Past

I go, “Please.”

And you say, “No chance.”

So, “Please. Please. Please,” I plead.

“No. No. No.”

Twilit. Almost all dark, outside, on our lawn is the stack of pallets your brother hasn’t come for. Not yet. And not for months. So. Now, when the squirrels successfully dash the street, they catch their breath between the slats. They rest themselves and their two-stroke hearts where the weeds are. But it’s fine. I like the stack. And the squirrels and the road they run. I like the other roads around our house, too. The catcall of the highway not so far from us. That airport. The idea of that airport. Of travel via flight. And bags. And cones. And siren lights that seem like they make noise but really just flash American light.   

“Please,” I say more serious, solemnly almost.  

“Absolutely, one-thousand-and-ten percent, not happening.”

I almost yell, Screw you. But you hate me talking jokingly.

So, instead I say, “Please” quietly, once more like I’m losing.

Because I am a little.

And you know I am but choose to say nothing. You just go back to stretching. Or thinking about stretching. Pre-stretching, maybe.

Then.

Long after you’ve left me, I do paint a big stripe across the garage.

“Like a racecar,” I say huffing, my cheeks tight. Everything blistered.

Everything racecar.

And there are flecks of Real Red in my hair because I am not very good at painting.

I look at it.

Stare at it, until evening becomes night. And night becomes goodnight.

Goodnight being: right about when the teenager band up the street turns down their amplifiers and starts dreaming.

I set down my drink and step back to admire.

To confirm.

The moonlight helps soften things and the line looks tighter the farther back I stand. So, I go way-way back and put my hands on my hips like I’ve really done something.

And.

And yes. You were right. You were.

It’s a nightmare; a complete and total fucking disaster.

It’s exactly––yes.

Exactly the way you told me it would be. 

__________

Sam Berman is a short story writer who lives in Boise, Idaho. He has had work published in Forever Magazine, Joyland, Expat Press, Maudlin House, the Northwest Review, The Masters Review, Vlad Mag, HAD, Hobart, X-R-A-Y, CRAFT, Dream Boy Book Club, and Rejection Letters. He was selected as the runner-up in The Kenyon Review’s 2022 Nonfiction Competition as well as a finalist for the 2022 & 2023 Halifax Ranch Prize. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions and Best American Short Stories. And has forthcoming work in Back Patio Press, Soft Union, and The Idaho Review, among others. In addition to his writing, Sam is also the Director of Storyfort, a literary festival held during Treefort Music Fest every March in Boise, Idaho.

GREETINGS FROM SANDS POINT, NEW YORK!

He’s under firework duress, John Phillip Sousa, down in his basement building a miniature American schoolhouse out of repurposed pieces of musical instruments. I am the glue. He’s making it to be sold at auction to support music education in public schools. John Phillip Sousa had written a march, but there weren’t any marching bands left to play it. Still, they tapped JPS for the job of fundraising. He had wanted to spend the weekend without organized music, skeet shooting. So far, piano wire windows maul the air. Still-wet saxophone reeds constitute the frame. The silver mouthpiece of a flute sends invisible smoke to the South. Out on the school grounds, the spiraling valves of a helicon constitute a playground under which many after-school yokels with lighters will come to feel big again. It is almost ready for habitation. WHAT ARE WE MISSING HERE? he asks me, filling a tiny ceramic birdbath with the played spit of a trumpet. B flat just does something to human spit that can be seen, and felt. YOU COULD PUT A ‘FOR SALE’ SIGN OUT FRONT, I say. I smell sweet, like a too-ripe pear. He applies me liberally to a peg from the neck of a Spanish guitar, pressed gently onto the cello wood front door for a handle. The desks inside are made out of cereal boxes and hold no books, but some kids are camped out beneath them, practicing their active shooter scenarios. The whole schoolhouse already has that abandoned music store look of foreclosure, and it’s just been built. I am doing my best. I KNOW WHAT TO CALL THIS, he fairly sings at max volume. D MINOR. YOU SURE THAT WOULD EVEN FIT IN THERE? I say. I have wanted desperately from the start to call it “American Schoolhouse.” SURE IT WILL. THE WINDOWS DON’T HAVE GLASS IN THEM, he says, marching his fingers into a point. He weaves a roof with the tired horsehair of an amateur violin bow. The stretched-thin mane doesn’t look like it would hold out one sour note. He works out the street address to the percussive tones of AM radio: dully, the house resides on Washington Street. He likes the federalist-leaning stations best because their exasperation is nearly musical. There is melody often in the ranting of out-of-time men. Through the intermittent static, we learn that someone, somewhere, is scared of a lightning storm fencing them in their home without toilet paper. They ask the host sincerely, BUT REALLY, WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO? An answer will be provided, after a quick word from the sponsors. I HOPE THIS GETS THE MESSAGE THROUGH, JPS says, adjusting his glasses to make sure his aim is sure. He tosses a stave paper origami bird into the school yard. He’s written EAGLE across the folded wings in a conductor’s cursive, and the gnarled paper thing is missing its head.            

GREETINGS FROM McLEMORESVILLE, TENNESSEE!

I walked in this morning to Mark Twain shaving his moustache. He was using disposable razors and there were already a few casualties piled on the edge of the sink. They had thick, white moustaches themselves. I said, MARK, WHAT ARE YOU DOING THAT FOR? He said, THE SHOW IS OVER, SON. I’VE TAKEN ANOTHER PART. I had stopped for portage on my way south, and he was drinking from a coffee mug between words and shaving cream was sliding into the lip of the mug. Turns out that was the way that Mark Twain took his coffee: with a few globs of shaving cream. He was holding up a pair of overalls with his body, and he was bare-chested between the straps. His armpits were like snow cones that hadn’t ever thought about melting. They appeared to be that white kind of Mystery-flavored. WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO TODAY? I asked. I was still standing by the bathroom door and feeling that sadness of not being alone in the bathroom. I had been driving for months over the Ohio River. PROBABLY GET MY UPPER LIP SUNBURNT. DO A LITTLE JUGGING. TOIL ON THAT DAMN PAIGE, he said, working a razor through the side I couldn’t see. It all was looking more raw by the second, and so I took off for the door. His front door had a ship’s wheel for a door handle, and so I turned the house East. I walked for minutes down steps that I couldn’t remember climbing. Out next to the highway, I slipped this note in his mailbox. Everything in here was sent to a guy named Hal Holbrook. The whole mailbox is swimming with the sardines of envelopes that request response. It’s damp and shaped like a large-mouthed bass. The mailman couldn’t have pushed another one in here. Here he comes now.

__________

Avery Gregurich is a writer living and working in Marengo, Iowa. He was raised next to the Mississippi River, and has never strayed too far from it.

They named her UMWELT, and she was the metric by which all internal experiences could be judged. They scanned her mind and sampled her stem cells daily to make those little cybernetic pills. Artists could pop one of those candy-coated globs of circuits and cells into their mouths and, when it hooked up to their brainstems, they could see their acrylics in the exact same shades she saw, correcting for defects in their sensory experiences. Chefs would taste their food with her tongue, knowing that their critics would too. She was a miracle for science, a perfect measuring point for any cognitive or metacognitive tests. UMWELT standardized sight, sound, scent, taste, touch. She was the control point, the objective experience. 

Soon, the radio was dominated by classical music and Cambodian rock, because UMWELT loved those genres. She loved Moroccan restaurants, which soared to popularity, ambrosia on her tongue. She was taken to galas in fine silk dresses purchased by her handlers. She loved the dresses. The handlers had dosed up on UMWELT before shopping. So they were the perfect dresses. If you didn’t love them, you were reminded that your experience was substandard.

Same if you expressed concern for the way that UMWELT floated through charity banquets and press releases, a handler’s hand always on the open back of her dress, pushing her like a cloud. The way her glazed eyes stared into shadows. UMWELT never expressed concern for herself, and her experience was objective. There was nothing to worry about.

Humanity understood the universe better, unfettered by differing biases. Everyone felt what she felt, experienced her eyes and ears and mouth and hands. UMWELT’s body hurt, a little bit, everywhere, always, and if yours didn’t, you’d be grateful, but you would grimace in recognition of your imperfect body. UMWELT remembered her dreams every night and most of them were nightmares. UMWELT liked the taste of iron. UMWELT jumped at footsteps and started shaking at loud sounds. UMWELT was dizzy when she saw the sky.

__________

Juniper White (she/her) is a red fox, a librarian, and a ghost haunting a house in Portland, OR, where she studies creative writing and theater. Find her on Bluesky @JuneWhiteWrites. She is a trans author of Palestinian descent. If she was a plant, she’d be a wisteria.

I held Raymond Carver at gunpoint. I didn’t know he’d be sitting in the kitchen when I busted into the apartment of my old creative writing professor, Gordon Lish. Carver gave me the face he makes on the back of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: an eyebrow-raised smirk that said, “give me your best shot.” The 9mm in my sweaty hands grew heavier as he stared me down, holding a chicken wing. He wore a greasy wifebeater. This seemed like the place where guys called them wifebeaters. “Where’s Lish?” I said. I slammed the chamber of the gun back. Carver motioned with his wing. I swung around and there was Lish, also in a wifebeater, also holding a wing. He offered me a seat. “Seems like you’re the real deal, after all,” he chuckled.

__________

Julián Martinez loves Chicago so much, he’s marrying her.

The scientists were holding a press conference.

They often did this and were often ignored. The public was sick of novel findings. They couldn’t figure out why anything the scientists told them mattered and so had decided that, by and large, it didn’t. The press corps didn’t have the option. Their paychecks depended on it mattering, so they had decided that, by and large, it must.

A long table, swagged with industrial polyester, thickly laid with the sigils of corporate sponsorship, waited for the scientists to approach. The journalists circled up, tablets in hand. Very much like sharks scenting for blood in the water, if sharks were able to manipulate tablets.

One by one, the scientists filed out. They looked terrifically pleased with themselves. Something in their eyes, however, made the press corps squirm. They moved funny, too, the scientists. Sidling, sideways. An intern for Quotidian Science, whose body was particularly inimical to the hard plastic chairs, closely packed and sized for children, wrote in her notes: scuttled. She read it back and chided herself as ungenerous. After all, the space behind the table was cramped. There were a lot of scientists. She herself had been known to move similarly under such conditions, fighting to adapt her body to a world that wasn’t ready for it. She paused, pencil raised, prepared to erase.

The scientists told the press what they’d done with—and in the spirit of scrupulous disclosure, for—the crabs. Then everything went sideways.

“You may not like it,” said the scientists, “but this is what peak performance looks like.” The scientists had spent much of the past five years on the same floor of the High Velocity Biology Building. They were unfamiliar with the concept of a stale meme.

“We do not like it!” the corps said, nevertheless.

The principal investigator adjusted her glasses, which no longer seemed to sit right. She said, as if to settle the matter: “Nature abhors a vacuum.”

