Epiphany Ferrell

Instinctive

I listen at night to the sounds of screeching baby chimpanzees, and the snap of crocodile teeth. The nervous laughter of graduate students. My wife’s calm voice, urging them to record, to document.

She shows me video.

“This is ground-breaking,” she says. “Infant animals of disparate species vocalize distress, right? And we instinctively know the difference between contented sounds and frightened sounds.”

I nod so she’ll go on.

“Well, so do other animals. For some species, of course, hearing a frightened baby is like ringing a dinner bell.”

She pulls up a chair for me, scooches herself over so I can see the video. “Primate infants really let you know when they’re distressed, right? Chimps, bonobos. Humans. Now watch this.”

She hits play. I see her on the screen, sitting in a long, low boat with an outboard motor, a white awning covering most of it, giving the research team meagre shade.

“See,” she points at the screen with her pen. “We’ve got speakers set up there, and there, near the bank.” Her pupils are dilated, almost black in the computer blue light.

And then, our daughter’s voice, a whimper that escalates to a small cry. It’s our daughter’s pre-bath cry. Layla often protests at first. If we just give her a minute, she likes her bath. She splashes and giggles. If we just give her a minute.

I look at my wife. She watches the screen. “Jordan, watch,” she hisses.

Crocodiles slide off the bank, glide through the water to congregate near the speaker. They quickly lose interest.

I sit back. “She really didn’t like her bath that day,” I say, hating how judgey I sound. “She doesn’t usually cry that much.”

My wife waves me quiet. “The crocodiles responded to the sound—there was no visual or olfactory stimuli.”

Our baby wails. Really cries. A scared, pained cry that cuts my heart, takes me half-way to my feet in one motion.

A slender crocodile swims in from the edge of the water, comes within inches of the speaker, and waits there.

“You see?” my wife says, triumph in her voice. “She can hear there’s a baby in distress. She’s checking it out. You know, to see if she should help. Like there’s some instinct to help a baby, any baby. That’s our theory.”

“Why was she crying like that?”

My wife looks confused. “She’s not really making any noise.”

“Layla. Our daughter. Why is she crying like that?”
“It was her 12-month shots.” My wife is matter of fact. “It was a good opportunity.”

I’m still absorbing this when the cry comes again. This time, a huge crocodile bursts out of the water, snapping its teeth at the speaker. The scene wobbles as the grad student running the camera moves back with a soft “Whoa.”

“That was definitely predation, and that’s a male,” my wife says. “You see the difference?”

“Why was she crying like that at the doctor’s office? What do you mean it was a good opportunity? You just let her cry? You recorded it?”

“My God Jordan, it was only for a minute, she’s fine. It was three months ago. Did you notice any trauma from crying at the doctor? No, you didn’t.”

“You used our daughter as crocodile bait?”

“This is science, Jordan. We’re studying maternal versus predatory reaction to prey sounds. It contributes to the ongoing debate about maternal instincts.”

She’s looking at the screen again, her eyes following the crocodiles in the water. She puts on headphones, cutting me out, and over her shoulder, I watch crocodiles mill around in the water, sometimes lunging at the speaker or snapping at each other, excited to a frenzy by the sounds of our infant daughter shrieking uncomforted at the doctor’s office.

I go to our daughter’s room. She’s peaceful, her little fingers curled, her hair tousled. Crocodiles swim in the shadows, leer at me from the closet, peer with yellow eyes through the window. I can’t keep them away.

---

Epiphany Ferrell lives perilously close to the Shawnee Hills Wine Trail. Her stories appear in more than 70 journals and anthologies, including Ghost Parachute, New Flash Fiction Review, Bending Genres, and Best Microfiction. She is a two-time Pushcart nominee, and a Prime Number Magazine Flash Fiction Prize recipient.

Bonnie Olsen

Collaboration

One member of the animal kingdom I've always liked is the chicken, Gallus gallus domesticus. So when my caretaker Phineas showed me the ad, WANTED: NEW HOME FOR CLASSROOM CHICKEN, I agreed to take her in. "Cynthia," the students had named her, their star specimen in a Gallus Maturation Project. They’d observed her progress through the wrinkle-skinned hatchling stage to the fluffy yellow chick stage, on to the gangly awkward pullet stage, and when she’d finally achieved full, adult chickenhood, they’d let her come to me.

Phineas and I provided a coop of good taut chicken wire, but maybe because Cynthia had always lived in a classroom, exposed to analytical thought and problem solving, she soon learned to launch herself in ever higher spirals until she topped the coop's chicken wire fence, then she'd soar—I'd never seen a chicken soar—down to the driveway, the lawn, or most often, the compost heap.

The heap provided ample habitat for invertebrates, primarily pill bugs, Armadillidiidae, and earthworms, Annelida. With pill bugs, like any chicken, the instant Cynthia spotted one, she'd peck it up and gobble it down. But for her, earthworms were different. Cynthia didn't just peck Annelids; she studied them.

She would nudge an earthworm gently onto the lawn, then stand up tall, and, cocking her head, would scrutinize first with one eye, then with the other as the worm performed its coiling, twisting, thrashing attempt to regain darkness and safety. Near as I could tell, Cynthia seemed to be collecting data—a predictable result of her classroom education.

Phineas thought so too. "Don't never see a chicken so smart like that," he observed. Then he went inside to put our groceries away. Rejoining me at the compost heap, he said, "Been some time, you know," but this time he wasn't talking about Cynthia. This time he was referring to my seizures.

"I suppose watching Cynthia keeps them away," I told him, which it demonstratively did. Nowadays, aside from one specific trigger, I was nearly seizure-free. When seizures did come, according to Phineas, what generally happened was, I'd “just thrash around some, then sleep a while," which does make them sound harmless, but those seizures were severe enough to keep me from attending university. They were, in fact, so severe as to keep me from ever leaving this house and the one-and-a-half-acre lot around it. Phineas was the best caretaker I'd ever had, and he said doing for me is the best job he'd ever had, so we figured the two of us were a pretty good match—and now with Cynthia, the three of us.

"I got you some more them ramen noodles you like," Phineas said, his way of reminding me it's lunch time. I can make my own ramen, if Phineas pours the boiling water.

***

One day Cynthia and I were out on the porch, the two of us enjoying a bowl of spicy ramen noodles—Cynthia can tell the difference between a squirming earthworm and squirmy ramen noodles—when all in a panic, she flew squawk-squawking away to her coop.

I was still picking noodles from my hair when my father's big rig zoomed up the driveway and screeched to a halt. "I’ve come for my own," he said, drawing pick and shovel from his truck. By "my own," he didn't mean me or even this house. No, lately, my father had become convinced that my mother had died withholding some kind of treasure from him, which he all-of-a sudden knew to be buried deep in some specific, previously undisclosed location behind the house.

In the old days, my mother used to refer to him as a “reformed academic.” He’d been an adjunct professor until the day his research revealed that the lowliest independent trucker out-earns any adjunct sociologist. Right then, he'd quit the university and bought himself a big rig. When asked, my mother would say, “No point trying to explain the inexplicable.” Her outlook did tend toward the calm and rational—as does mine.

My father must have excelled at trucking, because our family’s standard of living definitely improved, including the acquisition of this house-plus-workshop on a one-and-a-half-acre lot. The workshop was a nod to my mother, who liked to build wooden furniture. She took to saying she thought she'd married a scholar and instead had got herself a plutocrat. By “plutocrat,” she'd meant my father’s increasingly disagreeable approach to just about anything. He might be nursing the germ of an idea when he set off on a long haul, but without benefit of research, testing, and studied observation, by the time he returned, that germ of an idea would have blossomed into some irrational conclusion—always more twisted and disagreeable than the one before it.

Phineas joined me on the porch, being near in case I seized again. My father's abrupt appearances generally did trigger seizures, and that day's was bound to fall into the category of a "doozy"—which, unfortunately, it did.

By the time I recovered, my father was away on another long haul, and Cynthia had resumed her study of Annelid behavior. Her latest hypothesis seemed to be that an earthworm dropped onto a nasturtium leaf will behave differently from an earthworm dropped onto the lawn. Our nasturtium plant had gotten out of hand anyway, and its broad, flat leaves could easily be plucked by a chicken.

"She been sticking those leaves together," Phineas informed me one day as I was recovering from yet another seizure, and indeed Cynthia was doing just that. She would pluck a leaf, poop on it just so, then nudge another leaf partly over the moist poop to create a larger surface. Another dollop of poop, another leaf, and her leaf mat would grow. When she'd got her leaf mat large enough, she'd drop a worm atop it and observe intently.

"She timing how long it take for the worm to get hisself to safety," Phineas said, and that did seem to be it. We watched Cynthia perform another trial. Then another. With the third, Phineas roused himself. "You want to see that hole he dug out back?"

I supposed I should.

My father had dug more than a hole; he'd dug a pit. I estimated its dimensions at a radius of five feet, depth of four—though it looked deeper, because he'd been piling the dark, clay-like, dug-up earth high around his pit’s circumference. Judging by the boot marks in that heap, he’d been climbing up and over it to further his digging. I seized again, another "doozy."

Science tells us that the human brain is equipped to withstand only so many seizures, and by my own calculations, I had to be approaching that limit. The problem was, I could collect data, plot points, and draw graphs much as I liked, but no graph on earth could predict the exact day my brain would fail to recover—only that the day was fast approaching.

This time though, I did recover, and as soon as Phineas had me “up and at ‘em” again, he told me, "You got to come see Cynthia's mat now. I been given her Elmer's glue, works better than poop." It certainly did. During the days I'd been "out," Cynthia had fashioned a sizeable carpet of nasturtium leaves. "See how she keep them leaves soft and green? I puts out a pan of water, and she dip in a wing, then flutter around.”

I told him, "You know what you two have become? Scientific collaborators, that's what." We had a little chuckle over that, but then I sobered. "About that hole?" I had to know.

"Six feet deep now, closer to seven. He been bringing a ladder, winch, and bucket—no light though. Guess he got such a clear idea in his head, he don't need light."

I didn’t find that hard to believe.

Phineas said, "He be back again pretty soon—today, maybe tonight."

I took that as warning to stay indoors, which, given my increasingly fragile state, might be a very good idea. Cynthia, however seemed to take that news another way. She stopped her worm testing and stood up tall, taut, and alert, looking hard into Phineas's eyes, which were looking back, equally intent. They didn't break their gaze until I started walking alone toward the house, and Phineas had to stay beside me.

I couldn't know how many hours remained until my father's return, and I couldn't tell if I would survive the seizure it triggered. I spent all the rest of that afternoon writing my will. It wasn't long, because the only treasure I could bequeath was Cynthia, and the only heir I cared to name was Phineas. But I took my time to get the wording right.

***

Next morning, I woke to Phineas's voice saying, "You got...you got to come out back." I'd never seen him so shaken.

My father's big rig was parked there in the driveway, but for some reason, it didn't trigger a seizure. Phineas and I waited to be sure, then together, we walked around to the back. By now, my father’s mound had grown so high, we had to clamber up it just to see down into the pit. Phineas kept a tight hold of me, and frankly, I kept a tight hold of him, too.

It was good I had, because way down deep at the bottom lay my father's body, horribly contorted beneath a tangle of pick, shovel, rope, winch, ladder, and bucket. "Dead," Phineas said, though he didn't have to, because the buzzing of flies was already telling me that: Calliphoridae, a species known to sense death in minutes so as to lay its eggs within the decomposing flesh.

And as I stood atop that mound of earth, it seemed to me that a small piece of my damaged brain fell back into place, and with that newly completed brain, I achieved confidence, reason, and memory.

I could now remember how my mother and I had been out in the workshop, chatting amicably about university in the fall. Had I settled on a major yet? “Almost,” I’d told her. “General biology for the early years, then maybe zero in on ornithology or herpetology.” We’d been building extra-tall bookcases of fine, dense walnut, having agreed they should be weighty in every sense of the word.

And at that moment, my father had burst in, just returned from one of his extra-long hauls and fuming with rage. "I’ve come for my own," he’d said, referring to my mother's inheritance from her recently-deceased Aunt Muriel. The will had read, "I bequeath my most valuable treasure to my most valued niece," and the treasure had turned out to be a great many books, most of them about zoology, all of them deserving of extra fine, tall, weighty bookcases.

But out on the road, my father had reached the conclusion that the "valuable treasure" had to be gold or securities or jewels—and further, that if his spouse was heir, Muriel's treasure was his as well. My mother had tried to explain the true nature of her inheritance, and he’d beat her to death with a board of fine dense walnut. And on a back swing, he'd caught me too, hard on the head.

Later, the doctors had told me my survival was "a miracle," and that my mother and I had been found crushed beneath two toppled, unfinished bookcases, an accident.

Some accident. Some miracle.

So our new house became my convalescent ward, and the money for my university education went to wages for Phineas, and eventually, upkeep for Cynthia.

I climbed back down the mound, and Phineas allowed me to walk away alone. Somehow he knew, as did I, that there would be no more seizures.

I set out to find the leaf mat. Physically speaking, it still had to exist in some material form and in some actual location. I found it—or rather pieces of it—on the far side of the compost heap beneath dense and sticker-y brambles where few would care to look. I collected my specimens and transferred them to the lawn for further study. Piece-by-piece, I re-assembled the mat, carefully examining each component in detail.

Judging by the dark, clay-like soil clinging to the underside of my re-assembled specimen, this mat had once been in contact with the mound of earth by my father’s pit. There, someone intent on entering said pit—motivated by greed and heedless of the dark—would step on it. And where he'd stepped, boot had met earthworm—quite a number of earthworms, it looked like—and had slid, leaving behind a great long smear of Annelida guts.

I had to sit back. Even Cynthia could not have transported that mat all the way from the compost heap to the mound of earth. Nor could she have spread that mat and arranged all those worms just so. For that, she’d have needed a collaborator.

Phineas came up beside me. "Guess now, you can get yourself that university education you wanted."

I could.

We watched Cynthia scratch up an Annelid and immediately gobble it down. We kept watching, and she did it again—no observation, no timing, only consuming that worm quick as she could like any ordinary chicken might.

Phineas said, “Looks like she done gone back to being a chicken.”

“Yes.”

He took a breath. “Been wondering if maybe I could maybe buy that rig off you, take up long haul trucking for a while.”

“It does look like your days of scientific collaboration are over.”

“And you’ll be off to university, selling the house, the land, but…what you going to do about her?”

For a while, we watched Cynthia behaving very much like a chicken—almost self-consciously so.

“I think we can trust Cynthia to take care of herself,” I told him. “She is, after all, an educated chicken.”

---

Bonnie Olsen lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina with her very patient husband John, and only memories of the chickens she once knew.

Devon Ellington

The Forest Library

“But it’s a library,” said Bonnie, looking in wonder at all the shelves amidst the trees. “Nothing bad can happen in a library.”

“It must have been abandoned for years,” Marise said, peering inside. “Why hasn’t anyone found it?”

“Maybe they have.” Sonja shivered. “Maybe we’ll find bones here.”

“The books will protect us,” said Bonnie.

She led the way through the arched doorway in the trunk of the rowan tree. Marise and Sonja exchanged a look.

“We can’t let her go on her own,” said Marise.

“It’s not often she’s the bravest of us,” Sonja added.

“Maybe we can hide here,” Marise added, half to herself.

They followed Bonnie through the hollow tree into the…what was it? A room? A building? Not quite. The trees soared about them, arching over, and yet there was starlight. The floor was a carpet of soft grass. Flowers peeked shyly around tree trunks. There was a sense of both freedom and containment.

And books. So many books!

The wooden shelves rose between the trees, in the trees, around the trees. Everywhere there were beautiful, beautiful books, in jewel-toned bindings with gold or silver or copper lettering on the covers. Nothing moldy, damp, or damaged. Not abandoned at all, then.

Some of the books were splayed on the floor. Bonnie reached down and picked one of them up. “Hmm,” she said. “Interesting.”

“Do you think they’ll look for us?” Marise asked.

“They’re too busy with the others they’ve caught,” said Sonja. “Or those that tried to run. But failed.”

“What do you think they’re doing to them?” Marise shivered.

Sonja didn’t spare her. “Terrible things. But we escaped. Maybe they won’t find us here.”

Bonnie looked up from the book in her hands. “They won’t. We will find answers here.”

“How do you know?” Marise asked.

“Because all the answers are in books,” said Bonnie. “We just have to find the right one.”

Sonja looked around, at the endless rows of books. “It might take a while.”

“We’re safe here,” said Bonnie.

“How do you know?” Sonja persisted.

“It’s a library,” Bonnie emphasized. “Libraries are safe.”

“They burned the library at Tharus,” Marise reminded her.

“With the librarians and scholars in it,” Sonja added.

“Do you think the books escaped from there to here?” Marise asked.

“They won’t find us,” Bonnie promised.

“Are you feverish?” Sonja demanded. “You’re usually timid.”

Bonnie smiled. “Books make me brave.”

“I guess we’d better get to work,” said Marise. She picked up a random book and looked around. “I’ll be over in that chair.”

Sonja frowned. “Was that there a minute ago?”

“I don’t remember,” Marise admitted.

“It’s there now,” said Bonnie. “Enjoy it. I’ll be on the sofa.”

Sonja giggled. “It looks like something out of a grand house. Do you think this was a grand house once?”

