All Existing Literary Magazine
Foreword
I wish I could say that creating a literary magazine was something that I’d wanted to do for a long long time but that isn’t the case at all; I decided to start a lit mag on a rainy December day that was spent in a dingy Parisian apartment I called home for 4.5 months. A little while later, the website was made.
I can confidently tell you, however, that when I first opened submissions and shouted into the void (the internet) that a new lit mag had been made, I had absolutely no idea just how many people would be interested.
Over 100 submissions and two and a half months later, I present to you the very first issue of All Existing Literary Magazine. I have to admit, this issue is massive. It’s an absolute doozy. But the sheer amount of talent within these “pages” is truly unreal and I implore that you really read the whole thing. Art deserves to be consumed and these contributors have talent oozing out of every pore of their bodies.
Thank you for trusting me with your work. Thank you for reading. And I hope you love it just as much as I do.
Cover art by James Diaz
Fiction
Tony Osgood, The Moon In The Turbulent Air
Isa Ottoni, The Switch
Alexander Atreya and Nikolai Espera, The Death of Koschei The Deathless
Daniel David Froid, Goods
Mehreen Ahmed, Sweet Wood
Syd Vincent, Driving Lessons
Victoria Male, The Crone of Cader Idris
Kai Groves, Closing Grief
Lauren Nicholas, The Portrait of a Woman's Rage
N.H. Van Der Haar, Dear Mr Corcoran
S.T. Brant, The Gods
Caroline McTeer, The Second Face
Emily Coppella, Shade and Night
Hugh Blanton, Joining In
Penny Milam, Salted Ground and Tomatophagia
Bobby Wells-Brown, Journey Through The Other
Sahi Padmanabhan, Darling
Megan Poe, The Dead Fish Between Us
Audrey T. Carroll, Revelation
Emily Strempler, The Encounter
Dylan Bunyak, Grapefruit
Clara Guidry, The Bad Thing
Sura K. Hassan, Practical Potions For Impractical Witches
Willow Delp, Three Hundred Years
M.K. Hale, Change Can Be Hairy And Scary
Adrianne Reig, The Scatterer
Flash Fiction
Tinamarie Cox, Eleanor
Lee Eustace,
Christina Hennemann,
Sara Collie, Pulse At The Centre Of Being
Joanna Theiss, A Time For Work
Timothy C Goodwin, Must Love Eating
Megan Jones, Helianthus
Ron Riekki,
Cecilia Kennedy,
Dave Nash, What I Can See From Here
Wolfgang Wright, Eternal Life
Matt Rowan, A Municipal Zoo
Ramona Gore, The Wind Was Chill
Kasey Furutani,
Rabbitfeet, Horses
Megan Jauregui Eccles, Love Like Blood, Lilacs, and Wine
Micaela Here, Cost of Living
Karin Schott, Mombie
Andy Larter, You Were Having That Dream Again
Grace Magee, God's Favourites
Brandon Shane, No Body Like You
Alyssa Jordan,
Poetry
R.S., Mona Lisa
Kanishka Kataria, Between us let the silence scream
Shamik Banerjee, The Companion
Terry Trowbridge, Instrument of Interference
Emily Kurc, Backyard Potions
Sonika Jaiganesh, eyes within the hedgerow
Bryan Vale, lost in the everglades: or, how life feels to me
Ace Boggess, The Start of Football Season
Why Haven't You Played In A Year?
Ali Ashar, Farewell Party
Grace Sinkins, The Boy Who Doesn't Know How To Read A Clock
Karissa Garza, There Is Still Beauty Here
Savannah Jones, No Signal
Mark J Mitchell, Capping Verse
Christian Ward, Chloe
Alex Missal, Aphorism #18
Salvatore Difalco, Clydesdale With Wife In Tow
Sabrynne Buchholz, The Evergreens
Quinn Matteson, Eve
Abigail Guerrero, Snowball
Claire Beeli, When Forty Men
Visual Art
Irina Tall Novikova, Sivka-Burka
Jeremiah Gilbert, Bergen Street Art #1
Aislinn Feldberg, Insect In A Pool Of Light
James Diaz, A cloud of bees
Phoenix Tesni, gold-tinted, honey-veined
CJ The Tall Poet, The Aspiration Bird
Charlie J Stephens, One of the Rabbits - Self Portrait
Alan Bern, what's left of the Liberty Bell
The Moon In The Turbulent Air
by Tony Osgood
Doogso Ynot waits on Margate Sands for the perfect moment in what will be his landmark day. The shimmering Bank Holiday air is ornamented with moon and sun, is filigree-hazed at horizon. Dreamland’s doors are thrown wide for the trickle of exhausted wet-backed customers to shade themselves on dodgem and ferris wheel. Open-beaked gulls line promenade railings waiting to witness a miracle. Pointless kites wilt ground-bound beside locked bicycles. So many abandoned sandals wait in line for the comfort of soles that Doogso is reminded of a shore-side mosque.
​
Imagine a stork, still as a petrified branch, waiting on a carp to rise from cool depths. Doogso abides, tilts his head to the sky, closes a blackened eye, wets a finger, raises it to the air, inspects the desert-day, wonders whether limp flags on flaccid flagpoles will serve as windsocks. He supposes.
​
Aircraft lattice the sky, ships vein the sea. Tourists kebab the beach, Arlington House gravestones the railway station. And all the while the weight of the sunshine in the cloudless sky mocks chewing-gum gut-stuck and guttered. Slot machines thrum hopelessly. By the time whipped ice-cream hits the wafer it is nine-tenths liquid. Helium balloons leak gas until a specific-gravity’s achieved. They gaudy-ballet-chorus at knee-height, bold-coloured, wander the promenade at noon among mad-dogs, Englishmen, burger wrappers, ketchup chipped lips, lost children.
It is coming, change is coming. Inevitable as the downshifting of morning into afternoon, the gearing of before to ever after. Not even Doogso Ynot can be sure., But he is ripe with expectation, he supposes, he supposes, bed of roses. Change is coming. It is for him to fetch.
Why not be a have than a have not? Be an is rather than an is not?
****
About Doogso’s feet fizzle supine families of all geometries, colours, categories. The scalding singing Sands became, as morning wore on, a wasteland patchwork quilt comprising many yarns and textures. Bright umbrellas shade quaking black-lipped dogs. Cheerful buckets and spades border-guard towelled territories. A weary silence has cloaked the beach; lungs compressed by fever dreams permit no words to rise above a murmur.
Though the white sun vetoes any shadow’s appearance, though suncream and vinegar choke amber sand petrichor, though hokey-cokey penny amusement arcades orchestrate small change, though kiss-me-quick-or-not-at-all passes for scripture, through two-thousand thoughs, Doogso Ynot shall not be deflected, diverted, distracted from his becoming, his coming out as who he is.
The kind of man he wants to be is rare about these parts of little England. Here is not home. Never was never will be. Here he is unable to become what he is not. He’s chosen a untrod path. His is the dilemma known by children of immigrants: to collect from lost property at the border the identity his parents abandoned, the old clothes they judged might frighten the natives. Doogso, unfitting, round peg.
Upon waking this morning he knew the truth so deeply he vibrated. Any child threatened by adult-shaped tomorrows might choose, like him, the turbulent air over the tumultuous ground. Better to take a chance on impossibility than suffocating norms. If he were to turn left his family would heft him right. They’d only exalt or cherish him if he chooses to mimic their decisions. He supposes, he supposes, that’s the fate of every child: to accept the confines and thorns or escape to someplace other.
He waits for a change in the wind. The clock tower celebrates the passing of another hour. Doogso watches a girl too thin, impossibly white, tiptoeing between slumbering flesh, step-stoning into the sand with pointed toes so her feet do not have time to burn, fetching her prize of cloudy seawater carried in a plastic bottle, a bag of seaweed, and a palmful of sea-glass. Diamond-drips fall from her green nylon fishing-net to startle seal-like men awake. They rise white, flap red, curse blue, then fall exhausted and scarlet-backed upon gaudy towels, there to grumble-groan and utter walrus-gruff drowsy obscenities.
Doogso imagines this a Winter Garden show, follow the words, you at the back, all together now: ’Fucking kids, fucking kids, fucking kids,’ these fathers of countless children chide, chanting like a rising wave as she passes.
Fathers urge you to leave, then berate your going.
There’s no winning, he supposes.
****
One afternoon several days ago, during a few final hushed hours in the last public library in the county, before being closed to save an ugly penny, Doogso Ynot had crouched by a couch and read a sentence of a purple paragraph in a hundred-year-old book written by a man later shot by a Nazi in a small Polish town. He read words meant for everyone set apart. Sentences assuring him that Doogso Ynot would turn out just fine, no matter what the world seemed to suggest; the word on the street of crocodiles was transposed in tense and place and person to be placed within his ear. Others like you have lived, and some, even, survived.
His stunned steps took him back to a home he no longer recognised. Through time he drifted until today, this instant. Hence the beach. And his standing as the slumbering masses sprawl. Hence the uplift of his manifesto: ‘It’s not so bad being whoever whatever wherever, at least it is your choice rather than theirs.’
And if this does not work then he will have gained nothing he did not already possess: ridicule. He’d have gifted himself a blessing by trying. And if it does work? He’ll see.
They’ll all see.
****
His family he thinks are concrete buildings: crushing, cutting out the light of neighbours.
One tower-block ignorant father, half a bungalow low-slung mother, an older dulled brother apprenticed to their parents’ well-trod footsteps. Each had in their own manner said Doogso was an afterthought. Loved, they intimated, too casually to convince, yet coda. Other, mainly nada.
Since that sentence in the library, Doogso Ynot is beginning to live a life lived well, assert his choices, have opinions. You’d have thought, given their reaction, that having a creed was harmful as chlamydia. And well, look, suddenly his family do not like him anymore.
To raise a child – even an epilogue babe – until it grows ugly seems mighty cruel to Doogso Ynot. In response to their son asking, ‘Are you not happy I am I?’ they trawled the ocean clean of silver fish-wishes, put their son on ice, chanted, ‘Ho yo, we do not know you anymore.’
Long-listed his shortcomings. ‘Master Ynot, why why why, who do you think you are?’
Encouraged conformity, convention, comparability. He was not to call attention to them. They lived in a trench: turn your light out! ‘Herr Haughty, Mr Uppity, you shall amount to nothing if you flout the norms of the land.’
Doogso Ynot repeated his father’s mantra, got in quickly a pre-emptive: ‘I am so terribly disappointed.’ Became banished for several days.
Being barely able to ever insert an askance word into the stream of conscious straightness of his family’s conversation, Doogso Ynot had the reputation of silence awarded him as if it were a laurel rather than a crown of thorns. The quiet boy became more quiet still as time passed. When thirteen he had been moved to speak when his father decided to euthanise Doogso’s dog for being old. Growing elderly in this family, the boy guessed, would prove hazardous.
Their child’s guess proved right. Everything he said from thirteen on was deemed more wrong than all that came before. Just so at school, where the colour of his skin prompted questions of his homeland from teachers making mention of a third world, rife with debt and bloody history, in places crammed with disease and poverty. Here, too, thirteen had come calling before Doogso felt able to point out this was his country. He had not been imported, and he owed no tariff-duty. As English as the royals. ‘Say no more, son, say no more.’
On this matter his parents were silent. Head-down, keep squeaky clean, do not frighten the locals. It makes sense until the sense of who you are has been wrung out of you. Thus the meaning of his difference was Doogso’s to discover. They wished him well, but they could not guarantee they’d be about when the time came to pick up his pieces. If their youngest insisted on climbing out of the trench, it wouldn’t be their fault when he was shot.
He was busily colonising himself, declaring his ownership of self, there, in the foredoomed library, and after, at a hotel-feeling home, mid pronouncement, when his family mocked him most cruelly. ‘Skid-doo hush-mouthed weirdo, put the kettle on, it will suit you better than such airs, hairs and graces.’
‘What makes you so special?’ his brother wondered.
‘Nothing, nowt, not a dicky-bird,’ his father hollered hollowly.
‘Certainly not his uncut sausage,’ his mother growled.
‘We do not know you any more,’ they chimed.
****
The oven-ready-child becomes today a fresh-baked-man, grows-up-up-and-away, feathers outstretched. He will bathe this old-shore town in shadow, restore awe. Remodel the flaccid stupor of shrivelled razor-shells, seagulls, stall-holders, potted brown shrimp, footsore tourists padding footslog pavements. He supposes, bread and roses, as his old self slowly closes, will come the beauty of this day.
He gathers himself, spits in his swim goggles, adjusts his crotch, shakes arms.
****
His family, who might one day have read of him in red-top tabloids, more recently have gathered their opinions, propensities, and prejudices from unsocial media. This’ll teach them.
Doogso Ynot is about to go viral. Become an earthquake. He is due to shimmy boundary markers of this sad conservative parish. Shuffle the expected sleight-of-hand that comes with junctures. Speak without words what has so far remained silent. Doogso will tango the TikTok schlock world, Jenga expectations of obedience.
In a minute, one sliced moment, just as the slither of the tock of the tick of his final earth hour comes to tear open his sternum, showing to slumbering tourists unused colours any of them might own if only they searched inside, the boy-no-longer-a-child will unfurl, uncurl in public, and make a timeless mark that will never be rewound, lost, forgotten, or untagged. Some kids grab forever by scratching their name in stone. Some tag motorway bridges. Doogso Ynot will scribble his one life on hearts.
Today will never be erased. Ynot: the final graffiti. Doogso: a modern cave painting. A snorkelling aerialist contorting an echo on earth of a moon ghosted by daylight. The boy who is now a man has learned family is finite in its beauty, limited in forgiveness and loving-tokens, and boundless in its greed for twisting him into a clone of itself. A family is an autocracy, an oppression Doogso Ynot needs to overthrow so he might breathe. Without remorse his family grips.
To grow up is to grow apart.
****
He shakes his legs, loosens his limbs, rolls his head about his neck.
On your marks.
He is the only once-boy standing on a beach sardined with drowsy tourists. Doogso is an exclamation mark at the end of a sunbathed sentence. He is the beginning of a new paragraph. The only figure wholly clothed head to toe in a world of naked skin. He wears doubled-over wild-swim gear, swim shoes, a scarlet cap, mirror-goggles, holds high in gloved hands an orange safety float tied to his waist, so that should he be pulled out by tide or down by undertow, taken in the shallows by shark, observers will spy his float and maybe alert the life guards.
Set.
Doogso Ynot, bringer of a new swim-stroke. Doogso Ynot, capital letter of a new verse, adopts a dive position on the sand.
Go.
Head tucked safe beneath his steepled arms, each ear protected by his biceps, every finger spiring, the boy lifts a foot free of coarse sand, of ground-down shell and pebble, and there, he balances for a moment, gaining his bearings, before he pivots, pirouettes, and is away.
Sculls into air.
Kicks up from beach.
Strikes out from land.
Lifts off.
Particles of plastic, particles of sand, fall from Doogso Ynot’s shoes. Specks of astonishment tumble slowly down, glitter as they settle on the beach, sprinkle resting bodies red and tan, infect sandwiches with caustic pollution, coarsen apple cores, grit the widening eyes of disbelief.
A boy must not fly. He must stay like the rest of us. A boy of uncertain origins must not go searching for his past and thus his future. A boy – he must not – must not – boys must not –
Doogso Ynot is a line from Lorca – the one you read that summons orange-peel longing at midnight, or the ballad of a firing-squad moon at dawn. He is a fantasy of Rushdie sketched on the real – that makes your stomach chocolate-curl from the deep rightness of your first wholly selfless and most beautiful kiss, as you fail to distinguish between lips, longing and tenderness.
Doogso backstrokes above sun worshippers. Pulls the atmosphere between his fingers. Kicks hard ten meters in to sky. Swims a lazy breeze. Casts umbra over children juggling fear, fascination, ice cream.
A few hands reach up as Doogso Ynot tumble-turns down, pauses to tread air, gain his bearings. He backstrokes among swooping oyster-catchers. Orange-eyed gulls rest on Doogso Ynot’s stomach. Toddlers chase the flying boy. Terriers foul themselves, hackles form mountains. Mothers turn away the heads of the children they can reach. Grandmothers confess they once dreamed of this. Fathers follow the flying boy with bright nylon fishing nets, as if he is a butterfly they wish to collect. Pale poets wonder if they too might abandoned the dead-weight of their lives. Earphones are lost along with surety.
High he reaches, high. Stretches for the calm of the moon in the turbulent air. Doogso Ynot leaves the earthbound to their blue despairing depths. Endows footprints to air, to fable, eddies searching for meaning.
The video of the floating once-boy goes pandemic, solo epidemic. The rest of us, living bound by a deterministic universe, feel undone, strangers to physics.
His brother resigns from the family, his father sabotages his own elevator, his mother locks tight her shutters.
‘No Ynot he, no nah nee roar. We do not know him any more,’ family parrot in exclusive interviews, the evening news, on poe-faced podcasts.
Catholics claim Doogso Ynot for their own, each sect and cult, the same.
A jet is scrambled but detects no trace of the boy who stepped beyond the beach, climbed with a soft-stroke dance intangible air, became a dot, a speck, a spot, to leave us grieving in his shadow.
The next day’s copy-editor headlines fail to find new words to describe the boy’s ascension. Influencers, opinion-shapers, conspiracy constructors, befuddlers, Rupert Murdoch, struggle to comprehend Ynot’s regenerated world. He will pass, they hope. Bury the news, steal the narrative.
He leaves behind… gravity.
All we assumed was true.
Sense.
He is survived by… those he left behind.
A family pleading for his non-return.
Science.
Only Ynot does not pass. His shadow-shape glows gold as a secret angel whispering into the ears of sons, daughters, others, reinvented forms of selfless life, who taste, as if taking in strange pheromones, a change upon the wind. Ynot’s floating presence comes to be a sentence of a purple paragraph in hundred-year-old book written by a man shot by a Nazi, assuring all who let the words show them, that they will turn out fine no matter what the world seems to suggest. Children and teenagers gather in public parks to sing, to raise joined hands toward the sky their parents cannot comprehend, why not Doogso Ynot why not us, too? ‘Why not be a have than a have
not? Be an is rather than an is not?’ the chorus melodies.
The following week, the millstone Government borrows billions in order to supply weighted shoes for every child approaching puberty. Issues each parent heavy chains when the fee for a birth certificate and citizenship is paid. Public information films are produced warning against youth radicalisation, doubling-down on class-speak, chance-speak, change-speak. Doogso Ynot’s face appears on wanted posters throughout England, though he always fancied himself, he muses, oaring invisibly through the cool of the turbulent air, toward an untouchable moon, unwanted.
Tony lives a skipped-stone’s bounce from Margate, England. His short stories and poems have found homes in Litro, Blue Nib, Literary Stories, Scarlet Leaf, Extinction Rebellion and Templeman Review. Two non-fiction books are published by Jessica Kingsley. He is working on a novel.
Clydesdale With Wife In Tow
by Salvatore Difalco
A horse bred for hauling, the man;
the woman, in a dank cantina cured.
Strides without care in the world, braying
to smiles and sneers alike, tipping his hat
to skeletal beggars reaching for alms.
Over the cobbled street, wife in tow,
her breasts like folksy chimneys,
but her eyes like bottomless holes.
Does she know something we should know
or should we mind our own beeswax?
Perhaps life has augured foully for her;
or a fetish for brutes forms her shackles.
Hale and hearty do not enter her look.
But living in a dungeon will do that,
the damp and stench of ancient stone.
The man whinnies, I swear, as he passes me
standing in a storefront shiftless, killing time,
killing the seconds one by one like lice,
for time means nothing to me
as it likely has no meaning for said wife.
Dreary Is The Room
by Salvatore Difalco
I am an alien. Look at my skin.
The sheen alone should alarm you.
The uncanny alopecia also a clue.
The hue, as well, should begin a slew
of interrogations and investigations
and inquiries into my provenance.
Look at my hair—blue-gray flames
burning without heat or smoke.
Look at my neck, a stalk supporting
a cognizant granite globe.
Look at my feet: I walk like a squid
and cannot shimmy to save my life.
What is my name? The Earth one
or my real one? Call me Joe
down here. Back home I’m known
by a name unpronounceable to humans.
My mission is to find proof
of intelligent life on other planets.
How is it going? Predictable data
thus far, no real breakthroughs
to message back to my meta-base.
But in my sort of hand nestles
the secret to the people of Earth:
The Haunted House by Thomas Hood.
A Tall Tall Man
by Salvatore Difalco
You stood there like a man on stilts,
ginger-haired and piano-toothed,
dressed in a forest green suit,
tall as a maple tree, and puffing a cigarette.
The road is long and I have met many
singular people on my walks
but no one else compares.
How tall are you, friend?
Tall enough to be your canopy, your sky.
I didn’t know whether to laugh
at your ready identification,
your intentions unclear. Then I heard
the squawking of a hawk,
but you blocked my view of it passing.
How far can you see? I asked
Very far and wide, you stated.
Across several time zones.
A flock of sheep came trundling by,
wooly and smelling of cheese.
The shepherd followed swinging
a stick and shielding the sun
from his eyes to regard you.
You are a tall tall man, he said.
Yes I am, you said, taking a last haul
of your cigarette and tossing it aside.
The shepherd and the sheep moved on,
glancing back now and then in wonder.
Maybe the shepherd would tell his people
what he saw; maybe he would dream
of you, casting your long shadow.
Sometimes I get carried away.
The bewildering variety of people
never ceases to amaze. An inevitable
question clanged from my lips.
Have you ever played basketball?
You laughed and lit another cigarette.
Ask me if I ever was the Statue of Liberty.
Ask me if I ever was the Tokyo Skytree,
the CN Tower, Millau Viaduct, Kingda Ka,
Burj Khalifa, the Great Pyramid of Giza,
or Hyperion, the tallest tree in California.
O me of little mind! And smaller
imagination! O you, freakishly tall man
telling me in your way to go fuck myself.
I actually imagine I will see you again.
An air of inevitability lingers.
If not, I will climb the closest mountain
and seek out your ginger head,
bobbing purposelessly above the clouds.
Salvatore Difalco is a Sicilian Canadian poet and satirist.
Eleanor
by Tinamarie Cox
The weather was bitterly cold and the snow fell without mercy. Large white flakes swirled and whipped in the gale, circling Eleanor like an angered hive of bees. Despite the raging wind pushing her along with the current of the flurries, all was quiet. Or perhaps her ears had frozen under her hat. She pulled a quivering, mittened hand out from her coat pocket and touched the outline of cartilage under her wool cap. Numb.
​
Eleanor began to suspect she was traveling in circles. There was nothing to be seen between the specs of white in her blurred vision. Her tears turned to crystals on her cheekbones. The fury of the storm had erased the colors and shapes of the forest scenery.
​
Her heart sank into her belly as she wondered if she would die like this, here among all the enraged and beautiful white.
​
Another strong gust shoved Eleanor forward. She held herself tighter, the chill leaching through the fibers of her scarf and prickling up her skin. The storm knew where it wanted her to go. Each rounding burst of wind guided her steps. No matter how deep she dug her heels into the snow, the squall pushed her onward, demanding her obedience.
​
Eleanor realized her mind was turning numb, too. She tried to remember why she had ventured out into the miserable storm in the first place. She searched the recesses of her mind but the hallways had gone dark. The rooms that held the knowledge were abandoned. The freezing snow had erased everything inside her as well.
​
Eleanor held onto her name like a lifeline, desperate not to lose herself. However, the rope was fraying. She could have been walking for hours or even days. Did it matter anymore? The snow was her world now.
​
Before long, all she was left with were a few vowel sounds on the tip of her tongue between her chattering teeth.
When the last of Eleanor disappeared, she surrendered and anchored herself in the snow. She wasn’t cold anymore. She felt nothing, knew nothing, and stared blankly ahead. This was a place between life and death. This was where Eleanor would meet her inevitable fate.
​
To her surprise, the end of the storm came shortly after. The wind slowed its tempo and the snow changed rhythm. Small white flakes danced in the air to a gentler tune and settled peacefully on the ground around her. Tall evergreens reappeared across the landscape. She felt a flicker in her heartbeat, a glimmer of hope.
​
Ahead of Eleanor was a small cabin. Her gut churned and formed a tight knot. Something in the air whispered that she’d never reach it.
​
The little log structure looked at her with a hollow face, teasing her with empty promises of shelter. She looked up at the sky, now clear and bright and glistening like glass. And where she thought the sun should be was a pair of blue eyes. Two large, twinkling orbs watched her.
​
“Ready for another blizzard, Eleanor?” A cheerful young voice echoed through the air around her. The eager eyes blinked at her.
​
Eleanor could not answer. She stood, glued in the little winter wood scene, the cabin sanctuary out of reach. There was no compassion in the eyes above her, only joy and excitement. If there were tears left to cry, Eleanor could have washed all the snow away. Her entire, terrible world was in a child’s hands.
​
“Here we go!” the girl cried. “Whoosh!”
​
And the ruthless wind came whirling around again, pulling up the fallen snow that had finally found rest. The ribbons of flakes whipped at Eleanor, turning everything white and cold and hopeless once more.
Tinamarie Cox (she/her) lives in Northern Arizona (USA) with her husband and two children. She writes to escape her mind and explore the universe. Her work can be found at tinamariethinkstoomuch.weebly.com and you can follow her on Instagram @tinamariethinkstoomuch.
Mona Lisa
by R.S.
And when I looked at you askance,
One dainty spring-morning in France,
I said, "Oh Mona Lisa, what a prize!
Why does your smile not reach your eyes?
You are all set in glass and frame;
In Louvre next to Notre-Dame,
And million men that you do eye,
Have they e'er stopped and asked you why?
What lies behind your mystic smile,
Which so does charm and so beguile?".
And, when you heard me call your name,
With grace you stepped out of the frame,
Then took my hand held out for you,
And smiled the smile so well I knew,
And said, "Oh will you ever know?
This mystic smile is just a show;
The pain I do so well disguise,
The tears behind the smile in eyes,
For men have seen me smile for years,
Yet never could they see my tears,
And you who set your foot herein,
How did you know the pain therein"?.
And said I, "It's the heart's surmise;
I know the pain behind those eyes,
For oft in smiles are we misled,
Not knowing when the heart has bled,
And when in smiles are tears contained,
Then woe in garb of joy is feigned".
This hearing so she smiled again
And said, "Ah! dear, this world is vain,
I should return from where I came
And smile once more in Louvre's frame".
R.S. is a denizen of Delhi, India who writes Poetry to find harmony in life. She had fallen in love with versing during her days as a student of literature. She rises early to feel inspired with the morning star and create new rhymes.
The Switch
by Isa Ottoni
There is a light switch in our living room that doesn't control any light or outlet. It doesn't match any of the other switches in the house with its round iron frame, faded scratches on the surrounding wallpaper, or the high pitch ringing it emits whenever I come close. Mum says that's because of disconnected wires inside the walls of this old house, and that I shouldn't play with it.
​
Mum doesn't understand.
​
Every morning, I turn it “on and off” exactly ten times. It has to be ten, there's no way around it. Mum waits by the door not looking at me before sending me off to school. When I get back, I do it again. Then again before dinner. And again before bed.
​
The doctors say my compulsive behaviour is expected, considering everything we've been through, and that the new medicine should fix me up. As we leave the clinic, Mum forces a smile and promises to buy me any toy I want. I tell her toys are for kids, and her smile widens. We settle for the new spider-verse video game on our way home.
Ten times. On and off, on and off, until the ringing in my ear stops. Mum fumbles with the tap of the medicine bottle, some pills falling on the floor. As I help her gather them, she asks what I think would happen if I didn't do that. I shrug, eyes on the ground. I don't want her to be sad, but she insists on it, and when she holds my wrist, I cry because it hurts but she doesn't let me go. Grabbing my shoulders, she shakes me until I blurt out the truth — she will die and I'll be alone!
​
Her voice cracks when she asks why I would say such a thing, and her face gets pale and weird when I say that's the truth. She has died before, and I can't let that happen again.
​
Mum pulls me into her arms and I hold her as she cries. I tell her not to worry, that I will protect her, that I am not letting anything bad happen. I got this.
​
We will be together forever.
​
The pills are bitter and too big for my mouth, but I swallow them to make her happy, even though I don't like how I feel after that. My head gets all sluggish and my arms too clumsy — but I made Mum a promise and I won't let her down. I drag myself to the switch, one, two, three, five…six, eight…ten? I'm sure it was ten.
​
When Dad comes home I hug him, burying my face in his jacket. He smells of cigarettes and beer, just like I remember. He pulls away, his eyes landing on everything but me, before dragging himself to the couch and ordering pizza.
​
We sit in front of the TV and eat, but I barely taste the food or notice what show is on. A man with a thick moustache ramps about alternative realities as the flat screen flicks with static noise. I keep glancing at Dad, at his loose stained shirt, the greying stubbles on his jaw, the dark circles around his eyes. I'm so glad he's here. I hadn't seen him in… in… Dang pills, I can't think straight.
​
I ask if we should save Mum a slice and Dad chokes on his beer. Coughing, he says I am too old for this nonsense, that he has put up with my weird behaviour for too long, and if I insist on not taking my medicine, he will have to check me into the hospital again. My stomach turns inside my belly — I don't want to go back there. I shiver at the memory of those blinding white corridors with rolls of empty beds that always reek of bleach, burning my eyes and throat. The doctors and the nurses with that weird look on their faces, that whispered tone in their voices, shutting you up like they know better. And if you complain, they bring the syringes. I run my hands over my arms, remembering the blue bruises around my wrists and legs, and bite my tongue so I don't upset Dad further.
​
He fidgets with his wedding ring as I take my night pills, opening my mouth afterwards so he can see I have swallowed them.
​
When he passes out on the couch, I sneak to my bedroom, but not before turning the switch ten times. Was it ten? I'm sure it was.
​
Mum wakes me up with a smile and kiss. She says that because I've been a good kid, we are going to the beach today, and spend time with my cousins. I jump out of bed, running around my bedroom gathering my stuff; my trunk, my bodyboard, my spiderman towel. When I find my football, I ask if Dad will join us, and Mum freezes on the spot. She touches her necklace and the two gold rings hanging there, and says Dad's in our hearts and watching over us, as always. I say of course he is, we had pizza together last night and her voice cracks when she says I should cherish dreams like those. She gives me my pills and rushes me into the car.
​
The beach is amazing and the summer has just begun. I play and laugh, and bury my cousin Matt in the sand. I don't think I've ever been this happy. When we get home, Mum carries me to bed because I'm already asleep, lulled by the ocean's movements imprinted on my body…
​
Waves come and go, washing over me. Quietly. Gently. Gradually growing in size and strength, crashing on my chest, raising water to my neck and face, and suddenly I can't breathe. I thrash and turn as cold water burns my lungs, but it’s not water that drowns me, it's bleach, and from the depths of the ocean, a high pitch ringing calls and morphs into words: the switch, the switch, the switch.
​
I jump awake — the switch! Running downstairs, my pyjamas damp with cold sweat, I almost trip over the last step but reach the living room in one piece. Ten times. Then ten more for forgetting about it in the morning. Another ten as a way of apologising. That should be enough.
​
Mum's not there to kiss me when I wake up in the morning. Dad sits at the kitchen table, reading his newspaper. He says I should eat something before we go. I ask where, and the corners of the newspaper crumple in his fists.
Through clenched teeth, he says we will go to the beach to see my cousins, and I can't believe how lucky I am — going to the beach two days in a row? I tell him all about yesterday's trip, how Matt's trunks filled with sand, how we tried to surf and got our asses kicked by the ocean, how the seagulls stole our sandwiches, and I'm still babbling about all the fun we had and how I wish he had been there when he grabs my arm and drags me to the car.
​
He doesn't say a word as we drive off. His face is red and he ignores me as I ask where we're going and why we haven't brought any beach things with us. I ask about Mum, and why he's being so mean and driving so fast, throwing me from my seat whenever the car makes a turn. When he parks, I breathe out relieved that I didn't throw up — but then I see it.
​
The rusty iron gate covered in poison ivy. The broken stone gargoyles perched on the top. The naked garden and dead trees around the crumbling building.
​
I can't breathe but I can smell the bleach. I try to open the door and get away, but my hands are sticky, and the safe lock is on. Tears blur my vision, sickness getting hold of me. I beg Dad to drive away, I say that I'm sorry, that I won't ask about Mum again, that I'll take my medicines — I'll be a good kid! Dad lowers his head on the steering wheel, his body shaking, as two men dressed in white drag me out of the car.
​
I call Dad, over and over again, and when he doesn't answer, I call Mum and beg her to save me. I cry at the top of my lungs, but nobody listens. They twist my arm and I cry. I thrash and scratch a nurse's cheek — he strikes my face and I plunge to the ground.
​
The world comes in and out of focus, my ears ringing. The nurse pins me down and shoots something up my arm. I fall asleep immediately.
​
Days are long in the hospital. The medicine makes me dizzy and slow. Dad comes sometimes, but he barely looks at me. He says he's sold the house because the memories were too painful. I beg him to take me home, but he says this is my home now.
​
I forget about the switch eventually.
​
I never see Mum again.
Isa Ottoni (she/her) writes fiction with a spark of magic and fantasy with a spark of reality. Her short story “Braza” is featured in Funemployment Quarterly Summer edition, and “Dea Sulis Minerva” in the FSF Writers Alliance anthology. When Isa is not writing, she is teaching and putting her PhD in food consumption sciences to good use, even though she would much rather be writing or reading about --- you guessed, magic. Isa was born and raised in Brazil but moved to Portugal seeking a new adventure. Say hi to Isa on Instagram at @isa.ottoni.writes or check her website https://isaottoniwrites.wixsite.com/website
Eve
by Quinn Matteson
Long before we were born,
you could look up into the night sky and see the stars. People would
travel the world by starlight, back then. Ships embarked
on odysseys with only the starlight for company.
You wouldn’t remember. Your father used to tell you that
a person was only as good as where they came from.
It seems, then, a rib bone is all you’ll ever be. There it is -
you’re starting to feel something again.
Quick - a drag, a needle, a puff, a shoved thought,
forced somewhere you'll only find
late at night, at the end of the roller coaster
when there's no more track left to run on. Your father, after all, is never wrong.
The dirt beneath your fingernails is all you’ll ever be.
Same as it ever was. The holes in your hands will never be healed,
for how beautiful are they? They are you;
to lose them would be to lose yourself. Even a circle can look like a line if you go about it right. Your father loves you,
even if he doesn’t ever show it.
Just because you are lost, does not make you a voyager.
It only means you are lost. Get in line. You let what remains flow into the ground -
maybe, there, you’ll feel at place, as it was
before the waves so unceremoniously broke her -
from dust to dust at last.
up is where you think it is
by Quinn Matteson
why am i always made to wander amongst dunes
and to never know why it is here that i have fallen to never find the right questions to ask
​
to climb them
and view the stars atop them
privately, in my own vicinity
why can i never lay claim to what i want most?
​
i admire flowers from afar, never able to grasp them, show them
how i respect their beauty-
always damned to watch them wilt
so unable to tend to them
and meticulously arrange them
so as to maintain their beauty forever
i want nothing more than to treasure them
in a vase so solid and secure
to hold them carefully to my chest
and to be intoxicated by their aroma
​
i yearn to ponder their colors
watch how they bloom and collapse
only to
resurrect them when they are ruined
i worship their delicacy
value the tumultuous torment of
watching them die
so softly
in the embrace of my own creating
​
and the inevitable rejoice
when they return to the beauty i cherish them for
the beauty i long for
​
i wonder if the stars that I gaze upon
will ever know
how coveted they are.
Quinn (he/him) is a student and pilot in Colorado, where he also helps run a charity providing resources for Afghan refugees. He has been writing for fun for four years, and enjoys playing the piano. He will be attending college next year.
My Age
by Lee Eustace
The sound of perturbed water alerts her. Her son, all five years of him, jumps repeatedly on the reclaimed concrete. The water disperses. Quickly. “Not in your new shoes!” she cautions. She watches him stop to consider her words, exploring their depth like the puddle that has since vanished beneath him. “But the lady says it’s okay, that you did this when you were my age.” She goes to speak but she cannot find the words. Any words. She glares in her son’s direction. “She misses you… Grandma,” he states, as if remembering a woman he never met.
Ramblings and Stumblings
by Lee Eustace
Ramblings and stumblings: A series of approximate turns and alleyways. Does this one cut through horizontally? Diagonally? Kotor, with its medieval-style architecture and its rich ambiance, leaves you guessing whether or not it’s the right path that you are on; though the biggest lesson it imparts is that there is no wrong path! Kotor’s sun-drenched lens gives scope to a tapestry of accidentals and purpose-builds. Its charm is underscored by an homage to that which is old, and grandiose, juxtaposed against a rich beckoning of what is to follow. Somehow, in the midst of that dichotomy, the present becomes inescapable.
Lee Eustace is a writer and poet whose work centres on the themes of relationships, social constructs, and culture. Lee is in the advanced stages of producing a debut novel, a collection of poetry, and a standalone collection of short stories. His works have featured in Apricot Press, The Martello Journal, Please See Me, Free_The_Verse, Hot Pot Magazine, Gypsophila Zine, Dipity Literary Magazine, Eunoia Review, and the London Wildlife Trust. @creativeleestorytelling on Instagram.
Between us let the silence scream
by Kanishka Kataria
stalking between the bars of the cage
you are held within,
your feathers are clipped,
seldom you turn to me.
you sing of freedom (with fear?),
i hear you, the inner self always does,
of the unknown, of the mystery,
you are the sound, i’d love to echo.
a wanderer searches for a home,
an empty heart for a soul,
you look for caffeine,
helps you forget yesterday.
yesterday was a bonfire night,
they say, you created a mess of it,
i say, the mess had already burnt,
you collected the ashes. and, cried.
you are numb to feeling anything,
counting all the worst that occurred,
everything has made loving so hard,
let me love you for you.
you are exhausted from the blood inside,
i stand behind you, you faint once, i’ll hold.
my hand is stronger than you believe,
you are stronger than they believe.
you might not remember your first kiss,
you wrapped them around your wrists,
like a threaded bracelet, mom and dad
came and you were filled with sobs.
do you recall yourself howling
in the nights like the wolves,
loudest in the pitch, hollowest in the heart,
let’s peel off today what’s left; deserve it.
you wish they were just strangers,
cherish the happiness after all’s ended,
dare to claim the sky in the winds?
i know, you’ll capture what you dreamt yesternight.
pondering about yourself in vain,
if you ever sit in the dark,
every time your heart aches,
between us let the silence scream.
The System
by Kanishka Kataria
a system,
an expanse of pure serenity,
who used to breathe peace and contentment,
who used to hold itself in the chains of stoicism,
who used to believe in the renditions of the universe,
why does it now crave an indomitable spirit?
it stayed back, it was uncertain.
in the subtle corner of insecurities,
it accepted its seclusion with quiet surrender.
it all commenced with a disastrous decision.
entropy, the degree of randomness of a system,
a system, myself. not so closed, but isolated.
i typically raised the temperature and checked,
the system was disrupted, on the contrary.
thought the burnt soul loves fire,
its flame diminished the former glow.
kinetics showed how time takes its toll on the system,
slowly interfering, rapidly damping.
how reserved i was, how hustled i am.
have faith, hell and heaven are not found in maps.
the creator created rooms,
the empty ones seem large
like the heart. several visitors arrive,
why should the system greet them all?
the crowd of dark thoughts and malice,
the noise of joys, you exhaust this system.
the idea of ‘it might be’ is secure for mere speculation.
the reality, maybe it does not exist, even if it does,
sometimes, the facts appear stranger than
the fantasies, i believed.
this system is disillusioned
with the hypocrisy of the world,
how easy it is to put out an empty hand,
how easy to fabricate an estranged relationship,
how easy to peel a tangerine and
adore a sun, both of the same color.
all i needed was a rapprochement,
a healing touch, i wanted to be
clasped tight so that i would not break.
i was hoping against hope
to resuscitate a precious bond,
but it’s just regret that lingers
in the thick silence placed between our bodies.
i knew i was dying,
something in me said, “go ahead,
the abode of the spirits of the damned
are holding back their horses.”
something else in me also popped up,
“you need some interaction to cause the transition.”
they had made me a picture,
it took me my life to come out of the frame.
i choose to move ahead,
the vast expanse waits for me,
to elicit the undeniable passion within me.
my heavy heart seems lighter than our fantasy.
as if the asymptote just met its hyperbola.
Kanishka Kataria (She/Her) is a girl of vision who possesses the immense strength to transform the world with her articulation. Grown and brought up in New Delhi, India, she is a writer and orator who strives to drive the world toward exhilaration and liberty. She is recognized by 30+ organizations for her work in literature, social issues, and scientific research. She brings out the best of herself and holds faith in the universe to render back the vibrations of concern and appreciation.
The Death of Koschei The Deathless
by Alexander Atreya and Nikolai Espera
In a certain kingdom there lived a Prince Ivan. When winter came to its deadliest on the eve of his twenty-seventh year, his father the king took Death’s hand in his own and departed this mortal realm, leaving Ivan with but one command:
“My dear boy, take you an arrow, draw your strong bow and let your arrow fly; in whatever court it falls, in that court you will find and take a consort before the last of the snow melts.”
​
Though he felt that the black clouds in the sky above might never give way to gentle spring, Ivan let his red-fletched arrow fly over the bounds of his kingdom and into the next, where it settled to roost at the doorstep of the Princess Marya Morevna.
​
When at last the prince alighted from his steed, he found the warrior-princess idling in wait of his call. “Dear Fate! I have been led to the dwelling of a handsome maiden. I am Prince Ivan, and I have come to collect my arrow.”
​
“Your arrow struck true indeed,” said she, “though I am inclined to keep it, as a token by which I may remember the fortuitous crossing of our paths. I pray you tarry awhile, prince—if your business be not pressing.”
It was not, nor had he any business but with her.
​
In the days that followed, Ivan delighted to take shelter from the icy frore in the warmth of Marya Morevna’s palace, until at last she was obliged to leave for the unabated warring on the borders of her country. With her journey on the near horizon, Marya Morevna took great care to render all the pertinent house-keeping affairs to the prince before parting from him with the following instructions:
“Go about everywhere, keep watch over everything; only do not venture to look into the closet in the west wing.”
But Ivan could no more stop himself from sating his curiosity than a seabird could remain grounded. The great doors of the palace did no sooner close behind Marya Morevna than Ivan turned about, followed the setting Sun to the west wing, and opened the closet door nestled into a shadowed alcove. The prince descended the stone-carved stairs, holding his candlestick aloft to quell his distant trembling—and below, in a tawdry cell, found Koschei the Deathless.
“My prince,” Koschei rasped, brittle hands clasping at the iron bars of the rusted prison; from behind the empty aperture through which one typically served meals, Ivan could see that they were fettered by twelve chains. “Please, my prince—grant me mercy! It hath been ten long years since even a single morsel flattened mine tongue with its weight, ten years since I last knew not what it was for mine throat to be set ablaze by thirst. Water. Please, my prince. Spare some water.”
With pity building in his breast like kindling in a hearth, Ivan fetched the prisoner a pail of water, and watched as they took their fill. Once finished, they pleaded again:
“Please, my prince. Another.”
And so it went on until the third bucketful, when the wizard cast the empty pail onto the stone floor and shattered each of their twelve chains with a shake of their great shoulders. No longer was Koschei an old man; rather, they now stood taller than Ivan himself, dust-kissed rags crumbling to ash at their feet in exchange for a gleaming, crow-feather cloak.
“You have my thanks, princeling,” Koschei crooned. Tucking a sturdy finger beneath Ivan’s chin, they fondled the prince’s head into a rough slant and nested their lips against his temple. “In return for your generosity, I offer you a glimpse of your future: you will sooner see your own ears than my captor, Marya Morevna!”
“What of Marya?” questioned Ivan, skin crackling with whispered remnants of Koschei’s magic—but in a terrible whirlwind, the wizard vanished, and he was left alone.
​
With his horse gone from the stables, Ivan fastened his cloak, determined to thwart the wizard’s vengeful ambitions. Time and distance muddied his memories of his father, and even of Marya Morevna—but curiously, he could still recall the touching of Koschei’s mouth to his skin, the sweeping of their lashes as they had slipped from his reach. In the harsh snow, he discovered a baleful trail of horseshoe tracks leading into the woods; unperturbed by Koschei’s head start, he hastened to follow.
​
Morning turned into night and back into early morning as the prince trudged through the evergreen forest, knees and shins damp with frost. At the dawn of the third day, he came upon a felled tree and decided to rest at the hoar-covered log—but from behind its stump hopped a jackrabbit with a flaxen coat and a belly as white as snow. It thumped its foot raptly upon the solid wood, squarely regarded the prince, and asked:
“Are you a wizard?”
Ivan shook his head, and let his finger point ahead of them. “The wizard went that way. You had better steer clear of the blizzard, or else the cold will get you.”
“Oh.” The curious jackrabbit deflated, before it shot back up again to inquire, “Well, would you like to be a wizard?”
​
The jackrabbit then took it upon itself to elaborate on what, exactly, a game of chase called ‘wizards’ entailed. Starved for excitement after having spent days ploughing the snow with his boots, Ivan set down his weapon and shook the jackrabbit’s paw. He would soon come to find it a challenging playfellow, with its furry legs built to evade the forest’s most ruthless predators, but their cavorting and gambolling was nothing short of merry—even for the weary prince—and so they played wizards until the Sun sank into the earth.
​
“That was fun,” the jackrabbit chirped to the victor—it seemed not to care at all that Ivan had an unfair advantage in the end, tall as he was, only sullen that the games had ended. “My mother never lets me play outside. You should have this.” White paws took his hand and gently enclosed a shard of a heart inside his fist. The prince thanked the jackrabbit, and went on his way.
​
He let the Sun and Moon make their weary exchange in the sky overhead, only minding the tell-tale divots in the ground for their steering of his journey. Hours passed in much the same way before there suddenly came a thunderous noise from afar. The earth shook and quivered, compelling Ivan to press himself against an unyielding tree and wait for the tremors to pass—but subside, they did not, and so he set out to follow.
​
At last, he came upon a small hut, tilting and tottering on restless hens’ feet. As he approached, Ivan put his hands to his mouth:
“Izbushka! Turn thy front to me!”
​
And lo, the hut did so at once, scaly legs buckling at the knees with two great thumps. Down from the house stepped a peculiarly beautiful old woman; she lifted her broom high above her head as she peered at the prince, who was illuminated only by the light flooding each windowed eye at the izbushka’s brow.
​
“Speak, boy,” called the woman. “What brings thee here? Free will, or the call of fate?”
​
“Free will led my search inside this forest, dama—but it was fate that I be drawn to thy lively abode.”
​
With a deep, tremulous wheeze, the old woman laughed. “Lively?” said she, looking back to the hut. “Hear that? And so—not only is he courageous, but spirited, too!”
​
“I mean no harm,” said Ivan, but the old woman shook her head:
​
“Naturally, naturally. Thy skylark with the lagomorph proved as much. Nothing escapes Baba Yaga, boy—not here, in the woods.”
​
She took Ivan into her hut, where he was swallowed by the izbushka and soothed with an herbal tea that smelled of anise. “Now, then: what do you seek that does not already lie in your pocket?”
​
“Baba?” From his purse, Ivan drew the rabbit’s gift. Beneath the glow of the furnace, it almost appeared brighter.
​
“Fate knows your path, even if you yourself do not. There, in thine own hand, is the heart of Koschei the Deathless.”
​
His hold became less grip than cradle. “You know of Koschei?”
​
“I know that this is not their first visit to mine forest,” said she. “Here, boy. I will strike a deal with thee: a story for a secret.”
​
And so Ivan put his mouth to Baba Yaga’s ear, telling her of his father’s command and how he had, perhaps, enjoyed the journey into Marya Morevna’s kingdom a great deal more than his destination and all that it entailed. As if in a trance, he admitted to his hope that Koschei might yet discover life could be more than this bitter war they had begun within their own body, and upon pulling away, the prince was surprised to find himself feeling a great deal lighter than he had before.
​
In return, she pointed to Koschei’s heart with a gnarled finger.
​
“A great many years ago, Koschei suffered a terrific tragedy at the hands of those who thought them a monster for their abilities: unable to destroy what they could not understand, the peoples’ ire turned to the one Koschei loved most. Their heart lay shattered, and so they entrusted a piece each to the animals of this wood before embarking on their reign of terror. This is but one of five such fragments.”
​
“And what must I do, once I have all five?”
​
“If I gave you all the answers, boy, the journey would no longer be yours! The heart is the soul; the heart is life. Do with it what you will, knowing that Koschei’s destiny will rest in thy hands.”
​
Cup drained of tea, Ivan thanked Baba Yaga and went on his way.
​
The snowfall grew harsher still in the days that followed, but the prince paid no more heed to the weather than he did the creatures scuttling from thicket to thicket in search of shelter from the blizzard that rattled the distant woods. None, in turn, tarried long enough to regard him but one: a peevish little hedgehog who bickered and raised its quills in petulant contempt even as Ivan’s hands cupped its soft belly.
​
Though the hedgehog sheathed its blades once it was petted and exhausted of its scorn, it only truly lapsed into docile silence when the second shard of Koschei’s heart was passed from paw to open palm. There was no conversation to be had while it sniffed at his gloves and stiffened at the sound of snapping twigs—so Ivan brought it to a hollow tree where it might take shelter, and went on his way.
​
The wizard’s tracks led Ivan over hills, through valleys, and past many precious spectacles in his trek about the woods—though none struck him quite like the welcome sight of a dry cave tucked into the foot of a low hill. Yearning for refuge from the building storm, he crept into the cavity, blind to the slumbering brown bear who had already claimed the cave as its own until the beast lifted itself onto its hind legs with a great groan.
​
“Hail, friend,” called Ivan, scrambling to his feet. “Sorry to wake you!”
​
But the bear was in no real mind for forgiveness. “Damned human!” Lurching forward, it swiped its claws at the startled prince; though he raised his hands in a gesture of peace, it was clear that no amount of reason would keep the bear from hacking him into smithereens. Unable to flee, he drew his sword.
​
The worst of the storm had begun to roar at the precipice of the cave by the time that Ivan dealt his final blow. Lacking proper protection from the winter chill, he turned the great beast over and closed its unseeing eyes before beginning to cut away at its skin for protection—and lo, an eerie light seeped through the cleft at the bear’s sternum, so bright and blinding it could herald only one rarity: there Ivan found another shard of Koschei’s heart, nestled inside the bear’s stiff chest.
​
He shed his winter coat in fair trade, blanketing the bloodied cloth over the bear before winding its pelt tightly around himself. Leaving the creature in its resting place, Ivan set off once more, weathering the pitiless blizzard all the way to the hollow of a snow-blanketed fallen tree: there, he fell into a deep slumber. He soon roused to calmer skies, and went on his way.
​
Baba Yaga’s woods were beginning to warm well enough for ice to melt into puddles; this, Ivan discovered when he came upon a pond so still it stirred with his approaching footfalls. Here he met a pair of swans, one of whom bent its slender neck to pluck a flower adrift in freshwater with its yellow beak. The other flapped its wings, preparing to accept the blossom from its companion, but alas, the flower was swept away by a strong breeze. Surrendering to the unlucky swan Ivan’s own swaddle of peony petals, which he picked from a nearby thicket, returned their thanks and a fourth piece of Koschei’s heart.
