Keith J. Powell

Tongue Tied

The new French Ambassador was patient zero, confidently telling the young reporter that he wasn’t willing to concede her ruby grapefruit nipples and tits. We sat in stunned silence, taking in his strange jumble of words, thinking we were merely witnessing a career engulfed in an act of spectacular self-immolation. We didn’t understand we were watching history.

Worldwide and virtually overnight, lust began manifesting as a peculiar profane verbal aphasia. Researchers floundered. Prophylactics failed. Vaccines fizzled. So, eventually, we all just shook our heads and tried to get on with it. Not that it’s been easy.  

Your boss compliments you on a stellar fuck stick at the Monday morning huddle? Aroused. Order a grande soymilk twat constellation from the goth barista? She knows. Receiving communion and the bulldog-faced priest offers you the bonnet of cock wobble? Turned on. Thanksgiving and your cousin with the tittering laugh asks if you mind diddling the tulips? 

And it’s not as though innocent slips of the tongue went extinct, either. In fact, tragically, it’s estimated that innocent tongues slipping are today among the leading causes of divorce. True, it’s much easier to suss out partners for affairs and casual dalliances, but that’s a thin silver lining, not worth the hours we all spend sitting with our legs crossed in HR seminars, avoiding eye contact.

Anyway, that’s why the French were outlawed, and today people mostly text.

Bone Removal in 30 Minutes or Your Money Back

Kids call it “Going Bucket” or “Puddle Chic.” A trend birthed by a 90s-era goth rocker rumored to have had a rib removed for purposes of self-pleasure. It percolated there on the periphery of cool for years, but after three decades, a rib hardly seemed Metal anymore. The blue-haired K-pop singer took it to the next level by having his right femur removed. Suddenly, even soccer moms wanted in on the craze.

People on a budget inevitably end up at my shop — legally, I can’t call it a clinic. No one knows I meticulously preserve every carpus, coccyx, and clavicle I extract, storing them in plastic freezer bags for the future.

Like all trends, this one too will collapse. People will get bored and decide they want more bones, not less. They’ll crave fascinating protrusions extending out from their foreheads and limbs. They’ll call it “Going Full Wolverine” or “Triceratopsing” and when they do, you better believe I’ll be ready.

---

Keith J. Powell is a writer and editor based in Ohio. He is co-founder and managing editor of Your Impossible Voice and the author of the flash fiction chapbook Sweet Nothings Are a Diary If You Know How to Read Them (ELJ Editions). Visit keithjpowell.com for more.

Jessica Klimesh

Rusty’s Razor

        My boss said it was a promotion, transporting me to America and making me a human named Gail, twenty-two years old. “Twenty-two,” he said, “because humans value youthfulness there.” I said, “Is twenty-two really considered youthful? Why not twelve or thirteen?” And his face flushed furious and he said, “No, that would be too young. American humans don’t care about live children. Haven’t you ever seen the news? They let them get shot at school over and over again.” He paused before adding, “Don’t make me regret this promotion.”

         I nodded and didn’t say anything else, but now my youthful skin suit itches, hot prickles of angst. “If you’d seen the news,” my boss had said, “you’d also know that the humans there are beginning to suspect. They know about mutables.”

         Rusty, the bartender, is pouring Dan and me generous shots of what Rusty calls mood enhancers, saying “Let’s toast Gail!” and “Let’s all drink to Gail!” And after each drink, it seems like the temperature goes up, hotter and hotter, but the mood enhancers are doing their thing, so I just yell along with Rusty and the other patrons, “Yes, let’s all drink to Gail!” And then I remember I’m Gail, so I say, “I mean, let’s all drink to me!” 

         After the fourth round, Dan says, “Hey, Gail, wanna get out of here?” He puts his hand on my shoulder, fiddles with the curly strands of my blonde hair. I feel another rush of warmth and look toward the vents on the wall. It’s too warm. These human suits weren’t made for such heat.

         I just met Dan tonight, but he seems friendly, keeps smiling alright, twirling my hair in his fingers. It seems that humans always smile a lot when they have these mood enhancers, so it must be okay, but I also remember my boss saying not to get too comfortable. “You’ve got a job to do, and your age—Gail’s age—is a vulnerable one. And you’re green,” he said, and because I knew he was already doubting my competency, I didn’t want to ask what he meant by “green.” Surely he wasn’t referring to my real skin, underneath all the layers. So now I keep looking for seams on Dan, wondering if maybe he can see mine. Or if he suspects, even a little. But, I mean, at a place like Rusty’s Razor? So far from any metropolis?

         I say to Rusty, “Rusty, my man, what about some A/C, you know?” I try to say it like a twenty-two-year-old human would.

         And then Dan says, more persistently now, “Gail, let’s go somewhere else. You know, quieter. And maybe not so…warm.”

         “Oh, Dan-Dan-Danny-boy Dan,” I say, “I don’t even know your last name. Or, like, what you do. Or, ha ha, if you’re married.”

         “But does any of that really matter?” he says.

         “Well,” I say, “what if you’re one of those mutables, you know? Those extraterrestrials, ha ha. Those infiltrators. What if you’re not who you say you are? Because, you know.”

         Rusty, he’s watching us. I mean to say, he’s watching me. He flips a switch on the wall, the A/C, I assume, fixates his eyes on me. He’s got shocks of gray hair that stick out like he’s put his finger in a socket. And stubble, which I like, but I can just imagine it tearing my skin if he kissed me. Which I think about after last week, when, after three rounds of mood enhancers, I showed him the little daisy tat on my boobie. He said, “Put that away, Gail.” And I said, “Alright, alright,” giggling the way Gail would. I mean, it wasn’t even my real boobie, though he wouldn’t have known that. And not a real tattoo either. All that skin covering skin covering skin. But I’m sure he’s a non-mutable. That is to say, I’m sure Rusty’s human. One of those humans that don’t trust mutables. I mean to say, that don’t want us—them—here. On Earth.

         “I think it’s all just fear mongering,” Dan says. “Do you really believe they exist, mutables?”

         And then Rusty pours us another one, and the way he looks at me, I’m wondering if he wants to see that daisy again.

         “Ha ha,” I say to Dan, “who knows?” I try to pitch the question in a casual way, waving my arm in the air, but I accidentally knock over Dan’s glass, and that’s when I feel it all going wrong.

         “Rusty,” I say, “hey, barkeep, what did you maybe give us in that last shot? Because boy oh boy oh boy it’s hot in here.” And I can only think of melting, of my toes clumping together in my Docs, and how my mini-skirt might just be too short now because there are seams, seams everywhere, though maybe it’s my imagination. “Oh, hello, Rusty,” I say, “what about that A/C?”

         And he just looks at me, and I glance at Dan, who says, “So, Gail, I really think we should get out of here, you know?” He stands up but looks dizzy. Or maybe it’s me who’s spinning.

         “Uh, okay,” I say, trying to keep my tone light. But I can feel a burning in my chest now. I can smell ash and fumes. I touch Dan’s arm then, to steady myself, and when I do, I notice how hot it is. So hot you could fry an egg on it.

         “Wha—?” I say.

         “Oh, yeah,” Dan says, “that happens, you know?” And then he stares me down so hard that I know he knows, and I stare back so that he knows I know, too. But what I don’t know is if he’s here to save me or sacrifice me. If he’s really one of us—of me. Or if it’s a ploy. Either way, though, if Dan’s overheating, it can only mean one thing. That we don’t have much time.

---

Jessica Klimesh (she/her) is a US-based writer and writing coach whose creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Spotlong Review, Ghost Parachute, Milk Candy Review, Flash Frog, Gone Lawn, and Gooseberry Pie, among others. Her work was selected for Best Microfiction 2025 and Best of the Net 2025. Learn more at jessicaklimesh.com.

M.R. Lehman Wiens

         1 And then on the fourth day of his solitude, the Prophet heard the voice of God.

         God spake thusly:

         “Thou art a rotten worm, Braden. Be grateful that I speak to you, and do not banish you from my sight.”

         “Oh LORD,” said Braden, “How am I a worm if there are so many people that love me?”

         “Fool! Those that speak kind words to you at dawn curse your back at sunset. You must show them the truth.”

         Braden bowed low, pressing his head to the carpet of his Chicago apartment.

         “And what must I do, LORD?”

         “Thou must die, Braden. Take the pen in thy hand, and stab it through your eye.”

         And Braden did hesitate, unsure in the LORD.

         “Why do you tarry? Do you not believe?”

~

Braden twirled the pen in his fingers, spinning it around and around his thumb, the weight perfectly balanced. It was too easy to think of the pen piercing his eye, popping it like an overripe grape. Past the eye, further into his skull, more pressure would be required to break through the layer of bone protecting the brain, a shattering he would feel echoing through his body.

He set the pen down, and it rolled away from him, sliding across the desk to clatter on the uneven floorboards below. It kept rolling until it hit the baseboard, and he left it there.

Braden shivered, blinking to clear his mind.

Outside, the rain was still coming down, a dull drone on his window that made the apartment feel like a womb. He could barely see downtown through the deluge, whole towers hidden by the unrelenting storm. When he’d moved in, he’d audibly said,

“Wow. I’ll never get tired of that view.”

But now, three weeks into lockdowns and working from home, the landscape outside his window was forcing his window in, the glass almost bulging, shrinking his already small apartment. Window, door, walls. It was all part of the same cage. He didn’t want to work, didn’t want to relax, didn’t want to sleep. He wanted to run.

His computer chimed with a company email, and he turned off the oscillating fan that kept his mouse moving back and forth, maintaining his status on ‘Active, online’.

“Braden, do you have the Q2 internal reports? We need them for tomorrow.”

“Yeah, they’ll be there by EOD.”

He ran the macro he’d built his second week of work, and the report appeared before him in an instant. Attaching it to a fresh email, he scheduled the send for 4:43, a six hour delay. The first time he’d created a quarterly report, it had taken him nearly a full work day to gather the data. He saw the advantage in continuing to cultivate that expectation.

He tossed a breakfast burrito in the microwave, and turned on the Playstation.

~

2 And yet before the midday sun rose, God did speak to his prophet again, and the prophet did hear.

God spake thusly:

“Braden, thou shalt open the window, and fall to the ground, descending to the earth like the rains I send from heaven.”

“But LORD,” said Braden, “I am not a bird. Surely if I am to leap from the window I will perish.”

“Does my prophet not trust? Have I not provided for you, blessed you with a television and a PS5 and cushy work-from-home employment in these trying times?”

“You have provided, LORD.”

“Then jump.”

~

He was lost in New York City, swinging from skyscraper to skyscraper, a flash of blue and red spandex that traveled higher and higher. At last, he came to a tower that dwarfed the others, a shining behemoth that cast its shadow far across the city. He scaled it, running up the side in a feat of super human ability, reaching the observation deck in seconds. Soon, he was balanced on the top of the antenna, the rest of the city shrunk to lines and boxes.

Braden pulled up the menu, scrolled to ‘Save’, and named the file.

DO NOT DELETE

Then, he closed the menu, and jumped.

The edges of his vision blurred, wind that had been barely a whisper growing to the roar of a freight train as he sped towards the earth. He could save himself, the entire nature of his character placing salvation a single spider-web away.

I just want to see how close I can get, Braden thought, his thumb hovering over the button, ready to push it, waiting for the moment just before the inevitable.

When the character hit the ground, the screen flashed red. The body bounced on the sidewalk, rag-dolled into a pedestrian, and lay still. His thumb hadn’t moved.

He pulled up the menu, scrolled down, and hit ‘Load’.

He was balanced on top of the antenna, the rest of the city shrunk to lines and boxes.

He jumped.

~

3 And the LORD did speak in the dark and the stillness of the night, His true voice coming to his prophet on the whiskers of a mouse.

“Braden. Write down what I am to tell you.”

And the LORD’s prophet did scramble through his bedside table, retrieving a pen and a stained Chinese takeout menu.

“My prophet, you have weathered my trials and remained true. Now take my message to the masses, deliver it unto them, and spread my word.”

Then Braden the prophet did write, and write, and write, until the morning sun birthed a new day.

~

“You know the homeless people that you see that are talking to themselves?”

His therapist raised an eyebrow. The expression froze, but Braden couldn’t tell if it was his crappy internet or Dr. Long’s sustained skepticism.

“I mean, most times they’re people who are sitting quietly with a sign or a cup, or they’ll play music, what’s that called, bussing?”

“Busking,” the video unfroze and jumped ahead, allowing Dr. Long’s lips to form the last half of the word.

“Yeah, busking. But sometimes they’re talking to themselves, or even yelling, and when you get close, it’s all nonsense, not even a cogent conspiracy theory, just words strung together.”

“What’s your point here, Braden?”

“They don’t know they’re crazy, do they? I mean, whatever they’re saying, it makes sense to them.”

“Well, I think we’re all doing what makes sense to us.”

“Exactly! How is that not terrifying? We’re all just doing what makes sense to us, but how do we know that our senses are right?”

“Are you worried about your sense of right and wrong?” Dr. Long’s eyes darted to the notepad that Braden suspected was just offscreen.

“No,” Braden said, and then paused. Was he, though? If he wasn’t sure what was real, didn’t that equally mean that he didn’t know what proper behavior was? “I mean, yes, but not in the sense that I’m going to do something to hurt myself. More in the sense that I’m worried that what I’m experiencing is…real.”

“You don’t trust yourself? Your own perceptions?”

“I don’t know, Dr. Long,” Braden said. This was the thing he hated about therapy. Sometimes he wanted to vent, but Dr. Long, who always insisted that Braden call him Brian, constantly pushed him to resolve things. Braden would much rather wallow. “I guess I’m just confused.”

“It’s a confusing time.”

“And what am I supposed to do with that? Just live with the confusion?”

“If you can. If you can’t, you need to find something else to help you make sense of things.”

“Like a hobby?”

“No, Braden. More of a reason to keep pushing, something outside of yourself that deserves your attention. Something that hasn’t been derailed by whatever’s gone on the last three weeks.”

Braden considered this. There was a stack of papers on his desk, within reach but outside of the view of his webcam. It was an uneven stack, a combination of napkins and takeout menus and toilet paper and whatever else had been at hand in the middle of his late-night writing frenzy. He hadn’t read it since that night, but what he remembered of it scared him.

“And I believe our time’s up. Same time next week? Hopefully we’ll be past this flatten the curve stage and we can meet in person soon, but I think for now, we’ll stick with video chats.”

~

         4 In those days, a plague was upon the land, a sign of the LORD’s displeasure with an evil ruler and a complacent people.

         The LORD’s prophet Braden heard the call of the LORD, but he did not heed it, and the LORD’s displeasure came upon him as well.

~

         “I can’t get a test, Mom, but yeah. I think I’ve got it.”

         “Haven’t you been masking?”

         “With what, Mom? I’m not a seamstress. I had to get groceries somehow.”

         “Did you even bother to sanitize them once you brought them home?”

         Braden tried to say that there was growing evidence that fomites weren’t the transmission vector people thought they were, but his mother’s voice carried on, an unstoppable wave of sound.

         “Mom, I gotta go — therapy with Dr. Long is in a few minutes,” Braden said, breaking in as soon as his mother paused for a breath.

         “Oh! Well good. Tell him I say hello.”

It was a lie. His next session with Brian wasn’t until Tuesday. His head was pounding, though, and it was hard to talk without coughing. A lecture might have been tolerable before he was sick, but now it was torture.

He took a few swigs of orange juice he couldn’t taste and collapsed into bed.

~

5 “Braden, my prophet, why do you run from my call?” spake the LORD.

“Go away. I’m sick,” replied the LORD’s prophet, with more than a hint of annoyance.

“Ye be sick because I have made it so,” said the LORD. “Receive my call, spread my word, and ye shall be healed.”

And lo, the LORD’s prophet was sickly indeed and turned in his bed toward the face of the LORD.

“You have refused to sacrifice yourself as I have commanded. You have written my words but refuse to spread them.”

And the LORD’s prophet did curse, and blasphemy was full on his lips.

“Despite this, my prophet, I am faithful. Read what you have written, and ye shall be healed. Spill the blood from your wrists, and ye shall be redeemed.”

And then the prophet did sleep.

~

Braden woke up coughing, a deep hacking cough that gripped him like an electric shock, the muscles convulsing and rippling with a demanding power. He reached a shaking hand to the bedside table.

His fingers touched the piece of paper there, and he read words he didn’t remember writing.

~

6 The LORD’s prophet Braden descended to the street with the papers he had written, and he began to declare the LORD’s word in a loud, clear voice, and the people gathered, and were much amazed.

But as they heard his words, they began to whisper among themselves, saying:

“Who is this man that speaks as though he knows the will of God? Isn’t he the schlub from my building, the one in apartment 6F?”

And still others were disgusted, saying:

“He dares to shout on the street, unmasked when sickness lies on the land? He is at best a fool, and at worst he means us all harm.”

Then the anger of the crowd was stirred to action, and they began to stone him. Braden fled from their sight, running to the DuSable Bridge. There he climbed the railing and prepared to jump.

But the spirit of the LORD descended, and carried him away, and the LORD’s prophet thereafter resided in heaven.

~

“Jesus, get him out of there!”

“Oh my god! Call 911!”

The pedestrians on the bridge stared down at the man treading water in the Chicago River. Some pulled out cell phones and dialed emergency numbers. Most continued recording the videos they had started when Braden climbed the railing. The video of his 16-foot plunge and eventual rescue would soon go viral, with the title “Worst Suicide Attempt Ever.”

“What was he shouting about before he jumped?” said a woman to her friend.

“Something about the will of God. Look, one of his papers!”

She grabbed a Chinese takeout menu from its place floating on the wind. Between prices for veggie lo mein and General Tso’s chicken was an untidy scrawl, words thrown onto the page with abandon, connected only by threads of madness.

“My god, that’s sad,” said the first woman. Her friend nodded.

The man in the river below waved his arms, shouting not at any approaching boat, or at the onlookers gathered on the bridge. His quarrel was with heaven.

---

M.R. Lehman Wiens is a Pushcart-nominated writer and stay-at-home dad living in Minnesota. His work has previously appeared, or is upcoming in F(r)iction, Short Édition, Consequence, and others. He can be found at lehmanwienswrites.com.

Chelsea Stickle

After Dinner Activity

Hugh sous chef’d in a restaurant so when they roast chicken, he slides the knife behind the wishbone and pops it out in a fluid motion Jane finds deeply attractive. She displays them against the window over the back door. They count their time together in wishbones glowing in the Sunday afternoon sun. Five, ten, fifteen. It’s summer now, and the gnats love landing on them to search for tasty morsels.

“Why do you keep them?” Hugh asks one night as he breaks down the chicken. 

Jane scrubs the latest wishbone delicately like it’s their child’s first bath. “If you make a wish and snap it, you know immediately if you’re geting what you want. With other good luck totems, you just hope it works.”

He hmms, and says, “But it could go wrong.”

On tiptoe Jane tilts the newest wishbone against the others crowding the space. “But you know, and that’s something.”

Hugh stops moving the knife. “Want to try something?”

Sitting across from each other, they grip one side of the wishbone. Connected only via bone, they stare into each other’s eyes. Her, gently. Him, competitively. “Do you know what you want?” she asks.

He smirks. “I do.

Jane wishes for their happiness, and assumes Hugh is wishing for something similar. Hugh wishes for a kayak.

“Ready?” She nods. “Go!”

Hugh’s eagerness made her think he was going to yank it. But he does almost nothing, keeping his thumb and pointer clutched at the base of the v. There’s a twisted tension between them that Jane doesn’t understand. Neither of them is exerting enough force to break the wishbone. Hugh has hand and arm muscles that Jane isn’t even conscious of. He’s stood over a pot of cream and sugar, constantly stirring for an hour or more. He is purposefully waiting for her to make a move, and he can outwait her. Tentatively Jane pulls, and her side breaks off: tiny and thin, little more than a bony toothpick.

“Yes! Yes!” Hugh cheers and hoists the bigger half into the air like it’s the Stanley Cup. In his merriment there is no consideration for Jane. She misses the Hugh that walks on the road-side of the sidewalk, the Hugh who picks the peppers out of her salad if the restaurant forgets, the Hugh who places a pillow under her ass during sex. This Hugh she does not know.

The Disappearance

Without warning the words disappeared between them. For months they had been waning. Nights busy with lowlight grunts and sighs. They hadn’t complained. In the mornings they’d hmm’d to bring attention to a stray bowl, a dropped wallet. Over dinner she had a question that couldn’t be posed in a hmm or a lingering kiss. She wanted to know what they were doing, where they were going. Her mouth opened. A broaching breath as the words danced in her head. Her lips could move, her tongue could follow but words didn’t sound. She frowned, cleared her throat, sipped water. Nothing. He frowned and opened his mouth to ask what was going on. But nothing. Nothing came out of his mouth. He shrugged and held her hand. He didn’t mind. His love language was touch. But she was adrift in an ocean she didn’t remember wading into. Treading water with no land or boat in sight. Tired from all the mindless swimming she’d already done to stay afloat this far. Her legs were lead, her arms copper. Her gears were rusting, slowing, breaking down. He drank her in but didn’t notice the metallic taste in his mouth. That too he’d become accustomed to.

