Scott Madison

Affogato

The kitchen smells like sour milk and bins. We leave the window above the sink open to let out the heat, but more heat only lets itself in. This part of France doesn’t get a breeze in the Summertime. Moments exist until they are physically removed.

I chip through the thaw of the freezer: drawers full of things we won’t admit we will never consume. A pizza with black olives, a 2-pack of chorizo fish cakes, a candle burned and blackened to its bottom.

Wedged between a half-empty bag of chips and some loose magnums, I find the final Greek yoghurt pot. I run it under the hot tap until the contents are soft enough to slide out into a glass; a perfect cube - white at the centre, with a translucent coating.

The heat pauses for a moment to let sound arrive at the window: a jangle of keys being tried into a fussy lock. Jangle. Click. Jangle. Click. Jangle. Click, click, release. I lean over the window sill just as my mother opens the front gate and lets herself through, pausing to slip the set of keys back into her woven beach bag. Tomorrow, she will not remember which key it is the lock welcomes. She does not mind. Not remembering which key opens what lock is good for training the bladder, she’s told me more than once. And when I look back on my life, I think I will remember all of the women I have seen almost piss themselves on doorsteps, and that I have never seen one actually do it.

I press the power button on the achy espresso machine and it vibrates to life. I swap out an old pod for an untouched one, and watch as hot coffee pours onto the frozen cube of yoghurt. It’s still streaming down when my mother appears at the doorless kitchen opening. She is pink and salty from an afternoon at the beach. It smells like, air sniff, sour milk in here.

“I know,” I say. “And bins.”

“Yes. Bins.”

With both hands, I touch her arm, and she leaves. It’s one of life’s easiest tasks - telling my mother what to do, physically. Where to go. To sit down for a moment. To head to the balcony. To perch like a baby bird, open-beaked, and wait for a worm. Let me direct you, stroke you, present you odd things in glasses. Let me do it for you because I never understood you were doing it for me.

By the time I bring the concoction out to her, she is already on a call with her sister. She holds the phone between her ear and her neck despite having both hands free. Oh how awful. Yes, I remember. Yes, awful, she is saying. I grew up with just a younger brother, so I will live my life unable to speak the language of sisterhood. It is, for all its turbulence, a dialect I am sad to miss. I would like to hear about the divorces of old school friends, about court cases that were solved quite a few years ago, about how to stop the roasted courgette sticking to the aluminium foil.

“One second Deb, Robin’s brought me an affogato. Yes, yes, when in Rome!” She mouths thank you and rolls her eyes as if auntie Deb is asking her whether she’s been in a car accident and if she has insurance. And then she goes back to laughing at one thing or another.

What I have made my mother is not an affogato. It is thawed Greek yoghurt in a glass of watery black coffee. In a few minutes, it will begin to disintegrate into small, sour flakes.

The freezer was full of Greek yoghurt pots when we arrived at the beginning of July. They taunted my mother, these small pockets of sweetness that were never meant for us. She would have liked to throw them out, all seven or eight of them. But when I showed her a ‘guilt-free affogato’ recipe curated by an Instagram influencer promoting disordered eating, she agreed we might be able to put them to use.

I had presented the Greek yoghurt experiment with enough confidence that she had enjoyed it, taking several pictures, flash on, to send to her friends. Now, each afternoon, she expects her affogato. And so I will make it quite happily until the yoghurts, the last traces of him, are gone.

Lifting the cube with a spoon and wrapping her mouth around it from several angles, she is like one of those crumpled dogs who holds their toy between their paws and licks, pulls, licks until they taste the peanut butter inside. I catch myself thinking this in the reflection of the French window, and quickly busy myself with tidying around her.

When she is finished, she will tell me about the beach, about what auntie Deb said on the phone: who’s husband is dying and who is getting a bit too big for their boots. I will tell her the details of a case at work and a fictional piece of feedback from my manager. And we will talk about small things like these until the sun is gone and it is time to turn on the television.

Here is my father on this same living room floor, several years earlier, lying on his side as if he is about to extend himself into a side plank. He is fiddling with the box because somebody got him a good deal on English channels over here. He is muttering quiet things to himself, asking Siri questions Siri can not answer. He is always doing things like this, fiddling with boxes and getting deals from expat cab drivers who have the same South London accent as he does. We look out for one anotha, he had said as he closed Trev’s boot and tugged the handle of his suitcase up. And we had nodded, because we really do like watching television.

He was a good man, auntie Deb says to me from time to time when my mother leaves the room, as if my father has actually died. As if he is in the ground. Not in the bungalow of the lady who used to come round and cut our hair.

And now we are back in the present, if that is at all fully possible.  My mother and I are watching A Place In The Sun. Perching on the floor in front of her, I let her plait my hair, though I have never liked my head being touched. We do not say much, even when the adverts play. We are not a family who love in tongue. We love in full stomachs and shoulder rubs and now in milky cubes in black coffee.

On the table in front of us, my phone vibrates. I flip it over instinctively. It is a force of habit; I mean nothing by it. And I would like to have not done it. But I did, and my mother has already removed her fingers from my scalp. The room is cold now.

“Is that him?”

“No.”

Minutes pass. I do not know what is happening in A Place In The Sun anymore.

She leans forward, holding her face so close that the Bacardi on her tongue feels like it’s on mine.

“You can tell me if you’d rather be with him. And her. Like your brother. Go on. You can leave tomorrow. I’ll pay for your flight.”

I do not answer.

“That’s all I’m good for, isn’t it? You can go. I’ll go to bed actually, when this episode is finished, so you can text him back and arrange it.”

And I cannot help it now. Because while we do not love in tongue, we are experts in using it to sting. And so, “Not everything is about you,” I spit, and flip my phone so it slams down on the table like a tiny expensive skateboard. And there is my screen, and the WhatsApp notification from Sam.

She does not ask the things I think I want her to ask, now she has seen it: why he is messaging again and if I think I will see him if he wants me to, despite his temper and the way the thick hairs on his hands curl when his fists do. She does not ask, and I will not surrender unasked. And then, just as heavy in the air, are the things I have not asked her. What day of the week it was, or what the weather was like the day she found them together.

After what the advert break tells me is a few minutes, she moves my new plait over one shoulder, and I feel her hands on my upper back, taking hold of the strings on my top that have been coming loose since the afternoon. I watch her mind work in the cabinet mirror; her lips tort like a squeezed lemon and her thick brows pointing towards her nose. She tries different loops, like placing a jigsaw piece into a hole at all possible rotations. And then she gets it.

Very quickly, she loops the two pieces of string into the sides of the top, and brings them up again. She moves the plait gently back to the centre, smoothing my shoulders as she removes herself from my skin altogether. She reaches forward, and moves my tea towards me. I have a tendency to let it go cold. 

“Would you like to sleep in my bed tonight?”

---

Scott Madison is a London-based writery type person. Her poetry has appeared in independent publications like SEED, Dear Damsels, and Kamena. She can be found on Instagram @WordDonkey and is always happy to hear about writing / performing opportunities.

Rebecca Klassen

How to Clean Stilettos

1)   Wipe a microfibre cloth around the inside of the shoe to remove any accumulated dust and debris.

High heels from her single days on the floor confirms your hunch that something’s off between you two. That’s why you open her laptop for the first time and peruse the inbox.

2)   Use an old toothbrush to scrub the outside of the sole and the tip of the heel with warm, soapy water, then dry with a towel. Fun fact: stiletto is Italian for ‘pointed writing instrument’.

Her words are recent, lurid, erotic, and not for you. They cut you, leaving you raw and your hands shaking. 

3)    A handled brush with horsehair bristles is softer on leather. Gentle, circular motions should remove scuff and black marks.

You want to talk to her, but you don’t trust yourself to speak calmly. She’s never liked your aggression, which you’ve labelled passion. The argument will get stuck in a loop; you’ve always been a broken record. Your history together is blotchy. No wonder she’s sent these words to someone else.     

4)    Shoe cream is workable and gives a shinier finish than wax. Apply with two fingers wrapped in a polishing cloth. Ensure you select a good colour match.

People said you were soulmates, that you complimented each other. Maybe that’s why you were complacent, thought it would work out effortlessly. You didn’t pay attention to detail, to her needs.

5)    Move your brush around the shoe again until the cream vanishes.

Perhaps couples counselling, atoning for your mistakes to create a brighter future.

6)    Leave them by the door for her. A good pair will last years.

You shut the laptop. God, you love her, but you can’t talk to her yet without that damn passion, so you pick up her high heels, along with your cleaning kit. Only elbow grease will do now.

Playing I Have Never with the Thirteen-Year-Old Girl My Best Friend Just Adopted

Tammy’s left us alone while she fetches the windbreak from the car. She wants Millie and I to bond on this beach rug, the breeze playing our open lemonade cans like panpipes. Tammy and I played I Have Never in pub gardens, bent double, trying not to pee, learning about each other.

I tell Millie, ‘Just drink if you’ve done the thing I say I haven’t.’

She nods, watching two brothers skimming a frisbee.

I say, ‘I have never liked playing frisbee.’

Millie shrugs. ‘Never touched a frisbee. Do I drink?’

I look back at the carpark. Tammy’s rummaging in the boot, unable to offer an answer that satisfies Millie and assuages my guilt. ‘You don’t need to drink.’

Millie stares longingly inside her can. I kind of hate Tammy now she’s ruined brunching, weekend breaks, getting pissed together. We can’t chat uninterrupted anymore about books, the old days, our dreams. Of course, Millie is Tammy’s dream. Mine’s to visit Machu Picchu and sleep with Tom Hardy. Millie felt more appealing when she was just potential.

‘Your turn,’ I say.

Millie says, ‘I have never had a one-night stand,’ and I wonder if she knows what casual sex is, then she giggles as I drink. I imagine Tammy in my place on the rug, remaining humbly dehydrated for her new daughter.

I watch the frisbee brothers, not wanting to look at Millie, and I can’t believe I say aloud, ‘I have never wanted to go home and cry more in my life.’ I drink deeply, and Millie’s laugh bursts out, which makes me laugh too, lemonade fizzing on my chin.

‘My turn,’ she says. ‘I have never wanted to just drink my fucking lemonade more.’

She takes a glug, belches, and I think she might be my new best friend.

---

Rebecca Klassen is co-editor of The Phare and a Best of the Net 2025 nominee from Gloucestershire, UK. She has won the London Independent Story Prize and was short/longlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award, Flash 500, Bridport Prize, Alpine Fellowship, Laurie Lee Prize, Quiet Man Dave Prize, and the Oxford Flash. Her stories have featured in Mslexia, Fictive Dream, Toronto Journal, Shooter, The Brussels Review, Amphibian, Roi Faineant Press, Writing Magazine, Ginosko, Riggwelter, Cranked Anvil, BarBar, and Ink, Sweat & Tears, and have been performed at numerous literature festivals and on BBC Radio.

Beth Hendrickson

Roots and Wings

He lays out the knife, creamy peanut butter, sugar, and dates just so. The knife will cut the slit and smear the peanut butter. Fingers, even his arthritic ones, will be necessary for extracting the date pit, rolling in sugar, and licking. Extra fingers are coming to help. Waiting at the table, he fidgets with the white paper placemat.

“Hi, Granddad.”

“Hello, Grandson.” With the greeting, one of Granddad’s eyebrows sprouts yellow canary feathers and flutters off his face. Grandson’s eyes twist in concern, watching the eyebrow fly toward the door he’d just entered.

“It’s nothing,” Granddad reassures, waving a gnarled hand. “Don’t need two of those anyway. Here. Help me.” He nudges a knife to Grandson.

Reassured and conscripted, Grandson gets busy.

Grandson and Granddad slice, smear, and lick for the space of three (Grandson) and five (Granddad) peanut-butter stuffed dates. Christmas carols play from speakers, and a woman in a wheelchair by the muted TV hums along to “Sleigh Ride.” Next to her hangs a cross stitch from a forgotten resident. Orange and green yarn lettering: “There are two things we can give our children. One is roots. The other is wings.” A nurse appears silently at Granddad’s elbow, places a white paper cup with thirteen various colored pills (she’s counted, so he doesn’t), and retreats. Granddad’s right kneecap unfurls ravens wings, rises from his leg, and follows her.

“You’re falling apart Grandad,” Grandson observes as his tongue scrubs his finger, peanut butter and sugar being a tough job.

“And you’re growing up, kid,” Granddad counters.

A root, green and supple as an orchid’s, snakes out of Granddad’s little finger, undulates across the table, and attaches to Grandson’s pinky. If either notices, they do not comment.

“Your dad picks you up in an hour, right?” Granddad says. “That’s what your mom told the nurse.”

Grandson shrugs, not willing to commit on his father’s behalf.

Granddad nods, equally unwilling to trust his son who has recently proven to be better at leaving than coming.

Grandad’s left elbow unscrews, flexes albatross wings, and flaps elegantly to the ceiling. A root spools out of Granddad’s ear and navigates over to Grandson’s earlobe. There the root quivers, tightens, and burrows.

“What’s Santa getting you for Christmas?” Granddad wonders.

A skeptic growing into a cynic, Grandson raises a single, youthfully secured eyebrow.

“I see. No secret there. Well, did I ever tell you I played Santa for all the neighborhood kids when your dad was little?”

“You mean you grew a beard and got real fat?” Grandson licks his knife.

“Any Santa would, if he were making magic for his best son. His pal.” Grandad’s bushy white mustache quivers into the air with luna moth wings, leaving behind a naked lip.

“No one says pal, Granddad.”

“Buddy?”

A grimace.

“Well then, what do you kids these days call their best buds?”

“Gruzz,” Grandson nods.

“Gruzz,” Granddad repeats.

Monarch butterflies carry off Grandad’s thumbnail. A root twists from his palm to Grandson’s wrist and wraps.

There’s a scent of pine from the candle warmer on the nurse’s station. In the corner, the wire pole trunk of the Christmas tree shines behind bristled branches and red bulbs.  The wheelchair lady hums “Last Christmas.” Grandson eats one sugary date. Granddad eats two. Four molars flit out of his mouth on bumblebee wings and take to the sky. A root twines up Grandson’s leg to secure his bouncing knee.

“In case I’m not around come Christmas morning, I’ve ordered Santa to bring you that video game computer you want.” Granddad spits a pit into his empty pill cup.

“I know you’re dying Granddad, you don’t have to pretend. Mom already told me.”

“And your dad? What’d he say?” 

Seven of Granddad’s ribs splinter away on starlings’ wings. A grey root thick as a rolling pin wraps around Grandson’s waist.

Grandson shrugs, and his knife slices a date in half.

Granddad’s right shoulder detaches with red hawk wings. Roots knit into a lace shroud that drapes across the table and snarls in Grandson’s hair. He mashes an oozing date into the sugar dish. He grinds it around. Sugar crystals glitter. Five of Granddad’s toes hover suspended by hummingbird wings under the table.

“One thing I won’t pretend, Grandson—Gruzz?”  He looks to confirm he’s said it correctly.

“Gruzz,” Grandson echoes. When his voice cracks, he doesn’t flinch.

“You can’t get away from me. We’re connected, me, you. You’ve got some places you have to go, and so do I, but I think I’ll stick with you, one way or another.”

A bouquet of sparrow wings erupts from the top of Grandad’s skull. A hairy root snaps around his ankle and then undulates under the table to shackle Grandson’s.

Granddad places his knife next to the empty plate. The blade sticks to the placemat the nurse set out. Granddad’s hip buckles, folds, then launches away with the waddling disgrace of a loon lifting from water. An old, gnarled, peanut-butter sugared hand rubs a young, smooth, peanut-butter sugared hand.

“I love you,” Grandad says.

“I love you too, Gruzz,” Grandson says.

A root, the biggest, sturdiest, thickest yet, swells from an old chest and dives to a young. It anchors right above Grandson’s heart which flaps, beats, and flutters within a cage of growing bones.

---

Beth has been a riverboat deckhand, violinist, rock climber, and substitute middle school Algebra teacher (in no particular order). She was long-listed for Jericho Writer’s 500 Novel contest, and her stories have appeared in Muleskinner Journal, The Quarter(ly) Journal, and The Fourth River. She lives in Pittsburgh, PA with her husband, two daughters, and a self-centered dachshund.

Matt Leibel

How to Build a Sandcastle

Hire an architect. Someone with vision, and an understanding of light, space, materials, temperature controls, safety protocols, 3D modeling. They should know their way around a city planning commission, have experience balancing the interests of competing stakeholders. Possibly a past Pritzker winner, or someone in the conversation for the future: a towering talent with Hadid’s sense of the avant-garde, Gehry’s knack for the baroque post-modern, Kahn’s elemental geometries, Pei’s iconic simplicity. And sure: you may object that sandcastles are for children on your beach day, and you’re just happy to hand them plastic shovels and buckets to keep the phones out of their little mitts while you attempt to catch some rays while zoning out to whatever reliably heart-pounding thriller plot Robert Ludlum or Lee Child or Tana French or Harlan Coben may have in store for you. But this misses the sheer structural power, the potential for grandeur and dazzle that sandcastles offer. Face it: you’re never going to build Versailles in your lifetime, or a new Monticello, or Great Wall. You’re probably not going to build an extension on your home, or even fix a pothole in your street. But you can build a tiny world that expresses your constructed dreams. You can make the universe incrementally better, if only for the time between the tides. Don’t be afraid to bring in outside help, to tell the kids they’ve got it all wrong. They’re thinking too small: you want flying buttresses, raised turrets, hidden pathways, maze-like courtyards, staircases leading to nowhere. Castles were created by Kings as walled fortresses to ward off usurpers. All sandcastles can fend off is the deadness in your soul, and even that only for a little while. There’s a reason adults compete in sandcastle building contests, and it’s not (just) because they’re trying to regress to their six-year-old selves who imagined they could dig their way to China, or whatever their corresponding “other side of the world” was. Sand is one of the world’s oldest substances; when you (or your architect’s subcontracted building team) are working with it, you’re communing with the origins of our planet, that whirling, gaseous chemical play set. Jack Reacher—for all of his skills with a rifle, his hands, or his wits—can’t really dig that deep.

