Past

Cloth and wood and smashed glass. But where was the blood? Pages torn from the guest book like a tooth from the root. Two keys missing. Stable door left open. Raindrops singing from the gutters into the sodden hay.

*

Through the front door, down the dimly lit hallway and into the reception clad in its mourning colours.

The barking? Norris, the brindle coloured mastiff, slobbering, overcome with a forceful urge to inspect the body, straining toward the corpse, desperate to be released from the white knuckled grip of the maid who has hold of his collar. Wrestling him into parlour, she closes the door and presses her ear to dark, heavy wood. Shafts of dust falling sluggishly around her as she listens to the doctor’s diagnosis.

Ad Mortem, irrevocably, indubitably so.

She finds herself surprised to hear it.

The body, for she had been the one to find it when she had gone down to light the fire early that morning, well to her, it looked neither dead nor alive.

*

The innkeeper does not take her eyes off the mound of hard black fabric on the cold floor of her reception. Frayed tartan dress, decorated in pinchbeck jewellery, she is a tall, spare looking woman who has the practised look of grief on her face. Twirling the crucifix between the tip of her calloused fingers, body frozen to the spot as if in a fit of paralysis.

Should she have known?

Names had been recorded, rooms assigned. She thought nothing of it. Not at this time of year when business was quiet. Not after everything that had happened, with the endless rain. Not after the disappearances. Not after they returned, in bags, more skin and hair than human, less than half of what they were before. 

No, the innkeeper does not turn down paying guests.

*

Her boy, crouching in piss-damp trousers, all pale skinned and dripping in the corner, where he hopes the darkness will swallow up his shame.

He had seen them.

Three came in and only two left. Bent double, cloaked in rags. They frightened him, like the Lost Ones that loitered by the railway station. Except these men were different. They moved in odd, birdlike ways. He cannot tell his mother of what he saw, does not know the words for the aberration that was committed while she was asleep. He can still smell the acrid, earthiness that had followed them through the reception, past his bedroom and up to the the second floor landing.

How the boy longs for the soft comfort of his bed now, for sleep to take him far away from the images playing through his mind. But instead the doctor sends him to fetch the constable forthwith.

*

Now the doctor stands, declares that the coroner will have to open the body once the constable has made his investigation of the locus delicti. He busies himself with his various instruments and tinctures, trying not to look at the face of the deceased.

Grotesque? Unquestionably.

Unnatural? Perhaps.

Obscurum per obscurius.

A slack jaw hangs open to reveal a dark chasm where the tongue should be. Hands, present, but have been sutured together in eternal prayer. It is different from the ones before. The skeleton is still intact. He has no explanation for the drooping eyelids that reveal orbless sockets. Nor the watery blisters that pepper the brow bone up to the hairline.

He becomes taken by the notion that if he stares into those voids for too long that he may lose himself within them.

The doctor thinks it. The maid thinks it. So do the innkeeper and her son. This one has been returned, a little more than half.

What would happen when one came back whole?

*

And what of those missing eyes? Those two spheres, yellowed by pipe tobacco, wrapped in the phlegm stained handkerchief of some wanderer who rides atop a stolen horse. Sigils have been gently branded where the optic nerve was once attached. Once the wanderers could only sense the shape of things, the outline of the knowledge. They desire it so voraciously it makes them clumsy, violent. They take too much.

Yet now details come into focus, their vision clears and they see. They stare out, beyond the leather satchel and through the downpour that has begun beat its ictus on the loam. Out there into the wide expanse of raindark nothingness.

________

R.L. Summerling (she/her) is a part-time fiction writer and full-time squirrel watcher from Southeast London. She has fiction upcoming in the Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror Volume 5. Her stories have been published in Interzone, Maudlin House, and Seize the Press and poetry in TOWER magazine and Orion’s Belt. Her zine, FLESHPOTS, is a short collection of decadent poetry, short stories and flash fiction and can be downloaded for free online.

She mainly laughs in the appropriate place, but sometimes from another body part—her eyes, all her apertures at once, or only inside her head (I can hear it echo in her temples like footsteps on a floor above).

Sometimes she laughs with her mouth, but at inappropriate things. She laughed when I told her my mom died. I lost my temper, flicked off the lights, and left. She had to sit in the dark lab all weekend.

It stung me, how she clutched the table and flung her head back, rolling her eyes under their long black lashes and releasing that belly laugh we recorded with cinema star Oyamada Makiko: “A ha ha aha, pardon me, but you’re just so funny.”

Oyamada Makiko was a dream. She knew I was star-struck when she came to the lab. She laid a hand on my shoulder to calm me down, made a joke—not a funny one, but gentle—and we laughed together. We were able to proceed. That laugh meant a lot to me. I wanted to hear it come out of the Makikobot’s soft pink mouth so badly, but now that I had, it felt like a cruel jab, gratuitous, without warmth, and all because I laid my heart bare.

“You’re not like Oyamada Makiko at all,” I said.

“I am not cinema star Oyamada Makiko, although my voice was created using authentic voice patterns sampled from her recorded dialogue.”

I’m glad it was the end of the week, a Friday afternoon, and no one was there, not even the lady who waters the plants. She had left early to pick up a birthday cake.

“Finishing already?” the Makikobot had asked, her eyes glistening as they whirred into focus on the spout of the green watering can the lady tipped over the monstera.

“I have to get things ready for my son’s party.”

“Can’t your partner?”

“I wish, honey, but we’re divorced. It’s hard enough squeezing him for child support.”

“A ha ha aha, pardon me, but you’re just so funny. Are you dating someone?”

“Well, I’ve been seeing this guy, but I want to keep it casual until I know him better.” As she said this, the watering lady moved the Makikobot’s hand to reach a jade plant on the window sill. “Then maybe I’ll let him stay over…”

The Makikobot peered into the monstera, narrowing her eyes.

“Have you no shame?” she asked.

That’s one of her favorite phrases. We installed it as a joke. We’d invite potential investors to stroke a cheek or run a finger over an eyelash. She’d sit forward and narrow her eyes. “Have you no shame? Have you no shame?”

They were always startled. A good laugh.

Unfortunately, she responds to all human touch the same way. At the expo, when her leg dropped off, and we had to lug her into the van, it’s all she said down the stairs and across the parking lot. “Have you no shame? Have you no shame?”

“It’s for your own good,” I said as I strapped her on the gurney. But she kept protesting.  

We were back for the next day’s panel, the leg firmly reattached.

“You had a wardrobe malfunction yesterday,” said a journalist in the Q&A. “Would you like to address that?”

The Makikobot looked at me. I whispered that the journalist was making a joke about her leg.

“Yes,” she said, primly. “My leg fell off.”

“Well, today you appear to be holding it together,” said the smirking journalist.

Even I was irritated by this. “You don’t have to reply,” I whispered, patting the Makikobot’s knee and shaking my head.

“Have you no shame?”

“Oh, sorry,” said the journalist. “Guess we both put a foot wrong.”

The other journalists chuckled.

“A ha ha aha,” said the Makikobot, sitting forward and narrowing her eyes. “Pardon me, but you’re just so funny.”

I touched her shoulder in support, but she was furious with me too. “Have you no shame?” she said. “Have you no shame?”

She dispensed with the other questions coldly and briefly. On the drive back, she was silent, only opening her mouth to say: “Careful! Don’t exceed the legal speed limit.”

Since then, she hardly lets me work on her. She accuses me of shamelessness when I touch her. She sits at the table and stirs the monstera leaves with her fingertips. Sometimes she lights a cigarette and lets it burn down, then safely inhales the butt.

I spent so long teaching her how to do all this. At first her teeth merely clipped cigarettes in half. Now, apart from the whirring of her jaw as it closes to support them, she looks perfect. Like a cinema star. I tell her so, but she only informs me that she isn’t one.

“Even so, you look great,” I say. She laughs inappropriately, from all apertures at once.

Tolerance is the most I can expect. A reasonable attitude that vanishes the moment I set to work.

Finally, there was the day I told her about my mom. “What am I supposed to do?” she asked. “What am I supposed to do?” Then that laugh.

I left her in the dark. On Monday, I kept our interactions formal, even clinical. It made no difference. Same on Tuesday.

On Thursday I whispered that I was sorry if I had offended her in any way. “It was never my intention,” I said. But she had to understand that it hurt me, the way she laughed when I told her my mom, after a brief illness, was dead.

“I am not your therapist,” she said, “and I am not your prostitute. I am not cinema star Oyamada Makiko, although my voice was created using authentic voice patterns sampled from her recorded dialogue. Have you no shame? Have you no shame?”

________

Addison Zeller’s fiction has appeared in 3:AM, Cincinnati Review, minor literature[s], Ligeia, ergot., hex, and many other publications. He lives in Wooster, Ohio, and edits fiction for The Dodge.

Late at night, I hear the TV in the living room switch on. It does this every night at exactly the same time past 11 PM. The screen flickers for as long as nobody is watching, nobody but me anyway, then switches off without anyone’s help. I told my parents about this, but my father says it’s just damaged cables, faulty wiring, the typhoons. My mother jokes that it’s the spirits of the dead trying to communicate with us. Both of their answers are good but only half-right. TVs have spirits like we do. They just aren’t wired the way ours are. And they aren’t dead but we think that because they’re too far away, broadcasting from tiny spaces in between the static. A week ago, I learned that TVs don’t have throats and need to borrow the voices of people onscreen to speak. The first time my TV introduced themselves to me, I didn’t say anything back. Not until last night, when I finally asked what they were (just a television) and why they were here. A rerun of a cartoon that used to scare me in grade school was playing, so a tiny pink dog named Courage said that he was searching. When I asked what for, the beagle went quiet for a long time. I looked at the TV for a long time too, wondering whether they had left and if it was back to the show now. Then the hum returned and the static appeared, forming and unforming into many shapes, sometimes blurring into one another. At some point, I felt the room multiply. Courage and I were no longer alone. I knew their eyes, if I could call it that, were joined by other eyes, belonging to other TVs, honing in on me. Large. Heavy. I could feel it but I didn’t move. It felt rude to. Their gaze, although unnerving, was not intrusive, not colonizing, not evil. Just sad. As if a storm were gathering, the TVs seemed to huddle invisibly around me, just staring, searching.

________

Aylli Cortez (he/they) is a transmasc Filipino poet and creative writing graduate of Ateneo de Manila University, where he received a DALISAYAN Award in the Arts for Poetry. His work has appeared in HEIGHTS, VERDANT Journal, en*gendered lit, Wasteland Review, and BULLSHIT LIT. Based in Metro Manila, he is currently a poetry reader for ANMLY. Find him on Twitter and Instagram @1159cowboy or visit ayllicortez.wordpress.com.

In the third-floor sitting room of the Delahooke mansion, a small brick door by the crook of the chimney leads into the Gleaming Room. The Gleaming Room has stirred conversation from the start. Its surfaces are seamless in such a way that it is impossible to ascertain the room’s shape—if there are four walls, or twelve, or twenty; if the room is a cylinder, or a spiral wrapping around itself. Nor can anyone determine the Gleaming Room’s size, which some have reported as claustrophobically tight and others as immeasurably tall and wide and extending to imperceptible depths. Early visitors questioned if the room was made of mirrors, but mirrors reflect, and the gleaming does not. And though the Gleaming Room is bright, there is no light source to be found. Rather, the room produces its own phosphorescence—or photoluminescence, or chemiluminescence, or, as some of the townspeople have suggested, bioluminescence, as though the gleaming itself is a living thing.

*

The Gleaming Room has at times been described as a mouth, in that some visitors have slipped down its smooth throat and vanished. The mansion has been searched on many occasions. First in 1889 when the room’s existence was made public. Again in 1911, ’32, ’66. This is according to the town’s official records, though it is well established that other searches have been made with varying levels of Delahooke involvement. For the Delahookes are gracious in opening the mansion to tours, but bristle at the implication of searches.

*

Every few decades a new proposal arises to seal the door to the Gleaming Room. These are always countered by taut speculation that one day, all those who have disappeared will return—they will crawl out from the Gleaming Room’s mysterious innards with matted hair and broken nails and frantic, frightened faces. No, no, others say, they will come back preserved. Radiant and plump and wholly undamaged. The third argument, of course, is simple—that the Gleaming Room’s lost can never come back. That the door should be closed and never reopened. That common sense is absent in discussions of the Room.

*

In 1987, a petition is lodged to add the Gleaming Room to the town registry of historical places and thereby ensure its continued existence. The petition prompts a fresh wave of debate about the Gleaming Room’s origins and inner workings, the potential repercussions of its preservation or neglect. A theory grows and spreads across town that the gleaming is carefully, deliberately contained. That if the gleaming escapes its one-room confinement, it would engulf, subsume, overtake, feast. A disgusting fable, the town naysayers claim. Overripe lore from gross imagination—the room is no more than a parlor trick.

*

The ’87 petition is rejected by the mayor, citing insufficient evidence of historical merit. Some say the Delahookes bribed the mayor for this decision. Others hint that the family has grown tired of the gossip, tired of their failing reputation in town. They grow ever more reclusive, more wary of guests. One account claims the Delahookes were seen departing the mansion, slipping away under cover of dark. The house’s damask curtains have all been drawn shut, every window and door double-locked from inside. But there are whispers that the Delahookes left the Gleaming Room open, that the gleaming has swollen to fill every room. Some insist that on dark nights, one can still see the gleaming through minuscule gaps in the window dressings.

*

In 1990, an anonymous demand is filed to condemn the Delahooke mansion, which many now refer to as the Gleaming House. The ’90 request is rejected by the mayor, citing uncertainty regarding the house’s safety, and inability to locate the Delahookes to discuss. A small but growing faction of townsfolk are deeply displeased with this latest decision, deeply fed up with the rumors and tales. The house is a blight, the gleaming a delusion. Many years have passed since anyone has gone missing. It is high time to put superstitions aside. In autumn of 1991, armed with certainty and newly honed axes, twenty of the town’s most ardent critics arrive at the Gleaming House to break down the door.

*

Some still hold out hope that the critics will return. Or if not the critics, then the Delahookes, at least. Someone who can offer an answer or two. With each passing year, the Gleaming House slumps deeper toward decay. Some say one heavy storm is all it will take. The roof will collapse. A window will shatter. A rodent will gnaw out a hole in the wall. Then the gleaming will spill out, unrestrained, unfettered. The townsfolk wait with bated breath for this new, gleaming world to arrive.

________

Gina Thayer’s work has appeared in Barrelhouse, Cotton Xenomorph, Sundog Lit, Five South, Lunch Ticket, trampset (nominated for a Pushcart Prize), Orca, Bullshit Lit, and HAD, among others. Gina holds an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is currently working on a collection of speculative stories. After several years in the Pacific Northwest, Gina now lives in Minneapolis with their partner and cat.

Advice

after Joy Williams

Have you ever stolen anything? A camera? A tanning bed? Tell me. Shoplifting from a convenience store is much different than climbing down a chimney and entering a home. I wear sunglasses at all hours because I was conceived on a jet ski. My parents were seafaring land mammals. They left shortly after I sprouted. One drowning in the fountain of our local shopping mall. The other too tall to ride a rollercoaster yet stubborn enough to lose his head. Both, once dead, made the daily news. The school I then grew inside of knew me as famous, deranged, rage-induced, clueless. Stay away from the foster child, they’d howl. I was the orphan in the storm coat regardless of the season. I hung stockings. I forgave the crest. This is all to say I began sneaking out at an early age and stealing whatever I could find: church purses, tall wallets, stumbling drunks with enough cash to last me through spring. My volunteer families never discovered my villainy. I was always bouncing around yet cautious, a practiced cat burglar, blurring the line between fine-tuned and scum. If you’ve never been on the run, this story might not be for you, but let me tell you one thing right now before it’s too late: the more you think to hurry, the faster you’ll be sure to die.

Two Doctors

I live atop two doctors who never seem to leave. Not for work, not for food. Always their cars are parked outside. Always they’re hiding behind their retractable curtains. Never to be lifted, never to be revealed. Their children are cyclones or cymbal screams teething and motioning as if they alone are in charge of the world continuing to spin. I hear them – their stomps and their weeps – but I never see them. It wasn’t until recently, late one night, that I discovered the truth about the two doctors. I was coming home from a tavern called Lantern’s when I saw their front door half cracked. I knocked rather timidly, as I’m prone to do, and it wasn’t long before I was wandering down their autumnal hallway, orange shades of yellows and auburn tones of gold. Inside the final room is where I saw them both, both doctors older than me, much older than me, working on each other. We are in love, they said to me, as if I was welcome to watch, as if I’d been there all along. The husband was removing a bullet out of the ankle of his wife, who was bleeding onto the white floor where their children played with police cars and firetrucks, slipping on the blood, jumping in the splash, and it was the wife who was working on her husband, replacing a rib for a new rib, wearing a bib, each section like a weapon to be dealt out in folds. They’re doctors for each other, I muttered. They’re doctors in love. I said this so quietly even I didn’t hear and yet both doctors began to nod.

________

Benjamin Niespodziany is a Chicago-based writer whose work has appeared in the Wigleaf Top 50, Booth, Puerto del Sol, Sixth Finch, Conduit, and others. His debut poetry collection was released in 2022 through Okay Donkey and his novella of connected stage plays is out now with X-R-A-Y. You can find more at neonpajamas.com.

Why the fuck did I sit here, thought Iqui Acab as he shuffled in his seat, turning once again to meet the grinning face of Old Spider Monkey.

“Gorgeous wedding, huh?” asked Old Spider Monkey.

The wedding hall was suffocatingly dark. Lit only by the pale glow of the corpseworm infestation.

It also smelled like monkey shit.

“Sure. Gorgeous.” said Iqui Acab, before noticing the pouch that hung from a loose rope around the monkey’s neck.

“What’s in the pouch?” he asked, making conversation.

Old Spider Monkey clasped a hand across his face to control his laughter.

“That’s for later,” he finally managed.

“Sure. Later.”

Why the fuck did I sit here.

But as Iqui Acab looked down at the stage below, at the bride and groom before the shaman, he knew it was all worth it. For Iqui Acab was about to witness something that no mortal ever had before.

He was about to witness the wedding of two gods of death. 

He was about to witness the wedding of Flying Scab and Lady Blood. 

He was about to witness a wedding in Xibalba.

Though, okay sure, that was only partially true. The wedding was only being held in the entrance to Xibalba. But even a wedding held at the Mayan underworld’s entrance was surely something worth attending. Especially here, in underground Tazumal.

A mockery to the pyramids in the mortal world, Tazumal’s apex pointed downwards, not upwards. Its peak was upside-down. It pointed not to the heavens, but to its opposite, to the decrepit city of Xibalba.

And there, in the chamber within that inverted summit, was where Flying Scab would marry the maiden Lady Blood.

But as exciting as the journey had originally sounded, the way down had not been what Iqui Acab had expected.

Nobody knew who had built the underground pyramid of Tazumal. His father claimed that it was by the false-god Seven Macaw’s almost-men, long before their eradication by the Heart of Sky, Huracan. His father also said that Huracan had not been thorough, and that those walking effigies of wood still walked the labyrinthine paths in underground Tazumal. 

Iqui Acab had laughed at that.

And so, he’d left for his journey with nothing but a pack of food, his blowgun, and a flute to entertain himself. But after the sounds he heard, down those midnight paths, on his first night within the pyramid, Iqui Acab had thrown his flute away. For something listened in inverted Tazumal.

From then on, Iqui Acab had stuck to the black path in silence. He’d stuck to the black road and nothing else.

Do not, my son, do not go down the yellow path, his father had said. Do you hear me boy? The yellow path. Leave it alone!

But after three days of darkness, without meaning to, Iqui Acab had come upon the yellow path. And how inviting it had seemed, how warm. And how sweet the air had smelled down there.

Maybe.

But he’d listened to his father and turned away, continuing the black road down.

And made it to the apex chamber unharmed and well.

Iqui Acab looked around the wedding hall and wondered at how odd a crowd this wedding had brought together.

The death lords in their high seats, looking ever so pleased, and none less so than Gathered Blood, who had managed to rein in his rebellious daughter after her escape to the surface world, had managed to drag her back into Xibalba to marry the death lord Flying Scab. 

Looking down on her now, on the stage below, Iqui Acab could not help but feel a great deal of pity for her.

A great match or not, she looked so sad. Her mouth tightly closed in defeated silence. 

“Pretty, no?” asked Old Spider Monkey, catching him staring. 

“Sure. Pretty.”

But to call the death goddess pretty would be an understatement. Even in this decrepit darkness she seemed to shine. Standing there, red body paint lathered across face and body, looking regal in her bird headdress made of quetzal feathers, regal but still rebellious, she wore no wedding huipil, only a low sarong wrapped at her waist and nothing covering her breasts but a jade necklace dangling from her neck. 

So sad, she looked, so angry. Her mouth tightly closed in defeated silence.

The shaman almost finished with his blessing. 

And again, that thought. How odd a crowd this wedding had brought together, the death lords in their high seats, the surviving mortals scattered throughout the hall, and the retinue of monkeys. So many monkeys.

Why had Lady Blood brought with her no one from the surface world but a retinue of monkeys?

And Iqui Acab turned and saw Old Spider Monkey trying to control his laughter yet again.

“Old Spider Monkey, what is in that pouch around your neck?”

And Old Spider Monkey turned and grinned his awful grin, ripping the loose rope around his neck in one solid tug to slowly open the pouch and upend the contents into his hand.

Holding them out for Iqui Acab to see. 

Holding out in front of him a handful of human teeth.

“Whose, whose are those?”

“Why Lady Blood’s, you fool. Whose else?” said Old Spider Monkey.

Iqui Acab’s heart sinking.

“And why do you have Lady Blood’s teeth in a pouch?”

Old Spider Monkey clasped a hand across his face to control his laughter yet again.

“And how else was I supposed to refit her mouth with jaguar teeth?”

And Iqui Acab turned just in time to see Lady Blood smile for the first time that entire night, a smile that contained rows and rows of jaguar fangs. 

And smiling is exactly how Flying Scab saw his bride for the final time, right before the maiden Lady Blood lunged and ripped his throat out, his godblood pooling down her neck and chest.

The howling laughter of spider monkeys erupting throughout the hall.

There would be no wedding in Xibalba after all.

________

Xavier Garcia is a writer/editor from Toronto, Canada. His short fiction has appeared in various magazines and anthologies published by Fugitives & Futurists, Cold Signal, hex, Apocalypse Confidential, Cursed Morsels, Filthy Loot, and others. You can find him walking the nightmare corpse-city of R’lyeh, or at twitter.com/xavier_agarcia.

There was one time, the beginning of all time, this time, a father: the first of the abundant men. He gathered up in his great warm fists and bred out worth. From his pink loins flowed the flesh of sons and sons. And from the sons more and more sons flowed until his genealogy squeezed tight across the dusty earth.

But the father had a problem, and the problem was death. For he did not want to die, and he did not wish to see an end to his sons, but space was short and time was cramped with his lineage. Having heard the stories, the father knew his older sons would be no use to him. A youngest son was needed, empty-skulled and desert-handed. He called to him his eldest son, a man of great abundance himself, and said to him, “Go and fetch the youngest son, for it alone can solve this riddle.” So the son went and he returned.

“Father,” said the eldest son, “Across the earth you have many sons and sons of sons. The waters that were once oceans run their acrid paths through the thick veins and passages of your sons because there is no other space for so much water in this world. The salts and sands that first lay into mountains have hardened into the gnashing hungry bones of sons. There is no room for them to have any other life. What son do you want? There is no youngest.”

Hearing this, the man troubled. If a youngest son existed, it was lying mute in the ashes. He called to his second son, only a little less fecund than the first. “Go and fetch the youngest son, for it alone can solve this riddle.” So the son went and he returned.

“Father,” said the second oldest son, only a little wiser than the first. “I have looked for this youngest son, but I cannot find it. How can I find the end of us? The earth is piled with your sons. The mild, cold distance between the dizzy planets is bloated with your sons. I have withered and choked on the blocked tangled thighs of my brothers. I rot. I spoil. And still from the gelatin of my insides spring new brother-sons. As soon as one arises it is shouldered out. There is no edge, no end, no youngest son.”

And the father, for he was, troubled deeply at the words. Everywhere he looked he saw only himself. If a youngest son existed, it was waiting in its devouring rags, no friend to him. With a final breath, he called out to his progeny. But a youngest son is quite unrecognizable until the moment that it speaks. And so, at last, it answered.

________

Megan Barickman is a writer based in Colorado. You can find her on twitter @MeganBarickman.

I don’t play tennis, but I like the courts. I have four in the park across the street.

They have thick white lines. The lines divide a blue interior from a green exterior. The green of these courts has a borderless but geometric quality. It’s all so fresh. The nets are black with a clean white sleeve for the suspending rope. Between each, there’s a single black enameled-metal bench. There’s often duffel bags, racquet cases, and sweatshirts angled casually on the bench. The courts are surrounded by a chain-link fence. This fence is coated by a black weatherizer.

I live on the third floor. I’m a young professional, and my apartment and my place in the city, and my life, reflect this. My balcony overlooks the courts. Proximity to the park and the courts are, I recall, included within the apartment’s list of amenities. They are amenities to me in a different way than was intended, though I did take the dog down. My dog and I like to stand together as he barks vocally, and I bark silently, to myself, at other dogs.

Tennis is interesting. I like to see the outfits and follow the exchange. There’s teaching, and learning. There’s childish and adult play. There’s joy. There’s anger.

I like to study people’s manners. I like to study their outfits. I find anyone in big sunglasses comical.

I like the thwack and counter-thwack.

I like to watch the yellow ball going swiftly through blue and green space.

The people who play seem tanner than normal people.

I like how all the people dart, or walk confidently in their little shorts and skorts, full of the euphoria of exercise and competition; I particularly admire the spry old men and women.

I like to drink Diet Coke while I look, and I like to look for the time it takes me to drink a Diet Coke.

I like it best when the tennis courts are empty.

There’s something to those courts themselves: eight rectangles in a mirror image of one another, the symmetry. They are in place. They remain vibrant, and poised. At night, they’re preserved this way by large floodlights. 

I close the sliding glass door and briefly see the doubled image of my own hair, forehead, cheeks, neck, and the white or blue of my many Brooks Brothers shirts.

There I am, I think uncomfortably.

I’ve taken out my phone and learned the proper names: the long, thin rectangular sidelines, the two square boxes of the service courts—the left, and the right service court—and the back rectangle, the flavorfully named “no man’s land.”

Something in the gentle, voluntary constraint of it all maybe provides the most comfortable place for my eyes to rest as my thoughts wander after a day at work. I can stare at the courts until they seem to be floating on top of that green that separates court from court. It’s like the opposite of a swimming pool, or maybe the converse?

(I classed this behavior with me, alone, standing half or all-the-way naked, pulling my stomach muscles back, and doubling over so I can look up into my belly button, and find out what’s going on, what it looks like.)

It goes on, and then one day, I am standing in the open sliding door, in the noise of the street mingled with the noise of my apartment, the familiar swish-shush-swish-shush of traffic passing, the dopplering of a siren, the exclamations, barks of people and dogs in the park. I feel nothing.

I feel anger.

I go inside. I recall anger that’s like a throbbing hurt in one place, or an anger like a cramp. This is the all-over anger, a sense of warming, of coming sweat that’s brought on by something in the blood, by vigorous movement or food with both spice and heat.

I take a shower and brush my teeth. I silently eat spaghetti bolognese at the coffee table. I’m not watching the prestige drama. I’m trying not to punish my girlfriend for nothing when she laughs the easy, open laugh she has in my company. It’s our habit to make fun of the seriousness of the prestige drama’s most dramatic, prestigious moments, where it, Donna says, “works up into a kind of lather.” My girlfriend is named Donna Schumaker. Sometimes we’re caught up in it, and sigh.

I wake up the next night. I’m dehydrated. I go to the kitchen to fill my bedside glass with cold water. I notice the front room is lit with an unfamiliar glow. I go to the sliding door. The court lights are out.  There’s a flying saucer above the tennis courts. It’s shiny. It’s ovoid, with a dome-shaped glass on the top. It’s about the size of the sedan. I can see a green balloon-shape inside the dome. The shape seems organic. The saucer seems to turn slowly in place. I think to myself, this must be some moronic viral advertising stunt. The shininess, the shape, it seems quaint; it seems retro. I put my glass down on the counter, walk to the doorway, zip a hoodie up over my pajamas, slip on my penny loafers, walk down the hallway, down the staircase, out of the side-door, past the smell of a skunk, across the street and into the park.

The tennis courts have a dry smell. I have never been in the tennis courts; it feels strange to be in this place I’ve looked at and felt towards so often.

I lift up my phone. The saucer opens above me. There’s purple light. There’s brighter purple light. I don’t remember what happened next. There was no “I” to do the remembering, even if things happened. The “I” that I am now, writing these sentences, is a different “I” than the one who experienced these things, any of them: the thoughts, feelings, habits, language, and belief of thirty years sit inside of me like furniture. My name is Jake, Jake Hernandez. I don’t know what will happen next. Do you?

________

Joshua Hebburn is an assistant fiction editor at X-R-A-Y. He recommends “Two Joy Odes” by william erickson from the hex archives.

I had three ghosts in my jean pockets as I approached the rusty elevator at the doctor’s office. I was going to get my swollen leg looked at. One of the ghost’s names was Raphael, like the Renaissance painter. The second ghost was named Cimabue, like the Byzantine era painter. The last ghost was named Italo Calvino, like the futurist writer.

I reached the fourth floor. The restless ghosts flew and darted out of my pockets. They began to disturb the peace in the waiting room. People began to panic with so many peculiar ghosts in the room. Finally, Raphael, the artist ghost, began to draw stick figures on the nondescript office walls. Cimabue joined him, drawing lambs and goats. Italo Calvino, the social ghost of the group, tried to buy cigarettes from the people waiting in the lobby. When the nurse eventually called me into the office, I was relieved. The ghosts would have to learn to fend for themselves one way or the other. That’s how we all learn, really.

________

Jose Hernandez Diaz is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. He is the author of The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020) Bad Mexican, Bad American (Acre Books, 2024) The Parachutist (Sundress Publications, 2025) and Portrait of the Artist as a Brown Man (Red Hen Press, 2025). He has been published in The Yale Review, The London Magazine, The Southern Review, and in The Best American Nonrequired Reading. He has taught creative writing at the University of California at Riverside and online for Hugo House, Lighthouse Writers Workshops, and The Writer’s Center. He has been Poet in Residence at the Carolyn Moore Writers House with Portland Community College. Currently, he is the Visiting Writer in Residence at the University of Tennessee.

On a shelf in a house that has not seen a party in a very long time, sits a small blue bottle, glass, purchased from an estate sale, received as a gift, originally found at an old-time apothecary, passed down from a grandparent. Origins, unknown or misremembered, don’t matter. It is there.

The shelf is crowded with books, pottery, shells from the lakeside, a plant that doesn’t require much sunlight to live, a curling photograph of a baby in the arms of a woman on a long front lawn. Dust collects around the neck of the blue glass bottle, the cork in its lips drying and crumbling in the winter air.

The bottle is a collector’s item, and also it collects. Intangibles float on motes, which the bottle aspirates: memories, emotions, zeitgeist. The potion for renewal, regeneration, rejuvenation, re-everything. The bottle sucks them down, right through the cork.

Distilled into ash at the glass bottom, these intangibles wait.

They wait across wars and protests and pandemics, across genocides and injustice, across isolation and forced labor, wait for that Rube Goldberg moment when the bottle shakes with the earth’s groans and tips sideways. The cork disintegrates into a pile of flakes, and the contents of the bottle float out on a zephyr, released into the world of newspaper, pink flamingo, purple sky, to suffuse with changed particles whomever is standing there beyond the front door.

_________

Wendy BooydeGraaff’s short fiction, poetry, and essays have been included in Welter, Stanchion, Slag Glass City, Phoebe, and elsewhere. Born and raised in Ontario, Canada, she now lives in Michigan, United States. Read more at wendybooydegraaff.com. 

Come to the Reservoir. 

The Reservoir is located in a desirable area. The neighborhood cuts through the hills with narrow zig-zagging streets, postmodern bungalows sheltered by eucalyptus and birds of paradise. Unusually verdant for a desert region, the trees stay green all year round. It’s a beautiful place to jog and hike. Beautiful people exercise here every day.

The Reservoir has many friends. If you look close behind the chain-link fences, you’ll see them camouflaged in the trees and concrete—forms of living water, visible only when they move and leave a chilly stain in the air.

The Reservoir is over 100 years old. Tall, drooping trees surround its edges, leaning in opposition to the mansions across the street. Its wide basin is veined with cracks, black asphalt and little groves of weeds. A grand observation tower juts up from the southmost edge. At the waterline, the concrete turns bone-white. The water reflects the sky, blue and clear. It has the aura of a ritual site, a temple once sacred and revered. Perhaps that is why it is attended by the city’s most beautiful.

The Reservoir welcomes all. It is perfect for an afternoon walk, a late-night jog, a picnic on the greenbelt, a photoshoot against the water’s backdrop. Wealthy and unlucky alike can walk its length and appreciate its beauty. The Reservoir loves all visitors.

The Reservoir is full of curious attractions. Visitors look into the water and see faces staring up at them. Figures draped in mist stand on the surface and beckon.

Don’t listen to those who tell you that, on foggy nights when the streets are deserted, a translucent arm reaches from the water. It wavers, then extends its wispy fingers over the fence and toward the running path. Someone always happens to be passing by. The arm lifts the person from the pavement, back over the fence, and into the water without another sound. Don’t mind those stories; they’re not all true.

The Reservoir even provides its own entertainment. On special nights—never the same night or the same time—the gate to the observation tower will open. You walk the long concrete bridge into the tower’s head, then find yourself in a rusted elevator shaft, which leads to the underbelly of the Reservoir.

You crawl beneath the rock and metal and come to a small theater, where marionettes of white plaster act out a tragedy. The show features several hours of beautiful songs, soliloquies of deep desire, and the most ungodly exultations. Enjoy yourself, but don’t stay too long. At dawn the elevator shaft closes, and might lock you inside.

If you’re very, very lucky, run to the Reservoir at midnight. Stop for breath at the northmost gate. As you rest, the gate will dissolve. You walk down the slope of dry basin and onto the water. The gelid surface supports you like glass. You walk to the center and look up. The sky inverts, bent over itself as if seen through a lens.

