Tina Cartwright

Open. Open. Open.

            He turns to scream at me. His hands lift off the controls. The pod veers into oncoming traffic. Behind his rabid, jutting face I see other pods ignite force fields and pulse warnings. I make myself small. I am a dog on its back, belly exposed, eyes rolling. My skin is grass in the chill wind. My scalp curls away from him. He yells. He spits. His eyes jitter. The pod quakes and judders. A Commuter Ship bears down. He swivels the control toward it.

~

            What did he say before he did it? the panel ask. The woman with the curly hair and string of beads leans in. Can we get a reading? she asks toward the door and one of the assistants comes in with the reading station to check if I am physically sound enough to go on. I’m fine, I say, trying to wave it away. Take a break, the woman smiles. He said, I hate you. He hissed, I hate you.

~

            We are not supposed to get angry. I mean more, we are, we can, but we have been trained to let the anger sit inside us, to let it flame up and burn out. Gone. The anger is ours and it is not to be cast at another. I can do it, take anger in by moving, making my body large and jolting about the space, but the aim, the goal of the training is to take anger in like breath, just another part of being human.

            Training starts before we can speak. It is the true beginning of life when we can go out into the fields and the mountains with the others and learn to become who we are. Very early on there are some of us that are doers, some are thinkers, and some questioners. It is my job to bring the outsiders in, which I suppose I think is strange since I have more than a toe outside myself. That might be why he liked me in the beginning. He often said that we were the same.

            This is harder to relate than I thought. We believe that it is impossible to hide anything, impossible to obscure any belief, thought or inclination. We have been trained, convinced that to be alive is to be fully Open and to be fully Open is the only desirable state. We will never hide because hiding is childish, stunted and silly, not to mention impossible.

            We live on one of the closest PODS to the old earth and although we have people who can do anything, our POD is named T-POD since we specialise in the training. Envoys come from far flung planets, or from other PODs identifying new things to incorporate into the training and we get to work quickly testing and blending and adding this new element into the training schema. For me, the interesting thing is that any new training has to be the most efficient, the most instinctive, not only for all humanity but for every species, and of these we are always discovering more out there; so I find it busy and enthralling work.

            In each of our home pads one chamber is reserved for visiting species. Anyone might come at any time. Sometimes they are flooded with water for the new Cetaceans and sometimes they are sucked of air for the Xy-2s. When a new visitor comes to my pad a flash of knowledge will enter my thoughts and I can begin to prepare. I know instantly that Dlith will require one flat pillow to hug and one lumpy pillow for his head. He will need cooling, fur slippers and three old songs before sleeping. These things lead me to believe that he will be older than he is.

            When I open the airlock he steps in, pulling off his helmet with a suck-pop, his spidery black locks quivering into place. I will say that I do stand in the small hallway and watch as he strips off the rest of the suit and only then do I step back when I see that he is the perfect shape. His body is a magnet for mine. I feel the force of it immediately and have to turn side on, so as not to stand very close to the muscled shoulders and proud chin. We do not usually speak in words unless it is absolutely necessary but he goes on and on, he’s been on an expedition, done the weirdest mind blend with a giant slug, what do I like and do I know any old songs? He puts his head on the side and watches me with his deep, dark eyes. Do I sing by any chance?

~

            Dliiith, I say. My voice is fractured, quaking and breathy. ‘Dlith,’ I say again in the low and firm tone you use with a ferocious dog. Let me out, I say. I look at the pod hatch eject button but we are on the Zip, the fast highway returning from the Rest Moon. Just now we have passed the last Zip station and there is nowhere else to disembark. I am trapped. With him. The pod lurches wildly. His hands make fists and he almost lets go. Please, I say, and there’s a sob in my voice. But his anger has eaten him. You’re just like them, he screams, slamming a palm onto the controls. Earlier, he overrode the autopilot like he always does, the first time he did, flashing me a smile and saying, I like to be in control. I remember because I told myself who am I to take away his pleasure? Why was I not trained against myself?

~

            Three weeks after this when I am deemed recovered the panel will ask me if he made me do the Open Ceremony. Before I can answer one of them, an older man, will scoff, how can anyone make someone do that, it’s elective! I glance at him as he realizes what he’s said and we both know he will lose his position. In fact, he gets up and leaves to report himself before I can answer. I find it an interesting question because the most loving and honest thing you can do is the Open Ceremony. Sometimes we are matched up and strongly advised to do it. The most honest and senior among us has often done the Ceremony with beings that we can only ever imagine exist.

            Why have I done this Ceremony with Dlith? Not to prove anything. Not because he asked me. Not because he wanted it. Partly, I realize, because I felt sorry for him and partly because I loved him; but mostly—above all else—because I believed in myself. I believed that the absolute power of my Openness could heal.

            A Vam with flickering green eyes and narrow suckers, brings them together and leans across the table toward me. How well did you know him when you undertook the Ceremony? Did you know what he was capable of?

            Yes, I think, I did. I just thought I was capable of more.

~

            It seems like I agreed to the Ceremony on a whim, but I have been thinking about it for a long time. You see there is the beginning and then there is the truth. In the beginning Dlith and I will wake up together, we will turn away from one another and select our skins. Sometimes I like my tough feel of scales, slightly damp and that sodium chloride smell mixed with earth. I feel like swimming, I will say from within my new skin. He often chooses the lion skin. In the wash cube he’ll creep up behind me, I know he is there of course, and roar. I will pretend to be scared and we will laugh, lion and alligator face in the mirror. Who would win in a fight, he says, wistfully. In the afternoons we’ll lie out and look at the purple sky watching ships come in and I’ll stroke his mane away from his face. But we have no training on love and it is harder than it seems. That we have no training on love seems strange to me now and the more I saw he desired and admired me, the more he wanted to possess me, and the more he wanted to possess me, the weaker he felt, and the weaker he felt, the more he hated himself.

            Soon, he wanted to know every single little thing. What was that alert that I just got? Why did that flicker of frown pass my face? Was he not the best thing I’d ever experienced in my entire life? If I did not give the right answer with the right enthusiasm fast enough then he became furious, bursting in the face, swollen with yellow bile and red vengeance. In trying to avoid this I learned to speak his truth. But no reassurance was enough. I should have known that nothing would ever be.

~

            At the Opening Ceremony we are naked. There are hundreds of other naked pairs surrounding us in the metallic-grey landing hall, which is empty of ships. I am watching Dlith from the moment we walk in, hands outstretched to one another, so of the others I only register that the pairs are all different colours, species, sizes, shapes. In the far corner I see a senior I recognise, a Flying Ray, rise onto its tail in order to embrace a tiny black-and-white bee. It brings tears to my eyes, since what we hope is to bring the Ceremony to as many beings as possible. It is elective but we hope ALL will do it, as much as possible, with anyone and every being.

            It’s true I take quite a glance at Dlith’s body before locking into his dark eyes. There is no form to this so when we are ready we plant our soles on the cool floor and stand right up close to one another. When our palms press against one another, the floor raises slightly on my side so that we are eye to eye, nose to nose, chest to chest. I listen for the sound of his heartbeat. We match as much of our skin as we can, our forearms are flat against one another, and our palms too. Although we have experienced one another sexually many times this has nothing to do with that. This is better. His eyes are too close to mine to see them properly. What I do is make them mine. I see them perceiving me. I fall into their darkness, at the same time as sharing his breath. We breathe as one. Hour on hour. We breathe and see as one. We become one being. I feel his chest say, this is me, this is the how of me, this is what I believe. I do the same. Hour on hour. I hold all of myself Open. I let him feel my doubt. I dissolve it right now, with him as witness. There are the scars of childhood, the years of neglect, the misunderstandings and the slights. I am surprised by his capacity for revenge, and momentarily he flickers closed, defensive against my judgment. We stall. And then Open, Open, Open. I can see what he is. I can see how small he is inside. But this is what I wanted. If I am Open, Open, I can give it to him. I am him. Can’t he see. We are we.

            Weeks afterward we are having breakfast and he pours himself a glass of juice and moves the juice away from me, though he can see I want it. I am not sure whether to reach for it. Should I ask for it? He pretends to ignore me. I get up my courage and ask for some juice. Instead of handing me the bottle he snatches my glass and half-fills it, placing the juice bottle back on his side out of my reach. A bit more please, I say, and realize that I am I straining to keep my voice steady. Huffily, he unscrews the juice lid and violently floods my glass. There, he says, as the orange juice spreads over the table and pours into my lap.

            You weren’t Open, he says.

            What?

            At the Ceremony, you weren’t Open. You were faking it. You’re such a good actor.

            The air sparks. I do not know what he will do. Is there something I can say to diffuse? But also, I feel like crying because I have failed. My Openness was not enough for his distrust, for his self-hate.

            After the Open Ceremony we will be laughing, I will be telling how training of a bunch of newcomers is going, telling my anecdotes that I have saved up for him, and he will laugh with his neck bent backwards, but then when he brings it back to look at me, all the joy has leaked out of his eyes and I will be looking at the abyss. You are supposed to Hold Open forever with that being that you do the Ceremony with and he will say I caught that. What? I ask and he will laugh because after the Ceremony either you close everything or nothing at all. I had had a tiny thought that I had talked more than ever with him, and that I found it exhausting. I had thought that might be a good moment between us, one in which I could be myself, a contemplator and not a speaker, but no, he says that if I do not speak, then I am not doing my share and so I do, even though it is very hard and tiring for me.

            One afternoon he comes home happy. I am at my console in the living area and when I turn back to hear him enter, he is pulling off his helmet, and I am waiting for his eyes to appear, like that first time. Things have been hard. Words and thoughts have been hard. Something that was big inside me before is now made of the thinnest glass. I am a trainer and surely I should have known. But today his face is bright and his eyes soft and brilliant and my body does that thing where it leads me to him.

            I have a week off, he says, pressing me against him. I stop myself from looking back at my console and I admit I kiss him to try and keep him from catching my thought which is that I am on deadline. We have recently incorporated a new bunch of species, most of them touch thinkers, and now, I need to adjust our most intimate training sessions, somehow melding pinpoint sensation with holistic instinct. Sometimes I get carried away talking about my work, and then he thinks I think it’s more important than him. I do not yet see that there is no way to satisfy his self-destruction. So, I enthusiastically agree to go to the Rest Moon with him for a week. This means that for three days before the trip I must work eleven hour days while selecting my words carefully and still giving him enough attention.

~

            Why are we trained to identify danger and not power? Power is the most fearful. I said that to Dlith once, and he laughed, and said, you have to seize it. No one’s going to give it to you, you have to take it. I hum, because I am thinking that he needs retraining. I rush my thoughts on to the task we are doing because I know my next thought and I cannot think it in front of him. It is my duty to report that he needs retraining. And yet, if I do that he will come out different. Can I do that to him? Should I?

            He has a whistle that he plays with the tiny gusts from the movement of his toes. While it rises and hums, he sings. I think he knows how badly I want him to sing for me, because he only does it when I don’t need it. I am not allowed to ask for it. It surprises me to know that I just want to be loved like I love him.

~

            First thing when we embark the pod to travel to the Rest Moon, he has forgotten to refresh the air in the flux chamber, and we will have to stop somewhere and do it. Somehow this is my fault even though we take his pod. He will not let me control. He never does. He says his pod is bigger. I say mine is more efficient. He says he’s the better controller. When we are in and initiating our restraining fields I get an alert. I open my palm and glance at it quickly. How stupid is it that it pulses red. As I register it, Dlith sees and then I see that he sees I have seen. A blistering chasm opens its white jaws in front of me. Inside is whirling space, waiting to suck me in. Instead of getting out of the pod, instead of scrambling for my life, I breathe calmly. You’re an excellent actor, I tell myself. What did the alert say? he asks zipping the pod into the air, zinging toward the exit. Hackers, I say. I hope it wasn’t me, I sound tentative. Someone hasn’t followed shut down procedure at work. He nods and I cannot tell if he believes me or not. The alert said: WARNING. WE BELIEVE YOU ARE IN A POD WITH A REPORTED CONTROLLER. DLITH V. MELLOR IS RESCINDED FOR RECKLESS CONTROL. DISEMBARK NOW. IMMINENT DANGER.

~

            At the long table in front of the panel I tell them I’m happy to let them go in and explore my past thoughts, but we both know my reporting of the incident is more important than what really happened. My eyes ache from the reckoning. Am I safe? Why did it take them so long to alert me? I had been in the pod with him many times before. Later, I will find out why. Surely he will be excluded. He has killed someone. Not himself and not me. I am supposed to feel lucky it wasn’t me, but I feel guilty. I cannot reason at which point I crossed the battlelines not only against myself but against others. Warning after warning and I chose love. I thought I did.

            One of the seniors picks up her string of chestnut-coloured beads and lets them fall against her collar bone. Softly, she says, might you please tell us what you were thinking when you stayed in the pod after receiving the warning? Why you didn’t then activate the emergency alerts? This is a very, very good question and I wish I had a better answer. The truth is I was frightened. I had sort of been corralled by him, into believing it was him and I, that the greatest act of my life would be to trust him above all others.

~

            I manage to survive the week of holiday. There are fights and crying and confessions and me so careful, so measured, so caged. I dare not stare too long out the window, lest it seem I wish I was elsewhere. I dare not struggle to sleep, or eat or shit, lest he interpret this struggling as rejection. I must listen to him lie across the fake, old-timey, brown shag flooring of our holiday pad and play that damn whistle with the wiggling of his bristled toes, for hours on end, and I must not once register on my face how much the sight of his feet now makes me cringe. My head hums with exhaustion. My face is not good enough at hiding my exhaustion so I take to plunging it under the cool faucet many times a day to brighten it, so that he will not say, you’re supposed to be on holiday, with a deepening frown. Am I hard work for you? Don’t you enjoy my company?

            On the last day of holiday I have been especially careful not to be too cheerful. I do not think about reporting myself and requesting to change pads and never going home so that he will never find me. Because he has broken down crying now, telling me how it wasn’t his fault that his control was revoked, there was a pelican in the cross path. I hold my face very still. I have never seen a pelican in my life.

            I have made it through the week. I have and we are on the way home. I must just survive this last thing. Down in the exiting port we are stuffing the hold with our special pillows and left over berry treats. I make a play for control. I’ll get out of practice, I say. Pfft, it’s not hard, he says, and he shrugs, his finger on the hatch button. I hold my breath. Next time, he says.

            Ten minutes into the twenty minute flight back he erupts. Why did you want to control? he says. You don’t fucking believe me, do you? After everything we’ve been through. I trusted you! God, it’s hard to hide your thoughts from someone you’ve Opened to. It’s hard to shutter your eyes, wear your face in the right way. And I had done it. I had nearly done it. Now, he is screaming and I am shivering.

            Dlith! I shout. Please stop! Oh my God! We will hit the Commuter Ship. I see its yellow side crowd the window. I scream and shut my eyes.

            Hands on the controls he looks at me with his eyes bucked, whites showing, and his arms stiff. I sense what he’s going to do. Nooo! I cry. I am bawling as he flicks the control rightward and the yellow of the Commuter Ship engulfs us. A monstrous bang. My head falls into blackness. It rockets. Am I falling or flying? Am I dead? Crashing all around us. I am here again. We have hit. We are rising. I think we will be flung so high that we’ll flick over the barrier force-field and out into space. My mind tries to recall the training. What to do in the unlikely event your pod plunges into hard space. Eject. Suit up. Where are the suits? No, this is not the order. I cannot remember. But no, we are smoking and grating to a stop along the protective runnel of the Zip. Someone, perhaps the driver of the Commuter Ship, has activated the Emergency safety runnels.

~

            Weeks later, after I have been healed from most of my injuries, some of my bones broken and rebroken, stitched straighter and using that new, incredible electric bone growth starter they’ve manufactured. I feel good. Alive. Whole. But I don’t particularly feel like myself. I cry in the wash cube and am praised for it. Better to process than to withhold, although of course I am permitted to do both. That day Dlith has injured many beings, given them fear and trauma, when what he wanted was to hurt me, which became to him, the same as hurting himself. I will tell this to the panel.

            It turns out Dlith is the better actor because he has already been retrained once. That is why it took them so long to see that he was still a threat. In a glaringly similar situation to mine, it was not veering to miss a pelican that made them rescind his control, no, it was after he hit a woman. A woman, like me, that he said he loved. She has died. He has killed her. It was Decided that he hit her on purpose and the panel will permit me to read his statement in which he claims that he didn’t know what came over him, he was a good person, he only wanted to scare and punish her, for lying, for pretending to love him. What will happen to him? I ask. They do not yet know, but, they say he will never, ever be given any opportunity for any type of power. But we already know that, I say. That’s why we do the Open Ceremony. We know that when someone feels powerful their sense of collaboration, their empathy and Openness dissipates. Not everyone, they say.

            I am given a promotion. I am made a Teller. I am supposed to Tell about Love, and when I go all around the PODs and talk with all beings, I always start with this story because if someone asks you to trust THEM more than YOURSELF that has nothing to do with love. AND if they start to Tell you yourself, that’s ludicrous and vile too, and you must not believe them. Then I go on a bit about Holding Open and about how when you get to it the self doesn’t exist, not as this separate thing, and sometimes I’ll look out across the audience and see the fangs of an Ipyll gleam, the wiggle of an Eem sensor, bright blue and sparking, and I’ll think, this is me. Sometimes too, I look like me and sometimes I talk from within my Alligator skin but always, I am Open, Open, Open

---

Tina Cartwright (she/her) is a writer and healthcare worker living on Wurundjeri lands in Melbourne. Her manuscripts were longlisted for the Michael Gifkins Prize for an unpublished novel in 2023 and 2024. In 2025 she was a finalist for the Tasmanian Writers’ Prize, longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and Highly Commended in the Boroondara Literary Awards. She is a 2026 Small Fiction Nominee.

Catherine Chiarella Domonkos

Joanne, Where Do You Think You’re Going in That Dress?

Lady Gaga helps me squeeze into her dress, the one she wore to the VMAs, the one made from 50 pounds of tailored Argentine flank steaks. Straight from the fridge at the Haus of Gaga, stored in optimal conditions, there’s only the faintest smell of rot. Over the years the dress has gotten darker, less gore, more garnet and ruby. The fat, a defiance of lace swirling. 

       She fits the dress to my body, a body my mother calls zaftig when she’s feeling generous, tubby when she’s not. Gaga trusses me with butcher’s twine, stuffs the top with wax paper. I try to cover my thighs, tugging on the sticky hem, but she swats my hands, keeps moving. “Girl, everyone’s got the right to wear a meat dress.” She sweats with the effort of cutting and trimming and wrapping, a pool surrounding her rhinestoned armadillo boots.

       “What’s with the long face?” She slaps a slab of hat on my head, a jaunty tilt to the left, dipping low on my forehead. “Here, put these on,” as she tosses me matching boots.

       “I don’t think I can go, Gaga, not even in your dress.” I picture my evening more Carrie than Edge of Glory, grab a half-eaten Snickers from my dresser to satisfy my nerves. “I’ve changed my mind. This is a mistake.”

       She snatches the candy, flings it. “You’re beautiful in your own way, baby. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.” She yanks the neckline across my shoulders. “Chin up.”

       “But what if…”

       “Abracadabra you’re a queen, alright? Is that what you need to hear? Don’t be such a drag. You’ve got this.” She thrusts a clutch into my hands. “Let’s go.” She spins me toward the door.

       How I wish that she would come with me to prom. The cheerleaders would die if I showed up with Lady Gaga. Like their heads would literally explode. Then there’s Cindy Tagler who I’ve been crushing on since middle school but who only side-eyes me when we pass in the hall. Maybe she would finally stop and see me.

       “Come with me Gaga. I’m begging you.”

       “Can’t. I promised Elton I’d handle his kids’ bath time tonight while he and John are at couples therapy. But even if I were free, you wouldn’t catch me at a prom.”

       “Wait…what? It’s a rite of passage, memories of a lifetime and all that.”

