Kati Bumbera

Afterlife for Rent

Sometimes, in stiff-necked, midweek snooze-button dreams, it turns out that Dad is still alive. I find him towering in the kitchen, wearing that green cardigan, waiting to catch me out just like when I was young, when I’d come home from school and I’d be forced to walk past him, risking his glare, if I wanted anything, like a snack from the fridge, a Nirvana t-shirt, or a boyfriend, or a lift to the train station where I eventually left him. He waved me off in that same cardigan, the scratchy strands of childhood already fraying in a new light.

And now he’s here. But this time round, almost as old as Dad was on that platform, I am the one who looks askance at promises and late arrivals. His cardigan snags on rusty memories of hospitals and graveyards, threatening to unravel the fragile dream. I don’t believe in robins on windowsills. I know he isn’t bringing wisdom, I know he hasn’t come to seek forgiveness.

And then I think, maybe he’s not here for me at all. I can just leave him, one more time, to have his kitchen to himself and be a little bit alive. Sit by a window, listen to dust carts empty the bins. There’s beer in the fridge, Dad, I say to him, then turn around and tiptoe back into the light.

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Kati Bumbera is a video game writer who is happiest in the mountains with a notebook in her backpack. She has short fiction published in The Fabulist, Roi Faineant, The Fantastic Other, The Disappointed Housewife and The Selkie. She lives in France and occasionally posts as @KatiBumbera.

Mark Powers

Rabbits

When the pan-seared pieces of rabbit reached a perfect golden brown, he emptied chopped cloves of garlic from a cutting board into the heavy cast iron pan. He inhaled the heady aroma then poured a cup of a dry white wine over it all to deglaze the tasty fragments of fat and meat. A second portion of the wine went into a glass from which he sipped while scraping the pan’s bottom, enjoying every bit of waiting for the liquid to evaporate into thickened flavor.

His wife had called an hour ago to report her safe arrival at their daughter’s Washington, D. C. townhouse. He’d be alone at home for the next several days. Her call had been short and perfunctory, and among his wife’s parting words was a reminder for him to “get that rabbit” he’d bought on impulse months ago “out of the freezer.” She wanted no part of “that nasty thing.” He’d already defrosted it. Obeying her emphatic orders would at least fill this solitary evening, the first of the even emptier nights that would follow.

His cell phone’s ring startled him. If his wife were home, he’d have let it go to voicemail. There’d been so many junk calls lately. But there might be a problem in DC. He pressed his cell to his ear. “Hello?”

“Hello. Thank you for answering.” A young woman’s voice, sounding surprised that he had answered. “My name is Jenny. How are you this evening?” The words confirmed hers was a cold call, but warmth came through her tone. Maybe she was alone too and elated to speak to a live person and not the usual answering service or machine.

“Fine.” He’d been tempted to hang up, but her friendliness touched him. He waited for the inevitable sales pitch.

“I hope you have time for a short survey. I promise it won’t take three minutes. Okay?”

Why not? It would take about that long to deglaze the pan. A cup of broth was measured and ready to add. “Sure, Jenny. Ask away.”

“Thank you. Just answer yes or no. Here’s the first question. Are you in favor of reinstituting an assault weapons ban, like the one in place from 1994 to 2004?”

“Yes.”

The questions flew by, and he found himself looking forward to hearing her attentive voice with each one.

“Final question. Would you support a national buyback program for assault weapons?”

“Yes.”

The wine in the pan had almost completely evaporated. “Excuse me for a moment please, Jenny. I’m cooking dinner and need to put you on speaker.” He wanted to ask who she worked for, so she might stay with him longer. He set the phone on the counter and poured broth into the hot pan. The boiling broth’s sizzle filled the kitchen. He opened the oven and slid the rabbit’s pan beside a pan of roasting potatoes.

“Wow! I could hear whatever you’re cooking. I haven’t talked to any men who cook.”

“Then you should talk to other men.” Cooking was an artform for him, from the visual presentation to the olfactory and gustatory responses. His wife never cared much about food except as sustenance, although early in their marriage she’d kept him company in the kitchen while he cooked. He missed those tender evenings. Lately, even while home, she seemed as far away as Washington.

“So, Jenny, who are you working for?”

“An online company. I just get the questions and a list of numbers to call. They don’t tell me who pays for the survey. It’s a second job that I can do evenings.”

“If it’s the DNC or Sandy Hook, I suspect you’ll be asking for a contribution.” Her cheerful voice in his lonely kitchen was worth a donation.

“Oh no. That’s not one of the questions.”

“Pardon my nosiness, but I’m curious. What’s your day job, Jenny?”

“I don’t mind. I’m proud to say that I teach second grade.”

“A noble profession.” And why she’s working a second job. “Do you have student loans?”

“Doesn’t everyone?” she muttered.

“Most of those I teach seem to worry about them.”

“You’re a teacher too?” Her voice was upbeat again.

“Well, I work with residents at a teaching hospital.”

“So, you’re you a doctor?”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

“No wonder you feel the same way I do about guns.” A deep breath in. “Imagine taking sweet little children through active shooter drills.”

“My grandson was subjected to one of those drills in his preschool…He still has nightmares about it.”

“You’re a grandfather?”

“I am. Do you have children, Jenny?”

“Heavens no! I’m only two years out of college and not even married…and no one’s even close to asking.”

“That’s something you’ll want to take your time on—to make sure you get it right.” He’d overstepped, giving a stranger such advice. “Sorry. I’m sure you know that, and you probably have other calls to make.”

“Oh I’m fine. When you live alone, it’s good to have someone to talk to. Most people don’t answer, and if they do, they hang up as soon as I start talking.”

“Folks are busy and tired this time of day.” He might have hung up if his wife were home and close by, but he wasn’t ready to let Jenny go. It was good to have someone to talk to.

“So, Dr. Chef, what are you cooking?”

“Rabbit. Something I acquired a taste for while traveling through Europe.” Joyful times with his wife—but he shouldn’t have brought up travel. Jenny probably couldn’t afford such a trip. Maybe his mistake would make her decide to hang up. “Do you like rabbit, Jenny?”

There was no answer for what felt like a long minute. Then muffled thumps like something bumping her phone and a soft sniffing sound. He must have said the wrong thing.

“Hello? Still there, Jenny?” He knelt to peek in the oven window. The broth had mostly evaporated.

“I was letting you talk to Peter, my pet rabbit.” Her voice had become distant, like she’d also switched her phone to speaker and then stepped back. “He’s my best buddy and our class mascot. The kids love him. Want to tell Peter what’s for dinner?” Her interrogation pierced him.

“I’d rather not.” He cracked open the oven, and a wave of heat struck his face. “I’m sorry Jenny, but I should get back to my cooking.”

“You wouldn’t want to burn your rabbit.”

“No, I wouldn’t.” There was nothing he could say now to keep her from also deciding to leave him. “Good-bye, Jenny.”

“Good-bye, Doctor. Enjoy your dinner.”

He pressed the end call button, and Jenny was gone.

When he pulled the pans from the oven, the irresistible fragrance of roasted meat and vegetables offered him steamy comfort. The rabbit was done to perfection, its meat falling from bones to his gentle probing. He spooned portions onto his and another plate across the table, filled two glasses with wine, and lit a candle. The first bite took him to a French bistro where his wife’s knees touched his under a cloth-draped table.

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After almost forty years practicing and teaching pulmonary and critical care medicine, Mark Anthony Powers retired from Duke University as an Associate Professor Emeritus of Medicine and began his exploration of other parts of his brain. Writing, growing fruits and vegetables, and magic courses were just some of the enjoyment that followed. A deep dive into beekeeping led to his presidency of the county beekeeping association and certification as a Master Beekeeper. His previously published novels include the medical thrillers A Swarm in May, Breath and Mercy, and Nature’s Bite. His fourth novel, The Desperate Trials of Phineas Mann is scheduled for launch April 16, 2024. To learn more or connect with Mark, please visit hawksbillpress.com/.

Darlene Eliot

The Disinheritance of Mr. Chiweenie

It is my intention to make no provision herein for the conniving squatter, Mr. Chiweenie, for reasons which are well known to him. I give and bequeath two insulated dog parkas, three marble bowls, and one automated treat dispenser to the Society for Incorrigible Canines. I leave Mr. Chiweenie to his reckless life of biting fingers, hoarding shoes, ducking under credenzas, relieving himself at dinner parties, and no longer running off with Harold’s pocket watch (yes, we know it was you). He is free to unleash his treachery on another innocent benefactor who mistakes his boldness for loyalty when, just as it was with the kitchen staff, my former spouse, and that Hyacinth Macaw formerly known as Minx, he will turn on them in their greatest hour of need even though he is, without question, the least of their acquisitions.

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Darlene Eliot lives in California. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in New Flash Fiction Review, Cleaver, Crow & Cross Keys, Bellingham Review, and elsewhere.

Jonathan Pais Knapp

The Rain Never Lasts

A man entered the plaza and walked towards the ravaged fountain. He wore a gray, three-piece suit and a pencil-thin mustache. His hair was white and thinning, though neatly combed. He had a dancer’s posture—shoulders back, chin held high—and moved with measured strides, limiting the swing of his briefcase to no more than a few inches with each step. Despite his age and formal bearing, his electric green eyes beamed with youthful pride, like a child entrusted with a special errand.

The plaza occupied two square blocks in a small port city. Low, pastel-colored buildings fronted the plaza on three sides, their colonial era facades dutifully maintained in compliance with local ordinances. On the remaining side of the plaza, a yellow cathedral with two bell towers dwarfed the surrounding structures. The midday sun reflected off the colorful stucco. The heat was stifling.

Before the drought years, atmospheric rivers saturated the cloud forests in the mountains each rainy season, nurturing banner coffee harvests, infusing the local economy with productive capital, liquidity, as it were, that manifested, most importantly, in an abundance of jobs. The fountain in the center of the plaza had been a symbol of civic pride and a beacon for young and old alike. Water would cascade from the rim of the mushroom shaped basin as cherubic feet tottered over a cool mosaic of blue and white tiles. Young mothers would gossip on the periphery, keeping one eye trained on their screeching toddlers, while teenagers furtively circled each other, whispering commitments, and old men shook off their wives to caucus, some debating politics, others exchanging dirty jokes, periodically erupting in laughter, inevitably followed by fits of coughing.

The fountain became one of the first casualties of the dry years, which decimated the coffee export and reduced the port’s marine traffic to a fraction of its capacity. When the city shut off its water, a new force was released and wholly directed at the concrete reminder of more prosperous times.  Each arid morning revealed the aftermath of yet another late-night drunken assault on the fountain: shattered tiles, crude graffiti, cigarette butts and broken glass.

The man set down his briefcase near the fountain, whisked a thin layer of dust off a concrete bench with the back of his hand, and took a seat. He unfurled his handkerchief, wiped the sweat from his brow, and closed his eyes. His body was completely still; only his eyelids flickered. He visualized a circle and then willed it to expand outward and multiply, like ripples in a pond.

The man’s eyes opened as a dense flock of pigeons fluttered overhead; the frenzied beating of wings echoed in his ears.  Four brothers in threadbare jeans and faded t-shirts chased after a few remaining birds in front of the cathedral, laughing like a pack of hyenas. Their eight-year old sister sat perched in a tree, partially concealed by a sparse canopy of wilting leaves. Though her hair was braided in two pristine pigtails, she wore red overalls with fraying holes in the knees. The girl scanned the plaza as if it were a great savannah populated with wary prey.   

The man checked his watch. The gold timepiece lacked a conventional face, which enabled one to peer into its skeletal labyrinth of slowly rotating cogs and cranks. The man polished the watch with his handkerchief, peering across the plaza at a glum man selling popsicles from a pockmarked ice-chest on wheels. As the ice-cream vendor traversed the plaza, rolling his makeshift cart over the cobblestones, the small bell affixed to the cart’s handle clanged erratically.

The man crossed his arms and tapped his left foot. He tracked the movements of an exhausted bricklayer on a bicycle slowly trundling past, carting a basketful of tools and a wooden ladder on his shoulder.  The bricklayer hummed a popular ballad as he pedaled.

The man’s watch emitted a staccato rhythm of high-pitched chimes. He silenced the alarm and bowed his head, as if in prayer.  A cellular lattice of clouds, like rows of giant cotton balls, materialized in the sky, casting dark, if uneven shadows over the cobblestones. He felt the dappled shadows pass over him but did not look up.

The ice-cream vendor peered at the plump, celestial fingertips in disbelief. The bricklayer stopped singing in mid-breath, mouth agape. The four brothers howled in unison. Their sister regarded the man intently. A clap of thunder resounded through the plaza.

The man remained seated with his forehead resting on his clasped hands for what seemed like an eternity to the girl who, watching him from afar, quivered with anticipation. Finally, there was movement; the man slowly extended his right arm and opened his hand as if he were soliciting a tribute. Raindrops wetted the thin lines that transected the loose skin on his palm. He tilted his hand and the rainwater dotted the bright, parched ground, forming a dark circle between his feet.          

The man coaxed a small brass key from his vest pocket and inserted it into both keyholes on his briefcase. The locking mechanisms disengaged. He extracted a red bathing cap and a pair of dark goggles.  He donned the bathing cap, carefully tucking stray hairs that poked out around his ears under its elastic ribbing. He removed his watch, took off his suit jacket, folded it in half, down the spine, shrugged off his vest, loosened his bow tie, and stowed it all inside the case. 

The man extricated his cufflinks from his starched, white shirt – two glistening gold ovals with bright orbs of lapis lazuli in the center. Thin lines were etched in the blue stones, radiating outward in elegant whorls.

The boys on the far side of the plaza paused to consider the man as he slipped off his polished burgundy loafers, balled up his argyle socks, and removed his slacks, careful to follow the crease as he draped them over his forearm and placed them in the briefcase. He unbuttoned his shirt and folded it with some ceremony. The boys exploded in raucous laughter at the sight of the man, stunningly unclothed except for his red speedo swimsuit and bathing cap.  Their sister did not laugh, or even smile, but instead, remained transfixed by the man as he fell into a methodic stretching regiment. 

The man placed his right heel on the top of the bench and then doubled over grasping his toes. He felt his rigid, stubborn muscles begin to loosen and switched legs. Though puzzled by their exuberance, the man peered at the boys, fondly recalling how nimble he’d been at their age. One of the boys dropped to the ground, giggling hysterically. The man stepped on to the waist-high wall that encircled the fountain and completed his routine, shaking out his shoulders and rolling his neck.

Cold droplets filled the air, dissipating the heat. The bricklayer tilted his face upwards, relishing the feel of the raindrops on his skin.

The man put on his goggles. The precipitation intensified; sheets of rain buffeted the plaza.  The drops seem to be growing larger, congealing.      

The boys chased each other, racing in concentric circles with their arms outstretched like wings and then dove headfirst into a splotchy patch of grass, now transformed into a muddy runway, sliding on their bellies, tumbling over one another at the end of the line.  Their sister ignored them.  Nothing could pry her focus away from the man as she climbed down from the tree.

Blinded by the sudden downpour, the bricklayer lost control of his bicycle and slid to the ground, dropping his ladder and scattering his tools. The bricklayer scrambled to his feet and managed to catch two triangular trowels—used for smoothing wet concrete—before being carried away by a torrent of rainwater.  He stuffed the trowels in his waistband and sprinted after his ladder.

The man kneeled and clutched the edge of the fountain as if preparing to spring off a diving block. He felt a familiar, dull ache in his left knee. Giant globs of rainwater descended on the plaza with such velocity that the watery explosions seemed to defy gravity, rebounding back to the clouds. The man sprang off the fountain and surged upward, through the rain, dolphin-kicking into the darkening sky. 

The bricklayer clutched the lowest rung of the ladder as water swirled around him, like an inverted whirlpool. The other end of the ladder jerked into the air, disappearing into the frothy vortex. He held on with all his strength. As his feet lifted off the ground, the ice-cream vendor grabbed the cuff of the bricklayer’s trousers with one hand while anchoring himself to his cart with the other.  

Fifty meters above the plaza the man fell into a leisurely backstroke. He let his mind drift; thoughts flitted through his consciousness like leaves floating past on a trickling stream. He imagined his late wife standing in the doorway to their small backyard, fresh from gardening, her hands redolent of moist earth. Sorrow burrowed into his chest.   

The ice-cream vendor lost his hold on the bricklayer’s fraying trousers, the cuff shearing from the pant leg. Untethered, the ladder rocketed into the sky at breakneck speed. The bricklayer desperately wound his arms around the lowest rung.

The brothers solemnly followed the ladder and the dark figure piloting it into the clouds. The oldest brother crossed himself. The three younger brothers followed suit. 

The bricklayer peered down at the shrinking cathedral and gasped loudly at the thought of plummeting back to earth, a mass of flesh and splinters on the cobblestones.    

The sound of the bricklayer’s panic interrupted the man’s thoughts. The man transitioned into a freestyle stroke, propelling himself higher into the sky. A few moments later he appeared at the bricklayer’s side. He tapped the bricklayer’s shoulder and smiled reassuringly. The bricklayer’s lower lip trembled. The man motioned with his hand, molding a descending slope in the rainwater that retained its shape for a moment before dissolving. 

The bricklayer’s eyes brightened. He withdrew one of his trowels from his waistband and began shaping the rainwater around him into slowly dissipating walls. The man nodded approvingly.  The bricklayer reached overhead and smoothed the rainwater into a dome. The bricklayer’s body pressed against the watery ceiling as the ladder folded over into a horizontal position, parallel to the ground below. The bricklayer shifted on to the top of the ladder so that he was laying on its wooden rungs, like a surfer resting on his board between waves. 

At the man’s urging, the bricklayer cautiously moved to one end of the ladder, sitting on top of it like a toboggan.  The ladder pitched downward, starting the descent.  The bricklayer smoothed the rainwater in front of him as he plowed ahead, controlling his speed by adjusting the pitch of his path. He leaned forward and flattened the angle of his trowels—like opening the throttle on a motorbike—and sped up. Then he straightened his posture while rotating the tools backwards and slowed down. Moderating his speed in this manner, he slid back down to earth.

