Will Willoughby

While I Have You

To: Research Validation Division <a.acton@underpil.com +52 others>

From: Dave Fitner

Subject: Help?

Hi, all,

Does anybody know, or could help me find out, how I could donate or otherwise pass along what’s probably several 30-gallon trash bags of women’s clothing? It’s blouses, slacks, dresses, pajamas, robes, and such, but shoes as well, including sandals and water shoes, and accessories like belts, scarves, head bands, and things I don’t know what to call. Also jewelry.

Maybe Goodwill? I’ll need a pickup situation, is all. Since we all went home, I’ve been having seizures, so I’m grounded for a while. And it’s all free. I just need to get it out of the house.

Dave

* * *

 To: Dave Fitner

From: Kenn Graves

Subject: RE: Help?

Attachment: CommChannelsFinal.docx

David,

I’ve stripped everyone else from the string to surface the Comm Protocols (attached) for your review.

The salient sections outline the framework for deploying comms via the Division distribution list reserved exclusively for Leadership to disseminate updates on matters related to Divisional operations. For personnel seeking a forum for business-appropriate messaging such as items for sale, as in your case, a Community Chat has been mounted on the What’s U&P Connections4U page.

Once again, Leadership is deeply sorry for your loss.

Warm regards,

Kenn Graves

Associate Director, RVD, Underwood & Pilch

* * *

Hi, Kenn,

Right—forgot about the chat. My bad. Since I got back from leave, I’ve been off. Like there’s this hissy static in my head all day. And I don’t sleep. I rest, or I stay in bed for a long time without moving, but that’s not sleep, not really. I’ll get there.

Anyway, I’ve grabbed some sets of the uplift project. Figured that’d be a good way to ease back into things.

Dave

* * *

David,

Understood.

Please see attached EAP Guide to Mental Resources and Dental Plan. Contact HR via the Benefits Portal with any questions.

Warm regards,

Kenn Graves

Associate Director, RVD, Underwood & Pilch

* * *

Thanks, Kenn.

I’ll take a look. Maybe it’s the way to go. Things haven’t been great since the thing. Working at home doesn’t help. The seizures super don’t help. It’s hard to explain. It’s all the time now. I just stare into space, and my arms get crawly, and I lift off the floor and drop again, over and over, and want to puke. And I know—I’m sure—I’ve dreamed all whatever’s happening. Even the smallest thing—clicking that file, seeing that crumb on my keyboard, glancing at my phone just like that. And I have to remember what’s going to happen, based on the dream. I have to stop whoever’s going to do it. I don’t know who it is, just that he’s somebody I know. Or somebody I know but don’t know. Sometimes I see him in gallery meetings. He jumps into each face on the screen, one by one, but if I look right at him, he goes away. Next day, same thing.

Anyway, I’ll keep chugging.

I tried logging into the portal when I got back, but it gave me an error. It’s just my regular credentials, right?

Dave

* * *

David,

The Benefits Portal is under the purview of HR. Outreach them to troubleshoot your access.

Warm regards,

Kenn Graves

Associate Director, RVD, Underwood & Pilch

* * *

Kenn,

I’m not sure how to outreach HR to troubleshoot my portal access if I need to access the portal to outreach HR.

Do you have the HR phone number? It must be someplace, right? Maybe the portal. (ha ha)

* * *

David,

I’ve done some digging. Call the main line. They’ll connect you to our HR rep, Carla H., who can help you troubleshoot.

Warm regards,

Kenn Graves

Associate Director, RVD, Underwood & Pilch

* * *

Dear Kenn,

The main line people are pretty convinced the portal’s the way to get HR’s attention. After I explained the access issue, they said they’d have HR call me. Which, fine. But that was last Tuesday.

Does Carla H. have an email? I couldn’t find her in the directory, especially since I don’t know what the H stands for.

* * *

David,

I can’t resolve your Portal issue. It must be handled by HR.

Carla’s real name is Saundra. It’s s.holder@underpil.com.

Warm regards,

Kenn Graves

Associate Director, RVD, Underwood & Pilch

* * *

That makes a lot of sense, Kenn. Thanks for the clarifying clarification. Wondering: Why does she go by Carla if she’s really Saundra?

* * *

David,

I don’t know.

Warm regards,

Kenn Graves

Associate Director, RVD, Underwood & Pilch

* * *

Hi, Kenn,

Your assistance with the reopening of the portal is much appreciated! (Carla/Saundra says hey! Kind of a hey-yah, actually. Frankly, it’s unnerving friendliness, like you’d probably back away if you were in person, way beyond six feet. But hey—that’s classic Carla/Saundra, amirite?)

Turns out I just needed to clear my browser cache, should you ever need to avail yourself of well being and/or dental services.

Not sure what to expect from this portal now that it’s gaping open for the conquering! Will they put me through to a healthcare professional right there on the spot? Will they divert me to a receptionist who channels me to a second portal to scroll through an index of therapists so I can leave a voice mail for a scheduler who will schedule an appointment for two, three months out? And say I’m eventually connected to a healthcare professional, what then? Will I get a movie therapist (I hope!) who steadies me on my journey from grief to epiphany? Or will I spend a month or months spilling my guts (feat. blubbering) before I discover that this therapist abides by an Important Philosophy of Mental Health that emboldens them to constantly interrupt me in the name of disrupting my equilibrium, which just means I have to find somebody new, and then the cycle repeats, and I wait a month, another month, for a new therapist, who asks me to re-explain what’s wrong with me, but by then, I can’t even remember?

I’ll keep you in the loop! ;-)

* * *

David,

Glad to hear you found a therapist. Let me know if I can help.

While I have you, I’ve been asked to quietly update folks so they’re not caught off guard when this is socialized at the Quarterly Town Hall. Leadership, consulting with the Workload Task Force, has decided to merge the SNM and LOP divisions into a new entity, S&OL, which will be a streamlined functional group operating with an appreciably smaller workforce than the two original divisions combined.

Please keep this under your hat, as no personnel adjustments have been executed on.

Warm regards,

Kenn Graves

Associate Director, RVD, Underwood & Pilch

* * *

Kenn,

Bummer! Wonder what all those personnels are going to do for mental and tooth insurance.

* * *

David,

As always, I’ll assume good intent here and that you’re not cognizant of this, but the tone of your recent emails has drifted into quasi-professional waters. While I appreciate and even encourage positive (respectful) candor, please be aware of how an individual’s tone may be perceived by others, regardless of intention. Does that make sense?

Also, could you please update me on your progress on the uplift project, percentage-wise? I’m a bit worried you’re stretched thin.

Warm regards,

Kenn Graves

Associate Director, RVD, Underwood & Pilch

* * *

Kenn,

I wouldn’t say I’m stretched thin, but thanks for the compliment. ;-) Percentage-wise, the uplift project is somewhere between getting started and nowhere near being done. I grabbed the uplift stuff because it seemed to be a low priority. Is that no longer the case?

Re: my tone, I’ll keep that in mind. To exercise some positive (respectful) candor, I’ve got a cleanout project in flight at home that’s been claiming much of my energy. Between that and navigating the wellness waters, my plate’s been full. The at-home initiative will, I admit, take some time, as the volume is prohibitive. My primary end goal is to offload her items, including but not limited to her clothes, her shoes, her toiletries, her winter coats, her spring windbreakers, the backyard games she wanted, the camping gear we never used, the bedding that still smells like her, all her knickknacks, all her sheet music and books, all her sketches and paintings, all the photos, all the Post-its she left me in the morning, all the food she liked, and all the rest of whatever was hers and sometimes ours but now nothing at all.

Let me know your thoughts on the uplift project, and I can redirect my energies as need be. :-) ;-) :-( :-|

* * *

To: Saundra Holder

From: Kenn Graves

Subject: Personnel Question

Attachment: RE_ Help_.eml

Carla! How’s things? Sorry I haven’t checked in lately—it’s been a lot to deal with <gestures in every direction>. Since we went home, I’ve missed our lunchtime chats. Maybe do virtual lunch?

Wanted to get your thoughts on a direct report, David Fitner. His behavior’s been erratic lately. His performance hasn’t exactly been exceptional either. Hoping you can give me some viable options for a path forward. I’m sure we have to be careful, liability-wise.

Could you take a look at the attached email string? Let me know if you have time to chat.

Kenn

* * *

To: Kenn Graves

From: Saundra Holder

Subject: RE: Personnel Question

Mr. Kenn! Great to hear from you. :) Virtual lunch sounds awesome – let’s do it!

Looked over that email, he does seem out of sorts. I don’t think he crossed a line, he’s just venting. He was like that when I talked to him – real verbal. He’s looking for somebody to talk to.

I get what you’re saying with the “path forward” but there’s not much to do unless there’s a super obvious pattern. Performance would need to be coached and then a performance improvement plan given etc. before you get your path. Unless he just decides to move on.

All the best,

Carla

* * *

Thanks, Carla. I’ll monitor and let you know. But I like your idea—wait him out, see how he handles some more work. I’ve got a truckload. With the right catalyst, the situation could resolve itself.

See you for remote lunch tomorrow.

Mr. Kenn

* * *

To: Dave Fitner

From: Kenn Graves

Subject: Incoming Work

David,

I need you to jump on a request right away—it’s got a tight turnaround. Kevin S. will send you the details. We’re pushing the uplift project over to the contractors.

Warm regards,

Kenn Graves

Associate Director, RVD, Underwood & Pilch

* * *

To: Kenn Graves

From: Dave Fitner

Subject: RE: Incoming Work

Kenn,

What kind of job?

I’m partway through one of the sets. It’d be hard for somebody to pick that up midstream. Should I finish that one at least?

* * *

David,

Good question. No, leave that set unfinished. The contractors will do it. Your focus will be the packet Kevin S. is sending you. Have you heard anything yet?

Warm regards,

Kenn Graves

Associate Director, RVD, Underwood & Pilch

* * *

Kenn,

No, he hasn’t outreached me in the five minutes since your last email. Want me to drive to his house and see what’s taking so long?

* * *

David,

Let me know as soon as the packet arrives. I’ll need a quick rundown on your tack and a guesstimate on your ETA. See attached template JobRoadmapToT_final.pdf. You’ll need to convert it to Word. You have that software, yes?

Warm regards,

Kenn Graves

Associate Director, RVD, Underwood & Pilch

* * *

Kenn,

My license expired—meant to tell you. Could you just convert it to Word for me?

* * * 

David,

I could convert it but would rather take a teach-a-man-to-fish approach here. Please reach out to Ken B. through the Help Desk to have him reinstall the application this afternoon.

To summarize

1. Contact Ken B. for reinstallation of the software. A lengthy reboot will be necessary, and you’ll need to enter some basic job info. If you don’t have that on hand, it’s in the Portal.

2. Convert the template to Word format. Careful! The conversion process often dislocates labels from their related fields.

3. Notify me when Kevin S. contacts you. (He hasn’t outreached you yet?)

4. Complete the Word template, including your plan of attack and time estimates, remembering to update the total field for that column.

5. Give me an update on your progress on the packet. 

Make sense?

Warm regards,

Kenn Graves

Associate Director, RVD, Underwood & Pilch

* * *

David,

Haven’t heard back from you, so just a friendly reminder that you should be diving in by now. Kevin S. pinged me to say the packet got sent over. Have you cracked it open yet? Any do-ability blockers? Any word from IT on your software?

Keep me updated, please.

Warm regards,

Kenn Graves

Associate Director, RVD, Underwood & Pilch

* * *

David,

Shutting down for the day, but I’ll have my cell with me. Contact me first thing tomorrow.

Warm regards,

Kenn Graves

Associate Director, RVD, Underwood & Pilch

* * *

David,

You’re not logged in. There’s no answer on your cell. Check in asap.

Warm regards,

Kenn Graves

Associate Director, RVD, Underwood & Pilch

* * *

David,

Call me.

Warm regards,

Kenn Graves

Associate Director, RVD, Underwood & Pilch

* * *

To: Kenn Graves

From: Dave Fitner

Subject: Update

Kenn,

Got your notes. Thanks.

I’ve been thinking about the bedroom. It’s funny. Most of it’s painted pale mocha, but half of the east wall is an expanse of Granny Smith, this vibrant green that starts in the far corner and spreads toward the white window frame, where it terminates in a crisp vertical line. The wall behind my desk, to the right of the window, is still that milky brown. There are no curtains on the window, no shade or curtain rod. I’ve moved the paint cans, rollers, brushes, and drop cloths to the basement. But a strip of blue painter’s tape runs along the ceiling where it meets the wall. In the morning, the sun comes through that window and wakes me up, and I sit on the bed awhile. Today the bare branches of the oak outside my window are covered in ice. They droop and sway and turn the sunlight into pinpricks. I open the window so I can hear the branches tick in the breeze.

It’s been open all morning, the window. The cold feels heavy in my lungs. My feet are bare, but the radiator warms up the air near the floor. I imagine currents of cold pushing through the window over the warm air, shearing it off and spreading it out as the bent back of that warm pocket bulges up and then falls again. Particles of dust float through a column of sun.

Sunlight, I’ve read, is unspeakably ancient. Or it can be. Did you know that? Photons born in the heart of the sun take maybe tens of thousands of years to push their way through the churning plasma to the photosphere, where they streak at the speed of light across ninety-three million miles in only eight minutes to glint in the icy branches outside my window and lift the dust in my room. Moving that fast, the photons themselves don’t experience time. From the outside, though, billions of years have passed since the sun lit up, and billions more will follow until the sun swells into a gigantic red mouth that eats the inner planets and burns the life from the surface of our little world.

I’ll close the window eventually. I’ll take the painter’s tape down. I’ll put the curtains back up. I’ll get a new shade, one without a rip. I’ll dust. I’ll vacuum. I’ll put socks on, and then shoes. I’ll drink coffee. I’ll shovel the driveway in the winter, mow the lawn all summer. Kids will squeal in the sprinkler next door. I’ll rake leaves. I’ll take walks. Read. I’ll pay the bills, buy groceries. I’ll drive again. I’ll take my meds. I’ll do those things. I’ll do one thing and then another and then something else. The bedroom wall, though, will stay the way it is. I’ll leave it like that, half one thing and half another. Both and neither. I’ll see it there, just like that, when I wake up in the morning. I’ll think of it while I’m doing what I’m doing during the day. And I’ll see it there, as it is, when I eventually, quietly, go to sleep.

