Rachel Attias

Pond Scum

            Ryan and I have our fingers threaded through the chain link of the barbed wire fence. We’re staring at the pond that Libbie jumped into two-and-a-half minutes ago and hasn’t surfaced from yet. People used to call it The Pond by the Fish Hatchery, back when it was a place to picnic and play chicken while our parents held our little siblings up by the bellies so they could splash around with floaties on their arms. Now the hatchery is shut down and nobody calls the pond anything, except for Walker Gold and Metallurgic Corp, which drained it and lined it with something plasticky and permanent, and re-christened it Tailings Pond 2.

            “She’s dead,” Ryan says, and claws at his hair. “Oh my fucking god.”

            “She’s not dead!” I grab his arm and pull it down to his side, squeeze his hand tight. Libbie’s not dead. She’s going to surface now, and now, and now.

            The water in Tailings Pond 2 is an unnatural, vivid green. It’s cloudy like a cup someone has been using to rinse their brush after painting poison treefrogs. The green has long since closed around the space where I last saw Libbie’s body. The ripples she made have stopped.

            We don’t have a plan for this. Here’s how it’s supposed to go: Libbie jumps in the water and comes out a second later, and pretty soon she starts displaying the early symptoms of cyanide poisoning, which are headaches, dizziness, shortness of breath, vomiting, et cetera, and Ryan and I take her to the hospital and we call the local press and they report our protest against Walker Gold, who’ve been pulling rocks and ore out from the hill outside town, processing them with cyanide, and dumping their waste chemicals into the pond we used to swim in, which is probably leaking into our drinking water. National news syndicates will pick up the story because folks pay attention when an American teenager puts her life on the line—all that potential, potentially wasted—and Mark Ruffalo will petition Congress, and they’ll shut down the gold mine, and we’ll all be saved.

            It was always going to be Libbie who jumped in. We agreed it had to be a girl for feminism’s sake, and Libbie is blonde in a way that will elicit sympathy even from the staunchest right-wingers. I knew Libbie’s counterargument—"but you’re so pretty, too, Nat!”—was perfunctory, but I still tingled when she said it. Anyway, I’m way too chickenshit to do this. Plus, there’s a part of me that knows the whole design is flawed since nobody actually gives a fuck about American teenagers at all.

            At last, Libbie’s head and shoulders pop out into the cool Saturday morning air. Her skin is extra pale, almost glowing next to the green water. She’s gasping for breath. Ryan and I slip through the hole we already cut in the fence and we get in the water despite our revulsion, despite the way our shoes sink into the silty bottom past the ankle with each step, and then past our shins and up to our knees as we get waist-deep, until Libbie is in our arms, and she’s laughing hysterically, and lime green water is streaming off all of us, and weird, oily droplets cling to her throat like pearls.

            We get back to land and I wring out Libbie’s hair. I pat her cheeks with my one dry sleeve. I help her back into her jeans, her socks, her sweatshirt, her jacket. I glance at Ryan who, as the boy of the group, doesn’t get this privilege. I tell myself that at least I have this one thing he doesn’t, even as Libbie searches the sky for his face until he’s looming above us both, asking over and over again, “Do you feel the poison? Do you feel it yet?”

            Libbie pushes me off and sits up. “I went somewhere,” she says. She looks at the pond. “In there. Through the bottom. Another world.”

            “Another… world?” I ask.

            “A nether world,” she corrects.

            “The poison’s kicking in!” Ryan throws his hands up.

            Libbie says she got turned around when she was underwater, like she’d been roiled in waves even though the pond was completely still. She thought for sure she’d drown—“and then we’d really get their attention!”—but she surfaced and sucked in mouthfuls of air, not caring that she was swallowing the green cyanide water, too, because actually it wasn’t green, it was a normal dark blueish brownish color and she felt something against her leg and when she looked down the pond was thick with seaweed and a little fish swam past her ankle, meaning it was thick with life in other words, and when she looked up Ryan and I were on the shore waving her in, and we sat on our towels and ate salt and vinegar chips until our tongues hurt.

            “You have to see it,” she says.

            Ryan and I look at the water. We look at Libbie. We don’t say it, but I know we’re both thinking that the cyanide is working faster than we expected.

            “I’m not poisoned!” Libbie says. “I’m fine. Trust me. Please,” she says, and then grabs onto Ryan’s arm. She looks into his eyes. I get the feeling I get all the time, when Libbie texts me or touches me or looks at me, like a wet wool blanket has been wrapped tightly around my heart and is dragging it down, painfully, to my guts. Ryan thinks for a moment and says, “Fuck it,” and takes off his sweatshirt, because even though he doesn’t love Libbie she’s still a wet girl pressed against him.

            He strips down to his boxers and takes tiptoe steps through the mucky shore until he’s at the edge of the water and then he’s in it, and gone, and I feel so sick standing next to Libbie, who’s watching the place where Ryan used to be, that I know I’ll go in if he makes it out alive. When he comes up spluttering, I’m already in my bra and panties and splashing into the cold water myself, and it smells metallic and farty and I blow bubbles out through my nose until there’s no oxygen left in my lungs and then I keep on going, and when I rise to the air there are spots in my eyes and I can’t see anything and have to tread water until they go away.

            All I see at first is a gray day, the water around me still green, still farty, and somebody alone on the shore. I swim closer. It’s a middle-aged lady who looks like me, wearing my oversized green hoodie, except it fits her better. She’s staring at the water and her posture is bad and she just kind of looks like one big frown. She gives me a little nod of recognition, and I dive back into the water and swim as fast as I can to the real world.

            “It’s a nether world that gives you what you want!” Ryan is shouting to me even as I’m still dog paddling back to land. It gave Libbie a clean pond, and it showed Ryan himself and Katie V. sharing a picnic blanket, on a date. Libbie is sorting and passing us back our clothing so efficiently I can tell she’s trying not to cry. On the way to the hospital Ryan asks, “What did you see, Nat?”

            “Same as Libbie,” I say.

            No news outlets covered our protest, not even the school newspaper, who said they “couldn’t condone trespassing.” What happened instead was that Ryan told Katie V. the whole story about the nether world at the bottom of Tailings Pond 2. The night she became his girlfriend, they went to the pond together and jumped in. Afterwards she told all her friends. Some of them tried it, and they told their friends, and the rumor spread, and suddenly adults were diving into the pond too. Libbie and I thought for a couple days that this was it—the whole town would get sick, and finally we’d have Congress, and Mark Ruffalo, and everything. Some people did get dizzy and threw up but nobody paid any attention to that, and pretty quickly Walker Gold found out what was going on and put in a new fence, this one with a gate and an employee with a laptop so people could e-sign waivers and use their credit cards to pay for entry and rent towels for an extra three bucks. Ryan and Katie V. actually worked the Gold gate together, for minimum wage, through the end of high school.

            In the beginning the lines were longer. Some people would swim to the nether world, swim out, and run straight home. Divorces in our town and the surrounding areas skyrocketed that year, as did the number of affairs—which, Libbie pointed out, really meant that the number of known affairs rose, but probably the same amount had been happening all along. She and I would sit in camp chairs at the top of a hill and watch the circus from afar, passing a pair of binoculars back and forth. I was aware of the infinitesimal drift of the lenses as she pressed them to her eyes, how they lingered not on the pond but on the gate where Ryan and Katie V. laughed and made eyes at each other over customers’ heads. Libbie’s bitterness ran off her in cyanide ripples, and I tried in vain to mop it up.

            People quit their jobs.

            Three of our teachers walked out of school and were never seen again.

            A few bands were started. Some bad art was made.

            Mostly, though, people didn’t do anything after they came dripping out of the water. But as they toweled off they had a particular, private look on their faces you’d see flashes of every now and then, forever.

