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CW: harassment and pent-up rage

then switching to konnichiwa, then getting mad that I keep walking. I act like I don’t hear, but of course I do, when you run out of greetings and follow up with words like bitch and cunt and then laughing hah ha HAH loudly with your boys to SHOW ME how little you care. Because of course, yelling is the way to show you don’t care.

Save your energy. 

I know you don’t care because you can’t even tell what kind of Asian I am. You don’t really look, don’t see my face, my features, my blood-sweat-tears-love-grief that comes out in the way I hold my friends when they are sad, the way I tease my friends when they are happy, the way I listen seriously when a stranger’s kid in front of me on a checkout line turns around to tell me something, so that they recognize the feeling of respect.

You don’t need to tell me shit.

What I want to tell YOU, but don’t spend the time or safety to do it, is that I’m not your little China doll here to sucky sucky for five dolla. Surprise, you motherfucker! I’m a goddamn human and I will gouge your eyes out if you get near me because I am boiling with rage inside this bag of skin; it dissolves my bones and I am ready to erupt on everything in my path, destroying it all without prejudice because you have no right to slide your eyes on me, let alone fling words that mean nothing to you, or me, in your desperate attempt to get my attention. Go laugh all you want with your boys. You are scared and small inside and it shows.

When you are brave and try for real, I will see you, and even then I owe you nothing. Life pushes all of us, and it is your choice whether you grow up or rot down. You will never escape the seed of truth inside you that tells you which way you are going. The truth is, everybody knows the difference.

Shirley Chan is writing a memoir and teaching herself different essay forms. She’s a Tin House alum, a Rooted & Written fellow, and published in Hobart, HAD, UX Collective, The New York Post, The Daily Dot, and NYC Midnight. When the words part of her brain needs a break, Shirley embroiders. Hang out with her on Twitter at @irleywrites.

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The dollhouse has a gaping hole on the side facing east, a four-inch hollow overlapping the first and second floors, its splintered edges stretching into the kitchen with the checkered floor and the bedroom with the rainbow rug and the canopy bed. The baseball that soared through the wall with wrecking-ball fury has long since been retrieved by its pitcher. In the house’s attic, a girl’s name is carved into the balsa wood flooring slats with blue ink from a ballpoint pen: Annie. 

Annie’s smudged thumbprint is still visible on the miniature plexiglass of the window in the bathroom. In the tub sits a toy dog. The toy dog is a poodle, and Annie’s dog was a Labrador, but it was all pretend anyway. There is a wraparound porch extending around the front of the house, which is the back of the house if you are playing inside it. Annie’s mother had always wanted a wraparound porch on their real home, so she got Annie a dollhouse with a wraparound porch, because that’s what mothers do. 

The dollhouse is exposed, one wall absent to allow its owner to move dolls and miniature furniture from room to room. Inside its three walls, there are four dolls representing the family: mother, father, sister, brother. Annie had two brothers, but the doll set only came with one, and that was fitting since one of her brothers died anyway. He went careening out of her life with the speed of his lobbed baseball, ejected through the windshield of his pickup truck, flesh striking black pavement like white leather crashing through the wood wall, swirls of red stitches around curved limbs.

After he died, she liked to trace her fingers along the splinters of the hole in the dollhouse’s eastern wall, press her fingertip over the jagged spires to feel his absence as a prick. She preferred the tiny, needle-like stabbing sensation, to be up-close to it, to put her wrist through the gap between the shards. When she stood back, the hole was too all-consuming. She liked the way the dust built up. The way you couldn’t notice a difference from one day to the next, but from one year to the next, you could see how time had passed. The way his absence coated the dollhouse’s innards with a thick film that rested heavy, an anchor tethering her to the stillness of what used to be.

Annie Marhefka is a writer in Baltimore, Maryland. Her creative nonfiction and poetry have been published by Hobart, Pithead Chapel, Versification, Sledgehammer Lit, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Corporeal, among others. Annie is the Executive Director at Yellow Arrow Publishing, a Baltimore-based nonprofit supporting and empowering women writers, and is working on a memoir about mother/daughter relationships. You can find Annie’s writing on Instagram @anniemarhefka, Twitter @charmcityannie, and at anniemarhefka.com.

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I hear rummaging sounds coming from the backseat, where my daughter Essie is sitting. She’s brought a bunch of LEGOs in a Ziplock bag for the car ride and she’s fishing for pieces. It’s loud and annoying, but I don’t say anything. My mom gave her those LEGOs and a large LEGO idea book to inspire her. I’m happy for her to be playing with them. My mom always gave us the best gifts.

Essie and I are headed to a farm outside of town to pick blueberries. It’s an annual tradition I’ve managed to keep up, even after her dad and I divorced. Every June, I pick way too many berries and end up making an oversized crumble that, for some reason, Essie never eats. 

“What’re you building?” I ask. I have the rearview mirror tilted so I can see her face—rosy cheeks and a constellation of freckles under a faded blue baseball cap—but not what she’s doing with her hands.

“A crypt,” she says.

“A what?”

I’d heard correctly. She’s building a crypt out of LEGOS. I’m pretty sure this isn’t in the idea book. 

The GPS is routing us out into the county, past the lavender farm. I remember taking my mom there when she was visiting a few years back. It was a hot and humid morning like this one. That’s just summer in central Virginia, air like a soaked sweatshirt. My mom still had all her hair then. She could still make the long drive south. The three of us smiled for glistening selfies I cherish now and cooled down on small containers of blueberry lavender ice cream. I haven’t been back since.

“Look, Mama,” Essie says.

She wants to show me the LEGO monster she’s made to put inside the crypt. Its head comes off, apparently. I can’t look while I’m driving. I’m hoping this headless idea is related to the Scooby Doo episodes she’s been watching lately and not some latent plan to dismember me later on. I can see her hat bobbing in the backseat while she works at her creations. She sticks her tongue out when she concentrates. What an adorable little sociopath. 

I wonder if Essie remembers that the one-year anniversary of my mom’s death just passed. Only seven, but she knows Gram had breast cancer, she knows Gram died, she knows what death is—at least as much as any of us do. Does she make a connection between all that and what she’s building?

After my mom’s death, I drove by myself to upstate New York to be with my family, to settle my mom’s affairs, to sort through whatever stuff I could. It was overwhelming, all there was to do. The funeral director tried to upsell me on everything. She talked to me like we knew each other. She kept calling me “honey.” My uncle, aunt, and grandmother avoided this phone call. They were too sad and not up for a battle. Well, I was sad too, but I guess they knew I’d be able to say no, which I did, to everything. No to a service in the middle of COVID, no to an expensive headstone, no to a fancy casket to put my mom in. What did it matter? It was all going up in flames anyway. 

Back in the car, I try to start up a reminiscence with Essie about previous trips to the blueberry farm. “Remember the year of the drought? How small the berries were?”

Essie says, “Can you please stop talking so I can count?” 

Count what? I’m scared it’s more headless LEGO bodies for the crypt. 

“Fine,” I say, looking out toward the hazy layers of mountains in the east. I’d brought my mom there too one time, up to Shenandoah National Park. Even in her healthier days, my mom wasn’t exactly a hiker, so we took in the dramatic views from the side of the road, stopping at overlooks with names like Loft Mountain and Blackrock.

The time at the blueberry farm goes about as it usually does: Essie gives up after a little while and, after asking ten times when we’re going to leave, finds some shade to sit in while I pick seven pounds of fruit. The air smells so sweet amidst the rows of bushes. I buy Essie a cup of mint blueberry lemonade for the ride home, which she sips noisily instead of making more cemeteries.

Later in the day, after I alone consume the crumble we make together, Essie shows me the LEGO monster. It has pink flower petals for eyes. Its feet are black bricks. Its head, indeed, comes off.

“What’s the story?” I ask, as she twirls around the banister, her long dark hair dangling. “How does the monster lose its head?”

She reiterates that the head can come off. 

“I know,” I say, “but, like, how does it happen?”

I realize, as if my own head has become detached and I’m floating above my body, that I’m now pushing my child to imagine the various ways people can get decapitated. What am I doing? Death has a way of unhinging you, I’ve learned. 

So far as I know, my mom’s ashes are still where I left them, inside a brown burlap bag on the floor of my aunt’s guest bedroom. My family and I couldn’t figure out what to do with them before it was time for me to come home. Should we take her to the pond where the house her parents built still stands? Bring her to the national park and scatter her high into the air? Or, perhaps, the prospect I like most, bury her in the backyard of the home that her life insurance helped me and Essie buy—her finest, and final, gift? There will never be a gravestone to visit, a real concrete crypt. What we have is something different: LEGOs, a few ideas, and a daughter, or two, trying to make her way.

Emily O. Gravett mostly spends her days cycling around the counties near Harrisonburg, Virginia, where she also teaches at James Madison University. She lives with her daughter in a 100-year-old Victorian, just down the street from their favorite dairy bar, and writes in her “spare” time.

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After “Swerve” by Brenda Miller

I’m sorry we’ve never met. We could have met when I married your son 23 years ago. I wonder if you even knew he was getting married? You live in a small East Coast suburb where news of weddings travels fast. Surely one of your gossipy friends heard the happy news? If you did learn about the wedding, I imagine you became enraged. Your dislike of my husband’s choice in women began long before he met me, so I don’t blame myself for his estrangement from you. He told me how you cut him off financially when he was at Harvard Law School because he was dating a woman who was mixed-race. In a letter to him, you called his former girlfriend–who you had met once–the N-word. I’m sorry you will never meet me, a woman with a Black mother and a white father. I’m sorry you’ve never met your two grandchildren. The oldest, a girl, attends Northwestern University! The youngest, a boy, will start at the University of Pennsylvania in the fall. He has my brown skin and his dad’s blue eyes. I’m sorry I’m so afraid of your wrath that our will contained a section that said you were never to have custody of our minor children should anything happen to us. Of course, that probably wasn’t necessary. Looking back, I can’t imagine you would have tried to get custody of mixed-race grandkids you’d never met. I’m sorry that your son and I had to explain to our kids why they will never meet his parents. “They’re racist,” your son told them when they were old enough to understand what that meant, around age 9 and 12. I’m sorry you hide behind your big house in an affluent neighborhood, your involvement in the temple and your other two kids who married people you chose. I wonder if you’re aware that every few years, we visit my husband’s best friend in your hometown. One time we drove by your house to show our kids where their dad grew up and I got so nervous I told him to speed up in case you were home and I think we were going 55 MPH on your residential street so your house is a blur in my memory. I’m sorry you will never accept that I married your son, the best husband and father I know.

Christina Simon spent three years as the senior nonfiction editor and the “Letter to L.A.” editor for Angels Flight Literary West, an online literary publication and curator of author salons at The Last Bookstore in Los Angeles. Her essays are forthcoming in Slag Glass City and have been published in Salon, The Offing, Columbia Journal (winner of the 2020 Black History Month Contest for Nonfiction), Another Chicago Magazine, The Citron Review, PANK Magazine’s Heath and Healing Folio, Proximity’s blog, True, and Barren Magazine. Christina received her B.A. from U.C. Berkeley and her M.A. from UCLA. Christina lives in Los Angeles with her husband, her teenage son and their rescue pit bull. She misses her daughter who is away at college. www.csimonla.com

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Our eyebrows were already weird by the time we met. We were not new, but we had not been waiting, either. We came trailing wedding rings, dildos, mortgages, baby bottles, prom dresses, surgical histories, seltzer makers, dead transmissions, at-home injection kits, rosary beads, old photographs and new phones and empty whiskey bottles.

Instead of asking for nudes, I asked you to send me a picture of a scar. You sent a close-up of a wine-dark birthmark. I had been hoping for the two long and beautiful pink lines across your chest. You asked me if I had ever had an abortion. I asked you what your name used to be.  

Instead, you told me that when you were eight, you wore a bat costume every day for two weeks. When your mother finally pried it off you and tucked you into bed in your My Little Pony pajamas, your face washcloth clean, you pretended to sleep. Hours later, you snuck into the laundry room. She came running at three in the morning when you, crouched on your bed, unfurled your wings and flew, toppling a bookcase full of Nancy Drew and Goosebumps.

Now, I ask you to tell me again. Tell me about how you were a wild, half-formed thing in the night. Remind me that you and I are still not in our final forms. You fit yourself around my body. I slide two fingers into your vagina.

In the mornings, we take turns reading the news and telling the other: This can wait. Don’t look yet. It will be here later. For now, pull my ear to your mouth, your arms around my chest.

Aiden Grace Smith’s fiction and non-fiction has been published widely. Their collection of short stories, Adulterous Generation, was published by Queen’s Ferry Press, and their first novel, Palais Royale, is available from Engine Books. Aiden teaches creative writing and literature at Emerson College.

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Limestone country, where the quarry growls in heat thunder over the fields: we’re driving to find the place Dad wanted his ashes interred. Tonight Mark and I bring the boys to a cabin so quiet we can hear the electric lines of the high pylons hum through the easement. 

We take a creekbed for our evening walk. Limestone bears fossils and slips of gray clay, mayapples, mint and touch-me-nots alive with damselflies. I know them like old friends – comfortable even decades later because they represent the nothing-times, those stick-digging days when little needed to be said.

At nightfall, we walk back to the cabin along an access road white with crushed gravel. The kids rush through puddles made by over-payload dump trucks. Frogs hop out ahead, unafraid. None of us are afraid, somehow, out here. Quarry light brings a lingering, thick sunset and I realize how much beauty there is, in this silicosis sky I took for granted as a child. This light is also like an old friend, or, I suppose, a parent – steady, silent, illness hidden in plain sight. All this dust and now Dad is dust too, wanting only for reunification.

Lulled by the heat and novelty of the cabin loft, the kids drift into an easy sleep. On the porch, Mark and I talk over the nothings of the day and of death, which is a different kind of nothing. The heat thunder gives way to the truth of real thunder from an anvilhead flashing milky electric purple over the woods. We do not know how, or whether, to tell our children their grandfather has died. Could they already know? We do have to tell them soon, don’t we? Mark presses gently on my own grief, the denial I am still holding to my chest, then he uncaps a beer for me. The boys are still so young. Perhaps they will come to understand Granddad’s death in their own way, by discovering the absence. His name, unmentioned. His chair, empty. 

The power lines buzz. We glance in periodically at the crowns of the boys’ heads to see if they stir from the approaching storm, but it seems instead to deepen their peace. And so we drink our beers and go on with our nothings, and out on the road the frogs raise a din, and a hard rain collects on the dust in the air to quiet them.

Edie Meade is a writer, artist, and mother of four in Huntington, West Virginia. Recent work can be found in Atlas & Alice; The Normal School; Feral; Still: The Journal, and elsewhere. Say hi on Twitter @ediemeade or https://ediemeade.com/.

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Once upon a time, there was a mother and her son. They took the day to go to lunch, to a restaurant they had never been to before, yet had been wanting to try for ages. He was going to try french fries for the first time that day. What his mother never told him was that for every fry he took off her plate, she took a year off his life. She left his corpse at the table and drove home alone.

Once upon a time, there was a woman who was a server at a local diner. She worked the lunch shift, just as she had for ages. The highlight of her shift that day was a little boy who was over the moon excited to try french fries for the first time. His enthusiasm was so genuine and contagious that the woman couldn’t help but beam back at him as she set a plate of fries in front of the boy’s mother. She knew how this would end, but she couldn’t help but be excited for him. Watching from the counter, she saw how satisfied the boy was as he ate off of his mother’s plate. The mother occasionally glanced over to the server. The two women held that glance as long as either of them could bear. Neither could pretend that they weren’t exactly where they were, doing exactly what they were doing, so why not hold the glance of a stranger. As the pile of fries started to shrink, the server brought the mother the bill, assuring her she could pay whenever she was ready. By the time the server went back to check on the mother and son again, the mother had left, leaving only exact change and the corpse of her son behind. No tip. Bold move. The server was tired of this happening on her shifts. Her coworkers reported getting stiffed on tips a lot less at dinner and breakfast and even overnight. They also reported clearing fewer corpses from the tables they waited on. She took the exact change off the table, left the corpse as it was–still oddly enthusiastic–and drove away from the diner alone.

Once upon a time, two women each sat in their own cars at the same red light, headed the same direction. Both cars had the front windows rolled down. From each car came a distinct and desperate wailing.

Once upon a time, a person crossed the street. Two cars sat idling at the red light, windows down. The pedestrian paused between the two cars, an odd choice as the crosswalk signal warned that there were only a few more seconds left to cross. But they knew this song pouring from the open windows of these two cars. They hadn’t heard it since they were young. Maybe it was something their mother used to sing while dusting tchotchkes in the living room. Maybe it was the taunt she sang about not getting what you want. That’s a real song you know, by the Rolling Stones, not just a mocking nursery rhyme. The pedestrian didn’t realize that til high school, but that’s not the point. The sound coming from these cars was familiar and foreign. The pedestrian didn’t remember the song being so sad. Leaning closer, the song was only coming from one car. Sobs came from the other. The mix was punctuated by the crosswalk signal beeping faster and faster. There was less and less time to get safely to the other side.

Once upon a time, a red light turned green, and two cars hit a pedestrian, like that scene in Meet Joe Black, but less funny. The cars didn’t stop or slow or even seem to register the incident. Less could be said about the state of the former pedestrian. When asked to describe the scene, one witness said they were waiting to cross the street. The witness had been going the same way as the cars. They hadn’t seen the pedestrian get hit by the cars. They had seen the pedestrian in question. They had seen the two cars in question. They had not seen the three meet in any way. When asked if they had heard of the accident, the witness said they had heard a loud cackle–the kind of cackle you couldn’t decipher as joy or grief. 

Neither car was found, as neither woman was lost.

Megan Cannella (she/they) is a neurodivergent Midwestern transplant currently living in Nevada. Her chapbooks, I Redact You, Too (Alien Buddha Press 2022) and Confrontational Crotch and Other Real Housewives Musings (Daily Drunk Press 2021), are out now and available at https://linktr.ee/mcannella. Her chapbook Eldest Daughter: A Break-up Story is forthcoming from Porkbelly Press. You can find Megan on Twitter at @megancannella.

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Five.

Grandfather teaches me how to hold a butterfly without crumpling its wings. He raises his red sweater arms high above his head and tells me to wait. The early July morning is humid. I rock between my feet, sweating and impatient. One butterfly sits along his arm, and then another. Red sleeves covered in them, butterfly wings flap in synch. Colourful strikes of a metronome. Butterflies are attracted to reds and oranges is the lesson. Never hold on to something you wouldn’t want to hurt, I learn. 

Grandfather’s hands have done plenty of hurting, the sort of hurting that you do for a cause greater than you, the sort of hurt that stays with you sixty years later. He doesn’t explain and I never ask. Even at five I know better than to jump on his knee where the shrapnel is wedged. I know to bring the warm rice bag for the pain when it rains. 

Six. 

Grandfather is a witch. When he’s not out at sea, he spends his days walking, dozens of cats following him to and from the shipping docks. When he’s not out at sea, he brings home withered plants and leaves them in his room. The next time I see them they are green and luscious, breathing with life. He brews foreign teas and recites stories of lands far across the sea, sometimes across an ocean, of strangers and even stranger lives that people lead. I drink the tea and the stories; all the while grandfather watches me with his mis-matched eyes, one green, one yellow, and smiles. 

Eleven. 

I’m the one across the wide ocean, now, living the strange life. I run and hide when the telephone rings. I avoid my grandfather’s voice. His language, our language, our shared past a reminder of how broken home is. The water doesn’t run anymore. The concrete gets frigid in the winter with no heat. On the other end of the line, grandfather’s voice grows feeble and disjointed. He doesn’t tell stories about foreign lands anymore. 

Thirteen. 

I only care for myself.

Thirty.

No one told me when the telephone stopped ringing seven years ago. No more past to shame me. No more phone calls to avoid. A seventy-year-old messenger bag that smells of smoke and a bloodied youth. No medals, no uniforms, only a grey stone pressed into a land that’s not home. 

Thirty. 

I only buy withered plants to bring them home. I kneel for every cat I meet. I never hold a butterfly. I stand with my bare feet planted in the ocean. Sharp stones cut against my soles. It’s the wrong ocean, the wrong continent, but I don’t think he minds. I look out into the tide with my own mis-matched eyes, one green, one yellow. I think I learned the wrong lesson. 

The foam breaks against my knees with his laughter and he’s gone.

A.D. Sui is a Ukrainian-born, queer, and disabled writer currently living in Canada. She mostly dabbles in science fiction and fantasy but is expanding her horizons to literary fiction. She holds a Ph.D. in Health Promotion from Western University and spends most of her time being a stuffy academic of all things digital. When not writing convoluted papers that nobody will ever read, you can find her on Twitter as @TheSuiWay where she openly critiques academia and gushes over her two dogs.

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Time is a motherfucker. Time wears a belt of iron. But Arden’s words fall up. The sun a tickled curtain. She touches the throat of God. There is no God. She takes out the trash. The trees whisper: Victory is false. My heart is a good little toad. Her words fall up. She makes the bed. 

*

World war? my son asks. Maybe, I say. Ordinary heat gilds sidewalks, pools between neighbors touching fingertips. Birds dash out of view as we wait for news. You’ll grow up, I say, nothing to worry about. But there is plenty to worry about. War makes me furiously idealistic. My dreams exhume a ruined castle with beady eyes. It watches me as I murder tyrants, the tyrant in myself most of all. Then the castle is gone, and a fruitless light settles the dust. Which is enough to live by, to love with, I hope.

*

I meet Arden days after Russia invades Ukraine. I tell her: Make an example of me, my profound ignorance, but bend red tulips to my lips when you do. I don’t know what I fear most about my ignorance, but she fits in the sad space where I have given my heart away before. The days absorb each other through a golden aperture, sunlight slick on my skin. I tell her: My neighbors still ask me for a wrench, as I appear a practical and reliable man. I tell her: There is no bond like eating and talking at the same time. She says: Have you tried dandelion soup? 

Our tweets fall to mocking. 

*

How much does the anxiety underlying existence swell to critical mass and foreclose all the lovely whispers drifting on the air? What is love if not the galvanizing of this anxiety till it spoofs itself in trembling flowers tentative to touch the unspooling sun-fired air? 

My dreams now have a ceiling of light that quivers when I touch it. My throat opens with roses. I turn 40 in Nevada. Arden plans a garden along the Connecticut. I visit the hardware store twice in one weekend. To fix something, make it whole. My son asks about seeing the ocean, says the word “love.” He draws a boat. I tell him it’s like dancing through waves, sensing not the end or the beginning, but eternal tension between the two. 

*

Arden says: It’s kind of like war—invasion, nuclear blasts—but can’t compare ourselves to war. War or no war, Arden fruits when nothing else does. The mind can be fruit, no matter how broken. Over me, the sunset breaks war-like, fresh blood, tinge of iron. I write to her about childhood hallways, how light receding back to God is everything. I write to her about hearing wind in the trees at night, how I shake with loneliness as I separate from my wife. We love each other, yes, but don’t understand each other. We’re on again, off again, on again, off again. I just need a friend, I tell Arden. Because time is a bastard. Time tricked me, killed my youth, murdered my father, dropped me in the sea bound and weighted with pain. Eternity, she says, I see it in you. Eternity? I reply. What is eternity? 

*

No missiles in our nightmares. We pray for humans in Ukraine, send twenty dollars to a blood bank. We pray knowing God has to die. We have to let God die. I imagine He dies in Palm Springs, shouting for rain. It’s easy to call God a man though I know in my heart God is a woman. I see her in Arden, in my wife, in hope that slithers under death’s skirt, sticky enough to call a kiss. I tell Arden: We are both bipolar, susceptible to grandiosity. I say: Have you ever been rung by a mountain dusk, a golden floodplain? Have you ever sensed infinity in a cracked sidewalk, a splotch of gum? She says: I remember when my mind filled with light, found no limit, found you. I say: I’m weeping in the street. I say: What happens next, Arden? 

*

The truth is it’s hard being mentally ill and a father at the same time. The truth is I felt alone, and she broke my winter despair. Today, I’m sitting outside in the spring sun, feet on the ground. I turn my head one way, and it’s cold. I turn it the other way, toward the sun, and my head warms. There’s snow on the mountains. Grass begins its green show. Miles away, she makes the bed.

Scott Neuffer is a writer and musician who lives in Nevada with his family. He’s also the founding editor of the literary journal trampset. Follow him on Twitter @scottneuffer @sneuffermusic @trampset

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The time my Mom stayed home from work three days in a row, singing church hymns while rocking in Grandma’s old chair, holding me tight, to claim me back from the devil.

The night she ran out the front door into the dusk screaming that we were spiders out to get her. My Dad, chasing her down Oak Street and dragging her back. Her cotton nightgown ripping at the seams. Mom hissing at me when he pulled her through the door.

The stories Mom told at the dinner table when Dad asked, “How was your day?”

A young mother lingered over the onesies and called me a whore. 

Gina stared at me from across the break room during lunch. She’s waiting for me to let my guard down. (To do what Mom didn’t say)

My manager was nice to my face, but I know he wants to fire me. 

Me, believing it all. Dad, eating his roast beef and mashed potatoes.

Her weekly question: “You’ll take care of me when I’m older, won’t you?”

Her repetitive proclamations: 

You think you’re better than me. 

All you care about is yourself. 

I hope your daughter treats you the same way you treat me. 

I can’t wait until you’re eighteen.

The day, in my teen years, when Dad explained he’d no longer be saying he loves me because it upset Mom. My protests: 

What kind of mother is she? 

Do you think that will make her better?

Give in to her on this and you’re dead to me.

That when I started college, I only went home for Thanksgiving and Christmas.

After I got married, I only went home once a year.

After Dad died, I hardly went home at all.

The last time I saw my Mom, sitting in her living room, attached to an oxygen tank. Her, taking off the mask to tell me she wished I came around more. That she’d like to see those kids of mine. Her face, blushed with broken blood vessels. Her skin, wrinkled like a raisin dried by the sun. Her hair, undyed, matted, and begging for one last visit to Cut-N-Curl. My Mom, finally frail and almost normal.

That lost years can never be found.

Sally Simon (ze/hir) lives in the Catskills of New York State. Hir writing has appeared in  Hobart, Truffles Literary Magazine, After the Pause, and elsewhere. She is a reader for Fractured Lit. When not writing, ze’s either traveling the world or stabbing people with hir epee. Read more at www.sallysimonwriter.com.

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3:30 PM

The faded reflection of your own face in your laptop screen as you sit in the passenger seat typing outside of your daughter’s elementary school. As you approach the words that you need, as you change the tense, change the tension by framing yourself here like this in third person. Here you are, looking very much like a different person than you imagined that you would be by this age. That in itself is not surprising, I suppose. (And how these little clichés eat at this inner narrative…) What is surprising in its odd finality is how little you like the reflection that you see. This is only surprising in the fact of how little this feeling has changed from when you would look at yourself in your younger days.

You reach over to turn off the stereo, to stop the song because it is too beautiful for you to handle right now. You squint into the fading winter sunlight. You listen to the shushing sound of traffic remixed into the familiar tones of the children running full-tilt out of the schoolhouse doors. We all sound like this as we are expelled: Terrified is so close to exhilarated. The wind surrounds all of this sound, all of this chaos. The wind carries us, steals the breath from our lips as we open them to greet our children. As we try, try to speak.


Laramie


You come to me as park bench, as picnic table. The browning green space between them. As a swingset in the middle of the night after two tabs of acid – all of this childish motion traced and repeated through your vision. You come to me as a hard pack of Camel cigarettes, as haphazard stacks of books and stumblingly naked bodies among them. You come to me as some combination of grunge and goth. You come to me shaved bald one day, come to me with bubble gum pink spikes another, with girlish hair clips pulling back your brown bangs. You come to me all out of order like this. You come angry and afraid of being left alone. You come to me asking me if I am going to ever ask you the question you aren’t at all sure if you want me to ask. You come to me as a truth, as a much fiercer version of it than I was ever used to seeing. You come to me as 1993. You come back. You come to me decades later, still just as afraid and still burning brave, still so much brighter than every single one of them. You come to me now as a friend – the only one who has known me through all of this, across all of these years.

C.C. Russell has published his poetry and prose in such journals as The Meadow, The Colorado Review, and Whiskey Island. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and for Best of the Net and is included in two volumes of the Best Microfiction series.  He lives in Wyoming with a couple of humans and several cats. You can find more of his work at ccrussell.net

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I wanted to lick the small of her back, to taste the fuzz of her skin and bite into it like a ripe peach.  

I wanted to become so close with her that we would become one person, that her pain would be mine and mine hers, and in that way we would belong together so completely and fully that nothing could tear us apart. 

I wanted to fuck her on her trampoline.  

I wanted her to fuck me in the woods, where it was always possible someone could find us, because that was part of the joy of the secret, the excitement of hiding, that someone could always find out.  

I wanted to stop having dreams about myself as a man.

I wanted to have inside jokes about books, to tell people we were like Toad and Frog but not in a friends way, in a very gay way actually, and then one day we would get little tattoos of the characters and in that way we would carry each other around together in a very not-just-friends way but in a super gay way, the kind that would make my family uncomfortable but it wouldn’t matter because our love would carry us through anything.

I wanted to hold her hand in the grocery store. 

I wanted to show her that nothing could be as natural as the way that the breeze shook the flowers, twisting and turning them into each other so that pollen erupted out of them and became mingled together, dancing off into the wind and mountains that watched us. 

I wanted to convince myself that I didn’t care what other people thought.

I wanted to tell my grandfather. 

I wanted to stop having dreams where I was Samantha from Sex and the City and also the ones where I was with Samantha from Sex and the City.

I wanted a future where it was possible to have an apartment in the city and to get in mundane fights about the dishes like they did on TV, but those were always straight couples so a little bit, I thought only straight couples fought.

I wanted to eat cantaloupe in the summer, and when the juice ran down my leg I wanted her to lick it off me and that the sweat would mix with the juice and it wouldn’t matter which was which to her. 

When a friend jokingly asked if I had come out of the closet yet I wanted to say yes.

I wanted to read her Emily Dickinson’s letter and tell her that I understood what longing really was now, after all this, and that I was fucking sick of the yearning. 

I wanted her to tell me she loved me and mean it, like really mean it, like the kind of I love you where you don’t mean to say it but you’re feeling everything so honestly and deeply that it spills out of you like rain. 

I wanted to kiss her in the rain, holding the small of her back, like they did in The Notebook.

I wanted to stop having dreams where I was Ryan Gosling.

I wanted to become mist, no gender, no anything, just a covering across the skin of the bodies I loved.

I so desperately wanted to kiss the small of her back.

Kirsten Reneau is a writer in New Orleans. Her work has been published in a variety of magazines and won a few awards. Her chapbook, “Meeting God in Basement Bars and Other Ways to Find Forgiveness” is due out early 2023 with Ethel Press. She’s online at www.kirstenreneau.com.

I am struggling to get the credit card out of my small coin purse when she says it. I pause blankly before looking up at her behind the counter. The rich maroon wall of the café highlights her bronze cheeks and extends her warm smile. Her eyes hover over my hands as I close the little purse, the quiet click of its metal clasp echoing in my head. When she repeats the compliment, the crowd stills; I feel I can hear my pulse. “Thank you,” I try to say, but my voice isn’t there. I run the card through the machine to steady my shaking hands. I hear the waves; I remind myself that she was only making casual conversation. I feel their ripple; I tighten my grip. The green stitching of the coin purse feels raw, almost granular in my palm. 

I see myself gasping for air. Something presses on my chest. I try taking calming breaths, but with each breath, more water fills my lungs. The weight is unbearable. Soon, I will be under the water. I can’t be. I have been swimming all my life. I can’t lose now, not to these waves. I take a deep breath and blink to get the water out of my eyes. I can see the surface. It’s raining. I hear voices.

Clinking spoons stir fragments of a conversation about skim milk and sugar cookies into the ceramic cups. Behind me in the line, there is a woman in her sixties wearing a red mohair sweater like the one my mom used to have. An over-excited child with a massive mop of hair like my son’s swings the woman’s arm while eyeing the flower-shaped sugar cookie in the display. It is my son’s favorite. I wish that this scene brought back a memory. Instead, it lingers on what could have been—the moment I never lived. My eyes fill, my mouth tastes like salt. The waves surround me. 

“Would you like your receipt?” The young barista asks. 

“Yes. Please.” I manage to say without blinking. I need the welling tears to dry. I stare at a distant spot, a blue dot in a painting on the wall, behind the man typing on his laptop and the woman reading. Where do the waves take them? The hiss of the escaping steam overpowers the crashing waves—tears retreat. I walk out of the line to wait for my drink. I think about blues, the subtle breeze that makes the pool water dance, rolling up and down in calming curves. I almost feel the sensation of water splashing over my sun-kissed skin. 

*

Water doesn’t scare me. I learned to swim when I was barely four. I was so small that Miss Mina would give me a ride on her belly floating around the pool. I would hold on to her body with my legs and giggle as she pretended to be a fish or a boat. A series of heavy blue curtains sheltered the pool from the gaze of the surrounding buildings but not from Tehran’s blazing mid-summer sun. A few rusting lounge chairs from the time before the Islamic Revolution lingered near the overlapping panels. When someone walked through, or a strong breeze blew, I could see the white concrete office building where we stored our bags in lockers with no locks. 

In that all-girls pool, I learned multiple strokes. I dove deep and pushed hard through the water. And at the end of each swim season, I won a couple of races, with my mom’s petite figure tracing a hazy but steady image on the sideline. Occasionally, she would give me five Toman note to get ice cream after swimming. I remember running my fingertips over her coin purse, the stitched green leaves rough to my touch. 

I was a strong swimmer at a young age.

*

I lean on the brick wall, waiting. Outside, the rain has lightened. I hear my name. The young barista has my coffee; I catch her eye. 

“The coin purse that you liked…it belonged to my mom,” I say—the last syllables landing hard with the realization that I spoke of my mother in the past tense for the first time. 

Our hands exchange the cup; a tender knowing moment sifts through the voids of the unsaid. She nods before dragging her look past me, toward a distant spot, perhaps a blue dot in that painting on the wall. She doesn’t blink. 

The waves can break in again any minute; I need to get out of the water fast.

Naz is an Iranian-American writer and filmmaker. She lives in North Carolina and teaches storytelling and film editing at the local universities. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Mayday, (mac)ro(mic), and Lost Balloon. Find her on Twitter @nazbk.

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We promised that nothing would part us – not even death –  so we stay together after the accident.   

We lean our car seats back and listen to music, just like before.  You tell me about your first concert, your first joint, your first high school dance. I listen and take a hit. I wonder if this is what closeness feels like:  sticky leather seats, punk music playing low, the taste of weed, secrets spilling out of you like a hole in a tire.

I close my eyes when I get too dizzy.

#

We sip cheap wine coolers and go to shows, watching pierced teenagers thrust their fingers in the air and yell lyrics. We shout the lyrics with them, your arm around my shoulders. No one can see me shiver. 

We play pranks on the kids at the show. Push their drinks off the bar, drop their phones in the toilet, spill beers down their shirts. We laugh and dare each other. I want you to think I’m fearless, unafraid, even though your gaze makes me shake. 

The smoke fills my lungs and makes me cough, and you squeeze me tighter. I feel wanted and sick.

#

I have nightmares about dying, worse than when I was alive. Memories swirl with chaotic fantasy, and I wake up confused. It takes me several breaths to remember what happened. What you did.

I remember the message on your phone, the way you swiped it away. The way your breath smelled like IPA and sickly perfume. The way the steering wheel jerked to the right when you tried to grab the phone from my hand. The way the glass exploded around me in a burst of sound. The silence. 

I never found out who it was. There’s no point in asking about it now. 

#

I wake up with a headache and ask if you love me. You laugh and pull on your t-shirt, running your hand over your face. You look like a boy, like a child rubbing his eyes before a nap. It softens you.

You tell me I’m crazy to ask you after everything we’ve been through. After everything we’d lived through. You leave to make the coffee. I wipe the smudges of eyeliner from under my eyes.

I don’t ask you again. I let myself disappear into the sheets.

Madeline Anthes is the Assistant Editor of Lost Balloon. You can find her on Twitter at @maddieanthes, and find more of her work at madelineanthes.com.

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1. Two cars are driving toward one another to go to Ryan’s houseparty. Amy leaves Town A at 9pm traveling at 60 miles per hour. Wes departs Town B at 9:15pm traveling at 70 miles per hour. The distance between Town A and Town B is three Florence + the Machine songs apart. For 10 points — what is the EXACT moment that Amy realizes Ryan invited Wes too?

answer: 34 seconds into “Cosmic Love”

Bonus question 1: Answer the following questions about the color blue. For 10 points each —

A. Wes rented this 1999 thriller featuring sentient sharks and Alzheimer’s researchers on the third date with Amy, kissing her as LL Cool J avenged his devoured bird. 

answer: Deep Blue Sea 

B. For their one-year anniversary, Wes gifted Amy a locket featuring this gemstone, comprised of crystallized aluminum oxide and other trace minerals.

answer: Sapphire 

C. This author of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” coined the term “the blues” in 1807 to denote sadness and heartbreak, or how Amy feels when her best friend Dani tells her Wes has been slipping notes into Veronica’s locker. 

answer: Washington Irving

2. “My bounty is as boundless as the sea, my love as deep; the more I give to thee, the more I have, for both are infinite.” For 10 points each — which character and from which Shakespearean play did Amy quote in AIM messages to Wes, pleading they stay together?

answer: Juliet in Romeo and Juliet

3. Utilized in World War I and World War II, the German military developed a form of surprise attack, featuring swift, crushing force, much like Wes’s changing Myspace relationship status, ignoring Amy’s calls, and making out with Veronica and some freshman at the homecoming dance, all within 24 hours. For 10 points — what is this style of warfare?   

answer: Blitzkrieg

4. From papercuts to brush burns, red blood cells play an important role in repairing the physical body, though not in mending broken hearts, leaving Amy to superglue hers back together, shard by shard. For 10 points — what is the name of the structural protein which supports healing?

answer: collagen

Bonus question 4: Answer the following questions about Appalachia, where Amy road-tripped with Dani over spring break. For 10 points each —

A. Featuring sights such as “Dream Lake,” “The Stalacpipe Organ,” and “Titania’s Veil,” Amy and Dani almost got kicked out for causing a ruckus through the tour of this Virginia National Natural Landmark.

answer: Luray Caverns

B. In Point Pleasant, West Virginia, Dani shattered Amy’s digital camera trying to climb the wings of this cryptid statue. 

answer: The Mothman

C. At the peak of this small mountain in Maryland, sharing a name with a Brazilian attraction, Amy cursed Wes’s memory into a sudden storm, pitched his locket into the valley, and descended slowly with Dani, each raindrop on her cheeks a rebirth. 

answer: Sugarloaf Mountain  

5. Early automobiles in the United States and Europe did not incorporate the reverse gear, which Amy shifted to after seeing Wes’s Metallica bumper stickers in Ryan’s driveway, turning instead toward Dani’s for an offered movie marathon, backtracking gingerly to keep her heart-shards in place. For 10 points each — which two European inventors are said to have first incorporated the reverse gear into automobile production?

answer: Karl Benz and Louis Renault

Lauren Kardos (she/her) writes from Washington, DC, but she’s still breaking up with her hometown in Western Pennsylvania. You can find her on Twitter @lkardos.

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It is in August when the rains fall thickly and your ghost disappears. I am seated on the porch swing, my feet dusting the floorboards, our farm fields overrun and expansive in the distance. I am work-weary, grief-stricken, manifesting moisture of any sort. Our son joins me, his hair tousled by the day, his feet a soft padding down the hallway. I saw Peter’s ghost, he says, pausing to shovel blueberries into his mouth. I saw Peter’s ghost on my bed when I woke, and I wish I could see you like he does: Peter’s ghost sat next to me on the bus, Peter’s ghost did a cannonball off the diving board and soaked my whole class, Peter’s ghost rubbed my back while I barfed in the bathroom. 

But I don’t see you at all.

You mean Dad, I whisper in our son’s ear, pulling him closer, he was your dad. 

Our son cries and I rock us back and forth. The air is unmoving, stale.

You used to join me here at dusk, when the falling light made it dangerous to flail blackberries along the ditches, when you couldn’t hold the steering wheel or shovel a fence post any longer. You’d rub my feet, I’d rub your hands. We’d light a fire, watch our son marvel at the magic surrounding him.

Tonight, our son will wake next to me on the porch swing sobbing. He will say: I saw Peter’s ghost at the barn, at the barn, at the barn, and, for the hundredth time, I will wish he hadn’t followed me there that night. That I hadn’t told you I was worried about the rains. The run-off from the river. The momentum that builds when water has nowhere to go.

Jennifer Todhunter’s stories have appeared in The Forge, Hobart, Monkeybicycle, and elsewhere. Her work has been selected for Best Small Fictions, Best Microfictions and Wigleaf´s Top 50 Very Short Fictions. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Pidgeonholes and founder of Trash Mag. Find her at www.foxbane.ca or @JenTod_.

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(mac)ro(mic) readers who’ve been here for a while will remember The Bridge by Lucy Zhang, a haunted (and haunting) flash we ran back in December of 2019. Lucy has a brilliant new chapbook out from Thirty West called Hollowed, and Editor-In-Chief Nick Olson recently had the pleasure of asking her a few questions about it.

Many of your stories here synthesize new versions of/takes on motherhood, relationships, and agency, playing with things like time travel and traditional remedies while at the same time doing a lot of cool slipstream things with the form. What was it like tinkering with all of this?

I gravitate towards narratives with these slipstream and speculative elements (especially when choosing what anime or manga to consume) so I guess naturally, they show up in my writing too. Earlier, I wrote more pieces set in reality, but these days, almost all of my new pieces are off the rails in some way or form. HOLLOWED is a mix of both of those older and more recent works. Hah, I suppose as time passes, the more and more I’m trying to escape into imagined worlds. 

It was exciting to watch the way you deconstructed/reconfigured familiar settings and situations, broke things down into their composite parts. I’m especially thinking of the switch between coding language and a description of a pregnancy in “Code Baby.” Do you feel your coding background informs your approach to storytelling at all?

Yes? No? Maybe? But in less interesting ways than you’d imagine. I think many folks tend to iterate quite a bit on their stories, but just like how I write code with an end goal (churn it out, test it, ship it, bam bam bam), I approach stories similarly. Almost like engineering a solution with a definitive deadline at which I’ve got to ship it. I suppose my coding background makes me much less patient with how things move in the literary world—both within a story and within the industry (perhaps to my detriment :P). I wrote this particular piece while screening bugs, a tedious process of analyzing logs of bug reports folks file and either declaring their bug moot or declaring you’ll fix it in the indefinite future.  

There’s this interesting exploration of remedies throughout the chapbook, combined with a recontextualization of bodies and food. Some remedies are innocuous and culinary-based, but others, like the body modification in “Thigh Gap,” can be surreal, even horrific. Could you talk a bit about what it was like to work with remedies in your work?

I grew up around a lot of Chinese medicine that I ate without question. I don’t know how much it did or didn’t help, but there were certainly a lot of far-fetched conclusions that I had a hard time wrapping my head around. Statistics is a whole other can of lies, but I like at least having some guise of data to back up a point. A lot of that logic finds its way into my writing—especially how you can fall down the rabbit hole of one perspective that your brain has successfully logicked and convinced you is correct. 

There’s such a brilliant, seamless flow here from one piece to the next. Was there a chap structure you had in mind beforehand, or did these just manage to fit so well together? A bit of both/molding after the fact?

Why thank you! There was no structure beforehand. I tossed them together and maybe did a tiny bit of tinkering of order after the fact. 

Whether it’s exploring the mechanics of the body, tinkering with anatomy, or looking at the human form through the lens of sculpture, you get a lot of mileage out of peering deeply within bodies, their physicality and function. The fascination is infectious. Was this something you intended, or just a happy byproduct of things you like to explore?

A bit of both! The body fascinates me, so even when I don’t plan on writing about it, elements of it show up anyway. I like looking into how things work. It manifests through exploring the body, engineering details behind mundane (or not so mundane) items, and the mechanics behind supernatural elements. I also love imagery that completely sucks you into a story. 

What’s the oldest piece in this collection? Newest? How long did it take to piece this together, and when did you know it was done?

The oldest piece is The Stone Girl written 6/10/2020.

The newest piece is Century Egg written 4/20/2021.

I think almost all of my work fits together thematically and/or stylistically, so it wasn’t difficult finding pieces. Frankly, I think I saw Thirty West Publishing’s submission call, decided I wanted to submit something and whipped together a manuscript. 

When did I know it was done? When I reached the expected word/page count! I don’t iterate very much. I like to say things are done and ship them out, a mindset that has helped and hurt me. But I’m also of the mindset that if I think too much, I’ll waver and reconsider my writing, take it back into draft mode, or toss it entirely. I figure it’s always best to trust my first instinct. 

Lastly, I can’t wait to see what you do next. It feels like you could go anywhere from here. Do you have other projects in the works that you might be able to tease? What’s next for you?

I’m working on a revision of my first novel. It’s the most painful thing. I’m used to starting and finishing stories (whether it’s a micro or a 3k-word short story) in one day, taking another day to edit, and then sending them out. I even submitted this first novel manuscript with only a single copy edit, next-to-no revision and zero beta readers (the outcome: they liked the first 10 pages, asked for more, then rejected it kindly). Which I expected. It’s a dumpster fire manuscript. I wish I could say I was just done with it, but I guess I can’t complain too much. I do this to myself. Stay tuned.

Lucy Zhang writes, codes and watches anime. Her work has appeared in Fireside Magazine, Wigleaf, Apple Valley Review and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbooks HOLLOWED (Thirty West Publishing, 2022) and ABSORPTION (Harbor Review, 2022). Find her at https://kowaretasekai.wordpress.com/ or on Twitter @Dango_Ramen.

Her finger, tucked under his top lip, roved over his top front teeth. He wondered how much longer she needed. She had been kind—her veiny hand was sheathed in a blue plastic glove, but still, the bare unpleasantness was hard to bat away. She could see it in his expression, the moments where his congeniality died at the eyes and he was visible—exhausted. She had been talking about pearls. She must be in her mid-seventies, he estimated, in good-ish health but with a posture that might cave in the next four years. She was gentle. She did not burst the edge of a gum even though he hadn’t flossed in weeks.

“I’m done, I’m through.” She extracted her pointer finger from its landing spot on his left incisor. He nodded, running his tongue over the new plastic-taste. She pulled her phone out, tipped 22 percent, and gave him a small smile. A “get out of my house” sort of smile. He returned it to her. His bike was on her porch. Not locked; the neighborhood was quiet and suburban. He’d have a while to go to get back to the city, but he may be able to pick up something on the way. It was seven. The sky threatened pink. When he said goodbye, tying his shoes, his words threatened him with their own latex. The bike had a mint-toned frame. His forehead had a little headache. His bank account has seventy-four dollars now. The first of the next month was in a week. He would have to put himself back-to-back to make it out with no money and no debt after rent. The warmth of a zero providing a corona for an exhausted body. A small permission to sleep. He was so glad, so lucky, that most people were mostly ashamed, when you got to the things they actually, organically wanted.

People wanted to see people. You’d expect most of the postings on the app to be about seeing someone naked. And they were, at first, but people could see other people naked on the internet at any moment. It was the niche stuff survived: I want you to tell me about your worst breakup and cry in my kitchen, I want you to eat a bowl of olives for me because my blood pressure won’t let me, I want you to stand in the hallway between me and my wife and tell her that I do love her because she stopped listening to me. These were the desires that endured past the first few weeks of obvious requests. And these people were ashamed: to touch a stranger’s teeth and discuss a necklace made your guts feel like guts, so you felt bad, so you tipped the kid and then tipped him again when you watched his bike from your window. You saw him spit on the street. You tipped again. He had seventy-nine dollars now. You’d lose three inches of your meager stature in the next half decade.

He pulled his bike onto the sidewalk when he felt his pocket vibrate. Someone would paint a tiger face on his thigh for fifteen dollars a block from here. Sure, easy, tolerable, noninvasive, good prior reviews. If he could make it there in ten minutes, he could take the gig. He pumped his legs uphill. This would be a coveted one. Surely, someone else, maybe someone with a car, would be gunning for it too. He had his best luck with ones like the teeth one—ones that disturbed, but did not offend. Many casual workers shirked these, so they paid better, again, because of the shame. People just wanted to touch and see people. Could you blame them? Yes, he pushed into the bike, of course you could. You had to.

The house was a coral pink. It rang out that color, matching with the dying light. Down the block, a girl was turning a moped around. They saw each other like jousters. Deadly for how their postures, their tiredness, mirrored one another’s. She sped. She had gas but he had some minor advantage in maneuverability. His fridge: his roommate’s cottage cheese and a bag of chips and hot sauce. He stood up from the bike seat and hunkered himself over the handlebars. They raced toward the tiger between them, which would be done in nail polish and would be tricky to get off. It would eventually be removed with a vodka-soaked paper towel. There was no vodka at his house. She would win, would ditch her teal vehicle on the lawn, and give him a strained look as she bounded up the short steps. He stopped, half to get his breathing back and half to look into the house. She was sorry. She was ashamed to have beaten him. The tiger man’s hands would be gentle. It would be her best job all week. The tiger would look up at her like she was a mother. She would not become a mother.

Sometimes, she’d think about her childhood, defined by the destruction of the Amazon rainforest and the loss of the ozone. People forget that people fixed that problem with the ozone. It closed back up. Healing like it remembered its own un-body again. They’d fixed that. She would not become a mother or buy a house, not ever. The tiger looked at her until she washed its eyes clean off its face, off its head, off her leg. Before this, she’d come out from the house and text her girlfriend, one leg of her shorts hiked up as forty new dollars glistened on her screen. In the now-dark yard, the ungassable mint bike lay in the grass like something shot. Her moped was out of frame. She wanted to scream, but held it. The tiger man watched her from his window. She’d have to lower the seat, but the uphill home would be fine. It would have to be.

Claire Oleson is a queer writer and 2020 Fiction Fellow at the Center for Fiction. She is a 2019 graduate of Kenyon College, where she studied English and Creative Writing. Her work has been published by the Kenyon Review online, the University of Kentucky’s graduate literary journal Limestone, the LA Review of Books, and Newfound Press, among others. Her chapbook of short stories debuted May, 2020 from Newfound Press. She currently lives and works in NYC.

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CW suicide, abuse

My grandmother described my dad’s penultimate suicide attempt in 2018 como un milagro through both of our tears over the phone when I found out about his overdose. I hadn’t talked to the man in years, and quite frankly, I was terrified. Not of him dying, at the time, but of what I would have to face if he survived. Yes. Un milagro. When I was 19 my father briefly shook hands with death and then decided that maybe telling his then-15-year-old child he never wanted to speak to them again was a mistake. So because of this milagro, this miracle, we were briefly back in each other’s realms.

I’m always throwing my dad under the bus to try to convince you not to do the same to me. I’m telling you I believe my actions are okay because he hurt me first. I can air out my grievances because the only way he will read this is if my tía was right and he really is my personal angel now. I think he would care more about my grammatical errors than my speaking out.

So here I am, throwing him under the bus. There I am, 13 years old and learning to drive and almost flipping his truck into a ditch near our house. My dad instilled a(n) (un)healthy fear of vehicles in me early in life. My vehicles and tenors are everywhere and my metaphors blend and blend and I pretend I’m sorry. But am I truly sorry if I don’t know anything is wrong? I don’t notice it anymore, the wrongness, and I think it’s a symptom of my mood disorder. Disordered moods and processes and writings.

Bagging up my youth group shirts to donate today should have felt good like a slam! of the closet door but instead I just feel like I’m throwing my teenage self away. Nice to meet you, I am pseudo-adult now, complete with new name new hormones new everything. The Pope is Dope, one shirt reads. My old favorite, I like Her a latte, features the Virgin Mary inside of the Starbucks logo. Catholic Classic. yo soy católico. I threw away the letters from church camp, too, three years of them, without rereading a word. It would have been the ninety-ninth time anyway. I was so católica it duele. Named after the wife of Abraham and the Messenger. A miracle, my dad called me in a letter, never to my face. Nice to meet you.

About a month after my dad’s 2018 overdose, I adopted a kitten and named her Lorca after the new-to-me poet. The day I took home this gray and white four-week-old I could comfortably fit in one hand, I cried and cried and cried. 

She will die some day. I feared it then and I fear it now, watching her chase nothing and bolt from one room to the next.

I can only remember one time my family, my brother, sister, mom– wait, you have a brother?–  were all on one merged call. My dad’s incident was the catalyst for the odd July occurrence. I sat on the disgusting tan carpet of my first apartment, both my roommates away for summer and me stuck in Lubbock trying too hard at a minimum wage front-desk job on campus. 

The phone call itself is hazy, except for my brother’s voice, my brother’s loud and clear ex-cop-voice, asking me if I knew what it looks like when someone blows their brains out because he knows what it looks like and our ex-marine ex-cop dad knows what it looks like and god it is your fault he took all those pills did you know our grandfather didn’t even call an ambulance? Blood and pieces of skull.

It’s hard to write about one’s estranged father’s overdose, though I suppose I’ve been doing it for years. What can I write that doesn’t make me sound as callous as I feel? What can I write that doesn’t expose myself as the callous person I try so hard not to be? After all, I was my father’s daughter. Wasn’t I? My psyche and prescription for antipsychotics both say so. I am my dead father’s sort-of son.

Trust me, I am empathetic towards my father. Perhaps to a fault. I see myself in him. When he died I became even more him.

Though it’s been a decade since my dad taught me how to drive, I don’t do it now and I likely never will. No car, no license, no problem. (See: Fear of vehicles.) That summer of manic energy, the offers for rides became plentiful, the free coffee and books and quality time… it’s as if every one of my acquaintances believed themselves responsible for my dad’s incident. But he didn’t die. I was on standby for about a week while he rehabbed and recovered. Supposedly. False alarm, he’s okay, just incoherent enough to believe we are on good terms. I repeated this to myself until his fatal overdose two summers later.

2018 was the summer I chain smoked a bit too much and actually slept with the girls I was into and blew through money and books at an alarming rate. I found solace in the staying-up-til-sunrise on my balcony with my pretentiously thick and jacket-less Hemingway book, cup of coffee, and pack of light blue American Spirits. Who was I fooling? I was nineteen and crashing and burning and smoking and crashing. I romanticize those days when I think back on them now. To do anything else would drive me mad.
I like to think I left 2018 in the past when I gave up on forgiving my father. When he got me wasted and said he wanted to knock my teeth out, when the stranger on the street grabbed my arm: Are you okay? Is that really your dad? Do you need help? But then 2020 happened. He was gone–  really!–  and I’ve been crashing for just as long.

SG Huerta is a Chicane writer from Dallas. They are pursuing their MFA at Texas State University. SG is the author of the chapbook The Things We Bring with Us: Travel Poems (Headmistress Press, 2021), and their work has appeared in Split Lip Magazine, Infrarrealista Review, Variant Lit, and elsewhere. They live in Texas with their partner and two cats. Find them at sghuertawriting.com or on Twitter @sg_poetry

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It’s all about the light. It’s in the light. The light, the light.

I repeat my mantra over and over again for 20 minutes every day as I bathe in the multi-spectrum glow of my SAD lamp, darkness hiding in the periphery like a hunter in a deer blind.

It’s all about the light.

I wish my father could have seen my light.

It’s in the light.

His light was a spiritual incandescence that I never could see for myself.

The light, the light.

His light was born out of Sunday scriptures his mother read to him and a razor strop his father smacked across his back.

It’s all about the light.

He would pray silently to his light in the pre-dawn darkness on the first morning of every deer season.

It’s in the light.

Sometimes his prayers would be answered with a trophy buck or doe.

The light, the light.

More often than not, though, he would come home with nothing but a skinny squirrel or near frostbitten hands, still never doubting the light.

It’s all about the light.

Both he and my mother believed the light was brightest at the bottom of a bottle of Jack, and they worked together every day to reach that light.

It’s in the light.

My mother took his nightly preaching as a sign that the light had chosen our house to be a holy sanctuary for all the lost souls of the world.

The light, the light.

“The light,” my father would shout to my mother and me and anyone else he could persuade to cross our threshold, “showers us in glory and washes us clean of our sins!”

It’s all about the light.

“Hallelujah, Brother Abner!” the tiny congregation would holler back, fanning the flames of my father’s alcohol-fueled piety.

It’s in the light.

And then to prove his devotion, my father would un-holster the .38 he carried everywhere he went just in case he found himself lost in dark places, press the nose of the barrel against his temple, and pull the trigger.

The light, the light.

At the sound of the empty chamber’s sharp and hollow click, the congregants would become nearly feral, screaming and howling and praising the power of the light.

It’s all about the light.

“The time has come to be anointed by the light!” my father shouted from atop the stone hearth in front of the blue and orange flames of a coal-fueled fire the night I turned ten, the night I was to be baptized by the light.

It’s in the light.

“We give ourselves to the light!” my mother yelled as she pushed me toward my father.

The light, the light.

“I can’t see the light, I can’t see the light,” I wailed, crying for the soul I was sure I had lost forever.

It’s all about the light.

“Come to me, my son,” my father called as he reached for me with his left hand.

It’s in the light.

“Let me show you the light,” he sang as he raised his right hand that held the gun.

The light, the light.

“The light will protect us all from evil!” my mother harmonized, her hands reaching out towards the fire.

It’s all about the light.

“The light will save all of us, you and — ” my father began but did not finish because the bullet that tore through his temple stole more than the word “me” from his lips.

It’s in the light.

It stole the light that lit my father’s eyes.

The light, the light.

And it let my darkness in.

Kip Knott spends his spare time traveling throughout Appalachia and the Midwest in search of art treasures. His debut collection of short stories, Some Birds Nest in Broken Branches, was released earlier this year from Alien Buddha Press. His newest book of poetry, Clean Coal Burn, is available from Kelsay Books. You can learn more about him at kipknott.com.

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Most days, every day if he could, a certain man tried to make something. Some days he made one thing, other days another. Then, one day, the man’s doctor gave him the news that, though he would more likely survive, he also might die any day. As it turned out, knowing this was enough to prevent the man from making anything at all for some time, for the simple reason that none of the things he could imagine himself making seemed good enough – though perhaps “good” isn’t quite the right word – to be, or better said to have been, the last thing he ever made, which is precisely what they would have been if the day on which he made them also happened to be the day on which he died. And yet this man was so accustomed to making things that soon enough he could no longer tolerate making them no longer, and so he sat down and made this little story you are reading right now, about which, still alive, he subsequently thought to himself: it’ll have to do.

Eli S. Evans is the best writer you’ve never heard of, along with about a million other people who are also the best writer you never heard of. In short, you should probably have heard of more writers (but it’s not your fault). In the past month, his work has been published at Drunk Monkeys, Cowboy Jamboree, Six Sentences, Misery Tourism, and Queen Mob’s Teahouse (RIP). Obscure & Irregular, a small book of small stories, is available from a small press, Moon Rabbit Books & Ephemera, as well as the standard online retail and distribution behemoths.

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You wake up around midnight and through your closed eyelids you can already sense the brightness of the moon: someone forgot to close the curtains. A week ago was the last supermoon of the year but, for reasons scientists cannot explain, the moon forgot to wane. Each night it grows heavier with sunlight, its craters pulled taut under the strain; the moon is fit to burst. 

You reach for Sara but the sheets are flat where she should be. Outside, the moon hangs precariously over the trees and under those trees, your wife is kneeling in the dirt. 

It’s the middle of the night, you say when you go to her. What the fuck. 

I’m making a garden, she says. The moon’s made the soil more fertile. I read it in a magazine. 

She’s digging with her bare hands and a plastic cup from her birthday party. A week ago was also the last day of Sara’s thirties and, for reasons you can explain but are sick of tiptoeing around, Sara hated every moment. 

It had been a great party: all of her friends, even the ones you didn’t like; no kids to remind her of what she didn’t have; plenty of music and drinks to keep the mood up. She still had to step away twice to collect herself. She’d stood in a spot not too far from this one, her chilled cup pressed against her temple. You’d tried to hug her but she pushed you away. Hot flash, she’d said, the unhappy lines of her face sharpened by the angles of normal moonlight. 

She’s been restless ever since. You’d hoped it would pass. It’s not the first time you’ve been wrong. 

You sink into a lawn chair that’s tacky from spilled beer and heavy dew and watch her pierce the soil with slivers of something white pinched between her pointer and thumb.

What’re you growing? you ask.

Bones, she says. Go back to sleep.

What the fuck, you say, but what you want to say is, Do you really believe it can work like this and Do you want it to work like this and Less expensive than IVF, at least and You didn’t even fucking ask me and God, I wish I could. 

You do fall asleep, though, lulled by the quiet and warmth of lunar light. When you wake she’s sitting on the other side of the garden, four long furrows of soil drawn between you. Her dirt-covered hands rest on her stomach. She hums a song you don’t recognize and you forgot how pretty her voice is. It’s peaceful except for the pressure you feel to ask her what she’s thinking straining against your desire not to know. She stops humming only when the sun crests over the treeline, rising right beside the moon. 

Look, she says. Twins. 

You look but wish you didn’t because she’s right, the sun and moon are identically bright: two spots of searing white that leave you momentarily blinded. When your vision finally stops fizzling at the edges, sprouts of red-yellow bone marrow dot the garden. You can see them grow and lean toward the light. You can see them harden and calcify in the open air. 

Well damn, you say. What’ll you grow next?

Nerves. Organs, she says. Blood.  

Yours or mine? you joke. 

She doesn’t laugh. She goes inside and sits at the kitchen table where she can spread her magazines and browse nursery decorations and ignore you when you ask what she wants for breakfast. 

So you eat your cereal alone in the living room: away from the windows, out of sight of the garden. On TV, scientists talk about the implications of a moon forever full: the tides and seasons and sleep cycles, all out of balance. They worry the moon will burn up or break apart or its new weight will carry it out of orbit. There’s so much they don’t know and it’s amazing, you think, how you all took that soft glow for granted. How two things that never touch can still fall apart.

Jessica June Rowe is a writer, playwright, perpetual daydreamer, and Flash Fiction Editor of Exposition Review. Her fiction has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Best Microfiction 2022, Interstellar Literary Review, Flash Frog, Okay Donkey Magazine, Gigantic Sequins, and Atlas and Alice, among others. She also really loves chai lattes. Find her on Twitter @willwrite4chai.

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On Tuesdays we kick up ash in the alley behind Jackson Street, tossing crumpled parchment in bins, twisting our caps until the bills crane sideways, slinging black backpacks into the empty spaces where windows should be. Aiguo won’t unlock the door until half-past-three. We never see his face—just the sound of a rusty copper key, the smell of peach and tobacco.

It’s been years since an electrician last visited, so we bring our own flashlights to navigate the inside. The artifacts are stacked on stucco rectangles that disintegrate into dust at the bottom. There are many of them: a jar filled with pebbles and clay-colored water, a handful of old brass bullet casings, a slip of red fabric with smudges of yellow crimping the holes chopped in the middle. Some large, some small, all older than we can imagine. About thirty in total.

Aiguo refuses to tell us where they came from, even if we slip a platter of buttered biscuits beneath his bedroom door. Thus, we determine the history ourselves; we are archaeologists with toothpicks and secondhand makeup brushes. The thick ivory blade belonged to a warrior who hunted rhinoceros and water buffalo. The mound of gunpowder is all that’s left from a thrilling war two hundred years ago. These stories are etched into our notebooks—in Chinese, not English.

Our mothers don’t like it when we go to Aiguo’s. They buy us baseballs and miniature motorcycles, ask us to pick up potato chips from the nearest grocery chain after school. They buy us backpacks embroidered with American flags, even if we attempt to throw them out.



This Tuesday Aiguo doesn’t let us into the building. We press our ears against the base of cups and position the cups against the door, listening to his rough voice as he talks on the telephone. After twenty minutes, we leave, drop by the supermarket to pick up lychee and apricots. We bury the pits in the ground beside Aiguo’s, praying the trees will become a forest that reminds him of home

The change we keep in pillowcases beneath our beds is pooled in a porcelain bowl. Seven dollars and twenty-two cents. If we keep saving and saving and saving, we can eventually afford a trip back to Beijing, where Aiguo was raised. We will deliver the artifacts to their birthplace: drop the dried flowers in an antique Qing vase, reunite the iron helmet with its chest plate and boots, place the ragdoll in the open palms of a lonely village girl. They cannot stop us from grabbing our ankles, intertwining our roots with the soil that kisses both skyscraper and sea spray. Someday, somehow, we will return home.



Today Aiguo is arrested for involvement in over forty Chinese war crimes. We watch as the police raid his home, handle the artifacts with rubber gloves, suspend them in plexiglass cases, ship them to the land our mothers left fifteen years ago.

Matt Hsu is a student from San Francisco, California. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and he’s published or forthcoming in Roanoke Review, Kissing Dynamite Poetry, Longleaf Review, and The Lumiere Review. Currently he’s querying his first novel: a twisty, thriller-mystery about a crafty assassin. You can find him on Twitter at @MattHsu19 or at his personal website matthsu156538437.wordpress.com.

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In this new house — in her new house, she guesses — Rosie doesn’t know where to look. She wants to see everyone; she wants to be seen. If Rosie can’t be seen, she wants to be felt. Honestly, Rosie prefers to be felt. She just finds it’s easier to be seen, even though (or especially because) no one here, no one ever, stands still.

Rosie opens doors. Rosie patrols hallways. Rosie sits by windows, unless she can sit in a spot where someone else is sitting, then Rosie sits there. Rosie sneaks downstairs. Rosie has a room upstairs but prefers to sleep on a sofa that faces the foyer, so she can see if someone’s coming or, more importantly, if they’re trying to leave. Rosie’s second mom — her new mom, she guesses — brings down pillows and a blanket; she hands Rosie warm milk.

Rosie likes this second mom, but because she had a first one, she’s not sure about moms in general. Rosie thinks they might just change, like the weather. Every morning, she searches her second mom’s eyes for rain clouds. Rosie sees clear skies (she thinks), but still listens for thunder.

Rosie goes to school. Rosie eats lunch: soft, star-shaped sandwiches, neat lines of color-coordinated fruit, hard-boiled eggs with happy little faces. Rosie watches time tick off the face of her classroom’s clock. She worries the second mom won’t be outside once the bell rings. Rosie is surprised each time she sees the second mom standing there, standing anywhere, really.

Rosie thinks about her first mom but only remembers distance. I’m here, she’s there. We’re separate. Rosie figures, if this second mom decides to leave her, it’ll be on some church steps, because Rosie knows that’s where living things often go to get discarded. Rosie doesn’t pray. Rosie mostly panics. Rosie wonders if she should try on other moms, just in case she’ll need a third. 

Rosie clings, but to everything. Sweet and sticky, like honey. Rosie follows her second mom’s mom out of the new house when she leaves after Sunday dinner. Rosie waves to neighbors. Rosie talks to strangers. Rosie makes — Rosie maintains — eye contact.  

Rosie starts to skip, but on a zigzag, afraid to commit to a direction. One day, at school pick-up, Rosie follows a friend; she hops in his mother’s station wagon. Rosie’s second mom comes running. She picks Rosie up; she puts Rosie down. She places both hands on Rosie’s shoulders. The second mom’s not mad; she’s just scared and a little wounded. Rosie knows because Rosie looks — Rosie feels — that way all the time. Rosie wakes up. From a nightmare, she guesses. Her forehead is slick, and she hears thunder, but it’s coming from outside the house. Rosie sneaks upstairs. Rosie whispers; Rosie whimpers. The second mom rouses. She lifts Rosie into bed, slides over and curves her body like a cradle, but Rosie asks to trade places. She prefers to be the big spoon; it holds even water still. Rosie wraps an arm and a leg around her new mother’s body, chin to shoulder, nose on neck. Rosie breathes in; Rosie breathes out. I’m here, you’re here, we’re together.

Jeanine Skowronski is a writer based in N.J. Her work has appeared in Reflex Fiction, Tiny Molecules, Complete Sentence, Crow & Cross Keys, Lunate Fiction, and Fewer than 500.

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Her chubby little arms swaying as she careens down the mountain are all I can think of again this morning. The way her body’s flopped forward, and she stares at the snow passing underneath her. Her dad’s holding her up, her skis tucked between his. He’s trying to share this moment with her, but she appears more puppet than human. 

I try to bring my attention back to this damn mountain of laundry beside me, to focus on folding each piece in crisp thirds. It needs to be folded the Martha Stewart way. That’s his way, or his mother’s. They’re so entwined I’m not certain he has his own way. I run my hand along the crease of his jeans. At least I came to this marriage knowing how to properly fold a pair of pants. I pull my daughter’s olive-green hoodie from the pile. It’s the same color as the coat of that toddler on the mountain. 

Her dad shuffles her through the lift line, her hands swinging back and forth. Her whole body is limp, but he just keeps dragging her forward. He scoops her up onto the lift, and she looks catatonically at the vast whiteness before her. 

I know I should be happy here, surrounded by cream-colored walls in a safe suburban neighborhood. Robins chirp gleefully as I tuck one of my socks into another. Fuck Marie Kondo and Martha Stewart and their damageless way of folding socks. I want to stretch the binding until it won’t pull back together; I’m sick of everything feeling so constrictive. One of my husband’s socks lies at the peak of the pile. I toss the loose singleton into his basket. There is a right way to fold socks, and it isn’t mine. 

That dad pulls his daughter from the lift. There is a pride in his eyes. I know he is trying to impart his love of winter sports. He seems blissfully unaware of how disengaged she is. I want to tear her free from him, but I know I’m not strong enough to get both of us down the mountain. My legs are exhausted from all the runs I’ve done before. 

The pile of clothes is starting to diminish, but there is another in the dryer waiting to be folded. Sometimes I feel uncertain how I ended up here. I am pretty sure I am supposed to be enjoying this, but my flaccid spirit is being hurtled forward on someone else’s path. 

He’s taking her up again. I’m coming down. We start so young. Maybe they’re right, and eventually we’ll find joy in the descent.

Christina Ray Henry is a native Midwesterner. She is a sufficient handbell ringer, adequate second soprano, and former potter. An admirer of many art disciplines, she has added wrestling with words to the list of skills she is struggling to develop. Her work can be found in New Feathers Anthology, Intrinsick, and Anti-Heroin Chic.

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Tonight I hope something pours out of me. The LED clouds are on, ergo ambiance, and I ate the healthy food for lunch and I got the sun and the laundry is handled. 

You don’t care about that. I don’t care about that—about the things I/we have to get in order before the real things, the better things, the finally-things can come out. I want to let them out. 

Get out, GET OUT! 

I’m yelling. Maybe they’re more like baby mice. Maybe they need the soft words.

Come on out little buddies. Please, I need you. I know you’re in there, I can feel you kicking the walls. I have a clean apartment and a healthy atmosphere. I’ve been keeping it up for you. I don’t know why it’s taking you so long.. Please come out. It’s frustrating that I can’t quite see you. I need to see you. I need you out here. 

(Please.)

Bukowski said that he kept the bluebird in his chest and there was the girl, who was also keeping the bluebird in her chest, all locked up. They never knew. 

Goddamnit. I don’t want to not know. I want to open the cage. 

I don’t—I don’t know how to open it.



Let me try to say it another way

First of all, hang on. pause. can i just mention..

that i don’t like punctuation. see that apostrophe? not me. that was all bill. or whoever did autocorrect. periods? questionmarks? ok fine those were me—but only when i feel like it and don’t expect consistency. if you can’t figure out what i’m saying because a few little squiggles are missing then.. 

and i mean this.. 

i want to talk about divorcing you. 

it’s just not going to work out because it’s clear to me from right here that i’m not going to satisfy your imposing and brutish need for unwavering conformity to rules that you can’t even acknowledge as being temporarily contrived. and to be honest, i think that’s a bit gross of you. 

we’re just going to end up eating away at each others throats, insulting each other in exactly all the ways we hope never to be insulted, until we can’t even remember a time where we held the faintest respect, curiosity, or awe for one another’s potential. and if fostering that sort of contemptuous mindset is your bag then you should understand that i am not for you. in fact, you should probably understand that i am your enemy—and not, as you(/we) may have quietly (quietly, quietly) hoped; the arbiter of some great epiphanous change. 

(& yes i know that’s not a word but you fucking get it.)

at least, that’s why i read most of the time. the search. the quest for words that will unlock the parts of my guts that feel like they’re holding back little pieces of me who bang against the walls saying “let me out bitch” 

to which i say

bitch i am trying. let yourself out. no really. i can feel you in there. i would also like very much if you could figure out how to get the fuck out. 

because i figure that love is either in how i feel about myself or how others love me and neither one is attainable, i don’t think, until all you little gorgeous pieces are free. Because how can I love me if I don’t know how to be me, and how can I be loved for what I really am if no one can see her?



So,

Come on little hunnies. Come on you cute little fucking shy-for-no-reason assholes. Come on get the fuck out now pretty please. Little sweeties. Little nuggets of the real me. 

come on out now.

Loren Spurlock is a writer, veteran, and artist, among other things. Her work is the quest for keys to thought-liberation, autonomy, and awareness of the universal veins that connect all people. She values good ambiance, deep conversations, anything with cream cheese, and heresy. 

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I didn’t used to have to prepare myself to see him. Before the trench coat and bail bonds and scabs. Before the lies and the red-rimmed eyes, and the snot strolling toward his lips. Before the pleading for mom’s car payment and before the blue-eyed baby was taken away and mom’s dreams turned to nightmares turned to 3am house cleaning. Before I had to bleed the venom from my fangs so I didn’t scream into the receiver or into your face, “Leave mom alone!” Before you lived in a tent and in a van and before you stretched your hand out for change and we prayed for it. Before you sold Daddygrand’s map like a sheet of paper. Before every sentence was propaganda, and I had to plan what I’d say if you asked and what I’d say if you didn’t ask. Before I sat in this car beside mom two hours from home waiting to give you this plate of cookies, these birthday cards with the cash that we know better than to tuck inside. Before mom and I make small talk for an hour and pretend we aren’t wondering if you’re feet first in a metal drawer and before a woman’s voice finally answers your phone and says, “I’m sorry.” And before we sit for another ten minutes because if we move we’ll puke or cry or both and before I hug mom in my driveway and know her car will be a submarine for the next 40 minutes. Before I stand at my kitchen sink scrubbing knives after dinner and my phone asks, “Have you talked to my dad? I texted him for his birthday and haven’t heard anything back.” Before I had to answer. Before that you were my big brother, my fishing partner, the second half of a duet.

B. Bilby Garton is a Pacific Northwest writer who enjoys hiking and studying native conifers and edible plants. She has been published in Brevity, Cleaver, Bending Genres, FEED, and others. Her work was nominated for Best of the Net 2020. Reach her at [email protected]

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We shot in one of the ramshackle, defunct rooms at the Eastland Hotel during a blizzard. As we navigated labyrinthine hallways closed to the public en route to our makeshift studio, we whispered like we were doing something illicit, despite David’s of course having obtained permission for us to be there. While he had a penchant for photographing edgy subject matter in his spare time, David was an i-dotting, t-crossing, white collar straight dude, a veteran lawyer who fought for the little guy.

We found the room, and after some key jiggling the door burst open. Teal paint had peeled off the walls in places and faint heat attempted to death rattle out of the radiator every few minutes. Haunted as fuck, no doubt, although with the relentless draft I wouldn’t be surprised if even the ghosts flew south for the winter. Disregarding the chill—this was Maine, after all—we got right down to business. Between rounds of jumping jacks in an effort to maintain homeostasis, I transformed into a bearded soldier wearing an actual uniform, a glamazon in a red tutu, an androgyne in a black ensemble topped off by a fedora. David’s camera snapped all the while. I put on a fresh face of makeup to match each persona, smearing it off between looks with Vaseline and the rough, brown paper towel I’d pocket from public restrooms. Because my environmentalist roommate frowned upon paper towel use and therefore wouldn’t chip in for rolls for our household, I pilfered what I needed from out in the world. 

When I modeled I could sense the precise moment at which the photographer and I fully connected, spinning vision plus attitude plus thrift store threads into gold. David and I had captured at least a few stunners. After we finished I kept the androgyne look on and packed the rest of my accoutrements into the black plastic garbage bag I’d brought them in. On our way out, I made sure to stock up on complementary cookies and coffee in the lobby, since I was always hungry.

The squall had picked up speed. David offered to give me a ride home in his Volvo with its miraculous heating system—generous of him, since he was also paying me. I gratefully accepted, especially since my apartment was hardly balmy. Our building was made from old stock and the environmentalist kept the oil heat low due to cost, plus his qualms about carbon footprint. 

As David carefully ferried us up crystalline Munjoy Hill, he said, “By the way, what are your pronouns?”

I hadn’t expected this question, but hearing it made me realize I’d long wanted to answer. “They,” I said. “Thank you for asking.”

And then I thought oh, shit. Wow. It was the first time I’d said it out loud to anyone. Okay. I took a sip of coffee, wiped the fogged-up window with my sleeve and smiled out into the storm as the warmth returned to my body.

