Luanne Castle

Why I Always Wear Red

This cabin remembers when I dried my small red coat at the wood stove. It had grown too warm inside, so I left for the path to the dirt road. But the trail was buried by the snow that had been coming down for hours. What happened then I don’t like to think about. It does run through my mind still. Runs as an overprotected girl does from a wolf, trembling and fast.

This is the first time I’ve been back since it all happened years ago. To build a fire, I need to walk out to the diminished woodpile under its rotting canvas cover. Through the window I can see it beginning to snow, just as it did that night. While I am outside, I notice the old rusty chainsaw. As I carry back the saw and the birch logs, I spot a smudged set of tracks, the claw etchings more defined than the paw pads. I know he’s been here, waiting for me.

Inside, I load the stove and then I oil and fuel the saw. The room warms and glows, the scent of burning wood filling the air. The window’s lacy glaze has become transparent. Suddenly, eyes glare at me through the glass and breath melts the last of the frost. The image disappears, and the door bursts open, his body and hunting knife filling the space. The chain saw is ready for him. The fire is ready for the cabin.

The cabin with its ancient logs, the cooking oil and old mattresses, burns swiftly. The snow drifts will protect the forest from the fire, so I climb into my snowmobile and start the motor. Looking back at the blaze through the window, I will away the last smidgen of regret. At the open road, I spot my old friend, icy chunks clinging to his chest and shoulder fur. As I slow the machine, he climbs behind me and clutches my waist as I speed up and on down the newly plowed road.

See
how red
hides any
saw residue
That’s why I always wear red in the woods.

---

Luanne Castle’s award-winning full-length poetry collections are Rooted and Winged (Finishing Line 2022) and Doll God (Kelsay 2015). Her chapbooks are Our Wolves (Alien Buddha 2023) and Kin Types (Finishing Line 2017), a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award. Luanne’s Pushcart and Best of the Net-nominated poetry and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in The Dribble Drabble Review, Copper Nickel, Pleiades, River Teeth, Verse Daily, and other journals.  

Bethany Jarmul

Baby Doll

Future
After she passes, in her pristine home with sparkling floors, Lysol-scent still hanging in the air, her salt and pepper-haired son will decipher the code for the fireproof safe. It will click open. Inside he’ll find her passport, life insurance, a ceramic bunny he painted as a child. Behind the rest, a mangled plastic doll. He’ll jump at the sight of it. A germaphobe, he’ll slip on latex gloves before handling the smoke-scarred doll, turn it over in his hands and mind, unable to reconcile his picture-perfect mother with the woman who protected this trash.

Present
In the piles of blackened boards, charred clothing, and ash, a baby doll half-melted, deflated head. One blue glassy eyeball still intact. A smudged name written in Sharpie on the doll’s foot—“Bella.” The young woman holds it up with her shaky, gloved hands, hugs the doll tightly to her chest, soot mixing with tears.
If only the little girl was waiting at the hotel with her baby brother. If only the firemen had arrived five minutes sooner. If only the young woman hadn’t left the candle burning. If only.

Past
They didn’t know what to do with preemie babies then. They carried her around on a pillow, wore silk gloves when they held her—the tiny baby born to a child, a teenager of only 14. The girl-turned-mother lifted her daughter from the pillow with her bare hands, nuzzled her into her chest.

The girl didn’t have much to offer her daughter. Only two things, and she wanted them to be perfect. She gave her daughter the name beautiful and a pink-wrapped gift, purchased with the shiny coins she’d saved in her piggy bank—a pristine baby doll with sparkling eyes.

---

Lost or Found in the McDonald’s PlayPlace

Two white-turned-gray socks, one lime green with pink stripes
Half-nibbled chicken nugget
Dried-out markers in black, red, and brown.
Dust bunnies, approximately 7 months old
Friends
Slushie, either thrown up, dropped or dripped into a blue coagulated puddle
Size 7 pink Nike shoes, barely worn
A 15-month-old toddler, quickly discovered
Nicknames: “Chicken nugget man,” “Sock girl,” “Speedy”
Mario stickers on the blue plastic slide
Confidence to chase an older girl with twisty hair
A first kiss
Jigglypuff Pokemon card
Purple polka dotted pencil
Piggytails
Pineapple-print flip flop, busted
Fear of clowns
Soggy fries in plastic crevices
New curse words
Two daddy long leg spiders—no three
Strawberry-scented lip gloss
Hair ball with blonde, brunette, and black strands
Lightning McQueen toy, underneath a pirate hat
Six straw-wrapper spit balls
A heart defect, after playing tag
The softness of the padded ground
A dozen fluorescent lights, like angels
Urgent voices of strangers—a kind of hymn
The dial tone of 9-1-1—a musical crescendo
A new reality, just beginning

---

Bethany Jarmul’s work has appeared in more than 50 literary magazines—including Salamander, Emerge Journal, Cease Cows—and been nominated for Best of the Net and Best Spiritual Literature. Her nonfiction chapbook Take Me Home is forthcoming from Belle Point Press. She earned first place in Women on Writing’s Q2 2022 & Q2 2023 essay contests. Her essay “Intersections” earned the award for “Best in Show: Creative Nonfiction” for Winter 2023 from Inscape Journal. Bethany enjoys chai lattes, nature walks, and memoirs. She lives near Pittsburgh with her family. Connect with her at bethanyjarmul.com or Twitter @BethanyJarmul.

