C.M. Green

The Lover

Week one: You skip Mass.

Week two: You stand outside the doors of the Church at 11:07. It’s not too late; they probably haven’t even started the Liturgy of the Word yet. You could still go in. It just felt so good last week not to. Not to feel trapped for an hour like a rat in a maze. Not to worry that everyone could hear your thoughts. Not to think at all, actually. At 11:14, you turn away and walk home.

Week three: You try going to a different church, one where you’ve heard the priest is liberal and people can wear leggings and piercings. You sit through the readings and the homily, but when the gifts are brought to the front, and the Liturgy of the Eucharist begins, you slip out and sit in your car for the rest of the hour. You listen to NPR and the news is bad in Florida. When the crowd comes out of the church into the parking lot, you pull away quickly and head for your coffee shop where your coworker knows that you want an iced Americano. At a table by the window, you try to read, but you know something now: skipping Mass once is an accident and a mortal sin. Skipping Mass three times is a pattern.

Week four: You sleep in and cry when you realize you missed Mass again. You could go to a later service, somewhere in the city, but you don’t.

Week five: You get an early breakfast with your sister. She asks you how the new job is going, and she looks a little disappointed when you say you love it. “Brendan says they’re always hiring at his work,” she offers. He works in consulting, though who he consults and on what topic you’ve never figured out. Your sister practiced law until her third child was born, and she has always hoped you might do what she did not. She’s like your parents, in a way, except they are in Florida enjoying retirement and seldom talk to you. Your sister talks to you all the time. She has to leave by 9:30 so that she can take her children to Mass, and she says one more time, “There are tons of good jobs out there. You don’t have to stay where you are.”

Week eight: You pick up a closing shift for a coworker, and you and the manager are alone. He starts a long conversation about romance because he’s trying to figure out if he even wants to date. You tell him, “I don’t think dating is for me. People just don’t like me like that.” He pushes and digs and when you tell him you’re Catholic, or ex-Catholic, or sort of Catholic, he snaps his fingers. “It all makes sense now.” As you clean the espresso machine at the end of the night, he offers to set you up with a friend if you ever want. You think he probably knows very cool people. All your friends in college were Catholic and most of them looked the same, like white girls out of Invisalign commercials. It’s nice, working at the coffee shop, to see that people arrange their lives in myriad ways. It’s nice, too, to see that not everyone is straight.

Week eleven: Struck by something you at first call divine, you go to Confession. You sit behind the screen; you aren’t ready to look anyone in the eye and say this. “Forgive me Father, for I have sinned. It has been about five months since my last Confession.” You run through the list for him: lust, pride, avarice. He wants details, and you give him some but retain others. You tell him, for example, about wanting to strangle your sister last week when she sent you a four-paragraph email explaining why she thinks you should have a real job, but you don’t tell him about touching yourself and imagining St. Sebastian shot through with arrows. You tell him that you haven’t been to Mass in almost three months, but you don’t tell him why. He says, “Well, the place to start would be to go to Mass tomorrow. Jesus is still waiting for you, ready to forgive you if you want to be forgiven. Do you want that?” You say, “Yes,” so you make your Act of Contrition and he absolves you of your sins. A small part of you feels cleaner, but most of you is left wondering why a priest should have this power. Why God is so limited. Guilt for everything you didn’t say pumps through your body like a steroid in your blood stream.

Week fourteen: You go to a Methodist service, but it doesn’t feel real without the Eucharist.

Week fifteen: It’s the Triduum. You decide you’ll go to Mass on Easter, at least to please your sister. On Holy Thursday, in the shower, you wash your own feet and for the first time in almost a year, you pray. “What do you want from me?” You say it over and over until you’re crying, because it feels like you are screaming into a jagged silent cavern. The next day, you listen to Johnny Cash and the Carter Sisters sing “Were you there when they crucified my lord.” You want to feel what you used to feel about this, a real grief, mourning for a friend. Instead, only numbness. But on Easter Sunday, you go back to church. As soon as you step in, your chest constricts and your eyes burn and your thoughts spin faster and faster and you think Oh, I am a sinner, a queer dyke fag slut cunt sinner who will go to hell and suffer eternally because I am ungrateful and how many evil, evil things have I done this week alone and I need to stay here to be saved but the cost of salvation is to feel like this and I don’t know how to stand that. You don’t hear a single word the priest says as you sit certain that you are irredeemable. When it’s time for the Eucharist, you don’t go up to take it because you know you aren’t worthy, but how can you be unworthy of something that isn’t real, but even thinking it isn’t real is a sin so you must be damned. When Mass is finally over you almost run to your car because you have been holding back sobs for an hour and fifteen minutes and you finally release them, turn the radio up louder and there’s more bad news but you can’t hear it over your own weeping.

Week eighteen: You finally let your manager set you up with his friend, your first date in almost two years. He’s a little older, a little taller, beautiful but boring. You should like him, because he has a real job and he’s nice and your coworker thinks you’re perfect for each other. But when he looks at you, you feel like you are something you are not. It’s like you’re sitting in Church. He tells you a long anecdote about a chemistry experiment gone wrong and you laugh at the right places. At the end, he walks you to your car and says, “I’d love to do this again.” He leans down and kisses you, your first kiss since college, and your skin feels like it will crack and release something toxic if he doesn’t stop touching you this second.

Week twenty-two: You get a promotion at the coffee shop, shift manager, and you text your sister, excited to share the news. Her reply is enthusiastic but you know what she really thinks. You wonder if she’s right, if you should find a job with a salary, but you can’t bring yourself to even look. For the first time you understand your work. You enjoy the act of creation, of being productive in a literal sense. And the coffee shop is the first place you have ever known people who feel like your mirror.

Week twenty-four: You aren’t a hermit, so you know trans people exist, but this is your first time really hanging out with one. You met her at work, where she’s become a regular, and she asks you on a date while you’re talking after your shift one day. She suggests a hike, so you drive out of the city a little and meet at a trail that disappears into the woods. It’s the best date you’ve ever been on, your first date with a girl. The conversation is easy and light and then easy and deep. You tell her a little about church, how you stopped going months ago now. She’s Jewish and tells you a bit about her own experience. “I like asking questions. I never want to take the first answer I come to.” When you reach the end of the trail, you stand on an outcropping above the river. She says, “Can I kiss you?” and you freeze. No one has ever asked you that. She smiles, soft and kind, and says, “It’s okay. We don’t have to.” But before you part ways, before she gets in her car, you say, “I think I’d like that kiss.” And it feels warm and grounding, and you think you can never see her again.

Week twenty-five: You shave your hair off.

Week twenty-eight: It’s your niece’s first Communion. When your sister sees you she raises her eyebrows. “New look?” In addition to the buzzcut, you’ve also acquired two piercings. She doesn’t look happy about it, and you feel even worse sitting in church than you used to, like every eye is on you. She doesn’t know you don’t go to Mass anymore, so you follow her up to receive the Eucharist, but at the last minute, you cross your arms over your chest and the priest blesses you instead of giving you the bread. You just hope your sister didn’t notice. Afterwards, there’s a reception and all the second-graders in their white dresses and suits run around the parish hall. You text the girl you’ve now gone on several dates with and tell her where you are. Her response is immediate and sympathetic and she offers to buy you a drink tonight. You agree and that evening you meet her at a dive bar she loves and she buys you a vodka cranberry and a gin and tonic for herself. You sit and talk and laugh, because she’s so good at making you laugh and she thinks you’re funny, too, and have you ever felt this relaxed with another person before? She makes you forget about the things that make it hard to live, but not by erasing anything. By seeing you in another context. You tell her that you wanted to cry for your niece as she received the Eucharist for the first time, an indoctrination into something you’re pretty sure is evil. But you also tell her that you still miss it, the ritual and the beauty. After you’ve each had two drinks, you take her to that all-night taco place your coworker recommended and the red grease from the chorizo drips down your chin and she wipes it off with her thumb. And you are twenty-four and you haven’t believed in god for at least twenty-two weeks and possibly for three and a half years, so you ask her to come back to your apartment where you live alone and where you’ve never had company. She smiles when she walks in and asks why you invited her back. You don’t know how to say it, she’s the one who’s good with words, not you, so you kiss her softly, hesitant, and she seems to understand. Under her hands you become consecrated, form the same but substance absolutely new. Each piece of clothing that comes off sends you farther from Calvary, and her fingers trace your neck, arms, thighs. When she touches you, you think about hands in wounds and life-giving water and proof, evidence, certainty. Then you don’t think of anything at all but her, and her tongue, and the way her neck looks like this, and the way her back feels beneath your heel.

Week twenty-nine: You tell your sister you don’t think you’re Catholic anymore. You say it just to hurt her, not because you care if she knows. She says, “Is it because you’re gay?” You don’t respond. “I’ll pray for you,” she says, and now you feel dirty. Like her prayer is a stain you can’t remove. You think about Christ on the Cross, and you feel something akin to envy. That night, you ask your girlfriend how she knew she was a girl, and she says, “I felt it in my skin. But mostly in how people looked at me. It’s relational, because everything is, right? Nothing in a vacuum.”

Week thirty-three: You buy a suit jacket at the thrift store, sky blue and pure silk, and you walk around the city by yourself wearing it. Nothing is materially different about you, but you think about the last time you tasted the Eucharist, the paper thin wafer and the astringent wine, and you finally know that yes, that was the last time.

---

C.M. Green (he/they) is a Boston-based writer. They focus on history, memory, religion, and gender in their writing. C.M.’s writing has been published in Full House Literary, beestung, and elsewhere, and they are a 2025 Pushcart nominee. Their debut hybrid chapbook, I Am Never Leaving Williamsburg, is available from fifth wheel press. They support a free Palestine and encourage you to find tangible ways to do the same. You can find their work at cmgreenwrites.com.

Rick White

2007: The Summer the Smoking Ban Came into Place

And suddenly the pubs all smelled disgustingly of human bodies—rank breath and stale conversation. Without that old grey shroud to cover us, the succour and the fug of it, everything seemed at once too real, too solid to ignore.            

We found refuge in the smoking area (formerly the beer garden, although it was never a garden at all but a brick courtyard strung with flickering fairy lights and rickety benches—pretty enough, in its own way).

“Have one for me, will you?” you asked. You were trying to quit but still liked the smell, and a freshly-lit cigarette mingled with the trapped heat of summer pavements is a fine thing indeed. So I had one for you.  Haloed in the silvery smoke and the waning light we talked; talked of our favourite cigarettes, taken from us so cruelly now by the locum doctors in the for-your-own-good wards.            

“In a café. Early morning with coffee and the papers, when it’s raining outside,” I’d offered, typically dour. “In the club!” you countered. “When you’ve just come off the dancefloor and you’ve got that nice sheen of sweat on your skin, like after sex.”

The way you said it bumped my heart into my lungs. I’d invited you out to the smoking area on the premise we were just two fellow smokers who needed to get out. Now you were flirting. Or were you? Maybe you were merely asserting your dominance and higher social ranking? Underscoring the obvious fact that of the two of us, you were the sexy one.

I couldn’t work it out. My brain was starting to whir and fry. But I hadn’t time to pause, for at that moment the sun slipped below the kerb and the moon popped up above the fence—full and fancy and closer than it should’ve been, really, when I think about it now.

A dapper-looking black cat perched atop the wobbly old fence, appearing from nowhere as cats have a habit of doing, silhouetted against the moon’s pale light, a perfect tableau—spectral in framing.[1] He gave his tail a laconic swish, and then another, as the smoke swirled upwards past the moon.

“I think he wants us to follow him,” you said.

“He wants you to follow him,” I corrected.

“You can come if you want,” said the cat.            

You leaned in and took my arm; you smelled of perfume and sandalwood and charity shops. Your hair touched the bare skin on my arm. There was no way I wasn’t going with you.

We travelled over late-August parks, summer bandstands and barbecues. Pumpkin fields, smouldering bonfire-leaves and drowsing Sunday scarecrows. We floated up, up, up, on the thermals, looking down on Christmas chimney-tops and January frost.

And we came to a house, somewhere in a space that was not where we had come from, and not quite where we were going. And we walked through a door.

And inside there was love, and brightness. There was music playing in the background—The Cure’s Greatest Hits (in my opinion). There were candles burning and the scent of fresh cotton. There were cut-glass tumblers and peaty scotch.

And                        

we are both

still here.      

Two children sit at the table, decorating pumpkins. I don’t recognise either of them, though they seem innocuous enough, their features undefined and unmapped to me. I feel no pull towards them, until the older one—the boy—starts hacking with a knife at the orange flesh, gouging two uneven holes for eyes. I feel a strange compulsion to take the blade from him, or at least to place my hand on his wrist and guide him towards a better impression of a face.             

The boy is called Lennox, the little red-headed girl is Annie. She has chosen to paint her pumpkin black, working diligently to cover every bit of the surface before sprinkling purple glitter on top. Her gothic pumpkin is quite strikingly beautiful and I decide in this moment that I would die for this tiny new artist if she asked me to.

Days pass, weeks maybe, no, not weeks. The glitter still blankets the kitchen like the last of a winter snowfall and one of the pumpkins begins to sag and rot. Eventually it collapses in on itself and leaks foul smelling liquid across the kitchen table which seeps into some outdated correspondence left there by you.             

“Why did you let this happen?” Is that your voice I’m hearing? I’m not sure anymore, it doesn’t sound familiar but I answer anyway—            

“I didn’t. It just happened.”             

“Well it was inconsiderate.”            

“How am I supposed to consider every eventuality that might occur? I can’t control the pumpkins, it isn’t my fault.”            

“Nothing ever is,” says the cat, from somewhere down the hall, just loud enough for me to hear.

Fuck this, I think. I want to smoke. But I can’t smoke inside and it’s so cold out there. It’s cold in here too. So I take a hatchet into the draughty living room and chop my limbs into firewood, arranging myself neatly in the log-burning stove. I shave strips of skin from my back and scrunch up today’s newspaper to use as kindling. You find me holding a match uselessly between my teeth, trying in vain to strike it.              

“Why do you always do this?” you ask, not unreasonably.             

“Do what?” I sputter back.             

“Act like I am the one who has somehow diminished you?”            

“Balls,” I say. “I could have been a tree.”            

“I didn’t make you come here, get out of the stove.”            

“No. Let me burn. Spark a match for me and control my oxygen with that little grate thingy in the stove. I’ll warm us and then I’ll go.”            

At once we’re both aware of how ridiculous we sound. How this isn’t where either of us thought we were going, yet here we are. This version of us, here in this place, is not the version we would have chosen to show our children; they deserve—we assume—something better.            

Or perhaps not.            

Perhaps there is no version of love in which one person does not end up chopped into bits in a log burner, or as a rotten pumpkin-head slumped on a kitchen table, brains leaking everywhere. Perhaps that is the best thing we can know.            

“I’m going for a smoke,” I say. Beyond the glitter-frosted kitchen, the warm mechanised glow of the oven, the whistle of the kettle.            

I step through the patio doors onto the cold and uneven decking which feels as though it’s about to give way as it begrudgingly accepts my weight. I know, in some part of my brain—the dimly lit closet at the back of my memory where I keep everything now— that it was me who built it, because it looks OK but it’s not. The angles are all just a fraction out. These rickety old joists were meant to kiss each other but somehow just missed.

I take my last cigarette from the pack, the one I’ve been saving. My old Zippo appears in my hand, catching the spark first time as I light up—the pull and the crackle and the glow. The first puffs disappearing into the blackness of the space outside our little home. The feeling of the smoke in my lungs which never really left.             Our old black cat winds itself around my leg, as soft and as light as breath[2], and you step out beside me and say, “Go on then, have one for me.”

~

[1] A cat may appear to you, but you will never see one arrive. This is because cats are always where they’re supposed to be, whereas you, are not.      

[2] If you should meet a cat on Halloween night, they’ll be on a journey. Whether it’s your journey or not isn’t something you can know. You should always follow, but don’t tarry, for they will not wait for you.          

---

Rick White is an ex-smoker who now lives and writes in Manchester, UK. Read more of Rick's work at www.ricketywhite.com.

Lisa Thornton

The High Plateau

My grandfather tosses chopped onion and green pepper into a pan. He squirts soy sauce and vinegar and drops in a spoonful of chili paste. His fast-moving hands add some other stuff, too. Stuff I don’t know the names of. He’ll only let me flip the burgers even though I’m one quarter Chinese.

The ash of his Chesterfield is longer than the non-smoked part. His lips are strong, and he holds the cigarette straight out with the strength of them, so the long stick of grey ash appears to be defying gravity by not falling into the vegetables. Every minute or two, he grasps the cigarette carefully between his right thumb and forefinger and taps it into a sixth pan. A line of butts stains the countertop beside him. By closing time, there will be twenty or thirty.

