Kat F. Ellison

Underneath the Surface Tension

1.

Time ticks on but I can’t hear it when I dunk below the water

The world is blurred and chilled underneath

Bones don’t crack

Muscles don’t throb

I am suspended in every dimension

But my lungs search and fill and contract and flood the inside of me with desperation until I pull my nose and lips above the water, breaking the calm above me

Dad stands at the edge of the dirty pond

Arms hover and feet almost dip in, like he might join me,

Like he was thinking I might not come back up

Every inch of him covered by his royal blue sweatsuit, the hood up and strings pulled close to his face

Every inch of him sprayed with nearly toxic bug spray that makes me cough

And when I break out of the water he slugs me inside a towel

We don’t go outside without protection

Lily pads surround the circumference of the pond, green and black frogs blend and slide in and out

Dark water, serene without me

Humid air, perspiring, buzzing and humming with all the unseen things

Sometimes it feels safer to drown

2.

There are eight million things that can kill you

I count them before I fall asleep instead of sheep

Dad kisses me on the top of the head and even though I’m too old I let him because that’s all he has to kiss anymore,

I could never have imagined how quiet the house would be without her

Dad mumbles I love you, then clears his throat and says it louder, with distinction and purpose, because he wants me to believe him, and I do

I try not to hate him

I don’t really hate him

But he doesn’t know how to be himself and her, they were not blended like the frogs in the pond water, they were perfect and separate,

I try not to hate him

But I’m sixteen and it’s easy to hate things

In the morning I make his coffee and pour in too much milk because that’s how Mom would do it and I like to think he hates me (back) for that but I have no proof because he just smiles and slurps from his mug and she used to remind him how ugly that sound was but I can’t do it I can’t do it so I just listen to the slurping and then grab my backpack and run.

3.

The high school, on its dry hillside, is quieter than it used to be, than it should be

First it was all the rain, the mud, the flooding, the kids who lost their old brown teddy bears in their underwater seaweeded homes

The kids who lost their dogs and cats and guinea pigs,

Who started walking to school because their cars floated down the new rivers,

Who used to sit and smoke on their childhood swing sets,

Now there are no house pets, the smell of bloated, wet, and dead are too fresh in our minds,

Now no one drives, even if the cars were here we wouldn’t,

Now the childhood swing sets are just dangling chains

We own a house almost to the top of a winding mountain road (so yes, I walk to school uphill both ways) and didn’t fear the rising, flowing river so much

But Jetta did

And Sophie did

And Rabbit did

And Frank did

And Tyler did

And Lucky did

And Chester did (we didn’t make fun of his name so much after his house collapsed)

The water consumed the high school hallways without ever making it through the giant, swinging doors

Our bones crack

Our muscles throb

We walk to Biology and Environmental Science class dragging sledgehammers of memory behind us

We now hate Biology and Environmental Science but everyone, everyone presses upon the importance of science like it’s the only thing left that matters

Lucky plugs their ears during Environmental Science with cotton balls and Mr. Shapiro says nothing

Chester read comic books during every class before, does still, and always will

Tyler and Rabbit play some shit game on their phones during Biology, yell out and swear during lectures, and Mrs. Bello says nothing

Now Mom’s dead and I listen to all the lectures and take notes and raise my hand because anything is better than remembering

I’m a better student now than ever

Joking and snorting with friends tends to the past like trying to squash all the disease-ridden bugs with tissue paper

We are living in a jungle now. Stories upon stories of plants have begun to swell and tower above us and we’re expecting crocodiles to inhabit the rivers any day now. Giant, beautiful, rainbowed, and also miniscule angry insects buzz around and kill us so everyone carries a swatter tucked into their tucked-in sweatsuits with the perspiring air rising above us and we, no longer remembering the world as it was, no coldness or ice, no summer nights at the fair, no fireworks or parades or baking in the sun in beach sand. Just this – hellish, sweating place we call home now

4.

I’m going to build a time machine, Rabbit tells us at lunch

He’s the hottest boy in the sophomore class

His jaw bones could cut glass

Our temperatures elevate while staring at him

Tyler barks, a time machine, what are you, twelve?

Rabbit shakes his head so fast we can barely see it, I’ve got it all figured, it’s gonna work, I’ll go back and fix everything

Fix what? Tyler spits

He spits

And I imagine it fizzling away like bacon grease

Fix, you know, the world, so it’ll be better than this

We love Rabbit for thinking this way,

Me and Jetta and Sophie and Frank

Chester doesn’t sit with us anymore

Prefers the safety and company of his waterlogged comic books

Jetta says: I like it, what’ll you do to fix it though?

Frank says: well, the time machine has to work first

Sophie twists her black hair and says nothing

I look up and wish for a time machine more than anything, I wish and wish and wish and I can feel my throat getting thick and sore so I say nothing too

5.

At home

At night

Doing homework

I look at other variables besides x

There is y and z and sometimes m and i

i stands for imaginary

And I like the way the word feels in my mouth, the vowels, the soft G sound

Dad hovers over the pasta pot like he’s trying to steam away the pores in his skin

With the heat like this, already suffocating, I wish he would back up and crack a cold one

But he doesn’t drink anymore

I asked him why, once,

I need to feel it, he said

There’s nothing to celebrate, he said

I need to feel it just like this

He stirs the bubbling pasta, the water transforms into an ugly starch that I know will be hard to clean off the metal

He used to be the chef of the family, would celebrate by cooking us fancy meals with cilantro and mint and almost always a form of potato –

But now I do most of the grocery shopping and we eat a lot of cereal because I never know what to buy and food is different than it used to be, living in this flooding, bug-riddled, jungle world

Dad’s old olive green shirt slags over him, he wears heavy, oversized shirts that used to fit him so I won’t see the edges of his bones, just the sweat seeps through the fabric

He seems so small without her here

If I gaze around him, not through the window but between the triple panes,

I can see him back when his clothes still fit right

I see him beer-handed and merry with teeth-showing laughter

I see him tugging on Christmas lights and swearing at them

I see him dancing around our Christmas-lit living room, swaying his embarrassing hips to “Jingle Bell Rock”, nudging at her with them until she joins him

i is for imaginary

In silence, we eat soggy, overcooked pasta with cold marinara sauce

6.

Rabbit lost his mom in the first flood that no one was ready for,

She’d taken some pills and drunk some wine and when the water came during the blinding night it just ate her up

He lives with his uncle now, who, in a sincere effort to provide what was lost gives Rabbit almost anything he wants (except beer, apparently the uncle knows better than that)

The day I went back to school after my mom

I thought maybe we’d share something, Rabbit and me,

Because while others had lost things, no one else had lost anything so severe

But at first he couldn’t talk to me

And then he could talk to me but couldn’t look at me

And I was delicate without him, the only person who might know, feel, something, might tell me what to do, how to survive this next second –

But the first day he looked at me, after my mom, he blushed so hard and hot, and I knew he saw me as a mirror that could only crack and shatter all over him

And I understood

That night, Dad told me to don my lightweight daisy-yellow sweatsuit with my wetsuit underneath it and he drove us to the pond

Why are we here? I asked

Mom used to come here to think, he said.

Before everything went wrong.

This is the spot mom became my fiancé, and then my wife,

This is the spot we named you,

And when things got bad,

This is the place Mom told me she would never give up, even if it killed her.

That is why we’re here.

I broke into the water, let it splash around my cheeks, with my eyes closed I saw bubbles form and rise above me as I sank, let the blur and chill hold me, and from beneath the surface I swear I could hear Rabbit’s edging voice calm and clear and also somewhat broken, and he was saying you and me, you and me

7.

Toward the end, Mom had a fever so high she forgot who I was, who dad was, where she lived, and it’s the fear and confusion on her bleak, blanched face I remember best before she stopped breathing

She kept asking for something to drink and I gave her ice chips which she spit out at me

Mom lost consciousness and I thought of her dancing around the living room with dimples and love sewed into her face

She danced with AirPods in her ears so I wouldn’t hear all the swearing that her favorite artists sang,

And so it always seemed like she danced to silence,

And she shimmied and threw up her arms and she swayed and pulled and jumped

And pretended she was that girl she from way back when,

In a club that must have had bouncing lights and beer-sticky floors and friends loudly shouting for one another, reaching and stretching and embracing and grinding

Dad would watch her, grinning so wide I thought his lips might crack open, because he remembered and knew and loved all of her –

I have a video on my phone of it that I won’t watch

But I’m glad I know it’s there

8.

I’ve been collecting materials for my time machine, Rabbit says between bites of cafeteria pepperoni pizza

And Tyler snorts, rolls his eyes so high I hope they get fucking stuck

Jetta says: what kind of materials?

Frank says: can I help?

Sophie scrapes her elbow skin, smiles, nods, nibbles little bits of one half of her peanut butter and Nutella sandwich that she won’t finish

I feel myself lifting through my gut and esophagus and out of my skin and eyes and ears and mouth and all of me is hovering over our little group, floating with hope-infused lightness, until the real real me looks up and laughs at my hopeful, floating little ghost because i is for imaginary, and I smash back into myself, so full of hate and spite and I laugh and laugh and cry big tear-droplets and wobble away laughing so hard I can’t walk straight

Later: Jetta and Frank and Sophie fold their arms and pout their lips,

They sit me down in the abandoned, post-lunch cafeteria for a scolding,

You hurt his feelings, they say, one of them or two of them or all of them,

Jetta says: of all people

Frank says: we thought you’d be the one to get it

Sophie uncrosses her arms and hands me the second, untouched half of her peanut butter and Nutella sandwich

I’m sorry? I say, and wince

Two pairs of arms fold even more across their collective bodies, if that’s possible, like they’re trying to shield themselves from my insincerity

Jetta says: we’re not the ones you should apologize to

Frank says: go talk to him, figure it out, it’s your mess

Sophie drinks her chocolate milk with a straw, still somehow manages to spill a little on the chest of her favorite lavender colored sweatsuit

I take a too-big of bite of Sophie’s sandwich and have to chew for a long time before I can swallow

The alarm bell rings

Students should pack their belongings and head home, storm warning, preceding the storm an insect warning, keep your sweatsuits pulled tight with hoods and masks on, socks pulled up over your sweatsuits – once home, stay home, stay indoors

Students should pack their belongings and head home, storm warning, preceding the storm an insect warning, keep your sweatsuits pulled tight with hoods and masks on, socks pulled up over your sweatsuits – once home, stay home, stay indoors

Everything will have to wait until tomorrow

I stare out my bedroom window with my hair down, in a crop top and a pair of pink and skimpy gym shorts on, watch the storm tear through the trees and think how free it would feel to go outside just now, with nothing else covering my skin, the bugs all hiding from the storm, just like us, but me out in the thick of it, dancing while the water spills down until time stops and the sky drowns me

I dream of kissing Rabbit everywhere except his beautiful, blabbering mouth

9.

A knock at my door in my dreams

Rushes me up to real life

The storm is gushing, raging, against my window, and I hear Dad swishing down the stairs, unlocking the door,

The sound of the storm swirls inside our home until the door clicks and it stops

Muffled voices; people downstairs

I hurry down still in my crop top and shorts

Rabbit and his uncle stand there in hurricane coats, leftover rain sluices down them and forms little puddles on the floor

He won’t look up at me

Men talk and I don’t hear them, just stare at the mouth I didn’t kiss and couldn’t kiss and won’t tell him that I didn’t and I couldn’t

Dad says: take off your coats, come on in, we’ll fix some tea

Dad says: we had a generator put in years ago, so grateful for it now,

Dad says: make yourselves at home

Rabbit wilts into our cream-colored couch, puts up his sock-feet on the coffee table

Hasn’t even brought his phone

His uncle says something about being underwater that I don’t quite catch

Men stand together in the kitchen and wait for the teapot to boil

I sit on the coffee table next to Rabbit’s ankles, rest my naked feet next to his slouching hips

I’m sorry, I say

He shrugs

No, I mean like –

Rabbit leans forward:

You don’t have to say it,

You shouldn’t,

It was a stupid idea

It’s not stupid, I say

Isn’t it? I think

Isn’t it stupid to hope for things to change, to reverse, to edit themselves, delete, start over?

Come with me, I say

Rabbit follows me into my bedroom and we sit on the floor

What would you do with your time machine, I ask

Bring back Mom

I nod

I know

I get brave

Tomorrow, whenever the storm ends, let me bring you somewhere

Okay, he says

Okay

I give him a fluffy white pillow and he sleeps on the floor like a child, his knees curled to his breast, the blanket tucked into his elbow like he’s pretending to squeeze an old brown teddy bear

I try not to be such a creep and watch him as his chest rises and falls

Tears gently fall down his cheeks, across his nose, wet my pillow, but he doesn’t wake up

10.

Still raining but the wind doesn’t whip and the tree branches are still

We go out in our wet suits with hurricane coats on top

Dad and Uncle grumble but won’t let us go alone,

We pile in Dad’s truck and drive, the rain making no sound against the window glass,

The only sound the firing engine

At the round pond Rabbit and I shed the coats and dive on in,

Rabbit follows me to the middle where we tread cold water and our breath comes staggered and uneven

His scorching, cutting face the only thing above the surface

Like this, I say, you hold your breath, and hold my hands, and we plunge in, sink as far as you can, stay there as long as you can

Why? he asks

You’ll get it when you try

We make loud sounds as we suck our breath in and break the surface tension

Into my, our, blurred, chilled world, and his hands find mine and squeeze them

And everything in the world is dark

But nothing is broken

And nothing hurts

We live in temporal suspension

---

Kat Ellison graduated from Johns Hopkins’ MA in Writing Program and lives in the woods of southern Vermont. This will be Kat's second published piece. Her debut publication appeared in Litbreak Magazine in December, 2024. She is currently an MFA candidate at the Bennington Writing Seminars.

Judith Lysaker

What She Knows

She sets out in the cold. She was right to come, despite the storm and the fading day, right to leave her house, that was being boorish about her needs. Only yesterday, the kitchen refused to keep things in place, and caused her to waste her time looking for a can opener, which was lying beside the bottle of Vodka in the freezer.

She walks in the woods now. Pleasing patterns of snow cover her coat. The trail remembers her footsteps, and the oaks greet her kindly with their winter leaves. She feels at home here, the grayness layering itself in tree bark and cloud. Soon, she is on a ridge above the snowy reservoir where the wind shows off its velocity. She listens as its secrets merge with her own and watches the clouds bend back the edges of the sky to show her what she needs to know. “Ah, yes!” she says, but it returns to the sky.  

The path forks in front of her, and she hesitates, daunted by the familiar confusion. She sees a sycamore at the edge of a thicket of pines and takes the path toward it, detecting a hint of recognition, feeling more resolute in its presence. She walks on, though the path is longer than she remembers, and her steps become heavy in the snow-covered needles. She is tired now. The frozen ground calls to her. She lies down and relaxes into its firm welcome. In the dwindling light, there is a moment when she hears a thought sweep through her—someone might be wondering where you’ve wandered off this time—but it leaves in an instant and with forgiveness. So her mind lets go of all effort, and she lies in forgiveness, with the trees hovering over her like benevolent giants, her eyelashes tingling with slivers of ice. The wind fills her, and she smiles while she watches all she once knew flash brightly and disappear. 

---

Judith Lysaker lives in Indiana with her brilliant, veggie-loving German Shepherd. An erstwhile academic, she now spends long hours writing short forms. Her work has appeared in Gone Lawn and *82. In her earlier career she published books with Teachers College Press and the National Council of Teachers of English.

David Partington

Endless Pageant of Love, Beauty, and Quivering Delights

Francois was guiding his sheep through a muddy field when out of nowhere he heard a voice.

“Watch your step.”

He looked around but could see no one.

“Down here,” said the soft, husky voice.

Francois lowered his gaze.

“Yes, I’m a talking sheep,” it continued. The shepherd’s eyes widened as he took a step back. “Émile’s the name. I joined your flock earlier this morning while the rain was coming down.”

“So, are you really a prince or something?” asked Francois.

Émile looked up at him with gentle grey eyes. “You’ve been reading too many fairy tales.”

“Well, am I going to get three wishes?”

“Actually, you get unlimited wishes, but for each wish I grant, you must perform a task.”

“I know what my first wish will be,” said Francois with a grin.

“What’s that?”

“That I don’t have to perform any tasks.”

Émile chuckled. “That’s not the way it works.”

“Okay, but what if I want a brick of gold? Can I have it?”

“You can have the moon if you want, so long as you do what I ask. For a brick of gold, I might ask you to sit on a flagpole for a week.”

“A week? That’s pretty harsh. But never mind, I’ll think of some other good wishes.”

As they tramped through the wet grass with the rest of the sheep, Francois was full of questions. “So how come you’re magic?”

“It all began when I met a wolf carrying a golden amulet,” said Émile.

“Where did the amulet come from?” 

“The amulet came from the bottom of an enchanted well.”

“How come the well was enchanted?”

“Because a magic fish lived there, and there was a mermaid who—look, it doesn’t really matter. You mustn’t expect to understand everything in life. Just know that the world is complicated and full of surprises.”

“Yes,” Francois agreed, sidestepping a puddle, “I see that.”

“I can’t change the way people think, but beyond that, your future is in your hands. Play your cards right, and your life will become an endless pageant of love, beauty, and quivering delights.”

Francois stopped walking. Up ahead, a raven-haired young woman was walking along a path that crossed the field. Her name was Hélène, and she was a lacemaker carrying some of her work to a market in the nearby village.

“It’s her,” said Francois reverently. He had long been smitten by Hélène’s beauty but was too shy to approach her. He told Émile that he wished she liked him. 

“Maybe she already does. Go up and talk to her.”

“No, no! Not like this. Look at my crazy hair.”

“I can use magic to give you a haircut,” said Émile, “but not until you perform a task.”

“What’s the task?”

“You must go up and talk to her.”

Francois stood and fidgeted for a moment. “What will I say?” 

“You can tell her you’ve met a talking sheep. That should pique her interest.”

“Good point.”

So Francois went up to Hélène and said, “Hi, I’m Francois.”

“Yes, I know,” she replied with a smile. “We went to Sunday school together.”