G.G. Silverman

The Crush

I’m from a different plane of reality, and though I’m you and you’re me, you’re better, somehow, and it makes me crazy, so I follow your every move. Tonight there are more of me, more of us, pale ghosts of myself from the multiverse, and like me, they’re failures, and we’re pissed. What do you have that we don’t? So we’re here, in your bedroom, stalking you for answers, wondering where we went wrong. 

We form a circle around you, closing in as you sleep. You are perfect, inimitable, your life is a peach. Look at this penthouse, for fuck’s sake, one of us whispers. We pet the satin sheets. We ogle your understated but glam furnishings. A certifiable hottie sleeps beside you, wearing nothing but air. We ghosts are jealous, or awe-struck. Mostly jealous. 

We press nearer to you, slumbering beauty, still alive and pink and fresh, your rosebud nipples decidedly perkier than ours, and we listen to you breathe, admiring how even the way you suck air through your nostrils when unconscious is soothing in pitch and tone, an utter delight. While admiring you, we have thoughts of self-hatred, and regret: Why couldn’t we have worked harder? Why didn’t we invest in real estate when we had the chance? Why didn’t we make a harder play for the hot guy? Sometimes we slip into bed with you, and watch your face with our unsleeping, unceasing eyes. We don’t hug you, because our love isn’t kind, instead, we pig pile your body; we are a heaping mountain of ghosts crushing your heart. Except, for all our crushing, we can’t kill you, we can only make you squirm. Eventually another ghost enters the room, a version of us, but way more terrifying. We’re mostly pedestrian, garden-variety spooks, but she has leveled up—she’s the girl who ended up in a Japanese horror movie, a wraith with a curtain of stringy black hair in her eyes, the screamiest of scream queens. She stands in the doorway, all creepy-like and backlit, features inscrutable. We shudder. It’s the face, or lack thereof, that’s why we’re scared of her—the eyes we can’t see, the expression we can’t read. What does she want? Revenge? Empathy? A good hair stylist? We note silently that you, the woman we’re haunting, has really good hair, even in her sleep, and we hate you for it. Hair envy among spooks isn’t a stretch.

We sense abject loneliness from the girl in the door, the most misunderstood creep of all time. One of us holds out a spectral hand from under the covers, signaling our welcome. She takes it, and we pull her onto the pig pile, the heaving mound of ghosts. Climb aboard, one of us says. Let’s crush this bitch.

---

G.G. Silverman lives just north of Seattle. She is also disabled, neurodivergent, and the daughter of immigrants. Her short fiction has appeared in the Bram Stoker Award-nominated Women in Horror anthologies NOT ALL MONSTERS and CHROMOPHOBIA from StrangeHouse Books, and was a finalist for the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Award for feminist writing, among other honors. Her work has been published by Cemetery Gates Media, QU, Psychopomp, Scissors + Spackle, Speculative City, Corvid Queen, So To Speak, The Iron Horse Literary Review, The Seventh Wave, Molotov Cocktail, and more. She has just completed a collection of feminist short fiction with speculative overtones. For more info visit www.ggsilverman.com.

Isaac Radner

The Man Who Ate the Moon

I walked alone in the woods on an early autumn night. The leaves on the trees were only just beginning to turn, and they rustled like dried paper in the cold-bitten breeze. I had no need for torch nor lantern, for the moon was full and I could easily see my path.

            I had walked the very same path many times before, often under the light of the moon, but never was it brighter than that evening. I looked up, wondering what was different. It seemed to me that if I climbed one of the nearby trees, I could reach up and touch the moon, hanging in the sky just above the treetops. Had it always sat so low in the sky, so perfectly round and heavy?

            Then, as I stood gazing up at the heavens, I was privy to the most amazing sight. The moon fell out of the sky, sinking slowly toward the ground below like a rock dropped into water. As it fell, it diminished in size until it was small enough to pass undisturbed through the branches above. By the time the moon reached me, it was the size of a large marble—small enough to settle gently into my outstretched palm.

The moon’s surface was cool to the touch and stippled like an egg. Though the sky above had grown dark, the forest around me was illuminated by the steady silver glow that emanated from the orb in my hand. I had never seen anything so exquisite, so perfect. Holding it gingerly between my finger and thumb, I brought it up to my eye. I was shocked to find that, upon closer inspection, the moon’s surface was covered in thousands of tiny faces.

