Mileva Anastasiadou

Dead Boxer Has Wings

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

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

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

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

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

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

L.M. Conkling

The Artist’s Interview

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

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

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

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

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

         “No. It’s a scarf.”

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

         “No.”

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

         “Do you have questions for me?”

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

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

         My first meaty journalistic piece.

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

         She nodded curtly. “You are a student.”

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

         “I’d have guessed freshman.”

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

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

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

         “So you said.”

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

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

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

         “Which ones?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

         “Of course.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

         “Do you know what was in it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

         It was beautiful.

         And it was horrible.

         “I like your twin set.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

         “This one?”

         “Yes.”

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

         “Do you know what those are?”

         I shook my head.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

         It was a statement, not a question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

         Hector.

         Patty.

         Moira.

         Angela.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kate Maxlow

I Figured Out How to Turn Dopamine Into Solid Gold

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

         She puts her head in her hands and cries.

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

---

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

E Ce Miller

Elvin’s Mother Dreams of Koi

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

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

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

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

---

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

Emmet Hirsch

The Zonule of Zinn

Philbert O’Toole IV, a twenty-one-year-old man who had not exited the basement of his parents’ bungalow in Skokie, Illinois for three years, reached for his medical dictionary. The act of consulting the medical dictionary never failed to evoke in Philbert IV the memory of his great-grandfather, Philbert O’Toole MD. It evoked that memory now.

Philbert O’Toole MD had died sixteen years earlier, when Philbert O’Toole IV was five years old. The young man shuddered at the recollection. On the first Saturday after the funeral, he had accompanied his father and grandfather to their deceased ancestor’s twelfth-floor apartment in a rental complex on Touhy and Western in Chicago. The apartment on the twelfth floor still smelled of Great-grandfather’s after-shave, a ghostly reminder of the old man.

To his horror, the boy discovered that the purpose of the visit was not, as he had supposed, to spend a few final moments in that venerable presence. No, the purpose of the visit was to eradicate the apartment of all evidence that Great-grandfather had ever occupied it. Philbert O’Toole II and Philbert O’Toole III savaged the place, emptying closets and cabinets and drawers, tossing or sweeping or upending their contents into a huge bin they wheeled from room to room.

Little Philbert O’Toole IV, beside himself with anxiety, followed Father and Grandfather through the apartment as they cast the old man’s worldly possessions into the trash bin with only slightly more disdain than they had cast the man himself into the earth two days earlier. When they gleefully parked the container in front of the built-in bookshelves, a multi-tiered superstructure into which countless volumes had been crammed haphazardly, totteringly, dangerously, magnificently, the boy felt he might faint.

Taking turns, either Father or Grandfather would position the trash bin under a stack of shelves, and the other would climb a stepladder, toss three or four volumes from the left-hand side of each shelf into the maw of the container, and then reach a long arm through the back to sweep ten to fifteen books forward at a time. They cheered when all the books cascaded into the receptacle, sending up great clouds of dust, and cursed when even one missed its mark.

One of these errant volumes was the medical dictionary, and when it bounced off the edge of the bin and out into the hallway, the boy ran after it and stuffed it into his backpack, a secret souvenir from the dreadful excursion. Little Philbert had no idea what the book was, but he knew it must be a significant work, for he had seen Great-grandfather thumb through it many times, and those occasions frequently resulted in an exclamation and a twinkle in the ancient eyes.

Philbert IV’s final memory from that last Saturday in the apartment on Touhy and Western was that the bookshelves prevailed over the vengeful heirs, for even the gigantic bin was no match for the trove of volumes. Young Philbert O’Toole IV could not imagine there was a receptacle on earth that could hold them all. The elder O’Tooles retreated in anger, and the boy did not accompany them on the subsequent visit, during which the task of annihilating the old man’s belongings was completed. Philbert IV never set foot in the apartment again.

The three surviving Philbert O’Tooles returned to the bungalow in Skokie, where Father and Grandfather consoled themselves with a couple of beers at the kitchen table, while Philbert IV slinked away to stow his treasure under his bed. At night he would take the book out and peruse it using a flashlight, and that is how he taught himself to read. While other children were learning that A is for apple and B is for banana, little Philbert soaked up words like circulation and dermatitis and elephantiasis.

Even at the age of five, Philbert IV had understood that Great-grandfather prized two categories of items above all the things, and these were, in descending order, his great-grandson and his books. If the books could be discarded with such gusto, what might happen to Philbert IV? The apartment on Touhy and Western had seemed to the child the most dependable place in the world, for it was at the door to that dwelling that he was handed off to Great-grandfather every Saturday afternoon by Philberts II and III on their way to a sports bar in Lincolnwood. On those Saturdays, little Philbert’s excitement would intensify with every chime of the rising elevator until the lad thought he might burst before the twelfth toll. Indeed, it was through this agitation that the boy learned to count by his second birthday. As the elevator doors began to open, Philbert IV would squeeze through, turn left and rush down the balding carpet. Great-grandfather would be stationed at the end of the dim hallway without fail, leaning on his cane within a rectangle of light streaming through the open door.

“Come to my arms, my beamish boy!” Great-grandfather would chortle, and Philbert IV knew by the broad smile on the aged ancestor’s face that he considered the phrase very clever, but the child wasn’t sure why. And as the lad came within range, Great-grandfather would step back into the apartment, his right hand supported by the cane and his left extended like a parkinsonian boat hook, grappling the boy by the shoulder and drawing him in, the door’s springs doing the rest to slam in the faces of Philberts II and III.

Great-grandfather would lead little Philbert to the bookcase and ask him to point to a volume, any volume at all. He would rest his cane against a cabinet, pull the indicated book from the stack, blow the dust off its top, and hobble to the rocking chair, where he would sit and beckon the child to climb up his boney legs and onto his lap. And then he would read, his dentures clacking over the words like a pushcart on cobblestones. Little Philbert understood almost none of it, but luxuriated in the old man’s reverent rhythms. After what seemed like a long time, they would leave the library and move to the small table in the kitchen, where Great-grandfather would pour a glass of milk and lay out two chocolate chip cookies, and the pair would sit in silence until the doorbell rang.

“Those feckless fucks,” Great-grandfather would mutter at the sound of the bell. Rising unsteadily, he would lead Philbert IV whence they had come, pausing by the door to heave a sigh before opening it and restoring little Philbert to the custody of Father and Grandfather, their countenances radiant and their breaths sour with booze. After the boy learned to read, he was unable to find either “feckless” or “fuck” in the medical dictionary, and that is why for a long time he associated both words with leave-taking.

Years later, Philbert IV came to understand the phrase’s true meaning, the verdict of an aged man for his own flesh and blood. Great-grandfather’s offspring had exchanged the birthright of an O’Toolean intellect for two used car dealerships, one in Highland Park and the other in Park Ridge, using them to underwrite the betrayal of their patriarch’s scholarly legacy with suburban houses, materialistic spouses, large-screen TVs, and other tacky acquisitions of the middle class.

By the time Philbert IV was in his teens, Great-grandfather had long been gone, but the derision Philberts II and III harbored for the old man lived on. Father and Grandfather relished mocking their ancestor’s bookishness and impracticality, his contempt for life’s tangible pleasures. This phenomenon of equal and opposite scorn passing from progenitor to descendants and back again was eventually christened by Philbert IV, bored to death one afternoon in a high-school Newtonian Physics class, as “Philbert’s second law of phamilies.” So pleased was he with this little witticism that he scribbled it in his notebook, along with an addendum: “Phather and Grandphather, those pheckless phucks.”

Over the years, other volumes joined the medical dictionary in Philbert IV’s collection, including three regular English dictionaries and a thesaurus, along with many digital resources. But the medical dictionary remained his favorite. The definitions and word origins seemed not so much printed on its pages as emanating from them like whispers from Great-grandfather, rasping, gasping as they used to do from behind the boy’s perch on the skeletal lap in the apartment on Touhy and Western. It wasn’t difficult for Philbert IV to reenact those Saturdays whenever he chose to do so. There was a photo of the aged ancestor on the hutch above Philbert IV’s desk, and all he had to do to have Great-grandfather look over his shoulder as he read was to swivel his desk chair one hundred eighty degrees.

With time, the ability to commune with the spirit of his great-grandfather became Philbert IV’s fixed point of reference in a universe that seemed to be spiraling away from him. For as long as he could remember, Philbert IV had been uncomfortable upstairs, whence the world’s unhappiness seemed to originate, and where his parents and grandparents and their friends denunciated people and things Philbert IV hadn’t realized were bad. Outside the bungalow’s front door, it got worse. There were noise and disorder, bullies, demanding teachers, the boys’ locker room, and other threats, the sum total of which generated in Philbert IV an unremitting nausea. Downstairs, in contrast, were a pool table and a television and a game console, and eventually a computer with high-speed Internet, and from time to time a small circle of childhood friends.

Over the years, Philbert IV’s unease at emerging from the basement expanded and his circle of friends contracted until he was its only member. He managed to finish high school and attend a semester at the University of Illinois, but declined to go back after winter break despite the pleading of his parents. And when Mother acquiesced over Father’s objections to leave food or folded laundry or a credit card number with expiration date and three-digit security code outside the closed door of his room in the basement whenever he needed them, Philbert IV experienced a new sensation. He was at peace.

The only thing he might have wished for that he didn’t have was a girlfriend, but even in that domain he made do. Philbert IV had learned enough about the world to know that without major rehabilitation he was unlikely to attract any member of the opposite sex who was less of an oddball than he. Online chats, gaming communities, and pornography were helpful but unsatisfying. Eventually, he conjured up an imaginary French girlfriend, who pronounced his name “feel-bear” (accented on the second syllable and with the “r” all garbled up in the back of the throat).

The French pronunciation of his name was a multidimensional joke Philbert O’Toole IV regretted not being able to share with anyone except his imaginary girlfriend, but he accepted her imagined appreciation of the gag for what it was worth. Father and Grandfather were fond of recounting how “Philbert O’Toole” had become the family name, embellishing the story at each retelling. According to family lore, when Great-grandfather, a destitute and blinky-eyed fourteen-year-old orphan, disembarked at Ellis Island in 1922 from the steerage compartment of a rat-trap steamer from Odesa, he was still in possession of his birth name, Feivel Ostrovsky. The Irishman on duty behind the immigration desk hadn’t gone to the trouble of asking the tattered creature trembling before him to repeat his first appalling utterance of the words “Feivel Ostrovsky” in response to being asked his name. Instead, the Irishman scribbled “Philbert O’Toole” into the logbook and ripped out the carbon copy, jabbing it with his forefinger and barking “Philbert O’Toole” at Great-grandfather until the immigrant was able to repeat a fair approximation of the syllables. Thus, it was Philbert O’Toole, not Feivel Ostrovsky, who boarded the ferry to Manhattan in possession of little more than the clothes on his back and a slip of paper bearing the sum total of his American vocabulary: his own name. And it was Philbert O’Toole who operated a sewing machine on the Lower East Side during the day and completed his secondary education at night, eventually putting himself through medical school and taking a job as an internist in Rogers Park, Chicago.

Why, Philbert IV mused, if they considered the name so reprehensible, had Philbert O’Toole II passed it on to his son, Philbert O’Toole III, and why had that individual named his own son Philbert IV? Maybe the irony was too delicious to ignore, or perhaps they sensed that the name’s unequivocal goyishness could be leveraged to move used vehicles throughout the Chicago suburbs. Every ad they ran included at least seven mentions of the words “Philbert O’Toole.” Even Philbert IV, eight years old at the time, was featured in a commercial as evidence that generations upon generations of Philbert O’Tooles stood ready to assist the people with their transportation needs, stretching as far back and as far forward in time as anyone could imagine.

 ~

Philbert IV persuaded himself that Great-grandfather would have sympathized with his great-grandson’s need to take refuge in the basement in Skokie. But young Philbert was pretty sure the aged ancestor would have condemned his descendant’s preoccupation with the Internet. To fill the long hours, Philbert IV posed as a right-wing influencer, using the handle “PatriotCrusader” to post torrents of vitriol to his two hundred-thousand followers on a variety of social media platforms. Mindful of his progenitor’s sensibilities, he would rotate Great-grandfather’s photo toward the shelved dictionary during his lengthy sojourns in cyber-space. And when he was done venting, Philbert IV would turn Great-grandfather’s photo back to face the room, swivel one-hundred eighty degrees in his chair so the old man could peek over his shoulder, and soothe himself with selected readings from the medical dictionary.

In addition to this purely devotional use of the dictionary, Philbert IV consulted it whenever he needed to make a self-diagnosis, which was often. There was always one thing or another ailing Philbert O’Toole IV. Though he might have easily Googled his symptoms, and though after sixteen years of communing with the spirit of Great-grandfather through the dictionary’s pages, he had come near to memorizing the book, he found solace leafing through the gossamer pages in search of a label he could apply like a bandage. In Philbert IV’s experience, furthermore, there was no distinction between diagnosis and cure. As soon as he had identified an appropriate term to affix to the ailment, the symptoms would disappear. Every time.

Philbert IV applied his self-diagnoses creatively, embracing unlikely afflictions, such as aneurism (page 81), tuberculosis (page 1,770), or pleurisy (page 1,309). Yet he also evoked more common maladies, especially when their names thrilled him, like verruca vulgaris (page 1,830). But never had he diagnosed himself with one of the book’s final entries—inflammation of the zonule of Zinn (the bottom of page 1,865).

And thus it was with a practiced hand that Philbert O’Toole IV opened the medical dictionary on the morning he awoke with swelling of his left orbit (he congratulated himself on his appropriate use of the word “orbit” to refer to the eye socket). He ran his finger down the right side of page 1,865 until it came to rest near the bottom. And there it was, the etiology (a terrific word) of his orbital edema: inflammation of the zonule of Zinn. Alternative, and far more likely, diagnoses would have included allergic reaction, chalazion (another good one), cellulitis, trauma, insect bite, and conjunctivitis, but this bothered Philbert IV not in the least. Neither did the fact that the most probable cause was “idiopathic” (page 815, a term meaning of unknown causation). Philbert IV wasn’t fanatical about accuracy. No, he had been holding the zonule of Zinn in reserve for a long time, and he was not about to squander this opportunity. The diagnosis was inflammation of the zonule of Zinn, he insisted, also known as zonulitis, also known as inflammation of the ciliary zonule, the “zonule” being an alternative name for the suspensory ligament of the lens of the eye.

He snapped the book shut, and in the time it took him to turn toward the desk and restore the dictionary to its place on the shelf, he sensed both resolution of his swelling and the onset of melancholia. Now what? He had completed a cycle of sorts. Was he to spend the next sixteen years repeating it? Maybe this time from back to front?

No.