The ice-cream vendor and the four brothers rushed to the bricklayer, embracing him. They proudly clutched his shoulders and mussed his drenched hair, while the youngest brother tugged at the bricklayer’s torn pant leg. Hopping with excitement, the boys picked up the ladder, clamoring for a chance to sail into the sky.

The bricklayer and ice-cream vendor exchanged a hesitant look but then gave into the boys’ pleading. The ice-cream vendor parked his cart below the inverted whirlpool. The bricklayer hoisted himself atop it, and the four brothers formed a line behind him. The ice-cream vendor laced his fingers together. The bricklayer placed his right foot in the ice-cream vendor’s hands and held on to his shoulders for balance. With a wink and a nod, the bricklayer straightened his legs as the ice-cream vendor jerked backwards and heaved. The bricklayer sprung up and was immediately drawn into the sky. The four brothers queued up behind the ice-cream cart, eager for their turn.

The girl’s heart thumped in her chest—she was determined to intercept her brothers, to stop them from plunging into the unknown, baiting death. Why were they so stupid!  And reckless!  She raced towards them, channeling her mother, how, in these moments, infuriated by their idiocy, she would grab for a belt or whatever was in reach. The girl picked up a baseball-sized rock. She felt like the world was spinning too fast, and if she didn’t grab her brothers in time, they would be flung off and she’d never see them again.

The brothers heard the heavy thud of the rock striking the ice-cream cart before they saw their sister, violently motioning for them to back away. The boys laughed but hastened their pace, trailing close behind the bricklayer to follow his example precisely, including the pre-launch wink and nod. With tears of fury blurring her vision, the girl threw more rocks as the boys streamed into the sky, well out of range. 

The bricklayer shaped the contours of the four brothers’ ascent, molding a watery tunnel that curved and corkscrewed like a roller coaster. As they slammed into each new bend, the boys whooped with delight.

Pausing for a moment to regain his bearings, the bricklayer eyed the man once again. He was dancing the Tango, making long, fluid strides as he lifted his right arm to turn an imaginary partner.  A trickle of rainwater fell from his hand like a climbing plant’s tendrils, weaving together, forming an inverted replica of his open palm, only the fingers were thinner and more delicate.  As the narrow wrist and forearm took shape, the bricklayer could see the watery appendage revolving, following the man’s lead. 

The bricklayer leaned his shoulder into a tight turn and formed a coiled flume around the man, providing a clear view of his ethereal dance. The bricklayer motioned to the boys, who, at the sight of the man dancing with the phantom limb, hollered even louder.  

With his chest held high and his spine rigid, the man took a few more short steps and then threw his torso in the opposite direction. He flicked his right wrist sending his nascent partner swiveling. The head, shoulders and upper torso of a woman comprised entirely of water emerged. The man took two steps backwards and then raised his arm to turn her.  She completed the revolution on her own legs.  A beam of sunlight refracted through her tall, slender frame, illuminating the meticulous details of her creation: the high cheekbones, fine lines around her eyes, sinewy muscles in her calves, flowing skirt.  She rested her back against the man’s chest and they rhythmically swayed in perfect synchronicity as if they had danced together a thousand times.      

In the plaza, the ice-cream vendor launched popsicles into the sky. He wound his torso backwards like a discus thrower, and then rotated his shoulders forward, swinging one tightly packed handful of popsicles after another in a circle and then releasing them at the optimal angle. The brightly-colored projectiles rocketed up into the dissipating clouds. The boys elbowed each other, jostling for position, straining to catch as many popsicles as they could until their arms were filled with bouquets of strawberry, lemon, cactus fruit and mango flavored ices.

The man led the woman through a rapid series of perfectly executed turns; as she spun around, the crystalline filaments of her hair brushed against his cheek. The man’s hands dropped to her waist and he lifted her. The woman extended her legs in a front split with her toes pointing away from her body. Though straining from the exertion, the man continued to spin her for several more rotations. Then he abruptly came to a halt. He gently lowered the woman until her tightly muscled frame was parallel to their aerial stage. Kneeling, the man gasped for air, his chest heaving. She tenderly cupped his face in her hands, softly kissed his lips, and then let herself fall. She seemed to float, weightless, for a placid moment and then disappeared, dissolving into so many glistening droplets. Thin shafts of sunlight pierced the clouds, like water streaming through fissures in a dam, casting a filtered spotlight on the man, his eyes brimming with emotion.    

The brothers erupted in cheers, fragmented popsicles exploding from their mouths. The rain subsided.

The bricklayer throttled back on his trowels and the ladder slowed to a stop a few feet above the plaza. The ice-cream vendor was standing nearby, waiting for them to touch down. He clasped the youngest brother’s hands and helped the boy disembark as the ladder slowly dropped to the cobblestones. The boys then darted through the plaza, bounding uncontrollably, seemingly in all directions at once. Looking on from a distance, the boys’ sister quietly thanked the heavens for their safe return.

The bricklayer collapsed to the ground, exhausted. The ice-cream vendor fished through his cart and pulled out two purple, cactus-flavored popsicles. He plopped down beside the bricklayer and offered him one. The bricklayer used it as a microphone, serenading his new friend with an old love song. The ice-cream vendor playfully elbowed the bricklayer in the ribs and both men laughed.

The man landed a few yards away. He appeared stunned, lost in his own thoughts.  The bricklayer and the ice-cream vendor grew quiet, respectful of the man’s solitude. They smiled at him affectionately and the man bashfully bowed his thanks.      

The man opened his briefcase on the bench. He removed his bathing cap and goggles and stowed them away.  Then he took out his slacks and put them on. Next, he extracted his white shirt. He slipped his arms through the sleeves, buttoned up the front and then reached inside the briefcase for his cufflinks. 

But the cufflinks were gone. And so was his watch.

The man scanned the plaza and the surrounding streets that emptied into it, potholed and crumbling concrete tributaries into a long-forgotten estuary. People were returning to their normal routines following the downpour: waiters unfolded signs advertising lunch specials onto the sidewalk, contractors removed makeshift tarps, and stray dogs resumed their interminable search for scraps. The man spied frenetic movement on a narrow side street—it was the girl, the boys’ little sister, sprinting away from the plaza with clenched fists.  She rounded a corner at the end of the block and disappeared from his view.

The man inserted his index finger through the hole in his shirt cuff. He solemnly stroked the cuff’s starched fabric with his thumb. Moving cautiously, as if wary of aggravating an injury, the man rolled up his sleeves, slotted his belt through the loops in his slacks, put on his socks and shoes, and draped his suit jacket over his arm. He did not trouble himself with his vest or bow tie.    

The man peered into his briefcase. He closed his eyes and lipped a prayer, or perhaps it was a farewell.  The taut muscles in his back released, allowing his shoulders to slump forward. A warm breeze ruffled the man’s wispy hair. He looked up, studying the disintegrating clouds.  His lips curled into a grin. He shut the case. The locks nestled behind each of the keyholes engaged with a patter of clicks.  

~

The girl raced up a steep street, away from the city’s center, towards her neighborhood, a cluster of brightly painted cement buildings in varied states of completion protruding from the hillside.  She rounded a sharp corner and, on instinct, flattened herself against a brick wall as a speeding green and white taxi nearly clipped her face with its passenger mirror. Unfazed by the near collision she peered over her shoulder to see if anyone followed. The street was calm; a few middle-school boys waited for a mini-bus and an old woman slowly climbed the steps carved into the sidewalk, groaning with each footfall. The girl was relieved, yet remained vigilant, unwilling to rest until she was home. She continued on, resuming her breathless pace. 

At the blue house she darted to the left up a narrow alley passable only on foot. As the grade steepened, the cracked and crumbling cement gave way to patches of gravel and then dirt, now sodden with rainwater. At the broken chair—a rocking chair cleft in half and partially entombed beneath a small pile of discarded rebar and jagged concrete debris and the point at which her four older brothers invariably slowed down—the girl, as was her custom, pitched forward, digging her sneakers into the wet soil, scrambling ahead. It was a chance to distinguish herself, prove she was faster. And even though no one was there to see her as she summited the peak and strode across the vacant lot next to her house, she felt triumphant, confident that she’d set a new personal record. 

The girl pictured her mother somewhere in the city below, selling bread from the basket she balanced on her head until long after sunset. Her mother was a butterfly in the street, smiling at would-be customers, cheerily drumming up business. But by the time she emerged through their battered screen door, she was an angry wasp, ready to sting at the slightest infraction. 

Safe in her room, sitting on her bed by the window overlooking the vacant lot, the girl marveled at the interior workings of the watch and the delicate circles etched into the blue stones of the cuff links. These were the most beautiful objects she’d ever held. But it wasn’t their beauty that captivated her; it was the promise, the possibility, the power they seemed to possess. 

She surveyed the empty lot where nothing grew but a smattering of weeds and dry grasses.  Narrow rivulets of rainwater filled the parched cracks in the dirt.

When the girl’s uncle had visited from the countryside, he’d held the powdery, desiccated soil in his palm and explained, because of the drought years, the earth on the hillside was now afraid of rain. He tossed the useless dirt aside, shaking his head. The girl asked her uncle what it would it take for the hillside to change, to accept the rain. He shrugged and said that things would have to return to the way they were, when the rainy season gently soaked the hillside each year, taught the sloped land how to retain all that water. 

The girl clutched the treasured objects in her palms, knelt beside her bed, and shut her eyes.  She imagined a bounty of fruit trees and neat rows of vegetable plants, a productive plot that she, her mother, and her restive brothers, who roamed further afield each day, could all farm, together. The girl held her eyes closed for as long as she could.

Outside the rainwater washed away with the topsoil, disappeared into storm drains, or simply vanished, evaporating, as it were. And then there was silence and heat once more. 

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Jonathan Pais Knapp lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and two sons working as an energy attorney and writing fiction whenever possible. He previously published a short story in the pacificREVIEW.

Gita M. Smith

A Gardener in February Thinks About June   

I want to be that daring gardener who ploughs up her front yard—to the horror of the Neighborhood Association—and plants Birds of Paradise, waist high. 

I want the confusion of their orange and purple plumage to lure the staid widow from her manicured veranda across the street. 
She will enter my jungle yard, throw up her skirt and dance like a Cossack’s bride.

I want musicians to gather on my porch in late afternoon, get drunk on the perfume of four o'clocks, and play their revolutionary love songs through the night.

I want my neighbors to abandon their mowers 
and bland green lawns 
and plant old strains of corn and persimmon trees
and share their harvests as freely as they now share scowls and prohibitions.

When autumn comes, I want to walk among my Birds of Paradise, push their firm stalks aside, 
and find the widow lying with the banjo player, 
their bodies tightly curled like roots of salvia.      

First published on Fictionaut in 2013  

---

The Counter Where Names Go to Die

Inside Ellis Island 1912, arriving immigrants are being processed. At one counter stands a middle aged man whose job it is to give people their new American identities. He changes their foreign-sounding names to more American-sounding ones. Paderewski becomes Drew; Ystremskaya becomes Strong; Wjohowicz becomes Howard. 

The immigrants—so malleable—will do anything to become Americans. They suffer this indignity, which is far less onerous than many they have suffered in the past, for the sake of getting the papers needed to begin their new lives. 

 This man does his job efficiently and rotely. It doesn't occur to him that people have a right to their names as part of a long blood line stretching back thousands of years. To him they are just sounds—problematic in some cases—just strung together in chains that can be unlinked and made shorter. It is of no concern to him that these names have substantial meanings in other languages. 

They may be place names, signifying battlegrounds or vinyards or lakes wherein the bones of generations now lie. Or they may mean “son of so-and so,”  signifying precious relationships and lines of succession no less important than those of Tudors or Hapsburgs: Shlomo Ben Levi—Solomon son of Levi.  Ibrahim Bin Saud—Abraham from the house of Saud. Genetic history is seated in these names and yet, with a few pen scratches in a registry, he erases those connections forever. 

He doesn't hear the music in “Delaprovatti,” or the rhythmic susurration in “Sipsizimani.” 

One day a woman, one of several translators at Ellis Island, asks him why he has changed a passenger's name from Checzowicz to something else.

“The name was too long,” he says. “Ten letters.”

She replies, “But you didn't change O'Shaughnessy, and it has 12 letters.”

She waits for an answer but he doesn't have one. Finally, “How does it hurt to shorten a name?” he asks. “You can dock a dog's tail, but he is still a Rottweiler.” 

She turns away and doesn't speak to him again.

Sometimes, when he is in the great City of New York, going about his usual life at a Chinese shirt laundry, for example, or the fish market, he sees the hostile looks of the immigrants around him. He has been bumped in lines and glared at from vegetable stalls, and he is not sure why.

He doesn't recognize the faces, but they recognize him. He is the man at the counter where they lost their names. He is the man who stands on the spot where names go to die.

This piece was first published on Fictionaut in 2017.

---

Gita M. Smith lives and writes and gardens passionately in Montgomery, Alabama. She spent most of her working life writing non-fiction for newspapers and experienced immense joy when she allowed herself to make stuff up. Her fiction has appeared here and there, and so have her poems, but she never kept a list.

Leslie Cairns

Cassiopeia

My Mom was ivy spires, rivets with edges jagged

from being cut off with pliers, the way she screamed with fists.

I aspired never to be like her. I hoped that if you opened me

like a butternut squash, fresh from the vine, to turn into baked boats in ovens,

you wouldn’t find half of her there, when you split me down the middle.

She was once in a hot tub with churning water & cradled heads

near rose & merlot & sprawls of IPAs around her like a fallen down canopy.

& her falsetto voice singing Adele was the bluest, somber, ombre note. So much so

that I almost thought her hair would turn into mermaid. I almost thought

she’d never hurt me at all.

Standing, hugging the doorframe – almost staying behind – almost not

saying goodbye to her, in silence. Her voice could do that to you.

She could hit the high notes. My aunt saying in the car once, at 8, that:

mymomsvoicewasanangels, & Ibetternotforgetit. Speaking so fast about mom

& in ways that didn’t seem to match how she treated me, that I was wondering

if we were talking about the same person. But, yes, my Mom was a soprano.

No one could take that away from her. & when she sang,

you almost thought she loved you. 

                                                            ***

Now, I would kill to be a mermaid in manufactured & too scalding water.

“A dollar, or spare change?” I ask the strangers as they drive down I-95.

People around me look: raised brows, noticing.

Acting almost like I don’t belong there.

A weird sort of homeless.

We flail until we lose

love, until we lose home,

until words that used to lull us to sleep are

cross bones on a skull.

Help me.

I’d love sparkling water one more time.

My stomach gurgles. I don’t drink like she did; I just can’t afford home.

I’m making a pine tree my living room; the stars I name

with different flavors of tea.

Orien’s Belt is ginger,

North star is ginseng.

Cassiopeia is lemon or peppermint.

And, then, I almost convince myself that

I am sipping tea instead of stars & that

my belly is fully of galaxies.

I pivot towards the biggest crowd (about 20), waiting for brunch.

I used to love eggs benedict, made the way my friends made it.

I open my mouth. Remember when I sang

Blackbird, or ‘Maybe’ from Annie, that my voice echoed hers.

Soprano notes in bathtubs. A way we sang something – something – that we shared.

“Maybe this time…” I start.

A few people turn at me, eyes widen.

Fear like mountain tops.

“Maybe this time, I’ll be happy…”

            “Maybe this time, you’ll stay…”

Speeding up: I’m sparrow & I’m flying notes that match yours,

the way you used to sing in hot tubs and

I would almost think you loved me.

           
           As I sing, people keep putting money into my fedora.

I sing & spurt the way you taught me. 

Maybe – tonight – I’ll sleep in a bed,

instead of stars that wait for me.

---

Leslie Cairns lives in Denver, CO. She has a prose chapbook, The Food is the Fodder, with Bottlecap Press. She also has upcoming work in Ellipsis Letters, Fulminare Review, Moss Puppy Mag, and others.

Kat Meads

The Hers

Say, for starters, you are a girl with a grudge, someone who has lived with a grudge (the cause immaterial) for long enough to self-identify as a grudge holder. And say you have this thing about people, total strangers, who feel free to eddy up alongside you in the grocery store or drug store or cut-rate clothing store or wherever to brazenly stare at whatever item you hold in your hands. And say one day, one of those days when there seem to be too many objects in the world but not the right objects, a ripe, old, bruised shell of a woman whom you fear you’ll one day see in the mirror edges up beside you and instead of staring at your pending purchase brazenly stares at you, trying (you’re convinced) with that stare to snatch your age and height and hair density and very life. And say to prevent that theft you start shoving the old woman and shouting “Get off me, hag! Get your death breath off me!” and say the old gal, as if you’ve yelled none of those hateful words, continues to press closer still, and just as you’re about to bolt the line, the checker asks “Will that do it for you today?” and say you, the horribly conflicted, compromised girl, find you cannot speak.

___ 

Say, for starters, you are a woman who can’t recall exactly when you began to pick at your face but never mind since the picking is a private matter between your finger and your face. Say, nevertheless, you have for years been exceedingly careful about the when and where of separating one piece of your flesh from another and during your mid-morning break this day assiduously check sinks and stalls to confirm you are without company in the office restroom. Say the light, in the restroom, has recently been upgraded, a boon to picking, and when a colleague enters you surprise yourself and her by carrying on. And because your colleague does not immediately take herself elsewhere, you surprise yourself still further by digging deeper, drawing blood. Then she does depart, she and her pitying concern, and back at her cubicle will start the first round of Pass the Message. Soon your colleagues en masse will believe you are bleeding out on the restroom floor and wonder if they should “get involved.” Say you consider the entire episode wildly liberating and next day take less trouble covering the inflammation and divots and scabs with fresh makeup, eagerly anticipating the morning you will arrive in the office makeup-free, the first step in no longer disguising any private facet of yourself. Say you follow through.