            Many of the visages were those of women and men, young and old. Others were those of creatures and beasts I did not recognize, some of whom I was certain did not belong to any living thing upon this earth. Each face was as different and unique as any one might see on the street, with expressions just as variable. Some frowned solemnly, some seemed to be laughing, some looked like they were caught in the middle of speaking, others had features contorted with agony. At first, I thought them statues carved into the grey rock, but as I turned the orb gently in my hand their eyes seemed to track my movements. Unsettled, I drew back, the moon once again at arms-length. The faces dissolved into the crags and craters familiar to those who have contemplated the moon in the night sky.

            I noticed, then, that my hand was covered in a fine white dust left behind where the moon had rolled across the surface of my palm. I wet my finger with my tongue, and by lightly touching it on my palm, I was able to pick up some of the dust on my fingertip. I held my finger up to my eye, and I saw that the dust was not merely white, but contained a faint iridescence, a subtle prismatic gleam. There was also a fragrance, floral and sweet like honeysuckle.

Without thought, as if by instinct, I raised my finger to my mouth and gently set it on the tip of my tongue. Immediately, my mouth was filled with the most remarkable flavor – light and sweet, bright and nutty with a pleasant coolness. There was something else, too, more a sensation than a flavor, a sudden expanding of the space within my mouth so that it felt as vast as the night sky above. Then, it was gone as quickly as it began, the moon-dust dissolved and swallowed.

            I stood silently. The forest was still and familiar, yet the world around me suddenly felt claustrophobic and thin. I had, for the briefest of moments, held the entirety of the cosmos within my mouth, and I could not shake the feeling. It was, I imagined, what it felt like to be God, who held all of existence within his being. I was overcome by conflicting fears—that I would never forget the feeling and my world would forever be a smaller place, or that my recollection of that night would fade into oblivion, and I would never again experience that moment of bliss, not even in memory. The latter fear won out and, in a frenzy, I ran my tongue across my hand, lapping up what dust remained. Again, flavorful rapture of cosmic proportions was followed by its quick and tragic absence.

            I had assumed the moon’s strange visitation would be only temporary, that it would soon rise gently back up above the trees and return to its customary place among the stars. Such an experience, even momentary, should have been enough to fill a soul for the rest of its life, and had I not tasted the moon, my appetite for wonder and beauty would surely have been sated by the mere sight of it descending through the trees. But I had felt, for the briefest of moments, a universe blossom inside of me, and simply gazing upon the rock in my hand, however marvelous, could not match the sensation.

So, as I looked down at the moon where it lay, I was not thinking of releasing it into the starry sky. I thought of eating the thing—of placing it in my mouth and carefully, delicately, reverently taking a bite. And this is what I did. Once the thought occurred to me, it pushed away all else and became the only conceivable action.

            I placed the moon gently on my tongue and rolled it around my mouth. Its surface was powdery and sweet like a pastry, and, when I slowly brought my jaw down around it, it resisted only momentarily before yielding to my bite, revealing a delightfully toothsome interior whose notes of citrus perfectly complemented the bright and nutty exterior. Those flavors were secondary to what I felt. Upon the first bite, my whole interior seemed to heave and shift, expanding to make room for the moon, the planets, and the stars.

As I walked home under the dark sky, I waited for the feeling to diminish and disappear. Instead, I felt the edges of the universe inside me continue to expand, and I knew that, like our own cosmos, this process of expansion had no end. I would continue to sense it the next day when I awoke and during the coming weeks, months, and years when the disappearance of the moon from the sky worked unknowable havoc upon our world—as the tides disappeared, as animals who had hunted by the moon’s light starved while their prey thrived, and as the seasons of the earth shortened, then elongated, then disappeared completely and the world slipped slowly into an age of bitter cold.

            There were many who thought that the moon had abandoned us as retribution for our sins, judging us unworthy of its silver light. Or perhaps, others said, the moon had always been an illusion, and we were only now waking up to the cold, dark, and lonely reality of our universe. I knew that the moon had not disappeared, for I could feel it within me. And I was certain that if I could once more hold it up to my eye and look closely, I would see a new face added to the multitude covering its surface.

Perhaps my face would be frozen in the moment of surprised delight when I tasted the moon for the first time, or maybe my eyes would be closed as I savored my first bite. Whatever my expression, there I’d be, memorialized alongside those the moon had traveled into and through, leaving universes in its wake, voyaging ever deeper into the heart of being.

---

Isaac Radner is a writer based in Denver, CO with a BA in Political Science from Colorado College and an MA in Social Science from the University of Chicago.  Looking for ways to continue engaging with the ideas and concepts that he had been drawn to in school, he fell in love with writing creative fiction.

 Does It Have Pockets is proud to be home to Isaac’s first publication.