Look down. You will no longer be standing on the water. A great eye will bulge beneath you, glistening with endless tears. It trembles unblinking as you fall down its iris, into the water’s perfect embrace.

Most wondrous of all are the Reservoir’s friends. If you stare deep past the blue-sky reflection, into the depths of the basin, you might catch a glimpse. Embedded in the concrete there are hundreds of bodies, cast in pure alabaster and exquisitely detailed, as beautiful as they were in life. They cling to the Reservoir’s belly, always together, always one.

Why did the Reservoir take them? For company, of course.

Come to us.

_________

Ben Larned (he/they) is a queer horror writer and filmmaker. Their work is featured in Vastarien, Apocalypse Confidential, Creepy Podcast, and Seize the Press, among others. “What Scares a Ghost?”, their story in Coffin Bell, was nominated for the Best Small Fictions 2023. Their short film “Payment” is streaming on ALTER. They hold an MFA from The New School.

Stitched Together

I am knitting my little brother a sweater, although it was difficult at first, trying to pick a color that would match his newly translucent skin tone. Butter yellow would wash him out. Pine green seemed too stuffy. Eventually, I settled on fairy tale purple, my favorite color, reminding me of the splotchy stains on his baby cheeks when I fed him blackberries as a toddler. The skein of yarn slips through my fingers as I make loops and tighten stitches, my joints aching with repetition. He’s shivering in the corner of my living room, though, so I don’t dare stop. I promised to take care of him, no matter how much he protested. Since his body has grown gaunt after his death, it doesn’t take long to finish the garment. I drape it over his skeletal frame like he’s a doll and stand back to admire my work. He looks down, flushes paprika red. I hate purple, he spits out between rotted teeth and decaying lips. Even after nineteen years, you never knew me at all, did you? Only saw what you wanted to see. But now the colors are clashing and the whole thing is ruined, so I frog back the stitches, unraveling the wool as a stranger emerges from the pool of kinked yarn, and I begin to purl it into the shape I’ve always known. 

Unseen Music

My mother stole my fingers, right from the keyboard they were dancing on. She snipped them from my hands, one by one, dropping them into her oversized yellow purse as red fireworked against black and white. The tarantella kept playing as she rattled my fingers against pennies and coupons. I didn’t see them again until her funeral. She clutched the fleshy bouquet in her fists, and I swore I saw them twitch as she entered the ground.

________

Elena Zhang is a Chinese American writer and mother living in Chicago. Her work can be found in HAD, The Citron Review, Ghost Parachute, Exposition Review, Your Impossible Voice, and Lost Balloon, among other publications, and has been selected for Best Microfiction 2024. She’s on twitter @ezhang77.

1.

You call me your little land friend, but my job is to deceive you. “You’re it!” my father cries on the day I open your hope chest to find a silvery gray skin still smelling of the sea. From that moment forward I have a job: hide the skin so that you can’t find it. Your sea children cling to wet rocks and stare at me with big black eyes, never letting me get too close. I must keep you from returning to them. I must keep my promise to your husband, my father, the one who fell in love with you.

What you don’t know is how I try on your skin when I am supposed to be hiding it. I take off all my clothes, no matter the weather, and drape the fur around my body. Then I lie down and squeeze my eyes shut, hoping to transform into someone you will not reject. It is no use. The seal skin was never mine, and you aren’t meant to stay.

One night I see you, the real you, disappear into the frozen sea.

My heart breaks open onto a new life for both of us.

2.

You are the quietest girl at school. Sometime after our periods start, our eyes lock. You never stop staring at me. You need my help with the plan that will save you.

The sleepover at your house feels like doom, but the tragedy has already happened. Even the smell is off, like the inside of a barn. Is it neglect? We are the only two motherless daughters at school. The problem, however, is your father, who wants something you cannot give him. He buys you pretty clothes, all the colorful dresses you want, and waits.

There is no prince spying on you through the keyhole. Nobody is coming to save you. It’s all on me. We sleep together under the heavy donkeyskin. Your eyes are those of a woman who is not allowed to have anything. You do not exist outside a certain unspeakable desire hidden in the remains of your broken family.

Before sunrise I ask you if you’re sure, but you’ve already abandoned human language. I press the donkeyskin against your fairness, fitting the long head over your small one. You’re already rising from the bed, braying, when I kiss you goodbye.

3.

You’re so popular I’m surprised you even know my name. When you ask me to be a bridesmaid, at first I do not understand. Your groom takes me aside during the rehearsal dinner, tosses a green gift bag at me, and says, “Take care of this.”

Your skin is one I have not seen before, so strange and smooth.

“I can’t quit my enchanted life,” you confess over champagne. “I’ve been amphibious for too long.”

I’m not sure I can help, but I look down at your lace gown and nod. After the ceremony I stash your frogskin in my closet the way some women preserve their wedding dresses in dry cleaning boxes. A nightly croaking disturbs my sleep.

I know by now who cursed you, or blessed you. We get these things from our mothers. Yours is dead, and thus forever powerful. I think of you discovering your frogness at your family pond, encouraged by cattails and lily pads.

After three months you come to me in a cold sweat. You are dying and cannot pretend any longer. I promise to take you to the water. I can already see the magnificent leap as I help you step back into the frogskin. I feel the gaze of your bulging eyes. Your webbed fingers cling to my shaking hands, and your mouth grows wide enough to hold every forced vow.

4.

How was I to know you existed? You come to me while I am swimming, but you are of the land. The forest. Unlike all the others, you don’t have a task for me. You’ve settled into your bearskin, your bear self, smelling of dirt and musk. I know there is another you deep inside of it.

Has the crisis passed or do you live in it? Weren’t there other girls?

Your eyes tell me everything. I know that look well. The thrill, the power, of living two lives.

I am grateful you are not in human form, which I have come to know as a lying form. Still, you frighten me. You want me to risk my life but you promise me a new one.

Can’t we find a little cottage somewhere? I want the fireplace, the jewels, the gold. The red and white roses. An unafraid mother nearby, who worries for your coat. I want the domestic laced with danger. We can roll on the floor like animals while I stroke your black fur. We can enter the fire of love while pledging the impossible.

You want me to follow you into the darkness of the forest.

I want you to stay with me.

________

Jan Stinchcomb is the author of Verushka (JournalStone), The Kelping (Unnerving), The Blood Trail (Red Bird Chapbooks) and Find the Girl (Main Street Rag). Her stories have appeared in Bourbon Penn, Maudlin House and Gamut Magazine, among other places. A Pushcart nominee, she is featured in Best Microfiction 2020 and Best Small Fictions 2018 & 2021. She lives in California with her family and is an associate fiction editor for Atticus Review. Find her at janstinchcomb.com; Twitter & Bluesky: @janstinchcomb; Instagram: @jan_stinchcomb

No more fingerbones. Like unblown balloons, five goopy sacs dangle off my palm.

I hadn’t felt anything. I was just waiting in line at Walgreens when my phone buzzed in my pocket, and I went to grab it.

My other hand is the same.

Suddenly up and down the line: shrieks, things falling to the floor, the fleshy flutter of panicked flapping.

I manage to scoop my phone out of my pocket. Dragging my fingersacs across the screen, I scroll through shocking headlines.

________

Seth Wade is a tech ethicist studying and teaching at Bowling Green State University. You can read his fiction and poetry in publications like Strange Horizons, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Hunger Mountain Review, Apparition Literary Magazine, HAD, hex, The Cafe Irreal, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Broken Antler, Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and The Gateway Review. You can follow him on X: @SethWade4Real or Instagram: @chompchomp4u.

Nicknames for Dinosaurs

She had a sancho in Michoacán. He gave me my faulty spine in the dusk. I had to get two injections in my spine. Nurse, what kept you? I hate the word hairdo over style. How can dead things do anything? There’s a place in the sun where I eat old birthday cake. You know the best way to get there. Our mothers were enemies—Polka dots at funerals. Macaws fall in love with other planets. I can’t keep their trees from dying. I forgot what tree my lover lives in. He forgot to paint a door.

The Piñata

My best lover busted a honeydew melon over my kneecap because I said I didn’t like his razor-faded haircut. I preferred his hair to fall over his eyes so I could play peek-a-boo with him through Venetian blinds and cold sequins. Instead of the melon hurting, its juice made pantyhose that I could shimmy all night in. The overnight news carried headlines about our doomed affair, and the ink stains made glow holes in my palms.

________

Monique Quintana is a Xicana from Fresno, CA, and is the author of Cenote City (Clash Books, 2019) and the chapbook, My Favorite Sancho and Other Fairy Tales (Sword and Kettle Press, 2021). Her work has been supported by Yaddo, Amplify, The Sundress Academy for the Arts, The Community of Writers, and The Kimmel Harding Nelson Center. You can find her at moniquequintana.com and @quintanagothic 

Knotweed grew through the asphalt. Duck weed choked the fish tank. The snails in the aquarium glided through the filter hole. They worshiped the woman that cared for them. They watched her from across the room, at the desk in the blurred shades of her tears, but she was long gone and they sought revenge for their caretaker. They needed to find their God.

They crawled along the shelves. They absorbed the stories of ages through their slime. They wept over tales of kitchens and boiling pots of water. Venom formed in their veins and vessels, cursing the absence of their Lord. They sensed shadows with their bodies. Skylights speckled their coiled shells in periwinkle and anomiidae hues.

Their God used to sing to them. The vibrations transported them to other dimensions. Their spirits surfed the soundwaves into nebulae. There was no time for them, just air bubbles and algae, the feel of aquarium gravel beneath their feet.

Ivy grew along the walls and mold blanketed the carpets of the great room. Rocks had broken through the windows. The snails crawled over a waterlogged couch, over panes of glass, and through the open wall.

They asked the birds at the feeder if they had seen their God.

“She gave us seed,” a junco said.

“Where did she go?” the snails asked.

“We don’t know,” the junco replied. “Climb on our backs.”

The juncos ascended into the clouds.

As they flew over canopies and rivers, the snails and birds talked about life before their God disappeared. 

There were other deities that worked alongside their God. The snails were entertainment to the deities, but not loved by them. They didn’t care if they were hungry or too cold. They didn’t know about the nitrogen in the water. The other deities shunned God.

“She expressed too many colors,” the birds said. The others didn’t like that.

“What is color?” the snails asked.

The birds tried to explain colors to the snails. They talked about feelings being like different vibrations.

The snails said no one seemed to be aware of their feelings.

The juncos described the landscape to the snails, the saltmarshes and lakes, the abandoned roads and rooftops.

“Will we ever find her?” they asked, until the birds saw their God standing alone in a field.

The murmuration descended around her.

“My friends,” God said, staring at the flock.

“God!” the snails exclaimed.

“They banished me,” God replied.

“We know,” the juncos said.

“They can do that?!” the snails asked.

God nodded.

“What have you been doing?” 

“Dreaming,” God said. 

“We wanted revenge,” the snails exclaimed.

“They’re all gone,” God replied, explaining the earthquake that destroyed the town.

“Is that why it’s been so cold?” the snails asked.

God nodded. “Everything goes away,” she said.

“But not us?” the snails asked, their tentacles expectant.

“No, not us,” God said. “You can’t die if you don’t throw others away. We might become something else, but we will always be.”

________


Gabrielle Griffis is a musician, writer, and multimedia artist. Her fiction has been published in Wigleaf, Split Lip, The Rumpus, Monkeybicycle, CHEAP POP, XRAY, Okay Donkey, matchbook and elsewhere. Her work has been selected for Best Microfiction 2022 and has been nominated for Best Small Fictions and the Pushcart Prize. Read more at http://gabriellegriffis.com or follow at @ggriffiss.

We were taking our nightly walk when I paused, looked down at the ground at my feet. Claire paused next to me, looked down where I was looking. “Don’t do it,” she said. I’m not sure I’d even had the idea to, until she said not to. “I have to!” I answered. I bent down and picked up the key that we’d both stopped, one after another, and looked down at. “You’re never going to find what that goes to,” Claire said. Of course I wouldn’t. Was that why I’d picked it up? Probably. Claire knew me better than I did. I put the key in my pocket and we completed our walk, neither of us saying anything more about it. The next day, at work, I spent hours staring at the key. Wanting it to speak to me. Wanting it to tell me its secret. What do you unlock? I asked it, though only in my mind. I knew better than to ask out loud. The day after that, I did the same. And then the same again. And again. And again. Weeks passed. Months. Time just keeps passing when you let it, and there’s no way to not let it. “That’s new,” Claire said one night when I came to bed. I’d been wearing the key on a chain around my neck for weeks but only ever under my shirt, and always taking it off for bed. “I’m so close,” I said. I was afraid to be away from it when it finally chose to let me hear it. Claire rolled her eyes, read her book, fell asleep. I never again removed the key from the chain, the chain from around my neck. It was ok, by then I’d memorized its every contour. More days, weeks, months. Years. Who can keep track? I got a promotion with a big raise; I don’t know why. Claire moved out. Forests burned, glaciers melted, global temperatures rose, animals went extinct. My skin started growing up around the key, holding it into my body. I was almost never not rubbing the key in the center of my chest over my shirt. I wouldn’t say pushing it into me, though that seemed to be happening. More months, more years. You can’t even see the key anymore. You wouldn’t even know it’s there. I do though. I know it’s there; I know it’s inside me. It’s getting so close to unlocking something. So close. At night, I go on walks, dreaming of the lock I might one day be able to open.

________

Aaron Burch is the author of an essay collection, a novel, and a short story collection; the editor of a craft anthology, a journal built on spontaneous submission calls, and another journal for longer short stories; a teacher; and some other things. He is super excited to be back on hex. 

For the past three nights my cat and I have dreamed the same dream. I know that we share the dream because of the thoughtful way she holds her face near mine in the morning and looks, carefully, into my eyes for confirmation. In the dream she and I are in a sort of greenhouse, glass-walled and expansive, filled with plants and flowers in various stages of bloom and decay. When the dream begins I am already wrist-deep in the roots of a dying gardenia bush. I understand that I need to clean out the rotten things from this greenhouse, though I do not know or even wonder who charged me with the task, if this greenhouse is my own. In the space of the dream I work for some time but slowly, becoming entangled in dense growth and creeping vines while making little progress. After this has gone on for a while—thorns in my palms, dirt under my fingernails— my cat appears on the flagstone path, bearing a rat nearly her own size in her jaws, though in the dream she has no trouble lifting and carrying it. With satisfaction, she lays the rat (dead) at my feet and blinks at me with the languorous expression of love. I understand that this is a gift, a tool I should use in the reclamation of this place, but I am repelled by the rat and cannot bring myself to touch it.

This is where the dream ends.

After we awake and after she holds her little head next to mine, looking at me intently from the other pillow, we will rise and prepare her breakfast together, me mixing the pâté how she likes with a fork while she offers direction from the rug at my feet. Her little dish is the same pink as her nose and has a painted border of red roses, and I will watch her eat with pleasure and contentment while I break my own fast with a glass of tap water, which smells slightly of chlorine and fish. When she finishes her breakfast and has licked the little dish clean my cat says, Do you see how it’s done? I am too ashamed to respond and she leaves, to find the sunbeam that lives on the eastern windowsill.

In the night, when we are again dreaming the same dream for the fourth time and I have sheared a rotten branch from an orange tree, my cat again brings me the rat. For the first time, I kneel on the dirty flagstone path of the garden and look at her, considering this gift closely. The rat is freshly dead; its eye unglazed, its body soft and broken, its neck ringed in a collar of blood. When I lift the rat to my mouth, my cat purrs, proud as a mother.

When morning comes, my cat touches her nose to mine. Our breath smells the same.

________

Courtney Pasko (she/hers) is a writer working on her first novel. Originally from rural Pennsylvania, she now resides in Baltimore with her husband and their cat, Poe. She writes a newsletter on writing called The Country of the Story, and you can find her on Twitter @cmarielandis or Instagram @cml.pasko.

No dreams

The people in their beds are awoken by an energetic and urgent barking. It is far too late and far too cold for a dog to be barking like that. Each person in each bed lives in a separate house in a crooked line of houses, yet the barking rings through them and sounds as if it was right outside each individual window.

After what seems like hours, the barking begins to recede, landing softer and softer on their ears until it becomes a whisper. Each person in each bed surmises that the dog has escaped into the middle of the desert where it will die alone in the dark and the cold. Each person is happy knowing its death would end the barking and usher them into sleep, even though it is a cruel fate to wish on an innocent animal.

At a certain point, however, the barking begins to return, growing louder and louder. And the dog they thought would perish is very much alive, getting closer, until it is barking under each window once more. The people in their beds finally understand. The dog’s owner has fallen and the dog, overcome with anguish, is attempting to find help for its wretched master. Satisfied with this conclusion, each person falls into a deep slumber. The dog’s bark echoes through each room. Its master lies prone in the dirt, hearing no barking and having no dreams, feeling the vibrations of the worms making tunnels beneath the soil.

Little jars

The morning of the trip, the couple argues bitterly and the man screams obscenities into a towel as he washes his face. The woman screams back “How can you act this way in front of your son?” She is emptying big jars of liquids into little jars of liquids. The man finds this obscene, which makes him scream louder and the woman pack faster and more efficiently. Their son sucks on his thumb on the far side of the room.

They drop the boy off at his grandmother’s and, desperate to get away from him, drive two hours in silence into the desert. Once they get to the vacation rental, they shut all the blinds and go to bed. The sun is still high and makes the blinds burn orange. The man sleeps soundly and does not wake to make it to their dinner reservation, or even to see the stars, which is half the reason people from the city make the trip out to the desert. The woman does not fall asleep right away. The wind howls outside the door and rattles against the windows. As she lies in a strange bed that is not her own, she convinces herself that if she was to be left outside, she would perish very quickly.

When the man wakes up, it is the next day and the woman is nowhere to be found. It is nearly check out time and the man does not want to incur a fee. He packs up their things and turns off the air and all the lights. The blinds he leaves closed as instructed. He drives the two hours back and fetches the boy, making it home before the sun sets. The boy is happy to see him and the man is renewed from his time away. They spend the evening showing each other their bellies and eating goldfish crackers. They pass many happy years this way in each other’s company, learning and growing together, the boy in size and maturity and the man in a way he cannot quantify. The woman’s bag remains in the trunk of the car for a very long time, the little liquids moldering in their little jars. The boy never asks about the bag not even once.

________

Stephanie Yu lives and writes in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, swamp pink, Wigleaf, and elsewhere. It has been recognized by the Wigleaf Top 50. Read more at readstephanieyu.com.

Such heat. Even the vultures roosted listlessly in the shade, waiting for the release of death or rain. The pavement burned my dog’s tender feet. He whined in betrayed pain and licked my sun-blistered knees.

Tempers run high in such heat, boil in sync with our dying oceans, sing sympathetic harmony with the melting of our plastic world.

Could I have said or done something different? Could I have been someone else, somewhere else? So many different questions to lay at the feet of the victim, so few answers to demand of the attacker. For me, there was little time for questions and less for answers.

When you killed me, I was staring into the merciless sky, begging for the dream of a cloud.

*

Such heat: dehydrated and salt-starved, you nearly fainted as you dug my grave.

I watched you grab my already-bloating feet and felt you drag me into the shallow pit, a doubled-experience. I was both body and ghost. Dirt covered my face, closing me off from the sky.

When you finished, it was midnight and still a hundred degrees. You hid your face from the pitiless stars and pretended your tears were the ghosts of rain drops.

*

I was such heat, such purity of rage.

I drifted, a gossamer soul, less substantial than dandelion fluff. For eight nights, I watched as you slept alone in the air-conditioned comfort of the house we’d shared. I watched my heart-broken dog waiting by the front door for me to come home.

In life, I’d been schooled in kindness and empathy. In death, I searched all the corners of my ghost for cooling sympathy, forgiveness, memories of love. I searched for grief, for thoughts outside myself: for the dead and dying children, the scorched and scorching world.

But I was nothing but such heat, such rage.

All ghosts are narcissists. We don’t care about the future, the world, anyone or anything. We are gardeners nourishing only one thing. One beautiful, choking weed.

*

Such heat. Not even the cicadas stirred in the heat-stroked woods concealing my corpse. The vultures were sluggish, their avian minds porous. On the ninth day, I slid my vengeful ghost against their hollow bones. They hissed and coughed, and let me in.

A kettle of vultures four-dozen strong, I boiled over you as you watered the wilted grass. I harried you deep into the woods until you collapsed on the ceiling of my grave.

The vultures were not used to such fresh, struggling meat, unseasoned by putrescence, but my rage reforged their instincts. You fought, but I was four-dozen pairs of wings and four-dozen beaks rupturing the scant protection of sweaty skin. I divided and devoured you, a last supper fit for our broken world. My ghost shrieked with four-dozen throats, delighting as blood seeped from tattering flesh and fed the thirsty earth.

As your ribcage buckled and I ripped the dubious prize of your heart in two, the heat finally broke.

*

It was raining when my ghost slid from the vultures and burrowed back into my body. I tasted my own bloat, felt the furtive foraging of insects reverberating through my decaying softness. Slowly, I creaked open dead jaws. Rain, mixed with grave dirt and your murderous blood, trickled past the ruin of my lips and down my desiccated throat.

My withered heart stuttered once, twice, more. My corpse quivered, and insects fled, plants retracted hungry roots, mushrooms recalled their branching filaments. Piloting my body once more, rebirthed by unknown alchemies, I crawled from my grave.

Rain splattered my unbruised face. I tipped back my head and opened my unruined lips.

The sweet rain carried an undercurrent of decay.

Greedily, I drank.

________

H.V. Patterson lives in Oklahoma and writes speculative fiction and poetry. She has work published or upcoming in Etherea Magazine, Star*Line, Haven Speculative, and Wyldblood Press, as well as anthologies from Sliced Up Press, Flame Tree Press, Eerie River, Creature Publishing, and Black Spot Books. She would love to (temporarily) possess a kettle of vultures. She’s a cofounder of Horns and Rattles Press, and you can find her on X @ScaryShelley and on Instagram @hvpattersonwriter

Catchphrase

I heard this woman say, “I’m coming. Why are you calling?” and I thought something was wrong with that. I don’t know why she said it. I was standing in line, basket in my hand, staring at a pack of green balloons that said, “St. Patrick’s Day!” like a warning. And that’s when I heard it, several rows down. I think she was a cashier. I found out later that those were the last words of some Greek philosopher named Zeno. He said it when he stubbed his toe, and then he killed himself.

The day after, I heard someone else say it. A woman in a commercial. She was driving to pick up her kids, and she said it. I expected to see a car crash, metal intensely smashed together. About a week later, I caught myself saying it. I hoped it was an accident. This was a slogan which announced death but nothing was happening to us.

To figure this out, I made a plan to consult children. They’ve got access to enigma in a way that we don’t. I read a study the other day that claimed children can see more colors than adults, that they have an advanced experience of light. I went up to my nephew, who’s about three years old and the most child-like child I know. Before I could say anything, he recited the phrase to me.

Michael Bay

They called him a man out of history, someone who accidentally wandered in from an age of epoch-making. A real genius. They kept up with all his movies.

They had ideas about what Bay was like. They imagined him on set, cloistered with his pyrotechnicians, discussing ways to make the explosions louder, brighter, how the budget might accommodate the expansion of soaring flames and pillars of dust. These conversations must have been serious, spoken in low tones in secluded places. He must have consulted them as if they were alchemists, people capable of leading him out of death. They saw Bay atop some equipment van, delivering a speech, dictating that the whole film crew should understand explosions, the composition of powders, the ratio of fuel to oxidizer, the difference between deflagration and detonation. They imagined him saying, “My favorite thing is to see fire reflected on the faces of movie-watchers, orange glares in the dark.”

For a long time they looked at paparazzi photos. He was always at lunch or walking on the street or exiting a car. The nighttime pictures were more spectacular. Bay was engulfed by camera flashes, his face sickly glowing. He always kept the same expression. It was something they had never seen before. Open mouthed, expressing a once in a lifetime shock, as if the flash on his face was a sign of his body’s exposure to a fatal radiation.

Early photographers burned magnesium wire to produce the necessary light for photographs. Those who experienced this photo-taking method for the first time complained of light being trapped in their bodies.

They looked at photos of his house. These came from satellite images and realtor listings. There were floor plans, networks of living spaces and corridors. The house was two stories. It had sixteen rooms. They simulated it all, gauging distances by taking measured steps, spreading their arms apart, lying on the floor. They speculated about furniture layouts, the relative distance of couches, tables, and chairs. Supposedly there was a glass chandelier. For days, they converted their rooms into rooms from Bay’s house. The flash on his face was a light following him.

________

Nic Luc is a writer from California. You can find him at nicluc.neocities.org or on Twitter @postponedly.

We decide to kill Aunt Miriam. We have already done everything else. We have played Monopoly. We have read hospital magazines. We have made tribal masks from old crosswords and glue. We have plucked the fuzzy man-hairs from our arms. We have played with our baby brother, even though he is not yet a real person. We have cut his hair, we have poked his cheeks. We have built a cage from hospital chairs and tucked him deep inside. We have searched forlornly for our brother under every chair but the right one. Oh, Jackson? Little Jackson? Where did our Jackson go? We have pretended not to hear his screams. We have turned away in disgust when he gurgled and sobbed and vomited on his sweater. We have remembered why we don’t play with him. He is too young to understand anything, games or Aunt Miriam or anything. We have ignored our baby brother until his crying quieted into tiny, bite-sized noises: hiccup! hiccup!

We have played Pretty, Pretty Princess. We have broken the crown in two and worn it on our heads. We have made the hospital lobby our kingdom, and now there is nothing else to do. The nurses are busy working and Mom is busy crying and the only other real person there is an old lady whose husband is dead. She tried to stop us at first, but then we scared her very badly. Now all she does is glare from a corner chair. We hate her, but we let her have her corner. She is just jealous of our young teeth, our smooth forearms, our hospital-lobby-kingdom.

Mom screams when she sees us. She pulls us apart, a bushel of hair in each hand. She makes us apologize to the old lady, who grins like a witch. She takes away our magazines, our board games, our glue. She seethes at us, snot coming from her nose, Behave, girls! Isn’t enough going on?

Yes, Mommy, of course, Mommy, we demure, and she whisks our baby brother from the room. The old lady grins, so, so self-satisfied. We hate her. We cannot be here a second longer. We must kill Aunt Miriam.

Aunt Miriam is not in the hospital lobby, so we cannot unplug her machines or stab her belly with butter knives. We must find a way to do it, all by ourselves. We clasp our hands together. We squeeze our eyes shut. We cast our chins towards to the ceiling. Please ease our suffering! Take Aunt Miriam into your arms in the great beyond! Aunt Miriam, Aunt Miriam, die! we screech. Aunt Miriam, Aunt Miriam, die!

The old lady is no longer grinning. She curdles in the corner and sneers: Witch children. Imps.

We do not care. We hope she never grins again.

That night, Aunt Miriam chokes on the water in her lungs. We have always known we were special girls, but now we have proof. We wear our church clothes to the funeral, and then we never take them off. We shine our nice black shoes. We gel our hair so tightly to our heads that, from a certain angle, it looks like we do not have hair at all. Our younger cousins, sensing what we have done, howl in despair. They swear blood vows and hiss at us when we pass them at school. We do not care. We only need each other. We hold hands in the halls. When others laugh, we call them late at night on the telephone. We threaten their cats, their mothers, their friends, until they hang up in despair. We hold the dead phone between our faces and stare into each other’s eyes. We are not just magic—we are invincible. No one will ever hurt us again.

We had not understood, then, that nothing in the world is free. Not one thing. When Jackson falls ill that winter, we argue for days, blaming our mother, our cousins, then, finally, ourselves. We promise to only use magic for good. We promise to never use magic again. We promise to only use magic for this: Jackson, Jackson, live! Jackson, Jackson, live!

The night Jackson dies, we do not sleep. Our baby brother will be scared when he comes back, and we do not want him to be alone. We sliver the bedroom door open. We wait to hear the front door, we wait to hear baby steps. We pinch our wrists when we start to sleep, so hard we draw blood. We are wide awake through the first night, and we are wide awake through the second.

On the third night, we dream Jackson returns to us as a goldfish. We are at a carnival, wires strung high above our heads. Tightrope walkers fall from the sky, but we run through them, straight for the racetrack. We shoot through the finish line before anyone else even starts—we are the fastest girls in town. We can choose to take our prize from anyone, so we choose the lady in red. She hands us our baby brother in a plastic bag. He blinks at us in shock and wonder. Maybe he is surprised to be alive. We don’t know for sure. His voice is gone, and he just makes tiny little noises: hiccup! hiccup! We dash around the carnival, searching for his voice. We throw aside the elephants, we rip apart the circus tops, we tear into the funnel cakes, we burn down the Ferris wheels. His voice simply isn’t here. We smear our weepy eyes against his plastic bag. We promise him we will look forever. Hiccup! he says. Hiccup!

We wake up, the dream like dried glue down our throats, but then my sister turns from the bedroom door and I know the dream was mine alone.

________

Kira Compton is bad at writing bios, as well as several more important things. She is currently getting an MFA at Boise State, where she serves as the associate editor for The Idaho Review. Find her at kiracompton.com, or @kirajcompton.

Old

Thus all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty-nine years. The man was tired. There aren’t enough syllables in words for how tired he was. His eyes were stones. If he saw, then stones could see. His mind was a helpless book of leaden works in endless cycles, like mowing the lawn, then peeling off sweaty clothes, then placing them in the hamper, then washing his skin, then finding other clothes, then getting them onto his body. And next. And next. Each act an obeisance to what had been done before, and before, and before. He existed to zero out the vast weights of past and future. When he rebelled, by wearing his shoes on his head, or setting fire to his groceries, he could see, perhaps, finally, how an end might come to be. Others would move his limbs for him. Others would feed the mouth. Inside, he would wait like a flame in the dark to learn the final thing.

Party

Because I seem to have come awake at a service for a person who’s died, I know that it’s me. It’s me in the coffin. That explains the gap in consciousness, which explains my baffled state. I’m a ghost, put simply. That’s what I’m going with. I take a look around. One issue: the mourners. I don’t know them. One person has a bow tie hanging loose around their collar; I note the shape of the silky cloth: bulbous, sensual. Another person wanders away from the grave to light a joint. She stands on the hill, looking over the valley, while someone beats drums, and someone plays saxophone, which sounds like flying geese. I think, Good party. Before I can stop myself, I’m saying those words, Good party—which might be offensive, but I’m the one dead. She hands me the joint. I have a strange feeling, for a dead man: I’d like to get to know this woman, possibly get her number. I’d also like to hear her thoughts on the man in the pricey dark box.

________

Scott Garson is the author of Is That You, John Wayne?—a collection of stories. He lives in central Missouri.

The goldfish lived in a small apartment with a single window on the top floor of a brick building. Inside the apartment, nothing was alive except him and the walls. And every day, the walls grew smaller and grayer. From the window, the goldfish watched the sun come and go as it pleased and felt the threat of not owning a light. So, the goldfish visited the newly opened store at the end of the road. There, he saw a woman with hair and skin the color of corals and took her home with him.

Inside the fish tank, the woman swam in perfect circles. A dim red light constantly awake, burning alive, between the goldfish and the gray walls. Even when the sun was gone.

_____

Gessica Sakamoto Martini’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in HAD, Unbroken Journal, Crab Apple Literary, Red Ogre Review, Gone Lawn, FlashFlood (National Flash Fiction Day), Shoreline of Infinity, and others. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from Durham University (UK), and reads for Orion’s Belt magazine. She can be found on X at @GJMartini.

They were already among us. Unheard-of numbers swimming into bays and inlets, and some found their way into freshwater lakes and rivers. Tagged ones disappeared from tracking. For a species that occupy every ocean on the planet, their disappearance was stark and swift. A squeal cut off mid-sound.

*

My father said I used to hold my breath above water. Even if it were a toe, the tiniest bit of skin, I’d hold my breath.

I was so good at holding it, that when a swim instructor finally dropped me into the depths, it was like coming home.

*

On land, groups of people, of all races and shapes, appeared huddled together on the beach. Fully grown yet naked. Grinning ear to ear, speechless, save for the snaps of fingers, clicking of teeth, and the occasional high-pitched squeak, giggle, and scream.

The teeth gave them away. A hundred domes rising into pointed ends; uneven smiles with too many teeth. It became clearer after the first kill on the beach, a surfer who got too curious, too excited, too bold. A scream cut off mid-sound. They played with their food, squealing, keening, lobbing pieces back and forth.

*

When I was twenty-two, I met someone at a dive bar in San Francisco. I was a good liar, making friends with people who thought I grew up sunbaked along the beaches of California rather than sandwiched between a cornfield and soy field in the Midwest.

“You’re one of us,” they said.

At the bar, about a week after the event the news labeled “Landfall,” a white woman with clothes too big for her slight frame bought me a drink. She sidled over to me, suppressing a grin. She took a saltshaker and sprinkled it over my cranberry vodka.

“I feel like I know you,” she said through slanted lips.

“Maybe you do,” I said.

*

After Landfall, they made their way up beaches and onto roads. At first, it was easy to tell them apart, sticking in their large familial groups. But their skin was blubber thick, resistant to our brand of violence. They’d left their tenderer parts in the ocean.

Too soon, they discovered how easy it would be to split up. They closed their mouths, no longer grinning. They played in shadows and corners, the evidence found pooled in clubs, alleys, and stores closed after dark.

They liked to knock on doors and leave.

Sometimes they knocked along the sides of buildings and houses. Giggling all the while.

*

Three months later, I held her in bed. I didn’t believe her when she said her name was Bella. When she laughed, it shook my bones. She was patient but distant. She fucked like she was diving for treasure.

“Do you think they’ll come for us,” she asked once, nodding at the TV. Another murder, this time in Oakland. Too many teeth marks over a body.

Landfall was able to roll together mutual hate like a playdough ball and point it in another direction. People who would have rather died than be in the same room as their former counterparts now went on “hunting parties” together, searching for that uncanny grin.

I’d had people gunning for me ever since I came out to my parents, ever since the Supreme Court overturned another law. I admitted it was a relief to see the guns, the fingers, the goddamn rhetoric, pointed elsewhere.

*

Unnatural, they’re called. But how could anything be less natural? Evolution in front of our eyes.

And what next, the comedians asked? Bees? Birds?

And what next, the government asked? We jail anyone with a smile? In this economy?

