Richard Holinger

Copperheads and Cucumbers 

Brent lines up his two blue garbage bins next to mine because the sanitation trucks pick up on my side first and there is strength in numbers that helps prevent his bins from being stolen by the assholes up the street who do construction and bring their shit home in dump trailers when he says he just returned from Kentucky where his son has a horse farm and copperheads roost on roads and trails but sometimes you can sniff them out before you ride over them because copperheads smell like cucumbers and it’s good if you can because they wait for a horse’s forelegs to go by before striking a hind leg so the snake won’t get trampled to death by biting the foreleg first, a lesson inculcated over the eons, way before the fifteen hundreds when cucumbers came to America, before his son’s horses crossed paths with copperheads coiled beneath maple, oak, beech, and paper birch tree leaves crisp and dry as overtoasted bread, only the scent of salad giving rider and horse a hint there might be more than what a morning breeze or hoof fall might stir up beneath.

Leaving a Doctor’s Appointment after Getting Bad News

You are in a parking lot with several levels, each open to a view of the city: buildings made of glass, steel, and brick. You hunt for your car, somewhere on Level 3, you know, because you wrote it down on the back of a Target receipt when leaving your car. Walking up and down the dark interior, you realize you won’t be able to pay for the time you spent here because you forgot your wallet. You go to a window where someone looks officious, so you tell her your predicament. She gives you a promissory note to sign. She guides you to an outdoor parking lot you didn’t know existed where you see your decades-old standard shift yellow Volvo. From far away, you think the shiny yellow car next to it with a spoiler and racing wheels might be yours, but when you get there, you find no driver’s side keyhole as there is on your car. You get in and drive carefully because you don’t have your license and if you get stopped it could be a problem. The paved road through the city eventually turns bumpy, but you know you can get where you’re going if you stay on this route. On a steep incline down, you slide along the sandy rock road past impoverished houses and unpainted farm outbuildings. At the bottom, a turnaround has you driving back uphill, but the car cannot make it back up the steep grade, and as the earth closes in around the car, it stalls. You get out and begin to climb, bringing the car with you. At the top you get back in and drive through pleasant green lawns and two-story white houses. You park outside the largest home and ring the doorbell. “I’m lost, and I need directions,” you say to the person who comes to the door. She invites you in and guides you through a maze to a sliding glass back door. As she opens it, you say, “I forgot my car,” and start back for it, wondering if you can navigate the maze on your own but are willing to try. It is, after all, what brought you here and is all you have. How can you leave it for this woman’s spacious backyard, pool, and deck chairs? It may not be perfect, far from it, it’s home, and it’s all you have.

---

Rick Holinger has taught English and creative writing on the college and secondary school levels. A multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, his writing appears in Chicago Quarterly Review, Chautauqua, Boulevard, Witness and elsewhere. His book of poetry, North of Crivitz, and collection of essays, Kangaroo Rabbits and Galvanized Fences, are available at local bookstores, Amazon, or richardholinger.net. Contact him at editorial@kcchronicle.com.