Wake Lloire

Waking Up Dreaming

Candy reached over to put her hand on Simon’s stomach. She did this every morning to reassure herself that she hadn’t imagined him. That the man lying next to her was very real. She had met Simon four years previously; he had been sitting on a bench watching the water of a fountain spill over into the pond below, unabashedly taken in by the simple flowing of liquid from one moment to another. She had been out walking the dogs, a teeny tiny Poodle named Chester, and a Great Dane named Othello. Though she knew they looked ridiculous, she reveled in the absurd spectacle of her charges next to one another. Candy liked attracting attention. Simon looked up as she walked by and smiled, acknowledged the quirky in her step, and returned to watching the fountain. She took a chance and asked if he minded if she sat down for a moment. He nodded toward the place next to him. Othello lay down behind the bench, and Chester begged to be put upon her lap. Simon offered her a scotch mint from a bag in his pocket like her grandfather used to do. He asked her how her day was. She answered honestly and asked about his. He admitted that he had just lost his job. She told him that she was looking for a roommate. They exchanged numbers. The next day he texted her to ask her out for tea. Not coffee. Tea. Simon’s grandmother had been a tea drinker. Tea calmed him, he told her. Candy enjoyed his calm. He was not stressed about losing his job for he had an interview that very afternoon. She didn’t ask what he did. She was interested in his core, not his occupation. He asked questions like a fine antique dealer, assessing her value like an expert. He saw into her, her past, her scuff marks, and appreciated her stories. She was immediately taken in. Simon moved in three days later. The perfect roommate. Paid the rent on time. Made communal meals. Helped her walk the dogs. Simon was present when he was around. He never looked at his phone when she was talking, which made her feel treasured, like she really had value. He loved to surprise her. Once, he had convinced a friend to empty a whole restaurant so that he could ask her if she would, maybe, share his bed. For a while they just slept together, merely closing their eyes at the end of the day to snuggle in each other’s arms. They didn’t kiss for a year. She had never experienced a relationship like this one. So this morning, when Candy reached over to put her hand on Simon’s stomach, and instead of finding him, she found a large sculpted piece of driftwood in the shape of a man; she looked around and found herself on a beach. She doubted her hold on reality, wondered if everything that had come before had been imagined. Candy couldn’t remember the name of the dogs she had walked, the street she lived on, or whether she had parents. Her memory of life was empty. All but for Simon. Who apparently did not exist. Then she heard a whistling from behind her, and there was a fire, and Simon holding a tea kettle over a fire made of large pieces of driftwood. When he looked up, her memories came rushing back, and surprised her. She realized that it wasn’t he who was a figment of her imagination, but she of his…and really, the realization was a relief. Candy snuggled back into the arms of the wooden man on the beach and dissolved into sand.

---

Wake Lloire is a parent, poet, writer and storyteller. They are an infuriating optimist and queer community builder. They often pretend they live in a novel that employs magical realism.

Margaret Roach

The Father Of: The Husband Of

One

For all sakes and purposes, you are a young man. You need to be a young man. It doesn’t matter who you usually are, today, you are a young man. Close your eyes and take a moment. You are a young man. Nice, isn’t it? You are a young man around twenty. The specific age doesn’t really matter here. All that matters is that you are young. You don’t even have a beard yet. It won’t matter for long, because today is the day that you become a man.

Currently, you are standing in the kitchen. Well, you are cowering more than standing. Standing was not the best word choice, but despite this fact, you are in the kitchen. It is a kitchen of a bachelor. There are three bottles of water, leftover Chinese food, and an ancient jar of mustard in your fridge; you should be worried about the mold growing.

You feel shocked by my appearance, but still, you do your best to be polite with your large eyes on the floor. Human eyes are not meant to view ethereal creatures this closely. Even in this dream, it is too much for you. There are things about me that you cannot comprehend. Let me explain slowly. I am made out of teeth, flesh, and all things holy. It’s not too different from you. The eyes that cover my body are used to seeing everything at once. The teeth are made to make me appear friendly. They are smiling at you. You smile back. So little teeth.  The flesh is here because I am made out of flesh. You eat meat. You are aware of flesh. Don’t be a baby. You won’t be able to understand the last bit.

Onto the point - that you are going to be a father. Congratulations! You look at me with awe and a little bit of horror. This is normal for a parent. You feel shocked. You are a man of God and only dream of touching women (you know what you dream). You’re going to be a stepfather to the Messiah! That nice lady you were dating? She’s not a slut! Congratulations! She was chosen by God to give birth to your savior.

You are not someone meant to be the focus. You must have known this. All your life, you’ve sort of been there. People never noticed you. You know this. There isn’t much about you to notice. You’re a nice young man, but you don’t go beyond that. Sorry. They built you like this for a reason. It was never going to be any other way. Fate is a wicked twisted thing and you should know about it. You are now weeping. Tears fall onto your cheeks and they taste like nothing. You are crying because you are a young man and you have a purpose.  