Francois blushed, then got straight to the point. “Hey, look, I’ve found a talking sheep! Say hello, Émile.”

“Hello Émile,” said Émile. “It’s true—I can talk. And I can do magic too.”

“That’s right,” said Francois. “Watch—he’s going to give me a haircut. Go ahead, Émile.”

Émile blinked his eyes, and Francois’s hair started moving around as if in a high wind. In less than a minute, his traditional bowl cut was shortened on the sides and given a dramatic sweep.

Hélène was amazed. “Why, look at you—all fancy like the miller’s son.” 

“You know the miller’s son?”

“I danced with him last week at the fair.”

“Oh?”

“He’s very light on his feet.”

“You don’t say.” Francois had never met the son of the wealthy miller but envied all the attention he seemed to get from girls in the village. Noticing a faraway look on Hélène’s face, he took that as his cue. “Come along, Émile. I bid thee adieu, fair maiden.” As he spoke, Francois bowed low and attempted to remove his hat with a gallant, sweeping gesture, but since he’d left his hat at home, the effect was ruined, and he just backed away awkwardly.

“Okay, bye,” called Hélène cheerfully. She continued on her way as Francois and Émile went back to the field to rejoin the flock.

“I feel like such a fool,” Francois told Émile. “‘I bid thee adieu, fair maiden.’ Who talks like that?”

“Maybe she thinks you’re charming and unique.”

“No, Émile. The one she thinks is charming and unique is the miller’s son. It sounds like he’s a good dancer. That’s what young ladies like nowadays. Do you think you could teach me to dance? I mean, as a wish?”

“I could make you dance well for a minute or so, but it would require some work on your part.”

“Hélène said the miller’s son is ‘light on his feet.’ I just need to show her that I can go one better.”

For the wish to be granted, Francois was given the task of going meticulously through all the nettles growing on a nearby hillside, looking for caterpillars, and counting all their legs. 

Though a few wishes would be easily granted (for example, he could have eggs Benedict for breakfast in exchange for a few somersaults), most of the wishes Francois asked about would require weeks of effort. Still, knowing that anything was possible gave Francois the luxury of being able to dream, and he spent his time among the caterpillars happily pondering the wondrous possibilities.

Six weeks later, his task completed, Francois steered his flock toward Hélène’s thatched-roofed bungalow, ready to amaze. Approaching with Émile through a thicket of beech trees, he could see Hélène at her gate talking to a young man.

As soon as the young man left, Francois burst through the trees and said in a booming voice, “I bet you’ve never seen anything like this.” And with that, he rose eight feet in the air while waving his arms and legs and imitating trumpet sounds with his mouth.  

Hélène shrieked with glee. “How wonderful!” she said, clapping her hands when he came down to earth. “Can you do it again?”

“Not for a while, no,” admitted Francois sadly. He didn’t want to tell her how much effort went into that moment of glory, fearing it would detract from his mystique.

“Was that the famous miller’s son you were talking to?” he asked.

“That ragamuffin? No, he’s just a stable boy. The miller’s son is always very well-dressed.”

“I see.” Francois looked down at his ragged smock and pantaloons. Having run out of magic, he became nervous and self-conscious again. “Well, I must be heading off,” he said. “Sheep don’t graze themselves, you know.” And then he left.

“It was good to see you again!” called Hélène.

Once they were out of earshot, Francois turned to Émile. “‘Sheep don’t graze themselves.’ Why did I have to say that?”

“I saw her smiling.”

“That was out of pity. No, it’s no good. She thinks I’m a ninny—and probably a ragamuffin too. What I need is something to wear. Not shoes with shiny buckles or velvet breeches; nothing like that. I’ve got to take it to the next level.”

For this wish to be granted, Francois was required to spend the next forty-five days counting clouds that were shaped like animals and noting which direction they were moving. He finished his assignment on a Saturday, a day when Hélène would be at the market selling lace and taking orders.

Leaving the flock in a safe meadow, Francois and Émile entered the village square looking for Hélène’s little booth. 

The market was a hive of activity, with people buying and selling from tables and pushcarts, moving every which way. It wasn’t long, however, before Francois became the focus of their attention thanks to his new hat, which was more than four feet wide and covered with multi-colored feathers. 

The moment Hélène looked his way, Francois signaled Émile. Then the feathers started twitching, and the hat began to make low whooping sounds. Soon a whole crowd of people was watching in great amusement as the whooping grew louder and the hat began to rotate on Francois’s head, gradually picking up speed. Everyone roared with laughter until a man in a coach drove up and told them to be quiet. The hat stopped moving, and the crowd dispersed.

“Let me guess—that was the miller’s son,” said Francois to Hélène.

“You’ve got a thing about the miller’s son, haven’t you? No, that wasn’t him, but his coach isn’t much bigger than that. He says he’s going to get something very grand when he makes his fortune, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.”

Francois was surprised that his extravagant hat had been met with giggling—expecting something more like reverent awe—so even after Hélène told him that his hat was “really something,” it felt like his mission had failed.

He backed away from her, saying, “Fare thee well, Milady,” as he doffed his hat—not realizing there was still enough magic left for it to squirm out of his hand onto the ground, where it emitted one final, low whoop.

Hélène exploded in laughter as Francois snapped up the hat and stomped away.

He had never been so embarrassed. That evening, sitting with Émile by the fireplace in his cottage, Francois lamented the terrible turn things had taken. He didn’t blame Hélène for thinking he was soft in the head; after his floating dance, his crazy hat, and all of his stupid, awkward remarks, she could hardly think otherwise. At this point, even if he did something truly stupendous, he didn’t see how it could turn the tide.

“A lady so good and so beautiful should have a prince, not a silly shepherd,” he said, slumping forward in his chair. “And if she prefers the miller’s son, who am I to stand in her way? All I want is for her to be happy.” 

“So, is that your wish—just that she be happy?”

“Well, I wish it, but you said you can’t change a person’s thoughts or feelings; you can only change physical things.”

“Normally that’s the rule, but in this case there might be a way...”

“What would I have to do?” Francois asked, turning from the fire to face Émile directly. “I’ll do anything.”

“You’re sure?”

“Anything. I’d walk to the North Pole if it would bring her joy.”

“Even if you never see her again?”

Francois thought for a few seconds. “Even then.”

“You’re not going to like it.”

“I don’t care. Just knowing she’s happy is all I ask.”

“It means no more eggs Benedict.”

“Is that all?”

“What I’m saying is, you must release me. There will be no more wishes.”

“None?”

“I’ll be out of your life. Don’t underestimate the significance of that. I told you that if you played your cards right you could have anything; the world would be your oyster. Are you really sure you want to let me go?”

It was a big decision, but Francois didn’t hesitate. “I never did like oysters.”

Early the next morning, with the moon still glowing on the horizon, Émile and Francois said their goodbyes. They shook hand and hoof, then Émile set out along the road. Truth be told, Francois would miss Émile’s company more than he would miss his eggs Benedict, Émile having been a good conversationalist by any standard, not just as farm animals go.

An hour later, the sun was spreading its warm rays as Francois walked the narrow dirt path to the little paddock where his sheep stayed overnight. Though he was sorry that he would never see Émile again, and probably not Hélène either, the loneliness he felt was more than balanced by the fact that he had done something selfless.  Standing at the paddock gate listening to faraway cowbells, there was peace in his heart as a newfound optimism spread out before him, seeming to fill the landscape.

Looking up the road, he spotted a familiar figure approaching over the crest of the hill. It was Hélène. She waved her bonnet gaily, and Francois waved back. Picking up her pace, she ran up to him with a huge smile.

“I saw Émile out walking by himself,” she said, catching her breath. “He told me you’d finished with magic and that his mission was complete.”

“I hope you’re not disappointed. Did he tell you about my last wish?”

“No, why? What was your last wish?”

“Nothing. It doesn’t matter.”

“I still don’t know what his mission was. He just said I shouldn’t expect to understand everything in life.”

“He’s right,” said Francois, adding, “You seem very cheery.”

“So do you! Émile told me that you’re going to have lots of free time now and that you wouldn’t mind if I came by.” Her face glowed as she explained that ever since she had first met him, long before Émile, she thought he was something special. “Who else would think of dancing high in the air or wearing a hat that acts like a nest full of owls?”

“But the magic has left with Émile.”

“I’ve got to be honest; a talking sheep that does magic tricks was pretty amusing at first, but it’s no basis for a relationship.” 

“Why didn’t you tell me all that before?”

“Would you have believed me?”

Their initial attraction quickly blossomed into love, and before long, Francois and Hélène were engaged.

Their wedding was set for Saint Yves’ Day the following May, a day that turned out to be cool and still, with clear blue skies. As church bells rang in the nearby village, the families and friends of Francois and Hélène gathered in front of Francois’s humble cottage, some in chairs, most sitting or standing on the grass.

The parish priest had just arrived on foot with some villagers when a coach appeared on the hill approaching the house. Francois’s suspicion of who it might be tied his stomach in knots. 

The coach, drawn by eight white horses, with extravagant gold trim and a driver in a powdered wig, stopped in front of the cottage. Francois closed his eyes as the coach door swung open.

“It’s you!” squealed Hélène.

Francois’s heart sank. Then he opened his eyes. “Émile, old friend!” he exclaimed. He’d never seen Émile go anywhere except on foot. “What does all this mean?” 

“It means,” began Émile, stepping out, “that I’ve come to offer my congratulations to two very dear people. If you’re wondering about the coach—long story—I found a talking duck who has begun granting me wishes.”

“Does it make you do tasks?”

“Tasks? No. That’s with a magic sheep. Having a magic duck is a different situation entirely.”

As Émile spoke, the duck got out of the coach and said, “Hello,” followed by a smiling wolf with an amulet hanging from its neck and two fauns carrying a mermaid. The mermaid was taken to a seat among the other guests, then the fauns went back to the coach and began unloading bricks of gold that had been brought as a wedding present. Francois and Hélène watched wide-eyed as more and more gold bricks were taken from the coach and piled on the lawn.

“Don’t look so surprised,” said Émile. “Good things come to those who sacrifice, and fortune favors the pure at heart. You didn’t need magic. And, like I told you before, the world is complicated and full of surprises. “ 

“Okay,” said Francois, “but I’ve still got questions...”

“Forget them. Life’s great mysteries lay beyond the reach of human understanding.”

“What about the understanding of sheep?”

“That’s another story.”

---

David Partington is an omnivorous mammal, most active during daylight hours. He began life at a very young age, and has found his subsequent mortal existence to be a reliable source of amusement.

Shoshauna Shy

Lucky Stars

Ernest came to, then saw his wife, Nancy.

“Why’rnt our daughters here?” he managed to ask despite the tubes, the wires, his bandaged forehead. “What’s wrong with ‘em?”

“This woman here says she’s your daughter,” Nancy nodded toward the slim female dressed in a black pantsuit seated beside her.

“Pleased to meet you, Dad. My name is Chloë.” Chloë nervously raised a manicured hand in greeting.

Ernest glared. “Wha’? How old’re you?”

“Twenty in August, sir.”

He squinted, mouth twisting. “Mother Karla?”

“No–“

“Cindy?”

“Uhm–no–“

Nancy sighed deeply and stared down at her lap.

Chloë sat up straighter. “Amy. Amy Salter, sir.”

Ernest looked away from them and closed his eyes. “You look nothing like Amy. More like Janet. I should’a stayed with Janet,” he mumbled, then fell out of consciousness.

“Well, now you met him, you can leave.” Nancy stood abruptly.

Chloë didn’t budge.

“Will you please leave?”

The younger woman rose slowly to her feet, rubbing her upper arms as if cold. “Shouldn’t I stay? I mean, I missed out on so much!”

Nancy patted her shoulder. “If it’s any consolation, dear, his other daughters aren’t getting anything either.”

Chloë edged backwards toward the doorway, then halted. “That’s not what I meant; what I meant is it’s not fair! Those other daughters and you and my mother–the whole bunch of you– you all got to know him and I never did!”

“Well, what you got is a bunch of lucky stars,” a small laugh burst from his wife’s lips as she ushered Chloë out. “Go count ‘em.”

---

Where Boys End Up

1957

Nobody wants brothers, mine tells me when I say we should get chosen together. Nick explains that couples want boys who fit in, and brothers don’t “integrate” into families very well. Four years older than I am, he uses long words like that. Larkin House, up on the ridge, has bars on the windows. That’s where boys end up who don’t fit in, Nick says.

Weekend after weekend, Mrs. Emmert appears with wannabe parents at our dining hall. They survey us while we eat our bologna sandwiches for lunch. Their tweed and fur coats eventually become light-colored jackets. The women always wear high heels. I force a smile if one of them looks my way.

Nick says if you convince parents out shopping that you belong with them, they’ll give you a brand-new name, maybe even a collie. When my bunkmate, Bobby-who-never-talks, obediently sets his milk carton down and rises to follow Mrs. Emmert to the foyer, we never see him again. Washing up at bedtime in one long loop at the sinks, somebody says they bet Bobby has a puppy by now. I picture Lassie bounding around him as he swings back and forth on a tire from a tree bough, singing at the top of his lungs.

“Come along, Howard,” Mrs. Emmert motions me at the end of the summer. I’m about to turn seven years old. I wipe milk off my lip with one sleeve and follow her.

It’s a Mr. & Mrs. I met a week before. They crouch down and tell me I’ll have a bedroom all my own, a Schwinn bicycle, Popsicle snacks, trips to Disneyland. In the bunk room, I throw my clothes into a cardboard box fast as I can so they won’t change their minds and pick somebody else. I hope they call me Ken or Ben or Dan.

Nick scowls in the doorway. “Better do good, Howie, so you don’t get dumped at Larkin.”

Dumped? My stomach flips. That’s how boys end up on the ridge?

Mrs. Emmert appears and guides me and my box to the foyer. The Mr. beams down at me, ruffles my hair, says I’ll have fun in the treehouse he built.

In the back seat of a big black car, Mrs. swivels around from the front and asks which do I want most–a slice of chocolate cake or a fudge brownie?

I look down at my lap. I don’t know which answer is the one I should say. 

“Both! Right?” the Mr. laughs, steering us down the long driveway. The trees start rushing past the windows. I stuff all my words into my pockets and shoes. Squeeze the entire alphabet flat under my feet.

It’s Nick. I want Nick the most.

---

Author of five collections of poetry, Shoshauna Shy's flash fiction and micro-memoir has recently appeared in the public arena courtesy of Cranked Anvil, Five Minutes, Literally Stories and Flash Boulevard. She was a finalist for the 2021 Fish Flash Fiction Prize and earned a Notable Story distinction in Brilliant Flash Fiction’s 2022 contest, was long and shortlisted in the Bath Flash Fiction Award anthologies in 2022 and 2023, and shortlisted for the Flash Fiction Contest 2023 Awards conducted by South Shore Review.

Joanna Theiss

Summer Man

Summer! I grow a man. Not a sugar snap pea weakling who bleaches in the sun, but a big, virile man like the kind my mother wouldn’t let me date in high school.

My man is tall: eight feet and strong. Strong pectorals of thistle, nipple-shoots of habanero. Squash vines that shoot up like scaffolds and bushy, greedy mint with purple roots. A plate-sized sunflower growing at the cut in his legs. Arms of soft-petaled zinnias, perfect for cuddles. He leans against the fence with one stalk bent under him and watches me wiggle as I weed.

The other gardeners come to scold. This is a community garden, they say. You ought to be growing things you can eat. My man and I laugh at them. My man is a man but he is a thing to eat, too. He is seed bursting on my tongue in a hot gush. He is strawberry pie and basil ice cream, salty spicy lemony. My man is a meal.

Other men can’t compare. At my sister’s wedding, the row of groomsmen are soggy mushrooms, her new husband predictable as a hardware-store mum. My girl cousins, all married or engaged, cluster like starving bees to ask me, Where’s your man? Haven’t you got a man? so I hop on a rent-a-bike in bridesmaid’s taffeta and ride to where he waits for me, a giant against chain-link.

I dig. I push my satin shoe against a shovel and push. I squish slugs and crush cicadas, I draw up the bedsheet smell of bruised sage. When I reach my man’s hairy tangle of roots, I tug. I wrap my arms around his body and twist until his roots come free and the vines break. We dance-stumble to a wheelbarrow and I almost fall putting him in because he is so big, so tall, but horizontal, he does not look so strong anymore.

Until I reach the hotel I can pretend we will go on forever, but under the fairy lights and the compound eyes of my cousins, I see my man is wrong. Limp and wilted, his sunflower a wrinkled brown knot, yellow petals curved inward as if ashamed.

I touch his squash cheeks and kiss his crab-apple mouth. I remind him of worm nights in the garden, of sweat so thick it pickled, of green and dew and mud, but pieces of him are landing on the dance floor, crackly crunchy gritty as compost. A sympathetic usher offers to water him, but I know it won’t help. Our love is seasonal, and the season has already changed.

---

 Joanna Theiss is a writer living in Washington, DC. Her stories have appeared in Peatsmoke Journal, Milk Candy Review, Best Microfiction, the wigleaf Top 50 Longlist, among others, and she is an associate editor at Five South. In a past life, Joanna worked as a lawyer, practicing criminal defense and international trade law. You can find book reviews, links to her published works, and her mosaic collages at www.joannatheiss.com.

Brian Gifford

Haunted

In my memory, it is the summer of 1976.  I am climbing a hill on my bike, approaching a brick building that was already old when my parents were born.  Once an elementary school, it is now a library.  It is named Nauvoo, from a Hebrew word meaning “beautiful place.” The sun is struggling to reflect off the library’s dirty burnt red brick exterior, and I am now in its shadow. I am five years old and I am alone, my mother home hanging clothes on the line, my father working at the factory. I am over a mile from home, and no one else is around.  In my memory it is the kind of scene from which a child is likely to be abducted. But it is several years before Adam Walsh, before most parents began worrying about things like allowing children to be alone outside. It is just the library, the suffused sunlight and me.

