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.

Mike Itaya

Pen Pals from Ezekiel (Webelo)

         Last month at school, they gave out pen pals. I got a fellow named Charlemagne, from Auburn, Alabama, who sent me a picture with his first letter. He was this runty fellow who lived on a farm, which he swore was a “hellhole with no TP.” I took a liking to Charlemagne. We became blood brothers and sent each other bloody communiqués to make it bonafide. But things took a tailspin when I forwarded him my “Ezekiel, Mississippi Letters,” my account of this shitbag town and what all goes on here.

         And I believe Charlemagne's mama got a hold of my bizarre epistolaries then flipped her fucking lid. I got a final post, then never did hear from them again:

         Charlemagne and his family do not live here. They have moved to Canada. As such, Charlemagne is not your blood brother. He used Heinz 57 to seal the deal.

         It was one thing to lose my friend, but to’ve been blood brothers under false pretense is how I ended up on the dark road.

         Lordyjay, I’m just a ten-year-old nothing with a postcard covered in dried ketchup.

         So much happens in Ezekiel, that I believe the citizens are more cursed than the place itself is.

         Like this time when I was nine, me and R.T. (Pa) went on a father-son trip out west to Yosem-mite. I wanted to see all them mountains, especially one called Craterface. We pulled over off the road to take a gander. Yep. There were all kinds of folks out there lookin’. Near the Craterface summit, there was this dude in a blue bunny costume, free climbing. And watching him climb higher and higher made my heart soar, like if that bunny got to the top, there was no tellin’ where all he might get to. A person could take from that a mighty fine lesson about life. At least that’s what I was thinkin’, when that bun just kind of let go, and all of us watched him take a header from on high, and seconds later when it was all over was the first time I felt the dark road open up inside me. I wondered who was in charge of that bun, who was supposed to make him behave. Afterwards, R.T. bought me a Yosem-mite t-shirt, and while two days before I would’ve slapped my own bottom for such a prize, I didn’t know who’d want a shirt from a place where such things happened. 

---

Mike Itaya is the editor-in-chief of DIRTBAG and writes about dirtbags, always. @DirtbagWriting

Tom Hedt

Small Lessons in Thievery

….and you know you’ve rarely been a thief, but like magicians and shamans, you appreciate their skills, the skill to make things appear and disappear, like when you sat in that restaurant and were telling your son-in law that you can’t expect people to be perfect, and he is so caught up on being good, and he wants his daughter to be good, and he’s agitated because you and your daughter are teaching your granddaughter how to pinch silverware from this restaurant and she is slipping the knife into her sleeve and she is a good student and the silverware is beautiful braided patterns of fish and crustaceans that shine dull in pewter and yellow lighting and your son is getting animated and your granddaughter is getting giggly with the excitement of the heist and you quietly tell her she needs to keep her cool as you take the check from the waitress and examine it for accuracy, line by line and calculate the tip at 22 percent and your daughter and son in law are now arguing and your granddaughter has got the knife and the spoon in her sleeve and your son so much wants his daughter to be good and he’s adopted Buddhism and you explain to him that karma, like entropy, is not a law, but a statistical abstraction and how you used to steal toilet paper from the library when you were too poor in college and couldn’t afford to buy any but the universe didn’t starve you of toilet paper, but he’s not paying attention because two pieces are now in his daughters sleeve and you’ve handed your card to the waitress and he wants his daughter so much to be good and he’s arguing with your daughter who is explaining to him how she learned to steal cups from her mother and it’s a tradition and he feels so powerless and you again have to tell your granddaughter to breathe deeply and restrain her giddiness and to remember to always walk slowly and calmly and you eat the last fry as the waitress returns and you sign the receipt as your daughter walks out with your granddaughter and you stand and leave the bill on the table and look out the window and see you granddaughter on the sidewalk jumping for joy and pulling the silverware from her sleeve and you understand that the next lesson will be to never celebrate too soon.

Dancing Queen

It’s a bit of a drive, but it’s early so the roads are empty. Streetlights off black pavement, shiny from the mist, the burn of Smirnoff down my throat. We park in the alley.

“Come on Princess, its time.”

“I don’t want to go. It’s sad.” She’s in her onesie. The sideways frownie face always breaks my heart.

“I know it’s sad, but we agreed.” She pouts, climbs out of the van, pulling her stuffed pony along by the ear. Her face reminds me so much of her mom.

She looks up, startled. “Oh, I almost forgot my book.” I manage a nod and a half-smile, she gathers the stapled sheets of paper, the little play she’s been writing.

I lock up the minivan, and fumble for my key card, trying not to look up at the camera.

There’s a buzz and a click. I hold the door.

“Why do you always carry your bottle in a bag? Are you trying to hide it?”

I straighten up and take a breath. “No, I’m not trying to hide it. It’s the law, if you carry a bottle, it’s got to be in a paper bag.”

We’re waiting for the freight elevator. Silence is heavy, except the clang of metal as it slowly descends to us, the whirring of engine and cable. It’s only been a couple months since my fall. Technically I’m still on staff, but for some reason this place is freaking me out.

She’s dancing on the concrete floor. “Why? Why does the law say that?”

I watch her, trying not to let my nerves get raw. “I don’t know, it just is.”

We get up to the top and follow the dark halls. I nearly trip over some tools. I think about going to my locker, see if I’ve still got my old spot. But the kid is with me, and I want to get outside for dawn. I want to see the wreckage.

A right turn, then a left, and I see the opening, dark sky framed by walls. There’s a rush of cool air. I walk out. Fuck! Twenty stories off the ground. I reach and shimmy my way over to the ledge, push my back against the wall and slide down, take a shot. I’m dizzy. Grayscale shapes in the darkness make the height worse.

She’s dancing. For fucks sake, she’s dancing. She’s next to me on the ledge, I reach for her to pull her to me, but she turns out of my reach, feet floating over blackness.

“Get over here!”

She just smiles. “Did you know I have really good balance? In gymnastics, my teacher says I can balance on anything.” She steps on an open steel beam, and keeps on dancing, skipping, twirling, like she’s suspended in air.

“Get off the beam!”

“Did you look at my book?” My heart is beating so hard, I feel it hitting the wall.

“No. I didn’t. Bring it over, so I can read it.”

“It’s next to you on the floor.”

She’s dancing out further on the metal beam. I try to push myself from the ground, but my strength is gone.

“Read my book, daddy, you said you would.”

I try to steady my breathing. “You come over here. Then we’ll look at it together, OK?”

“No. You should come to see me do the balance beam. I’m really good. I can do a flip without falling off!”

“Don’t you dare do a fucking flip!”

“Read the book daddy.”

I fumble my right hand against the wall, feel the folded papers, crumble them in my hand, lift them to my face.

“Why did we stop living over there?” She points to the apartments. The wreck that’s about to come down. The reason we are here. The place where we began. The only place where the three of us lived together.

I take another breath. “It’s complicated sweetie, let’s just read your little thing here.”

“We get to see them knock it down today, right? Why did you want to watch them knock it down?”

“Let’s read your little play darlin’. Come here, you start, right?”