You nod your head yes. Up and down. You are aware of the smoothness of your chin as it touches your neck. You should ask questions at this moment. Maybe you would receive answers and clarity, but none are asked. I would answer them all. Go ahead, ask me the meaning of the universe. I know. I know how you will die, I know what you dream about, and I know everything about you. Background checks are important parts of choosing the next messiah’s father. You can ask questions.

You don’t, because you are a young man and you are a man of faith and you ask no questions.


Two

You are laying in bed next to your young and pretty wife. She sleeps peacefully, but she is always peaceful. Her lips are always a straight line and despite the fact that her world is changing, she remains peaceful. Do you love her? You ask yourself this question multiple times a day (you should have asked it earlier - the answer is no). You can touch her, you know. The whole sacred virgin thing is so outdated. She would let you touch her, but you don’t. Instead,  you lay there staring at her, at the way her eyelashes are so long they touch her cheek. You’re even doing it now in a dream. Stop that! Look at me. I have something to tell you.

You remain a young man. A little bit older now that you have to worry about people other than yourself. Still, you are young. People in the future will like to paint you as old and decaying because they also like to imagine your wife as a virgin with an uninterested old man as a husband. But, when I look at you - all I can see is a young man. You leave socks on the floor for your wife to pick up, but you’re growing.

You need to leave. There is a man and he wants to kill your son. He probably wants to kill you too. He doesn’t care that much about you; it’s more by association. You feel good about this, but then you feel overwhelmed by guilt. The child sleeps in the cot next to your bed. You stare at him. Most of your life is spent staring at other people.

He looks like his mother. His lips are a straight line and his eyelashes reach out towards his cheek like vines looking for water. You love him. You’re a good dad. But, you know why people want to hurt him. He’s strange. Sorry, but he’s so strange. Look, he’s the messiah. But, he’s also a pretentious mama's boy. He is an insufferable little brat who really needs to learn a lesson.  You would have bullied him as a child because he’s just a little too off. You don’t have the words to explain why he’s so strange. I do, but you don’t think to ask me. You’re such a good father. A good father just lets his son be. You spend most of your day thinking about how to be a better father (this is as good as it gets). He will need to grow up all by himself.

I don’t know where you should go, maybe the desert. It will be nice for you all. With all that sand, you can pretend it’s the beach. It will be a vacation and you need a vacation. This is not your home. It’s simply a place you are in for the moment. The desert will be your next home and will be a happy family there. I promise. You just have to be brave enough to go. Bravery is what makes you a man. That and a long beard. It’s really not that much work. Better men than you have done it hundreds of times.

I am watching you as you lay in bed watching your wife. You don’t weep anymore and I wonder why you do not cry. I have so many eyes, but they never cry. They are more practical than yours, but if I had your eyes I would cry in this little pathetic moment. You lay in bed and finally, you lay on your back staring up at the ceiling. Your eyes are blue and they are dry and the new beard growing on your face is starting to itch.


Three

You are standing outside the tent. It is mid-afternoon which is when you are not supposed to be standing outside the tent. The sun beats down on you and makes the dark hair on top of your head feel like it’s burning. If I wanted this dream to be more exciting, I would let it burn. I do not.

 The landscape in front of you is strange or at least, you find it strange. All it is is a landscape, but you are deeply disturbed by it. It is flat except for dark mountains at a very far distance. Sometimes you walk towards them, but you never reach them. They are always far away; no matter how long you walk and sometimes you walk for miles. The sand is not the sand that you expected. It is not the pale gold of childhood tales, but a thick dark brown. You believe it to be wet, but you are in the desert. Everything is dry.

You are no longer a young man, but you are not old. Your beard is long now, but not as long as I expected. I thought you would be an old man by now (life can’t be easy out here), but you are middle-aged. You resent me for saying this but smile politely at me. We are friends now.

I have something to tell you. You can go home now. You can leave the desert. The man who wanted you dead has been killed. I did it myself. The man simply wouldn’t die. It was taking too long. The story had stalled in this spot and we all needed to move on. Your son is almost a young man, he can’t spend his formative years in the desert. He’ll be even weirder than he is already and I truly cannot deal with that. He needs friends other than his mother. Frankly, I was getting bored of this part of the story. The pacing is too slow and how many times can you listen to someone complain about being thirsty? It’s desert. Of course, it’s dry. You are thirsty right now. Your throat hurts and your tongue feels stuck.

You need to go home. Go back to your old apartment and stand where you used to stand. Stand next to your wife. Stand next to your son. It will be a moment that you will cherish. You just need to leave. Are you sinking into the sand? Is that why you stay still? This was never going to be forever and you hate it here. Some days, you think about becoming a sculptor and designing things out of the sand. You know it’s a stupid idea. The next place you go will be better than this one. You deserve good things ahead.