The occasion called for a gesture, something grand and unprecedented. The kind of thing, in other words, that was difficult to accomplish below ground. The basement had been good to him over the years, true, but suddenly Philbert O’Toole IV yearned to leave it, and that’s what he did. He glanced out the ground-level window to confirm that it was a bright day, something he had already learned from his screensaver, along with the fact that it was September 21 and seventy-two degrees outside. He opened the closet, extracted a light jacket, pounded it a couple of times to clear the dust, reached up to the top shelf to retrieve a pair of sunglasses and, with the fluidity of a man who did this sort of thing on a regular basis, opened the basement door, climbed the stairs and exited the house.

The first thing he observed was the smell: it was mostly clean and piney, but someone nearby was smoking a cigarette. The second thing he noticed was a pleasant breeze caressing his face. There were noises in the neighborhood—children playing, a dog barking and a lawnmower in operation a few streets away—but Philbert didn’t linger. He walked down the path and turned right, allowing the picket gate to bang shut behind him.

Hardly aware of what he was doing, Philbert IV wandered west on Foster Street. Fossa, he hummed, supraclavicular fossa, ischiorectal fossa, ethmoid fossa. Arriving at the corner of Crawford, he headed north. Craw-craw, he thought to himself, a term used for onchocerciasis in West Africa. He turned left on Old Orchard Road. Orchidoepididymectomy, excision of the testis and epididymis. After a mile or so he found himself outside the gates of a cemetery. He wandered onto the grounds, its grass green, its plots well-tended, and fresh-cut flowers at a remarkable number of tombstones and obelisks. He passed by some McHughs and Pennicuts, Shrivers and Bowers, and soon found himself among Levines and Goldbergs and Feldmans. Instead of prominent markers and flowers, these graves bore flat headstones studded with loose pebbles. Suddenly he was standing at the foot of a thin granite slab bearing an inscription:

Philbert O’Toole, MD
1908-2008

Philbert IV was stunned. He recalled attending Great-grandfather’s funeral but had not visited the grave since. And here was a second shock: next to Great-grandfather’s stone was another:

Bessie Grossman O’Toole

1914-1980

She was a mensch.

He had never considered the existence of a great-grandmother. He imagined the two of them holding hands beneath the surface of the earth, and smiled. Surrounding the two graves was a radius of undisturbed grass. He figured it must be reserved for other O’Tooles to occupy when their times came, an eventuality he considered improbable given how annoyed a reunion with their predecessor was likely to make Philberts II and III.

Philbert O’Toole IV stood a respectful distance before the graves. He would have liked to park himself right in front of Great-grandfather’s stone and run his fingers over the lettering, but if he did so he might be sitting on the old man’s chest, which seemed disrespectful. He decided to position himself cross-legged facing the headstone from the top, the letters upside down.

It occurred to him that by speaking softly to Great-grandfather thus, he would be the one whispering into the other’s ear. He swept the sleeve of his left arm across the tombstone, wiping off its layer of dust and dead leaves.

“It’s me…Philbert…Philbert O’Toole IV” he began. “I know you can’t hear me, and I know there is probably nothing left of you in there, but all the same I want you to know that I think about you every day. And I miss you.” He paused. “I miss our time together, and I think it’s really great how you used to read to me. I’m sorry we didn’t have more time to spend with each other. I wish we had, because…because…I think I might have turned out a little better.” Tears welled in his eyes, and he wondered whether his zonule of Zinn was acting up again.

“I’m going to be OK, though,” he continued. “I think I’m starting to figure things out. It’s true that I don’t know how to do much of anything useful yet, but that can be fixed, don’t you think? I think that must be true.

“Anyway, I just came by to say hello, and to let you know that I am thinking of you. Don’t worry. Thanks.”

He gave the tombstone another wipe with the sleeve of his left arm. As he did so he felt a heavy weight in his lap and, looking down, saw that without realizing it he had brought the medical dictionary with him.

He lumbered to his feet and gazed at the grave. Then he stooped and laid the volume on the corner of the stone. Great-grandfather would probably enjoy having it nearby for a while one last time. Philbert O’Toole IV turned and walked away. He had no use for the dictionary anymore. He knew he would never find within its pages the diagnosis that ailed him most: heartbreak.

---

Emmet Hirsch is a physician, scientist, educator, and author of the novels The Education of Doctor Montefiore and the upcoming The Wolf Shall Dwell with the Lamb. His fiction and creative non-fiction have appeared in The Examined Life, The New England Journal of Medicine, The Chicago Tribune, and other outlets.

Denise Bayes

The Lost Art of Millinery

From his workshop window, Oscar watches the woman walk past his building every day at dusk. Watches her weary steps, her bowed head low. She pauses beside the glossy green leaves, lifting her head to the white magnolia blooms. Oscar has looked down into her melancholy eyes and felt her sadness shudder through him.

Now he clicks his desk lamp on.

 He focuses, circles around the blank mannequin head, sketching her features onto the smooth linden block in his imagination. Fingers stretched wide, he checks the precise proportions of crown, of brim.

Oscar climbs onto the stool, shuffling his limbs. Magnolia white feathers sprout forth from the purple felt base. He fixes them with an amethyst brooch. Unravels violet tulle.

“The exact shade of her eyes,” he whispers into the silent room.

Folded forward, Oscar hems the veil with minuscule stitches. The rhythm of the needle frees his arthritic fingers. He flounces the net in a practised flourish, swooshing it to flatter.

He carries the finished hat across the room in outstretched arms, a priest processing, step by step down the empty staircase. Outside, the city street is suspended in afternoon stillness. 

Soon, he knows, she will pass on her way home from work. He knows that her sad eyes will look upwards, into the tree.

Oscar pulls one branch close, releasing a waft of fragrance from the white petals. He perches the hat with care, releasing it with a shiver of violet net.

As he turns back towards his building, a ray of sun glances off the brooch, refracting a rainbow of light across the grey street.

---

Denise Bayes’ writing has appeared in various places including NZ Micro Madness, Oxford Flash, Free Flash Fiction, NFFD Anthology, 100 Word Story, Thin Skin, Temple in a City, and Underbelly Press. Denise lives in Barcelona, Spain with her husband and a cavalier King Charles spaniel called Rory, who is usually under the desk.

David Fowler

Kaylee Throws a Honeymoon at the Gulf

Rachel and Jason didn’t get much ceremony at the Dallas courthouse: a free rose pulled from a bucket and a dollar Polaroid from a man with one arm. Afterwards, they headed down I-35 to Waco to tell her parents. Halfway in between was a town called Italy (pop. 1944), pronounced Itlee. A sign on the highway advertised an Italian festival.

“Let’s try it,” Jason said, flipping the blinker.

“Let’s just get to my folks and get it over with,” Rachel said. Her folks had met Jason. They didn’t think he was very smart because he worked at the Amazon warehouse. He’d gotten his GED because Rachel said she wouldn’t marry him otherwise. So he did it, by damn.

“Just for a minute. We’ll have a honeymoon in Itlee,” he said.

“Okay.”

He imagined red-checked tablecloths and people stirring pots of spaghetti over wood fires in the streets. Instead, he found a convenience store at the Gulf station and no festiveness whatsoever. Jason surely didn’t want to disappoint Rachel in this new life; he had done a fair amount of that in their old one.

He walked into the Gulf praying the festival was underway nearby, maybe one street over. A pony-tailed girl who looked like she might be in high school stood behind the counter in a Gulf shirt with Kaylee on the nametag.

“They having the Italian festival?” he said.

“No, they ain’t givin’ it anymore,” she said.

“Ain’t givin’ it?”

“Naw, they ain’t givin’ it this year. Too bad that sign out on the highway still says they’re givin’ it.”

“I know, we saw it. That’s how come we stopped. We just got married and wanted to honeymoon in Itlee.”

“Well, congratulations.” She looked out the window and waved to Rachel in the truck. Rachel waved back.

“I’m sure sorry,” Kaylee said. “They just ain’t givin’ it.”

Jason went to the cooler and got a six-pack and put it on the counter. He couldn’t come back empty-handed on a day like today. There were fried pies, too, but he waved them off. He had bought stupid shit before and best not chance it.

“No charge,” she said, sacking the beer up.

“No charge? How come?”

“Just no charge.”

“Don’t they have cameras in here?”

“They’re busted.”

He went back out to the truck.

“What did she say?” Rachel said.

“Ain’t givin’ it this year.”

“Ain’t giving it? Why not?”

“Don’t know. Just ain’t.”

“What’d you buy?”  Rachel was suspicious. Money was tight.

“Six-pack. It was free.”

“How come?”

He reached into the sack and pulled two out. “That girl in there said she wanted us to have a honeymoon in Itlee.”

“No way.” Rachel held up her hands and made the heart sign to Kaylee. Kaylee made the heart sign back. Jason popped the tops. Rachel turned away, looking out her window. A chill ran down Jason’s neck. He’d fucked it up but he didn’t know what. Rachel was a kind girl, not hard on him. But he was sure he’d just stepped in it again. He handed her the beer.

“I can’t,” she said.

“But it’s our honeymoon.”

“I’m not supposed to,” she said, turning back to him. Her lip quivered and her brown eyes looked hard at him, right into him. His wheels started turning.

“You’re not.”

“I am.”

“No way.”

“Way. I peed on a stick this morning.”

 He set the beers on top of the dashboard then reached over and wrapped Rachel up like a Christmas present.

“You are something else, girl.” He pulled back and wiped her cheeks then laid her head on his shoulder.

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you, too.”

He determined then and there to get more hours at Amazon. A lot more. He was going to get more hours and overtime and work like a dog.

“She’s wondering what’s going on,” Rachel said.

Jason turned his head. Kaylee had her elbows on the counter, her chin in her hands, watching them like a love show on TV.

Rachel rocked her arms back and forth like rocking a baby. Kaylee’s mouth fell open in a great big Whaaaa?

A truck pulled up beside them and an old man in overalls headed into the store.  At the door, Kaylee blew right past him and made a beeline for Rachel’s side of the truck, knocking on the window, her mouth still wide open. Pow, pow pow. Rachel got out and they bear-hugged and launched a full-on cryfest. Total strangers in a gas station parking lot.

Jason rested his forehead on the steering wheel. “I’m gonna be a father,” he said to the floorboard. From the corner of his eye, he saw the old man still holding the door.

“I just need my Camels, Kaylee,” the old man called.

Kaylee, hugging Rachel, yelled over to him, “Just get ‘em and leave some money, Mr. Ray.”

Jason got out and put a hug around both of the girls. There they were, all three of them hugged up on the sidewalk in front of the ice machine and the Pennysaver rack.

The old man came back out. “What’s going on?”

“They’re gonna have a baby!” Kaylee said.

“Right now?”

“No, at some point in the future.”

“Well, good deal. I left some money.”

“Thank you.”

---

David Fowler has work in journals associated with numbers and rivers: The Threepenny Review, Five South, Fourth River, River Teeth and Naugatuck River Review. He attributes this not to a cosmic wrinkle but to blind luck because he is, in fact, legally blind. He writes slowly in Jackson, Mississippi (another river).

Francine Witte

Daylight Savings

The clock strikes 2:00.  Middle of the night refrigerator. The hum and the hum. On the table, plates with cake crumbs, half-filled glasses of wine. Dinner dishes still in the sink. The clock strikes 2:15. The whoosh of you leaving the table still so fresh in my ears. The thud of you closing the door as you left. The clock strikes 2:30. Your car rumbling out of the driveway. The clock strikes 2:45. Me waiting and waiting for you to come back. Me looking at the rest of my life. Me wishing to go back in time. The clock strikes 2:00.

Believing

When I am little, that is to say younger than now, that is to say before I knew how quick a face could disappear out of my life, that is to say quick as a lake reflection that ripples away if I try to touch it, when I am little, I believe. I believe my toys, my dolls with nylon hair, unbendable arms. I believe my mother as she tilts her face at the vanity mirror, lipstick, powder, rouge. She is playing dress-up for my father who plays office every day. Takes the toy train into a place he calls the city. When I am little, I ask my father where is the city and he tells me it’s where we saw the circus that time, and don’t I remember red-nosed clowns, the tall men walking on stilts? Is everything dress-up? I ask my father when I am little. This is years before he leaves us. Years before my mother tells me we have to live as if my father never happened. That it’s the only way we can go on. I believe her. I copy her motions, how she paints on a clown mouth, rouges her cheek, lifts herself on stilts of alcohol and other men. Each time now, now that I am not little any more, when a man walks away, I stitch up my heart, tell myself I’m whole, look at my reflection in the mirror as I practice a smile. Sometimes I even touch my reflection. I wait for it to ripple away.

---

Francine Witte’s flash fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous journals. Most recently, her stories have been in Best Small Fictions and Flash Fiction America. Her latest flash fiction book is RADIO WATER (Roadside Press.) Her upcoming collection of poetry, Some Distant Pin of Light is forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press. She lives in NYC. Visit her website francinewitte.com.

Mizuki Yamamoto

Receipt

I know the cashier sees the incense, the tiny pack of lily shaped candles, the box of anpan even though I never buy anpan, even though I haven’t eaten sweet bread since the funeral, and I know she’s clocked the way I hesitate over the coins, how I count too slowly, like I’m buying time instead of groceries, and she sees the envelope too, the plain white kind you leave at temples, the kind people fold with both hands, and she sees my nails, uneven, chewed down, and she sees that I didn’t bring a reusable bag even though I always do, even though I live in this neighborhood and probably passed her at the konbini a dozen times without noticing, and she doesn’t say anything—just scans and stacks and flicks her eyes toward the customer behind me like maybe I should hurry up, like maybe I’m the kind of person who lingers where I shouldn’t, but then she hands me the receipt with both hands, slow, careful, and I feel it there, for just a second—pity maybe, or recognition, or just a soft place where the world didn’t press too hard today—and I take the receipt like it matters, like it’s proof I was here—and then she sees the hesitation, the flicker in my eye when she asks, “Do you want a bag?” like it’s a trick question, like there’s a right answer and I’ve already failed it, and I say yes, paper, please, and she says we’re out, and I nod like I knew that, like I expected that, like I’ve always known I’d carry it all home myself.

Bath House

You scrub your shins first, like your mother did, like your grandmother must have, though no one ever taught you—just the memory of hands, firm but careful, and the creak of knees on plastic stool. The tiles are blue, not the sea kind—hospital blue, ash blue, the kind that stays after you close your eyes like worn enamel in the back of your mind. The woman next to you rinses twice, then steps into the bath without a sound. No one speaks. The windows have long since disappeared into the steam. Even the clock is gone, smudged into blur.

You don’t come here for the heat, though it helps. You come for the smallness. The folding of the world into cubes: basket, stool, tile, tub. There is safety in things with boundaries. Your towel sits folded beside you like a loyal thing. Everyone leaves their rings in the same little tray, where the condensation pools like tiny offerings.

You sink in slowly, knees to thighs to spine, the hot water climbing her body like memory—painful, then nothing. Fog rises in soft columns. You think of your aunt, the one who used to dye her hair with chrysanthemum tea, who said baths should always be silent unless you’re alone. You think of the phone call. The voice. The silence that came after, thick as steam.