“No. You start. You’ve got the first part. You get to be mommy.” That makes no sense. We’ve read this before; it has cats, mice, and frogs, not moms and dads.

It’s still dark, I have a hard time focusing my eyes. The vodka and my nerves all seem to be working against me. I take off my glasses so I can read better, put them on the ledge next to me.

I read the script out loud, my daughter’s handwriting. “John, stop! Please! We’re a family! It’s always just you and your bottle….” My voice trails off. That’s exactly what she’d said. I look up, there is a blurry shape dancing on a steel beam over an abyss, the sun is coming up, I am dizzy. Through my tears, she stares at me.

“You did it wrong. You’re supposed to yell. You’re mommy, you’re supposed to try to convince me to come back!”

“This is not funny! Get over here!”

Across the street they’re firing up the crane; it slowly lifts the wrecking ball. My fingers are numb, the papers fall, drifting, floating like white birds through the morning air.

“What did you do!? You have to read your part! You are mom, you have to beg me to come back! Otherwise, I can’t come back!”

All I can do is stare, slack jawed. Sprites are dancing in the water of my vision. The noise of the crane swinging the wrecking ball is drowning out my little girl’s voice. It is swinging in bigger and bigger arcs.

---

Tom Hedt’s work has been published widely in journals, including: The Sijo International Journal of Poetry and Song, Bright Flash Literary Review, Cirque, Cathexis Northwest, The Tule Review, The Lilly Poetry Review, Flash Boulevard, and elsewhere. His poetry compilation, Artifacts and Assorted Memorabilia, was published in September of 2020 by Cold River Press. He currently serves as the Associate Poetry Editor for Bending Genres. He lives in Eureka, California.

Stuart Watson

More Than It Can Hold

We were gardening, pushing bulbs into the ground and hoping for flowers. I heard a car door slam, looked up, saw four young men carrying something really heavy toward the front door of the house across the street and two doors down. It’s painted red, but I couldn’t tell much about the thing they were carrying toward it. All I could tell was they were straining under its weight, spread out, struggling with their share of the load, but knees bent almost to the ground.

Equally puzzling was the sound. Sometimes loud. Sometimes soft, like spring breeze. It was never the same, always distinct. One man went down and the others hurried to adjust, to keep their load from falling and crushing their friend. He sprung to his feet, quickly grabbed new purchase on the load and they resumed their trudge. Maybe it was the bright setting sun, but I couldn’t tell what this object was. It had corners and edges, apparently, where people could grab it and lift. It was longish, maybe the length of a rolled rug, but it wasn’t a rug. Or at least it wasn’t what I could identify as a rug. Frankly, I’m not sure if it was anything except heavy.

“New neighbors?” I said to Sylvia, tapping dirt from my trowel.

My wife looked up, a smear of dirt like a mustache above her lip.

“Looks like it,” Sylvia said. “House has been on the market so long. It will be nice having somebody in it.”

“Will it? I love empty houses. New people are always odd people.”

“Why?”

“Because people are odd? No, seriously, they just move in and go about their lives and none of it matters. Why should I care? Why not let the house be empty? So we can live in peace. They’ll probably have a dog. And let it sit outside and bark. The noise will drive me nuts. I’ll want to go over with my noise vacuum and suck it up and the dog with it.”

“What are they moving?”

“Not a clue. Can you see anything?”

She looked for a few seconds. “Nope,” she said. “But they sure look like they’re hauling huge stuff. Hey–” She got my attention. “--you think they’re mimes?”

“Who knows, but it sure sounds big.”

It was the same thing all week long. I grew despondent. Groups of two to five men, carrying large items that, at least to our eyes, were invisible, but appeared to have considerable heft. One day, a really long item, maybe an invisible girder? The next day, something that could have fit inside a small apartment, floor to ceiling, wall to wall.

“I’m guessing it’s a commercial laundry machine,” I said. “Dirty sheets in, gray sheets out.”

“You know how when you’re on the freeway and get stuck behind some huge piece of industrial machinery on a low-boy?” Sylvia said. “Things that sort rocks or make concrete or turn forests into toilet paper? Maybe they’re DIYers, making their own butt wipe?”

“We should get them an Oversize Load banner. As a housewarming gift.”

That got us giggling like little kids, and the next thing you know, we were in the rack. When we were done, Sylvia rolled onto her side, propping her head on her hand. I’ve always loved the way her breasts slumped sideways at moments like that.

“I didn’t want to tell you,” she began, “but when I was walking Oscar by their place earlier today, I heard … well, it sounded like the sound you hear when an elevator starts to move and picks up speed. Rollers. Rattling. Air rushing past. Hearts beating loudly, everybody hoping this isn’t the elevator that goes blooey.”

“Did it go blooey?”

“Nope, but I heard it ding and the doors open and suddenly a bunch of voices, like when you arrive at your floor and other people are waiting to get on and everybody stands back for the guy with the photocopy machine on a cart and maybe you know some of them. Somebody always says that line from the Aerosmith song. Good morning, Mr. Tyler. Going … down?”

“Maybe they’ve got a big elevator in there?”

“It’s a one-story rancher, you idiot.”

The day after they moved the big thing in, I noticed an aroma. It was a little like fresh-mown grass, with notes of strawberry and lime, backed by a somewhat yeasty base. I imagined it was what a kombucha bakery smelled like. If there was such a thing. I asked Sylvia if she noticed it, and she said it smelled nice, like a lotion she wouldn’t mind rubbing behind her knees. My imagination chased that one, like a rat into underbrush. The aroma lasted for a day or two, then waned. In that time, the house swelled to twice its previous size, mostly upward but a little to the rear as well, despite no evidence of physical alterations. A light touch behind the knees will do that. Lights pulsed behind the windows.

We hadn’t met the new residents, so we thought it might be nice to invite them over for dinner. Get to know them. Maybe satisfy our curiosities.

Lars and Wanda arrived at six with a bottle of screw-cap red. Chateau Oaky Hills something or other. I already had a beer but poured three wines for them and Sylvia. She had made chicken with roast potatoes, onions and carrots. Very Middle America.

I toasted “to good neighbors,” hoping it wasn’t too direct. Then I offered my help, if they needed any, with moving their … whatever in.

“It looks big,” I said. “And heavy. I didn’t know … well, that shit like that, uh, took up so much space.”

“Oh, you have no idea,” Lars said. “Sensational, actually.”

“Well, if you need a dolly or a come-along, let me know.”

They thanked me. From there, it was pretty open-ended questions, hoping they would spill the beans. “Lotta stuff.” “Don’t you hate moving?” “Where did you come from?” “Are you among the lucky ones, remote workers?”

They weren’t. They came from Dubuque. Two kids, in elementary. He was a sonic archivist. And an olfactarian. What he said, but he saw our uncomprehending looks.

“Like a sound engineer,” he said. “Not a producer so much. More a collector.”

“Oh,” I said. Then, “All abooooard!”

He looked at me like I was an idiot.

“You know? Trains?”

“That would be the conductor,” he said. “No trains involved.”