You don’t look at me and go into the tent. I follow you inside. It’s rude. It’s rude of you, but you don’t really mean to be so rude to me. You’re lashing out. Humans are all the same. Your wife sleeps on a mat on the floor and your son sleeps a little bit too close to her. He doesn’t look like you. Sometimes, you like to pretend that he does. Not in his looks – he is soft and pale – you are not that. You feel a feeling of both pride and anger. At this moment, you understand why fathers take an ax and murder their sleeping children. You would never murder him because you have become a good man. This is all I ever wanted you to be.

You lay back down on your cot (which is in the corner of the tent) and you think about what needs to be packed.


Four

You decide it is better to take a long way home, so you are standing on an old, lurching ship. You have never been on a ship before and you think this could have been the life for you. (If you had picked this life, you would have died young and in horrible pain.)  Something about the way the salt air burns your skin and the way fog settles in your bones that makes you feel like a young man.

You are not a young man anymore. You are very far from a young man. You are old. Sorry, but you are not looking well. You know this. You’re not built for longevity. We didn’t think that you would make it this long. But, here you are! Standing at the head of the ship with your craned neck held as high as it can. I’m proud of you. I’m not meant to be proud of people. I’m designed to look at you with cruel indifference, but I’m proud of the person that you have become despite the paths that your life has taken. Good job.
    
This is not a meeting of convenience. I’ve come to tell you that despite the fact that the man who wanted you dead is dead, there is another man who wants you dead. You must change course. Jump into the sea if you must. You can’t continue the path you are on if you want your family to be safe. All you have ever wanted is your family to be safe, but you feel a sinking feeling in your stomach.

You turn and look at the son who is sitting on the deck with his eyes closed speaking to someone who is not there. Do you really want to protect this young man? He is a fool. Or at least, you think that he is foolish. All fathers think their sons are fools. You are simply being a good father. His mother sits by him with her lips in a strict line. You believe her lips are too thin for you to kiss. That is why you never have. Keep telling yourself that and maybe one day you’ll believe it to be true.

You are a good man and you will protect your family.

Do you feel regret? I think that you do. When I look at your face, there are no emotions. But your lips are not a perfect line. You are frowning, or maybe you are trying to hold back tears. You could have said no. The first time that I met you, I never said that you had to say yes. And yet here you are. This was your choice. You should smile. Yours is a glorious purpose.

When I look next, you are standing in the middle of the ship, smiling, not because you were chosen for a glorious purpose, but because you still believe that your life will get better. I thought you smarter than that. But you are not.

 I  know how it ends. It doesn’t get better. You won’t even get a verse in the bible. People will theorize about when you died and how people mourned you, but they won’t know the truth. It doesn’t really matter, but there is something undeniably tragic about it.

 I’m spending too much time with you. I’m getting soft.

Stop it! Stop smiling about better things and smile about your glorious purpose. You have a glorious purpose. You just need to appreciate it. Not everyone is important. Some people are there to move the story along.

---

Margaret Roach is a writer who lives in the Hudson Valley and is currently working on completing her master's in library and information science. She has been published in her college’s literary magazine The Mosaic.

Tommy Dean

Undiagnosed Harmony

After the storm, the boy stood in the circle of broken tree limbs. The water dripped onto his neck and back, slowly soaking his shirt. The wind had disappeared; the sky purpled with promise.

Inside, the mother counts out her cash, checks her phone battery, and rocks her luggage. The wind, an unknown enemy, had ruined her plans to leave. She wavered on writing the boy a letter. Excuses in ink felt like names chiseled on gravestones. If she said nothing, and disappeared like smoke, wouldn’t that leave the boy with nothing to remember but her scent, her touch on his forehead?

In the driveway, the father sits in his Rav4, hysteric in his silence, the low thrum of NPR as constant as the tick of the vehicle's engine. A gathering of sounds to root him in this place. He saw the wife’s suitcase in the coat closet last week. He was returning a jacket after a quick run through the nature preserve. He wondered why she didn’t leave while he was out. Running, pushing his body to the brink of collapse cleansed his mind, made him more driven, possibly a better husband, but the suitcase disagreed.
Sirens assert their violence, rocketing the air, claiming tragedy through the neighborhoods, forcing everyone to stop and contemplate the tick, tick of their selfish thoughts and whims, desires secreted away.

The boy and the man enter the house from opposite doors, their feet slick against the hardwood floors that haven’t been waxed in months, their faces stricken as they both reach for the handle of the suitcase. The wife, they believe, in their harmony of action, has been rescued.

The mother’s walk down the stairs is accompanied by the notes of sirens slipping toward and then past their neighborhood. She can see their shapes in the mirror that hangs at the stair landing. The boy a toll she’ll have to pay, the father a good but distracted man, with impatient shoulders. Apologies or lies shuffling like a deck of cards as she meets them in the foyer.