---

Chelsea Stickle is the author of the flash fiction chapbooks Everything’s Changing (Thirty West Publishing, 2023) and Breaking Points (Black Lawrence Press, 2021). Her stories appear in Passages North, Fractured Lit, Identity Theory, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and others. Her micros have been selected for Best Microfiction 2021 and 2025, the Wigleaf Top 50 in 2022 and the Wigleaf Longlist in 2023. She lives in Annapolis, MD with her black rabbit George and a forest of houseplants. Learn more at chelseastickle.com.

Steven Swiryn

The NoHo Star

         In the NoHo Star Café at Bleecker and Lafayette, Sam sat stirring his coffee, though he used neither sugar nor cream. Habit—he had given up sugar and cream last winter. The menu offered him a “lonesome egg.” One egg, cooked how you want it. Sam didn’t want a lonesome egg. He wanted Marta to come back.

         In the Café the day they’d met, Marta had been cursing her cell phone, trying to get Bluetooth working, and Sam had explained to her about “pairing” devices. That evening, he found himself updating the operating system on her computer. When he told his friend, Jenny, the NoHo Star’s blonde cashier about meeting Marta, Jenny started referring to her as his “up-date.”

         “Dating will be good for you,” Jenny had told him, “as long as Marta’s not just using you for technical support.” In his early teens, when other boys spoke furtively of girls, spied on them, bragged about what they had seen or touched, Sam was in his basement with his electronics, sniffing solder and the burnt insulation of copper wire, or lost in Magic or Final Fantasy with his friend, Pudge. His projects ranged from a simple power source to a sophisticated radio telescope. Late in high school, he became intensely interested in girls, but he had missed the telephone stammerings and backseat fumblings that taught other boys what to say or not; what to do or not. He thought he would design an algorithm; sub-routines included ID_Girl, Meet_Girl, and something he labeled Count_Bases (both a musical pun and small pride at having made the JV baseball team) but, though it made theoretical sense, his code proved hard to compile, let alone run on a non-virtual machine. Writing code for the First_Base and Second_Base functions was as far as he got. Then, submersed in college math and computer science, he put the entire project on indefinite hold.

         I’m no virgin, Sam told himself. A fix-up by his college roommate’s girlfriend. An encounter in the University Bookstore with that pig-tailed, near-sighted salesgirl. Then, he stumbled into Marta, who seemed to be impressed with his tech-savvy charm, and he did his best to keep up.

         Sam cooked for her. He took her to theater and to movies. They strolled the Brooklyn Bridge; Sam had devoured McCullough’s book, and he explained the nineteenth century engineering to her. The days and nights with Marta astonished him. Many times, he found himself staring at her, waiting to see what she would do next. She moved in with him.

         It lasted four months. Marta told him she liked his steadfastness. Then she drifted away and here he was at the NoHo Star, steadfast and alone. He had barely begun the programming project due next week, finding the keyboard suddenly untrustworthy. He felt himself struggling, disordered. At the NoHo Star, Sam always sat facing out toward the street, “to appreciate the day’s parade.” When Jenny had heard him say that, before Sam met Marta, she told him maybe he should stop “appreciating” and do some parading himself.

         On the small table he straightened the book he was reading—today it was Piers Brendon’s, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire. Across from him was her chair—empty again. Marta had always sat facing the big mirror on the back wall as if, Jenny once pointed out to him, she needed indirection, as if she wouldn’t look the world in the eye. Jenny said Marta hid part of herself from him. Sam called this Marta's “Declaration of Independence” and made a schedule of times they could each be independent.

         He complained to Jenny. “Does she want me to pay attention to her or to leave her alone?”

         “Both,” Jenny told him. “The trick is balance and timing.”

         “I don’t really get it.”

         “Yeah, I know.”

         Three weeks ago, Marta refused his demands that she tell him where she’d been all night. This morning, looking at her chair, set at a small angle to the table as if she had just gone to choose a pastry, he wished he were looking at her face. Marta’s face was a full oval framed in short-clipped hair that was almost black. She had eyes of polished agate, and a mouth that told unnecessary lies. Fairy tales, whispered in the dark.

         Eight tables at the NoHo Star. Eight rotating stools upholstered in green plastic at the counter along the wall. Like eight bits in memory, each coded one or zero, occupied or empty, present or absent. Two ladies leaned across a window two-top to share gossip and toast with jam. An old man in a rumpled gray suit was digging at a half grapefruit with one of those too sweet, too red cherries punctuating the center. The man was saving the cherry for last; a red full stop at the end of a sour story. Sam had often saved things for later. Now, at thirty-four, he felt he had better not wait. There was spoiled milk and brown lettuce in his refrigerator. Jenny told him he needed another mouth to feed.

         The broad Café window looked out on Lafayette and the park with the fruit and vegetable stand diagonally across Bleecker. Beyond the window was the sidewalk, with its fast walkers, backpack luggers, shopping bag toters, tank-top flashers, basketball dribblers, joggers and stroller pushers. One homeless man lurched among them, confronting as many as he could for coins. Even he, Sam thought, had purpose, direction. When he was refused, the man went on to another possibility, taking refusal in his shambling stride. Marta’s refusal—well, how could he just move on, he’d asked Jenny, as if Marta were being stingy with loose change?

         Sam had fired off letters to Marta, first angry, then cajoling, then angry again, attempting to shine a bright logic on their being together. The letters were, he admitted to Jenny, more rain than shine. Sitting alone in his apartment, folding his pleadings into an envelope and scratching on a new address Marta cruelly gave him, he’d felt awkward and scattered, even a little lightheaded, lost in the churn of their history together. Like an old map opened and folded for exotic journeys, opened and folded many times and then left in a bottom drawer, Sam was coming apart at the creases.

         When the light changed, the street poured with yellow taxis, honking and dodging through the green. He had made a spreadsheet. It organized each of their schedules and coordinated the available times for them to be together. He came home to find their spreadsheet on the floor of the birdcage. Marta had angrily accused him of stealing her independence. “Grand larceny,” Jenny called it, and she roared when he told her what Marta had done with the spreadsheet, renaming it a ‘spread-shit,’ until she saw that he couldn’t laugh about it. Then she said, “Maybe Marta is stealing from you, too.” A police car raced west on Bleecker, red and blue lights flashing on the street, off the window, on the Café wall, and off Sam’s knife and water glass.

         Beyond the street was the park, with its dog-walkers and bench sitters, where the summer city trees were loden and still. Green railings and cartoonish light poles of the Eastside Subway funneled passengers up and down the steps. Sam checked his watch again; seven twenty-seven. Marta’s train would be leaving soon.

         And then she was there, on the far side of the park, making for the green railings and steep stairs. He saw her spin 360 degrees, perhaps at some sound behind her, all in one motion that barely interrupted her stride. Her watch sparked in the August sun—a present from someone. She wouldn’t tell him who. In sandals and sunglasses, she crossed against the light.  Her walk had the glide of a dancer, her purse swinging against her hip as she disappeared down the stairs.

~

          In the Café, Jenny watched Sam watch Marta and, at a lull in her credit cards and cash, she came to him and sat down at an adjacent table. Sam was still staring at the top of the subway stairs.

         “You could run down there after her.”

         Sam didn’t look up. “She’ll say I’m crowding her.”

         “She’d say you were paying attention.”

         “She’d say I’m desperate. She’ll laugh.”

         “You’ll find another girl, a better girl.”

         Jenny rotated the Piers Brendon so she could read the title. She found Sam attractive, even good looking, in a raggedy sort of way, with his curly brown hair, tender eyes and wrinkled frown. And Sam didn’t need her to hide how smart she was. The night she first met him, over a year ago, was the night Charlie Schmidt dumped her.

         She had followed Charlie from Topeka when he came to NYU for film school. When he left her, she found herself sitting, sobbing, at closing time in the Café. Sam was the last customer, and she spilled her grief and anger all over him, much, she realized later, to his discomfort. When he attempted an awkward retreat, she grabbed his hand and wouldn’t let go. “He turned his back on me,” she wailed at him, “he actually turned his back,” and she pulled Sam to an empty table. “Why do I always melt for the cold ones?” Sam had not been a good listener but, once resigned, he remained there all night with her, trying in his awkward way to staunch her tears with stale coffee cake and melting ice cream.

         Jenny was thirty, having survived high school’s awkward blues, college financial struggles and the long slog of small jobs and small loves of her twenties. She spent her off-hours reading at the public library or browsing at the Strand. Weekends, she spent time with a small group of friends in conversation at restaurants and bars or, when she had the money, at the Public Theater.

         Recently, she did not have the money. She would soon have nowhere to live, if she wanted to stay in New York. She had been sharing a Brooklyn apartment with two women, stretching to afford her third of the rent. When one of them gave up on her acting dream last winter and returned to Cincinnati, Jenny worked extra shifts at the Café.

         Now the remaining roommate had announced that she was moving in with her fiancé at the end of August. Jenny could not afford the flat by herself. Craigslist had produced only smokers and slobs. She had a few weeks remaining before she would surrender to Kansas, back to a laconic family and, well shit, clerking at the Safeway, probably. A man at the counter wearing a KC Royals cap had taken off his shoe and was pulling at the tip of one brown sock—the arid brown of the Sunflower State.

         Jenny had seen the signs before Sam had. Marta’s late arrivals and early departures. Looks of boredom. The decline and fall. But then, Sam was always in his book or in his head. So Jenny was not surprised to find the laughter from the back table thinning and, more recently, just Sam alone, expecting Marta to pass through the door.

         “You seem sad again this morning,” she told him.

         “I’m not sad. Why do you say that?”

         “Sam, you’re wearing black jeans and a black shirt, for God’s sake. It’s August.”

         He sipped his coffee. “What time is it?”

         “I see you every day, waiting for her. She doesn’t come in anymore. I know she was sparkly. But she wasn’t right for you. Probably thought Scrabble was a style of omelet.”

         “We played Scrabble once.”

         “I’ll bet she was good at it.”

         “Not really.”

         “The vocabulary of a shovel.”

         “What do you know about it?”

         “Sam, she left you weeks ago.” Her eyes tried but failed to be kind. “L-E-F-T-Y-O-U. Now you can draw all new tiles.”

         “This coffee is shit.” Sam looked down at his cup. “And it’s cold.”

         “I’ll heat it up.” Jenny turned to the twin carafes scalding on their hot plates. She refilled his cup and brought it back to him. “Did you ever notice that ‘carafe’ has only one ‘f’ and ‘giraffe,’ two?” she said.          “Maybe it’s because the giraffe has a longer neck.” She laughed. “‘F’ is four points, by the way.”

         “In French, ‘girafe’ has only one ‘f’,” Sam told her.

         “Maybe French giraffes have shorter necks? Probably the wine and cigarettes.” And again she laughed; even Sam laughed. “You look tired,” she told Sam. The toast-and-jam ladies got up and shuffled to the register to pay and she moved to meet them there.

~

         Sam watched as Jenny made change. She has nice wrists, he thought. Jenny had hair the color of Van Gogh’s wheat fields, changing in different light. Today, she wore it up, held there with a flock of black barrettes. Her blue summer dress buttoned down the front from an open collar. She accepted a few bills from two students.

         Sam stretched and got up to leave. When he moved to pay his bill, he found Jenny checking off names and addresses on a yellow legal pad.

         “Customers who left without paying?” he interrupted her.

         “These are losers of another kind,” she said. “Possible roommates I got off craigslist. They’re all snorers, whores or just bores.”

         “Poet.”

         “I made up the ‘whores’ part, but the rest is true enough.”

         “Where are you living now?”

         “As of September 1st, it will be back in Kansas unless I find a place I can afford.” Jenny made a big X through the last three names. Without looking up she said, “Maybe I’ll just move in with you, Sam.”

         Sam found himself staring at the way one point of her collar tilted up toward her ear while the other lay flat. Like wayward ears on a shelter dog. “I actually have a pretty comfortable couch,” Sam blurted out, then added, “There wouldn’t be a lot of privacy.”

         “What if it’s the best I can do right now? Are you really offering?”

         “Well, I don’t know.” He put both hands in his pockets. “Well, I guess—I don’t know.” He glanced out the window over her shoulder, then back at Jenny.

         Jenny looked at her legal pad. “I could chip in $800 a month for rent. I could keep the place clean for you. I’ll bet you have dirty dishes in the sink.”

         “Dishes get done on Wednesdays and Sundays. I don’t know if it would work. Let me think about it. Those things don’t always—.” He took his change off the counter. He watched the steady pulse in the hollow of her neck as she put the bills into the register. “Do you like stroganoff?” he asked.

         “Stroganoff? Is that one ‘f’ or two?”

         “I cook pretty good beef stroganoff. With two ‘f’s.”

         “I’m vegetarian.”

         “Oh.” Sam twisted one shoe into the linoleum.

         “I’m done at three today,” Jenny told him again. “Come back to the Café and we’ll talk.” Sam had code to write. He spent the remainder of the morning in the world of “if... then... else...” statements, bubble sorts, and breakpoint conditions. Three days of unopened mail, diet coke cans and pizza boxes cluttered the table near his computers. He stared at the Film Festival poster on the wall and pictured Marta, the dark-haired thriller and Jenny, the blonde romantic comedy.

         At two forty-five, he went out to get sweet corn, lettuce, peppers, cucumber and a few radishes and found himself, grocery sack in hand, outside the NoHo Star. Through the window, Sam saw Jenny reach under the counter for her purse and take out a small mirror and lipstick. She did what women do to their hair when they are about to leave a place. Then she called out something to the short order cook and the waitresses and was out the door.

         She crossed to Sam. “Groceries?” she asked.

         “Corn. Salad stuff.”

         “Vegetarian,” she said. “Enough for two?” Sam snapped his head toward the subway stairs, though he knew it was too early. “I meant for you and me.”

         “For you and me?” He opened his sack of groceries and looked in, as if he had forgotten what he had just purchased. He pictured his empty apartment and looked up at Jenny’s yellow hair. “We could roast corn on the grill. We could mix up a salad. I have radishes.”

         “Radishes are bitter,” she said.

         “They add color.”

         “Well, O.K., then,” she said, and took his free arm in hers. The easy warmth of her bare arm against his felt like old flannel.

~

         As they walked and Sam summarized the Brendon book, Jenny thought about whether a relationship with him had any chance of working out. He was in no condition to start something. To start what? What sort of relationship? What other choices do I have? It was only a few blocks to the walk-up where Sam lived: an old one-bedroom with wood floors and cobwebs. Three computers lived on a table on the east side of the living room: a Mac and a PC, both for testing, and Sam’s personal laptop. Jenny listened as he showed them off to her, elaborating on how they compared. He had named each of them, like pets. He made it interesting and she lost herself in his animation. Two parakeets agitated a cage in the tiny kitchen.

         “Oh, budgies,” Jenny cried when she saw them, and put her hand up to the thin bars, “what are their names?”

         “Von Neumann and Turing,” Sam told her.

         “Of course.” With Sam, Jenny felt no need to pretend she didn’t know who von Newmann and Turing were. “Did Marta like birds?”

         “She seemed to at first. She lost interest.”

         “You make it sound like it was all her.

         “I suppose it was half my fault. She said I would ignore her. It was all on the schedule. Figuring out the most efficient algorithms, debugging software, you have to concentrate. You can’t keep looking over at new shoes.”

         “So you broke up over her shoes?”

         “I would get mad if she was out late—somewhere. I don’t know what she expected.”

         Jenny studied her own shoes for a moment, her favorite blue clogs. “Maybe she expected your attention, and when she didn’t get it, she looked elsewhere. If it was me, I’d want your attention—not all the time, but enough.”

         “I’ve got to earn a living.” Sam moved to the sink, passing close to Jenny where she leaned against the counter. She could smell shaving cream. She watched as Sam put dressing on the salad. “How much is ‘enough’?” he asked her.

         “In order to know how much is enough,” Jenny took a step toward Sam, “you have to be paying attention.” When he didn’t respond, she added, “Don’t look so bewildered.”

         “I’m not bewildered; I’m analyzing.”

         “You don’t look ‘analyzing,’ you look bewildered. If you want to look analyzing, close your mouth.” Jenny reached out and gently pinched his parted lips to close them, then crossed to the kitchen doorway. She pictured herself on her parents’ farm near Topeka.

         Sam asked, “Did Charlie pay attention?”

         “Charlie could be a good listener, but he got sullen, especially in public, when I understood stuff he didn’t.”

         “Well, I wouldn’t do that.” Sam tossed the salad. “To tell the truth, Jenny, I haven’t had many girlfriends.”

         She pursed her lips and let out a gentle puff of air. She supposed not. “What’s your father like, Sam?”

         “My father? He still works for the New York Power Authority. Lives in his head, mostly. Came to all my baseball games, though.”

         “Baseball.” She looked him up and down. Sam wasn’t what she would call wiry, but he did move with a fluidity that was there if you looked.

~

         Sam roasted corn on a small charcoal grill on the fire escape while Jenny dished out the salad. After they had eaten Sam told her he had better get some work done. “Are you going to stay?”

         “Well, I’ll just hang here for a while.”

         He tried to lose track of her, poring over a sub-routine he was designing. Then he found himself typing the first simple code every beginning computer programmer learned:

        print('Hello, world!')

         Sam had written this program in many computer languages but it had never struck him before as desperate, to have the computer communicate to an outside world. A world that was, in Sam’s experience, not paying attention—of course that’s what Jenny says I don’t do. This program simply instructed the computer to output, “Hello world!” to the screen. He deleted “world” and typed, “Marta.” He looked up. Jenny was examining the poster on the opposite wall. He edited “Marta” to “Jenny?” then deleted these intrusions and went back to work.

         A few minutes later, Sam looked up to watch Jenny moving along the bookshelf against the living room wall. He liked the way her shoulders turned and the tilt of her hip when she stopped to remove a book. Marta had been rougher. She’d never browsed among the books. She didn’t love von Neumann and Turing—said they were messy, demanded they sing to her, as if they were Oscar Issac and Marcus Mumford, for crap’s sake. Jenny was softer, interested. Teasing, but kind. She made good jokes and bad puns. She played with words and numbers. Sam liked words and numbers. He liked bad puns. He caught himself staring at her legs and forced his eyes back to his screen.

~

         Jenny snorted and, slapping the book she had been browsing onto the table across from Sam, began scooping up dirty dishes and other mess he had neglected. She carried four armloads into the kitchen, dumping trash and washing dishes. Amidst the clang of spoons and clank of plates, she got no response from the other room to questions about where the cups belonged or which drawer he preferred for the can opener. Then Jenny moved to Sam’s bedroom, where she found piles of clothes on the floor and called out,          “Look at all this shit.”

         “You better go,” he said, getting up. “I have work to do.”

         “You have a lot of space for Manhattan. I could help you keep it organized.”

         “I have work. Marta never messed with my stuff.”

         “Is this why she left you? You gave her a schedule for when she could expect you to notice her? I wouldn’t put up with that either.”

         “Then go back to Kansas.” Sam strode to open the door, but Jenny did not follow and he skittered back to the bedroom. “I didn’t ignore her,” he said.

         “You’re a mess,” Jenny told him.

         “I—”

         Jenny brushed past him to the living room, where a red couch, a portly three-seater with flared arms, stood against the wall. A round gray pillow dotted the end, with ‘Pluto, 1930 – 2006, Sorry’ scrawled in red yarn. “So, this is your famous empty couch.” She flopped down, hands laced behind her neck, head on the former planet, feet comfortably crossed. She watched Sam, mired in the bedroom doorway, staring at his computers.

         “I have a deadline—,” he began, then turned and saw her. “What are you doing?”

         “Just seeing how it would feel. Maybe I’ll stay right here.” Jenny settled herself deeper into the cushions. “I think you need another human. You’re by yourself even when there’s somebody else in the room.”

         “I’ve got to work,” he repeated.

         “If the other choice weren’t Kansas—” she muttered. She left the couch and slid into the chair in front of his laptop. She tried to read the code he was working on, a file called, “Relationships,” but it might as well have been written in Ancient Budgie. She typed her own line at the end of a section titled “Living Together.”

         “What are you doing?” Sam rushed at her, rotating the laptop so he could read what she’d typed. “And then something unexpected happens? That’s not Python. Computers need exact instructions in a recognized syntax.”

         Jenny pushed back from the table. “I don’t respond to exact instructions, Sam.”

         “Unexpected would make it crash.”

