Robin Wilder

The Midnight Delicatessen

At the Midnight Delicatessen, your sandwich comes with a song. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say there is a song inside your sandwich. Before you order, before your fingers even touch the doorknob, they are baking your song into the bread. It’s not as if they know you are coming or have some magical soothsaying yeast, but the Midnight Delicatessen exists only when you need it to exist. When you turn a corner, eyes downcast, soles of your shoes scraping the pavement, there it is. You will enter because you are meant to enter.

A bell chimes. The sound is what you have always wanted to sound like crossing a threshold. Two people stand behind the counter, a man and woman in identical lavender aprons. You step closer, see that their aprons are shifting, amalgamating, and it might be the Milky Way or Andromeda or a galaxy of petals you can’t name. But it is beautiful, impossible to unsee. You blink. Your hands are flat on the countertop—you do not remember the time between the door and now. You wonder if the time ever occurred.

The restaurant is empty, save the man and woman and you. In another circumstance this might frighten you, but these people, they remind you of your parents, your parents at their best, distilled into dewy memories of birthdays and holidays and when both were still around. Heat spills down your throat and chest, a hot chocolate sensation, when the woman says, “Welcome to the Midnight Delicatessen.”

Her voice cracks you open, water in your eyes, and nothing makes sense. You haven’t cried in years, not since you cried so hard you became a wretched little thing who lost the ability to do so. The man offers you a napkin; you accept, blow your nose with all the gravitas of a cartoon character. It cannot be a pretty sight. They are unfazed, sharing a look that feels familiar, one you’ve seen a thousand times. You should not have forgotten.

Having embarrassed yourself for no good reason, you suppose you ought to buy something. Tacked to the wall behind them is a menu. You frown. You are bad at choosing things from a menu you don't know. Fortunately, this menu has only one item:

Your Sandwich (and song)

Unexpected, though you are not complaining. You do not enjoy being that person who dithers at the register unable to decide. Still, you want to ask what’s on the sandwich. The woman shakes her head, and you're quite certain you did not speak your thoughts aloud.

“Your sandwich is on the house,” the woman says, and the man disappears into the back.

Well, that’s very kind of them, of course, but what about money (you have no money) or if you don't like it (you will love it) or in an inexplicable way you manage to ruin everything (you won’t) and the shop catches fire (it won’t) and—

Your sandwich sits on a plate, the rim decorated with the history of your life. Friends. Lovers. Successes. Failures. Joy. Sorrow. Your entire life. You cannot fit on the rim of a plate, and yet you do. You stop questioning it. The plate, the sandwich, the man who did not return, the fact you are now seated in a booth by a window just perfect for you, and the woman is watching, brows crinkled. She nods toward the sandwich.

The bite you take floods your mouth—not meat, not vegetables, not cheese, not bread, a violet note, like the end of a sunset, the violinist's bow lifting from the final string, and your song is against your tongue, eternal, scorched into being, pleading for release, battering your teeth until you free it to soak the atmosphere. Your song surrounds you, the woman, the walls and the floor and the window you notice overlooks every decision you ever made, including That One, the reason you’re here, the reason you stare at the ceiling at night and pretend to be fine and pretend that you wouldn’t die ten years before your time to have ten more seconds, ten seconds to spare, ten seconds to do a single thing.

“It's alright,” the woman says. “He knows you wanted to be there. He knows.”

You turn to face her, but the Midnight Delicatessen is gone.

The sidewalk beneath your feet is the same corner from the beginning. It leads to a field of epitaphs and flowers, a stone you never read, spent ages running in the opposite direction because you were too late. Except maybe you weren't. There’s a song in you, and you have to listen. You have to round the corner and meet your mother in the black dress she wears once a year. You have to hold her hand. You have to tell her you’re sorry you made her wait.

You have to read the stone.

---

Robin Wilder is a non-binary writer, graphic designer, and illustrator based in Missouri. Their work can be found in BULL, the museum of americana, and Roi Fainéant. Robin lives with their two cats, Ash and Carbon, who are often the first to hear a new story. Unfortunately, neither is very good at feedback.

Wendy Elizabeth Wallace

Rules of the Door

After the thing that happened to Kevin, we make rules for The Door. We’ve decided it’s our duty to go back. Not because we want to re-enter this world, we say, but for Kevin. We must use the buddy system. We must not leave this buddy at any time, even if we see something marvelous, like a squirrel the size of a semi-truck wearing mittens or a waterfall made of molten cheese or a dining room table that compliments our wardrobe choices in a sultry whisper. Or we will go see those things, but only quickly, just a glimpse. We will go armed – we have some very sharp kitchen knives, and Chloe has a croquet mallet. We will not eat the treats that appear on the trees. Or we will avoid the ones Kevin has ever baked for us in the normal world – lime tarts, gingerbread cookies, macarons. We will not swim in the purple lake. We will not go into the cave with the welcome mat that asks us to remove our shoes before entering, even though it sounds like there is a very good band inside playing bluegrass covers of our favorite songs. We all love bluegrass covers, though none of us as much as Kevin. We will not go to the little stand with the sign that reads FREE WINGS, and we will not put on the wings and flap around, hovering first, and then testing higher and higher swoops until we’re doing magnificent dives above the trees and we can see all the way to the emerald ocean that lashes against the pearly cliffs. Or we will try the wings, because some of us still think we should search for the rest of Kevin. It has been a few days, but maybe it’s not too late? We know we shouldn’t have waited so long to try, but we’ve been afraid. A very reasonable fear. Certainly Kevin would have to agree. Probably it wasn’t the flying that caused just his legs to walk back through the door, a clean slice exposing his pinky innards and a wink of white spine. We shouldn’t have let his legs disappear the way we did – we’ve argued over this, the implications of them being discovered. This would not be good for us. We are not sure how we could explain. We keep expecting them to just turn up, the way Kevin always had. He’d begun following us at the beginning of college, loping around campus in our wake, trying to catch up, always finding us at the cafeteria or common room or library  and squeezing his way in, his backpack bulging with offerings – card games with complex rules he would babble at us, cookies he’d baked in the dorm oven, books that he thought we’d like. We did like the cookies and books, but not the sad-eager way he asked whether we had. He was always listening, always remembering things we didn’t even remember about each other or ourselves – the names of all of our professors, due dates for our assignments, our mothers’ birthdays. It unsettled us. We believed it would be easier to shed Kevin when we moved off-campus for our senior year, but he’d popped up at the apartment we couldn’t quite afford, pie in one hand and fat checkbook in the other, and so we’d let him set up the tent he’d brought in the corner of the living room. His own weird little Kevin house. We could be excused, then, for not following him at first when he found The Door, the shiny handle that had suddenly appeared at the back of the hall closet. We’d had no way of knowing what fabulous things waited inside for us.  And it was understandable, too, that when he’d said, that last time, Come on, guys, we had waved him off. We’d made a plan to go just us later that day, when we knew he had class. There was something exhausting about his enthusiasm, even in this most magical of places, the way he kept saying, Did you see that? And that? Isn’t that cool? It’s cool, right? Of course we saw. Of course it was cool. But we’d given him enough already, and we deserved some time beyond The Door, exploring the gift that our apartment – it was our apartment – had provided, without him tagging along. We thought Kevin would be fine on his own. But now Kevin is just legs and those legs are missing. We think about when the legs appeared, the way they only paused for a moment when we screamed, then crossed to the normal door to the balcony, opening it with a delicate kick. Kevin had always wanted us to jump together down the one story – something about a scene from The Princess Bride, maybe? – but we’d shaken our heads and he’d given up, turned and followed. But the legs – they’d made a neat little leap, clearing the railing, for a moment soaring, before they hit the ground, turned a corner and were gone. We think, too, about the last time we’d seen him whole. The look on his face as he’d reached for the handle, the hunch in his shoulders as he peered back at us, we huddled together and pretending not to see him leave. As if he was discovering, for the first time, that nothing he could offer would be enough to make him one of us.

---

Wendy Elizabeth Wallace (she/they) is a queer disabled writer. She grew up in Buffalo, New York, and has landed in Connecticut by way of Pennsylvania, Berlin, Heidelberg, and Indiana. They are the editor-in-chief of Peatsmoke Journal and the co-manager of social media and marketing for Split Lip Magazine. Their work has appeared in The Rumpus, ZYZZYVA, Pithead Chapel, SmokeLong Quarterly, Brevity, and elsewhere. Find her on Twitter and Bluesky @WendyEWallace1or at www.wendywallacewriter.com.

Tessa Smith McGovern

The Void: A List Story

1. The phone rings and it’s your mum speaking in halting sentences that make no sense and it feels like air blasted onto a cracked tooth.

2. You take her for a drive at twilight, and she can’t remember the name of La Traviata, her favorite opera since you were a child.

3. She says “Pardon?” repeatedly and blames her inability to understand conversation on the incomprehensible accents of Americans.

4. She slags off her first husband, your beloved Dad who passed ten years ago, and doesn’t remember he was your father.

5. We stop at a red light and she grabs the dashboard in a panic, exclaiming, “Oh! What’s that car doing? Why is it coming over here?” about a car that’s simply crossing in front of you.

6. When she phoned you yesterday, the washing machine of her mind had paused in momentary clarity. “I don’t know what’s happening. I can’t remember anything. It’s like that song, ‘Bits and Pieces’, she said. “I'm in bits and pieces.”

7. And your monkey mind throws out the thought, I can’t stand this. Is this my future?

8. And you have another thought, fast as quicksilver, about how much easier it would be if she died and that makes you think of the French who, of course, have a name for random, explosive thoughts like that: l'appel du vide. The call of the void. 

9. Then the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves reaches its melodic middle and the crescendo of sound takes her, closing her eyes, turning her expression to bliss, and she exclaims, “Oh! Just listen to that!” And in that moment, her words make sense again and the barbed wire in your heart dissolves and you are united in your bliss and the “what ifs” evaporate.

10. You remember that, after all these years, you’ve finally learned you are not her. You’re not your father either. He shed his skin ten years ago, and she will shed hers, as you will, too. And then the glimmer that is her will join the glimmer that is him, and in time you will join the glimmer that is them and together you will become the sun and fill the void.

