Three Stories
Road Work
I used to think adopting a highway meant you could name it.
Turns out it just means you get to clean it.
Most people think they want to have kids when they are trying for a baby. Or at least one of them does.
Lilly wants that baby, and Samuel likes to give her what she wants. He’s given her a proposal, a marriage, a house with his car motor in the living room.
He lets her play his games with him, takes her hiking on the weekends.
All she needs is a baby for the times when he is not there.
But what if the baby has her eyes instead of his?
A little girl who grows thick blonde hair and whose first words are Mama.
What if she sees herself in the baby, everything she is and everything she will never be?
The baby might not fix anything.
What if she starts to hate the baby?
Someday, that baby will grow and become her daughter.
She will be 9 years old, asking why her forehead is so big.
Lilly won’t respond.
She can’t possibly think her daughter is ugly. There’s no way. Does that happen?
But Lilly always thought her own forehead was ugly.
Doggone it!
My mom used to make me tell God what my favorite part of the day was during our nightly prayers. Eventually, she’d cut me off. She told me it was okay not to pray for my grandparents' dog, the one that died 3 years ago. So I did it in my head, to cover the bases. I wanted God to know I was thankful. The list is a lot shorter now, but I kept the dog on for good measure. I don’t say it most nights. I spilled elderberry syrup on my favorite pair of jeans. They are still my favorite pair of jeans. They just have a stain now.
Megan Koch
My name is Megan Koch, and I recently graduated from Appalachian State University with a degree in English and a minor in studio art. I have been published by Maudlin House and my school's arts magazine, The Peel. Thank you for reading :)
Janne Marie Dauer
Janne Marie Dauer combines comics with painting. She moves between the two areas and playfully explores various narrative structures in these media, which influence each other. In doing so, she focuses her artistic gaze on what she herself describes as the “mysticism of the everyday”. She very often uses the airbrush technique. In this way, the artist creates impressions of blurriness and softness in her drawings and paintings, which are often based on photographic sources of inspiration. An interplay is created between sharpness and blurriness, foregrounds and backgrounds, between suggestion and clear line.
Dauer was born in Göttingen in 1995. She lives and works as a comic artist and painter in Vienna.
She began her studies with Hendrik Dorgathen and Aisha Franz in the illustration class at the Kunsthochschule Kassel. In 2019, Dauer received the first Lion Feuchtwanger Scholarship from the Stiftung Kommunikationsaufbau and spent a writing residency at the artist residency Art OMI, Upstate NY. Since 2022, she has been studying in the Painting and Animation department with Judith Eisler at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. 2024 she received the Media Fellowship of Nationalparks Austria and was part of group exhibitions at Kommunale Galerie, Berlin and Picture Theory, New York.