“What the hell does a vacuum have to do with it?” asked a staff writer from Populist Mechanics. He was only at the presser because he had failed several times to unsubscribe from a mailing list.

“Well,” said the PI, with a thoughtful moue, “crabs are sort of…the opposite of a vacuum, if you think about it.” Behind her glasses, each eye regarded distinct corners of the room. The intern shuddered and wrote: dichoptic and also, beady.

“There’s a lot going on there,” added her colleague. “We think that once you give it some thought, you’ll find that crabs really are the way to go.”

“But what about thumbs?” asked an evotech correspondent from the Attenuated Press. She attributed the wrenching in the pit of her stomach to skipping breakfast, but would later recategorize it as prescience. “People are quite committed to picking things up and also to manipulating small objects, historically.”

“Many crabs can also pick things up,” the scientists reminded the Attenuated Press. “We got very interesting results in our preliminary crabs-with-knives studies, under laboratory conditions.” They directed the Attenuated Press to the third page of the press packet. The results were, indeed, very interesting, although not for the reasons that the scientists thought.

“Also,” added a sociologist, who’d been added to the grant last minute and who secretly resented the rest of the team for looking down on her work, “our exit surveys suggest that subjects who have fully acclimated to crab form are…less interested in picking things up and manipulating small objects, on the whole.”

She was mostly correct. The design of the exit survey, however, had failed to capture how the crabs felt about manipulating very large objects, like the fate of nations.

“We believe that this adaptation will greatly advance relations and understanding between disparate peoples—or crustaceans, as the case may be,” the scientists concluded with thin-lipped finality. “World peace, etc.”

Later, during that inevitable point when everyone’s life was flashing before their eyes, they would hit this moment—about 99.3% of the way through—and think: Whoops.

“Hey, crustacean relations,” said the fucking SEO content guy, whom nobody liked. “That’s pretty good.” Imagining the headline, the scientists felt the first twinge of regret for the dreadful path that they had chosen.

You clickbait writers will be first against the wall when the revolution comes, the Populist Mechanics writer thought darkly. He had a long and ever-evolving list of those who would be first against the wall when the revolution came.

This list turned out to be something he and the crabs had in common.

Nature was always trying to evolve a crab. Nature had expended a lot of time and resources on the project. It had persisted, through king crabs and porcelain crabs, through all the unpleasant back-and-forthing of birgus latro and various evolutionary dead ends. It was as if Nature had been looking for something in all those broad, flat carapaces and wide sternal plastrons.

That’s what the clickbait guy might have said, anyway, probably in an article titled “Ten Unbelievably True Ways Nature is Weirder Than Science Fiction!” and published just in time for Halloween. He might have been wrong about how evolution worked, but he was right on the merits. Nature was looking for something. It had been looking for a long time.

Now the crabs were here, and it was time to get to work.

__________

Anneke Schwob’s writing has appeared in Strange Horizons, Baffling, Nocturne, and elsewhere. Anneke lives in Montreal and can be found online at annekeschwob.info. 

A lighthouse stands. A lighthouse stands sentry some four miles off Ireland’s southernmost coast. This lighthouse is named the Fastnet after the rock on which it was built. The Fastnet stands sentry constructed of cast iron and brick. The Fastnet is now de-peopled. That is, since 1989 its operations have been mechanized. Its operations have been made automatic by computers, the people removed. Its great beam sweeps–wards and warns-off–all without the warmth of human bodies. Without body heat, a cold and desolate slab of shale jutting from an indifferent sea becomes more solitary, more gray, more soulless. More or less without a soul, the Fastnet speaks. More accurately, the Fastnet tweets. It tweets data on wind direction, wind speed, gust direction and gust speed. I confess, I do not know the difference between wind and gust. I confess, I pretend to know the difference between direction and speed. I profess, I have never asked the Fastnet, as such. The ghost of the de-peopled machine, the ghost who lives on the rock, tweets out the weather. As far as I can say, I am the lone soul who interacts with those tweets. I, the lone soul who listens. The only one who weathers. I am its Keeper. Each “Like” makes sea spray explode up from the screen of my mind’s eye. The mind’s eye that sweeps over the vast indifferent sea of tweets (not about wind speed or wind gust, not about direction). I am the single lonely heart applied to the Fastnet. I beat beneath each cry of direction, each cry of speed. I reply when it shines a light out amidst the darkness, bearing news of the wind. I answer that beaming call with a heart, a “Like,” a sign–to ward, to welcome in every sea-battered vessel, claim each isolated light.

__________

Adrian Dallas Frandle is a queer fish and reader of shorelines. “Book of Extraction: Poems with Teeth” out now with Kith Books (2023). Recently, their work has appeared in Poet Lore, Honey Literary, Hooligan Magazine, & The Connecticut Literary Anthology. Adrian holds an MFA in Poetry from Randolph College. Read more at adriandallas.com 

I don’t know what happened. The sun began torturing the moon. Everything visible was scraped with light. The peonies dripped petals in the hedge, and my mind told me everything was directly adjacent to its normal orientation. I had no family to drag me back inside away from the sky. My apartment sat empty. There was a book called Process and Reality on the shelf, there was an alocasia with spider mites. It’s not quite true. I had some family left, but they were distant and insular, withered by their own self-absorption. Having turned inward, they had nothing to occupy their mouths except their own problems. I lay paralyzed in the grass. The house made repeated gurgling noises, and water fell out of a pipe on the side. There were other people living there. I had two neighbors. The apartments were small and connected by holes in the walls. I could sometimes smell smoke.

Loving men had changed me. A clover trembled in the breath leaving my nose. The light had me pinned on the front lawn. I saw, through trial and error, that I wasn’t interested in seizing the vibrating object of love, but rather in manufacturing episodes of pursuit. I wanted to be alive when it was happening, but not before, after, or between. I hated what it looked like from the outside. My family never made eye contact.

A man came walking down the sidewalk, his face, like everything, scraped with light. I saw him before my eyes did. He looked at me bent in the grass and stopped. “What’s happening?” he said, looking at the sky.

I bolted upright. The uncertainty of his question and the insecurity in his voice gave me absurd strength. His gestures were soaked in self-pity, and I felt vigorous in his anxious presence. My purpose began to accumulate around his loss. This vulnerability, a great need for a hand or mountain. The air smelled like peonies. He looked up at the sky again. “What is this?”

Was he weak in the light? Beautiful? Incomplete? He looked at me wonderingly, and I imagined his face in a softer light. “The first law,” I said. “Someone broke it.” He didn’t understand. “Don’t you know the three laws?” Laws of what, he wondered. No man is this innocent. A car drove by in the wrong lane, its driver trying to look at the sky. “What are you talking about?” the man asked again. He was cute in the light. He was troubled and ugly. I could love just about any man, but it put me farther away from everything else. I did it anyway, knowing something of the cost. It wasn’t a choice.

I began to tell him about the three laws. “Bring two teenage boys to the Face every 48 hours. Always walk away from Night-holes. Don’t touch the Orchestra unless-“

“Enough!” the man screamed. He shook his head vigorously, giving me a headache. He bent down in the grass. “I’m sorry,” I said. I got down with him. His sadness filled my abdomen with flowers that were opening. “It’s okay.” He put his hands in my lap. His face was in the grass. His lips pitied the worms. “It’s okay,” I said. “You’re a good boy.” The comfort I offered or the sadness he presented made me recklessly horny. That’s what the longing is for. The cavity. I could be okay with this tableau until something happened to change it. Let them starve in waiting for a crescendo. I’ve had enough of limitations. The world was made and unmade by people who enforce rules for no other reason than that they are rules. “You haven’t done anything wrong,” I told him. His hands held a part of me.

I was aware of the fat, pink, evil flowers. Loving men, you don’t even have to try to hide, but no one knows what it’s like to love a woman either. Everything is stitched together with nothing and governed by a puzzle. The mask is presented because we can understand the placement of holes on a mask, but looking further would be like asking us to take the second letter of every sentence and arrange it into a new one that tells us everything about reality without knowing the rules by which to arrange them. I couldn’t just tell my mother that I was falling in love with men. That’s not enough. She would have to understand that my family feels small to me because they don’t know who I am.

The man whose hands I was in whined. He smelled good, like aged sweat under arms. His legs imprinted a shape in the grass that remained when he bent into another shape. I hated childhood, but this was worse. The best years were lost between, when memories were so bright they became invisible against the backdrop of the reality of having loved so many men in such a short time. “Please tell me what’s happening,” the man whined. He could be imagined to be beautiful. He could be delightful. “Shhh, it’s okay baby.” His confusion or my ability to disrupt it made me think about the future. I imagined him bringing in the cows. We were in Spain. I stood at the door with honey in my mouth.

My dream was interrupted. The third dimension of things was peeled off from the solidity of the others. We experienced it together, an unbelievable pressure. The agony of air, water, and blood filched from us. My soft lungs deleted. Our hands were the pages of books. I think the puzzle that governed us hated that we weren’t intoxicated by the little freedom we had. Someone had broken another law. “It’s okay,” I told him, “you’re a good boy.”

__________

Kyle can usually be found wandering Michigan’s forests, turning over logs looking for life. He currently teaches creative writing. His work has appeared in Clarkesworld, ergot, and Propagule, among others, and he won first place in poetry at Poetic Visions of Mackinac 2022 and again in 2024.

The line takes forever, but finally it’s my turn. I stare at my best friend, tucked into a girl-sized mahogany coffin. Bridget is incredibly dead.

Face painted, hair curled and crunchy, she looks ever so ugly and I wish I could tell her. I lean into the coffin and whisper Ugly, but she doesn’t hear me, so I lean even further––further and further––until I’m inside.

Don’t know why it’s so spacious in here. The coffin closes, and my body falls a good distance, hitting the ground hard. Lights flash and I close my eyes. It smells like dead girls in here. Like meat left out to rot. Like vanilla perfume gone sour.

I open my eyes, and there’s not a Bridget in sight. Only disco balls and blinking strobes and spinning spotlights. Bridget? I scream, and all the girls on the coffin dance floor turn to me. They point to their ears like, Music’s too loud, can’t hear you.

The coffin girls swish, swoosh, gyrate into one another. Music thumps into my eardrums and I join them, gyrate with them, moving my hips in circles like popstars in music videos. I think of nothing, not Bridget, not the smell, not life above ground, only my body, moving round and round like a clock.

After much gyration, sweat dotting my face and neck and armpits, I look for an exit, because there’s still no Bridget, and I must have entered the wrong coffin. I see but one door, tiny, a disco ball swinging above it. I go to it, through it.

Finally! Bridget says, as I enter the small white room, scrunching my body to fit. My tea party’s starting, she says, pulling out one of the toddler-sized chairs for me.

We drink several cups of tea, watery and bitter, until Bridget tells me she’s tired and is going to bed. I remind her that she’s dead, so what does that mean?