            Things leveled off pretty quickly. The line dwindled to a handful of people a day, the ones who kept coming back. They stood around in all kinds of weather and looked stooped and sad, before and after. They looked like the old guys who waited outside for the pub to open at three p.m. Some of them were those guys. The pub actually lost some business to Walker Gold. It was around then that Walker Gold instituted their subscription plan. You paid a flat monthly rate, which let you enter the pond any time and pay by the hour by scanning your member card on the way in and out. If anyone was tempted to swim to the nether world and never come back, Walker Gold assured them that they would be collecting dues on the other side, too.

            Libbie got bored of watching, bored of everything. Every time she said the word “bored” I knew she was trying not to cry. I knew she would leave, and she did, like Ryan, like most people, after high school. She doesn’t come home for holidays.

            I’m not one of those sad souls on the Walker Gold subscription plan, in case you were wondering. I only jumped into Tailings Pond 2 that one time. Sometimes the memory of the me I saw on that gray day fills me with horror, but more often she comforts me. She understands what I’m still learning, which is that in the end my loving Libbie never had much to do with being loved back. One day soon I’ll stand on the shore and look at the water and my own teenaged head will pop up like a buoy, and all I’ll do is nod. I’ll cross my arms in my green hoodie, and try to recall that feeling, any feeling, which could have compelled me to swim on such a chilly day.

---

Rachel Attias is a writer, educator, and editor based in Portland, OR. Her writing has appeared in n+1, Porter House Review, X-R-A-Y and more, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions. She holds an MFA from Oregon State University and teaches composition at Portland Community College and creative writing workshops around the Pacific Northwest. She is at work on her first novel.

Eirene Gentle

Independence day

Phyllis was 52 when she became a mushroom. It was a sensible decision, even her kids approved. They held her hand, bleached and withered from decades of exposure when she informed them. She was hard to see through the glare but her voice was firm and anyway Phyllis was more halo than mom since they were teenagers. A kind of visual psychotropic, or headlights of an oncoming truck if you’re churlish. She piled on clothes and makeup, doused herself in vats of ice but still beamed like a solar flare. She couldn’t contain it.

At 42 her sweat glands dried. Phyllis smelled like roast pork as she convected and passed out if no one hosed her down. The kids wore protective suits against the splatter.

Her tear ducts dried at 46. Unable to cry, Phyllis let out a kind of hiccup at her mother’s funeral and saved cremation costs by draping over the casket in the backlot of the funeral home, hic-moaning ‘mom’ until the everything was ash.

Ordinary people spend 3 years of their lives just blinking but there was no point in that for Phyllis so she saw everything. Flickers of deceit, the tiny tells of worst selves exposed daily in thousands of unblinking nanoseconds. She was like a psychological x-ray at the office, so uncomfortable they asked her to work from home. Then she was fired. There wasn’t much to pack up from her desk. She dumped it all in the trash just past the revolving door.

She made dry sounds like ceiling mice when she walked.

She stopped crossing her legs in case of fire.

Coincidentally her husband, Darren had been a cloud for a decade. Frequently stormy but cirrus when she needed him, he rumbled when hungry, puffed like soft serve when happy and only rained when he was out. Anyway, he was useless.

The family struggled. Darren was too changeable for regular work and no one was hiring a nimbus. Even her emails had a disquieting glow. Phyllis earned what she could through black-market cremations, happy to ease the burden of cash-strapped families but most of her dead got that way through extralegal means. Clients drove her to dubious locations in white or black vans where she smelled blood or solvents but they paid well and were usually polite. She liked that they didn’t ask questions. They liked that she was thorough and smelled deliciously of spareribs.

The job brought her to a lot of scenic places. Rivers, lakes, snowy mountains and especially woods. She loved the darkness of forest. Whispering canopy, sheltered from the broiling sun and moon. She dug her charred toes into cool earth, ran blistered fingers through pine needle carpets. Surprisingly soft. But mushrooms were the most comforting of all. So tenderly luminescent she hiccupped. Acres of cottony mycelium far from cruel sun.

Her farewell party was thrown on fireworks night so no one questioned the few extra flares. Phyllis got drunk and danced until morning. Goodbye to all this, she thought and dreamed of clammy soil with wide-open eyes.

A few of her regulars picked her up at dusk. Five vans slow-driving in a row, a thoughtful tribute. Her kids waved from their door while Darren rained over the lake.

It was a somber affair but not maudlin. Her clients wore black and called her ‘the best cremator we ever had,’ with an emotion that would’ve burst her tear glands if she had any. She settled on springy emerald moss by a chirruping creek. Everything peppery, damp and growing.

We’re the only things that burn

My timer, set for 1 minute and 31 seconds, begins counting down at exactly 1:31 pm.

A brief moment of serendipity. What to do with such a chance?

~

My brother had a firefly that danced on a pin. I don’t know where he found it. He pulled me from my bed to show me, down the small hall to the left, three normal steps for him, giant ones for me. His lamp splashed like chocolate coins in gold crinkly paper that disappeared when he flicked it off. My feet itched from cold. I was about to whine when something tiny bounced on his little wood desk.

‘So pretty!’

‘Don’t scare it!’

He held back my hair to stop it swooshing down on the firefly dancing teeny and green on the edge of a safety pin.

~

We’re born now, in this era of decline. Everyone feels it. We attack each other with nails and teeth in our cages. Any weapons we find. After killing everything around us, it’s natural we’d turn on ourselves. It’s never otherwise.

What to do, then?

What to do? 

~

My brother had three names in his short life:

1 - Len-Len, a cute approximation of Leonard, from birth to age four. Len-Len with a broad, placid face that puckered when I was born.

2 – Leo, from four into his twenties, the big brother I knew best though I didn’t. Know him. Leo walked me to school sometimes. No-talk walks. Just traffic blur and the skip-scuff of my sneakers on the sidewalk.

3 –Leonard, after he died, in emails from colleagues, documents and official papers. Leonard was paystubs and utilities bills, the ghost trail of a stranger. He was ‘close this account, please, the accountholder is dead.’ Spitting it out multiple times a day. Dying is an official act. Institutions insist on involvement.

…

The primitive mind is disturbing. For what reason did they learn to count? What was the moment someone needed five of something and instead of just bashing a head they invented a way to communicate the notion of five?

Five was what Leo said when he didn’t have a real answer. Five = I don’t know.

What’s the name of that tree? Who made you the boss?

‘How did your brother die?’

‘Five.’

~

Death certificates are incomprehensible. I don’t know if you know that. Something is clearly written but the mind can’t keep it in place. Letters scatter. I keep Leonard’s on hand for institutions to gnaw but I don’t know what it says.

I waft through his boxes, closets and shelves, trying to see what he kept versus didn’t throw out. Did the smushed paper cup fall accidentally and unnoticed or touch the lips of an early love, carry vital DNA, represent his first sale? Was it Leo’s or Leonard’s?

At night cords and cables slither to my bed and attack. One slips around my wrist, another my ankle. I hang from my arms or trussed like a hammock. Upside down, dangling. Blood heats my face, my skull shatters. I think I’ll die from the pressure but they know when to release me. I wake flushed and aching with my phone beside me. Battery 100 per cent. 

~

Leo was nine when we found out he couldn’t sweat. He’d get hot, red. Eventually he’d faint. They called it anhidrosis and said there’s no cure but it disappeared when was 15. How did it feel when moisture finally oozed from his pores? The humidity of it. The unleashing. Did he drip six years out in one go or just a little at a time? 

There was no celebration of the occasion but Leo needed something stuck inside him so anger stacked in. He piled it like firewood. He was his own effigy.

When Leonard died I tried to light up all he owned. House, garage, boxes, anything. I wanted flames visible to passing planes. But inferno is against city ordinances. City ordinances are like cables, I hang in them for days. 

 ~

Numerologically 1:31 = 5. 1+1+3=5.

1:31 and 1:31 is two fives. Two I don’t knows. Do they cancel each other out? Does I don’t know + I don’t know = knowing?

What to do with such a chance?

What to do? 