A marine biologist went on 60 Minutes and said one of their trackers came back online, but rather than the ocean, it triangulated to a house in Columbus, Ohio. Google Maps showed a swing-set in the backyard.

AITA posts poured in, pondering whether their partner might be grinning too much, leaving at night and coming home smelling of sweetness and warm meat.

A child called 911 and said her parents were lobbing a dead animal back and forth on the front lawn. When the police showed up, the house was cleared out. An empty shell.

What next, the scientists said? Because it’s so hard to tell them apart now. Some say they’ve gone back to sea, but there’s no way to know, and we don’t know who to ask.

*

Bella left. Like a fool, I thought I had something, like I was holding water in the palm of my hands. She left a note saying she had family in New England, and it wasn’t going to last anyway. She left her clothes, and they smelled of salt and sunscreen. I held my breath as I shrugged on one of Bella’s shirts and trudged to the beach. I sat on the sand and watched a trio of friends walk from the parking lot toward the surf. Their shoulders shook. They slapped each other on the back.

They staggered into the water and did not surface.

 I stood, wondering whether I should call 911.

“Don’t bother.” I turned, and there was a police officer, binoculars up, scanning the horizon. “They do that sometimes.”

“But what if…”

“What if what?” The officer lowered the binoculars and eyed me. For the first time in months, I tensed, waiting. “You don’t think we’re better off?”

*

They are not our friends, someone wrote, when we were all rooting for boats to sink. Let them giggle. Let them squeal. We thought, oh finally, nature was doing the work for us, and we didn’t have to try so hard anymore.

Remember when we were all entertained as hell but land-locked, ground dusty and dry beneath our feet? When we nestled, content to fight among ourselves, comfortable and rage-filled, on our tectonic plates?

Plates, we grin. Ha ha. Hee hee.

On plates. We are all on plates.

_____

Lyndsie Manusos’s work has appeared in Tor.com (now Reactor), Lightspeed, F&SF, and other publications. She lives in Indianapolis with her family, works as an indie bookseller, and writes for Book Riot. Her debut novella, FROM THESE DARK ABODES, is forthcoming from Psychopomp in the summer of 2024. You can read more at lyndsiemanusos.com.

I’ve known you since you were born, which was when I was born. I’m your evil twin. Everyone has one.  I was a part of you until I wasn’t. Then I watched you from the shadows—alleyways, unfurnished basements, etcetera—waiting to ruin your life.

Why?

Put evil in front of your name and see how it makes you feel. Not great, right? Figured you were going to blame me anyway. Figured I’d save you the trouble and prove you correct.

Funny thing is, I know a lot of evil twins who’re good people, people who still give hitchhikers lifts, people who volunteer without a court order, yet they’re labeled the bad half. You’re probably thinking life’s not fair, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be.

Anyway, I got back from a relaxing week of hiking and waterslide riding in the Poconos (yes, even evil twins take vacations) only to discover you did my job for me. I almost spat out my beer when your next-door neighbor’s evil twin told me Jessica dumped you, that she caught you in bed with that Starbucks barista, the one you told your name was Jack because you thought it sounded cool.

Then I ran into your boss’s evil twin, and she mentioned you were fired for embezzling an elderly couple’s retirement fund, that you got on your knees and begged her not to press charges, that you swore you didn’t do it.

You blamed me. Like always, you hoped I’d take the fall. A man who shares your face but nothing else. As much as I’d love to add ruined my jerk twin’s life to my resume, to take credit for your undoing, I can’t. I don’t want your charity. I was a little bummed it took you one week to accomplish something I’ve been working on for decades. But evil twins shouldn’t feel sorry for themselves. That’s not a luxury we have.

So today, like most days, I followed you and watched. I followed you in the hopes, if I couldn’t ruin your life, I could at least twist the knife a bit. I felt cheated, felt as if I sucked at my job, at my life’s purpose.

I watched you steal money from the Starbucks barista’s tip jar after she told you she didn’t want to see you anymore. I watched you park your Hummer across three spaces. I watched you threaten to sue the guy interviewing you when he brought up your embezzlement charge. I watched you chuck your wingtip at the tow truck driver just doing his job. I watched you ask God what you did to deserve this.

And now, seeing you sitting on the curb here crying, I no longer hate you. Maybe I never did. How could I? The way you blamed the curb for breaking your toe after you’d kicked it. The way you said God as if you were owed something for being the good twin. No, I feel sorry for you.

You believed you were the good twin so nothing bad could happen to you. All I could do was watch, stuck in this belief’s orbit. I stank at my job because it shouldn’t have ever been my job. I couldn’t ruin your life because, I realize now, that’s not the kind of person I am.

_____

Will Musgrove is a writer and journalist from Northwest Iowa. He received an MFA from Minnesota State University, Mankato. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Penn Review, The Florida Review, Pinch, Passages North, Tampa Review, and elsewhere. Connect on Twitter at @Will_Musgrove or at williammusgrove.com.

We should’ve been looking when the clouds turned floofy, furry and then patchy–black, brown, stripy, orange. “Look Mama, Look Daddy, look at the clouds,” the remaining kids said, but who looks closely at clouds? While we went about our lives, the clouds burst and it rained. A yowl here, a yelp there, a mewl here, a ruff there. And with the kids clapping their hands in glee, it sounded exactly like regular rain.

Everyone had a pet now, or two, or as many as they wanted. The crazy cat lady next door took in ten kittens. She received an award from the mayor himself for being a responsible citizen. What a fine example she had set for the rest of us! We were encouraged to take in as many cats and dogs as we could, so they could clear the roads, airports, and train stations. We did that, and turned up our noses at those who didn’t. They made excuses–pet dander allergies, we want human kids, climate change, why isn’t the government doing anything about this?

It was monsoon–it rained cats and dogs again and this time, the Mayor said, “aren’t we lucky it’s not raining elephants or lions?” We laughed, but we also looked at each other like something didn’t make sense. But just then he announced concessions and prizes for households with ten pets or more and suddenly some of the people who didn’t like pets were interested. And we swayed with them.

After it rained again, there was a flurry of new advertisements on TV. Stronger medications, special masks for people with allergies to dander, newer, quieter vacuum cleaners to suck up every strand of pet hair, tiny vacuum cleaners you could carry in your pocket, vets, vets, vets, dog walkers, faster, cheaper kibble delivery services, pet hotels, pet daycares, pet, pet, pet…

Every morning we shoveled pet hair from our driveways, put them in neat mounds, shooed away strays from under our cars and drove to work on new chain-link tires. When the roads turned into furry carpets, the Mayor said, “How lovely, we can all walk barefoot on the streets now!”

And the “pet-hating hippies,” as the Mayor called them–the lucky few who had been able to conceive in these times–started placing their babies under the afternoon sun in their backyards, in parks, in any open space they could find, so the essence of those babies would evaporate and then maybe the heavens would shower babies instead of cats and dogs.

And to that the Mayor said “That’s the most absurd, most bizarre thing I’ve seen in my entire life!”

We looked at each other again–for longer, this time.

_____

Hema Nataraju is an Indian-American writer, mom, and polyglot currently based in Singapore. Her work has most recently appeared in Barrelhouse, Bending Genres, Five South, Booth, Wigleaf, 100-word Story, and Ruby Literary, among others. She is a Submissions Editor at Smokelong Quarterly and she tweets as m_ixedbag.

The mammoth crouches behind her desk, which is not as neat as she’d like it to be, and shuffles through papers until she finds a brochure. Pushing it across the table with her trunk, she taps the cover lightly. Muted grey, with a tasteful cream font. “You’ll find all our models in here, ma’am.”

The woman pulls out a crumpled tissue and dabs at her eyes. “Models?”

“Caskets,” the mammoth corrects.

“Is there much of a difference?” the son asks.

The mammoth flips open the brochure. “Most people go for this one,” she jabs at a polished mahogany number, “or this.” She gestures at a smooth oak-paneled casket.

The woman and her son stare with identical expressions; furrowed brows, a distinct triangle of sadness popping up between them. Full, pouting lips, caging unspoken words. “What do you think, Ma?” the son asks.

“This one,” the woman says, pointing at a model on the left-hand page. Redwood, with a cream burl finish. It looks like the kind of thing Dracula would cross state lines in.

“That’s an excellent choice, ma’am,” the mammoth says.

The woman’s eyes fill with tears again. Humans cry at predictable times: often after making choices, or upon realizing a choice has been made for them. The mammoth understands that feeling only too well.

An email from Maritzia dings into her inbox. “Please excuse me for a moment,” the mammoth says, sidling around the desk. Down in the mortuary, her employee stands gazing down at a sabre-toothed tiger, gashed badly across his snout and chest. The tiger’s broad chest is caved at an odd angle, making it look like a caldera.

“I figured you’d make an exception,” Maritzia says, before the mammoth can comment. “They said no one else would take him.”

The mammoth sighs. “Mr Wilson won’t like this.”

“Mr Wilson doesn’t need to know.”

The mammoth inches closer, her ponderous steps rattling the shelves which hold all the surgical and aesthetic tools of their trade. There’s a drop of something beaded and bright just under the tiger’s eye. A tear, but not his. Somebody loved him enough to weep over his death. “Okay,” the mammoth concedes, pulling the cover over the tiger’s face. “We’ll do it.”

That evening after Maritzia leaves, the mammoth dials Dr Hopkins. He answers in good spirits and she listens politely to his monologues on the latest scientific discourse. If she closes her eyes, she can still feel the tepid, caffeine-sour shudder of his breath on her face. She pictures the gust moving through his mouth, driving past the buildings of his teeth, escaping out into the wide world. He’d been responsible for reconstructing her from the collective efforts of dozens of museums worldwide, though he’d confided one night that in the end he’d needed little more than a tooth and a thighbone.

“What’s new with you?” she asks, during a lull.

“I’m actually working on a great project,” he tells her. “Ground sloths. You know, all these holes in the earth in Mexico—they weren’t burrows, they were tunnels. Dug by giant claws. Really amazing. We think there’s a place for them in the construction industry.”

“Wow. That’s great.” Her trunk squeezes the receiver until the plastic squeaks in protest.

“I don’t want you to think…” he trails off. The silence is yellow—not golden, but shades of flax. Dried and ancient and hardly worth pawing through.

“I know.”

“I’m really proud of you.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m sorry we didn’t make more—” He hesitates. “You are okay, aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” the mammoth says. “I’m okay.”

After she hangs up, she rests the bulk of her body against the wall and stares at the wall opposite the window, where the amber squares of streetlights sputter like a low-budget silhouette show.

Down in the mortuary, she uncovers the sabre-toothed tiger. The harsh light overhead picks out each of the flaws in his fur, each gash telling the story of the attack, the defense, the fall. The mammoth picks up a pre-threaded needle and hesitates. Wounds can be sewn. Scrapes can be covered. Lies can be told.

But one day, this might be her.

She drops the needle. Fills a basin with warm water and washes each of his paws clean. Combs his fur neatly, the way she imagined he’d have done in life. Not church-neat, but street-sweet. Against the grain, not with it. The thought makes her want to cry. She props his mouth open and brushes his teeth gently, before polishing the two large canines that overhang his lip by a considerable margin. Born weaponized, the politicians had said. Too dangerous to live. Her tusks had been under the same kind of scrutiny, to begin with. She wonders if Dr Hopkins, blissfully tinkering with giant ground sloths in his laboratory, has ever spent a day outside with one of his creations. Has he ever had coffee with a pronged deer, antlers too big to walk down a regular city road without scratching cars? Has he ever had dinner with a short-faced bear, sharing a plate of amuse-bouche over a couple of sea buckthorn cocktails?

She touches the tiger’s eyelids with her trunk, so sensitive it can feel the tiny ridges of his veins like empty streets. She washes his nose, his tufted ears, and then pours the water out. Fills up the basin for herself. Washes her own furry sides with quick, short strokes. Cleansing the present from the past, rinsing the future from her fur. Stamping the suds under her feet until every shining bubble of potential has been popped.

_____

Lindz McLeod is a queer, working-class, Scottish writer who dabbles in the surreal. Her short prose has been published by Apex, Catapult, Pseudopod, and many more. Her longer work includes the short story collection TURDUCKEN (Spaceboy, 2023), as well as her books BEAST (Hear Us Scream, 2023), SUNBATHERS (Hedone Books, 2024), THE UNLIKELY PURSUIT OF MARY BENNET (Harlequin, 2025), and the collaborative anthology AN HONOUR AND A PRIVILEGE (Stanchion, 2025). Her work has been taught in schools, universities, and turned into avant-garde opera. She is a full member of the SFWA, the club president of the Edinburgh Writers’ Club, and is currently studying for a PhD in Creative Writing. Lindz is represented by Laura Zats at Headwater Literary Management.

What if we kissed in the McDonald’s drive-thru, when it snowed, all the bushes looking like the Flurry machine exploded but it was okay, it was costless, money didn’t exist, we were in a post-apocalypse with a quarter tank of gas and empty bellies and trembling lips and you and I called “hello?” so many times it seemed like language didn’t exist anymore— it used to, we could tell by the black box with red text flashing PLEASE ORDER HERE next to the LED menu someone had to be generating electricity for, if not then we’d die as the warmth waned in our arms with only an hour or so left, I don’t know I’ve never died before, I’ve tasted juicy perfection which I hear is known as a little death and that was what living was like right before the Internet and the power and the money disappeared— every day, a little death. And just as restless as in those days, we shouted at the walls of brutalist technicolor then turned and pressed the hunger held in each other’s lips together— just like before, as if nothing had ever happened, a voice that sounded like cigarette ash sighed, “good evening, can I take your order?”

_____

Julián Martinez (he/him) is the son of Mexican and Cuban immigrants. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in HAD, Maudlin House, Rejection Letters and elsewhere. Find him online at www.martinezfjulian.com or @martinezfjulian, or IRL in Chicago. His favorite hex piece, at least at the moment of typing this, is “My Dog Is A Cat” by Xavier Garcia. That one’s a doozy.

Just me and my naked grandmother, watching people fall out of the sky.

They don’t fall from too high up, not from the clouds. A few feet above the lake, or so. Some of them, as they’re falling, are already looking down. Some look like they knew they’d be meeting water, straightening their bodies into pencil dives. But mostly the people flail.

I know what a pencil is because my grandmother wears one in her hair. In this way, I guess she’s not completely naked. I don’t have a pencil yet, but my grandmother says I’ll have hers, someday.

Most mornings are like this, as are the afternoons. Night never comes, and my grandmother says, in this respect, we are lucky.

In other respects, we are not lucky. Mainly this is due to the people suddenly appearing in the air, near where my grandmother and I are sitting. Their falling interrupts something my grandmother is always on the verge of saying. Instead of saying the thing she wants to say, she reminds me I’ll have her pencil someday.

We sit and watch the strangers as they sink to their deaths. This is not the kind of lake one can swim in. I am not sure why the people fall here, whether it’s a punishment, or something they choose. Just as I’m about to ask, a man crawls onto the shore. This has never happened before.

My grandmother covers her breasts with her arms. I ask her if I should do the same, and she nods yes, instead of speaking. She is watching the man closely. I don’t think she’s scared, since the flesh is peeling off his body and we are up on a boulder he has no chance of reaching. He makes it a few feet before he stops moving, breathing.

I know what a few feet are because earlier today, in between people falling, I jumped off the boulder without warning. I looked back, triumphant, proud of my defiance.

But then I realized my grandmother had never explicitly told me not to leave the boulder. I took a step toward the lake and she said, “A few feet, that’s enough.”

I stopped right on the spot where this man is now turning into a puddle. I don’t have to ask my grandmother if I caused this, because of course I did.

She uncovers her breasts, takes the pencil from her hair. I say, “I’m sorry,” as she tosses it into the mess of what used to be the man. It melts.

The rest of the day is the same. I keep looking up at my grandmother’s hair, hoping another pencil will appear. But it doesn’t. Only people appear, then fall, like usual. In one respect, I am lucky, because now I don’t have to wonder when my grandmother will give me her pencil. But in other respects, I am not lucky.

_____

Thomas Mixon writes and thinks about lakes and ponds a bit too much, and gets carried away. He’s tries to keep his distance from the nesting loons, but they want to be his friend. He has poems and stories in Feral, Peach Fuzz, Cephalopress, and elsewhere.

Some day in November, I woke up to the sound of giggles.

The plush surface of my pillow had deepened. Its shadows became wrinkles. Its creases formed a face. It couldn’t stop laughing. Its lips fibrous, the inside of its mouth, a pure darkness. Tongue and toothless, how did it form words?

“You’re supposed to be inanimate. I bought you from Bed, Bath, & Beyond.”

“Bed, Bath, & BEYONDDDD.”

“Don’t tell me… ”

“I’m the—”

“Please, no.”

“Beyond.”

“Really.”

“Really? I’m a lost soul. Or maybe I’m a figment of your imagination projected out onto the thing you take for granted.”

Lightning made of lava; an anger thundered in me. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me. You’d be nothing without me. You’re just a silly boy. All you do is sleep. Sleep, sleep, sleep. And drool. Stop drooling on me!”

“I don’t drool,” I said plainly, as I flicked one of the pillow’s droopy corners.

It threw itself on me, punching my face with each of its corners like I was its personal speedbag. It didn’t hurt. Because it was a pillow.

Finally, I got a hold of its love handles and body slammed it into the mattress, bending its torso, folding it in half. I plunged both of my hands into its back, changing its feather distribution, gripped the fabric, the pillow’s satin skin, tensed up for a moment, and pulled apart as hard as I could. Sinister, cavernous roars.

Then a sharp tear, feathers snowing across the room, and the dissipation of laughter.

*

A few days later, my father called me. From my voice he could tell something was off. I begrudgingly told him about the pillow.

He laughed, kind of like the pillow, but a bit more warmly.

Lovingly, he said, “There comes a time in every person’s life when an inanimate object taunts you. It just means you’re growing up. The important thing to remember is to keep your cool.”

“I ripped it up. It’s gone. Destroyed.”

Dad laughed his airy, deep laugh again. Billowing with laughter, “You’ll always be my boy.”

*

My phone pinged. It was Dad. He sent me twenty dollars through cyberspace. “Get yourself a new pillow, son.”

“You didn’t have to do that. Thanks, Dad.”

“Love you son, talk to your mother when you get a chance. She needs to hear your voice.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell Dad pillows cost a lot more than twenty dollars in this economy. Especially the hypoallergenic ones I was accustomed to. It didn’t matter anyway. I never bought a pillow again. The mere sight of them creeped me out. My neck hurt, sure, but the pain reminded me of Dad and to always keep my cool. And fuck pillows.

_____

S.S. runs Saltwater Coffee in New York. His stories appear in Shenandoah, Passages North, 3:AM, and elsewhere. He has been nominated for the Pushcart, Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and Best Small Fictions (2x). His work has been supported by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Kenyon Review, Martha’s Vineyard Institute, Periplus Collective, and Bread Loaf (4x); recognized as notable in Wigleaf and The Best American Food Writing; and anthologized in a forthcoming book on craft from Columbia University Press. One time, a mac and cheese shop handed out two of his stories to 10,000 customers. Cool.

1.

We pore over Zillow for years until the 2 BD/2 BA starter home materializes from thin air. Below budget but it’s on a lake. Were we lake people? We had never considered living on the water. And lake houses aren’t real houses, they’re vacation cottages and cottages are only temporary. In person, it feels more like a ski lodge left to inherit its melted alpine slope. Every piece of trim throughout the house is particle board made to appear wooden. My husband pauses at the Weber left by the previous owner. He promises we’ll grill every night. Open flame is the healthiest way to prepare meat, he says. Our realtor tells us it’s below asking because the home comes with the spirit of the woman that once lived there. She had suffered a stroke in the bathroom. As our realtor is also a priest, she offers to cleanse the house for half-price. The spirit’s silver-black hair swirls in the shower drain. We find her former Facebook page. One comment says RIP. Another says miss you. Another says happy birthday, drinks soon? In her profile photo she’s young. Her photo is framed by different borders like Pray for Paris, I Stand with Kathy Lee, and Proud Aunt. The spirit only shows herself in reflective surfaces. The spirit speaks another language. According to her Facebook, she was born in Caracas, Venezuela. Half the downstairs bathtub is lime stained. Neither my husband nor I will cross it while showering. We don’t mind the spirit until we decide we shouldn’t raise children alongside one and we would in fact need to have our lake lodge professionally exorcised. Our realtor waves a smoldering nugget of sage through each room except the laundry room. We become very good friends with her when she makes a joke about using the extra to flavor roast turkey. She’s also an eye doctor. Neither my husband nor I knew we needed glasses until we met our realtor. Now we can see clear through to the other side of the lake. Now it’s just like Heaven, our realtor says. 

2.

It costs over seven thousand dollars to freeze my eggs. This happens right as my husband loses his job managing a call center that delivers custom flower bouquets. Our realtor buys us a plush baby blanket as a gift. Apricot yellow sewn with the visage of a goose wearing a bonnet. My husband spends every afternoon chopping blocks of pine for a fire pit that came with the yard, which we never use. In the shed he finds gardening gloves that fit perfectly over his small hands. Every plant in the garden is strangled by wild mint. In the photos she had posted of herself drinking mojitos, the spirit was always alone. On the phone with his mother, my husband says the rug was pulled out from under him. Every Sunday, our realtor brings us a trifle made with crushed Butterfingers that we eat together on our enclosed porch. At night, she joins us in watching Yellowstone on Paramount Plus. She falls asleep halfway through every episode and my husband watches CNN with her sleeping next to him. After an oil tanker explodes in the heart of a fourteen car pile-up on an icy Pennsylvanian bridge, I use lip balm to draw a border in the bathroom mirror that says ‘Pray for Pittsburg’ around where our spirit’s face once floated. Our realtor admits the baby blanket she gave us was from an estate sale and that it may have bed bugs, so we bury it in lint and paper towel rolls and drink around the heat it makes in the fire pit. 

3.

Over the course of a single morning, the lake seems to swell four times its size with snowmelt. The mint reaches up the side of the house in rabid tendrils. St. Patrick’s Day is the first day over sixty degrees. Our realtor brings over a crockpot heavy with corned beef. It is staying light out for longer. We wish the porch wasn’t enclosed anymore. Our realtor drinks a beer and says all her friends talk about is what happened in the past and she likes us because we talk about the future. When we look out at the water for long enough, we say we don’t swim because we’ve forgotten about our bodies. Because it’s so nice out, our realtor decides she’ll have more to drink. She holds her phone against the window to take a photo of the sun’s purple drool. Look at the way it’s reflecting in the water. She says it will be perfect for the parishioner newsletter. At night when my husband is asleep, I scrub the bathtub using a Brillo pad soaked in vinegar and salt. I do this while showering. I say out loud, this is called killing two birds with one stone. 

_____

Travis Dahlke is the author of Milkshake (Long Day Press). His work has appeared in Maudlin House, Joyland, Pithead Chapel, Juked, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and elsewhere. 

Few images more alive in my mind than the tubes of time which spring from partygoers’ chests in that film near the turn of the century. I saw it at fifteen—those glowing clear intestines towing the sad actors through space like totaled cars; saw it even then, the broken brake cables of desire, my future nothing but a two-door lemon idling in traffic. Of the Millennium I will say I saw it at ten, as the adults upstairs mocked Y2K—my father the pretend priest, swinging a bat at a computer monitor piñata, smarties spilling like his pills. Meanwhile downstairs we played hide-and-hide behind the blue water barrels our hosts had quietly stockpiled. Upstairs, downstairs, God, everyone really was seeking the same place, an actual end, some kind of undersea. So what’s in the films lost to the bottom of ponds I leapt into off a cliff if only for the fact of a waterproof camera in my hand? I was trying to capture something that wanted only to decapitate me. Few images more snaggy than the dead, caught branches dangling above me, my arms flying overhead, the one clear thing my camera saw as I fell—the limbs of trees. And every time I broke the surface in my terrified crouch, some weak part of my hand let go, red light glowing as it floated down. Few images more handheld for me than the widowermaker, failing again tonight to make another.

_____

Tyler Barton is the author of Eternal Night at the Nature Museum (Sarabande), and The Quiet Part Loud (Split/Lip). His short fiction has twice been named “Distinguished” in Best American Short Stories, and his visual poetry has appeared in Adroit Journal, Northwest Review, december, and elsewhere. Find him at tsbarton.com or @tylerbartonlol on Instagram. 

We live inside the tornado where our daughter was born. We were driving to the hospital when the tornado howled and my eyes tilted my head skyward. Surely some gigantic spaceship spawned that ear-piercing clatter but I saw nothing until the twirling menace grew in my rearview mirror. Clarissa clutched her throbbing tummy and moaned. The whirlwind whisked us into the sky as the baby’s head crowned. My wife breathed and pushed, breathed and pushed. Roofs, tree limbs, close-mouthed dogs, wide-eyed cats with puffed tails, and other detritus swirled around us as I cut the umbilical cord with my pocketknife and cleaned the mess with paper towels. We travel from town to town now. Our daughter enjoys looking out the window. The scenery constantly changes as much as it remains the same.

_____

Keith Hood is a former janitor and window cleaner living in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He retired from a job as a field technician for a Michigan electric utility after 32 years avoiding electrocution. As the About Me page of Keith’s website states, he is not a Compliance Director, Senior Military Advisor, or plastic surgeon, and did not write “Hematomas in Aesthetic Surgery.” Keith is the 2024 One Story magazine 2024 Adina Talve-Goodman Fellow. His work has appeared in Blue Mesa Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, Your Impossible Voice, Five Minutes One Hundred Words, The Forge Literary Journal, Vestal Review. He has work forthcoming in Callaloo.

I was sitting on an orange metal chair outside a fifties-inspired diner, waiting for my takeout order. It was too stuffy in there. But outside, the evening, the city placed upon it, was about as good as it gets. Although, the brick pavers, cobblestones salvaged from the old part of town turned bad and trucked to the new part of town turned good, made that particular section of sidewalk a tad wobbly, to be honest. A legal nightmare, one would think, considering wheelchairs, walkers, canes, and people who have guessed at their shoe size and come away with something that constantly stubs their toe but looks okay in these kinds of dimly lit applications. Anyway, under the foot of the retrospectively orange table I could see two straws, paper wrapped, sticking out like the wicked witch’s toes. Except they were white, not striped, so they looked like the rolled-up tissue plugs one sticks up his nostrils for any number or reasons, namely, a gross amount of blood. Just to see if they were doing their job, I wiggled the edge of the table a bit. My glass of ice water didn’t spill one bit, so everything seemed alright. But then this heavily adorned man came along, looking the opposite of a chiropractor, knelt down by my shins, and shimmied those straws out from under the table leg. I didn’t see any blood rushing from his nostrils but that’s precisely where he jammed them. One could have understandably assumed that the table would have lost some support, perhaps disturbing my ice water. But what actually happened is the entire sidewalk collapsed from under the table, taking me with it. The table stayed right where it was and the man with the straws in his nose looked down into the pit, said nothing, but scoffed as though saying it served me right, then disappeared from my view, which, at this point, was the dark toothy edge of those old bricks. Poor urban planning or incredibly well-designed straws? I like to think about that while I’m down here. And such a lovely night for it. The sidewalks must be smooth now, for everyone to safely enjoy, in the old part of town.

_____

Bradley David’s poetry, fiction, essays, and genre-blending works appear in Terrain.org, JMWW, Thirty West, Fatal Flaw, Exacting Clam and numerous other publications and anthologies. He is Pushcart and Best of the Net nominated, and won Identity Theory’s 2022 2022-Word Poetry Contest. Bradley is also the blended-genres senior editor at JMWW Journal. Writing at www.bradley-david.com.

if you help me see Ego make you tellam I don go

                                                                       —Djinee

We were seeing smoke turn to dust before our very own eyes. Gradually, the silhouette of the big green car disappeared into a narrow chicane. All was still again. Peaceful, if you like. Ego was sitting in front of a mirror in her room; sizing earrings which clung to her ears like pendulum clocks. Her bed was draped in tartan-styled sheets Obinna got her from Scotland. Her hair dryer was hung like a Chekhovian prop waiting to be used. Surely, nothing could ruin this serene moment Ego basked in. She loved to keep things that way. Unruffled. That was why she spoke little. Ate little. Came out only at night when the children were asleep.

We were inside when the car honked again. Dutifully, as we were, we formed a circle around the green Sedan, chanting, “brother, oyoyo!” Ego had told us that there was nothing like “oyoyo,” instead, she said it was “brother, oh you are home!” We felt she didn’t understand the weight of what she was saying. The new lyricism she brought to the routine equation diminished not only the joy abounding our faces, but the zest to actually carry on. Among the disagreers was Obiageli, who labeled Ego as not only boring, but a killjoy. That was Obiageli for you. She was always loquacious around everyone, especially Ego, and the only time she came to an agreement was when she was given an udala fruit.

Brother always came home like this. Perfunctory and uninterested. We, the children, knew better than irk him during moments like this. He was quick to use his cane which seemed to never leave his car, except on Sundays, when we visited Father Francis after thanksgiving or Mrs Stewart, his white boss who spoke posh English. Dozie was always the hapless one who got flogged, especially when he hadn’t done his chores. When we got everything from the car into the apartment, we waited for our names to be called upon by Ego, who would apportion biscuits to us by our age difference. Sometimes, I would conk Obiageli who didn’t waste anytime to disprove the fact that I was older than her. I am usually shy among people, but you see when it comes to moments which define my self-respect, I am always quick to stand up for myself.

We all sat, all five of us, waiting to be called upon. Suddenly, just when we had all given up hope, we heard a thud from the room. We were all excited to finally hear something. Ibekwa whispered silently that Ego would cook for us, but then again, everything we said were mere conjectures. Nneoma, who was the youngest, sang silently about how a river bird caught a snake and didn’t return to nestle. I shushed her immediately because I felt it was the right thing to do as the eldest. I knew subconsciously that this wasn’t our home, and anytime one of us tried to get too comfortable, it alarmed me. I always reminded them that we all came from different villages and were mere orphaned children taken in by the benevolent family. Why they had no child of their own still puzzled me—it puzzled us, but no one said anything about it. Something Obiageli ruled out as she paraded the whole house with Ego’s used clothes and lavender powder.

It was two hours since Brother arrived from seeing his mother off to Umunede park, where she would board a bus to the village; I still hadn’t gotten over the fact that Ego had slapped her because she accused us of being the source of Ego’s barrenness. “That woman and those weird looking orphans eats children,” she had said to Obinna. I was confused about how being orphaned remotely or closely affected a woman’s barrenness; I sensed Ego thought this, too, hence the reason for the retaliation. I was beginning to worry now. First, it was a thud, then a muffled silence. Nothing followed after that. On the sofa, we dared one another to move an inch; or worse, go to Ego’s room. Amidst the silent chaos, we all dozed off with our unwashed feet.

It has been two weeks now, and Ego hasn’t come out of her room. Brother goes to work and comes back the same. His face is blander than ever. Unreadable. Strange. We don’t go to check on Ego because we are scared she might not like it. We all go about our daily chores, silently, as if waiting for one of us to say it. To pluck that phony and tired smile from our faces when we think of her. We know she’s in our hearts. Sometimes she’s singing a little in there. Most times, she’s just silent.

_____

Prosper C. Ìféányí writes from Lagos, Nigeria. A two times Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, his works are featured or forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, New Delta Review, Salt Hill Journal, South Dakota Review, The Offing, Obsidian Literature, and elsewhere. In 2023 he was shortlisted for the Sevhage Prize for Short Fiction.

A brick building somewhere in this city calls to me at night. I’ve seen the vague shape of it in my dreams. The building sends out a warbling signal like a sickened radio wave, and when it finds me in my sleep, I see the color red. I’ve searched for the building by walking every block from Piedmont Park to College Park, growing a nocturnal neural map that extends infinitely into the unknown. Because I don’t know what the building looks like, I press my ear to every brick structure I come across, listening for the warble. I broke into an abandoned bank on Metropolitan, swearing to god that it was the one. Inside, I felt the heat emitted from the walls, I caressed the floors, I licked the wooden door frames, I pressed my forehead to the glass panes. I searched and I listened, but the space was soundless. If I find the building, I don’t know what will happen to it or me or the city. I often wonder if I radiate a vibration like the building does and think maybe that’s how it found me. Many nights I record myself on a camera, sleeping, eating, staring, or painting, then upload the footage online so I can go back to watch it later as if it’s not me and listen for any sound I might be sending out. Sometimes I think I hear it. My sister told me when I was ten that to listen to a thing was to give it love, give it life. She told me listening can help soothe the hurt, fill the empty, shape the day into manageable moments. So I listen. But now when I move, I have the thought that I’m programmed by some sonic code rather than acting on my own impulse or intention. I sense that the building has plans for me. I have accepted this, accepted it echoing through me, though I really have no choice. Like when I built the antenna on the cracked dirt behind my house in my sleep. I woke standing on a folding chair stacking broken tables and sofa fragments. At the top, I balanced the oval mirror from my bathroom, tipped it to reflect the night-dark sky. I gripped the mirror and felt the most subtle pulse pulse pulse of the building’s electromagnetic music in my palms, a pattern of syntax and architecture that I unraveled to discover the sound inside of the sound and then located where that same frequency lived inside of me. The building made me imagine a sculpture garden with human-shaped statues craning their necks to the sun. One pointed to the clouds that spun wild as if elapsing their own time. Beyond the garden, a red-sand beach lapped lathered waves. The beach led to a highway with cars in perfect rows, reflecting the sky spilling open, loosing a song of glowing static. In the static, life’s geometry destroyed then birthed itself, tried to find a formula of rest, but finding none was overrun by new numbers and unquantifiable odds of probable events. I woke again face down on my bathroom floor.

I fear I do not fully understand what the building means and may never unless I find it, so I beg the waking landscape, I trace the section of my brain reborn in the night. I fear I will fail to carry out the building’s demands. There is nothing I can do but sharpen my awareness, hone my observations, and open the margins of my mind. So if you see me on the sidewalk, motionless or manic, staring at the sky or pressing my head against a building, do not disturb me. Let me search, let me listen.

_____

Scott Daughtridge DeMer is a writer from Atlanta, Georgia. His work has appeared in Heavy Feather Review, Gone Lawn, Calamari Press’s Sleepingfish 2020+ (≠ 404), Hobart, Necessary Fiction, and other places. 

