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

Michelle Filer

The Embers

Bixbirnum Septim 3, 746 

Dear Sir,                                                                                

I hope this letter finds you at the bottom of a bog, drowning in a river, or in the middle of a long lecture from your father. 

After your horse passed through our gates, I simply forgot your existence. It wasn’t until your last letter arrived that I was jolted from this happy state.

I burned it.

I have the honor to remain your obedient servant,

Ms. Maelin Gentileschi

~~~

Azundry Septim 7, 746 

Dearest M,                                                                             

My thanks for your warm welcome and your even warmer farewell. Your hospitality was all that a baker’s son could ever ask for. If you see our mutual friend, please give him my greetings and well wishes and do send word. Remember the concerns that we discussed.

For my next visit, I hope that you choose to wear that purple dress again. Not that I was looking anywhere untoward–certainly not–I had simply noticed the deep color of your gown and found myself entranced.

I have the honor to be your obedient servant,

X. Baker

~~~

Bixbirnum Septim 12, 746

Dear Mr. Baker,                                                                     

I wrote my entire name for a reason. Please use it.

Not that I should expect any better from you. I do remember a time when you used the description “toddler’s fare” for the masterpiece bodice I’d spent months embroidering. I don’t forget, as I’m sure you remember.

Additionally, since you are so eager to know, I did in fact run into our friend. Quite literally. He spilled his brandy on my best purple frock and ruined it, despite my maid Abra’s best efforts (condolences that it will not be at our next meeting, if that is to ever happen, which seems unlikely). However, he seemed just as interested in that dress as you. Then he asked of my father and the business. I told him shipping—even of Embers—was dreary and I had no wish to speak of it. He still seemed interested.

I have already written more of this than I can bear. Please write to me no longer.

Your humble obedient servt.,

Ms. Maelin Gentileschi

~~~

Azundry Septim 16, 746 

Dearest M,                                                                             

My thoughts are with your purple frock. I have sung the proper mourning songs and lit candles for its passing. I pray for a replacement that is its equal.

As for our friend, I hope he destroys no more of your dresses and inquires no more into your father’s business, for I know how that bores you, even if your father’s Ember business is the source of your many frocks and soft pillows. Many years have passed since I have been able to speak to our friend, but when you see him again, please do pass along my regards. I’m sure he would be happy to hear of me, though he has nothing left of mine to ruin.

My dearest M, I know that your father frowns upon our correspondence and our own friendship has frayed in the time since we spent our days in the same city, but I wish you to know how much I look forward to your letters and any kindness you bestow upon me. Our friend may be responsible for our separation, but it pains me that we haven’t been able to find another way.

I have the honor to be your obedient servant,

X

PS-Your memory is too long and wildly uncharitable! “Toddler’s fare” were the words of an immature youth unable to tell you how he really felt. I hope you also remember the many times I’ve complimented your embroidery in the manner your skill deserves.

~~~

Bixbirnum Septim 23, 746

Dear Mr. Baker,                                                                     

While it is surely no matter to you since you have refused to use my current name, I wish you to know that I am to have a new one. Our friend came to dinner last night under the guise of learning more about the Ember trade and expressing interest in my father’s personal collection of specialty Embers. I suffered through the long discussion of shipping regulations, directions for handling the most volatile Embers, and current major trade partners. I’m sure you’ll be proud of me for how I smiled through a tour of my father’s Embers encased behind glass (the tour has grown even longer since Father took you on the tour–there’s a new one that Father even says can allow you to transport yourself from one place to another), and I only pulled faces when I was sure no one but Abra was looking. But, as I should have guessed, our friend followed our meal by requesting a meeting with my father. As you know, Father has been unwell and has been speaking increasingly of my marriage. I am now to be Duchess Ferness. 

The engagement isn’t to be long. I will be spending the time at my father’s summer estate in the country, where we used to play as children. I know it’s been years since you’ve been back. I’m sure that it will hurt to see your father’s bakery under new ownership, but if you would like to see my purple frock’s replacement, I will be hosting social calls there every day midmorning. I should be arriving within the week. My future husband will be staying here in the city for a month to finalize business or some other dull endeavor. Anyone wishing to see me alone would do best to come before he returns to the country.

I have the honor to be your obedient servant,

M

~~~

Azundry Septim 27, 746 

My Dearest Almost Duchess,                                                             

A title! What a boon to your family. Though I would have called you a duchess if only you had asked.

Holo is undeserving of the great luck of having a wife such as yourself. His family could gain no higher honor than to have you join it.

I plan to be at your father’s house the day you arrive. Look for me then.

Ever your servant,

X

~~~

Gaxony Septim 29, 746

Xavier,                                                                                   

No, no, no. Don’t come. I just got word that he’s right now en route to my father’s estate. It’s not safe for you.

M

~~~

Gaxony Octus 5, 746 

Dear Mr. Baker,                                                                     

Showing up to kidnap me? With a weapon? What did you think was going to happen? It was lucky that my fiancé arrived when he did! I shake to imagine what would have happened otherwise. Imagine the marks that your pots and pans could have made to a blushing bride-to-be! And bringing your friends with you. How dare they accompany you with walking sticks and hunting knives during a long journey!

I hope your new accommodations are to your liking. Please let me or the Prison Commander know if there is anything that you require. The hangings of your men—or your well-armed henchmen, as my fiancé refers to them to the public—were well-attended and I took pains to ensure a respectful process. Their bodies were treated properly and returned to their families, which I hope shall be a comfort to you while you await your own trial.

I have bought a new purple frock. If you look for me in the gallery at the courthouse, you will be able to see it. Tell me how you like it.

I have the honor to be your obedient servant,

Ms. Maelin Gentileschi

~~~

Gaxony Dungeon Octus 5, 746

Dear Ms. Gentileschi,                                                

The trial quickly approaches and I will look for you, though I cannot imagine you would look anything less than the Duchess you are to be.

I grieve for my friends and know their blood is on my hands. My remorse thickens in the darkness of my cell. I have little hope of making it through this.

Please pray for me as I do for you, my dear friend.

Your Servant,

X

~~~

Oc. 9/46

X,                                                                                                                   

Abra has found a way to get this letter directly to you. She has friends with servants across the keep and agreed to do me this favor. Please destroy this as soon as you read it in case someone finds it later. 

I am so sorry that I could not warn you in time. I found out too late that Holo was returning early, and my messenger couldn’t reach you in time, but I should have found another way. I should have done more. Your friends’ blood is on my hands, not yours. 

And now Holo is trying to turn the town against you. Anyone who could possibly be chosen to be a juror is hearing tales of our childhood and how you and I were teased: The merchant’s daughter and the baker’s son. He is telling them that you came to see me to seduce me and take me away from my betrothed and to break my father’s heart. You know how everyone loves my father (well, that, or relies on him for employment). And it’s working. Of course, it also doesn’t help that it’s not far from the actual truth. But I fear that no one seems to remember what Holo was like as a boy—or maybe just never really knew—and now that he’s inherited his father’s title, his word is God’s.

But I will not allow his slander to work. I am trying to remind the town of how much they loved you by telling them your stories. Remember when you traveled all the way to Noxton so that you could escort Madam Pollix’s daughter through the forest? Remember how you arrived just in time for her daughter to say goodbye just before Madam Pollix passed? No one was as beloved as you! I pray that reminding everyone of you as a beloved gentleman will bring others to your side and erase the memory of Holo’s accusation that forced our separation. I thought at the time—and continue to believe—that everyone knew he simply accused you to divert attention away from himself. We’ll find out now whether I’m right.

I have no access to Father’s purse, nor can I walk through town as freely, especially with the armed guards who now follow my every step–they say it is to protect me from any other would-be-kidnappers, but really they’re just Holo’s spies–but still, I’m working.

I have also been reminding my father of how much he hated Holo and loved you when we were children. Remember how you made him laugh while he ate your father’s apple tarts? He sent me every week to buy more of your father’s date and pistachio pastries. I’m battling against time, but I’m sure he can be convinced. Father seems to grow weaker by the hour while Holo drops hints your trial is still weeks away. Father spends much of his time worrying about the business and telling me of the vultures circling to get their hands on it. He fears that the Embers will get pulled into the weapons trade, which he has tried so hard to prevent, and he hopes that the business will stay within the family or with someone he can trust. The Board will never approve of it passing to his daughter, and he talks of pushing up the wedding so it can pass to Holo. I beg him not to and tell him tales of the ways that Holo could use the Embers. I think he hears me. There is nothing Holo would love more than selling the Embers to arms dealers, and while Father laughed the first time I told him this, the more I tell him the more he listens. 

Xavier, my heart won’t stop racing, and my hands have acquired a constant tremor. I am worried for my father’s health while agonizing over whether he’ll move up the wedding. I am terrified for you, my love.

Oh, it’s nice to write those words. Not cloak them in some silly discussion of my purple dress. I still have the one I wore when you kissed me by the river. I’ve been thinking of that moment often, when the leaves were turning and you had just returned from the bakery. Your fingers were sticky with sugar.

I ache to say the words out loud one more time.

I will find a way, Xavier. I know you have no reason to maintain your faith in me after I let you walk into that trap, but I hope you will.

All my love,

M

~~~

Oc. 13/46

X,                                                                                                                   

As much as I have been working to spread your stories through the town, I have heard little indication that anyone is turning on Holo. No one seems inclined to believe that Holo sabotaged your apprenticeship at my father’s company or ruined your inheritance. I had been afraid of telling stories of Holo’s childhood, worried that no one would believe me. Why would anyone believe me when I tell them of how their Duke had forced us to watch as he beat that servant boy? If they’ve denied and dismissed so much, would they really care that your exile to Azundry is a result of Holo casting blame on you for what happened at the tavern? At the time, I was so sure that everyone saw through Holo’s pointed finger and had known that he had been the one to rob the tavern and leave the barman nearly for dead. Maybe they’ve forgotten? Either way, reminding them that Holo was irascible and volatile seems only to evoke shrugged shoulders. He’s a duke, they say. That’s the way dukes are.

But, as my friends are spreading our message through the town and Father is confined to his bed, I’m working on a new plan. I won’t write more details here, but Xavier, please know that I won’t give up. I won’t. I will not marry Holo, and I won’t see you dead.

Don’t give up faith.

Love,

M

~~~

Oc. 19/46

X,              

I have found a way. My father is on his final breaths, but he can still wield a pen. You don’t mind if he signs his company over to you? Abra has found a lawyer who promises that he knows a law that could save the Embers from Holo and you from the gallows. All we have to pay him with is an Ember, but Abra says no one is paying attention to my father’s collection and can bring him one herself. 

Would Holo care about killing you if he is no longer interested in wedding me? Would he want to be my husband if I no longer come with a company? No.

The lawyer says this will work, and I believe it.

M

~~~

Oc. 21/46

X,                                                                                                                   

Holo has set the time. Tomorrow, just before midday. But my plan is in motion, and the lawyer has done his work well. Look for me in the gallery. Look for the purple dress.

-M

~~~

Gaxony Octus 25, 746

Dear Duchess Ferness,                                                          

It is with great relief that I write to you on this day from a room that is not my jail cell. My window is open, and I can feel the sun on my cheeks. This change in my position may well surprise you after you witnessed my trial, as I’m sure you noticed that the evidence did not favor me. But I am here, alive, and well.

I also hear news of your wedding, and I pass along my congratulations. I know you were worried about the possibility of our childhood friend being your husband, but Holo seems to have grown into his role as duke and speaks with the voice of his people. I hope he understands the blessing of having you as his wife. 

I hope that the joy of your marital bliss will take the sting away from your father’s passing. He was a good man, and I mourn his death. I hope you find solace in your new husband.

I am with sincere esteem Dear Madam your affectionate humble servt.,

Mr. X. Baker

~~~

Azundry Novum 10, 746

Dear M,                                                                                  

I can’t sleep at night. I can’t focus. The guilt and shame have become a smog that I can’t escape.

Holo discovered your plan. He showed me your father’s signature that revoked Holo’s rights to your father’s business and turned it over to me. You did your job well. Even upon my death, Holo would not get a single cent of his own. But what need have I of money if I am dead? He offered me the chance to walk out of Gaxony alive if I signed to give him back the company. I was weak.

And I was the one who told him that he would want to marry you as soon as possible to prevent another one of your plots. When I try to sleep at night, I see the way he laughed as his lawyer handed me the pen and ink. Alone in the dark, I couldn’t imagine my life ending at the bottom of a rope. So, I signed, even as his laughter burned my ears.

I can’t take back what I have done, but I think of you often. 

I am with sincere esteem your affectionate humble servt.,

Xavier

~~~

Azun Nov 13/46

Oh M,                                                                                                

What have I done? Write back. Please, I need to hear from you and know that you’re alright.

X

~~~

Gaxony Fabbiam 12, 747

Dear Sir,                                                                                 

It is with great relief that I write to you from a room that I do not share with my husband. My bed is empty save for me as I lay stretched across the silk pillows. This change in position may well surprise you after you traded your freedom for mine and encouraged my husband to wed me the night after your trial. How devastating for a bride to be married before her flowers have arrived! How astounding to learn so clearly that my freedom was nothing more than a deal between two men. 

Sir, it was so gracious of you to share your congratulations with me after my husband had taken me to our marriage bed, an act to which I did not consent. It was also then that I learned of his new ownership of my beloved father’s business and how he was to use it to fill our duchy’s empty coffers, selling Embers to anyone who will pay despite the danger. I’m sure it will be a shock for you—though it was not to me—to learn that it was due to my husband’s profligacy that the duchy’s coffers are empty. It is a balm to my heart that you have given your best for this blessed union. 

I hope I will continue to receive your well wishes once you hear how I spent weeks dreaming of ever more elaborate schemes to rid myself of Holo only to use his sword to slit his throat while he slept. My schemes couldn’t survive my anger as he drawled on about the expansion of the Ember trade. I’m sure he didn’t think there was anything I could do to stop him so there was no harm in revealing his plans to me. I proved him wrong. 

My dear Abra helped me clean the blood from the floor and hide his body. I’m not sure my husband saw the blessing in being my wife, but at least you did!

Sir, I’m also sure that you have heard the story of the duchy-wide manhunt for my husband, who was nowhere to be found, only for an unlucky tenant to discover the remains of the duke’s head. I am certain you then saw headlines of an investigation that ended in my arrest. Only when they realized that I was carrying the next duke did they stay my execution, though I do not know how long they will let me remain out of my cell once they learn that I have ended my pregnancy. 

But you should know, sir, that as long as I have any control of Gaxony, you are not welcome here, and you should not plan on returning for I have drawn up a warrant for your arrest. 

I know you wrote your latest letter to share your guilt and shame, as if learning of them will dim my anger. But neither will keep me safe when they come for me; your feeble approaches to an apology will not send me back in time. 

I told you to have faith in me. 

I told you that I had a plan.

I still hold to the promise that I would not let you die, but I look forward to the day I get to see you rot in my dungeon with nothing but my ridiculous purple dress to keep you warm. 