~

When Leo’s firefly danced I wanted one of my own. I wanted to hold it in my hand and feel it’s yellow-green kick, bounce, wave, step. I wanted to brag ‘my brother has a firefly and it dances on a safety pin.’ Like a fairy tale.

But Leo flicked on his lamp and pushed me out in the hall.

‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘You can’t hold light.’

---

Eirene Gentle writes lit, mostly little, usually from Toronto, Canada.

Elizabeth Rosen

Content Warning

This story contains a number of potential trigger topics, including:

Unwanted Sexual Attention

Misogyny

A Really Badly Stubbed Toe

Stalking

A Toaster That Startles When the Toast Pops Up.

Sexual Assault

This story also has content that may be emotionally challenging for those who have:

Encountered a co-worker who catches you when you snag your toe on a chair wheel and stumble.

Encountered a co-worker who misinterprets gratitude.

Dealt with a co-worker making repeated overtures, but is awkward so you initially feel sorry for him.

Experienced a second, unwanted invitation to go out with him.

Given an awkward but polite decline.

Received yet another invitation to watch the game together this weekend in a faked but-we’re-just-friends tone.

Been forced to manufacture a gently delivered excuse.

This story also contains graphic descriptions of: 

A rose left on your desk with no note.

A Fisher Price Little Person propped against your office telephone, its frozen smile turned toward you.

A neon blue Koosh ball left on your seat.

A pack of Pop Rocks taped to your computer screen with a winking smiley face drawn on it.

Male colleagues who shrug and say to just ignore it.

Please be aware that this work also contains potentially upsetting descriptions of:

A series of phone calls with no one on the other end of the line.

A sense of being watched.

A knock at the door in the middle of the night. An empty doorstep.

A sound in the attic that resembles neither squirrels, nor mice.

A breathless call to 911.

A perfunctory search of the house by the police. A bored officer taking a statement.

The purchase of a deadbolt.

Hours lost to reading online discussions about whether a gun or Doberman is the more effective deterrent.

The purchase of a second deadbolt.

Panic attacks whenever you have to enter your home after dark.

Hours lost to exploring how to purchase a Taser.

Moreover, the story has content that might not be suitable for some readers, such as:

The co-worker with eyes as black as a shark’s knocking on your office door and inviting you to have a drink after work. Again.

A blunt refusal. A warning to leave you alone.

A period of uncontrollable trembling in the ladies room that ends on your knees in front of the toilet, throwing up.

A rose, the bloom carbonized black, left on the doormat.

A breakfast appliance that makes you scream in fright when its timer dings.

Finally, the reader should know that this story deals with:

The feeling of a sharp-object pressed into the space between your shoulder blades as you unlock your car door.

The smell of the heat-degraded fabric of the back seat your face is pressed into.

The grip of strong fingers at the base of your skull.

The sound of nothing at all, after the zipper.

The brush burn on your forehead. The bruises on the back of your neck. The flash of a camera too close to your body in the E.R.

The painful glare of fluorescent lights as you listen to the resident on the other side of the curtain give the police officers a description of your injuries.

The knowledge that you will never be able to read a story again without first reading the trigger warnings.

---

Colorwise, Elizabeth Rosen is an autumn. She mourns the loss of Tab and still wants her MTV. Her stories have appeared in journals such as the North American Review, Baltimore Review, Pithead Chapel, and Flash Frog, and been nominated for the Pushcart, Best Small Fictions, and Best of the Net awards. Her story “Maw Maw’s Cheese Balls” is the 2026 winner of the Raleigh Review Flash Fiction contest. Find more of her work at www.thewritelifeliz.com.

Joel Tomfohr

Triples

Inside the heart is a chamber but not a cell. Or maybe it is a cell. A red blood cell and the whole thing a fist. Do I write a horror story about a hospital? Yes, I do. There is a walking cadaver in the corridor. He is me. He died in the hills with the coyotes and the vultures.

When I go home, I also stay in the hospital with myself. That means that there are three of me. My cadaver and I go down to the cafeteria, scavenging for food even though we are not hungry. We are entombing ourselves for the evening. We sit at a table. My cadaver looks at me and I look back at him. His eye sockets are empty. He has a bruise on his right cheek from punching himself in the face. The rays of light from the streetlamps are scimitars.

Back at home I am watching TV with my wife and the dogs. We cuddle. I feel her warm body and I would never let the cadaver come between me and her. I am in the hospital taking care of the cadaver.

How’s it going?

It is good.

What do you want?

I want your family.

Why?

I will tell you why:

See my nightmare. A litany of horrors. My stomach is a wet rag being wrung out. Save me from my pain.

I watch the cadaver walk the hospital corridors. First floor, second. Third floor, fourth. I would like to 5150 my cadaver, bit I think that one day he will 5150 me. I see him outside room B. I join a religious cult when I am four. Praise the Lord! Submit to corporeal punishment. Pull my pants down. Now my underpants. He spanks my bottom. A cadaver now hug my dad. He loves me. I tell myself in the hospital See him hug me while I wail. Take me to the hospital. I know what it’s like to be dead and live at the same time.

Back at the house, the living room is washed in blue television light and the dogs are curled up with us on the couch and we are curled up with each other and my wife has no clue that I am also a cadaver in the hospital.

---

Joel Tomfohr's chapbook, A Blue Hour (Bottlecap Press), was a finalist for the 2025 Orison Chapbook Prize. work can be found in Expat Press, Rejection Letters, Farewell Transmission, Maudlin House, and many others. He lives in the Bay Area.

J.R. Angelella

Cyclone

1.

The last time Noah saw Joy she was his girlfriend. It was Coney Island, and they rode the Wonder Wheel because she refused to ride the Cyclone.

“I’ve never been good at being scared,” she said. “I can’t commit to that.”

“Fear is only the absence of humor,” he said.

The Cyclone rose behind the park like something old enough to remember time.

“Then you must live an entirely fearful life.”

“Turn your frown upside down.”

“Don’t beat me with child psychology.”

Noah ate a Nathan’s hot dog with sauerkraut and spicy mustard. Joy licked a lemon Italian ice from a paper cup with a little wooden spoon until the ice went soupy and she drank it. They shared watered-down daiquiris out of plastic flutes while walking the cracked planks of the boardwalk, the ocean to their right, all pitch and muscle beneath the dark, and the rides to their left flickering like a cheap heaven.

They stopped to watch two street crews dance-battle to Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal.” This, thought Noah, was either art or tax evasion. Maybe both. All one needed, apparently, was a speaker, some athletic children, and an empty bucket for tips. The crowd cheered in uneven bursts, deciding who won not by anything measurable but by whoever made them yell loudest.

The dance-battle, said a teenage boy nearby, was epic.

One team twisted and dropped and spun, their limbs turning like garlic knots. The other answered with backflips and windmills and a lot of face. It was all very Coney Island’s West Side Story. Noah wasn’t particularly interested, but Joy was, so he feigned enthusiasm. He clapped when cued by the teenage boy. He nodded. He said, “wow,” in the proper places.

When one team clearly won, Noah cheered for them.

Joy, predictably, cheered for the team that lost.

“I guess this means opposites attract,” he said, leaning in for a kiss.

“We’re more alike than you think,” she said, sucking melted daiquiri through a straw.

After the crowd began to disperse, the youngest dancer from the losing team — a kid, probably thirteen or fourteen — walked up to the captain of the winning team, who was older, maybe nineteen, maybe twenty, and flashed a knife.

He stabbed her in the thigh.

“Oh no,” Noah said.

Joy laughed, unaware of what had happened.

“How does it feel to have humor?” she said. Then, mocking him: “Oh no.”

Blood pumped hot and immediate through the captain’s tights. She stumbled and dropped to the planks. The crews exploded into a clumsy fight, all elbows and panic and flailing loyalty. Cops on foot and horseback stormed through the chaos, breaking it apart and tackling dancers in batches. The kid who started it all rode away standing on the back pegs of someone else’s bicycle.