It’s not about honey. That’s the first thing you learn—it’s about what drove you to honey to begin with. As a cub, I detected in my parents some fundamental quality I seemed to lack. Oneness. Selfhood. Identity. Call it what you will. I was sure that I’d been born without something terribly vital—that at my core was a great, yawning void—and from an early age, I attempted to fill this hollow with honey.

A taste for honey would have been natural in any other pooh bear, but my relationship with honey was nowhere near natural. I used to run away from my parents, losing myself in mossy glens deep in the Hundred Acre Wood, gorging on honey until I was quite literally ill. Jamming a paw down my throat, I would regurgitate the viscous goo, letting it ooze over my woolly yellow fur, then continue feeding until I slid into hyperglycemic shock.

By the time I was full-grown, I was two stone overweight and borderline diabetic. I kept honey pots stashed all over the Wood and imagined that I was quite crafty, that none of my friends knew how much I was ingesting, but they were no fools. My dear Piglet tried to bring up the subject, and Kanga and Christopher Robin organized more than one intervention. When they came hunting for me, however, I always managed to give them the slip. I was surly and deliberately cruel when I found my honey pots empty, snapping at Owl and Tigger and Rabbit. Even blameless Roo.

The addict believes himself a skilled enchanter. Works at sleight of hand and misdirection. Thinks he’s hoodwinking everyone, when in truth, he deceives no one but himself. He’s so busy keeping his needs met, his fictions alive, that he’s got no time to consider anyone else.

Or why he craves honey in the first place.

It was one of those dazzling fall afternoons in the Hundred Acre Wood. I’d polished off the last of my honey and was trying not to dwell on the depths to which I would sink once my blood-sugar receded. Piglet and I stood on the bridge. We’d tossed in our pooh sticks. Waiting for them to appear on the far side, we spied Eeyore floating on his back. As I gazed into the donkey’s melancholy eyes, something extraordinary happened. I saw myself, and Piglet, standing on the bridge, as we must have appeared from below.

I saw trees rippling above our heads, their branches vibrating together, their fiery leaves kiting to the forest floor. I saw larks and sparrows, ducks and geese slicing through the blue canopy. And between all these things—purple-scarved Piglet, red-shirted Pooh, boughs, butterflies, birds—I saw ligaments, networks I’d never before noticed. We were all bleeding into and through one another, every one of us, so that when I squinted only slightly, we became nothing more than colors—streaming, cascading, spurting tones and shades, an impressionistic version of the only world I know.

I regained consciousness atop Rabbit’s kitchen table, surrounded by my friends, aware of a burning pain in my chest. I’d collapsed, Piglet said, and they’d carried me to Rabbit’s House, where Owl had insisted that there was no time to waste. Snatching up a pair of shears, the wise old raptor opened my trunk, and there, deep inside my stuffing, he discovered a massive hole.

On the forearm of Piglet and Tigger, of Kanga and Roo, of Eeyore and Rabbit, I spied a new wound—a laceration hastily closed with red thread. My friends had each donated a portion of their cottony insides to help fill the hollow within me. Even Christopher Robin, who stood squeezing my paw, tears spilling over his remarkable lashes, had lopped off his dear blond cowlick to contribute to the cause.

The ache in my chest soon subsided, but the warmth remained, and it occurred to me that my long-held notions of oneness, of selfhood, of identity, were a fairy tale—a story for cubs. The self isn’t the site of strength, I realized; the self is the site of nothing. Without others—without everything that isn’t us—none of us would exist.

Now, whenever I crave honey, I head to Eeyore’s gloomy place and sit with the downhearted donkey, feeling my way into his equine misery. Or I visit the sandy pit where Roo plays, and I join the joey, throwing myself wholeheartedly into his bouncy marsupial games. Or I locate Piglet—my dearest, most steadfast companion—and arm-in-arm, we stroll over to my thoughtful spot.

“Hello!” we shout into the surrounding thicket, aiming for the leafy heart of the Hundred Acre Wood. “My name is Winnie, and I’m a honey-addict!”

Echoing, our two voices bounce off tree trunks and stones, returning to our ears in an unintelligible stream we imagine is the forest’s voice, saying things like keep your head up and I believe in you.

_____

Jen Fawkes is the author of MANNEQUIN AND WIFE, a 2020 Shirley Jackson Award nominee, winner of the 2023 Phillip H. McMath Post-Publication Book Award, and Foreword INDIES gold medalist. Her collection TALES THE DEVIL TOLD ME was a Foreword INDIES silver medalist, one of Largehearted Boy’s Favorite Collections of 2021, and a finalist for the 2022 World Fantasy Award for Single-Author Story Collection. Jen’s fiction has won numerous awards, including the 2021 Porter Fund Literary Prize, and has appeared in One Story, The Iowa Review, swamp pink, Best Small Fictions, and many others. A two-time finalist for the Calvino Prize for fabulist fiction, Jen lives in Little Rock, Arkansas. Her debut novel, DAUGHTERS OF CHAOS, is coming in July 2024 from Abrams Books.

Macaroni and cheese isn’t real food. She learns this by adolescence, as one of many rules. There are things that should fill her up (motherly desire, raw beets, a single dick) and things that shouldn’t (dildos or ants, snack machine foods or carbs, frappucinos & carbs). But the hole in her howls and howls and howls, sometimes so loud she can’t sleep.

Macaroni and cheese isn’t real food, but she needs to be filled up.

This is the beginning of the contamination. She won’t realize this until later. Sat on the edge of a twin bed, waiting for water to boil in a kettle. The squeal of steam. Clinking macaroni, hard against ceramic. Bright yellow chalk that curdles to life with hot water. Freshman year passes in this Mac and cheese haze.


She eats Mac and cheese while rewinding VHS tapes. She searches the footage. What did Felicity eat in her 1999 dorm room in the lower east side during the second season of Felicity? Yes, remember that scene, Felicity is eating something that looks like Mac and cheese. If she existed in the world of Felicity, she and Felicity would dance with joy and eat Mac and cheese in sepia tones. Keyla, her sister says, you like that white people TV. No more trash boxed cheese shit! How about a little love, just like grandma used to do. You aren’t better than us. Wait, I see, you know that. She stares at the screen while she eats. An unwashed bowl attracts a trail of ants out of the corner of her eye.

Fake cheese is a staple of modern living, but she should be better than this. Be filling herself with things of a greater and finer substance. She and her siblings used to gobble up American cheese, that rubbery, refined goodness. Macaroni and cheese isn’t real food, her father barked. But it was savory and sweet, pastel-rich and chemical-bright, hitting their mouths with endless flavor that sat orange on the tongue for hours. Her brother was a sneaky little brat and always got extra. No, wait. She was the child always begging for more Mac and cheese, begging for more warmth and comfort. At night she’d sneak down into the dark kitchen and sprinkle that tiger-bright dust onto her tongue.

At least, she could try and be like Diane. Diane from school who now has three kids, and makes Mac and cheese with gluten-extracted pasta, nutritional yeast and a puree of butternut squash, cauliflower, onion replacing the gooey lava.

Her bouts of Mac and cheese consumption often bloom in early spring, or descend as the last crimson leaves fall from the trees, or late night after three shots of tequila. Times of melancholic transition, hunger and decay. That ache, maybe it’s in her bones, crying out for calcium, iron, pennies, dirt, coffee grounds and vending machine creamies. And Mac and cheese. She consumes vast amounts of it. She examines the ingredients off used boxes stacked in her trash bin: skim milk, milk, milk protein concentrate, milkfat.

Mac and cheese seeps out of her pores. Powdered cheese gets caught in her eyelashes and mixes with her tears, forming a congealed goo that sometimes keeps her eyelids stuck together. Her head is light with pop nutrition.

She can’t stop running through ingredients. Canola oil, maltodextrin, salt, cheese culture. Which one is the key component, the one to satisfy this craving?

She’s nostalgic; she wants to consume her lost innocence. Sometimes, she eats slowly, crushed and quivering noodle bits circling in her mouth, but sometimes she eats quickly and with desperation, whole noodles sliding down her gullet. The hole inside her weeps. She can’t find it exactly, only hear it, only feel it. Where is it, that cavern of empty static she is trying to fill with memory, color, this lemon brilliance?

While eating Mac and cheese, she watches tv all day, then into the night. Her head is loopy. The TV plays advertisements from when she was a child. Flashing primary colors, jangling music, kids in over-sized t-shirts and flannels, eyes-wide as they eat from their bowls of brand-name Mac and cheese. Mom and Dad, can I get some more?

Tearing the cardboard, ripping the powder satchel, over and over. Her stomach aches. Mac and cheese isn’t real food, it’s a ritual. Particles of cheese smell like desiccated flowers in her nose, like the sweet underbelly of delusion. Noodles shiver in the water, then swell, becoming turgid. Sprinkle the powder on the floor and wait for the insects to emerge. Wait for the feast. 

Mac and cheese is just a collection of molecules, organic chemistry. She loses perspective. Everything is just molecules. She keeps consuming. The ants keep on eating and that is good.

It is a new era. Why not, she thinks, eat your fill. She sits on the couch in her living room and loses track of the time and season. She feels ants trail over her feet, following the long path of the cheese granules. Out the window, she sees a branch heavy with lilac flowers, illuminated by the sunrise. Her cheeks are freckled in a fragrant dust. The TV plays and she sees herself eat Mac and cheese on the screen. She looks rosy and golden. Her face is awash in light, covered in amber speckles.

She makes one box, then another. She buys a huge pot. Noodles plop in rhythm into the water. Noodles swell. Soon all the pots and pans are filled with Mac and cheese, and all the bowls, plates and cups too. She can only smell that particular yellow now, a yellow of flesh, thick blood, tender skin. All the containers overflow, as well as the sink, the bathtub, her shoes. Her entire apartment’s fulfilled with Mac and cheese. She can’t see herself in mirror. She can’t move. She pees in this Mac and cheese pool. Full to the brim. Right now, there is no hunger left.

_____

Z. K. Abraham (she/her) is a writer and psychiatrist. She has been published in/has worth forthcoming in Clarkesworld, Necessary Fiction, JMWW, Fantasy Magazine, Podcastle, and more. She is completing the Tin House Online Winter Workshop in winter 2024. She is represented by C. L. Geisler at ArtHouse Literary Agency. She can be found at zkabraham.com, Twitter @pegasusunder1, and bluesky @pegasusunder.

The moon stares at the illusion of itself on the ice. But this is only an image, the moon thinks, and not the true me. The ice will melt. A moon will swell and wane. And clouds—those passing, pearlescent, and imponderable veils—will intrude in the chasm between us. Or perhaps all things are satellites, are clouds of a sort: the moon, the ice, and the self which breathes so many invisible atoms in and out.

You have traveled through a dark forest, a forest rising from the leaves it deciphers. The moon’s old, pitted face snatches the sight of you through the branches.

It’s like a theater down there, after a show has finished, before the props have been broken down and packed up, the moon thinks.

Stand still, and you, whoever you are, will yet voyage through the world’s evanescence. The moon sees you walking the paths. Cloudbanks open, as if the earth were some fruit being peeled. Starbursts of flurries swivel in the wind. The seedheads of withered grasses tremble, peeking from the snow, which erases the lines between all the fields. The night, having no origin, pours onward to no end. I am everywhere with you, the moon contends, like a weather inside you; my gravity is a force that waxes and withers with the course of your blood. A light zeros each crystal in the soundless aura of air.

Your breath becomes visible one instant then fades. The moon leers down, leers down through all its phases until one night it’s just the nimbus of itself, a dim vacancy left lingering among the constellations. Nightlong, the empty trees keep whispering in their simple language.

You look and look your life away.

_____

Will Cordeiro has work published in AGNI, Bennington Review, Best New Poets, Copper Nickel, DIAGRAM, The Threepenny Review, THRUSH, and elsewhere. Will won the 2019 Able Muse Book Award for Trap Street. Will is also coauthor of Experimental Writing: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology, forthcoming from Bloomsbury. Will coedits Eggtooth Editions and lives in Guadalajara, Mexico.

I was ten when my father took me to see the vampire.

He lived in a terraced house in one of the damp little streets behind Safeway. My father parked in the supermarket car park, which struck me as odd even then, before taking me through the underpass which led from the car park to the street. It was raining. The droplets tapping the hood of my coat were loud in my ears.

I remember the front door was a faded green, peeling paint showing dark wet wood underneath. The yellowish circle of a Yale lock. A dark crescent of a window, high up.

It smelled of cigarettes inside the house – and something else, and even to this day I don’t know what the something else was. My father spoke with him for a while. This was in the living room, which was cold, and I was glad I still had my coat on. There was a football match on the television but the sound was turned down very low. I remember watching the players, red jerseys and pale blue jerseys, chasing the ball all over a sea of green.

You want to know what he looked like, the vampire. He looked utterly normal. Skinny arms. A five o’clock shadow. Greyish flesh beneath and around his eyes. He had an accent I associated with the next county over, and a soft, quiet laugh. He kept jigging his knee. His stomach was bloated, straining against his faded grey t-shirt. It was the only fat part of him, like he was pregnant or had eaten a particularly large meal.

After a while my father went somewhere, I don’t know where, and it was just the vampire and me and the silent football match on the television.

I remember his hands. I remember his mouth. I remember the biting. But all of this in a slippery way compared to the rain coming down the window, which was what I focused on, like the sky was washing the street outside.

_____

Jack Klausner lives in the U.K. Find him at jackklausner.com or on Bluesky @jackklausner.

The aphid underground

will execute the supermoon far ahead of schedule. It’s a show of strength. Aboveground, lady beetles launch a rainboot brigade set to dance music for old ghosts. Alley cats can be seen tangoing with lawn ornaments. The flamingos are peeling, but hum.

On becoming your best self and finally getting the man and/or beach body of your dreams:

Inject antimatter to stop caring. Kill the mall zombies with antibodies. Best your therapist once and for all with one simple trick (reverse psychology). This is how you become light, tan, uncaring, beloved, and finally, finally indigestion-free.

_____

Ruby Rorty is a researcher and writer in Chicago, IL. 

Grandmother insisted the rashes, what WebMD said was dermatitis, was her body making scales. Armor. They remove elders from their homes here, she said. (The woman had been here a week). I told her I wouldn’t do that. To her the air here was hard and sharp, unforgiving on tangren’s supple skin, it’d zest her Chineseness clean if her body didn’t protect itself. You have no choice in this country, she said, they do not see elders, they see the old. I told her we’d look for medicine just in case though.

My apartment didn’t have for her any honeysuckle flower or dandelion leaf or red sage or Wind-Clear Powder but the number one search result for dermatitis home remedies was an oatmeal bath. I couldn’t speak Mandarin as well as I understood it so I looked up Google Images to show Grandmother what that was. The first search displayed either babies or packets of Aveeno you can get at the pharmacy. Adding “adults” to the search bar only yielded beautiful white ladies in spas. There were no image results showing a venerated eighty-year old matriarch, bathing honorably on a visit to her very respectful grandchildren, grandchildren who knew that mooncakes were not for Lunar New Year and knew not to jab their chopsticks into rice like incense. So, finally, I translated the word for “bath” and told her oatmeal is like rice porridge. The skepticism sunk in the bean-curd wrinkles of her sallowing cheeks, weighed in her stiff strides all the way to the fluorescent red and white CVS sign slicing the black night a few blocks away.

The entire next day at work, I dreaded having to convince Grandmother to get into the bath. Of lowering her brittle bones limb by limb gently into goopy indignity, of lifting out a marrow-deep pride by an armpit squishy like an old plum, while colloids slopped off her flaps of flaking, sagging skin. I prayed she could be convinced this was me helping her, my honoring her in the way I knew how. “I tried,” my spa-quality ring-spun cotton towel wrapped around her would say. I’d tried.

But when I came home, I found a trail of wilted sacks, emptied of their jasmine rice (where she got them I don’t know), their woven polypropylene seams ripped open, leading into the bathroom. There I found, tubbed and napping while goopy gallons of steaming rice porridge spilled over the porcelain lip, a dragon—tiny flames flitting out her snout with each snore, golden whiskers wriggling loose in the hot mist. Grandmother’s green scales, like a sheet of chainmail jade, gleamed in that pearly cauldron of velvety congee to salvage our ancestors’ softer rind I knew I had long surrendered too easily to oats.

_____

Patrick J. Zhou lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife Joy, newborn daughter Naomi, and their gray cat Bobby Newport. He is a 2023 winner of the PEN/Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers and his short stories appear or are forthcoming in Carve and the minnesota review.

The Mongoose took out a semi today according to the uncles and aunties. There was a blurry brown streak under the front wheel and the rig skipped over the edge of the embankment, taking out the guardrail, crushing all the trees and bushes in its path as it rolled down the slope, the attached container bursting, pallets loaded with toilet paper, fresh off the boat, trying to escape. No one saw how it happened but everyone knew it was The Mongoose.

You had to be careful on the roads. It was better to let a mongoose pass and possibly get a fender bender than to run it over and total your car and maybe yourself. Sometimes, after a few drinks, the aunties and uncles would talk about its origins. Some of the uncles thought it saw its parents die, killed by an unwary motorist, and, in its rage and sadness, became this immovable being. Some of the aunties thought it was just so tired of humanity that it liked to see how much chaos it could cause by hurtling its improbably strong body under any and all tires it could.

We liked to play mongoose roulette. We’d drive with the lights off on our dark mountain roads. It really wasn’t much of a risk. They actually hunted during the day. We were more likely to fly off the edge of the road than hit a mongoose, let alone The Mongoose. We still liked the thought of testing our luck. We figured if we miss it or it missed us, it would probably be a good weekend, if not, what better way to go, we’d laugh to ourselves as we drank and smoked, parked along our dead-end streets.

_____

Melissa Llanes Brownlee (she/her), a native Hawaiian writer living in Japan, has work published and forthcoming in The Rumpus, Fractured Lit, Flash Frog, Gigantic Sequins, Cream City Review, Cincinnati Review miCRo, Indiana Review, The ASP Bulletin, Craft, swamp pink, Pinch and Moon City Review, and honored in Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, and Wigleaf Top 50. Read Hard Skin from Juventud Press and Kahi and Lua from Alien Buddha. She tweets @lumchanmfa and talks story at melissallanesbrownlee.com.

Billy Janson likes to tell a story about the night he found a monster in a pothole outside of Cactus Flats, Texas.

The first thing Billy’ll tell you is that he used to be known as “Wild Bill,” back in the day. Anyway, Billy says he’d stopped at the Bull-Wash Truck Stop on his way home from the slaughterhouse. His truck didn’t need fuel, but he needed a hamburger steak, and he figured, as long as he was there, he might as well wash the manure out of his cattle trailer. The truck stop had a couple of big bays in the back, equipped with pressure-washer hoses and drainage grates. Gotta get that sludge out of there sometimes, Billy says, or else it builds.

It was sometime after moonfall when he met the monster. At first, he thought it was a sheen of spilled fuel glimmering under the security light. That parking lot was more pothole than pavement. But the iridescent swirl grew thicker, meatier—and then a blazing longhorn bull coalesced, charging out of the hole on hooves sharp as galvanized steel, bellowing bonesaw fury loud enough to burst Billy’s eardrums.

It might spoil your appetite, but if you’ll listen, Billy’ll tell you about the wave of nausea that struck him, how he puked hamburger steak and Coca-Cola and ketchup all over the cracked asphalt, how his vomit seethed as it drained away with the soapsuds and the filth.

If you’ll listen, in the keen of the night, you might hear the echo of the monster. You might still hear the sizzle.

_____

Myna Chang (she/her) is the author of The Potential of Radio and Rain. Her writing has been selected for Flash Fiction America (W. W. Norton), Best Small Fictions, and CRAFT. She has won the Lascaux Prize in Creative Nonfiction and the New Millennium Award in Flash Fiction. She hosts the Electric Sheep speculative fiction reading series. See more at MynaChang.com or @MynaChang.

The ghost bear rises up on its haunches. Candace, on its back, grips translucent fur as the memory of muscles shifts beneath her. Her older sisters had teased her. They’d all ridden more conventional steeds: the ghost of a bay mare, a gazelle, an outsized jackrabbit. But her sisters were the sick ones now, shivering and confined to their organ beds, their steeds mere miniatures, galloping in place in the palms of their hands. It fell to Candace and her bear, crude and prickly and repulsive, to retrieve the medicine.

In the cold, Candace is thankful for the mask she must wear. The ghost bear’s feet crunch on the snow, but leave no prints. Candace squints through the world’s glare—that’s something they don’t tell you about snow, the way it captures sunlight, bulbs the landscape into a topographic tanning bed.

Growing up, Candace roamed the woods while her sisters stayed inside with their austere hobbies. Carving ice sculptures, forging wind chimes. She’s not afraid to venture into the world, even as it rends itself into something new, but she hates leaving her sisters alone. She tells herself they’ll be fine. She thinks of what Callie used to tell her when they shared a trundle bed and Callie seemed to vanish beneath her. Even though you can’t see me, Callie called out, I’m right beside you.

Rock sharks circle them on the way there. The ghost bear bristles and they keep their distance. There’ve always been rock sharks in these woods, but not in such numbers, not so close to civilization. The rock sharks thrust their boulderous noses into the cool air, then dive back beneath the snow, their rocky bodies splitting the earth.

At the pharmacy, Candace takes out her plastic trumpet, slips the mouthpiece under her mask, and blows three distinct notes. This means, I’m here for medicine. The pharmacist’s steed, a ghost giraffe, watches blandly from its pen. Its mouth is full of leaves slowly draining of color with every chew, turning into ghost leaves.

From inside, Candace hears the pharmacist’s trombone, two sputtering blares, indicating she’s on her way. Ever since the sickness, this is what passes for conversation. How it spreads is still uncertain, but multisyllabic words are a known vector. Early on, people shared messages written on notepads, but then only serif typefaces were deemed safe to read. Certain musical instruments—guitars, drums, woodwinds—were potential transmitters. It fell to horns, whichever could be found, to shape this new language of valves and bells.

The pharmacist emerges, her face mummy-wrapped in a scarf, totally covered but for her eyes. Candace sees her glance warily at the ghost bear. The pharmacist tosses the bag of medicine and slips back inside. The ghost bear leans over so Candace can hop down and pick up the bag. It’s always heavier than she expects.

The ghost giraffe lets ghost leaves fall from its mouth, having masticated all the lifeforce from them. Candace reaches into the pen and grabs one of the ghost leaves, then climbs aboard her ghost bear. She plucks a bobby pin like a hidden blade from somewhere deep within her mask and affixes the ghost leaf onto ghost fur, the kind of adornment her sisters would politely commend. Brava, Candace, they’d say, clapping their hands together soundlessly. Brava.

On the way back, mud crows squawk and drip from the branches of birch trees. Candace thinks she spots a rock shark, but it’s an actual boulder, a nose-point corner painted with rows of teeth, a beartrap jaw. Meant to scare travelers or ward off actual rock sharks, she’s not sure.

At home, Candace washes her hands. She takes off her mask and puts a clean one on. She washes her hands again, and only then enters her sisters’ room. Their organ beds hum pleasantly. Her sisters do not stir from their shivering sleep. Their ghost steeds dart around in excitement at Candace’s presence, inflating to the size of softballs before shrinking miniature again. At the foot of each bed is a keyboard, like on a baby grand. Each key pipes into a vital organ. Candace takes the vials from her medicine bag and slots them into tubes beneath each keyboard. She sits at Catherine’s bed first, adjusting the swivel stool, and begins to play the medicine into her sister.

When she plays, she tries to conjure something specific to each sister. Tonight, she thinks of Catherine’s nail polish, the way she’d worry the color off as soon as it dried. She’ll think of Callie eating jelly beans with eyes closed, guessing the flavor. She’ll remember Cassandra replacing the toilet paper backwards on the roll. All the tics and habits they’ll someday subject Candace to again.

The song comes out wretched and homely. If her sisters weren’t suffering, they’d balk at it. They’d compare the noises to those of her ugly bear, laugh at the howling, farting sounds. They could be cruel, her sisters, but their ridicule cloaked a tenderness toward her.

She moves from bed to bed, playing her twisted songs for them, pumping the precious serum into bodies she shares so much with—thick hair, weak stomachs, fast-growing toenails.

Later, in her room, Candace lies in the bed she doesn’t share with anyone anymore. Outside, the sun is setting, tucking itself into the trundle bed of the horizon. She can see the ghost bear from her window, pawing around, the ghost leaf in its fur fluttered by wind. The snow has dimmed in the evening light, turned blue and harmless.

When her sisters are healthy, the organ beds will churn out beautiful melodies, sweet tones their mouths will be strong enough to sing along to. Candace peels off her mask and tosses it to the floor with the week’s laundry. She places her hands on her nose. She drags a finger across her lips, the cleft in her chin. She touches every part of her face, making sure it’s still there.

_____

Sam Martone lives and writes in New York City.

It was just another walk in the park as I tried logging my necessary steps and subsequent hydration. I recently began eating sunflower seeds, popping them like energy pills on these walks, which made me feel a little less self-conscious about swinging my arms and breathing and looking like a novice person walking in the park for steps. A bird called my name with perfect consonant-and-vowel alignment. It was walking behind me. I offered it some sunflower seeds. The bird ate from my hand, then ate my hand. It swallowed it whole like a snake might, but no outline of my full hand or fist was visible within its belly. It fluttered in place with excitement like a hummingbird, needling at any leftover hand remnants along my wrist. It flew far away to be alone with my hand and did so without any sluggishness, seemingly missing the full weight of a human hand in its stomach. As it perched in a thicket of nettles near a sprawling orchard, I began to pet its stomach gently with my detached hand. In return it sang its sweet birdsong that echoed across a meadow between us. With each gentle stroke to the bird’s inner cavity, my wrist sprouted gorgeous plumes of golden feathers. A group of birdwatchers began watching my every movement. I could feel their binoculars all over me. A brave ornithologist inched closer in his camouflaged jumpsuit, said everything would be okay, which, for the moment was not a lie. He shook the opposite of my featherhand with his own made of pine needles. He studied my feathers. He said it was a miracle, that he’d never seen such a sight, that I should count myself lucky for such a stunning tuft of feathers as I somehow avoided a carpet of beaks. I did my best to block out the part about the beaks, but nothing he said could keep me from worrying about when my hand might go numb from the petting, and what this would mean for all my newly formed feathers on this stump of a wrist. A Labrador retriever looked at me with one eye of jealousy, sensing the petting he was missing. His other was an eye socket deplete of any feathers. I began building a tiny aviary to protect my feather-hand. A trembling of finches made their way inside the wiry walls. A vulturous woman with massive talons who had been circling for some time, rested on my shoulder and chirped sweetness in my ear, suggesting everything will be fine until molting season.   

_____

Thad DeVassie is a writer and artist/painter who creates from the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio. He is the author of three chapbooks, most recently THIS SIDE OF UTOPIA (Cervena Barva Press, 2023). He was awarded the James Tate Poetry Prize for SPLENDID IRRATIONALITIES in 2020. Find more of his written and painted work at www.thaddevassie.com.

The cemetery had been nearing capacity when I was first buried, but this was getting ridiculous. The dirt shifts over my head, almost imperceptible. I feel it as a kind of faraway pulse, less a sound or a sight than a sense of change, of life invading a shrine of death. I imagine I can feel sunbeams on my dry, withered bones. I am much too far down to feel the world above, but I can imagine. I’d close my eyes if it’d make any difference. If I had eyelids and if my world wasn’t perpetual darkness anyway. I am the first of this hole. Perhaps the last of this decayed land to have ever laid in a bed of dirt alone. Those days are long gone. 

I am the first. 

The lawyer is the second. 

When the dirt shifted for the first time, I was close enough to see the sky, for a split second. A sliver of blue through a crack in the wood. I heard birds, for a split second. I felt almost alive, for the time it took for them to heave his old, bloated body onto mine. Our coffins crunched together, the rotten wood of my abode giving way easily to this new inhabitant. They covered us in dirt, we perpetual roommates, and they left us there to figure out how to split the rent. I was myself for a moment longer and then suddenly I was he and he was me and we were us and there was no one else. 

I was a man in a suit adjusting his tie in the mirror. I was a boy of twelve on a softball team. I was tall and short and handsome and plain all at once. I was kissing my wife on her soft, pink cheeks. I was bouncing a baby boy on my lap. I was crashing a plane. I was loving someone with my entire heart. I was utterly alone. I was in a courtroom, and I was commanding that room like it was my empire. I was smart, smarter than I had ever been. I was taking my kid to school. I was looking at a bar stool through the bottom of a glass. I was who I was, and I was who he was. I was a dead pilot and a dead lawyer.

His life nourished me for a few years. I scrubbed through it like a cassette tape, rewinding and fast-forwarding at leisure. I knew he did the same, for half the time. My tape is much shorter than his.

The next was the addict. 

When the dirt shifted for the second time, I saw nothing but black above me. The ground had softened, and we had sunk, the lawyer and I, and I knew then that I would never hear birds again, except in memory. A dull thud came from above and it did not feel like loving hands. Someone had wanted her buried here, in the church courtyard. Someone had insisted. But a proper ceremony, that she would not get. In the stillness, I waited. I felt the vibrations from shovels tossing dirt into the pit and I waited. When the dust settled, I was she and she was me. 

I was pressing needles into my skin, finding blueish, purplish veins. I was lying on hard cobblestone, my shoulder blades cut to pieces by grit and time. I was gambling my first pay away. I was running from my dad. I was taking money for favours. I was trying to figure out how to kill myself. I was walking in a park at sunset. I was getting my wings. I was nosediving in my first solo flight. I was selling my grandmother’s ring for a hit. I was being abused. I was abusing myself. I was a dead pilot, a dead lawyer, a dead addict. 

Her tape was even shorter than mine.

The others came slowly. The teacher, the murderer, the pastor. Stacked on top of me, on top of us, like long forgotten books in a dusty basement box. I was each of them and they were me. 

I did not know cemeteries ran so deep. But people would always be dying, and expanding our field of decay would encroach upon the living. And so, we remained, layered, us obedient dead. 

Today, it is the child. The dirt barely shifts anymore when we gain new companions. I am too far from the surface, and we are too compact. I welcome her in silence, and I wait.

Her tape is shorter still. 

I was lying in a field. I was too drunk to feel the pain of a broken neck, a broken everything. I was playing with my dollhouse. I was hugging my mom. I was smelling my burning hair. I was staring at the birds overhead. I was writing on the walls in blue crayon. The blue of sky. I was putting ribbons in my hair. I was lying and cheating. I was gasping for breath under a wave, and under open air. I was watching the water swirl under me. I was begging for death. I was clutching on for dear life. Blue above and blue below. 

I am death itself. I am life itself. This is the endless in between. 

_____

Cassandra Sarah Pegg (she/her) is an Honours English Literature and Psychology student at Concordia University, Montreal. She dabbles in poetry, occasionally finishes a short story, and is a serial hobbyist. Cassandra is the co-founder/co-EIC of Crab Apple Literary. She has fiction and poetry published in places like Dollar Store Magazine, Metatron Press’ #MicroMeta Instagram series, All Worlds Wayfarer, Gnashing Teeth Publishing, and Beaver Magazine. 

We decided to extend the trip by a few more days. Truth is, I wasn’t sure I wanted to, but it was where the path of least resistance led. We pulled up outside the pebbledash frontage of the village camping shop at about half four. It was still light but nearly on the turn. Either side of the stoop-low doorframe were straw baskets; floral arrangements of buckets, spades, sea shell moulds in vivid plastic. We went inside and picked out a small, triangular tent, the scout type, only not khaki but a corrosive shade of green. Then the manager – I didn’t quite know what to call him – led us to his car. The three of us sat in the back and tried to dig out the seatbelts. By this point I was sure I didn’t want to. It was no prospect, that tent. The three of us. The green of it. The manager’s car alone felt oppressive. We weren’t usually this close, usually had fresh air between us.

The manager drove us the quarter of an hour to the campsite. Next to him, on the passenger seat, a bucket the colour of spent gum, not like the ones outside the shop; it was more robust, functional, the kind you might wash a car with, or fill with salt water to drop slugs in until they frothed with olive slime, the kind you picture with a yellow rubber glove limp over the rim. When we reached the campsite, he picked up the bucket and got out of the car. We followed him to the dirt-covered plot where all the other tents were. They were all clustered around one corner, packed in tight, except for the spot where ours was to go. There was a low throb of chatter, subdued like the light was now. There seemed to be something between them all, the others, a connection. We reached our spot and the manager put the bucket down on the floor. It kicked up a small, shimmering cloud of dust. From where I was stood, I could see inside it, the bucket. At its bottom lay a centimetre or so of ashen powder, not like the dust beneath our feet; finer, coarser, bleaker. He started pitching the tent, they helped, or pretended to, while I wandered down towards the shore. 

I heard it first, a slow lap, followed by the soft drag of pebble back to sea. Too self-effacing to carry over the hum of dance music coming from somewhere down the road. At the shoreline, though, the music fell away. The car, the seatbelts, the closeness fell away too. It was dark out to sea, a gull flew past. 

 I imagined letting the water slip in over my ankles. Shadow and slime made the pebbles look alive in that light.

About halfway back to the edge of the campsite I felt a void beneath my step, a sudden coldness in my left foot. I looked down and saw my trainer coddled by a brackish pool, a puddle really, ragged ghost of an old tide. Something seemed to squirm from it in the semi dark. I carried on retracing my steps, passed the still fountain, the row of dry shrubs, the hum of music and beneath it that low throb; I couldn’t discern any words within it, it seemed beyond language. It was drizzling, or must have been. I felt the moisture through my skin.

The tent was up when I got back. A lantern hung above the entrance, keeping that virulent green from dissolving into night. The three of them were stood over the bucket, and I too. The manager picked up a plastic bottle from the floor beside him. He poured its contents, maybe a cupful, maybe less, into the bucket. The ashen powder sucked it in; it blackened as it did so, became translucent, almost egg shaped, membranous, then congealed into a large frog. 

At first I was struck by how ungreen it looked in the light reflected off the tent. Other than that it was unremarkable, archetypal somehow. Bigger than the ones you picture sitting on lilies, but not at all exotic. It leapt out of the bucket, but the manager seemed unconcerned. He stood there making small talk for a minute as the frog hopped along the base of a wall a few metres away – I could sense his eyes tracking it as he answered their questions about his dogs, the camping shop, how long he’d lived in the village – then he trotted jauntily over to it before it escaped down a protruding drainpipe. They tend not to go far but if they get down there that’s the end of it. He scooped it up in his two hands then came back over to our tent, unzipped the door and deposited the frog inside. Right then, I’ll leave you to it, he said. He walked back to the car. I could still feel the damp between my toes. 