“I think it’s something better,” said Bonnie, and curled up on the red velvet sofa with her book.

Marise withdrew with her book to a wingback chair with a blue and white checkerboard pattern. Sonja picked a book at random. A large leather club chair bumped up against the back of her knees, and she sat.

For a few minutes, the only sounds were breathing, pages turning, bird chirps, and the whisper of a slight breeze through the flowers. The scents of jasmine and honeysuckle filled the air.

“What’s your book about?” Sonja asked.

“Trains,” said Marise.

Sonja wrinkled her forehead. “What’s a train?”

A look of wonder passed Marie’s face. “I’d never heard of one before I opened the book,” she said. “But it makes perfect sense. It’s a series of rooms on wheels. It’s a way for people to ride long distances, in chairs, looking out the windows together. They can chat and make friends as they travel, and see villages and towns they’d only heard about before. The cars are pulled by something called an engine and run on something called tracks. It sounds like wonderful fun. What’s your book about?”

“Poison,” said Sonja.

“You always wanted to study with Old Mother Berry,” said Marise.

Sonja grimaced. “Papa promised me to the miller’s boy, and he didn’t want a wife who knew about poisons.”

“He didn’t want a wife with a brain,” Marise said.

“He doesn’t have to worry about that now, does he?” Sonja snapped, and then looked down. “I’m sorry. That was unfair.”

“Just because you didn’t want to marry him doesn’t mean you want something bad to happen to him,” said Marise. “Bonnie, what’s your book about?”

Bonnie looked up and smiled. “Possibilities.”

Before anyone could ask her what that meant, they heard something rattle farther into the structure. They looked at each other, got up as one, and closed their books. They left the books on the seats and moved into a darker portion of the library, with the occasional firefly lighting the way.

Marise, in the lead, tripped over something hard. “Ow,” she said, looking down, and then, “Oh.”

“What did I tell you?” Sonja demanded. “Bones.”

Marise knelt down by the pile. “What kind of bones do you think these are?”

“Bones of those who do not respect books,” said an unfamiliar voice.

The three young women looked up. Beside them stood a figure in brown trousers and a dark red tunic, with a long, open robe over it, decorated with scrolls and stars. The figure wore dark, sturdy boots, and a tall, pointed hat with designs that matched the robe, and carried a lantern in one elegant, long-fingered hand. Long hair flowed past the shoulders. The figure shimmered, sometimes appearing as an old man, sometimes a young woman with coppery hair, sometimes an old woman, sometimes a young man, and then through the round again, with different colored skin and hair and eyes. “What is it you seek?”

“Who are you?” Marise asked, mesmerized.

“I am the hermit of the library,” they responded.

“How shall we address you?” asked Sonja.

“I find ‘hey you’ often works,” the hermit returned, in a dry tone.

“I mean—” Sonja flushed.

“I know what you mean,” said the hermit. “I cannot be defined by something as limiting as gender. Or even age.” They gave her a soft smile.

“It’s rude to say, ‘hey you’ to someone of your status,” Sonja argued, feeling on steadier ground.

“And yet it doesn’t stop them,” said the hermit.

“Them?” Marise asked, pointing to the bones.

The hermit shrugged. The three young women waited in silence. Finally, they relented. “You may call me Ainsley,” they said.

“Pleasure to meet you, Ainsley,” said Marise.

Sonja nodded. The argument wore her out.

“What is it you seek?” Ainsley repeated.

“Refuge,” said Marise.

“Revenge,” said Sonja.

“Knowledge,” said Bonnie.

Ainsley watched the young women for a few long heartbeats, but none of them flinched. “Interesting,” they said. “What do you offer?”

“I fix things,” said Marise.

“I break things,” said Sonja.

“I learn things,” said Bonnie.

“Hmm,” said Ainsley. “There are things here that need fixing, things that need breaking, and plenty that needs learning. Such potential.”

“I hope you’re not making fun of us,” said Sonja.

“Me?” Ainsley pretended to be shocked, then chuckled. “Maybe a little. I don’t get many visitors. Not ones that survive, anyway.” They turned away. “Come on, then. You must be hungry. Tired. You need food and sleep.”

“We should warn you,” said Marise.

Ainsley turned back. “Yes?”

Sonja sent her a quelling look, but Marise continued. “Taking us in could put you in danger. Our entire village—”

“Yes, that was unfortunate, but you are safe here.” Ainsley turned and walked into the darkness.

“What if he murders us?” Sonja asked. “What if we’re added to the pile of bones?”

“He won’t,” said Bonnie.

“Says the girl who’s never been farther than a half a day’s ride from the village before.”

“It can’t be worse than would happen if we were caught,” said Marise.

They emerged into a kitchen area, with a round, friendly wooden table and chairs with hand sewn cushions on them. Sonja leaned down to take a look.

“Printed with peonies on them,” said Ainsley, not turning to look at them from the stove. “And not filled with the hair of my enemies.” They gave her a quick glance over one shoulder. “I’m not wearing a necklace of teeth, either.”

“Sorry,” Sonja mumbled.

“No, no, it’s wise for a young woman to be cautious, in many a dimension,” Ainsley assured her. “You’d think, after so much time, we’d have figured that bit out, but no, not yet. I have soup. No poison in it, I promise. There’s hot tea and cold, and fresh bread. Dishes are in the cupboard to your right, drinks along the counter. Set the table, please.”

“How does the library grow?” Bonnie asked, as the young women set the table. “The books don’t just pop up here, do they?”

“No, no,” said Ainsley. “I have a regular round of Inkpickers who stop by and show me their latest finds. If I don’t have it, and it’s in good enough shape to repair, I usually buy it. Weary travelers either tire of carrying their books, or they read them on the way and don’t want to keep them. And then there are those who remember the library in their wills.”

“How do they even know it exists?” Marise asked.

“Those who can’t come in person often find it in their dreams,” said Ainsley. “They can’t take anything back with them, of course. This isn’t a lending library. But a visit here imbues them with a passion for books. They spend the rest of their lives accumulating too many of them, and then will them here.”

“How do they get here?” Sonja asked, slicing the crusty bread, warm as though it had just emerged from the oven.

Ainsley smiled, as they ladled the soup into the bowls Bonnie brought them. “They follow the scent of ink and paper.”

They sat around the table and ate their supper.

Sonja looked up. “Are we dead?” she asked.

“No,” Ainsley assured her.

“Are we dreaming?” Marise asked. “Because something awful is happening to us elsewhere?”

“No,” Ainsley said, in a kind voice. “Your bodies and your spirits are here.”

“Can we stay?” asked Bonnie.

“As long as you like,” said Ainsley. “I have the room. Would you prefer to stay together, or be in separate rooms?”

“Together, at first,” said Marise.

Ainsley nodded. “When you decide differently, you can read the room into a different configuration.”

Before Marise could question that, Sonja asked, “What’s expected of us, if we stay? How do we earn our keep?”

“Treat the books as friends, with respect.” Ainsley began ticking off requirements on their fingers. “Don’t ignore them if they try to warn you about something.  I’ll teach you binding, mending, how to listen to the pages, the spines, the souls. You can help keep the place tidy, with dishes and mending and washing and the like, but I don’t need or want scullery maids or servants. You’ll need to study to achieve that which you seek.” He looked at Sonja, “Revenge might take some time. And clearer definition.”

She nodded.

“Can we return if we go past the door?” Bonnie asked.

“You can come and go as you please on short trips,” said Ainsley. “Although I advise caution in these turbulent times. Don’t leave unarmed, be it with a blade or a vial of belladonna.”

“The bones—” Marise began.

“Don’t worry, they didn’t die of over-reading,” said Ainsley.

Bonnie giggled.

“Intruders?” Sonja hazarded.

“In a sense,” said Ainsley. “There’s the type of word-hater who is upfront about it. They hate words, literature, passion, entertainment, education. They must be quashed before they gain a foothold and power, or they destroy everything in their path. Then there is the other kind of word-hater, the more insidious kind. They pretend to love words, but the truth is, they only love their own. They claim they know what is ‘good’ and ‘right’ and that their opinions are exalted, and the only opinions that matter. They are even more dangerous, because they manipulate those who would have a wider, more complex reading and learning experience without them. The upfront haters can’t get in; the library is fortified against them. It can’t yet hunt them down and remove them; we would need to create and train Ink Knights for that. And let’s face it, most of us would rather stay in and read than go out and do battle, until the battle is brought into our parlors. The bones you stumbled across are the bones of the insidious. They might get in, but there’s no one here for them to manipulate. Eventually, their own misanthropy and bullying bile eats them from the inside, and nothing is left but their bones.” Ainsley sighed. “I supposed I could tidy them up a bit, but I do like a little bit of drama here and there.”

“If we ever decide to leave,” Sonja began.

“If it is ever safe to leave,” Marise added.

“Then you will leave, with goodwill and blessings,” said Ainsley. “To be readers or writers or whomever you wish.”

“But we can’t come back,” said Bonnie. “If we left, for years. We’d forget?”

“The path to the rowan would close to you,” said Ainsley. “But you could return in your dreams.”

“As long as we don’t become insidious,” Sonja countered, and they exchanged a smile.

The girls finished their supper, listening to Ainsley tell stories of their youthful adventures discovering caches of scrolls and caverns of cuneiform. Together, they washed the dishes, and then Marise yawned.

“I’m sorry,” she said, embarrassed.

“You’re exhausted,” Ainsley said. “Best get some rest. Through the birch arch there.” They pointed.

“Thank you,” said Bonnie, and the other two young women echoed with sleepy voices.

The bedroom held three large four-poster beds, the foot-boards angled toward each other. The beds were stacked with fluffy pillows and, soft quilts, with a nightdress set out on each bed. And, of course, shelves of books with beautiful, luminous covers edged the space.

Sonja opened a small door. “A bathroom, thank goodness,” she said. “I was worried we’d have to use an outhouse.”

The trio performed their evening ablutions, crawled into their beds, and were asleep almost as soon as their eyes closed.

Sometime in the night they were woken up by shaking branches, rolling thunder, and angry voices outside. They heard the clash of swords, the shouts of fury, and was that a cannon? The room shook, and roof of leaves above their heads rattled.

They climbed into the bed with Sonja and huddled together.

“Are we dreaming?” Marise asked.

A walnut fell from above them and bopped Sonja on the head. “I don’t dream in walnuts,” she said, flicking it off the bed.

“It’s real,” said Bonnie. “It sounds bad, but we don’t need to be frightened.”

“How can you be sure?” Sonja demanded.

Bonnie smiled. “I believe in the books.”

Sonja snorted. “I still wish Ink Knights existed.”

Bonnie’s smile widened. “Maybe we can create them.”

“We’ll put it on our project list,” Marise joked as Sonja rolled her eyes.

Another blunt blow shook the building. The girls huddled tighter together.

“What if they come through the roof?” Marise whispered.

“We stab them with a hatpin,” said Sonja.

Marise opened her mouth to point out they didn’t have hats, much less hatpins, when Bonnie said, “Don’t imagine them breaking in, and then they won’t.”

“If only it worked that way at home,” Marise whispered.

“This is home now,” said Bonnie.

A book jittered off one of the shelves above them, due to the vibration of the fight outside, and dropped into the bed in front of them. It was bound in blue leather, with silver trim.

“Pick it up and read to us,” said Bonnie.

“Shouldn’t we stay as quiet as can be, so they won’t find us?” Marise asked.

“We should read this book,” Bonnie insisted.

Sonja picked it up and turned the pages. “Once upon a time, there were three brave girls, who grew into three adventurous women. They didn’t slay dragons. They slew those who hunted dragons…”

Sonja read in a strong, true voice, as the room stopped shaking and the voices receded.  Marise and Bonnie snuggled beside her, excited to learn what happened next. Sonja read about the girls’ adventures and challenges, their laughter, their tears. “And so they lived, happily ever after, because they were true to themselves and each other. The end.” Sonja closed the book with a snap.

Marise looked up. “Is it--?”

A series of strange screeching noises began, and grew in volume. Then more shouting, and screaming. The girls dived under the covers, trying to block out the sounds. The sounds of battle died away, the screaming lessened into moans, and then silence. The three of them drifted off to sleep, still curled together in one bed.

They woke, the next morning, to the sounds of birds chirping. The songs were familiar.

Sonja sat up in bed and frowned. “I didn’t think birds could tweet folksongs,” she said.

“They can do many things here,” said Bonnie, climbing out of bed.

“Look at her, she’s almost smug,” teased Marise.

“Hallooo! Good morning!” Ainsley called from the other side of the door. “Breakfast is ready. I hope you like coffee, although I can fix tea.”

“Coffee’s great,” Marise called. “We’ll be right out.”

Quick morning ablutions, even quicker dressing, and they were in the kitchen, facing beautiful poached eggs heaped with creamy sauce on muffins, and sides of hash browns. “Come, come,” said Ainsley, “eat while it’s hot.”

Sonja went to help herself to a cup of coffee and stopped short at something on the floor. “That’s a cannonball.”

“It’ll make a lovely doorstop, once I’ve polished it up a bit,” said Aisley. “it’s a bit too heavy for a bowling ball.”

“You bowl here?” Marise asked.

“It’s a library. Everything is here.”

“Last night—” Sonja began.

“Sorry about the ruckus,” said Ainsley. “Raiders are stupid and blunt. Which makes them easy to defeat, it’s not like there’s a lot of fresh ideas in their repertoire. But sometimes it takes longer to turn them back than others.”

Marise looked up at the roof.

“It’s almost fixed itself,” said Ainsley.

“And the raiders just…ran away?” Sonja asked, her tone cautious.

“Oh, no, the liberdactyls ate them,” said Ainsley, with good cheer. “I hope the screaming didn’t keep you up.”

“Liber. Dactyl?” Marise asked.

“I expect it’s like a pterodactyl,” said Bonnie. “I remember reading about them in school. I always wanted to go to the museum in Oberland to see the skeleton in the natural history museum there.”

“Very good memory,” Ainsley beamed. “A liberdactyl looks very much like a pterodactyl, but quite large. And vicious toward anyone or anything that attacks the library.”

“If we go out the front door, will the ground be littered with body parts?” Sonja asked.

“Maybe an eyeball or two,” said Ainsley. “The liberdactyls are quite omnivorous; you usually find evidence of their meals in their scat.”

“I think I’ll pass,” said Marise, and the others laughed.

They ate, until Marise said, “Does this mean our village is safe again?”

“I’d never feel safe again, and I don’t want to see what’s left and what’s been destroyed,” said Sonja. “I feel I should, to bear witness, to see if anyone survived, but I don’t want to.”

“Even if the group last night was the group that attacked your village, it would only be quiet until the next group came through,” said Ainsley. They looked at Sonja. “I suspect you three are the only survivors.”

“Shouldn’t we make sure?” Marise asked.

“I don’t want to leave,” said Bonnie. “Our parents told us to run and we ran. We need to stay here, and safe, for now. If any of them survived, we will find our way back to each other, through ink.”

“How many more groups of raiders are coming through?” Sonja asked.

“I don’t know,” said Aisley.

“Would the books know?”

“They might have information on patterns.”

“That’s where I’ll start then,” said Sonja. “Learning the patterns and figuring out a way to break them.”

“I’ll look for their weaknesses,” said Marise. “Then we can figure out how to build our strengths.”

“I’ll learn their fears, and create something worse,” said Bonnie.

“Sounds like a good day’s plan,” said Ainsley.

“I was scared last night,” Sonja admitted.

“How long can the library hold?” Marise asked.

“As long as people love words and stories,” said Ainsley. “And while that’s true—”

“The books will protect us,” said Bonnie.

---

Devon Ellington is a full-time writer, publishing under multiple names in fiction and nonfiction, and an internationally-produced playwright and radio writer. She spent years working in professional theatre, including as a dresser on Broadway. www.devonellingtonwork.com

Wayne Mok

Peaches

On our first wedding anniversary, my husband burned himself while cooking for me. I had to rush him to the hospital. The nurse told me to stay in the waiting room while the doctors examined the burn.

An older man sat across from me, hunched over, hands clenched on his lap, eyes fixed on the white vinyl floor. His legs rocked up and down rapidly; his lips moved inaudibly, as if he was praying. As the minutes passed, his movements looked increasingly distressing.

I spoke up,“Sir?” No response. I asked again, “Sir, are you okay?”

Without even looking up, “No,” he replied.The abruptness felt like it froze time.

“Do you need a doctor?” I asked.

He shook his head and chuckled,“What good is a doctor?”

His comment made me feel uneasy, so I remained silent.

“My wife,” he managed to say after a long pause.

I wasn’t sure what to do at that point—he was obviously here for his wife, but if they didn’t think a doctor could help, why were they here? The clock on the wall hung crooked; each tick, full of effort, rattled through the room.

The nurse entered the waiting room and we both turned. She called out a name that I did not recognize; neither did the man. He glanced in my direction before averting his eyes.

I broke the silence,“What’s her name?”

His legs stopped moving,“Peaches.”

Surprised, I replied, “That’s my nickname.”

He looked up, revealing a handsome face worn down by a large number of wrinkles,“Who are you here for?”

“My husband,”I replied, “he burned himself cooking.”

“Men,” he laughed.

I laughed too.