Don’t be a beotch, she says.

You’re dead, I’m alive, I say, making sure she knows how it is.

You sure about that? Bridget flips her ponytail and squeezes through the tiny door. I follow. Back to the dance floor. The music is softer now, coffin girls swaying lethargically, some lying on the floor, a few snoring. Bridget’s nowhere. I climb onto a cushiony pile of girls and drift to sleep, deadness wafting into my dreams.

I dream that we’re all in our own coffins. There’s banging to be let out, so much banging. I swell with desperation and start banging too. No one is coming for us, so we bang louder and louder until the banging becomes music, and I wake to girls dancing and spinning and gyrating around me.

I get up so as not to be stepped on. When I look more closely at the girls, I recognize them––Bridget’s sisters, doubled, tripled, multiplied like rabbits. Of course they’re here. They never leave her alone.

There’s a long-haired one I sort of like, pirouetting by the DJ. I grab her and pull her toward a corner.

Lottie, I scream.

What? she says, moving her hips in big round circles like hula hooping.

We should get out of here, I say. Do you know how to get out?

What’s this about, Bridget? she says, inching back onto the dance floor.

My forehead crinkles. Do you smell that? I ask. Deadness hovers over my nose, dense, thick, suffocating. I breathe through my mouth.

I’ve been dancing for days, give me a break, she says, lifting her hair off her back. Do you have a hair tie?

Am I dead? I ask her.

How should I know?

I wander around the coffin, unable to find any more doors. It really is just a nightclub. A nightclub that’s starting to come apart. Wallpaper peeling, floorboards wobbling. The ceiling splintering, opening up. Where there should be sky, only void.

I think back to life outside the coffin, back to me and Bridget’s science fair project. Collecting data about different hairsprays. Our teacher telling us the experiment was moot, as we only tested on our own hair, which was thin and brittle, and not collective or conclusive.

I feel for my longish, blondish strands, but they’re not there. I move my hands up and find my hair swaying above my shoulders, like Bridget’s.

I need a mirror, I tell Lottie, whose hips circle faster, like she has lost control, like she is glitching.

Use my sunglasses, she says.

I look at my reflection and see Bridget’s short brown bob. It’s hard to tell with the flashing lights, but it appears I’m starting to acquire her golden eyes and pointy pig nose, as well.

Do I look like myself? I ask Lottie.

She shrugs.

Coffins are heavy. Pallbearers make it seem easy, but there is nothing light about a coffin. About getting inside of one. I know that now. Now I know. There’s no getting out, and all we can do is dance, faster and faster until it all comes apart.

I swirl my arms like streamers, shake my head, thrust my hips, jiggle my shoulders, tap tap tap my feet, careful not to step through floorboards. When I tire, I sleep on a pile of girls.

Smells like dead girls in here! I scream.

Ha-ha-ha! say the dead girls, dancing around me, against me, into me. All of us laugh, all of us dance. The air gets heavy and sometimes we cough, it’s hard to breathe. Ceiling chunks rain down, exposing the void above us. The nightclub is becoming more void than anything else. Music gets louder, lights flash faster. Disco balls swing, back and forth, crashing into each other, bursting like balloons.

__________

Skyler Melnick has an MFA in fiction from Columbia University. She writes about sisters playing catch with their grandfather’s skull, headless towns, and mildewing mothers. Her work has appeared in The Pinch, HAD, Terrain and elsewhere, forthcoming in Fairy Tale Review, Wigleaf, and Hunger Mountain. She was awarded 1st place in Fractured Literary‘s 2024 Ghosts, Fables, and Fairy Tales contest.

The Old Crooner Makes the Pop Star an Offer

The pop star goes clothes shopping in London. Her usual shopping buddy, another singer, is not here. She has a bad feeling about the other singer, who has not been seen or heard from anyone in several weeks after declaring she was going to Ibiza for a rave. But coming and going from friends’ lives is the price she paid to be successful, and she hopes the other singer has not relapsed into her bad habits that landed her in the papers last year. Together, shopping is a fun diversion. Alone, the pop star’s bags weigh her down like shackles.

Exiting a store, the pop star bumps into an elderly gentleman in a suit and top hat. She recognizes him from her uncle’s CDs of greatest hits of the ‘50s. The old crooner apologizes for bumping into her, and when she says she is a childhood fan, he tilts his hat and says, I’ve heard about you. Would you like to chat?

He does not say, I’ve heard salacious rumors about you or I don’t like your music at all because it represents everything that is wrong about your generation, so the pop star agrees to chat. He hands her a note, with an address and a time scribbled, initials signed. How quaint to be offered anything handwritten, the pop star thinks, how unusual it is that she is on the receiving end of waiting for a signature.

The pop star arrives at the bar five minutes early. The average age of the bartenders and the patrons is fifty. A single saxophonist plays cool jazz in the back corner, the music loud enough that any conversation is hard to hear. The crooner arrives five minutes late, his suit impeccable.

Have I got a deal for you, the old crooner says. A great deal for you. I can make it so for a day, you’ll be a nobody again. Nobody will remember who you are, and your family and friends will think you work at a place like this, that you sing here instead of—he gestures at the window—out there.

What’s the price? the pop star asks.

I’ll take one song, the old crooner says. Pick your least favorite song, and I’ll take it away. You’ll never have to hear it again.

The pop star thinks it over, and this is a fair price to pay. She has been traveling for half a year on tour, and a day off is a dream.

She considers all her songs. On her second album, a slow number co-written by a man two decades older than her who would leer at her when he thought she wasn’t looking. Her first hit single, which she now finds cringeworthy in the sheer repetitiveness of the hook, I wanted you and now I don’t, I wanted you and now I don’t. The song about being the kind of friend that people don’t want to be friends with, someone who ditches old friendships whenever a new relationship starts, a song that was technically okay but sent her fandom in a tizzy as they speculated who she was singing about.

Let me think about it, the pop star says.

Miss, there’s no time to spare. The old man fiddles with his top hat in his hands.

I need to use the restroom, the pop star says, and slides down from the high barstool in search of the restroom. She makes a list of what she would do during her one day free of fame while washing her hands. She would walk down the street and sing. She would visit her shopping buddy, and she would have the energy to talk to her instead of just shopping, pop over to San Diego to see her best friend from home, go on mediocre first dates with strangers without having to worry about whether the strangers were only interested in her because she was famous, visit her parents and reassure them that she was doing okay even though she was just a singer in a bar. Once her day was done, she would wake the next morning and could resume her life.

When she returns from the restroom, the old crooner is gone. His glass is empty, his hat, nowhere to be seen.

She asks the bartender, Did you see the gentleman in the suit leave? The one sitting next to me?

What man in the suit? There was nobody here, the bartender replies. Didn’t you come alone?

In a Meadow of Pop Stars

The pop star moves to Los Angeles at sixteen to discover she is only one pop star in a meadow of pop stars. Pop stars grabbing drinks. Pop stars on the beach. Pop stars in sports cars crashing on the freeway. Ghosts of pop stars in the park, waiting for anyone who will listen to their plotless stories. Pop stars in grocery stores. Pop stars on the roofs of grocery stores, because nothing can weigh down a pop star as they float towards the sky. When the clock strikes midnight on December 1st of each year, the pop stars sing together so loudly that the entire world can hear, a final gasp of freedom before the holiday season arrives and the pop stars are doomed to performing “Jingle Bells” and “Deck the Halls” until January. The first year, the newest of the pop stars covers her ears to block out the noise. The second year, she joins them from her hotel room in Minneapolis in the middle of her tour. When the clock strikes midnight, she opens her mouth, adding to the chorus with noise of her own.

__________

Tina S. Zhu is a Lambda Literary Fellow who writes fairytales and co-edits WYRMHOLE, the terminally online speculative fiction newsletter, from New York. Her work has appeared in monkeybicycle, Lightspeed, and The Journal, among other places. You can find her at tinaszhu.com.

So today Mena’s got a bucket, and a bright, sharp trowel, and a scary-sharp gleam in her eye. Rain’s streaming down, and the air’s thick and gray. Her nails are dirty, and it looks like she hasn’t brushed her hair this week. Nothing unusual there, really. But the bucket, now. The bucket is wooly with condensation, like a window in midwinter.

“I’m off,” she says. “And I think I’m going to be a while. Look after Billy Behind Me, okay?”

Billy Behind Me is either the imaginary friend who lives on the third step of the front stairs, on the far right, away from the handrail and most people’s footsteps, or a cat she had as a child. Sometimes he’s both.

“What are you up to?” 

She shakes her head.

“Damn it, Mena. What’s in the bucket?”

She walks away, heading toward the road, toward the world. I follow, not to stop her, but just to get a look. I only want to see.

The rain is hot. The air is thick.

And Mena’s bucket is cold. A mist is coming off it, the tenuous white of winter breath.

“There’s very little point talking to her when she’s like this.”

I don’t turn around because I need to keep Mena in sight, but I know that it’s Billy, off his step for once, trotting behind me. His voice is higher than I expected.

And Mena’s walking faster than I would have thought she could. The soles of her shoes glint silver in the gray afternoon light.

“Do you know what’s in the bucket?” I ask.

Billy is silent for a block, then a block and a bit, and I am sure he’s not going to answer.

Mena, no surprise, doesn’t stop for lights, or cars, or even the woman pushing a stroller with two babies in it, who has to dodge. I’m starting to get out of breath, but I say, “Sorry, sorry,” as I pass her, which doesn’t make it right, but smooths the woman’s frown a little bit.

“Snow.” Billy sounds fine. He’s just cruising along, not puffing, not sweating, the bastard.

“In the bucket?”

“Yeah.”

I suck in air. “Where in the world did she get that?”

“My friend, your guess is as good as mine.”

I suck in more air. “But what’s she going to do with it?”

Again Billy drops into silence, but it’s a sort of…waitful silence.

Up ahead, Mena’s come to a stop. She’s looking around, this way, that way, every way but behind her. She crosses the street and sets the bucket down. Then she kneels, next to a patch of nothing, a break in the sidewalk that might once have homed a slender, hopeful sapling, back in the days when the municipal authorities did that sort of thing. Now it’s just a rectangle of gray dirt, without even a single skinny weed growing in it.

Mena stabs her trowel into the dirt and starts to dig.

“What,” I say. “What the hell.”

Billy lets out a sound that’s close to, but not really, a laugh. He’s feeling the strain too, I guess, however coolly he’s trying to play it.

We’re closer to Mena now, less than half a block away. Whatever she’s doing, it’s scaring me. Maybe I don’t want to see, I think.

Mena’s digging hard, digging deep. The wet earth she’s turning up smells of damp ashes and rotting paper. But the trowel is still bright, and the bucket is steaming. I can feel the cold coming off it, coming out of it, a tingle against my skin.

We go a couple of steps nearer. Three or four, no more.

Mena stops digging. Leaning forward, she peers into the hole. “I don’t need a bodyguard.” She doesn’t look behind her.