Ani King

Summerland®

Let's say we haven’t hung out since middle school, but we run into each other on an app and swipe right.  And let’s say instead of a quick hook up, we decide to go on a real date. Let's say that for our date we take the bus to the strip mall Summerland® Beach Rooms just outside the city, the one with the long lines but the good beach rooms, let’s say we always wanted to go back in the day, but our moms said it was too expensive, a waste of money, an experience no better than seagull shit on your face, they misremembered summers from when they were young, saying anyone back then could walk into a lake or splash into a pond or dive into an ocean without coming out oil-sheened or covered in rashes; let’s say when we begged to go on the middle school field trip to Summerland® they said no, and swore it wasn’t because of the money, but because we had the inlet, but let’s say the inlet is smells like piss and rotting fish, let’s say no one would ever risk swimming in the water and the sand is planted with torn shopping bags and fast food wrappers. Let's say for our date at Summerland® you bring a beach bag that says Fun! on the front and let’s say it’s stuffed with three big towels and a bottle of the same cheap sunblock we’ve used our whole lives, and let’s say we smear it on our arms and faces despite the UV filters in the beach room, and we keep inhaling the chemical-coconut smell of it, and let’s say I bring enough money to pay for a couple bottles of water and a couple of soy burgers with soy fries that will come to us on a plastic tray that we can eat at the real wood composite picnic table, because let’s say that we rent out one of the nice big rooms, with real sand and enough space for the dyed blue water to build into meager waves, like a real beach day, and let’s say after we eat we try to build a sandcastle with the vintage red plastic pail and two yellow plastic shovels that I found on eBay, but we’ve never done this without soda cans as bases for the towers, or waterlogged plastic candy wrappers for decoration or plastic straws to stick in the top, imaginary flags rippling out in an imaginary breeze, so they look like shit and they fall apart as soon as we take our hands away. Let’s say instead of a sandcastle, we build a ring of lumpy drip castles, the sand slurry plopping from shoddy anuses made by our loose fists, and let’s say we laugh for a long time at our shit castles, and the let’s say it feels stupid at first, but we play at being monsters, like when we were kids, but let’s say we wade out into the water even though neither of us can swim, but let’s say it doesn’t get more than waist high in any of these rooms; let’s say we splash until the water is frothing on top and then we come out roaring and stomping, we smash our ugly, SoftServe shit castles, and let’s say we don’t stop there, let’s say we dig furrows in the weirdly clean, weirdly pale sand so deep that we find the building flooring beneath and let’s say it’s just cold cement, coated in pockmarked brown plastic,  and let’s say we dig a person sized hole that goes all the way down the Summerland® floor and we climb in together, let’s say we melt into each other like our drip castles and we bury ourselves up to the neck like we always wanted to when we were little, but can you even imagine if we’d covered ourselves in inlet sand so the fleas made homes of our bodies, so our moms shouted us home the whole way? But let’s say when we close our eyes we can’t help but imagine the swelling whine of traffic whipping along the freeway that loops over our neighborhood, we imagine waves trembling onto the Summerland® imitation shore and carrying the cellophane remains of someone’s last microwave burrito, waterlogged maxi pads and tampons, Band-Aids and wrist braces, weed tangled wristbands from a night at the club, disposable razors and disposable needles and disposable lighters and disposable diapers, and let’s say we don’t go home to tell our moms we came here and they were right: it’s expensive and we missed being young and playing at the inlet, let’s say instead we pool the remains of our money and take a couple forties to drink while we hold hands under the overpass; let’s say we watch sunset smoking red-orange over the inlet, and the water twitching, and the children down there squatting over the treasures of the day, and the last of daylight pouring sticky and slow over them, let’s say we listen to them shrieking with the sea gulls, playing monsters, obliterating their own sandcastles in the elongating shadow of the Summerland® billboard.

Mermaid Park

Wade into the Mermaid Park swimming area up to your shoulders, shiver along with the buoys until your lips turn blue. Do this all evening when you arrive, and the next day, as soon as the sun rises, dart across the damp sand down to the shore. Turn pink, then red, skin bubbling up and sloughing away, pray for scales to reveal themselves beneath the tender flesh. An old wound breaks open with your skin: if you are really your mother’s child, when will it show? A pair of middle school aged girls are there with their dad for a custody exchange. It’s not like she’s gonna be here on time if she even comes, one of them says and flips her hair, rolls her eyes, plays with her phone. The younger girl complains, she always makes us wait for her. The whole place smells disappointing, like burnt popcorn and old fish.

Fidget over an extra cheese pizza in the motel room, because that’s what your dad used to order when he brought you here, and tell your girlfriend about the two girls, tell her again about how you feel like too much of your life has been the tedium of waiting for your mother. When she offers you aloe gel with a fragile smile, one that says she hopes you will sleep tonight instead of staying up drinking and complaining, lie and say you will wear sunblock tomorrow. I’m sure you’ll get to see her this time, your girlfriend says. She is only trying to help, but her parents are reliable. Fight over your impending wedding: the location is too far away from the ocean, can your mother attend if you do get to invite her? Cry (again) in the bathroom. Sleep fitfully under the weight of your lover’s arm, then rise at dawn and leave the room like you are escaping, go back to the swimming area to watch for the arc of tail fins slicing through the water and slashing at the sky. When you were little there were a couple of summers here that were just you and your mother. You remember her taking you in the water, you remember clutching her tight, flat against her back with your little legs wrapped around her waist while she swam so fast that the water tried to separate you. Back then she held you close with one arm and wouldn’t let it. Back then her tail seemed endless, rippling and rolling behind you.

On the last day before you go back to your apartment, your job, your life, wait with the others--children and adults, all of you scanning for tails and fins, all of you listening to the gulls shriek overhead, trembling in the cold water and salt-brining from the knees, the shoulders, the neck down. Watch as the two middle school girls hug and say goodbye to a mermaid who must have given them her eyes, her small hands, they wear her appearance in miniature. Watch them return to tapping on their phones, watch their mother be taken back into the sea. Pretend not to hear your girlfriend calling from the motel door; it’s time to pack and go home she shouts. Wait by the water and watch the sun bend light across the day, a gleaming white streak burning into your eyes, like a familiar long-flung tail.

The Sounds of Summer Camp

Wunderkind has to pee, but instead they get in line to take the next swimming level test. Wunderkind hears birdsong and shouting. A camp counselor reminding everyone to line up nicely. Someone playing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” on a ukulele badly, someone singing along with it in a different key. Swimmers splashing in the lake, contained by a half circle of buoys and two lifeguards. Short, sharp whistles preceding orders to dog paddle, to back-float, to stop splashing or pushing, to start getting out of the water. A line of kids chattering while they wait to use the outhouse bathrooms. The wooden outhouse doors creaking open, and slamming shut, percussive. 