___

Say, for starters, you are a child weaned on the phrase “Let’s not get our hopes up.” And say, as a child, you infer that hopes (always plural), while possible to lift, are better off un-lifted, that any attempt to do so will be taken by those in your immediate circle as unseemly, an act of bravado, a show-off-y performance. To “come to grips” with that imperative lesson, say your strategy (at first) is to picture hopes as the equivalent of an immensely heavy beast, most likely a bear. Not even your strongest uncle has wrestled a bear, much less lifted it. Then, say a year or so older, still struggling to tamp down your natural childish enthusiasm/optimism/belief in magic, you reframe the imagery. Hopes = a very tall ceiling and you, midge-sized, beneath. A midge could fly within reach of a ceiling, sure, but lift it? No way. Say one rainy afternoon, stuck inside, ceiling overhead, you decide to share your midge and ceiling decoding. And say you imagine (i.e., hope) that when you reach the end of your little presentation, the mood around you will instantly transform and you’ll be celebrated with nods, grins and maybe even complimented on your ingenuity (a word you don’t even know yet) rather than told: “it’s just a saying.” And say this time they are actually telling the truth and all the while you were making up stories to control and comfort yourself they assumed you knew it was “just a saying,” assumed it was just you being you.

---

Kat Meads's flash fiction has appeared in Your Impossible Voice, Fairy Tale Review, Necessary Fiction, Hotel Amerika, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet and elsewhere. She is the author of the flash fiction collection Little Pockets of Alarm. (katmeads.com)

Mary Biddinger

Too Much Charge

The new year loomed like a pair of torn pantyhose in a ditch. Neither of us wanted to touch it. My roommate kept flipping our Scarecrows of America calendar back to November. I couldn’t reach the bin where we stored our cat’s Baba Yaga costume. Somebody kept buzzing our apartment intercom looking for “Sheila.”

My roommate had decorated the radiator covers for Christmas: cloven hooves trimmed from spare felt, Dickensian waif silhouettes in charcoal. I was obsessed with a scratchy blue flannel even though it felt like aggressive dermatitis. It belonged to yet another ex-boyfriend, the one who relocated to Yellowknife because Chicago “lacked authenticity.”

On our new year resolution roster, my roommate applied one glittery holographic sad face sticker to the category of romance. We killed a few hours roller skating in the utility room. The housekeepers laundering Victorian garments of ancient inhabitants of the top floor—left over from the building’s vaudeville days—called us hookers in Polish. My ancestors were straight out of Podlaskie Voivodeship, which I couldn’t even pronounce, and I think the housekeepers could tell.

In 1986, a crime show film crew working in our apartment building released an accidental fireball that cascaded up to the twelfth floor, blowing doors off hinges and melting a few kitchens. Too much charge, the stunt master had claimed in a newspaper clipping. We reeled around a corner and down the half-flight of stairs, claiming to catch a shiver of ghost smoke left over from the inferno crew. My roommate shared an old trick of enveloping yourself in the nearest floor-length drapes, becoming virtually invisible. The housekeepers shuttled past us with their borax, curses, and bundled reeds. 

---

Trick Ethics

For such an old hotel, the doors of the Sheridan Arms sure were flimsy. I thunked and thunked in borrowed platform boots. Down the street, workers and their sledgehammers pledged to make the artisanal cheese chateau more modern. I tried to touch nothing but found my fingerprints everywhere. My hands always felt greasy in 1999, whatever I was doing, swabbing a stray cat’s ear mites or assembling a fake authentic vaudeville hatbox. Arranging dates with a fake boyfriend as cover for dates with an even more fake boyfriend, keeping my roommate in the double dark. 

Some roommates are tragedy-proof. Know them by the cuffs of their khakis, the reliability with which they conceal a mini-pack of tissues in an oxford pocket. My roommate never identified as tragedy-proof, and perhaps I did, but only on paper. Filling out the university housing survey felt like a flashback to my old summer job at Clothestime, with all the trick ethics. If your roommate secrets a mock-pieta necklace retailing approximately $8.99 and returns it the next day, packaging intact, is that a crime and do you report? I nicked the backs of my hands with a tag-trimmer, stood in line for grilled cabbage at the end of my shift.

According to the Tribune archives, a total of seven people had been murdered at the Sheridan Arms, two in the same night, and this brought a chill. Which was the more hideous crime: taking off all your clothes in front of a semi-stranger and watching each item fall to the floor, stepping outside a hotel room door for one minute in nothing but bracelets too byzantine to remove, or inventing a story that involved both? Dishonesty with a roommate is like sitting down at the piano and playing a fake song, then claiming the lyrics are too provocative to sing.

Even the most stereotypical hotel neon evokes pounding Rolling Rock on an empty stomach while perched on a bar stool in denim booty shorts. Once inside the Sheridan Arms hotel room I opened a solitary bar of Dial like it was a freak condom. Peered across the alley at my apartment building, as if I was leaving one body at home while the other hovered in two inches of hot water. Meanwhile my roommate was underlining every sentence in a research article using yellow highlighter.

How long until my date was standing at the door whispering something original like knock, knock? The rubber gloves in my purse belonged to my roommate. Cherry Chapstick on my bottom lip belonged to my roommate. 250 square feet of almost-lake view belonged to me until exactly 5:00 pm EST. I entered my ritual of peering under the bed, opening the closet, unfolding the ironing board that smelled like divorce and damp ribbons.

---

Curator of the Year

It was a period of “laying low” after the pedagogy awards ceremony fiasco. I was still mortified after penning a mini invective against the presumed winner, drinking two pitchers of beer (out of the pitcher), then unexpectedly winning and performing a revolting dance at the podium. But within the confines of my favorite Potterybarn, which we frequented daily, I was simply another style curator. Sometimes I finessed the merchandise into more positive angles. Polished the weekender spoons against my tank top. At the awards ceremony podium I could barely hold the novelty award check steady, but still executed the drop it low as if no time had passed since undergrad. I tried to abandon this memory in a glass carafe filled with seashells.

One Pottery Barn sales associate lingered next to my roommate, who was pondering the cost-effectiveness of homemade rattan, and then fifteen minutes later that same clerk was perched on my roommate’s knee talking about Swedish up-dos and pillows stuffed with alternative down. I was doing a great job of not thinking about the particulars, such as what kind of beer was in those pitchers (Miller Lite) and which jukebox songs I’d played on repeat to pump up my outrage before the awards ceremony. After the ceremony my roommate hand-fed me dates and made guillotine gestures at the bartender, but I just kept railing on about Scott Fennell and his feckless pedagogy paper on passive assessment.

At least I still had Pottery Barn, I thought, running through every retained fragment of dialogue from the post-awards reception, where my roommate claimed to be re-clasping my bracelet but actually tied my wrist to a railing. Around 8:00 pm we needed to make a purchase before Pottery Barn closed. My roommate strolled to the cash register with an armful of wooden beads, a six pack of plastic lemons, and a perfumed drawer buddy. I (accidentally) slammed one tiny sweet dreams bar soap onto the counter.

---

The Autumn Spark

Fall semester clocked in like a hung-over cashier. My roommate double-fisted dissertation hours, while I enrolled in a full load. Two classes overlapped by twenty minutes, which felt like a not-so-secret affair. Philosophy of Rhetoric, Wharton and James. Any time away from campus I spent attempting to read two books at once (one for each thigh.)

I was dating a guy who thought bats hatched from seeds. Let’s wash this beach blanket, he said, we might have picked something up from the trees. Beautiful like a roast beef sandwich. I had to stop my roommate from pinching him when he dozed on our secondhand divan, surrounded by my students’ “Remembering Events” essays.

One autumn afternoon I was cramming two novels at once, boyfriend snoozing in the center of the living room floor. His garments swayed in a breeze from the ceiling fan, which only had one speed. I lingered simultaneously on a description of clams and a treatise on liminality. Then the party girls on floor twelve started tossing lit matches out their window.

We had to spend three hours on the curb. My roommate lugged a typewriter down the fire escape, bit the head off a gingerbread scarecrow. The boyfriend kept running hands through his hair, even though it had long ceased being cute. I imagined my student papers drifting into the flames, at this point merely a smolder, then hunkered one book into the crease of the other.

---

The One Where We Trick Tourists into Learning How to Dance

I own three different tourist disguises, but the most convincing includes three layered tank tops, low-rise distressed jean shorts, and a straw hat with plastic feather in the brim. I whisk on silver-pink iridescent lipstick and grab my shell necklace and I’m ready to rock the plaza. 

Historically the plaza was dominated by flamenco demonstrations and noncustodial fathers herding children to the cotton candy cart. The flamenco demonstration was equally compelling and off-putting. The dancers wanted nothing to do with onlookers. It made us feel like we’d walked in on a stranger who forgot to lock the bathroom stall.

My roommate purchases a performer permit template and ream of 20-pound paper from a guy named Eddie who has a tiny office on Clark. The bootleg template spits out of our living room printer and I endorse it with my finest bureaucratic flourish.

Of course we have to arrive at the plaza separately. My roommate brings the boom box, bag of marabou boas, and mini trophies purchased from the party store.

It pains me to pay for a taxi, but we need to maintain verisimilitude. I smile at the taxi driver and tell him yes, it’s my first time in Chicago and I can’t believe how big and clean it is.

My roommate convenes a modest crowd, the plaza sidewalk chalked with foot outlines like we stood on in junior high when learning the electric slide. The flamenco dancers are nowhere to be found. A few weeks later, a fifty-word diatribe will appear in the Chicago Reader regarding the loss of culture downtown.

I stop at the cotton candy cart and order two pink-and-blues.

My roommate works the crowd. Speaks into a microphone that isn’t connected to anything, but does not need amplification. Are you ready to rock? Are you ready…to rock?

A couple with matching Cubs jerseys ventures into the circle my roommate has drawn in glitter chalk. I set down my cotton candy and step in like a dorky cartoon rabbit.

Have you ever danced before, my roommate asks, tips the mic to my face.

Um, just square dances back in my home in Iowa and whatnot, I say.

I follow my roommate’s lead, align flipflops with the footprints. I’m clumsy at first as if dancing had been banned in my hometown and I only attempted it in a crawlspace under my family’s split-level where I stashed a JC Penney catalog since its families looked so happy with their untangled dogs and unnaturally green lawns.

Then, as the kids say today, the beat drops.

I rip the straw hat from my head and fling it into the crowd, where a noncustodial dad catches it in his teeth. Peel off two of the three tanks, revealing a nude cami that matches my skin.

Almost everyone screams.

I slide my body across the plaza with sick delight, like a lava lamp cracked open and spilling forbidden contents.

My roommate shrieks with excitement as I writhe up the plaza stairs and whip my hair.

From the cornfields of Iowa, can you imagine, my roommate exclaims, then passes my hat to the crowd, waves copies of a dance how-to pamphlet (printed on 20-pound paper) for sale. Now she’s ready to take her show to the finest nightclubs and boudoirs in the Midwest.

Afterwards we dump the contents of my hat onto the Bennigan’s bar counter—mostly singles—and decide to split an order of seasoned fries.

---

Mary Biddinger's flash fiction has recently appeared in Always Crashing, DIAGRAM, Gone Lawn, and Southern Indiana Review, among others. These stories are part of a project that chronicles the adventures of two graduate school roommates in late-1990s Chicago. She is also co-editor, with Julie Brooks Barbour, of A Mollusk Without a Shell: Essays on Self-Care for Writers, forthcoming from the University of Akron Press in spring 2024.

Jim Gish

Harvey Dollar’s Used Cars

Harvey Dollar tried to sell Miss Lucille one of them cut rate cars he has got at Dollar Used cars. He smiled like a possum eating shit and said, “Sure, it is ten years old, but the odometer says forty–two thousand miles, right on the money.”

For a long time now, Miss Lucille had been nursing her ’78 Pinto’s death rattle wheeze, with which it practically begged to be shot and put out of its misery. So Miss Lucille asked Ethel May Kurtz where she could get a good, cheap car, and Ethel May, who is in her Missionary Society group and a trusted confidante, said she would try Harvey Dollar because she’d sent several friends in his direction, and they were all satisfied.

Now, what Ethel May did not tell Miss Lucille was that Harvey was married to her ugly niece, Eunice. What Ethel knows for the sure and righteous truth is that the niece wants to leave Harvey, who is a tightwad and a sleazeball, and unless Harvey sells some cars, Eunice will bring her obnoxious four-year-old son, Melvin, back to Ethel’s house to “stay a day or two” which might turn into six months or a year, at which point Ethel might just catch the Greyhound to Louisville and get her old job back at the Woolworth’s grill in order to escape her relatives and their tendency to suck a person dry down to the moldy core. So what Miss Lucille is getting is a slanted representation of Mr. Harvey Dollar, which she will find out soon enough, as will she rue the day she ever considered Ethel a friend of virtue and veracity.

Miss Lucille dickers in that way she knows to dicker on the price of the ‘96 Taurus saying, “I want you to know I ain’t got any money.”

And Harvey smiles with those two gold caps he’s so proud of and says, “Yes, but Personal Finance has got some money right over there across from the courthouse, and, anyways, everybody gets a loan for a car. It is the American way.”

So finally, Miss Lucille lets herself be persuaded over to Personal Finance where Tiny Kenny Roll gives her thirty pages to sign, which, for all she knows, says that she is pledging to sell her house and kill her cats and offer them to pagan gods, but she has put her trust in Ethel and Ethel believes in Harvey Dollar and Harvey trusts Kenny, although neither of them looks very prosperous or trustworthy. It is like a miracle when, half an hour later, Harvey gives Miss Lucille the keys to the Taurus.

Harvey Dollar is smiling and crossing his fingers, praying fiercely that the car will actually start and the transmission will not fall out. Kenny Roll is standing over in his office door smiling as he imagines taking the sales document home to his girlfriend, Thonda Lee, to show her that he is on his way to his first million and maybe she will let him make love to her again like she did two months before.

Miss Lucille is smiling because now she has got a car which does not have rusty quarter panels and will no longer be the ugliest car in the parking lot at the Pentecostal church where vehicle status determines who gets to sit in the front of the choir.

Miss Lucille starts the car and turns on the gospel station where Elvis is singing “How Great Thou Art.” She drives around the town square twice and stops at every stop light long enough to wave at her friends. And she is aware of how they wave in that tentative manner and then bend to whisper to each other, “I think Lucille has stolen a car,” although Lucille imagines they’re saying, “Look! Lucille has gotten herself a fine automobile.”

The trouble starts the following morning. Miss Lucille goes out to her car, meaning to go the Piggly Wiggly and get some of that cut rate bacon they mark down on Thursdays because the expiration date says it will be rancid within twenty four hours.

“You just put it in the freezer,” she announces to Tollie Dowler, the man who runs the meat counter, “and when you thaw it out, it tastes just as good as new.”

Tollie nods in an agreeable way because it is always easier to agree with Miss Lucille. If a person disagrees with her, she gets red in the face and sputters made up scripture until one no longer cared about the initial question.

Anyway, Miss Lucille slides into her new car and turns the key, taking a deep whiff of the interior which has a new smell to it. What she gets in return is a moaning noise and then a hissing sound. Neither of these, she notices, is a starting sound, the kind one promptly expects from a new car the second day one drives it. Miss Lucille turns the key three times and gets the same noises. At which point, she gets out of the car and closes the door and goes into her kitchen where she sits down for five minutes and reads the Bible.  

She has just finished the verse that says, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” and was wondering if that meant it would be all right for her to go next door and throttle Stacy Delrepp, who sometimes sunbathed nude in her back yard and once called Miss Lucille a “silly old bitch” right to her face. But her attention returns quickly to the matter at hand, which is getting her car started and going to the Piggly Wiggly.

Miss Lucille gets her sweater on a second time, feeling like the car has had time to cleanse itself of whatever evil spirits were circulating.

She crawls into the car, turns the key, and right on cue, the car starts up and runs as sweet as a morning song. Miss Lucille nods her head emphatically as though to say, “I may be an old woman, but I know what I know.”

It is only two blocks later that the car wheezes once more, spits out a huge cloud of dark smoke and stops dead in the middle of an intersection.

Miss Lucille tries to start the car three times. Then she closes her eyes and says a little prayer that nearly always works in bad situations.

“Dear God, help me in my hour of need. I am sorry that I ever had bad thoughts about Darl Farkinson when I hoped he would die from a lightning strike and then it happened a month later. Keep me ever in Thy mercy, Amen.”

She opens her eyes as the horns of other cars around her begin squawking. She closes her eyes one more time and says, “Make this damn car start.” Then she turns the key and hears a high whining noise that sounds like her car is pretty much finished with trying to do what it is supposed to do.      

Miss Lucille exits the car and walks off into the Piggly Wiggly parking lot, leaving the car sitting there and muttering to herself that Harvey Dollar is an agent of the devil, and Ethel, who recommended him, is now an ex-friend who can damn well find herself a new ride to the Frisch’s in Hopkinsville for the Friday Fish Special.

In the Piggly Wiggly, Miss Lucille goes straight to the office and asks Lazy Ass Leonard if she can use the phone. His lips get that bee stung look that he has copied from his idol, Elton John, when Miss Lucille reaches past him and grabs the phone and starts to dial Triple AAA.

“If that is long distance, you will paying for it, Missy,” Leonard says.

“Eat shit, Leonard,” Miss Lucille tells him, completely forgetting about her seventy-two years in the Baptist church and her sainted mother’s admonition against profanity.

“I thought you was saved,” Leonard says dramatically, covering his mouth like an ingénue from a 40’s movie who has been told her slip is showing.

“I was saved until about ten minutes ago, but now I am ready to kick some ass over this damn car I bought from Harvey Dollar. I think God will understand, and if he don’t, I will just go straight to hell and burn for a million years. I don’t give a damn.”

Missus Cloyd Wilson, the Baptist piano player, overhears this standing in the green bean aisle ten feet away, and she promptly swoons, clipping her head on the edge of an aluminum shelf.

Triple AAA is busy, and Harvey Dollar does not answer his phone. Miss Lucille steps over Missus Cloyd, speaking down to her silent form in rapid, clipped syllables, “Sorry, you had to hear that Missus Cloyd. Life is full of sharp surprises.”