I don’t look behind me, either.

“Or any help,” she says, and sticks the trowel into the bucket, deep, then lifts it out, brimming with snow. Bright. Clean. Cleaner than any cloud, than any hospital bedsheet.

That snow did not fall from the sky, Billy whispers.

“Mena. Where did you find that…snow?” It doesn’t even feel like the right word for something so fresh and pure.

“I didn’t.” She tips the trowel over the deep, deep hole in the mucky dirt, and off slides the snow, in one smooth go, into the earth. “It was a gift.” She takes the trowel, the bright, empty trowel, and heaps it with the terrible dirt, and buries the snow, and that hurts so much that I cry out.

“It’s all right,” Mena says.

I think I feel a touch on the back of my hand, but I don’t turn my head.

“Why,” I say. “But why.”

Billy whispers, “She’s planting it.”

“Are you planting it?”

“Yep.” She tamps the soil down with the back of the trowel, then pushes herself to her feet. “This is a good spot. It’ll be safe here.” She lifts her face up to the rain for a moment, then picks up the bucket, which the rain does not come near. “Until.”

“Until?”

She starts walking again. “Until the future.”

But the future is always here, I think. Every second, the future arrives.

She walks on, not a raindrop touching her. “Thought I told you to take care of Billy.”

“I am.”

And there’s the sensation on the back of my hand again, soft, light, almost imperceptible. The voice is also very light, very soft: We’ll be walking all day. Until the bucket is empty. Maybe until dark. Maybe even after that. It’ll be a long time until we get back home.

That’s a lot of untils, I think. But there are even more. How long until the rain stops. How long until a future is here.

Mena is getting farther away again, but I am keeping her in sight. We will walk until, Billy Behind Me and I. She will plant until. The rain is warm, the shadows are slippery. The bucket is bright, a silver beacon. And Billy is holding my hand.

__________

Patricia Russo’s work has appeared in One Art, The Sunlight Press, Vagabond City, The Twin Bird Review, Revolution John, and Metachrosis Literary. 

Businessmen do not often dwell far from the fluorescent halls of their elective palaces. Still, businessmen go walking. They commute from the private to the public, from the consumer to the producer, and in this vulnerable time, strange or wonderful occurrences sometimes come to meet them. One such occurrence: a certain businessman fell in love with the specter of a great, large creature as she stood at the bank of a stream chewing her ethereal cud.

He had been walking along a narrow path, head down, striving for his offices as quickly as he could. His mind was immune to the brown meadow as he passed, and the dry hill, and the gray and trickly stream that ran along the rocks just beyond. But that phantom, a new sight, smeared by the sun into soft white opacities, did catch his eye; it could not have been otherwise. Infinitely beautiful she was as he perceived her there with the sunlight fizzled and burnt into the mists of her ghostly form. He had the feeling that he himself had drawn the essence out of her, that it was his own face he could see reflected in her glittering fog.

Strange thing: beside the spirit lay her unzipped skin, neatly folded up, and the dun-white bones stacked carefully on top. He snuck and hid them in a close-by ravine behind a blackened bush. He kicked the gray dirt on top of them until the black and white fur matched the rocks around, and her white bones dimmed and saddened into dust. So, she became his. Then, he went and led the luminous, protesting creature to the glass-walled offices where his flock of profits grazed.

Dearly he did love her. He called all the other businessmen and people of the town to her side.

“A marvel,” said the spectators, gathering.

“There is a future in ghosts,” said the businessman proudly. “Ghosts are the future.”

“Pure value,” they murmured. And many wished they too knew the secret of it. For they yearned alternately to have her and to be like unto her.

But for herself, the creature was fitful and hungry, and she longed for her meat and the dried, sparse flowers of the valley she had loved. Here, and like as she was, she could not find a thing that she could eat. She sucked and gnawed at the apples in the stalls; the apples sat there still and sad as glass. Days passed, and the crowd grew, cooing. She nibbled at the grasses that grew up by the houses, and the grasses went untouched. Still days passed, and the throng grew yet again, so loud in their fawning voices. In despair one day, she extended her tongue, a long, pink-flecked cloud of sizzling steam, and licked into the mingled people.

This is not a happy story: one by one, the people, they were withered and were eaten and were killed, still marveling. They were marveling at how the specter had suddenly begun to grow. Indeed, she grew tremendously as she ate them, quickly as a maggot. The businessman was in a rapture seeing how she grew. He delighted in all increase. She swelled; the gleaming custard-colored bulk of her wobbled, expanded, and threatened to break open. The businessman cried out in ecstasy. His thoughts were full of prospects; he could not see the danger there before him, and so he too was taken.

But the end goes thus: when all the eyes were gone, and the specter had eaten all that she could eat, she set herself down on the land and rested for a time. Much later, she returned in her new freedom to the stream where she had been before. Behind the blackened bush she found the parts of her slightly damp, mammalian body. They fit, and welcomed her, and having put them on, she wandered out whole again into the valley. The newly breaking flowers stirred in the breeze. Sparse birds called in sharp, thin trills across the plain. And the sun warmed the fur on her broad back and brought the steam off of it, so that it mixed together with the steam of the grass in the dappled, bluing air of the morning.

________

Megan Barickman is a writer based in Colorado. You can find her on Bluesky at @barickme.

Friday is Johnny’s goodbye party, themed “Italian vs. American.” We face off — tiramisu versus ice cream nachos; Birra Moretti versus Sam Adams; Andrea Bocelli versus Dolly Parton — and vote on winners. The next day, he boards his flight to Rome with my gift in his bag.

On Saturday, for Ava’s farewell, we pile into a party bus and go to a day club where men with hulking shoulders and toothpick legs swarm around the pool. Things are a little quiet without Johnny terrorizing all the straight men, but Ava has a good time, and texts our group a line of blue emojis from the airport: crying face, cyclone, crying face, heart, butterfly, butterfly, jumping dolphin, evil eye. I heart her message and remind her to open her present when she gets to Cairo.

Sunday is Dani’s last night in town, and we celebrate with one of the group dinners we’ve shared since we all first met at a language exchange for expats. Ava and Manu usually make the main. But Ava is gone and Manu finished her own 6-month stay in this city of students and travelers and restless souls a few weeks ago, so my table is light. Those of us who are left pass around bags of double-fried potato chips and tubs of store-bought hummus. Afterwards, I slip a wrapped package into Dani’s backpack and go for a walk past my favorite bakery, shuttered for the night. The front window, usually cluttered with fat floury loaves and glistening pastry snails, is carapaced in thick metal slats.

It seems like I’m the only one who stays in one place anymore. I know my friends will get to their next cities — places in which they know no one, or know just their partner, or know many members of their extended family but are truly known by none of them — and, upon arriving at graduate student housing, or a strange apartment, or a guest bedroom, feel lonely.

The first thing they’ll do is sit down on their new beds, testing the tensility of the blankets and the softness of the sheets, and imagine they belong.

The second thing they’ll do, trying to feel at home, is unpack. Johnny will put up his black-and-white postcards. Ava will light her smudge stick of sage that’s seen the inside of no less than 26 airports. Dani will plug in their white noise machine and let the busy whirring of a thousand fans drown out the honks of Bucharest.

The third thing they’ll do, missing what they left behind, is open my present. Off will come the ribbon, rasped into frothy blooms. Then the paper, thick and crisp with tight corners. They’ll take out the leather-bound album I’ve prepared for them and open the first gilded page to see a photo of us.

When their real eyes make contact with their photo eyes, the two-dimensional ones that I’ve spelled into a portal, their bodies will be sucked through the page. They’ll ricochet like light refracted through a realm I’ve built out of layer after layer of memories, stories, late-night conversations, solemn pacts, and inside jokes. They’ll leave their apartments empty, their partners wondering where they’ve gone, and they’ll travel back across all the miles their misguided choices have put between us. They’ll come back to me.

I’ll know when it’s happened because my own album, sitting on my bookshelf next to the pottery I made with Johnny and the pressed flowers collected on a hike with Ava and the notebook Dani gave me, will start to glow. Light will drift around my living room like barbeque smoke. I’ll go to the book, open it up to a previously empty page, and see a new face added to my collection. It’ll be like they never left.

First will be Johnny, looking so handsome and so confused. The little line he shaves into his eyebrow will bounce around as he waves at me, eyes wide and worried. I’ll wave back and close the book, petting its cover before I put it back on the shelf.

Ava will show up the next day, with her hair curling over her collarbones and her gold necklaces glinting. Her lips will look pursed as ever but I won’t be able to hear anything she’s saying. “I love you, too!” I’ll mouth before shutting the album.

Dani’s usually late, so I might miss their arrival. I’m hiking part of the Camino de Santiago next week. I’m walking it a few days at a time. Every time I do a section, I make small talk with the pilgrims and hear about how most are compelled to do the grueling walk after losing someone important to them.

I’ll pat their backs and buy them beers but I won’t relate, not really.

All my people are at home, together again for any moment we may need each other, safe between the pages of my Friends Forever album, trapped under embossed leather on my shelf.

________

Katherine Plumhoff writes short fiction. Find her stories in X-R-A-Y, The Forge, Flash Frog, Gone Lawn,  Heavy Feather Review, and Best Small Fictions 2024. She is a 2x Pushcart Prize nominee and 3x longlister for the SmokeLong Quarterly Workshop Prize. Say hi at @kplumhoff or katherineplumhoff.com.

My colleague mentions seeing between words. He says if he unfocuses his eyes he can worm his way through the empty network on the page, connecting the gaps, and, once connected, the spaces—or is it a single space, the entirety of a page?—stand out, together in relative isolation, jutting from the typeset, and there it is, an image: a thorny seahorse, suppose.

An optical illusion, or something like, and of what, I can’t be sure. I have no eyes for this, I say.

He, my colleague, says: your brain wants to find the pattern, and when it does, you will think, how did I not see it before?

As if a chain-link fence. I do the very thing: conjoin the points, though not all, as instructed, only connecting those at the largest openings, my brain trying to make something of shapes around letters, but it’s as though I am looking at a chain-link fence, webbed across my vision, my eyes wanting to go beyond, at what the fence holds in, at the sentences. I say: I see the opposite. The negative of what you say to see, only words.

We begin again, my colleague eager for me to do what he does. He explains it will be worth it and doesn’t want to stop just yet, not after a single attempt. This time he photocopies a page. He explains that it’s like looking up at the night sky and connecting stars. But in this case, starting with the largest opening and making a point, then finding another and another. From there, a sort of constellation will form. He adds dots in the gaps, some large, some not so large, but now that I look more closely, there are clearly areas that are much larger than those around it. After dots, lines, polygons, eventually, an image. On this page, he says, a two-headed snake. See?

Not really, no, I say.

Let’s keep going.