The red lights awash on the rain-streaked foyer windows. Wife, husband, son peer through the windows, heads stacked by height. Tragedy, a blacking out of their own desires, erased by the spark of fear that has them all reaching out, finding fingers, the gentle touch of reaching into the past and framing it in an uncertain future.
The sizzle of garlic and shallots, the wafting comfort of onion, and the gentle roar of the stove hood taking it all away. The metro engine of her heart is beating somewhere in the bowels of an ancient tunnel in a city that could care less about her trifling feelings, but still, it waits to greet her, to swallow her in only the way a beast can. And yet, she plates their food, the steaming chicken golden in the half-light doming the dining room table, cleared of the daily detritus by her husband, her son, eyes wide, his screen put away for once, these men of hers offering their own adventure of escape. She sits in her usual chair, ignoring for one more night the calcification in her bones, these roots dragging her closer to the ground, and further away from the beast of her dreams.

---

Tommy Dean is the author of two flash fiction chapbooks and a full flash collection, Hollows (Alternating Current Press 2022). He lives in Indiana where he currently is the Editor at Fractured Lit and Uncharted Magazine. A recipient of the 2019 Lascaux Prize in Short Fiction, his writing can be found in Best Microfiction 2019, 2020, 2023, Best Small Fictions 2019 and 2022, Monkeybicycle, and elsewhere. Find him at tommydeanwriter.com and on Twitter @TommyDeanWriter.

Mike Murray

The Box

The box contains stories. Like German jokes without a punchline. Like dreams. The tale, boxed and sealed has no beginning nor end. For the addled, from the addled.

The box. Four sides, bottom and top is unremarkable from without. The walls and ceiling painted Navajo White – a landlordian prime color. The plywood floor is grey. Slate Grey. For a floor, Slate Grey is far superior to Navajo White. Slate Grey conceals blood. On the huge Navajo reservation in the most desolate corner of desolate Arizona, Navajo White does not exist. Except, maybe, on the sun-beaten siding of an abandoned double-wide; an aluminum box.

Normal and Talker ride battered Harley’s through the Navajo Nation traveling from Truth or Consequences to San Francisco. The motors drone, indolent, incessant. The riders roar past barb wired fenceposts, wrecked cars beaten senseless by the merciless sun and roofless shacks abandoned before air conditioning became a thing. Normal and Talker separately-together succumb to raw fuel fumes and mechanistic rumble. Each to his own meditates upon chrome and carburetors and windrush and a vibrating past receding in the mirror. Abord these motorcycles nothing, absolutely nothing, is static. They ride past abandoned silver mine punctures seeding the desert floor, an unfortunate wanderer may wind up deep in a hole, lost forever, so it is with the hypnotic nature of the road, the desert, the Reservation. Sunstroked, numb of hand, foot and rump, astride an awful, deafening Harley, romance is an illusion. Even Talker, rendered mute against the cacophony of engines, essentially designed in the nineteen twenties, is no help whatsoever. The arrow straight road bisecting an endless blue-white horizon does not inspire poetic notions. Rather, enormous sky and endless beige earth terrify him as if he’s stripped naked to the elements. Astride the unstable, oil leaking, gas sucking, clattering motorcycle, there is nothing to do but examine poor choices made. Floating far above the barren highway, Normal for the first time, understands he as the ridiculous; metalflake, chrome trim, upholstered in motor oiled leather; biker in a box.

 Big-sky motorcycle adventure squished into an ungainly receptacle.

Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle implies that nothing is as it seems. Though we may know the speed of a subatomic motorcycle, predicting where in the box it belongs is problematic.  Imagine a parallel universe where a big ass box is a tiny universe or, perhaps the opposite.

Home, sanctuary, safety, prison; Normal’s box is endlessly mutable. When a box contains the world, doors are superfluous, windows a distraction, unplumbed, the box lacks heat and is dark as a cave. Though the walls are bare, the box is lined with books. Normal stashes books in the box: albums, atlas, textbook, encyclopedia, essays, fiction, non-fiction, biblical (listed under fiction- horror). This library includes; leaflets, compendium, dictionary, manuals, dissertation, reader, roll, scroll, tract and treatise, hard cover and paperback all told his stash of books rivals the libraries of Alexandria and New York City combined. Every painting housed in the Louvre and the Getty adorn his Navajo white walls. Statuary from the British Museum – now twice stolen – reside in the box. Here too is a photo gallery encompassing in dramatic black and white, every woman who possibly, perhaps marginally, loved him or on some inexplicable whim, screwed him. Due to blackout drinking, not all of Normal’s photos are titled. Curiously or not, all of the women shy away from the camera lens gazing instead into oblivions shadow. One may assume this a gallery of broken romance and seething rage. Tiny splotches of blood on the Navajo white walls can be discerned if one is diligent.

