction and poetry has appeared at the Beacon Art Gallery in Boston, as part of the Yale Art Museum poetry anthology Lux, et Veritas, as well as in SIIR, Cease, Cows, Lotus Eaters, Apparent Magnitude, and elsewhere. Once he was awarded a medal for writing from his high school. His mother is still proud.

*Photo by h heyerlein