         “Not always. You take a chance.” She started to cross her arms in front of her chest, but not wanting to seem stubborn, she slid them to her sides as she moved to the hallway.

         “Like with Charlie?” Sam said.

         “OK, I crashed that time,” her hands came up again, “but it if wasn’t for Charlie, I’d still be in Topeka.”

         “Hurts too much.”

         “I can stand it.” She rose and moved toward the door. “Can you?”

         As the door closed behind her, she saw over her shoulder that Sam had already turned to attack the keyboard.  

         Strangling the railing in her hand, Jenny plunged down the two flights of stairs, but she stopped in the vestibule. Turning back, she leaned into the buzzer by Sam’s flat number and held it.

         “What!” The word spat into the vestibule, distorted by the ancient intercom.

         “You’re a mess,” Jenny sent back. “I’ve changed my mind.”

         “Changed your mind about what?”

         “I’m not moving in with you.”

         “What?” came the crackle of Sam’s voice. “I haven’t asked you. I’m not sure I want you here. I haven’t decided.”

         “It’s not only your decision.”

         There was only a hum from the box.

Then, faintly, “You’re going back to Kansas?”

         Jenny put her mouth close to the speaker. “I’m not going to take up with some guy I have to talk to from two floors away through an intercom.”

         “Take up with? What does that mean?”

         “I don’t know yet,” Jenny said. The box was still and she walked out.

~

         The next day, Sam was still trying to think this through. The way she threw herself onto the couch! Marta would never do such a thing, mess her hair, look undignified. And who ever found it funny how many ‘f’s something was spelled with? She was so damned interrupting. And what did she mean, “take up with?” What was she offering?

         At five, Sam returned to the Café. Jenny ignored him. He ordered stir-fry with tofu.

~

         Jenny stood behind her register, reviewing her legal pad, avoiding eye-contact with Sam. She thought about Kansas, the Café and about Sam’s couch. He seemed so blind to his role in losing Marta. What about Sam and her? Would that work? Would what work? What was she thinking—a couch to crash on for a short time? Rent she could afford? A friend to talk to and go places with? A lover? Would that work?

 ~

         When Jenny finally came to his table, Sam stared at her. “Maybe you’re just another Marta. You’ll use me.”

         “I—” She stood still. The short-order cook slapped a plate onto the service counter under the heat lamps. Jenny looked Sam in the eye. “I need a place to live.”

         “With me? Using me?”

         “If that’s using you, then, yes, I’m using you. I can’t afford my place anymore. I need to find another—” Jenny stepped forward, “and so do you,” she said, pulling out the chair at his table. He found himself staring over her shoulder. It was almost five-thirty. Jenny pointed to the grocery sack under his chair. “If you’re not careful, you may find that your life comes down to radishes,” she said.

         But he wasn’t listening. Marta, in a pale orange dress, rose from the subway stairs and turned away to walk through the park.

         Tears stumbled down Sam’s cheeks. “She’s not coming back to the Café, is she?” he said. “There’s no chance.”

         “No chance.” Jenny echoed, as Sam watched Marta fade across the park. Jenny reached across the table and, with the heel of her hand, brushed each of his cheeks. “I’m not sure how easy it would be,” she said, “living with you. Don’t algorithms do the same thing over and over again?”

         “I thought you needed to. Or it’s back to Kansas.” He was looking out the window again. “Good algorithms are reliable—steadfast.”

         She poked at a strand of yellow hair that had fallen past her eye and then, reaching out with one hand on either side of his chin she centered his face on hers. “I was here all along, you know. Before you started with Marta.”

         “You never said—” Sam wrapped his arms around the front of his t-shirt, holding tightly to his shoulders. “I guess I wasn’t paying enough attention.” He let go of his shoulders. “Jenny, I’m just lonesome is all.”

         “Is that built into your operating system or just a bug in your software?”

         “You made me laugh with that giraffe thing,” Sam said.

         “Enough to have me sleeping on your couch? ‘Couch’ with two ‘C’s.”

         “I suppose we could just write the code, debug it, and see if it runs.”

         “Can you promise you won’t print out our schedule?”

         “Von Neumann and Turing prefer the New York Times business section.”

         Jenny put her fingers up to his lip. “What’s this from?” Sam flinched.

         “What?” He put his own hand there, his fingers on hers.

         “This little scar.” Jenny traced it.

         “She bit me.” He felt his face flush at the memory.

         “Marta? Just a bug bite, then.” Jenny looked at her hands. “I won’t hurt you, Sam. I’m using you a little. But I won’t hurt you.” She reached out her hand to seal a new arrangement.

         “I’m not fragile,” he said, and they shook hands.

---

Steven Swiryn is a cardiologist who specialized in the care of patients with heart rhythm problems (cardiac electrophysiology). In retirement, he continues teaching, plays guitar and mandolin and, rarely, performs in sketchy coffeehouses and bars as a singer-songwriter. His first short story, “The Unicycle,” was published in the Bellevue Literary Review and was awarded “Special Mention” by the editors of Pushcart XL.

Erin Finnerty

Never Felt Better

Anyone can slip a penny under their tongue or clamp onions in their armpits to simulate a fever, but this is not evidence of any particular craft. The thermometer registers 99, maybe 101 if you overdo it, fine. But it’s the other details – the extra dab of blush, the hot washcloth on the forehead, the limp eyelids, the subtly labored breathing – that nail it. Any hack can grip their head and moan. But will they take note if their sinuses were palpated? Would they know if their anterior lung field was bilaterally auscultated if it hit them in the face? Do they take a sick day from Being Sick? A hack teems with tells.

Today’s class are third years, the larval stage of med school. They’ve been neck-deep in lectures and textbooks, but the brain knows nothing it hasn’t experienced with the hands. Some would classify today as a dry run for future patient encounters, but this inflicts a false distinction between acting and performing. The air is a-crackle with potential energy, on the cusp of conversion to kinetic energy through these greenhorns.

Here is one now, getting into character. Allow me to sketch him for you: milk-complected young man, trim midline from nonstop ing-ing (running, hiking, climbing, soccering), volunteered in a nursing home (told himself he loves old people, but the truth is he needed to bulk his anemic med school resume), atones for too much IPA with penal amounts of kale the next day.

I walk over, aware of how well the grey-blue hospital gown plays up my undereye shadows. He introduces himself, squeaks out “I’m Dr. Weston” (adorable), and motions for me to sit. I settle onto the exam table, and its paper covering crinkles which gives me the tingles every time.

“Hi Dr. Weston, I’m Laine.”

I look at him for a beat. He’s frozen already. Picture tapping him on the side of the head, like a broken TV.

“What brings you here today, Laine?”

LAINE

Well, I’ve been having this pain in my lower back, off and on, for a few weeks now. I’m usually able to ignore it – I’m very fit –

(LAINE lays back and bicycles her long legs in the air a few times to demonstrate their condition.)

 but recently the pain is just more than I can take. 

(Gaze falls to the ground, LAINE swallows hard.)

“DR.” WESTON

Okay. Let me start by taking a general history, and then we’ll go into the exam itself.

(Girds himself.)

He skids through the history checklist. When was my last physical exam? Two years ago. (Yesterday.) Do I have any chronic health conditions? Well, this back pain seems to be one. (A lady doesn’t tell.) When was my last menstrual period? Gee…probably two months ago? (Fifteen years ago, when an IUD capped that well.) Is there any chance I could be pregnant? Dear God, is there? (No. Never.) And what kind of work do I do? Sky diving instructor. (Actor.) Do I smoke? Occasionally. (Occasionally.) Do I drink alcohol? Yes. How much? Four drinks a night, every night, except Thursday, Friday, Saturday and sometimes Sunday, when I have six, or seven. (Never.)

DR. WESTON

Okay then! Great! And now I’m going to…start… the physical exam.

                   (Gingerly takes LAINE’S wrist, palpates radial pulse. Measures blood pressure. Inspects nasal vaults, oral cavity. Overlooks ears. Checks pupillary response to light. Forgot the ears though. Ears! Ears, ears, ears.)

                   (LAINE turns her head a few degrees and leans toward WR. DESTON. He tilts his head away from her while simultaneously stretching arms toward her neck to palpate her lymph nodes. His arms can not reach her. He stretches arms further toward LAINE while tilting his head even further away.)  

LAINE

Doctor, are you doing the limbo?

WESTON

Just…going to check your lymph nodes now.

                   (Palpates lymph nodes, missing five of the nine key areas. Auscultates carotids with bell, fails to have LAINE hold breath. Palpates thyroid, fails to visually inspect from front and side. And he forgot the ears.)

LAINE

Have you ever done this before?

PRESTO WESTO

                   (Acting.)

Haha! Yes, we’re taught all of this in medical school. I’m going to listen to your heart now.

                   (Pulls stethoscope from neck, inserts it backwards into his ears, pulls it out, inserts it properly. Places stethoscope bell on LAINE’S chest, auscultates aortic area, pulmonic area, right ventricular area, left ventricular area. LAINE’S paper gown rustles as his stethoscope bell slides across it to the next area of her chest.)

WESTO

I’m going to ask you to lay down now, and untie the gown.

LAINE

You what?

THE GOOD DOCTOR

So…I can examine your abdomen.

LAINE

Just joshing.

                   (LAINE punches him playfully in the arm, then lays down on the table and unties her hospital gown. She stares at the ceiling for a moment, and then looks at the young man standing over her.)

THE YOUNG MAN STANDING OVER LAINE

                   (Pulls LAINE’S gown to the side, places stethoscope on LAINE’S abdomen, auscultates for bowel sounds. Fails to percuss abdomen in four quadrants. Begins to palpate abdomen, looks unsure, cannot access the GPS for this part of the human body.)

LAINE

Did you lose something?

THE LOST DOCTOR

                   (Ignores LAINE. Presses deeply into her abdomen, searching for the liver’s edge, for the spleen tip. He cannot locate them.)

Can you sit up now please?

                   (LAINE rises – powerful, haunting, poignant.)

Ok, can you touch your finger to your nose?

LAINE

                   (Touches finger to cheek.)

A MAN GOES ON A JOURNEY THROUGH MED SCHOOL

                   (Examines LAINE’s knees, shoulders, range of motion in back and spine. Palpates iliac crest of her hips, pushes fingertips deep into her hip socket.)

A STRANGER COMES TO TOWN IN A GOWN

                   (Makes yelping sound. Watches his face.)

DOCTOR WHAT

(Skips rest of hip exam.)

LAINE

You’re just like a real doctor!

ELEVENTH HOUR AFTERTHOUGHT

                   (Chuckles.)

Oh - one last thing.

                   (Reaches for otoscope, switches on light.)

Let’s check your ears.

                   (Inserts tip of otoscope in LAINE’S right ear, leans next to her face, squints. Warmth from the high-powered light floods her ear canal.)

LAINE

Mmmmm. Hhhmmmmmm. HhhuuuuuuuugghhmmmMMMM.

END SCENE

~

Afterward I inventory his many, many mistakes. He nods along, with gusts of frustrated breath. I catch his eye, and give him a sympathetic smile. “You botched that exam today. Egregiously. But you’ll get there, perhaps. You just have to be humble, and practice over and over.”

I can see my words float through the air and travel into his ears, into his brain, where they nestle in crevices, soon to germinate a mental scrapbook of professional negligence.

“And one last thing – you didn’t wash those hands of yours before starting the exam. And who knows where they’ve been?” We both look at his hands.

~

I could have been a doctor, too. I’m practically a doctor. Let’s just say I’m experienced with doctors.

~

The acting bug is hereditary. You catch it from a parent, and then you just pray your own case is incurable.

My father acted as a father, but he was terrible with the lines and couldn’t improv to save his soul. He fell for anyone who smiled back at him, unable to tell they were acting too. Eventually my mother discovered his indiscretions, and in a fury drove him off. [Father exits, pursued by a bear.]

I can’t say I blame him. If I were married to her, I’d look elsewhere too.

~

Every one of my mother’s voicemails is the same. Went to the doctor about these pains (these headaches, this ringing); they don’t know what’s going on; I’m going to demand tests this time.

~

After the immersive external experience of embodying a standardized patient, it’s important to let the instrument that is oneself rest. The gold standard of treatment is full surrender to the interior, replenishment through self-wombing.

I put on my top-of-the-line headphones. They cost $4,000, paid for by my honest labor of participating in focus groups, sleep studies, and selling my plasma. The sound quality is unparalleled – a log flume you ride with your ears, tunneling through the deluge to arrive in another dimension.

Once I put on the pre-mixed soundtracks, I lean back and close my eyes, and envision myself standing on the edge of a better world. The sky is lavender and tangerine, and the ground is the texture of dry ice. The air shimmies. The stars are lower and closer, and they strobe. Today

I assemble myself this way: I have Baryshnikov’s body, a watermelon-sized dahlia for a head, and a leopard tail.

Something about the leopard tail feels two degrees off, so I swap it for a panther tail.

Once I’m assembled, I drop a tent down from the sky and hover it there. The strobing starlight passes through the sheer tent top, and all the light is melted butter. I turn the music up until it floods my skull, washing everything downstream. Away, away, into the gutters. Dance on.

~

Particularly active REM sleep of late. Whenever liquid comes out of my feet in a dream, I know something important is about to happen to me.

~

The next standardized patient assignment is for students learning differential diagnosis. It’s a new gig – seems word has gotten around about me.

I’ve done a little stage makeup for today: faint purplish undereye circles, a few zits I deliberately cultivated so I could pop them and let them crust over, and a little whitish concealer rubbed onto my lips for that extra-anemic look. I stayed up all night so my exhaustion reads authentic, and carefully placed a few grains of coarse cornmeal in the corners of my eyes, to look like that gunk that builds up. I haven’t washed my hair in eleven days.

Performance begins well before the audience is in place.

I can see the other standardized patients they’ve got for today. Basic. Basic. Another basic. Tends to be a mix of grad students, waiters, randos trying it out. Who’s in charge around here? I ask the guy next to me. He’s a terminal schlub; I’d peg him as a Grand Theft Auto addict who still lives at home and needs money for the next expansion pack but his mom makes him pay for it himself.

He jerks his head toward a White Coat in the corner. I catch sight of his throat, where he’s got a two-inch keloid across his neck. Excellent prosthetic makeup – I’d guess a thin line of mauve fondant, superglued into place and rubbed with Vaseline for sheen. This guy’s good.

Something about the Attending is familiar, or maybe it’s just the exhaustion playing tricks. She’s giving the med students their assigned cubicles for the run-through. She looks the part of a Woman in Charge. The hair on my arms raises a little; I’m a sensitive instrument.

When I get close, it comes to me, like a gumball popping out the chute: Gabby.

“Hello, Doctor.”

She turns to me, but doesn’t register. That’s how good I am. I give her my last name, and she slides down the list to check me in, and when she reaches my full name, she looks up again.

“Laine?”

Yes. But not today.

I zap her with a marquee smile through my bleached lips and haunted eyes.

~

The acting bug is also contagious. I’ll set the scene. It’s the tenth grade, and I’m auditioning for Our Town. A dozen girls are trying out for the role of Emily, and I watch them one by one act their way through the monologue.

When I get up and stand under the lights, and I AM Emily. I resuscitate her from the mass grave of high school theater clichés. Our monologue on the preciousness of every day and every moment is riveting. I get shivers from my own performance; I’m so moved, I have to fight tears.

Gabby is in the front row of the auditorium, here to cheer me on, my original Fan Club since we met in seventh grade biology. For some reason she’s sitting with the others trying out for Emily. I can see on her face she’s struck stupid.

Gabby must have auditioned for something that day. Being a diminutive thing, she was cast as Wally Webb, a character with few lines who dies from a burst appendix on a Boy Scout trip.

We ran lines with each other at our houses after school. Her family had a dog named Amy, a deeply weird name for an animal. Amy’s howls were toxic to my process, and I refused to continue in that space.

When we rehearsed at my house, my mother came out in her charmeuse kimono and sized Gabby up: “Are you an anorexic?”

We both looked at Gabby, giving her time to answer the question. Gabby never had a knack for improv though.

My mother touched her temple and gave her head a little shake, eyes bugging just slightly. She rubbed her fingertips together, as if stroking some invisible cloth. “I can’t…feel my hands.” She told us she wasn’t feeling well, and retired to her room.

~

Everyone needs work. Work gives life meaning. People fall apart when they have nothing to do.

My mother did not work. She came from money, as they say, as if money is a far-off land, or that protozoic ooze that amoebas first crawled out of. She blew into town one day, changed into a bathrobe, and only left the house to attend her various appointments. The money she came from still trailed behind her, and it was there when I needed new veneers for my teeth, or an accent coach, or a falconry tutor. There was money when she wasn’t well enough to work, which was always.

My mother’s job was figuring out what was wrong with her.

~

LAINE

OW.

STUDENT

I’m so sorry. Sorry. Does this hurt you?

         (Taps LAINE’S knee with a reflex hammer.)

LAINE

OW. OW OW OW OW.

STUDENT

         (STUDENT shakes head, holds hands up.)

I’m so sorry. You seem to have unusually sensitive…kneecaps?

LAINE

You’re HURTING me. Why are you HITTING ME with that?

STUDENT

This is just a reflex hammer…? I’m testing to make sure your reflexes are working properly. But maybe we’ll pause there if this is hurting.

         (STUDENT looks around for the instructor, for the escape hatch. STUDENT is experiencing mild chest pain and fresh regret about letting her parents pressure her into med school. Was pleasing them really the only way to feel secure in their love?)

“Let me stop you right there.” I drop the act and look this kid in the eye. “Pain is not an emergency. Maybe they haven’t taught you this yet. People can tolerate pain. You need to keep doing the exam, every part of the exam, or you could miss something crucial. You can’t do this with your hands over your eyes. Alright? Look up. Look at me. Look at me. Pain is not an emergency.”

As this message soaks in, the light shifts in her face. She breathes away her tears. Some distant voice is resurrected – perhaps a Bulgarian gymnastics coach from high school, who always squeezed the next level out of her – and validates what I was saying. It all checks out.

“Now take up your reflex hammer, and continue with the exam. If you don’t treat this seriously, if you don’t approach each exam like it’s life or death, you could miss something of vital importance.”

I find my own hand has balled itself into a tight fist. I look back at the student. There she is, stuck between a rock and a hard place and a scalpel and an iron maiden and one of those anvils suspended over her head like in a roadrunner cartoon. For a moment I pity her. Top doctors are made though, not born! Break down to break through.

She looks around for help – is there a doctor in the house? – but Gabby is busy observing a student palpate that schlub’s thyroid. From across the room, I watch this woman. Who would have guessed she’d have a star turn as Boss Lady? I certainly wouldn’t have. Not in a hundred thousand million eons.

Gabby can’t save this student though, only I can. I pull her eyes back to mine and lock her in. I am a carpenter and she is a baby. I am channeling knowledge into her. I am choreographing the muscle memories she will rely on for the rest of her career, so that one day, years from now, when a nonstandardized patient presents for care, she will follow the tank treads in the cement back to this seminal teaching moment, here in this exam room, and she will know what to do. 

STUDENT DOCTOR

I’m going to ask you to lay down on the table for the next portion of the exam.

DOCTOR TEACHER

Will it hurt much?

STUDENT DOCTOR

You’ll just feel some pressure. It’s important that I check your bowel functioning.

I lay down on the table, and lift my hospital gown. She presses deeply into my abdomen, searching for hidden organs with her blind little fingertips. Gabby is looking at me from across the room, with her own blind little fingertips. I wink at her.

~

Gabby had a boyfriend, Jamir. By senior year, she’d given up on auditioning and transitioned to doing the lighting for shows. She and Jamir would scuttle around the stage wings in black jeans and black sweatshirts, headsets and walkie talkies. Two nerdy ninjas, sitting in a tree.

Gabby was, as they say, tight-lipped about her romance. Always punting whenever I’d ask, as a friend, how things were going. I had to wonder if Jamir, a late bloomer, had the right skills to romance our girl Gabrielle.

I found him one night at the end of a dress rehearsal, checking all the nuts and bolts of the lighting. (Love a double checker!) I assessed what he knew in the romancing department: very little. He’d picked up some of Gabby’s terrible ideas about tongue.  

~

I put on my headphones and start with a single amoeba. It’s a two-dimensional amoeba, and I flip through multiple colors before tinting it electric lime with frosted tips. In my mind’s microscope I see all the amoeba’s parts: vacuoles, cytoplasm, membrane. In the center is the nucleus, and I set it blinking, like a lighthouse swinging a neon lasso. The pseudopods contract and swell in time with the nucleus. Once the tempo of the whole glorious mess is beating and catches fire, it’s like an electric cranberry color, and then I/it splits into two. We love this music so much!!!!! we shout and hear each other shout. We are both pulsating now, and we each split into two more. The louder the music, the more we divide and replicate. We add on animal hooves to the pseudopods so they don’t feel so naked. Then we are turning into aliens, we are turning into the sky.