       “They called me an attention-whore in high school, bullied the crap out of me because I was different. No good memories for me, but you do you. Go. Or don’t.”

       She escorts me to the limo, leans inside to lay paper towels so I won’t stain the white interior.   She slides a corsage, a single white rose – her favorite flower - onto my wrist. For the smell, I guess. 

       As I’m ripping a piece of paper towel from the roll to wipe my clammy palms, my mother shouts from the front door where in hell do I think I’m going and they’re all going to laugh at me and well they should in that ridiculous getup. Before I can answer, Gaga whirls around, tiny fists on her sequined hips. Chest puffed out, she glares at my mother like a superhero doll. My mother’s jaw flops open. She retreats and closes the door.

       Gaga turns back to me. “Don’t let anyone dim your light just because they’re blinded by you. You feel me? They’ll just have to put on sunglasses.” She hops onto her scooter and buzzes out of sight.

       I catch my reflection in the bay window, my mother peeking out from behind a curtain. At first, I wince at the shine, but I don’t turn away. I straighten, catch a whiff of affirming corsage, armor cinching around me. I see myself.

       I slip into the limo. “Where to?” My fingers stall on the door handle. “Well?” My head lolls against the icy window.

       I can’t wait to dance with Cindy.

---

Catherine Chiarella Domonkos’ recent words appear in Centaur Lit, The Disappointed Housewife, JMWW, and Bending Genres among other literary places. Her stories have been selected for Best Small Fictions, nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize and longlisted for the Wigleaf Top 50. For the complete collection, check out: www.catherinechiarelladomonkos.com.

Jeremy Mauser

My Neck, the Pendulum

The first time he said the f-slur in front of me, it was an accident. And by “accident,” I don’t mean it was like two cars colliding at peak velocities, hurling their passengers into a new stage of life, if their lives still exist at all. Or, actually, is that exactly what I mean? What I meant, at least originally, was he had greased his tongue with that word so often, with such little thought, that it slipped out seamlessly in my presence, in the presence of the other guys—“the boys,” as we call them. The boys who whipped their faces in my direction with such vicarious guilt.

Wait, no, that wasn’t guilt—it was just curiosity. They stared at me not because they knew I was queer (they didn’t), but because my reaction would either confirm or reject my status as one of “the boys.” A litmus test of sorts. A swarm of bug eyes and loose mouths eager to see whether I could hang. Whether I’d impede on this particular expression of their unfiltered selves.

I stared at the boy who said the word, my flesh starting to boil under the heat of the room’s collective gaze, and he didn’t flinch. Didn’t raise his hands defensively. No, he said coolly, calmly, evenly: “Don’t worry. I don’t use the word around anyone who’s uncomfortable with it.” I wasn’t positive whether there was a question beneath the statement, and this straight guy continued. “When I say it, I don’t mean it as an anti-gay slur. I just use it to show I don’t approve of someone.” The other guys nodded their understanding. They nodded their endorsement. I nodded my submission, hoping these eyes would direct their warmth elsewhere. But, no, it didn’t stop. The nodding didn’t stop.

It grew faster. More forceful. More desperate and aggressive. Like we were trying to shake something loose of its glue. And then it happened—bones splintered, skulls separated from spines, heads became free under the warm earth known as boyish flesh. Their nodding persisted against the laws of physics and physiology, without the constraints of the brain stem. I continued my nodding. That’s right, I continued. Not because I wanted it, nor because I needed it. I wasn’t forced, or coerced, or scared. I continued to nod because I never stopped. Simple as that. The way a knee jerks without thought when smacked in the right spot. Except this knee became a pendulum whose kinetic energy never transitioned into heat or sound. This knee inherited new laws, ones that our necks seemed to understand and obey.

My bones never splintered, were never severed, but they did bruise. Oh, did they bruise, and scar, and cycle through scab after scab. I’m still nodding, actually. Did you notice? I haven’t stopped, but I tell myself I can stop whenever I feel like it. The thing is, I forget how it feels to feel. And that guy, the one who prompted our nodding, he’s still standing there. He’s a foot shorter than me, but he lurks before me, stares me down, stares down at me. He ascribes his own meanings to whatever words he pleases, and we continue to nod. We insist on our nodding.

I insist on my nodding until my queerness works its way to my tongue, dormant and bashful, tasteless and expired. My queerness, the car wreck. And I stare at it as I slow down on the highway. Not out of respect, but to admire the spectacle of its carnage.

---

Jeremy Mauser is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Alabama. His prose, poetry, and everything in between are featured or forthcoming in Sonora Review, New Delta Review, and Eggplant Emoji, among other publications. He is an Assistant Fiction Editor at Black Warrior Review, a Reader at the Masters Review, and a stand-up comic who can be found on Instagram @jeremymauserwrites and Bluesky @jeremymauser.bsky.social.

Kik Lodge

At the soup kitchen, hearts shrink and flesh out

We’re freezing our backsides off in the queue and this woman pushes in, and because we’re not a culture that voices things, we don’t react but balance our weight onto the other foot. We can feel it though, in our bellies, the aching injustice—it’s enough to start a riot. So to soothe ourselves, we pull her apart in our minds, limb by limb. We tug at the threads of her cardigan with peacocks on it, we give her names, vilify her offspring, ridicule every decision she has ever made, stub out her qualities, spit on her attempts to make a clean break. We’re all suffering here, but a queue is a queue, and we have fresh charges for her the closer she gets to the ladle. In the meantime, a man, our hero, the man everyone wants to be, even the women, the man with a bobble hat and more courage than all of us put together, speaks up and says these words —Excuse me, I think you’ll find the queue starts here, and he points to the empty place just behind me. Everyone hears it, everyone feels the repose that comes when wrongs have been righted, and in our heads there are raucous claps and encores. We, hungry humans that we are, watch the woman, and the woman says Oh, just Oh, and she looks about and receives nothing but stares. She seems off-course in this world but it’s all the same to us. Then I notice she has a kid waiting in a pushchair by the tree with another kid watching over it, and she keeps looking at them, and the claps in my head start to peter out. Not everyone sees the kids by the tree, because their eyes are on the ladle, but I do, so I think of the courage of the bobble hat man and say come with me to the woman, and we walk to the front of the queue and I say she’s alright, she’s got littluns, and the chap looks over and nods and dishes out three bowls of hot chicken curry and rice, which I help take over, but the man in the bobble hat stands in front of me, so I say step the fuck away you righteous dick, and all the others have spears in their eyes, apart from an old lady who says it’s ok, go on love, and even if I have to wait all over again in the cold slug of a queue when I return, it doesn’t matter because there’s something settling in my heart right now, something new for me but as old as time, and it took root under the tree when the woman squeezed my hand and said you’re a good man, you.

---

Kik Lodge is a short fiction writer from Devon, England, but she lives in France with a menagerie of kids, cats, rabbit and a man now. Her work can be found in some lovely journals; The Citron Review, Bending Genres, trampset, Milk Candy Review, Splonk and Smokelong Quarterly, as well as the Best Microfiction 2024 and 2026 anthologies. Her debut flash collection, Scream If You Want To, is out with Alien Buddha Press and a second collection, The Bully in my Pillow, is forthcoming with Stanchion Books.

Lori Barrett

Jax and the Climbing Vine

Jax knelt on the grass bordering her overgrown garden, under a thick layer of clouds. Vines unfurled from a nearly dead clematis threatening to choke the blooms from her perennial bed.

“They call it the devil’s rope,” the woman who previously owned her home explained as she walked Jax and Ben through the yard ten years ago.

“Grim,” Ben had responded.

Jax picked up a green tendril and tugged. It followed her fingers, pulling dianthus and phlox blossoms out of the soil. Earthworms and centipedes oozed from their burrows. She unearthed a flying fairy, lost and lamented by her daughter Violet eight years before. Back when they’d hang out in the garden, weeding together or creating fairy villages with moss and bark.

She followed the web of roots to the base of a dead fig tree, where it spiraled in and out of the tree’s base. She needed her pruners.

“Ben,” she called inside.

No response. He was packing for a business trip, which on this morning meant he was rewrapping the handle of his tennis racket. They met in a badminton league, at a time when she was light as a shuttlecock, skipping and jumping with her racket to score points. They’d go out after games, split pitchers of beer and laugh about mistakes they made during play and in life. Now their criticisms had thorns. Now her feet were heavy with responsibility and fatigue. Ben, on the other hand, had unearthed two nights a week for tennis.

“Why do you need that if it’s a work trip?” she’d asked about the racket on her way outside to pull weeds.

“I won’t be working 24/7,” he said.

She tried to pull the vine away from the dead wood but it was wound too tightly. She stuck the toe of her shoe between the fig tree’s twisted roots to give herself leverage. The vine wouldn’t budge. She put her other shoe in between the roots and stepped off the ground. She felt like Tarzan. Or Jane. She began to climb.

From the height of her daughter’s bedroom window she saw Violet sprawled across her bed staring at her phone. In a few hours she had soccer practice. Ben was supposed to drive her before he left. Jax knew his packing would take precedence. She’d drive, which also meant Jax would be the one to remind Violet about laundry, walking the dog, emptying the dishwasher. Resentment propagated between mother and daughter like a fungus. The garden was Jax’s refuge, where bickering roots and stems acquiesced to her guidance. 

Trepidation dwindled with each step away from her house and neighborhood. Wind whispered encouragement. Finally she came to a flat carpet of clouds. She put a foot down to test the stability. Confident it could support her, she stepped off the vine.

She looked over an expanse of white punctuated by swaying wild grasses and brush, a pillowy prairie interrupted by a small house with a turret. How was any of this possible, she wondered. A cloud, a grassland, a mini castle? She walked toward the structure and knocked on the door. No one answered, though she thought she heard voices. She tried the handle. It opened. 

Inside it smelled of adolescent sweat and salty snacks. As she moved, her hip bumped a table covered in empty sports-drink bottles, balled up napkins, and wrappers from cereal bars and flaming hot snacks. One of the bottles rolled off the table. She froze.

From the bedroom a bored voice said: “Fee fi fo fud. I smell the scent of motherhood.” 

She ducked into a closet and tried to quiet her breath. Footsteps passed. After a few minutes the beeps and chimes of a video game filled the room. Spoons clinked against bowls. Voices spoke in superlatives: most, worst, so real, so fake.

She crept out of the house and hid behind a bush. She took in the sea of strange plants across the horizon, the tufts of spiky grass poking through the clouds like infant hair. She touched one of the dark, glossy leaves of the bush next to her. It looked like gardenia or magnolia, with big, reflective leaves. She could almost see her reflection. White spores covered the underside. She ran her finger over the surface and a few fell off into her hand. She wished she had her reading glasses. From what her aging eyes could make out, they looked like badminton shuttlecocks.

She was startled by what sounded like the click of fingers tapping on a phone screen. The  teens spilled from the mini castle.

“I knew I smelled something mom-ish,” one of them said, rolling his eyes.

She yanked a branch of the shrub, hoping to carry it home and propagate it in her garden. It wouldn’t separate.

From the corner of her eye she thought she saw a young girl kneeling, hair blowing in the breeze. She crawled toward the girl, hoping to get some answers. Close up, she realized it was wavy, wild grass, not a person. She wished again for her reading glasses. She ran her fingers through the wispy plumes, softer than any grass she’d ever felt. Like Violet’s hair. Or her own, when she was younger. Then the fragrance hit: drugstore shampoo from the eighties — something like Prell or Agree. It was the scent of hours alone in her bedroom, reading or listening to music. She reclined as she stroked the grass, almost falling asleep.

“Hey,” shouted one of the kids. “There she is. Get her!”

Four kids, cellphones in hand, ran toward her. One of them shouted: “Be she alive or be she dead, we’ll need her skills to make our beds.”

Another yelled, “And our dinner.”

She crawled toward the vine she’d climbed up on, ducking behind another bush as she moved, this one with velvety leaves like the lamb’s ears in her garden, with bunches of tiny green buds, like hydrangea at the start of the season. Little mounds of potential ready to burst. It smelled like new books, her first job at a publishing house, and the sandalwood oil she wore then.

She wasn’t sure if it was the strange fragrances or the thin air that made her so disoriented. She was surrounded by tactile reminders of treasures she once had: beauty, free time, ambition. It took her breath away. Could she carry any of it home? Would she want to? Maybe she would just eat a few leaves?

One of the kids approached.

“Have you seen my phone charger?”

These kids were killing her buzz. They were more menacing than regular teens. She hadn’t heard them laugh once. She ran toward the vine she’d climbed up on, passing the hairlike grass. She wrapped a bunch of it around her fist and tugged.

“Wait! I don’t have any clean clothes,” one of the kids called. 

“Can you bring some snacks when you come back?” said another.

She hurried down the vine. She landed on the ground as Ben stepped outside, his tennis racket in hand.

“Did you call me?” He looked puzzled.

Jax stared at the ground, unsure what had just happened.

Ben tried a smile. “I’m running out of time. Do you think you could run Violet to practice?”

Maybe she’d fallen asleep. Except the grass was still in her hand.

“Find the time,” she said. She walked into her kitchen to put the grass in a jar of water.

---

Lori Barrett lives and writes in Chicago. Her work has appeared in Salon, Citron Review, Laurel Review, Peatsmoke Journal, Maudlin House, and Identity Theory. She’s an assistant fiction editor at Pithead Chapel. Find more of her work at LoriBarrettwrites.com.

Michael Pershan

Tandem Jump

I only signed up on the insistence of my therapist who felt I needed, at the age of fifty-three, to confront what he called “terminal stubbornness.” In other words, he wanted me to do something awful to prove that I could. In other other words, he bet that I wouldn’t, even wagering the cost of three additional sessions. Ethically questionable, but it worked. Now I was taking off in a coffin with wings, a Cessna 182 with a goddam propeller, breathing steadily while harnessed to Travis, my tandem instructor.

This whole situation: I wanted it over quickly, with limited incident, so I could collect my winnings and make Dr. Jacobs listen to stories about my elderly father.

We reached twelve thousand feet. Diving time, someone said.

Hooray.

I opened my eyes and caught a glimpse of the sky. I admit I was impressed: blue beyond blue, in vast magnitude, draping a delicately curved world. I’m not a religious man, but it prompted thoughts of how much I mattered in this great scheme. Not much, was the answer. If the chute didn’t open, if I went splat, I’d be the one who mourned the most, in the brief moments before impact. The rest of this magnificent planet wouldn’t even blink.

Maybe thanks to these pleasant thoughts, I had a burst of courage. Now or never; if we must. But Travis, my instructor, wouldn’t budge. It took me a moment to realize that this was not routine, that Travis should have budged. It was, of course, the looks of the people around me that clued me in, including from Julian, a repeat jumper who spoke endlessly on our ascent and was giving a “this isn’t how it’s done” stare. The doorman (whose name I did not know) was motioning for Travis to make his move.

Because he was behind me—I was strapped to him—it took me a few minutes to realize the problem. It was that Travis, my instructor, was crying. I heard his sobs. I felt his hot tears roll down my neck.

“We’re all sad,” finally said the doorman, a twenty-something SkyLife employee. He had to shout this over the wind and the plane’s engine. He was talking to Travis. “It’s not just you.”

“What’s the issue?” I asked.

“His good pal Domino died,” said the employee. He looked at Travis. “Our good pal.”

“Oh,” I said.

“I love you Domino,” Travis said, almost in my ear. He choked back tears, each sob shaking my body. “I know you can hear me, wherever you are. You loved blue skies, and we’ve got a beauty today. Just know that we’re sending love, buddy. We’ll see each other someday real soon…real soon, I know…”

“Real soon?” I wondered aloud.

But nobody heard me, because at that exact moment Travis made his decision and dropped us into the sky.

~

I still struggle to describe what happened next. It lasted about sixty seconds. As best I can tell, existence unraveled into chaos and glorious madness. I lost the ability to put one thought beside the next, as if my capacity for language was a complex machine that had been set on fire with a match and gas. In other words, the dial in my head was set to static and the volume turned up. I saw only blue. The wind was in my cheeks. I was dissolving in air, drowning in sky.

Then, at last, Travis and I were plucked out of freefall by the tug of our chute.

For the first time I looked down, I mean really looked, and my mind registered simultaneously the danger and my safety from it—not very reassuring, unfortunately. A panic settled into my chest as I considered how my life depended on the man I was tethered to, who was again sobbing, speaking the word “Domino” over and over again.

“Domino, Domino,” he said.

“At least he’s in a better place now,” I said, turning back to speak.

“What?” said Travis. “You’ve got to be louder.”

“At least he’s in a better place!”

“Thanks,” Travis said, gathering himself. “I’m sorry for what happened up there. You paid SkyLife for a transformative experience and that’s what you deserve, no matter what I happened to be dealing with.”

“Not a problem!” I shouted back.

“Pretty great view,” he said. “Right? And if you look over there you can see the edge of Lake Washington.”

We fell on in silence. The ground was remarkably far below. I didn’t want to vomit but wondered if I would.

“You know,” said Travis, “My mind can’t believe it, even if my brain knows he’s gone. Want to know the first thing I did when I got the news? I texted Dom. Three texts in a row, boom boom boom. I just said I loved him, three separate times. Kept waiting for him to respond.”

“Did he?” I asked, like a dumbass.

“No,” he said. “But I keep checking.”

Travis pulled on something and we veered to the right, slicing through the wind.

“Look at this” he said, pushing his wrist close to my face. “You like the bracelet?”

“Yes,” I lied.

“If you can believe it, Domino made it. Dude was self-taught. A lot of the guys used to think that was funny, Dom skipping drinks to weave leather bracelets. But I’ll let you be the judge. He had some talent, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Definitely,” I said. My fear came roaring back. “What happened to Dom…was it an accident?”

“Overdose,” said Travis. “I always said, he should sell his bracelets. He said he wasn’t good enough to sell to strangers. He wanted to get good at magnetic clasps first. But I don’t think he really wanted to get good at clasps. He liked doing rough work. Not that he was clumsy, I mean look at the craft on this fucker.” He showed me his wrist again. “But Dom loved the moments before things happened. I don’t even think he liked jumping out of planes. What he liked most was sitting on the edge, if that makes sense. He liked bumpy rides in that rickety Cessna.”

“Shit,” Travis said after a moment. “I shouldn’t have said ‘rickety.’”

At this point, the ground was racing at us. Down below, in a grassy field, Julian and his instructor were untangling themselves from their gear. They high-fived and began loading things into a SkyLife van parked nearby.

When we hit land, I lifted my legs like they’d taught so they didn’t shatter on impact. Travis dug his boots into the dirt and brought us to a halt. Julian applauded in my direction and grinned. “You’ll always remember your first time,” he said and winked.

I nodded and imagined throwing Julian out of a plane.

Moments later, the doorman himself came gliding down. He went over to the woman who drove the van. I caught them laughing at Travis, who had gone off on his own in the field, wandering around a small radius, kicking dirt.

The van woman told us all—me, Julian, his instructor, the doorman, Travis—to pose for a photo. Travis had to be dragged back by the elbow by the doorman, who rolled his eyes at Travis and mouthed the word “Domino” to the van woman. She smiled.

“Big smiles and thumbs up, on three!” she said.

Once we got in the van and hit the road, Julian turned to me. “If they’d let me, I’d do it again right now,” he said. The guys in the van laughed, each in turn agreeing that there was nothing quite like the feeling one got floating above the world—that, if there were a way to do so, they would spend their entire lives in freefall. Above this world, everything below looking frozen and tiny. It was a spiritual experience, they said.  

I was stuck next to Julian. Travis sat at the back of the van—behind me again, I thought.

I turned to Travis, but he had his hand in his pocket, fiddling with something, staring out the van’s window into empty passing fields. He was pale and freckled, with a patchy red beard and tired blue eyes. Right, I thought. That’s what he looks like.

“You put your arms out like this and tuck in like that, and the wind just takes you,” the doorman was telling Julian. This was how you could somersault through the air if you jumped on your own.