He spent the next few minutes telling me about his wife. Her real name was Elizabeth. One day, early in their marriage, she choked on a peach pit and had to be taken to the hospital. From that day on, he called her Peaches. A year later, she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. That was twenty years ago.

“That must’ve been difficult.”

“It was.”

“She’s fortunate to have you,”I smiled.

The man seemed surprised by what I said, but after a long pause, he replied, “Fortunate?”

I wanted to say something, but I couldn’t. My mind drifted between thoughts of my husband and of the man. I was worried about my husband, yet at the same time, something about the man was unsettling,even a little frightening. The man closed his eyes, leaned forward, clasped his hands, and resumed his mumbling. I watched as his face grew paler with the tick of the clock, second by second, outrun by each beat of my pounding heart. For just a moment, the lights in the room flickered, the clock hand stopped—time seemed to stand still. The silence was encompassing, swallowing us up. I wasn’t quite sure why, but I shivered in my seat.

My husband came out a few minutes later. The burns were not too serious. I said a quick goodbye to the man and left.

“Who was that?” he asked.

I didn’t answer. “I’m glad you’re okay,” I said.

My husband smiled. He walked in front of me and pushed the door open with his left hand. His right arm was wrapped in gauze, barely exposing his fingers. I reached for them. He flinched in pain, then shot me a puzzled look, “What are you doing?” He tried to shake me off, but I resisted—somehow, I knew that I needed to hold on. I clutched his hand tighter and drew him close.

---

Wayne Mok is originally from Hong Kong and now lives in Sydney, Australia.

James W. Morris

RISE

Purdy was doing figure eights, rubbing her fur, alive with static electricity,against Eleanor’s ankles while Eleanor sought the kitchen light switch.

“Hey, you dumb cat,” Eleanor said. “Don’t you know ladies my age who get tripped and knocked down don’t always get back up? Who would feed you then?Ask yourself that.”She took a can from atop the stack in the cat food cabinet.

Purdy discontinued the figure eights, then balanced on her hind legs and deliberately stretched her mottled, gray-and-white body to prop both front paws—nails excitedly extended—against the already abundantly-scratched facing of the bottom storage cabinet. In the old days, the cat would execute a smart graceful hop up onto the kitchen counter and push her nosehard into her food dish before Eleanor had finished filling it. Such hopping seemed too much effort nowadays—the cat was old and would wait to have her bowl ceremoniously placed before her at the designated spot on the floor.

Purdy emitted one of those hard-to-decipher growly cat noises while Eleanor searched in vain for the can opener, which she was sure she’d left on the kitchen counter the previous evening.

“I know what would happen if I did fall down and die,” Eleanor said. “After a few hours you’d forget everything I’ve done for you and eat my eyeballs. Dumb cat.”

Where could the darn can opener be?For a second,Eleanor almost wished she’d purchased a brand of cat food whose cans featured pull-top lids, but of course those cost seven cents more per can just for the convenience and Eleanor resented being over-charged for certain things.

Purdy lifted her face—gray-muzzled, missing a fang—and looked at Eleanor searchingly.

“And by the way,” Eleanor said,“don’t think I haven’t noticed that you’ve been waking me up five minutes earlier each day to feed you. The sun hasn’t even risen yet. I’m onto your game, Missy. Good thing for you I just happened to be awake already.”

Nope. The opener was definitely not to be found on the counter, though she was absolutely sure she’d left it there less than eight hours earlier.

“Well, Purdy. I can be as certain as I want to be, but it still isn’t here. I hate this getting-old crapola. Makes you doubt your memory and your senses. But I guess you know what I mean.”

Eleanor reached down to consolingly stroke the cat, who reared back slightly, trying to determine whether the proffered hand contained food.

Eleanor rolled her eyes. “Yeah, right. Feed me.I get it.”

Well, despite having no memory of the action, she must have placed the opener in the gadget drawer last night, then. After ten minutes of searching, Eleanor had located a bent potato peeler and a warped plastic egg-slicer she had completely forgotten about, but didn’t see the can opener. She then searched all the other drawers in the kitchen—even the one she only used for trivets and potholders—before returning to the gadget drawer and removing all the entangled items one-by-one. The can opener was not there.

Since the kitchen was a galley-type, too narrow to hold a table and chairs, Eleanor had to retreat to the dining room to sit down, driven equally by fatigue in her legs and a furious sense of frustration.

“Think, Ellie,” she said. “What else could you use?”

She had a vague early memory of her father opening cans of pork and beans with a hunting knife and a hammer, but she wasn’t prepared to go down that road. Probably slice my hand off, she thought.

A church key! One of those pointy-ended old-fashioned openers with which you lever little triangle-shaped openings into the top of cans. Her husband regularly used one for his beer before manufacturers switched from steel to aluminum cans and added pull-tabs. (After pulling it, her husband would usually drop the detached tab back into his beer. How many other people did that?And what percentage choked while chugging?) Eleanor was sure she had a church keysomewhere, probably in a stored box of excess kitchen doo-dads in the basement.

Purdy came into the dining room and stood steadfastly in front of Eleanor, confused as to why she was not being fed on schedule.

“Well, cat,” Eleanor said. “Do I really want to go to all the trouble of creeping downstairs—and getting covered in cobwebs—in order to rifle through a bunch of dusty old storage boxes, seeing if I can locate an ancient can opener,just so you can immediately get fed?”

Purdy made a murmured cat noise as if in assent and Eleanor laughed.

When Eleanor raised her head in preparation to stand, a small dark shape in the next room, adjacent to the light fixture on the ceiling of the kitchen, caught her eye. God, not another leak, she thought, squinting as she approached. Her eyesight was poor. No, it was not a newly-emerged water stain. It was the can opener. Adhered to the ceiling.

*

Eleanor stared at it. The indisputable impossibility of it.

She went back to the dining room and sat down. There must be a logical explanation. Magnets? No. The opener was mostly hard black plastic, anyway. A practical joke then, or Candid Camera? Well, some unknown someone would have to have ventured down to her shabby out-of-the-way neighborhood, sneaked into her modest nondescript house in the middle of the night, then glued the can opener to the ceiling. Ridiculous.

A miracle, then? Maybe an updated version of the miracle of the fish, only this time the divinely-provided seafood will come in the form of canned tuna. For which a righteous, levitating opener will be required.

“Calm down, Ellie,” she told herself. “Get a grip. And don’t blaspheme.”

Getting a closer look at the renegade opener might prove helpful, perhaps bring a sense of reality back to the situation. Eleanor dragged a chair from the dining room across the tiled floor of the kitchen and climbed carefully up on it, but immediately felt dangerously unsteady when she peered upward in the direction of the opener. She climbed back down.

After thinking for a minute, she went to the little mudroom off the kitchen and returned with a broom. The house was old and the ceilings high—over nine feet—but Eleanor with her arms fully extended was just able to contact the can opener with the tips of the broom’s bristles. The moment she did so, the opener detached itself from the ceiling and dropped with a sharp, astoundingly-loud clatter into the kitchen sink. Purdy, shocked by the noise, rocketed into the dining room and cowered under a chair.

Eleanor looked in the direction in which Purdy had disappeared. “Yeah, don’t blame you,” she said. After that, there seemed to be nothing to do but use the opener—which upon examination showed absolutely no residual evidence of what might have been holding it on to the ceiling—to unseal the cat food can and dump its stinky fish-byproducts in Purdy’s bowl and place the bowl on the floor. She knew the cat’s hunger would overcome her fear soon enough.

*

Eleanor was scheduled to have lunch at noon that day with Ann, but postponed, texting her friend that she did not feel well, a common, easily-accepted reason for changing plans used by old people. Besides, it was true. Eleanor did not exactly feel sick, but she certainly did not feel right.

She took to her bed for the rest of the day. In the afternoon she dozed a bit, and awoke with a memory. She was a teen, preparing for a casual date with a boy she’d just met, a tall athletic boy who volunteered to take her ice skating at the new-frozen pond in Shake’s Woods. But her skates were not to be found at the back of her clothes closet where she thought they’d been stored, so she asked her mother—who happened to be in the hallway, passing the entrance of her bedroom—for assistance. “Mother,” she said, “have you seen my ice skates?” “Yes, Ellie, they’re on the ceiling,” her mother immediately replied, matter-of-factly, as she continued without pause down the hall. Perhaps her mother was trying to make some point about her children needing to keep track of their possessions, but Eleanor—already tense with anticipation regarding the date with the new boy—was so frustrated by her mother’s lack of interest in her missing-skates problem that she didn’t speak to her for three days.

What was that boy’s name? Eleanor now wondered. She couldn’t recall—the tentative ice-skating date fell through and he seemed to lose his already moderate interest in her after that. Anyhow, after that day the phrase, “It’s on the ceiling,”became a sort of in-family joke, a reply any one of them was likely to give when asked where something might be.Eleanor hadn’t thought of it, this stupid little sardonic rejoinder, in years—probably because she was the last member of her immediate family left living and there was no one to joke with.

*

The next morning Eleanor awoke feeling quite a bit better. There were unexplainable, head-scratching incidents, mysterious occurrences,written into the narrative of every person’s biography. You can waste your time, dwelling on them and obsessing about what happened,or you can just simply accept the fact of them and move on. It’s the same for that mentally-held compendium of gnawing little regrets accumulated by each aging person enjoying an otherwise happy life; it’s better to put those regrets aside and live as fully as possible in one’s ever-dwindling present.

Eleanor ventured downstairs and fed the cat, encountering no difficulty locating the can opener. She then sat in the living room with a bowl of bran flakes in front of her and watched a morning program on TV which featured a bunch of women—what her husband would call yentas—all seemingly talking at the same time. After the show was over, she climbed determinately back to the second floor of the house and entered the narrow bathroom at the top of the stairs, planning to brush her partial denture, which she’d left soaking overnight. The toothbrush she used for that purpose was not where she left it.

“Oh, no,” Eleanor said, after a second. She hesitantly craned her neck slowly toward the bathroom ceiling.

*

The ceilings on the second floor of her house were lower thanthe first, so Eleanor felt she might be able to reach the rogue toothbrush with the tip-end of a bath towel, if she flicked at it right. In fact, she was successful on her first attempt; when the snapping towel touched it, the toothbrush let go of its grip on the plaster,then impelled off a side wall, spinning helicopter-like mid-air for a half second before dropping, with a kind of sick inevitability, into the toilet bowl.

She sighed, retrieved the brush from the bowl, and tossed it directly in to the trash can. Eleanor was not the sort of person who would ever consider using a toothbrush that had been in a toilet bowl, no matter how pure and pristine the water in the bowl was reputed to be, or how spectacularly well the brush had been cleaned and sanitized.

Before exiting the bathroom, Eleanor stood still for a moment, then pointed and raised her chin to face the ceiling; she extended her arms outward, palms up.

Why?

*

Eleanor met Ann for the agreed-upon lunch postponed from yesterday. If she’d cancelled again, she knew Ann would worry, think Eleanor was really ill, be full of nosy questions. Better just to go.

At the restaurant, after inquiring about Eleanor’s health, Ann commenced her usual verbal binge,listing her own ailments, what her doctor said about each one, and why she thought he was bull-headed and wrong. In truth, Eleanor didn’t like Ann all that much; she was well-meaning, sweet and harmless, but boring. They’d met through their husbands—who had been golfing buddies—and now that both were widows some obscure, small-print subsection of the social contract seemed to indicate they should try to remain friendly. Anyway, it did lonely old ladies no harm to get out of the house once in a while.

While Ann was describing in detail her newest misdiagnosed symptom—an ominous, electric tingling occurring intermittently in her left instep—Eleanor’s mind strayed from the subject of her friend’s foot to her own house. She had to wonder: what unanchored possession of hers would she find attached to the ceiling when she returned home?

*

She did not have to wait long to find out. Upon entering the living room through the front door, house keys still in hand, Eleanor saw Purdy, her back attached to the ceiling, dangling lifelessly above the windowsill from which she must have risen.

Eleanor let out a yelp and dropped her keys. When she did so, the cat startled back to life; she was not dead—the stupid animal had actually been dozing comfortably, her legs extended and drooping unsupported mid-air.

Eleanor’s panic soon infected the cat, however—she began wailing, while manically waggling her legs and tail. Eleanor rushed off and returned ten seconds later with the broom. She didn’t feel she’d have to swat at, and possibly harm,the cat; the previous rogue items had detached as soon as touched.

She steadied herself, planted her feet and purposefully raised the broom above her head. When the tips of the straw bristles began to approach Purdy’s body the cat seemed alarmed, but the moment they contacted her fur, she dropped from the ceiling. Eleanor reflexively extended her left arm to mitigate the fall and catch the cat, a mistake. Purdy’s extended claws raked down Eleanor’s forearm, leaving parallel scratches, which immediately exhibited drops of blood. The cat disappeared into the basement, chased by Eleanor’s echoing scream.

*

During the next few days, Eleanor ate and slept little. Her shredded arm hurt, for one thing—and she was tortured by a hard-to-repress memory of her grandfather gleefully relating how a young friend of his had died from “blood poisoning” after getting a tiny cat scratch. His friend had laughed off the insignificant injury and subsequent infection until it was too late. Eleanor’s gouges were long and deep and looked horrible, but showed no sign of being infected.

For her part, Purdy refused to come out from the spot to which she’d retreated—behind the storage boxes in the basement—no matter how much Eleanor prompted her to, calling her name with put-upon sweetness and shaking a cardboard container of kitty treats that Eleanor assured her were yummy. Finally, she decided to relocate the cat’s food dish down there and let her be.

In the early hours of Sunday morning, Eleanor,lying half in bed without hope of sleeping, heard a vehicle pass by on the quiet street outside and a subsequent thwap that indicated her newspaper had been delivered. It was pretty rare for people to receive a physical paper these days—she was the only one on the block—but Eleanor had a forty-year streak of completing the newspaper’s coveted Sunday crossword puzzle in pen that she wanted to keep intact. She’d attempted once or twice to do the crossword online but found she couldn’t concentrate with an expectant computer screen blinking at her.

Eleanor donned her glasses and peered at the rectangular glowing red numerals on her clock radio. It was 4:12am. Retrieving the paper would be something to do, anyhow. She was sleeping in a t-shirt—a faded green one of her husband’s that read “Fly, Eagles, Fly”—so she pulled on some sweatpants, tucked the t-shirt in, then put on a pair of heavy-soled house slippers she kept near the bed.

*

Outside, in the dank November cold, Eleanor paused on the walkway a couple of yards from the house and looked up and down the street. She decided she liked her neighborhood at this time of day, with all fuss and noise quieted. The night sky was clear and numerous bright stars were visible—the bulb in the streetlamp nearby had been burnt out since 2019. Eleanor crunched through a thin rime of frost on the dead strip of grass laughably known as her front lawn, which she needed to traverse to retrieve the warm, plastic-wrapped newspaper from its landing spot on the driveway.

As Eleanor prepared to step back through the door of the house to reenter, she abruptly felt it—an urgently compelling physical need to ascend skyward. But it was not an irresistible impulse or desire originating from within her person as much as it was a newly-felt certitude, a premonition,that gravity was about to make an exception in her case. It was going to let her go, set her free of the earth.

Eleanor reeled a bit with the import of her new understanding, flitting lightfooted across the lawn, astonished. Then she dropped the newspaper and began an unhurried drift away from the house.

There was great joy. Why did it not occur to her that there would be joy?

---

James W. Morris is a graduate of LaSalle University in Philadelphia, where he was awarded a scholarship for creative writing. He is the author of dozens of short stories, humor pieces, essays, and poems which have appeared in various literary magazines, and his first novel, Rude Baby, was published last year. More info at www.jameswmorris.com.

Miranda Keskes

Perseus Isn’t a Character in This Story

I return to the scene: the abandoned cement plant. The monstrosity stands in defiance against the sandy shoreline, its stone chutes snaking out like tentacles.

Five months ago, I begged him to stop. After, my best friend called me a backstabber and a whore. Now, people avert their eyes when I pass by.

I place my hand against my swollen belly. Standing in the shadows of the stone structure, my resolve hardens.

There is the fluttering of beating wings in my womb.

Further down the shoreline, I watch the group of them around a bonfire, their bodies slithering against one another. Empty bottles reflect the moonlight. He looks up from the writhing body he presses down upon.

He is not expecting me tonight.

Curiosity and lust take over. He disengages from the group and comes to me, his silhouette enlarging as he approaches. The wind picks up, twisting my long hair into knots.

I tell him I want to talk. He has other plans. He drags me inside and forces me down onto a pile of rubble. I hiss at the pain, but he covers my mouth. I taste the grit of sand in my teeth.

Grasping, my hand connects with a chunk of concrete. My eyes meet his. He freezes. There is a rattling in my ears as the stone meets his skull.

Conception

“I’m ready to know how babies are made.”

My ten year old has been bringing up the topic—at the grocery store, after-school care, the neighbor’s backyard—but now he finds a captive audience of one at his bedside.

I can’t get up. His body is too heavy, too strong. The carpet burns against my skin.

“Alright.” I explain the process like a perfunctory scientist. “The man puts his penis in the woman’s vagina...”

Stop. Please.

“...releasing sperm, fertilizing the egg in the woman.”

He moans, kisses me roughly, then leaves to join his friends.

“Did it hurt when my dad.…” He squirms, scrunching his face.