Be well, Kenn.

You have my address. Please send any hard-copy comms, including terminal remuneration, there.

David

* * *

To: Research Validation Division <a.acton@underpil.com +51 others>

From: Kenn Graves

Subject: Praise for a Fantastic Team!

All,

I wanted to extend my heartfelt kudos to all of you who participated in the audit and reconfiguration project! It’s heartening (but not surprising) to see such thoughtful dedication and continued resilience. What a team!

Quick update: Dave Fitner has decided to part ways from Underwood & Pilch for greener pastures. Effective immediately, any in-flight work should come directly to me. Thank you all for supporting him during his recent time of need. We appreciate you!

Finally, this time has been a trial for us all, and we’d like to remind you of the great support services available through the EAP. If you or anyone in your family is struggling with mental health, please contact HR through the Benefits Portal.

Warm regards,

Kenn Graves

Associate Director, RVD, Underwood & Pilch

#####

Author’s Note: “While I Have You” was inspired by the Reedsy.com prompt: “Write a story in the form of a letter, or multiple letters back and forth.”

---

Will Willoughby’s short stories, often populated with characters facing absurd, comically sad situations, can be found in Epiphany, Defenestration, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife and daughter in southern Maine and can be reached through the contact form at www.willwilloughby.com.

Jude Potts

For sale, one womb, unused. Buyer collects.

A woman in a green kaftan wants to use my womb for an Etsy craft project. A light-fitting. It will “cast a diffuse pink glow and throw fascinating shadows”. She’s brought a Tupperware box. I place my womb inside, a soft click locks away unfulfilled dreams of unheld children. 

She checks that the womb’s empty. 

‘Never used,’ I remind her. 

You always demurred and deferred decisions about kids, until it was too late. You seemed relieved about my early menopause. Joked about saving money on condoms. You saved money on condoms with your new girlfriend too. I hear she’s six months pregnant. My womb ached at the news.

The Etsy lady usually uses fire extinguishers, car parts, old roller boots to make her lamps. This will be her first womb. 

‘Rare to find one in such pristine shape.’ she remarks, explaining how she’ll replace the fallopian tubes with LEDs.

I use the money to fix the kitchen ceiling you were always promising to get sorted, but never did.

Next, I sell an ovary. No use without the womb. I market it as an artistic ‘talking point’ sculpture. I show it carefully backlit, on a dark wood shelf, white wall behind. It gets snapped up by an interiors shop in Chichester. I sell the second, regretting I didn’t sell them as a pair. More valuable that way, like vases, bookend, or plant pots. And people.

Your new girlfriend still needs her ovaries, already talking about baby number two, a brother, a sister, to make sure your child doesn’t grow up alone. No one thrives when they’re lonely. I spend the ovary money on a cat. I name him Egg. He spends most of his time outdoors. Like he can smell need on me and can’t bear the stench.

I think about the shit-eating grin you gave every time my fingers beat a twitching tattoo of pleasure on the mattress, and I can’t sleep. My heart heaves. I want a new mattress. I think about selling the heart I don’t want anymore because it hurts. I toy with the idea of renting it out. The price of property is sky-high; I’m sure it would do as a bedsit. I empty it ready for rental, throwing out the ache from hearing you’re engaged. I send a text filled with congratulations I almost mean. I tell you I’m having a clear out, ask if there’s anything here you still want. You say - nothing.

The insurance needs paying, I decide I’ll lease part of my brain. I clear out memories I can’t use anymore. Your hand holding mine as we strolled cobbled streets one summer’s afternoon. Ice cream melting in my spare hand. Your tongue as you lifted my hand to your mouth, following the trail of vanilla down my wrist. The reassuring warmth and heft of you curled around my body one winter’s night, the wind rattling the tiles on the roof, your gentle kiss on my shoulder as I twitched awake, your breath tingling on my neck as you ssshed me back to sleep. 

A tech-bro rents the space. He uses it to store defunct cryptocurrency, old social media sites and other techno junk he really should just throw away. He swears some of his NFTS will be collectors’ items. He pays over the odds and I replace the mattress with leftover money. I hear him rummaging sometimes. I find it comforting. Like the sound of neighbours chatting as they cook together like we used to; drinking wine and sharing each other’s days. 

I wonder again about selling or leasing my heart. The house, once our home, costs too much on one income. In the end, I hang onto the heart and sell the house, easier without the memories that gave it meaning. 

I move into an apartment. Egg befriends a neighbour’s tabby. The neighbour invites me round. We talk cats, tech bros and lost love as he chops carrots and we drink wine. 

Egg and the tabby strut past the window with knowing looks on their furry faces. They stop and sniff at the open window, Egg slips in and winds himself around my legs. I don’t stink of loneliness that offends him tonight. 

A warm twinge in my chest. I’m glad I kept the heart.

---

Jude Potts is a full-time carer and sometime writer with work in WestWord and Free Flash Fiction, plus forthcoming work in Pure Slush’s Loss Anthology and Urban Pigs’ Hunger Anthology.

Eliana Megerman

Liminal

My left toe disappeared first. I thought perhaps my vision was just blurry, or that the morning sleep remained in my eyes. A ring of burgundy had formed under the empty wine bottles I'd left on the white countertop the night before, and a quick survey revealed dishes in the sink—again. All the self-help books recommend clean sinks, and also making your bed. The taut blanket leads to positive feelings about your life, and actually, for a few days I did feel better. I googled hospital corners and that motivated me for almost a week of mornings, but I could never keep it going. Other things always became a priority, like washing my hair or brushing my teeth.

When my boss offered the work-from-home option, I jumped. The daily commute was wearing me down. Merging onto the highway, the glare of sun in my eyes and the visor not quite blocking it, the honking, the gas tank constantly teasing towards empty. Plus, eventually I grew tired of podcasts, and working in pajamas sounded appealing. I did experience a mischievous joy the first time I attended a staff meeting dressed only from the waist up. How many others on the call were only in their underwear? Not those poor suckers actually in the office.

As I glanced down at my feet, reflecting on my need for a pedicure, I started wondering if there was a way to get to the salon without leaving my house. Of course I knew that I could paint my own nails, but now that I was working from home and most of my conversations were with myself, thoughts like that often popped in uninvited. Could I send only my legs to the salon while my upper half sat in on the staff meeting? A nice azure blue would look good. Or a lilac.

Suddenly, I saw it - or didn’t see it – out of the corner of my eye. My left pinky toe was missing. I tried to keep my face neutral on the screen as I stretched my legs long. But every angle held the same view; the toe had vanished. The cool hard tile beneath my feet felt the same, and I reassured myself that it was a trick of the light. In the meantime, the meeting dragged on and Phil presented my data as if it were his own. My boss congratulated him, and I curled my toes in frustration. Warding off a muscle cramp, I gripped the bottom of my chair and squeezed hard. When I relaxed my feet, I saw only seven toes. A panicked urgency tugged at my gut. By the time the meeting was over, I had to get outside. Desperately seeking confirmation, I dashed to my bedroom and slipped on a pair of straight fit black pants. As I slid my leg along the lining I waited, but no foot dropped out of the bottom. I buttoned them closed at the waist and plopped onto my unmade bed. Would my disappearing foot fit into my shoe? I pondered this dilemma until the light pouring through my bedroom window became a shadow.

When I swung my legs out of bed the next morning, they were both missing from the knees down. The secretary at my doctor’s office sounded exasperated, but she booked me a virtual appointment at two-fifteen. I shuddered at the word virtual. But the next in-person visit was three months out, and what would be left of me by then? When my doctor finally appeared on screen, an initial sense of hope surged through me. I swung my legs in front of the camera multiple times, but no matter how I tried to demonstrate it, she just couldn’t see their absence. Her brow furrowed. She asked if I’d been drinking again. If I’d been sleeping. She suggested going to the ER. I’d last been there four years ago with my mother. They brushed off her months of bloating as a consequence of her croissant-heavy diet. But the real cause, the tumor on her ovary, left her dead within five months. I didn’t want to go back there.

The next morning, as I pulled my socks over invisible feet, a toenail snagged on my left sock. A quick chirp from the smoke detector sounded, an assault on my nerves. Why did the battery have to run low at the worst times? I rummaged through some drawers, pushing aside worn-down pencils, buttons, paper clips, a hole punch, super glue, a bottle of whiteout, and a sparrow’s nest of cords – but couldn’t find a rectangular battery. If smoke detectors were so important, why couldn’t they run on regular AA batteries? The chirping became louder and more frequent. A Zoom meeting was scheduled to start in twenty minutes. It wouldn’t work to have that maddening sound in the background; my coworkers would think I was crazy. I climbed a step stool and removed the battery.

It continued to chirp, refusing to be ignored. I put a pillow on top of it and covered it in blankets, only to see empty space where my hands should have been.

By the time I got onto the Zoom, opening my computer and clicking and typing with hands unnoticeable to the human eye, I was six minutes late. Phil was showing off his work – my work.

I’d had enough. I unmuted my microphone, turned on my camera, and interrupted.  “About that data,” I began, and Phil cut himself short.

“Did somebody say something?” my boss asked.

“I did,” I replied.

The shortest extra moment passed, a half-beat. “That’s weird,” he continued. “Phil, go on.”

Was my microphone working?  I looked at the bottom of the screen.  My microphone was on. I then looked up at my icon, into the mirror image my computer camera afforded me, and there was nothing there. Nothing at all.

Phil continued presenting m–.

Phil continued presenting his work.

In the Palm of Her Hand

The mango was firm in her grip; it would not be ready by that evening. Nevertheless, she squeezed it again. Still no give. She thought of his heart—that of the young man, a kid really– which she’d held in her hand the night before. Except that his heart had been softer, more slippery, like the inner flesh of a ripe mango. Had it been wrong to hope? But he was so young, and no one regretted heroic measures for the young. Someone had felt a pulse in the few minutes before they’d scooped him up, lights blaring, sirens screaming. As they wheeled him in, his pale body limp on the stretcher, his youth dared them: You can do it. She swallowed hard. There was a mother out there, likely asleep in her bed, unaware that her son’s heart had bled dry. She grabbed a scalpel and cut through skin, yellow blobs of fat protruding through as she exposed his chest, slicing through membranes, slicing through muscle. Her scissors cracked against bone, retractors ratcheting open a space between his ribs. His lungs, pink and spongy, poured out; they were speckled with little black dots. But it wasn’t the cigarettes that killed him in the end, was it?

Tubes were everywhere, and as they transfused blood, it drained out even faster through the holes that had been shot through him, his body a grotesque colander.

“Come on,” she’d pleaded to his lifeless body as she squeezed his heart, like a rolled-up pancake in her fingers.

She sorted now through the pile of mangos and found another one. Her thumb left an indentation when she squeezed it. The inside was likely halfway to rotten. Another customer wheeled her cart around, reached in, and grabbed a mango. Didn’t even squeeze it for ripeness.

Eventually they’d had to stop. There were critical blood shortages. You couldn’t keep emptying bags if there was no return of life.  She would try to forget the look of his mother’s face as she broke the news.

She squeezed one last mango. It had just the right give. She could slice it into her salad that evening.

Lending Library

A slick spot hid underneath the pile of maple leaves, and she nearly lost her footing as she scurried down the sidewalk. The trees were magnificent this time of year, with their oranges, reds, and yellows, and she’d always marveled at their beauty, even though the raking and bagging were endless. This year, she’d hired a company. Pulling her jacket tight as she righted herself, she hoped none of the neighbors had seen her stumble. Maybe she should have driven. She’d wanted to, but it was only a few blocks away, and it would have been ridiculous to arrive in her hybrid car. Her breath came out fast, like little wisps of smoke in the cool air. She shuddered as she thought about the irony. He’d never even been a smoker. Not one puff. Now, the sight of someone casually dragging on a cigarette could send her whirling. What right did they have to be so reckless?

Donating the book had seemed like a good idea, but the moment she’d placed it on the shelf, a pristine hardcover copy of “Shogun” amongst tattered paperback thrillers and beat up baby board books, she’d regretted it. Why hadn’t she taken it back right then and there? Instead she’d trudged home, her legs heavy, crunching the leaves on the walk.

“It’s part of the process, Mom. You have to start moving on.” Marlene was always so practical. And she was right. She’d even helped box up his things. The blue and green striped terry cloth robe that hung on the bathroom door, the one he’d wear on Sunday mornings working the crossword while his coffee got cold, his white cotton shirt poking through at the top. Sweaters, polos, rain jackets, khaki pants, joggers, button-downs and a handful of ties. It was only about three boxes. He’d given away much of his stuff after retiring.

“Someone else can use it now,” he’d laughed as he’d packed the boxes. Proud of himself for making it to that stage.

But now they filled the boxes with his things, and they did not laugh.

“No one ever died from a cough,” he’d told her as she nagged him to go to the doctor.

“But I might smother you in your sleep!” she’d teased back. The cough had been irritating. She had to admit it: that constant, raspy hacking had interfered with TV shows, movies, and sleeping. Finally, he’d relented. They’d sent him for an x-ray “out of an abundance of caution,” but as soon as he came out of the radiology suite she saw the look on his face. The tech had asked him to stay. His x-ray looked like it was filled with cotton balls where his lungs should have been.

Stubbornly, she’d purchased a hard-cover. The book was supposed to represent permanence. They would beat it. There were new treatments all the time. There was hope. Eventually, after a few months of the treatment coursing through his veins, he’d looked up at her, his bald head, gaunt eyes and ghastly thin body. He nudged the book towards her, but his arms could no longer lift it. They could have found an audio version, but she hadn’t even blinked. This was only a detour. She’d started reading it to him every day. Some days, she was unsure if he was listening. His eyes were often closed and it was hard to tell. They only made it to page 800, at the point that Alvito begins to get suspicious about the relationship between Blackthorne and Mariko.

The book had since remained on his nightstand until three days ago, when she carried it to the neighborhood lending library. She had been trying to complete the process, to try to feel lighter. Her steps were faster now as she approached the little free lending library, a pale blue house with a gabled roof, just a few feet away from the road. The book had to still be there. The lending library was a wonderful idea, but she rarely, if ever, saw people actually taking books from it. And Shogun was hardly a new release. She undid the latch and opened the door.