We pulled up in front of the SkyLife office. I saw my car. I imagined driving back home to my apartment. I thought about the interesting statuettes I’d filled it with. I thought about my sister. I thought about the string of therapists I had burned through. I thought about a nice guy at work, handsome enough, who had asked me to dinner, and how I’d laughed and told him that I didn’t do dates.

I got out of the van and saw Travis walking ahead of me. I jogged up beside him.

“Hey,” I said, and reached out for his arm. I thought I’d thank him. Wish him luck. Offer consolations.

He walked straight past me. I felt like an idiot.

An hour later I was back home. I took a shower and cooked a bisque. As I stirred, I thought about Travis. I had tried, hadn’t I? How rude he’d been, in the end—would it have killed him to acknowledge my existence? Rude, not to mention wildly unprofessional. Some people, it occurred to me, were like that. Transactional. Wrapped up in their own concerns.

A fly buzzed above my bisque, flying through the steam. I swiped it away. It landed on the window by the stove, and without thinking I slammed my hand against the window, squashing the fly. Its body was pressed into the glass. Behind its still-fluttering wings and broken body the sky turned purple with dusk. An airplane, a big one, passed into view. I imagined everyone in the airplane jumping out of it—bankers, federal agents, fathers, mothers, little babies—tumbling through the sky. And—why had I hit that fly? What had it done? I couldn’t help myself. It was instinct. Just how I was wired, I suppose.  

Oh god, I realized—I missed Travis. I turned away from the bisque and began to cry.

---

Michael Pershan is a writer and math teacher whose work can be found in HAD, BULL, hex literary, and other places. His website is michaelpershan.com.

Dixon Speaker

Someone’s Dad Saved Him

The grass crunched beneath my feet as I climbed the hill behind the cardboard box factory that fired my uncle for drinking on the job. It’s the hill where fights happened.

The boys were already there. It was Roger The Calculator, Spunk Peterson, Murder Phillips, Kevin The Leprechaun, Dan The Plumber, Randall Collins Washington The Third, Greg The Undertaker’s Son, TC, Bagel Boy, Wisconsin Steve, Billy who only drinks coffee, Young Lewis, and Kiyoshi from Japan. Besides TC they were all ugly. I stood there thumbing my belt loops waiting for them to make a move.

They looked towards Young Lewis. Young Lewis stood up and took off his shirt and I did the same. We slapped our chests like wild gorillas and the sounds reached two crows on a set of power-lines laughing to each other over our dumb idiot species. Greg The Undertaker’s son looked at them longingly. Murder Phillips spit through his teeth. Bagel Boy, TC, and Spunk Peterson all handed money to Roger The Calculator in some secret wager. Kevin the Leprechaun scanned the horizon for police.

I knew I had to get Young Lewis on the ground. Young Lewis learned boxing from his dad who learned from a Puerto Rican drill sergeant he met in The Marines. He was going to try to knock me out. He put his hands up and peered at me over his knuckles which were cracked and dried out in the cold December air.

Me and Young Lewis were fighting because we both wanted to ask Cindy The Centipede to the winter dance. They call her that because she was born all bent out of shape and walked using an apparatus until the second grade, but she doesn’t use the apparatus anymore. Now she walks nice. I liked watching her eat lunch. Same thing every day. Celery sticks, ham and cheese sandwich, bag of Herr’s chips. She even puts a few chips in her sandwich for extra crunch. She never makes a mess. Never getting chip shards all over the table like us, greasy fingers that leave stains on your math homework like us. I liked the way she stayed clean, like during all those years in her apparatus she was able to master fine motor skills at the expense of not being able to walk, like how the blind can tell keys apart by feel.

Or maybe it was just her feminine nature, which is why we fight for them shirtless on frozen hills and not the other way around. Nonetheless, I liked her, I wanted her, and sometimes these things just can’t be explained

Young Lewis wouldn’t tell me what he liked about her, or that he even liked her at all, only that he had already called asking her to the dance and that Dan The Plumber heard him say it, which meant nothing to me because Dan The Plumber is a liar. My dad said his dad, who is also Dan The Plumber, is a liar too, which is why we stopped using him and now use our neighbor’s son Tommy who fixes our garage door but knows about plumbing too. I got in Young Lewis’s face when he told me and I just said we’ll settle it on the hill and he said you don’t mean that Carl, not for The Centipede, and I walked away squeezing my nails into my fists and breathing hard out of my nose while Dan The Plumber cleared his throat in the background like he always does.

The funny thing about it and what shows you how dumb we are is that we don’t know if Cindy The Centipede wants to go to the dance with either of us. She probably wants to go with TC like the rest of the girls. They want to go with TC so bad they ask him out! Salty Sandy, Hubcap Betty, Erika Who Eats Wax, and Judy Belkins Ross all asked him to the dance during the same lunch period. TC, as nice as he is, didn’t want to hurt their feelings, so he told them all he couldn’t go due to a surprise family vacation and plans to stay home and play Euchre with his grandmother from Ukraine.

Young Lewis shuffled towards me suddenly. He moved much faster than I expected. I looked at his belly for a chance to shoot his waist. I planned to form-tackle him but I slipped on the ice and almost lost my balance. Young Lewis was totally hairless on his chest besides one gross vine crawling out of his bellybutton. I crouched low, ready to shoot, and my foot slipped again. Oh fuck it! I swung my arms back but before I could shift my weight forward again Young Lewis flipped his shoulders square, so fast, so effortless, and his right fist shot out of hiding like a viper.

I ducked just in time or I was looking at a trip to the dentist and possibly drinking my holiday dinners through a straw. It was a direct hit to the top of my skull. It felt like he shattered a brick over my head. My vision closed up and the next thing I know I’m leaning back into Billy who only drinks coffee. Young Lewis was on the ground wailing. You broke my hand, Carl! Carl, you broke my fuckin’ hand! Billy who only drinks coffee whispered in my ear. You’re a pussy Carl. His breath smelled like burnt coffee. Light Roast. Get your coffee breath out of my face Billy, I said, are your parents too poor to buy you a toothbrush?

He shoved me hard in the back and sent me spinning into Kiyoshi from Japan who caught me gently, his quiet and steady breathing unaltered by my impact. He placed both palms flat on my shoulder blades. The world slowed down around me. Kiyoshi took his hands off me ever so slightly as my lungs filled with cold air. I was still reeling from Young Lewis’s pot-shot. How are you liking America so far, Kiyoshi? I asked him. Oh, I like it very much, Carl. Your English has really improved, you know that Kiyoshi? Thank you, Carl.

Kiyoshi lifted me upright. My vision was starting to return. It was snowing now and things were breaking up. Wisconsin Steve walked up the hill towards where his bike was locked to the jungle gym. Bagel Boy, TC, and Spunk Peterson were all standing around Roger The Calculator watching him count money. Greg the Undertaker’s Son wandered off towards the crows and was trying to scale the telephone pole with his belt. Murder Phillips was filing his nails with a pumice stone. Kevin the Leprechaun and Billy who only drinks coffee were now in a fight of their own over god knows what. They had each other in headlocks and rolled down the hill hurling insults until they got stuck under a pricker bush. Randall Collins Washington the Third was comforting Young Lewis who was now in the fetal position silently clutching his mangled hand.

It started snowing harder. I could barely make out Greg The Undertaker's son in the distance struggling to negotiate the transformer at the top of the telephone pole.

Kiyoshi still held me, hands steady as ever. Do they have snow in Japan, Kiyoshi? Yes, Carl. We hosted the Winter Olympics in 1998. No shit Kiyoshi, how about that, you learn something new every day. We both looked at Randall Collins Washington the Third and Young Lewis. Kiyoshi and I squinted in the heavy snow. Is he still breathing, Kiyoshi? I don’t know, Carl, he said, which was an honest answer. Alright Kiyoshi, I better go see what the deal is.

Kiyoshi gave me a push and sent me marching sideways towards the boys in the snow. I glanced back just in time to see Kiyoshi leave the earth and fly away, off the hill, over Kevin the Leprechaun and Billy who only drinks coffee pinching each other in the pricker bush, over Greg The Undertaker’s Son frozen to the telephone pole, over the cardboard box factory where my uncle got fired for drinking on the job, and off towards the condominium village where all the immigrant families live and where I hoped to get a job lifeguarding at the pool this summer.

I tried using my arms to shield my face from the snow. It was useless. I looked around, which was a mistake, because the now blinding white blizzard behind me was the same as in front of me as well. I tried to stop walking but standing still felt no different either. I thought about Cindy The Centipede and why I got myself into such a mess over a girl I didn’t have the guts to talk to. Then I thought of her face, her smile, and it started to make more sense. I could see her bright white teeth shining through the storm.

Just then my knee hit a weird snowbank. Hmphrunjkuh, it said. Is that you Young Lewis? No, it’s me, Randall Collins, is that TC? No, it’s Carl, this fight’s not over, I came to finish the job. You bastard, he said. I’m just kidding Randall, I came over to check on Young Lewis. I reached out and grabbed Randall Collins Washington’s hands. He was shaking all over in just a T-Shirt. Jesus, Randall, you’re freezing, where’s your coat? I gave it to Young Lewis, he said. You better go warm up, I told him. I’ll look after Young Lewis from here. Thanks Carl, which way should I go? Just feel the ground with your hands and crawl uphill, you’ll hit the street eventually. If you hit a pricker bush that means you went the wrong way, but don’t worry, Billy and Kevin the Leprechaun are in there so just crawl in with them and ride out this storm, it’s bound to be over soon. Thanks Carl, he said, and Randall Collins Washington the Third crawled off slowly into the storm towards his fate.

I got down on the ground and snuggled in behind Young Lewis who was wrapped in Randall Collins Washington’s dad’s Peacoat. His dad left it stored at the dry cleaners after moving to Dallas with his secretary. Randall Collins came to school late the day his dad emptied the bank accounts and moved out, finding his mother crumpled in the laundry room clinging to a pile of clean towels. The guidance counselor walked Randall to his seat, whispered something into his ear, and left. I asked him if everything was okay and without looking up he said to me, I am the last one, Carl, I am the last Randall Collins Washington.

No one understood why he kept the peacoat and wore it regularly every winter since. It must be the quality, because Young Lewis felt warm and comfortable in my embrace. He was still whimpering slightly, clutching his twisted right hand.

When I regained my senses after getting cracked on the head I decided I was going to kill Young Lewis. I moved my arms up his chest. He flinched. Watch out for my hand, Carl, he said. I carefully negotiated his shattered fingers and wrist. I was going to crunch his Adam’s Apple. I gripped my right hand with my left and positioned the bottom knuckle of my thumb just below his throat. When Young Lewis spoke again his voice was hoarse. What’s your favorite sport, Carl? I had to think about it for a second. Baseball, probably. You're a much better football player, he said. Maybe, but I like playing for my dad. Oh yeah, Young Lewis said, your dad is the best coach. Something about the way his throat was moving told me was smiling.

Everyone loved playing for my dad because he knows a lot about the game but still approached it with a light and casual attitude. He would lean back on his heels and grin while the other dads blew their tops over missed calls or arguing balls and strikes. After one or two games with a new team he could provide in just a few words some minor adjustment that would improve a player’s hitting far more than an off-season’s worth of expensive lessons. And at the end of season party after a few margaritas he would jump in the pool and indulge the boys in an hour of rough-housing, something that always left us cackling like hyenas.

I slowly lowered my hands, weakened with a wave of affection that blooms on some days during the normal life of an idiot son when you stumble once again upon the truth that you are lucky because you have a good dad.

Hey Young Lewis, do you have any more room in that peacoat? I’m freezing my ass off out here. Sure Carl, he said, just be careful of my hand, please.

I climbed over Young Lewis, careful not to touch his mutilated hand. I slithered into his chest. He used his one good hand to wrap me up in the wings of the peacoat and button me inside. Wow, this is great, I said. I know, he said, I think Randall Collins’s dad running off with that woman might have saved my life. I didn’t respond to that but thought to myself that someone’s dad saved him, and we both settled into a calm and synchronous breathing cycle, daydreaming about what we both wanted to be some day, coaching our sons, letting them play drums on our bare stomachs on a couch in a beach house in June, teaching them to spin throw-pillows like basketballs, wiring them money at college.

The snow was still coming down hard but bound to stop soon. We were warm inside the peacoat and were smiling with one another, thinking about the sky we knew was still blue, what was for lunch on Monday, and naturally of Cindy the Centipede crunch crunch crunching on her sandwich with her clean white teeth.

---

Dixon Speaker is a writer living in Philadelphia. His work can be found in X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine and BULL. He is teaching himself guitar and he recently learned how to hook a bowling ball. He lives with his wife and their tuxedo cat, Minnie, who is the most sensitive of the three. Twitter/X: @DixonSpeaker Bluesky: @dixonspeaker.bsky.social

Christian Jackson

To You, Again and Again

       You were/are/will be a corpse, dead and gone as the autumn leaves covering mom and dad's front yard, raked into piles or mashed into oblivion by the feet of dogs and humans alike, but the thing about autumn leaves is, come autumn, they return. I used to think you only told me that kind of stuff to frighten me. "Time is shaped like a football, we're bound up like the disobedient angels, destined to do this over and over and over again." But the seasons pass like a wheel, dad returns penitent after cursing mom and fate and stumbling out into the dark once again, and I find myself attempting communication with organic matter no different from the autumn leaves that set the lawn aflame every October. The world is full of cycles for those who have the eyes to see.

       After recognizing the cyclical nature of reality and, consequently, believing you had been right all along, I spent weeks throwing up each morning, wishing each night I could escape the, what seemed to me, forbidden knowledge I possessed. Dad drinks more than he used to, and whenever he would leave garbled voicemails in the dark of night, it seemed to me some entity whispered to me from the unreckonable reaches of space where I picture anglerfish-like creatures blink through the void. It tried to tell me I knew too much of this universe. I often wondered if this same knowledge had been your own downfall.

       There are those who believe we're not supposed to be here, that the material world is a prison to be escaped.  I started researching these sorts of things when the claustrophobia became too much. I needed out, I became certain. I needed to break the cycle, and I tried almost everything in the book. I fasted to the point of dry-heaving, I spent hours on the fire escape imagining myself perched on a pillar in whatever desert would form after a molten river had run its course through the city and the buildings were all stomped to dust. I disavowed my flesh and gave myself bruises and stopped taking showers. But all of this only led to me breaking down in front of Taryn. She had been yelling at me like I was a dog, but when I started crying she could only blink at me.

       I needed you. Taryn stopped answering my calls, the counselor from mom and dad's church wanted me to go on some retreat to a camp in Arkansas, but you were the only one who could've guided me through this mess. I gave myself more bruises while wishing I could've had such a revelation while you were still on this cycle or that I could remember all of this the next time we roll around some incomprehensible epoch from now. I exhumed every memory of you searching for any single moment that could have changed how we were but miserably decided there was only ever one way for us to be. We were trapped, just as you said.

       There were good times, I know, like when you hoisted me up on your shoulder and we garbed ourselves in a trench coat to look like one giant man or the time you led our two man expedition into Taryn's room pretending to be an astronaut on a dangerous planet. You used tongs from the kitchen to recover long-forgotten garments and Gatorade bottle mold terrariums from under the bed like they were yet-to-be-catalogued alien species. I'm smiling just writing all this out.

       But I'm also saddened by the idea you maybe hated me the whole time, because all it took was a tick on the clock and you'd turn vicious. Even though you snickered from inside the trench coat as I deepened my voice and pretended to be a new neighbor coming to say hello to our parents, I remembered you getting upset with me for not being able to clear my throat like a grown up. Or I'd ask how work had been that day, and you'd throw something at me. But I'm guilty for my own share of cruelty as well. I didn't actually think you were fat, I only called you that so you'd chase me around the house.

       I still have trouble some mornings, not feeling like I can catch a good breath, but I had a dream about you a few nights ago. We were talking with some friends I didn't recognize in a stairwell at our old high school, and when the others went off to class or wherever and left us alone, you wrapped your arms around me tight and giggled as I cried for you. And every morning since, it's felt good to breath. Dreams are just dreams, I know that, but I keep thinking maybe you did it.

       My brain feels like a piece of tape that's been placed and ripped off over and over, so I stopped trying to figure out what I believe about you or the universe for the time being. All I know is you were/are/will be a corpse, maybe an uncountable amount of times, but that scenario would also demand you were/are/will be taking me by the arm and gently leading me into the terror of Taryn's biohazardous bedroom. You were/are/will be taking me on long, summer drives in the country, blasting music I could never have fathomed beforehand. We were/are/will be laughing and wrestling and calling each other mean names and scaring our parents and skinning our knees, and I'll get to smile upon remembering all of these moments again and again.

---

Christian Jackson is a writer born and raised in Lexington, KY, where he also earned his undergraduate degree in English from the University of Kentucky.

Keith Woodruff

The Headlines

People want to shoot the message now, not the messenger. White House Claims Domestic Terrorism lights a Tranquility candle, kneels and prays. As a touch of self-care, another reads E.E. Cummings' best love poems. Imagines the rain's small hands. No one is taking down the temperature, so they will. They're calling in sick, letting every call go to voice mail. Swipe-trashing texts with a whack-a-mole intensity as fast as they come in. Where are you? Trash. Hey, what's going on? Pick up! Trash. They're tired of being red meat for doom scrollers, of trending on basement screens that blue the faces of incels, of feeling complicit in driving the country insane with around the clock heartbreak and outrage. Many stare questioningly at themselves in mirrors. Am I fake?  Click bait? Holding hands, two Musk headlines jump off a bridge to their death. Some go mad, rewrite themselves to resist. Scientists Call Record Temperature a 'Warning Shot' chugs Xanax like they're Skittles. All the Lizzo and Sharon Stone "claps back" headlines feel pointless, stupid ... the reality tv of headlines. They're checking in with their therapists. Their AA sponsors. They're huddling over cups of soothing golden Chamomile. Oklahoma School Shooting puts headphones on and sobs. Thinks some of The Smiths' lyrics would make better headlines. In a bar, they try and drink away their shame with shots that burn going down. Taylor's Wedding Plans Put on Hold has three too many and shoves ICE Agent Shoots Protester With Nonlethal Round Point-Blank and screams "you are such a fucking draaaaaag!" Many pair up, take comfort in each other's arms. The next morning some headlines are jumbled: Greenland Accepts Venezuelan Peace Prize. In Minnesota, as she packs their lunches, Mother of 3 Shot and Killed imagines the things her own kids would miss, like the sayings that aren't really sayings she writes and puts in their lunches: A dream of stars never loses. A mouse in the night needs no friend. Love hard and empty your basket. Hopes she'll always remember to tell them she loves them madly when she walks out the door for what could at any time be the last time.

---

Keith Woodruff lives in San Antonio, TX with a backyard full of moody tomato plants. His poetry has appeared in RHINO, Tupelo Quarterly, New World Writing Quarterly and is forthcoming in DMQ. His flash and micro writing has appeared in Wigleaf, Bending Genres, JMWW and is forthcoming in Emerge LJ, NUNUM, Pithead Chapel, Heavy Feather Review and Identity Theory. He is thrilled to be appearing in Does It Have Pockets for the first time. Read him in Best Small Fictions 2017, 2019 and at www.keithawoodruff.com. He was awarded a 2018 Pushcart Prize.

Keith J. Powell

Tongue Tied

The new French Ambassador was patient zero, confidently telling the young reporter that he wasn’t willing to concede her ruby grapefruit nipples and tits. We sat in stunned silence, taking in his strange jumble of words, thinking we were merely witnessing a career engulfed in an act of spectacular self-immolation. We didn’t understand we were watching history.

Worldwide and virtually overnight, lust began manifesting as a peculiar profane verbal aphasia. Researchers floundered. Prophylactics failed. Vaccines fizzled. So, eventually, we all just shook our heads and tried to get on with it. Not that it’s been easy.  