I lie there, immobile, skirt hiked up, one breast bare. Someone steps over me to grab another beer.

“Yes...but it’s not meant to.”

He looks down, frowning. “I’m sorry.”

The right words. The wrong mouth.

“You have nothing to apologize for.” I pull him into my arms, embracing the warmth of his body against my own. My eyes drift to the bedroom window.

The moon is full. Light pierces through the clouds

---

Miranda Keskes is a writer and educator whose fiction appears in Blink Ink, Pigeon Review, Every Day Fiction, Bright Flash Literary Review, Microfiction Monday, 50-Word Stories, The Drabble, as well as the following anthologies: Heart/h, Hysteria, and 100 Ways to Die. She lives in Michigan with her husband and their two boys. You can find her on Instagram @miranda_keskes_writer.

Jon McLelland

Gone to the Dogs

It had all seemed like such a good idea at the time. 

Darren Blevins bent over, put his hands on his knees and leaned his rump against the side of his pickup. He stared at the toes of his work boots and breathed in and out through his nose. That wasn't enough, so he breathed through his mouth, sucking in through his teeth and exhaling through pursed lips, until he had to sit on the asphalt because he thought he'd faint. 

Thank God nobody could see him sitting there, on the asphalt behind the abandoned Western Sizzlin' steakhouse, head between his knees now, dizzy and nauseated. It was eighty degrees in the summer night, but Darren was clammy and shaking.   

It was a soft, still, moonlit night, and behind the ex-restaurant the frogs in the drainage ditch down the embankment chorused their desire. When the light-headedness and nausea began to ease, his breathing slowed, and Darren leaned his head back against the warm metal of the pickup. Even in the dark, the pearlescent lettering of the decal gleamed along the full length of the truck bed. It gathered in the moonlight and broadcast its message: CHIHWEENIES-R-US ASK ME ABOUT EM!!!  

Darren reached for the paper sack on the ground beside him and pulled out a 16-ounce plastic bottle of Coke and a plastic flask of Evan Williams. He opened the Coke bottle, drank a long pull, burped roundly, and poured a third of the bottle's contents onto the pavement. Then he unscrewed the cap of the bourbon and decanted half of it into the Coca Cola. He took three long swallows of the warm, sweet fizz, leaned his head back against the truck again and let the football stadium aroma of bourbon and Coke envelope and settle over him like love.  He felt his shoulders begin to relax, felt his face flush, and knew with deepening satisfaction that coming here, with the bourbon and Coke, had been a good idea, had been the right thing to do.  He took another long drink from the bottle, burped quietly this time, and emptied the rest of the whiskey into the soda bottle. 

He had had to get out of that hospital room, away from the frightening antiseptic smells and the high-pitched beeping of the monitors and the sight of Brenda in that bed with all those tubes and all those bandages. And there was Brenda's sister, Linda, and her husband, Bennie, who wouldn't shut the fuck up, trying to get everybody to hold hands and pray, and the sheriff's deputy, and the man from animal control, and somebody from the fucking game warden's office, for God's sake.   

Why the fuck would the game warden care? Were the dogs fucking game now? Or, maybe the game warden was worried the dogs'd eat the deer? Shit, could be. Hell, they could eat fucking cattle. Might be right now. Or, might be eating people. Might be sneaking up on some damn poor bastards right now, out in the dark. But they couldn't sneak. Too loud and too jittery. So people were probably okay. They'd never manage to sneak up on a deer. And they were too stupid. Cows, that'd be the thing. Shit. Why the fucking game warden? Darren took a deep drink from the Coke bottle, swallowed, and took another deeper drink.   

In the cab of the truck, Dwayne gave a Woof that sounded like it came from inside an oil drum and began to moan in his sleep. Nobody could explain how a dog that size could make a sound like that. Before all of this shit, Darren had been meaning to call Bose about it, to see if they might could use the Duanes to come up with a new way to make little speakers sound big.  Some new kind of woofer. Woofer. Darren snorted. The snort turned into a spreading, slow-motion grin, swelled into a laugh that went all the way to his stomach, and in no time Darren was writhing and roaring against the side of the pick-up. He leaned his head back against the decal-ed side off the truck and laughed a gale into the night sky that momentarily silenced the frogs. The tears streamed down his red face as his abdomen cramped and the laughter tailed off into a drawn-out, high-pitched wheeze. With his head still leaned back against the truck, Darren stared into the sky. Strip-center lights bathed the boggy exhalations of the drainage ditch, hiding the stars with a velvety, navy blue polyester sheen. His vision swam with drunken dizziness, and tears that welled on their own rolled down his face and onto his shirt. His heartbeat rushed in his ears, sudden, fast, and insistent, a pulsing, whooshing white noise counterpoint to the frogs’ unworried rhythm. He breathed in great gulps and the pounding slowed. The rushing in his ears faded, but Darren didn’t notice. The frogs had started back up, but Darren longer heard them. Shit how did it come to this? 

Darren’s hands tingled, and his face pulsed like the night was pulling on it. To his left, thirty yards away at the back corner of the parking lot, a pole-mounted light cast its orange glow over the cracked asphalt and broken glass. A single power line tapped it from across the ditch, pulling at the pole so that it leaned back toward the woods. Moths and smaller flying insects swarmed in a tight ball around the light, and bats dove in and out of the swarm, cutting through it in jerky, high-speed arcs. Darren liked nature shows, and the bats reminded him of sailfish slicing through a ball of anchovies. Or wolves chasing caribou. Or the dogs. Chasing anything. Darren set the bottle down and put his hands over his face.  His breath caught in his chest, and tears ran down his nose.   

With his eyes closed and his body feeling very far away, Darren could see Brenda leaning on her elbow in the bed, her eyes on the sheet between them as she saw the future that their new dog-breeding business would build. They would make it. Chiweenie puppies went for five hundred or even a thousand dollars. They weren’t scared of working. They knew about dogs. It would work. Darren had had tears in his eyes then, too, as he watched her face while she described the future they would have, calling it into being as surely as if she’d been making an incantation. It wasn’t the vision of prosperity that moved him, it was the vision of her. He loved her, and the story of the future she was telling was part of her, and she was telling it with him in it. It could have been a vision of a burger joint or a hardware store or a shop selling harpoons to Eskimos in Alaska, and he would have been just as moved and just as ready to pledge his life to seeing it fulfilled. Darren bumped his head against the side of his truck as the tears streamed down his face. It made a hollow sound and he did it again, harder. And again, and again. It didn’t hurt, but a far-off-seeming part of him called from somewhere that it would hurt later, and that he should stop. He banged it one more time in defiance, the way he would’ve if he’d been sixteen and his brother had told him to stop doing something stupid, and then he stopped. The blood pulsed rhythmically in his ears, and it occurred to him that this must be what a big bell feels like when it stops ringing. There were waves of feeling at the back of his head. Not pain, just waves. He looked at the light and the bugs swarming around it. It pulsed as well, in time with the waves in his head. 

The Chihweenies were fine. They were sweet little things, sweeter than either of the breeds they came from, and cuter, which was the main thing for sales. It was like Brenda had said, they couldn’t keep enough of them. They got more breeding pairs and had more litters. And it wasn’t like those places you hear about, Darren knew. Brenda loved them all. Darren had seen All Creatures Great and Small on television as a kid, and Brenda was like those English sheep farmers. She worked hard for those dogs, and loved every one of them. Darren worked with her when he got home in the evening from his job with the Department of Transportation maintenance crew. He could spend all day clearing roadsides, and coming home to work way past dark with Brenda was like getting to go on vacation every day. He didn’t mind any of the work. Brenda the dog farmer was building the future she’d seen projected on the bedsheet between them that first night, and Darren had never felt more gratitude or satisfaction in his life than he did at being included by Brenda in her dream. He could have hosed dog shit off of concrete pads every night until he dropped from exhaustion and never would have minded it one bit. 

Linda and her fucking Great Dane. 

Darren had never liked Linda. If Brenda was a solid gold coin, Linda was a game token from Chuck-E-Cheese. As much as they looked alike, and as much as Brenda was beautiful to him, Darren had thought Linda was wrong from the first time he met her. Brenda’s lovely delicate face on Linda looked ferrety. Her blue eyes were broken glass, where Brenda’s were deep pools. Her hair was always a shade of too much, whatever color it happened to be, and she laughed short, harsh bursts over mean jokes about people. And she had fucking Bennie, and they had that fucking dog. And Brenda loved her sister. Darren closed his eyes again and blew an angry breath out between his lips. 

“It might be worth trying,” Linda had said. Nobody had ever thought of crossing Chihuahuas with Great Danes before, she said. Of course they fucking hadn’t, Darren had thought, but at the time he’d only looked at the ceiling. Brenda wanted her sister to finally be happy, to finally have something work out right, to finally realize what a good person she could be, and how much happier that’d make her. She didn’t have to say any of that, because it had all been said one way or another a hundred different times, after some goddamn dumb-ass thing, or after Linda had been cruel again and cried and apologized and begged forgiveness and said how she just wanted to be like Brenda. Fuck. So he’d just said, “Well, I don’t know,” and then he’d gone along with it and thrown himself into it because Brenda had. And for a while, by God, it looked like it was a great damn idea. 

They’d had to work at it for a while, to see what the crosses would produce. (You never know what you’re gonna git, Darren would say, and Linda would say That’s right, Forrest, because she knew that he didn’t like the idea, so she went along with the Gump jokes he made to cover it up.) Great Danes are big, simple, stupid, inbred things. Every damn one of them reminded him of a 1975 Chrysler. But Chihuahuas are complicated. Darren thought that they were mostly so nervous because too much was packed into too little space. Exactly the opposite of a Great Dane. Hell, he'd thought, maybe the Chihuahua blood would fill up the empty space under that oversized hood, and all that space would give the overpacked Chihuahuas the room they needed. Seemed reasonable. Some of the early crosses were too awful to talk about. Most of those died. The worst litter of all was the one that finally had two puppies that showed promise.  There were eight altogether, and Darren smothered six of them. He’d cried like a baby and had gone off by himself and gotten drunk then, too, because he was so angry he couldn’t stand it. When the first Duane puppy was weaned, Brenda gave it to him. She slid him onto their bed like a warm rubber water bottle.     

Darren took a long, slow breath and let his eyes swerve up the scuffed and filthy back wall of the old steak house. He took another pull at the Coke bottle and felt his body pulsing, but way off, like an ape stuffed in a snow suit, at the far end of a long pipe that he was looking through. 

Two more years it took, and all those other puppies. Another man would have made Linda and Bennie deal with the ones that had to be got rid of, but Darren couldn't stand the thought of what they might do to the poor damn things, and Brenda never said, but she loved him that much more for it. And then it was done. They had six pairs of Great Duanes and six of Gihuahuas. And, my god, the sound.  You wait, Linda had said, as they stood looking at the dogs in the pens, Two thousand a puppy. More. Darren built new pens for Linda and Bennie. They're yours, he'd said. He'd actually wept in the truck for those dogs as he drove home from Linda and Bennie's place, but he'd done what he had to do for Brenda's sister, and now they'd be free.  The Chihweenie business had suffered while he worked to build the new breeds, but in a year or so they'd be back to where they should be. Nothing left but clear work, and he'd make sure Brenda and their dogs were comfortable and happy and safe. No more of that awful shit. And he'd keep his job with the Department, just to be sure of things, unless the Chihweenie business got so good they knew they were set for life. But he wasn't counting on that, and that was fine. He didn't care if the dog business never did more than grocery money, as long as Brenda was happy. 

It was all so clear in his mind that he felt like he could touch it. Darren turned his head toward the light pole, and his vision swam, the orange sodium light painting beautiful, lazy swirls across the night, but the vision of that evening was perfectly steady in his mind's eye: Brenda closing the gate of the chain-link pen with her right hand and holding the puppy in her left, turning toward the house and seeing him as he walked toward her. No more complications. He'd worked hard, and made it all go away, and she was happy and he was happy and the dogs were happy and every damn body was happy.   

They ate supper and talked about what they'd do. She had the breeding planned out for three seasons. She had rebuilt their website. There was going to be a conference for cross-breeders in Indianapolis next year. They'd learn all kinds of things about how to improve the puppies. Maybe they'd go to a race while they were up there.  Indianapolis. Sounded exciting. But mostly he just listened to the music of their conversation. He loved the sound of her voice, and the rhythm of their voices together. The details of what got said were more or less all the same to him. It made him happy. 

Dwayne's one great booming Woof was the first he knew of everything coming apart.  Darren liked the Duanes. That was one more of the damn things about all of this, he thought, I love the Duanes. No damn way not to. His Duane — Dwayne — like all the others, was way past calm. He was a warm bag of liquid dog. The magic marble sack of dog traits had shaken around inside the breeding pairs of Great Danes and Chihuahuas, and the Duanes had won the lottery. It was the sense of contentment that got you first. Like cats, but without the killer instinct. They were completely content, and they didn’t have a vicious bone in their bodies. Like sloths, but only inert because they were so happy with wherever they were and whatever gravity wanted with them. Of course, the other thing about them was that they seemed not to have any bones in their bodies. Full-grown, they looked like quarter-sized Great Danes, but mostly made of rubber inside, and without the basic wrongness of Great Danes. They never had to live as pony-sized carnivores in constant submission to small, weak masters, and they never had to learn how to not to kill what they loved. Dwayne loved to slide off of things, or be poured out of things. Darren would take him to the church playground, and Dwayne would take turns with the children on the slide. He'd go down forwards or backwards, on his stomach or his back. He'd spill into a sort of puddle at the bottom, and then spring back up, like a Slinky dog, and lope back around to the ladder to go again. And the Duanes kept the Great Danes' bark, note for note, decibel for decibel, just as low, just as resonant, only the sound came from something far too small to make it. Darren told Brenda that watching Dwayne bark was like watching a squirrel sing opera. Darren sometimes wondered whether God made heaven for some really good people by putting their souls in Duanes when they died. He never said it out loud, but he really did wonder it sometimes. But when the bag was through shaking and the Duanes got the good stuff, what the Gihuahuas got was all the rest. 

One deep, round woof was all Dwayne gave. It was a quarter to five in the morning, and Darren stood in the kitchen finishing his coffee. Dwayne was a warm, brown pool of unconcern on the pale green vinyl floor. Darren drained the last sip, set the empty cup in the sink, and turned for the back door just as Dwayne lifted his head. Not the way a dog would do it, Dwayne extended his head from the puddle of himself like a snail extending its eye on a stalk. As it rose from the floor, Dwayne’s head rotated toward the door in one too-smooth movement, his liquid ears lifting, his liquid brow furrowing into a series of standing waves. Darren watched as Dwayne stared, motionless, through the kitchen wall. For ten seconds, Dwayne didn't move and neither did Darren. Dwayne pulled one long, whooshing breath in through his nose, swelling as he did like a thick brown balloon, and he barked one time. One booming WOOF, like the sound of a cannon fired from the other side of a bay, but somehow close enough to touch. Just once. Then the ears wilted, the brow flattened, and Dwayne's head subsided into the rest of him, finding its level.   

Darren stood staring at Dwayne, waiting to see if he’d give another sign of what he’d heard, but Dwayne only blinked a couple of times, sighed, and went to sleep. Darren opened the back door and stood on the stoop. There was no moon, and the night beyond the kitchen glow was black. Dawn was still too far off for the birds, and he could hear nothing else that he could think might have bothered Dwayne. Could’ve been anything. Deer, possum, coyote. They could all be nearly silent, and Dwayne’s bark would have scared them off or scared them still. Darren patted his pockets to make sure he had his wallet and phone, locked the back door, and headed off to work. Later, of course, it was obvious. The Archangel Dwayne, with a with a bass drum he could only hit once. 

He was out with a mowing crew just after seven o’clock, on the sloped bank of a county road half way to Buhl when his phone rang.  Darren, was all she said, before the sound of the dogs rose out of the phone like a thing. There was one sharp bang as the phone fell, and the connection broke. 

He called 911, and he called Linda. Her voicemail message said You've reached Dynasty Kennels, world-famous developer of the Gihuahua and the Great Duane! We have new litters! Leave us a message!   

Darren tilted the Coke bottle back and drank off the last of it.  He threw the bottle at the back of the dead steak house, enjoying the slow-motion, liquid-looking path that his bourbon-soaked eyes gave it, and listening to the manic, high-pitched, plastic hollowness as it bounced against the wall and the parking lot. The pitch threw him off balance, and he toppled onto his right side, bumping his cheek on the loose gravel scattered over the asphalt. The horizon bounced with him, and wavered, and he worked with his eyes to hold the swaying orange light at the end of the canted wooden pole. He breathed slowly through his mouth, and the swaying pole steadied, settling into a gentle oscillation, like the light on the end of a sailboat's mast after a big wave has passed and the water has settled down to a gentle background swell. This must be what it's like to be a Duane, he thought, and let himself settle into the pavement, trying to let his body ooze into complete relaxation like a Duane would.   