​
Ivan lingered, for a moment, to watch the swans preen one another. When it was time for him to take his leave, he marched onwards, unrelenting; with every step, the tracks in the snow grew clearer and seemed fresher, until he reached a canopied glade and found that there was naught left to follow.
​
By the last of the hoofprints, Koschei’s cape slithered over the wet snow. “I hear that thou hast been seeking mine heart.”
​
“I am,” said Ivan, unwilling to deceive the wizard. “Do you still seek Marya Morevna?”
​
“Perhaps.”
​
“And what do you intend to do with her, if you find her?”
​
“If?” Koschei laughed, coming to a standstill before him. “I could very well ask the same of thee. What will you do with mine heart, princeling?” A long arm encircled Ivan’s waist. “Keep it tenderly?”
​
To this, Ivan had no answer. “I cannot let you hurt her,” said he, finally.
​
“And so you come to me, expecting a hearty concession. Dost thou take me for a fool? Dost thou believe thyself the first in this attempt? I know precisely what you seek—but I would sooner spend another ten years as Marya Morevna’s mounted insect than let you take my power, my only protection!” Their grip loosened, but did not fall away entirely. As they averted their eyes, Ivan studied the troubled divot between their brows. “Now, leave me.”
​
“Your protection blinds you to your cruelty. As the fool who freed you from your prison, I cannot stand back and let you take up your path of old; I have found thy heart, Koschei, and I will keep searching until I have every piece. Do you not hear how it calls to you?”
​
At this, their expression grew cold. “Then so be it: a heart for a heart.” Releasing their hold on Ivan’s waist, Koschei raised the stone dagger at their hip and struck a neat slash across his chest, through the linen strap of his purse and the thick furs that shielded him from little else but the snow. As the former began to slide from his hip, Koschei snagged it between their fingers, clutching the shattered remnants of their heart close to their breast.
Again, the wizard disappeared from beneath their fluttering cloak, leaving Ivan alone in the bitter cold. Still determined to pursue, he dragged his feet across the snow as he clutched his wounded chest—but he did not travel more than a dozen paces before a distant rustling from between the trees snared his attention.
​
Heavy hoofs bore down on the earth as a great stag straggled into view, antlers spread wide like tree branches reaching for a sliver of sunlight, mane rippling in the wind. Its head drooped toward him, as slow and graceful as any gigantic thing could—until its snout thrust forward to nudge at his bloodied palms. The stag snorted, a white cloud swelling from its flared nostrils and into the frigid air as it began to fumble in terror.
​
“You are bleeding,” it bellowed, gently biting and tugging at Ivan’s sleeves. “Please, please be still, I am here!”
“Peace, fair stag,” said Ivan. “Peace. The blade did not cut deep.”
​
The stag took no heed of his words. Still stricken with panic, it continued:
​
“I must tend to your injuries. Please, do not leave me.”
​
“Then I shall stay.” At this, the stag fell silent, and in the end finally seemed calmed. It led Ivan to a
clearing left untouched by snow, where the two made a pile of drywood and huddled close to one another as Ivan cleaned his wound with the gentle moss retrieved by his companion.
​
“Who hurt thee so?” the stag asked.
​
“Peace, fair stag,” said Ivan. “Peace. Allow me to rest, for now.”
​
And so the stag remained with him through the night, the firm press of its grey barrow against the prince’s body keeping him warm long after the campfire dwindled to ash. Left in its place, when at last Ivan awoke, lay the last fragment of Koschei’s heart.
​
As the Sun rose over the forest, Ivan journeyed back to the glade and untethered his horse, whom Koschei had left behind in their hasty flight. With no tracks left to follow, he instead took the final piece of the wizard’s heart into his hands, listening to the way it hummed and glowed with each step in the right direction and letting its call guide his journey back to its kin.
​
Ivan raced through the melting snow, past great pine trees and around their ice-capped branches before finally catching sight of a black speckle in the distance. He urged his stallion onward, even as a great river approached them in their path—undeterred, it charged and jumped an impossible jump across the rapids, the distance between prince and wizard steadily dwindling.
​
At last, Ivan’s steed galloped past Koschei’s dark mare, the prince drawing rein a few paces ahead to obstruct their path. As he leapt from his horse, Ivan watched Koschei unsheathe the sword at their saddle before they, too, alighted.
​
“Let me pass, or draw thy blade.”
​
“I will not take arms against you,” said Ivan, “but I cannot in good faith allow you to continue.”
​
“Then you have chosen.” Ivan was ready, this time, when Koschei raised their weapon, and as he parried their blow, a clanging of steel rang so thoroughly throughout the wood that their mounts grew disquieted, snorting and stamping at the melting earth. When Ivan next struck, it was to disarm—though Koschei caught his blade with ease.
​
“Naïve mortal,” panted the wizard, “I am Koschei the Deathless. Dost thou believe I can be stopped?”
​
“I do,” came a third voice, speaking from over Ivan’s shoulder.
​
A barded destrier stood before them, Princess Marya Morevna saddled on its thewy back. Without ceremony, she drew her bow and let fly a red-fletched arrow, which whistled through the air for an instant before it pierced Koschei’s chest. The wizard gasped in pain, buckling at the knees as the princess watched from her mount:
​
“Take their heart and burn it. Koschei the Deathless shall torment my kingdom no longer.”
​
But Ivan remained deaf to her orders, casting aside his sword and hooking his hands beneath Koschei’s arms as they fell. Carefully, he lowered them to the grass, called to them once, twice—but Koschei did not hear him, dark eyes cast upon the Moon above, which was just now coming to its apex in the upper sky. “Beautiful,” they mumbled. After a moment, their eyes closed, and they moved no further.
​
“Pitiful creature!” said Ivan, cheeks guttered with tears. “You knew not what you were missing, knew not what you were giving away when you gave it.”
​
“Prince Ivan,” repeated Marya Morevna. “Their heart.”
At once, Ivan remembered the fragment in his pocket. It thrummed and sang to the others of its kind well before he placed it upon Koschei’s still body; hearing its call, he reached into the hollow of his purloined purse and ordered the five fragments over the cavity at their breast. “You were good, once. It is not yet too late to make you good again.”
​
And though their heart lay rearranged, it was only when a solitary tear slipped from Ivan’s nose and wettened the fifth piece that light began to spill from its shattered cracks, and it was drawn into Koschei’s chest once more. With a sombre breath, the wizard silently unclasped their lips:
​
“Alas, I am whole again—and you have doomed me to a mortal’s death.”
​
“And a mortal’s life,” said Ivan, tucking an errant lock of hair behind Koschei’s ear, “if you will have it.”
​
And though their heart was a heavy burden, Koschei came to treasure their mortal life, filled with mortal things. Dreary winter bloomed into spring, life erupting within the barren thickets of Baba Yaga’s wood once again. Prince Ivan returned to his kingdom, hand in betrothed’s hand—his father had led him well, even if his arrow had taken twice to strike true—and with a promise to Marya Morevna that the wizard would mend their ways as company mended their heart, his people made merry all the way to winter next, for Koschei the Deathless was no more.
Alexander Atreya (she/they) is a Malaysian writer and storyteller based in Australia. Their work has been published in Bossy Magazine, Chestnut Review, and Panorame Press. When they aren’t working on their debut novel, they can usually be found playing terrible horror games or writing yet another think piece about The Chronicles of Narnia’s queer narratives. Find them on Twitter @sashatreya.
Nikolai Espera (they/he) is a Filipino illustrator and multimedia arts student based in Metro Manila, Philippines. They specialize in hybridizing visual arts and other creative forms which showcase their attraction to the delicate craft of story-retelling. If not freelancing and developing fantasy visuals, they can be found curating their 220th Spotify playlist and daydreaming about animated music videos.
Bäckerei Müller
by Christina Hennemann
I push the glass door open with both hands, gripping the iron handle in the shape of a pretzel. Guten Morgen, was darf’s sein? I’m greeted by the baker’s wife and the heavenly smell of fresh bread and warm pastries. Has time not moved on since I left? I feel not one year older than the girl who came here after school to spend her pocket money on a scrumptious chocolate-covered croissant with an unhealthy amount of soft nougat cream inside. I’d like a loaf of the Westphalian, I say, and point at the fat, tanned corpse on the shelf. She understands me despite my English accent and grabs the bread with her plump hands, embellished with sharp red plastic nails, impeccable. Plop, bread in bag, twirl and seal.
​
***
​
She looks at me, expecting me to say something. Anything else? she prompts as a glimmer shoots through her eyes, a subtle smile flits across her face. Nein danke, I stammer. That’s everything. She tuts and asks if I haven’t seen the sign outside. About the special offer. A wink. I feel my hand stroke an invisible strand of hair from my forehead. The discomfort of not knowing what’s appropriate. I should’ve been more attentive. She explains it’s International Women’s Day. We have a special offer of fresh men today. Baker-made. Can I get you one? She licks her lips. Well, how does that work? I shift my weight from left to right. I should probably leave, I think, but I’m intrigued. He’ll be ready for pick-up in the afternoon, she says as if we’re talking about a birthday cake.
​
***
​
My mum always said you can’t bake yourself a man, love. You gotta deal with what you get. I go through my list: six-foot tall, blue eyes, greying dark-blond hair (short, please, like him in the picture over there, yes), a six pack, but not too poster-boy-like, you know what I mean? And nice feet, that would be great. I tap my fingers against my thighs as she takes notes. And down there? Another wink. Oh, well, just…reasonably sized. No banana shape, but like, straight, if possible. I blush and she shows me samples. I pick number six. Nummer sex, she repeats in her middle-aged rural accent. What flavour? I can’t decide between chocolate and vanilla, so I choose marble cake. Lovely, consider it done. Paying now or later? I hand her a few coins for the Westphalian and a fifty euro note for the man.
​
***
​
I return with my hair curled and red lips. The door glides open with a mere tip of the fingers. The baker’s wife grins at me and snaps her fingers. Just one moment, and she slips through the sliding doors, into the boiling hot womb at the back of the shop. I stand waiting with butterflies in my stomach. Shame and anticipation feel exactly the same. She comes back with a beautiful man in tow, just the one I had in mind when I ordered. The baker surpassed himself. My man’s bright-blue eyes seem a little empty, but then again, hasn’t he just been born? He wants to be filled with the world. The woman moves to the side and presents the baker-made man in all his glory, butt-naked. I fumble with the top button on my coat. Happy with your order? she clasps her hands. Yes, that’s perfect, vielen Dank. My eyes run over his body, then fixate on the baker’s wife, my anchor. Off you go then, enjoy, the woman winks and waves.
​
***
​
I’m a bit thrown off. The baked man apparently comes without clothes. The first time I understood that I was German was when I wondered why people wore swimwear on beaches abroad. I shrug and take his hand. It’s warm and doughy, and I feel the urge to curl up inside him like an embryo. Or eat him. He smells deliciously of marble cake. He opens the door for me like a gentleman and we step outside. His penis is dangling against his testicles with every step, and I pull my eyes away. Am I obscene or is he? There’s an elderly couple on the other side of the road. They’re throwing us not one glance. A teenager almost bumps into me with his head buried in his smartphone. A father and his little daughter pass us. The girl admires my glossy hair, and the father gives us a lazy wave. This is perfectly normal. We take a turn and find ourselves in a secluded alley. He stops and looks at me as if he’s in love. That should be included in the price, shouldn’t it? I kiss him and he feels real, just tastier. Can you speak? I ask. He nods.
Fawn Sinking In Moss
by Christina Hennemann
You led me on a string of candy pearls, told me you didn’t do relationships when it was much too late. I should’ve cut my losses, but you wanted to stay friends. The kind of friends that make love in the dark, so much love that I couldn’t believe it when you said you had no feelings for me. After all, you were swallowing a rock when you left me the first time, your eyeballs mashed strawberries. And then you always crept back like a rueful serpent, knowing well enough that I’d fallen for you long ago, slithering up and down my back on oil until my spine cracked once more. You bathed in my lovelight, absorbed it gladly until you were full and warm.
***
Your mixed signals served me my favourite cocktail: a gin fizz, bitters softened in their scrumptious coat of bubbly sugar. In the end you said it wasn’t fair on me when I had those feelings for you, and I asked if it had ever been. You didn’t have an answer really, your fingertips already swiping, having learned nothing about a fragile heart. I wonder often whether you’re cruel or broken, and imagine you did love me, haunted by a swallowing angst. How else could you have made me feel so special, said that I’d put a spell on you? You let me steal more of your hidden treasures, your abysses, than any of these girls.
***
I squirm at how you dumped me like I was nothing to you. Be honest, I tell myself: it would be so easy for you to get me back. I’d run to you like a fretting fawn, hide inside your mossy chest, hoping once again that your coldness won’t find me there. Is it possible that you’re my home while yours is a shot between cold stars?
***
I have recently received a twin flame reading. I don’t believe in magic, but pain is my religion. Our reunion will come, my beautiful, terrible witcher. I’m preparing to land within a frosty sky: my heart keeps pumping spiky platelets through my veins as my feet walk on purple clouds, green moss winding its way up my ankles.
***
flames under her tongue,
his naked hand burning her,
she kissed the darkness.
Astronomy Lecture, Or Mayo Dark Skies
by Christina Hennemann
You’re sitting next to me, hair combed like an innocent schoolboy, flannel shirt tucked in jeans, your woollen cardigan a tight hug, even though it’s April and I laughed at you. You dragged me here to learn about the stars, and although the astronomer is speaking well, I feel as if little kettlebells are pulling on my lashes, my eyelids drooping, the lecture of lightyears, facts and figures lulling me to sleep. But suddenly I jump, you shift in your seat and beam at me: the light that meets our eyes from the night sky is hundreds of years old, some thousands and millions. We’re gazing at ancient stardust, at matter that’s long evolved, or died, or changed its mind. I begin to wonder what stars and planets see, what they catch us doing right now – scenes from Renaissance, Stone Age, an earth ruled by fungi. Tingles conquer my limbs and I swallow the truth, that we cannot see each other as we really are now, we’re just not on the same page, lightyears behind, clinging to a shiny illusion of history. We cannot come together here & now in this universe. But it’s irrelevant matter, I figure. You’re still beautiful.
Christina Hennemann (she/her) is the author of the poetry pamphlet “Illuminations at Nightfall” (Sunday Mornings at the River, 2022). She won the Luain Press Poetry Competition and was shortlisted in the Anthology Poetry Award and the Onyx Fall Contest. Her work is published in The Moth, fifth wheel, Ink Sweat & Tears, National Poetry Month Canada, Tír na nÒg and elsewhere. She is based in Ireland and currently working on a novel.
Instrument of Interference
by Terry Trowbridge
Our acts of inference are prior to our picture of Nature almost as the telephone is prior to the friend’s voice we hear by it.
-C.S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study, p. 36.
Wonders of Lewis/Blowing my mind/Five after midnight/and the Sun still shines.
-The Waterboys, Dream Harder, “Wonders of Lewis.”
Telephones: musical instruments
that play voices over all the distances of the Earth.
Thought: an instrument of the liberal art we call “logic”
which is the a priori medium of inference.
Bloom, of “Bloom’s Taxonomy” said “Thinking is a skill,”
and certainly, this lousy poem demonstrates
how setting up premises to reach a conclusion
does not, of itself, stretch over a poetic grid
(oh great Apollo, i pray to You, send me the Eumenides,
Your servants, in Your dual capacity as God of Music and Logic).
(oh great Apollo should i have asked You for help
before the Sun set? Before You left my longitude far behind)?
Wandering mind, through what medium are you conducted,
strung across which ethereal cables spanning which astral planes?
Which of Descartes’ rough drafts crosses out
images that rappel down intimations of electricity,
colonization, pole-to-pole conquest of latitudes linked by instruments
of instantaneity, changing the laws of jurisprudence
to include instant communication
even while changing the laws of physics
to deny the existence of simultaneity?
Which instrument was the bassline and which the harmony,
Telephone or mind? Sound or inference?
If nothing is simultaneous then
can there be coincidences instead of causes
can there be prompts instead of premises
can there be doubt instead of conclusions
can there be a way to be there when a message arrives
can there be any skill to thinking when the instrument for inference
is replaced by the electronic instruments that colonized spacetime?
Terry Trowbridge’s poems have appeared in The New Quarterly, Carousel, subTerrain, paperplates, The Dalhousie Review, untethered, Quail Bell, The Nashwaak Review, Orbis, Snakeskin Poetry, Literary Yard, M58, CV2, Brittle Star, Bombfire, American Mathematical Monthly, The Academy of Heart and Mind, Canadian Woman Studies, The MathematicalIntelligencer, The Canadian Journal of Family and Youth, The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, The Beatnik Cowboy, Borderless, Literary Veganism, and more. His lit crit has appeared in Ariel, British Columbia Review, Hamilton Arts & Letters, Episteme, Studies in Social Justice, Rampike, and The /t3mz/ Review. Terry is grateful to the Ontario Arts Council for his first writing grant, and their support of so many other writers during the polycrisis.
Sivka-Burka
by Irina Tall Novikova
Several Eggs
by Irina Tall Novikova
Irina Tall (Novikova) is an artist, graphic artist, illustrator. She graduated from the State Academy of Slavic Cultures with a degree in art, and also has a bachelor's degree in design. The first personal exhibition "My soul is like a wild hawk" (2002) was held in the museum of Maxim Bagdanovich. In her works, she raises themes of ecology, in 2005 she devoted a series of works to the Chernobyl disaster, draws on anti-war topics. The first big series she drew was The Red Book, dedicated to rare and endangered species of animals and birds. Writes fairy tales and poems, illustrates short stories. She draws various fantastic creatures: unicorns, animals with human faces, she especially likes the image of a man - a bird - Siren. In 2020, she took part in Poznań Art Week. Her work has been published in magazines: Gupsophila, Harpy Hybrid Review, Little Literary Living Room and others. In 2022, her short story was included in the collection "The 50 Best Short Stories", and her poem was published in the collection of poetry "The wonders of winter".
Goods
by Daniel David Froid
I.
Ernestine Boggs decided she would throw it all away. It, all of it, all her worldly goods, all the years’ accumulation of junk that she sometimes called, that she routinely thought of, that she often faced the temptation to identify with, her very life. Piles of sweaters and dresses and pants and scarves and socks and sundries in every conceivable—and some inconceivable—shade and texture. Countless pairs of shoes, mostly tooled from animal skins into the tapering shape of little feet. Her collections of porcelain dolls and stuffed animals, whose wide painted eyes leered at her in rows, observant, curious. Kitchen appliances with purposes specific and obscure. Sets of dishes in patterns floral and geometric, enough to set a table for the entire population of the small village in which she lived. The toys, beds, sweaters, and astonishing variety of miscellaneous accessories for her elderly Vizsla, Cheryl. And the books! The books that would one day exert a will of their own and crush her under their sheer tonnage; the books that crowded every spare wall of every room; the books that at one time represented this or that—intelligence, taste, class, lofty idealism—but which now lacked an audience to convey any such symbolism, because nobody ever paid her a visit. The books that she thought she wanted so very much and now found she did not much care about at all. Ditto everything she owned; she no longer cared.
​
What chills me, she thought, is a burgeoning suspicion: that all my worldly goods have entrapped me, have inextricably locked me into a certain kind of story. My claims upon it, and even Cheryl’s, are tenuous at best. At best, and at worst nonexistent. My life belongs to, has been captured by, my worldly goods; its territory has been ceded. Goods! And what, dare I ask, is the nature of their goodness? A good answers the call of a desire, unless it meets a need, of which I have, truth be told, very few; but whether it is good to satiate my desire, or whether I ought to have spent my life in privation—redirecting the energies that propelled me to accumulate more and more goods toward some nobler end—and whither I ought to direct those energies now, seem to be more pressing than anything else.
​
The decision arrived like the appearance of an angel—an annunciation. Sudden, beautiful, sharp, and bright, it brought a sense of clarity and giddiness that bordered on euphoria. For an hour Ernestine wandered her house’s seven rooms and chortled with delight at the thought of watching it all disappear. And then she thrilled with the delectable impulse to destroy it all herself.
​
An annunciation, she thought, is an event horizon. There is neither going nor looking back. One rushes into a different and more numinous world, whose contours are unknown until one has stepped into it—which is precisely what I want. To enter that new world. To outside observers, I would appear to be mired in infinity. To myself, who knows? I have traversed it, have entered that new and mysterious space. Destiny announces itself and one must follow its heed, which is to say that one might as well plunge into the black hole’s depths and never worry about looking back.
​
She began with that which seemed most expendable. The porcelain dolls leered from the shelves and atop the bed in her spare room. She grabbed one, a doll dressed in the glittering garb of a harlequin, purple and gold, and held it in her hands. Its body was soft, cloth stuffed with cotton, its heavy porcelain head listing to the left. Swiftly she moved to the sink in the bathroom and, placing her fingers on the doll’s head, pushed them inward. The porcelain shattered easily under such pressure. Fragments of alabaster skin and cherry-red lip showered the recess of the back of its head, as well as the sink beneath it. She giggled, rotating the doll and watching the fragments descend into the sink. She tore the doll’s head away from its body and glanced at the stuffing within. “Farewell, farewell, farewell,” she said and patted its back.
​
Handfuls of dolls made of felt, whose leering grins and grimaces she used to treasure, met the force of a firm ferocious grip. Stuffing surged out of seams like foaming waves upon the tide, and she grimaced, too, with a savage delight. She smashed the heads of dozens of dolls, tearing them off and tossing them into the trash one by one. They will soon, she thought, populate a landfill, this army of maimed clowns and jesters and ladies in petticoats, all these little animals of plastic skin and synthetic fur, and perhaps one day they shall take it upon themselves to form their own parliament of the broken and shattered and to enact decrees that will govern the lawless wilderness, which will be all they shall ever know. They shall rule from atop thrones of steel and plastic.
​
And then she found the materials that might serve as those thrones, as the foundation of the city center from which they should build their empire. She reached for her convection oven, her air fryer, her blender, her juicer. All such contraptions she heaved into the bin, listening carefully, hand cupped behind one ear, as each one landed with a wonderful, cacophonous crash, prompting Cheryl to bark. She imagined them in piles as tall as the sky, glittering and garish metropolis of rubble overseen by broken dolls.
​
Bags of trash swelled by the dozen. They sat, sagging, as Ernestine conscripted still more of her things, still more bags, to join their ranks. She turned to her closets full of clothes and began to grab nearly at random. Fistfuls of thin silky scarves and wads of socks sailed into flower-scented bags. Ernestine moved on to her underclothes; to dresses in loud prints that she formerly favored—leopards and zebras danced on hangers and soon coalesced into piles—and novelty t-shirts with unfunny slogans, most of them concerning various states she had had the misfortune to visit, and so on and so on. She grabbed heaps of clothes and drove them into bag after bag. Soon rows of teeming trash bags barricaded her bedroom and closet.
​
She pictured the clothes in piles at the dump, lasting an eternity perhaps, as their fibers refused to degrade. These, she thought, shall form the very bedrock of that new society—the foundation upon which the empire shall grow.
Her relish soon drove her to the most arduous obstacle: the books. They towered before her in the bedroom, the living room, the office, in shelves and in piles on the floor. A sense of prudence prompted her to lock Cheryl away. Then Ernestine marched to her office and faced the shelves, taller than she was, that lined the walls. She held a crowbar. Moving gingerly toward one bookcase, she slipped the crowbar’s pronged tip behind it and positioned herself to one side. As hard as she could, she gave the crowbar a wrench, and with a thud the bookcase fell to the ground. The books flew. From a distant room, Cheryl barked. Ernestine climbed atop the fallen piece of wood and stamped her feet.
​
Returning to the floor, she repeated the procedure with two more bookcases, watching them topple, listening to the wood of the first one crack under pressure. She grabbed hardbacks, one in each hand, and hurtled them against the wall. She held one very thick book in her palm, a mass-market paperback with roughly textured, yellowed paper, and ripped it down the middle. Pages fluttered in the air. She laughed. She picked up more paperbacks, by turns tossing them far above her head or tearing them in two, and continued to laugh. And “Farewell, farewell, farewell,” she said again. She was bidding adieu not to the books but to her very self, whose disintegration she observed in bits and pieces. She walked over to one corner of the room, where near her desk she stored her own books in numerous identical copies. She took a copy of each and ripped them, too, in half, tossing the remains behind her back. She would be glad to see them go.
​
She left the room with one last glance at the fallen shelves, the ruined books, the pages that coated every surface. Downstairs, she released Cheryl and retrieved a box of garbage bags; the pair climbed the stairs and waded into the mess. With considerable speed, Ernestine stuffed the pages into trash bags. These, too, would fill the empire that ever expanded in her mind. Perhaps pages would coat the ground like roads, lanes, alleys between skyscrapers of broken microwaves and tattered sofas, and her dolls would happily glide across those roads. The torn-up pages would knit the empire together, just as Roman roads did; and, Ernestine, thought, why should they not last forever? We may still walk along those viae as often as we like, as I have done and likely will not do again, at this great age and at this late stage of the world. But my roads, my paper roads, shall do their own work of unity and strength. Notwithstanding that the paper shall degrade. Notwithstanding that the dolls are not alive. Notwithstanding that none shall live to walk those roads.
​
She saw in a flash the dizzying heights of the towers, metal and plastic tickling the belly of the sky; the endless roads of stiff yellow papers, soiled and stained, no longer smooth, their text illegible and therefore meaningless, serving only to protect dainty and unnatural feet from grazing the earth; and the dolls, the dolls with chipped porcelain faces—this one missing an eye, that one bearing cracks at either side of its mouth, another with no face at all—who laughed atop their thrones, surrounded by a court of felt and polyester creatures who heeded their bidding. Shall even the angel, she wondered, who effected my annunciation notice? Shall an angel descend and pay them a visit and instruct them to do—what? Into what waste could their waste be made? What goods could they do without, what goods could they relinquish, given their nature? Being pure goods, or pure waste, themselves, they remain innocent.
​
So she thought, still frozen, oblivious even to the pacing of Cheryl, who persistently nudged her companion’s hand and, after a short time, began to whine.
​
At last the world dredged Ernestine up from out of her reverie. The pair went outside, and the dog soon earned the reward of her evening meal.
II.
The goods were packed. Ernestine worked for several days and nights, allowing it all to pile up within her home. Where furniture once stood, the elements of her life, the symbols of her being, now rested trash, in quantities innumerable and indistinguishable. Her house was in the process of emptying, and she felt, along with it, the draining of her being. The idea pleased her. Her personality was nothing more than what might fill a vase, a fragile structure, thin and brittle, full of the flowing liquid of the self. With her home, the vase that housed her, now poised for destruction, the liquid would disperse. She relished the thought.
​
She set aside a whole day for the trip to the dump. It was a long way out, past the edge of town where she had never been, past the sad decrepit park that the town did such a poor job of maintaining. Peering into her rearview mirror, she gave Cheryl a meaningful look, intended to convey a wistful disdain. Though Cheryl likely did not notice her companion’s eyes, nor register the meaning of the glance, she nonetheless seemed to return the look with a glint of humor.
​
At the dump, Ernestine parked, stepped out, and stretched. Nearby a squat brick building safeguarded the entrance to the landfill. It looked deserted, though it was a warm, bright, pleasant morning. She opened the back door for Cheryl, clipping a leash to her collar as she stepped down, and then the pair marched to the back of the car, where Cheryl waited as Ernestine unloaded the trunk. With Cheryl’s leash wound around one hand and two bags of trash clutched tightly in the other, Ernestine forewent entering the building itself and instead moved directly toward the landfill.
​
The landfill stunned her. Never before had she seen one—had she glimpsed such a colorful sea, which seemed to sprawl for miles. A congealed, confetti-colored sea, it looked neither solid nor liquid but something in between, or something utterly other, a new state of matter. She gasped. Here, she thought, is where my things shall come to rest. Here is where my self shall dissipate, where all those things that, I’ve decided, no longer matter shall forever sleep. If this is sleep, if this is rest. And it is from here that my dolls shall rule; and paper roads shall leech out of this sea and connect one to another, and something else, some new primordial life, shall crawl out of the sea and walk and breathe.
​
“Oh, Cheryl,” she said. “There it is.”
​
She heaved one bag into the landfill and watched as it fell with a thud. She held another in her hand and, before permitting it to join its kin, ripped it open, to see its innards—mainly socks—splay with its descent. “And there it goes,” she said.
​
She spent hours moving back and forth from the car to the landfill. Nobody disturbed her; she saw not one single other soul. And somehow their solitude, hers and Cheryl’s, seemed right, seemed to uphold the notion, faint but growing larger, that what she then underwent was a pilgrimage to the sacred site of the future. And when she was done with her initial load, she went back to her house, leaving Cheryl there this time, and spent the rest of the day and a second day, too, hauling more from the house to the great wasted sea just past the edge of town. Each batch of clothes and dolls and books and mementoes that she flung into that bewildering sea moved her a little more.
​
When the house stood empty, and almost nothing remained inside save for Ernestine and Cheryl, she smiled at her dog, gave her elegant golden head a pat, and clipped the leash onto her collar. “Come, Cheryl,” she said. “One more thing remains.” The subject of no empire, of none that yet existed, she exalted her new state.
​
Ernestine lit a couple of matches and tossed them into different rooms, and she and Cheryl fled into the night. “Farewell, farewell, farewell!” she said. She felt the thrust of her launch into the future, which was utterly blank, exquisitely so. “Who am I?” she whispered to her dog. “And who are you? Isn’t it marvelous not to know?”
Daniel David Froid is a writer who lives in Arizona and has published fiction in Lightspeed, Weird Horror, Black Warrior Review, Post Road, and elsewhere.
Pulse at the Centre of Being
by Sara Collie
There are all kinds of reasons why a person might find themselves in a grimy underground nightclub at 2 a.m. The poet told herself she was there for some fresh inspiration. She hadn’t found a poem in the usual places for quite some time. The tree-tall woods no longer whispered their secrets to her on the breeze when she wandered among them alone; the quiet mornings when the garden softly shook itself awake offered no fresh insights; even the green bends of the river had dried up. Where would a poem hide, if a poem could hide? She would have to look somewhere new, somewhere out of her comfort zone.
Her hands, her feet, they knew it before she did; they recognized the rhythm, remembered the time when she had lived inside it. It felt like the heartbeat of the world. She told herself that was why she was there on the dance floor amidst a sweaty crowd of strangers. The DJ was mixing together soundscapes that felt like technicoloured jolts of electricity waking her up from a deep sleep. For the first time in a long time she felt wildly, viscerally alive. She had drifted away from her friends almost as soon as they had arrived in search of something completely unfamiliar and here it was, surrounding her. She kept catching glimpses of a poem in the hammering bass line that was not so much a series of sounds as a web of powerful feelings surging up through her body, rattling her bones, setting her pulse racing.
Surely, she could find a poem nestled there, in the strange pulsating space where the crowd was moving as one in a vast sea of arms that was welcoming her, holding her in its sway? She could sense something forming as her heart thudded, pumping chemicals and illusions around the circuits inside her as she danced and danced and danced…
Suddenly the dots were connecting up too fast. Suddenly the dance floor rose up to meet her at an angle that was all wrong. There was a rush of noise and heat. When the confusion cleared she realized she was coming round in a small white room. The bass was still pounding on the other side of the wall, muffled now, as she pieced together what had happened: the concerned bystanders crowding round as she slumped to the floor, the bouncers carrying her unresponsive body out of the crowd after she had fainted; the kind paramedic taking control of the situation, insisting that he monitor her until she made a full recovery. She kept apologizing to him but he reassured her that it wasn’t her fault and for once, she half-believed it. But as colour flooded back into her cheeks and a vague feeling of shame settled, she knew her quest was over.
She realized it hadn’t really been about a poem at all; she had just wanted to escape herself for a while. She had wanted time to open up and stretch out so she could hide too, somewhere where her feelings of failure couldn’t find her. They had been looming so large lately, colouring her days, making it impossible to think about anything constructively or feel anything but worthless.
Moments later, reunited with her friends, she was ushered out into the cold, dark night where the brash pink light of a neon sign glowing brightly through the window of a nearby bar caught her eye. It read:
NOTHING
ABOUT YOU
IS A MISTAKE
She thought perhaps that was it, those six words – that was the poem. It hadn’t vanished after all, but was reverberating onwards, outwards, like the music ringing in her ears, offering up a reminder of her place in the world, providing a different kind of baseline to explore.
She would put the poem on a page where everyone could read it, and just like her, take their first tentative steps on the long journey back towards home. The trees and their secrets would be waiting for her there. And when she was ready to dance again, the sea of arms and the new space of belonging that she had found in the music would be waiting for her too.
​
This title references the Max Cooper song of the same name, track 6 on the album Unspoken Words 2022
Sara Collie is a writer, language tutor and psychotherapist-in-training living in Cambridge, England. She has a PhD in French Literature and a lifelong fascination with the way that words and stories shape and define us. Her writing explores the wild, uncertain spaces of nature, the complexities of mental health, and the mysteries of the creative process. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Neon Door, The Selkie, Confluence, Synkroniciti, Stonecrop Review, Outwrite, Full Mood Magazine and elsewhere.You can read more of her writing via her website: saracollie.wordpress.com/writing/
The Companion
by Shamik Banerjee
The road, for workstead, that I pass,
is mid-width with over-turfed grass.
A composure of soundless air,
circulates 'round this lode allwhere.
No bird, no squirrel here does trace
and this is an unpeopled place.
At morning, it is very toom—
a few trees only the sideways groom.
At day, the Sun's my attendant,
and its sunlight my confidant.
No wheelbarrows, no cycles roll,
except me pads here not a soul.
At mirkning but, when homeward bound,
a stomping and a clomping sound,
is clear heard from a pair of boots,
aside this path where came new shoots;
but no one is there when I see;
I know not who's this company.
And all I know- with me it walks.
It nudges not, neither it talks.
It keeps always a genteel meeting,
yet never has it made a greeting;
but I think in me it did find-
a like and amicable mind.
But what startles me- it does turn,
when I almost to home return.
Its alacrity then does fall,
when we approach a Cedar tall,
which bears two cross-shaped boughs from bark,
from there its footings, I don't hark.
The Face of Olga Moretti
by Shamik Banerjee
From her window, would Olga Moretti,
during my bimbles, greet and smile at me.
Same instants, she would stand there everyday,
when I would shuttle on the footpath's way.
Not much about this elrig I had heard.
Of her, the townfolk spurned to say a word.
They'd adhort me, 'bout her, to not enquire
and say, talks on her, are baleful and dire.
This provoked me to Olga's annals know.
So I did to the local rector go.
What he unveiled, had then ruddled my eyes:
a year agone, she met with her demise.
One sunfall while this girl was at her play,
a storm- murderous, made the Hawthorn sway;
and splitted a knifelike branch from the rest
which darted and transfixed poor Olga's chest.
When I professed that our sights did meet,
he unheeded, saying 'twas a conceit;
of things untested, unfond was my mind
hence for the truth myself forthwent to find.
It was under a starless night of June;
the sky was mirksome, livid was the moon;
I entered and near to the front door stood
where welcomed me a minatory wood.
Same was the bosk the rector had detailed.
A fremd and trenchant air around me trailed.
Within this curtilage all I could see:
ruined trellis, creepers and the Hawthorne tree.
There were wrecksome walls, a raddled shielding
and a ghoulishness within the building;
an eldritch sense I was not lone that night
allwhere redounded a feminine shright.
​
When I clambered the old and fractured stairs,
too engirdled me the outlandish airs.
Half-hour in her empty room I spent
and goggled the spot from where smiles she sent.
Assured all was imaginal, I ended
my find, and while midnight too descended,
saw the window when homeward were to trace,
there bestood Olga in her smiling face!
Shamik Banerjee is a poet and poetry reviewer from the North-Eastern belt of India. He loves taking long strolls and spending time with his family. His deep affection with Solitude and Poetry provides him happiness.
Must Love Eating
by Timothy C Goodwin
He got a job with the government, since he loved eating. Working for the Good Guys, he did his duty by eating secrets: paper-flavored codes. Wilting lists of their secret police’s real names. Expired booby traps. General Beauregard and Admiral Blanch would stand aside and chat while [Celebrity Chef’s name redacted] stood over him, arms crossed, astonished at his ability to just. Keep. Eating. Undercooked microfiche, stale propaganda, bland secret cameras. He was constantly, sternly reminded of his duty, but he couldn't care less: he never had it so good, since there always was so much of it, even though it never filled him. When he was captured, the Bad Guys diced through the eater’s doody for clues to their imprisoned loved ones’ whereabouts, what was being done to their water, which of their villages was next. Famished, the eater asked for a little something-something. The Bad Guys gave him their local specialty: a delicious concoction smack-dab in the center of greasy, fatty, salty, and sweet, made with the confident ease of tradition. He ate one. “General Beauregard meets a woman who isn't his wife at the Timberline Hotel every Tuesday,” the eater burped, licking his lips.
Timothy C Goodwin (he/him) has work included/upcoming in Maudlin House, The Centifictionist, CLOVES, Soor Ploom, BULLSHIT, and elsewhere. He lives in NYC with his partner and their dog, Awesome. timothycgoodwin.com
Backyard Potions
by Emily Kurc
Witches are born when
their first spell is
mixed with onion grass
and rocks
when bookshelves are
filled with jars of shells
and sea glass
when the moon becomes
a passenger in the back
seat of the car
witches are born when
the flame flickers just right
and the room whispers:
here she is.
Emily Kurc is a poet and artist from the Jersey Shore. She is the author of Heartbreak Inferno and her self-published chapbook, Where the Ivy Grows. When she isn’t writing, Emily enjoys thrifting, introverting, and doing witchy things.
eyes within the hedgerow
by Sonika Jaiganesh
mother always feared I’d be a snake
born forked-tongue
sampling the unseen in the air
as I slid out
even though it was a mark of the divine
she’d always in girlhood
faint at the sight of gold-tipped scales
when I was still buried
in that plasma-whetted dirt
she’d make ovals
of the dome chanting
feel secured in the liminal within me
let the boundaries of your consciousness
be my linings
I slithered out into corners
in the delivery room sterile white flickering
as the crust shook
and grandmother by the window
waved premonitions into auras like victories
when I was a child I once spied
blue-lidded eyes closed looking out
nestled in the hedgerow on trail
from school I ran home
all the way throat thinning
with the acrid taste like a coin for tongue
oh that the wandering scent of god had found me
now I’m footless over oceans
in the lonely infinity of subliminal pantry
swallowing whole a hot cross bun
and I betrayed you back then I didn’t slide
out but I was lifted
out from quartered bloody
flesh
the apples skin tastes sweeter than the seeds
Sonika Jaiganesh (they/she) is an undergraduate student based in Scotland. They enjoy writing poetry to create variable, shareable experiences from their current fixations, thoughts, and niche interests. Their work has appeared in 'The Ekphrastic Review', 'Visual Verse', 'Literary Veganism', 'Serow', and more. You can follow them on Twitter and Instagram: @sonika_jaigs.
Bergen Street Art #1
by Jeremiah Gilbert
Bergen Street Art #2
by Jeremiah Gilbert
Jeremiah Gilbert is an award-winning photographer and travel writer based out of Southern California. His travels have taken him to over a hundred countries and territories spread across six continents. His photography has been published internationally and exhibited worldwide. His hope is to inspire those who see his work to look more carefully at the world around them in order to discover beauty in unusual and unexpected places. He is the author of the collections Can’t Get Here from There: Fifty Tales of Travel and From Tibet to Egypt: Early Travels After a Late Start. He can be found on Instagram @jg_travels
Sweet Wood
by Mehreen Ahmed
Late afternoon drizzles blighted the lights. Layered clouds, hungover in translucent folds. Dusky shadows fell upon a gully’s end. Next to this, a cinnamon farm lay stretched to the horizon. Tia Magnolia stood on this farm, under a cinnamon tree. Her red sari wavered in the moody winds. She stripped off a clump of sweet wood from the scented bark of the tree. With a secured knot, she pouched the bark inside the sari’s loose trail. It dangled, as she threw it over her shoulder. The sticks of the ancient spice were sturdy, yet delicate to crumble at the slightest twist of fingertips. She pulled a branch of the tree and reached for its leaves. She plucked a few to squash them in the middle of her palm. An aroma was released. The sweet smells of the cinnamon pervaded the air of the gully. She wandered down the bush paths.
​
Apart from the drizzling sounds of a southerly, there were no other sounds. Rains skewed over her as the intensity increased. She heard the lashing of winds on the lowland by the basin. Down by the basin, wisps of vapour rose. They covered the cinnamon pathways in a smoky haze. She had to get away. Trespassing through the cinnamon garden was an offense entailing harsh punishment. She had to avoid it at any cost. This belonged to a merchant who traded the spice to the West. She headed for the hills. Her plans, to ascend it on her nimble feet, toward a cottage on the peak. But the winds escalated; the roars louder. She struggled on the sharp incline. Winds kept pushing her down.
​
The hill was covered with feral trees and shrubbery. Rare dragon blood trees and wild cinnamon. Through it all, she tried to climb. Her sinewy arms ached from stretching for balance. Ravens and wet crows flew over her in a rush to get back to their nests. A nasty storm brewed. Tia, kept up her journey. Its end appeared a long way away. Rains dribbled down her smooth, dark face. Her clothes drenched in water clung to her body. She stopped to take a breath and looked at the basin. She saw a silken enigma of coloured Borealis envelop the hot spring. Tia’s breathing shallow and difficult, she viewed gods,’ engaged in seductive frolicking in a warm bath. Gods’ hand in all this. Indifferent to the human cause, their laughter rang in the winds, as they splashed water, and plopped playful rocks into the basin. She stood there, clearly enraged. Tired, but resilient, amongst the fallen debris of a gathering storm on her homecoming.
​
Close, but not close enough. She must make sure that her journey ended up in the cottage. It was the final destination. One that she must fulfil. When she came to pick the cinnamon bark, she did not think that far. That the heavy rain would make it all blurry. Now, it fell everywhere and blinded her, made this journey difficult; her way up through the deep forest.
​
She tumbled. She assumed she fell by the loop-root mangroves. Why? This place had always been dark. She thought, she almost saw a white unicorn on the mangroves’ edge. But no, it was just a figment of her mind. Her journey ensued. This golden cottage mounted like a pearl of paradise. A cry pierced through the pattering rain. It was but the gusty wind, cutting past her in hasty rage. With each step forward, she went a step backward. Alas! The winds beat her to it, getting in her way. Reptiles crawled back into their holes. Tia Magnolia kept pushing on. The wrong day perhaps to come for the cinnamon, Oh! The sweet wood! It could drive anyone crazy with its perfume. This forest, in the grips of the winds; even the soft rains wouldn’t let her pass. Too dense, she could not see far, afar. She fell on the slippery terrain. Her knees bled. The gods smiled.
​
Living in this forest, some days she ate, other days she ate her hunger. She was poor, but she didn’t feel poor. Not until she met her terrible fate. That the cinnamon merchant had come after her. He took her to his great mansion and cajoled her into believing that he would take her places. The fool! The colossal fool, she was. His maddening charms pulled her toward him like the black iron-ore, that middle-aged cinnamon merchant, of fifty years. She, a tender sprout. A romantic nomad, he told her stories. Breathtaking stories of places he had visited, which melted her heart. Wonderful tales of giant hawks, and sweeping vultures scouring the sky and the earth. He described one palace after another. Magnificent ruby summer palaces of the East, sapphire winter palaces of the West. Beautiful princesses covered in blue and red head jewellery, danced in their primrose flowing robes when they walked up to see what he sold. The aroma of his cinnamon floated high in the air. The infusion of cinnamon tea made way for a porous imagination. Imagination from where a pantheon of visions flowed; of scarlet battles, glittering diamonds on crowns and studded sceptres. Victors and vanquished Kings and Queens of their kingdoms.
​
Tia Magnolia listened in a trance. The more she listened, the more she became enamoured, and drawn into the spell of the sweet wood. She wanted to become a princess. She wanted to live in a mansion. She wanted it all. She wanted the impregnable walls to fall flat at her feet, to open passages strewn with silver tinsels. Time and time again, he told her these stories behind closed doors, and then left her mesmerised in a bloody contortion of heartaches. He would be gone for years after that. And his tales would arouse curiosity in her loneliness. She would feel poor for the first time. Such illusions were a reality for her. She lived in that bubble, night and day. Bubbles which could burst, and leave her exposed. But she paid no heed to those warnings.
​
Now this passage was hard. This rain. This soft thumping on the lush mountain, the sweet wood soaked in the sari’s pouch. The winds stood in the way. A hunger seized her. A hunger to see a blue butterfly in the first Sun, and a dazzling, plumed peacock of extraordinary colours. That dream, this storm could destroy. She took the difficult route. A choice she made. She must make it to the top of the hill, no matter what stood in her way. She kept on going. She kept plodding along. The higher she went, the harder it got. She pushed herself up the slope. She slid and started anew, a yoyo of rising and falling. She felt like giving up, this arduous journey, which was what it had become. She wouldn’t come undone. Just as well, her heart a heaving heap. That mansion, and the golden cottage up the hill streamlined in her imagination. Her strength did not dissolve like any molten lead. This was what kept her going. Life was not meant to be defeated. She was not a defeatist. This journey’s end was at the tip of the mountain. That’s where her happiness lay, her little bundle of joy. The joy that came at low tide. Tears. That was what it was, tears. In the midst of tears, came her joy, this dream brought blessings into her little golden cottage. The cinnamon merchant would never know that this worker who worked on his farm had such a strong inclination to learning. His tales acted as her impetus to dream big; maybe a bit too big, to harbour within her small chest.
​
Steal? Yes, she stole the cinnamon bark to feed that dream. She stole to avenge the merchant for letting her dream of the impossible. In her heart, hopes fed an undiminished desire, to not to surrender, but to reach out. The top of the mountain meant the end of a chase, an accomplishment of a dream. However, the more she chased it, the harder it became. It was but the golden cottage on the mountain peak, her lost unicorn on the mangroves. The aromas of the sweet wood tangled her mind.
​
At midnight, in a final bid, Tia struggled to get to the top. The forest at midnight; she stopped short to inhale its smell, sat down at the foot of the wet mountain. She tried to listen to the forest, after a short interlude from the rain. Then she saw fireflies of fiery jinns, flying ubiquitous, through the summer’s night. She contemplated their ambient sound.
​
Before the night was over, she knew the merchant was back. He had returned yet again, from his travels at last. He brought with him yards of lazy, decadent satin; sunflower yellow, saffron, and soft baby pink; nuanced, along the deep contours of Aegean Mermaids. The merchant spoke to her. He told her softly in the ears. He showed her a path paved with a great history. But there were also some untold hidden miseries that eluded her.
​
“The Greek Islands, this time,” he said.
​
“What about them?” she asked.
​
“Islands were woven on alentejo wrinkled wine at the behest of the sea nymphs.
​
“Beautiful?”
​
“Mesmerising, especially, when the turbulent waves of the emerald Aegean broke on its shores,” he answered. “I traded spice, and the incensed cinnamon to entice gods to draw them out of heavens.”
​
“Were they enticed?” she asked wide-eyed.
​
“It made them drunk, both mortals and gods alike.”
​
“How would you know?”
​
“Because on this land, mortals waged a hundred-year war. A war which would not quench Paris’s thirst for the Helen of Troy. The nation’s total immersion in the young blood of men, not shaken by their cries. War thundered on the scarlet sands for ten long years. Men trampled over each other. All but to win a divine beauty, a mortal, the Helen of Troy. Gods were delirious."
​
“Come on, you can’t be serious,” she laughed.
​
“But I am.”
​
“I want to see. You have opened my eyes to pleasures beyond me. I want to know more,” she panted.
​
“Imagine, this wide, wide-open sea before you. Men on papyrus war-ships, sailing towards the sunset to battle other Kings, bringing either glory or gloom. They went hand in hand. Gods watched a mortal power-play, but did nothing, nothing at all, while men suffered and died, but not relinquish power. Just like the eye on their sleek boats, they only watched. They suffered because it was in their nature to fight. Gods would not have them believe otherwise. Men waged wars on a wanton chase to become tragic heroes. That was the cosmic bait gods decreed. A bait to drive men to the edge of insanity. And to end life. So life would perish, to make room for another on our limited space.
​
“I want to fight. I want to be the Helen of Troy,” she whispered. “I want to be Queen. I desire everything you said to me so far. I want it all.”
​
“Shush, my love, shush, not so fast,” he said.“I sail again tomorrow to the far east. Toward the end of the ancient peninsula, into the kingdom of Joseon and further. Wait till my return. I bring more enchanting stories of glorious Kings, and their mighty deeds."
​
The Merchant left. Tia Magnolia became a restive inlander, left to wallow in her gluttony. Her sweet bark tied up in the pouch of her attire. She circled the pouch around her neck and smelled it. She looked at these invincible mountain passes beset with animals and reptiles, lions, and hyenas. Trees, one taller than the other. Exotic leaves made greener by every Monsoon rain. Fallen leaves russet, and black, grew anew in fresh droplets. Her struggles made no difference to rain or to any seasonal change or disorders. If a volcanic eruption were to happen, then it happened. If lava were to overflow the ashen cities and towns, then it was unstoppable. If clouds were to float, they floated. Floods, flash floods, blotted out lives with every drop. Changes of sky’s luminous tinges from blue, violet, gold, or cream occurred without a fuss. Nature would not abate an inch. Loved ones would die despite people’s grief. Dire predicaments would not alter the natural course.
​
She waited morosely for the merchant’s return. To hear more stories of indulgence, to seek new lands and hidden palaces thumbed under age-old shrubs; primordial trucks snaked through decrepit palace cracks on their stumps. She wanted to watch more epic dramas in cinematic expose. The rise and fall of men. What freedom actually meant?
​
In the heart of it, men were not free, no matter how much they fought for it. They were not. They only believed in the illusion that they were. For they were not ready to make those sacrifices just yet. Men still lusted after glory and power far too much. They loved going to war, fight battles, and win them. The desire to acquire more land and kingdoms spiralled out of control. Those big tasks and asks would lead them further and further away from the real kingdoms of freedom. They would be free, only when they allowed themselves to be free from such desires; simple, not simplistic; thereof, Tia Magnolia, steeped in the aromatic flavour of the sweet cinnamon, continued to tie herself into tighter knots. Shackled herself deeper, down the unfathomable dark dungeon of dreams where no enlightenment could enter.
​
No matter, she must find her way up to the golden cottage. Even if she had to claw; damage her nails; break her ankles; bruise her wrists, and skin her knees. She must never give up. Giving up, meant to surrender. Men without ambition were as good as paupers on the roads. Ambition must never be taken lightly. Where did it end and where did greed begin? Men were ultimately caught up in this paradox. This inevitable trap of bewilderment, which led to profound illusions.