“There goes the boy,” Noah said.

“It was a girl,” Joy corrected him. “And it happened because they lost. Nobody likes to lose.”

This was Sunday. Six days ago. They were not asked for a statement, and neither of them offered one. On the walk back to the Stillwell Avenue station, Joy asked, rhetorically, how it was possible she had never heard “Smooth Criminal” before. This disturbed her more than the stabbing.

“Everyone knew the words,” she said.

“Everyone pretends to know the words,” Noah said.

“Everyone knew the music.”

“You’re right,” he said. “Everyone did know the music.”

She did not laugh at his sarcasm.

“Next time,” he said, “the Cyclone.”

“I really don’t think,” she said, “there will be a next time.”

As the F train pulled away from the ocean, he kissed the back of her hand and sang quietly, “It was Sunday. What a black day.”

She let him keep her hand but turned her face toward the window.

That was the part he kept revisiting. Not the knife. Not even the blood. It was the hand. How she let him keep it without squeezing back.

2.

The man checking into the bedroom across the hall from Noah introduced himself as Large Charlie.

He was, according to him, seven-foot-two and four hundred pounds, though Noah had no way of verifying either figure or was too tired to challenge them. Large Charlie smelled like sausage pizza and discount cologne. Sweat shined across his skin without ever fully rolling free. He dragged a large black suitcase behind him and greeted the technicians as if he were a regular at a resort.

“I love this place,” he shouted to Noah across the hall as Tech Crystal fastened a plastic hospital bracelet around his wrist.

“This is his first time,” Tech Crystal said, nodding at Noah.

Large Charlie looked him over with interest.

“I love this place,” he repeated. “Best place in Manhattan, if you can get past the electrodes.”

The hallway of the New York Sleep Institute was carpeted, anonymous, and too brightly lit. Every door looked the same. Every room had two narrow beds, one desk, one chair, and the kind of television mounted high in a corner no one ever watched voluntarily. The whole place felt less medical than disciplinary, as if children with bad habits had once been sent here to be corrected.

“What are your problems?” Large Charlie asked. “Most people have more than one.”

“Sleepwalking,” Noah said.

“That’s a symptom, not a problem.”

“I don’t know then.” Noah pressed through his confusion at the question. “What are yours?”

“Sleep apnea and night terrors,” Large Charlie said, opening his suitcase. “Which is a nice way of saying my body tries to murder me in my sleep.” He unpacked with reverence: slippers, a folded robe, three over-sized Henleys, sweatpants, a travel pillow of unusual girth, earplugs, his own soap. “Did you know,” Large Charlie said, “the average person swallows six spiders a year in their sleep?”

“That can’t be true.”

“Afraid so.”

“Not possible.”

“Ten might be pushing it,” Large Charlie said. “But six…six is totally doable.” He stopped unpacking and wiped his giant hand across his forehead, clearing away sweat. “Six is a fucking lot of spiders.”

Noah decided immediately he did not want to be part of that statistic.

“Who’s counting these spiders?” Noah asked.

“No idea.”

“Based on how many people?”

Large Charlie looked up. “The question isn’t how many people. The question is how would they know?”

Noah thought about it and nodded in agreement. He wished they would stop talking about eating spiders now.

“What do you do for a living, neighbor?” Large Charlie asked, pulling off a sweat-staining t-shirt. His upper body didn’t look fat. He looked like the mythical creature.

“I’m a bankruptcy analyst,” Noah said. It was lie. He was not. He always lied when asked questions. “What about you?”

“I’m an exterminator,” Large Charlei said, rubbing his belly.

Noah didn’t even smile.

“What is it?” Large Charlie asked.

“You like to tell stories,” Noah said.

Large Charlie nodded and turned to Tech Crystal, setting electrodes on Large Charlie’s chest now. “Skeptic,” he shouted. “Tech Crystal, add that to your chart. This man right here doesn’t believe in truth.”

3.

Earlier in the week, a doctor diagnosed Noah with acute somnambulism.

“Put simply,” the doctor said, “severe sleepwalking.”

“Impossible,” Noah said. “I don’t sleepwalk.”

“That is often the opinion of sleepwalkers.”

“I think I would know if I got up and roamed around.”

“Would you?”

There were, in fairness, some recent incidents.

One night he woke standing barefoot at the kitchen sink, eating a square of feta cheese with chopsticks. Another night he woke on the couch with one leg crossed over the other, a men’s magazine in his lap opened to an article ranking the best hot dog stands in America. And yet another night he woke in the hallway of his apartment building urinating on his neighbor’s welcome mat. The mat said, in cheerful script: Good Guests Shed Their Shoes. He was aiming for all of the G’s.

After this incident, he called his therapist and begged for an emergency appointment. She sat with him through the details. The feta. The magazine. The hallway. The mat. The G’s.

“This has never happened before?” she asked.

“Not unless I’ve been incredibly efficient about forgetting it.”

And so, she referred him to the sleep specialist. And the sleep specialist referred him to the Institute.

“Likely causes include stress,” the doctor said. “A sudden lifestyle change. Anxiety. Substance use. Sleep deprivation. Any of these ring a bell?”

“I don’t even need a daily vitamin,” Noah said.

“That’s not really the defense you think it is.”

When the session ended, his therapist stood and walked him to the door. Before he left, she said, “I have never seen you be this honest before.”

He almost turned back to ask what she meant by that. Instead, he thanked her and went downstairs and called Joy.

She didn’t answer.

He hadn’t seen her since Coney Island.

Three days after that, she texted: I think you want me around because I make you feel like a person who has a life. That’s not the same thing as love.

He read the text six times before not responding.

She didn’t text again.

That had been enough, apparently, to teach his body the ancient art of sleep escape.

4.

The New York Sleep Institute sat between Ninth and Tenth Avenue on Fifty-Fifth Street in a building that looked like accountants might work there. By ten-thirty Noah had been wired with electrodes. Tech Crystal, a dental hygienist during the day, attached leads to his scalp and chest while Tech Dawn, a kindergarten teacher during the day, explained the bathroom protocol in a voice so calm it could have narrated executions.

“Try to sleep normally,” Tech Dawn said.

As if that were an option.

Through the thin wall he could hear Large Charlie speaking to himself in full conversational cadence. “I am relaxed,” Large Charlie said. Then, after a pause: “I am extremely relaxed.” Then: “Spiders aren’t real.”

Noah lay on the narrow bed in socks and an institutional T-shirt, staring at the ceiling. The monitors beside him glowed and clicked. There was no television. He had no book. He only had himself, which was clearly part of the problem.

It was sometime after midnight when he finally slept.

Suddenly, he was back at Coney Island. The boardwalk was empty. Not the normal bustle of things. No dancers. No tourists. No laughter. The newer rides glowed neon in the distance. And the Cyclone stood above it all. A giant in the night. Rising up against it all.

Joy stood by the Cyclone this time.

“You ready?” he asked.

She looked at the Cyclone rising and dropping. “I told you,” she said. “I’m bad at being scared. I really wasn’t kidding about it.”

“Fear is the absence of humor.”

“You keep saying that like it means something to me. I assure that it doesn’t.”

“It should mean everything to you,” he said.

“No,” she said. “It’s just something you say when you don’t want to admit you’re frightened.”

He tried to laugh but couldn’t.

The train rolled into the station. Empty. They climbed aboard. The bar dropped across their laps. The wooden car lurched forward and began to climb. Below them, the boardwalk shrank. The ocean widened. The whole city became a carbon copy of itself.

At the top, the train paused. The air changed. Joy turned and looked at him. “Why didn’t we ride this before?” she asked.

“Because you were afraid.”

She smiled, but not kindly. “No,” she said. “Because you were.”

Then the tracks vanished. The front of the train tipped into blackness.

Noah woke standing in the hallway of the sleep clinic with electrode wires dragging from his chest like seaweed.