As his eyes closed, his vision passed from the gently bobbing light to the landscape of his mind's eye. He could see in the dark, across the pasture, to where the running shapes came out of the woods. In the monochromatic moonlight, he could see the bouncing, frenetic way that they ran, their huge heads swinging from side to side. In the dream he raised his head from the puddle that he was, and drew a great barrel full of air in through his nose. He would warn them all. He could feel the force of the bark building inside him, rising through the smoothness, gathering in his chest, about to explode. But then, Brenda laid her head against him, and the warm, liquid weight of her drew him into the pool that their two bodies made. He could hear the ravenous quarreling of the Gihuahuas as they crossed the pasture, headed away. Brenda sighed in her sleep and settled more deeply into Darren's side. Let them go. Darren relaxed his chest and let the air stream from his nose. Let them go. 

---

Jon McLelland is an architect during the day, and runs a small practice with offices in Tuscaloosa, Alabama and Nashville, Tennessee. Besides writing, his other part-time gig is teaching seminars on Sustainability at the University of Alabama. He and his wife (who did not know each other growing up) both left their birthplaces expecting never to return, she toward Asia and he for Europe. They have since returned to the American South, a Möbius strip of weirdness, banality, kindness, cruelty, and wonder (and more weirdness). He has previously published in RUST Keepers, Every Day Fiction, Defenestration, The Bacopa Literary Review, and Drunk Monkeys.

Angeline Schellenberg

Bottled

Instead of flowers, after the first date, men bought her Kleenex, cards taped to the boxes: “Do you cry for me?”—her roomie’s brother. “My love won’t ‘blow’ over”—that writer at the bar. “Your tears are precious.” She’d told them about her gift, her livelihood. Were they even listening? It was enough to make her cry. She pulled two empty flasks, held one under each eye, let it flow. Not enough to treat rash or rug burn this time, but it should heal a cut or two. Almost time to make another shipment to the dispensary. She corked the bottles, slapped on the labels: “Potency: Morning-After Misunderstanding,” and returned them to the shelf.

Closeted

The sleeve caught Serena’s eye, making the hairs on her arm tingle. She reached into the vintage rack, seeking pearls draped across an open back; yes, this was it: the graduation gown she’d sacrificed to a rummage sale, thinking the navy satin could go a long way toward the church’s mortgage payment—until the pastor gave it away for a dollar. The church had paid its bills, but folded the following year, after the authorities seized the pastor’s computers, leaving Serena and the other dazed young women outside a locked soup kitchen. For ten years, she’d distanced herself from the memories of the pastor’s dark study, from men, from being seen at all. The armpits of her dress were faded from antiperspirant and the bodice held a wine-deep Rorschach—a sign the dress had been spared her fate. She thought of the skirt she could make of it as she snagged it from the hanger, pearls raining onto the tile.

On the Surface

Becky is lucky. Unlike other women, she can walk anywhere after dark without looking over her shoulder.

From band camp to board room, men have assured her they’d rather cut off their own balls than go near her body,though, on the surface, she has all the same desirable parts as other women. Apparently, Becky’s parts do not make her whole.

As early as preschool, boys would slide to the end of the seat to keep her from sitting, each leaning his upper body away from the aisle to avoid contamination. As the bus ploughed the potholes, pacing that aisle she found her balance, her still-warm curls petting her shoulders.

In high school, Becky had longer legs, higher cheekbones, and smoother elbows than the popular girls, and she’d read all the same articles, including “The 3 coyest ways to cross your ankles.” When she tried out #3 on her choir tour stop at McDonalds, the tenor section snorted and took their fries outside.

In college, her lab partner explained about pheromones: the girls who got offered backrubs in the cafeteria lineup had them. When Becky asked her English prof, he told her classically desirable women had “carriage” and handed her a copy of Jane Eyre.

She used to join the girls from the office for drinks, but since spring,every night Becky rushes home and up the steps to the door of her attic apartment, where her rescue is waiting. She carries the pitbull through the alley, sets trembling paws on a patch of lawn, and coaxes her to pee.

That day she found the old dog curled at the back of the kennel, something inside Becky cracked open. The shelter normally euthanizes the breed on intake, but their vet was busy examining a new litter of spaniels. Owing to the city’s pit bull ban, Becky gave animal control a fake address in the country and walked home with the emaciated body hidden inside her parka.

Becky contemplates the chasm separating nature from nurture, beauty from attraction, as she lifts the broken animal to her cheek. What the poor thing must have been through on the streets before she was discovered. There are no scars to tell.

---

Angeline Schellenberg is the author of the Manitoba Book Award-winning Tell Them It Was Mozart (Brick, 2016), the KOBZAR-nominated Fields of Light and Stone (UAP, 2020), and Mondegreen Riffs (At Bay Press, forthcoming 2024). Her micro-fiction has appeared recently in New Flash Fiction Review and The Dribble Drabble Review. She works as a contemplative spiritual director and hosts Speaking Crow: Winnipeg’s longest-running poetry open-mic. angelineschellenberg.wordpress.com

Ann Parrent

She Said

My mother stood at the stove, asked me to give her a rest; to take over stirring, or to mind the temperature, I don’t remember which. After a minute I complained, said it was too hot, too boring, too much work.

I remember she looked at me hard; a way she rarely did. She took my arm, held up my skinny wrist, examined my right hand. I remember she said, “This hand hasn’t done a day’s worth of work in its life.” She let go, put herself in front of me, scooted me aside. She said with her body, “Fine, I’ll do it my own self.”

She often had marks on her wrists, like little eyebrows; some were brown, some red and angry looking, some dried up and pink. I reached out to touch them and asked, “Mama, what’s these?”

She flinched, pulled her hand to her chest, rubbed on her wrist where my finger had been. “It’s from the oven.”

“Why’d the oven do that to you?”

“I did it my own self, putting your dinner in and pulling it out to feed you.” She said, “Stay clear of those racks; they’ll get you when you’re in a hurry.”

She said keep potholders away from spills. She said cook your eggs in butter, they’ll taste better. The crust is the best part of the pie, the heel the best part of the loaf. Mix a few unripe berries in with the ripe, and a pinch of salt.

She said take a bite plain, so you’ll know the difference. Those beans aren’t going to eat themselves. She said one more bite; just one, please, and you may leave the table.

She said wash your face before bed, you’ll sleep better. She said one stitch at a time; elbow grease is the best polish.

Honesty is the best policy, say please and thank you, wearing black is inappropriate for young girls, let the boys come to you, be home by 11:00.

She never said don’t, until she said don’t marry a man with a beard or a mustache unless you know what he looks like without them. Don’t marry a man who doesn’t like to read.

I remember her words now, when I bake a cake, when I roast a chicken, when I burn the toast. I remember when I make my own marks on my own wrists.

---

Ann Parrent is a writer, gardener, cook, caretaker – not always in that order. She keeps a wild and jungle-y garden, with birds, toads, spiders, some rabbits. She writes from observations in grocery stores, lobbies, gas stations, airports, family reunions and thrift shops.

Jessica Klimesh

Spelling Bee

Forty seventh graders (maybe more) line up against the bland cafeteria wall, lockers on the other side, and spell words like future, deficiency, and metamorphosis. Just like generations of seventh graders before them. Amid the fluorescent lighting of the junior high cafeteria, the forty seventh graders (maybe more) seek out (sometimes successfully, sometimes not) the letters for inconvenience or grammar. For sincerity, democracy, or boundary.
The cafeteria ladies always serve the alphabet for lunch, just like generations of cafeteria ladies before them, with slices of bread to soak up the letters that fall off the seventh (and eighth) graders’ forks. But by the time of the seventh-grade spelling bee, mid-afternoon, the cafeteria ladies are gone for the day, all bits of the alphabet out of sight. The students search for letters anyway, on each other’s shoes, out the windows, and on the neutral but encouraging faces of the teachers. They check to see if any letters have been left behind under the tables, but the janitors never miss a spot.
Tension runs high when there are only four seventh graders left, the others, defeated, now sitting bored at the cafeteria tables.
One by one, three of the last four spellers miss these words: misspell, ominous, and irony. The seventh grader that’s left spells tenacity correctly. Tomorrow (or next week), the others will find the letters for the words they missed, along with the letters for the words regret and expectations. And when one of the cafeteria ladies dies of a heart attack in a month, the news spreading via insecure whispers, the seventh graders will also find the letters for vulnerable, taboo, and anxious. And without thinking too much of it, they’ll soak the letters up with their slices of bread at lunch, the way they’ve been doing, the way they’ve always done. Just like generations before them.

It Won’t Happen to Us

The balloons are tired of the birthday parties and confetti. The confinement. The screams and shrill giggles. The wild children with boogered fingers. The clowns who rub and twist them into dogs, giraffes, swans, swords, and monkeys. “We’re people, too!” the balloons yell, but no one hears them.

So it’s no wonder that the balloons decide to venture out. They’ve heard the stories, of course, of their ancestors who were let go into the deep-blue nothing and never came back. The ones left to die in trees. Caught on telephone wires or light posts.

“It won’t happen to us,” they say, and the balloons go hiking at a wooded city park.

With their heads full of air, helium, and non-thoughts, the balloons have little regard for the world around them, though they’re surprised at all of the trees. The hostile twigs. Threats at every turn. Just like they’d heard.

But they’re not worried. “It won’t happen to us,” they say.

But one by one, they go. Pop pop pop. Their egos and bodies deflated, burst like a toxic appendix.

The balloons watch as their friends and family are taken down in short order.

Still, the ones who are left say, “It won’t happen to us.” They continue on their sylvan adventure.           

Pop pop pop. Pop pop pop. Poppoppoppoppop. The pops echo, sound like gunshots.

The balloons never understood why humans kept them on such short strings. They never imagined sticks like pins or how rabid branches could be. Not to mention the teeth of porcupines, the claws of squirrels. Thunderstorms. Hail.

But they continue their mantra. “It won’t happen to us.” Holding firm until the end.

Pop pop pop. Pop pop pop. Pop pop pop.

Poppoppoppoppoppoppoppoppoppoppoppop.

Pop.

---

Jessica Klimesh (she/her) is a US-based writer and editor whose creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cleaver, trampset, Bending Genres, Ghost Parachute, and Whale Road Review, among others. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, and Best of the Net, and she won 3rd Prize in the 2023 South Shore Review Flash Fiction Contest. Learn more at jessicaklimesh.com.

Jen McConnell

Stuffed Peppers to Please Everybody

Ingredients

• 8 peppers, hollowed out and blanched. Reserve tops.

• 2 pounds ground beef, browned like your skin on the last day of vacation, and drained.

• 4 cups white rice, cooked with extra water so it’s really soft or your mother will call you out.

• 2 big cans of tomato sauce. Not the generic brand; the cans that are red like the color of blood.

• Sugar, to taste. Your father in-law will say, “What is this, dessert?” but your parents won’t eat it otherwise.

• 2 cloves garlic, diced.

• Onion, powdered or diced. Your mother-in-law doesn’t like shortcuts, but you hate cutting onions; there’s no feeling of relief from fabricated tears.

• Pepper tops, diced and sautéed with garlic and onion/powder.

• Spices, to taste: hot Hungarian paprika, smoked Hungarian paprika, sweet Hungarian paprika, salt, and pepper.

• 1½ cups cheese. Your mother likes mild Monterey Jack. Your father-in-law doesn’t want any cheese, just a dollop of sour cream. Your dad and mother-in-law don’t have a preference. Your husband doesn’t know anything about cheese so you use what you like, sharp cheddar.

Directions:

Mix the stuffing ingredients, fill the cooked peppers, and top with cheese. Bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes. Serve with three bottles of wine: a chilled sweet white wine for your mother, a Hungarian red called Egri Bikavér (Bull’s Blood) for your father-in-law and husband, and a robust pinot noir for you and your dad. You’ll drink most of the pinot yourself and flush as red as an unsweetened tomato when your parents begin suggesting names for grandchildren.

Chef’s Notes:

1)    After two years of dating, you traveled with your future husband to a small town outside Budapest to meet his extended family. You hoped he would propose during the trip, somewhere romantic, like on a bridge over the Danube that was the site of a historic battle. But for most of the trip, you sat by yourself reading a book while he spoke half English, half Hungarian to his relatives.

2)    The first time you ate Hungarian food was also your first time experiencing heartburn. His great aunt’s stuffed peppers weren’t hot exactly. Just a slow burn that grew worse after you finished eating.

3)    As the two of you walked a mile to a pharmacy for antiacids, you spied a bridge in the distance. You asked your boyfriend if anything important happened there. He gestured at the bridge, the town, and the fields, and said there wasn’t much of that land that hadn’t been soaked in blood at one time or another.

---

Jen McConnell is a fiction author and poet, with work published in more than forty national and international literary magazines and two Pushcart Prize nominations. Her first short story collection, Welcome, Anybody, was published by Press 53 and she's finishing another. She received her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Goddard College. Read more at jenmcconnell.com.

Kathryn Silver-Hajo

Bones of Contention

We were all enjoying an amiable afternoon at the dog park. Aromas of lilacs and grass mingling with the occasional waft of poo. We chatted about rising daycare prices and the strangeness of bare shelves at the grocery store. We groaned over the alarming frequency of fires and floods, how there’s always some new war blazing somewhere. We spoke of feverishly-mutating viruses, the greed of politicians, how it all threatened to disrupt the pleasant quiet of our lives—a dire future looming in our peripheral vision. Yet here we were, our children chasing each other, shrieking with joy. Dogs yapping, sniffing each other’s butts, cheerfully wagging until one of them dragged some smelly, mysterious thing from the bushes and two-by-two they engaged in a feral tug-of-war like wolves on a gazelle carcass. As some retreated, others leapt in. A few of us tried to separate the snarling creatures, but someone took offense, screamed Get your hands off my fucking dog! And another yelled back, Get your mangy cur off o’ mine. Soon we were all hurling insults and trading blame over which animal—and which person—started it. Our children extended chubby, dimpled hands towards us, begging us to stop, but none of us heeded their cries, as canines and humans raged in a snarl of insults, bared teeth, grabbing, pushing, ripping. The dogs eventually began backing away, whining and licking their owners’ hands before giving up, tails between their legs. When it finally broke up, we emerged bruised and bleeding, yanked our panting pets and dazed children away. We headed home, avoiding each other’s eyes, unable to block out the wails of our children that seemed to echo all the griefs of the world like one great, collective howl.

---

Kathryn Silver-Hajo is a 2023 Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Best American Food Writing nominee. Her story, “The Sweet Softness of Dates” was selected for the 2023 Wigleaf Top 50 longlist. Kathryn’s work appears in Atticus Review, Craft Literary, Pithead Chapel, Ruby Literary and many other lovely journals. Her flash collection, Wolfsong, was published in 2023 and her novel, Roots of The Banyan Tree, is forthcoming in Fall of 2023. More at: kathrynsilverhajo.com; facebook.com/kathryn.silverhajo; twitter.com/KSilverHajo; instagram.com/kathrynsilverhajo

Joel Fishbane

rapunzel unbound

Once, there was a girl who was locked in a Tower. This didn't bother her, at least not anymore. It was habit by now, part of that inevitable routine of existence. The room had become a comfort, a womb of granite and checked stone.  She had a comfortable bed and three meals served on a silver tray. There was a lonely square window, beyond which the bramble crawled up the Tower’s side. There was heat in the summer and frost in the winter. None of this mattered. The Tower itself didn’t bother her; it was all she had ever known.

No. What truly bothered her was the woman with one face and many names: witch, warden, doctor, cook, confidant. None of them fit, as if her true identity was something much larger. Gothel was a hag, as old as the world and just as round. She walked with a cane, its head tipped with what she claimed was the tusk of an old rhino. Her nose stretched past her chin. She had remorseless eyes and a craggy upper lip. Of course, she also had warts - a witch without warts is corn without cob. Her very presence could provoke rabies in dogs; she was immoral as the weather and disturbing as leprosy.

Gothel had tremendous power. She could summon locusts at will and cause the ground to shake. One night many years ago, she had even caused the Tower itself to spring from the ground. As a young girl, Rapunzel had thought Gothel’s powers were stories told to frighten a small child into submission. Gothel would have had good reason to resort to such things; Rapunzel had been willful and obstinate, the sort of scamp who lied for pleasure, hid under the bed, and feigned convulsions just to see Gothel cry. Once she had tried to escape when she thought the witch’s back was turned. The door swung shut on its own. The wind, Rapunzel had said at the time. But it wasn’t. Most children start off believing the impossible and learn to disbelieve; Rapunzel went the other way.

The moment of belief started when she woke to find blood on the mattress. Oh, the scream! Had there been milk in the room, it would have turned to ice. The birds nesting in the Tower's eaves took wing and never returned. Rapunzel was twelve but had no knowledge of her body or its functions. She stuffed her pillow between her legs. It did no good. Her screams became whimpers as the linen became spotted with red. 

When Gothel appeared, the old hag came forward, clinking her rhino-tipped cane against the floor’s cobbles. She placed a wintry hand on the girl’s stomach and whispered words in that strange tongue of hers. At once, the pain vanished. Gothel crept back towards the exit. When the door shut and the bolt had turned, Rapunzel saw that her linens were white, and the cramps were gone. The door had locked on its own.

Later, Gothel explained what had happened. “And if you behave yourself,” she added, “then I shall come each month stop the blood and cramps.”

Rapunzel wasn't grateful. The old woman really was a witch. The horror crawled over her like lice.