How I have forgotten so much but remember this particular scene nearly fifty years later I do not know.  Still, I sense that there are things I cannot remember from that day. Sometimes there is a flash of red, a car door slamming, the smell of cigarettes in the ashtray, all ephemeral and suggestive of something more just outside the reach of my memory.

I wonder why this memory of the library comes to me from time to time while I can no longer resurrect what must be thousands of other scenes from my life, even those I have had as an adult. My wife often asks: “Do you remember?”  Often, I do not. The doctor says that this is probably normal, but that we will keep an eye on it.   

Our children are all grown now, so I have plenty of time on my hands. I tell my wife I am going for a drive.  She tells me she worries that I won’t be able to find my way back home. I assure her that I will.

After driving around aimlessly for a while, I end up at our town’s glittering new library, all awash in white and chrome, the sun easily reflecting off it.  Inside the library, a memory flashes: I am inside the Nauvoo library looking at the Berenstain Bears book The Bike Lesson, in which Papa Bear teaches Brother Bear how to ride a bike.  I find the book in the children’s section of the glittering library. I remember it as Berenstain Bears, and I recall that the Berenstains were Jewish and Holocaust survivors.  I notice that the title is spelled Berenstain Bears.  I place The Bike Lesson back on the shelf and go to the biographies, where I learn that only Stan Berenstain was Jewish, they were not Holocaust survivors, their name was always spelled Berenstain, and they were both born in Philadelphia.

“Let’s visit Philadelphia. ” I say to my wife.

“You know we’ve been there, just last year, right?  On one of our art museum trips.”

Now I remember.  We decide to visit an art museum we have not been to before, the Cleveland Museum of Art.

I discover that the Cleveland museum has a library with over a half million volumes.  It is a closed stack, non-circulating library.  I sign up for a library account, and I search the library’s database.  Sparked by one of the museum’s Edward Hopper paintings, I put in a request for a book titled Edward Hopper: Painter of Indirect Light and Loneliness.  I begin flipping through its pages.  There is a painting of a woman sitting alone on her bed.  There is a painting of a woman alone in an automat.  And then there is a painting of a young boy biking up a hill alone, approaching a building with a dirty burnt red brick exterior, the boy in its shadow .

It is my memory. 

Now I realize how unreliable memory is.  How fragmented.  Not only do I not recall things that happened, I recall things that didn’t.  Did I ever visit a library named “beautiful place” in Hebrew?  Did my mother hang clothes on a line?  Did my father work at a factory?  They are gone, so I cannot ask them. 

Worried that I am running out of time to uncover the answers, I go for a drive.  “Stairway to Heaven” comes on the radio, and the song unravels more threads in the tapestry of my past:  In my memory, I am being led out of the Nauvoo library on that day in the summer of 1976; the sun is blazing in the angry cloudless sky, I am being forced into a car that I had not seen before that day— a bright-red Dodge Charger with faded red interior, the texture of a crushed Velvet Elvis—Led Zeppelin is playing on the 8-track, a crinkled pack of Virginia Slims is lying on the backseat beside me, and I am being driven away from a past that I cannot yet remember, into a future that to this day remains contingent and uncertain.

---

Brian Gifford's fiction has recently been published in Agape Review, Bright Flash Literary Review, BULL, and The Muleskinner Journal, which has nominated his story "So Long as They Both Shall Live" for a Pushcart Prize.

Mikki Aronoff

Why We Can’t Lose Weight

Before there was arguing there was peace, and before there was peace there was war, and after the Second World War there were feelings, some specific, some vague, all floating around the heads of those who had them, like cartoon balloons with words inside, and my parents argued back and forth, back and forth, usually over pot roast and potatoes, that that’s not the way it should be, that floating is not what feelings should do— they should stick to bodies or more accurately reside inside them, bumping against organs and bones, and it should be a fineable offence for bodies to let go of them and let them be seen, or, worse, heard, and I wondered weren’t those feelings, but of course I kept quiet.

Today we extrapolate about such things, because that’s fun to do, and we explain, without saying how, because reason doesn’t count, that’s why we can’t lose weight, and we say this about everything, leaning back on our recliners with our calorie-controlled frozen dinners and dim the lights and wish for simpler times, when our grandparents maintained, simply, that balloons are simply for floating and really not much else, and when one is tired of holding on to them, one can simply let go, along with all those newfangled, fanciful ideas, but they did understand (since balloons seemed to be everyone’s favorite topic) how it was reasonable to be drawn to the Hindenburg, like my mother and father, who by then were starting to express their feelings—for airships, for each other, for painting and science, and for ideas about how we should all live and behave.

Sometimes my parents resembled Miss America contestants, world peace their motto, starting at home, everyone greeting in apartment hallways, helping folks carry groceries upstairs, but they’d turn three times, spitting ptooey, ptooey, ptooey, when they saw balloons, which they remembered first fearing then hating, though they hated the word hate (eschew, they’d say, with a lift of their chins) and, because they were good at subtraction, they knew what they loved by what they renounced— so much evil abounding then, as now—now, when we’re all trying to lose weight, when it’s something else we need to lose.

---

Mikki Aronoff lives in New Mexico, where she writes tiny stories and advocates for animals. She has stories in Best Microfiction 2024 and in Best Small Fictions 2024. 

Dave Clark

my world, my way

Dr Farida Singh brushed aside the usual chitchat. ‘I asked you to come today, Robert, because I want you to hear this in person.’

Oh, that’s her good news voice, thought Robbie. Almost shat my dacks for nothing. He leant forward, gingerly, like a praying mantis faltering into the shade. ‘What is it, Doc?’

‘You know how we’ve been developing procedures that help partially blind people see?’ He nodded as her speech picked up pace. ‘Well, it’s at a stage now where it also works for those born blind.’

Robbie’s body flinched. ‘What do you mean?’ His hands started shaking. He heard his doctor step around the desk to sit in a chair next to him. A trail of orange and jasmine followed her movements.

‘Robert, I’m going to help you see.’

‘Get stuffed! Really?’ He grabbed hold of his armrests, for stability. ‘Doc, are you tricking me?’

‘Robert, I’ve always told it to you straight. I’ve already performed the surgery on three patients.’ And? ‘And all three can see.’

See. A delicious word, one Robbie hungered for daily. But his hopes had crashed and burned before, much like his mate’s cheap dirt bike on their last camping trip. Smack bang into a tree and up in flames.

‘For real?’ He tried to wrangle his hopes back in before they sped off again.

‘Yes. I wouldn’t do it if I was less than 100% confident. Here, put your hands in mine.’

Robbie wiped his clammy hands on his trousers and slowly reached out. He let Dr Farida take hold of them.

‘Now Robert, tell me what you’re noticing?’

He felt a steadiness from her thin hands. No sudden rises or falls of temperature in her fingertips. No sweating of her palms. He listened to her breathing. Slow, even. Calm as. He released his grip and heard a single clap of her hands. He bet she was smiling.

‘Doc, you’re not one bit nervous.’

‘Exactly. This isn’t some pipe dream. Bosses said they’d cut our funding if we didn’t get it right. I’m not giving those fat cats the chance to derail me a third time. It’s not just your eyes on the chopping block.’

‘So…?’

‘So, if you want this to happen, we can book the surgery in for three months’ time.’

He felt his posture shoot up. Spain. TAFE. See which girls have their eye on me. ‘Do it! Book it in. And move me up that pecking order. We both know I’m your favourite patient.’

Farida laughed. ‘I thought you’d say yes. There will be a lot of work involved for you though. It won’t be as easy as taking the bandages off and voila!’ He guessed that her hands were twisting through the air like a cheap magician. ‘Parts of your brain have nineteen years of inactivity to overcome. It’ll be like culture shock, except for your vision.’

‘Whatever it takes. You know I’ll do the work.’ Robbie had taken on all her approaches over the past five years. Bonding with his guide dog Betsy. Using the GPS and earpiece like a spy to map out where he was walking.

‘You always have been dedicated.’ A warm coating on her words. ‘I wouldn’t have suggested this for you if I didn’t believe in your ability.’

His grin filled up the whole room. His body felt like it was crowd surfing again at Schoolies, held up by a sea of partying hands. ‘Far out Doc, this is happening, isn’t it?’

‘It is. It’s a lot to take in. That’s why I’m emailing you a voice recording of all the information. Think it over. It’s okay to take your time.’

It’s already been nineteen crawling years. ‘Stuff time. Let’s do it.’

~ ~ ~

The bang-crash of Friday night dinner preparations swirled around Robbie as he sat in the lounge room at home. He picked up the muttering of Dad’s obscenities as a saucepan hit the floor, the clinking of cutlery on wood as Mum set the table. His older brother Michael’s two daughters, Sophie and Kiara, were running amok, playing Princesses and Dragons down the hallway.

The room was warmer than Robbie liked, the air-con spluttering more than operating. Hurry up and get it fixed already, Dad. The TV was turned onto the nightly news, prattling on about a jam and pickle festival. The reporter was saying, ‘As you can see from the footage…’

‘Hey Mum, what can I help with?’ Robbie asked, as he turned down the volume on the TV.

‘Nothing, darl,’ she said, her voice wafery. ‘You just stay comfy right there.’

Dad yelled out from the kitchen. ‘Wash your hands, girls. It’s almost dinner time.’

‘Oh, not fair,’ Sophie and Kiara cried in unison. Robbie heard one of them stomp their foot on the floorboards. Salty princess.

‘We were about to get the dragon. He might get away,’ Sophie complained.

‘It’s okay, Soph,’ said Robbie. ‘I’ve got my eye on it. I won’t let it out of my sight.’

‘But you’re blind!’ said Kiara, the youngest of them. She plonked herself on his lap. Almost knackered me there, K. ‘Can’t see how many fingers I’m holding up, can you?’ Her words softened at the end, like ice cream left out of the freezer.

Easy. People always hold up two fingers. Robbie rubbed his chin, pretending he was solving a complex equation. ‘Is it two?’

‘What? You can see!’ Kiara hopped up. Robbie heard her little feet scurry to the kitchen. ‘Pop, Uncle Bobby’s not blind at all.’

‘Well love, he is. But not for long. A doctor is going to help him see. Now up to the table, Missy Moo.’

Michael called out to Robbie, his voice coming from about four metres away. ‘Grub’s on. Need a hand up, bro?’

Robbie flicked him the bird. Michael meant well, but irritation flared anyway. I haven’t escaped this prison like you have, choofing off to Ballarat. I know this house better than anyone. Three steps forward from the couch, a ninety degree turn to the left, two steps before the floorboards turned to tiling. Then four more large steps or six small steps forward to reach the head of the table. It had been in that same spot since he first started primary school.

Robbie felt the edge of the table and shimmied around to his chair on the right. He sat down, Kiara chattering away next to him about dinosaur stickers. Dad and Mum sat at opposite ends, like sentinels, and Michael and Sophie were on the other side.

Robbie could smell the mountain of parmesan that Dad had grated. Keeping the cheese industry afloat. Robbie felt the steam off the pasta tickle under his chin.

‘Dig in,’ said Dad. Bowls were passed back and forwards as they loaded up for their end of week feast.

‘What would you like, dear?’ Mum directed at Robbie.

‘He’ll sort himself out, love,’ said Dad.

‘I don’t mind,’ replied Mum.

Yeah, but I do. ‘I’ll dish up my own,’ Robbie said, hoping he’d covered the frustration in his voice with enough false sincerity. ‘You go first.’

Her tongue clicked. ‘Nonsense, dear. How much pasta do you want?’

Even Soph dishes up her own food. And she’s six.

‘Pile it on. Thanks, Mum.’

She began humming, happily. She’s gonna hate it when I can see. No one to fuss over.

‘So, Robbie,’ Dad said with what sounded like a very full mouth, ‘what are you looking forward to seeing once the surgery is done?’

‘Frozen!’ called out Sophie.

‘Yes. Yes. Or Frozen 2,’ said Kiara.

Michael jumped in. ‘Those movies will make you want to reverse the procedure, bro.’

The girls, oblivious to their dad’s comment, continued their suggestions. ‘Rainbows. All of the colours, Uncle Bobby.’

‘I only know one colour, girls,’ Robbie said. ‘Black.’

‘Not even blue?’ asked Sophie.

‘Not even blue. I don’t even know what colours are.’

‘What? Well, imagine a blue curve. And it’s like that, but in the sky. With other pretty colours.’

‘Sounds amazing, Soph. Can’t wait to see it.’

‘Could we see one together?’

‘Sure! That would be fun.’ It really would. He beamed her way. ‘And we’ll eat all that rubbish that Dad won’t usually let you have. Gummy bears. Chips. The works.’

Giggles spilled from both Sophie and Kiara. He felt Kiara’s affectionate hand on his forearm. ‘And we could wear our favourite dresses!’

‘Well, you wear the dresses, and I’ll bring the dragon on a leash. Don’t worry, I can still see him over there.’ Robbie flicked his head towards the lounge room.

‘I knew you weren’t really blind,’ she whispered.

Soon, Princess K, I won’t be.

~ ~ ~

The following Monday, Robbie walked into one of the city’s parks. After sweeping his cane over a bench, to make sure he wouldn’t sit on anyone, he eased onto it. A soft wind skimmed over his face, bringing with it traces of pine.

He could hear raspy cries behind him. Birds? He tilted his head to the right. A musical string of notes floated up and down, a song to attract a partner. Then the loud snapping of a beak. You gotta ask for consent, mate.

He folded up his cane and slipped it into his backpack. He pulled out his mobile and earphones to continue listening to the notes from Dr Singh:

After the surgery, you will see swirls of colours, not clear shapes or objects. It will take time for the brain’s visual pathways to come online and strengthen, as they have withered from a lack of use since birth.

Since birth. His parents hadn’t known he was blind until he started crawling and bumping into things. Bumpy Bobby.

He had been born seeing nothing. Even his dreams had no images in them. He smiled to himself as he remembered explaining it to one condescending teacher, ‘What can you see out of your butt? Nothing, yeah? Well, that’s what I can see.’

Was so worth getting detention for that.

…Simply seeing colours for the first time will be intense enough. Your brain won’t have the visual language to understand what it’s experiencing.

His shoulders dropped. It’s gonna be like learning a new language. I sucked at French. Je suis un blind as a bat.

…Early on, your brain won’t understand depth perception. Objects will be flat, in 2-D. Everything will seem close to you, even things that are far away…

He pressed stop on the audio file, feeling gut-punched. Why is my life so bloody hard?

Something soft brushed his left arm, startling him. He took out his earphones.

‘Sorry Robbie, didn’t mean to sneak up.’ A voice dripping with honey. Emily. ‘Sorry to keep you waiting too.’ He felt her sit next to him on the bench, her leg briefly brushing his. ‘Uni lecture dragged on. Then the line-up for coffees was out the door. Worth it though. I’ve already had a sip of mine. It’s divine.’

He sensed her holding out something to him and reached for it. A rippled cardboard cup, still warm. He lifted it to his nose. A rich, chocolatey aroma.

‘Sneak up on me anytime, Em, if you’re bringing drinks.’ He drank from the cup. The perfect blend of bitter and sweet. ‘Beats the iced coffees we used to knock back after Maths. That’s a ripper!’

‘Much like this park. I’ve never sat here before. It’s stunning. Do you want the play-by-play?’

‘Sure do. What’s happening?’

Em began detailing the park; lush grass bordered by tall grevilleas, not yet in bloom. Kids throwing frisbees, their parents lounging on picnic rugs. Most people wearing summer clothes, a few in suits and pencil skirts. Her words rocketed along, and even though Robbie couldn’t picture what she was reporting, he relished everything she said. Robbie usually hated his reliance on others to describe places. Most people only described the larger scene. A handful zoomed in to the patterns and intricate details. They either went macro or micro. Emily was one of the few people who did both.

 ‘One of workmen near the fountain has the greasiest mullet, Robbie.’ She rolled her r’s as she said his name. ‘I can’t wait for you to see things like this.’

And I can’t wait to see your face. I’m sure it’s perfection. ‘Call him over and ask if I can rub my hands through his hair.’

He felt her playful slap on his shoulder. ‘No way! How embarrassing. Nope, this mullet must be seen to be believed. And oh, there’s Trevor right behind them.’ Robbie felt a pang of disappointment. Emily continued. ‘We should hide from him, yeah? Give him a taste of what it’s like for you.’

Hide and seek. That’s my jam. Robbie had always been good at the game. He listened for where people went. The creaking of floorboards. Footsteps that turned left. The faster, louder breathing. The opening of wardrobe doors. Tiny giggles, the cracking of knee joints.

‘Em. Robert.’ Damn it. Spotted us before we even got off the bench. A firm mitt grabbed Robbie’s right hand and shook it. The smell of sandalwood floated by. ‘Sucks you can’t see how good this day is!’ Trev’s breath was minty, cool.

‘Yeah, it’s lovely,’ Em said. ‘Pity I gotta scoot back to Uni after this.’

‘Just pull a sickie. Plenty of people do it in first year,’ encouraged Trev as he moved to the other side of Em and sat down. Robbie felt the bench vibrate underneath them.

‘Not today,’ said Em, ‘but I will for a week next term if Robbie likes our plan.’

‘What plan?’ Robbie asked. People deciding stuff for me. Again.

Trev spoke up. ‘Mate, to celebrate your surgery, Em and I want to drive you to Uluru the week after it. Our shout. You deserve it.’

Robbie felt thrown, like he was playing catch-up. ‘Hey? What are you talking about?’

‘Just say yes,’ said Trev. ‘Trust me, it’ll blow your freaking mind.’

 ‘I think that seeing anything will be mind-blowing.’ He felt heavy in his stomach, for poking holes in their plans. Well, to Em’s part in it, anyway.

Em said, ‘Sorry Robbie, that’s probably a bit much to dump on you with everything that’s going on. We should’ve run it by you first.’

‘No, no Em, it’s more than fine. In fact, it’s lovely for you to think of it. Both of you.’ Good save. ‘It’s a great idea. Seriously. One day. No, it’s just…’ He held up his earphones. ‘My Doc said it’ll be ages before I can make sense of colours and shapes. Uluru would just look like a blob.’