My grandfather didn’t say anything when I flunked out of the University of Wyoming. He didn’t say he was ashamed or anything like that. Just offered me a job back home in the restaurant, which was maybe worse. When the disc of raw meat that is the American burger option on our menu begins to turn grey, I flip it. I slide the long-handled metal spatula under the patty and toss it onto its other side. I check the dangling slip of paper to see whether to add cheese from a large block that I often scrape white flakes off of before the dinner shift because cheese only goes on this one item, so we don’t order it very often from the Sysco guy.

I wipe down the booth that me and my friends crushed into after school. Before graduation. Grandfather used to bring us a plate of shumai and let us fill our Pepsis however many times we wanted from the pop machine. The lady on the kicking-you-out-of-college committee said I wasn’t ready. She said I needed more time. Like a patty that’s still pink. I’ve got time now. I sleep until late afternoon and then ride my bike to the restaurant. Grandfather is already there, every day but Monday when we’re closed, smoking in the mop closet where he shoehorned a desk and then piled it with receipts and restaurant supply catalogues, ashtrays, and slips of carbon copy paper. He doesn’t look at the clock when I arrive through the back door and lean my bike against the walk-in cooler. He’s never asked me what next.

Last night, a guy who works on the train with my stepdad ordered take-out. He asked Grandfather at the cash register what I was doing back in town. Grandfather clenched his cigarette between his lips. My stepdad says I can get a job on the train tomorrow. He says the pay is good even at the start and I’ll be taken care of for life. Davis’s wife needed two kidneys, and she had the whole thing covered by Union Pacific, he says. Both surgeries. He always adds that last detail. My stepdad doesn’t know how to make Chinese food, either. He came here from Mexico in the seventies to work the oil fields. He’s never told me why he switched to the train, but my theory is he was too skinny to hold his own out there.

There’s only desert between our house and the restaurant. Sometimes a white-tailed deer in the yard. This is not the Yellowstone postcard part of Wyoming. It’s the Flying J Travel Plaza off I80 part. The dry part. The state pen part. The white rocks on the side of a hill arranged in the shape of a cowboy riding a bucking bronco part. The antelope bones bleaching in the dirt part. But once, riding to work, I saw a golden eagle swoop down low in the direction where I used to go camping with the guys before we left for UW, south by Battle Creek. It stretched its sharp talons in front of itself and used its wings like a parachute behind it to brake a bit, snatched a ground squirrel, and then coasted out of sight. I never saw that in Laramie.

The guy ordering take-out has his young daughter standing beside him with two pigtails and yellow leggings on. She orders an egg roll and a cup of wonton soup. I secure the plastic lid on the soup cup and run my thumb along the rim so it won’t slip off. There was always something about wonton soup to me when I was her age. The dumpling floating there where it doesn’t belong. Made better somehow by being in the soup. Better than a whole plate of wontons outside of soup. A joyful surprise. How funny to find you here, I used to think as I pushed down on the floating dumpling with my spoon. How delightful.

---

Lisa Thornton is a writer and nurse. She has stories in SmokeLong Quarterly, New World Writing, Cincinnati Review, and other magazines. She has been shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award and the Bridport Flash Fiction Prize. Her work has been nominated for the Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. She lives in Illinois and can be found on Bluesky and Instagram @thorntonforreal.

Heather Emmanuel

constructions

The leather jacket has a tear in it when she first meets Josie.

It’s an old thing, bought from a street vendor in Porto with loose change rather than a bank note. Weary, worn in, torn at a seam where her biceps have filled it out. Josie’s eyes form crescent moons when they meet hers across the bar. It’s a Monday; a choice, cheaper drinks, less of a crowd. Josie is in a mesh number that makes her breath hitch.

“If I didn’t know you, I’d say you’re brooding,” Josie says. There’s an affectionate lilt to it that makes her stumble as she stands to greet Josie, caramel scent seeping into her skin with the half hug they share. Josie gestures at her jacket.

She wears that jacket less and less over the years. She is surprised with a new one on her 30th. A brother-in-law — since divorced out of the family — sends her another before his move to Rotterdam. She treats herself to a burgundy one when a generous tax rebate comes through. They gather dust for a while — sticky hands, weaning. Their oldest chews on the handle of Josie’s bag and she folds all her leather jackets on the top of the wardrobe.

~

The kids climb her like scaffolding. One on her shoulders, one around her waist. The youngest, not quite standing yet, latches onto her shin. She doesn’t mind. Walks like it’s an everyday occurrence. At this point, it is.

“Dad!”

She doesn’t bristle. The oldest started it. Aware that toddlers say all sorts of things when their teeth and tongue learn where they belong. The first time their oldest said it, a new layer of warmth permeated her veins. Not a microaggression, not misgendering — just the uncomplicated logic of a one-year-old who sees strong arms and safe hands.

The adoption was uncharacteristically swift. Six months old, an emergency placement. The kind that comes with a binder of redacted notes, a warning about attachment issues, and an uncle: no contact.

Once, she finds their oldest standing in front of the television, arms crossed. Socks pulled up to the knees, gaze fixed on the talking animals with the same gravity she watches the evening news. Josie chuckles into her camomile.

“What?” She says.

“That’s you,” says Josie. Points at their child — arms folded like a bouncer, jaw set with quiet resolve. She sees it. The stance, the socks, the stillness. In the slight furrow of the brow when reading a picture book.

She gets their daughter’s name tattooed on her collarbone a month later. Black ink, serif font, middle name included.

~

She sleeps facing the door. Always has.

In ground floor flats with too thin walls and cheap locks, dishwashers out of order for months on end. Now in a house, semi-detached, with a driveway and wind chimes.

In between night shifts, she reads. Not fiction. More understanding than escape. Containing words like resilient and boundaries and inner child. Some parts are highlighted, others scrawled with notes in smudged ballpoint. The pages blur. From fatigue or wet eyes, she doesn’t try to know.

‍ ‍Count to ten.

Their middle child is the one who runs headfirst into a glass pane and bounces back laughing. Grass stained shorts, a scar on the knee. She wonders what it means to move through the world without caution, to scale the monkey bars knowing the drop might hurt and doing it anyway. Sometimes she flinches before they fall. It’s the only time she does, these days.

“Dad, watch this!” Their middle child swears she can do a handstand for five seconds this time, counts out loud as she does. Legs buckle, elbows thud. She’s up again before she’s fully hit the ground. “I’ll get to five next time. You saw, right? Did you see? Did you see it, Dad?”

“I saw,” she says, even, shielding her eyes from the sun.

She thinks of her books at the top of her wardrobe, stacked next to the leather jackets she hasn’t worn since bottles replaced bar tabs. Receipts used as bookmarks, a yellow sticky note in between pages about risk tolerance. Most chapters she rereads, some she does not. Some speak louder the second time, others etch into her mind and refuse to leave.

~

They’re married on November 3rd. The date isn’t sentimental; the venue was cheap, and they were offered a discount for booking three months out.

Josie insists on a naked cake, says the kids will lick all the frosting and it won’t be fair on her sister. That same sister calls them newlyweds and makes a speech about fresh starts; decade long relationship aside.

Under a canopy of fairy lights and wind-chimed breeze, Josie says I do with a gardenia tucked behind her left ear. They kiss before the officiant finishes the sentence.

She wraps her hands around Josie’s waist like they belong there. Josie, in a sleek dress that hugs her hips, dipping low between her shoulder blades like a soft exhale. Goosebumps decorate her arms like glitter.

Carrot cake is cut by five-year-old who announces that a butter knife is not a real knife, and a served by seven-year-old who holds the paper plate with the same reverence as the ring cushion.

Not a bride, not a groom. A wife, Josie’s wife. A dad, her daughter’s dad. In a tailored tuxedo that holds like a second skin, fashioned to fit her waist, not accentuate it. Josie tugs off her suit jacket before the first dance, then pulls her in by the tie for a kiss. She feels Josie sigh against her lips, cheers and chimes, steady bass beneath the floorboards of the rented room.

That night, she unwraps Josie's dress like a gift. Dark skin framed in white lace, cinnamon scented, warm. She kisses Josie like it’s the first time again: jawline, sternum, beneath the caesarean scar. Hands anchoring Josie’s hips, mouth curved when Josie melts into her. Stone and bloom, tenderness and trust, clothed certainty and fragile grace.

Her sports bra stays on. Pristine white, racerback for Josie’s nails to dig in exactly how they both like. She gives, always. It gnaws at her some days, how much and how often she wants to give herself away. Once, a weight of growing up too soon, being everything to everyone. Now, it’s her wife grinding on her flexed thigh and asking for more.

She has never been anyone’s to give. But she has always been there for someone to take.

~

Josie’s second pregnancy hits harder than the first. Nausea, and hospital bracelets. Hyperemesis gravidarum, in uppercase letters, stamped on the hospital file.

The staff call her sir. She doesn't blink at that, doesn't correct them. Her priority is the fact that her wife is on intravenous fluids, breathing like she's teaching herself how; in and out.

She is rubbing circles on Josie's back. Behind closed bay curtains, other women are retching, crying. Some on the phone with husbands who hopelessly pack a hospital bag, with younger children at home who don't understand that their baby sibling isn't quite here, yet.

At home, she spirals.

She searches and reads, checks out books from the health and maternity care sections. The numbers ambush her, jump out at her. Impress into her skin like branding.

She is called husband and partner more times than wife. Between the beeping monitors and antiseptic, a Josie's shallow breaths: “Wife. She is my wife.”

She anticipates. The way she would anticipate a fist, or a locked door, or a slur she wouldn't understand until a decade later. The moment it falls apart, when someone cloaked in dark blue says, sir, we are, sorry, but your partner—

Category One.

They wheel Josie out mid-sentence. Breech, they say, barking orders at each other. Blurred lights, the middle of the night. Her mind is on Josie, on their children obliviously showing Josie drawings through the phone screen. On them, who told her she will never have this, who made her believe every flash of happiness was temporary while the bruises were constant.

‍ ‍“Say hi.”

Josie's rasp is light. Dark skin dotted with gleams of sweat. Crescent moon eyes, smile crooked, herself.

She doesn't cry. Urges herself not to. Not here, not when Josie needs her, not when Josie could have–

“She has your eyes,” says Josie, a space between heartbeats.

Their daughter is curled up on Josie's chest, a bundle of cotton and newness, mouth rooting.

She thinks: thank you.

She thinks: you'll never know how much I’ll give you.

She thinks of every moment that led here, the leather jackets folded on the wardrobe, the bruises that faded slower than they should have, the first time Josie kissed her outside the bar on her tiptoes.

Numbers terrify her.

“Eight one. That's you,” Josie says, dry. “She’s all you.”

Her thumb finds their baby's spine, traces plump skin. Fragile, real, hospital hat half-off.

“I hope she gets everything else from you,” she says. Kisses Josie's cheek, and means it more than she's meant anything else.

~

The warehouse runs on systems. Home runs on chaos. Thankfully, she is good at both.

She loves the feel of her steel toe boots hitting the floor. Her body has a purpose here: calloused hands, an aching back. Josie packs marshmallow scented hand cream in the glove compartment. Factory hours, forklifts and steel shelves. There is no glamour, no cubicles or after work drinks. But there is a paycheck and a rhythm and the bone deep satisfaction of bringing something home.

Josie greets her every time with a kiss on the cheek. Sometimes glossed, mostly not. Hey, handsome, into the corner of her mouth. Her neck if the kids aren't around. Josie, her wife, in a faded t-shirt and mismatched socks, braids rolled into a lopsided bun.

Her shoulders twinge. Not of pain, not exhaustion. Proof that her body works. Provides. In a sense, it could be seen as patriarchal. In her mind, it's a tree offering shade.

She used to hide when she heard tyres on gravel, holding back coughs of inhaled dust bunnies under the bed. Keys in the door meant tightened shoulders, shut windows.

These days, years later, she barely kicks off her boots before little limbs fly towards her. Arms around her waist, her leg. They call her Dad, always Dad. With all the certainty of small humans untouched by expectation. With no other word for safety and solace, no fear in their voices. She crouches to scoop them up and they cling, babbling, verbs and nouns tumbling out of them.

“Dad, I got a gold sticker in school today!”

“Dad, I made a paper aeroplane all by myself!”

“Wow, do I get to see them?”

“Dada, jam!”

She lifts them with ease, like weights she's trained her whole life to carry.

The house smells of banana bread, paint and the linen diffuser. The floor is littered with socks and puzzle pieces. Josie says something about their youngest discovering the wonder of eating jam straight from the jar with a dessert spoon. The oldest two ramble over each other about correcting a teacher who didn't say Dad.

She used to think dad meant taking punches without crying. Stone faced, jaw clenched, being harder than whatever hit her.

She knows now: it's kissing tears off round cheeks. Dabbing bloody knees with a cold cloth, offering a choice of plasters. It's tying shoe laces, holding kids on her broad shoulders, ignoring hushed giggles behind the curtain during hide and seek. It's pressing a kiss into her wife's neck and saying, I got it. Whether it's unloading the dishwasher, or surprising Josie with a new dress and a date.

The joy of being loved like this catches her off guard sometimes. Her body remains strong, sweat beading on her forehead as she moves freight, sorts pallets, lifts boxes twice her weight.

Steel presses in her thighs on the mezzanine and when she pulls out her phone, there's a string of photos from Josie and the kids. Grinning, laughing, on a patterned blanket in the park. There are sandwiches and grapes and melted ice cream and she thinks to herself, I made that possible. Josie says the same thing, unbidden, when they install a swing set into the backyard on a cloudless June afternoon.

She never thought she would live this long. Not out of misery, but from inevitability. Days blur into weeks then months. Years pass, and she turns forty with short hair and shorter nails. Their middle child is a specialist in candid shots.

A leather jacket is draped over her shoulders. By Josie, of course. This one is new, newer. Jet black, label attached and the price evidently scribbled out. She looks up, and Josie is there. In a dark green dress, ombre braids cascading down her back. Those eyes, the crescent moon eyes when Josie smiles, still makes her breath hitch.

“It’s been a while,” Josie says. And means it, too. Josie leans down for a kiss she is happy to give and the camera clicks, flashes. The perfect shot. Their oldest rolls her eyes. Their youngest wants the candles blown out already.

The other jackets stay folded in the wardrobe. So do her healing books, the earrings. Not relics, but fragments. Some are faded, creased, seams stretched beyond repair. Softened by edges yet holding its form. Here, the leather creases as she moves – soft, worn. Real.

---

Heather Emmanuel is a writer of contemporary lesbian literary fiction and prose poetry. Her work is forthcoming in The Offing, SWWIM, Maudlin House and Gone Lawn. You can find her at heather-emmanuel.com or at @heather.emmanuel8

Patricia Fuentes Burns

How Much Time Will Go By

1.     If you start life with a mother, a father, and a brother, an uncle in Montana who has 4 stepchildren you’ve never met, 2 grandfathers in heaven and 2 grandmothers on earth (one forgets your name, the other smokes), and when you’re 23 your brother hangs himself in the garage where 3 rubber bins hold your childhood, how many years later will you tell people you just met that you have no siblings?

2.     You are 26 when you meet a girl, also 26, and a year later you marry her when she is 3 months pregnant, and she gives birth to a boy a little on the small side at 5 lbs. 7 oz. In the next 5 years you have 2 more boys. On year 6 of marriage, you notice that one of the boys is not like the others, 4 couples you know get divorced, and your mother has both breasts taken. What is the square footage of your bedroom and how fast can you run?

3.     When you’ve been in your job for 11 years, you get called into an office and given 4 months of severance plus the 2.2 weeks of paid time off you did not take. You bench press 140 lbs. and call 5 contacts. Every day you do one more thing to help with the kids. Your wife does not work outside the house but takes 2 Pilates classes a week and your special needs boy sees 3 specialists. This continues for 5 months. How many hours do you sleep at night? You may estimate.

4.     The distance between your home and your new job is 17 miles. You stop to get the good coffee that costs $3.45. Your youngest son is 11, your middle son plays soccer, your oldest has 0 friends. Your wife works 20 hours a week at a school library in another town and you use 5% of the money she makes on a 4-hour monthly date. The rest goes into the college funds. How old do you think the girl with the curly hair who sits in the cube by the window is and what time do you get home in the evenings?

5.     You retire after putting 2 of your sons through college and paying 1/2 of the 3rd one’s rent for 1 year. You sell the house and 8-seat van, downsize to 1/4 the space in a small town. You are 0.4 miles from the water. You get your 3rd and final rescue dog. When your sons visit, your grocery bills triple. If you buy the boat you first liked at 35 and take it out on the water twice a week, if your wife can’t sleep and is quiet during breakfast, if the economy recovers, if you sometimes feel short of breath, how far will the horizon be on a mild winter night?