Your boss compliments you on a stellar fuck stick at the Monday morning huddle? Aroused. Order a grande soymilk twat constellation from the goth barista? She knows. Receiving communion and the bulldog-faced priest offers you the bonnet of cock wobble? Turned on. Thanksgiving and your cousin with the tittering laugh asks if you mind diddling the tulips? 

And it’s not as though innocent slips of the tongue went extinct, either. In fact, tragically, it’s estimated that innocent tongues slipping are today among the leading causes of divorce. True, it’s much easier to suss out partners for affairs and casual dalliances, but that’s a thin silver lining, not worth the hours we all spend sitting with our legs crossed in HR seminars, avoiding eye contact.

Anyway, that’s why the French were outlawed, and today people mostly text.

Bone Removal in 30 Minutes or Your Money Back

Kids call it “Going Bucket” or “Puddle Chic.” A trend birthed by a 90s-era goth rocker rumored to have had a rib removed for purposes of self-pleasure. It percolated there on the periphery of cool for years, but after three decades, a rib hardly seemed Metal anymore. The blue-haired K-pop singer took it to the next level by having his right femur removed. Suddenly, even soccer moms wanted in on the craze.

People on a budget inevitably end up at my shop — legally, I can’t call it a clinic. No one knows I meticulously preserve every carpus, coccyx, and clavicle I extract, storing them in plastic freezer bags for the future.

Like all trends, this one too will collapse. People will get bored and decide they want more bones, not less. They’ll crave fascinating protrusions extending out from their foreheads and limbs. They’ll call it “Going Full Wolverine” or “Triceratopsing” and when they do, you better believe I’ll be ready.

---

Keith J. Powell is a writer and editor based in Ohio. He is co-founder and managing editor of Your Impossible Voice and the author of the flash fiction chapbook Sweet Nothings Are a Diary If You Know How to Read Them (ELJ Editions). Visit keithjpowell.com for more.

Jessica Klimesh

Rusty’s Razor

        My boss said it was a promotion, transporting me to America and making me a human named Gail, twenty-two years old. “Twenty-two,” he said, “because humans value youthfulness there.” I said, “Is twenty-two really considered youthful? Why not twelve or thirteen?” And his face flushed furious and he said, “No, that would be too young. American humans don’t care about live children. Haven’t you ever seen the news? They let them get shot at school over and over again.” He paused before adding, “Don’t make me regret this promotion.”

         I nodded and didn’t say anything else, but now my youthful skin suit itches, hot prickles of angst. “If you’d seen the news,” my boss had said, “you’d also know that the humans there are beginning to suspect. They know about mutables.”

         Rusty, the bartender, is pouring Dan and me generous shots of what Rusty calls mood enhancers, saying “Let’s toast Gail!” and “Let’s all drink to Gail!” And after each drink, it seems like the temperature goes up, hotter and hotter, but the mood enhancers are doing their thing, so I just yell along with Rusty and the other patrons, “Yes, let’s all drink to Gail!” And then I remember I’m Gail, so I say, “I mean, let’s all drink to me!” 

         After the fourth round, Dan says, “Hey, Gail, wanna get out of here?” He puts his hand on my shoulder, fiddles with the curly strands of my blonde hair. I feel another rush of warmth and look toward the vents on the wall. It’s too warm. These human suits weren’t made for such heat.

         I just met Dan tonight, but he seems friendly, keeps smiling alright, twirling my hair in his fingers. It seems that humans always smile a lot when they have these mood enhancers, so it must be okay, but I also remember my boss saying not to get too comfortable. “You’ve got a job to do, and your age—Gail’s age—is a vulnerable one. And you’re green,” he said, and because I knew he was already doubting my competency, I didn’t want to ask what he meant by “green.” Surely he wasn’t referring to my real skin, underneath all the layers. So now I keep looking for seams on Dan, wondering if maybe he can see mine. Or if he suspects, even a little. But, I mean, at a place like Rusty’s Razor? So far from any metropolis?

         I say to Rusty, “Rusty, my man, what about some A/C, you know?” I try to say it like a twenty-two-year-old human would.

         And then Dan says, more persistently now, “Gail, let’s go somewhere else. You know, quieter. And maybe not so…warm.”

         “Oh, Dan-Dan-Danny-boy Dan,” I say, “I don’t even know your last name. Or, like, what you do. Or, ha ha, if you’re married.”

         “But does any of that really matter?” he says.

         “Well,” I say, “what if you’re one of those mutables, you know? Those extraterrestrials, ha ha. Those infiltrators. What if you’re not who you say you are? Because, you know.”

         Rusty, he’s watching us. I mean to say, he’s watching me. He flips a switch on the wall, the A/C, I assume, fixates his eyes on me. He’s got shocks of gray hair that stick out like he’s put his finger in a socket. And stubble, which I like, but I can just imagine it tearing my skin if he kissed me. Which I think about after last week, when, after three rounds of mood enhancers, I showed him the little daisy tat on my boobie. He said, “Put that away, Gail.” And I said, “Alright, alright,” giggling the way Gail would. I mean, it wasn’t even my real boobie, though he wouldn’t have known that. And not a real tattoo either. All that skin covering skin covering skin. But I’m sure he’s a non-mutable. That is to say, I’m sure Rusty’s human. One of those humans that don’t trust mutables. I mean to say, that don’t want us—them—here. On Earth.

         “I think it’s all just fear mongering,” Dan says. “Do you really believe they exist, mutables?”

         And then Rusty pours us another one, and the way he looks at me, I’m wondering if he wants to see that daisy again.

         “Ha ha,” I say to Dan, “who knows?” I try to pitch the question in a casual way, waving my arm in the air, but I accidentally knock over Dan’s glass, and that’s when I feel it all going wrong.

         “Rusty,” I say, “hey, barkeep, what did you maybe give us in that last shot? Because boy oh boy oh boy it’s hot in here.” And I can only think of melting, of my toes clumping together in my Docs, and how my mini-skirt might just be too short now because there are seams, seams everywhere, though maybe it’s my imagination. “Oh, hello, Rusty,” I say, “what about that A/C?”

         And he just looks at me, and I glance at Dan, who says, “So, Gail, I really think we should get out of here, you know?” He stands up but looks dizzy. Or maybe it’s me who’s spinning.

         “Uh, okay,” I say, trying to keep my tone light. But I can feel a burning in my chest now. I can smell ash and fumes. I touch Dan’s arm then, to steady myself, and when I do, I notice how hot it is. So hot you could fry an egg on it.

         “Wha—?” I say.

         “Oh, yeah,” Dan says, “that happens, you know?” And then he stares me down so hard that I know he knows, and I stare back so that he knows I know, too. But what I don’t know is if he’s here to save me or sacrifice me. If he’s really one of us—of me. Or if it’s a ploy. Either way, though, if Dan’s overheating, it can only mean one thing. That we don’t have much time.

---

Jessica Klimesh (she/her) is a US-based writer and writing coach whose creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Spotlong Review, Ghost Parachute, Milk Candy Review, Flash Frog, Gone Lawn, and Gooseberry Pie, among others. Her work was selected for Best Microfiction 2025 and Best of the Net 2025. Learn more at jessicaklimesh.com.

M.R. Lehman Wiens

         1 And then on the fourth day of his solitude, the Prophet heard the voice of God.

         God spake thusly:

         “Thou art a rotten worm, Braden. Be grateful that I speak to you, and do not banish you from my sight.”

         “Oh LORD,” said Braden, “How am I a worm if there are so many people that love me?”

         “Fool! Those that speak kind words to you at dawn curse your back at sunset. You must show them the truth.”

         Braden bowed low, pressing his head to the carpet of his Chicago apartment.

         “And what must I do, LORD?”

         “Thou must die, Braden. Take the pen in thy hand, and stab it through your eye.”

         And Braden did hesitate, unsure in the LORD.

         “Why do you tarry? Do you not believe?”

~

Braden twirled the pen in his fingers, spinning it around and around his thumb, the weight perfectly balanced. It was too easy to think of the pen piercing his eye, popping it like an overripe grape. Past the eye, further into his skull, more pressure would be required to break through the layer of bone protecting the brain, a shattering he would feel echoing through his body.

He set the pen down, and it rolled away from him, sliding across the desk to clatter on the uneven floorboards below. It kept rolling until it hit the baseboard, and he left it there.

Braden shivered, blinking to clear his mind.

Outside, the rain was still coming down, a dull drone on his window that made the apartment feel like a womb. He could barely see downtown through the deluge, whole towers hidden by the unrelenting storm. When he’d moved in, he’d audibly said,

“Wow. I’ll never get tired of that view.”

But now, three weeks into lockdowns and working from home, the landscape outside his window was forcing his window in, the glass almost bulging, shrinking his already small apartment. Window, door, walls. It was all part of the same cage. He didn’t want to work, didn’t want to relax, didn’t want to sleep. He wanted to run.

His computer chimed with a company email, and he turned off the oscillating fan that kept his mouse moving back and forth, maintaining his status on ‘Active, online’.

“Braden, do you have the Q2 internal reports? We need them for tomorrow.”

“Yeah, they’ll be there by EOD.”

He ran the macro he’d built his second week of work, and the report appeared before him in an instant. Attaching it to a fresh email, he scheduled the send for 4:43, a six hour delay. The first time he’d created a quarterly report, it had taken him nearly a full work day to gather the data. He saw the advantage in continuing to cultivate that expectation.

He tossed a breakfast burrito in the microwave, and turned on the Playstation.

~

2 And yet before the midday sun rose, God did speak to his prophet again, and the prophet did hear.

God spake thusly:

“Braden, thou shalt open the window, and fall to the ground, descending to the earth like the rains I send from heaven.”

“But LORD,” said Braden, “I am not a bird. Surely if I am to leap from the window I will perish.”

“Does my prophet not trust? Have I not provided for you, blessed you with a television and a PS5 and cushy work-from-home employment in these trying times?”

“You have provided, LORD.”

“Then jump.”

~

He was lost in New York City, swinging from skyscraper to skyscraper, a flash of blue and red spandex that traveled higher and higher. At last, he came to a tower that dwarfed the others, a shining behemoth that cast its shadow far across the city. He scaled it, running up the side in a feat of super human ability, reaching the observation deck in seconds. Soon, he was balanced on the top of the antenna, the rest of the city shrunk to lines and boxes.

Braden pulled up the menu, scrolled to ‘Save’, and named the file.

DO NOT DELETE

Then, he closed the menu, and jumped.

The edges of his vision blurred, wind that had been barely a whisper growing to the roar of a freight train as he sped towards the earth. He could save himself, the entire nature of his character placing salvation a single spider-web away.

I just want to see how close I can get, Braden thought, his thumb hovering over the button, ready to push it, waiting for the moment just before the inevitable.

When the character hit the ground, the screen flashed red. The body bounced on the sidewalk, rag-dolled into a pedestrian, and lay still. His thumb hadn’t moved.

He pulled up the menu, scrolled down, and hit ‘Load’.

He was balanced on top of the antenna, the rest of the city shrunk to lines and boxes.

He jumped.

~

3 And the LORD did speak in the dark and the stillness of the night, His true voice coming to his prophet on the whiskers of a mouse.

“Braden. Write down what I am to tell you.”

And the LORD’s prophet did scramble through his bedside table, retrieving a pen and a stained Chinese takeout menu.

“My prophet, you have weathered my trials and remained true. Now take my message to the masses, deliver it unto them, and spread my word.”

Then Braden the prophet did write, and write, and write, until the morning sun birthed a new day.

~

“You know the homeless people that you see that are talking to themselves?”

His therapist raised an eyebrow. The expression froze, but Braden couldn’t tell if it was his crappy internet or Dr. Long’s sustained skepticism.

“I mean, most times they’re people who are sitting quietly with a sign or a cup, or they’ll play music, what’s that called, bussing?”

“Busking,” the video unfroze and jumped ahead, allowing Dr. Long’s lips to form the last half of the word.

“Yeah, busking. But sometimes they’re talking to themselves, or even yelling, and when you get close, it’s all nonsense, not even a cogent conspiracy theory, just words strung together.”

“What’s your point here, Braden?”

“They don’t know they’re crazy, do they? I mean, whatever they’re saying, it makes sense to them.”

“Well, I think we’re all doing what makes sense to us.”

“Exactly! How is that not terrifying? We’re all just doing what makes sense to us, but how do we know that our senses are right?”

“Are you worried about your sense of right and wrong?” Dr. Long’s eyes darted to the notepad that Braden suspected was just offscreen.

“No,” Braden said, and then paused. Was he, though? If he wasn’t sure what was real, didn’t that equally mean that he didn’t know what proper behavior was? “I mean, yes, but not in the sense that I’m going to do something to hurt myself. More in the sense that I’m worried that what I’m experiencing is…real.”

“You don’t trust yourself? Your own perceptions?”

“I don’t know, Dr. Long,” Braden said. This was the thing he hated about therapy. Sometimes he wanted to vent, but Dr. Long, who always insisted that Braden call him Brian, constantly pushed him to resolve things. Braden would much rather wallow. “I guess I’m just confused.”

“It’s a confusing time.”

“And what am I supposed to do with that? Just live with the confusion?”

“If you can. If you can’t, you need to find something else to help you make sense of things.”

“Like a hobby?”

“No, Braden. More of a reason to keep pushing, something outside of yourself that deserves your attention. Something that hasn’t been derailed by whatever’s gone on the last three weeks.”

Braden considered this. There was a stack of papers on his desk, within reach but outside of the view of his webcam. It was an uneven stack, a combination of napkins and takeout menus and toilet paper and whatever else had been at hand in the middle of his late-night writing frenzy. He hadn’t read it since that night, but what he remembered of it scared him.

“And I believe our time’s up. Same time next week? Hopefully we’ll be past this flatten the curve stage and we can meet in person soon, but I think for now, we’ll stick with video chats.”

~

         4 In those days, a plague was upon the land, a sign of the LORD’s displeasure with an evil ruler and a complacent people.

         The LORD’s prophet Braden heard the call of the LORD, but he did not heed it, and the LORD’s displeasure came upon him as well.

~

         “I can’t get a test, Mom, but yeah. I think I’ve got it.”

         “Haven’t you been masking?”

         “With what, Mom? I’m not a seamstress. I had to get groceries somehow.”

         “Did you even bother to sanitize them once you brought them home?”

         Braden tried to say that there was growing evidence that fomites weren’t the transmission vector people thought they were, but his mother’s voice carried on, an unstoppable wave of sound.

         “Mom, I gotta go — therapy with Dr. Long is in a few minutes,” Braden said, breaking in as soon as his mother paused for a breath.

         “Oh! Well good. Tell him I say hello.”

It was a lie. His next session with Brian wasn’t until Tuesday. His head was pounding, though, and it was hard to talk without coughing. A lecture might have been tolerable before he was sick, but now it was torture.

He took a few swigs of orange juice he couldn’t taste and collapsed into bed.

~

5 “Braden, my prophet, why do you run from my call?” spake the LORD.

“Go away. I’m sick,” replied the LORD’s prophet, with more than a hint of annoyance.

“Ye be sick because I have made it so,” said the LORD. “Receive my call, spread my word, and ye shall be healed.”

And lo, the LORD’s prophet was sickly indeed and turned in his bed toward the face of the LORD.

“You have refused to sacrifice yourself as I have commanded. You have written my words but refuse to spread them.”

And the LORD’s prophet did curse, and blasphemy was full on his lips.

“Despite this, my prophet, I am faithful. Read what you have written, and ye shall be healed. Spill the blood from your wrists, and ye shall be redeemed.”

And then the prophet did sleep.

~

Braden woke up coughing, a deep hacking cough that gripped him like an electric shock, the muscles convulsing and rippling with a demanding power. He reached a shaking hand to the bedside table.

His fingers touched the piece of paper there, and he read words he didn’t remember writing.

~

6 The LORD’s prophet Braden descended to the street with the papers he had written, and he began to declare the LORD’s word in a loud, clear voice, and the people gathered, and were much amazed.

But as they heard his words, they began to whisper among themselves, saying:

“Who is this man that speaks as though he knows the will of God? Isn’t he the schlub from my building, the one in apartment 6F?”

And still others were disgusted, saying:

“He dares to shout on the street, unmasked when sickness lies on the land? He is at best a fool, and at worst he means us all harm.”

Then the anger of the crowd was stirred to action, and they began to stone him. Braden fled from their sight, running to the DuSable Bridge. There he climbed the railing and prepared to jump.

But the spirit of the LORD descended, and carried him away, and the LORD’s prophet thereafter resided in heaven.

~

“Jesus, get him out of there!”

“Oh my god! Call 911!”

The pedestrians on the bridge stared down at the man treading water in the Chicago River. Some pulled out cell phones and dialed emergency numbers. Most continued recording the videos they had started when Braden climbed the railing. The video of his 16-foot plunge and eventual rescue would soon go viral, with the title “Worst Suicide Attempt Ever.”

“What was he shouting about before he jumped?” said a woman to her friend.

“Something about the will of God. Look, one of his papers!”

She grabbed a Chinese takeout menu from its place floating on the wind. Between prices for veggie lo mein and General Tso’s chicken was an untidy scrawl, words thrown onto the page with abandon, connected only by threads of madness.

“My god, that’s sad,” said the first woman. Her friend nodded.

The man in the river below waved his arms, shouting not at any approaching boat, or at the onlookers gathered on the bridge. His quarrel was with heaven.

---

M.R. Lehman Wiens is a Pushcart-nominated writer and stay-at-home dad living in Minnesota. His work has previously appeared, or is upcoming in F(r)iction, Short Édition, Consequence, and others. He can be found at lehmanwienswrites.com.

Chelsea Stickle

After Dinner Activity

Hugh sous chef’d in a restaurant so when they roast chicken, he slides the knife behind the wishbone and pops it out in a fluid motion Jane finds deeply attractive. She displays them against the window over the back door. They count their time together in wishbones glowing in the Sunday afternoon sun. Five, ten, fifteen. It’s summer now, and the gnats love landing on them to search for tasty morsels.

“Why do you keep them?” Hugh asks one night as he breaks down the chicken. 

Jane scrubs the latest wishbone delicately like it’s their child’s first bath. “If you make a wish and snap it, you know immediately if you’re geting what you want. With other good luck totems, you just hope it works.”

He hmms, and says, “But it could go wrong.”

On tiptoe Jane tilts the newest wishbone against the others crowding the space. “But you know, and that’s something.”

Hugh stops moving the knife. “Want to try something?”

Sitting across from each other, they grip one side of the wishbone. Connected only via bone, they stare into each other’s eyes. Her, gently. Him, competitively. “Do you know what you want?” she asks.

He smirks. “I do.

Jane wishes for their happiness, and assumes Hugh is wishing for something similar. Hugh wishes for a kayak.

“Ready?” She nods. “Go!”

Hugh’s eagerness made her think he was going to yank it. But he does almost nothing, keeping his thumb and pointer clutched at the base of the v. There’s a twisted tension between them that Jane doesn’t understand. Neither of them is exerting enough force to break the wishbone. Hugh has hand and arm muscles that Jane isn’t even conscious of. He’s stood over a pot of cream and sugar, constantly stirring for an hour or more. He is purposefully waiting for her to make a move, and he can outwait her. Tentatively Jane pulls, and her side breaks off: tiny and thin, little more than a bony toothpick.

“Yes! Yes!” Hugh cheers and hoists the bigger half into the air like it’s the Stanley Cup. In his merriment there is no consideration for Jane. She misses the Hugh that walks on the road-side of the sidewalk, the Hugh who picks the peppers out of her salad if the restaurant forgets, the Hugh who places a pillow under her ass during sex. This Hugh she does not know.