Every month, when the blood started, Rapunzel pretended that the cramps could not twist her as she slept. It was no use. Gothel always knew and Rapunzel always cried out - not from the pain but to stop the witch from taking it away. Gothel had told her this was something every woman endured. Rapunzel did not want the one thing she had in common with the rest of womankind to be taken away. In this one way, she wanted to be like everyone else.

“Don’t,” Rapunzel pleaded. “Don’t use your magic on me.”

“It's so much more than magic," said Gothel.

*

There were no clocks in the Tower. For Rapunzel, time centered around two things: whether the sun was in the sky and whether Gothel was in the room. Sometimes, they played cards. Gothel knew the rules to over a thousand different games even though she thought card-playing was a ridiculous hobby for a witch. “All the best games require two people,” she explained. “And witches are perpetually alone.”

“Is that why you keep me locked up?” asked Rapunzel.

Gothel only smiled, a sight which was never pleasant.

She told stories as they played. Gothel had been across the world and lived in almost every country twice. She spoke a dozen languages. She could paint and sculpt, though Rapunzel had never seen her do either. She had beaten a king at chess and won half his kingdom (“I gave it back,” she laughed). An Arabian taught her to gamble; a Frenchman taught her to hunt. Always men, Rapunzel noted. Gothel replied that she had not always been ugly.

“Youth,” she said, “was kinder to me than time.”

Men, Gothel had said, are the witch’s downfall. “They hunt us and hang us.” The witch said this with a bitterness that could only exist alongside a personal vendetta. With the insolence of youth, Rapunzel asked Gothel if she had ever loved. Gothel barked with laughter. “Aye, girl, I've had my heart broken. I've seen men I love string me up and burn me alive.”

Gothel was a haggard swill of a woman but her voice was like silk. Rapunzel's first memories were of the Tower and Gothel scurrying about, singing melody after strange melody. The song she sang most often was the one that always put Rapunzel to sleep. Gothel never came to the top of the Tower to tuck Rapunzel in; instead, she used her evenings to stroll through the trees and sing as she collected herbs for potions. The sound calmed Rapunzel’s blood and sent her to sleep. Then the song would score her dreams so that, no matter what she dreamed of, Gothel was always there.

As she grew older, Rapunzel began blocking her ears with cotton so she could stay awake. The night became her sanctuary, her only time of privacy when she could read and think. It was here that she began to plot her escape.

Her first effort to run had happened on that terrible day when she was twelve and realized how powerful Gothel was. That night, Rapunzel had climbed out of bed and went to the window. Gothel always claimed the Tower was the tallest in the world, but Rapunzel didn’t think the ground looked too far away. She thought her saving grace would be the bramble that climbed along the Tower’s sides. Lowering herself out the window, she began to inch her way down grabbing the places in-between the thorns. The coarse bramble tore her skin just the same. Soon she was bleeding and knew that she could not continue. The window was still close, the ground too far away. There was nothing to do but climb back inside. The next morning, she swathed her hands in cloth and told Gothel she had fallen while sleepwalking.

Rapunzel saw that escape would take guile and cunning. One evening, she studied the lock on the door. It seemed simple enough and she believed she could unlock it using hairpins. It was hopeless for a time and then one night, after many months of work, the door clicked open with ease. Rapunzel stared at the stairs in wonder - they were the first she had ever seen. They terrified her and she feared they’d give way beneath her weight or worse, be nothing but one of Gothel’s illusions. Then she stepped forward and they held. They were real and nothing could stop her. She raced to the bottom, heart galloping in her chest, only to find a circular hallway that ran the base of the entire Tower. There was only one door and beyond it she could hear the witch's snores. Rapunzel searched the walls for signs of a hidden entrance, but it was pitch black and her fingers found nothing of use. Her only hope was to slip through Gothel’s room; this seemed too great a terror to try.

Dejected, she trudged back to the top of the Tower, where she curled into a ball and wept. She clawed at the walls and thought of flinging herself from the window or bludgeoning herself with a stone. Her despair seemed epic. She would be here forever. Eating when the witch wanted, sleeping when the witch sang, never leaving unless Gothel willed it so. She almost lost hope. It was then that the idea came to her, the one that was so simple she almost laughed in delight. Finding the mirror, she met her own gaze and swore on oath: she would never cut her hair.

*

Gothel had her own batch of ingenious punishments. I can make worms infest your skin and crawl about for days underneath; I can raise the temperature of your blood so it’s just below boiling. These, though, may have been idle threats because the one time Rapunzel could recall being punished, it wasn’t with worms or blood.

It happened the day Gothel had tried teaching her magic. “It’s a glorious heritage,” she told her.

Rapunzel snorted. She wanted nothing to do with Gothel’s powers.

“One day," said Gothel, "you will teach magic to your own daughter.”

Rapunzel snorted once more. This was when she was a teenager and was just starting to toy with being haughty. “Where would I give birth? Here?”

“You might. I was born in the Tower. There’s no shame in it.”

“I am not forcing my daughter to learn magic.”

“You will not have to. She will want to learn.”

Rapunzel laughed. “Like me?"

“You're stubborn. But you will learn.”

“Why? So I can become a witch. Then what will I do? Steal children from their parents?”

“You are an insipid girl. You know nothing of the world.”

“I know enough to know that you’re not wanted in it. Isn’t that the real reason you’re here, hidden away? Because the world doesn’t want you? Just because the world doesn’t want you, I don’t see why you should believe it won’t want me either.”

“The world won’t want you. You’re a witch.”

“I am not a witch and I never will be.”

Gothel grabbed her so tightly that Rapunzel’s arm began to bleed. “Who knows better than me what you are?" The witch clutched her by the hair, turning the girl’s face so that the two of them could see eye to eye. “If you’re not a witch, then what are you? If you can answer me right now, I will release you into the world. Go to the village, or across the sea, do whatever you like. Freedom is yours if you can answer me. What are you? Well? What are you?” When Rapunzel didn’t - couldn’t - answer; Gothel released her. “That’s right. You’re nothing. You’re just a girl in a Tower.”

It is doubtful any girl has ever sobbed as terribly as Rapunzel did that day. Most girls cry from despair or lost opportunity or a broken heart; Rapunzel wept because these things would never be hers. Girls in Towers have no despair or opportunities and their hearts can never break because they have been smashed at birth.

Gothel led the weeping girl back to the bed. “Shall I tell you a secret, girl? I do not intend to keep you here forever.”

Rapunzel looked at the old woman’s ugly face, studying it for a trace of honesty behind the warts. “You're going to let me go?"

“No. But if you ever hope to leave, it will take magic. That is why I keep trying to teach you.”

“You wish to teach me magic so I can leave you?”

“As long as you learn magic, you will be safe, and as long as you are safe, my duty is done.”

Rapunzel dried her eyes and stared at Gothel with all the force of her will. “I would rather stay here forever than learn magic. If I learn magic, then I will be a witch, but then I will also be like you. I can't think of anything worse."

For a moment, Gothel was no longer a witch; she was just an old woman with miserable eyes. Rapunzel was surprised. She had actually hurt the woman’s feelings. The witch rose and went to the door. When she reached it, she stopped and turned.

“Until now you have been willful but never truly wicked," said Gothel. "And wickedness deserves to be punished."

She waved a hand through the air and the night blotted out the sun. Rapunzel shrieked and clawed at the dark. Only when she heard Gothel walking calmly away did she understand the dark was just for her. Rapunzel clutched at the void. There was little to hear or smell. Better that Gothel had infested her with worms. Years of blindness! For the first and only time in all her years in the Tower, she stood at the window and thought about jumping. She stood for a long time, searching for find the courage to hurl herself into the bramble. She couldn’t. She supposed Gothel had known this. If she was the sort of girl to commit suicide, Gothel would not have left her alone in the dark.

She spent a bitter and terrible night, inching in and out of sleep. The next morning, Gothel came and returned her sight. The girl ate her breakfast in silence, grateful that she could see the coffee, the croissant, and the lovely yellow of the butter. 

*

There were two books and what she knew of the world came from them. The first contained plays by the Shakespeare. “The Shakespeare,” Gothel once said, “has a great deal of respect for us. He fears our powers. The one time he didn’t...”  Here, her voice faded and her tone became sad. “There was a great King who was obsessed with witchcraft. He sent out a proclamation declaring amnesty for all the witches in the land. Persecuted in other countries, they fled for his shores. My mother was among them and it was during this time that she met the Shakespeare. He was a great dramatist but he was also in the employ of the King and had to do his bidding. So when the King asked for a play about witches, the Shakespeare complied. Desperate to please his Majesty, the Shakespeare snuck into my mother's room and stole incantations that he placed in the play. When Mother learned what he had done, she flew into a rage. The spells had been her secrets and the Shakespeare had exposed them for the world to see - and for other witches to steal. Furious, she placed a curse on the play. ‘May it endure forever,’ she declared. ‘But its very name will bring bad luck to whoever speaks it.’”

Gothel laughed at this part, as if very proud.

Rapunzel knew nothing of drama, but she enjoyed the plays because they were the only fiction she had. She understood most of the language and invented meanings for the words she couldn’t deduce. Because of the Shakespeare, she once assumed that they lived in England. In fact, they were in the mountains and valleys that sat between Germany and France. Exactly where Germany and France were was not something she could discern. Gothel was stingy with geographical details. It had taken Rapunzel nine years just to learn about Germany and another three before she heard of France. A few years after that, Gothel gave her one more accidental detail when she accidentally used the word “mythical” to describe the land in which they lived.

“And just what does that mean?” Rapunzel asked.

Gothel chewed her fat lip. “It means we have no interest in progress. Everywhere else in this world, people have only one question: what’s next? They have great societies in Germany and France because they are not content. It drives them to wars and revolutions.”

The only other book Rapunzel owned contained her family tree. It had been scrawled out on an assortment of blank pages, dating back hundreds of years to the time when Rossiter Paupy and his wife, Llesnia, had first set foot in a barren patch of land next to the Munich River. Rapunzel made up stories about these ancestors. She decided Rossiter Paupy had faulted on a debt and been murdered in his sleep; his grand nephew Hadrian had gone mad and fallen off the edge of the world; and her parents - her horrible, treacherous parents who had died and left her to Gothel’s whims - they had been consumed by fire. Then their corpses had been ravaged by wolves, the wolves ravaged by vultures, and the vultures drowned in the sea.  Nothing whatsoever was left of them in the world.

*

On the morning of her eighteenth birthday, Rapunzel woke late to see Gothel hovering above her, her hand wrapped around a dagger. A haze had fallen over her and she had to fight her way through the fog. She bolted from the bed but was disorientated and collapsed at once. Her head swam. Her vision blurred. She tried to say something and gurgled instead. Gothel led her back to the bed.

“Should have used more hemlock,” she heard the witch say.    

“Hemlock?” Suddenly, it made sense. There had been something in her tea the night before. “What are you doing?”

“This will only take a second. Hold still!”

“Stay away from me!” The girl tried to thrash about, but her drugged body failed her.

“Calm yourself. Your hair is too long. You might trip over it. And the vermin!” Gothel tried to steady Rapunzel’s frantic head.

“I check for lice every day.”

“A witch cares nothing for vanity, Rapunzel.”

“I’m not a witch. And I never will be.”

Gothel grabbed her in a warty first. “Ungrateful wretch!”

“Cut it then," said the willful girl. "I’ll only grow it all again.”

Silence. A million year’s worth of stasis as the old witch hovered, the knife in one hand, the girl's head in the other. At last, she left the room and the door slammed on its own behind her. Rapunzel lay where she was for a long time, wrapping her braids around her. She had won her first battle; it had only taken eighteen years of war.

Gothel didn’t come to see her the rest of the day. Rapunzel spent the hours turning her two braids into a single long rope of copper strands. That night, when she was certain the old witch was asleep, she went to the window and, with the hope found in lovers and saints, lowered her hair down the side of the Tower wall. Then she wailed in frustration. After all this time, it was still too short. 

*

Now she stood atop the Tower, nineteen and in bloom. The sun was up and the witch was downstairs. The silver tray with her lunch sat at the edge of the bed. She took her time with meals. Gothel never dined with her. She stayed away so long as Rapunzel was eating - and Rapunzel made certain she ate for a long time. She paced herself. A sip of tea. Stand by the window. A bite of bread. Repeat. Rapunzel chewed her bread and went back to the window. Her long hair trailed behind her in a single magnificent braid.

It was then she heard his voice.

Rapunzel had known a host of men in her time. When she was fourteen, she had stood at the window and pretended Romeo was in the bramble below; when she was fifteen, she had traded barbed retorts with Benedict; and when she was sixteen she had imagined both Lysander and Demetrius lusting after her. In her morbid moments, Hamlet found her face down in the river and Othello had killed her over a handkerchief. Yes, she knew men. She knew their hopes and fears and what made their hearts swell. But she did not know if these fictional men were anything like the real thing, having never met one.

And then, suddenly, there he was. His voice was like thunder. When had she ever heard a sound so powerful and thick? Terrified, enchanted, body trembling, Rapunzel moved towards the window. She peered over the edge. He stood below. The Man. Was he ever a sight! Tall and strong like a tree, he was food for the hungry and a stay for the condemned. His clothes were torn, his face ragged with growth. Had she any basis for comparison, she might have said he looked worn and haggard, as if he hadn’t slept. But how was she to know such things? To her, he was glorious.

He stood off center, trying to keep his balance amidst the thicket that surrounded the Tower's base. His hands were cupped around his mouth, blocking part of his face.

“Hello!” she called.

“Hello!” he called back.

Neither knew where things should go from there.

There came a deep rumbling from beneath the ground. It shook the fruit from the trees and made the birds take flight. The Man stumbled out of the briar and leaned against his horse for support. The entire Tower shook and Rapunzel thought it might crumble beneath her. She cried out and clutched the window frame for support as her legs buckled. Below, the Man watched in terror as the ground cracked open. Old Gothel rose from the hole, a withered Venus in her oyster shell. The world stopped its trembling. The forest fell still. The wind itself ceased to move. Even the Man's horse lost its snort.

“Are you the devil?” asked the Man.

“Something close.”

“I'd like to see the maiden,” said the Man.

Rapunzel blushed. The only man in the world and he had come for her!

“She is not to be seen,” said the witch.

“You would deny royalty?”

Gothel laughed. “You would claim royal authority with me?”

Rapunzel started. Royalty? Was he a prince?

“I wish to speak to her," said the Man. "I'd need her to sing for me again.”

The witch scowled. "Her? Sing for you?"

Why not? Rapunzel began to sing.  

Gothel looked up. “Away from that window Rapunzel!”

Rapunzel didn’t move. She and the man locked eyes.

“Stop looking at her!” Gothel hissed.

The witch’s hand shot in the air. The Man stumbled back. So did Rapunzel. For a moment, her vision had clouded. Now it was clear. Had it been her imagination? She tried to steal another glance at the Man and saw that his form was blurred even while everything that surrounded him was clear.

“You will leave,” Gothel instructed.

“I will come back.” said the Man.

From under the witch’s breath came an incantation. She waved a hand through the air, forming a circle of fog. He tried to speak but she cowed him into silence with a growl. “You will return to wherever it is you woke up this morning. You shall fall in love with the first girl you see. The moment this happens, neither you nor Rapunzel shall ever think of each other again.”

“I will shut my eyes and look at no one else.”

“Spare me,” Gothel waved her hands. Against his will, the Man sheathed his sword and climbed back onto his horse. His body was not under his own control.

“I will return for you Rapunzel!” he cried, even as the horse turned and galloped away.

*

Rapunzel refused to leave the window. Long after the Man was gone, she stared across the treetops pretending she could still see him. “I might call him a thing divine," said Rapunzel. "For nothing natural I ever saw so noble.”

“I said step away from there,” said Gothel. She was in the room now, advancing with her horned cane. “There’s nothing noble about men, Rapunzel. They are carnivorous creatures. They care nothing for us.” She gave the sigh of a woman who knew what it was like to be a girl who had just seen a man for the first time. “He has come to see you before, hasn’t he?”

“You know my actions better than I do.”

“What happens here when I go on my walks?”

“Nothing. I'm alone, always alone.”

“‘I was hoping I could persuade her to sing for me again.’ Again, Rapunzel? You

have sung for him before?”

“The only singer is you. He must have heard your voice.”

“You little fool. You know nothing of the outside world. If it came to murder you, you’d unlock the door. You're too trusting, Rapunzel. You must believe me when I tell you that men are bad for you.”

Rapunzel turned back to the window. “He said he was royalty. Surely, they’re different.”

“They’re the worst of all. He’ll destroy you if you let him.” She was exhausted from the day and turned to leave. “I am tired. I will sleep. You will be punished in the morning.”

“Punished!” Rapunzel remembered what had happened the last time she was punished. The horror of Gothel blotting out the sun. "I haven’t done anything!” she wailed.

“You will learn, girl. I have sworn to protect you and I will not break my oath.”

“I did not ask for your protection.”

“It's a parent's curse to force their child to do things for their own good.”

“You're not a parent. You're a witch who has locked a girl in a Tower."

“You and your fairy tales. I'm your mother, Rapunzel. I gave birth to you in this very room."

The horror of this struck Rapunzel like a slap. She flung herself onto the bed and wept. It could not be true. And yet what other truths could there be? She would not look at Gothel as the woman left, leaving only the warning that her punishment would come at dawn. Rapunzel sat on the edge of her bed and watched the light fade. No. She could not endure this anymore. With the melodrama common to youth, she was certain another day would bring only death. Nineteen years in this room and in all that time escape had been a game for tomorrow and never today. Not anymore.