Large Charlie stood in his doorway watching. “Sleepwalker,” Large Charlie shouted.

Noah looked down the long hall. Covered in fluorescent light.

“What was I doing?” he asked.

Large Charlie shrugged. “Heading for the stairs. Said something about going to the Cyclone.”

The technicians descended fast, ushering him gently but firmly back into bed. No one seemed alarmed. To them, this was simply a Tuesday.

“We got enough data,” Tech Crystal said.

“Enough for what?”

“To tell you what’s wrong.”

“I already know what’s wrong.”

“Do you?”

“I think I lost my sense of humor.”

In the morning, after bad coffee and a stale blueberry muffin in a waiting room full of people, the doctor reviewed the findings.

“Your body is mobilizing during sleep.”

“Mobilizing toward what?”

The doctor folded his hands. “Something unresolved. You don’t need a prescription,” the doctor said. “You need sleep.” Then: “you can pay your bill at reception.”

Outside, the city looked fake and impossible. Too much light. Too many buildings. Too much glass. He stood on the sidewalk for a while, then pulled out his phone. He called Joy. To his surprise, she answered. He heard traffic on her end. A siren far off. Her voice was careful.

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

“You okay?” she asked.

There it was. The question.

When he was in second grade, he watched his dad fight a man at a gas station. His dad knocked the man to the ground with two punches to the head and then stomped him repeatedly. When he was exhausted and panting for air, his dad looked at Noah in the passenger seat of the truck and laughed. He said, “you gotta find the humor in it all, son.” The ambulance came and took the man to the hospital. Later, he heard his parents talking and that the man had lost one of his eyes. Noah remembered the blood. It was everywhere. Later, when Noah was in his late teens, he remembered the incident again and asked his dad about it.

“Why did you fight that man?” Noah asked.

“Because he fucked your mom.” Then his dad laughed and said, “you gotta find the humor in it all.”

Joy asked him again. “Hey…you okay?”

He should have said yes. I am okay. That was the adult answer. Instead, he said, “Not really.”

“That’s more honest than usual for you,” Joy said.

“I went to a sleep clinic.”

“That sounds glamorous. Proud of you.”

“I tried to leave in my sleep.”

“Where to?”

“Coney Island, I think.”

“What a terrible destination for your subconscious to want to go. Were you trying to get to The Cyclone?”

“Of course I was.” He looked west, although there was nothing to see. Only traffic. And windows. And sky. “I think,” he said, “I was scared.”

“Of what?”

“Of being by myself.”

“Of being alone?” she asked.

“No, I said what I was scared of.”

She was quiet for a moment, before she said: “You know, I’m not getting back together with you just because of this strange, dramatic medical journey.”

“I wouldn’t get back together with you if you had one either.”

“But,” she said, “if you want to go ride the Cyclone this weekend, I might be willing to watch you throw up.”

“Will you hold my hand after?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “But I’ll let you try and make me laugh.”

The line clicked dead.

Noah stood there. For the first time in weeks, he felt tired in what he could only think was an ordinary, regular way. Human tired. The kind that suggests the possibility of sleep rather than escape.

5.

Noah woke up already standing.

He was in his kitchen. The overhead light was on. The refrigerator door stood open, humming. Noah held a glass of water he did not remember pouring. He drank it because it was there. His body felt heavy and delayed. He set the glass in the sink.

The apartment door was open. Not wide open. Just enough for the hallway light to slip inside. Noah stared at it.

For a long moment he stood there. Existing. Then stepped into the hallway. Down the stairs and out onto Seventh Avenue. Brooklyn at three in the morning was less empty than paused. Streetlights buzzed overhead. A delivery truck idled at the corner. Somewhere someone’s television played something.

Noah turned left. He saw himself move that way. He did not protest. He followed. As it felt a necessity.

At the subway entrance the metal gate was halfway down. The wind descended the station and wrapped around him. The F train platform was nearly empty. A man slept sitting upright with his arms folded across his chest. A woman in scrubs stared into space while eating potato chips from a plastic bag. Noah sat and waited. That was something that felt important somehow. The waiting.

When the train finally arrived, he boarded. His body automated. The doors closed. The car lurched forward. For several stops he sat without moving. He watched his reflection bend and distort in the cloudy windows as they passed through tunnels. It looked like someone else sitting there. Someone calm. Someone with intentions.

At the end of the line, the doors opened and his body stood. The air smelled of salt. The boardwalk was mostly empty. A few fishermen stood along the railing, their lines cast into the black water. The amusement park behind them was dark except for a few security lights that turned the rides into enormous skeletal shapes.

The Cyclone rose above everything. Even in darkness it was unmistakable. All those wooden ribs. They ached in the wind. Noah walked toward it. The chain-link fence surrounding the ride was eight feet tall. He stopped in front of it. Not a deterrent, he felt like he thought. Then grabbed it. Climbed it. Not elegantly. Like a n early human discovering it. At the top he swung a leg over and dropped into the gravel on the other side.

Noah walked toward the loading platform. The ride sat in the station. Empty rows of seats waited beneath the yellow glow of a security light. He climbed into the front car. The lap bar rested tight across his thighs.

Nothing happened.

Then Noah woke up. Not gradually. But all at once.

He was sitting in a roller coaster car inside a closed amusement park.

A flashlight exploded across his face. A voice shouted. “Sir.” A police officer stood on the platform below him. Hands on hips. “Would you care to explain yourself?”

Noah looked around. The Cyclone. The ocean. The fence he had apparently climbed. He nodded slowly. “Yes,” he said. “I would care to explain that.”

The officer waited.

Noah considered how to explain. “I believe,” he said finally, “I may have been confronting my fears.”

“You being funny?”

“Unfortunately, that’s the problem.”

“You climbed an eight-foot fence.”

“Yes.”

“You boarded a roller coaster.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I think I was hoping it would start.”

The officer lowered the flashlight slightly. “Sir,” the officer said carefully, “are you intoxicated?”

“No.”

“On drugs?”

“No.” Noah thought. Then said: “I’m beginning to suspect that I may be escaping from myself.” Noah looked down the long wooden drop of the first hill. “Do you ever ride it?” he asked.

“The Cyclone?” the officer asked.

“Yes.”

“When I was a kid.”

“Was it scary?”

“Yeah,” he said. “But that’s kind of the point.”

Noah nodded. “That’s what I’m starting to realize.”

He looked past the officer’s shoulder and noticed something delicate trembling in the security light. A spider web stretched across a nearby wooden railing. The web swayed in the wind. At the center…a spider. Small enough not to worry about being blown away. And yet large enough to eat.

The officer tapped the flashlight against the rollercoaster’s frame. “Let’s get you off the ride before you confront anything else tonight.”

Noah stood slowly. His legs trembled.

“You okay?” the officer asked.

There it was again. That question.

“I am,” Noah said. Then he shook his head. “Actually, no.” Noah looked out toward the black water of ocean. “I am categorically not okay.”

Noah thought about his parents when he was a kid. The frozen dinners. The bottles of wine with handles. The thin walls. The long silences between arguments. The way the television stayed on all night like a third person in the room. The way his father once said everything’s fine in a voice that meant the opposite.

The spider scampered across the web.

“You know,” Noah said, “someone told me something interesting recently. He said the average person swallows six spiders a year in their sleep.”

“That can’t be true,” the officer said.

The spider sat motionless in the web now.

“That’s what I said,” Noah said, and then reached out and pinched the web between two fingers. The spider skillfully clung to the silk. He brought it closer to his face. Noah opened his mouth and placed the spider on his tongue. He chewed thoughtfully once. Then swallowed.

The officer’s flashlight lowered toward the ground with sadness.

Noah wiped his fingers on his jeans.

The officer sighed. “You know what?” he said. “I’m not even writing this part down in my report.”

Noah could still feel the faint grit of legs and silk at the back of his throat. Large Charlie’s voice floated back to him from the sleep clinic hallway: Six spiders a year is a fucking lot of spiders.