Wunderkind hears counselors saying no one gets to cut in line, but not stopping it from happening. Charlene calling everyone from Walnut cabin over to wait with her, halfway up the line. Charlene saying no way to Wunderkind, like they would even ask. Charlene and three girls in stylish monokinis tittering at Wunderkind’s size-too-small, shoplifted snakeskin print bikini, the breasts Wunderkind love-hates spilling over the top and sides, hips in abundance. Charlene saying Wunderkind is a slut as loud as she please while the smell of Hawaiian Tropic and cucumber-melon body spray creates a full circle barrier around her. The violent smack of two older boys landing cannonballs. More whistling, more shouting. Wunderkind still has to pee, they focus on clenching around the fullness, the ripening ache. 

This is how it sounds when it happens: the whisper of Wunderkind’s feet shuffling in the hot sand, the squelch of Wunderkind’s thighs rubbing together, flung-water sputtering, splashing, sloshing as everyone else swims, and another girl saying oh my god thanks bitch as Charlene lets her cut in front of Wunderkind. Water pouring over and over again from bright plastic pails to cool, damp sand. This is Wunderkind squirming and dancing in line, and this is Wunderkind saying no when the same junior counselor asks if they need to use the bathroom, and this is Wunderkind refusing to leave the line and this is Charlene refusing the junior counselor’s request to save Wunderkind’s place so they can run to the outhouse, and now this is everyone growing quiet as urine runs down Wunderkind’s leg, dribbles on the ground, soaking into the sand when Wunderkind can’t hold it back, and now this is the sound of Wunderkind being told you can’t go swimming like this, you have to go clean up and the sound of Wunderkind’s refusal is nonononononono, shrill as a whistle, frantic like birdsong, and this is Wunderkind leaving the line and running past Charlene, straight into the water, diving under the first row, then the second row of buoys, and swimming out until their arms hurt, finally this is the sound of lake water slapping against itself, Wunderkind lifting their face and breathing deep, all the rest of the sounds of summer camp muted and far away.  

---

Ani King (they/them) is a queer, gender non-compliant writer, artist, and activist from Michigan. Ani is the first-place winner of the 2024 Blue Frog Annual Flash Fiction Contest, a SmokeLong Grand Micro Competition 2023 Finalist, and has had work featured in Split Lip Magazine. They can be found at aniking.net, or trying to find somewhere to quietly finish a book without any more interruptions.

Jessica Klimesh

Lessons

The older girls clothe the younger girls in their hand-me-downs. They say this was my favorite T-shirt, too bad it doesn’t fit me anymore. Or they say I wore this dress to my First Communion. Or these Keds were my first Velcro shoes.

The older girls sigh at the memories.

The older girls fix the younger girls’ hair, then apply makeup to the younger girls’ faces—concealer, blush, mascara, eye shadow, lipstick. They bedeck the younger girls as though they were playthings, dolls, fashioning them into unrecognizable silhouettes of their former selves.

The older girls say to each other remember when? And they all nod, say yes, uh-huh. Of course the older girls remember when they were the younger girls.

~

The older girls say here, wear these earrings and put on these bracelets, this necklace. And they tell the younger girls that they should always wear a ring on their ring fingers.

The older girls smile and say to the younger girls: Look how beautiful you are! Don’t you feel special?

The older girls tell the younger girls what to expect when they grow older. They explain how to flirt, how to wiggle their hips when they move, and how to walk in heels. They say when you smile, you don’t want to show too many teeth but just enough. And they say speak loud enough to be heard but not too loud, except when you scream. Your screams should always be loud.

The older girls take a step back and view their young protégés.

~

The older girls prepare the younger girls for first dates, proms, and weddings. They dress the younger girls in their old prom dresses, their old wedding dresses. The younger girls are stiff and hard to dress in such delicate material. The older girls bend the younger girls’ arms and legs, whichever way they will contort, and try to keep the younger girls from falling over. They lay them on the bed, hold them upside down.

The older girls say that tight dresses are always the hardest. But they tell the younger girls that it’s worth all the fuss.

~

The older girls tell the younger girls not to move too much. They spray their hair into place and tell them not to cry because they’ll smudge their mascara and not to drink anything or wipe their mouths because their lipstick will smear. And they say don’t play too hard or you’ll rip your dress or get a run in your stocking or turn your ankles in those shoes. Then the older girls confer with each other, turn back to the younger girls and say no no no no, you mustn’t move at all.

The older girls lift the younger girls up and set them on a shelf, each one in her own individual pose.

There, that’s good, that’s better, the older girls tell the younger girls. You will be safe there.