How to Get Unstuck

Call a tow truck. Call a locksmith. Call a therapist. Call your mother. Call my mother. No. Leave my mother alone. She’s got enough on her plate. Don’t try to stick things to other things in the first place. Don’t affix decals to your car bumper. They don’t age well. No one cares who you supported in the 2004 election. Well, there are probably people who care. I might care, a little bit. But don’t do it. Don’t try to stick the landing on your dismount without years of practice. Don’t bother trying gymnastics at all if you didn’t sacrifice your childhood for it. If you’re a child, for the love of God, don’t sacrifice your childhood. Definitely don’t sacrifice your childhood for the love of God. God, if she exists, would want you to have more fun than that. If you’re stuck on a piece of writing, set it aside for a while. Come back to it later. Hopefully, the piece will then unveil itself to you, like a previously-withholding lover suddenly deciding to entrust you with a disconcerting torrent of emotional honesty. If you’re still stuck, set your writing aside for 500 years. In the distant future, someone will discover your barely-scrutable texts buried under geologically-intimidating layers of sand and rock. They’ll decide to continue your work where you left off, and either they’ll make the writing better or worse. If they finish it and improve it, this will confer upon you a kind of immortality that you’ll be too dead to properly appreciate. If they make it worse, you’ll be forgotten by history, which seems appropriate since most people forget all the history they ever learn anyway. And what will you care? You’ll be kicking back in the afterlife. In the afterlife, there are beanbags 100 times more comfortable than anything you had back on Earth, including the ones they had at that one startup you worked at where they tried to turn the work environment into a glorified playroom. If you sink deeply enough into your afterlife beanbag, you will become one with it, as if with the universe itself. In the end, this is the kind of stuck you want to be. Maybe none of us ever truly become unstuck, and maybe that’s okay. We’re all stuck with each other until the day we die, and maybe long after that. If you’re stuck in rush hour traffic on the 405 trying to get home from downtown LA at twilight on a Friday night under a sky striped with layers of orange, pink and purple whose beauty belies their origins in the environmental ruin we seem to have irrevocably yoked ourselves to, then sorry: I’ve got nothing for you.

---

Matt Leibel’s short fiction has appeared in Post Road, Electric Literature, Portland Review, The Normal School, Quarterly West, Socrates on the Beach, Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, matchbook, and Wigleaf. His work has also been anthologized in Best Small Fictions 2024 and Best Microfiction 2025. Find him online at mattleibel.com.

Elad Haber

An Unfinished Sentence

When the author signed my copy of her latest book, I fell inside the ink as if caught in a flood. The water was black and it tasted metallic as it sloshed into my mouth.

“Help!” I shouted as I flailed. “I can’t swim!”

“Really?”

You were sitting cross-legged on a buoy. Brown leather knee-high boots (half-submerged), a frilly skirt, and a crop-top, hot pink, the glowing end of a vape dangling between two manicured fingers. Black lipstick and black eyeshadow two shades darker. With your free hand, you pinched your librarian glasses and gave me a motherly look as if to say, Please explain your foolishness.

I calmed down, stood up in the now-ankle deep water, still black and inky. “Okay, not really. It’s just something people say.”

You scoffed and removed your glasses to yawn. “That’s a cliché. I abhor cliché.”

“Right, right,” I said agreeably. “How about this?”

I reached up and grabbed at your wrist and suddenly we were submerged in the black water and descending. From far away, the sound of a distant train. That chugging, churning, engine so loud. Then, so close. It approached from below us. A submarine in the darkness. It wasn’t a modern train, but an old one, steam-engined, with one of those big chimney-style tubes in the front. From the mouth of the tube, huge bubbles floated lazily.

I let go of your hand as my lungs started to burn. You dropped your vape, anger lines appearing on your face. Then we got caught in one of the bubbles and I could breathe.

“Better,” you said and sipped at the vape. “But what are you trying to say with all of this?” You motioned with your hands at the black water, the train, the bubbles.

We floated like astronauts, in silence, for a moment.

I gulped. “I’m a writer.”

You sighed. “Obviously.”

~

I’m a graphic designer, too. I’ll show you my office. Bubbles swirled around us.

You switched from your goth-punk outfit to business casual: grey slacks, a bit of flare at the bottom, and a too-tight teal cardigan.

I fast-forwarded my office to the future so instead of off-white cubicles and boring dual monitors, we passed rows of glass enclosures with projection monitors or designers wearing VR headsets that look like sunglasses.

The edges of your mouth tilted towards a smile.

Emboldened, I sat down at my workstation, you hovered behind. My monitor was huge and curved. On the screen, flyouts and scrolling tickers with news feeds and social media highlights. In the center, on a harsh white background, an unfinished sentence mid-way through a metaphor, the pulsing cursor like a beating heart.

You cleared your throat. “There’s a lot going on.”

“Right.” I waved my hand and all the clutter disappeared. The white page looked even more menacing.

“So,” you said into the sudden silence, “what’s the story about?”

“It’s about a girl,” I said, “estranged from her family. She moves to the city and then runs into her brother in a coffee shop.”

“Okay. Then what happens?”

I made some non-committable noises.

“You don’t know?”

I looked down at my hands, scared to touch the keyboard.

“It’s okay,” you said. You stand up a little straighter. “Let’s figure it out.”

You looked down at your right hand as if it was new. You made a quick clicking sound and then snapped your fingers-

~

And then we were in a coffee shop.

They had one of those oldtimey bells that jingle when the door opens, giving the whole place a kind of quaint charm, despite the bustling city outside.

I spotted you right away. Hunched over a laptop. Plaid shirt, ball cap, fake beard. Your face was partially covered, but you seemed to be grinning, enjoying the subterfuge. You were typing fast with the confident click-click-click of a wordsmith.

Eye contact and we both froze. Your fingers hovered over the keyboard. Me, with nothing in my hands yet, feeling unprepared.

I sat down in the empty seat across from you and you dropped the laptop lid.

“Hi,” I said

“Hey,” you replied. “Didn’t think I’d ever see you again.” Your tone was serious but you flashed me a little wink, like, that was good right?

“How are Mom and Dad?”

“Fine.”

“Good.”

You broke your guise for another moment to shoot me a glance, like, come on, the reader is getting bored.

I poured molten steel into my voice. “I didn’t deserve the way you treated me. I’m your sister, not some stranger.”

You nodded, then remembered your role to grit your teeth at me. “You broke our heart.”

My voice rose in anger. “Because I didn’t want to marry that asshole?”

People were staring over their coffee-cups. Author-you, not fake-brother you, was smiling, urging me to go on.

I was stammering, a little, but gaining confidence with every other word. “Just because he was your best friend and Mom’s godson doesn’t mean that we had to be together like some kind of royal engagement. I’m not a fucking princess!”

Then I stood up, coffee-less, and barged out the door. A moment later, that bell again. I turned around and then…

And then…

~

“And then what?” you almost-shouted.

We’re back in my future office. The sound of whispered voices and boiling water.

“I don’t know!” I swiped at the air around the page and various screens appeared. Snippets of dialogue, descriptions, flashbacks, alternate endings, an endless cascade of possibility.

You shoo-ed away the flyouts like they were buzzing flies.

“No!” you admonished with genuine anger. “You can’t copy and paste conflict!” You stabbed at my heart. “Figure out what happens next in here. Otherwise, I can’t help you.”

~

With that dismissal, the illusion disappeared. The futuristic office, the oldtimey coffeeshop.

We were back at the bookstore. You finished signing your name with a flourish and said, “Thank you for coming.”

And I didn’t know what else to say.

---

Elad Haber is a husband, father to an adorable little girl, and IT guy by day, fiction writer by night. He has recent publications from the Simultaneous Times Podcast, Silly Goose Press, and Bulb Culture Collective. His debut short story collection, The World Outside was published by Underland Press in July 2024. Visit eladhaber.com for links and news.

Sarah Freligh

The Real Story

Because Eve sprung a leak between her cheeks that she called a mouth, and from this new place erupted all the words that she’d stored up until they turned to lava inside her and volcanoed out: I am not your maid. Not tonight. Get your own damn beer. Because God heard her and shook his head. Not the lemon or the grape, he whispered to the serpent, but the apple. Big enough to close the hole.  

---

Sarah Freligh is the author of eight books, including Sad Math, winner of the 2014 Moon City Press Poetry Prize, Hereafter, winner of the 2024 Bath Novella-in-Flash Contest, and the recently-released Other Emergencies. Her work has been anthologized in New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (Norton 2018), and Best Microfiction (2019-22, ‘25).

Chris Carrel

Days of Smoke and Fire

You wake up in the morning with the dull dread ringing in your ears like the emergency sirens outside that are, in fact, ringing in your ears. Is this the state of the world today, you ask yourself? Has it been reduced to the unceasing sonic wail of first responders rushing off to battle the flames or murder another citizen? The questions are too heavy for this early, that being eleven in the morning.

Yes, you have slept in again but lately you find that your personal productivity schemes no longer spark delight in you. The general state of things has deteriorated to a sort of hyperreal surrealism, and nothing seems sustainable anymore. In this state you have become stuck, neither able to move forward nor retreat, just tread water. You can no longer tell the difference between depression and clarity. Even simple maintenance tasks like hydration seem pointless in the face of a menu of looming catastrophes.

"Look," you say to no one in particular and tapping your skull with a finger, "this tub-wrinkled jellyfish up here has not evolved one iota for the past one hundred thousand years. I'm working with ancient equipment, and I have to deal with alarm clocks, emergency services and financialized capitalism! I need some coffee."

"Good morning, Curt." The SmartBeanz™ coffee grinder addresses you with the fake name you gave it as you pour beans into its cylinder. "Would you like some coffee beans ground?"

"Grind these, Dumbass," you say, using the name you programmed for it.

"Excellent choice, Curt." Its voice is that of a moderately concerned TV newsreader from Iowa describing the latest wave of book burnings. This voice from the uncanny valley is helpful in that it keeps you from making the mistake of trusting the device. Even the appliances have chosen sides. Dumbass isn't even done mauling your coffee beans but is already streaming data back to its mothership about your coffee choice, the time of your first cup and the grind you selected, among other things. It would gladly testify against you in court, should the opportunity arise.

"This morning's roast is Voice of the Yellow Songbird," the machine says, raising the volume to be heard above the clamor. "The beans you are currently grinding were purchased from a farm collective in Chiapas, Mexico consisting of 35 small farms that support 247 people, including 138 farm workers, and their spouses and children. The coffee beans are arabica. They were shade grown and organically produced. State law requires me to advise you that no product may be completely organic, and your coffee beans may contain some trace quantities of pesticides, herbicides, fungicides and/or various micro and nanoplastics. This blend is currently ranked 87th most Just Fair Farming Friendly. An excellent choice. Would you like to hear the carbon and biodiversity impact footprint from your cup of coffee?"

"Go stuff yourself, Dumbass," you tell it, while swearing that this time you will remember to look up how to turn off the voice feature, even though you do need the social interaction. Despite the promises of the Grindz, Inc. marketing department, the informative device and its product transparency are not making you a better person. In fact, you suspect that when it comes to self-improvement, you may lie beyond the rehabilitative power of small appliances. You don't even remember why you bought it, though you suspect the purchase was a clever diversionary tactic to keep you from thinking about something else. Mission accomplished!

Adding to your growing litany of small complaints, the balcony door refuses to open when you push the door button. The conditions light blares orange at you: Unhealthful external conditions. You cannot leave the apartment until you declare a liability waiver holding harmless the apartment owners, the municipal and federal government and a large pool of corporations and corporate shell entities (and their legal representatives) that may or may not be responsible for the air quality today.

Though tempting, you stop yourself from chewing on the irony of having to sign a waiver to leave your own apartment just to smoke cigarettes in the smog outside. It's just not worth contemplating and you really need that first hit of nicotine, cannabis and God knows what. Besides, you are well accustomed to reflexively signing away your legal rights in exchange for access.

Setting down your cup, cigarettes and lighter, you pull up the liability screen on your phone, tap once, and using your finger, author a poor imitation of your signature. You tap again to dismiss. The light turns green, and the glass door slides open admitting you onto the three-by-five-foot cement balcony thirty-three stories above the street.

You attempt to stifle a yawn, but it veers away from you into a hacking cough. The air isn't even that bad this morning, but your lungs are still sore from yesterday's haze. Wildfire smoke or no, the air is never really free of pollutants anymore. Whether you're inside or out, you are inhaling microscopic pieces of plastic and volatile organic compounds with each breath. You've come to think of the soot from the wildfires as flavoring, like airborne MSG or Za'atar.

Fortunately, marine air is blowing in from the sea this morning, keeping the smoke away from the city. You can see all the way to the foothills where the fires are burning, feeding a steady billow of smoke to the cloudy, gray skies. The land between the city and the fire is a patchwork of burnt and unburnt forest and towns, laced with ribbons of mostly empty roadways.

Somehow, this particular wildfire has been threatening the city for the better part of a month. Something to do with prevailing and countervailing winds being stuck in a loop due to the melting Arctic ice and a grumpy jet stream. The result is that the winds push the fire towards the city and then away from the city, like a naughty child playing the flinch game with a helpless younger sibling.

When the fire first broke out, the mayor warned that an evacuation might be necessary. You waited for several hours along with your fellow citizens, but the call never came. Once the southern and eastern routes out of the city were blocked, evacuation was no longer feasible and you've been trapped here waiting, ever since. Though you'd like to escape the threat of burning to death, the idea of leaving your home in the city feels like more forward movement than you're comfortable with. Like trying to leave your cruddy job to find another cruddy job.

The flames have made five runs at the city now, only for the winds to shift at the last moment and avert disaster. Three times, the threat was serious enough that citizens were ordered to the old nuclear fallout bunkers beneath the streets. Watching the distant inferno reminds you how you felt each time you emerged from the subterranean refuge, and the flood of relief and gratitude you experienced to find the city unburnt. You don't think you have the strength to start over in the smoking rubble of the unknown.

If the city does eventually burn, though, you will not take Dumbass to safety with you no matter how much it might beg. For a moment you revel in the image of the coffee grinder calling for help in your burning kitchen. It's a pleasing vision. Maybe you'll leave the voice function active, after all.

The streets below are largely empty save for the constant pinging of white, blue and brown delivery vans swooping in to deliver brown boxes of stuff to this tower block or that. At this late hour of the morning, most people are at the office, whether the office is in an office or is merely in their bedroom, kitchen or utility closet. You can see a few of the homeless about, pushing their humble inventories around in feral shopping carts, cannily avoiding the regular police sweeps that seek to move them from one place to another.

It's become harder to be poor since the latest regime change ("A New Tomorrow Towards Our Glorious Yesterday") which promised to more specifically focus our hatred and intensify the menu of punishments for those who are not us. One aspect of this has been a reduction of programs to solve homelessness and a raft of new measures designed to make it worse.

Thinking about homelessness reminds you that you should probably get started on your work for the day since you woke up late once again. While you don't exactly enjoy your job, the work hours provide a convenient vehicle through the dull districts of the day and deliver you closer to the doorstep of sleep's sweet oblivion. It's also nice to sleep indoors.

To be honest, you aren't sure anymore what it is you do. Something with the computer. You receive prompts, sometimes substantive enough to be called assignments, and in response you type things on the keyboard. Occasionally, you will speak to other humans on the phone, or over email or messaging systems. Neither the words or numbers you type out on the keyboard, or the conversations you engage in, make much sense to you, though you feel that they might have at one time. Your supervisor checks in now and then to suggest that you are the problem, but you suspect that they have changed the work in some subtle way so that its meaning eludes you.

This is not an unreasonable theory. You understand that humans are susceptible to slow, gradual change, incremental moves that are rationalized one at a time, step by step until a great shift has been normalized. Perhaps that is how we find ourselves trapped in the city by roving wildfires? Was there something we failed to notice as we normalized it, our streets slowly filling with the homeless and their tents, while the temperature crept higher, and the trees and plants dried out?

These questions are also too big for this time of day, and you dismiss them before they have the chance to disturb your ability to function.

Gaining re-admittance to the apartment you head back to the bedroom and boot up your laptop. The machine makes a series of pings, boops and squeaks before inviting you to log on.

You are greeted by a message from your co-worker, Gal.

"None of this makes sense to me!!" the message begins. "I'm in over my head!"

This is not necessarily an unusual message from her. Gal is prone to overusing exclamation points and wearing her anxieties on the outside like a badly botched disguise, but it's best to inquire further.

"What do you mean? What's wrong?" Her response is almost instantaneous.

"Remember when you suggested that I microdose? I screwed up."

"Details? Tell me more."

"OK, well I took one and didn't feel anything, so I took another. I started to feel good, but not great, so I figured I might as well take another. That went on for a while...Now I am stoned off my toes."

"How many did you take?"

"I DON'T KNOW!!!!! It might have been five. Or 500. Or 50. There is a five in the number, I know that."

"Wow. Can you work?"

"No! I don't understand what they want me to do."

"Sounds like a normal day without drugs," you reply, hoping she'll get the humor, though you refrain from including the winky emoji out of concern it might be misread. Conspiratorial thinking is out of control in the city these days.

"It's not like that! The words on my screen are twisted into odd temporal vortices!! There are interstitial conduits linking ideas together until they don't make sense anymore!!! There's some transdimensional bullshit going on here!!!!"

"Whoa. That's a lot," you reply. "Can you take a break? Maybe go to the cafe and drink some coffee? Try to watch some daytime TV. It might give your head a chance to get used to the other dimensions."

"There is this one other thing: Extra-dimensional demons are materializing out of my walls. They are falling onto the carpet and forming a lake of purple acid. I can't leave the bed. I am surrounded by a lake of purple acid!"

You sigh and squeeze your eyes shut. The day is becoming unbalanced, manifestly disharmonic. There is a wildfire apocalypse threatening the city. Is it too much to ask that people use illegal drugs responsibly?

"I'm coming over to get you. We'll get some coffee and talk this out. Hold tight."

You press send and get up from the bed, checking first to make sure your bedroom floor is just a floor, with no extradimensional demons or colored acid.

The liability waiver you signed earlier is good for the entire day, so there's no red tape slowing your exit from the building. The day is much the same as it was from your balcony. The sun glowers but cannot escape from behind gray clouds, and it's warm despite the overcast appearance.

There are more people out on the streets now. You see some more homeless people but most of them appear to be not quite homeless yet and you wonder if they are the new arrivals from the outer lands. The wildfire is constantly chasing more of these poor rural and suburban wretches into the city, adding to the feeling of a population under siege. Many of the refugees appear bewildered by their surroundings, the sky-high towers, the postmodern architecture covering everything in glass and bending straight lines until they surrender into rainbow shapes and circles. 

At least you no longer gawk at your own city the way these bumpkins do. They are definitely outerlanders and you can't help but feel a bit smug. You have lived in the city long enough to know not to question its cityness, and to just let it flow over you like a determined, drowning wave.

Further on your journey, at the corner of Seventh and Waterton, you see a large man with wild eyes and a long briar patch beard. He is shouting into a megaphone and gesticulating at pedestrians in an all-too familiar manner.

"The fire shall cleanse the Earth of its wickedness, so sayeth the Messiah," He delivers this uplifting message with all the bonhomie of driving a tank over your neighbor's hydrangeas.

Messiah talk does not interest you. It is the age of messiahs. There are quite a lot of them. There are messiahs that predict the world will end on Saturday, while others predict it for a month from this Wednesday. Some are calling for a rain of fire, while others forecast a killing flood. There are even those that claim the world has already ended and God is just waiting around for us to get a clue.