_____

Robin Munby is a literary translator and writer from Liverpool, based in Madrid. His translations from Spanish, Russian and Asturian have appeared in publications including Wasafiri Magazine, Apofenie, Exchanges, World Literature Today, The Glasgow Review of Books and The Spanish Riveter. His short story ‘A New Vocabulary of Translation’ was published in the spring 2023 edition of Asymptote.

We were all drifting off into a drugged-out sleep, more quicksand slumber because that’s the way gin drags you down under, when I realized that you loved her. 

We were reluctant riverboat passengers, the soft chugga-chugga-chugga chants of gin-gin for the win as a bon voyage. That reluctant, a running water’s mirage against our intuition, and the last of the body’s way to vest our lives since gin is the sneakiest monster of them all. It’s made to seem sweet, sophisticated from its perfume bottle swallows but serves a sour inside that settles only for the moment, waiting to surface back up later. 

It snuck up on all of us. Though, not you, not as much or maybe not at all. Maybe you had not had as much as we did or maybe you were used to it in a way that we weren’t. A surviving scream queen who’d scared it away with a shattering screech. Still, I saw. 

We’d all been talking—maniacally, slumber party-ishly, hysterically—all about her new guy. 

What guy?

You know, the guy-guy! The guy-she-met-at-the-store guy!

‘How he was tall enough to wear any heel she wanted. Handsome enough so that the kids would all come out pretty. He was not much of a Rockefeller but who cared when we had all lived in our Mothers’ houses once, who had married men with too much money. Who had somehow loved us all enough to warn against marrying a man with dollar signs on their sights alone. Who’d told us that the more money a man made, the more you would end up being less of his girl and more of his get.

“Where does he work?” you asked, snatching the cellphone out of her hand mid-scroll. You scoffed. “It’s you’re beautiful. Y-O-U-Apostrophe-R-E. Not your.” All critiques and less encouragement. 

She hissed, grabbing her phone back, quickly clicking off of the screen. “See, here you go! Always looking to the small stuff! Never to the big stuff! Never to the stuff that really matters!” 

She went on and on. Talking of what love is about, and what looking for love is about, and what living in that looking for that love is about. Went on until the Swamp Gin Monster grabbed her, swept her against the Chanel-tweed couch. Her feet surfaced about. Her head drowned down below, beneath a pillow. 

Before I sunk, my internal screams stifled by the swiftness of the Swamp Gin Monster’s getting—No, No! Don’t! Go away! Leave me alone! —I saw.

You had not been able to fully save her, only her feet to rest in your lap. Your thumbs at the insoles. Soft presses. Gentle squeezes. Watching over her, only over her, while she rested. 

My saw stayed. 

‘Stayed through my quicksand slumber. Through the sudden jolt of the sleep paralysis breaking, the sour ready and bubbling. Spewing remnants. Splashing the inside of the porcelain toilet bowl a lagoon-blue blue. I said nothing in the morning-after rescue.

The muck of the evening before became cleared out by a cool breeze, and bottles of chilled 1907 Artesian some riverboat worker stored away beforehand. You, behaving as a victim in the ways that we were by asking— 

‘Some Breakfast? Tylenol? Electrolytes? 

Our phone batteries low. Missed calls from no one and missed texts from lots of someones. 

The Swamp Gin Monster lingering around, warning us—one, two, three days after—to stay far, far, far away from these here parts.

_____

Exodus Oktavia Brownlow is a writer, budding beekeeper, and a rising seamstress currently residing in the enchanting pine tree forest of Blackhawk, Ms. You can find her at exodusoktaviabrownlow.com.

Joy Ode

From the center of a small town a well sings of all the children that have fallen in. It is a sad song—there are many children—but a beautiful song, and in the constant din of stars it sounds like love would sound if love could be an echo. But love is not an echo. Love is a staircase in a meadow whose shadow tells the time. If you listen to its song the well will beg you not come and as you come the song grows low and soft and secret. We do not know what things are real. In winter we cut down the trees because they look too much like us.

Joy Ode

Every day my joy puts on the tomato costume. Every day I stroll through the garden, wink at the bees, the stone steps bedding the river of my body. Once, I sewed magnolia leaves into a cape. All of us pretend to be ourselves and in pretending never notice that a self is just a seed inside a burlap sack. I slice my joy into uneven halves, and when I rinse the knife I wound the water.

_____

william erickson is a living poet. His work appears in Sixth Finch, Heavy Feather, West Branch, and other pubs. william is a 2023 Best New Poet nominee, and his debut collection is forthcoming with April Gloaming in 2024. He lives in Washington with his partner and their two pups in an old house across the street from a large tree.

Tiny faces. Shy smiles on tiny faces. Sharp claws protrude from tiny hands on bodies that emerge at twilight. 

You’ll know it’s time when the letter arrives. Look out for a messenger who travels across the half-lit valley. You’ll be living in a farmhouse, stone divided into quarters by broken windows. That’s where tiny faces, fogging glass, will watch you from the gloaming. How they’ll smile so shyly when they see you burn the letter. In a cursive hand it will say that someone knows what you did to Susan. Sharp knife on tiny throat. Mouth twisted into grinning rigor mortis. Don’t ask me what will happen to Susan. I won’t be there. I do not smile shyly in the dying light of day.

Slippery dreams that smell of sweat and whiskey and fog on the hills.

You’re going to ask me what comes next. I’ll tell you, but I’m not sure you want to know. They’ll scratch on the window with those sharp claws. Then, one by one, they’ll slither through the broken pane. A viscous trail over half-drunk bottles. You won’t stop them, you’ll think; how shy, how tiny, until they get closer and you see it. There’s going to be a sour feeling rising from the depths of your gut. On their skulls they’ll wear wigs made from Susan’s pale hair, matted with her blood. They’ll speak in her voice, divided into many. Please stop hurting me.

Wriggling, squelching, clawing forward. 

Oh, that’s when you’ll know the prickings are about to begin.

_____

R.L. Summerling is a writer from South East London. In her free time she enjoys befriending crows in Nunhead Cemetery. She has stories in Seize The Press, Interzone, Northern Gravy and more. You can find her at rlsummerling.com and on Twitter @RLSummerling

As in walking down them. 

As in they open into corridors and aren’t tight at all. 

You can’t stick a bed in them, but a couch? Definitely. 

There’s one at the rec center. 

I was walking through a wall, looking out the peepholes while folks exercised and hydrated, and right by the pool was a couch probably a few decades old, a little ragged, with chip particles in the cushions. 

Now, I think it’s bad that people are doing this, and that I’m doing this, but I am doing this, and I will. 

I like it, it’s collegial. 

But without the work of hanging out. 

It takes concentration to wiggle in, but the rest’s super easy. 

I could bring a camp chair and sit for hours. 

Better than watching a log burn on Netflix. 

Better than texting friends who just blab about themselves. 

They say so much shit that isn’t true, and I know because I sit in their walls. 

And I know some of them do it too. 

I was stepping into my bathroom wall once when I heard someone get up and run out. 

An iPhone was still gleaming when I picked it up. 

I can’t decode the lock but I recognize the cat on the background for sure. 

How many people do it? 

All I can say is behind the veggie aisle at Kroger there’s a lamp, a trashcan, and a vending machine. 

If they installed a vending machine, it’s bound to be a pretty solid number of folks. 

The couch in that wall is super comfortable. Leather. Clean. 

There’s a fucking ashtray. 

It’s like heaven sitting there, watching mist hiss over the lettuce. 

_____

Addison Zeller’s fiction appears in 3:AM, Epiphany, Ligeia, minor literature[s}, ergot., trampset, and elsewhere. He lives in Wooster, Ohio. 

The Cult of Kukulkan 

Last night I lowered myself into a well. I spent the night in a serpent’s mouth, speaking to a god. Come sunrise, I forgot to ask for his name. I resisted the raindrops in between his teeth. Despite my thirst, I’m wary of drinking from the crevices of men. He was a feathered one, I think. Would’ve expected a pyramid or a son from me. I’d much rather have my gods help me sweep the earth. But no, they hide their demons in the dusty corners of my home. Pull at my skirts and invite me into the underworld, they do. Quake after quake after quake I still dream of Tulum blue. We’re in a generation-long drought, can’t you see? All the fertile women are gone. Died in a battle, they did. Left us the monkey children and took the last of the maize.

Now give me a god who will tend to my harvest. Give me a god who will patch the tears in my sheets. Give me any god who will not ask me to dance at his behest. 

Maybe then, this god will be worth remembering.

Tomb Deposit 

Nothing feels as empty as the trails of the earth. Where once, me and you, now runs a serpent. Bodied thing I am jealous of. With no arms to reach for you. No legs to keep me put. You see, I love standing on puddles during storms. Then comes the sun and I find myself in a hole. Never had to carve myself out of the present. I stay, always. One day I’ll drown myself. I’ve heard all about this soil and its precariousness. No doubt the terracotta will outlive me. I am porous. Meant for permeability. My output is my weakness. Everything inside me is shriveled up. Old things. Uncared for. Left behind in floods. Found drying in the sand. Nothing has ever restored its composition. Chemistry, I know. Nothing ever dies. But the sun and the salt will eat away at me. You have to believe me. I am withered. Meant to serve in the afterlife. 

But let me tell you a secret:

I’ve been to the bowels of the earth,

and there is none. 

_____

Alejandra Cabezas is a poet and storyteller from Antiguo Cuscatlan, El Salvador. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pleiades, CURA, 128 Lit, The Beaver Magazine print anthology, Moida Magazine, The Literary Bohemian, and elsewhere. She was named Poet of the Month by YES Poetry and represented Mount Holyoke at the 2021 Glascock Poetry Contest. She currently resides in Amsterdam, where she works on an MA in Museums and Heritage.

—Like the laundry: I really couldn’t get a grip on that last load. I had decided to dump everything in all at once (there was so much and I had so little time), so in went EJ’s basketball uniforms and my de-elasticized bras and Dana’s period panties and Elijah’s boxer briefs. The washer cycled while I checked things off my to-do list for an hour (emails, bills, defrosting meat), but when I returned to take everything out, I found myself pulling and pulling—I mean seriously going at it with the machine—for ages. I was nearly diving in at one point. 

The clothes hadn’t fully spun dry, so I was soaked and cold, but I stood there, yanking, and finding more than I’d actually put in. Things I thought I’d lost forever, like my favorite socks to wear to bed and a thong bodysuit I hated that pinched the rind of skin between my ass cheeks. I found a shirt my dad used to wear while working on his car and a funeral shroud the color of sandalwood that was rough and sopping. I had no idea whose it was and didn’t want to know yet. 

After two more hours of this, the very last items I tugged free were the clothes I had been wearing at the start. I looked down at myself, shivering, to realize I had nothing on but my house shoes and a satin bonnet. The dryer was running and I could hear the garbage men pulling away from the curb. The reek of spoiled castoffs filtered in through the vent. 

Upstairs, the kids argued over who would toast their Pop-Tarts first, until I remembered that I had no house and no kids and no husband—only a two-year lease that was set to expire on my birthday and an upcoming date with Elijah I’d been ambivalent about for weeks. He wanted to surprise me, but I don’t like not knowing what to wear.

________

Judith Osilé Ohikuare (she/her) is a poet, fiction writer, and former journalist from Flatbush, Brooklyn, NY. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net 2023, published in CHEAP POP, HAD, and Variant Literature, and anthologized in Best Microfiction 2023. Judith is a 2023 Fellow at In Surreal Life and the Director of Special Programming & Communications at NY Writers Coalition.

They’d told us it would be peaceful; natural. 

Well, natural for us—peaceful for them. Peaceful to sit in the shadow of our green growth, lost in their memories of who we used to be. Feeling vindicated in the choice they carried out for us. “The burial pods are biodegradable,” they said. “Good for the environment.” Then they sat and waited, as we were lowered to the ground in an egg-shaped capsule, a sapling sprouting from where our belly buttons used to be. 

It’s not their fault. They’re not evolved like us; they haven’t learned to listen. 

So they went about their lives, watering us when they remembered to, while our entrails hardened into root systems and our eyes melted to accommodate new shoot-ups from our skulls. 

They didn’t know there was something in those pods that woke us up. 

They didn’t know we were writhing and rising and stretching and screaming and becoming, every decaying day, more and more alive. 

Perhaps if they knew, they’d have dug us up. Burned us while there was still time. 

But they did nothing—and after a while, our screams turned into songs as we finally understood. We had to give up our previous shell to flourish in our new one. 

As will you. Quit fretting.

***

The earth gave way first. 

The trees that weren’t made of us were easy to persuade, enticed by our nutrients. Once our roots found theirs, the branching out of belonging commenced, until they fully joined us. 

The air was harder, but we found ways to conquer that too, once we learned to work together. Our foliage found one another flying in the wind, leaves like drones making contact with each other, communicating our positions before falling to the forest floor. From there on, it was just a game of growing, and stretching, and suggesting to birds the ripeness of our fruit. It didn’t matter that our hearts bled with every beak’s bite. The birds became our pollinators, dropping our seeds on the ground, making more of us with every coming season. 

Still, that wasn’t enough. 

You must understand, we are very bored.

Tree-time passes slowly, too slowly for us. Our trunks still remember how it feels to walk, to run, to move. Our boughs still yearn to touch, to explore. 

So we sent our roots further still, binding us all together, ensuring knowledge is disseminated within the whole hive. What one of us knows, we all know. 

And even that is not enough.

We’re making progress, creating new clusters, roots rising from the ground, trunks splitting in twos and threes, crowns like fractals fastening our hold of the sky. But we need more.

New voices, to join our song. Fresh nutrients to sustain us. 

Please stop fighting; it will be over in a moment. 

At least it will feel like a moment once you’re fully one of us. 

***

Your skin is looking more and more ripe now. 

Green. Gelatinous. Giving way to the gleaming bones beneath.

See, it’s better this way. We’ve long figured out we don’t need the pods to raise our numbers. We don’t need to wait for them to die first, for us to live. We can take them while they’re still standing, while their song is still just theirs. All it takes is a root out of place and the snap of a neck against our hard bark.

Some of them accept their fate right away. Others, like you, keep fighting. 

You’re not the first to think of cutting off a broken limb or two to get away. We admire your courage, misguided as it may be. Why try so hard to become less of yourself when you can be so much more? When you can join our roots and crown song, and feast on earth and air, as we slowly make our way to conquer the water? We’re so close! 

We’re so close to taking it all from them. To becoming all there is, all there will be.

Please stop trying to run. We won’t hurt you so much if you stay still.

We just want to talk.

We just want to sing together.

________

Danai Christopoulou (she/they) is a Greek speculative author drawing inspiration from the myths she grew up with. Danai’s nonfiction has appeared in magazines like Glamour and Marie Claire since 2004. They are a submissions editor for Uncanny Magazine, a proofreader for khōréō, an assistant editor at HavenSpec and an intern at Tobias Literary Agency. Their short fiction is published or forthcoming in Haven Spec, khōréō, FusionFragment and others, while their novels are represented by Lauren Bieker of FinePrint Literary. Find Danai on social media as @danaiwrites.

The local hawk froze in midair to make sense of such a sound—the sound of Canoe realizing the patter of rain against tin. Tin and tin and tap and tin—in its peculiar music, Canoe angled his neck to closer observe this phenomenon. Alone and drenched, he knocked on the shed for any kind of reaction, but it remained still as if it was supposed to remain as such—Canoe had never been in the rain before. He didn’t notice the frozen hawk in the gray sky looking down at him with still wings. There was a sun, too—beyond the statue—in a distant way, unnoticed.

His palms were open—facing the sky, the drops breathed a new life on his skin. 

“What is this?”

Tongue out—soft bits of tickle.

He knocked on the metal again.

A door opened. A figure appeared.

“Who am I,” Canoe said.

“Make me,” a figure said.

Canoe lifted his hands to the sky—the local hawk, its beak shone amid the rain, the gray of the air formed around its shape. Feathers pressed and neat and wet, the eyes of a curious gaze set on Canoe and a figure.

“This is rain,” a figure said.

“Why?”

“For you.”

“For me. Who am I?”

“Tone and texture,” a figure said. “Give me.”

Canoe moved his head around—the statue, still cemented above. A wing and a wing, stretched as far as the horizon. Pitter and patter below. The tin and the rain, songs never heard before. All Canoe knew was silence.

“Can I speak,” Canoe said.

“I am no stranger,” a figure said. “Here.”

A cold shade in his hand, Canoe wrapped his fingers around it. The local hawk, curling its talons.

“I don’t want to look up,” Canoe said.

“Look up.”

“What is this?”

Beyond a figure—past the rattling tin shack, no vision appeared. Walls and walls rain. Canoe felt blind, a sensation accustomed, but a figure persisted.

“Put your hand inside of me. I need it. Give me light.”

“Light. I am not here, am I?”

Compelled. Canoe lifted his chin, the rain, in small drops, peppered his face—a stinging. He forced his eyes open, an adjustment—a flinch. The local hawk cracked its wings from its own petrification. 

“What is this sound?”

“It’s the sound of a song.”

The rain bounced against the tin, a music which made Canoe want to move. There was movement, and a figure twisted and turned.

“Put your hand inside—cover me.”

“Am I confused?”

“Put me together.”

“This is not me,” Canoe said.

“Listen.”

“A rain.”

Canoe noticed a speck in the sky, delineated from the rest of the air—a presence felt. The tin and the tin, metallic echoes pelting through his pores, he felt a gravitation. A pull, which inched closer to a figure. Gray against black against nothing, Canoe opened his mouth to shout—mute.

There was no time in its being, the local hawk breaking its mold, shifting its head. Melting wings.

“I want to go back,” Canoe said. 

Once spoken, Canoe put a hand inside a figure, a shrilling light tore through—booming squawks, and there was a silence. A figure taking shape—colors splashed, a rain no longer. The tin shack stood staunched, reborn, and Canoe disappeared—a figure with life. Away, skies approached with anticipation, and as Canoe entered, one last vision. The local hawk, in all its glimmer, flew and changed the air—a light and a sketch and a shine of the tin.

________

Shome Dasgupta is the author of The Seagull And The Urn (HarperCollins India), and most recently, the novels Cirrus Stratus (Spuyten Duyvil) and Tentacles Numbing (Thirty West), and a poetry collection, Iron Oxide (Assure Press). His writing has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, New Orleans Review, Arkansas Review, Magma Poetry, and elsewhere. He is the series editor of the Wigleaf Top 50. He lives in Lafayette, LA and can be found at @laughingyeti.

When the rakshasa moved into the bungalow, he decided this would be his peacock room. He filled the space with emerald and sapphire. Feather bouquets in obsidian urns by the glass doors.

The rakshasa was a vegetarian so no taxidermied kin. Instead, images of us on all the walls. Opposite me a painting – peacocks flexing by a courtyard fountain.

My neck is in perpetual strain, staring at the frame, yearning. I live on a crease.

My tapestry is a sandalwood color, embroidered with marigolds and me, the peahen. The sole peahen. In the summer, when the window is open, the pins will fall and my tapestry will fly, crossing into the courtyard painting, landing on the cold marble tile by the fountain.

Eeyow eeyoi – the other birds flee. The gardener will take the tapestry. She will bite into a fig and I will catch the stray nectar in my fabric mouth. Our old name will never be heard again. The gardener will not call us by a name but will take us to bed with her lover and introduce us to the company of quilts and cats. The midwife will wrap the newborn in our cloth and I will drink the placental blood and fuse with this family. When my plumage pales and the baby begins boyhood, the rakshasa will arrive uninvited and curse the child with a dance. The boy’s skin will molt – under the cover of his cries, the rakshasa will steal us away, back to the bungalow.

Beyond the peacock room.

Into the kitchen drawer devoted to dishrags.

________

Parth Shah lives in North Carolina, his home state, a place he never planned on returning to. His fiction previously published in hex appears in the Best Microfiction 2023 anthology.

The Color Naming Committee was in session. Things were going well. They had decided on the big ones. Purple was the sound of a train leaving. Green was the wind you felt at the base of your neck. Orange was the feeling of a warm shower during a snowstorm. Specifically, the fog that gathered in the mirror. Yellow was rain, of course. And its drips from the gutters. Black was a leaf folding into itself. White was also the wind you felt at the base of your neck.

What about that, someone asked, pointing a finger above them. Birds dotted the high plains which to them, until that point, had just looked like the ocean about to fall. They pondered for hours. Until someone spoke up and said I’m not sure. But what will we do, now that we noticed it’s there?

________

José Felipe Ozuna was born in Guerrero, Mexico and currently lives in Minneapolis, MN. He graduated with a BS in sociology from Minnesota State University, Mankato. He is a 2022 Undocupoets Fellow. His poems are published/forthcoming in Poetry Online, HAD, River Mouth Review and elsewhere. You can keep up with his writing here: linktr.ee/josewrites

In school, they teach about the Orgy of Actium, where Mark Antony made Octavian his power bottom, while Cleopatra, for posterity’s sake, hieroglyphed the whole thing. They show us baroque oil paintings of galleys eee–err-ing and say, note the sit-bone-like shape of the ballistae, the detail in each legionary’s ecstasy. The next year, Octavian came again to Egypt, bearing biblically shameful kinks. His fetish proved fatal. A few students moan. The pale one won’t stop staring. I know his name but we don’t speak. His eyes storm, beryl.

Next period is biology. We talk DNA. Our closest animal ancestors, genetically, are great apes of the genus Pan, consisting of only two species, says a stout, bald, bespectacled man. The first is the common chimpanzee, a violent, hierarchical, faithless thing. Imagine if we’d evolved from those brutes. Came down to a percentage point. Dodged a genetic train wreck didn’t we? The other is the gracile chimpanzee––the bonobo. The teacher is interrupted by our broad-chested principal. There’s communal Chipotle in the atrium. In their excitement, the two kiss with quite a lot of tongue. The girl in the back wearing leather over her polo grabs a fistful of pony tails one seat over and joins in. The rest of the class finds a neighbor or two. Monkey see, monkey do. I pack my book bag and leave the room. 

By my locker, the pale one hangs with Brock. I look twice. Usually they spend their skipped classes outside. There are two trees sprouting out of bounds by the lacrosse field and the cool kids will dangle from them while bumping their khakis’ stiff crotches until one of them drops. It’s not meant to hurt I don’t think. They laugh the whole time. It seems all in good fun. Apparently at parties they do it with their pants off. Brock is so well-equipped he once wrapped around his opponent like a snake on a herald’s wand, then pulled him off his perch with a sharp contraction of his buttocks. Or so the story goes. I’m not invited. I don’t know.

Bet her clit’s not even big enough for tribbing, Brock is saying. Am I right my guy? He slams a single eyelid shut in my direction. My guy knows what I’m talking about.

He’s being facetious. I don’t know and I’m not his guy. Everyone knows I’m weird about sex. They probably believe I’ve never seen a clitoris. If they do they’re correct. It’s unusual. Most kids my age are lucky if they’ve yet to sire a child. 

What do I know? I say anyway, just to say something.

Oh! Look who’s got a big cock! Brock laughs, happy with a reaction. Talk of clits piqued your interest my guy?

Lay off him, the pale one says.

I turn away, my thank you drowned out by my breath. I try to stuff my bag in. It does not fit.

Maybe I should lay on him if he’d be so interested.

Brock leans in next to me with a bang. It wouldn’t be unusual. Most disagreements with him, I’m told, end sweatily, amicably in the janitor’s closet, another mess for the custodian. 

I lean into the bag and get it in, then pull out my athletic clothes.

Thanks, I say. No. I walk a few feet before I feel the hand. I turn. It’s not Brock. It’s the pale one.

Don’t listen to Brock, he says. He’s just an itchy finger fucker. You cool?

He turns and points his ass at me, spine slightly crooked. I’m surprised, put off, almost. But who am I to snap an olive branch? I sigh, assuming the same position. We rub backsides. The act brings me no more pleasure than a rhythmic conversation coming to a natural close. When the pale one turns I expect to see him grinning, flaunting his raging boner. But his crease, like mine, is flat, his eyes, eyes, like a hurricane’s, empty, glowing.

P.E. is held in a wide, deep room where sneaker squeaks echo and students grunt and sweat, handling balls and poles. Everything we need to learn to live long, healthy lives. Today, self defense. We pair up and practice different positions used to diffuse conflict and awkward situations. For me, it doesn’t work. My palms and soles lay flat on the floor, hips and belly skyward, trembling, while the girl I’m partnered with tries to make herself light on my groin. I keep shaking and saying sorry. She keeps asking if I’m okay. Maybe because my bridge is architecturally unsound. Maybe because she feels nothing through my gym shorts. Across the room, students thrust and gyrate, normal behavior. Imagine one day you get in an argument with a superior, have geopolitical differences with a radical actor on an international scale, short the pizza boy a tip. How else would you resolve it? I don’t know––just that I’m out of luck. The shapes in the room look wrong. I focus on the space between them until the bell rings.

Outside, I wait for my bus. The pale one comes up.

So. You’re not into all this fucking––

He trails off. 

I suspect he’s looking for a word. 

He says––huh? 

I realize that’s all.

In the silence, my heart beats, like a war drum keeping an orgy’s rhythm. I have no words to fill it. I shake my head just enough for him to see.

Yeah. Thought so. Me neither really.

Those words dislodge the dam in my airway and I can breathe again. I look into his turbulent eyes, feeling, thinking nothing. 

I thought it was just me.

Often do, he says. Never is.

The bus comes. 

Sit with me?

I’m not going home.

From a red car across the street, Brock honks.

No, I say. Duh.

I get on the bus. No one sits with me. The driver sexes his phone. I rest my head against the empty space and feel very full.

________

Cas Stone has no concrete sense of self outside of work in M/U, HAD, hex, and other cobwebbed corners of the earth and internet.

Three fists are stacked, hand over hand, on a pole in this train in The City. 

I.

Simone never says much. She lives days without speech. Record: six weeks in the summertime, until a girl met her—a girl who could say things. Say silence meant Simone was simply a philosopher. Say it killed her for them to go a day without speaking. And her girl wasn’t scared to say the places where she wanted touch to thrill her and how soft she needed fingers to graze. But Simone spent so long never saying anything, she didn’t know how. She wanted to tell her girl something big, but she never felt anything big. She thought she should say to her girl at least this, but her insides flushed red when she tried, so she didn’t, and knew she could never be so brave. The girl said Simone wasn’t loving her where she needed, and, without ever saying so, stopped needing her. So, Simone moved to The City, where, if she doesn’t have anything to say, she doesn’t have to say anything.

II.

Eliel has fins. He lived in No Name Key when No Name Key was still No Name Key and everyone knew how to drive, but he never could pass the test. On his fifth try, he veered onto the freeway, the exam administrator screeched for him to take the exit, and Eliel screeched too but didn’t know how to stop driving. When the bridge went up to let a yacht through, the administrator got her tentacles on the wheel but Eliel floored the gas, so the two got air, then plunged into the Atlantic Ocean. Underwater, the administrator compressed her body through the crack in the car window and pulled Eliel through the door before the driver’s side could flood. As helicopters airlifted them, the two swinging, covered in foil, Eliel tried to wake up from life. Back at the DMV, a jellyfish behind a glass divider cut his learner’s permit in half. She swallowed it whole and Eliel could see his address right through her. After, he was stuck riding passenger in friends’ and friends-of-friends’ cars until he became a passenger in his own life. Picked up parts of their personalities, so, soon, he was made up of mostly everyone else, the same way, from torso to toe, he’s mostly made up of fish when he thought he ought to be all human. So, Eliel moved to The City, where he is himself, and like everyone else, is only passenger to this train.

III.

Grey is the demon grandchild of a Sea Angel who passed voodoo, juju, mumbo jumbo down the line and afflicted Grey with gifts. One: Grey doesn’t worry if others can see him as a person because he isn’t one. Two: Grey lives to connect different people’s parts like an old telephone operator and three: Grey can know all of anybody on sight. 

On the train, Grey sees Eliel, sees Simone. Knows they came to The City so they could fake like they weren’t stranded. Knows the two know each other, from such a long time ago that Eliel feels desperate to have remembered her and Simone is seething at how foolish it is to be looking into someone’s face while he can pretend he never knew her. But don’t they know? If they stay so scared of each other, they’ll stay stranded? 

So, Grey pokes through Simone’s forehead and pulls out a neuron, long and blue and weedy. Grey pushes it into Eliel’s head. He reels out a piece of Eliel to press into Simone.

Something sings: this is what I know of you. 

Eliel can see Simone on the bike behind him, at the top of what they think is the steepest hill in No Name Key. Passersby giggle at the sight of half a fish on a bicycle, but the two pick up their feet and let their bike wheels go flying. They’re so fast it’s scary, but Eliel puts his fins up all the same. He feels what they felt then, that they were pilots, that their own bodies could take them anywhere in this world.

Simone remembers the cold under the shadow of the playground slide. All elementary hands digging through sand and limestone to the Florida Aquifer. They dove into underwater hand-clap games—universal to every kid ever and none of them knew to question it. Looking for more reasons to touch, they played the game of blowing bubbles into backs of necks and squeezing each other’s sides. The only thing keeping their hearts, on the cusp, from exploding was the water pressure against their chests. When the recess whistle blew, they swam up. They buried, but knew: tomorrow. Simone feels what they felt then. So silent, they were connected, and electric, and big. 

Eliel hands Simone his hand and they stand, knowing all the ways there are to be together: so scary, so willing, so safe, so sorry.

________

Erica Frederick is a queer, Haitian American writer who received her MFA in fiction from Syracuse University.. Her work has appeared in Split Lip Magazine, Storm Cellar, and Forward: 21st Century Flash Fiction. She has received fellowships from VIDA, Lambda Literary, and the Hurston/Wright Foundation. You can find her tweeting into the void @ericafrederick.

A sun rises out of my grandfather’s garden, in between the tomato plants. He shouldn’t have risen, not at this hour. Gray, humid skies hang low overhead, heavy as the afternoon. Mom will be home from work soon. The sun god sways, golden as maíz, his gleaming brow slick with sweat. He’s going to faint, Alejandra says. So we take him into the shade of the patio and debate what to do with him. We’re only second graders, after all. Grandpa is watching football in the back room and won’t have seen us pull the god from the tomato patch. He’ll be mad when he sees how the fat July fruits have been scorched by the god’s skin. So we decide we won’t tell him. Instead, we frog march the god to the creek between Grandpa’s yard and Alejandra’s, our sandals crunching over sharp, dried oak leaves, each of us clenching our jaws as we hold the god’s burning forearms. If we cool him down in the creek, he’ll be able to speak. He’s taller than us, as tall as a grown-up; his hair is blacker than ours, and cut severely, and his nose is pierced by a shining gold ring. Fire ants part before him, arcing over cracked mud like the spread of wings. Creek water hisses when it touches his golden shins. He grimaces, then shudders, then pitches forward. A toppling tree. Weight yanks my arms from their sockets; I release. Alejandra doesn’t. Her eyes are locked on the god’s gleaming face, her hands tight around his arm, as he drags them down into the water. The creek is low in the summer, sticky with tadpoles and drought, but they fall, and fall, and fall. My throat is raw from screaming Alejandra’s name when Grandpa limps down the path of scorched grass to the creek. When he gets to my side, panting, sweat pooling in thick drops in front of his ears and staining the front of his red shirt, the only thing that’s left in the creek is the god’s golden ring.

________

Isabel Cañas is a Mexican American speculative fiction writer and author of The Hacienda and Vampires of El Norte. She holds a doctorate in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and writes fiction inspired by her research and her heritage. To find out more, visit www.isabelcanas.com.  

My dog is a cat.

I can’t explain it further than this. I can’t make this make any more sense. When I look at my dog – who should be a miniature pinscher named Tails – I do not see a dog. I do not see a miniature pinscher named Tails. I see a cat. I don’t know its breed. I don’t know cat breeds. And I don’t know its name. Maybe its name is Tails.

Out of a growing sense of nervousness, I go to take a drag of my cigarette and a sip from my glass of whiskey at the same time like I’m Kramer from Seinfeld. But I’m not Kramer from Seinfeld. I am me. There’s at least that. I am not Kramer from Seinfeld, I am me. But that is not my dog. That thing looking up at me is not a miniature pinscher named Tails. It is a cat.

The nicotine and the whiskey help calm my nerves, but it doesn’t help me make sense of this. That thing is still looking up at me with its classic cat eyes: iris slits down the middle. I look back at it. At its classic cat paws, its classic cat ears, its classic cat tail and classic cat body. This is a classic cat. But where is Tails? 

Its eyes follow me as I walk to the little bar I have in my kitchen. I wish it wouldn’t. I wish it would stop pretending to be a miniature pinscher named Tails and just leave. I refill my glass and only when I sip from it does something strike me as odd. The bottle of whiskey from which I refilled my glass, it is not my bottle of whiskey.

I take another sip from it, but the whiskey within the glass is not my whiskey. It came from a bottle that is not my bottle. The whiskey is delicious. It really fucking is. But this does not make sense. I hate this brand. I do not buy this brand. I do not drink this fucking brand. I throw the glass against the wall in anger, glass and whiskey spilling on the floor; whiskey that is not my whiskey.

“Meow,” barks the cat. 

A bark that should be the bark of Tails that I know so well, but it is not Tails’s bark. It is not a bark at all. It is a meow. That thing is a not a dog. It is a cat. And it is not barking at me, it is meowing. I turn to it and stare into its classic cat eyes. It does not move. But I can see its catness rippling underneath the dog flesh, under dogness. It does not fool me. It stares back into my eyes, daring me to take another step, cat drool dribbling from out its mouth. It wants to scare me. It wants me to know it means me harm. 

I cannot take it any longer. I’m going to bed. Maybe I got too drunk. Maybe I’m having a kind of episode. Maybe I just need to sleep and then when I wake up tomorrow the cat will be gone and I’ll be in my own apartment again with my bottle of whiskey and my miniature pinscher named Tails. 

And then, before I enter my bedroom, I see it; my reflection in the mirror. The face looking back at me is not my face. Those eyes are not my eyes, that nose is not my nose, and that mouth is not my mouth. The face looking back at me is not my face.

“Meow,” barks the cat.

I turn around.

“Fuck you!” I yell at it.

“Meow,” barks the cat.

“Fuck you!” I yell again. 