I am with sincere esteem your humble and obedient servt.,

Duchess Maelin Gentileschi

~~~

Gaxony Fabiam 30, 747

Xavier,

Abra tells me not to write again, that you will see the news in the papers and that should be revenge enough. However, no paper could tell you what really happened, whereas I see it every night. The wedding gown, the blood, the guards. Maybe scratching out the details in this letter will relieve them from my eyes.

It was the Embers that saved me. I had convinced the investigators that Abra hadn’t been involved in Holo’s murder, but she always remained under suspicion. While she was able to continue working as my maid, she was no longer allowed to leave the keep, constantly under the eyes of the other servants and guards who clocked her every move. But at least she wasn’t sent to the scaffold. After the investigation, Abra lost most of her allies and friends around the keep, but she still had one ally in the staff who had helped me get access to the herbs I needed to end my pregnancy. But the poor boy, Matheus, was so terrified after that request, that we couldn’t ask him for anything else without feeling monstrous. 

So, we spent most days reading and most nights curled in front of the fire. Abra braided my hair while I embroidered a bodice I knew neither of us would ever have an occasion to wear. It would have been cozy if not for the constant thrumming fear and the gallows that awaited me when they found out that I no longer carried Holo’s baby. For weeks, nothing felt real to me but Abra’s fingers in my hair. 

But one night, Abra came back from the kitchens with news from poor Matheus. He reported that some man had come to the keep requesting an audience with me, acting desperate and wild. When the man had to be escorted from the keep, Matheus followed and watched him enter a law office looking disheveled and wearied. Alba told me that she thought it must have been the man whose work would have saved you. You remember–the lawyer whose knowledge of the law would have freed you and saved me from this fate. The man whose work you ignored. 

Well, Abra had asked Matheus to go back and talk to the man. Matheus had refused. He refused for a week before finally giving in and speaking with Mr. Caselden. This was the first time in months that I had felt any sort of hope, and I paced in front of the fire as I awaited news. To my surprise, when my door next opened, Abra wasn’t alone. The guards had allowed Matheus to enter and his was the first new face I saw in months. 

He told us of how Caselden had come to see me over the fear that the Ember we had given him in payment months ago wasn’t stable enough to be in the house where his daughters sleep. He wanted to be rid of it, but didn’t know how to do so safely. He had known my fear of being married to Holo and believed that the Ember could be of some use to me. I will never be able to repay Mr. Caselden, without whom I would likely have died in front of a jeering crowd. Because of him, Abra and I came up with a plan to get past the guards (I didn’t wait to see if they survived, though I pray they did), sneak down the servant’s staircase, and meet Matheus in a cupboard off the kitchens, where he waited with the Ember he had taken from Mr. Caselden. 

I had never held an Ember and didn’t know how to transform the substance into something useful. But Abra hadn’t been bored by business discussions or resentful of my father’s prioritization of Embers over me. She hadn’t tuned out the businessmen who came to dinner and talked shop throughout the soup course, the salad, and the entree. She had listened. 

In the dark of the cupboard, Matheus opened the lid of the box he’d used to transport the Ember to the keep and the small space lit with the warm glow of the blue Ember. Abra scooped the substance–much stickier and gooier than I had anticipated–out of the box. She held it a moment, staring and still, and I worried for a flash that maybe she didn’t know how to use the Ember and we would be stuck in the keep with more crimes to pay for. But then she smiled at me, tears in her eyes, and started twisting her fingers, the ooze following in loose spirals. She kept twirling the substance until it spun on its own, its color turning orange mixed with lines of gold as it twisted into coils that spun tighter and tighter until Abra suddenly brought her arm down in a slash. The movement took her off balance and she would have fallen to the ground if I hadn’t caught her at the last minute.

All three of us looked at the glowing gold line that hung vertically in the dark of the cell. In the middle, I could see a small opening and through it I could see something green. 

Matheus’s mouth was hanging open and I realized that mine was doing the same. But Abra wasn’t so shocked. Instead, she peeled aside the opening so it was large enough to squeeze through. I asked if Matheus wanted to join us. He blinked slowly, clearly struggling to pull his attention away from the Ember portal. Abra repeated my question, but the poor boy shook his head no, backing up against the door. He mumbled something about his mother. I repeated my question one more time, hoping he would change his mind, but he shook his head, firmly this time. He said that Abra had helped his little sister survive last year’s fever and he would have done anything for her, but he can’t leave his family. 

Despite my fear for Matheus and the blood on my hands, I nodded and took Abra’s hand. We walked through the opening. I don’t know how to confirm that his life wasn’t forfeit by coming to our aid, but I hold onto hope that he is safe with his mother and sister.

I won’t tell you where we landed but know that, for now, I’m safe from eyes that know my crimes. I don’t know how long that will last or how long I can bear the heaviness of those who I’ve hurt. But Abra helps me bear the weight and kisses me even knowing what I’ve done. She tells me that sometimes this is what it takes to survive. 

Do you have anyone to help you hold up the weight? I can’t decide if I wish you to be buried alive or to learn the relief of having a partner. 

Despite the days I miss the hours I spent writing you letters, mostly my anger is so wide and bright that it explodes from my ribs. Abra has tried to tell me that my anger is misdirected and Holo deserves it far more than you and he is now dead, but my rage feels endless and I have plenty for both of you. I wonder if I have space for forgiveness. I can’t feel it right now, but maybe someday.

As I write this, the candlestick is low and the flame is guttering, but my thoughts feel quieter. When I get into bed next to Abra, I will feel her fingers in my hair and her lips on my neck and the shadows will subside, if only for a moment. 

Farewell, Xavier,

Maelin

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Michelle Filer (she/her) lives with her dog and husband in Massachusetts where she teaches high school history, which means she’s very good at laughing at her own jokes and believing in the power of stories. This is her debut publication.

Michael Thériault

A Day of Grace

Teddy was a block from the house, off to get coffee for himself and Joanna, when he realized he’d forgotten his cap. He always wore a cap outdoors. A dozen of them, baseball caps and trucker hats, assorted in age and discoloration, awaited on pegs by the front door. He became aware of the cap’s absence not from the morning cool on the scalp exposed by his thinning black hair, but from a sensation that something had touched the crown of his head ever so lightly and briefly. His hand, going up, found nothing but the hair, no object to account for a touch, and no cap.

He decided against returning for one. The shouting was too recent. Left alone, Joanna might stew and grow angrier or might calm down. Staying away a good half hour, Teddy figured, gave better odds of calm.

To his surprise, after the touch on the head he felt not driven along by the argument, as before, but as though his thoughts ran down the sidewalk ahead. Something in the day had changed. He paid little attention to birds ordinarily, except to know their names, but now he heard from the clotted foliage of a Victorian box above him the chatter of twenty-three, and not just as mass of sound, but each bird’s vocalizations distinct. He looked up. House sparrows moved along and between branches, behind leaves, back into view. He told himself they must be searching for food, but his perception exploded this plain thought into myriad small gestures in service of the search: Cocks of head, flutters and angles of wing, openings and closings and half-openings of beak.

The three blocks to the café all passed in this multiplication, extension, new distinction of perceptions, as though he walked through rain and every drop pelting him was at once like and unlike every other. A clump of weed, Judean pellitory, clung to a low garden wall of native graywacke. He was sure that he saw sap flowing in its thin red stems and that he heard its quivering leaves’ stomata breathe. A minute displacement between the sides of a sidewalk crack revealed itself part of the movement of the land one side of it and the land the other, a movement extending to the San Andreas a few miles distant. Aswirl on the air were scents not just of eucalyptus, the closest of which was blocks away, but of kelp washed ashore, and this with Ocean Beach almost as far as the fault. Two ravens alternated elaborate caws, and Teddy heard very nearly speech, and understood it with no notion of how to say what he understood.

Thrilled, frightened, fortified, overcome, he attained somehow the café counter and greeted the dark-haired, ponytailed woman at the cash register. In her smile as Teddy ordered his latte and Joanna’s mocha with dollop of whipped cream he saw – How did he see? Maybe by a volume in her lips slightly greater than usual, a darker tone of carmine, a faint throbbing– long kisses scant hours before.

He had longer to watch the woman at the espresso machine. When with short strong brown fingers she pushed back behind her ear a wavy strand of dark hair that had strayed from her snood, the gesture recounted to him young children with her in a sequence of morning bus rides starting under streetlights. Two names, a boy’s and a girl’s – Diego, Celia – came to him; he had just enough Spanish to recognize them as names. Are these things I know? – thought Teddy – How would I know them?

His fingers trembled as he took the paper cups.

He saw ripples of heat traverse the cardboard.

The rain of perception sometimes harder, sometimes softer, he found his way home. Inside the front gate even the three cans for the City’s garbage and recycling service shone with a brilliance that their very ordinary colors – black for trash, blue for recycling, green for compostables –seemed hardly to accommodate. He saw now for the first time the graffiti inked down the side of the composting can. One in black clearly said “Lords.” He tried to decipher whether another, highly stylized, in rose, said “Boost” or “Beast” or “Best,” but suddenly he understood that it was all these at once, and the rose had the glow of fresh petals through which sunlight passed, and within “Lords” the black swirled as would, he thought, squid’s ink in green water.

He had to tell Joanna, to bring her to see, despite the morning’s argument, despite the curtain between them dark and heavy with so many arguments now decades into their marriage that he had begun to despair of opening it.

He gave her the mocha. “Thanks,” she said, not looking at him, the word hardly audible.

He knew no better way to say it; he said simply, “Come outside, please.”

She turned and narrowed her hazel eyes to examine him.

“Please,” he said again, and gestured toward the stair and front door.

In silence, she and her mocha followed him out.

He raised an arm toward the three cans and the graffiti. “What do you see?” he said.

She looked at them. Eyes again narrowed, she looked Teddy up and down. “I see,” she said, “all three need washing, and you’ll have to find something to remove what somebody scribbled there.”

To his astonishment, her failure or refusal to see what was so clear angered him not at all. He felt instead an ache for her senses to know what his now did, and this not from pity, but from a tenderness, an affection so complete that he wondered if it was even possible that he had ever felt it before.

“Is that it?” she said.

His lips moved without words. He had none. He nodded.

Sipping mocha, she returned inside.

They had shopping to do. This had occasioned the earlier argument. The supermarket was five blocks away. He didn’t consider the shopping list long. She disagreed. He’d said they should walk, for load-bearing exercise, good for aging bones, all that. By the time he was back with coffee and they’d finished it the sun would be higher, the morning more comfortable. She complained often about the spread of her hips, said she should do something about it. He’d known better than to address this directly. “It’ll do us both good,” he’d said, “and I’ll carry the heavy stuff home.”

But, no, this was what the car was for, to carry things; she insisted on driving.

After their coffee he started the car with her beside him and pulled it out across the sidewalk and past the Chinese elm with its thousands of leaves vibrating in desire for the sunlight, which was thickening into a kind of syrup. He drove slowly and with arduous attention to the task, because the world swarmed.

The supermarket had lately become a succession of disagreements culminating in angry silence in the checkout line: Low-fat or nonfat? Thin- or thick-sliced? Sweetened, unsweetened? Today he walked the aisles beside her and saw the touch of human hands in everything on the shelves, to the point of hearing – did he in fact hear it? – pulse through wrists, and no dispute entered his thought. The sensation peaked in the produce section, where the touch seemed less mediated by production and packing machines and the sound was unquestionable. Joanna held up in her left hand an artichoke as though expecting he’d dispute her choice of it, want one rounder or with milder spines. He saw also two leather-gloved hands, a knife, a field near Castroville, and heard the iambs of blood. He smiled

Then he noted the hand now holding the artichoke wore no wedding band.

His silence in the checkout line this time came not from the typical surfeit of anger, but from a mix of wonder at the chaotic variation of creases at the seams of the Mylar celebration balloons floating for sale nearby and of despair at what seemed a message of finality for his marriage of thirty-eight years. Joanna, too, was silent here as usual, but twice she turned to him as though an uncontentious trip through the aisles had left her with unfinished business, only now both times to see him and turn away, to appearance puzzled.

He drove them home safely despite the dance of a white plastic bag up the street before him on eddying breezes, to a music he could hear but not quite, in a choreography beyond human, for a thing not simply a thing.

She had laundry waiting to be done once groceries were put away. Awaiting him was painting the front fence. The work accorded perfectly with what the day had given him. The flow from each brush stroke into the rough, weathered surfaces of the redwood planks invited another brush stroke, and this another, flow succeeding flow, the surface over which each spread and into which it penetrated varying at once subtly and spectacularly from adjacent surfaces. Tiny moths and flies attached themselves by instances to the wet paint. He heard their cries. He understood their doom. He apologized to each as he plucked it from paint and gave it a merciful end against the dropcloth at the fence’s base.

In this way he reached lunchtime.

Joanna had prepared her lunch but not his.

From the refrigerator he brought sliced ham, jack cheese, two lettuce leaves, and a mustard jar to the kitchen counter.

The mustard jar was almost empty.

“The mustard jar is almost empty,” he said to no one, really, although Joanna was still at the kitchen table.

“I told you I was making a list this morning,” she said.

She had indeed told him, when she drank her mocha and he his latte and the brilliance of City waste cans and of urban calligraphy dazzled him. The hands in the supermarket aisles had amplified the dazzling.

“You see, that’s a thing I’ve been talking about,” she said. “Even in piddling little things we’ve stopped communicating. In big things….” She filled the ellipsis with opposing side-to-side waves of upturned palms.

He held too much to communicate just then.

“We’ve had thirty-eight years to figure this out,” she said. “We haven’t figured it out.”

He had never felt the mix of despair and exaltation he felt now. What was it they hadn’t figured out? It mattered completely; it mattered not at all. All the yeast that had given itself to the sponge of his slices of bread, the massed final breaths of innumerable organisms fixed in its pores! The quiet pleasure of the cows in the mechanical tugging of their teats and in the ruminant sounds of the herd up and down the milking shed! The triumphant power of the lettuce leaves – so frail in appearance and between teeth – as gales galloped from Monterey Bay up the Salinas Valley and over them! The hog that, trotting with others to the smothering chamber, squealed an ode to death!

“I’m making a sandwich,” he said. He meant this not to avoid response, but to state overwhelming fact.

Joanna, however, seemed to hear avoidance. She brought her plate and glass to the sink but did not wash them. Her back to him, she flung a dismissive hand up and left the kitchen.

He did not return to painting. Wind had come up and street grit and dead leaves of the Chinese elm flew and threatened to affix themselves to fresh paint. He went to the back garden instead.

He met the great mass of grays and dusky green of the neighbor’s Monterey pine, all windflung gesture, broad at scale of trunk and limb, tremulous and delicate at that of needle.

He stared long at it.

He pulled himself away at last to shovel compost from its bin into a bucket and spread it on beds and fork it into the sandy soil, but not the red wrigglings of earthworms nor the globular desperations of pill bugs kept him from stopping again and again to stare at the pine.

He escaped the pine’s grasp only when darkness in the crevices of its bark spread and thickened. It was time to make dinner.