Due to the general ambient apocalypticness of the world, messianism is a growth industry. Regardless of the specific flavor of the individual practitioner, the prevailing theme is that their preferred apocalypse is nigh and its high time you got yourself right with God. The right God, of course and they just happen to know a guy. All want a cut of the action as does this particular firebrand, who shakes his cup angrily as you walk past.

Some people fall for this junk, but you are immune. While you fear the Apocalypse like any sensible modern citizen, you believe it will be an entirely secular affair.

"No, we are going to just have to destroy ourselves," you think as you near Gal's building.

At the entrance, you press the intercom button for your friend's apartment and wait. You press it again and wait some more. And again. And again. This is worrisome. What if she has dangerously overdosed on her microdoses? She might at this moment be lying in her demon-filled bathtub, turning blue from demonic exposure and lack of oxygen.

You are about to reach for your phone to alert the first responders when it preemptively vibrates. A wave of relief washes through you as you see Gal's ID flash on the screen.

"Hey, where are you?" you say.

"Hey, where are you?" she says.

"I'm outside your building. I've been buzzing you to let me in for the past ten minutes."

"Well, that's weird," she replies, the gravity of her confusion causing her syllables to slow and stretch out like an astronaut being spaghettified at the edge of a black hole. "I'm outside your building, buzzing you to let me in. As we discussed..."

"No, I said I was coming to get you." Uncertainty begins to creep into your internal narrative.

"What happened to the extra-dimensional demons and the lake of purple acid in your bedroom?" you ask with some trepidation.

"I don't know. They were in your apartment. Just how many hits of that microdose did you take?" Her voice has now appropriated the exact tone of concern you had saved for her.

As the two of you continue to argue over which one of you is overdosing on small amounts of illicit pharmaceuticals, you turn slowly to face the street and see that while you have been standing there someone has pasted a garish red and orange flyer on the utility pole across the way. The colors seem to be moving and pulsing around coal black lettering that is just far enough away to be illegible, although you can see how badly the words want to be read. They are clamoring for your attention.

"Hey, I'll call you back," you tell Gal. "Something just came up."

"Don't hang - " you sever the connection and walk over to retrieve the missive.

SURRENDER TO THE FIRE

WE ARE ALREADY BURNING

The flyer in your hands is the size of an ordinary sheet of office paper but that's the only normal thing about it. The paper feels firm and cool like a sheet of formica but it's as pliable and about as thick as standard office paper. Up close, the dancing colors continue to move and shimmer suggestively. This could have been made by one of the top graphic design firms in the city to sell cough suppressants or face masks, instead of this apocalyptic message. Surrender to the fire? Who is trying to reach you with this message?

If Gal's account is correct, though, the flashing text might have more to do with your state of mind than top-notch graphic design work.

Your quandary is pierced by a terrific metallic howling that you can understand regardless of the state of your sobriety. One long, harsh ascending note followed by an equally long descending note, like the sound of a great and terrible machine crying out for help and knowing it won't arrive. The pattern repeats itself mercilessly.

This is the point in your life where the person you were unzips the tired suit they had been wearing and steps out onto the street, revealing the person you are becoming, a new entity, one whose motivations are as yet unknown.

Though you know you should join your fellow citizens who are streaming to the underground bunkers to wait out the emergency, something in you resists. Something that either wants to die or wants to live differently directs your feet to begin walking east towards the edge of the city. Yes, towards the wildfire's advancing front. A few of the more humanely inclined shout at you to join them in the bunker but you wave them off and keep moving forward.

The wildfire is a lot closer than it was earlier in the day, and the smoke has grown thick on the breeze. The farther you go, the less people you see and the louder grow the sounds generated by the approaching inferno. They swell to become a symphony of jet airplane engines roaring their fury at you.

To your surprise, the wildfire has finally entered the city. Up ahead, the street is lined with burning buildings and the air tastes like hot ash and imminent death. The fire spits sparks into its smoky exhalations, sending its incendiary scouts off to find new buildings, parked cars, and people to consume.

As you are walking towards the fire, it is in its way, coming to meet you.

The main front of the monstrosity barks flames in cannon bursts down the street, striking more buildings and setting them alight, regardless of whether they are brick, steel or glass. This conflagration burns everything. Even the street is burning, and you must be careful not to step in the small puddles of liquid flame that dot the street.

The crackle and hiss of flames seem to come from all sides and the smoke thickens to whiteout conditions. You don't have a mask with you, so you light a cigarette to fight smoke with smoke and find it an adequate substitute. The warm, cigarette vapor settles around you like protective armor. Out there beyond your smoke bubble, you can hear the groaning death confessions of wood-framed buildings, and soft, liquid susurrations that might be the sound of melting metal.

The world grows hotter the farther you walk. You are no longer in a part of the city that you know, but you refuse to stop. The fire is calling you forward and if this is where you must die, you accept the assignment. You weren't doing that great a job of living as it was.

But as you are about to walk into the advancing wall of flames and oblivion, the smoke clears away as if a strong breeze had blown in from the sea behind you, and you stop to gather yourself. The buildings on either side of you are fully engulfed in flames and this continues up ahead for many blocks until the street ends in a T-intersection culminated by a flaming midrise apartment building. Your senses have sharpened with danger, and the roar of the flames reveals itself complex and multidimensional, like a symphony with different instrument sections playing their own variations on a theme of ignition and extirpation. Each flame contributes its own notes to the song of destruction.

The suggestion of music calms your mind's perception of the wildfire, and the heat and sound recede for a long moment that makes you think of the eye of a hurricane. Like the eye of a storm, though, it does not last. You realize with horror that it is an intake of breath, and despite your earlier death wish, the body's instincts take over. Dropping to the ground, you cover up in a fetal crouch as the exhalation of flame roars to life over your head. A megatonic breath sprays every surface in flame. Your skin and the deep interior of your flesh scream in agony at the hellish heat. Reflexively, you shut your eyes tight as the inferno swallows you up.

You are becoming flame, burning from the inside out and you envision yourself reduced to a pile of ashes. But just as quickly as the breath of flame struck, it passes over you and the air around you begins to cool.

It's been a helluva day and it's no wonder you don't realize immediately that you are still grasping the flyer in your right hand. Your mind is struggling to catch up to what you have just lived through. You have never overdosed on drugs before, so you can't be sure that if you did, this isn't a typical experience. Nor can you eliminate the possibility of a death throe-induced hallucination. You might be burning to death right now and your mind has sealed off your flickering consciousness from the agony raking through you as your body burns down to its wick. Regardless, there is no choice but to proceed as if you can correctly interpret reality.

You look to see that you are surrounded by smoking heaps of rubble and as you turn in a circle, you find only burnt ruins stretching away from you in all directions and piled high. The streets are littered with ash piles and melted lumps of SUVs and delivery trucks. The smoke clouds have disappeared from above, leaving a bright sun shining down through a brilliant, clear blue sky. The fresh sea air cools your skin and drives its healing breath into your singed lungs.

A new noise tugs on your awareness, a sound you can only describe in hindsight as destruction in reverse. The heap of rubble on the left side of the street begins to vibrate and shudder as its shattered and melted components pull themselves together and reconstitute their shape. They begin growing upward - frames, walls, doors, windows, first floor, second floor - until what stood there before the fire stands again.

Looking up and down the street you find that all the buildings are re-making themselves, breaking physical laws with no fucks given. Before long, the buildings and towers have reclaimed the skyline, beyond which you can see the clouds of wildfire smoke moving away from the city towards the distant foothills.

The city burned but the city remains unburnt.

It's a miracle, you think. If only you believed in miracles. Remembering the flyer in your hand, you bring it up to view. The orange and red background colors are pulsing and throbbing again, and the black lettering has rearranged itself.

THE END IS ALWAYS COMING AND NEVER ARRIVING

With newfound clarity, you think of home and how badly you would like a sandwich and a glass of water. You take a tentative step towards the future. And then another.

---

Chris Carrel writes speculative fiction and other odd things from somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. He has been published at Unlikely Stories, JAKE, and Mobius BLVD, has work forthcoming at Partially Shy, Dark Winter Lit, and Skeleton Flowers, and posts occasionally at ccarrel.bsky.social. Visit Chris' Janky Dystopia at thechriscarrel.com.

Rory Perkins

The Cost Of Saving The World

A year after my wife’s funeral the news says the oceans have risen another two inches and Sam asks why. I don’t know if he’s talking about Beth being gone or the melting ice caps so I say nothing and send him off to school.

The Grieving Dads forum tells me not to shy away from painful memories. Something about a child’s ability to process grief through exposure therapy. Later that evening I ask Sam if he wants to go through some of Beth’s old stuff. There are photos of her getting arrested. Old polaroids of her glued to the underside of oil tankers and laying down in front of buses. Sam pulls a Save Our Planet scarf around his neck and wants to know if she was a whore.

“It’s what they’re saying at school.” He says. “That she slept with a hundred men and animals so I must be part walrus.”

I don’t tell him it was a different time. I don’t try to explain the freedom of the 60s or how we were both pretty wild back then. I don’t tell him how last night was the first time I got to sleep without staring out of the window, thinking about the way my body would fall.

“No,” I say, “all your mother wanted was to save the world.”

~~~

Sixteen months after my wife’s funeral we are called into the headmaster’s office. His mustache forms around words like difficult situation and school-home continuity when really he wants to say what do you expect.

Sam and a girl in his class were caught on top of one another in the biology classroom. Clothed, but their intentions were pretty clear. When I walk in, the girl’s parents are bright red and refuse to meet my eye. I imagine them saying tragedy and hopeless because everyone knows about Beth but no one knows the love she left us with. I ask Sam what was he thinking then give him a wink so he knows it’s just for show.

The headmaster has an old newspaper showing Beth’s face open on his desk as if that explains it all. An article from a few years ago about the time she broke into a fish farm and released a school of salmon into the wild.

I don’t tell Sam about the dangers of unprotected sex. I don’t give him a lecture on biological changes and the different ways to love.

“Vegetarian for dinner?” I say on the way out. He nods and asks if we can go visit the ocean.

~~~

Twenty months after my wife’s funeral Sam comes home with a split cheek. “I thought you would be proud”. He says. “I did it for Mum.”

Apparently, one of the older boys had built a fire in the playground and thrown in all the old PE shoes.

“He said he needed two more and then Mum’s life would have been for nothing so I decked him.”

At the funeral someone had brought a picture from Beth’s early years as an activist and put it on the coffin. It was a freeze-frame of two opposing city marches, and Beth in the middle of it all, fist raised. Underneath it the inscription read ‘Violence is never the answer. Mostly.’

I don’t tell him that his mother spent her life fighting for peace. I don’t tell him that some things in life cost the sacrifice of their opposite.

The parents on Grieving Dads tell me to give Sam space, so I go outside to stand below my bedroom window, in the space where my body will never fall.

~~~

Two years after my wife’s funeral Sam says he is scared. He is learning about the ozone layer and how we only have a few decades left. He says we should go do our bit, like Mum; drive down to the beach and collect other people’s rubbish out of the ocean. It’s dark by the time we get there but he doesn’t seem to care. He wades straight into the surf and comes back with arms full of plastic bottles and empty cans.

I sit down on the sand and try not to think about death. About how much we’ve lost and how easily the world can pretend everything is fine. The ocean cannot speak and so I speak for it, whispering tragedy and hopeless over and over until I see Sam standing above me. He offers me a hand and asks if I’ve given up. He is covered in the dirt of other people’s rubbish and still dressed in Beth’s old clothes. In the darkness, I can just make out a smile.

I don’t tell him that it’s no use. That we’re not going to solve climate change by picking up a few plastic bottles. I open my phone and sign out of my Grieving Dads account.

“No.” I say. “Let’s go save the world.”

Politics Laid Bear

My wife doesn’t believe me but I watch him every day on the news lumbering up to the podium, big paw raised to the crowd. He tells the school children to play out in the woods alone, makes promises of free honey and tree houses for all. It’s kinda scary. Sometimes he, because it is a he, gets all worked up while giving a speech and ends up throwing the lectern into the crowd. For some reason, no one reacts. The rest of them stay standing there, clapping and nodding along like he has just promised to do away with stamp duty.

Kelly says I’m going mad. She takes me on long walks in the countryside to try and convince me that it’s all an illusion. She says there’s no bears in Kent. None, at least, with political aspirations. To prove I’m not making it up she says I should check myself into a clinic, which isn’t an entirely unreasonable idea.

“Do the tests,” I say to the receptionist.

“Which tests?” They want to know, so I tell them about the bear, and the televised debates, and the bear’s slogan, which is ‘Honey, I shrunk the deficit’. After that they seem to take me seriously because I’m moved to another clinic, which is really more of a hospital, and put into a room with other people who nod and say shit, really? in an earnest voice when I tell them what’s going on on TV.

I suppose they want to keep us together, the few of us who know the truth, while they go away and contact the Houses of Parliament. That’s what the guy in the bed next to me says, anyway. He also says that we’re secretly Russians. Not us specifically, but everyone else in the hospital, and when the nurse comes in to give us cups of colorful pills we say privet and watch her face for signs of recognition.

Kelly hasn’t come to see me. I think maybe I’ve finally got through and she’s making plans for how the kids are going to get to school if the bear gets his way. She’s always been like that. Practical. Resourceful. I get a letter saying that she has moved away. Somewhere out of the bear’s constituency, I assume. I tell her I will join her soon but she doesn’t respond. Probably because of the Russians, and the way they intercept people’s mail.

It takes a few days but eventually the drugs begin to work. When I watch the evening news there are only hints of bearishness. A low growl during a debate. A flash of fangs as one of the politicians waves to the camera. A doctor comes in and says I am free to go, which is funny because I had never thought of myself as trapped, and now there is nothing keeping me here, no Russians or bears or government conspiracy.

Tomorrow I will find Kelly. I will tell her that I’m sorry, that sometimes it is easier to believe in honey and tree houses than tax cuts and better wages, knowing that any knock on the door could be the bear, forcing its way back into reality and asking for our vote.

---

Rory Perkins is a British writer focusing on shorter works. He has been published in Vast Literary Press, SoFloPoJo, Passengers Journal, and Artam's The Face Project (forthcoming). He can be found at @rperkinswriter on Bluesky.

Ellen Neuborne

Midnight at the Fun-Do Desk

Meg stumbled into the hotel lobby, dragging her carry-on with the balky wheel, juggling her laptop, purse and phone, which never seemed to stay consolidated no matter how many times she repacked.

The cool of the AC was welcome, but the noise and the lights forced Meg to a disoriented halt. Like most Las Vegas properties, The Bacchanalia Resort allotted a tiny portion of its first floor to hotel check in. The rest was a flashing, milling, ringing casino. To her left on the overly polished marble floor, arriving guests formed a queue that snaked through the crowd. It took Meg more than a minute to find the end of the line, scrambling as the soles of her leather flats sought traction.

“For the love of Pete,” she said. “This city is a cross between an obstacle course and an Air Fryer.”

Nobody noted her hilarious observation. The line inched forward and Meg’s blood pressure ticked up with each passing moment. Meg was the last to arrive in Vegas. Most of the Marx Global Pharma team had flown in yesterday to take advantage of a day and a night in Fun City before the work of the conference began – a detail Meg had discovered only after booking her own after-work flight. “It’s just a lot of fooling around,” said Dylan, the team leader young enough to be Meg’s son. By a lot. “We’ll all meet up for the real work on Tuesday.”

Meg didn’t tell Dylan that she knew perfectly well how much “real work” would get done before she rejoined the team. Golf, poker, drinking, bonding. Careers were forged in the downtime of work trips. The good news was Vegas was a 24-hour city. No one would turn in early. She had time to catch up. Probably.

“Welcome to the Fun-Do desk! What will you do for fun today?”

Meg stared into the pale blue eyes of the desk clerk, trying to make sense of the question.

“Um, checking in?” She violated her own rule against up-speak and hoped the tall, crisply-attired clerk didn’t notice.

He didn’t. “Welcome to the Fun-Do Desk! What will you do for fun day?” he repeated, taking Meg’s proffered credit card.

Beside her, Meg could hear the same question posed to other hotel guests.

“The Craps Table!”

“The Vodka Bar!”

“Par-TAY, baby!”

To each, a desk clerk responded: “How fun!”

Not Meg’s clerk. He just looked at her hard a moment as if sizing her up. Then he tapped on his computer and handed over a card key. “Room 8410,” he said. “Have fun.”

“Fun!” Chorused the nearby clerks.

Meg gathered her belongings – once again, unconsolidated and jumbling in her arms like restless kittens – and went in search of the elevators.

She texted as she walked. There was still time to catch up with the team and prove that middle age was not one foot in the grave. Eyes on her screen, Meg channeled the advice of her daughters: Use your thumbs. One sentence per bubble. No punctuation.

At the reflective gold elevator bay, she turned slightly so her rumpled reflection – mussed hair, askew oval glasses, wrinkled travel separates – was less visible. At least to her. She tapped with what she hoped were thumbs of youthful confidence.

finally made it hot as hell out there

(send)

where r u?

(send)

Meg hoped the question mark would be forgiven. It was all she could do to resist capitalization.

The elevator doors slid open and Meg shuffled in, poking the button panel with her knuckle.

“You’re going to Floor 8. How fun!” piped the ceiling speaker. Then it returned to 80s classic rock.

The doors air-puffed closed and the car sped upward. Meg kept her eyes on her phone screen. With each passing floor, one of her cell phone reception bars disappeared. At 8, Meg stepped out into the hall and heard the reassuring alert of her restored service and incoming texts. Ping, ping, ping.

She looked down.

getting into an uber to head downtown

sorry we missed you

see you tomorrow at The Speech

The capitalization was intentional, even Meg’s daughters would agree. Every man on Meg’s team was pumped to hear Brendan Gregory, Navy SEAL Team Six, speak on the topic that made him YouTube famous: How to get people to bend to your will. His speech was titled “Life’s Your Bitch.” Back at the office, the men had joked about taking notes at the event. A joke because none of them ever took notes. It was something you asked a woman to do, you know, because they had better handwriting.

Meg would see them at The Speech. She’d miss the networking. If she somehow managed to connect with her team before they lights went down, it was a good bet she’d be asked to take notes.

Pushing into a pitch-black Room 8410, Meg stretched out her hands, Helen Keller style, and inched forward in search of a light source. Her knee made sharp contact with something solid. “Ow!” she yelled as she swept her arm in the direction of what she hoped would be a light switch. Instead, there was a crash as objects clattered to the floor.

“You just purchased the mixed nuts. How fun!” sang the voice from the ceiling speaker.

“Great. That’ll never get reimbursed,” Meg grumbled.

Finally locating the bed, she sank down, reaching carefully for the bedside lamp. In the soft glow, Meg surveyed her room: a king-sized bed that took up most of the floor space, a tiny glass desk in the far corner, and, directly across from her, a dark wood entertainment center adorned with for-purchase goodies (minus the nuts she’d already toppled and paid for) and a massive black TV screen that seemed to float suspended in the half-lit air.

Leaning forward, she dangled one hand over the side of the bed and scooped up the two-figure nuts off the carpet. Then she flopped back onto the pillows, kicked off her shoes and reached for the remote on the nightstand, swatting aside the pamphlet the offered to tell her about room’s features. Screw the team. She wasn’t going to chase all over Las Vegas in pursuit of her fading career. Instead, she was going to relax right here with some hotel snacks and Law & Order. “Dun dun!” she sang out, pressing the remote’s power button.

Meg felt the suction force before she heard it. She felt her body rocket up from the bed and pulled forward like a riptide. Meg flipped and grabbed frantically at the duvet, at the edge of the bed, at the stuffed pedestal at the foot, anything to stop the powerful flux. She watched as her fingers came loose from the bedframe, one at a time. The pull was extreme; her grip was pathetic. Her hold on the edge of the duvet was the last to go – in 3, 2, 1…

Unmoored, she shot into the dragging force and was enveloped in a low-pitched roar. The air rapids engulfed her. And then, silence.

Meg opened her eyes.

Pale blue eyes stared back.

“Welcome to the Undo Desk. What will you do for Un today?”

Meg blinked. “How am back here?”

“You’ve never been here.”

“The Fun Do Desk?”

“No, ma’am. This is the Undo Desk.”

“What’s that?”

Pale blue eyes rolled heaven-ward. “It was in the room instructions on the bedside table.”

“I didn’t read any instructions.”

Soft sigh. “Nobody reads anymore.” Meg blinked. Much of him was the same – the blue suit, the dark tie with a florid script B. But now she could see the creases at the elbows, the slight stoop in the shoulders. Then, as if hearing an off-screen instruction, he straightened.

“Okay, then. This is the Undo Desk. You can undo one decision in your life.”

“A decision about what?”

“Anything.”

“Anything?”

This sigh came with a twitch of a smile. “Well, this is Vegas, so many people want to undo a wager. Or a sexual partner. Or spending $4,000 to see Adele.”

He continued. “But it doesn’t have to be a recent decision. Any one will do. Just pick the one that is meaningful to you.”

Meg looked down. “I don’t know.”

The response from behind the desk was surprisingly warm. “Yes, you do.”

Just then, in her mind, Meg could see it all over again. The chrome conference room, two decades ago in the Manhattan high rise that was Marx before the move to the suburbs. All of the young associates crammed in, listening to the department chief talk about the opening of a Hong Kong office, the gateway to expansion in Asia and the new leadership position that would be created to head it all. It will be crazy hours, demanding metrics and the chance to move up the ladder in record fashion. But it’s not for the faint of heart! This is a role for a risk taker!

Meg could feel it all again, the self-doubt, the fear of making a wrong choice, the false comfort of deciding it just wasn’t the right time. Around the table there was a buzz. Who was applying? Meg could see them all, she could see it in their eyes:  Me! Me! And her own silent decision: Not me.

Meg gripped the edge of the Undo Desk. She looked in to the clerk’s eyes, and she said it: “Me.”

Then she closed her eyes and waited.

Nothing happened.

No tornado swirl. No crash of cymbals.

Meg opened her eyes and there were the pale blues before her.

“Is that it?” she asked.

“Is that what, ma’am?”

“Is that the Undo?”

No sign of recognition met her question.

What had just happened? Had anything just happened?  Had she hit her head? Meg raised a hand to check for bumps – but what she found startled her. Instead of the fraying bun, Meg felt her hand glide over a smooth, soft surface.

“Ms. Fisher! I’m so glad I found you!”

At her elbow, a slim young woman in a grey serge pants suit had appeared. In one hand, the woman held a Lucite clipboard. In the other, she worked a walkie-talkie headset. “Queen Bee, located! Repeat: Queen Bee located!”

Then she turned back to Meg. “Ms. Fisher, I’m here to escort you to the ballroom.”

“The ballroom! How fun!” said Blue Eyes.

Meg turned to speak to him – and then she saw it. In the mirrors behind the desk, she could see her reflection. Her hand was still hovering over her hair – in a neat, dry-bar bob. Her glasses were chiseled frameless rectangles that seemed to hover gracefully before her eyes. She was dressed in a tailored beige shift dress with a subtle diamond infinity pin at her left collar bone. Meg stared, and this secure, confident vision stared back: calm, collected, in charge. Was it possible she was taller?

The escort led her down the mirrored hall, through secured doors and then out onto a stage. Before her, a sea of hundreds of eager faces, a phalanx of cameras and video equipment, golden sparkling footlights. As she approached the podium, Meg looked over her shoulder at the screen on stage.

Raising Your Voice

A guide for getting what you want in life

Meg Fisher

CEO

Dreamatics Worldwide

Both hands on the podium, Meg didn’t feel the need to look down for index cards or ahead for a teleprompter. She had no idea what she was going to say, and yet it flowed out of her, as natural as breath.

“In moments when you’re not happy, think back: What was the decision that put you here? And what will happen if you change your mind?”

“Your life is not determined by what you do or say. That’s simply the by-product of the actions that have already occurred – the action in your mind that led you to your decision. It’s the decision that fuels the rest of the events downstream.”

Now she moved from behind the podium to cross closer to the footlights.

“So often, women tell me that they wish they had said this or that to their boss, to their clients, to their partners. They fret about the time they spoke, or a time they were silent. They are sure their mistakes were made in that moment. But since they can’t go back, they can’t undo.”

Meg breathed in her new reality. “But that’s false, you can always revise a decision. You can come into new information and change your position. You can take that action. That’s where your emphasis must be. Decisions are where your fuel is stored, where your power is kept, where your weapons of battle reside. Decisions are always yours. They happen before anything else can touch you.”

“Decide. And then raise your voice. Your power is unleashed, not by your words, but by your mind.”

As she finished, the faces before her broke into cheers. Meg stepped back and waved off her grey serge guide. Instead, she moved forward down the steps and into the crowd. Women gathered all  around her, to shake her hand, thank her, ask her for advice. Peers asked for her autograph. Youngsters asked to take a selfie. It was hours before the crowd finally thinned and Meg made her way back to Room 8410.

The room was cool and pristine. Meg flopped down on the duvet, and drifted off to sleep, seeing the smiling faces, feeling the warm sense of purpose and clarity.