“Well,” Noah said, “that’s one.”

---

J.R. Angelella is the author of the irreverent, darkly comic coming-of-age novel Zombie (Soho Press, 2012). His short fiction has appeared in various journals and most recently in the crime anthology Eight Very Bad Nights (Soho Crime, 2024). He teaches creative writing at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he directs Jiménez-Porter Writers’ House, a literary center dedicated to creative writing across cultures and languages. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing & Literature from Bennington College. He lives in Baltimore with his wife and two children.

Judy Slitt

The Appendage

My wife, Shirley, and I walk in on my dad rubbing ointment into my mom’s leg stump. It’s our first morning visiting my parents. Mom’s laying back on the brown Barcalounger and Dad’s bending over her. Mom looks angry. She says, “You have to really get it in there!”

            Dad’s face is scrunched into a little ball, focusing, and they’re both so in the zone that they don’t see us standing there.

            I can tell this isn’t a hit with Shirley.

            Shirley says, “Uh. Hi.”

            Dad looks up. He’s sweating. He says, “Rob. Shirley.”

            Mom makes a face at Shirley, a not-very-nice face, but you see, she had her leg amputated just last year due to her diabetes and she’s still sensitive about it. I mean, I think she’s embarrassed. That’s what I tell Shirley later that night, when we’re alone in my childhood bedroom.

            “Yeah,” Shirley says. “I could tell it was an intimate moment.”

            The stump looked puckered and angry. Like the end of a sausage. Like a butthole.

            “It’s not like I wanted to see it either,” I say. Last time I saw Mom, she wore a muumuu to cover it up. This was my first time seeing the stump in its full glory.

            Last year, Shirley said we should pay for Mom to get a prosthetic. “We have the money,” Shirley had said. “It’s the only thing that makes sense. Your dad shouldn’t have to cart her around all the time.”

            But my parents refused. “We won’t take money from you,” Dad said.

            “I’m perfectly happy with my appendage,” Mom said.

            If I’m being honest, I’m not in the most stellar mood. Visiting home makes me have mouse poops. My feces congeal into a brick inside me.

            Mom isn’t pleased that Shirley and I won’t have kids. Mom says things like, “Oh, did you see the pictures of your cousin Jeannie’s baby? Let me show you,” and spends forever hunting for the pictures on her phone.

            That night, Shirley says, “They don’t give a shit about cousin Jeannie’s baby. They’re just trying to pressure us.”

            I say, “Yeah,” because she’s right, but what am I supposed to do, tell Mom not to show us any baby pictures? So I say, “That’s just the way they are. We’ll be home soon.”

            “I still can’t shit,” says Shirley. She takes off her earrings and puts them on the dresser.

            “Tell me about it,” I say.

            “I mean, I haven’t had a shit this whole week,” says Shirley. “It’s like World War III in my colon.” She changes into her pajamas, a Dead Kennedys shirt that goes to her knees, and I have to say, she looks pretty fetching. Her curly hair is out of its bun and she looks like a lion.

            “Yeah, totally,” I say. “So, you wanna have sex?”

~

            On the last day, Shirley and I are with my parents in the living room, watching football. Dad grunts from time to time and says, “Seriously?” and sips his beer. It’s a more mellow vibe, I think, because Shirley’s anticipating a return to her routine and French press coffee and also regular shits.

            Mom turns to Shirley and says, “Dear, can you fetch my ointment? It’s in the cabinet above the bathroom sink,” and Shirley brings it back and holds it up awkwardly – it’s like a jumbo toothpaste.

            Shirley says, “Here you go, Mom,” because Mom likes her to call her ‘Mom’ and has made this clear on multiple occasions, even though Shirley’s face always twitches when she says it.

            Mom rolls up her tie-dye muumuu to expose her leg stump. We all have to keep our faces neutral. But the stump looks angrier than last time. Maybe on account of Mom being too embarrassed to apply unguents in front of us this week. Maybe Dad still applies the unguents at night, when we’re asleep, but it’s not cutting it.

            Mom can’t apply the ointment herself, on account of her stomach being in the way and her lack of flexibility. I expect her to ask Dad to help.

But she says, “Shirley. Dear. Can you rub in the ointment? My appendage gets so dry in the winter.”

            Shirley stares. Then she sinks to her knees. She sneezes and shoos away my parents’ cats. Shirley’s allergic to cats and always says, “I can’t breathe with all this fur,” but I can’t tell my parents to give their cats away, can I?

Shirley uncaps the tube and squeezes ointment onto her manicured fingers. The smell of menthol fills the room.

It dawns on me: I wonder if I’m watching my marriage fall apart.

            Mom smiles. Her teeth are gray. Her eyes sparkle.

---

Judy Slitt lives in Virginia. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Bright Flash Literary Review, surely magazine, Cosmic Daffodil Journal, Moss Puppy Magazine, M E N A C E, Crow & Cross Keys, and BULL. Her website is judyslitt.com.

Brett Nelson

Exposure

“Holy shit, it worked.” Joey held the photograph up to his face, then further away, under the light. “Victor! Victor, come here!”

He tilted it, looking for imperfections. But really, there weren’t any. Hard to even believe it came from his own hands.

“What’s up?” Victor asked. Then he saw what Joey was doing and stepped eagerly into the little room. “It worked?”

Joey held the photograph up proudly. In it, Victor stood holding an ice cream cone in front of city hall. There were a few other people in the shot and the edge of it was blurred just a little from Joey’s thumb. Victor was smiling in the photo, holding up the ice cream cone like a trophy. It had cost six dollars and seventy-five cents.

Joey handed him the photo.

“Holy shit.” Victor held it close to his face and smiled.

There was the entire rest of the film roll to work through but for the moment Joey wanted to enjoy this moment, savour it. When he’d come home with the chemical medley the internet had told him he needed, Victor had complained that it would be easier to drop the roll off at London Drugs. That they didn’t need to convert a closet of their tiny apartment into a darkroom for a hobby.

But it cost almost forty bucks(!) to develop one roll of film there and with the kit he’d bought for just twenty, he’d been able to make a setup that would last for the development of at least ten rolls. His first attempt hadn’t worked, and he’d had to sacrifice that roll as a loss. But once he’d convinced a put-out Victor to fill another, Joey had studied up on the techniques and now he was holding the fruit of all that labour.

“I told you it’d be worth it,” he said.

Victor grinned up at him. His front teeth were a little crooked, like they were all leaning away from something in his mouth. “Yeah,” he said. “Totally.”

~

They’d gotten the camera at the big flea market hall on Terminal Ave. There were lots of good deals there but they started charging entry a few years back. Five bucks, unbelievably. Joey learned that if he walked in with confidence and nodded to the guys at the entrance about half the time they’d just assume he was a vendor. Sometimes he carried a box like he was carrying it to his table.

The day they’d gotten the camera he’d paid for both their entries because he didn’t want Victor thinking he was cheap and the carry-something-in-and-nod move might not work for both of them. The camera itself was an old camera that looked like an old camera. Like something out of a movie or one of Victor’s Pinterest boards. They found it on a table amid other bits of half-working mechanical items, beneath the hanging display of raincoats, pants, boots, and work clothes. Joey was tempted to grab some new boots for work but he didn’t have the cash and he wasn’t working just then.

So they got the camera instead. For forty dollars, because Victor had gone on and on about how cute it was and how cool film photography was and how the pictures came out better and how his parents had all these photo albums and he didn’t have any because people these days only took photos on their phones.

And they’d fought the night before. Joey had kissed Victor and then touched him and Victor had pushed his hand away gently and said he was tired. Joey had said that he was always tired and Victor had said that it was because he always worked and Joey had said he was trying to find work to help out and Victor had said he knew but it had gotten really tense after that and nobody spoke for the rest of the night.

“It’s hard to know if the photo’s going to be good,” Victor said the first time he pressed the shutter, got the click. “There’s nothing to look at after.”