He brought in sorrel and arugula to add to the refrigerator’s lettuce for the salad he would prepare. Joanna began a spaghetti alla carbonara. The intricate dance of two in a small kitchen, halts and pivots, pauses of knife blades, turn-taking at cabinet and refrigerator, at pot rack and sink and table was one they had perfected in the thirty-eight years, so that, despite its many possibilities for conflict, it was a time of day in which they never argued. He managed his part in the dance well enough this evening, despite the draw – powerful at moments – on his attention of the wildly disparate paths of the leaves’ tearing at his hands.

This truce had ended lately when they sat for dinner. Tonight, before she had twirled the first forkful of pasta, in fact with fork poised above bowl, she looked across the table into his eyes and opened her mouth as though to speak.

Not at all because of his expectation of argument, her hazel eyes made him ache.

Something in his must have stilled her. She lowered her gaze. She worked her fork.

Dinner passed with no sound but fork against bowl or plate and the infrequent slurp of a stray end of noodle. Teddy’s head was too aswarm for speech. Twice more Joanna did look up and open her mouth not as destination for food – once before reaching for oil and vinegar, once after a sip of wine – but both times her eyes met Teddy’s, again to quieting effect.

Together mute, they brought the empty dishes to the sink. He reached for a towel to dry, but instead of washing she caught his hand and led him back to the table. She sat and indicated the chair, not across the table, but next to hers. He took it. She took both his hands.

“You’ve been…,” she said, and paused.; “I don’t know what, today. Sweet, maybe. Or scared, or lost. You’d think I’d know, after so many years, but today you’re … different.”

Her voice was like the wind through the pine that afternoon.

“I’ve wanted to be angry,” she said, “maybe because that would make this easier. But I’m not angry. You’ve taken that out of me. It may be hard, but I can’t be anything but straight up. It’s only fair to you.”

“Your voice is like the wind through the pine,” Teddy found himself saying.

She sat back suddenly but did not release his hands, and he did not lean forward to the tug, so that their arms, joined and stretched, were taut almost as stays on a mast, guys on a tower. “What does that…,” she said, looking flustered. “You…,” she said. Then her face regained its usual firm cast. She again leaned forward. “The pine…. The pine is exactly what I wanted to talk to you about. I was in the yard a few weeks ago, looking across the fence at it, and the morning sun was beautiful in it. It was full of birds. It came to me, ‘I have no desire to share this with Teddy.’”

She squeezed his hands.

“I was fine with being alone,” she said. “And I realized, not just then, there, fine with being alone. Always, being alone.”

Teddy didn’t know what to say. Now it was her words that made him ache. He did not want her hands to release his. For a moment he detested everything about himself and despised this day, which seemed to have crippled him, deprived of him of any response; how could anyone live amid such unrelenting beauty?

Somehow the moment passed.

Still not knowing what to say, he said, with no intention of saying it, “The juncos, they were up and down, pine to the ground, back up, and every move, their tails flashed white each side and said something, signaled something, something specific, but I saw it was private, not for me, theirs. The chickadees stayed up above, hanging from twigs, and I saw upside-down, and same time right-side up, like them. A house finch up top was singing, red-faced, its voice was too big for it, it was a flute, a wild flute, the tree danced to it. But the tree didn’t dance to the trumpets, two of them, stubby-tailed, climbing in spirals up the trunk, nuthatches, you call them, nuthatches but they were Gabriels, announcing, I understood them: Something was being born, or reborn. There was one small bird, yellow stripe above and below its eye, yellow on its chest, some warbler, I think, and it moved so quick through the branches, and I tried to see why, and I saw it stitch together the world.”

Her eyes went up and down his face, back and forth, to his eyes, away, to them. He was sure he had confused her.

It came to him that he could happily live out his days with this in her, this sweet confusion, and in himself.

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Michael Thériault has been an Ironworker, union organizer, and union representative at various levels. He published fiction in his twenties, half a dozen stories in literary magazines, but abandoned it for decades to support first a family, then a movement. In his recent return, since 2022 his stories have been accepted by numerous publications, among them Pacifica Literary Review, Overheard, and Sky Island Journal. Popula.com has published his brief memoir of Ironworker organizing. He is a graduate of St. John’s College, Santa Fe and San Francisco native and resident.

Lucinda Kempe

Small Pink Cherries

“The hostess has hair like Marilyn Monroe,” her mother had said the first time they came to the restaurant followed by “How sad the way she died.” She shook the dark thought from her mind. She smiled. Her braces were gone. Tonight, she felt ready for change. She’d trained in from Long Island and drawn her long dark hair into an updo for the occasion. It was a night to celebrate—an eighteenth birthday dinner alone in Manhattan. “Go to a nice place, dress up, and celebrate your success with your own money,” her art teacher had suggested.

“I don’t have a reservation,” she said, giving her full name.  

“Such a pretty name,” said the hostess, a young woman a bit older than herself, “You must be Greek?”

“Yes,” she said, thinking of her mother. “I’m half Greek.”    

“It’ll be a ten-minute wait. You can have a seat at the bar.”

‘Not the bar!’ All that alcohol. She hated liquor. The bartender placed a napkin on the counter. “May I get you something to drink, Miss?”

Her mother had suggested she try a glass of wine. “Something sparkling,” her mother had said.

 “I’ll have a Shirley Temple, a little ice,” she said, ordering what her mother ordered to pretend she was still drinking.   

“One Shirley Temple coming up!” 

The mirror behind the bar reflected the diners at the tables. Six-thirty; the place was jammed. Plaster narwals and dolphins painted blues and greens frolicked on the walls; looking at them made her feel like a sea creature swimming in an aquarium. She thought about the artist who’d made them—what a cool job. In a few weeks, she’d be going upstate to school, on a scholarship, to study art and ceramics, but the thought was scary. How could she keep up with those competitive young artists? Last spring, her mother had accompanied her to an internship interview at MOMA, a job she hadn’t gotten, because it made her anxious. All those sophisticated city girls with Botoxed lips who talked fast and mingled as if they’d known each other forever, which they hadn’t. Then afterwards at the restaurant, her mother had made her feel foolish for ordering the pricey bottle of sparkling water, which was ridiculous because her mother was high maintenance.

“Your drink, Miss,” said the bartender. “Let me know how it is.”

The grenadine matched the red cherry. It was a pretty drink, and she sipped. The hostess glided over. Her eyes followed the lines of her legs. In her mind’s eye, she drew one leg black and the other white.

“A table has opened up in the back,” said the hostess.

“I’d like to stay away from the kitchen,” she said.

Last time, they’d gotten a table near the servers and her mother had complained.  

The hostess smiled approvingly. “It’ll be a bit longer then.”

A group of men in their late twenties, well-dressed but casual, entered the restaurant interrupting her thoughts. They barreled to a table in the middle of the room. Waiters flitted around them, pulling out chairs. Regulars. All three were good-looking and her stomach jumped. She’d had crushes but never had a boyfriend. She wasn’t sure how she felt about men. Tonight, certainly wasn’t about them.

“Miss, your table is ready,” said the hostess.

She felt the men’s eyes on her and the hostess as they made their way to a table near the French doors opening to the street. The menu was all in Italian. The waiter arrived with a small plate of hor d’oeuvres and a glass of champagne.

“Pink champagne courtesy of the gentleman,” he said, gesturing to the men whose eyes had followed her.  

“Excuse me,” she said, pointing to the glass, “Doesn’t it usually come in a different shape?  

“A flute. The gentleman asked for the coupe. He said the lady would require it.”

“Thank you. I’ll have the Bolognese,” she said.

‘The lady would require it? OMG, they’re too young to be boomers,’ she thought, suppressing a laugh. The shallow, saucer-shaped glass made the alcohol shimmer. Ignoring the drink, she nibbled the bread and tapenade. One of the men, tall with cobalt eyes, his shirt opened to the third button, pulled up a chair next to her.

“You remind me of Taylor Swift,” he said. “I hope you like the champagne.”

She blotted her lips with the napkin. He was handsome but so intrusive.

“Thank you, but I’m celebrating on my own,” she said, signaling the hostess who glided over as if she was skating on ice.

“Isn’t her hair divine? Just like Marilyn Monroe in Gegege no Kitarô,” she said, visualizing the vampire who’d been modeled after the original.

The man sprang up and returned the chair to its empty place beside her.

“Is everything okay?” asked the hostess.

“Perfect.”

She watched the hostess glid off. Her mother had been correct about how beautiful she was. Later, she’d render her in a fuchsia mini dress with one black and one white leg and a tiara of diamonds. After her mother’s comment about Monroe, she’d found a YouTube clip of the actress descending a staircase surrounded by suitors who she didn’t care for at all. It made her realize the power of agency.     

She finished eating and paid the bill with babysitting money. When she arose, she didn’t acknowledge the men, whoever they were. Exiting the French doors the wind kissed her checks; her tongue ran over her teeth savoring the absence of metal. Outside she hailed a cab and took it to Penn station.

Inside the restaurant, the bubbles in her drink like small pink cherries, tangoed to the surface and popped.

Original artwork, Milk and Honey, by Lorette C. Luzajic.

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Lucinda Kempe’s work is forthcoming in Salvage (China Miéville editor), The Summerset Review, SoFloPoJo, Unbroken Journal, Bull, Does It Have Pockets, Gooseberry Pie, New Flash Fiction Review, and Centaur, among other places. An excerpt of her memoir was short listed for the Fish Memoir Prize in April 2021. She lives on Long Island where she exorcises with words.

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Lorette C. Luzajic is a writer, artist, editor, and educator. She is the founding editor of The Ekphrastic Review. Her award-winning mixed media visual art has been collected in 40 countries so far. Visit her at www.mixedupmedia.ca.

Eirene Gentle

Cycle of violence

The teeth rose this morning the with the sun. Pale and gleaming out my window from earth that kept its secrets since the last time. ‘Peace is short,’ my mother used to say sipping tea in the ceramic cup taken from her neighbour’s kitchen after they disappeared. ‘You should marry.’ With my mother marry always followed peace. ‘It’s ghoulish drinking from your neighbour’s cup,’ I’d say but to her that mug was blood was already spilled, no hunger remained in it for us just as nothing hunts in the seconds after a storm. ‘I’ll take it to my peaceful grave’ my mother said, pincering it in skinny fingers and she did but I didn’t marry and the teeth rose today, less than five years after we scattered her ashes. Like her, they couldn’t settle. A broad-backed wind arrived as we shook the can of clumpy grey fragments into the roots of the fruit trees she sat under after she married dad. Before she witnessed the teeth rise and the sky rip its scars. ‘Terrible times,’ she said. The dead in living eyes, the feral in scared eyes, the flickering of the snake in the rest. ‘It becomes epidemic,’ my mother would say to the lip of her neighbour’s cup which heard all her secrets. ‘Something opens in eyes you’ve looked at your whole life.’ Like dad under a distant tree, packed in a neighbour’s car and taken as far as they dared with him slumped in the back all arms legs and malice because they couldn’t lift his body as high as the trunk. Bare and reeking something older than death. ‘Even your father,’ she said and I saw her wonder if I should marry after all, maybe I should just wait and take a neighbour’s cup at the next time of teeth. But she didn’t say it, she spent the rest of her life pointing at bird toes, the flick of toad tongue, the shape of clouds. ‘Choose carefully what you look at,’ she advised when I dug in the garden for carrots and potatoes. We’d sit in the cilantro breeze, my nails caked in the smell of warm, familiar dirt. I used to play in the tilled-up soil of the garden, burying myself until my little arms ran out. I’d swear that earth soft as a whisper had never known teeth but sometimes my mother had a presentiment, she saw me snapped by giant molars, crunched like the shell of a potato bug. ‘Get out, get out’ she’d scream and rip me from the garden bed as if I was ripe. 

Skins

It happens sometimes that a room full of people turn into animals in front of me. A normal room until the elegant slim-skirted woman in the corner stretches skinny legs, shrinks her pointy head and she’s a heron. A barrel kind of man, thick, is a bear. A speck of an old lady, all bright red lips and tropical fabrics blooms into a parrot and spends the rest of the afternoon asking after the weather like a personal friend. I was so bored.

Do you think it’s real?

You always say things like that. Isn’t it your job to say? Anyway the point is if I’m losing my mind it’s fucking embarrassing, 1+1= banal. The stocky guy didn’t turn into an egret or the skinny woman a rhino, nothing contrary or imaginative, they just slip their skin like they’d been cosplaying. Maybe we’re all pretending to be human but some of us forget.

Do you think you’re real?

There you go again. I’m just saying some of us don’t peel off human like pants or stand on one leg or sleep upside down or whatever it is we’re supposed to naturally do. Anyway I’m usually in a comfortable room when it happens, a little hot, sometimes there’s wine, sometimes a lot of wine, not enough wine if you ask me and anyway we’re all just sitting there bored saying the usual stupid things and they start dissolving into ferrets and foxes and just once, a frankly spectacular white horse with black patches and a mane like winter wheat. Then I go home and stare at the mirror, cheeks hot, eyes smudgy but still me. I look within the lines of myself to see what I must be inside. A pig? Falcon? An ocean dweller so deep we don’t know its name? Just me. Tragic.

Do you want to be someone else?

Not someone, something, are you even listening? Or maybe you think I’ve lost my mind. Tell me I’ve lost my fucking mind. Give me a prescription, wild drugs, the kind you can’t buy on the street, or a long retreat somewhere in the trees. Is there a tree hospital somewhere, high enough you have to fight to keep your balance like on a ship and the sound of wind through the needles is so constant you can’t sleep when it stops? Don’t send me somewhere deciduous, all that budding is exhausting. Let me ask you something. Would you bud again if you could? Would you be born again or leave it at this life sitting in that worn out chair against the window so I can barely see you? I check 40 times a day hoping for something other than this ridiculous body and your ridiculous questions. Come to think of it this room is pretty comfortable. Anyway it never happens. So I take more pills. Give me more pills. Have you ever been in love?

Are you in love?

Nice try, dear doctor, I’m asking you. If you’ve been in love you know what it’s like to wait. Checking for texts, scrolling social media for what they don’t show you, always wondering if they’re ok, if they’re alive, if they’re having fun without you or plotting to leave. It’s excruciating. I can’t see your face, just nod or shake your head or something or I won’t think you’re human either. Do creatures fall in love? If you were a ferret would you know what I’m talking about?

Lauren.

What? Are you checking it’s still me? Maybe you see something. Look closely. Just under the bones, do I look like a deer? Flamingo? Or something inelegant but cheerful. A capybara? Give me something. Or give me something to black me out. I get stomach aches. I want feathers or to roll around in my own fur. It’s not quite hot enough. Can you turn the heat up again? Can you tell me a story? Start with once upon a time and end before it finishes. End where I turn into the wolf and the sun leaks. You like happy endings, right? Isn’t that why we’re here, to reveal your true nature?

---

Eirene Gentle writes lit, mostly little. Based in Toronto, Canada and published in cool places like The Hooghly Review, Litro, Jake, Maudlin House, Bull, Leon Literary, Ink in Thirds and coming soon to Flash Flood and Neither Fish Nor Foul. 

Patricia Q. Bidar

Recovery I

Recovering from foot surgery, Oscar’s mother is always fucking home. In the recliner or her desk chair. Parked before the television. Always near the door and ready to siphon Oscar’s life force with her lonely inquisition. His girlfriend has bailed, a fact he blames on his mother. Who worries about Oscar’s drinking, his solo nature, his unfashionable glasses, his driving, his position at the firm, his pallor. She frets, she says, he’d be an Eleanor Rigby.

After Oscar’s shift, he hustles past, praying she’s asleep. Nothing doing. She’s animal alert to his scent. In thirty years she’ll still be in that recliner. All her body parts patched and replaced in turn. Her and his clear and green and brown bottles mingled in the bin. Oscar, having forgotten trash day, seething in his dark room. Her, just outside. The television’s undersea light animating her face as she darns their socks.

Recovery IV

After an angry dealer tried to run him down, Maire’s son was left with a broken foot and splinted soft dressings. That stifling summer, Casey lived in a studio atop a steep stairway. Threw his crutches down the stairs and followed them on his butt, step by wooden step. He wouldn’t stay away from his drug addict friends. Wouldn’t let Maire help. The city bus knelt to take him where he wanted to go.