The Disappearance

Without warning the words disappeared between them. For months they had been waning. Nights busy with lowlight grunts and sighs. They hadn’t complained. In the mornings they’d hmm’d to bring attention to a stray bowl, a dropped wallet. Over dinner she had a question that couldn’t be posed in a hmm or a lingering kiss. She wanted to know what they were doing, where they were going. Her mouth opened. A broaching breath as the words danced in her head. Her lips could move, her tongue could follow but words didn’t sound. She frowned, cleared her throat, sipped water. Nothing. He frowned and opened his mouth to ask what was going on. But nothing. Nothing came out of his mouth. He shrugged and held her hand. He didn’t mind. His love language was touch. But she was adrift in an ocean she didn’t remember wading into. Treading water with no land or boat in sight. Tired from all the mindless swimming she’d already done to stay afloat this far. Her legs were lead, her arms copper. Her gears were rusting, slowing, breaking down. He drank her in but didn’t notice the metallic taste in his mouth. That too he’d become accustomed to.

---

Chelsea Stickle is the author of the flash fiction chapbooks Everything’s Changing (Thirty West Publishing, 2023) and Breaking Points (Black Lawrence Press, 2021). Her stories appear in Passages North, Fractured Lit, Identity Theory, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and others. Her micros have been selected for Best Microfiction 2021 and 2025, the Wigleaf Top 50 in 2022 and the Wigleaf Longlist in 2023. She lives in Annapolis, MD with her black rabbit George and a forest of houseplants. Learn more at chelseastickle.com.

Steven Swiryn

The NoHo Star

         In the NoHo Star Café at Bleecker and Lafayette, Sam sat stirring his coffee, though he used neither sugar nor cream. Habit—he had given up sugar and cream last winter. The menu offered him a “lonesome egg.” One egg, cooked how you want it. Sam didn’t want a lonesome egg. He wanted Marta to come back.

         In the Café the day they’d met, Marta had been cursing her cell phone, trying to get Bluetooth working, and Sam had explained to her about “pairing” devices. That evening, he found himself updating the operating system on her computer. When he told his friend, Jenny, the NoHo Star’s blonde cashier about meeting Marta, Jenny started referring to her as his “up-date.”

         “Dating will be good for you,” Jenny had told him, “as long as Marta’s not just using you for technical support.” In his early teens, when other boys spoke furtively of girls, spied on them, bragged about what they had seen or touched, Sam was in his basement with his electronics, sniffing solder and the burnt insulation of copper wire, or lost in Magic or Final Fantasy with his friend, Pudge. His projects ranged from a simple power source to a sophisticated radio telescope. Late in high school, he became intensely interested in girls, but he had missed the telephone stammerings and backseat fumblings that taught other boys what to say or not; what to do or not. He thought he would design an algorithm; sub-routines included ID_Girl, Meet_Girl, and something he labeled Count_Bases (both a musical pun and small pride at having made the JV baseball team) but, though it made theoretical sense, his code proved hard to compile, let alone run on a non-virtual machine. Writing code for the First_Base and Second_Base functions was as far as he got. Then, submersed in college math and computer science, he put the entire project on indefinite hold.

         I’m no virgin, Sam told himself. A fix-up by his college roommate’s girlfriend. An encounter in the University Bookstore with that pig-tailed, near-sighted salesgirl. Then, he stumbled into Marta, who seemed to be impressed with his tech-savvy charm, and he did his best to keep up.

         Sam cooked for her. He took her to theater and to movies. They strolled the Brooklyn Bridge; Sam had devoured McCullough’s book, and he explained the nineteenth century engineering to her. The days and nights with Marta astonished him. Many times, he found himself staring at her, waiting to see what she would do next. She moved in with him.

         It lasted four months. Marta told him she liked his steadfastness. Then she drifted away and here he was at the NoHo Star, steadfast and alone. He had barely begun the programming project due next week, finding the keyboard suddenly untrustworthy. He felt himself struggling, disordered. At the NoHo Star, Sam always sat facing out toward the street, “to appreciate the day’s parade.” When Jenny had heard him say that, before Sam met Marta, she told him maybe he should stop “appreciating” and do some parading himself.

         On the small table he straightened the book he was reading—today it was Piers Brendon’s, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire. Across from him was her chair—empty again. Marta had always sat facing the big mirror on the back wall as if, Jenny once pointed out to him, she needed indirection, as if she wouldn’t look the world in the eye. Jenny said Marta hid part of herself from him. Sam called this Marta's “Declaration of Independence” and made a schedule of times they could each be independent.

         He complained to Jenny. “Does she want me to pay attention to her or to leave her alone?”

         “Both,” Jenny told him. “The trick is balance and timing.”

         “I don’t really get it.”

         “Yeah, I know.”

         Three weeks ago, Marta refused his demands that she tell him where she’d been all night. This morning, looking at her chair, set at a small angle to the table as if she had just gone to choose a pastry, he wished he were looking at her face. Marta’s face was a full oval framed in short-clipped hair that was almost black. She had eyes of polished agate, and a mouth that told unnecessary lies. Fairy tales, whispered in the dark.

         Eight tables at the NoHo Star. Eight rotating stools upholstered in green plastic at the counter along the wall. Like eight bits in memory, each coded one or zero, occupied or empty, present or absent. Two ladies leaned across a window two-top to share gossip and toast with jam. An old man in a rumpled gray suit was digging at a half grapefruit with one of those too sweet, too red cherries punctuating the center. The man was saving the cherry for last; a red full stop at the end of a sour story. Sam had often saved things for later. Now, at thirty-four, he felt he had better not wait. There was spoiled milk and brown lettuce in his refrigerator. Jenny told him he needed another mouth to feed.

         The broad Café window looked out on Lafayette and the park with the fruit and vegetable stand diagonally across Bleecker. Beyond the window was the sidewalk, with its fast walkers, backpack luggers, shopping bag toters, tank-top flashers, basketball dribblers, joggers and stroller pushers. One homeless man lurched among them, confronting as many as he could for coins. Even he, Sam thought, had purpose, direction. When he was refused, the man went on to another possibility, taking refusal in his shambling stride. Marta’s refusal—well, how could he just move on, he’d asked Jenny, as if Marta were being stingy with loose change?

         Sam had fired off letters to Marta, first angry, then cajoling, then angry again, attempting to shine a bright logic on their being together. The letters were, he admitted to Jenny, more rain than shine. Sitting alone in his apartment, folding his pleadings into an envelope and scratching on a new address Marta cruelly gave him, he’d felt awkward and scattered, even a little lightheaded, lost in the churn of their history together. Like an old map opened and folded for exotic journeys, opened and folded many times and then left in a bottom drawer, Sam was coming apart at the creases.

         When the light changed, the street poured with yellow taxis, honking and dodging through the green. He had made a spreadsheet. It organized each of their schedules and coordinated the available times for them to be together. He came home to find their spreadsheet on the floor of the birdcage. Marta had angrily accused him of stealing her independence. “Grand larceny,” Jenny called it, and she roared when he told her what Marta had done with the spreadsheet, renaming it a ‘spread-shit,’ until she saw that he couldn’t laugh about it. Then she said, “Maybe Marta is stealing from you, too.” A police car raced west on Bleecker, red and blue lights flashing on the street, off the window, on the Café wall, and off Sam’s knife and water glass.

         Beyond the street was the park, with its dog-walkers and bench sitters, where the summer city trees were loden and still. Green railings and cartoonish light poles of the Eastside Subway funneled passengers up and down the steps. Sam checked his watch again; seven twenty-seven. Marta’s train would be leaving soon.

         And then she was there, on the far side of the park, making for the green railings and steep stairs. He saw her spin 360 degrees, perhaps at some sound behind her, all in one motion that barely interrupted her stride. Her watch sparked in the August sun—a present from someone. She wouldn’t tell him who. In sandals and sunglasses, she crossed against the light.  Her walk had the glide of a dancer, her purse swinging against her hip as she disappeared down the stairs.

~

          In the Café, Jenny watched Sam watch Marta and, at a lull in her credit cards and cash, she came to him and sat down at an adjacent table. Sam was still staring at the top of the subway stairs.

         “You could run down there after her.”

         Sam didn’t look up. “She’ll say I’m crowding her.”

         “She’d say you were paying attention.”

         “She’d say I’m desperate. She’ll laugh.”

         “You’ll find another girl, a better girl.”

         Jenny rotated the Piers Brendon so she could read the title. She found Sam attractive, even good looking, in a raggedy sort of way, with his curly brown hair, tender eyes and wrinkled frown. And Sam didn’t need her to hide how smart she was. The night she first met him, over a year ago, was the night Charlie Schmidt dumped her.

         She had followed Charlie from Topeka when he came to NYU for film school. When he left her, she found herself sitting, sobbing, at closing time in the Café. Sam was the last customer, and she spilled her grief and anger all over him, much, she realized later, to his discomfort. When he attempted an awkward retreat, she grabbed his hand and wouldn’t let go. “He turned his back on me,” she wailed at him, “he actually turned his back,” and she pulled Sam to an empty table. “Why do I always melt for the cold ones?” Sam had not been a good listener but, once resigned, he remained there all night with her, trying in his awkward way to staunch her tears with stale coffee cake and melting ice cream.

         Jenny was thirty, having survived high school’s awkward blues, college financial struggles and the long slog of small jobs and small loves of her twenties. She spent her off-hours reading at the public library or browsing at the Strand. Weekends, she spent time with a small group of friends in conversation at restaurants and bars or, when she had the money, at the Public Theater.

         Recently, she did not have the money. She would soon have nowhere to live, if she wanted to stay in New York. She had been sharing a Brooklyn apartment with two women, stretching to afford her third of the rent. When one of them gave up on her acting dream last winter and returned to Cincinnati, Jenny worked extra shifts at the Café.

         Now the remaining roommate had announced that she was moving in with her fiancé at the end of August. Jenny could not afford the flat by herself. Craigslist had produced only smokers and slobs. She had a few weeks remaining before she would surrender to Kansas, back to a laconic family and, well shit, clerking at the Safeway, probably. A man at the counter wearing a KC Royals cap had taken off his shoe and was pulling at the tip of one brown sock—the arid brown of the Sunflower State.

         Jenny had seen the signs before Sam had. Marta’s late arrivals and early departures. Looks of boredom. The decline and fall. But then, Sam was always in his book or in his head. So Jenny was not surprised to find the laughter from the back table thinning and, more recently, just Sam alone, expecting Marta to pass through the door.

         “You seem sad again this morning,” she told him.

         “I’m not sad. Why do you say that?”

         “Sam, you’re wearing black jeans and a black shirt, for God’s sake. It’s August.”

         He sipped his coffee. “What time is it?”

         “I see you every day, waiting for her. She doesn’t come in anymore. I know she was sparkly. But she wasn’t right for you. Probably thought Scrabble was a style of omelet.”

         “We played Scrabble once.”

         “I’ll bet she was good at it.”

         “Not really.”

         “The vocabulary of a shovel.”

         “What do you know about it?”

         “Sam, she left you weeks ago.” Her eyes tried but failed to be kind. “L-E-F-T-Y-O-U. Now you can draw all new tiles.”

         “This coffee is shit.” Sam looked down at his cup. “And it’s cold.”

         “I’ll heat it up.” Jenny turned to the twin carafes scalding on their hot plates. She refilled his cup and brought it back to him. “Did you ever notice that ‘carafe’ has only one ‘f’ and ‘giraffe,’ two?” she said.          “Maybe it’s because the giraffe has a longer neck.” She laughed. “‘F’ is four points, by the way.”

         “In French, ‘girafe’ has only one ‘f’,” Sam told her.

         “Maybe French giraffes have shorter necks? Probably the wine and cigarettes.” And again she laughed; even Sam laughed. “You look tired,” she told Sam. The toast-and-jam ladies got up and shuffled to the register to pay and she moved to meet them there.

~

         Sam watched as Jenny made change. She has nice wrists, he thought. Jenny had hair the color of Van Gogh’s wheat fields, changing in different light. Today, she wore it up, held there with a flock of black barrettes. Her blue summer dress buttoned down the front from an open collar. She accepted a few bills from two students.

         Sam stretched and got up to leave. When he moved to pay his bill, he found Jenny checking off names and addresses on a yellow legal pad.

         “Customers who left without paying?” he interrupted her.

         “These are losers of another kind,” she said. “Possible roommates I got off craigslist. They’re all snorers, whores or just bores.”

         “Poet.”

         “I made up the ‘whores’ part, but the rest is true enough.”

         “Where are you living now?”

         “As of September 1st, it will be back in Kansas unless I find a place I can afford.” Jenny made a big X through the last three names. Without looking up she said, “Maybe I’ll just move in with you, Sam.”

         Sam found himself staring at the way one point of her collar tilted up toward her ear while the other lay flat. Like wayward ears on a shelter dog. “I actually have a pretty comfortable couch,” Sam blurted out, then added, “There wouldn’t be a lot of privacy.”

         “What if it’s the best I can do right now? Are you really offering?”

         “Well, I don’t know.” He put both hands in his pockets. “Well, I guess—I don’t know.” He glanced out the window over her shoulder, then back at Jenny.

         Jenny looked at her legal pad. “I could chip in $800 a month for rent. I could keep the place clean for you. I’ll bet you have dirty dishes in the sink.”

         “Dishes get done on Wednesdays and Sundays. I don’t know if it would work. Let me think about it. Those things don’t always—.” He took his change off the counter. He watched the steady pulse in the hollow of her neck as she put the bills into the register. “Do you like stroganoff?” he asked.

         “Stroganoff? Is that one ‘f’ or two?”

         “I cook pretty good beef stroganoff. With two ‘f’s.”

         “I’m vegetarian.”

         “Oh.” Sam twisted one shoe into the linoleum.

         “I’m done at three today,” Jenny told him again. “Come back to the Café and we’ll talk.” Sam had code to write. He spent the remainder of the morning in the world of “if... then... else...” statements, bubble sorts, and breakpoint conditions. Three days of unopened mail, diet coke cans and pizza boxes cluttered the table near his computers. He stared at the Film Festival poster on the wall and pictured Marta, the dark-haired thriller and Jenny, the blonde romantic comedy.

         At two forty-five, he went out to get sweet corn, lettuce, peppers, cucumber and a few radishes and found himself, grocery sack in hand, outside the NoHo Star. Through the window, Sam saw Jenny reach under the counter for her purse and take out a small mirror and lipstick. She did what women do to their hair when they are about to leave a place. Then she called out something to the short order cook and the waitresses and was out the door.

         She crossed to Sam. “Groceries?” she asked.

         “Corn. Salad stuff.”

         “Vegetarian,” she said. “Enough for two?” Sam snapped his head toward the subway stairs, though he knew it was too early. “I meant for you and me.”

         “For you and me?” He opened his sack of groceries and looked in, as if he had forgotten what he had just purchased. He pictured his empty apartment and looked up at Jenny’s yellow hair. “We could roast corn on the grill. We could mix up a salad. I have radishes.”

         “Radishes are bitter,” she said.

         “They add color.”

         “Well, O.K., then,” she said, and took his free arm in hers. The easy warmth of her bare arm against his felt like old flannel.

~

         As they walked and Sam summarized the Brendon book, Jenny thought about whether a relationship with him had any chance of working out. He was in no condition to start something. To start what? What sort of relationship? What other choices do I have? It was only a few blocks to the walk-up where Sam lived: an old one-bedroom with wood floors and cobwebs. Three computers lived on a table on the east side of the living room: a Mac and a PC, both for testing, and Sam’s personal laptop. Jenny listened as he showed them off to her, elaborating on how they compared. He had named each of them, like pets. He made it interesting and she lost herself in his animation. Two parakeets agitated a cage in the tiny kitchen.

         “Oh, budgies,” Jenny cried when she saw them, and put her hand up to the thin bars, “what are their names?”

         “Von Neumann and Turing,” Sam told her.

         “Of course.” With Sam, Jenny felt no need to pretend she didn’t know who von Newmann and Turing were. “Did Marta like birds?”

         “She seemed to at first. She lost interest.”

         “You make it sound like it was all her.

         “I suppose it was half my fault. She said I would ignore her. It was all on the schedule. Figuring out the most efficient algorithms, debugging software, you have to concentrate. You can’t keep looking over at new shoes.”

         “So you broke up over her shoes?”

         “I would get mad if she was out late—somewhere. I don’t know what she expected.”

         Jenny studied her own shoes for a moment, her favorite blue clogs. “Maybe she expected your attention, and when she didn’t get it, she looked elsewhere. If it was me, I’d want your attention—not all the time, but enough.”

         “I’ve got to earn a living.” Sam moved to the sink, passing close to Jenny where she leaned against the counter. She could smell shaving cream. She watched as Sam put dressing on the salad. “How much is ‘enough’?” he asked her.

         “In order to know how much is enough,” Jenny took a step toward Sam, “you have to be paying attention.” When he didn’t respond, she added, “Don’t look so bewildered.”

         “I’m not bewildered; I’m analyzing.”

         “You don’t look ‘analyzing,’ you look bewildered. If you want to look analyzing, close your mouth.” Jenny reached out and gently pinched his parted lips to close them, then crossed to the kitchen doorway. She pictured herself on her parents’ farm near Topeka.

         Sam asked, “Did Charlie pay attention?”

         “Charlie could be a good listener, but he got sullen, especially in public, when I understood stuff he didn’t.”

         “Well, I wouldn’t do that.” Sam tossed the salad. “To tell the truth, Jenny, I haven’t had many girlfriends.”

         She pursed her lips and let out a gentle puff of air. She supposed not. “What’s your father like, Sam?”

         “My father? He still works for the New York Power Authority. Lives in his head, mostly. Came to all my baseball games, though.”

         “Baseball.” She looked him up and down. Sam wasn’t what she would call wiry, but he did move with a fluidity that was there if you looked.

~

         Sam roasted corn on a small charcoal grill on the fire escape while Jenny dished out the salad. After they had eaten Sam told her he had better get some work done. “Are you going to stay?”

         “Well, I’ll just hang here for a while.”

         He tried to lose track of her, poring over a sub-routine he was designing. Then he found himself typing the first simple code every beginning computer programmer learned:

        print('Hello, world!')

         Sam had written this program in many computer languages but it had never struck him before as desperate, to have the computer communicate to an outside world. A world that was, in Sam’s experience, not paying attention—of course that’s what Jenny says I don’t do. This program simply instructed the computer to output, “Hello world!” to the screen. He deleted “world” and typed, “Marta.” He looked up. Jenny was examining the poster on the opposite wall. He edited “Marta” to “Jenny?” then deleted these intrusions and went back to work.

         A few minutes later, Sam looked up to watch Jenny moving along the bookshelf against the living room wall. He liked the way her shoulders turned and the tilt of her hip when she stopped to remove a book. Marta had been rougher. She’d never browsed among the books. She didn’t love von Neumann and Turing—said they were messy, demanded they sing to her, as if they were Oscar Issac and Marcus Mumford, for crap’s sake. Jenny was softer, interested. Teasing, but kind. She made good jokes and bad puns. She played with words and numbers. Sam liked words and numbers. He liked bad puns. He caught himself staring at her legs and forced his eyes back to his screen.

~

         Jenny snorted and, slapping the book she had been browsing onto the table across from Sam, began scooping up dirty dishes and other mess he had neglected. She carried four armloads into the kitchen, dumping trash and washing dishes. Amidst the clang of spoons and clank of plates, she got no response from the other room to questions about where the cups belonged or which drawer he preferred for the can opener. Then Jenny moved to Sam’s bedroom, where she found piles of clothes on the floor and called out,          “Look at all this shit.”

         “You better go,” he said, getting up. “I have work to do.”

         “You have a lot of space for Manhattan. I could help you keep it organized.”

         “I have work. Marta never messed with my stuff.”

         “Is this why she left you? You gave her a schedule for when she could expect you to notice her? I wouldn’t put up with that either.”

         “Then go back to Kansas.” Sam strode to open the door, but Jenny did not follow and he skittered back to the bedroom. “I didn’t ignore her,” he said.

         “You’re a mess,” Jenny told him.