---

Patricia Fuentes Burns has published fiction in TriQuarterly, Quarter After Eight, Fictive Dream, Jellyfish Review, and Quarterly West, among other journals. Her work has been anthologized in Grace in Darkness, Shut Down Strangers & Hot Rod Angels, Grit & Gravity, and America's Future. She holds an MFA from George Mason University and lives in Arlington, Virginia with her husband and three daughters.

Dustin Duby-Koffman

Cake

            My feet ache in my new dress shoes. I decided to wear my suit so that I’d need only my lightest carry-on. I’m trying to compensate for a heavy heart, so full of mixed-up feelings that it presses on my other organs. Sunlight pours through rosy stained glass. Music plays, all in a major key. The aroma of chocolate chip cookies wafts through the cool air. I’ve heard that one airline has brought in labradoodle puppies to their gates. Through the windows, I see planes lined up for boarding. They look like balloon animals, a far cry from the tin cans from just a decade ago.

            I get in the security line behind a gaggle of beach-bound teenagers. One by one, they practically conga through the scanner. The monitor blinks sunflower yellow. I step forward, trying to visualize the ocean but instead seeing traffic on the bridge, my last bad sunburn, and headlines about sharks and jellyfish. When I manage to call up a picture of the shore, Rita is lying on a lounge chair, auburn curls waving in the breeze, with William sitting by her side. When my turn comes, I walk hesitantly into the scanner. The agent shakes his head and hands me a pamphlet and brown card, directing me to secondary screening.

            I read over the pamphlet describing Advances in Mood Physics. I’m already familiar with the basics: Passengers’ positive emotions fuel flight while negative feelings create drag. The newest scanners can distinguish among joy (yellow), sadness (blue), and anger (red). They cannot yet precisely measure intensity, complicating weight calculations at boarding. The mud color I’ve triggered signifies completely mixed emotions, presenting a particular challenge to the system.

            In contrast to the rest of the airport, the secondary screening area feels dank and cramped. It reminds me of interrogation rooms from old cop shows I’ve watched with my parents. A desk, some hard chairs, no windows. A uniformed pair of agents greets me. The woman smiles kindly; the man, a real bruiser type, scowls. I have never faced this hurdle before, but screening interviews feature in many films and stand-up routines. I know that I have two options: convince the shrinks that I will be fine and the scanner has erred, or beg for an exemption and hope to fly as a charity case, floating on others’ positive energy.

            The woman introduces herself as Rhonda Albright, a psychologist employed by the TSA. She holds her hand out for my tickets and smiles when she sees I’m heading to New England. I do my best at small talk about Cape Cod towns. Then we get down to business as the scowler takes notes.

            “So, what is the purpose of your trip?”

            “My college roommate is getting married. I’m best man so I really do need to get on that flight.”

            “That’s so exciting,” says Dr. Albright. “Are you maybe worried about your toast? That’s a very common source of anxiety for folks who don’t do a lot of public speaking.” I feel for the folded paper in my pocket. Dr. Albright notices and guesses correctly. “Why don’t you practice on me, and maybe we’ll get your confidence up.”

            I picture Dr. Albright as a high school cheerleader. I had my first crush on the head of the cheer squad in middle school. Susan Siddons is probably in the next room over, giving pep talks to businessmen who worry they don’t measure up. I pull out the speech. I figure it’s safe. I labored over every word, trying to express joy I could not feel. I decide to go all-in. I stand, raise an imaginary glass, and begin. “It’s my great honor to toast William and Rita. Rita and I were fast friends in high school, bonding over Mr. Stevens’ incomprehensible lectures in chemistry. When she visited me during freshman year, she could hardly contain her interest in my enigmatic roommate, William. I became a third wheel faster than I learned my way around campus. And it was a very small school. Though I would not have thought to match them up, William and Rita simply make each other better versions of themselves. I hear that that’s what love should do. So join me in toasting my two best friends as they start the next chapter of their lives.”

            Dr. Albright frowns for the first time. “Well, I don’t think nerves about that short speech are what set off the scanner. What do you think the problem is?”

            “He’s in love with the bride. Hopeless case. Sorry, buddy, but you won’t be flying today.” The scowler unnerves me. I have to get on the plane.

            “She’s a dear friend.”

            “She’s a dear friend you’ve been in love with for years, I’d guess. Your plane lifts off in an hour. I don’t think you’re going to fall out of love before the boarding call.”

            “I am not in love with Rita. She and William are perfect for each other. I even loaned Will money for the ring. I’ve helped them sort out a dozen arguments about the wedding. I planned Will’s bachelor party—golf and a baseball game and a fancy dinner. Why would I do all that if I were in love with the bride? It doesn’t make any sense. How can you know what’s in my heart, anyway? This is nuts.” I’m nearly screaming. I probably seem unhinged.

            Dr. Albright sighs. “Either way, Leo, I’m not hearing an explanation for what our technology is telling us. I’m sure you know that its accuracy is very high, as are the stakes involved. You have the right to phone a friend for help working through your emotions. You can also take time in our rehab room to pull yourself together. I’m not recommending an override. You can try the scanner one more time when you’re ready. Good luck to you, Leo.”

            I pass by the phone-a-friend booth on my way to the rehab room. The only friends whom I trust to help me figure out my own mind are the last people on Earth I can call. I imagine how that conversation would go: Hi guys. I’m so excited for your big day, but the mood machine at the airport is finicky today. Any good news to share that could help me yellow? I mean, besides the obvious?

            The rehab room strikes me as a cross between a kindergarten classroom and a spa—peopled by sad sacks who should head directly to the bus station. Anywhere else, people would be doomscrolling or playing crush games on their phones. With phones disabled here, the Downers have chosen a mix of strategies for relaxing. I see a teenager doing yoga in the corner and an older man knitting what looks to be a pair of socks. I sit down next to a woman about my age who is sketching on a large pad. When she takes a break from her drawing, I decide to say hello.

            “Hey, I’m a first-timer. Do you know how this works? In the movies, there are kittens and ice cream.”

            “Hi. Yeah, the bigger airports go all out. Here you can buy cake or use the treadmill to boost endorphins. Where are you trying to go today?”

            “Oh, I’m going. I’m best man at a wedding. What about you?”

            “I’m supposed to go to my college reunion. The grouchy guy in secondary screening proclaimed me an embarrassment to my alma mater, too ashamed of my unemployed status to fly. I think I blued because I’m nervous, and the machine tracks that as sad.”

            “You think you’ll make it?”

            “I’m counting on some deep breathing and some chocolate cake. I’ve read the rehab rate is almost 50%. How come you’re not happy to go to the wedding?”

            “The grouchy guy looked deep into my heart and decided I’m in love with the bride.”

            “Are you?”

            “No. Maybe once upon a time. She’s great. But we would never work.”

            “So why did you blue?”

            “I muddied out. Probably just a result of too much caffeine or something.”

            “I’m not buying it.”

            “Well, are you married?”

            “You need a date to this shindig?”

            “No, I mean, yes, that would be awesome, but that’s not where I was headed. I guess I feel like everyone is moving on to bigger things, and I’m being left behind. Does that make sense?”

            “You’re talking to a single, unemployed thirty-two year old who doesn’t even have a goldfish or furniture I didn’t find on the sidewalk. But what’s the rush?”

            I think about William and Rita moving on with their lives. New condo. New married friends. Probably a baby in a year or two. The whole montage plays in my mind, as it has hundreds of times before. I’ll go from best man to honorary uncle. I’ll be a smaller and smaller part of their lives. I picture myself reading their Christmas letter and being surprised at how little we have in common. In my mind, I fold the letter without finishing it.

            I try to explain the whole mess. I unpack my heart, shaking out each item. Yes, my years-long infatuation with Rita, but also my gratitude for William. My fear of being left out. My resentment at being taken for granted. My bafflement at letting years go by as the third wheel. The great emptiness that stretches ahead.

            “Wow. That’s a lot. So when you’re not daydreaming about your friends’ future, which you clearly have all planned out, what are you doing about yours?”

            “That’s harsh, you know?”

            “Just trying to help. When does your flight leave without you?”

            “I’ve got time.”

            I don’t really, though. I know I’m screwed. I try to focus on what William and Rita mean to me. How much they are counting on me. All the good times we’ve had. Arguing about the meaning of song lyrics. Playing endless rounds of Scrabble with our own lingo added to the dictionary. Walking with Rita to take pictures in the city. Playing Horse with William. I really do love them both. But this feels like an ending. My heart still feels heavy, a weight that smushes my good intentions.

            I look over and see that Ella is drawing me. She stops and grins like my sister when she’s cheated at Monopoly. Silently, she hands me the sketch pad. Ella draws with minimal fussiness, all clean lines and expressive shading. I look surprisingly handsome with sad eyes and a half smile. I tell Ella she’s too kind, and she laughs. She rips out the page, but not before captioning it with Leo. I stare at my own likeness for a while. I think this guy has a chance.

            The chocolate cake from the cart has too much icing, even for me. I’ve always thought I would never outgrow the double frosting that William and Rita get for me on my birthday cake each year. Now, alone, I realize I’d prefer something new. Maybe some tropical flavored cake with just a glaze of something sweet. Maybe something I’d never imagined. I gently drop the plate with the uneaten slice into the trash by the door, then head toward the scanner.

---

A resident of Rockville, Maryland, Dustin Duby-Koffman writes poems, song lyrics, and short stories. He has published two chapbooks, Eating Broccoli on the Moon and Dedicated to the Seekers. Dustin has also published in The Sligo Journal and The Westchester Review.

Keith Woodruff

Bookworms

WORM 1. A dried blood smear on page 39. Rust colored. Likely paper cut. Have seen bloody nose blood dried; it’s always more perfectly round. Two or three drops like a polka dots that fell before the reader could reach for the nearest tissue or shirt sleeve then smeared over the words come play.

WORM 2. Cigarette smoke. Again. Jesus, it’s always the Russians. Notes to the Underground, Death of Ivan Illyich, every time I get Russian Lit it comes reeking of cigarettes. Is this the work of one chain-smoking madman obsessed with Russian literature? I turn the pages cautiously, expecting ashes to fall into my lap. The stories are beautiful, but dreary enough without the threat of second hand smoke vapors giving me reader’s cancer.

WORM 3. Dear ungentle reader, dear patron before me, I am reading this book of poetry to know the poet better, not you and how your mind works or doesn’t work, but I have no choice now as you have chosen to make notes throughout the book. You write: Metaphor! Symbolism? Throughout the slim volume I see your comments as you work to unbaffle yourself. You are a bad patron. If I were a librarian I would constantly shush you.

WORM 4. A hair on page 182. If the title of the book made this discovery some how ironic I would mention it. It is not obvious like an eyelash, or strict like a nose hair. More curly. A chest hair. Maybe a pubic hair, though it’s hard, but not impossible, to imagine what must happen for a pubic hair to wind up in a book. I never read in the nude. Note: Crafting with Cat Hair has just arrived via interlibrary loan. Coincidence?

WORM 5. A short list of worms:  a university bookstore receipt from 16 years ago, when the book was $5.95. Squashed bugs. This seems intentional. Boogers. This is definitely intentional, and usually in history books. Bookmarks. It's hard to leave these, but I do. I was especially fond of the one with a Japanese mural of cranes flying. Newspaper clippings. Obits. Marriage announcements. Sepia tone photos, inscriptions on the back. Once, reading Hemmingway, so out of  the deep blue was the scribbled on grocery receipt I found between the páginas, that I 🤍 you, Tiff  in big swoopy letters, remains a favorite part of The Old Man and the Sea. Always I leave these for the next reader.

WORM 6. This morning, in a book on sea anemones, on the page celebrating the pink sand-rose sea anemone, which looks like a squiddish fright wig, and which is found primarily in the Pacific, I find a ticket stub for a train to California.

So Much Entering

In Kalamazoo, there are three kinds of Velvet Touch: a car wash, a dry cleaner, and a handjob.

I am working part-time in a small used bookstore, which is really just a house that has been converted into a shop. From the window, I can see the Velvet Touch adult arcade across the street. In the parking lot, rain is falling on three empty pickups right now. That image - a soft-porn infused haiku. All day, men come and go. Enter empty, leave empty.

There is no shop cat in the window or on the register to keep me company. All day, the string of bells on the door jingles as women come and go with bagfuls of romance novels. Taped to the door front, written in black marker, is an 8 1/2 X 11 piece of paper that reads ENTER HERE. 

I spend the hours unpacking bags, reading a few passages now and then. Restocking shelves. On every book cover, a swain or rogue looking at her with stern passion as if to say, Rejoice, for I will soon enter you. She returns his gaze, Yes, rejoicent am I that you will soon enter me. The pages are alive with rampant entering. He enters her chamber. Her dreams. He enters her hut, her tent. On the covers, bodices pawed asunder, swan lithe necks laid bare for feasting, and inside, that moment of surrender when he enters her.

I have been directed to leave the radio on the soft rock station. I hear Air Supply Lost in Love a lot and don't know why I always hated it. There are days when I feel delirious with gratitude to have found what so many are still looking for, days I am sure you created my life, invented me in the pages of your novel. Only there, I am a lumbering bear and you the sun I walk under endlessly.

---

Keith Woodruff lives in San Antonio, TX with a backyard full of moody tomato plants. His poetry has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Sundog Lit, New World Writing Quarterly and RAWHEAD. His flash and micro writing appeared in lovely places like Wigleaf, Does it Have Pockets, JMWW, HAD and is forthcoming in Pithead Chapel, Heavy Feather Review and FlashFlood. Read him in Best Small Fictions 2017and 2019 and at www.keithawoodruff.com. He was awarded a 2018 Pushcart Prize. @keithwoodruff.bsky.social

Lucas Flatt

Office Hours

            Office hours: are the worst. It says that on the dingy yellow note card they gave us to list our times upon our office doors. Sometimes, as footsteps clatter down the long hallway outside my office, there comes a pause and then a titter, and as the footsteps fade, I feel seen, or heard, or something. I'm sort of a jokester, here.

            But now I've changed the placard. It reads: "Office hours 24/7/365." I'm never leaving. I've packed in supplies. It's sort of the opposite of solipsism; I mean only to exist in the exterior of me, insofar as I'm useful, and for my students, always.

            I have no further plans to meet my classes. Notions of home, even a physical world beyond campus, are ceding from my consciousness. I’ll leave this office only as per root biological functions.

            It’s OK. No one will have a problem with it. They let me get away with pretty much anything. They let everyone get away with everything. I’m growing uncertain whether there even is a tangible “they.” By the juridical subtraction of a “they,” there is no longer any meaning in “it.”

            There is a wide horizontal window behind me in my mildew-smelling office. It looks out on the faculty parking lot, where I want to go to smoke. No one really comes by my office hours. Heretofore, I haven’t publicized them in class. The proscribed “Office Hours” slots on the proscribed syllabi have been left conspicuously blank. No one noticed.

            I post an update to my syllabi online, listing my times as “always and forever.”

            It's quite a syllabus. On the second page, I like to superimpose a face over the text. For a while, it was Joseph Stalin, really zoomed in on his nostrils, mustache, upper lip—the danger triangle, that Soviet bloc of his lower-central face. For a while, it was Charlie Parker because I wanted to think outside the box, and it worked in a sense. Here we are.

            Today, I have a student conference scheduled. It’s for a young woman who hasn’t been to class in weeks. I doubt she’ll show, and if she does, there’s nothing to talk about. She hasn’t turned in any work.

            I break my vow of ever-presence almost immediately to go outside for a smoke break. I'll be late for my meeting, my only professional obligation for the afternoon, but she can sweat it out if she shows. It's late in the fall, but hot. You have to smoke in a parking space cordoned off in yellow tape. In the space, several trash cans bring the bees. I do not like bees.

            The bees should be dead by now, in mid-November. But they’ve decided to live and swarm the trash cans so I can't enjoy my cigarettes. I'm not allergic to bee stings, but I don't enjoy them. Most people act surprised when a bee stings them. Not me. I’m vigilant.

            (Fuck you, bees).

            Their tendency to surprise really says everything you need to know about people, in case you don’t know much. Bees are hardly stealthy creatures.

        I stay vigilant and stand a little outside the cordon. It’s risky because the campus cop holds most sacred the jurisdiction of the designated smoking area. He doesn’t have much else to do.

            Another place bad for bees is the dump. One time, and this is a true story, I was dropping off the trash and there were lots of yellow jackets swarming the dumpster. In anticipation of the yellow jackets, which are indisputably the worst variety of bee, I had on long sleeves, long pants, gloves, dead of summer. Panicked, I was transporting the trash from my trunk too fast and ripped a bag, spilling my garbage all over the lot. The bees swarmed, so I hopped back in my Corolla and made to escape.

            The dump attendant, an elderly woman with a frizzy permanent, came running out, waving her freckled arms. I barely cracked my window.