Four years later, after surgery on her own left foot, Maire, stoned, listens to true crime podcasts into the night. Behind her recliner the window is open exactly an inch. Pain pills, snacks, and lotions are within reach. A ten-week convalescence. Club Med! she calls it online. Young Casey has a girlfriend now. The bill that will bankrupt Maire has not yet arrived. It waits, fat in its envelope, in a canvas Post Office trolley cart three cities away. After 63 years, Maire believes time is finally on her side.

The Moment We Almost Love, We Begin Dying

How charmed he’d been after their first date, when Lana kissed the top of his motorcycle helmet after saying good night. Another time, riding on the back, they’d seen a shoe in the road and he’d said, A shoe, and Lana’d said, Gesundheit. The time his futon had collapsed with their urgent congress. The waffles they made in the morning. And then the descent: that long night of tequila shots at the no-name bar next to the Roxie. Lana’s idea was a night out, some fun. Their bond was coming apart, she knew. It wasn’t his scene. She’d excused herself to hurry a cigarette near the toilets, but his eyes had found her in the mirror behind the bottles of spirits. Lana had a feeling then like earth was abandoning her. It was too late to go home. Too late to have The Conversation. They’d gone back and, in the morning, had sex in his dirty shower both pretending to like it, both playacting their orgasms. And then those lost, lost weeks began, where most of Lana’s brain was occupied with thoughts of him, feverish calculations about where he could be. This was all decades ago now, but Lana can abandon earth by snap-summoning her old lover’s newspaper and green onion smell. The unkind expression on his face that night in the mirror behind the bar. His workman’s hands and the way they had held her.

---

Patricia Quintana Bidar is a native of Los Angeles, with ancestral roots across the American Southwest. Her work has been widely anthologized, including in Flash Fiction America (W.W. Norton), Best Small Fictions 2023 & 2024, and Best Microfiction 2023. Patricia is the author of Wild Plums (ELJ Press) and Pardon Me For Moonwalking (Unsolicited Press). She lives with her family and unusual dog outside of Oakland, CA. Visit patriciaqbidar.com

Jody M Keene

How to Take Your Dad to Rehab (the Springsteen Version)

The August you start middle school, your mom gets a new job at the chicken-feed plant two towns over—six am to six pm four days a week. They tell you after burgers one night as you’re rinsing plates for the dishwasher. “So that means Dad’ll be taking you to and from school now,” your mom says. Her voice is cheerful, like it’s your birthday or Christmas morning instead of a random Thursday. She smiles, a flash of teeth, and her eyes never leave your dad’s face.

“What do you think about that, my little Cass? My little Cassi-dee-dee?” He snaps a towel at your knee, and you squeal. You love your dad. But (and you would never say this out loud) his truck is Frankensteined together with different-colored panels, rust holding them all together. There’s a hole in the floorboard that makes the cab blazing or frigid depending on the season, and if it’s raining, dirty water churned up by the tires gets all over your shoes. Beer cans rattle in the bed and roll out from under the seat and through the hole in the floorboard. Even Amber thinks his truck is social suicide, and she rides a hot-pink Huffy with a banana seat and wicker basket to school.

But (and you would never say this out loud) you’ve heard the low voices of your mom and dad before you get up, before you go to bed, all weekend. Your mom needs this job. Your family needs this job. So you lob a loose waffle fry into the trash and say “cool,” and go back to scraping ketchup off the plates.

You settle into a rhythm, a routine. Mom sneaks in and plants a kiss on your hairline before she leaves, then you have frozen waffles or cereal out of a bag for breakfast in the near dark; the Hot Ones 97.4 morning show blasts on the boom box in your room while you get ready. You’re pretty sure Dave, the morning DJ, is a good kisser. Anyone with a voice like his must be. Amber says her aunt dated him when they were in high school and he was too handsy. You picture an octopus with a boy’s head and full lips. “Got a new Pearl Jam track coming up soon,” he says, “but first, over to Damon for the weather report.”

At seven-fifteen on the dot your dad knocks and says, “Ready to go, my little Cass? My little Casserole? My little Cassette Tape?” He grins and tries to mess up the bangs you spent the last thirty minutes fixing. In the truck, he puts a tape into the tape deck, and you listen to side A the whole way to school, side B on the way home. That first year he played Bruce Springsteen a lot. “He’s only the best goddamn artist to ever live,” he says every time, his eyes glassy, “and you can quote me as long as you don’t say the swear.”

One afternoon in November he throws the truck into park in the middle of county road 475. He opens his door and pulls you across the bench seat since the passenger door doesn’t open anymore. “What are you doing?” you sputter. There are no other cars in sight, but still—you’re in the middle of the road.

“Come on, dance with your old man, my little Cassidy.” The next song starts, Bruce singing about his father’s house. You dance in the middle of the road, half embarrassed, half thrilled to be swaying like this in the open, your dad spinning you out and bringing you back again, his hands rough and his breath sweet. You laugh, and he laughs, and Bruce sings about shining beacons, hard and bright. You dance until the song ends then climb back into the truck.

Twenty years later, you pull into the parking lot of a Chinese buffet outside Austin. Your Jeep Grand Cherokee is only a few years old but new to you—leather seats, heated steering wheel, the works. Amber’s husband gave you a great deal on it. “Kick the tires and light the fires! You’re going places in this one,” he hooted. He kicked the tires there on the lot. You’d already written the check for the down payment.

Your dad pecks at his phone in the passenger seat trying to find the Oklahoma Sooners football score. You close your eyes to keep from rolling them at his hunt-and-peck routine. “How’s Chinese?” you say, and he nods, already pulling his cigarettes out of his shirt pocket as he opens the door. You sit behind the wheel and watch him light up, one hand blocking the cheap gas station lighter from the wind. He closes his eyes on the inhale, and you suck in a long breath with him. You shoot a quick text to your husband—“Made it to Austin, getting food”—and check the maps app again. When you look up, he grinds the rest of the cigarette under his shoe.

You have been here before. Not this parking lot, not this Chinese restaurant, but (and you would never say this out loud) this place of optimism cut with resignation; the place where you sit with the knowledge he won’t stay, won’t change, won’t admit it’s long past due—all of it warring with the simple hope that this time he means it.

Inside, you hand him a plate from the end of the buffet. He takes it in both hands and looks down at it. “Your mom used to dish me up. I don’t know what I like.”

This time you can’t help it. You roll your eyes. Your mother has been dead for nearly two years now, enough time for grass to sprout over the mound of dirt she’s under, and more than enough time for your father to learn how to make his own damn plate. You love your dad, of course you do, but some days you wonder why your mother put up with him for so long. “You’ll be fine. Look, there’s the sweet and sour chicken. And fried rice.”

At the table he rubs his hand up and down his thigh, callused palm rasping on the denim, his foot in constant motion. He eats with quick bites and drains glass after glass of unsweet tea. While he waits for you to finish, his hand flickers up to the pack of cigarettes in his pocket and back down, a bird startled into flight. Finally, you say, “Go smoke. I’ll pay and be right there.”

You’re about to turn out of the parking lot when the song on the radio ends. “It’s Drivetime Johnny, kids,” the DJ says, “with a deep cut from the living legend himself, Bruce Springsteen.” The opening chords spin out from the dash, and your hand drops from the wheel. Drivetime Johnny. An octopus with a boy’s head. A truck with holes in the floorboard. Your mother’s lips as she whispers a kiss on your forehead. You put the Cherokee in park and look over at him.

You crank up the volume. “Dance with your kid?” you ask, and his face transforms, twenty years of hard drinking, hard living gone for a second.

“With my little Cassi-dee-dee?” You leave the Cherokee running where it stands and meet him at the front bumper. He takes your outstretched hand, puts a hand on your waist. Cars shoot down the access road; cars turn in and out of the parking lot; people go in the restaurant and come out; you don’t care. He spins you out and brings you back as Bruce sings about loss and regret, and you sway together in the parking lot until the song ends. His hands are brittle now, his breath bitter.  You laugh, and he laughs, and (you would never say this out loud), maybe there’s a chance after all, for both of you. Maybe this time it’ll work. Maybe this time will be the time that matters.

---

Jody M Keene is a writer with a healthy stack of rejections living in Arkansas with her family. She previously worked as managing editor for scissors & spackle literary magazine, and her work has been published in or is forthcoming from Flash Fiction Magazine, JMWW, Emerge Literary Journal, Cleaver Magazine, and Peatsmoke Journal. She is a Best Microfiction and Best Small Fictions nominee and can be found on her website, jodymkeene.webador.com.

Joan Slatoff

Cupcakes

“Kate. Get in here.” Prunella’s voice trickles from the kitchen. “You have to see this.”   

After class and a grueling rehearsal, vaguely aware my housemate is back from work, I sink further into the lumpy living room sofa. Knowing Prune, it’s probably an animal video on her phone; puppies tumbling over each other perhaps. 

“Get in heeere!” Prunella’s voice rises into an annoying shriek. Uh, no, not a puppy video.

Using as little energy as possible, I flop off the couch, left arm, shoulder, and knee catching the floor first, then roll onto my back, ignoring the gritty crumbs of forgotten meals, a rubber band, some gum wrappers, and a few long strands of Prunella’s blonde hair.

“All right, all right.” I curl to the side, plant my feet, and rise up vertebra by vertebra, my head gracefully coming up last. I’m a dancer, it’s how I get to standing. Brushing off the lint, I step into the kitchen.

At first, I don’t see anything alarming. No dead body, no snake, or anything like that. Then I realize. The counter is spic and span. No dirty dishes in the sink. Sponge and dish soap neatly placed. Cupboard doors closed. One beautifully decorated cupcake in the center of the rickety kitchen table.

“Ana’s been here.” I say, unable to tell if the tickle in my stomach is happiness or fear.

“Yeah.” Prunella pulls on her hair so ponytails stick out on each side of her head, reminding me of a blonde Pippi Longstocking. Her eyes look like a scared rabbit’s. “She must have come in while we were both gone. I told you we shoulda changed the locks. God.”

“Maybe this is a peace offering. Or...or a plea to come back. Or just…” I pick up the cupcake. An elegant squiggle decorates the top; the kind you see on high end chocolates.

“Don’t eat it. Could be poison.” Prunella reaches for the cupcake, but I keep it safe in my hand. 

I picture Ana at the stove, hand on one hip, stirring a chocolate ganache. Humming some tune so quietly it seems like a hummingbird vibration coming out of her rather than a song.

“Don’t worry so much, Prune. It’ll be okay.” I say. Though I’m not sure of anything except that I intend to eat that cupcake. I take a bite. Fresh orange flavor and rich dark chocolate, my favorite. 

“Ooooh,” I gobble the rest, and gnaw every last bit off the paper wrapper.

Prunella gives me one of her looks. The one that says ‘Okay for you Kate. Whatever’.

~ ~ ~                   

Ana was our housemate until three months ago. Skin smooth as honey and the color of it too, the darker buckwheat variety. She is beautiful. More than normally so, with violet blue eyes, perfectly proportioned body, expressive fingers, and fluffy hair. Her perfume smells clean and expensive.

September, when she first moved in, we couldn’t believe someone so smart and gorgeous would want to live with us. We knew she was from California, but not much else. She never talked about her family. Obviously, money was not a problem. Cashmere sweaters, and not the kind from the thrift shop. Handbags made of leather, soft and smooth as butter. Real pearls. Not only that, but she baked incredible desserts. She was, maybe still is, a PhD student in philosophy at Columbia.

Prunella and me? We’re everyday kind of girls. We grew up neighbors in a New Jersey suburb; small lawns with decks out back, malls, and chain restaurants. When we both ended up in the city, me to explore the contemporary/modern dance world, Prune to escape her parents, it was natural that we ended up sharing the rent. Of course, it was Prunella who found our apartment and figured out all the details. She’s great at that kind of thing. Me, not so much.

Manhattan is expensive. When Ana showed up to our ad for a third housemate, we mouthed ‘wow’ to each other, and that was that.

Mostly, the three of us got along great. Ana was busy with school, while Prunella waitressed and spent her money on clothes and the bar scene. Dance takes up all my energy, so when I’m home, I need down time to rest my aching body. None of us tended to have visitors at the apartment. Home was a relaxing nest, I think for all of us.  

We had a little ritual on Tuesday and Friday nights where we drank cheap wine and watched Jeopardy. Ana never called out the answers but we suspected she knew a good proportion of them. When Prune or I yelled out the (rarely) correct answer, she would give us a deferential nod.

We always sat in a row on that old lumpy couch, me in the middle. Ana would sip from one of the delicate wine glasses she had bought to enhance our mismatched kitchenware.  Prunella and I took turns with the wine bottle. I wanted Prune to like Ana. It’s not that she didn’t, but I think she resented Ana’s obviously wealthy, cultured background. So she always made a point out of drinking from that wine bottle. I felt caught in the middle. Part of me wanted to reassure Prunella, so I shared the bottle. But the other part of me figured I should be honoring Ana’s contribution to our household by using one of those dainty glasses.

One Tuesday Ana said, “I made a peach melba cake. Would you guys mind tasting it?”  She’d bobbed down and up in a tiny curtsy.

Would we mind! Ana always acted like we were doing her a favor eating her unfailingly tasty concoctions.

“Ana,” I gestured towards my perfect slice. “That looks gorgeous. Like a raspberry peach sunset.”

“Thanks.” Ana smiled. Her eyes crinkled in a happy way, like when someone gives you a present. Though she was the one doing the giving.

“Well, I guess, I’ll try it,” Prunella had said with a sniff.

Ana raised one of her shoulders almost imperceptibly. As dancers we’re trained to be super aware of our shoulders. Our backs must be strong; our shoulders lowered, and relaxed at all times, so Ana's tension was obvious to me.

“Broke hundred fifty in tips. Fifth straight night!” Prunella stamped through the door one night and slapped her apron down on the kitchen table so we could hear the heaviness of her take.

“Nice.” Ana bowed her head in appreciation, hands together as in a prayer. 

“You don’t learn to dodge drunks and keep track of thirty-five orders at once in college. Like tonight? One lady changed her mind five times and ended up demanding eggplant parm without the parm, sauce on the side. And salad with extra cheese! If she likes cheese so much, why can’t she just get it on her eggplant?”

“Jeez,” I said.

“You said it,” said Prunella, and she dashed off to shower.

“Why does Prunella do that job, if it’s so annoying?” Ana’s face looked genuinely perplexed. 

“Lack of options,” I replied.

“I know what that’s like.” Ana stood up and quietly disappeared into her bedroom.

Once, Ana and I went to a Hitchcock movie; Rebecca. She’d grabbed my hand during the suspenseful parts and I sensed her body shaking. It had felt good to be there for her. I’m not normally the solid sort, like Prunella is for me. 

Ana adopted a Tabby cat a month after she moved in. She named him Cat.

Prunella wanted to know why. “How about Mulberry, or Tawny Boy, or even George?”

Cat strolled to the center of the room and crouched in a relaxed but attentive position as if to say I know I’m the center of this discussion. And I don’t care. But I will observe.

Ana said, “I’m trying to pare things down to their essence. Cat. Just look at him. That’s what he is.”

Prunella shrugged and meandered off.  

I thought the name was so cool. Carefully, I crept up to Cat and sat cross legged about a foot in front of him so I could feel his being-ness.

“Cat,” I said.

His eyes met mine. I don’t know what he got out of it, but I felt some kind of human-cat communion going on. Then Cat did a graceful turnabout and leapt onto Ana’s lap. I admired his swift smoothness of movement.

Ana ran her hand through his fur and stared into the distance. The two of them stayed like that for quite a while. Like statues, except for her hand passing over and over him like a mechanical doll. I reverted to my usual supine position, watching, but not watching, the girl and the cat.

Towards the end of a muggy midsummer day, it was just me and Ana at home. I comatosed on the couch in my usual position. Smells of the city floated into the apartment; garbage aromas mixed with unidentifiable factory burnings and grilled hot dogs from the corner vendor.

“I call this a heavy gravity day,” I said.

Ana flipped through a cookbook nearby. Or maybe it was a philosophy text. “Heavy gravity day?”

“A day where you can’t move; can’t get it together to even get dressed.” Though of course, I had been dressed and gone to dance. But still, the kind of day where you feel drained.

“You wouldn’t even know.” Ana continued turning the pages.

“What do you mean?”

“I was sent away, you know. Twice.