If We’re Lucky

My hands are not strong enough to open a bottle of orange seltzer, even with the use of a thick elastic band, and I cannot read the slanted script on the envelope of a letter from my pen pal Rose in London, even with glasses. My sense of smell has diminished, and I no longer notice the fishy sourness of my own body. This morning, I stared at a photo of my gray-haired, grinning daughter and for a second wondered, who’s that? A month ago, I fell seven carpeted stairs whilst going up to bed one night and am now confined, for all time, to the ground floor of my cottage. The visiting nurse says it’s not safe for me to drive any more so my daughter has taken the keys and I’ve lost the thrill of getting up and out in my little red Honda to Stop & Shop on the Post Road for a loaf of raisin bread. My daughter has refused corrective rotator cuff surgery for me because of the risks of anesthesiology so my left arm is permanently disabled. But with a handheld, battery-lit magnifying glass, I can still read--I can become an outwardly assured Irish attorney or a dragon rider in the Napoleonic wars or a prodigy who plays the violin so brilliantly they lose the sense of who they are and become one with the slicing, soaring sounds.

---

Tessa Smith McGovern has an MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and is the author of London Road: Linked Stories and Cocktails for Book Lovers. She teaches online for the Writing Institute, Sarah Lawrence College, NY, and Bloom Writers' Studio. Her flash fiction has been published in literary journals such as the Connecticut Review and the UK's Equinox. She's currently working on a fantasy inspired by British Mythology.

Shelby Raebeck

The Fourth Person

What separates me from the rest is my utter lack of any distinguishing characteristic. I am the one among us who betrays no hint whatsoever of an organism responding to its own peculiar set of circumstances.

This is not to say I lack the complexity of the modern human animal. No, only that my behavior does not reflect it, not any of it. Look at me as I sit each day before the great window in Southstreet Café. Do you see any sign of modern affectation? An angled cut of hair demanding to be constantly swept from my eyes? A glaze of nostalgia settling upon my visage as I peer through the window, back toward those early years in Colombia, to a youth misspent here on the streets of New York, to a budding manhood that slipped first into lethargy, then into a dark misanthropy, a hole from which I may never have emerged were it not for my discovery of American baseball, a game with an orderliness, a symmetry impervious to the vanity of its participants?

Dispassionately, I sip my coffee, examine the Yankees box score, and be sure to ask Abbas how he is feeling today. To which Abbas responds as only he can. Each day, as if my question were a key to a vault of exotic artifacts, Abbas’s concerns reveal themselves in all their brilliance. He mentions his fiancée, Feeren, and his face glows with blood. He speaks of Ahaad, the cook and owner of Southstreet, and his voice hushes into a hesitant stream, quivering slightly as he expresses the fear that he may have to leave for a higher paying job. He speaks of Tehran, and his sentences shorten into syncopations, as the emotion cuts into the words, backtracking against their own syntax, toward what he left behind. “I don’t understand what they want, William. They rule with no heart—my family is there—my younger sister—William, I don’t know.” And the blood withdraws from his face, the hope draining away. But Abbas’s blood does not descend too far and is soon recalled.

For me the blood doesn’t stir; the complexion remains uncolored, even when confronted with the most extreme situations.

Take last September, the day my beloved Yankees lost the pennant to the Red Sox, the very last day of the regular season. Five stops from the stadium on the number 4 express, I walked into Southstreet. Abbas brought me my coffee.

“Bases loaded, one out, and they cannot score?” Abbas said, his eyelids peeled back behind imploring eyes, the television above the counter now turned off. “This Rodriquez, he cannot hit the ball past the infield?”

“It is a shame,” I said. “Although the Red Sox did make the plays.”

But Abbas’s emotions are not easily dispelled. “Catching pop-ups, William? The children on my street catch pop-ups.”

“You are quick to suspect the Yankees of a personal betrayal,” I said. “Don’t forget, there was a fellow pitching to Rodriguez. And today that fellow was better.”

“Not better, William, hungrier. Our Yankees did not want it.”

“Wishing a sated animal to be hungry may be a waste of a wish,” I said.

Yet you could not say Abbas cared for the Yankees any more than I. My season box seat cost twenty percent of my yearly pension. The difference was that I no longer let things beyond my control affect my wellbeing. What if the Yankees never won another pennant? What if they packed their bags as the Dodgers of ’59, just five years after my father had fled La Violencia in Colombia and brought me to New York? What would I do then? Would I become so enraged as to throw things across my rented room on 8th Avenue? Would I hurl the years of diligently acquired memorabilia—the framed portraits of Larson and Ford, Maris and Mantle, the encased score cards from every game attended, the eighteen, eighteen, foul balls—against the otherwise unadorned walls? Would I enter a deep depression as my father did and consider—to the point of purchasing two plane tickets and actually taking me, his trembling child, as far as the JFK Express beneath Rockefeller Center—returning to our war-torn home city of Villavicencio, giving up the eighty-one—plus the playoffs, God willing—trips to the park, the walk cross-town through Washington Square, the five stops on the Number four, the hot dog after the 3rd inning and knish with mustard during the 7th inning stretch, the post-game recounting with Abbas over fresh coffee?

No. My father took his grief to his grave more than thirty years ago, and though it did, admittedly, take me a number of years, the surface has since smoothed over, leaving scarcely a ripple on the placid sea of my life. Indeed, the equilibrium I’ve achieved is such that I now speak of that person sealed in the past—the child growing into the mystified teenager and into the bitter young man—without trepidation. My recollection may be a bit imprecise—it is not a person I think of often these days, or rather, think of in the 3rd person.

Yes, I have adopted one modern affectation after all—referring to myself in the third person. Not in the first person, yet as I think, not truly the third either, as it is, after all, myself to whom I refer. And so it is that I speak of this extinct self, this atavistic I, without any fear of reversion—the him that was me—the fourth person.

“William?”

It is Abbas. He knows I am prone to bouts of reverie and is hesitant to interrupt. I withdraw my eyes from the great café window that frames the activity on 8th Avenue and smile at my young friend—he always brings a smile to my lips—never a grin or guffaw, but a smile nonetheless.

“William, I need to speak with you. It is Feeren.”

“What is it, Abbas?” I sip the coffee he has placed on the table before the window. He brews a fresh pot when I enter with my newspapers.

“We are fighting,” he says, looking worried. “She has gone to her aunt’s. And her aunt is one of these Shia Twelvers, and does not like me.”

“You think she may stay there?”

“I am competing with the old world. And I am afraid Feeren is not ready for mine. I am agnostic, William, and she is unsure. I am afraid the Shia will take her back.”

“When you are fighting,” I say, “you imagine this possibility?”

“Yes.” Abbas glances back at the only other customer seated at the counter. “Yes, I am always afraid of this. When we select a movie, when we go out to eat. Whenever there is a choice, the imams are there, and I have to fight them.”

“You must evict them,” I say.

Abbas shifts to the side, as if from an angle he may better see my meaning.

“If they are always with you,” I say, “there would seem to be little question where they live.”

He nods at me. “Yes, they are there always.”

“Because you invite them in. Feeren, she loves you. Her aunt is not a competitor. A strong moon, perhaps, shining on her from the side, but you, you are her sun.”

How pleasing is the truth when one no longer has any stake in it.

“You see, my friend,” I continue, “these Shia, they live in your head, mere shadows. But there is a way to evacuate them.”

Abbas peers at me, his brown eyes deep as wells.

“Bring in the real Shia,” I say, “and the ghosts will flee.”

Abbas holds his eyes on me. Then he nods. “To know something is not to fear it,” he says. “Yes, I will call her aunt. I will speak with her directly. I will invite her opinions into my home. Thank you, William,” Abbas says. “You have pointed past the—I am thinking of the Farsi, it may not translate—you have pointed past the clothing and into the heart.”

I gaze into those grateful brown eyes.

“Go and get your Feeren,” I say, and strangely, my voice quivers, the body not cooperating as it used to, and I pull my eyes from his to the great window where a bicycle vendor winds his way through halted traffic, my eyes moving up across the grey stone buildings across the street, finding at the top a small opening of milky blue sky.

“The key, my friend, is to act,” I say, turning back to Abbas. “The angels retreat from a person who is waiting.”

I offer a smile, and he returns it, only for some reason his smile is sad.

I turn back to the window where a large truck has pulled up. One man in the cargo hold slides boxes down a ramp to another who stacks them on the sidewalk. They step away from the ramp—one into the truck to retrieve a box, the other to stack one—then return in unison to their positions at opposite ends of the ramp, exchange another box, step away, and return.

“William?”

I shake my head, captivated by the muted dance beyond the glass. “You go ahead,” I say.

But Abbas only stands there, and when I turn, his smiling lips are rolled in, his eyes shaded with remorse. I open my mouth to admonish this display of melancholy, to tell him, Abbas, it is appreciation I feel—for the beauty of the world. I raise a hand to either side, wanting to say, Don’t feel badly for me, my future is fixed, all uncertainty safely behind. But no words come. 

Abbas blinks slowly, his posture straightening. And then, a bit of sparkle returning to his eyes, he completes our conversation in the customary manner. He leans across the table, places a hand on my shoulder, and kisses me, once on the left cheek, once on the right, his lips dry and smooth against my face.

---

Shelby Raebeck's collection of stories, Louse Point: Stories from the East End, has earned wide critical acclaim, including a starred review from Kirkus.

Mathieu Parsy

Glove

I dream we’re back in Toronto, inside St. Michael’s Cathedral. You’ve written a note on a Tim Hortons receipt—something about you and Stan lasting longer than the skyline. Me, I’m not Stan, and I don’t pray like you do. I slip out to Queen Street, where streetcars slide by on their tracks, sparks under cold wires. I watch them pass and start walking west as if I might cross the entire city.

In this dream, the Gardiner Expressway is clogged with traffic, red lights stretching past the CN Tower. Commuters, late-night cabs. I just step off the curb and let myself float, easy as smoke. A lady on the sidewalk waves at me like she’s missed her bus. She looks like you—a romantic, always searching for some grand meaning in the people she meets. You’re all the same, really, thinking you can tag along for the ride.

“Next one is on his way,” I tell her. I sound a bit unkind, so I wave back and smile, hoping to keep it friendly.

Ahead, a woman points at a raccoon waddling across a crosswalk. “My god, it’s huge, Jeff!” Her partner snaps a picture. The raccoon pauses to look back at us, totally indifferent, and for some reason, my heart swells with a kind of fondness for it, as if it understands.