Out on the street, Hoke Lord and Dickie Varbel, who have been smoking dope all morning, decide that someone needs to move the car out of the intersection. So they abandon Hoke’s ’87 Ford Ranger and walk to where the offending car is clogging up morning traffic. The Clugg traffic cop, Buster John Holloway, is standing there writing a ticket when Hoke nods to him and reaches in to pull the gear shift into neutral. By the time Buster John thinks to yell for them to stop, Dickie and Hoke have thrown their weight behind the car and started it across the intersection and toward the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly. Dickie is trying to steer and push at the same time, but when the front wheel hits a man hole cover, the steering wheel jerks out of Dickie’s hand thus detouring Dickie and the Taurus and Hoke down Water Street.

By now the Taurus is picking up speed down the grade. Buster John is chasing after the boys to tell them they cannot move a car when he is giving it a ticket. Dickie keeps digging in his heels and yelling, “Whoa! Whoa!” but the Taurus is not a mule and does not understand commands, although it understands momentum really well.

The car is now doing fourteen miles per hour. Hoke trips on some loose pavement and falls on his face. Dickie turns it loose because he can’t run that fast, especially with his pot saturated lungs begging for relief. Buster John stops because he sees very clearly that Taurus is about to run through an intersection, jump the curb, and probably slam through Phyllis Detrick’s redwood fence.

So as Dickie and Hoke and Buster John watch helplessly, the Taurus hurdles the curb, shatters the fence and dives nose-first into the swimming pool, missing Phyllis, who is sitting in a deck chair, smoking a Salem Light and drinking a Chocolate Raspberry Cappuccino, by about fifteen feet.

Phyllis sits there, observing the Taurus as it gurgles and becomes submerged. She looks up to see Buster John, Dickie and Hoke walk through her shattered fence.

“I never had a Taurus in my swimming pool before,” she says.

“That car nearly killed you,” Buster John tells her.

“Yeah, but it didn’t,” Phyllis says. “My mama said God does everything for a reason, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out what lesson I am supposed to learn from this.”

“Nobody knows the mind of God,” Dickie says, and sits down in a deck chair next to Phyllis.

Hoke hunkers down on the balls of his feet like he does when he sitting with his uncle and cousins around a fire listening to the coon dogs run.

“Reverend Bill Chase thinks he knows God’s mind,” Hoke suggests, “but he is just sad because he has got a short pecker. I tried to tell him six months ago, but he just said he would pray for me. I don’t think people with short peckers like to discuss it much.”

Just then Miss Lucille totters up and stands with her hands on her hips, taking in the whole breadth of the scene, her Taurus, and Buster John, Hoke, Dickie and Phyllis.

“Phyllis Ann,” she admonishes, “cover up your titties.”

Phyllis Ann squints at her.

“Miss Lucille, you mind your own business. I did not invite you or your car into my pool or my life.”

Miss Lucille shakes her head in a meditative manner and sits down in a lounge chair.

“I am sorry, Sugar,” she apologizes. “Up until fifteen minutes ago, I was a Christian and I tried to save folks my whole life. It is none of my damn business if you want to sit around with your titties out. I am going to burn in hell anyways since, as soon as I get some energy back, I intend to catch a ride over to Harvey Dollar’s car lot and cut off his nuts.”

Buster John has been watching, first one person and then another, trying to decide at what point he needs to assert his jurisdiction. But he is completely baffled and lowers himself to a sitting position against what is left of the redwood fence.

Dickie rolls a joint and offers it to Hoke, who takes a hit and hands it to Miss Lucille.

Miss Lucille takes the joint and shrugs.

“I can only burn in hell once, and it looks like I am going to, so I don’t think it matters what else I do.” 

Phyllis asks if anyone would like a cup of coffee. She emerges two minutes later with four cups on a serving tray.

As Buster John sips his coffee, he looks over the scene. The car is still gurgling a little in the pool. Miss Lucille is toking on a joint while she and Phyllis speculate about what it will be like to live a million years in Hell together, sort of like roommates discussing a color scheme.

Dickie is sitting on the edge of the pool with his legs in the water looking placidly at the blue sky.

“I just think the world is going crazy,” Buster John says. “I might as well go, too.”

He sits down between Hoke and Miss Lucille and waits for the joint to come his way.

---

Jim Gish was born and raised in Western Kentucky among the rogue Baptist tribes. The author is a writer, a college instructor in psychology, and a counselor for the Lotus and Phoenix website. Gish has published over 50 short works of literary fiction, humorous fiction, and horror fiction; and has won a number of prizes including first place in the FISH FOOD fiction contest and first place for a national contest sponsored by PHOEBE, the James Mason University writing magazine. The author hopes he will be remembered as an admirer of the grand human pageantry in all its raucous diversity.

Cheryl Snell

First Date

“You got kids?” she asks him.

“Who knows? I came of age in the sixties,” he says with a wink. “You?”

Her kids had made themselves scarce after they warehoused her, so she tries a lie on for size. “I’m nobody’s mom,” she says. The lie is a snug fit.
 
“So what made you finally say yes to me?” He is the only man at the nursing home who still drives at night, but she can’t very well tell him that.

“I only said yes to dinner,” she reminds him.

One booth over, a woman is curved against her young man like a comma. They are both wearing wedding bands, but the rings don’t match.

“Hey, pretty mama,” the old man growls, comically imitating the young man.

“Hey baby,” she coos, playing along. She takes the man’s raw hands in hers. The gesture startles him, but he’d be the first to say it’s not his first rodeo. He gives her a slow smile, a light he’ll keep on long after the young cheaters have left, fortified for their fight to be together but leaving separately, the woman leading with the bump she’s already named.

---

Creeper

She returned home from visiting her mother to find her rosebushes dead.  She knelt down to hug them, and looked closely into their collapsed petals. Dead.

“Why didn’t you water them?” she asked her boyfriend.

“Didn’t get a chance. We had a heat wave while you were gone, and they all died, like overnight,” he said.

They entered the house. “What about my plants? Did the heat wave get inside and turn off the AC? Each one is withered!” She squinted at the bent stems with her blurry eyes.

“Weirdest thing─ they all shriveled the second you left. Must’ve missed you. So what’s for dinner?” he asked brightly.

While they waited for the delivery man, he said, “How is your mom? Which one of the kids is living with her now?”

He liked to poke fun of the fact that the siblings kept coming back home after divorces and firings. She stared at him as he mocked them; as his face went in and out of focus; as the doorbell rang.

After they finished their cartons of Chinese food, he went into the mud room and wordlessly handed her the watering can. It was empty, of course.

She filled it and went outside to try to coax her bushes back to life. On her knees, hands deep in soil, she looked up at the ivy she had planted not long before. It had scrambled up the siding fast, and now smothered half the house like a dark curtain coming across someone’s field of vision just before blindness sets in.

Higher up, a sling of moon pantomimed a warning about time, and she saw that although the roses had given up on her, the creeping vine had not. It had even grown a little.

---

Cheryl Snell’s poetry collections include chapbooks from Finishing Line Press, Pudding House, and Moira Books. A full length volume, Prisoner’s Dilemma, in collaboration with the late expressionist artist Janet Snell, won the Lopside Press Chapbook Competition. Cheryl’s work has appeared in a Best of the Net anthology and been nominated seven times. Her collection of novels is called Bombay Trilogy, about the Indian diaspora. She lives with her husband in Maryland, twelve miles from DC.

Eric Roe

Infinite Flow 

Autumn proposed to Winter. Winter ditched Autumn and melted into Spring, but Spring was swept off her feet by Summer, who took his sweet time before he finally started eyeing Autumn. Autumn gave Summer a dance, the two of them spinning breezy through the leaves. But Winter was Autumn’s true love. She blazed for him, drew him close from where he shivered. Later, Winter grew embarrassed by Autumn’s nakedness. He covered her in snow and resolved to go it alone. He marked her as the past tense of infinite flow.

As if she would never come around again.

---

Gathering 

Because it was going to rain. Because I had not gone out to clear the drainage ditch and I knew the water would flood the yard. Because the tree had rotted and would drop its limbs at the first gusts of wind. There is no shelter here. That's what I tried to tell them. And Dad? Dad just stood there, smoking a cigarette, and he said, “Some things you just can't save, son.”

---

Eric Roe’s stories have won the Chautauqua’s Editors Prize and The Bellingham Review’s Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction, have been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes, and have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, including Story, Redivider, december, and Best American Fantasy. The writer lives in Chapel Hill, NC, and serves as the editorial assistant at UNC's Marsico Lung Institute.

Charlotte Larson

If I Drink Whiskey

If I drink whiskey, I dream of that motel room in Butte. How I stuffed my socks into my boots, and stripped the soggy sheets off the mattress, leaving them in a pile on the floor. You stood up on the bedside table covered with leftover lottery tickets. With the box cutter from your back  pocket, you worked on the painted-shut window. I snuck away to the bathroom to wipe my face, to splash cold water under my armpits. Above the mirror, a water stained picture of Jesus looked down on me as I peeled off my cotton underwear and tossed them in the garbage. A miniature statue of Mother Mary handed me blue bar soap.

When I came out, you were fed up. You sucker punched the window. One.Two.Three. You busted the frame right down the side. Jumping up and down on the bed, you held up your fist like a prize fighter. That’s me Baby, you shouted. I’m always the last one in the ring! Splinters dripped from your knuckles, and I wrapped them with a wet towel while you finished a beer with your good hand. Even though the evening smoke made it hard to breathe, you tugged me to the bed so we could lie together. Waiting for some kind of dry breeze. We were afternoon shadows in the sun-drenched room. There was no outside world, just us.

I was on your chest and you asked for more kisses: just one more. One for good luck, one for healing, Babybabybaby come on, you know I need them. I straddled you, hooking my fingers into the loops of your dirty jeans. My chin was raw from your scruff, but I kissed you deep. Whatever you said, I probably needed you worse. Your tongue found its way to the back of my throat. You tasted like Hams and river water and you filled me up up and up.

You had called it our motel getaway. A night away. Something different. You didn’t have to convince me. We were bored searching for quarters and waiting for pool tables and pitchers. We’d run out of our usual hideouts: the bar by the train tracks, our sandspit down by the green river that was only big enough for a towel and for me to stretch out so you could put your hands up my shirt. No one liked us together. At night, my friends hid my phone and pulled me onto the dance floor. They taught me how to swing, to shoot sunflower seeds like darts, anything to distract me.

I would never admit that I liked running into you. Finding you outside in a cool alley. We’d share a smoke in the dark, passing it back and forth. I’d touched every scar on your body, folded up and kept all your white T-shirts, seen how you reached out for me in your sleep. For those few sticky weeks, I stayed out for last call. I’d wait till I felt you touch the small of my back. For you to ask if I was ready to walk home.

On our way, you stopped for smokes, jerky, and cheap matching sunglasses from the gas station. Somewhere outside of Anaconda, the mountains turned lavender and you started singing. You had a husky singing voice, but you belted it out, tapping along on the steering wheel. You were the only man I had ever heard sing besides my Grandpa in church. You taught me campfire songs, boy scouts songs, wait, wait Baby what about this one? You gotta know this one songs. You wouldn’t let me be shy. Really sing. Come on, do it, I know you can. Just try. I leaned over, squeezing your inner thigh. I’ll sing when I get a little drunker, I said. You started driving with your knee and swerved when you bit my lip. You’ll do anything if I get you a little drunker.  When we weren’t singing or kissing, we were quiet. I counted every antiabortion billboard and picked at my knuckles, cracked from scraping too many breakfast plates. I stuffed them under my legs so you wouldn’t see. We never really had much to talk about. All we could do was watch the ash fall on the road.

I stood outside while you paid for the room. I pressed my back to the dusty car door, the air was tight, like it is before a storm. I was just buzzed enough to steal one of your last smokes. Across the parking lot, men, who were really boys, were drinking out the back of their Rams. One waved me over. Come on Baby. There’s a seat right here next to me. I made it special for you. I didn’t move. He licked his lips and howled. The rest of them yipped.

When I go find you, you were still filling out paperwork, signing our names as Mr. and Mrs. Newlyweds. The woman at the front counter didn’t care until she saw me. She turned down her gameshow, stuck her gum in the ashtray. You tipped your imaginary hat and said thank you. She watched you grab my hand and pull me towards the room. She shook her head, turning her back to see who the winner was. It was like she felt sorry for me.

I was drunk when you took my picture. In the picture I’m rolling on the grainy brown carpet, eyes heavy, my face cherry red from giggling. The bottle was so heavy I held it with both hands. Half a sip trickled out and down my cheek. You handed me the photo and I studied the girl’s face. She looked like a baby.

We’d been there all afternoon, you with your Ham’s and me sipping Tennessee honey out of the bottle. The plastic fan whirling whirling whirling. The more pulls I took, the more I let my braid fall out. The more I scanned the room for leftover jewelry, the warmer I got. The more I drank, I was someone else.

Even with the window open, the room got hotter, everything smelling like fresh asphalt. The beers eventually ran out, and you started calling me sweet names. I knew you’d had too much. You flopped down on the floor, pulling your Stetsons off and throwing them at the wall. Hard enough to leave a mark. You were breathing heavy, words slurred together, calling me something like a delicious dream. I was sticky with sweat and whiskey. I liked seeing you like this, kind of helpless for once. Standing above you, I hiked up my dress. Just enough. I was the burlesque girl hanging on your bedroom wall. I was the stripper who called you “a regular.” I was the girl in the corner of the bar with the see-through tank top. I was someone else.

My brown butter. You stood up so quick you scared me. You were taller than me by two heads. You locked and bolted the door. Yanked all the blinds down. Turning up the TV to drown out the boys smashing bottles in the parking lot. My girl. It was just you and I, and your eyes never left me when I started dancing. One tug and my freckled shoulder slipped out. My zipper snaked down, until my dress was on the floor with the sheets. You took out the camera again and I twirled, I skipped, I laughed, the room was spinning and I was too, leaping across the room, I moved like a deer, arching my neck back, pausing only for a better picture, for one more pull, the whiskey tasted like water, I scissor kicked my legs, spread myself open, the room trembled, headlights flickered on the walls as I reached out and sucked on your fingers, you ran out of film and patience, I couldn’t slow down and you moved closer and closer.

I never thought it would end like this. By you chasing me into the cool bathroom. Your mouth like a rabid dog. You kept screaming I need you.I need you.Ineedyou. I don’t remember getting in the shower, but there we were. Together, under cold water.

It must have been the last time. What I remembered most were your eyes. When you were inside me, they stayed wide open. You put your hand on the back of my neck and pulled. Pulled till my face was against yours. It was the closest we ever were. Warm period blood leaked out, running down my legs and drained in between our toes. I was too drunk to be embarrassed, too drunk not to love you. You turned me around, pressing my face against the glass–Baby, you feel so much better than she does, you said.

The taste of honey coated the back of my throat. I stopped breathing but I came anyway. Shaking and squeezing myself into you. Until it was over. Until it was just us again.

I slipped down to my knees. The shower floor gritty and yellow. Water filled my ears, drowning out everything. I would have stayed there forever, but you picked me up. Carefully. Pushing my hair out of my face. You washed me. Like I was a little kid, you scrubbed my back with bar soap. Wiped my bloody legs till the water ran clear. Before I got out, you wrapped me in a damp towel and cradled me to your chest. You smelled like sweet smoke. You smelled so familiar. You didn’t know what you said and I didn’t tell you.

If I drink whiskey, I dream of that motel room in Butte. I wake up wet and thirsty, like you were still there, somewhere in the dark. It took a few moments to remember that those weeks in August happened years ago.

Like most things, we didn’t last, and by winter I had gotten used to sleeping alone. But you were everywhere, at stoplights, in the same aisle of the grocery store. Every Sunday, sitting at the diner counter, waiting for me to come over. Waiting to look at my tired eyes and my apron covered in crusty ketchup and huckleberry syrup. I’d pour you a drip coffee and you’d ask for two sugars, the real sugars. You know what I like. You’d leave a big tip and linger until there were no more crosswords left. I’d flip hash browns, roll silverware, refill salt, pepper, oil, wash my hands again, again and again with a swollen throat. Waiting for the bell on the door to open and close. So I could breathe. I moved away by spring, and I hadn’t been back since. I never had the chance to ask you who she was. I’m not sure you’d even remember.

---

Charlotte Rose Larson received her BA in Creative Writing at University of Montana. She writes copy for an advertising agency by day and works on her debut novel, So Long Honey, in between meetings. This is her first published short story.

Epiphany Ferrell

Instinctive

I listen at night to the sounds of screeching baby chimpanzees, and the snap of crocodile teeth. The nervous laughter of graduate students. My wife’s calm voice, urging them to record, to document.

She shows me video.

“This is ground-breaking,” she says. “Infant animals of disparate species vocalize distress, right? And we instinctively know the difference between contented sounds and frightened sounds.”

I nod so she’ll go on.

“Well, so do other animals. For some species, of course, hearing a frightened baby is like ringing a dinner bell.”

She pulls up a chair for me, scooches herself over so I can see the video. “Primate infants really let you know when they’re distressed, right? Chimps, bonobos. Humans. Now watch this.”

She hits play. I see her on the screen, sitting in a long, low boat with an outboard motor, a white awning covering most of it, giving the research team meagre shade.

“See,” she points at the screen with her pen. “We’ve got speakers set up there, and there, near the bank.” Her pupils are dilated, almost black in the computer blue light.

And then, our daughter’s voice, a whimper that escalates to a small cry. It’s our daughter’s pre-bath cry. Layla often protests at first. If we just give her a minute, she likes her bath. She splashes and giggles. If we just give her a minute.

I look at my wife. She watches the screen. “Jordan, watch,” she hisses.

Crocodiles slide off the bank, glide through the water to congregate near the speaker. They quickly lose interest.

I sit back. “She really didn’t like her bath that day,” I say, hating how judgey I sound. “She doesn’t usually cry that much.”

My wife waves me quiet. “The crocodiles responded to the sound—there was no visual or olfactory stimuli.”