It was a pleasant evening. Social events drain us both. We crashed. I was deep in dreamspace when the sound of a huge crash jerked me awake. Sylvia was screaming. “What is it? What is it?” Our room was fine. I slipped into my sweatpants and hoody, closing the door behind me in case we had an intruder, who had accidentally tipped over the refrigerator. I flicked on the hall light and slowly made my way through the house. All was normal. Nobody jumped out from behind a doorway with a knife.

So I went outside, out front, where activity lived. It was still dark. We had no street lights, by our choice, so I had to pick my way along our sidewalk. When you’re looking for a sound, or more precisely, the source of a sound, it can be challenging. Nothing presented itself. Across the street, I heard crunching and tinkling, like what you hear after a building has collapsed and the stuff on the top floor is just arriving at the bottom, all atomized and reduced to rubble inside a billowy cloud of concrete dust.

Otherwise, nothing to see here. I turned back toward our house and that’s when I tripped, stumbling forward and down, onto our lawn. What was that? I crawled to my hands and knees and worked my way back, feeling the ground for the obstruction. I found nothing but flat, pebbly concrete.

And then the voice. Ahh, that magic voice. Fred Parris. I’m old enough to remember when he first shone from the airwaves, he and his do-wop Satins. “In the Still of the Night” became the theme song to my lost innocence. Our lost virginity. But where was it coming from? It was almost as if the song had … body? Like wavy, blonde hair made out of air. What was the source? I heard Fred, but I saw no one. I was lying on a sidewalk in the dark, no radio, no passing car, no lights from any window. The song’s lyrics trailed off, as if just passing through, which of course, any song does.

Sylvia had the lights on when I returned, and told her about that magic moment. She smiled that smile, and wrapped her arms around my neck. Still the same.

After the sun came up and everyone got after their yard chores, I could see the new neighbors – Lars and Wanda and two teenage boys – out picking up stuff from their yard. I couldn’t see what. Frankly, it looked like they were just going through the motions. There was nothing there, but they were bending over and reaching down and struggling to stand back up, whatever it was (or wasn’t) cradled in their arms. Then they would take it back into the house.

I couldn’t resist wandering over, casual as can be, with Oscar on his leash. “Lend a hand?” I offered. Lars looked up, smiled. “Thanks, no,” he said. “Think we got it.”

“Uh, it?” I said.

“Oh,” he said, looking around, almost as if it should have been obvious. “Our sound file tipped over in the night. Not sure why. But audio went everywhere. Still missing a few pieces. If you happen to come across The Still of the Night or Alley Oop, we’d love to get them back.”

“Records?”

He stared at me, geezer and dog. “No,” he said, finally. “Songs. The sound of voices and instruments. Gear on gear. Weather. Urbanity. Construction and transport. All for aural consumption. They’re beasts, these sound bites. And heavy. Especially the death metal. Cavernous. Enough to fill St. Paul’s Cathedral.”

I must have looked confused. “Sorry if it woke you,” he said. “Moving is a bitch. We hadn’t organized everything yet. Our Tower-Crane-Toppling audio … well, it toppled– ironic, right? –  and knocked over the 747-Crashing, and that tumbled into the Walk-Off-Home-Run-Cheering and the Atomic-Bomb-Detonating and …”

He looked at me, as if something on my face betrayed what, in fact, I felt – a mixture of confusion and incredulity and the sense that I was being fed a line of snake oil mumbo-jumbo. Or the jabber of a savant. So I jumped at the chance for clarity.

“Isn’t sound just air? Invisible vibrations passing through? Like a pulse? Not much more than a feeling?”

“Or like a stupid question,” Lars replied. “It’s not just air. Sound is … value-added air. It’s  the most valuable thing, the repository of words, emotions, speech, music, natural percussive echo and oral transmission of memory, the gospel rock of Sister Rosetta Tharp, bird journeys, exhalations swept away by atmospheric rivers, conversations in sidewalk cafes and the councils of government, where hate takes root, gains traction, where fear inhales and hides, where ...”

“You’re stoned, right?”

To his credit, Lars smiled. Took no offense. Figured Rubes like me would never get it, so why waste time and breath trying to explain. He invited us to come by later.

“This house is way too small for our collection,” he said. “Last night? Proof if ever we needed it: We’ve got far more than the house can hold. We’re having a yard sale later. You could find a bargain or two. I’ll give you a deal on a priceless Steam-Engines-Colliding.”

I nodded. Priceless? As if anyone would pay for something as evanescent as a sound bite from the 19th century? I didn’t know what to say, but I’m sure that when our eyes met, Lars realized that I thought he was nuts.

“You could get a phone,” I said. “Upload all your noise. To the cloud? And download it when you need it. Easy peasy.”

Lars’s lips thinned out, tight, cinched into a grimace. It was like I’d insulted him and he didn’t want to get arrested for taking me to the ground and extinguishing my lights. Such as they are, my lights. Maybe I should’ve called it something other than noise, but it wasn’t exactly all music, was it?

“We gotta lighten the load,” he said. “Got a cacophonous shipment of stuff coming down the river on a barge. Need to make room.”

On the way back to our house, I chastised myself for being too judgmental. Who was I to say that Lars and his clan were any different than some scruffy philatelist or presser of flowers between paper towels inside the pages of the Sears catalog, whatever that is? Was.

Sylvia was sipping coffee when I returned. Slurping it. Loudly. At the top of her lungs. Or lips, actually. She peered over the top of her cup, expectant.

“News?”

“Lars is an air collector.”

“No shit? Where does he collect it?”

“Anywhere and everywhere. Only thing is? They’ve got too much of it. It’s crashing down around their ears.”

I suddenly felt the urge to capture Sylvia’s slurp, like a free-flying parakeet, and put it in a cage for future reference. To protect it, treasure it, appreciate it whenever I wanted. Then I realized that was unnecessary. It would always be there, every morning, until it wasn’t. Instead I told her about the yard sale.

---

Stuart Watson worked at newspapers in Anchorage, Seattle and Portland, and has literary work in Bull, Barzakh, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Bending Genres (Best Microfictions nominee), The Writing Disorder, The Muleskinner Journal, Reckon Review, Sensitive Skin, The Broadkill Review, Does It Have Pockets, and others, all linked from chiselchips.com. He lives in Oregon.

Rhea Thomas

Have You Seen My Sphinx?

Missing - Oakwood Grove Neighborhood

Paula H. on Moss Side Lane

May 27 at 8:13 AM

MISSING! My sphinx has escaped the backyard again. Please keep an eye out. Her name is Zara, and she might come to you if you call her by name. However, she doesn’t like men. Also, she’s going through menopause and is a bit grouchy, so you might want to avoid her. If she approaches you, don’t run. Hold very still and try your best to answer her riddles. If you see her, please call me and I’ll retrieve her safely, so no one gets hurt. There’s a reward.

Comments:

Jennifer T. - I haven’t seen your sphinx, but I’m very curious how you came to have one. Do you need a permit for that?

Alan M. - Is she microchipped?

Gene K. - What happens if you can’t answer her riddles correctly?

Luis H. - I wouldn’t advise calling her if you see her. She could kill a person.

Leslie R. - Oh, I’ve met her before. She’s very pleasant and intelligent. We discussed the theory of relativity for two hours.  

Vick S. - Why do you keep her in the backyard and not the house?