            “You can pick that up,” she said, like she’s giving me permission.

            “Bees!” I yelled back, through just the tiniest crack in my window. As I drove away, I yelled, “Allergic!” which was a lie, and by then I’d closed the window. Anyway, I had to find another dump.

            Three women are smoking in the designated smoking spot amid fewer bees than I'd expected, so I'm sitting by the cans. One of the women is in my class, and she sees me, but she's talking about my class like I'm not sitting there smoking.

            We’re doing research papers in the 1010s. I’ve made the classic mistake of allowing open topics, and you couldn’t even imagine how stupid these topics are. Hers is how feminism is hurting women.

            She’s telling the other women about her topic, in media res; I’ve missed the beginning. She’s talking about a “her,” whom I gather might be another teacher. My student says, and I’m quoting, “I told her that I’m writing about all the problems with feminism. Like, how unfair it is to guys. And she tells me ‘You’re stupid. You’re too stupid to deserve feminism.’”

            The way she says it, straight reportage, no indignation, no humor, absolutely kills me. I laugh loudly. Now I’m not invisible anymore. All three women stare, and I toss the lit cigarette in a can and go back in for my office meeting.

            Nothing in ten years teaching prepares me for what I encounter back in my office.     

            My appointee is waiting for me, looking put out. But her indignation hardly registers because of her outfit. She's tall and muscular with lots of piercings in her face and a severe, martial buzzcut. If she peer-reviewed with the anti-feminist, I don't think it would go well.

            But instead of her usual punk get-up, overalls and t-shirts with profane band names stenciled on by hand, by her, I imagine, which is to say, bootleg punk rock t-shirts…she's got on a toga. And sandals made of cork and twine that she's certainly made herself. And a Grecian wreath of olive leaves resting jauntily atop her quarter inch of rigid pink buzzcut.

            “Hello, Margaret,” I say. Then I remember she prefers “Peg.” I mumble, “Peg,” by way of apology. Sometimes I mumble. It irritates the students. I can tell she’s irritated.

            "It's 3:45," she tells me. I want to ask her how she knows, with nary a sundial on the premises, but I shrug and show her into my office.

“I like your costume,” I say. It’s well past Halloween.

            “It’s not a costume.”

            I look at her like, go on.

            She doesn’t take the hint. “What’s my grade in the class?” She throws her muscular arms across her toga. “My advisor wants to know what my grade is in your class. You haven’t posted midterm grades.”

            That checks out. I always feel like I’m forgetting something, and I’m never wrong. I’ll hear about this. I get emails, never from the same person, with made-up sounding names like Jane Frowning-Constable and Douglas Oversight.

            “It would have to be an F,” I say. “It’s like asking me to grade a stranger on the street.” I point to an imaginary person behind Peg. “She looks like a C minus.” I consider if I’ve just committed sexual harassment.           

She nods. “I figured. That’s not really why I’m here.”

            I nod, like, go on.

            “I’m here because I’ve decided that I’m Aristotle.”

            I blink at her.

            “After your lecture on Aristotle, I started thinking about it, and I decided that’s me. Aristotle.”

            “You weren’t here for that lecture.”

            “You posted it online.”

            That doesn’t sound like something I would do, but I nod anyway.  

            “Interesting,” I say. I mean, it is. That’s one word for it.

            “I’ve decided I want to teach your class tonight. You have a class tonight, don’t you?”

            “I do, yes, in theory. I’m not going to it, though.”

            She nods, but not like, Go on. "I'd like to teach it. I think it would be good for them. My adviser, Ms. Penny Wisdom, says it would be a good experience for me.”

            “And what qualifies you to teach the class?”

            “What qualifies you?”

            I shrug. The truth is that I have a bunch of degrees. More than anyone else who teaches here, but not the right degrees. They don’t really form a cohesive gravitas.

            Something buzzes behind my head. Aristotle glances over my shoulder. “So, what you’re telling me is that you assume all people are failures.”

            I pivot on my rolling chair, scanning for the buzz. My desk is too large for my small office and I bang my knees with a clang; I’m always doing this and irritating the man next door who surely teaches farts, such is his mastery. I can’t find anything, and spin back on Peg. “Beg pardon?”

            “You said that you would give a stranger on the street an F.”

            “I said ‘a C minus.’ And anyway, that’s rather a misinterpretation of what I meant.”

            She nods, and grins at me. She's going for smug, but in her Animal House getup, she looks too ridiculous for proper condescension. "What kind of ethical basis would support that?"

            I consider the ethical basis. “You got the job.” I want to see what happens.

                        She’s not thrown. “What time does class begin?”

            “Five. You should probably know that. You’re enrolled in the class, and it’s the 4th of November.”

            She nods, stands, and goes. I guess she'll find it. The campus isn't large. I mumble, "Room 204."

~

            Here I am, facing a conundrum. I've committed myself to omnipresent office hours. I'm already planning to present on this at an upcoming conference our college hosts. I'm going to speak very quietly, smiling smugly, about how important it is that we're "there" for the students. I'll hold for applause every time I say, "There." People will leave smiling smugly to themselves and chattering briskly about how they now intend to be "there" for their students. But none more so than me, because I'll only be telepresent, holding office hours while giving the presentation. Probably I'll stage a student coming to meet with me and interrupting the talk at some crucial point.

            I've vowed not to leave, but I want to see Peg teach my class as Aristotle, so at 4:55, I post a note that maybe says "BRB" in my illegible scrawl and travel down the empty hallways to room 204. Ever since the pandemic, the campus is nearly always nearly empty. I say "nearly always" only excepting those times that it is empty.

            No one can figure out where the students have gone. I picture them all in a parking lot somewhere. I’ve always pictured students who don’t attend classes as assembled somewhere in a parking lot, looking somewhat bored, somewhat lost, but all the same relieved that they’re not in my class.

            I’ve presented this theory at faculty meetings. Some tittered, but I was serious. People spoke in warm tones evoking great empathy for our lost students, what they’re going through. But why feel sorry for them? Isn’t the point of standing pointlessly in some parking lot to relish the sweet release of giving up?  I can’t shake the feeling that this is a form of Nirvana. Aren’t we always getting emails about mindfulness workshops? Why not the eternal present of the parking lot?

            As I leave the dark and empty atrium for the dark and empty hallway to my classroom, I pass the anti-feminist. She makes pointed eye contact and says, “That trash can is on fire.”

            And, as a reflex, I put my hand to my temple as an indication of “drat,” furrow my brow in embarrassment, and, somehow, the anti-feminist student simply disappears, evidently having been some form of censorious hallucination. This rattles me, but as the campus is so empty, I chalk it up to a haunting, or else to some phenomena bigger than myself.

            At 204, I find Peg setting up at the whiteboard. Attending my class are only four other students: an international engineering student from the local university making up freshmen comp, a young man–Tyler?--with a scruffy beard who often sleeps, and two young women who sit in the back and giggle at everything anyone says, including me, which I find very distracting and disheartening, but am too cowardly to address. 

            Peg isn’t, though. “Shut up,” she says to them, before they can even begin giggling, and points to the word “Arastotel” written neatly on the board. “I’m Aristotle. I’ll be taking over this class.”

            The international student raises his hand. “Yes, Shiresh.”

            “Excuse me, teacher. You’ve misspelled ‘Aristotle.’”

            Peg turns and considers her work. “I know how to spell my name.”

            Shiresh acquiesces with a nod. The women in the back stifle giggles.

            Peg/Aristotle unfolds a wrinkled notebook page. “The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living differ from the dead. The roots of education are bitter, but the fruits are sweet. Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom. Those who can, do. Those who understand, teach.”

            I nod along. She’s doing pretty well, so far. I’m definitely learning a lot. Even Tyler is awake. But that seems to be the end of the lecture; she wads up the paper and bounces it off Tyler’s forehead. “It’s all horseshit!”

            Of course! We all nod vigorously. How did we not see it?

            “An ‘education’ is what they want you to believe.” She points at me. I look around, but she clearly means me. I shrug and grimace in apology.

            “It’s not your fault, Mr. Flatt. You’ve tried. All the same, someone has to pay the price.”

            The students nod again, more vigorously. Shit. I’m starting to think this was a mistake.

            She holds up a hand. “And that person is me.”

            Thank God. I sigh loudly in relief.

            Peg/Aristotle withdraws from a canvas bag a mason jar of brown water with leafy twigs jutting out. I believe there are acorns floating in the mire.

            “Are you, like, going to drink that?” one of the women in the back asks. You can honestly feel the joyous anticipation in her voice.

            “Please don’t,” I volunteer, though I sort of want to see it, too.

            “I fear I have no choice but to drink this hemlock.” (I consider telling her those are clearly maple leaves, but decide to let her cook.) “Thousands of years ago, the nation-state of Ancient Greece put me on trial and sentenced me to extinction for challenging its dogmas; now, I am going to face that fate again.”

            The other young woman in the back says, “Wasn’t that Plato?”

            I’m touched that she’s tried to remember.

            Shiresh raises his hand. “Excuse me, teacher, but it was Socrates.”

            “Whatever,” Peg/Aristotle/Socrates says. “Here’s to you, Mark.” She raises the jar in both hands toward the bearded student, who evidently is not named Tyler, but Mark. He gives a “who, me?” raise of the eyebrows. Classic Mark.

            Peg upturns the jar and takes huge, splashing gulps, the stuff spilling down her neck and onto her toga.

            “Don’t,” I mumble.

            “Guh, it’s straight ass!” she exclaims.

            Shiresh and Mark shake their heads. The women giggle. I only watch as Peg takes breaks to breathe and belch, resumes chugging. Surely, she’ll vomit, I tell myself, and I start to rise to go find the custodian, but remember he was furloughed.

            Peg turns up her palms and holds them out to the class. "And so," she says, hiccupping, "Crito, we owe a cock to Axios." She retches and covers her mouth with her fist. Shiresh raises his hand, but she waves him off. After several more huge retches, she concludes: "Pay it and do not forget it."

            “Cock!” shouts one of the young women and they bury their heads in their arms, shrieking with giggles.

            I go to the desk, seeing it high time that I resume control of the situation. “Thank you, Peg,” I say.

            “I need to sit down,” she says. She goes to the corner and slumps down against the wall.

            I sit crisscross applesauce at the center of my desk, as is my habit. The students seem relieved to have me back in charge. Now feels like a good time to explain my never-ending office hours, and, as I do, as I extend my invitation of total accessibility to my students, I begin to levitate an inch or so above the desk. I just go with it.             “You see, we at Pioneer State think it’s so important that you know that we’re always there for you, to meet you where you are and lead you toward your dreams.”

            Shiresh raises his hand.

            “That will be all,” I say and leave.

            Floating down the hallway I see several students that should be in my class huddled by the bathrooms and laughing at some loud video on a phone.

            “Shouldn’t you all be in class?”

            They spin and, registering me floating there, disperse in random, halting patterns like squirrels.

            “No running in the atrium!” shouts our campus police officer, approaching from the atrium.

            I rub my brow in consternation and, again, the students simply vanish.

            “Wow,” the campus officer—is he Tyler?—says. “That was a close call.”

            We stare at each other.

            He says, "Good thing you're, uh, magic."

            I nod. Our conversations are always awkward, owing to his having several times dressed me down for smoking outside the yellow tape.

            “Well, Lucas, just let me know if y’all need anything.” He walks the wrong way down the hallway toward the shuttered vocational wing of the building, turns after ten paces, and gives me an embarrassed smirk as he walks back into the atrium.

~

            I go back to my office hours. Waiting outside my office is a smiling man and woman close to my age, the man thin and gangly and the woman short with oily curls and a ruffled black blouse. They are married, religious, and religiously attend my morning section of Early World Literature. They present me at the beginning of each class with a list of things I’ve forgotten to do, failed to explain, discrepancies in my materials, and, sometimes, mock-cheerful comments on my rumpled personage, my tired, incredulous, beseeching eyes.

            “We came by your office to ask about the midterm,” he says.

            “But you weren’t here," she says.

            “It says you’re always here.”

            “But you weren’t here.”

            “We asked up front and Mr. Tattle said you should be in your office. He called you.”

            “But you weren’t here.”

            “We called the main Campus in Clarksville. They said they checked your hours, and you were supposed to be here, but you weren’t.”

            “So, they gave us the college president’s personal cell number and we called her.”

            They both cross their arms in unison, say in unison, “She said we should go wait here and let her know when you return.”

            I look them both long in the eyes, flitting my glance between their unwavering, affronted, wolfish glares, and I reach to press my temples and channel the effluence of my energies, but they squint in tandem and rub their temples, too, and with a crack like lightning and an unpleasant ripping sensation, I find myself immaterialized and hurtling through a purple-black cold vortex loud as a jet engine and rattling with stinging hail.

            Then I come to on my hands and knees in gravel, and I look up, and all around me it’s parking lot, far as I can see in every direction. And I collect myself, stand and dust off my trousers. My cigarettes and lighter are in my pocket. Over there I see some students I recognize from last Spring cheering and leaning over a game of craps under halogen streetlamps. There are no trash cans, no bees.

            I follow the gaze of the anti-feminist who’s perched on a truck gate–she’s watching the ambulations of the honest-to-Jesus real life Socrates, unmistakably ugly and be-robed, and I approach the master to ask: “What are you doing here?”

            He swivels his chin, his neck creaking, regards me with no little wisdom. “What are any of us doing here?”

            “You don’t belong here in the liminal parking lot.”

            “Who belongs anywhere?”

            He’s committed to his shtick. But he’s also glowing and I assume he might be in charge. “Look, I don’t belong here. I have more to offer. I’ve given everything to my students.”

            “Is that what they need?”

            “They need something.”

            “From you?”

            “Do you want to see my CV? I graduated from one of U.S. News and World Report’s Best Value Colleges!”

            He wrinkles his nose. “Could your parents not afford you the proper tutors?”

            “My parents weren’t rich.”

            “Do you think knowledge is the purview of the rich alone?”

            “Do you?” I give him a taste of his own medicine. He loves it. It’s yummy and he smiles and rubs his belly. And it dawns on me, this guy doesn’t know anything. He’s just a weird asshole.

            All the same, I want a selfie. When I put my arm around him for the shot, he goes rigid. One of us smells like serious BO. He only frowns as I snap a couple of pics, then trudges away.

            I call after him: “I just met Aristotle. He was way smarter.”

            Socrates creaks back around. “Fuck that guy. He stole all my ideas.”

            When he's out of earshot I say, “What a jerk” to the anti-feminist.

            She looks up from her phone. “Was that Julius Caesar?”

            “Yes.” What difference does it make?”

            “Is it true? Did the other guy steal his ideas?”

            “I don't know.”

           “Did you read their like whatever? Stuff?

            I try to give her a withering look, but it’s probably more a gawk of shame and terror. “Yes. Some. A little. Not really,” I stammer. “No one does.”

Right?

          She shrugs. “That's like the problem. Like how do you know? Stuff, I mean.”

           I’m so sweaty. Isn’t it hot in this parking lot? I mumble, “I don't think anyone's figured that out.”

           She's not listening anymore. My phone dings. It’s a note from HR welcoming our newest English Instructor, Arastotel.

            Another ding. Peg somehow has my number and has sent me a video of herself hovering a solid foot over my desk and pontificating to my enthralled students. All are smiling and some are high-fiving and you can really sense they’re learning a lot. I click the play arrow and she pronounces, “Those who’ve failed you offer to be there,” and she imitates perfectly my doltish low mumble: “There! There? There, there.”

            My students shake their heads; I am too, in the parking lot. She’s really got my number.

            Now she looks directly into the camera: “When what we really need is here,” she points to her head, “and here,” to her heart.

            Ooh. I suck my teeth. She’s good.

            I want to send the Socrates selfie to her in retort, but now there’s no service. I throw my cell phone up into the air and it keeps going and going up into the clouds. “Wow,” says the anti-feminist. “Look at it go.”

            So, we do.

---

Lucas Flatt's work has appeared in X-R-A-Y Lit, Pithead Chapel, Roi Fainéant, and Maudlin House, among other fine literary establishments. He has been longlisted in the 2026 Jeanne Leiby Chapbook Award and won the 2016 Larry Brown Short Story award at Pithead Chapel, and teaches at Volunteer State Community College. He lives with Merry, Ira, and Susie in Tennessee.

S. Mubashir Noor

A Fortunate Flood

My father picked an unfortunate day to die. Now he was wrapped in a white muslin shroud and drifting in a sea of tea-black floodwater—not unlike how he’d drifted in and out of our lives.

He lay on a rough-hewn charpoy, its chipped legs buoyed by inflatable gray tubes from a tractor. A hemp rope was fixed to the charpoy’s rail, and its other end tied around my waist, which bit into my skin.