When the sun had set and she was sure Gothel was asleep, Rapunzel slipped her pillowcase free and stuffed it full of clothes. She took the Shakespeare too and the book with her family tree. She wanted to leave nothing behind. Gothel had forgotten to clear the tray from her dinner. Rapunzel picked up the knife and wiped it clean. Her hair lay around her like a coiled snake and she sawed it off as short as she could. At some point the knife slipped and sliced her fingers. She stared at the wounds, filled with a strange excitement. Normally, if she cut herself, she could depend on Gothel to heal her. But if all went as hoped, she would have scabs for the first time in her life. Finally, the knife slid through the final strands and the braid, seven years long, lay by her feet.

Next, she tore the bedsheets off her bed and tied them to the end of her braid. The makeshift rope stared back at her as if even it thought her mad to use it. But Rapunzel knew she could no longer think. She had reached the point of no return. She would act. If she was going to get caught, it would not be while she stood in indecision.

Rapunzel tied the end of the rope to her least favorite dress and the end of this to the leg of her writing desk. She yanked the cord, until she was satisfied the knot would hold. Next, she pushed the desk as close to the window as she could and made certain it was too big to fit through the gap. It would be a suitable anchor, or so she hoped. Then she threw the rope out the window and peered into the dark as it snaked down the side of the Tower towards the bramble below. It was no use; she could not tell where it ended. It might be touching the bramble or it might have fallen short. There would be no way to know until she was there.

She gave her quarters a final look. One room, a broad circle, twenty feet in diameter, with only a single window to show her the outside world. One room which had seen so much, heard so many stories, been the sole witness to the only moments she had ever known. This room where she had dwelled as baby, child, girl, and now woman. Don’t be a fool, said the room. Gothel told you the world is evil. You do not belong out there. You are ill-equipped. What will you do for money? Where will you live? Gothel may be a witch but she is also your mother. She cares for you. Can you say the same about anyone out there? Does anyone out there care for you? You have no family. You have no one.

All true. She climbed out the window just the same.

*

Later that evening, the Man’s eyes met those of another and, as Rapunzel's mother had foretold, he fell instantly in love and forgot all about Rapunzel. And in the trees, in accordance with the magic, Rapunzel forgot all about him. In the years to come, she would never remember what had led to her escape. But she never cared. It would always be enough that she was free.

---

Joel Fishbane’s novel, The Thunder of Giants, is available from St. Martin's Press. His short fiction has been widely published, most recently in Crannog, Dark Horses, and Abandon. For more information, visit www.joelfishbane.net.

Spencer Nitkey

Stigmata Pentaptych

Stigmata no. 1 (Right Hand), 2005
Acrylic On burlap

“I have longed looked at appendages, in particular, hands, as cartographic instruments,” says the artist, “because it is through hands that bodies come to know the topography of the other, and this has never been more clear for me than in the running of fingers through damp hair, white and salt-scented from the sea, with new love cresting like a wave, white capped, at a time when hands are not yet inured to a body, when the map has not yet been taken in, memorized, when the land is new and the grass is hard beneath your boots, when the touching is also a fresh mapping of the toucher themselves, and, finally what brazen capacity for deracination there is in a heart newly flooded with love,” explaining the inspiration behind this piece. Look. We know better. The artist’s thick layers of oil paint, almost tendrils of mountains rise in red from a tan abstraction of background colors and arouse the finger-tip touch of real love. A touch the artist, if he was being honest with himself, would admit he had only ever once felt before when his sister wiped a salty tear from his cheek at their father’s funeral. A touch that is both a mapping and terraformation that came as he trembled under the earthquake of their father’s absent voice, under a shared fear of a man who had not learned how to love without bruising. They also shared an unspoken agreement to end the hemophilic love: he by not having children, she by loving with a careful precision, hands like a surgeon’s, trained, practiced, and rare. When she took those hands and knew him with them, knew by touching, him known by the touching. Knew the hatred of his father, the hatred of his own hatred, a hatred of a love that came through in subtle breaks, light through the interstices of blinds, life from the protoplasmic ocean, a ball tossed in the backyard, tackling a man with a knife in the grocery store to protect his son. Knew the tapes the artist had listened to in the newly empty apartment where his father had lived, alone, with empty white walls and only a few mystery novels and the checkered comforter. In the tapes, his father recounted marching through the Pacific and meeting death, and they made the artist cry and know his father better, and still did not help the artist forgive him, but instead filled him with a sadness that overflowed in the church, the light passing through the stained glass windows illuminating the hardwood floor in reds and blues and greens. All this his sister knew as she helped him wipe away a tear, and which is both reified and abstracted in this simple work of topographical acrylic.

#

Stigmata no. 2 (Left Hand), 2007
Oil and stencil on canvas.

In this painting the artist has arranged various, hand-painted blocks of color, nuanced meditations on various forms of red, with mathematical precision, creating an almost staircase like image of layered, rotating rectangles which intend to induce within the viewer a sensation of descent, designed to capture the interior experience of the artist’s remembering a moment of fatherly love surrounding his first fall from a training-wheel-free bike and the red-faced burning, eyes red and tearful, pain searing red up from the bend of his knee, and the slow mix of pride and anger as his father's hard hands reached down like they were from heaven and him feeling like he was small but also liking to be small but also ashamed of the desire to feel small, and the artist putting the head wet with tears he was trying to stymie up against the shoulder of his father who was wet with sweat and shirtless from mowing the lawn, who was tall and distant but sometimes loving in ways that surprised the artist, like right then as he held him and did not say anything about the tears and took him inside and poured peroxide over the wound and let the artist squeeze his arm tightly and did not scold the artist for letting out a small yelp like the dog when someone accidentally stepped on his tail as the peroxide sizzled and momentarily turned the asphalt speckled red of his bloody knee into a pink primordial ocean and then covered the clean wound with a bandage and a tenderness, like the red of a sky kissing the sun farewell, and the artist, more than almost anything, wishes that he could remember his father’s eyes on that day and see the love he knows must have leaked from them but cannot and instead only remembers the screams the two shared, the bright hot fire red, when the artist was trying drugs and the bodies of men for the first time, a remembering which produces a gentle, almost maroon sense of shame now when he thinks about it, and soon the memory falls out from under the artist, but of that day all he remembers are his father’s hands and the too often untapped potential for love the artist did not acknowledge until right then, lost in reds.

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Stigmata no. 3 (Left Foot), 2006
Brass (patinated green), Glass, and Copper

Investigating the annealing properties of metallurgy and its philosophical connection to both art and love, the artist created this piece by exposing long stretches of brass, carefully sculpted and imprinted with the footsteps of his mother, to the elements, embedding them in the permafrost of Alaska for the extent of his mother’s chemotherapy treatments, and after two years that saw his mother wither under an encroaching mass of cells, multiplying without reason, out of control inside her, the healing poison slowly wilting her, like a rusting nail hammered into a tree (maybe the termites flee, but first the color falls from the leaves, dry and brown far too early, a microcosm of winter even in the burgeoning heat of the early summer, and then the color drains from the bark, almost imperceptible until it’s not, shedding its skin, the way a mother sheds her hair, first in clumps, then in a preemptive trimming) as she fought against the illness, until a double mastectomy ended it, an annihilative final strike, erasing the field of battle, victorious and weathered and alive, but not before the artist and his mother sat for hours, and discussed what she wanted from her death and funeral--the exact choral songs to be sung, the biblical passages equally old and new testaments to be read, the music that would bellow from the pipe organ, and the gentle melodies that would sing from the grand piano, the food at the reception afterwards calibrated to each guests tastes, her saying this was all so they could mourn, not plan, when she was gone, him sitting and learning about love as a slow, sometimes malignant presence that stings and twists and masses, that culminates in a gentle exchange of words and a deeper, more unspoken tenderness placed between the church pews where she wanted to be remembered, like her mother before her, a profound piece of art that makes permanent the transitory, almost bipedal, aspects of love.

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Stigmata no. 4 (Right Foot) 2009
Glass, coal, earth, and blood.

In this lacerating installation which is both a prop for performance art and a sculpture in its own right, the viewer is asked to witness a literal trail of now cooled coals and glass over which the artist ran numerous times and consider the small flecks of still visible blood preserved on the larger, more obtrusive shards, as the work strives to capture, visualize, and, during its creation, realize the pain of discovering a sexuality that exists in the liminal space between boundaries, a sexuality which for the artist became tied to the act of walking during a 10-mile-a-day backpacking trip through the Sierra Nevada mountains where a steady pace and the overwhelming ambient silence that comes in the mountains, the trees rising up on both sides, slowly empties out the mind of its voice, each step chopping away like an ancient logger, at the internal monologue, as the slowly thinning air strips the mind of its embattlements, until there is the simple, raw and untouched self, exposed and wide-eyed at the universe stretched overhead, a self which is, he realizes, when he leaves his tent in the middle of the night, and cries under the stretched tarp of stars (more than he has ever seen, hundreds of them streaming across the sky luminous and momentary and fragile), essentially a stranger to him. A self that wants and loves in ways he has never really known. Pissing beneath the beauty, he realized that he was in love with his best friend, and despite this longing for the lithe and taut man he watched submerge himself in a lake each night, he still could want women too, and wanted both from this same strange center, and so, unleashed, this foreign thought leaked like the flooded banks of a river, while his blistered feet carried him for another two weeks, his want a second, heavier weight, that wrapped itself around him, and the back of his friend, his neck burned red and peeling in the sun, and his calves slicked with sweat and rhythmically tensing and relaxing as he walked, and the back of his arms as they pumped, and the rounded caps of his shoulders indented by the thick straps of his backpack, all heavy his want with specificity, and with each step over narrow dirt paths weaving their way, switchback up and down mountainsides, with each blistered heel rubbing minutely against the artist’s hiking book, he is close to giving up on it all, but instead he keeps it stymied and tries to ignore the swell of forest fire when their hands touch unfolding the thin aluminum windshield so they can light their stove, or when they laugh passing a bottle of cheap vodka between them and his lips linger on its rim, or when they sleep, two mummies, side by side, until one day they are back in the parking lot and their girlfriends are waiting for both of them with fast food, kisses, and complaints over their smells, and the artist, only 18, remembers what there is to love about women, and that two things can be true, and that perhaps his heart is big enough to hold two loves inside it, and as he drives home, the car jumping for twenty minutes over back roads then gliding for four hours over freeway, he thinks that maybe he can howl to both the moon and the sun, both Artemis and Apollo, and that no body is too small for its wanting despite the pain it takes to walk into acceptance, which is symbolized and immortalized by this aesthetic reflection on the paths we take to realization, and the bodily threats our desires can manifest.

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Stigmata no. 5 (Heart), 1998
Oil on Canvas

Looking at first, a viewer’s eyes see only broad swaths of color, suggesting, one can imagine one thinking, something vaguely heartlike, but as the gaze is prolonged, either by innate interest and trust in the artist, or through a sense of obligation, having bought expensive tickets to this museum, the image transforms in, at first, a visual manner (the colors slowly delineate from one another, and the gaze is rewarded by a slow, cumulative enriching), until suddenly, like a door slamming open, shuddering the tan painted stucco ceiling of your childhood home, there is a well of feeling within you, and you are remembering loving yourself, and the shape of your footprint in the sand on the dark beach on New Year’s Eve when you stood alone, just inches from the ocean’s reaching, taking, in slow, measured breaths, a moment for yourself, pausing, with nothing but the sounds of faraway fireworks like wrinkling paper, and a moon low and ripe in the sky, the cold crawling up your legs as the waves touch your toes, the stars strung up over the ocean, vague and opalescent against the sky, and you there, with your neck back, extending and breathing, taking in this beauty for yourself, all this for you, and the moonlight and the sound of waves and the fireworks all congealing to your skin, and the slow dancing of your heart inside your chest, and for one moment, all this is yours and yours alone, and your skin, hairs raised from your shins to your arms, your whole body like a cactus, or a choir singing a hymnal, like thousands of goodnight kisses, and swollen, sprained ankles, and dissonant singing against the porcelain of your bathroom, and rain clouds slowly ruining your home’s new paint, and the ice of January, and meteoroid showers, and the cattle outside your car window, and the broom in the closet you never use, is all yours, and you love yourself for it, until time pulls you out of this moment and you are once against staring at an unfurling array of colors, beautiful and representative of the artist’s early oeuvre, before taking a more sculptural and conceptual style later in his career.

---

Spencer Nitkey is a writer living in Philadelphia. His writing has appeared in Apex Magazine, Fusion Fragment, Apparition Lit, Cosmorama, manywor(l)ds, and more. You can find more about him and read more of his writing on his website, spencernitkey.com

Salena Casha

As Seen Here: Woman Preserved in Iron

When Peter brings the cast iron skillet home, Elaine is shocked by how natural it comes to him. How he seasons it with shortening and azure flame before working oil into its skin. The house smells like Crisco and sweat. Her bones shiver as he kneads it. He tips the pan, coating the metal, and then lets the extra oil patter down onto aluminum in the oven.

Once he’s finished, it’s a smooth black patina. So unlike the web of lines underneath Elaine’s left eye. He leaves it out on the stove and goes for a run and while he’s away, she dips her thumb into the black pool, expecting liquid heat. Instead, her skin slides away. Not bone or muscle, but uneven iron.

The start of panic hardens behind her eyes. I’ve got a deck to do tomorrow before the big meeting with Carlisle. When am I supposed to fix this? She thinks of calling her PCP but shuts the app down. Her last visit with them resulted in the most expensive five minutes of her life. So instead, she takes a seat at her kitchen table and stretches her arm out, palm up, on the wood. The table is cherry, her skin is eggshell except for the deep black of the thumb.

If the neighbors see it oxidize, she knows what they’ll say. That Elaine, she’s really let herself go. And it’s fine, you know, if she keeps it to herself, but it’s just spreading.

It’s the same sentiment as the time her friend told her she looked prettier when she didn’t smile. Containment, she learned, was always preferred by outsiders.

She brings the thumb close to her face. It’s still newly forged, but she knows that if she takes her eye off of it for just a second, it’ll be unusable. It’s fine now but it would become a problem when it creeps up her neck and chest. Then, it would make sex weird and she does love sex. More troubling, she wonders if it could make it hard to breathe, if it’ll be like inhaling icy air, if the alveoli in her lungs will burst or just fossilize.

She gazes longingly at the door through which Peter left. He probably won’t know what to do either, she realizes. If there is any time not to panic, it’s now. That realization brings her arm up from the table, her elbow hinging inward. She stands and pushes the kitchen chair back in place before walking to the stove.

She breathes deep, lights the burner, and begins. When Peter returns, she’s got the oven open and her hand inside and he pulls her away from the heat before he sees it.

“Ok,” he says when she explains what happened or really, just tells him what she knows so far. “We can work with this.”

The seasoning ritual gradually replaces her daily shower. As she makes coffee in the morning, she gets the oil and turns on the burner and marinates in the gentle solution. She always preferred it to butter and her mother swore by it for face masks. Though now, her crows feet and discoloration are no longer visible. No longer something she worries about.

Peter never mentions a cure and as the days pass and the iron spreads down her limbs, she begins to notice small, but concerning changes. Her fingers cannot grasp items and so she walks around with a pair of kitchen tongs to pick her clothes up off the floor. If she goes outside in the sun, her body temperature rises to over two hundred degrees and blisters her soft insides. She wears gloves and then long sleeve billowy tops and then wide legged pants and finally a hat that she hates but hides her well enough so people don’t say hello.

Soon, she stops going outside entirely. Peter, on the other hand, begins running longer. She prefers when he’s outside so she can spend the hour in front of her bathroom mirror, checking for signs.

It all seems so silly now.  

“You’re so beautiful,” Peter says to her. He said that before the iron and he says it still, but now, she knows it’s true. She has seen her iron skin glisten. “You have to tell me if it starts to hurt.”

His eyes are worried and the gray is beginning to come through on his eyebrows. With an index finger, she smoothes away the crease above his nose.

“Of course,” Elaine says, but she knows it will never hurt, that it’s just a gradual slowing, a gradual burning away motion and movement and she wants to embrace the time she has left as much as she can. It’s happening already, how, if she doesn’t remind herself to breathe, she stops entirely. How she wakes in the middle of the night and is unable to rise.

So, even though she is flexible enough, she has Peter help her with the oiling and the brushing, has him spend more time than necessary on harder to reach areas, the spot between her shoulder blades and the dimples just above her hip bones. She closes her eyes and savors the way his palms press and kneed into her metal. Shivers when he licks the excess oil off her neck. Slow dances with his bare chest on her cool skin, letting it suck away his heat in the summer.

And one day, as she’s heating the oil in the palm of her hand at the stovetop, her heart stops. Her feet are so heavy now she can’t even lift them to stagger back and collapse on the floor. Instead, she places her hand against her neck and lets her vision tunnel.

Peter finds her and holds her hand, still warm from the stove. Even though he tries, his thumb does not peel away.

It was just for her all along.

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Salena Casha's work has appeared in over 100 publications in the last decade. Her most recent words can be found in HAD, Metaphorosis Magazine, and Flash Frog. She survives New England winters on good beer and black coffee. Subscribe to her Substack at salenacasha.substack.com.