As a performer and art model, Goldie Peacock spent over a decade bouncing between frenetic movement and absolute stillness before chilling out and becoming a writer. Their work appears or is forthcoming in HuffPost, Wild Roof Journal, Sundog Lit, Bullshit Lit, and DRAGS, a book showcasing NYC’s drag superstars. They live in Lenapehoking (Brooklyn, NY, USA). You can find them more often on Instagram and less often on Twitter.

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“Nothing^* could be worse than dripping taco sauce⁺ on her brand-new^† wool^‡ sweater^¤.”

^*In her immediate current vicinity. ^**

⁺Is it even “taco sauce” if she used no ground beef, no garlic, and no onion? I think it’s just sauce. ⁺⁺

^†Seriously, she just removed the tags and steamed out the lines from the folding and packaging. ^††

^‡Because of course she wouldn’t be caught wearing acrylic or a wool blend. No—not her. Wool, maybe even cashmere. ^‡‡

^¤More of a sweater dress, but I suppose you could still call that a “sweater” since it’s knitted and sweater-like material. But why not say dress? ^¤¤

^**That’s not really true, though, is it? Considering that in her immediate vicinity, she has cats, a husband, a house, a car. Surely, plenty things could be worse than this? What is it with these convoluted turns of phrase? ^***

⁺⁺I suppose she could make an argument that anything can be a taco if you eat it in a taco shape, but that argument would be quite empty. ⁺⁺⁺

^††Because she spends way too much fucking money. It’s embarrassing. She hides it, and she opens packages when no one is looking and disposes of the packaging and the tags before anyone finds out. ^†††

^‡‡Because she’s a snob, and she’s always cold. ^‡‡‡

^¤¤Because she’s still embarrassed that she’s lost her glamorous style for this shapeless, rectangular wardrobe. Sure, it’s comfortable. But it’s not sexy. Not even close. ^¤¤¤

^***Because she can’t bear to acknowledge the actual problems she has. They’re weighing her down. They’re all but suffocating her. 

⁺⁺⁺And she does, because she can’t eat tacos. She can’t eat the things she loves. She has to pretend.

^†††Because she’s tried to stop, and she wishes desperately she wasn’t so obsessed with things and things and THINGS. ^††††

^‡‡‡Because, really, artificial fabrics make her skin break out in rashes and acne, and she can never seem to regulate her body temperature because she’s always sick. 

^¤¤¤Because she’s sick—more sick than most people know. Because she’s always distended and in pain; she looks six months pregnant most days. Because she can’t bend or turn or twist or lie on her side or have sex or hold her cats without pain, without wincing, without crying and sometimes gasping or screaming or falling to the ground. ^****

^††††But she’s autistic, even if she “doesn’t seem autistic,” and collecting things is her biggest obsession, and trying not to collect causes physical discomfort, and she knows no one will understand. 

^****So she buys herself nice things, and she cares for them, and she finds comfort in the soft wool against her distraught body, and, truly, what could be worse than ruining that?

Adrienne Marie Barrios is the editor-in-chief of Reservoir Road Literary Review and CLOVES Literary and author of the collaborative poetry collection Too Much Tongue (Autofocus, 2022), co-written with Leigh Chadwick. Her work has appeared in trampset, Passages North, Identity Theory, Sledgehammer Lit, and X-R-A-Y Lit Mag, among others. She edits award-winning novels and short stories. Find her online at adriennemariebarrios.com.

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Erin plays the part of the heroine. Cast for her soft lips and full body, she throws herself into relationships with gusto. She has mastered the laugh where she pulls back her lips, bares her teeth, and squints like she’s sharing an intimate joke. Roland casts opposite her, chosen for his bravado. He’s been practicing for this role his whole life, from plastic sword fights with his brothers, who rolled him onto his back and pinned his shoulders to the ground—tip of the sword on the Adam’s apple. 

In the opening scene, Erin enters Roland’s apartment carrying an overnight bag disguised as a tote. Roland puts a comedy routine on the TV. He watches out of the sides of his eyes for a laugh to rise up from Erin’s chest. Head tosses backward. Shoulders shake. 

Just before a punchline, Erin rests her fingertips on Roland’s back, feels the tautness of his muscles, and when the moment comes, releases a giggle that sends her whole body rocking backward onto a cushion. She isn’t sure whether it’s the three glasses of wine she’s had, or the feeling of delight in her chest—Roland’s hand on her knee, a gentle squeeze.

Erin has always been attuned to tight muscles, micro movements, quick shifts in mood, like the tensing of her father’s jaw or the clenching of a fist. She has perfected the art of a disarming smile. Erin has been on the lookout for love since she left home at seventeen. She has been practicing for this role since she was a girl and discovered the difference between dialogue—I love you—and stage action—a door kicked open, doorknob punching a wall.

On their first date, Erin caught the gleam of desire in Roland’s eyes, opened her purse, and found a mint. Roland has been waiting for a repeat of what followed ever since. A grip on the back of his head, lips pressed against his.

At the sound of Erin’s laugh, Roland turns onto his back and exposes the soft front of his neck. Erin remembers something her parents once said about becoming one of those women—wasting time with those men, interested in one thing only. Erin isn’t sure how to trust her judgement, but she knows she’s remarkable at perfecting a role. The scene is set, Erin will stay over, and leave in the early morning. Erin is a little sorry for the look of desire, and maybe affection, on Roland’s slender face, she’ll be sorry months later when he calls to ask after her dogs, when he texts her over the new year, and later on her birthday, but not sorry enough to break character, which would make her feel silly and small for having to explain her own lack of certainty over whether she’s still performing. She asks for another glass of wine, is relieved at his relief. Body arcing toward his. Roland is contemplating what the kind of man Erin could love would do next. These days, he barely speaks to his brothers, and wouldn’t know what sort of advice to ask if he did. Days before, he bought an extra bottle of wine to keep in case Erin asked, and wrote a note confessing how often he thinks of her. He imagines an entire life with her, buying those little mint trays for her at the grocery. He replays in his mind the giggle that makes her sound like a girl and tucks her arm into his side. He imagines how her expression will look when she unfolds the small note he scrawled in pen the evening before, when her eyes will rest upon the words, falling for you. Then he’ll remember his brothers, their plastic swords tipping toward him. He gets up for the extra bottle. At the last minute, he’ll conceal the note in the trashcan underneath a couple of paper napkins and a wine cork. Fold, tuck.

Lauren Woods is a Washington, DC-based writer, with fiction and CNF in The Antioch Review, Fiction Southeast, The Forge, Wasafiri, Hobart, Lit Hub, The Writer, and other journals. She tweets @Ladiwoods1.

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1. If you fold down the back row of seats and let her father Tetris your boxes into an impossibly efficient arrangement, your entire life in New York can fit neatly into a standard SUV.

2. It actually takes five hours to get to DC. It takes you significantly less time to realize the friend you’re staying with might be just as lonely as you are.

3. The road trip is going to delay the feeling of loss, but you can feel it following you on the highway, just one exit behind you. Once you stop for good, it’s going to hit you like a semi.

4. Google Maps is a filthy liar.

5. You miss her.

6. Driving hungover should be illegal. MAHD should exist.

7. You’ve never relied on strangers for their kindness, just their ability to distract you.

8. The curly-haired Boricua at the Ruby Slipper Cafe in New Orleans left Brooklyn three years ago. She seems happy here, and that gives you a foolish, fleeting hope.

9. Whenever you stop to get gas in a small town, you are glad you stripped off the green nail polish and the rubber rainbow bracelet, and, because you are ambiguously brown, glad you shaved your beard off completely.

10. It’s not the wild nights in Hell’s Kitchen that you miss the most. It’s drinking a glass of Chianti that the Italian man at her favorite wine store told you to get as the two of you scream at the TV during “Top Chef.”

11. You’ll never drive fast enough for the F-150s.

12. Your Chevy Equinox (or similar) is your noble steed, your most steadfast companion. His back (and front) seat driving can be infuriating (no one is going to die if you drift a bit into the shoulder, and no, there’s nothing behind you, so stop auto-braking), but you’ll learn to find the smell of his leather interior comforting.

13. A terrifyingly harsh and sudden downpour between New Orleans and Houston will test the limits of your Californian driving skills.

14. She thought the reason you never had her over was she wasn’t special enough, but the real reason was her apartment was the only place you felt whole.

15. A terrifyingly harsh and sudden welling of tears between Houston and your final destination will test the limits of your ability to deny reality.

16. New York was never your city because it was hers.

Aaron H. Aceves is the author of “Fifteen Things You Learn After Moving to New York,” the prequel to this story, published by Flash Fiction Magazine.

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Ten years ago, a childhood friend came out to me. He was nearly sixty and still living in Laurel, Mississippi, the small town where we both grew up. He said he had been seeing the same woman now for 20 years, unable to come to terms with his sexuality. He had had plenty of sex with men, but had never had a date with one. Had never spent the entire night with one. Had never been sent flowers. Had never been kissed. It’s still the rent gay men pay for living in certain parts of the world. Sever your heart from your sexuality, lest you lend dignity to what is deemed as evil by Heaven’s bouncers.

My friend had been listening to the radio preachers and had come up with a solution, one that he was hoping would quell his inner demons. “Do you think,” he asked earnestly, “that castration would work?”

I told him he might want to begin with something a little less permanent. The first thing that came to my mind was a quick trip to New Orleans. 

You see, when I was in college back in the seventies, there were two rivers that flowed into the Crescent City. One of course was the Mississippi. The other was that river of young gay men fleeing red-dirt, Bible-belted, ultra-conservative, football fanatic, sexually-fevered crossroad communities in Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Texas and Louisiana. Refugees from their own families, friends, and faith. 

Shy, hormonally frustrated, gender confused, sexually silent outcasts. Pariahs, lepers, misfits, and social cripples making their pilgrimage not to the healing waters of Lourdes, but to the sweet elixir that was Bourbon Street. 

New Orleans has always been a beacon to us prodigal sons of the South. For many a Bible-bred gay Southerner, it was our last shot at salvation. Of course the radio preacher would say salvation is about giving up your life to gain your soul. But that assumes you have a life to trade in for a soul. We had run out of options for lives worth living.

The choices were only different flavors of death. Perhaps it was the gradual sexual suffocation in a straight-jacketed hetero-marriage. 

Or maybe the neutered role of the sweet-as-can-be bachelor organist at the Cottolandia Baptist Church. Going home alone at night with the musty smell of the church basement mingling with the scent of the face powder, hugged-off the delicate old ladies who, “can’t understand why some girl hasn’t snatched you up yet.” 

We emitted a desperate death-odor from a suffocating heart, confined to a cell constructed by those two dictatorial pronouns, unambiguously defined, intelligently designed, Biblically fundamental, biologically distinct—He and She.

New Orleans for us was a city of grace and glitter and most of all a myriad of sizzling options. Where the borders of rigid sexual maps melted like the mascara on a fevered drag queen’s sequined face. 

New Orleans was a place where eyes, brimming with all the desire and longing of a football hero ogling the homecoming queen back home in Tupelo were now fixed upon us. These were not furtive glances shadowed by shame. They were lingering and liquid and straight-out audacious.

New Orleans was a place where your flesh was not leprous and detested, but desired and sought after and most of all worthy of human caress. 

By the tens of thousands we drove and hitchhiked and bussed ourselves over that concrete span to paradise, the Lake Pontchartrain Expressway, with every mile the halo of the city growing more intense until at last, cresting the final incline, there lying below us, was the starry firmament of New Orleans. A shimmering bubble below sea level.

At the city gates, you gasped, and only then did you realize that your soul had been holding its breath since you were 9 or 10 or whenever it was you first knew. You dared to believe for the first time in a very long time. God, there is a life after Mississippi or Alabama or Arkansas, maybe one worth trading a soul in for. 

As my friend and I approached the city on I-10, I wondered if the magic was still there. And if it was, would there be enough to save a sixty-year-old man. 

We walked down Bourbon, past Iberville Street and its out-of-town gawkers; past Bienville and Conti Streets and the single-for-the-weekend businessmen; past St. Louis and Lafitte and the strip bars; past Orleans and the drunken fraternity boys. 

By the time we approached the magical boundary of Bourbon and St. Ann, the straight crowd had thinned, and the nervous stragglers, sensing the instability of the gender-shifting tectonic plates beneath their feet, abruptly about-faced and hurried back to the safety of their herd. 

But we continued our descent deeper and deeper into the Id of the Quarter, toward Dumain and St. Phillip. The air became thinner, the population gayer, society’s sharp edges began to blur, and the possibilities became legion. 

The moment he entered his first-ever gay bar, with scores of men, short and tall, fat and thin, masculine and effeminate, young and old, stunningly studly, baby-doll pretty and hopelessly ordinary; laughing and preening and flirting and joking and debating, celebrating a thousand ways of being with one another without shame or apology, I knew then, my friend had turned a corner. I could see it in his eyes. It was the moment you realize that what you thought was your last best hope is only the opening bid at life’s gaming table, and the house just raised your limit high enough to cover your heart’s desire. 

That’s what I want to tell my friend’s radio preacher. That perhaps the reason the French Quarter has survived hurricane, fire, flood, pirates, preachers, and Republicans is because it is indeed the holiest of ground. All the proof I need is to see my friend now, living with the man he adores, in a bigger, roomier world, with space enough for not only the love they have for each other but also for their God. 

I want to tell his radio preacher, “You see, even when the churches lock their doors, and the preachers shut their eyes, God still finds a way to bring his children home. Sometimes by mysterious and wondrous routes.” 

And one of them is to take Interstate 10 across the Pontchartrain Expressway, and let it gently lower you into the forgiving, generous arms of New Orleans.

Author of three novels, The View from Delphi (Macadam Cage 2004) The Healing, (Random House 2012) Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League (Maiden Lane Press 2015). Odell’s essays appear in various publications (Commonweal, The Bitter Southerner, etc) Raised in Mississippi, he presently lives in Minnesota with his husband.

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I add to the festivities. I create glow because I otherwise wouldn’t return from the darkness. I don’t turn down the dial. My walkway is lined with small flags we waved on the 4^th of July before the accident in August crushed everyone in the car but me and I keep spare sparklers in my purse now for emergencies. What makes you think it can’t happen to you? Deep winter spreads inside me and I keep it lit with potted fir trees twinkling on the porch, flanking the front door hung with a misshapen heart wreath. All the holidays every day! The car took us to the health checkups and the fun parks, the playgrounds and parties, to the grocery and work, to the last vacation. The car took us to the end. What makes you think it won’t happen to you? I fall asleep beneath twinkle lights and wish for visitations by familiar ghosts, but I have Ada instead.

Ada slides through the summer’s thickest air in my night kitchen, wanting to press a cheek against the oven’s blue finish, to skate across the half-laid Brazilian walnut flooring. Ada wants to cook for her family too—bacon butternut squash peasant bread mushroom risotto tomato bisque cinnamon walnut rolls vegetable beef stew rack of lamb—she wants a foot to caress the rich wood, a finger to trace the star-shaped burner. She rises beneath the cavernous stainless-steel hood, a reverse birth, and the metal gleams in the streetlight beyond the French doors and she wears the apparatus like a costume from the future, her metal dress. Ada taps a rhythm on the surface, a song a lament a message to say this neighborhood has interrupted a one-hundred-and-forty-three-year peace—in just one year we have laid foundations, mansion atop mansion, changed the course of a meandering stream for a golf course, upended the forest around her bed. From my bed I respond with a fingernail against the copper lamp, tapping a plea for punishment.

Ada tries to give me what I want and feeds me metal dreams: A harried woman in a sequined gown rushes towards an elevator and claws at the seam until the doors part. She throws herself into emptiness, shrieks she has made a mistake but there is no time to take her outstretched hand, and our agony repeats for hours. Another: My daughter’s shoelace is caught in the teeth of the airport escalator, the free foot hopping up the toothy steps hopping hopping. Endless nights. 

I set the master bath aglow with candles to thank Ada for the torture and she whispers her woes: diphtheria, hemorrhaging during childbirth, infant pneumonia. We sizzle one sparkler for each lost love, ritually dousing them in the bathtub when they turn black before we dance outside beneath a Super Pink Moon. The landscaping is a pristine sea of green, a product of roaring machines but we follow the two carefully planted strips of pollinator-friendly growth, weaving our way through the bellwort, bloodroot and tall grasses until we reach the last cluster of century-old beech and sugar maple left in the neighborhood. This is the last place Ada recognizes and the trees remember her. I kneel and run my palm against the moss growing at the base of one and wonder what will remember me when I go and who will I haunt? What makes you think I won’t happen to you?

Kate Gehan’s debut short story collection, The Girl and The Fox Pirate, was published by Mojave River Press in 2018. Her writing has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Split Lip Magazine, People Holding, Literary Mama, and Cheap Pop, among others. She is nonfiction editor at Pithead Chapel. Find her work at kategehan.com.

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Few can do it, but I’ve gotten the perfect level of drunk for karaoke. Paced myself and now I am feeling the right amount of bold, horny, irreverent, and ultimately nihilistic. I am ready. 

I make eyes with the guy running the mic and he flashes ten fingers at me. I head to the bar for a final beer. Our neighbor Lanie is in line in front of me. Even from behind, I can tell she has a pained expression on her face. She certainly doesn’t blend in with the crowd, which is mainly me and Camina’s drinking crew since high school. I can see this from the lilac leather fringe experiment of a jacket she’s wearing. She must have thought she would be impressing her new bestie Camina. Cute really, how much Lanie looks up to my wife. This isn’t new, women have always loved Camina because everyone loves Camina. God only knows why she chose me. Probably came down to time and persistence. Camina likes steady and secure. 

Lanie turns around and jumps. I tell her to relax and take a shot with me. She looks nervous but agrees. We take the shot and then I slug the fresh beer. I am the perfect amount of drunk, all right. I’ve got that oxytocin rush that makes me wanna tell the next person I see anything to make them smile. I clasp a hand on Lanie’s shoulder and stifle a laugh when the fringe shakes beneath my grip. I tell her I’m happy she and Camina have gotten close. I won’t lie, I tell her, shouting over the music that has suddenly getting louder, I can get jealous of anyone spending a lot of time around my wife. Looking like that—how could I not? Lanie gives me a weak smile and we both look at Camina. People swarm her as she cuts her birthday cake into squares. 

The mic guy calls my name. Camina hears it and looks over at me. It’s loud but I see her mouth the words, What are you doing? I blow her a kiss and set my beer down on the bar. I would finish off my drink before running up, but if I do Camina will make the face and I don’t want to see the face. It’s a party. She’s happy. I can keep it this way. Tonight, I can keep her happy forever. 

I picked the perfect song: In my range, crowd pleaser, romantic, easy lyrics, and not too long. The well-known piano chords start and there are scattered woo-hoo’s. I look to see if Camina has noticed the song, but she looks deep in conversation with a co-worker. She doesn’t look at me. Maybe she can’t hear the song in the back. 

The mic guy calls my name again and points to the screen where the words fly by. I yell fuck into the microphone which gets the crowd’s attention. I take a breath and pick up the next lines. 

I’ll make you so sure about it

God only knows what I’d be without you 

I have most of the women’s attention in the room. Camina is buried by people at the gifts table. Why are they making her open stuff now? This is my birthday gift to her, so it’d be nice if she saw it. 

Lanie hovers at the bar. She must not know anyone else. She looks like she has cut her bottom lip from chewing it too hard. She picks up a shot from a roaming tray and takes it with surprising gusto. 

If you should ever leave me 

Though life would still go on believe me

I catch Lanie’s eyes and point to Camina then back to myself. She nods and moves through the crowd. She looks relieved to have something to do. I see her reach for Camina’s wrist and give it a gentle squeeze, too nervous to interrupt the conversation I suppose. Camina turns too fast and her loose curls whack Lanie’s face. Camina leans back laughing then rocks forward and kisses Lanie on the forehead. Wow, Camina must be drunker than I thought. Lanie turns bright red and rushes back to her bar stool. 

The world could show nothing to me 

So what good would living do me 

God only knows what I’d be without you 

At the bridge I set the mic down and dance. Laughter ripples. It is good-hearted. I have the crowd.

Everybody sing with me!, I shout into the microphone. Keep singing, as I talk.

The drunk people in front do a decent job of the chorus while I pull the crumpled piece of paper out of my back pocket. My birthday speech for Camina. I have to bend over it to see because of the stage light above me is so bright. When I look up into the crowd everyone is a dark blur. My eyes catch on the lilac of Lanie’s jacket. She is mouthing the lyrics to someone in the room. Her gaze is intense and focused.

God only knows, I sing

I take my eyes from Lanie and look for Camina. There she is. But she’s not looking at me either. She’s looking at someone on the other side of the bar and singing. I look back at Lanie and there it is. As plain and easy and ugly to see as Lanie’s jacket. She is staring at my wife. My wife is staring at her. They are serenading each other.

God only knows, I sing for the final time. 

The crowd applauds and I hear Camina blow a whistle through her fingers. She smiles, blows a kiss, and walks towards the back patio of the bar. Maybe outside to smoke a cigarette. I can’t see well because my eyes have filled, but I can trace a lilac blur walking ahead of her in the same direction. 

God only knows what I’ll be without her.

M.M. Kaufman is a writer of the south. She is a Fulbright Scholar and earned an MFA in the University of New Orleans Creative Writing Workshop. She is the Managing Editor at Rejection Letters. She has work published with Slush Pile Magazine, Memoir Mixtapes, Tuck Magazine, The Normal School, Hobart, Shift, Metonym Journal, Sundog Lit, Orangeblush Zine, Our Name is Amplify, Daily Drunk Mag and forthcoming from Olney Magazine.Find her on Twitter @mm_kaufman and on her website mmkaufman.com. (She/Her.)

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Dear Josh,

Today, I pulled my A&W mug down from a cabinet. There was a dead spider in it, a thick coating of dust on the rim. It’s been thirty years this spring since I stole that beveled glass mug, thirty years since I saw you. 

Do you remember sledding at St. Mary’s Glacier when we should have been shelving or returning books as high school student assistants, when we threw on jackets and hiked up the trail, raced each other to the top of the glacier, and threw ourselves on old sleds? Do you remember cursing to the wind, your voice thin like breaking ice? Could you hear what I screamed while my teeth chattered? Did I scream loud enough to be heard? 

While I soaked the mug in soapy water, while I gently wiped its thick, beveled glass, I remembered that spring afternoon. Snow and mud mixed in the dirt parking lot of the A&W. We had passed the restaurant every time we’d gone sledding at the glacier. Each time, we said we’d stop the next time.

“Want to stop?” one of us would say. We looked out the window longingly, the idea of root beer, with its carbonation and suspected trace of caffeine dangerous to you as a Mormon and me as a recently rejected fundamental Baptist. 

“We’d better get back. Next time.” 

“Yeah, next time.” 

What made us stop that day, finally go inside, finally order two root beers in frosted glass mugs, finally sit at the small table? Do you remember that day, Josh? I sat with my back to the dusty windows, you with your back to the kitchen. The sun shone in your blond hair, making it almost disappear. You reminded me of my brother, the younger brother I knew I should have protected, should have saved from our parents, the church, God. 

When the waitress brought our root beers, you flinched. You froze. I saw your eyes go empty, saw your shoulders hunch forward, your hands jump into your lap. I saw it because I had done it too. It had been several years since I had lost my parents, my brother, my extended family, the church, my faith. I didn’t tell you. I was ashamed. 

You watched each sip I took, the dark root beer shooting up through the straw. I held the thick syrup in my mouth; carbonation bounced off my tongue and the roof of my mouth. I closed my eyes, swallowed, pulled soda hard through the straw. 

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone enjoy a soda so much.” There was a taunt in your tone. 

You never touched your root beer, never took even one sip. That’s when I knew you were still Mormon, that you had never really left. There was too much of you at stake. I had already lost everyone. I didn’t want you to experience that kind of loss. 

I guzzled the rest of my root beer and stood up, my mug dangling from my thumb behind my back. I smirked, daring you to steal yours too.

You smiled, then stopped when you realized I wasn’t teasing. You looked at the waitress, her back turned. 

I took a few steps toward the door. “We should get back.” 

In the car, you watched the sky for darkening clouds, for lightning. I had already stopped believing in lightning coming after sinners, stopped believing in hell or heaven or God. You still needed it. 

“You know you can never go back now,” you said, meaning the A&W. 

I nodded. A small pool of root beer sloshed from side to side in the bottom of my mug. I would move from one foster placement to another that weekend, shove what little I had in a black trash bag and move from one place I was unwanted to another. I kept the mug. Through each move, through college, through various jobs and places I’ve lived, one marriage, and another, I kept the mug. It was the first time I had something that I wanted to keep, the first time I knew I could keep something. 

The mug has dried while I wrote this. I hold it carefully between my hands. It’s durable, but still worth protecting. I set it back in its place behind a water bottle, turn the mug so I can see the A&W logo if I look for it, so I can remember. 

Your friend,

Shawna

Shawna Ervin has an MFA from Rainier Writers Workshop through Pacific Lutheran University in Washington state. She studied nonfiction and poetry and was a recipient of the Carol Houck and Linda Bierds scholarship. She works as a guest artist and mentor for Art from Ashes, which helps struggling youth to tell their stories through poetry. She also reads for Adroit and is working with Black Lawrence Press on an anthology about grief and loss.

Shawna attended the Middlebury Bread Loaf Nonfiction Workshop series in 2021. She has also attended the Mineral School residency with a fellowship from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and received a Pushcart nomination. She is an active member of Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver. Recent publications include poetry in Tampa Review, Evening Street Review, Maryland Literary Review, Hiram Poetry Review, and Rappahannock Review; and prose in Apalachee Review, The Delmarva Review, Sonora Review, Summerset Review, Superstition Review, Sweet: A Literary Confection, and elsewhere. Her poetry chapbook Mother Lines was published by Finishing Line Press.

We drift in and out of the room like it’s ours, like it doesn’t belong to Haley. We caress the O-Town poster and dream that the guys would come to life so we could entertain them in our room. The one with bead bracelets on door knobs and a water bottle used to store a rainbow of scrunchies that no one ever wore. The door is always propped open by an oversize jack star. Haley can sleep with the door open, the lights on and fourth of July fireworks exploding in our backyard. 

After bad nights—nights where Dad screams at Mom and Mom screams at us—we curl up in Haley’s queen size bed like puppies whimpering for love, affection and confirmation that everything will be okay. Lifting the salmon bedspread, we back our butts into her and she snuggles in until our loneliness evaporates like a bad joke. It only lingers if you think about it. In the morning we wake up in a pile of doll limbs. 

Our little coven of three practices in the morning. We talk about what we want and what we’re afraid of, and Haley gives the best older sister advice as she brushes and braids our hair in intricate designs. She’s got the quick fingers and imagination for that. Somehow there’s never time for her hair or what she’s afraid of. But having overcome our fears, we imagine there isn’t much left for Haley to defeat. 

One night Haley comes home with skinned knees, bloody heels seeping into the back of her new white Keds and pupils wide like lollipops. She showers, bandages her cuts and closes her bedroom door. 

The next morning, in our chase down the hallway to begin the day, we ram into her bedroom door and pile onto the floor, pressing our fingers into the conspicuous red patches where bruises will form. Haley gasps like we shocked her back to life, like on those hospital shows we pretend we don’t watch. Rising, we whine about the aches and pains. We’ve suffered. We twist the knob. Our hands sliding in circles, slipping off like it’s slick with olive oil. We didn’t even know her lock worked. We slap our hands against the hollow door, certain that if we keep trying, we can break in. When our adult voices fail us, we use our baby voices and plead for her to let us in. But all we hear is a silence that crawls into our bones and never leaves.

Chelsea Stickle is the author of the debut chapbook Breaking Points (Black Lawrence Press, 2021). Her fiction appears in CRAFT, Gone Lawn, Tiny Molecules, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Best Microfiction 2021 and others. She has been nominated for Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. She lives in Annapolis, MD with her black rabbit George and a forest of houseplants. Read more at chelseastickle.com and find her on Twitter @Chelsea_Stickle.

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The music came with a steady beat of swinging arms and staring eyes. I was a child. I felt insecure, out of tune, awkward. I wanted to disappear, to hide from the hum and the heat. You drew me out of the dark corners of family gatherings. You taught me to dance; you held my hands.

You lived with Grandma because you could never work enough hours to hold a job, because you needed a new heart, because you had a bad heart, because Grandma had you after the doctor warned her not to, because she had a weak heart, too. Still, you were the best uncle that I could wish for and a true friend too.

You used to swim and ski, but everyone worried your heart would get worse. So, you returned the ski boots borrowed from a friend, a young man with a good heart, who now had a job and a wife; he did not ski, but he still could, if he’d wanted to.

You were always at Grandma’s house, or in the green hospital room on the 4th floor, or behind the ICU doors with two round windows that I couldn’t reach. I always visited you, alongside my mom and her anxious eyes, wandering through the cardiology ward.

You and I watched your favorite movie together: Edward Scissorhands. Your hair was as dark, and your skin as pale as his. I followed his reflection in your glasses—behind them, your brown eyes looked like my mom’s. And I wished that doctors could find you a new heart.

You lent me your favorite book, The Velveteen Rabbit. When you began translating the text, I would sit at Grandma’s table and listen to you read. I would trace your words written in blue ink; your script leaned toward the edge as if ready to slide off the page. When your voice would get low, too often, too tired, too soon, I would tuck the frail leaves of paper into the middle of the hardcover book and let you sleep.

You were tall and thin, but each time you went back to the hospital, you seemed smaller, as if you were fading into the starched white sheets that I knew more and more wore on your skin. Your hands, with their swollen shades of purple, were covered with needles, IVs, scars.

I remember the last days vividly, even now thirty years later. I was finally tall enough to see through those round windows. Beyond the tubes, the wires, the needles, and the beeping machines, I saw you framed in those circles—eyes resting, quiet, soft, still. You left that frame too early; you became real too soon.

Naz is an Iranian American writer and filmmaker. Her writing has appeared in Mayday Magazine; she has a story forthcoming in an anthology by Alternating Current Press. Previously, her translations have been published in Farsi. She lives in North Carolina and teaches storytelling and film editing at the local universities. You can find her on Twitter, @nazbk.

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Of course I want to go back and capture that night in that mason jar, the one with former lives holding pickled apples, apple cider, homemade wine. I would have mixed up the fireflies that danced outside your bedroom with the Everclear mixture spiked with an apple pie flavoring so it wouldn’t make me gag, like the way I almost threw up in your sink after you gave me a shot of your first batch, just to try a little. You warned me first – it’ll go down hard and you’re not gonna like it much. You were right. Your palm pressed against my back as I leaned over your kitchen sink, which was silver and bright against your bare bulb apartment. That summer, everything smelled like your old pickup truck and felt like grass in the morning dew. Were we more tender then, or was life just softer? The moon didn’t care that it was shining on us then and it doesn’t care we haven’t traced its phases on the map together in the five years since. I am far past trying a little; now I take full swigs in the back of cars without fear. Summers feel hotter than they used to, and I recently heard fireflies are going extinct. Everyone else has moved on but I’m still palming the glass of the mason jars that once were, from many moons ago.

Kirsten Reneau is full of yearning nostalgia and she’s making it everyone’s problem. She’s on twitter: @reneauglow.

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“Two days of snow, two flashes in the sky, I know the world ends, but I do not yearn.” – Matteo Tafuri, 1492-1582




When the ice froze for the last time, Persephone walked out on it. In the middle of another ash-dark night she’d heard the crack and rumble she remembered so well, the sound of freezing, and just as she had in girlhood she followed that sound.

From the gray shore her sister called after her. Something about how thin the ice was, how fragile, but in those days everything felt like Seph could crush it between her fingers. This wasn’t the kind of thing she feared anymore.

Still she stepped gingerly. She’d never been careless. She stretched her body out on the ice and let the cold seep through her clothes, her skin, all the thin layers that separated her from the world. When she finally came back inside, Tiamat wrapped her in blankets before the dying fire and fed her hot tea, but Seph never received the scolding she expected.

Three weeks ago the radio had told them about the fires and the smoke, somewhere thousands of miles away, but still close enough to blanket their little farm in ash. They’d walked through lanes of crops, the food they’d been counting on for winter, and brushed white dust from the leaves. Overhead the sky glowed orange, then faded to dark.

Two days ago the snow had begun to fall, and it hadn’t stopped yet. The air had the flat, iron smell of midwinter, though Seph was fairly certain it was only September, and whether it was September or January she hadn’t seen a snowflake in ten years.

After Seph thawed she and Tiamat lay on the floor of the cabin, listening to the static hum of the radio. Occasionally one of them would sit up and crank it for a while, though they hadn’t heard voices in a week.

“Do you remember the last time the lake froze?” Tiamat asked her.

She did, of course. The last time the lake froze over was a story in their shared end-times repertoire, alongside classics like the last time the sky was blue and the last time we spoke to anyone other than each other.

Then Tiamat asked her something new, something she’d never asked, in all the times they’d recounted the story together: “Did you know, then, that it was the last time?”

“Second-to-last now,” Seph corrected her, gently. A hum in her bones still called her back to the ice. She’d heed it soon enough.

“Second-to-last,” Tiamat acquiesced.

Seph shrugged. “Then, I thought everything was the last time.” She’d lived a whole life in that way. Clutching moments tight, like she could stop their leaving.

“Did you worry about falling through?” Another new question.

Seph thought back. She must have. Growing up on the water she’d been told ten times or a thousand not to go out on the ice until a grown-up said it was all right, but of course now there were no grown-ups other than the ones they’d become.

“When I was twelve,” she said, instead of answering, “a boy in my class drowned. Do you remember? He was out with his family kayaking when a storm came up.”

The storms from their childhood: she could still taste them. The foam and howl and salt, a flavor that should have been impossible so far from the ocean. Their inland sea, the way it stretched and churned, swallowing frigates and small boys all alike.

“He knew what to do, we all did. We learned swimming in school. All our field trips were out on the lake. He was wearing his life jacket.”

Tiamat’s eyes were round and dark.

“All I mean is,” Seph said, “you can do everything right and still get swallowed up.”

#

They woke cold in the night. Tiamat curled up smaller, trying to rub warmth into her limbs, but Seph got up to look for the winter blankets they hadn’t needed in a decade. Once they’d have been moth-eaten by now, after such disuse, but Seph wasn’t worried about that anymore. She hadn’t seen a moth in ages.

Seph walked to the window and pressed her palms against the dirty glass.

“Tiamat,” she whispered. The snowdrift was half her height now. They wouldn’t be able to get out the door, even if there was anywhere else to go.

They wrapped blankets around themselves and watched the snow fall, the sky dark as night with ash and heavy clouds. The fire was out.

Seph said, “I read this in a story once. I don’t remember which one. The world ended when the snow kept falling and buried everything.”

“Do you think this is the end of the world?” Tiamat asked.

Seph said, “We’ll find out.”

They didn’t talk about it beforehand. Both of them pulled on snowsuits they unearthed from the closet, parkas and pants and mittens knitted by someone who loved them once. Tiamat, who was taller, lifted Seph up and out the window, then followed her out into the snow.

The lake cracked like a shot in the distance. They took each others’ hands, like they had when they were girls sent out into the woods to play.

The wind had built dune-drifts of snow on the shoreline, leaving the lake clear and shining even in the absence of moonlight. They climbed a dune and slid down the other side, and when they finally reached the ice it felt sturdy and true beneath their feet.

Tiamat looked at her. “Are you ready?”Hand in hand they walked out into the vast white, toward the center of the lake. It held their weight and they lay down; they waited for what was next.

Amanda Crowley (she/her) lives in Chicago and has spent most of her life on and around the Great Lakes. Her short fiction has previously appeared in Fusion Fragment and Mythaxis. Follow her on Twitter @amandaccrowley, or visit her website at www.amandacrowley.com.

When your mother takes ill – the outcome of being bitten by a rogue mosquito – and temporarily retires from the kitchen, you set out to acquaint yourself with the myriad occupants of her fiefdom. Far from easy. There are two rows of identical steel tins, housing lentils that all look like first cousins, so any attempt at cooking daal must be preceded by an identification parade. You place a few grains of each variant onto a plate and take it to her room. This is moong, she informs you, and this is arhar, and this is masoor. The daals sorted, there is now a cupboard full of glass jars, with three variants of chilli powder alone, all labelled with numbers. What do the numbers mean? Jar 1 will expire first, your mother explains, so that must be used up before opening Jar 2. What about Jar 3 then, you ask. That one is a bright red but very mild, she replies. I reserve it for pao bhaaji. Since you always want yours to look hot and spicy – like in those Youtube cookery videos – but your father can’t tolerate the heat, this variant helps to keep both of you happy. 

Amma is astute, you think to yourself. You’d never thought of Amma as so clever before. 

On one of those evenings, with your mother still confined to bed, you decide to surprise her with a dish she loves – curried okra. You have no experience in cooking okra, but how hard can it be? You take a quarter-kilo of the vegetable, wash and scrub it dry. In a pan, you crackle mustard and carom seeds, add some chopped onion and green chillies, and toss in the diced okra. In less than two minutes, the okra starts to stick to the bottom of the pan. Of course! Vegetables need water to cook, don’t they? You add two whole glasses of water to the pan, then cover it and wait for time to work its miracle. You’re unaware, as a 35-year old with a doctorate from Wharton, that okra and water do not mix. When your mother hears of the debacle, she laughs hysterically, then picks up the phone to tickle her sisters. You know, already, that this particular culinary defeat of yours is going to become stuff of lore. 

Amma knows so much that I don’t, you think to yourself. You’d never thought of Amma as erudite before. 

Two weeks into convalescence, your mother is in better shape. The fever has subsided and so have the rashes. But the cramps persist. Her body feels leaden, her fingers are stiff as wood, and every trip to the bathroom feels like a workout, leaving her deflated. Keen to help her regain her mojo, you decide to become her personal masseuse. Every night, before she changes into pyjamas, you massage her aching muscles with diclofenac gel. You adjust the vigour of your fingertips in response to her reflexes – less pressure when she groans with pain, more pressure when she moans with relief. Soon enough, you can read her sighs like Morse code. You knead in some places, pound in others. You learn the exact size and shape of the mole on her back. You memorize the topography of her body. A week into the job, you know which mounds are sore, which joints creak, and which one of her toes is dead to touch. 

Amma is suddenly so feeble, you think to yourself. You’d never thought of Amma as vulnerable before.

A month after she tested positive for chikun gunya, your mother is slowly getting back on her feet. But her legs are unsteady and her hands swollen, even after all the ibuprofen and physiotherapy. She can’t reach the top shelves anymore because her arms won’t lift. She has trouble sealing the pressure cooker, and more trouble opening it. Every time she needs lentils from a tin or spices from a jar, she has to call you for help. She hates it, bitterly. She has always been the saviour, never the sufferer. She feels betrayed by her own body. Some evenings, she sits on the porch swing, staring at her limbs like they’re strangers. Then, determined to repair her broken bits, she gets off her perch and begins cleaning. She sweeps the floor and scrubs the table tops and hangs out the laundry. Don’t do all this, you scold her. The house is already clean, the laundry isn’t an emergency. But she ignores you and perseveres, because exerting her muscles, no matter how painful, is an assurance that they still exist, that it is only a matter of time before they regain form. 

Amma is so resilient, you think to yourself. You’d never thought of Amma as a fighter before.

A year has passed now, since your mother recovered from that ill-fated mosquito bite. The toxins have left her body, but in the brief period that they inhabited her flesh and blood, they altered her pathology. Your mother is now a distant cousin of who she once was. She has enrolled with the laughing club that assembles in the park every morning. She doesn’t find “laughing like a rakshasa in public” ignominious anymore. She picks up a glass of fresh juice – apples, celery and cucumber – on the way home, its cost no longer a deterrent. She watches television at odd hours. Some mornings, she ditches chores in favour of a new movie. She has gifted herself one of those Caravan radio sets, in pink. It plays Mohammed Rafi all day. She sings along, sometimes loudly. Yesterday, she asked you to order her a chocolate cupcake. “Why, can’t an old person want to try out young people’s food?” she’d retorted after you raised an eyebrow. This had made you smile. She’d grinned back. 

Your mother has become a million things she wasn’t known to be. 

Amma is a whole world unto herself, you think admiringly. You’d not known Amma to be vast as the universe before.

Megha Nayar is a communications consultant and fiction writer from India. She teaches English and French for a living, and writes stories to remain sane. She was longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2020. One of her stories was showcased at India’s prestigious Kala Ghoda Arts Festival 2021. She is currently a mentee-in-training on the British Council’s Write Beyond Borders programme. Her work has appeared in several lit mags, among them Trampset, Bending Genres, Rejection Letters, Out of Print, Gulmohur Quarterly, Bengaluru Review, Kalopsia Lit, Brown Sugar, Burnt Breakfast, Marias at Sampaguitas, Cauldron Anthology, Potato Soup Journal, Cape Mag, Interpret Mag, Postscript Mag and The Daily Drunk Mag. She tweets @meghasnatter.

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imagine the faded polaroid: january 2000, a beach. rippled sand waves, still water. picture me: twenty years old (terrified) and eight months pregnant. my cousin works for united airlines, so we fly standby to san diego for a last hurrah! before i (officially) become a (single) mother. we flirt with the cab driver. baby kicks — isn’t having that. first stop is the beach. slip off the stupid mom shoes. my swollen feet won’t fit in anything else. bare feet in the sand. the ocean! i’d never seen that. hungry, always hungry. what’s baby want this time? fish tacos with extra cilantro! — shut up, it doesn’t taste like dish soap. 

back to the hotel room, giggling all the way. remember our choreography to iesha? (who was it by? oh yeah, another bad creation) what about the time we walked to the grocery store but worried we couldn’t leave without buying anything, but only had fifty cents, and bought a can of beans? memories and jokes! we fight over who gets which bed. pillow fights! pizza? sausage and mushrooms, we agree. no, half with black olives. rachel can’t stop eating, my cousin laughs. 

the next day we take a trolley to tijuana, flash our ids to get across the border. another cab, another driver. no hablamos español. guy on the street asks, do we want to see naked men? sí, sí. we follow him into a strip club: women dance slow and sexy. cool, even better. but my straight cousins hate it. they confront the guy: you tricked us! he takes us to a back room with nothing but stripper poles and a boom box. he unbuttons his shirt, sweats. (oh god, is he nervous?) we tell him, stop! we’re happy if we can play on the poles. he agrees, leaves us alone in the room. my big bulging belly — i can’t spin like my cousins. i’m not nimble like them, not sexy like the club’s dancers. 

we laugh when we’re done playing, tell the man gracias. we think it’s hilarious: my pregnant ass on a stripper pole! i worked up a sweat and am hungry again. we find a place with rooftop dining. order cokes (don’t drink the water!) and beef tacos. baby needs iron. we dance when we’re done eating, spin to the music. baby kicks — is feeling the ranchera. but it’s time to go back. back to the states. back home tomorrow night. home is a (poor?) city in the midwest. here, poor kids sell chiclets on the street. will my baby be poor? i’m on welfare. (but in college!) i’m missing class for this trip. to have fun (gain perspective?) the sunset makes me sigh. the hormones make me cry. why am i crying?

i’m hungry. back in san diego: we order tropical fruit smoothies. want to add a vitamin c boost for 50 cents extra? sure, baby needs that. baby needs so much. stuff i can’t afford. prenatal vitamins so big they’re hard to swallow. in-and-out burgers. back to the beach. i kick my feet in the sand. take the polaroid. my cousins look hot in their bikinis, i’ll never wear one again. (never look hot again?) here, we’ll take your picture, they say. but i’m embarrassed by my body, these thick curves. 

we go to the contemporary art museum and study paintings of women’s bodies. thin and skeletal, no curves. i’m an artist. my work was displayed in an art museum — won an award, an art scholarship. but will i still make art when i’m a mama? can i stay up all night painting? i like listening to loud music (don’t wake the baby!) and wonder how to make my baby like punk. can i force that? you’ll have to force a head through your vajayjay, my friend laughs. 

i can’t believe you’ll be a mom, she says in the airport. our flight didn’t have open seats, so we’re waiting for the next one. we sit and people watch. watch people our age, none with babies. people with babies, all much older. babies have both parents. a dad and a mama. my baby is only guaranteed to have one of those. any of those mamas also artists? 

art can’t support a baby. i’ll be a teacher. i’ll be a MOM. (!!!) i’m not ready, not ready. i want another fish taco. i want another eight months. i want to get a stripper pole, my cousin says. no more stripper poles for me. no more beach trips. that sunset! water, water — can’t drink enough from the fountain, can’t afford an evian. 

the next flight has seats for us. one in first class, two in coach. my cousin claims first class. but i’m pregnant (!) it’s my last chance to fly. (last chance, last dance) she shrugs, says i won’t know what i’m missing. so, coach it is. my other cousin helps put my carry-on in the overhead bin. i can’t with my balloon belly. can’t buckle my seatbelt. can’t wait to stop feeling scared. (oh god, i’m nervous.) it’s time for take-off. baby kicks — says, ready or not, here i come.

Rachel León is a writer, editor, and social worker. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Fiction Writers Review, Nurture, Entropy, The Rupture, Necessary Fiction, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a novel.

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The first time my sister talked about running away was when our stepmother gave us dolls’ clothes she’d sewn from scraps of our mother’s bath robe. When my sister had ripped them at their tiny seams and cried, Jane had called her ungrateful and said Dad should smack us, which he did. Sal had showed me the print his palm left on her flesh. She told me how she’d gone under the kitchen table and Jane had pulled her out by her ankle like a whippet snaring a rabbit.

~

The damp on our bedroom ceiling grows like soda poured too fast, bubbling up in patches. I tell my sister that the latest growth looks like her. She slaps me, pushing herself up from the bed next to mine and leaning close, but says I’ll miss her when she’s gone. 

~

As we grow, Sal’s plans become more elaborate. She’ll go north of Tacoma to watch the towering smokestack that billows clouds of lead and copper into the sky. She’ll travel to Europe, to The Sistine Chapel, so she can crane her neck to see Michelangelo’s frescoes. She’ll keep bees in the valley of Durance and grow lavender in endless domed rows of purple. At night, she sprawls herself across the globe. Running ever faster away from here until she’s gone completely. 

~

It’s late and I don’t know why I’m out in the bat-swooping twilight wearing only my night dress, turquoise fringing brushing my thighs, my toes dug deep into the stones, but I thought I heard Sal whispering to me. I’m standing beside the fence that divides our property with the next one. I’m on the gravel side where the cars park and our neighbour’s son is in the paddock, the grass side, where the sheep graze. He’s flicking a lighter. It’s fizzing but not catching. I ask, and he hands it to me through the squares of wire. I flick the spark wheel with my thumb. It grinds, leaving pink ridges in my flesh. On the third spin, the blue-orange flame erupts. We share a cigarette and puff smoke out into the frigid night. He doesn’t ask to come closer or touch me. I know, like me, he’s wishing I was Sal. 

~

When Sal has been gone a full month, I go to the gasoline station on the corner of our street. It’s been repurposed as a religious centre for years now and the pumps on old forecourt are painted with messages from God. During Sunday meetings, when most families were inside, Sally and I used to bike down together and take turns pretending to guzzle from the pump that said, “fill up with old time salvation and you will be reborn.”

~

When Mom left, we watched from the window. The car was a muted, mossy green. The taillights glowed in the dark. The voices were muffled, but we knew it was bad. We understood tone by then. And, when Jane arrived, we watched from the window as she kissed Dad. Both of them pressed to the metal shell of his works van. Her arms weren’t around his neck; instead, she balanced her weight against the van, her fingers pushed into the groove of the door’s sliding side panel.  

~

On the nights when Dad and Jane take themselves upstairs, I tuck myself under the kitchen table until the floor joists stop creaking. It’s not our kitchen table. It has rounded corners. It’s baby blue, a colour my mother would never allow and is rimmed with metal. I trace the ridges where Sal carved her name into its underside years ago. 

~

Waiting to collect my kids from the religious centre that’s now a mixed martial arts gym, I’m older than Mom when she left, and younger than Jane when she died. One of the original gas pumps stands in the parking lot, the faded features of Jesus just visible. Be sure to Fill up with the Holy Ghost and Fire.

~

At home, I feed my hungry boys dinners of melanzane di parmigiana, and desserts of shop-bought tiramisu. And after they’re in bed, I stand on our porch and smoke, thinking about Italy and France or that corner of Tacoma and the smokestack they brought crashing down in 1993.

KEELY O’SHAUGHNESSY (she/her) is a fiction writer with Cerebral Palsy, who lives in Gloucestershire, U.K. She has writing forthcoming with Bath Flash Fiction and Five on the Fifth. She has been published by Ellipsis Zine, NFFD, Complete Sentence, Reflex Fiction and Emerge Literary Journal, among others. Find her at keelyoshaughnessy.com or on Twitter @KeelyO_writer

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 “So far as we know, all the fundamental laws of physics, such as Newton’s equations, are reversible. Then where does irreversibility come from?…Why is it that the situations we find ourselves in every day are always out of equilibrium?”

— Richard Feynman, Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol 1, Ch 46

The blue-lined white wrapping paper bit my palms. Ice crystals outlined the okra bits inside the package. I had spent five out of the twenty precious dollars that had to last me till I got my teaching assistantship stipend on the package of okra, a pillow, a carton of eggs, and a loaf of bread. It was my first trip to the USA and my first supermarket shopping trip with my first roommate.

“Okra with onions, with cumin seeds’ seasoning is the easiest and fastest dish to cook,” Ma had tried to teach me during the sweaty summer months before I left home in mid-August for graduate school in the USA. It was the first time I was stepping out of India. In fact, it was the first time I was stepping out of my town and my parents’ home. I had never lived or traveled alone. 

*

The year I turned 18, Ma had bargained with me, “Either you study and decide to have a career. Or I teach you cooking and arrange your marriage. But let me tell you that you are nothing if you don’t study. And do you really want to waste your life as a housewife?”

I chose to study. Yet the summer before I left home for graduate school, Ma’s voice had buzzed like a mosquito as she followed me while I packed, “Learn the recipes of at least a few dishes so that you can survive.” It was only when I complained about the heat and the fumes of the spices in the kitchen, and reminded her of the bargain of a few years ago, she had given up, “You will learn when you have to eat, I guess.”

Her words echoed in the empty flat on that first weekend in a country not my own, in a kitchen that felt as foreign as me. It was a long weekend and my roommate had gone to Chicago to be with her boyfriend. I decided to try and cook my first meal. The ‘easy recipe’ was a mess though: the okra pieces still semi-frozen, onion bits shriveled like cockroaches, the cumin burnt bitter.

I kept trying to call home all day, but had not been able to get through, not able to figure out the complex country code and phone number combinations that my roommate had told me for “cheap calls home”, and finally gave up, eating the half-cooked okra with bread slices that were damp with the salt of my tears.

*

The year I turned 18 was when Ma had cut short a trip to her parents’ home and came back, silent and with purple bruises on her arms. She had gone to help my maternal grandparents build an extension to their home, a part of which was supposed to be her inheritance. At some point, my maternal uncle insisted that she doesn’t deserve a share, and she was thrown out and told to go back ‘home,’ her husband’s house, in the middle of night. 

In the subsequent years, my grandparents and uncle sent her a series of forms to sign and relinquish her rights to everything. Ma didn’t fight with them, but started shouting at me, “Stop wasting time!” This ‘wasting of time’ extended from my chatting with my friends, reading anything other than my textbooks to trying on makeup or talking to any ‘boys.’ 

The year I turned 18 was the year of the ‘Great Bargain.’ 

The year I turned 18, Ma’s secret to a good life became: “Get out of this country.” 

*

And yet, a few years later, when I did get a chance at this longed-for good life: I realized the ‘dark’ seams within it: the colour of my skin meant this country, once the land of Ma’s dreams, will never be home for me. What had started as “Where are you from?” became “Go back home where you belong” from people who couldn’t look past my brown skin. 

*

A few months after I came back to India, Ma suffered a sudden heart attack while in another city. By the time my father and I reached there after a frantic flight from Delhi, all I could do was watch flies dance around Ma’s swollen feet as the ice slab beneath her body melted into a stream of teardrops.

Jonaki Ray was educated in India (Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur) and the USA (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign). A scientist by education and training, she is now a poet, writer, and editor in New Delhi, India. Her work has been published in POETRY, Poetry Wales, The Rumpus, Indian Literature (India’s National Academy of Letters), and elsewhere; and her debut poetry collection is forthcoming from Copper Coin Publishing. You can find more about her on Twitter (@Jona_writes) or at https://jonakiray.com/

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Sami’s mom has Sami’s bed facing away from the door because that’s how the devil enters your body when you are asleep and the devil would like nothing better than to possess a girl like you from your toes right on up to your head. So, her bed is against the wall under the window she isn’t allowed to open because evil spirits like to come in, especially when your room isn’t clean. Sometimes, she likes to look into the darkness and catch a glimpse of any spirit trying to enter her room, imagining a swirl of hair and glinty eyes.

Sami must always keep her room immaculately clean, especially under her bed, because ghosts feel welcome if they have clothes and towels and books and bags to hide among. Ghosts want to grab you and pull you under there, taking you to their world. She imagines a dark-haired girl with unblinking eyes grinning at her, waiting to pull her down as she looks under her bed to check if it’s clean, knowing that the things under her bed have nothing to do with ghosts.

Sami never puts her purse on the floor even in her room. Always hang your purse on a chair or on a hook. Spirits will steal your luck and take all of your money. She doesn’t really have any money but she knows that when she does, she will lose it as quickly as she gets it even if her purse never touches the ground.

Sami’s parents tell her not to whistle at night. They will get you if you whistle. Evil spirits love to take little girls who whistle at night. They tell her not to clip her fingernails at night, too. Dark witches love to collect your bits and use them to curse you. So, she is always careful to never whistle no matter how much she wants to and to bury her fingernail clippings in the bottom of the trash where no witch can find them.

When Sami’s parents leave her at home one night, she absolutely knows there is a ghost under the kitchen sink full of dishes she was supposed to wash and dry and put away and she runs across the street to the neighbors, crying and shaking, snot streaming down her nose and into her mouth, hiccupping about dark hair and dark eyes behind the bottle of dish soap. When her parents come home to a house with the doors open, all of the lights on, the dishes still dirty in the sink and no Sami, the neighbors try to bring her back but she is screaming about the girl under the kitchen sink and crumples on the neighbors’ perfectly green lawn, knowing that there are worse things than a ghost under the kitchen sink.

Melissa Llanes Brownlee (she/her), a native Hawaiian writer, living in Japan, has fiction in Booth, Pleiades, The Citron Review, Waxwing, Milk Candy Review, Claw & Blossom, Bending Genres, (mac)ro(mic), Necessary Fiction, HAD, The Birdseed, Bandit Fiction, NFFR and Best Small Fictions 2021. Hard Skin, her short story collection, will be coming soon from Juventud Press. She tweets @lumchanmfa and talks story at www.melissallanesbrownlee.com.

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At some point in the conversation, Jena could no longer understand what her boss was saying. Sorry. Her former boss. Once she heard the word “downsizing,” her ears clogged up, as if there were chunks of bread stuffed inside the canals. Everything muffled and unbelievable and yeasty.

His mustache bounced around on his sweaty top lip like a bushy buoy in a lake. It would have been comical, Jena supposed, if her anxiety wasn’t spiraling out of control. What the fuck was she going to do now? She had a blue Hyundai with a half-paid car note. She had over 40 grand in student loans left to pay. She had a shitty but expensive condo, for Christ’s sake. 

Jena pinched the soft skin of her upper arm, hoping the sting would bring everything back into focus. “Security will escort you to your office to collect your things and then out into the lobby,” her boss was saying.  “I hope you understand you have been a valued and trustworthy employee, and this is just a formality.”

She wanted to take the metal name plate off his desk and feed it to him. With a name like W. W. Koppenhagen, the plate was long and would do considerable damage to the man’s esophagus, but Jena nodded in compliance instead. 

After eight years, there were a lot of things to shove into the medium-sized file box security had given her. The chintzy wooden bobblehead her work best friend Eileen brought back with her from Cabo. The framed photo of her 10-person team when they’d won highest regional sales back-to-back, everyone smiling large and ignorant of the future. The stainless steel Yeti travel mug with the company logo, given as an employee appreciation gift that March, that held Jena’s still-hot coffee from before she was called into Koppenhagen’s office. In the end, she took nothing. 

Eileen, with her antiquated feathered hair, shuffled shamefully out of her own office and stood watching with sad eyes, as Jena was escorted out of the building.

The time was just shy of noon, so Jena did what she did every day for lunch: she walked to the local park to feed the ducks. Typically, she would give them a few handfuls of oats from a bag she kept in the bottom drawer of her desk. But those oats, like so much, she would never see again. Instead, she stepped inside the local 7-Eleven and picked up a loaf of multigrain bread. And since Jena knew bread was basically junk food for ducks, in solidarity, she bought a PayDay for herself. 

Her usual bench—the one by the small man-made pond—was unoccupied. She looked at the six-inch bronze plate on the seat that denoted a generous donor by the name of Schwartz, and as always, wondered who Schwartz was. A banker? A lawyer? A doctor? She doubted Schwartz ever got laid off in the middle of a bathroom renovation, the skeletons of a toilet and sink doomed to sit in a condo foyer for eternity. Or until the foreclosure process was completed.

Jena pulled the plastic tab from the end of the multigrain loaf and spun the twisted mouth until it gaped, loose bread falling toward the opening. A duck scurried over with a hungry quack. Jena ripped off a corner of one of the slices and tossed it over. The duck’s orange beak made short work of the piece and quacked again. Jena launched a second chunk, which landed at the duck’s webbed feet. She gobbled that up as well, her mottled brown feather ruffling in pleasure.

The next chunk summoned a second female mallard. And a third. And then Jena saw the bright green neck of the male saunter from the pond to the bench, in search of food. 

Soon, the geese came.

Once the bag was empty, Jena moved her attention from the birds to her candy bar. Suddenly, the combination of sweet caramel and salty peanuts no longer tugged at her taste buds. She could think only that the last time she’d eaten a PayDay she had been employed. So, she threw the candy to the birds, wrapper and all.

When the swan appeared, Jena looked at the majestic animal and could not bear her empty-handedness. She pinched her upper arm once again, which had warmed in the afternoon sun and away from the ice cold air conditioner of corporate offices. When she pulled her hand away, some of her skin crumbled into her palm. She lobbed the crumbs into the eclectic team of fowl and watched as the swan, more aggressive than the others, gobbled them up.

She next dug her fingers into her leg and carved out a handful of doughy thigh. She tossed this to the fuzzy ducklings that had followed their mama into the hungry throng but were too meek to eat. Two passing pigeons, plump in their scavenging, snacked on a chunk she pulled from her forearm. A cardinal with the reddest breast Jena ever saw nibbled the buttery slab of stomach she dropped to the ground. A few yards away, a golden retriever pulled at her leash, struggling to join the feast. Her owner, a man in Under Armour and a sheen of sweat, curled his lip at Jena’s body, which now looked much like a porous slice of ciabatta, and yanked the dog back to continue their jog.

This is the last worst day of my life, Jena thought, as her nails scored the dough of her smiling cheeks.

Lannie Stabile (she/her), a queer Detroiter, is the winner of OutWrite’s 2020 Chapbook Competition in Poetry; the winning chapbook, Strange Furniture, is out with Neon Hemlock Press. She is a back-to-back finalist for the Glass Chapbook Series and back-to-back semifinalist for the Button Poetry Chapbook Contest. Lannie currently holds the position of Managing Editor at Barren Magazine and is a member of the MMPR Collective. She was named a 2020 Best of the Net finalist. Her debut full-length, Good Morning to Everyone Except Men Who Name Their Dogs Zeus, is out now with Cephalopress. Find her on Twitter @LannieStabile.

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I have to eat trash again; there’s no other choice tonight. I trudge toward the lonely house by the train station and sag with relief when I see an empty driveway. No car means no judgement, no guilt, no intense conversation.

The house belongs to a Mrs. Alta and her family. I know her well. Whenever she catches me in her cans, she emerges with a meal and a lecture. I could root through other people’s garbage, but I’ve heard of houseless people shot for less. At least with Mrs. Alta, I know I’m safe from harm, if not scrutiny.

A rat waddles across my shadow, cast by the sharp metal moon. Quiet as a ninja I unhitch the latches and undo the red ties of the trash bag. When I leave I will re-tie them. Making dinner, unmaking dinner. I choke down a sour carrot and a winy carton of old apple juice.

Mrs. Alta likes to advise me peering down from her deck like a smug old owl. When she offers food, she always emphasizes that she has only four ceramic dishes, that the other three go to herself, her husband, and her infant daughter, that I should count myself lucky to claim one. Which I do. Then begin her sermons. 

Look at you, pretty girl, she’ll exclaim, why do you make such terrible choices? You’d be happy if you settled down. Sure, Mr. Alta and I argue. He drives too fast; I fret too much. But we love one another. Might not seem like much, but we at least have dinner, right?

I listen well. It would be too easy to disregard her stories. Wasps bore into the porch beams. Her windows are caulked shut to keep out heat. The neighbors planted invasive trees that treat themselves to a trespass grow, shading out her wildflowers. She and I share discomfort in suburbia. She has the loud laugh of a country woman, like me. 

She’ll also press me about being houseless. I’ll tell her how we stay under bridges when it rains. How a fracking pad lives upstream and sometimes the water atstes fnunky and yuor hed hruts. It’s harder to be a houseless woman than a houseless man. My chest bulges out like hers but I hide in this baggy shawl for a reason, because I’ve seen men fuck trash, a cantaloupe rind or turkey, cut a hole with broken glass or a soda can peeled razor-mean like an orange. How she would be wise to stay inside if she finds a round eye in her plastic bags. She’ll shake her head in awe, convinced that her life could never suck like mine, and that is the part I hate, the part I duck. Otherwise, Mrs. Alta is the closest thing I have to an aunt.

Tonight she is home after all. The porchlight flares on, blinding me like an interrogator’s lamp. “In my cans again?” she says. “Thought so.” I am exposed using a licked finger to stick ants and scraping them into my mouth like spilled sugar. 

I squint as she sidles out, three plates soldiered on her arm like a waitress. She usually announces each recipe like a sports star—stewed sweet potato, tamale casserole, buttery peppers with goat cheese—but tonight she simply tilts each onto the railing. It’s all I can do to thank her before snatching the closest. It’s more food than she’s ever offered. The tasteless cabbage rind I’d been nibbling can be donated to the rat.

As I feast, Mrs. Alta slumps in the shape of the number 6, silent. I don’t notice how muted she is until partway through the second dish. I see tightness in her lips, which usually gab away, urging me flee the addicts and seedy corners. When she catches me staring, she doesn’t direct me to “sit like a lady.” She only says that she’s glad I’m enjoying the food, that she has more casseroles and leftovers than she knows what to do with.

Perhaps she’s given up. 

“Next time dinner is on me,” I nudge, trying to elicit a reaction, expecting a diatribe on responsibility, on cleaning myself up to find a husband who can support a family, like she did. She says nothing, picking the plastic skin on her armrest. I can’t believe it, but I think she’s on something, stoned, maybe, but no, she’s too far off for that. Downers. Booze. 

“You have any friends out there?” she finally asks. “Close ones?”

I tell her about Kade. He was the most peaceful man I know, spending his days collecting rubber bands in a ball. His eyes shone wide as a gecko’s when he picked them off the curbs. A few months ago, he was found by hikers with those bands around his neck, skin squeezed right to the spinal bone. Everyone knew teenagers did it to him while he was up. Nobody investigated. 

I’m waiting for the disbelieving head shake, that motion I dread, confirming that my life blows a hundred times more than hers. But she doesn’t. “Poor boy, god bless him,” she says. “And where exactly can I find you, girl?”

I mark the location on her phone, shocked at her interest, at saving my mattress under the overpass as a destination. Then she bids me goodnight and I watch her return sluggishly to her living room, leaving the lights off, quick as she came. 

I want to stop her, to tell her that she only has four ceramic plates, that she had given me three, that her husband and daughter would have nothing clean to eat on. To ask why she’s home alone drunk with no car and so many leftover casseroles. But I don’t, and sew closed the trash bag before I leave.

James Cato does environmental justice work outside Pittsburgh with his snake, Baby Sleeves. He has stories in Tiny Molecules, Atticus Review, Gone Lawn, JMWW, and Daily Science Fiction, among others. He tweets humbly @the_sour_potato and his work lives on jamescatoauthor.com/fiction. He’d enjoy a conversation with you.

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While I lay bricks for a house I could never afford, a day shy of a year after Leigh picked me up from rehab for the last time, I think about falconry. How the bird needs to share a strong bond with its falconer for it to land safely on their arm. The falconer must not flinch, not fear talon lacerations through the leather gauntlet. The falcon must want to return to its human more than it longs to fly unfettered. That’s what I think about while the sun assaults the construction site, the sweat stings my eyes.

On my way home to Leigh, I pass the garage sale. Only, it’s gone now, the house a husk. I was lucky yesterday when I bought that falconry equipment, raptor hood and protective glove still unused in their sealed box.

Leigh doesn’t know about the box stashed under our bed. But tonight, I will tell her. Because, tonight, she will want to talk about tomorrow.

“A year,” she says over a microwaved lasagna dinner. “It’s a big deal.”

What present can she give me? What can she do for me? Although I have a whole speech rehearsed–tasting of sun and sweat and brick-dust–when the moment comes, I cannot work my jaw loose.

I am too much sometimes. I cling. Once, high as anything, I found a sex doll in the trash behind the club and hugged it despite the filth and fleas, wanting to feel close to the person who last had their hands on her pink plastic likeness. Sometimes pills swallowed with strangers felt like a group hug, a shared consciousness that rocked and cradled me.

The drugs let me fly along thermals, the wind ruffling electric fingers through pinions and vanes. I was never tongue-tied then; my caw powerful enough to put fear into the pebbled hearts of smaller birds, bigger raptors.

I get up, clear the dishes, buy myself some time. Leigh waits while I go into the bedroom and return with the falconry equipment.

“Make me a hood,” I tell her, leather changing hands. “That’s what I want for my sobriety anniversary.”

Leigh doesn’t ask how–she owns a leather workshop where she makes all sorts of accessories. Why falcons? is another thing she doesn’t ask, although I answer in my head anyway.

Because they return.

Ever practical, Leigh wants to talk safety. Words and signals and minutiae. The precise dimensions of my skull.

She doesn’t ask why, but she makes it happen for me, a year and a day after she picked me up from rehab for the last time.

#

While I kneel on a floor pillow at Leigh’s feet, brown leather hood over my head, I think about falconry. The little morsels of fruits and nuts Leigh hand-feeds me through the hood’s opening crunch pleasantly in my mouth, treats for a job well done. For returning to her side when it would have been so easy to abandon our aerie and become one with the sky. That’s what I think about while Leigh and I perch in our living room together, bird and handler.

We skipped certain parts of the process. Bells, jesses, they didn’t fit the metaphor I have going. The one Leigh has caught on to by now.

The drugs made me soar, but it was the safe landing that had me singing. The spotting-Leigh-from-the sky, the plummeting-down-to-meet-her. A falcon, digging sickle talons into the buttery-soft leather of my falconer’s equipment.

Old track marks pucker the skin under Leigh’s gauntlet. The wound isn’t as fresh for her, but she understands how the wind never really stops battering or serenading those in its domain. What’s another scar? someone might think, but I’m mindful of my talons. From my perch on the pillow, I hold onto her gloved hand as it rests across the armchair’s worn velvet. My fingers curl around her wrist, circling it completely. Digging nails around the leather cuff, but never breaking skin.

I cling and cling, and she lets and lets me.

Although my vision through skin-warmed leather is reduced to twin tunnels, the world the fuzz of the peach slice melting in my mouth, I know Leigh is above me, her wings mantling protectively over us both.

Avra Margariti is a queer writer and poet from Greece. Avra’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, The Forge Literary, Baltimore Review, matchbook, Wigleaf, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Longleaf Review, and other venues. You can find Avra on twitter @avramargariti.

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We dressed like cowboys for the occasion. Furry chaps, jeans and frilly shirts we found in the attic, cowboy hats our grandpa gave us, and just like that, we were practically miniature replicas of John Wayne, and we had our dad to thank for forced exposure to all the classics. The get-up was complete. We were desperados at family Thanksgiving. 

“I’m not showing up to Thanksgiving with you two dressed like that,” Mom said. My brother and I didn’t move. We were two holstered six-shooters from full-on cowboys and there was no going back now.

“I kinda like it,” Dad said, though of course he wasn’t coming anyway. He had plans to rewatch Tombstone.

“But why?” Mom asked.

I shrugged. I didn’t know the answer to that question, though I reckoned I should come up with one soon, since I would be asked it about thirty more times before the night was over. All I knew was that I was a free-thinking 12-year-old and my seven-year-old brother would do anything I told him. Plus, he really liked John Wayne. Though he had taken a strange liking to Bruce Cabot.

“Draw,” I said, and as I flipped out my finger guns, my brother did the same.

Somehow that was all my mom needed to agree to it. 

_________

“You’re two months removed from Halloween,” my uncle Ted, a statistician, said as he opened the door. 

“Draw,” I said, flipping my fingers. My brother shadowed.

Our cousins avoided us, but that wasn’t new. The older ones shot side-eyed glances and disappeared into the backyard and the younger ones kept glued to their mothers’ hips. Everyone dressed in their Sunday best.

“But why?” I heard someone ask mom. 

“Have you tried gramma’s green bean casserole?” she responded. 

My brother and I found our way into the basement. My Uncle Ted and Aunt Belinda were hoarders. Which worked out well for us. Lots of stuff to see. Lots of wrongs to right. They had mannequins dressed to impress and giant teddy bears, all proving the deadliest highwaymen this side of Dodge City. 

My brother and I rescued a strange blow-up doll laid precariously close to a pin cushion, we helped a stuffed unicorn out from under a weight bench, and just when I thought we’d set the world right, my little brother turns to me, a look in his eyes like I’ve never seen before.  

“Draw,” he says, and turns his finger guns on me.

Josh Sippie is a foolish mortal. His writing has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Hobart, trampset, and more. When not writing, he can be found wondering why he isn’t writing. More on Twitter @sippenator101 or joshsippie.com.

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(mac)ro(mic) readers will remember One Day in the Life of a Haunted Minimalist House by Laura Eppinger: an excellent, different kind of haunted house story that we ran back in July. This piece and six other flashes appear in Eppinger’s chapbook Loving Monsters, available now and published by Alternating Current Press.

Editor-in-Chief Nick Olson recently spoke with Eppinger about her work.

There’s this wonderful weaving of the normal and the supernatural in Loving Monsters, with tableaus of everyday life set against stories that deal with vampires, werewolves, the Jersey Devil, and more. What was it like putting these pieces together?

Weaving the supernatural in with the everyday feels like a natural way of storytelling to me, and I’m thinking more and more about why. Certainly one reason is a lifetime of education in Catholic schools. For example we began every day of 5th grade with a random saint card picked out of a box and our teacher reading about their gruesome martyrdom, miracles, and divine interventions. I know a lot about saints being killed with arrows and boiling oil. I also learned that their sainthood was canonized because they performed miracles while alive, such as levitating or demonstrating bilocation—being in two places at once. I learned these things during the school day, where I also took classes like Science and Math. We were taught: Science can be proven. Religion is a mystery we accept on faith.

And yet, in modern Catholic theology it is acceptable to believe (and most commonly taught, at least in the U.S) that the Bible is full of symbolism that does not need to be taken literally. So if I ever learned how to “deep read,” I learned by hunting for symbols and historic as well as cultural contexts in the Bible. Water means eternal life, and so on.

The summer before I started high school, I found a copy of The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis at my parents’ house and read it unsupervised. I was disturbed but I couldn’t put it down. It also made me comfortable with the idea of humans writing in the voices of supernatural beings. Of course this had to prove some moral point in the end. But sure, demons write letters reporting their progress on corrupting human souls. Makes sense to me!

At another point in high school, I chose the short story “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World” by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez for independent reading. I read it and distinctly remember wondering, What is HAPPENING to me? I wasn’t given the definition of “magical realism,” context, or any guidance from an adult or teacher. I don’t even think I had to write a book report. I just read it and felt like I was dreaming or had a fever. Why was I so haunted by this story that could be real but certainly wasn’t real? 

And so to answer your question, it was like that: finding that fevered dream state where the supernatural is totally plausible, and also knowing each story needed some kind of engine to keep a reader turning each page.

Were these stories written with an eventual collection in mind, or did they all come together somewhere along the way?

A little bit of both! Most of the last 15 years I’ve been writing in completely haphazard ways—I’m writing about whatever I’m obsessed with at the moment. But I think given enough time, every writer will see the themes they keep returning to from different angles.

In May 2020 I realized I had written a whole lot about monsters. I gave myself a few challenges: It’s time to write about the Jersey Devil, or, You can write a ghost story! I landed on the title of LOVING MONSTERS and made that the target. I ended up writing five new flashes for this collection between May and December of 2020. Two of the other stories had been written in previous years.

You do a great job here of setting the monstrous nature of toxic relationships against more mythical monstrosities. What was it like balancing those elements?

Thank you! A friend just called me “The Bard of Bad Relationships,” and I admit I have spent a lot of time working through some rough experiences in therapy and also struggling to capture the experiences in writing.

I keep searching for a better answer, but truly, when I experience bad behavior from someone (or see something horrible on social media), my first instinct is to connect the behavior with something supernatural, some dark force. I guess it lets the person doing the bad thing off the hook, since they are clearly possessed by a demon with an anti-mask agenda or whatever.

A supernatural explanation just seems natural to me. I am sure there are dozens of reasons for this but here is what I’ve arrived at: When I was 10 years old, a dear relative was re-reading Fahrenheit 451 and challenged everyone at the family dinner table: If all books disappeared and you had to spend the rest of your life memorizing, then reciting, just one book, what would it be? The adults in the room were saying things like the Bible or the collected works of Shakespeare. Without hesitating, I responded, “Monster Blood III by R.L. Stine.” Perhaps that was legally binding somehow? I have to tell spooky stories? I suppose I have to accept that I am the CryptKeeper.

Some of these stories tackle the pandemic directly, with an especially potent piece that handles the ugliness of conspiracy theories and weaponized disinformation. Can you speak a little to the process of handling/fictionalizing this moment while living through it?

During the summer of 2020 I lived in the Fairmount neighborhood of Philadelphia, across the street from the Eastern State Penitentiary. This building “haunts” the whole area, and taking the self-guided tour reminded me that the cruelest adversaries we’ll ever have as humans are OTHER HUMANS. Even ones with good intentions! The penitentiary was built to give every imprisoned person a single room and 23 hours a day of solitude. Its architects believed this quiet time would inspire imprisoned persons to pray and align themselves with the Christian god. What a cruel practice⁠—pandemic lockdown showed us how isolation hurts humans! And of course, when these folks were released back into society, none of the social ills had been cured. Many folks served multiple sentences at Eastern State Penitentiary. Solitary confinement did not “cure” them of course.

Every day I looked at Eastern State Penitentiary and remembered that society turns us into monsters⁠—or views us as monsters unjustly. People were imprisoned for being poor and hungry enough to steal food. People were imprisoned for being queer. Formerly enslaved persons sometimes served sentences at Eastern State, which is as understandable as it is tragic, since a racist society barred them from accessing life’s necessities.

I encourage everyone to learn more about the philosophy of corrections that informed the construction of this nearly-200-year-old prison building, and its overall history. (Also, Al Capone was imprisoned there!) https://www.easternstate.org/

So while I was living in the shadow of the Eastern State Penitentiary (literally), I was locked down working from home and absolutely binging on podcasts: ones about folklore (like “Lore” with Aaron Mahnke), history (like “Noble Blood” by Dana Schwartz), and hard news or current events (everything by Vox, or “The Daily” by the New York Times).

When I think about writing many of the pieces in this chapbook, I think of all these different ideas and inputs in my brain, and then throwing them all in a blender. LOVING MONSTERS is the smoothie my brain made out of all of this. Yummy.

There’s such a freshness to these depictions of well-known monsters and mythical creatures. Did it feel important to take these constructs in a different direction?

Thank you for saying that! Whenever I write anything, I try to avoid stereotypes or perpetuating harmful representations. (But I do imbibe society’s messages, so I am certain I make mistakes in this often.)

As I was writing each story, the monsters were characters who felt real. I can think about and talk about the monsters as constructs of course! But I didn’t want to feel any distance or indifference toward them, though it is disturbing to speak for monsters. (In “Five Issues That Didn’t Get Resolved After We Turn Into Vampires,” I wrote a vampire reflecting on eating the hearts of children. Sitting here now, I consider that very dark!)

I guess I wanted to be as respectful as possible in portraying these monsters … just in case they are real and would seek revenge on me for publishing a hatchet job!

What was your decision-making process like for which creatures to cover in these stories? Or was it more about following your interest/inspiration with them?