I still think of that windy night on the ferry to the Toronto Islands. I remember the skyline glittering, the way you watched it like it was some enchanted city. I wanted to stay on the shore, but you convinced me it was better from the water. The ferry rolled with the lake, and I agreed it was idyllic in its own rough way. We had poutine at a food truck near the harbor. You made fun of my French accent.

I think of the movie Lost In Translation. How you’d quote lines and say I was your favorite love escape. I wasn’t. But I knew Stan was. Sweetly lost, untethered you. I can still see you in that cathedral, like you were asking for something sacred. This is where I left you, drifting away in my mind, letting go of the resentment. Like leaving a glove on the subway, knowing I won’t go back.

Timekeeper

You’re waiting at the bus stop when a stranger walks up to ask for the time. You tell him because you always know it. You permanently feel the tick of the clock on your wrist, the press of hours on your temples. And then someone else asks, and someone else, and before you know it, the line has formed. No one checks their phones, no one even glances at the clock on the train station across the street. They ask you.

You’ve spent your entire life wondering why. Is it your face? Something about the slope of your jaw, the way you stand like a sundial rooted to the pavement? Could it be the way you keep your arm slightly bent, as if you’re poised to check your watch? But it goes deeper than that, doesn’t it? It’s the fact that you always respond.

Your mother used to say you had a helpful face—the kind that strangers trust, that invites people in. She meant it as a blessing, but you’ve come to feel it’s a curse. You think of her sometimes, late at night, when the apartment is too quiet, and the clock by your bed glows like a dull red wound. She died at exactly 3:47 a.m., and you know because you were the one sitting there, counting the minutes as they stopped coming for her.

Sometimes you wish you could stop knowing. Hide your watch, keep your phone in your pocket, shrug when someone asks you what time it is. But you don’t. You can’t. Instead, you look down, squint at the little hands that never stop circling, and tell them.

“3:23.” “4:48.” “6:02.”

And they always thank you, even if they don’t mean it. Some just slightly tilt their heads absently and walk off, like they’ve taken something you didn’t even know you were carrying.

Today, though, as you stand at the bus stop, a man doesn’t ask. He doesn’t even look at you. He checks his phone, glances at the train station clock, and keeps walking. For a moment, you’re surprised. Relieved, maybe. Or something worse, like being a lighthouse no one needs anymore.

A cab pulls up. The driver leans out, cigarette dangling from his lips, and asks you the time. You tell him because, of course, you do. He nods and flicks the cigarette onto the curb.

“Always knew you’d know,” he says, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

---

Mathieu Parsy is a Canadian writer who grew up on the French Riviera. He now lives in Toronto and works in the travel industry. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as Nunum, FEED, Libre, and Brilliant Flash Fiction. Follow him on Instagram at @mathieu_parsy.

Peter DeMarco

Blue Shirt

The short-sleeved three button shirt is powder blue, sky blue, the world is a safe and cozy kind of blue, and to see it in a body bag, well, not a real body bag, but a Ziplock bag used for leftover food, sent home with you by the hospital, is certainly a surreal site, your dead father’s wallet, watch and blue shirt in this ersatz body bag for possessions.

He’d been wearing the shirt when he collapsed mowing the lawn. The lawn had been kept green and lush with chemicals and seeds and fertilizers, ironic, since your town was named for the Indian translation of fertile or pleasant land, and the grass you’d die valiantly on as a kid, imitating black and white gangster movie deaths, is now a setting for a real death, a heart attack, with the blue shirt framed by this verdant landscape.

A neighbor drives you to the hospital. He waves a cigarette. Your father was good at fixing things, he says. Giving him a legacy. What else can you say to an 18-year-old.

A doctor takes you inside the emergency room. Your father expired eight minutes ago, he says, in a clinical cadence. Your father’s body lies on a steel table. The blue shirt is out of place here. It belongs in the warm confines of your neighborhood, not here, in this place with metallic machines hovering and antiseptic white figures racing around, in blurs, balletic in life-saving choreography.

You wear the blue shirt to church, the supermarket, even Sears, where it was purchased. You pass racks of other blue shirts, lifeless on plastic hangers. Your blue shirt had a long life. Barbeques, Little League games, and when you played the outfield, it always stood out in the bleachers, the sun in your eyes creating a halo of blueness that enveloped your father.

At the disco you stretch your arms up to the spinning ball, the bass thundering, Donna Summer and Hot Stuff, everyone circling you, dozens of hands reaching, touching its soft blue polyester, I am the resurrection, the strobe light breaking everything around you into fragments, and you try to read the expressions on their faces, expressions that disappear for a moment in the blink of the strobe and then reappear, and you wonder if you missed an important frame from those looks, clues to how they felt about the beauty of miracles.

---

Peter DeMarco published a New York Times “Modern Love” essay about becoming a New York City high school English teacher and meeting his wife. Before teaching, Peter had a career in book publishing, and spent a considerable amount of time acting in regional theater and attempting to be funny on the amateur stand-up comedy circuit in New York City. Other writing credits include pieces in trampset, Maudlin House, New Flash Fiction Review, Monkeybicycle, Hippocampus, SmokeLong Quarterly, Pithead Chapel, Cleaver, Flash Fiction Magazine. Read more at: peterdemarcowriter.com

Barbara Diggs

Big Girl

First, there was thumb. Like the rest of your fingers, a miracle, but better. Thumb was made for your mouth.  Thumb never falls out of bed in the middle of the night or rolls under her bed where the monsters wait. Thumb could not get left behind on the number 62 bus or at McDonald’s. Thumb hides among your other fingers, and no one would ever know unless they were looking closely. Then they would see the wrinkles. Ugly, ugly, mama says. Big girls don’t suck their thumbs. But you love thumb anyway. Thumb is there when the storm comes. You can feel the change temperature, hear of slithery hiss of the wind growing, sometimes shaking windows, smashing plates. The storm is over when the front door bangs shut. One of them will always leave, sometimes both, but thumb will always stay.

Then there was spoon. You love the spoon the way you had loved thumb, but spoon was objectively beautiful. Elegant and smooth, a matted silver and elongated bowl. You don’t know where spoon came from. It just appeared in the drawer one day, quietly gleaming amidst the cheap clatter of the rest of the mismatched cutlery. Spoon was the real thing. Spoon was the princess who got bruised when sleeping on a pea under a mountain of featherbeds. Spoon was Zandra Jameson, whose thick-lashed doe eyes and delicate brown limbs had the boys pretending they weren’t scuffling to sit next to her in science class. You loved eating with spoon. Spoon made you feel elegant too as you shaved curls of caramel ice cream with it, lifted golden mounds of butterscotch pudding to your eager mouth. You should be eating soup with that damn spoon, mama mutters, poking the fleshy roll spilling over your jeans as she passes by. I don’t know how you can stand yourself. Mama was the one who got stranded after the last storm.

Then there was them. You do not love them, but you could pretend you did when they squeezed your heavy breasts, plunged fingers into your depths. You almost did when you took them into your mouth, and you heard them moaning above you as if you’d drawn a sword across their throats. You can forget so much in that moment. The looks people give you just for existing in your own body; the names people call you, even strangers on the street, even your mama, even them as they zip up and leave. You reach for spoon, replaying the groans in your head on repeat. Sometimes you imagine that spoon is a sword and drag it across your own throat.

Now there is ache. Heat in your calves or lungs. Scratches, when your bare legs scrape against a bramble. Occasionally, a bite or sting. Discomforts, but a cheap price for the trek. There is mountain air to drink like water. There are trees and vines and leaves; dirt and stony pebbles, misshapen or mud-covered, each is so perfect you could cry. There are people who offer an arm if you stumble, and when you offer your stout arm, they clutch it with gratitude. Thumb is on your hand; spoon in your backpack. Mama continues to yap far in the distance, but now you know you don’t have to listen. Still, sometimes the old sadness rolls in. Sometimes you feel like an empty pit. But at the top of the mountain there is rain, clouds, mist, or sunshine. A silky wind or a sharp one. When you reach the peak, you open your mouth and let whatever you find there fill you up. Everything in the world is so much bigger than you.

Where Your Knit Hat Went

The knit hat is gone.  It’s not coming back, so please stop looking for it.

It’s not the navy-blue beanie the guy at the bus stop is wearing. His hat doesn’t have thin white stripes or a red double brim anyway, so it couldn’t be yours. And it’s not the shadow you spotted in the corner of the neighbor’s yard that made your heart jump. That’s a cat. A small dark one that actually doesn’t resemble a hat at all.

It’s not in your closets. Neither the one in the bedroom nor the one in the hall. So there’s no use searching behind the stack of board games you used to play, Scrabble, Stratego, Carcassonne; nor feeling around inside the black, dry-cracked rubber boots that you should have thrown away ages ago.

You know it’s not among your ski things, but that doesn’t stop you from rummaging through the pockets of the flashy red North Face jacket again and again. Eleven times now. It’s as if you think the hat could find its way home on its own. As if you think it isn’t really gone. As if you think the hat could send you spinning backward through time. To the life before ghost-blue brain scans whirled constantly, kaleidoscopically, behind your closed eyes. Before you had to learn words so toxic they swelled your tongue.

You’d be on the mountain again,

the sun in your face, poles planted in the snow,

him grinning as he tugs the hat low on his forehead,

tucks a stray curl under the brim,

then turns toward the white void below,

more alive than a flame.

But hats don’t do that. 

You’re tired, so tired. If only someone would tell you where it went. If only someone would tell you why. You would drink the story like warm tea with honey. You would finally sleep through the night. You would believe it like a child.

If only someone would tell you that you left it in the back of a taxi. Maybe that night they sent you home to rest. (To wait.) You couldn’t find your keys, so you dumped everything out of your bag onto the back seat and scrabbled about in the darkness for a long time. Maybe the hat slid to the floor and faded into the rubber mat. Maybe you collected your keys, your tissues, your pills, your wallet, your phone, your breath, yourself, but somehow missed the hat.

That’s not so hard to believe, is it?

You would believe that the taxi driver’s eleven-year-old daughter found your hat the next day. She would like its heft, the tight weave of the knit. Her fingers would trace the stitching on the brim reading Zermatt. The look of the word would please her, the bold Z, the double ts.

You could believe that the girl would take the hat home, wash it by hand, place it tenderly in a drawer. She would later look up Zermatt on the school library computer; savor the crumpled witch’s hat of the Matterhorn and the sugar-dusted Swiss villages. Her eyes would sweep over the mountain where you and he once stood, and she would feel a pull she cannot explain. She will wonder whether black girls ski. You would want to tell her yes, baby girl, absolutely, we do.