As he searches for a new page in a new book, us being in a place filled with books, he explains he is looking for the right page in the right book, an easy example, since I am new to this type of gazing, and it takes time, all of this coming from a lull, a gap where all we can do is wait for a patron to enter and inquire, all other tasks having been completed or having been sent off to others for review, and when they give their feedback we can get back to work, but until then or until there is a patron, there is a lull, and once he finds it, and makes copies, one for him to apply his constellation and one for me to do the same, but before all that, during the period while he sought and I waited, I mentioned canopy shyness, how the branches of certain trees will never touch those nearby. They will grow up and out and never collide, and so there is a perfect trail between them, a void where if you were to look up, you would see channels of light, of air, of clouds, of nothing. I wonder if you can do the same thing with those trees, see between them, and find an image: a leaf slug, say.

He ignores me, preoccupied with identifying the hidden shape before passing me my copy. I follow his process of dot, line, polygon, but the potential paths go on and on. I erase multiple sequences and start again. He assures me that if I keep it up, following his instruction by first locating the larger openings and then joining them, I will soon see how they fit together, their relationship into something I can easily recognize.

Through the trees, through the words, along the chain-link fence and not beyond, I allow the dots to point my way along the breaks, and then the lines come with a drag of my pencil along the paper, until I see. Yes, I can finally see. I show him what I see. I say: a dog, a wolf, a coyote.

Yes, he says excitedly, his eyes lighting up, full of stars, stars which quickly fade when he checks my work, tilts his head, finds we have found the identical beast, some type of canine, in an identical orientation, but in two independent instances; the same conclusion by the same means, but in different spaces: two dogs, two wolves, two coyotes, on the page, through the trees, in the night sky. It takes him a moment, his head full of confusion, needing to shift, reorganize in the initial excitement, in the lull.

His eyes come back, alight. Yes, he says again, truly happy and with something else, not embarrassment, not really, but he appears more self-conscious, less sure, and yet never more sure, when he reveals his prior confidence in the pattern, believing there to be only ever one, always, all this time, but I can see where he can’t, he explains, this is better, he reasons, unexpected but better, he rationalizes. Together, he says, we will see more; together we won’t miss a thing.

Turning back to the shelves, he grabs a book at random—no longer searching for the right page in the right book, perhaps convinced I no longer need it—and without copy or pencil, no dot or line, we try again; we try again until there is no lull, until there is only what we can see, what comes through.

________

Martin Piñol is a librarian. His work has appeared in 3:AM Magazine, About Place Journal, Asymptote, The Journal, The Los Angeles Review, The Maine Review, and is forthcoming in Hunger Mountain Review.

I want to look (inside) and see that the (centre) leads to a different world. A kaleidoscope of a world. And in that world is a brand spanking new. A diamond chrysalis. (inside) the chrysalis is another world that has been eating up the dreams of someone who wants the world to be good to them. That centre, hard and shiny and cutting at a touch so red blood washes over. (inside), in the (centre), is that soft, sweet, can’t get at it to eat, nub of essence of those dreams.

The blood washes over, down and around the points of the diamond to petals, because the chrysalis is the (centre) of THAT flower. Yes. THAT flower. Get it out of my face, the engineer said. I can’t build that vulgar. But he had to suck it up and build because nature is urgent, is dire, can’t wait for nothing. So in the (centre), yes of THAT flower, sits a chrysalis.

It’s a sight fore sore eyes.

Before.

Afore.

Foretune.

And ain’t these eyes sore. In a cry—a REAL cry only two tears because water is hard and hard to take so it burns— kind of way. But this is a sight (inside) a (centre).

It’s not like nobody tried to get at it, them soft, chewy dreams. But it cuts so that this vulgar flower is now a red vulgar flower, enriched by those oxygenated erythrocytes. I call it the Flame because that other name chokes up in my throat. Blood Rose tastes dusty like I’ve been sweeping in a circle instead of out the door. This Flame, I’ve seen it. In a shell that was small with a cue that was curly and a cut down the back to see into the world where the chrysalis sits (inside) the (centre) of THAT flower.

That Flame and that chrysalis. A blade. Leave it alone; I’ve got the scars to prove. And don’t bother with tongs, it’ll cut then too. Even the crane. I heard a man bled out like that once. Even if you can get a really big shell and go through the chip in the back. That’s how I did it, a crawl with a kind of snake and wiggle to get that fatty through.

It was (inside) a room but not the (centre). It’s a kinda-nice-like room. Like a closet, can only fit two people at a time, three if you’re lucky and they’re small-ish. Four, if you stack them like children. And wallpaper like Morris but haunted, by something like dehydrated fish. All that flaky scaly dandruff. Salted and dropping from the ceiling, like when I don’t wash my hair for months. Dry, built up, flakes falling to polka dot my black nightie.

(centre) your thoughts on what it is like to bite a shark. Rub your nerves with sandpaper, break a tooth on a fly. This dream-selective plaque membrane. Dreams in. None out. Doh give dat [REDACTED] chile none. Left are the dreams of someone to whom the world is ungood, which is not bad just bad adjacent.

Enough to flush your pores. Watch those pustules float away.

Where is the time? In here, it’s not. Probably somewhere over there. There being a place I don’t know that’s connected to here unless the time can teleport which, let’s be honest, it likely can. So there is an absence of time, not an absence of motion. You would think that motion needs time, but apparently it doesn’t, this contradiction that we think is a contradiction is actually just how things work.

I came away from that room salty and bruised and bleeding in and out. That’s how everyone comes away. That’s if they come-away-at-all. The bleeding proportional to the attempt: cranes, machines, other etceteras, the less you are to come-away-at-all. Though there’s no bodies in there. No one knows where they go or who takes them, maybe Time. Even if you’re in the room with an entity that tries too hard, you just don’t know. But I didn’t try all that hard. I figured that if I could touch it, I would touch it. I want that mind where there’s dreams of joy, but if I was disappeared because I’d bled a little too much, I couldn’t enjoy it, now could I?

I’ve given up now. Maybe. I still follow the journals reporting the mathematics of the room. There’s two of them. Journal of the Room and The Existence We Cannot Compute. One’s more of the theoretical. The other’s more of an experimental collection of counternarratives about the room. Useful to those trying to touch the (centre).

I don’t know why anyone else wants to touch the (centre). Money can’t be worth certain death or injury. Me? I just want my dreams. Yes. They’re my dreams in THAT mushy (centre) hard as diamond. Just my dreams. Not them other folk’s dreams. But no one believes me when I tell them. “Can’t be your dreams,” an Edifice of a Marginal Lens told me once. “Can’t be your dreams. They’re no one’s dreams. If they were your dreams, you’d be able to tell us what the dreams are and we wouldn’t be risking death for them.”

Can’t argue with a good bit of incomplete logic.

I don’t know what the dreams are because as soon as I dream them, the (centre) sucks them (inside). But I know that I dreamt them and that they’re my dreams because the flower says so. It’s part of those dreams I do remember. The ones of pain and stress and suffering. I’ve seen it right before; it looks at me, shrugs leaves and shakes a petal as though the damn bastard thing is sorry about taking away another happiness.

________

Isana Skeete (none/they) is an ace non-binary Black author based in Florida. Isana’s writing has been published in hex literary, OFIC Magazine and Strange Horizons.

She’s out in the backyard, squatting over a pile of sticks. She just turned up one day, said her mother was drunk, again, and she was hungry. A stray bloody kitten. I mean, I thought twice about it. Who wouldn’t? I asked if she remembered her mother’s number. I asked if I could walk her home. Fine, I said eventually. Then come in and help me light the stove. I’ll make us some scones, I guess.

She comes most mornings now. Early. Arrives out of the bush down by the fenceline, slips through the wire, and walks through the empty paddock. By the times she gets up to the house, she’s wet to the knees, and there’s a dark line through the silver-dewed grass.

I’ve started making jam. She’s just a kid, and a scrawny one at that. She acts like sugar lights her from within, like it’s the best thing she could imagine ever happening to her. It’s only marmalade, I say, because I’m ashamed I have no strawberries, just the orange tree covered in aphids and sooty ash out by the clothesline. The fruit hasn’t been sweet in years. Thought it might be a bit tart?

It’s become a game. I pretend she is Paddington Bear, and she pretends she hasn’t heard of him. I ask when her mother wants her back, and her mouth sets in a small hard line. I do not ask about school. But there are moments, sometimes, when she’s still sitting at the kitchen table fingering up the last drops of jam on her plate, when she tells me things. Small things. The name of her old puppy. The best cicadas to catch. The kind of ice cream cake her brother promised to buy on her birthday, but the shop was all run out.

I’d thought he was younger, the way she said it. Like it was cute. I told her she could bring him next time, if she wanted, and she’d frowned at that. Looked around like she was assessing the place. The old fridge with its topping of greasy dust. The cracks in the window. John’s old show ribbons pinned above the door, the reds and blues all faded and the gold writing rubbing off. The jars and junk on the shelves. Maybe, she said.

Some days, my skin feels so dry, it’s like I could go up at any moment. Poof. I don’t notice most of the time, but some days, I feel very, very old.

I used to know this town. These people. All of us spread across the valley, all of us rising at the same time to get the milking done. And I was one of them so I didn’t have to think too hard to understand any of them. But I still have no idea who her mother is, can’t even think where she might live.

John’s ute is still parked by the house. I’ve thought about it. As if the pile of junk would even run now. As if I could drive through the fog of cataracts, find the girl’s home somehow, and deliver her to a mother who would turn around and love her. And I thought I’d left that all behind, the urge to fix what wasn’t mine.

In the end, John wouldn’t even take his pills. Hid them under the bed like I was a bloody warden. Everything had already been sold off then, except the land. I hated him, I think, for giving up so easy. For expecting me to follow. Or maybe I just miss the cows, the purpose I used to have.

I watch her from the kitchen window, talking to herself and swinging her little head as she plays.  When she finally comes in, she’s holding the little bunch of sticks. Look, she says, pressing it into my hands. I made you.

A doll.

Two arms. Two legs. Bunched grass for the head. A dry tip bursts from the chin, like the long hair I used to pluck, the one that won’t stop growing. My hand goes to my face to hide it. As if I could hide anything from those clever young eyes.

Very nice, I murmur, because she is still looking up at me, waiting for praise, because she is so very hungry and ready to grow, and it is clever, really, how she’s managed to make the thing, tying those limbs with nothing but knots of grass.

Embarrassed, I ask her if she’s going to take it home and show her mother. Then, to correct my mistake, Or your brother?

He’s not around much, she says. Anymore.

And I understand then. That he’s older. That he’s the kind of brother who cares enough to make promises but not enough to keep them. She says it careless, but I see the hardness in her face, and I can guess well enough what it hides.

An ember in me. Orange lines cracking a darkened husk.

I’d make him stay. And I don’t hide my anger. Everyone in her life had left her. I wanted to shake them all by the collar. Chain them down and force them to really look at her. Bring him, I tell her. Next time you come. Tell him I want a word.