The journey.

 Normal wakes to find the nonexistent door kicked in. He is on his way to Sears to purchase a baseball bat; equalizer for whatever score needs settling. He stops for cigarettes in the tiny convenance store wedged into the front of his building. The store owner, his Navajo landlord, holds a bucket of paint and brush. To the landlord’s stink-eye, Normal replies, “What?”

“The fuck wrong with you last night … didn’t hear the firetrucks?” He points. “Fuckin firemen kicked in your door. Evacuated your dumb ass.” Noting the blank stare, “Don’t remember, huh?” His head wags back and forth, “Dumbfuck.” The Navajo landlord’s face fractures. He laughs, not a happy laugh, more like, I’m going to punch you in the throat sort of laugh. Then he chokes, “Goddamn – you a hazard.” His Navajo landlord’s message is unambiguous; evacuated from flame. Normal backtracks. He woke that morning as usual – naked, in a tangle of whiskey breath, exploded hair, filthy sheets, an erection but sneezing from the acrid aroma of a nearby house fire. In hangover’s turbulent pitch he recalls no siren nor flashing lights. That firemen bashed in the door is a total black hole. Evacuated. He has no recollection of the barefoot, naked, midnight sidewalk.

The Navajo’s recounting adds little green to Normal’s memory desert. Often alcohol’s oily sheen sloshes, thick as Creme de Menthe inside his skull prone to stuttering memory. For all he knows, the fire might as well have happened to another Normal. Grace, the same thing as dumb luck, shimmers across a burning horizon of ash and smoke with little recognition. Those who sleepwalk through inferno take note.

The box is clad in mirrors. Normal crouches shadowboxing before the mirrors. Left foot forward, dukes up, chin tucked behind left shoulder he begins throwing punches, slowly at first then rapid left jabs, an overhand right, a left hook, slide. The man in the mirror knows all his moves. Normal’s particular bob and weave cannot be disguised from the man in the mirror. Duck and hook, slip to this side or that, he sweats, cursing the mirrored image he’ll never beat.

Oh shit.

On closer inspection, the foe in front of him is ‘the Old Man,’ grinning his cocky, you’ll never be as good as me, grin, after all, he installed all Normal’s moves. And behind ‘the Old Man’, is the Old Man’s father, and his grandfather and on and on. They punch  from all angles and ages, they are inexhaustible, an elastic infinity of punching men. Before the box and mirrors there was a photograph – four generations of semi-amused first sons, he sits upon the knee of his great grandfather, his grandfather stands to the left, ‘the Old Man’ looks over Normal’s shoulder. The photograph is in a wooden frame. They are four men in a box.

It is vaguely funny or perhaps like a magic trick; so many things misplaced within the box: a Kennedy assassination 1964 silver half-dollar, high school yearbook containing only a ghostly shadow of Normal, the Clash’s 1977 debut studio album, a Mikuni carburetor, his favorite Rose trowel, a roll of braided masons’ line, a wooden lacrosse stick, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, an expired passport containing the only exceptional photo ever taken of him, a bicycle frame pump, a tiny first edition Morrice Sendak book of ABC’s, an ink cartridge for a broken printer, and his virginity. If he removed every article from the box and set those things in an ordered pile, even-money, self-confidence might be found wedged in a lint dark corner like a long-lost Indian Head penny. Penny in a box.

From the addled to the addled.

Abandoned highway beneath boxed sky has no beginning nor visible culmination it is road to the long lost or perhaps never had. Normal ponders things denied; education, success, love; the most abstract thing on the razor edge. An ancient boxed road, old Route 66, is the reddish brown of a very old basketball, patched axis to axis in trills of black tar. The road, like all roads, is a timeline of sorts oscillating toward infinity. Speculation from wayfarers is of a world beyond the box. Perhaps so. A fog horn on San Francisco’s Bay mourns for all that has been lost. Beyond the Golden Gate, monsters, as yet unseen, roil in the living current off Ocean Beach.

The man, Normal, with the timeless contemplation of granite, mute to all that is and is not, cocks his head in wonder at the expanding nature of his universe-in-a-box that now envelopes the whole of the Pacific Ocean. Normal concedes that this place, this squared receptacle, no thicker than five sheets of paper, contains all the truth that can be found.

---

Mike Murray has, as most writers, a checkered history that we won’t get into here. He's been published in 2 Bridges Review, SF City College Forum, Red Light Lit, Strange Tales of an Unreal West and online. Mike, up until his recent departure from San Francisco, has been a regular contributor in submission based Bay Area literary events and readings including Bay Area Generations and Bang Out and was a 2018 camper at Lit Camp. Mike is a former member of Bricklayers Union Locals #28 and #3 and has an M.A. in C.W. from SFSU.