Trev’s voice lifted. ‘So, we just need to start you off with mundane things and then build our way up once your eyes are rocking and rolling, yeah? Maybe kick off with Em’s taste in shoes?’

‘Nothing wrong with my boots,’ said Em, her voice slightly wounded. ‘Maybe you’re the blind one.’

Robbie wanted to smack Trev. He clasped his hands over his stomach, pressure building in his fingertips. ‘Hey look, that trip sounds good. Really. I can’t wait to see Uluru with you two.’ We can always leave Trev by the side of the road as dingo fodder.

‘And don’t forget that filthy mullet, Robbie.’ Em place her hand on top of his and gave it a squeeze. ‘It really is magnificent.’

Your touch is magnificent, Em. You can keep your hand there forever.

~ ~ ~

Friends and family became obsessed with telling Robbie all the things he should see after the surgery.

‘Ballet. It’s such majestic movement.’

‘Expiry dates on milk.’ I can still smell things, you muppet.

‘You must go to the art gallery.’

‘You have to see my backyard. I’ve landscaped the daylights out of it.’

‘Gotta see your own name, written down.’ I have wondered what it looks like.

Even the checkout guy at the local fruit and veg shop had an opinion. ‘Your own eyes, in the mirror. Or stare at your balls. Whichever’s more interesting to ya!’

Shut. Up. All of you.

His mates continued peppering him with ideas as they sat on the sidelines of a suburban oval a few Saturdays later.

Every summer weekend, over the past four years, they’d played blind cricket together. He’d loved listening to cricket on the radio as a kid and felt jubilant when he was selected to play for the Division 1 blind team down the road from his place.

The ball they used was a cane ball, a rib cage with a bell in it. Like my chest when I’m around Em. They had some helpers from the local club, who told them where the ball was once it stopped moving. Robbie’s team knew when one of the sighted helpers was new, as they’d be telling the batters to take their time and get their eye in.

We see with our ears, knobhead.

The bowler yells out, ‘Play,’ then delivers the ball. It had to bounce at least twice, giving the batter time to hear it. Robbie had smacked a few shots around that day, before getting clean bowled.

‘Didn’t see that one coming, did ya?’ sledged the bowler as he walked off.

‘Nope. I was too distracted by your ugly mug!’

They both laughed. The stuff we get away with.

Robbie sat down on the grass, on the sidelines. It was soft beneath him. He untwisted the cap off a sports drink, and his teammates kicked on with the conversation about what he should do after surgery.

‘Rob-Dog,’ said Pete, one of the sighted coaches, wearing enough aftershave to knock out a cat, ‘I was just telling the lads that you gotta see this chick at my work. If you only see one thing in this life, let it be her.’

‘I won’t be able to see the details of her face.’

‘Her face? Trust me, you won’t be looking at her face.’ Howls and hoots from some of the younger lads.

‘You’re a sick man, Pete.’

‘Forget that chick,’ said Steven, another of the helpers. His voice came from the middle of the group and sounded like boots trampling on gravel. ‘Wait ‘til you hop in my Tucson. One drive of it and you’ll want the same car for yourself.’

‘You reckon they’ll let me behind the wheel straight up? Dream on, Steve-O.’

Some of Robbie’s frustration tempered as the blind players took over the conversation, their suggestions quieter, more personal.

‘Gotta tell me if the missus smiles when she’s around me. Does she still give a toss, or have I become her charity case since my accident?’

‘If there’s ever food around my mouth, let me know. I’m sick of looking stupid.’

‘Enjoy a sunset. Every day finishes with something beautiful, so I’m told. Make the most of what the rest of us can’t do.’

After fifteen minutes of being hounded, Robbie was getting pins and needles in his legs. Felt like it in his head too, from all the badgering. He hopped up and went for a brief walk without a cane, counting his paces. Twenty-one. Twenty-two. He turned around when he sensed someone following him, hearing their deft steps on the grass. ‘Who’s there?’

‘It’s Macca.’ Their best bowler and their worst batter. Cooked a mean burger at their annual team BBQ.

‘You stalking me? What if I’m taking a slash?’

‘Are ya?’

‘Nah. Just moving about. My legs were stiff.’

‘Fair enough. The best trees for a slash are the other direction.’

‘Good to know. Probably would’ve just gone on Steve-O’s tyres anyway.’ Only a grunt from Macca. C’mon man, that was gold. ‘You’re not here to tell me some other thing I gotta look at?’

‘Well, kind of. Robbie, this might sound a bit weird.’ Macca stopped talking, a rare thing.

‘Go on mate.’

‘You’re going to come and see us play after your surgery, yeah?’

‘Of course, I am.’ Damn. Robert hadn’t thought about it. I won’t be one of the Blind Boys anymore.

‘Well, can you do something for me then?’

‘What is it? Sure yeah, whatever you need.’

Robbie could hear that Macca’s words were directed towards the ground. ‘I want you to tell me if I’m as hideous as some people say I am.’

‘What are you talking about...’

Macca cut him off. ‘Let me get this out. I want to know from someone who hasn’t seen colour before. Am I disgusting to look at?’ The air around them stiffened.

‘Is this about what those blokes said last week? Those cruel, racist pricks. We reported them. We all have your back.’

‘I know that. But Robert…’ Robert? Geez, he is serious. ‘I want to hear it from someone who sees me for the very first time. No bull. Just your gut response. I need to know why some people treat me like crap. Can you do that for me?’

Silence stretched out between the two of them. Loud chirping from a flock of birds overhead saturated the space, followed by an audible whoosh, their collective dive towards the ground.

‘I’ll let you know what I see.’

‘Thanks mate.’

‘And Macca? I’m certain that the only thing that will disgust me is your batting technique.’ Chuckles from both men. ‘God, you know the aim of the game is to actually hit the ball, right?’

~ ~ ~

Three months passed. It felt like three years to Robbie.

The day before the surgery, Robbie went to Dr Singh’s office to talk over the final aspects of the procedure. The deets. Farida gave Robbie a braille copy of the paperwork. Robbie was happy to sign anything that gave the go-ahead.

‘Doc, what does my signature look like?’

‘It looks slightly neater than the graffiti in the bathroom stalls.’

‘Is it that bad?’

‘It’s messy. But the person who wrote Kellyz a hag scrawls worse than you, so that’s something.’ She tried unsuccessfully to muffle a snort.

Robbie felt glad that he’d stayed with Farida as his doctor, even when his parents pressured him to change to practitioners who had bigger ads in the phone book. She was the one who, after learning that students were mocking Robbie at school for his ‘old man’ cane, helped him order a custom-made one. A gear stick head on top, to show who was in the driver’s seat. His creed carved along the side of it:

[my world, my way]

All those jerks at school wanted to have a go using it after that. From pauper to king, with one wave of my royal sceptre.

Farida was the one who pushed him to trust his other senses. On his second visit to her, she whispered out of earshot of his mum, ‘She babies you,’ then threw his hat across the office, getting him to hear where it landed. One time she took him to a shopping centre he’d never visited before, telling him to find her at the exit without asking for help.

She was the one who helped him adjust to living with his seeing eye dog, Betsy, and was the one who advocated for other technologies when she saw that he couldn’t face losing another Betsy again.

His attention snapped back when she asked, ‘Robert, how are you feeling about the surgery tomorrow?’

Robbie paused. ‘Freaking out. Nervous. Excited. Can’t wait. I don’t really know. Is that weird?’

‘All normal things to be feeling. After tomorrow, your life will change.’ Her last words dropped with the heaviness of Easter Island-sized stones.

 ‘That didn’t sound positive, Doc.’

‘Every change brings some grief. You’ll lose some of life’s innocence, like seeing people’s faces crumple when they think your ideas aren’t good enough. Your other senses will dull somewhat, as you won’t rely on them as much.’

‘Oh.’ A dam wall broke inside Robbie. Doubts he’d held back flooded in. His eyes watered. Suck it up. Suck it up.

‘Don’t get me wrong. The benefits will far, far outweigh the sad things. I wouldn’t do the surgery if I didn’t believe that. But Robert, it’ll take time to see things clearly, and it may be more frustration in the short term before the good things kick in.’

‘Is it really worth it?’ For the first time in months, fear smacked him in the guts.

‘Every patient who has had the procedure is glad they’ve done it. But the final call is not up to me.’

‘I just signed the paperwork though. I can’t back out now, can I?’

‘Well, I bought a really good shredder recently. It wouldn’t take long to turn your signature into confetti.’

Robbie tried to stop his uncertainties from overflowing. ‘People keep telling me all the amazing things I’m gonna see. You should see this. You should see that. See this. See that. Is sight really that good?’

Farida let out a long, slow breath. ‘Robert, it’s a wonderful feeling being independent and making more decisions for ourselves, but it’s also damn scary. You will gain your sight but lose your safety nets.’ Her voice strengthened. ‘I believe it’s worth doing. But if you want to put off the decision, I’m happy to do so.’

The idea of delaying jolted through Robbie’s bones. Hell no. ‘Nah, Doc. We’re not delaying. No way.’ He sat up tall. ‘Let’s do it. These eyes have been slacking off for way too long.’

‘Excellent. We’ll get you prepped at nine o’clock tomorrow morning in the surgical room.’

‘Done.’ He felt more strength kick into his arms and legs. ‘Hey, before I head off, could we give that shredder a go?’

Her voice sounded the most joyful it had all appointment. ‘HR dumped some stupid policy about lifting boxes onto my desk, as if I don’t know how to pick up a box! I think it’ll shred nicely.’

~ ~ ~

He could hear Doctor Singh next to his bed.  ‘You’re okay, Robert. You’re just waking up after surgery.’

His eyes were stinging as she gently explained that she believed the surgery was a success. Her voice was confident, solid as oak. She told him to rest and keep his fluids up. Over the coming days she would remove his bandages. If I don’t rip them off first.

Robbie was visited by streams of people. Should’ve charged an entrance fee. His parents carried in flowers that smelt sour but felt like the velvet lining of his guitar case. Mum fussed all around him. Dad told her four times to relax. She ignored all four.

Members of his cricket team dropped by. They gave him a ball. He shook it, but there was no rattling sound. Smelled like real leather.

‘This is to help you get your eye in,’ joked Steve-O.

Em brought daily coffees, waving them around the room like incense sticks, trying to cover the stench of hospital bleach. Robbie didn’t want Em to leave each time. Gonna sign up to the same course as her once I’m outta here.

On the third day, it was time to remove the bandages. Robbie asked for his brother to be there for support. He’ll be a less of a pain than Mum. He knew when Michael arrived with the girls, because he felt two bundles of limbs clamber all over him like play equipment.

‘Can you see how many fingers I’m holding up now, Uncle Bobby?’ asked Kiara, her voice more sugary than usual.

‘Girls!’ pleaded Michael. ‘Sorry bro, they’re just so excited you’ll get to see the fairy wings they’re wearing.’

‘I hope you’re wearing some too, Michael!’

‘Always, Robbie, always.’ Michael’s voice broke. ‘I never thought this day would come, bro.’

‘Me neither, hey.’ Robbie’s voice broke too.

Michael cleared his throat. ‘I haven’t always been good to you. Probably treated you like my kid brother too much.’

‘Yeah, you have been a pretty rubbish brother! But I’m glad you’re here for this. And I’ll finally have proof that I’m the better-looking one!’

A punch landed on Robbie’s left shoulder. Deserved that. Robbie could feel happiness radiating off his brother.

Footsteps approached the door of the room, to his right. Flat shoes striking the floor at a medium pace, a waft of jasmine. Doc’s back.

‘Robert, it’s time,’ she said.

His body fully relaxed, then tensed right back up a second later.

‘Here we go,’ said Michael. ‘Let us know how we can help.’

‘You can dim the lights of the room, thanks,’ said Dr Singh. ‘Right down.’ Michael did as he was told, then ushered the girls to the end of the bed.

Robbie felt stuck to the mattress, as though held down by guards.

Farida spoke with a calm reassurance, reminding Robbie of the feeling of having a quilt pulled up to his chin when he was a kid. ‘When your eyes experience light, it may be confusing and overwhelming. That’s okay. It’s normal.’ She unwound the first loop of bandages from his head.

Anticipation filled his whole chest. He heard the echo of his pounding heart. The second and third loop of the bandages came off. He gripped the bars of his bed. One more to go.

‘Robert,’ Farida asked, ‘is everything okay?’

‘So far, so good.’ What if this hasn’t worked?

The last layer of bandage and padding was removed. Robbie lay still, eyes closed. The ticking of the wall clock thudded, each second weighted.

‘Is he okay?’ Sophie eventually whispered. ‘Can he see us?’

‘Robert,’ Farida asked, ‘do you want to slowly open your eyes?’

‘Not yet, Doc.’ His shoulders relaxed. His breathing slowed right down. He kept his eyes shut, savouring the moment. ‘Give me a few minutes, yeah.’

Light and colour and everyone else can wait their flipping turn. For the first time in nineteen years, Robbie chose to see nothing.

---

Dave Clark is a reliable human with unreliable health. He is a writer-poet with chronic fatigue syndrome, living in Mparntwe (Alice Springs). His writing speaks into grief, illness, justice and how we love and laugh together. Dave works as a counsellor, creating space for stories of significance. Instagram/X: @DaveClarkWriter

Spencer Nitkey

The Wanting, 2011-2023

Luka Andersen

steel, desert, glass pane

“The wanting is the rainstorm,” says the artist, when asked to describe this challenging piece of mixed media geosculpture. When viewing the piece from the floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall observatory window in the gallery today, you may not witness art at all. The wanting, the art, is not the desert. It’s not the morning sun’s whisper across the steel. It’s not the steel: twenty-nine corkscrews, each thirty feet high, installed like skeletal cacti across the landscape. It’s not your mother asking if you want to wait a little longer to see if the clouds will come today. The wanting is the rainstorm, and rain comes only twenty to thirty days a year in this cracked land. On a clear, cloudless day, as the sun pools over the desert sand like red paint spilled over a carpet, you will be looking at a canvas. An artfully arranged canvas, yes, but a canvas, 3 hours outside Phoenix where the saguaro peer with blue eyes along the horizon.

The wanting is the rainstorm. It is the lightning that strikes and the thunder that curdles. The rainstorm is the wanting. Want, the artist says, is true miasma, a black cloud of not-enough that never dissipates. You want the rain to come, for the long trip here, from the hotel where your cousin will be married tomorrow, to be worth it. You want to be lucky. For it to happen for you. More than that, you want to be more than the pedestrian worries and pettinesses you have begun to suspect constitute the vast majority of adulthood. Better and larger than your neighbor Lydia’s weekly arguments with the butcher. More than Gio’s patronizing gestures from his porch toward cars that deign to go the speed limit and not ten miles an hour slower. You want to separate like an aged balsamic from the oil of everyone else.

This is your wanting, the first time you see this installation on a washed out Saturday. The sun makes shadows and spears of the steel screws. Their interstices tangle along the flat desert. It looks so very much like a painting: the reds, the black lines, the sky like a dome. It could be art. But this plaque, these very words etched at the artist’s insistence remind you that no, this is not the art. The wanting is the rainstorm. So you leave, want a steel shadow across your chest.

You leave. You change. Your wanting transforms. You begin to long for this vision of the ordinary you once loathed. You want the energy to be angry at the butcher, to wish the cars would drive slower—children play on this street, after all. You want these concerns, rather than your own: worrying whether the speech therapist will make it through traffic in time for your mother’s appointment; whether the exercises you do with her after dinner each night as she scowls and tries to point at parts of her body after you name them will work; whether the consonant and vowel sounds you repeat together every day will ever find purchase on her tongue; whether her right leg has grown strong enough to conquer the stairs or whether you’ll need to take out the last of her 401K, a full decade early, to replace the broken stair lift. You want to vanish from these midnights spent crying over insurance claims on the kitchen table, the future like a cracked, empty desert, either sweltering or freezing, but always unlivable. You want normalcy as you knew it before, as butcher meat, as talking to your mother on the phone during Sunday night football and caring about anything normal.

In time, like the earth's mantle, this wanting shifts, too. A dozen years after your first visit, you return to this gallery. You have thought about the wanting, the pregnant promise of it’s almost-art, many times since you left. Now you enter, alone, and stare out the window at a blue sky. You are asked by the absence of the artwork to think about your wanting. Inside your chest, you find a new miasma, a new normal, a cliche until it isn’t. You want dinners out where the staff has served someone in a wheelchair before, a night where the Eagles win by 7 and not one of your family members cries in your arms. You want her to gain one new word this month, just one. You want to keep your blood pressure below 130 and your mothers below 120 and you want lychees to be in season. This is your wanting, and the wanting is ambrosia and just within grasp some days. So you stare out the gallery window toward the barren and bountiful desert and find you do not mind the sun. You do not mind this gentle assurance of normalcy. You do not even mind the bitter-edged memory of being here with your mother, there is light in it, too. You are fine without the wanting, today.

But the wanting does not care. The sky shawls itself gray in an instant. Athenaic bursts of rain dehisce the clouds, and the screaming of a storm reaches you, the gallery, and the steel all at once. Rain smears the window. You watch as each flash of lightning extends in white searing arcs, cracking against steel corkscrews, veining between them, creating primordial shapes your mind recognizes before your eyes can register them. This is the wanting, as certain as laughter, ignorant of you and your newfound contentment. This is the wanting. All twelve years of it bearing down upon you. This, all this, the rainstorm, your tears, your mother back in California, your sister texting you updates, the lightning striking, the cars driving too fast, the butchers cutting too sloppily, all this is the wanting, and God, isn’t it heavy.

---

Spencer Nitkey is a writer, researcher, and educator living in Philadelphia. His writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Does it Have Pockets, Apex Magazine, Diabolical Plots, Lightspeed, Flash Fiction Online, and others. He was a finalist for the 2023 Eugie Foster Memorial Award for Short Fiction, and has been nominated for Best Small Fictions, the Pushcart, and Rhysling awards. You can find more of his writing on his author website.

Claudia Monpere

If I Write I’m Not Thinking of You, Old Man, Does that Mean I Am?

