Future Tense by Anna Mantzaris

On Friday I’ll move. On Saturday I’ll get a new job. On Sunday I’ll find a new husband. On Monday I’ll move. On Tuesday I’ll get another job. On Wednesday I’ll decide I don’t want a husband. On Thursday I’ll move into a place that asks if I plan to have any liquid-filled furniture and next Friday I will be evicted for failing to disclose my bourbon-filled La-Z Boy. On Monday I’ll put on my ruffled sweater, comb through tangles of my wet hair and drive to the college and beg for my old job back. On Tuesday I’ll look up my ex and drive to ask if we should have had kids, stopping to get him the banana shake he used to love His landlord tells me he moved to New Zealand (my ex, not the landlord, but the landlord says he’s considering a Sky Tower-jumping trip in Auckland) and asks if I have a straw for that shake and why didn’t I get the extra-large. On Wednesday afternoon I will take my mother to her weekly doctor appointment and the tire will blow. We will cross eight lanes of freeway as I drive with my eyes closed. On the side of the road my mother will take out her lipstick and reapply because she believes a tow truck is coming soon. I will tell my mother I’m sorry I screwed up so badly, that the car hadn’t felt right for quite some time and I thought the red light that had come on was just a warning for something far in the future. She will wave her hand and then take my hand and suggest we go out for those nice big salads once we get rolling again.

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ANNA MANTZARIS — Anna is a San Francisco-based writer. Her work has appeared in BlazeVOX, The Cortland Review, Five on the Fifth, Free State Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Milk Candy Review, Necessary Fiction, New World Writing Quarterly, Sonora Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of Occupations (Galileo Press).

Art MILO BROWN — Milo (they/them) is an artist and science teacher based in a small mountain town in Southern California. They were a 2026 Artist in Residence at Chateau Orquevaux and have participated in galleries and published in literary magazines. You can find more of their work at https://www.milobrownart.com and on their Instagram account, @milobrownart.