The woman across from you has the same scar. A crescent above the knee. Her eyes are closed.

When it’s time to go, you dry between your toes like your mother did, like your grandmother must have. Probably your aunt, too. Fold the towel. Dress in cotton with no buttons. You forget to check your locker twice, which you never do.

Outside, the vending machine hums. You buy a bottle of barley tea and drink it in one long swallow. The plastic crinkles in your hand.

You feel just a little bit like a new woman, a small step forward from where you started when you first arrived. Cleansed, but not yet of the ache.

That, you fold up and carry home.

Molting Season

After my sister died, a koi fish started flapping around in the gutter down the street, just thrashing there like it had a point to make and no way to say it, and I don’t know why I picked it up but I did—bare hands, salad spinner, no plan. It wouldn’t touch the pond, wouldn’t stay in the sink, flopped right out of the neighbor’s glass punch bowl, so I filled the tub and it stared at me from under the bubbles like I’d forgotten her birthday again, which maybe I had.

Every morning it left something weird on the bathmat—half a mood ring, the missing rhinestone barrette, a plastic bead I swallowed in second grade and apparently never found until now—like it was saying remember this, dumbass, and I did, I did. And the house got weirdly nice for a while, like warm and golden in the corners, like someone just left the room and the air hadn’t caught up yet, and once or twice I caught myself singing along to that stupid song she loved, the one I used to mute as soon as I heard the first notes.

I almost forgot she was dead. The morning it left, the water was still warm and on the edge of the tub was a single shining scale and this smell in the air—like her shampoo, or jasmine, or something I only ever noticed when she was already gone.

---

Mizuki is a writer from Japan, currently living in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming at SmokeLong Quarterly, Flash Frog, HAD, The Forge, hex, and other places. She was the winner of The SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction 2025. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net, Best MicroFiction, and the Pushcart Prize. Find her online at mizuki.carrd.co or on Bluesky.

Tom Busillo

Squirrel on My Back

You live long enough, you learn to carry what you can't explain. Even if it shifts with every breath. Even if it never leaves. Even if it never asks your permission to stay.
It showed up sometime after Linda left. Maybe a week, maybe two. I wasn’t keeping track.
I was sitting out back, not doing much. On my third oil can-sized Foster’s, watching the neighbor’s kid kick a soccer ball into the same section of fence over and over. Just thump, thump, thump.
At first, I thought it was a bird landing on the chair. Then the weight moved. And stayed. Little claws kneading through the flannel of my shirt. Didn’t hurt exactly. But didn’t not.
Normally I would’ve jumped up. Swatted at it, cursed, made a scene. But by then I was in that stage of things where you let the world give you what it’s going to give. You don’t fight it. You nod, accept, and keep going. That kind of acceptance makes it easier to move on. Or at least not make things worse.

I figured it would leave. They all do.

Instead, it made a home. At night it curled under my collar, right where Linda used to press her chin when I still had a place to be.

It didn’t ask to stay – just settled in, quiet and insistent, like Linda did in the beginning.

I knew that no matter how comfortable it felt, I should try to get it to leave. I tried everything. Bent low under branches. Sprayed myself with vinegar. Called Animal Control.

Eventually, I just let it be. It wasn’t noisy. Didn’t tear anything up. Sometimes it twitched in its sleep. I got used to the feeling.

At the bar, they stopped asking where Linda was. Now they just nod when I walk in and scoot the peanuts down my way. One guy always asks, “How’s your friend?” I tell him to ask him himself.

Some nights I talk to it. Tell it what I should’ve said to her. What I’d do differently. Sometimes I forget it’s there until I feel it breathe against my neck.

It doesn’t answer. But it doesn’t leave either.

And that’s something.

Daughter

All my life, I could feel it building. Right in the center of my forehead. No visible bumps. Nothing to give anything away. Just a pressure that grew worse over time. Doctors said it was migraines. Stress.
It happened on a Tuesday. I’d had four cups of coffee, plus four more made from spent K-cups – light roast by way of sad beige water. Not that I noticed. COVID had taken my taste.
The headache hit hard and suddenly. Most people would blame the caffeine, but I had a feeling this was the day things would finally come to a boil and spill over. The blinding pain had me sinking to my knees.
Then my skull split open.
She dropped out fully formed, landing on the linoleum, sneering.
She looked like a young goth Joan Jett: fishnet stockings, Doc Martens, a Fields of the Nephilim T-shirt, black leather miniskirt, silver skull-and-serpent rings, and eyes like smudged eyeliner had given up.
I’ll never forget her first words:
“I need twenty bucks.”
I just stared.
“Are you slow on the uptake or something?” she snapped. “I said I need twenty bucks.”
I opened my wallet and gave it to her. She didn’t thank me. Just folded it once and stuck it in her boot.
“And your car keys.”
I handed them over. Stunned.
“I hope you won’t be needing it anytime soon,” she muttered, and turned for the door.
“I always hoped I’d have a daughter,” I blurted out, stupidly.
She paused. Rolled her eyes.
“God, you’re so weird,” she said.
Then she slammed the door behind her.
That was the last I ever saw of her. Or the car.
I still leave the porch light on, just in case.

---

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

Daniel Cohen

Another Fish

Raise your hood, and everybody’s a mechanic. My car is a Camry of a certain age, freshly washed, pretty good tires, dead battery. Passing men stop to talk, to spend a moment. Together, we stare at the engine, hands in our pockets. No one has jumper cables. I circle back to my trunk, check for the third time. Toolbox. Three quarts of motor oil. No cables.

A sound from the sidewalk, half snort, half chuckle. The Safecracker watches from a doorway, the toes of his sneakers peeking out into the sunlight. He looks like he’s leaning against the doorframe, but that’s just how he stands. Crooked. Tilted. Like one leg is shorter than the other.

The Safecracker understands the situation. He ducks around the corner, reappears at the wheel of a Honda with no hubcaps. He pulls alongside, jumps out, leaves the door open. Rummages through my tools as though they’re his own. Wrench and screwdriver. The Safecracker disconnects the battery from the Honda, carries it toward my car with two hands, like a box of peaches, and rests it next to the radiator. “Hop in,” he says.

The guy’s not a stranger to me, not exactly.  He’s been around for a few months now, renting the apartment above the ten-dollar barber shop. He says he’s from here, grew up in the neighborhood, but none of us remember him. Maybe it’s just a comfortable lie he tells. Or maybe he wasn’t worth remembering.  

The way the Safecracker tells it, he left us in the middle of tenth grade, when his mom broke their lease to follow a boyfriend to Indianapolis. He ran loose for a few years after high school, making his money breaking into bars around the ass-end of Lake Michigan. Did okay until the night he had a couple vodka tonics at a club in South Bend, then came back after closing to pop the safe. The bartender recognized him from the security tape. It was an election year, so the county prosecutor wasn’t in a forgiving mood, and he caught some time in prison.

Once I’m in the driver’s seat, I hunch down and watch through the gap under the hood, waiting for instructions. The Safecracker leans in, hovers over my battery, spits on one terminal, reloads, spits on the other. He lifts the battery he took from the Honda, flips it upside down, lowers it onto mine, matches terminal to terminal, steadies it. “Now.”

The Camry starts. I rev the engine because I’m afraid it’ll stall if I don’t. I leave my foot on the gas and don’t let up until I start to feel stupid.

When I get out of the car, the Safecracker is already putting the battery back in the Honda. I drop my hood.

“Thanks,” I say to his back. “I owe you one.”

“Yeah,” he says, twisting around, half-smiling. “You do.”

#

The Safecracker doesn’t wait long to cash his check. A favor owed is a diminishing asset. I’m passing Joanie’s fish market on my way to get coffee, and there he is standing outside, his face just far enough from the shop window to keep his breath from fogging it up.  He’s stalking, peeking, watching through the plate glass while Joanie works. If Joanie notices him out here, she doesn’t show it.

The Safecracker is clearly smitten. Entranced. Enthralled.

I try to skirt around him, to pass at a safe distance, but the Safecracker is jumpy about people getting behind him. He turns, scans me up, down, up, and stands there. Crooked.

“You don’t look like you’re here for the fish,” I say. I smile, but I keep my lips together. Primates show their teeth to appear threatening.

“Full of mercury,” he says. “Parasitic worms. Microplastics. I’m particular what I eat.”

I try to picture the Safecracker eating. I can’t. He has that loose-jointed, hollow-cheeked look you see in heroin addicts and long-distance runners.

“Do me a favor.” He says it like he’s Aladdin rubbing a lamp.

He tells me he can’t just walk up and talk to Joanie. It’ll be easier if he’s with someone she knows. Someone local. Someone familiar. It’s like he’s a vampire in some black-and-white movie. Can’t cross the threshold unless someone who belongs inside invites him.

“Tomorrow,” the Safecracker says. “Tomorrow’s Friday. Good day for fish.”

#

Friday, there’s a crowd inside the market, but there’s always a crowd. If I got here early some morning and stood next to Joanie while she rolled up the iron shutters, I’d probably find a dozen people already there in the shop, clutching numbered tickets.

The Safecracker hasn’t shown up yet, which doesn’t surprise me. He reads that way. Distracted. Flaky. I go ahead and pull a number out of the ticket machine anyway. One hundred fifty-seven. Might worry me if I were at the Registry of Motor Vehicles, but the numbers work different here.

I look over the competition, the faces, the knowns and unknowns. I recognize the paunchy guy from the real estate office who spends his days hunched over an antique Rolodex. The old lady who walks her gray-muzzled Yorkie around the cemetery, keeping to the edges like she’s dipping her toe into a swimming pool. Others are younger, locals I went to school with, awkward teenagers grown into uneasy adults.

Not all the faces are familiar. By the window, a guy in tech-bro uniform, plaid button-down under a Patagonia vest. Next to the lobster tank, a pair of women side by side, clearly a couple, but each fully involved with her phone.

The crowd keeps shifting, taking cover behind one another, moving around just enough that I can’t be sure exactly how many people got here ahead of me. I once read about a band of polar explorers, out of food and freezing to death, who fell under the persistent illusion that there was always one more member of their party than they were able to count.

From behind me, a wash of cold air as the door opens, closes. The Safecracker has arrived. He scuttles sideways to the far wall, his shoulders hunched. Scanning the room. I look down at the floor, at the scatter of discarded tickets. I’m in no hurry for him to spot me.

“Thirty-one!” Joanie yells. Thirty-One holds up his ticket to identify himself, a somber man with heavy-lidded eyes, umbrella under his arm. It hasn’t rained since March. Maybe he knows something. The body of customers splits before him like a dividing cell, creating a passage to the counter.

Thirty-One is standing in the semicircle of open space in front of the display case. He’s big, but not as big as Joanie. Don’t get the idea that Joanie is fat, or heavy, or whatever the euphemism of the moment is. She’s fit, even athletic, with the sort of uncomplicated beauty that airlines and insurance companies are always casting into their commercials. It’s easy to see why the Safecracker, or anyone else, would be drawn to her. She just happens to be built on a scale normally reserved for power forwards and heroic statuary.

Thirty-One presses his belly against the refrigerated glass. Joanie leans in to meet him. Beneath them, on a bed of ice, a chorus of upright fish heads stare vacantly skyward, mouths open.

Joanie grew up with us, dated us, was disappointed in us. She worked her way through the local talent methodically, thoughtfully, as if she were trying to guess a password one character at a time. After we failed to measure up, I expected she’d turn to some urban slick with a German car and a lawyer’s haircut, but that never happened. When her father died, she stepped into his place at the fish market, secure behind the counter, like it was what she’d always wanted. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between destiny and the path of least resistance.

My turn with Joanie came a year after graduation, a couple of dinner-and-a-movie Fridays and a single night of dancing that didn’t go well. We both moved on, no discussion necessary. Thirteen years later, she’s the person I buy my scallops from. I think we’re both fine with that. Some of the other guys in here holding their little pink tickets could tell you almost the same story.

Thirty-One whispers to Joanie, like he’s confessing his sins to a priest. Joanie nods, reaches into her case with a gloved hand, and he retreats through the crowd with a tightly wrapped bundle of cod.

There’s a hand on my forearm. The Safecracker. He doesn’t know me well enough to touch me, but I let it go.

“Fifty-three!” Joanie calls.

The Safecracker looks at the slip of paper in my hand, pinched between thumb and forefinger. “What the hell happened to forty-eight? Or fifty-one?” he asks the room. No one answers.

“You’ll be happier if you don’t worry about that kind of thing,” I say. I gave up on figuring out the fish market’s numbers a long time ago. Joanie keeps the score. She gets to you when it’s your turn, and that’s it.

Fifty-Three steps forward, a woman with impossibly red hair. Her face takes me a moment to place: last week, a bar across from the bus yard. Nets and crab pots nailed to the walls, a plastic seagull perched by the door. We played eye-games over the heads of the drinkers, but never made it to the same table. A mystery, a might-have-been.

She collects a dozen sizeable shrimp, and on the way to the exit her shoulder brushes past mine, a moment of contact. If she recognizes me, she swallows the memory.

“Seventy-one!”

Seventy-One draws herself to her full height with the assistance of a pair of nosebleed heels. The customers rearrange themselves as she passes, and, avoiding an elbow here and a handbag there, she presents herself to Joanie. Cherry red jacket over what look like black pajamas. The nails match the jacket. She orders in a girlboss alto, two lobsters, ready for the pot.

Not so simple, though. Joanie points. Affixed to the front of the lobster tank is a handwritten sign, a list of names in a rainbow of colors: Franklin in coral blue, Rachel in crocodile green, Carlotta in lemon yellow. Inside the tank, the dominant claw of each lobster is bound shut by a corresponding-colored band.

“I know they’re just bugs,” says Joanie. “Maybe not as clever as us. But they desire things. They’re happier some days than others. We call them by their names.”

 Seventy-One examines Joanie’s face, the unblemished skin, the sculpted eyebrows. She finds no humor at the corners of her eyes, no incipient smile concealed in the curve of her lips. Joanie means it.

She doesn’t want to play this stupid game, but she does want a pair of lobsters. Seventy-One meets Joanie’s gaze, weighs her options, and blinks. Peering into the tank, she matches a rose band and an orange one to the list of names. “Mercedes,” she says. “And Josephine.”

Joanie dips into the tank with a short wooden rake. The struggle is one-sided. Mercedes and Josephine are boxed up and handed over to Seventy-One.

“Eighty-three!”

The Safecracker straightens at the sound of Joanie’s voice, and she mistakes him for her customer. He beams at Joanie and her brows rise, a question beginning to form, but the true Eighty-Three steps forward, ticket held high, and the question dissolves before it can take shape.

The Safecracker catches at my sleeve. He wears a look of concern. “When we get up there – it’ll come off better if you buy something, right?” He reaches beneath his untucked shirt and tugs his pants up.

I nod. “I like the look of those scallops,” I say, and point with my chin. The Safecracker follows. On the other side of the glass, the scallops sit in the bottom halves of their shells, arranged on the crushed ice in a pattern suggesting the scales of a fish. Each cream-colored disk shares its shell with a crescent of roe, floating atop the scallop like an eyebrow above an eye.