Our baby wails. Really cries. A scared, pained cry that cuts my heart, takes me half-way to my feet in one motion.

A slender crocodile swims in from the edge of the water, comes within inches of the speaker, and waits there.

“You see?” my wife says, triumph in her voice. “She can hear there’s a baby in distress. She’s checking it out. You know, to see if she should help. Like there’s some instinct to help a baby, any baby. That’s our theory.”

“Why was she crying like that?”

My wife looks confused. “She’s not really making any noise.”

“Layla. Our daughter. Why is she crying like that?”
“It was her 12-month shots.” My wife is matter of fact. “It was a good opportunity.”

I’m still absorbing this when the cry comes again. This time, a huge crocodile bursts out of the water, snapping its teeth at the speaker. The scene wobbles as the grad student running the camera moves back with a soft “Whoa.”

“That was definitely predation, and that’s a male,” my wife says. “You see the difference?”

“Why was she crying like that at the doctor’s office? What do you mean it was a good opportunity? You just let her cry? You recorded it?”

“My God Jordan, it was only for a minute, she’s fine. It was three months ago. Did you notice any trauma from crying at the doctor? No, you didn’t.”

“You used our daughter as crocodile bait?”

“This is science, Jordan. We’re studying maternal versus predatory reaction to prey sounds. It contributes to the ongoing debate about maternal instincts.”

She’s looking at the screen again, her eyes following the crocodiles in the water. She puts on headphones, cutting me out, and over her shoulder, I watch crocodiles mill around in the water, sometimes lunging at the speaker or snapping at each other, excited to a frenzy by the sounds of our infant daughter shrieking uncomforted at the doctor’s office.

I go to our daughter’s room. She’s peaceful, her little fingers curled, her hair tousled. Crocodiles swim in the shadows, leer at me from the closet, peer with yellow eyes through the window. I can’t keep them away.

---

Epiphany Ferrell lives perilously close to the Shawnee Hills Wine Trail. Her stories appear in more than 70 journals and anthologies, including Ghost Parachute, New Flash Fiction Review, Bending Genres, and Best Microfiction. She is a two-time Pushcart nominee, and a Prime Number Magazine Flash Fiction Prize recipient.

Bonnie Olsen

Collaboration

One member of the animal kingdom I've always liked is the chicken, Gallus gallus domesticus. So when my caretaker Phineas showed me the ad, WANTED: NEW HOME FOR CLASSROOM CHICKEN, I agreed to take her in. "Cynthia," the students had named her, their star specimen in a Gallus Maturation Project. They’d observed her progress through the wrinkle-skinned hatchling stage to the fluffy yellow chick stage, on to the gangly awkward pullet stage, and when she’d finally achieved full, adult chickenhood, they’d let her come to me.

Phineas and I provided a coop of good taut chicken wire, but maybe because Cynthia had always lived in a classroom, exposed to analytical thought and problem solving, she soon learned to launch herself in ever higher spirals until she topped the coop's chicken wire fence, then she'd soar—I'd never seen a chicken soar—down to the driveway, the lawn, or most often, the compost heap.

The heap provided ample habitat for invertebrates, primarily pill bugs, Armadillidiidae, and earthworms, Annelida. With pill bugs, like any chicken, the instant Cynthia spotted one, she'd peck it up and gobble it down. But for her, earthworms were different. Cynthia didn't just peck Annelids; she studied them.

She would nudge an earthworm gently onto the lawn, then stand up tall, and, cocking her head, would scrutinize first with one eye, then with the other as the worm performed its coiling, twisting, thrashing attempt to regain darkness and safety. Near as I could tell, Cynthia seemed to be collecting data—a predictable result of her classroom education.

Phineas thought so too. "Don't never see a chicken so smart like that," he observed. Then he went inside to put our groceries away. Rejoining me at the compost heap, he said, "Been some time, you know," but this time he wasn't talking about Cynthia. This time he was referring to my seizures.

"I suppose watching Cynthia keeps them away," I told him, which it demonstratively did. Nowadays, aside from one specific trigger, I was nearly seizure-free. When seizures did come, according to Phineas, what generally happened was, I'd “just thrash around some, then sleep a while," which does make them sound harmless, but those seizures were severe enough to keep me from attending university. They were, in fact, so severe as to keep me from ever leaving this house and the one-and-a-half-acre lot around it. Phineas was the best caretaker I'd ever had, and he said doing for me is the best job he'd ever had, so we figured the two of us were a pretty good match—and now with Cynthia, the three of us.

"I got you some more them ramen noodles you like," Phineas said, his way of reminding me it's lunch time. I can make my own ramen, if Phineas pours the boiling water.

***

One day Cynthia and I were out on the porch, the two of us enjoying a bowl of spicy ramen noodles—Cynthia can tell the difference between a squirming earthworm and squirmy ramen noodles—when all in a panic, she flew squawk-squawking away to her coop.

I was still picking noodles from my hair when my father's big rig zoomed up the driveway and screeched to a halt. "I’ve come for my own," he said, drawing pick and shovel from his truck. By "my own," he didn't mean me or even this house. No, lately, my father had become convinced that my mother had died withholding some kind of treasure from him, which he all-of-a sudden knew to be buried deep in some specific, previously undisclosed location behind the house.

In the old days, my mother used to refer to him as a “reformed academic.” He’d been an adjunct professor until the day his research revealed that the lowliest independent trucker out-earns any adjunct sociologist. Right then, he'd quit the university and bought himself a big rig. When asked, my mother would say, “No point trying to explain the inexplicable.” Her outlook did tend toward the calm and rational—as does mine.

My father must have excelled at trucking, because our family’s standard of living definitely improved, including the acquisition of this house-plus-workshop on a one-and-a-half-acre lot. The workshop was a nod to my mother, who liked to build wooden furniture. She took to saying she thought she'd married a scholar and instead had got herself a plutocrat. By “plutocrat,” she'd meant my father’s increasingly disagreeable approach to just about anything. He might be nursing the germ of an idea when he set off on a long haul, but without benefit of research, testing, and studied observation, by the time he returned, that germ of an idea would have blossomed into some irrational conclusion—always more twisted and disagreeable than the one before it.

Phineas joined me on the porch, being near in case I seized again. My father's abrupt appearances generally did trigger seizures, and that day's was bound to fall into the category of a "doozy"—which, unfortunately, it did.

By the time I recovered, my father was away on another long haul, and Cynthia had resumed her study of Annelid behavior. Her latest hypothesis seemed to be that an earthworm dropped onto a nasturtium leaf will behave differently from an earthworm dropped onto the lawn. Our nasturtium plant had gotten out of hand anyway, and its broad, flat leaves could easily be plucked by a chicken.

"She been sticking those leaves together," Phineas informed me one day as I was recovering from yet another seizure, and indeed Cynthia was doing just that. She would pluck a leaf, poop on it just so, then nudge another leaf partly over the moist poop to create a larger surface. Another dollop of poop, another leaf, and her leaf mat would grow. When she'd got her leaf mat large enough, she'd drop a worm atop it and observe intently.

"She timing how long it take for the worm to get hisself to safety," Phineas said, and that did seem to be it. We watched Cynthia perform another trial. Then another. With the third, Phineas roused himself. "You want to see that hole he dug out back?"

I supposed I should.

My father had dug more than a hole; he'd dug a pit. I estimated its dimensions at a radius of five feet, depth of four—though it looked deeper, because he'd been piling the dark, clay-like, dug-up earth high around his pit’s circumference. Judging by the boot marks in that heap, he’d been climbing up and over it to further his digging. I seized again, another "doozy."

Science tells us that the human brain is equipped to withstand only so many seizures, and by my own calculations, I had to be approaching that limit. The problem was, I could collect data, plot points, and draw graphs much as I liked, but no graph on earth could predict the exact day my brain would fail to recover—only that the day was fast approaching.

This time though, I did recover, and as soon as Phineas had me “up and at ‘em” again, he told me, "You got to come see Cynthia's mat now. I been given her Elmer's glue, works better than poop." It certainly did. During the days I'd been "out," Cynthia had fashioned a sizeable carpet of nasturtium leaves. "See how she keep them leaves soft and green? I puts out a pan of water, and she dip in a wing, then flutter around.”

I told him, "You know what you two have become? Scientific collaborators, that's what." We had a little chuckle over that, but then I sobered. "About that hole?" I had to know.

"Six feet deep now, closer to seven. He been bringing a ladder, winch, and bucket—no light though. Guess he got such a clear idea in his head, he don't need light."

I didn’t find that hard to believe.

Phineas said, "He be back again pretty soon—today, maybe tonight."

I took that as warning to stay indoors, which, given my increasingly fragile state, might be a very good idea. Cynthia, however seemed to take that news another way. She stopped her worm testing and stood up tall, taut, and alert, looking hard into Phineas's eyes, which were looking back, equally intent. They didn't break their gaze until I started walking alone toward the house, and Phineas had to stay beside me.

I couldn't know how many hours remained until my father's return, and I couldn't tell if I would survive the seizure it triggered. I spent all the rest of that afternoon writing my will. It wasn't long, because the only treasure I could bequeath was Cynthia, and the only heir I cared to name was Phineas. But I took my time to get the wording right.

***

Next morning, I woke to Phineas's voice saying, "You got...you got to come out back." I'd never seen him so shaken.

My father's big rig was parked there in the driveway, but for some reason, it didn't trigger a seizure. Phineas and I waited to be sure, then together, we walked around to the back. By now, my father’s mound had grown so high, we had to clamber up it just to see down into the pit. Phineas kept a tight hold of me, and frankly, I kept a tight hold of him, too.

It was good I had, because way down deep at the bottom lay my father's body, horribly contorted beneath a tangle of pick, shovel, rope, winch, ladder, and bucket. "Dead," Phineas said, though he didn't have to, because the buzzing of flies was already telling me that: Calliphoridae, a species known to sense death in minutes so as to lay its eggs within the decomposing flesh.

And as I stood atop that mound of earth, it seemed to me that a small piece of my damaged brain fell back into place, and with that newly completed brain, I achieved confidence, reason, and memory.

I could now remember how my mother and I had been out in the workshop, chatting amicably about university in the fall. Had I settled on a major yet? “Almost,” I’d told her. “General biology for the early years, then maybe zero in on ornithology or herpetology.” We’d been building extra-tall bookcases of fine, dense walnut, having agreed they should be weighty in every sense of the word.

And at that moment, my father had burst in, just returned from one of his extra-long hauls and fuming with rage. "I’ve come for my own," he’d said, referring to my mother's inheritance from her recently-deceased Aunt Muriel. The will had read, "I bequeath my most valuable treasure to my most valued niece," and the treasure had turned out to be a great many books, most of them about zoology, all of them deserving of extra fine, tall, weighty bookcases.

But out on the road, my father had reached the conclusion that the "valuable treasure" had to be gold or securities or jewels—and further, that if his spouse was heir, Muriel's treasure was his as well. My mother had tried to explain the true nature of her inheritance, and he’d beat her to death with a board of fine dense walnut. And on a back swing, he'd caught me too, hard on the head.

Later, the doctors had told me my survival was "a miracle," and that my mother and I had been found crushed beneath two toppled, unfinished bookcases, an accident.

Some accident. Some miracle.

So our new house became my convalescent ward, and the money for my university education went to wages for Phineas, and eventually, upkeep for Cynthia.

I climbed back down the mound, and Phineas allowed me to walk away alone. Somehow he knew, as did I, that there would be no more seizures.

I set out to find the leaf mat. Physically speaking, it still had to exist in some material form and in some actual location. I found it—or rather pieces of it—on the far side of the compost heap beneath dense and sticker-y brambles where few would care to look. I collected my specimens and transferred them to the lawn for further study. Piece-by-piece, I re-assembled the mat, carefully examining each component in detail.

Judging by the dark, clay-like soil clinging to the underside of my re-assembled specimen, this mat had once been in contact with the mound of earth by my father’s pit. There, someone intent on entering said pit—motivated by greed and heedless of the dark—would step on it. And where he'd stepped, boot had met earthworm—quite a number of earthworms, it looked like—and had slid, leaving behind a great long smear of Annelida guts.

I had to sit back. Even Cynthia could not have transported that mat all the way from the compost heap to the mound of earth. Nor could she have spread that mat and arranged all those worms just so. For that, she’d have needed a collaborator.

Phineas came up beside me. "Guess now, you can get yourself that university education you wanted."

I could.

We watched Cynthia scratch up an Annelid and immediately gobble it down. We kept watching, and she did it again—no observation, no timing, only consuming that worm quick as she could like any ordinary chicken might.

Phineas said, “Looks like she done gone back to being a chicken.”

“Yes.”

He took a breath. “Been wondering if maybe I could maybe buy that rig off you, take up long haul trucking for a while.”

“It does look like your days of scientific collaboration are over.”

“And you’ll be off to university, selling the house, the land, but…what you going to do about her?”

For a while, we watched Cynthia behaving very much like a chicken—almost self-consciously so.

“I think we can trust Cynthia to take care of herself,” I told him. “She is, after all, an educated chicken.”

---

Bonnie Olsen lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina with her very patient husband John, and only memories of the chickens she once knew.

Devon Ellington

The Forest Library

“But it’s a library,” said Bonnie, looking in wonder at all the shelves amidst the trees. “Nothing bad can happen in a library.”

“It must have been abandoned for years,” Marise said, peering inside. “Why hasn’t anyone found it?”

“Maybe they have.” Sonja shivered. “Maybe we’ll find bones here.”

“The books will protect us,” said Bonnie.

She led the way through the arched doorway in the trunk of the rowan tree. Marise and Sonja exchanged a look.

“We can’t let her go on her own,” said Marise.

“It’s not often she’s the bravest of us,” Sonja added.

“Maybe we can hide here,” Marise added, half to herself.

They followed Bonnie through the hollow tree into the…what was it? A room? A building? Not quite. The trees soared about them, arching over, and yet there was starlight. The floor was a carpet of soft grass. Flowers peeked shyly around tree trunks. There was a sense of both freedom and containment.

And books. So many books!

The wooden shelves rose between the trees, in the trees, around the trees. Everywhere there were beautiful, beautiful books, in jewel-toned bindings with gold or silver or copper lettering on the covers. Nothing moldy, damp, or damaged. Not abandoned at all, then.

Some of the books were splayed on the floor. Bonnie reached down and picked one of them up. “Hmm,” she said. “Interesting.”

“Do you think they’ll look for us?” Marise asked.

“They’re too busy with the others they’ve caught,” said Sonja. “Or those that tried to run. But failed.”

“What do you think they’re doing to them?” Marise shivered.

Sonja didn’t spare her. “Terrible things. But we escaped. Maybe they won’t find us here.”

Bonnie looked up from the book in her hands. “They won’t. We will find answers here.”

“How do you know?” Marise asked.

“Because all the answers are in books,” said Bonnie. “We just have to find the right one.”

Sonja looked around, at the endless rows of books. “It might take a while.”

“We’re safe here,” said Bonnie.

“How do you know?” Sonja persisted.

“It’s a library,” Bonnie emphasized. “Libraries are safe.”

“They burned the library at Tharus,” Marise reminded her.

“With the librarians and scholars in it,” Sonja added.

“Do you think the books escaped from there to here?” Marise asked.

“They won’t find us,” Bonnie promised.

“Are you feverish?” Sonja demanded. “You’re usually timid.”

Bonnie smiled. “Books make me brave.”

“I guess we’d better get to work,” said Marise. She picked up a random book and looked around. “I’ll be over in that chair.”

Sonja frowned. “Was that there a minute ago?”

“I don’t remember,” Marise admitted.

“It’s there now,” said Bonnie. “Enjoy it. I’ll be on the sofa.”

Sonja giggled. “It looks like something out of a grand house. Do you think this was a grand house once?”

“I think it’s something better,” said Bonnie, and curled up on the red velvet sofa with her book.

Marise withdrew with her book to a wingback chair with a blue and white checkerboard pattern. Sonja picked a book at random. A large leather club chair bumped up against the back of her knees, and she sat.

For a few minutes, the only sounds were breathing, pages turning, bird chirps, and the whisper of a slight breeze through the flowers. The scents of jasmine and honeysuckle filled the air.

“What’s your book about?” Sonja asked.

“Trains,” said Marise.

Sonja wrinkled her forehead. “What’s a train?”

A look of wonder passed Marie’s face. “I’d never heard of one before I opened the book,” she said. “But it makes perfect sense. It’s a series of rooms on wheels. It’s a way for people to ride long distances, in chairs, looking out the windows together. They can chat and make friends as they travel, and see villages and towns they’d only heard about before. The cars are pulled by something called an engine and run on something called tracks. It sounds like wonderful fun. What’s your book about?”

“Poison,” said Sonja.

“You always wanted to study with Old Mother Berry,” said Marise.

Sonja grimaced. “Papa promised me to the miller’s boy, and he didn’t want a wife who knew about poisons.”

“He didn’t want a wife with a brain,” Marise said.

“He doesn’t have to worry about that now, does he?” Sonja snapped, and then looked down. “I’m sorry. That was unfair.”

“Just because you didn’t want to marry him doesn’t mean you want something bad to happen to him,” said Marise. “Bonnie, what’s your book about?”

Bonnie looked up and smiled. “Possibilities.”

Before anyone could ask her what that meant, they heard something rattle farther into the structure. They looked at each other, got up as one, and closed their books. They left the books on the seats and moved into a darker portion of the library, with the occasional firefly lighting the way.

Marise, in the lead, tripped over something hard. “Ow,” she said, looking down, and then, “Oh.”

“What did I tell you?” Sonja demanded. “Bones.”

Marise knelt down by the pile. “What kind of bones do you think these are?”

“Bones of those who do not respect books,” said an unfamiliar voice.

The three young women looked up. Beside them stood a figure in brown trousers and a dark red tunic, with a long, open robe over it, decorated with scrolls and stars. The figure wore dark, sturdy boots, and a tall, pointed hat with designs that matched the robe, and carried a lantern in one elegant, long-fingered hand. Long hair flowed past the shoulders. The figure shimmered, sometimes appearing as an old man, sometimes a young woman with coppery hair, sometimes an old woman, sometimes a young man, and then through the round again, with different colored skin and hair and eyes. “What is it you seek?”