My toes wouldn’t touch the silt as I swam through cold, sticky currents. Would I ever find dry land to bury him? Should I even care?

Rescue workers had long left the area in their puttering motorboats that could barely seat more than a household of five. When I begged them to return, they gave me a once-over and said petrol prices had risen.

The drizzle fell like shards of glass. A deep mist choked the horizon, limiting sight to only a stone’s throw in any direction. Shapeless garbage bags bobbed about the water like toy ships with crows and rats for captains and crew.

My path had crossed others carting their belongings on makeshift rafts, some bearing brass pots and bleating lambs. Hollow-eyed families who looked about as alive as my father. I hadn’t seen any for a while now.

Brown outlines in the distance should be land, but I was inching no nearer. The odd gather of trees both lush and skeletal resisted the deluge, but they too appeared bent and spent.     

I issued a sour chuckle. Dammit. What a crappy way to die.

I was five when the powers-that-be first promised that never again would the plains of Punjab drown in monsoon rains and India’s mischief of opening its floodgates. Thirty years had passed. Damn them all. They never built those damned dams. They never cared.

My father knew the score. He was quite the dime-store philosopher, insisting there was no saving this country. A fluke of fate had tossed it into our laps, he claimed, when we as people were no better than toddlers unable to control nature’s calls, much less run a state.

Not that he wasn’t an indulgent toddler himself. I’d barely seen him growing up. He’d abandoned us for adventure when I was still a child, leaving my siblings and me to work fields we could barely manage for pennies while our mother sewed herself to near blindness. Two days ago, he walked back in, all smiles, enthusing about making up for lost time. This morning, he was dead.

His last words were haunting, because I’d so often heard them as a child whenever he smashed to bits any clayware within reach. Sometimes in winter, when gathering firewood seemed like a chore, he’d light some of our clothes on fire for heat, but never his own.  

“Kanjara, kee kitta ee—scum, what have you done?” he’d said, clutching his heart before keeling over.

What was I trying to prove by dragging his corpse along? That I wasn’t a monster? That I knew how to do the right thing? Would burying him honorably somehow make me a different man in the mirror? Shouldn’t I just release the rope and let fate decide for him the grave he deserved?

Maybe it was the whiplash of other memories half-buried that stopped me from letting go. The memory of a slim collection of mystery paperbacks he’d bought at the village fair—books that nightly soothed the aches of my daily toil.

Or the memory of when we strolled through wet thickets by the irrigation canal near the border, trapping frogs with flashlights and catching fireflies with our fists. Maybe I was just a sap.

A violent crack of thunder startled me.

I sniffed at the air. The wind now carried whiffs of sulfur and garlic. What gave?

A fluttering near my ears, then a swoosh.

I glanced behind me, my heart racing.

A bird about the size of my shoe had alighted on my father’s head. Its beak gently pecked and poked where the man’s eyes would be.

I tried to shoo it away with my palm, but each time it hopped out of reach.

A sleek chocolate-brown body, a black round head, and a white-tipped tail. Slashes of yellow skin around its eyes like a masked villain’s eyeliner. A mynah bird.

A talker, huh? Wonder if it could tell jokes. Ah, what I wouldn’t give to just fly away and choose the land of my choice without concern for borders or money.

“Kanjara, kee kitta ee?” said the mynah in a small harsh voice.

My arms went still in the water. I’d hoped to never hear the taunt again or relive it in my mind’s eye. My father shouting it a thousand times at my mother, spitting it at me when I brought home wilted vegetables, screaming it at God himself when the rains hollowed our roof.  

“What?” I finally whispered.

The mynah’s eyes had brightened. Its beak was wide open, its body quivering. Was it silently laughing at my vexation?

My breath grew heavy. “Baa-ji?” I asked in a meek voice.

The bird hopped about the charpoy in silence. By then, the stench of sulfur and garlic had dimmed.

I turned around and shook my head. What was I hoping for? Some companion? A supernatural presence—my dead father’s no less—who could save me from suffering? Impossible. His remains were beginning to stink.

The sudden rush of adrenaline had focused my brain. I slapped my cheeks. Get a grip, Malkoo. Time to paddle onward, live to fight another day.

The mist was now thinning around me, but what it revealed was heartache—an endless film of forbidding water.

And yet, the currents were behaving strangely. They were going around in circles like a mini whirlpool, with the charpoy as their vortex.  

A tingling started in my chest. I paddled faster to escape their orbit, but the ripples changed direction. What the hell was going on?

Ahead, a flat stump was now visible, no wider than a semitrailer and nearer than I could’ve imagined. A tiny island?

It wasn’t deserted. There was someone there. A man, or was it a boy?

A flicker of hope sparked in my heart. Another rescue worker? Could he help me get to higher ground? I could reach within earshot of the island in a few minutes. Maybe there was a God after all. Maybe there was a government after all.

I sucked on a piece of candy for the sugar rush to enliven my sore limbs. The mynah was muttering to itself in many voices, but I ignored it and started toward the island. I needed to be saved. 

The island’s only resident was a very short man, no taller than a stool, with weathered features. A thick mustache adorned his humorless face. His head wore a coiffed puggaree, and his glossy waistcoat was reminiscent of patwaris—the oft-treacherous land accountants of Punjab.

He was seated at a small steel desk, poring over a thick ledger, marking it with a flourish of his … quill?

I frowned. Had his office been swept away by the flood, walls and all, leaving just him and the table intact? He looked nothing like the other rescue workers.

My curiosity was laid waste by the mynah alighting on my head.

“Kanjara, kee kitta ee?” it screeched in my ear.

I winced and let my fist fly to murder the fiend.

“Get lost,” I said as it hovered above me, its cry shattering the still. “Leave me alone, you dumb bird.”

An eerie whistle. The short man peered at me with binoculars.

The patch of water between me and the island was astir.

I gulped. Something was rising to the surface.

A concave mound many meters wide, patterned like a chessboard and of the ugliest gray, peeked above the water’s brim.

Goddammit. That thing was too large to be a turtle—hell, even an alligator. Was he some master criminal with a seafaring monster as his pet?

The mynah landed on my buoy with half a biscuit clenched in its beak. “Beware,” it said in a very human voice. “This is no ordinary mortal.”

“What’s g-going on?” I croaked.

A splash next to my arm. The man was glaring at me, frozen in a chucking motion.

I gaped at him. Did he hurl a stone? Why? “Hey, that could’ve blinded me!”

“I am the guardian of this sector. Where’s your ticket?” he asked in a demanding voice.

I cupped my ears. “Huh?”

The mynah clawed at my sleeve. “Kanjara, Kanjara.”

The mound was growing larger. My head was pounding with dread.

  “I d-don’t understand. P-please help me. I need to bury my father,” I said.

His stony expression didn’t change. A sharp ridge had emerged from the water ahead of the mound.

The mynah snickered. “Who knew his people had been pressed into service too?”

The flat of my palm struck the buoy, making the mynah scatter. “Who the hell are you?” I asked the bird. “Can’t you stop talking in—”

“Impossible,” interrupted the guardian. “No ticket, no ride.”

I looked around incredulously. “Ride? Where are the boats?” My arms shot up in frustration. “Can’t you people get anything right?”

The mynah returned to the buoy and tittered anew. “You’re a stupid one, Malkoo.”

My jaw dropped open. “How do you know my name?”

More whistling. The mound was growing fast.

I nearly swallowed my tongue in terror. What province of hell had spawned this creature?

A head like a rock carved by a feral river; a jagged cliff for a snout. Its thick leathery neck met a massive black shell that bore knots like freshly kneaded bread. When it opened its maw, its razor-sharp teeth snapped like thunder.

“Kanjara, kee kitta ee?” the mynah screamed, twisting my bowels into a seekh kebab.

The guardian made a disgusted face. “What a foul pet. Now leave before mine tear you to shreds. You cannot pass beyond this point.”

My gaze flitted between him and the monster groaning ominously. I splashed floodwater on my face. This was still Pakistan, right? Not the land of the djinn or something.

Snatches of conversation, cheerful. The wind also carried the aroma of something brewing.

Son of a …

A white platform beyond the guardian’s island, not unlike a pier, floated in the sea of filth. Dinghies moored at its stiles.

Many silhouettes. People lounged on deck chairs; children crowded a steaming tea stall.

The dark cotton clouds had parted right over the pier to let through shafts of warm sunlight.

My hands trembled. There was dry land after all. There were people who’d never touched this filthy water. And here I was, dragging a corpse through hell. Why? What made them special?

The guardian tapped his foot impatiently. “Leave now, unless you want to die. The ark will be here soon.”

The creature growled on cue to show he meant business.

My forehead was clammy from sweat even though my toes were so cold I couldn’t feel them wiggle. There was no way past that beast. One lunge could take my limb, and he’d certainly puncture the buoys.

The mynah buzzed with excitement. It tittered, screeched, and hopped between the charpoy and my head. 

“You can’t talk to my son like that,” it said, wagging its wing at the guardian, who recoiled in surprise.

Instantly, the bird hid its beak behind its wings and gave me a furtive glance.

I gawked at it, dumbstruck. “What did you just say?”

More sloshing nearby, and muted grunts.  

Four haggard men, their heads down and wearing only singlets, were pulling along a wooden platform the length of four donkey carts.

On the platform was placed a couch, on which sat a smartly dressed man, his bejeweled wife, and two young children—all wearing fancy khussa shoes inlaid with mirrors, all bone-dry.

My teeth gnashed. A wadera, huh? Landowners who commanded vast acres of farmland. What was with the cold side-eye? Think you’re special? You’re lucky that I forgot my firearm.

The guardian’s reaction was the opposite of mine. He stood erect and saluted the family.

The wadera showed the man something like a glossy postcard, to which the latter responded with a small bow.

“Please continue, sir,” he said in an oily voice. “Have some tea at the station. Your ride will be along shortly.”

The mynah tsk-tsked as the procession pushed away. “You may as well kill yourself, Malkoo. No wonder people risked a creaky boat halfway across the world for a shot at a better life. It’s not like you could avoid death by water here.”

My temples twitched. “Careful. You’re starting to sound like my father. Maybe I ought to wring your neck.”

I glared at the guardian. “How does one get that ticket, huh? What if I promise you my kidney?”

His eyes grew softer, and he sighed. “You can’t buy this anywhere, son. You must be born in the right place.”

The water felt colder against my skin. What the hell … Born in the wrong place. Not worked hard enough. Not prayed devoutly enough. Not suffered nobly enough. Just ... born.

He’d returned to his desk and scribbled on his ledger. His pet had moved to the distance, though its deep-set inky eyes still fixed on me.

The mynah snipped at my ear. “Kanjara, you can’t turn back now. You must bury your father. Turn around and try another way,” it said in a strained voice.

“Unless you can grow wings the size of a truck, shut up.”

I scratched my arm. Survival was paramount, Malkoo. I should tip the corpse into the water and rest awhile before changing course. I was finished if night fell before I found land.

I glanced back at the charpoy. “Sorry, Baa-ji. I’d hoped to bury you honorably, but life is hard.”

No sooner had I reached for the rope around my waist than the mynah started going berserk—beating its wings in a frenzy and shrieking.

Then it dove for my arms and stabbed them with its scissorlike beak. “Don’t do that,” it said, dodging my attempts to swat it into the stratosphere. “You toss him and I’ll never be free!”

“What the hell are you talking about?” I shouted back. “Who are you really?”

The mynah hovered before my face, wide-eyed and panting. “My real name won’t roll off your tongue, so just call me Chichi. I’m a djinn, well, at least a child djinn.”

A sliver of fear cut into my chest, but I was much too exhausted to panic. “Then what are you doing here? Can’t you find happier people to mock, huh?”

Chichi, the djinn turned mynah bird, shook his head vigorously. “It’s not my fault. Your late father was pissing under a jasmine tree one night many years ago, and I just attached myself to him. That’s our nature.”

Tch. That’s how he knew the man’s favorite phrase. “Sure, prey on the weak, why don’t you. Were you also responsible for his abandoning us?”

The bird shrugged. “Nothing personal, really. I just wanted to see more of the world.”

I closed my eyes and exhaled. The djinn showed no remorse. He was so much like the man he’d possessed.

My belly burned with hunger. I raised myself to retrieve the meager bag of rations I’d stowed on the charpoy, when the bird jumped in front of my reaching hand.

“Sorry, I already finished everything,” said Chichi in a sheepish voice.

Then he swerved sideways with a yelp before I could close my fist around his head.

“What did I ever do to you, you scoundrel?” I spat, shaking my fist at him. “What? You came back to see me drown too?”

“No, no, I’m on your side,” said Chichi in a cracking voice. “You must bury this man on dry land. Unless the worms eat him, I won’t be set free. I can’t stay a bird forever.”

“Everything is about you, isn’t it? Get lost.”

The waves were taller now and rippling faster.

Loud whistling, not in the guardian’s shrill tone, but in a bassy timbre suggesting a steam engine.

Something was edging over the horizon—many stories high, shaped like a V with a bulbous bow, its tall pillars emitting the shadow of smoke. The ark?

The guardian stood with rapt attention, his shoulders pulled back. Even his creature stretched its neck out of the water to witness the scene.

After Chichi’s offhand remark, it wouldn’t have surprised me if the guardian was a bonna—that mythical race of diminutive thieves.

The waves grew choppier, more vicious. Soon, they would overturn the charpoy and pull me into their depths. I had to get as far away as possible.

“Sorry, father,” I said, untying the rope from my waist. “It’s either me or you. And you’re already where you need to be.”

Chichi’s feathers were now standing on end, like he’d been electrocuted.  “Kanjara, kee kitta ee!”

“That won’t work on me anymore,” I said in a bored voice. “You’ve ruined my life enough. Now begone.”

“Wait, wait. You’re forgetting something important. I’m a djinn. I could easily possess you right now.”

I scoffed. “You want to drown with me? Is your kind that stupid?” 

Chichi kept mum.

I reached for the burial shroud and tucked it tighter around my father’s frame. “How about you pay me back for the food by pointing me in the right direction, eh? Fly around a bit. Be useful.”

“What’s the point? Your chance of survival is slim.”

The waves were lapping at my chest. The whistling grew louder, and soon there appeared a mammoth wooden ship with bright fog lights fixed to its bow.

My pulse was frantic, but I formed a weak smile. “That’s the way it works here, djinn.”

I pushed the charpoy away and watched it dance with the waves.

Chichi wore a surprised look. “I thought you were going to shift to the charpoy?”

“Yeah … I thought so too.”

He hung his head and groaned. “Dammit. I’m stuck in this stupid meat suit.”

The ark moored itself to the floating pier, and soon it lowered steel ladders that were instantly surrounded. The chosen people were hurrying to board and shoving without reservation.

Someone fell into the water and shouted for help. No one looked. They kept ‌climbing the ladders.

Well, that was it, I thought, cradling my chin on the buoy. When the wooden behemoth turned around, it would surely come my way. I’d run out of time. Hmm?

The creature streaked across the water in my direction. The guardian stood on its back.

“Oye, you guys want a job?” he asked gruffly.

I gazed at my father’s shroud bobbing in the distance. Thirty-five years I’d spent on the wrong side of every line that mattered. Thirty-five years playing by rules written by men on piers.

Rescue workers had considered me a corpse in waiting. The wadera’s cold stare explained my station in life. A ticket given only to those who’d won the birthday lottery. How preposterous.  

My father had been right about one thing—there was no saving this country. But maybe there was saving myself.

“Do I need to sell my soul?” I asked in a tired voice.

“Very funny. I must steal supplies for the pier, and my replacement never showed. The boat is due for two more trips.”

“Wait,” I said, straightening. “You want us to guard your little island and shoo the poor people away?”

He gave a thumbs-up.

Chichi cackled with glee. “I can find a new vic—I mean, friend.”

I crossed my arms and faked a serious face, even as my heart was doing somersaults. “Aren’t you worried my poverty will stain your royal party?”

He laughed. “All that separates you is a change of clothes and address. How else do bottom- feeders rise to lead this country?”

His face darkened. “But don’t tell anyone,” he said, putting a finger to his lips. “Let them think the ticket is a birthright. It’s easier to control them.”

He passed me a glossy postcard edged in gold.  It bore strange writing that came and went as it caught the light from different angles.

Chichi was fluttering next to my ear. “Hang on a minute. Where did you learn this ancient tongue?”

I stuffed the ticket in my breast pocket. Life made sense now. I was home again.

“You can count on us, sir,” I said, saluting. “My associate and I will make sure no serfs are allowed beyond this point.”

His suspicious look lingered for an instant, but then he turned around and jetted away.

I stretched my arms and yawned. “Do as you please,” I said to Chichi. “This is my best shot.”

The bird wore a puzzled expression. “I don’t get it. How can you change sides so easily?”