The Safecracker squints. “Never seen the orange things before. What the hell are those?”

“Reproductive organs,” I say. He smirks at my delicate choice of words. “They cut them off frozen scallops. You won’t see them outside a fish market.”

“No kidding? So she’s got a bunch of bull-scallops penned up in there.”

“Half-right,” I say. “Hermaphrodites. Male and female. Scallops have both sets of equipment. Improves their odds.”

The Safecracker considers this possibility. “Stuck inside that shell, I guess they have to think of something. Not much fun being a scallop.”

“Not much.”

Joanie stands above the glass, attending to Eighty-Three. The Safecracker lifts his eyes from the scallops and runs them along the visible portion of Joanie, a retail mermaid, half woman, half refrigerated display. He is soft-eyed, worshipful, gazing upon her as though she’d just emerged from the surf, ushered out of a giant seashell by a pair of fleshy cherubs.

Joanie surveys the customers, a slow scan. She might be looking for someone, or just counting heads. Her eyes flick to the Safecracker, once, twice, but she catches herself the third time. A shadow passes over her features, a tightening of the jaw, an extra line crossing her forehead. “Ninety-seven!”

Again, the Safecracker checks my ticket. The number is not ninety-seven, and he grunts his frustration. He stoops, gathers a double handful of tickets from the floor, and starts to thumb through them. I’ve seen guys at the racetrack who do this, scooping up betting slips from the ground, looking for winning numbers some dope tossed away by mistake. 

Ninety-Seven makes himself known: a pimply-faced guy playing a game on his phone, guiding cartoon jellyfish through a maze of billowing fishing nets. The man is pushing forty, too old for pimples, too old for playing games. I wonder if the two conditions are related.

A trio of haddock is nestled into the ice beside a cobblestone arrangement of perch fillets. Ninety-Seven points at the central haddock, asks to smell it. Joanie’s eyebrows slide north. Forget the pimples, forget the coffee spots hiding in the pattern of his madras shirt. Joanie recognizes a man who knows his way around a fish market.

She gathers the haddock in her gloved hands, cradles it, inspecting the fish before she presents it to Ninety-Seven. She brushes away a shard of ice clinging to the edge of the tail, runs her gloved hand down the length of the fish to align the dorsal fins. She gives a nod to Ninety-Seven, or it might be the slightest of bows, and extends her hands, presenting the haddock in cupped palms, as though it were a bowl of ceremonial tea. Beneath the yellow latex, her hands are enormous, powerful.

The Safecracker bites his lips as Ninety-Seven bends from the waist and, straight-backed, brings his nose within an inch of the haddock and inhales deeply. There is desperation in the Safecracker’s eyes. He is undone by the intimacy of the exchange. He twists and folds the mass of paper tickets, as if his hands can’t bear to remain still. Something is beginning to take shape.     

Ninety-Seven nods in approval, directing the gesture at the fish rather than to Joanie. The haddock remains indifferent. With a smile whose warmth seems to go beyond the requirements of mere commerce, Joanie wraps the man’s purchase in clean white paper, and thanks him for his business.

Joanie’s tango with Ninety-Seven has left a flush on her cheeks. “One-oh-one!” she calls. No one steps forward. “One-oh-three!” Still, no one. “One-oh-seven!” I’ve seen this happen before, a string of numbers whose owners have disappeared, or perhaps never existed.

The Safecracker drops his eyes to the wad of tickets in his hands, twisted and worried into a torpedo. He discovers something among the curls and creases of paper, maybe one of the missing numbers, maybe something else. His fingers return to their work with new purpose. 

Our time will come, but not yet. Joanie wraps up two pounds of salmon for One-Oh-Nine and listens with professional patience as One-Thirteen explains in a stage whisper why she can no longer eat mackerel. “It gives me the most awful gas,” she says. “Why does it do that? No one warned me. No one.”

“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” The Safecracker has recovered from Joanie’s encounter with Ninety-Seven. I nod, perhaps without the expected enthusiasm. This is not a path I want to walk.

Joanie summons One-Twenty-Seven and One-Thirty-Nine and sends them on their way with neatly wrapped bundles. “We’re getting close,” says Safecracker. “You’ve got our ticket?” I don’t like this presumption, that we’ve become accomplices. I suppress the urge to point out that I got here first, that I’m the one who acquired ticket one-fifty-seven.

The Safecracker readies himself, raises his chin, tries to square his rounded shoulders. He fixes his gaze on Joanie, who is inspecting a bowl of heavily bearded mussels as though she’s never before seen such a thing. The Safecracker tugs his nylon jacket into place, rakes his fingers through his stringy hair.

After a moment of stillness, Joanie’s chin floats upward, settles. “One-fifty-seven.” She does not yell this time. Before she finishes announcing the number, Joanie’s eyes find the Safecracker’s, and there’s something going on here.

An unseen force connects the two, a cylinder of invisible light, a wormhole tunneling through space.

On one end is the Safecracker, widow’s-peaked, dressed like a cab driver, nothing going for him except the boundless, unreasoning adoration beaming out of his rumpled face.

On the other end, Joanie. Tight ponytail. Face so hard, so smooth it could be porcelain. She is the cop writing you a ticket, the teacher who caught you texting under your desk.

I retreat a step. The Safecracker won’t be needing me. I consider the slip of paper in my hand. The number is no longer mine. I release it, let it drop to the floor.

He steps to the display case, plants himself in the crescent of vacant space. His mouth opens, but nothing comes out, it hangs there, frozen, agape. He is twelve years old, in love with the piano teacher beside him on the bench, smelling of medicated lip balm and dollar-store body powder.

Joanie has set aside her script, the routine of give and take that exists between a customer, a woman, and a pound of fish. She doesn’t offer, and the Safecracker doesn’t ask. She waits, her lips a horizontal line, arms akimbo.

The Safecracker extends his hands, one cupped around the other, as though he’s shielding a candle flame from the breeze. As the Safecracker reaches across the glass, eases his hands toward Joanie, flashes of color, the salmon of the tickets, escape from between his fingers.

He penetrates the no-man’s-land of the counter until his hands are closer to Joanie’s heart than to his own. She stands her ground. He lifts the top hand slowly, steadily, as if he’s afraid of frightening whatever is underneath. There in the Safecracker’s palm is a fish, a fish made of cast-off paper, pink, intricate, sharply creased, magical. Triangular fins, fan-shaped tail, a gaping mouth.

The Safecracker checks Joanie’s attention, holds up an index finger. He has a wild look to him now, like a street preacher gone feral. Joanie meets his gaze, her face a poker player’s mask. She waits, shoulders back, gloved fists on her hips. The Safecracker runs his finger slowly, even tenderly, along the top of his fish, beginning just behind the eyes and continuing along to the fish’s tail. As his finger passes, a row of dorsal spines spring erect, one after another. He squints, adjusts one spine, tugs at another, nods to himself, and holds the fish up to Joanie. Wide-eyed, she inspects his creation.

The Safecracker gives the head a tap, and, impossibly, the fish begins to move, paper body flexing, mouth opening and closing, fins waving, gills fluttering. As it undulates, it exposes the secrets of its construction: a printed 3 appears and disappears as the mouth opens and closes; part of a 7 peeks out from under a gill flap.

Now that the fish has been awakened, a single palm is too small to contain it. The Safecracker brings his hands together, presents the fish to her, an offering.

“Yours,” he says, “if that’s what you want.”

Joanie’s hands leave her hips. Her eyes are unreadable, flat, the eyes of a kestrel. They run along the Safecracker’s rumpled form, head to toe and back again, taking stock.

Whatever miracle has given the fish movement seems inexhaustible, at least for the moment. She extends a wet glove toward the creature, her fingers spread, the talons of a great bird. The fish’s writhing becomes faster, even frantic.

As the shadow of her hand crosses the Safecracker’s open palms, the undulations of the fish resolve into a single shiver that travels the length of its body. The Safecracker, eyes shut tight, whispers something that might be a prayer, or it might be his true name.

---

Daniel Cohen is from Boston and has the accent to prove it. He’s earned his living fixing telephones, washing pots, and teaching at UMass Amherst and Tufts. He was nominated for the 2025 Pushcart Prize and won this summer’s Peatsmoke Editor’s Prize for flash fiction. To date, he has struck three Nobel laureates (two economists and a chemist) with paper airplanes.

Fiona McKay

Civil Twilight

There are a thousand gulls on our roof, their throaty squawks drilling through me, and I picture them lifting the house, like a fallen tree, roots and all into the sky. It is July, the heat unbearable, these houses built for cold weather, lapped in thick padding, insulated. I turn over in bed, seeking a cooler place on the sheet, disturbing my husband who is also awake. I feel him rock in the aftershock of my angry turn.

‘It was just one drink,’ he says, and I feel heat flare through me.

Too many words build inside me, I can’t speak, and then: ‘It’s not just the drink. She’s only fourteen. And there was the boy too.’

I spit the words out into silence, but there is no silence. The flocks of gulls on our roof shriek and keen, soaring up and resettling. I tell my husband I can’t hear him because of the thousands of gulls, and he laughs the laugh of someone who has listened to my hyperbole for twenty years. There’s still kindness in it.

‘There are, like, two gulls up there,’ he says, ‘You know this, it happens every year. The chicks are fledging, and no one is going to sleep for a few nights. It’s normal.’

I don’t want him to be reasonable; I want him to say something I can fight with. It’s too hot to argue, hotter than last year, hotter than any other years, and I flap the thin, lacy fabric of our summer blanket – a double-bed version of the baby blankets we used to swaddle our girl with – aggressively to make a breeze, but end up hotter, clammy, sweat on my thighs, in the grooves of my groin.

‘We shouldn’t have left her,’ I say. ‘She’s too young for the responsibility.’

‘Jesus, we went out to a dinner,’ he protests, his voice rising, expanding. ‘There has to be a first time, and really it was fine.’

It’s the kind of conversation where he could tell me to calm down, and that could be the thing that pushes me over the edge. I wait for it. Hope for it? Maybe.

The noise on the roof starts up again. It might have been last year he told me about the chicks, or some other year – maybe the year the gulls kept me awake while my newborn dozed beside me and I thought I would die from the exhaustion, with the love, the life I’d had before fast slipping away. Maybe it was then he’d explained that the chicks, unable yet to fly, are tipped out of the nest to learn.

‘I don’t mind that she had friends over,’ I say.

‘Friend. One friend,’ my husband cuts me off. I don’t know if he’s saying this as a defence, or to be as scrupulously exact as he always is, but it slices like a paper cut: nothing, nothing, then the sharpest pain. It stabs my heart that my girl thinks she’s unpopular. What would she do to make herself popular?

‘One boy,’ I say. Try not to think of hands and mouths and drink and stupidity. I push down my girlhood when it threatens to rise in my throat. The things you do for popularity. The things I had done. A time of my life I’d never talked about to my husband. Or my daughter. Maybe I should. Maybe now is the time. Hands and mouths and drink and stupidity.

The chicks are on the ground outside our house, stomping around. Have they even been asleep? Have I? my husband’s breath is deeper now, more even. The room is not as dark as it was, the sun hovering just below the horizon. Astronomical, nautical, civil twilight as the sun angles its way up and over the line. I used to count the sleepless hours that way when my girl was a baby, a child. Getting through the night with feeds, with sickness. Willing the day to spin around again, so there might be appointments, or playgroup, or people on the street exhaustedly pushing buggies that I could stop and make common cause with for a few minutes. Better than the cries in the night.

If a gull nests on the roof of a house, and the chick falls out of the nest, there’s no way for the chick to make it back until it learns to fly for itself. The chicks howl, their throats distended from their hungry baby cries, beaks open wide. But there is nothing the parents can do. They patrol the rooftops, hurling squawks of abuse at any human or animal threatening their kid. Watching from a distance. Powerless, really.

He takes my sweaty hand in his cool, dry one.

‘It was one friend, and one drink. Nobody threw up, nobody did anything stupid. She’s a smart kid. I think we’re alright here.’

I want him to be right. I want to relax into sleep like a cool swim. I lie there, my hand in his hand, and the shiver of early morning passes through me. I close my eyes, waiting for the gulls to drag me back to the surface, but it’s all quiet. They’ve moved to another rooftop vantage point. Maybe something has happened to the chicks – a dog, a speeding car – sending the gulls down to the road to investigate. Or maybe, the chicks have taken flight.

---

Fiona McKay is the author of the novellas-in-flash, The Lives of the Dead, (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2025) and The Top Road (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2023), as well as the flash fiction collection Drawn and Quartered (Alien Buddha Press, 2023). She was a SmokeLong Quarterly Emerging Writer Fellow in 2023. Her flash fiction is in Gone Lawn, New Flash Fiction Review, Pithead Chapel, The Forge, Ghost Parachute, trampset, Fractured Lit and others. Her work is included in Best Small Fictions 2024. She lives in Dublin, Ireland.

Sage Tyrtle

The Lurching Horror of Kennewick Road

November, 1963

At the dinner table Carolyn’s little brothers are mixing gray peas and black cranberry sauce, stuffing them in bread sandwiches. She cuts a small piece of ash-coloured turkey and tries to chew. Her ribs still ache from yesterday.

“Pass the butter,” the monster growls. Her mother hurries to obey, pearls swinging. Heels clacking.

The monster gobbles and snorts, flinging stuffing around his plate, and Carolyn is not the daughter in this movie. She is not the niece or the girlfriend or the secretary, fleeing in a pencil skirt, wailing. That’s her mother’s job. Carolyn is the hero-scientist. The one who says things like, Keep that net handy, George. I might need it. She swallows the half-chewed turkey and without thinking says, “That’s margarine, not butter.” Under the table her capable hero-scientist hands start to shake. She knows better.

Her mother the heroine does nothing.

“Do you think,” says the monster, his smile revealing his long fangs, “Do you think, stupid girl, that I can’t tell the difference between margarine and butter?”

The screenwriter is, as always, typing away at a furious speed. “Say Yes sir! Wait. Say No Sir! No no no, that’s wrong — say, Of course you can tell the difference, O Holy Patriarch Of Our Precious Nuclear Family! I know nothing, you know all!”

But hero-scientist Carolyn ignores the screenwriter. Even though when she turns to the monster her ribs burn. “What you’re spreading on your bread right now. It’s margarine.”

“You wanna make a bet?” His tongue lolls. Drips venom. Carolyn can see herself in the back of his mouth in pearls and clacking heels, arms outstretched.

Her brothers are competing to see who can drink their milk fastest. Donny’s shirt is soaked.

“Your mother will give you a piece of bread with either butter or margarine. You taste it and say which it is. If you’re wrong, you get a whipping.”

Her mother comes unstuck from the air and murmurs, “Oh honey, I don’t know that — ”

The monster doesn’t look at her. “Shut up.”

Mouth dry, Carolyn fights to keep her voice even. “What if I’m right?”