I wasn’t deliberate at all in choosing which monsters to write about. So I did struggle when it was time to decide what to include in a manuscript to submit to presses. (I am most comfortable writing vampires and have far too many stories about them!)

I admire writers who are more intentional with what they write. Throughout 2017 I tried and failed to place a chapbook of fiction with a theme of women’s erasure from science, so there is this era of my writing that is all about the Manhattan Project and physicists. I think sometimes a writer’s phase or obsession CAN present itself in a way that leads to a salable themed manuscript. Other times it’s a muse blowing a raspberry and taunting, “I made you read three biographies of Einstein, you nerd!” (Maybe that’s just me.)

Were there any monsters that were left on the cutting room floor?

So many! I had originally conceived of this as being a much longer collection involving short stories as well as flash. I wanted to shoehorn all kinds of things in there: a short story I had published in 2012 about an unnamed spirit of lost objects, or some fiction about bad relationships with magical realism elements but no clear “monster.” And, even though there are two vampires in this collection, I’ve written about this particular monster even more (like here: https://dansemacabreonline.wixsite.com/neudm/laura-eppinger-112).

I do wish I had a witch in here. I love witches!

Do you have a favorite monster/cryptid?

Vampires were placed in my path at such a key time in my life—it’ll always be vamps.

When I was 17 my dad encouraged me to read “Dracula” because he said it was the most frightening book on earth. He was so right! The epistolary form worked so well for me; even more than the convoluted plot, the idea that these events were happening live and the characters were all in imminent danger kept me flipping pages.

My high school love got me reading Anne Rice and Christopher Pike. I have to say, that first heartbreak made me see the vampires Lestat and Louis in a whole new light.

Do you remember the first thing you ever wrote?

There may have been earlier stories but I do recall using my grandparents’ first PC with word processing software to write and print out something called, “The Evil Head.” In this story, a marble bust of Mozart taunts two children and no matter what they do, it won’t break. Like I said, I’m the CryptKeeper.

It feels like you can really go anywhere you want from here. What’s next for you? Do you have a new project in the works?

I’d like to make some pretty big pivots, actually.

In trying to be more deliberate, I am officially saying: I am writing a longer essay collection, specifically about the time in my life between the end of high school and the end of undergrad four years later. I felt a lot of worlds colliding and learned a whole lot about myself during that era.

That said, the last things I’ve actually written have been fiction about haunted houses, ha! I saw Carmen Maria Machado read (virtually) this summer; she read “Eight Bites” (exquisite as always) and then referenced this Jo Walsh piece in Tor about haunted houses. (https://www.tor.com/2009/09/24/anatomy-of-the-gothic/) A gothic needs a girl and a house. That really got its hooks in me. So I’ve been trying to write about homeownership, and living in a suburb that is frankly whiter and more affluent than anywhere I have ever lived. It feels uncanny and spooky, at least to me.

I do have to say, this fiction project has been failing so far. I’m either too close to it, or a gothic tale isn’t my way in. (I want to read others who write their way into this though, please!)

While I think as writers we need to talk more openly and honestly about the times we suck and fail … I don’t want to close this interview here!

At this current moment, the way I feel I am expressing myself best is in needlework.

Sometimes words on a page just fail (me, at least). In the last year I took on an embroidery and photography project called Have a Petty Party. Most recently, this image I created in that series was the cover of the literary magazine Beyond Words: https://issuu.com/beyondwordslite/docs/oct21_issue21_bw_issuu_wbv2?fbclid=IwAR27NtxlRejLc6k3q8prtzRBCtfxXVWeGyO81EOAS1sglqVXsBZsmSau-3Y 

And I have been cross-stitching something like four hours a day (many days, not all) to cope with my Delta Variant Anxiety. I’m working on this project I call The Denim Tarot, creating wall-hanging, larger-than-life tapestries styled like tarot cards, but taking imagery that keeps popping up in my own life and placing them in the Major Arcana. This may take me years to finish but I am inching toward an interactive art exhibit where visitors walk from “card” to “card” and are encouraged to piece together a story or answer to a query based on how they interact with or interpret the symbols. 

As I said, it’s a pivot. Textiles and especially stitching are the best ways I can express ideas or tell stories at the moment. But please poke me about finishing a collection of essays.

The house finch has a red head and breast. There are three on the feeder this morning, little bursts of crimson between a frenzy of brown—chickadees and sparrows, boring birds, or so I thought. Over a few weeks of observation, I have come to notice their intricacies. Speckled faces, multihued feathers, a blending of chestnut, almond, walnut browns. Birds like a bowl of mixed nuts on a bartop. I envy their gathering, circled around the tray of birdseed like a group of friends sharing a pitcher of margaritas and a basket of chips. I imagine their conversations. 

This one complains that her husband never changes the toilet paper roll. Another says, you’re lucky, her husband doesn’t even know how to do laundry. So teach him, a third says, show him how to fish, but the first bird only shrugs. You can’t teach a man something he doesn’t want to learn. They are all tired of their children. They love them, of course. Of course they love them. The light of their lives. But this one’s kids won’t shut up. All day yammering, yammering. A zillion questions. Yes! All the birds agree. So many questions. Another one’s kid still hasn’t learned to read. It’s fine, she says. We’re not worried. It’s fine. She says it one too many times, so the rest of the birds know it’s definitely not fine, but they nod warmly. Every bird has its own strengths, they say. Timelines are arbitrary, they all agree, each one thinking, thank god that’s not my kid. Each one thinking it could never be their kid. Each one silently patting themselves on the back. 

One bird wants to leave her partner. Another’s been having an affair with a coworker.  One is waiting on the results of a biopsy. They don’t share these stories with the group, though they want to. Tell me what to do, they want to say. Tell me I am bold. Tell me it’s okay. They ignore the painful truths thumping beneath their ribs and refill their margarita glasses, except for biopsy bird who isn’t drinking. When she leaves early the rest of the birds will say I’ll bet she’s pregnant. She must be pregnant. Oh, she’s definitely pregnant. They’re too young to think of dying, though each one says old, and barks a laugh when asked how she’s feeling. They have lost loves and babies. Parents and dreams, gone too soon. But they can picture themselves twenty, thirty years from now: the same flock, still gathering. These stupid birds, who can’t see the cells metastasizing. Who don’t know it’s already too late. 

One bird will ask, what does that mean, Stage Four? One bird will set up a meal train. If you can’t come to the feeder, we’ll bring the feeder to you. One bird will bring fresh flowers each time she visits. Replace the drooping tulips with cotton ball peonies, then perky daisies, then brilliant dahlias. Dump the fetid water from the vase. Say, there, that brightens things up a bit, as she sets the vase back on the nightstand. All the birds will say: you’ll beat this, you’ve got this, you’ve always been a fighter. They’ll make plans, talk about this summer, next year, when the kids are older. None of them will say: you’re dying, you’re dying, you’re almost gone. One bird will come and rub the dying bird’s sore, wilting legs. Kiss her on the cheek. Say, I’ll see you next week. She’ll be in the checkout line at the grocery store when her phone buzzes. She’ll let it go to voicemail. She’ll think, I’ll call her back, but she’ll get busy and forget and when she remembers, the dying bird won’t answer. Will never answer. I was in the grocery store, she’ll tell the other birds and they’ll hug her to their breasts. We know, we know, they’ll say. I was checking out. She’ll repeat it, again and again. It’s okay, they’ll lie, it’s okay.

Even the smallest movement startles the birds on the feeder. I take a sip of coffee and they panic. The sparrows and chickadees, all three house finches—a flurry of brown with a spark of red. They scatter in all directions without saying goodbye.

Claire Taylor is a writer in Baltimore, MD. Her micro-chapbook, A History of Rats, is part of the Ghost City Press 2021 Summer Series. You can find Claire online at clairemtaylor.com and Twitter @ClaireM_Taylor.

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I took early maternity leave and spent the last month of my pregnancy wrapped in blankets on my bed, alert and blinking. I suppose I missed some signs. When he came, he was an egg that slipped forth without edges, like driving too quickly over steep hills. He was born en caul. The midwife called it a veiled birth. Newborn, yet there had already been so many layers to his existence, and she broke the sac, removing him from yet another safe, warm place. When I held him close, I whispered, I’m so sorry.

I didn’t think it was unusual that my baby would have pink skin, that it would look almost translucent, that I would be able to trace the tiny blue veins branching over his entire body. And though it was days before he opened his eyes, I knew they were there, dark beneath milky lids. I knew they would open when he was ready, and they did. Soft as down, he joined me in my nest of blankets and food went into me first, before going into him. I don’t think I ever actually said it aloud: bird.

With fragile bones and proud of each new feather, he grew up always perched on the edge of something new, and though my thoughts never failed to scream in protest, instinct compelled me to push. I don’t know who I have to thank, but he always flew, every time. It may have been my sighs of relief that kept him aloft, my spirit in the currents of air that followed him wherever he went; my body, back in the tree, tried to reconcile the fact that I had yet again sent my naked heart into the world, on someone else’s wings.

His absences became longer and longer, until he was away more than he was with me, and I didn’t notice in time to mourn the shift. Collecting sticks and memories and tidbits from the ground, scratching around for something stabilizing, and tucking them into place just-so, I wonder, when did this happen? When did I become jealous of the sky, for the privilege of holding him? When did his vulnerability become the heartbeat of his beauty rather than the thing that keeps me up at night? I sing a song I hope he would remember. I tilt my head and listen for his call.

Nadia Staikos (she/her) lives in Toronto with her two children. Her work has previously appeared in perhappened, Montréal Writes, Fudoki, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is currently working on her first novel and tweets @NadiaStaikos. Read more: linktr.ee/nadiastaikos

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Watch. Always watch. The day watch. The night watch. Never turn your gaze. There will be signs. This is how the mouth will curve. How the brow will bend. The eyes will have that look. That look.

Listen. Listen to the language of sighs. This is the sigh of disappointment. This one, frustration. Sighs of anger. Impatience. Best to shut your mouth.

Open. Open those ears. Those ears. Better yet, like the roaches in the kitchen, grow antennae. Pick up the sounds of quiet. This quiet means Mom’s gone to la-la land. This quiet means she’s planning something. This is the quiet before her storm.

Eat. Eat pudding when you feel like crying. Cookies when you’re confused. Hershey’s for fear. Save the ice-cream for terror. Stick your face in the bowl. Let the cool coat your throat, your stomach, your big, growing stomach. Soften the edges. Sharp corners everywhere.

Smile. Like this when you’re lying. Like this when you’re telling the truth, but she thinks you’re lying. Like this when you’re telling the truth, but she knows you’re lying. Like this when you give up.

Lie. Say you’re sick when you don’t want to see a friend. Say you’re sick when you want to skip school. Say anything when you want to get out of everything. When you want to disappear.

Build. Build a wall around you. Build it wide. Build it tall. Don’t let anyone in.

Study. Study people’s faces. Read their bodies. Take note of their smells. Become a social worker. Dream of saving all the sad children. Take their stories home. Volunteer at an animal shelter. One that kills the unwanted. Want them. Take them home before they get the needle. You’re the hero until you’re not. No one can save another. No one saved you.

Don’t. Never forget the don’ts. Don’t air your dirty laundry. (Let it stink up your home instead.) Don’t give yourself away. (She will think you have before you do, so you might as well.)

Don’t date a musician. Never date a musician. (But you can fuck a musician. Let him play all your strings.)

Don’t eat. Funny how those tables turn. Don’t eat breakfast. Don’t eat lunch. Don’t eat anything but string beans for dinner. Love your hunger.

Watch. Watch the eyes of boys around you. Watch the men.

Listen. How you make their breath quicken. How you make them spin. Make them spin. Make them spin.

Smile. Like this when they want you. Like this when you want them to think they have a chance. Like this when you leave. Leave before the thought of leaving even enters their mind.

Lie. On your back. On your belly. On the bed, the couch, floor. Lie. Lie. Lie.

Build. Build a dream, a world, an empty self.

Watch. As all the pieces tumble down.

Diane Gottlieb’s essays, stories, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in About Place Journal, The Longridge Review, 100 Word Story, The VIDA Review, The Rumpus, Hippocampus Magazine, and Entropy, among others. She has an MSW, an MEd, and received her MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles where she served as lead editor of creative nonfiction for Lunch Ticket. You can find her bi-weekly musings at https://dianegottlieb.com.

This piece was inspired by Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl.”

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Between Ava’s Nana saying you’re a growing girl, eat and her mom telling her that should be enough, a fissure line forms across the dining room table. Where before there was surface so flat she never noticed it, the ocean to a fish, her body to her, now there is a gap in the pine, a chasm separating then from now, youth from this. This: expanding, oily, unsure. This: ripe, sticky, full. This: wrong. This: no. This: stop. She takes in the faces of her family, their down-turned eyes and dewy brows. Grandpa’s hands have become shovels. Mom’s neck turns like a sunflower. Dad burrows in his mashed potatoes, Aunt Sue burrows in her mashed potatoes, Uncle Dez burrows in his mashed potatoes and Mia, her cousin, three years older and endlessly cool, floats inside her phone. Nana carries waves of plates in and out from the kitchen, making room, bringing more. And even though the idea of more has always seemed so good to her, a sign of progress, a mark along a doorframe, an extra sticker on a math test, Ava sees the crevasse, the rip in time and table, and shrinks, shrinks like a rock worn to sand, an inner tube with a leak, shrinks like a girl becoming a woman.

Brooke Randel is a writer and copywriter in Chicago. Her writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and published in Gigantic Sequins, Hypertext Magazine, Jewish Fiction, Pidgeonholes,and elsewhere. She is currently writing a memoir about her grandma, literacy and the legacy of the Holocaust. Find more of her work at brookerandel.com.

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I think I love her. I really do. I love her speckled face, freckles like crumbs across the bridge of her nose, falling down her cheeks to the corners of her lips. I love the way she sees. The way she looks at things, not as things but as…oh I don’t know. It’s like the pot of daffodils she keeps on the glass table next to her chair on the balcony. She told me it looks like a thinking angel. I’m not sure what she means, but I love it all the same. I love how I have to focus whenever I’m around her, how I can’t just zone off and let my thoughts wander away. She grounds me, and I think that’s funny considering how high up we live, floating aimlessly in our little house.

The sun’s setting now and I can see other houses in the distance, afloat between dark grey clouds and drifting between the high rises. They look like hummingbirds to me, stable bodies and wings aflutter, so fast you can hardly see them. Their giant balloons quiver and shake in the forthcoming storm, lost within the wet mist, droplets flowing down their skins like sweat. I want to reach out and touch them, but they’re too far away, and I’m scared of falling.

We’re on the balcony, me in my wide plastic armchair and her in her red twine one. Her legs are crossed and her head is turned towards the rising night. I can see the crystals hanging from her ears, and I love the way they glimmer.

I think about telling her, but thunder strikes sudden and cuts me off before I can start. I flinch and the daffodils quiver.

“Storm’s coming,” she says, and looks at me. The rain is starting to patter her face a bit, blending in with her freckles and mixing them together like wet paint.

I nod, and we both turn to look at a strong strike of lightning connect with the top of a skyscraper in the distance, lighting up the night sky for a split second.

There’s music I can hear, drone-like and ambient, forgotten, like the kind of sound you’d expect to hear from the blue guitarist in that Picasso painting, but I’m not sure if she can hear it too. Her face looks thoughtful. She probably can.

I think about telling her right then.

I don’t want to never tell her.

“Mom says hi,” I say instead, and she smiles. A house drifts past us. The windows are lit with yellow light. I guess that was where the music was coming from.

“I miss her,” she remarks. “How’s she doing?”

I wasn’t sure. I hadn’t spoken to my mom in almost a year. “She’s good. Tired. Dad still gets on her nerves but, they manage. She does.”

There’s a moment of silence before she turns to me and says “I brought tiramisu. From that place you like.”

#

We watch another house float by. I wish I was braver.

But I can’t stop thinking. I think about myself, I think of pretty things, glowing things, happy things. I think I love her. I should tell her, but I don’t.

She reaches over and hands me a plate. It’s a small plate, like a coffee plate, but there’s a slice of tiramisu on it, beige coloured, brown and white and cream, and drooping over the edges like a wet sponge. I stick my fork in and taste it, and it tastes like how a butterfly feels on the skin. It’s soft and tingly, and I almost laugh because I see her face and I can tell she’s thinking the same thing.

“Butterflies,” I say, my mouth full of the stuff. She laughs and spits it back out into the plate, covering her mouth with a slender hand.

#

Another house passes by. This time there’s people on the balcony, and I can see their figures as it approaches through the mist. I don’t like when there’s other people out, but I don’t say anything. They get closer and we can see them clearer. They’re naked. Lying on the ground, entwined within each other, wet skin touching wet skin, mouths agape and eyes wide with ecstasy. I feel my face heat up and I look away, but she doesn’t. She watches them thoughtfully, looking at them the same way she looks at everything else. She smiles as their house drifts away, and then she says, “we should do that,” and I feel my stomach twist as the words leave her lips. She looks at me with those big eyes, the kind that could say a million different things in a million different ways, but I couldn’t make out a single one.

“I don’t know.” I shrug and look away, and she does too. Her twine chair screeches on the concrete balcony as she gets up, her arm brushing past the daffodils.

“They need water,” she says in explanation, and then steps over the sliding glass door and into the house, her footsteps like knocks on the wooden floor. Her scent lingers long after she’s gone, and I love the smell.

I glance back out the balcony as the rain grows harder. I can feel the house shaking beneath my feet, rattling in the winds. Other houses are rising above the clouds to avoid the storm, and all I can see now are the bottoms of them, the pipes and the framework—skeletons and organs. I should follow. 

I think I should tell her. 

I don’t want to never tell her.

I open my lips and whisper, “I think I love…”

Faris Salhi is a writer living in Calgary, Alberta and hailing from Syria. He is currently working towards a Bachelor of Science degree at the University of Calgary, as well as a career in writing and storytelling.

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Today, I discovered The Moment You Stopped Loving Me. Just sitting there, casually, out in the wild. I was shocked that it didn’t even seek cover when I approached. Later, after some research, I found that The Moment You Stopped Loving Me doesn’t have any known predators. Nothing will thin this herd. Darwin has no say here. 

Locking eyes as I descended the stairs into the living room, we just stared at each other. It was almost as if we recognized each other, as if we had met before…like at camp or something, but that didn’t seem true or feasible. In reality, I had only ever heard rumors of this species existing. I’m pretty sure those rumors just live in memes, deep in the internet. So you can imagine my surprise when I came downstairs and saw The Moment You Stopped Loving Me eating cereal out of my favorite bowl on that ugly old couch you love so well. We bought that couch from my friend Ryan for $50. We bought it, but it was my friend, and my $50. We bought it together.

After the shock wore off, I went to get some cereal myself. Unsurprisingly, The Moment You Stopped Loving Me put a nearly empty carton of milk back into the fridge. Like a monster. It ate the last of the good cereal too. I decided to make toast instead. I thought it would be nice to smell something being burned for a while. But eventually, I started to worry that the toaster wasn’t really working, and I was just having a stroke. I touched the toaster to see if it was warm. I left my hand there too long, to make sure I was understanding the moment correctly. I hurt my hand. The toaster was working. I may still have been having a stroke, but at least there would be toast.

When the toast popped up, I thought about getting a plate to put it on. The plate shelf in the cupboard was empty though. I yelled to the living room to ask The Moment You Stopped Loving Me if the dishes in the dishwasher were clean or dirty. It ignored me. “Mo!” I yelled, because there’s an intimacy between us that allows for the affectionate shortening of names. “I’m serious! Are these clean? I need a plate for toast! The crumbs otherwise!” The Moment You Stopped Loving Me told me to just use a paper towel. 

I took my towel of toast into the living room and sat next to The Moment You Stopped Loving Me on the couch. We’re currently watching Pioneer Woman. Ree is making breakfast. Neither of us will ever make anything she is talking about. We agree she is kind of annoying but that we’d still go to brunch with her quarterly, if she asked. We would not, however, attend any birthday party she might have, should we be invited.

Later in the same episode, The Moment You Stopped Loving Me slurps its sweet cereal milk over Ree’s explanation about how much Ladd enjoys this lunch (but her kids can sometimes be finicky) and sets the bowl on the edge of the coffee table. I fold up my toast towel, careful not to let any of the crumbs free. I wipe buttery, jammy crumb residue off my mouth, twist the toast towel up, and toss it into the used cereal bowl. 

I think about going to put the cereal bowl in the dishwasher and running again…or for the first time, who can say. If dishes get washed twice, so be it. The Moment You Stopped Loving Me is a guest in our home after all, and clearing its dish is the hospitable thing to do. I keep watching Ree, until I hear you open your office door. After I hear that, I’m just looking at Ree’s ranch life and bigass kitchen and perfectly seasoned cast iron full of yum. But I’m just looking, not watching. Without moving a muscle, my body has turned all of its attention to you. 

“Hey babe. Whatcha watching?” you ask, leaning on the door frame that bridges the kitchen and the living room. For a split second, The Moment You Stopped Loving Me and I lock eyes, and I remember. That’s where I recognize The Moment You Stopped Loving Me from–the fight we had in the kitchen about why I let my friends make jokes about my getting another English degree, but I won’t let you make jokes about it. And it occurs to me that was almost a year ago. And, the reason The Moment You Stopped Loving Me looks so familiar is because it is really just The Moment I Stopped Loving You with a new haircut. All that resentment got too heavy, so it got a trim to lighten things up. I was so used to seeing it with resentment that the new bangs threw me. The bangs don’t look good either. They dull The Moment I Stopped Loving You and make it unrecognizable. But that’s the point, yeah? For me to not recognize this moment. To assume this can’t be my moment but is more reasonably your moment. A moment where I’m unloved makes more sense to both of us. You know this. The Moment knows this. We all know this.

Given this turn of events, I guess Mo isn’t a house guest. It’s us against you. You’re the odd one out. I’m just not sure how to get you out yet. So, I tell you I’m watching the Food Network and ask if you can throw my bowl in the dishwasher and run a load, because we’re out of plates.

Megan Cannella (she/her) is a Midwestern transplant currently living in Nevada. Her debut chapbook, Confrontational Crotch and Other Real Housewives Musings, is out now: https://linktr.ee/mcannella. You can find Megan on Twitter at @megancannella.

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Though in her defense K really did fear that Paint. I saw it take shape like that myself more than once, say when she’d step inside the barn to ask me something strange—say strange like: Art, suppose that’s throwable clay making up the red shores of the riverbed? Or say strange like: Art, where in town can I find more’a that firm foam board we keep inside the walls for warmth in winter?—and then all the moisture in the air might just burn off all around her. 

Listen: A truth you learn out here is fear makes heat. So there’s times I thought maybe I’d even felt it happen to her, like maybe I’d felt the way K had all the air in that barn burning and folding in around herself anytime she’d step inside and fear that Paint. Suppose a horse might sense that. Suppose even a well-broke horse might sense when all that wet country air is folding in and burning off around a person soon as they enter a room. Now I’m no horse. Suppose there’s some truth to how K’s Ma had me broke to harness, kept me broke anew and compassed with each of the first white flowers of spring. But that’s just good marriage, friend—that’s just good sense. Which is to say, if I were made to guess? I might say that Paint’d come to fear K for it. Like come to fear for what was capable in those thin moments of air which widened anytime some young woman might come around asking more strange questions. Questions like candles displacing deep water—questions like white crests of heat. 

Sure as hell I know that’s what happened in me. 

K sculpting in spring dresses. Water steaming off coals of fire, like off of rock. K firing bowls and hands and flowers in the barn where-in I rigged her kiln in the basement, just below the feed room where-under I’d run hundred-foot-yellow-wire through stone and wood and hay for her—and still: Never once did I see K meet eyes with that Paint. At first it was my offering, say like when I first came around and was putting in new windows for the Renovation, how for a moment there I thought K might take to me, or at least to the Paint. I thought maybe I’d catch her whispering little mysteries to it in the morning. Like when she’d take some time away from her throwing wheel to help me measure glass, say, or like when—as a break from the work—we’d lay in the green and unwrap clementines together for the good father-daughter bonding. K’s hands always so red with earth. We’d chew on the fruit slowly, too, slowly through the evening so she could tell me her story correct. Like little tales gone neglected in what by then had become a pit of a year for marriage between me’n her Ma, that first year of Renovation, and by dusk the tree frogs would cry along with her is how I remember it. 

And even then, friend—we were left in masculine wonder. Those punishing full moons with K and her Ma, like coals might be kindled by that watery light. K’s dresses streaked so red with those handprints of earth. I guess what I mean is, she never would say it explicit. So the Paint and I were left alone t’wait it all out in that barn, anticipating full moons as if for rain, for never could I know a woman’s fears any better’n I could a horse’s. Instead, friend, perhaps you’ll allow me this: How long might we live apart before we learn’t express ourselves correct? Before we return to our earth as it was? To the first white blossoms of the garden, friend, to our cohesion? See, I’ve seen mystery in my years, and as an ex-stepdad of the working-man’s persuasion, suppose I no longer know how to speak to’m straight. Not that I ever could. What I could speak to, though, was what I believed in—and what I believe is in fire as the working hand of God. Blame his calloused fingers. Perhaps you think yourself a man might notice when his barn is burning in the night. A kind of man who’s to wake with an aching part in his temple when the vengeful hand of God is working at your van, or at the red pinto coat of your Paint, or at all that lumber and hay and rope you’ve worked at for collecting all your life. But friend—and I promise you this: Nothing builds from burning quite as true as the open hand of God. There are mornings a man must suffer. Mornings a man must be suffered awake to a smoldering patch of black where his barn once rose in the window in the spring in the morning, or to suffer the terror of his van’s axel warped into wicked nightmare shapes, and maybe you kick at some familiar blackened metal bits, but when there’s nothing left of your beloved saintly Paint but heat and black and ash—and not a bone to bury—and back inside the farmhouse you find all the rooms are emptied out, and the windows boarded up, and when all this falls upon your head like a wide breaking-in of water, and finally you’ve come to reckon with the fact that it was in your anticipating all these fears, these wants, these moons and all this liquid heat that you’d lost what the point of it all was anyway—as if to ask a friend: What season is it? Because you haven’t thought to prepare for winter, even, and now you’re tasked to wonder with what tools—with what substance, friend, or toward what hope, what God is a man to turn to in times like these? 

Times void of all remaining light?  

Well this here’s winter, friend. Just be grateful your fear’s making heat.

Dylan A. Smith is an emerging writer with work in Maudlin House and Complete Sentence and Vol. 1 Brooklyn and sometimes helps to curate fiction workshops with a Brooklyn-based project called Think Olio.

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During the Spanish Civil War, they ate my grandmother’s cat. If you were to meet her, she would tell you the story and get sad. Now her present is receding and her cat is getting closer, so sometimes she is seven again, alone in the street for hours and she can almost hear him purr. It was the year of hunger, and her cat would steal the neighbours’ food and leave it at her feet. Then they would share the plunder, she feeding him small pieces, careful so he wouldn’t choke. That was the war she knew, growing up on the high plains where no bombs or soldiers ever arrived, just the bitter cold and the wind on the fields, shaking the cereal that they could not eat. One day her cat didn’t come and later she found his head. Her mother told her to close her eyes. ‘It was the neighbours’, my grandma whispers. I look at her and I don’t know what to say.

There was also a boy. A long time ago, a warm summer night. They were at the end of the village, hiding in the darkness of his hallway. Upstairs, someone was cooking stew. In the distance, a dog was barking and their friends were calling for them and laughing. The air smelled of hay and sweat and they, in the centre of all things, couldn’t look each other in the eye. He touched her, and for an instant, the future was endless. For three months my grandma became afraid of her own happiness. Then the boy’s parents decided that he should become a priest and sent him to the seminary in Segovia, and there was that. When he left, she briefly wondered how she would survive without his hands, but then she moved to Madrid and became a typist and life pushed on. Of course, that’s not how my grandma tells the story, but she mentions him a lot and I’ve filled in the gaps.

She doesn’t talk much about my grandfather. This is what I remember: a dark garden and his smile as he pointed at a snail, a silvery trail in the dewy grass. In my mind, his mouth is moving, but I can’t hear what he says.  I’ve been told that he was kind. What my grandma remembers is that he never explained to her how babies were conceived, and she had to wait for a neighbour to tell her, laughing at her naivety, when my father was already nine. I don’t think she ever forgave him for that. But sometimes she looks at his picture and smiles and proclaims that although she had hundreds of suitors there was never another man, and if she were young again, she wouldn’t have been so prudish. His name was Felix, and he never got to be old.

Sometimes there are other people too. Her father, who left them as my own father would leave us one day. Her sister, who she hasn’t spoken to in thirty years. Her mother, her poor mother, God rest her soul. And her children, who tease her about her bad memory and still drive her mad.

But if you were to meet her, she would tell you about the cat.

Irene is a bilingual writer, freelance journalist and immigrant from Spain living in the UK. Her non-fiction has been published in leading Spanish and UK titles such as Huffington Post, El País, Telva and Positive News. Her fiction has been featured in Tales to Terrify and she recently won Castilla y Leon International Fantasy Film Festival’s short story competition. She was also one of the winners of the Serious Flash Fiction Competition 2019. Her poetry has recently been featured in Unique Poetry Journal. You can find her on Twitter as @IreneCantizano.

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Stealing Valium from my father used to be easy. After school, before he came home from work to drowse in front of the TV, I rattled the orange vial and dropped a few in the toilet. I hoped his doctor would notice how quickly the tablets were used and stop the prescription.

Dad started the pills the day after Mom’s accident. Those closest to us were called to the hospital where we held off fears in familiar arms. But my father shrugged off hugs, wanting only to sit in a far-off chair and hold the blood-specked purse he had given his wife as a gift.

Surgeons finished later that day, snapping off bright overheads, satisfied with rewired ribs and a plug for the unwanted lung hole. For now, nothing could be done for her spine.

Valium came home the next day. The bottle clanked with permanence in the metal medicine cabinet next to his never-changing brand of shave cream.

For two weeks I biked straight from school to hospital to watch my mother adjust from sleep to pain to tolerance. With each day’s gain, fewer neighbors and acquaintances would visit. And though the hospital was near his office, my father first drove home before joining me bedside. I would see him in the hall, shadowing the frosted window until the pills blanded worry from his face.

He would eventually enter, touch her sheet to let his presence be known, then warm his hands in pockets. As their eyes met, Dad would raise his cheeks with half a smile, but the muscles couldn’t move the dullness from his gaze.

#

When I was pedaling home again, the thing to stare at in the living room wasn’t television but a rented hospital bed. Conversation came only from the periodic nurse whose face and name kept changing. Then a new TV appeared in the master bedroom, next to the bathroom where he caught me flushing pills.

Mother smiled when she heard my confession. Then asked for another blanket against the early winter chill. I didn’t think it was that cold.

It seemed I was always first to arrive, wherever my mother’s bed resided: the spare bedroom, another hospital, a nursing home, or funeral parlor. It was only at the final visit did someone else arrive, well before the acquaintances. 

I recognized him from the rattle in his pocket.

DL Shirey writes fiction, by and large, unless it’s small. He lives in Portland, Oregon and has been caught flashing at Café Aphra, 365 Tomorrows, ZeroFlash, Fewer Than 500 and others listed at www.dlshirey.com and @dlshirey on Twitter.

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You never know people
till they die
you gingerly page
through their privacy

Those fresh, fateful photos:
mothers in mauve miniskirts,
fathers frying hash browns, wearing floppy hats

After there is nothing at stake,
you find out all that you could have given

A little air comes in,
combats the forming mold that corrupted keepsakes,
contaminated these attic memories

This knowing threatens to sun the was
the is, now, will be more forgiving

A Whittenberg is a Philadelphia native who has a global perspective. If she wasn’t an author she’d be a private detective or a jazz singer. She loves reading about history and true crime. Her other novels include Sweet Thang, Hollywood and Maine, Life is Fine, Tutored and The Sane Asylum.

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CW: abuse

When my mother was eight years old, she climbed to the top of her neighbor’s greenhouse and leapt, convinced she would fly. Her body crashed through the glass and she landed on top of a table filled with bright yellow daffodils. 

Her right calf was badly cut, and after her neighbors rushed out to help her off the crumpled flowers and pick the glass out of her hair, they wrapped her leg, called her mom, and sent her home. 

My mom limped across the street and bled up the stairs of her house in Hull, Massachusetts. Her mom attended to her wound and when her father returned from work, he pointed out all the blood still on the porch and said do you know how this makes us look?

***

At night, my mother lay motionless in her bed and listened very carefully. Sometimes she was alone. Sometimes one or all of her sisters were with her. They waited to hear the stairs. They waited to see who their father would choose.

***

When my mom was 15, she sat in the back of her parents’ Oldsmobile as her mother drove. They were going to the pharmacy to buy pantyhose. About halfway there, her mom pulled over on the side of the road, blinker ticking. She turned around and faced my mother.

“You’re a little whore,” she said, and slapped my mother across the face. 

She then turned back around, checked her mirrors, and continued to the pharmacy where they were having a sale on Hanes, the leading brand of pantyhose in 1963.

***

My mother met my father in Boston when she was 17. They were both attending a small communications school. My father had just returned from Korea after two years in the Army. He had been a journalist with Stars and Stripes and once blundered into the DMZ, almost causing an international incident. He now wanted to be a disc jockey. My mother dreamt of becoming an actress. My mom, who still lived at home, was soon pregnant. When my father asked if they should get married, move up to New Hampshire to be closer to his family, my mother smiled.

***

After my brother was born, my mother went to see the doctor for her first postpartum checkup. The doctor said she seemed healthy, asked how the baby was. My mother said he was good. “Great,” he said. “Because you’re pregnant again.” And I was born the following October.

***

When I was 18, my mother remarried. That Thanksgiving, she invited her father over. She had also invited her sisters; they were waiting for him. We had a kind of dinner. Afterward, I snuck beers and drank them in my bedroom with my brother, who was on leave from the Marines. We listened very carefully. We heard many voices rise into a single knot in the dining room. As I looked out my bedroom window and watched my grandfather drive away, I understood I would never see him again. 

Weeks later, setting up the Christmas tree, my mother spoke to my stepfather, bewildered, and asked, “Why do I still love him?”

***

It is April, and I am visiting my mother. We stand on her porch and look at what flowers are coming in this year, and those which remain stubborn. She leads me around the yard and then to the fence, points out a long row of daffodils. I ask if she planted those bulbs in September. She laughs. She sounds young. She gets down on one knee and touches a petal. “These,” she says. “These have always been my favorite.”

Christopher Locke’s flash has appeared in such magazines as SmokeLong Quarterly, Jellyfish Review, Barrelhouse, Flash Fiction Magazine, New Flash Fiction Review, JMWW, Maudlin House, Moon Park Review, and elsewhere. He won the Black River Chapbook Award (Black Lawrence Press—2020) for his collection of short stories 25 Trumbulls Road. Locke received the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Award, and state grants in poetry from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts. He has been nominated for Best of the Net and The Pushcart Prize many times.

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In the new apartment, the couple patches a hole in the drop ceiling, waiting for the noises to start again. Patch may be too strong a word for the frantic application of duct tape, the shingling together of the tiles, but they can hear the scratching, the clawing, the awful weight of the thing dragging itself over the ceiling.

Later, they will laugh. They will tell their friends, will say we checked online, it was probably some pest, something small. She will pantomime him dropping the duct tape but will not mention how she screamed at him to pick it back up, to hurry, damnit, hurry. Will not mention the trembling of her voice—of his hands. 

In the retelling, he will pause at the exact same place to give the backstory:

Now the reason, he says, we were so scared: the man who lived here before swore there was ‘something’ in the ceiling. Then we moved in and there were crosses nailed above every doorway, and all the mirrors were turned around. Like, what the hell does that mean?

The dinner guests will laugh, will not notice the hurried glances upward.

They will flinch at the clinking of glasses, remembering the sound of nails on the lighting fixtures above. The furious scratching and scampering above the kitchen, then the living room, then back. They will remember the moment they locked eyes, each one asking what the fuck? what the fuck? Repeating, but never daring to finish the question—to ask what it is. 

She will tell their guests about their other apartments, the plagues they have endured:

Stinkbugs and flies in Monroe, mice when we lived above the bakery, and in Springfield we had crickets (she always brings up the crickets, he will interrupt through Chianti-purpled lips) and the chirping, the godda—she will stammer, will find her place, and continue as both of their eyes flit toward the ceiling. Neither are religious, but the invocation, the cutting off of the curse, is itself a small talisman against the unknown.

One day, all these things will happen. They will settle in, have friends over for wine and cheese, introduce them to the cat they have adopted to staunch their quiet hours. 

They will wake alone in the night. She will put on his bathrobe and stand below the duct-taped hole in the ceiling, will stand for what feels like hours, the contours of the room taking on frightful clarity in the dark. Hours after she comes to bed, he will rise and pour a drink to steady his hands, will search for and cradle the cat. They will not tell each other of this, will never admit to checking every corner and crevice, to pressing their ears against the walls and praying for silence.

Carleton Whaley would kill to have fresh star fruit again. He is an incoming MFA candidate at Goddard College, and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Maudlin House, Paper Darts, Trampset, and more.

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It’s the night before Christmas Eve. I am twelve and three quarters years old. I come home from swim practice and see an unexpected splotch in my underwear that looks like blood, but brassier. This color is not represented in American Girl’s Keeping and Caring of You.

The next day I go to the airport with my dad and my nine-year-old little brother to pick up my grandparents. I am convinced that everyone knows I’m wearing a pad. I don’t want my mom to tell anyone, though it seems likely that my grandmother and aunt know. This is the first time that I’m jealous my mother has a sister while I don’t. I envy the emotional labor that she can share, starting with but not limited to, having your period during the holidays. My little brother will never have to deal with this embarrassment. I hate him for it. 

One day, after I’ve been getting my period for about two months, I tell my mom that my stomach hurts and I don’t want to go to swim practice. She assures me exercise will help the cramps. 

I stand in my bathroom unable to put on a swimsuit. Pain swells throughout my abdomen, my back aches, my skin stings with sweat but I’m freezing. I look at myself in the mirror. My reflection is pale and the sound of my breath blurs until I can’t hear much at all. In a moment, I can’t see anything. The silence is interrupted by a crash. 

When I open my eyes, I’m on the tile floor of the bathroom. Around me is a broken glass that held shells collected from trips to Florida, the Jersey Shore, and Hawaii, also scattered on the floor. My mom rushes in to ask what happened.

I cry naked on the bathroom floor and vomit and ask what’s wrong with me. She doesn’t know; she never experienced period cramps like this. Exercise will not help the particular brand of PMS that causes fainting spells. In fourteen years, I will be referred to an endometriosis specialist. 

We don’t go to swim practice that night. I don’t know what excuse she tells my little brother. 

Another swim meet. I’m fifteen and have gotten used to tampons and regularly popping Advil once a month. It’s a badge of honor that I have these problems which none of my friends can relate to. I am somehow more woman than them. 

Before my first race I go to the bathroom. In the stall I feel lightheaded and a stabbing that radiates from the center of my body through my hair and fingernails. I recognize a mom from my team whose daughters I coach. She fetches my mother for me with a grace I can’t appreciate because I’m retching over a public pool toilet. 

In this moment, I fantasize about a hysterectomy. Though I haven’t heard that word, the fantasy is of my organs being taken out, told they’re no good, but that’s okay. I don’t have to have this problem anymore.

My father drives me home. I lay down in the backseat of the minivan where I groan, sigh, cry, and, in the worst moments, am reduced to silence. My mom and little brother get a ride home from the pool with some neighbors. I don’t know what reason they give for me to have left before swimming any of my races. 

By seventeen it is clear that this problem is not getting better. The gynecologist suggests hormonal birth control. We are Catholic, but not that much, so my parents say okay. 

This summer our family is going on a safari in Tanzania. We go far out into the world to get a break from our own. The worse our phones work, the less of the language we understand, the more fulfilled we return. 

Before we can go, we need vaccinations and prescriptions for malaria pills. All four of us sit in a room with a doctor who specializes in these less common medications. My mother asks about me. 

“My daughter just started oral contraceptives, but for medical reasons, not because she needs birth control! I’m not worried about it working for that, but, if the medications could interfere for taking care of her other issues.” Her question isn’t really a question, just rambling. 

My little brother is the most aloof person I know. His fourteen-year-old self surely doesn’t pay enough attention for the phrase “oral contraceptive” to register, but “birth control” he’ll recognize. Whether he wants to or not, my little brother knows something about my period. 

I’ve been getting my period for ten years, half of that time under the regulation of hormonal birth control. Over the years I switched pills four times due to side effects like having my period twice in one month or migraines. I suspect that my body is somehow immune to the pills, rejecting every attempt to calm itself. 

The summer after I graduate college we go on another family trip: two weeks in China. If I don’t take my pill at the exact same time every day I’ll bleed within an hour. Since I’ve been taking the pill at 5:00PM at home, I need to take it at 5:00AM during out trip. My brother and I share hotel rooms, so he wakes up when my alarms go off. He is in college now. I know he knows what birth control is, but I don’t know if he understands why I’m so strict about mine, waking him up before dawn. 

He never asks me any questions. I wonder if he remembers those times when we were kids and I came home from school early or skipped dinner with the family. I wonder if he ever wished for an older brother instead of a sister. I hope this will make him a compassionate husband and a gentle father to daughters, should he have any. I wonder if he would have learned some things any other way.

Lauren Cortese is a fiction writer working on her first novel. She is currently based in Annapolis, MD and will soon begin PhD studies at the University of East Anglia. This is her first published piece of creative nonfiction.

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2 cups of flour

I slide my index finger across the measuring cup. The excess flour sprinkles into the bag below. I wipe what’s stuck to my finger against the bag’s papery skin.

Waste not, want not.

Dad’s catchphrase.

I inherited my old man’s slender nose, his deep-socketed eyes, and his worries about if there’ll be enough. What’s enough? I guess the definition depends on life’s lottery. As a kid, enough meant waiting for necessities to drip, drip, drip like a leaky faucet, meant lining up in church parking lots. Today the word means remembering when times were rough.

Doing without punctuates my DNA.

Waiters zoom around me. Prep cooks chop ingredients. Line cooks combine these ingredients. They all depend on me to keep their lights on. My dad also depended on the kindness of others. 

1 tablespoon of baking powder

With the back of a paring knife, I level the baking powder. I whisk the chemical together with the flour. Eventually, it will mingle with the batter and birth carbon dioxide, giving the cake a cumulus texture. 

I’ve prepared desserts stuffed with edible gold, ones infused with lavish oils, ones auctioned like masterpieces.

Extravagance to one-up extravagance.

Those recipes only belong to those who can. This one belongs to everyone. 

Fluffiness will be the only reminder of wealth in my remembrance.

2 sticks of unsalted butter and 1 ¼ cups of brown sugar

I unwrap the room-temperature butter. I measure the sugar. I join the two in a mixing bowl. Convenience calls for a machine. Instead, I’ll beat these elements together by hand like he taught me. Electricity costs money. Everything costs money except your own hands, your own feet. 

“Savor the authenticity,” he used to say.

“Savor the authenticity,” I say.

With a wooden spoon, I squish the butter and sugar into one, blending them into a golden cream. 

I speed up.

My wrist and forearm burn.

Stopping early causes clumping.

I keep pace not just for him but for my grandma, too. Baking is generational. She guided him like he guided me. When you smell one of our cakes, you’re smelling all of us. When you take a piece, you’re taking a piece of all of us.

4 eggs

The recipe says four eggs, but I add another for extra density.

One at a time, I crack the eggs on the edge of the mixing bowl and stir them into my concoction. The whites and yokes will emulsify, will gift their proteins, will serve as a foundation, as something to build on.

When I was growing up, dad drove a city bus. Each day he went around in circles to pay the bills. But in the kitchen, he’d dance, blaring classical music on the turntable. He’d spin around me like a top, encouraging me to tinker, to substitute, to make the dish my own. And when I told him I hoped to go to culinary school instead of something six-figures, he pirouetted like a ballerina, extended his hand, and said: “Can I have this dance?” 

1 ¼ cups of whole milk

Alternating between pouring in the flour and milk, I give the batter life. The white liquid swirls. Each bite will taste like chewing the ocean.

I use buttermilk, which is almost $5 a quart.

Despite lacking the same fat content, dad always was able to procure me buttermilk’s less thick cousins, one- and two-percent, to keep my pastries moist. Milk was a common inclusion in our handouts. Purchasing more for baking, however, got expensive. So, dad befriended a cafeteria worker who rode his bus and traded him passes for lunch-room cartons.

He made sure I never went without.

1 teaspoon of vanilla extract

I dump the vanilla extract into the mixing bowl. The solution will provide the cake with its signature seasoning while also enhancing every other nuanced flavor. 

“Sweetness is the soul,” dad used to say. 

“Sweetness is the soul,” I say.

Bake for 30 minutes at 350 degrees, let cool for 10 minutes, and enjoy 

The oven beeps. I transfer the pans to a cooling rack. Steam drifts off the cake like fog off a lake. Once cool, I frost the cake with basic white frosting. I place the finished product onto a cake stand and carry it out to my awaiting customer.

The restaurant is packed.

People are chatting about this, about that.

In the corner, mom sits alone at a table.

Her eyes resemble bell peppers. She’s been crying.

Atop the table, dad rests inside polished ceramics. 

I set the cake stand on the table. Mom looks up at me. I pull out a chair and sit down. I cut her a slice. With her fork, she brings a part of dad, a part of me, to her lips. 

She chews.

She swallows.

She reaches across the table and puts her hand on mine and smiles.

Will Musgrove is a writer and journalist from Northwest Iowa. He received an MFA from Minnesota State University, Mankato. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Versification, Unstamatic, Ghost Parachute, Serotonin, Defenestration, Rabid Oak, The Daily Drunk, Flash Frontier, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter at @Will_Musgrove.

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Shadows frighten me, lately. Shadows of my own body that I actively make. My body floating across the top of the chair until the whole of it sits in darkness; my fingers cascading through a bright portal of light slashed across the cherry wood of the hallway floor like a warning. 

When I realize it was me, should I feel better? I don’t. I feel worse. 

I pull at the skin on my lips until I taste blood, no matter how many times I tell myself I’ll stop. When it grows back in small sheets, the edges lift up again, some sheer kind of scab, and I feel them with my tongue, on my other lip, on his—

I can’t stand it. 

I can’t stand the thought of him not being able to stand it. 

I can’t stand the way my lips look on camera, mottled mauve on pale skin. There’s either blood or the reminder of blood, but never the absence of it. 

I wonder how long I would have to bleed to get there: the absence of it.

Adrienne Marie Barrios is a disabled, neurodivergent writer and editor. She writes about mental health and relationships, the interplay between the two and the external world. Her work has been featured in such magazines as X-R-A-Y Lit Mag, Punt Volat, Drunk Monkeys, and superfroot. She serves as editor-in-chief for Reservoir Road Literary Review and edits award-winning novels. Find her online at adriennemariebarrios.com.

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The war drilled the sound of sirens into my mind. When I began to have nightmares, the mechanical screams dominated them. The sky is always dark, clouds rolling through as if they too are afraid of living in the city. The street lights give off cones of undersaturated yellow that makes the storm look like it’s clinging to the ground.  

The alarms sound, and they follow. Lurching down the street, heads turning left and right; mash-ups of alarms and cameras. No discernible eyes, it’s impossible to tell if they truly see what’s around them. The things are hulking sticks — half a mile high with pelvises grossly attached for the scrawny legs. Infrastructure made of bony limbs. All they do is walk and scream, waiting for one of us to get too close to the wood and wire arms.  

As if it’s inevitable that some of us will meet their gaping plastic mouths, silencing the screeching as well as someone’s life. 

When I woke up, I’d be sweating — paralyzed. 

After the nightmares came enough times, the sirens in my waking hours triggered those same emotions.  When the ships flew across the sky, the warning system bellowed, and I panicked. 

Those around me tried to explain my discomfort, but they never quite nailed it. Someone once told me wide-scale sirens sounded eerie because of the design. Tall poles and squished speakers. They called it “omnidirectional.” 

Omnidirectional, Omni-fucking-terrifying. 

There is one time, in particular, I dwell on sometimes. I sat on the bed, head between my hands. The edges of my vision were getting blurry, which meant hyperventilating would come soon if I didn’t relax. I remember Marlie’s hand pressed into my back. 

The wailing outside had my heart pounding as I imagined the walking poles; then, my fiancée… the hugger, the lover, the optimist, simply sat there with her hand on my back. A moment later, her lips grazed my ear. Her breath came first; warm, minty breath that swept around my face as if trying to comfort me on its own.  

“It’s okay,” she said. “The bombs are far away.” She meant to send my fears away. 

Of course they are, I thought, shaking my head. The bombs may be far away, but the sirenheads are right outside.

The bombs weren’t the source of my fear. I didn’t name the monsters out loud, had never shared the dreams with her. I didn’t think she’d understand. It wasn’t a part of her reality.

My body shook with every breath. “I — ” a gulp of recycled air. The dust and mildew of the old quarter came with it. “Know.” 

I knew. I knew I’d likely never die of airborne explosions. But that didn’t stop the sirens. It didn’t stop the clouds from rolling overhead. And it never once stopped the nightmares that lingered long after the war.

Alyson lives in Maryland where she got married, had her daughter, and began her writing journey. She has appeared in (mac)ro(mic), Twin Pies Lit, and most recently in Pyre Magazine. You can find her on Amazon, and Twitter @rudexvirus1

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Allen Ginsberg had died the day before, so the open mic poetry night began with a local kid reading Howl, only he got carried away and was told to stop, and right by the tiny stage an old guy called Gene would snipe or gush from the wings, saying, “Don’t give up your day job,” or “Tough act to follow,” until a pattern emerged that Gene only praised young men, so he seemed like a joke from then on; and at the table in front of the stage sat an odd crowd – a girl who’d modelled herself on a porcelain doll, who sat all night with her handbag in front of her like she was about to pray to it, and her old companion, Tallulah, who yelled out anecdotes to the ether, declaring that she thought her voice was rough, who demonstrated this by repeating the phrase ‘rock and roll’ over and over, as in “People say my voice is really, like, rock and roll,” while the handbag girl sat glassy-eyed, half-listening, half-dreaming of the demi-monde, then the third cog of their clique was dressed up like Bryan Ferry, all louche and swagger, and he shouted, “Go, Frankie!” to the next poet on the mic, which made Tallulah jump, and when she screamed, “Jesus Christ!” we all thought, “Yeah, your voice is quite rough after all,” – and I sat at a candlelit table nearby, the fortune-teller smiling by my side, and sometimes I’d listen to the poets, those cool Café Yum Yum kids, as they spat out their words into the mic, but then I’d listen to the teller’s reading, and he’d turn over tarot cards and say things like, “One day soon you’ll fall in love with a married woman in Paris,” and I’d paid him $5 so at that point I thought about asking for a refund, but instead I said, “Really?” and he replied, “Well, that’s what the cards say,” which struck me as his token response to any difficult encounter, but then he turned over another card, gasped and said, “Wow, you have great friends,” – and on solitary nights now it’s words like these I weave into my pillow; it’s words like his that steer me towards a warmer place, towards a kinder town.

Michael McGill is a poet from Edinburgh, Scotland who has recently been published in Lunate, Dreich, Anser Journal, Dream Journal, 433, Lucky Pierre, Stone of Madness Press, Dreams Walking, Milly Magazine, Versification, The Daily Drunk, Rejection Letters, FEED and The Haiku Quarterly. His overheard comments and photopoems regularly appear on Twitter @MMcGill09 and Instagram @michael7209.

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I climb into my car, head south down the mighty 405, drive to Torrance again, to my old neighborhood, start to relive my childhood shit. I see in my mind the little mudman I unearthed from a corner of the backyard in my lonely afternoon of the living childhood imagination—realler than life, talking to myself as I moved Matchbox cars around a tiny mud and rock freeway system. The little mudman talked to me about bad things in life that I don’t want to hear about, about a bad man who pulled down his pants at the girls, and about the nasty neighbors over the high wall who we saw swimming naked in their pool, about a bad boy who stole money from the convent and hopped the wire fence but gashed open his armpit on the steely barbs at the top of the fence, and about being a little mudman who screams when people pull him from the ground, who squirms and dies in little boys’ hands when they yank him from the ground, who dies and dissolves back into the earth. And later on my big brothers had brought home 4 orange crawdads from Alondra Park lake and let them loose in the back yard—the dogs got them. Then alone at night in my room I could see the bright red flare from the Torrance Union Carbide chemical plant and refinery. It beamed bright orange right into my room every night.

I asked my dad one day what it was. He told me that’s where they make napalm.

“What’s napalm?”

“It’s a chemical they make, which when it lands on your skin burns and burns and nothing can make it stop burning.”

Then I would look at the refinery flare every night and think about people burning and never being able to stop the burning, and nothing can stop the burning, not all the water in the world can stop the burning on your skin and it burns right through your skin and keeps burning, and the refinery flare burns and burns from the refinery, which is like a condensed city with all those lit-up platforms and tiers and towers, and there are all those different refineries scattered around Torrance and Carson and Compton and Long Beach and San Pedro and they are all like distant orange Ozs seen from the freeway coming home late Sunday night from old Aunt’s and Uncle’s houses, scary in the night in the back of the ’64 Ford Ranch Wagon on the freeway, looking up at the ceiling and seeing the lights and shadows arc and blend on the ceiling of the car as it zooms under streetlamps and bridges.

Last year I asked my dad about the napalm refinery flare and he denied the whole thing, that they ever made napalm there, that he ever told me they did, that he ever told me how it burned and wouldn’t stop burning—he denied it all. Maybe he just wiped it from his mind. Maybe he didn’t want to admit that he ever told his young son such a horrible thing. Maybe it wasn’t my dad.

“What’s napalm?” is excerpted from Jack Skelley’s novel Fear of Kathy Acker, to be published next year by a major independent press (announcement soon). His new chapbook Dennis Wilson and Charlie Manson (Fred & Barney Press) has been featured in recent reviews and podcasts, including KCRW’s Bookworm. Jack’s psychedelic surf band Lawndale is completing a new album this year. twitter.com/JackSkelley instagram.com/helterskelley

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I’m sorry to tell you your uncle Jaime died last week of a heart attack.

I read the text message from my mother, type: 

Ok thank you for letting me know,

and then shove the phone into the bookshelf where I won’t hear it buzz. 

I’m making ramen for the first time. I thought I planned the multiple steps out well, making the broth and boiling the eggs the night before, but it turns out I forgot about marinating the mushrooms and infusing the finishing oil with garlic and onions. I’ve been cooking since two o’clock–my feet hurt, my back hurts– but when it’s time to make the noodles at five o’clock I punch the flour like it said something bad about my mother. 

“Can I help?” My daughter asks. I bought a pasta maker so I could make noodles from scratch and the kids are fascinated by its shiny metal and heavy attachments. 

“Do you want to turn the crank or feed the dough into the press?” I ask her.

“I’ll crank.”

It’s hard going–the dough is thick and crumbly even though I rolled it out, and she has to throw her whole body into turning the crank around and around. “Put your back into it!” I fake yell. 

My daughter gives me a dirty look but doesn’t say anything because she wants to work the machine.

I laugh but decide not to say anything else. The list of things I don’t say is long. I don’t say, ‘Your great-uncle, that you met maybe twice in your life, died last week.’ I definitely don’t say ‘I wasn’t on the list of people who got invited to his Zoom funeral.’

We take turns muscling the crank, turning dough into sheets of pasta a foot long. After, we run the sheets through the cutter, long noodles flowing onto the counter soft as water.

I wish making healthy family relationships worked the same way. I’ve been estranged from my father for almost eight years now. He would tell you that he’s tried to reach out and I’ve refused. I would tell you that he wants to look like the one trying to heal the breach without doing any actual work. We can’t agree on a starting place. He wants to forget the past and come stay at my house for two weeks. I want to start by following each other on Facebook. So we bob along in our parallel lives, occasionally crossing paths at a wedding or anniversary party, where we discover, yep, still can’t agree on how to build a functional relationship.

My mom and dad divorced twenty years ago. Before I left my father’s orbit I used to be the one who kept her up to date on that side of the family. Now our roles are reversed. My dad probably told her my uncle died just before she told me. 

And all I can think is that my dad finally stopped trying to reach out. None of his other attempts were genuine. He’d say, “let’s meet for coffee,” when I flew into town but never commit to a time and date. But now even the pretense of trying is gone.

I have no time to think about that. There’s only time for the rhythmic snick snick snick of the cleaver as I slice through spinach, broccoli and carrots. The enormous pot of water on the stove is wreathed in white steam, and rumbles with the vibrations of the boiling water within. Time to cook the noodles.

My husband wanders into the kitchen and I press-gang him into sautéing the vegetables while I pour broth into another pot. I don’t tell him my uncle died either. So many things have to happen at once–the broth has to be hot and in the bowls so the noodles have a place to land once they’re done cooking. 

It’s fussy and exhausting work and I welcome the distraction because the fact is, I don’t feel anything about my uncle dying. I don’t know why. Maybe you only get a certain amount of grief in a calendar year. He was the fourth death in eight months; maybe there wasn’t any emotion left for him. I cried my eyes shut when my grandma and aunt died, never thinking that I might have to save some grief for later. No tears for you! Come back another time!

Maybe you don’t get to cry about someone you haven’t seen in years. 

I pull the kelp leaf out of the pot of broth and pour steaming ladles-full into four bowls. The timer beeps, and I pull dripping baskets of noodles out of the boiling pot of water. My husband leans away as I spill slippery noodles into broth. My son and daughter lean against the far counter as they watch the pieces go together. The vegetables, green and orange, go on top of the noodles, followed by the marinated eggs and brown pickled mushrooms. I pour a tablespoon of garlic oil onto each bowl and my son leans in and takes a deep breath, eyes closed. 

Perfection.

Teresa Douglas is a Mexican American woman living in Canada. She has an MFA in Fiction from Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has appeared in P.S. I Love You, Bombfire, and forthcoming in Flashflood Journal.

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See him as xe first sees him that summer: skin faultless and slick and pulsing in the hot lights underground. His curls big and weightless. He smiles down at xer and his hips swerve to xer side; he says he’s heard a local band is playing a bar up the street. Xer eyes touch base with xer friends and they ragtag all of them up into the humid night. Cobblestones and consignment shop window mannequins waxy and startled in their poses beneath the yellow streetlight cones. By morning xe is at the bus stop in front of his place. He has given xer flipflops to replace the heeled boots that hobbled xer and a sweatshirt to see xer warmly home. Xe thanks him and before the bus comes they share stories and tongues. He tastes of old cigarettes and the cinnamon gum xe gave him. He tells xer about summers at an uncle’s farm down south, cicadas louder than any voice in your head could be, broad red clay and tufted grass and barefoot runs with only a kite to anchor him to the sky. Xe notices the first tattoo then, a kite boyish and shy on the inside of his wrist.

See him next a month after: his teeth hard and lovely when he laughs in the smoke behind the bakery. He is a ghost of flour and soda, his arms tangible things only below the elbows where gloves had shielded him. His hair swells beneath the edges of a cap. He laughs again and drags his cigarette. Xer eyes follow his fingers like a cat trailing string — dexterous and sinister, knuckle thin and nail chewed close. More tattoos there, anchors and roses and thorns. Xe takes his hand and bites his thumb, eyes sly and promising him things. It is an hour yet before the end of his shift.

Xe does not see him for two nights after a particular fight. It doesn’t matter what it was or which side xe took; it is only an outward ritual of their inward negotiation. He has been working hard hours and even though their clothes and records mingle now their paths seldom cross, even less so when he schedules to avoid xer. When he returns xe is on their bed; xe doesn’t wear his shirts to bed anymore. Xe sits with laptop and the aloof formality of a fresh new shirt and says you could have called. He smiles less often now, only looks at their pictures pinned curling like specimens to the wall as he says his apology. They split the bed between them but the night knits them closer. In the morning he sleeps while xe looks at him, his ink limning billows and mermaids and seadragons the color of drowning men turning snakewise around bicep and shoulder. Xer nails scrape but only leave white marks that fade. His ink is indelible.

In the shower xe finds traces of him bruisecolored creeping up xer wrists. Xe rubs and scrapes and they do not come off.

Xer eyes refuse to see him for some time, xer clarinet and xer Alma Thomas prints propped against xer friend’s couch while the ink spills within xer, avoiding the shadow of him in the corner of xer eye whenever their steps take them past the same shops. Texts querulous and apologetic and resigned alike go unanswered. Ferns and flowers in fevered bursts of color entwine with stormclouds and lightning radiating up xer arms, a careful riot of growth and fury xe keeps hidden under sleeves. Xe isn’t ready. The world isn’t ready for xer.

Summer comes again, and xe hesitates. Arms hidden still, demure exterior, a cocoon of professional demeanor suitable for late conferences and meetings with museum donors, the old uninterrupted routine. A storm puffs its chest above the city, sending food wrappers and newspapers scuttling for cover into stairwells and subway tunnels. Xe misses a bus and finds xerself stalking xer way against the wind, xer skin aglow, infected with electrons underneath xer suit. At first xe doesn’t see where xe is going. A bakery, a record shop, a bar, xe walks past them all, xer steps resounding with the tidal tremors of the ground beneath xer. A rhythm pulling xer downward into a den of sweat and noise and pulsing lights beneath the city.

See him, then, the way xe last sees him: wearing faultless skin as a disguise, the remembered curve and swell of him lost in the music and the shy secrets of another. Xe knows his true form, though, the indelible marks of his ink. The story of him, the marks of him left upon the story of xer.

Their eyes meet.

Rick Hollon (they/fey) is a nonbinary author, editor, and parent from the American Midwest. Feir work has appeared in Prismatica, perhappened, Pareidolia Literary, and other small-press publications. Find them on Twitter @SailorTheia.

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My coffee cup lies in shards on the kitchen floor. Boutros Boutros Ghali licks his paws.

Can you at least feign remorse, I ask the cat. He blinks, yawns and lifts a back leg as he begins licking his hindquarters.

You are disgusting Boutros, I snarl. I prepare the coffeemaker and then retreat to the living room, where I select an album for our day.

In an ordinary time, I would walk to The Sunnyside Up and order a cortado. I would take my coffee, perhaps a pastry and end up in Laurel Run. There, I would sit on a park bench and watch young fathers teach their children to ride bikes. The mothers, arms linked like comrades, would stroll the park, complaining bitterly of office mates or lovingly discussing children, bestsellers, Peloton instructors.

This is not an ordinary time.

When the first wave of the pandemic washed over us, I had already lived alone for eight years. After the death of Gretchen, our only child, Roland and I drifted past one another as shades of our old selves. On an early Tuesday morning, 18 months after we had buried our daughter, I stubbed my toe on a single suitcase as I walked from the guestroom to the hallway bath. Roland stood in the doorway of our bedroom. I am only taking some clothes, he said. Perhaps I will be back. I’m not going anywhere, I replied. After a year, I stopped leaving the hall lamp on at night.

The second wave enveloped us, more ferociously, six months after the first. A week into it, I received a postcard from Santa Monica. Roland’s girlfriend had died suddenly from the virus. Might he return to convalesce? No, I wrote back.

Unmoved cars, furry with pollen, look like iron caterpillars dormant in driveways. Curtains are never drawn back. Newspapers stockpile on lawns and now have moldered, rotting in wet clumps on untrimmed grass.

A week after the third and most virulent wave struck, I opened my back door to take my trash to the fire pit. I almost kicked over a cat carrier. An angry Boutros hissed from within. A note atop read I will die tonight. Please care for Boutros Boutros Ghali. Stay well. Indira. I looked over at my neighbor’s house, trying to discern her health from the once-tidy Tudor, now marred by peeling paint and loose shutters. In the glare of the mid-morning sun, I could see the freshly painted black Xs on the windows. That is how I came to live with an insufferable cat named after a globally admired statesman.

Now, I am standing at the glass door in my front hallway, a fresh cup of coffee in hand. Madama Butterfly’s soaring heartbreak fills the house. Boutros has come to sit by my feet and we watch the collectors as they dolefully approach front doors. If I squint, in their white Hazmat suits, they look like a processional of pilgrims.

I finish my coffee. Cio-Cio San has already plunged her father’s seppuku dagger into her heart. The collectors are spray-painting Xs on the Johnsons’ windows. Boutros yawns. Pinkerton has discovered Butterfly’s body. His tenor wails. Do you hear him, Bou? Do you hear Pinkerton’s regret? I ask the cat. Boutros stands, arches his back and weaves between my legs. Boutros, listen, I say. The collectors are sealing the Johnsons’ door; their dog Suzuki lays next to the three orange body bags. The tenor warbles, wracked with guilt. I close my eyes. I see him standing over her lifeless body. Boutros, I ask, can you hear the lament?

Fannie H. Gray lives in Montclair, NJ with her husband, two children, Mac the Boston Terrier, and Neo the Tuxedo. Her poem The Trick was included in Beltway Poetry Quarterly’s Langston Hughes Tribute Issue. Her fiction can be found in The Tatterhood Review, Sledgehammer Lit, Sad Girls Club and K’in. She prefers coffee with chicory and a damn fine Rob Roy.

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will not really go down in history because it’s not even an age or an era. But it’s an individual one, something bound to be repeated throughout the year. It could be— any day really. 

When all efforts of third-world resilience are overwhelmed by a sense of our own— self-preservation, it’s a feeling that any abled body in the country might vanish and dissolve into just a number on the news.

It’s a gut-instinct that only Filipinos can understand. What might suddenly motivate a simple mind hoping for some— divine savior, will detach itself from any rational thought, but idolatry.

In between our dire straits and empty stomachs, we cling to anything that resembles— salvation. We like to think we’re way past it now, at this point, at this time. Reality resumes like a slow tune that explains itself to everyone, yet no one in particular.

We like to think that “grief will fade in time,” with an understanding that there is an end to this— madness. Like a premonition of a better time, a better age that defies our limited existence. A period written to symbolize the end of pain. Like a song that everybody sings at end of a curtain call. 

For all the wasted months it has been— a condescending and calculated speech called it: an “extended vacation.” Suddenly it turned into: an extended lockdown. Fretful and dispirited, because we know from experience that it’s also an extension of: loss, sorrow, agony. 

We still pick ourselves up, all on our own. Weary yet still alive. Exhausted but still hanging on. Because we have to and because we need to. Now and again, we must hold onto something and fight to still be here. 

How odd that we keep living, in such precise indifference, with all the minutes of grief.

Neen Ramos is a Pinay (Filipina) who loves to devour pop culture and random stuff on the Internet. A lover of good books and a cup of coffee, her Spotify playlist keeps her sane as she juggles her remote work and TV show marathons. She’s a self-proclaimed foodie and a habitual bargain addict. You can find her aspirational Insta-poet alter ego (@whatneenwrites) on Twitter and Instagram.

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While I am a strong advocate of home cooking over dining out, an exception was made when my father suggested Bubbalou’s Bodacious Bar-B-Que for my eighteenth birthday. We must’ve arrived during peak hours considering there were practically zero parking spaces available. After several rounds of circling the lot, my eyes fell upon a lone spot deemed undesirable because of its distance from the entrance. My father seized the opportunity without hesitation, insisting that any worthwhile climax was only as good as the rising action leading up to it. Besides, what were a few extra steps but exercise on the off chance we ate a little more than expected? 

When trying new restaurants, it became customary in our family to bestow the power of decision onto the server. Instead of bombarding him/her with questions regarding this or that item, my father narrowed it down to a single inquiry which mitigated superfluous small talk and granted access to what he refers to as “the good stuff.” Four simple words: What would you recommend? A question which Filip, our server from the far reaching sovereign state of Czechoslovakia, was more than happy to answer.    

“The potato salad does pretty well,” he said. “It’s a side, so I’m afraid you must order something el—”

Before Filip could finish, my father shushed him with an index finger to the lips.

“Potato salad, you say?”

Although the origins of his infatuation remains speculated, I’m almost certain my Aunt Lucille was the primary instigator. She brought it over for Thanksgiving years ago and baffled a group of folks whose understanding of salad was limited to lettuce and tomatoes. My father, being a picky eater, showed great hesitation when confronted by the foreign entity. Only after several glasses of Cabernet Sauvignon did he agree to try some. And only after several more did he wash it down as the rest of us awaited the final verdict. Long story short, my father left that Thanksgiving with a newfound appreciation for a dish he never knew he needed but was now unable to imagine living without. He’s since been seeking out establishments capable of satisfying his cravings for the sacred item. And judging from the way my father screeched with delight as Filip approached our table, it is safe to say he hit the jackpot.

Within a matter of minutes, I became the side dish as my father devoted all attention to the plate of carbs sitting before him. It was so bizarre hearing a grown man say “come to Papa” and not be referring to his son; who became nonexistent as his father made train noises before each bite while fellow patrons began staring. The collective heat from their eyeballs enough to set the entire place ablaze if sustained. Although it’s silly to envy potato salad, I couldn’t help but be saddened by the neglect on a day which had rightfully belonged to me. The more I thought about it, the more I realized maybe there was reasoning behind my father’s behavior.

Potato salad never broke the neighbor’s window with a stray baseball. Potato salad never got poor grades in school. Potato salad never tainted living room walls with permanent markers. Potato salad never got grounded nor did it ever catalyze the countless verbal turned physical arguments between my parents. Besides, at only two dollars and sixty-nine cents, it was an absolute bargain when compared to the hundreds spent on childcare. With such a clean track record, it was a more than viable candidate for the endless love and admiration a person could humanly offer. Even if it came from a man whose son has excused himself in avoidance of feeling like a third-wheel.

The bathroom here was no different than any other, minus a few decor tweaks to assure it aligned thematically with the rest of Bubbalou’s. Toilet paper was wrapped around holders shaped like rib-eye bones while cliché seashore paintings got replaced with a smiling cartoon piglet accompanied by a caption reading, “When you’re here, you’re family.” I chuckled, wanting desperately to believe the sentiment but knowing in my heart of hearts that it was far from true. To ease the mental turmoil, I shifted my attention towards the bathroom’s various details which would have otherwise gone unnoticed had the lunch not gone awry. My wandering eyes met sanitation instructions beneath the mirror some rascal took the liberty of defacing, causing it to now read, “Employees must wash anus before returning to work.”

Luckily for Bubbalou’s, my love of markers followed me into adulthood and I formed a habit of carrying one at all times. Whether it be for word searches or, in this case, fixing vandalization, it is nice to know I am well-equipped should the situation arise. While assessing my penmanship, I began thinking about the debacle I’ve sought shelter from. And how, unlike the guidelines before me, it would take more than a couple of strokes from my Expo to salvage. Lifting the marker up to my lips as if it were a candle, I closed both eyes and began wishing. Not for an extravagant cake or lavish party filled with friends and family, but simply to feel acknowledged by the one person who was seemingly unphased by the weight of my absence. Of course, I’ll open my eyes some time later after extinguishing an imagined flame to find that nothing has changed. Nothing at all except the time flickering above the doorway; reminding me that, by then, I had been gone for far too long.

Nam Hoang Tran is a writer living in Orlando, FL. His work appears or is forthcoming in The Daily Drunk, White Wall Review, Bending Genres, (mac)ro(mic), Rejection Letters, and elsewhere. Find him online at www.namhtran.com.

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7 a.m. One of them stirs underneath the duvet. No matter how cold it is outside the covers, they hop out and onto the hardwood floors to make coffee for the pair. While the water boils for the Chemex glassware, they survey the kitchen: It remains of a modernist, minimalist, Scandinavian style. 

Throughout the single-floor ranch I can find no cursed mirrors nor eerie portraits. No window vines to rustle or petals to spoil then drop—succulents, plump and prideful, make no one shiver.

7:20 a.m. Steaming coffee poured into unadorned white mugs, then one lover brings over a cup to the other. They sip in bed. I used to leave inauspicious shapes among the grounds they left behind, but they never noticed, not once.

I’ve learned to make contact in other ways: I love a takeout menu, its inked pinks and greens. Pluck it out the trash, lay it across the mantle. But how did this get here? My owners keep only books with black or white spines. The words that spark their joy fit into an aesthetic, match their geometric prints. So I try to bomb them with color, ruin a scene.

7:45 a.m. Begins the series of showers. One scrubs up with a black terrycloth, one scrolls the news on a phone. The couple strictly dresses in black, white, leather. Even for telecommuting.

8:30 a.m. They log on to their jobs in different rooms, one from behind a bedroom door, one from a spot at the dining room table. They grouse to themselves sometimes that they furnished this place not expecting to spend this much time in it. Low-backed dining room chairs and even the sturdiest of headboards offer insufficient lumbar support.

If I’m up to it, I’ll make the WiFi cut out. Or hide an important thumb drive, “misplace” that manila envelope.

10:45 a.m. They remain in their separate “offices” but message each other ideas for an interior redesign—just fantasies, though. I pray they’ll bring me home more tools to work with, but during this year of lockdown, this house feels colder and sparser than ever. Still no old pipes to rattle or moan through. Oh, grant me a claw-footed bathtub! In any color that isn’t slate.

It’s not easy being the kind of ghost who haunts a house decorated out of an Ikea catalog, but that doesn’t mean I’m giving up.

12 p.m. They break for lunch. If I am lucky they’ll notice I pulled a loose thread on their linen tablecloth and opened a proper hole.

There’s no other way to tell them who I am … or was. Before this was an open concept home, it was a different kind of dwelling. My bones are here and they were at rest, until they weren’t. I long to return to natural cycles of production and rest. This modern human condition is a constant pacing, a late-night anxiety fit. And I resent the order they’re trying to impose on this land, which was harmoniously wild for so long. I don’t believe I can keep up these small acts of resistance indefinitely—Will I go extinct? Grow stronger or weaker? I’m not certain but something tells me things could boil over, at last.

5 p.m. They should stop working, but they don’t. Some invisible force compels them to type-type-type, open just one more email. Their labor honors no rhythm.

Perhaps if they took a break they would remember that everything decays in the end.

8 p.m. One of them encourages the other to break for dinner, though they’ve both been sipping wine for an hour. They do allow a dark red liquid in this instance, a detour from the house’s palette. The only colors allowed in decor are champagne or clay; so committed, they wrap Christmas presents in plain brown paper!

Tipsy, hungry, this is when they are most aware of me. They’ll say the room seems a little off, or shiver like they’re being watched. (They are.)

Lately I’ve been snapping off bits of wicker from their chairs, leaving them in unexpected corners of a room. So far, it has only elicited a perplexed trip to the trashcan.

But tonight, when one bends over to inspect a slice of dried woven reed, an accusation erupts. “HOW ARE YOU BREAKING THESE?”

Even I startle at the sound of anger. The meek reply, “Me? I thought it was you?” doesn’t soothe.

“Don’t play dumb, it’s just the two of us here, I know it was you!”

Fighting, slamming doors, then somehow kissing, biting too. They leave a mess around the house, I didn’t have to tip over a single scented candle.

At rest again, they ache with the awareness that they don’t touch anymore. Then I sense why tonight different: One of them is leaving. Contemplations of loss, of death.

11:40 p.m. Sleep is where they are most attuned to me, where I can sow seeds: Don’t just browse the new catalog from West Elm, start over. What if you really cleared out? Don’t even sell to a new owner. Cut your losses and let the floor fade back to earth. Give your roof to the birds. What could be more minimalist than no walls at all? When the sun rises, accept something different.

Laura Eppinger (she/her) is a Pushcart-nominated writer of fiction, poetry and essay. Her work has appeared at the Rumpus, the Toast, and elsewhere. She’s the managing editor at Newfound Journal. Visit her here: https://lauraeppinger.blog/workspub/ She Tweets at @lola_epp

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Collin had eaten candles nearly all of his life. He could remember his mother and father encouraging him to lick chocolate frosting off a candle from his sixth birthday cake, bite into it, and peel the wax from the wick like flesh from a bone. Sixty-four years to the day later, he hasn’t stopped eating candles since that first bite.

Throughout Collin’s childhood and adolescence, the only candles his father allowed in the house were yellow tallow candles. The year Collin turned sixteen, his father died of a heart attack. At the funeral, Collin asked Monsignor Troyer if he could have the pristine white candles that flanked his father’s casket, and that night he mourned his father as he feasted on them alone in his room.

Feeling both lost and liberated, Collin spent the next several years experimenting with candles the way most other young adults experiment with drugs, dabbling in votives, organic soy candles, long tapers meant to enhance romance, and even scented candles that never tasted like the scent they were named for.

The year Collin turned 21, he inherited the family farm when his mother died in a fire that trapped her in the barn as it burned to ground. After interring her remains in the family plot, Collin proclaimed, “I am all that’s left now. The time has come to stop experimenting and settle down.”

The next day while cleaning out his mother’s closet, Collin found a shoe box full of Amish beeswax candles, some with small crescents nibbled out of them. He picked out a bee-shaped candle and took a bite out of one of its wings. The honey-sweet grassy notes that filled his mouth titillated his taste buds, and the smooth, almost creamy texture of the wax coated his teeth wonderfully. From that day on, Amish beeswax candles were the only candles to feed Collin’s soul.