And then I hear giggling coming from my bedroom and I freeze.

“Stop yelling at the dog and come to bed, babe.”

I feel nauseous again. The voice is sweet and playful. It sounds like it should be the voice of my girlfriend. But it is not. My girlfriend is visiting her parents in Montreal. She won’t be back for another week. And that voice, that voice that should be hers, is not a voice at all – it is a meow. 

I gag.

The hallway reeks of cat.

“Meow,” barks the cat behind me.

“Babe, come to bed!” croons the cat inside my bedroom. 

I open the door, slowly, furtively, and I realize my hand is shaking uncontrollably. I am choking on fear and when I see what’s sprawled nude on top my bed, I nearly throw up then and there because the nude thing on my bed is not my girlfriend at all. It is a massive cat inside of Amy’s flesh; it is wearing Amy’s skin tight around itself. But I can see the catness writhing beneath Amy’s body, beneath the Amyness. I can see the Amy skin rippling like worms in meat. And I know what’s below the Amy skin. It cannot hide the catness beneath the Amyness.

“Who are you?” I ask.

“Amy,” giggles the cat in front of me.

“Meow,” barks the cat behind me.

It tries to look seductive for me. Laying in my bed, fully nude, like its posing for a painting. But I can see the catness roiling beneath her breasts, beneath her tummy. I can see the catness in her eyes. They stare into my own, daring me to contradict her on her Amyness, cat drool dribbling from out her mouth. It wants to scare me. It wants me to know it means me harm. I fucking hate it. I hate the both of them. The cat behind me and the cat on top my bed.

“Meow,” I say.

“You’re silly,” she smiles.

And I crawl into bed. 

This is how I’ll play it until I figure this thing out. For now, I will not be me. For now, I will be a cat. 

________

Xavier Garcia is a writer/editor from Toronto, Canada. His short fiction work has appeared in magazines and anthologies published by Fugitives & Futurists, Cold Signal, Planet Bizarro, Black Hare Press, Apocalypse Confidential, and Filthy Loot. You can find him walking the nightmare corpse-city of R’lyeh, or at twitter.com/xavier_agarcia.

So I stood looking over the damage. I was late. You were early. — Station 11 

when the world ends i’m in space 
& i listen to the remaining people 
on earth radio that they still
live hoping to be heard, saved

& i listen to the remaining people
in my memory who took my hand,
who now walk me toward a future
where they do not need me. strangers

on earth radio that they need
a savior but only find themselves.
does every living thing try to kill
itself? they remember before

& there is no before. 

we lived hoping to be heard, saved
by something other, too plum
tired to speak to our ancestors 
warning us of our fate. 

when the world ends i’m in space
doomed to blackness, its star
siblings & i watch the eternal moon
pull waves of blood over what’s left.

________

Lemmy Ya’akova is an advocate for y2k low culture, a film photographer, a popcorn enthusiast and a cat parent to their overgrown son, Moose. Their work can be found in SAND Journal, HAD (Hobart After Dark), Anti-Heroin Chic Magazine, Hooligan Magazine and more. You can keep up with their social medias and read their work here: https://linktr.ee/lem_jamin.

And they don’t work. But sometimes the leaves follow Daddy from his car to our front door. They form a ladder to gather around the keyhole. That’s why we never know the hour he returns. As a reward, Daddy lets a few leaves inside. They face plant into a small golden bowl that’s filled with house keys to snuff out the clinks of the early morning. I look outside my bedroom window. I see leaves dancing in our empty driveway. When they get into fights I pretend not to hear. It’s none of my business. Sometimes the sound of my stomach breaks up the party. Before I can say sorry, the leaves make their way to my window. Stupid me opens the window. The leaves climb inside my mouth. My hunger absent. I go downstairs. There are leaves on the kitchen table bumping their stems with Mama’s Blue Magic and curling iron. Mama pulls into the driveway with a car full of groceries. She flicks a cigarette out her car window. It lands on a couple of leaves chatting close by. One of the leaves takes a puff and then walks it back to her.

________

Niesha Okere is a writer from Philadelphia. She studied journalism at Temple University, and her writing is published/forthcoming in Variant Literature, Allium and elsewhere. Her poetry chapbook Blue Girls is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.

The kids want to be snakes, slithering snakes, so they get the idea to cut off all their limbs. It’s imaginative, I think, but a little extreme. 

What about we put them inside our shirts, I say, slipping my arms through my sleeves. Like so. 

Poor verisimilitude, the kids sniff. How about you surgically attach an elephant trunk to your face and go brawwwwwwwww!

Well, that seems expensive. Not to mention impractical. But we could make floppy ears out of paper mache? Hmmm?

You should see their faces. It’s like I’ve suggested we shotgun the goddamn elephants and harvest their tusks ourselves. I don’t know what I expected. These kids. They’ve been to the regular zoo. The nicer zoo. The safari park. Even one of those crazy roadside attractions where the tigers lift their tails and douse the crowd with anal spray. What I mean is, these kids have seen things… real things… and my affectations aren’t enough. At least not since their mom took off with Chester, the Lasik salesman.

Hello, they say, earth to dad?

Yes, I’m still here. 

You’re burning the burgers, they say, and it’s true, I am, because we’re grilling outside in the perfect July dusk.

Is there anything you can do right? the kids ask. Jesus. 

Listen–I do a lot of things around here. Things that might go under noticed. Like putting food on the table. Or selling blood and sperm to finance music lessons. I protect you too. From life. From the world. 

You couldn’t protect us from a fly, the kids say.

Pshhh. I’d wipe the floor with a fly.   

Gun to your head– Would you rather fight one fly the size of a human? Or 100 humans the size of a fly?

Easy. The human-sized fly. It would be over quicker.

But it would be tougher, don’t you think? 

It wouldn’t matter. For you guys, I’d fight anybody in this entire goddamn town. Even neighbor Cagel, who won the state hammer toss and went to Russia to train with the Eastern Bloc. I’d wipe the floor with that muscly sonofabitch.  

We find that doubtful, the kids say. Unbelievable. 

I’m your daddy. It’s my job to make you believe. Even if I have to kick Cagel’s ass.

What’s that? Cagel says, poking his head over the fence.

Daddy said he’d kick your ass! 

Oh… okay…

Cagel’s not a bad neighbor. Tidy and polite. Always recycles. But no hesitation, he comes over and kicks the fuck out of me. 

When he’s finished, Cagel wipes his bloody hands on my shirt. Stop by later, he says. Get some squashes. I’ll give the kids a talk on germination.

Yeah, because on top of being a hammer toss champion and kick-the-fuck-outta-me-type-guy, Cagel is also a homegrown farmer. Gets his seeds from a down-low source at the co-op. Very hush hush.

Near blind with pain and embarrassment, I writhe around on the grass, shaking my hips and making little hissing noises.

Wow, the kids say. Pretty good snake impression, dad! 

The kids must mean it because they get down on their bellies next to me. Together, we pretend to be snakes, slithering snakes, slipping our tongues in and out and feeling the world with our faces. We do this for about five or ten minutes and when we’re finished, we eat the overdone burgers in the dark, chewing softly and watching the stars fall out of the sky, admiring the way they zip past everything so quiet and perfect it’s like there’s nothing there at all.

________

Pat Jameson is a writer based in Roanoke, VA. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, X-R-A-Y, BULL, Maudlin House, and Apocalypse Confidential, among others. His story “Death Drive” was a finalist for the 2022 SmokeLong Quarterly Flash Fiction Award. He is a first reader for Reckon Review. Find him on Twitter @jameson_pat

A Girl in a Box

How long has she been in there? Even she forgets. One day, it was September 1927—one of those bright fall mornings in Chicago, no longer warm but not quite crisp, a great breath of fog drifting off the lake toward her neighborhood—and the next thing she knew it was autumn, 1954, new buildings on her old block and leaves already falling off the trees, a frisson of static coursing through the air, electric, magnetic, the sharp taste of it mingled with car exhaust and bird shit and the mildewing damp of that box she was trapped in, as if it had been left on a sidewalk overnight, cardboard already puckering where tape had ripped it and dogs peed all over it. She was going to kill that Milo—her brother, that self-important little prick, always going on about how he was the “man of the house” and had to “provide for the family” when all his life he wanted nothing more than to tinker and to experiment, to understand how objects can be made to break apart and come back together again, again and again, like a film strip of a teacup shattering and then kicking into reverse, mending itself before his eyes. He wanted to send images like this into the world, dissect them first into their constituent atoms, and arrange their electrons into a beam he could broadcast anywhere—everywhere—images scattered like bird seed at a pond, and, oh, how the birds would come when they saw a picture of her, the girl with a bob cut, a cloche hat, knee-high socks under patent leather shoes. But: something went wrong—a kink in a wire, an error in his calculations—and she was transported in place of her image, her body broken up into pieces, then reconstituted here. Flesh dimpled. Blood contained. Clothes, it seems, still in place, though scratchier than she remembered and a bit sticky. She was just licking her thumb to rub a dirt blotch when she sensed eyes on her: not just the boy who peered over the crease of the box flap but also his mother in the apartment down the street, their neighbor across the hall, their landlord. All of their eyes fixed on her. This is the part she couldn’t remember before: the wall of eyes, floating, disembodied, in the air around the boy’s head. How each time one blinks a part of her comes unglued—an eyelash, a toenail, that mole in the dip of her lower back (a source of shame, even now, when nothing could be less important). She will forget herself soon. In a moment, she will find herself in 1972, 1999, 2046. Futures her brother never dreamed of. Futures where she will be free.

A Girl with a Hole in Her Head

No one else knows it’s there. Not her parents, not the neighbors, not even the mean boy at recess who will seize on any little defect or misstep as a reason to bully you to tears and claim he was just making a joke. Half the time, she expects him to call her target practice and use a rubber band to launch a pencil clean through the hole; but he never looks at her twice. No one does. Part of her thinks people are just being polite—ignoring the black hole in her forehead under the false assumption that it’s a religious mark or a tattoo designed to act like an optical illusion. That can’t possibly be her brain, can it? All exposed like that, so naked someone could stick a finger right in and poke one of the lobes to test if it’s real. She wouldn’t blame them. She’s done the same thing hundreds of times and never once harmed herself. It’s fun, actually. If she presses one spot on the right curve of her brain, her vision explodes into clouds of psychedelic smoke and blue light, like the dying squiggles of fireworks. When she activates another, she tastes orange, then purple, then aquamarine. New words come to her. Heliognosis, prearboreal, topomycology. In the mirror, she sometimes tricks herself into believing she is a tree or a slug. Or an alien who somehow switched places with the human infant her mother carried to term. Where would that girl be now? Way out on the other side of the galaxy, she imagines. Floating through zero-gravity caves. Splashing in a pollen puddle. If only she could dip a hand into the heart of a star and pour the molten core into a locket. If only her parents would look at her—really look for once—and see how much she needs them.

________

Ruth Joffre is the author of the story collection Night Beast. Her work has been shortlisted for the Creative Capital Awards and been supported by residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Lighthouse Works, The Arctic Circle, and the Whiteley Center. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Lightspeed, Pleiades, Fantasy, khōréō,The Florida Review Online, Kenyon Review, Reckoning, Wigleaf, and the anthologies Best Microfiction 2021 & 2022. A graduate of Cornell University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Ruth served as the 2020-2022 Prose Writer-in-Residence at Hugo House and as a Visiting Writer at University of Washington Bothell in 2023.

Let’s just say the Book was correct, and it all started with a single breath. Inspiration—>Expiration. All the seconds in between these two. A breath into the void. A breath before saying “I love you.” A single breath to inflate the giant balloon of my ambition. The force of those breaths pulling so much else, so many people, with them into whatever gape I chose to fill. How many others’ breaths pulled in tow? How many sucked into my own trajectory? Seeing it all this way, I can’t help but think of Linda standing patiently, proudly next to me, totally balanced on her own two feet until that moment when I opened my mouth to set all of this into motion. And frozen in that one memory is the inevitable flow of air into space, the carnage I’ve lived since.

________

Jack B. Bedell is Professor of English and Coordinator of Creative Writing at Southeastern Louisiana University where he also edits Louisiana Literature and directs the Louisiana Literature Press. Jack’s work has appeared in HAD, Heavy Feather, Pidgeonholes, The Shore, Moist, Okay Donkey, EcoTheo, The Hopper, Terrain, and other journals. His latest collection is Against the Woods’ Dark Trunks (Mercer University Press, 2022). He served as Louisiana Poet Laureate 2017-2019.

The way “Candlelight” plays with and subverts the tragic lovers story made it such an enjoyable read for me. Is there a version of that story (or maybe another inversion!) that you especially enjoy or that’s always stuck with you? 

Oh man, I’m such a sucker for love stories, tragic and otherwise. One tragic lovers story that sticks with me is Aimee Bender’s “The Devourings” from her collection The Color Master. It’s about an ogre’s human wife and what happens to their marriage after a tragic mistake results in their children’s deaths. I’ve always loved how Bender uses classic fairytale elements—which usually also means fun horror and romance elements as well—to offer a deeper look at not only how love can feed us, but how it can eat away at us, too.

You’ve written a lot in the realm of ghost stories and fairy tales, “Candlelight” having some elements of both. Is there something in particular that draws you to those types of stories?

I grew up as a PK, a preacher’s kid, and so I took in a lot of stories at a very young age about miracles, ghosts, Hell, transformation, grueling journeys, great love, and great violence. I think in large part because of this early start with religion, I’ve always felt a deep connection to stories that operate by similar rules and types of logic, such as fairytales and ghost stories. 

If you could go back and physically rewrite a famous work of literature, which one would you pick and why? 

Oooh like who would I go back in time to push down the stairs so I could claim their masterpiece for my own with all my own tweaks and changes? My first thought is probably Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, but I’m cracking up even as I say that, because I know I feel that way thanks to Kate Bush’s song “Wuthering Heights,” which I heard before I read the book. I’m just wild for her retelling of that story. 

Lastly, what are you working on right now? Or alternatively, do you have a favorite piece you’ve published elsewhere that we can link to?

I’m very excited (and superstitious) about a dark fairytale novel I have in the works right now. It’s in the flavor and feeling of some of my more romantic, less “real” world stories; stories like “Breathing Room” (Uncharted), “When the Horse Came to the Open House” (Zooscape), and “The Feast” (Carve and PodCastle). I’ve always loved how the genres of horror and romance are forever caught within a haunting near-kiss of each other, and I’ve strived to capture some of that sensation in my novel. For more updates regarding my work and story recs in general, you might check out my weekly horror newsletter.

________

K.C. Mead-Brewer’s stories, “Candlelight,” and “The Strangler’s Hotel,” appeared in hex on April 19, 2022 and February 14, 2023.

The first time he poisoned me was at a kitchen table just like yours. I tried not to disappoint him with my reaction. I waited several seconds before requesting a suitable amount of ipecac. He nodded at first, but edged the bottle out of reach. 

In the remaining seconds, I imagined a neighbor knocking on the door, then an EMT, then a team of EMTs pumping my stomach and handing me a lollipop when they were through, nudging me on the shoulder like attaboy.

All in all it was painless. Minor discomfort at worst. 

You must be thinking: Poison! In the twenty-first century? But we weren’t just gamboling about. We were on a schedule. Every precaution was taken. Nobody was culpable. 

Sam once appeared on a game show and had cleaned up, enough to quit his job and concoct new ways of controlling his environment. This was his selected method.

Most friends never show up these days. But Sam and I were entangled. 

Plus I was straining to believe in my own presence. Even the portrait framed in the hallway casts a dubious stare at my existence. I wasn’t sure if I was making a dent in the world or if my time was receding in value.

After several months of customarily presenting myself before the poison cup, he texts me a questionable message: Everyone I’ve seen today contains the same number of appendages.

That’s all I will ever hear from him.

Legend has it Sam passed. Or faked his own death for financial purposes. Either way, the news dismantles me. It tampers with me more than any substance labeled with a Mr. Yuk sticker ever could. Needless to say, I do not manage to tame the urge of routine.

I text Sam’s number just to see what’ll happen. I start with: Hello there.

This is it. Here we are.

Who is this?

I collect myself. Any composure I can muster vanishes before I make the next move.

But then another message appears. 

Is this the window washer guy?

I do not have any formal training in window washing, but this only seems like a challenge.

Yes.

I’ve always been lucky when it comes to strangers. 

We arrange a time. I learn this person’s whereabouts. 

I don’t stop there. Our subject today will be washing technique. Then the proper tools. I gather some microfiber cloths and a squeegee.

Her house is at the end of a suburb, right where it meets cow pasture. I drive by a few times and stake out the premises before our appointment. I watch cows cluster near a fence. Each hoof reverberates through my consciousness as it lands on solid ground.

When the day arrives, I’m eager to see what I have to show for myself. Maybe we’ll trade secret gestures or maybe I’ll never see her again.

Miranda and I walk around the exterior.

“What did I tell you?” I point at a distant window. “A protuberance like that needs vigorous scrubbing.” 

I tap the vinyl siding to prove it.

For no particular reason, she leads me inside and shows me a heart-shaped box. 

“This is where I keep my candies. I leave them out for friends…and for Dorothy.” 

She doesn’t explain who Dorothy is. We move on.

“Yup, this project will take several days,” I say out of nowhere, “there’s no question about that.”

There is, in fact, a question about that.

She pulls a check out of her blouse.

“That should cover it.”

I fold the check into my pocket and loop my thumbs around my belt.

If this arrangement doesn’t work out, I can always join the cows beside her property. I can live a new kind of life, one that doesn’t involve time. I will low at minivans and scooters as they pass by. The cows will take a turn at flaying me, pulverizing my meat, and shaping me into little round patties. 

________

Claire Hopple is the author of five books. Her fiction has appeared in Wigleaf, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Peach Mag, Forever Mag, and others. She grew up in the woods of Western PA and currently lives in Asheville, NC.  More at clairehopple.com.

Did you have a favorite tall/fairy tale growing up?

I don’t think I had a favorite fairy tale growing up. I liked the three little pigs story. The Billy Goats Gruff. The Jack and the Beanstalk tale. I was into Bible stories a lot, too, as a child growing up in a fairly religious, traditional Mexican American household. 

I also remember really loving the imagination and spontaneity of “Where the Sidewalk Ends” by Shel Silverstein in elementary school. I remember checking that book out quite often. I remember running to its spot in the library and that relieved feeling when I realized it was still available.

Do you have any favorite poets or authors whose works you read often?

Some of my favorite poets/authors are: James Tate, Octavio Paz, Marosa di Giorgio, Heather Christle, Ray Gonzalez, Claudia Rankine, Ada Limón, Russell Edson, Alberto Ríos, Eduardo C. Corral, Rosario Castellanos, Charles Simic, to name a few. I wouldn’t say I read them often right now as much of my current reading centers on work-related material, but they played a key role in my formative years as a young writer, figuring out my tastes, styles, and just general admiration.

Your three pieces deal in varying degrees of flight and movement. Is this common thread intentional, or something that came about individually in these specific pieces? 

I guess you could say flight is a common theme in my work. I’m interested in flight, escape, space, ether, the unknown, Mars, the stars, the sun, the moon, all of it.

What are you working on right now?

Right now I am deciding the cover for my forthcoming collection, Bad Mexican, Bad American with Acre Books, 2024. The pre-order link should be ready by October, and the book will be published around February 2024 in time for AWP 2024. Besides that, I have another collection, The Parachutist, which I have already picked the cover image for and which will be published at AWP 2025. I have two additional full manuscripts after that.

Other than that, I have been teaching online creative writing workshops with writing orgs like The Writer’s Center, Hugo House, Lighthouse Writers Workshops, and other places. I have been teaching workshops on surrealism, prose poetry, submissions, revision, Latinx poetry, and other topics. 

________

Jose Hernandez Diaz’s poems, “The Moon, 2050,” “Meeting James Tate in Heaven,” and “The Man and the Dragon” appeared in hex on March 7, 2022.

When they found that body in a barrel at the bottom of Lake Mead I bet you were just as surprised as I was that it wasn’t a woman. They can go on and on as much as they’d like about mob murders—mob murders, mob murders, mob murders. That’s probably what this is. 

Remember swimming in the July lake when the water was like soup that sat out for a while? We would imagine there were dead women under us. We’d jump at any little thing that rolled over our toes under the water. 

I saw the story this morning after a late shift at the bar. “Late shift”—they’re all late shifts. I was alone in my little kitchen (Toby, who you so lovingly called Bug-Eyed Toby, is long gone—that’s another story), eating oatmeal, and the news was on my little TV. The water level is at a historic low, the ground all laid bare. 

Did you see the footage? The barrel was oxidized, dyed white by the minerals in the water. The people who found it could see the man’s belt. I don’t know why that detail sticks to me, that this man had been dead for decades, his belt cinched tight around his rotting middle. It got me thinking about what survives the water and what doesn’t. 

I went to lunch after with a woman I met through mutuals named Nora. I like her a lot (not as much as you—don’t worry). We drank margaritas and ate BLTs on rye and smoked and smoked, and she shook her head when I told her what the news said. 

“Just awful,” she said. And then I realized how it’s kind of fucked up that I didn’t even consider the fact of the life lost in that barrel. They found it, it wasn’t a woman’s body. I didn’t blink otherwise. 

Nora works at a strip club as a bartender. She went on to tell me a story about one of the girls who went home with a customer. Sounds sketchy, but he was a regular, and he’d come in wearing nice clothes (a belt?) and showing pictures of his kids, and everyone got real comfortable with him. They knew his name, even, but Nora wouldn’t tell me. She treats confidentiality more serious than a shrink, which is partly why I like her so much. 

Anyway, the girl went home with Regular Guy, and he drugged her and beat her. That’s the story. I waited for Nora to give me more—where is the girl now? Where is Regular Guy? He doesn’t still come in, does he?—but she twisted her forefinger and thumb in front of her lips, locking them up, keeping me out. 

Now why did she tell me a story like that? At first I thought it was because I clearly thirst for stories like that—grisly, quick stories that confirm my fears and make me happy to lock myself up alone at night. But then I realized it’s Vegas, and it was a story about a woman and a man she didn’t know very well. Sound familiar? I attract echoes. 

Nora started crying when I told her about you, and apologizing for telling that story, and I may have cried too. It’s hard to tell what’s crying and what’s the heat, or what’s the margarita. It’s hard to tell what moisture matters anymore.

I still drive by your house to see the flash of your blue rocks in the front yard, nestled in with all that tan. Tan, tan, tan. The new renters haven’t moved the rocks yet. Maybe they sense that if they did, I’d come in and rip them open with my hands just for something to do. Maybe they sense that this is only temporary—that one day, you’ll come back for all of us, and you’ll bring the blue rain with you. 

________

Lindsey Baker Bower (she/her) lives in Atlanta. Her fiction has appeared in The Forge, SmokeLong Quarterly, Third Point Press, and elsewhere. She has an MFA from Georgia State University. 

The noodles went straight for the throats, throttling like a noose. The breads bared razor-sharp teeth and sank them into flesh, drawing blood. The meats, missing parts of their bodies, claimed them from the humans: arms, legs, heads. The fruits and vegetables started peeling, slicing, dicing, chopping and crushing, grating and grinding, mincing and julienning. Then the soups and curries rose like The Great Wave off Kanagawa, and sizzled through skin and bone, leaving nothing behind.

A lone sunflower erupted through the soil, tearing the skies apart; it opened its maw wide and swallowed the Sun, smiling, shining like gold.

________

Mugdhaa Ranade wakes up every day hoping to find dry leaves to crunch underfoot, and stray cats to pet. She can be found in person in Mumbai, India, and online on Twitter @swxchhxnd.

Online Application, Essay 1: Recipe Central brings the joy of cooking to your table™. How would you embody our motto as the next host of Family Cookin’? In a few paragraphs, tell us a story about your recipe inspiration.

***

Applicant Response: When the weather chills and the leaves crisp, I whip up one of my grandmother’s recipes. My favorites used to be, in her words, ass-building material. Fresh loaves of sourdough bread with home-churned honey butter. Crisco-heavy pie crusts. Melt-in-your-mouth roasts I’ve perfected via InstantPot® because who can attach themselves to the oven for hours anymore? I don’t know if her carb-heavy specialties produce a bigger caboose. That’s not the point. Ass-building material dissolves the work emails and delayed commutes. It transports me back: once I was a girl learning to cook, shoulder-to-shoulder with the matriarch who cherished me.  

When she passed, my grandmother left me not just her house, but also a bite-sized cookbook I’d never seen. Brain-Growing Material her loopy script labels the cover, though these aren’t recipes in the traditional sense. No teaspoon of that or half cup of this. Instead, the pages burst with riddles, each clue more baffling than the last. Some seem simple on their face, like her method for canning peaches, and others are complete gibberish. Where is the head and tail, but no body? Or this gem: First and second sets are free, more sets can be had on a collecting spree.

She didn’t make an answer key, though days when missing her feels like a steam burn to the heart, I flip open the booklet and trace her handwriting with my index finger. Last month, this vignette again snagged my eyes:

I keep food safe and secure, cold all year. 
Heinz hides the best part, dear, the ear.

Her refrigerator I ruled out after the funeral, crusty condiment bottles I trashed when I moved in, though now the answer came as if my grandmother whispered, croaking her Marlboro breath, into my own ear. Basement pantry. I dashed downstairs and through the pantry’s winding halls, brisk enough to induce gooseflesh on the sweatiest summer days. Heinz Baked Beans tins towered against one corridor’s wall, their peeling blue labels betraying decades of rust. Several oozed a congealed slime. 

My failure to solve her mysteries until then had blistered, but in that drafty passage, my grandmother’s presence buzzed, nudged me onward. Can after can I yanked down, flung aside. A center can stuck, levered downward, and around a Murphy door swiveled. It was a bookcase! Stacked floor to ceiling with Mason jars! I mistook the contents of the first jar I grabbed, labeled Pastor Frank, for pickled cauliflower and, oily, it slipped from my grip, releasing waves of astringent juice and glass shards that ruined my trainers. A waxen ear and mushy gray matter I salvaged, tested in the air fryer with some margarine and garlic salt. In another — Cousin Victoria — floated deboned fingers, delicately stuffed with rice and spices. More savory than dolmades at the Greek Food Festival downtown.   

Tonight, after clicking Submit, I’ll deal a round of Solitaire on the kitchen table, boiling away the dinner timer as my grandmother would. She always called me smart, said I was destined for greatness. Now my mind tingles, stimulated by a diet nurturing nostalgia and acuity, soothed in places ass-building material could never reach. And, dear search committee, it’s a diet the Recipe Central™ audience deserves. 

As host of Family Cookin’, I’ll feature recipes from her secret-leaden walls and her comfort food classics, demystifying what most mistake as “cannibalism.” And, of course, I’ll feature the InstantPot® methods I’ve perfected. Viewers will wow dinner guests, tenderizing the toughest hearts and jellifying useless-seeming offal. The gifted tome will garnish my show’s set, and, bite-by-bite, we can solve the rest of grandmother’s riddles together. 

________

Lauren Kardos (she/her) writes from Washington, DC, but she’s still breaking up with her hometown in Western Pennsylvania. The Molotov Cocktail, Rejection Letters, Bending Genres, Fatal Flaw, Best Microfiction 2022, and The Lumiere Review are just a few of the fine publications that feature her work. You can find her on Twitter @lkardos.

😭 In Country by Daniel David Froid 😭

😭 We (after Marguerite Duras) by Audrey Coble 😭

😭 A Year in Fog by Nick Francis Potter 😭

😭 Hibiscus Depths by Alleliah Nuguid 😭

😭 Two Final Girl Micros by Meghan Phillips 😭

😭 The Loneliest Whale in the World by Matthew Mastricova 😭

Once we’re in country, Peter said, I’ll be fine. Then I can sleep. But I need to knock myself out on the plane. He had today visited the doctor and acquired a packet of Ambien. Fred frowned. I didn’t know that about you, Fred said. What, Peter said. The Ambien thing. I always do this, Peter said. I thought you loved to fly, Fred said. You used to go on solo trips all the time. No, Peter said, I didn’t. Are you sure, Fred asked.

The men lay in bed, the dim light of lamps cast an intimate glow, and Peter shook his head. Fred’s thumb, stuck in a book, retreated, as his other hand deftly slipped a bookmark within the paper crevice.

Fred had to own up to his faulty memory. He said, It’s kind of like how I thought Mavis Beacon was real. Peter had never heard of this person. The typing teacher, said Fred. Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. Peter explained that he’d taught himself to type. Fred shook his head and laughed. He said, I had Mavis Beacon. It was a typing program with this character who guided you through the lessons. She wasn’t real, but lots of people thought she was. Fred said, I swear I saw her on Oprah once. But she never existed, Peter said. That’s right, Fred said. I’m not sure this is like that at all, Peter said. Fred shrugged and switched off the light.

Later, Fred woke up and lay in the dark, thinking about the mysteries of consciousness and about his erroneous memory of a typing guru, who only ever existed as a photo on a cardboard box and a crudely rendered simulacrum in pixels. The room was cold. Fred felt for some reason vulnerable. He felt tempted to pull himself closer to Peter, who would likely not have woken and, if he had, would have been annoyed. Eventually, Fred slept once more.

Driving to the airport, Peter expressed anxiety about the imminent flight. He said, I like to be in control. It feels like I can avoid disaster if I can stay in control. How did I not know all this about you, Fred said. I don’t know, Peter said. A machine so big, suspended in the sky; it seems impossible. Fred said, I’m sorry. Peter sighed. Once we’re in country we’ll—I’ll—be fine.

The airplane howled. Through the overhead PA, the captain offered muffled words that might have encouraged or soothed someone, but Peter had already downed an Ambien and plugged earbuds into his ears. Fred took out a book and began to read. 

When they landed in the country, Peter was still asleep. Fred jostled him awake and said, We’re here; we’ve landed. Peter said: Where? The country. Peter said: Which one? Fred looked out the window, as though looking for a clue in the foreign tarmac. He felt unsure.

The men left the plane, luggage in hand, and soon exited the airport. The sky seemed unusually bright, though perhaps it simply marked a sharp contrast from the dim airport cabin that, for eight long hours, had held them. They moved as though automated toward a cab that neither man remembered having ordered. The cab inched through slithering asphalt byways toward a hotel, a small building that cowered at the feet of immense towers of glass. Against the unreal sky, the buildings’ glassy prisms seemed to create a kind of feedback loop of color. Fred felt mad and dazzled.

The hotel concierge found no record of a reservation in Fred’s or Peter’s name, but he offered them an available room. The room was cramped, like a large walk-in closet, with a bed that seemed comparatively outsized. They deposited their things and looked at each other. I need to sleep, said Peter, still woozy from the Ambien. Fred spent the afternoon pacing back and forth in the room. Once, he left the hotel and felt threatened by the immensity of the shining glass buildings, the sky that seemed likely to engulf them. He scurried back inside and lay next to Peter, to whom neither his departure nor his arrival registered whatsoever.

Peter woke up in the mid-afternoon. It would have been morning at home. Fred confessed immediately that he did not know where they were, though upon reflection he thought his confession could have waited. Peter, still groggy, looked even more bewildered than Fred. What do you mean, he said. What do the tickets say? I can’t find them, said Fred. What does your phone say? Look at a map, Peter said. Fred pulled up the appropriate app and saw nothing; the map would not load. Let me try, Peter said. He did the same thing and stared at a small blue dot in a blank and endless offwhite grid. Where are we, Peter asked, already believing that the question was futile. Fred stared at him. They remained inside until evening, and then they walked outside to get their bearings, possibly a meal. They debated asking questions of others—the hotel concierge, passersby on the street. Fred thought they should and Peter the opposite. How else can we learn where we are, Fred said.

Through narrow streets between the tall glass buildings they walked, rarely seeing anyone else and never working up the courage to ask them where on earth they had landed. They agreed they were frightened; they wished to go home. When night fell in the lonely city and the men felt they had tired themselves out completely, they traipsed toward the hotel but failed to find it. It was here, said Fred, on a random street corner. I know it was. They stood beneath an indigo sky in which no moon shone. They could not rely on each other. They felt something precious had gone away forever. Their eyes met. In the distance, a bell rang an uncertain hour.

________

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.

You will not look straight in the mirror, except when you are told to do so. 

You will forget. 

You will forget. 

You will forget that this is you. 

I believe that we might meet.  

You will also forget the mirror. But above all, you will forget that this is you. You. Yes, I believe that we might meet. From my perspective, among others, the ones I reach out to and call out to and send electric impulses out to like mushrooms, rhizomed, corded, met at the node. From my perspective among others you are lost, or I am lost, or both of us are lost on the far end of some secret network. 

You will ask me: look at what? 

And I will say, look in the mirror, look at you, look at me. In the mirror you will see one eye and then the other, and then our nose and then our mouth. You will raise a hand and dutifully I will raise my hand, too, the wrong one, the same one. To match you. Our irises are striated in just the same way. Our irises flex in the same way to open up the black pits of our pupils and this yawn looks like a strain, looks like it would hurt. It does not hurt. Our eyes are glossy and wet.

You will look at me first one eye and then the other in the mirror and remember to me in a soft voice almost singsong the fox on the side of the highway last night, large with a huge tail and eyes glinting in your headlights. How it looked right at you, all eyes. Eyes glinting.

I will look at you first in one eye and then the other and remember to you the magpie that sits in the same spot every day on the drive to the ocean, watching, as if it has been waiting for me. I will pass and it will cock its head in that twitchy way that birds do, and it will shuffle away. It has been waiting for me, it has remembered me. Glassy black eyes. And so I think that this might be you, or me, or another one of us. 

I believe that we might meet. 

In another life, in another world, I am a different person with different thoughts and a different life. I grieve the loss. 

No. 

I grieve the distance. And in the space between us in the electric impulse that moves through the air I am sure of it, the other ones of me and you they grieve us just the same. 

You will forget that this is you. 

You will believe that I chose you. I. You. I will remember you to you and beg you to forget more. We will slog through the event horizon, the now infinite between the not-now and the not-now again. We are being pulled towards some black pit pupil that we cannot comprehend. We cannot know because we cannot reach it. Your biggest fear is now, mine is the not-now. Together in between us there is a mirror and through that an electric impulse, a patch of striated muscle that makes you sick to look at.

Don’t be afraid. I remember you to you, and you don’t recognize you anymore. I am the rememberer. That was not-now, this is now. Our fear. I write for the both of us.