Jennifer T. - I’m pretty sure that goes against our HOA policies.

Bev J. - I didn’t know sphinxes could go through menopause. Has she tried any hormone replacement therapy?

Linda L. - I hope she comes home soon. Prayers to you and your family.

Jake R. - I saw her! She was in the park by the school, perched on top of the playscape. She looked like she was locked in on those annoying chihuahuas that always escape their backyard and run loose in the park, barking at the ducks. How much is the reward?

____________________________________________

Paula H. on Moss Side Lane

May 27 at 9:43 PM

UPDATE: Thank you to everyone for helping us find Zara. She was successfully located and brought home, but not after, regrettably, eating several chihuahuas and a duck. My apologies to the one gentleman who approached and attempted to solve her riddle before we showed up. That was a close one. She’s now safely in our backyard, and we’ve reinforced the gate. She’s really quite happy here, she just occasionally gets bored. She’s my best friend, and I’m so thankful nothing bad happened to her.

Comments

Jake R. - Nothing bad happened to her … You’re kidding, right? Thank god nothing bad happened to any humans. Those poor chihuahuas…although I’m so glad I don’t have to hear them yapping anymore.

Linda L - Thank God! Our prayers to Him were answered, and your sweet friend was returned. God bless you and bless Jesus for his miracles today!

Bev J. - I really hope you’ve looked into hormone replacement therapy for her. Menopause is a b*tch. I know that I raged regularly before I got help. I could have easily eviscerated my husband. Frankly, eating chihuahuas is way more chill of a result than it could have been.

Paula H. (author) - I’ve contacted a veterinarian who handles exotic animals and my gynecologist. They are currently consulting on the best course of treatment for her unique biome.

Jennifer T. - I looked in the HOA handbook. There are no rules around sphinxes in particular, but exotic and/or mythical animals are strongly discouraged, and you need to get the HOA board's approval before having one on your property.

Vick S. - Surely you don’t keep your best friend chained in the backyard? She must have a bedroom in your house? That seems inhumane. I have a friend who has an alicorn in their backyard, but they’ve built a temperature-controlled stable for him.

Paula H., (author) - My husband purchased her on our honeymoon in Egypt. She’s always lived with us, and I can’t imagine life without her. She goes in and out of the house but seems to prefer the outdoors over the bedroom at night. As with most cats, she does like our bathtub.

Leslie R. - I’m not sure Zara could have lived with herself if she’d eaten that man. She’s a very deep thinker and empathetic being. I’m sure she would have controlled herself. We’re both reading the book Sapiens and plan to discuss it next weekend over tea.

Jennifer T. - The city of Austin does require a permit for mythological animals. I’d hate to suggest anyone might call the cops on you, but you’d better have a permit just in case.

____________________________________________

Luis H. on Hawthorne Street

May 28 at 8:35 AM

This is Laura, Luis’ wife. I can’t find him. He’s gone missing. He was last seen looking for our chihuahuas at Oakwood Park.

---

Rhea Thomas lives in Austin, Texas where she works as a program manager in the digital media world. Her short stories have been published in multiple publications, including, most recently, The Fictional Café, Toasted Cheese, and Does It Have Pockets. She spends her free time hoarding books, walking her stubborn Labrador retriever, playing games with her sons, kayaking and swimming in rivers, searching for mysteries and writing short stories that explore magical moments in the mundane. Her first book, a collection of short stories, was published in August 2025, and she’s currently working on a literary mystery novel. You can find her online at https://rheathomasauthor.com/

Chris Scott

Someone Adopted a Mile of Route 59

         I almost missed the sign on my way to work, a commute I’d done so many times I kind of functioned on autopilot. But I’d also driven these 25 miles back and forth to town often enough that I was prone to notice even the smallest change of scenery -- minor construction, freshly painted dividers, the infrequent trooper patrolling for speeders. And this sign was definitely not something that’d been there before, though by the time I processed what it was -- blame it on not enough coffee in my system yet -- I’d already sped past it.

         So I was on the lookout for it on my commute home later that evening, and sure enough, there was an identical sign erected on the opposite side of the highway, just past the 72nd mile marker, southbound on Route 59. I eased off the gas a bit to read it. The sign was clearly brand new, as I’d suspected, its light blue background and white reflective lettering still crystal clear, not yet stained by the elements. It read: Adopt-A-Highway. Next Mile. Sponsored By: The Good Earth. I had no idea what The Good Earth was -- some environmental organization or religious group, if I had to guess -- but I couldn’t help but feel some pride in my community, a little gratitude for these unnamed good Samaritans. Lord knows Route 59, with its frequent neglect and littering and outright illegal dumping, could use a little TLC.

         A few miles later I pulled off into Blue Cove, a new-ish housing development and my home of 5 years -- and where, it should be noted, there is no cove, blue or otherwise. The largest body of water that could conceivably have anything resembling a cove is hundreds of miles away. I took the winding main road through the cookie cutter array of houses and manicured lawns until I arrived at mine, which I shared with my wife Melanie. I pulled my sedan up next to Melanie’s smaller teal green hatchback and opened my door to the sound of a lawnmower which was abruptly cut off. I didn’t even need to look across the road to know it was Reggie, who seemed to spend maybe 70% of his time mowing his yard, which always looked immaculate.

         “How goes it?” Reggie called out, per usual.

         “It goes!” I replied, giving Reggie a quick wave, along with his wife Sherri who was seated on their porch, securely under the shaded canopy, and sipping a glass of what I guessed was a cocktail. Retirement suited them well.

         Inside the house, Melanie was already home from work and seated at the dining room table, carefully studying one of a dozen magazines spread out across the polished wood, opened to various room decors and colorful nursery concepts.

         “Hey,” I said.

         “Hey,” Melanie said back. “This shit’s overwhelming.”

         I walked up behind her and put my hands on her shoulders. From this angle I could see she was beginning to show. “So give it a break for a while,” I said.

         “I mean, it’s still fun.” Melanie showed me an outer space themed nursery, with planets and rockets and astronauts painted on the walls. “Do you think I could do this?”

         “For sure,” I said. “Absolutely.” Melanie was a teacher and t-minus five months from delivering our first child, which was the whole reason we moved into a house that was unquestionably too big for only the two of us. It just took us a little longer than we expected.

         “Oh, cool thing,” I changed the subject. “Someone adopted a stretch of Route 59, just down a little ways. Few miles from here.”

         “That’s great,” Melanie replied, still focused on the magazines. “It could use some TLC.”

         “That’s exactly what I was thinking,” I said, leaving Melanie at the dining room table so I could start dinner.

~

         The next week I was driving to work when, just past the adopt-a-highway sign, I saw a group of people holding garbage bags and spread out along the grass between the shoulder and the woodline. Making an uncharacteristically impulsive decision, I slowed down and pulled over onto the shoulder, turned on the hazards, got out of my car, and started walking back to them. There appeared to be around ten of them, two adults -- a man and a woman -- and a large group of kids of varying ages. They were all dressed casually with orange reflective vests hung over their shirts, and using pickers to move trash from the roadside into their bags.