I hesitated. How indeed? Every man in the water thought he was different from the man on the island. But put him on the island, and he became the same man. That was the way of the world—the real flood to drown one’s vanity, the fetid water that cleansed the ego.

I combed my hair with my fingers. “You wouldn’t understand. I picked a fortunate day to live. Sometimes that’s all they ask of you.”

---

S. Mubashir Noor moonlights as a mediocre communications professional by day and crafts absurdist satire laced with magic realism at the crack of dusk. A Pakistani expat based in Malaysia, he enjoys photography, sharply sketched TV shows, and the fleeting euphoria of reaching his weekly word count. Find him on Instagram @smobynoor and on LinkedIn.

Joshua Wetjen

This Aquaman Costume is of the Utmost Quality and Fits Like a Glove

uncannycarl

0.5/5 stars

The crotch pulls hella tight—worse than discomfort but just shy of agony. My vitals obvious to passersby in bright lighting—embarrassing. Less visible outside the velvet rope in the alleyway entrance to the hipster Beacon Club annual Heroes Costume Ball!!! where I got stood up, though. Rachel. She ghosted me—no Halloween pun intended. I came on too strong, I assume. I got excited I bought this costume (on sale 30% off—Superman sold out) to compliment her as Wonder Woman. I texted her the tracking number and a photo of me and several vintage panels of rare Aquaman feats, like his legendary melee facing a Maarzon warrior. Then the ongoing pull on my crotch reminded me our lot in this life is to suffer. I rate half a star.

lsmith

no stars

Not at all like the recent film reboot starring Jason Momoa. A sh***y attempt of the old timey OG version with golden scales on top and green tights below. No one will get who you are. The scales aren’t scales, just curved lines.

jennys

4/5 stars

Bought this in kids’ size for my son who watches Super Friends on his iPad. He loves it. He cried when I said he couldn’t wear it to swimming lessons at the Y, tho. :-)

uncannycarl

5/5 stars

The polyester clinging one piece faded—after one wash the scales disappeared. What happened with it then—I needed one more layer to go paintballing in the woods—an invite from Rachel who I hadn’t heard from in a year since I asked her out. What’s great—the costume kept me warm under my jeans and flannel! What’s not great—Rachel kissed Max from the front office at my job before they got into his Subaru as I discharged my last round at my friend Rob who fell off a tree branch. Rachel drove away before I could say goodbye. Rob broke his leg. I helped him to his car and sat with him in the ER waiting room, because I possess a warrior soul. The costume of muted colors underneath my flannel kept me brave. Rachel texted: so great to see you today. Trying not to over interpret. Next week I’m doing a bachelor party in Vegas for my friend Tino. I’ll try it there. We’re going to a rave.

jeffw

3/5 stars

Runs small. The photo looks like it comes with boots. Nope. Tried Birkenstocks, then rainboots same color. Boots not bright enough to match. Worked ok. Fun to look like a DC legend. Deeper cut in the DCU :-( Like the other review said looks nothing like the recent movie.

uncannycarl

4/5 stars

I wore my trusty faded Aquaman suit and Tino and the other groomsmen wore Morphsuits in primary colors. Said I wanted to do Aquaman instead. Tino laughed. He’s used to me being on “another wavelength.” I Sharpied the outlines of the scales back on—pro-tip—this works if you have the patience. It took some time with the fabric stretching in my fingers, so I pulled it across my coffee table before packing the rest of my duffel bag. Walking down the strip back to our room some women having a bachelorette party laughed. One yelled “Save me Aquaman!” Then they all ran up into The Venetian. She was cute—short and blonde. She looked nothing like Rachel  She did have a shiny pink balloon shaped like male genitalia reminiscent of the original fit from the costume, lol. FYI, it does get bigger with time and becomes less NSFW around the crotch. Tino weeping into my shoulder right before he passed out when we got back to the room—he loves Becca but is terrified. I assured him. I remembered the blonde bachelorette which made me think of Rachel. I drunk texted her me as Aquaman—nothing gross but just weird—so far from Atlantis and so far from you. I threw up the next morning and regretted the text, but I look pretty good! Been working out. The better you look, the better Aquaman looks.

jmylestherealmyles

5/5 stars

My kids don’t even know Aquaman, but they liked me in it. Fun to dress up to hand out Tootsie Roll Pops to kids trick-or-treating. We got a trident and a fake fishing net too! My wife wore a pirate costume with an eye patch. she was recycling my costume from last year. She should have been a mermaid!

r

0/5 stars

Flimsy fabric. Don’t jump over your neighbor’s hedges! :-(

uncannycarl

5/5 stars

Rachel never responded to my drunk text, of course. I did cry. I’ve been on other dates—I did go out for a while with Nina from the yoga class and Maura from the running group. Now I’m invited to Rachel’s wedding, which is costume themed… Max, now her fiancée, likes old Universal Horror movies and wants to be the Frankenstein monster and Rachel to be the bride. He’s nice but I hated being there recently when the three of us got coffee. Maybe I’m getting over Rachel, but it sucks putting it all in my face like that with her new guy who is taller than me and skinnier but probably not as funny (?) Then this happened—I got the number of a nice woman who was eyeing some vintage comics at hobby store on the same block. We struck up a conversation about the origins of Batman and The Shadow. This beautiful person, Andrea, knew some the stories in the original Aquaman series! “Aren’t we all trying to find our lost Atlantis?” she asked, winking. I don’t think I’ll make it to Rachel and Max’s wedding, much as they want me to be there. True story: I had the costume in my trunk, ready to give it to Goodwill before meeting Andrea. Didn’t feel right! After a couple years, the costume feels like my best outfit, lol. Seriously. It fits good. I need to keep it.

---

Joshua Wetjen is a high school English teacher living in Minneapolis and working in St. Paul. When not grading or chasing his two children, he likes to tinker on his jazz guitar and try new restaurants with his wife. His work has appeared in The Pinch, Newfound, and Yalobusha Review among other publications.

Nora Esme Wagner

Mud Pies 

The pies are full of twigs and leaves and dirt so dark it looks dredged up from the center of the earth. Pale, silvery shapes squirm inside, so when you hold a pie, it feels like a swamp creature is in your hands. These are the worms. The best around, the pride of the Campell girls. You couldn’t find tastier worms if you flipped over every rock in the playground, sifted through all the piles of damp woodchips. It takes an experienced eye. A knowing tongue.

“Are you gonna try?” the youngest Campbell asks. Of the three sisters, she looks the least threadbare. Baby fat still pads her cheeks, but in a thin, vanishing layer, like slowly collapsing coffee foam.

“I’m not sure,” Tammy says.

“I can hear your belly grumble,” the middle Campbell says. “You’re hungry.”

Tammy thinks back to the bento-box lunch she brought to school in her backpack. A thermos of chicken and dumplings, a heap of cornbread, spears of okra, a clementine peeled clean of its white strings. Her mom always packs extra in the event that she ever makes a friend. Yet the lunchbox always returns fully eaten, only an orange shell left, and teachers still report that Tammy is a recluse. Not bullied. Ignored, which her mom finds, in a way, worse.

“My mom won’t like it if I don’t eat what she packed me.”

“Your mama still packs you lunch?” says the oldest Campbell, who rarely ever speaks. No one knows her age, and rumors have flown that she’s so quiet because her tongue was bitten off by a grown-up boyfriend. But Tammy sees the tongue dance in her mouth, a slip of gray-pink.

“Your mom doesn’t?”

The Campbells paw the ground like skittish horses. The youngest seems upset, the oldest ready to throw a punch. The middle crosses her arms over her chest and says, “C’mon. Let’s not waste our good worms on her.”

They snatch the mud pie out of Tammy’s hands, where it leaves smears of dirt that look like brownie crumbs. A sheen of worm-slime lingers. Guarding the mud pie, the Campbells sneer and turn their backs. Leaving her at the forested edge of the playground, alone. She wonders why they’d slipped her a note in the first place. What expectation she’d disappointed.

“Wait.”

All three Campbells pause.

“My mom’s making a pie tonight. A real one, with apples. You should come over.”

The oldest looks back at Tammy, tilts her head. She licks a dirty finger absentmindedly, as though she were only wetting a thumb to flip a page in class. “We gotta think about that.”

Tammy nods quickly, opening her mouth to say more. That the apples are fresh from the grove, the deepest red she’s ever seen. That her mom never skimps on the lard for the crust. That the smell of cinnamon and nutmeg and roasting fruit steeps the whole house.

But the Campbells keep walking. Off to eat their lunch.

Tammy isn’t anticipating the knock. Dinner’s been eaten already—the hamburger steak and gravy cleared from the plates, the silverware arranged in the dishwasher according to her mom’s neat system. The pie’s now baking, leaking sweet odors into the living room where Tammy’s watching television. She jumps at the sound of a fist against the door.

“Are we expecting someone?” her mom asks.

“I invited some friends over for pie.”

“Friends?”

“Some classmates.”

“Well!”

She hurries to the front door as if it were the oven’s and her pie was about to burn. The Campbells are waiting on the porch, still wearing their school clothes and carrying their school bags. Dirt freckles across their noses.

“Please come in! The pie’s almost ready.”

They stumble in slowly, like there’s an invisible membrane impeding their entrance. Their eyes swivel around the kitchen. The booming rack of pots and pans. The grade reports tacked onto the fridge. The soapstone countertop, balancing a bowl of just-ripe bananas.

“Hi,” Tammy says shyly.

They sit around the table, three Campbells on one side, Tammy alone on the other. Conversation moves through her mom, who asks their names, their parents’, the teachers they like best, the church they attend. Her eyes rest on their muddy faces, the wrist bones prodding out of skin, but she says nothing. Feral Campbells for friends are better than no friends at all.

When the pie’s finally ready, she serves them mountainous slices on her second-best set of china. The Campbells fork apart the pie, like they’re monkeys grooming bugs from fur. Tammy’s halfway done with her piece by the time they take a first bite.

The youngest makes a face. The middle spits it into a napkin. The oldest starts coughing.

“Gosh, what’s the matter? Have you never had pie before?”

“It’s a little sweet, ma’am,” the oldest says finally.

“I didn’t add any more sugar than usual. Do you think it’s too sweet, Tammy?”

Tammy says no through a heaping forkful. It comes out as nargh.

After their disastrous first taste, the Campbells go silent, mushing the pie around their plates, taking no further bites. Tammy’s mom sighs and mutters to herself. A second helping for Tammy. Then a third.

Once a deep dent has been made in the pie, Tammy’s mom rises and asks if the Campbells need a ride home.

“We’re all good, ma’am,” the middle says. Despite the too-sweet pie, they seem reluctant to leave, hovering near the hot breath of the oven. Tammy, too, is worried. That it’s all been a gotcha for not eating their mud pie. That tomorrow will be just like always, and no one will speak to her.

She follows them onto the porch, where stars gooseflesh across the sky. The Campbells rub at their dirty noses, seeming sad, as if they also wished they’d liked the apple pie. But girls who grow up on dirt will choke on sugar.

“Lookie here,” the youngest says, pointing at the railing. A shiny worm inches along, blossom-pink, clean of any mud. She plucks it up and puts it in Tammy’s hands.

Tammy brings her palms to her mouth. The Campbells stare hungrily. She kisses its clammy head, then opens wide.

---

Nora Esme Wagner is a junior at Wellesley College. She lives in San Francisco, California. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Smokelong, Wigleaf, JMWW, Milk Candy Review, Flash Frog, Vestal Review, and elsewhere. Her stories have been selected for Wigleaf’s Top 50. She is an assistant fiction editor at Pithead Chapel and the Co-Editor-in-Chief for The Wellesley Review.

Matthew Snyderman

Only in New York

            Claire shielded her eyes and scanned the Arizona sky for vultures.  It wouldn’t be long before a trio of them - she always pictured them in threes - began to circle.  Waiting for her to weaken.  Then they would land 20 yards away and begin their slow advance, one grotesque hop at a time.

            She hated vultures almost as much as she hated this kind of heat; 93 and climbing, according to her phone.  So what if it was dry.  And she wondered what the temperature would be in the shade, if there were any.  That noon was 90 minutes off did not improve her mood.

~

            Repeated attempts to suppress images of her sun-bleached skull in a series of Georgia O'Keeffe paintings went for naught until a speck emerged from the heat waves where Route 40 met the horizon, set to an audible hiss coming from the 1972 Buick Riviera she'd been driving cross-country since leaving New York five days earlier.  Less than 200 miles to the west was Sedona, which she'd called home after her father had pulled the plug on his law practice and a rickety marriage to a devout socialite 17 years ago in favor of a small desert art gallery. But given present circumstances, it might as well have been on Mars.

            “Come on, buddy,” she pleaded with a plaintive wave as the speck became a hump and then an 18-wheeler.  Wishing she could temporarily morph from a plump 5’2” barista and aspiring artist with a spiky, two-toned hairstyle into a size six blond capable of bringing the most reluctant trucker to a halt, Claire forgot to cover the car's still legible "Hillary in 2016" bumper sticker.  This guy was really moving.  There was no chance that rig was going to stop safely without ending up  at least 1/3 of a mile down the road, and it whooshed past in a cloud of dust and gravel.  She imagined the bimbo whose image was sprawled across the truck's side panel smirking at her.  “Fucking Republican!”

            Trying to decide whether she was actually getting light-headed or simply imagining it, Claire drained what was left of her water and confirmed that neither those orange road triangles nor a reflecting windshield screen had miraculously sprouted in the trunk since she'd last looked.  Then she opened the doors, collapsed onto the rear seat with her feet sticking out the door, and closed her eyes.  It wasn’t real shade, but it beat crawling under the car.  Two thousand miles of hard summer driving had failed to dissipate the old lady smell that seeped from the interior.  It wasn’t from just any old lady, though.

~

            Claire remembered receiving that phone call, with her loathsome cousin Moe’s nasal New York accent on the line reporting how her beloved Great-Aunt Mimi (his grandmother) had stroked out during Final Jeopardy, that the funeral had already happened (“Sorry about that”), and how she’d left Claire (and not him) the Riviera.  He added that she’d have to fly out posthaste and claim it or start paying the monthly storage fees.  Unless, of course, she wanted to sell it, which she didn’t.  She loved that car.

            Every July prior to going away to college, Claire would accompany her dad on a pilgrimage to visit his side of the family.  One on one, the grown ups were pleasant enough, even fun.  Together, their relentless efforts to guilt him into returning to the Big Apple were more stifling than the sticky inferno outside and kept her planted near a rattling standard-issue apartment air conditioner, mercifully out of earshot.  Coloring books ultimately gave way to pens, pastels, and sketch pads in providing some welcome diversion.

            But she counted on Aunt Mimi, with her garish dangly earrings and wristfulls of clinking bracelets, the sole relative who'd supported their move West, to notice her fidgety niece and usher her into the Riviera, driving like a cabbie on his second thermos of coffee for some adventure and a little “girl talk.”  The topics also changed with the years, from her cat to school to boys and, with some hesitation, girls.  And, most importantly, her art, several pieces of which had occupied places of honor in Aunt Mimi's apartment.

~

            Knock, knock, knock…

“You alright miss?”

            Jolted out of her reverie, Claire found herself staring up into a pair of bottomless black eyes framed by unruly eyebrows and a web of crow's feet.

            “You had me a worried there,” said the man as he withdrew and she peeled herself off the vinyl upholstery.  He had dark skin with creases running along a prominent nose.  His jet-black hair was tied in a ponytail and he was wearing oil-smudged mechanics overalls.  A yellow wrecker, hazards blinking, sat behind her car.  “You don’t see many of these nowadays.  A ‘72.”  Claire was a bit leery until he handed her a bottle of water.  It was warm, but sure enough wet.  “Want me to take a peek?”

            “Sure…please.”  She popped the release and followed him to the front of the car and watched the upper part of his body disappear under the hood.  A minute or two passed.  Then his disembodied voice floated out; “Could be anything.”  Extracting himself from the maw of the Riviera, he wiped his hands on his coveralls.  “It’s good you pulled over when you did.  Came close to cooking your engine.  I'll give you a tow to our garage so I can check her out right.  That is if that’s OK.”

            “Do I have a choice?”

            “Not unless you’d rather wait for the Highway Patrol,” he replied with a shrug and a crooked half smile that Claire hoped was honest.

            She waited in the cab and listened to him rattle around.  Her rescuer’s dash was covered with various knickknacks: his operator’s license, a photo of a somber woman in front of a rural gas station, several tiny Kachina figurines.  A military patch dangled from the rear-view mirror on a cord.  No old lady smell in there, just sweat and cigarettes.

            “OK,” he said, fastening his seat belt and waiting for her to do the same.  “It’s a 20-minute drive, more or less.”