---

Eliana Megerman is an emergency medicine physician and writer. She leaves the knife fights and heart attacks behind to write novels and stories between shifts. She was born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, and when she is not writing, enjoys spending time with her husband and children, one of whom has adopted her love of coffee.

Susan R. Morritt

Behold! The Wrath of Gordon

“I still don’t see why we have to bring all these animals aboard the ark,” Jethro complained. He slouched against the side of the gangplank that led up to the hold of the huge ship, and watched as his two older brothers struggled with a pair of uncooperative ostriches. “There’s going to be mud everywhere, never mind the stink of their shit.”

“The Lord has spoken, Jethro,” his father, Norm, replied. “We alone were chosen to be spared—

“Yes, yes. I know,” Jethro interrupted, impatiently. He glanced up at the dark and threatening sky. Rain had been falling lightly all day, but now it appeared that a downpour was imminent.

“It’s raining cats and dogs,” Jethro sang out in a child-like voice. He cackled with hilarity at his own wit, before being brought back to reality by the force of his father’s open palm as it glanced off the side of his head.

“Go help your brothers, you good-for-nothing boy.” Norm strode past Jethro, and inched gingerly by the ostriches, whom were in the process of being prodded up the last few steps onto the ship. What a useless excuse for a son.

~

Age before beauty. Norm’s three young daughters-in-law stepped back with respect to allow Edna, his wife, to approach their patriarch, unimpeded. Edna, his rock, the matriarch of his tribe, had a steely control over his sons’ wives, which was seldom challenged.

Barb, big boned and bosomed, was the spouse of his eldest son, Sam. Marie, squat, and already broad-of-the-beam, was wed to his middle boy, Hank. As for Annie… Norm’s eyes roved over his youngest daughter-in-law with pure delight. Annie, of the spun-gold hair, and eyes the colour of a cloudless summer sky. Norm licked his lips as he observed the plump curve of Annie’s round breasts through her thin cloth dress. How in Hades name had his son, Jethro, won this maiden’s heart? And why was there no swell of her belly as yet to be seen?

Norm started, when from the bowels of the great ship came the distinct sound of children’s laughter. Children— his grandchildren. His other sons had no problem begetting heirs.

“So, are you and the girls almost finished with the livestock’s feed?” Norm asked, tearing his eyes away from Annie, to meet the sombre gaze of his wife. He spun around, to inspect the piles of stacked hay, bagged grain, and dried meat hanging from the curved ribs of the rafters.

…And the Lord, Gordon, sayeth: let there be a great flood over the land, and let the sin and the evil that man doeth be washed away…

Norm rubbed his hands together, briskly. He was ready.

~

The oasis of billowing clouds spread out across the heavens; shades of apricot and fuchsia, intertwined with rivulets of magenta and lemon yellow, floating in a sea of exquisite turquoise blue. From amidst this riotous colour, sat the Almighty Lord Gordon, perched on his magnificent bejeweled throne. His ponderous, silver head was lowered in absolute concentration.

“Check.”

Across the elaborately carved gaming table, his twin brother, the Dark Lord Lucian, chuckled.

“Checkmate,” he counteracted, tossing back his mane of salt and pepper curls with a grin.

Lord Gordon stifled an oath, and heaving a sigh, he turned away with considerable irritation.

“I’ll take Earth, thank you very much,” Lord Lucian stated, fixing his fiery gaze upon his brother. “Our agreement—”

Lord Gordon’s eyes blazed. “We made no such agreement!” he thundered, rising from his throne with indignation. “I will give you Pluto, or any star you so desire in the next galaxy. Earth is off limits!”

Lord Lucian frowned. “You’re a sore loser, Gordie.” He arose from his throne with the fluidity and grace of a large cat. “A sore loser, and your Word means nothing.”

Lord Gordon sniffed his displeasure, and gazed about to survey the majesty of his realm. “Enough of your insolence! I have spoken, Lucie… and I have work to do.”

Lord Lucian smirked. “Yes,” he replied, “so do I.”

~

Forty days and forty nights… So it was that the Almighty Lord Gordon conveyed through a waking trance, the details of the imminent flood to Norm. Norman, son of Arnold, whom had begotten a legion of sons…with Norman the sole “chosen son.”

Visions and dreams. Of late, holed up in the bulkhead of the great Ark with his family, and the multitude of animals, with the rain pelting down upon the roof, Norm had been plagued by torn emotions. Just this night past, Norm had heard the voice of the fearsome Dark Lord Lucian, whispering in his ear as he lay in a sleepless stupor next to his slumbering wife, Edna. Whispering words in a honied tone, about Annie. Beautiful Annie.

“Go to her, Norm. No one will ever know. She must bend to your will. You are the Patriarch— the chosen one. Your useless eunuch of a son, Jethro, will never beget a child, so it is your duty to do it for him. Give Annie a child of your own loins. Do it, Norm. No one will ever know."

Norm crossed to the forecastle of the rolling ship, and gazed at the rising sea stretching to the empty horizon. Tomorrow…yes. No one will ever know.

~

Forty days and forty nights have come, and gone. Norm and Edna stood alone on the rain-soaked quarterdeck of their great floating Ark home, and watched as the first rays of the sun rose over the eerily calm water.

Where was the rainbow of which the Lord promised?

Norm picked up the bamboo cage at his feet, and opening the hinged door, reached inside to gently grasp the cooing dove within. As he flung the startled bird into the sky above, he shouted aloud. “Lord Gordon, where is the sign? Give us a sign the great flood is over!”

Suddenly, the ship listed with a groan to plunge into a swirling whirlpool, and the cries of both humans and animals filled the air.

Thou hast broken one of my commandments! Thou shalt not commit adultery!

As the booming voice of the Almighty Lord Gordon faded away, Norm grasped the railing, and gazed up at the heavens with horror.

Down, down, and downwards plunged the mighty ship, sucked into a furious vortex of raging waves. Just before oblivion struck, Norman, the chosen one, felt Edna’s hot breath on his cheek as he heard her final words. “You asshole.”

~

“Gordie, I see you’ve been busy,” Lord Lucian remarked, dryly. “You pulled the plug.” He leaned back on his throne, and gestured towards the chess board on the table before him. “Another game, perhaps?”

Lord Gordon, seated across from his brother, shook his head. “No. I’ve work to do, again. Heaven knows the drain will probably be plugged. This creationism sure works up an appetite, though.” He inhaled the breeze that wafted across the shimmering oasis of cloud. “Smells like ribs tonight.”

---

Susan R. Morritt is a writer, visual artist, and musician from Waterford, Ontario, Canada. Her prose, poetry and art appear in various journals including 34 Orchard Journal, The Rabbit Hole Writers Co-op Anthology VI, The Speckled Trout Review, and Third Estate Art Decapitate Journal. She was short-listed for The Staunch Short Fiction Prize, and long-listed for The Redbud Writing Project Coppice Prize. Susan is a former racehorse trainer who has worked extensively with livestock, including talking turkeys.

Jessica R Cull

This Too May Kill Us

He asked where I wanted to eat. I said a Chinese restaurant, covered in wall-to-wall glow-in-the-dark stars and with the smell of burnt oil so strong it might have made me sick.

He always chewed his food on one side of his mouth, munching down as though he was afraid of scraping his teeth against an ulcer or -

“You’re chewing on the left side tonight,” I said. Then the clang of metal against ceramic as he dropped his fork.

“For fucks sake, Ellie.” I watched the words spit themselves out in small pieces of broccoli and tofu. “Why do you always bring that up? It makes me so damn self-conscious.” I shrugged. I didn’t think anything could make him self-conscious. For a middle-aged accountant eating shit Chinese food with a twenty-nine-year-old, he was absurdly sure of himself.

“It’s not a bad thing,” I said, picking up my chopsticks and flinging a noodle into my mouth. I ate them one at a time, taking forever and never tasting anything.

It wasn’t a long walk home but he called for a taxi and I didn’t bother arguing. We bundled into the back, me going first so that I had to clamber across the back seats whilst trying to keep my skirt from flashing my ass. I sat down and laughed, a real bark and squawk of a thing.

“What?” he said, lowering himself into the car after me.

“I almost flashed my ass!”

He sighed, huffed, and buckled his seatbelt like a good boy. The city moved slowly past the windows as we began to move, and I looked upon it with famished eyes; the meadows of my youth replaced with all this steel certainty of skyscrapers and seduction. I smiled at the giant face of a woman who looked down at our car from a flickering billboard, lying out on a sofa in her underwear.

“Do you mind that my bra and knickers never match?” I asked, pressing my face right up against the glass.

“What? No, of course not,” he replied.

The car moved forwards and the woman disappeared out of view. Her pastel pink lingerie lingered in my mind and I thought that perhaps I had a crush on her. Or maybe it was just marketing. I moved away from the glass, then, worried about the other giants who might try to lure me in and turned to him instead. He was on his phone, scrolling through either his favourite tailor's website or looking at porn (he made the same face for both).

“Have you heard that the world’s going to end?” I said.
“No.” He continued to scroll.

“Yup,” I nodded. “Next Tuesday. So there are only eleven days left - if you count today and Tuesday. Do you think we should? Or should we say it’s only nine days? Or ten?”

He sighed and locked his phone with a swift click. “What the fuck are you talking about?” He was swearing a lot these days and it didn’t suit him. He swore as though his mother was going to hear.

“The world. It’s ending.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Yes, it is.”

“But it’s not.”

“But it is.”

The driver looked at us in his rearview mirror and raised an eyebrow. Perhaps he knew what I knew.

We got home and had sex. He was having sex with other women, too, and he didn’t do much to cover it up. At first, I viewed his adultery as a mirror. The sadness I felt was closer to guilt; something that I tried to turn into a reality but could find no proof for. Such introspection didn’t suit me, though, so I drowned my guilt in persistent indifference and quelled any lingering anxiety by reminding myself that no matter who he slept with, I was the one who lived in his flat. His two-bed bachelor pad had me all over it.

I lay naked in bed afterwards, on top of the covers and listening to the world through the safety of a closed window. He had a shower and came back in pyjamas. A set of them; a button-up shirt and trousers with an elasticated waistband, both in green check. He was most vulnerable in his pyjamas and it made me sick. He got under the covers and put on his reading glasses whilst I tried not to vomit on the bedsheets.

“What do you think we should do before next Tuesday?” I asked, batting my eyelashes in his direction.

“Have you got a twitch?” he frowned.

I gave up and rolled back, looking up at the ceiling.

“No,” I mumbled, consciously petulant. Then I thumped the mattress with my fist, saying “We need to talk about what we want to do before the world ends.”

“Jesus,” he sighed.

“Personally, I don’t have a lot on my bucket list. I would’ve liked to go to Iceland - or maybe Norway - but that’ll be too late now. I doubt there’ll be any plane tickets left, anyway, what with everyone flying home to be with their families. Speaking of which, I definitely don’t want to see my parents. I can’t stand the thought of dying whilst Dad fills out a crossword. Besides, I’ve cut my hair short and Mum never likes that.”

He took off his reading glasses. “Why are you so hellbent on the world ending, for fucks sake?”

“I’m not hellbent on it. I’m a realist,” I nodded, waving my feet up in the air.

“This is the opposite of realism, Ellie. I wish you’d fucking stop.”

I rolled over onto my stomach and crawled over to him. I put my face close to his, my eyelashes almost touching his cheek. “When are you going to face up to the fact that we’re going to die?”

He shook his head and moved away from me. “I’m going to sleep,” he said and turned off the light.

Despite my pleading, he continued going into the office. I’d been working in data entry since moving to the city; it was an easy job I could do from home and I didn’t have to talk to anyone apart from Steve. He was my ‘direct manager’ and he sent me an email every day, attaching the reams of data I was to upload to the system. Every Monday, he would start his email with “I hope you had a good weekend” and every Friday he would finish it with “Have a good weekend!”. I liked to imagine he was an old man - about the same age as my dad, maybe - and had a silver beard and a beer belly, and a dog called Barney that slept under his desk. I was sad to tell Steve I was leaving him, but I didn’t want to waste my last days plotting data into spreadsheets. Besides, I hadn’t been able to see any numbers on the screen for the past two weeks. Steve never replied to my email. I was happy that he’d gotten out, too.

He didn’t come home from the office, so I spent the evening washing all of our clothes. I emptied the wardrobe and put everything in the washing machine; then I emptied the drawers and did all of that, too. The smell of detergent reminded me of babies and the spinning barrel made everything else appear still and solid. When the final wash was done, I added the fresh clothes to the pile on the floor and stuck my nose into it until I could taste the cleanness. Then I went back to the washing machine and climbed inside. I was an acrobat, with my knees touching my chin and my nose touching my toes. The smell of cotton and detergent all over me as I spun around, and when I came out I was baptised. I knew, then, that everyone should get in their washing machine before they die.

His key turned in the door. He smelt like whiskey and tasted like perfume. I pushed him away when he tried to climb on top of me and he gave up, falling back against his pillow.

“I have one thing to ask that you do between now and next Tuesday,” I said.

He rolled to face me, breathing his cheapness all over my face.

“I want you to stop having sex with other people,” I said. He reached out and blindly found my face with his hand, doing a strange impression of stroking my cheek.

“Only you, Ellie. Only you.”

We fumbled our way around the kitchen making breakfast and I tried not to laugh at how absurd it was. We were children, playing make-believe at being grown-ups and in love. He threw me the mixing bowl and I dropped it on the floor, covering my ears as the metallic noise spun around and around. We tried to make pancakes but forgot to add the eggs. He ordered croissants and coffee from the local coffee shop.

“Do you know what I’d like to do before Tuesday?” I said, spitting flaky crumbs all over the kitchen counter.

“What?” he replied.

“I’d like to have a picnic. I’ve never had one before, not even when I was a child. My mum didn’t like the idea of mixing food with the outdoors. She wouldn’t even let me eat crisps outside. Can you believe that?”

He nodded.

“Is that a yes to the picnic or my mum's neurosis?” I asked.

“To both.”

On Sunday afternoon, we took supermarket sandwiches to the park. I thought about Steve at home with Barney, feeding him pieces of apple pie, and it made me want to cry. But I didn’t. Instead, I lay down on the picnic blanket and tried to spot clouds in the clear sky. He was reading a book and checking out women as they walked past — even the ones I knew weren’t his type.