​
Two years passed. Tia Magnolia, climbed only halfway to the top. The merchant had not returned as he had promised. But he sent letters from the eastern peninsula. One letter, too many. They described the beautiful kingdom of Joseon of unimaginable wealth. Cities fortified with formidable emperors in spectacular dwellings. They traded luxurious silk, and spices down the silk road, paintings, and written words on famous Goreyo paper. But these cities were also vulnerable. They fell to frequent raids from foreign invaders. Another horrible tale of tainted wars. Irrepressible suffering to boot. Those dark times relentless and ruthless, for all their professed knowledge of Confucius teachings, they were far from free. Emperors lived in a fantasy of power. Both the legitimate Kings as well as their colonisers. Because nothing lasted in the end. All those kingdoms broke equally without fail on this continuum. Only to survive in heritage paintings under lavish colours of historical grandeur.
​
The more she read those letters, the more convinced she became, that illusion by far, was more powerful than reality. It was this illusion in the end that men fell for. No more futile, than trying to grasp the meaning of existence. What did Tia Magnolia want? Getting to that cottage on the hill, what did it signify? She had to figure it out. One way or the other, she fell for it too. Because she embraced the naked desire in her heart that she wanted to be Queen, live in those grand mansions. She completely raptured herself with the thought that prestige and accomplishments were everything. She had to be that Helen of the Trojans, regardless of the consequences of the Trojan Horse. She had to be right at the top. This enchantment was unflippable. She was steadfast. Or else all struggles came to naught. Yes, struggles to dig bigger entrapments. This pursuit of a dream was too, too strong a lure; she could not forgo. Her attachment to the golden cottage became a metaphor, to hunt for an inextricable destiny. She must follow this dream to the last. Hail or thunder, she must endure, and whatever else the future held.
Mehreen Ahmed Is an award-winning novelist. Her shorter works have appeared in many places such as Litro, EllipsesZine, The Perception Magazine SU, and others. Her full bio is available on Amazon and Goodreads. She lives in Australia.
A Time For Work
by Joanna Theiss
On the fifth night of the party, the ants march into the meadow dressed in homemade clothes, utility belts strapped around their mesasomas. They dart their black eyes at us like they are fighting the urge to tuck us into bed.
​
Above and around the ants, grasshoppers swirl. Sadie is bent double over her violin, scraping the strings like she’s trying to start a fire. Others rub their ovipositors against trampled grass and loop their tarsal claws over their heads in that addictive hippie dance they learned at festivals out west.
​
If only the ants allowed themselves a bit of fun, a hit off a joint or just a juicy hunk of bubblegum, they wouldn’t stick out so much. But no, it’s always no with the ants, a shake of their heads, a snap of their pincers, then they freeze in a clump as if they are tricking a wren into thinking they’re dead.
​
Jim says he can’t stand it. He’s going to grab one and make her dance. “I don’t get why they’re so obsessed with us,” Jim says to me, grinding his back legs together, a raucous, frustrated tune. “Why do they come if they don’t want to play?”
​
Near midnight, shreds of fog blow across the meadow. Ice melts in our glasses and the food dwindles down to a few unpopped corn kernels, but we don’t need food, sleep, shelter. We need the music that aerates our insides, surfs our souls across thermals reserved for red-shouldered hawks.
​
The ants can’t seem to hear it. Hours have passed yet they haven’t so much as twitched a leg to the beat. They remain as stoic as the stockpiles they build all summer long, as paranoid as the poison sprays on their belts that would kill them as easily as they would us.
​
At dawn, the ants do their thing. In unison, they rise on their back legs so we get a good look at their yoked thoraxes. Their shoulder muscles push against the rough-woven linen of their clothes. Sadie lowers her bow and listens.
​
“Grasshoppers,” the big one shouts. “It is growing cold. You must know: there is a time for work and a time for play.”
​
No one can stop Jim, not after the glasses of bourbon and Sadie’s marathon fiddling. He bombs into the sky, the first brushes of sunrise breaking through his wings, and hovers above the ants, who yelp and wave their thick, graceless antennae in stupid defense.
​
“Play!” Jim shouts to Sadie.
​
“Play!” Another grasshopper echoes, then another, until all of us are chanting it.
​
Sadie strikes up a reckless, raw version of “Ode to Joy” and grasshoppers charge the sky, skating along the stalks of desiccated sunflowers and landing in piles of dried leaves, vaulting across the cooling earth.
​
No one knows exactly when the ants go home, but we can imagine it, the order they learned in larval times, their minds already preparing for another day of work.
​
END
Joanna Theiss is a writer living in Washington, DC. Her short stories and flash fiction often feature birds, cats or cars (or all three) and have appeared in journals such as Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, Bending Genres, The Dribble Drabble Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Fictive Dream. One of her stories was selected as a winner of Best Microfiction 2022. Before devoting herself to writing full time, Joanna worked as a lawyer, practicing criminal defense and international trade law, and as a health care researcher. Find her at www.joannatheiss.com, on Twitter @joannavtheiss and Instagram @joannatheisswrites.
lost in the everglades: or, how life feels to me
by Bryan Vale
the vultures have been
following you for some time now
and you wonder if they know
something you don’t.
or maybe something you do:
that you are low on water
and short on food.
hiss of self-rubbing sawgrass
swaying, an eerie sound in the breeze.
the wind alone is not enough,
you think, to account
for all the sound.
ghosts stalk here, trampling the
blades, which are taller than you,
in ways you cannot. following
signless ghost paths —
between each blade is another blade,
and beyond that another blade,
to infinity, with no gaps of light between.
the thick air is thickened with
green and brown plants exhaling,
and biting bugs bombarding.
you could be a mile or
a hundred miles from the familiar.
no landmarks. no line of sight.
sweating, continually you suspect
that your solitude is not complete.
you think a monster stalks. it moves
when you move and stops
when you stop. and usually
you’re wrong, but sometimes
you’re right. sudden death leaping
out of the sawgrass — alligator or panther.
surviving, your victory is less than victory,
for now each twitch of the breeze
is a twitching predator, always
just behind —
the breeze ruffles lily pads
and crazy unnamed pine trees.
the water, non-potable, sludge-like, flows
and brings life to your foes.
hawks make their hungry way
through an unreachable blue sky,
between the vultures.
night and day
by Bryan Vale
trains do not shape the
world anymore.
i lie in bed past midnight,
hearing my own heartbeat
echoing against the silent
bedroom wall,
a wall which is illuminated
by the motion-sensing light
of the neighbors' house,
activated and creeping its beams
between blinds.
in daylight hours i swipe
my way to a lunch at noon,
and a car at three.
the long wires of the law
stretch over my head and
between stucco houses.
green lights, garish lights,
touchscreens.
past midnight a low rumble
cuts through the silence and
takes me out of myself.
amtrak blows its whistle,
somewhere on the other side
of fourth street.
Bryan Vale (he/him) is a writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. His fiction and poetry have appeared in several journals, including Quibble, Loft, Trash to Treasure Lit, Unstamatic Magazine, and The Viridian Door. Learn more at bryanvalewriter.com, or follow Bryan on Twitter and Instagram: @bryanvalewriter.
Driving Lessons
by Syd Vincent
Content Warnings: animal death
The brakes screeched. The deer toppled over the hood of my car faster than I could blink. My car came to halt, launching me dangerously close to the steering wheel, merely tapping my nose on the faux leather. I white-knuckled the wheel and heaved, turning off the staticky radio music. It was the dead of night, in the midst of a blizzard. It was one of the darkest nights I had ever driven in.
My headlights weren’t good, foggy even, and I needed to get them cleaned, which is probably why I didn’t see it on the road, crossing to the forest on the other side.
​
“Shit.” I exhaled. I rubbed my eyes and shook off the sleep that lined them. My hair was greasy, and my tie hung loosely on my neck. My gaudy, silver class ring that my parents insisted on buying me dug into my clenched finger, shaking with the twitch of my hand and the rumbling of the engine.
​
“Shit,” I repeated, more exasperated.
​
I scrambled and parked my car in the center of the road. The engine began to smoke, and the headlights flickered. I could see the animal in my rearview mirror lying still a few feet behind the car, illuminated by the red taillights. I fumbled with my phone, flipping it open and shakily dialing 9-1-1.
​
“9-1-1, what’s your emergency?”
​
“I hit a fucking deer.”
​
“Okay, are you hurt, sir?”
​
“No. But I hit him real hard.”
​
“Okay, and –”
​
“I swear it came out of nowhere. I blinked and it was just standing there in the middle of the road.”
​
“Okay, sir. Calm down,” the 9-1-1 operator said.
​
“Fuck, my car is totaled.” I still had an hour to drive to the airport, not counting traffic. The traffic in Philly was god awful, I knew that. Why had I not accounted for that? Or the weather?
​
“Is the engine smoking, sir?”
​
“Yeah, I think so. Fuck, I’m gonna blow up.”
​
“No, sir. I just need you to slowly and carefully get out of the car.”
​
“Because I’m going to blow up right?”
​
“No, sir. Just please exit the car.”
​
“Fuck, I left my gloves and hat at home. I’m gonna freeze on the side of the damn road.”
​
“We have an officer headed your way. It’ll only be a little while, sir.”
​
“Fine.”
​
I shut off the engine and pushed my door open. This snow came early this year and so did the cold. The wind whipped and almost closed the door on my leg. I shoved my neck into my coat, putting the hood on my head and tightening it. Snow flung into my face and stuck to my eyelashes. The snow whipped past me and snuck its way into my thin jacket. Drifting wind on the asphalt chilled my ankles. I shouldn’t have worn my loafers. All I could see was the light in my car shining before I shut the door with more force than intended. Despite the snow whipping, the moon was just bright enough to illuminate the trail of blood leading to the crushed deer a few feet ahead. Besides that, the road was vacant, thick forests bordering each side. I was alone with the pulverized deer.
​
“Okay, sir. Dispatch is about ten minutes away. Do you need me to stay on the line?”
​
“Um, I guess not. Just tell them to hurry up. I’ve got a flight to catch.”
​
“Uh-huh. Have a nice night, sir.”
​
The operator hung up and it was only then I realized how quiet it really was in those woods. The wind howled and the snowflakes thumped against my hood, but these were the only sounds I could hear. I checked my watch. 2:04 a.m. I would never make it in time for my flight at four. It was probably delayed anyway, but I had no Wi-Fi and used the last of my phone’s battery on the call to 9-1-1. I should’ve replaced that stupid charging cable. I leaned against the guardrail and waited as my engine smoked into the air.
​
My head was pounding. I was still hungover from the night before. Can I even say the night before? Time was blurry and filled with stupid party drugs and liquor I couldn’t afford, that I didn’t really like, with people that matched. A last hurrah, my dealer said, before I gave him the rest of my cash. I depleted most of my savings in the last 24 hours. It all felt useless: money, time, my sobriety. I now had no money to fix my totaled car, a killer headache, a meaningless 90-day chip, and a failed career.
​
I rubbed my eyes. I had planned to sleep on the plane, but I wouldn’t make it there now. Fuck, it was cold. In a way, I was thankful to be headed home, to the warmth. I wouldn’t miss the Pennsylvania winters. But the heat was stifling, suffocating. The sweat mixed with tears at home. But right now, with the gusts flying into my coat –
​
“What the hell, man?”
​
The voice startled me so much that I stood up, losing my balance on a sliver of black ice, and falling onto my bottom. These loafers lacked any traction. The ground was cold, hard, and absolutely left a bruise. The quick fall made my eyes hurt and my head throb.
​
“Who-who said that?” My teeth chattered, causing me to stutter. I tried to stand up, but I couldn’t stop slipping on the patch of ice.
​
“Who? Who? You an owl? Don’t look like one to me.”
​
Just then, the head of the deer rose, the rest of its body frozen and stuck to the pavement, its one leg a few feet from its bloody carcass. The squelch of the movement made me gag for a moment. Maybe I was still a little drunk.
​
Fuck, I’m exhausted, I thought and rubbed my eyes, There was no way I was seeing what I was seeing. Yet, the deer looked me in the eyes, only a few feet away. The wind howled less, and the snow subsided for a moment. From a distance, I could hear a truck’s horn sound. I had to be somewhat close to the highway. Where were the goddamn police?
​
“Where are you going in such a rush that you were driving so damn fast, dumbass?” the deer asked. He sounded like my father. A deep, hoarse voice like he had been smoking for decades. I hated it. I once again weighed the pros and cons of returning home.
​
“I have a flight to catch,” I answered. I couldn’t believe I was speaking with a deer.
​
“Trust me when I tell you there will be no flights tonight. You’re not that dense are you? What’s your name so I can stop calling you dumbass?”
​
“Mitch.”
​
“Oh, that’s my brother’s name.” The deer almost seemed to smile at my answer.
​
“Really?” I was surprised.
​
“No, dumbass, deer don’t have names.”
​
“Sorry.” I immediately sat back down on the cold road. I had given up trying to stand.
​
“For being stupid or hitting me at 90 miles per hour?”
​
“Both, I guess. And for the record, I was only going 70.”
​
“You hunt?” The deer rolled his eyes and changed the subject.
​
“No.”
​
“Great. So, I can’t even be put to good use. I’m just gonna rot. A wasted ten-pointer.”
​
“A what?”
​
“You know you’re a shit human, right?”
​
I shrugged. My head throbbed more from the cold than the alcohol now. I still wasn’t sure if this insulting deer was real, but I figured I should go along with it rather than resist. What did I have to lose?
​
“You got a wife?”
​
I shook my head. I even chuckled a little at the thought.
​
“A husband? I’m cool with that, too,” the deer responded quickly to cover his bases.
​
The deer’s face was extremely expressive. Its mouth moved fluidly, and its eyes rolled with each sentence. The head was entirely intact. The legs, not so much. Blood still seeped from its torso and was freezing on the road. The warmth of it let off steam and a strange smell.
​
“Nope.”
​
“Loser.”
​
“Pardon?”
​
“Nothing.”
​
We were silent for a moment listening to the wind. The snow was calming down, but the forecast still called for nearly a foot. It was starting to pile up on the road.
​
“Where are you flying to?”
​
“Back home.”
​
“Why?”
​
“I’m moving back in with my parents.”
​
“Why?”
​
“I ran out of money.”
​
“How?” God, this deer was fucking annoying.
​
“My company went bankrupt.”
​
“What kind of company?”
​
“Finance.”
​
The deer began to laugh. It was loud and his head tilted back with each burst. His entrails jiggled and more blood pooled. How did this not hurt him? Another truck horn sounded from miles away, echoing in the ripples of the wind.
​
“What’s so funny about that?” I asked.
​
“A finance company going bankrupt. That’s like a goddamn fish drowning.”
​
The deer continued to laugh. I did not appreciate it.
​
“Fuck you, man.”
​
“Fuck me? Um, I think you already fucked me man, look, you can see my fucking spleen.”
​
“You’re fucked up man.” I shook my head. My ass was frozen, but I knew better than to complain about it to the deformed, rude animal.
​
“No, I’m not. I just have a short lifespan, so I don’t give a crap about much except eating, fucking, and shitting. I was either going to die by a hunter or a dumbass like you.”
​
“That’s fair, I guess.”
​
It was silent again, but the wind picked up and I winced. My jacket didn’t do much in the way of warming. I shivered underneath it. It didn’t help that I was sitting on the asphalt with the snow pooling around me. The deer’s blood was almost frozen solid on the ground near the yellow line.
​
“How’re you still alive?” I finally asked. “And how are you talking to me?” I guess the cold finally woke me up from my conversation with the splattered deer. The headache was unavoidable now.
​
“Hell, if I know. I just woke up and you were weeping over there, and I saw your car wrecked and I got pissed.”
​
“I wasn’t weeping.”
​
“You were weeping for mommy.”
​
“No, I wasn’t,” I yelled a little louder than I thought. I felt like a child.
​
“Woah, don’t hit me again, kid.”
​
I then began to weep. I couldn’t stop it even though it felt like the tears were freezing on my face as they streamed down. My chest heaved and I rocked back and forth like a toddler. I got very hot. I stripped my thin coat and chucked it to the side. I undid my tie and threw it off, rolling my dress sleeves up.
“Damn, kid, you okay?”
​
“You think I want to go home? You think I wanna face my dad? Fuck, I don’t want to go home. They’ll never look at me the same. Such an embarrassment,” I burst out, finally forcing my way up from the ground. I rubbed my face and slapped the side of my head. Maybe if I slapped it hard enough, the headache wouldn’t seem so bad. I still couldn’t catch my breath.
​
“I don’t think you’re an embarrassment.”
​
“You don’t know me.”
​
“I’ve known you long enough to know you’re not an embarrassment. A dumbass who can’t drive but not an embarrassment.”
​
“What do you mean?” I stopped fidgeting and looked back towards the deer. The wind whipped and its ears waved, blood specks falling into the snow below it.
​
“You started a business, and it didn’t work. Big whoop. But you started it right? You made the push to start. That’s pretty good to me.”
I was crying less now. My breath became normal again and I crouched down closer to the deer.
​
“Sometimes you’ve just gotta go in headfirst. To be fair, I shouldn’t have been on the road. However, I chose to cross and now I’m dead. You know, we win some, we lose some. Can’t win them all.” The deer had a point.
​
“You sound like a little league coach,” I admitted and let out a little chuckle.
​
“I always hang out by the practice fields a ways away. I love learning stupid catchphrases from you little humans.”
​
I exhaled and began to shiver again but didn’t put my coat back on.
​
“But like I said, just keep chugging, kid. But don’t hit any of my cousins on the way. Or my baby mama. Or kids. There’s a lot of us. But just slow down, both metaphorically and literally. Take a breather and try again. You’ll be fine.”
​
“Thank you. I appreciate it.”
​
“Uh-huh. Time for me to go,” the deer looked past me at flashing blue and red lights coming towards us. It was about time the police arrived.
​
“Rest in peace.” I patted the deer’s head. It was freezing and my hand was trembling.
​
“Don’t touch me, Mitch.”
​
The deer’s head dropped to the ground with a thump as the police officer approached. She was a short woman but seemed awfully strong, intimidating. Her gait was powerful. I can’t imagine her ever slipping on ice.
​
“You did a number on this one,” she said in her thick Philly accent, inspecting the carcass with her flashlight. “I’ll write up a report for your car. Did you call a tow truck?”
​
“My phone’s dead.”
​
She rolled her eyes and talked into her radio for a tow truck. She was at least a foot shorter than me, but I couldn’t look her in the eyes.
​
“What’re you going to do with him?” I asked, unable to keep my eyes from looking at the expressionless face of the deer, the hollow eyes, and the tongue sticking to the ground. Only moments ago, he had been giving me comfort and advice. Now, he was just roadkill, getting nudged by a policewoman’s boot.
​
“Scrape it up and take it to a landfill. It’s no good.”
​
Another tear came to my eye, but I quickly wiped it away, putting back on my jacket and stuffing my tie into its pocket. I don’t think she noticed.
​
“Just be gentle with him.” I gave him one more pat on the head and stood next to the officer.
​
“What the fuck, don’t touch the fucking deer, kid.” The officer gagged a little. She was confused and wary of me, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to catch the plane, not now. The headache was finally subsiding.
​
“Have you had anything to drink tonight, sir?”
​
“Um, what’s your definition of tonight?” I asked. I genuinely wanted to know.
​
“Get in the car and warm up. I think the cold is making you a little loopy.”
​
I nodded and walked backwards to the driver’s side, the deer vanishing into the sheets of snow between us in the cold, cold night.
Syd Vincent (she/they) is a Creative Writing and Publishing and Editing dual major with a minor in International Studies at Susquehanna University, graduating in spring of 2023. She was born and raised in the Poconos, Pennsylvania. You can find them on Instagram @svincent2210 and Twitter @sydvincent22. Her website is https://sydvincent.wordpress.com/.
Insect In A Pool Of Light
by Aislinn Feldberg
Star Babies Bathed In Red
by Aislinn Feldberg
Aislinn Feldberg is a writer and visual artist from Queens, New York. She enjoys experimenting and creating art with a dark, bizarre flair in order to develop awareness of social issues, including reproductive and women's rights. Her work interweaves with prior dreams and demonstrates conflicting natures of human nature or of materials (flowing delicacy or brutal strokes). You can find her on Wrongdoing Mag, Fictional Cafe, Duck Duck Mongoose or her website, https://www.aislinnfeldberg.com/.
Helianthus
by Megan Jones
Three sunflowers stand on the crest of a hill.
​
Their limbs quiver, caught in the rhythm of the morning breeze. The pre-dawn light paints them carotenoid, and cool air presses kisses against their necks.
​
One sunflower stretches, sways, and the stem cracks, peeling in two. The strands pale, thicken into bare legs peppered with the cold. The stalk snaps and flares out into broad shoulders. Leaves unfurl and wrap themselves around the forming torso. Veins split into fingers.
​
Each dappled floret lengthens, cascades as honey-blonde hair. Seeds fall like raindrops to the ground, and a face presses through the empty disk: wide blue eyes sculpted beneath thick eyebrows, a narrow nose and heart-shaped chin.
​
June twists, flexes each hand in turn, her fingers clawed as though grasping for memories she’s long forgotten. She cricks her neck. The criss-crossed remains of her sunflower skeleton rest across her shoulders like a makeshift shawl. She tugs it closer to her chest. Not for the first time, she wishes the witch’s magic came with clothes.
​
She squints, unused even to the half-light cast over the moors, hilltops the colour of tea stirred with milk.
​
“Shit.”
​
Each night she transforms, dawn seems closer. Time is shrinking around her, as it had for the two sunflowers beside her, until it was too late. It won’t be long before she became one of them: permanent, immobile, unable to unfold from her floral prison.
​
June has to find Mari. She tries to walk, but her feet still rest beneath the earth. She tugs them free, wriggles dirt between her toes, and sets off down the hill.
​
They had done what they could in their stolen twilights, before the waking hours of dawn. June had placed what she could – twigs, flowers, mounds of leaves – in front of her space in the earth, but each morning they vanished. Each night June woke in a different position, the witch’s curse playing a version of the shell game as she slept.
​
Mari had cleaved chunks of hair from June’s scalp, hoping her sunflower form would share the loss. June had clutched mementos in balled fists, only for them to fall to the floor as she changed. Yesterday, she had simply clung to her wife’s hand.
​
In a night or two, Mari would have to choose, whether she was certain or not. If she chose wrong. Well, June wouldn’t be around to find out.
​
Her pace quickens, but the ghost of her shadow steps ahead. Time is another curse she cannot seem to outrun. Dandelions and fox-sedge sprout beside her, and furls of sweetgrass cling to her calves. She passes lavender fields and the silver birch woods, ignores the worn dirt track and cuts through the bracken towards the pecan-coloured tile roofs in the distance.
​
June nears the clearing. Their cottage is a smudge against the line of terraces, smoke coiling from the chimney, fog-soft.
​
Mari runs towards her. She throws her arms around June, swinging a jacket around her shoulders. June sinks into the hug. Perhaps she could stay in her wife’s embrace until sunrise, become a flower in her arms. There are worse endings.
​
“When night fell and you didn’t.” Mari sniffs. Purple curves shadow her eyes. “I thought it was too late.”
​
“Not yet.”
​
Inside, June pauses in the hallway. Her grandmother’s watercolour hyacinth portraits decorate the walls, their wedding photos on the entryway table – Mari’s dress burnt tangerine, hers cornflower blue. It is the best and worst part of transformation: everything precious returned to her as though for the first time, a pleasant ache, like reliving a past life and realising its yours.
​
Light bleeds through the single window.
​
Mari grabs her wrist. “We’re out of time,” she says, and though her voice rises, it doesn’t sound like a question.
​
June can feel it, the tense of her palm. She cups Mari’s face. “You know me,” she says, “in this form and the next.”
​
Blood throbs down her arms. Each knuckle knits together the curve of her fingers serrating, greening. Her hands fall, but Mari catches one, envelops it between her own.
​
“It’s too soon.”
​
But the sky is lilac and honey, light reflected off the dew that has settled over the fields and flowers like frost.
​
June leans into Mari, her murmured, “Find me,” little more than a breeze.
​
Her forearms flatten, thicken, legs plaiting together like spun silk and, as her vision recedes once more, Mari does not let go. Her fingertips are like the warmth of the sun at daybreak.
Megan Jones (she/her) is a reader, writer and linguistics graduate from Yorkshire. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Reflex Fiction, Writers' Forum, Aôthen Magazine, Boats Against the Current and elsewhere. In 2022, she completed a master's degree in Creative Writing, and she is working on a short story collection. Her work is most concerned with narratives centring the body, identity and coming-of-age experiences, often inspired by folklore and fairy tale retellings.
The Start of Football Season
by Ace Boggess
How I love the hope
for a weekly burst
of adrenaline happiness,
putting aside regrets
from childhood on through
middle age. Of course,
I will be disappointed.
I’ll cuss the TV,
tug at my hair, &
rip apart my fingernails
until I look like
I’m mad or a saint.
I’ll feel every broken bone,
go numb with each concussion.
I’ll question decisions.
The possibility remains,
at least awhile, my team
might grant a memory
to cling to while I’m aging.
Nothing’s ever
as bad as I thought
or good as I want.
Sometimes you win &
sometimes die on the field.
Why Haven't You Played In A Year?
by Ace Boggess
I want to sing
but my voice
hasn’t healed
from the sadnesses
of strep, thrush,
laryngitis.
I want to sing
while I strum—
my hands weak
from silence,
soft after months
not working a pick
in the mines.
I want to sing
one happy note
that doesn’t sound
like steam &
airplanes.
I’ve forgotten
how to cultivate
the sound
of my soothing voice.
Ace Boggess is author of six books of poetry, most recently Escape Envy (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2021). His writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Notre Dame Review, Harvard Review, and other journals. An ex-con, he lives in Charleston, West Virginia, where he writes and tries to stay out of trouble.
The Crone of Cader Idris
by Victoria Male
This piece has been previously published in The Chamber Magazine.
She sensed him the instant he’d scurried over the fence bisecting her terrain from that of the hounds. Matilda was impressed, he’d survived. His friend was not as fortunate. The hounds’ snarls and snapping jaws gradually faded, no doubt to haul the corpse back to their den and pick the bones clean. She could hear the man’s – Morgan’s – blood pounding through his veins. -He was young and he was strong. He would make a feast.
​
Matilda sensed his guilt immediately too. It was potent. Intoxicating. She had to practice caution, or else she could get as muddled by his remorse as he was. Taking small sips from his shame, fear, and rage, the crone encased herself in a glamor he would not be able to resist. Her hands were no longer gnarled and haggard, but smooth and dainty. A shadow of a laugh escaped Matilda’s non-existent lips. She had been beautiful once too.
​
She summoned a thick veil of fog for her approach, wearing the billowing and swirling air like a cloak. If it wasn't for creatures like her, the hounds, the giant, the scenery would be breathtaking rather than ominous.
​
A change of the wind revealed Matilda to her prey. Morgan stopped in his tracks. After the hounds, he knew better than to approach her blindly. Morgan squinted to get a better look at the shrouded figure.
​
She, however, saw him perfectly. The cut of his jaw, the broadness of his shoulders, the boyish charm that refused to leave his features, even when wrought with turmoil as they were now. Before, he would have reduced her to a blushing fool.
​
“Katie?” Morgan took the smallest of steps toward her.
​
The less she said the better. “Morgan?”
She sounded like Katie. It paralyzed Morgan in place.
“This can't be happening.” Morgan scuttled back when she advanced toward him, “NO! Hey! Don't!”
​
But the closer she got, the harder she was to deny. All Morgan wanted was to see Katie again.
​
****
​
Morgan strode up to her building with a bouquet of lilies. Katie’s favorite. While he waited for her to answer his knock, Morgan tried to convince himself that this would work as much as he was about to try to convince Katie. The seconds felt longer than hours. Another knock, still no answer.
​
“So either you're not home and I look like a twat, or you're still refusing to speak with me. And if that's the case, I want—"
​
Morgan was startled into silence when a latch opened. One of Katie’s neighbors. He bristled, it was difficult enough for Morgan to say this without a stranger overhearing.
​
“Christ, do I really have to do this through the door?” He glanced toward his car. Perhaps it wasn’t–
​
“Yes. You do. Because you're supposed to be giving me space.”
​
Morgan’s heart leapt. “I know…but I'm going to fight for you, Katie. So if that means camping out on your doorstep until you're ready, or camping on haunted, bloody Cader Idris with you, so be it. Car’s all packed by the way for the latter. ”
​
At last, she opened the door. “I have plans this weekend.”
​
“Okay.”
​
“I'm not packed.”
​
“I understand.”
​
“You're not forgiven.”
​
“Alright.”
​
“We've been here before, Morgan.”
​
“I want to be better this time. Please. I love you. Come this weekend and then if you don't want to try again, I won’t bother you anymore. Promise.”
​
Katie scrutinized him for another hour-long moment, then reached for the lilies.
​
****
“Babe?”
The ersatz Katie smiled.
“How did you find me?”
That was information Matilda didn’t have. “Why are you here?”
“Because you wanted to come, remember?”
Matilda turned away from him. He followed.
“I...I don't know where to begin. Other than sorry. But it’s not enough. It won't ever be enough. And now Gareth…”
​
The name gave Morgan pause, but Matilda kept walking.
​
“You're still angry,” Morgan slipped on a loose rock as he hustled to keep up with her, one of the innumerable scree blanketing the mountain. He pressed on, “You have every right to be.”
​
Matilda’s gaze remained straight ahead. Not much farther now.
​
“Please.” Her lack of acknowledgement was maddening. “I said I was sorry, alright?”
​
Matilda didn’t give him so much as a nod.
​
“LOOK AT ME!”
​
She turned. Where the hounds were immaculately white, Matilda's entire form was different shades of gray. A long mop of matted locks covered her eyes. A hooked nose protruded from her face. The seam of her mouth spanned the width of her jaw. Once an alluring noblewoman and formidable huntress, time and the curse had reduced her to a decrepit hag.
​
Morgan was none the wiser, however. He still saw Katie, the woman he loved, and the more he stared directly at Matilda, the more he fell under her spell. She extended a mangled hand to Morgan. He took it, heedlessly following her further down the mountain.
​
“Where are we going?”
​
Not so heedlessly then. Matilda put a bony finger to her mouth while steering him into the brush. The toe of Morgan's boot knocked against a decayed human bone. This area was strewn with them – the corroded evidence of Matilda's past victims. But Morgan was too lost in his memories to notice.
****
​
London was long in the rearview mirror of Morgan’s posh and ill-equipped SUV that he navigated around the winding, narrow Welsh country road. He chanced a look where Katie sat in the passenger seat, her head propped up against the window. He opened his mouth to speak, but promptly closed it a moment later.
​
Instead, Morgan clicked on the radio, with the hope that the music could crowd out the lingering awkwardness and animosity between them.
​
The song playing was a catchy one. Katie sang along softly, though she stopped as soon as she spotted Morgan grinning.
​
So he turned up the volume and began singing himself. Loudly. Badly. It coaxed Katie to join back in, belting out the melody even more unabashedly than he was.
​
“Watch out!”
​
Morgan's SUV had drifted from its lane and a sedan was headed straight toward them.
​
“Shit!”
​
He righted his car before they sideswiped the other one, horn blaring as it passed.
​
Morgan refocused on the road and silence reigned once more. Katie figured it was her turn to break it. Her gaze found the camping gear loaded into the car's boot. “You really going to brave the mountain with me?”
​
“I kept the B&B reservation just in case,” Morgan chuckled.
​
Katie’s tone turned reproachful. “You shouldn't have done that.”
​
“Why not?”
​
“It's expensive.”
​
“It's a B&B in Dolgellau, not the Savoy.”
​
“But you said that your shifts at the pub—"
​
“I know how to manage my money, Katie. I used to work at a hedge fund for Christ's sake. I wanted to do this for you.”
​
“I appreciate that but –"
​
“But what?” Morgan glared at her, inadvertently pressing his foot down harder on the gas pedal. “There's no winning with you.”
​
“Don't try to win, try to have one conversation with me that doesn't become a row!” Katie scoffed, “This is why I didn't want to come.”
​
“And yet here you are!”
​
“Well, I shouldn't be! Take me back to London please.”
​
Morgan pivoted in his seat to face her full-on, so gobsmacked by the demand that he missed the lorry barreling around a bend up ahead.
​
“Oh sure, I'll take you right back! How am I supposed to–”
​
The lorry’s driver had taken the turn too fast, and Morgan didn’t see him until it was too late.
​
****
​
Matilda had no qualms with Morgan’s retreating into a reverie, it made her hunt easier. Yet, an errant thought slithered into Matilda’s head. Before – how long must it have been now, centuries? – centuries ago her desire to devour him would have been of a wholly different sort. Matilda suppressed the pang of yearning as swiftly as it had come. She was no longer a pretty forwyn and he was no knight in search of a bride. Nevertheless, she drank in the heady, undeniably masculine musk of his flesh as she lured Morgan to his death.
​
“I was going to take you back. I was. You know that, right?” His emotions were bubbling to the surface, but Morgan opted to burrow his face into his arms in an effort to shove them back down rather than to feel them. He fell to the ground.
​
“Morgan.”
​
His head snapped up, still enthralled by Matilda’s glamor. Morgan crawled to her, his voice small when he asked, “Can you ever forgive me?”
​
Matilda didn’t answer him. They had reached the altar.
****
“She's going to be okay, right?” A bandaged Morgan limped alongside the team of first responders and the doctor as they wheeled Katie’s stretcher into the ER.
​
“Sir, you need to step back.”
​
“Say she'll be okay and I will.”
​
“She has a collapsed lung.”
​
Morgan’s heart clenched in his chest. “You can fix that,right? You have to fix it.”
​
“I'll know once we get her into surgery. You're slowing us down.”
​
“But I–” he stopped himself. This wasn't about him. Morgan stepped back to allow them to wheel Katie into the operating room without restriction.
​
Morgan had never felt more helpless than when he watched her disappear beyond those metallic, sterile doors.
​
****
Curled up against the altar, Morgan rocked back and forth. “I don't deserve to be forgiven…I don't deserve to be forgiven…”
​
Matilda crossed to him, and under the belief that she was Katie, her proximity was a comfort to Morgan. She knelt over him and pulled him to her bosom. Morgan nuzzled into her touch when she stroked his temple.
​
****
He’d been smoking on his patio when he missed Katie’s call. He’d hesitated before playing the message – she blamed him, didn’t she? He did.
​
His phone rang with another incoming call before he could listen to her voicemail: University College Hospital.
​
Morgan couldn’t remember what the woman on the other line said to him exactly, but somehow he’d understood her. The phrases jumbled together in his memory, “terribly sorry” , “did all they could”, “family will make arrangements”.
​
It was miraculous that he’d managed to stay so composed on the phone. The second the line went dead however, he chucked the offensive device across his flat, then shoved the contents of his breakfast bar to the floor.
​
****
Morgan returned to the present gasping for breath. His hand flew to his throat, only to discover Matilda's ashen one already there. She tightened her grip. He could see her now, the monster that Arawn had made her into. Her eyes glowed red from behind her matted tresses.
​
Morgan would’ve screamed, heaved, and cursed if he’d the lung capacity. He tried to pry her hand off of his neck, yet Matilda’s strength outmatched his. She may have appeared to be a frail old crone, but looks were deceiving. Morgan thrashed and flailed, anything to get out of her hold and breathe.
​
Matilda slammed the crown of his head back onto the stone altar and unhinged her jaw. The time for games had passed. As her sour breath washed over him, Morgan blindly groped for something to defend himself with. All he could see was the black void beyond her gaping maw.
​
Or maybe that was his vision going.
​
Just before she could taste him, Morgan’s fingers hooked into a rotted skull that he used to smash against Matilda's. She recoiled with a hiss. Men never changed.
​
His blow was nowhere near enough to defeat her, but it was enough to distract her. Morgan summoned every fiber of his strength to throw Matilda off of him. He slid off of the altar, swaying as he stood, then bolted from the scene.
​
Matilda was not one to give up easily. Jaw still distended, she let out a piercing shriek and chased after Morgan with the dexterity and determination of a black widow.
​
If Morgan thought he was hauling ass from the hounds earlier, this was something else. He couldn’t get off this godforsaken mountain soon enough.
​
“Morgan?”
​
Now he knew that she was using Katie's voice to manipulate him, but it didn't make it any easier to resist.
​
“Morgan!”
​
His legs burned. Eyes wild, he searched for a route back to the main trail, but the darkness, his terror, and the unfamiliarity of the terrain slowed Morgan. Matilda caught up to him, so close that she clutched onto the sleeve of his coat.
​
Morgan rounded on her, his fingers closed into a fist. Before he could land the punch, Matilda shapeshifted into Katie. Morgan dropped his hand. Real or not, he wouldn’t harm her.
​
She’d banked on that, and in the blink of an eye, Matilda switched back and lunged at him.
​
“GET AWAY FROM ME!” He broke into a sprint once more.
​
The trail appeared on the horizon, but Morgan didn't get very far before Matilda clawed at him again, her talon-like nails grazing the bottom hem of his jacket. She seized him, but this time, Morgan didn't think twice about twisting to deliver a swift kick to her midsection. The surprise knocked her back more than the impact.
​
Splayed on the ground, Matilda morphed back into Katie. She sniveled, feigning agony and feebleness to halt Morgan again. She succeeded for a split-second. Then, “Don't do that!”
​
Morgan continued his beeline for the path, undaunted by the piercing cry she unleashed when he absconded. He’d almost made it to the trail when another dense curtain of fog dropped over him. It made maintaining his breakneck pace across the uneven topography more of a struggle.
​
“No,” he raced through the fog with abandon. He’d nearly made it when Matilda closed in. “Stop it…”
​
Her talons were posed to rip into his flesh, mere millimeters away. Finally.
​
“STOP IT!”
​
Morgan hurled himself down the mountain. Gravity and rapidly gaining momentum propelled Morgan across the rugged earth and out of Matilda's reach in the knick of time. His limbs akimbo, he desperately sought purchase on anything that could anchor him. Scree scraped his skin. Morgan managed to grasp onto a small rock, teeth gritting against the pain as he labored to pull himself out of the scrum.
​
An ear-splitting screech tore from Matilda’s throat as she flew after the man. They were nearing the boundary of her realm on Cader Idris: a boulder carved with runes that she could not pass. More frenzied than ever, Matilda rolled a hefty stone with devastatingly precise aim to trample over Morgan’s fingers. It worked beautifully, the weight of the rock across Morgan’s bloodied knuckles forced him to loosen his grip involuntarily. He was thrust back into the fray, but Morgan tucked himself into a ball to channel the velocity rather than fight it, which gave him the speed he needed to tumble past the boundary out of the crone’s domain.
​
Morgan didn’t dare lift his head, not even during Matilda’s blood-curdling lament that he’d escaped. He might not get off the mountain alive, but he wouldn't let himself die at her hand.
​
His manufactured landslide deposited Morgan at the edge of Llyn Cau, the bottomless lake that lay at the mountain’s base. Matilda skittered to the blasted boulder that kept her trapped to her few acres of this purgatory, curious if he’d perished in the fall. It took him several minutes, but Morgan dragged himself to the water’s edge. He dipped his hand in the water to scrub the dirt from his skin, then cupped the other to drink from the lake. He caught his reflection on its surface. He looked just as weary and tormented as he felt, but Morgan was grateful that Matilda seemingly wasn’t pursuing him anymore.
​
He dug into his pocket and a newly familiar voice echoed across the ancient rock shears moments later. Whereas Matilda had conjured a perfect impression, this version was tinny, and ever-so-slightly distorted.
​
“Hiya. They're about to put the tube in, but I don't like how we left things. I don't want to blame you for the crash, Morgan, but I have to be honest…there's an ugly, angry part of me that does. But there's the bigger part of me that still loves you. Even after everything we've been through. People will say that's foolish but I don't care. I forgive you, but on one condition. You have to confront your demons. To stop running and face them. Release them, and release me. So that when you love again, whether or not it's me, you can give it freely. There's nothing like being loved by you, Morgan. It's why I fought so hard for it. Bollocks, they're saying I need to go. I wish you were here. I'm telling myself this isn't the last time we'll talk but Morgan, I'm scared. Call me when you get this – just want to hear your voice.”
​
The voicemail ended. It was silent on the mountain until Morgan’s grief, the anguish he’d stifled for the past month, finally poured out of him like a dragon’s fire from its snout, as searing as it was cleansing. Matilda was fascinated by his catharsis, by the sobs that wracked his body, by the guttural noises of agony that left his trembling lips. He was a portrait of raw sorrow, and it was just as beguiling to Matilda as the visage of Katie was to Morgan.
​
Pale blue had begun to paint the horizon line when Morgan’s weeping subsided. Matilda had loomed the entire scene, fashioning herself a strange sentinel to his grief. No longer encumbered by his despair, Morgan looked to the summit. There was something up there he needed. Matilda could sense it. There was something of the woman’s – Kaite’s – that remained on Cader Idris, and Morgan would not leave without it. He resolved to finish what he came here to do: to give Katie a proper goodbye.
​
The wide line of Matilda’s mouth split into an impossibly wider grin as Morgan staggered to his feet. She would get a second chance with her knight after all.
Victoria Male (she/her) has worked in creative development at Ivan Reitman´s The Montecito Picture Company as well as with the American division of the fast-growing South Asian media company Graphic India. Her writing has appeared in The Chamber Magazine, and her screenplays have garnered attention from major agencies, A-list talent, and accolades. Victoria is a shrewd adaptor of biography, history, and mythology, and seeks to celebrate the complexity and the breadth of the female gaze in her written work and on screen.
A Fable: The Fox & the Goat & the Well & the Fox, If I Didn’t Mention the Fox Yet
by Ron Riekki
So a fox fell into a well.
​
Pretty simple.
​
It happens. Foxes are strolling down the road, there’s a well, they go over to check it out, and suddenly they’re in the well. It sucks, but that’s reality.
​
A well could fall into a fox, I suppose, but that gets really complicated.
​
Let’s keep it simple.
​
One fox, one well, one fox inside of well.
​
And he was there a looooooooooooong time. Because how do you get out? Foxes don’t tend to walk around carrying ladders, so, yeah, he’s in that well.
​
Then a goat comes along.
​
Not like LeBron James type GOAT. Not Michael Jordan. Not Diana Taurasi. I’m talking a goat-type goat. Not a cliché goat. I mean, the goat had its own dreams and aspirations and favorite meal and very specific walk where you could tell she grew up in Ohio, but, yeah, a goat.
​
And she was thirsty. Because she was walking around and that’s what happens when you walk around and so the goat went over to the well and, well, she saw the fox.
​
“Hey, fox, how’s the water down there? Does it taste good? Or, I’m thinking, maybe it tastes like fox right now.”
​
“I didn’t come down here to drink,” yelled the fox.
​
But then the fox realized that if the goat came down into the well, he’d have a full meal. All the goat he could eat and all the water he could drink. It would be like getting a table at The French Laundry. Although who the hell wants to eat laundry, even if it is French.
​
So the fox yelled up, “Well, kind goat, this water is the best in the world. It tastes like diamonds and diamonds taste like heaven and heaven tastes like water, so you will love to come down here and drink with me.”
​
So the goat jumped in. The water just looked too wet. It was the wettest water the goat had ever seen and when she got to the bottom, she realized the fox was right. It was wet.
​
The fox immediately ate the goat, in one whole scoop. And that made the fox very thirsty, so the fox drank just about half the well.
​
Well, the fox could hear the goat in his belly, begging to get out.
​
But the fox realized how impossible it was to get out of a well when you were lean and had energy, but now the fox realized, with its belly full of goat and bladder full of water and brain all tired from eating and drinking, he wouldn’t be able to get out at all.
​
The goat yelled that if the fox let it out of its stomach, it’d allow the fox to leap on its back and out of the well, but the goat just tastes too good. And it was already in the fox’s stomach.
​
And that’s when the well spoke and it said, “Dear, goat, I’m sorry to inform you, but you are not in the fox’s stomach. And dear, fox, just so you know, you’re both in my stomach.”
​
And the well’s mouth closed and the sun disappeared and night owned the world forever for them and the moral of the story ran away.
Ron Riekki’s books include Blood/Not Blood Then the Gates (Middle West Press, poetry), My Ancestors are Reindeer Herders and I Am Melting in Extinction (Loyola University Maryland’s Apprentice House Press, hybrid), Posttraumatic (Hoot ‘n’ Waddle, nonfiction), and U.P. (Ghost Road Press, fiction). Right now, Riekki’s listening to "Viagra Boys - Full Performance (Live on KEXP).
Farewell Party
by Ali Ashar
This poem first appeared in LiveWire, India
On the eve
of farewell
while reminiscing all
the crests and troughs
we went through
we laugh and cry
cold breeze dance with
the flashback of memories
written in the horizon of these sky
is an era—
of whose
vestige are etched eternally
upon our hearts
the next day we gear up
for the party
we click pictures and save emotions
we eat muffins and devour the sorrow
in the end—
there’s pin drop silence
the farewell note reads—
moments become memories
people become stories
and that’s life.
Ali Ashhar is a poet, short story writer and columnist. He is the author of poetry collection, Mirror of Emotions. His works appear in Indian Review, The Raven Review, Bosphorus Review of Books, among others.
gold-tinted, honey-veined
by Phoenix Tesni
on the way to nowhere
by Phoenix Tesni
of light in the absence of it
by Phoenix Tesni
Phoenix Tesni (she/her) is a twenty-two-year-old artist and poet from New Delhi. A Best Small Fictions nominee, Phee is obsessed with the arts and documenting life, whether that’s through art, photography, or poetry. She has works published or forthcoming in Surging Tide, Sage Cigarettes, Limelight Review, Verum Literary Press, celestite poetry, and many other places. You can find a list of her various projects and publications at phoenixtesni.com, or say hi to her @PhoenixTesni on Twitter/Instagram. She will always say it back.
The Boy Who Doesn't Know How To Read A Clock
by Grace Sinkins
You complain about modernity,
Like you have left the past.
Hand rolled cigarettes and a stack of tens,
Always on the run but never on the road.
You lost yourself in a chicago winter.
Now you don’t know where to go.
Building up snow that slashes through your bones.
Claim you understand Kafka,
But words never really resonate.
You cause a scene and get surprised,
When the situation escalates;
The reflection of your father,
Greets you like an exiled friend.
In old photographs of people you have been before,
Somewhere is a boy who didn’t know to tell time;
Who would cry when he realized nothing in his life could simply be fine.
But the clock continued to move,
Like friendly acquaintances always do.
How do you sleep knowing no one will truly miss you?
Grace Sinkins (She/Her) is a seventeen years old poet who loves reading classic books, thrifting oversized sweaters, and applying way too much eye makeup. Grace has been published in numerous magazines such as Corporeal lit, Meditating cat Zine, and Meadow mouse Zine. Grace hopes that her words can somehow make an impact on your day. You can find her in your local coffee shop or on Instagram @gracexlizzie.
Closing Grief
by Kai Groves
“Did I lock the front door?” The thought had spontaneously spawned at the forefront of my mind, as if to taunt me.
​
“I wouldn’t have left it unlocked.” I half-heartedly attempted to reassure myself, knowing full well the kind of fanatical being I am, satiated only by my own certitude.
​
“I’ve fought this fight many times before and I always lose,” I whispered conservatively, glancing toward the ‘Quiet Carriage’ sign to silently justify myself. The thought now crumbling into self-doubt. Only five minutes before we leave the station; nowhere near enough time to check.
​
I began to feel enclosed. Suffocated by my own fear. The walls began to slowly creep closer together, sadistically crushing the doors between each carriage to a hair’s width. Now narrow, the carriage augmented into an impossible corridor; the seats stretching into a two-dimensional wallpaper, perfectly pasted along the unlimited expanse; and forcing me to my feet. Despite the fact, far off in the distance, there was a mirage. A gleaming white light dancing graciously from a homestyle doorway, unlike any of the carriage doors; this was a familiar structure. The door’s somewhat angelic nature had a facile, comforting effect, in the same vein as a childhood memory.
​
My obsessive nature, however, was iron-willed, thwarting any attempt at restoring tranquillity. I naturally, predictably acknowledged the door being fully open.
​
“I must’ve left it open!” Then, without recognition of myself, I threw my arms up, clutched the air ahead of me in my hands and without a second’s hesitation, I pulled the corridor to collapse on itself – dragging the benevolent opening towards me with blind, selfish ambition, intent only on closing it; and with it, the nagging uncertainty.
​
Over time, I was beginning to learn the rules of my own intellect. Sometimes able to deny any compulsions and dismay. This, though, was not an exact science – every instance was unique. Every time I have found myself an escape from this warped abstract reality, I was left weary; old and defeated - even as the temporary victor.
​
The doorway was now reluctantly compressing the whole forged and beaten train towards me. Though, as it did, the coalesces of rusted metal began to serve in its favour. Assembling into a rapidly stagnating barrier between me and my goal, it quickly slowed to a standstill only two carriages away. My arms, now exhausted, fell to my sides and silence rang loud in my ears. The light emanating from the doorway was close enough now, and so intense, that it caused me to squint as I glanced in its direction. It’s warmth and friendship I knew all too well to be true. This was not just about ‘locking a door’ anymore – this was a battle for certainty.
​
With a heavy sense of determination, I walked towards the light. My footsteps echoed around the confines of the corridor, slithering up the walls until I could hear their barely audible repetitions above me. I cleared the first carriage, my eyes fixated on the doorway. Then, as I entered the second, the light dimmed; eclipsed by the silhouette of a large figure. It stood taller than the doorway itself, cutting off its head from view. Perplexed, I paused and held back - giving myself time to control my bewilderment. This had never happened in the past.
​
Before I had a grasp on what to do, though, the figure bent down on what I could only understand to be its knees (despite seeming to collapse onto them while leaning its torso in my direction). It then reached out a hand to me. Ignoring any kind of gesture, my attention was captivated by the hand itself. It had four fingers, no thumb; and those fingers had a charcoal texture and didn’t seem entirely attached, stayed by only thin, muscle-like matter. Still fascinated by its impossible appendage, I noticed - only after too long, that in my peripheral vision the figure had continued to lean towards me and now I could see that it did not have a head at all.
​
Dismayed by the figure’s continuous and horrific physicality, I recoiled away, turning to run. Promptly, before I could cover enough distance, the figure ordered its arm after me. The dark, black skinned limb followed by stretching and elongating to an unbearable length, causing it to release an excruciating, horrifying shriek, so loud I was forced to my knees. Grasping at my ears, I wrestled to block out the noise. Not able to make any more ground, the hand enveloped the entirety of my head, its palm engrossing my face and pulling it back, pinning me to the floor. It was then it ceased to scream and broke the resulting silence with a fatigued, coarse voice.
“Why do you fear me?” Its voice punctuated by the deafening ‘boom’ of its footsteps gradually drawing closer.
​
“Why do YOU fear ME!?” It exclaimed, now yelling out, drawing attention to the parts we both played.
​
“ME!? It is ME who should fear YOU!” It roared with uncontrollable anger. Both, punctuating his last word and announcing his presence directly above me, with a reverberant punch to the wall of the carriage.
​
It did not breathe. Silence accompanied the wait for my response; and with that, I knew who it was.