---

Jessica Klimesh (she/her) is a US-based writer and editor whose creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in Flash Frog, Cleaver, Atticus Review, trampset, Bending Genres, and Funicular, among others. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, and Best of the Net. Learn more at jessicaklimesh.com or jekwrites.substack.com

Mark Schimmoeller

Postcards

The writing professor wanted us to finish our winter-term course assignments, remarkable given that we’d recently discovered humanity had only one year of existence left. She did tweak the last story assignment, asking us to write about someone we knew who had a project that should have been started earlier. I’m decades older than the other students, and her words made my skin itch. I feared that one of my classmates would want to interview me.

The students, however, ignored the request, leaving the university to take care of more urgent matters. I drew a blank on what to do in the coming weeks and months, so I remained in the class. Just me and the professor, every Tuesday and Thursday, while the world went berserk around us.

She didn’t act like I was the only student in the class; I didn’t act like she was the only professor on campus.

I’m not sure why I didn’t have anything more pressing. I’m a bit embarrassed by that.

The assignment gave me an excuse to visit a friend. Jeremy Orr would be doing something, everything else be damned, what little I knew about him. I hadn’t seen him since middle school, but I heard he was a hermit, living off tree nuts and fruits. We had corresponded sporadically in the last few years. His postcards were made of pressed shagbark from a hickory tree, and I brought them into my suburban home and displayed them on the mantle above the fireplace. I have six of them. Of all my things—the lamps with their embroidered shades, the white oak floors, the glass and walnut dining room table—they are what attract the eye. My wife, who died of Covid five years ago, didn’t like them. Or didn’t like the way I stared at them. “They make you sad,” she said.

I disagree. I look at them as one would look at a souvenir. People often have souvenirs from places they haven’t been, sent to them by friends or family who have, and one can feel a pleasure like the travelers must have experienced.

In his last postcard—sent a year ago on January 19, 2025—Jeremy wrote directions to his place. Though I knew Harmony Road—it dead ended in the northern part of my county—the directions made no sense. They would have me cross the Elk River on foot. He said his earthen roof baffled GPS. I was not to use GPS. I needed to be baffled instead, apparently, by handwritten instructions.

The muscles in my neck and shoulders unexpectedly relaxed as my Tesla backed out of the garage on the morning I set out to find him. By the time I left Woodland Estates, I was listening to the Rocky soundtrack, music that hadn’t appealed to me since my first days in college. These songs had turned sour on me. But when? A decade into my corporate career? Two or three?

Wednesday morning and already a line coming out of First Federal, people standing deep into the parking lot, hunched against a chill in the air.

I made it out of town.

On one of my visits to Jeremy’s childhood house—we were in sixth grade—we decided to cross a barbed wire fence into someone else’s land. Jeremy lived then with his parents in a saltbox tenant farmhouse on a cow and tobacco farm, and we had always stayed within the boundaries. When Jeremy squeezed through the barbed wire that day, I followed, feeling free and reckless.

On the other side of the fence, we moved quietly forward, avoiding branches on the ground. He was more like me then—a shy, rule-abiding, good student. I never followed him after that day. I don’t know why. He kept going where he wasn’t supposed to go.

He whispered that we should try to step on rocks if we could, so they couldn’t find us. I’m not sure now who they was, but I think I knew then. If we stepped on the ground, we would have to brush leaves and sticks over our prints. We used cedar branches like brooms. For some of the way, we stepped from rock to rock along the creek bed.

After what seemed like a long trespass, we entered a cedar grove and stopped. I don’t think either of us had ever been so secreted from the world. How the topic came up, I’m not sure, all I remember is that in this cedar grove we talked about the Capron twins, Jasmine and Jessica, who were in our class. We felt safe talking about them here, nearly certain they couldn’t hear us.

Jeremy and I hadn’t mentioned them before, though I believe we knew of each other’s interest in them. They had freckles and long, auburn hair and maintained just enough distance from the popular girls for us to dream about them. Jessica was more of a tomboy, Jasmine more feminine. The revelation in the cedar grove was that we were attracted to the other girl, Jeremy to Jessica and I to Jasmine, a revelation that turned our friendship into a near blood bond. We loved each other for loving the other girl.

On the way back, we swung on a wild grapevine, a more dangerous activity than typical for us, imagining that the Capron girls were there to see us. We joked about how Jasmine would never swing on a grapevine.

~

I parked where Harmony Road ended, activated the Tesla’s global alarm, and set out on what looked like a deer trail. Jeremy wrote that I would be able to find my way once on the trail, yet after a while the trail forked. The clearest path headed away from the river through a sunlit field of yellow and brown grasses. The other way headed down an embankment toward the Elk River, cedar trees blocking the sun and casting a shade that seemed familiar. It had blue in it amidst the black.

~

A homeless encampment had sprung up on campus, and my schedule quickly became known. Getting to the Sylvia A. Bee Humanities Building required me having up to ten five-dollar bills. A member of the National Guard now let me in the building, after I presented my student identification.