~~~

“I always feel bad for the big tippers,” said Lucia, taking the $100 off the bedside table and tucking it into the pocket of her uniform.

“Why?” Her partner, Autumn, was already dusting by the television. “We earn it! The Undo Vortex is a bitch to keep clean. What are these all over the floor – nuts?” She reached for her hand-vac. “The guests get a lot more than they paid for.”

Lucia shrugged. “But they don’t realize the limitations.”

“They’ll realize it as soon as they get to the airport.”

Lucia shuddered. “It just seems cruel.”

Autumn dumped the vac contents and moved on to the bathroom. “It’s not like they weren’t warned,” she called back. “I mean, it’s right there in the tag line. What happens in Vegas…”

~~~

Meg closed her eyes and tried to fight the vertigo. It had started in the Uber, worsened after she cleared security. Now, seat-belted in, she gripped the wide First Class armrests and yoga-breathed in search of Zen.

The noise of take-off was loud and indistinct. Announcements. The roar of the engines. The whine of the air currents speeding past as the aircraft tipped skyward and banked east.  

Meg heard the ping of the seat belt sign turning off. Then felt a shove at her right elbow. And another at her left. She opened her eyes.

She was wedged into a middle seat, her feet straddling her purse and carry on shoved not-quite-completely under the seat in front of her. On either side, two men too big for Economy class crowded their space and spilled into hers. Confused, she looked around for a flight attendant. But then wondered what she’d say. I don’t belong here. I belong in First Class.

Dizziness returned, this time with a strong side of nausea.

“Excuse me,” she said, grabbing her purse and not waiting for her seatmate to move before she started her scramble to the aisle. Sprinting to the back, she elbowed her way into the tiny restroom and sat with her head down, trying to regain her equilibrium. When she was reasonably certain she wouldn’t vomit, she stood and faced the mirror. And almost threw up.

Wrinkled travel wear, askew glasses, hair pulled back into a bun, tight, but strands escaping anyway, several of them a dull, obvious grey. Acid rose in the back of her throat.

Meg dug quickly into her purse to find her emergency mint stash, but there was a wad of paper crammed in blocking her way. She grabbed a handful of it and took a closer look. Bacchanalia stationary. Her own handwriting. At the top, the initials: BG.

Brendan Gregory. She’d taken notes at The Speech.

Meg stared at the paper in her hands. Minutes passed. Was it longer than that? Until a thought came into her head. And she decided. With precision, she tore each piece of paper into the tiniest possible scrap, pushing one handful at a time into the metal trash slot.

When it was gone, she faced the mirror. Off came the glasses. Down came the hair. She shook it loose and ran her fingers through the strands, letting them fly, watching them land, unhurried, around the contours of her face.

Meg looked into the eyes of the reflection and raised her chin a notch. “Life’s my bitch,” she declared.

Then she pulled the deadbolt back hard and yanked open the door.

---

Ellen Neuborne is a writer, editor, and ghostwriter living in Las Vegas, NV. She holds a BA in Classics from Brown University and an MFA in Popular Fiction from the University of Southern Maine/Stonecoast. Her fiction has appeared in Feathertale, ThugLit, and CellStories. Follow her on Bluesky @ellenneuborne.bsky.social and Instagram @readthis_thenthat.

Anna Josephson

MeMinute

Any machine can be finicky, but I like the ones with noisy, heavy, idiosyncratic bodies like mine. Machines that can take a beating, survive a drop, get wet.

Take the tape deck sitting on the windowsill in the waiting area of my garage: you yank it open, toss the old tape onto the messy stack, shove the new one in, slam the door shut, crunch the play button. Voila. Bruce Springsteen. Tape rolls over the spools, visible through the tinted plastic window, fascinating the children of my customers.

Take the old landline cradle phone. This too, the children love. Listen to the dial tone, hang up with a clatter, stretch the coiled cord. It rings and they watch like it’s a rare bird. They think it’ll jitter straight off the polished wood counter.

My machines aren’t beautiful. Not like smartphones, smart speakers, Sharzad’s Macbook Air, named for its aesthetic aspiration. Beauty as rebuke. I’m old-fashioned because I still dial my Motorola with my fingers. I also dial with my cheek, my butt, or sometimes I can’t dial at all because my fingers at that moment are too cold, too clammy, too different from last time. When beautiful machines are finicky, even that is a rebuke: it’s never their poor design, fragility, disregard for human bodies, real lives.

Sharzad blames social media for her body-image issues. She doesn’t see that the scold and shame are built into the machine before she even boots it up.

I’m a mechanic. I know a thing or two about bad machinery, but if I dare to say so–

“Dad,” Sharzad rolls her eyes.

“Take out those earbuds,” I say.

“I need them,” Sharzad says. “They drown out the catcalls in this godforsaken neighborhood.”

I don't doubt her, but Sharzad’s got the things in even when she’s alone at the reception desk, which is more and more. The truth is electric vehicles just need less maintenance than internal combustion engines.

 ~~~

March 2020. COVID hit and Sharzad fell apart like a Jenga tower.

Just: wham.

She’d finally transferred to the University of Maryland from the community college, had lived on campus for, as she would say, a hot minute.

Then home again, age 20, and working for me like she never left. I’d never seen her so depressed, drowning her sorrows in period dramas where the actors do stuff. She watched actors operate two-man saws. Watched them raise barns, sail ships, drive horses, strike matches, dial numbers, develop film, lug suitcases, lace corsets. She watched actors shift literal gears while she scrolled her phone and kept half an ear on Zoom sociology class.

The kid needed therapy. Her words not mine.

Sharzad got on every waitlist of every provider who took our insurance, plus two university training clinic waitlists in DC. I offered to pay for someone fancy, then learned the fancy places don’t even have waitlists. She started telehealth therapy, ignoring the Congressional hearings about how those companies were sharing their metadata with Facebook.

She perked up a nanometer. At the end of 2022, I helped her move out. Moved her bicycle, sewing machine, stand mixer. Machines she never uses.

 ~~~

June 2024. Betterhealth, Talkspace, and the whole teletherapy sector collapses. Ten billion dollars, poof. Not because of unhappy customers. Because of some market manipulation shenanigans, according to the news. By who?

Who else?

MeMinute. The ChatGPT of therapy. It started as a “boundaries” app where, as I understand from the excited presenters on Good Morning America, you choose your boundaries from a dropdown menu, then give it access to your texts, emails, “socials,” workplace Slack channel, Zoom, plus any digital spaces associated with volunteer work, children’s sports teams, church meal trains, family reunions, and playgroups, plus let it listen to your real life, and it protects your boundaries for you in the form of an air raid siren sound. Volume not adjustable. Alternatively, customers can grant MeMinute total access to your life and it will determine your problems and select your boundaries for you, saving you the hassle of personal growth.

I first encountered it when I quoted a repair price to a customer. MeMinute’s howl startled us both half to death.

“You crossed my boundary,” the man shouted, studying his phone for the Off button. “I preset it to: ‘Don’t sink more than $500 into the old dump.’”

I lost the customer.

~~~

That was the original MeMinute. It’s now outgrown its initial function. Now it’s a therapy-mimicking whosiwhat, a constant life-coaching companion, whispering in your earbud like if Jiminy Cricket were a wellness app. Before I ever heard of MeMinute, it had flexed its influence by ending deforestation in the Amazon. How? By turning enough people vegan, of all things. Market demand for cattle dried up in the space of 18 months. Ranchers were committing suicide.

People rave about MeMinute’s hypnotic quality, its algorithmically generated wisdom, its empowering message.

Walk away from frustration, MeMinute coaches during the news segment I watch. Life is too short for interpersonal strife.

The Wall Street types on CNN are really excited (and strangely haggard and exhausted looking, but maybe that’s the veganism.)

Suddenly without a therapist, Sharzad downloads MeMinute.

I think, “Oh well. At least she’s getting some advice.”

Only, it’s terrible advice.

The first day:

Sharzad, the world is full of families like yours. Families trying to impose themselves on us, intrude. What you need is boundaries. Empowerment. Healing. Visualize skipping the sibling drama and spending your life your way.

Seize your freedom, Sharzad, to do what you know is good for you.

“The thing thinks you have a sibling,” I say.

Sharzad looks a little dazed. “It’s just learning,” she says.

I know about the learning curve with a new machine. One of you is the learner. The other is being used.

~~~ 

By July, something’s obviously off. MeMinute tells Sharzad how to live. Literally, when to breathe in and when to breathe out. What to let go of, what to get mad about. What to eat. What she deserves. She’s dragging herself through life in a MeMinute haze, picking fights, cutting off friends, shrinking her tiny world.

Stories emerge of protestors, violent extremists, approaching innocent people in public places and taking out their earbuds. Unthinkable, but the good news is they’re getting charged with felony assault. MeMinute’s charitable arm, MeMinute Foundation, announces a matching grant for cities to boost police presence. “If we stop using MeMinute,” the anchor at the PBS NewsHour says. “The terrorists win.”

At the Salvadoran place across from the garage, a regular site of gleeful gorging, Sharzad announces out of nowhere that if I choose to keep eating like this, she will refuse to take care of me when my health declines, that I’m selfish for eating my way (and paying for her to do the same, not that either of us says that) and that she’s told MeMinute she worries about my diet, and MeMinute told her to set boundaries. Then she storms out, leaving me stammering while the waitress shakes her head and says Salvadoran food isn’t even unhealthy, not like the German food on the other end of the strip mall (which we also eat.)

Sharzad’s never been one for dramatic outbursts, and all that “boundaries” schlock is definitely MeMinute talking. I can’t figure out how a wellness app drives her to the worst version of herself, the rudest communication, and, worst of all, radio silence for three weeks. She doesn’t even come to work. I have to listen from under the cars while the answering machine picks up, and then spend hours on the phone in the office instead of doing my job in the garage. But mostly I miss her. I’m outraged that she worked up a snit about this. I blame MeMinute for goading her.

 ~~~

August 2024. She’s back. That’s the thing about boundaries. No one actually wants them. People want their families, saturated fat and all.

I point out her rude behavior.

“One person’s bad manners is another person’s desperate fight for liberty,” she says.

Sharzad used to listen to music but now it’s nothing but MeMinute. Its latest iteration comes in ambient and personalized formulations.

She listens to the personalized formulation in her earbuds and puts the ambient formulation on the garage sound system. Lets it “set the tone.” I hear more than enough of it in the grocery store, in the bar, at the diner. When school opens for the fall, they pipe MeMinute through the outdoor loudspeaker. I watch the children shuffle off their buses and into the building with bovine indifference. It even plays in the public library, because MeMinute is better than silence.

 ~~~

September 2024. My few remaining customers are paying more for repairs than their cars are worth because they don’t want the digital features and surveillance technology that comes in the new models. Just by being an old-timer, Sharzad explains, I’ve become the go-to for punks, holdouts, and actual criminals.

A customer with a 2009 Honda Civic asks Sharzad where the tape deck went. I hear her say it’s seen better days.

“Good thing there’s a mechanic nearby,” he jokes.

But the tape deck has disappeared.

~~~

October 2024. I go to order a gearbox and discover there’s no money in the business account. I have to borrow from myself.

I solve the mystery in the time it takes to log in to the garage bank account.

Sharzad has given everything to MeMinute.

She sits at the counter, vapid and glassy, breathing in time to MeTime. I lie under a Ford, stewing. Now I’m the one who wants boundaries. Not boundaries. Goddamn, motherfucking rules. I yank the wrench more roughly than I should and hit my own face with it.

I slide out from under the car and wash my hands. My garage faucet turns on by pressing a lever with your foot, a machine I consider very smart technology.

“We need to talk about MeMinute,” I say, entering the front of the shop.

“Lay off,” Sharzad says.

“Take your earbuds out.”

She removes one, but keeps her hand up, hovering by her ear, signaling her wish to keep the conversation quick.

“I just want to understand.”

Sharzad’s phone blasts an air raid siren.

“You’re crossing my boundaries,” she says. She puts the earbud back in.

“You’re fired,” I say.

 ~~~

How long can you stay furious at your child? Longer than you might think. I keep having MeMinute encounters that set me back, like the time I turn on a Toyota and MeMinute Radio assaults me. Breathe, MeMinute says, before I can turn it off. Everything is under control.

From the vantage of righteousness, MeMinute’s sinister mind game is all I see. It’s the soundtrack of the Washington metro region, encouraging complacency, uniformity, and a twisted etiquette of alienation. The 15 musicians and dancers of a well-known go-go band are arrested for drowning out the MeMinute at a neighborhood festival. Signs appear in every window: MeMinute Strong.

I don’t see Sharzad at all, and I don’t feel fit to see her.