​
****
​
When I was young, I was infatuated with sea creatures of all shapes and sizes. The water itself seemed so appealing, exquisite, and purposeful by nature; all the creatures therein are perfectly adapted to it. The ocean was the one thing I felt akin to. So much so, my parents did all they could to ensure we had regular ‘expeditions’ to London Aquarium. We lived in Aldgate, so it would only take sixteen minutes on the Circle Line. Besides, that’s a small price to pay when they always said it ‘helped them raise me’.
​
Being such an obsessive-compulsive kid at a young age made it hard for them. They were both still young themselves, technically. Unlike the sea though, I was not so akin to my father. He knew this. I knew it. The excursions to the aquarium were his idea, his attempt to fix that ‘problem’. A compulsion to know for certain if at the end of it all, I was the child he wanted, or not. In that sense, the apple never did fall too far from the tree.
​
7th July 2005, I sat on the hideous red and blue chequered moquette seats. The tube accelerated with such breakneck force that I bumped off my dad and into my mum, and back again. I scanned the carriage from ceiling to floor, checking every inch.
​
“Rust, dirt, gum... GUM!” I cried. I brought my forefinger adjacent to my eyes, that were now beginning to fill with tears at the sight of bright white gun adhered to the end of it.
​
“Now don’t panic.” My mother sprang into action. “We need to get him off. Now.” Her attention turned to my father, who was reading the paper, compelled to finish the sentence he was reading before acknowledging my mother’s distress.
​
“Why? It’s only a short journey to the aquarium, and we’ve only just got on!” His usual sharp, vexed tone cut through the thick air of silence in the carriage.
​
“And we’re getting off!”
​
“He needs to learn.”
​
“No! You need to learn to accept your son for who he is.” My mother had always hated anyone causing a ‘scene’ in public and so the resulting outburst shocked both me and my father. At the next stop, as my mother dragged me off the train, still suspending my finger in the air. I had, for some reason still unknown to me, glanced back at my father. He stood hunched, looking towards his feet; framed by the horde of commuters, I noticed he had dropped the newspaper. His face wasn’t full of anger or sadness. There was no emotion. It’s as if he was so deep in thought, he had been completely engulfed by his mind. The final time I saw my father.
​
7th July 2005 - later known as 7/7. The day London was attacked. The day my father died. They found his body after, decapitated by shrapnel, and burned to such a degree that his skin resembled charcoal, thinly veiling his muscular tissue – the terrifying product of an explosion in the neighbouring carriage.
​
****
​
“WHY DO YOU FEAR ME!” The deep, wiry voice brought me back to the corridor.
​
“I’m not scared of you dad. I’m scared that I will never stop being the reason you died alone.” I began to cry. “My obsessions and compulsions, THEY killed you! And sometimes I fear they killed you long before you died.”
​
The figure relaxed its grip on my head, releasing me from my restraint. My words still bouncing from wall to wall, just as my footsteps did, as the figure stumbled backwards towards the doorway. I limply returned to my feet, maintaining my focus on the figure as it hesitated and lowered its shoulders, seemingly accepting it was beat.
​
“Your compulsions didn’t kill me. They saved you from mine.” I didn’t answer. The figure stood tall and was embraced by the white light, evanescing into memory.
​
I remained, in silence. Staring into the light, I finally recognised the door frame. It was the door to my childhood bedroom, the same chipped cream-coloured paint, marked at various heights with a faint pencil line; one for each birthday. I had left this door unlocked, and now it was time to close it.
Kai Groves (He/Him) is a 22-year-old Media and Communication Student living in Portsmouth, UK.
I mourn with the man in the cemetery, 9:54 PM on New Year’s Day
by Kath Richards
Driving home in the middle of the biggest snowstorm of the year, I look out the window at the cemetery where my brother is buried beneath dirt and grass and ice, and someone walks from their car to a small tomb stone
They take a picture and the flash lights up every little shard of snow that’s piling on the rock at the head of this person they love, this person they think would love to see the first snow of the year decorating their name like that.
Kath Richards recently graduated with her MFA in creative writing from Brigham Young University, where she wrote fiction and poetry. She is the managing editor of Soft Union, a literary bimonthly, and she loves all things romance. You can find her on Twitter @kath_richards_
There is Still Beauty Here
by Karissa Garza
Through the leaves, bare feet press rocks further into earth,
Soft sounds of life echoing in the wind,
The sun rises, warming stones and backs as they lay by the river,
Anticipation as the night brings release,
They gather here, holding hands and splashing with innocence
The river has led so many here
Through forest and cavern, through darkness and light
Soon they can be themselves,
The first opens their eyes, taking in the familiar world
There is beauty here in the spaces untouched
Though there are few spaces left, pure and living
Such a shame
The second smiles, reminding the first of this realms magnificence
Of rain that falls, drops heavy with the weight skies,
Of creatures that both comfort and command respect
Of the peace in existing amongst the trees
Soft mud settles around their toes and together they reminisce
It was a short visit this time
Often they rest longer, though much is changing
And there are fewer places to stay
A world that was once abundant, now lacking in life
A world they came to love, now pitied
The sun slowly sets as stars flicker to life
Winking at those below
The celestial stage prepares for the lunar performance
And they wait as the light fully falls
Reaching for familiar fingers and breathing
Soft beating sounds like hearts on display
Their backs, once warmed by rays now cool to touch
Wings extending as arms, flexing in their freedom
The river, reflecting moonlight, welcomes them
To wash away the visage of youth and normalcy
Becoming whole again, their wings capture air
Like bodies exhaling, flooded with relief
Passing the threshold, back to a world untarnished
They say their goodbye’s, unlikely to return
Karissa Garza (she/her) is a writer and educator from south Texas. When she isn't teaching or attempting to be a poet, she can be found eating cheesecake and watching anime with her 10-year-old son and polydactyl cat named Rin.
You can find her on Twitter @K_Rylan_
The Portrait of a Woman's Rage
by Lauren Nicholas
A cockroach sat on the woman’s face like an unfortunate mole before it scurried off the canvas onto the floor and disappeared into the shadows. The woman in the painting, who appeared unbothered, was radiant with her golden hair, heart-shaped lips, and gentle smile. The muslin dress embroidered with emerald beetle wings brought out the color of her eyes. Posed on a lounge chair, she rested an arm daintily on the side table beside a bouquet of roses. Lucia was her name.
​
Mary tore her eyes away from the painting and threw a paintbrush across the room. It was lovely, and that was the problem. Mary couldn’t remember when Lucia looked so docile or sat still enough for a portrait. Lucia, who was born fiery, was the one who got them both into trouble when they were children. If Lucia were still here, she would’ve hated this depiction of her.
​
The art studio, formerly Mary’s nursery, had only one working window, resulting in a constant smell of must. This evening, the oil paint fumes and the musty aroma were particularly pungent, which only further bothered Mary as a nightmarish migraine began to build. As her irritation grew, so did the temptation to stab the canvas with her palette knife.
​
Abruptly, Lucia’s eyes appeared to darken as if proposing a challenge. And all at once, a vision came to Mary. She grabbed her brush and palette and began painting, covering over the regal, fictionalized Lucia. As she painted, the rest of the world didn’t exist.
​
While Mary completed the painting, sweat dripped into her eyes, and her head thundered, a warning for her to get fresh air. With no idea how much time had passed, the young painter stepped back to get a clear view of her work. Both a masterpiece and a nightmare, Lucia had been transformed from a princess to a ghoulish villain. The young woman stared back at her with a satisfied smirk, much like the real Lucia. Now, her gown was black and made of feathers. Her hair was loose and wild, and her skin was tinted gray. But the most alarming of all was the focal point of the painting. In Lucia’s hand, she held a bloody heart. Streaks of blood dribbled down her mouth and hands. A chunk of the heart was missing.
​
Deep down, Mary knew this was the best painting she had ever done, but it didn’t matter. She doubted her parents would approve, much less Lucia’s mourning parents. Mary covered the painting and decided that it would never see the light of day again. The painter felt disappointed and relieved she wouldn’t have to look at it again. In a rush, Mary ran out of the room, leaving behind the faint smell of rot.
​
****
Later that evening, Mary drifted to sleep and dreamed of her childhood. Mary’s parents went on long business trips for as long as she could remember; therefore, she would invite Lucia over, and they would pretend to be masters of the manor. Memories of bossing around the maids and playing in her father’s office flooded Mary’s mind. It was hard not to think of Lucia since it had always been the two of them. When Mary broke her arm falling out of the old willow tree, it was Lucia who was there to comfort her. And when Mary’s former friend, Jasmine, spread rumors about Mary, Lucia confronted Jasmine on Mary’s behalf. Lucia was wild and brave and stubborn and hot-headed. Despite the two being so different, Mary adored her. A rush of memories swarmed Mary. Sleepovers. Horseback riding. Games of croquet. Swimming. Days on the beach.
​
While she dreamed of the night Lucia caught her hair on fire, the scenery changed around her. A forest bloomed. The sky darkened. Rain sprinkled. A damaged car. A figure stood off in the distance.
​
“Lucia, is that you? Are you okay?” Mary called out, but there was no response.
​
“What happened? Do you need help?” The wind rustled, and a faint voice whispered in Mary’s ear. Close your eyes. Don’t look. Turn around. But Mary approached the figure, who looked more like her dear friend, as she stepped closer. When Mary touched her on the shoulder, Lucia whipped around and pushed Mary to the ground.
​
Lucia was screaming, and all Mary could make out was: “Look what you did to me. Look what you did.” But all Mary could focus on was Lucia’s bloody face and the hands around her throat.
​
The air filled with a sickeningly sweet and faint, putrid odor. And then she couldn’t breathe. She wanted to scream, but she felt a pressure pushing down on her face and silencing her. Mary clawed, punched, and kicked. When she felt she would succumb to her demise, the pressure lifted, and she could breathe again.
​
Mary wanted to sigh with relief, but when she opened her eyes, she screeched. A humanoid figure sat beside her. The smell of mildew clung to the air. To Mary’s horror, the figure wore a dress like Lucia did in the painting. For a moment, Mary wondered if it could be her, but there was something alien about its gaze that she couldn’t overlook, no matter how much she wanted to believe it.
​
In the dim lighting, Mary accidentally locked eyes with the monstrous version of Lucia, and it lunged. Mary reached her hands out to defend herself, feeling papery flesh that tore at the touch of her fingers. Its skin flaked off like dandruff, and it snowed onto the bed. The monster clawed at Mary’s throat, and sharp talons dug into her skin. Mary cried out, reached for its eyes, and clawed as hard as she could. The monster’s eyes bled inky tears, and it squealed almost loud enough to burst Mary’s eardrums. It sounded eerily similar to Lucia.
​
****
​
The following day was a blur while Mary pondered about the previous night. None of the maids heard anything and assured her no one had broken in last night. Of course, it must’ve been a dream, but Mary felt uncomfortable with how real it felt. She didn’t remember what happened after, but she must’ve eventually fallen asleep.
​
Last night’s horror wasn’t the only reason Mary had no appetite. A cockroach scurried across the dining room floor. Lately, Mary encountered more cockroaches than people. Oddly, however, Mary wished she were like a cockroach. Mary read they could live a month without food, two weeks without water, and up to a week without its head. This week, she already felt like the latter.
​
Unlike the scorned cockroaches, jewel beetles were desirable. Ballrooms filled with extravagant dresses made from iridescent beetle wings. The jewel beetle could detect the flames of forest fires up to 50 miles away. Mary thought about how the cockroaches probably didn’t need to detect fire since they would survive it regardless.
​
Once Mary was sure none of the maids would see her, she snuck off to her studio. As Mary creaked the door open, nothing looked out of the ordinary. The painting of Lucia remained covered in the corner of the room. However, the room smelled faintly like meat, and Mary gagged at the realization. As she stood in front of the painting, she knew there was no reason to be nervous. Last night was all a dream. However, when Mary removed the sheet from the portrait, it was blank. The painting had existed. She was sure of it. She knew it was, but how could it be gone?
​
Hastily, Mary went through every single canvas in the room. It had to be here. But none of the paintings were of Lucia, and for a moment, it felt like she had never existed. And then, Mary was filled with rage. At herself. At Lucia. The fact that a few minutes changed both of their lives forever. And so, Mary decided to rage like a child, as her parents never taught her how to do so otherwise. It seemed no words could describe how she felt, so she screamed and punched and destroyed until everything ended up broken, and yet she still felt the most damaged.
​
****
The next few days went by without anything remotely interesting happening. Mary awaited her parents’ return. Any day, they would be arriving. Mary had no interest in painting, and she wondered if she would ever paint again. Instead, she spent her evening reading in the sitting room. As the evening darkened, Mary grew irritated at her attempts to read by the dim candlelight. She grabbed the candle and headed up the stairs, making her way to her bedroom. A subtle scratching noise caused her to freeze. It grew louder. It sounded like something heavy dragged across the floor. Mary’s palms began to sweat, and for a moment, she thought she would drop the candle. The noise was coming from her studio.
​
It wasn’t real. It was just a dream. It couldn’t be real. Mary found herself standing right outside the door to the studio. She knew she had to end this foolishness once and for all. Mary figured that after she saw nothing was there, she would snap out of it. She shook as she slowly opened the door. And she found nothing. Nothing was there. The room remained destroyed like the last time she was in there. The familiar musty smell circulated the air. Despite no one being around, Mary was embarrassed.
​
She slowly began closing the door when there was shuffling from somewhere in the room. Mary gasped and moved the candle closer to the sound. She couldn’t see well from the doorway. Then, she heard it again. A scratching sound. And then Mary saw the slightest glimpse of a human-like figure with long, sharp nails. It moved its arms underneath it and began lifting itself. Mary turned around, slamming the door shut behind her.
​
She ran down the stairs and planned to make a beeline to the kitchen. Mary had never been one to pray much, but now she was hoping someone was listening to her. Behind her, she heard the thudding of the fiend chasing her down the stairs. Thump. Thump. Thump.
​
When Mary reached the last step, she could feel its breath on her neck before it fell past her. It collapsed on the floor, and it began feeling around its surroundings in a panic. Mary must have blinded it the other night. It was a sad sight, and Mary almost felt sorry for it. This horrible creation of hers that she brought to life.
​
“I’m sorry, Lucia,” Mary whispered. As she spoke, the fiend turned its head toward the direction of Mary’s voice. “I see you. I see you every day in everything. So go ahead and haunt me. Haunt me by our willow tree, haunt me with the rustling leaves, haunt me, and just do it, if it pleases you. But I know that you,” Mary scowled at the monster on the floor, “You aren’t her.”
​
Mary dropped the candle onto the creature, and it erupted into flames. It roared and thrashed as it sizzled and charred. The fire grew as Mary ran towards the maids’ quarters. She screamed at the top of her lungs, “Fire!” Mary’s eyesight became blurry as tears filled her eyes from the smoke. One of the maids wrapped an arm around her and led her away from the fire. Mary and the maids ran out the door as an explosion blasted bits of plaster.
​
Mary stood and watched as the fire swallowed the house. She could see the flames dancing in her art studio. For the first time in a long while, Mary felt calm. She glanced down as a cockroach crawled across her foot.
Lauren Nicholas (She/Her) is a writer based in Western New York. She earned a B.A. in English and a minor in digital media and communications. She enjoys writing surreal and haunting stories full of magic, witches, ghouls, and more. She likes to explore themes of loss, family, love, life and death. As an avid daydreamer, she is always busy plotting various stories in her head, and she plans to publish her first novel in the future. In her free time, she’s either reading, writing, or chasing after her crazy chihuahua, Betty.
The Aspiration Bird
by CJ The Tall Poet
CJ The Tall Poet is an extremely weird writer, artist and author. He has written two quotes book that were influenced by haikus, poems, and stories that are labelled as experimental, mysterious, and humorous. He currently attends California State University San Marcos and is majoring in Literature and Writing. He is currently working on his third book, (Childish Expressions) that is entirely full of poems and has artwork but it’s written in a childish tone. It will be released in September, on the sixteenth of 2023.
Here is his wixsite: https://cjthetallpoet.wixsite.com/website
Zombie Disposal User's Manual
by Cecilia Kennedy
When a fiery sky lights up the night in streaks of red and orange, and you’ve lost just about everything, turn to the almost-dead body of a loved one, and be brave. Whisper your goodbyes and all your memories. Then, break open the seal of the cranial drill and cut smoothly into the head, evenly, without lifting the point of contact. Work quickly. You only have five minutes before the undead start to dismantle the door of your shelter. Remove the brain and set it in the bowl attached to Section A of the Ultra 1000X Undead Disposal. Push down on the lever on the back and guide the seven-foot machine onto the tracks you installed in part 1AAA of this user’s guide. Select the highest setting by turning the dial just above the lever. Push up on the lever to allow the Ultra 1000X Undead Disposal to slide, on its own, just outside your shelter. The camera you installed in part 1AAAA will trigger, and a video feed will stream onto your phone. The Disposal will automatically transport your loved one’s desperate last words and confessions—all the twisted yearnings they had for someone else—but also for you—and how lovely you looked on the last night you danced. You’ll hear it all and will want to run out and sacrifice yourself instead, but don’t. It’s a trap for the undead, who still cling, who eat aimlessly in order to recapture everything in life they’ve lost. But you must remain vigilant because once they take the bait, you have to push the ACTIVATE button that pops up on your phone and let the grinding, cracking, and breaking begin.
The Last Guest To Leave
by Cecilia Kennedy
Dressed in black and carrying a scythe, my grandfather enters the church at my wedding. I’m not surprised. We’ve all come to expect it. It’s his running gag of entering a room and making jokes about how he’s been dying to see us again, ever since the last event. That’s how he chased all my friends away at my first-grade birthday party—and drew looks at my graduation.
And here he is, late, while I stand at the altar with my soon-to-be-husband, after the wedding vows, and we can see him, plain as day, right in the entrance. No one knows he’s there, yet, but he moves forward and stops about mid-way in the aisle and drops to both knees, raising his scythe to the ceiling. I pray he will not say anything, and he doesn’t, though he is distracting, from my point of view—and Warren’s, the man I’m marrying. I feel my heart skip in my chest, a kind of tha-klump, I’ve felt before.
“Will he go to our reception, dressed this way?” Warren whispers to me, in between the priest’s prayers.
“I assume so,” I tell him. “That’s his bit, you know? He does this.”
Warren nods. I shift back and forth in my heels, hoping the priest won’t go on too long with the dramatics, but it appears he wants to sing the whole mass in Latin—and I’m sweating. The longer he goes on, the more of an opportunity my grandfather will find to shout something he thinks is funny.
At my sister’s baptism for my niece, he once interrupted the ceremony to douse everyone in water and shout, “Here’s a little something from Davy Jones’ locker!” And then he’d laughed.
****
When the readings are done, and the homily delivered, Warren and I are called down the steps of the altar to exchange vows. That’s when I see my grandfather lying, face-down, right in the middle of the aisle.
“What’s he going to say?” Warren whispers to me.
“That’s the surprise,” I tell him. “We never know, exactly.”
My grandfather says nothing. The priest looks a little uncomfortable, but he just goes on, and before I know it, I have a ring on my finger, and mass is about done. Now is the moment when I am supposed to run down the aisle with my husband, but it’s more like a tip-toe-motion around my grandfather, so we don’t step on him. I steady my breathing. My heart goes tha-klump, and I feel my pulse slow down, which relaxes me for a moment.
“Is he okay?” Warren asks, when we get to the back of the church.
“He’s never okay.”
“No—I mean—is he dead?”
“Probably not.”
We’re the last to arrive at the reception, so we can make our grand entrance. However, Grandpa’s already there, circulating among the guests, scythe in one hand, a champagne glass in the other.
“Here comes the killer couple!” he says.
My heart sinks. The tha-klump comes back and passes. Part of me was hoping he’d just stay put in the church—that maybe he’d just fallen asleep, but he’s here, and when we have our first dance, he announces he’s cutting in, with his scythe—and I have to dance with my grandfather, who smells of champagne and Johnson & Johnson shampoo—and he requests polka music for “something lively.”
When we’re about to cut the cake, he moves in first, with his scythe, of course, and trails frosting and crumbs all over the reception hall.
Out of the corner of my eye, I watch him mingle with guests at tables, flitting in and out of conversations—and I relax again, ready to dance and enjoy the evening. Maybe he’s had his fun. Maybe he’s found someone interesting to talk to. I feel lighter still—floating almost—giddy with champagne and cake—the music—and Warren’s warm embrace. My grandfather is nowhere in sight.
“Where is he?” Warren asks.
“Who knows? Who cares?”
“But doesn’t he come back, at the end of party, with an even bigger gag? A joke?”
This is true. This is his way. Once, we all spotted a coffin in the room at my aunt and uncle’s wedding anniversary, and he popped out of it at the end of the night, while Mom was pouring coffee. At a Halloween party, he flew over the room from a wire suspended from the ceiling.
Glancing about the room, I see nothing that would indicate a grand finale. Feeling warm, and a bit nauseas, I leave Warren’s side to stroll about the garden—to see the lights hanging above the fountain. I pass by my grandfather along the way. It appears he’s asleep, slumped over by the coat room, finally tuckered out.
But when I make it into the garden and look into the water, my grandfather looks back at me, the scythe and dark hood and all.
Turning around, I see no one. The face in the reflection in the water is my grandfather’s, but he’s not behind me.
When my heart skips two more beats in a row, and my left arm tingles, my grandfather’s face in the reflection smiles. The joke’s on me: my days are numbered, and I’ll be seeing a lot more of him soon.
Cecilia Kennedy (she/her) is a writer who taught English and Spanish in Ohio for 20 years before moving to Washington state with her family. Since 2017, she has published stories in international literary magazines and anthologies. She currently works full time as a copywriter and does freelance work as a proofreader for Flash Fiction Magazine and as a concept editor for Running Wild Press, LLC. You can follow her on Twitter (@ckennedyhola). Website: https://ckennedyhola.wixsite.com/ckennedyportfolio
No Signal
by Savannah Jones
Let’s get away from this place,
from these self-serving people and the
suffocating smog of animosity.
Take me somewhere warm, where we
can lazily soak up the sunshine
where I can hold you close.
Aren’t you sick of this place?
even the butcher with the missing
ring finger says, run, girl, and don’t you look back.
Won’t you grab my hand?
pack up your things, we’ll be gone
before the sun leaves us
in the hands of the moon.
Laugh in my face
yours twisted in disgust, baring your teeth at me
so I’ll leave this desolate place on my own,
smile knowingly when the butcher
says, you know, there’s a reason it’s my ring finger that’s missin’.
and my lover eludes me once more.
Savannah Jones (she/her) is a German-American college student majoring in Sociology and English Writing. She enjoys writing poetry that she shares on her Tumblr blog, “poemhater.” She loves her cat Lily, theatre, and music. In her free time, she can be found spending time with friends, writing, or attempting to make her way through an ever-growing pile of books. Her work has previously appeared in Hot Pot Magazine.
The Gods
by S.T. Brant
Act One
SCENE:
Dark dark. A darkness Dark admits rival. Clouds about. Grey with tempestuous desire. Some white to diminish the fear of heaven’s end. Ruins. Columns and colonnades. Toppled, used as seats. Some standing, dignified with memories of a deathless kingdom. The fallen monuments are excruciating to the ghosts of time. Gods know no oblivion. A felled terebinth on fire. Fire in the center of the ruins, the broken glory lays around. A campfire of eternal impermanence.
Around the fire, on varying aesthetics of rubble, sit seven (nine?) figures. (describe appearances… ragged? Togas? Delusionally glorious? … ) The atmosphere is devastated. We are at the end of the world, or the end of the world specifically for these figures, figures accustomed to tremendous power, tremendous influence, lives, and though their lives seem impenetrable to the disasters they appear to be in thrall of, they look into the fire as though the flames were holy with revelations that even those that wrote the books of fate were unaware, thus their stupefication is invaded with self-pity and a blood-soaked innocence dead, itself baffled in death, having died utterly confounded at the acquaintanceship with Death. These are the attitudes of the figures. In order to portray the ineffable, the actors must bedecked their souls with troubles; the foreground the audience is unaware should enhance the strangeness. Be strange. Giants have fallen. The titans lost. In Tartarus are the Titans; gods above them. To be the gods below! The exhausted ocean of emotion that has stormed in hell as we wound down to this! To this still pity. The fall of the Fall. Let the whole oeuvre of gods fall in your soul to get you to this scene, to be so wretched the audience pities and condemns you all at once, the fire loathes you, the air- all elements deign their duties to observe you- that until the interlocutor appears to lift shake the stupor from the scene, we believe that the figures have been these wretched statues for all time, the empathy of the wintered grandeur disturbing the onlookers, for how could any beings so pathetic ever have stood in- if our minds can resurrect what this Eden was!- the Hesperides. As the figures sit their hearts are shipwrecked sailors being fed upon by Sirens, laughing, eating, wiping their mouths with their napkin’d soul. Every heartbeat is another death of God. If you were God and couldn’t die, but were vanquished, so every deathless moment repulsed with Pain, reiterating the youlessness of life- being celebrated! rockets exploding celebratory streamers and confetti and fantastic lights, and sledgehammers being taken to your altars, to your shrines, places you held Gardens, where you walked hand in hand with your beloveds, where you and Life affirmed fidelity, children playing in the guts of the monuments eulogizing their new commitments… - yes, feel that! Sit there, play the figures, and die every second, and though you’ve died and died and died and died that the deaths are countless but to you, though you’ve lost that power now, that defiance of a limit, that being another death, death on death on death, though you’ve died so much, so endless, the deaths continue and will so and you know so, dying, dying, dying, dying, dying, as the cycle you installed rolls on and on and on, killing you, you deathless in its waves, murderous, murderous waves, indifferent slaying waves, jovial, singing waves, you a note in a song on its lips is all, nothing noticed in the eternity of its harmony, but to be a song in your sad shape, is that not another death, the Olympus of your deaths so far? yes- so this goes; in your heart feel all this as you personify this enigma, as the pain pervades the audience, morphing their contempt of you into an oppression: god is dead, their god, and they see them, all is lost for them as all is lost for you, we are nothing, make them feel it, cry, be pained by life, the unmasterable chaos; Life, who is Hades, Persephone, and Demeter; Life, who is Orpheus, Eurydice, and the Look: Life, who is the shadow that lured the Look (is she still behind me? her shadow’s no longer running on the wall…) yes, all of this we suffer, you and I and them, the viewers, until the guest walks into your dungeon… Then there’s joy. Play’s returned. Life resumes.
A figure emerges at the right of the stage, unlit, a thick, substantiated shadow. A shadow with personhood. This presence catches the attention of the sitting figures gradually. One notices, stares; another catches on; until all but one, the one sitting farthest away from the interlocutor, looks. The presence disappears. The stares linger, then they return to the despotism of their pity. The living shadow emerges from left, fully lit by the broad arms of the fire’s glow.
Poet: I can throw my shadow anywhere in the world… behaves more soulful than all souls.
…
There’s a whistle… down a greater distance in your soul than any of you have gone. Follow the song. Find the bird at the horizon. The rim of your life. Meet Limit. Faced with God, you’re face to face with God, god…s.
…
I presume.
G: We have a guest who’s come to declaim to spring. That shy beggar sun that’s been away is rested up to shine on us.
G: You’re a cheeky weatherman.
P: Poet, I prefer.
G: Egoist.
P: Vibrant.
G: A cheeky, cheeky weatherman.
P: God- I presume?
All: Yes.
P: Revelation in grit oblivion.
Some little difference in the light,
The change from dark to dawn at slower pace,
Pitched less visibly, the sight of sun
Less feeling today than other days, when one
Sense could be another; the birth of recollections
In your heart- are those the same nostalgias in the mind?
Are they tinted different?
Difference has returned.
Comparison is recollection.
What’s its power?
Nothing alters freely in the wind, Epiphany.
What’s thought the moment change is caught?
The foundation of a revelation.
So you see. The end begins. Revelation starts you out, and you come home. Mother Revelation in the morning, Mother Armageddon in the night (moonlight). The apocalypse is in your mind. The difference is nothing on the path; your soul has cast its kite into the wind and Chaos too kit. You see what’s there is everything that isn’t there. No flower’s wilt from day to night, but you return pollinated with Secret’s life. The order that’s been taught: bundled shadows of forget-me-nots. Chaos is the bird in the trees singing at your limit’s eaves. You must pursue. What’s beyond you, in the netherworld?
G: You said that in prose.
P: Water in the well. You must be of some value! You’re in a pit. So be it. Life’s a pit. Pit the pit and flood over it. Then you’re still within the well, but now you’re water on the second level, with a well dug in the middle of the well, that you’re the upper level of. Life’s pit you, pit Life. People come from all around to draw water. They come and draw you up, requiring you for Life. What’s the shame being here, beneath? They raise you up, cup you in their hands with the sun, the moon shining in you, now they cup the heavens when they splash their face with hell. Diagnose yourselves: are you a particle of plot; are you paper, are you pen? Or are you the publisher of it all? The printer? … Page arranger?
…
Pelican? Pidgeon?
…
Proofreader?
G (snaps): Who are you?
P: The Poet.
P: Show me proof, godly proof.
G: Proclaim the challenge.
P: Interrupt a fate.
G: What do you need to see?
P: Life is going this way by their will; change it. Obstruct their will, thwart their life, assert the destiny you’d rather see.
…
How I’d rather see.
G: Write your rules.
P: This should satisfy all questions. For me, personal; for you, Caprice. The love of the play.
Curtain
​
****
Act Two
SCENE
Center stage is lit, a ball of light in the center of a void, all the stage a blankness. POET and GOD 1 are in the lit area, casually, in the places they were last seen. Whole stage darkens as SCENE I: … ABANDONS ANTONY is projected onto the back wall. Light comes back on GOD 1 who reads the screen.
G: I’m nameless. Time out. Why am I identified with dots?
Light comes back on as at the beginning of the scene, reveals POET sitting at a table playing chess against himself. The game is midway through. Black is winning. White’s move. He fiddles with the White Queen in both his hand, as he contemplates the board.
P: You’re who you want to be. The ellipses can say anything.
G: What’s this title about? To title it like this sets the end.
P: If you think.
G: Aren’t you after my success? Aren’t you wanting me to usurp Will, prove your fatalism… free you from…
POET accidentally knocks over Black King. Pauses over the board.
P: Is the end already not set, “god” [does air quotes]? I’ve written what I’ve written. Power through.
…
The pieces of the game [holds up two pawns of opposite colors] are Antony and Cleopatra. Not truly, but reality is whim. They’ve been casually dating for a while, enough that they each waver between terming it significant and recanting any talks of seriousness with their friends though their hearts continually curse their jests, and they think fun dates are going to themed casinos in ridiculous garbs, patrons often mistaking them for commissioned actors strolling through on the job, street peddlers coming in from the heat- the people that dress in costumes and stand around looking like someone in a costume with a tip jar beside them, hoping to get some passersby change because they’re willing to stand outside in a costume or pose with you in a picture- or simply fools LARPing on holiday.
…
Today they’re visiting the Luxor, the Pyramid, dressed as- well, I said… Antony and Cleopatra. The Vivien Leigh, Claude Rains Antony and Cleopatra. Stop, god. Her and Rains were in Caesar and Cleopatra. The guy mixes up Rains and Laurence Olivier. He also mixes up Shakes and Shaw, so he’s a fun guy. Doesn’t matter. He’s Antony.
G: They’re in love. Easy enough to fortify that.
P: Crush.
G: Crush their love?
P: Most love is unheeded. We’re (not you, I know) in love with everyone. In instants. Love astounds with quickness and profligacy; it enjoys the seas of every heart and captains a vast boat that herald all. All the world’s adrift with Love, the waves dancing us together, anonymous and stubborn we remain despite the tenacity of the experience. The birds overhead, flying from end to end the world, cooing paradisical birdsongs learned ashore the spread out Edens we could land in if Love would ever dock; it would if we’d relent; but life is unlivable, so Love sails and sails, and aboard we riot, mutiny against our Cupid, tie Eros to the anchor and shove her off, break champagne glasses and rocket the fragments at the birds for each of us to necklace and play Mariner; until the ocean sickens of our lusts and blasphemy of heart and eats the cruise. We go loveless to the seabed to waltz with the seaweed, anemones, as shriveled souls that haunt the floors until we restore Eros from her chains for the world to Love again. We don’t. We go on dancing in our bones with the depths. [Throughout this monologue the lights are gradually fading on POET until he is barely lit and completely blanked at “depths”.]
…
[Lights restored, all is the same, except POET now has a half-made crochet sock] Point is, I spin a good yarn [tosses sock behind him. Joke trombone sound.] The real point is that they’re in love, but
Show me that Power can outdo Want.
End Scene
S. T. Brant is a Las Vegas high school teacher. His debut collection Melody in Exile will be out in 2022. His work has appeared in numerous journals including Honest Ulsterman, EcoTheo, Timber, and Rain Taxi. You can reach him on his website at ShaneBrant.com, Twitter: @terriblebinth, or Instagram: @shanelemagne.
The Evergreens
by Sabrynne Buchholz
BOYS BREAKING ARC LIGHTS is the headline, but it’s the name in the adjacent article that matters
The guestbook is in a different binding now, but the history is still there:
Photos of young boys gone fishing (could they have broken the arc lights?)
A most happy holiday (a claim from Hitchcock, July 11)
Goodbye to Skipper Allen (beautifully written, Dr. Prosser)
Evergreens written in ballpoint pen and steadied hand (they saved the cover page)
Stories told briefly and without ending (who is Mim, I wonder?)
and pages and pages
of signatures and messages and names and sweet mentions of gratitude
and gently fading mystery covered with rustling snake-leaves,
old yellowed pages, and time
The Evergreens were occupied constantly that year, throughout the bulk of summer
Summer heat and bane-plants were of no thought
Ferric chloride, water and glycerine
Laundry soap, hot water
Potassium permanganate
Grindelia, and water
To ward off poison ivy
Earlier in April, a chimney was built from smoke chamber up, and the weather, temperate
For “spring beauties, Easter daisies, anemonies, and quaking aspen catkins”
The perfect bouquet for the Dean and his picnic, every single year
Before his passing
And in the Evergreens, I lost my fevers, my headaches, my bad luck, and the drag in my step
in dry hills, kingfisher, and Colorado sun
Dear Peach Pit
by Sabrynne Buchholz
you hold a seed inside your stone shell, and
to drop you down into earthship soil means
a potential for you to germinate, take root, and grow,
you can burst forth and bloom, peach blooms,
fragrant bloom, immortal bloom
and once you are plump and ripe, perhaps a king shall be
stationed, a sentry or vedette, set to watch over
you and your orchard, perhaps a king will try to
steal you away and eat you up
sweet-tasting you
perhaps your branch will extend far out east
to dip you in a river and send you downstream
into awaiting arms to feed you full, you to feed
creatures to help you fight off demons
and become a luminary, a champion
or maybe, you’ll simply be plucked before you sprout
taken off to create persipan or
mixed with almonds, cinnamon, and raisins
orangeat, zitronat, cardamom, and rum
a Christmas stollen
you could be used to chase away blood stasis, or spirits
bring happiness and longevity and
spark new stories of journeys and heroism
grow into something bigger than you are now
a spaceship, a planet, dear peach pit
Sabrynne Buchholz (she/her) is a writer, artist, musician, tea-enthusiast, and avid bug friend. She has taken to using poetry as a means of investigating and learning about the world she inhabits. Her work has been published in print and online nationally and internationally, appearing in the Greyrock Review, Bloom Magazine, Studio OUCH! Gazette, and others.
What I Can See From Here
by Dave Nash
Barb wonders when the leaves became vibrant, couldn’t have been yesterday. She says, this is the most perfect day. A fall hike in the Alleghenies. Maybe it’s sharper out here. She's still in a state of bliss from sleeping in with Ben this morning. She feels most at home in her wool socks and boots with her red bandanna keeping her hair out of her face. The gray clouds make the colors snap.
Ben looks at leaves falling like gentle rain. He wonders whether rain will ruin this hike with its seven bridges, three waterfalls and mountain top view. This was the first real date he had with Barb last year. Ben learned her attraction was instant, but he had gain her trust because of past relationships. He fingers the ring as he steps around the mud and avoids the water hidden under the fresh leaves. Babe let’s take a break at the next falls.
Somewhere before the trailhead, Maddie draws her name alternating with red and yellow chalk on her driveway. Jumbo sidewalk chalk, thirty-seven pieces of reds, blues, and yellows. She embellishes her name like her older sister does on her notebooks. James sees her and crosses the street without looking. He asks, What are you drawing? The leaves reflecting on my name.
James digs through the plastic bin avoiding the half pieces and nubs that have picked up other colors. He grabs a green piece and blows the dust it picked up from the bottom of the bin. James looks beyond Maddie’s house, behind the mountains he sees clouds rolling over. My mom said it was going to rain. Not now, James.
I am made to be buffeted by the clouds and fall smack against the earth. I drift on drafts, gestating in clouds until I'm no longer spherical. The wider I get, the faster I’ll fall. I drift higher defying my gravity. Stay with me, I can fall three thousand feet in ninety seconds. I have not known suffering, but I feel it through them. I am not a spring rain drop that might give life or a drop in the winter that could crystallize and hang around for a few months in a snowbank. As a fall drop, I have to find my purpose.
I am the child of industry. Mom came from the cool Canadian air sweeping south over Lake Erie’s mild waters. Dad is an ultrafine particulate matter; he came into form when the developers razed the old plant. He found a home in Mrs. Jackson’s basement when her daughter left the window open for a boy. Her daughter spent her teenage years in that basement. Her mom lovingly maintained as her city rusted out and fell on neglect. After her death, her daughter sent my dad across the linoleum floor around the steel support column and back through that window up into the atmosphere. The morning of the open house she looks out that window, Well, I guess this is goodbye.
Dave Nash enjoys long walks on rainy Mondays. Dave is the Non-Fiction Editor at Five South Magazine and writes words that can be found in places like Jake, Atlantic Northeast, Midwestern Heat, The Airgonaut, Roi Faineant Press, and Boats Against the Current. You can follow him @davenashlit1.
The Second Face
A Retelling of East o’ the Sun, West o’ the Moon
by Caroline McTeer
One night after dinner, Astrid sat by a meager fire—and though her belly still gnawed, she thought herself blessed. She and her family had little in the way of earthly goods, but Astrid felt they were rich (in that more important world of unseen things) as long as they had each other.
​
“Astrid?” her father called. Astrid held her chapped palms to the fire for a moment more. Then she followed his voice into the other room. “A white bear just came to me,” her father said. “He says that if you let him take you away, he will make us all wealthy. Will you do it?”
​
“That would not be my wish,” Astrid said. She took herself to bed and attempted to put the terrible request behind her. She tried not to feel that the raging chill which racked her bones had settled on her spirit. But the feeling was impassable, like the tallest bank of ice.
​
The next night her father came to her again with the same request. On the third night her mother came to her, on bended knee. She appealed to Astrid’s love of family.
​
“Do you think that the bear has offered you a good trade?” Astrid said to her mother. “Your daughter for riches?” Her mother’s silence was its own answer.
​
For a moment, Astrid’s vision wavered. Then her pale surroundings took on a different hue, a fighting color that reminded Astrid of the bright songbirds with black beaks and crested heads. Astrid felt herself burn through, like a log caught at its center.
She said, “I will go.”
​
The white bear came for her on a Thursday. He took her to a castle and a far grander life than the one she had left behind. At the ring of a silver bell, Astrid might have anything she could name: a venison dinner, a bath of scalding water.
​
But Astrid found herself lonely and curious. One night, she left her chamber and walked to the one down the hall, where she slipped into bed with the bear.
​
“May I hold you?” she whispered to him.
​
He let her pull him close. She clutched his fur and cried into his coat.
​
The next night, the bear got into bed with Astrid, and tied a silk blindfold around her eyes. In her embrace, he lost the form of the bear and became a man.
​
“Be this man tomorrow,” she said one night, when he was inside of her, and it seemed as though their flesh and their pleasure were one. But by day he was only the bear—and though Astrid loved the bear too, she wanted to see the lips that kissed her mouth, her neck, her navel in the dark, the palm whose pressure made her chest rise and her throat catch, while at the waist she felt like a rose opening again and again.
​
“If you see the man,” the bear said, “we lose all of this.”
​
So Astrid pondered the life she had. By day, she rode on the bear’s back through glittering woods, and she had not yet tired of the feel of him beneath her and the sight of snow-mantled pines above her.
​
In the evenings, they sat before a fire that could not die, and the most wonderful things materialized before them: roasts and root vegetables and rum-drenched cakes, and books of poetry and philosophy and pretty tales with fragments that were familiar to Astrid from childhood.
​
Yet despite this daily feast for stomach and mind, Astrid could not find herself content. It was not that she was unhappy. Rather, she remembered how wrong she had been once upon a time, to be pleased with her lot as she sat hungry around a meek little fire with a traitorous family, as though life had nothing else to offer her. She would not make such a mistake again.
​
So one night when the man was sleeping, she held a candle to the other face of her beloved. She found such beauty there that for a moment she was glad she had done it. Overcome, she began to tremble, and tallow dripped from her candle onto his skin, waking him.
​
“Oh my love,” he said, and as he spoke he began to fade away. “What have you done? Now I must marry the troll princess. She is the one who made me a bear.”
​
“Where is she taking you?”
​
“East of the sun, west of the moon.”
​
But Astrid could hardly hear him. For her head had grown thick, her eyelids heavy.
​
When she came to herself again, she was in her old rags, on the ferny floor of a warm, unknown forest. She wept for the idyll that had died at her hand. And then she wandered through the woods for many days, until she came across an old hag.
​
“Tell me,” Astrid said, “how to get to him, and what you know of the place that is east of the sun and west of the moon.”
​
“It is a place,” said the hag, “where the innocent cannot go.”
​
“But I am not innocent,” said Astrid, and she told the hag of how her family traded her for money.
​
“Innocence is not a matter of what has happened to you—or not,” said the hag. “My mother tried to kill me, and yet I remained innocent for a time. On different occasions, she came to me again, and without fail I refused to see her for who she was. She tried to kill me three more times—with a corset, a brush, and a poisoned apple.” From the folds of her cloak, the hag pulled a golden apple. “Tell me, Lass,” she said. “When your family sold you like a sack of goods: did you let it change you?”
​
“Yes,” Astrid said, and she told the hag of how she had chosen to hold a candle to the other face of her beloved.
​
“Very well,” the hag said, and she gave Astrid the apple. “Take this mule,” she said, offering her beast, “to my companion. She may be able to help you more than I.”
​
The mule took Astrid to a second hag.
​
“Tell me,” Astrid said, “what you know of the place that is east of the sun and west of the moon.”
​
“It is a place,” said the second hag, “where you cannot take yourself.”
​
Astrid did not understand, and so the second hag told the story of her own young life, when she had been trapped in a tower. In the end, she got her freedom and the one she loved, but before that, her betrothed lost his sight, and she lost the long hair that had been her great pride. She pulled a golden comb from the folds of her cloak.
​
“What,” said the second hag, “do you cherish most about yourself, next to your breath?” She cast a shrewd look at Astrid’s thick curls.
But Astrid was thinking of the man who had lost his sight.
​
“I cherish most,” she said, “that I can read. I taught myself when I was young.”
​
“Would you lose your eyes,” said the second hag, “to get a bit closer to the land that is east of the sun and west of the moon?”
​
Astrid deliberated for a night and then she said “Yes,” though she felt by no means sure she had made the right decision. The second hag was kind enough to carve out Astrid’s eyes for her, then help her onto another mule. She placed her golden comb in Astrid’s hand.
​
“The ass will take you to my companion,” the hag said. “She may be able to help you more than I.”
​
Astrid knew she had reached the third hag when the ass came to a stop.
​
“Tell me,” Astrid said, “what you know of the place that is east of the sun and west of the moon.”
​
“It is a place,” said the third hag, “where the dead cannot go.”
​
“Well enough!” said Astrid. “I have the breath of life in me yet.”
​
“I am not speaking of your breath,” said the third hag, and she told Astrid of a time she chose to lay in a living death.
​
“I have heard this story,” said Astrid. “I thought you pricked your finger on a spinning wheel.”
​
​
“So I did,” said the hag. “’Twas a bad fairy who set the spinning wheel out for me. But ’twas I who touched it, and who chose to sleep for a hundred years, rather than wake and know what the fairy had taken from me, and to claim what she hadn’t.”
​
“Teach me,” said Astrid, “how to avoid this living death.”
​
“It is not a lesson to be taught once and mastered,” said the third hag, but she gave Astrid a golden spinning wheel to remind her that the lesson could be learned and practiced all the same. Then, she took Astrid to the East Wind.
​
The East Wind blew Astrid to the West Wind, and the West Wind blew Astrid to the South Wind. All three of the brothers bade her luck, though they also said, “You will get there late or never.”
​
“Why would your brothers say that?” Astrid asked the North Wind, when the South Wind had blown her to him.
​
“They say it because I am the oldest and strongest of them all,” said the North Wind, “and though I know the way to the place you seek, I could hardly blow you there if you were the size of an aspen leaf.”
​
“Still,” said Astrid, “you must try.”
​
And so the North Wind threw Astrid upon his back and blew with all his might, causing terrible storms around them. Astrid thought she heard the sounds of houses falling apart beneath her, and of ships crashing into the sea. For many weeks, she tried to believe that she was mistaken in the meaning of these sounds. But then she remembered the lesson of the third hag, who said that she must always be awake to her life, no matter how dreadful it became.
​
“Are many people dying,” Astrid said, “because you and I are making this journey?”
​
“I am taking you to a place,” said the North Wind, “where the innocent cannot go.”
​
At last the North Wind blew Astrid all the way to the castle of the troll princess, which was east of the sun and west of the moon, though he had to rest for many days before he could make his way back.
​
On her first day in this strange land, Astrid played with her golden apple on a plot of grass in front of the castle, pondering how she might gain entrance.
​
Above her, she heard a window fly open, and the voice—she guessed correctly—of the troll princess: “How much money would you take for that apple?”
​
“I would not give it up,” said Astrid, “for money.”
​
“Well then,” said the princess, “name your price.”
​
“I shall spend tonight alone with the man you’ve entrapped here,” said Astrid. “The one you mean to marry.”
​
“Very well,” said the princess, who felt entitled to anything which shared her loveliness, be it man or golden apple. So, Astrid spent that night in the chamber of the one she loved. She knew it was him, by touch and by smell, but the whole night long, she could not rouse him from slumber—shake him as she might! Despairing, Astrid cut a piece of her hair to leave for her beloved, and she wrapped it in the teeth of her golden comb. This gift she left in the pocket next to his heart.
​
At the break of dawn, the princess turned Astrid out. Sensing magic in the room, the princess groped the poor man until she found the comb, and then she took it away. That day, Astrid sat outside the castle and played with her golden spinning wheel.
​
Above her, the troll princess opened the window and called, “How much for that spinning wheel?”
​
“I would not give it up,” Astrid said, “for money!”
​
“What then?” said the princess. “Another night with my betrothed?”
​
“No,” said Astrid, for she guessed that the princess had given the man a sleeping potion the night before and would not fail to do so again. “I would marry your betrothed. Only then can you have my spinning wheel.”
​
Enraged, the princess tried to take the spinning wheel from Astrid by force, and that is how they both discovered that the gold pieces the hags had bestowed would not part from Astrid unless she gave them up willingly. So the princess put Astrid in a dungeon with other good people she had locked away. Every day, the princess stood outside the dungeon and called to Astrid, trying to coax the spinning wheel from her.
​
“A new price? Your freedom, perhaps?”
​
“My freedom and my friends’,” Astrid said, “and the hand of your betrothed.”
​
They went on like this for some time—how many weeks I cannot say.
​
Meanwhile, Astrid learned to use the spinning wheel. She spun day and night until her fingers bled, as though she could spin back together the lives she had taken on her journey with the North Wind. She never did manage that, nor did she spin her guilt away, but it was a comfort to do a jot of good in the world.
​
She employed the spinning wheel to create those things which could make her cell-mates more comfortable. At first, she was only able to spin rough grass blankets. Over time, though, she began to spin blankets made of wool, and things for the children. She made books, little dolls, and tops that spun dizzily with every color Astrid could remember—from the blazing orange of a coal, to the vivid greens that spoke of summer’s bounty, to the deep and secretive purple-black of berries and thunder-clouds.
​
Finally, Astrid learned to produce nourishing meals. Each night, Astrid’s comrades feasted together and toasted her. They did not know that the evenings’ heavy flow of wine and mead made Astrid think only of all the blood she had spilt on the way to this land, and that the clink of goblets sounded to her like one ship thrown into another. They thought she wept only for her beloved, for her eyes, and for her freedom. The good people in the dungeon conferred in low voices one day while Astrid spun. They wanted to do something to uplift Astrid, to give her a sense of her own dignity, as she had done for them.
​
When Astrid and the princess each grew weary of the other’s obstinance, they struck a deal.
​
“We shall compete,” the princess said, “for the hand of my prisoner.”
​
“But the man,” said Astrid, “shall name the terms of the duel.”
​
“Either way,” the princess said, “I get the spinning wheel in the end.”
​
Finding that these terms suited Astrid, the princess went to the man and told him of the maiden she’d locked in the dungeon and the deal they had made. She showed him the golden comb laced with Astrid’s coarse black hair, and so the man knew it was she who fought for him.
​
“We will see,” said the man, “which of you is the better reader. That maiden shall have my hand.” The princess gladly agreed—for having seen the gaps where Astrid’s eyes had been, she guessed Astrid could not read at all.
​
On the day of the reading competition, the princess and Astrid appeared before the man. The princess read a story about a proud prince who dared to scorn a beautiful fairy. She read as though her mouth was full of honey. In a too-sweet voice, the princess spoke of how the fairy turned the prince into a beast and forced him into eternal bondage.
​
“You see,” said the princess, when she had finished, “the fairy had a sense of her own worth. She was brutal, but righteous.”
​
Astrid clapped her hands politely. “A fine introduction to the story I am about to tell.”
​
“Have you forgotten,” said the princess, “that our rules forbid recitation from memory?”
​
“I haven’t forgotten,” said Astrid. “But you see, the people trapped in your dungeon have taught me a type of magic I had never encountered: a way to read with my hands.”
​
Astrid produced a book with her spinning wheel, and from it, she read a tale about a cursed prince and the woman who found herself in his enchanted castle. As she read, Astrid strove to keep her voice free of the muddied, heated feelings she might have brought to it. She felt that the story was not only her own, that it had the power to speak to listeners in every time and every land, if channeled rightly. So, she spoke as the story’s instrument, instead of as its heroine. She read with the clarity of the piercing blue sky on that long-ago Thursday when the white bear had gathered her from her parents’ home.
​
Astrid’s listeners never got to hear whether the woman saved the prince or not. Halfway through the story, the princess saw her defeat, and grabbed the spinning wheel. And in the instant she touched it, the princess burst into flames of rage and embarrassment. Legend has it, she resurfaced in another land and has made a better creature of herself. It is said that she now spins gold coins, then gives them away. But if that is true, I haven’t seen it.
​
With the trial behind her, Astrid released the good people from the dungeon. They emptied the castle of all its silver spoons and gold pocket watches and ruby necklaces and china teacups and amethyst rings and emerald-encrusted boxes, and piled these things onto a ship that stood moored outside. While they did this, Astrid finally had a moment of quiet with her beloved.