“What?” he says.

“What if I’m right?”

He shrugs. “Then... nothing happens.”

“No thank you,” says Carolyn. “I don’t want to make a bet.” Inside her head the screenwriter screams. Her ribs scream. Her brothers stop mid-gulp.

“The hell did you just say?” says the monster.

This time Carolyn doesn’t need the screenwriter’s hissed, “Stop, please. Stop.” She stares at the turkey on her plate. Counts each small gray pea. She thinks that if someone walked into the movie theatre right now it would seem like the monster had frozen them all in time. Only the milk dripping from Ralph’s shirt looks alive.

When the monster finally speaks everyone lets out a breath. “Boys, clean up that milk. Right now.” Her brothers, speaking-role extras, scurry into the kitchen for dishtowels.

Carolyn picks up her fork. Her mother walks back to the table. Everyone finishes dinner. Everyone goes to sleep.

April, 1964

Carolyn is standing in the dark at the kitchen door and she is turning the knob by centimetres, by millimetres, breaking into the safe of the outside. In her other hand she is holding a suitcase. Light washes through the kitchen and her heart pounds in the moment before she understands it’s truck lights, trundling by on I-63.

The soundtrack swells, the violins high and filled with tension and Carolyn turns the doorknob, and turns, and — there. The latch disengages. She eases the door open and goes down the cement steps into the backyard. She creeps along the edges to the thicket of cedar trees and steps over the gray daffodils. She kneels down. The props people have filled the suitcase with three blouses, three skirts, three pairs of underwear. Three hundred and fifty-seven dollars, every penny from babysitting and sewing jobs, her grandmother’s Christmas envelopes. She can’t keep the suitcase in her room. The monster does periodic checks, running his clawed hands over her spartan desk, leaving a thin layer of iron-coloured slime on everything, emptying her dresser, her closet. Ripping down the magazine pictures taped to the wall in case there’s something hidden behind them, the Giant Leeches and the Alligator People and the Cat Women lying in shreds on the floor.

The rain machine starts and she feels the first drops on the back of her head. She knows the monster will ask why she is wet, why her tweed skirt is muddy, what happened to her cardigan, why why why and the screenwriter instructs, “Say I slipped in the mud, Sir. I fell, Sir,” and there is a part of her that understands the futility of it all. Understands that she is playing at the escape she is not fearless enough to effect. Daydreaming of her own hero-scientist shack on the edge of the swamp / top of the mountain / underground in a field of ice, her never-to-be realized shack where it would be so quiet. Where there wouldn’t be doors to walk into, stairs to fall down. Where she would move among her bubbling beakers with grace. With ease.

She digs in the soft soil and buries her sanity in a place the monster never goes. A grip turns the rain machine up. She’s pushing the last of the dirt over the hole when the kitchen door bangs open and the monster comes down the steps, holding two bags of trash in his long claws. The screenwriter tells her to freeze and hero-scientists don’t freeze, they act, they fight, they get up and swing their suitcases into the monster’s face until it is a battered pulp, but Carolyn freezes. Water stings her unblinking eyes. If she is caught, if she is caught, if she is caught, if she is caught —

The monster strides across the yard, his crocodile eyes catching the moonlight. He opens the metal can and the screech drowns out her rabbit breaths. He slings the trash bags inside and turns back to the house, where Patsy Cline is falling to pieces on the record player and that’s when the lightning strikes. A flash of stark white, outlining his body as he falls to the ground. Thunder cracks. The screenwriter claps a hand over Carolyn’s mouth to stop her from shouting with joy.

The director has given her an early birthday gift. Has heard her talk about the dream she has every night of the monster drowning in his own too-thick silvery blood and made it come true. The monster lies in the pelting rain on the exactly two-inch high grass and his unseeing eyes are open and he must be dead. The lurching beast in the horror movie that is her house, her family, must be finally, astoundingly, dead.

The violins swell again but this time in a major key, this time with possibilities, and she thinks of unburying the suitcase. She thinks of an unhaunted house. A comedy, in which she plays a brave and plucky teen helping her family navigate Life Without Father. She thinks of going back inside, of curling up on the couch as her mother hems a skirt, the set designer roaming the room removing the fear that covers the house like floodwaters. She pictures her mother’s head thrown back in laughter.

But the monster takes a big, shuddering breath. Of course he does. Of course. He stands up. He pats the skin around his suppurating slate-coloured sores, rubs his face. He shakes one foot, then the other. He chuckles and shambles back toward the house. Whistling along with Patsy Cline. The kitchen door bangs shut after him.

She waits for the director to yell, “Cut!” for the crew to bustle, to re-set the scene, to film it again, correctly this time, because he was dead. And even the daffodils were celebrating. Brightening from gray, past white, into... something new. Different. But the director says, “Great job, everyone! Moving on,” and it wasn’t an early birthday present after all and Carolyn sits on the ground under the rain machine, shaking with silent laughter that turns into sobs. She sprinkles the small mound with sticks and leaves. She goes back inside.

June, 1964

Usually at the end of the monster movie the hero-scientist shoots or strangles or drowns or burns or beats the monster, saving the heroine, who by then has been screaming for a long time and the hero-scientist reigns triumphant and the monster is gone forever.

But hero-scientist Carolyn is doing none of these things. She is sitting on her bed while the make-up artist pats charcoal bruises around her eye, her cheekbone, her jaw. Dapples pewter-coloured fingermarks on her neck.

The heroine is in the kitchen making bologna sandwiches for Donny and Ralph and the monster is in the driveway, humming as he washes the car. In the back yard, her suitcase lies open. Her clothes scattered in the grass, ripped to pieces.

Her mother taps on the door and comes in, drying her hands on a dishtowel, not looking up. “Barbara called to see if you wanted to go swimming with her and Sandy. I said you were... not feeling well.”

Carolyn doesn’t have any lines in this scene. She nods and her jaw aches and she wonders if hero-scientists ever get tired of the heroine just standing there and doing nothing, nothing, never defending anyone from the monster’s claws. If hero-scientists ever think of saving themselves instead.

August, 1964

The dawn light is burning away the dew on the fields. Carolyn is striding through the grass toward I-63. The director, the producer, her agent, the screenwriter, they are chasing her, hollering for her to come back, that her contract isn’t up, that she can’t leave the movie, that there’s no movie without her, and the sound engineer turns up the volume on the cicada sound effects and drowns them out.

If she were to turn she would be able to make out her bedroom window on Kennewick Road, now a square the size of a freckle. But she does not turn. She climbs over the metal guardrail and stands on the shoulder facing the traffic. She sticks out her thumb.

When the VW bug coasts to a stop and the passenger door opens, Carolyn runs to get in and as the VW Beetle merges back onto the highway the camera lifts into the sky. Showing the small town, the bustling train in the distance, the almost-yellow field of daffodils.

This piece originally appeared at The Lumiere Review.

---

Sage Tyrtle is a Moth GrandSLAM-winning storyteller and Pushcart-nominated writer. Their work has been featured on NPR, CBC, and PBS, and in publications like The Offing and Apex Magazine. Since 2010, they’ve taught 150+ workshops worldwide for organizations from Clarion West to the Afghan Women’s Association, helping writers transform raw stories into resonant art. Sage believes in the alchemy of constraints and the power of unexpected details.

Cole Beauchamp

We wanted to be cheerleaders

During football season, we track the cheerleaders’ every move as they razor their arms, leap into pike jumps and herkies, smiling despite the sub-zero temperatures and their pleated miniskirts, bare legs. We copy their hair – feathered at school, high ponytails for games – and mimic how they stand before a touchdown – hands in prayer position, fingertips resting on their lips. On sleepovers, we practice the cheers but our voices are timid, our arms sluggish, jumps barely off the floor. We catch each other as we careen into sofas, collapse into each other’s arms, giggling.

During basketball season, we shout ourselves hoarse as the cheerleaders cartwheel and handspring through half-time, shake their butts and pom-poms, flash Chlorox-white teeth. Their voices ricochet off the gymnasium walls as they finish in gravity-defying pyramids.

During try-out season, I keep practising but all Bethany wants to do is deconstruct John’s latest TikTok vids – “That’s about me, right? Right?” Linda’s ping ponging about whether she’ll still get an A in Biology after that pop quiz.

On the day, I am the only one who makes it.

At lunchtime, Bethany looks like she’s been sucking on lemons. "Oh. We thought you'd want to sit with your new friends."

“You’re my friends,” I say. Linda looks at the floor and I turn at Bethany. It’s always Bethany, with her big house and absent parents, with her Drunk Elephant skincare and credit card. Her eyes are like flint. On Monday, I join the cheerleader's table.

During the summer, my stomach churns as I’m wolf-whistled by men old enough to be my father during bake sales. “Take it as a compliment,” breezes Cassy, the cheerleading captain. When I complain about paying for our uniforms and cheerleading camp while the boys are fully funded, the other cheerleaders roll their eyes. “You’re so negative! Lighten up!” I learn to use my elbows at the car wash fundraisers, when hands linger longer than they should, in places they shouldn’t. “Careful you don’t get a reputation for being a b-i-t-c-h,” spells out Maggie. Jennifer teaches me to Vaseline my teeth for an extra glossy smile.

During football season, we fight over which socks to wear and whose turn it is to run the hot chocolate stand. We try not to slip on the ice in our smooth-soled saddle shoes, smile and cheer and jump until it's over and we stick our numb, nearly frostbitten thighs under the hand dryers in the bathroom.

During basketball season, we fight over who gets to be top of the pyramid and flirt with the opposite team's players to keep our boys keen. We smile at ex-friends who don’t smile back. We wave at younger girls who ape our every move, enjoying the attention while secretly hoping they find someone else to admire.

---

Cole Beauchamp (she/her) is a queer writer based in London. Her stories have been in the Wigleaf Top 50, nominated for awards and shortlisted for the Bath, Bridport, Oxford and WestWord prizes for flash fiction. She's been widely published in lit mags including New Flash Fiction Review, Ghost Parachute, The Hooghly Review, Gooseberry Pie and others. She lives with her girlfriend and has two children. You can find her on bluesky at @nomad-sw18.bsky.social

Kathryn Kulpa

The Banshee and Me

The banshee was humming, plaiting her long black hair, combing it with a bone comb. It looked like the spine of a fish. Like a fishbone somebody in the funny pages would throw to a stray cat. It looked like a comb a mermaid would use. Were mermaids related to banshees? I didn’t know; I’d never met one before. Neither of them.

I’d ask the banshee, but direct questions only made her scream, loud and shrill. I’d learned that quick enough.

The humming wasn’t so bad, a kind of airy trill like a towhee on the wing.

I hadn’t summoned the banshee. She just came.

I’ll put on the tea, I said, not a question. I could understand how she disliked them. Questions made me nervous, too. Waiting for questions to be asked, even more.

I made a pot of tea, poured four cups. One for my mother, one for me, and one for the banshee. And one for any other uninvited guests who might happen by, fairies or angels, as my mother had taught me.

I have a decision to make, I’d told my mother last night. She said to ask for help from above.

Should I marry John Tay, I asked the banshee when we met, and she screeched like a cat who’d caught her tail in the door, so I put that question aside.

John Tay was a church-goer. A steady earner. Would be a fine father, my mother said, and it was true that when we’d walk out together he’d talk about how many children we would have, but he’d never actually asked me to marry him. It was more a plan his mother had made with mine, and he just went along.

But a girl likes to be asked.

There’s a ship that sails in the morning, I told the banshee, and I put a cup down close by her, but not so close she couldn’t ignore it. The banshee was white as winter milk, but her lips were red. I wondered were they red all on their own, or was she “painted,” as my mother called it. You don’t want to be a painted minx like that Rosemary O’Shea, my mother said.

But sometimes I did.

Once I picked blackcurrants, rubbed the broken berries over my lips and cheeks, imagined myself a different kind of girl. High colored. High stepping. A girl who wasn't satisfied with things as they are.

My mother had names for those girls. A bold baggage if you were the paint-wearing Rosy O’Shea type. A man-woman if you were a bloomers-wearing suffragist.

If you were a woman who didn’t stay where God put you, you could be sure my mother had a name for you.

My mother’s one hand was telling beads on her rosary while the other lay out a spread of cards. Never put all your eggs in one basket, my mother always said.

John Tay is a decent man, my mother said. A good provider.

There’s a ship that sails in the morning, I said.

My mother lay down the tower, struck by lightning. Her breath whistled in sharp, but she pinched her lips shut.

The banshee said nothing. She finished her tea, nodded to us both, walked to the door. A not very communicative banshee, I thought, though as I said, I’d never met one before.

I opened the door. The banshee took my hand, clasped it tight, and walked off.

You won’t regret marrying John Tay, my mother said, as if it were settled.

I stood in the doorway, looking out. The banshee was gone; the lane was empty. A towhee perched in a thicket, branches scritching as it foraged for berries.

I opened my hand, saw the three blackcurrants the banshee had left me. Bit down, felt purple juice staining my lips.

There’s a ship that sails in the morning, I said.

---

Kathryn Kulpa is the author of A Map of Lost Places (Gold Line Press) and For Every Tower, a Princess (Porkbelly Press). Find her stories in Best Microfiction, Flash Frog, HAD, Milk Candy Review, and Women’s Studies Quarterly. She is a 2025 writer-in-residence at Linden Place in Bristol, Rhode Island.

Kat Meads

What Happens Happens

Fina Martin had been reading her all-novels-in-one volume of Jane Austen on the deck when the neighborhood militia trooped by on its Tuesday practice drill, heading downhill. Drill leader Harvey Sams waved congenially and Fina reciprocated in kind. Saluting was reserved for acknowledging the like-minded during a real emergency as opposed to emergency prep.

Like every house in the neighborhood, the Martin house was two quarters living space and two quarters storage. The kids had helped with the shelf building after Larry, Fina’s husband, had reconfigured the interior walls of the storage area to achieve optimal stacking space. Larry had also rewired the house to accommodate the largest generator available by trade, an item he’d driven across state lines to retrieve. To be on the register of a big box store for such a purchase was madness, Larry believed; Fina, less so. But Larry had enjoyed the drive and the one-night camping that enabled him to test out the wind-worthiness of the family tent. He had also brought home cowboy hats and remarkably authentic looking toy guns for the kids that had kept them entertained and out of her hair for days, so, as Fina had to concede, the trip had served multiple purposes. As a backup to the generator, Larry had procured five camping stoves—two added last week—along with the propane to fuel them. Just now he was in search of a larger, more powerful chainsaw and more durable chainsaw blades.

Fina’s responsibilities included freeze-drying a year’s worth of pasta and other nourishing meals, stocking up on flashlights, backpacks, sleeping bags, gloves, masks, water-purification tablets, solar-powered lamps, blankets, scissors, waterproof matches and jigsaw puzzles. She was also responsible for keeping the family’s checklists and first-aid kits up-to-date and browsing beyond the community’s Facebook page for supply suggestions. Just yesterday Fina had come upon a posting arguing the absolute necessity of owning a hand-crank radio in the event of. If she shared that information with Larry, he’d expect her to (snap! snap!) haunt the swap.com sites until she found and secured the highest rated hand-crank radio. 