This avalanche slope glows with purple asters, trillium, pink mountain heather. How we’d scour the web for wildflower sightings each spring, think nothing of driving 6 or 7 hours to see blooming meadows, hills, deserts. These are smart flowers here at Glacier National Park. To survive in extreme wind and snow and intense ultraviolet light, their flowers are often shaped like a parabola to focus the sun’s warmth on their reproductive parts. Or drooping bells to capture heat radiating from the earth. But you know this, my love. I wish I hadn’t rolled my eyes when you spoke flowers. I wish I’d learned instead of simply being greedy for color. You said your biggest fear was me seeing the future you: dying neurons, shriveling hippocampus. You said we’d have to stop seeing each other: your daughter’s demand. That she couldn’t cope with the awfulness of your diagnosis, couldn’t be there to support you if I was in your life. That this was her mother’s job in spite of the divorce, that her mother longed to care for your shrinking brain, your vanishing memory. You said you were too old and sick to stand up to your daughter. You said I could make you happy by not thinking of you anymore. You were crying, so I nodded. I lied. You’re in every bloom, waterfall, mountain peak. In every shrinking glacier. Dear aid, dear nurse, dear anyone. Please read this aloud to him, then shred. 

---

Marigold

Drip, drip. From the ceiling into the pail. Sara curses herself for not getting the roof repaired, the ceiling already discolored from last winter’s rain. Her dying mother’s words: “Take care of Marigold. Promise me. Cherish her.” When diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, her mother didn’t worry about dying; she’d go to Heaven and be with her husband who—never without his toolbelt— was probably remodeling the clouds. She told this joke often: to doctors, nurses, lab technicians, adding, “It’s not the dying. What I can’t bear is the thought that Marigold will be neglected.” She named the 118-year-old house when she moved in, a new bride, charmed by the marigolds out front.

Sara empties the pail, returning it carefully to the floor. Dry rot around windowsills. Deteriorating knob and tube wiring. Plumbing problems. The fireplace, the only thing she loves about this house— unsafe. The chimney’s crumbling.

The house contains all her mother’s nurturing. She babied the red pine floors, oiling them regularly. She spotted wall and door smudges before they happened. Whenever Sara played indoors as a child, her mother lurked with a rag and spray bottle. In her last days of life, pain controlled by the hospice nurse, she rarely spoke. When she did, her labored voice rattled words like Mari and promise. Once the word love. Sara leaned in. Finally, after all these years. But no.   

The rain stops. A roofer makes repairs. The furnace goes out again. Sara talks to the broken furnace, who she’s named Haley. Tells her she’s exhausted by promises. Tells her she wants to burn this house down. Tells her about those glorious thirty-two months when she had her own apartment, rooms her mother never entered. A job working with people who smiled. Before her father died. Before her mother’s heart disease worsened and she pressured Sara to quit her job and move back home. Before Sara shrank to a speck. Vanished.

Like the fireplace. She awakens one day and it’s gone, the wall empty. She feels the wall; maybe she’s in a dream and the fireplace is invisible. But the wall is smooth, as if the fireplace has never been there. Outside, she sees the chimney is gone. She takes one of her mother’s sleeping pills, returns to bed. Late afternoon she awakens, groggy. Heads upstairs for the bathroom. It’s vanished. She showers in the second bathroom and wonders what else has disappeared. Maybe the antique curio cabinet with the creepy bisque and porcelain dolls. But nothing else appears to be missing even though she examines every room, opening closets, drawers, cabinets.

 A walk to test her sanity. Everything seems normal in the neighborhood, and she has a lovely conversation with her neighbor, Blake, whose cocker spaniel is at dog boot camp. She’s too embarrassed to ask Blake whether or not he can see her chimney. She goes to the bookstore and buys a level 4 Sudoku book, completing some of them easily in a café. Good brain, she says. Thank you. Back home, the entire second floor is gone. Google is no help. She goes to the basement. Perhaps Haley can talk now. But the furnace is silent while Sara tells her about parts of the house disappearing.

She can’t sleep. She roams the remaining rooms in the house, grateful she lives mostly on the first floor, searching for what is most important to her. What must not vanish. It turns out it’s only her old leather boots, the emerald earrings her dad gave her for her sixteenth birthday, a framed photo of him on a ladder waving, and a few novels and collections of poetry. And of course, her wallet, laptop, and phone. She places everything in a backpack next to her bed, dresses in several layers of clothing, and lies down. Maybe she should take the backpack to a hotel, spend the night, drive back to the house in the morning and see what’s left. But no. She’ll sleep here tonight. She shuts her eyes. Something glows inside her, like she’s swallowed stars.

---

Alphabet

My pet ghost apologizes that she’s not a very good ghost. She can’t do any tricks. She’s uncomfortable scaring people. She’s only a gray blob the size of a toddler, not like other ghosts who prism and shapeshift. I tell her she’s perfect. I tell my husband about her but he thinks the medication is making me hallucinate.  He’s so earnest, leaning in, holding my hand, running his fingers through my hair.

My pet ghost is full of opinions. She’s furious when my friend Sharon finally visits. “Does that bitch think she can just waltz in here with a box of bakery goods and you won’t remember that she hasn’t been in touch for months?! And you were so nice to her!”

I shrug. “It’s too sad for her. She doesn’t know what to say.”

“You’re too nice,” she says. “You need to grow some balls.”

No one can make me laugh like my pet ghost.

One day she surprises me by shaping herself into some letters. She can do C, D, I, and O perfectly and she’s close to getting some other letters. My husband hears me clapping and thinks I'm watching tv, then shakes his head sadly when he sees nothing. He asks if I’m up for a short walk. I’d rather be with my pet ghost, but I don’t want to hurt his feelings and the sun on my face feels good as he pushes me in the wheelchair. He talks yet again about how he wishes we had a child. Back when we went out a lot, our friends were full of funny stories about potty training and sleep routines.

My pet ghost says I’m lucky because few people in hospice get a ghost.

By the time I can’t leave the hospital bed that has taken over our bedroom, my ghost can do the entire alphabet. She knows I’m impressed even though I spend most of my time sleeping. But I notice something—she’s shrinking. I try to ask if this is a new trick but it’s getting so hard for me to speak. But she understands and shakes her head. Over hours or maybe days – time is a mirage--she shrinks and shrinks, still doggedly practicing her letters. When she is the size of a pencil stub, she shapes herself slowly into seven letters: g-o-o-d-b-y-e. Then she wraps around my right pinkie, like a ring, and I feel the pulse of her warmth and I know that she is me and I am her and really, there’s no need for either of us to say good-bye.

---

Claudia Monpere’s flash appears in Craft, Split Lip, SmokeLong Quarterly, Trampset, Atlas and Alice, New Flash Fiction Review, and elsewhere. Her poems appear in such journals as The Cincinnati Review, Plume, Prairie Schooner, New Ohio Review, and Hunger Mountain. She was the winner of the 2024 New Flash Fiction Prize by New Flash Fiction Review and was awarded 1st place in Refractions: Genre Flash Fiction Prize 2024 by Uncharted Magazine. She received the 2023 SmokeLong Workshop Prize, and her story, “Solar Flare” appears in Best Small Fictions 2024.

Amy Marques

Chorus Line of Silent Protests

You couldn’t argue with Alex’s brother Sean because he won any argument, not because he actually knew what he was talking about, but because he kept repeating himself louder and louder and was the kind of stubborn that thought if you just heard and understood what he was saying you’d obviously agree with him because there’s only one way of thinking of things and that was however Sean believed things should be, so Alex had learned to retreat into stillness and order his thoughts like a chorus line of silent protests while Sean went on and on about how people these days had no work ethic, not like when he’d been a postman in the 50s and never complained about what was mailed because that was before people started making up words for everything and giving you all these forms with tiny letters you couldn’t even read with magnifying lenses, besides it couldn’t be illegal to mail their mother’s remains to their sister in the East Coast because it would be, after all, fitting since, as an infant, she’d been mailed—sealed and stamped and all legal and everything—and carried by the postman from her parent’s house to live with her grandmother a dozen miles away and it was obviously much harder to carry an actual live infant than it was to carry a box of dust and you should, of course, agree.

The Sea is Kindest to Poets

~ after Neruda’s The Sea & also after the legend of Labismena

Year after year, ferryboats deliver them to Mena’s shores: wild-haired intellectuals with a penchant for stroking island cats, baby poets who walk the beaches, notebooks in hand, seeking lessons in the crunching shells and ceaseless waves, wanting to harvest the grace of the wind and the rhythms of the tides.

Year after year, they gather at Mena’s table. The guests digest ideas with fervor as she refills their cups. She wonders if they know she’s been hearing much of the same for decades, that her sea has lulled others who’d spoken similar thoughts, who have themselves to have achieved unprecedented vastness on these shores.

Year after year, sabbaticals done, they leave. The kindest among them have learned her name and promise to send word, to send books, to send invitations to fulfill her dream of knowing what lies beyond her shores.

Once, she believed them. But after years and years, Mena is no longer susceptible to words spoken under the spell of the sea. She knows that when the guests are gone, their promises disappear like the sun when it sets a torch to the horizon; the water reflects its flames for a moment, before pulling them into the deep. Her sea endlessly crashes against the shore, against the shattered shells, the grains of sand, once whole mountains, which now wash out beneath her sinking feet.

---

Amy Marques grew up between languages and places and learned, from an early age, the multiplicity of narratives. She’s been nominated for multiple awards, longlisted twice in Wigleaf 50, and has visual art, poetry, and prose published in journals such as Streetcake Magazine, SoFloPoJo, Raw Lit, Ghost Parachute, BOOTH, Chicago Quarterly Review, and Gone Lawn. She is the editor and visual artist for the Duets anthologies and author and artist of the chapbook Are You Willing? and the found poetry book PARTS. More at https://amybookwhisperer.wordpress.com.

Check out Amy’s featured gallery in DIHP’s November 2024 Art & Hybrids section.

Kathy Hoyle

Humbug Shark

On the funeral director’s desk there’s a jar of black and white humbugs. An old-fashioned glass jar with a shiny silver lid, like the ones you see in sweet shops of yore. And don’t ask me why I use the word yore when I would never ever use that word usually, it just seeped into the room of its own accord, alongside a thin woman in laced boots and a white cap and apron, stark against her high-necked black dress.

The woman has veined hands, which she uses to take those glass jars down from heavy oak shelves. She unscrews the silver lids and fills a bronze scoop with humbugs from the jars. She pours the humbugs onto an iron weighing scale. They clink-clink and the dish tilts. The woman tips the humbugs into striped paper bags, carefully folds the top of the bags and hands them to children in bright bonnets, while indulgent mothers look on. The woman has a kindly smile and a gleam in her eye. A gleam that says, you chose well, your decision will bring you happiness, well done you.

I wonder if her name is an old-fashioned one, a name of yore (what even is yore?) And I’m thinking maybe it’s Marjory or Ethel or Mrs Ada Quinn. I wonder if Mrs Ada Quinn was taken to her final resting place from right here, in this very funeral home - established in 1913 by Messrs Banbridge, Bolton and Sons - and I wonder if the money from her family paid for those swirling gold letters etched onto the shop front window and I wonder if the humbugs on the desk were her humbugs, and are still.

I wonder why humbugs. Because humbugs are sharp, not soothing at all, they’re sombre sweets that nip at the tongue. They taste like shit. I wonder if the slick funeral director is even aware that they’re there.

The funeral director is talking, flashing small shark teeth, talking, endlessly, talking about colours, Dove White, Genteel Cream, Break of Dawn Blue, and now he’s telling me about fabrics, silk, velvet, satin or calico and he leads seamlessly into caskets, oak, wicker, steel and cherry, and he’s talking, still fucking talking, about flowers, lilies, orchids, roses or irises.

 I wonder if Ada would sigh, like he does, if I took my time choosing things from her shelves. Or would she kindly make suggestions? Maybe not humbugs at all. Maybe she would carefully bring down each jar for me to peer into and inhale the sugared smells? Give me all the time in the world to consider the overwhelming myriad of coloured candies, my tastebuds tingling. Maybe she would smile and say, ‘it’s okay, it’s important to take your time,’ until finally, I could breathe and make my decision.

The funeral director is smiling now, actually smiling, and it makes his face look even younger, and I realize that he’s probably not even the funeral director at all, just the funeral director’s son. My father did not warrant the funeral director… just the funeral director’s son.

The smiling funeral director’s son pauses. His words float just above his head, like little drops of candy, like little humbugs. He pushes his pale hands through his slick dark hair. He is waiting for me to answer. I think his hands must feel slippy now, and slick, and if he were to try and open a jar of humbugs, say, his hands would be too slippy, he would have difficulty, for sure. So, because I’m feeling ornery and feisty and a more than a little pissed off at his stupid shark teeth and his smiling and his talking and his slicker-than-slick business-like manner, I lean forward and nod into the hanging silence. I nod toward the glass jar on his desk.

Confusion creases his brow.

‘Oh, please do,’ he says, with his leering shark-smile. He holds his hand out for me to help myself. But because I’m apparently in the anger stage of grief, I lean back in my seat and wait. I wait and wait, until finally he stands up and walks around his stupid way-too-big oak desk and smooths his stupid pale hands through his slick dark hair and runs them down the legs of his expensive trousers - paid for with the bones of people like Mrs Ada Quinn  since 1913 - and I watch him pick up the humbug jar and struggle with the lid, hands slipping, shark teeth clenched, a snarl of slipping, clenching ick, until finally the lid pops and he thrusts the jar toward me with a sigh of relief.

I peer inside the jar and say, ‘Oh, humbugs, no, thank you. Do you have anything else?’

 I watch him turn toward his desk and then back to me and slowly shake his head. He holds the jar steady. Ada stands in the corner of the room, eyes downcast with pity because she cannot help me and she knows, she knows, that all I need is a little more time, and for him to stop yapping, even just for a minute, for a second, and let me breathe before I have to make a decision, but now I’m forced to put my hand in the jar and pick out one of  those fucking humbugs and seethe at the funeral director’s son with his stupid shark smile.

I shove the humbug in my mouth and suck hard, the sharpness nipping my tongue, almost bringing tears to my eyes. Almost. And when the funeral director’s son starts talking again, talking, talking, about colours and caskets and flowers, I keep sucking, harder. I let him talk and talk, trying to force me to make a decision, any decision, anything at all. I sit there sucking on that sombre, shit-tasting humbug, refusing to say a word or, even for a second, let that shark-faced fucker see me cry. 

Ada looks on. She gives me the gentlest nod and whispers, ‘you just take your time.’

---

Kathy Hoyle’s work is published in literary magazines such as The Forge, Lunate, Emerge literary journal, New Flash Fiction Review, South Florida Poetry Journal and Fictive Dream. She has won a variety of competitions including The Bath Flash Fiction Award, The Hammond House Origins Competition and The Retreat West Flash Fiction Competition. She was recently longlisted for the Wigleaf Top 50 and her work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions, Best Microfictions and The Pushcart Prize. She lives in a sleepy Warwickshire village and when she’s not writing, she spends her time singing Dolly Parton songs to her long-suffering labradoodle, Eddie.

Karen Walker

The Meaning of Words Unknown to Doug

·      matutinal: occurring in the morning

Doug is not at the kitchen table with his oatmeal. He's in the garage under the Chevy, stuck in a pool of thick oil. 

·      jentacular: pertaining to breakfast

Louise stirs You could've died in a pot on the stove. Pours it into her bowl and his. Despite a kiss on the cheek and an extra spoonful of brown sugar, Doug denies needing anyone's help or ever wanting oatmeal.    

·      dès vu: the knowledge that something has become a memory

As the dealership changes the Chevy's oil, Doug sinks deeper and deeper into a leather tub chair in the customer lounge. There's only complimentary latte. No coffee. What's a latte?

·      acatalepsy: the impossibility of comprehending the universe

At least six—!—building permits would be required to convert the spidery garage into a den or other living space. 

·      umarell: a retired individual who stands and watches construction sites

When the strip mall was finished, the guys signed a 2x4 and presented it to Doug. They gave him leftover insulation and wire, promised to come see his garage renovations. They haven't, and he hasn't applied for a single permit.

·      catastrophize

When Louise's preliminary results come back, Doug paces the garage. It's thirteen of his Please-God-save-her-I-can't-be-alone shuffle steps wide and twenty-five long.

·      saudade: a longing that's as hazy as it is powerful

He grew up a grease monkey in his father's garage. Mechanics taught him how to change a Chevy's oil. Doug recalls them slapping his back, tousling his hair, shouting, Attaboy! and maybe even, Proud of ya! Doug's father, being forever busy with oil changes, did not.

---

Karen Walker (she/her) writes in Ontario, Canada. Her most recent work is in New Flash Fiction Review, Exist Otherwise, Misery Tourism, Switch, The Ekphrastic Review, and EGG+FROG.

Marijean Oldham

What the Heart Wants

Fate finds Junie in the Taco Bell parking lot, a cup of ice pressed against her swollen eyelids, Diet Coke coursing through her veins. A wrapper floats from her fingers to the floor. She’s smuggling her broken heart into the secret compartment in her chest, girding her body before driving home. She scrolls through her phone, deleting the professor’s texts, his number. A broken heart is harder to hide than the affair ever was.

Her phone rings. “Where you at?” her husband asks, putting Junie’s teeth on edge.

Stan is a courier of human organs, packed in ice, gentled into coolers. He speeds down the highway from hospital to hospital. When Junie thinks of Stan in his vehicle, cooler next to him on the passenger seat, she imagines the heart inside red and beating. 

“On my way home,” she says, cutting her eyes to the wrapper.

Stan, that courier of hearts and livers, a devout eschewer of fast food, cannot know about the way she takes her hurt to Taco Bell, sinking into the soothing comfort of a cheesy double beef burrito. The affair with the professor would be a more welcome revelation than this; her drive-through dalliance. The weight of her secrets hardens like plaque in an artery until she’s an impenetrable wall of pain.

Junie looks in the rearview and uses the condensation from the cup to clean the ruined mascara from under her eyes. She rolls down the driver’s side window and tosses cup and wrapper into the trash can with its long, wide neck, there for just this purpose, there to receive deceit, the driver never having to come fully to a stop.