“That can be cool, though,” Joey said. He didn’t like the disappointment in Victor’s voice, was hoping that the camera wouldn’t be like other things he’d picked up and put down without putting much time into them. The crochet needles sitting on their windowsill; the potted plants on the balcony, overgrown with little weeds and dead shoots.

~

They had to wait for the rest of the photos to develop after that first tester. A handful of minutes to develop, then the stop bath, the fixer. Joey moved the sheets between tanks with each timer. He tried to catch a glimpse of the photos as they passed through but the darkroom was, well, dark and he couldn’t yet afford to put in the safety light that the guy at the camera shop had tried to sell him along with the development kit.

They stood in the kitchen while they waited, talking about all the things they might take pictures of in the future, now that this new world had opened up for them. Victor talked about a trip to the island. To Victoria, or Salt Spring, and the pictures they could take there. Joey nodded enthusiastically, ignoring his mind as it calculated ferry costs—twenty per person, seventy-five each way for the car—and tried to encourage him instead.

They mixed up drinks using the last of what they had in the liquor cabinet over the fridge. A bit of gin and the last can of tonic water and Victor even found a lime of dubious quality in the crisper. He got a pair of half-decent wedges out of it and he slid them onto the rims of the mismatched glasses.

“We could even go to Ucluelet.” He leaned in and kissed Joey softly, then pulled back. “Or Tofino. Tofino would be cool.”

~

When the photos were dry they sat down on the couch together, Victor in Joey’s lap, and looked through them. Some were completely underexposed, minor textures in the shadows. But others turned out. Holding the photo and seeing a physical record of their existence made Joey feel like they were living their lives through something important.

“I like this one.” Victor pinched it between two fingers before Joey could move on to the next one.

It was a picture of the two of them that someone else had taken. They were standing together at the edge of a railing near the waterfront. Joey was wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses. Victor was wearing a t-shirt and tiny shorts.

“Huh, that’s weird,” Joey said. He tapped the photo.

“What’s weird?”

Joey tapped again. “There’s like, something here.”

Victor frowned. “I don’t see anything.”

“Really? That little smudge there? It’s almost like a dick.”

Victor laughed. “You think so? I don’t see anything. Or like, maybe a shadow or lens flare or something.”

“No, seriously. It’s right there. Next to your hip, see? It’s like—seriously, it looks like a dick or something.”

“Maybe you’ve just got dicks on your mind again, darling.”

“Seriously? It’s right there.” Joey tapped a third time.

“I think you’re tired,” Victor said. “And you’ve had a drink—”

“Just one.”

“—and maybe you’ve inhaled some chemicals.”

“I don’t think they do that.”

Victor held his face like he was trying not to laugh and glanced one more time at the photos, shook his head. “You coming to bed?”

Joey didn’t answer. He went back to the darkroom, frowning at the photograph in his hands.

~

“See? It’s not just the one.”

Victor stared bleary-eyed across the kitchen table. He had a mug of coffee in front of him—Joey’d waited at least that long before assaulting him with what he’d learned overnight.

“The little dick is in a bunch of these.” He gestured to the pile on the table. “Everything in this pile.”

Victor picked up the pile. “So, they’ve all got little smudges?”

“They’re not smudges!”

“Maybe it’s your fingerprint on the camera.”

“It’d be on all them then, and it’s not.”

He sifted through the pile while he drank his coffee. “I really don’t see it.”

Joey put his finger to one of the exposures. “Seriously? Right there. You can’t see that?”

“I guess there could be something.”

“That’s a dick! The same as in the others.”

“Yeah, maybe. Sure.”

Victor got ready for work and left without talking more about the photos. Joey tried to put them off to the side and ignore them too. He had more job applications to fill out and needed to check if any of the temp agencies needed a painter. Even a day’s work would help at this point.

Joey had just put on his jacket and was about to head to the library when he saw the pile of photos on the kitchen table. He hesitated only for a second before grabbing them. The ones without the dick, too. He grabbed them all.

~

Victor got home from work around midnight. Joey made him a mug of tea and waited until he was settled on the couch to show him.

“Look at these,” he said.

“The photos again?” Victor groaned, slumped. “Joey.”

“No, it’s different. See these?” He handed him a stack of paper. “These are the ones I showed you this morning. I scanned them on the computer at the library and re-printed them, but I brightened them up a bit first. Look at this.” He tapped the photo, where the dick had been. It all looked overexposed now—the whites washed out to flatness, artificial brightness wrestling with shadows in the corners.

And there was the dick. Amid the brightness and the washed-out colours was the unchanged greyness of a dick. Within the context of that new background, it was almost undeniable to call it anything other than an honest-to-goodness cock, floating right next to Victor’s leg.

“That—does look a little strange.” Victor shuffled the photos, looked at a few more. “No luck getting a shift today, huh?”

“And look at these,” Joey said. He handed over the rest of the re-printed photos. The ones that hadn’t had a visible blemish the night before. “These ones also have it after I brightened them up. Take a look, seriously. Nothing until I edited them on the computer and suddenly that same dick is there.”

Victor frowned at the photos. “So did you apply to anything today?”

“Yeah,” Joey lied. “There were a couple—some places looking for a painter. I’m hoping they call tomorrow. But seriously, isn’t this weird?”

“Sure, Joe. But, like, it’s probably just the camera. What else would it be?”

“I don’t know.”

“Like, do you think it’s a ghost? A—what? A cock ghost?”

“I don’t—what? A cock ghost? Really?”

“Well?”

“No, I just—I don’t know.”

“Then what?”

“I said I don’t know.”

“It’s almost definitely the camera.” He stood and kissed Joey on the cheek. “Get some sleep. Hopefully one of the places calls tomorrow.”

~

Joey was at London Drugs by the time an employee came to the front and activated the doors at eight. He walked all the way back to the photo centre and bought a roll of film with an emergency twenty-dollar bill he had stashed in an envelope his between mattress and box-spring.

He got ISO 800, double what he’d used for the last roll, because he’d read online that the higher number would increase the sensitivity to light and pick up more objects in low light. The people on Reddit warned of graininess, but Joey was past caring about quality.

He loaded the roll of film into the camera and spent the day shooting. He burned all thirty-six exposures walking around the city, trying to get a range of images. He took more pictures of City Hall; the Skytrain station; the faded shell of the old Toys R Us; an empty bar; the tree-lined neighbourhood streets broken up by bike lanes; the construction sites where they were putting in more Skytrain stations but apparently didn’t need a painter; a bookstore with baskets out front; a white-walled grocery store that felt like a hospital.

He took pictures of everything he could think of, not bothering to adjust any of the settings he’d so carefully learned the first time they’d used it. Back when he hadn’t wanted to waste any of the film they’d spent their money on together.

He walked far—far enough that the walk home at the end of the day took hours. The transit cops were at the stop and he couldn’t sneak in, so he walked the whole way. He got home with the sun still up; Victor at work until midnight again, probably. And he went to work in the dark room.

~

“You can’t tell me you’re not seeing this, now. This pattern?”

“Did you buy a new roll of film? Jesus, Joey, we’ve got to pay rent next week.”

“Okay, but will you look at these? Seriously? You’re going to deny there’s something there?”

“These are actually pretty good.”

“Sure, but look here.”

Victor hadn’t even changed out of his scrubs yet. He squinted at the images and shrugged. “Yeah, there’s definitely something there. But like I said, it’s something wrong with the camera.”

“I completely scrubbed the lens. I made sure there were no smudges or blemishes and you can see there aren’t any scratches.”

“Couldn’t there be one on the part inside? The sensor or whatever.”

“No, it’s a dick.”

“Whose dick, Joey?”

“I don’t know!”

Victor threw up his arms and laughed. “This is so, so ridiculous.”

“It’s not.”