“You’re chewing with the right side, now,” I said, sitting up.

“Fucking hell!”

We didn’t speak for the rest of the picnic. It suited us, not to have to hear each other talk. I think we both worried we’d catch a glimpse of what the other person was really like if we said too much and the glue in our papier-mâché romance would finally melt. We ate, we drank. I had a nap whilst he crossed the park to chat up a woman on a bench, and when we went home we had sex. It was the perfect last Sunday. Before we went to bed I thanked him for it.

“It’s going to be a shame not to have weekends anymore. I always enjoyed them - every one of them.”

He grunted and turned off the light.

Monday was cheerful. I skipped around the flat, waiting for him to come home from work. I ordered takeaway meals four times and went to the local supermarket to buy a chocolate birthday cake. At the checkout, I did my best impression of a full-toothed grin at the old lady behind the counter and said, “I’m surprised you’re open. I thought the world would have gone to shit by now.” She looked at me from beneath bushy eyebrows as she scanned my cake.

“Of course we’re open. It’s Monday.”

At home, I ate the cake with my hands in front of the window until I was sick.

He came home and I surprised him with a hug. He put his hands on my shoulders and pushed me back, raising his eyebrows.

“What’s this?” he said.

“I’m excited, I’ve missed you!”

“You never miss me.”

“Well, I do now. We only have one day left to get all of this done.” I waved my arms above my head.

“The end of the world shit. I’d almost forgotten.” He walked past me and into the kitchen, getting out his phone to order food.

“I want pizza!” I shouted and began to run around the flat in giant, overlapping circles. Energy burst outwards from within me and I felt, at last, like a star.

We ate the greasy pizza in bed and, afterwards, I attempted something close to intimacy.

“Are you trying to hold my hand?” he asked as I foraged around under the covers.

“Yes.”

“But we don’t do that.”

“Well, I thought it might be nice to try.”

“Okay.” He found my scrambling hand and held it still in his. We sat like that for a few seconds, not looking at each other. Somewhere a clock ticked, which was odd as we didn’t have one.

“No,” I said, pulling away. “You’re too clammy and your skin feels like raisins.”

“Ha!” he huffed. “Fucking charming.”

During the night I turned off his alarm. By the time he woke, he was already thirty minutes late for the office.

“Shit!” he shouted, jumping out of bed and fumbling to unbutton his pyjama shirt. I waltzed in, completely naked and holding two takeaway coffees. He was red in the face and had only managed two of the buttons. “Why didn’t you wake me?” he asked.

“I called the office,” I said. He stopped. “I told them you were sick and wouldn’t be coming in.” He shook his head. “It’s the last day, silly!” I laughed. “I thought we could spend it together.”

“Oh,” he said, dropping his arms to his side and leaning his head back towards the ceiling. “But I was meant to have a meeting with John…” his voice trailed off. Then he shook his head. “Fuck it. You know what? Let’s do it. Let’s have your end of the world. John can wait until tomorrow.”

We spent the last day in bed, having sex, eating leftover cake, and ordering coffee. Somewhere in the midst of it, I told him I loved him. It wasn’t true, but he was chewing with the left side of his mouth and it moved me. I felt I had to say something. I think he pretended he hadn’t heard me.

The sun dipped below the skyscrapers, then below the office blocks, and then below the few bungalows that stood their stubborn ground in the high-rise city, and I knew it was time to go. He was asleep, wearing his god-awful pyjamas, but at that moment I didn’t even care. I kind of liked the vomit-green checks. I woke him up. “Come with me,” I whispered. He may not have been empathetic or witty or anything close to spontaneous, but he was obedient when I wanted him to be. He stood and dressed in the suit I’d laid out for him and I stepped into the nicest red dress I owned.

He followed me up to the roof of our building as dusk slipped into twilight.

“I should’ve brought a jacket,” he mumbled behind me. Our block of flats was tall and the wind buffeted around us, but the view of the sky was clear and unbroken. I laughed, delighted at our front-row seats.

“It’s as if it were made for it!” I cried into the wind.

“What?” he yelled back. I laughed and skipped and danced. Then I stopped and looked up, the pure darkness of space revealing itself from under its violet-hued cloak.

“It’s starting,” I whispered.

In the distance, I watched two stars spark and glow in a sudden culmination of energy. Then they went dark. “I have regrets,” I began, maybe to him, maybe to myself; maybe to something else. “I wish I’d read more books and spent more time looking at other people. I wish I’d taken more cocaine and less iron tablets and eaten chocolate cake every day.” The wind stirred and groaned as another star, smaller than the tip of my fingernail, went black. “I wish I’d tried to love something. Even a houseplant. Why didn’t we have any houseplants?”

“I don’t know,” he said, squinting up into the sky.

“I wish I’d had matching underwear - something pretty; something pastel! Something I might have felt something in. And I wish I’d talked more about how meaningless this has all been because at least that would’ve been worth saying.” I was shouting now, reaching my voice over the wind as it chased the violence of a hurricane. A star closer to Earth burst into a plethora of light, painting the universe in a watercolour of gas and ancient atoms before it, too, faded into nothing. “I wish that I had told you that your sleeping with those other women made me hate myself!” He looked at me then, his face raw and bright. “I always thought that I was the reason you did that; that it was some hardwired fault everybody could see in me. Even when I told myself I didn’t care anymore, I couldn’t stop looking at my damn reflection and wondering what it was about my face that made you fuck other people.” I laughed, then, and began to cry. “Which is funny, because I never loved you anyway. And you never loved me.” All across the infinite expanse of the universe, suns were burning out in a glorious triumph of inevitable ends and new beginnings. A final wave to those that had been gazing upon them for millennia; a standing ovation before they left the stage. Sirius, the second brightest star in the sky, grew impossibly magnificent and shook the planet, sending the tallest buildings plummeting to the ground and raising the ocean from the sea bed. Somehow, our block of flats stood, solemn and stubborn like a well-bred soldier. But the Earth was rocking and I knew it was almost time. I’m here and I’m ready. I wish I’d said goodbye to Steve. Is that my final thought? I won’t be angry if it is.

He’s swearing, looking up at the sky and saying, “Is this it?”

---

Jessica R Cull is a content writer living in Sussex, England. Her short story "Fifteenth Year" was published by Literally Stories.

Alyson Smith

Winter

Cast

• William Winters (M) Actor.

Supporting roles until winter when alter ego Winta reappears.

• Winta Wick (M) Dame.

  Nanny to Sleeping Beauty. Typical dame role, with warm and tender character traits beneath bravado and brashness.

Act I

• Prologue 

William Winters carries a small, battered suitcase down the rickety stairs of the bed and breakfast in which he has boarded every year since the 1940’s with only a break for his three years’ service. He exits left and walks the relatively short distance to the Palli, once a majestic building its green paint now peels, and the sea wind whips through the tears in the box office awning. He nods to the man on the door, one of the few men he knows that are older than him, and enters backstage right comforted by the familiar smell of damp and mold.

• Scene 1 Meeskite

William Winters comes alive the time of year others hibernate. He shakes out his dresses and accompanying petticoats, releasing must and lavender before hanging them on the rail, which looks barer now than it did unclothed. William blows the dust from his towering, faded wig with its worn, yellowing curls. His mouth is dry and he breathes in cold air and cobwebs whilst he dusts the mirror, a faded rag held tight in his pale, wrinkled but soft hands.  

• Scene 2 Willkommen

The air feels warmer as he moves his head closer towards his reflection, his fingers tingling as the cream he uses spreads over the skin of his face with long, sweeping strokes. He tries to focus on its smell; floral and sweet and there she is … a year older ... but there.

‘Hello Miss Wick. How are you? What’s that? You didn’t expect another year? Cheeky Mare, stop your bitching. Open that bottle and get the bloody lippy on.’

• Scene 3 Beedle Dee, Dee

There used to be an urgent voice and sharp knocks on the door, but now an intercom crackles pushing out a thin, monotone, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your ten-minute call. Ten minutes please.’ The phoenix rises, not quite resplendent but grand enough, pushing up trussed cleavage and downing some more Dutch grog in a single swallow, a tart punch in the throat as swallows a belch and arthritically lifts her coarse petticoats.

• Scene 4 Mein Damen und Herren

Winta owns that stage. She is bathed in light and raises her arms towards the audience who drape her with applause as she dances with precise movements, awaiting the inevitable moment their eyes turn to a spotlight shining to her left where the bit celebrity will enter. Winta will be left alone, her show stolen, and presence forgotten.

‘Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls, and the rest of us Beauties, I had a job as a pantomime horse, but quit while I was ahead.’

Act 2 

• Scene 1 Nicht Mehr

Winta returns to her dressing room for an interval refresh. She knows what she will find but smudges still appear under her eyes as she looks into the mirror, but not at her face. The words, as always, are there in smeared red lipstick:

‘Still See You.’

‘Still Miss You.’

‘Still Here.’

She tissues under her eyes and takes out an old Polaroid camera to photograph the writing that he will now see in a snapshot. He takes the old rag, dabs it with nail-varnish remover and wipes the greasy make-up from the glass. She is momentarily distracted and imagines the queue of parents in front of the ice-cream seller. She remembers when they used to dress correctly. White, elasticated frilly caps, starched aprons with lace stitched on edges over short pink striped dresses, small pots of ice cream tucked tight into a ribboned tray. Now it's just a bored denim swathed student counting down the days until they get back to the city where the lights are bigger and shine brighter than those on this worn-down pier.

 William Winter cries inside; Winta Wick drags him back to the stage.

A pie in the face, sweets for the kiddies, the scare of the demons behind you.

‘IT’S BEHIND YOU.’

‘IT’S BEHIND YOU.’

• Scene 2 O Wie Wunderbar

It’s an age-old story; boy meets girl and the problem is solved. Just like all the pantomimes since time began. William wonders if it will ever be boy meets boy but he pushes this thought to the back of his head where the gassed and the mutilated lie and wills Winta back. She helps him empty his mind so the shell-shocked stares of those left behind can’t bother him.  

• Scene 3 Mein Traum

The kiss of life. Sleeping Beauty awakes, gasping for air, her eyes opening, sitting up as the orchestra plays. Golden confetti is dropped from the rafters covering the performers and the stage with glistening shimmers as the Handsome Prince wraps her waist in his strong arms as the audience cheers their passionate kiss.

• Scene 4 Toodle-oo

They’re all together now. The air is stagnant, unmoving in its heavy humidity and smelling of stale greasepaint and the perspiration of anticipation. Winta holds her breath as she studies the course, gray lining of the red velvet drape. She is sweating under her imposing wig, causing her scalp to itch before beads roll down her forehead.

Crossed fingers: when the curtains swish the audience will still be there. Nothing so much destroys the soul than a curtain call to emptiness.

But here they are. They clap and cheer and shriek as the actors bow to the blurred mass.

‘Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls, and the rest of us Beauties, an actor I know kept falling through the floor, it was just a stage he was going through.’ 

Finale

William Winters struggles to take off Winta Wicks, but eventually he is stripped, her garments lay crumpled on the floor. He is naked apart from her cloying perfume. He doesn’t manage well without her. The silence is oppressive so he starts to whistle a tune about a soldier and his love but still the stage fright twitches as he contemplates the three seasons he is now to endure.

---

Alyson Smith works as an administrator in a Nursing Home in Newcastle upon Tyne. Alongside this she has recently completed an MA in Creative Writing though the Open University and is working on her first collection of short stories. Alyson has a long-standing diagnosis of Bi-Polar and a recent diagnosis of Level I Autism which has helped her to understand why she doesn't always see the world as other do.

Bryan Vale

Rules for Our Airbnb

1. No parties! We cannot have more than 8 guests in this house at a time.

2. Please, no loud noises after 10 o'clock at night. This is not our rule but our neighbors' requirement.

3. Checkout time is 11 o'clock in the morning. Before you leave, please remove the bed sheets, place used towels on the bathroom floor, and start the dishwasher. Thank you!

4. The second hall closet on the right is locked, as we use this closet for storage. Please do not attempt to open it.

5. Please remove shoes in carpeted areas!

6. If the second hall closet should happen to be unlocked, please do not enter it. The closet is dark and it is easy to bump one's head or shins on the supplies within.

7. If you do enter the closet, please do not panic. Move slowly and carefully backwards without turning around, then shut the door tightly.

8. Failure to obey rule No. 7 will result in the discovery that rule No. 6 is a lie. Be aware, however, that you do not need to be afraid of the dark void, although we don't recommend exploring it.

9. The discovery that the house is fundamentally hollow, containing multiple dimensions of emptiness, may surprise you. But please do not explore the alternate dimensions, as we have not yet mapped and categorized the spaces between the walls. Do your best to return to the portal in the second closet on the right through which you entered the hollow void.

10. You will have discovered, by now, that not just the house, but reality itself, is completely hollow and in fact illusory. If the entropy captures you, try to aim for the black hole, which — if struck at the right angle — may send you into a time warp and put you back into the hallway before the point in time at which you entered the second hall closet on the right. Upon striking the event horizon, remember to tuck your knees into your chest to avoid injury. (You may, of course, decay into nothingness well before you are able to do so. The entropy is no joke.) The other possibility is that the horror of the nothingness of the universe may consume you psychologically. To exist or not to exist? Remember not to dwell in the angst, but to choose. You are free even in the floating void of a dimensional vacuum, even when you are rapidly approaching the point at which your choices no longer matter. Embrace the terror of the cliffside of existence, aim for the event horizon, and tuck and roll (this all should have been covered in your sixth grade physical education class).

11. After rematerializing in the hallway, please make sure to remove your shoes, as this is a carpeted area.

---

Bryan Vale is a writer from the San Francisco Bay Area. His fiction and poetry have appeared in several journals, including Streetcake Magazine, Paragraph Planet, Unstamatic Magazine, and Paddler Press. His work has been nominated for The Best of the Net, and he has read for the memoir journal Five Minutes. Learn more at bryanvalewriter.com, or follow Bryan on Twitter and Instagram at @bryanvalewriter.