“I don’t know.” I sat up and looked at her, but she seemed far away, gazing straight ahead, maybe into her past. Maybe somewhere else. She was talking, but not to me.

“Didn’t help. Wasn’t needed. What do they know.”

I figured she was talking about something like a nervous breakdown but didn’t think I could ask more. Maybe I should have taken the opportunity. Her skin had looked translucent; I could almost see the nerves inside. For some reason, I handed her a pillow. She smiled, put it down gently, and went to the kitchen with Cat following.

“What’re you making today?” I called.

“It’s about the cooking,” she’d said.

Her response confused me. I slumped back down on the couch, unsettled.

Then, “Tablecloth,” she’d said one Tuesday evening. And she’d put a white lacy one on the kitchen table. Laid three places with a neatly folded napkin under each fork. It was our usual ritual day, but this was not our usual ritual.

“Genoise.” She set out a four-layer cake with white icing and fresh raspberries. We oohed and aahed and dug into our slices.

“Did you make this up, or was it a recipe?” I’d asked with a mouthful.

“Egg.” she said.

“Egg?” Prunella pushed on her temples with the back of both wrists, hands flipping out like funny ears, eyebrows raised.

Ana produced a brittle smile and stood up to collect our dishes. “Sponge,” she said. I didn’t know if she meant sponge as in clean up, or sponge as in making a cake.

Maybe our lax ways got to her. I could see the point of the tablecloth. Me, standing in front of the open fridge, plucking leftover noodles with my fingers and calling it dinner. Prune and me, eating in front of the tube more usually. Doesn’t everyone? But from that night on, Ana stopped using sentences.

Anyone can lose it for a moment. At first, we figured she needed some time. A week of single words and we started to freak out a little. Prunella reacted by rolling her eyes whenever Ana was around.

For myself, I’d made a list of her words. I wanted to understand. I wondered if there was a pattern or a hidden meaning. Or possibly, and this was the most hopeful scenario, it was an experiment for her thesis. Maybe she was checking out our reactions. I didn’t really believe this though.

River. Dumpling. Pie. Beard. Under. Queen. Pillow. Bed. Frangipane. Marigold. Feather. Joker. Wild. Infinity. Grape. Black. Snow. Elephant. Shoes. Yeah, I could read anything into a word. But without a clue, it would be an exercise in hopeless speculation. The words rarely seemed to have anything to do with the situation at hand.

Once I tried to act out the word in dance to see if I could get a response. I was coming out of the bathroom and Ana was on her way in.

“Feather,” she said.

I held an invisible feather in my fingers, as I pretended to brush her with it, while dancing around her in a pas de bourrée. She stood still, eyes downcast, arms limp at her sides.

“Feather?” I asked.

She glanced at me and continued into the bathroom.

On a Tuesday morning, Prunella and I sipped our coffee as Ana left for campus. I could feel Prunella vibrating as if containing a small bomb. The surface of her drink shimmied as she held her cup in front of her nose.

“Okay, Prune. What happened?” I poured myself a second cup, though scrambled eggs would have been a better way to get through morning dance class.

“She’s got to go.”

“Prune?” I covered my suddenly quivering lips with my hand.

“Last night? On my way to work? She followed me step for step. I could feel it. Didn’t come up beside me. Nothing. Every now and then I’d stop and look behind me and she’d stop too. Just looked straight ahead. Step for step, Kate. The whole four blocks.”

My first thought was that it could have been interesting choreography, but Prunella was really upset. And yeah, maybe I would have been too.

“Did you say anything?”

“I told her to cut it out. No reaction. When I kept going, she continued the same way as before. Felt prickles all up my back.”

“Then what?”

“Nothing. I went in to work, and didn’t see her again until this morning.” Prunella slapped down her coffee cup, spilling a drop. “You hear her before she left? ‘Raincoat’ she said. And look out there. It’s sunny.”

“Raincoat? So what. And I don’t know, Prune. She needs help. We can’t ask her to leave. Just like that.”

“Well then we’ll call her parents. We can get the number from her phone.” I could see that Prunella was determined to ‘do something’ about Ana. Me, I didn’t know. I wanted to do something too, but I didn’t want to go behind Ana’s back. And I didn’t want to lose her as a housemate and friend. Maybe I didn’t want to give up the baked goods either. We needed the rent money too, but that didn’t really figure into my thinking.

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea. Anyway, how would we get her phone?”

“I dunno. Okay. I know. It’s always in her bag, right?” Prunella smirked in the way that she has when she’s about to pull one over on someone. I think she actually enjoys that sort of thing. Not me. “So, when she comes back from class tonight. Or wherever she goes.”

“She’s going to class Prunella M. Davis.”

“I don’t see how you know that Ms. Kate J. Gullible. Anyway. When she comes in, you call her into the kitchen with a baking question. You’ll have to start cooking something a little complicated and then come up with needing at least five minutes of cooking help. Maybe a soufflé. Then I’ll pull her phone out of her bag and check her contacts real quick.”

I folded my arms and spread my legs into second position. Sometimes I need a strong pose when dealing with Prunella. It’s not that I didn’t agree with her about needing to get help for Ana. But I wasn’t comfortable with her methods. Or maybe her motivations.

“Really Kate. Sometimes a parent has to step in.”

“I don’t think her parents would be all that helpful. And who are her parents? She always talks about some ‘they’. Like when she told me they sent me away”. Again, I covered my mouth with my hand. I hadn’t told Prunella about that conversation.

“What?” Prunella pushed her head forward like a snapping turtle. “When did she say that? You mean like a loony bin?”

Cat stalked into the room and rubbed his whiskers against my leg. I had the feeling he was telling me to protect Ana. “She didn’t say exactly, but whatever it was, she said it wasn’t needed.”

“And you believed her?” Prunella’s eyebrows went up.

“Yeah, no. Yeah.” I picked up Cat and buried my face in his soft warm fur.

Prunella looked at me with a calm eye. Like she knew me better than I knew myself.    That night, it was our usual, the three of us on the couch, drinking our wine and chipping away at a pan of Ana’s salted caramel brownies, Cat on Ana’s lap. She’s fine, I thought. You can’t cook like that and not be fine.

“White,” Ana said. “White, white, white!” She wasn’t pointing or giving any kind of clue to what she was saying. Her body bounced off the seat with each word, and she said the words sharp and loud, as if calling out a danger like fire.

Prunella had scooched away from her. “Hey hey hey.”

Ana turned her head towards Prunella, then robot-like, swiveled to me, the violet in her unmoving eyes dulled to a dusty mauve. I got chills.

“Pat kitty. Pat Cat,” I said to her.

For a millisecond I’d actually thought we were making progress, because she lowered her head to look at Cat. Animals can be therapeutic I’ve heard. Bring someone down to earth from where-ever they’ve flown. But she didn’t connect with Cat. Not at all. She stood up like Cat wasn’t even there. Cat, being a cat, landed gracefully on his feet.

She walked stiffly to her room. We heard soft sobs, then pitiful whimpers, behind the closed door.

“Should we go in? Knock?” I whispered.

Prunella shrugged. “Crying is good. It’s something. It’s normal.” And she stalked into her bedroom, then came out again. “But I’ve had it. We’re telling her tonight Kate.” 

Pacing the hall outside our bedrooms, I wanted to do something. But I didn’t want to intrude. I stood right outside Ana’s door. and tried to google a crisis line number, but my shaking fingers tapped the wrong letters on my phone like in one of those frustrating dreams where nothing works.

 Then I made out the buzzing of her phone, some bumps and miscellaneous noises. I wasn’t sure if I hoped she would come out, or if I hoped she wouldn’t.

There was a honk from the street and Ana emerged from her room pulling two suitcases. “Taxi,” she said.

“Ana.” I stood still.

“Yes.” Ana let go of her suitcase handles and turned directly to face me. For a moment I saw the regular old Ana in her eyes. She looked down and to her left, her bottom lip puffing out.

“Where are you going? Are you okay? Did we do anything?” I reached a uselessly fluttering hand in her direction.

“Lemon.” she said.

My hand dropped to my side.

“Shit,” she said, and walked out the door, Cat right behind her.

I followed her out. “Don’t go!” I cried as she stepped into the taxi. The driver put her bags in the trunk, Ana grabbed Cat around the belly, and they took off.

Prunella, of course, couldn’t have been happier. How did I feel about her leaving? I wasn’t the one who wanted her to go.

I threw myself into rehearsals. We were dancing a Merce Cunningham piece. It had to be perfectly executed without music. The music would come at the time of performance. We never knew what the music would be, but we had to dance to it anyway.

~ ~ ~

It’s the day after that cupcake materialized in the cleaned kitchen. I arrive at the dance studio to find a bronze-colored bakery box in my mail cubicle. I don’t get much mail at work, just the occasional memo from the Brothers Modern Dance directors. The box has my name on it and a sticker saying ‘City Couriers Ltd.’

Rehearsal starts in five minutes and Lorenzo is a bear about lateness, so I tear open the box on my way to the dressing room and find a cupcake gorgeously decorated with teensy silver balls. I carefully close up the box and lay it on the top shelf of my locker. All I think about during warm-ups and morning announcements is that cupcake. Naturally at the 10:30 break, I eat it. Oh, it is smooth as sugary silk with little explosions of something sweet from those silver decorations. There’s no return address, no note; only a typed card saying ‘Vanilla Bean with Starry Buttercream Frosting’.

When I return to the apartment, Prue hands me a new key. She’d changed the lock. I understand why, but I feel sick. I don’t tell her about the cupcake at dance.

The next day there is another box; same color, same delivery service. Ana is okay, or at least alive, but I am a bit annoyed at the typical Ana mysteriousness of it. This one’s note says ‘Mocha times Three’. It tastes sweet and bitter at the same time.

The next morning as I open the studio door, my eyes dart anxiously to the mail cubicles. Again, there is a box. At break time I tap my nail on the brittle delicately browned cake top. Creme brulee cupcake. Hard, soft, sugary, burnt caramel.

By now, the dancers all know about the cupcakes. “A secret admirer?” they ask.

“Nothing like that,” I tell them.

The daily cupcakes continue. They’re always in the same kind of box, sent by the same courier. Wherever she is, Ana still has money. There was one labeled Lavender Rain with tufted light purple frosting and tiny black specks. Another was fruity with a hint of rum called Treasure Island. I wonder if Ana makes the cupcakes by the dozen and then picks one out for me. Or does she make them one at a time? Does she eat them too? Does she share them with anyone else? 

A week after the first cupcake, and as I now expect, my treat is there. Rosewater Sponge with Red Flower. I lift the cupcake from its box and skim the frosted rose with the tip of my pinky so gently that no icing appears on my finger, though I lick it anyway. My tongue touches the one grain of sugar that sticks to my finger, and I think Ana’s like that; a sweet that dissolves before you know it and leaves you wanting more. Prunella is more like a solid oak chair, maybe with a blue corduroy cushion to pad the seat. I feel a little guilty about it, but I still haven’t told Prune about the cupcakes.

At five o’clock I leave the studio. Ana is standing there on the sidewalk, looking as fabulous and fragile as ever.

“Treat you to a coffee?” she asks like any old day.

Without more discussion, we enter a nearby cafe and sit at a small table across from each other. I play it cool; no big hug, no big reaction, though I am stunned to see her. Stunned like I don’t know what to feel, or how to.

“Thank you for the cupcakes,” I say. “Mmmmmm.” I don’t want to say too much, or ask questions, or scare her away. I’m most afraid she’ll do the single word thing again.

“I can’t do anything except cook, Kate.” She stares straight into my eyes with what looks like clarity mixed with terror.

“Okay.”

“Can’t even hang up my clothes. Dropped out of school.”

“Your family? Where are you living?”

“Pffft.” She brushes a hand dismissively past her face.

“You okay? Can I... What can I do? Er....”  I want to ask her to move back in with us, but I know Prunella would not be welcoming. And I’m not sure about that idea, myself.  

She tilts her head in a thoughtful way; then points one index finger upwards. Sparkles appear in her violet eyes.

She gestures, palms flat up, and says, “You can keep eating my cupcakes!”

I extend my own uplifted palms towards her. Her palms up is an ‘of course’ kind of gesture; mine is more of a ‘kudos to you for a brilliant idea and for being an amazing baker’ kind of thing. Funny how slight differences in the angle of the fingers can be so meaningful.

Sometimes during a dance, I feel a moment of harmony; harmony within myself and with the other dancers. The moment is always fleeting, but it’s there. That’s what I feel at this moment.

“I can do that,” I say.

We exit the cafe as a quiet duet, then Ana trips off in one direction and I in the other. I walk into the too bright late afternoon sun. Should I tell Prune? Maybe not. I’m in one world with Prunella, and another world with Brothers’ Dance, and now I’m in one with Ana. At Brothers’ I’m a background dancer. I love it, but I’m replaceable. Part of the ensemble but generic. It’s different with Ana. I feel like I’m an essential part of something even if I don’t understand it. It’s true Ana is calling the shots with her cupcakes and all. Like in dance, I move to the music, but I don’t create the music or the choreography. But what’s different is that look in her eyes. The one that needs me. Or maybe it’s just the cupcakes.

---

Joan Slatoff's work has appeared or is forthcoming in 101 words, Consequence, Exposition Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, Isele, Literary Yard, The Bookends Review, and elsewhere.

Jennifer Maloney

Pieces

We break up. We break camp, pack our various cans and bottles, wrap the garbage, open the mouths of the trunks of our cars and feed back in each bite we had removed. We fill the bodies of our conveyances with what our lives have broken into, and the cars seem satisfied, especially when we pack ourselves in as well—the car lighting up, purring. Beginning its next journey.

Break down. Like a body, unhooking itself from itself, parts moving apart, some carried off by wolves and foxes, eyes and tongues plucked into the beaks of crows. What is stringy and tough begins to melt. Insects colonize it, make it an apartment house they can also eat, like the witch’s gingerbread walls and candy roof, all the sweet and the savory packing into bellies that need and rumble and want, until they stop, and they, too, become someone else’s food.

Break out—of this prison of bones, or beliefs, or circumstances. Step back and see the steps you’re dancing. Pull off your dancing shoes—break the laces, gray and fraying, and place your naked sole against the earth. Everything beneath your heel is moving: growing, living, dying, dancing, and the grass you’ve crushed smells like a summer you remember when you were young, kneeling on the sidewalk, half an earthworm broken and wriggling between your flat palms. A mystery, a sadness, the way everything breaks becoming clearer every day.

Erasing the Compass

Under the sun, all details erase. My fingers twine, the light between them, diffuse, glowing through the thin skin that divides them, through my eyelids, pulse and pressure. In my grandmother’s car, red leather, black dash, my hands between me and the sun. At the top of her windshield the glass turns green. Deepens. An egg-shaped compass floats and wobbles on the dashboard.

My grandmother, driving us to Star Market, Mother simmering in the seat next to her. Grandma’s cigarette wedged at the ashtray’s edge, pink lip-print trembling like it might cry. My mother’s cigarette ribboning smoke out her window, her white plastic cat’s eye sunglasses winging up in perpetual dismay, their lenses green as the top of the windshield, a red paisley kerchief knotted beneath her chin rippling in the breeze and nobody’s talking. Two sets of bow-shaped lips, one pink, one red, one pointed staunchly toward the road, one twisted towards the window, sipping smoke, fuming.

At the grocery store Grandma will pull up in the fire lane. My mother will slam out, fling open my door,  yank me from the red leather into which I’ve been trying to shrink, to burrow, grab my upper arm and pull me out onto the pavement, hip-shut the car door and drag me away, tossing we’ll walk home over her shoulder at Grandma, who won’t hear, already pulling out in a screech of burnt rubber and  hurt feelings. I’ll stumble along in my mother’s grip, past glass globes filled with pastel jawbreakers, SweetTarts and mouse turds, my arm bruising beneath her fingers, the sun unable to erase those shadows.

The cart bites my thighs, pinch and scratch. I want to stand on the back and ride like the big kids, but she won’t let me. Squirm, wiggle, try not to cry, bite the inside of my lip to stop it, but my face is still something she can police and she slaps it. Quit it! A hiss under her breath. Don’t you dare embarrass me, but now I can’t stop, I can’t, the sun is in my eyes again, glowing, stinging, erasing every barrier.

Finally, she lifts me out. Fine, get down, she sneers, but it’s sure gonna be a long walk home, Sunshine. I don’t care because the grocery store is cool, green as celery, yellow as bananas, there are big, pillowy letters hanging on the walls that I can’t read but red and blue balloons mean Wonder Bread, my nails scratch paths in the milk carton’s wax, and the eggs in their baby blue Styrofoam beds remind me of the compass in Grandma’s car. I like the compass, but it tattles. It tells on us and how we go, like pink lips in a knotted bow.