         I waved to the adults and called out “Howdy!” even though I never say howdy. The man and woman and some of the kids waved back, all smiles, and I suddenly felt a little awkward. But I extended my hand to the man first and he shook it and I said “Welcome to the neighborhood,” which I immediately realized was a little weird because I don’t really consider the highway my neighborhood per se, and also it’s not like these people actually lived right here.

         “I’m Ted,” I said, and then turned to shake the woman’s hand next. Both of them appeared slightly older than me, maybe in their late 40’s, and what I would describe as classically good-looking and tall, with light blue eyes and perfect postures.

         “Hi Ted, how are you?” the woman asked.

         “I’m great,” I said, “How are you?”

         Before she could answer, a little boy sidled up next to me and echoed, “How are you?”

         So again I said, “I’m great.” And again I asked, this time of the boy, “How are you?”

         That’s when the boy, instead of answering, said, “Do you know Neil Armstrong?”

         I reflexively chuckled at the out-of-leftfield question before saying “Sure, yeah, first man on the moon!” And then the boy’s face completely changed, his smile transforming into an awestruck and mesmerized gaping mouth.

         “And how is he?” the boy asked, in what I could only describe as pure wonderment. I was so taken aback by the question that it took me a few seconds to understand what he meant.

         “Oh I’m sorry, I’m not actually friends with Neil Armstrong. I just mean I know about him. Because he’s famous,” I said, and looking into the boy’s face, now morphing into clear disappointment, I figured this would be the wrong time to mention that Neil Armstrong had been dead for a number of years.

         It was at this moment that a young girl, around 9 years old or so, walked up next to the boy and announced in one breathless and uninterrupted sing-song stream-of-consciousness: “Neil Armstrong Buzz Aldrin Pete Conrad Alan Bean Alan Shepard Edgar Mitchell David Scott James Irwin John Young Charles Duke Gene Cernan Harrison Schmitt.”

         I really had no idea what to say to this peculiar outburst, so for a moment we all just stood there for a bit, under the bright heat of the sun, a steady stream of traffic buzzing by us.

         Finally I asked, “Is that a list of everyone who’s ever walked on the moon?”

         And the girl nodded with a grin and said, “Sure is!”

         “That’s remarkable,” I said, still unsure how to respond to this inexplicable turn in the conversation. “That’s really, really impressive,” I added.

         And then I turned to the man again, trying to salvage my attempt at a neighborly introduction. “Well I just wanted to say thank you for doing this. For cleaning up,” I said, and the man nodded, smiling, clearly appreciative.

         “Of course,” he said, “We’re making pretty good headway so far. Lots of trash picked up. This is the first phase.”

         “Oh,” I replied, “And what’s phase two?”

         “Clearing out all these non-native invasive plants,” the man said, gesturing back toward the brush. “Kudzu, English Ivy, knotweed, and so forth.” I didn’t really know what any of these things were, but I took his word for it.

         “Destructive species that don’t belong here,” the woman added, apparently sensing my confusion. And I have to confess that there was something about the tone of her voice combined with the smile stretched across her face -- across all of their faces -- that sent a slight chill down my spine. I noticed they had formed a large crescent shape around me.

         “Well, thank you again,” I said, starting to step backwards toward my car. “Maybe my wife and I could come help out sometime.”

         “We’d love that,” the man said, his smile never wavering. The kids started spreading out again, getting back to work with their pickers. “Enjoy the rest of your day,” the man said, and then pointed at the sky. “Going to be a waxing gibbous tonight.”

         “That sounds great,” I said for some reason, “See you later.” And then just before I got to my car, I remembered something and turned back to holler, “Oh I meant to ask, what’s The Good Earth?”

         “A nonprofit!” the man yelled back.

         “Awesome!” I said, because that’s just usually what people say whenever someone says they’re associated with a nonprofit, no matter what the nonprofit is. As I started to pull away, I realized I’d never gotten any of their names.

~

         When I arrived home that night I found Melanie upstairs working in the guest bedroom that we were gradually converting into a nursery.

         “So guess what,” I said. “On my way to work this morning I ran into that group that adopted Route 59. The one I was telling you about?”

         “How exactly did you run into them?” Melanie asked.

         “I mean they were cleaning up the highway when I drove by so I pulled over and chatted with them. Anyway, it’s actually this, like, huge family. Or maybe it was two adults chaperoning a group of kids? I couldn’t really figure that out, but they all seem really nice. But also a little weird? Like they’re all kind of obsessed with the moon for some reason?”

         “Oh weird,” Melanie said, a little distracted.

         “And the guy -- the dad I guess -- said The Good Earth is a nonprofit. Though now that I think about it, I don’t know if that means they work for the nonprofit, or they own it or something. Or they’re just volunteering? I’m not wording this right, but they all just seemed a little off. I searched for The Good Earth online but that combination of words is pretty much Google proof. So I…” I noticed Melanie was texting on her phone, not really listening to anything I was saying. “What’s up?” I asked.

         Melanie sighed and said, “Have you seen Reggie the last couple days?”

         I searched my memory. “No, now that you mention it, the last time would’ve been a couple nights ago. He was mowing his yard, naturally.”

         “Sherri’s been texting me. Apparently she can’t find him. Says he went to town to run some errands yesterday and then she got some weird texts from him, and then he just never came home.”

         “Oh wow,” I said. “Weird how?”

         “She didn’t say. God, my fear would be like a stroke or dementia or something. Really scary.”

         “He’s always seemed fine to me,” I replied. “I mean I haven’t noticed any slippage. Have you?”

         “No, but I guess it’s hard to tell when you start getting along in years. And it’s not like we’re super close.”

         I noticed Melanie gently rubbing her stomach, which prompted me to ask, “How are you feeling?”
         “Honestly pretty good. Appetite’s firing up though. Hint hint,” she said.

         I went downstairs to start dinner.

~

         Over the next two weeks I saw the Good Earth family -- as I’d taken to referring to them, whether they were a literal family or not -- on their mile of Route 59 just about every morning on my way to the office. It made me wonder why the kids -- there were 10 of them, I’d counted, ranging in age from about 5 to 16 -- weren’t in school, or if they were homeschooled, or what. And I was a little puzzled by these people’s obsession with this one mile stretch of road. But there was no arguing with their results.

         In just a few days’ time they’d completed the first phase, clearing a full mile of all trash, fast food bags, water bottles, tires, and other junk. It looked so much cleaner than I’d ever seen it. Then they began phase two, swapping in their pickers for shovels and pruners and loppers, ripping up all manner of plants and vegetation that must have been the invasive species they’d mentioned.

         It was amazingly clear, very quickly, what a difference simply removing some garbage and problematic vegetation had on this mile-long stretch of highway. The colors appeared more vibrant, the remaining plants and wildflowers more alive and lush, the sky clearer, the air actually fresher -- as hard as that might be to believe. I basked in it every morning and every evening, driving by with my windows down, waving to the family hard at work. And they always took the time to wave back, the usual big smiles on their faces.