Meg Pokrass

Your Family, From Afar

When seen from afar, your big sister resembles the stars of all the movies your mother loves to watch on TMC. Ma says she looks like Natalie Wood, an actress who died from falling off a yacht, drunk.

“Natalie Wood couldn’t sing, and neither can your sister,” she says.

But your sister plays her guitar and sings very well. You love the sound of her voice and the look of her hair, but mostly, she hides behind her locked door so nobody can hear her.

“My acting's good. But I can’t sing. And I'm not thin enough. These deficits are going to be a serious disadvantage.” 

This is what she said the day before she left for Hollywood to become famous. You rescue what remains of her hair from the shower drain and collect her it like bits of blown bird’s nest.

___

It’s a year later, you are laying in a deck chair near the pool at your sister’s apartment complex. You all live here in California now because you've left your father in the dust. “The Born-again Christians in LA are insane,” she reports.

She explains it like this: “They knock on my door and shove me their flyers about Jesus Christ. They could be serial killers.”

You think about how skinny she is, how easy your sister would be to pick up and carry away.

In the pool, your brother is dog-paddling, squealing like he's never lived on land.

Your sister is sipping a wine cooler and looking like a skinny movie-star but with her bones popping out, too thin.

___

Ma, who seems to have revived from her life with your father, is sometimes smiling. You develop California skills from long days at the beach— green-blue water and the silhouettes of seals. Your skin becomes brown as roast chicken.

Your new favorite hobby is sneaking into hotel pools illegally with your brother. Saying confidently, Our family’s staying on the top floor.

And you love the tiny brown birds that gather in your yard. You try to catch them with your butterfly net. You’ve never caught one, which Ma says is a damn good thing, because birds don't like to be trapped.

___

When the call comes in that your father has died in a car crash, you imagine yourself jumping on a trampoline, thinking about how it might feel to fly into outer space like a small brown bird.

You hear her say, Oh dear God, thank you for letting us know. Then she puts her arm around you, explains it while holding you tight, and you stop jumping up and down in your mind.

“Later we can check and see if there’s any hummingbird liquid left in that bird feeder,” she says, but she stays there with you, waiting for your brother to come home from the beach.

___

Life becomes a parade of stories about the terrible decisions your father had made in his life on earth. For example, he had gone after younger women—Ma would be home sweeping the kitchen floor and he'd come in looking like he just won at Russian roulette.

“He was always getting away with it,” she said. "Just like you kids, swimming in those hotel pools.”

For most of your childhood, you imagine your father slumped over his steering wheel, daylight squinting through his t-shirt. One day you’ll meet him again in a different world perhaps, and ask him about it— about this accident, and others.

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Meg Pokrass is an award-winning writer of flash fiction, prose poetry, and hybrid work. She is the founder of New Flash Fiction Review and co-founder of the Best Microfiction series. Her generative workshops and prompts are acclaimed for their ability to spark creativity and open new doors. Meg’s new full-length collection, The First Law of Holes: New and Selected Stories has been acquired by Dzanc Books, and will be published in late 2024.

Mary Grimm

The Marriage of Poets May Sarton and Henry David Thoreau, a Union Unconsummated Due to Issues of Time and Space as Well as to Differences of Temperament and Gender Preference

May embraces her solitude, but when no one comes to visit she is annoyed.

Henry prefers to sit on a pumpkin, if only he can be alone.

May paints her toenails red. Not the fingernails, which would be a show of vanity. (May is vain but she is too vain to want anyone to know it.) The color matches her new sweater.

Henry reminds us that the purpose of clothing is to retain body heat.

No green beans in May’s garden: she devotes herself to the evanescence and color of flowers, which she gathers at daybreak so that they may come into the house and die.

May likes to do things herself, unless they are time consuming or difficult. When workmen come she has them into the house for tea. If they are charming, she may write a poem about them.

Henry is the original DIY-er.

Long ago, May met Virginia Woolf, who was not as interested in her as May would have liked. May has a recurring dream in which she and Virginia have a fist fight and May wins.

Henry certainly didn’t retire to the woods to lick the wounds inflicted by transcendentalist Margaret Fuller’s rejection of his poem. (She encouraged him to submit again, noting that it did not fit the needs of The Dial at that time.)

The ocean is better than a mere pond, May thinks, and only what she deserves. She too though would like to suck the marrow out of life, and is not opposed to driving life into a corner, for its own good.

In her garden, May paces up and down, letting the balm of nature soothe her. She is a devil when it comes to weeds. If she could buy a flamethrower to burn them into ash, she would.

Is it Thoreau as the French say it? Or does it sound the same as “thorough?”

May gets an enormous amount of mail. Perhaps she should hire a secretary to deal with it? Perhaps the secretary might be an attractive woman who wouldn’t mind having a dozen or so poems written in her honor in lieu of payment?

Thoreau is so shy that he blushes when he passes through the Emersons’ kitchen where their two young maids are working.

May hikes on the solstice on Monadnock Mountain. Up there, the air and her mind are clear. She is one of the greatest poets alive: why is this not more widely recognized?

On the banks of Walden, Henry ponders the wrongheaded Englishman who went to India to make a fortune so he could come home to write poetry.

If May were a younger woman, she might have joined the army. She would have enjoyed the camaraderie and the violence (she has a terrible temper). She understands though that the food is terrible.

Henry prefers a night in jail.

Once, when May was a child, she stood on Pemaquid Point, her mouth open, her toes gripping the rock. She sang out her defiance to the world while her mother took her picture and pronounced her a darling.

Once, when Henry was a young man, he stood among the wood shavings of his father’s pencil factory, and dreamed of looking deep into earth’s eye.

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Mary Grimm has had two books published, Left to Themselves (novel) and Stealing Time (story collection), and a number of flash pieces in places like Helen, The Citron Review, and Tiferet. Currently, she is working on an urban fantasy set in the flats area of a near-future, dystopian Cleveland.

C.A. Coffing

Audit

To date is relatively simple. We make an agreement to go out. With a friend’s brother. A roommate’s cousin. The guy who caught our eye across the counter — the one with the charming smile. Our college advisor’s son. He’s always liked you. You’re close to graduating, aren’t you? The manager at our work. A coworker. A coworker’s friend. We meet them. Or they pick us up. We have dinner. A cocktail. A beer. We converse. The waitress flirts with them. They lean in knowingly. The waiter gives us a wary look. Or looks down our shirt. Or both.

We have a drink. They order another. We excuse ourselves, use the restroom. Tidy up. A new drink waits for us when we return. It sparkles in the glass, reflects the lights of the room. Soft music plays. Loud music plays. Others talk around us. The buzz works itself into our brain, which grows increasingly fuzzy and weak. Can’t think. Let’s go. Shall we? We stand unsteadily, grateful for the hand on our arm or our waist. The world twists ever so slightly.

We are on our backs. On a bed. On the floor. In the backseat of a car. On the grass in a field. No. Stop. I don’t want to. Words with no sound. We stare up at the ceiling. The roof of the car. The night sky with its whispering stars. We cannot move our fingers. We drift until the grogginess lifts.

A pile of condoms on the nightstand. No condoms on the nightstand. Wet grass beneath us. Wet sheets. Stains on the carpet. They are naked. We are naked. We are partially naked. They are clothed. Our clothes in a pile on the ground. Our clothes half on our bodies. Our clothes clumsily replaced. A button gone. I’ll take you home. Now we stand with half memory. I’ll walk. I’ll call a friend. I’ll find my car. No thanks. Why do we say the thanks when we refuse?

We tell someone. We tell no one. We report it. We don’t report it. We don’t even think about reporting it. We forget. We never forget. It defines us. We defy it. We are it. We are not it. It lives inside of us like a sharp stone. We are alone. We are not alone. We carry it as we pass in crowds, in theaters, in bars, sit with it in churches, on park benches, enshrouded in the ordinary.

Jacob’s Breath

AIDS hitting the city didn't scare us. It terrified us. But instead of hiding, we were even more determined to live, to revel harder in the underground of the banal world. Friends, co-workers, and relatives stopped calling, stopped working with us, stopped inviting us to dinner. They didn’t want us to use their toilets, finger their books, or eat from their cutlery. They loved watching us dance, but from a distance. They didn’t want to touch us, lest they get it.

I know the feeling of bare feet on damp grass after a rare spring rain. I know the feeling of twirling, my arms wide and open, beneath a blossoming cherry tree. I know what it is to have danced on the edge of the fountain in Central Park, while the angel opened her arms and released flowing water. While the saxophone player folded melodies into the warm May twilight. I have been naked on a rooftop on Twenty-Third and Steinway, dancing in the light of a perfect morning.

He lies still. He no longer wants to talk. Jacob, whose perfect body has forsaken him. Who once performed on the city’s biggest stages, now lies with protruding cheek bones wrapped in thin flesh. Jacob, whose family disowned him, never having watched him leap across the Marley floors of the finest theaters. Jacob, who loved so many until loving, became like crossing a field of wildflowers and landmines. Jacob, whose eyes will close to the New York City skyline and whose belongings they will put on the sidewalk, because no one will want anything that’s left behind. The garbage truck will take his clothes, his furniture, his writings, his artwork, on a Tuesday. The Tuesday after Jacob’s last breath joins the swirling dust in the room and drifts out the open window into the cloudless sky of a perfect day.

Bleed

We hear the song first and scatter. Our feet in boots, sneakers, rubber flip-flops, or simply bare. We run to scour for coins, to search in drawers or fish through pockets for random quarters and dimes. Fifty cents. Seventy-five cents. The ice cream truck grows closer. The recorded song grows louder. Catch it before it turns the corner. We see it, the blue and red clown painted on the side, his mouth wide, ready to envelop an ice cream sandwich. The menu posted next to the sliding window. Nothing over seventy-five cents. Red and white stripes across the cab of the truck.

I choose a root beer popsicle this time. Brown and sweet with two sticks, and if I don’t eat it fast enough, it drips down my arm like flavored earth. My brother gets the Missile. He stares at me as he swirls it about his mouth, looking as if he could swallow it whole. He pauses; points it at me. Your legs are hairy, he tells me.

I look down at my legs sticking out of the tops of my red cowboy boots. Without a word, I drop my popsicle, letting its shape break apart on the hot pavement, and run as fast as I can to the house and up the stairs to my parent’s bathroom. I pull off my boots and grab my mom’s razor. I sit on the edge of the tub and dry shave my legs until I bleed.

---

C.A. Coffing has an MFA in Writing from Lindenwood University. A self-published novelist and playwright, her work has been published in Flash Fiction Magazine and elsewhere. She was a 2013 Santa Fe Writers Project Finalist, third prize recipient in Flash Fiction Magazine’s 2021 contest and a 2022 Pushcart Prize nominee. Her written work has appeared in live theatre showings throughout the Pacific Northwest, including a series of social/environmental justice themed plays for Reach for The Sky July, a program for at risk youth. She currently writes, teaches dance, waits tables, and dreams in a small river town.

Jamie Anthony Louis

Rises in the West

It took me too long to get here. To get home. I open my eyes and I’m a child. Born again in midnight’s bosom and the sun is rising now. The windows across from my bed show the Pacific in oranges and yellows and pinks and purples. About half the colors in the world right there, I think, as I sit up and lay my tiny hands on my lap. These hands are mine and yet they are not mine.

The boy in my head, who is me and isn’t me, says, “You made it. Now what?”

I shake my head to dismiss him and continue to stare at the rising sun. But then something nags at my mind. Chews on my brain stem, takes a bite out of my cerebellum.

“The sun doesn’t rise on the Pacific Ocean,” the boy says with a laugh that sounds more like a sob.

My lips tremble. I look away. “Maybe the sun is setting and it’s my mistake,” I say. But then I look again, and that orange circle is still inching up above the horizon, and my stomach is whirling like it’s filled with salt water. And I know I’m forgetting the most important thing in all of this.

By the time I realize it’s all a fake, a man I don’t want to see appears at the foot of my bed. He smiles too pleasantly and sits on the edge. He crosses his expensive black chinos that clash with his old t-shirt and converse sneakers.

“Hello again, sweetheart,” he says like I know him. But this is my own mind, after all. I can’t be fooled into false senses of security.

He knows my thoughts, because he adds, “I almost got you this time. If only you hadn’t thought too hard about the sun.”

A tear falls down my cheek. I scowl. He knows my feelings towards him. This man who I’ve never met. This man, my father.

He tilts his head, “Of course I do. That’s why you’re here.” I look away again and again. He says, “You love me too much. That’s your Achilles heel.”

Finally, I speak out loud. “You’re like a devil trying to tempt me to Hell.”

He taps his finger on the blue comforter, where he’s leaning on one arm. “I thought you didn’t believe in all that.”

“Neither did you.”

He smiles again. “That’s true. So why would you say something so mean?”

I lean forward a bit and stare at my elongated fingers. Yes, a dream it is. I say, “I’m trying to protect you. The real you.” The memory of you.

“I’m not real enough for you?”

“No,” I say. I reach for the boy, but he pulls back like a kicked dog.

The man I love too much—but really, it’s just a poor imitation—stands up and brushes off his chinos like the conversation covered him in dust and debris. “Well. That’s all she wrote.” He’s gone with my next breath.

I go back to staring at the rising sun. I know I could make this real. If I tried hard enough. Took a big enough risk. But I have to get up soon. I don’t need a lie. I don’t need this home.

But then, why is the boy crying so hard?

---

Jamie Anthony Louis (they/them) is a non-binary Chicano who loves to write and is trying to share their love with the world one story at a time. They have been published in Maudlin House and, now, Does It Have Pockets.

Charity Tahmaseb

Steadfast

Poppy fell the moment Carlos showed her his feet. She’d never met a man—or rather, a civilian man—with feet uglier than her own. But ballet slippers weren’t any kinder to toes than combat boots were.

Before she saw him, she’d planned on making a tactical retreat from the reception. It’d been a mistake to take leave for this wedding, an even bigger one to wear her dress uniform. Coming home never worked. Hadn’t she learned that by now? Too many awkward questions, too many thank yous.

What made her pause at the ballroom’s entrance, Poppy couldn’t say. She didn’t see the groom twirling his bride or the bridesmaids in clouds of chiffon floating across the parquet.

Only Carlos.

With uncommon grace, he crossed the room. He navigated the maze of chairs, tables, and guests like a man intimately familiar with each muscle of his body. When he landed in front of her, he didn’t speak but merely held out his hand.

“I don’t dance,” she said.

“Everybody dances.”

“Not me. I march.”

He tipped his head back and laughed. “I can dance well enough for both of us.”

And yes, he could. Demanding to see his feet came several glasses of champagne later.

“Stay,” he whispered the next morning. “Spend the week with me. You can come to rehearsal. I’m dancing the role of the steadfast tin soldier.”

She laughed at the audacity of it, of burning a week’s worth of leave in New York City, with this beautiful man whose world was so different from her own.

“Do you know anything about being a soldier?” she asked.

“That’s why I need you. You can be my technical advisor.”

“No one will believe that.”

Everyone did. Or, rather, they indulged their principal dancer. She taught Carlos how to drill with a wooden rifle. During breaks, he taught her how to hold herself so he could lift and spin her around.

With Carlos, she could dance. With Carlos, she was weightless.

At the airport, he tucked a necklace into the palm of her hand, the pendant an exquisitely engraved poppy.

“We both have demanding mistresses.” His words were so soft she barely heard them above the clamor of traffic and travelers. “You don’t need to come home to me. Just come home.”

She wore the necklace every day in Afghanistan. Poppy no longer regretted attending the wedding, or even wearing her uniform. Her only regret was never seeing Carlos dance on stage.

They wrote letters, the old-fashioned kind, hers torn from a notebook, the paper encrusted with sand and dotted with dirty fingerprints, his on the back of paper placemats, or cleverly crafted in the margins of playbills.

Then her world erupted in fire. When the burn subsided to mere embers, it was too late and Walter Reed a world away from New York City. Still, Poppy vowed: she would see Carlos dance.

Sleeping Beauty gave her the chance.

She had flowers delivered to his dressing room—white roses laced with red poppies. That way he’d know. That way, if he didn’t want to see her, he could hide until she abandoned her vigil at the stage door.

Poppy waited there, her head still buzzing from his performance, her weight sagging into the crutches, her foot heavy in its cast.

Her cheeks flamed when she caught sight of him emerging from the door, her skin hot against the December air. He scanned the alleyway behind the theater. The moment his gaze met hers, he froze.

“Bet my feet are uglier than yours now,” she said.

He exhaled and laughed. It was only then she saw the poppy tucked in his lapel. He took in her crutches, her foot in its cumbersome cast. His eyes grew somber.

“My steadfast soldier.”

“I’m home,” she said.

He moved close, fluid and graceful, and cupped her cheek with his palm. “So am I.”

All at once she was weightless.

“Steadfast” was originally published in the December 2017 issue of Flash Fiction Online.

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Charity Tahmaseb has slung corn on the cob for Green Giant and jumped out of airplanes (but not at the same time). She’s worn both Girl Scout and Army green. These days, she writes stories, both short and long, and works as a technical writer for a software company. She has a fondness for coffee, ghosts, and things fantastical. She blogs occasionally at https://writingwrongs.blog/