Fortunately, Collin lived deep in the heart of Ohio Amish country, so he was never for want of beeswax candles. But not just any beeswax candle would do. After a blind taste test of samples gathered from 24 different Amish candlemakers within a 50-mile radius, Collin determined that the Yoder family on County Road 13 made the best candles he had ever tasted. Collin knew after his first bite of Sample #9 that this was the candle for him. The floral honey notes, he found, were exquisitely complimented by a fresh vegetal aftertaste, followed by a smoky finish that elevated the whole experience to something close to operatic.

And now, as Collin lights the single pinecone-shaped beeswax candle that tops the cake he baked for himself to mark his 70th birthday, he realizes that candles have consumed his life. He pauses for a moment to make a silent wish before blowing out the flame, then carefully lifts the candle to his lips, licks the frosting off the bottom, and bites into it as if it were an apple. Just like the first time he tasted the Yoder’s candle, Collin is moved to the point of singing. But in spite of years of candle wax coating his throat, his voice is as rough and grating as the rusty windmill that screeches its complaints against the slightest breeze. The windmill that looms over the family plot that holds the manicured graves of his parents. The family plot where one day—a day closer to him now than at any other time in his life—Collin’s wish may come true and he will miraculously saponify into a better version of himself that will burn brightly for a thousand years.

Kip Knott’s writing has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Drunk Monkeys, Eunoia Review, (mac)ro(mic), New World Writing, ONE ART, and Versification. Two new full-length poetry books are forthcoming in 2021: Clean Coal Burn (Kelsay Books) in June, and Hinterlands (Versification Publishing House), later in the year. More of his work may be accessed at kipknott.com

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First you have to remember things the way they happened. This is not always easy. Ravens flew past me that day and that’s what I remember first about Josephine. She appeared and so I thought, for a moment, that she came with the ravens. That she was a raven. One could be excused for thinking of Josephine as a raven: jet black hair to her waist, the bird-like quality of her tiny bones, her words that came in squawks and bursts.

Second is the thing that didn’t happen second but it goes here anyway. That is the day Josephine took us for a ride in her convertible BMW, or rather we thought it was hers. We drove Sunset all the way to the ocean. She loves corners and Sunset has many and she took them fast. It was exhilarating. We screamed and we loved it. And her, we loved her. When we got to PCH, she drove straight across to the parking lot. She did not, however, stop at the booth where the man stood with his hand outstretched, awaiting five dollars. She did not stop for the ricket-wooden fence. She only stopped because the car mired in the sand and could no longer move forward. And then she spun the wheels so the car dug itself deeper into the beach. We scattered in all directions when people of responsibility came toward us. I looked for the others. I ended up alone on a bus to Santa Monica and another to Hollywood.

Third is the boy she loved. The boy we all loved. His name was Full Moon and he claimed to be a native Californian but could not name a tribe. What did we care? He was tall and lovely. Like Josephine with long black hair, but his bones were solid and substantial. I thought he could take care of me forever. He chose her to take care of. I didn’t mind, none of us did because it was Josephine. 

Fourth is the idea: If not ravens, then what? If not Josephine, then what? Where is my life when I need it? Why does she wander across my landscape? What led all of us to believe in her? In anything? ee cummings wrote about “the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart” and I wonder what keeps them in our sky? If I were a star, I would have left a long time ago.

Fifth comes last in one cycle:  Full Moon and Josephine implode very slowly. We watch, fascinated, repulsed, amused, jealous. It is a coming apart that charges everything in its vicinity with electricity and spark. We argue with each other. One leaves a room and we don’t realize it at that moment, but we never see that one again.  I see opportunity but so do others and Full Moon slashes his way through a field rich and ripe with grain, leaving behind empty husks, as if the locusts had invaded. So this is what it is to be empty.

Six is when I am alone. Rhinos trample me. Black footprints invade me. Josephine’s laugh. Pain can become constant so that I would die if it left me.  

On the seventh full moon we are all that remain and we raise beer bottles in a toast to Josephine for the time she gave us. Beer makes us drowsy so we descend back to oblivion where we are warm. Content and confused, we try giving our hearts to each other. Grief is an empty doorway and no matter how many times I walk through, I am here, always.

Amy Jones Sedivy is a high school English teacher, a career that would surprise her teen-age self. Her favorite class to teach is creative writing; she enjoys the students’ originality and enthusiasm. Amy has been published online and in print journals on and off since the early 90s. She lives in Los Angeles with her artist husband and most (but not all) of her stories are about artists.

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It sits at an angle, no longer plumb with the sky, at odds with our world. The fence seems sturdy, I went out and prodded it to make sure it’s safe. The squirrels scamper over it with aplomb, accustomed already to its slant.

My wife worries that it’s going to fall flat into our elderly neighbor’s yard, but I remind her that we’re only renters. We’ve already told the management company a couple times. I think it was their company who had the wooden fence built when they bought the house twenty-some years ago.

Our elderly neighbor hasn’t complained about it. She thanked me for three lemons I left on her doorstep. 

We have a nice back yard in the city. It’s small with a giant oak tree in one corner, a small, square patch of green lining the cemented section with the old wicker furniture. We have three bird feeders out so the morning songs are from yellow-bellied finches and dark-eyed juncos, cooing mourning doves and the hummingbirds’ endless chirps. 

In the morning, I find my wife in front of the window, coffee cup in hand, her head bent an angle. 

“What’s wrong?”

“I think it’s sagged a little more in her direction.”

I turn my head at the angle and move it from that angle to normal to angle. “I think you’re right.”

My wife calls National Management again. Two days later our management company sends out a representative to evaluate the fence. We safely open the side gate to let him in and walk down the clean pathway to the back yard. My wife’s wiry hand tightly grips my left wrist. The fence looks even worse. The rep takes pictures of it with his cellphone, standing on top of the wicker couch for a different angle. Then I take his picture with the slanted wall because he wants one. He gives a thumbs up. I hear him laugh when he sees it, slipping his phone into his pocket. We walk to the gate. 

“So what happens now?” I ask, opening it up for him but keeping my distance.

“Nothing,” he replies, walking out. “It looks fine.”

I point down the pathway. “Don’t you find the angle troubling? Especially if it falls into my neighbor’s yard? What if she calls the city?”

He signs a form and places it on the edge of our front planter box. Proof he was here. “Naw, it’s solid. I talked to the old lady beforehand. She’s fine with it. The city’s fine with it. But thanks for letting us know.” I close the gate and walk to the backyard. My wife listens to the singing birds. I hand her the form.

We both reflexively look at the wall. It appears more tilted. My wife sighs and walks back inside. 

The birds keep singing. I don’t know if it’s because they’re happy or hungry.

That night we eat dinner outside, rollups crammed with healthy things, watching the wall. It seems to have sunk even further, the top of the fence beginning to arc down toward her house. Luckily, the slanted section only lines the grassy area, and her house is safe. She has a small white dog who my wife fears might be innocently sleeping on the grass in her backyard when it finally falls.

“We have to do something,” she says, a sprig of arugula sprouting from the side of her mouth. 

I wipe sweat from my face. “Honey, according to our lease, we’re only allowed to do something with the management company’s approval.” She nods at me and looks to the fence.

The next morning I find her in a chair next to the window that overlooks the fence. She types on her laptop and sits there most of the day. 

“Something’s going to happen,” she whispers as the dark starts to invade our living room. I close the curtain and make dinner. Later that night, I wake up to go to the bathroom only to find my wife sitting in the chair again. “Let’s go to bed,” I say. She drinks her water, and we go back to bed.

In the morning, she’s again at the table. Her laptop closed. I know she has to log in remotely for work, but she never opens her laptop that day. That night she shrugs off dinner, staying at the table. At nine p.m. she makes a full pot of coffee.

“We can’t keep doing this,” I say, shutting off the coffeemaker. “It’s been a couple days.”

“It could hurt someone.” I understand her fear. Elderly neighbor, little dog, grandkids visiting. Bad things happen to innocent people, not that our management company cares. I hug her, not wanting her to worry, but it might be too late.

I call the management company again and express serious concern with the fence. The representative, a different one, listens and replies the issue’s already closed. In fact, it was closed before the phone call. Have a nice day. I slide the phone in my pocket and go outside to find my wife and deliver the news.

She’s outside in her pajamas. There’s a rope tied to the top of one of the leaning fence posts. She has the other end of it tied around her waist and pulls against the fence, the rope taut and stretched, tight around my wife’s waist. “Look it’s working!” she says as she gives it another pull. She gasps for breath, her face red, the veins engorged on her neck. “It’s working! It’s working!” She calls to me. I slide the phone in my pocket and pull with her, the weight heavier than I expected.

Ron Burch’s fiction has been published in numerous literary journals including South Dakota Review, Fiction International, Mississippi Review, and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His new novel, JDP, comes out in 2021 from BlazeVOX books. He lives in Los Angeles.

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I caught sight of him standing near the nails. My first thought had been the bakery, he always had a leaning toward anything iced, but something told me I might find him in the hardware store, so I went there instead. His gray hair curling from beneath a faded baseball cap confirmed I’d made the right choice. From two aisles away, I watched while he contemplated the selection. A clerk approached and offered assistance. “I reckon I can figure this out.” I recognized the tone, a raspy indifference that accompanied most everything, be it compliment or criticism. The clerk backed away.

When I switched to his aisle, it was a subtle maneuver choreographed with caution in mind. I settled a few feet away, but to him there was nothing but the nails. I wasn’t there, nor was anyone else. So I spoke: “You building something?” 

“No,” he said, “Nothing like that. My wife wants me to hang a picture and I need a nail.”

His wife. My grandmother. Ten years gone.

“I see,” I said. “Then you’ll need something small.” I reached in the bin for what looked like the perfect picture hanging nail.

“This won’t do. It’s much heavier.”

I asked how much heavier and he studied the nail, then focused on something I couldn’t see. Then he looked at me and said, “Lots.”

I pinched up a larger nail and held it out for inspection. “A ten-penny nail,” he said. “That’s just what I need.” I’d never heard a nail described as ten-penny and asked what it meant, but my question passed unanswered. My guess is he knew, but it didn’t matter. To him, things were what they were, named or not. 

We walked toward the register, him holding the nail like a trophy, me with a hand on his shoulder. He said something about how pleased she’d be and in that moment, I envied his inability to remember. Outside, I circled back to the ten-penny nail, asked again about the name and this time his eyes came alive with seemingly fresh recollection. His answer detailed theories so plausible, I wondered which was true, but before I could ask, he skidded into a dark patch. “Speaking of nails,” he said, “I need one. My wife wants me to hang a picture.”

My first thought was to make mention of the one we’d just purchased. Instead, I led him back in the hardware store. And we bought another ten-penny nail.

Foster Trecost writes stories that are mostly made up. They tend to follow his attention span: sometimes short, sometimes very short. Recent work appears in Ariel Chart, Fiction Kitchen Berlin, Right Hand Pointing, and The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts. He lives near New Orleans with his wife and dog.

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CW: abuse


What’s Your ACE (Adverse Childhood Experience) Score?

Take the Quiz

1. On a cool evening in March, did your father stumble across the foyer, grab your mother by her neck, spray her face with hot spit and laugh while she struggled to breathe? Yes/No

2. Did you later find your mother in a dark closet, praying behind the laundry basket, and when you tried to touch her cheek, did she bite your hand with rage and leave a horseshoe-shaped scar, jagged with teeth marks, that you see now every time you reach for something: your car keys, a lover, the stars? Yes/No 

3. Did you dream one night that you were in stuck in a rain storm, a hot deluge of water bullets, sharp and pounding against your skin, only to realize that you weren’t dreaming at all, but that your drunk father had staggered into your bedroom and peed on you? Yes/No 

4. Did your older cousin pull you down the cement stairs into your uncle’s basement, slip his fingers into your panties and tell you that you liked it, you little whore? Yes/No  

5. Did your classmates crack jokes about your slimy hair, the stench of your clothes, the fact that your lunch box had only boiled eggs and Club crackers? Yes/No  

6. Did your father catch you stealing cigarettes from his suit pocket and decide you’d never amount to anything?  Did he speak to you through the whip of his brass belt buckle, because that’s the only language you’ll ever understand? Yes/No 

7. Were you put on “bruise watch” at school? Yes/No  

8. Did your brother talk like a lover to his veins while he pumped them full of dragon rock? Did you find him sprawled out on the bathroom floor, blue as the sea, cold as arctic wind? Yes/No 

9. Did your mother wake you before dawn, press her pale finger to your lips, slip you into the backseat of a car, drive for miles with the headlights off, dye your hair in a gas station bathroom on the outskirts of Frisco, change your name to Lisa and tell you that Darleen, the girl you thought you were back in Dallas, is dead? Yes/No  

10. Did you often wonder what it felt like to be loved? Yes/No  

Results: Give yourself one point for every “Yes.” 

Your ACE score is 10.  

Toxic stress from your childhood has altered your brain development, hindered your ability to focus, make decisions, learn. Your relationships are not healthy or stable; you struggle with finances, job stability, substance abuse. The likelihood that you will develop chronic pulmonary lung disease is 390 percent higher than your counterparts with ACE scores below 4; hepatitis, 240 percent; depression, 460 percent; alcoholism, 700 percent; attempted suicide, 1220 percent. 

What’s Your PCE (Positive Childhood Experience) Score?

Take the Quiz

1. Were you left at your grandmother’s house for weeks? Did she pull you into her arms, sing silver-spun lullabies and softly kiss your cheeks? Yes/No If yes, deduct 1

2. On sun-soaked summer afternoons, did you and your best friend, Jade, canoe across the glassy waters of Aquia Creek, finger the yellow lily pads pushing above the mud-brown surface, watch the sky until darkness fell and a white moon hung bright?  When Jade said, “once upon a time…” did you fill in the blank with stories full of hope and triumph, sparkle and bliss? Yes/No If yes, deduct 1

3. Did your 8th grade teacher hand you a copy of Catcher in the Rye one day, Lord of the Flies the next? Did you stay up reading night after night, and writing furiously in your rainbow journal with the matching unicorn pen? Yes/No If yes, deduct 1

4. Did you bravely take a creative writing elective? Did the teacher pull you aside, the crisp pages of your short story in hand, and describe your extraordinary lyricism, your powerful voice, the way you make words sing? Yes/No If yes, deduct 1

5. Did you visit a famous tattoo artist in Miami and did she turn that scar on your hand, the one with the jagged teeth marks, into a double-sided helix? Do you see it now in everything: galaxies and weather patterns, seahorses and sunflowers, the horns of antelopes and sheep, your own finger prints, the DNA of every living thing? Yes/No If yes, deduct 1

6. Do you often visit Gravelly Point Park, lay on the grass and look up at the roaring sky where jetliners fly so low you think you can touch them? Yes/No If yes, deduct 1

7. Have you always felt a kinship with trees, the language of their sway, the sound that bird wings make when they launch from blooming branches in spring? Yes/No If yes, deduct 1

8. Is your lover standing beside you right now, warm fingers laced with yours, watching the green tentacles of the Northern Lights whip and whirl across an Alaskan sky? Have you decided that beauty, alone, is a reason to live? Yes/No If yes, deduct 1

Results: Your ACE score is now 2.  

Trauma changes the brain; healing changes it too.

Jamy Bond’s stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Barren Magazine, The Forge, Janus Literary, Wigleaf, XRAY, The Sun and The Rumpus. Her work has been awarded a Fulbright grant and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She earned an MFA from George Mason University where she co-founded the literary journal, So To Speak. She lives in Washington, DC and is working on a novel about intergenerational trauma and aging. 

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We learned to smoke in the spring, watching The Big Lebowski, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, or Superbad on nights when the wind whispered through windows, and smoke rose into the air so wide and wondrous. Adulthood was something nascent, a still-forming beauty, something tender and wonderful to hold. We laughed at absurdity of adulthood, pissed on rugs, using it and losing it. We took to our rented basements, brushed off notions of bills and social politics and said fuck it, a cry that rose into the night. And obviously, we mocked parental visions of the future as reactionary, doctors, lawyers, businessmen, things to be relegated to Trotsky’s dustbin of history while we strode up and down streets, laughing, into Burger Kings and McDonalds’s when late-night munchies called, and Coke fizzled with joy. Of course, we wake and baked and we carried six packs with pride, even if they were just Budweiser, while others shook their heads and told us to just grow up again. Accept responsibility, the world’s a jungle. We love you, we love you, but love always was followed by a but, a defect on display. Hair’s too long, laughter isn’t professional enough, sounds like a constipated goose, walk straighter, don’t march like a bunch of kids.  In spring, they told us a thousand don’ts, but not a thousand dos. All in good time, we said, we’d learn, we’d made it to adulthood, hadn’t gotten run over, hadn’t ended up in the gutter.

In spring, we wanted to do, do, do, and don’t was a dirge from Debbie Downer.

By summer, we smoked a little less, adulthood beginning to demand in voices we couldn’t pacify. We began to see debts, interest rates rising from screens like unbeatable creatures. Cars broke down and we had to learn how to fix and not just cruise. We tried to bury them, but collections calls rose, words like delinquent, risk, payment plan, installment, and debt peppering our parlance. Wallets grew tighter and appliances broke. We partied a little less and withdrew into the world of news alerts, political deals, shootings, families dissolving. Those stories became our daily companion. We communicated in texts, boiled greetings to emojis and abbreviations. Learned to become obsequious, sir and ma’am our steady companions in offices, even if douchebag and fascist were bandied in secret. Oh, how we graded student exams, edited manuscripts, and worked behind call centers, trying to boil technologically befuddling principles down to simple English. And we absorbed criticisms, storing them as carefully as possible in consciousnesses, piles of a Jenga tower that threatened to collapse. Too slow, not smiling, smile more, be upbeat, ask the customer about their day, don’t ask them too much, you asked too much.

By fall, we rose from beds with groans, slunk downstairs, to cars, coffee, oversized Diet Pepsis, and to office spaces. The criticisms in our mind began to fall, but we couldn’t find the words to stop the fall. We nodded, nodded, as if nodding could banish. When we boozed, we did it at home, too weary to trudge blocks to the sounds of pulsating jukeboxes and windows lit with warmth and welcome beer was replaced with the sharpness of vodka, the occasional reverie of overpriced moscato or merlot consumed in the shadows, while the moon tried to get us to come out and play and we drew the curtains tighter. We stopped answering texts, promising tomorrow, the tomorrow after tomorrow, watched some cynical Netflix show or another. Or watched people kick each other in certain bodily regions, because we felt too old to absorb dialogue.

When the curtains were open, we yelled at people partying in apartments across the way, in courtyards, and we lambasted bodies bouncing and laughing up and down our streets. We dissected stained, skimpy purple tank tops, tight jean shorts, baggy midnight-colored sweatpants that smelled stale. The pot they carried, wafting into furniture-polish scented apartments. Lemon or pine scented, naturally. We mocked the rap beats that rose from cell phones and Spotify playlists and we demanded they go, go, go, be gone, be gone. But sometimes, when they were gone, we looked their direction and offered a vaya con dios, followed by a long and cracked smile. We tried to follow them up the street, but couldn’t track their paths, trying every street and avenue, looking to capture an ember of laughter. We yelled, hello, hello, sorry, sorry, cried out contrition or something that resembled it. We even leapt, standing on tiptoes, but catching only the charcoal-colored clouds, the chill and the crackled leaves descending, their dance dissolving, leaves landing to cold, crunched earth.

Yash Seyedbagheri is a graduate of Colorado State University’s MFA program in fiction. His stories, “Soon,”  “How To Be A Good Episcopalian,” and “Tales From A Communion Line,” were nominated for Pushcarts. Yash’s work  has been published in The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Write City Magazine, and Ariel Chart, among others.

“I don’t know the scientific names of plants and flowers,” she says. “But I can tell you how to ride the bus from, let’s say, Hunter’s Point to Stonestown Mall.” She breathes in and out three times, but he only stares at her, so she points to his backpack on the ground and tries again. She says, “I probably can’t fill in the blanks on your quiz about Greek gods or the food pyramid, but I have private deities and secret snacks from my cousins in the Philippines, and I will share both with you, if you ask.”

He’s not sure what to make of her, this fellow 11-year-old whose vocabulary includes the word “deities” and whose mother lets her wear gigantic gold hoop earrings and t-shirts that say things like “stone cold fox.” He wants to touch the tip of her nose with his own, wants to trace the lines on her palms. He stares at a spot in the sky just above her head. He understands that she is waiting for him to speak. He manages: “I already have a best friend.”

“Oh? I don’t remember asking if you do or if you don’t,” she says. She flips her hair over her shoulders and considers him, her stare level and sincere. He can barely stand it. She’s like an x-ray machine; she sees the white of his bones, the rush of his blood. “Are you scared?” she says at last. She makes her big eyes extra big; she raises her dark brows. “Okay. I’ll give you one more chance.”

“I don’t need another chance,” he says. “I’m sure.” He’s not really sure at all, only desperate to free himself from her scrutiny. He picks up his backpack and swings it over his shoulder. “Are you deaf or what?”

“What was that you said?” She cups her hands around her ears.

“I said ‘are. you. deaf.’” He says this before he realizes she was making a joke.

“Oh. Oh.” She moves her lips from one side to the other, and when he sees that she is trying not to cry, he wants to punch himself in the face, he wants to hurl his body through space and never return to earth, not ever. What should he say now? She swallows hard and rushes past him, so close they bump shoulders. 

In the years that follow he’ll catch sight of her a few times a week, her hair blue-black like crow feathers, her eyes as big as ever. She will look away at the last moment and pretend not to see him, but he waves anyway and takes the rejection as his due. He gets her number and texts her, and every time she doesn’t answer (which is every time), he imagines that she almost did, and it inspires him to try again. His daydreams are full of her. By junior year, he wants to ask her if maybe he hasn’t been punished enough; he wants to let her know that if she’s interested he could really use that one-more-chance she offered all those years ago. But she is flanked by boys all the time, boys who were less stupid than he was when she looked at them and told them amazing, incredible things.

In college he drinks beer and smokes weed and wonders what’s become of her, her and her mysterious gods, her weird Filipino snacks. He’ll explain this to a person who is trying to love him, and the person will tamp down their jealousy and pretend not to care, but how could they not? All his life he will parse his memories of her, and coax from his staid imagination the things she might have done or said. He sees her stare up at the night sky, hears her say, “I don’t know how to read what’s in the stars.” And he thinks, yes you do.

Veronica Montes is the author of the award-winning chapbook The Conquered Sits at the Bus Stop, Waiting (Black Lawrence Press, 2020) and Benedicta Takes Wing & Other Stories (Philippine American Literary House, 2018). Her flash fiction has been published in Wigleaf, SmokeLong Quarterly, CHEAP POP, Fractured Lit, Lost Balloon, and elsewhere.

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Since we discovered the bottles, I can’t stop counting, and my therapist reassures me, tells me it is anxiety’s way of working through fresh trauma, but all I know is that at night, after I’m done playing mommy and left prostrate on my back staring at the ceiling fan, it feels like I must count to survive, and so I perform Cole Prize–worthy mathematical equations that stump me time and again and always, always, I start with the bottles: those we found that dimension-rocking afternoon, plus the ones I didn’t find, but my dad did (in the attic a few weeks later), and the complexities of the items—of the empty liquor bottles piled into jagged, glassy mountains and the numbers populating my endless algebraic loops—somehow keep me from going to sleep and from staying awake and my counting order is always the same: the photo first, the haunting, sickening photograph I captured electronically, a perfectly timed snapshot of a family’s demise, the 1 of Mom sitting on the bed (the rest of us out of view since we were working, uncovering her secret again and again in every drawer and corner), of Mom hovering over her hidden treasures like the ghost of piracy she’s come to be, just watching us as we pile and pile—bottles clinking their clinks that I’m so glad I didn’t count, into the rising heap, spotted with crumpled cigarette packs and brown prescription bottles and used tissues for the love of God—used tissues?—and I know by memory that the picture displays about 1/5 of what we found that day (that’s 20 percent, I tell myself and the ceiling fan blades as I solve), so if those bottles are 20 percent of what we found, and we filled 5 yardwork-sized trash bags with our discoveries on that first day, then I should multiply by 5 whatever is in the photograph, and I know by examining that photograph too fucking often that there are about 50 to 60 bottles in that image alone, so we probably bagged 250 to 300 empty bottles that afternoon, then, surprise surprise, I can’t forget (we mustn’t forget) to add the bags my father found hidden in the attic, well, not hidden exactly, but presented to him by my mother, when she led him 1 otherwise peaceful Sunday up the stairs, over the garage, and through the locked attic door, when she begged him not to “be mad,” and revealed her hidden booty—10 or 12 more trash bags full to the brim, which saved him the trouble of having to play hide-and-seek for each empty nightmare, a second surreal hide-and-seek I’m not sure he would’ve survived, so that’s a positive, I think to myself, as I try to add another 500 to 600 bottles to my total (carry the 1) or is it possible there were more, or fewer, and good lord, I haven’t even started the division yet, so if she had 1 bottle of alcohol per day, this woman who used to be 1/5 of my family but presents more like a carcass, and there are a total of 800 to 900 bottles and 365 bottles in a year . . . I mean, days in a year . . . wait, that’s how many lies, wait . . . I mean, how many bottles—the consumption of which all started according to her (the carcass, not the mother) in May 2009, coinciding (she posits) with my breast cancer diagnosis, which stings in strange and deep places—but we found the bottles in September 2011, or 2.3 years later—could it be that she drank that much in 2.3 years or no it must’ve been longer and the list of lies too extensive to possibly count and Jesus now things about my mother and the carcass are starting to make sense but, hold up, how many bottles were in the photo again? 

Let me start over.

Tracy Rothschild Lynch has written poetry and creative nonfiction for more than 20 years. She holds an MA from Virginia Commonwealth University and an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. When not writing, she devours books, plays mediocre tennis, watches movies, and divides her time between her home in Glen Allen, Virginia and London, where she currently lives with her husband Mike and a handsome one-eyed Shih Tzu named Fergus. She’s the proud mother of two young-adult, smarty-pants daughters. Tracy’s favorite thing is teaching. In addition to creating and teaching online creative writing courses for adults, she has worked with more than 200 teens in the past ten years, helping them find confidence and voice in their writing. Tracy has recently completed a memoir about her mother’s sudden death from secret alcoholism; is finalizing a collection of flash essays exploring the “micro-moments” of her breast cancer treatment; and is working on her first screenplay, which explores the quirks of southern small towns and the power of strong women.

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Elliot’s mother knew he would be a magician only days after he was born. “It’s amazing how he can just make things disappear,” she would joke with neighbors. “Money. Sleep. Poof! Vanished into thin air.” 

When Elliot was six, she nicknamed him Houdini. “I don’t know how the damn kid does it,” she explained to the women at Sunset Lanes. “But every man I bring to the house disappears as soon as they meet my rotten little Houdini.” She pushed hard on a half-finished cigarette deep into a black ashtray. “I just try to make them a nice meal is all. And poof! Gone before the salad is dressed.”

In high-school, Elliot bought his first magician’s set. He saved for months, stealing bottles of charcoal-filtered Vodka from his mother’s pantry then selling them to the popular kids. Before anyone could say “abracadabra” he was making pencils and quarters vanish into the ether. Pulling a rainbow of scarves from between teeth and out of ears.

At 18 he moved into an artists’ studio after his mother told him to leave. “You’re a man now,” she said pointing at him up and down as if he hadn’t yet noticed the body he inhabited. “Go.” 

The cramped studio housed five, six, seven artists, actors, musicians, models and one magician, depending on the day. Most didn’t do art so much as they did drugs, but it was all the same to Elliot. He was nose-deep in books learning from the great conjurers, tricksters, and illusionists of centuries past. The only contact with his mother came in the form of an invitation he mailed: Elliot the Magnificent, it read in a jagged hand-written scrawl. Palmdale Community Center. 8:00pm. One Night Only!

Among the six people that sat scattered about Conference Room 2, Elliot’s mother was not one of them. Beethoven’s Fifth began out of a portable CD player he borrowed from a roommate. A smoke machine belched out plumes of white fog that lingered low to the ground and smelled of wet paint. Elliot was dressed in black. His face blank. His cape red. The only prop was a large black box. It sat on wheels that squeaked as he rolled it to center stage. He pounded on top of the box then spun it around in circles, pounding on every side, boom, boom, like thick wood. An older lady in the back began to cough on the smoke. After a sweep of his arm and a bow, Elliot opened the top of the box and climbed in. Like a collapsing umbrella, the gangly limbs of the teenager stuffed and folded themselves inside, and the top slapped shut. 

The smoke machine continued to sputter while the half dozen onlookers sat and waited. The coughing lady in the back was first to leave. Then a younger woman followed, dragging with her a small boy. After the fourth movement finished, the symphony started again from the beginning. Two more women got up. One shrugged. The other shook her head, and they walked out. An older man decorated in age spots was the last to go. He pulled a handkerchief out of his back pocket, wiped his forehead and shuffled out of the building and into the warm night. When the symphony began for the third time, Elliot’s mother was in some shitty bar, downing her third whiskey and giving her number to a guy named Dale. By the time the symphony began for a fourth time, Conference Room 2 was completely engulfed in sticky damp fog. From floor to ceiling it expanded and thickened, swallowing the metal chairs, swallowing the fold-out tables along the back wall, and swallowing the black wooden box that sat somewhere in the middle of the room. The black wooden box that was and would now always be completely empty.

Eric Scot Tryon’s work has appeared in Glimmer Train, Willow Springs, XRAY Literary Magazine, Monkeybicycle, Berkeley Fiction Review, Bending Genres, LEON Literary Review, Wisconsin Review, and others. Eric is also the Founding Editor of Flash Frog. He lives in Pleasant Hill, California with his wife and daughter. You can find more info at www.ericscottryon.com or on Twitter @EricScotTryon.

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Sour Candy

{CONTENT WARNING: suicide and self-harm references} 

The link that directs you to ‘what to do if you are struggling right now’ is glaringly purple. Here are some resources to help yourself. 

No, I don’t think you understand. I am the problem. I can’t be trusted with anything. Just tell me how I can mop up my sticky existence from anywhere it may have spilled.  

A sour candy: I realise I won’t be the one to clean it. 

I wonder when I get to hell (and it will be hell. I have packed my summer clothes) if I will be new again, like a neatly packaged doll in a shop window, or if I will be loosely ambling around with weeping wrists or a mess of a head.  

If I remain the same jumble of broken connections and dreams that I have always been, which seems deliciously fitting, poetic justice – I will still be looking for a boyfriend in hell to fix me.  

I will get frustrated that I don’t look like the girl that seems to turn heads, the girl who is here for lying. She had her tongue removed as punishment, but when her mouth is closed, she looks so pretty. Paradoxically angelic, you wonder why this is her main residence.  

She glimmers; I walk around and leave ruby blood drops everywhere I step. I did study science at school like everyone else but it’s still a shock to me to know a person has this much blood, yet can still be so shallow. 

When you zone out at a spot on the wall, is such a mood, HAHAHA, everything is such a fucking mood. I’m told that’s dissociation, when you lose track for a few minutes or you sit in your towel for a while after a shower. I am a parody of a person, a walking, talking cartoon.  

I idly wonder if a TikTok about wanting to pull off your skin to get to your rotting soul would go viral.

Mantle

{CONTENT WARNING: abortion, body image, eating disorders} 

I assumed it would be a poetic experience, with searing pain written through it like a stick of rock. The kind people write blistering memoirs laced with hurt about. I removed my armour, and waited dutifully for a hail of arrows that never came. I was prepared for punishment, battle scars. I felt I deserved to have lasting reminders of the choices I had made. I was told that they would remove the pregnancy and I never asked what that meant, because I loathed that word. It tasted frightfully bitter. It made me think of adverts for laundry products, where they insist nothing is too difficult for their product to remove: except maybe this.  

I still wouldn’t be able to tell you which word I would prefer that they used. I knew the cargo I carried wasn’t a fully formed baby, but I still had visions of gently waking a child by poking them very gently on the nose. Brushing hair from her eyes, (she was always a girl) and carefully placing her in a basket and carrying out a Moses, an Old Testament. I would surely miss her, but she needs to drift off to her new family. I would tuck her in with blankets and toys so she will sleep, comforted, until she gets there.  

I never thought it fair to try and take responsibility for anyone else at all when the job I do with myself is so sporadic, so lacklustre. Mental illness bleeds into my existence like a carelessly spilled pot of ink on fabric. I can cover it up, I can stop the stain spreading, but it will never be what it was before. How can I ask another, someone I profess to love, to take a seat at that table? My mother did that to me: gave me a legacy I never sought, solicited or wanted.  

I want to smash that mantle, not pass it on. 

But just so you know, just because I was never meant to be a mother, doesn’t mean I don’t have maternal instincts. Please don’t assume that of me. Years later, I find myself absently cradling my stomach protectively: but it’s devoid of any life. I fill the void with food, and the lies I feed myself taste better than the snacks. Unsolicited advice about weight loss finds its way to me all the time. But they don’t know about my bump, my beautiful baby bump.

Camille Elizabeth Lewis is an avid reader and fledgling writer who lives and learns with borderline personality disorder. Her recent publications include poetry in Anti-Heroin Chic, Brave Voices Mag, and Sledgehammer Lit. She can be found indulging heavily in the Plath fantasia and crossing off days on a calendar until the next instalment of the ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ series is released. Camille resides in South West England.

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How the smoke never washed out of his shirts or his hair, how it fuzzed into the cotton fibers of his pillow. A dark sour smell, like motel ashtrays from the 1970s. Waiting on the sidewalk outside the 5th Street United Methodist Church, cigarette butts leaving black birdfoot trails on the chipped cement. All of them trading one addiction for another. Hunching over for a light, leaning against the wall, hoping the bricks held a memory of midday sun. He was always cold in those days. Legs jittering. Eyelid twitching. Rubbing the yellowed calluses on his fingers against his pick-flattened thumb, listening to the 6:30 choir practice sing about having once been lost, voices sweet and sure, like they had no doubt any lost thing could be found again.

Kathryn Kulpa has words in Cease, Cows, New World Writing, Atticus Review, and SmokeLong Quarterly. She is a flash fiction editor at Cleaver Magazine.

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By 4:30 PM on November 22, 1936, the sun had set, the sky was black. The four people in The Passavant Hospital Maternity Ward could not tell if the sun was up or down. It did not matter. Dad, Uncle Richard, Grandma Bess, and Grandma Jessie had been waiting hours for me to arrive and were bored and tired. 

The room itself held little initiative to stay awake. Timeless prints, undeserving of close inspection or comment, hung on four stark white walls. The prints, blending into the walls, hours before had become indistinguishable from the walls themselves. 

The reading material scattered on a blond wooden table was limited to fragments of various sections of Chicago newspapers and a few frayed editions of popular magazines. 

With conversation having run out, there were few options other than closing one’s eyes for a catnap, siesta, or whatever one might wish to call it, and slouch in an uncomfortable chair, attempting to doze. 

A few empty coffee cups on a plain wooden table confirmed that others before them had also waited in the room. Coffee was not an option. There were neither clean cups nor a coffee maker in the waiting area.

After several hours, the door opened, and Dr. Bloomfield came in with one of the nurses.

“Congratulations all. Bert Boy has arrived with ease. Aye, he is a bonnie, bonnie, laddie.

Eileen is doing fine.”

A cheer went up. Uncle Richard produced a flask. Dr. Bloomfield smiled, but shook his head.

Grandma Davidson had liked Dr. Bloomfield as soon as she met him. They both spoke the same English, the kind of English even thicker in the old country, where a Yank might need two days and more than a few drams of The Famous Grouse to understand it. Grandma was from a small town near Aberdeen. Dr. Bloomfield was born nearby.

Rich stood up and stretched. “Why don’t we duck out and celebrate for an hour… drinks and dinner are on me.”

Grandma Davidson nodded as Grandma Hoffman spoke up: “What do you think Jessie, might be better to leave the celebration to the boys… but it would be wonderful if they could bring us back some sandwiches.”

“I’m with you, Bess. Go ahead boys, lift a glass or two for Bess and me, and sandwiches sound fine. Bring me whatever looks good.”

One of the hospital people recommended a tavern about two blocks away.

Rich and Dad found the place easily and sat at the bar. By the second drink Uncle Richard was offering Scotch toasts. Rich eased into his native brogue after a few drinks. The owner of the tavern, a friendly guy named Al, served them. 

All was good. A new Davidson, mother doing well. Yes, all was going well… until it wasn’t.

Rich and Dad were on their third Scotch, when a fellow, not far away, said loudly to his buddies that what Hitler was doing was right. He stood, raised his glass, and, in an even louder voice, shouted, “Heil Hitler!” His right arm shot up in a Sieg Heil salute.

He was maybe fifteen feet away. Dad heard him; so did most people in the tavern. 

Dad’s mood changed instantly. From smiling and laughing with Rich, instinctively his eyes narrowed, his chin set. Dad’s breath came in quick bursts as he sprung from the barstool, purposely knocking it loudly to the floor as he walked over to the “tough guy.” 

Dad was a lefty; he kept his left hand free. With his right hand, Dad splashed the remainder of his drink in the Nazi’s face. “Drink this you God damned Nazi bastard.”

For his generation, Dad was a big guy… 6’2″, about 220 lbs., broad muscular frame. Rich was smaller, but one tough guy when he had to be. They had the genes and upbringing of the Davidsons. The Davidson boys could handle themselves.

A hard left hook to the jaw dropped the “Heil Hitler” man in a second. The Nazi’s two buddies jumped Dad, but by then Uncle Richard had Dad’s back. Within a couple of minutes, the first guy, the “Heil Hitler” guy, was lying on the bar room floor, unconscious, in a pool of blood. The other two were also on the floor, moaning, but conscious.

Rich went to pay the bill. The bartender happened to be the owner. He tore up the bill.

“Nice going buddy, those sons of bitches had it coming. This is on the house.”

Dad left a ten-dollar bill on the counter. “Thanks Al. Hold this for the next guy that decks one of these bastards and take your time before you call the police. See you next time my wife and I have a kid.”

Dad and Uncle Richard returned to the hospital. Mom was sitting up in bed and Grandmother Bess and Grandmother Jessie were speaking with her.

Dad’s first words to Mom after my birth were: “Eileen, I may have killed a man tonight.”

I don’t know if I heard them. Didn’t matter anyway, I always loved my father… still do.

Bert Davidson began his career in the Wyoming oil patch. A successful entrepreneur, Bert has fulfilled a life-long ambition of writing narrative non-fiction, having studied with Tom Daley for the past few years. His work has recently appeared in Fine Lines and Scarlet Leaf Review. Bert received his undergraduate degree at the Colorado School of Mines and earned his Master’s Degree in Industrial Administration at Yale University. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife of 45 years, Toby.

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My neighbor planted a plastic swing-set, staked into dirt a domed cage for climbing, and dubbed her lawn daycare. Brown and blue footholds studded green panels for budding belayers to practice their scaling. A fat cartoon car with yellow blind spots idled near trash cans, awaiting the horsepower of four toddler feet. Jump ropes slithered toward trellised tomatoes. Hula hoops hung from the garden hose hook. 

In want of a hedge trim and new ornamentals, my yard missed my son. He learned to toddle by gripping fat fists around the ringed handle of a popping push mower. Hours slid by as he sheared the plush carpet, reaped the faux earth, squealed at the stripes his crackling toy laid.

Grade school snuck up. While other kids freeze-tagged or dunked blown-up balls into safe driveway hoops, my son spent Saturdays spading a colony of craters deep in the dirt of our postage-stamp plot. I need many samples was all he would answer when I brought him a brownie, suggested a walk to the tip of the hill for the fireworks show. Unbalanced pH in the soil obsessed him. He sacrificed summer to a total re-seed.

He’ll grow out of it, the monsignor said, straight faced, un-punning.

Flora-obsessed and suffering spells after anything more than an hour indoors, at eighteen he pitched a pup tent amongst lilacs, sleep shrugging him off unless his body touched land. His father left then, citing parenting philosophies that forked irreconcilable, his tine leading to a life with Ivy League daughters and a wife who wore make-up.

My neighbor’s new children haven’t arrived yet. I make my escape in the echo-strewn night. I’ll sell the house later, hire a moving team of men my son’s age the day he walked into the river. I drive a hundred miles, hunker in a hotel, nothing in sight but a mall, two cell towers, blacktop for weeks.

Amy Lyons has published flash fiction in No Contact, Lunch Ticket, 100 Word Story, Literary Mama, and Anti-Heroin Chic. She’s a 2020 Best of the Net and Best Small Fictions nominee, and a 2021 honorable mention for Miami Book Fair’s Emerging Writer Fellowship in fiction. She holds an MFA from Bennington.

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It begins, and ends, with sourdough bread.

Ellis is in the kitchen, baking. He’s been kneading, stretching, folding, repeating. He holds the dough to the light and stretches until it’s almost translucent, then proves it, watches it slowly double in size. Clara comes over and they’re shaping and tucking it into the perfect round ball. He lets her slash the top after a second proving- a single cut down the middle- then bakes the bread until it’s golden brown. 

The nutty homely smell wafts through his flat as he brews some tea. He holds his breath in anticipation as Clara takes a bite, chews as crumbs from the crispy crust fall like tantalising confetti, goes: ‘Christ that’s good Ellis. Sourdough’s my favourite,’ and Ellis beams.

He’s feeling giddy. He can hardly believe he’s here, with this stranger in his home, completely out of his comfort zone. 

Clara goes: ‘I have to say, when you suggested this as our first date, I did think it was a bit… different.’

Ellis raises his eyebrows. ‘Oh?’

‘Like, I’d have preferred dinner in a posh restaurant with you treating us to bottle of Moet,’ Clara says as Ellis’ face drops, ‘but d’you know what, it’s actually been lovely.’

Later, she pulls her arms through her coat, stands on her tiptoes and kisses him quickly on the cheek, says, ‘Let’s have another date soon. I like you Ellis. You’re… really sweet.’

Ellis closes the door and exhales, relaxes, and retreats into his kitchen; scrubs the surfaces until they gleam. 

Time passes- days, weeks, months of dating.

‘But you’re twenty-nine,’ Clara says when he tells her he’s a virgin. He’s sitting on the bed, his pale skin exposed, as a blush spreads up his neck like a flood.

‘I am,’ he says, and there’s no denying it. That is his age. These are the facts. ‘There’s just…’ he scratches his neck. ‘I’ve just never met anyone and so…’ 

And then she waves her hand dismissively, tells him she hopes he’s a fast learner because she’s a cracking teacher.

Clara moves in. She clutters his flat, swaps his books for her photographs, leaves her clothes over the bedroom floor. 

‘Oh, are you really wearing that?’ she asks as they’re heading to a club to meet her friends.

‘Mhm.’

‘You’re so clueless, it’s adorable. Here, let me choose something more stylish. I don’t mind.’ 

The club makes his skin crawl; the music’s too loud, there are too many people, he doesn’t drink.

‘Lighten up babe, live a little,’ Clara goes, and Ellis thinks perhaps he should, but just then, a colossal man crushes on his foot and he thinks he wouldn’t mind returning to his quiet little life.

When they get back to his flat, Clara’s vomiting in his bathroom. He brings her water with a slice of lemon, ties her hair back and tucks her into bed. He watches her fall asleep, then bleaches every inch of the bathroom, showers until he’s clean again, washes every part of himself, winces as the shampoo falls into his eyeballs and stings, scrubs them anyway, every part of him, and then he’s mixing, stirring, piping, baking, reaching perfection until he feels tired enough to sleep.

Christmas changes too. Before Clara, he’d wake mid-morning, go for a run, cook a small lunch, fall asleep on the sofa underneath his favourite tartan blanket, wake early evening to eat some crackers and brie with cranberry, savouring every last bite, then soak in a bubble bath, his narrow limbs practically floating in the silky water and then head to bed with his novel: the perfect day. 

Now though, he’s at Clara’s family home on Christmas day. He brings homemade fudgy cappuccino crinkles and cottage cheese pogi’s as a gift, nervously hands them over in Tupperware boxes, but they’re tossed aside without thanks; wine would been better received, he thinks. Ellis finds himself gorging on a three-course meal which is overcooked and makes him feel sluggish, crushed at the dining table with strangers all talking over one another, vying for their voices to be heard.

‘Oh Ellis, you must come to Italy for Sally’s wedding,’ Clara’s mother says, clapping her hands.

Ellis blushes and flattens his shirt with his palm. ‘Oh, no thank you. I don’t even have a passport and I don’t think it would be for me. Thanks for asking me, though.’

‘What? Everybody’s got a passport surely. Haven’t you ever been abroad?’ Clara asks. ‘Not even as a child?’

‘Nope. Never.’

‘Christ. We’ll have to change that.’

‘I didn’t have a typical childhood…’ he says, but the conversation has moved onto politics.

Ellis doesn’t think it is going to work out with Clara after all. 

Still, he wants to make her happy, doesn’t like to think of anyone unhappy, and so when she’s gone to bed on Boxing Day, although his limbs feel heavy like cement, he’s somehow kneading, and exerting every ounce of energy, and then he’s crying, salty tears mixed with the imperfect dough underneath his insufficient kneading, ripping and tearing, unable to hold itself together, yet he continues because sourdough bread is Clara’s favourite and when she comes through the next morning, all sleepy eyed and takes a bite, he watches with anticipation- as though sourdough may mend her, him, them- and when she says, ‘Urgh, that’s so fucking dry Ellis, I thought this was your thing,’ with her face contorted and spits out the rest in an unsightly splodge on the gleaming kitchen top he scrubbed for forty nine minutes at four this morning, he internally curses himself for his imperfect bread, and he wonders if two people on earth can actually know each other at all, or if we are all just strangers, muddling along, trying our best, failing.

He thinks you can never really please somebody completely. 

He wipes his eyes.

Takes a shower.

Tries again.

Hannah Sutherland is a writer and teacher from Scotland. She placed 2^nd in the Writing East Midland’s Aurora Prize in 2020 and recently won Cranked Anvil’s first Flash Fiction competition. She’s been listed for Retreat West’s Short Story and Flash Fiction competitions, the Flash 500 Short Story Award, The Phare Magazine and Strands International Flash Fiction. Her stories have been featured in The Common Breath, The Phare Magazine, (mac)ro(mic), Fahmidan Journal and others. Her Novella-in-Flash was shortlisted for the Bath Novella-in-Flash Award and will be published by Ad Hoc Fiction in late 2021. Hannah tweets at @HannahWrites88.

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Fact: sleep deprivation can be used as a form of torture, bending perception until you offer whatever answers you must to escape, not dissimilar to the frantic bargaining of grief. I also read that you do sleep throughout the drought, quantum micro-slumbers keeping death at bay no matter how hard you try to beckon it in. My favorite fact, one I learned by experimentation: if you stay awake long enough you begin to hallucinate, badly. I tried every pill this year to outrun my nightmares, until monstrous ghostly stags began darting across the road on my morning commute and the sick irony of the situation hit me like a hoof to the windshield.  

When I stopped the pills, the visions did not disappear. Instead, they clustered at the beginnings and ends of sleep, loitering in portals to the astral plane. In these doorframes, my body seized, each attempt at motion deepening the sickening swell of waves, guts dropping through the bed bottom in a slow-motion dive. I scrabbled in shadowy borderlands, pulse clanging like my body was full of echoing pipes instead of bones. Many sufferers of sleep paralysis hallucinate demon possession or alien abduction or succubae. The only presence I sensed was you, lurking just out of my sightline. 

I became a student of lucid dreaming, the next-level seminar after sleep paralysis. If I could turn and catch your eye, I thought, I could control the storyline. I could disable your alarm, seduce you to stay. I could follow you out to your car in the damp May morning, sun slicing through fog from the valley, red maple buds crushed into steaming pavement. I could sit at your side and thumb the radio dial so you could keep both hands on the wheel. I could tell you that I wanted to take the long way to the airport. But beginnings and endings would scramble, usually to tangles of antlers and blooded asphalt. Once, I got you to the plane, only for it to go down over the Atlantic. Once, you were the stag, gutted on the median. Each night I would beg you to stay and each day I would wake to sweaty sheets, to dark alone. 

By fall I was tired, wrung out with nightly loss. There was only one way to end a sleep paralysis episode reliably, I had read, and that was to stop fighting against the drowning, and let consciousness or dreams claim your body from liminal terror, on their own inscrutable timeline. When my mind snagged at the doorway that night I let go and slipped under the waters. I did not bargain and I did not grasp, and then you spoke, voice tender as shadow: 

Just a few more minutes. 

And for once I was happy to be struck still, as the sun cut through the blinds and you nestled behind me, soft arms encircling, your breath warming my frozen skin, until it was time to wake up.

S.E. Hartz (she/her) is a queer fiction writer and environmental scientist living in Brooklyn, New York. She has work forthcoming from small leaf press and can be found on Twitter as @unsilentspring.

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Mrs. Johnson,

I received your message on my answering machine concerning Zane’s tardies and absences. I’ve talked with him about missing the bus. I go to sleep around 8 P.M. most evenings and though I tell Zane to go to sleep soon after, I know he doesn’t. 

You also mentioned his drawings. The doodles seem to cover every scrap of paper in my home, so I’m sure he’s doing the same at school. He’s always sketching those aliens, from that show about crystal gems, or some nonsense. It’s a show about lady space creatures with superpowers and there’s a boy too, a fat, funny-looking little boy named Steven. Lord knows Zane has tried to explain it to me a million times. Even though I don’t understand it, I keep letting him watch his program. I imagine it’s hard for him living with me in this retirement community. 

His mother loved to draw, too. My wife and I often found her with her art set alone in her room. She had so many pads of paper—and she really used them, not like these people who only draw on a couple of pages and buy a new one before the old one is done—every page was covered in colored pencil. I still have a few of the pads my wife saved in a box somewhere in my closet. 

You’re an English teacher, so you would’ve loved my wife. She was always reading. Reading the Bible mostly, but there are some good stories in there, too. Have you read the one about Hannah asking the Lord for a baby? God gave her a son and she named him Samuel. My wife and I tried for a long time to have a baby. Once she turned thirty-eight, I lost faith, but my wife kept on praying. Right before she turned forty, she gave birth to our only child, Samantha. We loved that little girl more than I can say. I know Hannah gave her son back to God, but I’m not sure I love God that much. I know you don’t teach religion at Zane’s school, but maybe you’ve been to church. Sometimes I wonder if God thinks I’m a Christian. Can you believe in God, but be unwilling to give him everything he wants? Is the belief enough to do the saving or do I have to lose it all? Can you imagine giving away a child after you prayed so hard to have her? 

After our Samantha died, my wife went shortly after. Sam by a car accident, my wife by complications after a stroke. I don’t blame her for leaving me behind. Our Samantha Rose was the brightest light in our lives and it’s dimmer here without her. My wife didn’t know what would happen to Zane’s father.

Sam met Kouame at college. When she brought him home, we thought he was her classmate. After she got pregnant, she told us he worked in the kitchen of her school’s cafeteria. When Zane was born, we learned Kouame was in the States on a work visa. Sam didn’t give her son Kouame’s last name. That’s why Zane is a Thompson like me. I bet Zane—and his teachers—are glad he doesn’t have a long last name full of vowels like Kouame does.

Zane was only a year old when the light of our world was snuffed out. Kouame couldn’t take the shadow-filled post-Samantha world either because he stopped working. He took care of Zane and I helped him with money whenever I could, but he couldn’t seem to keep a job. That’s why when he got pulled over for a broken taillight, they realized his work visa had expired earlier that year. 

You’d be surprised how easy it was for them to send Kouame back to Liberia and to designate me Zane’s rightful guardian. That’s when I found out Samantha never named Kouame on the birth certificate. My life is so full of questions for people who can’t give me answers.

My wife and I were simple people who had one bright and shining star to adore and we did so faithfully for twenty-two years. Now my wife and child are gone, and I’m left with this little boy, who is not as little as the toddler they gave me when Kouame was sent away. Sometimes, I can still find the face I remember when I see him sleeping on the couch in the morning, with one of those stupid game controllers in one hand. 

I know it’s not good for him to watch so much TV or to spend hours playing video games, but he has no friends here. There is one part of that show I mentioned, the one with the weird boy with a gem in his belly button, that I remember Zane explaining. I think that kid’s mom died when he was a baby, too. Have you noticed, in all of Zane’s drawings, I never see any sketches of the kid or the dad, just the women? I wonder what it’s like for a kid to never say the name Mom during the day.  

I’ll continue to talk to Zane about going to sleep earlier and getting on the bus consistently. I understand that school’s important. I also understand that I’m his only parent, but my name isn’t Mom or Dad.

Raymond Thompson

P.S. I asked Zane to deliver this. I trust it’s still in its sealed envelope when it reaches you.

Celesté Cosme has been teaching high school English for fifteen years. She is an MFA candidate at Rosemont College, where is the Flash Editor for their literary magazine, Rathalla Review. Her CNF essay “For Greenwood” appears in Pangyrus, and her flash “Thief” is forthcoming in the South Florida Poetry Journal. Her current WIP is an MG novel about two kids whose best-friend is the ghost of Nina Simone. She lives in New Jersey with her photographer husband, curious five-year-old, and crazy tuxedo cat.

I gift you a fruit bowl to say ‘Happy New Home’. 

To my boys? No. Practise this: to my son and his father.

The underside is lacquered red; only the cradle bares the grain. Your eyebrows rise-fall-rise as you consider the bowl, the motherly gesture. 

Every hour pours out its sorrow; I channel it anew – away. Our child sees nothing sad in two fruit bowls, two homes. His face beams pure adventure. 

*

When I pick him up on Sunday, I keep my coat on. 

There are two green apples in the bowl. 

It holds them gently, makes no promises.

Lucy Goldring is a Northerner hiding in South West England. She has been shortlisted by the National Flash Fiction Day (NFFD) three times and won Lunate Fiction’s monthly flash competition in 2020. Lucy was nominated for Best Small Fictions 2020 by both NFFD and 100 Word Story. Tweets @livingallover

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Tomorrow, her phone’s weather app predicts a thirty percent chance of rain at 9 a.m., sixty percent by 10 a.m., and one hundred percent between the hours of eleven and two. She’s willing to accept the iffiness of the morning hours, placing her and her daughter’s galoshes side by side by the front door, ready to go beneath the dollar store Frozen II umbrella she’d hung from the handle so they won’t forget it again. But the cockiness of the one hundred percent prediction fills her body with rage so red she wants to throw her wineglass into the fireplace, tear at the skin on her arms. 

Who’s to say anything will happen with that level of certainty? Will the ache in her left knee continue to predict changes in barometric pressure? Will the sprig of her daughter’s dirty blond hair, held in a locket at her chest, finally bring the luck it so long ago promised? Will the rain come in sheets or waves of gray mist?

Tomorrow, it will likely rain. Tomorrow, they will very likely drive to her appointment where they will more than likely receive information that will rather certainly change their current course, one way or another. 

But tonight, the clocks spring forward. They’ll lose an entire hour, just like that. The blink of an eye. Less than. And if they can arbitrarily change time like that, how can anyone be one hundred percent sure of anything?

Kelle Schillaci Clarke is a Seattle-based writer with deep L.A. roots. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Superstition Review, Pidgeonholes, Barren Magazine, Lunate, Cotton Xenomorph and Bending Genres. She can be found on Twitter @kelle224.

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Ellen unclasps her American flag pin from her blazer, and tucks it into her purse; she glides into a bathroom stall where the pantsuit and heels come off, and she resumes her jeans, sneakers, and flannel. They’re a size too large, now. She hails a cab. En route she traces the sparkling silhouettes of the geodesic domes, takes in the faint dewy aroma of yeast from the Miller plant. The stadium rears up on the left – the new one, she calls it, though the children born alongside it have college degrees. But it had just opened its doors when she left, that first time.

The unreconstructed spur of the highway careens to the right, northward, away from the airport, her plane, and the tawny dust of an ancient civilization still clinging to the soles of the kitten heels in her carry-on. She had worn them at palaces and ministries, at balls and summits, in the smoke-filled rooms and in barbed-wire-edged camps. In them she’d skirted past the uniformed men with AK-47s. Greeted the camo-sporting teenagers opposite, toting identical weapons. Walked messages back and forth. Offers. She’d always rephrased the threats.

The taxi driver says, “So where’re you coming from?”

She tells him. The foreign syllables land like so many bubbles on his ear.

“Oh,” he says, the vowel long and nasal and achingly familiar. “Yah. I heard about that on the news.” The th sounds harden into ds. “Ya know, yer probly not usedta the weather here anymore. It’s goin’ to get cold tonight.” Co-weld.  “You might wanna get yourself a coat.” Co-wet.

“Thanks,” Ellen says. They’re rolling up the off-ramp, and suddenly they’re in a neighborhood, where the lovingly-remembered bungalows sit in dignity like stately ladies from another century. In the last days, she and the staff had cabled back to Washington to report the collapse in negotiations, while hunkering down, curling up under their desks, and awaiting extraction. Ellen had dozed between mortar rounds and dreamt she was nine again – sunburned, happy, and hungry – gleefully sprinting toward her house. 

Not away.  

From anything.

The maple and ash leaves dance in the September air, extend dainty taupe and tangerine greetings. Ellen notes the street numbers rising.  She fumbles for a Kleenex. And then the image in her mind’s eye suddenly corresponds to the block before her, except for an expanded garage here and a repainted front door there. The cab stops, she pays, she rushes to the door.

And her mother enfolds Ellen in her arms, and smiles, “Welcome home, Ambassador.”

“Not anymore, Mom.”

Over her mother’s shoulder she can see the edge of another familiar skyline, obscured by smoke and red chyrons. Her mother switches off the TV.

“Let me get you a sweater,” she says, and bustles off upstairs. Ellen sinks gratefully into the sofa, and her thousand-yard stare lands outside the front window. The kids across the street are coloring with sidewalk chalk and dancing, turning the soles of their shoes into rainbows.

Linda McMullen is a wife, mother, diplomat, and homesick Wisconsinite. Her short stories and the occasional poem have appeared in over ninety literary magazines. She received Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations in 2020. She may be found on Twitter: @LindaCMcMullen.

All opinions expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not represent the Department of State or the U.S. government.

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The boys stopped calling after their mother died. It was only Hope that kept up the tradition, sitting down with a cup of coffee and dialing her childhood phone number as she watched steam curl above her mug. If her father was back from church and if it was a good day, he answered. Otherwise, she would listen to it ring and ring, picturing the pale, yellow handset in the kitchen. After the funeral he’d unplugged the answering machine. It remained on the counter until the visit when Hope tucked it into her suitcase. She hadn’t listened to the tape, yet, it was enough to know that it was there, the long-ago recording of her mother’s voice, the cheerful instructions to leave a message that ended with a door slam and her mother’s surprised “oh!” before it clicked over to the beep.

It was Michael, the dutiful eldest, who finally texted her. He hadn’t come to one of the kid’s birthdays, even though they had mailed an invitation, as usual. Hope was in Cincinnati for work and she didn’t respond right away, because when was the last time her father had picked up to tell her about the weather and wonder aloud about the science curriculum he no longer needed to plan?

There was an envelope waiting for her when she returned. Her name and address clearly there, if written by a shaking hand. Inside there was an article torn out of Smithsonian Magazine on the patterns of fireflies. Her father had underlined a sentence mid-way through. “Some researchers are trying to control the patterns.” Hope put the article on her fridge with a magnet and texted Michael, Heard from Dad. She didn’t mention he had neglected to include his usual note. Michael sent her back a thumbs-up emoji and she imagined that would be the last communication until the email about Thanksgiving.

Still, she called, first from New York City and then from London. Berlin, London again, and then from Los Angeles. Sometimes, with the time differences, she couldn’t be sure he was awake and she only let it ring a few times before she clicked off and returned to her laptop. At Christmas they tried to Skype her in but the connection was spotty. Sitting on a hotel bed she’d watched her father shuffle by once and though she called out his name he hadn’t heard, or hadn’t known to answer, and he’d returned to the chair in the corner as he absent-mindedly tapped his fingers against his knee and watched the kids tear through wrapping paper and boxes.

Her childhood house had once butted up against a wooded area with a creek, and her brothers liked to reminisce about their outdoor boyhoods, and the Scout badges their father helped them meet right out the back door. By the time she came along, a surprise and her mother’s last chance for delicate lace dresses and neatly pulled braids, the trees had been ripped up for a golf course and a condo development called Bubbling Brook. Hope could hear a group calling to each other and the thwack of clubs as she unlocked the door and went inside. Michael had been the one to drive their father to the memory-care facility, and he’d let him pack on his own. The suitcase had contained every worn sock from the top dresser drawer, one book on the solar system, and an empty glass jar. Hope would gather the rest.

It was late evening by the time she was done. She took the boxes out to the car and stood for a second considering the garage. The wooden door had expanded in the heat and stuck a bit, but she pushed it open with her shoulder. She searched for the light switch but when she found it nothing happened. Hope stood, letting her eyes adjust to the dark. Then, in the corner, a flash. It was brief, but it was quickly followed by more. The lights clustered together. Hope carefully moved forward towards the bits of lightening. Bursts of yellow and small darts of blue illuminated the darkness. She reached out and closed her fingers around a jar. The bugs bumped against the glass, blinking together in a pattern of dots and dashes. She picked up another. Another synchronous dance, a separate universe of light in her hand.

Out in the grass she sat down. It was still wet from the afternoon’s brief rain shower and it soaked into her jeans. The fireflies were moving against a nearly moonless night, the lingering clouds covering most of the sky. She watched the flashes blink and dart. It was slow, the realization of what she was seeing. Her phone created the only constant source of light as she copied the pattern into the text box. Blink blink. Dart dart blink blink… She watched the fireflies over and over until she was sure and then hit search.

..  — .. … … -.– — ..-

Even though Hope knew it was just an echo, that it wasn’t really him, she stayed on the ground until each firefly had flown off or found rest and stopped flashing, until each yellow blink and dart of blue faded into the summer air, just to stay a bit longer with him.

Margaret LaFleur lives, teaches, and writes in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Her recent flash fiction has appeared in Montana Mouthful, Bright Flash Literary Review and elsewhere. See more at margaretlafleur.com or in 280 characters @margosita.

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It all happened when the polar bear chased me to the end of the glacier and I was so, so frightened to leap in the icy waters. You see, I had no faith left to leap with. Just a heart that was somehow still warm, somehow still beating. But then I saw the glaring white fox, just over there, nestled in the cleavage of an iceberg. Its black eyes looked so curious and so amused, and its little black nose sniffed the air like, “I don’t know what you’re freaking out about, you still have legs don’t you?” It was right, and just then a beluga spouted a fountain from its blowhole, distracting the polar bear, and for some reason, I really wanted to give the fox a hug. It seemed so fluffy. So, I dove. 

The truth is that it all happened when you burnt our only tent, crushed my compass under your boot and ran off with the snow mobile. You took the pen but left your journal. I still have it in a pocket of my parka. You kept meticulous notes of all the fish we didn’t catch. I named the fox Snowball. Together we found our way to a more manageable plot of tundra. He brought me lemmings, and sang fox songs, and right before sleep, he sniffed my gloves, but he still wouldn’t let me touch him. 

The real truth is that it all happened when I was a child and the bedtime routine was that mom would plunk me in a warm bubble bath, keep the bathroom door open and leave me to the toy fish and dolphins and whales while she went to the kitchen to talk on the telephone for hours. I listened to her for hours while all the bubbles popped, my finger and toe skin puckered, and I got cold and colder, until I became one violent shiver. I could see my warm bed from there, but I just couldn’t, couldn’t, couldn’t get out on my own, so lonely. When I told you that story, you bought me the hugest, pinkest plush robe. Then you were like, “Oops! Look at the time! I have a thing.” Your smile hung in the room, but I couldn’t touch it.  When I told Snowball that story, he started bringing different foods: white geese, seabirds, a long metal wing, the yoke of a seaplane, and then he crawled up into the cross of my lap, sighed, and released all his weight to me. 

But maybe the real, real beginning was when after that long hard winter with Snowball by my side through it, feeding me, nuzzling my face, listening, scavenging pieces of an airplane I started rebuilding. The sun of my heart grew warmer and warmer, releasing the rough grasses underneath. I realized I never even really loved you and honestly, I never even really liked you. I just thought I had to because you were the one who was there. You were just the one who came to my door, like I had no choice about it. You weren’t my mother; you never fed me; you never saved me from anything, honestly, it would have been worse if you had. And suddenly it was spring. And it was time to say goodbye. Snowball leapt into my arms, finally letting me hug him, and I’ll tell you I squeezed him so tight I wasn’t surprised when he crumbled apart in my embrace, falling to the rest of the melting snow.

Caroljean Gavin’s work is forthcoming in Best Small Fictions 2021 and has appeared in places such as Milk Candy Review, Barrelhouse, and Pithead Chapel. She’s the editor of What I Thought of Ain’t Funny, an anthology of short fiction based on the jokes of Mitch Hedberg published by Malarkey Books. She’s on Twitter @caroljeangavin

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Four.

You are at your uncle’s house and your parents said you could get a pet for your birthday. His dog had pups a few weeks ago and now you are surrounded in tan and white fur, cold noses and small paws pressing against you.

Fifteen.

You are at your first concert and the bass from the opener is vibrating in your sternum. The air smells of sweat and smoke and tomorrow you will, too, ears ringing and head buzzing.

Nine.

You are in class when a new kid walks in the door and introduces themselves with a stutter. Their speech is formal, stilted, stiff, and you join in the laughter breaking and cracking off the walls.

Seven. There are birthday candles. Twenty-two. There is an accident. Seventeen. There is a tentative kiss. Five. There is a swing set. Fifty-five. There is a new house. Nineteen. There is a voicemail. Twelve. There is a ferris wheel. Thirty-six. There is a bubble gum ice cream cone. Forty-two. There is a sapphire ring. Twenty-three. There is a wake. Eight. There is a school building. Twenty-nine. There is a hospital. Two, seventy-nine, forty-one, sixteen. There is, there is, there is, there is,

There is a sunset and ocean spray on your cheeks and waves like a heartbeat. You are six, you are thirteen, you are thirty-seven, you are eighty-two. The sky is red and pink and gold. The air is salty on your lips. The sand is soft beneath your feet.

Rachel Abbey McCafferty has been writing since she first learned that was a thing people could do. She’s a newspaper reporter in Ohio whose favorite questions are ‘what if’ and ‘why.’ Her flash fiction has appeared in journals like formercactus, The Ginger Collect and The Cabinet of Heed.

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“The best you can do about it is the best you can do about it,” Dorothy Parker said on the occasion of her fiftieth birthday. Middle age was an anathema, middle anything “the label of frump.” She said “People should be one of two things, young or dead,” yet she postulated about the potential, the panache, of getting old—“There is chic to seventy, elegance to eighty” she said—if you can carry it off. I want to age with grace and style, but what interests me most is watching it evolve, the alterations in body and brain that I experience as participant and observer, scientist and subject simultaneously. I’ve written about post-seventy tattoos and marathons, of declining health and dwindling opportunities, of patience and a thicker skin, a fuck ‘em attitude. I adopt Parker’s conviction that now “there are no more mistakes; you have made them all”—so what’s to fear? She said “You’re the only one who is passionately interested in your age,” and yes, here I am, antennae waving as it continues to unfold, what Virginia Woolf called “this loose drifting material of life … flowers, clouds, beetles, and the price of eggs.” And squirrels. This morning I watched two resident squirrels in my back yard, one minute nibbling sunflower seeds off the deck, the next chasing each other up and down and around a palm tree, leaping onto the ground, sauntering back to the seeds. Woolf used to address her future self—old Virginia—in her diary; days before her death she reminded herself to “observe the oncome of age.” Baby Boomers have entered their seventies, passionately interested in age, speaking and writing about it as if they discovered it, painful joints and purported joys, with interest or indignity or averted eyes as they grasp at perpetual youth, pronounce seventy to be the new fifty. But I got there first by a few years and will beat them to eighty. The deaths of Woolf at 59 and Parker at 73 and of my mother at 60 are the impetus to remain acutely aware and part of the conversation.

Alice Lowe’s flash prose has appeared this past year in Hobart, JMWW, Door Is a Jar, Sleet, Anti-Heroin Chic, and BurningWord. She’s had citations in Best American Essays and nominations for Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net. Alice writes about life and literature, food and family in San Diego, California and at www.aliceloweblogs.wordpress.com.

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For much of the past year, I have been obsessed with sitting. How to do it, for how long, in what permutations. 

Currently, I sit by the corner of the dining table to write. My legs are splayed open at a 90-degree angle, perpendicular to my torso, each foot raised on a separate dining chair. My body a bookend. I sit ugly, I know. But it’s not like anyone can see. 

Exactly one year ago, the pandemic hit, and I was bundled back to Singapore, with half my life still strewn around my 9x11ft room in New York. The messiness was deliberate, an act of defiance. Like, I’ll be gone just a minute. I’ll turn around and come right back. It’s fine if I leave my underwear kicked under the bed, I’ll pick it up when I return, next week. Three months later, I conceded defeat, enlisting a girlfriend’s help to pack everything up and move it into storage. Wow, she said, as her phone camera dragged across the first room I ever had to myself, painstakingly furnished with second-hand furniture unearthed from the armpits of Brooklyn, each piece meticulously cleaned, polished, and painted as I carved a life out for myself, once upon a time. Her face was large and pixelated on the screen. You sure are messy. There’s nowhere to even sit. 

One of the pettiest grievances I have regarding the pandemic is the forced separation from my chair. A couple of weeks before the pandemic hit, I spent 2 hours dawdling in the Staples on 81^st Street. A new chair would cost 3 weeks of grocery money, but it’d be worth it. Good posture was a hallmark of successful adulting. It took me a long time to decide on The Chair. Longer to pull out my purse and actually bring myself to pay. I sat in it less than 20 times, and then, the rest, you know.

My chair, my chair, a kingdom for my chair. 

In quarantine, everything hurts. My muscles are still pretzeled up from the 27-hour flight. I’ve gone from deep winter to aggressive humidity in a day; I’m perpetually sticky, tense, and anxious. The place I’m quarantined at gives me three sitting options: the vinyl floor, a red mini couch, some glass dining chairs. All made for lounging, not working. A different kind of life. But life, regardless, must go on. When I sit to work, my thighs glue to the glass. The screaming suction of protest it makes every time I try to get up makes me feel ashamed. Eventually, I don’t move from the chair at all. I sit cross legged, facing down the blank computer screen, trying to get the words out. 

I buy a cheap chair when I get home. It’s only temporary; I expect to be reunited with my beloved ergonomic one back in New York at any moment. I keep waiting, and waiting. 

I’m sitting down when the news comes. The first wave of grief takes the shape of action, the immediate injection of a supernatural capacity to handle. I call the funeral parlour for updated Covid-safe guidelines, coordinate schedules, deal with the administrative stuff. The second wave manifests in paranoia. This cannot be happening again. And again? Clearly, we have been hexed. Cursed. By the time the third wave comes, I have lost all interest in sitting, I crawl into bed, where it’s purportedly safe. 

My mistake. It was time, regardless, that goes on.

Because I am chronically Type A, inaction, for me, is dread. It only compounds into failure, an arrow’s straight path towards doom. I nudge myself out of bed and into the kitchen chair. Hello, hello. Sorry I’m late. Just a heads up, I might cut in and out today. My internet’s been wonky. The connection’s a bitch.

My mother is worried about me. The way I hunch across my screen, as if protecting it with my body. As if restraining it. Keep sitting like that and you’ll get a dowager’s hump. Dowager: dignified widow, retired queen. Ha. I am not worthy of a dowager’s hump. I have so much further to go, I am so tired. I straighten my back and type the same words, over and over again. 

Ergonomically-driven research becomes a means of escape, of procrastination. I’m not writing because my back hurts. I’m not writing because I can study my way out of hurt. I’m not writing because if I have this piece of information, I can fix my posture; thus, my life. I’m not writing because I cannot bring myself to contemplate what it means to live with so much grief. I’m not writing because I don’t want to make sense of the year. Because I don’t want to confront the answers. What I’m doing: reading yet another white paper on lumbar support.

Did you know? Spinal pressure sits at about 140mm. Slouching increases it to 190mm. Bad posture puts up to 40% more weight on your spine, triggering the deterioration of your vertebrae’s integrity in as little as twenty minutes. The worst possible thing you can do is to sit, slouching, bearing weight. Say, for example, a bowling pin. The total amount of pressure exerted on your spine is insane. It’s the equivalent of, like, 275kilograms. Imagine all of that, compressing your spinal disc. Weighing it down. Making it hard to breathe. It hurts less if you hold the weight closer, but only slightly, only temporarily. The best thing you can do for yourself, really, is to let it go. 

Time, it goes on. 

On the one-year anniversary of all this, I get a real office chair. Finally. It’s cute and red and made of mesh. The height is adjustable, the armrests swivel. There is a complicated hydraulic explanation for the way it offers support. I thought getting it would feel like defeat, like surrendering to circumstance. But it feels good. Here I am, in my chair. I’ve not moved. I am still learning how to sit.

Jemimah Wei is a writer and host based in Singapore and New York. She is a Pushcart nominee and her fiction has received support from Singapore’s National Arts Council. Jemimah was recently named a 2020 Felipe P. De Alba Fellow at Columbia University and is a Francine Ringold Award for New Writers honouree. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Nimrod, Smokelong Quarterly, AAWW’s The Margins, Pigeonholes, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazines, and CRAFT Literary, amongst others. Presently a columnist for No Contact Magazine, she is at work on a novel and several television projects. Say hi at @jemmawei on socials.

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Fry

While you were in the store, I sat in the car, taking advantage of the air conditioning, radio, and lack of people. From my comfortable chair, I watched two crows fighting over what appeared to be an old french fry.

Then the fry hopped, or more accurately flopped, as I discerned it was a semi-live grasshopper. The crows seemed to take turns pecking at it until it made its way under a car. I held my breath and watched the black birds moving towards the doomed insect.

You returned then and saved me from the end of that familiar narrative.

Look

The sunny aide says the leaves are changing. The tree in me has been dead a thousand whiles, but I don’t tell them I’m not interested. Just roll back to my room where the window looks out at where the mailbox and dumpster sit, cold like relatives on the other side of the state too cheap for phone calls, too absent-minded for letters.

TV is still on. SVU still, but different-same episode.

Now and then a curious squirrel comes tapping at the window, and I tell him the good nuts are down the hall. Otherwise, there is nothing to see.

Michael Neal Morris’ most recent books are Based on Imaginary Events, Release and Haiku, Etc.  He is a regular contributor to the blog Two Cents On and posts almost daily to This Blue Monk. He lives with his family just outside the Dallas area and teaches Composition and Creative Writing at Dallas College.

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We were drunk at the Wawa, how embarrassing, but also exhilarating. You and I, fifteen, pinkie-sworn BFFs, wrists corded with neon bracelets, black chipped nail polish, maybe we had braces, I’ll never tell (again too embarrassing), but then you shot gunned a beer in the motor oil aisle. No one lives at the Wawa for free! you crowed. We crouched on youthful knees, giggling. You played spin the Vodka bottle with a Twix, a Butterfinger, my mouth. My mouth won. But you ate the Twix too.

*

The next time, we were pregnant at the Wawa. I peed on a stick I didn’t pay for. Two pink lines and then you were proudly claiming it as yours. We’d raise it up as witches, dance in the field, eat its afterbirth and name it Cowpoke. Later, when I crouched over a toilet bowl, letting it go, letting loose, losing it, you, next to me, released the controlled burn I had been holding in my throat.

*

And then there was that one time, really the best time, we found a deep-fried human hand at the Wawa. It was not fresh or built-to-order, it was built-to-build bile. Once I realized what it was, not a chicken wing, I drop-kicked it across the store. After the cops came, you overstayed your welcome, watching them take notes, complaining about the lack of fingerprints. The only time I saw you without a smile was when they confiscated your Cherry Coke, because, you know, evidence.

*

But then there was the time we became human bombs at the Wawa. You told me you were leaving our piddly Podunk town for bright lights. I tried to understand, tried to play it cool and casual because I was a community college kinda gal, but all I heard was that you were leaving for brighter lights than me. You gnawed on a Red Vine (stolen, I might add), wiggled your tan toes in your Birkenstocks and said we could have one last sleepover. I didn’t want to have one last sleepover I wanted to have all the sleepovers. I wanted to spin around you like the moon. Because you were mine and I was yours and then we kissed in the cereal aisle for the first time and neither of us said anything when the cleaning crew arrived. They were sweeping the floor around us just as you linked your pinkie finger to mine.

*

The last time at the Wawa, we see each other for the first time in 600 days. And it’s that sucker punch grand slam kind of kiss. We don’t even have to think about the years between us, we are the years between us: phone calls, emails, midnight texts, two boyfriends I hated, one girlfriend you ghosted, and I-love-yous we never trusted until now. We crash into each other like planets. My heart hammers so hard we vibrate. Your fingers, still stained from rolling fingerprints from nail-to-nail, cradle the cool curve of my cheekbone. I nip at your nose, inhale your beeswax lip-gloss. A truckdriver cracks a big bottle of Busch and gapes at us, his erection evident. We laugh, lean into each other, hair swirling around us, tangled, golden, alive, and you say, Come to California with me. There is no Wawa there, there is only us and a Piggly Wiggly, but I think we’ll be okay. I kiss your lips and I take your hand and I say okay. Because at the Wawa, we are always okay.