~

To prepare for the next week, I take a walk in the woods. I dislike hiking. All the plants look alike. I am trying to recall an educational rhyme. Leaves of three, let it be. Or maybe it’s leaves of fivey, poison ivy. No reception on my phone to google a picture. No matter. I take my clothes off and roll around on an especially planty section of the forest floor.

By evening the itching starts. Next day, little bubbles spread up my thighs and torso and onto my neck. I scratch until it oozes and forms patches of crust. It’s phenomenal. 

~

At the next teaching session, the guy with the thyroid scar is back, along with the thyroid scar.

“What’s all over your neck?” he asks.

“Just a little treat for the kids.” I try to arch my eyebrow, but the rash has spread onto my scalp and movement is fraught. “What’s all over your neck?” 

“This? Thyroid cancer. Took it out.”

“Is that so? So that’s an actual, real scar there?” I bring my nose to his throat to get a closer look. His body is cabbage-scented.

“Yep. First month afterward sucks, but then everything just settles down. I was all over the place before, and now I’m top-down, cruise control on.”

Mr. Topdown Cruisecontrol slurps on a can of orange Fanta and waggles a finger my way. “You might want to have someone take a look at that mess.”

~

I have to throw myself into it, wrenching with force. I draw on my training in corporeal mime: always make the invisible visible. Finally, the spaghetti sauce lid gives way, with a defeated pop and hiss. Inside are – everyone mime a surprise face! – tiny colonies of fuzz, sea-foam green and kitten grey. Scoop these gems out and spread them across a slice of three-week-old deli turkey whose ammonia smell is a bullhorn in the nose. It doesn’t go down easy, but down it must go, so that symptoms manifest in time for the morning’s performance. Once committed to a role, you must engulf yourself in it.

For years, it has been a chronic outrage that others can’t appreciate what I put in. Role after role, handed out to lesser actors. Fine. Let the chorus fill the ranks of community theater, Law and Order spinoffs, and toothpaste commercials. All actors reconcile themselves to degradation, an occupational hazard.

The true professional is nourished by the ubiquitous opportunities for interrogation of the human condition vis a vis the emotional petri dish that is another human. Acting is ultimately not a performer and an audience. It is a two-person relationship. An actor, and an interpreter.

~

FUTURE DOCTOR

We’ve gotten the results of your biopsy back. Unfortunately, they showed that the cancer has come back –

STANDARDIZED PATIENT

         (Screams.)

FUTURE DOCTOR

         (Continues, with raised voice.)

– the cancer has come back, and it has spread to your spine.

STANDARDIZED PATIENT

         (Screams over FUTURE DOCTOR’S words; begins weeping loudly.)

FUTURE DOCTOR

         (Shouting.)

It is important that you not lose hope. Please calm down. We need to discuss your treatment options. Outcomes indicate that treatment at this stage can prolong life by as much as two years. Please calm down. Please. Please.

STANDARDIZED PATIENT

         (Continues screaming, weeping. Tilts face up to the ceiling and wails.)

BEDSIDE MANNER BIG BANG

         (Reaches slowly toward STANDARDIZED PATIENT, hand hovers before choosing destination, settles on shoulder. Squeezes.)

“Laine. Laine. That’s enough.”

But soft! Here’s Gabby, drawing the curtain. Dimming the lights. She’s holding a paper cup of herbal tea that smells like radioactive dirt. Killjoy.

“I think you’re mistaken, Doctor. That is not enough. I’m providing this student here with a valuable opportunity to cultivate his bedside manner. He knows nothing of how to deliver difficult news. Doctors, as we all know, are all-too-frequently inept at delivering difficult news.”

The student looks concerned, like this is still part of the simulation and he’s lost his line. Like I said, I’m very good. The education must go on.

“What if I were to go into shock at this moment? What if I completely blacked out, and my mind erased the entire conversation? What if I blacked out, forgot the conversation, and fell and hit my head? What will this future medical professional do then?”

Gabby fails to grasp my process. “Right, of course those are important considerations. For today’s purposes though, the priority is for students to get a chance to practice an intervention. And that’s impossible if all anyone can hear is you screaming.”

She does. She does say those words to me.

The future medical professional is trying to figure out what’s happening in the performance. Gabby tells him he can take a ten minute break. He leaks away toward the others in their white coats.

“Laine, are you sure this kind of work is a good idea for you?” Gabby’s using her Quiet Respectful voice, which is the ultimate sign of disrespect.

“ Actually Gabby, I was going to ask you the same thing. I seem to remember you don’t really like touching much. That you’re a little squeamish about that. Must make it rather difficult for you be competent in this line of work.”

Gabby doubles down on the I’m Concerned face. “Laine, I heard about your mom. I’m really sorry. I can only imagine it must have been such a shock, and I can imagine you might be angry that nobody intervened sooner. It just doesn’t make sense to me though why you’d put yourself through all of this.”

I clamp Gabby in place with my eyes. I put on my imaginary headphones and picture Jamir in his black tech sweats, against a black curtain, in the dark, and I’m in black tech sweats, and I move toward him and we converge into a single blob. I roam around and absorb all the blobs hidden in the wings of the stage until I am massive enough to crush the entire structure. There is Gabby, standing in front of me, and I could absorb her too. Instead, I reach over and lift the bell of her stethoscope to my mouth.

“Doctor Gabrielle. Doctor Gabrielle.” She winces, and this gives me the giggles, so I drop down into a baritone and boom into the scope: “Doctor Gabrielle. Paging Doctor Gabrielle.”

Then I yank the scope from her neck and yeet it across the room.

~

I kept the gown from today, just wore it out of there under my regular person disguise, out into the parking lot, under a sky the color of toilet paper. At home, I put my headphones on and lay back. I set a scene in which I am the doctor and I am the patient.

DOCTOR LAINE

I’m afraid it’s malignant. We’ll have to take it out.

         (DOCTOR LAINE unsheathes scalpel.)

STANDARDIZED PATIENT

Yes, we will.

         (STANDARDIZED PATIENT palpates herself, prepares for excision.)

DOCTOR LAINE

You may feel some pressure, but you’ll feel so much better when it’s over. Count backwards from a hundred.

         (STANDARDIZED PATIENT reaches up and takes scalpel. Removes the tumor herself.)

~

Whenever my mother sneezed, she would freeze in place, expecting it would bring on a seizure. I learned to never say “God bless you” – the sound of a human voice in those fragile moments sent her into the spins. After a minute or two, her body would thaw and release. She’d find a dark place to lay down with a handkerchief tied across her face, to prevent any nasal intrusion that might trigger further sneezes.

She was always listening deeper and deeper into herself. When her bowels bubbled or squeaked, she insisted on total silence, to isolate the sounds. She would beckon me, and lift her shirt. I would press an ear to her belly, and close my eyes. We would both slow our breath and listen. Squeezing, whining, microscopic roaring, some demon trapped in there and unable to make its way out. Doubling my focus, I would hold my breath altogether. I never could localize the source of the disorder, before I became lost in space inside her. Overlaying this was lub-dub lub-dub lub-dub, that classic backbeat, radiating from her tiny eggshell heart.

~

My ideal setting is where I’m walking down a street lined with Japanese maples, and they’re all perpetually at the stage of just starting to leaf, delicate fetal foliage. The air smells like permanent markers (the good ones, like they had when I was young), and pencil shavings, and the air is the temperature where you can’t tell where your skin ends. The fourth wall is dissolved, the fifth wall, the sixth wall, the set is struck, and there is nothing separating you any longer. Homeostasis carries the day.

---

Erin Finnerty writes speculative fiction in order to ride out speculative reality. Her work has appeared in Mobius Blvd and is forthcoming in Wallstrait and Bog Fancy.

Tom Busillo

It Wasn't Necessarily the Cocaine

It wasn’t necessarily the cocaine that made me decide to propose.
But it didn’t hurt.
We were at a dinner party hosted by a guy named Craig, who collected vintage spoons and rugs, all laid haphazardly over each other like modular wall-to-wall carpet. There was a duck confit situation. A woman in a tinfoil dress read aloud from her own screenplay. Someone played harp through a loop pedal.
I had done two bumps in the guest bathroom – polite ones, just enough to sharpen the evening\ – and then I looked at her across the room and thought: Yes. This is the moment. This is the woman. This is the jagged point in time where all my timelines converge like a trainwreck inside a fireworks factory.
I didn’t have a ring, so I bent one of Craig’s cheap knives and got down on one knee, and she looked at me like I had just asked her to join a pyramid scheme involving endangered birds.
“You’re bleeding,” she said.

I hadn’t noticed. My nose. My fingers. The knife. Who could say.

“Yes,” I said. “But I’m doing it with love.”

She didn’t say yes. But she didn’t say no. She said, “Maybe go sit down.”

So I did.

The harpist started playing something that sounded like a whale giving birth to triplets.

Someone handed me a napkin. Someone else handed me a tangerine.

Craig leaned over and whispered, “That rug was Peruvian.”

I apologized – to Craig, to the rug, to the tangerine, to time itself.

She never mentioned it again.

We dated another year. She left me for someone who made their own vinegar.

But sometimes, when I see a knife or pass in front of a rug store that has been having a going out of business sale for six years, I still think: It wasn’t necessarily the cocaine. But it definitely helped me believe in forever for a second.

---

Tom Busillo's (he/his) writing has appeared or is forthcoming in McSweeney's, trampset, The Disappointed Housewife, Heavy Feather Review, and elsewhere. He is a Best Short Fictions nominee and the author of the unpublishable 2,646-word conceptual poem "Lists Poem," composed of 11,111 nested 10-item lists. He lives in Philadelphia, PA.

Mileva Anastasiadou

Dead Boxer Has Wings

We recognize the ghost when it first appears. We can read, and we’re educated, and we already know it’s not just a dead horse. We recognize Boxer, the workhorse from the Animal Farm that worked hard for the revolution, only to be betrayed by the revolution. How sad, we say, when we first see dead Boxer in the zoo, because he looks sad, and we don’t hear his words, we only hear his tears.

He lurks behind the trees at night, we see his wounds and we feel his pain and we want to comfort him and hug him and thank him for the sacrifice and the lessons he taught us, but when we get close, he disappears, like ghosts do. We build a statue in the middle of the zoo, and every morning we sing the zoo anthem, life is too long to be spent in fear, we sing on the top of our lungs, because we’re free now, protected, safe, there is a huge fence around us that keeps the dirty hungry rodents away, and we don’t work much, because the zookeeper does all the work, he brings the food, cleans, answers all questions and trains us to be out best selves and entertain visitors.

The zoo ghost doesn’t let us sleep at night. His tears get louder and louder. We try to tell him that things have changed. He takes a look at the rats. He stares with pity. We follow his glance, then turn back to him and say, the rats aren’t visitors, the rats are rats. We think that he envies us perhaps, that he feels sad because he wasted his life working hard for the wrong cause. That’s why he cries, explains the zookeeper who doesn’t want us too concerned or worried, he wants us happy, if only for the visitors who pay for our food.

The zoo ghost looks away, his eyes travel over the fence and his ghostly body follows. Dead Boxer rises and makes a gesture, like he’s inviting us, but we can’t fly or walk through fences, not like ghosts do. We exchange awkward glances, we think he may not get the fence thing, we won’t ever cross it because outside lies danger, but he stretches his front legs, like saying, outside lies the sky. The zoo ghost lingers above our heads and his words fall hard on us, they hurt like rocks, when he says, life is too short to be spent in prison, but then the zookeeper starts singing the zoo anthem, urges us to sing along, and we join him and sing and forget.

We smile politely and play happy, but we can’t be; there is this ghost that walks among us, flies over our heads, our cages, inside our minds, haunting us, and he angers us with his persistence, because he can’t accept that we are as happy as we can be. The lion takes a step ahead and says, look, I’m wild and I’m accepted, and then the zebra talks and says, I look weird and I belong, while the monkey tries his best dance moves screaming, I follow my dreams, and we think we hear the bear say, poor rats, and the tiger mews like a cat, that she wants wings, but then the zookeeper comes. He steps in and yells, quiet, because we have a long day tomorrow, joy to devour, visitors to entertain. He promises that we all get wings in afterlife like dead Boxer has wings. Then he comes close and sits among us like he’s one of us, and sings us a soothing lullaby about how the rats once tried to take over our little heaven and how we won.

---

Mileva Anastasiadou is a neurologist, from Athens, Greece and the author of We Fade With Time and Christmas People by Alien Buddha Press. Her work has been selected for the Best Microfiction anthology and Wigleaf Top 50 and can be found in many journals, such as The Forge, Necessary Fiction, Passages North, and others. She's the flash fiction editor of Blood+Honey and The Argyle journals.

L.M. Conkling

The Artist’s Interview

         The subject insisted on conducting our interview by video chat instead of in person. When I asked why this was her preference, she replied, “I’m sensitive to smells,” and would elaborate no further.

         When I logged in, the picture was hazy and distorted.

         “Hello, Victoria,” I said, my voice chipper, “it looks like there might be something on your camera.”

         “Yes, there is.” Her amorphous form shifted slightly then stilled.

         I waited expectantly, then forced a smile. “Do you need to grab something to clean it with?”

         “No. It’s a scarf.”

         “Oh.” I licked my lips nervously. “Would you prefer a regular phone call?”

         “No.”

         “Alright.” Even though I could not see her clearly, I knew her from old photographs. The thin, hawkish nose, large gray eyes, and skeletal frame would not have changed much from her youth. Though now, instead of the rebel’s uniform of ragged t-shirts and dark pants, she seemed to be draped in an assortment of scarves and long robes like an ancient priestess. Her eyes were sharp, and even through the veil she’d draped over her camera lens I could feel them inspecting me carefully, taking in my tight ponytail and twin set. Although I had thought I looked polished this morning, now I felt childish. I should’ve worn a jacket, not a cardigan. It’s the little details that she will zero in on.

         “Do you have questions for me?”

        “Um, yes, I’m sorry.” I shuffled my papers as I felt my face redden. My preparation for this interview had been rushed, Victoria’s acceptance of the invitation wholly unexpected. Madelaine, my advisor, had told all her students to reach out to Victoria this year, as it was the twentieth anniversary of the Artist’s Pardons, excusing them of any charges that had been applied under the previous administration.

         Victoria had been amongst the first handful to be recognized, not only pardoned but awarded the National Medallion of Arts by the then newly elected president, Simone Algeny. Madelaine had been slightly alarmed when I told her I’d been able to schedule time; I know she’d been hoping one of her more politically leaning students would’ve had that honor, if Victoria granted it at all. I knew her name, as did everyone. She was mentioned in most Women’s History classes, which had never been my strongest subject. But I was tired of the assignments Madelaine encouraged me toward: asking children what their favorite flavors and colors were, writing up “This is Your Life” style interviews with the oldest residents in the county. I wanted someone to tell me something that would stick in my brain. I knew Victoria would be the one to do it.

         My first meaty journalistic piece.

         I smoothed one hand over my ponytail and smiled at the blurred image on my screen. “So, we are interested in what motivates people into extraordinary action.”

         She nodded curtly. “You are a student.”

         “Yes ma’am. But a senior this year.”

         “I’d have guessed freshman.”

         I tugged at my cardigan. It was even baby pink, for goodness’ sake. I should’ve gone with the black. “No, ma’am, a senior.”

         She shrugged her shoulders. “I’m not a ma’am. Not yet. Possibly not ever.”

         “Ok.” I bit at my lip, worrying at the tissue. I’d have no lipstick left at this rate. “So, as I was saying, we’re interviewing people about their extraordinary actions.”

         “So you said.”

         “And, I, um, wanted to ask about one of the bigger performance art pieces you did.”

         Her laugh was startling. “Who told you it was performance art?”

         I shuffled my papers until I found the articles chronicling her activities. “Well, I thought it was, because of your award? And the newspapers around here—"

         “Which ones?”

         As I rattled off the names of the three local papers she shifted, leaning forward over her desk. There was a hurried movement; I assumed she was taking notes.

         “I’ll look up the pieces; you don’t have to read them to me.” She settled back in her chair. “It wasn’t performance art. It was vandalism.”

         “Oh.” I clasped my hands in my lap to keep them from fidgeting. “Well, what made you want to vandalize property?”

         She sighed, the sound like rushing water through the speakers. “So many things. We all felt like we had to do something, you know? But what can you do in those kinds of situations? You’re powerless.”

         I nodded, past history lessons muddled in my head. I remembered there had been riots. Rights stripped away. But not much else. “Now when you say ‘we,’ you mean—"

         “Patty, Hector, Moira, and me. I never could’ve got up on top of some of those things without help. You realized that, surely.”

         “Of course.”

         I hadn’t. None of the articles, none of the textbooks, mentioned anyone but Victoria.

         I cleared my throat nervously. “There have been many questions about where you found your materials, especially at that time, when there were shortages of pretty much everything. Can you tell me where you sourced the raw elements of your pieces?”

         Again, she shrugged. “Everywhere. People throw out so much. We found wire coiled by garbage cans or pulled the springs from old mattresses. The wood was old pallets or pieces of disintegrating homes. I’m sure you know how many of those there are in the area.”

         Entire blocks of my hometown had been abandoned after the first wave of clashes turned violent, the empty husks of dilapidated homes still unclaimed to this day. Often, I wished a fire would break out, get rid of all of it. I think most people felt that way; everyone just wanted to forget. The cameras were the only thing protecting the remaining pieces of the old world.

         “Other bits would pop up without us looking and we’d always find a way to use them. Broken ceramics were my favorite.” Her sigh was wistful, memories rippling like stones thrown in a pond. “They were the best, at least for aesthetics. They weren’t the best for strength.”

         “There are so few photos of your work, and they’re grainy. Newspaper archives.” Behind the scarf, Victoria didn’t move. I shuffled my paper notes again, head ducked. “Um, to me, it looks like you used cement in a lot of your work. Is that right?”

         Victoria nodded. “When we could find it. It wasn’t as available then as it is now. People used it for so much then—building walls, lining moats. It was insane.”

         My fingers flew across the keyboard as I took notes. “So when there was no cement, what did you use?”

         Her laugh this time was genuine, crystalline. “Oh, it was so perfect. Hector—a brilliant mind, truly—came up with this mixture. It was so, so awful! But it set fast and set hard. But the smell!” She waved her hand in front of her face. “I picked up masks whenever I could, but even they didn’t help much.”

         “Do you know what was in it?”

         “No idea. We used to try to get him to tell us, but he’d refuse every time. But he could make vats of it anywhere, as long as he had water, dirt, and a drugstore.”

         I pulled out my favorite photo of her work and held it up to my camera. “Can you tell me more about this piece?”

         It was a dimensional mural, textured and rippling, plastered onto the brick wall of a tidy suburban home. Black lines and circles suggested a crowd clustered around the giant figure of a woman, her mouth open in what looked like a scream. Fangs curved beneath her cracked lips, dark liquid dripping from their points. Behind those bloody crescents, deep in the darkness of her throat, there were flames. Destruction.

         Victoria leaned closer to the monitor. Through the thin scarf, I think I saw her smile at the memory. “That was Patty’s design. Always the artist, though of course she couldn’t use it in those days, not for any legitimate purpose. Women weren’t supposed to have voices of any kind.”

         The veil over the camera wavered, sliding across my screen. Victoria reached for a large black creature I assumed to be a cat and settled the animal on her lap.

         “We spent the entire first night sketching. We used glow in the dark paint, can you believe it? So all day, before we added the textural elements, the design was right there, but they couldn’t see it.”

         She stroked the cat slowly. The gauzy barrier of the scarf slipped a bit more, and half of her face showed clearly. Her smile was dreamy, interrupted only by a ragged scar that started on her cheek, bisected her lips, and ended at her chin. I held my breath as I stared, this new image of her so different from the smooth-faced young woman in my old textbooks. My readers would be fascinated. Could I ask about the scar? How, without telling her the scarf had slipped?

        “I think about it sometimes, why we did it.” Victoria continued, oblivious to my curiosity. “It could’ve been so bad, then. We could’ve been locked up, or worse. You girls are so lucky now, but we weren’t. They sold some girls, I’ve heard. To other countries or gave them away as bribes. Girls who were supposed to be on their way somewhere—usually jail or the asylums they had built—but never arrived.”

        Victoria was quiet again, and her gray eyes grew glassy and distant. “I never thought about it at the time, not until Moira’s sister Angela went missing. Over something stupid, really. She was thirteen and shoplifted a lip gloss. They were sending her to juvie, but she never arrived. Moira never got answers, not in all these years. When she tried, she was told to let it go, that her sister was gone. But Moira had always been a painter, a talented portrait artist, and she decided to put her sister’s face everywhere. At first, I was just the lookout, made sure no one caught us. But the pictures of Angela would be painted over the next day. Which is when Hector got involved, and we started using cement, mud, things that were harder to erase.