David Galef

Two Streams 

I went back to the neighborhood brook, a meandering line at the base of a dead-end street, stippled with stepping stones, flowing past maples and willows bent over the water, populated with tiny translucent fish and tadpoles in season, the surface stirring in the breeze and dotted with leaves headed right to left, so that on a Sunday afternoon, all the kids came on foot or by bike, in pairs or in groups, playing games that had to do with almost falling in or teasing the fish or racing twigs downstream, or just lying on the far bank to stare up at the shade-woven sky till it was time to head home for supper, feeling heavy or light but full of the stream that flowed through the day,

            only it had been years since that time, now October instead of August, the wind fleecing branches pruned back to reveal a vacant parking lot on the other side, the brook reduced to a rivulet over a stony bed, and me standing there, yearning for something I hadn’t even recognized was gone, cold and alone.

---

David Galef has published short pieces in the collections Laugh Track and My Date with Neanderthal Woman (Dzanc Short Story Collection Prize), long-form work in the novels Flesh, Turning Japanese, and How to Cope with Suburban Stress (Kirkus Best Books of the Year), and a lot in between. His latest is Brevity: A Flash Fiction Handbook, from Columbia University Press. He is a professor of English and creative writing program director at Montclair State University as well as the editor in chief of Vestal Review, the longest-running flash fiction magazine on the planet.

Cathy Ulrich

Something About a Balloon

And afterward, we’re on the crew helping clean everything up, broken plates and splinters from the wooden benches. You find something that could be the hollow shatter of someone’s tooth, show it to me in the cup of your gloved hand. I see you, later, slide it into your back pocket, and I want to tell you it’s not a thing you should keep, something cursed, something haunted. I can’t see your face under your mask, only recognize you by the way you turn your head from side to side before you bend to pick up another broken thing, put it in the black garbage bag they have provided, the way you only know me by the hunch of my shoulders when I see a yellow balloon draped over the edge of one of the tables. Something about it makes me think of the boy I saw on the news the night before, the way his body made that same sad arc before the camera cut away, and the balloon goes into my hand, and, then, into the bag.

---

Cathy Ulrich thinks there is something so sad about deflated balloons. Her work has been published in various journals, including Main Squeeze Literary Journal, trampset, and Washington Square Review.

Dana Hammer

A Biting Clown

“Where I come from, clowns don’t bite people,” says Matt, glaring down at me, with his arms crossed, like an asshole.

 Matt is in charge here. He’s a “rehabilitation specialist” which means he gets to sit around and berate me for my supposed crimes. Matt is short, and fat, with pasty, doughy chins that droop down, covering his neck. He wears a trucker hat, un-ironically.  He has never bitten anyone in his life, or made anyone laugh on purpose, and it shows. He is the opposite of a clown.

Not that all clowns bite. Obviously not, or very few people would hire us to perform at children’s parties. But I do. And that’s why I’m here, at Clown Rehab.

I try to answer Matt, but I can’t because of the ball-gag in my mouth. They placed it there as soon as I checked in, as a “precaution”. I tried to explain that the gag was completely unnecessary. After all, it’s not like I bite just anyone, at any time. I’m not a rabid animal for God’s sakes. But again, it was difficult to explain, because of the fucking rubber ball in my mouth.

The ring they made me wear buzzes. It’s an electronic ring, placed snugly around my middle finger, on my left hand. It looks like a simple black band, very plain and innocuous. But in fact, it’s anything but. It’s actually a high-tech gadget that notifies me when it’s time to go to the cafeteria, when it’s time to go to therapy, and when it’s time to go to bed. If I fail to respond to a buzz, the buzz turns into a mild shock. If I ignore a mild shock, it becomes a strong, painful shock. I have never ignored a strong, painful shock, but I assume what comes next is awful.

Matt hears the buzz and grimaces.

“Lunch time again,” he says, as if meal times were a personal affront. His girth would suggest otherwise, but I can’t say this. Ball-gag.

I nod and stand, eager to get away from him. He’s been lecturing me for the better part of an hour, and I can’t stand the sight of him much longer.

Most of the clowns are here for more ordinary reasons. They showed up to work high, or drunk,  or got into serious fights with obnoxious party guests. Maybe they stole things from homes where they worked. A few clowns are here for being creepy with children.

All of those clowns are allowed to eat in the cafeteria, like human beings. I, on the other hand, am forced to eat alone, in my room, where I don’t pose a risk to anyone. A guard removes my ball-gag, holding a stun-gun in case I start chomping. He escorts me into my room, where my sad plastic tray awaits me. He leaves, I eat, he comes and gags me again, and we repeat the process at the next meal time.

Today my meal is mashed potatoes and gravy, with chocolate pudding in a little plastic cup. Soft foods. Nothing that requires chewing. It’s all part of my program, you see, to wean me off the urge to bite.

It’s not working.

You’ve probably heard of Clown College, or Clown Academy. There are many of them, and they all have different philosophies, and different styles. The one I attended was called The Academy of Fine Clowning, and it was strictly about classic clowning, with a focus on mime, dance, and physical comedy.

In my own clowning practice, I performed solo shows with dark themes. My stage name was Jaunty, and I wore a traditional black leotard, with white face paint. I was not a birthday party clown. I was not there to make you feel good. I was not your dancing monkey. I was an artist, and my job was to convey EMOTION. Which I did. Well.

My most intellectually complex show was called “Shrubland” and it was a psycho-sexual thriller that took place in a heavily vandalized abandoned house that was haunted by the ghost of a serial killer. As you probably guessed, I was the serial killer.

Of course, it’s frowned upon for classic performers to involve the audience in the show. It’s called “breaking the fourth wall” and it’s strictly for hacks who don’t understand art, and nasty attention whores. However, because of the brutal nature of my piece, I felt it was necessary to add a real element of danger, something to wake the audience up, to shock them out of their complacency.

Hence, the biting.

After lunch, we have mandatory Clowning With Kindness Class, which is exactly what it sounds like. Matt, thank God, is absent from these proceedings. The teacher is a practicing clown named Lulu, who comes every day in full makeup, with a bright blue fright wig, reminiscent of Marge Simpson. Lulu is all about Clowning With Kindness. Lulu wants to bring smiles and hugs to the whole world.

I very much want to bite Lulu. But I don’t. Instead, I take my seat in the back of the grimly bland classroom, tightly gagged, alone in a sea of Bozos and Timmies and Flopsies and Buddies.

“One of the most important things we can do as clowns is to make our clients smile. Let’s all think of ways we can make people smile,” says Lulu, demonstrating with her own garish, pink smile.

“We can not steal from them,” says Kiki, giving a side glance at a thieving clown sitting next to her.

“Great!” Lulu says, and writes this on the white board.

The scent of institutional marker floats back and assaults my nostrils.

“We can read the room,” says Bozo, with totally unearned confidence. After all, he is here for doing inappropriate things with bananas at a children’s party.

“Excellent,” says Lulu, adding that to her sad list.

This is what my life has become.

My jaw aches.

At night, when I’m locked in my room and expected to sleep, the gag is removed, and I’m free to close my mouth and open it as I see fit. It’s a relief, and I savor the cramping as my lips close firmly, pressing together like hands in prayer.

I reach into the slit in my mattress, where I’ve hidden several paper clips, purloined from the various classrooms I’ve been forced to sit in over the past few weeks. A paper clip, by itself, is a silly, flimsy thing. But many paper clips, unwound and bent into sharp points, can be formidable weapons, in the the right hands. Or, in this case, the right mouth.

My makeshift dentures are now bent and fitted to my liking, nestled behind my lips, my secret weapons.  Tomorrow morning, the guard will approach me with the ball-gag, holding it out with both hands, as always. He will leave his soft white neck exposed when he does this. And then he will learn an important lesson about biting clowns — we are not so easily broken.

---

Dana Hammer is the author of The Cannibal’s Guide to Fasting, My Best Friend Athena, and Fanny Fitzpatrick and the Brother Problem, all published by Cinnabar Moth. She is the author of many short stories and novellas, which have been published in various anthologies, magazines, and journals. Her stage plays have received productions around Southern California, with a few upcoming productions in 2024. She writes a lot.

Kai Holmwood

Return to the Dam

After “At the Dam” by Joan Didion

Since it first shimmered into holographic form before me on a summer afternoon in 2361, the ruined Hoover Dam has slouched gargantuan in my imagination. I will be virtually exploring the interlinked trees of the Amazon, or soaring like a bird over Europe’s verdant ecocities, and suddenly the dam will spring to mind. I will be walking through the redwood forest and call forth the image of that structure, its once-smooth slope crumbling and worn against the distant desert surrounding it. I ask the image to expand until it fills my view, imagining the trees themselves are the pillars that once stood in the inhibited lake. In the forestal wind, I hear the water flowing freely over the structure now as it never did when the dam was in use, damaging the vertical concrete and slowly erasing the memory of who we were and what we did and what almost became of our world.

~

Something about that dam has always reminded me of San Francisco—the city that stood testament to the endurance and resilience of the human spirit, until one day it stood only as a faltering memory, its evacuated buildings lapped at by Pacific waves reclaiming the coastal land. The dam equally is a relic of a different past, a reminder that we were almost too late.

This particular dam is perhaps little different from any other except in its magnitude and in the fame it once held, with tourists flocking to see its sheer and deathly pale face. And yet this particular dam, Hoover Dam, is the one that carries something else for me, some whispered hint that it might be able to explain why they did what they did, what they were thinking, and how they could fathom that this scale of natural alteration was progress rather than devastation.

~

It would be too simple, of course, to make some Ozymandian comparison. Nor would it be entirely accurate. The desert around the dam is far from “lone and level sands.” Perhaps back then, when they built the dam, its unrelenting control of the area’s water deprived the desert of the necessary nourishing moisture—or perhaps this land was never lone and bare, and always blossomed with the resilient desert life that thrives there today, but the people who lived there then wanted more, as they so often did. Regardless, one can imagine the women and men who built the dam taking misguided pride in its construction, imagining that it would stand for all time, an eternal monument to the labors of their hands and their machines.

The hologram shivers before me as one of the giant concrete blocks, half-loosed after two hundred years of freedom, tumbles over the side and crashes into the water below.

~

Once, I visited the dam in person rather than viewing it as a hologram. I toured it with a man from the Bureau of Remembrance—a man who dedicates himself to these grisly skeletons of the past so that our future may be full of life. He spoke of “sediment dynamics” and “floodplains” and “river habitat.” We walked a few steps onto the decaying structure, holding our breath that it would not choose this moment to give way, and I stood at that liminal point between the desert and the dam. There, the absence of human voices other than ours didn’t feel regenerative or restorative, as it usually does when one is in the wilds. Instead, it felt eerily empty, almost haunted. It felt like a glimpse into the future that could have been—the future that was almost ours.

He took me down, down, down to the swirling pool at the bottom of the dam. There, at the edges, water rippled between fallen concrete blocks, lapping gently at the shores. “Touch it,” the Remembrance said, and I did, submerging my hands in the clear water. A minnow darted away, and a few bubbles rose to the surface. In that moment, it might have been any lake below any waterfall. The moment that should have been meaningful was peculiar in its ordinariness.

~

When I left the dam that day, the hot wind flung itself through my hair, carrying with it the scents of Mojave sage and misguided dreams. Later, as I drifted in my solar- and steam-powered drone over the desert, I turned on the holographic remembrance view of the desert below, set to the year 2017. What must once have been Las Vegas shuddered into view, its garish neon lights and unhinged buildings flaunting their spatial and temporal incongruity with the landscape around them. When the Continental Restoration Counsel met centuries ago to discuss land reclamation, rewilding, and relocation, these consumptive desert cities were among the few that were almost universally agreed to be destined for removal. Today, nothing remains except their optional holographic memories, inviting anyone who sees them to ask, again and again, the question we who were born two hundred years after the beginning of the revitalization have been asking all our lives. I hadn’t thought to ask the Remembrance man, but I thought it then, with the twilight falling over the desert and the wind blowing on my windows and the holographic lights below the only memory of the past. Of course that was what I had always seen in the dam: the question of what they had thought they were doing, how they had ever thought any of it would work, and whether they had ever thought of us at all.

---

Kai Holmwood’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Stanchion, DreamForge, Solarpunk Creatures, Flash Frontier, and elsewhere.

Carol Phillips

Woman Who Would Be Wolf

I think of snow. I sense its freshness, its purity. Being alone in its stillness and watching light bounce off crystals formed in the dark. Seeing its whiteness stretch to the horizon, its translucent blue when it turns to ice. Breathing its newness. Surely the world was created from snow. Snow was what the raven pierced and fixed into place. Risen from the sea, a gift from the goddess Sedena, surely this was how the land was formed.

I was born on snow. I gave birth on its clean surface. The midwife was near and my mother and my father, my husband, our aunts and uncles, our brothers and sisters sang and drummed my daughter into life. I searched the northern lights for one who just died and, seeing her, I named my child as I washed her soft skin in snow’s melted purity.

I long to live there still, there on snow. Not here, not in this town. I long to feel soft flakes falling, watch them drift across the floes. I long to feel the silence, allow it once again to seep into my being. I long to know the secrets it hides: the crevices that carve its depths to the earth’s crust; the bones of my ancestors whose spirits drape wintry nights in the greens of the tundra of spring, the blues of the sea of summer, and sometimes reds, the reds of their passion.

I wish to run with my dogs over wide plains of alabaster, trusting them to find the packed snow covering ice, and skirt around the hardened skin covering soft billowy powder. Even in wind that cuts the surface into grooves and builds ridges. Even when air swirls icy mists around us as the dogs pull and I push the sled over the uneven ground. 

For I am like the one my mother spoke of, the one who became a wolf. The one who did not want her sons to support her. She built her own snow houses and so will I. She tried to fish, and stole when she caught none. But I, I will catch them. I will catch fish to eat. I will support myself. She was abandoned, and one day after catching no fish, she walked inland to hunt the caribou. I will walk inland too, me and my dogs, and hunt the caribou. She took off a shoe and was half wolf and half human. She took off her other shoe and became all wolf. When people come to hunt caribou, she knows they watch for her.

For I do not want to be crowded into a box, laid shallow in permafrost with all the others. I long to die in snow. I am happy thinking of this. Thinking of my body washed in its melt water and my hair braided and my jade knife placed in my hands. I long to be covered in caribou hide and taken inland and laid on luminous land, as my mother was, and her mother before her. I can feel even now the rocks that will protect me from the bear and wolverine. I can feel the cold embrace of the snow turning to ice. A child, a great granddaughter or niece, will be named after me and they will watch me dance in the winter night. And when they hunt the caribou, they will think of me.