Jules Archer is the author of the chapbook, All the Ghosts We’ve Always Had (Thirty West Publishing, 2018) and the short story collection, Little Feasts (Thirty West Publishing, 2020). Her writing has appeared in various journals, including SmokeLong Quarterly, PANK, Okay Donkey, New World Writing, Maudlin House, and elsewhere. Her story “From the Slumbarave Hotel on Broadway” appeared in Best Microfiction 2020.

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Toasting

Each doorstep-thick slice impaled on a long fork licked by flickering orange flames, I toast bread over an open fire while Nan fetches butter from the pantry meat-safe.

Cut from stoic cloth, she raised fifteen children in this tiny house, witnessed two World Wars with milky-eyed, mustard-gassed Grandad, now long-wintered, like blackbird song on window snow.

Now, she stoops when she walks, coarse brown stockings encasing thin pale flesh. Now, her pinned ash-grey plait is wound round her head like a Cumberland sausage. But when her hair flows loose and free – a silver waterfall – crowning her shoulders, she becomes a girl again. 

I ask what life was like, then. Her reply always: What’s past is past. It can’t be changed. Life goes on. Then it stops. 

Yesterday, blue tits pecked through foil-topped bottles for the cream, and the wildflower posy I picked – yellow-bright celandines, purple clover – takes pride of place in an empty jam jar on the mantelpiece, where the clock ticks loudly. The fire is slowly dying, pale embers dimmed, like a decaying peach. 

Nan takes the knife, bone handle worn, deftly slices a knob of yellow butter onto hot toast, watches it melt golden. Sprinkles salt on top. Together we sit. Eat. Stare into the fire’s star-spitting crackle. Sharing warmth.

Weighting Ash

You’re heavier than I expected. 

Heavier than you were in the care home before your final hospital admission, murdered by the C-word virus and the C-word government.

The Tesco bag-for-life taken to carry you back isn’t up to the job but the funeral administrator gives me a smart hessian one (light burgundy to match the urn) with sturdy white handles, which helps me get a grip. 

“Any plans?” she asks.

“Sheffield Park, with a couple of his close friends. When the restrictions lift. When things return to normal.”

“I’ve still got my husband at home with me, on top of the wardrobe. He’s not going anywhere.”

“That’s nice.” I notice a display cabinet showcasing crystal jewellery mounted on the wall. Apparently, you can have ashes made into a tasteful pendant or bracelet, so you can wear your loved one. Tears well up behind my obligatory mask. I hastily sign the release form and hurry towards the door. 

Walking beside the busy road, indifferent traffic rushing and roaring, I wonder what you’d think about being taken home inside a container in a bag. My arm aches. 

You’re heavier than I expected.

Based in the UK, Jane Ayres re-discovered poetry studying for a part-time MA in Creative Writing at the University of Kent, which she completed in 2019 at the age of 57. She is fascinated by hybrid poetry/prose experimental forms and has work published or accepted in Confluence, Postscript, Dissonance, The Agonist, Lighthouse, Viscaria, The Sock Drawer, Streetcake, The North, The Poetry Village, Scrittura, Door is a Jar, Marble, Agapanthus, Confingo, Crow & Cross Keys, Kissing Dynamite and The Forge.

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A half-finished crochet blanket lays on the floor, its frayed ends fully submerged in last night’s Pasta Alfredo. My dead pointe shoes (three months overdue for replacement) are half-haphazardly strewn against the cheap faux-leather ottoman I bought on Amazon with a gift card from last Christmas. My friend, AJ, surveys the mess and laughs. “You have a hot girl LA apartment, you know,” he says. 

After a few internet searches, I find an article that describes the stereotype of women with messy bedrooms, taking selfies in a mirror, fully unaware of the hurricane behind them.

To be honest, I’ve been called worse things. Messy and selfish, from my parents in response to dishes scattered Jackson Pollack style around the house. Erratic, from my first boyfriend, after I started a presidential debate worthy brawl with him in a Lululemon. Disorganized, from every Mathematics teacher who’s had to straighten out a crumpled piece of paperwork with suspicious stains on the edges. 

Sometimes the labels make me feel unique, special. Like that girl: The one who goes to the beach three hours away at 2 A.M to watch waves and talk about childhood memories. But that girl isn’t some elusive manic-pixie archetype. That girl has an 8 a.m class the next morning in which she can barely keep her eyes open. That girl just failed an Econ test that she forgot existed.        

And on a Tuesday in July, that girl hasn’t slept in 32 hours. Like many college students during a pandemic, sleep has been replaced by a barrage of thoughts playing over and over in my head. I call my doctor, who prescribes me a sleep aid. It helps, a little.

Meanwhile, small spurts of focus keep me afloat in my summer fellowship. I miss many of the classes and find myself relying on the rare ten minutes of brilliance to come up with a somewhat acceptable piece of work. I describe to my professor-mentor, “I can only write when it comes to me.” This is normal. I tell myself. I’m a creative type, special.

During a routine doctor’s check-up, I describe my lack of focus, intense mood swings, and destructive behaviors. “I think I have a mood disorder, but Google says anxiety. Maybe PMDD or SAD or one of the acronyms?” I explain. I’ve researched this for the last three hours and I am confident that I’ve given myself a Grey’s Anatomy worthy diagnosis. My physician asks for my family history of mental health. I realize that I honestly have no clue. My family is traditional, and we talk about mental health about as much as we talk about Russian politics, which is to say, not at all. 

That day encompassed an awkward phone conversation in the Union Square Macy’s with my mother. Our family history reads like a rap sheet of ADHD, Asperger’s, and Autism.

Immediately I am referred to a neuropsychologist and begin a process that can only be described as standardized testing for Satan.

“ADHD?” My mom asks, “You’ve always been focused. You get A’s, you played chess. And remember that year when you skipped five levels in gymnastics?” I do. It was all I could talk about. All I lived for. I’d practice every day until I was covered in bruises and scrapes, and my muscles ached so badly I could barely get out of bed.

My psychologist called it hyper-focus; becoming enraptured by something due to the inability to center my attention on more than one thing at a time. When I was young, it was praised as dedication, decisiveness, and drive.

A few weeks later, after numerous tests and interviews, I was diagnosed with severe ADHD. 

I am part of a generation known as The Lost Girls: Women who hadn’t been diagnosed in their youth because ADHD in females is widely misunderstood and signs are missed. Women from an early age are taught not to get mad; to not be hyper; be ladylike and perfect. As a result, girls, especially those who manage to get good grades despite their disability, tend to fly under the radar.

We, The Lost Women, spent our childhood and adolescence plagued by labels we never quite understood. Ditzy: for the time I walked forty minutes off campus daydreaming about book plots before I realized school wasn’t actually over yet. A Liar: for when I had lost all of my credit cards in a situation so out of the realm of normalcy my parents had accused me of being drunk. Mean: for that moment when I said terrible things to my best friend for missing my birthday party, my emotions as out of my control as the gloomy March storm outside.

The diagnoses came as shock and relief. It wasn’t an excuse, but at least it was an explanation. 

After hearing my diagnosis, my doctor asked me one of the only questions I hadn’t heard during the barrage of psychologist visits. “How are you feeling?”

I paused, “I’m angry.” That thought had never occurred to me before this moment. But ADHD had stolen so much from me. I caused the first girl I loved an incredible amount of pain, by taking her on up and downs so steep she couldn’t stay on board. I scared away a man of amazing morals, with impatience and erratic destructive behavior. I kissed a close friend out of impulse, who turned into a stranger. I’ve spent years studying and reading and feeling like something was wrong with me, as the information evaporated the second my eyes left the page. And no one noticed. I was alone.

“It’s okay,” my doctor said, “You’re in mourning. But this diagnosis, it’s not a bad thing. I promise you, what you’ve lost, you will get back.”

So begins something new. Not an impulse move across the country, or a whirlwind summer love, but a new type of journey. And for once I’m the one driving.

Jules Schulman is a journalist and legal researcher. She writes about LGBT+ issues, culture, and sports. 

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Cleaning Soldiers

Bleach, toilet cleaner, sanitiser bottles all lined up like defeated soldiers after a gruesome battle. Minute brown stains from the rusted metal gate still adorn my fingertips. 

I really need to get these stains out. (or off?) 

The voices whisper. Now they shout. 

YES! Nail polish remover could work.

The voices begin to quieten. 

Wash your hands again…and again. 

The serrated bottle top cuts through my weakened tired skin. There is blood all over the bottle now. I fall to the ground – sobbing. A bundle of anxiety; a heap of failure – glances of disappointment twinkle in your eyes.

Forever after

It had been a year now. A year that he had left. She was so lonely. Lonely and sad. She had been thinking about him frequently; more than usual. But she knew she had to let go; let him finally go. 

She thought that maybe a nice roasted piece of meat and a warm pudding would lift her mood. Maybe just a little. Maybe just for a short while. She wiped a stray tear from her eyes as she carved the glorious roasted leg. 

At least now, for one last meal, he would be with her.

The goodest boy

Tiger was the first dog that I ever had. Small, golden and very clingy – always wanting to be around me; I never had a moment of privacy when I was awake. Interestingly, he never bothered me at all when I slept. Not to pee or to be fed midnight treats or to snuggle up beside me during cold winter nights. 

The night after he passed away, I laid my sleepy sad head to rest on his fur-covered doggy bed. 

I awoke at about 2 am – to complete darkness and a soft gentle hand whispering good doggy, good Tiger.

Shiksha is a South African of Indian descent. She uses poetry (mostly) to express her internal and external struggles and journeys, inclusive of her OCD and depression roller-coaster ventures. Mostly, however, she writes in the hopes that someday, someone will see her as she is; an incomplete poem. Her work has been featured (on/forthcoming) in Mixed Mag, Aerodrome journal, The Daily Drunk, Visual Verse, The Kalahari Review, Brave Voices, Glitchwords, Petrichor Journal, Small Leaf Press, Versification, Green Ink Poetry, Resurrections Magazine, amongst others. Twitter: @ShikshaWrites

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I went to a speed dating event on Tuesday after work. It was a last minute thing. My best friend Astrid got food poisoning from her lunchtime Chipotle burrito, and the $10 ticket was nonrefundable. In return for bringing her $10 worth of Bruce Cost Ginger Ale and Pocari Sweat, she gave me the ticket. Her apartment smelled like vomit and also like vanilla lavender incense which was supposed to mask the vomit smell but did not. I walked her dog so that she wouldn’t have to, and I borrowed the dress she had with owls on it because I was still wearing my work polo and Astrid wanted me to look cute. 

The event was at a Soho bookstore and it was for women who wanted to meet women. There was one for men who wanted to meet men the next day, and one for men and women the day after that. I thought about buying a ticket to that one too, but if everyone was straight I probably wouldn’t fit in. 

It was so warm inside the bookstore that I had to take off my jacket immediately. It was a motorcycle jacket and without it I no longer looked punk rock. 

My first partner’s eyes were the same color that my hands sometimes got when my Raynaud’s disease acted up. She said that she voted for Trump in the last election. I told her that I was the Angel of Death and when she gave me a blank look I said that I was trying to empathize with her by telling her something similar to what she had just told me. She said that I wasn’t funny and that she didn’t appreciate being condescended to. 

I thought about going home right then, but then the event director’s iPhone played the “Night Owl” alarm, and we had to switch to the next person and I auto-piloted to the next table. 

My next partner asked me what my favorite book was. I wasn’t sure if this meant that she was pretentious or if she actually just really liked books a lot. I thought about telling her that my favorite book was the My Hero Academia manga series, but I didn’t. I told her it was Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. Her jaw hung open for a few seconds, and she swallowed so hard I could hear it. Then she told me that Charlotte Bronte’s work was far superior, and could she get my number so that we could discuss this in more detail. She gave me her phone. It had a case on it that said A Well Read Woman is a Dangerous Creature in cursive. Mine had a picture of the @dril tweet that said user named “beavis_sinatra ” has been terrorizing me since 2004, by sending me pictures of cups that are too close to the edge of the table. 

We exchanged numbers. I thought about giving her a fake name, but decided to tell her my real one, which was Lucinda. Her name was Daisy, which made me think about Astrid, and how I wanted Astrid to be jealous that I’d gotten a girl’s number. It made me think of all the times that her mouth wasn’t full of vomit, and I’d wanted to kiss her, but didn’t. 

Daisy started trying to talk about why Charlotte Bronte was a better writer than Emily Bronte even though we had planned to do it later, but before she could get past the first incorrect sentence about Jane Eyre being more socially progressive, “Night Owl” played again. 

Next I sat across from a woman wearing a pre-faded Ramones t-shirt and bright red plasticky high heels. Her lipstick matched the heels. We exchanged names and professions – her name was Clare and she was a paralegal. I was a little distracted because I was wondering whether or not Astrid was keeping down the fluids I brought her, but I managed to tell Clare that I was a cashier and a dog walker and also I transcribed things online.

Clare wanted to know when I realized that I was a lesbian. I told her that I hadn’t realized anything like that – I was probably bisexual but wasn’t sure. I said this mumbling into my hands. She raised an eyebrow and sneered, then said, “Oh. I don’t date bi girls – can’t trust them not to run off with a man.”  

I was a little mad at her, but I didn’t feel like I could yell at her. I’d never encountered this specific type of biphobia in real life before. It made me feel like I’d just eaten a spoiled burrito from Chipotle. 

I thought about texting Daisy and arguing with her over hot chocolate, but Jacques Torres was closed and when I typed hot chocolate near me into Google my phone thought that I was in midtown and gave me suggestions that would take an hour to get to from Soho. I tried to summon the emotional energy to text her anyway. To even just send her an emoji. I also thought about texting Clare, whose number I did not have, and telling her to go to hell. 

But then I noticed that Astrid had texted me three times asking me to bring her back soup from Whole Foods so I had to do that instead. She wanted broccoli cheddar, so I had to remind her that she was lactose intolerant. Then I told Astrid about Clare, and Astrid said she’d punch her if she ever met her. I told her about Daisy and she said she sounded like a fun new friend, but not quite my type. Then we started talking about what we were going to watch on Netflix when I got back to her place, and I thought that I’d probably been in love with Astrid the whole time.

Anna Lindwasser is a freelance writer and educator living in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been published in The Molotov Cocktail, Bridge Eight, and Scarlet Leaf Review, among others. She can be found on Twitter @annalindwasser, or on her website, annalindwasser.com.

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I keep a row of used wine bottles in a crate in the garage, waiting for Transvaal daisies to start wilting. These sunny flowers don’t fall apart, they wilt with a graceful bow, giving the floor the next stalk—I usually cut them mid bow. Today a butter-coloured friend goes into their tipsy retirement on the island in our kitchen. They lean onto the dark neck of their new old bottle, and we sigh at each other. 

My brother comes home in the afternoon without a smile. I tell him that I’ve saved him the last chocolate chip cookie, and he thanks me with a, “Ah, that makes me a little happier.” 

“What now?” 

He bites into the crusty edge. “I was bullied today.” 

“Bullied? By who?” 

“How do some people learn to bully?” Caramel crumbs are falling down his school uniform. 

“I don’t think people learn to bully, sometimes they don’t know they’re bullying. Who bullied you?” I repeat my question. 

“All of them. All the boys.” 

“What did they do?” 

He takes another mouthful and chews quickly. He always eats too fast. “They teased me. They said they had the right answer and I was wrong.” 

“Was this in class?” I set my laptop aside. 

“Uh huh, in English class.” 

“What was the question?”

His dimple on his left cheek peeps in as his teeth break the cookie and his mind flips through the day’s pages. “It was about indirect speech. ‘Leo said that he—uh—not a rat.’” 

I squint. “Do you mean fill in the blank? ‘Leo said that he—blank—not a rat?’” My brother nods. They’re starting to read Roald Dahl at school, like I did when I was their age. “What did you say?” 

“I said, ‘was’. My friends said, ‘is’.” 

“And what did the teacher say?” 

He picks up a crumb from his shirt and tastes it with his tongue. “She said I was right. But my friends still teased me. They said I’m dumb.” There are two bites of the buttery cookie left. 

I lean back in my chair and reposition my spine. “People like to think they’re right about things, but no one’s right all the time. And when they realize they’re wrong, they can feel a little upset. It makes them say things they don’t mean.” 

He doesn’t seem convinced, and it pops into my head that the first Roald Dahl I read from cover to cover was The Witches. “I think when that happens, you can take a step back,” I say. “Give them time to calm down.” 

The last bits of the cookie remain in his little fingers. The Transvaal daisy sits in the calm of their island behind his back. 

I ask, “They said you’re dumb?” He nods, and I ask again, “Do you think you’re dumb?” 

He knows the answer, but he waits a while to say it. “No.” 

“All right, that’s fine then. You know you’re not dumb. They don’t know. They’re not in your head, so how can they know?” He blinks at that. And then he finishes his cookie. 

I propose fried chicken for dinner.

Thao To writes short stories and peruses newspaper archives. She’s always between timezones. You can find her musings in Literally Stories, Anak Sastra, or on Twitter @thao__to

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I couldn’t remember if depression was anger turned inward or anger was depression turned outward. Either way it seems to be an issue of orientation. If we could just get things facing the right way it would solve a lot of problems. Not that any of this was new information of course. Disorientation runs in my family. Vertigo. Motion sickness. A chronic case of the where-the-hell-am-Is and the how-the-hell-did-I-get-heres. The doctors say it’s an inner ear issue. A possible iron deficiency. We don’t eat nearly enough salmon. One time my dad called me from outer space. “You’re where?” I said. On Saturday my parents’ dog comes to stay with me and J for a week while my parents go on vacation. An old golden retriever with hip dysplasia. My parents got her the same year I moved out. 2009. Twelve years ago now. Twelve years ago this month.

The day Sandy comes over the temperature in Dallas drops into the twenties. We make a bed for her on the bedroom floor using old blankets and beach towels. At night she breathes so heavily I worry about CO2 poisoning. Sometimes I rub her belly and say mean things to her in an affirming voice.

“Your application for a National Endowment of the Arts has been denied,” I say, her tail wagging, this goofy-looking smile on her face.

“You are not well-respected in your field,” I say.

On Monday afternoon I catch her in the backyard staring off into space.

“Don’t get any ideas,” I say.

This year I’m the same age my dad was when he went to space. When he, I should say, went to space the first time. Recently on a medical history form I saw a note: Father has been to outer space. They say if your dad has been to outer space you have a one in four chance of going there too. It’s just one of those things apparently.

In the morning we open the back door and Sandy goes panting out into the backyard. The grass is frozen and crunchy. It sounds like she’s walking on Corn Flakes. She sends cumulonimbus clouds up into the lower atmosphere. Next week it’ll rain a little in India and they won’t know why.

“This wasn’t on any of our charts,” they’ll say.

They’ll wonder why they even bother having charts.

What’s the point in trying to know what’s coming?

I stand on the patio while she looks for things to pee on. She takes her time and considers her options. I’ll say this about my parents’ dog. She’s not in a hurry.

“Let’s see some hustle out there!” I yell.

“Let’s see some decision making!”

Sometimes I look around at my life and think: How the hell did I get here? 

And also: Where the hell am I?

Then I remember. I’m in Texas. Off Jackson Street. By The Home Depot.

The evening before it’s supposed to freeze over, J and I go to the grocery store for wine and cheese and Totino’s Pizza Rolls. Inside, there’s a song playing that was popular when I was in high school. Now it’s a grocery store song, I guess. 

It goes like this: La la lala la Lala la La la. 

Do you know that one?

“I’ll meet you in the cheeses,” J says and then rides the cart off like a dog sled.

“I’ll find the wine,” I say but accidentally end up in the soups. Then I accidentally end up in the meats. Then I accidentally end up in that weird aisle with all the cheap kids’ toys. Plastic handcuffs. Bubble wands. Those rubber parachute men my brother and I used to shoot up into the sky with a sling shot. My dad taught us that trick. You shoot them up there. I swear we once shot one up there and it never came back down.

And all this time it just keeps getting colder. At night we let the faucets drip. We keep the space heaters running. We sleep in socks and sweaters and fingerless gloves. Sandy snores so loudly I worry she’s choking to death. I think she has sleep apnea. She should really get that looked at, I think.

“They have equipment for that now, you know,” I say to my parents when they come to get her Saturday afternoon, before the snow storm hits that will shut the city down for a week, before all of Texas declares a state of emergency. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of. I’ve been thinking about getting one myself.”

They look pretty cool, those sleep apnea masks. They look like a SCUBA respirator. They look like a space suit from a 1950s sci-fi comic book. They pump air directly into your head. I’ve heard that after a few years you hardly even notice it’s there.

Mike Nagel’s essays have appeared in apt, Hobart, DIAGRAM, and The Paris Review Daily.

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You were there, not conscious but in body, when they draped you, intubated and hooked you to a ventilator. Your bladder, catheterized. Your body turned, from back onto stomach. Bolsters placed under your chest, to accommodate the breathing tube. Face lowered onto a horseshoe-shaped pad. Your skull locked into a clamp, pins tightened. Hair shorn, scalp cleansed. Your MRI, called up on a screen. An incision, maybe five inches, where the back of your head cradles onto your neck. Skin and muscles folded back and clipped. A section of your skull sawed, removed, set aside. The surgeon sliced through tissue, collagen and nerves, parting layers with tweezer-like tools, navigating blood vessels that crisscrossed a glistening surface, a maze of membranes: the dura mater, arachnoid, the pia mater. Long-handled scissors, drills, an ultrasonic aspirator that irrigated and suctioned around compacted folds. Instruments like this, likely used. A delicate probe, a jet of water. Suctioning, another probe. Cautious cuts. Seeping blood. Tunneling toward Angie—you’d named your tumor—deep in your brain stem. 

You imagine it might have gone something like that.

After twelve hours, what remained of Angie was placed in a tray, measured, sent to pathology. They returned your bone flap, screwed it down, stitched you up, sterilized and gauzed you. 

***

“Your eyes, nose, mouth, it all blended together,” your mother remembered, on seeing you in ICU. Nothing about your face was familiar. “I looked,” she said, “but couldn’t find you.”

You assured her, as you recovered in the months following, that you’d been there. Still there, beneath the swelling and the bruising. With the monster no longer in your head, you were ready to heal. Ready to live again.

Ann Kathryn Kelly lives and writes in New Hampshire’s Seacoast region. She’s an editor with Barren Magazine, a columnist with WOW! Women on Writing, and she works in the technology sector. Ann leads writing workshops for a nonprofit that offers therapeutic arts programming to people living with brain injury. Her essays have appeared in a number of literary journals. https://annkkelly.com/

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On the record Lydia Ruslanova was singing a war song, the wounded bird of her voice trying to fly, quivering, hurt, temporal, employed not as an instrument of beauty but of grief, so that as we sat in Slava’s study—dusk, cognac, The Fall of the Roman Empire—we were all wounded in time, together but solitary in the particular cages of our memories, our losses, our deaths, the feeling I once had many years earlier as a child at the circus in Fresno, California on a hot September night before school had started, when as a final act they removed the net for a family of Romanian acrobats, and under the sickly spin of light I saw a woman on the high wire teeter and drop, alive briefly in the fall, grasping and gorgeous, a dilation of time forever caught in the cinema of remembering, and the crowd released a collective animal sound before my grandmother clapped her hands over my eyes and there was the most perfect silence I have ever heard, each of us trapped in the specific machines of our grief as the lights went out and darkness came on.

Ryan Griffith’s fiction has appeared in FlashFiction.net, Fiction Southeast, NANO Fiction, and The Wigleaf Top 50 Very Short Stories of 2012.  He currently runs a multimedia narrative installation in San Diego called Relics of the Hypnotist War.  You can visit his website at relicsofthehypnotistwar.com.

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She pours more bourbon into her watered down old fashioned, the glass sweating even on as cold a day as today. The neck of the bottle taps the glass, her hand too tired to raise it any higher. She’ll need to buy another bottle, she thinks, as she shakes the last of it out. She had promised herself that she wouldn’t drink on a weeknight but seriously who is she kidding. She stares at the rivulets making pathways through the condensation, going further than she has in a long time. She imagines river journeys down the Amazon, filled with mysteries and secret islands full of dolls’ heads. Each bubble a landmark to be found, each tributary a new destination. Anything is better than this. She shatters the delta forming at the lip with her next swallow. She drinks more than she intends, worried that this last one for the night won’t be enough for her to make it to her bed time. All the experts say you need at least eight hours, so she tries to be in bed by ten. It doesn’t really work, but she tries, always hoping her dreams take her some place she’s never been, some place where she never needs that glass of bourbon every night, some place where she swims with pink dolphins.

Melissa Llanes Brownlee is a Native Hawaiian writer. She received her MFA in Fiction from UNLV. Her work has appeared in Booth: A Journal, The Notre Dame Review, Pleiades, The Citron Review, Waxwing, Milk Candy Review and elsewhere. She was a finalist for the 2018 New American Fiction Prize and the 2019 Brighthorse Prize.

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My son held up his wrist, tapped the empty rectangle where the digital numbers used to blink 12:00 12:00 12:00. I tried to set it once, but Jackson, five, had complained that it never moved. His eyes darted from the afternoon shadow morphing on the wall to the pile of plastic blocks at his feet, to the sound of his mother opening a package in the kitchen. When I pointed out the movement from 3:40 to 3:41, he cried, tears welling up under his eyelashes.

“I want it to move all the time,” he said. “Just like me.” And he wriggled like an upright worm, his body a constant flash. I was bad at forecasting his movements, knowing when to get out of the way, when to trail behind, when to block him from the worst of his impulses. 

“The blinking?” I asked. “But that’s not real time, Bud.” 

He hid his wrist in his armpit and shook his head. I prepared myself for another battle I wouldn’t win, probably didn’t need to win, but so little had gone right in those weeks. I wished I could cry, too, but there was an anger that always held me back. I hadn’t cried in years. In those years waiting for my own father to explode a night. 

“Give it here,” I said. I stood over him, hand out, my own wrist flexed. 

I was already feeling ridiculous, the shape of the demanding father, when he darted through the playroom door and into the kitchen, slamming into his mother’s leg as she turned, bowl of cereal flipping from her hand, crashing to the floor. The milk ran like melted ice cream across the bubbled linoleum floor. 

“Jake, leave it,” she said.

“He needs to learn,” I said, twisting past her, careful to step over the bits of cereal. Even angry, I wouldn’t track the mess all over the house. His feet, light, but graceful, like a frog traveling across lily pads, Jackson scaled the stairs, and rushed through the narrow hallway and into his room.

A fleeting thought of wondering if this was who I wanted to be, the thirty-second version of that shadowed man on that chart of evolution. How many generations of angry fathers were caught in this exact moment? A parallel universe of unmatched anger. 

My own steps were labored, arthritis at my age, an unplanned crack, creeping invisibly across the foundation of my body. Kids run, while adults lurch, and then totter. My anger, in those years, especially when I didn’t know it, was always about aging, my own clock blinking. Medications taken to dull the pain like kindling to a fire of disappointment.

I stood in the doorway, while Jackson burrowed under the comforter on his bed, the blanket twitching. My heart rate commanding I do something; the swell of pounding in my ears refusing to abate. 

Strewn across the floor were action figures guns and swords at the ready, faces twisted in menace, propped up by walls of legos; stuffed animals, turtles and hedgehogs, flipped over, bellies exposed, at the mercy of this miniature war that surrounded them. My son was encased in the shell of his comforter and I couldn’t go through with it.

I wanted it to be my grandfather’s watch. The one I hide underneath my comforter at night trying to time my breathing with the thud of each tick, wondering if my heart would keep beating, hoping the house would remain silent, that my vigilance would keep us all safe from the uproar of potential violence. But one night, early in my marriage, fired from a job that no longer felt like the right identity, I’d sold the watch at a pawn shop, secure in the thought of reclaiming it before it was lost to the next desperate buyer. 

My attempts at teaching respect and discipline were the impulses of fear, a grasping of control in a mercurial world, one where the blinking of the clock had more potential than the constant onslaught of time. 

When I sat on the bed and put my hand on his back, he twitched. We sat there until he felt safe enough to pop his head out, offering me his wrist. 

“We don’t have to change,” I said. “We don’t have to change a thing.”

Kids are adaptable to our whims, our fears, our entitlements. He gave me so many chances to change him, and so few of these opportunities did I resist. 

“Good,” he said. “because I want to keep blinking.”

Tommy Dean lives in Indiana with his wife and two children. He is the author of a flash fiction chapbook entitled Special Like the People on TV (Redbird Chapbooks, 2014) and Covenants(ELJ Editions, 2021). He is the Editor at Fractured Lit. He has been previously published in the Bending Genres, Atticus Review, The Lascaux Review, New World Writing, Pithead Chapel, and New Flash Fiction Review. His story “You’ve Stopped” was included in Best Microfiction 2019 and 2020 and the Best Small Fiction 2019. He won the 2019 Lascaux Prize in Short Fiction. His interviews have been previously published in New Flash Fiction Review, The Rumpus,  and CRAFT Literary. He has led writing workshops for the Barrelhouse Conversations and Connections conference, The Lafayette Writer’s Workshop, Bending Genres, and for Kathy Fish’s Fast Flash. Find him @TommyDeanWriter.

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The spinning takes hours. We start and don’t stop. The world goes on around us. Around and around us silken fabric swirls. I swell up, into the vortex, a tornado of nothing but sound and swirl. I couldn’t stop even if I wanted. 

I don’t know who I am any more. This monastery. This mountainside. We spin and in the evenings, we drink hot tea and eat oatmeal. Then we sleep and in my head the spinning goes on, through winter and spring, through green shoots of wet grass pushing up from the muddy earth. Through watery tears and weeding the kitchen garden in the morning sun. 

I’m lightheaded. From spinning or the one bowl of oatmeal a day, I’m not sure. Dashiel left. He kissed the tip of my nose when I said I was staying. Two monks—or maybe they are called clerics—stood on either side of the door, their eyes on the floor, waiting. Maybe their minds were spinning too, the world going on around them. 

Dashiel left and I stayed. I need this, I told him. Not just a three-day sabbatical. Not a mini vacation. But movement, meditation, revolving endlessly. 

The monks wear yellow and red robes, they pray and chant. I pray and chant and spin. The spinning is what matters. The spinning opens me up. Or the world opens up to me. I’m still not sure which. 

Today is Monday or Wednesday or maybe September and I can’t stop even if I wanted. The symptoms of loss are greater than the condition. Dashiel left and I stayed and neither of us could say her name. Her pale blonde hair. The half-moons of her tiny fingernails. Her lips still and white—gelid memories. 

At night I lay on my cot, really a narrow straw-filled mattress, single blanket, and imagine her spinning in the stars, whirling through space. I close my eyes and see her looking down at me—the cold, stone floor beneath my hands; the empty space, untraversable, between us. Sudden sensations include dizziness, wooziness, utter desolation.

Jamie Etheridge’s writing has been published or is forthcoming in JMWW, X-R-A-Y Lit, Burnt Breakfast, Eastern Iowa Review, Every Day Fiction, Inkwell Journal and Wild Word magazine. She can be found on Twitter at @Lescribbler.

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Life must go on, we all agreed on that. We can’t live in fear. So we decided, yes–the kids would attend their Sunday morning tennis class, and yes–we would meet at the Café Ourcq, like always. But when we got there we didn’t enter, just huddled together like pigeons in the grey morning, our gloved hands tucked under our armpits.

Only a handful of other people were on the street, maybe three or four. They looked normal, as far as we could tell. They moved warily; heads turning right and left as they pulled shopping caddies, carried baguettes. A few cars were on the road, driving neither slow nor fast, as if they hoped nobody would notice them. Except for the quiet, the dearth of people, the reluctant cars, it was normal. It was normal. One of us said, should we go inside? And we thought inside would be even more normal, so we did. 

Our usual table was by the plate glass window. We drifted over toward it, then stopped. Had we really sat there only last week, our eggshell-brittle bodies so casually bared? We glanced around the café, pretending we weren’t looking for emergency sortie signs, assessing the bullet-shielding potential of the café’s zinc-topped oak bar, trying to remember whether the bathroom had windows and whether our hips would fit; thinking about what those people, those poor, poor people, must have–

One of us laughed. Not out loud, not with mirth, it was just a shimmer of air, but we recognized it all the same. We were being paranoid, weren’t we? It’s probably safer now than before, someone said, and the rest of us fell on this. The streets are crawling with police. The guy must be long gone by now. I heard he was seen in Belgium. Turkey is what I heard. We’ve got to live, right? We can’t not live, that’s what they want. We’ll be okay. It’s fine. We’re fine.

We slid into our usual seats, ordered our usual drinks, and continued to plead with each other, blinking violent imaginings from our eyes, refusing to notice that we were perched on the edge of our chairs, ready to flee.

Barbara Diggs is an American writer in Paris, France. Her flash fiction has appeared in numerous publications, including Lunate Fiction, Ellipsis Zine, Reflex Fiction, Spelk, and 100 Word Story, among others. Her story “sometimes you walk right in” was shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award, February 2021. She is also the author of three non-fiction history books for middle-schoolers. Come chat with her on Twitter at @bdiggswrites.

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On our 293rd day at home, I pack a small bag with three pairs of underwear, my jeans, your soft sweatshirt, and I pull on the new $37 DSW boots you bought me for Christmas, tell our kids that I’m going to the store, yell “I’ll be right back,” but after starting the car I take a breath, pull into the street and drive, not to the store, but past it and down the road, through the three stoplights to the highway, where I take the west ramp and thirty-seven miles later the loop to Route 70, arguing out loud with myself, should I have gone north instead, taken 80, but 70 is the fastest, a straight shot to Denver, and so yes west, west until the Rockies, then north, up through the wind that shakes the minivan, rattles the car seat I keep forgetting to tighten, and back down into Wyoming, stopping in Cheyenne at that little boot shop, leaving the ones you gave me on the front stoop by the trash can, in favor of snakeskin, maybe red but probably brown, and from there to Lander, where there is a foot of snow on the ground and the streets are deserted but I find that tattoo parlor again, the one I couldn’t afford to go into seventeen years ago, but now with our credit card that you haven’t canceled yet, you still waiting, watching my receipts as I go, a trail of gas stations and fast-food restaurants and cheap motels and blank spaces after I take money out of our checking account and pay by cash for a couple of days, then your relief at my breakfasts at McDonalds in towns you’ve never heard of, and after the tattoo, the one of our kids as birds flying away one by one, I lay sore and quiet on the hard bed, the dusty bedspread making my nose run, wondering if that guy at the parlor gave me Covid, wondering if I’ll make it to Yellowstone to see the wolves like we talked about, wondering if the park is even open for visitors right now, wondering if this will open your eyes, if you’ll see that I left not because of a virus, or depression, or the kids, but because I needed to curl up alone in bed wearing boots I picked out myself.

Hannah Grieco is a writer in Arlington, VA. She is the cnf editor at JMWW, the fiction editor at Porcupine Literary, and the founder and organizer of the monthly reading series ‘Readings on the Pike’ in the DC area. Find her online at www.hgrieco.com and on Twitter @writesloud.

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They come, some on canes or walkers, hopeful, tired, tentative, and my job is to hook up their TVs and hang pictures and most times I talk to them and say I’m Andrew, call me for anything you might need. Many don’t say much and those are the ones I keep my eye on. It’s the last place on earth they are going to live and I know they miss the homes they had to leave. There’s plenty to do here, three movies a week, documentaries, lectures, entertainers brought in to play and sing. This place tries its best to keep the residents from getting bored or lonesome.

But still.

Here’s where I come in. They tell me, some way or another, that they have had enough. Dr. John put in nine years and he was almost crying when he said “Thank you Andrew, you’re a good man.” He looked so much at peace afterward. And Jane touched my hand before her eyes closed. She had a small smile on her face. Her time in this place was six years.

I like to think my mission on earth is to help people any way I can.

Lucille Bellucci grew up in Shanghai with an Italian-Dutch-Indonesian father and Chinese mother. They lived three years under the communist regime until 1952, when Lucille was interrogated daily by the secret police for spying for the United States. They threatened execution if she did not sign a confession. She was 18 and had not seen an American since WWII. Being full of righteousness at that age she refused to sign. Six weeks later the police threw exit visas at the family and told them to get out. They sailed to Italy, where they lived five years before immigrating to the United States. Ten years later she moved to Brazil to join her husband, an engineer engaged in a dam project. They returned to California in 1980 and she began writing. Her novels and essays are on Amazon and other websites.

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I wasn’t there very long. What’s funny is, I’ve been here, a place I didn’t even want to go, for longer. I hated saying goodbye to everyone but it wasn’t up to me. It was just time to go. You can’t stay in one place forever, can you? 

Sometimes I’m still right there with them. Like when I sent a black crow my little sister Jenny’s way. It was me perching on the branch in front of her bedroom window making all the fuss. I got Jenny her apartment downtown with the big oak tree two years ago. The listing came up and I made sure she saw it and the landlord chose her. She didn’t know it was me working it all out behind the scenes. 

She lives on the first floor below the piano player. Every afternoon at two, the tenant above will practice and Jenny can’t help but think of me because that lady is endlessly playing two of my favorite songs. The ones that used to drive Jenny crazy as I practiced them day in and day out, until I got it right. Beethoven’s Bagatelle in A Minor, Für Elise, for one. Jenny is hearing those songs again in the same way. The stumbles, the repetition, the triumphant movements followed by the sudden wobble and pause. The do-over. And over! I laugh. This is me laughing.

Sometimes I cry. I miss everyone so much. I was given twenty-nine years. Twenty. Nine. Can you believe it? I was born into all the best things and it was all taken away. I was pretty, I was smart. And fun? Life of the party. I had it all so it was pretty unfair what happened to me. Just one thing can go wrong and change everything you’ve ever worked for, ever loved, ever hoped to become. One little thing. 

I can tell you something about being here, though. It’s different for everyone depending on what you believe in, how you behave, how you got here to begin with. For me, it’s not too bad. There’s a piano in a room at the end of the hallway. Some days, an old friend will visit out of the blue. I’m always surprised the first time some show up. And others, I’m sort of expecting them. Dad came first on his own, then mom a few years later when she was finally ready. Now they visit together, more accepting of the whole thing.

I suppose I should tell you more of my story. Before I had to come here, that is, because I’m pretty different now. I was born into my family with four older brothers before my sisters came along. I was a tom-boy, too, because of them until I got to be a teenager and then I was the girliest girl you could ever meet. I had to share a room with my sisters which I hated at the time, but boy, what I wouldn’t do to be in that room with them now! 

I made the rules. Like, I got to wear all of their clothes but they weren’t allowed to so much as breathe on mine. And I had the say on what went up on our walls. Bobby Sherman, no. James Taylor, yes. David Cassidy, no. Eric Clapton, yes. I decided when lights went out and what records rotated on the hi-fi. I decided how they should wear their hair, what shoes and eye shadow and perfume to buy.

Gosh, I miss them. But it’s just time and space between us, that’s all and if you haven’t figured it out yet, that stuff is not linear. It’s a circle. You’ll see. Eventually. It will feel like eternity if you believe otherwise.

Let me explain. It was on my twenty-eighth birthday when the sentence was handed down. I know, so young. So much life ahead of me, so much potential. I didn’t see it coming. Wrong place, wrong time. 

Who goes to the doctor on their birthday and finds out something like that! At the time, I was so mad, I felt like I let everyone down. Later, I saw the light. No one was disappointed in me. They were disappointed in the crappy hand I was dealt. I try to stay connected, for example, one day when Jenny was sitting in the park, Mom, Dad and I appeared at her feet. Three crows doing our dance around her in a circle. She sat watching, even talked to us a little bit. Funny. The things she felt were important to say, we already knew.

I guess this is the ending of my story. Twenty-nine years is not a long time. I enjoyed my embodiment, even if it was brief and I missed out on so much. My last year was sad; visits to the hospital, losing my hair, losing so much weight from that pretty body of mine. Losing my way. Until I found the proper map and got myself ready to go. 

Listen. It must be two o’clock! Jenny’s upstairs tenant is practicing her piano. Today it’s my other favorite. Moonlight Sonata, First Movement, Opus 27 No. 2. Jenny is listening and staring off into space, feeling my visit. Hi, Jenny! Remember it? 

Anyway. 

We’re all temporary residents. I was a brief visitor, but so are you, you just don’t really get it yet. I never did, get that I was just passing through. You might get to visit longer than I did, but it’s all the same. Some take the long way and others look for the shortcut. In the end, we’re all just walking each other home. You’ll see. Someone will be waiting for you. Jenny, I’ll be there for you. I’ll meet you on the corner and we’ll walk together hand in hand. Back home together.

Mary Corbin is a writer and artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her approach is one from the heart, seeking honesty and connection to the global community. Whether in words on a page or paint on a canvas, she aims for strong narrative and relatable characters and experiences. Mary seeks common ground by capturing a simple moment, thought, or gesture of the ordinary, while suggesting the mysterious layers that lie beneath the surface. This contemplation is her constant source material.

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His reflection in the passenger side mirror revealed a profound impatience with the slow trickle of the gas pump. I imagine he was itching for it to finish so that he could feel alright about lighting up. He probably would’ve already been about halfway through his L&M if I wasn’t here. 

The easy thing is to ascribe his rapid aging solely to the chunk of missed time rather than ponder more sinister culprits, but even so, he really aged so much faster than any of my friends’ parents. The creases around his mouth were darker each time I saw him, like there was something behind his jaw, tugging at the seams to hold them in place. I noticed his hair had begun to thin too – just a little. At first, the last time I saw him, I thought it was my imagination, but this mirror view settled it. He was getting old. 

The pitch of coursing gasoline against the inside of the tank rose steadily into its uppermost register, putting a fast timer on my staring session. As soon as the automatic stop clicked “full,” I yanked my eyes from the mirror and stared off at some nothing elsewhere. I didn’t want him to know I was watching when he looked up from the pump. 

His shifting appearance aside, there was a completely different air about him that day. Just a few days prior to this, he had been hellbent on heaven, desperate for my forgiveness. He was trying so hard to wipe the slate clean, and like always, I caved after a point. It was always easier to love. Still is, I think. 

Looking back, I think I loved him more with each piece of forgiveness I granted. Part of it was probably the way he outdid himself each time, holding his arms out so wide you could practically hear his bones creaking with each breath. The physical counterpart to an “I love you this much” gets harder for human hands to depict when surmounting such a sizeless mass of evidence to the contrary. Past a point, I guess, it’s just unsustainable. Maggie always warned me against buying into it, but I could never help myself. She doesn’t get to see the joy of relief that streaks across his face at the moment I let it go. Maybe it’s because he knows he missed out on those chances with her. 

Maybe I could have held out on him if I tried, like Maggie always told me to, and gotten something bigger, better out of it all, but that’s not what I wanted. I don’t know if I believe that’s what Maggie ever really wanted either. I guess I just don’t see how anyone could find themselves cradling a moment like this between their caged fingers and make the decision to squeeze. I know I couldn’t do that. 

Anyways, this time his apology came in the form of a car – his old car, obviously. He didn’t have the money for a new one, at least not a new one for me. But I guess you could say that his new car was supposed to be part of his apology too, a new one that was warm in the winter and cool in the summer and years newer than anything we’d ever had. 

That’s right – It was ‘we’ again, at least for the time being, and that’s what was important in the moment. 

That day was one of those perfectly warm previews of a spring where winter was never real. March is a flighty month, and I could never help swinging back and forth on the back of its whims, fluttering each day from hope to despair and back again. My dad is the same way, I think. At least, that would explain the way he comes and goes. In a way, he may as well be the month itself, leapt off of the calendar and bounding down the street. 

I sat there in the passenger seat, trying to keep my eyes from defaulting back to the mirror. A text flashed across the top of my screen and my sister’s words intruded on my idle scrolling. I held my thumb over it for a moment and finally decided to swipe it away as my lagging memory caught up to recall what she’d said a couple hours earlier. Listen. I know this hurts to hear, but it’s just an act. He wasn’t going to stay last time, and he isn’t going to stick around this time. I can’t keep watching him let you down. I know it sucks, but you have to stop buying into it. You just can’t let yourself get too excited is all. Only Maggie. And on my birthday, of all days. Maybe she means well, but more often than not I think she’s jealous. He never makes it for her birthdays. But then again, it’s never snowed on mine. That’s kind of just how it goes. 

I thought about opening her message for a second more, but decided to click the lock button and began searching languidly for a new object to hold my attention while the driver’s seat remained unoccupied. Inadvertently, my eyes crept back into that rearview mirror and landed on the worried little nozzle burrowing into its home on the pump. At first I didn’t think much of it, but motion in the background illuminated the empty space at the fore. As my eyes adjusted to the new depth of field within that rear-view mirror, I took in the motion occurring off in the distance. 

I’d never seen my dad run before, not like that. I had to crane my neck back around the passenger seat to see it for myself. Three of them were chasing him, coming close. His legs were moving so fast, it looked like the rest of him wouldn’t keep up with them much longer as he began to round a corner, leaving my line of sight. 

I tore off the seatbelt, still fastened in an exhibition of patience and trust in his return, squandered now, and flung the door open. But before I could really even start in his direction, an enormous crack drew an invisible fissure in the ground between us. It rang out eternally in the air, isolating itself over any other sound in the area. Hearing a gunshot for the first time stopped me dead in my tracks. Every day that winter I wondered whether it did the same to him. Maggie said the answer didn’t really matter.

J.M. Landon is a fiction writer from New Haven, Connecticut. While he is currently at work on a debut novel, that path gives way to frequent experimentation in shorter forms. More on James’ work can be found at JMLandonWriting.com and @JMLandon_ on Twitter.

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I sit here alone. It’s dark, save for the glow of the telly. The news is on. I’ve been watching the news for a long time now. There is always something interesting going on in the world. Sometimes it’s good, usually it’s bad. The petty intrigues and cruelties of the world pass me by.

The faded, threadbare couch is comfortable in my little bedsit. I stare at the news until I can no longer see. The telly keeps on broadcasting, regardless.

I watch a cockroach skitter up the wall and over the sill to exit the still open window. It runs along the ledge, presumably to enter the adjacent flat, though I could not possibly see it do so from this vantage. I can’t blame the thing for seeking greener pastures. There hasn’t been anything to eat in here for years.

Occasionally, the phone will ring, but I don’t answer. Once in a great while, there’s been a knock at the door. I ignore those, too. Even he doesn’t try to come after me, which is good.

I think at one time there must have been a fetid stench. In this neighborhood no one would notice or remark on such a commonplace occurrence, no matter how foul. To some who live in this building, my few belongings might seem grand; my past almost royal. But my flat is dank and dingy. The grey carpet smells of mildew. I used to wonder if grey was its intended colour when it was new. There is a hotplate near the sink in one corner. The comfy if crumbling couch serves as my bed, my resting place.

Once I had friends, family, a good job. There were parties and outings and laughter. My uncle had a boat and used to take me sailing. Oh how I loved being on the water with the wind in my hair! I was pretty then. Young and pretty and full of life.

Then I ended up here and it felt so lonely at first. But when the days stretched into weeks, and the weeks into months, and the months into years, I resigned. It was clear that no one missed me. No one outside of my flat found my absence remarkable. How could that be? Yet it was.

The knock at the door today is less a knock than a pounding. The angry voices outside are demanding and insistent, but I do not heed them.

Soon there is a much louder pounding and the crackle of splintering wood. They’ve broken the door down. It’s about bloody time, I think. But there is no humor in the thought.

Nor can I find humor in their horror, as the two men who burst in find me sitting on the couch, watching the news with empty sockets. My once lush black hair is brittle and stringy now. Still, it might hint at who I used to be, in a way that my fleshless bones cannot.

Vivian has been writing as long as she’s been reading. She has previously published short stories in, Our Country, Our People and The Scarlett Leaf Review, along with several non-fiction pieces in Horse Illustrated, Horseplay, and Washington Horse Breeder’s Digest. Her first novel, Rock’s Wages, will be released early in 2021. A lifelong equestrian, Vivian divides her time between writing, riding her horse, teaching dressage professionally, and enjoying her day job as the Sales and Business Operations manager at a small software company you’ve never heard of. Her identical twin sons are adults now, but always the greatest joy of her life.

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Alexander stirs, hesitant to meet the golden light streaming in through the large bay windows and gracing his eyelids. He knows that the moment he opens his eyes, reality will hit him over the head with a brick. He knows that he’ll find himself in the tattered brown armchair that he’s imbued with his shape. He knows that the boxes scattered around him won’t have moved, or magically unpacked themselves. He knows that the empty bottle of Jameson on the floor next to him will remind him of how he failed last night. And he’s afraid of how comfortable he’ll feel in that failure.

Instead of opening his eyes, he imagines. Clouds of alcohol linger on his mind and they aid his fantasy. He lives in his quaint suburban home with a woman. The most beautiful woman he has ever known, with a smile stronger than sunshine. She loves him. He doesn’t quite know why, but she does, and she brings out the best in him. They unpack the boxes together. She laughs when he gets tape stuck on his back. He laughs when she picks up a box and its contents come tumbling out of the bottom. They make love on the bare oak floorboards in the afternoon sun. Alexander looks into her starry brown eyes and sees a dazzling future in them. A future filled with backyard barbecues, children’s laughter, outdoor movie nights under the stars, and yearly trips to southern Europe.

Cynthia.

Alexander’s phone vibrates in his pocket. Salted whisky tears tickle the corners of his mouth. His eyelids struggle to open, held in place by crusted sadness and an unwillingness to greet the day. The light penetrates and feels like an intruder to Alexander. Cynthia would have considered it a friend. He checks his phone. Another missed call from his sister.

Alexander stands on shaky legs and trudges through the large, empty house to the bathroom, careful not to jostle any of the boxes with her name on them along the way. He grips the counter with brittle fingers as he relieves himself. His eyes avoid the mirror. He feels the fear of living another lost day creep into his mind, but he doesn’t know how to fight it. He doesn’t want to. He doesn’t care. He sits on the toilet and the cracks of his broken soul quake and further fracture at the knowledge that he can’t escape her memory.

He sees her sitting on the toilet, on her phone, the door to the bathroom open, for a half hour. He would joke, calling the bathroom “her office,” because she would often do work on her phone while she was there. He remembers all of the conversations they had with her on the toilet, pants around her dainty ankles, and him sitting on the floor in his suit. They would talk about their respective crushes on James McAvoy, about the men in Alexander’s office who didn’t understand him, and Cynthia’s troubles with her family, about science fiction, travelling, racism, or baked goods. Then, mid-sentence, Cynthia would play a song she’d recently heard and they would sit, her on her porcelain throne, he on the stained rental-apartment tiles, and listen in silence. Alexander remembered a time that he farted in the middle of one of their quiet song moments and they laughed for an hour. It was the last time he really laughed. The last time he really smiled was when he was last with her.

Alexander pours a coffee. He doesn’t know when he made the coffee, or how long he has been standing, staring out the kitchen window. He stirs two tablespoons of sugar into his cup and adds the spoon to the mountain of dishes. Cynthia had always told him he takes too much sugar in his coffee; that she would outlive him by an extra day for each unnecessary spoonful he would add. Alexander laughs at the thought of how wrong she was. Then he cries at having laughed. Then he laughs at the thought of how pathetic he must look. Then he cries because the coffee is cold.

Alexander turns on his computer with the intention of signing in to work remotely. He enters his password – her birthday – and clicks enter. Incorrect Login Information. That’s right. He was let go last week.

Alexander sits in his tattered brown armchair amongst the scattered boxes and looks out the bay window. Beside him is a full bottle of Jameson. He doesn’t remember how it got there, but is happy at the touch of the smooth glass. He imagines its warmth touching his lips, rushing through his shivering body and filling the cracks in his soul like a thick molasses. He doesn’t need a glass. He lifts the bottle, but is interrupted by a knock on his door. His daze is momentarily broken. His mind quickly scans the ever-thinning list of contacts, friends, and acquaintances; it doesn’t take him long. He can’t think of anyone who might be knocking and turns his attention back to his liquid friend. The knock returns, more desperate than before.

Alexander opens the door and is stunned.

“Nicole?”

“Hey bro… how are you?”

“I… I thought you were in Africa.”

“I was. I figured you might need me.”

Alexander feels his legs rattling. His breath is sharp. His heart is bursting. Tears are welling.

“I left you a bunch of messages telling you I was coming, but I’m guessing you didn’t get those. Are you okay, Alex?”

“There are too many boxes,” Alexander stutters between pained gasps, and falls into his sisters
arms.

“It’s okay, darling. I’m here. Shh. It’s okay. It’s okay.”

Andrei Preda is an artist based out of Toronto, Ontario. He is a graduate of the university of Windsor’s BFA Acting program. He has performed everything from Shakespeare to original works, both comedies and dramas, in theatres across the province such as 4th Line, Hart House, and the Secret Shakespeare Company to name a few. He has won the Subscriber’s choice for Best Leading Performance by a Male at Hart House Theatre, and was nominated for the Best Featured Male in a Play for Woman in Black by BroadwayWorld Toronto. He has worked with prominent Canadian playwrights Judith Thompson and Sky Gilbert. Currently transitioning from acting to writing, Andrei is a self-published author with a novel, an audio drama podcast, and several short stories in development.

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My father and mother: married fifty years, divorced five. My father’s long-ago sweetheart; a letter, a short-lived affair.

He gives her half of his money and the beach-front condo. He moves into a smaller one in the same neighborhood. He can see her building from his window, points it out to me when I go visit.

They see each other every Sunday, after Mass, at their favorite chain. Sometimes, he proposes they marry again. Most times, she storms out after he denies the affair, the incriminating letter. They meet again, the next Sunday, or the one after that.

For the last two years of my father’s life, my mother, every day, cooks all his favorites, minestrone, apple tart, onion frittata. She delivers his lunch in a glass container at noon, and trades it for the dirty empty one of the day before. Sometimes she brings him a quart of milk from the grocery store. He saves quarters and singles to reimburse her for the $3 parking valet.

For the last two years of his life, my father calls my mother every morning when he wakes up and every night before he goes to bed. He asks her what plans she has for the day. He encourages her to go to the pool when she’s depressed. He gives her financial advice. He offers to drive her to the doctor, or to the mechanic when her car breaks down. He buys her flowers on Mother’s Day.

She has diabetes. His kidneys are failing.

She has a cyst on her liver. He’s plagued by a tremor, the onset of Parkinson’s.

An MRI reveals melanoma in his lungs and liver. The diagnosis is uploaded onto his digital record on the day he is scheduled for dialysis access surgery. The hospital cancels the procedure while my father is already in the waiting room. “Call your doctor,” they tell him, no other explanations.

The urologist doesn’t answer my father’s call. The oncologist’s earliest appointment is two months away.

No one will tell my father the obvious: he’s dying. Better by kidney failure than metastasized melanoma in the liver and lungs. They decide for him which death is best without letting him know.

Long ago, the tremor in his hand took writing from him. Now, without dialysis, his tongue stumbles, words get stuck in his mouth, then explode out of shape.  A mix of English and his native Italian. “Gratta my ankles, please.” He itches all over.

When he collapses on his way to the bathroom at four in the morning, my sister, visiting from Italy, finds him and calls 911. An emergency treatment gives him back his speech, but it’s temporary. The hospital doctors are less circumspect: there is no point, they say, in having access surgery. His heart is too weak.

At first, he insists he is strong enough. When the nurse comes for a formal assessment, he forces himself out of bed and walks twenty feet leaning on his walker. He’s breathless, pale-faced when she tells him “enough,” and he collapses into a plastic chair in the hallway. I praise him. “You did good.” He shakes his head, having understood something I haven’t yet.

Later, the surgeon tells my mother, “It is cruel to give him hope.” He leans close to my father’s face, nearly shouting, “You really want surgery? You could be stuck in a coma, with tubes down your throat. You want to do that to your family?” If he goes home now, he tells my mother, he won’t even feel it. He’ll slip away in sleep.

It’s a lie.

It takes him five days. Just in time for my brother to fly in from Denver and to watch a soccer game with him, holding his hand.

On his first night at home he asks me if he’s still at the hospital. He looks at the wraparound view in his condo’s bedroom, eyes wide and nodding. “Mine?”

He can only speak in short bursts. When the hospice caretaker is done towel-washing him, he asks my sister, “Ready?”

“For what?” she says.

“The funeral,” he says.

He must be spoon-fed. He refuses milk, soft cheese, my mother’s home-made broth. He eats only chocolate pudding and tiramisu.

Morphine won’t soothe the itching. My sister and I take turns through the night rubbing his skin with CBD cream, but touching hurts him. His lungs, filling with water, won’t let him rest. The itching keeps him awake. He nods off, then startles awake, his weak voice crying, “gratta, please, there,” a shaking finger pointed at a foot, or a shin.

On the third day, only hours before his lungs will fill with water and suffocate him, he says, “It’s a terrible world.” We gather around his bed. “The whole family is here,” we reassure him. He seems lost looking at me, then at my sister. “And Mother?” His voice is a whisper. “Right here,” my mother says, touching his hand. He turns to her, struck, mouth gaping. Then, “Come sei bella.” How beautiful you are.

 

Laura Valeri is the author of three short story collections and a book of essays. Her most recent work, After Life as a Human, an ecological memoir, was released in November 2021 with Rain Chain Press. Laura Valeri’s essays, stories, translations, and critical essays are widely published, most recently in South85 Journal, Assay, Santa Fe Writers Quarterly, Fiction Southeast, PRIMS, and others. She teaches creative writing at Georgia Southern University and is the founding editor of Wraparound South, a journal of southern literature.

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Rain started the day and gray skies provided the appropriate ambiance for this pilgrimage.  The bus was nearly full with over two dozen Poles all younger than I. There were some families with teenagers.

We descended from this lush green mountain valley, winding our way toward Krakow, passing the villages of Poronin, Rdzawka, and Chabówka, crisscrossing the small Skawa River several times.  Closer to Krakow, we took a left turn. The green and yellow fields of corn and wheat gave way to a more industrialized area with huge, no longer used factories in every direction.

Within two and a half hours, the houses became gray and hazel. Even homes painted pastel colors were somehow steeped in a dull henna that would never wash out. The few flowers there were seemed sad and overwhelmed by the grayness of the place.

As our bus drew closer and closer to the camps, I had this overwhelming urge to shout, “No farther!  Let me off! I want to go no farther! Don’t take me in there.” But the bus did all the same.

Arbeit Macht Frei. So the colossal sign spread above the gate reads. Nothing – not all the books written nor all the movies and documentaries made – can come close to the horrendous enormity of this place – and I didn’t even get to Birkenau!

Dachau was white gravel glistening in the Bavarian sun. All the wooden barracks had been destroyed before the Allies arrived. This place was row upon row of huge, three-story brick buildings. The Nazis stuffed hundreds of people in each, Polish intelligentsia and resisters in the beginning. Photographs of these early arrivals line the walls in one of the barracks. I looked for Skarbeks as I had in Warsaw’s Wilanow Palace. I didn’t find any.

The dates of entry and of death on each photo indicate most died within two months. Their faces stared back at me. The crowd I was with pushed me on against my will.

I stepped into the cell where the Jesuit priest Maximilian Kolbe starved to near death as he attended to nine others, all Jews. He was later executed. The space isn’t bigger than my walk-in closet.

I saw the nearby standing cells: think of an area no larger than four airplane seats, and brick it up.  Cram four people overnight in this low-ceiling cellar with no air and take them out in the morning for more forced labor. I felt sick several times over during that hour and 45 minute tour.

I dreamed this morning of my father (who died aged 84, in 2007). I was in a strange place – outside a house I had never lived in. It had a walkway and this long, serpentine staircase to the front door. I couldn’t get in and called for my father. I knew he was inside but he didn’t come. I walked around the house and saw him (now about 40 years old) through the window. I went up the steps and met him as he was coming out. He turned to lock the door.

Because I could tell he neither saw nor heard me, I cupped his cheek in the palm of my hand. He – whom I never saw cry – leaned into it and wept. His shoulders shook with his sobs. He was alive – I was the one who was dead.

I immediately awoke and the image in front of me in its fullest form was that of two drawings on the walls of the washroom of the women’s barracks. The first was a large beautiful mural in shades of blue by a Polish woman. It depicted two men clad only in shorts and shoes, riding bareback on a pair of horses galloping across a rivulet. The second was on the wall directly opposite, with two sitting babies splashing in a puddle. Even in this place of death, there were affirmations of the glory and the wonder of life and tributes to this poor watered planet on which we live.

It is 4 AM as I finish writing this. It’s raining in Zakopane.

 

Christine Skarbek is a journalist, editor, translator, foreign student exchange coordinator pre-9/11 in metro Atlanta, GA, now living in Konstancin, Poland, author of the memoir The Colorful Kaleidoscope of My Uncharted Life: Confronting Power & Chaos, due out in November.

This piece is a short excerpt from that memoir.

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Gray clouds gather over my head. It’s getting cold, even though it’s summer. Goodbye to my afternoon in the garden under the warm rays of the sun.

The scent of jasmine invades me and fills my soul, as the first drops of rain begin to fall. My leg hurts, more than yesterday. Maybe I shouldn’t have let them operate on me. But my doctor insisted. He told me that survival with chemotherapy and surgery was more likely than with chemo alone.

Before the first downpour, I take refuge under the great oak, walking slowly, aided by my cane. I sit on my old wooden and wrought iron bench. Just in time. It’s good watching the rain while you’re sheltered.

My son comes, alarmed.

“Dad! What are you doing here? You’re going to get sick.”

“I’m already sick. I’m enjoying life. I will not choose my moments according to the weather report.”

I realize that he doesn’t understand me. He thinks I’m demented. I take his hand and look into his eyes.

“Could you bring me a lemon tea? I’ll stay here a little longer.”

I watch him go under the pouring rain and I know it’s going to be tough.

 

Marcelo Medone (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1961) is a fiction writer, poet and screenwriter. His work has received awards and has been published in magazines and books, both in digital and paper format, individually or in anthologies, in various languages, in more than 30 countries all over the world.

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When you crack eggs, is the yolk whole or runny, is it yellow like buttercups, yellow like an Easter dress, or is it gold instead? Is the white jelly-thick, the shell farm-fresh and freckled with chicken shit and feathers? How do you crack eggs? When you separate eggs, do you do it like your mother showed you back when you were a girl who wore dresses, and if it wasn’t your mother who showed you, then who taught you about eggs? How do you separate the white from the yolk, and for what purpose? In culinary school, we were slow to separate our eggs into plastic measuring cups. We talked while we worked, marveling at the one-in-one-thousand strangeness of double yolks. We thought we knew eggs; we knew nothing. At the university cafe, my first job, I cracked flats of eggs into large metal pitchers, eighty or ninety at a time. The grumpy baker told me to take one in each hand and smash them together lightly–one egg would crack the other. He sighed as he pulled eggshells out of my pitcher, but he was always sighing over something so I didn’t pay him any mind. At the Irish bar, I cracked my eggs slowly, slowly, and always right before I ran upstairs to the stove to boil cream for whiskey-flavored custard. I was a ghost in a grey basement, but I was still  sure it would get better than this. In downtown Boston, however I cracked eggs wasn’t good enough. I was supposed to crack them open with one hand, then pour egg into the other and cradle soft yellow yolk while white slipped through the sieve of my fingers. My hands did a one-two waltz, but left never trusted right. At the California bakery, we were instructed to lay a dozen boxes of eggs across the metal table, their flaps interlocking. We had to break six at a time into a bowl and scoop out yolks with one hand. The whites were dumped into buckets, where they became someone else’s project. Overlooking Ferry Plaza, I crack my eggs with a sheet of parchment paper laid underneath a 30-count flat, one egg in each hand. One sharp rap and I pull open the shell with my thumb and pinky. Deposit the spent shell in the flat, pass the second egg to my left hand, reach underneath with my right for another egg, and in between find time to rap, crack, slip. If you are not sure, bits of shell will go everywhere and you will have to chase them up the bowl with your pointer finger. So I sway, letting hands lead body in an unobserved and holy egg dance. I am sure, I am sure, I am sure.

 

Lindsey Danis is a Hudson Valley-based writer and Creative Nonfiction editor of Atlas and Alice. Lindsey’s writing has appeared in AFAR, Longreads, and Condé Nast Traveler, among other places.

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It’s time to take the $40 plunge. A break-up gift to myself. I’m 37, not young and not old, except to people who are older or younger than me. My favorite class to teach is Early Childhood Literature, and my colleagues say it’s starting to get a bit weird, this obsession with Matilda and Charlotte’s Web and Green Eggs and Ham. I don’t even have kids. Probably never will. If I got pregnant now, it would say “Advanced Maternal Age” on my chart, next to “never-smoker” and other lies. When we were together, you used to make two pots of coffee a day, sometimes three. You used to tell me I should bake more and then frown like a disappointed celebrity judge at my sagging cakes and souffles. You used to set out a fruit bowl on the drop-leaf table and stack up your orange peels. I told you I was allergic to citrus and you didn’t give a shit. You told me I should smile more. When we were together, I used to grind my teeth at night, and I never do that. My molars felt like they were hooked up to live wires with each bite of tortilla chip, every spoonful of ice cream. Once, after a particularly bad fight, I could only eat applesauce and mashed potatoes, like my 88-year-old grandma. My favorite literary tooth reference is in The Hobbit, thirty white horses on a red hill—except my horses are palominos, exhausted from all that champing and stamping. At Target, I stand in the toothpaste aisle for twenty minutes, struggling to choose a box of white strips. Gentle White or Glamorous White? Somewhere, you’re peeling clementines for a younger woman who loves oranges and smiles more, and fuck her, and fuck you too. I look at the girl on the box, her perfect nose and pink-grapefruit lips and radioactive smile and the smooth, photoshopped skin around her mouth. The rest of her face is cut off, which makes it easier not to hate her. I choose Glamorous White and I know I’ve made the right call. A girl with teeth like that, she can do anything. She smiles and men collapse in the middle like overbaked souffles, clutching at their eyes.

 

Lindy Biller grew up in Metro Detroit and now lives in Wisconsin. Her fiction has recently appeared at Bending Genres, Okay Donkey, and SmokeLong Quarterly. She can be found on Twitter at @lindymbiller.

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It was easy to miss her sadness. It lay deeper, occupying a soundless, dark, expansive space, and herself a satellite, flung from the bosom of a warm world a long time ago, constantly moving through the darkness, perhaps even believing at times she was escaping it, but its edges raced perpetually beyond, and she remained in a place where time forgoes its gentle wearing, where things exist in a permanence unbound from imagination.

“I’m worried it’s like my husband. That I’ll die,” she said.

She was short of breath. A common malady with a universe of consequences. I studied her X-ray: incandescent bones and the blackness of lung tissue—essentially normal. But then my eyes were drawn to the left upper lobe to a collection of white specks, like pebbles spilled across a chalkboard. Brighter than bone, foreign by all appearances, unnatural but not obviously malignant. Oftentimes infiltrates are thought of as invaders, entering spaces they did not belong, but the appearance of these lesions were different. They didn’t belong but they weren’t invaders, more like pilgrims. They’d buried their flags and burned their boats. They believed they belonged and had stubbornly remained, haunting her since their inception.

She did end up having what her husband died of—idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis—a cruel disease where the normally elastic and spongy lung tissue becomes scarred and stiff to the point where the heart cannot pump blood any longer to exchange oxygen. We found that out later. The day I did the chest X-ray, I let her know there was nothing obvious to explain her symptoms, but we’d get to the bottom of it. When I mentioned the fragments in her lung, her sadness came to the surface. I’d known it was there. I’d seen glimpses of it in past visits, but not in the way it was then. The pieces in her lung were fragments of a bullet. A lifetime ago she’d gently placed a gun against her chest and pulled the trigger. Decades later the wounds had healed but the shrapnel remained. A moment she’d regretted and repressed best she could until the X-ray brought the remnants back to life.

A year later, she made me promise I wouldn’t let her suffer at the end. I promised I wouldn’t but didn’t think we were at the end yet. The sound of her oxygen tank pushing air and her gasping inhalations broke the silence between us and challenged my prognosis. In the following months we struggled to keep her heart and lungs alive with diuretics, specialists, and hospital stays. She came to my office after our final desperate attempt to keep her out of the hospital. It had failed. I tried to avoid staring too hard into her blue eyes, didn’t want to watch her shaking hands too closely, as I risked blurring my vision and seeing double. Who she was before and who she was now were one and the same. She’d been a woman desperate to escape and now she was a woman desperate to hold on—both looking for reprieve.

She went home instead of the hospital. I signed the order and the hospice team kept her from suffering. Alone in my office, I pictured her at home in those final moments, a quiet solitude despite being surrounded by family, having a private communion with her former self, asking forgiveness and understanding, knowing that both entities were facing their own fear—fear of the end, fear of it all going forward—and understanding that at times both can be unbearable.

 

SR Schulz is a writer who sometimes thinks too much. He’s also a doctor among other things. His work has been published by McSweeney’s, Pidgeonholes, Rejection Letters, and others. Most of his work can be seen at www.SRSCHULZWRITING.com

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Even though I knew Larry was thrilled to have his own apartment, he looked angry as he showed me around the place the human resource center’s social workers had set him up in. Larry was good-natured but always looked mad because of how his eyes were crossed, one of the consequences of the ham-handed forceps that pulled him into the world forty-odd years ago.

Larry’s apartment was a converted shoe store on the north side of the railroad tracks from the square. The picture window that once displayed wing tips and pumps gave plenty of light, which bragged how clean Larry kept the place. He even got a calico kitten he named Root Beer. I don’t know what became of it.

I noticed several alarm clocks, which was strange because Larry couldn’t tell time. He nodded at a clock near the television and said when that one beeped, he knew it was time for bed. Others, he explained, reminded him to shave, eat breakfast and leave for the center’s workshop.

I was Larry’s supervisor. He chopped capacitors for transistor radios. Sometimes he’d cut a batch too long or short. I’d dump his output in the defectives bin. Larry would smile and usually say something like Sorry I’m defective, boss. I’d assure Larry it wasn’t him, just those particular piece parts. Sure, boss.

Larry never blamed his poor vision for his mistakes. To better understand how he saw the world, I once crossed my eyes, chopped a capacitor and nearly cut off the tip of my finger.

The only time I saw Larry truly angry was when he was still living at the dorm in the center. It was a Monday morning. Larry’s temper was parched underbrush, and anything anyone said was a cigarette flicked from a car window. I had to isolate him in the break room. I later learned his brother had failed to show for a promised visit that weekend. I’m not sure why, but I’d never thought of Larry having family.

After moving into the apartment, Larry set his sights on getting a red Beetle and an operation to fix his brain so I could teach him to drive. I knew both were impossible but couldn’t help rooting for him.

Instead of a car, Larry got a three-wheeled bike. Straps gripped his feet in the pedals, and a squeeze horn squawked like a mallard. I saw him riding all around town. His eyes were still angry-looking, but he always had a big smile. Why not? His own place. His own transportation. Even his own cat, for God’s sake.

#

The newspaper account didn’t say if Larry was headed north or south on his bike that Saturday. Was he hurrying home, hoping his brother would be there? Had an alarm clock sent him off on an errand? Had his distorted vision caused him to misjudge the speed of the train?

Apparently a small crowd gathered around Larry before the ambulance arrived. I used to wish I’d been there to close his cross eyes. Now I’m glad I wasn’t. At the end of it all, Larry deserved to look mad as hell.

 

David Henson and his wife have lived in Belgium and Hong Kong over the years and now reside in Peoria, Illinois. His work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions and Best of the Net and has appeared in numerous print and online journals including (mac)ro(mic), Fictive Dream, Pithead Chapel, Moonpark Review, and Literally Stories. His website is http://writings217.wordpress.com. His Twitter is @annalou8.

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It’s important to remember to have the dinner ready at 6:10 exactly, since her husband walks through the door at 6:00 and takes ten minutes to wash up and then he sits down to eat and the dinner has to be ready at just that time, not sooner or later, and after dinner while she loads the dishwasher he pretends not to watch, but he is watching, and he corrects her on the placement of the coffee mug and the silverware and he’s told her over and over, why on earth can’t she remember, and later still, as he gets ready for bed, putting his dirty clothes precisely into the hamper she thinks about her friends who complain because their husbands drop clothes on the floor and she wishes, just once, that he would drop clothes on the floor or leave hair in the sink or forget to put the toilet seat down but it’s important to remember that he is a good man, like her mother told her, a good provider and it’s just as easy to marry a rich man as it is to marry a poor man, and it’s important to remember that she loved a poor man once and what good came of that, what with picnics of bread and cheese in the warm grass, laughing while they drank sweet wine that tasted like cherries, which, it’s important to remember, is not a favorite of her husband who likes the dry wine that makes her thirst for water and she remembers the time that it rained and she and that poor man finished their picnic in the car and the windows fogged up and the air smelled like wine and the whole world was contained in that small fogged-in place and she thought there was nothing else that she would ever need or want but her mother told her that it was important to remember that artists like that poor man will always be poor and what is a fondness for sweet cherry wine compared to security because you can always learn to like different wines and different people and at some point picnics in the grass become less fun and it’s important to remember that ladies should sit in chairs with their ankles crossed and let the man pay the check and hold the door and order the wine and pick out the house and choose the carpets and the drapes and the furniture and the friends because it’s important to remember that one sweet year that she lived with that poor artist the two of them almost froze to death because they couldn’t afford heat and they spent most of their time in bed keeping warm and reading poetry to each other and studying each other’s bodies in a way that she has never studied the body of her husband and she can still see the mole near the dimple of his lower back and how his second toe was longer than his first and the scar on his right knee or was it his left, oh God, which knee, which knee, it had to be the right, and how he would curl into her in the night to keep her warm and her husband just sighs and turns up the heat but it’s important to remember that marriage is for richer or poorer and for better or worse but what is so bad, really, about not being cold or hungry, about having to pretend to like wine that tastes like wood, about having to have dinner on the table every day at 6:10 exactly, about having to vacuum the carpets in straight lines and making sure that the towels are hanging evenly on the rack and the forks are facing the correct way in the dishwasher and the junk mail is shredded before being thrown away and the lawn man comes every ten days because weekly is too frequent and bi-weekly is too infrequent and it’s a shame that he is allergic to cats as well as dogs because it would be nice to have a pet for company even though they make messes and chew but it’s important to remember that he is good about so many things, she just can’t remember any right now but he’s certainly not a bad man and it’s important to remember that she can’t go to her usual grocery store anymore because yesterday while buying some of that bitter, oaky stuff that he drinks she caught sight of a bottle of sweet cherry wine which made her break down and sob right there in the aisle.

 

Beth Moulton earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Rosemont College in Rosemont, PA, where she was fiction editor for the Rathalla Review. Her work has appeared in Affinity CoLab, The Drabble, Milk Candy Review, Fifty Women Over Fifty Anthology and other journals. She lives near Valley Forge, PA with her cats, Lucy and Ethel.

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Though there is no best way to flip a burger, there are better ways and worse ways, and it was part of my training to know the difference. It’s not the world’s greatest job, obviously, but it is a job, and I think it is important. It is important to me. It is important to me because it is my job. It is a dirty job; by the end of my shift, my feet hurt; my back hurts; I avoid talking to my coworkers, some of whose problems are so big I only feel diminished by my helplessness to do anything about them. It is hard to have a job where you wear a paper hat and have your name on a tag, but at the moment, this is the best I can do, and so I do the best I can do. A poet came and did a reading once. It was funny. She just walked in and started reading poems like it was a college classroom or something. I remember liking the one about degree of difficulty, though I’m not sure I understood it. She had copies of the poems she read and gave them out to people. A lot of them ended up in the trash, along with the empty burger wrappers and soda cups and ketchup-stained napkins. If she had noticed, I would have told her not to take it personally, but she didn’t.

 

Sue Allison was a reporter for Life Magazine; her writing has also been published or is forthcoming in Best American Essays, Antioch Review, Harvard Review, New South, Streetlight Magazine, Threepenny Review, Fourth Genre, The Diagram, Isacoustic, Puerto del Sol, River Teeth, and a Pushcart Prize collection. She holds a BA in English from McGill University and an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

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The sand is cold under my toes but I’m determined to see this thing through. To walk along the Pacific, listening to the waves, watching the surfers fight their delicate battles. Alone doesn’t feel so alone when you’re looking at the ocean. The seagulls soar and the sandpipers scurry away.

It’s a singular dance, surfer and board. They make it look easy. Even when the waves beat them, they still look cool. You can’t feel their panic standing on the shore. Unless you’ve been there yourself. Unless you know how it feels for the shifting current to crush your hope.

I grip the phone, wondering what I will say. How do you start something new when the road is long, and you’ve traveled so far, and why are there no instructions? No guidelines for how this should go.