He won’t come.

You’re a smart girl, I say. I’m sure you’ll find a way to convince him.

Everything is lit then. I am crackling, fairly humming. And this, this is the magic they talk about. The life she gives me. The life I do not want to give up, or not yet. Perhaps I am too hungry. She looks away. Her attention drifts over the room like a net. But I have her thinking now, I know it.

I set the doll on the counter, next to the stove. The old Aga is still warm, still sending up smoke. And I wait as she works it all out, how different it could be.

________

Jane O’Sullivan is an Australian writer. Her work has appeared in Meanjin, Passages North, Bull, Peatsmoke, New Flash Fiction Review, Milk Candy Review, Flash Frontier and Micro Podcast. She lives and works on Bidjigal and Gadigal Land in Sydney and can be found online at janeosullivan.com.au.

My dear, you told me your dream because it frightened you. But I want you to know that when you children first started appearing on the grassy knoll behind the hospital, we were the ones who were frightened. Even now we don’t have the full explanation of where you come from. You are human, of course, nothing different about your DNA. But you came from a place with much more advanced technology, but also a draconian system of morality.

The people of our world have been assailed by pollution, war, pandemics, our population in decline for so many years, many of us have not seen a child. So, all you children arriving beautiful, cherub-cheeked in the sunny glen in the southern part of the country simply seemed like a miracle.

We would have taken you into our homes; raised you as our own, but you were all so fervently possessed of a sense of having wronged someone beyond reason. You could not live in society; our world was too gray for you, and so we made the compound. I know you all call this place the Ruins. But we live here, we call it home. And we want you to be happy here. That’s why we have teachers and doctors here, to help you take it easy on yourselves. Think about this, can anyone wrong another being beyond the possibility of forgiveness at seven years old? Your utter conviction of guilt made people think that you were angels, fallen from a height – ridiculous, of course. The name stuck, though, and you became the Angelic Youth.

You wanted to know what they mean, your dreams. It means you’re doing well. I’m not lying. Let me prove it to you. I will tell you the dreams of the others.

The Endless Stair: a boy approaches a tower. He is asked a question, but failing to answer correctly, he cannot be transported to the top. Instead, he must ascend the stairs to reach the pinnacle of the tower, and he does not know when he starts climbing that the climb would be in complete darkness, and that even though he was supplied food and water, and every few days he glimpses a light, he will die of old age before he can reach the top. He had missed his only chance, and the rest of his long life lived in the darkness is the consequence.

The Black Goo: A girl pulls out her hearing aid and what comes after is a long, ropy, stringy tangle of black goo, which she understands to be the all the badness inside, and so she keeps pulling and pulling. It is sticky like tar, and even when she has extracted so that it puddles at her feet, she is still not done, because she is so much worse than anyone knew. She still believes she could be totally purified, but there would be a price.

(Many of the Angelic Youth enjoy cosmetics that promise to “get the gunk out.” They like cleanses. They tidy their rooms. They make many resolutions at the new year or their birthdays. You are not alone in that, either.)

The Meeting with God: A boy goes up the hospital stairs to the very top floor, to the upper room.  In the room there is a bed and in the bed there is an old man with many tubes coming out of him connected to many machines. The man tells the boy that he is not an angel. Here is the real story: the boy was grown in a lab, with other children. The boy was told a story about himself, which is that he is bad, that he has done terrible things. Why this story? Maybe it will make him work harder, to never be satisfied, to achieve more. Maybe because it was the story everyone else got, too.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: A girl and her brother are in the glen. The boy raises his arm and calls for the doors to open to the place where they came from, and though the girl didn’t think it would happen, it did. But then, in the space where the two worlds connected, where she and her brother stood, the air ignited. The flame spread to consume both worlds, and she understood too late why the door must not be opened. They have seen her laugh in the Ruins, where there was only ever supposed to be lamentation; she cannot go back.

Right, that’s your dream. It is a good one – the world bursting into flames. A real firecracker of a dream.

Yours is my favorite dream of all of them, do you know why? Because you’re right. You can’t go back. How can you ask to live in the world and be blameless? There is no such existence. To live in the world is to know that you’ll be wrong, you’ll make a mistake, you’ll be ruined. The only hope is in knowing there is no cure. You’re stuck here in the Ruins. Might as well enjoy it. Might as well earn your guilt, like the rest of us.

Feeling better? That’s what I’m here for. I’ll recommend that you can integrate in another six months – nine, tops. Now back you go to art therapy. I’ll see you next week, same time. Yes, I think you will do well.

________

Shiwei Zhou is a Chinese-American writer of speculative fiction; her work is forthcoming from Asimov’s, khōréō, and Diabolical Plots. She lives in the Midwest with her family and a golden retriever named Mango. You can find her on Bluesky at @shiweizhou.bsky.social.

We’re having coffee, me and my sister-in-law Sharon, when Sharon says, “It would be nice if we had some apple pie to go along with this.”

Being a good host, I happen to have a supermarket pie in the refrigerator. I take it out, cut two slices and toss them in the toaster oven to heat up a little.

When I serve though, after taking a forkful, Sharon wrinkles her nose. “Supermarket pie? How can you eat this with all the sugar and chemicals and who knows what else? It’s so bad for you. Let me just pop over to my kitchen: I made an apple pie the other day I know you’ll just adore.”

It only takes a few minutes: our twin husbands Dirk and Dan have always lived next door to each other. Soon Sharon’s back with two warmed up slices. I know I should be polite and praise her for the quality of her baking, no matter how good or terrible her homemade pie happens to be, or her detailed feedback on my coffee making skills, but inside I’m seething. I take a forkful and deliberately wrinkle my nose.

“What sort of apples did you use for this?”

“Granny Smiths,” Sharon says. “Why? What’s wrong?”

“No wonder this tastes so pedestrian. Granny Smiths make such ordinary pie filling.”

It takes her a moment to process what I’ve just said and come up with a response.

“At least I made this pie with my own two hands, instead of hoping a supermarket has any idea what an apple pie is supposed to taste like besides sugar and chunks.”

I stand up. Fine, most people don’t have the time to make bespoke artisanal apple pies to keep around in case their sister-in-law drops by for coffee unannounced and comment on their housekeeping. But neither do most people have time machines.

“Wait right here,” I say. I go down to the basement: I set my time machine to Goddamn Biblical Times, just right before you know what, where I grab a basketful of a particularly long lost variety of apples. That’s right, that kind. The kind you eat and you get the knowledge of what the apples in an apple pie are supposed to taste like, along with everything else, like why you shouldn’t have married one of two twin brothers whose names begin with D, Sharon.

I set the time machine to return a few weeks early so I can remodel the cellar, make my own cultured butter and pick up some exclusive pastry flour sourced from France, and I bake the best bloody pie that lady will ever taste in her life.

Still warm from the professional oven now installed in my basement, I plate two slices and climb upstairs with them, passing myself on the way up. I give my earlier self the grim, “Oh yeah we’re doing this,” look, and she nods like someone who knows the meaning of pie.

I hand the plate to Sharon and smile as sweetly as possible. “I’m so sorry about the supermarket pie. Try this instead.”

Sharon takes a forkful of what has to be the most delicious slice of apple pie anyone on earth has eaten in the last five thousand years. She sets down the fork and gives me a measured, hardened stare, the look of someone who will never admit defeat, or that she married the wrong twin.

“You used a time machine just now,” she mutters. “Didn’t you? Is that what Dan got you for Christmas?”

I just smile even more sweetly. I can only surmise how stingy Dirk is with his presents.

Sharon gets up. “You just get whatever you want, Kathy, don’t you?” she says; then she fiddles with her watch and blinks out of existence.

Next thing I know, there’s an enormous apple tree in the middle of Sharon’s yard. The leaves are unbearably green, and each branch bends with the most luscious of apples, but the rest of the yard is now all barren and blasted with scorch marks.

I hear the moan of lamentations outside, and church bells ringing out, too late, too late, too late.

Sharon returns trailing a cloud of sulfur, looking like she’s been crying blood, and in her hands is someone’s idea of a perfect apple pie.

She sets it on the table. “Go ahead, Kathy. Cut yourself a slice.”

I look at the pie, right there next to all our previous pies, and while my pie is fantastic, hers is perfect. Hers is too perfect, it’s writhing with perfection, it’s practically moaning perfection from all its perfect lattices, little wisps of inexhaustible perfect apple pie scented steam, and I’m kind of afraid to do that. You do not touch a pie like that without consequences.

“What’s the matter, Kathy?” Sharon asks. “It’s just pie. It’s not like I sold my soul for this pie. It’s not like I watered that apple tree now standing in my yard with the blood of our butchered husbands for this pie, Kathy. It’s not like I brought the end of the world a whole lot closer just to bring you this pie, Kathy.”

She storms into the kitchen while I stare at the pie, like it’s temptation itself, a damned thing, but a delicious damned thing, no doubt. Next to which my own pie will never be quite delicious or perfect enough.

Sharon storms back with a knife and stabs into the pie, carving out an oozing, softly moaning slice.

“The least you can do is try some.”

________

Hugh Behm-Steinberg’s prose can be found in X-Ray, The Pinch, Invisible City, Heavy Feather Review and The Offing, among others. His short story “Taylor Swift” won the Barthelme Prize from Gulf Coast. A collection of prose poems and microfiction, Animal Children, was published by Nomadic/Black Lawrence Press. He lives in Barcelona.

It was autumn, a few months into the first semester at Prairie Woods Nursery. The rich, maple’d winds flung ruby leaves from skinny maples.

The children were out. They rang around the rosy and tossed about flying balls and leapt into each other’s arms and laugh-cried. They jumped into piles of shallow leaves, they slid onto tiny plastic Huffies and revved up, revved down. In their Own Worlds, they created and imagined, dreamed wild fantasies of pirates and princes and elfin journeys up high-tipped mountains. They painted Worlds and pushed away nasty truths like Mama never picked them up on time or Daddy was always seen Off with Some Woman. They played by themselves at first, then things got lonely. Too lonely.

So they stuck in friend-clusters, they shook hands and then, at some point they wondered, wondered about the Other Worlds where kids bounced and played differently. They started reaching for each other’s Worlds, crushing into them, complimenting them, they transform into a flailing princess in One World, a monster in the next.

A little girl in the corner gets quiet. She doesn’t speak out as much as the other children and wonders if anybody will see her World. Wouldn’t that be too good to be true? That another child would enjoy the way she can make a frog laugh or she can color a horse or ride a rainbow. For a little while, she waits, waits, and she finds herself passed over by the other children. Finally, finally, just as the sun is flattening over a bloom of purple evening cloud, she sees another child approach. The child enters her World easily, is fascinated by how she colors that horse and that child rides the rainbow too. The girl becomes joyous beyond belief, and she forgets about the children who pass her by, who are finding their own Worlds to love, who are painting their own animals with their baby minds.