         “Angela, though, she was gorgeous. Even though she was only thirteen, she turned the heads of grown men. Which is dangerous now, but then?” Victoria shook her head. The sliver of clarity the shifted scarf provided allowed me to see the anger tightening the skin around her eyes. “Girls would do anything to not be beautiful, did you know that? Wear ugly, dirty clothes. Not wash their hair for weeks. We couldn’t cut our hair at that point without persecution, though I know some wanted to. Some women even tried to pose as men, but that didn’t go well for them. As you know, right?”

         I nodded slowly. Had this been taught in school? I couldn’t remember. This had all happened before my time. My parents hadn’t talked of those times, certainly had never been a part of the uprisings. It had never been a part of my story.

         Victoria continued, her voice low. “As for Angela… I sometimes wonder if she’s still out there, or if she got away. I hope she’s dead.”

         Silence descended between us. The scarf slid a little more and I held my breath to keep from gasping. They must have smoothed this over in the photographs I’d seen, or this had happened after she’d gone into hiding. Victoria’s face had more than one scar. The right side of her face was a pattern of dots and dashes, spiraling out into a fanned flower. The scars were pink and ridged, precise and calculated.

         It was beautiful.

         And it was horrible.

         “I like your twin set.”

         Victoria’s voice caught me by surprise. When I glanced up, her gray eyes were staring directly into mine. I wasn’t sure if she’d noticed that her cat had upset her scarf, and I wasn’t going to tell her. I needed more time to study her face, her reactions, her eyes. If I was going to communicate to my readers what this legend looked like now.

         “Thank you,” I said, tugging at the edge of the pale pink cardigan. “I wanted to look professional.”

         “It’s better to look like yourself,” she said, her hand sliding down the cat’s back. “But you still look nice.”

         Looking like myself would’ve meant pajamas pants and a stained t-shirt. I doubt that would’ve inspired much trust from a woman like Victoria.

         “Thank you.” I cleared my throat. “So, about this piece?”

         “Yes. That piece.” Victoria smiled again, the scars around her eye crinkling into the folds. “We only did the doors and windows that time because we wanted to seal them in. Every section was inspired by something he’d said or done, a reflection of his hate. I wanted him buried under it. My idea had been to do a mosaic across every inch of the house, making it impossible for them to get out. But it would’ve taken too much time. I was still happy with what we did, and in the end, I rather liked the negative space the open walls gave.”

         “Me too!” I held up the picture and pointed. “My favorite is the front door. I like these bits here, where it looks like bars.”

         “That’s dog shit, encased in mattress springs.”

         I stared at the photo. “Seriously? That is disgusting.”

         “Hector’s idea.” Victoria’s lips tilted, her scars rippling as she smiled. “He said that’s what the man living in that house was, and the mattress springs were because of the abuses we suspected at the time. Which were confirmed later. Besides, smells didn’t bother Hector like they do me, so he sometimes used very nasty elements in his pieces.” She leaned forward and the cat was dumped on the floor. He stalked away with a meow of protest, his black tail fluffed and upright.

         “I did the side door. Do you have a picture of that?”

         I held up a photo to the camera. The door frame and steps were covered with hundreds of small U-shaped lumps, of various colors and sizes. Some were thick and plain, others delicate and ornamental. It seemed a hodge-podge, unlike her other pieces.

         “This one?”

         “Yes.”

         Her eyes flicked from the photo to me. I tried not to indicate I could see her clearly.

         “Do you know what those are?”

         I shook my head.

         “Most people don’t, not anymore. At the time, the man who lived in that house had made a silly little statement, something that no one remembers. He’d said that the strong drink coffee, like real men. The weak drink tea, like subdued women. So for months before we did this project, I collected the handles off every teacup I came across. Then I bound them to his door, making such a thick, strong slab he could not escape.”

         Victoria’s voice was angry as she remembered. “He probably didn’t notice. He was that kind. But I knew. I knew it took machinery tearing the door from its hinges to let him out.”

         My fingers flew across the keyboard as I recorded her story. It seemed obtuse, distant even. My professors had told me that art that must be explained was not really art.

         “Why did you use teacup handles for this? I mean, I understand that you were trying to play off his statement, but—"

         “That’s not what it was about at all.” Her gray eyes were sharp and disappointed. I felt as though I had failed her.

         “I’m sorry, I just thought you were trying to, um, cover him in tea since he said it was too feminine?”

         “No.” Her sigh was magnified in my cramped apartment and I hunched down in my seat, trying to be as small as possible.

         “He said that tea was weak, like women. The multiple handles—and their representation of all women, since they were of all colors, sizes, and shapes—is what that was about. How all of us together, even broken, were able to trap his hateful heart in that prison he called home.”

         “Hmmm, okay.” I thought of President Algeny, her presence throughout my entire life as she navigated her way to an unprecedented sixth term. The men she managed, the way she deftly squashed any disrespect with guillotine and firing squad. The world Victoria was describing felt like the fever dream of raving dissident.

         “So you’re not an artist,” Victoria said.

         It was a statement, not a question.

         “Well, not myself, no. I did take art classes in school. But mostly I’m a writer.” I shifted under her scrutiny. After a moment she sat back in her seat, her smile adding new textures to her scarred face.

         “So you’re an artist, just not a visual one. That’s actually a relief. I don’t have to explain my art to other artists. If I do, I know they’re morons. But a writer…that makes sense. It’s not your scene.”

         “But I thought you said it was vandalism, not art.”

         “But you choose to see it as art, so it is for you. In my time, that opinion could’ve got you arrested, and a sweet thing like you, in your pastel pink twin set, would’ve gone the way of Angela for such opinions.”

         I could again feel her studying me through the camera, and I steeled myself enough to meet her gaze. We hung in silence for a moment, our eyes locking in that fraction of clear space. Then she reached forward and straightened the scarf, again establishing the hazy division between us.

         “Do you have any more questions? I don’t like to stay on these connections too long. It’s too easy for someone to figure out where I am.”

         “But you were forgiven for all your crimes when Simone Algeny became President.”

         “Forgiveness on paper is nice. Forgiveness from the government is nice. But all those men that were ousted when Simone got the seat? All their followers, and the sects and militias and nationalists and traditionalists? They didn’t just go away. They’re still there. And someone like me, who made fools of them when they were at their most powerful, would be quite a score for them nowadays. So let’s wrap this up.”

         “Um, yes, just one more question.” I started to flick through my notes again, but then glanced up at Victoria’s still form. The blurred division between us gave me courage to ask the only question that mattered to me. “Why did you accept my interview request? You must get a lot of them.”

         She was quiet for so long I did not think she would answer.

         “You’re right. I got hundreds. Thousands, maybe. This anniversary really seemed to rile up the journalists. So to be honest? I didn’t want to go with a major media source, so I just picked a student’s request at random. That happened to be you.” Victoria smiled, and even through the scarf’s barrier I could see that it was small, tight.          “I’m sorry if you thought it was because there was something special about you. Anything else?”

         I was barely able to stutter out my thanks before Victoria ended the call. Madelaine was right to doubt my ability; I hadn’t been able to get enough to write a decent piece. I always took notes during an interview to jot down any thoughts for angles that might come up, and as I glanced at my screen I saw I had written a list of names.

         Hector.

         Patty.

         Moira.

         Angela.

         Angela. The vanished girl. The beauty who didn’t try to hide behind dirty hair, who was vain and young and silly enough to steal cosmetics during a harshly fascist regime that sneered at the rights of women. This much I remembered from school, though I always felt like they harped on it a little too much. It certainly couldn’t have been that bad, not when less than thirty years later women were so solidly in power.

         But Angela… of course she was my angle. Her disappearance was the epitome of how things had been in Victoria’s younger years.

         My hair was still in a ponytail when I heard a key unlocking my door. I hadn’t even had time to change out of my cardigan before they came in swiftly, silently, their clothes ordinary, their faces clean shaven. Most of them were young, though a few were grizzled, close to Victoria’s age. They looked like the men I saw waiting tables, pushing strollers, installing cable lines. They were unremarkable.

         One crossed the room to crouch down beside me. “We will not hurt you if you are still and quiet.”

         Hurt me? My mouth opened to protest and his hand was suddenly on my arm, heavy, hot, and squeezing. The spike of fear running through my core was unfamiliar, nauseating. A glimpse into another world, one that I’d been told was eradicated before my time.

         One of the men lifted my laptop from me, seating himself at my battered table, his fingers flying over my keyboard. After a moment I heard my own voice, tinny and high, as I greeted Victoria. My stomach clenched as I realized that my call had been recorded.

         The men huddled around my table, their presence taking up so much air I fought to breathe. My hands gripped the edge of my chair as they silently watched my screen, their smiles brilliant when the scarf slipped, giving them a view of her face.

         “I told you this was the right place,” one of them said softly.

         They left as quietly as they came, filing out my door into the hallway. I could still feel that heavy hand imprinted on my skin long after their footsteps faded.

         I tried to reach Victoria again, but she would not accept my calls. My emails to her went unanswered. The cops were uninterested since there had been no theft, violence, or even threat.

         A month later when the piece ran about Victoria, highlighting her artistic efforts and ongoing behind-the-scenes activism, I began to receive the phone calls. At first, the silence would only be broken by a wet, salacious panting, like a dog on a summer day.  But they soon changed, a woman’s screams shattering like broken glass down the line, a reminder of what could be. I was relieved that Madeleine had edited out the bit about the men swarming my apartment.
         Graduation came with its scratchy cap and gown and when I left town to start a new job, I changed my number and the calls stopped. I wondered about Victoria and remembered what she’d said about Angela: that she hoped she was dead. I hold that same hope for Victoria, too.

         I don’t walk alone at night anymore. There is a tide turning, and I wonder how many will drown before it ebbs. I keep quiet, pray for safety, and hope no one realizes that I see them. Really see them.

         I am only one. There is nothing else I can do.

---

L.M. Conkling is an author of speculative, corporate, and supernatural horror. In her free time, she enjoys exploring new restaurants and haunted locations, challenging herself with difficult recipes that last several pages, reading, and creating quilts that cause viewers to stare for much too long. L.M. Conkling resides in the Pacific Northwest with her husband, Will, and their black hellhound, Val. She received her Bachelor’s degree in English Literature from Cal Poly Humboldt.

Kate Maxlow

I Figured Out How to Turn Dopamine Into Solid Gold

         Last Saturday, after the second espresso martini, I figured out how to turn dopamine into solid gold. Then, because the espresso martinis were hungry, I ground the dopamine gold into little flakes and used them to flavor some spaghetti. It tasted like chicken. I wrote down the recipe and put it somewhere I’d be sure to find it again, and accordingly, I haven’t seen it since.

         So on Monday, I ask my therapist if she can hypnotize me into remembering. She rolls her eyes and tells me to picture the last place I had it, or maybe try journaling about it. I shrug and say that seems like a lot of work and maybe I’ll just use the Betty Crocker recipe for chicken piccata instead. (I can feel her silent groan every time I waltz into her office; she has given me all the handouts on mindfulness and I have yet to read even one. But really, how am I supposed to take life advice from someone who secretly believes you can’t actually turn dopamine into gold?)

         The following Tuesday, I find the recipe beside the boxers that went to live under my bed, the silk ones with mushrooms that proclaim, ‘Hey, I’m a fungi!’ They belonged to my ex, who said I needed to buckle down and take life seriously for once and that’s why he couldn’t be with me anymore. He sells tires now and is married to a professional astrologist. Once a month I sign up for a new email at a public library and spam her business page with questions about Ophiuchus, the ignored stepchild of the astrology world.

         In November, she shuts down her site. Feeling guilty, I make an appointment to have her do my star chart and I promise myself I won’t tell her I could just use ChatGPT or (wait for it) Gemini. Her office, tucked above a company that installs bespoke fallout shelters, smells like a cloying miasma of amber and sandalwood, and I sneeze three times in the waiting room. Her previous appointment is running over—I hear a woman crying about something that her dead Corgi said at the last seance—so I chicken out and leave. I stop by TJ Maxx and buy my ex-boyfriend’s professional astrologist wife thirteen different scented candles, one to represent each Zodiac sign (I see you Ophiuchus), and leave them on her doorstep with an unsigned card that says ‘Hang in there!’

         When I tell this story to my therapist, she recommends I see the doctor to change my medication. That’s when I tell her: I haven’t taken that junk in months because it makes the dopamine taste like blue cheese and goat urine. She does not ask how I know the taste of goat urine, which is unfortunate, because it’s a really funny story.

         Instead, she gesticulates wildly in my direction and shouts, “Why are you like this?”

         Ah, finally! I think to myself. For years I have been digging away at her professional training and demeanor with a spoon, wondering what’s behind the careful facade, wanting to connect with her soul the way she interrogates mine. She has that special gift: a big heart hidden behind a face she keeps carefully neutral as her patients confess all the horrors of the universe.

         Her heart is so beautiful I want to bite it to know what a good person actually tastes like. Just the one bite, I think—before the world goes up in flames, before we are all ash and memories, like best friends who never stayed in touch. Like those three big countries who finally decided they’d had enough of posturing and meddling and hypocrisy. For months, they sent our country threats and I bullied a professional astrologist because her stars were slowly killing us all. I bit my nails, hand-copied star maps by moonlight, and prayed to all the gods who’d forgotten to remember their Mindfulness lessons. Then finally, last week—my birthday!—those three once-best friends sent us bombs and mushroom clouds. I can’t wait to see what we send them back, any day or minute now.

         So I tell her, “We’re standing at the end of the world. Why shouldn’t we enjoy this last, heady draught of dopamine to its fullest?”

         She puts her head in her hands and cries.

         I pat her shoulder and ask if she’d like to borrow my gratitude journal.

---

Kate Maxlow is a recovering school district administrator who likes to wear sparkly shoes when she has tea with her existential dread. She lives in Virginia with her family. Her work appears in Maudlin House, Defenestration, Jersey Devil Press, and more. She can be found at https://katemaxlowauthor.com/kate-maxlow or on BlueSky at @katemaxlow.bsky.social‬.

E Ce Miller

Elvin’s Mother Dreams of Koi

         I had a little baby once who rose from the quaked earth of my body, comma-ed over gloved hands like a peeled-pink shrimp, webbed with red, good enough to nibble; nibble sometimes I did, brushing the front of my teeth against the tender skin of his cheeks, sucking in air, mimicking consumption. All nom-nom.

         For a while I kept the baby in a laundry basket in the center of my bed—rectangular, padded down with bath towels—until he started to roll and scoot, inched the basket closer and closer to tipping over the edge, to spilling the baby and the towels all over the floor like so much washing. So I moved the basket to the floor, but still the little baby grew until he was quite a large baby, arms and legs reaching through the slats like a belly-shelled turtle.
         The wash had really begun to pile up in the corner outside the bathroom, where the basket used to sit, so I finally took the baby and the towels out of the basket and dumped all the dirty laundry in. By the time I turned to reach for the baby on the floor, he was gone, and the side door that didn’t latch well was open and swinging in the wind.
         I ran out the door and across the yard and down the street, looking in all directions, when a Koinobori came yawning out of the sky, blue-black scales flying, tail waving umbilically behind it. I hadn’t realized it was the season for carp streamers, being occupied with the baby and all, but the sun on my skin said spring and I hadn’t hung one—marveled, for a moment, at how much bad luck I’d inadvertently invited into my little baby’s life. It suddenly felt like an eternity since I’d last seen him and I thought maybe if I caught the streamer and hung it, he’d see it and come back.

         Wind-inflated, paper teeth flicking, riding a wave of air. I pursued that carp as people in the street looked on, neighbors I hardly recognized muttering to themselves, pointing at the madwoman flailing arms overhead, screaming after a carp streamer, though not one of them would think twice about a mother running behind a running child instead of a flying one.

         Finally—ahh—I caught it: chased it into a treetop, untangled the fish free from branches, clutched its ribboned rainbow cord in my fist and drew it to my chest, rocked back and forth, cradled its windsock snout in my palm. Eventually, night came, chilled the air, so I tucked my carp into my shirt and descended, curling into a nook of exposed roots, too tired for anything but sleep. By morning, my clothes were damp and smelled of fish and I shivered and hugged myself all the way home, where the side door was still blown open. Inside, I removed my sopping shirt and out fell a carp, golden and long as my arms spread wide. I didn’t have anywhere to store such a large fish, so I dumped all the laundry out of the basket and put the carp in, curling it around itself, apologizing for smashing it a bit in the process. Then I gathered the laundry in my arms, carried it to the roof, hung it all unwashed on the line, where it flapped and fought against the breeze.
         I returned indoors to find the carp a carp streamer again and there inside the carp inside the basket was my little baby all swaddled up in polyester scales, rows of washi paper teeth circling his neck like a ruffle.

---

E Ce Miller's writing has been performed in the Liars' League reading series in London and is published or forthcoming in Bustle, Heavy Feather Review, Pacifica Literary Review, and elsewhere. Originally from the American Midwest, now living in South Korea, she is writing a collection of speculative short fiction and a novel.

Emmet Hirsch

The Zonule of Zinn

Philbert O’Toole IV, a twenty-one-year-old man who had not exited the basement of his parents’ bungalow in Skokie, Illinois for three years, reached for his medical dictionary. The act of consulting the medical dictionary never failed to evoke in Philbert IV the memory of his great-grandfather, Philbert O’Toole MD. It evoked that memory now.

Philbert O’Toole MD had died sixteen years earlier, when Philbert O’Toole IV was five years old. The young man shuddered at the recollection. On the first Saturday after the funeral, he had accompanied his father and grandfather to their deceased ancestor’s twelfth-floor apartment in a rental complex on Touhy and Western in Chicago. The apartment on the twelfth floor still smelled of Great-grandfather’s after-shave, a ghostly reminder of the old man.

To his horror, the boy discovered that the purpose of the visit was not, as he had supposed, to spend a few final moments in that venerable presence. No, the purpose of the visit was to eradicate the apartment of all evidence that Great-grandfather had ever occupied it. Philbert O’Toole II and Philbert O’Toole III savaged the place, emptying closets and cabinets and drawers, tossing or sweeping or upending their contents into a huge bin they wheeled from room to room.

Little Philbert O’Toole IV, beside himself with anxiety, followed Father and Grandfather through the apartment as they cast the old man’s worldly possessions into the trash bin with only slightly more disdain than they had cast the man himself into the earth two days earlier. When they gleefully parked the container in front of the built-in bookshelves, a multi-tiered superstructure into which countless volumes had been crammed haphazardly, totteringly, dangerously, magnificently, the boy felt he might faint.

Taking turns, either Father or Grandfather would position the trash bin under a stack of shelves, and the other would climb a stepladder, toss three or four volumes from the left-hand side of each shelf into the maw of the container, and then reach a long arm through the back to sweep ten to fifteen books forward at a time. They cheered when all the books cascaded into the receptacle, sending up great clouds of dust, and cursed when even one missed its mark.

One of these errant volumes was the medical dictionary, and when it bounced off the edge of the bin and out into the hallway, the boy ran after it and stuffed it into his backpack, a secret souvenir from the dreadful excursion. Little Philbert had no idea what the book was, but he knew it must be a significant work, for he had seen Great-grandfather thumb through it many times, and those occasions frequently resulted in an exclamation and a twinkle in the ancient eyes.

Philbert IV’s final memory from that last Saturday in the apartment on Touhy and Western was that the bookshelves prevailed over the vengeful heirs, for even the gigantic bin was no match for the trove of volumes. Young Philbert O’Toole IV could not imagine there was a receptacle on earth that could hold them all. The elder O’Tooles retreated in anger, and the boy did not accompany them on the subsequent visit, during which the task of annihilating the old man’s belongings was completed. Philbert IV never set foot in the apartment again.

The three surviving Philbert O’Tooles returned to the bungalow in Skokie, where Father and Grandfather consoled themselves with a couple of beers at the kitchen table, while Philbert IV slinked away to stow his treasure under his bed. At night he would take the book out and peruse it using a flashlight, and that is how he taught himself to read. While other children were learning that A is for apple and B is for banana, little Philbert soaked up words like circulation and dermatitis and elephantiasis.

Even at the age of five, Philbert IV had understood that Great-grandfather prized two categories of items above all the things, and these were, in descending order, his great-grandson and his books. If the books could be discarded with such gusto, what might happen to Philbert IV? The apartment on Touhy and Western had seemed to the child the most dependable place in the world, for it was at the door to that dwelling that he was handed off to Great-grandfather every Saturday afternoon by Philberts II and III on their way to a sports bar in Lincolnwood. On those Saturdays, little Philbert’s excitement would intensify with every chime of the rising elevator until the lad thought he might burst before the twelfth toll. Indeed, it was through this agitation that the boy learned to count by his second birthday. As the elevator doors began to open, Philbert IV would squeeze through, turn left and rush down the balding carpet. Great-grandfather would be stationed at the end of the dim hallway without fail, leaning on his cane within a rectangle of light streaming through the open door.