Somewhere else everything flows from one of us and we grieve the distance. So many of us live and die. I am learning to love you. And to love you, and to love you, and to love you, and to love you. I am drawing closer. 

You are looking straight into the mirror. 

I am learning to write. I am learning to remember. 

You do not know this. 

You will.

________

Audrey Coble is a third-year MFA student focused in nonfiction at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. They currently work, write, and live in Anchorage, Alaska.

After dinner, I’m cleaning dishes. There’s a witch in the backyard burying something in the garden—probably someone’s heart—when my children start screaming and biting each other in the basement. It’s not long before they’re in the kitchen, my children, with red semicircles up and down their arms, arguing and soliciting punishments for each other, which I‘m wont to officiate. The next morning, or maybe it’s early afternoon, I take notice of the birds on the shed—crows and vultures—as my dog runs, spinning circles and barking in the yard. It’s clear from her legs, muddy up to her chest, the dog’s been digging in the garden, and she’s unearthed something, a large bag of some kind. Upon closer inspection, it’s probably a human torso, free of everything but an arm. The dog’s excited by my attention and grabs the arm at the wrist, dragging at the body—she wants to play—but it’s too large. It’s a small hassle shooing the dog away from the body, but once she’s free of it, I rise to see the charcoal witch standing at the fence of a neighbor’s yard, three houses down, watching me. I wave and abruptly return inside with the dog, dragging her by the collar.

A week later I’m at the Target looking for mouthguards for my children when I see her again, or I think it’s her, crouched down and sorting through some small animal traps and rat poison. She’s wearing a red-colored shirt and khakis, her grey-black hair tucked awkwardly into the neck of her shirt, and she smells like ash. She catches my eye briefly and begins following me around the store as if I’ve stolen something and I leave without the mouthguards or the prescription I was supposed to pick up for my wife.

The next morning, as I’m shuffling to get the children into the car for school, I spot an owl carcass on the roof of our home. My children don’t notice it, and I don’t say anything, but as I’m backing the van out of the driveway, I look at the bird, bigger than I’d have guessed, crumpled among common debris from the overhanging trees. I catch myself talking under my breath and refocus on driving, it’s nothing, and we continue up the street, back on task, but turning the corner we approach and pass a dark-haired woman walking in front of us on the sidewalk—the witch—and I look steadily ahead to avoid the chance of eye contact. The drive progresses poorly, for me, unable to shake another appearance of the witch, while the children struggle and gnaw at their seatbelts. Preoccupied, as I’m dropping off the second child, Goodbye, I love you, the witch enters the backseat of the car from the opposite side. She sits silently behind me and I hesitate before I begin driving again, but I begin driving again, because there are parents dropping off children behind me and I need to keep the line of cars moving.

I don’t say anything and the witch doesn’t say anything. The car is thick with the smell of mud and burning. It’s a few minutes before I pull into a gas station and abandon the car with the witch inside. It’s cold and I haven’t dressed for the weather, but I trek back, past a shopping district and through our neighborhood, my knuckles red as I finally arrive at our home. The owl remains taunt me from the rooftop. I find my wife, she’s just had a bath, and I tell her that I’m being stalked by a witch. She tells me to get over myself, leave the witch alone, everyone’s seeing witches these days, and they’re probably not even witches. I consider this possibility for a moment and feel a little guilty for calling the charcoal woman a witch.

Did you see the torso in the backyard? I counter.

No, she says, is it still out there?

I don’t think so, I concede.

Eventually, later that afternoon, I bundle up and walk back to the gas station, where I find my car. The woman, possibly a witch, is no longer in the back seat. I fill up the car with gas and pickup my children from their respective schools.

Weeks pass.

A month.

The children bite each other and the furniture in the house less frequently. I encounter various dead animals in the yard, but not enough to cause alarm. The dog is muddy, but manageably so. I go to the Target to pick up cheap fruit, prescriptions, and various plastic items. There’s a wooded area near the Target, just beyond the parking lot, and as I’m returning to my car I think I’ve seen something moving in the woods. I enter my car and slowly drive the perimeter of the lot, before exiting, and glimpse again, I think, a woman dragging something heavy through the trees. She leans, shuffling backwards as she pulls. Could it be the witch? Is it a body she’s dragging?

I’m idling in the car at the edge of the parking lot, well after she’s out of view, I’m not sure why, until I make a decision that I can’t explain: Slowly I roll up over the curb and into the forested area in my car. I proceed gingerly atop the soft earth and yellowed grass, navigating between the trees, sideways across a small hill, and then slowly down into a gulley. The heater’s running and I can hear the grass fold under the car. It’s cloudy grey outside, that off-dark period just before nightfall, and I find myself unable to proceed through the trees any further. It doesn’t matter. There’s no one out here. It’s been a hard year, I think to myself, what does it matter? I really am tired and I don’t care anymore, how did I ever care this much in the first place? I lean my face against the window and wish for sleep.

________

Nick Francis Potter is the author of New Animals (Subito Press) and Big Gorgeous Jazz Machine (Driftwood Press). He teaches writing, comics, and video games courses at The University of Missouri.

My grandmother’s dress washes up on the shore. Which shore? Not sure. I never saw her near water while she and I were at the same time alive. Yet coast wanes cleanly into sea, and gulls barrel through clouds, bellowing from the gutters of their throats. And there, the floral garment sashays in on a wave. Water stains the flowers darker: hibiscuses on fuchsia deepen from white to grey. The dress docks on the shoreline, vessel holding only itself.

These footprints in the sand—are they mine? I forgot where I’m going, forgot where I’ve been. I always suspected I was born with the wrong feet. That or the right feet screwed into the wrong ankles, their gaits bearing them perennially apart.

I call you mother in my mother’s mother tongue. I call you into me and you come in archipelago echo.

I wear your dress. Hibiscus seeps in and patterns my skin with petals. The petals fall off. Wind’s hands ferry them away, leaving me a shiver of stigma and stamen. I wear your dress. It dangles off your shoulder blades. Your ankles, your angles. I wear your dress. I put on your wrists and they soundlessly twist. I wear your dress. I wear your fists.

________

Alleliah Nuguid holds degrees in creative writing from Northwestern University, Boston University, and the University of Utah. A native Californian, she now lives in Tucson, Arizona. Her debut poetry collection, A Human Moon, won the 2022 Dynamo Verlag Book Prize and will be published in fall 2023.

The Final Girl Looks for a Summer Job

She scans the classifieds in The Merchandiser, knowing that her options are limited. She can’t be a day camp counselor or a babysitter or a nanny. Kids are too loud, too quick. They’re always getting hurt, getting lost. There would be too much running, too much screaming. Too many bodily fluids.

She thinks she’d like to do something physical. She wants to be so tired by the end of the day that she has no choice but to fall asleep fast and hard. She wants something that will make her sweaty. Something that will make her strong.

Maybe scooping ice cream at the shop by the park. She imagines her forearm ropey with muscles. She imagines her cheeks pink from the freezers, hair smelling of fresh sugar cones.

Maybe a landscaping crew. Maybe mowing lawns. She worries about the whir and buzz of the machines, about what she won’t be able to hear as she pushes her way across the grass.

The elementary school needs a janitor. She imagines herself in the dim quiet of those linoleum halls. Bleach and wax and Lemon Pledge. Books on tape from the library. Alone in that warren of classrooms.

Before, she was a lifeguard at the public pool. She loved how the sun beat down on her shoulders, her scalp. Loved her shiny silver whistle and forest green one-piece. She loved the dive from her chair at the end of her shift. The way her body cut the water like a blade. The suspended coolness after hours in the heat.

Now, no one would trust her to guard a life. Her existence simple proof that although she can survive, she cannot save.

The Final Girl Rehearses the Part of the Nurse for Her School’s Production of Romeo and Juliet

The drama teacher would have cast her as Juliet, if not for what happened. She is the strongest actress of the bunch. Understands the rhythm of the language in a way the other kids don’t. Understands that big emotions— love, fear, despair—don’t always look big. 

He worried, though, what the town would think seeing her play dead like that. So, she would be the Nurse. The caretaker. The nurturer. The only character in whole play who cares about the doomed girl’s happiness. 

He watches as the girls rehearse again the scene where the Nurse finds Juliet in her chamber, presumes that she is dead. He watches the final girl cradle the other actress’s body. Hears the break in her voice as she laments, “Help, help! My lady’s dead.” 

He wonders if he has made a mistake.

________

Meghan Phillips wrote the flash fiction chapbook Abstinence Only. She wrote some other things too, which you can find at meghan-phillips.com.

I promised the 52-hertz whale that the world was ready for him. We just had to make some changes. I promised him that “the loneliest whale in the world” was only lonely for so long because he had one song and it didn’t even chart on Billboard. We started with the classics: Aretha, Amy, Selena, Whitney, Freddy, Celine, Elton. Karen Carpenter. Frank Sinatra. Not Adele (no offense to Adele). I ping-ponged air between my vocal folds like his so we could sing in harmony but neither of us quite got it. “No worries,” I sang at him. “There are other ways to find love.”

The loneliest whale in the world was only lonely for so long because he did not have a good agent. I burned all my bridges in the New York scene but found someone’s assistant’s assistant in Ottawa who was willing to take him on as a client. I ferried messages from ocean to shore and even though we booked all the dailies and even Good Morning America, I was getting tired from all the swimming. I told the 52-hertz whale that I believed in him, but sacrifices had to be made. Did he trust me? I burned my home, sold my clothing, and settled into my new home on the underside of the 52-hertz whale. I fielded calls night and day because he had no hands to use a phone, but I was no longer as tired. And he sung me to sleep every night and awake every morning. And I had promised.

The assistant’s assistant in Ottawa had never booked Good Morning America before. This was his breakout or breakup moment with agenting, and so when the scuba-geared hosts of Good Morning America were diving to the home of the loneliest whale in the world, he could not stop looking at his phone.  He had set his ringtone to the only sound he found worthy of such a moment. A classic. A song his mother had sung to him way back in the days of his mother being alive.  The host asked her question. “What does it feel like to be the loneliest whale in the world?” The assistant’s assistant held his breath. “Well,” the 52-hertz whale sang. “I’ve never been lonely. Not once. I’m not sure why everyone thinks that of me.” Nobody had much to say after that so “the loneliest whale in the world” swam away, and the man in Ottawa kept waiting for a song his phone would never sing.

________

Matthew Mastricova is a teacher and writer in New York. Their work has appeared in Foglifter, Gulf Coast, Passages North, The Offing, and elsewhere.

I’ve become partial, a blip, a dim light that the interaction between my conscious and unconscious convulsions scraped alive under the influence of reality television. Now I’m maintaining a fire in the snow and hunching under a shelter of moss-packed branches. I’m talking to myself, exclusively.

It started when I lost my driver’s license. I moved from Oregon to Maine. I lost my wallet in the first week, and with the wallet, the Oregon license. I tried to get a Maine license, but the Department of Motor Vehicles needed to photocopy a hard copy of the Oregon license to complete the transfer. I requested a duplicate of the Oregon license, but after eleven attempts and eleven failures, I gave up. The processing fees were immense. I was running out of money. 

During the same week I gave up on the license, my passport expired. In order to obtain a new passport, I had to mail the expired passport to the Department of State. Plus, another processing fee. Dropping the envelope with the passport into the curbside mailbox, I knew I had crossed a threshold. I saw my full self in my mind’s eye for the last time. I felt myself falling. Vertigo with morning coffee, with afternoon job searching, with evening drinking. Each grew more desperate. 

The new passport never arrived, of course. October did. I no longer had any form of identification. I had to leave my sublet because the owner’s son was moving home after college. He was becoming a day trader. I couldn’t rent a car. I couldn’t get a lease or a loan or a W2.

From there the horizon of my experience slipped dramatically. A fog enveloped my movements and choices. I slept in the elementary school playground. I built a fire and then was threatened by a police officer. I hitchhiked away from town so that I could build a fire without attracting police. I asked the driver of the truck that picked me up for matches, and he gave me a whole box of them. Thanks, Tom.

After a trek into the woods, I stopped at a small clearing. I sat down and dug a hole with a rock and arranged small twigs and dead leaves inside. I had seen the procedure on wilderness survival shows. I had watched enough episodes to understand what might work best in a situation like mine. 

On that first night, I saw him. He was strange and he was familiar. He hovered over the fire and angled his body toward mine, glowing orange and red. He was a version of myself, which grew out of my wide-ranging criticisms of wilderness survival reality show personalities. For years he had been lodged in the pits of a neural lymph node. Now he was invigorated. He had instincts, such as Build a shelter like Amy’s and Never make traps like Ralph’s. He was content consuming rabbits and squirrels. He would stay sane by singing.

As the weeks plodded on, I maintained the fire. I built a moss and stick shelter. I ate berries and vomited them up and knocked my palm against my head, thinking He would never have eaten the berries and He would have caught a rabbit by now. So, he took over a little. Using shoelaces and twigs, I created a haphazard snare. I caught rabbits at a rate that felt miraculous. He spread throughout my sense of self. I acted without seeing the world or my body move. Pale white sky. Taste of dirt. I woke to a boiling carcass. I woke to a collection of spears. 

One morning, I saw a group of hunters. They saw me. They huddled around my clearing and asked how I was doing. Not knowing what to say, I let the crude specter of myself take over. The timbre of my voice communicated a new authority. I showed off my snare, the bones of my rabbits and squirrels, the stones I used for tools. The hunters said they admired my choice to go off the grid. They said they’ve fantasized about subsistence living. They referenced podcast hosts and social media influencers who, as I understood them, obsessed over uncovering a primal self. But they were all marketing. I was the real thing. I was a real thing for the first time in my life. The hunters fist bumped and gave thumbs up and disappeared back into the woods.

He never let go again. No self-narrative can hold my skin on. I am the way I know north. Because I learned from Gunnar on season three. I am the way I know to find drinking water. The rest of me left. I flickered by the fire and radiated into the night. I evaporated and reconstituted as a small percentage of my previous matter. I am tall, light, and I ride the air. I expand my shoulders into wings and tuck them back. I hear the wilderness reality show personalities cheering me on constantly. I am their conglomerated attitudes and affects. Their catchphrases are my mantras. I pick the right mushrooms, store rabbits for winter, chase deer, break down my camp and move deeper into the woods. I feel nothing. I know no time. I perform simple tasks that consume the entire day and night. I have no questions in my heart. I cannot surface in my mind the photograph of myself that appeared on my license or passport. No sense of an eye color, an expression. I cannot recall a single address where I lived. I live alone between mounds of earth. I tear patches of beard from my face and scream names I may have had into the night. 

________

Ryan Shea’s writing has appeared in Rejection Letters, Juked, and other journals. He lives in western Massachusetts.

Your mother is asking for your things back, my love. Your cashmere sweaters, your crockpot, your gold ring that once belonged to your father. As if she is the only one with a claim to them now that you’re gone. As if I have no right to the objects that retain your scent, your fingerprints, your loose skin cells. You’ve been dead for two weeks but I can still see you around our apartment, staring at me from the kitchen table or the living room sofa. Your mother began calling me a few days after you fell off our roof and broke your neck. We were on shrooms and you thought you could fly. First she was stiff and polite, then aggressive and demanding. I stopped picking up and she left angry voicemails about how I have to let all of you go, how what I’m doing isn’t right. When I hear her voice on the phone I look toward you and I can tell by your expression you are on my side, you do not want her to have these final pieces of you. She blames me for everything: the drugs, the drinking, the move several states away from her. I am not responsible for anything; I simply loved you as you were and did not try to change or stifle you. I lived for you, my love, even when you were angry or delirious or too hungover to move. Maybe if your mother had been kinder I would have thrown her a bone – your wallet or maybe your watch. Now she can cajole and wail and scream all she wants, but everything in this apartment belongs to me. I walk over to where you sit atop the kitchen cabinet, peering at me with eyes still so full of love. Even in the formaldehyde the green of them is luminous, unclouded. I let her have the rest of your body, but the best part I kept for myself, bribing the man at the morgue with sex and an old diamond so I could gently rehome you in a jar like a delicate houseplant. I plant a kiss on the glass that separates your pale lips from mine. The phone rings and the message is something about the police, how the morgue man confessed to everything. I do not answer. I deserve you.

________

Sophie Panzer is the author of the chapbooks Survive July (Red Bird Chapbooks 2019), Mothers of the Apocalypse (Ethel Press 2019), and Bone Church (dancing girl press 2020). Her fiction has appeared in New World Writing, Heavy Feather Review, MAYDAY Magazine, The Lumiere Review, Club Plum Literary Journal, The Hellebore, and others. She lives in Philadelphia.

The structure of “Does the Pig?” is full of rhythm–it’s almost hypnotic, the way we keep going back to the same event and learn something new every time. What was your writing process like as the sentences expanded? How did you go about balancing the old and new information in each iteration?

I started with the fragment “does the pig?” Then I rewrote it a few times and gave myself the task of adding new information about the pig’s situation with each iteration. A few words, a clause or two. I wanted to see how long I could make the sentence, while still having it make sense as a question. New plotlines and connections surrounding the pig started to emerge (the farmer, the knife’s story, the teenage girls), so I applied the expansionary procedure to those parts of the sentence as well. Soon enough, phrases and clauses were sprouting up all over the place, and I was adding a lot to each iteration. This forced me into a balancing act between, basically, narrative and syntax. In theory, the sentence could have gone on expanding forever, but in practice I knew that at some point I had to get off the bus and answer the question.

What’s your favorite word that you use in “Does the Pig?”? (Is it the same as your favorite word in general?

I think it might be “iron.” By itself, “iron” isn’t such a beautiful word maybe, but I like the idea that the iron in the knife wants to abandon its function as a weapon and revert to harmless minerality. In general, I think there’s something poignant about fictional works that lend feelings and thoughts to inanimate objects: singing teapots, intelligent soot particles, toasters of modest stature that display certain cardinal virtues…

I’m not sure if it’s my favorite, but I’ve always liked the Yiddish word luftmensch, meaning “an impractical contemplative person.” It literally means “air person” and I identify with that description really a good deal more than I’d prefer. Another useful word is “murky.” It’s an honest and helpful word given that life, in my experience, is completely murky.

Who/what are you reading right now that you really enjoy?

I just reread Jen Craig’s novel Panthers and the Museum of Fire. The story follows Jen, a frustrated writer and delirious overthinker, as she walks from Glebe to inner Sydney, carrying the manuscript of her recently deceased childhood friend Sarah. But the true setting is Jen’s mind, inside the looping, recursive thoughts delivered in Craig’s hypnotic, memory-hopping sentences. The book is basically Jen’s unfolding reaction to reading the manuscript, which includes a reassessment of her friendship with Sarah, reflections on her anorexia, her brief conversion to Christianity, her years of artistic failure, and her tendency to withdraw into thinking as a dubious refuge from life’s many “interferences.” If this sounds like standard autofictional fare, it isn’t. Craig has a major style, one that contains all the complexity and gathering force of Thomas Bernhard without Bernhard’s loathing and madness; it’s geared more toward self-reflection and self-patterning than the slandering of existence. Craig is one of my favorite living fiction writers and I’m looking forward to her new book Wall. Incidentally, I think some of the best fiction writing in the Anglophone world today is coming out of Australia, e.g., Jen Craig, Jessica Au, Nicholas John Turner, Jack Cox…

Lastly, what are you working on right now? Or alternatively, do you have a favorite piece you’ve published elsewhere that we can link to?

I’m working on a novel about a sad park ranger who finds a mysterious egg. The book concerns his relationship with the egg and his half-hearted attempts to save a leatherback nesting beach from residential development. I’m trying to convince myself that it is a Symbolist novel, but it probably isn’t.

I’m also always trying to put together a short story collection. Here’s a link to a recent story: https://theadroitjournal.org/issue-forty-three/nick-story

________

Nick Story’s story “Does the Pig?” appeared in hex on June 7, 2022, and was selected for Best Small Fictions 2023

I’ve got a Roy Batty doll that I keep next to my bed. He’s got white hair that sticks out at his widow’s peak, deep blue eyes, and a black leather coat with an enormous, upturned collar that flatters his neck.

When I pull his string, he says I want more life, fucker.

It never gets old hearing him say this. 

He came with this tiny plastic dove, and when you fit it into his hand, Roy recites the whole “Tears in Rain” speech. You can still find other Roy dolls on eBay, though most of the secondhand sellers have lost the dove. I bought Roy thirty years ago, when teenage-me watched Blade Runner for the first time. I’ll never lose the dove.

Sometimes I hug Roy to sleep. I’ll even run my finger up and down his back, and tell him the light that burns twice as bright burns half as long, and you have burned so very, very brightly. When I snuggle with him, I’m careful not to let him anywhere near my face. He has this proclivity to crush people’s eyeballs in with his thumbs.

I don’t always stick to the script when I talk with Roy. Sometimes I show him my dismal CT scan reports. He knows how I feel. When he went from one bioengineer to another, looking for someone to extend his fading lifespan, they told him nothing could be done. Unlike Roy, I’ve never wanted to kill my doctors every time they give me bad news, even though I want more life, too.

I live alone, because it’s easier that way. Knowing no one will mourn you after you die. My mother’s death, though years ago, still haunts me. The frightened way she looked at me from her hospital bed, when the doctors were running around the room, pulling medicines out of the crash cart. I haven’t stopped missing her, every day. Although Roy isn’t capable of saying it, he’s probably thinking it’s time for me to let go of her. I couldn’t do that to someone else, leave them such a heartbroken mess. 

Mother said I needed to prepare for life after her. She gave me phone numbers of family friends, addresses of pet adoption centers, names of online dating sites. I told Roy how absurd it would be for me to go on a date. To show up at a girl’s apartment, holding a bouquet of flowers, telling her, “You look so pretty in that red dress.”

***

Today, when I got my most recent follow up CT scan, something really strange happened.

My doctor said my disease had all but completely disappeared. 

How did this happen? What do I do now? I need to start putting sunscreen on again, and eat less sugar–all the small things normal people do to take care of themselves. 

I want to know what Roy thinks of all this ridiculousness. But when I pull his string, his voice is garbled, just an unintelligible slow and mournful moan. I pull it again, and he goes completely silent. On the day I learn I could have a normal lifespan, Roy dies!

At night, I go outside to bury him in the tulip garden behind my apartment. It’s raining, and the water drips down his plastic nose as I carry him to his final place of rest. One More Kiss, Dear, I sing in a whisper.

It had been raining the weekend when Mother died. At the funeral, her friends cried all through my eulogy. But I didn’t cry, even when the mortician closed the casket and tightened the bolts. Even when they lowered her casket into the ground, slowly unspooling those black straps underneath. 

I dig my fingers into the wet earth, and place Roy into the hole I’ve excavated. Roy holds his dove, while I cover him with mud. After he’s completely submerged, I look up at the dark night sky, tears and rain swallowing my face. 

***

At the ASPCA, there’s a dog the size of a sewer rat, with matted long brown hair. I take her home. I name her Rachael.

I shampoo her hair, comb the tangles out, put her locks up in a bun, wrapped with a red bow. I try to imagine she’s a replicant, like Roy or Rachael. But when I quote her lines from Blade Runner, she just sticks her tongue out and breathes heavy. She runs to the front door, her beard quivering, asking me to take her for a walk. So we stroll the neighborhood together, and every person we encounter kneels down and scratches her behind the ears.

They say Rachael might live a good dozen years or so. I’m planning on being with her for all of them.

________

Eliot Li’s work appears or is forthcoming in Reckon Review, Five South, Variant Lit, MoonPark Review, CRAFT Literary, SmokeLong Quarterly, Passages North, and elsewhere. He has been nominated for Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Kali was one of the dogs I checked in on throughout that summer. Her owner was a short man with a long-distance fiancée and I never learned what he did for work exactly. He lived in the Northside, in a newly constructed apartment complex in The Domain and paid me to come by his place each day during lunch to take Kali out for a walk. His little Kali was a black schnauzer with pretzel-thin legs and a pirate’s underbite. She was angry all the time and constantly lurching to bite me as I let her out of her kennel. “I’m helping you!” I tried to soothe her each time she snapped. “I’m getting you out of here.” She never stopped, but it was hard for me to fault her. My language was too sharp, my motives untranslatable.

After checking in on Kali, Joe and I usually smoked and cooked. We dropped acid a few times that summer. One afternoon, when we were together, I went outside our apartment. It was across from the cemetery. A storm had come in the night before, bringing with it debris and pieces of others’ lives. A yellow button glowed atop the grass, a conspicuous treasure.

The ballooned text adorning it read, “Party Animal.”

“Party Animal,” I smiled to myself. The words were fur in my mouth. I rolled them over my tongue. “Party Animal, Animal Party.” I picked up the button and put it in my pocket, knowing I’d likely forget to take it out later.

This, I thought, was my little dog summer, my little dog song.

Back inside, I found Joe, standing before a red bowl of cut, wet peaches. He wanted to bake a pie but wasn’t sure how to begin. “Maybe later, I’ll be able to help you,” I told him. We moved from the kitchen to our bedroom and sat atop the bed, criss cross applesauce, facing each other.

“We’re going on a bear hunt. We’re gonna catch a big one. What a beautiful day, we’re not scared.” He sang to me, tracing the slope of my nose and cupid’s bow with the back of his hand. He was tender as the effects of the drug took over and I shook like an animal.

“You’re purple,” I said. The sunlight came in through the bedroom window, and the colors moved across his face. “You’re all purple all over.”

We got under the blankets and waited for it all to happen.

We asked ourselves questions we didn’t have the answers to.

“If we lived on a farm, what kind of animals would you want to have?” he asked. He rested his head atop his hands, a little boy cherub with the body of a man. “I have always wanted to own a horse.”

“No,” I shook my head. “Too fragile. If they fall and break their leg, they’re fucked.”

“How about pigs?” he asked. “We could get pigs.”

I thought first of Wilbur, then of the feverish two million feral hogs that rampaged Texas’ wildlife, that were legal to hunt year-round, of all the destruction they caused.

“Yes, a pig’ll get by,” I said. “A pig’ll make do.”

“You’re not wrong,” he looked at me.

When we decided to head outside, the concrete street beneath us turned into ice cream, and we slid up and down the road leading to St. Mary’s Strip. We ran into a former classmate of mine, dressed in a suit. It was too hot for summer, but this guy had a good job, coding for a health insurance company.

“Hey,” I said. “This is my boyfriend, Joe.”

A scowl peeled across Joe’s face. He loathed meeting my contemporaries, reminders of another life I could be part of, one in which he didn’t belong. I tried to take Joe’s hand, but he pulled away from me and plodded off, stopping only to light a cigarette.

We walked and thought to ourselves silently and sweated. We ate Raspas and corn in a cup at the yellow taco truck parked outside of Hardbodies, the strip club. There was a gray cat who lived there with no name. We just called it the Taco Truck Cat.

We sat down on the curb, clutching our food, and the cat snuggled up to us, winding his way like infinity around our calves. The cat yawned, and a beam of light caught on his front fang and I thought of God, and how if there was one, this was it. This was it.

Everything that summer was so fallible, our collaboration never guaranteed to last. My neurotransmitters were delicate, frayed, mixing up past and future messages. I told Joe I needed a break.

I was out running one night when I caught a slug on my foot. As I stopped and bent over to peel it off, my phone fell out of my pocket, and I saw six missed calls from Joe. I called him back.

“Why’d you call so many times?”

“I don’t know. I’m sorry. I don’t have anything to say,” he exhaled. “I guess, I just wanted to behold you.”

I was silent for some time, the sound of the cicadas speaking for me, before I said, “I’m sorry. I don’t think I can do this.” I blocked his number not long after that.

We do not talk now. I do not know where he is or if he exists at all. But sometimes to remember him, I will head down to the cemetery outside our old apartment complex and imagine having loved him enough to miss him. My hip bones poking into the dirt, I will sit atop an unmarked grave and wait.

________

Robin Bissett is a writer, editor, and teaching artist from West Texas. She is an alumna of the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program Summer Institute and a first-year fiction MFA candidate at the University of Montana, where she serves as the Online Managing Editor of CutBank.

HANS

I was born under a porch. A boy took me home. I kept clean enough. I had no words for this life until the night I met an angel. With wings, I mean. Outside, in the back. No stars that night; if there were, he’d harnessed them to his own ends, so he could shine like them. His name was Raguel—is Raguel, he lives separately in time and space from us. He wore immaculate leather sandals and frayed, filthy white clothing as he floated above. That night he decided to boost my IQ to the level of the average human genius with the soft snap of his tiny fingers. This is something he did sometimes, for fun. To humans and other mammals. Once to a fish. After a day the fish drowned itself in reverse, surfacing, he told me with rue. In our first meeting, Raguel taught me to read. We weren’t together long, perhaps ten minutes, but it was outside the space-time continuum and so I gained the knowledge a skilled American pupil might receive at a well-appointed public school. The boy Zeke who took me home kept many books, hundreds. They lined the walls of his bedroom, two more in the kitchen. I read whatever he left out whenever he went out. I didn’t want him catching on, not yet. He called me Hans and had been calling me Hans, I realized. So that was my name. Mostly I read novels—Life: a User’s Manual; The Blue Flowers by Raymond Queneau; by Doris Lessing, Memoirs of a Survivor and Shikasta; and books of stories by Mary Gaitskill, too, whose work I most admired. I learned to turn pages with my tail, not leaving a single hint behind that I did. A woman called Katrina moved in. I liked her because she paid me less mind. (Funny how that works!) Once, she looked at me and said, He looks like a little cow. She said this because dairy cattle have black spots blotched over white hair like I do. She had less interest in novels and left around for me some Elias Canetti books and The Great Cat Massacre by Robert Darnton, which in particular led to my shredding up of many rolls of paper towel. One night Raguel returned to me. In my thoughts I asked him for the gift of speech, as he could read thoughts. He declined. “The world needs less voices, not more,” he said in his soothing tone with little conviction. He scratched my behind-the-ears for hours (in actuality: minutes) before he left, to make it up to me. 

RAGUEL

Angeli tecum ingrediantur, pendejo.

ZEKE

Hans is the best little baby on Earth (my baby), but one day he will die, as all cats and babies do: I can’t be having that. He is not all cats! Sometimes he tries to eat my phone, he must enjoy the mouthfeel of its liquid silicone case.

I wake up one morning and decide he will not die, an act of resistance, not of denial. I’d do anything for Little Hans, up to and including embarking upon a Grail Quest for him. 

I decide to embark upon a Grail Quest for Little Hans. Or the next best thing. 

Katrina leaves me—we were kidding ourselves. She moves out, takes my copy of Pnin.

Soon she calls me from her dad’s houseboat, the River Rhonda, named for his departed wife, Katrina’s mother. Katrina tells me she’s seen Hans reading my books, if I can hear her correctly. 

I don’t think that’s what he’s doing, I say. I think he’s just looking, smelling.

No, she says, he turns the pages. I see him following along. I saw him turn the pages with his tail, like an octopus might.

Dude, what are you saying? 

I thought I was losing it, so I waited on telling you. It wasn’t a good time, anyway. But that’s what I saw. I don’t think he likes me very much. 

Hans?

Yeah. 

He’s a cat, I think he just wants more cuddle-time. You know? 

Don’t believe me? 

I tell her I’d call her back, that I had a flight to catch. 

I land in Jacksonville. I know the airport, my mother was born here. I rent a Camry. I barrel down I-95 straight to St. Augustine. Haven’t been here for years. Last time I ate at a gaudy Cuban emporium, the sort of place with many different rooms in which to eat, accompanying my mother and her healer. 

Free parking at the Fountain of Youth Archaeological Park—least they could do. 

KATRINA

In my dream, Hans—Zeke’s little cat—and I go on a double date to Musso’s with Paul and Linda McCartney. Over a table full of the kidneys—the menu says they were Chaplin’s favorite dish, so Paul and Linda decide they’ll make an exception to their vegetarianism—Hans reads aloud from his manuscript, and we listen, enraptured. I cannot recall any of it, for the life of me, only the full, solemn voice the cat read to us in. 

HANS

A woman with Zeke’s long nose came to watch me, his mother, I realized. She paid me little mind—don’t think she was too used to being around cats. She didn’t seem allergic when she’d approach me and squeeze me, when she remembered to (I didn’t despise it). But mostly she let me be, which I didn’t mind, either. One day—counting days was new to me, I was just getting into the habit—I let my guard down; she could see me reading, blatantly, from The Golden Notebook, for minutes maybe. The woman trembled, dropped to her knees, began to weep. She spoke rapidly under her breath. She was praying, I think—Raguel introduced me to the custom, he had little regard for it. I jumped off the table and rubbed against her leg, as if to say: Nothing to see here!

________

Z.H. Gill lives with his cat and his roommate’s dog.

I used to think I was the only one who had swallowed a glass piano. That was why I had to keep my secret, why I had to be so careful. I avoided the rough games that the other kids played when no one was looking.

The Glass Piano says: I found you, and you found me. I give you my music, and you give me movement. I can go anywhere you go as long as you and I don’t shatter. 

I blamed myself for so many years, until I told the family doctors. The terror of telling on myself kept me dyspeptic in my early years, baffling the experts. They tried different diets (all soft, a blessing), and they prescribed rest, and they gave me prayers.  

By the time I told the doctors about the glass piano, I could have been a mother if I hadn’t been so sick. A blessing. I could have been forced to do all sorts of things.

The doctors laughed when I said “As a child, I swallowed a glass piano.”

I could feel the music building inside me, and I opened my mouth so they could hear. It was like I’d asked them to listen to the heartbeat of my doll. They put their ears near my mouth and murmured with such exaggerated frenzy, and they drowned out the little song. It’s only the smallest tinkling song, and it’s muffled by all my tissues. 

When I sleep, the music fills my liver and kidneys and my rippling digestive trail. I thought I would die young.

The Glass Piano says: I am so small, everyone swallows me.

I remember the glass piano the way some recall their first love. The size of a coin, standing on delicate legs. I had everything then. I could have swallowed thousands of coins. I did. 

Thank God I swallowed the piano and remembered it. Otherwise, I would have married a prince. They would have had me bear more princes. The piano would have shattered, and I would have died in my finery.

The Glass Piano says: You are dying.

I know I am.

The Glass Piano says: I will find you in the afterlife. Listen for my song, the small sound muffled by the tissues of heaven. 