This piece was originally published in the 2017 anthology created for the Ekphrastic poetry event, Vision and Voice, sponsored by Mariah Wheeler.

---

Carol Phillips’ essay, “Waiting In Time,” appears in the Main Street Rag Publishing Company’s anthology About Time. Her short story “Driving Lessons” won Second Place in the Carolina Women’s 2020 Writing Contest. Carol has written columns about mild traumatic head injuries and invisible disabilities for the Chapel Hill News, part of the News and Observer group. In addition, her short stories and haiku have appeared in small journals. She has been a member of the NC Writers’ Network since 2006, and served as a Regional Rep for four years.

Jeff Burt

The Boxers Protest

Rain collected in the soft indentations in the yard. The wind ruffled the water like a lazy spoon cooling coffee. A car had turned the ess curve a little too sharply, and was bogged down, wheels whining with increasing anger, splattering mud and mist from the tires’ frictionless spin.

The driver, a young man in his late twenties, reluctantly got out of the car to survey the ground. When he took his first step near the right front fender, his shoe and lower nine or ten inches of his trousers disappeared into the mud. I could hear the woman laugh as she scooted to the steering wheel. He looked around and mimed using a pry bar.

They were stuck, and I was stuck, mired by the insistent voices of my father and mother decreeing I should help travelers in trouble.

I opened my door and waved for them to come in. The woman shut off the engine and sprinted toward me. The man strolled, looking skyward, as if God had caused these indignities.

My dog sniffed both of their behinds, and satisfied, went to the stuffed chair and laid down. I was also less energized by guests than I expected.

No tow truck would come at this hour and in this weather. I had two spare bedrooms, so invited them to stay overnight.

I outfitted them the best I could; my sweats and a tee for him and, for the woman, my late wife’s sweats. My wife had been dead for four years, and I’d never been sure why I’d kept her sweats. At first, it was awkward seeing the young woman in them, but I was glad they’d finally come to use. When you get old, you look for reasons to justify hanging on, and this was one: those sweat pants brought a little magic back to my life, magic I had been missing for those four years.

They retired early, and I didn’t hear a peep.

I thought about my wife that night, how she always praised my ability to fix things, put two and two together. By profession I leveled buildings, piloted cranes, drove dump trucks, occasionally set explosives. For her, I did delicate repairs. Once I repaired her favorite tea cup , the crack undetectable, and she told me I had a little magic to me, a line she repeated for many years. When she died, the magic disappeared. I was run down, the cabin was run down, and everything seemed to be running downhill.

~

Snow fell overnight. It was not snow in a flake form, but an accumulation of flat hail and slush. The little wooden table I had set out on the side of the house had about three-quarters of an inch of what might’ve been mistaken for chunks of quartz. The dog slipped and slid on the porch, licking every step, at first with razored hackles up, then, finding it unusual and amusing, raced forward, skidding, scampering in place, until she became wild, and circled the yard eleven times before remembering she had a duty to do. She entered the house with steam pouring off her back and haunches.

When they came into the kitchen, the young couple lamented how cold the house felt. I had a pot of coffee on, and they quizzed me about the grounds:  how old they were and whether or not the coffee had been approved by some council.. I couldn’t answer any of that, and they drank it all the same.

I had enough oatmeal to share, and the woman seemed thankful. They kept looking outside as if yearning alone could lift their car – which had sunk perhaps another two inches overnight – from the rut.

I told them the tow truck could not make it until nine, and that seemed fine with the woman. She plopped herself into the dog’s chair, opened a shade, and peered out into the snow, her brown eyes seemingly glazed blue. She stretched in an intentional way, as if doing yoga.

The man fidgeted. Nothing pleased him. Nothing seemed to work for him. He kept re-tying the robe I’d given him, and pulling up his socks over his pajama leg-bottoms to keep the air from the skin of his shins. He smoothed his hair back with both hands as if he were stuck beneath a waterfall, shaking his dry head back and forth and rubbing his eyes.

He asked if the tow truck driver could do all of his work without opening the car, and I said he might need to put the transmission in neutral.

That’s it though? he asked.

Yep, I said.

No trunk? Or opening the hood?

Nope.

I’ll have to be there, of course, he said.

You should be, yes.

In case he needs the keys.

Or help. Another set of eyes is always good.

Should we pack our dirty clothes and be ready to go as soon as he pulls the car out?

If you want to get going right away. I don’t mind some conversation if you want to stay a bit.

The woman perked up, almost leaping to her feet.

We aren’t much for conversation, unless it’s on Zoom, she said, and laughed. Maybe if you were in one room and we were in another we could Zoom.

We’ll be ready to go, the man said.

They went to the bedroom to change, and came out with a trash bag of dirty clothes and their luggage. I had one spare toothbrush and offered it to him, but he pushed it away.

The woman said they had used their own, but I hadn’t heard the water run, so knew that wasn’t true. My coffee brewed strong, and I could smell it on their breaths.

My dog had taken back her chair as soon as the woman had stood, and now rose to inspect their luggage, wagging her tail.

Must be a mouse in there, I said.

Oh, probably just my lotion, the woman said. Unless she’s a drug-sniffing dog. She laughed again.

The man scoffed. We don’t have any drugs, don’t use any drugs.

He pulled the woman toward the door and there they stood, staring out without speaking for the ten minutes before the tow truck showed.

~

People can leave behind sensitive things when they pack too quickly. My wife’s brother and sister-in-law would routinely leave medications – prescribed and non-prescribed – in plain sight on the bathroom on the counter: beta blockers for the heart, nicotine patches and gum, and over-the-hood-of-a-car opiates, presumably for pain. My father often left a small stack of dirty clothes, which usually meant I should launder them and invite him back to pick them up, both of which I did.

This young couple left behind hair dyes, and in the corner near the outlet, a small pair of clippers.

I figured they were on the run, though from what or whom I could not say, and tried not to imagine. From the window, I saw them standing near the tow truck, inspecting the damage to the right front bumper as the tow truck driver hosed off the wheel and hub watching for axle damage. The woman was still laughing, though nothing was very funny out there – while the man frowned, paced, and glowered. I assumed he was not high and probably upset that she was.

The axle was broken. The man kicked the tire, aiming about three inches away from the tow truck driver, who responded with a swash of water on the man’s coat. The woman laughed.

Hesitatingly, the couple made their way back to the house and asked if they could stay until they arranged for a rental to be delivered. I said yes, and handed them the dyes and the clippers. The woman nodded and smiled.

This may not go well, she said, looking directly at me, somewhat sad and dreamily.

The man shook his head and stomped loose mud onto the entry rug. Not true Persian, is it? he asked.

No, I said. Home Depot, on-sale. Cheap. Lasts forever.

Not well, not well, not well, the woman sing-sang.

I’m going to have to disable your phone, and I need you to give it to me now, the man said, inverting the order of his steps, a not unusual thing to do in a moment of stress.

I handed over my cell phone.

Landline doesn’t work. Had it disconnected after my father died.

The man checked the wall phone anyway. He pulled out a snub revolver, somewhere between a derringer and a pistol, large enough to be a hand gun, but small enough to resemble a toy. He waved it, motioning for me to sit down. I sat.

He used my cell to call Enterprise and my credit card for the charge.

They can have a car here at 9:30, he told the woman.

Enough time, she said, to have coffee. You don’t know who we are or why we are here, do you?

Nope, I said. Just that you dyed your hair and cut it shorter.

Good, she squealed. You can live!

The dog came over and looked at me with eyes that said you are sitting in my chair.

I slid over to the couch and she clambered into the chair, her head over the armrest so she could see the road.

What do you plan to do with the car?

It’s a rental. We plan on leaving it.

Whose name is it in?

Ah, now, you don’t need to know that, do you? Let’s cut the questions and keep on living, okay? By the way, do you like my hair? The woman giggled and patted her head.

It’s well cut, I said.

But the color? The color?

Looks a tad too rusty, for my taste. Not an Irish red. Too dark.

I know, I know. But what can you do? CVS doesn’t carry Irish red.

But the cut is good, kind of sassy, I said.

Sassy? I like that, she laughed. I’m sassy, darling, she said to the man, who insistent on pacing a hole through my faux Persian rug.

Wonderful, he said. Fits you.

She scooped coffee into the filter, filled the coffeemaker with water, and then with her head in her hands and elbows on the counter, watched every drop stream into the pot until the beeper sounded. She smiled.

She poured two mugs, one for herself, and one for me.

Caffeine doesn’t make you agitated, does it? she asked. It does me, but I’m more proficient when I’m agitated. At work, I’m a dynamo in the morning, a slug after lunch, and then a vortex after my mid-afternoon cup. A fucking tornado. How about you?

It stimulates me, but I keep it to a cup a day so I don’t start clenching my teeth. My wife said she could hear me grinding my teeth by eight in the morning.

Your wife? She’s where?

Dead. Cancer. Four years ago.

Oh, sorry. You’re alone here. Get along with your neighbors?

Hardly know them. They keep to themselves. I’m a little rough for them, which is to say, maybe a little too poor for their tastes.

Oh, their rugs are real Persians?

Something like that.

Are they snoops? Are they gonna ask about the car?

Eventually. They’re East Coast snoops, which means they won’t ask for the first day. Midwestern snoops would ask within the hour.

She laughed. Guess I’m a Midwestern snoop. Do you know about estate scams? That’s our specialty. Buy an entire estate one day, sell it overnight, leave town the next morning before the wire transfer clears. Do one big one, you’ve got money for a year. This last one—big money. Four semis. Almost two million dollars. We get twenty percent.

The man abandoned his pacing to put his hand over the woman’s mouth.

She’s just making conversation, I said. She’s proud. It’s okay to be proud. I would have heard about it in day or two anyway, and put things together. I can still add things up, you know.

The man told me to stop talking, and strip down to my underpants, no socks, no shoes.

I protested, but did as he said.

When I was a teenager, I told the young man, I got arrested for walking down Main Street in just my boxers. The deputy held me in the lobby of the jail and called my dad. It was around midnight on a Friday after a basketball game at high school. I had taken off almost all of my clothes to protest against that very deputy. The deputy who had raced a classmate on a highway where she died in the resulting crash. I had stripped to my boxers because the deputy had tried to get my girlfriend to go off with him in his police car, and I knew the result. I had stripped down because I couldn’t think of anything else to do to draw attention.

I assumed that my father would bail me out, or talk my way out altogether. All he did, however, was chat with the deputy and examine the edge of the desk where he drummed his fingers. He didn’t acknowledge me once.

The deputy didn’t put me in one of the two cells. He let me sit in the lobby in my boxers under the fluorescents so that every person in a car or walking on the street could see.

Death by public humiliation.

Except I didn’t die.

When morning came and I got my release, I took the folded clothes under my arm, tied my tennis shoes, and tromped the eight blocks home in the early March cold.

My mother saw my outfit and did not bat an eye. She told me, this, pointing to my naked torso, this is a more serious problem than what you did last night. You’ll ruin your father’s honor. And mine.

I snorted and feigned throwing up. Honor, I said. You call siding with liars and cheats ‘honor?’ Saying nothing about the deputy murdering my friend when he raced her on County G and forced her off the road into a tree so just so he could have some fun?

And that’s how you challenge us? my mother snapped. Parading through town in your boxers? You need to go to college. You’ll learn there are better ways to protest than this small town can offer.

So I went to college. I learned new ways, and tried almost all of them. Sit-ins. Marches. Protests by word. Protests by deed. Letters to officials. Even a fire.

Deep in my heart I am still proud of wearing those boxers down Main Street, drawing attention to that murdering cop. No one listened to my protests. No one read my letters. Hell, they let the fire burn, didn’t even douse it.

But those boxers. The deputy was investigated, fired, arraigned, and found guilty for manslaughter. Imagine that. The power of a kid in his underwear.

This is all to let you know, I said, that sitting in my underwear I am more proud and more dangerous than I have been in decades.

The young man grunted, and said I was crazy, stupid, old.

I agreed.

~

Some argue awareness is consciousness, others that consciousness is always there, but not necessarily awareness, meaning even if a being is alert, it may lack the intellect to notice things profitable to its well-being.

These two could think, plan, react, and even steal. However, they were unaware of the danger lurking in their specific surroundings.

Scammers get frustrated when they can’t find another victim, or their costs rise necessitating bigger, more lucrative, and thus, riskier scams. I was no victim, either, unless they straight out shot me, which I mentioned the neighbors would overhear and report, as they did any loud noises, East Coast or Midwest.

They couldn’t abduct me, I told them. I was large, lazy, ornery, and had a terrible prostate. I peed a little every hour.

I knew their faces. I knew their names, at least their current aliases.

The woman banked with First Third. I could see the logo in the reflection of the computer screen on the window behind her. I saw the same logo on the man’s iPhone, along with app logos from Hertz, Enterprise, Zoom, and Airbnb. I told them a skilled detective skilled would identify them within an hour .

They clutched their phones even tighter. I was a threat.

And still the woman laughed. They were cooked, done. How could they still be giddy about a getaway? Was she sociopathic? Her giggling started to annoy me and her partner.

I told them I needed to pee and I needed to wear my pants or my kneecaps would turn into breakable glass. She laughed. He relented.

I peed in privacy, drew up my pants, and removed my belt.

When I opened the door I snapped the belt across the man’s face, then spun it around his neck before he could take a step. I had planned it, but my success surprised me.

The woman sat as if in a stupor, continuing to giggle. I dropped him to his knees, then used my chest to bully him to the floor, squashing him like a bug. I stood, with a foot on his lower back. Where’s the gun, I yelled at her.

She looked outside. The Enterprise car slipping on the snow into the driveway.

We packed it, she howled. It’s in his luggage.

A friendly double toot of the horn sounded.

It's a Prius, she said, mocking a pout. I wanted an SUV for the snow, but he wanted something inconspicuous. He said no one would expect criminals to drive a Prius. Scam artists aren’t Eco-friendly.

She closed the computer. She put her right hand on the table, flat, smooth, and then from underneath the table came an explosion. I thought at first she had fired a gun, but it was my dog barking at the driver coming to the house. The woman knew exactly why I had a stunned look on my face, and rolled into a ball on the couch, and began laughing.

The Enterprise driver knocked. I yelled for him to come in.