You would sleep so well knowing that the girl will make it a mission to return the hat to the mountain, to the highest peak possible. That one day, she will turn her face to the sun, tuck her curls beneath the hat, then disappear into the void, the wind buoying her up like an angel, pulling diamond tears from her eyes.

It wouldn’t surprise you to know the hat will fly off her head somewhere along the way and become swallowed by the whiteness. Though she will side-step back up the slope with clownish clumsiness, it will never turn up again. But she won’t mind at all and neither would you.

You could believe all this, couldn’t you?

Go ahead. Believe this.

The hat is loved; the hat is happy. 

It’s where it belongs.

Let it go.

Note: This piece was originally published with Lunate Fiction, 2019.

---

Barbara Diggs is an American in Paris whose flash fiction has been published or is forthcoming in numerous literary journals, including Your Impossible Voice, Emerge Literary Journal, Fractured Lit, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Disappointed Housewife, and FlashBack Fiction. Barbara’s stories have also won Highly Commended awards with The Bridport Prize and the Bath Flash Fiction Awards and placed as finalist in competitions such as the SmokeLong Quarterly Grand Micro (2023) and the Best of the Net (2023).

Hannah Yerington

In Another Revelation

 The Angel of Wildflowers always sighs at the shifting of leaves, gathers her skirts, sets her flowers to sleep, and takes a cup of tea with The Angel of Bulbs, before tucking in for Fall.

In another revelation, she thinks she would like to be the Angel of Dahlias, the last blaze of starflowers before winter. But she also knows that in Springs of super bloom, hill burning with purples and yellows, she is truly at glory.

This is not to say she thinks all angels should be glorious. It is not their purpose, or rather each has their own, varied and essential, idiosyncratic divinity; the Angel of Carrot Soup, The Angel of Muddy Boots, The Angel of Three Legged Dogs.

Her role is expansive, exhausting really—tending to millions of feral flowers, their constant need for water, and sunshine, their odd and sometimes inappropriate relationships with earthworms, and their incessant protests against aphids and frost.

So maybe, in another revelation, she would like a smaller job, like the Angel of The Third Hour of the 7th Day of June. She is not sure what that job entails but it sounds low commitment, finite, and manageable. She wonders what she would do with her other 8,759 hours.

But then again, maybe holding a whole hour for the whole world, involves an awful lot of preparation, 1440 minutes held in perfect suspension—she makes a note that should she ever meet The Angel of the Third Hour of the 7th Day of June, she will ask for their job description.

---

Hannah Yerington is the author of Sheologies, published by Minerva Rising Press in 2023. She is the director of The Bolinas Poetry Camp for Girls and holds an MFA in Poetry from Bowling Green State University. Her work can be found in Porkbelly Press, Prism, Room Magazine, Half Mystic Press, Hey Alma, and Cascadia Daily News. She writes about Jewish magic, talking plants, and teenage girl ancestors. She lives in Bellingham, Washington, with her imp puppy, Poe. Find her on Instagram @hannahyerington.

Travis D. Roberson

Editor’s Note: This piece has brief allusions to suicide/self harm. Please read with care.

Disciples of Buster

Call them the Disciples of Buster. This is their pilgrimage.

1,924 steps down into the belly of the earth, where their sanctuary, their church—The Nickelodeon—awaits. They dream of this moment: the day they meet The Projectionist and elect their eternity.

The Projectionist is not a prophet. Disciples don't believe in that kind of thing. This is not a religion, even if it might seem that way. The Projectionist came up with the idea, inspired by the actor whose name they borrowed for their movement. Surely you've seen the film. If the answer is no, then what have you been doing all this time—watching Youtube? That's what Steph would have said. The movie's called Sherlock Jr. and Buster Keaton is who I'm talking about. You know who he is, right?     Neither did I. Until I met Steph.

Buster plays a projectionist in the movie. The whole thing's silent, black and white. What do you expect from a movie that came out in 1924? That's where The Projectionist got the idea for the amount of steps a Disciple has to conquer to get down to The Nickelodeon—1,924, the year Buster's film hit theaters. Or whatever passed for an AMC in those days. Anyway, Buster's projectionist has dreams of becoming a great detective. That's the key word: dreams. He's up in the projector booth one day and dozes off. Next thing you know, his spirit is standing there, amazed that he's somehow managed to detach himself from his own body. And this Ghost Buster, he goes ambling up the aisle of the theater, a little perplexed by the whole affair. Then he's climbing into the screen. The audience, they seem unaware of the miracle before their eyes, the way the images Buster's trapped inside keep changing. One second he's rolling on a city street, nearly getting wiped out by a speeding car. The next second he's trapped between two male lions, trying to not end up as their next meal.

That might sound a little frightening, but the scene gave The Projectionist an idea. Back before he built The Nickelodeon down in the sewers, he worked at The Museum of Light and Sound—the kind of respected institution that frowns on superhero flicks and mid-film snacking and shows five hour long Cambodian films. The Projectionist had projected Sherlock Jr. so many times he lost count. The museum even invited a piano player to give the film a live soundtrack during screenings. It was the five hundredth time, or the thousandth, and The Projectionist was up there in his pitch black roost,  once more watching Buster fall asleep and wander into the silver screen, and he thought, I've projected so much celluloid, but I've never projected myself.

That's how the Disciples tell the story—how Steph told it—and that's how I'll tell it to you. Why go on watching movies when you can choose to disappear inside them?

If you're journeying the sewers like me—tackling the 1,924 steps—The Fundamentals of Astral Projection is one of two items you're required to bring with you. To join the Disciples of Buster, The Projectionist mandates you read the book cover-to-cover at least three times—study it, know it, practice projection before you ever attempt a pilgrimage to The Nickelodeon. Astral Projection (Disciples call it AP) doesn't come easy. You'll fail more times than you succeed. It took me a solid eight months of practicing to ever pull it off. I felt like Buster in Sherlock Jr.—all of a sudden I was somewhere else and that somewhere wasn't my body. But there was no movie screen for me to climb inside. Instead, I just floated there, pressed against the ceiling of my apartment, staring down at my unconscious self on the sofa. I had never looked so peaceful.

After that, I started AP'ing all the time just to prove I could. On bus rides. At work, when I should have been doing anything other than evacuating my body. Late at night, after I got home, I'd lay in bed, close my eyes, and set my intention on the same place again and again. Peeling out of my chest and arms, I'd float out the 4th story window of my apartment building and drift across town. I never did anything more than hover in Steph's apartment. It was empty by then, scratches on the parquet floor revealing where her bookshelves and bed used to be. When a new couple moved in I stopped AP'ing there.

On step 748 I decide to take a break. I'm not sure how long I've been walking, but the muscles in my calves keep score. All the steps have a number carved into them so you can keep track of your journey and how much farther you have before you reach The Nickelodeon. I'm alone for a while, listening to the sound of sewage running through the guts of the city above me, when an elderly couple hobbles out of the darkness, their arms hooked together.

“Mind if we take a breather with you?” the wife says.

“Go ahead,” I say, motioning to the empty space next to me.

They ease down onto the rough concrete and lace their hands together. I watch from the corner of my eye while they pass a canteen back and forth. The elderly man reaches into his backpack and produces a copy of The Fundamentals of Astral Projection. “Done any reading?” he says.

“Not today,” I tell him. I'm afraid to admit I broke one of The Projectionist's cardinal rules: I left my copy of the book at home.

His wife nudges him with her elbow. “Cleve, let her relax.”

Cleve rolls his eyes in a playful way. “There's nothing wrong with a little conversation, Vera. We're all sitting here, aren't we?”

“I'm sorry, dear,” Vera says to me, flashing a row of white teeth.

“Really, it's okay.”

The sound of flowing water punctuates the silence between us. When I first started my trek down the 1,924 steps, the water's rank smell infiltrated my nose; I considered turning back. This is another of The Projectionist's tests—can you endure the stench? Are you dedicated enough to abandon all discomforts? Does The Nickelodeon mean that much to you.

I take a Slim Jim out of my backpack and go to chewing. Not sure if a meat stick with the ingredient MECHANICALLY SEPARATED CHICKEN was the best snack to bring with me, but it seemed like the right choice when I was packing. The thing with braving the steps, it's not like scaling a mountain or running a marathon. There's no seasoned vets out there on YouTube providing recommendations on the best approach. The steps are a one way trip. If you're successful in your pilgrimage, you don't return from The Nickelodeon.

Halfway through the Slim Jim, Cleve asks me another question. “What's your top five?” Vera nudges him again. He swats her elbow away.

“Excuse me?” I say, swallowing.

He studies my blank expression and elaborates, “You know, your top five favorite films.”

“Oh.” I ball up the empty Slim Jim wrapper and stuff it into the side pocket on my backpack. Cleve looks disappointed when I shrug. “I can't say I'm much of a film buff.”

My answer piques Vera's interest. “What do you mean?”

“I never really got into movies. I watch a lot of YouTube.”

Cleve makes a face like he's got bad indigestion. “I'm sorry, dear,” he says, “and I hope you don't take offense to this or anything because you seem like a nice enough girl, but if cinema isn't really your thing, then what exactly are you doing here? This doesn't seem like the pilgrimage for you.”

I don't take offense because Cleve's got a point. This confession of mine is the main reason I've avoided getting trapped in conversation with Disciples I've encountered.

“Don't get me wrong,” I say, “I watched all the movies on The Projectionist's syllabus. I liked a lot of them. My fiance—she was more of the film buff. I saw a lot of stuff because of her.”

“So you've seen Sherlock Jr,” Vera says.

“Never thought I'd like a movie with no sound.”

Vera nods her approval. “I guess we all come to The Projectionist in our own way.”

I can tell my answers bother them. Cleve and Vera no longer have the warm, welcoming demeanor they had before. They gather their things, pass the canteen one more time, and sling their backpacks over their shoulders.

“Well,” Cleve says, “good luck on your pilgrimage. I'd say we'll see you down in The Nickelodeon but—” He knows he doesn't have to finish the sentence.

“What did you both pick?” I ask.

The question coaxes a smile out of Cleve. He flips his backpack around and unzips it.

“We picked the same film,” Vera explains. “We plan on going together.”