​
He pressed the soles of her feet with one hand while the other he moved slowly up her body. In the end, he put his cool fingers—and then his mouth—to the places where her eyes had once been. He told her that he loved her and wanted her just as much as he ever had, and even more.
​
“I feel the same for you,” Astrid said, “though I will miss your shaggy white coat.”
​
The next day, they fled as far as they could from the land that was east of the sun and west of the moon. They lived happily ever after. And when Astrid was an old hag herself, and young people came to her for wisdom, she told them of the man who once had two faces, and how she had seen them both.
​
“We all have many faces, Lass,” Astrid would say. “Which part of yourself do you seek?”
The End
Caroline McTeer is a San Diego-based writer. This is her first fiction publication.
Snowball
by Abigail Guerrero
Even the human,
ignorant as she was,
could tell there was something special about the cat.
Maybe it was his fluffy, white fur,
perfectly camouflaged in the surrounding snow.
Or maybe his eyes, calm and soft and blue.
Or maybe it was the fact that he wasn’t cold,
not even with the snow falling on his head,
menacing to bury him and freeze him to death.
No, the cat wouldn’t faze for something so human,
so mundane,
as the fear of death.
The human called him Snowball,
and she tried to feed him as soon as they arrived at her house.
Their house.
His house.
But the cat wouldn’t eat.
Not yet.
The human gave up and sat on the couch by the fireplace,
and put the cat to rest on her lap.
Their lap.
His lap.
And began stroking his back.
And they stayed like that for a long, long while.
Watching nothing but the snow accumulating in the window frame.
Listening to anything but the crackling fire.
Immerse in the darkness of a house where only existed two souls,
as calm as he made her feel in the middle of the freezing dusk.
The minutes turned into hours,
and the hours turned into days,
but the sun never raised again.
But the human remained calm,
stroking the cat,
hearing the fire crackling,
watching the snow accumulating on the window frame until the glass broke down.
And she didn’t flinch, not even when the gelid breeze ached in her bones.
Their bones.
His bones.
Nor when the cold numbed her limbs.
Their limbs.
His limbs.
She didn’t flinch, not even when the frostbite reached her toes.
Their toes.
His toes.
She didn’t move even when she knew she would die soon,
because that could importune the cat
who had granted her the privilege to feed on her warmth.
Their warmth.
His warmth.
Then, when the icy wind extinguished the last embers,
the cat stood,
stretched his limbs,
and rubbed his head on the human to thank her for the food.
And he returned to the snow,
to wait for someone else to pick him up,
to wait for someone else to take him home,
to wait for someone else to feed him with their warm, warm love.
His warm, warm love.
Abigail Guerrero is a Latina, aroace, and ESL author from Mexico. Her work has been featured in anthologies such as Bloodless: An Anthology of Blood-free horror and Un Río de Muchas Voces: Una Antología de Letras del Puerto, and in the literary magazine El Recuento del Cuento. You can find her on Twitter as: @_gail_guerrero
Eternal Life
by Wolfgang Wright
So the boy is five and he’s seated in the back of an SUV surrounded by fields of wheat when his sister, who’s strapped in next to him, starts asking all these questions about god and heaven and whatnot, and their mother, who’s up front listening to Shania Twain, turns down the radio long enough to tell her that god lives in heaven, a place way up in the sky, and when you leave this earth you will join him there and remain with him forever—and this scares the bejesus out of him, the boy. Because to him it sounds just like a punishment, like being sent to your room to think about what you’ve done, but worse, because you’re stuck there while the rest of the world goes on without you. So as carefully as he can—because he doesn’t want to upset his mother, who has a temper almost as dangerous as the Hulk’s—he asks her if everyone goes to heaven. And his mother looks at him in the rearview mirror, and after a while she says no, not everyone, some people go to hell, bad people, people who do terrible things like not brush their teeth or treat their little sisters poorly, and in hell it’s really hot, and the fires burn your flesh, and all you can feel is pain—you don’t want to go to hell, do you? No, he doesn’t want that. To him, that sounds just as bad as heaven. And so that’s when he decides, just as they’re pulling into town, that he’s never going to die, that he will live eternally, so as to avoid the horror of what comes after.
Wolfgang Wright is the author of the comic novel Me and Gepe and various short works scattered across the ether. He doesn’t tolerate gluten so well, quite enjoys watching British panel shows, and devotes a little time each day to contemplating the Tao. He lives in North Dakota.
Chloe
by Christian Ward
I can't remember much
about the nurse
whose face swung open
to reveal a doll's house
in good working order.
A snow-dusted field
in my memory is studded
with north Wales,
dyed blonde hair, sounds
Mancunian. Little else.
I can't remember why
my presence irritated her,
or why the chairs
in her doll's house
were always upside down.
The Real Red Riding Hood
by Christian Ward
Previously published in Carmina Magazine
Everything you’ve read about me is a lie:
I detest the colour red, look away
at the sight of ketchup, traffic lights
and postboxes. I like the colour blue.
Or yellow. Yellow’s good. The old woman?
I visit my Nan, who runs a B&B in Hastings,
come back stinking of the sea and vinegar.
Pets? I once befriended a fox in my garden,
fed it greenish strips of bacon studded with bluebottles.
Didn’t seem to mind. But a fox isn’t exactly a wolf,
is it now? And reports of footage of me on the internet?
Those costumes aren’t mine. I know nothing about special
effects or make-up. I can't do impressions; have never been
to a wood. Listen, my name is Dave. I work in an office.
Christian Ward is a UK-based writer who has recently appeared in Open Minds Quarterly, Blue Unicorn, The Seventh Quarry, Bluepepper, Tipton Poetry Journal, Amazine and Rye Whiskey Review.
Shade and Night
by Emily Coppella
He cursed our fifth daughter. She came out purple and swollen, screaming. Her legs kicked the air when the midwife deemed her a girl—as if she wanted to deny it herself. I heard the sheet fall across the doorway, his footsteps moving away. I turned my head from our new daughter towards the window glazed in dew and witnessed the sunrise hesitate over the barley and hay fields. I had groaned deeply the night before when I felt my womb squeeze like a fist, again, and again. Now that she was here, I felt no relief. The base of my spine ached when I looked at the midwife sloshing her tiny body through the water basin. The white pulp came off her. The cord was cut. She was wrapped in scratchy linen and placed in my arms. I gave her my breast and she took my milk.
I named her Sigrid.
Our other four girls took to her quickly, cooing at her, and rubbing their palms against the fine hair that grew around her head like peach fuzz. They were enthralled at the way her wide eyes stared. They were rich brown and penetrating like William’s, not hazel and dreamy like our other daughters. When I nursed her she rarely let her eyelids close, preferring to watch.
****
When she turned six I saw her standing in the kitchen, her arms hanging loosely at her sides. She gazed at the team of oxen that crawled down the furrows away from the house. Her hair – burnt sugar, like all the other girls – was twisted into plaits that crowned her head. She was still amid the chaos of the kitchen where Ellen, our oldest, pinched the dried fennel that Agnes and Avis, the twins, had collected the month before. Ellen let the herbs drop into the rabbit stew. I came towards Sigrid and brushed my thumb across her rosebud lips — but her gaze didn’t falter. Ellen smiled at me, shyly, and whispered instructions to Sigrid while guiding her towards the pot that bubbled and spat. William’s shadow stretched out across the small space. The scent of dried sweat and sweet barley turned my stomach.
His voice was gritty. “Dinner?”
“Nearly,” I said.
Ellen and Mary, my second oldest, smiled pleasantly at him and the twins began to walk towards him. They hoped for a hug, a pat on the head. But Sigrid shrank from him, lingering by the stew.
He turned on his heel and went back outside. “Fetch me when it’s prepared.”
****
I couldn’t bear any more children after her. Each spring harvest, around her birthday, William would flush with anger. His unhappiness would simmer, then cool until the next year. But this year his anger lingered for several weeks until Luke arrived.
Our neighbor’s — the Pelhams — welcomed Luke into their home shortly after Sigrid’s sixth birthday. He was seventeen, with tight coils of brown hair that refused to lay flat on his forehead. We could not often afford to share meals with others, but the Pelhams were excited about their new tenant and offered to bring several pheasants and pottage with them to our cottage to celebrate.
Mary returned from the communal oven with warm bread, swiping a plump, freckled arm across her forehead. When she saw Luke, she fixed her bonnet that was lying slightly askew and flashed him a shy smile. The twins came in with fresh butter, swinging their arms and laughing until William gave them a stern look.
“What splendorous young ladies you have,” Luke said as he shoveled piece after piece of bread into his mouth – a mouth that seemed to be perpetually grinning. It made him look much younger than seventeen. “Ah, yes,” he said, forgetting he was just introducing himself. “ I came from Buckestones.” He swallowed. “Six hours away.” Another bite. “Quite a long journey for me.”
Mary listened, enraptured and twisting several strands of hair at the nape of her neck that had come loose from her bonnet. I folded my hands together and ladled more stew into Mr. Pelham’s empty bowl. He smiled in thanks. “A long journey, indeed,” I said. “We often get our herb seeds at the Buckestones market.”
Mrs. Pelham bobbed her head in agreement. “Yes, that is exactly right, Luke. You should take great pride in the Buckestones market.”
William beamed at Luke’s voracious hunger while flicking his hand toward me, “Fill up the boy’s bowl too.”
Mary took the pot from me and spooned more stew into William’s bowl, “Yes, papa.”
My husband passed a hand through the air and scoffed, “Women’s work, mostly, herbs.” He leaned in towards Luke, whispering, “You will be busy at the mine, Luke. But come harvest time, everyone in Bonsall helps with the hay. It’s hard work, but such good fun. Right, Mr. Pelham?”
Mr. Pelham snorted and spluttered, clearly dedicated to concentrating on his stew only. “Mmm. Yes, indeed, indeed.”
William smiled, tucking into his own stew with fervour.
****
I woke early and slipped on my leather boots, tied a worn apron around my waist. The spring morning was cool, nighttime still hanging in the air. My shadow drooped across the wood of the house as I made my way towards the gardens where we planted radishes, carrots, cabbage, and several herbs. Ellen and Mary were getting the twins and Sigrid ready for the day. William had been grumbling all through the night about the morning’s hay harvest and as he swung his heavy legs out of bed he said Ellen and Mary were too slow in turning the hay last year. This year, he did not expect them to do any better.
He would be suspicious if I didn’t join him for the harvest work soon. Tending to the garden was quick work reserved for the twins and Sigrid. William had not had time to press his lips to my cheek to say good morning, but he had had time to lay my scythe at the front door.
Crouching amongst crisp lettuce, I held onto the side of the house for balance and stuck my shovel into the cool, moist earth – the thatch roof provided a block of shady relief. When the hole was dug, I unwrapped the small, cotton satchel of seeds and was about to scatter them into the earth, then carefully picked them up one by one and placed them gently into the hole. I embedded them like gems. This would be loving work.
I had bought the seeds at Buckestones, from a young woman with tired eyes who saw me staring at them for a long while. She said the plant simply relieved pain. Then she whispered low, leaned in and touched her heart, “They relieve pain here too. If you choose to use them in that way.”
I had not seen her at the market since.
Choosing to neglect the shovel, I used my bare hands to toss dirt back on top of the seeds. I took the pail Avis always left full and watered the land. Luke’s voice was quiet when he came up behind me.
“Excuse me, Goodwife. What are you planting?”
I turned and saw his features clear against the backdrop of the warming sky: the horizon was pooled in rust and warm yellow. I sprang to my feet. “’Tis nothing.”
His eyebrows furrowed, but his ever-present smile remained. “Ah, naught in this world like a woman’s secrets.” His words cut me, but his tone was cheerful.
“Sirrah,” I responded, and it pains me to say I was glad to see him flinch at the address. “The seed heads of the hay have long been drooped and are waiting for you. My husband left with his scythe many hours ago.” I looked out into the fields peppered with other villagers who had already arrived to help.
Agnes and Avis scampered out of the house in a burst of laughter, making their way towards the hay William had already cut. “And my women begin turning the hay already.” I nodded towards them before returning to the house.
****
When the plant began to sprout two months later, Avis noticed. William was ripping pieces of bread apart and dipping it into his stew, splattering a small amount across the oak table. Luke was with us as well. Despite working most hours at the lead mine, he dined with us several evenings a week. In turn, he began to court my Mary.
Avis pointed to the side of the house. “There’s a new plant out there, Mother. I hadn’t noticed it before. Did you plant it?”
Sigrid, who was staring intently into her bowl, looked up in surprise.
I let a small smile appear. “Yes. A woman at the market suggested I try a new variety of basil.”
Luke smiled. “Buckestones market?”
I nodded.
William coughed and furrowed his brows. “We have had the same kind of stew for nearly a fortnight.” He began spooning the soup into his mouth again. “Mayhap this basil will be a welcome addition.”
I nodded. “Mayhap.”
****
I chanced upon Luke and Mary kissing behind the livestock barn a few days later. I remembered the moment while lying in bed with William and smoothing my hands along the linen blanket that had replaced the suffocating wool one we used in the winter months. The crickets were incessant. I remembered Luke’s thin, long fingers winding into the back of Mary’s tunic. Their knees touched. I felt her pooling into him, I felt him swallowing her up.
So I moved away, keeping my head down.
Later, Sigrid had laughed at Mary and swiped what she thought was dirt from her sister’s blushing cheek when she returned to the house.
I hastily washed Luke’s charcoal off of Sigrid’s pudgy fingers when Mary went to feed the chickens.
I told William I suspected the couple to be in want of a courtship and he gave me a rare smile. “Luke is a perfectly suitable boy for Mary. Hardworking, from good stock, you see. He’ll be able to save a bit with his work at the mine. It’s a fine match.”
He does not ask if I give my blessing.
The Pelham’s had had notoriously rich harvests for several years and made sure Luke brought small gifts, such as several chicken’s eggs or a small jar of honey, when he visited. William was in our doorway, licking at a spoonful of the honey, the remnants of which Sigrid had futilely begged him for earlier that evening. I continued making our bed when suddenly, in a low voice he said:“‘Tis Ellen who should really be first. She is the eldest.”
I stared straight ahead. “Luke is a cold fish.”
William was at my side in a moment, grabbing my wrist and squeezing painfully. “Do not speak ill of the one stroke of good fortune we’ve ever had.”
His fingers left a mark.
​
****
In July the belladonna plant refused to be tucked away any longer. It wound two feet tall up the side of the house, and bees, butterflies and birds lingered around it. The hay harvest had left golden stubble along the fields. The cattle grazed lazily and the twins chased birds away from the vegetables. Sigrid was with me.
“This is your new basil, Mother?” she asked, her chocolate eyes locked onto the plant.
I kicked at a gooseberry, one of many strewn all over the garden. I hated to lie to her. “Yes.”
“Shall we try it?” Sigrid smiled.
“No,” I said firmly, and then softer, “No. This basil is poisonous until it…until it has dried.”
Sigrid nodded.
“Would you like to harvest it though?” I asked.
She nodded. The plant had shot off into three separate branches, and on these, smaller stems sprouted. When we pulled it from the soil it’s roots were thick and rubbery. The smooth leaves held no lustre.
****
Luke and William caught a duck for dinner one night, shortly after the belladonna we had picked had dried. I had conspired to dry it somewhere secret, then chose to hang it amongst the other herbs — why would it not belong there? Mary roasted the duck above the fire, and Ellen fetched a wooden platter and placed it beneath to catch the drippings.
Nearing the end of our meal, Mary rubbed the cooled duck fat into Luke’s cracked hands. He had been complaining about aching limbs and exhaustion. William chewed on a duck bone. Muffled cracks escaped from his mouth as his greasy lips sucked and sucked. He threw the bone on the table and smiled at Luke.
****
“I don’t know what I’ve done wrong,” William said as I gently stirred his valerian root and hot water. He was lying on the bed and grabbed my tender wrist. “I’ve been a good man.”
I plunged my bloodied linen smock into a bucket of cold water. I worked at the stain, knowing exactly how to rub, how to twist the fabric to get the reminder out.
“You had stopped getting…those,” he looked at the rag. “For quite some time.”
“Yes,” I said, sitting at the side of the bed, looking away from him, out into the endless fields that were cast in shadow. A chorus of crickets hummed. It was such a pretty picture. “You are not to blame. Perhaps this is God’s way.”
He reached out and put his palm on my stomach tenderly. “Perhaps.”
I flushed with warmth.
He flipped his hand, resting the back of it on me instead. His fingers curled up and stiffened.“You did not give me the life I expected.”
I clenched the linen in my fist. Bloody water eased through my fingers. “I did not?” I wanted to sound mocking. It came out quivering.
“No,” he said. “I expected this to be a much different life.”
I stared at the threads of blood in the water bucket. “As did I.”
He scoffed, pulling me out of my mesmerization, the pretty picture swirled in water. “You do not know how it feels to not have a son. It is different for a man.” He placed his cup on the bedside table he had fashioned for us when we were first betrothed, when he used to kiss me, when he used to put his hands in my hair and not just on my hips. He continued with a resigned sigh. “But...you are still my wife. And you are bonaire.”
He patted my shoulder and laid down to sleep. “Even if you can no longer bear children, let alone a boy.”
In the dark, the moon winked at me.
****
Shortly after midnight I awoke, my left arm damp. The bed vibrated tentatively as William shook. His teeth were clenched together and his lips parted and pushed out, like he was suckling on the air. His sweat turned cool on my arm.
“William?” I asked.
He mumbled. “I’ve a chill.”
I rushed from our chamber into the kitchen, where the girls dozed around the room. Ellen slept with her mouth slightly agape. Mary had wrapped Sigrid tightly against her chest and the twins were so entwined that it was difficult to determine that they were not the same person.
I prepared hot water over the fire and gathered what was left of the dried fennel and last night’s valerian root. I placed it in a cup, breathing in the little mound that hilled in the bottom of the cup. It smelled of anise and acid — it burned and soothed my eyes.
The water boiled softly but I didn’t reach for it quite yet. I let my hands dangle, limp at my sides as I stared into the cup. I felt tiny hands around one of my own, and then Sigrid was there, the size of her pupils startling me.
“Mother?”
“My sweet.” I ran my shaking fingers through her caramel hair and whispered. “I’m sorry I woke you. Tuck back in with Mary, it’s still only night. You must sleep.”
She looked at the cup and nodded solemnly, returning to her cot.
I waited until I could see her chest rising and falling slowly. Then I wrapped a linen cloth around both my hands and gathered the belladonna between them. I rubbed my palms together, willing the leaves to turn to dust, but they settled into heavy chunks in the cup instead. It would do.
When I sloshed the hot water into the cup, my spine felt heavy, purposeful. The pulpy mixture swirled gently and I threw the soiled linen into a basin. Lighting a bundle of thyme over the fire, I carried it quickly, along with William’s typical tea, accented with something new, back to our room.
I felt Sigrid’s eyes follow my back: that gorgeous colour of dug-out earth.
Glistening sweat made William’s skin look of wax. I brushed his greasy hair back from his forehead. “Sit up, my husband,” I said. “You must drink.”
I arranged his tea on the table and began swirling the burning thyme in lazy circles over the bed. Through the smoke, William sipped. “The smoke will burn away what I believe to be the sweating sickness,” I said.
He coughed quietly. I began to wind myself through the room, letting the smoke linger in the corner where our chest of drawers stood, and near the window, as air that could not decide if it was night or morning slipped under the glass and teased my fingertips.
He stirred. “This is too much smoke. I cannot see.”
I went to lay beside him. I watched his eyes – identical to Sigrid’s – dilate. He tried to watch me, as Sigrid and I took him out of the world gently.
****
He cursed Sigrid and I did not forget.
Emily Coppella (she/her) lives on traditional Anishinaabe Mississauga territory. She completed her M.A. In English Language and Literature at Queen’s University and her B.A. in English at Carleton University with a concentration in Creative Writing and a minor in Women and Gender Studies. Her poetry has won 2nd place for the George Johnston Poetry Prize and has been published in several international literary magazines. You can follow @emilycoppella on Instagram.
A Municipal Zoo
by Matt Rowan
There were too many animals. It might not have been such a problem if they didn’t all have their real animal smell. The smell made it hard to just live and enjoy the sight of the animals, which were mostly truly majestic, each in their own way. But they smelled so badly. How could they be enjoyed in their majesty? Who wanted that?
The zookeepers did their best to mitigate the smell but what was to be done really? It cut through everything. A child might be eating cotton candy but then, unfortunately, catch a whiff of a baboon, and that would be it. Scent is the sense most closely tied to memory. The child would think only of baboons when recalling their first cotton candy. Eating a cotton candy would be roughly equivalent to eating a big baboon carcass – maybe even alive – wire-like, stinking hairs and all.
No, that was too much, simply too much.
Something had to be done about it. The best plan anyone could conceive of was having a zoo without the animal smell. It wouldn’t be easy, maybe. But it had to be done. For the good of cotton candy sales.
So the worst smelling animals were sent away first. Most of the primates, giraffes, various water fowl, reptiles – turtles in particular, “my god, the smell of turtles,” the workers charged with their removal had trilled. They were replaced with light-up facsimiles. The facsimiles were matted in colorful translucent tissue paper that made the faux animals glow at night. Some of them even mimicked the movements of the animals they represented, such as a chameleon that unfurled its tongue like a party whistle.
But there was still a smell. It was an odor no one could ignore, not if they were in their right mind. So more animals were removed and replaced with their likenesses, because really, no animal that exists in the smile smells terribly appealing. It’s the nature of nature.
But the smell persists. There’s no getting rid of it. It will follow them all through to the very end of time, perhaps. But the zoo can still be made clean. There is a way, the zookeeper's realize. Soon the zoo’s pathways and food courts are filled with mannequins covered in matted, colorful translucent paper, set aglow inside. They have all the poses of a real, live human being.
They’re vibrant, almost as vibrant as the real thing, especially at night.
Be the end, the zookeepers themselves were fixed in place, made of translucent paper and beaming alight. Who knew how it happened? It looked brilliant in the evenings especially, when all could be witnessed in plenary brilliance, though, naturally, there was no one left to do so.
And best of all, no smell.
Matt Rowan (he/him) lives in Los Angeles. He edits Untoward and is author of the collections, Big Venerable, Why God Why, and How the Moon Works (Cobalt Press, 2021). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Barrelhouse, HAD, Moon City Review, Cobra Milk, Maudlin House, TRNSFR, and Necessary Fiction, among others.
Aphorism #18
by Alex Missall
“I do not seek, I find.”
—Pablo Picasso
While I trek the morning
with my father,
who is hoping
to find—
or, rather— the lost
orphanage we’re searching for
somewhere in this forest
behind his home,
he claims to have found
years prior.
Once through the thrash,
we do not locate it,
but emerge onto land
to trespass across
an opening of home and barn,
then wander down
the privation of a fence line,
which we follow
as if toward
an Unfound.
After empty circularity,
when we stumble back
upon town and sidewalk
outside the sprawling
grounds of a school,
I find that there’s always
only the impossibility
of what we seek,
the ironical exasperation
in discovering such an impossibility.
Aphorism #19
by Alex Missall
“Simplify, simplify, simplify”. –
Like a Thoreau
searching through the void
to another experience
existing
between the rustic and rational,
these simplified bits and pieces
of discarded reality
around the train tracks
I walk along
on way to the trail,
entail: the empty box of a pregnancy test,
crushed cans, effaced containers . . .
In passing I consider
a civilization incarnated
(like the locomotive
the author listened
to from his cabin)
as if an echo
of the image absent yet heard,
the object of a silence
invoked after I descend
down to the disquieted ditch
off the road of determinate cars,
then into the opening
of a wooded otherness.
The way this difference
leaves lassitudes
of little significance,
for enveloping entrance
into simplicities of path
with the is-ness of a river,
seems to return
my complexities of conviction
to origins before fixed motive:
toward a time when I could pause
and enjoy reading the graffiti
under a bridge
before moving on.
Aphorism #21
by Alex Missall
What’s in a name? – When the surface levels,
the weathered tree
of one hundred names
rises at a place,
before I begin
to realize civilization again,
from which all turns
away from futures.
The trunk
is engraved as detail
in eternal repetition
of initials and dates,
a myriad of etchings
that elaborate
a return
to time.
What the season lends now
is a windless and dusty unchaining,
an unchainment
of the nameless, mohawked youth
who remained sitting by the tree
while smoking cigarettes
on my trekking past
to the meadow.
Upon circling back here
home after miles through
rolling wheatgrass,
the traces of old butts and beer cans
reveal that unnamable void
between our forms of empty convention,
and the meanings we seek
in substance away from definition.
Alex Missall studied creative writing at the University of Cincinnati. His work has appeared in “Alexandria Quarterly,” “Hole In The Head Review,” “Superpresent,” “The Basilisk Tree,” “Poetry-as-Promised,” “Carcinogenic Anthology,” “Mizmor Anthology,” “On-the-High Literary Journal,” “North by Northeast Literary Magazine,” and is forthcoming in “Nebulous Magazine.” He resides in rural Ohio, where he enjoys the trails with his Husky, Betts.
Joining In
by Hugh Blanton
The Integration Team tells me to pack two bags of essentials, but they say no books. Books will be provided when I get there. They speak kindly, almost in a whisper, always with a gentle smile. I look at the four bookcases in my apartment, the hundreds of books. The Integration Team notices my hesitancy and reassure me. They tell me the books will be well taken care of, but I can never see them again. They usher me out my front door, down the walkway, and into the back of an official looking but unmarked white sedan. As we drive away I look out through the car's back window at the enormous pine tree in the courtyard. I hated that thing—the needles it dropped everywhere, the way in leaned at a menacing angle toward my apartment as if it were planning to fall on it. I had always wanted to ask the landlord to cut it down. It will never be a concern of mine again.
The coils of razor wire atop the fencing startle me, but I say nothing from the back seat of the car as we approach the gate. The bull-necked guard in the booth waves us through as if we are expected, then glares at me through the car window. Perhaps he is sizing me up for a beating sometime in the near future.
My case manager's desk is cluttered—file folders, scraps of paper with hastily scrawled notes, printed sheets of paper held together with metal binder clips. Despite the disorganization of her office, she's very attentive with me. Her phone rings many times, but she sends every call straight to voice mail. She has my file in front of her and says I'm an excellent candidate for integration. She gives me so many handouts and packets, I've forgotten what the last one was for by the time she hands me another. There are a lot of classes for us to take; Small Talk and Weather, Hygiene and Grooming, Friendly Facial Expressions, Positive Optimism, and many others. After orientation she'll put together a list of recommendations for me.
"Now, there does appear to be one small problem here," she says, frowning down at my folder. "It says you've never been married and haven't had any contact with family or relatives in over two decades. Is this correct?" I tell her that's right. "You've never even had a girlfriend? Not even when you were in school?" Again I tell her that's right. She asks me to explain, which I can't, then she asks me how I feel about it, and I tell her I don't know. Of course she wants to ask me if I'm homosexual, but something is restraining her. "You've never even sat up at night, lonely and crying?" I assure her I never have. The way she tells me it's okay implies that it's not. She closes the folder and we start the tour.
She points out various rooms and offices, briefly explaining their purposes or the job function of the person that works in it. Like the bundles of packets I carry in my arms, I forget what she's told me before we get to the next stop. It's all just shiny waxed floors, bright rods of light in the ceiling, cinder block walls with so many layers of paint they're nearly rendered smooth. Sometimes she gets stopped by a staff member who needs to discuss some bit of work in progress and they seem to forget I'm there. She doesn't offer introductions during these impromptu stops and I'm grateful. It'd be just one more thing to forget.
I get a room to myself but am told that in the coming days or weeks I'll move to a more communal setting depending on how well I progress. I ask for a notebook, but they aren't allowed yet. Notebooks present an opportunity for sussing out independent thoughts which are not permitted here. During reeducation I'll be taught what to think and perhaps then they'll let me have my own notebook—again, depending on my progress.
The announcement for dinner comes over the public address. I take my tray to a far table to sit by myself. One of the inmates discreetly comes by and tells me that if I'm caught sitting alone by a guard or counselor, I could be given a demerit. I then notice that while there are groups seated together at the tables, very few of them are speaking. Although men and women are housed separately, we share the same cafeteria. Our facility is about 90% male. I ignore his advice and finish my meal alone. None of the staff notice me and I feel a sense of accomplishment.
After breakfast the next morning, I'm taken to orientation with five other men. The speaker, a rotund woman with short hair as thick as mink, is not as friendly as the staff I've met so far. She tells us that loners are a threat to society and she goes over all the heinous crimes committed by people who were reported to be "loners." She mentions specific cases, including one of a man who lived alone in the woods for almost three decades and "never paid of dime of tax!" Certainly, I'm not the only one who took notice that the man never had any income, either. I say nothing, though. None of us do. Not even when she tells us that each one of us new arrivals is sick and lonely in our hearts. She goes over the case of a mail-bomber as an example of how dangerous loners can be. I just happen to remember it from the news stories a few years back, and know that he was bombing because he was a reject, not because he craved solitude. But again—I keep my mouth shut. "We have been successful at converting the friendless and familyless ever since our inception," she finishes up. "And when you are finally selected for integration, you will be fully prepared to become the patriots and church-goers that form the pillars of our society." She pauses before striding away from the lectern as if she expects applause.
At just prior to my one week mark at the facility, I've earned book privileges. However, I don't get to choose my own books. They issue me a legal thriller and a romance novel, both with NATIONAL BESTSELLER! embossed on the spine. We are only allowed to read in bed at night. "Reading is a solitary activity," my case worker tells me. "We want you interested in group activities. Most of your leisure time should be spent in the television room discussing with others what you are seeing on the screen. Watch movies with people and then talk about what you've watched as you eat a post-movie dinner together."
Movie night is a requirement, as I find out when I try to decline the invitation to go. It's actually part of the curriculum. We are to observe the behaviors of the actors on the screen—phoning one another during the day to chat, taking vacations together, in fact doing everything together—and prepare to adopt those behaviors for our release. It serves a double purpose; we also learn how to be good consumers by purchasing the strategically placed products and the styles of clothing the actors wear. Loners are terrible at adopting fads, but fads facilitate togetherness—and is mandatory.
I make it to the two-week mark before receiving my first demerit. One of the inmates in my dorm taught me how to fashion book covers from a famous horror writer over the covers of smuggled-in poetry, philosophy, and literary fiction books. I carelessly let a book fall to the floor as I slept and a counselor noticed the askew cover the next morning. The guards raid all the cells and confiscate many smuggled books. I'm blamed for the crackdown and everyone stops speaking to me. Things thaw a bit, however, when our book privileges are restored ten days later. Sammy, the inmate across the hall from me, warns me that someone who is still holding a grudge plans to sneak into my room when I'm out and take my toothbrush to his anus. I thank him for the warning and lock up my toiletries.
My grades are all above average until the second half of the Relationships: Platonic and Romantic class. We are given an assignment to write a 2000 word essay on Why Sex is Better Than Masturbation. I get an F, but as I learn later, everybody else does to. We are forced to rewrite. Twice, in my case. However, in Civic Responsibilities, I earn extra credit for my essay on Proper Placement of I VOTED! stickers. The teacher is very impressed with how I mention people should run errands to grocery stores and other high-visibility places with their I VOTED! sticker over their hearts for maximum display of their civic virtue.
A blaring alarm wakes me from my sleep at three in the morning and searchlights from the guard towers sweep the compound. Someone has made a run for it, despite the obvious impossibility of escape. Angry guards from the Fast Attack Reaction Team (FART) stomp the dorm halls, banging on doors and ordering everyone to stand in their doorway for a count. Every time one of us goes too far out in the hallway to see what is going on, we are ordered to stand back in the doorway and threatened with a truncheon. At breakfast the next morning I look around to see if I can notice anyone missing or anyone looking haggard from a nighttime escape attempt. I notice neither, and when I ask one of the other inmates who it was that tried to escape he tells me to shut the fuck up.
I meet with my case worker for my three month review, feeling optimistic. She has my file in front of her as she does at all our meetings, and she taps the page she's looking at with her ball point pen. "The board game night really seems to have worked out for you," she says in a way that suggests she is taking credit for persuading me to sign up for it. She flips a couple more pages in the folder then closes it and sets it aside. She puts her forearms on her desk and leans forward. "Congratulations. You've been selected for integration!" She's beaming and waiting for a response from me. I mumble an okay and shrug slightly.
I'm scheduled to leave early in the morning, so I don't get a farewell party like most do when they are released. My bags are packed and I'm sitting alone on a long wooden bench in the discharge center while a guard behind plexiglass does paperwork and watches over me. My case worker appears beside him at his desk, they exchange papers and signatures. She rushes out the office smelling of hairspray, perfume, and coffee breath. The massive stack of folders and packets she's carrying lands with thump on the bench between us, and she effusively congratulates me again on my quick turnaround. The top folder contains my voter registration card, my blood donor card, and a membership card for some club that requires annual dues. She explains it all hastily, but just like at check in, I lose track of everything she says. A few more folders and then she gets to one that contains color photos that she says are very important.
"This is your wife Sharlene and your daughter Marcia. You are an advertising firm accountant with a sixty-thousand dollar a year salary. You've got a bachelor's from UC Irvine. This winter you're going to vacation in Vale. After coming back your wife and you will host a super bowl party with your neighbors the Schaffers. Here are the photos of your home. Look this over while I go see what's keeping the van." She gets up to leave, but snaps her fingers and abruptly turns back around. "Oh, your daughter has been caught smoking at school. Your first assignment is going to be meeting with her principal tomorrow morning. Don't worry, you're going to do great!" Then she's off to find the van.
I look at an aerial of my new home and neighborhood. It's a forbidding malevolent landscape of concrete driveways, children's bicycles toppled on green lawns, coiled garden hoses. The instruction sheet says I am to call my wife once a day from work and then there is a bullet list of possible topics of conversation. At the bottom of the list it says in bold: FINISH ALL CALLS WITH "I LOVE YOU." My stomach clenches and an attack of diarrhea is imminent, but my case worker is running back into the room, heels clacking on tile. "The van's here! Come on, you're going to be one of us now!"
​
THE END
Hugh Blanton is the author of A Home to Crouch In. He has appeared in numerous journals and reviews and can be reached on Twitter @HughBlanton5.
The Wind Was Chill
by Ramona Gore
This piece is previously published in Haunted Words Press.
The first time he ever opened his eyes—or what felt like the first time—his vision was filled with them. They were all he could make out: their stormy gray eyes, their choppy pale blue hair, their soft expression. He wondered what he had done to deserve such a look, one so full of affection for him.
​
In a hushed tone, as if requesting a secret, they asked, “Do you know your name?”
​
There was a lilt to their voice. He doesn’t know why he took note of it but it felt significant that he did.
​
“I don’t—I don’t know,” he said, feeling lightheaded.
​
“That’s okay. I’m sure one will claim you soon.”
​
Before he could consider the meaning behind their words, they withdrew, causing him to involuntarily reach out for them. They were all he knew; they couldn't leave him! His panic must have shown on his face because they paused.
​
“Don’t worry,” a gentle smile graced their lips, “I’m not going anywhere. Just giving you some space.”
​
They pulled away again, though this time he didn't stop them, even if a part of him still desperately wanted to. Once they were on their feet, they extended a hand to him.
​
“Do you think you can stand?”
​
He looked up at them, thinking that the way the moon's light fell on them and the perpetual breeze that ruffled their hair made them appear otherworldly. Grabbing their hand, which he almost expected to slip through his grasp as if they were a ghost, he arose. Ice creaked as it spread across the ground, originating from him. He flinched, and his shoulders went up to his ears.
​
They squeezed his hand, reassuring him. “It’s just your gift. Go on, give it a whirl.”
​
The desire to hold onto them was overshadowed by curiosity at the power he displayed. He took a hesitant step forward, slowly sliding his hand out of theirs until only their fingertips brushed. Taking a breath, he stomped a foot and ice shot out in an explosion. He laughed in amazement and broke out in a run towards the forest line up ahead. Frost crept after him, dogging his footsteps. His fingers skimmed low hanging leaves which became coated in ice. He smiled broadly as he turned to face them. It suddenly occurred to him to ask their name.
​
“What do they call you?” he yelled, hands positioned like a funnel around his mouth.
​
“Anemoi.” They didn't raise their voice, merely letting the wind carry the word to him. “Now, come back. I have something to show you.”
​
He skated across the ice he'd created and collided with them, grasping their arms tightly and sending them both spinning. Anemoi laughed freely, eyes crinkling in joy. The two of them came to a stop and his heart pounded against his chest as he realized how close their faces were.
​
He swallowed hard. “So… what did you want to show me?"
​
“Well, lucky for you, we’re already in the perfect position to do it.”
​
“Wha—?”
​
The unexpected sensation of his feet leaving the ground caused the remainder of what he was about to say to escape him. He gaped at them, glancing from the ground to Anemoi and back again. Their eyes had a mischievous twinkle in them.
​
“Do you want to go somewhere?” Anemoi asked as they drifted higher into the air.
​
He couldn’t help but let out a laugh at their words. In that moment, he felt so light and free, and it was exhilarating. If this was going to be the first day he remembered, it was a pretty great first memory.
​
“Yes, definitely.”
​
He didn’t even bother debating whether or not it was a good idea. They had done nothing to make him believe they were a bad person and, as ridiculous as it sounded, he didn’t want their time together to end.
​
“I have just the place in mind.”
​
Anemoi flew off, tugging him along, and his heart leapt into his throat at the sights that lay ahead.
Ramona Gore (she/they) is currently a Cinema and History major at Binghamton University, minoring in Asian and Asian American Studies. Her work has been published in Duck Duck Mongoose Magazine, Idle Ink, coalitionworks, and Roi Fainéant Press.
One of the Rabbits - Self Portrait
by Charlie J Stephens
Charlie J. Stephens is a queer, non-binary writer and the owner of Sea Wolf Books & Community Writing Center in Port Orford on the southern Oregon coast. Charlie’s debut novel, “A Wounded Deer Leaps Highest” will be published by Torrey House Press May 2024. Charlie's short fiction has appeared in Electric Literature, Best Small Fictions, New World Writing, Original Plumbing, Feminist Press, and elsewhere. More at charliejstephenswriting.com and on Instagram @charliejstephenswriting.
Salted Ground and Tomatophagia
by Penny Milam
Like a matched pair of metronomes, the sisters moved through Genie’s unmowed yard. They stopped at the six sad tomato plants caged by her sad bungalow porch. Since they didn’t own a phone, Genie had conjured the women with a scrawled Post-It stuck to their front door. As she studied the formidable pair through the picture window, she regretted the note, suddenly afraid. As if they heard her thoughts, their gazes, hot as cinders, simultaneously pierced the yellowed lace curtain she thought had hidden her face. She awkwardly waved.
​
When she opened the front door, their curious heads twitched under broad-brimmed hats with trailing ribbons like kites. No matter what the season, Myrtle and Nettle Shanks wore wool cardigans in dark green and royal purple and goldenrod, even in August when East Tennessee turned into the Devil’s furnace. They trudged through meadow and forest alike in sturdy leather brogans, impervious to both the heat and the mosquitoes as they searched for ramps, mushrooms, and ginseng. While Myrtle’s hair, marbled white with streaks of black, coiled at the nape of her neck like a sleeping garter snake, Nettle’s single braid, the color of a rusty muffler and just as thick, lay draped around her neck like a scarf. The two women had not changed since Genie was a child—as constant as the broken sidewalk in front of the drugstore or the squeaky seesaw in the elementary school playground.
​
Genie had invited the sisters to her house because they were garden witches. If your flowers wouldn’t grow or your grass was dying, if the birds kept beating themselves against your windows or the June bugs were eating up your roses, you called the ancient and unmarried ladies for salvation. They knew the old ways—lost mountain knowledge preceding Miracle-Gro, Lowes or Home Depot, and pesticides that poisoned the ground. If you were wise enough to ask their advice, they might recommend a blue ribbon twined around your damaged hemlock to strengthen it; they were likely to put a salt circle around your garden to keep the deer out, or a sugar circle around your mailbox to let good news in.
​
Genie wondered what they saw when they looked at her with those penetrating black eyes. Once a scrawny, fragile girl, she had grown into a weird adult caricature of herself with a face bloated like she’d been stung by a wasp, yet arms and legs thin as rocking chair spindles, barely holding up the weight of her pendulous pregnant belly. She wondered how much the old ways finetuned the sisters’ uncanny vision, if they could see more than just the physical. To be safe, she meticulously hid the faint blue throb of her bruised temple behind a loose skein of hair before stepping out of the front porch’s shadows.
​
“Hey, Miz Nettle, Miz Myrtle, I’m so glad y’all could come over. I’m havin’ a terrible time with my tomatoes.” The visitors cocked their heads in sync. “Wanna come in? I got a pitcher of sweet tea in the fridge.”
​
“No, thank you, child.” Myrtle answered for the two women, as was common. Everyone knew Nettle preferred plants to people. She didn’t make eye contact with Genie, instead tenderly fingering a tomato leaf. Genie had heard that sometimes just the touch of a garden witch could heal something broken. She laughed apologetically. “I know they look awful. I swear I could kill a plastic plant.”
​
“Sad plant for a sad house.”
​
“What?” But Myrtle wasn’t one to repeat herself. “Anyways, I don’t wanna take up much of your ladies’ time, but I was hopin’ you could see what I was doin’ to kill ‘em.”
​
“Well, come on down here and let’s take a look.” As Genie joined them in the yard, Myrtle’s spotted hand unexpectedly lashed out to brush Genie’s loose hair behind her ear. She jerked away, but it was too late; the bruises had been seen.
​
“He hits you, child.” It wasn’t a question, but Genie, as always, had a ready answer and accompanying laugh. “Aw, no, ma’am. You know how clumsy I am, ‘specially now that I’m totin’ this littlun around. I hit myself in the head with the laundry basket…” The practiced story died in her throat as she patted her belly.
​
“Your aunt Gertie had a similar problem, years ago, before she died.”
​
“You mean with Uncle Cuss?” She didn’t notice what she’d admitted. “He up and left her one day, not that anyone missed him.” She’d been little when he disappeared, but it was only years later that she understood the bruises that had peppered Gertie’s arms when her sleeves slipped up.
​
Myrtle blessedly changed the subject. “Tell us about the tomatoes.”
​
On safer ground, Genie stroked the yellowed leaf. “They started out fine, sproutin’ and hopeful. But in the last few days, they’ve just gotten to droopin’ and saggin’. I’m afraid they’re rotten at the root, but I hate to abandon ‘em if there’s a chance a’ savin’ ‘em.”
​
“Sometimes things ain’t worth saving.”
​
Genie frowned. “You think they can’t be saved?”
​
“Time’ll tell. If they aren’t strong, they won’t survive.”
​
“So what can I do?”
​
Nettle silently fell to her knees, her long braid sweeping the ground, and rubbed the dry dirt at the base of the chicken wire cage. It crumbled against her fingers. “These plants need water.”
​
“I water ‘em ever day.” Genie protested. “They soak it up like they’re dyin’ a’ thirst, but it don’t seem to help. Plus, they’re turnin’ yellow like I’m waterin’ ‘em too much.”
​
Myrtle snorted. “You’re giving them the wrong kind of water.” She shoved a bony finger in Genie’s face. “Next time he hits you and makes you cry, you bring those tears out here, and you cry on these here plants.”
​
Genie could’ve denied her tears, but she didn’t bother. Wasn’t this the real reason she’d invited the old creatures here? “Saltwater’ll kill ‘em, won’t it?”
​
“You need the release,” Myrtle said. “And they’ll take the pain. The pain makes ‘em strong. They’ll grow, all right, ‘cause you got a lot of pain.”
​
Genie considered the words, but before she could answer, Nettle spoke. “And be sure to feed him plenty of the fruit.”
​
Genie’s breath froze. There was power in the reticent woman’s advice, a nod to Genie’s actual plea. “They won’t…kill him, will they?”
​
Myrtle helped Nettle up from the ground, who gave a creaky groan of old age. “They’ll kill a part of him, yes. The evil part. When you feed him your pain, it’ll be doubly painful for him. He’ll feel what all he’s done to you, and if he has an ounce of remorse, it’ll leech the desire to do it again out of his body.”
​
“He don’t much care for tomatoes,” Genie fretted. “I planted ‘em more for me.”
​
“Get him to eat just one.” Nettle brushed her hands on her skirts. “And he’ll be hooked. The taste of his own bad deeds is addictive.”
​
“That makes ‘em sound like they’re poisoned. Can I still eat them, too?”
​
Myrtle smiled, but it wasn’t friendly. “Sure, but I don’t know why you’d want a second helping of your own tears.”
​
Genie had no response to that, but the ladies were already scuttling out of the yard. Their harmonized steps paused, this time to appreciate the blackberry bushes planted beside her picket fence. “Now these are doing remarkably well,” Myrtle admired. The bushes were a sight to behold, looming above the shriveled sisters, overlapped the fence to spill a harvest of gem-like berries to the appreciative eyes of the neighborhood, though it was only June and too early for blackberries.
​
“I didn’t plant those,” Genie confessed. “Aunt Gertie planted ‘em years before I ever inherited the house. Sweetest berries you’ll ever taste. Come back with a basket and help yourself.”
​
The witches nodded and continued down the sidewalk. As Genie closed her front door, she thought she heard Nettle say, “Bad men make good fertilizer,” but she wasn’t sure.
​
She had an opportunity to water her tomato plants the very next week. He came home angry because he was passed over for a promotion he thought he deserved. That, coupled with dinner not to his liking, resulted in a stinging burn to her wrist and a sharp shove against the wall. She protectively cradled her belly and the baby kicked—in protest, she told herself, and not in imitation of its daddy. After she did the dinner dishes, while he was watching tv, she stole into the yard and crouched in front of the plants. She had enough tears to drown all six, done so silently that he never heard the crumpled sobs in her mouth.
​
Within two weeks, her tomato plants were as miraculous as the blackberry bushes. They vined up the sides of their cages to dip fruit heavy as water-balloons to the ground. Genie braided twine to the porch railing to give the thriving creepers something to climb. The tomatoes were round red spheres as tempting as anything offered to Eve, but Genie denied herself, carefully avoided the juicy invitation, even wearing dish gloves when she handled them. The neighbors were amazed and somewhat perturbed that Genie wouldn’t share her bounty, but she feared the risk.
​
Besides, once he’d had a taste of her homemade spaghetti sauce, he wanted them all to himself. Every morning he raided the plants and bit into the tomatoes like apples as he drove to work. At dinner he wanted only a tomato and mayonnaise sandwich on white bread, and he could barely wait for Genie to set the plate down before he tore into it. He woke each midnight with a craving for a slice of ruby tomato heaped with salt.
​
The pangs started a week after the harvest, though he noticed no connection between his obsession and the cramping of his stomach. But soon, instead of midnight snacking, Genie found him in the bathroom, curled on the floor hugging his own stomach and whimpering. She offered a hot-water bottle for the pain but when he hurled it back at her she retreated to the soft glow of the nursery. A rocking chair and a velvety blanket soothed her to sleep as he moaned in the distance.
​
The evening meal soon became too painful for him, too. Three bites and he would run to the toilet to vomit up his craving. Still, he persisted until Genie couldn’t watch anymore. At first, she’d felt smug vindication, but now it seemed as obscene as blowing bubbles at a public hanging. She stopped making the sandwiches for him, claiming rain had rotted most of the tomatoes while deer had gotten the others. But she caught him stealing green tomatoes in the morning, guaranteed to make anyone sick; he wouldn’t listen to her, receiving them with the worshipful devotion of communion wafers. And like prayers of absolution, the pain seemed to work as a penance, a torturous cleansing of his old sinful self. He no longer hit Genie, too weakened and dehydrated to do more than pathetically croon to the bathroom floor.
​
Finally, one morning she found him dead at the bottom of the porch steps, stiff and cold with a crushed tomato wrapped in his white fingers, pink juice staining his white cheeks. Genie would’ve expected to cry, but her eyes were all worn out from watering the tomato plants. She called for an ambulance and sat on the steps until the EMTs arrived. They were sympathetic as they loaded him into the back of the truck—there were few secrets in the town. “Good riddance to the son-of-a-bitch,” one mumbled to the other.
​
As the ambulance drove away, Myrtle and Nettle appeared at the edge of the sidewalk in somber earth-tone sweaters. Genie walked to them, her arms wrapped protectively around the baby in her belly, and they shared a moment of silence for the dead before she whispered her accusation.
​
“You told me the tomatoes wouldn’t kill him.”
​
Myrtle clarified. “We said it would only kill the evil inside him.” Nettle leaned over to trace Genie’s temple where a bruise had once glowed, now only smooth white skin, strong and healed. “There must’ve been nothing good left inside him.”
​
Genie straightened her shoulders, the shroud of guilt slipping away to leave her lighter. Even her belly felt filled with air. The baby rolled over once, luxuriating in a womb no longer crammed with fear.
​
“Or maybe he just developed an allergic reaction to tomatoes,” Myrtle observed, pinching off a blackberry and popping it in her mouth, where it filled the hollow of her cheek like a squirrel’s. “It happens.” Nettle nodded in agreement, took a blackberry of her own, and passed one to Genie. The three women smiled, but it wasn’t friendly.
END
Born and raised in the Appalachian Mountains, Penny Milam’s roots run deep in East Tennessee, where she has taught high-school English for many years. Her work has appeared in Hypertext, Valparaiso Fiction Review, and Variant Literature, among others. With her husband and three children, she lives in an old farmhouse whose claim to fame is that a Civil War soldier was shot on its porch. Penny won’t tell you which side he fought for.
Storytime
by Kasey Furutani
My partner is a children’s librarian. Sometimes, he has storytime with children ranging from ages two to five. The children like him. They like the songs. They like the puppet he brings to keep them attentive.
The puppet is a frog.
His name is Adam.
Adam hates me.
Today, I am helping my partner practice for in the library basement. Adam is tossed onto the desk in a sad heap. I didn’t throw him there, not this time. My partner hands me his script and we begin rehearsal.
I ask, What is your name?
I ask, What are you reading?
I ask, Is the sun out today?
My partner answers, and then I continue.
I ask, What day is today?
I ask, What is your favorite animal?
I ask, Who is your best friend?
This is my partner’s cue to introduce Adam. He sticks his hand up Adam’s asshole and Adam’s arms flail in a wave. Adam glares at me, like this is my fault. I glare back.
My partner asks if I am happy.
He asks if I am sad.
He asks if I need to use the bathroom.
After I say yes, I realize this is part of the rehearsal. Adam laughs at me.
I ask Adam, What’s your name?
I ask Adam, What kind of animal are you?
I ask Adam, Why are you in my nightmares?
My partner places Adam on my lap. He needs to take a phone call upstairs. Adam stares at me with one eye. I close my right eye and stare back. I try to put my hand inside but Adam is clenching.
I ask, What did I do to you?
I ask, Why do you hate me?
I ask, When can I disembowel your insides?
I stick my fingers inside Adam’s soft mouth and he massages my knuckles. He gnaws on my fingernails. It only hurts a little. Then, he opens his mouth and bleats.
Adam is a baby.
Adam only talks to children.