         “I—”

         Jenny brushed past him to the living room, where a red couch, a portly three-seater with flared arms, stood against the wall. A round gray pillow dotted the end, with ‘Pluto, 1930 – 2006, Sorry’ scrawled in red yarn. “So, this is your famous empty couch.” She flopped down, hands laced behind her neck, head on the former planet, feet comfortably crossed. She watched Sam, mired in the bedroom doorway, staring at his computers.

         “I have a deadline—,” he began, then turned and saw her. “What are you doing?”

         “Just seeing how it would feel. Maybe I’ll stay right here.” Jenny settled herself deeper into the cushions. “I think you need another human. You’re by yourself even when there’s somebody else in the room.”

         “I’ve got to work,” he repeated.

         “If the other choice weren’t Kansas—” she muttered. She left the couch and slid into the chair in front of his laptop. She tried to read the code he was working on, a file called, “Relationships,” but it might as well have been written in Ancient Budgie. She typed her own line at the end of a section titled “Living Together.”

         “What are you doing?” Sam rushed at her, rotating the laptop so he could read what she’d typed. “And then something unexpected happens? That’s not Python. Computers need exact instructions in a recognized syntax.”

         Jenny pushed back from the table. “I don’t respond to exact instructions, Sam.”

         “Unexpected would make it crash.”

         “Not always. You take a chance.” She started to cross her arms in front of her chest, but not wanting to seem stubborn, she slid them to her sides as she moved to the hallway.

         “Like with Charlie?” Sam said.

         “OK, I crashed that time,” her hands came up again, “but it if wasn’t for Charlie, I’d still be in Topeka.”

         “Hurts too much.”

         “I can stand it.” She rose and moved toward the door. “Can you?”

         As the door closed behind her, she saw over her shoulder that Sam had already turned to attack the keyboard.  

         Strangling the railing in her hand, Jenny plunged down the two flights of stairs, but she stopped in the vestibule. Turning back, she leaned into the buzzer by Sam’s flat number and held it.

         “What!” The word spat into the vestibule, distorted by the ancient intercom.

         “You’re a mess,” Jenny sent back. “I’ve changed my mind.”

         “Changed your mind about what?”

         “I’m not moving in with you.”

         “What?” came the crackle of Sam’s voice. “I haven’t asked you. I’m not sure I want you here. I haven’t decided.”

         “It’s not only your decision.”

         There was only a hum from the box.

Then, faintly, “You’re going back to Kansas?”

         Jenny put her mouth close to the speaker. “I’m not going to take up with some guy I have to talk to from two floors away through an intercom.”

         “Take up with? What does that mean?”

         “I don’t know yet,” Jenny said. The box was still and she walked out.

~

         The next day, Sam was still trying to think this through. The way she threw herself onto the couch! Marta would never do such a thing, mess her hair, look undignified. And who ever found it funny how many ‘f’s something was spelled with? She was so damned interrupting. And what did she mean, “take up with?” What was she offering?

         At five, Sam returned to the Café. Jenny ignored him. He ordered stir-fry with tofu.

~

         Jenny stood behind her register, reviewing her legal pad, avoiding eye-contact with Sam. She thought about Kansas, the Café and about Sam’s couch. He seemed so blind to his role in losing Marta. What about Sam and her? Would that work? Would what work? What was she thinking—a couch to crash on for a short time? Rent she could afford? A friend to talk to and go places with? A lover? Would that work?

 ~

         When Jenny finally came to his table, Sam stared at her. “Maybe you’re just another Marta. You’ll use me.”

         “I—” She stood still. The short-order cook slapped a plate onto the service counter under the heat lamps. Jenny looked Sam in the eye. “I need a place to live.”

         “With me? Using me?”

         “If that’s using you, then, yes, I’m using you. I can’t afford my place anymore. I need to find another—” Jenny stepped forward, “and so do you,” she said, pulling out the chair at his table. He found himself staring over her shoulder. It was almost five-thirty. Jenny pointed to the grocery sack under his chair. “If you’re not careful, you may find that your life comes down to radishes,” she said.

         But he wasn’t listening. Marta, in a pale orange dress, rose from the subway stairs and turned away to walk through the park.

         Tears stumbled down Sam’s cheeks. “She’s not coming back to the Café, is she?” he said. “There’s no chance.”

         “No chance.” Jenny echoed, as Sam watched Marta fade across the park. Jenny reached across the table and, with the heel of her hand, brushed each of his cheeks. “I’m not sure how easy it would be,” she said, “living with you. Don’t algorithms do the same thing over and over again?”

         “I thought you needed to. Or it’s back to Kansas.” He was looking out the window again. “Good algorithms are reliable—steadfast.”

         She poked at a strand of yellow hair that had fallen past her eye and then, reaching out with one hand on either side of his chin she centered his face on hers. “I was here all along, you know. Before you started with Marta.”

         “You never said—” Sam wrapped his arms around the front of his t-shirt, holding tightly to his shoulders. “I guess I wasn’t paying enough attention.” He let go of his shoulders. “Jenny, I’m just lonesome is all.”

         “Is that built into your operating system or just a bug in your software?”

         “You made me laugh with that giraffe thing,” Sam said.

         “Enough to have me sleeping on your couch? ‘Couch’ with two ‘C’s.”

         “I suppose we could just write the code, debug it, and see if it runs.”

         “Can you promise you won’t print out our schedule?”

         “Von Neumann and Turing prefer the New York Times business section.”

         Jenny put her fingers up to his lip. “What’s this from?” Sam flinched.

         “What?” He put his own hand there, his fingers on hers.

         “This little scar.” Jenny traced it.

         “She bit me.” He felt his face flush at the memory.

         “Marta? Just a bug bite, then.” Jenny looked at her hands. “I won’t hurt you, Sam. I’m using you a little. But I won’t hurt you.” She reached out her hand to seal a new arrangement.

         “I’m not fragile,” he said, and they shook hands.

---

Steven Swiryn is a cardiologist who specialized in the care of patients with heart rhythm problems (cardiac electrophysiology). In retirement, he continues teaching, plays guitar and mandolin and, rarely, performs in sketchy coffeehouses and bars as a singer-songwriter. His first short story, “The Unicycle,” was published in the Bellevue Literary Review and was awarded “Special Mention” by the editors of Pushcart XL.

Erin Finnerty

Never Felt Better

Anyone can slip a penny under their tongue or clamp onions in their armpits to simulate a fever, but this is not evidence of any particular craft. The thermometer registers 99, maybe 101 if you overdo it, fine. But it’s the other details – the extra dab of blush, the hot washcloth on the forehead, the limp eyelids, the subtly labored breathing – that nail it. Any hack can grip their head and moan. But will they take note if their sinuses were palpated? Would they know if their anterior lung field was bilaterally auscultated if it hit them in the face? Do they take a sick day from Being Sick? A hack teems with tells.

Today’s class are third years, the larval stage of med school. They’ve been neck-deep in lectures and textbooks, but the brain knows nothing it hasn’t experienced with the hands. Some would classify today as a dry run for future patient encounters, but this inflicts a false distinction between acting and performing. The air is a-crackle with potential energy, on the cusp of conversion to kinetic energy through these greenhorns.

Here is one now, getting into character. Allow me to sketch him for you: milk-complected young man, trim midline from nonstop ing-ing (running, hiking, climbing, soccering), volunteered in a nursing home (told himself he loves old people, but the truth is he needed to bulk his anemic med school resume), atones for too much IPA with penal amounts of kale the next day.

I walk over, aware of how well the grey-blue hospital gown plays up my undereye shadows. He introduces himself, squeaks out “I’m Dr. Weston” (adorable), and motions for me to sit. I settle onto the exam table, and its paper covering crinkles which gives me the tingles every time.

“Hi Dr. Weston, I’m Laine.”

I look at him for a beat. He’s frozen already. Picture tapping him on the side of the head, like a broken TV.

“What brings you here today, Laine?”

LAINE

Well, I’ve been having this pain in my lower back, off and on, for a few weeks now. I’m usually able to ignore it – I’m very fit –

(LAINE lays back and bicycles her long legs in the air a few times to demonstrate their condition.)

 but recently the pain is just more than I can take. 

(Gaze falls to the ground, LAINE swallows hard.)

“DR.” WESTON

Okay. Let me start by taking a general history, and then we’ll go into the exam itself.

(Girds himself.)

He skids through the history checklist. When was my last physical exam? Two years ago. (Yesterday.) Do I have any chronic health conditions? Well, this back pain seems to be one. (A lady doesn’t tell.) When was my last menstrual period? Gee…probably two months ago? (Fifteen years ago, when an IUD capped that well.) Is there any chance I could be pregnant? Dear God, is there? (No. Never.) And what kind of work do I do? Sky diving instructor. (Actor.) Do I smoke? Occasionally. (Occasionally.) Do I drink alcohol? Yes. How much? Four drinks a night, every night, except Thursday, Friday, Saturday and sometimes Sunday, when I have six, or seven. (Never.)

DR. WESTON

Okay then! Great! And now I’m going to…start… the physical exam.

                   (Gingerly takes LAINE’S wrist, palpates radial pulse. Measures blood pressure. Inspects nasal vaults, oral cavity. Overlooks ears. Checks pupillary response to light. Forgot the ears though. Ears! Ears, ears, ears.)

                   (LAINE turns her head a few degrees and leans toward WR. DESTON. He tilts his head away from her while simultaneously stretching arms toward her neck to palpate her lymph nodes. His arms can not reach her. He stretches arms further toward LAINE while tilting his head even further away.)  

LAINE

Doctor, are you doing the limbo?

WESTON

Just…going to check your lymph nodes now.

                   (Palpates lymph nodes, missing five of the nine key areas. Auscultates carotids with bell, fails to have LAINE hold breath. Palpates thyroid, fails to visually inspect from front and side. And he forgot the ears.)

LAINE

Have you ever done this before?

PRESTO WESTO

                   (Acting.)

Haha! Yes, we’re taught all of this in medical school. I’m going to listen to your heart now.

                   (Pulls stethoscope from neck, inserts it backwards into his ears, pulls it out, inserts it properly. Places stethoscope bell on LAINE’S chest, auscultates aortic area, pulmonic area, right ventricular area, left ventricular area. LAINE’S paper gown rustles as his stethoscope bell slides across it to the next area of her chest.)

WESTO

I’m going to ask you to lay down now, and untie the gown.

LAINE

You what?

THE GOOD DOCTOR

So…I can examine your abdomen.

LAINE

Just joshing.

                   (LAINE punches him playfully in the arm, then lays down on the table and unties her hospital gown. She stares at the ceiling for a moment, and then looks at the young man standing over her.)

THE YOUNG MAN STANDING OVER LAINE

                   (Pulls LAINE’S gown to the side, places stethoscope on LAINE’S abdomen, auscultates for bowel sounds. Fails to percuss abdomen in four quadrants. Begins to palpate abdomen, looks unsure, cannot access the GPS for this part of the human body.)

LAINE

Did you lose something?

THE LOST DOCTOR

                   (Ignores LAINE. Presses deeply into her abdomen, searching for the liver’s edge, for the spleen tip. He cannot locate them.)

Can you sit up now please?

                   (LAINE rises – powerful, haunting, poignant.)

Ok, can you touch your finger to your nose?

LAINE

                   (Touches finger to cheek.)

A MAN GOES ON A JOURNEY THROUGH MED SCHOOL

                   (Examines LAINE’s knees, shoulders, range of motion in back and spine. Palpates iliac crest of her hips, pushes fingertips deep into her hip socket.)

A STRANGER COMES TO TOWN IN A GOWN

                   (Makes yelping sound. Watches his face.)

DOCTOR WHAT

(Skips rest of hip exam.)

LAINE

You’re just like a real doctor!

ELEVENTH HOUR AFTERTHOUGHT

                   (Chuckles.)

Oh - one last thing.

                   (Reaches for otoscope, switches on light.)

Let’s check your ears.

                   (Inserts tip of otoscope in LAINE’S right ear, leans next to her face, squints. Warmth from the high-powered light floods her ear canal.)

LAINE

Mmmmm. Hhhmmmmmm. HhhuuuuuuuugghhmmmMMMM.

END SCENE

~

Afterward I inventory his many, many mistakes. He nods along, with gusts of frustrated breath. I catch his eye, and give him a sympathetic smile. “You botched that exam today. Egregiously. But you’ll get there, perhaps. You just have to be humble, and practice over and over.”

I can see my words float through the air and travel into his ears, into his brain, where they nestle in crevices, soon to germinate a mental scrapbook of professional negligence.

“And one last thing – you didn’t wash those hands of yours before starting the exam. And who knows where they’ve been?” We both look at his hands.

~

I could have been a doctor, too. I’m practically a doctor. Let’s just say I’m experienced with doctors.

~

The acting bug is hereditary. You catch it from a parent, and then you just pray your own case is incurable.

My father acted as a father, but he was terrible with the lines and couldn’t improv to save his soul. He fell for anyone who smiled back at him, unable to tell they were acting too. Eventually my mother discovered his indiscretions, and in a fury drove him off. [Father exits, pursued by a bear.]

I can’t say I blame him. If I were married to her, I’d look elsewhere too.

~

Every one of my mother’s voicemails is the same. Went to the doctor about these pains (these headaches, this ringing); they don’t know what’s going on; I’m going to demand tests this time.

~

After the immersive external experience of embodying a standardized patient, it’s important to let the instrument that is oneself rest. The gold standard of treatment is full surrender to the interior, replenishment through self-wombing.

I put on my top-of-the-line headphones. They cost $4,000, paid for by my honest labor of participating in focus groups, sleep studies, and selling my plasma. The sound quality is unparalleled – a log flume you ride with your ears, tunneling through the deluge to arrive in another dimension.

Once I put on the pre-mixed soundtracks, I lean back and close my eyes, and envision myself standing on the edge of a better world. The sky is lavender and tangerine, and the ground is the texture of dry ice. The air shimmies. The stars are lower and closer, and they strobe. Today

I assemble myself this way: I have Baryshnikov’s body, a watermelon-sized dahlia for a head, and a leopard tail.

Something about the leopard tail feels two degrees off, so I swap it for a panther tail.

Once I’m assembled, I drop a tent down from the sky and hover it there. The strobing starlight passes through the sheer tent top, and all the light is melted butter. I turn the music up until it floods my skull, washing everything downstream. Away, away, into the gutters. Dance on.

~

Particularly active REM sleep of late. Whenever liquid comes out of my feet in a dream, I know something important is about to happen to me.

~

The next standardized patient assignment is for students learning differential diagnosis. It’s a new gig – seems word has gotten around about me.

I’ve done a little stage makeup for today: faint purplish undereye circles, a few zits I deliberately cultivated so I could pop them and let them crust over, and a little whitish concealer rubbed onto my lips for that extra-anemic look. I stayed up all night so my exhaustion reads authentic, and carefully placed a few grains of coarse cornmeal in the corners of my eyes, to look like that gunk that builds up. I haven’t washed my hair in eleven days.

Performance begins well before the audience is in place.

I can see the other standardized patients they’ve got for today. Basic. Basic. Another basic. Tends to be a mix of grad students, waiters, randos trying it out. Who’s in charge around here? I ask the guy next to me. He’s a terminal schlub; I’d peg him as a Grand Theft Auto addict who still lives at home and needs money for the next expansion pack but his mom makes him pay for it himself.

He jerks his head toward a White Coat in the corner. I catch sight of his throat, where he’s got a two-inch keloid across his neck. Excellent prosthetic makeup – I’d guess a thin line of mauve fondant, superglued into place and rubbed with Vaseline for sheen. This guy’s good.

Something about the Attending is familiar, or maybe it’s just the exhaustion playing tricks. She’s giving the med students their assigned cubicles for the run-through. She looks the part of a Woman in Charge. The hair on my arms raises a little; I’m a sensitive instrument.

When I get close, it comes to me, like a gumball popping out the chute: Gabby.

“Hello, Doctor.”

She turns to me, but doesn’t register. That’s how good I am. I give her my last name, and she slides down the list to check me in, and when she reaches my full name, she looks up again.

“Laine?”

Yes. But not today.

I zap her with a marquee smile through my bleached lips and haunted eyes.

~

The acting bug is also contagious. I’ll set the scene. It’s the tenth grade, and I’m auditioning for Our Town. A dozen girls are trying out for the role of Emily, and I watch them one by one act their way through the monologue.

When I get up and stand under the lights, and I AM Emily. I resuscitate her from the mass grave of high school theater clichés. Our monologue on the preciousness of every day and every moment is riveting. I get shivers from my own performance; I’m so moved, I have to fight tears.

Gabby is in the front row of the auditorium, here to cheer me on, my original Fan Club since we met in seventh grade biology. For some reason she’s sitting with the others trying out for Emily. I can see on her face she’s struck stupid.

Gabby must have auditioned for something that day. Being a diminutive thing, she was cast as Wally Webb, a character with few lines who dies from a burst appendix on a Boy Scout trip.

We ran lines with each other at our houses after school. Her family had a dog named Amy, a deeply weird name for an animal. Amy’s howls were toxic to my process, and I refused to continue in that space.

When we rehearsed at my house, my mother came out in her charmeuse kimono and sized Gabby up: “Are you an anorexic?”

We both looked at Gabby, giving her time to answer the question. Gabby never had a knack for improv though.

My mother touched her temple and gave her head a little shake, eyes bugging just slightly. She rubbed her fingertips together, as if stroking some invisible cloth. “I can’t…feel my hands.” She told us she wasn’t feeling well, and retired to her room.

~

Everyone needs work. Work gives life meaning. People fall apart when they have nothing to do.

My mother did not work. She came from money, as they say, as if money is a far-off land, or that protozoic ooze that amoebas first crawled out of. She blew into town one day, changed into a bathrobe, and only left the house to attend her various appointments. The money she came from still trailed behind her, and it was there when I needed new veneers for my teeth, or an accent coach, or a falconry tutor. There was money when she wasn’t well enough to work, which was always.

My mother’s job was figuring out what was wrong with her.

~

LAINE

OW.

STUDENT

I’m so sorry. Sorry. Does this hurt you?

         (Taps LAINE’S knee with a reflex hammer.)

LAINE

OW. OW OW OW OW.

STUDENT

         (STUDENT shakes head, holds hands up.)

I’m so sorry. You seem to have unusually sensitive…kneecaps?

LAINE

You’re HURTING me. Why are you HITTING ME with that?

STUDENT

This is just a reflex hammer…? I’m testing to make sure your reflexes are working properly. But maybe we’ll pause there if this is hurting.

         (STUDENT looks around for the instructor, for the escape hatch. STUDENT is experiencing mild chest pain and fresh regret about letting her parents pressure her into med school. Was pleasing them really the only way to feel secure in their love?)

“Let me stop you right there.” I drop the act and look this kid in the eye. “Pain is not an emergency. Maybe they haven’t taught you this yet. People can tolerate pain. You need to keep doing the exam, every part of the exam, or you could miss something crucial. You can’t do this with your hands over your eyes. Alright? Look up. Look at me. Look at me. Pain is not an emergency.”

As this message soaks in, the light shifts in her face. She breathes away her tears. Some distant voice is resurrected – perhaps a Bulgarian gymnastics coach from high school, who always squeezed the next level out of her – and validates what I was saying. It all checks out.

“Now take up your reflex hammer, and continue with the exam. If you don’t treat this seriously, if you don’t approach each exam like it’s life or death, you could miss something of vital importance.”

I find my own hand has balled itself into a tight fist. I look back at the student. There she is, stuck between a rock and a hard place and a scalpel and an iron maiden and one of those anvils suspended over her head like in a roadrunner cartoon. For a moment I pity her. Top doctors are made though, not born! Break down to break through.

She looks around for help – is there a doctor in the house? – but Gabby is busy observing a student palpate that schlub’s thyroid. From across the room, I watch this woman. Who would have guessed she’d have a star turn as Boss Lady? I certainly wouldn’t have. Not in a hundred thousand million eons.