This is the second item The Projectionist requires you to bring on your pilgrimage—the film you plan on sealing your soul inside. Format does not matter, he claims. Cleve seems ready to put that to the test. He produces something that looks like an old vinyl record. Audrey Hepburn, Gregory Peck. Roman Holiday. I've never seen it.

Cleve grins deviously. “Laserdisc,” he says.

I've seen fellow pilgrims with VHS tapes and DVDs, USB drives, even a few film reels—but this is the first laserdisc I've encountered.

“Think he can project it?” Cleve says, with an eagerness that reveals he almost hopes to foil The Projectionist.

“No format can challenge The Projectionist,” I say, reciting one of Disciples' tenets.

Cleve and Vera smile. This is the answer they wanted to hear. I stay on step 748 a while longer, allowing them a head start to ensure we won't cross paths again. When I can't hear footsteps or murmurs anymore, I start moving.

1,176 steps to go.

I wonder how long it took Steph to make the pilgrimage, how many breaks she took and what kinds of snacks she brought with her. She loathed the smell of my prescription nasal spray, so how did she ever put up with the stench of flowing sewage?

Movies brought me and Steph together. In a sense. I worked the ticket desk at The Museum of Light and Sound. Steph paid the annual fee asked of all museum members, which gave her the privilege of unlimited access to every screening the museum put on. She came in once a week to catch whatever we were showing and always smiled at me when I handed her her ticket. Before I fell in love with her, I fell in love with that smile, the way she habitually tucked her strawberry hair behind her ear. She came in one stormy July afternoon soaked with rain and asked for a ticket to our screening of The Wizard of Oz, hair dripping water on the floor while she waited for me to print her ticket. Steph smiled like she always did when I passed her the ticket, but this time she looked down at the ticket like it was something important—money or a birth certificate.

“I've never seen it on the big screen. It's my favorite.”

She'd never offered so much about herself in our brief exchanges before, so I felt the need to reciprocate. I confessed to her I'd never seen The Wizard of Oz.

“Seriously?” she blurted, blinking water out of her eyes. “You work in a film museum.”

I shrugged. “All I do is print the tickets.”

Steph grinned. Most of the time when I admitted to not having seen Star Wars or The Godfather or The Wizard of Oz, it was met with so much ire and disbelief from whoever I told that I ended up annoyed. People like pretending that you must have been raised in a bunker just because you haven't seen a movie they cherish. As if life is nothing but a long series of rep screenings and Blu-Ray menus. With Steph, though, I didn't feel that way. She wasn't judging me. She was excited to meet someone who had never seen her favorite movie, to share the joy it brought her with others.

“We should change that some time,” she said. “I doubt you'd want to come to work on a day off just to see a movie, though. There's always the DVD at my apartment.”

A week later we got drinks before we went back to her place and sank into her big sofa. Steph had a TV that took up an entire wall, hooked to speakers I'm sure her downstairs neighbors loathed. I sat next to her, sipping cheap wine, and watched The Wizard of Oz for the first time. She made me wait until the credits rolled before I could go down on her. We kept this routine up during the early days of our relationship: Steph invited me over to show me a film she adored, and then I'd show her the tricks I knew with my tongue. It's not that I didn't like the movies she showed me. I just liked Steph a lot more.

Her apartment became more of a home for me than my actual cramped studio. Things accumulated. Hairbrushes and underwear. My special sulfate-free toothpaste. Laying naked in the dark in Steph's bed, our bodies exchanging warmth, we divulged the intricacies of our lives. I told Steph about the car accident when I was 7, how it robbed me of a mother and father and forced my grandparents into raising me. Steph told me about her mental breakdown when she was 19, the suicide attempt and subsequent hospitalization. I still cherish those vulnerable moments, free of clothes and emotional armor.

I wasn't scared off by the amber pill bottle Steph kept on her kitchen counter. Everyone was on meds these days. At least she was taking care of herself. What scared me were the long stretches of despondency, when the only way I could interact with her was sitting next her while she watched a movie. Steph disappeared inside herself for months at a time, barely speaking besides a few one word answers. She lost herself in lives she imagined as better, staring blankly at her TV and imagining she was Dorothy Gale or Amélie.

It makes sense she fell for The Projectionist's teachings. We were walking down the sidewalk one night when a copy of The Fundamentals of Astral Projection fell out of her bag. I picked it up and laughed at the title. “What is this?”

Steph snatched it away. “Nothing.”

One night I woke up and rolled over. Steph was still awake, her face bathed in artificial light while she scrolled through the Disciples of Buster's Instagram page.

“I know him,” I said, blinking at a blurry photo she scrolled past.

“The Projectionist?”

“Yeah, from the museum.”

It seemed like a lot of hokum back then. I didn't start taking it seriously until she disappeared. Her family went wild, came to the city demanding answers from me but I had none to give. After a while, even the police threw their hands up. “Sometimes people leave and don't want to be found,” a detective told me. It wasn't until afterward that I connected the dots. I don't know why I never told anybody. Probably because they would never believe me. I know how crazy it all sounds.

Now, here I am. Standing on step 1,924. The Nickelodeon glitters before me, adorned in a hundred old-fashioned bulbs that burn off the sewer's darkness with halos of gold. Film posters paper the walls surrounding an empty glass ticket booth. On either side of The Nickelodeon hang drain pipes spewing green water into a black pool around it. The Nickelodeon looks like a place out of time, some lost temple trapped beneath the earth centuries ago.

What The Projectionist doesn't teach his Disciples—what I learned from a YouTube video—is that back in the early 1900s, during the heyday of nickelodeons, the cheap theaters lured patrons in with flashy facades. But beyond the ornamented exteriors, a nickelodeon didn't offer much. Bare walls and uncomfortable wooden seats. As I pull open a door with a brass-plated handle, I discover The Projectionist has kept with tradition: the same old concrete walls that have entombed me for the past seven hours. Arrows painted on the walls direct me to the projection booth. My feet splash through puddles of stagnant water, soaking my sneakers. Before The Projectionist moved in down here, this place was a control room of some kind. A steel door speckled with rust bears the words PROJECTION BOOTH, scribbled over a faded sign that once read DEPARTMENT OF SANITATION. I knock once—twice—and the door creaks open.

The man standing before me is exactly who I remember from the museum. That quiet weirdo with his silver ponytail and round eyeglasses. He scratches at a chin littered in gray stubble. The Projectionist grunts and motions me inside.

The door clangs shut behind me. I'm not sure what to focus on, the massive projector in front of me, its lens angled into a hole carved out of the wall, or the two bodies on the floor, covered by white sheets. A wrinkled hand with hairy knuckles poking out from one of the sheets tells me its Cleve, meaning the smaller body next to him is Vera. “Sorry,” The Projectionist says, motioning to the cadavers. “I didn't expect another Disciple to get down here so soon.”

“They already AP'd?” I ask.

“Go ahead,” he motions towards the projector, its mechanical intestines clicking and whirring, “take a look.”

I approach the hole cut into the wall, monitoring The Projectionist from the corner of my eye. He hangs back, wringing his hands. Below the booth is a vinyl screen stretched between two metal poles, held there by duct tape and zip ties. This is what the Disciples of Buster make their pilgrimage for: this chapel of secondhand junk. Black and white images flash across the screen. Thanks to Steph making me sit through To Kill a Mockingbird and Breakfast at Tiffany's, I recognize Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn. The two stars motor through the streets of Rome on a scooter, Audrey's lithe arms wrapped around Gregory's sturdy waist. I've never seen the movie but that doesn't mean I can't spot something that shouldn't belong. A scooter pulls up alongside them. The riders mounted on the scooter look too crisp to belong in this picture. They're grinning at Peck and Hepburn like they're the celebrities they were and not characters in a film. Cleve and Vera. They did it—interred themselves in the laserdisc spinning inside the projector. I back away and bump into The Projectionist.

“What do you do with them?” I say, pointing at the soulless bodies on the floor.

“I worked out a deal with a local medical school. They still use cadavers. For their students.”

I swallow. So that's what happened to Steph, her body carved up by some eager med student.

“Don't worry,” says The Projectionist. He’s registered the color draining from my face. “It's just your body. Your soul—” He angles his finger toward the beam of light dancing out of the projector—“is there.”

“Right,” I say.

He stares at the projector, marveling at the giant contraption, as if it's a loved one. “I built it myself. Multi-format. Pretty incredible, huh?”

I wonder if such an invention wowed Steph. I guess the ingenuity of it all should impress me, but all the projector looks like is a big collection of sprockets and gears. Who gives a fuck.

“Where do you keep them all?” I ask. “The movies we bring with us, I mean.”

“As a Disciple you should know we prefer the term film,” The Projectionist says. I try not to roll my eyes. “But I store them back there.” He hitches his thumb over his shoulder, toward another steel door behind him.

“Can I see?”

His Adam's apple bobs up and down while he contemplates my request. “I guess that's fine,” he rasps. He yanks the door open—another screech of rust—and I follow behind him into a narrow room lined with metal shelves holding the contents of every successful pilgrim's soul. DVD and Blu-Ray cases. Wrinkled VHS boxes. Yes, even big laserdisc sleeves like what Cleve and Vera carried with them. “It's organized by format, alphabet, and year of release,” the Projectionist explains. I'm glad he saved me from asking; it helps me locate The Wizard of Oz with a little more ease.

There's thirteen DVD copies of The Wizard of Oz, their uniform spines glistening with the reflection of the fluorescent lights above. Even though they all look the same, I know which one is Steph's right away. I tilt it toward me, thinking about all the times I watched Steph crack this case open, delight spreading over her face. She loved this movie so much. More than she loved me. Now she lives inside it.

“Put that back please,” The Projectionist says.

I turn and look at him, the DVD still in my hand. “You don't remember me, do you?”

He scratches the stubble on his chin. “Um.”

“I worked at the museum,” I say. “I printed the tickets. I used to see you walk by before you went up to the projection booth. One day you just stopped coming in.”

“I found my calling.”

I shake my head. “All these souls—there's people who miss them.”

The Projectionist doesn't react to this, which lets me know he doesn't care. “But they're happy. They're where they belong.”

“People belong in the real world.”

The Projectionist nods at Steph's copy of The Wizard of Oz. “Who were they?”