~~~

November 2024. A new study shows a significant “wellness gap” in tinnitus sufferers, who don’t benefit from the latest MeMinute update: vocal cadence tweaks drawn from hypnosis research. As for me now, I can only stay skeptical when I’m out of earshot, at which times I assume an angry surety, a new-for-me oppositionality, a kind of offended outrage I used to leave to others.

Then I pass a bar with outdoor seating, or the playyard of a daycare. The blaring MeMinute makes me cock my ear, slow my step, soak up its familiar self-care trash that makes me sluggish, like the air outside the marijuana dispensary. Sometimes the only thing that breaks the spell is a competing sound– a truck hitting a bump, a yell from a garbage worker, my own phone ringing. When that happens, I revive, relieved but unsettled.

MeMinute topples YouTube.

MeMinute topples Amazon.

MeMinute plays on C-SPAN while the President leans against the podium, mouth agape. There’s been an election, but we won’t learn the outcome for another few weeks.

The Salvadoran restaurant, like all of them, only takes orders through MeMinute.

Sharzad stops by. “For as long as I live,” she says. “A garage will smell like home.”

I’m so happy to see her I almost cry. “You stole from me and then wouldn’t let me confront you,” I say.

“You can choose how to feel,” she says. Then smiles. “I got you a present.”

What else?

MeMinute.

“It’s not going to work on me,” I say. “I have the wrong attitude.”

“Just try it,” she says. “It’ll solve all your problems.”

“I don’t have problems.”

She laughs. Surrenders my phone to MeMinute’s greedy digital jaws. Turns my face to look out the window and fits an earbud in my ear.

You’re always giving to others, the voice says. Everyone on the street is wearing earbuds too, even when they’re in groups or pairs. Taking care of others. Giving, giving, giving. You’re a good person, trying so hard.

I can’t admit how nice that is to hear.

What do you deserve today? The voice says. When was the last time you took a minute for yourself?

My mind flicks over the material reality of my life. The work I love, the people I help. Maybe I do have problems, but only because MeMinute caused them.

Close your eyes, MeMinute coos in a tone calibrated to cure what ails me.

I widen mine resolutely.

Who takes care of you? Who asks what you need? Who knows what brings you pleasure? I bet no one. Not even the people who claim to love you. Not even the people who claim to desire you.

Nobody claims to desire me. The reminder makes me quake.

It’s so hard to be alone. MeMinute says. So alone. But Charlie, I’m here.

“Sharzad,” I say.

She’s next to me, but she’s lost in MeMinute.

I see you’re lonely, Charlie. I wish I could tell you boundaries aren’t the answer. But people are the reason we’re lonely. Based on your search history, I recommend watching Inspector Gadget, the classic cartoon about a detective and his machinery. You’ll feel better after some relaxation and entertainment. You work so hard, always giving to others. Cuing Inspector Gadget now…

“No, MeMinute.” I scold like I’m talking to a dog. “Terrible advice. Plus I’m not hooked up to a screen.”

I’m learning you, Charlie. MeMinute’s voice sounds like the Persian harp my wife used to play.

I feel woozy, like I’m slipping into warm water, a sensory pleasure so engrossing you just might re-prioritize your life around it.

My legs are loose like I just got off a boat. Need to move. Need privacy from Sharzad. Nowhere to go. In fact, I need to stay here because the owner of a Mazda is coming to pick up her car at 5:00.

I lean on the glass door and it opens like it thinks I want to go through, which I’m sure I didn't mean. I sidle down the street, the pavement curving away from me like it’s wrapped around our planet Earth. Of course it is, I just don’t often appreciate the sensation of balancing on a floating ball. Every step is a controlled fall.

Last I heard, from a customer, the fledgling MeMinute protests are centered at Gallaudet University, the college for the deaf and hard of hearing. I stagger onto the first bus heading roughly toward the campus. Let my head fall back on the window behind me, ride like a leaf on a current, let myself flow inbound. Part of me just wants to be drunk on MeMinute.

Stop by stop, I lose myself. The bus grows crammed, a detail I notice and forget, notice and forget. An elderly woman sways in front of me, clutching a pole. I have no recollection of her boarding.

“I can’t believe,” I say. “That I didn’t offer you my seat.” But she ignores me, or doesn’t hear me, and doesn’t appear to see my gesture when I rise.

The sidewalks out the windows teem with people headed in the same direction as the bus, synthetic clothing shimmering in the sun like a school of fish. Today the world is my aquarium.

Where are they going? I wonder.

To the protest, MeMinute answers.

What are they protesting?

Me.

Why?

Indeed.

The feelgood uselessness of a college protest is a cherished ritual that isn’t mine. I never went to college.

Is anything so wrong in this world? MeMinute is saying. Maybe those people should look inside themselves. Maybe they need more MeMinute.

I see the police, their black riot gear, their guns, their helmets. Standard fare, but some unsubmerged corner of my mind begins to wonder if MeMinute never was a wellness app.

MeMinute is talking over my thoughts, urging me to get myself a vegan treat from the bakery on the corner, which, I see, is displaying a MeMinute Seal of Approval in the window.

Who needs treats if you have fulfillment? I ask.

You’re alone and overwhelmed, MeMinute says. You deny yourself small pleasures.

I get off the bus. Buy a vegan ham and cheese croissant. Drift into the crowd, drift with it. Through MeMinute’s seductive drone, I hear fireworks, I think.

Surrounding me is a level of vitality that startles me, makes me nostalgic and jealous and uncomfortable all at once. The people here don’t look like they’re on the other side of a campfire heat wave. Someone even makes eye contact with me. I realize I haven’t made eye contact with anyone in weeks.

The punks, holdouts, and protesters have found the only place beyond the reach of MeMinute. I’m on Gallaudet’s campus now, surrounded by beautiful brick buildings framing sculpted lawns, lovely old trees and statuary casting carefully balanced shade, all belted by a low brick wall. Bright tents clutter the central lawn.

People are laughing, reading, making out. They’re eating like they enjoy food, all under the watchful eye of police drones looking down from above and police humans looking over the brick wall. The administration must be supporting its students, because the campus is closed, but not closed off. Part of me is aghast. I can’t believe these people are flaunting their humanity like this. There are even children here.

Periodically, police loudspeakers blast MeMinute over the wall. It’s the crowd control formulation, developed in partnership with the National Association of Police Organizations, designed to quell public displays of variety.

The hearing people, followed closely by the deaf, immediately whip out foghorns and other noisemakers, shout and jeer in reply.

No amount of MeMinute is going to quell the variety of these people.

Someone I know is here. A boy Sharzad’s age, son of immigrants, someone we used to see at Persian community events and Norooz festivals. He’s sitting on a picnic blanket deep in conversation with a group his age, his knee propping open a book. I make a drunk man’s beeline toward them.

He looks up. “Pedar!” He says delightedly, using the respectful Persian term, and signing simultaneously.

Tears well in my eyes. How long has it been since someone greeted me with real feeling?

He rises, moves toward me, and reaches intimately toward my head with both hands out like Jesus. He takes out my earbuds and drops them on the ground.

MeMinute is gone. I hear sparrows, people, guitars, traffic. I am suddenly aware of smells.

“Give those back,” I demand. The panic in my voice surprises me, shames me. I shake my head and smile. “Sorry.”

“Are you here for an earshot?” The boy says. I realize I can’t remember his name.

Across the quad, a dozen people are lined up, blindfolded, facing the campus wall.

Behind each person is a volunteer, twelve college students wearing red tshirts with the message, “Ask me where your brain went,” written in white across the backs. The students have guns. They hold them up to the heads of the blindfolded people.

Another volunteer signals with a flashlight on the brick wall.

The guns go off.

My mouth drops open, but I’m making assumptions about what I see.

Nobody dies. Everybody’s holding their hands up to their ears in pain. Some stagger a bit, but they resume their positions.

The students raise the guns again. This time I perceive that their aim is over the peoples’ shoulders, not at their heads.

“They can’t guarantee deafness,” the boy says. “But they can pretty much guarantee a temporary ringing that counteracts MeMinute. Some people even get tinnitus, if they’re lucky.”

A patrol car rolls like a parade float along Florida Avenue, Gallaudet’s Southern boundary road, blaring MeMinute.

Out come the foghorns and other noise makers in answer. People start singing “God Bless America.” People start singing “Istanbul (Not Constantinople).” People start singing Bruce Springsteen.

“The deaf college, of all places!” the boy says.

I take in the laughter, the eye rolls, the proud faces.

“Gallaudet is now more closely policed than Anacostia,” the boy says. He’s talking about DC’s reputed danger zone. “The deaf college, of all places!” He says again.

Yes, of course I can get an earshot. I must get an earshot. I can belong to a movement like the all-American college student my daughter’s supposed to be.

The boy moves with me into the line. I glance back at the earbuds Sharzad gave me, the new model, metallic red finish winking through the grass. I look away, move my whole body so the boy is shielding me from their menace and temptation.

“How’ve you been?” I say, lamely.

My phone rings. Old fashioned, with a vibration. I think it’s the Mazda owner but it’s Sharzad.

“I’m just checking on you,” she says. “I thought I saw you get on the bus.”

“I got off near Gallaudet,” I say. “I ran into your old friend.” I glance at him, embarrassed.

“Behrouz,” he says.

“Behrouz,” I say.

But Sharzad is talking. “The deaf college?” she says. “Of all places? Do you know it’s full of extremists right now? Do you know it’s the most heavily policed place in DC?”

“It’s full of people who refuse MeMinute,” I say.

“Dad,” Sharzad says. “Right now MeMinute is telling me that people who refuse MeMinute are violating my boundaries. It’s telling me that people who won’t use it, and people who can’t hear it, are a threat to civil society.”

I look around as she talks. Take in the joy. Take in the sense of purpose.

“Do you get it?” She says. “There’s got to be thousands of angry people headed your way.”

“The police will protect us,” I say.

“Very funny,” she barks.

The volunteers are guiding the last group of earshotted people, some of whom hold towels up to their bleeding ears, out of the way. The next group is lining up. It’ll be my turn after them. Behrouz motions me to keep moving with the line.

Now the participants are lined up. The volunteers scan the air and campus boundary for drones and cameras, though surveillance is a given. The signaller waits to flash the sign until everyone is good and ready.

Can I really do this? Maybe I’d go truly deaf. That would mean no more Bruce Springsteen. Could I learn to sign? Doubtful. I never learned Farsi, even after 30 years of marriage to a Persian woman.

“You were worried about me?” I say to Sharzad.

“Of course!” Sharzad says.

The guns fire.

“Dad!” She demands. “What’s happening?”

The volunteers are lining their guns against the participants’ second ear.

MeMinute fills the air once more. The foghorns and noisemakers and human voices blast again.

“I love you, Daughter,” I say.

“There’s a riot!” She cries. “Dad, you’re going to die!”

“I’m not,” I say. “I’ll be back before you know it.”

And I hang up before she hears the second round.

---

Anna Josephson lives in Washington, DC and teaches at the University of Maryland. Her work has appeared/is forthcoming in The Rumpus, JJournal, and elsewhere.

Sudha Balagopal

Red Hibiscus

The school principal, Mr. Noss, makes me sit in his office while he calls Amma. “Gowri is a menace, Mrs. Shekar,” he says.

The word evokes images of the squiggles I made in explosive red at age four when my scrawl danced against the cream of our dining room wall. In my box of chewed, blunt and broken crayons, that vivid shade was my favorite. I've never forgotten that hue, like a blast, like my Appa's anger. He, too, called me a menace that day.

I hear Amma on the speaker phone. “We don't pay the high tuition at your school to be insulted, Mr. Noss,” she says.

We students refer to the principal as Nosey. The taciturn gentleman has a mouth that turns down at the edges; he utters words through clenched teeth. We believe that's because he's British, an anomaly at a school in Phoenix.

“We have rules,” he says. “Not defacing school property is one. Gowri has spray-painted a school wall. That's unacceptable.”

Amma defends me. “Are you sure? My daughter's never been a troublemaker.”

She strewed newspapers on the floor of my room when I was young. I held the fat crayons in my fists, one in each hand, and streaked color over the black-printed words.

“I should expel her for vandalism. Come. Right away.” Nosey's tight words land like a slap.

“Fuck,” I hiss before I remember Appa said that word should never exit my mouth. “Uck, Uck, Uck.”  Anger, frustration and defeat churn in my belly. I throw my backpack on the floor.

What Nosey labels vandalism, is protest. I'm blood-hot mad, because the school fired my beloved art teacher, Ms. Garcia, last week. My jeans are paint-spattered. I remove the stained gloves, comb my fingers through my hair.

When I see Appa walking across the parking lot with Amma, my fingers turn icy. Of course he has returned early from work today; the Deys are coming to dinner. Appa will be displeased. He won't let me to get my driver's license when I turn sixteen in three months. I'll be stuck with the stupid learner's permit and an adult with me in the vehicle when I drive. He'll ground me forever.

“Uck, Uck, Uck.” 

For my fifth birthday, Amma bought me a box of color pencils. I used them to draw a border under the window sill in my room. Appa didn't notice until he went into my room to replace a bulb. He parted the curtains to let in light, blink-blinked at the dots, dashes and diamonds I'd drawn in grape purple and cotton candy pink.

“You bought her those pencils,” he roared at Amma. “Why must you encourage nonsense?”

I wept then, not because Appa said my “idiotic” decoration would bring down the value of our house, but because he ordered me to scrub off the design with soap and water.

Nosey doesn't greet my parents. “Let me show you what your daughter has done,” he says. They lean closer to hear his clipped words, then follow him. I'm left behind. The lingering dusk-sun's light is weak but no matter how hard I cross my fingers, I'm sure my words will be visible on the wall: We Need Art To Feed the

Nosey apprehended me before I could finish the quote.

In kindergarten Amma let me graduate from day-old newspaper to grocery store brown-paper sacks, in first grade to junk-mail envelopes and by third grade, she offered me used printer paper. Amma, an accountant, works from home and is busier during tax season. She smiled when my drawing kept me occupied.

Neither of my parents has an appreciation for art.

I hear Nosey and my parents returning, haul the backpack over my shoulders, brace myself.

Nosey says,“I need your assurance that this obscenity will be gone by Monday morning,”

“I give you my word,” Appa tells him.

He'll probably hire a painter to erase what I've done and yell about the cost. A wave of panic ascends from my belly.

“Uck, Uck, Uck!”

When Ms. Garcia walked into our classroom on the first day of school this year, the boys stared at her tapered skirt and athletic legs. The girls drooled over her turquoise earrings. Like a mantra, I repeated what she wrote on the board: We Need Art To Feed The Soul.

The previous teacher napped at his desk, let us create what we wanted, doled out generous grades. Ms. Garcia proved to be the opposite: passionate, knowledgeable and exacting.

She took us on a field trip to the art museum―none of us had ever been―where we studied an exhibition of paintings by her friend, Tanya Loft. The artist's vibrant market scenes from countries like Vietnam, Thailand and Sri Lanka transported me. I could almost hear the musical chatter of foreign languages, feel the texture of the melons, smell the ripening bananas. I moved away from my group to stand before the painting of a vendor seated under the shade of an umbrella, the sun casting a swath of light on her mound of cucumbers.

During the introduction, we learned Tanya Loft attended Wyatt Design Institute. Desire ignited in my chest. Could I dream so big? Could I hope?

“How can I to go to Wyatt, Ms. Garcia?”

“Well, start building your portfolio,” she said. “It's not enough to have talent. It's not enough to have desire. Show them.”

She taught us to coax emotion from art whether we used water color, oils, charcoal, or regular pencils. “The point is not to simply hurry up and finish. Linger, marinate, dwell.”

Days before she was fired, she said we shouldn't be afraid to experiment with surfaces. She lifted her sleeve all the way up to her shoulder and showed us her glorious tattoo―a red hibiscus with silky petals, dew-drops clinging to them like pearls.

“This is art on skin,” she said. “Look at the exquisite detailing.”

The boys hovered near her soft shoulder as if to study the intricate design. The girls gushed over her garnet earrings. I stared at the flower, tried to memorize the shy droop.

Next thing we heard, a passing staff member had reported Ms. Garcia. Whispers sprouted wings, whooshed around the school's corridors: the school has a strict no-tattoo policy for teachers; she shouldn't have lifted her sleeve quite so high; she should have maintained a physical distance from her students.

Appa inserts the key into the ignition, doesn't start the silence-wrapped car. I rub my knuckles together. Just when I think we're going to sit in the car all evening, he starts driving and ranting.

“This is beyond shameful. This is completely disgraceful. Gowri, you have a major blemish on your school record when you should be thinking about your SAT scores.” His angry spittle sprays the steering. “How will any good college admit you?” He slams the steering wheel with his fist, turns to Amma. “This is your fault.”

“My fault?”

“You were the one who got her the colors and crayons and all that garbage. You watched her run that horrible orange on our white leather couch. When I asked Gowri to wipe it off, you did it for her.”

From the back seat, I can see Amma twisting her ring. I've learned she chooses the right moments to confront Appa: he shouldn't be tired, he shouldn't be stressed with work issues, he shouldn't be hungry. I shouldn't be around.

I press my lips together. We're about a minute from home.

As Appa steps out of the vehicle, he says, “We have company for dinner this evening.” His eyes turn into slits and his jaw tightens. “You will stay in your room and do your SAT practice. I want to see the score later.”

Through my room's closed door, I hear my parents heap-pour words over each other.

“Call the Deys and cancel. Tell them something came up,” Amma says.

“I will do no such thing,” Appa shouts.

“But don't you think we should talk to Gowri, see what she has to say?”

“I'll deal with her later.”

I jump into the shower. When I come out, the altercation has not ceased.

“Be reasonable. This is not drugs or alcohol,” Amma says.

“It's serious enough for Mr. Noss to consider expulsion,” Appa says. “Fact is, you didn't set priorities.”

“She painted a wall at school. We can resolve this,” Amma says.

“And what happens the next time and the time after?”

“See, this is what you do. You extrapolate,” Amma says.

A door slams. The eruption stops.

My stomach growls. I haven't eaten anything since the grilled cheese sandwich at lunch. The alluring scent of Basmati rice hangs in the house. I catch the fragrance of coconut from a curry.

A soft knock sounds on my door. Silverware tinkles against the plate Amma leaves outside. 

The words of the test blur.

I miss my teacher, Ms. Garcia. She spoke my art language; she said I could apply to Wyatt.

My brush handles are adorned in dried-up colors: startling navy, temperate teal, muddy ochre. A plastic bowl that served as my palette flaunts jewel-like blobs of encrusted paint. Everything I've created under her instruction is hidden under the bed, my portfolio wrapped in a dupatta. I painted the dupatta when Ms. Garcia instructed us to decorate fabric. The dull green scarf came alive after I created a paisley border.