Keeping it Together at the Falling Apart Salon

I settle in the chair at Rose’s, careful not to bump my broken elbow. She fusses, getting the cape just right. “Washing my hair one-handed isn’t really getting the job done,” I say, embarrassed at the state of my faded crowning glory.

“Of course it isn’t, honey. I don’t know why you didn’t call sooner!” She teeters behind me on sky-high heels and, as always, I marvel at her pinup figure.

Theresa pops out from under the dryer hood with a head full of green curlers and scowls at me. “Aren’t you the one who swapped husbands with that other lady?”

“Theresa! Let’s mind our manners,” Rose says, trying to come to my rescue. Theresa’s memory might be fading, but this salacious detail remains.

“Not exactly,” I say, reaching for my cup of takeout coffee, the question still a gut punch after all these years. “It was more a matter of my husband dumping me for her, and her dumping her husband for mine. Later, the two of us dump-ees decided to get together. But that’s old news!”

Claire, her white hair already coiffed and gleaming, chimes in from the manicure chair, where Louanne is just finishing painting her fingernails a bright coral. “Theresa, you know that’s none of our business.” She pauses a second, cocks her head with a smile and says, “Now, whatever happened to those other two?”

Rose leans me gently back into the washbowl and begins to rinse my hair, “They got married just as soon as they could,” I say, looking at the ceiling.

Rose gets to lathering my head, rinsing, conditioning, and rinsing again, suspending further conversation. When I’m upright again, I find them all looking at me, Theresa, Claire, and Louanne. There’s nothing this bunch likes more than a little gossip.

While Rose combs my hair into tidy sections, Claire takes the seat next to mine and pats my leg. “That must have been hard, dear.”

“It almost broke me, at first, if I’m being honest,” I say, patting my elbow in its formidable splint, the result of a misstep on a steep gravel hill. “But if it weren’t for them dumping us, my husband and I never would have gotten together! Every year on the anniversary of simultaneously being asked for a divorce, we say we ought to send them a fruit basket.”

The ladies hoot with laughter.

Rose’s eyes meet mine in the mirror as she uses a round brush to dry my hair, the sound drowning out all conversation, and holding me in a cocoon of my own thoughts. I give her a grateful smile. Rose has heard it all. It was in this exact chair that I dissolved into tears when I got the text from my daughter telling me her dad had set a wedding date. She saw my hair fall out at the worst of it, my eyes and skin wrecked from sleepless nights and tears. And when I first told her about Sam, she said she thought I should go for it, and in the years that followed saw me lift and brighten, along with my hair, which got blonder and bigger with every visit. She squealed and kissed my cheek when I asked her to do my hair for our wedding.

When she’s finished smoothing and curling my unruly mane, Rose turns me in the chair so the other ladies can cluck their approval.

Rose says, “Honey, every single person who has sat in this chair has fallen apart from time to time. There’s nothing like a good friend and a blowout to put you back together.” Rose has been the glue for each and every one of us; Louanne, getting back on her feet after a bad marriage, Claire when her husband passed away from a heart attack at fifty, and even cranky old Theresa, when her dementia became undeniable. I reach back with my good hand and hold Rose’s for a minute.

Louanne says, “Are they happy?”

“Who?” I ask.

“The other couple—your exes?”

“I assume so,” I say. “They divorced each other and are both married to entirely other people now.” And again, the tiny salon fills with laughter.

---

 Marijean Oldham is a public relations consultant and writer. In 2003, Marijean set a Guinness Book World Record for creating the largest bouquet of flowers. When not writing, Marijean is a pie enthusiast and competitive baker.

Sophia A. Montz

6174

You hadn’t heard of Kaprekar’s Constant before you died. If you had, it may have given you comfort. If you had, you might have looked at me with half-hooded knowing eyes, see, I told you there was a meaning to all of this. I told you. You wanted me to believe so badly, and I called it ancient divination, desert ravings, limerence with prophecy, ketamine for the human spirit. Ah, but I’ve learned about Kaprekar’s Constant now. I would have explained it to you with all the ecstasy of the converted, the tenderness of a sermon—did you know that almost any four-digit number can be distilled into a single, ecstatic fixed point, a syllable in integers, an om ringing through the nitrate pepper of the stars?

I see why they study biblical numerology, why they find the divine hand in single and double digits, secrets in tens and hundreds and thousands. Did you know that three and a half in the Old Testament is a week severed in two, an arrest, a stopping of the heart? Three feels unfinished anyway, twin half-circles curling into nothing, dead air and absence. Is that not what happened to you and me, some ethereal tyranny that stopped us midway? I see you too in this recursion of numbers, in the dyscalculia of us. The curve of a seven is like the curve of your back, the twist of a six the round of your cheek.

I think now—too late—that there is a hidden code to the universe, some great secret underlying the surface of our lives. The script of a melody, the measures and rests of a symphony breaking like waves around the stony figures of us. Imagine hearing music, singing music, feeling and being music, with no knowledge of the notation, the written shape, the translation of sound upon the page. Kaprekar’s Constant must be that sound upon the page, the glimmer of a hidden truth just beyond the veil. Six thousand one hundred and seventy-four. 

Translate us into this cosmic dialect, read our numerals in back-room tea leaves. Arrange our lives on a page in numbers—I’ll be eight, you six, my mother four, your father two. Rearrange us, subtract us, subtract us, subtract us, and you are left with this strange universal constant, this magic that underpins all the pain and suffering and joys and triumphs of it all.

One Zero Three One.

The day we met. The night rang with a tympani of plastic cups and in a single breath I was twenty-two and burning with innocent life. I was dressed as a priest in some satirical impotent rebellion and you were a rabbit, I think, but I don’t remember the costume. I don’t need to, because all I saw in the rearview of your cheap half-broken car were your eyes rimmed with plastic jewels, alive with the corona of youth. I learned the tell that you were lying that first night, when you told me that my outfit offended you but your eyes crinkled in the corners and you blew just a little too much air out of your nose. And from that too-hot fall evening I knew you weren’t much of a liar, not when a smile gave your bluff away.

One One Zero Three.

The first time I kissed you under the neon marquee of the movie theater and you tasted like popcorn and salt and benediction.

Zero Three Two Six.   

We moved in together and we sat on our Ikea sofa drinking whatever liquor store clearance rack wine you picked up on the way home and I knew, I felt in the faraway blood cell spaces of my marrow that you and I were everything, everything, everything.

One Zero One Zero Zero One Zero One One …

We collapsed into binary, into infinite repetition. Alike digits, you see, escape Kaprekar’s Constant, and can’t be distilled into that single fixed point, into that peculiar universal alchemy. Our days crumpled into dyads, into routine, into a kiss goodbye and an increasingly halfhearted hello and arguments about dishes and coworkers and checking accounts. One—we fought, I raised my voice and you said I was just like my father, and I said something hateful and stupid and cruel that I regretted as pride smothered the apology in the back of my throat. Zero—I kissed your lips in the underwater light of a full moon, where your hands on my back and in my hair and over the thick denim of my pants were delirious fire. One—you stared out my sedan window, mute, arms crossed and eyes fixed on the downy gray of rain. Zero—we curled into the corner of the sofa like satisfied cats, mouths wet with gin, hands pressed together in reverent worship of each other.

Zero Two Zero Nine.

You told me that you couldn’t justify the bad days anymore, that someone else would fill your life with only good days, and that you would find them. That you had to find them.

Zero Two One Zero.

I let you.

Zero Eight Two Nine.

Calculating the collision of objects in space is an imperfect poetry, but I would have twisted any probability and committed any sin for my car to collide under that banner of August summer. I fell to my knees, crying in great, gulping anguish to something I knew did not exist, to something that I wanted so badly to exist I could collapse from hot burning want into a pillar of ash.

But now I understand what you could never make me understand together, that there is, somehow, a mysterious harmony in the bones of this world. If we are numbers, and if Kaprekar’s Constant is true, then we may change and rearrange and transform, only to be resurrected, all of us resurrected, into a single ever-burning perpetuity. I don’t pretend to know why, to be able to justify it, to be able to draw if-a-then-b-then-c. But I stare at the number two and in it I see the eighth rest in a canticle of us, consecrated in smoke and incense, the melody one day to begin again.

---

Sophia Montz writes legal memoranda by day and literary fiction by night. She lives in Miami, FL with her husband and two cats. Her work is forthcoming in The /tƐmz/ Review.

Ken Foxe

The Three Burning Castles Problem

My mammy always said to me I should never get a tattoo, and good son that I was, I did exactly what I was told. When she passed away though, her gentle heart packing in after a lifetime of cigarettes and dry cider, that cleared a path for me. It was a month or so after Dublin had done the six-in-a-row, and I was flush with cash. Mammy had a few thousand euro – a few old punts included – stashed away under her mattress. I’d known nothing about it, which was good in a way. I would probably have ‘borrowed’ half of it before she departed, may the lord grant her eternal rest.

As an only son, I’d been making solid progress in spending my unexpected windfall. But I’d nothing to show for it bar new jeans and t-shirts to replace the old ones that had gotten a little too snug from all my bonviverie. I’d the day off work from my job in the bean factory and had frittered away much of the afternoon drinking down in Phibsboro. There was a spring in my step as I headed home and as I made my way up towards Connaught Street, I noticed a newly opened tattoo parlour just across from the shopping centre.

It was called Idle Ink, its lettering in an old playbill font, and I liked the ring of its name. The outside was decorated like an old saloon from one of those Western films my daddy loved. And as I pushed open the door, a little bell chimed to inform the proprietor of my arrival and mid-life crisis.

The tattooist was beautiful in a way that left even an inveterate raconteur like me without words.

“Hello,” was the best I could muster.

“Hi,” she said, her voice deep like you could swim in it. “Can I help you?”

“I was thinking of getting a tattoo,” I said as I counted her piercings. One in her nose, another in her cheek, both eyebrows, half a dozen in each ear, her bellybutton … God only knew where else because I never would.

“Have you something in mind?” she asked, my eye drawn to a green and yellow Brazilian flag stencilled on her upper arm, which almost seemed to billow with its blue disc turning.

“Maybe something to do with Dublin.”

She smiled at me, and I was doing all I could to stop my mouth opening and closing like an old trout.

“You’ll have to give me … well, a bit more to work with,” she said.

I pulled out my phone, which helped focus my mind, because it meant I wasn’t looking straight at her anymore. I searched Safari for Dublin and Gaelic football, and the old county crest with the three burning castles popped up.

“Something like this maybe,” I said, showing her the screen.

She took the mobile from me and even her hand was able to draw my eyes helplessly as I noticed the teal nail polish on her delicate fingers.

“I’ve seen this before,” she said.

“So, how does this work? Do I make an appointment and come back?”

“We could do it right away if you like.”

“And do you do it exactly like the photo on my phone?”

“I could,” she said. “Or you could trust in my imagination?”

And I’ll be honest, she could have asked me to go swim across the Liffey on a snowy January morning in my y-fronts, and I would have caught my cold, and probably drowned.

I laid out on the black leather reclining chair, eyes closed. It put me in mind of being in the dentist’s but with the scent of recently smoked marijuana befogging the air instead of antiseptic and mouthwash.

“What’s your name?” she asked me.

“Christy,” I said. “And you?”

“Gabriela.” Each of the four syllables, gentle waves breaking on warm sand.

“Ga-bree-ay-la,” I whispered.

“How are you with pain?” she asked.

What answer could I give except to say ‘grand’ even though the flu jab from the nurse every November would make me wince. And while the vibration of the needle was sore, it wasn’t so bad. Moderate pain, when you know it won’t get any worse and will soon be over, tends to stay self-contained and tolerable.

“How long has the shop been open?” I asked her.

“Just this week,” said Gabriela. “A pop-up until our main parlour is ready.”

“Pop-up?” I said. “Hmmm.”

By the time I left, three hours had passed, which was peculiar because it felt like a quarter of that. Perhaps the lingering aroma of cannabis had caused some mild sedation because all I wanted to do was sleep. My eyes were heavy as I looked at the finished tattoo. It was exquisite. I don’t own the words to describe it well, except to say that Gabriela seemed as gifted as anybody I had ever met.

She sent me on my way, upper arm wrapped in clingfilm, and a sheet of instructions on how to take care of my freshly inked body. In the living room of my small house in Cabra that evening, I read through them. How I could expect soreness and sensitivity. That this might last for up to a week. If it didn’t seem to settle, that there could be an infection. But that the chances of this were low. I fell asleep right there on the couch, the A4 page landing on my mammy’s well-worn Persian rug. I found it there the next morning, ink smudged, the text indecipherable.

It wasn’t my priority though because when I first awoke, my skin was clammy, and I had an overwhelming nausea. I was sure I was going to get sick but when I raced to the toilet, nothing came. My stomach though; it felt like a tumble drier filled with citric acid. Growling. Cursing at me.

I took a Nexium tablet from the medicine press, washed it down with a glass of full fat milk. That seemed to ease the gurgling, but I still felt a little feverish and had to wipe my brow with a dishcloth. I didn’t link it to the tattoo at first, instead blaming a bad pint from the previous afternoon. Talking to the factory supervisor on the phone, I knew he thought I was on a bender again when I told him there was no way I could make it in.

I dragged myself up the stairs and flopped down on my bed. I hadn’t changed my clothes from the night before and I stank. But I couldn’t muster the energy to change into pyjamas or go for a shower. Lying there, I would sometimes wrap myself tight in the quilt. Other times, I could hardly stand for an inch of the duvet to be touching me. My tattooed arm was burning but so too was the other undecorated one, along with my forehead, neck, chest, legs, and every other appendage.

The hours simmered away so that when my temperature finally came down, it was already getting dark outside. It was drizzling, dark clouds in the sky, one of those winter days where the sun seemed hardly to have risen at all. By then I felt okay, given the circumstances. I heated chicken soup in the microwave, drank it directly from the Tetra Pak, and gulped down two Solpadeine. I looked at my covered arm, the three burning castles blurred beneath the cellophane. It was itchy but I was able to resist the urge to scratch.

North by Northwest was playing on the TV, and I remembered how my mammy used to love Cary Grant, and that famous suit he wore. She used to say daddy looked like him when he was younger, but I’m not sure who she thought she was fooling. The warm soup settled my stomach, so that I was able to eat a banana sandwich as well. I stayed watching the telly, dozing off for a few minutes here or there. And by the time I headed back upstairs, I had a hope like the worst of what ailed me was over.

It was a little after 3am when I awoke feeling like my arm was ablaze. Not just where the tattoo was but all down through my forearm, wrist, and into my fingers. My hand instinctively went up to where the clingfilm was before I grabbed the crook of my elbow tight hoping it would ease the pain. I staggered to the ensuite bathroom, turned on the light, approached the mirror. Terrified as I wondered what I would see.

My entire arm was covered in ink now, from top to bottom. I tore off the wrapping and I could see the tattoo was in motion. There was a Viking longboat sailing down along the central vein, the one doctors use for taking blood. I could see the meandering Liffey and the Black Pool as they were before the quays tamed them. There were bonfires on each riverbank, and it was there that my arm burned most intensely. The wooden ship scythed through the water, pushed forward by twenty lines of fierce bearded Norsemen, the strokes of their oars rippling and fluttering on my skin. It seemed as if arrows were being fired toward the boat, and each would land like a sharp pin on me that would dimple and pierce the surface, then vanish subcutaneously.

I’m not sure what happened after that, but I must have made it back to bed and I didn’t come to until midday. I looked first of course to my arm, the protective film removed, the tattoo at peace. It occurred to me that what had happened was a dream until I stood again before the mirror, and I saw smoke rising from the top of the three castles and felt skin that was warm to the touch.

Strangely, I felt fine otherwise. The fever seemed to have passed and I was well enough to walk back down to Phibsboro to speak to Gabriela. It was a crisp day, the barest tickling of winter sun on my back. I tried to think of what I was going to say as I passed by Eddie Rocket’s and came to the pedestrian lights.

‘That can’t be right,’ I muttered to myself as I looked across to where the tattoo parlour should have been. The premises was almost derelict, its large display window boarded up. It was covered in anti-fascist posters and tagged with graffiti. ‘Am I after getting confused,’ I wondered? ‘Was it further up the road?’ But as I looked along the streetscape, there was nowhere else it could have been – all the other buildings were occupied.

There was a charity shop next door, so I went inside and spoke to an older lady at the cash register.

“Did the tattoo shop next door close down?” I asked.

“Tattoo shop?” she said.

“Yeah, a pop-up shop or something.”

“That building’s been empty these years.”

My arm began to burn again, and I could feel beads of sweat on my forehead. It was like a hot flush, as the strength wept out from my legs and left me wobbling. I wondered if it was a panic attack; mammy had suffered that affliction.

“Have you a bathroom?” I asked.

“No,” she answered, “try McDonalds.”

With every step, it felt as if I might topple over, like a Slinkie teetering on the top of the stairs. I tried to gather myself in the restroom, sitting on the toilet seat, my t-shirt pushed up above my shoulder. The fire atop the three castles was raging now, and for the first time in my life, I wondered if I was going insane. All I could see was myself in the fraying armchair of a psychiatrist’s office, talking of hallucinations and hospitalisation.

Maybe it was the fever. I remembered a teenage flu when my temperature soared to 102 and how dreams, nightmares, and wakefulness began to coalesce and fuse. Perhaps it was just an infection and so I took my phone and called the office of my GP, Doctor Devlin. I told them it was urgent, and they said there had been a cancellation.

“Could you come in at 5.20pm?” the secretary said.

“I’ll be there.”

Dr Devlin was visibly tired when I arrived. I must have been the last appointment in a long day of chest infections, mild depression, lonely pensioners, and suspicious lumps. He was a white-haired man in his early sixties with the demeanour of a school principal. Whenever I sat at his desk, I always felt like a naughty boy banished from his classroom. It was hard to know what to say either and I was terrified of looking foolish. I knew the strange phenomenon of my dancing tattoo was better kept secret.