---

 Jennifer Maloney writes poetry and fiction; find her work in Synkroniciti Magazine, Anti-Heroin Chic Magazine, Flash Boulevard and many other publications. She is the author of Evidence of Fire, Poems and Stories (Clare Songbirds Publishing, 2023) and Don't Let God Know You are Singing, Poems and Stories (Before Your Quiet Eyes Publishing, 2024). Jennifer is a parent, a partner, and a very lucky friend, and she is grateful, for all of it, every day.

Beth Sherman

Zonk!

Excitation

My grandmother once dressed up as a bowl of spaghetti for Let’s Make a Deal. A man who was not my grandfather wore a matching meatball costume.

We were so excited, Nana says. Our mouths hurt from smiling. And they picked us.

On the show, Nana has a 60s bouffant and a hot pink miniskirt. The penne pasta (actually yellow mop strings) hot glued to the cardboard plate jiggle as she claps enthusiastically.   

That Monty Hall, Nana says, inching her right foot up her thigh to yoga tree pose and motioning for me to do the same. Such a gentleman. Not like Bob Barker. I heard he was handsy.

Why not do it?

The man with Nana is Jack Rubin, a dental student from Queens. They were supposed to marry the following spring. But her parents disapproved. Nana shows me what he looks like now: Doe eyes. Merry grin. A full head of hair. According to his profile, he has four sons, nine grandchildren and a wife who died of diverticulitis. They’re Facebook friends who rarely comment on each other’s posts.

You should message him, I tell her. On Let’s Make a Deal, his arm curves around her size four waist like a smile. My grandfather’s been dead for five years. In all the time I’ve known them, I  never saw them touch.    

Uber Trouble

Men are like taxis, Nana says, after my latest relationship ends. There’s always another one right around the corner.

Is there though? What if the last one was the ONE? What if everyone after him is second best? What door do you choose? You can’t possibly know, Nana says. It’s like deciding what to eat for lunch. Some days you’re in the mood for tofu. Other days, it’s chili.

Nonetheless, I obsessively stalk all my exes on their socials. It’s not unhealthy. It’s a way to stay connected.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

Big Brain Teaser

Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what's behind all the doors, opens door No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, do you want to pick door No. 2? Should you switch your choice? The problem is a paradox because the solution seems too counterintuitive to be true. Mathematically speaking, however, it is advantageous to switch to the new door. You will then have a 66 percent chance of winning a desirable prize.

Which One to Pick?

Nana and Jack Rubin chose door No. 3. (The middle one seemed too obvious, Nana recalls. The first one didn’t feel right). But instead of opening it, Monty Hall showed them door No. 2, which contained 89 boxes of Shake n’ Bake.

A worthless gag gift. A zonk. Nana was right.

Monty, looking dismayed, told them they could switch to door No. 1 if they wanted to. Jack Rubin put his lips to Nana’s ear. If they won enough money, they wouldn’t need her parents’ help. They could elope to Atlantic City, put a downpayment on a house. Nana considers, tells Monty they’ll stick with No. 3. A leggy model opens the door with a flourish to reveal a shaggy moose head. The other door contains a new ’67 Corvette convertible, worth $4,500. Nana squeezes Jack’s hand, determined not to cry. She is younger than I am now.

That Day Again

Nana’s life exhausts me: pickleball, Zumba, Mahjong, a cruise to Portugal, another to Iceland, quilting circles, book groups, volunteering at the cat shelter, singing with The Merry Widows, an a cappella group. I barely have enough energy to make it through work.

On the rare weekend she’s home, we watch the game show again. There’s Monty in his suit and tie. The spaghetti and meatball couple. Beaming. In love. It kills me that your life could change so completely over something not in your control.  

You need to contact Jack, I insist. Nana stares at me, puzzled. Why?

We’re at the part when they’re picking the first door.

Nana’s studying the screen intently, watching her younger self, not Jack. Look at that girl, she says. I look. The young Nana is vivacious and enthusiastic. Animated. Hopeful. I see it now. Why Nana never wants to lose her.

---

Beth Sherman’s writing has been published in more than 100 literary magazines, including Flash Frog, Gone Lawn, Tiny Molecules, 100 Word Story, Fictive Dream, and Bending Genres. Her work is featured in Best Microfiction 2024. She’s also a multiple Pushcart, Best Small Fictions, and Best of the Net nominee. She can be reached on X, Bluesky or Instagram @bsherm36.

Jennifer Thomas

Much Later: A Dinner Party in Gloucester

I met Joshua a year ago kayaking off the coast of Maine. We were both recovering—he from two tours of duty in Iraq, I from a string of unsavory suitors I’d matched with on Tinder. I can’t figure out how serious he is about us. He rattles on about “ethical nonmonogamy,” but can’t explain what’s ethical about it.

Then one day he pops the question:

“You’re having a dinner party. What three people, living or dead, would you invite?”

I consider. “I’d like to invite Odysseus and Penelope, along with Polyphemus the Cyclops for comic relief. It’s my favorite story. Returning from war, Odysseus is cunning and brave, risking all to return home to his wife and son. But it takes him ten years to get home, antagonizing the gods, sleeping with nymphs and sorceresses along the way. Should I admire Odysseus, despise him, or both?”

Joshua knits his brow. Clearly, he skipped the required reading in eleventh grade.

“Well, how about it, will you attend?” He nods; I knew he would. He likes adventure. And variety.

This will be a special occasion, so I rent Hammond Castle, a lavish seaside venue in Gloucester. This dinner party won’t be easy to pull off, but it will be so worth it. The day before the party, I head to Trader Joe’s, Joshua in tow, to pick up the ingredients. Planning the menu has been a challenge. I think the packages of beef are safe—no god is angry over those dead cattle! Goat: not available. I grab figs and dates from the produce section, stuffed grape leaves and pungent cheeses from the refrigerator case. Wine, lots of wine; those folks were always chugging the wine, day and night. Polyphemus ate some of Odysseus’s sailors, if memory serves, crunching the bones and all, so I pick up some marrow bones. I’ll serve those to the one-eyed giant “as is.”

The day arrives; I’m awake well before the rosy fingers of dawn start poking us. We lug the provisions to the castle and set up the banquet table in the cavernous, red-curtained room. I set the table with placemats that my mother wove on her loom—a touch I’m sure Penelope will appreciate. Some of us get to finish our work!

I obsess over preparations to ward off anxiety. Will the food be good, will the people get along, will I have anything interesting to say?

“Relax, babe,” says Joshua, though he knows that’s not my preferred term of endearment.

The guests arrive. They stumble about at first, befuddled as to where they are and how they got there. Odysseus and Penelope have been in the Underworld for quite some time, sorting out their relationship. Polyphemus has been staggering around his island with his sheep, ever since Odysseus blinded his one eye. He grunts with pleasure at the change of venue.

Wine is poured. Odysseus surveys the room, spies swords and armor mounted on the walls, and spirals into a panic. I assure him nobody is here besides us.

“Nobody!” shouts the Cyclops, who lunges toward us; now I have to calm him down too. Penelope is already seated, staring down at the table and pulling at a thread on one of the placemats.

“I suggest we raise a glass to our hostess,” says Joshua, ever the diplomat.

The caterers start bringing out the dishes of figs, dates, and grape leaves. The first server, a slight young girl, takes one look at the Cyclops and drops her tray, running out after it clangs to the floor. The other servers soldier on, grimly. I’ll remember to give them a big tip.

Once we are a little “in our cups,” and the meats and the bones are served, I’m emboldened to open the topic of the evening: How much of a jerk is Odysseus, really? I don’t phrase it exactly like that—but everyone gets the gist. Penelope and Odysseus have been discussing this very question in the Underworld for several thousand years. I tell them that, in this world, we recognize that soldiers coming home from war have wounds in their souls as well as in their bodies. In fact, I tell them, to this day we celebrate Odysseus’s story as a journey of returning to society, transforming from a soldier into a normal person again. On the other hand, there was all that sleeping around, along with a few epically stupid moves. Odysseus looks smug and defiant; Penelope rolls her eyes. That, more than any words, tells me everything I want to know.

And what does Polyphemus think of Odysseus? Has time healed the monster’s wounds? Nope, he still nurses a grudge. Forced to sit politely at the same table as the wandering man, he twitches in humiliation. My heart goes out to him.

Suddenly thunder cracks overhead. The Cyclops’s dad, Poseidon, has intervened. The original helicopter parent! Polyphemus leaps up, overturns the table (he’s a giant, after all), and bolts out the door. We race to the window to watch him clamber down the hill into the sea. A wine-dark wave picks him up and sweeps him out between seaweed-festooned rocks and a swirling foam-lipped eddy. He vanishes beyond the horizon.

“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” says Odysseus, or something to that effect. I’m distraught; this kind of thing has never happened at one of my parties. Penelope clucks in disgust at the overturned table, the wine soaking the rug, the bones scattered across the floor.

“So long; we must catch the ferry,” she says.

I turn to her and hold her gaze. “I’ve always admired you, most of all,” I say. She smiles demurely and looks away. She and Odysseus leave the building, arm in arm.

The guests are gone. As darkness comes on, I sink into a chair, exhausted. “Joshua, what just happened?”

“Nothing’s happened,” he says. “What I mean is, nothing has changed, really, in three thousand years. Has it, babe?

---

Jennifer Thomas began writing fiction after a long career as a science writer. Her stories have been published in 365tomorrows, Flash Fiction Magazine (contest honorable mention), Bewildering Stories, Women on Writing (second place contest winner), Windward Review, and Persimmon Tree, among others. You can find some of her work at www.jenniferthomas.net.

Guy Cramer

The Radiator

(after Meg Pokrass)

My brother, sister, and I are standing at the window in order of height, our thick little bodies like the levels of a snow man, watching the invasion of white flurries covering car hoods, the streets and sidewalks. It feels as cold in here as it does out there. Mom and Dad are in the back fighting, again. They’ve been at it since the holidays. For a while we thought they were good. Santa had been coming by all year, leaving presents for Mom at the front door, and for Dad at the back door. There was magic in the way their warmth clothed each other. We figured it has to do with the radiator. Dad’s fussing at it, “I’m tired of your coldness.” While Mom defends it, “If you’re never here, how can we fix it? You promised to be home more.” Dust covers the floors. Mom says that cleaning this soon into the New Year brings bad luck. Dad refuses to bring anything new home, he says it’s also bad luck. My sister asks if the radiator is dead, how are we going to make it? Outside, Cardinals swoop down over our white lawn, reminding me of the blood drops from my knee when I fell off my scooter toward the end of summer. I called out to Mom and Dad from the streets. They seemed to have the radiator working back then, as I heard the steady tapping from the inside, Mom cheering Dad on, “That’s it, a little more.” 

The F Word

Shawn and I are hanging from the monkey bars, the shirts of our powder blue uniforms part at the waist where our bellies hang out. We say things like “no you wear a size extra extra extra large.” “No you wear a size extra extra extra extra large.” Anything to avoid calling each other the F word. There’s not a day we can remember when we weren’t. We’re used to hearing it day in day out from flat stomached kids and adults alike. They wield shame like a knife to whittle us down to the perfect size. They think they’re doing us a favor in these lessons of humiliation. The evidence of our service lies in the white paint on Shawn’s locker even bleach couldn’t rub out: “Lard Ass”. The four tiny marks on my arm now faint on the skin’s surface from a babysitter who said she could deflate me. We’re both soldiers in the same trench, lighting each other’s cigarette, knowing we’re drawing attention to ourselves from those who linger in the shadows, thinking what they’re aiming at is no longer human, but a mass blotting the light of their crosshairs.

Potluck

My elders bend over blue and white checkered card tables covered in assorted Jell-O molds, soupy garlic scented beans, and bowls of mustard potato salads with pimento eyes gazing upward. Looking at Bill Tenement, you wouldn’t know his steady hands once strangled a man in the forests of France when ammunition ran out, the way peas tumble one after another on his plate like graceful grenades as he wipes mayo on the mound of nearby napkins. The Coleman’s grandson stands on his tip toes reaching for the legs of pepper flaked fried chicken, too even in size to have come from different birds. Someone checks the greasy parchment for the logo of a nearby fast food chain. The tables are butted up end to end, going from the kitchen into the library where shelves of leather bound editions sit, gold lettered spines gleaming across the light of the crockpot. Rump roast juices steam the glass lid, dripping onto the burgundy carpet after each removal. Shirley D’Angelo whispers to the person in line ahead of her, pointing out her pink marshmallow mandarin orange and cherry salad, saying the recipe’s as old as her. The Hoskins, all ten of them, stand holding paper plates with dirty hands over their chests, as if the Pledge of Allegiance is being said. Mrs. Hoskins passes out plastic forks and knives to each of her kids. “We didn’t have time to bring anything,” she says, her long dress swallows her skeletal frame in flowers. Hope looks at her spinster sibling, Glenda, pulling back a loose gray strand from her beehive hair, adjusting her tortoise shell glasses.

“There’s enough food here for the Marriage Feast Of The Lamb.”

Glenda shakes her head, “t’won’t last long with all these children here.”

“They’ll outnumber us in glory, sister.”

Hope cuts off a soft cube of butter, spreading it over the slice of her sourdough littered with holes, the loaf having risen in haste this morning, her hands feeling their age from every stretch and pull.

---

Guy Cramer is a writer from east Texas whose stories have appeared in Paragraph Planet, Short Beasts, Vestal Review, Flash Frontier, and Major 7th Mag. He is on Instagram @guy.cramer

Robin Wilder

The Midnight Delicatessen

At the Midnight Delicatessen, your sandwich comes with a song. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say there is a song inside your sandwich. Before you order, before your fingers even touch the doorknob, they are baking your song into the bread. It’s not as if they know you are coming or have some magical soothsaying yeast, but the Midnight Delicatessen exists only when you need it to exist. When you turn a corner, eyes downcast, soles of your shoes scraping the pavement, there it is. You will enter because you are meant to enter.

A bell chimes. The sound is what you have always wanted to sound like crossing a threshold. Two people stand behind the counter, a man and woman in identical lavender aprons. You step closer, see that their aprons are shifting, amalgamating, and it might be the Milky Way or Andromeda or a galaxy of petals you can’t name. But it is beautiful, impossible to unsee. You blink. Your hands are flat on the countertop—you do not remember the time between the door and now. You wonder if the time ever occurred.

The restaurant is empty, save the man and woman and you. In another circumstance this might frighten you, but these people, they remind you of your parents, your parents at their best, distilled into dewy memories of birthdays and holidays and when both were still around. Heat spills down your throat and chest, a hot chocolate sensation, when the woman says, “Welcome to the Midnight Delicatessen.”

Her voice cracks you open, water in your eyes, and nothing makes sense. You haven’t cried in years, not since you cried so hard you became a wretched little thing who lost the ability to do so. The man offers you a napkin; you accept, blow your nose with all the gravitas of a cartoon character. It cannot be a pretty sight. They are unfazed, sharing a look that feels familiar, one you’ve seen a thousand times. You should not have forgotten.

Having embarrassed yourself for no good reason, you suppose you ought to buy something. Tacked to the wall behind them is a menu. You frown. You are bad at choosing things from a menu you don't know. Fortunately, this menu has only one item:

Your Sandwich (and song)

Unexpected, though you are not complaining. You do not enjoy being that person who dithers at the register unable to decide. Still, you want to ask what’s on the sandwich. The woman shakes her head, and you're quite certain you did not speak your thoughts aloud.

“Your sandwich is on the house,” the woman says, and the man disappears into the back.

Well, that’s very kind of them, of course, but what about money (you have no money) or if you don't like it (you will love it) or in an inexplicable way you manage to ruin everything (you won’t) and the shop catches fire (it won’t) and—

Your sandwich sits on a plate, the rim decorated with the history of your life. Friends. Lovers. Successes. Failures. Joy. Sorrow. Your entire life. You cannot fit on the rim of a plate, and yet you do. You stop questioning it. The plate, the sandwich, the man who did not return, the fact you are now seated in a booth by a window just perfect for you, and the woman is watching, brows crinkled. She nods toward the sandwich.