The tide is high and there are piles of rocks to get past. But when you stand on top of the mound and the fading sunlight hits them just right, it’s the most beautiful shot of the day. Sunsets and surfers have nothing on the natural disorder of rocks upon rocks in the waning moments of day, reflecting every color and hue.

The phone never rings. I slip my flip flops back on and head for the car. Her voice will find me, soon enough. By then, maybe I’ll know what the hell to say.

 

Mary Lynn Reed’s fiction has appeared in Mississippi Review, Colorado Review, The MacGuffin, and many other places. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Maryland. She lives in upstate New York with her wife, and together they co-edit the online literary journal MoonPark Review.

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When the three of them shared a taxi on the way to an off-campus party one night, squeezed into the back seat with him in the middle, she could barely breathe, so aware of his body next to hers, how their legs touched, hip to knee. She was sure he was conscious of how she felt, had deliberately shifted nearer to her, casually touched her knee when the taxi braked.

She’d been resisting her feelings for months. The way her breath quickened when he glanced at her. How her heart beat faster when he drew closer. How the hair stood up on her arms when his hand brushed hers. Could it have been an accident, or was it intentional? When he walked into a crowded room, didn’t his eyes search out hers before anyone else’s? She spent weeks trying to decide. He was her best friend’s boyfriend. They seemed happy together. At least her friend seemed happy, he seemed—how to describe it?—amused, in control. Very cool. 

When he took her hand under the table at the bar a week after the taxi ride, she was relieved he’d made a move and it wasn’t all in her head. Even though it could destroy everything. Her relationship with her friend, who was also her roommate, and had always been good to her. (How excited they’d been in the fall. Rooming together in the same dorm suite!) Her belief in her own integrity. Could she really betray a close friend like that? Apparently so. When he followed her and stopped her in the corridor outside the restrooms, she turned to him eagerly, ready to say yes to anything, anything. He’d pulled her close and told her where to meet him the next day. And she’d gone without thinking twice, and he’d picked her up on his motorcycle and driven her to a friend’s apartment, and their lovemaking had been everything she’d wanted for weeks. He took his time, made her high school boyfriend seem callow and selfish. Sneaking around had added to the excitement, more stolen afternoons at his friend’s, a late-night encounter in a study room at the library, a breathless meeting before breakfast in her dorm suite once, when her roommates had already left for class. She agreed not to tell anyone right away, agreed her best friend was going to take it hard. She was dizzy with longing, couldn’t think of anything but him. The smell of his sweat. The tiny scar on his shoulder. How his hair curled when it was damp. His lazy smile after sex. 

It was a small town and it didn’t take long before someone saw them. Was it when he squeezed her hand outside the bagel shop? Or did someone see her dash out the door of his friend’s apartment building five minutes after he’d exited? Or spot her riding on the back of his motorcycle, arms circling his torso, breasts crushed against his back? 

The breakup with her friend had been as awful as she’d expected. Her friend had screamed and cried, called her a jealous bitch. She couldn’t shake the image of her face contorted with rage. They were no longer speaking, most of their mutual friends were no longer speaking to her either. She was aware of their eyes on her in classes, avoided the café at the University Union because she was afraid she’d run into one or another. Of course she wondered if it had been worth it, but every time he touched the side of her bare neck or ran a finger down her spine, she shivered; every time he slid a hand under her shirt, she stopped thinking altogether. She knew she wasn’t the first girl he’d been with—of course not, but she believed him when he said he’d been looking for her his whole life. None of the others meant anything to him. It was fated. Her world had narrowed to him, and for a few weeks that was more than enough.

The bar was noisy and crowded tonight. It smelled of wet wool coats and weed and stale beer. She’d been waiting, her coat and scarf and backpack piled on a seat to save it for him, and spotted him coming through the door before he noticed her. She was about to raise her hand to wave when she saw him searching over the heads of the boisterous drinkers until he found the person he was looking for and locked eyes with her. Startled, she turned her head to see who it was: the girl down the hall, one of the few mutual friends who’d supported her after the breakup. She’d slept on the couch in the girl’s suite while she looked for a new place to live. She’d had soulful conversations with her, about her regrets, about fate, about how irresistible the boy was. Her stomach lurched as she looked at him looking at the girl and the girl looking back at him. The girl was all rosy confusion, his gaze was enigmatic and intense. She must be mistaken.

 

Jacqueline Doyle’s award-winning flash chapbook The Missing Girl is available from Black Lawrence Press. In addition to a previous flash in (mac)ro(mic), she has published flash in Wigleaf, matchbook, CRAFT, Juked, Pithead Chapel, and elsewhere. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and can be found online at www.jacquelinedoyle.com and on twitter at @doylejacq.

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I always knew we were temporary.

Or rather, I always knew that she knew we were temporary.

We met at the start of summer, drunk on sun and alcohol. The years that have passed since have dissolved into a mess of moments so fluid that looking back on them feels like drowning. She told me she was drifting. Trying to outrun something behind her but not wanting to catch up with whatever was waiting in front. I leant over to light her cigarette and told her I’d lived there for years.

I often wonder if she’s still drifting, wherever she is. I can’t remember the number of times I’ve caught myself thinking of whether her bones have started to ache, or whether the grey has started to show through her hair.

She asked for my name and I told her. I asked for hers and she told me.

That night we stumbled back to mine and consummated our conversations before falling asleep. We woke up and she asked me where we were going for lunch. After that she asked what we were going to do before dinner. Halfway through a film, we let sleep swallow us.

It went like that for 11 weeks. I was in between jobs, figuring out what I wanted to do and, well, she was just drifting.

Whenever I think back to that time, to piece together the fragments of feeling left like shrapnel, I try to latch on to what it was about her that was so addictive. I wonder if it was the way she walked, with a light skip after every three steps, or the way she talked to strangers like she’d known them for years. I wonder if it was her mannerisms, sat on a spectrum between brilliant and bizarre.

I remember one time we were outside, the grass pressed like a living cushion beneath our backs. She rolled over so she was laying on my stomach. I liked the weight of her on top of me.

I remember watching as she pressed her thumb to my forehead, filling its print with my sweat before putting it into her mouth. After, she had kissed me, and I had tasted the salt of my sweat on her tongue.

The day before she left, we took a walk through a forest. It took us two hours to drive there. On the way we were unguarded with our words, unfastened, and I remember telling myself that this is what it must feel like to be alive. When we arrived we lost ourselves in the trees, winding through trunks and over roots, our feet making marks in the heaps of pine needles lining the ground. We ate on a blanket that had a rip in the middle, and drank warm wine. Sometimes, the needles would push themselves into my skin but the smell from the forest made it worthwhile. She fell asleep on the way home and I carried her into bed.

When I woke up in the morning she was gone.

*

It’s been a number of months since my first appointment with the young woman in front of me, when I told her what I’ve just told you. I answered all the questions she’d asked me, and I’d responded by asking her about her craft. When I left I was anxious and had forgotten her name.

Now I’m back, stood in the same room with the same four grey walls. The shelves are filled with the same polished brass and glass containers, dark with white labels holding promise of iris, cistus and musk. She shakes my hand with a smile and tells me to take a seat. I wipe my hands on the fabric of my jeans, aware at how damp they must have felt on her skin. She leaves and returns from a room I will never see, holding the thing I’ve been waiting for.

The bottle is dark and I train my eyes to see past the glass, to confirm the liquid is real. I see the label, a brilliant white, wearing my name and today’s date. I watch as she opens the bottle, and transfers a drop to a sliver of paper. I watch her shake it, bring it under her nose and inhale.

With a smile she offers the paper to me. I hear my heart in my ears. I take it, bring it to my own nose and breathe in. I smell cigarettes and sweat, sun-drenched Sundays and pine, and rub my arm against the sensation of needles against my skin.

‘So?’ the woman says, a hopeful look in her eyes. ‘Do you remember what it’s like to be loved?’

 

Josh Walker is a writer and online instructor with bylines in a number of publications. Originally from the UK, he currently calls Canada home. You can find him at his website, Instagram or Twitter.

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1.

It’s morning all over again. Loud white lighting, sharp edges, pressured skull. Allen throws another few pounds of bacon on the grill to get ready for the day. Food particles hidden in steam settle into his body, his clothes. He holds his breath for a moment to steady his stomach.

Yesterday’s stink is still in his beard, in the creases of his skin. There’s nothing worse than waking up to himself when he gets like this. He pushes the strips around on the grill and tries not to imagine today’s bacon grease building on yesterday’s, layers of gray wax coating his skin.

 

2.

The orders begin to come in and he fills them. At a certain point, things get like they always do. A person can only move so fast and his head is pounding and more order tickets are always clattering out of the machine, one after the next after the next. A four top, two top, seven top, three top. Some of the plates are already coming back with complaints. Pancake batter bubbles all over the grill. Omelets wait to be flipped, browning at the edges, cheddar spilling out. Biscuits wait ready on a plate, already too cold to serve. Forgotten corned beef hash goes to smoke on the grill and a timer is going off and he doesn’t remember what it’s for and his head swims in all this greasy steam. A pan clatters out of his hand and someone yelps. Hot sausage gravy has splashed all over the prep cook’s leg and the dishwashers are staring.

 

3.

The prep cook is just a kid, somewhere in his mid-twenties. He has spent a few years working here while he tries to decide what his real job should be. Allen remembers when he used to feel like that too, knows most of the people in this kitchen felt that way at one point.

The kid has experienced a lot of small accidents during his morning shifts. He flinches a little whenever Allen gets too close with hot pans, boiling water, knives.

This time the kid doesn’t clean up the gravy. He leaves pieces of sausage clinging to his leg, keeps his eyes lowered to the cantaloupe he has gone back to slicing. This will be another thing that will get more uncomfortable to address as time goes by, but Allen doesn’t know what to say, so he mumbles a quick apology and lets the moment pass, gets back to stirring and flipping and frying.

 

4.

Eventually the ticket machine’s clattering comes to a full stop. Allen scrapes burnt oil and butter off the grill, scoops leftover potatoes into a tub for tomorrow, wipes breadcrumbs and egg splatter from the counters, walks home.

It has been another rough morning, but he has certainly had worse. He has been doing this for too long to think that tomorrow will be different, but he has also been doing this for too long to think that guilt will improve anything. He forgives himself and moves forward. Besides, it’s a perfect day to take care of something. He finds his bottle and mug and gets ready for another warm afternoon in the garden.

 

5.

Between sips, he clips spent blooms, unburdens the plants. He digs out ones that don’t belong, trains others to grow upward on the backs of twigs and branches. He sprinkles cinnamon in the soil around some pepper seedlings to prevent damping off. Protects the tomato plants from mold with a mixture of baking soda and water applied to each crinkled leaf.

Fruit is already starting to appear on the raspberry bushes. In a few weeks he’ll get to spend whole evenings sipping from his mug and picking jar after jar of red clusters. He’ll take jam to work like he does every August and share it with the tired dishwashers and waitresses in the break room. They’ll smile and tell him from between berry-stained teeth that it’s the best batch yet.

Everywhere in this garden things grow. Life comes bursting out of shriveled seeds, discarded vegetables, and dry crumbling soil.

 

6.

For a while someone even lived in the garden. Allen found her in the Lost & Found at work, thick eyelashes fluttering closed over glass eyes. She was missing an arm and she was lovely. He always thought if he had had children, they would have been daughters. He wondered if they would have liked this sort of thing.

His guest lived propped against the trunk of a sapling until one morning he found a robin drawn to the sparkle, trying to keep her glass eyes. There are a lot of birds on his land. They’re only meant to live in the trees, but the rafters of the cabin are also clotted with nests he’ll always let stay for just one more week.

Sometimes he pockets oranges at work, then watches orioles and crows sip from the bright citrus while he drinks from his mug and lets the world grow warmer. They swoop and peck and dance around the garden. So in the end he slipped the lovely glass-eyed girl back into the Lost & Found and hoped for the best for her.

 

7.

The afternoon is getting softer. He drags the hose around, splashing cold water on his toes and on coiled roots. He likes the way the water spills into the cracks of his skin.

Tomorrow he will have to slog his way through the murk of another early morning in a too-bright kitchen. As always, the prep cook will pretend not to notice Allen’s churning stomach, the hungover stink on his mouth, how his eyes will have filled with tangled lines of exhausted blood. As always, Allen will pretend not to notice the kid looking away. But today he is happy in this garden. Things are growing and everything is warm. He takes another sip and smiles at the pleasure of his undoing, lets the harsh lines in front of him smooth themselves out.

 

Jess Golden lives in California. Her stories have most recently appeared or are forthcoming in Lunate, Bright Flash, and Cotton Xenomorph.

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My older sister Nan and I drink champagne from paper cups.

It’s the same champagne colleagues bought me when I got awards and was a departmental commodity.

Nan drinks to talent, revitalization, serendipity. She says I’ll be on top soon.

I love her smile. I can’t tell her about luck drying, commodities becoming burdens, or drunkenly likening awards to penis size.

I drink to kindness, newness, honor, discarding tempers. 

I swig with desperation.

Like everything, the paper cups go fast. 

I leave the last champagne untouched. Watch the moon illuminate its smooth surface.

I’ll save it for victory. Or desperation.

 

Yash Seyedbagheri is a graduate of Colorado State University’s MFA program in fiction. His stories, “Soon,”  “How To Be A Good Episcopalian,” and “Tales From A Communion Line,” were nominated for Pushcarts. Yash’s work has been published in The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Write City Magazine, and Ariel Chart, among others.

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Our baby comes into the world, and the doctor winds it up and hands it to us as it starts to cry. It’ll run out of steam quickly, the doctor tells us. Best to let it sit for about an hour before winding it up again.

Of course, we know this already. We know a lot; we’ve been reading all the most well-regarded books on baby care and development, and we know that over the next year, the baby’s rest time will get longer and less frequent. After about five months, we will be able to leave it off through the night, if all goes well, which we think it will.

We are both readers, and we hope our baby will be one too, so for its first nap we set it on our vast bookshelf, between a Woolf and an Adorno. We sit together on the couch, our fingers interlaced, and watch our baby sleep. We don’t speak, but we know we are thinking the same thoughts: that we did it, we’re doing it, our baby will grow to have its own thoughts, its own will, a set of fears and favorite places. It will grow away from us and break our hearts, though hopefully not in a gruesome way. In thirteen fourteen fifteen years, its wind-up mechanism will come loose, and then fall off completely, and our baby will take ownership of its destiny, which will terrify us.

We wind up our baby after it has rested, and we feed it, dust it, polish it. After a month, we take it to the farmer’s market, to the park, the post office, the library. We show our baby off to the admiring hordes of cousins, siblings, grandparents, neighbors.

A strange harmony settles on us as we no longer have the luxury of arguing, and our devotion to our baby leaves us without room for disagreement about what matters in life.

We confess our fears to each other. What if our baby grows sick? What if our baby comes to violently disagree with our fundamental worldview? What if it grows into a monster, scratches out our eyes, or the eyes of someone else we love dearly, or a stranger?

We soothe each other to sleep with lullabies. We have read enough to know that parents fall out of love with each other as often as they don’t, so as we cherish our baby’s fleeting smallness, we also cherish what vestiges we have left of our own youth, which, on a day-to-day basis, amounts to each other.

We know parents can fall out of love, and sure enough, soon after the baby starts sleeping through the night, something invisible starts tugging on us, and we grow terse with each other. Sometimes, when the baby sleeps, we quibble. We have petty spats about baby socks, Amazon Prime, lightbulbs, fried foods.

After the baby starts daycare, we have an ugly fight, over the matter of dog-earring pages in old books, and soon we are sleeping in separate rooms. We apologize and exchange a weary hug, but we also grow greedy for the freedom from each other afforded by daycare, and when our baby is home, we are greedy for the baby.

Our baby is not yet a year old, and we are so tired. We remember the days when our opinions on lightbulbs and dog-earring pages were like nothing, and we wonder if this was all a mistake. Of course, we keep going, because we must, because our baby needs us, and our baby might soon be all we have left of each other. We still share occasional happy moments, when our baby crawls over and picks a Le Guin off our vast shelf, or when it approximates sound into words: nanana; baff. And we still like to sit together on the couch sometimes as our baby sleeps leaning against our books.

One day, after a long hike in the woods with our baby on our backs, we set our baby down next to a Kundera in the shelf and fall asleep together spooning on the couch. When we wake, we look at the clock and realize we’ve overslept. I get up to wind up our baby.

Wait, leave it, you say. I like it just like this.

 

J. Thomas Eells is a former dishwasher and line cook who lives and writes in Minneapolis. His work has been featured in Molotov Cocktail, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He tweets @OneSilent_E.

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I fear I’m becoming one of those middle-aged Midwestern moms who decides to finally tell the truth about her life instead of taking a trip to Tuscany or adopting a kitten or fucking who she’s always wanted to fuck all along. You know the type. She has a bookmark or a bag with those beloved lines from that Muriel Rukeyser poem:

What would happen if one woman told the truth about

        her life?

     The world would split open

Turns out, though, if you write about when you first discovered sex or when you knew the violence visited upon you was soul-crushing or that you further entrenched inequality by saying nothing, doing nothing or that the trip you took somewhere “exotic” is someone else’s home and that you didn’t really have to go anywhere to “find yourself” or how motherhood wasn’t for you or gutted you and fulfilled you or fucked you up (or fucked them up) or hurt more, felt more exquisite than you ever thought it could, the world doesn’t actually cleave in two as predicted.

In fact, the world plods along as we all live out our own personal versions of Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour.” He isn’t really dead, you say? I’m still married. I’m still making beef stroganoff in a Crockpot and boiling egg noodles al dente and taking early-morning walks with other middle-aged Midwestern moms who nod at one another in passing as thundersnow approaches—the sky a subtle beauty of glittering grey—just so we can be alone with our thoughts for a silent, sacred second, even if we are forsaken by the elements or our families, whichever comes first.

 

*Inspired by Aileen Weintraub’s tweet on December 16, 2020

 

Michaella A. Thornton’s writing has appeared in Brevity, Complete Sentence, Creative Nonfiction, New South, Southeast Review, among others, and she will gladly take all the cannoli. She calls St. Louis, Missouri home. You can find her procrastinating and dreaming @kellathornton.

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The studio door opens. You enter, say Shalom, sorry, so sorry, traffic. You point to your champagne-colored hijab, asking if it’s okay to change. I multi-move: guide the group into Downward Facing Dog and show you the bathroom. When you emerge, I’m dazed by looping, licorice-colored hair, Maybelline-proof eyelashes, silken blouse tucked into flowy pants. My regulars—American, British, South African, Brazilian, Turkish—dress in anything-goes like t-shirts, tank tops, and leggings. They’re not all Jewish. I’m accustomed to accents, to other. Still, you stand out—the only Muslim. When you’d called to inquire about class, making sure it was women only, and told me you live in Jaljulia, a neighboring Israeli-Arab town known for its hummus and car mechanics and massive new mosque, I didn’t think you’d come. In miles, it’s close; in culture, another world. Now, here, you scan the room, lift your lower body, breathe loudly. I see your legs shake. Is this right? you ask in a sweet syrupy voice. I nod, smile, encourage. As everyone releases into Child’s pose, folding into themselves like snails, you catch my eye and whisper, Hard, but beautiful. A friendly titter fills the room. Your words crack my heart open. A mirror for where we live. Hard, but beautiful.

 

Jennifer Lang’s shorts have appeared in the Maine Review, Atticus Review, CHEAP POP, Miracle Monocle, Pithead Chapel, Gravel, and Brevity One-Minute Memoir. “Repeat the Enchanting” won first place in Midway Journal’s flash contest 2020. A four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and serves as Assistant Editor for Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction. Born in the San Francisco Bay Area, she lives in Tel Aviv, where she runs Israel Writers Studio and attempts to write her first memoir.

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For four months, I dream my insides are jellybeans. Not the good flavors, the bad ones. Rotten eggs, smelly socks, dirty diapers, dead fish. If they were good flavors, normal flavors, I wouldn’t worry. When I call to tell you this, you’re in a meeting. You laugh. You always laugh. You say: It’s better than being full of expired sausage or atomic bombs. Or celery.

I agree with you, but I wonder if you’re full of anything. You wear three-piece suits and Rolex watches disguised as family heirlooms. I miss your band t-shirts—mustard stained with swiss cheese holes. I miss your unkept beard, your sweat mixed with cigarettes, the grease in your shaggy hair. That person seems far away now. Past tense.

I’m not sure anyone has intestines at all. Or hearts or kidneys or lungs. Maybe it’s all made up, I say. Maybe we’re just victims of simulation.

You ask if I’m high. You always ask. All of our problems are tied to a plastic bag, overflowed with my drug use. Not yours. Never yours. 

At the beginning, it was hard to tell where I ended and you began. Where we existed outside of monitoring each for using. Outside of sex—the kitchen floor, the coffee table, your brother’s couch. Now, it seems like we’re separated by everything. Oceans, bank accounts, bedsheets, careers, taste.

What’s mine is yours. What’s yours is yours. It wasn’t like that in the beginning.

We were barely clean when we met. Everyone said it was a bad idea. We needed to be with someone good, someone safe: a music teacher, an accountant. Someone with discipline and clean underwear and enough patience to make lasagna from scratch. 

We plugged our ears.

You wanted me to come to your sisters’ wedding, I gave myself the flu.

I wanted you to hold my hand at my father’s funeral, you scheduled a boys’ trip to the moon. You said: You didn’t even like your father. You were right, but I still wanted you there. I wanted you to wear a suit for me. 

Was that selfish?

We were constantly missing each other even though we shared the same address, the same mattress, the same toothbrush. 

I missed you all the time, though I saw you every day. 

***

When you cut off all your hair, I lock myself in the bathroom and cry. When you get a desk job, I rip off all my nails and put them in a plastic bag below the sink. When you get promoted, I staple my thighs. 

You make friends, your family invites you to Sunday night dinners again. You drink Sprite and chew gum. You join a gym. I get an hourly job at a call center. My hair starts to fall out. I tell strangers my insides are full of unwanted jellybeans. My friends are dead, and you don’t want me anymore. I’m still wearing band t-shirts and too much eyeliner.

When you ask me to leave, I do.

 

Gabrielle McAree is a reader, writer, and cereal enthusiast from Fishers, IN. She studied Theatre and Writing at Long Island University Post. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Versification, Tiny Molecules, Dream Journal, and Reflex Press, among others. Twitter: @gmcaree_

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We learnt to speak in one-word sentences. Growing up, our families were similar – we had been born into families of craftsmen and arc-welders. They forged weapons with their teeth—each word an arrow, each syllable a silver bullet designed to puncture the air and bleed. When they fought, they tore through the drywall, peeling away years of hidden wounds. We understood very quickly, between the chipped paint and broken mortar, that there wasn’t enough room for us or our emotions. We learnt to shrink ourselves down to the size of a pin, that when we fell in the eye of a storm, they wouldn’t hear a sound. We learnt to parse our sentences, in hopes that they would float, bright-footed, somewhere above gravity. 

Over time, it became a habit to pare our speech into its bare skeleton—to strip away skins of emotion, inflections and undulations, that our words would sit, simple, unassuming and squared away in a corner of the room.

Last winter, we drove up to the coast to watch the waning tide.  As we stood on the shore of a world fading into darkness, you watched the waters lap at your feet. It was cold but you couldn’t feel it, not with your stripped-away bones. You wanted to swim, as you always did when you came to the beach. At first, it was because you wanted to forget—there was something about being five feet underwater, bereft of sound and life, that made your thoughts grow still. However, as time passed, it grew into the darkened molars of an addiction. You swam, that when the cool waters hit your skin, you would know that you were alive. You were living and breathing, and not merely a shell of the past. If you swam far enough, you were convinced that you could drown the memories that had robbed you of your voice.

“Swim,” You pleaded, eyes brimming with tears, as you pulled at the sleeve of my jacket.

I shook my head. “Cold.”

“Swim.” Your voice grew more insistent.

I shook my head.

You pointed at me, face contorted into a scream. “Hate. Vile.” You spat out the only words you knew how, mind scrambling to find the word that would sting the most. “Awful. Worst.”

You found it. “Monster.” The word hung between us, growing its lungs. Both of us knew that, later that night, it would sharpen its teeth to take on a corporeal form in the silence.

You sank to your knees and covered your face, sobbing. For the longest time, we stayed there like this. Me standing, palms open, watching you. You, on the ground, racked with guilt and cradling the fragments of the evening.

Finally, you spoke, lips curling around a word you hadn’t spoken before.

“Love?”

I nodded, sinking down to my knees to meet you eye-to-eye, and wrapped my arms around you.

“Love.”

 

Sher Ting has lived in Singapore for 19 years before spending the next 5 years in medical school in Australia. She has work published/forthcoming in Trouvaille Review, Eunoia Review, Opia Mag and Door Is A Jar, among others. She is currently an editor of a creative arts-sharing space, known as INLY Arts. She tweets at @sherttt and writes at downintheholocene.wordpress.com

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With a thud like a fall from grace, a horror that deepened like dread, like the truth, there was nothing–my right arm, hip, the length of my leg, my right foot—no feeling, no movement. I regained consciousness with the primitive sense of hearing—the voice of a nurse, the rasp of a pager, the call of an intercom—and the smell of the cotton sheet that covered me. 

I flashed on my head pain in the rear seat of the tour bus with my husband and friends. The bus jolted us onto the road from a gravel lot in a picnic ground. Out of cell phones’ reach, in the western Pennsylvania Highlands, the bus driver called the emergency on his radio. Semiconscious and dead-weight in the policeman’s arms, he carried me up the aisle and down the steps to the ambulance. I felt and heard the roaring gust, and dimly saw the helicopter land. The technicians lowered the gurney, and rolled it across the grassy, rutted field at the E.M.T. station. Through the din and storm clouds, I was on board to a West Virginia hospital without my husband. They said he would have to find his way to Ruby Memorial Hospital. The last I heard; the transmissions of pilot and crew, and I was over and out.

“A hemorrhagic stroke,” the petite neurologist told me and my husband, as she pointed to the MRI mounted on the wall across from my bed in step-down ICU. The shading on the image was the left-sided bleed that suffocated my brain cells; the blood and toxins that caused the neurological injury–right-sided paralysis–hemiparesis. Apraxia caused my garbled speech, an effect of brain damage that prevented me from forming words. The doctor smiled and said, “How lucky you are! You can recover with therapy!” I couldn’t fathom that the major stroke would affect me for the rest of my life.

*

My passion was to grow plants. Life-affirming work in gardens, strengthened my fiber and restored my spirit. I’d found purpose and fulfillment in creating colorful pictures with flowers and greenery. Would I do the work again; perform the tasks that had become second nature during my fifteen years as a gardening business-owner? How could I pinch and prune plants’ new growth for fullness, lop shrubs’ branches to find form and shape, kneel and weed in the fragrant soil; plant and stake perennials? Would I again stride out to a summer border; red handles of pruners that were the hallmark of my trade visible above my back pocket?

*

With a nasogastric tube for nourishment, I began passive physical therapy on my back.  I struggled to verbalize. A speech therapist directed me to recognize and name childlike images on flash cards.

All but immobile after two weeks, I rocked side to side on a stretcher in the ambulance, transported after hours with my husband by two moonlighting med techs to the Easton, Pennsylvania rehab hospital near our home. Sometime after midnight, the Chief of Neurology admitted me to a two-bedded room.

In the morning, I embarked on months of physical, occupational, and speech therapy, in a regimen of neuroplasticity. (Oxford Living Dictionary: “The ability of the brain to form and reorganize synaptic connections, especially in response to learning or experience or following injury.”) The nurses, therapists, and my husband helped me measure my progress. They reminded me that life still held meaning; that incremental changes proved that my neuromuscular system was re-learning. They would not allow me to languish. My native determination and fortitude must work in tandem with the team. I needed to muster courage.  “You can do it. You must do it! Start now, or lose the chance!” But my frail spirit faltered, and I crumbled in a battle with self-pity for what I had become. How could this happen to me?

“How do you feel about the weakness?” the clinical psychologist asked. After a few sessions, I refused to see him. How could he know what it’s like to lose everything? When my devastated, angry tears stopped, I admitted that if I were to walk again, I must make the effort. And I would either stretch, move, reach, throw, and use my fingers, or give in to a sleep that healed my brain but weakened both body and resolve. The choice was mine to fight the temptation to remain passive, or to try and try. 

One early morning in bed, I was elated that my toes could move! A breakthrough! My right foot followed on my journey to walk again. The weeks crawled by, I did the work, and my foggy brain kept healing. 

At last discharged to our home, my speech improved, and I progressed from wheelchair to left-sided walker, then to a cane. I began to read and write again for pleasure. My left fingers fly across my laptop keyboard. I’m fortunate to have had the outpatient therapy I needed, but I’ve never gotten back the full use of my right hand. 

Fifty-eight when my life changed, I’m still the same person, only different. Not a flimsy flower, ten years on I still haven’t gardened. Sometimes I waver; stumble on snags, but each time–with fortitude–I regain my footing.

 

Mary Ellen writes personal essays about an adopted Air Force daughter in the 1950s and ’60s, search and reunion with her birth family, and survival of a stroke at mid-life. Her work appears in The Remembered Arts Journal, Soft Cartel, Drabble, Memoir Magazine, Bella Muse, Borrowed Solace, Spillwords, BookEnds Review, Mac(ro)mic, and other fine journals. She has self-published three books, ‘Stroke Story: My Journey There and Back,’ ‘Coming to Terms: My Journey Continues,’ and ‘Permanent Home,’ a collection of stories. Her memoir is in progress. Follow her megam-author.com/

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Long before irony and before we all wore futuristic leggings, our class painted blotchy doomed planets, nobody yet wise or lucent or talented. We had graduated from shells and pebbles (delicately-seamed) and expanded logically into the universe. We’d captured Saturn’s rings and moons; our brushes ran circles around swirls of gas. But John Casimir had brought his brush from home.

With it he painted a horse, no rider, around which my green memory has constructed a scene of dark boughs, rakish mountaintops, glades, caves, waterfalls. The horse’s face was hidden, its neck twisted off into the distance, and a heaving mass of black shadow spilled out from underneath the animal, a dark cloth. And while we had our blues and purples out, John – silent, compact, intractable – was mixing umbers for the trumpeting event of his night sky, a bulging curtain that gave the impression the firmament might tip.

Half of us were nine; the other half ten. It was February or thereabouts, and our lives were destined to continue processionally. We went on miming the words to the Lord’s Prayer, one of us walked into a broom closet thinking it was the door to the science labs, the deputy head was pulled over for speeding. All spring the art room’s high windows gave us the tops of conifers, swaying in strange light, but all I ever thought of was John Casimir’s brush from home and his horse in the painted gloaming, the most crepuscular shadow ever cast.

 

Jack Barker–Clark is a writer and artist from a passé valley in the North of England. He is the founder of Pale Books, a reading project, and writes primarily on ornamental grasses and the novel. He tweets occasionally at @jackbarkerclark

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What to Bring:

• Seven short-sleeved tops in hard candy colors, neatly folded.
• Seven pairs of denim shorts, cuffed above the knee.
• Seven pairs of socks and underwear. Mom says laundry’s done weekly. There’s no need to stress.
• A pair of knock-off Keds, laces removed. You ask to bring your real Keds, the purple ones, but Mom & Dad say those are for special occasions—like Red Lobster with Grandma. Not for therapy camp.
• Looney Tunes pajamas, a last-minute Wal-Mart purchase because you wear Dad’s old t-shirts to bed, or nothing at all, and that won’t fly when staff make their rounds at night. You’re 11 and maturing.
• One spineless notebook. You enjoy writing: on paper, in your head, at night when Mom’s morphine kicks in and Dad yells and your younger brother bruises his own face.
• An electric razor (to remain in a locked place when not in use). You may shave your legs if your blade hums instead of scrapes.

 

What Not to Bring:

• Belts, music, jewelry, pencils/pens, drugs, anything sharp, anything that resembles rope, anything that resembles home, anything personal and/or comforting.

 

What to Expect:

• Walls painted sea glass and warm weather sky. Floors and hallways exuding calculated calm. A clean fish tank. Grandma’s beachside condo but off.
• No cable, no MTV. But you’ll sneak a peek when a bolder kid dares to wade through the static, stumbling upon a splash of technicolor sound: I got a man. What’s your man got to do with me? You’ll remember solo bedroom dancing, daydreams about your 5th grade crush. Staff will catch you drifting, change the channel. Recommend you watch the VHS of Three Men and a Little Lady instead.
• A mulleted staff member’s impression of Jim Carrey as that female bodybuilder, your only form of PG-13 entertainment.
• Tokens awarded when you share your feelings, take your pills without protest, make it to Group on time. Tokens awarded if you comply, if you don’t tear at your arms like wrapping paper, if you just stay calm, please. When the token “store” opens its doors, you’ll “purchase” troll dolls—stroke their neon manes, press your thumb against their jeweled tummies, and wish hard. 
• Access to your favorite condiments in the cafeteria: Tabasco and A.1. Once customary household staples, now glass-bottled talismans.
• A swimming pool for practicing handstands. A swimming pool for sinking to the cool blue bottom and forgetting where you are. 
• A rubber room with padded walls the color of perfect day clouds to sit and scream and squirm against, straight-jacketed. One boy will enter the rubber room during your stay, a boy who shares in Group that his mother once put him in the oven, turned it on, and left him to die. Staff will restrain him and slam the door but you’ll still hear his muffled cries of terror, of release. They’ll keep watch through the window until they observe the rise and fall of his harnessed body, until he’s done in by his own pain.
• Family visitation dinners at Applebee’s. Mom glaring and gritting her teeth while you evade the deafening blows of her silent treatment. You’ve told the therapists about school nights sleeping on dirty waiting room floors, emptying her bedpans at home without assistance. You’ve mentioned her moods, her hurtful sarcasm, how she sometimes says she wished she’d died in that ICU last Easter and you know that she means it. Be more like your brother, her eyes threaten. Let your body flail with feeling, but only harm yourself. 
• A girl in the room next to yours drumming a lonely melody through the wall, trembling with her fear of the dark, her fear of this place, her stepfather back home. You’ll respond in rhythmic pulses like your hand’s a heartbeat. Like, for the first time, you’re alive with the things you can’t tell doctors or your notebook or yourself.
• A 4th of July group outing to a mall parking lot. The motley crew of you awestruck by those fiery sky petals blooming and quickly wilting into ash. You’ll remember what it’s like to be in a world away from the mandatory and daily recounting of all your darkness. You’ll wonder if you’ll ever enter this world again.
• An adjustment period. One night, staff will wake you and lead you to the common room where your younger brother, red and inconsolable, bawls for his mother. You’ll hold the shuddering heat of him and he’ll cool like that boy in the rubber room. Staff will say you can sleep together for the night, the sofa yawning into their hands, revealing its mattress tongue. Your brother will nod off, done in by his own pain, fresh tears scoring his cheeks. You’ll want to whisper you love him, but you won’t. Instead, you’ll lie awake while staff make their rounds, opening and shutting the doors of other campers’ rooms until the overhead lights bleed through the halls like you remember from Mom’s hospital rooms where you monitored the mechanical breath of her machines—the same slow hiss now echoing from your brother’s sour mouth.

 

What Not To Expect:

• The truth. Therapy camp isn’t a camp at all; it’s a mental hospital for children. You’ve known this, but your parents slipped that euphemism under your tongue and it lodged there. Decades later, Dad claims your brother was recommended for treatment, but you’d volunteered to keep him company. You’ll hold no memory of this, but you won’t contest it. You know how to take one for the team, for the family’s greater good. You’ll wonder if this was legal, about your parent’s caretaking. But you won’t wonder why you went. Therapy camp promised rules and routines, adults who listened, sunshine rippling the pool’s surface like you remember from vacation. You’ll never attend a real summer camp with horses or campfire songs, but you and your brother will learn your own lifelong lessons. You’ll just never tell each other what they are.

 

Jillian Luft is a Florida native currently residing in Brooklyn. Her creative non-fiction has appeared in Pithead Chapel, X-R-A-Y Lit, Barren Magazine, Hobart and other publications. You can find her work at jillianluft.com or follow her struggles navigating Twitter @JillianLuft.

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trimmings from your shaved head itching my neck, when an egret swoops down low several cars ahead of me. Traffic is light but oppressive. The bird’s long legs probe the air over eight lanes of fast cars. “Don’t land here, bird!” I yell from inside my car. Your trimmings chafe my clavicle and I wish I’d had sharper clippers. It took so long to do your entire head even though the hair was already falling out in clumps. I ran my hand over each new clear patch, your broad back inches from my chest. The egret gains a few reassuring feet and I imagine it navigating back to the nearby wetlands, sinking its feet into cool wet mud. My phone lights up and a picture of your face fills the screen. It’s from a year ago. Your skin taut and tan instead of slack and pale; your cheeks full, not gaunt; your eyes saying love not sleep. Then the egret descends and circles toward the other side of the interstate. I crane my neck at eighty miles an hour to see if it’s safe, but I’m moving too fast and lose sight of it completely.

 

Jason Fox is one of many Jason Foxes. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in X-R-A-Y, Riggwelter Press, The Daily Drunk, and Autofocus Lit. He’s on Twitter @JJFoxBox

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Marianne always had dreams like this, dreams where she had to pack and run. It was a leftover of a situation where that was a reality, where every day she wondered if it would be the day that she had to leave, that she had the means to leave. It was not an easy conversation for a teenager to have with herself, but Marianne had had it many times. For years, she’d been perpetually packed, underwear and cash and an address book all inside of a Minnie Mouse backpack carefully covered in an old, ripped coat in the back of her closet. This was well before she’d met Henry and eventually had Jason. And then the dreams had started to come back. Then they’d disappeared again, and then Henry had gone missing after work one day and the dreams came back again. All of this to say that when the news started sharing numbers of the sick and dead overseas, she wasn’t waiting for permission.

Henry’s aunt and uncle had a lakeside cabin in the Adirondacks. She’d emailed them, asking if she could use Henry’s key and stay there. His aunt said that she didn’t think there was much to worry about, but gave her blessing. That same day, Marianne’s constant anxiety dreams became useful. She’d packed all of Jason’s necessities and as many of his favorites as possible: sippy cups and overnight diapers, books and Teddy Grahams, play instruments and puzzles. She had to take her laptop to work from home, as promised, and some clothes, but her treat was a bottle of Black Label that they’d been saving in the back of the closet for a special occasion. Marianne wouldn’t call a plague a special occasion, exactly, but she did believe that it called for Black Label. She’d stop on her way into the small Adirondack town to grab food. Cans, rice, beans, pasta. Things that would mean she could last a while without seeing a human face that wasn’t her son. She was determined to keep him safe, to protect him in a way that her own mother had never protected her.

Jason sat in the back seat, thumb in his mouth, clutching to his stuffed octopus as he watched the trees out the windows. He had no idea what was happening, where they were going or why. It wasn’t like when Henry disappeared and Jason would ask about him constantly—where he was, when he was coming home. At this point, Marianne was grateful for small blessings.

And, as she kept driving, Marianne’s stomach turned at the thought that she had no idea what might be coming next.

 

Audrey T. Carroll is a Best of the Net nominee, the author of Queen of Pentacles (Choose the Sword Press, 2016), and the editor of Musing the Margins: Essays on Craft (Human/Kind Press, 2020). Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Prismatica Magazine, peculiar, Glass Poetry, Vagabond City, So to Speak, and others. She is a bisexual and disabled/chronically ill writer who serves as a Diversity & Inclusion Editor for the Journal of Creative Writing Studies. She can be found at http://audreytcarrollwrites.weebly.com and @AudreyTCarroll on Twitter.

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I’m in the neighborhood a few times per month, mostly on weekend nights to make a hundred bucks by taking care of other people’s children. It’s an easy job—at least in the houses I go back to. If a kid throws a full-body tantrum and refuses to sleep at the time their parents deem appropriate, or tells me I smell like rice, I simply don’t return. I don’t need the money, although I want it for my savings fund. My route towards this enclave traverses by the Rings End bridge and an entrance to Great Island, which was listed for sale at $120 million in 2018. I continue onto Long Neck Point Road, and from there the view of the private island is so vast the Long Island Sound remains hidden. The pristine grass is surrounded by the property’s ornamental steel fence, one that may have been installed in the middle of the last century. Vines interweave between the hundreds of pickets, certain sections have more rust than others, where the black steel has given way to the color of mud.

My mom, who works in the area as a full-time babysitter, sees a deer on top of the fence one day, trying to get onto the island property, rocking, as if trying to pull away from an invisible rope around its torso. It isn’t until she enters her employer’s house that she understands the deer is caught on the sharp ends of the fence, maybe in the last moments of its life, struggling to survive until its bodily functions cease. It’s the only time my mother has been a witness to such a scene, but her boss tells her it happens often. Sometimes, when animal control arrives, the deer are dead, tongues sticking out, their bodies slumped over thorns and vines, the decomposition barely starting, and the workers are in a hurry to remove it so neighborhood children don’t learn the word impalement before school.

Each kid has their own ritual before bed. For some it’s sipping milk and eating apples for dessert. Others want to be read a book before bed, while some say ‘night and bang their bedroom door hard enough to make it clear I’m only there because their parents don’t trust them to be alone. I read two books if the kids pick short ones, or I lie and make up the story if I know they can’t read. A few surprise me with a hug before I leave the night light on. I assume the warmth comforts them as they enter the peace of sleep. I never mention the dead deer, of course. But once they are in bed, maybe fake sleeping but at least in bed, I let the dog out in the yard and my mind deviates to stags. If it’s a night that only requires a light sweater, I follow the dog, throw a ball around, and stare at the stars. There aren’t any street lights, and I see thousands of them, glistening, wondering which ones are dying, collapsing onto themselves until all that’s left is the light of their past.

Sometimes I spot a doe and its fawn, or maybe a lone deer skipping away from the danger of barks, toward Great Island. Shushing the dog doesn’t help because the deer are already escaping towards what they assume is salvation, away from a dog that would never bite, away from me—not knowing the fear I hold for them—the continuous crunch of leaves in unison with the whoosh of adrenaline beating within my ears. I hope they jump high, their hindlimbs barely meeting the fence finials, and with a swoop it’s done. Maybe they end with a scrape, but not a cut, no blood, no impalement. I’m glad I’m there only at night—the dark hiding failed leaps.

After a quick goodnight with tipsy parents, small talk as a form of etiquette before I accept a check they don’t write my name on, only cash, I make sure to drive slowly on the road. Over the years, I’ve halted for opossums on moonless nights. Fox have flashed their eyes as they’ve tread away in silence. The high-beam headlights are on so I don’t take a life. Most of all, I avoid looking towards the fence surrounding Great Island, hoping it’s not the night I see a doe that didn’t make the jump. I wonder, though, if it would matter if I did see one, since my mind has created a scene of it anyway, since I know it will continue to happen, long after I stop coming to this neighborhood and once all the kids I tuck into bed forget who I am.

 

The title of this piece is a play on words inspired by Robert Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

 

Victoria Buitron is a writer and translator with an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Fairfield University. Her work has been featured or is upcoming in The Citron Review, Bending Genres, Lost Balloon and more.

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Charlie’s wistful heart tingles as he pulls up to 437 Wilton Street, the apartment building from his childhood. Everything is gone but the skeleton of a structure and the echoes of Charlie’s memories. You can board up the windows, but you can’t cross out the souls that once occupied the walls. 

Every Saturday night, the entire block would light up with a Fourth of July jubilance. Dueling music speakers battled to steal the humid air at full volume. The Ramones shouted to the rooftop. Bruce Springsteen crooned to the moon. And Sam Cooke sang to the heavens.

Out in the street, Rich used to show off his candy red Mustang. Rich thought he was a lot cooler than he actually was. His hair grease looked like a mixture of egg yolks and cement. Charlie hasn’t forgotten the time that Rich revved up his ride in front of the whole neighborhood, only to blow the engine. As everybody laughed, Rich’s face blushed redder than his broken car. 

Shawn was the tallest human that Charlie had ever seen. He dribbled the basketball on the bubblegum-stained concrete like he had the world in his hands. He never did make it to the pros, though. But he did become a pro of another kind. Charlie hadn’t heard about Shawn in years until the day a familiar voice spoke through the television. It was a commercial for a landscaping business — aptly named Shawn’s Professional Landscaping. 

Charlie wished that he were older. Then, maybe he might’ve gotten noticed by his first crush, Henrietta. He’d often daydream about her curly hair, sparkly lip gloss, and mysterious eyes. Sometimes when Charlie passed by her door, he’d hear loud yelling and harsh bangs. Wherever she is now, he hopes that she’s safe and happy.

TJ always treated Charlie like a little brother. He’d even give him extra cash for snacks every single week. Charlie always admired TJ’s bright red Nike shoes. One day, TJ got arrested by the cops in front of Charlie’s very own eyes. It turned out that TJ was selling a certain kind of product, and it wasn’t chocolates. 

Charlie’s grandma cooked the most delicious spaghetti. It smelled like love. The sauce was made from fresh tomatoes that she grew on the building’s rooftop. Charlie still thinks of her sweet smile with the missing front tooth, and the big, dark moles on her cheeks. The cancer eventually got to her. When she was put to rest, Charlie was forced to go into a new home. But it wasn’t really a home. The memories from that place are the ones that Charlie permanently boarded up in his mind.

After snapping out of his trance, Charlie picks up a decrepit brown brick from the building and sets it on the passenger side floor of his pristine Cadillac. When he arrives back at his quaint house in a quiet neighborhood, he places the brick in the soil of his tomato garden and smiles.

 

Zach Murphy is a Hawaii-born writer with a background in cinema. His stories appear in Reed Magazine, Ginosko Literary Journal, The Coachella Review, Mystery Tribune, Yellow Medicine Review, Ellipsis Zine, Drunk Monkeys, Wilderness House Literary Review, and Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine. His forthcoming chapbook “Tiny Universes” (Selcouth Station Press) is due out in Spring 2021. He lives with his wonderful wife Kelly in St. Paul, Minnesota.

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I called it Macumba because that was what my parents called it.

“It’s an offering to evil spirits,” my mom explained after she warned me not to go near the three-tiered cake with fifty-cent coins nestled in the pearly, whipped-cream peaks that glistened temptingly under the old park bench. She stayed away from it too, sitting on a rock near the swing set instead.

My dad prayed over me after I reported excitedly that we’d found a dead chicken surrounded by flaming candles behind the wide-trunked, glossy-leafed tree that was my favorite play spot, “You stay away from there now!” he said after he was done, “No more climbing that tree today!”

On New Year’s Eve, my parents pulled us away from the regal women in brown beads and white dresses who walked barefoot across the sand and tossed flower petals into the waves. Never mind that the entire multitude on the beach, waiting for the midnight fireworks, dressed in the pure, bright white that was their color. My parents were afraid, so I was afraid. I threw away my favorite pink and purple shells after my dad told me macumba worshippers use them in sacrifices and woke in terror from dreams of candle-lit chickens.

My mom’s eyes snapped open at my clammy grasp, her body started when she saw me beside her bed, moist with sweat and trembling with fear. “God is more powerful than any witchcraft,” she sighed, after I reported I’d been dreaming of macumba.

Still, they crossed the street when they saw the rose-laden feasts on corners and shook their heads in dismay when they saw that street children had dug through the evil-spirited offerings to gather up the coins. It’s no wonder the prayers of my childhood faded like so many jumbled words from my day-to-day life or that when I miss home, I greet the new year in white.

 

K Ferguson grew up as a third-culture kid in Brazil. An early love of reading left her dreaming of writing stories and ultimately transformed her life. Today she works as a research scientist in Northern Virginia and enjoys reading and writing fiction when not working her day job.

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The way the dishwasher sounds at night. The way the light from the microwave illuminates the room just enough, as if sharing a secret just for me. The way the papers on the fridge are eight years deep. The way I can’t tell if it’s the streetlight outside or the moon streaming in. The way the book is laid out, mid-page, belly to the table. The spine creased in that manner just so. The way there are three pieces of popcorn left in the bowl. The way I think I can just hear the hollow deep sounds of klezmer from the radio, even though the dial is dark. The way I look out the window and the frost on the ground emits steam. The way I look up and down the street and see no one. The way I look again and see a coyote trotting across our urban street like it belongs to him. It does.

I wander to the back of the house and look out the office window. The way these padded wool socks feel on my feet. The way I have to manually pull up the blinds because you never got around to fixing it. Outside the plastic kiddie pool is filled with dirty rainwater from autumn, from before. The way two leaves spin around each other in a dance they’re choreographing with the wind. 

The way the shrouds are still on the mirrors. The way your laptop is still open, screen black. The way the pen cap isn’t on. The way those three coffee drips on the floor still lead to the stairs.

The way the other pillow still holds the ghostly indentation of your head. The way I sleep only on my half even now, four months later. The way I still put the pillow over my head so I don’t hear your snoring. The way I don’t sleep. The way the bar of soap has a tendril of your long hair clinging to the underside. The way your towel has grown mildewy on its hook. The way a smattering of tiny beard hairs confetti the sink and counter. 

The way the grocery list says: ketchup, lox, seltzer, dishwasher soap, Nilla wafers, and something to go with the cheese. The way you used ellipses. The way I go to the store with this list and wander the aisles for two hours wondering what was meant to follow those three dots. What did you want? The way I get back in the car and I douse my hands in sanitizer. The way it burns the paper cuts on my fingers. The way I will still use a collection of old postage stamps instead of the sticker ones. The floral way those stamps taste, the sticky residue on my fingertips. The way my hand aches after thanking everyone for their kindness during this time.

The way your khaki pants are pooled on the floor as if you just stepped out of them. The way the mug sits on the bedside table, a muddy circle of dried out old coffee at the bottom. The way your electric bike is parked in the garage, your helmet dangling. The way I will charge your bike’s battery to ensure it has full power.

The way we have that special bank account for that one big trip to Europe. The way your name is still listed, the font meant to be impersonal but isn’t. The way we chose not to go paperless for those statements and they keep coming.

The way the sun goes up and the way the sun goes down and the way I wake and the way I go to bed reminds me of you.

 

Jennifer Fliss (she/her) is a Seattle-based writer whose writing has appeared in F(r)iction, The Rumpus, The Washington Post, and elsewhere, including the 2019 Best Short Fiction anthology. She can be found on Twitter at @writesforlife or via her website, www.jenniferflisscreative.com.

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My brain has been injured and is not working properly. I appear to be asleep, dead even… but of course, I’m right here. Hovering. The frenzy, shouts, rushing… all for what—I’m not coming back. I begin to relax, breathe, take in my surroundings. Roger is looking numb, whitewashed, catatonic even. He’s taken up space in another world. Not mine… I can’t get him to notice me. Per usual, he won’t react.

Lettuce-coloured walls need washing. The TV is stuck on Jeopardy. And the nurses are wearing shoes that squelch on the over-polished floor. I can see they’re about to pull the plug, but I don’t say anything; it’s not my way. Wires and tubes fill and connect me to and from beeping machines. Monitor readings sputter and gasp…skidding flat. My sister is looking bereft, her head bobbing, lips quivering. She wasn’t so nice yesterday. Probably regretting her off-colour remark about my looking gaunt. Not so terrible in the scheme of things. But soon she will ruminate on her horrid deceit. She doesn’t think I know. The ugly truth always comes out. Roger spilled the beans. His big apology… ‘it was an accident. It didn’t mean a thing. It will never happen again’… And I don’t think it ever did. But my sister never did fess up. And that I could not forgive. 

He’s going to be miserable without me. Lost really. For a while. He’ll find his way, in time. It’s my only regret really, not being there for him, with him; through this. I know what he needs, how to reach him. But that’s not going to happen. Maybe I should begin thinking about where I’m going. I’ve never given it much thought. Probably now is a good time.

I watch my sister slink over to Roger, sidle up against his chest. He’s slow to respond, but takes her hand in his. So warm, caring, close. My heart sinks, as my lifeline is wrenched free.

 

Karen Schauber’s work appears in fifty international literary magazines, journals and anthologies, including Bending Genres, Cabinet of Heed, Cease Cows, Ekphrastic Review, Fiction Southeast, New Flash Fiction Review, Spelk; and a ‘Best Microfiction’ nomination. ‘The Group of Seven Reimagined: Contemporary Stories Inspired by Historic Canadian Paintings’ (Heritage House, 2019), her first editorial/curatorial flash fiction anthology, achieved ‘Silver’ in 2020 in The Miramichi Reader’s ‘Very Best Book Award” for Short Fiction. Schauber curates Vancouver Flash Fiction, an online resource hub, and in her spare time is a seasoned family therapist.

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“Is this something that people do?” Jet asked. “Go on trail rides at night?”

Jet wasn’t the first boy I’d kissed, but he was the first boy I wanted to kiss again. His breath smelled like the beer he’d drank earlier at the party. He’d told me his real name was James Edward Thomas, he was a Scorpio sun, and he wore all black because he believed it helped his blood flow better. Now, he held Belle’s reins like they were freshly cooked spaghetti noodles. I checked Belle’s girth, then walked back to Carl, rubbing his muzzle before I mounted. 

“Horses have excellent night vision,” I said, angling my feet in the stirrups. “They have more rods in their eyes than humans. A higher proportion of rods to cones.”

“Why are you telling me this?” He had a natural seat, but his spine was stiff.

“To give you some reassurance.”

Carl and I led the way to the entrance of the wooded trail. We rode in silence through the forest. The trees blocked most of the remaining daylight, so I loosened the reins and let Carl take over. His muscles rippled under me like ocean waves. After a few miles, the trees began to thin out as the trail opened into a clear flat meadow. Carl quick-stepped and pushed against the bit. I looked back at Jet and Belle. 

“You ready?” I asked.

“For what?” 

“Just hold on.”

I nudged Carl with my heels. He was on off-the-track Thoroughbred and all I had to do was let him know he could run, and he would. He knew, like I did, the relief found in action. 

I felt the trees rushing past me. I smelled pine and dirt and the sweet bloom of spring flowers. The meadow glowed ethereal in front of me and the full moon shone high in the sky as Carl and I shot across the field. 

Carl’s speed was a rough, ragged thing. I loosened my arms in front of me, like elastic bands. I rooted my seat down into the saddle, envisioning my tailbone reaching and wrapping itself in a coil around Carl’s intestines. I imagined weights in my heels. I stretched my chest open, ready to release a rabble of butterflies from between my breasts. 

And then I took a big breath and I let it all go—all the specific muscle actions, all the trained techniques and positions. I became one with the horse, not by making movement happen, but by letting movement happen. It’s what I imagined happens in the best sex, when two people are consenting not just to the bodily act, but to the joining of souls. To the universe being integrated into the fibers of their being. 

At the other side of the meadow was the forest again with wild overgrowth and swarms of green. Carl stopped, fluttering his nostrils in delight. I turned to check on Jet and Belle. Her middle was coated with sweat like marshmallow cream, and his face crinkled on the verge of tears or laughter. His blonde hair, before swept neatly back, now swayed in spikes across his forehead. 

“Are you okay?” 

Jet laughed. “Am I okay?”

“You’re okay.” 

“Do you do this often?” Jet asked.

“Depends on what ‘this’ is.”

“Take boys out for joy rides and instill terror in their hearts?”

I tangled my fingers in Carl’s mane to try and steady myself. The strands of hair were damp with sweat and evening dew.

“No, I don’t do this often. You just said—at the party—you said you wanted to reconnect with your soul, so, this was my answer to that.”

“I was kind of joking. About the soul stuff, or whatever.”

“I didn’t think you were.”

“How would you know? You just met me.”

“Then how would I know if you were joking?”

Jet said nothing in response. He directed Belle to position herself right next to Carl and then leaned sideways towards me. He kissed me, differently from how he had in the car earlier. Not so sloppy and fast. Slow motion. Our lips connected, like static cling, vibrating against each other. He dropped the reins and his fingers, long and delicate, slid up and down my torso like river stones. My fingers stretched forward to curl around his smooth lanky arms. I heard the wind in the trees, the hoots of the owls, the grass as it crunched in the horses’ mouths. My head was hot and buzzing and felt close to exploding when Jet finally pulled away, a satisfied look on his face.

“Do you want to get off the horses?” I asked. “Hang out here for a while?” 

“No. That would be a bad idea.”

“Why?”

He shook his head and ran a hand through his hair. I wanted to be the hand raking through his hair. I wanted his oils and smells clinging to my skin like dirt and horsehair already did. But at the same time, I knew it would change something, irrevocably, and I couldn’t say for sure whether I was ready for the change. 

“Let’s just go again,” he said, grabbing up the reins again and nudging Belle out in front of Carl and me.

As the horses once again picked up speed underneath us, I turned to look at him. He was already looking at me. At first it felt strange to not look in front of me. But we weren’t the ones who could see in the dark. It was the horses. So we looked at each other, and in the moonlight I determined Jet’s outline: his shoulders spanning across the horizon like albatross wings and his torso narrowing on the way to his waist, like a well-written capital V. When a cloud passed through the inky night sky, covering up the moon, I closed my eyes and imagined Jet’s soul, being tugged back into his body, deeper and deeper, with every indentation the horses’ hoofs made on the ground.

 

Erin Schallmoser’s work has appeared in Flash Fiction Magazine and Litro and is forthcoming in The Hunger. She lives in Bellingham, WA, and when she’s not reading or writing, she’s probably listening to a podcast or delighting in moss, slugs, stones, wildflowers, or small birds. She is still figuring out Twitter @dialogofadream.

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A January blizzard brawls outside the studio window. Like the weather, my thoughts churn. Hands firm on the clay, elbows locked and braced against my inner thighs, I close my eyes and lean in. Gently, I press the foot pedal, and the wheel spins. In the background CBC emits the deep lament of a lone cello. It conjures a story I read about a soloist whose body spoke only through her instrument. 

I’m afraid I, too, will turn mute if I don’t start talking about the storm that’s brewing inside my mind. Left to express my thoughts only through an expanding collection of the pots I throw as the silence between you and me stretches. On the dark screen of my lids, I picture the bowls and vases on my dining room mantel—the coiled fruit bowl resembling a bird’s nest, the blue and green speckled canisters and the square teapot, a bird nesting on its lid. Tears pinch at the back of my nose as my eyes fix on the once-bright bouquet of lilies on the table. I can’t bear to empty the vase although the flowers have long since withered. 

I inhale a howl that seeps in through the window, tense my shoulders. As my soul exhales a moan, the clay steadies between my palms. Through narrow slits I spy the mound spinning round and uniform. My heart summersaults—this steady sense of balance has been absent for months.  In my thoughts, Teresa, my first pottery teacher, warns me it’s not yet time to celebrate. I wet my hands in the lukewarm bucket of water. Too many times I’ve let my hands go dry. Managed to center the clay yet pulled it askew when I dropped the hole. 

I glance out the window and hope that the storm is clearing at the ranch. My heart drops as the double-entendre sinks in. After months of picnics in the pasture and star-scaped country drives, we’ve awoken in the aftermath of an unexpected storm. The more urgent my need to talk, the less accessible you’ve become. Months of trying to pinpoint where our meanderings began to veer off course has helped nothing, so, for now, I’m resolved to focus on the crocus and sage buried beneath the snow.  

Each rotation of clay slips firmly against my left hand. I implore my hands to remember patterns my mind forgets and hook my slip-dripping thumbs together. Half-closing my eyes, I force the middle finger of my right hand deep into the center of the soft, wet mound. Through half-lowered lashes, I gaze at a perfectly sunk hole. Nothing has been pulled off-center. 

Maybe it’s as simple as that. In November, you complained there wasn’t enough of you to go around, and I assured you that I understood. Said you wanted to get back to the basics but couldn’t explain what that meant. Perhaps our romance pulled off-kilter when so many responsibilities—job, children, house, ranch—cried for your attention. I admit I’ve felt it too.

I scrape slip from my palms onto the lip of the bucket before I dunk my hands. In my mind, Teresa’s gnarled fingers grip her ever-present sponge, so I reach into the bucket for mine. Re-hooking my thumbs, I place one hand on either side of my doughnut of clay and draw in another deep breath. Teresa’s voice rings clear: The right hand must know what the left is doing. In one swift motion, my hands glide up with just enough slip and tension, and I blink at the first even wall I’ve pulled in months. I’ve forgotten how natural this process should be. 

The right hand must talk to the left. One lover to the other. In early autumn, I drove your tractor while you manned the attached fence post pounder. Unable to hear you above the machine’s clamor, I deciphered your signals through the rear window. The fence we repaired strung out behind us, sturdy and straight. These days, we’re surrounded by the buzz of silence, and we build separate barricades. At this rate, you’ll disappear from my sightline before the crocuses poke their heads through the last crust of snow.

I lift my slip-slick hands from the cylinder spinning on the wheel and loosen the brace of my elbows from thighs. Outside, the snow swirls to the cadence of the cello as I swipe a sleeve across my cheeks. Straightening my shoulders, I unfurl from the low wooden stool and rise.

 

Rachel Laverdiere writes, pots and teaches in Saskatoon. She is CNF co-editor at Barren Magazine and the creator of Hone & Polish Your Writing. Find Rachel’s essays in journals such as Lunch Ticket, The Common, CutBank and Pithead Chapel. In 2020, her CNF was shortlisted for CutBank’s Big Sky, Small Prose Flash Contest, made The Wigleaf Top 50 and was nominated for Best of the Net. For more, visit www.rachellaverdiere.com.

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Auntie Liu glanced at the door every few minutes. The food in the baby bowl still sat untouched.

Each morning, she cooked chicken breasts and ground the meat until the crumbs were no bigger than her fingernails. She put a full bowl at the corner of her storefront, then positioned her chair to leave enough distance between herself and the bowl, but still with a clear view of it. 

The cat usually came at nine or ten, before the summer air turned sluggish. The first couple of days, he’d push around the pieces with a paw, sniffing before nibbling on them. Now he gulped them down, pink tongue darting and curling with impatient speed. Auntie Liu watched the feeding cat with a familiar satisfaction that had long evaded her. The chicken must be good, for the cat had grown noticeably rounder.

Every day Auntie Liu waited, and every day the cat came.

Except for today. It was past noon already, and the cat still hadn’t shown. Auntie Liu hovered by the door and looked up and down the street. Lao Wang, the neighborhood guard, sauntered through the bicycle-littered alley, with a bamboo fan in one hand and a tea mug in the other.

He spotted Auntie Liu and waved. “Auntie Liu, alright? Has Ling called lately?”

“He’s busy,” Auntie Liu said. “You know, city life.”

“Yeah. The hustle-bustle.”

“Listen.” Auntie Liu switched the topic. “Have you seen an orange cat?”

“What?” Lao Wang squinted his eyes as sweat trickled from his forehead. 

“An orange cat. Chubby. Have you seen him?”

“No? I don’t remember you having a cat.” 

“I don’t.”

Lao Wang half frowned, half laughed. “Then why —”

“Can you keep an eye on my shop for a bit?” Auntie Liu interrupted him.

“Sure.” Lao Wang shrugged. “When are you coming back?”

“Soon,” Auntie Liu hurried out.

#

The sun blazed in the middle of the white sky as Auntie Liu hastened down the street, searching under parked scooters, on top of fences, and behind food stands. She shook every garbage can she could spot, hoping the cat would come scuttering out. Passers-by shot her side glances, but she didn’t care.

Maybe he’d been hit by a car. Her heart squeezed as soon as the thought crossed her mind, and she quickly pushed away the image of an orange lump lying still in the middle of the street as blood crawled like snake from underneath.

Her mind always went to the worst place. Years ago, when Ling threw a tantrum on their way home, she pretended to leave him behind. After charging forward for a couple of minutes, she realized he didn’t keep up. She searched for hours, terrified that he might be kidnapped or hurt or worse, before he turned up at a guard station unscathed. Relief washed over her as she pulled him in her arms, apologizing over and over as if saying “sorry” enough times would flush away the guilt and shame. Ling remembered the anecdote as an adventure, oblivious of the panic that it still inspired.

#

Auntie Liu looked all afternoon for the cat. Every time she spotted a moving creature, her heart leapt before tumbling again, realizing it was not him.

Dinner time came as mothers called to their children to come home. Auntie Liu wandered down the street, sweat cooled on the back of her shirt. 

She should give up. After all, it was just a cat. She let out a soft laugh and suddenly felt all the weariness of the silly chase after a stray cat. 

She plodded back to her store. Lao Wang was still waiting for her.

“Where have you been?” 

“Sorry,” she said. “I —”

“Never mind! Come, you gotta see this.” 

Lao Wang pulled her inside, led her to the inventory room in the back and through the door that stood ajar. Inside, cardboard boxes littered on the floor.

“Look, under that cardboard by the window,” Lao Wang whispered.

Auntie Liu frowned and bent down to peer underneath. 

Within, outlined by the last tender light before sunset, lay an orange cat with five kittens suckling on her belly. Auntie Liu stared at the tiny creatures, wearing the thinnest coats of fur, eyes still closed, clinging blindly to their mother. 

“He’s…a mom.” 

She’d assumed that the cat was a boy. All small animals appeared to be boys to her, playful, mischievous, in need of constant, devoted care. 

“See, no need to worry.” Lao Wang patted on her shoulder. 

Auntie Liu smiled. She’d always worry. As the cat licked her babies with that pink tongue, she felt the comfortable burden of motherhood.

 

Yunya Yang was born and raised in Central China and moved to the US when she was eighteen. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in trampset, Heavy Feather Review, Brilliant Flash Fiction, and others. She lives in Chicago with her husband Chris and cat Ichiro. Find her at www.yunyayang.com and on Twitter @YangYunya.

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CW: self harm, suicide

 

Eliot lights the votive candle, then immediately blows it out. The gun-shot of his breath ricochets off the stone walls of the church until it finds a way out and vanishes. He lights the candle again, blows it out again, and listens, again, to his breath as it slowly dies out. After seven times lighting the candle, he leaves it to burn in remembrance of Beth, his wife whom he found dead in her art studio with an exacto knife in her right hand and a purple origami orchid in her left hand above four neat vertical lines running down her wrist. Eliot kneels in front of the bleeding-heart-red row of votive candles, pantomimes the sign of the cross, then rises and turns away without looking back.

Every door Eliot opens from today until this day next year he will open and close seven times before walking through. Every light he turns on he will turn on and off seven times before leaving it to shine. Every meal will have seven portions. Every mouthful of food will be chewed seven times, a vast improvement from the first year when every morsel he ate had to be small enough to swallow after only one chew. Every night before he snaps out the light, he will say Beth’s name seven times.

On his way home from the church, Eliot stops at Bed Bath & Beyond to buy a new accent pillow, number seven, to add to growing mountain of pillows on Beth’s side of the bed. He stops at the pet store to choose a seventh velvety red Siamese fighting fish in a round bowl to join the expanding school of bowls lining the long windowsill of their bedroom. He stops at the florist to pick out a seventh purple Phalaenopsis orchid to add to the circle of six marking the exact spot on the floor of Beth’s studio where she died.

Before he calls it a day, Eliot makes two final stops. First, he stops at Beth’s favorite deli, Profumo di Carne, and buys seven slices of prosciutto, seven ounces of the ripest Taleggio cheese, seven garlic stuffed Kalamata olives, seven artichoke hearts, and seven small ciriola loaves, which he will eat over the next seven nights. Finally, he stops at Beth’s favorite bakery and wine shop, Bel Fiore, and buys seven of her favorite pistachio cannoli, seven sugared almonds, and seven bottles of her favorite Sangiovese, which will wash down the prosciutto, the cheese, the olives, the artichoke hearts, the ciriola, the cannoli, and the sugared almonds over the next seven nights.

After completing all of his ritual errands, Eliot arrives back at the house that he used to call home before Beth died. He stores the groceries, adds the fish bowl to the circle of bowls in Beth’s studio at the back of the house, places the orchid at the end of the line of orchids on the windowsill, and balances the pillow atop the slow-growing mountain that still doesn’t quite fill the space where Laura used to sleep. He strips off his clothes, turns on the shower to nearly scalding, Beth’s favorite temperature, sets the timer on his phone for seven minutes, and steps beneath steaming needles of water.

When the alarm sounds, Eliot towels himself dry and stretches out naked on his empty side of the bed. He opens the drawer of his bedside table and extracts the exacto knife that Beth used to cut fine flower petals from her own handmade paper to make the complex collage art she was so famous for. He reaches down and rubs that special place high on the inside of his right thigh, the place Beth loved to stroke with a feathery-light touch of a fingertip because it made Eliot’s leg spasm uncontrollably, the place that now holds six perfectly straight vertical scars, each nearly three inches in length. When Eliot made the first cut on the first anniversary of Beth’s death, he believed that he would use each new cut every year to create his own collage tribute to her. But after trying to draw a template for his masterpiece in Beth’s unfinished sketch book, he accepted that he was not an artist, and gave up any idea of trying to match her skills. So this year’s cut, the seventh cut, will line up perfectly with the previous six, another row in the expanding garden of scars growing on his thigh. He doesn’t pretend to know how many more cuts it will take before the scars become like a hedgerow to block out the rest of the world. All he knows is that next year the number will be eight.

 

Kip Knott’s writing has recently appeared in Barrow Street, Flash Fiction Magazine, La Piccioletta Barca, MoonPark Review, and trampset. He is also a regular monthly contributor to Versification. His debut full-length collection of poetry—Tragedy, Ecstasy, Doom, and so on—is currently available from Kelsay Books. His new poetry collection, Clean Coal Burn, is forthcoming in 2021, also from Kelsay Books. More of his work may be accessed at kipknott.com.

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Uniformed men with shotguns patrolled the entrances to the American Embassy in El Salvador.  They were likely children of the Salvadoran civil war, now grown, who were over-familiar with violence and death. The pre-dawn darkness suited them.

My husband and I approached the crowd of civilians who had gathered across the street from the embassy. We had an interview for his green card at eight o’clock and, by the looks of it, so did hundreds of others. I gripped our paperwork in my hands.

“I guess we wait,” he said, decisively. He stood with his back perfectly straight, as if his pride could protect him. He had lived continuously in the United States for twenty years, since eleven years old, and even his face had been Americanized. He’d taken out his earrings that morning just to be safe.

At seven A.M. the uniformed men approached the crowd and herded us towards the embassy, into a new line. A fleet of suited women in high heels approached us with clipboards, highlighters, and questions.

“Your name?” she asked in Spanish.

“Oscar Guzman Orellana,” he said.

She wanted proof. He handed her a paper which she studied until, satisfied, gave it back. She highlighted his name and continued down the line. She nodded at me. Perhaps, because of my blue eyes, it was obvious that I was his American husband.

Years before, I’d messaged him on Grindr. After a few brief exchanges I, mostly out of boredom, asked if he wanted to meet sometime. I offered Jake’s, a cigar bar with a lazy atmosphere. He agreed.

A couple days later, I got there before he did. I texted him that I was sitting on the patio. I lit my cigarillo, sipped my drink, and watched bright, Midwestern clouds meander across the sky. A blanket of calm settled on top of me. I was having a lovely day.

I vaguely recognized him from his photos when he showed up. I stubbed my cigarillo out for politeness. He was in his mid-twenties, handsome and solidly-built with simple clothing, like an undecorated beauty. His cologne was sharp,  and coquettish, spiking the air with his intentions.

“Oscar?” I asked.

“You’re Zack, then,” he said, sitting down “I think I’ve been to this bar with my uncle.”

“Your uncle?” I asked, “I barely like my brother.”

He had an accent I wasn’t familiar with. I leaned forward and listened carefully.

“It’s a big Latino family, y’know,” he said.

“Do I look like I know what a big Latino family is?” I laughed.

He explained about his five siblings: three were born as Americans, and two were born as Salvadorans.

“I’m one of the Salvadoran ones,” he declared, proudly.

“Okay,” I said, equally confused and curious, “what does that mean?”

The afternoon of our two year wedding anniversary, Oscar and I were ushered into a waiting room in the American embassy. We faced a line of numbered booths where, behind the Plexiglas, bureaucrats worked. A suited woman handed us a number and gestured towards one side of the room. We took our seats among the other applicants. Multiple signs were posted throughout the walls, directing us to organize our papers in a specific order. I pulled papers out of our manila folder and spread them across Oscar’s and my lap then, piece by piece, compiled our story into a single stack. Every so often, an automated voice broke through the room’s murmur to announce an appointment.  Somebody in our patch of seats stood up and carried their paperwork towards a booth.  The rest of us watched.

Two pretty girls my age sat in front of us. They talked amongst themselves in hushed, Southern California accents. I figured they were sisters. Maybe one had been brought to the States as a baby and the other was born American. They both had wide, uncertain eyes, like Oscar’s. What would such an obviously Americanized girl do if, when her number was called, she learned that she couldn’t go back to the States? Would she be stranded alone in El Salvador? Forever?

I scratched Oscar’s back and searched the room for other Americans. I hoped their paperwork was in order.

Our number was called.

We went to booth eleven where, on the other side of the Plexiglas, a young woman sat. She had short, blond hair, like an everyday Anubis.

“Oscar Guzman Orellana?”

“Yeah,” he answered.

“And this is the husband?”

“If you can believe it,” he said. He laughed nervously, as if he could charm her into believing that he belonged in America.  She smiled evenly.

“Have you ever worked illegally?” she asked.

“No.”

“Do you have proof?”

Oscar handed her our stack of papers. She didn’t want our wedding photos.

“When did you cross the border? Who was with you? Where do you work?  What’s your wedding date?” Then, “Congratulations, you’ve been approved.”

“Really? That’s it?”

“That’s it,” she said, “Here’s the instructions to pick up the passport with an entry visa. You’ll get your green card in the mail, in America.”

We turned around to leave and Oscar greedily gripped my hand. Liberated, we kissed, like a newly married couple, and left the building.

Outside, a different Americanized couple waited in the shade. They crossed through the sunshine and approached us with pained eyes.

“Did you get approved,” the wife asked.

“Yeah,” I beamed.

“They didn’t accept our marriage license,” she said, handing a piece of paper to me. I looked at it.

“It’s supposed to have a certified stamp,” I said.

 

Zack Austin lives in Omaha, Nebraska with his husband. He believes in pop music. His work is also forthcoming in Drunk Monkeys.

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Jolene sleeps with her back toward me, never faces me anymore. Makes sure she goes to bed way before or after me, says that she’s tired or that she can’t sleep. I feel her body radiating heat—my little furnace, I try to joke—but there’s a moat of cold sheets between us every night, and I do not dare step in and freeze. 

***

I dream of a large white fox standing amid the thick, knobbly branches of an ancient forest. The fox burns with a green flame and looks me right in the eye, seems like it wants to speak.

I think about how foxes don’t climb trees. Or speak. But the fire, the green flames licking at the fox’s legs, somehow do not seem impossible. 

***

Jolene pours me lemonade from the fridge. It’s her mother’s recipe, made with real lemons and limes, brimming with sugar. Jolene fills the glass with ice cubes so there is almost no room for the juice. I am about to tell her not to be so stingy, but she is focused on the drink, using only her fingertips to hold it, yet by the time she comes and hands it to me, all twenty feet between the fridge and the porch, the lemonade is warm like bull piss on a summer day.

There is a question mark on my face. She grins sheepishly, mutters she’s sorry about the warm lemonade, and looks at me the way she hadn’t in a long time, like she’s about to say something important.

I see a faint green flicker dancing in the white of her eyes, behind her dark brown irises. 

***

The fox stares at me and says, “Come closer.”

“I can’t,” I say. “I am afraid of the flames.”

“Well, you should be,” says the fox. “Come anyway. I can see you want to touch me. You want to touch the flames.”

“I do. But I cannot.” 

“You are a fool and a coward,” says the fox. 

***

Jolene used to want to get married, but I didn’t. She asked me a few times, and I shut her down with blather about how we didn’t need a piece of paper, how love was enough. Every time I did so, she would look down at her folded hands and get really quiet.

I don’t know why I was such a jerk about it. Or maybe I do. I used to think, for the longest time, that I could do better. That the sweet, quiet Jolene, who loved me with the fervor and innocence of a child, would be a step to something else, something greater, magical even, something away from this town that smelled like cow dung and homemade liquor.

But it’s been ages since I thought about anyplace else or anyone else. My dreams of cities unknown, buzzing with people and life, have faded, and I don’t even feel sorry about that. I have accepted the red dirt and the humming of bugs and the job at a car repair shop and our small house with potted flowers and a fridge filled with Jolene’s mom’s lemonade as where I need to be.

My fantasies of strange women, their legs and lips and breasts, have disappeared like the images from old-timey photographs left out in the sun for too long. I think only about Jolene, who becomes more beautiful with every passing day, as if she’s come in possession of some secret power. I swear there is a glowing green aura around her whole body.

Jolene hasn’t asked me to get married in a very long time. I am afraid of what she’ll say if I ask her, so I don’t. 

***

Jolene has worked at the town diner since high school. She’s kind and swift, and she gets good tips.

She tells me she’s thinking about getting another job, at a new location in a town twenty miles over, that it will be more money, more opportunity. I say no, why does she need to do that, we have enough, don’t I provide enough for us?

She says of course I do, then looks down at her folded hands and gets really quiet. 

***

The fox stares at me.

“I know it’s you, Jolene,” I say. “Tell me what’s going on.”

The fox remains silent.