As more and more children come to say hello to her World, she remembers how lonely things could get and she wants to reach for them all and bring them to her chest and tell her how lonely things got. So she says the small things that bring little smiles and while they are playing, she bends a flower petal with her baby mind. Despite the clamor of happy voices, she knows the way she bent that flower was reserved only for her.

________

Jennifer Maritza McCauley is the author of SCAR ON/SCAR OFF, When Trying to Return Home, Kinds of Grace and Neon Steel (2/26) She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Kimbilio and CantoMundo and her work has been a New York Times Editors’ Choice, Best Fiction Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews and a Must-Read by Bookshop, Elle, Latinx in Publishing, Ms. Magazine and Southern Review of Books. She is fiction editor at Pleiades and an assistant professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Sailor Moon doesn’t need a magical wand or an idiot with roses. The ghouls that chase her are already a dying species—outdated, second class to the real monsters shouting on the TV. She rides the train with oversized sunglasses and a wig that makes her scalp itch, dreaming of all-you-can-eat dim sum buffets and clubs where the lights strobe just enough for her to find another body in the dark that’ll help her forget her own. She’ll put on the sailor outfit if they ask nicely. If they’re good in the only way that still matters.

She spends her late nights looking up plane tickets to cities where she hopes no one will recognize her. Kirkenes, Chuxiong, Puerto Williams. But every blog says New York is supposed to be nice in the spring. Daffodils and forsythia-draped brownstones. Skies blue enough to sip through straws. She can order a small almond latte at that overpriced Brooklyn cafe her dentist recommended and nurse it for hours in a corner seat. But she’s worried about the bathroom. Those jars of potpourri and wooden sticks soaked in sandalwood and cherry blossom-scented oil perched on a dainty shelf behind the toilet. She’s not sure she could stand the sticky sweet smell. Everything mixes with the lingering stink of the burning ghouls. Sugar toast, cheeseburgers, hot and sour soup, it all smells like burning bodies.

She takes long showers, wondering when the stink will go away, if it’s soaked too deep into her skin. She’s thrown out the old white gloves because the stains never come out completely. Under the hot stream of water, she licks her wrists, wondering if she’s started to taste like them.

Her phone flashes with FaceTime calls from her friends, the upbeat ringtone like the Saturday cartoons she grew up watching. Fighting evil by moonlight, winning love by daylight. She smiles, watching the red and green buttons like colorful full moons, letting it ring. She pictures the bouncing EKG of the other sailor scouts, their heartbeats like sharp violin strokes. She pictures her own heart wrapped in tightening red ribbons. She mutes the sound and opens a private browser. She looks up horror escape rooms within a 100-mile radius and imagines herself as one of the staff, slipping on a chafing bloody gown, prop knife in hand, white make-up smeared over her face. I could scare them too, she says to her reflection in the flickering touchscreen, give them something to really scream about. She runs her tongue over her teeth.

I could punish them real good.

________

Angela Liu is a Nebula-, Ignyte-, and Rhysling-nominated writer/poet from NYC who writes about intergenerational trauma and weird things. She formerly researched mixed reality storytelling at Keio University in Japan. Her stories and poetry are published in Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, Uncanny Magazine, The Dark, Interzone Digital, Lightspeed, khōréō, and Logic(s), among others. Check out more of her work at liu-angela.com or find her on Twitter/Instagram @liu_angela and on Bluesky @angelaliu 

My wife told me about the banging from next door. I told her there could be no banging from next door, because the house is empty—the To Let sign has stood aslant in number 17’s front garden for almost half a year. The shutters are closed. No light ever shines through the transom window above that door.

My wife stays home all day, looking after the baby. She has a lot of time to think, a lot of time to fill. In the void of hours it is not unreasonable to imagine certain things. And I am home late every day; every morning I depart early. I have never heard such banging at night.

Only in the day, my wife told me. There is somebody there.

Impossible, I told her.

Look—one weekend, I showed her: I went outside while she watched from the upstairs bedroom, eleven in the morning one Saturday, to knock on number 17’s front door, rapping three times in quick succession, before pausing to listen for movement inside.

In that pause I looked up to see my wife, holding our baby, staring down at me from our bedroom window. I knocked three more times, louder, in quicker succession, then paused again. Then three more times. Then I crouched down to peer through the letterbox. An empty hallway, the inverted duplicate of our own, returned my gaze. When I looked back up to our window, my wife was gone, the shutter closed.

It is just like that, said my wife from the stairwell. It seemed she did not wish to move from that spot—she hesitated, as if snared in place.

Come down, I said. Come on now.

It’s just like that—three knocks, and then a pause.

You’ve been sleeping badly, that’s all.

No.

You’ve not been sleeping badly?

No, I’ve been sleeping badly, and someone has been knocking on the wall.

Impossible, I said.

*

Things happened. It doesn’t matter how. Sometimes there is no how. I lost my job. My wife left me. It was for the best.

Tell me, I said, before she left me. Is the child mine?

I sleep badly, but rise early every day and dress for work. At seven I leave the house, walk once around the block, then return home. I watch the street from the window. I stand in the stairwell listening to the house and the houses on either side of it.

I have a lot of time to think, a lot of time to fill. In the void of hours it is not unreasonable to imagine certain things.

Yesterday, I heard it: three knocks, from the empty house next door, then a pause. Three knocks and then a pause. Then three more knocks.

*

A pause.

________

Seán Padraic Birnie is a writer and photographer from Brighton, England. His work has appeared in venues such as Best British Short Stories 2022, The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, Fictionable, Cōnfingō, The Dark, ergot., and Interzone. In 2021, Undertow Publications published his debut collection of short stories, I WOULD HAUNT YOU IF I COULD. He is on Bluesky & Instagram @seanbirnie. For more information, see seanbirnie.com.

It isn’t like what I see online.

It could have been a witch. Dark cloak and a creeping way of moving around the room. Grabbing my wrist until I wake up and can’t move.

No, my visitor has a knife.

He stores it on the inside of his cheek, wet against his fangless gums. Plucks it from his mouth as he kneels on my throat. He raises the blade to his own.

I choke on the glitter. The colors he cuts out of his throat. Sounds like a hard rain filling my nose and mouth. A mineral crunch every time I try to move my jaws. To ask him to stop or to let me breathe. To ask him why.

This happens every night.

But, with glitter in your eyes, it’s easier to make sense of the demon in your bed.

The little cuts bring out the loveliest colors. Like those creatures on the ocean floor, eyes bugged out to take in 10,000 more colors than a human can observe.

That’s what it’s like when I look at him. Glowing something unearthly as I run out of breath. But, he’s running out of glitter, slowing from the gape in his throat.

This is the part that sends me searching for answers. What to do here in this almost-out moment between us. What I have to do to keep him from killing me each night.

I read somewhere that this is where you can find some autonomy. You may gain the ability to speak or move an arm again.

One blog recommended carving the sigil of an archangel in his chest. If you don’t have a knife on hand, you can use your nails. Really sink them into the skin, deep enough to feel fluid. But when I claw the shapes, I feel my jaws grow further apart. The glitter piles under my tongue. I die until morning.

Another article instructed me to make a small offering. So I ask him to take my fingernails, painted in countless shades. But when he slips them into his mouth, the glitter burrows deeper into my eyes and I bleed color from my irises. I hate that it makes me feel beautiful.

By morning, the fingernails have dissolved on his tongue and I’ve watched the whole disintegration. My research proves ineffective here. I spend the day plumbing the depths of my computer screen, learning how to get rid of sleep paralysis demons, taking naps to practice my new knowledge, filling my body with colored plastics and aluminum. Pretty soon I’m poking myself with the knife just to watch the glitter come out. The demons laps it up with his tongue. He crawls around my ankles in the waking hours too. In motion and paralysis, we’re connected by the colors I couldn’t see before he first cut his throat for me.

*

I saw a movie once where hell was shown as an expanse of ashen dunes, glorious, nauseating, sad. That’s what’s become of my room in the last weeks. But it’s colors that we wade through each day, from the bed to the computer and back. Awful ones, haunting goddamn colors I wish I couldn’t see. No ashes to eat. Only glitter to slide down our throats.

He even lets me be the demon now—has dug a hole as his bed to settle for the night. I stand on his throat, dig the knife from his mouth.

________

Caleb Bethea is the author of DISCO MURDER CITY (Maudlin House ’25). Follow along to get DISCO MURDERED at http://CalebBethea.com.

A meet-up had been arranged for me to see Chunker for the first time in seventeen years. By then, I’d assumed Chunker had died, like most dogs would’ve done. I knew Chunker had joined the Pet FBI, though, from the note in my then-mailbox on the last day of May nearly two decades ago—same year me and Angie had gotten engaged, same year we’d taken in Chunker, same year we’d gotten married, same year she’d gotten pregnant, same year Chunker ran away and joined the feds, same year as our divorce. A lot was going on then, so I believed in any message that came from a higher power about the things I was losing, especially if it meant they were alright.

I was parked with my flashers on by the city’s pier. It was a muggy morning in early June, and no tourists or fishermen were there yet, just a ruddy attendant in a yellow vest squinting at me from her info booth. I kept checking the time on my phone, then glancing at the car radio clock that was two minutes ahead, then checking my phone again, as if the radio’s time would speed up the phone’s. My background was a photo of a Polaroid—cleanshaven me, full head of hair, holding puppy Chunker up to a cloudy sky. 

A white van crawled from the loading zone at the end of the pier towards me. One of its headlights was out, which may or may not have been a sign from the Pet FBI. This was the only other car on the pier, and it was 6:29am—this had to be it. I realized that my cup holders were jammed with gas station receipts and fast food wrappers but it was too late to clean up the place, or to turn back.

As the van inched closer, I looked to see if the attendant was still staring but her booth was empty. Must be in cahoots with the Pet FBI, I thought, imagining a pitbull wearing a blue polo and a reflective vest. Then I shook my head and rubbed my over-caffeinated temples, staring forward through windshield grime at the approaching van.

There would be no dogs disguised in people-clothes or burlap sacks placed over my eyes or secret underwater bunkers or my sweet labradoodle puppy in my arms, licking my face, heading to his new home, which would temporarily be my four-door hatchback with no A/C. Like my pastor said: I wouldn’t understand any of it, and I wouldn’t have to. 

So I accepted it when the terrier-faced figure wearing a fedora and trench coat materialized on the walkway. I accepted the smack against the top of my car door as I stepped out and a bag was thrown over my face and I saw nothing. When I heard the van turn off and the doors slide open and sets of keys and hardware jingle out of the seats and low voices murmur to each other, pants and whines between pauses—I accepted all of it. A long fart pushed itself out of me as I stood, palming my pockets for my phone to show Chunker our picture.