I swallow and clutch the DVD closer to my chest. “I loved her,” I whisper. I don't tell him that Steph loved me too, that she radiated so much love but just didn't know how to channel it, and when loving turned too overwhelming for her, she imagined other worlds for herself, worlds with clear cut rules and resolutions. I don't tell him how I felt Steph slipping away from me for so long, how it's so much worse when you know you're losing someone who doesn't want to lose you but doesn't know how to hold on. I blew an entire paycheck on a ring I thought Steph would like, proposed to her thinking it would keep her here. The idea of marriage's romantic monotony made Steph run even faster, straight into a movie screen just like Buster Keaton in Sherlock Jr.

Other things I don't tell The Projectionist: about all the YouTube videos I watch, some of them lessons in self defense, so I know when he lunges for the DVD in my hands that a palm heel strike to the nose will put him down. He writhes on the floor, screeching and gripping his face while his nose pumps blood through the cracks between his fingers. I don't tell him that I originally learned the mechanics of AP'ing so I could make the pilgrimage to The Nickelodeon and project myself into The Wizard of Oz. So I could always be with Steph. But that was grief's puppetry.

Once The Projectionist stops crying, I help him to his feet and pass him the DVD.

“Project it,” I say. He looks into my eyes, the threat of another palm heel strike lingering in my scowl, and whimpers. I follow him to the big projector and watch. He moves like a surgeon, delicate and precise, stopping Vera and Cleve's adventure in Roman Holiday and transferring the laserdisc back to its sleeve. The Projectionist uses his shoulder to wipe away another stream of blood from his nose as he cracks open Steph's copy of The Wizard of Oz and loads the disc into a slot on the projector.

The projector whirs. A beam of sepia light spills from the lens, funneling toward the screen below us. The Projectionist backs away, holding his face again. I'm scared to step forward. Scared of who I'll see. For a while I listen to the projector hum. I watch the light shooting from the lens and stand there waiting until it shifts to color, marking Dorothy's arrival in Oz. Thanks to Steph, I know this comes at the nineteen minute mark. I step forward and there she is, standing right next to Dorothy clacking her ruby shoes together. Strawberry hair hanging in her face. Steph has her own pair of ruby shoes on. She's never looked happier. And I know that look on her face—that smile she used to flash me at the ticket counter inside The Museum of Light and Sound. The longer our relationship went on, the less I got to see that smile. I thought it was me that made Steph smile that way. But it wasn't. Movies brought her that joy, distant worlds that were not her own.

Another thing about YouTube: if you're curious enough, you can find plenty of videos that teach you how to make your own explosives. I unzip my backpack and brush past two more Slim Jims I packed for the journey back up the 1,924 steps. I take out the homemade dynamite I've been carrying with me since I started my pilgrimage.

“No,” cries The Projectionist, but he doesn't dare come near me.

I wedge the dynamite into a hole on the projector and slip a lighter out of my pocket. This dynamite isn't powerful enough to harm me or The Projectionist, but it will ruin his invention and that's all I want. Will he rebuild his projector? Maybe. But for a while it will stop the Disciples of Buster, hopefully long enough for them to find an escape better than vanishing from the world before they should. Steph's copy of The Wizard of Oz won't survive the blast either. I wonder where her soul will go when that happens, if makeshift dynamite is capable of destroying something so powerful and ethereal. Wherever her soul goes, I hope it goes on dancing like she is right now, twirling and skipping while Judy Garland sings.

I light the fuse. Sparks whip through the air. I turn around and look at The Protectionist. “I really do love this movie,” I say, wiping tears from my eyes.

---

Travis D. Roberson is a New York based writer and artist originally from central Florida. Travis’ work appears or is forthcoming in The Iowa Review, Cutleaf, Pithead Chapel, Juked, and many other publications.

Shira Musicant

Deluge, Surging River, Flooded House

 What James wanted most when the storm eased up, after all the weathering, was comfort food. A bowl of Cheerios. The box, yellow but swollen, floated through the kitchen. He thought maybe it was still dry on the inside. Those plastic-y bags, he was thinking.

The river was no longer rising—but neither was it receding. Water covered his knees as he traversed his living room—above and inside the boots he’d had the foresight to bring upstairs with him. His socks squished with each step. A smell assaulted him—a wet dog smell, then something sour underneath. He could practically hear mold growing.

He navigated through the living room, pushing through the water. The current he created sent the Cheerios box bobbing away, toward the dining room. The box taunted him, laughing. He lunged for it, and it danced further away. It was like his wife. Here one minute, then not.

Though she wasn’t gone-gone. Just out-of-his-life gone.

Loss is like that, always just around the corner, underneath everything. You see something you want. Maybe you have it for one small minute, then poof. Friends, jobs, children, good looks and health. Gone.

Now his house. Walls swelling with river water, pieces of furniture floating about, cupboard doors off and the contents of his life spilled out. Not a fancy house, he granted the Unseeing Universe, but still, it was his.

There were things to do. Real things. Insurance and calling people and checking on neighbors. That’s what he should do, instead of chasing this cereal box around his house, fielding the remnants of his life. Soon he would put these remnants, and the sodden chairs and sofa, along the roadside and the City or County or FEMA or someone would come to pick things up and toss them into the landfill. But the road hadn’t yet emerged for him to put anything alongside.

The box lodged itself between a dining room chair and the table. There would be no milk, the power having gone out days ago, and any milk he had now souring in the fridge. Food was already going bad. That might be what he smelled. A partial loaf of bread bloated with water bumped him, then moved on, as if on a mission to somewhere. Cupboards and drawers had emptied. He might find a bowl somewhere in the floating debris, if he wanted to search through garbage.

It swirled around him as he worked his way over to the cereal box. Something nudged his knee. It was his wedding picture—the one he had stuffed in the back closet because he and Annie had looked so happy and painfully unaware of the fissure yet to plague their marriage. Still in the frame, the photo was now soggy and discolored. He threw it across the living room where it splashed and sank.

He waded through the dining room and grabbed the yellow box. Ripped open the water-logged cardboard, dropping pieces of it into his dining room lake. Yep. The waxy plastic-paper innards seemed intact. Dry O’s. He was glad. He was hungry. Wife gone, house destroyed, but cereal bags still intact. All over the world, cereal bags piling up in landfills and oceans.

Some of his neighbors on the river were probably drinking from their coolers in their upstairs while their wives entertained babies. Wives and babies. He was further along in the nothing-left-to-lose slide than many of them.

He took the Cheerios bag with him as he waded back to his stairs, climbing until he reached the dry landing. Dry-ish. Not covered in water. He sat and opened the bag, took a handful of cereal in his mouth and crunched.

Pieces of his house drifted below him in his living-room lake, little boats holding his past life. He’d have to take the walls down to the studs to rebuild. Or maybe it would all have to go, framing, studs, swollen dry wall, roof. Clear the sucker out. There would be some comfort in that. Not comfort. Maybe satisfaction was the word. Finishing what the Universe had started for him.

James reached into his cereal bag and grabbed another handful. He’d need to find a water bottle soon, but now he just sat and chewed, as the oaty crumble in his mouth turned to paste.

---

Shira Musicant lives in the foothills of Southern California. Her current and forthcoming stories can be found in Vestal Review, Santa Barbara Literary Journal, Blue Earth Review, Fourth Genre, and BULL. Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Shira has recently won the "People's Prize" in the Welkin Mini Competition and has placed second in the Smokelong Quarterly Workshop Prize. Find her @shiramusicant.bsky.social

Andrea Marcusa

The Slide

As the cluster of greying dowagers shift uneasily in the reception hall after Mom’s funeral, their muffled chitchat rises beside the photos I’ve gathered and displayed of my mother. Few notice them—not the wedding picture, the framed articles about her gardening awards, or the ancient snapshots of her, the paper curled and faded, images showing her gliding across the town pond with yellow pom poms on her skates. Two women shuffle towards me, seize my hands and say, “Peg, we’re so sorry to lose Joan.” They’ve got my name, which is Maggie, wrong. I smile and thank them, not bothering to correct them. There’s no Mom nearby to laugh with later about this mix-up. Just a hall which feels very large and echoey, save for the refreshment table, the few chairs, and three gigantic bundles of helium balloons cheerfully bobbing in the corner. I study a photo showing Mom digging in her bed of tea roses, pink, always pink. The image is so vivid I can almost smell the blooms. This picture hurts the most. And I miss her all over again.

Some guests pick over the plates of Linzer cookies oozing with jam and delicate tea sandwiches—exactly the kind of treats that Mom would have nibbled on guiltily, the raspberry filling hitting her tongue and making her eyes glow. But there’s not a glimmer of this same delight in the guests. They look beat down, spent. So unlike Mom who possessed a spirit I could never get enough of. Next to her, I always felt dull, staid, measured. She used to say it was as if I’d been born wrapped in gauze. Where I saw muted shades, bright jewel tones greeted her day.

Except when Mom’s mood turned dark and ugly, and her temper flared scorching everything around her. That’s what drove Dad away. I’m more like him, preferring being understated to the dramatic. But my mother? When it was good, there was nothing else like it in the world.

As I watch the guests and their obvious unease, they are no comfort for my grief that sits like a cold granite boulder lodged in my gut. I’d always understood the idea of loss. But standing here, holding my appreciative smile in place, hearing their bland condolences, I feel them needing something from me that I cannot give. My thoughts jump to a photo I didn’t include, one showing Mom’s impish smile while riding a camel in the Sahara, the smile that she managed to beam at the end, through decay, age and cancer. The smile that said, “Maggie, it’ll be okay. Perhaps death is like a new adventure to an amazing place no one can comprehend.”

But it isn’t okay.