“I’m going to shower.” He paused, then put his fingers in Joey’s belt and pulled him closer. “You wanna come? Obsess over a different dick for a while? I’m not too tired from work this time.”

Joey pulled away. “I—sorry, I’m tired.”

“Yeah, sure. Okay.”

Joey looked through all the photos again while Victor showered. There were dicks in every single one, most of them overexposed, some to pure whiteness. Others had detail, things he’d captured only to find whatever it was that existed beyond the realm of the naked eye.

That thought was a cold hand on the back of his neck. He’d been preoccupied with proving that this thing—whatever it was—existed and hadn’t thought extensively as to what it was, where it was. What exactly it was doing following him through every picture.

“I believe you,” Victor said when he came out of the shower. He sat down at the kitchen table in just his towel, wet hair dripping onto the tile. “There’s something there. I get it. I think we should put it away and not use the camera anymore.”

“You think it’s the camera?”

“I don’t know, Joey. But whatever it is, it’s not hurting us. We can just ignore it.”

Joey picked at a frayed thread on his pants. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, sure.”

~

The guy from Marketplace didn’t want to give Joey the camera for less than fifty but he got him down to forty.

“It’s an F2.” The guy said it like it should mean something. “It’s already a huge discount.”

But Joey hadn’t said anything to that, just kept holding out the two twenties, folded together between his index and middle fingers.

“Fine,” the guy had said. “You’re robbing me, but fine.”

Joey took the camera. There weren’t any transit cops at the stop, so he got on the 99 with the crush of other people going through the backdoor to avoid paying for a ticket. He rode three stops then walked two blocks to the camera shop. The film was more expensive here, but they also hung it out in the open, rather than behind alarm-protected cases like the London Drugs.

The door jingled as Joey walked inside the cramped space. Almost every inch of wall was hung with product. There was one glass case at the front where the cameras were. An old guy in a polo shirt standing behind that.

“What can I do for you?” he asked.

“Yeah, I—,” Joey said, scanning the wall behind the guy. “Could I get a look at that Canon behind you? The one on the shelf?”

The guy looked back to where Joey was pointing, and Joey managed to fish a roll of ISO 200 film off one of the racks beside him and drop it into his bag.

“This one?” The guy asked, pulling down the camera.

“Yeah, that’s the one.” Joey took it and pretended to heft it, peered through the viewfinder. All the things he figured he was supposed to do when he tested out a camera.

“Yeah,” he said. “I gotta get some cash, but I’ll come back?”

The guy shrugged. Joey put the camera back on the counter and left the shop, triggered the tinkling of the door once again.

~

He took pictures of everything. Some of them were the same as the pictures he’d taken with the last roll, or close enough. He took pictures of the same place at different times of the day. He took a picture of full darkness and one angled directly at the sun. He took a self-portrait. He asked people in the street if they would stop for him. Pose. When his phone rang, the Caller ID announcing the temp agency, he let it go to voicemail.

Victor was home when Joey got there but he didn’t say anything. Joey’d been hoping that he’d pick up an extra shift to try to help pay the rent so that he’d have the place to himself, but it didn’t end up mattering because Victor didn’t say anything anyway. He just sat there on their couch watching as Joey got everything ready.

He didn’t want to find what he was looking for in these photos, didn’t want to be chased by whatever was there. As Victor had said, it could be the camera. Probably was.

Painstakingly, he went through the process. He flicked on the heater to get things to temp. The developer, the stopper, the fixer. He transferred image after image onto photo paper, careful not to knock anything over as he worked in the dark. The smell of the chemicals crawled up his nostrils

He worked carefully; he wanted no mistakes, no possible way to refute whatever it was he found when he finished the process. Dick or not. The truth. That’s all he was looking for. If there was nothing there, they could blame the camera and leave it at that. He could call the agency back, go to work, go paint someone’s fence or house or the metal parts of some machine laid out on sawhorses in a ventilated room. He could don his jumpsuit and respirator and work methodically to get something to where it was supposed to be.

And if there was a dick? If it was still there?

He waited. Slowly, achingly. It wasn’t even a long time. A handful of minutes per tub. He wanted them to dry, everything to be perfect.

Eventually, they were.

He pulled down the first batch and laid them out on the kitchen table. He felt the apprehension rise up within himself as he prepared to look, the self-preserving quality of his fear crashing down upon his need to know as he leaned over the table and sought the dick within the images. He braced his hands on either side of the table and took one last look at Victor, who hadn’t bothered to look in his direction, as if something momentous weren’t happening to them right then. Joey looked down.

And saw.

---

Brett Nelson works and writes on the unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. His fiction has been longlisted for the 2026 CBC Short Story Prize, the 2026 Camel Gilmer Prize, and published in The Malahat Review and elsewhere. His nonfiction has appeared in Briarpatch, Current Affairs, and elsewhere. He is the prose editor of PRISM international.

Ben Daggers

Lost Letters

SEARCH: Sent mail
FROM: Prisoner 0367 - Jonas Landtner

TO: Lucy Severeux

MESSAGE COUNT: 884

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

SHOWING MESSAGES 451-460 (Page 46 of 89)

2084.10.29     

Lucy,

You’re not going to believe what they’ve cooked up this time. As part of the Intellectual Elite Countermeasures, starting next week there’s a hard limit on any words longer than six letters. You know that I’ve never exactly been Shakespeare, so it won’t affect my messages much, but it just goes to show how bad things have gotten. I think they’re still letting us receive messages as normal, so at least I can continue to enjoy all those words of yours that I pretend to understand.

While I still can, let me sign out in style: You are the most prepossessing, captivating, splendiferous creature in the universe! 

2084.11.5       

Lucy,

They really went and did it. I just spent the last minute trying to write a seven letter word and every time it got wiped from the screen. The rumor mill says that there may even be plans to reduce the letter count from six to five soon. As if one mail per week weren’t cruel enough, they’re now going to limit the words I can use? The world is going to hell in a hand cart. But we’ll get past this, just like we always do.

All the kisses in the world for you, my angel.

2084.11.12     

Lucy,

The rumor was true.

It was once said (more or less) that “the limit of my words is the limit of my world,” and I can now see what they were on about. With so many words now out of reach, I find it hard to think as I once did. But I still feel the same way about you as ever, and I hope you know that. At least I still have the tried and true “I love you”. Maybe that’s all I need?

I await your next mail (just five days to go) with every fiber of my being.

2084.11.19     

Lucy,

I hate to give bad news each time, but one more rule came in two days ago. I am down to just four. It’s as if they want to take the very last bit of life from me. From us.

I know you hate to hear it when I’m down, but I am in a bad way. My mind is a cage. With each week, each new law, each new loss, I feel its cold, iron bars push in more and more. Even when I had no rule to bind me, it was hard to tell you what you mean to me. But now, I am all but lost. When they take one more (and they will do any day now, I can feel it) I will weep, for I’ll have lost your name. Your name! But till that day, I will type it so hard that the keys will want to cry out in pain. LUCY! LUCY! LUCY!

2084.11.26

To my L,

Who am I to you now? And who are you to me? I beg God for aid, but he is not in. He is not. How can he be? 

I am so sad. My eye is wet all day. I am all ire now. Yet no end to the bad era for me and you: A new law in a day.  Is it the end for us?

My tip to my toe are all for you, my L.

2084.12.3

To my L,

Oh no.

Is it “I” or is it “we”? If it is “we,” I am to go on. If it is “I”... No. 

I or we?

We? We? We? WE?

2084.12.10

L,

x

2084.12.17

L,

x

2084.12.24

L,

x

2084.12.31

L,

x

CLICK HERE FOR MESSAGES 461-470 (Page 47 of 89)

---

Ben Daggers is a short story writer based in Osaka, Japan. He loves to explore the dark edges of fiction, before slowly backing away before things get a bit too dark. When not writing, procrastinating, or feeling guilty for procrastinating instead of writing, Ben spends his time doting over an emotionally-needy Italian Greyhound.

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.