The professor was always in the room, even if I was early, and always prepared, though once I saw her hastily put her long hair back in a bun. I guessed she was maybe ten years younger than I was. I admit that I often thought of Jasmine as I watched her lecture, the auburn hair a similarity.

One Tuesday she said it was time for our last story workshop. Because of the small class size, we would start with a story that a student had—hypothetically—submitted.

In this story, a young woman wanted to go out into the world and have adventures and write a novel, but she kept hearing her father’s voice in her head, urging her to be responsible, establish a career. The voice gave her headaches. In the end, she decided she would have no peace until she followed his wishes. She went to graduate school, received her doctorate, and by the time she was twenty-eight she was a tenured professor at a university. Then she began to hear another voice in her head, this one telling her to live her life. But by this time, she was a divorced mother of two, and she had no option but to continue bringing home a paycheck.

In a voice still calibrated for a room full of students, the professor went on to discuss the workshop etiquette, how we were to talk first about what we liked about the story. When we talked about what we would change, we would refer to the story as our own. We were not to bring attention to the author of the story.

 “James, would you like to start,” she asked.

I’d signed up for my first creative writing class on a complete whim—the same day I took an early retirement—and I’d been one of the quieter students. Not discontented. Just like in a daze. I listened to the discussions of the emotional states of fictional characters as I would, it seemed to me, stare at Jeremy’s postcards once I got home. Not a blank kind of daze. More like a soaking-in kind of daze. It blew my mind that someone could arrange words on paper and make someone else feel a character’s emotions.

I’d never been called on before. I suppose I should have anticipated the possibility, given the sparsely attended classroom.

“I like the story,” I said.

“What makes you like it?” the professor asked.

I saw that her eyes were red, like she hadn’t slept.

“I mean, I don’t like it for the character,” I said. “I wish she could have been in a different story.”

 “What kind of story would you like her to be in?”

For the first time, the professor moved from the back of her desk to the front of it. She leaned against it, her hands gripping its sides.

“She has tenure,” the professor continued. “She has two children, whom, presumably, she loves. Why would she want anything different?”

“To get away from the voices in her head,” I said.

“Ah, the bothersome voices,” she said. “The infernal voices. Is this a complete story, James?”

“It’s more like a summary.”

“Right. A statement about a life. Period at the end. That’s all she wrote. So, tell me how you would turn this from a statement of fact into a story?”

I couldn’t think of what to say, and in the silence, heat rushed to my face.

“Well,” the professor said, “I would describe the voices more. Maybe they crawl out of her eyes. Wouldn’t that be a different thing for voices to do? They’d crawl out of her eyes loud and irritating and gang up on the first thing they come to. Say a coffee mug. Say they get all over an innocent coffee mug, berating it for being in the service of grading papers instead of writing a novel. Then they go from the coffee cup to her children.”

Her fingers had turned white.

When she spoke next, she whispered, and I felt, for the first time, alone with her in the university.

“My story, you see, needs details if I want it to be alive. That’s a big if. And fewer periods. It has too many sentences. It has too many endings.”

~

I set off on the well-trod, sunlit path, but something stopped me. I turned around. On the faint path going the other way lay a cedar branch. It looked recently snapped from a tree.

I reversed direction, picked up the cedar branch and headed into the blue shade toward the river.

The path dropped, and I was inside a cleft in the hillside, stepping on rocks and roots. I’m not sure one could describe it as a path at this point. I had to lower my body to scoot down miniature cliffs. Shagbark hickories grew among the cedars on either side of me. When I rested, I stared at bark that curled like off ramps from trunks.

He sands the inner side of the bark, turning it to a light tan. Pencil marks show up clearly on this side. I like the contrast between the tan side and rough gray side. That’s why I always have a couple of the postcards on the mantle turned the other way. Each card has two Forever Amphibian stamps on it. That’s more than what is needed. But who would know for shagbark postcards. The stamps look old.

I’m not sure what I expected once I was on the riverbank. Though the Elk River is small, more like a large creek, one still couldn’t cross it without getting submerged.

~

 The professor is always asking me where the emotional center of a scene is. She directs me to pick an object or an action or a setting that can carry that emotion. She says this like I can accomplish the task. We both sit in desks now. She makes the desks look more comfortable than they are. Maybe if I were as slender as she is, they would feel comfortable to me too.

We’re spending far more time on my story than the hypothetical student’s. I’d likely feel insecure if we focused on an absent person’s work. As it is, I’m gradually gaining confidence in her presence. I even told her about staring at Jeremy’s postcards. That’s about all I do now since I’ve stopped watching television.

She didn’t seem surprised.

Sometimes I look at the postcards like they are hands. The sanded sides feel like skin.

~

 It took me a minute to see the rusted church bell hanging from driftwood. The driftwood was set vertically in a pile of rocks. A length of twine hung from the bell’s clapper.