The vibrant helium balloons, all eighty-six of them (her exact age), stretch to the ceiling. She’d asked for them, "Something different, something not sad,” she had said, as we discussed her inevitable end, her blue-veined hands and arms as thin as twigs. She always planned everything—part of her lived in the future until she was left with none. "Who doesn't love a helium balloon?” she’d said, laughing. I watch the colored orbs drift to and fro, waving at me, in the slight breeze from the open side door. Suddenly, I’m striding towards them, seizing the three bunches, the boulder inside me dissolving, as I maneuver them outside where I lift off, my only witness is a dog who barks madly below from an open window in a pickup truck in the parking lot. I giggle as I rise, relieved to leave behind the platitudes, the fumbling as faces and names I don’t recognize as they reach out to me, my mother’s only child. It’s easy to hang on to the balloons, as if I’m weightless. I rise above the church, the cemetery, the railroad tracks and float East towards the Sea Break Amusement Park. I don’t know what is steering me, only that something tugs me along. When I arrive at the park, I descend toward the top of the giant slide, where I spot Mom, her eyes aglow, flashing her smile, and waving to me, because she’s found a new exploit. “You Hoo! Maggie!” I touch down beside her, tie the three balloon bunches to a stanchion, while Mom arranges the small square of rug beneath her and hands another to me. “Quick get on, there’s no crowd!” She’s right, the entire park pulses with jellybean lights and movement, where we are the only patrons. She motions to me to sit, and I do, slipping behind her, my arms clasping her waist. She feels warm and strong, and I sink into her, nothing like the icy hands and bony ghost of a few days ago. I’m speechless, giddy and choked up simultaneously. Together, we gaze out at the merry-go-round horses bobbing, the Tilt-O-Whirl spinning, the Ferris wheel turning, feeling the sea breeze blowing off the harbor. The rollercoaster clatters, the calliope um-pa-pas. We rest there, on top of the world, one last moment together, a proper send-off. Neither of us speaks. We inch towards the slide’s steep incline, and as we draw closer, our laughter rings out, bright and wild, like teenage girls on a high dive. I dig in my heels for a few seconds, holding us at the top, drinking in the colors, the music, the warmth of her back against my chest. Over the water, a day moon peeks out from behind a cloud, and then she pushes off.                  

---

Andrea Marcusa's writings have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, River Styx, River Teeth, New Flash Fiction Review, Citron Review, and others. She’s received recognition in a range of competitions, including Smokelong, Cleaver, Raleigh Review, New Letters, and Southampton Review. She's on the faculty at The Writer's Studio and also a member of the school's the Master Class where she studies with Philip Schultz. Andrea’s chapbook, What We Now Live With, was recently published by Bottlecap Press. For more information, visit: andreamarcusa.com or see her on Blue Sky: @andreamarcusa.bsky.social

Leslie Johnson

My Pompeii

Tonight I was visited by a sudden memory of the paper mâché Mount Vesuvius I built in the basement of my family home when I was boy. Whatever became of it? Did my mother or dad happen upon it in the basement and toss it out when they downsized to their retirement condo? I found myself wondering.

Earlier this evening my husband Anthony and I were settled in our usual spots – me in the armchair with my laptop, Anthony sprawled on the sofa under the throw blanket with his iPad. He sent me a link for a tour of Italy’s most popular attractions, saying, “Here’s a good one. Even you would like Italy. Doesn’t everyone like going to Italy?”

We used to sit side by side, sharing my large-screen Mac, taking turns controlling the touchpad on virtual journeys along the Great Wall of China or up the Inca Trail of Machu Picchu or through turquoise waters of a tropical coral reef. This was during the pandemic, which now seems like another lifetime.  We met at a New Year’s Eve party, Anthony and I, and dated for a couple months before Covid shut down normal life in Boston. He moved into my apartment; we cocooned together, then married at city hall. I made him exotic dinners inspired by the various locales he fantasized about visiting on our honeymoon once things were safe again. By the time they were, though, all sorts of distances had developed between us. We started eating out again, often on our own with our separate groups of old friends. We stopped comparing our different tastes in books and movies and politicians, which no longer seemed so amusing. We’ve both wondered aloud more than once – sometimes angrily, sometimes sorrowfully – if we were tricked by the emotions of quarantine, rushing into something that couldn’t last.

I still do most of my work as an insurance lawyer remotely from the home office I set up in 2020. Some things are hard to change back once they’ve been transformed. But Anthony meets plenty of new people through his job in guest services at The Langham hotel. I know this, but I don’t wish to hear about it. I’ve grown churlish and clingy at same time, trying to hang on while bearing grudges. What about that honeymoon trip we never got? We both deserve it.  I’ve been egging him on, although now that we’re looking for a real destination, it’s clear that my appetite for traveling is more delicate than his. Beach resorts and Smithsonian tours appeal to me, while Anthony is drawn to Amazon rainforests and polar expeditions and camel treks through wasteland deserts. “We’re still in our thirties, for god sakes,” he snapped at me recently, “and you want to sign us up for a senior cruise.”

 “I’m forty,” I corrected him. Nine years older than Anthony, who could pass for 25 with his thick curly hair and smooth complexion. Even doing the most ordinary tasks, he moves rhythmically, as if perpetually on the verge of dancing.

From my armchair this evening, I scrolled through the photos of Tour Italia!, admitting to myself that it would be nice to ride on a gondola in Venice or gaze up at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or stroll down the streets of Pompeii once covered in lava thousands of years ago. And quite suddenly, I remembered my childhood creation of the ancient city buried by volcanic ash, waiting to be excavated.

I was in the sixth grade. It was the first Monday of the new month, October, and Mrs. Peck gave us an assignment for a do-at-home science project. We had two weeks, and we could work alone or with a partner. Kids in the class looked around, making eye contact, and I looked over at Denny, but he didn’t look back at me. At the bell I even hurried over to get close to him in the hall to ask him to be my partner. Hey, I called. Hey, wait, and he stopped.

Denny looked different this year. He was taller, for one thing. Our heads used to be in the same place, but now I only came up to his neck. His hair was parted in the middle; that was another thing. He was wearing a new Nike sweatshirt that day and his old basketball shorts. Those shorts used to be long on him, but now I could see his knees and little dark hairs growing on his legs. Denny noticed me looking, and it made my stomach tighten.

 “Nah, probably not.” That’s what Denny said when I asked him to be my partner, shrugging as if it wasn’t even up to him, just something that likely wasn’t going to happen, like seeing a tree split in two by lightning, which we’d agreed would be really cool to see back in fifth grade when we used to be best friends. We’d started making a list one time, each adding things, and it couldn’t be something totally impossible, like the alien in ET, but something that could happen even if it would be super rare. Like finding a snake in the woods at the exact moment it was crawling out of its old skin. That could totally happen. We just hadn’t seen it with our own eyes yet.

“Probably not” still wasn’t no, and I called him on Tuesday after school. I waited till nobody else was in the family room by the phone and dialed. I knew the number by heart even though we’d never called each other much when we were friends. We would just find each other outside in the neighborhood or go to each other’s door and knock. I mostly blamed my parents for making us move to a new part of town where the houses were bigger and kind of fancier and farther apart.

But what I didn’t understand was why we weren’t friends at school anymore. Denny wasn’t mean to me, exactly, but he kept moving away from me during free time when I tried to talk to him like we used to about Zbots or Pokemon or the deadliest reptiles.

Denny’s mom said just a minute, Greg, and when Denny got on the line, I asked him again if he wanted to do the science project together because I had an idea about a diorama of the habitat of the Komodo dragon. Denny said he was probably making a solar system with Blake and Eric. Probably. That word again.

“But that’s three people,” I said. “It’s supposed to be partners.”

“Whatever, man.”

The way Denny said it made me feel weird. “Okay,” I said, and he hung up.

I forgot about the science project. I didn’t forget about it exactly, but I tried not to think about it, and then not thinking about it seemed to work until Mrs. Peck reminded the class on Friday that the presentations would start on Monday.

I waited till Sunday to tell my mom. She looked at the crumpled assignment, retrieved from the bottom of my backpack. I figured she’d be really mad, and I waited for her to yell at me. I was ready for it. But then she didn’t. She sat down at the kitchen table and looked at the assignment packet, flipping through the stapled pages, shaking her head.

“I signed up for the volcano,” I said, just to break the silence. I hadn’t signed up for the volcano because you didn’t have to sign up for anything; you just had to pick one of the six projects in the packet and bring it to school on Monday. It was too late now for the diorama because I didn’t get a library book about Komodo dragons and I didn’t know where they lived. I just knew they were poisonous. Now it was Sunday, and the library was closed.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” She was smoothing out the pages, trying to flatten them with her hand.

“I forgot.” I was standing behind one of the kitchen chairs, and my mom looked up at me like I’d turned into some kind of unusual zoo animal.

“Sit down, Greg.”

Her voice was all serious and soft, not like her regular mad voice at all. I sat down and picked up the pepper shaker that was a rooster and shook out some black flakes that sprinkled from its red coxcomb into my palm.

“Stop that.”

She sounded irritated now, which was what I was waiting for. “I forgot, okay?” I let my voice get louder. “People forget things sometimes. It happens.”

I wanted her to yell back at me about being irresponsible and disorganized, so I could yell back, too, but she just looked at me again, making a wrinkle between her eyebrows.

“This isn’t like you, Greg. You’re not acting like yourself lately. You haven’t been for some time.”

I looked down and moved the rooster like a chess piece on the plaid tablecloth, white square to blue square.

“Dad thinks you’re still getting used to the new neighborhood, but that’s not it. Is it? Because you quit the baseball team before we even moved. And your new room is super cool, right?”

I licked at the pepper on my palm. The flakes tasted terrible and made my eyes water. I heard Mom sigh, like she did when she was trying to be patient.

“I just want you to know that you can tell me if something’s wrong, Greg. Because life can be…really confusing…when you’re going through changes and –”

“Nothing’s wrong with me.”

“I didn’t say anything was wrong with you, Greggie.”

I wiped at my eyes, smearing pepper specks in my left one by accident. It burned. “Sorry I forgot about the stupid science project and I don’t get perfect grades like Megan and I’m not on the baseball team like stupid Blake Finnegan. You probably wish he was your son.”

It felt good to say that, to say anything, to get her to stop talking about changes.

“You know I don’t think that.”

“Dad does.”

“That’s not true.”

She leaned her elbows on the table, put her chin on her hands. “Don’t cry, sweetheart.”

“I’m not crying. Geez.”

She took a paper napkin from the holder on the table and waved it at me like a flag. I wanted to take it to wipe my eyes, but I didn’t. I wrapped my arms on my stomach instead. She dropped the napkin on the table between us.

“Okay. Let’s see.” Mom flipped through the first few pages of the packet till she got to the volcano. “We actually have everything we need here. You can get the newspapers out of the trash. I can pour out the rest of my Fresca for the bottle, I guess. Baking soda, check. Dish soap, of course. Vinegar and food coloring, check-check.”

She stood up quickly, like she just got zapped with a live wire, and cleared the table. “So the volcano. That’s definitely the coolest one, right?” She was nodding at me like a bobble-head toy, and I could tell she was waiting for me to agree, to get excited about making it.