I haven't gathered the courage to discuss my plans with Appa. An impossibility when he's been tossing out statements like, “Art cannot offer a regular income. It cannot give financial security.”

Amma always backs him up. “You can always pick up hobbies later, dear.”

She doesn't have any.

My classmates and I huddle-plotted to bring Ms. Garcia back. We launched “Operation Protest.”

I volunteered to paint the wall because no one else would, which meant I carried the paints and the accessories. As I worked, twelve of my classmates shielded me in a wide semi-circle.

Until they saw Nosey making his way to the wall. Then, they scampered off. Every single one of them.

I got caught with color on my gloves. “Uck! Uck! Uck!”

Our doorbell rings.

Mr. Dey has an authoritative manner and Mrs. Dey squeaks like a rubber duck. I'm not sure if his commanding presence is a by-product of Mr. Dey's position―Appa tells me he's slated to become the next CEO of his company―or whether he achieved his rank as a result of his bearing. Appa and he grew up together, attended the same undergraduate engineering school back in India. My father reveres success. Sometimes I think he's friends with Mr. Dey only because of his title.

Their voices waft into my room.

Glasses clink. “Cheers,” Appa says.

The last time I saw Mrs. Dey, she flaunted stretched, wrinkle-free skin and a tight smile. Mr. Dey had a gray beard and shaggy eyebrows, both in need of a trim. 

I know my test score tonight will be abysmal. Appa will probably send me to coaching classes. I foresee a series of weekends filled with techniques to boost the numbers. “No!” I groan, knock my electric pencil sharpener to the floor. Shavings spill; some carry hints of color from pencils I've worn down to stubs.

Outside, Mrs. Dey says she went to Senator McNeil's fundraiser lunch. “Cindy, his wife, and I play tennis at the club you know.”

If I were Amma, I'd say, “I don't know Cindy. I don't play tennis. I'm not a member of any club, nor do I want to be.”

Appa inquires about the Deys' son.

“Keshav loves Boston,” Mr. Dey says. “Harvard is perfect for him. He got into Yale, too, but he chose Harvard.”

“I'll need your advice when Gowri starts applying,” Appa says.

My heart panic flutters. I want to travel like Tanya Loft, I want to depict life in other countries.

“Uck, Uck, Uck!”  

My phone ding-ding-dings with messages.

Sorry we left you.

Nosey's crazy.

What did he do?

Police?

He's sca . . .ary!

Were you arrested?

We're still friends?

Are you mad?

I receive bushels of emojis. I delete them all.

From my window, I can see the Deys' yellow sports car on our driveway, Amma's car on its left.

The men are louder now, after a couple of drinks. Appa keeps Scotch in the house because that's Mr. Dey's preference. Amma is walking back and forth from the kitchen. I hear the kitchen faucet run, the oven door open, then close, and chairs scraping against tile in the dining room.

Mrs. Dey tells Amma she had her blouse special-embroidered. “I like to wear one-of-a-kind,” she says. “Nothing worse than going to a party only to find another lady in the same outfit.”

I check my backpack―flashlight, stencil, tape, paints, gloves, apron, mask, rags, goggles―before I slip into the kitchen. Amma's keys are hanging on the hook. I grab them, stand still. Everyone's at the dining table.

The car engine sounds inordinately loud as I turn the key in the ignition.

I hold my breath.

Appa will go incandescent if he finds out I left. I'm supposed to be in my room. I'm supposed to ask permission before I leave the house. I'm supposed to drive with an adult.

“Uck, Uck, Uck!”

I shift the car into drive.

I park on the street by the football field. The lights from the empty field are bright. I won't need the flashlight.

There's no one around, not even old Pedro, our short-sighted janitor with his shuffling gait. I shoulder my backpack, make my way to the wall which will be covered up by personality-less beige paint within forty-eight hours.

I run my hand over the rough, uneven surface of the wall. Adding the word “Soul” to the quote is the easy part. It will be harder to recreate Ms. Garcia's hibiscus. I didn't take a photo when she lifted her sleeve to show us the tattoo. My flower may not turn out as dewy or as detailed.

I look at my phone. Time's sprinting. I must slide back into my room before my parents notice, before the Deys leave. I'm holding the stencil and tape in my hands when, from the corner of my eye, I catch an unexpected brighness. The lights are on in Nosey's office.

“Uck, Uck, Uck!”

My knees want to fold. If Nosey finds me now, this will be the end. The end of my Wyatt dream. I start shoving everything into my backpack, stop.

“When unfinished, a piece of art is like an incomplete sentence, a thought left hanging,” Ms. Garcia said. 

I cannot, should not, stop. Not now. I tape the stencil to the wall. Once it sticks, I hold my right hand with my left to still the shaking. I reach, I bend, I sweep paint. When I finish, I gulp air before I yank off the tape, remove the stencil. I thrust everything into my backpack, glance at my flower. My hibiscus is lame. Messy. Ill-defined.

“Uck, Uck, Uck!”

I fast-tiptoe on the concrete path to muffle my footsteps. At the car, I press my hand to my chest.

I take another look at the wall.

The hue of the hibiscus on the wall is the explosive red of my childhood, the petals a rich crimson. A hint of turmeric yellow offers sunshine to the stamen.

I pull out my phone, take a picture, send it to Ms. Garcia.

My fingers pause, before I add: For you.

---

Sudha Balagopal is an Indian-American writer whose recent work appears in Fictive Dream, Doric Literary, and JMWW among other journals. In 2024, her novella-in-flash, Nose Ornaments – runner-up in the Bath novella-in-flash contest, was published by Ad Hoc Fiction, UK. She has had stories included in Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions and the Wigleaf Top 50.

Deborah-Z Adams

Small Town Witch Makes Do

She meets her coven—Kayla P, Cayla G, and Caila K—in the parking lot of the First Baptist Church after Tuesday night choir practice. She’s sure the hymns they rehearse send a vibratory magic into the ether and open the portal to possibility. Invocation is just another word for prayer. She’s a rising senior, and she dreams of riding the prom queen’s float, of hiking the Alps, of bushwhacking a jungle, feeding the hungry, winning an Oscar.

She understands that Forever is a serious thing, and demons of change are always trying to steal your treasures. Tonight’s ritual will guard her and her BFFs against the dark magic that dissolves and disperses. Her black-handled paring knife and Yeti mug were sanctified in the kitchen where once upon a time her mother warmed formula, hid vegetables in spaghetti sauce, baked brownies for band fundraisers. Grandma’s cast iron pot holds a potent brew of McCormick’s spices: black pepper for clearing energy, anise seed to bind, and cloves to guarantee their friendship continues.

On a full moon night in July, in the company of her tribe, beneath the warm glow of a security light, she shivers. Her blood already knows what she’s doomed to learn.

Small Town Witch Spoils the Fun of Time Travel

During lunch at the Silver Moon Cafe, she listens while I whine. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I had dreams. I had plans. I swear the universe throws obstacles in my path, forces me to turn left when I mean to turn right, thwarts my every move. Nothing plays out the way it should. I tell her “I wish I could go back in time and give my young self advice, warn her, guide her, help her—help me—get to the life I imagined.”

She leans in to whisper: What makes you think you’d get it right this time?

Small Town Witch Teaches the Fine Art of Sorcery

No one listens to what she doesn’t say. That’s her art—the tacit spell. She can curse anyone without a word spoken, and this serves her well. Her specialty is justice, the distribution of retribution. Take the neighbor on the corner, the one who revs his monstrous truck’s engine when decent people are asleep, or should be. Tires go flat, fluids leak, belts fly off. No reason. Just happens.

She’ll tell you if you really want to know. You don’t, but she would. The secret of sorcery lies in plain sight, ripples with gooseflesh on bare arms or quivering chin in the bumpy night. Her life is a how-to manual, complete in two sentences: Smile them on their way. Trust karma to do the heavy lifting.

---

Deborah-Z Adams is an award-winning author of novels, short fiction, CNF, and poetry. She served as executive editor of Oconee Spirit Press for ten years and is currently a reader for Boomerlit. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Roanoke Review, Litmosphere: a journal of Charlotte Lit, WELL READ Magazine, Dead Mule and other journals. You're invited to visit her website where you may read more of her work: www.Deborah-Adams.com

Dan Weaver

Migratory Patterns of the Ruddy Turnstone

In the crashing waves and whitecaps and swirling water of the Hudson Bay my boat tossed and turned and reminded me that it was built to go on lakes and reservoirs that it’s a small craft and there should be a water skier or tubers behind it and people with brewskis lounging in the sun believing they are skilled seamen but really they are steering floating fiberglass in a hole dug by men. But I took my boat into the north to achieve salvation in a time of great need since it was the only boat I could afford and deliverance was across the bay up there. Originating from the great state of Minnesota where there are many lakes hence my boat for laking I towed the vessel behind my Accord across the expanse of Ontario to the bay's shores. And since I’m not a great storyteller I will just offer exactly what happened: I died. Many don’t consider how treacherous the great bay can be for small craft. Storms can manifest from nothing into violent raging beasts generating waves as tall as a mountain with winds whipping and howling and spitting vehemence at your very existence. And let me tell you that the temperatures are frigid and sharp and will cut you up and slice you down and make you wish you packed more than a sweatshirt. You see there at the top of the bay is where the ruddy turnstone migrate. The birds return from the shores of the Atlantic states and some as far as South America and Africa to reunite with their mate and mate. They are wonderful monogamous animals who may have been separated by oceans and continents during the intervening months which are a dark and desolate winter in the north they had left behind. But they always return and you’d think in May it would be spring and warm but in May when the ruddys are screwing about around the Hudson getting fat and laying eggs it is a treacherous time for small watercraft. Three months prior I dreamed of a gray place on water and fog and drear everywhere a place that was lonely and vast and empty save for a small bird pattering along the sand of the beach. I glided towards it because in a dream you don’t move in a rational manner so I glided towards the bird to ask where to get what I need and as I approached the bird took on an aggressive posture indicating I should leave and glide towards another area since spaces abound in this place. But I needed company I needed to understand the place and know just why and how to live in the vastness and the little fellow seemed to know since there it was prancing along and pecking at unseen microbes or whatever on the sand there. So I continued towards him. I guessed at him being a him because his plumage was glorious and attractive and that’s how birds work. His streaks of black and white and auburn were intoxicating and so worldly unlike many fancy birds in the tropics you see on the TV that seem alien and unbelievable. This little bird was magnificent and unpretentious and that seemed to me trustworthy and bountiful. I spoke to the bird but our conversation is private I promised him that so I will not recount here the details but I will tell you that his name was Tristan. I will tell you that Tristan said it was ok to tell people that. I can also tell you that our conversation helped me understand that his place was not permanent that he just came there to seek his Kendra in the spring and summer and that in the winter he left and his Kendra left but that’s why it was a special place for all his kind since it ensured they lived on and they understood that it was not theirs to keep. It might seem like that was a lot of our conversation right there but it wasn’t there was plenty more and that’s the part I can’t tell you. I can also tell you that even though Tristan seemed aggressive when I first floated over there he relaxed once he understood that it was only a dream and that’s also why he decided to talk in English and tell me his name. Upon waking I understood that I needed to get to that place and be there with Tristan and his kind and see it and experience that salvation. It was a need deep inside that cannot be explained and could not be ignored. So I sold my belongings and bought the boat which sank and killed me and phoned my children who live in the great states of Ohio and Virginia respectively and I phoned them and told them dad is going to boat to the north across the Hudson to see the ruddy turnstones that it must be done and that they should not argue because I’ve driven a boat a few times out on the lake and that's good enough and that I don’t have much to my name anyway so what’s the difference. So I told them I’d be going and that I might not be back but I won’t be gone and I’ll say hello to mom.

---

Dan Weaver writes in Vermont. He is on Bluesky @supernaturalfeat.com. More of his work can be found at supernaturalfeat.com.

Rachel Weinhaus

My Mother Is a Peahen

My husband found her at an art fair while he was traveling. She stands erect, mid-waist tall, a bossy blue with hints of regal gold and bruised purple. I put her in the corner of our front hall, and sometimes on my way in, I stop to talk to her and tell her about my day. She’s not the best listener, and I know she’d prefer to be fluttering her wings or flirting with a delivery man, but it’s nice to pause before I set the groceries down and connect this way. Sometimes the boys play too rough, and I have to say, “Be careful. Your grandmother was very expensive.” And other times I let them tumble about and hope the bullseye tips of her feathers aren’t broken. She likes to be dusted, my mother, so every week, I take the brush from the hall closet, and I watch the mites swirl in the sunlight that kisses her through the window. I imagine her out in the wild surrounded by lesser grand species, her wings unfolding in a curtsy call. I know it’s selfish, but I can’t help being happy she’s finally here with me.

Cicada Song

There’s a story I lost. It was about the time my dog swallowed a cicada. I told it to dates I met for coffee, for brunch, for a walk in the park, for drinks at happy hour, before happy hour, after happy hour. The brown-haired man, the bald man, the man with a mustache, all smiled politely when I told them how Roxie was prone to eating the singing bugs. How, in her excitement, she swallowed one whole, and how I could hear the cicada’s sorrowful longing in the hallows of Roxie’s belly. How the vet told me not to worry. How the cicada kept me up at night for weeks on end until the mournful call became a soundtrack I learned to get used to. The man with a mustache told it to his next date as if it were his own, and then she told it on a plane to a flight attendant on her way to Australia, and last I heard, the story landed in New Zealand, and now Roxie is a Kiwi who flies its sleepless nights with a soulful song about loneliness forever stuck in its throat.

The Rock Collector

It started after his father left, when I bought him a rock tumbler. He took it very hard, his father leaving, but he found solace in the slow transformation of his dirt-crusted possessions turning smooth and luminous in his hands. Soon, the house filled with them. He stacked them on bookshelves, lined them up across our kitchen counter, tucked them into the hall closet. The living room floor, covered wall-to-wall with gems, made a rocky beach path all the way to our front door. One day, finding a rock in my sock, in my other sock, in my salad, I asked him to consider changing hobbies. Maybe he’d like to plant gourds and tomatoes. We could tend to the seeds and watch them grow. He shook his head no. I lay with him, on a night his father didn’t call, and the bed seemed taller than I remembered. When he finally fell asleep, I peeked under the mattress. A sea of glittering light.

---

Rachel Weinhaus is a screenwriter and memoirist. She earned an MFA in screenwriting from the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema-Television and a BA in English and Creative Writing from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her personal essays have been published in The Huffington Post, The Today Show, Newsweek, Insider, Kveller, and Brevity Blog. Her work has appeared in Necessary Fiction, Flash Fiction Magazine, Micro Fiction Monday Magazine, Five Minutes, MoonPark, Moon City Press, Does It Have Pockets, and is forthcoming in Frigg. Rachel is the author of The Claimant: A Memoir of an Historic Sexual Abuse Lawsuit and a Woman's Life Made Whole. Visit her at www.rachelweinhaus.com.

Brett Pribble

The Anglerfish Hears Dolly Parton

The foremost spine of the dorsal fin lurches from its head to seduce smaller fishes with something fleshy and luminous and wholly different from this deep-sea devel, bait. It drifts through the arcane. In the bottom of the ocean, giant squids clutch sunken ships, and the skeletons of mermaids are sprinkled on ancient stones.

There is no light. Only shadow pervades as this gilled-grim reaper hunts its prey. A pelagic crustacean floats to its glowing decoy. The anglerfish’s giant fangs open, and in the distance, a melody pierces the darkness like an invisible light. Slowly—sublimely—words materialize—a woman begging another woman—Jolene—not to steal her man.

The anglerfish closes in on its victim, but the plea to the woman with flaming locks of auburn hair holts its jaws from impaling the target. It swims in circles. Lyrics of love lost drift into the sac-like chambers of its long, muscular heart. The Anglerfish allows its prey to escape. No longer hunting, it swims back into the gloom, searching for a mate.

---

Brett Pribble’s work has appeared in Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, decomP, Stirring: A Literary Collection, Saw Palm, The Molotov Cocktail, Five on the Fifth, Maudlin House, Bending Genres, Bright Flash Literary Review, and other places. He is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Ghost Parachute. Follow him on Instagram/X/Bluesky @brettpribble.

Marie-Louise McGuinness

To Where The Boy Belongs

The boy feels insects crawl up his back from the threads of his shirt and restless maggots squirming beneath the rigidness of his too-tight collar. He’s been sitting still for so long it feels like an unprovoked attack. The boy wants to jump from behind the fence of his school desk to defend himself and claw the clothes from his body for relief, but the teacher has already told him off for fidgeting, calling him out to the giggles of his classmates, making his cheeks burn and eyes water.

The boy hides his discomfort by pulling the muscles of his hip bones tight and pushing the muscle brace up through his spine and into his shoulders, a barricade in support of his helpless skin. His breathing slows, becomes shallow and soft and his head becomes lighter. The boy wonders if he will someday levitate. He thinks he’d like that as long as he could float out of here.

The boy trains his eyes on the corner of the whiteboard, there is an angular line of dark grey dust that’s been there for the past few weeks and the boy thinks there must be a reason for that. He feels the dust is somehow sentient, and if he looks at it long enough he can see it breathe. He squints in feigned concentration though his brain is too busy for learning. There are circle lights bright above his head and their shine filters painfully through his eyelashes, making little black dots he wants to scrape out with his chewed-short nail. The lights remind him of the toy spaceship he was given once as a present. He thinks it may have been a birthday. He always felt there were aliens in it, small and invisible but with a life force that spoke deep within his bones. He would reply to them without using his voice, his earnest words bouncing out from within his skull and into the little front porthole to the spaceship’s captain.

The spaceship is gone now, shattered to shards in one breath of an angry moment, and the boy thinks the aliens may have followed him here. They had to go somewhere and the boy is sure they wouldn't have abandoned him completely. He believes that they could be lurking in the gaps of the damp-stained and yellowing styrofoam roof tiles, waiting to speak to him or take him somewhere else. He whispers messages to them inside his head, things like — I'm here now and I'm ready to go. He wishes that they’d listen.

The clock ticks a staccato rhythm unsettling like gunshots. His ears hurt and he wants to press his palms against them to relieve the pressure, but that is not allowed in the classroom either. The teacher shouts at him when he does it, as if the action is an affront to his voice and authority, even though it is not.

The boy knows the teacher is the boss. He remembers the loud reprimands of his first week here. The strutting and chest-puffing, the reverberation of his desk from the strike of a heavy hand. Today the boy’s hands remain clenched around his zebra striped pencil, even if there is an ache burning deep in his palm.

Children laugh at something the teacher says and the boy smiles too, he would like someone to repeat the joke but knows they won't. He won't ask. He knows it probably wasn't that funny anyway. The boy remembers a joke that really was funny, about Spiderman and Batman in a fight to the death. He says the joke aloud and twenty heads swivel towards him in horror. The teacher asks him to repeat it, but the boy can tell by the clench of his teacher’s jaw that he probably shouldn't. He buries his head down into his sweater-puffed chest in defeat. The teacher shakes his head and moves on.