“Who are you?” Marise asked, mesmerized.

“I am the hermit of the library,” they responded.

“How shall we address you?” asked Sonja.

“I find ‘hey you’ often works,” the hermit returned, in a dry tone.

“I mean—” Sonja flushed.

“I know what you mean,” said the hermit. “I cannot be defined by something as limiting as gender. Or even age.” They gave her a soft smile.

“It’s rude to say, ‘hey you’ to someone of your status,” Sonja argued, feeling on steadier ground.

“And yet it doesn’t stop them,” said the hermit.

“Them?” Marise asked, pointing to the bones.

The hermit shrugged. The three young women waited in silence. Finally, they relented. “You may call me Ainsley,” they said.

“Pleasure to meet you, Ainsley,” said Marise.

Sonja nodded. The argument wore her out.

“What is it you seek?” Ainsley repeated.

“Refuge,” said Marise.

“Revenge,” said Sonja.

“Knowledge,” said Bonnie.

Ainsley watched the young women for a few long heartbeats, but none of them flinched. “Interesting,” they said. “What do you offer?”

“I fix things,” said Marise.

“I break things,” said Sonja.

“I learn things,” said Bonnie.

“Hmm,” said Ainsley. “There are things here that need fixing, things that need breaking, and plenty that needs learning. Such potential.”

“I hope you’re not making fun of us,” said Sonja.

“Me?” Ainsley pretended to be shocked, then chuckled. “Maybe a little. I don’t get many visitors. Not ones that survive, anyway.” They turned away. “Come on, then. You must be hungry. Tired. You need food and sleep.”

“We should warn you,” said Marise.

Ainsley turned back. “Yes?”

Sonja sent her a quelling look, but Marise continued. “Taking us in could put you in danger. Our entire village—”

“Yes, that was unfortunate, but you are safe here.” Ainsley turned and walked into the darkness.

“What if he murders us?” Sonja asked. “What if we’re added to the pile of bones?”

“He won’t,” said Bonnie.

“Says the girl who’s never been farther than a half a day’s ride from the village before.”

“It can’t be worse than would happen if we were caught,” said Marise.

They emerged into a kitchen area, with a round, friendly wooden table and chairs with hand sewn cushions on them. Sonja leaned down to take a look.

“Printed with peonies on them,” said Ainsley, not turning to look at them from the stove. “And not filled with the hair of my enemies.” They gave her a quick glance over one shoulder. “I’m not wearing a necklace of teeth, either.”

“Sorry,” Sonja mumbled.

“No, no, it’s wise for a young woman to be cautious, in many a dimension,” Ainsley assured her. “You’d think, after so much time, we’d have figured that bit out, but no, not yet. I have soup. No poison in it, I promise. There’s hot tea and cold, and fresh bread. Dishes are in the cupboard to your right, drinks along the counter. Set the table, please.”

“How does the library grow?” Bonnie asked, as the young women set the table. “The books don’t just pop up here, do they?”

“No, no,” said Ainsley. “I have a regular round of Inkpickers who stop by and show me their latest finds. If I don’t have it, and it’s in good enough shape to repair, I usually buy it. Weary travelers either tire of carrying their books, or they read them on the way and don’t want to keep them. And then there are those who remember the library in their wills.”

“How do they even know it exists?” Marise asked.

“Those who can’t come in person often find it in their dreams,” said Ainsley. “They can’t take anything back with them, of course. This isn’t a lending library. But a visit here imbues them with a passion for books. They spend the rest of their lives accumulating too many of them, and then will them here.”

“How do they get here?” Sonja asked, slicing the crusty bread, warm as though it had just emerged from the oven.

Ainsley smiled, as they ladled the soup into the bowls Bonnie brought them. “They follow the scent of ink and paper.”

They sat around the table and ate their supper.

Sonja looked up. “Are we dead?” she asked.

“No,” Ainsley assured her.

“Are we dreaming?” Marise asked. “Because something awful is happening to us elsewhere?”

“No,” Ainsley said, in a kind voice. “Your bodies and your spirits are here.”

“Can we stay?” asked Bonnie.

“As long as you like,” said Ainsley. “I have the room. Would you prefer to stay together, or be in separate rooms?”

“Together, at first,” said Marise.

Ainsley nodded. “When you decide differently, you can read the room into a different configuration.”

Before Marise could question that, Sonja asked, “What’s expected of us, if we stay? How do we earn our keep?”

“Treat the books as friends, with respect.” Ainsley began ticking off requirements on their fingers. “Don’t ignore them if they try to warn you about something.  I’ll teach you binding, mending, how to listen to the pages, the spines, the souls. You can help keep the place tidy, with dishes and mending and washing and the like, but I don’t need or want scullery maids or servants. You’ll need to study to achieve that which you seek.” He looked at Sonja, “Revenge might take some time. And clearer definition.”

She nodded.

“Can we return if we go past the door?” Bonnie asked.

“You can come and go as you please on short trips,” said Ainsley. “Although I advise caution in these turbulent times. Don’t leave unarmed, be it with a blade or a vial of belladonna.”

“The bones—” Marise began.

“Don’t worry, they didn’t die of over-reading,” said Ainsley.

Bonnie giggled.

“Intruders?” Sonja hazarded.

“In a sense,” said Ainsley. “There’s the type of word-hater who is upfront about it. They hate words, literature, passion, entertainment, education. They must be quashed before they gain a foothold and power, or they destroy everything in their path. Then there is the other kind of word-hater, the more insidious kind. They pretend to love words, but the truth is, they only love their own. They claim they know what is ‘good’ and ‘right’ and that their opinions are exalted, and the only opinions that matter. They are even more dangerous, because they manipulate those who would have a wider, more complex reading and learning experience without them. The upfront haters can’t get in; the library is fortified against them. It can’t yet hunt them down and remove them; we would need to create and train Ink Knights for that. And let’s face it, most of us would rather stay in and read than go out and do battle, until the battle is brought into our parlors. The bones you stumbled across are the bones of the insidious. They might get in, but there’s no one here for them to manipulate. Eventually, their own misanthropy and bullying bile eats them from the inside, and nothing is left but their bones.” Ainsley sighed. “I supposed I could tidy them up a bit, but I do like a little bit of drama here and there.”

“If we ever decide to leave,” Sonja began.

“If it is ever safe to leave,” Marise added.

“Then you will leave, with goodwill and blessings,” said Ainsley. “To be readers or writers or whomever you wish.”

“But we can’t come back,” said Bonnie. “If we left, for years. We’d forget?”

“The path to the rowan would close to you,” said Ainsley. “But you could return in your dreams.”

“As long as we don’t become insidious,” Sonja countered, and they exchanged a smile.

The girls finished their supper, listening to Ainsley tell stories of their youthful adventures discovering caches of scrolls and caverns of cuneiform. Together, they washed the dishes, and then Marise yawned.

“I’m sorry,” she said, embarrassed.

“You’re exhausted,” Ainsley said. “Best get some rest. Through the birch arch there.” They pointed.

“Thank you,” said Bonnie, and the other two young women echoed with sleepy voices.

The bedroom held three large four-poster beds, the foot-boards angled toward each other. The beds were stacked with fluffy pillows and, soft quilts, with a nightdress set out on each bed. And, of course, shelves of books with beautiful, luminous covers edged the space.

Sonja opened a small door. “A bathroom, thank goodness,” she said. “I was worried we’d have to use an outhouse.”

The trio performed their evening ablutions, crawled into their beds, and were asleep almost as soon as their eyes closed.

Sometime in the night they were woken up by shaking branches, rolling thunder, and angry voices outside. They heard the clash of swords, the shouts of fury, and was that a cannon? The room shook, and roof of leaves above their heads rattled.

They climbed into the bed with Sonja and huddled together.

“Are we dreaming?” Marise asked.

A walnut fell from above them and bopped Sonja on the head. “I don’t dream in walnuts,” she said, flicking it off the bed.

“It’s real,” said Bonnie. “It sounds bad, but we don’t need to be frightened.”

“How can you be sure?” Sonja demanded.

Bonnie smiled. “I believe in the books.”

Sonja snorted. “I still wish Ink Knights existed.”

Bonnie’s smile widened. “Maybe we can create them.”

“We’ll put it on our project list,” Marise joked as Sonja rolled her eyes.

Another blunt blow shook the building. The girls huddled tighter together.

“What if they come through the roof?” Marise whispered.

“We stab them with a hatpin,” said Sonja.

Marise opened her mouth to point out they didn’t have hats, much less hatpins, when Bonnie said, “Don’t imagine them breaking in, and then they won’t.”

“If only it worked that way at home,” Marise whispered.

“This is home now,” said Bonnie.

A book jittered off one of the shelves above them, due to the vibration of the fight outside, and dropped into the bed in front of them. It was bound in blue leather, with silver trim.

“Pick it up and read to us,” said Bonnie.

“Shouldn’t we stay as quiet as can be, so they won’t find us?” Marise asked.

“We should read this book,” Bonnie insisted.

Sonja picked it up and turned the pages. “Once upon a time, there were three brave girls, who grew into three adventurous women. They didn’t slay dragons. They slew those who hunted dragons…”

Sonja read in a strong, true voice, as the room stopped shaking and the voices receded.  Marise and Bonnie snuggled beside her, excited to learn what happened next. Sonja read about the girls’ adventures and challenges, their laughter, their tears. “And so they lived, happily ever after, because they were true to themselves and each other. The end.” Sonja closed the book with a snap.

Marise looked up. “Is it--?”

A series of strange screeching noises began, and grew in volume. Then more shouting, and screaming. The girls dived under the covers, trying to block out the sounds. The sounds of battle died away, the screaming lessened into moans, and then silence. The three of them drifted off to sleep, still curled together in one bed.

They woke, the next morning, to the sounds of birds chirping. The songs were familiar.

Sonja sat up in bed and frowned. “I didn’t think birds could tweet folksongs,” she said.

“They can do many things here,” said Bonnie, climbing out of bed.

“Look at her, she’s almost smug,” teased Marise.

“Hallooo! Good morning!” Ainsley called from the other side of the door. “Breakfast is ready. I hope you like coffee, although I can fix tea.”

“Coffee’s great,” Marise called. “We’ll be right out.”

Quick morning ablutions, even quicker dressing, and they were in the kitchen, facing beautiful poached eggs heaped with creamy sauce on muffins, and sides of hash browns. “Come, come,” said Ainsley, “eat while it’s hot.”

Sonja went to help herself to a cup of coffee and stopped short at something on the floor. “That’s a cannonball.”

“It’ll make a lovely doorstop, once I’ve polished it up a bit,” said Aisley. “it’s a bit too heavy for a bowling ball.”

“You bowl here?” Marise asked.

“It’s a library. Everything is here.”

“Last night—” Sonja began.

“Sorry about the ruckus,” said Ainsley. “Raiders are stupid and blunt. Which makes them easy to defeat, it’s not like there’s a lot of fresh ideas in their repertoire. But sometimes it takes longer to turn them back than others.”

Marise looked up at the roof.

“It’s almost fixed itself,” said Ainsley.

“And the raiders just…ran away?” Sonja asked, her tone cautious.

“Oh, no, the liberdactyls ate them,” said Ainsley, with good cheer. “I hope the screaming didn’t keep you up.”

“Liber. Dactyl?” Marise asked.

“I expect it’s like a pterodactyl,” said Bonnie. “I remember reading about them in school. I always wanted to go to the museum in Oberland to see the skeleton in the natural history museum there.”

“Very good memory,” Ainsley beamed. “A liberdactyl looks very much like a pterodactyl, but quite large. And vicious toward anyone or anything that attacks the library.”

“If we go out the front door, will the ground be littered with body parts?” Sonja asked.

“Maybe an eyeball or two,” said Ainsley. “The liberdactyls are quite omnivorous; you usually find evidence of their meals in their scat.”

“I think I’ll pass,” said Marise, and the others laughed.

They ate, until Marise said, “Does this mean our village is safe again?”

“I’d never feel safe again, and I don’t want to see what’s left and what’s been destroyed,” said Sonja. “I feel I should, to bear witness, to see if anyone survived, but I don’t want to.”

“Even if the group last night was the group that attacked your village, it would only be quiet until the next group came through,” said Ainsley. They looked at Sonja. “I suspect you three are the only survivors.”

“Shouldn’t we make sure?” Marise asked.

“I don’t want to leave,” said Bonnie. “Our parents told us to run and we ran. We need to stay here, and safe, for now. If any of them survived, we will find our way back to each other, through ink.”

“How many more groups of raiders are coming through?” Sonja asked.

“I don’t know,” said Aisley.

“Would the books know?”

“They might have information on patterns.”

“That’s where I’ll start then,” said Sonja. “Learning the patterns and figuring out a way to break them.”

“I’ll look for their weaknesses,” said Marise. “Then we can figure out how to build our strengths.”

“I’ll learn their fears, and create something worse,” said Bonnie.

“Sounds like a good day’s plan,” said Ainsley.

“I was scared last night,” Sonja admitted.

“How long can the library hold?” Marise asked.

“As long as people love words and stories,” said Ainsley. “And while that’s true—”

“The books will protect us,” said Bonnie.

---

Devon Ellington is a full-time writer, publishing under multiple names in fiction and nonfiction, and an internationally-produced playwright and radio writer. She spent years working in professional theatre, including as a dresser on Broadway. www.devonellingtonwork.com

Wayne Mok

Peaches

On our first wedding anniversary, my husband burned himself while cooking for me. I had to rush him to the hospital. The nurse told me to stay in the waiting room while the doctors examined the burn.

An older man sat across from me, hunched over, hands clenched on his lap, eyes fixed on the white vinyl floor. His legs rocked up and down rapidly; his lips moved inaudibly, as if he was praying. As the minutes passed, his movements looked increasingly distressing.

I spoke up,“Sir?” No response. I asked again, “Sir, are you okay?”

Without even looking up, “No,” he replied.The abruptness felt like it froze time.

“Do you need a doctor?” I asked.

He shook his head and chuckled,“What good is a doctor?”

His comment made me feel uneasy, so I remained silent.

“My wife,” he managed to say after a long pause.

I wasn’t sure what to do at that point—he was obviously here for his wife, but if they didn’t think a doctor could help, why were they here? The clock on the wall hung crooked; each tick, full of effort, rattled through the room.

The nurse entered the waiting room and we both turned. She called out a name that I did not recognize; neither did the man. He glanced in my direction before averting his eyes.

I broke the silence,“What’s her name?”

His legs stopped moving,“Peaches.”

Surprised, I replied, “That’s my nickname.”

He looked up, revealing a handsome face worn down by a large number of wrinkles,“Who are you here for?”

“My husband,”I replied, “he burned himself cooking.”

“Men,” he laughed.

I laughed too.

He spent the next few minutes telling me about his wife. Her real name was Elizabeth. One day, early in their marriage, she choked on a peach pit and had to be taken to the hospital. From that day on, he called her Peaches. A year later, she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. That was twenty years ago.

“That must’ve been difficult.”

“It was.”

“She’s fortunate to have you,”I smiled.

The man seemed surprised by what I said, but after a long pause, he replied, “Fortunate?”

I wanted to say something, but I couldn’t. My mind drifted between thoughts of my husband and of the man. I was worried about my husband, yet at the same time, something about the man was unsettling,even a little frightening. The man closed his eyes, leaned forward, clasped his hands, and resumed his mumbling. I watched as his face grew paler with the tick of the clock, second by second, outrun by each beat of my pounding heart. For just a moment, the lights in the room flickered, the clock hand stopped—time seemed to stand still. The silence was encompassing, swallowing us up. I wasn’t quite sure why, but I shivered in my seat.

My husband came out a few minutes later. The burns were not too serious. I said a quick goodbye to the man and left.

“Who was that?” he asked.

I didn’t answer. “I’m glad you’re okay,” I said.

My husband smiled. He walked in front of me and pushed the door open with his left hand. His right arm was wrapped in gauze, barely exposing his fingers. I reached for them. He flinched in pain, then shot me a puzzled look, “What are you doing?” He tried to shake me off, but I resisted—somehow, I knew that I needed to hold on. I clutched his hand tighter and drew him close.

---

Wayne Mok is originally from Hong Kong and now lives in Sydney, Australia.

James W. Morris

RISE

Purdy was doing figure eights, rubbing her fur, alive with static electricity,against Eleanor’s ankles while Eleanor sought the kitchen light switch.

“Hey, you dumb cat,” Eleanor said. “Don’t you know ladies my age who get tripped and knocked down don’t always get back up? Who would feed you then?Ask yourself that.”She took a can from atop the stack in the cat food cabinet.

Purdy discontinued the figure eights, then balanced on her hind legs and deliberately stretched her mottled, gray-and-white body to prop both front paws—nails excitedly extended—against the already abundantly-scratched facing of the bottom storage cabinet. In the old days, the cat would execute a smart graceful hop up onto the kitchen counter and push her nosehard into her food dish before Eleanor had finished filling it. Such hopping seemed too much effort nowadays—the cat was old and would wait to have her bowl ceremoniously placed before her at the designated spot on the floor.

Purdy emitted one of those hard-to-decipher growly cat noises while Eleanor searched in vain for the can opener, which she was sure she’d left on the kitchen counter the previous evening.

“I know what would happen if I did fall down and die,” Eleanor said. “After a few hours you’d forget everything I’ve done for you and eat my eyeballs. Dumb cat.”

Where could the darn can opener be?For a second,Eleanor almost wished she’d purchased a brand of cat food whose cans featured pull-top lids, but of course those cost seven cents more per can just for the convenience and Eleanor resented being over-charged for certain things.

Purdy lifted her face—gray-muzzled, missing a fang—and looked at Eleanor searchingly.

“And by the way,” Eleanor said,“don’t think I haven’t noticed that you’ve been waking me up five minutes earlier each day to feed you. The sun hasn’t even risen yet. I’m onto your game, Missy. Good thing for you I just happened to be awake already.”