He clocked the woman in her spell of hilarity.

She’s high, I told him. They robbed someone, something.

I told him to call the police, and he dialed.

Is that a leash, he asked, pointing to the belt. Role play?

It’s my belt, I said. I use it to keep my pants up.

The woman rolled from the couch to the floor. My dog bathed her hands with licks as she covered her face.

That’s when I saw consciousness without awareness. The Enterprise driver’s eyes were wide open but he wasn’t seeing anything. Danger had called, and without fear, he had opened the door. He stood with an older man, shirtless, in saggy jeans with a belt around a man’s neck, a young woman helpless in mirth, and a dog sniffing his pants, yet all he could think about was sex.

They’re going to jail, I said.

He shook his head side to side. What about the car?

They won’t be needing it?

He got on his cell phone. There will still be a charge, he said, muttering that he would still need some paperwork signed.

The cops will do that, I said. What is their ETA?

ETA? I don’t know. I called my dispatch, not the police.

The woman erupted in long waves of laughter, holding her sides, crying, and then just crying.

The driver called 911. He turned to me asking what role she was playing.

In ten minutes, this will all be over, I told him.

I am sure if you asked the driver what happened that day, he would tell you a story featuring the belt with a side of kink.

If you asked the man with a belt around his neck, another story. The woman, a third.

They would tell of how consequences did not seem to flow from their actions.

The world tends toward disorder, and I had tried a little to hold it together.

A little magic had returned.

---

Jeff Burt lives in Santa Cruz County, California, with his wife and a Labrador that thinks she's a horse. He has contributed to Gold Man Review, Lowestoft Chronicle, Per Contra, and won the 2016 Consequence Fiction Prize.

Mike Itaya

I Knew Conway Boom: Toot Maudlin’s True Hollywood Story

I knew Conway Boom. He was glorious. The real article. Hanes underoos. Buns of steel. Spanish fly. And for a period between the spring and fall of ’93, I tried very, very hard to fuck him. Problem being, he didn’t seem to care if I lived or died. And living in his dispassion was as lonely as the moon.

Which is why I had to go for it.

That fall I threw a wrap party for Cop Movie at my dojang. Box wine. Two types of cheese. A brand-spankin’ Hitachi boombox. Then our co-star, Burt McHands, showed up, and the first thing he did was take a King Kong shit in my can. And he was all—from inside my bathroom—“I don’t think anyone should come in here again.”

That’s when Conway Boom (who was also legendary for kicking down doors) kicked down my apartment door. From inside my half-bath, McHands said: “I have a drinking problem.”

“McHandsy, that you?” Conway yelled. “C.B. has got the funky feels about this commode-abode.” He held up my best box of wine, chugged the remainder, and massaged his areolas.

“So, you know what looks great on Conway Boom?” I drained my Solo cup and chucked it on the ground. “Me.” I framed my face with my fingers. I was going for it, before anyone else showed up.

Conway looked at me with bored concern like I’d just swallowed a mouthful of spiders. He picked up the block cheese, sniffed it, then dropped it like a turd on the table. He yawned right in my face. His breath smelled as bad as I felt.

“Don’t do it, C.B.,” McHands said, still in the can. “She bought shitty cheese.”

I kicked my bathroom’s plasterboard door.

“I’m worried about Burt,” C.B. said.

“He’s fine, everybody’s fine.”

“He just told your hand towels he has a drinking problem,” C.B. said, as if I hadn’t just said he was fine. 

I pushed play on my Hitachi boomer. To “Thriller,” I furiously shook my fanny.

Conway stared at me like I had snakes coming out of my clothes.

“That sucked grapes,” McHands said.

Conway cleaned his cuticles with the arrogance of the handsome-bored.

“Sorry, but I never boogie for free.”

I pulled out a Jefferson and handed it over. C.B. examined the mint, holding it up beneath my flickering fixture. He passed it under the door hole to McHands, who inspected the bill for a long time before saying, “It’s real, C.B.”

Conway shrugged: “Let’s get retrosexual.”

This was all before a lot of things happened, long before Conway got me blackballed from the Cop Movie franchise, and before (but not long before) Conway left me alone in a Motel 6 under an assumed name with rather significant room charges.

Before all that: We boogied like I’d never boogied before.

We danced across the face of the moon.

---

Mike Itaya lives in southern Alabama, where he works in a library. His work appears in New Orleans Review, BULL, and Storm Cellar, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He holds an MFA in Fiction from Pacific University.

Kait Leonard

After They Removed Your Body

When I opened the door, the room sucked the air out of me. A path wide enough for a stretcher had been cleared through the piles of boxes and stacks of papers and overturned chairs.

I kicked at a pyramid of food wrappers and pizza cartons and found your collection of snow globes and ashtrays from all the states. Except New York. I’ve spent hours now searching for it. Through drawers and piles. We went there together. I have a vague memory of a plastic globe with an apple inside, but it’s nowhere. I found stacks of books stolen from libraries, due dates stamped clearly inside. A history of Pythagoras and one of Vlad the Impaler. A series of slim books on the American presidents, minus McKinley and Kennedy. Notes, letters, unopened bills long overdue, faded reminders written on post-its. Torn tee-shirts and greasy ball caps. Newspaper clippings reporting car crashes, openings of pizzerias, and Y2k prophesies. Stacks of obituaries from all over the country, even one from Canada. A piggy bank with “p-i-g” written on the side. It rattled when I shook it. Seven cheese graters and twice as many corkscrews. A box of feathers that might have come from a pillow. Cocktail napkins, wrinkled from the sweat of glasses, now dried. In your closet, a pyramid of the tubes from rolls of toilet paper. A deflated football. One crutch from that time by the lake. I found pictures of holidays and birthdays and vacations, of people I recognized and people I didn’t. But also pictures of isolated body parts, feet in shoes and bare, hands, knees, a bearded chin I recognized as yours. Prescription bottles, some almost full. Percocet. Dilaudid. Valium. Wine bottles. Vodka bottles. Soda pop cans, some full but not cold. Pay stubs and tax forms and insurance cards. A golf ball with something unreadable scrawled on it. An antique silver picture frame. I’d chosen it carefully at a little boutique downtown. I inserted the perfect photo of us and then wrapped the gift in purple paper with mint ribbon and hid it in my undies drawer until your birthday. In your care, the frame tarnished. The picture was nowhere to be found.

Sharing Secrets and Old Movies

I leaned over and puked on the passenger seat of my Pinto, shoved my seat back, and closed my eyes. I prayed the nausea would pass soon. 

~

I jumped and looked around. In the window, A man’s face shifted, doubled, and blurred. My head felt like an autumn melon, heavy and full. I closed my eyes. 

His voice pounded through the glass: “Are you alright?”

A cop, or maybe a security guy. My car. The clinic parking lot. I cranked it down and squinted, trying to get his face to hold still.

“Can I call someone?”

I wiped my sticky mouth on my sweatshirt sleeve. “I’m fine. Just need a minute.”

He spoke slowly, syllable by syllable. “You been here for hours.” He explained that I couldn’t camp in the lot. 

The sun had begun to drop behind the clinic, a weird neon disk mounted on the roof. It would disappear soon. 

~

I drove out of the parking lot and around the corner, away from the watchful eyes of the security guard. The clinic probably needed security just in case crazy protestors showed up to taunt women trying to get inside. I thanked God they hadn’t been there that morning. They wouldn’t have changed my mind.

Everything looked fuzzy, and my empty stomach tightened. I steered to the curb, turned off the engine, and threw my seat back again. 

The sky transitioned from blue to silver. I wished I had a someone to call who wouldn’t ask a bunch of questions or even try to console me. I wanted my grandpap, but I didn’t want to walk through their front door and act like everything was fine. My grandma would want to know why I was there, why I wasn’t home with my husband. She’d want to know when I would come to my senses and grow up. I dreaded having to listen one more time to all the things that made Danny a good man and why I should count my lucky stars because he’d chosen me. As I thought about it, there were so many things I didn’t want. I wished I could figure out what I wanted. 

~

When cramps woke me, the sky had gone heavy black. The dashboard clock read 11:43. Good. My grandparents would be asleep. I’d deal with everything tomorrow. The hollow pain in my abdomen kept me alert, as I navigated the dark streets toward home. Their home, I reminded myself.

A blue light shone around the edges of the metal blinds in the window of the TV room. Grandpap always fell asleep with the TV on. He devoured old westerns, staring at the images he’d seen a million times. Since his hearing had gone, there was no reason to turn on the volume. It also meant my grandma wouldn’t know what he was watching and scold him for wasting time on reruns, especially on those old cowboy movies.

I’d kept my key when I moved out, just in case. Now I turned it carefully and tiptoed through the little entry and into the kitchen. I shook three aspirin from the bottle my grandma kept with the spices, washed them down with milk from the carton, and leaned on the open refrigerator door. The cold felt good.

“You okay?” my grandpap whispered. He stood in the doorway, the little hair he had left pillow-mussed, his pajamas mismatched and baggy.

I couldn’t speak. It was like when I was little and he’d ask what was wrong. I never knew what to say because I didn’t want to make him sad. I pressed my palm against the cramping in my abdomen.

He looked at my hands and then at the clock on the stove. He held out his arms, ropy with purple veins and scarred from hard work. “I got you,” he said.

I crossed the room and fell into him. I cried, quietly so my grandma wouldn’t wake.

“Come on,” he said. “I’ll share the couch. John Wayne’s on. It’s the good part coming up.”

On the couch, I leaned into him and pulled the blanket to my chin. I told him everything. I knew he couldn’t hear me, but it was okay.

---

Kait Leonard writes in Los Angeles where she shares her home with five parrots and her gigantic American bulldog, Seeger. Her fiction has appeared in a number of journals, among them Does It Have Pockets, Roi Faineant, Sky Island Journal, The Dribble Drabble Review, and other wonderful journals. Kait completed her MFA at Antioch University.

Tighe Flatley

The Bed

Move-in day, freshman year. Kevin noticed Bryan’s wide shoulders; Bryan noticed Kevin’s acne, but forgave him for it, because under all of those bumps, his face was handsome with the kindest, deepest green eyes he had ever encountered.

Neither of them shared these observations out loud. They let it flood the private chambers of each of their hearts, and held it there.

“Which side of the room do you want?” Bryan asked. “It doesn’t matter to me.”

Kevin pointed to the left, knowing he slept on his right side and could face the wall, ensuring it was the first thing he saw each morning.

The first weeks of fall floated by, the Georgia sun still hot on the green campus. Bryan darted between ultimate frisbee, parties and class, while Kevin stayed in the room, priding himself on not missing an assignment.

“You’re always studying,” Bryan said one morning, as Kevin pulled out the chair from his desk and turned on the lamp. Bryan had just come back from the showers, a wet towel wrapped around his waist.

“Don’t you ever have any fun?”

“Studying is fun,” Kevin said, feeling his ears burn red. He tried to look Bryan in the eye, but his dark, flat stomach was right there, the hairs from the center of his chest climbing straight down into the fold of the towel. Kevin dug through his bag for a book to put on his desk and mime reading. He grabbed one blindly, not caring if it were for Calculus, Quantitative Analysis, Physics – anything but Anatomy.

“If you want to come to this party my friend is having tonight, you can,” Bryan said. “Think about it.”

It wasn’t until Bryan left a few minutes later that Kevin realized the book on his desk was still closed, light shining on the cover.

~

It was raining that night when Kevin agreed to join. The two talked the whole night by the keg, under the awning of the house, warm beer in red cups.

“These are my people,” Bryan said. “I’d never fit in before, not until college.”

I’m not sure there’s anything for me to fit into, Kevin thought, as he watched Bryan gleam a bright smile toward anyone who approached them.

They a shared cab home after midnight, after standing in the rain to hail it down. In the room, they both threw their water-soaked shirts in the hamper.

“You have a great body you know,” Bryan said.

“Thanks.”

He reached out to put his hands on Kevin’s shoulders, first the left and then, when he didn’t react, his right. Kevin leaned forward, close enough to share a secret.

“Can I?” Bryan whispered. Kevin was still nodding when Bryan’s lips touched his.

They woke up the next morning in Kevin’s bed, Bryan laughing, teetering on the edge. They stayed in the room all weekend, ordering pizza, playing video games, swapping between Kevin’s bed and Bryan’s.

“What does this all mean?” Kevin asked before classes started Monday.

“What do you want it to mean?”

“I don’t know, but I like it.”

“Me too.”

“What will my parents think?” Kevin asked.

“Who cares,” Bryan said. “They don’t need to know to think anything. This is your life now.”

Kevin blushed.

By the start of spring semester, Bryan suggested moving the beds together.

“It just makes sense,” he said, holding Kevin from falling off the edge.

“What will we tell people?” Kevin asked.

“We don’t have to tell them anything.”

It took Kevin longer to think about it and agree than to rearrange the room. No one in the building batted an eye. Even the RA said, oh, cool, and moved on. It wasn’t long before friends would come over to visit. They’d see the beds put together and put it all together themselves. By the first frisbee game in spring, when the blossoms were popping out of the trees, Bryan and Kevin left the field hand in hand. 

~

Bryan and Kevin signed up as roommates for sophomore year. They were in the next building over, and on the first day, they wedded another two bed frames to each other, this time in the center of the room, a desk on each side.

They didn’t tell their parents until the end of the academic year, when they decided to move into a one bedroom off-campus the upcoming fall.

“As long as you’re happy,” Kevin’s father had said.

Bryan’s parents simply hung up the phone. It’s not natural, they told him.

Kevin burned. As if there were an engineering formula that could explain love in the first place.

Bryan barely slept that night, knowing he couldn’t afford the rent on his own. Early the next morning, still lying in bed before the sun rose, Bryan whispered to Kevin he was prepared to call the whole thing off. He could live at the frisbee house; Kevin could do his own thing.

“Why?” Kevin asked.

“I need my parents.”

Kevin reached over and put his hand on Bryan’s chest.

“No you don’t,” Kevin said. “This is your life now. We’ll figure it out.”

That’s how Bryan fell asleep, Kevin’s hand blanketing his heart.

~

Two years passed in that house, with a full sized bed covered in cotton sheets the color of mud. Junior year, Bryan quit frisbee for an on-campus job at the library, stacking books in the back shelves to make the rent without asking his parents for help. They split the rent evenly, each paying $350 a month. By the last week of the month, they ate bread and cheese for dinner, climbing into bed early with no beer money, but they would always make it work.