I wasn’t surprised that he would have a nonstandard doorbell. I dropped my cedar branch and rang the bell three times; a minute later, Jeremy came bounding through the underbrush on the other side of the water. He wore buckskin and a fur cap, and he stopped when he saw me.

 “James Dunworth!” he yelled to me.

~ 

“Take me there,” the professor said.

 “What?” I said.

She got up and locked the door. I saw then, through the small door window, a couple of men in garbage bag ponchos drift by. It had started to rain and sleet. Maybe the National Guard was letting people shelter in the building.

“Transport me,” the professor said.

~ 

I’m a good traveler as I sit in my recliner. It’s an off-white leather with walnut trim. We chose it because it matched the dining room table. I should exercise, but my mind wanders more when I’m in my recliner. If they ever discover—within the next few months, I mean—that a wandering mind helps with the heart, I’d be pleased.

Each of Jeremy’s postcards is written with precise detail, the last one precise in the most practical way, the earlier ones more like poems, precise that way—the bluebirds coming out of the cedar tree, a moon shadow of smoke rising from the chimney, etc. I want to impress the professor with my last story, as I’m sure Jeremy could—yet I keep thinking I won’t be able to arrange the words right.

Also, I’ve not proven I can travel with someone else.

If I had liked my career at Kroger, I could have talked to my wife about it. If she liked my imaginings of an alternative life, we could have talked about that. As it turned out, we were a mostly quiet couple.

~

 I told the professor one Thursday about my trumpet, which had been buried under boxes in the walk-in closet. I loved that trumpet, but I bit my nails while playing it in middle school. I hadn’t wanted to see the blood stains on the keys. Until my wife died, that is. I took it out then and made it bleat. Now I blow on it once a day.

It always sounds like a distressed animal. I blow as loudly as I can, filling my house at 873 Ravenwood with noise.

~

 A man like Jeremy would use the junk that washed up on the riverbanks. Like bed springs. Once he found some bed springs that helped him complete a catapult made from cedar poles. And some baby carriage wheels, so he could roll this catapult from behind a bush.

He pulled back a long, spring-loaded pole and loosely wrapped what I thought was a grapevine around it.

 “Catch it,” he yelled.

The vine made a path in the sky coming toward me. I clutched it someplace in the middle. Once it was in my hands, I realized I held a rope.

He instructed me to hold where the knot was, back up to a rock on the bank of the hill.

~

“You can come if you like,” I said to the professor.

And she came through the blue shade toward me.

Sunlight blocked by cedar trees must make a blue shade. I’m seeing everything through a blue shade. The shade must also have green and black in it, but it’s the blue I keep seeing.

The professor has long, slender fingers. Mine are stunted in comparison. But now both of our hands are rocks stuck on the rope as we prepare to swing.

“What’s the strongest feeling right now,” the professor asks me.

She smells like burnt chamomile, like disaster and calmness together.

“That I’m only now doing this,” I say.

Then we are flying, our bodies hung together, the air pushing around us.

The professor shrieks. What comes out of my mouth is a cross between a grunt and a screech, coming from someplace I had thought lost inside me.

On the other side, we drop to the ground laughing. The professor’s hair drapes over a rock.

Jeremy is smiling at us. He’s in fine shape, lanky but muscular.

“Jeremy Orr,” I say. “I’d like you to meet my professor.”

“You bastard,” he says, still smiling. “You’ve found a beautiful woman.”

I’m embarrassed. We’ve moved our desks so they make a continuous surface between us.

Jeremy pulls the rope back, wraps it around a branch. Then he leads us up the embankment.

“Jasmine was always afraid of grapevines,” I say to no one in particular.

I’m panting by the time Jeremy stops, close to the top of the hill, where it has leveled off a bit. Jeremy and the professor are not out of breath.

In school I was interested in football. I have a stocky build that could have been developed into a football player’s physique. Yet I was too afraid to try out, afraid I wasn’t good enough. An old story of mine is that I did try out for the team and went on to become a good player. Jasmine notices me in this story.

“Welcome,” Jeremy says.

I see the house now, which is almost completely blended into the landscape, the roof covered with the same bottlebrush grass and wingstem and blackberry that grow on the ground, as if his place is only a trick of elevation. Its rounded walls are the same color as the subsoil. It has no windows. To get through the doorway, Jeremy would have to stoop. Wrapped around half of the house is a porch, cedar posts holding up a scaffolding of branches and thatch. On the porch is a pile of firewood. It is split into pieces smaller than my wrist. Next to the firewood, a clay oven sits on a rock base. Steam is seeping out from the oven’s wooden door.

“Oh,” the professor says.

I dump words on him—I’m nervous—thanking him for the invitation, apologizing for not getting out sooner, wondering if he had a project he wished he had started earlier, given that the end of the world approached.

“Whoa, buddy,” Jeremy says, “I’m trying to remember if you were always so inclined toward dystopia.”

We gape at him. A gust of wind tosses a few snowflakes around us.

“You haven’t heard?” the professor asks.