It was a lot of work. And although Larry seemed energized by the extra tasks and extra communications and constant vigilance, and although the kids were still young enough to treat playing alongside blackout curtains as a lark, Fina needed her deck time and her Jane A. indulgence to remain chipper during the preparation. As she was only too aware, should the event render them homeless, there would be no space in her backpack for a hefty Jane A. omnibus. As Fanny Price regretted in advance her cousin Edmund’s absence from Mansfield Park, Fina regretted in advance her separation from Jane. 

She had just embarked on one of her favorite passages—“Miss Bennet, there seemed to be a prettyish kind of a little wilderness on one side of your lawn. I should be glad to take a turn in it, if you will favour me with your company”—when a thrashing near the hedge at the bottom of the yard heralded the emergence of Harvey Sams’s barrel chest and thereafter the whole of Harvey, preventing Fina from getting to “I am not to be intimidated into anything so wholly unreasonable,” and “Neither duty, nor honour, nor gratitude has any possible claim on me in the present instance” before Harvey mounted the deck steps and Fina was obliged to close her book. 

With his fat neck and sweaty knees, his khaki shorts and gym socks, militia leader Harvey Sams would not have been welcomed in dashing militia officer George Wickham’s dashing regiment.

“Smashing day!” Harvey enthused, an enthusiast in general, even for hot-air marching. Despite preferring to spend her smashing day with just Jane, Fina mustered agreement. Larry thought pissing off neighbors who might be willing to barter a portion of firewood or some other prize commodity in the event of, madness.

Because a half full glass of lemonade sat on the table between her chair and the chair Harvey had made himself at home in, she offered refreshment.

“Don’t mind if I do,” Harvey said, despite the fact that it was Fina doing the doing, returning inside for his glass and pour. While at it, Fina replenished her own drink, deliberately overfilling her glass with ice.

She would miss ice. She really would.

Upon return, Fina inquired about the militia’s stamina as evidenced by the day’s trek and Harvey’s recent machete acquisition, which exhausted her repertoire of Harvey inquiries. The new couple down the street had not, thus far, responded to the coalition invitations left in their mailbox, Harvey reported. As a gossip, Harvey was not half as entertaining as ear-to-the-ground Mrs. Jennings of Berkeley Street, London. Fina fervently hoped that, in the event of, she and her family would not find themselves garrisoned with Harvey Sams.

“Speaking of which,” Harvey said. “We missed Larry at the quarterly.”

“Oh?”

There were so many meetings—weekly, monthly, quarterly—Fina never bothered to keep straight which was which.

“Can’t afford to go slack,” Harvey intoned.

Fina’s slack interest in anything Harvey Sams said or might say allowed her the leisure to daydream, joining the Dashwood sisters for a stroll around the Longbourn gardens, accompanying Mr. Knightley on one of his pilgrimages, Donwell Abby to Hartfield. When, out of the corner of her eye, Fina saw her younger son tiptoeing toward Harvey Sams, bow and rubber arrow at the ready, she did nothing to discourage or interfere with the plot at hand. If accused of favoritism, she could always impersonate Mrs. John Dashwood, who would rather think her son a pigeon than wrong in anything the heir-in-waiting wished or attempted.

The rubber arrow harmlessly dinged Harvey Sams and afterwards dropped to the deck boards. Rubbing his uninjured shoulder, Harvey pretended to be amused and failed to match even the low bar of fake sincerity Mrs. Norris practiced, wheedling about in Lady Bertram’s affairs. At the next coalition meeting Harvey would likely push for an expansion of the children’s disciplinary code and, while at it, propose stricter penalties for inattentive mothering.

Fina’s son recovered the arrow and drew back his bow.

“Son! I’m not the enemy!” Harvey shouted, twisting in the chair.

 “Intruders are enemies,” Fina’s son coolly replied.

Since children identifying intruders was part of the neighborhood brief, Harvey Sams could hardly object to Fina’s son’s interpretation or vigilance. No one had invited Harvey Sams onto the deck.

“Well, then,” Harvey said.

After draining his glass of lemonade, Harvey made as if to rise. Neither Fina nor her son urged him to stay, not even for the purpose of target practice.

“Tell Larry I’ll see him at next week’s council, if not before.”

Fina mumbled into her lemonade. Maybe she’d pass on the message to Larry, maybe she’d follow the closemouthed, secret-keeping example of Elinor Dashwood.

“Our little visit has given me an idea,” Harvey declared. “Powdered lemonade should be part of our stock. I’ll get Sally crackin’ as soon as I’m home.”

Powdered lemonade was to fresh lemonade as Sophia Grey was to Marianne Dashwood—a sad and sorry substitute, as John Willoughby discovered. However, if Harvey shared the powdered lemonade idea with Larry, Larry would probably decide they should stock up on powdered lemonade, too. Just in case. In the event of.

Harvey exited as he had entered, through the hedge. The street route would have been shorter, faster but less clandestine. As soon as the intruder vaporized, Fina’s sentry son took himself elsewhere and the sun began to do the same. Fina returned to her Jane.

“Obstinate, headstrong girl! I am ashamed of you! Is this your gratitude for my attention to you last spring?”

If Larry found her thus occupied, supper not started, kids who knew where, she would say it was a training exercise. She would explain—in enthusiastic and convincing detail—that she was teaching herself to read in low light should the solar-powered lamps in storage fail to live up to the hype. She would remind Larry of the importance of expecting the unexpected, of preparing for every eventuality. She would quote Larry to Larry: to not prepare, to not train, would be nothing short of madness. She would repeat Larry’s word, “madness,” until he agreed. And the moment he did, she would return to her Jane.

---

Kat Meads's most recent title is the novelette While Visiting Babette. She lives in California. katmeads.com

Sarp Sozdinler

Primaries

Grandpa gets his news from a messenger pigeon club that has survived since World War II. He says it’s a necessary form of communication between like-minded people, what with the mainstream media and its misleading propaganda. Every Sunday morning, shortly after sunup, the bird flies in from east and chirps twice before leaving the ribboned parchment on the top of our porch stairs. One week the news is about an engineered flood in Tokyo and the next a school shooting in Colorado. There is a different pigeon for each type of content depending on the animal’s speed and the urgency of the news item, each determined weekly by the editors of the club.

Some mornings, on my way to school, I pass by the club’s headquarters downtown. The mustachioed birdkeeper releases the birds into a whirling flock, and the birds make one monstrous shadow before breaking into different routes for their designated delivery. Mostly shrouded in the sun by day, by night the building shines with weird interior lights. I rate its design as a nightmarish version of all those zoos we used to visit with Mom, looking less of a news outlet than an intensely crowded display of dismembered birdlike mannequins and whatnot. The vitrine is, by comparison, rather uneventful except for a gold-veneered frame and a bronze bust of Mercury, the messenger god. The picture within the frame changes every week, ranging from the news clip of the President pardoning a turkey to a bird’s eye view of our town. Every time I pass by the building I make a mental note of documenting the series with Mom’s old Polaroid camera, but I always forget about it afterward.

One day, on my way back home from school, I see the birdkeeper nursing a pigeon perched on his right hand. He is feeding her a palmful of bread crumbs with his thick red glove and caressing her right wing spotted with clots of blood. The sound of daytime TV buzzing out of the birdkeeper’s booth is making it difficult to understand the words coming out of his mouth. As I draw near, I recognize the bird on his arm as the one that delivers us the news whenever there is war-related stuff giving on. In this low, grumbly voice the birdkeeper sings to her what sounds like the national anthem of a faraway land and after a while the animal works up the courage to flutter her wings, only to fight for her balance against the immediate pull of gravity. She strikes it right on the third try and chirps deliriously before heading westward, where our home is, like a missile.

When I tell Grandpa what I witnessed the day before, he simply ignores me. He talks nonstop about his plans on how to stock up our shelter while going on with his morning routine, shaving and whatnot. He turns around to lock his gaze on me when he says that even a simple bottle of water will double its price at time of war, which, in his opinion, will be much sooner than I anticipate. I ask and ask but he won’t tell me when. The whole weekend I fear for Sunday to come, for the pigeon to deliver us the bad news, but no one arrives, not even a neighbor.

The next evening, I find the pigeon from the other day lying motionless on one of the dirt roads leading to our house, her wounded wing folded over a parchment. The page corners are fluttering in the wind like feathers, and the ribbon on it looks wet and wavy around the edges because of the fresh blood. I stoop to pick up the parchment from under the bird’s wing and check its dry part under the weak street light. The news shows the black-and-white picture of an old aircraft, warning the reader of the deep state’s plans for an airborne spray of the bird flu virus. I put the dead bird in my backpack and carry her all the way home. When I arrive, Grandpa is busy hauling in his wheelbarrow some cans of what he calls the Primary, a mixture of water and some precarious energy-boosting ingredients the club’s newsletter gave the recipe of a few months back as a precaution. He says the war is imminent now and that I better pack a suitcase before it’s too late. He tells me that I at least owe my mother that. I run up to my room and unzip my backpack to rest the bird on my bed. I take a damp towel from the bathroom and only after I clean her wings does she look peaceful in her marble-like state, almost as beautiful as Mom, her eye-rings unevenly colored in blue. I pluck a bloodied feather from her wounded wing and put it between the pages of my diary in her memory. I pray for them both at night.

These days, on the patchy acre of land where Grandpa used to tend his garden, I keep a graveyard full of raw, tender bones; my diary is bulky with the dead hands of nature. Grandpa now lives fully underground, sending me messages for this need or that. Behind the hills in the distance I occasionally spot some shadows darkening the sky but I can’t make out whether they are birds or bombs. On and on they fall in front of my eyes, like the chemical rain in Mom’s war tales. The night before she died, she told me that I should look for the sun whenever I would feel lonely or scared, for it was the home of one true God. Today, a poem about the bird that burned up her wings flying toward the sun fills the frame on the vitrine of the pigeon club. The birdkeeper is watching the afternoon news in his booth, and I can’t bring myself to ask the inevitable question.

Home I walk.

---

Sarp Sozdinler has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Masters Review, Fractured Lit, JMWW, and Maudlin House, among other journals. His stories have been selected or nominated for such anthologies as the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Wigleaf Top 50. He is currently at work on his first novel in Philadelphia and Amsterdam.

Jody Hobbs Hesler

When Everything You Love Fits in Your Hand

Amelia bolted out the front door in her floppy slippers, her nylon robe fluttering in the wind behind her. That blasted garbage collector. Or maybe it was the truck itself. She never made it outside in time to see how dregs of trash managed to fly from the truck and land on her specific lawn every week. The truck’s gears screeched and the truck lurched, while she waved one hand in the air, the other clutching the front of her robe closed, and shouted, Hey hey hey! to no avail. By the time she reached the sidewalk, the truck had disappeared onto the next street.

A discarded plastic container now roosted in the early blooms of her quince bush. She’d have to go back inside to fetch a plastic bag from the pouch where she saved bags to recycle. She refused to touch an invading piece of trash with unprotected hands.

Inside, her kitchen gleamed from its first wipe down of a new day, and coffee chortled from the walk-in pantry. She selected the cleanest looking bag she could find from her stash, bristled when two others wafted to the floor. She preferred to wash her hands the moment after she stowed a new bag and be done with it forever. Who knew what muck they mingled with at grocery stores? The newspaper’s plastic sleeve was worse, lying in the dewy grass for hours, subject to the sniffing whims of every passing dog. The thought sent a shiver up to Amelia’s shoulders. All because of that careless garbage collector.

Outside, the yogurt cup waited, tilting precariously, threatening to fall deeper into the bush. If it fell, Amelia was sure the quince’s twiggy branches would scrape her skin as she reached in to retrieve it. The germs the container smeared on the branches and leaves on its way down would shuttle into little scratches along her wrist. Her arm tingled as if the shuttling had already begun. She cursed that garbage collector under her breath once more, hoping her first swoop to scoop the cup into the bag wouldn’t dislodge it further.

With the bag inverted like a glove, she slithered her hand toward the cup and reversed the bag around it. Now the cup’s mouth gaped at her through a haze of plastic. Where once she’d seen the last scrapings of something like strawberry yogurt clotted with bits of debris and possibly mold (she hadn’t wanted to look too closely), now she saw something quite different.

She held still, staring into the cup, unwilling at first to believe her eyes, because how was it possible? There, minuscule and in her hand, lay the strip of beach she and her siblings had run along every summer as children. Every summer before their mother died.

If she leaned closer, she could hear it too. Not just the crashing rumble of the sea, but her little brother and sister’s squeaks and laughter. She remembered the velvet feel of wet sand beneath her feet. Their vacations always fell on the early end of the season, so the sand was cold, the ocean not yet tempered for summer. Sometimes it was so cold the sand made the bones of her feet ache, but still it felt splendid. Imagine encountering that here, inside a piece of trash tossed sloppily into her yard.

More memories spilled into mind, and Amelia pressed her eyes closed to better receive them. The sticky cream cheese and jelly sandwiches her mother packed for lunchtime, how she and her siblings clustered together to eat them under the wide beach umbrella their mother spread open at the beginning of the day. Red and white stripes, like a peppermint stick, and the sky blue, the sun blinding beyond it. The gulls screamed and dove for their dropped crumbs. Their mother tsked and waved her open book to scatter them again.

All this, before. Before their mother died, before they went to live with their grandmother, before the foster homes after their grandmother died. This was back when a little grit in a sandwich meant nothing more than beach sand and wind and summertime. Back when Amelia’s body was an organ of pleasure, her life a series of gifts. Before she knew that people could call themselves parents when they were distinctly something else. That they could make you do awful things, and no amount of cleaning would get rid of the traces.

Amelia stood in the yard, unsure what to do next, with her robe flying wildly open in the breeze and her toes, sticking out from the edge of her slippers, turning red from the cold. She was afraid to throw the cup away, but also afraid to clean it. She wanted to stand in the yard and simply gaze into it. See what else it would bring.

Her next-door neighbor, Albert, familiar with Amelia’s annoyance with the trash collector, called across their yards, “Another piece of trash?”

A feeling washed over her that she couldn’t name, but part of it was sadness because everyone who knew her now only knew how finicky and irritable she could be. They had never heard her childhood laughter because after the foster families, her laugh lost its luster, came out rusty and sharp if it came out at all. She would whip up casseroles if you were sick, buy peanuts from Boy Scouts, cookies from Girl Scouts, donate to every marching band, chorus, orchestra, and sports team from the local schools. She would cut flowers from her garden if someone in your house was celebrating something. She was kind to people but quarrelsome with life. She closed her eyes again, even though she knew she should return Albert’s greeting. Ask about his wife, if her knee surgery went well, and when she opened her eyes again, she would.