         Back in Blue Cove the police visited Reggie’s and Sherri’s house a few times in the immediate days following Reggie’s disappearance. I caught Sherri outside once or twice, and she looked distraught, despondent. I felt awful for her. Shortly after that the police appeared at a couple other houses further down the street. The McCluskys (a family of four who moved in shortly after we did) appeared to have upped and left town without telling anyone. Another teenage boy, Charles Camp was his name, went to his job at the gas station one night and never returned to his parents. This was far and away the most police activity I’d ever seen in Blue Cove. Everyone was a little on edge.

         Maybe I was on edge too, because pretty soon the mile 72 stretch of Route 59 started to feel a little creepy and unsettling to me. The Good Earth family appeared to have finished their work, and I turned in six or seven consecutive commutes to and from work without seeing them. But the section of highway they worked on took on a distinct feeling of unreality to me, as though the pendulum had swung too far in the other direction from the neglect and degradation that once marked that place, to the borderline artificial and sterile cleanness that I drove through every day. It was too perfect, in other words, a jarring contrast to the immediate miles preceding and proceeding it. Every blade of grass in this one mile seemed deliberately organized, the trees marking the woodline symmetrically spaced and exactly straight in a way that made me feel anxious and uneasy. When I asked Melanie if she’d noticed this too, she was no help. Even though Route 59 was the only access point for Blue Cove, the high school she taught at was in the opposite direction, meaning she rarely drove through mile 72.

         Then one night, driving through Blue Cove after another long day at work, I noticed police cars at yet another house on our street. That was when I started to get a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. I pulled into our driveway and noticed Melanie’s car wasn’t there. When I got inside, the house was empty and I realized I had several missed calls from her, and a series of texts:

         Running to the hardware store for some paint and stuff. Back later!

         And let me know if you need anything from town

         Just tried calling, can you call back?

         I seem to be turned around on 59 somehow. GPS isn’t working. I’m totally lost

         Nobody else around. Really creepy. Getting freaked out. Call back asap

         I immediately turned back out the door and ran to my car, jumped in, and spun out of the driveway, tires screeching as I floored it down our street, out of Blue Cove, and back onto the highway. I white knuckled it for three miles, speeding toward that awful and disquieting stretch of road, where I felt in my gut I would find Melanie. 55 mph, 60 mph, 65, 75, 85. Dusk was descending, and when my headlights caught the reflective glimmer of the adopt-a-highway sign, I immediately slowed the car to a crawl, and started scanning, eyes peeled in every direction, squinting through the setting sun for any clue, any sign of Melanie anywhere.

         I almost missed it. There, tucked in the trees, how it got there was anyone’s guess. The teal green bumper of Melanie’s car, peeking out through the immaculate brush. I braked hard and threw the door open, started running toward it as fast as I could, calling out Melanie’s name, fearing the worst. If I had been paying closer attention at that moment, if I hadn’t been so distracted, so focused on Melanie, I would’ve thought it odd that there were no other cars on the highway. I would’ve found it peculiar that there were no tire tracks leading from the pavement to Melanie’s car. But when I finally got through the brush, the tall grass and leaves, I flung open the driver’s side door and just as I did there was a loud crack, a blinding flash in the sky, a shaking of the earth, and I was subsumed by a cold and ghostly white space, that looked uncannily as bright and brilliant as the surface of --

~

         I’m on autopilot again. No memory of leaving work, but I must have, because it’s nighttime and I’m driving south on Route 59. When I pull into Blue Cove, it’s totally empty. All the lights are out in every house I pass. Nobody’s home. There’s no sign of life anywhere, until I pull into my driveway and open the car door to the sound of a lawnmower. I step out of my car, and the first thing I notice is that even though the sky is black, it’s still incredibly bright out. I look up to the source of the light and see a full moon, but it’s not just a full moon. It’s far closer to the earth than it should be, casting everything under it in an eerie white luminescence. It’s so near to the Earth I can make out its pocked surface in unreal detail. Every crater and peak, every death-black shadow against its white and gray and ancient surface. It’s so horribly vibrant it almost looks alive, like it has a pulse, and I’m gripped with a dread so all-consuming I have to avert my gaze.

         I once again notice the sound of the lawnmower and look across the street to see Reggie, back home and diligently mowing his lawn again. Under the moonlight I can make him out clearly, and when he pivots his push mower back in my direction, I can see that his cheeks are wet with the tears streaming down his face. I call out his name but he doesn’t see me, can’t hear me over the roar of the mower. He turns back to mow the next strip of grass.

         I follow the walkway up to my front door, open it, go inside. It’s not until I see Melanie sitting at our dining room table that I remember she’d gone missing. I’d left the house in a rush to go find her. It’s coming back to me now.

         “Where were you?” I ask her.

         “I’ve been right here,” she says, and then she turns and looks at me, and it’s immediately clear she’s trying to communicate something to me with her eyes, something she’s afraid to say out loud. She breaks eye contact and looks aimlessly around the house, so I do the same, and that’s when I realize: There’s something wrong with our house. Nothing obviously amiss at first, just the kind of deep wrongness you’d notice in a place you’d inhabited for years, a place that’d been profoundly changed somehow. It’s too clean, yes, but there’s more to it than that. Like someone took our house completely apart, and then reassembled it piece by piece in a way that’s slightly off, vaguely unreal. Everything is at a wrong angle. It could be the too-bright moon hurtling its vast wattage through our windows, but I know it’s more than that. I know this is not the same house I left this morning. This is not Blue Cove. Not exactly.

         Suddenly there’s a knock at the door. I give Melanie a look like “I’m not sure I want to answer that.” But her expression is impossible to read. Or maybe I just don’t want to acknowledge how terrified she looks right now.

         In spite of myself, I walk to the door, open it. The man is standing there. The founder of The Good Earth, or the good samaritan, or the husband and father of ten children, or whoever he is. He’s smiling, of course.

         The man says, “Welcome to the neighborhood.”

         “But this is my neighborhood,” I say, and he gently nods and says “Mmhmm” and gives me a look like he’s patiently humoring me.

         “Mind if we talk outside?” he asks. I don’t want to, but I follow him out onto our walkway, and then he stops and breathes in deeply, exhales with a beatific smile across his face, and looks up at the massive moon hanging above us, nearly close enough I could reach out and touch it.

         “Beautiful, isn’t it?” he asks. I don’t reply.

         “Humans used to imagine there might be beings living on the moon,” the man says. “Of course now you know there’s exceedingly little atmosphere there. No liquid water, temperatures far too low to sustain life, et cetera, et cetera. But there’s more to the moon than what you can see and touch. A great deal more, in fact.”

         “What did you want to talk about?” I ask, eager to get this over with. Eager for him to leave so I can get back to my wife, back to figuring out how to deal with all this.

         “Ah, yes, well…” he kind of trails off, seems to collect his thoughts. “I guess I wanted to talk about pollution. Both the obvious kind of pollution you leave by, say, carving up hundreds of millions of acres of pristine natural beauty with paved roads and automobiles. Or, just as another example, the kind of pollution you create when you choose to stain the perfect void of space with chemicals and exhaust and debris, and… other things.”

         That’s when I notice that planted right in the middle of our front yard is a flag that wasn’t there before, flapping gently in the night breeze, intermittently unfurling itself to reveal red and white stripes, white stars against a blue background, all faded just slightly with a light layer of gray dust. My mind is racing. I don’t want to know what it is. I don’t want to know how it got here.