“Come to my arms, my beamish boy!” Great-grandfather would chortle, and Philbert IV knew by the broad smile on the aged ancestor’s face that he considered the phrase very clever, but the child wasn’t sure why. And as the lad came within range, Great-grandfather would step back into the apartment, his right hand supported by the cane and his left extended like a parkinsonian boat hook, grappling the boy by the shoulder and drawing him in, the door’s springs doing the rest to slam in the faces of Philberts II and III.

Great-grandfather would lead little Philbert to the bookcase and ask him to point to a volume, any volume at all. He would rest his cane against a cabinet, pull the indicated book from the stack, blow the dust off its top, and hobble to the rocking chair, where he would sit and beckon the child to climb up his boney legs and onto his lap. And then he would read, his dentures clacking over the words like a pushcart on cobblestones. Little Philbert understood almost none of it, but luxuriated in the old man’s reverent rhythms. After what seemed like a long time, they would leave the library and move to the small table in the kitchen, where Great-grandfather would pour a glass of milk and lay out two chocolate chip cookies, and the pair would sit in silence until the doorbell rang.

“Those feckless fucks,” Great-grandfather would mutter at the sound of the bell. Rising unsteadily, he would lead Philbert IV whence they had come, pausing by the door to heave a sigh before opening it and restoring little Philbert to the custody of Father and Grandfather, their countenances radiant and their breaths sour with booze. After the boy learned to read, he was unable to find either “feckless” or “fuck” in the medical dictionary, and that is why for a long time he associated both words with leave-taking.

Years later, Philbert IV came to understand the phrase’s true meaning, the verdict of an aged man for his own flesh and blood. Great-grandfather’s offspring had exchanged the birthright of an O’Toolean intellect for two used car dealerships, one in Highland Park and the other in Park Ridge, using them to underwrite the betrayal of their patriarch’s scholarly legacy with suburban houses, materialistic spouses, large-screen TVs, and other tacky acquisitions of the middle class.

By the time Philbert IV was in his teens, Great-grandfather had long been gone, but the derision Philberts II and III harbored for the old man lived on. Father and Grandfather relished mocking their ancestor’s bookishness and impracticality, his contempt for life’s tangible pleasures. This phenomenon of equal and opposite scorn passing from progenitor to descendants and back again was eventually christened by Philbert IV, bored to death one afternoon in a high-school Newtonian Physics class, as “Philbert’s second law of phamilies.” So pleased was he with this little witticism that he scribbled it in his notebook, along with an addendum: “Phather and Grandphather, those pheckless phucks.”

Over the years, other volumes joined the medical dictionary in Philbert IV’s collection, including three regular English dictionaries and a thesaurus, along with many digital resources. But the medical dictionary remained his favorite. The definitions and word origins seemed not so much printed on its pages as emanating from them like whispers from Great-grandfather, rasping, gasping as they used to do from behind the boy’s perch on the skeletal lap in the apartment on Touhy and Western. It wasn’t difficult for Philbert IV to reenact those Saturdays whenever he chose to do so. There was a photo of the aged ancestor on the hutch above Philbert IV’s desk, and all he had to do to have Great-grandfather look over his shoulder as he read was to swivel his desk chair one hundred eighty degrees.

With time, the ability to commune with the spirit of his great-grandfather became Philbert IV’s fixed point of reference in a universe that seemed to be spiraling away from him. For as long as he could remember, Philbert IV had been uncomfortable upstairs, whence the world’s unhappiness seemed to originate, and where his parents and grandparents and their friends denunciated people and things Philbert IV hadn’t realized were bad. Outside the bungalow’s front door, it got worse. There were noise and disorder, bullies, demanding teachers, the boys’ locker room, and other threats, the sum total of which generated in Philbert IV an unremitting nausea. Downstairs, in contrast, were a pool table and a television and a game console, and eventually a computer with high-speed Internet, and from time to time a small circle of childhood friends.

Over the years, Philbert IV’s unease at emerging from the basement expanded and his circle of friends contracted until he was its only member. He managed to finish high school and attend a semester at the University of Illinois, but declined to go back after winter break despite the pleading of his parents. And when Mother acquiesced over Father’s objections to leave food or folded laundry or a credit card number with expiration date and three-digit security code outside the closed door of his room in the basement whenever he needed them, Philbert IV experienced a new sensation. He was at peace.

The only thing he might have wished for that he didn’t have was a girlfriend, but even in that domain he made do. Philbert IV had learned enough about the world to know that without major rehabilitation he was unlikely to attract any member of the opposite sex who was less of an oddball than he. Online chats, gaming communities, and pornography were helpful but unsatisfying. Eventually, he conjured up an imaginary French girlfriend, who pronounced his name “feel-bear” (accented on the second syllable and with the “r” all garbled up in the back of the throat).

The French pronunciation of his name was a multidimensional joke Philbert O’Toole IV regretted not being able to share with anyone except his imaginary girlfriend, but he accepted her imagined appreciation of the gag for what it was worth. Father and Grandfather were fond of recounting how “Philbert O’Toole” had become the family name, embellishing the story at each retelling. According to family lore, when Great-grandfather, a destitute and blinky-eyed fourteen-year-old orphan, disembarked at Ellis Island in 1922 from the steerage compartment of a rat-trap steamer from Odesa, he was still in possession of his birth name, Feivel Ostrovsky. The Irishman on duty behind the immigration desk hadn’t gone to the trouble of asking the tattered creature trembling before him to repeat his first appalling utterance of the words “Feivel Ostrovsky” in response to being asked his name. Instead, the Irishman scribbled “Philbert O’Toole” into the logbook and ripped out the carbon copy, jabbing it with his forefinger and barking “Philbert O’Toole” at Great-grandfather until the immigrant was able to repeat a fair approximation of the syllables. Thus, it was Philbert O’Toole, not Feivel Ostrovsky, who boarded the ferry to Manhattan in possession of little more than the clothes on his back and a slip of paper bearing the sum total of his American vocabulary: his own name. And it was Philbert O’Toole who operated a sewing machine on the Lower East Side during the day and completed his secondary education at night, eventually putting himself through medical school and taking a job as an internist in Rogers Park, Chicago.

Why, Philbert IV mused, if they considered the name so reprehensible, had Philbert O’Toole II passed it on to his son, Philbert O’Toole III, and why had that individual named his own son Philbert IV? Maybe the irony was too delicious to ignore, or perhaps they sensed that the name’s unequivocal goyishness could be leveraged to move used vehicles throughout the Chicago suburbs. Every ad they ran included at least seven mentions of the words “Philbert O’Toole.” Even Philbert IV, eight years old at the time, was featured in a commercial as evidence that generations upon generations of Philbert O’Tooles stood ready to assist the people with their transportation needs, stretching as far back and as far forward in time as anyone could imagine.

 ~

Philbert IV persuaded himself that Great-grandfather would have sympathized with his great-grandson’s need to take refuge in the basement in Skokie. But young Philbert was pretty sure the aged ancestor would have condemned his descendant’s preoccupation with the Internet. To fill the long hours, Philbert IV posed as a right-wing influencer, using the handle “PatriotCrusader” to post torrents of vitriol to his two hundred-thousand followers on a variety of social media platforms. Mindful of his progenitor’s sensibilities, he would rotate Great-grandfather’s photo toward the shelved dictionary during his lengthy sojourns in cyber-space. And when he was done venting, Philbert IV would turn Great-grandfather’s photo back to face the room, swivel one-hundred eighty degrees in his chair so the old man could peek over his shoulder, and soothe himself with selected readings from the medical dictionary.

In addition to this purely devotional use of the dictionary, Philbert IV consulted it whenever he needed to make a self-diagnosis, which was often. There was always one thing or another ailing Philbert O’Toole IV. Though he might have easily Googled his symptoms, and though after sixteen years of communing with the spirit of Great-grandfather through the dictionary’s pages, he had come near to memorizing the book, he found solace leafing through the gossamer pages in search of a label he could apply like a bandage. In Philbert IV’s experience, furthermore, there was no distinction between diagnosis and cure. As soon as he had identified an appropriate term to affix to the ailment, the symptoms would disappear. Every time.

Philbert IV applied his self-diagnoses creatively, embracing unlikely afflictions, such as aneurism (page 81), tuberculosis (page 1,770), or pleurisy (page 1,309). Yet he also evoked more common maladies, especially when their names thrilled him, like verruca vulgaris (page 1,830). But never had he diagnosed himself with one of the book’s final entries—inflammation of the zonule of Zinn (the bottom of page 1,865).

And thus it was with a practiced hand that Philbert O’Toole IV opened the medical dictionary on the morning he awoke with swelling of his left orbit (he congratulated himself on his appropriate use of the word “orbit” to refer to the eye socket). He ran his finger down the right side of page 1,865 until it came to rest near the bottom. And there it was, the etiology (a terrific word) of his orbital edema: inflammation of the zonule of Zinn. Alternative, and far more likely, diagnoses would have included allergic reaction, chalazion (another good one), cellulitis, trauma, insect bite, and conjunctivitis, but this bothered Philbert IV not in the least. Neither did the fact that the most probable cause was “idiopathic” (page 815, a term meaning of unknown causation). Philbert IV wasn’t fanatical about accuracy. No, he had been holding the zonule of Zinn in reserve for a long time, and he was not about to squander this opportunity. The diagnosis was inflammation of the zonule of Zinn, he insisted, also known as zonulitis, also known as inflammation of the ciliary zonule, the “zonule” being an alternative name for the suspensory ligament of the lens of the eye.

He snapped the book shut, and in the time it took him to turn toward the desk and restore the dictionary to its place on the shelf, he sensed both resolution of his swelling and the onset of melancholia. Now what? He had completed a cycle of sorts. Was he to spend the next sixteen years repeating it? Maybe this time from back to front?

No.

The occasion called for a gesture, something grand and unprecedented. The kind of thing, in other words, that was difficult to accomplish below ground. The basement had been good to him over the years, true, but suddenly Philbert O’Toole IV yearned to leave it, and that’s what he did. He glanced out the ground-level window to confirm that it was a bright day, something he had already learned from his screensaver, along with the fact that it was September 21 and seventy-two degrees outside. He opened the closet, extracted a light jacket, pounded it a couple of times to clear the dust, reached up to the top shelf to retrieve a pair of sunglasses and, with the fluidity of a man who did this sort of thing on a regular basis, opened the basement door, climbed the stairs and exited the house.

The first thing he observed was the smell: it was mostly clean and piney, but someone nearby was smoking a cigarette. The second thing he noticed was a pleasant breeze caressing his face. There were noises in the neighborhood—children playing, a dog barking and a lawnmower in operation a few streets away—but Philbert didn’t linger. He walked down the path and turned right, allowing the picket gate to bang shut behind him.

Hardly aware of what he was doing, Philbert IV wandered west on Foster Street. Fossa, he hummed, supraclavicular fossa, ischiorectal fossa, ethmoid fossa. Arriving at the corner of Crawford, he headed north. Craw-craw, he thought to himself, a term used for onchocerciasis in West Africa. He turned left on Old Orchard Road. Orchidoepididymectomy, excision of the testis and epididymis. After a mile or so he found himself outside the gates of a cemetery. He wandered onto the grounds, its grass green, its plots well-tended, and fresh-cut flowers at a remarkable number of tombstones and obelisks. He passed by some McHughs and Pennicuts, Shrivers and Bowers, and soon found himself among Levines and Goldbergs and Feldmans. Instead of prominent markers and flowers, these graves bore flat headstones studded with loose pebbles. Suddenly he was standing at the foot of a thin granite slab bearing an inscription:

Philbert O’Toole, MD
1908-2008

Philbert IV was stunned. He recalled attending Great-grandfather’s funeral but had not visited the grave since. And here was a second shock: next to Great-grandfather’s stone was another:

Bessie Grossman O’Toole

1914-1980

She was a mensch.

He had never considered the existence of a great-grandmother. He imagined the two of them holding hands beneath the surface of the earth, and smiled. Surrounding the two graves was a radius of undisturbed grass. He figured it must be reserved for other O’Tooles to occupy when their times came, an eventuality he considered improbable given how annoyed a reunion with their predecessor was likely to make Philberts II and III.

Philbert O’Toole IV stood a respectful distance before the graves. He would have liked to park himself right in front of Great-grandfather’s stone and run his fingers over the lettering, but if he did so he might be sitting on the old man’s chest, which seemed disrespectful. He decided to position himself cross-legged facing the headstone from the top, the letters upside down.

It occurred to him that by speaking softly to Great-grandfather thus, he would be the one whispering into the other’s ear. He swept the sleeve of his left arm across the tombstone, wiping off its layer of dust and dead leaves.

“It’s me…Philbert…Philbert O’Toole IV” he began. “I know you can’t hear me, and I know there is probably nothing left of you in there, but all the same I want you to know that I think about you every day. And I miss you.” He paused. “I miss our time together, and I think it’s really great how you used to read to me. I’m sorry we didn’t have more time to spend with each other. I wish we had, because…because…I think I might have turned out a little better.” Tears welled in his eyes, and he wondered whether his zonule of Zinn was acting up again.

“I’m going to be OK, though,” he continued. “I think I’m starting to figure things out. It’s true that I don’t know how to do much of anything useful yet, but that can be fixed, don’t you think? I think that must be true.

“Anyway, I just came by to say hello, and to let you know that I am thinking of you. Don’t worry. Thanks.”

He gave the tombstone another wipe with the sleeve of his left arm. As he did so he felt a heavy weight in his lap and, looking down, saw that without realizing it he had brought the medical dictionary with him.

He lumbered to his feet and gazed at the grave. Then he stooped and laid the volume on the corner of the stone. Great-grandfather would probably enjoy having it nearby for a while one last time. Philbert O’Toole IV turned and walked away. He had no use for the dictionary anymore. He knew he would never find within its pages the diagnosis that ailed him most: heartbreak.

---

Emmet Hirsch is a physician, scientist, educator, and author of the novels The Education of Doctor Montefiore and the upcoming The Wolf Shall Dwell with the Lamb. His fiction and creative non-fiction have appeared in The Examined Life, The New England Journal of Medicine, The Chicago Tribune, and other outlets.

Denise Bayes

The Lost Art of Millinery

From his workshop window, Oscar watches the woman walk past his building every day at dusk. Watches her weary steps, her bowed head low. She pauses beside the glossy green leaves, lifting her head to the white magnolia blooms. Oscar has looked down into her melancholy eyes and felt her sadness shudder through him.

Now he clicks his desk lamp on.

 He focuses, circles around the blank mannequin head, sketching her features onto the smooth linden block in his imagination. Fingers stretched wide, he checks the precise proportions of crown, of brim.

Oscar climbs onto the stool, shuffling his limbs. Magnolia white feathers sprout forth from the purple felt base. He fixes them with an amethyst brooch. Unravels violet tulle.

“The exact shade of her eyes,” he whispers into the silent room.

Folded forward, Oscar hems the veil with minuscule stitches. The rhythm of the needle frees his arthritic fingers. He flounces the net in a practised flourish, swooshing it to flatter.

He carries the finished hat across the room in outstretched arms, a priest processing, step by step down the empty staircase. Outside, the city street is suspended in afternoon stillness. 

Soon, he knows, she will pass on her way home from work. He knows that her sad eyes will look upwards, into the tree.

Oscar pulls one branch close, releasing a waft of fragrance from the white petals. He perches the hat with care, releasing it with a shiver of violet net.

As he turns back towards his building, a ray of sun glances off the brooch, refracting a rainbow of light across the grey street.

---

Denise Bayes’ writing has appeared in various places including NZ Micro Madness, Oxford Flash, Free Flash Fiction, NFFD Anthology, 100 Word Story, Thin Skin, Temple in a City, and Underbelly Press. Denise lives in Barcelona, Spain with her husband and a cavalier King Charles spaniel called Rory, who is usually under the desk.

David Fowler

Kaylee Throws a Honeymoon at the Gulf

Rachel and Jason didn’t get much ceremony at the Dallas courthouse: a free rose pulled from a bucket and a dollar Polaroid from a man with one arm. Afterwards, they headed down I-35 to Waco to tell her parents. Halfway in between was a town called Italy (pop. 1944), pronounced Itlee. A sign on the highway advertised an Italian festival.

“Let’s try it,” Jason said, flipping the blinker.

“Let’s just get to my folks and get it over with,” Rachel said. Her folks had met Jason. They didn’t think he was very smart because he worked at the Amazon warehouse. He’d gotten his GED because Rachel said she wouldn’t marry him otherwise. So he did it, by damn.

“Just for a minute. We’ll have a honeymoon in Itlee,” he said.

“Okay.”

He imagined red-checked tablecloths and people stirring pots of spaghetti over wood fires in the streets. Instead, he found a convenience store at the Gulf station and no festiveness whatsoever. Jason surely didn’t want to disappoint Rachel in this new life; he had done a fair amount of that in their old one.

He walked into the Gulf praying the festival was underway nearby, maybe one street over. A pony-tailed girl who looked like she might be in high school stood behind the counter in a Gulf shirt with Kaylee on the nametag.

“They having the Italian festival?” he said.

“No, they ain’t givin’ it anymore,” she said.

“Ain’t givin’ it?”

“Naw, they ain’t givin’ it this year. Too bad that sign out on the highway still says they’re givin’ it.”

“I know, we saw it. That’s how come we stopped. We just got married and wanted to honeymoon in Itlee.”

“Well, congratulations.” She looked out the window and waved to Rachel in the truck. Rachel waved back.

“I’m sure sorry,” Kaylee said. “They just ain’t givin’ it.”

Jason went to the cooler and got a six-pack and put it on the counter. He couldn’t come back empty-handed on a day like today. There were fried pies, too, but he waved them off. He had bought stupid shit before and best not chance it.

“No charge,” she said, sacking the beer up.

“No charge? How come?”

“Just no charge.”

“Don’t they have cameras in here?”

“They’re busted.”

He went back out to the truck.

“What did she say?” Rachel said.

“Ain’t givin’ it this year.”

“Ain’t giving it? Why not?”

“Don’t know. Just ain’t.”

“What’d you buy?”  Rachel was suspicious. Money was tight.

“Six-pack. It was free.”

“How come?”

He reached into the sack and pulled two out. “That girl in there said she wanted us to have a honeymoon in Itlee.”

“No way.” Rachel held up her hands and made the heart sign to Kaylee. Kaylee made the heart sign back. Jason popped the tops. Rachel turned away, looking out her window. A chill ran down Jason’s neck. He’d fucked it up but he didn’t know what. Rachel was a kind girl, not hard on him. But he was sure he’d just stepped in it again. He handed her the beer.

“I can’t,” she said.

“But it’s our honeymoon.”

“I’m not supposed to,” she said, turning back to him. Her lip quivered and her brown eyes looked hard at him, right into him. His wheels started turning.

“You’re not.”

“I am.”

“No way.”

“Way. I peed on a stick this morning.”

 He set the beers on top of the dashboard then reached over and wrapped Rachel up like a Christmas present.

“You are something else, girl.” He pulled back and wiped her cheeks then laid her head on his shoulder.

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you, too.”

He determined then and there to get more hours at Amazon. A lot more. He was going to get more hours and overtime and work like a dog.

“She’s wondering what’s going on,” Rachel said.

Jason turned his head. Kaylee had her elbows on the counter, her chin in her hands, watching them like a love show on TV.

Rachel rocked her arms back and forth like rocking a baby. Kaylee’s mouth fell open in a great big Whaaaa?

A truck pulled up beside them and an old man in overalls headed into the store.  At the door, Kaylee blew right past him and made a beeline for Rachel’s side of the truck, knocking on the window, her mouth still wide open. Pow, pow pow. Rachel got out and they bear-hugged and launched a full-on cryfest. Total strangers in a gas station parking lot.

Jason rested his forehead on the steering wheel. “I’m gonna be a father,” he said to the floorboard. From the corner of his eye, he saw the old man still holding the door.

“I just need my Camels, Kaylee,” the old man called.

Kaylee, hugging Rachel, yelled over to him, “Just get ‘em and leave some money, Mr. Ray.”

Jason got out and put a hug around both of the girls. There they were, all three of them hugged up on the sidewalk in front of the ice machine and the Pennysaver rack.

The old man came back out. “What’s going on?”

“They’re gonna have a baby!” Kaylee said.

“Right now?”

“No, at some point in the future.”

“Well, good deal. I left some money.”

“Thank you.”