But I was the only kid in the class without a partner, and years later, I still remember this moment, stuck in the memory of my body, as being filled with shame. It wouldn’t have occurred to me at that age to think the word “shame” or connect it to the vague aches that were spreading in my gut, my chest, and the pits of my arms as I looked at my mother who was smiling with such encouragement.

At the time, I just felt furious with her even while she was helping me. I stomped to the garage and kicked at the big blue trash bin. When I got back with the newspapers, she’d already spread an old vinyl tablecloth, and I waited till she got everything set up. It took awhile. She found a box and cut the sides with an X-Acto and fastened the empty soda jug in the middle with the hot glue gun she used for her crafts. I helped her wad up pieces of newspaper – that was my main job – and she taped them around the bottle till it looked kind of like the shape of a mountain. She mixed glue with water in a baking pan, and we dipped strips of newspaper and stuck them all over the mountain till the tape was covered up.

We stood back. It looked lumpy and lopsided, but Mom said that’s how volcanos were supposed to look. I could see part of President Clinton’s face near the bottom looking up at me. My mom gave me her blow dryer and went to do laundry, and my arm got tired aiming the hot air on all the sides. Instead of making chicken and peas, my mom ordered pizza and we got to eat in the family room on trays and watch TV. After pizza, the volcano was still soggy, but my mom said good enough and got the poster paints and brushes from her supplies. We ran out of brown toward the end, so we switched to green. Mom used a funnel to pour in the baking soda and some dishwashing soap and water through the top of the plastic bottle in the volcano’s middle, and then she let me add five drops of red food coloring. She put a half-full bottle of vinegar in a plastic bag in my school backpack. “So, when you pour in the vinegar,” she told me, “that’s what’ll make it fizz up. Like a regular Mount Vesuvius.”

“What’s Mount Vesuvis?”

“Vesuvee-us. It’s a famous volcano. The one that destroyed the city of Pompeii a jillion years ago. Anyway, it’s too late to try it now. But it’ll work.”

“Okay.” I could see places where the newsprint and tape were starting to show through the paint as it dried.

She gave me a halfway smile, like when you feel sorry for someone.

In the morning, I rode the bus beside my volcano, protected in a black plastic trash bag. At school the projects were lined up in the hallway outside of Mrs. Peck’s door. After pledge and announcements, she pulled four of the popsicle sticks with names from the turn-taking can. My name wasn’t picked, but everyone would get their chance, Mrs. Peck said, by Friday.

Melissa Doane and her partner Becky went first. Their project was so big that Melissa’s dad had left it in the office on a rolling cart, and we were all going out to the courtyard where there was more room for the presentation. The class filed out and gathered near one of the picnic tables where the custodian lifted the project off the cart and placed it on the table with a grunt. It was a gigantic volcano on a huge wooden base that Mr. Doane probably made in his woodshop. My volcano was as tall as the Fresca bottle, which at home had seemed pretty big, but the girls’ looked at least three feet tall, painted black and gray with a clear coating of varnish that shone in the sun. Melissa did all the talking while Becky stood behind her with her hands on her hips like a security guard. Melissa used words like magna chamber and conduit and secondary vent that I didn’t know anything about. Then Mrs. Peck directed groups of students to step up for a closer look at the model before Melissa and Becky would make it erupt.

I leaned in, looking at the landscape around the bottom of the volcano, with green felt grass and sandpaper ground and glued-on pebbles, and all these tiny trees and bushes that they probably bought at Craft Corner at the mall. There was a river made with crinkly blue paper, and glued into the waves were miniature plastic dolphins. I touched one, lightly, with my little finger. Then Mrs. Peck was telling our group to move on.

Blake Finnegan – the stocky, redheaded captain of the Little League team – elbowed my back and said, “Faggot.”

I heard a few kids laugh. I didn’t want to turn around to look, but I couldn’t help it, and Denny was one of them. One of the people laughing. I looked away quickly in the direction of Mrs. Peck, but she was just waving on the next group of kids. I had an urge to yell out to her to tell – Mrs. Peck! – but that would be crazy.  Unthinkable. I stumbled along with the rest of the class that formed a semicircle around the volcano.

“Everyone stand back,” Melissa ordered. “Stand back!”

Bright orange lava suddenly exploded from the top of the volcano with a loud hiss, bubbling higher and higher before flowing down, and then yellow and pink started spraying out from two more holes on the sides. Becky jumped up and down, clapping her hands like a little kid, girls squealed, and even most of the boys made a sound like whooaa.

I wanted to go to the bathroom and put water on my face but if I raised my hand to ask then people would look at me, and I could tell my cheeks were probably still red. They felt like it, anyway. I didn’t know. I told myself it didn’t matter. It was just asshole Blake. But it was Denny, too.

After school I waited by the lockers till all the busses had been called. I took my project from the hallway and snuck it away, taking the shortcut through the Town Hall parking lot and the wooded area behind it toward my neighborhood. The bulky bag wasn’t so heavy, just kind of awkward, and I shifted it from one side to the other as I walked. When I got to the trees, I tossed the bag on the ground and kicked at it, breathing hard. I was crying, just a little. I looked over my shoulder and up into the branches, as if someone hidden might be watching me. But of course there was no one. I thought about climbing onto a nearby boulder and jumping down on the stupid volcano, smashing it, then throwing it into the woods. But I didn’t.

I carried it home. I knew there was nowhere to hide it in my room where my mother didn’t clean, so I figured the furnace room in the basement was the best place. That’s where my parents stored the extra patio chairs and Christmas decorations and boots when it wasn’t winter. If I went through the kitchen to get to the basement stairs, though, my mother would see me, so I used the hatch door on the back of the house. I’d never tried opening it before – I’d never needed to and didn’t know if I could – but after sliding the latch, I pulled up the metal door with no problem, and I climbed down, closing the hatch behind me.

The furnace room was crowded with stacked boxes and a few pieces of furniture covered with sheets. Under one of them was the small desk from my old bedroom set. I took my volcano out of the trash bag and placed it there. It was dented where I’d kicked, but it didn’t matter. Nobody but me was going to see it. I looked at it for a few minutes. Then I got some Sharpie markers from my mom’s craft supplies. My neck felt hot under my chin as if I were doing something forbidden. On the cardboard base of my volcano, I drew streets of cobblestone like they probably had in an ancient city. I took the poster paints and brushes and covered up the see-through places and added some yellow and orange globs for lava. When it was close to dinnertime, I covered it up with the sheet and left the way I’d come, through the hatch, and walked around the side of the house to the front door. When Mom asked where I’d been, I told her just hanging out, and when she wanted to know where, I said, “With Denny.”

“That’s terrific, honey. I’m so glad.” She tried to hug me, but I pushed away.

At school the next day during study hall, I went to the library and wrote a sloppy handwritten report on the Komodo Dragon and dropped it on Mrs. Peck’s desk. Written reports for half-credit in place of projects were for the serious slackers or the kids with bad parents who wouldn’t buy them any supplies, but I didn’t care anymore.

For the rest of the week, when I got home from school, I’d head straight to the basement to work on my volcano. I took bits and pieces from Mom’s craft boxes – mini pom-poms, pipe cleaners, squares of colored foam that I cut into shapes – not too much of any one thing so she’d never notice. I’d lose track of time down there, building a jungle thing on one side of Vesuvius and a city, kind of, on the other.

On Sunday, near the end of the day, I became aware of Mom’s voice yelling my name. Greg? Where are you? Greg!

I wiped my hands, sticky from tape and Elmer’s glue, on the old sheet, stepping back from my project. The dinosaurs I’d made by twisting pipe cleaners around pieces of putty looked like weird bugs with antennas, and the pom-pom trees like nothing more than random fuzzy blobs. An army of Z-bots, picked from the collection in my room, were glued down in a formation. Nothing about it looked like an ancient city about to be covered in lava, but I didn’t mind.

I covered it quickly and climbed up the hatch and raced around the house to the front door and into the kitchen for Sunday shepherd’s pie with my parents and my sister Megan. None of them had any idea what I’d been doing all day since church, and in a weird way I wanted to tell them about my Pompeii. But of course I couldn’t. Mom would know I’d lied about my presentation, and Megan would torture me with days of teasing.

The next week at school there was a special assembly for the DARE program in the gym. We had to sit in homeroom line order in rows of folding chairs set up in front of the stage. Denny was in the row right behind me, a few seats from the aisle, and when I turned around in my chair, we looked at each other. I didn’t turn around to see Denny; I was looking at everyone, mostly at the other sixth graders from other classes who were still filing in. But then right when I looked at Denny by accident – or so I told myself – Denny looked at me, too. His forehead pinched above his dark eyebrows and his lips pressed together. It was a wince – a wince of remorse, as I remember it now, although at the time I never could have articulated those words in my mind. But we looked at each other for several long moments, and I recognized what he was feeling. That he was sorry for laughing at me, sorry for the way things had to turn out between us.

When I got home from school, I climbed down the hatch and started moving across the dusty cement floor toward the furnace room as usual, but my feet slowed to a standstill. I thought about how I was going to stop coming down here pretty soon. I knew I wouldn’t be working on my Pompeii much longer. I wasn’t sure why, or how I would know whether it was actually finished or if I just didn’t want to do it anymore. But I could tell it was getting close, and a sadness flowed slowly down on me from my head to my feet.

Now I close my laptop and stand. “I’m going up,” I say to Anthony. “To read or something.”

He reaches for the remote. He watches Netflix without me, the reality shows that he knows I abhor. He holds it in the air but doesn’t click it yet. He’s studying me. “You know, we can still travel together,” he says. “No matter what happens. Whatever we decide. We could still go places together now and then. In our future lives.”

I pause by the stairs.

“You know. Just for fun?” He smiles up at me sadly.

I’m remembering now, as if it were yesterday, the feeling of elation that washed over me as a boy, like a fresh, clean wave, when I pulled on the cord of that light bulb in the furnace room, illuminating my secret Pompeii.

“We could,” I say to Anthony. “Probably.”

---

Leslie Johnson’s fiction has been broadcast on NPR and published in anthologies and literary journals such as Threepenny Review, Puerto Del Sol, december, Third Coast, Cimarron Review, and Colorado Review, among others. Her work has been awarded the Pushcart Prize (also appearing in Love Stories for Turbulent Times, a “best of Pushcart prose” anthology from Pushcart Press) and the 2023 Three Sisters Award in fiction from NELLE literary journal. She teaches writing at the University of Hartford and lead workshops for the Connecticut Office of the Arts.

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