“Not bread or flowers or wine. No, my friends come bearing news of the end of the world,” Jeremy says.

We tell him that deep sea mining has released a chemical into the atmosphere that will kill us and most mammals within a year. I’d stopped watching television, sick of the continuous coverage of the first few people who had died.

I’m embarrassed that I don’t have a gift for him. I never thought I would make it this far.

“You truly don’t get out,” the professor says.

“Kinda gotten out of the habit,” Jeremy says.

“And I guess our news doesn’t help you get back into it,” the professor replies.

Her eyes, they are soft now. They’ve had a surface hardness to them. I’m remembering Jasmine in the hallway outside our classroom in sixth grade, when she tossed a glance in my direction, her eyes soft like that.

“Come,” Jeremy says. “Let’s get out of the cold.

He leads us to the doorway and stops.

“No need to take off your shoes, but I’d like you to close your eyes for a minute to help them adjust. I wouldn’t want my guests to think my house is completely black.”

He laughs. There it is—Jeremy as a kid. I hear him. He’s a kid again, that same laugh. A surprising burst, then a sound like someone sliding down a staircase.

I’m closing my eyes. A din that had been in the background is drawing nearer. It could be traffic from State Road 169. But it is distant enough for it to turn into anything.

Jeremy has us duck, and he guides us into his house. He asks us to feel for a cob bench on our left. We are to sit on the cob bench and then we can open our eyes. The professor and I are clutching each other. The air is velvety, like it’s another body.

Warmth comes up from the seat. The professor exhales. The din in my head fades.

When I open my eyes, they are not overwhelmed with darkness. I can see the blunt forms of things. Jeremy is across from us. His teeth show up. He’s smiling. He’s always had such white teeth. At one end of the bench there’s a barrel with a tea kettle on top.

Jeremy is handing us wooden mugs, asking if we want to try his sassafras tea.

We do.

The tea is made from boiling sassafras root, the mugs carved from a sassafras trunk. 

“The seat is warm,” I say.

My recliner is soft, but I’m more comfortable on this hand-made, warm earthen bench. Comfortable and sleepy.

“Y’all have impeccable timing,” Jeremy says. “The flue for my barrel stove runs through the cob bench. It’s most comfortable about three hours after I’ve had a fire. In fact, I was resting on it myself when I heard your bell.”

Both of my hands are holding the large wooden mug and now warmth from the steaming tea is spreading into them as well.

“You asked about a project,” Jeremy says. “I’m glad you asked about that instead of hoping for some school news.”

That laugh again.

I’m soaking in the warmth. It’s a warmth of embers.

I think they’ve stopped heating the Sylvia A. Bee Humanities building. Either that or dozens of cold bodies entering the building have lowered the temperature.

“Anyway,” Jeremy continues, “I had a window wash up. In one piece. I couldn’t believe it.”

I can move my body slightly toward the professor and avoid the direct stare of a gaunt face.

Jeremy tells us that in the spring he’s going to carve out a section of his earthen wall and build an alcove for the window. He says his walls are over a foot thick, made of clay and stray, so the sill will be deep, and the angled reveal will round the light. It will face east.

“What will you see?” asks the professor.

“I’ll see the red morning sun through the cedars,” he says.

“You’ll always look toward the coming day,” the professor says.

He laughs. “I’ll only have one window.”

He takes our mugs, tells us he will be back.

The din in my head returns. Jeremy leaves the house, and light bursts in. Its entrance sounds like a fist on a door.

Jeremy comes in carrying something. A rich, sweet, burnt aroma. He hands us each a wooden plate and a wooden fork. The thing on the plate is not visible. He tells us the sweet potatoes have been in the clay oven for three hours, that we should peel off the burnt. We do, and it’s like emerging out of blindness seeing the flesh of the sweet potatoes.

“They make their own sugar if you allow them time,” he says. “It’s about all I eat this time of year.”

He keeps talking, but the din in my head distracts me.

A boot is on the door window. Someone is using his hands to knock a boot against the door window.

“In my story,” the professor says, her voice loud, “that sweet potato looks like the morning sun.”

I concentrate on its deep, complexly sweet flavor.

“You’ll keep moving ahead, won’t you?” I ask Jeremy. I’ve drawn my breath, pursed my lips. “You’ll put that window in, right? And the days when the sun doesn’t come out? What will you see then? Tell us what you will see then.”

“There will be mist,” he says. “There will be rain and snow. I’ll see sleet and hail and slate skies.”

~

The professor moves her desk so it’s parallel with mine. We turn in our seats to face each other.

The battering on the door is awful.

She gives me her hand. Then we are holding each other. I’m trembling and happy.

---

Mark Schimmoeller is the author of SLOWSPOKE: A UNICYCLIST’S GUIDE TO AMERICA (Chelsea Green, 2013), which was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Creative Nonfiction. When not writing, Mark is often found cooking for his wife in a solar oven on their off-the-grid Kentucky homestead.