Nope. The opener was definitely not to be found on the counter, though she was absolutely sure she’d left it there less than eight hours earlier.

“Well, Purdy. I can be as certain as I want to be, but it still isn’t here. I hate this getting-old crapola. Makes you doubt your memory and your senses. But I guess you know what I mean.”

Eleanor reached down to consolingly stroke the cat, who reared back slightly, trying to determine whether the proffered hand contained food.

Eleanor rolled her eyes. “Yeah, right. Feed me.I get it.”

Well, despite having no memory of the action, she must have placed the opener in the gadget drawer last night, then. After ten minutes of searching, Eleanor had located a bent potato peeler and a warped plastic egg-slicer she had completely forgotten about, but didn’t see the can opener. She then searched all the other drawers in the kitchen—even the one she only used for trivets and potholders—before returning to the gadget drawer and removing all the entangled items one-by-one. The can opener was not there.

Since the kitchen was a galley-type, too narrow to hold a table and chairs, Eleanor had to retreat to the dining room to sit down, driven equally by fatigue in her legs and a furious sense of frustration.

“Think, Ellie,” she said. “What else could you use?”

She had a vague early memory of her father opening cans of pork and beans with a hunting knife and a hammer, but she wasn’t prepared to go down that road. Probably slice my hand off, she thought.

A church key! One of those pointy-ended old-fashioned openers with which you lever little triangle-shaped openings into the top of cans. Her husband regularly used one for his beer before manufacturers switched from steel to aluminum cans and added pull-tabs. (After pulling it, her husband would usually drop the detached tab back into his beer. How many other people did that?And what percentage choked while chugging?) Eleanor was sure she had a church keysomewhere, probably in a stored box of excess kitchen doo-dads in the basement.

Purdy came into the dining room and stood steadfastly in front of Eleanor, confused as to why she was not being fed on schedule.

“Well, cat,” Eleanor said. “Do I really want to go to all the trouble of creeping downstairs—and getting covered in cobwebs—in order to rifle through a bunch of dusty old storage boxes, seeing if I can locate an ancient can opener,just so you can immediately get fed?”

Purdy made a murmured cat noise as if in assent and Eleanor laughed.

When Eleanor raised her head in preparation to stand, a small dark shape in the next room, adjacent to the light fixture on the ceiling of the kitchen, caught her eye. God, not another leak, she thought, squinting as she approached. Her eyesight was poor. No, it was not a newly-emerged water stain. It was the can opener. Adhered to the ceiling.

*

Eleanor stared at it. The indisputable impossibility of it.

She went back to the dining room and sat down. There must be a logical explanation. Magnets? No. The opener was mostly hard black plastic, anyway. A practical joke then, or Candid Camera? Well, some unknown someone would have to have ventured down to her shabby out-of-the-way neighborhood, sneaked into her modest nondescript house in the middle of the night, then glued the can opener to the ceiling. Ridiculous.

A miracle, then? Maybe an updated version of the miracle of the fish, only this time the divinely-provided seafood will come in the form of canned tuna. For which a righteous, levitating opener will be required.

“Calm down, Ellie,” she told herself. “Get a grip. And don’t blaspheme.”

Getting a closer look at the renegade opener might prove helpful, perhaps bring a sense of reality back to the situation. Eleanor dragged a chair from the dining room across the tiled floor of the kitchen and climbed carefully up on it, but immediately felt dangerously unsteady when she peered upward in the direction of the opener. She climbed back down.

After thinking for a minute, she went to the little mudroom off the kitchen and returned with a broom. The house was old and the ceilings high—over nine feet—but Eleanor with her arms fully extended was just able to contact the can opener with the tips of the broom’s bristles. The moment she did so, the opener detached itself from the ceiling and dropped with a sharp, astoundingly-loud clatter into the kitchen sink. Purdy, shocked by the noise, rocketed into the dining room and cowered under a chair.

Eleanor looked in the direction in which Purdy had disappeared. “Yeah, don’t blame you,” she said. After that, there seemed to be nothing to do but use the opener—which upon examination showed absolutely no residual evidence of what might have been holding it on to the ceiling—to unseal the cat food can and dump its stinky fish-byproducts in Purdy’s bowl and place the bowl on the floor. She knew the cat’s hunger would overcome her fear soon enough.

*

Eleanor was scheduled to have lunch at noon that day with Ann, but postponed, texting her friend that she did not feel well, a common, easily-accepted reason for changing plans used by old people. Besides, it was true. Eleanor did not exactly feel sick, but she certainly did not feel right.

She took to her bed for the rest of the day. In the afternoon she dozed a bit, and awoke with a memory. She was a teen, preparing for a casual date with a boy she’d just met, a tall athletic boy who volunteered to take her ice skating at the new-frozen pond in Shake’s Woods. But her skates were not to be found at the back of her clothes closet where she thought they’d been stored, so she asked her mother—who happened to be in the hallway, passing the entrance of her bedroom—for assistance. “Mother,” she said, “have you seen my ice skates?” “Yes, Ellie, they’re on the ceiling,” her mother immediately replied, matter-of-factly, as she continued without pause down the hall. Perhaps her mother was trying to make some point about her children needing to keep track of their possessions, but Eleanor—already tense with anticipation regarding the date with the new boy—was so frustrated by her mother’s lack of interest in her missing-skates problem that she didn’t speak to her for three days.

What was that boy’s name? Eleanor now wondered. She couldn’t recall—the tentative ice-skating date fell through and he seemed to lose his already moderate interest in her after that. Anyhow, after that day the phrase, “It’s on the ceiling,”became a sort of in-family joke, a reply any one of them was likely to give when asked where something might be.Eleanor hadn’t thought of it, this stupid little sardonic rejoinder, in years—probably because she was the last member of her immediate family left living and there was no one to joke with.

*

The next morning Eleanor awoke feeling quite a bit better. There were unexplainable, head-scratching incidents, mysterious occurrences,written into the narrative of every person’s biography. You can waste your time, dwelling on them and obsessing about what happened,or you can just simply accept the fact of them and move on. It’s the same for that mentally-held compendium of gnawing little regrets accumulated by each aging person enjoying an otherwise happy life; it’s better to put those regrets aside and live as fully as possible in one’s ever-dwindling present.

Eleanor ventured downstairs and fed the cat, encountering no difficulty locating the can opener. She then sat in the living room with a bowl of bran flakes in front of her and watched a morning program on TV which featured a bunch of women—what her husband would call yentas—all seemingly talking at the same time. After the show was over, she climbed determinately back to the second floor of the house and entered the narrow bathroom at the top of the stairs, planning to brush her partial denture, which she’d left soaking overnight. The toothbrush she used for that purpose was not where she left it.

“Oh, no,” Eleanor said, after a second. She hesitantly craned her neck slowly toward the bathroom ceiling.

*

The ceilings on the second floor of her house were lower thanthe first, so Eleanor felt she might be able to reach the rogue toothbrush with the tip-end of a bath towel, if she flicked at it right. In fact, she was successful on her first attempt; when the snapping towel touched it, the toothbrush let go of its grip on the plaster,then impelled off a side wall, spinning helicopter-like mid-air for a half second before dropping, with a kind of sick inevitability, into the toilet bowl.

She sighed, retrieved the brush from the bowl, and tossed it directly in to the trash can. Eleanor was not the sort of person who would ever consider using a toothbrush that had been in a toilet bowl, no matter how pure and pristine the water in the bowl was reputed to be, or how spectacularly well the brush had been cleaned and sanitized.

Before exiting the bathroom, Eleanor stood still for a moment, then pointed and raised her chin to face the ceiling; she extended her arms outward, palms up.

Why?

*

Eleanor met Ann for the agreed-upon lunch postponed from yesterday. If she’d cancelled again, she knew Ann would worry, think Eleanor was really ill, be full of nosy questions. Better just to go.

At the restaurant, after inquiring about Eleanor’s health, Ann commenced her usual verbal binge,listing her own ailments, what her doctor said about each one, and why she thought he was bull-headed and wrong. In truth, Eleanor didn’t like Ann all that much; she was well-meaning, sweet and harmless, but boring. They’d met through their husbands—who had been golfing buddies—and now that both were widows some obscure, small-print subsection of the social contract seemed to indicate they should try to remain friendly. Anyway, it did lonely old ladies no harm to get out of the house once in a while.

While Ann was describing in detail her newest misdiagnosed symptom—an ominous, electric tingling occurring intermittently in her left instep—Eleanor’s mind strayed from the subject of her friend’s foot to her own house. She had to wonder: what unanchored possession of hers would she find attached to the ceiling when she returned home?

*

She did not have to wait long to find out. Upon entering the living room through the front door, house keys still in hand, Eleanor saw Purdy, her back attached to the ceiling, dangling lifelessly above the windowsill from which she must have risen.

Eleanor let out a yelp and dropped her keys. When she did so, the cat startled back to life; she was not dead—the stupid animal had actually been dozing comfortably, her legs extended and drooping unsupported mid-air.

Eleanor’s panic soon infected the cat, however—she began wailing, while manically waggling her legs and tail. Eleanor rushed off and returned ten seconds later with the broom. She didn’t feel she’d have to swat at, and possibly harm,the cat; the previous rogue items had detached as soon as touched.

She steadied herself, planted her feet and purposefully raised the broom above her head. When the tips of the straw bristles began to approach Purdy’s body the cat seemed alarmed, but the moment they contacted her fur, she dropped from the ceiling. Eleanor reflexively extended her left arm to mitigate the fall and catch the cat, a mistake. Purdy’s extended claws raked down Eleanor’s forearm, leaving parallel scratches, which immediately exhibited drops of blood. The cat disappeared into the basement, chased by Eleanor’s echoing scream.

*

During the next few days, Eleanor ate and slept little. Her shredded arm hurt, for one thing—and she was tortured by a hard-to-repress memory of her grandfather gleefully relating how a young friend of his had died from “blood poisoning” after getting a tiny cat scratch. His friend had laughed off the insignificant injury and subsequent infection until it was too late. Eleanor’s gouges were long and deep and looked horrible, but showed no sign of being infected.

For her part, Purdy refused to come out from the spot to which she’d retreated—behind the storage boxes in the basement—no matter how much Eleanor prompted her to, calling her name with put-upon sweetness and shaking a cardboard container of kitty treats that Eleanor assured her were yummy. Finally, she decided to relocate the cat’s food dish down there and let her be.

In the early hours of Sunday morning, Eleanor,lying half in bed without hope of sleeping, heard a vehicle pass by on the quiet street outside and a subsequent thwap that indicated her newspaper had been delivered. It was pretty rare for people to receive a physical paper these days—she was the only one on the block—but Eleanor had a forty-year streak of completing the newspaper’s coveted Sunday crossword puzzle in pen that she wanted to keep intact. She’d attempted once or twice to do the crossword online but found she couldn’t concentrate with an expectant computer screen blinking at her.

Eleanor donned her glasses and peered at the rectangular glowing red numerals on her clock radio. It was 4:12am. Retrieving the paper would be something to do, anyhow. She was sleeping in a t-shirt—a faded green one of her husband’s that read “Fly, Eagles, Fly”—so she pulled on some sweatpants, tucked the t-shirt in, then put on a pair of heavy-soled house slippers she kept near the bed.

*

Outside, in the dank November cold, Eleanor paused on the walkway a couple of yards from the house and looked up and down the street. She decided she liked her neighborhood at this time of day, with all fuss and noise quieted. The night sky was clear and numerous bright stars were visible—the bulb in the streetlamp nearby had been burnt out since 2019. Eleanor crunched through a thin rime of frost on the dead strip of grass laughably known as her front lawn, which she needed to traverse to retrieve the warm, plastic-wrapped newspaper from its landing spot on the driveway.

As Eleanor prepared to step back through the door of the house to reenter, she abruptly felt it—an urgently compelling physical need to ascend skyward. But it was not an irresistible impulse or desire originating from within her person as much as it was a newly-felt certitude, a premonition,that gravity was about to make an exception in her case. It was going to let her go, set her free of the earth.

Eleanor reeled a bit with the import of her new understanding, flitting lightfooted across the lawn, astonished. Then she dropped the newspaper and began an unhurried drift away from the house.

There was great joy. Why did it not occur to her that there would be joy?

---

James W. Morris is a graduate of LaSalle University in Philadelphia, where he was awarded a scholarship for creative writing. He is the author of dozens of short stories, humor pieces, essays, and poems which have appeared in various literary magazines, and his first novel, Rude Baby, was published last year. More info at www.jameswmorris.com.

Miranda Keskes

Perseus Isn’t a Character in This Story

I return to the scene: the abandoned cement plant. The monstrosity stands in defiance against the sandy shoreline, its stone chutes snaking out like tentacles.

Five months ago, I begged him to stop. After, my best friend called me a backstabber and a whore. Now, people avert their eyes when I pass by.

I place my hand against my swollen belly. Standing in the shadows of the stone structure, my resolve hardens.

There is the fluttering of beating wings in my womb.

Further down the shoreline, I watch the group of them around a bonfire, their bodies slithering against one another. Empty bottles reflect the moonlight. He looks up from the writhing body he presses down upon.

He is not expecting me tonight.

Curiosity and lust take over. He disengages from the group and comes to me, his silhouette enlarging as he approaches. The wind picks up, twisting my long hair into knots.

I tell him I want to talk. He has other plans. He drags me inside and forces me down onto a pile of rubble. I hiss at the pain, but he covers my mouth. I taste the grit of sand in my teeth.

Grasping, my hand connects with a chunk of concrete. My eyes meet his. He freezes. There is a rattling in my ears as the stone meets his skull.

---

Conception

“I’m ready to know how babies are made.”

My ten year old has been bringing up the topic—at the grocery store, after-school care, the neighbor’s backyard—but now he finds a captive audience of one at his bedside.

I can’t get up. His body is too heavy, too strong. The carpet burns against my skin.

“Alright.” I explain the process like a perfunctory scientist. “The man puts his penis in the woman’s vagina...”

Stop. Please.

“...releasing sperm, fertilizing the egg in the woman.”

He moans, kisses me roughly, then leaves to join his friends.

“Did it hurt when my dad.…” He squirms, scrunching his face.

I lie there, immobile, skirt hiked up, one breast bare. Someone steps over me to grab another beer.

“Yes...but it’s not meant to.”

He looks down, frowning. “I’m sorry.”

The right words. The wrong mouth.

“You have nothing to apologize for.” I pull him into my arms, embracing the warmth of his body against my own. My eyes drift to the bedroom window.

The moon is full. Light pierces through the clouds

---

Miranda Keskes is a writer and educator whose fiction appears in Blink Ink, Pigeon Review, Every Day Fiction, Bright Flash Literary Review, Microfiction Monday, 50-Word Stories, The Drabble, as well as the following anthologies: Heart/h, Hysteria, and 100 Ways to Die. She lives in Michigan with her husband and their two boys. You can find her on Instagram @miranda_keskes_writer.

Jon McLelland

Gone to the Dogs

It had all seemed like such a good idea at the time. 

Darren Blevins bent over, put his hands on his knees and leaned his rump against the side of his pickup. He stared at the toes of his work boots and breathed in and out through his nose. That wasn't enough, so he breathed through his mouth, sucking in through his teeth and exhaling through pursed lips, until he had to sit on the asphalt because he thought he'd faint. 

Thank God nobody could see him sitting there, on the asphalt behind the abandoned Western Sizzlin' steakhouse, head between his knees now, dizzy and nauseated. It was eighty degrees in the summer night, but Darren was clammy and shaking.   

It was a soft, still, moonlit night, and behind the ex-restaurant the frogs in the drainage ditch down the embankment chorused their desire. When the light-headedness and nausea began to ease, his breathing slowed, and Darren leaned his head back against the warm metal of the pickup. Even in the dark, the pearlescent lettering of the decal gleamed along the full length of the truck bed. It gathered in the moonlight and broadcast its message: CHIHWEENIES-R-US ASK ME ABOUT EM!!!  

Darren reached for the paper sack on the ground beside him and pulled out a 16-ounce plastic bottle of Coke and a plastic flask of Evan Williams. He opened the Coke bottle, drank a long pull, burped roundly, and poured a third of the bottle's contents onto the pavement. Then he unscrewed the cap of the bourbon and decanted half of it into the Coca Cola. He took three long swallows of the warm, sweet fizz, leaned his head back against the truck again and let the football stadium aroma of bourbon and Coke envelope and settle over him like love.  He felt his shoulders begin to relax, felt his face flush, and knew with deepening satisfaction that coming here, with the bourbon and Coke, had been a good idea, had been the right thing to do.  He took another long drink from the bottle, burped quietly this time, and emptied the rest of the whiskey into the soda bottle. 

He had had to get out of that hospital room, away from the frightening antiseptic smells and the high-pitched beeping of the monitors and the sight of Brenda in that bed with all those tubes and all those bandages. And there was Brenda's sister, Linda, and her husband, Bennie, who wouldn't shut the fuck up, trying to get everybody to hold hands and pray, and the sheriff's deputy, and the man from animal control, and somebody from the fucking game warden's office, for God's sake.   

Why the fuck would the game warden care? Were the dogs fucking game now? Or, maybe the game warden was worried the dogs'd eat the deer? Shit, could be. Hell, they could eat fucking cattle. Might be right now. Or, might be eating people. Might be sneaking up on some damn poor bastards right now, out in the dark. But they couldn't sneak. Too loud and too jittery. So people were probably okay. They'd never manage to sneak up on a deer. And they were too stupid. Cows, that'd be the thing. Shit. Why the fucking game warden? Darren took a deep drink from the Coke bottle, swallowed, and took another deeper drink.   