Only, when she opened her eyes, she wasn’t in her yard anymore. The roar of the ocean startled her, so near, and the spray of it, icy on her now bare arms. She looked down at herself and recognized the bathing suit from when she was seven or eight years old, a navy one piece with a red band around the middle like a sash. She touched it and felt the surprise of nylon against her fingertips, the ribbing of the edges of the sash, the small delicateness of her own hands.

Another wave surged and bubbled into the shore, and this time it licked her toes. She leapt aside, and the sound she made, the high-pitched shriek, rang like bells inside her. This was what joy felt like. And indeed, there was little Josiah, only three, and Bettina with her sand-colored curls. They rushed toward her with their buckets full of sand, and she knelt with them, dumping the buckets into castle shapes. Digging moats with her hands, as water rushed in and ebbed away. No matter how big and good this castle would be, it would be gone by nightfall, and that was the point, not a sorrow but part of the thrill.

“Amelia?” It was Albert again, kneeling beside where she’d fallen in the grass. Now quince blossoms dappled her view upward. Otherwise, the sky looked the same as the one she’d just left, but for the cast of light that suggested a different season. The plastic bag with the dirty yogurt cup had fallen from her hands. Tilting in the grass beside her, it was clear it had become nothing more than trash again.

“Are you all right?” Albert was nervous for her, as if aware he’d stumbled into something essential about her beyond her everyday indignation. Or maybe, despite everything, people could sense what she’d been before all the befores that made her who she was now—a lonely older woman, living alone, suddenly stricken prone in her front yard, in her old robe and tattered slippers, with no one else to find her but her neighbor.

Eventually she allowed Albert to help ease her from the ground. When she laughed to excuse herself, the sound came out less raspy than usual. Then her life rushed in on her again, bringing a nearly unbearable urge to scrub her hands and shower dirt and grass from every inch of her backside. She wanted the hot cup of coffee that waited for her inside. Inside, where everything was quiet and clean. She wanted to feel okay again.

She glanced once more at the yogurt cup, still wrapped in the plastic bag, and lifted it gently back into her hands. What she wanted most was to return to where it had taken her, to move forward from there toward a different life.

Swallowing the urge to clean herself, she let small talk with Albert ebb naturally, then walked at a normal pace back into her house. Alone again, she hurried to the laundry room and dumped her clothes directly into the washing machine, stepped into the shower in the downstairs bathroom, and let hot water course over her while she scoured and scoured, pretending to hear seagulls in the distance.

When the garbage truck rumbled up the street a week later, Amelia stood on her porch, already dressed, with a clean plastic bag in her hand.

---

Jody Hobbs Hesler (she/her) is the author of the novel, Without You Here (Flexible Press, September 2024; Winner of the 2025 Independent Press Award for Literary Fiction and finalist for Southern Literary Review's Book of the Year) and the story collection What Makes You Think You’re Supposed to Feel Better (Cornerstone Press, October 2023). Her words also appear or are forthcoming in Swing, South Dakota Review, The Pinch, Necessary Fiction, Gargoyle, Electric Literature, CRAFT, Arts & Letters, and elsewhere. She teaches at WriterHouse in Charlottesville, Virginia; writes and copy edits for Charlottesville Family Magazine; and serves as assistant fiction editor for the Los Angeles Review.

Phebe Jewell

Wings

         I got my wings the summer me and Drew kept our clothes in garbage bags, just in case Cherie lost another job and we had to move again. The summer of Jimmy B and the kid I almost killed.      

         The first time we saw Jimmy B he was perched on top of the monkey bars, legs dangling. He pointed at an empty swing. “If you can stay on the RollerCoaster for a count of ten, I’ll let you play.”

         The swing’s left chain was short and the right chain so long the seat dangled, almost touching the ground. Drew froze, heavy with fear. I sat on the warped, torn seat, pushing it back as far as the chains could take me. Then I let go, pumping my feet until I was kicking air.

         “Eight nine ten.”

         Too high to stop, I flew over the swingset, above the roof of the apartment building and  the boarded-up pawn shop. I soared over cars and streets, bridges and boats. I saw rivers and forests below me, and when I was ready to return to earth, I flew out of the seat, landing on a little kid waiting his turn by the seesaw.

         “You’re pretty good for a girl,” Jimmy B said, pulling me off the kid who ran away before I could say sorry. Drew wrapped his arms around my waist. “Show me how to fly,” he whispered.

         We lived on the playground that summer. Jimmy B waited for us on top of the monkey bars every morning. I’d survey the scene below with him while Drew and the younger kids chased each other. We were always the last to leave, long after the other kids were called home for supper. I’d switch on the light, pull open the fridge, scraping the half empty jars of peanut butter and mayo and make us sandwiches. The day before school started Cherie told us we were going to live at our dad’s. “Pack your toothbrush,” she added, in case we forgot she was our mom.

The 16th of Every Month I Check My Mailbox

         God started sending me letters every month, ever since my teen-age son had brain surgery. I’m no church-goer, but I murmured lines from half-remembered prayers as I watched them wheel my boy into the operating theater. Would he survive? If he did, who would he be? When the surgeon showed me before and after pictures, repeating “It was a miracle,” I nodded, flooded with relief.

         The first week he was home from the hospital I found a pearl white envelope in our mailbox addressed in handwritten block letters. I usually get bills and appeals from nonprofits I can no longer afford to support, so I was surprised to open the envelope and read a handwritten note in the same block letters : “It gets better. Trust me, he’ll come through it alright, though he might be a little different afterwards, and so will you.”

         The letters were a little shaky, but the “you” was underlined with a firm hand. No return address. Stamped, but the ink on the postmark was so smudged I couldn’t make out the sender’s location. Had I been wrong to doubt God’s existence? But why now? Why me? I dropped the letter in the recycling bin only to find my son later, standing in the kitchen, holding the letter. “It’s cool that someone cares enough to write you,” he smiled. “So old school.”

         Months after his surgery the letters arrive like clockwork. They’re never signed. They have to be from God. Who else knows what’s really going on in my world? I only share the outline of a life on social media because my days are filled with fears that never go away, people I miss. I show my son the God-letters but he just shrugs. This generation has no appreciation for mystery.

         I make sure to check the mailbox the 16th of every month, certain a letter will be waiting for me. Like this month’s message, written in the same shaky hand: “Look around you: the world is full of surprise.” I frown. Lately the surprises hollow me out with dread - flash floods, ugly elections, missing neighbors.

         Again the “you” is underlined. I stare at the page, trying to see the hand hesitate before writing each word. I hold out the letter to my son, who pats my arm. “Maybe that God of yours is on to something,” he says as he hands me the letter. “One thing I can tell,” he calls as he starts up the stairs, his thin back shaking with a laugh he can barely contain, “whoever wrote these sure is dope.”

---

Phebe Jewell's recent flash appears or is upcoming in numerous journals, including Ghost Parachute, JMWW, Wildscape Literary Journal, Bright Flash Literary Review, SoFloPoJo, BULL, and other wonderful publications. A teacher at Seattle Central College, she also volunteers with the Freedom Education Project Puget Sound, a nonprofit providing college courses for incarcerated women, trans-identified, and gender non-conforming people in Washington State. Read her at https://phebejewellwrites.com.

Martyn Rosser

We Have All the Time in The World Wide Web

       It’s after the phone call that it starts.

       I answer and nod and offer my thanks and try desperately to think of a question that will convey my anger and sorrow and composure, but my mind slips and I tumble away, watching myself, watching my wife watching me, watching myself watching her watching me – spinning like a cartoon animal trapped in a whirlpool. I have no idea how she feels, but every idea about what’s happened. Ideas appearing in rotation, a series of slides from an ironically endless briefing about the end; the snap of the clicker, the whir of the motor. I see everything we weren’t allowed to: the jagged line falling flat; the squeak of plimsolls on vinyl, the white sheet pulled overhead; the gurney tucked into the lift at an improbable angle; the closed casket in the church; the cross behind the altar, its scale emphasised by the emptiness; the slow drive to the crematorium; the indifferent flames burning like a childhood vision of hell. I was blind but now I see. All these events unfold in silence. The reverend is waiting for me to reply. I thank her again, hang up and look at my wife. I nod and offer a smile that will never quite be enough, that is an admission of our awful limitations. She rises from the stool and leaves the kitchen.

       She doesn’t want to talk. I understand – I have to understand – after all it’s my job to be supportive. Admittedly, I never really knew my own father, but I did lose my mum in her fifties. I’ve been here before, approximately, and I’m not saying it was a good or a bad thing, but it did change my life, God knows. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. So, I’ve offered to listen, practised my open questions and eye contact. I’ve waited, refusing to placate my own anxiety by kicking away the heavy blanket of silence. I’ve given practical support. The kids are fed and watered, the house spotless – clothes on the line, beds made, vacuum recharging. I even struggled through the list of calls. Stressed but sympathetic colleagues, forgotten relatives and chatty strangers. Odd how much they want to talk about this person I barely know. Barely knew. I mean, I was never really sure if my father-in-law liked me. Even when it wasn’t mandated, he kept his distance. Or how, instead, they start discussing the weather or their new hobby or make little jokes about how they never really got out anyway. It’s a pity there wasn’t a proper funeral, they say. God is always watching, I reply.

~

       I drive to the house and stand in the garden not chatting to my mother-in-law. We grow drowsy with the scent of spring flowers. Neat beds of trumpeting daffodils and wilting snowdrops; heavy towers of hyacinths; bushels of starry rhododendrons; aubretia clambering hungrily up the shed wall. Yellows and whites and blues and reds and purples offering a wordless eulogy. Margaret acts like it’s normal. Says he had a good run, that it gives her a chance to clear out some of the clutter. Grey-haired and knock-kneed, she looks as if she’s been up since five scrubbing the kitchen floor and darning socks. When I ask if she’ll move somewhere smaller, easier to manage, she answers my question with a question: how’re the kids doing? As I back out of the drive, watch her wave and walk back into an empty house, I’m reminded that my troubles are relatively minor. That I should come again. Halfway home, I put my foot on the brake and tap a reminder into my calendar. There are no other cars on the road. Haven’t been since the rumours infected the headlines, since they told us to travel only when necessary. You think it’s impossible to forget until you do.

~

       I spend too much on the shopping, and the delivery guy gives me a look like I’m hoarding vital supplies. I guess it’s my own fault, I didn’t know what to buy so asked the kids. Katie, with the world-weariness of a teenager, complained about the amount of packaging. Libby tried, but what does an eleven-year-old know of well-rounded meals? Peanut butter and burgers? Tomato soup and crisps? I gave her a hug which, thankfully, stopped her talking, and sent her back upstairs. Within a couple of minutes, I heard her sister telling her to get out but decided to let it go.

       The cooking, at least, I can manage. I produce sloppy piles of stew, pies dripping in gravy and bubbling pasta bakes. The veil of steam and the aroma of melted cheese remind me of when I first met my wife. Back then she was so consumed with her writing, or with toddler Katie, that she’d forget to eat. I’d arrive in her kitchen with carrier bags of comfort to peel and dice and simmer my way into her heart – to stir her leftover emotions. The cracked tile behind the stove. The flabby grind of the extractor fan. The seasoned assurance of a home-cooked meal. It’s strange how a scent can evoke a memory; how our thoughts are tangled up with what we smell and see and hear and taste.

       At five pm, we sit in front of the telly and watch the daily briefing. The living room, with its doughy sofas and wide screen, felt cavernous when we first moved in; the girls suddenly too old to share, the money from her marketing job heavy in our pockets, but it’s amazing how things gather. Houseplants and shoe racks and occasional tables and cubes of shelving and floor lamps and leather puffs coalescing into a tidy mess, forming the rocks around which our lives used to run.

       We’re allowed to eat in here because she never joins us for food, and because I find it easier than actual conversation. It’s not like the kids are really listening anyway – they spend most of their time staring at their phones – but there’s something soothing about the academic tone, the endless rotation of slides, the line that goes ever upward, that never stops.

       Testing capacity is now at 51,254 per day.

       If you can stay home, stay home.

       We will be totally transparent about what comes next.

       Protect the NHS.

       There is no link between these two things.

       Hands. Face. Space.

       Makes it feel like the world is still turning, that the people in charge are in charge. Meantime, I leave optimistic snacks in opportune locations and then can’t bring myself to tidy them away. Biscuits soften in the trapped air. Red apple skins crinkle. Cups of tea catch cold, their milky heads slumping. At two am, I find her eating a plain tortilla, wrapping on the floor, a glass of water half-empty. I pray for guidance.

       I get why she shuts herself in the attic, I do. I wouldn’t want to talk to me either. But the rules are there for a reason, I was just doing the sensible thing. Time unravels, days falling into hours falling into minutes, the excess pushing at the sides, spilling over the top, piling up until we have to wade through it in slow motion. The only thing we have too much of. I wish I could donate it to some good cause. Fast forward a year and still feel worthy. By then, maybe, we’ll be back to normal, whatever that looks like. Maybe she’ll have stopped blaming me. Don’t shoot the messenger, I’d said. How would you feel if you could never see your father again, she’d replied, what damage could it really do? She’d had a point.

~

       Overnight, her laptop disappears from the office giving me a reason to investigate – right after breakfast. I manage to add a little to long enough by checking the kids are at their desks. Libby looks at me through half-closed eyes and offers the memory of a smile. Her golden hair, growing wild, sprawls over her forehead, threatens to envelop her face. Katie won’t open her door, tells me I worry too much. Didn’t I just watch her eat her damn cornflakes? I want to tell to be careful with her language. That sitting there hoping won’t get her through GCSE maths. That just because her dad lets her talk like that doesn’t mean it’s okay here. Maybe now’s not the time. Sunlight dapples through the window. The metal ladder winks at me. I dust the skirting, evicting a spider from its home, before stealthily poking my head through the trapdoor to scan the dusty savannah like some fragile mammal. There’s a moment where I believe she’s gone. That’s she’s at work, the kids at school. That I’m alone in the house again, thinking I heard a noise. That’s there’s nothing to worry about, that this madness is mine alone. Then I spot the light at the back and, as my eyes adjust, find her pouring and pawing through a warped cardboard box, head bent in concentration, and surrounded by flimsy towers – an avatar walking through a city of paper memories.

       “Hey.” I try for eye contact, but she continues to scan the sheet in her hand. The laptop is sat by her feet, the pale light casting shadows.

       “Hey,” she mumbles.

       I embrace the silence, ask an open question. “So, er, how’s it going?”

       “Pretty good.” Then, as if remembering herself, “All things considered.”

       I take a few steps up the ladder, rest my arms on the floor, and wait.  When she doesn’t protest, I lever myself up, briefly, thankfully, squeezing my middle-aged spread through the hole without incident. Then I stand and crack my head on the roof. While I wince – checking once, twice, for blood – she drifts, pauses in contemplation, skims through the top of one pile, then another, and another, before turning her attention back to the first. I offer support, “Can I help?”