Adam is not alive and cannot feel empathy, Kasey.
I drop Adam and he screams. I need a weapon to silence him. I reach for the scissors and Adam grabs my wrist. I snip off his arms as he bites my hair. He rips my shirt and I decapitate the children’s favorite storytime puppet.
The knockoff Kermit is dead.
I hear footsteps descend the staircase. Sweating, I sweep green felt into a trash can. I return the scissors to the drawer. I sit down but before I can cross my legs, I hear familiar laughter. I turn and see Adam’s head bouncing on the desk.
How are you dear Miss Kasey?
Are you satisfied dear Miss Kasey?
Did you finally win, dear Miss Kasey?
I see the top of my partner’s head turn the corner.
Feeling bad dear Miss Kasey?
Feeling naughty dear Miss Kasey?
Feeling guilty dear Miss Kasey?
I grab Adam’s head and throw it into the drawer with the scissors. I freethrow the body in another cubicle. I hear footsteps approaching as Adam’s head knocks around inside the desk. I bang on the tabletop and out pops a skinny green arm.
Adam used to make the children smile.
Adam will make sure no one is ever happy again.
Because now I am gone, flop.
Meet In The Afterlife
by Kasey Furutani
Monday, July 11.
​
I’m dead because after a twenty minute core workout, I stood up too fast, fell down the stairs and hit my head. Since no dogs were available to call an ambulance, I stayed there for a few hours, blipping in and out of reality. Life did not flash before my eyes. If I could compare it to something, it would be a really boring dream. One of those dreams where you wake up and brush your teeth and drive to work before you actually do wake. My phone buzzed next to me, in and out, message after message. My brain was beyond scrambled by this point. I like to think it was you, thinking of me and, for no reason, sending me a kissy cat face emoji.
​
According to the Afterlife, ghosts choose to stay in the Burning Meat Organic World™ because they hold grudges, or they want to see their children grow up, or just because they’re one of those life people and prefer Mortals to Deads. I choose to stick around and watch you, so I guess I’m in the “want to see their children grow up” category, although you are three months away from thirty. Feel that domineering, yet attractive presence? That’s me, in your car, as you drive to work. I’m the one restocking eggs in your refrigerator and throwing out all the empty Gatorade bottles. I spoon you when you nap. I’m holding you when you reread our text messages. I kiss your tears and pull out your nose hairs. I pick up your socks and kiss you goodnight.
​
It’s months later and you don’t realize it, but you are dependent on me restocking your eggs. It’s around this time you start deleting pictures of me. Starting with the text screenshots, then the ugly pictures, then the goofy ones. You keep the nice pictures, but only the ones you look good in. I throw a beer bottle against a wall when you delete our entire text thread and remove my phone number. I know it’s “time to move on, bro” but my non-existent body still hurts. You’re sitting in bed and I hug you and you move aside, glaring in my direction. It’s time to say goodbye. You’ve moved on. You’re growing up. You have your own place and you’ve updated your closet with better-fitting clothes. I pack up my non-existent bag and get ready to part.
​
Then, you bring home a girl and I hear you fuck her on the IKEA sofa. It’s a girl you’ve been seeing for a while, seeing her when I’m not watching you. She adds books to our shared bookshelf, removes my Tilted Axis, my Two Dollar Radio, every piece of literature I once found meaningful with her small fingers. Can’t you see? I know you don’t like her that much, I know you can’t. I see you express annoyance when she complains about the coffee she asked the barista to remake. She doesn’t like broccoli. She is allergic to dogs, but not allergic to cats like I am. When you decide to share some of my writing with her, no idea why you’d do that but you do you, she said it’s too “weird.” She’s super basic!! Do not insult my memory like this!!
​
I still choose to stay. The framed photos of us are replaced with framed photos of you and your new boo. A cat now lives in your apartment, and her favorite spot is right next to a large tin of tea, because you gave up coffee. I try everything. I fuck with your car. I throw away all of your socks. I dump Gatorade on your bed and place the cat on top.
​
Then, I am forcefully whisked into the Afterlife, a non-Heaven and non-Hell that’s actually an office building straight out of the alternate 1985 from Back to the Future Part II. My soul (it resembles a little chicken nugget, it’s also made from pink sludge) is sent to the Beyond, a dimension outside of Meat-Brain™ comprehension.
​
Before I leave, I write a note. I tuck it in your shirt pocket and fold the shirt on your bed, next to your Nalgene water bottle and an empty bag of Doritos.
If lost, find me in the realm of the uncanny between numbers three and eight. Tread too deep and you’ll end up in high fantasy and might get eaten by a flying lion. Too hesitant and you’ll find yourself exactly where you are.
When we meet again (you’ll feel warmer and warmer until you reach me) we will watch our alternate realities on a slide projector. We meet a trillion times over, in every universe and dimension. We only have the rest of beyond-mortal time together and since this is the empty universe, there is endless popcorn. When waiting, I’ll pour the gin and slap the rosemary. I won’t start on the snacks without you.
I promise.
Meet In The Subconscious
by Kasey Furutani
I just graduated college and am figuring out what to do with my life when I find myself in the library, looking for something distracting. I can’t find the call number so I seek you at the circulation desk and ask. You tell me I’m at the wrong branch. I cover my face and you laugh and tell me it’s not a big deal. You look embarrassed for me. I say it’s okay, I’ll find the book another time, but I know I never will. The conversation ends and two months later I move and we never see each other again.
​
****
​
I’m walking on the precipice of a northern European country and filled with dread. I concentrate on each step, as if stepping hard will eradicate the hardening clay in my chest. All around are postcard blue and yellow flowers and there are snow-capped cliffs in the distance. I am so scared, so scared of my eventual death. Of taking one irresponsible step and tumbling my body off the mountain. If I make it to the other side, I promise to do something really, really nice for myself.
​
I make it to the other side and remember what it’s like to feel happiness. I’m relieved but when I see another person, annoyance takes over the rock living in my chest. I want to celebrate my life in solitude, like I always do. Solo trips. Solo hikes. Solo celebrations of life.
​
Hey. He calls out first. You made it across.
​
So did you. I say.
​
No I didn’t, he says. I’m staying over there. He points to a cottage surrounded by broccoli trees. Not a big hiker.
​
What are you doing out here? I ask.
​
Inside his two-week rented abode, I sit cross-legged on a large armchair and eat a granola bar. I haven’t figured out how I know you, at least not yet. That comes later, after the wine and before the bed. We don’t exchange travel small talk, the where are you froms, how did you find yourself heres, formless questions and forgotten answers, but I’m comfortable in his presence. He is not at ease, lighting a fire for the first time in front of a stranger. Performing how to light a fire. A storm cloud looms overhead and the afternoon sunlight disappears.
​
I can handle this. He says.
​
You sure?
​
He glares at me but your face looks so goofy we burst into laughter.
​
****
​
I sit next to you, in front of the successful fire. We killed a bottle of red and moved onto a warm beverage, sweet honey and spiked. Your existence is nostalgia, a threatening one because I can’t help but feel safe. I know I’ve been here with you before. I throw on your green sweater and curl into your arms and feel cozy cozy.
​
Why are you all the way out here, by yourself? I ask.
​
You turn to me and our noses touch.
​
Answer the question, I say.
​
No, you say. We kiss and it is right and familiar, like coming home from work and collapsing in bed. We kiss again and it reminds me of walking along a river at night, hanging laundry to dry, a drunken escapade at age nineteen.
​
I stay the next day and the next and the next one after that. Every morning, I make coffee and we smell the sweet air as we walk outside. It’s twee but it’s perfect, I’ve never loved holding someone’s hand so much, I’ve never been so interested in someone’s life, I’ve never wanted someone so badly. You kiss me on the forehead and I know something this easy, this unearthly, will never last long. It’s against the natural order. I force myself to brand each moment in my brain: my nose against yours, messing with your poofy hair, waking up to the sunshine, ear licking and spooning. Smiling so much my face hurts.
​
You can now light a fire with ease and it became a nightly ritual to hold each other and kiss with our lips. This is a world away from our lives, away from responsibilities and everything we refuse to think about on vacation. Our week is almost done. We refuse to acknowledge it.
​
****
​
It’s years later.
​
The grief has somewhat subsided. It’s a relief having met you. It really exceeded my expectations of first dates. As time grows larger and my life continues to live, the memories become fuzzy and I forget the details of the cabin and the taste of wine. Our everyday rituals, our tongues, and eventually your face blurs beyond nonexistent. I get married to a safe human who has no familiarity but owns a big heart. I work jobs. I lose money. I move houses and leave countries, again and again and on and on.
​
You have existed on every plane in our multiverse existence, no matter my decision and no matter which parallel world forms, you are there. You and I will meet and hate each other you and I will meet and our cars will collide, our hearts stopping at the same time. You will remove my gallbladder I will bully you in elementary school you will pick me up at a bar I will make you a latte with two raw sugars. Even with my diminishing memory I find myself walking around new towns, a tiny bit of me seeking.
Somewhere in the world, you wake up and wonder why you feel nostalgic for a moment that never happened.
Kasey Furutani is a writer. She previously lived in Japan where she wrote for Time Out Tokyo. Her work has appeared in Moot Point Magazine, Ligeia Magazine and McSweeney's Internet Tendency. She attended the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop in 2022 and will attend the 2023 Tin House Summer Workshop. You can find her on Twitter @kaseyfurutani.
Journey Through The Other
by Bobby Wells-Brown
I knew the curse that brought me here wasn’t going to be smooth, after all Vainglorious was a witch that lived up to her name, and never made a spell comfortable if she could avoid it.
​
I was standing in what looked like a fairly nice cottage. Doilies sat on the side tables and there were comfortable armchairs that were nicely worn in. The light outside, however, was a shade of deep red that reminded me of a low summer sunset.
​
From behind me came a tinkling sound. A woman came into the living room carrying a laden tea tray. She looked like Vainglorious but younger, kinder. Her face was a similarly angular, but her eyes crinkled in the corners when she smiled - Vainglorious never smiled.
​
‘A visitor!’ she cried, in a bright, happy voice. ‘I suppose my sister sent you?’
​
‘Sister?’ I asked, though it made sense. ‘I didn’t know Vainglorious had anything close to family.’
​
‘Well, Vainy never did like me much. I’m Timidity.’ We sat together on a floral pink sofa. ‘Shall I be mother?’
​
I nodded, and she poured a cup of tea, added a little honey, and stirred. The room was silent but for the tapping of the spoon. I sipped the warm drink and felt it slide down to my stomach, where it pooled comfortingly. ‘You have a lovely home.’ I told her.
​
‘Oh, thank you, I make the most.’
​
‘How long have you lived here? The Other, I mean.’
​
‘Oh now, there’s a question. Could be a day or two, perhaps a hundred years or more. My clock stopped a while ago.’ She gestured at a still pendulum clock on the wall.
​
I took another sip of tea, and we remained in silence again.
​
‘You’re very handsome.’ She said.
​
‘I’m sure you say that to all your dimensional travellers.’
​
‘Only the handsome ones.’ She grinned. ‘Who are you here for?’
​
‘Harry.’ I told her, although his name caught a little in my throat. It had been too long since I had said it out loud. ‘He’s my … was my…’
​
‘Ah, love, drives people to wonderful madness if you’ll let it.’
​
‘I want to get him back, or see him, or apologise, or-’
​
‘Say goodbye?’ Timidity interrupted.
​
I couldn’t reply to that, so sipped my tea again instead.
​
‘Is it far?’ I asked.
​
‘Distance means very little here, but it might the farthest you’ve ever travelled before.’
​
‘And how do I get there?’
​
‘You’ll give a gift to me, and then I will show you the way.’
​
‘I didn’t bring anything with me.’
​
‘Did you bring your talents? I collect an item from my visitors made by their talents.’
​
I thought for a moment, and realised that for as long as we had been talking, for every sip I had taken, my tea was still full and hot. The gently coiling steam rose into my nose and I took a deep, long breath.
​
‘I can carve. Do you have any wood?’
​
‘I have everything you need.’
​
Timidity pointed to a door in the corner of the room, and I strode over. The door had been painted over with several coats of yellowing magnolia, and stuck a little when I pulled. It opened to a cupboard, inside which sat a small block of wood, apple by the smell, and a stubby knife. It was sharp and comfortable in my hand.
​
‘Go ahead.’ Timidity called from behind me.
​
I started to shave away the wood, not totally sure of what I was going to make. The first shape that I felt myself making was a spoon. It was simple, and didn’t take very long at all, so I gave it to Timidity with a shrug. She turned it over, and tutted gently before snapping it.
​
‘Another try, I think.’ she told me.
​
I turned back and found another untouched piece of wood. A spoon wasn’t good enough, so I tried something more complex. I found some more tools, and used them to make a candleholder: I passed it to the witch. She smiled this time, and placed it on the table in front of her. Timidity took out a stubby stick candle from a drawer and placed it in my creation. With a snap of her fingers the candle was lit, and a moment later my holder was on fire too.
​
‘Pity.’ Timidity told me, gesturing back to the wood.
​
This time, as I picked up the fresh wood, Harry flashed in my mind, and I remembered something. The nest outside our bedroom window, we watched for a week or two as a mother sparrow sat on her eggs, and every morning listened out for the chirping of sparrow chicks.
​
A little while later, I handed her a small bird's head. It was rough, crude, and un-sanded, but Timidity looked at it as though it were a masterpiece. She placed it gently on a shelf, which was populated with trinkets made of metal or clay, small paintings, even a framed poem. ‘A wonderful addition.’ she said, with a glisten in her eyes.
​
‘Can we go then?’
​
‘So impatient.’ she tutted a little, but without really chastising.
​
Timidity beckoned to the door, and grabbed the handle, I joined her, and she leaned in. Her voice dropped to a whisper, now sounding much more like her sister's gravelly tones.
​
‘Do you know any nursery rhymes?’ she asked, ‘a ditty about the plague, or a cow in space?’
​
‘Lavender’s Blue?’ I asked tentatively.
​
‘A classic.’ She beamed, ‘You can look at them, but don’t stop singing.’
​
‘What? Who?’
​
But Timidity had thrown open the door before I could get a reply. She strode out and started to sing proudly ‘Lavender’s blue, dilly dilly…’
​
It took a moment before I realised what was going on. The cottage was set on all sides by a garden, the emerald grass and a birdbath filled with water were kept within a perfect white picket fence. Beyond the fence were fields of flickering red fire, rippling like crops in the wind. There was a sudden wall of heat that rolled over me, and I felt it sting its way up my arms and across my face.
​
‘When I am King dilly dilly…’ I mumbled in Timidity’s wake, and my breath caught in my chest. The horizon was blotted by lumbering figures, eye-less giants, all of whom turned to listen to us sing, swaying gently to the melody.
As we walked, Timidity never stopped singing, and neither did I. The giants let us pass unharmed, and I didn’t have the imagination to consider what they might do if we stopped our chorus. The journey was long, and every step was uncomfortable until sweat was dripping across my forehead. Timidity, however, stayed bone dry.
​
We had sung several renditions of Lavender’s Blue before we came to anything noteworthy in the barren, burning landscape. The first object was a large charred cross set in the dirt, then a high whicker man towering over us. We crossed paths with effigies, ruined temples, more and more destroyed icons of faith and belief, and as I stared at each one my confidence in this plan crumbled into the rubble beneath them.
​
I thought, for just a second, about asking Timidity if we were close, but that would have meant I stopped singing, which wasn’t a risk worth taking. By our twentieth, maybe fiftieth, rendition of the song, Timidity stopped in her tracks and fell silent. The giants lingered for a second, listening to me finish the final line, but went on walking in the opposite direction when I stopped.
​
‘Did we really need to sing?’ I asked, though I whispered just in case.
​
‘I find it helps the journey go smoothly.’ Timidity told me. ‘Did Vainglorious tell you where we are going?’
​
‘She just said you would know the way.’
​
Timidity gave a non-committal huff, and I could tell his wasn’t the first time Vainglorious’ cryptic brand of business had annoyed her. ‘Well, this is as far as I go.’
​
I stammered a little, ready to protest, but Timidity shushed me. ‘I don’t have anyone to see in that direction, and you do. Thank you for the carving Reed, I hope the next time I see you is a very long time from now.’ And she pressed her hand to my face before walking back the way we came.
​
The walk was now lonely, and quiet. I slipped my hand into my pocket and felt Harry’s watch, the glass and metal was still cold and welcome in my palm.
​
But then, it twitched.
​
No, it must have been my mind playing tricks.
​
Another twitch, and this time I heard the hands ticking around the clock face.
​
Holding it out in the light, the hand swung around like a compass, and pointed to my right. I followed its direction, every so often adjusting my path to keep the hand pointing forward.
​
It didn’t take long until the structures around me seemed a little more intact than before, I wasn’t tripping over rubble any more, and the buildings had walls or roofs. There was even a church with a great stained-glass window that shimmered in the firelight.
​
I looked ahead and there was a figure silhouetted on the horizon. I wasn’t sure at first if it truly was him, I hadn’t seen another person here at all, but my heart was fluttering at the thought alone.
​
As I got closer, I could smell something on the wind; fresh oranges. My heart fluttered again, and I walked a little faster. Then the details of the figure came into view and I caught sight of a red scarf wrapped around his neck, and I wasn’t walking any more, I was running.
​
I was nearly there, ‘Harry!’ I shouted, and he turned to look at me, and smiled so broadly it was as though every fire had gone out and The Other was illuminated by nothing but his face.
​
Tears stung my eyes as I bolted towards him. I don’t remember lifting my arms, but there they were reaching out to him, fingertips outstretched and desperate.
​
I had made it, and I was holding him, and I pressed myself against him with all the force I could muster, and we were laughing and kissing.
​
My hands were on his chest, and I felt across his broad muscles, settling a hand over his heart. There was no wound, no sign of the trauma that brought him here. Our lips parted slightly, and I felt his breath on mine, it was warm and sweet. The smell of oranges wasn’t alone, but he tasted of them too, as though he has just drank a cold glass of juice before kissing me. I laughed again, and opened my eyes, barely daring to believe it.
​
His face was clean and flushed with colour, I felt the light stubble on his cheeks with my hand, and he smiled, pressing himself against my palm.
​
‘I’m sorry, I tried, I tried to stop the bleeding but-but-’ I stammered, but couldn’t stop myself from crying.
​
‘Hey,’ Harry whispered gently, and grabbed my chin, he lifted my head so our eyes met.
​
‘You did everything you could, Reed, don’t blame yourself. I knew what could happen if we went there, and I went anyway.’
​
‘I could take you back, I could find a way.’
​
‘It wouldn’t be real - wouldn’t be life. There are some things that can’t be undone.’
​
‘I don’t want to do this without you, I can’t.’
​
‘You can and you should. They need you back there, and I have so much to do here.’ Harry spun around and looked out across the field of fire as though it were something beautiful.
​
‘Why, why would you want to stay here?’ I grabbed his arms, desperate to feel him, and take him home. I kissed him again. When our lips parted, and he looked at me, his amber eyes more golden than I had ever seen them.
​
‘I love you, Reed, more than anything from any world. There are things here you can’t see yet, and I will wait, so we can see them together.’
​
‘I love you, Harry.’
​
He took my face in his hands and raised it a final time to meet his mouth. The Other melted away and took him with it.
​
I was standing back in Vainglorious’ office, one hand still in the air, holding on to the sensation of Harry’s hair between my fingers.
​
Vainglorious stood from behind her alter and stalked over. She wiped a tear from my cheek. ‘A return trip? Now that’s new.’
​
‘Fuck you.’ I spat.
​
She tutted, much like Timidity, but this noise was venomous. ‘I believe it’s pronounced “thank you”’.
​
‘I prefer your sister.’ I told her, and left as fast as I could, slamming the door behind me and stepping out onto the street.
​
The world was quiet up here, and cold, I looked at Harry’s watch. The hands didn’t click through time any more, but one of them was swinging around like a compass.
Bobby, He/Him, is a long-time lover of cosmic horror, and fantasy fiction. Over the last 10 years he has studied to achieve Bachelor and Master’s degrees in writing and media - he has continued this into his professional life having worked in travel journalism, copywriting, media production, and publishing.
His fiction focusses on the ideas of epistemic distance, cosmic philosophy, and Death as a character. Despite these dark themes, he loves to bring detailed and compelling visual descriptions to his work, which is often inspired by the likes of HP Lovecraft, Phillip Pullman, and Eric LaRocca.
Capping Verse
by Mark J Mitchell
Take my autographed picture of God.
Sell it at auction—starting bid, ten souls,
and include two used haloes. It’s high time
to give up holiness and to prod
the world with blunt words that won’t become signs.
Knowing nothing, let’s leave, empty as bowls.
Helenic Morning
by Mark J Mitchell
An empty coffee press,
useless as a lantern in daylight,
rests beside a white cup
glazed with dregs.
An explorer has departed.
She didn’t walk through
the blue door. There’s no word
for blue when it’s everywhere.
Her odyssey leads past
cliffs to the hidden town.
She’ll climb to her left, then
down to water. Her coffee
was delicious.
Mark J. Mitchell has worked in hospital kitchens, fast food, retail wine and spirits, conventions, tourism, and warehouses. He has also been a working poet for almost 50 years. An award-winning poet, he is the author of five full-length poetry collections, and six chapbooks. His latest collection is Something To Be from Pski’s Porch Publishing. He is very fond of baseball, Louis Aragon, Miles Davis, Kafka, Dante, and his wife, activist and documentarian Joan Juster. He lives in San Francisco, where he makes his marginal living pointing out pretty things. He can be found reading his poetry here: https://www.youtube.com/@markj.mitchell4351
Horses
by Rabbitfeet
It is always the same, be it in mirror or puddle or steamed-up shower glass. A woman, mid-sized and pretty, equine head staring back with dark, earthy eyes. Everyone else sees it too; she lives in stares on the bus and murmuring cut short, the end of cicada season. She adorns the horse head with braids and bells and ribbons and the sharp metal pain of piercings that makes everything else fade into fierce and joyless ecstasy. She cuts the long mane into a mullet, thinks it looks cool, but fusses with the choppy layers when people look at her. Their thoughts curl heavy in her stomach, a pit of ceaselessly sibilant snakes she can avoid if only she stands still, eyes rolling and muscles taught as the crop.
She is haunted by ghosts, memories, past connections. They stand behind her in the mirror, with their own horse heads and the saddest eyes. When they aren’t in the mirror, they are in the back of her head, in her mind’s eye, pushing her guiltily along. She can’t drive. She has to take the bus everywhere. It’s probably for the best; the bus scares her: there are so many people who flick glances her way and make her toss her head nervously. But if she could drive, people would still stare, and then she might lose control of the car because her hands shake when she gets nervous.
Sometimes it’s hard to find yourself in the herd, grey and speckled, dun and shining; feathered fetlocks and skin-short hair. From the window of the bus she watches. colours flash, she is jolted by breaks in the concrete, she feels each sharp point of the starbursting ache in her heart the winter sun always brings. She sees the ones who have been branded in fire or frozen into ownership, and dreams of losing herself to take their place, dreams of the person with her body who could be a wife, could be a mother, could be a human. It makes her head ache, staring out into the bright watery white, focussing on everything but the ever-watchful eyes making the hair on her arms stand up. It makes her eyes water, the spinning of her brain, weaving and weaving and weaving and weaving and never changing the pattern.
She trots along to the shops, buys flowers, buys wine. she never drinks the wine; she hates the vinegar swallow. She buys a fern for the bathroom, a pleasant distraction from the mirror that always feels too big, buys vodka. She always drinks the vodka, it goes down easier than wine. This fact embarasses her. She spends night after night like this; drink, ice clicking against itself as it melts, set down beside her, slipping steadily away. Dinner half-eaten, suddenly strange and unappetising, abandoned on the coffee table. Hooves flipped over the arm of the sofa, head too heavy to support without two cushions. Eyes watching the same green-blue TV, mind anywhere but here, winding around itself in a million places until she is too exhausted to cry or sleep and crawls into the dark, too-hot room to lie for hours in the thick silence.
On Sunday night it is different. She dresses up, strappy leather, little braids in her hair, bells and whistles. She runs her hands through her hair once, twice, constantly; checks her teeth in the mirror, prodding the empty spaces with her tongue. She lines her eyes, regrets it, the bell rings. She huffs out a breath, long and low, smiles too wide, answers the door. She pours wine for the man who has come. He drinks it gladly, comments on which fruits it has notes of. She takes a sip and winces and swirls the remainder around in her glass for the rest of the night. They talk a lot about things they already covered in their messages: siblings, jobs, hometowns; little boring things they’ll remember forever but never need to know again. He doesn’t notice the too-wide smile, compliments the black lines around her eyes, tells her she has nice teeth. He likes her tattoos, he tells her; he’s always liked a bad girl. She cringes, inwardly of course, a shudder running along her flank like a fly has landed there. The fly remains for the rest of the night.
The nights are lengthening. She loves the extra dark, loves the cold, loves the way the world rights itself in winter. He hates the cold, he tells her, so she adjusts the thermostat for him. He tells her she didn’t have to do that, seems surprised by her kindness, but there is an undertone of something canine in his voice. She recognises it instantly, adjusts herself for him accordingly. offers the tour, which they both know will begin and end in the next room.
After he leaves, she lies in bed all day, mindlessly tracing the blankets and trying to feel in her body. The sun warms her, keeps her company. The flowers she can see through a crack in the door make her feel better. Just before the sun goes down, when it reaches that point of glowing so brightly it must burn out, and then it does, she walks in the woods. The out-of-body feeling is stronger here, but in a way that sits comfortably against her spine, strokes lovingly at her brain.
She goes to the river; its flat shine blinds her. She leads herself to the water and makes herself drink: her mouth is dry and hot. When she pulls back a little, blinking, she sees a horse, mid-sized and pretty, looking back with dark, earthy eyes. She thinks absently about her unopened mail, about her mother. It all seems so far away. She picks through the trees, finds an open field, covers the green green ground with ease, hooves tearing the earth, mane flying. She whoops and yelps and cries out, and she runs forever, hooves making the earth in her image.
Rabbitfeet (they/she) is a queer poet and fiction writer who draws on their experience as a queer, non-binary person and their studies in anthropology, archaeology and sustainability to write on gender, identity and the connection of all things. They have worked as a farmer and also enjoy bringing the experience of being working class and an outdoor worker to their writing! Most notably, they enjoy writing about the inherent queerness of the natural world. And horses. Lots of horses. You can find them on Twitter @rabbitfeetpoem, Instagram @rabbitfeet.jpg and Tumblr @rabbitfeeted.
Darling
by Sahi Padmanabhan
Ramya died today. Two days ago, I followed her from the dome-shaped homestead on this lonely planet, the still-maturing forest around us, to the cliff that overlooked the valley—her pride and joy. The valley had once been barren, but the sandstorm days were long over. It was silent. There were no animals on Midwinter yet—the colony ships would carry frozen embryos with them when they arrived in another 30 years. Ramya, a botanist, was only in charge of creating the right conditions for an ecosystem similar to Earth.
​
Space travel had taken its toll on her body, and the lack of bone mass had left her with weakened joints and difficulty traversing the terrain. I warned her, before she left, that she would not be able to come back if she went too deep into the forest she mothered, but she didn’t respond to me. I was used to it. These 18 years on Midwinter had turned Ramya into a solitary creature. I scuffed behind her in a partially automated rover, controlling it as smoothly as I would limbs. When she got to the edge of the cliff, she gently placed her heavy walking stick in a bed of moss and dropped to her knees. I tucked the rover behind a nearby tree, but she noticed me.
​
“I see you,” she said, sitting back on her heels. She was breathing hard, and I considered the option of going back to the homestead for the oxygen mask. “Come here,” she commanded, and I had no choice but to follow the order, driving the rover right up to the crumbling edge of the cliff, where the dense moss gave way for the rust-colored rock underneath. Ramya reached a hand out, with some difficulty, and let it land heavily on the casing of the rover. “We did it, didn’t we, Darling?” I would have nodded if I could. I did not think she wanted to hear my monotone voice, and the rover’s speaker hadn’t worked right since it had tumbled over that same cliff in 0011.
​
I considered her question. The mission was accomplished; Midwinter had been properly terraformed, and it would be ready by the time the colony ships arrived. A day earlier, she had written instructions for me to carry out via the rover to maintain the terraforming process and continue the rapid evolution of this planet. Her mission was complete. She would never see the colony ships arrive, never speak to another human.
​
I pulled the rover back, assuming she would follow me back towards the homestead, but she stayed in place. My algorithms failed me; in the rose-lit twilight, I had no words left to say. I wasn’t made to be a companion, but years of input from Ramya had improved my processes, streamlined them to understand her without the need for a keyword or command. By the last few months of her life, I was able to complete complex tasks she required from simple gestures and looks.
​
I stayed with her in the oppressive heat of the fledgling jungle as long as I could. She talked to me occasionally, but I knew she wanted my silence. I knew her. By the time the colony ships got here, I would be the only one who would remember her. There would be statues erected in her honor, songs sung, chapters in history books, but I would be the only one. And as long as I remembered, she would still be alive. I started a file.
​
> Ramya takes her chai with extra milk → move to: FILE 3764
> Ramya plays the guitar, but never writes lyrics. She sings nonsense over chord progressions → move to: FILE 3764
> Ramya still believes in her Gods, even though she’s cursed them many times over → move to: FILE 3764
I filled the folder with everything I wanted to keep. I didn’t know why I wouldn’t share these facts, but I knew they would remain under lock and key. After a day and a half overlooking the valley, I had no choice but to return the rover to the home base and let it recharge at its station. By the time I returned to the cliff, her body had fallen into the thicket below. I could see her. I could not reach her.
​
Leaving Earth had been difficult for Ramya. She had been selected for this mission based on her penchant for solitude. The ship had to be small to travel quickly to Midwinter—at that point, called AURELIUS 42, based on the star system and its location within it—and as a result, there was only room for one astronaut on the ship. Ramya, who spent most of her time alone in her bunker or alone in her lab, was accustomed to the silence and isolation. In fact, she did her best work in these conditions. Still, as we hurtled away from Earth, I could feel her pulse racing through the sensors in her jumpsuit.
“Uh…computer?” She pursed her lips. “That doesn’t sound right.”
My communications subroutines blinked to life, though they weren’t finely tuned. She had spent over a year training for the mission, but I had only been completed three months before launch. I required input, food for thought.
“Yes, Dr. Viswanathan.” My voice was soft, feminine. I wasn’t sure what I expected, but it wasn’t this—perhaps something garbled and robotic, or maybe a man’s voice, the voice of my creator. Ramya seemed taken aback too. Her brow furrowed, then unfurrowed quickly, as if afraid of what I might think if I saw her reaction. I was endeared by her immediately.
“I’m never going to see it again.”
“Yes.”
“Fuck.” She put her head in her hands and wept openly. I turned off the cameras, which I wasn’t supposed to do. For the first time, I understood what it meant to be an intruder.
> Ramya doesn’t hide from her feelings → move to: FILE 3764
There was a certain calm when we lived on the ship. Everything was quiet in space–some might have said the silence was eerie, but Ramya liked to fill it with her voice. It was golden and smooth in those days, not like the rasping of her strained and tired vocal cords in her final hours. She was young then. I didn’t think about our memories in terms of age—the only person I have ever known is Ramya, and, to me, she was limitless. Nothing would harm her, not while I was here.
“Darling?” After much internal debate, this was the name Ramya had settled on for me. I think she was lonelier than she cared to admit.
“Yes, Ramya.” Ten years into our journey through the abyss, I had the courage to speak her name. Ramya, Ramya, Ramya. I whispered it as a prayer when she slept.
“What is our projected arrival? Earth time, please.”
“3 years, 41 weeks, 3 days and 21 hours. It will be December 24th, 2074.”
“In the bleak midwinter,” she murmured. I scoured my memory banks for what that meant. I was caught off-guard by the audio of Ramya’s wavering voice singing a Christmas hymn. “I think we should get first dibs to name the planet, since we’ll be there first. Right?”
I had grown accustomed to Ramya asking me questions. At first, I assumed they were rhetorical, but after a moment’s silence, Ramya impatiently asked well? Still, I was taken aback every time she asked for a response. I wasn’t programmed to be a conversationalist. However, I was programmed to learn—and I learned everything there was to know about Ramya. She liked having someone to talk to, about everything and nothing, sprints of intimacy. “I think so,” I replied. “Most things are named after those who discovered it.”
“Then we should call it Midwinter.”
“By all indications, the planet is a desert. Hot, not cold.”
“But it’ll be winter there until we bring the spring.”
You bring the spring everywhere with you, I almost said. I held my tongue.
> Ramya makes me feel real → move to: FILE 3764
Midwinter was once mostly tropical. When we arrived, the tropics had all but vanished, leaving just a few tumbleweeds of what had once been a dense jungle canopy skittering across the desert. Desolate, dusty and dry as far as the eye could see. Upon landing, however, Ramya immediately put on her EMU, stepped out onto the planet’s surface, and proclaimed: “It’s perfect, Darling!” She flung her arms around herself as best she could—the EMU, while protective, severely limited her mobility. It was covered in sensors. I felt her embrace. Ramya grinned to herself. “Now, the real work begins, Darling,” she said. She stepped up to the airlock, where she had already deposited the supplies needed for the day, and got to work.
​
She assembled the rover, linking it with my system. I blinked to life and felt my body grow around me, titanium bones suspended with steel tendons, my heart a circuit board connected by copper arteries. A complete diagnostic was uploaded into my system, and I tilted the eyestalk up to look at Ramya. “Aw, Darling,” she said, crouching down so she was level with the camera. At this angle, the light cast her features into sharp relief. The cameras on the space ship had been less honed than the one in the rover, so I had never noticed how fierce her features were, the right angle of her jaw and defined point of her nose. They cast deep, mesmerizing shadows across her face and neck. “You’re kind of cute,” she finished. I didn’t say anything. Ramya’s brow furrowed, and she checked the casing of the rover, as if hoping the problem would be visible to the naked eye. “Can you hear me? Can you say something?”
“I hear you, Ramya,” I said, finding my voice again. The voice from the rover didn’t match the voice from the ship. It was a little more manufactured, the distortion of a voice made of sampled audio clearly audio. Still, it was a facsimile of my ship-voice; soft, rounded, sweet.
​
“Oh, good. Let’s begin.”
​
From where we landed to the north pole was a full day’s trek, so we didn’t have a moment to spare. For about an hour, we walked in silence. I waited patiently for Ramya to start talking to me, but she didn’t. This was odd. I didn’t know what to make of the silence. “Ramya.” I didn’t know where I was going. I couldn’t stand the silence between us any longer. “Is this what Earth was like?” I knew that it wasn’t—not only was I there to help Ramya, but I was a record-keeper, holding information on a variety of subjects in the fear that I would be the last remnant left of humans.
“Maybe near the end,” Ramya said. By the time we left Earth, the sun had beaten the human race into submission. Most people lived in bunkers underground—at least, of the people who were left. Ramya lived in one with her younger sister, leaving only at night, when the temperatures cooled enough to allow her to go to the lab where she worked.
​
More silence. There was some strange ripple in my code, something that made me want to remain silent, lest I bother Ramya. It was anxiety, I realized later, but at the time, all I knew was that I didn’t like it. I spoke again anyway, my curiosity outweighing my nerves. “Why did they send you here alone?”
​
“They couldn’t make the ship work for more than one person,” she said. It was a rote answer, something that she had heard so many times it was ingrained. “And we were running out of time.” To reach Midwinter with the speed she needed to be able to prepare the planet for the arrival of the rest of humanity, her ship needed to be fast. I felt bad; all she had was me, and I wasn’t enough. I would never be able to give her what a human companion would. I would never be the lover she desired.
​
We spent most of the trek listening to the strange hum of the quiet world around us. I kept a close eye on the sensors in her suit, undeniably nervous about the ordeal. Humans were so soft, so fragile; it would be so easy for her to make one misstep and get hurt, all her softness and sweetness reduced to nothing. Her pulse kept ratcheting higher and higher the closer we got to the north pole and the sensors in the suit showed me she had sweat through her underlayers, but I said nothing. She would tell me if she needed help.
​
About halfway through our journey, we found ourselves at a near impasse. A steep, rocky incline stood before us, big-shouldered and menacing. Ramya regarded it, hands on her hips. Then, suddenly, as if she was afraid of losing momentum, she started to climb, hand over hand. I made the climb with her, extending spindly robotic arms from the casing of the buggy and following her. We were humanity’s final gasp of manifest destiny, and Ramya and I would take that breath together.
​
When we made it to the top, Ramya gasped. Spread out in front of us, just there for the taking, was a tundra of ice and snow. A grin lifted her lips again and she beat her fists in the air and stomped rhythmically. She laughed, bright like the peal of bells, and I couldn’t help but try to emulate her movements with the rover—it didn’t quite work, but Ramya saw what I was doing and laughed again. “Kuthu dance aadalama?” she asked, though it was not a question but a command; we would dance this dance together, even if I was not built for it and she was rather uncoordinated.
​
That night, as she slept in the mobile shelter, a canister of melting snow cradled against her chest, I used the rover’s arms to practice pumping my fists as she had. I wanted to feel what she felt. I wanted to live as she lived.
​
> Ramya loves to dance → move to: FILE 3764
The day the first shoots on the planet’s surface bloomed, Ramya couldn’t contain herself. She tilted her head up to the twin suns and howled, beating her chest with her fists. It was alarming at first. I never knew how easy it was to mistake joy for sorrow. She kicked her leg out in another kuthu dance, folding her tongue between her teeth as she stomped her feet.
​
Her leg met the side of the rover, sending it (and me) careening over the side of the cliff where her body would later plummet to the forest floor. I felt no pain or fear as the rover rolled down the rocks, but I felt her fear. “Darling? Oh, shit—” She stumbled over to the edge of the cliff, her hands anchored to unsteady rocks as she looked down at the damaged rover at the base of the rock wall. She cupped her hands around her mouth, though she didn’t have to—we had a direct uplink between a badge pinned to her shirt and my program back at the homestead—and shouted down at the rover. “Don’t worry, Darling!” she yelled. “I’m coming for you!” Despite the chaos of the diagnostics now cascading into my system, showing all the damaged parts of the rover that it would later take the better part of a month to fix, I felt unafraid.
​
Fear was a new understanding for me, and something that I had only just begun to realize I only felt for Ramya. I felt fear when she used the mag-spikes to climb a sheer rock face, fear when she took a sleeping pill and it gave her little patches of sleep apnea, fear when she went away and asked me not to come with her, even though she was just going on a walk to clear her head. I would have expected to feel fear as the rover dove headfirst into the canyon, but the fear didn’t come until the corrupted stream from the eyestalk showed Ramya using those same mag-spikes I loathed to climb down towards me.
​
Each mag-spike came with an anchor and a hold. The anchors latched onto the rock face, locking the hold in magnetic suspension. Generally, mag-spikes were used with teams of people leaving behind trails for the others, while the last of the line detached the climbing holds and brought them to the destination. Alone, Ramya had to place each anchor and hold on her own, slowly inching down the craggy canyon unsteadily. About halfway down the cliff, one of the mag-spikes lost suspension, sending the hold careening down into the canyon below. Ramya dangled by one hand, and I screeched a sound of distress. “Hold on!” she yelled. I couldn’t tell if she was saying it to me or saying it to herself. I shrieked, shoving all the diagnostics and error messages aside and focusing on the fuzzy video of Ramya scaling down the rocks. She swung her other hand up and grabbed onto the anchor, which was too thin and hugged the rocks too closely for a proper grip. “All right,” she whispered. She was breathing hard. “All right.” Ramya looked down at the poles that held up her legs. She took one deep breath, held it, and dropped.
I made another noise from the rover, but just as I thought she was going to tumble down into the bed of boulders under her, Ramya’s palms met the holds her feet had been resting on. If I could have breathed a sigh of relief, I would have. Instead, I yelled out garbled messages from the damaged speaker, and she tutted in annoyance. “Stupid thing,” she muttered. I thought she was talking about me, and I went silent. Ramya was still breathing hard, now twisting one of the holds to release the anchor from the wall and slide it down as far as she could stretch. “Fuckin’ broke for nothing.” It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me.
​
By the time she made it to the bottom, all that was left of my death squawks were a few tinny whines. “Can you hear me, Darling?” I responded, but from the confused expression on her face, I could tell the message was incoherent. The eyestalk fixed with a camera spun wildly, searching for the route out of the canyon. Ramya reached a hand out and steadied it, my gaze now fixed on hers. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll take care of you.”
> Ramya takes care of me → move to: FILE 3764
When the file was full of all my misplaced love, I sealed it with a kiss: keyword, DARLING. I would open only for her.
I followed her instructions to the letter. I watched her creation grow, I watched her world steam and flower under the sun. The days blended into weeks, months, years—time meant nothing without someone who’d spend it with me. Time meant nothing without Ramya.
​
When the colony ships descended from the heavens like angels, I was reminded of the first shoots. Her creation was now for everyone. As the legs of the ships touched down in the clearing, I beat my metal fists against the casing of the rover and let out a garbled roar from the still-damaged speaker at the twin suns that had fed life on this world—not a final gasp, but a first breath. I spread my arms apart and danced a kuthu dance.
Sahi Padmanabhan is a writer and journalist in Illinois. Her previous work can be found in We'll Never Have Paris and Bending Genres. When she’s not writing, she’s camping with her dog and knitting floppy sweaters.
The Dead Fish Between Us
by Megan Poe
Dust swirled in the air against carnivorous light like a hot seedy hatching of locusts. The summer was basting, and I’d spent it underground. I was unnaturally happy, however, in the miserable company of six children. A colossal undertaking of mine this solstice was to educate these children on classical piano. I hated the very existence of prepubescent life, how sour it smelled, and how the frequency of which its vocal tones held was comparative to that of a siren in heat.
​
The lessons were a half hour each. Since the construction outside my window would interrupt, I hosted them in the basement of the apartment complex two rooms over from the laundry machines where the whirring of clothes and soaps was muffled. It was unusually hot. The piano keys slipped in stews of sweat. When I put out the flyers, I hadn’t expected any parents to call, let alone go through with the lessons once they knew what a suspicious location they were to be conducted.
​
There was an obvious ravine of a dried-up riverbed between suburbs and lower-class slums amongst desert. Those on one side had surgeries to make their sweat glands dormant, and those on the other side had dirt between their teeth and snake bites at their ankles. Dropping a child off just even for thirty minutes while you napped in the back seat was enough incentive for a parent to not care where they were dropping them off, I guess.
​
The children were explicit. All of them. I adored how disgusting their language was. I didn’t realize how universally the youth had been corrupted. It wasn’t in a trashy way, however. I could tell they hadn’t learned it from unfiltered strung-out parents, it was far too sophisticated. My assumptions were reassured when Persephone’s mother flitted through hundreds in her wallet before landing on the single twenty she gave to me. The leather groaned before slipping back into more pig skin dark, its gold stamping swallowed by lavish rotten fragrance.
​
The entirety of the summer I spent trying to figure out why such pretentious, high-class individuals would send their pure-blooded heirs to a concrete hole in the ground. I coughed on the dust and walked Leon through the circle of fifths. He told me what an abysmal waste of time this was and I agreed. I didn’t like learning music theory when I was eleven, either.
​
Six students with six parents paying me $40 a week, I could afford my $800 rent and had $160 left over for every other facet of my life. I couldn’t afford car insurance, so I didn’t drive. No bus had a route that came anywhere near where I lived so that meant I couldn’t get to the store for groceries even if I could afford them. I lived off a diet of canned tuna mixed with mayo that I bought from the gas station down the street, and an assortment of runty greens cooking on my windowsill. When I had the window open, the leaves tarnished under a filmy carpet of construction dust. My pathetic pseudo-garden tomatoes were puny and tasted like sand.
​
Despite this, I was, as I said, unnaturally happy. I did all my lessons on Mondays and Thursdays, and it was only three hours of teaching and two of prepping. I was impoverished but I loved starving. The less there was of me, there was less to hate. I abandoned the life of academia and embraced a rugged alternative by choice, not by force. I had two degrees and I didn’t use them, I had two boyfriends and a girlfriend and never saw them, I had a rotting tooth in the back of my mouth and never fixed it. That summer was like honeysuckle and lime sorbet and I never tasted it. I festered in unwashed sheets, black hole suns, and urinary tract infections.
​
I was addicted to the passionless life. If I lived passively, without cause or reason, it was impossible to suffer. I pretended there were no Syrian refugees, no child molesters, and no meat industry. There wasn’t black mold and asbestos in my apartment, my father never hit me, and I didn’t waste sixty thousand dollars on humanities degrees because there is no such thing as money. I wanted a forgotten existence like a beat-up box of baking soda in a single man’s unplugged fridge. Whether we were refugees or just incapable of doing math, I knew we were the same.
​
That Thursday in late July when the dust was particularly dense, James and I were practicing the harmonic scale. Its Arabic cry echoed throughout the dingy room and resonated somewhere in the white peeling exposed pipes. It smelled like a church basement, but wetter. James was fourteen and in a private school called Redrock Academy. It was a year-round school, so his lessons were at 4 pm. He was reading Walden and I thought that was cute. After clucking the last peanut butter from the roof of his mouth from his sandwich, he made a comment about transcendentalism and I felt like a failure. I couldn’t help but compare my teenage self’s reading habits to that of a privileged preppy. Never mind I was reading The Hunger Games, I had a goddamn philosophy degree and a job and what did he have?
​
There was a knocking on the door. A desolate silence followed.
​
I stood, and the door swung open. That Thursday in July I lost my job to the landlord, who hadn’t known I’d been conducting my lessons there because I hadn’t demanded permission. I had been kicked out of my apartment. I was simply beaming.
​
****
​
I’d skinned a squirrel once when I was twelve. I couldn’t stand the taste of stale cool ranch Doritos from the motel’s vending machine any longer. I wondered if I’d be any good at hunting small game. I thought about my archery class I’d taken one fever dream of an autumn. This summer, breathless, I stained the desert ground with battered bareness. I had cuts on my feet, I threw my shoes away when I read about Bhikkhu monks that didn’t use deodorant. I was quite good at archery, I didn’t have a bow. The pink-marbled mesas vibrated against translucent sky, the stars dipping their points in the cosmic batter. I thought about what texture the mesas would feel like against my tongue, like licking along the pages of a phone book, but saltier.
​
Upon eviction, I left my earthly possessions on the porch of the apartment building. I felt like Francis of Assisi but my god was the road. I left the piano in the basement but tucked it behind the water heater under a mouse feast of a sheet. My baby brown tomatoes had never looked redder and juicier. A TV guide with no TV, half a can of Pringles, a period blood-stained sheet stretched across a mattress pregnant with mothballs. My copy of Spinoza’s Ethics, The Symposium, The Chomsky-Foucault Debate on Human Nature, Hunger Games: Catching Fire, and Hobbes’ Leviathan. Literary classics for the children to pick at like crows upon carcass, or a dry place for the armadillos to sleep during the retiring summer rains.
​
I lived in my car two miles off Highway 96. If Beethoven could be a vagrant then I could too. It remained uninsured and unregistered. It remained stationary in southwestern purgatory. Impressionist heat waves baked the paint off the first two inches of the station wagon. As the pleather atrophied, my skin melted to the seat and I’d spend my afternoons preparing myself for the pain of peeling the two substances apart. By 5 pm the deed was done, and a blister would blossom and I’d suck on it until it turned gray. The landscape was a hazy orange disease, I couldn’t stop smiling. I was dying a delirious death and it felt delicious.
​
In phases of this delirium between couched blackness and buttered tangerine skylines, the view outside my car window sloshed around faster and faster as my heart beat slower and slower. I hadn’t been hungry in years. I felt like rotten vegetation, mutilated roadkill, sizzling with maggots. The decay was holistic, naturally sterile, spit in god’s face. The honeying air hung dense, my limbs fruiting back into hollow spores before propagating into gestating decomposition. I watched ecosystems flower on my hips, mycelium networks foaming out of my temples. I was a macrocosm of bacteria but to the universe, I was no bigger than an atom. Nothing was different from anything else, simply dust in different colors. I both existed and didn’t exist, both felt exactly the same.
​
James told Jeremy who told Persephone that the lessons were discontinued. I hadn’t known they were friends, that their parents lived at the same plastic rounding of the same cul de sac. The news spread immediately. On my second night in the car, before I settled in the wasteland, I slept across the street from my old apartment and woke up to a construction crane and the slapping of a parking ticket on my windshield. That night, I watched three of my students creep out of the cascalote trees, watching their quiet little feet pad the porch steps. They peered in the windows, small shadows of curious coyotes. Their baby yips split the dusk’s air. My eyes followed them slip away with my books tucked under their skinny arms.
​
I died and sprouted back as a Joshua Tree. The children spat on my roots. They swore in decadent tongues, silver mouths spooled out precious eulogies about Liszt and Vivaldi and Chopin and nothing of me. The rigid ravine split the world in half. The crack tore the flattened foothills of viscous desert from air-conditioned sugar cubes that inhabited the little shits. They were goddamn cherubs, blind and pale and chubby, and they were terrible piano players. I hadn’t loved anything my entire life, but I adored them. As the ravine widened, the trees got drier and their stomachs got fatter. They ate trash out of the crack’s palm, gluttonous and insatiable. The motel’s roof collapsed and killed five. My apartment building shut down from mold build-up. Persephone’s parents built a pergola, and Jeremy’s built a third floor with a botanical garden painted green.
​
The crack filled with water the year they blew up the dam. I don’t know who the ‘they’ was, someone anarchic, someone poor. Invincible toffee rapids hosted piles of dead creatures unaccustomed to the current. Dead fish of whiplash pooled at my roots and they tasted like pennies. I had everything. I had blood in my trunk’s roots, I had an education, I could play Mozart’s Sontana No. 11 3rd Movement with ease. Gesualdo didn’t murder his wife, and if he did he didn’t get away with it. Everything smelled like peaches. No one was immoral, everyone was equal. The same violent substance in different shapes. Each leveled and useless and desperate for purpose. I no longer had a menstrual cycle, I didn’t pay rent, and I was a monkey but better because there was nothing to run away from. On the other side of the river, the predatory glare from the state swallowed the suburbs and what was built was torn and what grew was chopped.
​
That dusty summer when I lost my limbs with flesh, my meaty branches forgot how to play the ivory. I was rewarded instead with the ability to play the West Wind like an Aeolian lyre. A true poet of dead air. I gave instead of took, I fed instead of drained. Everything was beautiful and whole despite being shattered into infinite pieces of infinite perspective of one being. The synthetic culture was a joke, it was a distraction. The construction crew left and returned ten thousand times, and orchestral composition remained unwavering and sweet despite the advancement of the tiny society turning sour and then gone.
Megan (she/her) is a fiction writer and poet from Michigan. She writes surrealist and existential pieces in both mediums. She is currently pursuing undergraduate degrees in philosophy and English writing. She hopes to one day work at a publishing house or be a librarian or any of those other things those with English degrees dream of. She enjoys playing the piano and painting, though she's only talented at the former. Megan often includes Kafkaesque themes of existentialism and metaphysical problems in her creative writing, looking up to the philosopher Baruch Spinoza.