The bite you take floods your mouth—not meat, not vegetables, not cheese, not bread, a violet note, like the end of a sunset, the violinist's bow lifting from the final string, and your song is against your tongue, eternal, scorched into being, pleading for release, battering your teeth until you free it to soak the atmosphere. Your song surrounds you, the woman, the walls and the floor and the window you notice overlooks every decision you ever made, including That One, the reason you’re here, the reason you stare at the ceiling at night and pretend to be fine and pretend that you wouldn’t die ten years before your time to have ten more seconds, ten seconds to spare, ten seconds to do a single thing.

“It's alright,” the woman says. “He knows you wanted to be there. He knows.”

You turn to face her, but the Midnight Delicatessen is gone.

The sidewalk beneath your feet is the same corner from the beginning. It leads to a field of epitaphs and flowers, a stone you never read, spent ages running in the opposite direction because you were too late. Except maybe you weren't. There’s a song in you, and you have to listen. You have to round the corner and meet your mother in the black dress she wears once a year. You have to hold her hand. You have to tell her you’re sorry you made her wait.

You have to read the stone.

---

Robin Wilder is a non-binary writer, graphic designer, and illustrator based in Missouri. Their work can be found in BULL, the museum of americana, and Roi Fainéant. Robin lives with their two cats, Ash and Carbon, who are often the first to hear a new story. Unfortunately, neither is very good at feedback.

Wendy Elizabeth Wallace

Rules of the Door

After the thing that happened to Kevin, we make rules for The Door. We’ve decided it’s our duty to go back. Not because we want to re-enter this world, we say, but for Kevin. We must use the buddy system. We must not leave this buddy at any time, even if we see something marvelous, like a squirrel the size of a semi-truck wearing mittens or a waterfall made of molten cheese or a dining room table that compliments our wardrobe choices in a sultry whisper. Or we will go see those things, but only quickly, just a glimpse. We will go armed – we have some very sharp kitchen knives, and Chloe has a croquet mallet. We will not eat the treats that appear on the trees. Or we will avoid the ones Kevin has ever baked for us in the normal world – lime tarts, gingerbread cookies, macarons. We will not swim in the purple lake. We will not go into the cave with the welcome mat that asks us to remove our shoes before entering, even though it sounds like there is a very good band inside playing bluegrass covers of our favorite songs. We all love bluegrass covers, though none of us as much as Kevin. We will not go to the little stand with the sign that reads FREE WINGS, and we will not put on the wings and flap around, hovering first, and then testing higher and higher swoops until we’re doing magnificent dives above the trees and we can see all the way to the emerald ocean that lashes against the pearly cliffs. Or we will try the wings, because some of us still think we should search for the rest of Kevin. It has been a few days, but maybe it’s not too late? We know we shouldn’t have waited so long to try, but we’ve been afraid. A very reasonable fear. Certainly Kevin would have to agree. Probably it wasn’t the flying that caused just his legs to walk back through the door, a clean slice exposing his pinky innards and a wink of white spine. We shouldn’t have let his legs disappear the way we did – we’ve argued over this, the implications of them being discovered. This would not be good for us. We are not sure how we could explain. We keep expecting them to just turn up, the way Kevin always had. He’d begun following us at the beginning of college, loping around campus in our wake, trying to catch up, always finding us at the cafeteria or common room or library  and squeezing his way in, his backpack bulging with offerings – card games with complex rules he would babble at us, cookies he’d baked in the dorm oven, books that he thought we’d like. We did like the cookies and books, but not the sad-eager way he asked whether we had. He was always listening, always remembering things we didn’t even remember about each other or ourselves – the names of all of our professors, due dates for our assignments, our mothers’ birthdays. It unsettled us. We believed it would be easier to shed Kevin when we moved off-campus for our senior year, but he’d popped up at the apartment we couldn’t quite afford, pie in one hand and fat checkbook in the other, and so we’d let him set up the tent he’d brought in the corner of the living room. His own weird little Kevin house. We could be excused, then, for not following him at first when he found The Door, the shiny handle that had suddenly appeared at the back of the hall closet. We’d had no way of knowing what fabulous things waited inside for us.  And it was understandable, too, that when he’d said, that last time, Come on, guys, we had waved him off. We’d made a plan to go just us later that day, when we knew he had class. There was something exhausting about his enthusiasm, even in this most magical of places, the way he kept saying, Did you see that? And that? Isn’t that cool? It’s cool, right? Of course we saw. Of course it was cool. But we’d given him enough already, and we deserved some time beyond The Door, exploring the gift that our apartment – it was our apartment – had provided, without him tagging along. We thought Kevin would be fine on his own. But now Kevin is just legs and those legs are missing. We think about when the legs appeared, the way they only paused for a moment when we screamed, then crossed to the normal door to the balcony, opening it with a delicate kick. Kevin had always wanted us to jump together down the one story – something about a scene from The Princess Bride, maybe? – but we’d shaken our heads and he’d given up, turned and followed. But the legs – they’d made a neat little leap, clearing the railing, for a moment soaring, before they hit the ground, turned a corner and were gone. We think, too, about the last time we’d seen him whole. The look on his face as he’d reached for the handle, the hunch in his shoulders as he peered back at us, we huddled together and pretending not to see him leave. As if he was discovering, for the first time, that nothing he could offer would be enough to make him one of us.

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Wendy Elizabeth Wallace (she/they) is a queer disabled writer. She grew up in Buffalo, New York, and has landed in Connecticut by way of Pennsylvania, Berlin, Heidelberg, and Indiana. They are the editor-in-chief of Peatsmoke Journal and the co-manager of social media and marketing for Split Lip Magazine. Their work has appeared in The Rumpus, ZYZZYVA, Pithead Chapel, SmokeLong Quarterly, Brevity, and elsewhere. Find her on Twitter and Bluesky @WendyEWallace1or at www.wendywallacewriter.com.

Tessa Smith McGovern

The Void: A List Story

1. The phone rings and it’s your mum speaking in halting sentences that make no sense and it feels like air blasted onto a cracked tooth.

2. You take her for a drive at twilight, and she can’t remember the name of La Traviata, her favorite opera since you were a child.

3. She says “Pardon?” repeatedly and blames her inability to understand conversation on the incomprehensible accents of Americans.

4. She slags off her first husband, your beloved Dad who passed ten years ago, and doesn’t remember he was your father.

5. We stop at a red light and she grabs the dashboard in a panic, exclaiming, “Oh! What’s that car doing? Why is it coming over here?” about a car that’s simply crossing in front of you.

6. When she phoned you yesterday, the washing machine of her mind had paused in momentary clarity. “I don’t know what’s happening. I can’t remember anything. It’s like that song, ‘Bits and Pieces’, she said. “I'm in bits and pieces.”

7. And your monkey mind throws out the thought, I can’t stand this. Is this my future?

8. And you have another thought, fast as quicksilver, about how much easier it would be if she died and that makes you think of the French who, of course, have a name for random, explosive thoughts like that: l'appel du vide. The call of the void. 

9. Then the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves reaches its melodic middle and the crescendo of sound takes her, closing her eyes, turning her expression to bliss, and she exclaims, “Oh! Just listen to that!” And in that moment, her words make sense again and the barbed wire in your heart dissolves and you are united in your bliss and the “what ifs” evaporate.

10. You remember that, after all these years, you’ve finally learned you are not her. You’re not your father either. He shed his skin ten years ago, and she will shed hers, as you will, too. And then the glimmer that is her will join the glimmer that is him, and in time you will join the glimmer that is them and together you will become the sun and fill the void.

If We’re Lucky

My hands are not strong enough to open a bottle of orange seltzer, even with the use of a thick elastic band, and I cannot read the slanted script on the envelope of a letter from my pen pal Rose in London, even with glasses. My sense of smell has diminished, and I no longer notice the fishy sourness of my own body. This morning, I stared at a photo of my gray-haired, grinning daughter and for a second wondered, who’s that? A month ago, I fell seven carpeted stairs whilst going up to bed one night and am now confined, for all time, to the ground floor of my cottage. The visiting nurse says it’s not safe for me to drive any more so my daughter has taken the keys and I’ve lost the thrill of getting up and out in my little red Honda to Stop & Shop on the Post Road for a loaf of raisin bread. My daughter has refused corrective rotator cuff surgery for me because of the risks of anesthesiology so my left arm is permanently disabled. But with a handheld, battery-lit magnifying glass, I can still read--I can become an outwardly assured Irish attorney or a dragon rider in the Napoleonic wars or a prodigy who plays the violin so brilliantly they lose the sense of who they are and become one with the slicing, soaring sounds.

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Tessa Smith McGovern has an MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and is the author of London Road: Linked Stories and Cocktails for Book Lovers. She teaches online for the Writing Institute, Sarah Lawrence College, NY, and Bloom Writers' Studio. Her flash fiction has been published in literary journals such as the Connecticut Review and the UK's Equinox. She's currently working on a fantasy inspired by British Mythology.

Shelby Raebeck

The Fourth Person

What separates me from the rest is my utter lack of any distinguishing characteristic. I am the one among us who betrays no hint whatsoever of an organism responding to its own peculiar set of circumstances.

This is not to say I lack the complexity of the modern human animal. No, only that my behavior does not reflect it, not any of it. Look at me as I sit each day before the great window in Southstreet Café. Do you see any sign of modern affectation? An angled cut of hair demanding to be constantly swept from my eyes? A glaze of nostalgia settling upon my visage as I peer through the window, back toward those early years in Colombia, to a youth misspent here on the streets of New York, to a budding manhood that slipped first into lethargy, then into a dark misanthropy, a hole from which I may never have emerged were it not for my discovery of American baseball, a game with an orderliness, a symmetry impervious to the vanity of its participants?

Dispassionately, I sip my coffee, examine the Yankees box score, and be sure to ask Abbas how he is feeling today. To which Abbas responds as only he can. Each day, as if my question were a key to a vault of exotic artifacts, Abbas’s concerns reveal themselves in all their brilliance. He mentions his fiancée, Feeren, and his face glows with blood. He speaks of Ahaad, the cook and owner of Southstreet, and his voice hushes into a hesitant stream, quivering slightly as he expresses the fear that he may have to leave for a higher paying job. He speaks of Tehran, and his sentences shorten into syncopations, as the emotion cuts into the words, backtracking against their own syntax, toward what he left behind. “I don’t understand what they want, William. They rule with no heart—my family is there—my younger sister—William, I don’t know.” And the blood withdraws from his face, the hope draining away. But Abbas’s blood does not descend too far and is soon recalled.

For me the blood doesn’t stir; the complexion remains uncolored, even when confronted with the most extreme situations.

Take last September, the day my beloved Yankees lost the pennant to the Red Sox, the very last day of the regular season. Five stops from the stadium on the number 4 express, I walked into Southstreet. Abbas brought me my coffee.

“Bases loaded, one out, and they cannot score?” Abbas said, his eyelids peeled back behind imploring eyes, the television above the counter now turned off. “This Rodriquez, he cannot hit the ball past the infield?”

“It is a shame,” I said. “Although the Red Sox did make the plays.”

But Abbas’s emotions are not easily dispelled. “Catching pop-ups, William? The children on my street catch pop-ups.”

“You are quick to suspect the Yankees of a personal betrayal,” I said. “Don’t forget, there was a fellow pitching to Rodriguez. And today that fellow was better.”

“Not better, William, hungrier. Our Yankees did not want it.”

“Wishing a sated animal to be hungry may be a waste of a wish,” I said.

Yet you could not say Abbas cared for the Yankees any more than I. My season box seat cost twenty percent of my yearly pension. The difference was that I no longer let things beyond my control affect my wellbeing. What if the Yankees never won another pennant? What if they packed their bags as the Dodgers of ’59, just five years after my father had fled La Violencia in Colombia and brought me to New York? What would I do then? Would I become so enraged as to throw things across my rented room on 8th Avenue? Would I hurl the years of diligently acquired memorabilia—the framed portraits of Larson and Ford, Maris and Mantle, the encased score cards from every game attended, the eighteen, eighteen, foul balls—against the otherwise unadorned walls? Would I enter a deep depression as my father did and consider—to the point of purchasing two plane tickets and actually taking me, his trembling child, as far as the JFK Express beneath Rockefeller Center—returning to our war-torn home city of Villavicencio, giving up the eighty-one—plus the playoffs, God willing—trips to the park, the walk cross-town through Washington Square, the five stops on the Number four, the hot dog after the 3rd inning and knish with mustard during the 7th inning stretch, the post-game recounting with Abbas over fresh coffee?

No. My father took his grief to his grave more than thirty years ago, and though it did, admittedly, take me a number of years, the surface has since smoothed over, leaving scarcely a ripple on the placid sea of my life. Indeed, the equilibrium I’ve achieved is such that I now speak of that person sealed in the past—the child growing into the mystified teenager and into the bitter young man—without trepidation. My recollection may be a bit imprecise—it is not a person I think of often these days, or rather, think of in the 3rd person.

Yes, I have adopted one modern affectation after all—referring to myself in the third person. Not in the first person, yet as I think, not truly the third either, as it is, after all, myself to whom I refer. And so it is that I speak of this extinct self, this atavistic I, without any fear of reversion—the him that was me—the fourth person.

“William?”

It is Abbas. He knows I am prone to bouts of reverie and is hesitant to interrupt. I withdraw my eyes from the great café window that frames the activity on 8th Avenue and smile at my young friend—he always brings a smile to my lips—never a grin or guffaw, but a smile nonetheless.

“William, I need to speak with you. It is Feeren.”

“What is it, Abbas?” I sip the coffee he has placed on the table before the window. He brews a fresh pot when I enter with my newspapers.

“We are fighting,” he says, looking worried. “She has gone to her aunt’s. And her aunt is one of these Shia Twelvers, and does not like me.”

“You think she may stay there?”

“I am competing with the old world. And I am afraid Feeren is not ready for mine. I am agnostic, William, and she is unsure. I am afraid the Shia will take her back.”

“When you are fighting,” I say, “you imagine this possibility?”

“Yes.” Abbas glances back at the only other customer seated at the counter. “Yes, I am always afraid of this. When we select a movie, when we go out to eat. Whenever there is a choice, the imams are there, and I have to fight them.”

“You must evict them,” I say.

Abbas shifts to the side, as if from an angle he may better see my meaning.

“If they are always with you,” I say, “there would seem to be little question where they live.”

He nods at me. “Yes, they are there always.”

“Because you invite them in. Feeren, she loves you. Her aunt is not a competitor. A strong moon, perhaps, shining on her from the side, but you, you are her sun.”

How pleasing is the truth when one no longer has any stake in it.

“You see, my friend,” I continue, “these Shia, they live in your head, mere shadows. But there is a way to evacuate them.”

Abbas peers at me, his brown eyes deep as wells.

“Bring in the real Shia,” I say, “and the ghosts will flee.”

Abbas holds his eyes on me. Then he nods. “To know something is not to fear it,” he says. “Yes, I will call her aunt. I will speak with her directly. I will invite her opinions into my home. Thank you, William,” Abbas says. “You have pointed past the—I am thinking of the Farsi, it may not translate—you have pointed past the clothing and into the heart.”

I gaze into those grateful brown eyes.

“Go and get your Feeren,” I say, and strangely, my voice quivers, the body not cooperating as it used to, and I pull my eyes from his to the great window where a bicycle vendor winds his way through halted traffic, my eyes moving up across the grey stone buildings across the street, finding at the top a small opening of milky blue sky.

“The key, my friend, is to act,” I say, turning back to Abbas. “The angels retreat from a person who is waiting.”