---

David Fowler has work in journals associated with numbers and rivers: The Threepenny Review, Five South, Fourth River, River Teeth and Naugatuck River Review. He attributes this not to a cosmic wrinkle but to blind luck because he is, in fact, legally blind. He writes slowly in Jackson, Mississippi (another river).

Francine Witte

Daylight Savings

The clock strikes 2:00.  Middle of the night refrigerator. The hum and the hum. On the table, plates with cake crumbs, half-filled glasses of wine. Dinner dishes still in the sink. The clock strikes 2:15. The whoosh of you leaving the table still so fresh in my ears. The thud of you closing the door as you left. The clock strikes 2:30. Your car rumbling out of the driveway. The clock strikes 2:45. Me waiting and waiting for you to come back. Me looking at the rest of my life. Me wishing to go back in time. The clock strikes 2:00.

Believing

When I am little, that is to say younger than now, that is to say before I knew how quick a face could disappear out of my life, that is to say quick as a lake reflection that ripples away if I try to touch it, when I am little, I believe. I believe my toys, my dolls with nylon hair, unbendable arms. I believe my mother as she tilts her face at the vanity mirror, lipstick, powder, rouge. She is playing dress-up for my father who plays office every day. Takes the toy train into a place he calls the city. When I am little, I ask my father where is the city and he tells me it’s where we saw the circus that time, and don’t I remember red-nosed clowns, the tall men walking on stilts? Is everything dress-up? I ask my father when I am little. This is years before he leaves us. Years before my mother tells me we have to live as if my father never happened. That it’s the only way we can go on. I believe her. I copy her motions, how she paints on a clown mouth, rouges her cheek, lifts herself on stilts of alcohol and other men. Each time now, now that I am not little any more, when a man walks away, I stitch up my heart, tell myself I’m whole, look at my reflection in the mirror as I practice a smile. Sometimes I even touch my reflection. I wait for it to ripple away.

---

Francine Witte’s flash fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous journals. Most recently, her stories have been in Best Small Fictions and Flash Fiction America. Her latest flash fiction book is RADIO WATER (Roadside Press.) Her upcoming collection of poetry, Some Distant Pin of Light is forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press. She lives in NYC. Visit her website francinewitte.com.

Mizuki Yamamoto

Receipt

I know the cashier sees the incense, the tiny pack of lily shaped candles, the box of anpan even though I never buy anpan, even though I haven’t eaten sweet bread since the funeral, and I know she’s clocked the way I hesitate over the coins, how I count too slowly, like I’m buying time instead of groceries, and she sees the envelope too, the plain white kind you leave at temples, the kind people fold with both hands, and she sees my nails, uneven, chewed down, and she sees that I didn’t bring a reusable bag even though I always do, even though I live in this neighborhood and probably passed her at the konbini a dozen times without noticing, and she doesn’t say anything—just scans and stacks and flicks her eyes toward the customer behind me like maybe I should hurry up, like maybe I’m the kind of person who lingers where I shouldn’t, but then she hands me the receipt with both hands, slow, careful, and I feel it there, for just a second—pity maybe, or recognition, or just a soft place where the world didn’t press too hard today—and I take the receipt like it matters, like it’s proof I was here—and then she sees the hesitation, the flicker in my eye when she asks, “Do you want a bag?” like it’s a trick question, like there’s a right answer and I’ve already failed it, and I say yes, paper, please, and she says we’re out, and I nod like I knew that, like I expected that, like I’ve always known I’d carry it all home myself.

Bath House

You scrub your shins first, like your mother did, like your grandmother must have, though no one ever taught you—just the memory of hands, firm but careful, and the creak of knees on plastic stool. The tiles are blue, not the sea kind—hospital blue, ash blue, the kind that stays after you close your eyes like worn enamel in the back of your mind. The woman next to you rinses twice, then steps into the bath without a sound. No one speaks. The windows have long since disappeared into the steam. Even the clock is gone, smudged into blur.

You don’t come here for the heat, though it helps. You come for the smallness. The folding of the world into cubes: basket, stool, tile, tub. There is safety in things with boundaries. Your towel sits folded beside you like a loyal thing. Everyone leaves their rings in the same little tray, where the condensation pools like tiny offerings.

You sink in slowly, knees to thighs to spine, the hot water climbing her body like memory—painful, then nothing. Fog rises in soft columns. You think of your aunt, the one who used to dye her hair with chrysanthemum tea, who said baths should always be silent unless you’re alone. You think of the phone call. The voice. The silence that came after, thick as steam.

The woman across from you has the same scar. A crescent above the knee. Her eyes are closed.

When it’s time to go, you dry between your toes like your mother did, like your grandmother must have. Probably your aunt, too. Fold the towel. Dress in cotton with no buttons. You forget to check your locker twice, which you never do.

Outside, the vending machine hums. You buy a bottle of barley tea and drink it in one long swallow. The plastic crinkles in your hand.

You feel just a little bit like a new woman, a small step forward from where you started when you first arrived. Cleansed, but not yet of the ache.

That, you fold up and carry home.

Molting Season

After my sister died, a koi fish started flapping around in the gutter down the street, just thrashing there like it had a point to make and no way to say it, and I don’t know why I picked it up but I did—bare hands, salad spinner, no plan. It wouldn’t touch the pond, wouldn’t stay in the sink, flopped right out of the neighbor’s glass punch bowl, so I filled the tub and it stared at me from under the bubbles like I’d forgotten her birthday again, which maybe I had.

Every morning it left something weird on the bathmat—half a mood ring, the missing rhinestone barrette, a plastic bead I swallowed in second grade and apparently never found until now—like it was saying remember this, dumbass, and I did, I did. And the house got weirdly nice for a while, like warm and golden in the corners, like someone just left the room and the air hadn’t caught up yet, and once or twice I caught myself singing along to that stupid song she loved, the one I used to mute as soon as I heard the first notes.

I almost forgot she was dead. The morning it left, the water was still warm and on the edge of the tub was a single shining scale and this smell in the air—like her shampoo, or jasmine, or something I only ever noticed when she was already gone.

---

Mizuki is a writer from Japan, currently living in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming at SmokeLong Quarterly, Flash Frog, HAD, The Forge, hex, and other places. She was the winner of The SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction 2025. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net, Best MicroFiction, and the Pushcart Prize. Find her online at mizuki.carrd.co or on Bluesky.

Tom Busillo

Squirrel on My Back

You live long enough, you learn to carry what you can't explain. Even if it shifts with every breath. Even if it never leaves. Even if it never asks your permission to stay.
It showed up sometime after Linda left. Maybe a week, maybe two. I wasn’t keeping track.
I was sitting out back, not doing much. On my third oil can-sized Foster’s, watching the neighbor’s kid kick a soccer ball into the same section of fence over and over. Just thump, thump, thump.
At first, I thought it was a bird landing on the chair. Then the weight moved. And stayed. Little claws kneading through the flannel of my shirt. Didn’t hurt exactly. But didn’t not.
Normally I would’ve jumped up. Swatted at it, cursed, made a scene. But by then I was in that stage of things where you let the world give you what it’s going to give. You don’t fight it. You nod, accept, and keep going. That kind of acceptance makes it easier to move on. Or at least not make things worse.

I figured it would leave. They all do.

Instead, it made a home. At night it curled under my collar, right where Linda used to press her chin when I still had a place to be.

It didn’t ask to stay – just settled in, quiet and insistent, like Linda did in the beginning.

I knew that no matter how comfortable it felt, I should try to get it to leave. I tried everything. Bent low under branches. Sprayed myself with vinegar. Called Animal Control.

Eventually, I just let it be. It wasn’t noisy. Didn’t tear anything up. Sometimes it twitched in its sleep. I got used to the feeling.

At the bar, they stopped asking where Linda was. Now they just nod when I walk in and scoot the peanuts down my way. One guy always asks, “How’s your friend?” I tell him to ask him himself.

Some nights I talk to it. Tell it what I should’ve said to her. What I’d do differently. Sometimes I forget it’s there until I feel it breathe against my neck.

It doesn’t answer. But it doesn’t leave either.

And that’s something.

Daughter

All my life, I could feel it building. Right in the center of my forehead. No visible bumps. Nothing to give anything away. Just a pressure that grew worse over time. Doctors said it was migraines. Stress.
It happened on a Tuesday. I’d had four cups of coffee, plus four more made from spent K-cups – light roast by way of sad beige water. Not that I noticed. COVID had taken my taste.
The headache hit hard and suddenly. Most people would blame the caffeine, but I had a feeling this was the day things would finally come to a boil and spill over. The blinding pain had me sinking to my knees.
Then my skull split open.
She dropped out fully formed, landing on the linoleum, sneering.
She looked like a young goth Joan Jett: fishnet stockings, Doc Martens, a Fields of the Nephilim T-shirt, black leather miniskirt, silver skull-and-serpent rings, and eyes like smudged eyeliner had given up.
I’ll never forget her first words:
“I need twenty bucks.”
I just stared.
“Are you slow on the uptake or something?” she snapped. “I said I need twenty bucks.”
I opened my wallet and gave it to her. She didn’t thank me. Just folded it once and stuck it in her boot.
“And your car keys.”
I handed them over. Stunned.
“I hope you won’t be needing it anytime soon,” she muttered, and turned for the door.
“I always hoped I’d have a daughter,” I blurted out, stupidly.
She paused. Rolled her eyes.
“God, you’re so weird,” she said.
Then she slammed the door behind her.
That was the last I ever saw of her. Or the car.
I still leave the porch light on, just in case.

---

Tom Busillo's (he/his) writing has appeared or is forthcoming in McSweeney's, trampset, The Disappointed Housewife, Heavy Feather Review, and elsewhere. He is a Best Short Fictions nominee and the author of the unpublishable 2,646-word conceptual poem "Lists Poem," composed of 11,111 nested 10-item lists. He lives in Philadelphia, PA.

Daniel Cohen

Another Fish

Raise your hood, and everybody’s a mechanic. My car is a Camry of a certain age, freshly washed, pretty good tires, dead battery. Passing men stop to talk, to spend a moment. Together, we stare at the engine, hands in our pockets. No one has jumper cables. I circle back to my trunk, check for the third time. Toolbox. Three quarts of motor oil. No cables.

A sound from the sidewalk, half snort, half chuckle. The Safecracker watches from a doorway, the toes of his sneakers peeking out into the sunlight. He looks like he’s leaning against the doorframe, but that’s just how he stands. Crooked. Tilted. Like one leg is shorter than the other.

The Safecracker understands the situation. He ducks around the corner, reappears at the wheel of a Honda with no hubcaps. He pulls alongside, jumps out, leaves the door open. Rummages through my tools as though they’re his own. Wrench and screwdriver. The Safecracker disconnects the battery from the Honda, carries it toward my car with two hands, like a box of peaches, and rests it next to the radiator. “Hop in,” he says.

The guy’s not a stranger to me, not exactly.  He’s been around for a few months now, renting the apartment above the ten-dollar barber shop. He says he’s from here, grew up in the neighborhood, but none of us remember him. Maybe it’s just a comfortable lie he tells. Or maybe he wasn’t worth remembering.  

The way the Safecracker tells it, he left us in the middle of tenth grade, when his mom broke their lease to follow a boyfriend to Indianapolis. He ran loose for a few years after high school, making his money breaking into bars around the ass-end of Lake Michigan. Did okay until the night he had a couple vodka tonics at a club in South Bend, then came back after closing to pop the safe. The bartender recognized him from the security tape. It was an election year, so the county prosecutor wasn’t in a forgiving mood, and he caught some time in prison.

Once I’m in the driver’s seat, I hunch down and watch through the gap under the hood, waiting for instructions. The Safecracker leans in, hovers over my battery, spits on one terminal, reloads, spits on the other. He lifts the battery he took from the Honda, flips it upside down, lowers it onto mine, matches terminal to terminal, steadies it. “Now.”

The Camry starts. I rev the engine because I’m afraid it’ll stall if I don’t. I leave my foot on the gas and don’t let up until I start to feel stupid.

When I get out of the car, the Safecracker is already putting the battery back in the Honda. I drop my hood.

“Thanks,” I say to his back. “I owe you one.”

“Yeah,” he says, twisting around, half-smiling. “You do.”

#

The Safecracker doesn’t wait long to cash his check. A favor owed is a diminishing asset. I’m passing Joanie’s fish market on my way to get coffee, and there he is standing outside, his face just far enough from the shop window to keep his breath from fogging it up.  He’s stalking, peeking, watching through the plate glass while Joanie works. If Joanie notices him out here, she doesn’t show it.

The Safecracker is clearly smitten. Entranced. Enthralled.

I try to skirt around him, to pass at a safe distance, but the Safecracker is jumpy about people getting behind him. He turns, scans me up, down, up, and stands there. Crooked.

“You don’t look like you’re here for the fish,” I say. I smile, but I keep my lips together. Primates show their teeth to appear threatening.

“Full of mercury,” he says. “Parasitic worms. Microplastics. I’m particular what I eat.”

I try to picture the Safecracker eating. I can’t. He has that loose-jointed, hollow-cheeked look you see in heroin addicts and long-distance runners.

“Do me a favor.” He says it like he’s Aladdin rubbing a lamp.

He tells me he can’t just walk up and talk to Joanie. It’ll be easier if he’s with someone she knows. Someone local. Someone familiar. It’s like he’s a vampire in some black-and-white movie. Can’t cross the threshold unless someone who belongs inside invites him.

“Tomorrow,” the Safecracker says. “Tomorrow’s Friday. Good day for fish.”

#

Friday, there’s a crowd inside the market, but there’s always a crowd. If I got here early some morning and stood next to Joanie while she rolled up the iron shutters, I’d probably find a dozen people already there in the shop, clutching numbered tickets.

The Safecracker hasn’t shown up yet, which doesn’t surprise me. He reads that way. Distracted. Flaky. I go ahead and pull a number out of the ticket machine anyway. One hundred fifty-seven. Might worry me if I were at the Registry of Motor Vehicles, but the numbers work different here.

I look over the competition, the faces, the knowns and unknowns. I recognize the paunchy guy from the real estate office who spends his days hunched over an antique Rolodex. The old lady who walks her gray-muzzled Yorkie around the cemetery, keeping to the edges like she’s dipping her toe into a swimming pool. Others are younger, locals I went to school with, awkward teenagers grown into uneasy adults.

Not all the faces are familiar. By the window, a guy in tech-bro uniform, plaid button-down under a Patagonia vest. Next to the lobster tank, a pair of women side by side, clearly a couple, but each fully involved with her phone.

The crowd keeps shifting, taking cover behind one another, moving around just enough that I can’t be sure exactly how many people got here ahead of me. I once read about a band of polar explorers, out of food and freezing to death, who fell under the persistent illusion that there was always one more member of their party than they were able to count.

From behind me, a wash of cold air as the door opens, closes. The Safecracker has arrived. He scuttles sideways to the far wall, his shoulders hunched. Scanning the room. I look down at the floor, at the scatter of discarded tickets. I’m in no hurry for him to spot me.

“Thirty-one!” Joanie yells. Thirty-One holds up his ticket to identify himself, a somber man with heavy-lidded eyes, umbrella under his arm. It hasn’t rained since March. Maybe he knows something. The body of customers splits before him like a dividing cell, creating a passage to the counter.

Thirty-One is standing in the semicircle of open space in front of the display case. He’s big, but not as big as Joanie. Don’t get the idea that Joanie is fat, or heavy, or whatever the euphemism of the moment is. She’s fit, even athletic, with the sort of uncomplicated beauty that airlines and insurance companies are always casting into their commercials. It’s easy to see why the Safecracker, or anyone else, would be drawn to her. She just happens to be built on a scale normally reserved for power forwards and heroic statuary.

Thirty-One presses his belly against the refrigerated glass. Joanie leans in to meet him. Beneath them, on a bed of ice, a chorus of upright fish heads stare vacantly skyward, mouths open.

Joanie grew up with us, dated us, was disappointed in us. She worked her way through the local talent methodically, thoughtfully, as if she were trying to guess a password one character at a time. After we failed to measure up, I expected she’d turn to some urban slick with a German car and a lawyer’s haircut, but that never happened. When her father died, she stepped into his place at the fish market, secure behind the counter, like it was what she’d always wanted. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between destiny and the path of least resistance.

My turn with Joanie came a year after graduation, a couple of dinner-and-a-movie Fridays and a single night of dancing that didn’t go well. We both moved on, no discussion necessary. Thirteen years later, she’s the person I buy my scallops from. I think we’re both fine with that. Some of the other guys in here holding their little pink tickets could tell you almost the same story.

Thirty-One whispers to Joanie, like he’s confessing his sins to a priest. Joanie nods, reaches into her case with a gloved hand, and he retreats through the crowd with a tightly wrapped bundle of cod.

There’s a hand on my forearm. The Safecracker. He doesn’t know me well enough to touch me, but I let it go.

“Fifty-three!” Joanie calls.

The Safecracker looks at the slip of paper in my hand, pinched between thumb and forefinger. “What the hell happened to forty-eight? Or fifty-one?” he asks the room. No one answers.

“You’ll be happier if you don’t worry about that kind of thing,” I say. I gave up on figuring out the fish market’s numbers a long time ago. Joanie keeps the score. She gets to you when it’s your turn, and that’s it.

Fifty-Three steps forward, a woman with impossibly red hair. Her face takes me a moment to place: last week, a bar across from the bus yard. Nets and crab pots nailed to the walls, a plastic seagull perched by the door. We played eye-games over the heads of the drinkers, but never made it to the same table. A mystery, a might-have-been.

She collects a dozen sizeable shrimp, and on the way to the exit her shoulder brushes past mine, a moment of contact. If she recognizes me, she swallows the memory.

“Seventy-one!”

Seventy-One draws herself to her full height with the assistance of a pair of nosebleed heels. The customers rearrange themselves as she passes, and, avoiding an elbow here and a handbag there, she presents herself to Joanie. Cherry red jacket over what look like black pajamas. The nails match the jacket. She orders in a girlboss alto, two lobsters, ready for the pot.

Not so simple, though. Joanie points. Affixed to the front of the lobster tank is a handwritten sign, a list of names in a rainbow of colors: Franklin in coral blue, Rachel in crocodile green, Carlotta in lemon yellow. Inside the tank, the dominant claw of each lobster is bound shut by a corresponding-colored band.

“I know they’re just bugs,” says Joanie. “Maybe not as clever as us. But they desire things. They’re happier some days than others. We call them by their names.”

 Seventy-One examines Joanie’s face, the unblemished skin, the sculpted eyebrows. She finds no humor at the corners of her eyes, no incipient smile concealed in the curve of her lips. Joanie means it.

She doesn’t want to play this stupid game, but she does want a pair of lobsters. Seventy-One meets Joanie’s gaze, weighs her options, and blinks. Peering into the tank, she matches a rose band and an orange one to the list of names. “Mercedes,” she says. “And Josephine.”

Joanie dips into the tank with a short wooden rake. The struggle is one-sided. Mercedes and Josephine are boxed up and handed over to Seventy-One.

“Eighty-three!”

The Safecracker straightens at the sound of Joanie’s voice, and she mistakes him for her customer. He beams at Joanie and her brows rise, a question beginning to form, but the true Eighty-Three steps forward, ticket held high, and the question dissolves before it can take shape.

The Safecracker catches at my sleeve. He wears a look of concern. “When we get up there – it’ll come off better if you buy something, right?” He reaches beneath his untucked shirt and tugs his pants up.

I nod. “I like the look of those scallops,” I say, and point with my chin. The Safecracker follows. On the other side of the glass, the scallops sit in the bottom halves of their shells, arranged on the crushed ice in a pattern suggesting the scales of a fish. Each cream-colored disk shares its shell with a crescent of roe, floating atop the scallop like an eyebrow above an eye.

The Safecracker squints. “Never seen the orange things before. What the hell are those?”

“Reproductive organs,” I say. He smirks at my delicate choice of words. “They cut them off frozen scallops. You won’t see them outside a fish market.”

“No kidding? So she’s got a bunch of bull-scallops penned up in there.”

“Half-right,” I say. “Hermaphrodites. Male and female. Scallops have both sets of equipment. Improves their odds.”

The Safecracker considers this possibility. “Stuck inside that shell, I guess they have to think of something. Not much fun being a scallop.”

“Not much.”

Joanie stands above the glass, attending to Eighty-Three. The Safecracker lifts his eyes from the scallops and runs them along the visible portion of Joanie, a retail mermaid, half woman, half refrigerated display. He is soft-eyed, worshipful, gazing upon her as though she’d just emerged from the surf, ushered out of a giant seashell by a pair of fleshy cherubs.

Joanie surveys the customers, a slow scan. She might be looking for someone, or just counting heads. Her eyes flick to the Safecracker, once, twice, but she catches herself the third time. A shadow passes over her features, a tightening of the jaw, an extra line crossing her forehead. “Ninety-seven!”

