Why Owls?
Bryson Newhart

A woman goes on excursions for the purpose of becoming sick. While others cast spinners into the rising sea, she dives underwater and throws up plastic rubies. She brings her mother’s hollow leg to the airport, but the security guard can smell the bananas. “You’re a wise one!” he exclaims, his eyes encircled with lipstick, and the woman replies, “When the treasure is owl vomit, sometimes you actually find an owl, which can help you strongarm a breakthrough. Take a box of diluted feathers populated by selective mistakes. You might wake up as a zombie on the flaps of an airplane.” A long emergency station break follows, then the background floods with images of owls dropping glass ketchup bottles from a church’s rafters, swooping down to slurp the paste from among the altar shards, humping plastic bottles before a crucifix, their beaks clamped over the nozzles.

Bryson Newhart's writing has recently appeared or will soon appear in BDtDaEAtC, elimae, Tarpaulin Sky, Caketrain, and 5_trope.