“Christy,” he said. “I haven’t seen you since your mam’s funeral.”

“Yeah, and I meant to thank you for coming.”

“And what can I do for you today?”

“I did something stupid Doctor Devlin; I got a tattoo and I think it’s infected now.”

“You’re a bit auld for that,” he laughed.

He asked me to take off my top. Around the edges of the burning castles, there was an obvious redness, but at least they were no longer moving. There were a dozen small angry bumps too around the perimeter and as Dr Devlin moved his head from side to side, shining a tiny torch, he pursed his lips.

“Yes, yes,” he said. “I think there’s a bit of an infection all right. Nothing of too much concern but I’m going to give you a script for an antibiotic. It’ll bring that redness down and if there’s pain or tenderness, paracetamol should do the trick.”

“Thanks doctor; it was a silly thing to do.”

He sat back and rubbed the palm of his hand on the crown of his head.

“Ah,” he said, “if I was a young man these days, no doubt I’d have one myself. Do you know the story of the three castles by the way?”

I gritted my teeth in ignorance, a touch embarrassed. I’d never really given it very much thought.

“Was it that Dublin Castle was burnt down three times?” I asked.

“That’s what you’d think all right. But nobody really knows. Some say it’s that the people would do anything to defend their home. Obedientia Civium Urbis Felicitas, the obedience of the citizens produces a happy city.’”

“I was never much good at Latin in school.”

“It was an acquired taste.”

I managed to get the prescription filled at the local chemist, just minutes before they were due to close. I dry-swallowed the first amoxicillin tablet as I walked home, thinking there was no point in wasting any time. And as I sat on the sofa that evening, taking my time over three cans of Tuborg, checking my arm every other minute, it felt like the redness was dimming.

Falling asleep was never easy for me. Unless of course I’d enough drank that I might fall into a stupor, readying myself for the hangover to come. But that night when I stretched out on the bed – ear plugs snug, eye shades on – I must have dropped off straight away. I have no remembrance of tossing or turning, or a racing mind despite all that had happened. And that made my sudden awakening just after 3am even more jolting.

It is hard to describe how it feels for every centimetre of your arm to feel in motion even as it is still. It was as if it had been invaded by a colony of ants that were searching out breadcrumbs or grains of sugar. In one moment, there would be burning, the next pulling, stretching, and piercing. And that was only in the sixty seconds it took me to regain my equilibrium and stagger to the bathroom.

In the mirror, I could see my arm pulsing and quivering. Two ferocious gangs of men – the weavers and the butchers – were at battle. Forty men on either side, armed with clubs, pikes, stones, and cleavers slashed and hacked at one other, and my skin. Routed, the butchers fled to their shambles but were followed and attacked again. Six or seven died, dozens more were injured; arms, backs, legs, heads twisted and broken open. The bloody skirmish only ended when soldiers came to disperse them.

As the confrontation ended, my arm returned to normal, like ink was spilling from a fountain, but in reverse. All that remained were the three burning castles, light smoke drifting up from the crenelation. And then that too ceased, so that peace descended upon my body once more.

It doesn’t happen nightly, only every three or four days. I saw firsthand the Fenian Rising and the execution of Robert Emmet. I watched shells rain down on Dublin from the Liffey; the GPO and Four Courts left in rubble. Nelson’s Pillar exploded on my bicep, and along my brachioradialis, the Invincibles stabbed Lord Cavendish with surgical knives.

I spend my free time poring over history books trying to piece together the lesser-known events that unfold on the skin that covers my ulna, radius, and humerus. The tattoo occasionally spreads so that my chest and other arm become illuminated too. Will it someday cover me entirely?

I’ve learned to live with the pain as it ebbs away when each spectacle ends. My body has become a cinema screen, an animated portal to the past. All I wish for now is that it would happen every night.

---

Ken Foxe is a writer and transparency activist in Ireland. He is the author of two non-fiction books based on his journalism and a member of the Horror Writer’s Association. He has had around three dozen short stories published in a wide variety of journals, magazines, and anthologies. You can find him on Instagram (@kenfoxe) and Twitter/X (@kenfoxe). www.kenfoxe.com/short-stories/

Mark Fellin

The J Line

Becca steps to the edge of the platform for the fifth time in the past four minutes and bends in half to look into the tunnel. The late-night J train to Brooklyn is the goddamn worst. Followed closely by every other line on the colorful subway map sprawl. All aboard a crumbling relic built in 1904. Congestion ahead, track issues, sick passengers, we appreciate your patience. Don’t worry, the latest fare hike will fix it all. Becca steps back and scans the empty platform before leaning against a rusting girder. She adjusts the backpack hanging over her shoulder and pulls her coat tight against the icy December air.      

It’s three in the morning and Becca’s on her way home after eight hours of proofreading. Reviewing forms and fine print is mind-numbing work, but identifying other people’s errors feels a lot better than dwelling on her own. It’s therapy in paragraph form. She scored the overnight gig a few months ago after acing the copy editing exam; maybe those AP English classes actually paid off. But today, just before punching out, the shift manager tells her the position is being eliminated. AI is cheaper and faster with less sass and fewer coffee spills. Thank you, good luck, fuck you.       

She pushes her giant headphones over the top of her tight black wool hat, maxes the volume and is assaulted by the new Deathalon album, Somnolent Scream, the band’s loudest yet. Her frozen breath billows around her head.

When the J eventually limps into the Essex Street station she doesn’t hear it. Deathalon rages through her brain at one hundred twenty decibels. The doors slide open. Becca enters and falls into a seat. It’s three fifteen. She assesses her four fellow travelers as the doors close.

The girl directly across the way is crashing hard. She looks a little younger than Becca, maybe twenty-two. It’s hard to say with pretty little party girls. Across and to the left, a small stiff man studies the bible, his mahogany hand glides down each sacred page, CVS readers grip the tip of his nose, a gold bookmark ribbon extends down between his knees. He’s wrapped in a long black coat, a burgundy scarf twirls around his neck, a green Yankees cap is pulled down tight. To Becca’s right, one bench over, a teenager is sprawled out on his back. His head is shrouded in a grimy gray hoody. His left arm is extended, palm up, panhandling even in his dreams. The kid will freeze when he gets outside, if he goes outside. They say lots of the homeless winter in the subway; it certainly smells like it.

And at the far end, in the corner, a long narrow figure sits up straight, legs crossed at the ankles, hands jammed deep in the pockets of a silver Canada Goose down jacket. He reads the ads that ring the car, lips moving slightly. He smiles at Becca. She looks through him subway-style and shuts her eyes.

The next stop is on the other side of the East River. The Manhattan-to-Brooklyn crossing is a six-minute, slow-motion rumble over the Williamsburg Bridge. Becca taps her phone and “Möbius Man” slices through her soul. Nodding in time with the gouging base, Becca’s upcoming weekend flashes by like a bad poker hand: shopping for the ancient aunt she lives with, six hours of court-ordered community service, getting high with Paul, dodging sex with Paul. She knows he’s boning her friend, but Paul has the best weed in Ocean Hill. The best bone too. She’ll break up with him soon. Or move in with him.  

The J pitches forward with a spasm, reconsiders with a jolt and starts its eastward crawl. Becca watches the young girl stretch like a kitten before slinking along and disappearing into the next car. The train emerges from the depths and begins its slow ascent over the bridge. The tall guy is looking at Becca again, or still, so she looks out the window. Through the dirty glass, the city spreads out northward, a dash of glitter tossed on a black cat. Becca pats the Marlboros in her coat pocket. She quit five days ago. She’ll quit again.

Becca replays yesterday’s conversation with her father. It’s the standard artificially flavored peppermint Christmas call from Indiana, with the merry-merry morphing seamlessly into The Checklist: work, boyfriend, come home and give college one more try. Becca’s clipped answers chill the holiday cheer, so they mumble through their I-love-yous and hang up. Her father means well but in the decade since her mother died he hasn’t upped his parenting game.     

Another drum avalanche slams through Becca’s skull and her eyes crack open. The tall guy is standing now, looking down the length of the car. He’s trim but sturdy. His face is straight lines and clean edges, more efficient than handsome, like an IKEA bookcase. His eruption of thick, black hair sways with each dip in the tracks, a smirk slides across his lips. Becca’s eyes close again.

Without a job she’ll be out of her windowless one-room basement apartment soon. Her aunt is not unkind, but she’s a bottom-line lady on a fixed income. A guitar solo plows down Becca’s spine and makes her knees ache. Her eyes twitch open long enough to see the tall guy standing in front of the man reading the bible, who’s looking up and shaking his head. The J train’s jangle pushes her heavy lids down.

Is it bad breaks or bad decisions that have her slouching home to a secondhand futon in the pre-dawn frost? A bad attitude, she’s been told more than once, coupled with a toxic ego and sprinkled with stubbornness. She came to New York two years ago. It has wrestled her to the ground and tapping out may be her only option. She’s heard that Portland is a great place for exiles and castaways, with plenty of rain to keep expectations sufficiently low.

Becca absently fingers her lip rings. When she opens her eyes again the bible reader is lying on the floor, face down, mouth slack with death. His hands are tucked under his body, against his belly, failing to hold in his life, which zig-zags down the black rubber floor of the subway car, thick and red. The bible is nowhere in sight.

The tall guy sits directly across from her now. He’s leaning forward, elbows resting on his knees, a long silver blade hangs down from his clasped hands. He’s looking to his left at a second motionless pile on the floor, the kid in the now very bloody hoody. The tall guy looks at Becca and yawns, wide and long.

“That’s rude,” Becca says. She can barely hear herself so she slips off her headphones, drops them in her lap. The savage beat thumps across her thighs. “You should cover your mouth,” she adds flatly, the words thick, heavy.

He responds with a toothy weatherman’s smile, his head bobs along with the train.

Becca glances to the left at the dead man, at the dead boy to the right. “Did you do this?”

“Do what?” He waits a beat. “Oh, yeah. They don’t matter.”

“According to you?” Becca is not surprised that she’s not afraid. Being gutted on the subway by a psychopath will not be the worst part of her week.

“They didn’t know my name when I asked them so they don’t matter. According to me.”

“I don’t know your name, either.” Becca’s eyes are stapled to his. She knows somehow that this is essential, vital.   

“That’s too bad,” he says, still grinning.

“You know what’s too bad?” Becca shakes her head. “These people were killed by a joke. A sad, tragic joke.” She wants to look down at the victims again, for emphasis, for confirmation, but she will not break her focus on him. It’s all she has, all she can control.

“I’ve lived here my whole life and these people don’t care.” He taps the bloody knife against his chest a few times, spreading a bright, crimson constellation across the metallic sheen of his coat. “Nobody shows me any respect.”

“Why would they?”

“I take this train every goddamn day and nobody cares, nobody knows,” he says, pointing the weapon toward Becca. “I have to show them.”

“This is your big reveal?” Becca leans forward for emphasis, her face now only a few feet from his. “If you’re going to kill everyone who doesn’t care, you’ll be on this train a long time.”

“I know that.” His smile thins.

“This is a big city little boy.”

“I said I know.” He stands, unfolding in sections, one fist wrapped around the overhead handrail, the other clutching the knife, tapping it against his thigh. His stare circles Becca’s body. He is a nightmare, an absurd baneful giant in a narrow metal tube tumbling through the night.

Becca realizes she has stopped breathing and gasps. “You need to sit down so I can tell you what I know.”

The J groans as it reaches the apex above the river. The lights flicker then go out. In the darkness Becca imagines crushing his windpipe with her fist, smashing his Roman nose flat, ripping his tongue out. The lights flutter back to life. He’s still standing there, looking at her, expressionless.

“You don’t know anything.” He peers at the bodies again and drops back onto his seat.

“What I know is that you can’t figure things out so you’re angry,” she says.

“Shut up,” he shouts. “I will carve that dirty mouth off your ugly face.”

“What I know is that you’re not a coward. You just have it all twisted around.”

His gaze passes through her now, through the window behind her, through the frigid night and across the river. He shifts back against the pale blue plastic bench. The knife dangles loosely between his fingers

“If you want respect give them something to remember, something only you can do. This here,” Becca nods toward the lifeless passengers, “anyone can do this. It’s gutless, it’s ordinary.”

He toys with the knife, tests the point against his thumb.

“You think I should do it?” he asks, lifting it to his throat. His smile is back.

“I don’t know that you have a choice. If you want to control your own story.”

“You might be the only person who gets me,” he says, tilting his head back against the window, holding the blade just below his jaw.

“I don’t give a fuck about you.” She doesn’t recognize her voice. “But you should.”

Becca sees her reflection in the window behind him. It’s the best she’s looked in a long time.

The steely scent of blood hovers between them, sharp and urgent. The J train slows.

The recorded MTA announcement barks. “This stop is Marcy Avenue, Brooklyn. Thank you for riding with us.” The J grinds to a stop. It’s three twenty-one.

Becca stands, slides her headphones on, winces as the singer shrieks through a chorus. She turns to face the exit and waits.

The doors stutter and split apart. Becca steps into the cold, blue-black opening and onto the empty concrete platform. She looks back into the train, at the knife lying on the floor, until the doors slide shut.

---

Mark Fellin lives in New York City, always has. His stories have appeared in Berkeley Fiction Review, Criminal Class Review, Daikaijuzine, Literally Stories, Rock and A Hard Place Magazine, and The Realm Beyond.

KM Baysal

Pink Camellias (Longing)

It was the line of pink camellias trailing along my husband’s spine that finally convinced him to go to the doctor. They had been popping up here and there—bright pink blooms springing from his armpit, his shoulder, tucked behind a knee— for about a week before he said anything. When they sprang up along his spine and in that unreachable spot between his shoulder blades, he had to tell me.

The doctor said he had been seeing a lot of this lately. People of all ages and ethnicities were spontaneously growing flowers. It wasn’t as alarming as it seemed; no injury or disease was associated with their existence. Preliminary studies suggested the blooms were manifestations of unprocessed or unspoken emotions. Just a theory, he said, as my husband frowned and crossed his arms over his chest. The doctor recommended we keep plucking the flowers until someone developed an inhibitor cream.

A stoic man, my husband dismissed the doctor’s theory and continued to grow flowers. He didn’t only grow camellias. He’d wake to find daffodils, or geraniums, or camellias in every shade imaginable growing in patches all over his body, embarrassed but forced to ask for my help in their removal. As long as I’d known him, he was shy about being naked. Even when we were first dating, our mid-twenties bodies in their most attractive state, he’d only shed his clothing for as long as it took to have sex, donning a tee shirt and boxers as soon as he could afterward. Meanwhile, I’d prance around the apartment with abandon, exhilarated by the kiss of the cool or warm air on parts generally kept covered, reveling in the effect my nakedness had on him. Over the years as age and familiarity set in, we revealed less and less of ourselves. There was comfort and ease to be found in the dark.

I suggested we make a game out of his condition to lighten the mood. Together, we’d pick the morning’s offering, attempting to identify each flower as we went. It was awkward at first, this reacquaintance with his body in daylight. I traced the half-moon of freckles behind his left ear with my fingers. Gasped at the tuft of hair on his chest that had turned salt-and-pepper without my notice. Marveled that the scar on his knee from a bike accident once red and angry had faded to a ghostly white. All the while, plucking gorgeous blooms of sapphire, violet, and gold from his olive skin and arranging them in vases throughout the house. Our lives were suddenly full of vibrant rainbows and intoxicating perfumes.

As I arranged a vase full of purple forget-me-nots and pink morning glories, I recalled Ophelia distributing flowers and how each had a special meaning. It didn’t take long to find an internet guide on the symbolism. Forget-me-nots meant just that, and morning glories represented affection. I researched other blooms we had picked: light pink and peach peonies (bashfulness or shame) and violets (watchfulness and modesty) the day after the doctor’s appointment; red geraniums (folly) and yellow chrysanthemums (slighted love) the morning after an argument; pink and white hollyhocks (ambition) cropped up all over the day he planned to ask for a promotion to regional manager.

I waited a bit before sharing my discovery. I liked having such a visceral guide to his emotions every day, and I loved the closeness our morning ritual had reignited. He started to insist on checking my body for flowers, too, even though we both knew there weren’t any. A soft touch on my hip, a brush of my thigh, a light kiss on the back of my neck inevitably led us to more intimate pursuits when we had time, lingering over and delighting in each other’s bodies like we did when we first fell in love. I didn’t want that to end, but I began to feel guilty, as if I were sneaking peeks at his journal.

One night after we searched for errant blooms on each other, my head resting on his chest, his arm circling my waist, I told him. That morning’s blooms were red roses, white heliotrope, and honeysuckle (all representing love)— an auspicious sign. He smiled and told me he already knew. He had looked them up as well. I reluctantly offered to stop checking the meanings to give him some privacy, but he shook his head, pulled me closer and asked now why would he want that. The next morning, every inch of him was covered in purple and blue hydrangeas (gratitude for being understood), and red tulips (passion), an entire field of flowers waiting to be picked.