         “Then there’s another kind of pollution,” the man continues. “An unseen, odorless pollution you create, every second of every day, simply by being what you are.” The man looks at me, and for the first time I can recall, he’s no longer smiling.

         “What… am I?” I ask. And then the man laughs, like I’ve just said the funniest thing he’s ever heard.

         “Excellent question, Ted,” the man says. “Excellent question.”

         Then we’re both just silent for a minute, before he says, “So I wanted to talk about this, yes, but I also wanted to share the good news. Would you like to hear the good news, Ted?” he asks, and the truth is I really don’t. I don’t want to hear whatever he has to say next. But I nod anyway.

         “The good news,” he continues, “Is that whatever is done can be undone. And whatever is made,” and then he gestures grandly at my home with open arms, “Can be remade even better, safer. Cleaner. And far, far from where it can do any more harm whatsoever.”

         Then, the man puts his hand on my shoulder, and for the first time I can sense his immense, unnatural strength and total command of me and everything around us, his obvious otherworldliness. He leans in close and whispers, “That’s phase three.”

         The man pats my shoulder, then turns and begins strolling away leisurely through the bright night, turning back just once more to holler, in a voice barely audible above the din of Reggie’s lawnmower, “It’s pretty quiet here now, but you’ll have more neighbors joining you soon. Many more.”

         He turns the corner and disappears. I stand alone before my house, ablaze in the moonlight. If I squint, if I think about this in just the right way, I can believe this is my home. My big, immaculate, perfect home. Just as it’s always been. I can believe that Melanie and I and our growing family will be happy here, whatever this place is. What other choice do I have? I clear my throat, walk back up the steps, and go inside to start dinner.

---

Chris Scott's work has appeared in The New Yorker, HAD, Flash Frog, ergot., Gooseberry Pie, New Flash Fiction Review, scaffold, Maudlin House, and elsewhere. He is a regular contributor for ClickHole, and an elementary school teacher in Washington, DC. You can read his writing at https://www.chrisscottwrites.com.

Nicole M. Babb

Useless

Excuse me, I want to call after you as you turn off the lights to the now-empty office. You’ve left me behind. But I don’t say anything, and you don’t look back.

~

       We met the day you graduated from college. Your grandfather gave me to you as a gift. Precision, he said. It’s everything in this business. He would know. We took our first picture together that day – the one you kept in a brass frame on the top shelf of your bookcase; the one you placed into a box just this morning. You held me aloft like a queen with a scepter, the world at your feet.

       You got your first job and brought me along. You spent hours bent over the drafting table in your office, me under your hand, making sharp, straight lines together. You were a natural. Everyone said so. 

       One night, late, a senior architect with frat boy hair and a single front tooth inexplicably more yellow than the rest, passed by on his way out. We were still working. He stopped in your doorway and stared. A t-square, he sneered. Useless. Computers are the future, baby. You better keep up or you’ll get left behind. Your face remained scarlet long after he left, your warm tears pattered onto my unvarnished oak body, leaving behind faint spots. Scars I bear to this day. You put me away that night, into a dusty corner where I could humiliate you no more.

       The following summer, the facilities manager seemed determined to single-handedly end the record-breaking heat wave plaguing the city. The A/C was set to Arctic. Your arms were covered with goosebumps. You looked desperately at the vent, wide open, and searched around for a means of closing it. Your eyes landed on me. Hello, friend. In your outstretched hand, I was just long enough to slide the tab that would block the icy blast. Instead of returning me to the corner, you propped me against your desk. It felt good to be of use again.

       You got a promotion – with a raise – and bought your first piece of real art. A landscape painting, Impressionist style. No buildings. An unusual choice for an architect. You laid me flat against the wall, making tiny pencil marks and moving me back and forth until you arrived at a midpoint. Precision, just like your grandfather instructed you all those years before. When you had the spot just right, you turned me on my side and used my thin edge to hammer the nail into place.

       That senior architect was also promoted, to partner. He stopped by your office again. That night he came in, his one discolored tooth portending malice. He touched your hair, then your neck. He called you baby, but instead of condescending, it sounded sinister. You wielded me like a sword to keep him at bay as you fled. If I could have, I would have tripled in size to shield you from him. I would have used my giant, permanently outstretched arms to fling him to the ends of the earth.

       You got your second job. The one that would be home for the next twelve years. The one that made you, nurtured you, almost broke you. You burned bright in those years. Clients sought you out. You were staffed on the most prestigious projects, pushed to your limits.

       On your hard days, or when you just needed to think, you held me over your shoulder in a batter’s pose, tossing crumpled drafts into the air, swinging me with more heft than necessary to make the connection. Over and over, the wads of paper would bounce off the wall into a pile. T-ball, you called it, in my honor. Other times, I hung upside down in your hands to become a putter as you took aim at makeshift golf balls, rocketing them into an upended cup. Carolyn would come in most afternoons. She acted as pitcher, or caddy. But mostly, she was your confidant, and you hers. You were inseparable then. Best friends.

       You started using me for work again. Your wealthy clients enjoyed the theater of it. Of feeling like something special was being created just for them. During meetings, you brought me into the conference room along with an oversized drafting pad. The clients looked hungrily across the marred table, mesmerized watching you work. Yes. Yes, that’s exactly what I had in mind, they whispered. Without fail, they left the office contract-bound, several thousand dollars lighter, and clutching your sketches as though they might take flight like some rare and mythical bird. Those were some of my favorite days.

       You started getting the recognition you deserved. Your projects were featured in Architectural Digest. A luxury beach cottage in the Hamptons, a sprawling ranch in Wyoming, an eco-friendly winery in the Willamette Valley. You were chosen for the Design Network’s 40 Under 40. Each accolade was cause for celebration. Champagne in the conference room, Bruce yelled from the hallway. For our star. He was thrilled to have you as his protégé, to claim he had some hand in your skill.

       Those celebrations lasted well into the night. One bottle of champagne turned into two, turned into half a dozen assorted bottles, always left scattered about the conference room in the mornings. Eric would bring a bottle of bourbon out from his office. Jackie would put on music. Once, I was still in the conference room, left behind after a meeting, when the party started. Bon Jovi came on. You grabbed me with both hands and belted Livin’ on a Prayer. I was passed around. Carolyn took her turn with Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. I was the star of Conference Room Karaoke. Jackson even had a habit of flipping me over mid-song, turning me from mic into electric guitar. He ran his fingers back and forth, strumming the imaginary strings along my spine. There was a period when those parties happened more nights than not. From our perch on the 47th floor, the city sparkled below and it those moments it felt like the sparkle was just for us. You were still the queen, the world still at your feet. It was exhilarating while it lasted.

       You were unstoppable then. Before the accident.