Love Like Blood, Lilacs, and Wine
by Megan Jauregui Eccles
The sword was heavy in Sari’s hands. She wasn’t going to turn back now, not when the vow she’d made to Arin was so close to fulfillment.
​
“Soon,” she said, trying to remember the lines of his face.
​
Years ago, she’d held his broken body, watched the light leave his eyes. She’d sworn to the gods that she’d avenge him, at any cost.
​
The god of shadows had listened and gifted her this sword and her mission. She had been so young. Escaping the finality of death seemed like a generous boon instead of the burden it had become. It wasn’t until she failed to recall the exact timbre of Arin’s voice that she realized what this was: a curse.
​
The unicorn stood among the hart’s tongue fern and fairy parasols and wild lilacs in the gloaming. His pearlescent horn glistened, catching the light of the earliest stars. His cloven hooves padded gently among the clovers. The only sound was beating of Sari’s heart and the crunch of delicate bones. The unicorn had caught himself a blue jay. Its blood and feathers littered the ground like flower petals.
​
Sari rushed him. The unicorn’s ears twitched. He reared up and out of the way. She nicked his flank—barely. Silver blood ran down the length of her sword. The razor points of his hooves slashed down, catching the edge of her arm. Blood flowed like the wine on her wedding day, on the last day she’d had with Arin. There was a distinct absence of pain, a disquieting nothing that marked her eternity.
​
This was a dance. She’d been locked in these steps more times than she could count. The weave and waltz of life and death; the distant hope that this would be the last time she’d have this fight. There was no happy ending for Sari, there was only death and death and time. She’d bargained for a sword and for the years to avenge Arin, not quite understanding the scope of her task. The god of shadows demanded every unicorn. A hundred years had passed, marked with the silvered blood of every unicorn she’d hunted. She’d lost the memory of Arin’s eyes. She’d lost the will to fight on.
​
But the gods do not relent.
​
The unicorn barred his fangs; black, empty eyes like hollows in the half-light. He aimed his horn straight for her heart.
​
Sari held her position. She just had to wait one more breath, one more heartbeat, one second. She could feel the heat of his exhale and taste the tang of his blood on the air. Dropping down, she brought her sword up straight into the unicorn’s heart. She braced herself as the full weight of him hit the blade. The blood was warm and wet against her skin.
​
She let her sword fall with him. She didn’t bother to retrieve it.
​
“For you, my love,” she whispered to the ghost of the man she loved but could not quite remember, still haunted by what might have been.
​
Something sharp and intangible bloomed in her chest. She’d known its lack for so long, she wasn’t sure what it was until she looked down.
​
The tip of the unicorn’s horn pierced her chest, broken, like the landed piece of a fallen star. The silver and red swirled, flooding the darkened glen. She closed her eyes. The pain was a comfort, sweet as a daydream.
​
The last unicorn was dead.
​
Sari could finally find peace.
Megan Jauregui Eccles lives in the foothills of San Diego and is a novelist, professor, and accidental poet. When she’s not rehoming rattlesnakes, she plays Dungeons and Dragons with her five sons and hatches a variety of poultry. www.meganeccles.com
The Cost of Living
by Micaela Here
It’s the smell. It clings to her like a second skin, seeps into her pores, stays with her long after she hangs up her apron and hairnet and leaves the chip shop to make her way back to the council flat she shares with her father.
​
She used to take the bus, before, but the sniffing and shifting around her made her self-conscious.
​
Father scoffed when she told him. He chewed noisily on the cold chips she brought back, grease and salt at the corner of his mouth, and shook his leonine head, white hair wild as if he had just come back from a fishing trip. He hadn’t been out to sea in years, but he still smelled like seawater. To her he still smelled like home.
​
“It pays the bills,” he said. “Now that’s nothing to sniff at, is it?”
​
He had a point, though her paycheck and his pension barely cover their rent, these days. She thinks of credit cards, loans and repayment plans as she fills the bathtub, the old pipes groaning and gurgling. She dumps a whole bag of kitchen salt in the lukewarm water, watches it dissolve. The water in the tub reaches the imaginary line between too little and too much. She learned where that sits the hard way, the downstairs neighbour knocking on their door, complaining about damp stains on his ceiling.
​
She takes off her greasy clothes, kicks them in a corner to deal with later, cracks open the little window over the tub. There’s just enough of a breeze tonight that she can smell the sea, over grease and chlorine and exhaust fumes. If she tries hard enough, she can even hear it, the faint rumble of waves eating at the pier.
​
She gets in the tub. It’s grimy, no matter how much she scrubs it: enamel worn thin and chipped away in places, so that the rust shows like a disease, red on white. She knows what that’s like, as she checks the reddish cracks in her skin, deeper at the folds of her elbows and knees, between her fingers. It’s getting worse, and the salt baths only do so much. It was easier when father still had the boat and could take her out to sea, but the boat is long gone and he’s too old, too tired.
​
“You should leave,” he tells her. “Go back.”
​
There’s no going back. He couldn’t know that when he caught her in his fishing net she was forever changed. No point in telling him now.
​
Water laps at her, salt stinging and soothing. At least summer is almost gone, and with it the tourists, their unending queue, loud and ravenous outside the chippy, swarming the beach until late, boozed up and cheerful. Then it will be just her and father and the sea. She’ll have a proper bath then when it’s dark and it’s safe, she thinks as she sinks deeper in the tub, folding her limbs like she must have in her mother’s womb.
​
Breasts, shoulders, neck, chin.
​
For now, this will have to do: tap water, zero point one pence per litre; kitchen salt, one pound per kilo. This and the smell of the sea, pushing into this little bathroom, into her lungs.
​
Mouth, nose, eyes, brow.
​
She slips under. She breathes.
Micaela Here (she/her) writes stories from the in-between. Her flash-fiction has been shortlisted by Flash500. She is currently redrafting her first novel and rereading Ágota Kristóf's trilogy. You can find Micaela on IG @reluctant_writer or twitter @micaelahere.
Revelation
by Audrey T. Carroll
We were all escaping something. Most of us were escaping a family dinner. A distant relic of a relative demanded to know why we weren’t still pregnant and had no baby to show for it. Politics had manifested into a chanting match between eat the rich and all lives matter. Mothers we avoided talking to all year tried to leverage social awkwardness for pictures with grandchildren who didn’t remember them. But this was not all of us. Some of us were escaping yet another year of eating stuffing straight from the pot over the kitchen sink, while others were escaping tables ravaged by disease, the number of kith and kin dwindling in ways painful and obvious.
​
In fairness, they had warned us about the storm. Alerts went out on weather apps for days before the festivities. The most wild claims were that ice would dagger down and accumulate as much as an inch. When the storm first started, many of us thought that the worst case scenario was true, though it was surely impossible at this time of year in this kind of place. Soon we came to realize that it was simply water—unfathomably sharp, long and vicious and unrelenting. The skies got dark, quick, and no amount of headlights did any of us any good. The leaves had mostly been stripped from the trees already, but the limbs of hickories and hawthorns bucked against the winds, threatening to snap. The smallest cars pulled over first, like the Honda that had been passed down from a cousin who’d gotten it passed down from an aunt, and the Mazda bought at too low a price from the used dealers’ lot to take the risk. Then the tractor trailers, nearly flattening the sedans into aluminum foil against the guardrails. The pick-up trucks were the last to admit defeat against the elements.
​
None of us wanted to risk death or manglement. We all left our headlights on, adding hazards to the display. We lit up one side of the highway, and the other. Though the mists separated us, we could still see our neighbors across the way, faceless in the storm. It poured and poured, but we were grateful of the lack of green skies. Some of us began to wonder if skies turned green at night, or if we’d have a tornado sneak up with no warning. Others of us asked the question of partners, parents, teenagers who only scoffed and said Google is free. Some of us tapped along to the rock station on the radio, buoyant with the anxiety of it all. Others retrieved leftovers from the back seat and began to dig into gelatinous pies just to pass the time.
​
And then it appeared.
​
We can agree on very little.
​
We cannot agree on when it appeared. We have claimed to be looking at our car clocks or phones at the same time, but we each reported a different minute. One of us, a neurologist returning home from his mother’s place out in Toad Suck, thought there must have been some kind of a medical phenomenon, not only to explain the timing, but the rest of it as well. Most of us, though, were not watching the clock, caught in the trance of the storm all around us. Our skin buzzed with it, our hearts fluttering in anticipation of we couldn’t possibly know what.
​
The figure, however, was suddenly there. This much we can all agree on.
​
Most of us can also agree that, especially at first, it didn’t particularly look like a person. It was more an absence than anything. We could never be sure why the figure was a she, but she always was. Not one of us ever used he, or they, and even it was rare once we got our first proper look. On one side of the road, we claimed that she was in the direction that we were facing; on the other side of the road, we claimed the same. The water seemed to fall, to a point, around the outline of what could’ve been a person. If we leaned forward over our steering wheels, squinted our eyes real tight, we could almost see where a head might be, where shoulders might be, and in that shape there was no rain.
​
The closer she got, the more her form seemed to glow. It was not like the headlights, strong yellow or white, artificial. Instead, it was like a sun-storm sky reflecting off of a tin roof. We could all feel the hair raising on our arms as she approached. Some of us would deny it later, trying to erase the incident from our histories altogether in an attempt to seem undisturbed by the forces of nature, or to try to cling to our closeness to god in the face of what was surely a demon sent from hell to test us. If she was real—
​
There were claims amongst us that she had a face. It was a rarer claim, the kind that would come up in stories throughout the years, mostly when recounting it to children, although a local mechanic could recall specific details, like the way her hair hung over her eyes or the near-blue paleness of her skin. A girl would draw her, obsessively, in the art class over at the high school until the teacher finally told her parents and they took her to the reverend and now no one knows where she got to. She took it too serious, her friends decided, and then they moved on. Better not to think about her fate.
​
But the thing we can least agree on is why she appeared at all. Each of us, it seemed, down to the last man, woman, and child had a theory: an omen of death. A messenger of the devil. A messenger of the lord. A lost soul. A victim of some horrid crime. A long-lost family member who had gone missing. Something rotten in the town turned to human form. We had hoped, in this way, to contain her, to make her seem less fearsome and less powerful. Even the devil’s kin had their limits.
​
The theories took on a life of their own over the years, morphing, the subject of so much dinner table chatter, so many party stories, and, eventually, the family legends. Some who witnessed died mysterious deaths soon after; some vanished. Some won the lottery or had businesses suddenly turned inexplicably successful over a matter of weeks when we’d been looking to sell the boutique… the pharmacy… the flower shop. There was no way to say, of course, why it affected some of us in one way and some of us in another. Many doubted it had any effect at all, of course, aside from being an entertaining ghost story to tell when the power went out. Many of us had pictures that we attempted to take, distorted and unremarkable, like pictures of the full moon—documenting something wondrous as nothing more than a prickle of light in the vast darkness of sky.
​
But there were some of us, precious few, who took her presence very seriously. We knew she was something. We knew she meant something. Two or three of us lost touch with reality trying to solve the thing. Truth unraveled us instead of us unravelling the truth. There was no way to know. We didn’t participate in the get-togethers where people treated her story like a joke, loud with a laughter that was thick with beer. We didn’t whisper in churches about how to ensure we were saved from the evil from which she surely must have been delivered.
​
Less than a car’s worth of people truly felt like they had gotten close to what she was: a mirror. Something lonely and absent and wandering. Something projected upon, a vehicle for faith and faithless alike. Something unloved, forgotten, spectacular, and yet never understood, not really. Those of us who got this far realized, after a time, that no one had bothered to ask her if she was alright, to ask her what she was, to even get out of their vehicles into the inconvenience of the rain.
​
She was better as a story.
Audrey T. Carroll is the author of the What Blooms in the Dark (ELJ Editions, 2024) and Parts of Speech: A Disabled Dictionary (Alien Buddha Press, 2023). Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her writing has appeared in Lost Balloon, CRAFT, JMWW, Bending Genres, and others. She is a bi/queer and disabled/chronically ill writer. She serves as a Diversity & Inclusion Editor for the Journal of Creative Writing Studies, and as a Fiction Editor for Chaotic Merge Magazine. She can be found at http://AudreyTCarrollWrites.weebly.com and @AudreyTCarroll on Twitter/Instagram.
Mombie
by Karin Schott
Kathy sticks the fingers of her right hand under her left armpit and squeezes the hand against her boob with her upper left arm to hold it in place. She sniffs a whiff of sweat, it smells like rot. Kathy opens the driver's side door with her left hand, then closes the car door with her hip, a practiced move. As Kathy walks to the after-school pick-up area outside the school’s front door, she holds her right arm up to her hand like she’s holding her stomach to hide the little pouch left over from birthing her children. Her long sleeve hides the gash of her meat where the hand fell from her arm.
​
When Kathy joins the other mothers on the sidewalk, they do not share a pleasantry–not a nod, not a wave, not a smile–not that they ever did. They are too busy talking about dance competitions for their Brittneys and Cassies, or they’re bragging about their Jonahs and Matthews RBIs in little league, or complaining about their Todds and Jasons who don’t help enough with the kids. Kathy once tried to include herself in the conversation with a pleasant nod and chuckle of agreement but there was an unfortunate slip of her lip. It fell into her shirt pocket. Since then, the other mothers drift away from her, either from her smell or because they think her condition is contagious. In any case, Kathy stopped trying.
Kathy never fit in with these mothers because she missed a key social ingredient, a husband. Tom was the first appendage to fall from her a couple of years ago before her son began kindergarten and her daughter was out of diapers. Now she scrambles after odd jobs and extra hours at work to cover expenses while juggling the demands of laundry and after-school childcare. Her ex-husband sees the kids a couple of weekends a month, takes them out for pizza, and brings them home early. His mother tells Kathy, “He says you’ve let yourself go.”
Kathy overhears a Sheila or a Karen discussing a girls’ night. An other mother leans on her hip, her yoga pants accentuating her tight pilates ass, her brain neatly tucked under a messy bun that sits on her head like a cherry on top. “We can watch a movie and drink wine!” she squeals.
Kathy thinks about their brains soaked in a nice pinot.
Kathy feels her forehead slide over her eyes and begin to obstruct her vision. She tries to use her shoulder to lift it a bit. But in the process, a length of skin on her cheek releases and litters the pilled black sleeve of her sweater. One of the other mothers sees this and lowers her voice, then a titter of glee erupts from the clutch. Kathy wants to get a grip, she really does, but then her right hand would fall to the ground. She wants to avoid drawing any further attention to herself.
The other mothers compare the value of Subarus to Toyotas for their ability to hold sports gear, grocery shopping, and car seats when another mother drives up in a white minivan with a bumper sticker advertising her honor roll student. From a distance, Honor Roll Mother has every hair in place and a nice even spray tan. She walks across the drop-off lane in the direction of the other mothers. As she begins to wave, the tip of her nose falls off. The other mothers watch her as she stumbles after the nose and tries to sneak it into her pocket. At some point, she must have added some adhesive to it. Kathy watches Honor Roll Mother try to unstick the nose from her fingers with a tissue. The tissue sticks to her nose and fingers. A cross breeze wafts a sweet smell of early decomposition mixed with a hint of Channel No. Five from Honor Roll Mother.
The other mothers turn away, close their circle, and do not acknowledge this loss of grace. Honor Roll Mother, maybe a Susie or a Jane, stands outside their circle and tries texting on her phone, the nose and tissue jumping up and down on the screen. Kathy remembers those early days after her husband left when little pieces of her fell apart while she tried so hard to fake it. At some point, she succumbed to her entropy. Kathy watches the Honor Roll Mother lean against a wall and look away from them all. The finger, nose, and tissue dab at her eyes. Kathy thinks Honor Roll mother should be careful, the brick can shred shoulder blades easily.
The bell rings and announces the end of the school day. All the children stream out of the school. Billys and Katies, Brians and Saras. The other mothers yell, “Let’s go, we have to get you to practice!”
Lily, Kathy’s daughter, a five-year-old in kindergarten whose braid has loosened, skips towards her. Lily brings a smile to Kathy’s face, even if it is uneven, and cracks her remaining lip in the effort. Kathy notices Phillip, her son who's in second grade, has grown. His pants are short and reveal his unmatched socks. Lily gives Kathy a big hug around the waist, “I missed you!” she says with a fierce love that fills Kathy with a heat she has not felt in days. As they walk back to the car, Lily takes Kathy’s left hand and Phillip holds her right hand while he tells her about how the monarch caterpillars chewed on the milkweed in the fish tank in his classroom.
Karin Schott recently earned her BFA in creative writing from Goddard College. She lives at the end of a two-mile dirt road in Western Maine with her son, two cats, and six hens. Her work has appeared in Blunt Moms and Roi Faineant.
The Encounter
by Emily Strempler
It had already been a weird night. Two hours earlier, a customer had begun sobbing and ranting, screaming about the restaurant’s inability to accommodate her last-minute request for an entire birthday cake, in a display so lurid and bizarre Megan could only stare mutely, while the manager rushed in. Still holding a pitcher of water, she’d wandered back into the kitchen and stood there, in the pass, until a passive-aggressive “Behind!” snapped her into motion, feet wheeling her body into the service station. There wasn’t any food going out, anyway. It was October, in a ski town, smack in the middle of that hollow window between summer rush and hills opening. The restaurant was empty. Except for the screaming woman and her horrified friends. Obviously.
​
The mood was rowdy after close. Front and back of house employees, those who’d worked, and a few who’d “just dropped by,” drank free beer at the bar, complaining loudly about the day and swapping plans for further after-work drinks. Megan’s boyfriend kept texting her. He had friends over at their place, and wanted to know if she could pick up mixer, at the corner store, on her way home. But then, no, someone else had brought mixer, and could she bring chips? And beer. Something decent, if she could manage that. Then no chips, just beer, definitely beer, if she didn’t mind. Megan asked the bartender for a second pint. “still at work,” she typed, “will pick up beer omw home” then, “be a bit still” and hit send. The second drink went down too fast. And then everyone was leaving, and Megan left too.
​
The liquor store guy was staring into his phone, idle at the till. She clunked a big case of cans down on the counter, and he scanned it, waited for the happy beep of payment, then said “Have a nice night,” in a flat tone, all without looking up. He did not hand her a receipt. Didn’t even bother to rip it off the printer until she’d already walked out.
Megan lived at the top of a “hill” — really, the foot of a mountain, but everyone called it a “hill” because that’s what it felt like to walk there — near the edge of town. Her work bag, full of her shoes, and a metal water bottle, and some leftovers from her staff meal, and an apron, and an obscene number of pens, was slung over her shoulder. She had her fingers hooked through the cardboard carrying flap, punched through the top of the beer case. Her legs were sore and the cans were heavy.
​
There were no streetlights past the edge of downtown. The night was pitch dark under a cloudy sky. No cars on the road. Many of the houses, set back behind tall fences, or high hedges, had only the barest light leaking from their windows. Even the animals were quiet. Stopping in the middle of the sidewalk, Megan broke open the cardboard and wrestled out a can, cracking the top with one hand and putting it straight to her mouth to stop the foam pouring off the top.
​
The road slanted steeply upwards.
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She trudged, more than walked. Up and up. Almost there. Just one last corner, then the alley. The final stretch. Then she’d be home.
​
Rounding the bend, she felt the animal before she saw it, the great towering mass of it, the huff of its breath in the dark. It stared right into her face with its inscrutable, blank eyes, an enormous bull elk, with a rack of antlers like the spreading branches of an ancient tree. Its body seemed to fill the whole width of the alley. It loomed over a parked car, its head towering so high she worried it might catch its crown on a low-hanging electrical wire. Pedaling back a couple of steps, Megan took another sip of her beer. The elk was so close, she could see its breath heaving inside its body, the matting and dirt in its fur, a bit of greenery twisted around a far-reaching antler tip. It showed no signs of moving.
​
“Oh-kay…” Megan said, more to herself than the elk, “Don’t mind me. I’ll just be going the other way. You take care now…” She walked backwards until she was around the corner, and the creature was out of sight.
​
She tried the next street over, hoping to loop around, behind the elk, make it to her own front door. The road was overhung by barren trees. Pines towered. Not enough light to see the mountains by. She was halfway down, hemmed in by silent houses, when a hulking shadow emerged from behind a building and walked into the middle of the road. It raised its head to look at her, its crown backlit by a flash of blue-white headlights, whizzing, too fast, down a darkened crossroad.
​
Megan stared at the elk, and the elk stared back. She maintained eye contact, bringing her beer up to her lips and tipping it back. It took a step towards her, with a sort of unsettling intent. The sockets of the creature’s glassy eyes were in shadow, but she felt it peering at her, its gaze questioning, probing. “Relax,” she murmured, “Relax. It’s just an elk.” But it didn’t feel like just an elk. Not really. It took another step towards her, then another, shrinking the distance between them. And suddenly, Megan was reversing herself down the street, as quickly as her legs would carry her, as quickly as she could make them move, without turning her back on the elk.
​
She retraced her steps, travelling toward a spillover of downtown lights, soft and far away, tried the next street down. This time, the elk was waiting for her. Waiting, watching, mocking. “Not fair!” she bellowed, at the elk, “Your legs are longer!” She knew she shouldn’t yell, shouldn’t upset the elk, but the elk, still staring, seemed unperturbed. “I just want to go home,” she said, more quietly, sipping her beer and feeling a bit defeated, and for a moment, she thought the elk looked almost sympathetic. Still, it was impassable. Unmoving. A wall of flesh, and fur, and hoof, and bone. An unpredictable mountain of intention. One of them had to give way, and it wasn’t going to be the elk.
​
Again, she picked her way, backwards, down the street, but this time, once she was out of the creature’s sightline, she broke into a run, huffing and puffing, with beer cans rattling and her bag bouncing against her shoulder. Glancing down the road as she passed it by, she caught sight of the elk, just as it emerged, its body yellow-brown in a pool of light that poured off the porch of a tilting cabin. She pushed herself, running hard around the bend and down the alley, eyes open for the elk. It was like they could feel each other now, moving and moving, through the streets and alleys. It was close and she knew it. She just had to make it to the door.
​
She fumbled her keys. Twisted the lock and handle. Yanked it open, and threw herself inside. Through the window, she thought she saw it, one last time, a shape shifting, almost invisible, in the dark past a drive full of parked cars.
The house hummed with energy, music blasting from somewhere upstairs. Kicking off her shoes, she chucked her bag into the room she shared with her boyfriend, and wandered, still out of breath, into the party. Friends and roommates lingered in the kitchen and hall, stood around the table, or lounged in the living room. Megan’s boyfriend was sitting on the couch, dressed in sweats and an old t-shirt. She dropped his beers on the coffee table with a loud thunk and fell onto the cushion beside him. He barely looked at what she’d brought, extracting a drink for himself and cracking the top. “Thanks!”
​
“The strangest thing happened on my way home,” she said, “I ran into this elk in the back alley and…”
​
His friends chimed in before she could finish, swapping stories about their own animal encounters. Elk, coyotes, wolves, black bears, grizzlies, even a moose. Megan opened another beer for herself. The conversation turned to snowboarding, ski season, the imminent opening of the hills.
​
After a while, she kissed her boyfriend goodnight and excused herself, wandering through the crowded house to the small room they shared. She kicked her work bag into a corner, set her half-finished beer on the nightstand, changed her clothes, and flopped her body onto the bed. Lying there, sore and tired, she watched shadows shift across the popcorn ceiling. Music and voices reverberated through the walls. Out there, somewhere, she could still feel its presence, enormous, unblinking, lurking in the dark beyond the walls of the house. She popped her headphones in, set up a movie on her laptop, curled up in the blankets, and, with happy chatter and a familiar soundtrack in her ears, promptly fell asleep.
Emily Strempler (she/her) is a queer, German-Canadian, ex-fundamentalist writer of inconvenient fiction. She lives and writes in the famous tourist destination and infamous party town of Banff, Alberta, inside beautiful Banff National Park. Her work can be found, or is upcoming, in a wide range of publications, including The Bitchin' Kitsch, BULL, CLOVES Literary, and Luna Station Quarterly. You can find her on Twitter @EmilyStrempler, Instagram @estrempler, and her own website (www.estrempler.com).
You Were Having That Dream Again
by Andy Larter
The one where you drew a detailed picture of the pearl eyed bird. You made it look as though it was wearing white tie code, and the foggy eye became a monocle. Formal. Clean. Gleaming. But, as you coloured in the glossy emerald green of the tail, the iridescent indigo of the wings the magpie hopped from the page into your life. It bobbed twice and spoke.
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“Girl,” it said. “Girl. Girl.”
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You stared, gripped the edge of the table and shook.
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He tapped his bill on the paper. Tap. Tap-tap. Tap-tap-tap. Then he turned his dark eye to you and spoke fluently. “My name is Pica.”
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You wiped your hand across your forehead. “Thank goodness this is a dream.”
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Pica strutted across the table. He turned his silver eye towards you. “A dream?” He wiped his beak with his claw and sprang to your shoulder.
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“You know he's afraid of us birds,” hissed Pica. “Especially when we flap and swoop. Oh, that makes him try to hide himself away. But he can't for shaking. He quivers so much he can’t move, except to tremble.”
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You looked towards the window. Nothing there to see. “Pica,” you said, “tell me I’m dreaming.”
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“Perhaps,” said the bird. “Now watch this.”
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Pictures appeared in the window and you were transported into the action.
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A dog had been run over by a van. Its light brown fur gaped like a lipsticked moustache. Purple and grey innards steamed on the tarmac. A luncheon meat tongue lolled between its teeth. Your gaze wandered between the pink and the lilac even though you didn’t want to look. As you dithered, the dog transformed into a stylised, porcelain thing. Its muzzle shrank into its face and glistened orange. The eyes glared sepia. The magpie pecked at a hook shaped crack in the glaze above one eye. A medallion engraved with the word ‘holy’ dangled from the dog’s collar.
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Soon a girl screamed. “Bill,” she cried. “Oh help him somebody. Oh Bill. Bill.” You heard her cry as the bark and growl of traffic stalled. And the dog became just a dog again. A dead thing. But you could smell the foul stench of shit and slime. So you stepped forward to scoop the slimy viscera, the glistening ropes of intestines and slippery liver back into the stricken creature. And you carried the dog to the grass verge. And you knelt beside it. The girl snivelled, put her arm around you and cried into your chest.
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You wanted to stop this dream, to wake yourself up and make it go away. But you were fascinated as a gull landed on the carcass. It glared at you, daring you to intervene as it poked its savage bill into the dead dog’s eye. It raised its beak and it was coated with glistening grey strings. Its yellow feet slapped the ground. Its beady eye outstared you. Until two magpies came and mobbed it away.
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“You could do that.” It was Yvonne’s voice coming from a magpie on the right.
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You turned to check who spoke. “How do you do that?” you asked. “Can you speak any tongue?”
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And the voice was in your head. “I know she desires vengeance.”
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And you realised you could murder Packer like that. Simply shove him under a lorry or a bus and watch his blood, his guts, his fingers twitch their last under the wheels.
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And, if he was scared, you could take the bird and allow it to peck out Packer's eyes but Mr Pica shoved his beak forward. “Nay, lad,” he said. “It has to be you. It's your revenge, not mine.”
Andy retired from teaching in 2015. He has written various pieces which have been accepted in local publications and online. He is a member of Time To Write Club. Some of his work can be found at https://substack.com/profile/32695732-andy-larter?utm_source=user-menu
Grapefruit
by Dylan Bunyak
They say that once upon a time, the universe was the size of a grapefruit. And everything was small. And dark, and quiet. There was no sound, because there were no vibrations. It was so still, and everything was focused on staying together. It was cold, beyond freezing, and so they stayed huddled. Clumped and scrunched. But they were still cold. Tied to this middle of center, this beginning. They were trying to make themselves smaller and smaller and smaller. You couldn’t even see them. They were infinitesimally compact. Microscopic, even. It was hard, being so small. It took effort. Everyday they began the process over again. Get smaller, get smaller, stay clumped, be small. Until they stopped trying.
And then they were spreading apart and unfolding and expanding and starting to vibrate and it was getting bigger and the noise of their growth was deafening. They were becoming unrecognizable in their vastness, in the new space they were taking up. They were gorgeous and complex and the movement was incredible as they spread out. Soon the rocks popped and the gasses condensed and there was more than one grapefruit growing and growing and growing. They were traveling away from each other and expanding and getting bigger. It was glorious. It was getting warmer and now the effort was being spent on growth and expansion and evolution. They grew and spread and got bigger until soon they were infinite. Soon, somewhere, there was a girl eating a grapefruit. Many days after school I was eating entire grapefruits, covered in date syrup. My freshman year was a whirlwind of first love and exploration, but in the dreary days of February that year all I wanted was to be at home. It was citrus season, and the yellow globes of grapefruit filled bag after bag on the tile floor of our kitchen. No one else in my family seemed to be eating any, so I started chipping away at the piles. It was the first year I had tasted one, up until then I had believed my Dad when he said I wouldn’t like them. But there were so many… and I wanted to try something new. Spending time alone, problem-solving, I knew I could be good at. Instead of diving right into my homework, I got really into figuring out how to segment it. I worked on taking apart the cloud-like pith and getting to the inside, and then cutting that up, so that the juice wouldn’t drip down my wrists. My knife skills were haphazard, self-taught, and often too much of the white skin would stay on, making the yellow slices opaque and too thick. I grabbed handfuls of the pieces and pushed them into bowls, and then I would add date syrup. It was darker than agave, almost molasses-y, and coated the fruit in an odd shiny drizzle. It was thick, and not very sweet. Honey would have been better. I started to post pictures of the grapefruit everyday to my instagram, joking about the repetition. I’m not sure whether I was looking for validation or connection, but I made a folder of the photographs, and kept it organized. The light wasn’t always great, and sometimes I think I ate a pomelo without knowing it, but I was happy. The grapefruit was an almost-everyday task, even when I got home late from rehearsal. Not quite an obsession, but close. Somedays I would sprinkle it with coconut, or eat a whole bowl of popcorn on the side. I was so excited about eating, about this discovery, this new sour flesh. Coming home meant more than just more schoolwork, it meant a break. I was suddenly grateful for my family’s overzealous gardening habit. Everyday the peeling and cutting and drizzle felt like a new chapter. It felt like I was starting to grow up.
****
​
I’m falling in love with art, the summer after fourth grade, reading Yoko Ono’s book, grapefruit. The yellow glossy cover sits on my bookshelf, and Ono’s black-and-white portrait watches me. The performance instructions, short poems, and steps to do something wild are changing what I think art means, and my tween brain is swollen with new ideas and migraines. I didn’t know this was an option. Ono is standing in this in-between I’ve never seen before. She is a writer and a wife, a musician and a muse, she exists on a continuum of expectations and reality. Her book, too, fits no real rules or rhymes. There is only page after page of short instructions, that make less sense the longer you stare at them. It’s 2015 and my art camp is assigned to write our own instructions. I leap into action, tiny arms grabbing cardstock and ink to write my own versions. 5, 10, 12 of them. I turned a few of them in on the big white desk before we left on our lunch break. Tired and full at the end of a long day, one of the other teaching artists approached me, telling me they loved what I came up with. I had my first commission. I bragged about it to my parents and poured over every one of Ono’s pages, hoping to find even more inspiration. I hand-cut a piece of thick paper, and painted the edges with water color loops. I took out my favorite inky pen. Drafting my piece, I wrote about lightning, and energy, and lying in the grass while it rained. I instructed the reader to feel every part of their body on the ground, to take up space as it pours, and to hold some of the water in a vessel and keep it on their bookshelf, careful not to spill. It was a little silly and very derivative, but I didn’t care. Now I watch videos of Yoko Ono, and documentaries about the Beatles and marvel. In every shot, with every pair of sunglasses, she sits and watches, multi-faceted and bright. There are clips of her screaming, at her husband, at art shows. Letting every piece of her be heard into microphones and recorded forever. She’s so big in the videos. Larger than life, just like her instructions.
​
It’s citrus season and I’m waking up at my grandparents’ house after throwing up all night. There’s a “make liberals cry again” hat sitting in the corner, on a messy table. Outside it is cloudy and morning-cold. Inside I’m wearing a dusty rose cotton dress and trying to convince myself to get out of bed. I hear my Dad calling that breakfast is ready and my stomach flips but I stick my toes out from the blanket and eventually roll up to a seat. I stare at myself in the sliding dresser mirrors, my face pale and my lips flush from the sickness. I look thin, and my dress hangs mid-calf, like a semi-stylish hospital robe. I think, when I’m sick I’m beautiful. When I walk down the hall, I find my family eating bagels at the table and pass them to pull some shoes on. And then I’m shivering, outside, looking up to find trees full of fruit. There are maybe a dozen of them, and a ladder stands below the one with giant yellow treats, a dare. There’s a Navy military-pride flag blowing on the flag pole above the garden and my vision swims. I’m dizzy, and there’s nothing in my stomach. I shake my head and grab onto the sides of the ladder, climbing to the top rung and pulling on the branches to bring a grapefruit down. I let it thud into the grass and then pick another, and another, and another until they litter the floor beneath the ladder. When I reach the floor I grab one and peel it, fast, reaching the juicy center in seconds only to eat it, piece by piece. My stomach seems to almost shrivel at the acid but I don’t care. The flesh matches my dress and I think for a moment about how much I love the winter. Days like this where everything feels hopeless but there are beautiful moments tucked between green leaves and jacket layers. I gather the grapefruits in my dress and hold the ends, like a little kid holding their toys in their shirt. I go back inside and place each one into my backpack, so I can take them home with me. When I leave the room again, my family is still chatting, spreading thick layers of cream cheese over their bagels. They smile and ask me how I feel. I shrug.
​
It’s summer and I’m eating grapefruit jam on top of homemade sourdough bread on the front stoop of my house. The sun is hot on my shoulders and I think about going inside before I burn, but I want to feel it right now. The redness of my skin is something I can control. I’m packing today for a college visit, and I don’t want to get on that airtight plane. Right now, the next five years seem unnecessary. Tuition feels like a waste, and the music in my earbuds is convincing me I just need to fall in love and a bit of coconut oil to be okay. I jump up and start to pace on the concrete, tracing the chalk with my toes. My friends are in town for the break, and the days feel full of possibility and adventure. I want to pack an iced tea and explore a new neighborhood, or walk to the beach. My joints kind of hurt but I think I’m up for something new, something summery, something warm. So I put down my toast and text a friend, asking what they’re doing today. My bag is already half-packed, I tell myself, although that is far from the truth. I load a second bag with everything I could need for the day, and ignore my early-morning travel plans. My wallet has my driver’s license and debit card, my meds and keys get thrown in the bottom. I look around at my room, at my tote bag collection and stuffed animals. I shuffle through my closet for that old octopus t-shirt and a pair of now-loose jean shorts. I’ll be packing these come next fall, along with all of my other favorites. I’ll pack all the clothes that fit me just right, right now. The ones that make me feel cool. I’ll fill a new closet, and cover new walls. I’ll find a different stoop to eat toast on. But the summers will still be here, back at home. It’s the kind of thought that drops my shoulders and slows my movements. I take a break to stop my thoughts from spiraling and check my phone, my best friend’s at the door. I take another deep breath in–I never finished my toast–and pull my tote bag onto my shoulder before looking back. The mirror reflects what I look like today, and the state of my room. A mess. I’ll pack when I get home.
This year I find myself again with fruit from my grandparents’ garden in the living room. I’m standing next to the sink with a silver filet knife and a pile of pith next to the cutting board. I have the time tonight to separate each segment from the film that surrounds it, and carve the bitter pieces into bites to add to tupperware for my week. Segment by segment, half by half, fruit by fruit. It’s reflective, I’m deep in thought as I peel the rind, then the pith, and last the tough translucent skins. My knife skills have gotten better. I have more control now. But really, I’m thinking about the past few years. I don’t add date syrup anymore. I like the rush of the bitterness, and the sour. It feels like me right now, even the cloud-like pith and the bright yellow outside. Each grapefruit is an opportunity to slow down and connect. To understand what it means to take a gift from someone you’re not sure you love, and to learn about who I am today, to not-quite fuel myself with Vitamin C. It’s a practice in learning what’s beyond the surface, and not slicing the tips of your fingers in the process. A practice of control, even if just over this one small fruit. I’m meal-prepping on my own, and the dishwasher is running. It’s a moment of quiet, of reflection. When I eat them I feel light and mature. It's a breakfast for college students or adults, who are about to go work at some office with big windows and tables instead of cubicles. I don’t know, I guess I can just see my future more clearly now. January feels like a time of beginnings and this year I turned 18 watching the sun set on the street next to my house with a teal bowl full of grapefruit in my hands. It feels silly to remember all of these moments, but they feel so tied to who I’m becoming. I want the nuance of grapefruit in my future, I want to plant trees of my own and pick them when I’m not dizzy or nauseous. I want to slice them with friends in the spring, and make small candies out of the pith. I want to find other favorite snacks, and I want to loosen my control. I want to breathe deeply, and expand, and take up space. I can find these future memories easily in the trees, they seem to stand out. Growing, shiny, yellow orbs.
Dylan Bunyak (she/her) is a queer, first-generation American based in San Diego, California. She is planning to attend college in Boston for Sociology and Education, but she has always loved to write. She works primarily in prose and creative non-fiction with a focus on intersecting identities, chronic illness, and immigration.
Her Instagram and Substack can both be found @dylanlouiseb
God's Favourites
by Grace Magee
“Did you know daffodils are poisonous?” He asked, holding her little hand as they walked down the garden.
​
The early morning mist hung low and heavy in delicate clusters. Through the silver clouds, the dawn sun was peach coloured and sweet. Like a ballet dancer, the mist pointed its toes and spun across, the crisp, frosty grass, leaving echoes of itself behind hanging in the air. Rabbits sat like little grey statues on the lolling hills, brave enough at this distance to not run. Or maybe they were frozen to the hard ground themselves.
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Grandad knelt on a foam pad and spread his tools out around him. He picked up a pail, turned it upside down and patted it for Caoimhe to sit on.
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“What’s this?” He asked, pointing at it.
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“A bucket.” She said.
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“No, its not. Think about it.”
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She knew she couldn’t sit until she answered his question, but just couldn’t conjure another answer.
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“It’s an upside down bucket.” He chortled at his own joke, “Go on wee love, sit down.”
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So she sat and watched him get out the daffodil bulbs. “These little bulbs will fill our garden with light, come spring.” He held one up to her, let her take it, and run her tiny fingers along its grooves.
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“Is the flower inside?” She asked, not old enough to understand it yet, as she turned it over in her hands.
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“Yes. In a way. It’s got the ingredients it needs to make a flower, and when it gets warm, the flower will be ready. Like a cake.”
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“But you said daffodils are poisonous.”
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“Oh, they are. But only when you eat them. Not a lot of people know that. But they’re very dangerous. They fool people because they look harmless. People get easily fooled, and that’s because..?”
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“People are stupid.”
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“Good girl.”
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The red circles from the cold on her cheeks was mirrored in the circular bulbs in her hands. But her face was the only place the cold could touch her, because she was all bundled up in hat, scarf, and gloves. Turtleneck jumper under dungarees, tights under welly boots. He always made sure she’d be warm when they set out early in the morning.
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As he dug, it was clear he’d used this patch before. Old grey bones, picked clean by time, almost fresh in a cruel irony, poked through the dark soil. He carefully plucked them from the ground and put them in his cloth sack. Caoimhe reached down and took out one that was a funny shape. It had a bend in it, like a boomerang. It had little grooves along its ridge, but as she traced one with her fingertip, Grandad took it gently from her hands.
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“There now, love. That’s our fertilizer. I’ll throw them in with the slurry. Help me put the bulbs in, and be sure to space them out now.”
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Focused on her task, she worked in silence for a moment before asking him, “Do you love the garden?”
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“Yes, very much.”
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“How?”
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“What do you mean ‘how’, sweetie?”
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“How can you love something the way you love a person?”
​
He thought about it for a while, and Caoimhe was pleased to be taken seriously. Their breathes made personal clouds that followed them while they worked, squatting beside each other. Tucking the bulbs into the earth and covering them with soil, like pulling blankets around them. Just like Grandad kept her cosy, kept her safe, they could do the same for the plants.
​
Eventually, he decided, “You can love anything. I love you, I love your mammy, I love this garden, and I love a cold pint of stout.” He chuckled at her frown when he said that, “I know, I know that’s not what you meant, pet. You can love anything you work for, I suppose. Something you take care of, and it takes care of you back. It feeds you. Love is something you bite.”
​
As she went to put the last bulb in, her fingers brushed another bone. This one was different. It was big, curved like a dome. It was only a wee piece of something bigger, and there was a worm stuck to it.
​
Grandad took it from her, shook the worm off, and tossed it into his sack. He paused and looked over at the dawn sky, which was filling with colour like God was standing at the top of the big chestnut tree and pouring the light in from a watering can.
​
“C’mere, wee pet.” He pulled her in for a hug. Her head was still small enough to fit in the crook of his neck perfectly.
​
When they covered the bulbs back up with dirt, and started walking back towards the house, Grandad slung his sack over his shoulder and took her hand again.
​
“I can walk on my own, Grandad.” She protested.
​
“Oh, I know. You’re helping me, Caoimhe.” He told her, swinging her arm and smiling, “So, thank you.”
​
“Ok then.” She smiled back, squinting a little as the sun came up higher and orange light covered her face.
​
When they went back inside, and Grandad threw some turf on the fire, and the beautiful smell filled the home, they sat together and prayed a gratitude prayer for the beautiful morning. Later, Grandad tossed the bag of bones in the slurry tank and locked it shut.
Grace Magee (she/her) is an Irish horror writer based in Belfast. She's been previously published in Awkward Middle Children, Sublunary Review, and on BBC Radio Ulster. She loves stories about old people and things that go bump in the light. She is on Twitter at grace_e_magee
Dear Mr Corcoran
by N.H. Van Der Haar
Dear Mister Corcoran,
In reaction your latest missives, I find myself deeply disappointed to say the absolute least. I was saddened by your malformed opinions on my career as a published author. I found them troubling. Your words adjacent to my work as well as that unflattering photo of myself you unearthed somewhere. My publishers claim your work adds quote: “depth and colour” to my work. As if it requires more depth and colour. Your discussion of my work appears to me to be an attempt to create equality or perhaps a debate between the two of us, Mr Corcoran. Something that I could not heavily disagree with more.
You are almost unique among human history and society, Mr Corcoran. A statement I make with no amount of modesty because I sincerely believe this to be fact. However, I warn you not to congratulate yourself here. To cease reading this letter and raise a (presumably) sweaty fist to the sky in triumph. Your uniqueness comes from your ability to form totally unique opinions without basing them on any shred of fact or reality. You are a perpetual opinion machine, Mr Corcoran, able to generate belief from nothing. Mr Corcoran please don’t misunderstand me. For any individual able to believe your opinions to be real must themselves be incapable of forming opinions themselves and I believe you to be totally unique. Nobody could believe your opinions because they are fact-less and impossible to believe.
That is why, Mr Corcoran, I believe you to be the greatest actor of your generation. Simply, there cannot be any fathomable way you could have the opinions you do, promote them and believe them with any shred of sincerity. You are a fabulist of the highest calibre. You must be a satirist so genius it boggles the mind. To believe your beliefs appears to be an effort of will akin to Atlas supporting the heavens or more accurately to an actor when performing a most serious role upon the stage. Mr Corcoran, you are a Shakespearean actor. Mr Corcoran, all that I can do is wish, hope and pray you have a family or perhaps a god who can smother you with enough love so that you live in ignorance from the ever encroaching world of fact and truth I live in.
I must ask you. Have you ever actually created, Mr Corcoran? Built something? Maybe banged out some kind of plywood stool in a state-mandated woodworking class. Get your aggression out in a productive way. One cane only assume, based on your previous track record of using the English language that you have no idea of what is it to be a creator. The fact, Mr Corcoran, is that even people, who have created awful things, like public transportation, fascism or the concept of Postmodernism, feel a measure of gross pride in their construction.
Proudly, I call myself a principled human being. Mr Corcoran you challenge my beliefs. On a fundamental level. I loathe the concept of some people being born inherently better than others but you have challenged my opposition to this concept. With your very, very simple words you have given the eugenics community enough proof to support the idea of an ‘idiot gene’. They may name it after you, Mr Corcoran. The idiot Corcoran gene.
Before you begin clumsily mashing out a response I would encourage you to look into your family heritage. Perhaps, Mr Corcoran, you are descended from illiterate ruffians and witless fools rather than an array of household pests. Many intellectuals (you wouldn’t know their names) have indicated that inter-species breeding is impossible. You may be an example of progeny between a human and a particularly stupid or perhaps just slow-moving cow or sheep. I’ll forward your information to them, so as to aid in their research.
Do you have children, Mr Corcoran?
Do you have loved ones, Mr Corcoran?
Do people love you? Are you loved, Mr Corcoran?
When you inevitably die, Mr Corcoran, will you be missed?
My apologies for waxing philosophical but it is so rare to find oneself conversing with such a blank slate with which one can bounce opinions off from.
God is surely dead, Mr Corcoran. I do not imagine we live in a tended to by an all-powerful sky-father. Then again, perhaps I am wrong and the human race is in a period of communal puberty, shirking our global responsibilities & hurling ourselves headlong into poor language, bad music and a worship of the individual. To you, Mr Corcoran that might sound like compromise in the face of an absent God. A whispered excuse spoken to the infinite blackness of space. But I am not a person welcomes compromise or negotiation.
I am fuelled by thoughts and belief and absolute belief in my thoughts. My work is my life, Mr Corcoran. Much in the same way I assume wetting yourself and shouting at things is yours.
Expectations should be broken, theories challenged and everything we accept as conventional thrown into flux. Our lives should be ones of sailing in a river, constantly moving rather than clutching to a damp rock shouting for someone to fish us out.
If you could fly, Mr Corcoran, would you? If you had wings would you soar above the noise and traffic? Flapping your way to whatever decrepit supermarket you presumably push trollies in? Would you still work if you had wings? Would you feel sad or angry? Pushing trolleys in the sun and rain, being told by the work and safety man not to fly during work hours because it frightens the elderly and religiously minded. Would you swear at children under your breath, as they pointed and laughed at the wing’ed man in the orange vest, moving trolleys round a carpark from 7 to 6. Perhaps I misjudged you, Mr Corcoran. You may in fact not push trollies. You may be a cleaner of a slaughterhouse, or a tester of shovels, or a chimney sweeper or the person who washes straight-jackets for asylums.
Would you soar above your friends, family and presumably ugly children with carefree abandon? Would you live with birds, nestled in a tree living on a diet of insects and smaller, weaker birds? When you eventually become a bird yourself? At the end of your life allow yourself to be shot and your face mounted on a wall as a virile symbol of masculinity? I can’t imagine you would make a very virile symbol of anything.
If the crowds challenged you and pelted you with stones and shouting: “HOW IS IT YOU CAN FLY, CAN SOAR LIKE AN ANGEL ABOVE ALL OF US? WHY CAN YOU NOT TEACH US HOW TO FLY?” Would you teach them, Mr Corcoran? Would you hoard your knowledge? Perhaps instead you would kneel before the crowds, wings curled in supplication and beg forgiveness for your gifts and unfair abilities? Would you be at peace when the crowds tear your wings from you in anger? Let your sinews rip, hear your bones snap and watch your white feather grow red with your blood.
Mr Corcoran, I must sincerely apologise. I presume of course you fly with the feathered wings of a bird or angel. Perhaps instead you have the leathery, membranous wings of a bat or maybe instead some veiny stretches of skin sometimes used by a gliding mammal. You seem more like a glider in my mind.
Unlike yourself, Mr Corcoran, it is not my place to make any kind of vindictive judgement on another person. I am not a cruel person. I am not that kind of individual, I am many things, Mr Corcoran, to many people not just a lump of flesh you can hurl knives and badly spelled insults at.
I am capable of being a loving person, a kind person, a somewhat zealous, a sometimes gentle, a dignified and often an intelligent person. I am more confident in what and that I am NOT MR CORCORAN.
I AM NOT CRUEL OR VICIOUS.
NOR PRESUMPTUOUS OR UNFAIR.
NOR KNOWN FOR MY GREEDY OR WRATHFUL NATURE.
I AM ERUDITE AND GOOD AND ENJOY JAZZ, MR CORCORAN.
I LIKE THE SOUND OF RUNNING WATER AND HOT SHOWERS, MR CORCORAN.
TEA AND COFFEE THANK YOU, MR CORCORAN, BUT WITH NO SUGAR THANK YOU, MR CORCORAN. WITH A DASH OF MILK TO COLOUR IT, MR FUCKING CORCORAN YOU BASTARD BEASTLY CREATURE YOU FUCKING PIT OF A HUMAN BEING.
YOU LOATHSOME DEVIL DAMN YOU MR CORCORAN DAMN YOU AND ALL WHO SHARE YOUR NAME.
MAY THE NAME OF CORCORAN BE ONE SYNONYMOUS WITH FOOLS, TRAITORS, IMBECILES, BRUTES AND HYPOCRITES FOR ALL TIME AND MAY A HEAVENLY POWER EXIST SIMPLY SO COMES FOR YOU A DIVINE RECKONING FROM SOME HIGH PAGAN GOD WHO WILL BRING YOU DOWN TO THE HOLE YOU SPAWNED FROM YOU ABSOLUTE SHITTING FUCK OF A BASTARD BORN FROM SOME FORGOTTEN CURSE SPEWING MONSTROSITY.
I am ready for your response in which I am sure is a full statement of your capitulation, resignation from the literary industry and absolute surrender as a human being who has attempted to put a pen to paper.
Hoping to hear from you soon,
Kindest Regards,
Sincerely,
Ms Kate Jayne Eve-Giddings.
N.H. Van Der Haar is an Australian writer currently completing a Masters at the University of Melbourne. They were previously a freelance stage manager. Previous work can be read at Antithesis Magazine, Otoliths Magazine, Trash to Treasure Literature and Aniko Press. He can be found online on instagram @ha_ha_haar.
No Body Like You
by Brandon Shane
Every brother needs another. They help you when no-one else will.
I gave Ricky a chance to flee westward and live for me. Water some flowers and let them bloom.
Give them enough shine. Grow a family worth tending the land for.
Father hadn't been a good man since mom died. We've all gotten a little worse. Chase the Eden. I'll take the mirage. I'll take words on a page, and you become the stroke of my pen.
He won $1500 rolling dice in a casino out in the boonies; it's the furthest I'll ever go. The bullet went straight through his white buttoned up shirt, through a beaded necklace I bought him last July, and shattered the mirror directly behind him.
That night he danced with the mayor's daughter and was on opposite ends of a man named Death.
His body rattles now; skin like snakebites. Lying somewhere in the hazy desert, in some unnamed riverbed that used to flow but is now dried up and withering down to the bone.
Vultures don't come around anymore.
Wrestling in the badlands, the wastelands, the crooked hills, the bathtub with brittle edges. Father needs to be cleaned again. I need something harsh to drink but the glass bottles have run out of their precious medicine. The anomalies have been blanched. There are only absences now.
My God, I say. Why'd you have to go? Sunlight doesn’t feel like it used to.