       She bites her top lip. Finally, she glides beyond the towers – a phantom spirit, dressing gown streaming behind her – kneels and starts construction on the bare brownfield beyond. “No, not really,” she replies.

       “Right,” I say, wondering whether it’s a statement or a question. I watch for a few minutes, recalling a sermon on forgiveness – Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven – then head back to the kitchen.

~

       I get an email from Libby’s form tutor that leaves me mortified. My child has not been to a single lesson in the last week. They understand the situation, it’s difficult for everyone right now, but it’s important she doesn’t fall behind, especially so soon after starting a new school. What should I say? The kid just lost her grandad, for goodness’ sake. I know what her mother would say. Words would not be minced. Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up. I listen for the distant pad of her feet. Then I draft and redraft an apology. I’d prefer to go in and talk to them. Break the ice. It’s what I do. What I did. I miss chatting to the customers while I made teas and coffees. St. Luke’s, the place meant something to me, gave me grip after mum passed. Dallying at the end of my shift. Popping into the shop if it was quiet. Taking the new recruits under my wing. The jobcentre called their placement mandatory. I joked: man, de Tories; to break the ice. Though definitely never in a West Indian accent.

       We finish eating and, as cutlery clangs onto porcelain, I take a breath, mute the telly, and try to sound casual, “So, Libs, I got a message from Mr. Carr.”

       I watch her hand dart up and down the chair arm, a spider fleeing the light. Then she looks away and shrugs. I’m about to ask her what’s wrong when Katie interrupts, “Idiot.”  She manages to imbue the single word with contempt despite never looking up from her mobile.

       Libby is quickly to her feet, fists clenched, body leant forward, a half-empty bowl clatters to the floor. I watch the soup spread, a circle of brown on the carpet, noodles twisting like earthworms. “Who are you calling an idiot?” she says. I want to run and get a cloth. Leave them to it.

       Katie is big enough – five years older and blessed with the graceful authority of an apex predator – to remain nonchalant. She’s wearing a white dress, thin shoulder straps, black ankle boots. Dressed like Friday night, she raises a contoured eyebrow then responds, “You. Idiot.”

       Libby drops her head, pulls an arm back and prepares to charge.

       “Girls. Girls. Girls!” I’ve gone sotto voce, though have no idea why. I grab her Libby the waist and pull us both onto the sofa. Katie offers a grunt of amusement, nudging her hair away from her eyes like a god flicking away a fly. Then there’s a knock at the door and we freeze. Who on earth could it be? We look at each other as if the answer is harder to discover than it is. Although we don’t hear anything, suddenly, there she is – wife, mother, dead father’s daughter – opening the door and picking up the parcel. It’s size, and the white cross, reminds me of a tithe box. Then we watch her turn away, hear the steps on the stairs – heavy now, certain – the metallic twang of the ladder and the wooden clap as the trapdoor closes.

       Katie looks up, as though there’s nothing left that can surprise her, and catches Libby with a questioning glare, “Why don’t you just sign in and turn your camera off, like everyone else? No one cares anymore.”

       I care, I want to say. God cares. But it seems stupid.

*

       The following evening, I start hearing voices. I’m in the kitchen putting away the dishes, steam rising from the sink, when Libby begins talking. She’s at the top of the stairs, telling some story about a trip to the zoo, the rhinos and how they were grumpy like grandad. Some story that elicits a familiar laugh, but by the time I arrive she’s gone, every door closed apart from one – my, our, bedroom. It rocks gently on its hinges, tapping out a message in Morse code, beckoning me in. I tiptoe forward and reach for the handle, almost expecting my hand to pass through. The door opens onto a pile of my wife’s clothes. Business suits wrapped in plastic mingle with crumpled summer blouses. I spy her jogging pants, a blue velvet jumper, that cocktail dress she wore on our first anniversary. The hood of a winter coat hangs from the wardrobe where Katie – acting as though it’s completely ordinary, as if she isn’t in her parents’ room, isn’t rifling through her parents’ belongings – pulls out another dress, hanger and all, and tosses it into the mire. Then she looks over, eyes grappling mine and says, “Mum said I could.”

       I take a moment to rank the possible responses by order of importance. I fail. She knows what I’ve done, is old enough to understand. Knows what her mother thinks of me. Has decided what she thinks of me. The day I refused to let them go to the funeral, when I blocked the doorway and hid the car keys and threw her mother’s phone, I exhausted any authority I’d acquired. Katie doesn’t have to listen to my sanctimonious bullshit anymore. She hoists the pile of clothes into her arms and pushes past me and out of the door, fabric rustling in the silence.

~

       The reverend says I should make more of an effort to connect. I head upstairs to see Libs and lose track of time watching her sing tunelessly to herself, comically large headphones slipping down her head. When I wrap her in a hug she leans in, like a dog nuzzling for treats, and I don’t want to leave. On the way down, I spot the bruised and broken notebook that contains my wife’s unfinished, unfinishable, novel. Unearthed, perhaps, during her late-night wanderings and set aside. It shivers through me, a visceral memory, the scent of blood and iron; a lamb sacrificed at the altar of our family’s future.

~

              “I found some old photos of your dad.”

Once again, I’m a disembodied head, upright on the floor. It makes me think of John the Baptist, the loner, the beheaded, the Nazarite, who could not drink wine, or cut his hair, or come near a dead body.

       “Thanks.” She’s sat cross-legged on the floor, laptop in her lap, fingers poised in thought. She looks at me and smiles beatifically, “But I’m not sure I need them.”

       “Then…” I pause and she looks at me patiently, looks ready, “Er...”

       “It’s not what you think.” She seems awake, aware of me, for the first time in – what’s fair – days or weeks? She rests a hand on the parcel box beside her, “Do you still have that stuff from when we were first dating?”

       She knows I do, knows I can’t bear to throw those things away. “I guess.” I look at her and I look at the box. “Though they’re pretty tatty.”

       It started with me leaving messages – saying the things I couldn’t say – on her kitchen table after she’d snuck off in the morning. We could have texted, but it’s not the same. She responded, then I again, and so on, until the backs of envelopes, or flyers from local takeaways, or council tax bills became festooned with the chaotic awkwardness of our courting, and I, with unsuccessful secrecy, snaffled them away. Even after all this time my cheeks redden at the thought.

       “Super,” she smiles again, goes back to typing, “If you can rustle anything up, anything at all, I’d be forever grateful.”

       “Great. But…” The word balances on my lower lip, pulling it down until I’m almost gawping. “Why?”

       She glances at the box, then back at me, and brings her hands together in a ball, “I’m pulling my life together.”

       “Well. Good. But…”

       She finishes my sentence, “Why?” incorrectly as it happens. That smile again, like a politician answering the question they wanted to hear, “Because it helps. Because it’s good for the family.”

       “But…”

       “You’ll understand when it’s finished.”

       “But…”

       This time she waits, reaching into the cool dark for a sip of water.

       I look at the box, the only solid thing in the room, and find a train of thought to follow, “What are you trying to do? You can’t put your whole life in there. It’s here. We need you, me and Libby and Katie and…” I realise I don’t want to say her mum.

       “The girls are fine. You’ll understand when it’s finished.” She’s as certain as a line falling flat.

       “But…” my lower lip must have dropped below the floor by now, must be working its way down the ladder and towards the landing, “When?”

       “Soon,” she continues, “If you’ll help.”

       And, so, of course, I help. What else is there to do? What else am I supposed to say? I help happily and reluctantly, doling out utility bills, holiday snaps, school reports, prescription slips, warranty guarantees, car MOTs, Christmas cards, TV licenses, tax returns, security passes, CDs and DVDs, recipes, newspaper clippings, home videos, and magazine subscriptions in incremental doses, testing the impact, reviewing progress, updating my hypothetical charts. I take it as a good sign that she leaves the attic most days now, and try not to feel disheartened when, after the first box is taken away, a second and then a third arrive. I look up the company name, Total Recall, but only find the sci-fi film from the nineties. I need expert help so go in search of the children.

       Katie rolls her eyes, looks as though this is more embarrassing for her than me. Why don’t you just ask her, is all I get. Well, that and a mutter as I leave which sounds something like grow a pair. Teenagers require the patience of Job, especially if you’re locked indoors with them.

       I discover Libby dragging a box across the hallway. Turns out both girls were recruited to their mother’s cause a lifetime ago – Libs was easy pickings once her big sister was onboard – and have been busy gathering digital footprints ever since. She shows me on her computer, so I nod and pretend to understand. Then I wait until everyone’s asleep and open the box. My head throbs but I don’t throw up. I don’t throw anything, thank God. How’s it possible that I’m the last to realise? Did the girls figure it out for themselves, or did she tell them? And when did she tell them? Worse still, the whole thing is legitimised by this revelation. It’s hard to have an issue with something that’s been happening for weeks. That all your family have agreed to. You can’t, halfway through your baptism, complain about the temperature of the water. But – while I have no wish to be categorised as difficult – it doesn’t seem fair. I don’t like feeling isolated in my own home.

~

       It’s weeks before I work up the courage, even though I know it’s unavoidable. I lie awake at night, thinking and rethinking how I might approach it, listening to the inhospitable silence, questioning my own beliefs. I tell myself I have to say something, if only because I promised never to lie, even by omission. Yet, trapped inside these walls of things unsaid, it becomes easier to say nothing. Time thrums by, enumerated by boxes arriving empty and leaving full. With little else to distract us we become a well-oiled machine. We fill the present with the past until it blocks out the future. We grow to understand our roles, are consumed by the gathering weight of our workload, rediscover the imperative joy that can only be found in a sense of purpose. Even when we begin to chronicle the present, keeping records about keeping records, setting up cameras and watching our lives on playback, counting hours of sleep and steps made, calories consumed and defecations completed, itches scratched and spots picked, the girls just get on with it. They capture every moment and I crunch the numbers and draw the graphs, like an epidemiologist preparing for the next briefing, so we can submit our findings to some invisible overseer, who like us find their life enumerated by the sending and receiving of boxes. But little by little, in the dark, my courage grows. Nurtured by resentment and fed on a terrible fear, it grows.

       And this is that fear: that each day she becomes a little fainter, a little less recognisable, like a garden at twilight. That, in trying to hold on, we’ve created something eternal. Have become trapped in a recording of our lives, and are now compelled to wander aimlessly, our heads turned forever backwards, victims of a self-inflicted torment plagiarised from the inner circles of hell. And everyone else is okay with that.

       I climb the ladder. I squeeze through the hole, embarrassed that the kids, woken by the noise or kept up by the expectation, are listening. I pull myself upright and hit my head on the ceiling. She ignores me, looks at her laptop and is pleased with all she’s created.

       “Hey.”

       She takes a moment, considers me with a distant kindness, like my teachers on the last day of school, then says nothing.

       “So, I, er, look...I don’t want to be the bad guy here, but I don’t think you’ve...I’ve been left with much choice.”

       I pause, expecting something. She places the laptop on the floor, screen tilted upwards so that it catches her face, shrinking it to a circle, to eyes and nostrils and lips shaped by shadow.

       “Look, I think you know this already. If we’re being honest, there’s nothing I can say that you won’t have already thought of. I know you,” I used to think I knew you, “You’re smart. Much smarter than me. I still thank God every day that you chose me, chose us. But sometimes I wonder whether you’re only doing this for the kids.”

       I look at the floorboards. Can they hear this? Do they understand? Libby is probably recording it like a good girl.

       “And if it’s just for them, is this really how you imagined it? Shouldn’t we be trying to make their lives more normal, not less? I get the structure, I do, I like the structure...but they should be at school.”

       I shake my head, retrace my steps, “They should be doing their schoolwork. Katie has exams in less than two months, and you’ve got her running around collecting our online shopping history and fuc...and Facebook posts. Libs is still a child and, instead of encouraging her to value education, you give her an excuse to do nothing. They just lost their grandfather, they need their parents. They can’t afford to lose anyone else.”

       I look up. I’ve gone too far. She looks back, her lips curling upwards. A slight smile or awkward frown, I can’t say.

       “You act like none of this means anything. Look, if you’re trying to punish me, I get it. It isn’t like anyone in this house is damn…is talking to me properly these days. I can leave if that’s what you want me to do?” The words rise in me, self-determined, “Libby and I can just go.”

       She stares and blinks and stares.

       “Alright, I’m sorry. I’m fuck…fucking sorry. I’m sorry he’s dead. But he’s with God now. Well, I believe he’s with God now. Funeral or not. I get that’s no excu…”

       She moves and I hesitate. I watch while she picks up a piece of paper, turns it over, puts it down again.

       “I don’t want to do this, alright. You must know I’d never want this. I was just trying to be sensible, reasonable, yet here I am dragged ever further into this...godless debacle.”

       She reaches out, pulling a glass from the darkness. I see the fissures in her lips as the rim closes. When she pours the water into her mouth it overflows at the corners, rivulets catching the light as they run down her chin and dampen her nightdress.

       “I’m just worried about you. I get what you’re doing, I do. I’m terrified too. We’re all terrified. But whatever this is, however it ends, if it…if it, God willing, ends; this thing, these boxes and boxes and boxes won’t be you. Can’t be you. You are you. Here and now. Here. We have all this time and this how you want to spend it? The glory of creation on all sides and here we are watching. Watching screens, watching ourselves, watching life pass us by. Do you think that’s what your dad would want?”

       A quote I’ve been saving dashes through my mind – and the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it – too quick to wrestle into words, “Tell me it’s right to teach your kids that he’s not in heaven. That he’s nothing but bone fragments and dust. That your soul can be captured here on earth. That eternal life is less a matter of faith and more a matter of careful cataloguing. Did you even think about discussing it with me? You must have known how I’d feel. They’re not just your DAMN...sorry. But how can you think whatever you leave behind will be you? How can anything but you be you? I’m sorry he’s gone but you know we couldn’t have saved him. We can’t even save ourselves. Only God can do that.”

       Her mouth moves, forming a small parting between the lips shaped like a yogic exhalation. Nothing escapes. I watch the pale membrane stir and shimmer, a bubbled surface stretched flat by the movement of her jaw, transparent across the neat white rows of incisors and molars, and sewn tight at the gums. I want to reach out and punch a hole through it. Then, the mouth closes and she steps back into the darkness.

       The fear that fills me is not for her but for all of us. I whisper to myself, “Oh Becca, what have you done?”

       “Hey baby, I haven’t done anything.”

       The tinny sound rises from the laptop. At some point, it must have turned toward me. I see her face, pixelated but perfect. The hair falling over her brow in a neat line, cut back across the ears to fall into a bob; the face shaped like a cartoon heart; the fierce brown eyes shining with curiosity; the pale skin against rouged cheeks; the nose like a Victorian doll. She tilts her head and offers an impudent smile, “Not yet, anyway.”

---

Martyn Rosser is a teacher. He has been published as part of the “On Silence” podcast featured in the Lincoln Review. He lives in Yorkshire and spends far too much time thinking about the dangers of solipsism, the ambiguity of everyday acts, and how easy it is to make sweeping judgments about things he knows almost nothing about.