Aftermath

It wasn’t until much later, after our parents rushed to our high school and all us kids in our sequined prom dresses and cheap polyester suits were accounted for; after we found Coach’s wife, Mrs. Owens, calling his name as she ran in and out of the gym, saying Coach was chaperoning the prom, but only Billy recalled seeing him there early in the evening, chatting with Ms. Green, the school secretary, as they manned the beverage table, and Caroline said the table was empty when she arrived an hour late claiming she had a hair mishap, but we all knew it was really because she was making out with Mark in his dad’s old Mercedes in the parking lot; after the mayor and the volunteer EMTs and firemen and police followed the route the tornado took to barrel through town like a bulldozer, proclaiming it a miracle that the there was so little damage, that the funnel mercifully picked a mostly clear path, lifting a shingled roof here, an old rusty car there; after they found Coach’s body in his red Toyota by the river crushed under a massive oak tree that was rotted inside, and people wondered what he was doing down there, in the backseat no less, when he was supposed to be chaperoning the prom; after our mothers circled together and spoke in whispers at the funeral, none daring to say how grateful they were that it wasn’t their husband but each of them thinking it, and all the while keeping a close eye on our fathers standing a few feet away; after they dropped off pierogies and casseroles and chocolate cakes to comfort Mrs. Owens and people talked about what a good man Coach was, recalled how he announced the raffle drawings at the school carnival each summer with gusto, how he always had a smile and a word of encouragement for even the worst basketball player on the team, voices trailing off into the distance as they imagined their own lives being cut short in such a sudden way; long after our classmates mowed Mrs. Owens’ lawn, shoveled her driveway, paused to chat when she sat on her porch drinking her morning coffee and rocking in Coach’s favorite chair with a sad, lost look on her face that never went away, a look of grief and heartbreak and something that we couldn’t quite name; years after we graduated and some of us moved, some of us stayed, some married our high school sweethearts, some divorced those sweethearts and married others, some had kids, some adopted pets, all found and lost jobs, gained and lost weight, acquired wrinkles and a few gray hairs; after a group of us met at the rec center for our twentieth reunion, sitting at folding tables with purple plastic tablecloths, drinking cold Miller Lite from red plastic cups and laughing about the time that Billy lit a stack of papers on fire in the restroom trashcan so our trigonometry final would be postponed; it was after all that reminiscing when Billy somberly recalled the night of the tornado and Coach’s untimely death, and Caroline remembered seeing Ms. Green huddled by the ambulance down by the river wearing Coach’s prized varsity jacket, the one he wore on all but the hottest summer days, and after Mark recounted finding Ms. Green a week later in Coach’s office cradling his favorite basketball—signed by the 1995 state championship team—and watching the principal, Mr. Long, escort her out while she clutched the ball to her chest and fought back tears, that we finally realized Ms. Green’s grief was not the same as ours, and what we thought we understood about the lives of the adults in our little town was not as simple as it had seemed.

---

KM Baysal lives, works, and writes in NYC. She can often be found haunting the New York Public Library or cozy coffee shops, tapping away on her keyboard. She is currently working on a fantasy novel.

Stuart Watson

Unfurnished

Avocado-green shag carpet lay between my sleeping bag and the one wrapped like a tortilla around Ellise. I felt like throwing up, not from the carpet, although it didn’t help, but from the too-much-of-everything the night before. We struggled, trying to find the zipper pulls.

Ellise wore a T-shirt, sexy as day-old mashers. Neither of us offered an invitation to romance, no surprise, since neither of us ever did, much, anymore. Like marriage for her was a place she could hide from all that. After six months, I had given up. Ellise had declared victory.

In the front room, we scanned our new space in the light of day. Rented the night before. Floor-flopped shortly thereafter, without the walk-around. Avocado shag in the living area, decorated with the red velour overstuffed chair we had hauled south from Redding. I wondered a lot during the drive, what other motorists thought of this relic hanging from the Cortina’s trunk beneath the tied-down lid. Did they steal it? Are they destitute? Do they have a bed?

It was our only piece of furniture. After we signed the lease the night before, I sat on one arm while she occupied the seat. She flipped through an old Sunset magazine we found in the laundry room of the apartment villa.

“Look at this,” she said, and held the magazine up. “Polka dot.”

“Dining table?”

“Sure. Festive. Better than what we got.”

We had no table. We needed jobs, but Ellise was all about getting a table and chairs to clash with the floral-print linoleum in the part of the living room we called our kitchen. All electric.

“But … jobs?” I said. We had spent all but a hundred bucks on first, last and security, for two bedrooms up across an alley from the fenced yards of one-level ranchers. No gunshots yet.

In fresh light, Ellise put on her fake-leather fur-lined-collar coat and we went to the thrift store.

A woman behind the counter brought to mind a polyester eclair. Ellise went one way, I went another, in search.

“Paul!” Ellise’s voice, but I couldn’t see where. Half yell, half squeal. Like a 12-year-old. Oh, lord, what have I done. “Come look. It’s magic.”

I followed the sound until I saw her, decked out for a faux winter.

That is where we made the acquaintance of an actual polka-dot dining room table, formica top and four chairs with matching print Nauga crap upholstery, ripped from the pages of Sunset. I imagined us dining there in silence, jaws masticating pasta and ground cattle with a flavor packet.

We were verbally ejaculating all over it. “Look at the chairs,” I said, not really sure what I wanted her to see.

“I know,” she said. “Chairs. It’s got a leaf.”

“Don’t buy anything here,” snarled a guy with a beard to his waist and black-on-black attire. “They’ll rip your ass so bad it’ll feel like you were fucked with a vacuum cleaner.”

He kept moving toward the exit, while I mentally parsed his advisory. Vacuum cleaner? Upright or canister? What about …?

Ellise tugged at my hoodie. “Let’s go,” she said. “I’d hate to get fucked like that.”

I wanted to ask her how she would prefer to get fucked, since she hadn’t shown much interest in that aspect of our married life, and she had few other aspects to counterbalance that  void. We had a list of thrift stores. The next one featured furnishings salvaged from roadside “free” disposal. A big maple monster with a ruined finish could be ours for a fourth as much as the polka dot model.

I looked down at its top. Somebody’s family had etched it with history. Initials carved into the surface. Simple excavations that looked like things. Cars. Dogs. A baseball and its stitches. Two of the initials matched mine. I felt a sudden craving for a table just like this, minus the other family. Blank. Ready for my own.

“You can’t have it.”

I turned. Red lipstick spilled a bit beyond the natural edges of her lips. A woman maybe a couple of years older than me, in tight jeans with big frizzy hair and a sleeveless blouse.

“It’s mine,” she said. “My dumbass boyfriend left it at the curb and it was gone in the morning. Him too. Asshole.”

“Didn’t you try to stop him?”

“I was out. Late.”

She pulled cash out of her pocket and paid the cashier.

“You’re paying? It’s yours.”

She looked at the cashier, then me.

“Not when it’s in here,” she said. “These doofs don’t know, don’t care.”

 Ellise slipped her arm around my waist. “I liked the polka dot model better,” she said.

The other woman smelled nice, not perfumey. Like shampoo. I wanted more.

“Can I help you load it?”

She smiled, turned toward the door.

I turned back toward Ellise. “Would you grab the other end?”

“Shouldn’t the store people load it? They sold it.”

The woman behind the counter lifted a smoldering cigarette to her lips and ignored us. She opened her mouth to talk and the cigarette stuck to her lipstick, flapping as she said “I’m sales, not warehouse.” I looked at Ellise. She didn’t know what to say. I waited for her to lift her end, then led the table toward the double glass door.

The other woman had a pickup. She helped us hoist the maple monster into the bed.

“You got a way to unload it?” I asked.

She looked at the table, then me, then Ellise, then the table.

“We’ll follow you,” I said.

“Really?” Ellise said. “What about our table?”

“Won’t take long,” I said.

It didn’t. After we set it back in her dining room, she brushed her hair back, smiled my way, extended her hand with a limp wrist. “Donna,” she said. “Can I … pay you?”

I shook my head, her words clacking around like billiard balls inside. Ellise and I drove back to the first store, bought the polka dot number. It seemed OK. I looked underneath, to see if there was any clue about how it might fuck me in the ass.

We strapped it to the top of the Cortina, stuffed the chairs inside, went back to the apartment. I still have nightmares about that rental, the sliding glass door off the main bedroom, onto a cheesy deck that sloped away from the building, like it wanted to fall off the minute somebody stupid stepped onto it.

Once we set it up in the kitchenette, where the carpet ended at a tack strip and the fleur-de-lis linoleum began, I thought it would benefit from decor. I went to our bedroom and brought back my box of used Playboys. I set them in the center of the table, then pondered how we could get phone service if we didn’t already have a phone. I told Ellise I would take the car to the Bayside Bell store and order a hookup.

I did, but when I emerged from the store, I thought about Ellise. Why had I married her? I was twenty-one. She was two years younger, a kid with memories of things her dad did to her. She didn’t want me doing anything.

Instead of turning toward the apartment when I pulled out of the lot, I aimed our car toward the house with the maple table. The sun had set by the time I pulled up in front. The engine purred as I sat there, thinking. I turned it off. Stared at the lights inside the other woman’s house. Ellise and I hadn’t done anything in awhile. Sex with a beautiful woman was all I could think of. I started getting hard.

Is this the day?

I thought of Ellise. She was a sweet person. She didn’t deserve me, cheating on her with the table woman.

I’ve come this far. What am I going to do about it? I want it. I know she wants it. She’s probably inside, looking out, waiting for me to get out and knock on the door.

I sat there into the night, frozen, on the cusp of betrayal. Wanting. Fearing what that last step would bring. My addled brain ran through an endless list of what ifs.

What if I went inside and did the thing? Then I would have to lie?

What if I didn’t lie? What would Ellise do?

What if I did lie? What would the rest of my life look like, staring back at me from my morning mirror?

What if I didn’t go inside, and thought of my big fail every night, before falling into tortured sleep?

What if the table woman got tired of waiting for me to get out of the car and come up the walk and knock on her door, and she came outside and walked down to my car and got inside and fucked me silly? That would be hot, but what if it didn’t happen that way?

What if she called the cops, scared shitless that I was some sort of psycho stalker about to …?

It was brutally dark, no traffic on the road, when I heard the tap on the window beside my head. It was her. I rolled the window down.

“What are you waiting for?”

I stared at her. Luscious. Inviting. Off-limits. Just like my wife. I smiled weakly, rolled the window back up. She stood there a second, then turned away. Dragged her index finger through the dirt on the window and disappeared. Eventually, I fell asleep.

The glare off the rearview mirror of a garbage truck woke me. I started my car and made a U-turn and drove back to the apartment.

The phone guy was fiddling with wires when I got there. The manager stood there, watching the phone guy to make sure he didn’t steal our sleeping bags or rape Ellise. Without a word, I stood next to Ellise and watched him work. I wondered how he knew which wires to connect when he removed the thingy from the wall and all the wires suddenly looked like hairs on an old man’s ear.

I picked up Miss March 1963. The lass had pigtails and a perky bust. Like Donna, back at the house. Probably. I wondered what she looked like, without clothes. Napping after sex. Slightly sweaty. Maybe I would feel surprise, to see a mole beneath her arm, faint blonde hairs.

I looked up to see my wife in her faux coat, looking around, at the walls, the floor, the sink. Wanting to say something. Not knowing where to start, so not starting. Likely, her thoughts went like this: So this is it. Home. For a month, at least.

Then looking around, to see if something anywhere in that apartment offered her a reason to be there, with me, with the phone man. With a polka dot dinette.

When the phone guy left, we looked in the directory for employment agencies. She got a job taking calls from home buyers.

I got a job ringing up sales of munchies to graveyard ghouls. Every night, I waited out the wee hours, hoping nobody high on dexy came in waving a gun without a clue how to keep it from going off accidentally, the terms of what would be this numbskull’s defense at trial for manslaughter. Then I went home and slept while Ellise was at work. We rarely saw each other until we decided to move back to Seattle.

I never went back to Donna’s. I had the spine of a banana slug. Twenty years, four jobs and five relocations later, I rose one night in the dark, packed a bag and walked out and downtown to the bus station.

I didn’t leave a note. What could I say that had gone unsaid every day since my night outside Donna’s house and her table full of family history?

Before I left, I set the car keys on the polka dot table, so Ellise could go somewhere of just her choosing.

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Stuart Watson has been honored for his work at newspapers in Anchorage, Seattle and Portland. He has fiction in Bull, Yolk, Barzakh, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Bending Genres (Best Microfictions nominee), Erozine, The Writing Disorder, The Rush, Reckon Review, Sensitive Skin, The Muleskinner Journal and others. Poems appear in The Muleskinner Journal and The Broadkill Review. He lives in Oregon with his wife and their current “best” dog.

Susan Emshwiller

Welcome, C’mon In 

The beginning can be pointedly precise or obliquely obtuse. After all, it’s hardly more than a greeting.

Dangle the bait. Hook. Reel in slow. So slow you don’t even feel the pull.

I’m no expert but I’ve caught a few. Would have mounted trophies if that were possible.

Wording is the thing. Easy going. Easy flowing. Friendly-like. Adding a smidge of slang to put folks at ease.

Most don’t even notice the words I sprinkle for the subconscious. Red is common but I like to thresh it up with surprises. Like thresh. Gives a sense of danger. Danger draws you in. Gives zest to cozy lives. Makes you wonder—What is going on?!

Sometimes I set out pedestrian things. Everyday items.

Spoons.

Or a cheese grater.

The captive mind leaps into action. What will be done with these!? A cheese grater?

Basement. Sounds of something dripping. Flies circle under the glaring bare bulb. A cheese grater is removed from a worn leather satchel. The cheese grater inches closer. Near a most tender part. It hovers over bare skin and then —

Can you see it? 

Where does it gravitate to? What can it toy with? Images fly. The forbidden. The unthinkable becomes visible behind the eyes.

 Can you see it?

The swinging bulb seems brighter. Muffled voices echo. What’s being done with this cheese grater? You know. Something disturbing.

There’s a terror there. Down in your gut it rumbles, in that hidden place. It isn’t me. It’s you.

Every time you see a cheese grater, remember what you imagined.

I offered the seed. You did the rest.

I’m not a bad sort. I don’t make you feel anything I haven’t felt. I’ve done it all to myself. Everything.

I know if I push too hard I lose you. I’ve lost a few by going too far. So let’s stop now and move on. To spoons perhaps?

I call forth great geese to fly you on their smooth muscular backs feathered in brown and cream. A wide V formation of determined companions all heading —somewhere. They fly, calling out over the green and gold patchwork below. You’re with them, surrounded by them. 

Listen to that honking!

Listen to the great wings thresh the air.

Listen to the chimes.

Chimes?

There, behind,—

—tied to the black webbed feet with red ribbons

—dangling in the wind

—spoons.

The spoons chime together as bells, ringing out to churches underwing. Bidding the church-bells join the joyous cacophony.

And? What next?

Well—if the satin ribbons are frayed or brittle with age, they might break. They might break and release the spoons and there is no telling where those might land.

Perhaps the spoons plummet, tarnished bowl-head first, and splash in that pond below, zig-zagging past algae and green bubbles to silently stop on the silty bottom.

Can you see them?

Down there, nibbled on by curious tadpoles.

This might not go further.

Let’s rewind.

Perhaps the ribbon breaks and the spoons drop in a slow arc to the landfill. They land in the landfill and they plop atop the favorite photograph. Why is this favorite photograph in the landfill? A photograph that didn’t mean to be discarded but got mixed up with the junk mail when—when what?—when the grandchildren knocked everything off the mantle.

Can you hear the crash? The anxious cries?

The spoons frame the precious discarded black and white picture of—

You can almost see it.

Of—

—the departed father.

A derby-hatted man—who’s almost smiling. A man who almost never smiled is almost smiling—and amidst the cawing gulls, we’re at a landfill remember, amidst the cawing gulls—only you see—the spoons and cherished photo become covered by the last truckload of trash, not to be seen again for one hundred years.

Not long enough?

Not to be seen again for a millennium!

And in a millennium they are uncovered by—let’s say by future archeologists! Discovered, and methodically uncovered by future archeologists trying to get a clue as to what went wrong. What went wrong with—

No. Let’s rewind.

The ribbons break. The spoons tumble through clouds down to that suburban home, there—the last one at the edge of the development. And as the sun heads for its bed, the spoons hit the roof, clatter and clang on the tiles, bouncing like goats down a hillside, skipping off to land noisily on the front step—just as the teenage boy, his courage finally summoned, taps on the door.

And so?

The two ribbon-tied spoons glisten at his feet.

And so?

This is not the greeting he expected.

And so?

This is not the greeting he expected but he picks up these spoons, these gifts, and when the teenage girl opens the door, he presents them. The two watch the flock honk overhead, and because they both are aware that her parents have left for the evening, she accepts the spoons and, barefoot, leads him to the kitchen when—

When what?

—when all across the county the power goes out.

Perhaps a goose landed on the lines.

And in the surprise darkness of the kitchen, the girl pauses her walk but the boy doesn’t, and the accidental bumping becomes a fumbling which becomes a quickening of hearts and unseen reddening and neither knows what to do but they make it up as they go along.

And maybe the naked boy licks one of the spoons and slides it over the naked girl. And maybe she guides him and they do things with the spoon because they’re artists at that moment and in a state of grace, without shame to halt their inspiration.

And only you know what they do with those spoons.

And the next morning their respective Moms and Dads talk about the power outage. As Dad grates cheese into threshed eggs they talk about emergency kits and flashlight batteries. And in their respective homes the boy and girl lift sacred spoons with cereal or yogurt and smile at their secret.

And you know their secret. You made it.

It could end there. Or there could be a coda of sorts.

Perhaps—no one understands why they give spoons to each other on every anniversary. Or why their wind chimes are made of spoons hung from red satin ribbons. Or why they always look up at the honking V of geese and touch fingers. Or why, well into their eighties, the wrinkled hand of one slides a cool spoon gently over the blue veins of the other.

But you know why.

If a spoon falls from a goose or a cheese grater shines in a basement and no one’s there to read it, did it happen? Does it mean anything?

Without you, these are just squiggles of ink on a page. 

---

Susan Emshwiller is a produced screenwriter (including co-writer of the film Pollock), a filmmaker, a published playwright, novelist, teacher, artist, and short story writer. Her novel Thar She Blows debuted in 2023 and All My Ancestors Had Sex came out this year. Other writing can be found in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Dramatists Play Service, Playscripts, Independent Ink Magazine, Black Heart Magazine, Gone Lawn, and Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine. Ms. Emshwiller was a set decorator for many years in Hollywood and a featured actress in Robert Altman's The Player. Her feature film, In the Land of Milk and Money, a wild social satire, garnered awards and rave reviews at festivals in the US and internationally. Susan has taught screenwriting at North Carolina State University, OLLI at Duke, the Met Theatre in Los Angeles, and in conferences and festivals around the country. She lives with her husband and dogs in Santa Fe, NM where she enjoys inventing stories and backyard contraptions. Find out more about Susan in a DIHP interview: https://www.doesithavepockets.com/features/susan-emshwiller and her website https://www.susanemshwiller.com/. Follow her on Facebook.