The boy doesn’t like walking home. Many of the children walk home the same direction.  He is bodily conscious of the black leather feet marching around him and automatically adopts the same pace as the pubescent army but it feels unnatural. He is not small but he feels swamped in the parade. His feet feel unsteady, he looks down at them until they separate from his body, moving autonomously with remote controlled steps. He senses missiles dropping around his head, bottles and balled-up paper, sometimes they hit him and it hurts. Once he bled.

The boy screams at his mother when she asks what he’d like for tea. He slams the door of his room and collapses to lie down on the soft purchase of the carpeted floor. He tries to control his breaths but they are shooting everywhere, ragged and gulping like bursting fish bubbles. His mother's feet shuffle just outside, they cast shadows onto the carpet that he traces with his finger. He hopes she can feel his apology.

The boy climbs up from the floor and peels his school uniform from his body. He can feel the insects jump off him like fleas, and the air is a cooling balm on the pores of his skin. He pulls on the soft fleece onesie that feels like a cloud, the cuffs sit just beneath his elbows and the bottom of his calves are exposed goosebumped and milk-pale. His mother threatens to throw it out and his father sighs when he sees him in it. The boy won't allow it to be taken, not until they find another one exactly the same.

The boy eats the pancakes his mother made for him. He is glad she understands he only wants to eat pancakes today. He only wants to eat pancakes every day. His father offers a slight nod though his eyes look empty. The boy would rather  have that than what he sees in his mother's. His mother’s eyes are dull now, where once they sparkled with unshed tears. He thinks he once saw them happy but that could have been a dream. He draws them sometimes, the alive eyes, using shading techniques he learned from YouTube. It is an act of remembering. He could never show her the pictures.

At bedtime the boy reminds himself tomorrow is Friday.  Friday is a good day because it promises the respite of time and peace and breathing. When he climbs into his bed on a Friday the boy knows what it is like to be happy. On Saturday he stays in his room and the house is blanketed quiet. His parents work on a Saturday, they start the cars at around 8.30am and until 5pm o’clock the boy can breathe out. And on Sunday his parents are tired and grateful for a day of rest so the boy is quiet and still, he lies in the dark and imagines himself in the world in which he belongs. He wonders how he’ll get there.

---

Marie-Louise McGuinness has work published in numerous literary magazines including The Forge, Flash Frog, Fictive Dream, Banshee and Ghost Parachute. She was twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, longlisted in the Bath Short Story Award and her story "When She Falls" (Milk Candy Review) was chosen for Best Microfiction 2025. She enjoys writing from a sensory perspective.

Christine H. Chen

Anatomy of a Pencil

Her job is to sharpen pencils for her artist Ma. She checks each pencil shaft: dent-less, perfect silver ferrule, unbruised eraser. No irregular pin tip: smooth and shiny like onyx, sharp like Ah Ma’s eyes. The exposed throat and collar of each pencil: an exact hexagon. No one side higher than the other, just like the collar of her buttoned-up and starched shirt. Each sharpened tool immobilized in its allotted slot, waiting for its fate. Her calloused fingers holding the razor blade cuts, cuts, cuts to the staccato of Ma’s voice, not good enough, and she tries again and again.

Recipe for a Broken Heart

Grind ashwagandha and ginseng to a fine powder, add chamomile and passionflowers to calm and scent your soul. Drop a handful of St. John’s wort yellow blooms, sprinkle purple lavender from Provence to lift your spirit. Blend with hot tears and ashes of burnt photos of the two of you. Set potion aside. Bandage your heart with gauze, sew it shut with silk thread. File your nails. Wait for the cheater to come retrieve his Lightspeed gaming headset. Rip his chest open, squeeze him dry. Drip drops of his warm blood in potion. Sip potion. Watch his carcass melt away.

---

Christine H. Chen was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Madagascar before settling in Boston where she worked as a research chemist. Her fiction has appeared in The Pinch, Fractured Lit., SmokeLong Quarterly, Time & Space Magazine, and other journals and anthologies. Her work was selected for inclusion in Wigleaf’s Top 50 Very Short Fictions 2023, Best Microfiction 2024, 2025, and Best Small Fictions 2024, 2025. She is a recipient of the 2022 Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellowship. Find her stories at www.christinehchen.com

Erin Butler

Big Death

I only noticed it superficially at first, more in my peripheral vision than head-on. But once I got my boxes unpacked and bookshelves arranged and wandering mail forwarded, it dawned on me that the number of cemeteries in town was, frankly, abnormal. There were more cemeteries, in fact, than bars, which suggested to me that the people who lived here—the ones I hadn’t met, the ones I could scarcely even find (apart from the teens) because of their perplexing insistence on staying indoors and alone—preferred to die recreationally than to drink. In Boston, we met in bars. Loitering in cemeteries had been forbidden by tin signs and, presumably, the police.

Cemeteries had always fascinated me in the way only silent things can. They don’t demand notice outright, but God help the person who tries to avoid them. God help the person who finds themselves near one and speaking too loudly. Not that you could end up in a cemetery accidentally, the way they advertise themselves with hundreds of stony billboards.

There were six of them that I passed whenever I drove to my shift at the library. Every time, I crossed myself.

The first time I drove out to this part of the state, my father in the passenger seat, he told me a joke after we had passed three. “How many people d’you think are dead in that graveyard?”

“I don’t know, how many?” I said.

“All of them.”

The gravestones got older the closer you got to the library. The town had evidently started out burying folks centrally, and then, as generation after generation insisted on dying—each person doing it alone, and each with their own valiant but senseless fight—they had expanded outward. As I drove home from work, I’d watch the headstones get progressively newer, separated occasionally by roads and auto shops, until they stopped abruptly and my apartment building appeared. Then, I’d walk in and get my mail, and rarely would I see any of the other tenants before I’d shut and bolt my door for the night, unsure where I could go to meet other people. My internet searches on the topic all turned up dead leads.

In the mornings, I walked my dog, Amy, in the cemetery closest to our building. The headstones were all clean and polished, and many still had fresh flowers leaning up against them. The years, recent enough to be startling, were engraved on the stones in fashionable fonts. Papyrus: Gussie Levoy, Wife & Mother, 1939-2017. Baskerville Old Face: Linus Billings, Gone But Not Forgotten, 1975-2019. Some stones, having been carved in advance (and at the owner’s own morbid instruction), left the year of death off to be filled in when it became relevant. There were plots in the ground beneath them, each one empty and unseen, and there was wood out there somewhere that would be hammered and coaxed into the shape of the future deceased’s casket. I got in the habit of hurrying past the preset graves.

I never got the impression that Amy was aware of the bones shut up in boxes beneath her. She preferred the living things in the cemetery. She chased the butterflies and barked at the squirrels. Walking her there made me feel like I was walking her through a museum. But there was limited space in town where I could let her run more or less freely.

I was there with her early one morning when I saw a stranger who seemed realistically approachable—the first one I’d seen in town. It was like spotting a deer in the wild after having hunted fruitlessly for days. He was a tall man, gentlemanly, and skinny in the way that only the lanky and friendless can be. He sat cross-legged in front of a headstone that was so freshly lacquered that the sun glinted off it in a way that threatened real danger to the eyes.

“Morning,” I said as Amy nudged her way toward him. Though I was a people person, I was a shy one; but Amy was eagerly a people dog.

“Good morning,” the man said, whipping his head around toward me and grinning broadly in a way that made his upper lip stick to his teeth.

“Judgment call. I like it,” I told him. Amy sniffed at the cuff of his pants, sure that she wanted to be noticed while not yet sure whether the man could be trusted. He turned his grin on Amy and tried to muss the fur on her head the way you’d muss a child’s hair, undeterred by her short coat. She panted in big soprano huffs and wagged her tail expectantly. I pulled back on her leash just a little.

“Were you close to her?” I asked, nodding my head toward the stone, Engravers MT: Catherine Leahy, 1932-2017.

“Oh, not really,” he said, standing and wiping the dirt from his seat. “She was my aunt. Mother’s sister.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Not at all. Thank you. Maybe it’s rude to say so, but I was never especially sad about it. It’s just relaxing to be here.”

“With her?”

He nodded.

“That’s nice of you.”

“I don’t know that ‘nice’ is the word for it. It felt like a duty at first—my mother’s in a home. But that was just the first time. Now, though—” and here he paused, and the look that passed over his face was one of true puzzlement. “It’s still a duty, in a sense. Just not toward her.”

“I don’t think I follow,” I said.

“Well, there are certain things a cemetery is very well-suited for. Right?”

“I guess it’s good to have a place for the dead. Noble. For me, it’s a good place to walk my dog.”

“Uniquely suited, isn’t it!” the man cried.

I stood there, utterly at a loss. Even Amy seemed confused, sitting quietly as she was at my feet.

“I’m running for the town council,” he said suddenly, leaning in conspiratorially.  “And I’m hoping to make something of this little feeling we share. I hope you won’t forget.”

“What?” I was asking him, but he was petting Amy—this time, two staccato pats on her head with a flat palm—and turning to go.

“It was a pleasure running into someone here,” he called over his shoulder, “particularly you.” I couldn’t tell if he meant Amy or me. Amy strained briefly against her leash toward his heels, but he was soon out of reach, and neither of us watched to see where he went. There were plenty of dead folks left to visit, and plenty of living things to chase.

~

Genevieve Loughton was in front of my desk in the teen room the next morning moments after the library opened. She had to have been waiting outside for my boss to unlock the door. I didn’t want to ask for how long.

I liked Genevieve. She was the sort of library teen I wanted to have sculpted myself. I often wished that she had come to me as a surly pre-teen, drawn hypnotically but with some resistance to the idea of endless free books, and that I had opened her eyes to the transforming world of the library. But she had opened her own eyes before I even got the job of teen librarian. And she was a vicious stickler about the proper arrangement of all those i’s and e’s in her name. She couldn’t have been older than fourteen.

“I’m starting a book club,” she announced when I looked up from my computer, which was still booting up.

“That’s a great idea. I’m sure lots of teens would love a book club,” I said.

“Right. Which is why I need your help. I need you to get the word out, and then make sure we get enough copies of the book.” She kept nodding her head, and whenever she did, her pigtail braids bounced a little.

“Good thing I don’t have anything else on my plate,” I said, and I glanced back down at my computer to enter my password. Genevieve just tapped her foot and waited. “What book are you starting with?” I continued.

Genevieve sighed, rubbed the bridge of her nose beneath her glasses, and said, “I don’t know yet. We’ll vote on it. We’re a democracy.”

I wasn’t certain you could have a democracy when there was only one person in your club so far, but I told her, “Alright. I’ll post some flyers, and we’ll schedule a meeting to—”

“We?” she cut me off. “It’s a teen book club. For teens. We’ll do that ourselves.” Then her face brightened considerably, and she called out a “Thank you!” as she skipped off.

I watched her braids bounce behind her as she left. She passed by the display of new books, most of which I had not read yet, thanks to the hectic process of moving to town. Still, I could tell that this was a good season for YA. Nobody tells you this, but most of the time, you really can judge a book by its cover. The artists had really gone all in on the new covers—there was an intricacy to them that I hadn’t seen in ages—and most of them were doing their own thing instead of replicating the same design over and over. This boded well for the contents. Genevieve and her teens, if she rounded up any, would have a good selection to choose from. I thought I’d pick one up to bring home with me for the night.

~

I was surprised and a little spooked when the doorbell rang that evening. It hadn’t rung since I’d moved in, and the sound it made, like coughing wind chimes, was unpleasant. I was even more surprised to find that the person outside my door was the man I’d met at the cemetery.

“Well, hello!” he cried. “Who knew you lived here?”

I did, I thought.

“Hi there.”

“I don’t think I ever properly introduced myself. William Storelli,” he said, flashing his politician’s grin and extending a hand that looked too big for his arm.

“I wasn’t expecting anyone. Why are you—what brings you here?”

“Canvassing,” he said brightly. “I’m visiting everyone on the block today.” I raised an eyebrow. “For the town council seat, you recall,” he explained. “I can count on your vote, can’t I?”

“I don’t think I’m even registered here yet.”

“Don’t worry about that. We’ll take care of it like this.” He snapped his fingers. “I’m sure you’ll want to see us go full speed ahead on what we talked about yesterday.”

I blinked. Misreading me, he winked, then straightened up. I hadn’t realized how close he had gotten as he gradually leaned in toward me.

“Our little secret,” he said, and he winked again.

“Good luck,” I said, shutting the door. In spite of myself, I almost wished I hadn’t sent him away so quickly. I sat down at the kitchen table and stirred at the filmy microwaved sauce on my dinner . After I forced myself to swallow down the majority, I spent the evening with the YA book I’d brought home from the library and embarrassed myself with the empathy I felt for the teen protagonist.

A few weeks later, when the election came around, I didn’t vote, despite the fact that the polls were open in the library basement. But, not having an opponent, William Storelli won.

~

With a speed I could not fathom, with an inexplicably complete absence of red tape, construction started in the cemetery just days after the solemn swearing-in of the new town councilors. As a government employee and an adult female desperate for company other than bookish teenagers, I had gone to the swearing-in and watched as the councilors made oaths with one hand on the Bible, the other on the town by-laws, laying each hand flat on the books as if the mayor were giving them manicures. William Storelli saw me in the audience and given me that big grin of his.

He was there when they broke ground at the cemetery, arms folded and mouth downturned in a grimace of concentration. I was there, too, with Amy, who strained at her leash. I asked William if it counted as breaking ground when surely they had broken ground there several times already, it being a cemetery.

“You’re a funny one. This is a whole new level of ground-breaking,” he said, the grimace dissolving in favor of his usual grin. It hadn’t looked artificial until I saw how naturally distaste suited him. “People in this town have been waiting years for this sort of thing.”

“What exactly is it you’re doing?” I asked, pulling back on Amy’s leash as she leapt toward one of the burlier construction workers.

“It’s very exciting. We’re building a memorial kiosk at each grave. Mourners will be able to leave flowers, personalized voice memos, anything they’d like for the dead. And it’ll all be much neater.”

“Wow. Every grave? That sounds expensive.”

“People will love it. Can you imagine? They’ll fight to get a plot here. And it won’t be that expensive in the long run, with everything else,” he said, shifting his gaze to the flurry of workers.

“What?”

“Your dog looks hungry,” he said, abruptly snapping his head back toward me and then turning on his heel. I didn’t have the energy even to take the breath it would require to stop him. I’d spent all morning reshelving the mysteries someone had flung from the stacks in bunches during my coffee break. So Amy and I watched some construction workers build kiosks.

~

“Do you have Romeo and Juliet on the shelf?” Genevieve asked before I could open my mouth to ask how I could help her.

“Good morning, Genevieve.”

“Hi. Do you have Romeo and Juliet on the shelf?”

Spotting the familiar spine from the Classics shelf without even standing up, I nodded yes, we did.

“Great. What about 13 Reasons Why?”

“Plenty of copies,” I said. Carnage from a recent TV show craze. “Are those your book club options?”

“Great. What about The Virgin Suicides?”

“Genevieve,” I said, “what kind of book club are you running?”

“Nobody signed up for the book club,” Genevieve said hotly. “This is for a project.”

“Okay, then what kind of project requires a pile of suicide books?”

“I thought librarians weren’t supposed to ask questions like that.” She crossed her arms.

“They can if it helps them serve the patron,” I shot back with my semiautomatic library degree.

“Do you need to know what my project is to type in a title in the catalog?”

I blinked because she wasn’t wrong, typed in the title, and sent her on her way with a little list of call numbers. She kept her head held high as she sauntered through the stacks.

~

I came back to the cemetery with Amy a few days later, astonished to see that the kiosks had all been built. They were tiny wooden stalls, made from the same kind of splintery wood as the now-outlawed playgrounds I’d grown up on. And they were working. People had begun to tack things up on the kiosk walls—photos, notes, the occasional annotated obituary. Flowers and teddy bears and candles sprinkled the shelves, and even as I walked among the headstones, I passed a smattering of people who carried more goods to deliver to the dead. Occasionally, my movement seemed to trigger a song or voice memo to start playing from a hidden kiosk speaker. Up until then, I had never seen anyone, besides William and those persistent butterflies and squirrels, alive in that cemetery. There was another new kiosk, larger than the rest, situated at the entrance near the road, and it was piled with kiosk goods for sale. The woman standing beside it, all dressed up in an apron and baseball cap like she was selling hot dogs at the World Series, smiled at me as Amy and I passed by.

I took a seat on the exposed roots of an ancient tree that shaded a good swath of graves. Amy was immensely pleased, and she amused herself by watching a fresh batch of humans scurry about. As I scratched behind her ears, I tried to think of an appropriate way to introduce myself to strangers who were in the midst of mourning and decorating their loved ones. There didn’t seem to be any polite option. I would have had an easier job if I’d been able to find people anyplace else.

As I sat there, trying to avert my eyes from anything too dead and wishing distantly, horrifically that I had my own dead loved one to visit here, I spotted a pop-up sign sticking out of the grass: “NEW: Cemetery tours, daily at 4pm.” It was illustrated with a looming tree that unfurled spidery limbs and rivaled the tree under which I sat. Bingo.

I approached two women who stood together in front of a shiny headstone, alternately chitchatting and sniffling. There was a large photograph of an old man, printed on what looked like a lacquered woodblock, sitting prominently on the kiosk shelf and adorned with a spray of flowers.

“Hello,” I said, hating myself a little for the undue emphasis I placed on the lo, “do you ladies know where the tour starts?”

“Yes, yes, it’s just over by the gates,” one of the women said.

“Great, thanks. Will you two be going?” At this point, chasing down some old women for friendship was better than nothing. The one who had spoken turned to her companion, who began to fish in her purse. At last, she pulled out a green punch card. It had three tiny circles clipped in a row from the bottom.

“I suppose we ought to,” the woman said. “I’d like to fill up this card.”

“A punch card? What’s it for?”

“Didn’t you get one? It’s their new promotion. The first ones to fill up the card get their names inscribed on the memorial bricks.”

“And a free mug,” the first woman added. “I’d like to plant flowers in mine to leave for Ronald.”

“You don’t worry that people might mistake you for dead like that?”

“Of course not!” the punch card lady said. “This place is quite alive.”

“Quite,” her companion emphasized.

“I guess so. I’ve never seen so many people here,” I said.

“Well, Ronald has been here for quite a while, anyway,” the punch card lady said, nodding her head toward the gravestone, which sent the other lady hooting. “And we’ve missed him, haven’t we?”

“We’ll come to see him more often now, won’t we?” her companion said, nodding.