It was the spring of senior year when Kevin got the call for the job offer. A twelve-month international rotation for an engineering firm, with a salary higher than his father’s.

“You have to take it,” Bryan said.

“But what will you do? Where will you be?”

They had been here before. An ocean had separated them once already, a dark, swirling depth. Kevin still remembered the continental groan of the four posts against the tile floor as they dragged his frame toward Bryan’s bed, two lands, rich with loam, crashing into one another with a final, settling hush. It sounded like relief; it sounded like love.

---

Tighe Flatley spends his days directing marketing campaigns, his early mornings writing and his late evenings editing. He lives in San Francisco where he is a founding member of the Page Street Writers. If you need him, he's usually by the snack table.

Rhea Thomas

The Third Eye

Most people couldn’t see Sam’s third eye, but when he was tired or drunk, it tended to make an appearance, winking suggestively at other men, indiscriminate.

Sam was both super tired and beyond tipsy, so he shouldn’t have been surprised when he felt it open. His third eye was a problem for several reasons: 1. He wasn’t gay, 2. He hated being seen as a freak, and 3. It was the first time Rebecca, his girlfriend of two would witness its appearance.

The party was opening night for a hip new restaurant located on the top floor of a downtown hotel. Rebecca worked for a monthly Texas magazine as a food critic, receiving a coveted invite.

Deep in a discussion about avocados with a guy named Beto, Sam’s third eye opened. He could tell by the brief tightening of skin and the fluttery feeling of eyelashes on his forehead as the eye awoke and stretched. He considered excusing himself, but it was too late.

“Avocados were originally called alligator pears in Florida, but in California – “ Beto stopped midsentence to stare. “Are you seeing this, too? Or is it just me?” he asked his date, whose name Sam didn’t remember.

Beto’s girlfriend pointed, mouth open wide.

Rebecca gasped sharply.

Sam felt all eyes on his forehead. He usually grew his hair long enough to cover his forehead, but Rebecca had talked him into a haircut last weekend. He usually carried a beanie around too, but realized it was unhelpfully in his car downstairs in the hotel garage.

He had planned to tell Rebecca about his unique condition, but kept putting it off, and now, well, there was no hiding.

He felt the eye wink at Beto and flutter suggestively. He turned to Rebecca and whispered, “I’m sorry, maybe we should go?”

“Oh my god, look at that! What’s wrong with his head?” someone blurted from across the room. Other exclamations filled the air as people turned to look.

He ducked his head, cheeks burning, that familiar sick feeling roiling his stomach. 

Rebecca looked appalled, and tried to angle her body to put herself between Sam and the onlookers. She replied quietly, “I need to stay, but maybe you should.” She looked around at staring crowd. “Yes, I think you need to leave.” She pivoted away, and headed toward the bar.

Beto spoke up. ‘“So, I’ve never seen that before. How does it work?”

Staring after Rebecca, Sam said, “Well, I see chakras. I can tell if they are out of alignment or need to be unblocked.” He glanced around to make sure other people weren’t listening.

Beto looked impressed.

Beto’s girlfriend spoke up. “Can you look at my chakras?”

Sam sighed. “Yeah, your root chakra is out of alignment.”

“I knew it! Beto, I told you something felt wrong. I’m going to schedule a massage!” She stood, fishing a cell phone from her cavernous bag.

Beto shrugged and rose to follow her.

Sam found himself alone. This was the story of his life; always slightly apart from others. Even his parents hadn’t understood, pushing him to hide his third eye so other kids wouldn’t treat him differently. But it was like everyone sensed his differentness. He’d only found true acceptance from his grandmother, Seraphina, who never made him feel weird or asked him to hide. In fact, she encouraged him to embrace the third eye, told him to lean into his gift, and learn from what he could see . 

“Hey, it’s Sam, right?” a voice piped up behind him.

He turned to see a coworker of Rebecca’s. He thought she’d been introduced to him earlier as Teagan.

“Don’t let these losers upset you. They don’t appreciate anything that’s different.”

“That’s really nice of you to say. Teagan, right?”

“Yeah. And I mean it. Don’t worry about these people, they aren’t the kind you should care about anyway.”

He looked at her dubiously.

She continued, “No, really, only pretentious snobs here today. All restaurant openings are like that. The people who feel the need to name-drop and be the first to eat somewhere new and trendy. Trust me, I know what I’m talking about.”

Curious, he asked, “Aren’t you one of those people too?”

She mocked offense, and then laughed. “Ha! I’m undercover.”

“You’re what?”

“Undercover. I write a food blog under an anonymous name. I don’t blow smoke up these celebrity chefs’ asses. I tell it like it is. I get invited occasionally, like tonight, because my dad’s a chef, but if they knew I wrote that blog, they wouldn’t want me here. Critiquing and bitching is kind of my thing.” She grinned and shrugged.

“Sam, I thought you were leaving.” Rebecca reappeared at his side, her voice quiet but firm.

He flushed and noticed Teagan’s eyebrows rise. “I am leaving, not because you think I should, but because I don’t want to spend any more time with you and other rude people who think it’s okay to stare and point.”

He heard someone clapping and saw Beto, his girlfriend frantically trying to shush him. He caught and held Rebecca’s gaze. “I’m so disappointed. I thought you were different.”

Teagan caught up with him at the elevators. She smiled. “Want to grab some coffee?”

Her chakras were perfectly aligned, not a single one blocked. He nodded. “I’d like that.”

They stepped into the elevator. As the doors closed, she leaned in and whispered into his ear, “When I get turned on, I grow a third nipple.”

All three of his eyes widened in surprise.

---

Rhea Thomas lives in Austin, Texas where she works as a program manager in the digital media world. She spends her free time hoarding books, kayaking and swimming in rivers, searching for mysteries and writing short stories that explore magical moments in the mundane.

Will Willoughby

The Projectionist

There’s a sleeper down in the theater. I’ve seen them before, these sleepers, and never know what to do. From the projection booth, I watch them through the port window beside the projector—people who’ve paid good money just to nod off in one of the lumpy, torn leather seats. Most don’t outlast the credits. Dazed and sheepish, they stand, stretch, address their mouth-side spittle, and scuttle off. This one, though, is dedicated. This one’s top-notch. This one’s slept through the final courtroom scene—the verdict uproar, the cracking gavel, the swelling music—and has slept through the credits as if sleeping is all he’s ever done and all he’ll ever do. He’ll need a prodding for sure. And nobody—not the sleeper, not the waker—likes a prodding.

But I go downstairs to administer the prodding.

He’s a gawky, sedated thing jammed in his seat and propped, Weekend at Bernie’s style, against the wall. He’s wearing a pale white shirt and gnawed-on jeans. He’s knock-kneed and up-palmed, mouth agape, eyes sewn shut, a plume of gray hair spattered up the carpeted wall. His breathing is rapid, shallow, mechanical. He’s as old as I am now and as old as my father ever got.

I stand in the aisle at the end of his row and consider the options. There’s the obvious: kicking his seat, clapping, and so on. Yelling’s always good. Maybe “Hey! or “Wake up!” or “Not sure what your deal is, but you’re super vulnerable right now! People could pile popcorn on your face! Also! This kind of sleeping seems concerning! Maybe it’s a condition!”

However you do it, though, there’s risk. Especially with sleepers like this, sleeping as hard as a father sleeps after work or on weekends. Sleep as escape. Sleep as a fortress. Sleep as a satisfying middle finger to anyone outside who wants in. These fatherly sleepers are somehow both imperturbable and ready to pop. Speaking, even at low volume, could make them suck air and flail their limbs and gush profanity. So they are, traditionally, best left alone. And they’re fine, totally fine. They rest their eyes. They snore. They do their time. And when they die, they’ll die the way they lived—truculent and shrunken in their bed. Surrounded by a jagged circle of disacquainted family members who, having driven a great distance, aren’t thinking straight and don’t know where to look, what to say, or who to blame for the way things are.

Just, you know, for example. Hypothetically.

So what do you do with sleepers like this? A case can be made for doing nothing. Because it’ll end. Time will decide the matter, one way or another. There will be some sound—maybe a rumble and whoosh from the air-conditioning—and he’ll stand, stretch, address his mouth-side spittle, and scuttle off, looking at you like you’re not there, like you’re the ghost in this situation. And he’ll stagger like a discontent marionette down the hall, swing open the doors, and vanish, leaving behind only a half-eaten popcorn, an untouched Coke with no ice, and a lot of questions.

Mainly: Why come to a movie—a courtroom drama built on tropes—just to bag some zees? Is he homeless? On the lam? In a fugue state? Or just fed up? Is his life full of the wrong people? Devoid of the right ones? And how many layers of insulation does this freak need? He’s already wrapped in the dark and then wrapped in a movie. Why would he need the dreaming? Where does it end?

I could walk away. Put this behind me. Move on. But the biggest question remains: How do you wake a sleeper?

I think I know. I know I do. I’ve always known. Now I see it.

But all this would be easier in a movie. In a movie, there’d be a law about fatherly sleepers. Take action or else. Things would make sense. Accountability would exist. There’d be right and wrong. A clear struggle. A resolution.

If I were in the movie, charges could be leveled. The evidence, the prosecution would say, is incontrovertible.

Consider, they’d say, the staggering simplicity of the waking act. Consider the mandate of the first projectionist on the scene. Dereliction of this clear duty must be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. We can all agree on that.

Consider the sleeper himself. There he sits: splay-limbed and scream-faced, discarded, repugnant, untended to, unmissed by a loved one. Is this a creature driven and derided by spite to impose a malicious, obstinate self-isolation? Perhaps. But whatever has pushed him here is immaterial. He’s here. For some reason, he’s here. Cut off from whatever he loves. Alone and frozen and clearly in pain. That’s all we can know. All we need to know.

We must therefore reframe the question. It is not, as the defendant claims, “How do you wake a sleeper?” It is “How do you wake a sleeper in pain?”

The answer is, once again, brutally simple. You do whatever’s necessary. You do what the sleeper needs. You move him from where he is to where he should be. You wake him quietly. You wake him gently.

Do not clap.

Do not yell.

Do not kick.

Speak to him, and speak in a whisper. Sleepers are, by nature, looking for something—something lost, longed for, or denied—and they’ll strain to hear what’s hiding in your whisper, even as they refuse to speak themselves.

If the whispering alone fails, whisper while rocking his arm, gently. He may gasp or lurch or scream what the fuck is wrong with you, you stupid fuck. Do it anyway.

If you don’t know what to say, tell him everything’s okay. Even if it’s not. Tell him anyway. Tell him, gently, what he needs to hear and what you need to understand. Tell him it’s over. Tell him you’re sorry. Tell him, quietly, that it’s time to go.

---

Will Willoughby is a copyeditor and writer living in southern Maine. His first published short story was “Splice” which appeared in the Summer 2023 issue of Epiphany. His work often features characters in absurd, funny/sad situations. He enjoys woodworking, astronomy, and talking to his potato-colored dog, Charlie.

Nicola de Vera

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Nicola de Vera (she/her) is a queer Filipino writer currently residing in Los Angeles. She holds a BA in Communication from Ateneo de Manila University and an MBA from Cornell University.

Rina Palumbo

Wingspan

They had told you that, as you flew higher and higher above the earth and closer and closer to the sun, the heat would melt the wax on your wings, and you would plummet into the ocean.       

They had lied.

The first feather fell off when you leapt from the rocky cliff and started a long, slow ascent on a rising column of warm air. You watched it slip away as you moved your wings in counterpoint to lesser breezes. Flight was relatively easy once you understood what your body had to do to the fabricated machinery of wood, leather, wax, and feathers. Flight was relatively easy once you found the currents in the air that would lift you and those that would propel you forward.

But winds are precarious. Just as some move you in the direction you want, others push you back; flapping uses energy and strains the tendons and muscles in your arms and upper body. The only release in that tension is gliding; to glide, you must keep rising.

But, as you rise, the air temperature gets colder. Cold temperatures shrink the spaces between the molecules in wood, leather, wax, and feathers. What you feel, beyond aching muscles, is how stiff and tight everything becomes. The leather straps that connect you with the wings contract, becoming less subtle and more challenging to move. So, you must climb higher into the sky, farther from the earth's surface, to hold out your wings.

There is a point when you move in slow circles, climbing higher and feeling the wind lift you and carry you forward. But it is so much colder now, and the wood that felt so soft yet had hard tensile strength becomes more brittle as the moisture still trapped within it evaporates. As it dissipates into the atmosphere, acute fractures begin to erupt, minimal at first, but each a threat to the integrity of your wings, the very objects between you, the sea, and the sun.

So, you stay at that altitude as long as possible. The coastline had disappeared long ago, but you can see the vague outline of the island in the distance. Follow the sun and let the wind carry you.

And, for a while, it was almost exhilarating. Until that is,  you need to climb even higher. The wind was biting now, and in that thinner air, your pounding heart and aching lungs made each necessary breath an agony. You feel yourself growing tired, almost sleepy, so high above the earth, between the sea and the sun.

And then, the wax. Wax does not melt at high altitudes. The wax that bound the feathers to the wood, which had been carefully placed on each quill, was allowed to dry and harden and then overlapped in tessellated patterns that repeated from smaller to larger along each wing and from apex to nadir, that binding medium was contracting. The wax was cracking, and as it did so, it separated itself from wood and feathers. You saw more and more feathers loosen and then be pulled away by the currents of air.

You started tumbling in the sky, fighting to follow the sun.

The cold had seeped into the wings as much as it had into blood and bone. You stretched the wings out as far as you could, and, for a little while, the spiral currents found you again, and you circled with them, looking at your shadow on the ocean below.

But the wood, leather, wax, and feathers no longer worked as they should. You felt each tightening, each break, each contraction, and each loss; you felt the pain in your lungs, the muscle ache, and the growing shadow.

---

Rina Palumbo (she/her) is working on a novel and two nonfiction long-form writing projects alongside short fiction, creative nonfiction, and prose poetry. Her work appears in The Hopkins Review, Ghost Parachute, Milk Candy, Bending Genres, Anti-Heroin Chic, Identity Theory, Stonecoast Review, et al. Read more at her website.