Gabby can’t save this student though, only I can. I pull her eyes back to mine and lock her in. I am a carpenter and she is a baby. I am channeling knowledge into her. I am choreographing the muscle memories she will rely on for the rest of her career, so that one day, years from now, when a nonstandardized patient presents for care, she will follow the tank treads in the cement back to this seminal teaching moment, here in this exam room, and she will know what to do. 

STUDENT DOCTOR

I’m going to ask you to lay down on the table for the next portion of the exam.

DOCTOR TEACHER

Will it hurt much?

STUDENT DOCTOR

You’ll just feel some pressure. It’s important that I check your bowel functioning.

I lay down on the table, and lift my hospital gown. She presses deeply into my abdomen, searching for hidden organs with her blind little fingertips. Gabby is looking at me from across the room, with her own blind little fingertips. I wink at her.

~

Gabby had a boyfriend, Jamir. By senior year, she’d given up on auditioning and transitioned to doing the lighting for shows. She and Jamir would scuttle around the stage wings in black jeans and black sweatshirts, headsets and walkie talkies. Two nerdy ninjas, sitting in a tree.

Gabby was, as they say, tight-lipped about her romance. Always punting whenever I’d ask, as a friend, how things were going. I had to wonder if Jamir, a late bloomer, had the right skills to romance our girl Gabrielle.

I found him one night at the end of a dress rehearsal, checking all the nuts and bolts of the lighting. (Love a double checker!) I assessed what he knew in the romancing department: very little. He’d picked up some of Gabby’s terrible ideas about tongue.  

~

I put on my headphones and start with a single amoeba. It’s a two-dimensional amoeba, and I flip through multiple colors before tinting it electric lime with frosted tips. In my mind’s microscope I see all the amoeba’s parts: vacuoles, cytoplasm, membrane. In the center is the nucleus, and I set it blinking, like a lighthouse swinging a neon lasso. The pseudopods contract and swell in time with the nucleus. Once the tempo of the whole glorious mess is beating and catches fire, it’s like an electric cranberry color, and then I/it splits into two. We love this music so much!!!!! we shout and hear each other shout. We are both pulsating now, and we each split into two more. The louder the music, the more we divide and replicate. We add on animal hooves to the pseudopods so they don’t feel so naked. Then we are turning into aliens, we are turning into the sky.

~

To prepare for the next week, I take a walk in the woods. I dislike hiking. All the plants look alike. I am trying to recall an educational rhyme. Leaves of three, let it be. Or maybe it’s leaves of fivey, poison ivy. No reception on my phone to google a picture. No matter. I take my clothes off and roll around on an especially planty section of the forest floor.

By evening the itching starts. Next day, little bubbles spread up my thighs and torso and onto my neck. I scratch until it oozes and forms patches of crust. It’s phenomenal. 

~

At the next teaching session, the guy with the thyroid scar is back, along with the thyroid scar.

“What’s all over your neck?” he asks.

“Just a little treat for the kids.” I try to arch my eyebrow, but the rash has spread onto my scalp and movement is fraught. “What’s all over your neck?” 

“This? Thyroid cancer. Took it out.”

“Is that so? So that’s an actual, real scar there?” I bring my nose to his throat to get a closer look. His body is cabbage-scented.

“Yep. First month afterward sucks, but then everything just settles down. I was all over the place before, and now I’m top-down, cruise control on.”

Mr. Topdown Cruisecontrol slurps on a can of orange Fanta and waggles a finger my way. “You might want to have someone take a look at that mess.”

~

I have to throw myself into it, wrenching with force. I draw on my training in corporeal mime: always make the invisible visible. Finally, the spaghetti sauce lid gives way, with a defeated pop and hiss. Inside are – everyone mime a surprise face! – tiny colonies of fuzz, sea-foam green and kitten grey. Scoop these gems out and spread them across a slice of three-week-old deli turkey whose ammonia smell is a bullhorn in the nose. It doesn’t go down easy, but down it must go, so that symptoms manifest in time for the morning’s performance. Once committed to a role, you must engulf yourself in it.

For years, it has been a chronic outrage that others can’t appreciate what I put in. Role after role, handed out to lesser actors. Fine. Let the chorus fill the ranks of community theater, Law and Order spinoffs, and toothpaste commercials. All actors reconcile themselves to degradation, an occupational hazard.

The true professional is nourished by the ubiquitous opportunities for interrogation of the human condition vis a vis the emotional petri dish that is another human. Acting is ultimately not a performer and an audience. It is a two-person relationship. An actor, and an interpreter.

~

FUTURE DOCTOR

We’ve gotten the results of your biopsy back. Unfortunately, they showed that the cancer has come back –

STANDARDIZED PATIENT

         (Screams.)

FUTURE DOCTOR

         (Continues, with raised voice.)

– the cancer has come back, and it has spread to your spine.

STANDARDIZED PATIENT

         (Screams over FUTURE DOCTOR’S words; begins weeping loudly.)

FUTURE DOCTOR

         (Shouting.)

It is important that you not lose hope. Please calm down. We need to discuss your treatment options. Outcomes indicate that treatment at this stage can prolong life by as much as two years. Please calm down. Please. Please.

STANDARDIZED PATIENT

         (Continues screaming, weeping. Tilts face up to the ceiling and wails.)

BEDSIDE MANNER BIG BANG

         (Reaches slowly toward STANDARDIZED PATIENT, hand hovers before choosing destination, settles on shoulder. Squeezes.)

“Laine. Laine. That’s enough.”

But soft! Here’s Gabby, drawing the curtain. Dimming the lights. She’s holding a paper cup of herbal tea that smells like radioactive dirt. Killjoy.

“I think you’re mistaken, Doctor. That is not enough. I’m providing this student here with a valuable opportunity to cultivate his bedside manner. He knows nothing of how to deliver difficult news. Doctors, as we all know, are all-too-frequently inept at delivering difficult news.”

The student looks concerned, like this is still part of the simulation and he’s lost his line. Like I said, I’m very good. The education must go on.

“What if I were to go into shock at this moment? What if I completely blacked out, and my mind erased the entire conversation? What if I blacked out, forgot the conversation, and fell and hit my head? What will this future medical professional do then?”

Gabby fails to grasp my process. “Right, of course those are important considerations. For today’s purposes though, the priority is for students to get a chance to practice an intervention. And that’s impossible if all anyone can hear is you screaming.”

She does. She does say those words to me.

The future medical professional is trying to figure out what’s happening in the performance. Gabby tells him he can take a ten minute break. He leaks away toward the others in their white coats.

“Laine, are you sure this kind of work is a good idea for you?” Gabby’s using her Quiet Respectful voice, which is the ultimate sign of disrespect.

“ Actually Gabby, I was going to ask you the same thing. I seem to remember you don’t really like touching much. That you’re a little squeamish about that. Must make it rather difficult for you be competent in this line of work.”

Gabby doubles down on the I’m Concerned face. “Laine, I heard about your mom. I’m really sorry. I can only imagine it must have been such a shock, and I can imagine you might be angry that nobody intervened sooner. It just doesn’t make sense to me though why you’d put yourself through all of this.”

I clamp Gabby in place with my eyes. I put on my imaginary headphones and picture Jamir in his black tech sweats, against a black curtain, in the dark, and I’m in black tech sweats, and I move toward him and we converge into a single blob. I roam around and absorb all the blobs hidden in the wings of the stage until I am massive enough to crush the entire structure. There is Gabby, standing in front of me, and I could absorb her too. Instead, I reach over and lift the bell of her stethoscope to my mouth.

“Doctor Gabrielle. Doctor Gabrielle.” She winces, and this gives me the giggles, so I drop down into a baritone and boom into the scope: “Doctor Gabrielle. Paging Doctor Gabrielle.”

Then I yank the scope from her neck and yeet it across the room.

~

I kept the gown from today, just wore it out of there under my regular person disguise, out into the parking lot, under a sky the color of toilet paper. At home, I put my headphones on and lay back. I set a scene in which I am the doctor and I am the patient.

DOCTOR LAINE

I’m afraid it’s malignant. We’ll have to take it out.

         (DOCTOR LAINE unsheathes scalpel.)

STANDARDIZED PATIENT

Yes, we will.

         (STANDARDIZED PATIENT palpates herself, prepares for excision.)

DOCTOR LAINE

You may feel some pressure, but you’ll feel so much better when it’s over. Count backwards from a hundred.

         (STANDARDIZED PATIENT reaches up and takes scalpel. Removes the tumor herself.)

~

Whenever my mother sneezed, she would freeze in place, expecting it would bring on a seizure. I learned to never say “God bless you” – the sound of a human voice in those fragile moments sent her into the spins. After a minute or two, her body would thaw and release. She’d find a dark place to lay down with a handkerchief tied across her face, to prevent any nasal intrusion that might trigger further sneezes.

She was always listening deeper and deeper into herself. When her bowels bubbled or squeaked, she insisted on total silence, to isolate the sounds. She would beckon me, and lift her shirt. I would press an ear to her belly, and close my eyes. We would both slow our breath and listen. Squeezing, whining, microscopic roaring, some demon trapped in there and unable to make its way out. Doubling my focus, I would hold my breath altogether. I never could localize the source of the disorder, before I became lost in space inside her. Overlaying this was lub-dub lub-dub lub-dub, that classic backbeat, radiating from her tiny eggshell heart.

~

My ideal setting is where I’m walking down a street lined with Japanese maples, and they’re all perpetually at the stage of just starting to leaf, delicate fetal foliage. The air smells like permanent markers (the good ones, like they had when I was young), and pencil shavings, and the air is the temperature where you can’t tell where your skin ends. The fourth wall is dissolved, the fifth wall, the sixth wall, the set is struck, and there is nothing separating you any longer. Homeostasis carries the day.

---

Erin Finnerty writes speculative fiction in order to ride out speculative reality. Her work has appeared in Mobius Blvd and is forthcoming in Wallstrait and Bog Fancy.

Tom Busillo

It Wasn't Necessarily the Cocaine

It wasn’t necessarily the cocaine that made me decide to propose.
But it didn’t hurt.
We were at a dinner party hosted by a guy named Craig, who collected vintage spoons and rugs, all laid haphazardly over each other like modular wall-to-wall carpet. There was a duck confit situation. A woman in a tinfoil dress read aloud from her own screenplay. Someone played harp through a loop pedal.
I had done two bumps in the guest bathroom – polite ones, just enough to sharpen the evening\ – and then I looked at her across the room and thought: Yes. This is the moment. This is the woman. This is the jagged point in time where all my timelines converge like a trainwreck inside a fireworks factory.
I didn’t have a ring, so I bent one of Craig’s cheap knives and got down on one knee, and she looked at me like I had just asked her to join a pyramid scheme involving endangered birds.
“You’re bleeding,” she said.

I hadn’t noticed. My nose. My fingers. The knife. Who could say.

“Yes,” I said. “But I’m doing it with love.”

She didn’t say yes. But she didn’t say no. She said, “Maybe go sit down.”

So I did.

The harpist started playing something that sounded like a whale giving birth to triplets.

Someone handed me a napkin. Someone else handed me a tangerine.

Craig leaned over and whispered, “That rug was Peruvian.”

I apologized – to Craig, to the rug, to the tangerine, to time itself.

She never mentioned it again.

We dated another year. She left me for someone who made their own vinegar.

But sometimes, when I see a knife or pass in front of a rug store that has been having a going out of business sale for six years, I still think: It wasn’t necessarily the cocaine. But it definitely helped me believe in forever for a second.

---

Tom Busillo's (he/his) writing has appeared or is forthcoming in McSweeney's, trampset, The Disappointed Housewife, Heavy Feather Review, and elsewhere. He is a Best Short Fictions nominee and the author of the unpublishable 2,646-word conceptual poem "Lists Poem," composed of 11,111 nested 10-item lists. He lives in Philadelphia, PA.

Mileva Anastasiadou

Dead Boxer Has Wings

We recognize the ghost when it first appears. We can read, and we’re educated, and we already know it’s not just a dead horse. We recognize Boxer, the workhorse from the Animal Farm that worked hard for the revolution, only to be betrayed by the revolution. How sad, we say, when we first see dead Boxer in the zoo, because he looks sad, and we don’t hear his words, we only hear his tears.

He lurks behind the trees at night, we see his wounds and we feel his pain and we want to comfort him and hug him and thank him for the sacrifice and the lessons he taught us, but when we get close, he disappears, like ghosts do. We build a statue in the middle of the zoo, and every morning we sing the zoo anthem, life is too long to be spent in fear, we sing on the top of our lungs, because we’re free now, protected, safe, there is a huge fence around us that keeps the dirty hungry rodents away, and we don’t work much, because the zookeeper does all the work, he brings the food, cleans, answers all questions and trains us to be out best selves and entertain visitors.

The zoo ghost doesn’t let us sleep at night. His tears get louder and louder. We try to tell him that things have changed. He takes a look at the rats. He stares with pity. We follow his glance, then turn back to him and say, the rats aren’t visitors, the rats are rats. We think that he envies us perhaps, that he feels sad because he wasted his life working hard for the wrong cause. That’s why he cries, explains the zookeeper who doesn’t want us too concerned or worried, he wants us happy, if only for the visitors who pay for our food.

The zoo ghost looks away, his eyes travel over the fence and his ghostly body follows. Dead Boxer rises and makes a gesture, like he’s inviting us, but we can’t fly or walk through fences, not like ghosts do. We exchange awkward glances, we think he may not get the fence thing, we won’t ever cross it because outside lies danger, but he stretches his front legs, like saying, outside lies the sky. The zoo ghost lingers above our heads and his words fall hard on us, they hurt like rocks, when he says, life is too short to be spent in prison, but then the zookeeper starts singing the zoo anthem, urges us to sing along, and we join him and sing and forget.

We smile politely and play happy, but we can’t be; there is this ghost that walks among us, flies over our heads, our cages, inside our minds, haunting us, and he angers us with his persistence, because he can’t accept that we are as happy as we can be. The lion takes a step ahead and says, look, I’m wild and I’m accepted, and then the zebra talks and says, I look weird and I belong, while the monkey tries his best dance moves screaming, I follow my dreams, and we think we hear the bear say, poor rats, and the tiger mews like a cat, that she wants wings, but then the zookeeper comes. He steps in and yells, quiet, because we have a long day tomorrow, joy to devour, visitors to entertain. He promises that we all get wings in afterlife like dead Boxer has wings. Then he comes close and sits among us like he’s one of us, and sings us a soothing lullaby about how the rats once tried to take over our little heaven and how we won.

---

Mileva Anastasiadou is a neurologist, from Athens, Greece and the author of We Fade With Time and Christmas People by Alien Buddha Press. Her work has been selected for the Best Microfiction anthology and Wigleaf Top 50 and can be found in many journals, such as The Forge, Necessary Fiction, Passages North, and others. She's the flash fiction editor of Blood+Honey and The Argyle journals.

L.M. Conkling

The Artist’s Interview

         The subject insisted on conducting our interview by video chat instead of in person. When I asked why this was her preference, she replied, “I’m sensitive to smells,” and would elaborate no further.

         When I logged in, the picture was hazy and distorted.

         “Hello, Victoria,” I said, my voice chipper, “it looks like there might be something on your camera.”

         “Yes, there is.” Her amorphous form shifted slightly then stilled.

         I waited expectantly, then forced a smile. “Do you need to grab something to clean it with?”

         “No. It’s a scarf.”

         “Oh.” I licked my lips nervously. “Would you prefer a regular phone call?”

         “No.”

         “Alright.” Even though I could not see her clearly, I knew her from old photographs. The thin, hawkish nose, large gray eyes, and skeletal frame would not have changed much from her youth. Though now, instead of the rebel’s uniform of ragged t-shirts and dark pants, she seemed to be draped in an assortment of scarves and long robes like an ancient priestess. Her eyes were sharp, and even through the veil she’d draped over her camera lens I could feel them inspecting me carefully, taking in my tight ponytail and twin set. Although I had thought I looked polished this morning, now I felt childish. I should’ve worn a jacket, not a cardigan. It’s the little details that she will zero in on.

         “Do you have questions for me?”

        “Um, yes, I’m sorry.” I shuffled my papers as I felt my face redden. My preparation for this interview had been rushed, Victoria’s acceptance of the invitation wholly unexpected. Madelaine, my advisor, had told all her students to reach out to Victoria this year, as it was the twentieth anniversary of the Artist’s Pardons, excusing them of any charges that had been applied under the previous administration.

         Victoria had been amongst the first handful to be recognized, not only pardoned but awarded the National Medallion of Arts by the then newly elected president, Simone Algeny. Madelaine had been slightly alarmed when I told her I’d been able to schedule time; I know she’d been hoping one of her more politically leaning students would’ve had that honor, if Victoria granted it at all. I knew her name, as did everyone. She was mentioned in most Women’s History classes, which had never been my strongest subject. But I was tired of the assignments Madelaine encouraged me toward: asking children what their favorite flavors and colors were, writing up “This is Your Life” style interviews with the oldest residents in the county. I wanted someone to tell me something that would stick in my brain. I knew Victoria would be the one to do it.

         My first meaty journalistic piece.

         I smoothed one hand over my ponytail and smiled at the blurred image on my screen. “So, we are interested in what motivates people into extraordinary action.”

         She nodded curtly. “You are a student.”

         “Yes ma’am. But a senior this year.”

         “I’d have guessed freshman.”

         I tugged at my cardigan. It was even baby pink, for goodness’ sake. I should’ve gone with the black. “No, ma’am, a senior.”

         She shrugged her shoulders. “I’m not a ma’am. Not yet. Possibly not ever.”

         “Ok.” I bit at my lip, worrying at the tissue. I’d have no lipstick left at this rate. “So, as I was saying, we’re interviewing people about their extraordinary actions.”

         “So you said.”

         “And, I, um, wanted to ask about one of the bigger performance art pieces you did.”

         Her laugh was startling. “Who told you it was performance art?”

         I shuffled my papers until I found the articles chronicling her activities. “Well, I thought it was, because of your award? And the newspapers around here—"

         “Which ones?”

         As I rattled off the names of the three local papers she shifted, leaning forward over her desk. There was a hurried movement; I assumed she was taking notes.

         “I’ll look up the pieces; you don’t have to read them to me.” She settled back in her chair. “It wasn’t performance art. It was vandalism.”

         “Oh.” I clasped my hands in my lap to keep them from fidgeting. “Well, what made you want to vandalize property?”

         She sighed, the sound like rushing water through the speakers. “So many things. We all felt like we had to do something, you know? But what can you do in those kinds of situations? You’re powerless.”

         I nodded, past history lessons muddled in my head. I remembered there had been riots. Rights stripped away. But not much else. “Now when you say ‘we,’ you mean—"

         “Patty, Hector, Moira, and me. I never could’ve got up on top of some of those things without help. You realized that, surely.”

         “Of course.”

         I hadn’t. None of the articles, none of the textbooks, mentioned anyone but Victoria.

         I cleared my throat nervously. “There have been many questions about where you found your materials, especially at that time, when there were shortages of pretty much everything. Can you tell me where you sourced the raw elements of your pieces?”

         Again, she shrugged. “Everywhere. People throw out so much. We found wire coiled by garbage cans or pulled the springs from old mattresses. The wood was old pallets or pieces of disintegrating homes. I’m sure you know how many of those there are in the area.”

         Entire blocks of my hometown had been abandoned after the first wave of clashes turned violent, the empty husks of dilapidated homes still unclaimed to this day. Often, I wished a fire would break out, get rid of all of it. I think most people felt that way; everyone just wanted to forget. The cameras were the only thing protecting the remaining pieces of the old world.

         “Other bits would pop up without us looking and we’d always find a way to use them. Broken ceramics were my favorite.” Her sigh was wistful, memories rippling like stones thrown in a pond. “They were the best, at least for aesthetics. They weren’t the best for strength.”

         “There are so few photos of your work, and they’re grainy. Newspaper archives.” Behind the scarf, Victoria didn’t move. I shuffled my paper notes again, head ducked. “Um, to me, it looks like you used cement in a lot of your work. Is that right?”