I screamed when the first bullet was shot, then another, then another, paws squeezing me tight and shoving me onto the pavement, hands on my ears, barks and roars and hisses and unloading machine gun clips all around. A heavy splash. The van peeled off and crashed into something and the alarm went wild. And the guns—endless gunshots, endless howls. I felt sick. Marching boots shook the ground along with my entire body. I didn’t notice my sobs until the pier went silent.

After what could’ve been a minute or half an hour, I reached for the ends of the bag while rising onto my knees. Just when I grabbed the burlap, someone pulled me by the armpits and, while I shrieked and flailed, lifted me into the air. They growled behind me, breath fishy, whiskers jabbing the back of my neck through the fabric. I don’t remember all I said, but my voice was to shreds so it may not have been much. I might’ve been praying. They stilled, meowed like a cuss, then I was on the ground again.

The pier was empty when I got the sack off of my head and the sweat out of my eyes. Only bullet casings by the dozens, pieces of shattered glass around the wrecked van, and trails of blood left. My car—the only place I could call my own, besides the shower at the gym or my sports betting app or my camera roll—had one rearview mirror pushed in, but was otherwise untouched. As I turned to see what the hell had just happened, I saw him over the water.

He was peeking out of the hatch of a submarine—his red shock of hair now grayed. I only caught him for a few seconds, but it was my Chunker, wearing a metal dog tag, holding a hunting rifle. Then he closed the hatch with one paw and the submarine went under.

I didn’t have enough time to shout anything, and by the time I understood that it was him, I was crying. I cried for a while there, in the wreckage of the morning. My ex-wife and I hadn’t spoken in years, but I had to tell her that Chunker was alive. Maybe she’d remember how things were when we owned him, how they could be again. But I had no clue how to tell her. A sense that I was being watched grew—I looked over to the info booth. The attendant was a star-nosed mole.

________

Julián Martinez is the son of Mexican and Cuban immigrants. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in HAD, Hooligan Mag, Little Engines, The Sonora Review and elsewhere. He is the author of the chapbook, This Place Is Covered Head to Toe in Shit (Ghost City Press 2024). Find him online @martinezfjulian or martinezfjulian.com, or IRL in Chicago, IL.

Why do you ask about my mother? I thought the interview was about my music. I will tell you her favorite place was her garden. She cared for it as if it were her child. How often would I seek her out, beg her to sit on that chair, the one closest to the grand piano. Time after time she refused me, only to return to her garden. I often opened the window so she could enjoy both my music and her garden. On those days she would contrive to work at the farthest border. She said my music was a distraction. She said her flowers would perish without her. I find that rather amusing, given the circumstances of her demise.

I wrote only one piece of music for my mother. A nocturne in B flat minor. It will be remembered as my magnum opus. Before you ask, no, I will not play it for you. I composed it as my gift to her memory. I wonder what posterity will make of that fact. A fortnight after my mother died, I had her garden eviscerated. Is not the fountain beautiful to behold?

Let us go exploring. Such a fine morning. Who knows what treasures we will find. Come, give me your arm as we circle the marble fountain. Beyond there is the bird bath. A special surprise awaits past the wooden swing. Tread carefully as the leaves may be sodden from last night’s storm. My, what perfect little feet you have. And how quiet you have become. Is my clasp too tight upon your arm? Look. Beside the ivy trellis. My mother sits on the stone bench. She wears the smile she never wore in life. Bend down and put your ear to her lips. Tell me what you hear.

________

Roberta Beary grew up in Queens, New York and identifies as gender-fluid. Honors: Finalist Rattle Poetry Prize (2023), 1st Prize Bridport Poetry (2022), Best Microfiction 2019 & 2021, Best Small Fictions 2020 & 2022. Their work is featured in The New York Times, hex literary, Atticus Review, and other publications. A trauma survivor, they divide their time between USA and Ireland.

I sold the memory when I was young. The startup offered enough to bridge the gap in my funds for a month or two. For weeks after the extraction of the memory, it felt like an inch wide section above my right eye was missing. I swear I could feel the wind coming in.

When I went to buy back the memory years later, I couldn’t afford it. It had been sold to a firm that resold it to another firm that—

I was six in the memory, walking in the woods on the way home from school, following a path I’d taken many times. It was June, two weeks before summer break. I was about to come upon a pond whose water was covered in all seasons with an inch-thick layer of algae. A steady wind shook the canopy, the sky visible in pinpricks between the leaves—and then suddenly I was back home, my handle on the round knob of the rear door, relieved to see my stepfather’s car was no longer in the driveway. If anything unusual happened on the walk, the significance was wiped as well.

The category in the memory’s publicly available metadata was, “Insight.” The description read, “A six year old boy fully, completely, totally understands his place in the universe while walking around a pond.”

Years later, I became obsessed with recovering it. I went to a support group, but they only offered a way to manage the absence. I found a pirated version of the memory, but it was just an hour of static ending with an advertisement for a cruise ship. I would stare into the gray noise, convinced I could see the curve of the pond, the pattern of the leaves.

Later, the firm that owned the memory went out of business. I lost track of who bought it in the liquidation sale. And then the rain came, and then the drought, and then the infestation, and then the light grew toxic.

After a period of silence, those forces withdrew.

*

During the blights I had next to no desire for the memory, but in the silence, it came pummeling back. I no longer thought concretely about the need; I only felt it.

I traced ownership of the memory to an old woman on an extended cruise in the Pacific. She’d bought most of the available memories from that time period—well worn by that point, devalued through use—but was unwilling to sell or rent them.

My stepfather’s meager inheritance had whittled down to a reproduction Eames chair and some leafed-through comics. I liquidated everything to rent two days in a shared berth several decks below hers.

I was helicoptered onto the ship mid-voyage. Ahead of it, rows of turbines fixed at a distance ate the top layer of oceanic trash. From time to time, a turbine would hit a fish and send a quick jet of red spitting out the back. No system is perfect; no progress is made without a cost, my stepfather used to say, slurring. The ship left a strip of clear blue water in its wake.

In her cabin, invited under false pretenses, I demanded the elderly woman show me the memory, but she refused. Her body had contracted in on itself like a fist. “I couldn’t if I wanted to,” she said. The device she had to replay the memory—a chrome monolith occupying a full quarter of her expansive berth—had been configured to show all the memories she owned all at once. Through overuse, they’d fused.

Her hands shook like branches in the wind. Her pupils gave the impression of infinite depth, not flatness. Before I met her, I looked up how she had acquired her wealth, but I didn’t understand it. It involved the buying and selling of things I didn’t think of as commodities: thought, burden, and time.

“Then show me all the memories,” I said, but she shook her head.

“The combination of them, the shape the melt makes—it’s mine.”

*

At that, the upper level of the boat caught fire. According to court documents, a candelabra tipped over in a ballroom causing the velvet wallpaper to go up like a cheap wig. I surprised myself. I picked up the old woman and removed her from the room. I left the memory machine behind. It was too large to carry, but she insisted I go back, yelling about a removable hard drive and jabbing her pointed elbow into the crown of my skull.

It was too late by then. The boat listed left then right. We weaved our way across the slanted deck, dodging flaming debris ejected from above. I carried her over the side of the vessel and into a lifeboat.

The ship went under the skin of plastic and trash, but not before lighting the skin on fire. It was just us in the lifeboat. We were lucky to be drifting in the clean, nonflammable wake.

The other boats?

One by one into the wall of flames.

Night fell, day came. The flames exhausted themselves. We ate rations from a metal box on the lifeboat, flavorless gels the colors of plastic gems: seven emerald, one ruby. She wailed at the loss of the memories. Her pale skin somehow did not burn, did not blister. She tried to claw out my eyes, but her limited reach only bloodied my shoulders.

Time passed. The sun seemed to have stopped rotating, fixed above in permanent day.

Throat dry and croaking, I asked the old woman to tell me a story.

She pursed her cracked lips. They folded in like origami. “Alright,” she told me. “But all of it, all at once.”

________

Will VanDenBerg’s short fiction has been published in X-RAY, Denver Quarterly, New South, and elsewhere. He is a graduate of the Literary Arts MFA program at Brown University and lives in Queens. 

After you die, your shadow attaches itself to me.

This morning, you stretch long and broad as I begin my walk. I change direction and walk into the sunrise, hoping to shake you off. But there you are, on the ground in front of me in your ludicrous gumshoe hat, like a character in a noir film. 

Yesterday, you ruined my moment with Ben. 

“Go away!” I stomp on your shadow with one foot, then the other.

An elderly lady walking her dog throws me a worried look. 

*

To distract myself, I turn on music, huff when orchestral music soars―it’s your playlist. For you, music had to be “complex, exalting, classical.” You said popular music’s sameness is numbing, that the puerile lyrics will turn my brain into mush.

I believed you.

You were the scientist, all logic and numbers when I craved emotion. You explained relationships clinically, something about matching attributes causing a response within cells. Ben’s your opposite. He lets me be who I am.

I don’t need you to tell me shadows are formed because of the absence of light―any object blocking the rays will create an area of darkness on the other side. But nothing I’ve read explains why the shadow that follows me everywhere is yours, not mine. 

*

Last evening, Ben took me to Fountain Hills to see the famous fountain spray water 500 feet in the air. I knew what was coming because he had one hand in his pocket the whole time, because he’d never taken me to Fountain Hills before, because, unlike you, he likes to make special moments memorable. But just as the majestic fountain rose and he pulled me close, you inserted your unwelcome self between us. My skin erupted in goosebumps and I shivered, moving away from Ben. 

“What’s the matter?” he asked, puzzled, hurt. 

The moment evaporated. 

*

I clench my fists, enter a tree-lined avenue, boughs casting patterns on the road. You superimpose your shape over the leafy mosaic. I quicken my pace and you follow, just like you’d chase me with phone calls when I was at the grocery store, at the bank, at lunch with a girl friend. 

I jump to the right. You leap with me. I hop to the left. You pivot as well.

“What do you want?” I shout. 

Remember, I told you voulez-vous means “do you want” in French? Remember you said my tastes were abysmal? Remember, you put your hands over your ears, raised your eyebrows? Remember I stopped listening to what I liked? Remember I watched the movies you liked to watch, read the books you said I should read?

I stop, gather my breath. It’s time to erase your playlist. Your shadow stands still.

I find “Voulez-Vous” on Spotify and when the upbeat instrumentals begin, I move my feet faster, then find the rhythm to dance my way down the road. 

The elderly lady with her canine is seated on a bench at the end of the street. She shakes her head as I approach. Her dog barks, pulls on his leash and paws at your shadow, the shape getting smaller and smaller.

I turn the volume up, sing loud. Your shadow shudders, folds into itself.

________

Sudha Balagopal’s writing appears in Smokelong, swamp pink and Vast Chasm among other journals. Her novella-in-flash, Nose Ornaments, runner up in the Bath contest, has recently been released from Ad Hoc Fiction. She has had stories included in Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions and the Wigleaf Top 50. 

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.

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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 😭