            Miles of sun-blasted landscape sailed by while Claire salved her despair at having possibly trashed the mother of all keepsakes by flipping through a packet of postcards from famous museums - all from Aunt Mimi and all beginning with “To My Favorite Artist” - when a photo she’d palmed from an album on Moe's coffee table surfaced.  She was standing in a Sedona coffee house next to her first painting to be displayed publicly, flanked by her father and Aunt Mimi, both looking prouder than she did.  And both now gone.  A single tear ran down her cheek and she discreetly knuckled it away.

            “You from the Big Apple?” he asked, breaking the silence.

            “Sort of.  I was born there, but we moved to AZ when I was a kid.  How’d you know?  Can't be my accent.”

            “Naw.  Your plates.”

            “My plates.  Nice, Sherlock…Thanks, by the way.”

            “You should really thank Red Mike.  He has the semi with the white lady in the bikini on the side.  He drove by the shop and told me about you.  You don’t want to be stuck out in this sun for too long.”

            “No kidding.”

~

            The Last Chance Pit Stop stood in the middle of nowhere, a small convenience store fronted by three gas pumps standing in a row.  “Edward Hopper, where are you?” muttered Claire to nobody in particular.

            The garage occupied a separate building with a short line of pickups and a Subaru parked alongside with “Wash Me” scrawled on one of its dusty windows.  The man killed the motor and began uncoupling her Riviera.  “Why don’t you go cool off inside?  We have a fan going.”

            A gravel path bordered by larger rocks led to the store part of the operation.  Claire crunched along it to a shaded wooden porch above the roadbed.  The oversized thermometer nailed to the wall read 102 while a fistful of flies buzzed listlessly overhead as if trying to conserve energy.  An otherwise intimidating mongrel planted between a pair of rusted metal rocking chairs managed to do little more than raise its eyebrows when she passed by and pried open the creaky screen door.

            A couple of lanky old timers, one sporting a weather-beaten Stetson and a Z.Z. Top beard and the other in an Arizona Diamondbacks baseball cap, rotated on their stools to give the newcomer a cursory once-over, quickly returning to their conversation and whatever they were drinking, elbows on the counter.  Claire walked by wire racks of postcards, an unattended cash register, and shelves stocked with pretzels, Slim Jims, and smokeless tobacco, on a beeline to the refrigerated case where she was enveloped by a rush of frigid air.  “Ahhh!”

            “Refreshing, ain't it?” said the baseball fan, his back still to her.  “That fridge is the only reason anybody comes in here.”  He spoke so loudly, Claire figured it was meant more to summon somebody than start a conversation.

            “Coming!” A man with dark skin, piercing black eyes framed by unruly eyebrows, and a ponytail strode through the doorless doorway behind the register.  He had on a short-sleeve button down and Levi’s that actually looked ironed.  Even his fingernails were clean.  “Nice car,” he said with a familiar crooked smile. 

            “That was fast.  You didn't need to change on my account.”

            The man burst out laughing.  “You mean my brother, Al…Everybody and their mother makes that mistake.  Our mother did, too.  At least until I got this,” he added, pointing to a dime-sized scar next to his nose.

            “Ah, double trouble.”

            “That’s what she called us…Tell you what,” he said, leaning toward her across the counter and hooking his thumb toward the vintage menu board, “How about some refreshment on the house?  Whatever you want.” 

            “Hmmm…,” she responded with a perfunctory glance at the red plastic letters.  There, between Iced Tea and Root Beer, were two words that had her suddenly sitting bolt upright.    

“You sell egg creams?" she guffawed to the gurgle of two drinks being drained in tandem.  Egg creams, that signature New York delicacy and a treat Claire hadn't tasted for ages.  No eggs.  And no cream.  Just “seltza,” u-bet chocolate syrup, and milk.

            “Local specialty,” said the old timer through his beard, drawing a sleeve across where his mouth should be.

“Change your life,” said his companion.

            “Oh, really…OK, mister-”

            “Call me Russ.”

            “OK, Russ.  I'll have an egg cream; chocolate,” challenged Claire, hoisting herself onto the remaining stool and kicking her feet in their clunky combat boots. 

            All the familiar Pavlovian clattering, whooshing, and tink-tinking set her mouth to watering, despite her skepticism.  “Your Southwest egg cream,” said Russ.  In his hand was an antique-styled Coca Cola glass with a 1-inch crown of white foam which became four fingers of tan liquid above a chocolaty base.  He set it solemnly on the Formica and crossed his arms.  They eyed each other for a moment to the sound of the overhead fan.

Claire took the straw sticking out of the foam and gave the drink a stir. 

“Talk about cultural appropriation.” 

“Huh?”

“Never mind.”  Raising the elixir with a dramatic flourish she took a pull.

            That first sip transported Claire back to girlhood, when a procession of aunts, uncles, and the odd cousin would take turns escorting her to some of New York’s storied soda fountains.  They all had lunch counters with stools on which she’d spin around and soda jerks in cute paper hats who called her “sweetheart.” 

            Another taste and the scene shifted to Aunt Mimi’s kitchen table, where her father’s clan gathered, always in the same chairs, over homemade honey cake and tea to witness Claire anoint that year’s champ; Uncle Billy’s Blue Dot vs Uncle Irwin’s Duplex vs Cousin Herman’s Bronx Cheer.  Yet it was Louie’s, Aunt Mimi’s favorite, that came out on top each summer, whether it had the best egg cream or not, to the inevitable good-natured protests that “the goils” were fixing the contest.  She’d loved every variation, though, including the honorable mentions. 

            This time, the New York phantoms were joined by four underdressed corporeal interlopers from the Last Chance Pit Stop whom the New Yorkers were trying hard to ignore while awaiting the inevitable verdict.

            Claire stared into the glass for a beat or two and polished off the egg cream without taking a breath. That gentle bite of carbonation was there mingled with a divine chocolate semi-sweetness.  But there was something else.  Something so not Brooklyn.  Nor Manhattan.  Nor the Bronx.  There was heat there and it was perfect.  It was the best ever.

            Howls of dismay only she could hear erupted from the New York contingent as they rent their clothes and covered their heads in ashes.  No such histrionics were forthcoming from Aunt Mimi’s doppelgänger, however.  She sat there in her beloved cocktail dress, palms upturned, wearing an expression of wounded betrayal that caused the straw to drop from her grandniece’s mouth.  Claire, face aflame with guilt, had to shut her eyes to avoid it.

            “What’s the matter?  Don’t care for it?” asked somebody who didn’t sound at all like Brooklyn.

            Looking about, Claire saw only concerned Arizonans with not a New Yorker in sight.  “What was THAT?”  she gasped, ordering another to savor. 

Russ explained that he had stumbled on egg creams during a long ago East Coast road trip and that it had taken weeks of trial and error after returning home to finally conjure a product worthy of the Arizona dessert, let alone the Five Boroughs.  No amount of cajoling, however, was able to wrest the identity of that magical ingredient from the twins, other than that they discovered it through a kitchen mishap involving their mischievous cat, Axel, and his insistence on exploring the spice shelf above an egg cream sitting on their kitchen counter. "One of life's lucky accidents."

            “That and penicillin,” Claire laughed.  A final slurp emptied her glass.  “So, how's my car?”

            “Good news; I only had to replace some hoses and you were low on coolant.  I’ve never seen a '72 with so few miles on it.  You buy it from some little old lady?”

            “She was little, but never old.  How much?”

            “That'll be $140 plus tax with plastic or $125 if you pay in cash,” Al said conspiratorially.

            Claire dug through her leather backpack and produced some sunscreen, a hairbrush, and a paperback before finding her wallet.  Its lack of heft produced a wince followed by a dubious squinty-eyed peek inside.  “I have exactly $114.”

            “$114, then.”

            Sliding off the stool with a thump, she thanked them again on her way out the door.

            Both brothers and old timers appeared in her rear-view mirror to watch Claire gun the Riviera’s motor and pull onto the interstate.  She returned their waves with a farewell salute of her own as they receded from view.

~

            Ten miles down the road, her new used car rumbling contentedly, Claire flipped on the radio and trolled for anything but country.  Images of a succession of dearly departed relatives seated beside her at The Last Chance Pit Stop materialized in her head - Cousin Harold…Uncle Irwin…Uncle Billy…and especially Aunt Mimi - all sampling the best egg cream in the world.  And all of them, like good New Yorkers, dismissing it.  And each one planning to sneak back for seconds when nobody was looking.

---

Matthew Snyderman lives in Northern California with his wife. When not writing, he enjoys swimming, watching old movies on the big screen, and participating in the occasional Moth StorySLAM. His work has appeared in The Avalon Literary Review, The Berlin Literary Review, Bristol Noir, Bare Back, Fabula Argentea, Killer Nashville, Literally Stories, The Loch Raven Review, The Lowestoft Chronicle, The Opiate, Punk Noir, The Under Review, Twelve Winters, Twin Bill, and The Yard.

M. D. Smith

The Education of Vampire Bobby Lassater‍

Bobby Lassater was ten years old when he died, which is an awkward age to be a vampire undead. Old enough to recognize irony, too young to be taken seriously by immortals who had seen empires rise, fall, and be replaced by chain restaurants.

He lived in the depths of an abandoned coal mine in West Virginia, sharing subterranean real estate among fourteen vampires who referred to themselves—without irony—as the Family. Their coffins were arranged like pews in a church no one attended anymore, each filled with soil hauled lovingly from ancestral homelands: Transylvanian soil, Balkan clay, Carpathian loam, and a suspicious amount of dirt labeled simply “Old Country, Don’t Ask.” Of course, everyone asked about it, and no one answered.

Bobby’s coffin was different. His dirt came from the mine floor itself—coal dust, broken shale, and the damp mineral smell of Appalachian neglect. He had not traveled across oceans to become a vampire. He had wandered into history by accident, flashlight failing, curiosity intact, and met a woman with too many teeth and not enough mercy.

She drained him almost dry. Which is how you get a child vampire: not with ceremony or consent, but with poor portion control.

The Family did not let Bobby hunt humans. This was framed as a matter of ethics, though everyone knew it was really about liability. A ten-year-old vampire with impulse control issues and a lisp was a public relations disaster waiting to happen.

“Try animals,” said Viktor, who had last legally existed under the Ottoman Empire. “It’s for your own good,” he said, smoothing his mustache like a man about to lie. “Build skill. Learn restraint.”

“Yes,” Ilse added dryly, “and every year humans become more litigious.”

Bobby tried a sleeping doe.

The deer woke up screeching—an undignified sound that carried like gossip through the woods. Her mate, a buck with antlers shaped like agricultural equipment, arrived immediately and gored Bobby in what scholars might later describe as an argument. Shirt shredded. He was launched bodily into a tree, where he hung, impaled by embarrassment, until the buck lost interest.

Bobby could not die. But he could lose dignity, which he did in bulk.

He returned limping to the mine just before dawn, clothes torn, leaves and twigs lodged in his long hair, antler-shaped bruises blooming artistically across his torso, and pride flayed. The Family laughed. Centuries of restraint collapsed into wheezing, coffin-slapping mirth.

“Bambi fights back now,” someone said.

“Nature,” said Marta, sipping from a crystal goblet, “has opinions.”

“He should see himself in a mirror,” an elder joked. “But he can’t.”

After that, Bobby experimented, and things went downhill.

A raccoon bit him. Twice.

A goat head-butted him so hard his vision briefly included stars not visible from Earth.

A porcupine resulted in a face full of quills and a moral lesson about assumptions. A wolf left him with puncture wounds deep enough to whistle in the wind because Bobby stepped on a dry twig at the critical moment—a failure of narrative tension and basic awareness.

“You must approach with calm,” Viktor instructed.

“I was calm,” Bobby protested.

“You hissed.”

“I whisper-hissed.”

Sometimes the older vampires brought him blood in zip-lock bags, like lunch leftovers. O-negative, A-positive, one unlabeled bag everyone pretended not to ask about.

Bobby hated the bags. Cold blood had the emotional warmth of a voicemail apology.

He wanted to hunt. He wanted to matter.

One night, bleeding from multiple species and time zones, Bobby managed to turn into a vampire bat—an achievement he announced loudly while still airborne—and flapped back toward the mine. He misjudged the entrance, ricocheted off a rock face, and reverted mid-fall, landing in a heap of limbs and fur, unconscious.

He arrived at sunrise, still intact.

The Family stared.

“You should be ash,” said Ilse. “Vampires can’t tolerate the sun. You’re more of an oddity than we thought.”

Bobby blinked. “I forgot.”

They began whispering the word banishment, a dramatic term for exile, but sounds worse when you’re ten, homeless, and immortality is on the line. There sure as hell wouldn’t be anywhere else he could find friendship, much less companionship.

“Please let me stay on. I know I’m different, but I don’t have any other place to go.”

“The council of elders will discuss it, Bobby, but I can’t be very optimistic,” said Dracula’s brother, one of the oldest there.

Then the mountain shook.

A bulldozer chewed into the earth above the mine, followed by men in hard hats discussing views and retreats and natural light, which is vampire for existential threat. The Family surged toward the entrance in panic—until sunlight sliced down the shaft like a blade and drove them back, hissing and blistering.

Bobby stood at the edge, coal dust steaming faintly from his skin.

“Don’t,” Viktor said. “You’ll burn.”

Bobby didn’t.

He walked into the light, squinting, clothes still torn, face still dotted with quill scars. The construction crew saw a pale, blood-smeared child in black, emerge from the mountain like a coal-born ghost with unresolved issues and long, protruding canine teeth.

They screamed.

Bobby screamed louder. He did not know why. It just felt right.

The bulldozer driver froze long enough for Bobby to grab his arm and—finally—drink. Just a taste. Enough to feel warmth that wasn’t borrowed or plastic-sealed.

The driver fled. The crew fled. The bulldozer idled, abandoned like a mechanical monument to bad decisions.

Bobby stood alone in the sun, alive, undead, victorious.

The Family watched from the shadows in stunned silence.

That night, no one laughed.

Viktor placed a hand on Bobby’s shoulder. “You saved us.”

Bobby nodded, wiping coal dust from his face. “Am I still a loser and getting banished?”

Viktor smiled, revealing centuries of teeth. “Banishment? No. Loser? Yes. But you’re our loser.”

Which, in the long tragicomic tradition of vampire immortality, was as close to love as it would ever get. ‍ ‍

---

M.D. Smith of Huntsville, Alabama, writer of over 350 flash stories, has published digitally in Spillwords, Flash Fiction Magazine, Flash Phantoms, and many more. Retired from running a television station, he lives with his wife of 64 years and three cats. https://mdsmithiv.com/‍ ‍‍ ‍

Craig Roads

Dale

I was out on a back country road near the state line flying through the dark cornfields from tavern to tavern on hell’s own errand. I didn’t even see the raccoon before I hit it. I just heard this ka-thunk and felt a little bump. I stopped and backed up to take a look, to make sure I hadn’t just run over somebody’s Checkers or Rollo or Bandit or anything I might have to apologize for. There it was laying in the road, just a lump of fur with blood trickling from its head.

I dropped the car into gear and took off. What I really wanted at the time was more beer, and maybe to find some woman, but then I just couldn’t get that raccoon off my mind. I pictured a little masked face, wondering if maybe it was a mama, and had little ones waiting in vain for her to bring back some dinner, or maybe it was a boar: one of those ornery ones that will take a dog’s eye out in a fight.

A few miles after I got off the gravel road and onto the blacktop there was this little place, Doug’s Tap. Doug’s was crowded like it gets on the weekend, and there was a pretty decent band playing. There were a few folks from town I recognized and a bunch I didn’t, so I got a seat at the bar ordered a beer and determined to do some serious drinking. I swiveled around on my barstool, checking out the action on the dance floor. The band heavy into a Bob Seeger tune. An older couple who appeared to be unreconstructed hippies dancing to some tune other than what the band was playing.  Mostly women dancing together, but a few girls had coaxed their dates into some awkward motion; dancing isn’t considered a social skill for men in these parts, with the exception of a belly-to-belly slow dance where you can grab a handful of ass. Over in the corner, a bunch of farm boys whooping it up on the foosball machine.

I had myself another beer and sipped slowly, thinking about raccoons. The masked eyes. The thick fur, and striped tail. And those little paws. Paws that were almost as good as fingers and they were smart enough to put those little hands to work at any opportunity.

Once when I went camping with my brother Vincent; we were up in Wisconsin, fishing in some state park. We had set our cooler outside the tent with our breakfast bacon, eggs, and beer. The cooler was latched, so we figured we were good. About 3 a.m. our eyes jerked open to a whole herd of raccoons outside. They were making these raccoon sounds, like they do. We unzipped the tent enough to see they had opened the latch and turned over the cooler and were having a big raccoon fiesta out there. The ice melted; we drank warm beer that weekend.

I was deep into my raccoon reverie when I got shouldered out of it by a girl trying to squeeze by to the bar. “S’cuse me. Then she double-taked at me and she goes “Dale? Is that you? How the hell are you?”