“I don’t understand. Why won’t you talk to me? I love you!”

“You don’t love me,” says the fox. “You don’t even know me. You can’t even tell that I am a fox.”

The green flames rise to envelop the animal and the thick knobbly branches it stands on. They burn bright and wild, and I start to backtrack before they burn me, too. 

***

Jolene hasn’t been home in weeks. She hasn’t worked at the diner either, nor has she ever taken that job at the new place.

Before she left, she made several pitchers of her mom’s lemonade. Filled the whole damn fridge.

I finish them all. As I grab the last one, I find a wet piece of paper stuck to the wall behind.

I slowly peel the paper off. It’s glossy, the size of a palm.

I see blotches of light and darkness, like faint licks of flame, surrounding the shape of baby.

 

Maura Yzmore writes short fiction, long equations, and goofy poetry poetry. Her literary flash can be found in Bending Genres, Jellyfish Review, Gone Lawn, and elsewhere. Find out more at https://maurayzmore.com or on Twitter @MauraYzmore.

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Papa’s got me waiting in the car. He’s taking me to Nanna’s cause Momma’s screaming makes me scream and Papa says he can’t think like that. Momma slipped in the shower and is hurt. Papa is taking care of her and she’ll be alright. But she has a lot of bruises and her nose is leaking blood like  the hose out back when you forget to twist it all the way to the right and that’s just wasting water you little shit is what Papa says and how long’s it been like that he asks me and I tell him since we put up the slip ‘n slide I guess and he tells me that won’t fly around here but I don’t know what made me think of that cause it was a while ago that happened. Oh, Momma’s blood. That’s right. There’s a lot of it coming out.

Papa’s in the car. We’re ready to go. Are you ready, kid? I’m ready. Papa asks me to hand him a beer from the back, he’s got his hands full driving. I hand him a beer from the back. Papa puts on Storm Front by Billy Joel. When Papa puts on Storm Front by Billy Joel his eyes well up. When Papa puts on Storm Front by Billy Joel I’m supposed to listen to the words, really listen, and hush up. I hush up. We turn left at the end of the street to get to Nanna’s. Papa takes a sip of beer. Pass Four Brothers Gas Station, can we stop and get a candy bar but Papa doesn’t hear me over Billy Joel. Papa takes a drink from the glovebox. He gets bad headaches. Closes the glovebox. Papa starts turning left when

Sharp. Stomach. Glass shards in skin blood. I hang out above for a minute and watch the cars spin, twisty twirlies. Someone took a hammer and hammered out all of the sound. Everything is muffled. It smells like gasoline. Papa’s coughing. God-fucking-damnit Papa shouts.

I wake up. Beeeeeeep. Beep Beep. Tubes. Momma is in the chair. Papa is sitting in the chair next to her. There’s a new man here. New man is pacing by my bedside. I fall back into a kind of sleep.

I dream. I dream of thuds. Uncle Raymond in the tree stand. Aim. And Pop. Thud. I see it through my noculars. The stag falls, rests. Nanna in her bathroom. Snapback. And Pound. Thud. I see it through the crack space I peer through sometimes watch cousin Misty peeing. Nanna throw her head to mirror one two three times. No shatter, no blood. Nanna careful not like Momma. Nanna sigh. Crack bat thud. Fist face thud. Car, thud.

I wake up. Beep Beep. Beep Beep. Beep Beep. Still tubes. Only Momma in the chair. She gets real close to me:

“Honey, honey. Oh my. You’re fine, you’re gonna be fine they say. Everyone says you’re fine really. But honey, honey. A man is going to come around and you got to…”

I dream again. I dream of hiding places. The shed. The woods. Fort. Attic. Under the bed. My bed. Momma bed. Nanna bed. 

I wake up. New man is next to me in chair. Momma in chair out of focus. Papa in chair out of focus too.

Hard voice, real voice: I need to ask you a couple of question when you’re feeling up to it.

Same voice I remember in the courtroom. Judge voice. He called me son. Papa didn’t like that. Judge also wanted to ask me some questions. I looked out and saw Momma, her face still very puffy and her eyes looked like the whole ocean wide and deep. I looked out and saw Papa. His eyes steady, focused, like a beacon. Papa told me what to say to the Judge. Momma told me to tell the truth. I didn’t know which. Looked at Momma’s eyes, saw ocean. Looked at Papa’s eyes, saw beacon. Needed a map, not a swim. Told Papa’s story.

I let new man know I’m feeling up to it. New man signals to Momma and Papa to get going for a bit. Momma looks at me with ocean, Papa looks at me with beacon. 

He asks what I remember, was my father drinking, did my father ever hit me or my mother?

I remember Moonshot, Woodstock, Watergate, Punk Rock. I don’t know who what drinks. Momma’s clumsy, anyone’ll tell you that.

I dream. I wake. They move. Planets touch. Too hot to go in the attic. Getting too big to fit under these beds. Momma fixing good meals. One day a storm’ll come says Papa. I believe him good.

 

Derek Maine lives in North Carolina with his wife, two children, and dog (Gidget). They also feed an outdoor car, Lily. Derek has stories published or forthcoming in X-RAY, Ligeia, Expat Press, SCAB Magazine, Misery Tourism, The Tower Babel Notice Board, and elsewhere. He is on twitter too much @derekmainelives

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Culture Shock

 

Settling into our new Floridian life was no easy feat considering Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam was all my family had ever known. My father took up a job at Regal & Nautique Orlando as a boat service technician while my mother soldered tiny IC chips until persistent nosebleeds caused by inhaling solder smoke forced her to seek employment elsewhere. Neither job was particularly interesting, however, they swallowed their pride knowing it was a necessary step towards establishing any sort of footing in this foreign place. Especially since my brother and I were only four and seven, ages far too young to contribute anything of significance to help lift the burdens off our parents’ backs.

About halfway into our second month here, my father returned from work and announced he “brought home the bread,” which was something I never heard before. He must’ve picked up some weird American lingo while on the job. Had I heard him correctly? It was a rather small achievement, I thought, considering he was gone for most of the day. My father clarified that “bread” was a term Americans used when referring to money. Somehow a block of flour and water was equivalent to social economic wealth. Such an odd place, this America. 

In simultaneous celebration of my grandmother’s first month in the States and birthday, my family decided to treat her to a steakhouse dinner even though her few remaining teeth were hanging on for dear life. She opted for Outback Steakhouse after having seen a commercial for it where entire families were smiling and giving countless thumbs ups. “Take me to the happy food place,” she said. And since it was her special day, we happily obliged. My grandmother wouldn’t stop talking during the car ride about how excited she was to be visiting the land of good times and delicious food.

Once we got parked and began towards the door, my grandmother suddenly stopped as she started removing her shoes while other patrons darted us weird glances through the windows.

“Ma, what are you doing?” my mother asked. 

“This is steak house? Ma always take shoe off before enter house. Good manners.”

We spent a solid ten minutes explaining to her that, contrary to its name, Outback Steakhouse was not an actual house with couches, showers, and bedrooms. She finally agreed to slip her shoes back on before all of us went inside, avoiding eye contact with inquisitive folks who wondered what happened. By the amount of bearded beer-bellied white men moving about, we might as well have arrived at a Santa Claus convention. My quick-eyed father ushered us towards a table that was somehow vacant amidst the heavy bustle of customers. Moments later, we were approached by a waiter who informed us the table we chose was “For Reserved Guests Only,” as specified by a small piece of folded white paper sitting atop its surface.

Waving the sign about, my mother claimed we were emotionally calm and collected, thus it was only fitting to dine at a table clearly designated for reserved people like us. The waiter snatched the sign away and gave us exactly thirty seconds to find new seating before upper level management got involved. With what little English she knew, my grandmother suggested we avoid further confrontation and move elsewhere. It wasn’t long before we found ourselves at a table near the registers within the waiter’s line of sight as a reminder to not attempt any more funny business. Now my mother began lamenting, cursing the tricky nature of American words with a quick shake of her fist. Stopping as the waiter came by with menus, saying only, “Thank goodness, that little miscommunication back there sure worked up an appetite!”

My grandmother tapped my shoulder and I noticed she was furrowing her eyebrows at the open menu. 

“What the steak do good job?” she asked.

At first I had no clue what she was talking about. As I followed her thin fingers towards the laminated page, only then did I realize she was asking about the words Well Done under a piece of steak which looked like burnt sheetrock. My perplexed grandmother had sworn they were complimenting the meat for some praise-worthy achievement. Withholding laughter, I explained the words were referring to how the steak was cooked.

She replied, “If chef cook good job then grandma not worry, food will be delicious.”

Then the waiter swung by and recommended their medium-rare steak, pointing at a cross-section of meat with a beautiful pink center. While my father appreciated the suggestion, the offer was kindly denied since he refused to eat something that was difficult to find. Realizing my family wasn’t from around here, the waiter tried explaining to him that “rare,” similar to well-done, was just another way steaks were cooked. After about fifteen minutes of heated banter regarding the confusing nature of American vernacular and steakhouses, my family said screw it and went to McDonalds instead. 

Grandma managed to snag two peppermints on the way out as mementos from her first time (almost) trying Western dining. “Look at the pretty candy!” she said, transfixed by the swirl of reds and whites like it was some Christmas hypnotist wheel. She was equally fascinated by the crinkle of wrappers, showing my brother and I the sound the plastic made when rubbed between her fingertips. We pulled up to the drive-thru and ordered chicken McNuggets for the kids and grandma while my parents split a Big Mac, which they claimed was printed deceptively smaller on the order board.

Once everyone began digging into their respective meals, I couldn’t help but reflect on the evening’s occurrences. In hindsight, although we failed to offer my grandmother the full Outback Steakhouse experience, things actually turned out pretty well. Not only did we learn some new words along the way, my grandmother got to try McDonalds for the first time surrounded by people she loved. And that alone was something worth celebrating.

 

Things I’ve Lost

 

Milk teeth: the first at an Outback steakhouse during Christmas of ‘02, another at the hands of my father equipped with about a foot of dental floss securely tied to a doorknob. Sleep: as my mother’s rendition of the tooth fairy was more frightening than comforting, instilling in me an image of a winged tiny person who came during the night to take my baby teeth in exchange for a quarter or two. Slight trust in my mother: as I stumbled upon a small tooth shaped container in my bathroom holding all my baby teeth, thinking that perhaps, my mother, was in cahoots with this winged tiny person. A few brain cells as I was channel surfing and stumbled across “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” for the first time. My mother at the supermarket: as I failed to locate her after accomplishing the assigned mission of acquiring a milk jug and some paper towels.

A pick-up basketball game in my middle school physical education class, where I realized putting a ball into a hoop was not my forte. Sensation in my left ankle: an injury I sustained from being crossed during that same pick-up game; further solidifying my realization that basketball wasn’t for me. My first high school friend to drug addiction; he was always there but never was. My appetite: upon discovering the copious amounts of oil and grease found on school pizza; nothing quite like the thrill of putting a triangular piece of cholesterol into your body. Delicious.

Patience and the feeling in my legs: while waiting in line for two hours at a local Walmart as the folks preceding me were loading up on produce in preparation for Hurricane Irma. My spot in that same line as I had to quickly run to the bathroom; sympathy, quite literally, goes flying out the window during hurricane season. A close family friend whom I considered a second grandfather, to cancer: as he was unable to fulfill his promise of attending my high school graduation.

A significant amount of weight during puberty; and my interest, post weight loss, in a girl who had turned me down years before I got slim. Perception of time as I awaited my name to be called during the aforementioned graduation ceremony: consumed with the realization that the supposed best four years of my life were now over and questioning whether they had lived up to that title. Faith in humanity: on January 20, 2017. A thin layer of skin atop my shoulders: resulting from a failure to evenly cover them with sunblock on a recent beach trip; a decision I now regret as the Sun showered me with radiation and made me his bitch. Many hours creating this, and subsequent pieces of writing; a price I am willing to pay, always.

 

Nam Hoang Tran is a writer living in Orlando, Fl. His work appears or is forthcoming in Funny-ish, Montana Mouthful, Star 82 Review, Bending Genres, and elsewhere. Find him online at www.namhtran.com.

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Don’s gloves are useless. He fell hands first into a stream five miles back. Water entered the gloves. Now they are frozen. He can barely grasp his walking poles. “We need to make camp. I’ve had it, my hands have had it.” His voice is desperate. After six miles on a cold, snow-drifted trail, we clear an encampment. Soon, the crackle of a campfire breaks the silence of the wilds. He pulls his gloves off and leans into the fire to warm his hands. His right index and left middle fingers are white. They appear frostbitten. 

The daylight waning, we climb into our tent. We are without cell phones (they were not yet ubiquitous), and miles from town. The weather forecast is for more snow, deeper drifts, and colder temperatures. We warm some water on a small stove, make dinner, then soak Don’s hands. He crawls into his sleeping bag, wraps his hands in gauze, and covers them with two pairs of clean woolen socks. 

By morning, his gloves are thawed but still wet. The weather is screeching, the snow gusting sideways. It is a blizzard. We are not going anywhere. The campfire is long extinguished, although the small stove keeps the tent comfortable. I disperse the drift that has gathered at the door of the tent but leave the side drifts as buffers against the swirling wind, then settle in for a worrisome day. Don warms his hands continuously by the stove. We heat more water and soak them. We sit in shared silence and attempt to stay warm. Don removes his boots. Three toes are white, two pale. He refuses to soak them; instead, he covers them with dry, clean socks. “I’m going to bed; I’ll soak them tomorrow.”

The following morning, the snow covers the landscape in quiet repose. The sun glances over the horizon, cutting black contours of the surrounding mountains. More altitude, colder temperatures, slower miles, more frostbite. As Don stirs in his sleeping bag, I decide the safest option is to turn back. Six miles of flat terrain is better than five miles of a soaring, uphill struggle. Don agrees, reluctantly. He is on this hike because of a pending divorce. He wanted to accomplish something of significance. We eat breakfast, soak his fingers and toes, and break camp. We search for evidence of the trail; there is none, everything appears the same—white. A map is worthless. We default to my fallible mental compass. 

We trudge for a mile; it takes two hours. We rest. I light the stove. We warm our hands and feet and prepare hot chocolate and soup. I begin to worry Don might succumb to hypothermia. He is shivering uncontrollably, his speech mildly slurred. I decide to activate an emergency beacon and wait. I erect the tent. Don stumbles and falls, then climbs inside. I wrap him in blankets. tell stories, sing songs, and question him with trivia, repeatedly. The day passes slowly. Finally, the sun sets in flickering patches. 

I am concerned there has been no response to the emergency beacon. I check the device; the alert is not activated. Fuck. I activate it again; it flashes. I lie next to Don in his sleeping bag to afford more heat. He mumbles disjointed words and rambling sentences. I am unsettled, discomfited, regretful. I sleep little. I worry I will awake next to a corpse.

The dawn rises cloudy. It is quiet. Don is asleep. Then, the distant whoosh whoosh whoosh of a helicopter. The sound gets louder and louder. I scramble from the tent. A helicopter floats above dangling a rope and body basket. I hear the high-pitched ring of snowmobiles. Then voices, louder and louder.

 

Paul Rousseau is a semi-retired physician and writer, published or forthcoming in The Healing Muse, Blood and Thunder, Intima. A Journal of Narrative Medicine, The Human Touch, Please See Me, Months To Years, The Examined Life, Burningword Literary Journal, Cleaning up Glitter, The Centifictionist,  Dr. T. J. Eckleburg Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Tendon, and others. Lover of dogs.

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We live near the naval air base where the Hindenburg went down, fell to pieces like a flaming piñata. Sometimes planes fly so low they shake the pictures on the walls, make them slip to show the holes I’ve hung them over. I don’t know what drives men to violence, bloodied knuckles. But I know how to hang a picture, I know how to dress a wound. When my son hears the planes, the backyard under siege, he drops his truck and searches for my face. A spray of earth cyclones his running feet. Body still in motion, fear melts from his eyes the moment they meet mine. By the time we embrace he is laughing. The plane is just a shadow overhead, something for our love to ricochet against. I will kiss the buds of my son’s knuckles. I will teach him to be tender. His love will cover up the holes in mine.

 

Elizabeth Muller is a New Jersey writer whose work has appeared in Catapult, Maudlin House, Rejection Letters, X-R-A-Y Lit, and elsewhere. She is a reader for Pidgeonholes, an unapologetic horse girl and an apologetic everything else. You can find her on Twitter @eawrites.

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Little Compton, late fall: Fern escapes from the clove and nutmeg of her mother’s house. She leaves the car near a pasture where bay mares graze in patches of sun. Across the dirt road, through a small park dense with maple and oak and advancing wintercreeper, and then it’s two miles, flat and easy, down to the water. She’s not looking but she sees them anyway, the maitakes under the bare trees. 

Fern is alone on the rocky slash of beach, except for the wind, much too cold, and the birds. Gulls, a red-tailed hawk screaming. A crow gives a single unimpressed caw. She kicks driftwood into a nest to keep her feet warm, sinks her hands into her deep pockets, worrying the handle of her knife. She has no basket, but she’s promised wood ears and oyster mushrooms for hot and sour soup. An offering, an apology. Her breath settles and wets her cowl, loden green and lumpy, the one Cressida made for her. 

Cressida’s last summer, they rented a cabin in the Adirondacks. They read, swam, ate, spied on a bear discovering a patch of blueberries. One morning Cressida said she wanted to taste the sun in a chanterelle. Fern knew she could find them. They hiked further and further from the cabin, found puffballs and destroying angels, lion’s mane and black trumpets, but not one chanterelle. Overhead, the crows passed each other a warning of their presence. They took a different route back through a small clearing, sending a doe and two fawns blurring through the undergrowth. Fern stepped forward and halted: a fairy circle. 

At her skittishness Cressida laughed, raspy and wonderful. She leapt past Fern, her locket—silver scrolled with acanthus, hiding, inside, a tiny fern preserved in resin, though Fern doesn’t know this and never will—flashing for an instant in the speckled light. Once she caught her breath she stepped back through and kissed Fern’s cheek. “Different?” she said, and she wasn’t, really, only a minute older, and her locket was missing. 

They combed through the loam, and despite her old fears, Fern crawled through the circle, searching. But it was no use. At the cabin Fern waited until Cressida fell asleep and then cleaned every inch of the three rooms, hoping she’d been wrong when she saw it around Cressida’s throat in the clearing, hoping that the locket was in the shower drain or stuck between floorboards. “Maybe a crow took it,” she said in the morning. “Greedy for sparkle.” Which she didn’t understand, having been drawn always to treasures masquerading as ordinary earth.

Now Fern walks back to her car, her pockets full of mushrooms, her mind half on the road, half in summer woods, looking for mushrooms. A gradual presence grows in the late weak sun. She can’t shake it. A crow lands on the split rail fence next to the car. Something shines. Just a trick of the light, a gleam in the bird’s eye.

 

Carolyn Oliver’s very short prose and prose poetry has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Indiana Review, Monkeybicycle, Jellyfish Review, jmww, Unbroken, Tin House Online, CHEAP POP, Midway Journal, and New Flash Fiction Review, among other journals. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net in both fiction and poetry. Carolyn lives with her family in Massachusetts, where she serves as a poetry editor for The Worcester Review. Online: carolynoliver.net.

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Whatever it was that happened during the time it took Lyle and Dwight to make it down the three flights of stairs from my apartment, they were full-on fighting by the time they hit the street below.

I’d stuck my head out the window to wish the brothers a final “Merry Christmas,” and there they were, throwing down on the boulevard snowbank. I stuck my head back in where it was warm.

“Guys,” I hollered back into the living room at the half-dozen others sitting around, drinking and smoking and carrying on. “Lyle and Dwight are at it again.”

A couple folks crowded around the window to see. But nobody got too excited. Those two had been slugging it out since they were kids. They fought at school. They fought at summer camp, at picnics, at weddings. They fought on the ice during a game once when they were on the same peewee hockey team.

Sure, they loved each other. But there was no stopping them. They were brothers.

The boys were in town for the holidays, same as half the others in my apartment that Saturday night. Most of us hadn’t seen each other since the summer, some folks working out west, others in school out east. We were all getting good and lit up with holiday cheer. Why not? Monday was Christmas. 

The brothers’ disagreement seems to have started shortly after they mentioned they were headed to the lake the next morning, to spend Christmas at the family cottage, winterized for just such occasions as it was. But it could have been simmering for some time. Hours, days, weeks. Years.

“Seen some wolves playing out on the lake, last time I was there in the winter,” I said, or something along those lines. It’s a beautiful memory, even years later. Those wolves, two of them out there just prancing about on that thick ice, snow falling all around them. Not a care in the world, it seemed. Or maybe they were brothers too, scrapping like brothers do? “Never seen nothing like it.”

Lyle sank back into my sofa and mumbled something. Dwight’s booming laugh filled the smoky room.

“What’s that?” someone asked.

“Wolf talk’s spookin the Lyler,” Dwight said with an evil grin. “That right, bud?”

“Fuck off,” Lyle muttered, no doubt hoping the subject would change, pronto. No dice.

“Lyler thinks there’s werewolves or worse in the woods up there,” Dwight jeered. “Says he even saw one, once. Didn’tcha, Lyler?”

“Seriously,” Lyle said, seething though he tried to play it cool. “Fuck off.”

“But that’s what you told me, wasn’t it?” Dwight was in his glory needling his little bro. “You said you saw a werewolf. Out back of the pizza place that one time. Didn’t you?”

“Could have been anything,” Lyle demurred, pulling a fresh bag of weed out and throwing a nug on the coffee table. “Fuckin bear, fuckin coyote. Fuckin werewolf. I dunno. That was a long time ago.”

“Maybe a windigo?” someone offered. Whether they were being helpful or piling on was hard to tell. “Or Bigfoot?”

“Sure,” Lyle said, dismissively. “Who knows. I was fuckin high OK?”

That got a laugh, sure enough. Lyle rolled a cannon, more drinks were poured, and everyone moved on. Looking back you could feel the resentment burning between the brothers, though everyone ignored it at the time.

Yet when they left a little after midnight, something set them off in that stairwell. Why else would they be down there in the street, big fat snowflakes falling all around them, pummeling each other senseless until they finally broke it up and stumbled off towards the bridge and the bars beyond, yelling back and forth at each other until they faded into the snowfall? 

The holidays can be emotional. Old beefs often come bubbling up from the depths like a bad case of gas. It’s been years since I’ve seen my own brother over the holidays, for a laundry list of mostly stupid reasons. You just never really know what can set someone off during the darkest depths of winter. 

But for my money, on that night, it was that werewolf shit.

 

Sheldon Birnie is a writer from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada whose work has appeared recently in Door Is a Jar, Cowboy Jamboree, The Daily Drunk, Rejection Letters, BULL, among others. Find him online @badguybirnie

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In a time of death and great anxiety, we look to the tree and its unfurling leaves, or to the climbing pea and its orchid-like flower at the end of a tendril. One day, at last, its pods are fat and translucent, and my son peels it open and each pea bursts in his mouth, sweeter than the soil and he proclaims them to be his “garden candy.” The zinnias, impossible to imagine from their thin slivered seeds that get lost when a gust of wind blows them out of my hand, grow tall and bright in the heat of summer, and for the first time in my life, I am a person who has fresh cut flowers on my table. But the pumpkins, who had spread marvelously over everything, get a pest, and the tomatoes, a blight, and eventually even the quiet cocoon of a swimming pool cannot save me. But somehow, the zinnias thrive and keep blooming and reaching for the sky, twisting their stems as the sun moves with the season. They are so tall they fall over, and even get spots and start to rot, but still they bloom, and every time I think I should cut them down, I see a bee or a butterfly floating above and ready to land in a sea of yellow pollen, and so I wait another week, even though I know the white winged creature is a cabbage moth that will ruin my fall garden. It was the right decision, I think, to wait another week, and then another, because finally I see a monarch, nervous with me hovering so close by, but hungry enough that it stops to unfurl its proboscis and drink. It needs food for its journey, but I worry that it is all alone and too late and I wish it would stay with us. At last the frost comes and the zinnias brown, their petals crumble like ash, but the stalks, when I cut them down, are strong and hollow, anchored by their roots, deep in the soil.

 

Desi Allevato lives in central Virginia with her husband, where they are raising one child, two cats, and a hundred tree saplings in a suburban backyard. She has a brain tumor, ADHD, and an unfinished dissertation about Russian history. Her recent work is published in Longridge Review and she is a contributing writer to Grow Christians. Follow her on Twitter, @desirosie.

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This year’s donation came two days before Christmas – a single large box with a red bow on top. Usually the gifts weren’t right for Dina, since they mostly included toys for younger kids. Dina was 12 and past the age most people pictured when their heart ached enough to unzip their wallets. 

To Dina’s surprise, this year’s box contained a large tin of Werther’s Original, her favourite treat, and since her mother didn’t like sweets, the whole tin was hers. The box also contained a plump teddy bear, caramel-coloured as well, and Dina placed it beside the tin of Werther’s on her bedside table. She smiled to herself as she gazed at them together, a tiny nook of her world that looked like a display she’d seen at the mall.

Though school was out for another two weeks, Dina sat on her bed and started a writing assignment. She swished a hard, smooth caramel over her tongue as she imagined the teacher’s praise, the thing she thirsted for every day, and as she tried to block out the sound of her mother in the kitchen, yelling at her boyfriend, Tim. She hoped they weren’t arguing about tomorrow’s dinner – her mother’s surprise promise to take her to Red Lobster as a combined Christmas-birthday gift. Dina hadn’t expected any gift at all and she felt giddy as she remembered her last visit to that restaurant when she was five. How the server had come around with a giant treasure chest and let her pick a toy from inside. Dina knew she was older now, but an excited hope jumped around in her stomach – maybe she wasn’t too old just yet.  

At the restaurant, Dina sat across from Tim as he glared at the menu and declared the prices outrageous. Dina made sure to pick the cheapest meal and to shake her head quickly when the server came by to ask about dessert. They ate mostly in silence as her mother drank the beer she had brought in her purse and Tim took gulps from a flask of whiskey. Every few minutes, Dina scanned the restaurant, hoping to catch sight of the treasure chest. But only the bill came at the end, and Dina was too shy to ask. 

On the bus ride home, Tim went on about “what a fucking waste of money that was”, and her mother didn’t disagree but tried to make him stop. Dina stared hard at nothing out the window and pretended not to hear. 

At home the fighting started again and Dina went quickly to her room. She sat at her desk beside the Christmas display and wondered about the person who donated the tin and the bear. She wondered what they’d thought about when they chose those two items, and whether they had imagined a girl like her. She felt a sudden ache, a longing to meet them, just to tell them in person that they were nice. But mostly she wanted them to tell her yes. Yes, they had imagined a girl like her.

 

Andrea Lynn Koohi is a writer from Toronto, Canada, with work appearing or forthcoming in Streetlight Magazine and Emerge Literary Journal. She has also had work short-listed in Hippocampus Magazine’s 2020 Remember in November Creative Nonfiction Contest.

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They packed up and shipped out and left us to watch the house. Mail, recycling, dusting. Bring in the papers, take down the Christmas lights. Throw the coffee grounds on the plants, won’t you? We hadn’t had two weeks together in the same place — consecutively — in years. It was just me, Megan, and the dog.

Stunning gifts arrive in inauspicious packages. This one looked a lot like a 13 year old Dotson with a bad bladder. Us, the motley crew never trusted to run the house, out there in the wake of the holidays, running the place. The arrangement lacked the sentimentality of a homecoming — it wasn’t the house of our childhood — but maybe that was for the best. My sister and I walked up the stairs like exterminators, feeling the lack of give beneath our feet. They were still being broken in, without any telling creaks. Surely it was for the best. It would be far harder to tend to the shell of what was once great — once formative. It would feel a bit like decay.

We turned to activities to fill the days. Sweep the pantry of its former glories. Toss out all the circulars that had been kept for fire kindling, but instead piled into a cascading Mount Olympus of ads for out of season blueberries. When we weren’t organizing, compiling, and compacting, we were traveling. We looked for little haunts — field trips — to break up the bleak January gray. It was that brutal type of Chicago cold that cuts into you like clean razorblades.

We started chasing sunrises like bingo squares, and that’s how we ended up in the parking garage of Rush University Medical Center. Me the passenger, Megan the driver, two foggy, uncaffeinated minds endlessly circling the notion that there might be somewhere better, a little further. Maybe somewhere less windy. Our cylinders were grinding, and we knew it. So we parked without paying. From that roof, we watched the sun fail to come up. It slipped into the sky, an Irish goodbye over Greektown. The fog made it seem like we were back in San Francisco. Everything misty, cold, damp.

Undeterred, we drove north — inbound Kennedy in local parlance — and ended up at the Wormhole on Milwaukee. I sandwiched myself into the arm crease of one of the couches, and hoped the coffee I poured down would beat back the shivers. We’d never been there before and walked out with almost an entire punch card stamped — nothing merited by one drink each. The barista looked like someone I dated before I cared about punchcards.

For the flicker of a few weeks, we lived quietly, the way you do with someone you implicitly trust. To carry the dog out and in, to pull the laundry out, then in, were just routines in a current of many; none were notably arduous. There was an air of undisputed certainty that the coffee would always made and deadbolt always locked. That’s what happens when you love someone more than you love yourself.  You do ten thousand tiny things to make sure they feel safe.

Downshifting from the heightened panic of December, in our last days as West suburban wardens, we found our way back to forgotten rhythms. Maybe we were looking to bring back some semblance of awareness, as if kicking our limbs lightly was invitation enough for the tingling to return. To come replace the numbness. On the last Saturday, we stood in the parking lot of Our Lady of the Angels, losing all feeling in our feet. Counting potatoes. Tying bags. Being something more than dissatisfied. Being useful, if nothing else.

I flew back to New York with enough gas in the tank to make it through 14 months of a job I would love more than anything, and that would fray every single one of my seams. It would grease my gears from grinding, and drain the feeling from my extremities. In the times of the latter, I would call my other housekeeper. Both of us in places that we weren’t certain would become home, I trusted she could declutter the wires, for a little while.

 

Mackenzie is a writer and illustrator based in Los Angeles who currently writes for television and podcasting. Her chapbooks Alms Basket For Your Heart (Variant Lit) and Bento Box (Kelsay) are out now. She believes bagels heal most wounds.

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CONTENT WARNING: implications of sexual assault and domestic violence

 

The bar is loud and hot, too small to hold all these people as is always the case with dingy New York bars, but this is where Mark wanted to have his birthday and so we are here. I am waiting at the bar for our drinks. A man grabs my ass. I grimace at him but say nothing. He doesn’t notice. I return to my friends, and spend the whole night looking over my shoulder.

*

Mary Beth and I are seated at the bleachers at recess. The sun beats down on our eleven-year-old ponytails. Brayden G approaches us from across the field, leaving the group of boys huddled together there. We’ve been waiting for this for days. Everyone knows Brayden’s about to ask her to be his girlfriend since he tried to kiss her after school on Tuesday. “Mary Beth”, he calls out. She blushes. “You’re a whore.” He runs back to the group of boys who turn away from us laughing. “What’s a whore?” she asks me. 

*

We’re sitting in Freshman Orientation. They’ve taken the boys to another room. They hand each of us a whistle with the university’s logo embossed on it. There’s a powerpoint about all the ways we can avoid harassment. I wonder what kind of advice the boys are getting.

*

I can’t decide between green or yellow peppers for the stir fry. I’m standing in the produce aisle with one in each in hand when the stranger approaches. Long, stringy hair and a Walt Disney World sweatshirt, but I don’t remember his face. “Give me your number,” he says. “Tell me your name. Give me your number. You’re so pretty.” He follows me down the dry goods aisle despite my repeated pleas for him to leave me alone. Other customers are staring but do nothing.  I give up on grocery shopping and walk quickly towards the exit. But I hear him call out after me. “Bitch.”

*

The showers at the university run hot, but I’m trying to burn my skin off.  Why bother having roommates if they’re never home when you need them? Why did you answer the door? Why didn’t you scream when he picked you up and carried you down the hall? Or when he climbed on top of you and stuck his hand down your pajama pants? How many times did you say no? When he sobered up and started to apologize, why did you say it was okay? 

*

I am helping Mark move into his new fancy apartment in Long Island City with views of the river. He smiles at me as I taunt him again about his ridiculous new job in finance. I am still hunkered down in deep Brooklyn working freelance, living on bagels and rice. We are happy, but as I go to put pots and pans away in the kitchen, I accidentally pull off a cabinet door. Panic sets in and I am flooded with embarrassment. I apologize profusely, too much honestly. And Mark reassures me it is nothing. Won’t let me fix it. Instead he has me sit down on the couch with a cup of tea while he takes out his toolbox and reattaches the screws properly (they hadn’t been screwed in to begin with; it was not my fault). I am on edge the rest of the day, saying sorry every ten minutes, wary of the pressure of my limbs on the furniture and countertops. Mark rolls his eyes at my umpteenth apology, cups my cheek in his hand, and reassures me everything is fine. I know, deep down, it is, but I cannot shake the learned response. We are sitting on the couch after dinner. He places a hand on my back as I reach for the remote on the coffee table, and though I should be reassured by the touch, it takes everything in me not to shrink away. With sleep, I’ll reset, let go of the habitual fear. Tomorrow, we’ll return to our content and jovial routine. Tomorrow he will be just Mark, my Mark, and not every man who has done me damage.

 

Elizabeth Bluth is a writer of fiction, poetry, and plays. Her work has appeared or is upcoming in LIT Magazine, Emerge Literary Journal, VERSIFICATION Zine, Kissing Dynamite Poetry, and others. She has a BA in Theatre and Creative Writing and an MFA in Fiction from The New School.

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Every year, starting when I was nine, I went trick-or-treating at my mother’s house. Her name was Nancy. I looked up her address in Dad’s directory. He hid it in his file cabinet. I didn’t know why she’d left when I was six, why she didn’t write or call, only that she had “issues.” Issues, a word he pronounced with sorrow. 

The first year, I dressed up as a king with a fake beard, Burger King crown. I wore my old blue sheets as a robe, the ones with stars and moons. I tried to frown. But I also laughed, hoping she’d recognize my goose-like laugh.

Nancy didn’t recognize me. She wore a purple polka-dot dress, like something in an old movie. She was so beautiful. Just the way she stood, she held what my father called “elegance.” Even the way she smelled, like Marlboros and sweat felt right. It was like everything could be good, because my mother was someone who had “really lived,” as Dad would put it. She seemed like someone who could keep you safe.

“Trick-or-treat,” I said, trying to keep my voice cheerful.

“Aren’t you cute?” she said. 

I just waited, but she laughed when I didn’t speak. She whistled something mysterious. Later I’d realize it was Tchaikovsky. Swan Lake. 

She dispensed some York peppermint patties and a thin little smile. But she didn’t ask where my father was. I kept waiting for it. Was this a game? Was it all fun?

“You’re a very noble king,” she said before she closed the door. “Always be proud.”

“I won’t,” I said.

“I love time machines,” she said. She leaned down and I smelled sweat. It was oddly soothing. “I wish you could buy me one. I could go back in time.”

“What would you do?”

“Never get married,” she said. She smiled. “I’m sorry. Just learn to be yourself.”

She shut the door softly.

I heard cracked laughter and the sound of bottles being popped through the window. Wine bottles.  Dad told me how to recognize different bottles being opened. Beer, wine, champagne. He also told me what different footsteps meant. Coming, leaving, leaving for good. He’d later teach me how to recognize drug addiction and how to know when someone was lying. He was different, always reading and looking like the world was chasing him.

I stood out there waiting that night. Dad once said a mother recognized her child, even in disguise. But I just heard more bottles popping, more laughter, and then crying, blurring with the butter-colored streetlamps. It was so painful, like the way you cried after a bully stole your lunch, but a hundred times in a row. 

I wanted to tell her I’d cried like that, to say everything would be all right. I wanted to dry her eyes the way Dad did with me, real awkwardly, tickling a little too much.

And I wanted to hate her. But if I hated her, she wouldn’t talk to me.

In the coming years, I’d dress up as many things, Darth Vader, vampires, figures who commanded respect. Sometimes I’d imagine her bowing, following me home. If Darth Vader ordered her to love me she would. Right? 

But I could never demand that. I imagined her refusing, leaving again, even though she lived there. I had friends with runaway parents. So, I stole small images and hoarded them. I hoarded her hazel eyes, rings around them, her twitching thin fingers. And every year, I held onto her sad smile, which crumpled more and more. I imagined that smile full of sorrow. Love. I conjured her hugging me, feeling squeezed, the surest sign of motherly love. So my friend David Connors told me.

When I was sixteen, I dressed up as myself. I wore a maroon Big Lebowski T-shirt with YOU ARE ENTERING A WORLD OF PAIN emblazoned in white and baggy navy-blue sweats. It seemed like the right time to reveal the truth. Of course, I didn’t know to say. I’m your son? Why didn’t you write? Didn’t you know? Doesn’t a mother know? I was already telling Dad to kiss my ass daily because he said X girlfriend was too nervous and Y girlfriend was too opinionated.

I’d probably say something worse to her. Something I’d beat myself up over for years.

It was a dark and stormy night. Seriously. Rain whooshed from the sky, as she opened the door. The street was so still, it seemed to taunt.

She looked at me, long and hard, her eyes widening. Then she shook her head. She smiled her little smile and said, “I don’t have anything. I wish I did.”

“I don’t want candy.”

“What do you want?” 

Half her teeth were missing. She looked like a depressed jack-o-lantern or someone from Breaking Bad. “Everyone wants something.”

“I just wanted to know you,” I said. But I wished I’d said something else. Nancy, Mom, even Mama. Mama, what a beautiful word.

 Leaves swept onto the sidewalk with a soft crunch. Tree branches swayed, as if pointing at me.

“You’ve got the wrong house,” she said. “You’re not looking for me.”

“You’re Nancy Botkin,” I said.

 She arched an eyebrow and looked at me again.

“Don’t you know me?”

She looked at me again and shook her head. A little too fast.

“You have the wrong person,” she said, her words a little softer. “Trust me, I’m the wrong person.”

“I’m Nick,” I said, my voice rising. “Nick. Nick. Nick.”

She looked again and swayed a little. She looked like she wanted to tell me something, her mouth flailing like a fish. A secret. A joke. Maybe she wanted to ask how I was. To call Dad a fascist douchewaffle and pity me. Maybe she even wanted to say she loved me. To wish me a good life.

Then she slammed the door. Thwack. 

That was the last thing I took. That and the porch light flickering, leaving me in the dark.

 

Yash Seyedbagheri is a graduate of Colorado State University’s MFA program. His stories, “Soon,”  “How To Be A Good Episcopalian,” and “Tales From A Communion Line,” were nominated for Pushcarts. Yash’s work  has been published in The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Write City Magazine, and Ariel Chart, among others.

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I have a photo of my son taken when he was about two years old, smiling as he walked through the wet grass outside the hospital where we’d gone to visit his great-grandmother who was recovering from a serious illness. My boy was too rambunctious to sit still for very long in the quiet room, so I let him roam around in the sunshine for a bit while I played photographer. The picture is so perfectly sweet. But there is an anomaly that I can only describe as a shimmering mist that stretches from the clear blue sky down to my son’s little head. And in the mist, I can see a smiling face. I often wondered if I captured my son’s guardian angel or some old soul searching for a new home.

I thought of this photo when we were camping in the desert a few years later. Our truck was parked in a campground nestled between rocky hills and scattered clusters of palm trees, the empty landscape colored vermillion and indigo by the setting sun. We were all tired from a day spent hiking. As I was spreading out the sleeping bags and blankets in the back of the truck, I looked over at my son. He was sitting very still, staring out into the distance as if under a spell.

After a few moments of silence, he said in a voice that sounded too old for a child, “It’s all just so beautiful.”

I felt his words squeeze my heart and couldn’t respond for fear my voice would crack. What I wanted to say was “Yes, it is all so beautiful, and I hope you can hold on to exactly what you’re feeling right now and return to it whenever the world begins to look wrong, because it will sometimes.” And though I wondered if some ancient soul was speaking to me in that moment, all I could see in my son’s wide, hazel eyes was innocence. So I just sat in silence with him, my heart simultaneously full and broken.

 

Lisa Lerma Weber lives in San Diego, CA with her husband and son. Her work has recently appeared in ang(st), Close To The Bone, Mookychick, X-R-A-Y, and others. She is an editor for Versification. Follow her on Twitter @LisaLermaWeber

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The block association welcomed the new neighbors by throwing a pipe bomb through their window. In the suburban tract housing development, created decades before for newly minted veterans in search of the American Dream, every house was identical. This meant the attackers strategically tossed the bomb through the window of the room most people used as the master bedroom, potentially leaving two children instantly orphaned. I’m sure the sounds of the four am explosion rattled my neighbor, Cal, unleashing a few wartime memories. We didn’t have the language to talk about the impact of war back then and the term PTSD wasn’t yet in our vocabulary. But the word the kids called the new neighbors, one we can thankfully no longer say aloud without fear of concrete consequences, was still spoken.

As smoke rose from my neighbor’s house, I watched Cal shriek, cry, and drink from a flask he had pulled from his robe pocket, before he ran into the flames, ready to serve. Cal was able to help the family escape without any physical injuries. In my town he wasn’t labeled a hero. Instead, the block association let him know his actions weren’t aligned with their mission by mildly vandalizing his home. The block association didn’t take credit or get charged for the welcoming activities, although everyone suspected the few members behind them.

The new neighbors put their house up for sale. The old neighbors said Cal only helped because he wasn’t quite right. These were once Cal’s buddies. Afterward he openly discussed his repulsion for their behavior, “Like I learned in the war, you don’t get to know people talking to them,” he told my parents, “only by their actions.”

The morning after the bombing, the faint smell of smoke still clung to the humid air, as I stood in our yard, I heard my neighbor Paula say to my mom, “They moved to this town, what did they expect?” I was old enough to know this wasn’t a question in search of an answer.

Later that day, reporters milled about the block, asking questions. One of them asked if I played with my new neighbors. Paula spotted me with the reporter and raced over to us, her hair in curlers, calling out, “Stop! Don’t answer him.” She reprimanded the reporter, “Questioning a child? Who does that?”

As the reporter walked away, I asked Paula, “Who blows up someone’s house?” “Oh Sweetie,” Her doughy hands touched my face, “When you’re older you’ll understand.”

I was around the same age as Cal the night he raced into the house, when a video clip filmed in my old neighborhood went viral. Residents threw rocks at Black Lives Matter protestors and shouted at them to leave their neighborhood. My family hadn’t lived there in decades, but I still scanned the crowd for aged familiar faces. I wanted to find Paula and call out to the screen, “you’re wrong. I don’t understand,” even though she couldn’t hear me.

 

Alison Lowenstein is a freelance writer and author of children’s books, guidebooks and plays. She’s written for The Washington Post, Huffington Post, Narratively, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and many other publications and websites. Her fiction has been published in Fiction, Portland Review, Molecule Tiny Lit Mag, and other journals. She has a piece forthcoming in 101 Words. You can find her at brooklynbaby.com and on Twitter @cityweekendsnyc

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John, James, Mary, and Martha were inseparable, tied together since birth. They’d lived on the same cul-de-sac, gone to the same elementary school, and grew up being called each other’s names.

Every day during summer vacation, they marched out the back gate of Mary’s house, crossed an empty swath of grass, and shimmied onto a forest path that only the kids explored. Branches and leaves hid the foot-worn dirt while thick vines crisscrossed between the trunks. But just beyond the shadows — it was there.

***

The day before 7th grade, they stepped onto the path at dawn. The air between the trees was charged, raising goosebumps on their skin. Each ray of sunshine became a spotlight, highlighting a strange moment in time for the quartet. Every breath a memory of the day, everything would change.

Sometime that afternoon, they veered off their special path. None of them mentioned it, and John wasn’t sure the others even noticed. Eventually, they came upon an old well they didn’t recognize.

James found the ladder — coated in years of forest air and moisture.

The girls coughed as his movements unsettled dust and spider webs.

John’s lips stuck together as he watched the other boy climb over the slick stones of the well.

“One last adventure,” James said before climbing down the rungs.

The ladder didn’t look safe, but James didn’t slow down. Before long, he had disappeared, alone on a brand new hidden path. A secret within a secret. His footsteps echoed before softening into a whisper. There was a grunt, and after a moment came a thump.

The well went silent.

Mary and Martha screamed.

***

None of the friends talked after that day, happy to settle at uncomfortable eye contact throughout high school.

Years later, long after the girls had moved out of state, John often thought of that summer — of James and Mary and Martha. He remembered how they’d been inseparable. He daydreamed of the cul-de-sac, the old elementary school, and getting called each other’s names.

Except no one called him James anymore. Not since the day before 7th grade.

 

Alyson spent her adolescent years in the southwest of the United States, going to high school in Arizona. She moved to Maryland where she got married, had her only daughter, and began her writing journey. She has appeared in Altered Reality Magazine and on Purple Wall Stories.

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It was the first time he’d been to my apartment, and the suspense boiled hot in my guts. Would we laugh? Would we fight? Our fights could level cities, and we hadn’t even kissed yet. We dodged someone waiting for the elevator and headed for the stairs. Impossible to know which random stranger worked for the company, or maybe took pilates with his wife.

I’d never noticed how decrepit the stairs were until I imagined the way they looked to someone like him. He had the kind of house where mulch was dropped at the end of the driveway by a dump truck. A place someone like me would never know except from the stories he told me. Back then he told me everything.

His favorite song flooded us when I opened the door, and I knew he must’ve known I’d planned it. He smiled.

“Do you want a tour?” I asked, although there wasn’t much to see. Living area, bedroom, bathroom. I apologized for the mess, even though I’d spent hours cleaning.

“Sit with me,” he said.

I’d been dreaming about it for weeks, what it would feel like to be this close to him. How we would finally talk side-by-side, not staring each other sheepishly in the face across a desk or café table. He had a face that was hard to look at and talk to at the same time. Dark, serious eyes. Salt and pepper stubble. He sat lengthways on the couch and I lay across his chest. I put my hands under his back to keep them from shaking. I breathed in. His cologne was too strong, and I could smell his sweat underneath it. If he’d been obtainable I might’ve been repulsed.

“You smell good,” I said.

I pulled my hand out, and he held his hand up to see how much bigger his was than mine. Then he ran warm fingers up and down my waist and across my back like a father. I absorbed the shock waves, tried to think of something important to say.

“I just want to inhale you.”

“Such a sensual little thing, aren’t you?” he replied.

I sat up to face him, and his eyes turned from spring to winter. Can’t lose control with you, he’d said. “Why can’t you just let us be what we are?” I was always saying. “Someday,” he was always saying.

I leaned forward, buried my face in his neck. He didn’t pull away. The music continued to play, dreamy and convincing. He rested his hands at his sides, which I should have taken as a sign but didn’t. Instead, I ran my lips across his ear, his cheek. Then, my mouth touched his mouth. He tasted sour and rotten, or maybe it was me. He sat, unmoving, not kissing me back.

 

Brittany Terwilliger is Managing Editor at Pithead Chapel and her novel, The Insatiables (Chicago Review Press) was published in 2018. Her short fiction has appeared in JMWW, Ghost Parachute, Five:2:One, Ponder Review, Ellipsis Zine, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for Best of the Net. Find her on Twitter @Brttnyblm.

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There are few passengers on the 73 late morning, so I take a set of two empty seats. One for Juliet. Three rows behind me, a woman wearing a bottle green flat cap is talking loudly on her cell phone in a language I don’t recognise. At first I think she’s angry, but then she laughs.

There’s a message on my phone. You’re apologizing for accusing me of being consumed. You don’t actually say sorry, but you’re the master of the sideways apology. I don’t even care, honestly. There’s a fly on the window. It’s crawling along the pane of glass to the side of me, and I know it wants to escape. I can’t help. I have to save myself.  

Yes. I am consumed. People say they miss someone with every fibre of their being, and its snap has softened with use, overstretched elastic, but I feel it with visceral reality. Juliet would be twelve now. I search for her in faces, in movements.

The bus stops, the brakes hiss and the doors crank open. A girl gets on, late teens. She is paler than Juliet, her frame more slight. Every girl measured by Julietness. Her hair is black, bobbed with a straight fringe across her forehead. As she approaches I see thick tears running down her face, her lower lip is trembling. She takes the seat across the aisle, two rows in front of me. My hands grip my bag. If she doesn’t get off at the next stop, I’ll speak. Maybe: ‘Can I do anything?’ or ‘Are you okay?’ 

We pass offices and the playground, a multi-story carpark and the new wine bar where the video shop used to be. Stop changing, please, stop changing. The girl’s head is pressed against the seat back, eyes almost closed, her face still slick. Maybe I’ll ask if there’s someone I can call for her. 

I read that when a woman is pregnant, the baby’s cells transfer to her body and remain there for the rest of the woman’s life. Knowing that feels like validation. She is in my blood, her cells nestle among mine. Juliet is me. Perhaps that’s why you don’t understand me. You gave her your DNA but it wasn’t an exchange.  

The bus stops and the girl doesn’t make a move. A young man gets on, early twenties. Combed slick hair, crisply ironed shirt tucked into dark jeans, black trainers.  He has earbuds in, plugged into his phone. I begin to rise, a hunched version of standing, when I see him notice her.  He pulls out an earbud and moves beside her. She looks at him, unsure, then she slides across and as he sits, he offers her the earbud.  She pauses then takes it, eyes wide and wet, and puts it in her ear, leaning her face against the window.  He looks at his phone, and they sit connected by a song flowing through a white wire. I sit back down.

When the bus approaches the next stop, she takes the earbud out and returns it. He stands to let her pass. I can’t see his face, but she offers him a small smile, before walking to the doors. My hand is wide open across my chest. Does she see me?

I carry her, tucked away deep in my bones, forever safe. Your DNA is part of hers; you reside in my blood too in a smaller sense. You are part of me in a way that I’m not part of you.  You have to choose to stay close to me. 

The bus moves on. I’ve long missed my stop. The fly has gone, to another window, or maybe it found its way to the door.  Maybe it’s lying on the floor of the bus, dead.  Through the window, I scan the passersby for forms like Juliet’s. I pull out my phone and text you.

– Do you remember my favourite Wilco song?

It’s beginning to drizzle outside.  My phone pings.

– Of course ‘Jesus, Etc’

I get up and hold the rail as the bus comes to a stop. I mouth, thank you, towards the back of the young man’s head. The bus pulls away and I stand on the wide pavement. There’s a newsagent’s on my left, a bookie’s up ahead. I start walking.

 

Originally from England, Jo now lives outside New York City.  She is the creative nonfiction editor at X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine and creative nonfiction contributing editor at Barren Magazine.  Her short stories and creative nonfiction have recently appeared, or are forthcoming, in PANK, Hobart, Jellyfish Review, Pithead Chapel, JMWW Journal, and others.  Jo is a 2021 Pushcart Prize nominee and is studying for her MFA.  She can be found on twitter @jovarnish1

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His job was to peel and quarter the fallen apples from the lawn, take the sun-bathed laundry off the line, and place a little crate beside the hammock so she would have someplace sturdy to rest her glass. Her job, though sometimes protested, was to simply be his girl. To be the beneficiary of these small acts of love.

She watched his boyish lips move as he talked to himself over the bowl, carving out seeds and bruises. Honey bees crawled over sedum plants with their emergent tiny pink blooms. From an altitude of the purest blue, a small white jet moved in the direction of Spain. That was the future, faraway.

In the here and now, the hammock swayed.

Birdlife was silent but industrious. Occasionally a flock of sparrows would make a break for it, darting in a tribe from one shrub to the safety of the next. A gull would fly overhead, going east, then a few minutes later, another would contrarily head west. Then, three hummingbirds dipped in and out of the cedars.

“It’s probably a family that hasn’t separated yet,” he said from the bowl.

The German lady next door stepped out on her porch. She wiped her hands on her apron, calling attention to what she had witnessed. This morning two boys had bolted into the yard, snatched some fruit off the tree, and raced away. The little scoundrels!

The girl cast a long, studied look at the compact tree with the prized red apples.

The tree was motionless, a still life painting. The apples held tight to their posts, soaking in the razor heat of late afternoon. Conserving for the long, cold drink promised when he would come out at dusk with the hose.

The dog rolled onto her back, paws bent, nose in clover.

Maybe they won’t be back, she thought. Then with stolen hope, Maybe they will.

He didn’t raise his eyes from the sly smile of the bowl.

She turned and noticed the gate swung open at the top of the driveway, exposing the tree in clear view. His job was to close the gate.

Small white butterflies moved between the verbena. The daisies bobbed their heads up and down, yes, yes.

 

Karin Hedetniemi is a writer and street photographer in Victoria, BC. She’s inspired by ordinary beauty in quiet places. Her creative work is published/forthcoming in Prairie Fire, Still Point Arts Quarterly, Moria, Sky Island Journal, Barren Magazine, and other journals. Karin won the 2020 nonfiction prize from the Royal City Literary Arts Society. Find her at AGoldenHour.com.

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I grew up going to school with Stiller, but never knew him well. The way you know everyone in a small town, but don’t know them well. We first met in middle school. Through junior high and the first two years of high school, Stiller flew under the radar. He could have been considered a nerd. Or a loner. He didn’t have friends, let’s say that. 

That all changed junior year when he found Bud Light, realized he was funny when he’d had a few, and discovered if he wore camouflage and boot cut jeans, he could identify with the redneck crowd which was a sizable portion of the high school we attended in rural South Carolina and a safe group to align with to ensure access to parties. 

He started going with his first girlfriend, Sarah Kate, the librarian’s daughter. She was funny and tomboyish. They were an unlikely pair. I was surprised to see them walking down the hallway holding hands one Monday morning.

For several months during junior year, I watched Stiller ascend the ranks of popularity at Clover High. What started as stories of him at redneck parties became stories of him attending preppy parties, senior parties and even parties thrown by graduate losers who stuck around town because they couldn’t let go of high school. 

Every Monday there was a new Stiller story. Tales of his escapades swept through hallways and classrooms. His swagger grew. Teachers even seemed taken with his charm and newfound powers. Crowds surrounded him at lunch or when he entered the commons area. 

One Monday morning it was Stiller leapt from a second story window into an above ground pool. Another Monday morning he’d driven away from a party on an old dude’s Harley. He eventually made it to one of our parties. My friends and I were basic nobodies. We hung out at our friend Justin’s house on weekends because his dad traveled for work. 

Stiller showed up with his entourage. A cavalcade of lifted pickup trucks roared up Justin’s driveway. They walked in like they owned the place, searching for a freshman named Ben Nygard who’d been picking on someone’s little brother in homeroom. We stood idly by and watched as several of them carried Ben Nygard outside and tossed him into the hot tub fully clothed. A small fight broke out and then they left. 

Not long after that the popularity started getting to Stiller. He had to constantly outdo himself. What was once Monday morning swagger became Monday morning haggard. None of it seemed fun to him anymore. He argued with Sarah Kate in the commons. At lunch. The crowds around him thinned.

One Monday morning, Stiller wasn’t at school. A strange hush fell over the commons. The only sound were the escalating sobs of Sarah Kate who sat at a table surrounded by consoling friends. Devasted looks were plastered across faces. Heads shook in disbelief.  

At a party on Saturday night, Stiller had climbed in a truck with the town drunk who often dropped by high school parties when he could find them. Stiller’s buddies pleaded with him not to, but he shooed them away in an alcohol-fueled display of invincibility. With little fanfare, the town drunk burnt out, drove two hundred yards down the street and slammed into a tree. Stiller exploded through the front windshield and landed on the sidewalk where he was pronounced dead. 

I don’t recall much being made about it at school that Monday; maybe an announcement at the end of the day that no one heard. Sarah Kate’s tears and the bell ringing and everyone dispersing to class. The mad squeaking of chairs on the floor. The hundreds of students who attended Clover High going about their day, too far removed from the thought of death to stop and reflect on the fact it had come for one of their own. No one was even grown up yet. There were still too many parties to attend. Friday night games. Fights and heartbreaks and first times. SAT dates to secure. Homecoming. Senior Year. College applications to fill out. Four years or two. Uncertain futures waiting to roll out before them. Maybe good, maybe bad, maybe unspectacular, but most importantly, there. 

I remember precious few from high school now. A Facebook request pops up. A fleeting memory flashes across my mind. I can’t see his face or hear the sound of his voice. I’m not sure I’d recognize his photo. But I never forget Stiller. It’s not his meteoric rise in popularity that stays with me. It’s not the stories that grew more outlandish. Or even the final story. It’s the little hush he got that Monday morning when Sarah Kate found out. As the hands on the clock ticked silently toward the bell. How things returned to normal when it rang and just like that, Stiller was forgotten.

 

Wilson Koewing is a writer from South Carolina. His work has recently appeared in Maudlin House, JMWW, Bending Genres, New World Writing and The Loch Raven Review.

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“Rivers ebb through my heart. Rivers of regret, love, passion and fears. 

Rivers rush through my heart. Rivers of blood, sweat, tears and fire. 

Blood pools in my heart. A pool shared by ancestors of past and future. 

And we all share something small, and I hope it is a shared bless, not a shared curse.” 

 

How many times have I wanted to RIP that poem off the wall and throw it into the lake? 

But I haven’t. It’s a pretty poem. And I don’t even like poetry. I know a lot about it though. The old man forced a bachelor’s degree worth of information on me over the years. He always called my comics my “little sketchings” and said they were not true art, that they are too shallow, and couldn’t understand why I didn’t pursue poetry or novel writing. Well, now his poem hangs over my desk where my “little sketchings” are born and win awards and sell out. Why do I keep that poem here?

He was a bastard. A right proper Irish drunk bastard. He was a lot like this whiskey; bold, fiery, bitter but with hints of sweet caramel. At least that’s what the bottle says, but who can taste that shit? Not me, all I taste is bitter, but with an odd lingering after effect that makes you want more and more until it leaves you high and dry on the bathroom floor.

 

Mom always liked him, and whiskey. Maybe she just had the taste for it and could get to the sweetness under the fire. Or maybe she did it for the drunk. 

 

I don’t know why he wrote poetry. Perhaps he thought it made him good somehow. Like all the yelling and beating went away when he wrote. He put so much time and passion into it and it showed. If only he put that much time and passion into us. He called us his greatest poems, but I don’t see it. I don’t see where the love is in us the way it is in his poetry, just look at this one. It shimmers with his tender words; I never did. Maybe that’s why I keep it. The only tender part of my dad that I have, or ever got. 

(He hears his daughter’s bedroom door open. He gets up to close and lock the door to his study then sits back down.)

Is it morning already? I must have stayed up working all night again. 

(He sips his whiskey.) 

I vowed that I would never force any form of art on my children. They can do whatever they want whether it’s painting or music or writing. Whatever art they wish to pursue. 

 

That poem really is the perfect poem.

(He hears his daughter in the kitchen making breakfast)

I guess I should get to work. This little sketch is almost ready for the world.

 

David La Ponsie is a writer, student, and manufacturing machinery technician in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He lives in a haunted house with his beagle named Jack. David has lived a life of great variety as a freelance journalist, a member of the United States Army, a boxer, a van-life hippie, a standup comedian, and a poet. Recently he has focused his attention on his tried and true passions; writing fiction, performing standup, hiking, and taking care of his furry friend, who has been through so many adventures with him. To keep track of his latest projects, follow him on Twitter @DeadWord4

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All I can think is, this water isn’t bad, not cold not hot, the reeds, they don’t bother me, they’re like ribbons on the ballet shoes I wore as a girl, the pink satin wrapped around my ankles and calves, and I consider twirling on this transom, giving the ocean a show while it tries to take what hasn’t already been taken.

In the morning, I return to the dock, the fog not yet lifted, the squeak of weather-worn boards greeting me like they greeted us when we brought morning coffee to watch the sunrise or wine to watch the whales breaching. I loved the feeling of the salted wood against my back, the jut of your hip against mine.

The boat isn’t there in the morning, and I remember it sinking, the mast laying flat against the churning water before turtling into the murky depths, the way I tried to save it and myself, the drag of my clothing, my jeans, my shoes water-logged and weighted. It’s a similar feeling to waking and remembering you’re gone. Remembering I asked you to leave.

 

Jennifer Todhunter’s stories have appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Necessary Fiction, The Forge, and elsewhere. Her work has been selected for Best Small Fictions, Best Microfictions, and Wigleaf´s Top 50 Very Short Fictions. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Pidgeonholes. Find her at www.foxbane.ca or @JenTod_.

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Wollstonecrafted

 

She keeps the postcard from Universal City, though she’s never been. Acquired at a flea market, the image of a towering man dressed as Frankenstein has been stuck on the fridge in every rental she’s had since she lost the baby in ‘98. In it, he’s tall as a tree and kudzu’d with five large children: one under each arm, two on either side tugging at his clothes and yet another wrapped around his calf. Only one child in the picture is doing what he’s told — pose, smile. She hates that one most.

The monster’s gray face and unkempt eyebrows let slip the madness of every suburban mother patched together since 1946. Frankenstein wants to turn this car around, send the children to bed without supper and throw back tequila shots all night. No training wheels.

To mother, she convinces herself looking at the souvenir of where-she-won’t-go, is to Dr. Frankenstein the fuck out of your life. Every time she makes eye contact with the weary beast she sees her own strained make-up, a village staged with happy foam houses, the sky above an unbelievable shade of blue.

 

How to cure a hangover

 

She presses brew, grabs a couple mugs from the cupboard and stiffens at the clash of keys which means Eddie is letting himself in. She doesn’t pivot from the Mr. Coffee but knows he’s balancing a beverage tray in one hand, choking the necks of two white paper bags with the other. She’s certain they contain twin bagel sandwiches and a pair of donuts from Cutie Pies, a name they loved to hate, a place they loved to love.

When he clears his throat, she faces the display: Eddie holding up their favorite weekend breakfast, smiling at his own slick fists like a toddler seeking praise. Instead of speaking, he tilts his head. Charm as punctuation. Gesture as ellipses. She doesn’t know she wants to smile back until she does.

Since she announced she wouldn’t move with him to Burlington, she hadn’t seen him at all and had avoided CP’s, the bakery nickname they used when they couldn’t stomach the whole thing. She understands the current offering to be more than Boston Creme and lox. He leaves it on the table and approaches, stands close, hands on the counter aside her hips, a familiar fencing, a lingering question.

One possible answer shuffles into the kitchen, half asleep and fully naked. The man she met last night rubs his face with one hand, scratches his balls with the other, casually bumping against an invitation she considers even as Eddie turns to see.

 

Ama Cocina

 

Frida’s 16-foot face floats on broad purple dahlias, big as clouds. The space below one ear painted around the fire alarm call box, a red earring to tug. Pull down in emergency, thinks Luc. Which is short for Lucy. Sounds like “loose.” It’s what she goes by, leading to the predictable jokes. Fuck those guys, anyway, she’s known to say. No woman gets by without being called a slut at some point.

This is Luc’s first date in two years, and she already feels unsure about bringing him here. She takes her usual seat at the bar, her back to Frida. To commune with the artist as much as she likes – to feel saved, as though by a bungee cord after a terrifying leap — she’s been through the entire menu several times. The guac. The Bad Ass Burrito. The Grim Reaper Chicharrones. Margarita, margarita, spicy margarita. Take a shot. Take a shot. Then what? The hard part. Waiting. Like early weeks at a new job working for nothing ahead of the thrill of the first paycheck. Only the opposite: thrill up front and then work.

When the date doesn’t show, Luc uses the paper strip that coupled her fork and knife to cinch a cocktail napkin and create a pair of wings. She’s folded dozens of butterfly-like offerings from this exact stool, knowing they tumble into the trash each time the bartender clears the setup.

 

Carolee is a writer and artist living in Upstate New York, where – after being first runner-up in a local, annual poetry competition – she has fun saying she has been the “almost” poet laureate of Smitty’s Tavern. She blogs sporadically at gooduniversenextdoor.com, has an MFA in poetry and works full-time as a writer in social media marketing.

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The console table is more than a console table, but you don’t know that yet, not when Ma says you can put it in your bedroom, if you want. It’s only gathering dust in the loft.

Pop built the console table for Ma’s eighteenth birthday. That’s the sort of thing he did. Gifted items he made with his bare hands. Plaques and pendants. The figures on Ma and Dad’s wedding cake. Pop even built the coffin he’s buried in. A little present to himself.

‘Be careful with it,’ Ma says, hands on her hips. You decide to sit your television on the freshly polished surface, telling her you will be careful – promise.

And you are. Until you’re not. Because on the day Ma has her cleaning shifts cut in half, you knock a cup of coffee across it.

The brown liquid spreads, oozing underneath the base of the television and staining the wood. A string of ‘Shits’ spill from your worried mouth as you try and mop up the mess, then hide the mess, and possibly lie about the mess. Or at least hide the truth. You want to save Ma any heartache. Yourself any trouble.

She finds the damp towel you shove behind the water tank, and the stain, less than three hours later.

Did you think she wouldn’t?

She found Dad with your Aunt Lisa in the backseat of his car, windows fogged up like that scene in Titanic, though your Dad is no DiCaprio, and Aunt Lisa isn’t Winslet.

She found Pop crumpled at the bottom of his overgrown garden too.

You don’t know what it’s like to find a dead body. You wish Ma didn’t either.

She scolds you for what you’ve done. Your carelessness. Your lack of respect. Doesn’t matter that the console table was hidden away in the loft. It’s the principle of the thing.

You pitch yourself between petulant and punctured, ignoring her requests to ‘Look at the table’ and then ‘Look at me,’ because you think you’re old enough to be beyond this. 14 years old and maybe you don’t give a fuck. It’s only a cup of coffee, isn’t it? It’s only a table. Pop’s dead anyway, so he won’t even know.

Ma says that you’re not keeping your television in your room anymore, and forget carrying coffee beyond the kitchen.

‘Big punishment,’ you say, and regret it pronto, because Ma’s got that lilt to her voice, like she’s going to rupture, and when she picks up the television to remove it, she forgets to unplug the leads.

You don’t tell her. Instead, you watch as she yanks the television and its wiry arms haul her back. There’s enough tug to pull her into the table and instead of holding on she just let’s go. A thin crack clips across the screen and one of the volume buttons pops out to roll under your bed.

There’s a moment of nothing – all quiet like the sun before it begins to burn off a morning haze – but it tears when she kicks out at one of the table legs. She kicks with enough force that it snaps clean off, the same way cheap wood can split if you try and saw it.

Pop told you that. Told you a lot of things, come to think of it.

You grab her by the arm, but she shoves you and arcs back to kick her foot into the table again, and again, and again. Thud, thud, thud.

It creaks and collapses and, in the melee, the skin between her foot and ankle severs. Your chest constricts.

#

Ma shuffles into your room later that night – a bandage wrapped around her ankle from the trip to A&E – her eyes puffed up from crying. You had to call a taxi to get to the hospital. Spent what was left of your pocket money to make it.

She asks if you’re awake and lingers like you used to when the shadows in the corner of your room were stuff of nightmares and you wanted to get into Ma and Dad’s bed. Ma would often get out to save annoying Dad, and you’d squish together in your old single.

Where is Dad now? Ma has frequently said you can call him, if you want.

You’re not sure you do.

‘Yeah, I’m awake,’ you whisper, and lift up the covers.

She smells of mint toothpaste and antiseptic. You tuck yourself into her, laying your head on her chest.

‘I’m sorry,’ she murmurs.

‘Me too,’ you reply.

Is this where you start to get it? That the console table is more than a table, and maybe it’s not even really about that at all.

‘Ma, you remember when I stayed with Pop? Years ago. When I got that sunburn on my forehead and it all peeled off and Dad said I looked like a tomato?’

She nods, her chin dotting the crown of your head.

‘Pop showed me how to repair broken things, that weekend. He said you just need some strong glue to stick stuff back together. If we get some glue tomorrow, I think it could work on the table.’

‘That all we need?’ Ma asks.

You say you think so, and Ma believes you, or you think she does, because it sounds like something Pop would say.

You don’t need to tell her that isn’t true. Pop said you needed more than that. Clamps to hold the thing together, so the glue would fuse to the wood, and nails depending on the structure. And sometimes, broken things can’t be fixed, sometimes they’re just meant to stay broken and bungled onto a scrap heap or even burnt in a fire. Sometimes it’s a lost cause, best left alone.

But the white lie is enough to stick some of you and Ma back together – enough to slumber until the morning.

 

Emily likes looking at the stars, but she can’t name them. She has had work published or upcoming with X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Ellipsis Zine, Barren Magazine, STORGY Magazine, The Molotov Cocktail, Coffin Bell, Retreat West, Nymphs, Tiny Molecules and Gone Lawn to name a few. She can be found on Twitter at @emily__harrison

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Just like I could rely on my older brother William to drink straight from the milk carton back then, I could count on Friend. At 3:00 sharp, Friend, as she told me to call her, would meet me after school to walk me home. After what happened with Eliot Peters, we were all on high alert. Eliot had been lured towards a blue Buick, driven by an older woman who offered him Starbursts and a pack of Big Red gum. When Eliot strolled towards the window, the driver flipped open the door and grabbed him by the wrist. He had one knee propped on the front seat before he managed to shake her off. In fact, he’d kicked off his left shoe, and then with one stockinged foot, teetered the remaining six blocks home.

After that our teachers taught us about Stranger Danger and to never accept a ride or candy. Nor to help locate a lost puppy, no matter how cute and furry the animal sounded.

Once the school bell rang, I’d elbow past the older kids guiding their ten-speeds to the bike path and the first graders dangling their superhero lunch boxes. I always found Friend behind the stone wall near the basketball court, far enough away that no one else could see her. I never knew if Friend was hiding from the same strangers I feared, or if she worried the other kids might mistake her for one. But she was never a stranger to me.

Friend appeared the day after “the incident” with Eliot, but then she kept showing up. In the late fall, I trailed behind Friend as she crunched a path through the crisping leaves. Together, we watched the vibrant reds and oranges cartwheel to the ground. Friend said we should collect them before the snow swallowed them whole. We could build our own forest, she said, far and away, where there were no strangers, no chance of danger.

In the winter, as Friend glided over the ice patches, she reminded me of one of those fancy tap dancers I’d seen on TV. She’d stretch out her arms, and sometimes flap them like a newborn robin learning to fly. Once when I tried to imitate her, I slipped and dropped my woolen scarf and one of my mittens. Before they could disappear into the fresh snow, Friend zipped them up in my backpack and helped me to my feet.

Each day, when I turned left onto Chestnut Road, Friend would go straight and stroll past the Catholic school that let their students out twenty minutes later. I figured she had more children to walk home.

After the thaw, Friend stopped coming around. One night, around dinnertime, my mother asked me about the single shoe in the bottom of my backpack. It was buried beneath crumpled loose leaf and emptied sandwich bags. I couldn’t remember if I’d found it by the side of the road, or if Friend had tucked it into my backpack along with my fallen mitten and scarf.

I didn’t know what to say when my mother spotted Starburst wrappers hidden beneath my pillow–the dazzling reds and oranges and yellows–like a trail of leaves leading to a diseased elm, and that telltale strangle of a red circle.

 

Susan holds an MA in Education and an MFA from Hamline University in St. Paul, MN. She has been published or forthcoming in various print and online journals, most recently Ellipsis Zine, Gone Lawn and Serotonin.

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Space Mountain means something more this time, which is saying a lot, considering how much Disney World in general means to me. 

Homesick, 

a word I worried would worm its way inside me, a disease I was warned about before picking myself up and dropping myself off to different locations across the country and across the world. The displacements never left me pining for the shaky ground of California, the ice storms of Vermont, the bloated heat and mosquito sting of night-time in South Florida. But curled in my bed, when the darkness slipped in from the shortened days of winter’s night at 4pm and smothered the cocooned warmth of my duvet, I tasted sweet pineapple Dole whip on my tongue, smelled the strangely acidic water of Splash Mountain, and shivered in an artificial ghostly breeze that cooled the line at Haunted Mansion. I have only ever been 

homesick 

for Disneyworld, and its happiness could find me wherever my passport was stamped, until happiness could not find me at all.

The absence hooked around my ankles in a way that should have been more uncomfortable than it was. I did not have to think about it, or complain about it, or do anything about it. It was not much, until it was, until I carried it for months and convinced myself that I was just overreacting. But then I was on Thunder Mountain, 

you should be happy,

you are in Disneyworld and you are on the Thunder Mountain Railroad,

and you have been happy here before, 

and if you cannot be happy here you cannot be anything, 

you should feel happy, 

you should feel happy, 

and realized that it was not working. I did not feel happy. 

oh well, 

at least you tried. 

It was not a sad feeling, because I did not feel sad. I felt the cold kind of emptiness of 4pm darkness, just all the time, and it was not something to fuss or complain about. You cannot control the sun in winter. 

But it was unsettling. I was happy in Disneyworld. I was, before. It was as home as home would ever be, and it was not working. I carried the absence down Main Street USA, and then I carried it back to the pocket of the world that I did not call home. 

The decision to get better is hard. It is especially hard when nothing feels like it really matters, when a Scottish castle and a magpie drift like they could disappear if they had an inkling of how desperately I am watching them. 

Routines replaced feeling and took me out of the cocoon of my duvet. I may not have experienced some kind of magic transformation when I walked the streets to classes I paid for beforehand, so I had to go, but at least I was going. Insomnia rocked me awake most nights, a cicada song of unease, but the trick is pretending to sleep, 

imagining the sleep drifting up through your limbs until you cannot move them if you tried, 

and the pretending becomes close enough to the truth, that when true sleep slips in beside you and inside you, you do not even notice that it has arrived. I don’t remember the moment I got out of bed because I wanted to, and not because I had a place I needed to be, an activity to attend with no refunds available. The movements were the same, the repetition rote, but the days were becoming a little brighter, too subtly for me to realize that I was no longer eating dinner in the dark. 

It did not feel like magic, until I was in a place where it could not feel like anything else.

Now, I am on Space Mountain. Now, I realize that I do not have to remind myself to be happy, because 

I already am happy. 

They say that Space Mountain is a rollercoaster that you ride in darkness, and the world falls away around you as the track is turned invisible. This is not true. Fluorescent paint stars dot all around the track, a manufactured kind of pixie dust, but your eyes do not know the difference when they are the only bright spots to hold on to. Every piece of Disney World is a decision, every bench an artistic statement, every character the result of hours of training, every flower tended for months of nothing but green until suddenly, now, a flower. Somebody made the choice to brighten the darkness, one painted point of light at a time. One more spoonful of pineapple Dole whip. One more exhilarated scream through the man-made night.

 

Alexandra Grunberg is a Glasgow based author, poet, screenwriter, and artist. She is a postgraduate student in the DFA in Creative Writing programme at the University of Glasgow. You can find links to more of her work at her website, alexandragrunberg.weebly.com.

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You and me, babe, against the world. I recite the charm against contagion at the start of every neighbourhood walk. As my husband and I leave the yard, I reach for his hand and say the words. If I forget, he stops on the sidewalk and grins until I grab his hand and deliver the line. Our little joke as the dangers of the world rumble in the distance. 

***

I’ve waited months for my appointment at the Thoracic Clinic, postponed twice during the lockdown. The delays blur the edges between my pockets of anxiety—my stomach polyps, his precarious health, the hazards of exposure during hospital visits. I cannot, cannot bring home the virus. My husband has chronic leukemia.

The Montreal General Hospital straddles the mountain, with a confusion of entrances at different levels. It’s my first visit and I need to get a hospital card, which means navigating a maze of pavilions in search of two destinations: the admitting office and then the clinic. I imagine a coronavirus cloud hovering in hospital corridors, all those globules with sticky pink spikes invisible to the naked eye.

Will two shorter hospital visits minimize hallway wandering and my use of bathrooms vacated by infected people? Three days before my appointment, I head downtown to get my card. This is not paranoia, I convince myself, but a practical plan based on science. The actions of a prudent woman protecting her immune-suppressed husband.

A way to keep the waves of panic at bay.

I arrive at the hospital parkade and drive up ramp after ramp in a dizzying spiral of left-hand turns until I find a spot on the 13th level. It’s open-air, and I catch a glimpse of lacy treetops and curling streets below. A breathtaking view of the city. But I focus on the necessary routine—pluck a paper mask out of the baggie in my purse and press the nose wire into place. Don a face shield, a flimsy homemade one bought at the local health food store. For a second, I forget the world’s perils and half-smile at my old-lady-self, fussing over protective gear.

After exiting the car, I click the remote, reassured by its familiar beep-beep. The mask rubs against my mouth, hot and scratchy. The General’s brick walls looming next to the parkade look fuzzy through the plastic shield. My fingers twitch, wanting to adjust the face coverings. Vigilant, I must remain vigilant and avoid touching contaminated surfaces.

A covered walkway next to the ramp leads to an entrance. Automatic doors swish open, and I step from muggy heat into the chilled air of a grey-walled passageway. A masked security guard with bored, half-lidded eyes sits behind a table. He beckons me with a squirt bottle of hand sanitizer, and I hold out my hands, grateful for gatekeepers and rules.

Do you have a fever or any symptoms?

No.