Again, the Safecracker checks my ticket. The number is not ninety-seven, and he grunts his frustration. He stoops, gathers a double handful of tickets from the floor, and starts to thumb through them. I’ve seen guys at the racetrack who do this, scooping up betting slips from the ground, looking for winning numbers some dope tossed away by mistake. 

Ninety-Seven makes himself known: a pimply-faced guy playing a game on his phone, guiding cartoon jellyfish through a maze of billowing fishing nets. The man is pushing forty, too old for pimples, too old for playing games. I wonder if the two conditions are related.

A trio of haddock is nestled into the ice beside a cobblestone arrangement of perch fillets. Ninety-Seven points at the central haddock, asks to smell it. Joanie’s eyebrows slide north. Forget the pimples, forget the coffee spots hiding in the pattern of his madras shirt. Joanie recognizes a man who knows his way around a fish market.

She gathers the haddock in her gloved hands, cradles it, inspecting the fish before she presents it to Ninety-Seven. She brushes away a shard of ice clinging to the edge of the tail, runs her gloved hand down the length of the fish to align the dorsal fins. She gives a nod to Ninety-Seven, or it might be the slightest of bows, and extends her hands, presenting the haddock in cupped palms, as though it were a bowl of ceremonial tea. Beneath the yellow latex, her hands are enormous, powerful.

The Safecracker bites his lips as Ninety-Seven bends from the waist and, straight-backed, brings his nose within an inch of the haddock and inhales deeply. There is desperation in the Safecracker’s eyes. He is undone by the intimacy of the exchange. He twists and folds the mass of paper tickets, as if his hands can’t bear to remain still. Something is beginning to take shape.     

Ninety-Seven nods in approval, directing the gesture at the fish rather than to Joanie. The haddock remains indifferent. With a smile whose warmth seems to go beyond the requirements of mere commerce, Joanie wraps the man’s purchase in clean white paper, and thanks him for his business.

Joanie’s tango with Ninety-Seven has left a flush on her cheeks. “One-oh-one!” she calls. No one steps forward. “One-oh-three!” Still, no one. “One-oh-seven!” I’ve seen this happen before, a string of numbers whose owners have disappeared, or perhaps never existed.

The Safecracker drops his eyes to the wad of tickets in his hands, twisted and worried into a torpedo. He discovers something among the curls and creases of paper, maybe one of the missing numbers, maybe something else. His fingers return to their work with new purpose. 

Our time will come, but not yet. Joanie wraps up two pounds of salmon for One-Oh-Nine and listens with professional patience as One-Thirteen explains in a stage whisper why she can no longer eat mackerel. “It gives me the most awful gas,” she says. “Why does it do that? No one warned me. No one.”

“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” The Safecracker has recovered from Joanie’s encounter with Ninety-Seven. I nod, perhaps without the expected enthusiasm. This is not a path I want to walk.

Joanie summons One-Twenty-Seven and One-Thirty-Nine and sends them on their way with neatly wrapped bundles. “We’re getting close,” says Safecracker. “You’ve got our ticket?” I don’t like this presumption, that we’ve become accomplices. I suppress the urge to point out that I got here first, that I’m the one who acquired ticket one-fifty-seven.

The Safecracker readies himself, raises his chin, tries to square his rounded shoulders. He fixes his gaze on Joanie, who is inspecting a bowl of heavily bearded mussels as though she’s never before seen such a thing. The Safecracker tugs his nylon jacket into place, rakes his fingers through his stringy hair.

After a moment of stillness, Joanie’s chin floats upward, settles. “One-fifty-seven.” She does not yell this time. Before she finishes announcing the number, Joanie’s eyes find the Safecracker’s, and there’s something going on here.

An unseen force connects the two, a cylinder of invisible light, a wormhole tunneling through space.

On one end is the Safecracker, widow’s-peaked, dressed like a cab driver, nothing going for him except the boundless, unreasoning adoration beaming out of his rumpled face.

On the other end, Joanie. Tight ponytail. Face so hard, so smooth it could be porcelain. She is the cop writing you a ticket, the teacher who caught you texting under your desk.

I retreat a step. The Safecracker won’t be needing me. I consider the slip of paper in my hand. The number is no longer mine. I release it, let it drop to the floor.

He steps to the display case, plants himself in the crescent of vacant space. His mouth opens, but nothing comes out, it hangs there, frozen, agape. He is twelve years old, in love with the piano teacher beside him on the bench, smelling of medicated lip balm and dollar-store body powder.

Joanie has set aside her script, the routine of give and take that exists between a customer, a woman, and a pound of fish. She doesn’t offer, and the Safecracker doesn’t ask. She waits, her lips a horizontal line, arms akimbo.

The Safecracker extends his hands, one cupped around the other, as though he’s shielding a candle flame from the breeze. As the Safecracker reaches across the glass, eases his hands toward Joanie, flashes of color, the salmon of the tickets, escape from between his fingers.

He penetrates the no-man’s-land of the counter until his hands are closer to Joanie’s heart than to his own. She stands her ground. He lifts the top hand slowly, steadily, as if he’s afraid of frightening whatever is underneath. There in the Safecracker’s palm is a fish, a fish made of cast-off paper, pink, intricate, sharply creased, magical. Triangular fins, fan-shaped tail, a gaping mouth.

The Safecracker checks Joanie’s attention, holds up an index finger. He has a wild look to him now, like a street preacher gone feral. Joanie meets his gaze, her face a poker player’s mask. She waits, shoulders back, gloved fists on her hips. The Safecracker runs his finger slowly, even tenderly, along the top of his fish, beginning just behind the eyes and continuing along to the fish’s tail. As his finger passes, a row of dorsal spines spring erect, one after another. He squints, adjusts one spine, tugs at another, nods to himself, and holds the fish up to Joanie. Wide-eyed, she inspects his creation.

The Safecracker gives the head a tap, and, impossibly, the fish begins to move, paper body flexing, mouth opening and closing, fins waving, gills fluttering. As it undulates, it exposes the secrets of its construction: a printed 3 appears and disappears as the mouth opens and closes; part of a 7 peeks out from under a gill flap.

Now that the fish has been awakened, a single palm is too small to contain it. The Safecracker brings his hands together, presents the fish to her, an offering.

“Yours,” he says, “if that’s what you want.”

Joanie’s hands leave her hips. Her eyes are unreadable, flat, the eyes of a kestrel. They run along the Safecracker’s rumpled form, head to toe and back again, taking stock.

Whatever miracle has given the fish movement seems inexhaustible, at least for the moment. She extends a wet glove toward the creature, her fingers spread, the talons of a great bird. The fish’s writhing becomes faster, even frantic.

As the shadow of her hand crosses the Safecracker’s open palms, the undulations of the fish resolve into a single shiver that travels the length of its body. The Safecracker, eyes shut tight, whispers something that might be a prayer, or it might be his true name.

---

Daniel Cohen is from Boston and has the accent to prove it. He’s earned his living fixing telephones, washing pots, and teaching at UMass Amherst and Tufts. He was nominated for the 2025 Pushcart Prize and won this summer’s Peatsmoke Editor’s Prize for flash fiction. To date, he has struck three Nobel laureates (two economists and a chemist) with paper airplanes.

Fiona McKay

Civil Twilight

There are a thousand gulls on our roof, their throaty squawks drilling through me, and I picture them lifting the house, like a fallen tree, roots and all into the sky. It is July, the heat unbearable, these houses built for cold weather, lapped in thick padding, insulated. I turn over in bed, seeking a cooler place on the sheet, disturbing my husband who is also awake. I feel him rock in the aftershock of my angry turn.

‘It was just one drink,’ he says, and I feel heat flare through me.

Too many words build inside me, I can’t speak, and then: ‘It’s not just the drink. She’s only fourteen. And there was the boy too.’

I spit the words out into silence, but there is no silence. The flocks of gulls on our roof shriek and keen, soaring up and resettling. I tell my husband I can’t hear him because of the thousands of gulls, and he laughs the laugh of someone who has listened to my hyperbole for twenty years. There’s still kindness in it.

‘There are, like, two gulls up there,’ he says, ‘You know this, it happens every year. The chicks are fledging, and no one is going to sleep for a few nights. It’s normal.’

I don’t want him to be reasonable; I want him to say something I can fight with. It’s too hot to argue, hotter than last year, hotter than any other years, and I flap the thin, lacy fabric of our summer blanket – a double-bed version of the baby blankets we used to swaddle our girl with – aggressively to make a breeze, but end up hotter, clammy, sweat on my thighs, in the grooves of my groin.

‘We shouldn’t have left her,’ I say. ‘She’s too young for the responsibility.’

‘Jesus, we went out to a dinner,’ he protests, his voice rising, expanding. ‘There has to be a first time, and really it was fine.’

It’s the kind of conversation where he could tell me to calm down, and that could be the thing that pushes me over the edge. I wait for it. Hope for it? Maybe.

The noise on the roof starts up again. It might have been last year he told me about the chicks, or some other year – maybe the year the gulls kept me awake while my newborn dozed beside me and I thought I would die from the exhaustion, with the love, the life I’d had before fast slipping away. Maybe it was then he’d explained that the chicks, unable yet to fly, are tipped out of the nest to learn.

‘I don’t mind that she had friends over,’ I say.

‘Friend. One friend,’ my husband cuts me off. I don’t know if he’s saying this as a defence, or to be as scrupulously exact as he always is, but it slices like a paper cut: nothing, nothing, then the sharpest pain. It stabs my heart that my girl thinks she’s unpopular. What would she do to make herself popular?

‘One boy,’ I say. Try not to think of hands and mouths and drink and stupidity. I push down my girlhood when it threatens to rise in my throat. The things you do for popularity. The things I had done. A time of my life I’d never talked about to my husband. Or my daughter. Maybe I should. Maybe now is the time. Hands and mouths and drink and stupidity.

The chicks are on the ground outside our house, stomping around. Have they even been asleep? Have I? my husband’s breath is deeper now, more even. The room is not as dark as it was, the sun hovering just below the horizon. Astronomical, nautical, civil twilight as the sun angles its way up and over the line. I used to count the sleepless hours that way when my girl was a baby, a child. Getting through the night with feeds, with sickness. Willing the day to spin around again, so there might be appointments, or playgroup, or people on the street exhaustedly pushing buggies that I could stop and make common cause with for a few minutes. Better than the cries in the night.

If a gull nests on the roof of a house, and the chick falls out of the nest, there’s no way for the chick to make it back until it learns to fly for itself. The chicks howl, their throats distended from their hungry baby cries, beaks open wide. But there is nothing the parents can do. They patrol the rooftops, hurling squawks of abuse at any human or animal threatening their kid. Watching from a distance. Powerless, really.

He takes my sweaty hand in his cool, dry one.

‘It was one friend, and one drink. Nobody threw up, nobody did anything stupid. She’s a smart kid. I think we’re alright here.’

I want him to be right. I want to relax into sleep like a cool swim. I lie there, my hand in his hand, and the shiver of early morning passes through me. I close my eyes, waiting for the gulls to drag me back to the surface, but it’s all quiet. They’ve moved to another rooftop vantage point. Maybe something has happened to the chicks – a dog, a speeding car – sending the gulls down to the road to investigate. Or maybe, the chicks have taken flight.

---

Fiona McKay is the author of the novellas-in-flash, The Lives of the Dead, (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2025) and The Top Road (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2023), as well as the flash fiction collection Drawn and Quartered (Alien Buddha Press, 2023). She was a SmokeLong Quarterly Emerging Writer Fellow in 2023. Her flash fiction is in Gone Lawn, New Flash Fiction Review, Pithead Chapel, The Forge, Ghost Parachute, trampset, Fractured Lit and others. Her work is included in Best Small Fictions 2024. She lives in Dublin, Ireland.

Sage Tyrtle

The Lurching Horror of Kennewick Road

November, 1963

At the dinner table Carolyn’s little brothers are mixing gray peas and black cranberry sauce, stuffing them in bread sandwiches. She cuts a small piece of ash-coloured turkey and tries to chew. Her ribs still ache from yesterday.

“Pass the butter,” the monster growls. Her mother hurries to obey, pearls swinging. Heels clacking.

The monster gobbles and snorts, flinging stuffing around his plate, and Carolyn is not the daughter in this movie. She is not the niece or the girlfriend or the secretary, fleeing in a pencil skirt, wailing. That’s her mother’s job. Carolyn is the hero-scientist. The one who says things like, Keep that net handy, George. I might need it. She swallows the half-chewed turkey and without thinking says, “That’s margarine, not butter.” Under the table her capable hero-scientist hands start to shake. She knows better.

Her mother the heroine does nothing.

“Do you think,” says the monster, his smile revealing his long fangs, “Do you think, stupid girl, that I can’t tell the difference between margarine and butter?”

The screenwriter is, as always, typing away at a furious speed. “Say Yes sir! Wait. Say No Sir! No no no, that’s wrong — say, Of course you can tell the difference, O Holy Patriarch Of Our Precious Nuclear Family! I know nothing, you know all!”

But hero-scientist Carolyn ignores the screenwriter. Even though when she turns to the monster her ribs burn. “What you’re spreading on your bread right now. It’s margarine.”

“You wanna make a bet?” His tongue lolls. Drips venom. Carolyn can see herself in the back of his mouth in pearls and clacking heels, arms outstretched.

Her brothers are competing to see who can drink their milk fastest. Donny’s shirt is soaked.

“Your mother will give you a piece of bread with either butter or margarine. You taste it and say which it is. If you’re wrong, you get a whipping.”

Her mother comes unstuck from the air and murmurs, “Oh honey, I don’t know that — ”

The monster doesn’t look at her. “Shut up.”

Mouth dry, Carolyn fights to keep her voice even. “What if I’m right?”

“What?” he says.

“What if I’m right?”

He shrugs. “Then... nothing happens.”

“No thank you,” says Carolyn. “I don’t want to make a bet.” Inside her head the screenwriter screams. Her ribs scream. Her brothers stop mid-gulp.

“The hell did you just say?” says the monster.

This time Carolyn doesn’t need the screenwriter’s hissed, “Stop, please. Stop.” She stares at the turkey on her plate. Counts each small gray pea. She thinks that if someone walked into the movie theatre right now it would seem like the monster had frozen them all in time. Only the milk dripping from Ralph’s shirt looks alive.

When the monster finally speaks everyone lets out a breath. “Boys, clean up that milk. Right now.” Her brothers, speaking-role extras, scurry into the kitchen for dishtowels.

Carolyn picks up her fork. Her mother walks back to the table. Everyone finishes dinner. Everyone goes to sleep.

April, 1964

Carolyn is standing in the dark at the kitchen door and she is turning the knob by centimetres, by millimetres, breaking into the safe of the outside. In her other hand she is holding a suitcase. Light washes through the kitchen and her heart pounds in the moment before she understands it’s truck lights, trundling by on I-63.

The soundtrack swells, the violins high and filled with tension and Carolyn turns the doorknob, and turns, and — there. The latch disengages. She eases the door open and goes down the cement steps into the backyard. She creeps along the edges to the thicket of cedar trees and steps over the gray daffodils. She kneels down. The props people have filled the suitcase with three blouses, three skirts, three pairs of underwear. Three hundred and fifty-seven dollars, every penny from babysitting and sewing jobs, her grandmother’s Christmas envelopes. She can’t keep the suitcase in her room. The monster does periodic checks, running his clawed hands over her spartan desk, leaving a thin layer of iron-coloured slime on everything, emptying her dresser, her closet. Ripping down the magazine pictures taped to the wall in case there’s something hidden behind them, the Giant Leeches and the Alligator People and the Cat Women lying in shreds on the floor.

The rain machine starts and she feels the first drops on the back of her head. She knows the monster will ask why she is wet, why her tweed skirt is muddy, what happened to her cardigan, why why why and the screenwriter instructs, “Say I slipped in the mud, Sir. I fell, Sir,” and there is a part of her that understands the futility of it all. Understands that she is playing at the escape she is not fearless enough to effect. Daydreaming of her own hero-scientist shack on the edge of the swamp / top of the mountain / underground in a field of ice, her never-to-be realized shack where it would be so quiet. Where there wouldn’t be doors to walk into, stairs to fall down. Where she would move among her bubbling beakers with grace. With ease.

She digs in the soft soil and buries her sanity in a place the monster never goes. A grip turns the rain machine up. She’s pushing the last of the dirt over the hole when the kitchen door bangs open and the monster comes down the steps, holding two bags of trash in his long claws. The screenwriter tells her to freeze and hero-scientists don’t freeze, they act, they fight, they get up and swing their suitcases into the monster’s face until it is a battered pulp, but Carolyn freezes. Water stings her unblinking eyes. If she is caught, if she is caught, if she is caught, if she is caught —

The monster strides across the yard, his crocodile eyes catching the moonlight. He opens the metal can and the screech drowns out her rabbit breaths. He slings the trash bags inside and turns back to the house, where Patsy Cline is falling to pieces on the record player and that’s when the lightning strikes. A flash of stark white, outlining his body as he falls to the ground. Thunder cracks. The screenwriter claps a hand over Carolyn’s mouth to stop her from shouting with joy.

The director has given her an early birthday gift. Has heard her talk about the dream she has every night of the monster drowning in his own too-thick silvery blood and made it come true. The monster lies in the pelting rain on the exactly two-inch high grass and his unseeing eyes are open and he must be dead. The lurching beast in the horror movie that is her house, her family, must be finally, astoundingly, dead.

The violins swell again but this time in a major key, this time with possibilities, and she thinks of unburying the suitcase. She thinks of an unhaunted house. A comedy, in which she plays a brave and plucky teen helping her family navigate Life Without Father. She thinks of going back inside, of curling up on the couch as her mother hems a skirt, the set designer roaming the room removing the fear that covers the house like floodwaters. She pictures her mother’s head thrown back in laughter.

But the monster takes a big, shuddering breath. Of course he does. Of course. He stands up. He pats the skin around his suppurating slate-coloured sores, rubs his face. He shakes one foot, then the other. He chuckles and shambles back toward the house. Whistling along with Patsy Cline. The kitchen door bangs shut after him.

She waits for the director to yell, “Cut!” for the crew to bustle, to re-set the scene, to film it again, correctly this time, because he was dead. And even the daffodils were celebrating. Brightening from gray, past white, into... something new. Different. But the director says, “Great job, everyone! Moving on,” and it wasn’t an early birthday present after all and Carolyn sits on the ground under the rain machine, shaking with silent laughter that turns into sobs. She sprinkles the small mound with sticks and leaves. She goes back inside.

June, 1964

Usually at the end of the monster movie the hero-scientist shoots or strangles or drowns or burns or beats the monster, saving the heroine, who by then has been screaming for a long time and the hero-scientist reigns triumphant and the monster is gone forever.

But hero-scientist Carolyn is doing none of these things. She is sitting on her bed while the make-up artist pats charcoal bruises around her eye, her cheekbone, her jaw. Dapples pewter-coloured fingermarks on her neck.

The heroine is in the kitchen making bologna sandwiches for Donny and Ralph and the monster is in the driveway, humming as he washes the car. In the back yard, her suitcase lies open. Her clothes scattered in the grass, ripped to pieces.

Her mother taps on the door and comes in, drying her hands on a dishtowel, not looking up. “Barbara called to see if you wanted to go swimming with her and Sandy. I said you were... not feeling well.”

Carolyn doesn’t have any lines in this scene. She nods and her jaw aches and she wonders if hero-scientists ever get tired of the heroine just standing there and doing nothing, nothing, never defending anyone from the monster’s claws. If hero-scientists ever think of saving themselves instead.

August, 1964

The dawn light is burning away the dew on the fields. Carolyn is striding through the grass toward I-63. The director, the producer, her agent, the screenwriter, they are chasing her, hollering for her to come back, that her contract isn’t up, that she can’t leave the movie, that there’s no movie without her, and the sound engineer turns up the volume on the cicada sound effects and drowns them out.

If she were to turn she would be able to make out her bedroom window on Kennewick Road, now a square the size of a freckle. But she does not turn. She climbs over the metal guardrail and stands on the shoulder facing the traffic. She sticks out her thumb.

When the VW bug coasts to a stop and the passenger door opens, Carolyn runs to get in and as the VW Beetle merges back onto the highway the camera lifts into the sky. Showing the small town, the bustling train in the distance, the almost-yellow field of daffodils.

This piece originally appeared at The Lumiere Review.

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Sage Tyrtle is a Moth GrandSLAM-winning storyteller and Pushcart-nominated writer. Their work has been featured on NPR, CBC, and PBS, and in publications like The Offing and Apex Magazine. Since 2010, they’ve taught 150+ workshops worldwide for organizations from Clarion West to the Afghan Women’s Association, helping writers transform raw stories into resonant art. Sage believes in the alchemy of constraints and the power of unexpected details.