“Carla,” I said. Carla Something-meister. Kugel- Kuchen-. Something. Graduated high school two years behind me. She had put on some poundage, but she still looked good. “How you doing?”

She frowned, “Sorry to hear about the divorce. That must have been tough. After getting laid off and all, too.” She touched my wrist in gentle sympathy. I could tell by her eyes she was pretty drunk.

“I’m trying to keep a positive attitude, move past that stuff,” I said. “Been living out at my cousin’s place. He’s got an old mobile home sitting on his dairy acreage and lets me stay out there. Got it fixed up okay. I do some mechanic and carpenter work for him. Once in a while help out with milking.”

“Wow,” she said noncommittally. And then, “Buy me a drink?”

We took our beers over into a booth. The backs of her legs squeaked on the naughahyde.

“Tell me more about you. Dale. Haven’t seen much of you since high school.”  Carla leaned forward, showing off some admirable cleavage in that tank top. “What you been up to lately?” She tipped her bottle up.

I just kind of looked over her shoulder and spaced out. My mind was still on raccoons. Thinking about cute little cartoon character raccoons.

We had a few more beers while Carla talked about her own self, and how she had went to the LaMolo School of Beauty Culture after high school, and was almost kind of engaged to this guy Bud but it turned out she didn’t really like being a hairdresser that much, at the salon she worked at it was all a bunch of old ladies coming for a rinse and set all the time and she dumped Bud because it turned out she didn’t like Bud all that much either and now she was between boyfriends and was thinking about going to community college and studying to be a paralegal. She figured paralegal paid better and she could move out of her dumpy apartment and maybe get a new car, too. All the while little cartoon raccoons danced around in my head, like some Bambi movie or something.

Then Carla leaned in close, rested her breasts on the table and searched into my eyes as if there might be something hiding in there. She smiled a shy smile and says, “You know I kind of had a crush on you back in high school.”

I didn’t say nothing.

“Hey,   Earth to Dale.” Vexed, she waved her hand in front of my face. “I’m talking to you. Can you say something?”

“I pretty much told you all there is to tell. I’m living in the country. Working on a farm.”

Carla squinted,  “So nothing just the teensy-weensiest interesting thing in your life?” She pinched her finger and thumb.

And meanwhile my mind is racing with “cartoon-raccoon”, “cartoon-raccoon” “cartoon-raccoon-harpoon”, “harpoon-cartoon-raccoon-pontoon”, playing with the words like that.

We get another beer and Carla starts going on about how she came here with her friend Shawna only it looked like Shawna had found herself somebody to go home with. She looked over her shoulder at the bar and there was Shawna hanging off a guy named Duane that I kind of knew, looking like their bodies just might ooze together. You couldn’t have stuck a piece of paper between them.

Carla traced a water drop down the neck of her bottle and looks at me and says so if Shawna hooks up with this guy she might need a ride back home.

By then I guess I was feeling kind of drunk-sad about that raccoon and how I had snuffed out its little life and how life is like that, you’re living your life and then wham – and you never know when your ticket is going to get punched. And Carla saw the glum look come over my face. Finally she puffs out her cheeks and stands up in a huff, big blobby tears at the corners of her eyes and says, “To hell with you Dale. I can see my charms is wasted on a stuck-up son-of-a-bitch like you.” And she  weaved her way unsteadily through the couples across the dance floor, jostling into a few of them.

I finished my beer and left. I drove up to another little place up across the Wisconsin state line and had a couple more beers, sitting at the bar thinking about those striped raccoon tails that people used to hang on the radio aerials of their cars and Davy Crockett hats and raccoon coats in the Twenties and such. I left just before closing time because I had to get up early and do some welding on my cousin’s manure spreader the next morning: cracked frame.

It had been a long night and I took it easy going home, watching for cops, listening to the radio to try and keep my mind off this whole sorry episode. I pulled up in the field to where my mobile home sits, along with a bunch of ancient rusted-out farm implements and there I saw it: one of those little buggers sitting up on the steps, fooling with the door latch, staring at me, daring me, beady little eyes glowing in my headlights.

---

Craig Roads was an aspiring songwriter in Nashville before "getting a real job" as an ad agency copywriter and Creative Director. He is married and lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Gill O’Halloran

Loving the Alien

There are aliens in the fridge. They say they’re Ben’s new friends, came home with him after school. Anyone wanting to befriend my son is welcome, so I ask if there’s anything they need, and they shake their blue cephalopod heads.

“Is there anything you need?” they rattle in chorus.

“Me? No, I'm fine, thanks,” I say. “It's more you I was worried about.”

Wow! Their politeness could be a positive influence on Ben, and I’m thrilled he’s invited friends round. Our bedtime talks on rebuilding trust, on not everyone’s a bully, are starting to pay off.

I ask if they’d mind if I got some cheese for my toast, and they shift around the shelves.

“Would you mind if I got some cheese for my toast?” they say, suctioning up the cheddar with their tiny hoover-hose tentacles. This time, I clock it: they’re parroting back to practice human language. What resourceful little guys.

Ben comes downstairs.

“I’ve just met your new friends, “ I say. “They seem nice.”

He grins, does a thumbs-up. But the next morning, the outlook’s not so good.

“Get rid of them!” demands Ben. “I don’t like them; they were laughing at me all night.”

I’m gutted. This is how it always goes: Ben hiding upstairs, Make them go away, mum, the friends downstairs bonding over Ben’s Xbox, me making excuses for him, I'm afraid Ben’s got a headache- he’s lying down. Maybe another day? The kids always look relieved, practically run out the door.

I say, “Ben, I’m sure your new friends aren’t laughing at you,” but he’s shaking, like the last time he was bullied.

“Get rid of them!”  

I promise, heart-sink sad as I watch him trudge down the path for his solo walk to school.

When he’s left, I open the fridge. Ben’s friends scuttle into the crisper drawer. I scoop them into a pot and snap the lid shut. I could put them outside, but the neighbours are bound to see, there’ll be gossip about the odd mother and her odd boy. There are aliens all over the garden. No, no kidding. No wonder the husband left them. The clock’s ticking, I’ll be late for work. I run upstairs. Sorry, I say, flushing Ben’s wished-for pals down the toilet. I feel guilty all day: I don’t always like his friends, but I don’t usually drown them.

When I get home from work, Ben’s out in the back garden peeing against the garden fence.

“What d’you think you’re doing?” Don’t allow bad behaviour; he still needs boundaries. He explains he can’t pee in the house because the aliens are swarming in the toilet bowl, under the lid, calling him names.

“Why did you put them in the toilet?” he asks, bottom lip quivering, “when it’s obvious they can swim.” 

Secretly relieved I haven’t killed them, I go upstairs to the bathroom.

“Sorry, aliens,” I say, lifting the toilet seat. “Ben’s not feeling well. Time to climb up now, and off you go to yours.”

The aliens spring out, clamber up the tiles, stencilling them with sticky tentacle prints.

“Sorry, Ben, aliens feeling well. Time to climb away. Now off we go and up yours.”

One alien dilates the hole on top of its head, emits a sound like a broken fan belt, then another, then all of them, squealing in unison. They’ve suctioned themselves to the ceiling and are dripping phosphorescent gloop. It fizzes and scorches holes into the carpet, a smell of burning hair, like on bonfire night when you’re too close to the flames and a spark flies out.  

I run out into the back garden, sit on the bench next to Ben. The squealing’s so loud now, we can hear it through the walls. I hand Ben his fidget toy and watch as he fiddles, wait for him to calm.

“Why did you invite them back in the first place?” 

“You wanted me to have friends.”

“Well, yeah, it’s always nice to have friends. But why these friends?”

“Cos they were nice to me,” he says. “When I said, Hello, let’s be friends, they said the same back.”

Tonight, I’ll swallow my pride, ask if we can stay at his father’s. I’ll skip the usual bedtime chats. Instead, we’ll huddle together under a blanket and we’ll watch Ben’s favourite film, and Ben will say he wishes he had a friend like ET, and I’ll say, one day, Ben, you will one day - he just hasn’t found you yet.  

---

Gill O’Halloran is a lido-loving Londoner and a Pushcart Prize nominee. Since her debut in Trash Cat Lit, she won the 2025 NFFD Anthology Editors Award and was shortlisted for the Fish Publishing Prize. Her flash appears or is forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, BULL, and Flash Boulevard, with further work in the Bath and Oxford anthologies. A LISP finalist and winner of WestWord and Flash500, she loves turquoise, but maroon makes her miserable. ‍

Mario Moussa

Damian Puts His Foot Down While God Watches

Damian opens the front door of his row house early one morning to find a woman sitting on the stoop. He pauses before closing the door, then hops around her, his hands waving in the air, almost sticks the landing on the sidewalk, and with a quick shuffle step, steadies himself as he exclaims, in the packed stadium of his mind, Olé! He twirls around. Hoops and studs run up her right ear—gold, diamond, turquoise, pearl—her hair pulled back tight in a ponytail. Black yoga pants, yellow tank top, taut skin visible in-between. Sunlight filters down onto her shoulders through the leaves and branches above. Past lovers shimmer in the verdant glow, one and then another and then still others, but they appear indistinct, like overlapping images on a faded billboard. Always, in recollection, his MBA program intrudes—the courseload, the hyper-competitive classmates, the stress-filled search for the best jobs (six-figure starting salary, plus a bonus, at a top-three consulting firm). It caused lasting PTSD, though his wife dismisses the feeling as an exaggeration.

It’s not an exaggeration.

But today could be different. Dance with this woman along the sun-dappled sidewalk. Uber to the airport and in the afternoon sit cross-legged on a beach in Big Sur. Grow a long beard. Pull his hair up in a bun. Discover the divine in a purple flower pushing up through the sand. A post-professional sadhu. What would it take?

When he was in business school, his dad became his second mom and his first mom married a woman and then he had to cope with having three moms. He married Katie and then she became a doctor and they had kids and they traded up from a small house to this bigger one, with four floors and a roof deck with a garden—lush with tomato vines, lavender, rosemary bushes—and a covered garage in back. These things should feel like markers of progress, but they feel like a slow-motion video of a collapsing building, dust rising from a pile of concrete as the walls tumble down. The debris settles in the thought-video, and the quiet that follows is palpable, like a fine powder falling on the skin.

He squares his shoulders, inserts his earbuds, and walks to the bike rental station.

Later, over lunch at an outdoor café, Damian sits with his friend Ashish. The smell of grilled hamburger floats in the air and mingles with exhaust from cars and buses rumbling by. People at neighboring tables stare at their phones, fingers flicking. At the firm where Damian works, Ashish is known as a quant jock. When a CEO wants to squeeze a few more percentage points of margin from a useless product, Ashish gets the call. Damian has never gotten such a call.

“On the way to work, I listened to an unbelievable story on NPR,” Damian says.

“Yeah?” Ashish, hunched over his Greek salad, speared half a cherry tomato.

“Bill Bennett—Secretary of Education under Reagan. Bennett thought potential mass shooters should be exorcised, to get the demons out of them.”

“How exactly would that work?”

“He didn’t say. He just said, ‘Where are the ministers? Where are the priests? The rabbis? The imams?’ ”

Nearby, office workers trudge across a plaza in midday heat, like the Israelites lugging tents and baskets across the desert. Was God watching the Israelites as they wandered from one camp to the next? Is God concerned about mass shootings? Where is God? (Gott ist tot, says a philosopher devil into Damian’s ear.) Why didn’t Bill Bennett ask about God? Damian considers sharing his thoughts with Ashish, then thinks better of it. He imagines that if he could step inside Ashish’s head, he’d find that Ashish is thinking about nothing besides the difficulty of capturing another cherry tomato. But then Ashish asks about Damian’s work on the Diversity Group.

“Why do you ask?”

“No reason really.”

Damian suspects there really is no reason behind Ashish’s question, except an auto-pilot impulse to ask a question—any question—after a conversational lull.

“Most days I feel good about it, but some days I’d like to get out of my pigeonhole.” He waits for Ashish to ask about the pigeonhole. Damian wants to talk about all the ways he feels stuck. Stuck with thoughts about random women, like the woman on his stoop with studs in her ear. Stuck in middle-age with two daughters and a wife and two cats and a dog and tropical fish (or did they die?) and three moms. Stuck being pegged at the firm as a soft-skills guy and not a quant jock.

“You play the hand you’re dealt,” Ashish says.

Damian feels he had a chance, a moment ago, with Ashish’s help, to pull himself out of the pigeonhole, even if Ashish is just a work friend and not a close friend (does he have any close friends?), but maybe he should just hunker down in his pigeonhole, embrace the darkness, and settle into the hellish little space where he deserves to be stuck for the rest of his days.

“Did you hear about the road-rage shooting downtown? Ashish says. “A driver jumped out of his car and opened another guy’s door. Two shots—stomach and leg.” Ashish shakes his head.

Damian hadn’t heard about it.

“My wife says I should carry a gun,” Ashish says.

“Bad idea.”

“I have a Zoom back at the office.”

Biking home, Damian pictures Ashish on a subway platform brandishing a six-shooter like a gunslinger in a 1950s Western, the weapon twirling around a crooked finger. Math Prodigy Had Enough, Brings Order to Commute. A phone call interrupts his thoughts. It’s his wife Katie.

“I’m so tired. The hospital was so busy today. Pizza tonight?”

Damian likes the idea, suggests they grab the girls, get out of the house, try the new place by Fitler Square. They’ll take an Uber—avoid the stress of finding a parking spot. “Deal,” says Katie.

The evening air is thick and hot when they pile out of the Uber. Damian approaches a waiter standing on the sidewalk by an outdoor dining hut. The waiter’s hair is pulled into a bun and perspiration trickles down his tattooed neck. Damian asks for one of the outside tables by the corner so his family can feel the breeze. The girls, wearing flouncy pink dresses, dance from one foot to the other. Either they’re hungry or need to pee. The waiter says the hostess is inside and he’ll get her. The girls keep dancing, and Katie looks off into the distance, as if she’s surveying a metropolis from a skyscraper observation deck.

Heat surges like a wave along the sidewalk. Sweat soaks Damian’s shirt. Katie starts leading the girls in a modified two-step. The girls giggle—left foot out, stomp, back, right foot out, stomp, back—then stop, cross their arms, and begin to whimper. Katie leans down, hugs the girls, glances over at Damian. Her face is red and glistening. Damian looks skyward, searching for help among the indifferent stars. A group of four people—two men and two women who look like they’re in their late twenties, all dressed in faded T-shirts and dark cotton pants—take one of the outdoor tables. The waiter walks over, fanning himself with a handful of menus. He smiles and says something that Damian can’t hear and the young people laugh. Damian checks the time on his phone. They’ve been waiting almost fifteen minutes.  

“You’d like a table?” says the hostess. Damian hadn’t seen her come outside. He turns and her face is inches from his. She wears tinted aviator glasses and a long black dress.

“An outdoor table,” Damian says. “It’s way too hot anywhere else.”

“We can seat you over there,” she says, gesturing to a table inside the hut. Above the table, a fan rotates slowly. The other tables inside the hut are unoccupied. “The tables outside on the sidewalk are for people waiting,” she adds.

“But . . .” Damian begins to say, pointing toward the four young people seated nearby, then trails off. He feels like he’s been Tasered, though he’s never been Tasered, or been in any kind of situation in which that would have happened, but he imagines he’d feel like he does now. His girls begin to jump up and down.

“We’re not going to do this,” Damian says to the hostess. “That fan is just moving the heat around.”

Katie mumbles: “Here we go.”

“What?” says the hostess.

“I’m not sitting at that table,” Damian says. “It’s too hot in there.”

“Suit yourself.”

Damian turns to Katie. “Let’s go.”

“What?”

Damian remembers the woman on the stoop, the sweaty office workers, Ashish and his cherry tomato, their conversation about the Diversity Group. “We’re not going to do this.”

They walk away, their daughters whining in unison, “I WANT PIZZA!”

Damian knows it’s unlikely they’ll find an open table at another restaurant. The girls collapse on the sidewalk and start to cry. Damian and Katie stand over them, heads bowed as if in prayer. Damian feels reverent in this prayer-like pose. God must be watching.

“Boy, you really put your foot down,” Katie says, keeping her eyes on the girls.

He hears the sarcasm in her words, but a solemn voice in his head intones: “You did it, Damian. You did it. You put your foot down.”

---

Mario Moussa is a best-selling author whose work has appeared in such varied publications as Fortune, Forbes, Heavy Feather Review, and elsewhere. He was a finalist in the Principal Foundation’s 2024 Story Initiative contest. A recent story is forthcoming in the Chicago Quarterly Review. He is finishing a collection about a fictional neighborhood in Philadelphia.

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.

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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.