         Victoria nodded. “When we could find it. It wasn’t as available then as it is now. People used it for so much then—building walls, lining moats. It was insane.”

         My fingers flew across the keyboard as I took notes. “So when there was no cement, what did you use?”

         Her laugh this time was genuine, crystalline. “Oh, it was so perfect. Hector—a brilliant mind, truly—came up with this mixture. It was so, so awful! But it set fast and set hard. But the smell!” She waved her hand in front of her face. “I picked up masks whenever I could, but even they didn’t help much.”

         “Do you know what was in it?”

         “No idea. We used to try to get him to tell us, but he’d refuse every time. But he could make vats of it anywhere, as long as he had water, dirt, and a drugstore.”

         I pulled out my favorite photo of her work and held it up to my camera. “Can you tell me more about this piece?”

         It was a dimensional mural, textured and rippling, plastered onto the brick wall of a tidy suburban home. Black lines and circles suggested a crowd clustered around the giant figure of a woman, her mouth open in what looked like a scream. Fangs curved beneath her cracked lips, dark liquid dripping from their points. Behind those bloody crescents, deep in the darkness of her throat, there were flames. Destruction.

         Victoria leaned closer to the monitor. Through the thin scarf, I think I saw her smile at the memory. “That was Patty’s design. Always the artist, though of course she couldn’t use it in those days, not for any legitimate purpose. Women weren’t supposed to have voices of any kind.”

         The veil over the camera wavered, sliding across my screen. Victoria reached for a large black creature I assumed to be a cat and settled the animal on her lap.

         “We spent the entire first night sketching. We used glow in the dark paint, can you believe it? So all day, before we added the textural elements, the design was right there, but they couldn’t see it.”

         She stroked the cat slowly. The gauzy barrier of the scarf slipped a bit more, and half of her face showed clearly. Her smile was dreamy, interrupted only by a ragged scar that started on her cheek, bisected her lips, and ended at her chin. I held my breath as I stared, this new image of her so different from the smooth-faced young woman in my old textbooks. My readers would be fascinated. Could I ask about the scar? How, without telling her the scarf had slipped?

        “I think about it sometimes, why we did it.” Victoria continued, oblivious to my curiosity. “It could’ve been so bad, then. We could’ve been locked up, or worse. You girls are so lucky now, but we weren’t. They sold some girls, I’ve heard. To other countries or gave them away as bribes. Girls who were supposed to be on their way somewhere—usually jail or the asylums they had built—but never arrived.”

        Victoria was quiet again, and her gray eyes grew glassy and distant. “I never thought about it at the time, not until Moira’s sister Angela went missing. Over something stupid, really. She was thirteen and shoplifted a lip gloss. They were sending her to juvie, but she never arrived. Moira never got answers, not in all these years. When she tried, she was told to let it go, that her sister was gone. But Moira had always been a painter, a talented portrait artist, and she decided to put her sister’s face everywhere. At first, I was just the lookout, made sure no one caught us. But the pictures of Angela would be painted over the next day. Which is when Hector got involved, and we started using cement, mud, things that were harder to erase.

         “Angela, though, she was gorgeous. Even though she was only thirteen, she turned the heads of grown men. Which is dangerous now, but then?” Victoria shook her head. The sliver of clarity the shifted scarf provided allowed me to see the anger tightening the skin around her eyes. “Girls would do anything to not be beautiful, did you know that? Wear ugly, dirty clothes. Not wash their hair for weeks. We couldn’t cut our hair at that point without persecution, though I know some wanted to. Some women even tried to pose as men, but that didn’t go well for them. As you know, right?”

         I nodded slowly. Had this been taught in school? I couldn’t remember. This had all happened before my time. My parents hadn’t talked of those times, certainly had never been a part of the uprisings. It had never been a part of my story.

         Victoria continued, her voice low. “As for Angela… I sometimes wonder if she’s still out there, or if she got away. I hope she’s dead.”

         Silence descended between us. The scarf slid a little more and I held my breath to keep from gasping. They must have smoothed this over in the photographs I’d seen, or this had happened after she’d gone into hiding. Victoria’s face had more than one scar. The right side of her face was a pattern of dots and dashes, spiraling out into a fanned flower. The scars were pink and ridged, precise and calculated.

         It was beautiful.

         And it was horrible.

         “I like your twin set.”

         Victoria’s voice caught me by surprise. When I glanced up, her gray eyes were staring directly into mine. I wasn’t sure if she’d noticed that her cat had upset her scarf, and I wasn’t going to tell her. I needed more time to study her face, her reactions, her eyes. If I was going to communicate to my readers what this legend looked like now.

         “Thank you,” I said, tugging at the edge of the pale pink cardigan. “I wanted to look professional.”

         “It’s better to look like yourself,” she said, her hand sliding down the cat’s back. “But you still look nice.”

         Looking like myself would’ve meant pajamas pants and a stained t-shirt. I doubt that would’ve inspired much trust from a woman like Victoria.

         “Thank you.” I cleared my throat. “So, about this piece?”

         “Yes. That piece.” Victoria smiled again, the scars around her eye crinkling into the folds. “We only did the doors and windows that time because we wanted to seal them in. Every section was inspired by something he’d said or done, a reflection of his hate. I wanted him buried under it. My idea had been to do a mosaic across every inch of the house, making it impossible for them to get out. But it would’ve taken too much time. I was still happy with what we did, and in the end, I rather liked the negative space the open walls gave.”

         “Me too!” I held up the picture and pointed. “My favorite is the front door. I like these bits here, where it looks like bars.”

         “That’s dog shit, encased in mattress springs.”

         I stared at the photo. “Seriously? That is disgusting.”

         “Hector’s idea.” Victoria’s lips tilted, her scars rippling as she smiled. “He said that’s what the man living in that house was, and the mattress springs were because of the abuses we suspected at the time. Which were confirmed later. Besides, smells didn’t bother Hector like they do me, so he sometimes used very nasty elements in his pieces.” She leaned forward and the cat was dumped on the floor. He stalked away with a meow of protest, his black tail fluffed and upright.

         “I did the side door. Do you have a picture of that?”

         I held up a photo to the camera. The door frame and steps were covered with hundreds of small U-shaped lumps, of various colors and sizes. Some were thick and plain, others delicate and ornamental. It seemed a hodge-podge, unlike her other pieces.

         “This one?”

         “Yes.”

         Her eyes flicked from the photo to me. I tried not to indicate I could see her clearly.

         “Do you know what those are?”

         I shook my head.

         “Most people don’t, not anymore. At the time, the man who lived in that house had made a silly little statement, something that no one remembers. He’d said that the strong drink coffee, like real men. The weak drink tea, like subdued women. So for months before we did this project, I collected the handles off every teacup I came across. Then I bound them to his door, making such a thick, strong slab he could not escape.”

         Victoria’s voice was angry as she remembered. “He probably didn’t notice. He was that kind. But I knew. I knew it took machinery tearing the door from its hinges to let him out.”

         My fingers flew across the keyboard as I recorded her story. It seemed obtuse, distant even. My professors had told me that art that must be explained was not really art.

         “Why did you use teacup handles for this? I mean, I understand that you were trying to play off his statement, but—"

         “That’s not what it was about at all.” Her gray eyes were sharp and disappointed. I felt as though I had failed her.

         “I’m sorry, I just thought you were trying to, um, cover him in tea since he said it was too feminine?”

         “No.” Her sigh was magnified in my cramped apartment and I hunched down in my seat, trying to be as small as possible.

         “He said that tea was weak, like women. The multiple handles—and their representation of all women, since they were of all colors, sizes, and shapes—is what that was about. How all of us together, even broken, were able to trap his hateful heart in that prison he called home.”

         “Hmmm, okay.” I thought of President Algeny, her presence throughout my entire life as she navigated her way to an unprecedented sixth term. The men she managed, the way she deftly squashed any disrespect with guillotine and firing squad. The world Victoria was describing felt like the fever dream of raving dissident.

         “So you’re not an artist,” Victoria said.

         It was a statement, not a question.

         “Well, not myself, no. I did take art classes in school. But mostly I’m a writer.” I shifted under her scrutiny. After a moment she sat back in her seat, her smile adding new textures to her scarred face.

         “So you’re an artist, just not a visual one. That’s actually a relief. I don’t have to explain my art to other artists. If I do, I know they’re morons. But a writer…that makes sense. It’s not your scene.”

         “But I thought you said it was vandalism, not art.”

         “But you choose to see it as art, so it is for you. In my time, that opinion could’ve got you arrested, and a sweet thing like you, in your pastel pink twin set, would’ve gone the way of Angela for such opinions.”

         I could again feel her studying me through the camera, and I steeled myself enough to meet her gaze. We hung in silence for a moment, our eyes locking in that fraction of clear space. Then she reached forward and straightened the scarf, again establishing the hazy division between us.

         “Do you have any more questions? I don’t like to stay on these connections too long. It’s too easy for someone to figure out where I am.”

         “But you were forgiven for all your crimes when Simone Algeny became President.”

         “Forgiveness on paper is nice. Forgiveness from the government is nice. But all those men that were ousted when Simone got the seat? All their followers, and the sects and militias and nationalists and traditionalists? They didn’t just go away. They’re still there. And someone like me, who made fools of them when they were at their most powerful, would be quite a score for them nowadays. So let’s wrap this up.”

         “Um, yes, just one more question.” I started to flick through my notes again, but then glanced up at Victoria’s still form. The blurred division between us gave me courage to ask the only question that mattered to me. “Why did you accept my interview request? You must get a lot of them.”

         She was quiet for so long I did not think she would answer.

         “You’re right. I got hundreds. Thousands, maybe. This anniversary really seemed to rile up the journalists. So to be honest? I didn’t want to go with a major media source, so I just picked a student’s request at random. That happened to be you.” Victoria smiled, and even through the scarf’s barrier I could see that it was small, tight.          “I’m sorry if you thought it was because there was something special about you. Anything else?”

         I was barely able to stutter out my thanks before Victoria ended the call. Madelaine was right to doubt my ability; I hadn’t been able to get enough to write a decent piece. I always took notes during an interview to jot down any thoughts for angles that might come up, and as I glanced at my screen I saw I had written a list of names.

         Hector.

         Patty.

         Moira.

         Angela.

         Angela. The vanished girl. The beauty who didn’t try to hide behind dirty hair, who was vain and young and silly enough to steal cosmetics during a harshly fascist regime that sneered at the rights of women. This much I remembered from school, though I always felt like they harped on it a little too much. It certainly couldn’t have been that bad, not when less than thirty years later women were so solidly in power.

         But Angela… of course she was my angle. Her disappearance was the epitome of how things had been in Victoria’s younger years.

         My hair was still in a ponytail when I heard a key unlocking my door. I hadn’t even had time to change out of my cardigan before they came in swiftly, silently, their clothes ordinary, their faces clean shaven. Most of them were young, though a few were grizzled, close to Victoria’s age. They looked like the men I saw waiting tables, pushing strollers, installing cable lines. They were unremarkable.

         One crossed the room to crouch down beside me. “We will not hurt you if you are still and quiet.”

         Hurt me? My mouth opened to protest and his hand was suddenly on my arm, heavy, hot, and squeezing. The spike of fear running through my core was unfamiliar, nauseating. A glimpse into another world, one that I’d been told was eradicated before my time.

         One of the men lifted my laptop from me, seating himself at my battered table, his fingers flying over my keyboard. After a moment I heard my own voice, tinny and high, as I greeted Victoria. My stomach clenched as I realized that my call had been recorded.

         The men huddled around my table, their presence taking up so much air I fought to breathe. My hands gripped the edge of my chair as they silently watched my screen, their smiles brilliant when the scarf slipped, giving them a view of her face.

         “I told you this was the right place,” one of them said softly.

         They left as quietly as they came, filing out my door into the hallway. I could still feel that heavy hand imprinted on my skin long after their footsteps faded.

         I tried to reach Victoria again, but she would not accept my calls. My emails to her went unanswered. The cops were uninterested since there had been no theft, violence, or even threat.

         A month later when the piece ran about Victoria, highlighting her artistic efforts and ongoing behind-the-scenes activism, I began to receive the phone calls. At first, the silence would only be broken by a wet, salacious panting, like a dog on a summer day.  But they soon changed, a woman’s screams shattering like broken glass down the line, a reminder of what could be. I was relieved that Madeleine had edited out the bit about the men swarming my apartment.
         Graduation came with its scratchy cap and gown and when I left town to start a new job, I changed my number and the calls stopped. I wondered about Victoria and remembered what she’d said about Angela: that she hoped she was dead. I hold that same hope for Victoria, too.

         I don’t walk alone at night anymore. There is a tide turning, and I wonder how many will drown before it ebbs. I keep quiet, pray for safety, and hope no one realizes that I see them. Really see them.

         I am only one. There is nothing else I can do.

---

L.M. Conkling is an author of speculative, corporate, and supernatural horror. In her free time, she enjoys exploring new restaurants and haunted locations, challenging herself with difficult recipes that last several pages, reading, and creating quilts that cause viewers to stare for much too long. L.M. Conkling resides in the Pacific Northwest with her husband, Will, and their black hellhound, Val. She received her Bachelor’s degree in English Literature from Cal Poly Humboldt.

Kate Maxlow

I Figured Out How to Turn Dopamine Into Solid Gold

         Last Saturday, after the second espresso martini, I figured out how to turn dopamine into solid gold. Then, because the espresso martinis were hungry, I ground the dopamine gold into little flakes and used them to flavor some spaghetti. It tasted like chicken. I wrote down the recipe and put it somewhere I’d be sure to find it again, and accordingly, I haven’t seen it since.

         So on Monday, I ask my therapist if she can hypnotize me into remembering. She rolls her eyes and tells me to picture the last place I had it, or maybe try journaling about it. I shrug and say that seems like a lot of work and maybe I’ll just use the Betty Crocker recipe for chicken piccata instead. (I can feel her silent groan every time I waltz into her office; she has given me all the handouts on mindfulness and I have yet to read even one. But really, how am I supposed to take life advice from someone who secretly believes you can’t actually turn dopamine into gold?)

         The following Tuesday, I find the recipe beside the boxers that went to live under my bed, the silk ones with mushrooms that proclaim, ‘Hey, I’m a fungi!’ They belonged to my ex, who said I needed to buckle down and take life seriously for once and that’s why he couldn’t be with me anymore. He sells tires now and is married to a professional astrologist. Once a month I sign up for a new email at a public library and spam her business page with questions about Ophiuchus, the ignored stepchild of the astrology world.

         In November, she shuts down her site. Feeling guilty, I make an appointment to have her do my star chart and I promise myself I won’t tell her I could just use ChatGPT or (wait for it) Gemini. Her office, tucked above a company that installs bespoke fallout shelters, smells like a cloying miasma of amber and sandalwood, and I sneeze three times in the waiting room. Her previous appointment is running over—I hear a woman crying about something that her dead Corgi said at the last seance—so I chicken out and leave. I stop by TJ Maxx and buy my ex-boyfriend’s professional astrologist wife thirteen different scented candles, one to represent each Zodiac sign (I see you Ophiuchus), and leave them on her doorstep with an unsigned card that says ‘Hang in there!’

         When I tell this story to my therapist, she recommends I see the doctor to change my medication. That’s when I tell her: I haven’t taken that junk in months because it makes the dopamine taste like blue cheese and goat urine. She does not ask how I know the taste of goat urine, which is unfortunate, because it’s a really funny story.

         Instead, she gesticulates wildly in my direction and shouts, “Why are you like this?”

         Ah, finally! I think to myself. For years I have been digging away at her professional training and demeanor with a spoon, wondering what’s behind the careful facade, wanting to connect with her soul the way she interrogates mine. She has that special gift: a big heart hidden behind a face she keeps carefully neutral as her patients confess all the horrors of the universe.

         Her heart is so beautiful I want to bite it to know what a good person actually tastes like. Just the one bite, I think—before the world goes up in flames, before we are all ash and memories, like best friends who never stayed in touch. Like those three big countries who finally decided they’d had enough of posturing and meddling and hypocrisy. For months, they sent our country threats and I bullied a professional astrologist because her stars were slowly killing us all. I bit my nails, hand-copied star maps by moonlight, and prayed to all the gods who’d forgotten to remember their Mindfulness lessons. Then finally, last week—my birthday!—those three once-best friends sent us bombs and mushroom clouds. I can’t wait to see what we send them back, any day or minute now.

         So I tell her, “We’re standing at the end of the world. Why shouldn’t we enjoy this last, heady draught of dopamine to its fullest?”

         She puts her head in her hands and cries.

         I pat her shoulder and ask if she’d like to borrow my gratitude journal.

---

Kate Maxlow is a former school district administrator who likes to wear sparkly shoes when she has tea with her existential dread. She lives in Virginia with her family. Her work appears in Maudlin House, Defenestration, Jersey Devil Press, and more. She can be found at https://katemaxlowauthor.com/kate-maxlow or on BlueSky at @katemaxlow.bsky.social‬.

E Ce Miller

Elvin’s Mother Dreams of Koi

         I had a little baby once who rose from the quaked earth of my body, comma-ed over gloved hands like a peeled-pink shrimp, webbed with red, good enough to nibble; nibble sometimes I did, brushing the front of my teeth against the tender skin of his cheeks, sucking in air, mimicking consumption. All nom-nom.

         For a while I kept the baby in a laundry basket in the center of my bed—rectangular, padded down with bath towels—until he started to roll and scoot, inched the basket closer and closer to tipping over the edge, to spilling the baby and the towels all over the floor like so much washing. So I moved the basket to the floor, but still the little baby grew until he was quite a large baby, arms and legs reaching through the slats like a belly-shelled turtle.
         The wash had really begun to pile up in the corner outside the bathroom, where the basket used to sit, so I finally took the baby and the towels out of the basket and dumped all the dirty laundry in. By the time I turned to reach for the baby on the floor, he was gone, and the side door that didn’t latch well was open and swinging in the wind.
         I ran out the door and across the yard and down the street, looking in all directions, when a Koinobori came yawning out of the sky, blue-black scales flying, tail waving umbilically behind it. I hadn’t realized it was the season for carp streamers, being occupied with the baby and all, but the sun on my skin said spring and I hadn’t hung one—marveled, for a moment, at how much bad luck I’d inadvertently invited into my little baby’s life. It suddenly felt like an eternity since I’d last seen him and I thought maybe if I caught the streamer and hung it, he’d see it and come back.

         Wind-inflated, paper teeth flicking, riding a wave of air. I pursued that carp as people in the street looked on, neighbors I hardly recognized muttering to themselves, pointing at the madwoman flailing arms overhead, screaming after a carp streamer, though not one of them would think twice about a mother running behind a running child instead of a flying one.

         Finally—ahh—I caught it: chased it into a treetop, untangled the fish free from branches, clutched its ribboned rainbow cord in my fist and drew it to my chest, rocked back and forth, cradled its windsock snout in my palm. Eventually, night came, chilled the air, so I tucked my carp into my shirt and descended, curling into a nook of exposed roots, too tired for anything but sleep. By morning, my clothes were damp and smelled of fish and I shivered and hugged myself all the way home, where the side door was still blown open. Inside, I removed my sopping shirt and out fell a carp, golden and long as my arms spread wide. I didn’t have anywhere to store such a large fish, so I dumped all the laundry out of the basket and put the carp in, curling it around itself, apologizing for smashing it a bit in the process. Then I gathered the laundry in my arms, carried it to the roof, hung it all unwashed on the line, where it flapped and fought against the breeze.
         I returned indoors to find the carp a carp streamer again and there inside the carp inside the basket was my little baby all swaddled up in polyester scales, rows of washi paper teeth circling his neck like a ruffle.

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E Ce Miller's writing has been performed in the Liars' League reading series in London and is published or forthcoming in Bustle, Heavy Feather Review, Pacifica Literary Review, and elsewhere. Originally from the American Midwest, now living in South Korea, she is writing a collection of speculative short fiction and a novel.