In the cab of the truck, Dwayne gave a Woof that sounded like it came from inside an oil drum and began to moan in his sleep. Nobody could explain how a dog that size could make a sound like that. Before all of this shit, Darren had been meaning to call Bose about it, to see if they might could use the Duanes to come up with a new way to make little speakers sound big.  Some new kind of woofer. Woofer. Darren snorted. The snort turned into a spreading, slow-motion grin, swelled into a laugh that went all the way to his stomach, and in no time Darren was writhing and roaring against the side of the pick-up. He leaned his head back against the decal-ed side off the truck and laughed a gale into the night sky that momentarily silenced the frogs. The tears streamed down his red face as his abdomen cramped and the laughter tailed off into a drawn-out, high-pitched wheeze. With his head still leaned back against the truck, Darren stared into the sky. Strip-center lights bathed the boggy exhalations of the drainage ditch, hiding the stars with a velvety, navy blue polyester sheen. His vision swam with drunken dizziness, and tears that welled on their own rolled down his face and onto his shirt. His heartbeat rushed in his ears, sudden, fast, and insistent, a pulsing, whooshing white noise counterpoint to the frogs’ unworried rhythm. He breathed in great gulps and the pounding slowed. The rushing in his ears faded, but Darren didn’t notice. The frogs had started back up, but Darren longer heard them. Shit how did it come to this? 

Darren’s hands tingled, and his face pulsed like the night was pulling on it. To his left, thirty yards away at the back corner of the parking lot, a pole-mounted light cast its orange glow over the cracked asphalt and broken glass. A single power line tapped it from across the ditch, pulling at the pole so that it leaned back toward the woods. Moths and smaller flying insects swarmed in a tight ball around the light, and bats dove in and out of the swarm, cutting through it in jerky, high-speed arcs. Darren liked nature shows, and the bats reminded him of sailfish slicing through a ball of anchovies. Or wolves chasing caribou. Or the dogs. Chasing anything. Darren set the bottle down and put his hands over his face.  His breath caught in his chest, and tears ran down his nose.   

With his eyes closed and his body feeling very far away, Darren could see Brenda leaning on her elbow in the bed, her eyes on the sheet between them as she saw the future that their new dog-breeding business would build. They would make it. Chiweenie puppies went for five hundred or even a thousand dollars. They weren’t scared of working. They knew about dogs. It would work. Darren had had tears in his eyes then, too, as he watched her face while she described the future they would have, calling it into being as surely as if she’d been making an incantation. It wasn’t the vision of prosperity that moved him, it was the vision of her. He loved her, and the story of the future she was telling was part of her, and she was telling it with him in it. It could have been a vision of a burger joint or a hardware store or a shop selling harpoons to Eskimos in Alaska, and he would have been just as moved and just as ready to pledge his life to seeing it fulfilled. Darren bumped his head against the side of his truck as the tears streamed down his face. It made a hollow sound and he did it again, harder. And again, and again. It didn’t hurt, but a far-off-seeming part of him called from somewhere that it would hurt later, and that he should stop. He banged it one more time in defiance, the way he would’ve if he’d been sixteen and his brother had told him to stop doing something stupid, and then he stopped. The blood pulsed rhythmically in his ears, and it occurred to him that this must be what a big bell feels like when it stops ringing. There were waves of feeling at the back of his head. Not pain, just waves. He looked at the light and the bugs swarming around it. It pulsed as well, in time with the waves in his head. 

The Chihweenies were fine. They were sweet little things, sweeter than either of the breeds they came from, and cuter, which was the main thing for sales. It was like Brenda had said, they couldn’t keep enough of them. They got more breeding pairs and had more litters. And it wasn’t like those places you hear about, Darren knew. Brenda loved them all. Darren had seen All Creatures Great and Small on television as a kid, and Brenda was like those English sheep farmers. She worked hard for those dogs, and loved every one of them. Darren worked with her when he got home in the evening from his job with the Department of Transportation maintenance crew. He could spend all day clearing roadsides, and coming home to work way past dark with Brenda was like getting to go on vacation every day. He didn’t mind any of the work. Brenda the dog farmer was building the future she’d seen projected on the bedsheet between them that first night, and Darren had never felt more gratitude or satisfaction in his life than he did at being included by Brenda in her dream. He could have hosed dog shit off of concrete pads every night until he dropped from exhaustion and never would have minded it one bit. 

Linda and her fucking Great Dane. 

Darren had never liked Linda. If Brenda was a solid gold coin, Linda was a game token from Chuck-E-Cheese. As much as they looked alike, and as much as Brenda was beautiful to him, Darren had thought Linda was wrong from the first time he met her. Brenda’s lovely delicate face on Linda looked ferrety. Her blue eyes were broken glass, where Brenda’s were deep pools. Her hair was always a shade of too much, whatever color it happened to be, and she laughed short, harsh bursts over mean jokes about people. And she had fucking Bennie, and they had that fucking dog. And Brenda loved her sister. Darren closed his eyes again and blew an angry breath out between his lips. 

“It might be worth trying,” Linda had said. Nobody had ever thought of crossing Chihuahuas with Great Danes before, she said. Of course they fucking hadn’t, Darren had thought, but at the time he’d only looked at the ceiling. Brenda wanted her sister to finally be happy, to finally have something work out right, to finally realize what a good person she could be, and how much happier that’d make her. She didn’t have to say any of that, because it had all been said one way or another a hundred different times, after some goddamn dumb-ass thing, or after Linda had been cruel again and cried and apologized and begged forgiveness and said how she just wanted to be like Brenda. Fuck. So he’d just said, “Well, I don’t know,” and then he’d gone along with it and thrown himself into it because Brenda had. And for a while, by God, it looked like it was a great damn idea. 

They’d had to work at it for a while, to see what the crosses would produce. (You never know what you’re gonna git, Darren would say, and Linda would say That’s right, Forrest, because she knew that he didn’t like the idea, so she went along with the Gump jokes he made to cover it up.) Great Danes are big, simple, stupid, inbred things. Every damn one of them reminded him of a 1975 Chrysler. But Chihuahuas are complicated. Darren thought that they were mostly so nervous because too much was packed into too little space. Exactly the opposite of a Great Dane. Hell, he'd thought, maybe the Chihuahua blood would fill up the empty space under that oversized hood, and all that space would give the overpacked Chihuahuas the room they needed. Seemed reasonable. Some of the early crosses were too awful to talk about. Most of those died. The worst litter of all was the one that finally had two puppies that showed promise.  There were eight altogether, and Darren smothered six of them. He’d cried like a baby and had gone off by himself and gotten drunk then, too, because he was so angry he couldn’t stand it. When the first Duane puppy was weaned, Brenda gave it to him. She slid him onto their bed like a warm rubber water bottle.     

Darren took a long, slow breath and let his eyes swerve up the scuffed and filthy back wall of the old steak house. He took another pull at the Coke bottle and felt his body pulsing, but way off, like an ape stuffed in a snow suit, at the far end of a long pipe that he was looking through. 

Two more years it took, and all those other puppies. Another man would have made Linda and Bennie deal with the ones that had to be got rid of, but Darren couldn't stand the thought of what they might do to the poor damn things, and Brenda never said, but she loved him that much more for it. And then it was done. They had six pairs of Great Duanes and six of Gihuahuas. And, my god, the sound.  You wait, Linda had said, as they stood looking at the dogs in the pens, Two thousand a puppy. More. Darren built new pens for Linda and Bennie. They're yours, he'd said. He'd actually wept in the truck for those dogs as he drove home from Linda and Bennie's place, but he'd done what he had to do for Brenda's sister, and now they'd be free.  The Chihweenie business had suffered while he worked to build the new breeds, but in a year or so they'd be back to where they should be. Nothing left but clear work, and he'd make sure Brenda and their dogs were comfortable and happy and safe. No more of that awful shit. And he'd keep his job with the Department, just to be sure of things, unless the Chihweenie business got so good they knew they were set for life. But he wasn't counting on that, and that was fine. He didn't care if the dog business never did more than grocery money, as long as Brenda was happy. 

It was all so clear in his mind that he felt like he could touch it. Darren turned his head toward the light pole, and his vision swam, the orange sodium light painting beautiful, lazy swirls across the night, but the vision of that evening was perfectly steady in his mind's eye: Brenda closing the gate of the chain-link pen with her right hand and holding the puppy in her left, turning toward the house and seeing him as he walked toward her. No more complications. He'd worked hard, and made it all go away, and she was happy and he was happy and the dogs were happy and every damn body was happy.   

They ate supper and talked about what they'd do. She had the breeding planned out for three seasons. She had rebuilt their website. There was going to be a conference for cross-breeders in Indianapolis next year. They'd learn all kinds of things about how to improve the puppies. Maybe they'd go to a race while they were up there.  Indianapolis. Sounded exciting. But mostly he just listened to the music of their conversation. He loved the sound of her voice, and the rhythm of their voices together. The details of what got said were more or less all the same to him. It made him happy. 

Dwayne's one great booming Woof was the first he knew of everything coming apart.  Darren liked the Duanes. That was one more of the damn things about all of this, he thought, I love the Duanes. No damn way not to. His Duane — Dwayne — like all the others, was way past calm. He was a warm bag of liquid dog. The magic marble sack of dog traits had shaken around inside the breeding pairs of Great Danes and Chihuahuas, and the Duanes had won the lottery. It was the sense of contentment that got you first. Like cats, but without the killer instinct. They were completely content, and they didn’t have a vicious bone in their bodies. Like sloths, but only inert because they were so happy with wherever they were and whatever gravity wanted with them. Of course, the other thing about them was that they seemed not to have any bones in their bodies. Full-grown, they looked like quarter-sized Great Danes, but mostly made of rubber inside, and without the basic wrongness of Great Danes. They never had to live as pony-sized carnivores in constant submission to small, weak masters, and they never had to learn how to not to kill what they loved. Dwayne loved to slide off of things, or be poured out of things. Darren would take him to the church playground, and Dwayne would take turns with the children on the slide. He'd go down forwards or backwards, on his stomach or his back. He'd spill into a sort of puddle at the bottom, and then spring back up, like a Slinky dog, and lope back around to the ladder to go again. And the Duanes kept the Great Danes' bark, note for note, decibel for decibel, just as low, just as resonant, only the sound came from something far too small to make it. Darren told Brenda that watching Dwayne bark was like watching a squirrel sing opera. Darren sometimes wondered whether God made heaven for some really good people by putting their souls in Duanes when they died. He never said it out loud, but he really did wonder it sometimes. But when the bag was through shaking and the Duanes got the good stuff, what the Gihuahuas got was all the rest. 

One deep, round woof was all Dwayne gave. It was a quarter to five in the morning, and Darren stood in the kitchen finishing his coffee. Dwayne was a warm, brown pool of unconcern on the pale green vinyl floor. Darren drained the last sip, set the empty cup in the sink, and turned for the back door just as Dwayne lifted his head. Not the way a dog would do it, Dwayne extended his head from the puddle of himself like a snail extending its eye on a stalk. As it rose from the floor, Dwayne’s head rotated toward the door in one too-smooth movement, his liquid ears lifting, his liquid brow furrowing into a series of standing waves. Darren watched as Dwayne stared, motionless, through the kitchen wall. For ten seconds, Dwayne didn't move and neither did Darren. Dwayne pulled one long, whooshing breath in through his nose, swelling as he did like a thick brown balloon, and he barked one time. One booming WOOF, like the sound of a cannon fired from the other side of a bay, but somehow close enough to touch. Just once. Then the ears wilted, the brow flattened, and Dwayne's head subsided into the rest of him, finding its level.   

Darren stood staring at Dwayne, waiting to see if he’d give another sign of what he’d heard, but Dwayne only blinked a couple of times, sighed, and went to sleep. Darren opened the back door and stood on the stoop. There was no moon, and the night beyond the kitchen glow was black. Dawn was still too far off for the birds, and he could hear nothing else that he could think might have bothered Dwayne. Could’ve been anything. Deer, possum, coyote. They could all be nearly silent, and Dwayne’s bark would have scared them off or scared them still. Darren patted his pockets to make sure he had his wallet and phone, locked the back door, and headed off to work. Later, of course, it was obvious. The Archangel Dwayne, with a with a bass drum he could only hit once. 

He was out with a mowing crew just after seven o’clock, on the sloped bank of a county road half way to Buhl when his phone rang.  Darren, was all she said, before the sound of the dogs rose out of the phone like a thing. There was one sharp bang as the phone fell, and the connection broke. 

He called 911, and he called Linda. Her voicemail message said You've reached Dynasty Kennels, world-famous developer of the Gihuahua and the Great Duane! We have new litters! Leave us a message!   

Darren tilted the Coke bottle back and drank off the last of it.  He threw the bottle at the back of the dead steak house, enjoying the slow-motion, liquid-looking path that his bourbon-soaked eyes gave it, and listening to the manic, high-pitched, plastic hollowness as it bounced against the wall and the parking lot. The pitch threw him off balance, and he toppled onto his right side, bumping his cheek on the loose gravel scattered over the asphalt. The horizon bounced with him, and wavered, and he worked with his eyes to hold the swaying orange light at the end of the canted wooden pole. He breathed slowly through his mouth, and the swaying pole steadied, settling into a gentle oscillation, like the light on the end of a sailboat's mast after a big wave has passed and the water has settled down to a gentle background swell. This must be what it's like to be a Duane, he thought, and let himself settle into the pavement, trying to let his body ooze into complete relaxation like a Duane would.   

As his eyes closed, his vision passed from the gently bobbing light to the landscape of his mind's eye. He could see in the dark, across the pasture, to where the running shapes came out of the woods. In the monochromatic moonlight, he could see the bouncing, frenetic way that they ran, their huge heads swinging from side to side. In the dream he raised his head from the puddle that he was, and drew a great barrel full of air in through his nose. He would warn them all. He could feel the force of the bark building inside him, rising through the smoothness, gathering in his chest, about to explode. But then, Brenda laid her head against him, and the warm, liquid weight of her drew him into the pool that their two bodies made. He could hear the ravenous quarreling of the Gihuahuas as they crossed the pasture, headed away. Brenda sighed in her sleep and settled more deeply into Darren's side. Let them go. Darren relaxed his chest and let the air stream from his nose. Let them go. 

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Jon McLelland is an architect during the day, and runs a small practice with offices in Tuscaloosa, Alabama and Nashville, Tennessee. Besides writing, his other part-time gig is teaching seminars on Sustainability at the University of Alabama. He and his wife (who did not know each other growing up) both left their birthplaces expecting never to return, she toward Asia and he for Europe. They have since returned to the American South, a Möbius strip of weirdness, banality, kindness, cruelty, and wonder (and more weirdness). He has previously published in RUST Keepers, Every Day Fiction, Defenestration, The Bacopa Literary Review, and Drunk Monkeys.

Angeline Schellenberg

Bottled

Instead of flowers, after the first date, men bought her Kleenex, cards taped to the boxes: “Do you cry for me?”—her roomie’s brother. “My love won’t ‘blow’ over”—that writer at the bar. “Your tears are precious.” She’d told them about her gift, her livelihood. Were they even listening? It was enough to make her cry. She pulled two empty flasks, held one under each eye, let it flow. Not enough to treat rash or rug burn this time, but it should heal a cut or two. Almost time to make another shipment to the dispensary. She corked the bottles, slapped on the labels: “Potency: Morning-After Misunderstanding,” and returned them to the shelf.

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Closeted

The sleeve caught Serena’s eye, making the hairs on her arm tingle. She reached into the vintage rack, seeking pearls draped across an open back; yes, this was it: the graduation gown she’d sacrificed to a rummage sale, thinking the navy satin could go a long way toward the church’s mortgage payment—until the pastor gave it away for a dollar. The church had paid its bills, but folded the following year, after the authorities seized the pastor’s computers, leaving Serena and the other dazed young women outside a locked soup kitchen. For ten years, she’d distanced herself from the memories of the pastor’s dark study, from men, from being seen at all. The armpits of her dress were faded from antiperspirant and the bodice held a wine-deep Rorschach—a sign the dress had been spared her fate. She thought of the skirt she could make of it as she snagged it from the hanger, pearls raining onto the tile.

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On the Surface

Becky is lucky. Unlike other women, she can walk anywhere after dark without looking over her shoulder.

From band camp to board room, men have assured her they’d rather cut off their own balls than go near her body,though, on the surface, she has all the same desirable parts as other women. Apparently, Becky’s parts do not make her whole.

As early as preschool, boys would slide to the end of the seat to keep her from sitting, each leaning his upper body away from the aisle to avoid contamination. As the bus ploughed the potholes, pacing that aisle she found her balance, her still-warm curls petting her shoulders.

In high school, Becky had longer legs, higher cheekbones, and smoother elbows than the popular girls, and she’d read all the same articles, including “The 3 coyest ways to cross your ankles.” When she tried out #3 on her choir tour stop at McDonalds, the tenor section snorted and took their fries outside.

In college, her lab partner explained about pheromones: the girls who got offered backrubs in the cafeteria lineup had them. When Becky asked her English prof, he told her classically desirable women had “carriage” and handed her a copy of Jane Eyre.

She used to join the girls from the office for drinks, but since spring,every night Becky rushes home and up the steps to the door of her attic apartment, where her rescue is waiting. She carries the pitbull through the alley, sets trembling paws on a patch of lawn, and coaxes her to pee.

That day she found the old dog curled at the back of the kennel, something inside Becky cracked open. The shelter normally euthanizes the breed on intake, but their vet was busy examining a new litter of spaniels. Owing to the city’s pit bull ban, Becky gave animal control a fake address in the country and walked home with the emaciated body hidden inside her parka.

Becky contemplates the chasm separating nature from nurture, beauty from attraction, as she lifts the broken animal to her cheek. What the poor thing must have been through on the streets before she was discovered. There are no scars to tell.

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Angeline Schellenberg is the author of the Manitoba Book Award-winning Tell Them It Was Mozart (Brick, 2016), the KOBZAR-nominated Fields of Light and Stone (UAP, 2020), and Mondegreen Riffs (At Bay Press, forthcoming 2024). Her micro-fiction has appeared recently in New Flash Fiction Review and The Dribble Drabble Review. She works as a contemplative spiritual director and hosts Speaking Crow: Winnipeg’s longest-running poetry open-mic. angelineschellenberg.wordpress.com