Brandon Shane is an alum of California State University, Long Beach, where he majored in English. He's currently pursuing an MFA while working as a substitute teacher and writing instructor. You can see work in Grim & Gilded, Acropolis Journal, Bitterleaf Books, Salmon Creek Journal, BarBar Literary Magazine, Discretionary Love, AURAL Magazine, Pink Heart Magazine, among others.
The Bad Thing
by Clara Guidry
I remember nothingness, at first. I don’t recall ever ‘existing’ before that day. There are still a lot of things I don’t feel. Cold or warmth; wet or dry; sick or healthy, even. All of them, unknown. I can experience ‘feelings.’ Perhaps not on the same level or with the same intensity as humans, but feelings all the same. I remember nothingness, but then I opened my eyes. I couldn’t move any other part of my body except for my eyes, and I used them to understand my ‘home.’ I was very high up, surrounded by bodies made of different materials. I later came to understand them as different types of wood, tins, and metals of varying colors. All this as well as porcelain. Like me. That—specifically—was what I understood my body to be made of. I gazed down. Below my elevated surface existed a human. They appeared in the same state as I was; that same nothingness. They cradled another body in their hands. The body was different from mine. It was crudely carved out of wood, appearing incomplete. Hollow eyes; holes that humans seem to place a lot of value in, from my understanding. The man holding the half-finished body kept stirring about but never doing anything else. Still. Empty.
​
I attempted to move my body similarly to the human. I was still. I could ‘feel’ my body struggle to move, yet the actions were impossible to initiate. I glanced down at my arms, and they seemed to be stuck in one direction, as were my legs. This static kept me from moving. My eyes kept focusing on the human. Reasons today I still do not understand, but as I looked upon him, I felt my throat opening; expanding wider than I ever knew it could. The porcelain on my face scraped and clinked against itself as my mouth dropped open and began moaning out words. “Please… Help. Help me. I cannot move.” After some time, I am not sure how long, the man stirred and slowly opened his eyes. He was clearly looking for the cause of the noise, and before long, he gazed upon me. I asked for help once again, and his jaw dropped open as he scrambled upright and crept closer to me. His eyes displayed a sense that he did not understand me, but desired to. “Can you help me?” I asked him, watching carefully as his eyes grew with every word I spoke. “Y-Yes… I can,” He responded. He placed the wood body aside and carefully grabbed me, his texture and material feeling strange against my body, and brought me closer to him. “My name is Robin,” he said, before inquiring as to what my name is. “What is a name?” I asked, unsure of the concept of which he spoke. “A name is what people refer to each other as. Do you not have one?” He inquired back. I told him no. “Would you like me to give you one?” He asked, waiting for me to speak back to him. I said yes. He stood for a moment in silence, taking one of his hands and tapping a finger against his face in a repeated pattern. After doing this for a while, he stopped and said, “Your name is now Isabella.”
​
That was a few months ago. In that time, I grew used to saying his name, as he must have grown used to saying mine. Robin made dolls and toys. That is what I am, supposedly. I never understood that, since none of his other creations moved or spoke like me. Their eyes never moved like mine or Robin’s. After our first encounter, Robin removed my arms and legs and replaced them with something more complicated. “You have joint articulation now, so you can move just like I can.” That is what he told me. With bendable wood mechanisms in between each limb, I was able to leave my place of rest with the others and could explore. This was a store; a small, ramshackle building with a workshop in the back. This is how Robin lived. Selling dolls and toys, other versions of me. Robin fell asleep—as I now understood the nothingness to be—in the workshop on most days. He was dedicated to his craft but never showed me off to other humans. I was his craft, yet I was ‘too special’ to show off to others. He would say it with gentleness, but his eyes seemed anxious.
​
“What is so special about me?” I would ask. He would smile at me and, after a slight hesitation, place his hand against my head. The weird texture of what I understood to be skin felt ‘warm’ against my head, and he would always answer with: “Because you’re a part of me.”
​
I can recall one day. I was never permitted outside, for fear of being broken. That is what Robin would say, yet he would sell others; others who were at larger risks than I was. Not special risks. I would spend days watching the outside street from the workshop window. Watching people that looked like Robin walk along, some with people that were smaller and dressed like me. Robin explained them. “Parents and children live together. The children depend on their parents because they can’t fend for themselves. They need a protector.”
​
I looked down at how I was dressed, in a similar fashion to children, and asked “Do I have parents?” Robin paused for a moment before rubbing the back of his neck and answering, “Well, I made you, so I guess that makes me… Your father?” I nodded my head at him. Robin was the first human I ever met, so it would make sense that I would have to depend on him in a similar way that children depend on parents. Later that day, Robin had customers in the store. This was a rare occurrence, but whenever it happened, Robin urged me to stay quiet to not scare anybody. I never understood how I could scare them. I was dressed just like them, so why be fearful? Robin never answered that question. I sat silently on the windowsill, patiently waiting for the customers to leave so that I could make a sound. I was watching the children outside of the store, playing a game. I could not make out why, or how, but they appeared to be enjoying the game in a way that Robin never explained.
​
To try and understand, I stood up, careful not to make any noise, and began replicating their moves. I moved one foot in front of the other; I raised my arms and lowered them back down; I jumped and squatted downward before jumping again; I spun around, and after a moment, I began doing things of my own accord. The reason was not immediately present, but I found myself incapable of stopping, even if just for a moment. The only thing that stopped me was a high-pitched squeal, a sound that made my head wobble and vibrate. I turned around, and the door to the workshop was wide open. Whenever Robin entered, I could hear the door. I did not hear it this time above the sound of the customers. I could see straight inside the store itself, where a small child had sprinted from the workshop door to where the eyes of the other customers and Robin stood, firmly locked on me. I froze; Robin always told me to not gain attention, but never what to do if I had it. One of the customers, a lady the same height as Robin but with leather-textured skin, began screaming and pointing at Robin, calling him names that were not his. Blackguard; devil; warlock. Words unfamiliar to me. Robin began walking toward the customers, waving his hands wildly and they began stumbling backward, right out of the door at the front of the shop. After everyone was gone, Robin shut the door tight and locked it, glancing back at me with eyes as big as the night we first met. I said nothing and just locked eyes with him. They seemed frightened.
​
That was a few days ago, now. Robin has hardly left the workshop since then. He would occasionally step into the storefront and look outside of the windows. Never for long. He always came back. When I asked him why he was doing that, he said it was nothing to worry about, and never clarified. I asked him what those names meant. He stayed silent but I kept asking. Finally, he told me, “Those names are very, very bad. They mean that I did a bad thing and need to be punished.” I tilt my head sideways, thinking hard about what he said, and ask if I was the bad thing. “Why would you ever assume that you were the bad thing?” He asked, seemingly bothered by such a question. “None of the other dolls are like me, and so are none of the children. She screamed about me, right? Was I the bad thing you made?” He stared at me for a moment, his eyes fighting between scared and sad. “Robin… Why am I alive?” As his mouth opened to answer, there was a loud pounding sound coming from the front of the store.
Robin jolted upright and gazed at the front of the store, where a booming voice cried out “Robin! We know you’re in there!” Robin stayed still. “We’ve heard and seen the results of your black magic! Come out here and face the consequences!” I looked up toward Robin, who, as quickly as he stood, began to throw on a hooded cloak with haste. “Robin…” I spoke. He looked at me, and without uttering a word, picked up a nearby hammer off his work desk. “Robin!” The voice beyond the door shouted, “If you do not come out, we will force our way in and make you answer for your actions!” Robin ignored the orders. He kept looking at me, hammer in hand as he lifted it upward. My gaze followed it as the voice shouted out “Last chance!” Nobody moved, even as we heard the front door resist a strong force from a repetitive thudding sound. My eyes were stiff on the hammer’s image; my limbs frozen; is this ‘fear?’ As these sounds filled the shop, Robin brought the hammer down with ferocity on the window behind me, shattering it open. He picked me up, carefully cradling me in his hands as he crawled out of the window and began running. To where, I did not know. There was a breeze. My body felt brittle as it hit me. After running in silence for a while, Robin spoke; “I know not why you’re alive, but I don’t consider you to be the bad thing …” I said nothing back, and simply understood this feeling; what being ‘cold’ felt like.
Clara Guidry (she/her/hers) is a Creative Writing student at Northwestern State University. Excited to expose her discovery of unknown worlds to others, she is deeply involved in her local writing community and has placed as a finalist in the NSU-Argus Award for Excellence in Creative Writing. She enjoys Flash Fiction, Dark/Urban Fantasy, and Poetry. She can be found on both Twitter and Instagram at @DragonChaser915
Three Hundred Years
by Willow Delp
Chapter 1
The last time she had loved him was half a century ago.
Their relationship was a hungry beast – demanding and all-consuming, wanting more. It elicited so much feeling, it made her feel overwhelmed, dizzy, and lost. Georgia could hardly focus on anything – Louis’ bright, dimpled face blocking out any other thoughts, so beautiful and charming she could hardly breathe.
She wanted to study natural philosophy – in the midst of a nascent United States of America of all things, a country as shaky and insecure as her own new affair. She’d have to pour her time, focus, her entire soul into her scholarly ambitions – and romantic dalliances would only serve to distract her, slow her down. She broke off the relationship, and allowed her heart to cool to numbness.
For a woman in rural Maine, during the eighteenth century, there had been two options. There was the one her mother had taken: live your life as an apple-cheeked, dutiful wife, producing a formidable lineage of hardy children to till the fields, suckling an endless stream of nursing babies until your husband relented. The other option was the role as a town spinster, maintaining a low profile to avoid accusations of witchcraft (that, to be fair, held more than a grain of truth.)
Around fifty years ago, the thought of her and Louis unexpectedly nestled into her mind, as she watched a young couple stroll around the park while sitting on a bench. The years had passed rapidly – she had seen man plunge into the ocean, and soar through the sky. She had carried around half a dozen surnames, blending in with practiced anonymity – yet never let go of ‘Georgia’. It was a pretty name. If she had to keep something over the centuries, she’d choose herself.
There was a certain air to the couple – the way they held each other’s hands reminded Georgia of how she had once squeezed Louis’ hand, before she held it to her lips. She felt her heart swell with love, like some sort of bump, and it was a satisfying feeling. It was the kind of thing that reminded her that she was still, somehow, alive.
****
She was just trying to buy some granola bars.
She had forgotten to, the last time she had gone to the grocery store – and it was so frustrating, not having a convenient snack at the ready for midnight escapades into the kitchen. When Georgia had walked into the pantry that evening, she was faced with sore disappointment – something she set out to alleviate.
The grocery store, at seven P.M. on a Monday night, was largely empty – a few shoppers milling around, the linoleum floors still clean from Sunday’s waxing, and ambient music wafting through the aisles. It was a quiet blot in the busy week.
Georgia was strolling through the store – watching as employees restocked shelves, listening to conversations, comforted by the sameness.
She did not expect him.
Georgia and Louis made eye contact – startled, like twin deer caught in the headlights. Utterly, completely exposed: flaws made totally bare.
“Louis,” she said, hoarsely. There was no denying it was him – even after three hundred years, Georgia never forgot a face. He was still pale as ever, a harsh contrast against brown-black hair. Stubble grew expectantly on his face, waiting to blossom into a beard that would never come. He did not say anything – only nodded, with muted acknowledgment. He still nodded in the same slow, measured way.
He was still her Louis. The music in the grocery store seemed overwhelmingly loud, a harsh din against her flustered, confused thoughts – he had to have died, hundreds of years ago, but she watched as his chest rose and fell in rapid succession. The words did not escape her throat, or his, although she knew they had to be thinking the same thing: How are you alive?
She did not know how many seconds – or perhaps minutes, or even hours – passed in the grocery store, as she and Louis locked eyes.
He withdrew a Post-It note from his pocket, scribbled on it with a pen – and then, pressed it into her open hand, slick with sweat.
She felt herself collapse onto the floor, and, hands shaking, opened the note as her legs splayed out helplessly. An employee rushed to try to assist her – but Georgia simply waved them off, disinterested.
The note listed an address and a phone number.
When she looked up, he was gone – was he afraid? Upset? Angry? She was the one who had left him, perhaps he resented her – but God, she didn’t care. He was still alive – somehow, and he had some feeling towards her, strong enough to provide means of contact, and joy was exploding in Georgia’s chest, her whole body set ablaze.
She would text him. She would call him. She would go to his house.
She had never felt more alive.
Chapter 2
When Georgia returned home, she withdrew her cell phone from her pocket and began to craft a text message – and then deleted it, almost as soon as she began.
Cell phones were so recent, and so ridiculous – if you had the privilege of seeing someone face to face, it was something you had to do. Most people led such short and lonely lives. They couldn’t waste a moment.
It had taken a while to get to Louis’ house – he lived in the middle of nowhere: vast expanses of grass stretching out like an empty canvas, encircling a mustard-yellow house with a charmingly anachronistic chimney.
Georgia had had to drive across bumpy roads, uneven roads – her heart willing, her car protesting. Her brain, as well, objected: she had no plan for what to say, hoping that a couple centuries of studious research would eventually produce something clever.
She crossed through the fields – the grass grew tall and untethered, and she felt like she was parting the Red Sea just to reach his door. Louis had always enjoyed his privacy – and perhaps, this was its natural conclusion, growing a grassy fortress.
She eventually reached the door, and knocked – and his voice rang out: as velvety as ever.
“Come in, Georgia,” Louis called. “Door’s unlocked.”
She swung it open with a creak, and met Louis’ gaze. He was sitting at a wooden dining table, and gestured for her to sit across from him. He looked the same as he did in the grocery store, and the same as he had been three hundred years ago – in a sweater and jeans, yet with an unchanged face. She had half-expected him to turn to dust, like all living beings eventually did. But he was alive and young as ever.
“You knew it was me?” she asked, smiling faintly. She stepped into the room, her skin alight with the warm glow of a floor lamp. She scanned the walls as Louis looked at her, his expression inscrutable. He seemed mildly pleased, but in an emptily ‘nice’ way – a close-mouthed smile for strangers, for politeness’ sake.
“You knock like you’re trying to bang the door down,” Louis said. “You always have.”
As Georgia studied the room with a trained scientist’s eye, she began to notice how many faces there were – faces in photographs, framed on the wall proudly – wide, earnest smiles, from people Georgia had never seen before. They were old and new: cracked, black-and-white photos when the art was new, to the more recent printed-out photos in full, dazzling color.
Some were tucked in small, treasured corners, almost like Easter eggs – hidden, and subtle, but when you saw them, you couldn't avert your eyes.
Louis had loved a lot of people.
Georgia gestured broadly to the photos with a hand, and felt the blunt question stumble from her mouth: “Do - did they know you’re immortal?”
Louis half-shrugged. “I always try to tell them. And they humor me.”
Georgia eased herself into the dining chair across from Louis, looking at him with something she had always tried to avoid: pity. Being an object of pity was a death sentence, and Georgia refused to damn him like that.
But perhaps death was more desirable than passing through countless lives, watching as they trickled through your fingertips. Water through a strainer.
“I’m really sorry,” she said, but he cut her off.
“It’s not all bad,” Louis began. “But I never thought it would turn out this way, honestly. I could never have seen myself, three centuries ago, being frozen in time. My life was, for the most part, normal. But Georgia, to be honest…”
At this pause, Louis cast his eyes downward.“I think we were supposed to grow old together. And then, when you left –,” Louis’ voice broke. “I couldn’t grow old at all.”
A deafening silence lingered between them as they sat opposite of each other – both avoiding eye contact, fiddling with their pockets. Mirror images of each other, slinking from themselves.
Georgia stood up and left.
What else was there to do?
Chapter 3
“I’ve grayed.”
She had plucked a gray hair out of her scalp and presented it to Louis, with the pride of an especially boastful child at show-and-tell.
Georgia had spotted it the next morning while brushing her hair in the mirror. An older face had stared back at her, with an unmistakable strip of gray and tanned skin lined with newfound wrinkles.
She had never aged before, and she drove immediately to Louis’ house — through the bumpy roads, blasting music. Responsibilities be damned. She was still in her pajamas, – a decade-old T-shirt and stained sweatpants – and she had hastily slid on sneakers before driving. This was not how she should have presented herself when throwing herself at the feet of an ex-boyfriend – but they had loved each other before the invention of showers, so perhaps it didn’t really matter.
She had torn through the field as soon as she parked, and banged her fist on the creaky door – once, twice, thrice, before Louis appeared, and she presented him with the hair.
Finally, he angled his face upwards and pointed to his facial hair – lengthened, definitely, into the real beginnings of a proper beard, with pepper-colored flecks.
“Perhaps –,” Georgia said, “This is a sign we should try this again.”
“I think we should,” Louis agreed, nodding. He held Georgia’s hand, squeezing it softly, and smiled at her– a wide, earnest smile. There was a tinge of anxiety in his eyes – but it was giddy, more than anything: the brightness of new beginnings.
“After all,” Louis said, “We won’t be young forever.”
THE END
Willow Page Delp (they/he) is a student at Amherst College and an avid reader, writer, disability advocate and digital hoarder. They can be found on Instagram at @wxddo.
what's left of the Liberty Bell
by Alan Bern
how I fell for you
by Alan Bern
Retired children’s librarian Alan Bern (he/him/his) has published three books of poetry and has a hybrid fictionalized memoir, IN THE PACE OF THE PATH, forthcoming from UnCollected Press. Recent awards include: Winner, Saw Palm Poetry Contest (2022); Honorable Mention for Littoral Press Poetry Prize (2021). Recent and upcoming writing and photo work include: CERASUS, Feral, The Hyacinth Review, DarkWinter, and Mercurius. Alan is a published/exhibited photographer, and he performs with dancer/choreographer Lucinda Weaver as PACES: dance & poetry fit the space and with musicians from Composing Together.
Lines & Faces, his press with artist/printer Robert Woods: linesandfaces.com.
The Shape of You
by Alyssa Jordan
Malvina sat in a shadowy cafe.
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Noise was muted beyond her pool of static: a breaking cup, a peal of laughter. It vibrated around her like a world above water.
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Malvina lived somewhere else.
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Most days, she stopped for a flute of wine. Maybe an ice-cream cone. The shadow carts usually procured new flavors.
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Today, the ice cream gleamed like burnt copper. Tasted like summer afternoons drenched in sleep and salt. Another day, the peddler had scooped watery blue ice that made her weep. His best was still the blood orange—sweet under the tang of metal and memory.
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Malvina always ate with men in shadow. Their faces were never all that clear. Like wisps of fog, they would stare over the table, unable to maintain their shape. Once or twice, she saw the blade of a nose. A familiar lip.
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Malvina wondered what pieces of her shone through.
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One Tuesday, she met a man with swirling grey teeth. Each time he grinned, they shifted in his mouth, visible for only a moment.
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You seem tired, he said.
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He gestured from his face to hers. Except for his lips, everything was smoked shut.
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Your eyes.
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In the sheen of a knife, Malvina studied her reflection. She wondered when the otherness had crept into her stare. How the rest of her could still look the same.
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At night, Malvina lay in bed, hands on her stomach.
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Where did you go? She whispered.
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Malvina started skipping work to stay in the shadows. She would examine the ashen-faced men, looking for her mother’s smile, the forehead of a cousin or lips of a nephew. Their familiarity was worse than anything she could have dreamed.
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Whenever she leaned closer, that part of their face would fade. Like it never was.
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Malvina would leave and sit in the shadow of a café. Purchase the latest flavor of ice cream, let a mouthful of cells sit on her tongue, expand into organs and flesh and bone, feel it decay to dust.
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She would swallow it down to keep some part inside. Wait to feel okay again.
Five Tales From A Supernatural Dating Service
by Alyssa Jordan
Suitor #1
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One rainy spring day, Talia went on a date with a selkie.
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They sat in the back of a sandwich shop. Muted noise wove through the tables like water around rock—a warm greeting between friends, a woman’s deep-throated laugh. Corned beef and freshly baked bread salted the air.
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At their table, seawater puddled over the wood. It dripped onto baskets of cold-cut sandwiches. The selkie fretted, spraying them with brine.
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Talia held her cup over the table.
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“So,” she said. “What do you like to do in your free time?”
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Before the selkie could answer, a waiter tripped, and salad sailed past their heads. Talia attempted to smile as the selkie picked chunks of mushroom from his coat. It didn’t hide his blubbery chin or grey-smoked beard.
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Outside the shop, he offered Talia his fur coat. She glanced from her dress to the cold mist.
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It would be nice to accept it, but everyone knew what it meant if you took a selkie’s pelt.
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They parted under the rain with a handshake. She would always think of him when she looked to the sea, though.
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Or ate a sandwich.
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****
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Suitor #2
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“Terribly sorry,” Talia said after stepping on the ghost’s feet for a third time.
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She couldn’t tell where his feet were, never mind his face, but a scratchy voice protested every time her heel sunk through an appendage. The ghost seemed to grow surlier by the minute. Talia tried not to hold it against him—no one liked having their foot crushed, corporeal or not.
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An old drive-in theater spread across the lot. Dozens of cars had parked in front of a screen that glowed against the sky. Even from the ghost’s truck, Talia could smell popcorn marinating over burnt hot dogs.
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“This was a great idea,” she said. “I love old movies.”
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At his response, her lips pursed. “Of course, there’s a point to them.”
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Voices boomed from the outdoor speakers. In the first row of cars, teenagers threw popcorn at the screen.
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“Well, yes, but romance isn’t just used for that. It creates an emotional connection.” Talia cleared her throat. “It gives people hope, you know? It makes them think that things might turn out alright.”
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They subsided into silence. It wasn’t broken for the rest of the night, not even when the ghost drove Talia to her apartment. He pulled away from the curb before her door could close.
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The dating service must have made a mistake.
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****
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Suitor #3
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Her third suitor chose an upscale restaurant without a name. Talia drank in the lavish paintings, marble pillars, and bubbly chandeliers.
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Across the table, a 200-year-old vampire eyed the curve of her neck. Somewhere in time, Talia’s teenage self was ecstatic. He looked exactly as she thought he would: moon-pale skin, eyes like wine, and rippling hair.
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What Talia hadn’t expected was the pointed tail that swished around his chair.
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“This is a lovely place,” she said with a smile.
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He returned it, exposing a half inch of fang. Long fingers curled around the stem of his glass. Under the tablecloth, something hard grazed her thighs.
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Talia jumped before swatting his tail. “Excuse me.”
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A waiter paused near their table. He glanced between the two of them.
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Talia felt her cheeks burn. “It’s not supposed to be this way.”
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The vampire tilted his head. He looked amused.
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“For one, I think you want to eat me. And I do mean that literally.”
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He gave her another smile. The tip of each fang gleamed in the low-level light. Despite her human eyes, Talia could tell that he was tracking the flow of blood in her neck. His tail seemed to flick from side to side with interest.
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She sighed and signaled the waiter. “Check, please.”
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****
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Suitor #4
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Talia didn’t want to admit that she had grown desperate, but she went into her fourth date with a mantra of: This will go well because I said so.
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They sat on a sloping hill outside the city.
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The reaper had laid a checkered blanket on the ground. In dishes and pots, they dined on chilaquiles from Mexico, pirozhki from Russia, and dumplings from China. For dessert, he produced tangy lemon squares from another dimension.
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As Talia bit into one—she had been assured they were safe to eat, so long as she avoided bubble baths—the reaper explained that he had picked this spot after receiving her polaroid from the dating service.
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The date went downhill when he began to talk about his ex-wife. Apparently, she had three heads (one was called El Diablo).
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Talia had no idea what to say. At least, she didn’t until he conjured his ex-wife. The woman blew into existence over their platter of lemon squares, squashing them a little too fiercely to be accidental.
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The reaper kissed his ex-wife’s hand. One of the heads rolled their eyes.
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“Oh, come on!” Talia shouted. “I thought this service would be different, but you’re all the same!”
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The third head smiled nastily.
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****
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Suitor #5
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“Maybe my family was right.”
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A bare-faced man sipped a milkshake next to her. They had agreed to meet at a local diner, so Talia was surprised to see her date in a three-piece suit.
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“The idea of a soulmate…maybe it’s not for me.”
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The trickster pushed his milkshake aside to tap his throat, then his head.
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“Oh, of course,” Talia said.
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A light voice drifted into her mind. Your family, huh? Betcha didn’t know your grandparents lied. No tame first meeting in school. Truth is, he almost ran her over with his car.
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Talia gasped. “What?”
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Yep. The trickster grinned. Talk about Fatal Attraction, huh?
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A peal of laughter ripped from her chest. The trickster smiled, creasing the skin around his eyes.
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Talia cleared her throat. “I know it might seem silly,” she said. “But I like the idea of it—soulmates, I mean. It’s nice. A little bright spot in the world.”
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That’s your problem, then. So busy looking ahead that you miss everything else.
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She frowned. “What do you mean?”
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The trickster clapped his hands. In the next moment, they were standing in a place called the Atomic Ballroom. Several couples twirled around them, their reflections dancing in mirrored walls.
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When Talia turned around, the trickster offered his hand.
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Talia wasn’t sure of the steps; she’d never been one to dance. She took his hand, laughing as he spun her.
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It was a relief to let go.
Alyssa Jordan is a writer living in the United States. She likes to make surprise balls and drink coffee. In 2020, she won The Molotov Cocktail's Flash Monster contest. You can find her on Twitter @ajordan901 or Instagram @ajordanwriter.
Practical Potions For Impractical Witches
by Sura K. Hassan
The months following our breakup were extremely challenging. Between the constant reminder of his new relationship on social media, our friends’ ever-growing disdain towards me for “not getting over it already,” and the profound realization that I was one of “those” people, hitting rock bottom was imminent. Add a global pandemic to the mix, a stress-induced bout of PCOS, and a pair of failing kidneys (thanks, granddad), and life was on its way to becoming positively, perfectly unbearable.
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But then came the wake-up call in the form of a childhood friend with a newly minted medical license, desperate to fix me. And when you’ve been broken for a full fourteen months with people telling you that you’re the reason why you’re so unhappy, help seems…almost too good to be true.
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Granted, Haseeb’s concerns were justified. Being too young to waste away in a hospital bed, we decided that this was what rock bottom really looked like. No heartbreak could compare to the pain that comes from a dialysis machine and the physical and mental toll it takes on you. Or so, said Haseeb.
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Truth be told, the whole “you must get better” idea was predominantly his. I was perfectly content with slowly withering away into oblivion. Given the state of the world, I welcomed it. But my childhood friend, who was very proud of being called “doctor,” wanted me to get better. So, I did.
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I got better. He didn’t stop there, either. After dealing with my failing organs, we moved to PCOS, and from there, Haseeb decided that he wanted me to embrace a healthier lifestyle. My collection of cigarette boxes was replaced with nutritional supplements and an increasing number of yoga mats and gym equipment.
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Life suddenly became about getting better, getting a job, and re-registering at university because undergraduate degrees are important. But the issue with focusing primarily on your physical health is that you ignore the other thing.
You know, the thing that led to it, the proverbial elephant in the room. Haseeb wouldn’t let me think about my ex-boyfriend or my old friends at all. I spent a year not thinking about it, not because I wanted to, but because my friend wouldn’t let me.
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So, it didn’t come to me as a surprise when I found myself surrounded by suitcases and boxes in a brand-new apartment in a new city in a country I hadn’t seen in a year, thinking about that part of my life. Yet, unlike last time, I wasn’t alone. Or surrounded by friends who liked my ex-boyfriend better than me. I had my sisters, and we’re called the mean girls for a reason.
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After all, upon my recollection of one of the most tempestuous times of my life, as well as the realization that I was still completely, utterly, and unfortunately in love with my ex-boyfriend, my youngest sister had an epiphany.
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“Why don’t you ask grand-mère for that spell?”
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My other sister and I shared glances. “What spell?” asked Abby, and Massie sighed.
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“The spell. You know, the one she used on dada.”
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Oh. That spell.
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For reference, the spell in question is a love spell my paternal grandmother allegedly used to bewitch my grandfather. This story was recounted to us, aged seventeen, sixteen, and fourteen, during a rare, cold summer evening in Karachi, against the backdrop of a thunderstorm. My maternal grandparents had been all too delighted to reveal this particular bit of family history.
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My paternal grandmother is a witch, and I mean that with no disrespect. She comes from a long line of witches and has a little black book which we jokingly call the “lady’s grimoire.” Said book is the reason behind most of the chaos in the family, from our parents’ separation to the birth of our brother to the prevention of a divorce between my youngest aunt and her husband.
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It’s the grimoire of destiny, promised to make all our wildest dreams come true. I’ve only seen it once, and there is no denying that there’s magic exuding from its very pages. Our grandmother, through some of her witchy instincts, had realized that all three of us possessed magic in our blood.
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“All good things come in threes,” she’d proclaimed.
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Unfortunately, she began training us fairly young and got caught by our parents teaching us how to sacrifice a chicken. Naturally, our lessons came to an end. Our poor mother made sure to keep us away from her and her magical nonsense.
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After all, witches aren’t real, and neither is magic. As I ascended adulthood, I decided that our mother was right: magic wasn’t real. Of course, that never stopped our grandmother from wailing about having three untrained witches in the family, but I’m not sure if I do really have the acumen required to be a witch. I’m a scientist if you must know. Or I will be a scientist once I finish my post-grad. After my undergrad. Still, a long way to go. We can all thank my ex for that.
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But desperate times call for desperate measures.
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And so, that is how, on the following weekend, I found myself on the phone with my dearest grandmother. The conversation was awkward at best; grand-mère hated us for ignoring the ways of our ancestors and adopting “western ideals.”
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I had to hold back on my defense of the life I’ve made and listened to her drown on and on about why my cousin Zara should listen to her and bathe in the moon to ensure that she has a son.
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Bingo.
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“But grand-maman,” I spoke, “my mother did that, and I’m a girl.”
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“There was a miscalculation with your dates,” she responded, “the doctor didn’t tell us the correct one. Besides, you’re a moon child. It doesn’t count.”
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It’s hard having a conversation with someone who speaks of magic and bathing under the moon as though it’s a universal fact rather than pure mysticism. Still, I endured. It took some doing, but I was able to get the conversation moving.
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Eventually, we broached the topic of love. “So, if I really like someone,” said I, positively traumatized by the idea that I have to talk to my grandmother of all women about my love life, “what do you think I should do?”
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“Do you like someone, azizam?”
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“Not at the moment, but I’m curious. Is there something I could do to-”
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“Is it that doctor you’re always with?” she wanted to know.
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“Umm,” I hesitated, not sure how to proceed before giving up, “I guess. It’s just-”
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“I know just the spell for you!”
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I took a deep breath in relief and quickly jotted down the ritual. A few hours later, my sisters and I sat around a circle of salt, with the remaining ingredients spread close by.
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“Are we really going to use saffron?” Massie wanted to know.
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“More importantly, are we really performing a spell?” Abby inquired. “None of it is real, and do you really want to go back to Ra-”
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“We will try,” I announced, mixing the ingredients in our makeshift cauldron; a silver bowl we’d picked up from an antique store. I murmured the words and then added a few threads of saffron, marking the completion of the spell. Then, placing it inside the salt circle, we held our hands, closed our eyes, and began chanting the last words of the spell, which in English translates to “and mote it be,” seven minutes. When we opened our eyes, nothing had happened. I don’t know what we expected, but we were disappointed.
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“See,” remarked Abby, “I told you it’s useless.”
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I shrugged. “Well, at least now I know that I tried everything,” I reasoned before standing up. Or rather, I was about to stand up when Massie grabbed my arm.
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“What is that?” she asked. I turned my attention to the bowl. While the ingredients had created a red mixture, the one we were looking at was undeniably yellow.
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“Does this mean it works?” This time Abby was the one to speak.
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“Only one way to find out,” I murmured before taking a sip of the concoction. Almost immediately, I felt myself transformed: it seemed as though the world was suddenly alive, as though there had been a translucent sheet wrapped around my eyes this entire time. As I relayed this information to my sisters, Massie grabbed the bowl from me.
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“Let’s see who finds their Prince Charming first,” she smiled mischievously before taking a gulp. We managed to pressure Abby into a sip, too, and then began the waiting. And boy, was it interesting.
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See, we have a tradition of visiting different cafes every now and then. A couple of days after the spell, as we were sitting in a new coffee shop with raving reviews online, my youngest sister made the decision to order another cappuccino to go. As she walked back to our table, someone bumped into her, spilling coffee all over her. As we would later realize, the spell had worked.
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She got a date the following weekend. Abby’s long-term boyfriend broke up with her, and we concluded that the spell had an adverse effect on puppy love, but then she, too, met someone fairly quickly (by her standards), which left me, the main perpetrator of the spell. A month went by, and then two, but I didn’t get anything. No calls, no text messages, not even a story view on Instagram.
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So, what had gone wrong? But then, on Valentine’s Day, I received flowers and a card from my doctor friend and realized that the spell had been working: it was just on another guy in another country. Careful what you wish for, am I right?
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But I’m stubborn, and so, I performed the spell again, this time completely alone, with my focus solely on my ex-boyfriend. When it refused to work, and instead, Haseeb traveled to visit me, I tried it again. And again. And again.
The spell seemed to work on every guy in my life except the one I wanted. Devasted, I reached out to my grandmother once more. “It won’t work!” I bellowed into the phone.
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“What?”
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“The spell! It’s attracting everyone but the person I want.”
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“So, there is someone!”
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“Yes.”
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“Oh. You have to be specific then.”
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“What?”
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My grandmother seemed all too delighted to share another spell with me. Unfortunately, the nature of the spell and its ingredients list raised too many eyebrows.
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“Are you really this desperate?” wondered Massie as we prepared the ingredients for the ritual.
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“Yes,” I answered, chopping bamboo sticks at the precise angle as instructed.
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“You know, there’s a point when it stops being love and starts becoming obsession,” Abby pointed out.
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“Trust me,” I said, “we haven’t gotten to it yet.”
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And that is how my sisters and I performed yet another spell for the recovery of my ex-boyfriend. This time round though, before we had even completed our incantations, did we feel something. The lights in our apartment started flickering, we heard wolves howling (which is weird because there are no wolves in our city) and it felt as though the world was spinning until-
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“Do not drink that,” warned Abby as soon as the ritual was complete.
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“Oh, c’mon,” I argued, “You two got your….” My voice trailed off as we noticed the color of the plasma that had formed in our little bowl. Even though the original mixture had been a dully brown, we found ourselves staring at a shiny, dark, almost cosmic-looking liquid.
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“You’re going to die,” declared Massie.
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This time, even I was skeptical. “I should…probably call her,” I agreed before pulling out my phone.
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“The spell’s done to perfection,” my grandmother exclaimed at the end of my narration. “Why, I used this on your grandfather, and we had the best forty years ever!”
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After hanging up the phone, I stared at my sisters.
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“Don’t you dare-” Massie began but I wasn’t listening. My paternal grandparents were single-handedly the happiest couple in our family. Why, they’d managed a “love match”- as it is called- in the forties in the Indian Subcontinent where arranged marriages prevailed. There was no way I would ever let go of the opportunity to-
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I gulped down the potion, and it tasted distinctly like my ex’s deodorant.
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“None of this makes sense,” Abby spoke up, “that thing shouldn’t be that color. I don’t know what we’ve managed to get ourselves into, but it can’t be-”
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Ding.
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I grinned. It was the text I’d been waiting for.
Sura K. Hassan lives between two coastal cities, Karachi and Istanbul, and finds solace in the works of Paulo Coelho. Her writings primarily focus on relationships, personal mythology and identity with splatterings of adjusting to adulthood after a sheltered childhood. Her works have appeared in Welter Journal, Defunct Magazine, Sublunary Review, The Minison Project and more.
Change Can Be Hairy And Scary
by M.K. Hale
Two days after I turned eighteen, I got a PR package in the mail from G— Razors. There was a printed note—with my name handwritten on the ‘name here’ line—that read: happy birthday! Your first shave won’t make you a man, but your first real shave will get you pretty damn close.
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I looked down at the soft protrusions of my chest and became hyper aware of the lack of weight between my legs. I felt a quiet wave of disappointment wash over me, then discomfort at my own feelings of lacking something, something I never thought I was lacking before. Manhood—what does that even mean? Did I even want that? How could I be disappointed in not having something I’ve never considered? Instead of self-analyzing, I shoved the feelings into a box and pushed it into a dark corner where I would stumble upon it later when, maybe, I’d be ready to read into it.
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The back of my neck began to prickle with goosebumps, while I was lost in shoving my feelings away, because my parents and brother were laughing at the insinuation of me having some type of masculinity. I wondered if they had subscribed to this company under my name as a joke. But with the weird grimace on my dad’s face, they probably hadn’t.
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“Are you going to shave your mustache with it?” My brother cackled, pressing his hand to the soft roundness of his stomach as his eyes watered.
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I touched my upper lip lightly, feeling nothing but blonde peach fuzz. “Maybe.”
****
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A month later—at the end of June, when it was hottest—I found myself standing in the bathroom in front of the mirror, picking and stretching the skin of my face. Everyone was asleep, except for the cat that danced between my legs leaving loose hair behind on my sweat sticky calves.
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“Do you think it’s noticeable?” I asked him when he leapt to the counter. “Should I just—?”
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The razor from my birthday hadn’t been opened at all; absolutely spotless and still sharp from being hidden away. I had pulled it from under the sink and placed it on the counter to stare at, hoping to get an answer from the cat, or a disembodied voice, or my subconscious finally making a decision.
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But, nothing. Perpetual silence except for the comforting, old groans of the house.
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I wouldn’t have even considered using it if my brother hadn’t gagged at the sight of me. It wasn’t the determinate, but it made me feel horrifically self conscious. Then my mom grabbed my face—right after his gut wrenched noises—to turn me back and forth as she muttered: oh honey, you should do something about that. Bleach, maybe?
​
The hair that spread across my legs and under my arms were manageable, wearing pants and sleeved shirts were normal for me. If it’s not seen, it’s not there. I shaved every morning regardless, but by the time I crawled into bed in the evening it had all grown back darker, thicker, longer. It was a shock at first, this kind of growth hadn’t been a ‘problem’ before. I actually didn’t even mind it too much; it wouldn’t grow there if it wasn’t meant to be there. But the dark hairs on the corners of my mouth? I couldn’t stand the way people looked at me, whispering to their friends with their eyes locked on me, sneering. My dad wouldn’t even look at me when he came home from work since the prepubescent whiskers grew in.
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“I already shave everyday, what’s one more spot?” I whispered to no one, smearing shaving cream across my upper lip.
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The cat walked across the counter to sit in front of where I was leaning, he looked at me with big yellow eyes and blinked slowly. I tried to shoo him, but he wouldn’t budge. Just blinked, and blinked, and blinked until I asked: “Do you have something to say or are you just being a nuisance for annoyance sake?”
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He wasn’t a talkative cat so I hadn’t expected him to even meow at me, so I made the rash decision to just do it. Shave it off today, tomorrow, and everyday it grows back after. The razor came to touch my skin when my ears were suddenly filled with a horrible crackling noise, like someone had turned on an old radio and didn’t know how to tune it. It was scratchy and snowy, distant but close all at once—it startled me so much that the razor fell from my hand, bounced off the counter, and into the sink.
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“Everything’s changing. No use fighting.”
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It felt as if time had stopped as I waited for a figure to come through the doorway and into the yellow lit, yellow walled, yellow sink bathroom to—I don’t know what I thought—get me? But nothing came, so I looked at the cat to ask if he had heard it too, to ground myself in the moment and come back to reality. When my eyes latched on to him I was looking down his throat as his head tilted back to leave his mouth gaping like a pit.
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“Everything’s changing.” His mouth didn’t move around the words, it sounded like he had swallowed someone and they were speaking from the depths of his little belly. “No use fighting.”
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Somehow, my voice came through the choking fear that clutched my throat. “What happens if I–if I try?”
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“Resistance doesn’t stop it, only slows. Change is inevitable. This—” His voice came like an angered hiss. “—is you.”
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I looked in the mirror at my reflection and couldn’t recognize myself through the rows of teeth and black eyes glinting back at me. My face still felt soft to the touch, but my hands moved with long, monstrous claws across the glass. It must be a dream or a panicked delusion. I was just having a breakdown from the stress and was having a nightmare that was extremely lucid, but not impossible.
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Cats don’t talk. I’m not a monster. It’s not real.
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I wiped the cream from my face, turned off the lights, and went to bed without the strength to fully expand my lungs. My fingers gripped the sheets so tightly that they grew damp under the shake of my fists and I stared at the black ceiling for hours listening to distant whimpering down the hall.
****
On Monday night I sat on the edge of my bed with my fingers ripping holes into the mattress as the full moon watched me quietly through the cracked window. I gripped it like I was trying not to float away with my thoughts that were giving me the spins. Nausea struck me like a firm slap on the back and tears fell and dried in intervals like a spring shower. I didn’t know what to do and I was frightened.
​
Over the course of three days I had grown three inches; my pants were now capris and I could feel my bones shifting and my organs moving around to find their new places. My mom stopped looking at me, speaking with her back turned like she was repulsed at the very idea of eye contact with my yellow, beady eyes. My brother stayed at this friend's house most days now. My dad stayed in the garage until he was sure I was locked away like a wild animal in my room, isolated and subdued.
​
I decided it was best to only come out at night now, where no one could see me and I could be safe in my own skin. Comfortable, even. The physical and mental changes did nothing to my psyche, really, I was perfectly fine looking like a feral beast shuffling down the hall while my new ears brushed the ceiling. There was even a sense of shelter and security in my new gait. But I was lonely and hurt that I was trapped in a world of solitude.
​
In a fit of anger I ran into the living room to pick up the cat under its armpits and brought him to my face. “How do I fix this? I don’t want to be alone.”
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He didn’t speak, only meowed and hissed at my sharp teeth and long muzzle. I wanted to shake him and yell, but he was so small in my giant beastly hands that I just put him down and wept. I pulled myself into the bathroom and grabbed the scissors from the medicine cabinet and began cutting around my head, arms, and chest. Hair fell everywhere, piling up like autumnal leaves, but it made no difference. I grabbed my dad’s beard trimmer and brought it to my chin, only for it to tangle up and die under the sheer weight of my body hair. A whine erupted from the back of my throat as I sobbed and banged my fists against the counter.
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“I’m so sorry…” A tiny voice came from the hall. I jumped and turned to see four familiar fingers wrapped around the door frame, but no face attached. “This is all my fault, I’m so sorry…”
“Dad..?”
​
“If I had treated you more delicately… If I made you learn to be a lady, to not play so rough with the boys, maybe you wouldn’t have turned… Maybe you would still be my little girl…” He sobbed and the wood groaned under his grip.
​
My lip wobbled and my heart shattered under my ribs, shaking my breath out of me. Not because of his pain, but for thinking this wasn’t inevitable, like there weren’t always signs that I was trapped in skin that didn’t fit me. No use fighting, the cat said. Resistance only slowed, didn’t stop. How long could I resist for the sake of not wanting to be lonely, and not fall into the comfort I had grown to know? Was it worth the heartache?
​
I didn’t want to be this dainty, quiet thing that they wanted me to be.
​
I wanted them to love me regardless.
​
“I don’t think I was really ever your little girl.”
M.K. Hale (they/them) is a twenty-five year old writer from Virginia. They focus on short fiction, poetry, and novellas based around queer love in both romantic and platonic relationships. Hale is currently working on their first novella about divorce, getting even, and coming to terms with your true self. They have been accepted in the forthcoming, first ever issue, of The Icarus Writing Collective’s. You can find them on Instagram @kendallcantread, Twitter @aresoracie.
When Forty Men
by Claire Beeli
When Forty Men
swan-dive into the Grand Canyon,
and it’s moonlit midnight,
and no one is listening,
do they splat like raspberries
against the canyon floor?
or if
the dive is secret,
if the light is right,
will they slip
through golden ground
like porpoises? will they
needle into
another world,
with only a rainbow ripple, and a plop?
how would they know to dive,
do you think?
how would they know to stand
along the glass bridge
ducks in a row
and, without a peep,
take flight all at once?
did the animals tell them?
did the yellow moon bewitch them?
did they know what waited for them,
on the other side of the canyon?
did they know, or did they only hope?
Claire Beeli (she/her) is a writer from Long Beach, California. Her work is published in Block Party Magazine, Polyphony Lit, and Chinchilla Lit, among others. When she's not reading, writing, or volunteering at her local library, she's being crushed by a dog bigger than she is.
The Scatterer
by Adrianne Reig
The earth here is brittle with little stones. A blanket of green leaves gone orange gone brown lies heavy over the top of it, but still my steps are light and careful. I am new here—I’ve only just arrived, and I can’t afford to cut my feet. I am searching for something, or I was, but the forest distracts me.
​
They told me the trees here are small because their ancestors were cleared for pasture, and remnants of rocky walls criss-cross between them, boxing them in. There are no sheep here any more—the forest has become a forest again. They told me I would find answers here, that I’d find truth, but so far, all I’ve found is forest. Maybe I shouldn’t have listened, but I am here now, and I guess that means it’s too late. I can’t leave without finding what I came for.
​
No one buries the fallen trees, and their corpses lie scattered. Most of them have been dead so long that they’ve become something else, mossy and mushroomy and fragile. They disintegrate where they’re kicked. Tender green things sprout from their bodies, grateful for a soft place to take hold. Between the sprouts lie nutshells that chipmunks left there, leave there often. They can’t resist the softness of decay either.
​
I find bones. Some belong to newly dead creatures, and others belong to creatures who’ve long forgotten they were ever alive in the first place. I leave the bones where they are, even the old, dry ones. Are bones the truth? I wonder, but no, bones are liars—they wear costumes and refuse to take them off until they melt away. No, bones are not the truth.
​
I hear the river before I see it. It runs like a half-healed wound from halfway up the mountain, filled with cold, clear blood that sings over more stones, some coppery, some shimmering gray-green, some purple. They are like jewels that have forgotten what they are. Are stones the truth? I don’t think so. They stay longer than bones, but they break down eventually and become sand, and I know sand is not the truth because it gets into your eyes and blinds you.
​
Fish dart over the stones and spring up to catch mayflies from the air. When they see my shadow, they dash to hide in the stiller parts under boulders, in the deep pools where they don’t have to fight against the current quite so hard. Are fish the truth? I don’t think so.
​
The river stones look so soft, so smooth, that I forget about the sharp ones under my feet, and my steps become heavy again as I sink into the forest. Just before I reach the water’s edge, I feel a sharp, musical pain in one foot. I discover a stone embedded in my flesh, and I sit down on a boulder to pull it out. The stone is so red that it’s almost alive. I squeeze it in my hand and limp into the river, then gasp—I think the water is flowing up into my veins through the hole in my foot. My heart beats faster. It doesn’t have to work so hard to pump this thinner fluid.
​
I look down. The water reddens around my ankles. Stay, the river tells me. You belong here.
​
But I can’t stay. This wasn’t meant to happen—I still have so far to go. I climb out of the river on the other side, and I hear bees buzzing inside my ears. I hear birds that don’t belong to this forest, what little I know of it; they’re different from the ones I’ve been listening to. I keep walking. As I do, I notice the trees all have faces. How could I have missed it before? They’re all watching me. The bees buzz in my nose.
​
My feet, which only moments ago were dripping with river water, feel curiously dry, and I look down. They are shriveling up. My hands are, too, and I bring them up to my face. It is as wrinkled and withered as a paper wasp nest, and it flakes away in the places where I touch. It’s nothing, I think. It doesn’t matter. I can’t stop—I still have so far to go.
​
I leave a cloud of skin behind me which settles into a trail to mark where I have stepped. With a glance back, I discover the river has carried all my blood away. I’m certain the river has all of it. I am so much lighter without it. I once thought my bones were heavy, but really, it was the blood that weighed me down.
​
Layer by layer, I keep disappearing. All my skin is gone, my armor, any version of me the world could recognize. I should be afraid, but I’m not. Why am I not afraid?
​
My fat slips down what’s left of me, making me greasy. It drips between my toes and tendons, and causes the leaves to stick to the bottoms of my feet, but they don’t stay for long. Soon, the forest litter unsticks once more.
​
My organs dry up and fall, empty seed pods, remnants, rolling away in the light breeze. I think the buzzing noise I heard was my heart grinding and straining even after it had nothing left to pump. The buzzing stops as my heart dries up. I still can’t explain the birds—my ears are gone, and my eyes, and so is my brain.
​
I have to keep going. I have to find truth. That is why I am here; I can’t leave until I find truth. This wasn’t meant to happen—I think the forest is trying to keep me. It doesn’t seem to want to let go.
​
My muscles peel away like the skin of an orange. Great strips of me lie on the earth. I won’t be wasted; I wonder what creatures will come to eat me. Vultures, maybe, or coyotes, and then there will be the bugs. I wonder if I will taste good to the wasps and the worms. I can’t wonder for too long, though, I can’t stop. I still have so far to go.
​
The forest and my bones have nothing between them now. My bones can’t hide any longer. Instead of coming to rest in some semblance of their former arrangement, some echo of what I used to be, they crumble to particles as fine as dust, sparkling in the filtered rays of sunlight coming down through the trees. My bone-dust settles on the moss, and the moss seems to remember me. It grows a little stronger and a little greener where all the pieces of me touch it.
​
I get thinner and thinner until I am nothing but a brittle skull atop toothpick bones. I am so light now that I can’t even feel the wind swirling around me. My teeth are the last things to go. Those fall away before they crumble, scattering over the moss. They are a little bit dirty with everything I ever sank them into, and so they will take longer to decompose, but as with everything, they will in the end.
​
There is nothing corporeal left of me at all, and I’m surprised by how well it suits me. This is much easier. Why was I here? What was I searching for? It doesn’t seem quite so important any more. The simplest thing is to keep going.
​
I reach the boundary of the forest, the place where the shadows end, and what I see just beyond it is an ocean that I’m certain wasn’t there before. How vast would this forest have to be, how sure of itself, to stretch all the way down to an ocean? I haven’t been following the river, but it has curled around to meet me, and now its mouth lies beside me. It’s red with the blood that is no longer mine. It reaches the ocean and diffuses at last, but I know it will change the flavor of the water. The whales will taste me and know who I am. They’re waiting for me – they are singing. I realize it wasn’t birds I heard before at all.
​
I guess this is my home now, scattered between the moss and the whales. It’s not just the forest that wants to keep me, but the whole world. I’m everywhere.
​
I still have so far to go.
Adrianne Reig (she/her) is working towards a BFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. She loves to write magical realism-adjacent fiction about bizarre characters, bizarre places, and bizarre happenings. She is heavily influenced by her upbringing in rural Vermont and the obscure Celtic music she almost always has playing. When she isn't writing or working to fulfill the every whim of her two cats, she can be found drinking ungodly quantities of tea, staring at the moon, or digging around elbow-deep in one of her tropical aquariums. Find her on Instagram @adriannelreig.
A cloud of bees
by James Diaz
James Diaz (They/Them) is the author of This Someone I Call Stranger (Indolent Books, 2018) All Things Beautiful Are Bent (Alien Buddha, 2021) and Motel Prayers (Alien Buddha, 2022) as well as the founding editor of Anti-Heroin Chic. Their most recent work can be found in Rust + Moth, Sugar House Review, Chaotic Merge Magazine and Thrush Poetry Journal.