I offer a smile, and he returns it, only for some reason his smile is sad.

I turn back to the window where a large truck has pulled up. One man in the cargo hold slides boxes down a ramp to another who stacks them on the sidewalk. They step away from the ramp—one into the truck to retrieve a box, the other to stack one—then return in unison to their positions at opposite ends of the ramp, exchange another box, step away, and return.

“William?”

I shake my head, captivated by the muted dance beyond the glass. “You go ahead,” I say.

But Abbas only stands there, and when I turn, his smiling lips are rolled in, his eyes shaded with remorse. I open my mouth to admonish this display of melancholy, to tell him, Abbas, it is appreciation I feel—for the beauty of the world. I raise a hand to either side, wanting to say, Don’t feel badly for me, my future is fixed, all uncertainty safely behind. But no words come. 

Abbas blinks slowly, his posture straightening. And then, a bit of sparkle returning to his eyes, he completes our conversation in the customary manner. He leans across the table, places a hand on my shoulder, and kisses me, once on the left cheek, once on the right, his lips dry and smooth against my face.

---

Shelby Raebeck's collection of stories, Louse Point: Stories from the East End, has earned wide critical acclaim, including a starred review from Kirkus.

Mathieu Parsy

Glove

I dream we’re back in Toronto, inside St. Michael’s Cathedral. You’ve written a note on a Tim Hortons receipt—something about you and Stan lasting longer than the skyline. Me, I’m not Stan, and I don’t pray like you do. I slip out to Queen Street, where streetcars slide by on their tracks, sparks under cold wires. I watch them pass and start walking west as if I might cross the entire city.

In this dream, the Gardiner Expressway is clogged with traffic, red lights stretching past the CN Tower. Commuters, late-night cabs. I just step off the curb and let myself float, easy as smoke. A lady on the sidewalk waves at me like she’s missed her bus. She looks like you—a romantic, always searching for some grand meaning in the people she meets. You’re all the same, really, thinking you can tag along for the ride.

“Next one is on his way,” I tell her. I sound a bit unkind, so I wave back and smile, hoping to keep it friendly.

Ahead, a woman points at a raccoon waddling across a crosswalk. “My god, it’s huge, Jeff!” Her partner snaps a picture. The raccoon pauses to look back at us, totally indifferent, and for some reason, my heart swells with a kind of fondness for it, as if it understands.

I still think of that windy night on the ferry to the Toronto Islands. I remember the skyline glittering, the way you watched it like it was some enchanted city. I wanted to stay on the shore, but you convinced me it was better from the water. The ferry rolled with the lake, and I agreed it was idyllic in its own rough way. We had poutine at a food truck near the harbor. You made fun of my French accent.

I think of the movie Lost In Translation. How you’d quote lines and say I was your favorite love escape. I wasn’t. But I knew Stan was. Sweetly lost, untethered you. I can still see you in that cathedral, like you were asking for something sacred. This is where I left you, drifting away in my mind, letting go of the resentment. Like leaving a glove on the subway, knowing I won’t go back.

Timekeeper

You’re waiting at the bus stop when a stranger walks up to ask for the time. You tell him because you always know it. You permanently feel the tick of the clock on your wrist, the press of hours on your temples. And then someone else asks, and someone else, and before you know it, the line has formed. No one checks their phones, no one even glances at the clock on the train station across the street. They ask you.

You’ve spent your entire life wondering why. Is it your face? Something about the slope of your jaw, the way you stand like a sundial rooted to the pavement? Could it be the way you keep your arm slightly bent, as if you’re poised to check your watch? But it goes deeper than that, doesn’t it? It’s the fact that you always respond.

Your mother used to say you had a helpful face—the kind that strangers trust, that invites people in. She meant it as a blessing, but you’ve come to feel it’s a curse. You think of her sometimes, late at night, when the apartment is too quiet, and the clock by your bed glows like a dull red wound. She died at exactly 3:47 a.m., and you know because you were the one sitting there, counting the minutes as they stopped coming for her.

Sometimes you wish you could stop knowing. Hide your watch, keep your phone in your pocket, shrug when someone asks you what time it is. But you don’t. You can’t. Instead, you look down, squint at the little hands that never stop circling, and tell them.

“3:23.” “4:48.” “6:02.”

And they always thank you, even if they don’t mean it. Some just slightly tilt their heads absently and walk off, like they’ve taken something you didn’t even know you were carrying.

Today, though, as you stand at the bus stop, a man doesn’t ask. He doesn’t even look at you. He checks his phone, glances at the train station clock, and keeps walking. For a moment, you’re surprised. Relieved, maybe. Or something worse, like being a lighthouse no one needs anymore.

A cab pulls up. The driver leans out, cigarette dangling from his lips, and asks you the time. You tell him because, of course, you do. He nods and flicks the cigarette onto the curb.

“Always knew you’d know,” he says, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

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Mathieu Parsy is a Canadian writer who grew up on the French Riviera. He now lives in Toronto and works in the travel industry. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as Nunum, FEED, Libre, and Brilliant Flash Fiction. Follow him on Instagram at @mathieu_parsy.

Peter DeMarco

Blue Shirt

The short-sleeved three button shirt is powder blue, sky blue, the world is a safe and cozy kind of blue, and to see it in a body bag, well, not a real body bag, but a Ziplock bag used for leftover food, sent home with you by the hospital, is certainly a surreal site, your dead father’s wallet, watch and blue shirt in this ersatz body bag for possessions.

He’d been wearing the shirt when he collapsed mowing the lawn. The lawn had been kept green and lush with chemicals and seeds and fertilizers, ironic, since your town was named for the Indian translation of fertile or pleasant land, and the grass you’d die valiantly on as a kid, imitating black and white gangster movie deaths, is now a setting for a real death, a heart attack, with the blue shirt framed by this verdant landscape.

A neighbor drives you to the hospital. He waves a cigarette. Your father was good at fixing things, he says. Giving him a legacy. What else can you say to an 18-year-old.

A doctor takes you inside the emergency room. Your father expired eight minutes ago, he says, in a clinical cadence. Your father’s body lies on a steel table. The blue shirt is out of place here. It belongs in the warm confines of your neighborhood, not here, in this place with metallic machines hovering and antiseptic white figures racing around, in blurs, balletic in life-saving choreography.

You wear the blue shirt to church, the supermarket, even Sears, where it was purchased. You pass racks of other blue shirts, lifeless on plastic hangers. Your blue shirt had a long life. Barbeques, Little League games, and when you played the outfield, it always stood out in the bleachers, the sun in your eyes creating a halo of blueness that enveloped your father.

At the disco you stretch your arms up to the spinning ball, the bass thundering, Donna Summer and Hot Stuff, everyone circling you, dozens of hands reaching, touching its soft blue polyester, I am the resurrection, the strobe light breaking everything around you into fragments, and you try to read the expressions on their faces, expressions that disappear for a moment in the blink of the strobe and then reappear, and you wonder if you missed an important frame from those looks, clues to how they felt about the beauty of miracles.

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Peter DeMarco published a New York Times “Modern Love” essay about becoming a New York City high school English teacher and meeting his wife. Before teaching, Peter had a career in book publishing, and spent a considerable amount of time acting in regional theater and attempting to be funny on the amateur stand-up comedy circuit in New York City. Other writing credits include pieces in trampset, Maudlin House, New Flash Fiction Review, Monkeybicycle, Hippocampus, SmokeLong Quarterly, Pithead Chapel, Cleaver, Flash Fiction Magazine. Read more at: peterdemarcowriter.com

Barbara Diggs

Big Girl

First, there was thumb. Like the rest of your fingers, a miracle, but better. Thumb was made for your mouth.  Thumb never falls out of bed in the middle of the night or rolls under her bed where the monsters wait. Thumb could not get left behind on the number 62 bus or at McDonald’s. Thumb hides among your other fingers, and no one would ever know unless they were looking closely. Then they would see the wrinkles. Ugly, ugly, mama says. Big girls don’t suck their thumbs. But you love thumb anyway. Thumb is there when the storm comes. You can feel the change temperature, hear of slithery hiss of the wind growing, sometimes shaking windows, smashing plates. The storm is over when the front door bangs shut. One of them will always leave, sometimes both, but thumb will always stay.

Then there was spoon. You love the spoon the way you had loved thumb, but spoon was objectively beautiful. Elegant and smooth, a matted silver and elongated bowl. You don’t know where spoon came from. It just appeared in the drawer one day, quietly gleaming amidst the cheap clatter of the rest of the mismatched cutlery. Spoon was the real thing. Spoon was the princess who got bruised when sleeping on a pea under a mountain of featherbeds. Spoon was Zandra Jameson, whose thick-lashed doe eyes and delicate brown limbs had the boys pretending they weren’t scuffling to sit next to her in science class. You loved eating with spoon. Spoon made you feel elegant too as you shaved curls of caramel ice cream with it, lifted golden mounds of butterscotch pudding to your eager mouth. You should be eating soup with that damn spoon, mama mutters, poking the fleshy roll spilling over your jeans as she passes by. I don’t know how you can stand yourself. Mama was the one who got stranded after the last storm.

Then there was them. You do not love them, but you could pretend you did when they squeezed your heavy breasts, plunged fingers into your depths. You almost did when you took them into your mouth, and you heard them moaning above you as if you’d drawn a sword across their throats. You can forget so much in that moment. The looks people give you just for existing in your own body; the names people call you, even strangers on the street, even your mama, even them as they zip up and leave. You reach for spoon, replaying the groans in your head on repeat. Sometimes you imagine that spoon is a sword and drag it across your own throat.

Now there is ache. Heat in your calves or lungs. Scratches, when your bare legs scrape against a bramble. Occasionally, a bite or sting. Discomforts, but a cheap price for the trek. There is mountain air to drink like water. There are trees and vines and leaves; dirt and stony pebbles, misshapen or mud-covered, each is so perfect you could cry. There are people who offer an arm if you stumble, and when you offer your stout arm, they clutch it with gratitude. Thumb is on your hand; spoon in your backpack. Mama continues to yap far in the distance, but now you know you don’t have to listen. Still, sometimes the old sadness rolls in. Sometimes you feel like an empty pit. But at the top of the mountain there is rain, clouds, mist, or sunshine. A silky wind or a sharp one. When you reach the peak, you open your mouth and let whatever you find there fill you up. Everything in the world is so much bigger than you.

Where Your Knit Hat Went

The knit hat is gone.  It’s not coming back, so please stop looking for it.

It’s not the navy-blue beanie the guy at the bus stop is wearing. His hat doesn’t have thin white stripes or a red double brim anyway, so it couldn’t be yours. And it’s not the shadow you spotted in the corner of the neighbor’s yard that made your heart jump. That’s a cat. A small dark one that actually doesn’t resemble a hat at all.

It’s not in your closets. Neither the one in the bedroom nor the one in the hall. So there’s no use searching behind the stack of board games you used to play, Scrabble, Stratego, Carcassonne; nor feeling around inside the black, dry-cracked rubber boots that you should have thrown away ages ago.

You know it’s not among your ski things, but that doesn’t stop you from rummaging through the pockets of the flashy red North Face jacket again and again. Eleven times now. It’s as if you think the hat could find its way home on its own. As if you think it isn’t really gone. As if you think the hat could send you spinning backward through time. To the life before ghost-blue brain scans whirled constantly, kaleidoscopically, behind your closed eyes. Before you had to learn words so toxic they swelled your tongue.

You’d be on the mountain again,

the sun in your face, poles planted in the snow,

him grinning as he tugs the hat low on his forehead,

tucks a stray curl under the brim,

then turns toward the white void below,

more alive than a flame.

But hats don’t do that. 

You’re tired, so tired. If only someone would tell you where it went. If only someone would tell you why. You would drink the story like warm tea with honey. You would finally sleep through the night. You would believe it like a child.

If only someone would tell you that you left it in the back of a taxi. Maybe that night they sent you home to rest. (To wait.) You couldn’t find your keys, so you dumped everything out of your bag onto the back seat and scrabbled about in the darkness for a long time. Maybe the hat slid to the floor and faded into the rubber mat. Maybe you collected your keys, your tissues, your pills, your wallet, your phone, your breath, yourself, but somehow missed the hat.

That’s not so hard to believe, is it?

You would believe that the taxi driver’s eleven-year-old daughter found your hat the next day. She would like its heft, the tight weave of the knit. Her fingers would trace the stitching on the brim reading Zermatt. The look of the word would please her, the bold Z, the double ts.

You could believe that the girl would take the hat home, wash it by hand, place it tenderly in a drawer. She would later look up Zermatt on the school library computer; savor the crumpled witch’s hat of the Matterhorn and the sugar-dusted Swiss villages. Her eyes would sweep over the mountain where you and he once stood, and she would feel a pull she cannot explain. She will wonder whether black girls ski. You would want to tell her yes, baby girl, absolutely, we do.

You would sleep so well knowing that the girl will make it a mission to return the hat to the mountain, to the highest peak possible. That one day, she will turn her face to the sun, tuck her curls beneath the hat, then disappear into the void, the wind buoying her up like an angel, pulling diamond tears from her eyes.

It wouldn’t surprise you to know the hat will fly off her head somewhere along the way and become swallowed by the whiteness. Though she will side-step back up the slope with clownish clumsiness, it will never turn up again. But she won’t mind at all and neither would you.

You could believe all this, couldn’t you?

Go ahead. Believe this.

The hat is loved; the hat is happy. 

It’s where it belongs.

Let it go.

Note: This piece was originally published with Lunate Fiction, 2019.

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Barbara Diggs is an American in Paris whose flash fiction has been published or is forthcoming in numerous literary journals, including Your Impossible Voice, Emerge Literary Journal, Fractured Lit, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Disappointed Housewife, and FlashBack Fiction. Barbara’s stories have also won Highly Commended awards with The Bridport Prize and the Bath Flash Fiction Awards and placed as finalist in competitions such as the SmokeLong Quarterly Grand Micro (2023) and the Best of the Net (2023).

Hannah Yerington

In Another Revelation

 The Angel of Wildflowers always sighs at the shifting of leaves, gathers her skirts, sets her flowers to sleep, and takes a cup of tea with The Angel of Bulbs, before tucking in for Fall.

In another revelation, she thinks she would like to be the Angel of Dahlias, the last blaze of starflowers before winter. But she also knows that in Springs of super bloom, hill burning with purples and yellows, she is truly at glory.

This is not to say she thinks all angels should be glorious. It is not their purpose, or rather each has their own, varied and essential, idiosyncratic divinity; the Angel of Carrot Soup, The Angel of Muddy Boots, The Angel of Three Legged Dogs.

Her role is expansive, exhausting really—tending to millions of feral flowers, their constant need for water, and sunshine, their odd and sometimes inappropriate relationships with earthworms, and their incessant protests against aphids and frost.

So maybe, in another revelation, she would like a smaller job, like the Angel of The Third Hour of the 7th Day of June. She is not sure what that job entails but it sounds low commitment, finite, and manageable. She wonders what she would do with her other 8,759 hours.

But then again, maybe holding a whole hour for the whole world, involves an awful lot of preparation, 1440 minutes held in perfect suspension—she makes a note that should she ever meet The Angel of the Third Hour of the 7th Day of June, she will ask for their job description.

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Hannah Yerington is the author of Sheologies, published by Minerva Rising Press in 2023. She is the director of The Bolinas Poetry Camp for Girls and holds an MFA in Poetry from Bowling Green State University. Her work can be found in Porkbelly Press, Prism, Room Magazine, Half Mystic Press, Hey Alma, and Cascadia Daily News. She writes about Jewish magic, talking plants, and teenage girl ancestors. She lives in Bellingham, Washington, with her imp puppy, Poe. Find her on Instagram @hannahyerington.