       The firm was hired to design a 200-unit luxury condo building in a historic district. Your name on the project was part of the deal. You didn’t want to do it. It was out of your depth, you said. Your other projects had been smaller. You could prioritize form. Aesthetics. This was all function, hidden behind only the thinnest veneer of creativity. Your involvement was non-negotiable. It was the only time you and Bruce argued. The only time he pulled the boss card. I may as well be designing a Wal-Mart, you whined. Bruce was pissed. You think you’re too good for our clients? You’ll do this, and you’ll do it well, or you won’t even be able to get a job as a greeter at Wal-Mart by the time I’m through with you. You may have had more raw talent, but Bruce had connections. You knew when you had lost. You did the job, adding your signature touches where you could. And when you attended the ribbon cutting, even you had to admit, it was magnificent.

       Six weeks later, a two-year-old boy, left alone on a balcony for just a minute, slipped under the beautiful wrought iron handrail you had so painstakingly selected. A lawsuit was filed. The gap between the floor and the bottom of the railing was one inch wider than it should have been. One inch, and someone’s child was gone.

       The suit dragged on for nearly two years. I didn’t think you would survive it. There were no more parties. You started keeping your door closed. You blamed Bruce, and yourself. Some people said the inch wouldn’t have made a difference. Two year olds are small. It was really the mom’s fault. But it mattered to the building department. It mattered to you. Then, as abruptly as it started, it ended. Carolyn testified in a deposition that you partied a lot. That you often came to work hungover. Finally, someone said it. Someone who was supposed to be on your side blamed you. The next day, the case settled, and that night, you bludgeoned your office to bits. Swinging me like a mace, you brought awards, sheetrock, knick-knacks to ruin. Even that beautiful, blurry landscape was unrecognizable when we were done. We too, were changed. One of my arms snapped off in the fray. For the second time since we met, I thought, That’s the end for me. Useless now. I think you felt the same.

       But when you went out on your own a few months later, you brought me with you to the two-room office at the corner of a strip mall. The carpets were a dirty beige, as were the walls. You patched me up with a thin line of wood glue bolstered by a strip of duct tape. You arranged your few surviving items – the picture of us – on the bookshelf left behind by a former tenant. It was bulky, old-fashioned, nothing you would have picked out.

       You worked alone. It was somber. And sober. No champagne, no karaoke, no glittering lights. You took small projects. Houses. Office remodels. A Target – which I had to admit was a lot like a Wal-Mart. You erred on the side of caution, so much so that your work became bland. You sighed a lot.

       After we had been alone for a couple of years, one Wednesday, at five o’clock sharp, a man met you at the office. Tall, with black hair, wearing the khakiest pants I’ve ever seen. It was the first time since the move that another person had been in the space. Less than a year later, you added a second picture to the top shelf. This one in a crystal frame. You in a white dress next to the man.

       I was the first to know when you got pregnant. You were in the middle of sketching a conceptual design for a beachfront hotel – your first big bid since going out on your own – when you doubled over, hands pressed to your mouth. You crawled to the trashcan and vomited. Then you addressed your stomach, Keep it together, Pipsqueak. We need this job if you want to live in a good school district.

       You got the job. There was still no champagne, but the tall man – Scott, I learned – came and painted the walls a mossy green. You replaced the carpet. Bought a new landscape. Scott hung it with a real hammer, which was probably for the best, given my arm.

       As your belly grew, you found new uses for me. A shoe horn to slide your swollen feet from your shoes so you could prop them on your desk, and to squeeze them back in. A back scratcher for that fleshy part just beneath your right shoulder blade that always seemed to itch.

       The hotel took years to finish, but it breathed new life into. Or maybe it was Scott and Pipsqueak. I was never really sure. You brought on two associates. Young, eager, like you were once. They hung on your every word.

       When Pipsqueak decided to be an architect for career day, like her mom, her outfit included me. I was going to school for the first time. Then, the morning of, she decided she wanted to be a judge. I could tell you were sad, when you asked, Are you sure, but then you said, You can be anything you want to be. You pulled me out of her backpack and turned me into scales of justice with string and paper plates. I still got to go to school. It was more fun than being an air guitar. Some years later, you added another photo. Pipsqueak in a cap and gown. She looked just like you did the day we met.

       You started having hot flashes and we came full circle. I was back on vent duty, full time. Open the vent, close it. Open, close.

       The years passed in a comfortable rhythm. Another photo appeared, Pipsqueak in her own white gown, you and Scott beside her. One day you brought in a boy who called you Mimi and climbed on everything. You pulled him from the bookcase, and as you set him down, I thought I saw your eyes glisten. I wondered if you were thinking of another little boy.

       Work slowed. Your associates had become partners and they got other offers. You were happy for them, even as you knew it was the beginning of your end. You packed up the office and turned off the lights and locked the door and left me here. If there’s no use for you, there’s none for me.

~

       The lights flicker on. You’re back. You pick me up, gently now. I’m as frail as you are. Come on, you say. We have shit to do.

---

Nicole M. Babb is a recovering litigator who is using her exit from the world of facts to write stories that exist somewhere between the real and not-real. Her favorite stories include larger-than-life characters and an extra helping of snark. She’s a lifelong New Orleanian, and when she’s not writing enjoys good wine, the occasional bad wine, yoga, and board games. She has a piece forthcoming in Foofaraw (November 2025) and in 2024, she was awarded the Scribes Prize for Microfiction. Find her at nicolebabb.com.

Kristen Havens

In the Face of Such Hope

(The Giant Cookie We’ve Been Waiting For)

On the afternoon the first asteroid hits, a woman in the building across from mine orgasms for forty-five minutes. I am on my balcony, reading a sci-fi novel about Mars. The sound of their lovemaking bounces off the walls of our shared alley. Every so often I shuffle my pages so as to say, "Here I am, going about my business, not listening,” but I am caught up; it is impossible not to be. The lovers laugh; the woman’s voice moves around the apartment, her climax rising here, falling there, until it seems a traveling prank. When it’s finally over, I hear the shower running and realize half the chapter has finished without me; the red planet rises like an ogre on the horizon. I check my watch. Once again, I have lost time: hundreds of seconds have slipped away from me while eavesdropping on other people’s lives. I go inside to moderate my afternoon support group. So many heads in little boxes on the screen: so many people like me, needing purpose before the end, and then others who’ve looked and found and lost and now demand nothing less than true love immediately, like a klieg light in the eyes. That alignment. What can I say, in the face of such hope? Each of us is alone, but we’re together in loneliness: isn’t that enough? No. They want more. I’m burning, it’s like a burning, someone says. Another: I want that. And another: What do you think it means? Consumed by clues, signs, and suggestions, they examine everything in search of joy. I envy this: the way they wring meaning from every moment, rather than merely tumbling through time. Doctor, someone says. I listen again for the couple next door, but there is nothing, only sirens in the distance. What do you think? Nobody has ever demanded passion of me like that; I am no one's one and only. Doctor, they repeat. What are you reading? I look down. My hand is still on the cover of the old paperback. Mars pulses and writhes under my palm. I hold the book up so they can see. Hurry, the red planet hums to me. There isn’t any time. One of the men onscreen, a teacher, nods. It’s a sign, he says. A girl in the class I am teaching writes of a giant cookie that blots out the sun.

---

Kristen Havens is a writer living in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in PANK, Atticus Review, Monkeybicycle, Necessary Fiction, and Bending Genres, among others. She makes her living as a freelance IT contractor and developmental editor. She is currently writing a novel about technology.