Do you have an appointment?

Yes, I need a hospital card.

The correct passwords. He waves a gloved hand to the left toward Pavilion L, and I pass through one hallway after another, my shallow breathing warm inside the mask. I check people as they shuffle by, my silly heart thumping as I step sideways to keep 6 feet away.

In 15 minutes, a masked stranger behind Plexiglas will enter my personal details into a computer and hand me a card. I’ll tuck it into my wallet and head back to my car in the sunshine. In 15 minutes, I’ll tick off this item from the to-do list in my head, a scrap of control that will lift me back to a semblance of calm for the rest of the afternoon.

But right now, as I enter Pavilion L, the dangers of the world rumble closer and closer. I’m adrift in a long grey hallway, scanning room numbers on drab institutional walls—my chest tight with yearning for small certainties in uncertain times.

***

You and me, babe, against the world. On our walk the next day, we spot a rabbit in the park. It’s beside the path, perfectly still, with shiny unblinking eyes and mushroom-coloured fur. As we inch closer, it quivers and bounds away in a graceful flurry of hind legs, as rabbits do. 

Long after we reach home, I hold onto that moment of quiet—our stroll together under a canopy of trees, a small wild creature running free.

 

Karen Zey is a Canadian writer from la belle ville de Pointe-Claire, Quebec. Her work has appeared in the Brevity Nonfiction Blog, SFWP Quarterly, The Nasiona, and other fine places. You can read Karen’s micro-musings about life and writing @zippyzey.

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After Dad leaves for another drinking session, my older sister Nancy and I look for snack money under ripped sofas and Dad’s second-hand futon, which smells like sweat and stale feet. I’m thirteen, she’s sixteen. 

We dig beneath every cushion, craning our necks. We look for runaway pennies, occasional dimes, but better yet hidden quarters. Then we plop each find down on the wobbling coffee table, brush away the unpaid bills that still hold Dad’s puke stains. Each coin has a particular sound, a particular victory. There’s the clink of a penny, the heavier clink of a dime, and the definitive plonk of a quarter.

The goal is a McChicken at McDonald’s. We love the blend of chicken, bun, and spice. The shape of a feast. Of course, there’s a slight shame in emptying an old plastic bag full of pennies on the counter. It’s a dollar, an amount so simple and yet so difficult to reach. It takes so long to count and sort pennies on polished counters. 

But we can live with a little shame.

Dad promises to shop, to stop drinking, but we know his promises. He promised Mom so much. Promised to get a new job after he lost his temper and destroyed a printer, like Office Space. Dad’s favorite movie. He promised to be patient, promised, promised. 

Promises don’t keep people together, Nan always says. Promises don’t stock the fridge with something other than white onions and half-empty mustard and grease. We tried eating part of that mustard bottle, but it made Nan sick.

We split our victuals, Nan divvying the loot with tenderness. Sometimes she sneaks me a small portion of her share; she thinks I’m not looking. I do the same. She’s my sister. She could have walked away too, but she didn’t.

 We crunch away methodically, relish the softness of chicken and fleeting nourishment. We chew with such slowness, that sometimes people ask if we’re mentally disturbed. On rare occasions, we scrape up enough to not share. We attack the buns, the meat with the force of invaders on those occasions. There’s no logic, only ravenousness and ripping. 

But with the last bite, which always goes fast, a new hunger arises. Dad keeps drinking, his promises replaced by belligerence and hangovers. Even the creepy onions and mustard from the fridge disappear.

Of course, we begin the hunt again. But even pennies are getting harder to find. I suspect Dad’s been digging through the sofas. Nan smiles and jokes we just have to look harder, but her smile wobbles and I want to hug her. But talking about our feelings is something we’ve forbidden.

So, we take to parking lots and bushes. We turn ourselves into money detectives.

Nothing truly disappears. Especially emptiness. 

I guess we have to hunt harder.

Maybe we’ll find dollar bills by broadening our territory. And just maybe we’ll be able to get fries next time. 

But maybe’s a word we banish fast. When we start talking of one maybe, another maybe opens up. And another.

All we need is another McChicken. 

Although small fries wouldn’t hurt either.

 

Yash Seyedbagheri is a graduate of Colorado State University’s MFA program in fiction. His stories, “Soon” and “How To Be A Good Episcopalian,” have been nominated for Pushcarts. He has also had work nominated for The Best of the Net and The Best Small Fictions. A native of Idaho, Yash’s work is forthcoming or has been published in The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Write City Magazine, and Ariel Chart, among others.

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For a moment in my life, I was scared of everything. I was spending the summer in France. Using money I should have been saving for a mortgage, or whatever, to live right on the beach and order fish stews every night. I was, to quote the French, avoir le temps de ma vie.

And then I got scared.

I was scared of jellyfish in the sea when I dived in. The water was very clear, so I could see all the little fish swim around me, but when the sun glistened I thought I could see shades of purple shooting through the sea. I imagined the jellyfish swarming in, ready to destroy me. I imagined getting stung, and not knowing the French for I’ve been stung. And lying in agony on the beach, alone.

I was scared of carbon monoxide poisoning. You couldn’t see it or smell it. You didn’t notice it until it swallowed you whole. Every time I felt lightheaded, I opened the window and stared at the ceiling, waiting for the end.

I was scared when cooking chicken. I stuck a knife down the charred breast, and cooked it for a bit extra. The chicken was so tough that when I ate it, I spat it back out, but at least it was white the whole way through.

I was scared of flying. Every bump or shake I convinced myself was the end. When the pilot announced 10 minutes until landing, I looked out the window and only saw blue water. He’s gona sink us in the sea, I thought, and held on to my arm rest, my breath sucked in, paralyzed in my imminent death.

I was scared of every man I met when the sun went down, especially if he was the only other person on the street. He wants to rape and murder me, I thought, as I quickly ran across to the other side. There could never be enough distance between me and those men.

Even if the street was full of people. They’re all conspiring to rape me. It will be a gang rape. And my mother will have to identify me by my teeth. I started carrying a knife around with me, a sharp one I ordered off the internet from a German company. I don’t trust the Germans with much, but I do with quality cutlery. The knife was so sharp it cut through the cloth of my bag more than once. Achtung!

Then I got afraid of that knife, afraid of its power. A man will pull it from my hand and stick it in me. My defense will become my demise. I grazed the knife over my stomach and thighs while I lay in bed at night, drunk. Sometimes I pressed down, and saw little blood freckles form on my skin freckles. Maybe I will be my demise, I thought.

I stopped carrying the knife.

*

I was scared, I am scared, I will be scared.

I am scared I only exist if someone if looking at me. If they turn away, I will fall to the ground in ash.

I am scared to die tomorrow, and my last breath being please, give me more time. I could have been someone.

I am scared to die at 90, and still have those dying gasps.

I am scared of getting pregnant, even though I’m on the pill.

I’m scared I won’t be able to have a baby when I want one.

I’m scared that if I do, he’ll end up a serial killer.

I’m scared if I do, she’ll be called a slut.

I am scared to marry my best friend, and for him to become a stranger.

I am scared he is already becoming a stranger.

I am scared I have no talent, or I’m wasting my talent, or I’ll get to my last breath and realize talent meant nothing at all.

I am scared of everything I am not, but I’m fucking terrified of everything I am.

*

Being fearful means you have something to lose. So what am I afraid of losing?

I’ve spent most of my life wanting to die. Now I want to live, and I am terrified of that being taken away.

Wouldn’t that be ironic?

I learned the word irony in Miss Jordan’s class at 14. Irony is being afraid of flying, then getting on a plane, and that plane crashing. I was very mean to Miss Jordan, and she was never mean back. I was a mean to a lot of people, and I justified it because I was most mean to myself. Like it let me off the hook.

I’m scared that I haven’t got my karma yet. I’ve done bad, to myself and others, and haven’t been punished yet. In fact, I’ve only been saved. When I’ve spat badness into the world, the world has met me with good. It’s smothered me with kindness. I am every antagonist in all those cliched films, who get away with it all, right up until they don’t.

I hear the wheels churning, getting quicker and quicker, and I know the train is coming. I have no idea from what direction or how soon it will trample my body, but I feel the ground trembling, getting louder with each second. I know it’s coming.

When you get scared, you’re supposed to think of your happy place. I imagine my body floating in the cold salty water, my chest in the air and the wind whipping my face. I keep my head raised, my eyes opened, trying to survey the blue around me, making sure nothing will permeate this happy place.

A wave hits my body, turning me over in the water, slapping me awake. I cough and spit the sea back up as I tread the water. In that moment, I forget about the creatures that could hurt me. All I can think of is staying alive.

If the jellyfish are going to sting me, let it be when my back is turned.

 

Marise Gaughan is an Irish stand up comedian and writer living in London. You can follow her at @marisecomedy.

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In the haze of twilight, she felt both confident and then, suddenly, at a loss when she tripped over a pile of garbage on Broadway. It was light enough for her to see, but dark enough that in this moment she had been careless, not double checking her path, but proceeding boldly forward, just like the others out at dusk. But she was not like the others. She thought all this in an instant, hands out in front of her, grasping at straws that poked through black plastic. A rat scurried out from the pile, startled by her interruption. She would have laughed to avoid tears, but it was already too late. 

She wasn’t embarrassed not to have seen the trash. She was embarrassed by the assumptions of the passerby: that she was just a drunk, or drugged-up, or an idiot. She always got the last assumption when she mispronounced a particularly difficult word, or when she had to ask someone to repeat themselves for the third time. 

She got up on her knees, examined her palms. No blood this time. She scanned the street. There was a man mouthing something at her. 

“I’m fine,” she snapped. She assumed he had asked her if she was alright, if she needed help. No help. That, she was proud of. No help. 

She walked on, slower, scanning the ground in front of her, glancing up at the cross-walks, double checking for cars. This disease was like a cup of poison that she drank slowly all the time. She got used to the taste, but the effects were getting more serious as time went on. 

That was a negative example. She was upset. She would feel better after a shower. She would remember herself under the hot water with silence all around. 

But she still had to get home.

Her walks had become more careful, slow. When she was a girl, she had bruised her shins almost every day. Her parents had thought she was just reckless. They hadn’t gotten her full diagnosis, yet. 

She thought back to last November when a bicycle hit her as she crossed the street. He had yelled at her, but she didn’t know whether to go forward or back, or to stay still, and so he had hit her. Then he had asked her why she didn’t move when he yelled. 

Her mother wants her to use a cane. 

When she got the diagnosis, she had imagined herself a bird travelling from shore over sea to the land of the Deaf and Blind. She didn’t think, then, that she’d still be travelling fifteen years later. There was no far-off shore, or maybe there was, but the sea that stretched out in front of her was murky and dark, a mix of contradictions, like the tide, a sense that grew and faded from day to day. She longed for a definite answer, but found that some days she could see, some routes she could walk, some people she could understand. Nights, she was blind. Sometimes she fell, some people appeared, mouthed words. She would hear every other syllable. 

She was embarrassed again last Tuesday when her coworker forwarded a video of a toddler getting his cochlear implant turned on for the first time. 

“Isn’t it just so inspiring?” Angela raved. 

She did the smile and nod she always did when she hadn’t heard someone. But she had heard Angela. The video was just offensive. 

Simpering Angela smiled. “I knew you would just love it, Sofia.”

Why, Sofia wondered, but she nodded again. People acted like cochlear implants, or even hearing aids, were just like glasses. Put them on and presto! you can hear. At this thought she smiled a bit. Even when she explained that speaking required years of speech therapy, Angela had still responded, “Oh, yeah, but it’s better than the alternative.”

The alternative? Signing? Going to a school for the Deaf? She had begged her hearing parents to let her go, to release her from the pain and humiliation of mainstreaming.

By now she had reached her door. She dug in her pocket for the keys. She felt for the lock with her left hand, carefully aligned the key, and twisted. The hall was dark, but she had memorized the number of steps to the elevator, and as long as there were no packages underfoot, she would be alright. 

Last December, there was a blizzard in New York City. She had been late for a first date and miscalculated the depth of a puddle. She fell, hard. That time she needed stiches. But she had finished the walk to the bar and sat there with a guy who played music, holding a tissue to her leg. The next day in urgent care, the nurse scolded her for toughing it out.

Another date that winter, the musician had walked her home, insisted on it, took the subway with her, even though he lived way out in Flatbush, and she lived in Harlem. At the corner before her building, she had paused to thank him, and he told her about his addiction and the pain that comes from a different kind of poison. She had felt lucky a month later when she got a message from him, full of regret, but he had relapsed again, gone into recovery again, and was making amends, again. 

At her own door now, she breathed a sigh of relief and stepped inside. She hung up her coat, took off her shoes, padded down the hall to the shower that promised release from the stench of garbage and pee. And the water washed it all away, the embarrassment too, and she was joyful again within her body that was still full of youth and promise.

 

Catherine Bloomer received her MFA in fiction from the New School in 2016. She is currently a PhD candidate in Italian Literature at Columbia University, where she is writing a dissertation on the representation of disability in Dante Alighieri’s works and times. Catherine serves as the Associate Director for the arts education program WriteOn NYC, bringing creative writing classes to underserved schools in the New York area. She has a poem forthcoming in The Gateway Review. Follow her on Twitter @bloomersea or check out her website: catherinebloomer.com.

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Herman wanted to meet a normal woman. He hated using the word normal. It seemed so passé, perhaps even bigoted. But all the women he met these days were abnormal.

Herman was a patient at Happy Days Assisted Living Center in Ashleyville, Ohio. He was in Memory Care, but he didn’t know it. His daughter visited him every so often. Their conversation was always the same.

“Hi, Dad.”

“Hi.”

“How’s everything going?”

“OK, but I can’t find a normal woman.”

“What?”

“A normal woman. Can’t find one here. Where’d they all go?”

It was an afternoon in the fall, and the memory care patients were all seated in the gathering room. They had to be there, Hermina was told, so they could socialize.  Hermina looked at her father’s old face and unkempt hair and then surveyed the room. 

“Why do you think the women aren’t normal?”

“Can’t think. I don’t know. Wait. I’ll show you.” He smiled at a woman on the other side of the room. Unlike some of the others, she was not in a wheelchair. 

She walked over to where Herman and Hermina were sitting. “Hi. Great time we had last night.”

“What did we do?”

“We went to the movies. The drive-in.”

“What did we see?”

“Uh, I don’t remember. We had a great time.” They sat in silence. Then the woman wandered off to the other side of the room.

“See what I mean. Don’t think I was at a drive-in.” He reached for the wallet in his back pocket and looked through it. There wasn’t much there, just a few photos and dollar bills. “No driver’s license. Someone took my driver’s license. Didn’t go to a drive-in last night.”

Hermina had brought an old photograph album with her to Happy Days. She gave it to her father.

“What’s this?”

“It’s your old photo album, Dad. I thought you would like to recall some happy memories.”

Herman reached for the album. “Memories?” He started looking at the pictures. “Looks like me. Younger. A younger Herman, yes. Who’s that?” 

“That’s Mom.”

“Mom?”

“Yes.”

“Whose mom?”

“My mom.”

“Your mom? Pretty woman. She looks normal. And tell me again who you are, my dear.”

 

Anita G. Gorman grew up in Queens and now lives in northeast Ohio. Since 2014 she has had 65 short stories and 17 essays accepted for publication. Her essays have been published in publications such as Unfinished Chapters, Finding Mr. Right, Pilcrow & Dagger, Kaleidoscope, and Table for Two. Her short stories have appeared in many publications, including Gilbert!, Down in the Dirt, Dual Coast, Jitter Press, Red Fez, Speculative Grammarian, Scarlet Leaf Review, Knee-Jerk, Eyedrum Periodically, Adelaide, and Inwood Indiana Press. Her one-act play, Astrid: or, My Swedish Mama, produced at Youngstown Ohio’s Hopewell Theatre in March 2018, starred Anita and her daughter Ingrid.

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I’m craving barbecue on a Friday, thinking, maybe. I skip filling up and head straight home from work. My car runs on hope alone. Except it doesn’t. It gets all sputtery and weird, forces me to stop at a gas station outside my neighborhood. I put exactly ten dollars of gas in my tank and peel out.

Liquid rushes into the test window, a wave wetting dry sand. “It’s when you start craving foods you wouldn’t normally. That’s how you know,” my mom says, comforting me over the phone.

I sit on the tub’s edge, recall being ten, refusing to eat anything other than pulled pork with mac and cheese. “I don’t normally crave ribs, though.”

“I know, honey. I just can’t stand to see you get your hopes up like this, okay?”

 

My husband and I start eating barbecue every Friday. We’re trying all the places in town so I can critique them according to my ranking system:

1. Sauce
2. Meat
3. Potato salad
4. Beans
5. Mac and cheese

The top three are the keys to the kingdom. The Holy Trinity. I want a brisket with thick sauce that licks and slips, could be the choppy type or thinned in strips. If the sauce doesn’t hit right, I’ll eat the meat, but I’ll be sad about the sauce the whole time, and I care more about the potato salad than I put on. It’s third according to my ranking system, but that’s just a product of societal pressure to ascribe a higher value to the meat and sauce. I never forget a good potato salad. Or a bad one.

And these days, I measure time by barbecue night. It’s been five rib, pulled pork, and brisket combo plates since the last negative test, and tonight, I’m craving chicken.

 

Blake L Bell is finishing up an MFA at Mississippi University for Women and teaches English at a magnet school in South Louisiana. To read more from her, visit blakelbell.com or follow her @blakelbell.

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Family Tree

 

Mother

(n.) one who sheds their human form to fully transition into sacrifice; the juxtaposition of widow and youth, never quite finding the right time to be

See synonyms: martyr, enemy, friend, stranger, future

Father

(n.) a myth you don’t quite believe in anymore, despite the evidence you see every time you look in the mirror and see his face; an ancestor; an increased risk of heart disease and heartbreak

See synonyms: absence, answer, question, mirage

Brother

(n.) a person you raised but have no maternal claim to

See synonyms: ungrateful, asshole, heart, forgiven

You:

(unsure) versatile; resilient; repurpose as needed

See synonyms: mother, father, sibling, tired, wretched, alone

 

Recipe for Staying Hungry

CW: disordered eating

 

1. List all the foods that feel repulsive to your mind’s taste buds. They are too slippery, too gamey, too chewy, too gristly. You used to like these foods. Now, your imagination says no, and your tongue doesn’t want to be part of this conversation at all.

2. Check your bank account. Can you afford to be neurotic about your next meal? Maybe, but only if you scale back your neurotic output somewhere else. There is only so much to go around. 

3. Are you really even hungry? If yes, proceed to Step 4. If unsure, consider the following questions:

• • a. Are you sad?
  • b. Are you lonely?
  • c. Are you forgotten?
  • d. Are you broken?
  • e. Are you forgetting the name of this feeling but still able to remember the feeling of cheese?

4. Do you want to eat cottage cheese again? If yes, eat cottage cheese as a meal for the 4th time this week. If no, go to Step 5.

5. Do you want to eat super chunky peanut butter from the jar again? If yes, eat super chunky peanut butter from the jar as a meal for the 7th time this week. If no, go to Step 6.

6. Repeat steps 1-5. More than once. Just to be sure you really are too pathetic to eat any of the food currently taking up space in your freezer and pantry.

7. Do you want to order something that is mostly bread? If yes, fine. Whatever. You need to stay alive. If no, repeat steps 1-5 one more time. Then, maybe, move on to Step 8.

8. Give up. Go to sleep. Try again later.

 

What I Wanted 

 

When I finally left, I wanted to leave five open cans of tuna hidden around the apartment in places he’d never think to look, but I was too lazy to go out and buy revenge tuna.

Instead, I got four days between the moment I realized I didn’t love him and the moment I realized that mattered. I tried to talk him out of coming to my grad school graduation. I didn’t want my happiness or pride or enthusiasm to be near him anymore, because I knew they weren’t safe.

When I was packing up, I tried to think of three things to make it worth staying but could only come up with HBO, which I suppose I can pay for on my own. (I still haven’t though. Never knowing how Girls ended seems like a positive side effect of this breakup.)

Instead, I got two years of pain that even now still sometimes tastes like love.

When it started, I just wanted one I love you that I trusted.

 

Jorts and Depression

 

The star patches on the pockets are comforting. They generously lend some optimism to this whole situation.

I usually like finished hems and think faux rips and tears are tacky, but in this case, the mass-produced cutoff-ness makes me look like this isn’t the first time I’ve worn shorts in 20 years, the first time since my mom made me cry in the Target dressing room, as she tsked and sighed that she’d apparently have to try to find a bigger size for me. If the shorts believe they’re familiar and worn, other people will believe it’s normal that I’m wearing them, and I will forget that there isn’t actually a rule against fat girls in shorts.

The fit is decent. There was no breath holding or wiggling or jumping or bargaining when I put them on. I think I’ll keep them anyway as an incentive outfit. Before ordering, one reviewer said she wore them to a family picnic and got lots of compliments. One reviewer said she wore them on a date and felt flirty and fabulous. A supportive family, a date, and shorts all for $25.99—even less once my Torrid Cash was applied—is a fucking deal, even if I never wear them out of my apartment. But I am working on that part.

 

Megan Cannella (@megancannella) is a Midwestern transplant currently living in Nevada. For over a decade, Megan has bounced between working at a call center, grad school, and teaching. She has work in @PorcupineLit, @dailydrunkmag, @VerseZine, @TBQuarterly, and @perhappened.

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Those black Vans clop, clop, clopped when I walked.

They swallowed my small feet because they were meant for a man and I hadn’t gotten the sizing conversion right, but rather than returning them, I hung onto them, thinking they’d magically fit me, or at least grow on me. I’d slip them on every time I’d walk to the train station to get him, my first college boyfriend, a bad boy who grew up in the rough part of his town, and who’d smoked cigarettes since 12 and got a girl pregnant at 15.

He wasn’t a dad when I met him three and a half years later when mutual friends introduced us through an AIM group chat. They’d tried to warn me he wasn’t a good choice for me, square me, when I pushed for more information. They said he’d broken up with her after she had an abortion, which he was relieved about. So her parents asked him to leave their house where he’d been staying, forcing him to live back with his flighty, alcoholic mother and overworked stepfather.

I’m supposed to be living it up right now, he’d tell me a week after the online chat, on our first date at Tom Jones — that I’d driven us to after picking him up from his mother and stepfather’s house — where we flirted over a towering plate of curly fries and Cokes, and where, after seeing his nipple piercings protruding from his red t-shirt, I felt I needed to start wearing black eyeliner on my top and bottom lash lines and probably get a creatively-placed piercing of my own. He coyly suggested we go Dutch on the bill “so that [he’d] have plenty of money for [me] later,” but there were no more dates with the exception of an Elton John concert two weeks later, paid with my own money I’d saved for months.

He’d often claim exhaustion and stress from work, so we’d stay in instead of going anywhere or doing anything. He’d lounge on my dorm room twin, watching TV or stuffing his face with the cheesesteak and sweet tea he’d brought with him (but would not share with me) while my body language, leaning towards him in my cross-legged, back to the TV position, begged for him to listen to my week’s worth of stories from class or troubles at home. Then he’d leave late at night, texting me a flat “Night” at 3:00 a.m., at which point I’d finally fall asleep, after having spent hours flipping my phone open and closed.

On a rare occasion, he’d pick me up after my last Friday class, and drive me in his rundown gold sedan, listening to The Postal Service along the way, back to his hour-away apartment where I’d be alone, getting classwork done or cleaning his kitchen or organizing his clothes, to pass the time while he worked his three dead-end jobs. Come Sunday, he’d drive me to the train station to get back to school, and when I said I would miss him, he’d toss me his Volcum sweatshirt, noting he’d need it back the next time he saw me.

Yeah, I’ll be there, he said one afternoon on the phone, four months into it. He was talking to Paul, his buddy who was holding a (dry) “Thirsty Thursday” party that night, to which he wasn’t taking me. He told Paul, I’m driving around with the girl from Temple right now.

Stunned and slow, like a sloth, I turned left to look at him, and unphased, he finished his conversation and kept driving, flicking his hand occasionally in my direction to suggest don’t worry about it.

A few days later, when he finally called me back, I questioned him, wanting to know why he’d referred to me as “the girl from Temple” and not his girlfriend, as I thought I was.

“This is exactly what I didn’t want!” he screamed. “I don’t want a fucking label on everything!”

Click.

And I never heard from him again.

 

Christine M. Estel is a Philadelphia-based writer and private tutor. She enjoys writing in various genres about her personal experiences — the big, small, and tiny. She tweets from @EstellingAStory.

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Tennessee Moon (Pie) 

 

The last remnants of our sky is fluttered with snow. It’s real snow, the kind that piles in our hair like the petals of a flowering Dogwood. The two of us find shelter in the MoonPie store and browse through all their mountain woman goods. We pick up different flavored candles and drug store candy, their glass jars flickering like fireflies against the twinkling lights. I tell you about the time my dad left out moon pies for Halloween and how to this day no trick or treaters will come near our house. You laugh and curl your hair behind your ear — maybe it’s too soon — too early to enjoy a cool moon pie and dollop of ice cream. 

This last minute voyage is the remnants of our spring break. We’re meant to be in Pigeon Forge hoping for glimpses of Dolly Parton and maybe a bear or two, but with snow like this we can hardly stand to leave it. As we browse and pack our carts with sweet mooncakes, I say a silent prayer that my car can withstand a belated spring snow. 

Chattanooga has seen its fair shares of winter bliss, they call them flurries or light showers but it’s coagulated more than any phenomena we’ve ever seen. Further South, back home our snow is ice, thin and murky, where snow angels are puddles and snowmen play as lumps of sludge and pine straw. 

As we step back out onto the cobblestone street, our hands fiddle for the clear plastic. Our traveling tennis shoes don’t hold well against the ice that’s formed on the sidewalk, so we stay close enough to catch the other in case someone slips. Our chilled hands threaten to crack in this heavy moonlight, all for the taste of these Tennessee s’mores. I think this was worth it, you say shoving the wrapper into the pocket of your coat, I’ve never felt anything quite like this. 

We take a bite, mine the classic — yours the banana cream. The biscuit crumbles on the edge of our lips and the marshmallow fluff sticking to our teeth — I smile — unrelenting at its sweetness.

 

Lonely Hearts Club 

 

There on the kitchen table it sits — this off white envelope stained with the dirt from across state lines. The red, white, and blue stamp has brushed against the bottom of the mailman’s bag too many times, its tapered edges are peeled ever so slightly from the journey here. Behind you — your six children are playing in the backyard — their laughter and squeals oblivious to the budding kiss that lines this letter’s seal. 

He’s a widower too — he’s told you in smudged black ink — the scrawl drains like a river coming off each vowel. It wasn’t long ago, when the bittered chill of December hit and your sister gave you this club’s information. A child needs a father, she said, a woman needs love, she said — lonely hearts will find a way to each other — she insisted. He’s got three kids just across the river. Like his wife, your husband has gone home to heaven. That’s what you’ve told the kids — that’s what you try to believe when you lie awake at night — your evening prayers sent up like one of your letters. 

You sit down at the kitchen table and lift the envelope, ripping it open with your homegrown fingers. In his letters he writes to you of a horn shaped moon, its yella’ light outshines all the lightnin’ bugs that dance over the Mississippi River. You laugh when he tells you they’re kin — yours and mine — our little lightnin’ bugs are connected you see. 

You can feel it in your bones, when you write back, this gentle love is almost too early to be certain and yet it is all the same. One day soon he’ll show up with those kids in tow and settle his hands on his hips. From your front porch he’ll ask you a question that words in letters can’t convey — and somehow — the answer is simple. 

You’ll change into the little brown dress you’ve been saving for the Easter picnic. From the yard all the kids will watch as you climb into the passenger side of his car. The whole way there you gently clutch his hand between the coos of Hank Williams and gentle wafts of springtime rain. This little church is like a branch of home, the love that grows here is strong. You’ll take his hand in yours and stand beneath a whittled cross that’s draped in stems of dried lavender. It’s there you marry him — it’s there the kids will grow — it’s there this love will spool like one of the myths you’ve stitched in your quilts. 

By now this story has dwindled into squash casserole recipes and your youngest’s blended family history. When you’ve gone home to heaven too your great granddaughter will be the first to pick up her needle and stitch along those very same lines. Lonely hearts tend to find a way, she’ll say, and think of your love with each pull of her heartstrings.

 

Blue Cicada 

 

The sound of summer rain and cerulean is birthed in the mouths of the cicadas that sing outside my bedroom window. One of them is howling — albeit off key — and I have no choice but to think she has been barred from the neighborhood chorus. Her wings are spooned under the midnight silk of Orion’s Belt, its sapphire shell flickers beneath the streetlamp that glows from the front yard. I wonder what song she is singing, what lover has spurned her, or what sister she has lost through their limited life cycle. I think of the mother arachnid that has spooled a home in the azalea bush. I wonder if her eight prowling eyes have caught sight of such delectable prey, a growling hunger that’s festered beneath a Strawberry Moon. Maybe that is why I hear this series of wails that echo down our cul de sac. Perhaps this insect has turned from mortal to exoskeletal, an apparition searching for a love that was wrapped in an impenetrable web. Now as I lay here, I too mourn a love that was meant to last beyond these clouded June nights.

 

Taylor Wyna is a writer from Birmingham, Alabama whose work has been featured in Cypress Press, Aura Literary Arts Review, and Reckon Women. She has work forthcoming in the Amethyst Review and Emerge Literary Journal. Taylor serves as the Founder and EIC of Camellias, a Southern Regional magazine dedicated to the modern Southern woman. Say ‘hi’ on Twitter and Instagram @TayyWyna

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“Only babies believe in Santa,” Lloyd taunted during recess a week before my seventh birthday. “It’s your parents, stupid!”

“I know that,” I shot back and rolled my eyes. Heart pounding, I turned from our game of hopscotch and scurried to the school bathroom. I sat on the toilet, sweaty and slightly nauseous. Lloyd’s claim made perfect sense. My head spun as the scaffold supporting my suspension of disbelief came crashing down around me. I mean, I lived in Puerto Rico. We didn’t even have a chimney. A row of dominoes tumbled in my mind as I extrapolated: Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy, Three Kings. Fake. Fake. Fake.

I pulled at my pigtails in frustration. Stupid Lloyd. Why did he have to tell me? I wasn’t ready to forgo candy-filled Easter baskets, trading baby teeth for cash, or getting gifts from mythical creatures. I received presents from my family and from Santa. Would I now only get half as much at Christmas? And worse, Santa brought all the special presents. I envisioned future Christmases when I’d hold my gifts despondently, a nightgown, a package of socks, Maja soap, and maybe a Lladró figurine for my room. Nope. No way.

Clearly, I needed to keep this new knowledge to myself. Raised by strict adherents to the ostrich-with-its-head-in-the sand approach to life, I was thankfully well versed in the art of keeping secrets. Ever since I could recall I’d wondered why I lived with my grandparents. Why did my mother have her own apartment? All my friends had fathers; where the heck was mine? Questions abounded, but I knew not to ask. Abuela had drilled that lesson into me early on. Young me had been coloring a Cinderella scene, trying to keep the magenta crayon within the lines, while Abuela chopped pumpkin for soup in the steamy kitchen. Done, I held up my artwork and said, “Abuela, I’m going to dress like this beautiful princess when my Papi comes.”

Understand that Abuela was hardly your sweet cookie-making granny. She was short in stature but formidable, and chupacabra-scary when inflamed. She turned toward me, arm extended, her massive, razor-sharp chef’s knife pointed at my head. Her face contorted into a landscape of rage as she spat disdain in her raspy smoker’s voice, “What do you mean ‘your Papi?’ Your Abuelo is your Papi. Don’t you dare disrespect him like that, you little pila de mierda.” She ordered me to take a bath, as if I’d soiled myself by bringing up the topic of my father. I immediately understood: if something seems off in this family, pretend it’s normal and never speak of it. Don’t rouse the Abuela beast again.

So continuing to pretend I believed in Santa came easily, and I maintained the charade until well past the age when children logically figure these things out. Nobody asked and I didn’t tell, and by my eleventh Christmas, my family naively thought I still expected Santa to deliver. We attended the annual Benitez Christmas Eve soiree and consumed copious amounts of fritters, morcillas, lechón, rice with pigeon peas, pasteles, and for the adults, rum and Cokes. Fully sated, I dozed on the ride home and sleepwalked to my bed where I dared to dream of opening Donny Osmond’s new album in the morning. For the rest of my family, however, a nightmare awaited.

After ensuring I was asleep, Abuela, Abuelo, my mother, and my aunt, hurried to arrange Santa’s gifts under the tree, ready for bed themselves. I imagine Abuelo’s face blanching, his body breaking out in a cold sweat upon realizing my presents were still in the vault. “The vault” was not a euphemism for “excellent hiding place.” My gifts were literally inside the vault at the savings and loan where he presided, and that vault was impenetrable, hermetically sealed until 8:00 am on December 26th.

Abuelo did not handle crisis well. Once when an actor yelled “Fire!” during a play, Abuelo sprang from his aisle seat and, without a backward glance at Abuela or me, sprinted toward the exit. The blood loss when I broke my chin open in a fall had him running in circles, arms windmilling. His panic that Christmas Eve must have reached heart-attack proportions. The rest of the clan, I’m sure, flung blame at him in shouted whispers. I envision crying and accusations, followed by creative plotting as they tried to find a solution to this untenable situation. Because, as usual, the truth was not an option, no matter my age.

The next morning I padded over to the artificial Christmas tree, crusty-eyed and breathless with excitement. With a jolt, I registered the giant piece of paper covering a third of the tree. It was…a note? I read the bold black lettering: “My Dear Friend Peggy, My sleigh broke. As soon as I fix it, I will send your presents.” Signed, “Santa.” 

Wait. What? I was confounded. Where was my stuff? What had happened? My imagination failed to come up with a single plausible scenario for the lack of presents from Santa under that tree. Flummoxed, I pretended to accept the situation and sat down to open the “lesser” gifts from my family. Everyone oozed relief.

I never got those Santa presents. Abuelo did bring them home, where they taunted me daily from the back of a little used closet. But I simply couldn’t bring my preteen self to ask, “Do you think Santa’s sleigh is fixed yet?” It was beyond embarrassing. I imagine my grandparents were equally chagrined, and with both parties experts at avoidance, we entered a permanent standoff. Eventually the gifts disappeared, probably donated to a charity.

The next Christmas my mother approached me solemnly ready to break my little heart as she revealed the truth about Santa Claus. “Yeah, yeah,” I waved my hand in her surprised face, “I’ve known for a while. But, Mami, what happened last year?” And, perhaps because I’d saved her from the horror of having a difficult conversation, she told me the vault story. It may or may not be true.

 

Margarita Barresi’s work has appeared in Acentos Review, Pink Ink, Boston Accent Lit, Drowning Gull, and Your Teen Magazine. Her recently completed first novel, A Delicate Marriage, is currently under agent representation. It’s a historical fiction tale set in Puerto Rico during the first half of the 20th century and earned her a writer’s residency spot at Noepe Center for Literary Arts in Martha’s Vineyard.

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This time, in maroon

 

I never remember looking into the mirror as a child. I can remember the mirror so well, the bathroom and the smell of our wood stove and the burgundy tinted air from the wood walls. The frame, still there in the same bathroom on the same wall, is dark maroon with small floral details on the face, which is thin, maybe two and a half inches. 

But again, I can never remember my own face. My face which expanded and relearned its landscape. My hair which has thinned and grown and curled back out. My smile which was gapped and now tries to pull back against where the braces once held me together. 

Okay I lied, I have worked myself into a memory. One single memory of the slope of my forehead and the flush of my cheeks, red even beyond the burgundy tinted air. My knees are pulled to my chest and I am squatting on the counter top, my feet curved with the bowl of the sink. My tooth is loose, a front lower tooth which I can feel is connected to my pinky toes. The pain is bleached white, popcorn igniting in my roots. 

The sight makes me woozy, the fragility of this tooth, so I explore with my tongue, right there in front of the mirror. I see with the hot muscle of my mouth. I close my lips and push the tooth back, then forward, then back, and smile against the indent. 

The snap is small and delicate, bone china meeting glass, or bone meeting bone, or bone meeting the sound we fear most. This is the only memory I have of my face in the mirror of my childhood. Flushed and bloody and alive. 

 

This time, in blue

 

I’m a woman named Tuesday and you’ve loved me since birth. My voice is all broken sticks and satin panties. My face is round. 

This time, in blue, we never look in the eye and the sky is constantly shedding. Flakes land on my shoulders and my stomach and I’m wading in a blue lake who speaks a blue language. This is what she says:

Teeth are expendable objects but a heart never is. Bury yourself in a bottle and moss will choke out everything else, you yourself, will choke out everything else. And when you walk through snow do not be surprised by the frost bite, we were always prepared for the bite. 

Now pucker up, you have to smile when the wind takes the first layer of skin off and you have to sing when it hurts. We’re singing, listen close. 

This time, in blue, we’re focusing on you. Birthed from a river who never knew how to run straight, you scraped the bottom with a rusty pontoon and called it music. Called it the color yellow without ever seeing the color in real life. Skinned an animal from the feet up after your dad brought it home and said dinner. This time, in blue, we both licked our fingers clean and swallowed the dinner plates too.

 

Olivia Kingery grows plants and words in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. She is an MFA candidate at Northern Michigan University, where she reads for Passages North. When not writing, she is in the woods with her Chihuahua and Great Pyrenees.

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You sit at the dining table with my father. You like him more than you like me.

I ask if you want to go for a walk, or drink, or lay in the desert sun and kiss and you say nothing, just sit at the table and listen to my father tell stories.

I admit, he’s good at tall tales – of Tibetan secret service and fancy caviar dinners in grimy public parks in Germany. You are more interested in my father than me but I don’t care. Last night your dry smoke breath made me pray you’d stop kissing me and I’ve never wanted that before. In the sunlight now your hair looks like a pilgrim. Where are your buckle boots? You are ugly.

Returning home, I have a long call with my stepmother. It’s the first time we’ve talked without my father there. She asks how you make me feel.

“He’s figuring you out, I don’t think he’s made up his mind,” she says, and my body completely relaxes. It’s the first time in months I’ve felt this soft comfort because it is something honest.

In the beginning you liked me more, now there’s been a shift. She sensed it after one night. Even I sensed it. Your distance and lack of touch. Yes, it was the first time meeting my father. Yes, you get to be human, feel nerve.

Sometimes when you look at me it is with hate. Then I hate myself for a while.

“In life, it is important to feel good,” my stepmother says. “There’s a time for perspective but also a time for caring. I’ve gotten very mad at your dad for this and when I hear you talk it’s like you’re talking about your father. The important question is: does he want to understand your hurt?”

No. I can’t bring the words up. She hears when my silence translates. No.

When we visited my father in New Mexico, I found myself on the verge of tears- the kind that break streams into rivers- when you took the side of my emotionally abusive mother. I hadn’t seen her for five years, then I brought you home. It was alien and I both missed and could not stand to be around her. Later that day in the park, at the diner, driving, I wanted to end it with you but then I thought of kindness. If I were you and you were me. How it feels in a foreign land with strangers. So I waited.

Waiting has blown sand over the trap door and I cannot find the handle again.

I tell my stepmother, “when I’m around him, I feel like a kite. Fluttering and sick in the wind.”

“It’s important to feel grounded. Pay attention to how you feel,” she says. 

“Pay attention to how you feel.” Repeating it many times until the words are sad and say something else.

You are similar to my father in so many ways. Normally I ask myself: is this man enough like my father to care for me and give me comfort when he’s gone? Now I think: do I want the type of care my father gives my stepmother. She used to ask my father to hold her hand because he did not do it naturally. She says his feelings confuse her because he does not make them certain. I used to get mad when my father mentioned her. But that hate was my mother speaking through me like a doll.

My stepmother loses service as she’s about to speak again. We’ve been on the phone for an hour. I let the call drop because you are on the way with beer.

The world feels bigger. I picture having your babies – yes, more than one.

I want it all now and in the past that’s how I know I’m in trouble. It’s better to care less, I know this too.

You’re on your way and it’s later than we planned. I ask the Magic 8 Ball – should I end things with you tonight.

“As I see it, yes.”

How weak am I to see the signs, hear them, have them barked, spit-spraying on my nose, and do the opposite. I rationalize: weakness is the only romance left. To be clobbered by Clydesdales. Hey you, come here. Leave me lovesick, lovesad, lovecrying, and lovetender. Then I’ll sniff it out again because that’s the way I am.

Most of all, we must be ourselves.

 

Jahla Seppanen was born and raised off the grid in Madrid, New Mexico. She received her BA in Writing and Fine Arts from Sarah Lawrence College in New York. Over the past year, she completed her first novel. Jahla enjoys tequila and listening to r&b. Her stories have been published in Fourteen Hills, The Bookends Review, Niche, Used Gravitrons, and Turk’s Head Review.

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Ella runs her fingers through Mother’s party dress, the lavender one with the puffed sleeves and ruffles around the neck. She keeps it in the back of her closet, in a place where Dad can’t see. He’d tell godawful stories about how Mother was the only one for him. She told the darkest jokes. And of course, he’d state the obvious: Lavender was her favorite color. 

Dad is gone tonight anyway, a business trip.

Mother said the dress was too domestic, left it behind, almost a year ago. Exactly a year as of midnight. Midnight draws closer with each hour and quarter hour marked by the nearby church clock, the quarter hours passing in four, eight, twelve, and sixteen notes. The hours are definitive, stentorian strokes. Seven, eight, nine, ten. Eleven.

Mother took almost everything. Her collection of Yates, Nabokov, Salinger, the Corona Zephyr typewriter she used to write stories, even the leftover meatloaf. She took the vodka, the lemons. The Sinatra records. But she didn’t take petite, fourteen-year old Ella. Ella with the same flame-colored hair and owl eyes. Ella with the same long nose. Ella who could have fit in the trunk with ease. 

Ella rips a piece of fabric. 

It’s an accident, her fingers clutched tight, but there’s something frightening in it. It’s the power to hurt, to wound, disrupt, something no one associates with her. She’s always in school or trying to fill the living room with lilacs and her pen-and-ink drawings that Mother once loved. Trying to make something out of the onions and sardines that Dad keeps in the fridge.

She rips another piece.

And then another. A neat clean rip.

Ella imagines Mother’s Chevy Bel-Air moving across the vast country, backseats and trunks filled.  Mother is listening to Sinatra. Or Rosemary Clooney. Or Erroll Garner. She loved “Misty,” said it was music for one’s “alone time.” Mother’s words float in the night sky, “I need space, darling.” 

Space, as in the rarest of phone calls. Once a month, then every three months. And even those calls are replete with Is. I’m finding my creativity again, I’m taking up the piano, I might get a book deal. Space, the lack of a guest bedroom at Mother’s new apartment. More phrases echo, “your father,” “expectations,” “needy,” “you’re growing up,” and the worst, “understand.”

Eleven-thirty chimes, the moon too full for comfort. Ella draws the blinds; the moon still glows. Mother and Dad are fighting. Dad is telling her the kitchen is her domain. Surely, she can be happy here. She can write as a hobby.

Ella rips out another section in the waist. She feels a pang of pity. Unacceptable. And another, around the chest.

She is younger, eight or nine. Mother is reading her a fairy tale, even though Ella has been reading since she was four. She is calling her “my precious Ella.” Ella cannot recall which fairy tale, only that goodness wins and the heroine is given a new life. Mother smells of perfume, and her smile, while sharp has an odd tenderness to it. There is a sensation that the world cannot creep in with Mother here. Mother will not let it. She cleans, arranges, the “tsaritsa of order,” as Mother puts it with a sigh.

Rip.

Mother is telling her to be good, that she truly loves her. She’ll write. She promises. But the words feel an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Something horrible will ensue. Ella cannot imagine the twist. 

Ella doesn’t just rip, but she claws, digs with sharp fingernails. Rip, rip, rip, a rhythm that’s oddly soothing. There goes part of a sleeve. Rip. Another section. 

Mother is making her announcement. She is moving to the city of X in one month. She cannot keep cleaning and cooking day in, day out. Her decision is final. Please respect it, she says, with a firmness that frightens Ella and that Ella secretly envies.

The day of departure: Dad is begging, trying to wrest the suitcase from Mother. Mother is telling him to stop demanding. There’s something dark in Dad’s motions. Forceful. Ella cannot help but want to tell Mother that all will be right. She can help Mother in her new life, her writerly life. She truly can. But a part of her knows this is childish, foolish.

A truly foolish image: Ella is chasing after Mother’s Chevy Bel-Air. She is holding onto the bumper, feeling the wind, the speed, all of these things taunting. She is knocked over by the speed, like being shoved off a cliff.

Another image: An empty mailbox. A mailman wearing starched condescension through his mustache while Ella pesters him. Check again. What about that fat envelope? 

And yet another image, imagined: Mother arranging her apartment, trying to figure out an arrangement that connotes newness, filling walls with new photos, newspaper clippings of rising success. Mother is wearing a smile Ella cannot see, something wide and wonderful. And a voice within her subconscious wishes Mother luck. She will read Mother’s books someday and pretend she was right there while they were being written.

Another rip. Rip, rip, a sound that disrupts such thoughts.

She rips on until the party dress is but fleeting fabric, dispersed like a war zone. She starts ripping her own dresses too. The clock tower announces midnight, but Ella barely notices. The moon sets and she rips in the dark. She’ll buy new dresses, light blue and yellow and white. Dresses that don’t hold the weight of Mother’s choices. Ella rips the wallpaper. She’ll have it replaced with something functional, as Dad would put it. 

Up next to be ripped: Wallpaper, books, fabric, boxes of cereal, napkins. She rips until there’s just rawness and the faintest hint of sun creeping through the window. The clock tower signals a new morning, an old morning.

 

Yash Seyedbagheri is a graduate of Colorado State University’s MFA program in fiction. His story, “Soon,” was nominated for a Pushcart. Yash has also had work nominated for Best of the Net and The Best Small Fictions. A native of Idaho, Yash’s work is forthcoming or has been published in WestWard Quarterly, Café Lit, and Ariel Chart, among others.

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The tree was the last of it, left up into March until right before her birthday because neither of us could bear to see it go, as if it wasn’t real as long as the tree stood proudly in the corner, its boughs aching and what few needles were left stiff and piercing, as if that tree could still bring everything back to us okay, the living memory of taking the day off and talking to the tree lot guy about when the others might come in and would it be worth the wait, sizing them all up and down and letting it choose us as much as we chose it, then walking it home one of is in front of the other, she in her mind playing something out like the lobster scene in Annie Hall and me like Chevy Chase in bed with too much sap trying to read a magazine and enjoy the memory while it was being made, and the children were pointing at us eyes wide as we passed (a true mark of the season), and the burly high-wire installer guy in the van stopping us giddy to ask where we got it and how much was it and was that a Douglas or a pine, and we finally brought it in and up the stairs so the three of us could get drunk on Nat King Cole and spiked cocoa until we couldn’t stand it, like our hearts were spilling out onto the floor, like it hurt so much I wanted to die right there in that moment, and so we left it up into March until right before her birthday because it had to be out by her birthday, it wasn’t fair to leave it up past her birthday, so we dragged it out to the deck and hoisted it over the edge like we were at sea, and we finally let it drop, and we observed a moment of silence to hear the thud and mark the occasion and finally wept for the end of the year and all we had lost and were losing and squeezed our eyes shut tight, hoping to better see whatever pinpoints of light might come through.

 

Robert John Miller’s work has appeared in Hobart, Necessary Fiction, MoonPark Review, X-R-A-Y, Peregrine and others. You can find more stories at robertjohnmiller.com. He lives in Chicago and is polishing his first novel.

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The sun warmed my skin as I stood still, waiting, listening for the crunch slide, crunch slide of his steps on the gravel driveway. It would become my cicada song, sending my heart into dysrhythmic palpitations, stealing breath each time. He walked to me, crunching, sliding, and pressed me against the heat of my car, my hand brushing the bumps of his stick-and-poke tattoo, latching on as the cicadas hummed a low, piercing tone in the background.

“Calvin Klein! Looking sharp! Come on, son. He just got here. Let him breathe,” a voice boomed.

“Hi, Ned! I’ve always considered myself more of a Ben Sherman guy,” I answered.

Strong fingers pressed into my wrists. I could feel the ink transfer to my skin. A tattooed warning to keep my mouth shut. “Just about to check on the upper orchard, Dad,” my Cicada Song called over his shoulder. He shot me a look.

“My eyes were closed,” I defied.

“What a romantic.” The sarcasm dripped from his pores.

A cicada shed its skin at my feet.

***

The truck growled over the terrain. We rode along the road, enclosed in a fence to keep the deer from eating the fruit of the upper orchard. Going off road in an old pick-up truck was not a gentle ride. Lily the German Shepherd cooled off by breathing down my neck. I heard the cries of cicada nymphs crushed under the tires. Seventeen years underground and they never got to sing a song. The bees had a gift to give. Sugary puke to soothe allergies and sweeten tea.

My Cicada Song parked the truck a safe distance from the beehives dressed in white. He wore a veil over his head and vowed to make them sleep with a canister of smoke in his hand. I listened for our song in the grass. Squish slide, squish slide. Lily tailed behind while I searched the ground. My Cicada Song returned with honey in hand. I held up a cicada’s ghost shell. We drove back in silence.

***

We had to be quick. The river has a tide, and if it gets too low, we would be stuck in river weeds. The island wasn’t really an island. It was a grouping of rocks between the main orchard’s property and the Amtrack Hudson line heading north. We pushed the rowboat into the water, and I climbed to the bow. I sat and listened for the song: swoop splash, swoop splash; escorted to an island of bird shit rocks. Supposedly this was relaxing, in the blaring sun, as the commuters rumbled by only a few hundred feet away in the bay.

I didn’t complain, of course. I did not steal someone’s solace. I made the most of my time on the island of rocks, where the river lapped at the algae. A soothing sound. I even tried to spy a face as the train cars flew by. The water followed the tide, and we went back to shore. We were greeted by silence. A cicada’s ghost.

***

“Come out in five minutes,” my Cicada Song told me as he walked by with a towel over his shoulder. I closed my eyes and heard the swoosh slide, swoosh slide of his bare feet on the laminate wood floor. He went to shower under the full moon. The idea seemed cold, but I was up for an adventure. A shower under the night sky. The end of summer sounds. Soap. Steam. I kissed his neck and we had a ritual moon bath. The sky opened up. We scurried inside, both hot and cold.

Together, still naked, we slipped between stark white sheets. My heart bled that night. “I don’t love you,” he said. I didn’t sleep. A specter slipped my spine.

***

Fall came and the apples rotted, mealy slick littering the grounds. I sat on the ground at his feet listening for our cicada song. His feet moved along the floor in silence. It was getting close to Thanksgiving. We both had to travel. I stroked his stick-and-poke tattoo but nothing happened. No ink stain. No pin prick on my soul.

I boarded a plane to San Francisco, the cold air in the upper atmosphere chilled my skin. My Cicada stopped singing, driving south, stopping in Nashville, Savannah. I stood at the Pacific Ocean—the salt frothing at my feet, unpacified—and received a message from the waves that he was singing for someone new.

***

It was the summer of the cicadas when our story began. They lay dormant for seventeen years. Burrowed through the soil in search of romance, shedding their skin. The insects’ symphony buzzed the orchard. Little did they know how short-lived that summer would be. Nor did we.

We continued through the fall and winter, despite the death of our love. It died in the boughs of the trees. Its dried carcass corroded by the sun. Maybe it was eaten by wasp. A giant wasp called incompatibility. I sit here still, remembering December nights in a poorly insulated barn, accompanied by complacency, and the cold memory chills this room.

 

Ryan Norman is a writer from New York living in the Hudson Valley. Inspired by the landscape, he writes what he feels. His work has appeared in From Whispers to Roars, XRAY Literary Magazine, Black Bough Poetry, Storgy Magazine and elsewhere. You can find him on Twitter @RyanMGNorman and an updated list of his publications at Linktree: https://linktr.ee/RyanMGNorman

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It had been years since Maury had ridden on a train, and now with the momentum beneath his feet thrusting him toward the terminal, he laid his head back against the seat and remembered something his father used to say whenever he pulled the station wagon into the garage: “End of the line,” he’d call out like a conductor.

An orange glare filled the compartment. Outside, it was dark. All he could see was his own reflection until they came to a town with lit-up signs or flashing red lights blocking off the crossways.

Growing up in Bryan, Ohio, there had been tracks behind his house. He loved hearing the forlorn whistle in the night as he fell asleep and the iron wheels grinding against the steel rails. Sometimes, he would stand in the back yard watching the Cleveland-bound Pensy from Chicago, his eyes flickering back and forth as the cars rattled by. Sometimes, he laid pennies on the track to be flattened. Twice a day, early morning and late at night, the Lakeshore Limited swooshed by with passengers gazing out. He always waved at them. Sometimes, they waved back.

Once, for his eighth birthday, his parents surprised him with a ride. That morning, he and his mother boarded the Lakeshore Limited, his father seeing them off at the station. Maury remembered the bored looks on the commuters’ faces, how they closed their eyes and napped or read the newspaper. One woman hunched over a crossword puzzle, the eraser tip poised to her lips, thinking.

He sat on his mother’s lap, staring out the window at the passing scenery. Trees, houses, farms, cars, horses, cows, pigs—they all seemed to be rushing backwards as he hurtled forwards. He held his mother’s warm hand. His breath steamed the window. The conductor called out the stops: Waterloo! Elkhart! When they disembarked at the next stop, in South Bend, there on the platform stood his father, waiting, and they all got in the station wagon and drove back home.

He remembered something else his father used to say: “The angels always sing in heaven.” “Always?” Maury had once asked. “Always,” his father had said. “They never stop, ever.” But surely, Maury thought, they must take a break now and then. Surely, if anyone deserved a rest, they did.

 

DS Levy lives in the Midwest. She has had work published in New World Writing, Bending Genres, Bull Men’s Fiction, Atticus Review, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, and others. Her flash chapbook, A Binary Heart, was published by Finishing Line Press.

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In the driveway the care assistant waits patiently in her small blue car as Don makes his final visit to what had been his home for over forty years of happy married life and afterwards to several solitary years.

Just soldiering on. He recalls his jolly response, frequently practised, to the concerns of neighbours, friends and relatives. “Still soldiering on,” he murmurs as he thinks of his worsening arthritis and the myriad ailments afflicting his ancient body. He grips his stick firmly with his bony arthritic hand. “Some soldier!” he mutters with a wry smile.

Moving to the care home, abandoning his beloved home and garden, he’d put a brave face on that. “A strategic withdrawal,” was the way he described it to anyone who was interested. He would share a smile, guessing their thoughts as they nodded their approval. Still got spirit – the old chap. Strategic withdrawal. Hah, hah. Last stand more like. 

In a few days’ time the new owners will take possession. Don does not want to enter the house. He easily visualises the rooms, bare of furniture, stripped down to the floorboards, all pictures, shelves empty, all his books gone – an alien place, as alien as his small room in the care home. My hutch he calls it remembering the cage where he kept his pet rabbit as a child. It’s just the garden he has come back to see. Stick in hand he makes his way slowly through the tressled archway hung with climbing roses, rich red and yellow in the summer. “Need deadheading,” he mutters, as he notes the seed bulbs where the flowers had been.

In form and layout, the garden still resembles the arena of a shared life, the years of their retirement. Memories come easily to him, but often they are more than just memories, rather portals to a different time; in that instant, to a neatly maintained garden when he hears again their laughter, the sound of amicable argument, and sees once more his lifelong chum as she bends and plucks a weed, pruning and occasionally turning to nod approval of his manly efforts – his digging perhaps, or his sawing.

Fruit is forming on the ancient apple tree. Going to be a good crop, he thinks. Perhaps, like his wife, someone in the incoming family will convert the fruit into something stewed, an apple pie perhaps, or – the flow of his mind falters – or, perhaps something else.

After his departure to the care home the garden maintenance contract was discontinued. The rain and sun of the summer months have encouraged strong growth. He looks around. Doing what plants do. Growing. Between plants and the gardeners there is a relationship. Will against nature. Conscious of his frailty he chuckles to himself. And nature always wins. 

For several minutes he looks around, then suddenly realises that he is bored. Nothing more to see, he thinks, and, with a small barely perceptible shrug, casts a last quick glance around the garden before heading back to the car. At the archway, a trailing rose branch catches the sleeve of his jacket. Carefully, gently – my last act as a gardener, he muses – he tries to secure the errant branch back in its place; but a second later it whips outward, a thorn lancing into his hand. “Damn and blast,” he shouts.  Grimacing he watches the blood ooze from the puncture point and quickly grow to the size of a small coin. He sucks at the wound. A big red full stop at the end of a long, long chapter. Inwardly he shrugs. Only one sentence remains. Back to the hutch! 

The care assistant, a buxom, young, jovial woman named Helen or Hilda – Don can never exactly remember her name – gives him a tissue and is clucking about his wound.

“That will need looking at.”

“I think I’ll survive,” Don murmurs. Not that it really matters. He does not share the thought. It would prompt discussion. Is Don a bit depressed? A note might be inserted in his record. The staff will award him an extra dose of manufactured cheerfulness. Jollification he calls it. Be happy as you crumble!

“These garden scratches can be nasty,” Hilda – or is it Helen? – is saying with unchallengeable authority.

As they reverse out of the driveway, Don suddenly becomes aware that he is hungry.  I wonder what’s for lunch, he is thinking.

 

John Young is an old chap, grappling with themes of limits, longings and finitude.  Likes spooky stuff. Lives in St Andrews, Scotland, an ancient town with an ancient university, home of golf, home also – allegedly – of many ghosts. (He has not met any yet.)

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A girl my age died our senior year; kidnapped, raped, murdered, mutilated, her body in a bag left in a shed. I didn’t know her. I remember reading the newspaper (we still did that then) and seeing two photos. The first was her, poised and smiling. The second was the shed where she rotted.

I recognized it, had driven past it hundreds of times on my way to the dam. But it was just some shitty sheet metal shed in a farmer’s field. I’d never stopped before, but I’d noticed it.

Death was still romantic to me at seventeen, and I drove to the shed that night by the moon, with flowers for her. When I hit the access road, I parked. I left the car running. Death Cab was on a loop; Plans had just come out.

She wasn’t there, of course, but I felt her. I stood chattering in the cut corn during the last cool night of summer’s end, unaware of the chill of ghosts and bad men. It was the first time I knew that a body in a bag in a sheet metal shed in a cornfield in autumn somewhere in Ohio could just as well be me.

 

Vic Nogay is an emerging writer of poetry and flash fiction; her work tends to explore small traumas, misremembrances, and Ohio, where she is from. She has one poem forthcoming with The Daily Drunk. After earning her English/Creative Writing degree from Denison University in 2010, she discovered a passion for animal welfare working as a humane agent. Her return to writing is a personal reclamation.

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1908, Ellis Island, New York

 

I fidget in a line formed by women and children. My forehead drips with perspiration from climbing several steps up to this enormous hall; my ears brim with snatches of conversations.

I smooth my circle skirt decorated with floral embroidery and inspect my black vest and white blouse for any signs of filth. My black leather boots shine.

When my turn comes, a gray-haired man in a dark uniform stares at my stomach. He asks me something, but I don’t understand. My heartbeat quickens. He grabs a piece of white chalk and marks “X” on my vest. Then he takes me across the hall to a small room that smells of stale sweat.

My breathing is shallow. I’m pregnant and unmarried, so I’m undesirable to them. They are sending me back to Poland. At the thought of traveling another two weeks in the ship’s steerage, a sense of dread rolls through the pit of my stomach. I beg him to let me stay, but he doesn’t understand me, and I don’t understand him. He walks away.

Hours pass, but time seems to slow down. I finger my necklace of coral  beads. They surely forgot about me. But the screeching door swings wide open, and a young, fair-haired doctor charges into the room. 

“Name and age,” he says in a heavy accented Polish, a mask of reserve seeming to cover his smooth face.

“Bronka Sosnacz.” I keep my voice steady while a spark of hope lingers in my heart. “I’m nineteen.”

After a detailed physical examination, he narrows his eyes and asks, ”Where is your husband, Bronka?” 

“I’m not married.” In my head, I curse my parents who instilled truthfulness in me. 

He stands up. “I’m sorry, but we can’t let you into this country.”

As adrenaline shoots through my system, I touch my belly. “The father of my baby is from a noble family, and I’m just a peasant girl.” My chin trembles. “His family forbade him from marrying me.”  

“You surely don’t talk like a peasant.” 

“I take pleasure in reading.”

His blue eyes soften. “Do you have anyone here?” 

“My great-aunt offered to help me out.” 

He is silent for a moment, his eyes focus on mine. “Welcome to America,” he says. A smile plays about his lips. “We need people as honest and strong as you are.”

 

Gosia Nealon lives in Lake Ronkonkoma, New York, with her husband and two sons. She graduated from the University of Warmia and Mazury in Poland with a master’s degree in Environmental Engineering. Her work was recently awarded fourth place in the Genre Short Story category in the Annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition. Her previous work had appeared in Eko Swiat, The Polish Ecological Monthly Magazine.

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Watery light came through the small patch of window above her kitchen table, enough to guide Maribella to the now-silent fridge. She had not been aware that her fridge hummed until it stopped humming. She had not been aware how many sounds electricity makes until it stopped; a symphony of white noise. Her whole apartment was coated in silence, it rested thick on her tongue and mingled with the darkness to create a bitter taste. 

Beads of sweat began to rise from her skin, joining together to form larger drops, tickling her back on their way down. The heat had immediately rushed in to replace the cool air of the AC, a power vacuum of temperature. She decided to eat the ice cream first in her mission to handle the defrosting food. Standing by the freezer, she took a brief moment to strategize. There were two pints, both Ben & Jerry’s, one Half-Baked and one Cherry Garcia, one her favorite and one Jackson’s. Both would melt before the power came back on, Maribella was sure. The New York Times alert had dispassionately informed her the blackout would last at least twenty-four hours. The message sat on top of the text from Jackson telling her he would be by tomorrow to get his stuff from her apartment. It was a notification tower of crappy news. 

She opened the freezer door in a quick movement, scooping both pints into her arms as if cradling a lumpy, cold baby. She hugged the ice cream to her body for a moment, reveling in the splinters of ice working their way into her bones, before she set both pints down on the coffee table in front of her couch. 

Half-Baked first. She dug the spoon into the mound of cream and sugar, struggling to excavate a bite of cookie dough. She let the first bite rest in her mouth, the cold numbing her tongue and the sweetness trickling down the back of her throat. She saved the cookie dough for last, only crashing her teeth down once the last of the ice cream had dissolved around it. She let out a sigh and relaxed farther into the coach, allowing the synthetic material to sponge up the accumulated sweat from her back and legs. A grim smile swept across her features. She was eating ice cream alone in the dark after a breakup. How cliche. 

Each bite was progressively easier to scoop as the ice cream melted, and harder to eat as her stomach filled and her teeth ached. She tried to keep her mind blank, a meditative ice cream state. As her spoon scraped the bottom of the container, she turned her attention to the Cherry Garcia. Her stomach already hurt, and there was so much other food to get to in her fridge. There was leftover chicken from Monday’s dinner, parsley and cilantro wilting in their vegetable drawer, and chunks of cheese likely sweating in their saran wrap. There was so much food she would prefer to Jackson’s Cherry Garcia. 

She dug her spoon in, the first taste overpoweringly sweet. It drowned out any remnants of the cookie dough, the cherry flooding through her system. The dark of the power outage closed in with each bite. She gagged as it slipped down her throat. She was suffocating. She kept going. 

An image rose of the ice cream curdling in her stomach, the two pints fusing together with her stomach acid. The final inch of Cherry Garcia was now a liquid resembling diluted and chunky Pepto Bismol. Maribella abandoned the spoon, raising the container like a cup and pouring the remaining gunk into her waiting mouth. 

She rested a hand on her protruding stomach but the slight pressure proved to be too much. She ran to the bathroom. She scooped her hair up in one hand and wrenched the toilet seat up with the other. For a moment, she tried to fight down the tide of vomit, swallowing and clamping her mouth shut. Her jaw shrieked from the pressure. The ice cream won the battle. His and hers came rushing up, a creamy half-digested torrent clawing its way out of her throat. Her body convulsed, squeezing out every drop of cherry and cookie dough. 

Maribella sat in the dark of the bathroom, catching her breath and wiping a dribble of vomit from her chin. Her hand returned to her still distended stomach, cradling the baby bump beginning to form.

 

Victoria Dillman is a Canadian writer living in New York. She is an MFA candidate in Fiction at The New School and a Foreign Rights Associate at a literary agency. This story is her debut.

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I should have written before. Papa sent me the boondi ladoos you like, and I knew I should try to explain. You’ve been waiting so patiently. He’s doing that more often now, sending treats but mixing up people’s favourites, sometimes their names. He addressed the package to Gunjita. I kept the wrapping with her name, put it in the box with that bookmark she embroidered and her memorial card. Papa’s the only one who thought we looked alike. Sisters often don’t.

                                                                                    ***

The story goes like this, a farmer and his wife finally had a baby boy after many years of trying. They knew there’d never be siblings, so they find a mongoose to keep him company. The mongoose watches over the baby, brings him presents of dead frogs and grasshoppers which the wife sweeps away. The couple are called to an emergency, the mongoose is left as guard. The farmer’s idea, the wife is… less sure. They return to a mongoose with a mouth crimson with blood and no sign of the baby. The wife is distraught, tears her hair, rends her clothes, throws a cooking pot at the animal. Only to discover her boy peacefully sleeping under the stove, next to a headless snake. The brave mongoose, though, is dead. Sacrificed.

                                                                                 ***

I’ve been trying to keep track of everything. The accommodation, my text books, signing up to classes. Gunjita would have loved it. It’s family legend that she drew her wedding in 5th Standard, right down to how she would wear her hair and the embroidery on her crimson sari. Had you asked her then? She planned it for February too, although you probably told each other those kinds of secrets. Papa always said you’d fit in the family. I liked reading about frogs and snakes, liked catching dragonflies in the fields. Marriage was for other people.

                                                                                ***

The other version, the origin story, is that the wife, tired and heartsore from many, many lost children, makes a bargain with Nature itself. Give her a baby and she’ll pay any price. When the mongoose arrives uninvited, she thinks, this is the Reckoning. She never bargained how long she could keep the baby. Nature is known to be cruel. She doesn’t sleep, she barely eats. The rage that floods her when she kills the animal, the knowing that she has that ultimate power doesn’t strike her as the penance until much, much later. Her name wasn’t written down but she lives on as a warning. Emotions tear into you from the inside, sharper than teeth or claw.

                                                                                ***

I supposed I wanted to see whether I’d fit in with these people, whether the grey feelings would stay at home. It was never about running away, or that you remind me of her. It doesn’t matter that you asked her first, I promise. I know you’re not the only one waiting for me to say yes. I think you always knew what I would say.

 

Anita Goveas is British-Asian, London-based, and fuelled by strong coffee and paneer jalfrezi. She was first published in the 2016 London Short Story Prize anthology, most recently in The Ilanot Review and Little Fiction. She’s on the editorial team at Flashback Fiction, an editor at Mythic Picnic’s Twitter zine, and tweets erratically @coffeeandpaneer. Her debut flash collection, ‘Families and other natural disasters’, is available from Reflex Press, and links to her stories are at https://coffeeandpaneer.wordpress.com

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Imagine this. You’re glancing out the window, watching the clouds float as you glide towards your future. The woman next to you twirls her iridescent earrings and turns the fan above her head, muttering about the clamminess.

Don’t you feel it too? she asks you to which you give a nonchalant shrug. 

Your thoughts aren’t on the temperature, but of him. Thirty-eight thousand feet below, in his bedroom, listening to records whilst his narrow body reclines on his Star Wars bedsheets. Your thoughts so singular you are blind, caring not for your surroundings.

So uncomfortable, she continues, now batting her hands madly in the air. 

You close your eyes, feigning sleep. You let your mind drift, to the previous night, when you too lay carefree on his bed, patting down R2D2, whilst you watched a film. One of you is enjoying it, the proximity, the bareness of the others ankle, the softness of such skin teasing. One of you is in love with the other. The other is so adroit at missing such clues, they are oblivious. 

I’ll miss you, you know, he says, when you’re travelling in America. You’re going to make the most incredible memories and come home a completely different person.  

You close your eyes and swallow. You like who you are just now. You enjoy your life, there is nothing wrong with it. Everybody tells you that when you leave, you will return a better person, that you are lucky for this experience, that it will change your life. But all you want is him. You cannot see yourself existing in a different time zone without him by your side, where he has always been. 

I’ll miss you too, you say, I… 

What is it? 

No. It’s nothing.

You sure? Because you can tell me anything. You know that.

No. It’s nothing.

You swallow your syllables whole. You want to say so much more. You wish you were eloquent, expert with words and able to tell him the truth. You do not know as an adult, you will develop such skills and look back on your younger self, feeling desperately sad you were unable to express yourself freely at such a tender age. That sadness will take permanent residency inside you as you look back at all the missed opportunities throughout your youth with him. You do not know, as you sit on the plane, pummelling towards your future, that when you return, three months later, he will no longer be for you for he will be bound to another. Not that he was ever for you to begin with. But your lack of boldness, that night, before America, will leave you questioning, forever guessing, what ifs and you will never know.

You leave his room, the childhood bedroom of your best friend, walk home and sleep. You think of his face which you know better than your own as the excitement of America bubbles in your stomach, a bittersweet sensation. 

Ridiculous. This heat, the woman says, her elbows prodding your ribs as your eyes ping open in discomfort. You check your watch. Four more hours to go. Four more hours until your future, as they say, begins. When you will be eight hours behind him. He will have lived his day without you whilst yours just begins, without him. Loneliness catches in your throat and you swallow it. There is no place for loneliness on a plane, surrounded by people, all chasing dreams, looking forward, never back. A plane full of strangers. Time passes. Three hours to go. Two hours. One hour. 

The plane lands, sending your body forward with a jolt as the woman beside you complains of whiplash. You stifle a laugh, having grown quite fond of her, finding her bitterness slightly comical. You wish her luck and make your way from the plane as the foreign wind caresses your skin. You walk with the crowd, with an eagerness in your eye, noticing the same shared expression upon those you step in time with, feeling secretly bonded. The world is yours, and, with every step you take, you leave him and the life you know, behind.

 

Hannah Sutherland is a Scottish writer. Her short story The Encounter is currently shortlisted for the Aurora Prize in Writing 2020. She has writing published in Product Magazine, WriteNow: A Literary Journal and Milkyway Magazine. Forthcoming work will be in Remington Review Fall 2020, Fahmidan Journal and the Dark Poets Club. She can be found on Twitter @HannahWrites88

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Her grandparent’s home was located on a quiet street directly across from an old cemetery. At night, when the house was silent and everyone was asleep, she would climb out of bed, sit by the window, and watch the evening mist blanket the gravestones one by one. One might think the proximity of the cemetery, especially at night, would be unsettling for the girl, but it wasn’t. She drew comfort from it, though she didn’t know why. 

During the long summer days, she walked the grounds inspecting the headstones. Many were old with sepia tintypes set in the stone above the resident’s name. She would study the image and wonder if the person buried below had any idea, when the photograph was taken, that one day it would adorn their final resting place. She wondered what image would mark her headstone. She liked to think it would be the one of her wearing her pink, one-piece bathing suit, a turquoise swimming pool in the background. She realized, that much like the inhabitants of the cemetery, her Kodak image would have had no idea what was to come—the subject still alive when posing for the camera, still breathing, still thinking, still wanting, now forever frozen in the past. Life would be over, just a memory—a memory for those who were left. 

One night she got out of bed, and instead of sitting by the window, she swung her legs over the sill and lowered herself into the garden. She stopped for a moment to gaze up at the corner streetlamp buzzing with insect life. She listened to the crickets tuning their wings and imagined them calling a warning or a greeting or even a fuck you across the yard, across the cemetery, across the tiny town. The idea of crickets chanting four letter words made her smile. She had recently discovered the word fuck, and it gave her a lot of pleasure. She would never say it out loud of course, but she thought it quite a lot. 

She walked past the stone pillars that marked the entrance to the cemetery grounds. Rows of headstones, statues of angels, and small mausoleums with rusted iron gates fanned out before her. In the distance, tall pines marked the boundary where the original cemetery ended and the newer section with acres of lawn began. She much preferred the old section with its crumbling monuments and narrow pathways. 

She walked up and down the rows, pausing to touch the top of a headstone, run her hand across the wing of an angel, touch the cheek of a Virgin Mary—savoring the coolness of the stone in the heavy, misty air. She was alone, and she fantasized she could do anything—fly if she wanted to. It was an amazing sensation, to feel so free, so unrestricted, so safe. How odd to feel safe in a graveyard. She didn’t feel safe as a rule. The world was an unpredictable place, dangerous even. But here, alone and barefoot, wearing her pajamas, she was content and completely at ease. 

She was turning a slow circle, her arms outstretched when she saw the boy sitting on the shoulder of an angel. 

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“What are you doing?” she replied mid-spin, her arms still outstretched.

“Thinking,” he said.

“Spinning,” she said.

“Why?’

“I dunno. I just felt like it. What are you thinking about?’

“Stuff.”

“Who are you?” she asked.

“Who are you?” he replied.

“I asked you first.” 

“I asked you second.”

“I’m visiting my grandparents, they live across the street,” she said, pointing in the direction of the house.

“Oh, I’m visiting too.”

“I’ve never seen you before,” she said coming a little closer.

“I haven’t been here very long.”

“It’s my birthday in three days,” she said. “I’m gonna be twelve.”

“I’m thirteen,” the boy said, jumping down from the angel’s shoulder.

They stood face to face, sizing each other up. The boy was taller than she and his hair was much darker. He was wearing jeans and sneakers and a loose tee shirt. 

They studied each other for a moment and then walked the paths together like old friends. They commented on the headstones and the carvings and the general uselessness of adults. They didn’t notice the angel on a child’s tombstone turn its head as they passed by. The Virgin Mary, near the chapel entrance, inhaled and exhaled, and the eyes of a cherub followed their movements as they walked up and down the rows. It was as if the cemetery breathed and flexed and stretched in their wake. 

The boy picked up a pinecone and threw it in the direction of the newer section with the expanse of grass. She liked the way he threw, like it was a baseball. 

The sky was turning light and the girl realized she had been out almost all night.

“I have to go,” she said. “It’s late, or early, or something. It will be morning soon.”

“Yeah, I have to go too.”

“I wish we didn’t,” she said.

“Me too,” the boy replied, throwing another pinecone. 

All that day she thought about the boy in the cemetery. She wondered if he was real or a dream. She made herself a tomato sandwich and took it with her across the street. She sat in the shade of a weeping willow and closed her eyes. She dreamt about the boy and the crickets and the marble headstones. She woke to find a small, perfectly shaped pinecone in her hand. 

That night she lay in bed waiting for the house to settle. When she was certain all was quiet, she took the pinecone and slipped out the window. Once again, crickets tuned their wings and sang a concert of fuck you-s into the night air. 

She entered the cemetery looking for the boy. She found him balancing on the peak of a small mausoleum.

“Hey,” she called up to him.

“Hey,” he said concentrating on his balancing act.

“I have something for you.”

She watched as the boy scaled the side of the structure and dropped to the ground. She pulled the pinecone from her pocket and held it out to him.

“You can have it,” she said.

“Thanks,” he said, taking it from her outstretched hand.

They walked the rows of headstones, this time studying the ancient tintype photographs. As they walked, they didn’t notice the images come alive. A sepia-toned woman in a corseted dress turned her head to follow them as they passed by, a man in a World War I uniform shifted his weight from one leg to the other, a dog seated next to a child, swiveled his ears in the direction of their footsteps, the child tightened his hold on the hound. Once again, the cemetery breathed and flexed and stretched as they walked. It held them and moved with them, inhaled and exhaled with them—its heart beating in sync with theirs. They were protected, safe, embraced.

The girl looked up at the sky, and though it was still dark, she knew it was going to be morning soon.

“I have to go,” she said.

“Me too,” the boy said.

“I wish we didn’t,” she said. “I wish it would never be morning, and we would never have to leave.”

“Me too,” the boy said again.

The stone angels sighed, the Virgin Mary turned her head, the marble cherubs blinked and looked away, the black and white image of the child tightened its hold on the black and white hound. The cemetery inhaled and exhaled and flexed and stretched. It sighed with the stone angels, and the Virgin Mary, and the cherubs. It gently held the boy, and gently held the girl, and mustering all its strength and determination forever held the moon in the indigo sky. And by doing so, eternally kept the night from giving in and giving way to the light of day so that the boy and the girl never had to leave, never had to be afraid, and never had to be alone.

 

Wood Reede was a featured author in Quiet Lightning‘s annual Poetry in the Parks 2020 and was a semifinalist for the Allegra Johnson Prize in Novel Writing. A graphic designer by profession, Wood is also an avid backpacker and a vintage clothing junkie. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and son, their opinionated, one-eyed rescue cat, and Watson, their Miniature Schnaupin.

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