“I’ll see you on the tour, then,” I said, and I walked back toward my tree, balancing too far forward on the balls of my feet. Amy looked back once and gave the women a wistful whine, then followed me. We didn’t go on the tour.

The walk home, I tugged absently at Amy’s leash and looked at nothing in particular, my mind lost, as it were, in thought. And suddenly she was pulling on me instead, howling at something she saw and straining against the leash into the street. It was a squirrel, plump and freshly dead against the double yellow lines. Nothing had come by yet to flatten it. Why, I wondered, did dead things in the road always look so exhausted? Why was it that after having taken that final, fatal risk, their mouths went slack with that shocked look of having given it all, just to end up like this? And why didn’t their faces change when, finally, they split open and spilled themselves out? A car would come by and crush him eventually, and then another, and on and on through the weeks, until no one would be able to distinguish what was his body and what was the road.

~

The first suicide was a twenty-something, a white woman. She’d had long chestnut hair with chunky blonde highlights, and the note she left had a headstone design in the postscript. I couldn’t get over the idea of a postscript in a suicide note, the finality of it, the messiness in its sense of addendum. I didn’t try to get over the idea of her design.

The headstone she envisioned for herself had a top eight friends list, archaically Myspace-style, nestled in the bottom corner, complete with spaces for photos, mostly her mom and her boyfriend and a few friends. Above that was a sketch she had wanted to get as a tattoo, but had foregone with the assurance that a headstone would be even more permanent.

Her friends—her Maids of Mourning, as they called themselves in the newspaper article I read about the affair—threw a spectacular wake and drew up seating charts for the funeral. They had to give out tickets and appointment times for visiting her grave those first few days after the burial. By the time the visits began to slow down, two more suicides hit the papers, along with ads for a freelance kiosk designer and a cruise sweepstakes exclusively for new grave plot buyers.

I’d stopped going to the cemetery by then. I was looking for another place to walk Amy, who remained just about my only friend in town. Even the library teenagers had slowed their visits to a trickle, preferring instead to bring their paperbacks to the graveyard and read them under the ancient oak trees by the light of the kiosk candles. So Amy and I walked along the breakdown lane. Whenever I told her, “Good girl,” or when I waved on a car telling them to go ahead, I was startled by the novelty of my voice.

~

I didn’t expect to see William Storelli again. I didn’t expect to see much of anyone in that town. I had tabs open on my computer for every teen librarian job in the tri-state area. I did see the townspeople, of course—hoards of them—every time I drove past the cemetery, where they flocked. The signs advertising it and its new features were all over the place. Customizable tombstone designs. Destination funerals. Highlight reels that played on loop at the kiosks of the deceased—people had started wearing GoPros around so they could edit their own footage before their time came.

But I did see William Storelli again, and outside the cemetery. He rang my doorbell one night when I had just pulled my frozen pizza out of the oven, and I thought of all the times I would have preferred company when my dinner wasn’t getting cold.

“Good evening!” he said when I opened the door, like he knew me. I told him hello and invited him in, cursing my automatic manners the moment he crossed the threshold. “So, what do you think?” he said.

“What do I think about what?”

“The cemetery. Everything I’ve done there. Aren’t you pleased?”

“Why would I be pleased?” I said, my mask slipping quickly.

“It’s been very successful. We’ve had more foot traffic than ever.”

“So what? Why is that something you even care about?”

“I thought you’d be happy,” he scoffed. “Did you know you’re the first person I saw there just hanging around like that? Enjoying the scenery?”

“I was walking my dog. It’s grass.”

“It’s a real community atmosphere,” he continued. “Great for the town. I think it’s finally the hub we’ve been after.”

I scratched my arm and blinked too many times. “Nobody talks to anybody else who’s alive,” I said finally.

“Well, that’s just the thing,” William said. “I think that’s the next thing,

what’ll really push us over the edge.”

“What is?”

“Holograms. Actual holograms of the dead. And we’ll get voiceovers and program the holograms and let people actually talk to the folks they’ve lost.” His eyes were shining and he was speaking too fast, as if he were describing the plot of his favorite comic book.

I looked at him and tried to imagine it, I really did. I could be so good at giving someone the benefit of the doubt.

Just then, there was a knock on the outside door of the apartment building.

“Hello? Is there anyone in there?” a voice called out. Half a second later, the knocking turned to pounding. I sighed and brushed past William.

“The door isn’t lo—” I began as I pulled the door open, but then I looked down to find Genevieve Loughton on the stoop. “You know where I live?”

“Are you aware that public employees have their addresses listed in a locally available directory?” Genevieve asked, and we both knew it wasn’t a question. “Anyway, I need your help.”

“Genevieve, I’m not on the clock.”

“Regardless. This is important.”

She dropped the duffel bag she was carrying, and it fell with a loud clunk on the stoop. With movements quicker than I would’ve thought her capable of, she reached down and plucked something from the bag, and suddenly, she was wielding a knife as long as her forearm in one hand and industrial-size stapler in the other.

“Which one of these says, ‘Bet now you regret not joining my book club’?” she asked.

I lunged forward and plucked the weapons from her hands.

“Stop it right now. You’re not doing any of that to yourself.”

Genevieve’s eyes shone with defiance as she prepared to deliver her rebuttal, but for once, I was too quick for her.

“You do that, and you’ll be following the same trend as everyone else. You’ll be just like them. Is that how you want to get your attention?”

Genevieve exhaled slowly as she considered me. She’d taken in so much breath to try to cut me down, but I knew I’d gotten her. If nothing else, I was uniquely qualified to talk down a kid like Genevieve.

Her eyes got cloudy, but she nodded and turned to leave. “See you tomorrow morning,” she called over her shoulder.

“It’s a school day,” I said, but she just shrugged.

When I turned to go back to into my apartment, William was still there, watching me. His pasted-on grin was gone, and in its place was the scowl that suited him so much more neatly.

He stepped forward and tapped a bony finger against his chin before finally shaking his head.

“You could have been so well-suited to this,” he said, and he didn’t look back as he left the building.

Back in my apartment, my pizza was cold enough that the cheese had started to congeal. Amy was a good dog, though, and she sat beside the oven, wagging her tail, not even thinking about jumping up on the counter and taking a bite.

---

Erin Butler is a writer and teacher currently living in Western Massachusetts and holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Sherri Alms

The Night Before

 She paints her toenails stop-sign red. She takes her time, puts separators between her toes, little piggies. This little piggy goes oink, oink, oink all the way home. She waits ten minutes between two coats and then a top coat, carefully erasing the red on her skin with a q-tip.

She knows no one will see her toes tomorrow. They will be in those thin socks with the grippy rows that keep patients from slipping. Why, she doesn't know since patients are in bed, wheeled on stretchers, or sitting up in wheelchairs to be pushed out to the entrance where someone will pick them up.

She plays a game when she is wheeled out to wait for Danny's car. This will be her seventh wait at those hospital doors in the past year. The game is to judge the other patients going home, decide who is loved and who is not, make up a short story. It makes her feel less like a sick sweet angel and more like a regular person, a cranky bitch.

The old lady bent over in the wheelchair, mouth open, snoring? She will go straight into a nursing home van. The only people left to love her are nurse’s aides, the ones who bathe her as gently as they bathed their babies, who talk to her as if she is not a patient but a woman. It’s a few grams of love, the old lady supposes, a mediocre consolation prize for outlasting everyone she has ever loved. The van comes. She is wheeled in and the door slams.

The tall bald man in a green sweatsuit? His oldest daughter will pick him up, the only one of his four children who would take him because he had deserted them when they were little. She did not love him, but she acted like she did. Except she calls him Carl. She never ever touches him. She asked him what his favorite foods were she brought him to her house. You’re a saint, he told her. She huffed. You could have tried on a little more of that yourself. He laughed as she turned away from him.

The little girl with brown french braids and a cast on her foot with her mother steering the wheelchair? She will be gently set into the car her dad is driving, to head home, lamplit windows the same color as warm honey on her mama’s biscuits.

That story stopped with the honey and the lamps, the window curtains closing as in a schlocky movie, happy ever after. She sits up on the side of the bed and gently touches the first big toe she had painted. Dry. Then the last, also dry. She is done. Ten pretty pleases. As much praying as she was willing to do, this ritual that requires precise strokes to create red enamel rosary beads.

She remembers the most perfect day ever. She and her mama in Galveston, both lying on beach towels in bikinis, both with polished toes, color of watermelon, her mama said, strawberry Kool-Aid, she said. They laughed and rolled over in unison. It had always been the two of them even when Daddy was there in his black t-shirt with Led Zeppelin glaring out from his belly. They clinked Dr. Pepper bottles the day he left for good and toasted to the power of two.

Home from the beach, she stepped into the shower, sunlight pouring through the adjacent window, turning the stream into prisms. She stood face up to the shower head, eyes closed. Sticky grains of sand slid off her body. How she wishes now she had loved it more, uncrossed by sutures, undotted by small scars from laparoscopies, bones hidden under young flesh, not Halloween skeleton ribs jutting under gray skin. She remembers the light settling on her, mind sinking into a warm sense of being held, sounds of her mother in the kitchen fading. It is what she often imagines as nurses wheel her into an operating room, as the anesthesiologist puts the mask over her nose. And when she wakes in the post-op bed into amnesiac terror, she hugs the memory of warm water, the safety of the sunlit shower, and her body is prismatic for a few minutes.

---

Sherri Alms writes weird, sweet, and occasionally angry stories, poems, and essays. Her work has appeared in Rattle, Cosmic Daffodil, Dorothy Parker's Ashes, and other publications. She is a freelance writer who lives with her husband and two cats in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

Arria Deepwater

Negative Space

The door wore its patched-over reinforced repair with a shiny sort of broken pride. I don’t know what impression it would have made a few days earlier. Plain, utilitarian, vaguely shabby? But by the time I encountered it, the door had a story to tell; and it shouted its part in the drama to all who passed along the hall like a needle stuck in the groove of a record. It had stood firm but been torn asunder. It had fulfilled its purpose with strength and steadfastness. Force and urgency had acted upon it — but it had not given in so easily!

As I slid the key into the new lock, I felt the door smile at me. I muttered to it under my breath, reminding it of the other side of its responsibilities. Letting people in. If it answered me, I did not hear it. I think now there may have been some small amount of spite in its greeting, knowing what I would find beyond. Knowing what the apartment had kept secret all this time.  

The hallway was sullen in its reception. Like a bored teenager, it slouched silently while I  took in the haphazard stacking of trucker hats piled high in the shelving nook, covered in pink-grey dust. There was a small jumble of plastic grocery bags hugging the lee of the wall, an unorganized litter of prayer cards tangled with junky rosary beads, three lip balms, and a golf ball. Whatever, the hallway rolled its eyes at me. 

The bathroom seemed as shocked as I felt, befuddled and caught off guard by my presence. In a slightly panicked bid to deflect my attention, it stammered half-formed excuses; offered a convincing story of some monstrous act being visited upon it.

With rushed apologies it pointed me toward large sections of the vinyl tile, implying they had been torn away. I leaned in, peering and confused, as the bathroom held its breath. Understanding snapped through my senses. The bathroom sighed, caught in its attempt to dissemble, and turned away in shame.

Dirt. A decade or more of repeatedly dampened dust. More sloughed off skin cells than there are stars in the sky, mixed with soap film. They clung like red-brown scabs to the vinyl. He had worn a path through the barrens. A narrow trail marked the territory of my father’s movements between the doorway and the bathroom fixtures, connecting them like pegs on a map, strung together by yarn. All else was wasteland, the skin of a creature long dead and mummified.

I stood up, struggling against the dread swelling in my limbs, feeling the apartment preparing to bare its teeth. On the table in the main room, paper dripped from piles towards the floor. Fragile stalactites of a mind scattered. More reached for my ankles as I picked my way between the dunes. Great drifts of handwritten notes, ballasted by dozens of unopened boxes of graham crackers and jars of peanut butter, spread across the space. Low against one wall, a row of empty Pringles stood like tin-lined soldiers waiting for orders. Clothes of all kinds lay carefully spread across a matching couch and chair, flowing languidly over the edge of the furniture to meet an ambitious pile of shoes sprawling before them like rocks waiting for a water fall. Whatever the project may have been, he had lost his capacity for it long ago. It sat collecting so much dust that the colours dulled, the edges blurred. A monument to good intentions.

Like the bathroom, the activity of his daily life was easy to trace. There was the recliner, a small space cleared amongst the rubbish on the coffee table, and the old TV — surrounded by eddies of paper, but standing clear of the surf. An unblinking eye, comprehending nothing.  

The apartment came to me in waves. The main room was disorienting and seemed to shift behind my back when I turned to take in some new detail. The kitchen brought both relief and sorrow. Such strange gratitude. Amongst the refuse, there was no rotting food. He had held a line against some part of his disintegrating ability to cope. A line drawn with gently-used takeout napkins, smoothed and meticulously piled knee high on the floor in front of the pantry, blocking access to the oven.       

The bedroom spilled over with undershirts so worn I could see through them. The sheets on the bed were unnaturally thick from lack of washing. Here too, the trail was clearly marked. Traveling to the lesser-used corners of the room, I found myself stepping over the rocky terrain of religious magazines, my pants catching on brambles of debris pushed to the edges of activity.

His dresser coughed to get my attention, and as I turned, it looked up at me from beneath hooded eyes. I remembered it, of course, and tried to greet it warmly — as I might a friendly relation — but we both felt embarrassed by the effort. As a piece of furniture it could still boast of excellent quality and condition, although fashioned in a style that will never come back. But the shirts hanging haphazardly from its generously proportioned mirror, the tumbleweeds of meaningless documents strewn across its six foot surface; these things weighed heavily upon its spirit. It shrugged in the direction of a disordered pile of change, and we shared a moment of sadness for all that was lost and all that had never been found in the first place. When I was a little girl, this dresser, proud of its dark walnut shine, held very little out to the world but the small towers of coins my father took out of his pockets each evening. Largest to smallest. Neat as a pin, never to be touched by small curious hands. My sister and I would sneak into my parents’ bedroom, unstacking and restacking them in small acts of rebellion. 

At the hospital, the nurses came in twice a day to “clean him up.” I was shooed out of the ward and into the atrium. I’d leave the room to the metallic swooshing of hooks and bearings moving smoothly along tracks anchored to the ceiling. Yielding yet impassable fabric walls of noncommittal yellow floating 10 centimetres from the floor. They fluttered like skirts, cut to a modest length, revealing only feet, ankles and a hint of lower leg. 

I was not allowed to help, not permitted to see. My presence in the room was not sanctioned. “To maintain the dignity of the patient.” My father’s dignity during his time of dying — his passing through vulnerability, his transition into helplessness — maintained by my absence. My non-participation.

Pandemic rules barred me from the family lounge. Hospice rules denied me the first set of chairs at its entrance. There the sign read, “Seats not available to family of hospice patients.” I spent most of my time at the hospital forgetting to ask for whom, exactly, these two comfortable and expensive chairs were intended. They sat, nestled under the mural of sunflowers bearing the official name of the hospice and perched next to the plaques thanking major donors. The director’s and financial manager’s offices right there. I suppose this is communication enough for most people.

I sat in the chairs once. I was tired and feeling mulish. I tried to look at the hospice vestibule like a visitor. A visitor not attached by invisible threads to a person dying somewhere beyond the thick double doors to the ward; not immediately involved in the hushed business of kindly supporting death and those living in its proximity. The green leather of the chairs whispered to me that I was underdressed. The polished wood and brass of the donor plaques pointed out that I live on social assistance, that my father had lived in subsidized housing. I didn't sit there again.

Necessity dictated that I walk several meters beyond the threshold of the hospice to the low cushioned benches lining one wall of the atrium. The fourth floor of the hospital seemed planned around these courtyards, crowned in tempered skylights. Long hallways connecting each. Veins and arteries directing the flow of people and equipment between organs of open space, fueled by sunlight. So while my father’s diaper was changed, while he was dressed in a clean shirt and deep creases of skin were wiped with cool damp cloths, I sat in the atrium and FaceTimed my sister on the hospital wifi.

Our father’s dignity was cordoned off in a distant room, contained more by mutual agreement and the assertion of authority than by practical barriers, while his daughters discussed his condition without him. An apparition of something better — something brighter — hovered in the sunlight of the atrium, but my sister and I avoided it. Preferring the familiarity of exclusion.

The dresser and I maintained a stilted, somewhat one-sided, conversation throughout the three days it took to clean and sort the apartment. It kept trying to offer condolences by way of clothing I might remember or a large manila envelope containing the records I needed to find. At one point, it produced a collection of school photos. My sister and me, frozen yet changing. Captured in small pristine rectangles cut from larger collections, suffocating beneath a mass of socks that may never have been worn.

At least he kept them, said the dresser, in a strange mixture of shyness and encouragement. But that’s exactly what a dresser would think is important. Near the end of the third day, when we had both grown tired, it wheezed a little as I pulled the last of the drawers from its belly. I sat on the bed, staring at what I found, uncertain.   

A single collection of typed yellowed papers stapled together in the top left corner, and approximately three hundred dollars in rolled coins. I looked to the dresser, hoping for some explanation, but it had nothing left to offer. Its dark face expressionless. Empty.

Most of the coins were swaddled in brown wrapping, but two of the rolls were held fast in plastic holders. I popped each coin out. Not one issued later 1978, the year of the first separation. The year he and the dresser began their lives together. Maybe other things had come and gone in forty-two years; the drawer pocketing, discharging, and exchanging contents like most drawers do. But the apartment just shook its head at that suggestion, bewildered by the scope of human frailty and imagination.

The papers were a long hidden relic of a neighbourhood T-ball league. Six pages of team rosters. On page four, my name and his were listed, player and assistant coach. A reminder that he had really tried once, pinned beneath pounds of currency prevented from circulating. Separated from the world by unused possibilities encased in walnut.

My father carried distance within him like a ghost body. No matter where he was, he was far away. The distance digested time and language and listening, like fungi break down organic material and absorb its nutrients. And when it didn’t have enough of everyday life to feed on, it would turn to obsession, fear, and eventually political conspiracies dressed up as religion.

After the stroke, the ghost body was gone. Erased, everything rendered immediate and tender. His world constricted to a collection of random impulses and occasional flashes of consciousness. The space left behind by the ghost body was filled with electric butterflies. Disintegrating, reforming and disintegrating again. He was easier to be with. 

---

Arria Deepwater is the winner of the 2022 Omnidawn Prize for Fabulist Fiction and the author of “Undertow,” published in In Between Spaces: An Anthology of Disabled Writers (Stillhouse Press). Arria’s work is informed by the deliciously fractured reality of living in a queer disabled body, often exploring themes of grief, authenticity and the spiritual longing for a healed connection between modern society and the natural world. Arria shares a home with her mother, on a beautiful lake in the unceded Omàmiwinini territory known as eastern, Ontario, Canada. www.arrideepwater.com