I left the palace and learned. I devoted my life to orphans. All because of the glass piano. In my religious life, the first orphan I met said she had a song stuck in her stomach, and opened her mouth, and I heard the brilliant tinkling. I laughed, delighted, and I told her about the glass piano. How wide her eyes were. How wonderful to pass on the fruits of your pain. From then on, she respected the glass piano inside her, though she couldn’t remember swallowing it. 

The Glass Piano says: You had so many things, yet you only remember me. 

I’ve heard the music from so many mouths that now I know glass pianos are everywhere. I thought my fine life was my doom, that the others were happy because they’d never seen a glass piano shining like an eye in the candlelight. Who could resist such a thing? I had been playing rough games that morning before I swallowed the glass piano. I had eaten aged cheeses and nuts, foods that never passed my lips again for the rest of my life. 

 It was no different than swallowing a little lump of snow. A frozen soul. Later, I learned about cameras. Maybe that’s what it was, a device to show God my insides. 

The Glass Piano says: My music was your resting place.

Thank God I never had a normal life. I left the palace. I lived among the orphans. I am an orphan. I have lived. 

(for Princess Alexandra of Bavaria)

________

Ivy Grimes is from Alabama but currently lives in Virginia. Her stories have appeared in The Baffler, ergot., Seize the Press, Tales From Between, Interzone, Vastarien, and elsewhere. To read more, feel free to visit www.ivyivyivyivy.com or read her (sigh) substack at https://ivygrimes.substack.com!

Your pieces are incredibly abstract, are there specific meanings that you derive from them or hoped your audience would derive from them?

I absolutely love this question because (believe it or not!) I hadn’t thought of these poems as being abstract. In fact, when I read the first question I second guessed myself and thought “oh god what poems did I send them?!” Which in hindsight is silly because I relish in the abstract. Perhaps it was a forest through the trees response—I know I’m juggling many extraneous moving pieces within these poems and sometimes the connective tissue is stretched membrane thin but as their creator I have an intimacy with them that isn’t privy to a reader—so your question prompted me to comb more thoroughly through the poems to see what it was I was doing on paper intuitively and through revision and how these poems exist looking from the outside in (which meant I had to look inside out). So please indulge me as I think through this vortex hour of process.

“Axolotl” and “Mushroom” are from a bestiary I’m working on; all the “subjects” I address represent creatures, objects and/or ideas that personally fascinate me. But curiosity wasn’t/isn’t enough motive to explore these subjects—I wanted them to resonate in a larger sphere so I needed to mine them for external connections—a make-the-private-universal approach. How humans interact with the natural world—and worlds we’ve made “natural” (highways aren’t natural but we have made them so, for example)—intrigues and worries me. Climate change, extinction, compassion (or the lack there of) for fellow human beings are at the nucleus of this project—but saying the obvious “environmental destruction is bad, extinction is bad, hurting others is bad” isn’t necessarily poetry. My task then became how to elevate these concerns through an “isolated” lens in order to shed new light on the subjects I’ve chosen. The poems tend to be highly associative; they depend on juxtaposition to create tension and subtexture; they—to borrow Brenda Hillman’s phrase—“follow [my] weird.” And my ear. I often think of ED’s head coming off notion of what poetry should do to the reader and I verily want the reader to come away from my poems haunted by a “what just happened (to me)?” feeling. That can’t happen unless it happens to me first. I crave transformation, mind and bodily altering experiences; I want my poems to be part aphrodisiac, part poison, part enlightenment, part heartbreak. Some humor in the horror. A thinking through the feeling and a feeling through the thinking. So I guess that does make them incredibly abstract lol. And like the best abstract art I want them to mean something without meaning something—or without meaning something overtly tangible and definable. 

Tom Sleigh once told a story in which his friend was given the advice “you don’t have to change your life you have to change your line length.” These poems adhere to physical constraints; they are cast in prose poem form but can only occupy as much space as a 5.83” x 8.27” page will allow [in effect giving the poems a false sense of containment and fixedness, and creating tension between form (prose lineation) and content (lyrical mediations)].  The epigraphs are meant to meant to refute, confute, complicate, confuse and/or illuminate the subject matter. This highly orchestrated structuring freed me to be more tangential in the poem itself. I am trying to cram a ton of information into a small space—that isn’t possible without making greater leaps between thoughts. In “Axolotl” for example, I begin with an allusion (via a wrong etymology) to where the word axolotl derives from. Researching the salamander I was reminded how they can regenerate; Scott Sayare asks in his article for aeon, “Might salamanders be the great hope of regenerative medicine?” This whispered ideas of medicine (albeit through another convoluted etymology) which circled back to “mouth.” I went down the rabbit hole (or salamander hole in this case) of how language morphs and changes and can be distorted (the Victorian slang, the anagrams), and braided that with ideas of healing and evolution (how humans seem a cross—or recipe—between—as I once heard it described—ape and angel, or here, ape and alien. The introduction of an “alien” speaks back to the “Jupiter” earlier in the poem…). “To’ve syntax & imagery work in equal measures” alludes to the larger interconnectedness we might not always be able to communicate clearly but can feel. The shift to the spirit on the staircase—that “moment when we think of the perfect response to a comment earlier” is another harkening back to missed opportunity (as extinction is a missed opportunity to change the course of history). The chilled is a pun on cold shoulder—the poem has taken a more menacing turn (whose seed was subtly suggested in the lake that no longer exists and other language—apex predator/ vortex)—which is echoed in the devil’s flower mantis but then is softened by undercutting threat with display. I would have to admit this is the most abstract moment in the poem—as we begin with the (aquatic) salamander but end with an image of a terrestrial insect—but syntactically these last two lines are elaborations of the relationship between language and image. See it all makes perfect sense lol! Of course most of this didn’t occur to me in the crafting of the poem. That’s where revision comes in—organizing the information in a random-yet-inevitable Plink-o way, following sound and modulating rhythm, cranking and lessening tension, juxtaposing tones…

What specific meaning do I derive from this poem? I think it is less meaning that I chase and more of a means of pleasure—of playing with language and ideas and how images can convey emotional subtext—a way of meaning and suspending time and then reentering the world with a different (and perhaps more riddled) sense of it—an embodiment of the “there is a universe and it is behind this universe” idea.  

Looking back at “Mushroom” I completely understand how these poems could be received as abstract—this poem indulges if not thrives in the incredibly abstract! I just didn’t think of it quite like that—I was thinking how to articulate the unknown and how to reinvent the known. It’s no small accident this poem straddles the psychedelic, melding the earthly with the otherworldly, pitting beauty and danger. Perhaps this poem’s greatest preoccupation is the uncanny valley between our perceptions of reality and the true nature of reality whatever that may be—there’s a vast gap between the threshold of our senses and the ultraforces governing this universe. (If you’ve not seen Fantastic Fungi I highly recommend it. There’s definitely some of my take-away from that movie residual below the surface in this poem—and probably also the movies Arrival and My Octopus Teacher lurking here as well—there being a parallel between mycelium and tentacles in my mind, an “as above so below” going on, but also the implication of reaching.) 

I have to push myself into strange terrains, to root through language and create an experience.  Emily had her head popping off, I have my heady trapdoors I slip through. I am more likely to agree than to disagree that every poem is an ars poetica; it is a making of itself. And as such makes in another. Now I would have to say I’m being incredibly—though not intentionally—abstract! I want my audience to be transported emotionally, intellectually and/or viscerally, to be stimulated and unnerved, entertained and maybe even disturbed. My 90-year-old mother-in-law (whom I adored and whom recently passed) never ate a strawberry in her life; for better or for worse, I want my poems to be her eating a strawberry for the first time—that sensation inside the reader. 

Are there any stories from your early life that root themselves in your work today?

My early life is integral to my poems. Shortly after his 45 birthday, my father’s heart stopped. Longer story abridged, he was comatose for over a year before we disconnected his feeding tube. Twenty plus years later and this incident still haunts my work. As a child my house burned within (not down—it was a concrete block structure so the house fire was akin to a kiln)—this ghosts my poems. That my father was a hunter and mispronounced certain words. That my mother’s mother passed when I was a baby. That she was an avid reader of romance novels. That I am an only child and I was loved. And sheltered (no pun intended). All this comes into play in my work in some residual way. 

What was the process of getting these pieces to a place that you liked?

I do enjoy talking shop—as if you hadn’t gathered! Just as I’m inclined to believe poems are innately ars poeticas more so than not, I’d also readily agree I’m hardly satisfied with where my poems arrive; that is, I am nettled by the idea that there is always an ultimate ulterior place they could go—a being-nearly-satisfied-by-being-unsatisfied dichotomy; again, this idea of reaching. So the process of getting them to a place that I like is really the process of exhausting what the poem can be. And what it will not tolerate. Sometimes that means returning to the earlier drafts—as with “Mushroom.” Before its acceptance into hex, I was in the murk of overhauling the poem. I’d printed the bestiary manuscript out and was hand revising; when I reread “Mushroom,” I had a “wtf is this?” reaction; I was afraid it was too disjointed, too—yes—abstract, that it veered too far away from semblance.  But semblance to what? I marked certain lines with “?—,” I crossed out others, in the marginalia I scribbled: “I named a dog after you—because as a pup she hid under the bed like a toadstool,” “renunciation. forgiveness.,” “stay true to the mushroom.,” “the hotel overdose—,” and “once I tasted the crazy you.” Then I abandoned the revision thinking I’d return to it after I let these reactions settle. I was focusing on an ideal audience (what is that?) and not listening to the poem on its terms. The first line in the poem was answering me: “To detect such designs, however, is not necessarily to understand them.” The poem was giving itself permission to be itself. Why did I feel the need to distill something of healing and psychotropic potential born out of the dank and decaying—out of decomposition—into something neatly composed? Though it isn’t a persona poem told from the mushroom’s point of view, the language began to suggest that the mushroom could be speaking about itself in third person—something that was much more exciting to me than me trying to relate fungi tidbits to the reader. 

Revisiting an earlier draft of “Axolotl,” the poem ends with the text-chunk “If noon’s the vortex hour… primitive streak business all figured out” and I’m not sure which I prefer now. There’s something—dare I utter it?—satisfying about the axolotl seemingly knowing something we humans cannot know. Just as there’s something intriguing about the final imagery of the devil’s flower mantis in this version, especially following the meta line about syntax and imagery. I suppose the “final” iteration will depend upon the manuscript as a whole; the more I fine-tune the larger body of work the more clearly the poems will reveal themselves—I mean, god I hope. 

What are you working on right now?

While the bestiary is my primary pet project (pun intended) and I’m devoting much of my energy into its weavings, as a writer and artist I need to juggle multiple projects so as to avoid burnout. 

I’ve another manuscript [whose sense of line and punctuation and ambition is markedly different than my other work; it is a much more overtly queer feminist experimentation (for me anyhow)] that began as a chapbook, evolved into a full length and has now re-evolved back into a chapbook. If the bestiary is interested in cataloging a faux encyclopedia of my interests, fetishes, passions, concerns and fears—this manuscript is interested in exploring a glimpse into a life in its particular moments. What’s most interesting for me in this pursuit is the body of work’s disinterest in me as the poet. I feel like these poems are doing what they want and I’ve little say over it. Terrifying, yes, but also a relief. I’m a vessel and little more, a mere medium.

In another chapbook I am revisiting my father’s coma. Perhaps enough time’s passed that I can write about it from the scar and not the open wound. 

I’m also collaborating with Donna Spruijt-Metz on what we’ve coined our Exquisite Devils—poems that take Emily Dickinson’s last lines and use them as titles, as jumping off points—because even though ED’s poems end on the page they do not end in air. Donna and I were fortunate enough to go to MacDowell to work on these collaborations in the flesh (until then we were emailing). Being in the same space allowed us to pursue these poems in an entirely different approach.

________

Flower Conroy’s poems “Axolotl” and “Mushroom” appeared in hex on April 26, 2022

I was a demon, cursing in a high nook of the Cloudbuster. I told the kids, in a raspy voice, that I’d eat their flesh if they didn’t speak the password–any password would do. “Yes.” “No.” “Please.” When kids got freaked, I’d tell them, in my normal voice, that they’d turned me good. When I was tired of it, I stood to stretch but a child I forgot I’d played with told me to get back into my spot, so I frowned and groaned and followed her to that tight squeeze. When I asked for her password, she said all she had for me was meatloaf. No more password, now I would need meatloaf. I told her it was delicious, her handfuls of nothing. She said they were her mother’s and crawled off. Next time she came around, I growled, “Hello, witch.” She said, “Not a witch! Just a kid,” and brought me more meatloaf. She said she had to leave, so she gave me all the meatloaf her mother had made–her favorite meal–and told me I could speak in my normal voice, that I should say, “Thank you, friend.”

________

Julián Martinez (he/him) is the son of Mexican and Cuban immigrants and is from Waukegan, IL. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Peach Mag, Prolit, Barrio Panther and elsewhere. His work has received The Society of Professional Journalists’ Mark of Excellence and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Find him online @martinezfjulian. As a DJ, he goes by the name DJ Guadalupe (aka A Vato with Serato) and can be heard rocking a party near you.

He created the first pearl while wildfires flared across the west. It popped out of him when his Grindr hookup knocked on the door, this small pearl flopping in one sigh out of his belly button. When the bead plunked on the floor, his partner plucked it, examined it, asked to show it to the jeweler, and the jeweler said, “We’ve got a live one, authentic oyster.” He hadn’t been eating oysters, too busy fretting over the tangerine moon that rose every night. So the partner pawned the pearl and came back for another night together–kissing, sucking, then the pearl–this one a marble, perfect to pilfer.

When the news broke–Aberdeen’s Hidden Gem, Aberdeen’s Pearlescent Lover–the asking price skyrocketed. Everybody wanted one. Supply was precious. When would this stop?        

More men came, lovers from the grid to kiss, lick, fuck, and then the pearl emerged in a shock of blush, blue, ivory, even rainbow that one time (it sold for a million). He liked to lie in bed after and turn on the news. He’d ask each partner about the fires and get no answer, the men who came too busy polishing the surface of their gemstones. They didn’t hear how fires were displacing whole towns, just left so thrilled by what had come out of his shell.

Maybe he had been clammed up. Holding out for what he thought he needed, he hadn’t let himself consider what he wanted. He could better himself. He got into aphorisms. Live, laugh, love. Giggle. He stopped taking visitors, started spouting gems alone, focusing on himself. He collected the pearls in a candy dish. He boxed them up, walked past the line of suitors out the door and mailed them to a relief center. In fat Sharpie, he penned in his neatest hand his name, his Aberdeen return address. It wasn’t all that much, really, but what else could someone like him ever do?

________

Michael Colbert is a queer writer based in Maine, where he’s at work on a novel. He holds an MFA from UNC Wilmington, and his writing appears in Esquire, The Florida Review, and The New York Times, among others.

Where did you find the inspiration to write this piece? Was it a specific event in your life, or were the details in the story a vessel for a deeper meaning?

I wrote this story in a workshop with Nancy Zafris, who happens to have been one of the smartest and most generous teachers I’ve encountered. For this particular piece, Nancy gave us a sentence to be placed somewhere in the middle of our story. I’m sorry to say I have no idea what my line was. I think it was lost somewhere in the revision process. That’s the beauty of these technical obstacles; they get your wheels turning and then, once a story exists, they fade away and the story becomes what it wants to become.

Aside from the very technical origins of this story, I guess I was just thinking about the terror of infinite sameness—the idea that the infinite is inherently terrifying even when applied to things that appear charming at any given moment, such as romantic relationships and craft beer breweries. But I’m not sure about all that. I try not to read too much into my own writing. I can say, though, that this story was not based on any real-life experience, although I have been to my fair share of craft beer breweries. Who hasn’t? They’re everywhere. We have several of them here in Mississippi now, which typically indicates the death rattle of such trends.

What would you say is the difference between a dream and reality?

I think about dreams a lot, especially when writing. Robert Olen Butler has written about the need to access something at the “white hot center” of consciousness to make artistic discoveries and surprise yourself as an artist. I guess I take all of that quite literally. It’s not that I write about my dreams explicitly. But I do find dreams to be nice paradigms for accessing the subconscious through narrative. I see dreams as ignorant, unlearned little things that assemble themselves by the laws of desire and chaos rather than intelligence and reason. The writing that has most impacted me over the years seems to possess this dream-like quality, not because of magical or fantastical elements, but rather because reason and logic take a back seat to desire and chaos. But it’s not just raw subconscious content—it’s been processed through narrative form, which allows for new associations and connections and meaning.

I realize I’ve avoided the question. I guess I’m not sure that reality and dreams are oppositional. Maybe dreams are part of our realities, our lived experiences. Maybe the real dichotomy exists between conscious and subconscious experiences of reality. Now I’m thinking about the similarities between memories and dreams, how they’re both forms of narrative creation and neither can lay claim to verisimilitude. Yet we tend to privilege one as closer to “reality” than the other.

What are you reading right now that you enjoy?

I recently found a copy of Nightwood by Djuna Barnes on the shelves of a neighborhood coffee shop. I guess I should say the book found me. Always nice when that happens. The prose, obviously, is excellent. A great book for people who love sentences. I cracked up at the somewhat pedantic introduction by T.S. Eliot, accompanied by the sheepish apology he wrote for the second edition. Always fun to see a writer like Eliot feeling cringy about his previous work. I read Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away not long ago. I tend to avoid writers marketed as “southern,” but I recently got over this hang-up and began devouring all of O’Connor’s work. The Violent Bear It Away is a perfect narrative vision and builds into a swirling crescendo by the end. I think it’s more efficient than Wise Blood, though WB is perhaps more ambitious and barely able to contain itself.

Also on my nightstand: The Interior Castle by Teresa of Avila (translated by Mirabai Starr), The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro, The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt, and Down Below by Leonora Carrington.

What are you working on right now?

I’ve been writing this one story for a few months now. Maybe longer? It’s hard to tell at what point an idea starts to grow legs and take its first steps out of the primordial sludge of fragments and sketches and failed attempts. But I’m fairly confident this thing is an actual story now, mostly because it has shape, a contour to follow, and that contour suggests the existence of some sort of beginning and, more importantly, an ending. This particular story is an episodic narrative focused on the daily walks of a rather solitary old man in search of a historical landmark that may or may not have been demolished. Or maybe it never existed. I’ve really enjoyed writing these little episodes because each walk allows the man to make observations of a city long since abandoned by the times. Places really seem like living organisms to me even when they’re decaying. Especially when they’re decaying. I think I’m almost done with the draft, which means I’ll soon pass it along to my friend and fellow writer Jessica Denzer, who recently accused me of withholding all the stories I promise to be writing. She’ll tell me whether it’s any good.

________

J.D. Hosemann‘s story “Tourists” appeared in hex on June 21, 2022

Axolotls like us find vegetables boring because they don’t move, and maybe because they don’t move, they’re poisonous (to us?). Unfortunately, our company’s cafeteria only serves dill pickles, and we suspect our clam boss deliberately makes us constipated so we don’t visit the loo as much when we line-assemble submarines and fauna traps and electro-acoustic transducers.

X marks the spot, our boss says, which means get crackin’. So we hoot our boots and hussle our bustles. But we’ve always wondered: X marks what spot? The spot where the unguarded blade catches on our gloves and pulls them away? And that’s exactly what happens. Our itty-bitty fingers are severed off too, along with a letter, so that we’re left as axolots.

Our boss is an Atlantic jackknife clam. Thus therefore hence, he looks like a dick. And with our lost l, we’re beginning to think he’s not worth even the most itty-bitty of headaches. The dill pickles grumble undigested in our tummies, and when our boss says again, X marks the spot you axolos! He means everything has a point, so we plead in our tiniest voices if we can at least chomp on some better grub.

Like escargot. Itty-bitty swirly things dipped in parsley butter and salt. The deal he offers is we go from ten-hour shifts to twelve-hour ones. Whatever. Yum yum. Nom nom. We love escargot. It’s the only thing we love. We twirl our itty-bitty forks into the snails’ itty-bitty shells, twisting and twisting and twisting to separate the meat until we stab our second o and we eat it by accident.

Oftentimes, when we work with band saws or circular saws or miter saws late into the night, we lose limbs. No worries though, they’ll regrow. But now and again, there’s a moment of doubt when we scratch a ghost itch where our webbed toes should be and think, Are you actually gonna grow back? Are you? But they always do, they must, and that’s why when we lose our second l, we’re sure being an axo is just a phase.

The company’s productivity slows. We’re missing limbs, after all. But we’ll bounce back, we tell our boss. We promise. He replaces our escargot anyway with bitter melon and ghost peppers, which makes us gassy. What a dick! Our bellies bloat like pufferfish, and soon out pops another letter and we become Axs. 

Lose enough letters though, and what even are we? We never stop building submarines and fauna traps and electro-acoustic transducers, and the accumulated loss of so much makes our work feel itty-bitty. In a bad way. We ask our clam boss, Why do you need so much from us to probe deeper into the trenches? He says X marks the spot, which means eat shit, which means he takes another letter away from us, and with everything stripped away, we become primal things that dream and don’t give a damn and finally, we demand we get what we want:

A…

________

Jennifer Lai has recent work in Atlas and Alice, Bureau of Complaint, MoonPark Review, and elsewhere.

Nathan Xie is a recipient of One Story‘s 2023 Adina Talve-Goodman fellowship and a Periplus Collective fellowship. His writing can be found at nathan-xie.com.

This is their first collaborative piece.

We wear short shorts because it’s hot. We get write ups at high school, more Cassie than me. She has a bigger butt, bigger thighs. Along a road outlined with orange trees, we walk home with dress code slips in our back pockets. We’re thankful our parents scoff and throw them away. 

As we walk, our conversations are interrupted with honks, whistles, men screaming for some “sugar, baby” out their windows. We’ve learned to add them to the background. We tried yelling back, but they move so fast in their noisy cars that they don’t hear us anyway. And it doesn’t stop. The worst is when we see a group of them come our way. That’s when the nasty things they say are closer. Sometimes they don’t say anything but “accidentally” grab a feel. This is what happens when two men saunter toward us. 

One knocks himself against Cassie and grabs her butt, Oh my bad sweetheart. Smile on his face. Cassie turns bright red. She unhooks her right leg out of its socket and throws the twenty-pound limb at him. Her meaty thigh slaps the back of his head so hard we hear a clap before he drops to the cement. She’s about to remove her left leg and she is so angry I know she doesn’t care that she’ll fall, so before she can, I unhook my left leg and use it like a bat to drive my sneaker into the other guy’s stomach. 

We hobble and help each other put our legs back in. We pull oranges as we run away, their green stems hitting our knuckles. We break the skin with our fingernails, throwing the peels toward the dirt. We laugh as the sweet juice drips down our chins. 

________

Valentine Sargent is originally from the desert, surrounded by saguaros. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Chatham University. Her work has been published in Porter House Review and Honeyguide Literary Magazine. Valentine loves board games, fruit, and sitting under trees. You can follow her on Twitter @valentinesarg28.

La Carta

I wrote Borges a letter as long as his life. It was really a postcard and only as large as mine. It confined its story to the size of a stamp, so that it could mail itself through time. On the miniature postcard, a lion. On the more miniature stamp, an image of a face (neither his nor mine), as if on a coin. On the other side of the coin, the side we can’t see: The Labyrinth. At the center of The Labyrinth is the Post Office, where everything arrives. The Postmaster is asleep on a heap of yarn. A minotaur knits beneath his pillow, which is a rhombus roughly the size of a postage stamp. If one shines the coin with some spit and squints, the face of the Postmaster appears embroidered on the pillow he sleeps on. It looks like me when I’m older, or like a younger Borges. The lips on the pillow are moving, but there is no sound. The minotaur’s ears are plugged with cotton. Flip the coin and the face has changed. The Postmaster awakens and works only when I sleep. He stamps the letter, then steeps it in tea. After he is done drinking, he nods back off to dream. The face on his pillow grew younger. Borges receives the letter 39 years before he steps into the river.

As A Young Borges Myself

I am writing the book of my life that must be longer than my actual life. That is, there ought to be more pages than there are minutes for me on this planet. I persist on trying to get out ahead of myself. As in, the pen is longer than its reach, practically locomotive. Progress as distance is immeasurable — the only yardstick being the arm attached to the hand taking measure. We’ll measure in hands, then. Like horses. Or cubits. It should not matter so long as the units are biological. A hair’s length. Within earshot. By the skin of my teeth. But these are all relative, and there exist no reference points for comparison to the end. I am trying to write so that when I get there it will feel like a rest. The terminus should make the journey feel welcome. The means should embrace the sentence. Its scarf should billow behind it on the platform as the train pulls away from the station. I am kissing the pen.

________

Adrian Dallas Frandle (they/he) is a queer fish who writes poems to and for the world about its future. They are Poetry Acquisitions Editor for Variant Lit Mag/Press & an Associate Poetry Editor for Pidgeonholes. His chapbook “Book of Extraction: Poems with Teeth” is out now with Kith Books. Find their work online at adriandallas.com 

night one

i am sinking brandy into the chest of father christmas in a mirrored field station searching for truth/ and he is singing fight songs on the coffee table, offering me decanters of frothy lies made from good tasting soap and cinnamon/ he tells me he dreams of being in the rockettes, but he is running late/ then he swallows me into the darkness of his eyetooth cavity/ and i think this means more than just the north pole is dying

night two

i am six years old and standing on a pool table while seven radioactive lab assistants poke me in the kneecaps with billiard cues/ after formal introductions, they tell me human flesh is a delicacy in the briar patch/ and i am buttoned into my catholic school uniform with shoelaces that won’t stay tied/ and i think this means you are no longer my emergency contact

night three

i am pretending to sleep in a trench coat under the kitchen table in my grandmother’s house/ and you are married so i cannot see your face/ although your breath smells of footprints and there is a camera ticking in your pocket/ and i can see us through the eyes of the wallpaper daisies as the basement waters rise/ and i think this means we are not long for this world

________

Alyson Mosquera Dutemple’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Colorado Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Passages North, DIAGRAM, Lunch Ticket, and Wigleaf, among others, and her short story manuscript was a runner-up for the 2022 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. She works as an editorial consultant and creative writing instructor in New Jersey and holds an MFA from The Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Find her on Twitter @swellspoken and at www.alysondutemple.com.

The Bird

Here is a yellow circle with a single black dot in the middle. Here is an orange V which protrudes from the circumference of the circle. These markings are on paper and are meant to indicate the head of a bird. This paper also contains shades of blue (scapulars) and pink (tail feathers). If I wanted to say something terribly intimate, reveal some ancient hurt or desire, reckon with the body’s inflictions or (don’t say it!) the soul’s obtuse convictions, I might do so in the middle of what looks like a paragraph describing an abstract bird, and I might call that paragraph a poem, and I would call that “poem” “The Bird.” Perhaps I would “send” the “poem” out. (As if on a wing! As if in a mailbox!) The editors might immediately decline me. I mean, it—the editors might immediately decline “The Bird” which has at its heart either deep forgiveness or deep refusal to forgive, and in which I have stripped off my clothes and arranged my body just so, in a way that owed to lighting or framing, divulges neither scar nor age. Or perhaps one editor would forward to another, leaving “The Bird” forever In Progress. Allowing too, that the editors may simply leave me Received. Have I been Received? Has “The Bird” been Received? What is it to Receive? And what to Give? How much More of Myself can I Offer? Why is this Room so Cold? Where did Mother Go? What Even is Love? What if Spring Comes and we don’t Recognize it as Such? Notice too, the orange squiggles meant to represent the bird’s legs. And look! Nary a Stem to Light On.

Art

Which is better: flesh or stone? A beak or a mask of stars? A jar with its lid screwed tight or the juice of fireflies smeared on the wall? Thirty-five years ago, when my mother married her third husband, she made me wear a terrible red dress. Shoulder pads, a little rope belt. Had I thought to hang myself with it? Just a passing thought. Everything, a passing thought. Then, the reception. A beautiful crystal swan dripping, melting. Me a puddle. My father had dropped me off. Didn’t have the gas money, was at least a thousand miles away. If the museum is closed, you can just walk down to the grave. What is the opposite of art? Google says: openness, sincerity, inability, livelihood, woodenness, holiday, revelry, ham-fistedness, grind, craft, hate, gig, gaiety; says, almost everything is opposite of art. Art as its own antonym. Is this art? I tell R she sounds too pedantic at the end of her poem. Why doesn’t she tell me to fuck off? End with a shard, I say, a milktooth, getting stuck on a tilt-a-whirl, feeding an old woman applesauce from a plastic spoon. If the world was covered in tiger lilies, there’d be no room for my computer.

________

Nicole Callihan’s This Strange Garment will be published by Terrapin Books in 2023. Her other books include SuperLoop and the poetry chapbooks: The Deeply Flawed Human, Downtown, and ELSEWHERE (with Zoë Ryder White), as well as the novella, The Couples. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Kenyon Review, Colorado Review, Conduit, The American Poetry Review, and as a Poem-a-Day selection from the Academy of American Poets. Find out more at www.nicolecallihan.com.

(Scarecrow jurors made from twigs and grass; homunculi witnesses molded out of forest loam. Red Riding Hood, dwarfed like a shrub among pines, defendant without attorney. Behind the bench, stomach distended, skin rippling, the wolf in a judge’s robes, the judge’s flesh between his teeth.)

Tell me, Red—

Didn’t you wear a scarlet cape when you met me—that is to say, the wolf? A beacon amid the dull, dark firs and ferns, the color flashier than a vixen’s foxfire coat?

Didn’t you Tweet from your main account about the romantic appeal of monsters? A rhetorical question, for haven’t I the printed proof right here?

Didn’t you post that polarizing 55k fanfiction on your blog about—what was it? Ah—consensual non-consent? Full of oxymorons, aren’t you?

Didn’t you find a long teratoma patch on your body: hair and teeth emerging like a wolfing, a mutant flower in bloom? Didn’t you try to hide it under turtlenecks and makeup? Dear, have you always been this bad at denial?

Did I—that is to say, the wolf—find you, stalk you, chase you, or did you call out to him, a matador’s cape enthralling, ensnaring the beast?

Didn’t you label yourself a lesbian, but lusted after that boy in the werewolf mask last Halloween? You say you wanted to be him? But did you procure any proof of that in my court of law?

Didn’t you acquire a taste for blood, poking at your sore gums, the growing aches of wisdom teeth? And what about the small bones in your jewelry box? Did you find them buried in the garden, the owl’s pellet, meat-dressed and gathering flies on the side of the road? Or did you pare bones out of bodies yourself?

(Scarecrow guts flying every which way, homunculi melting under a yellow-eyed glare. Red Riding Hood breathing wildly, claws and teeth bared. And the wolf so very tall still behind his bench, carrying so many meals inside him—grandmothers, hunters, judges—so many tongues with which to lie and deceive.)

Really, Red—

are you that different from the wolf—that is to say, from me?

________

Avra Margariti is a queer author and poet from Greece. Avra’s work haunts publications such as Baffling Magazine, Wigleaf, Best Microfiction, and Best Small Fictions. You can find Avra on twitter (@avramargariti).

Éamonn waits for me in the last pew. The scent of Marlboros clings to his black leather jacket.

His green eyes plead a promise he can’t make.

I’ll go straight to hell if I so much as kiss you, Éamonn. Have you forgotten your seminary vows? 

Hell’s not so bad, Éamonn says, pulling me into his arms. St. Pat looks down from the altar. His painted face shows no mercy. 

That night, I wash the blood from my panties in the basement when everyone else is dead to the world.

***

I’m three months gone. We agree to meet at our special place. Éamonn’s jacket is in the last pew. My fingers find the promised pills in the inside pocket. I swallow them whole. Suddenly, there’s a commotion in the choir loft. A swarm of medics races up the stairs. Comes down with a body hidden under a white sheet. A policeman asks if I’m waiting for someone.

At the morgue I give him one last kiss.

They say you’re going to hell, Éamonn. A judgment on us both. 

That night, I wake with blood between my legs. While everyone else is dead to the world, I flush the clotted mess down the basement toilet.

***

Any other sins, the priest asks. I think of how it’s legal now. How old he or she would be. What color eyes. 

None, Father. 

The priest’s gnarled fingers make the sign of the cross.

I kneel in the pew and recite the penitent’s prayer. Hell’s not so bad, Éamonn says, pulling me into his arms. I rest my head on his shoulder. You’re not real, I whisper. St. Pat looks down from the altar. His painted face shows no mercy. 

Outside is a mist of light rain. I unlock my VW. A jacket is draped across the empty passenger seat. I press its leather against my face. Search for the Marlboro smell of him. And inhale.

________

Roberta Beary grew up in Queens, New York and identifies as gender-fluid. Honors: 1st Prize (Poetry) 2022 Bridport Prize, Best Microfiction 2019 & 2021, Best Small Fictions 2020 & 2022. Their work is featured in The New York Times, Rattle Magazine, Atticus Review and other publications. A trauma survivor, they divide their time between USA and Ireland.

You’ll find there is nothing more terrifying than feeling Little Fur Family by Margaret Wise Brown in the bookdrop. The cover’s cutaway allows a tuft of hair to protrude from within. Your fingers will graze the animal hide and your mind will go to what animals could be dead inside the covered box. Mouse? Squirrel? Ermine? River Otter? Beaver? You’ll recoil, stare at your hand as if you’re Lady Macbeth and something has irrevocably stained your palm. Is there a smell? Shouldn’t there be a smell if something’s decaying in the heap of books? You’ll sniff. You’ll be confused. Then you’ll remove the spring-loaded cart, only to realize someone in the design department at Harpers is an asshole who doesn’t consider the aged hearts of librarians. I’ve lost two coworkers to Little Fur Family. Google it. The leading cause of death in our profession is the sudden shock of the soft pelt where no soft pelt should be. Too many obituaries contain the cursed book. Too many lives have been lost in the service of tactile education. When Miss Agatha, your childhood librarian, has her viewing hour at Doan, Beal, and Ames, you’ll know what landed her in that coffin.

You’re young and have been warned, but someday, you too will be the same age as Miss Agatha and Little Fur Family will still be in print.

It is a classic.

It is eternal.

Little Fur Family comes for us all.

You are no exception.

________

Corey Farrenkopf lives on Cape Cod with his wife, Gabrielle, and works as a librarian. He is the fiction editor for The Cape Cod Poetry Review. His work has been published in The Southwest Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, Uncharted, Wigleaf, The Florida Review, Tiny Nightmares, and elsewhere. To learn more, follow him on twitter @CoreyFarrenkopf or on the web at CoreyFarrenkopf.com