Beth Sherman

Suck It Up, Buttercup

My father broke it by accident. He was reaching for a can of sardines one shelf higher and his hand knocked into my mother’s favorite mug. She’d bought it at a flea market in Miami Beach on the day she graduated High School. One hundred and ninety ninth out of a class of 224. Voted “Most Likely to Win the Lottery and Lose the Ticket.” Went to prom with Philip Delvecchio, who founded a brokerage firm that made millions, and who she could have married and lived with in one of those pink stucco mansions overlooking Biscayne Bay, not in our two-bedroom apartment in Jupiter with no dishwasher and roaches racing each other around the kitchen sink. But she’d met my father by then, and they were in “love,” she said, using her fingers to trace quotes in the air.

My father could have said, “I’m sorry.”

Or “It was bound to break sooner or later.”

Or “I’ll get the gorilla glue and fix it.”

Even though this last was impossible. The mug had shattered into a billion pieces scattered like stars on the linoleum kitchen floor.

Instead, he opened the sardines and began making himself a sandwich on toasted rye, with plenty of mayonnaise.

“He acted like he hadn’t done anything wrong,” my mother said, shaking her head in dismay. “Like it never even happened.”

She was thinking she should have left him years ago when she was prettier and thinner. That having someone next to her at night, his arm cradling her belly, his breath tickling her ear, didn’t make her less lonely. That if she’d married Philip Delvecchio, someone would be serving her coffee this minute in a Wedgwood, gold rimmed cup.  

I’m guessing those were her thoughts. I don’t know. I wasn’t there.

The next day, an Amazon truck pulled up with a small brown box addressed to my mother. She opened it on the terrace, where she sat every morning and read The Miami Herald, drinking instant Sanka as hot as she could stand it. From there, she could see all the other buildings identical to hers, cars baking in the sun, a sliver of turquoise that passed for a pool.

It was a yellow mug. Not the same color as the one that broke. More of a lemon-y shade, paler, a little washed out. But close enough. It said Suck it Up, Buttercup. Just like the old one did. Though the font was smaller on the new mug. Black, not silver. And the handle didn’t have the same lilting curve.

She got up and went into the bathroom where my father was shaving. He’d been retired for 20 years, but he still shaved every day, put on a clean shirt and pressed slacks, like he had somewhere to go.

She set the mug on the sink next to the glass with their toothbrushes. She didn’t hug him, hadn’t done so in ages. But she leaned into him and they swayed like two lemons lifted by the same breeze until it was time for The Price is Right.  

Ten PhD Defense Questions You’ll Probably Face

1) Describe your PhD in one sentence.

A study of female madness in the Victorian age.

2) What are the weaknesses of your work?

I don’t use enough five-dollar words like hegemonic, uncanonical, jape, and quotidian. Especially pedagogy.

3) What are you most proud of?

The Munch portrait of a woman covering her ears and screaming, with a torn sunset behind her. I capture that.

4) If you could redo your PhD, what would you do differently?

I would visit Scandinavia, eat pistachio gelato cake for breakfast, lie by a lake counting dragonflies, hike the Greenbelt Trail, love madwomen instead of dissecting them, hitch a ride on a cloud.

5) What did you learn while writing your dissertation?

That academia sucks up time, flattening it to dead paper, causing me to miss the pleasure of standing still.

6) How long until your research can be implemented in the real world?

Is this a jape?

7) Where will this research go next?

Wedged on my shelf between the Real Housewives Ultimate Trivia Book and a torn stuffed cow.

8) Your findings in Ch. 2 disagree with findings from Caminero-Santangelo in 2017. Can you explain why?

Caminero-Santangelo is a tenured professor at NYU with a research budget and a 1/1 course load. Winner!

9) Do you think this dissertation merits a PhD?

The last person who said no is now CEO of Nvidia.

10) What was the toughest part of your PhD?

Losing the sheen of words, the way they sweep and curl and meander then bite unexpectedly, their baby doll gloss tangerine crackle, how they start off on the sidewalk holding a briefcase and end up rambling through forbidden woods.

---

Beth Sherman has an MFA in creative writing from Queens College, where she teaches in the English department. Her stories have been published in Portland Review, Blue Mountain Review, Bending Genres Journal, 100 Word Story, Fictive Dream, Full House Literary, Flash Boulevard, and elsewhere. Her work will be featured in The Best Microfictions 2024. She’s also a Pushcart, Best Small Fictions, and multiple Best of the Net nominee. She can be reached at @bsherm36 or https://www.bethsherman.site/

Zoie Jones

How to Run an Estate Sale

TAKE INVENTORY OF ALL ITEMS IN THE HOUSE.

“People will buy anything,” I repeated. A liquidless NYC snow globe sat on the walnut mantel; a boy and girl skated within the foggy glass dome. Yellowing fake snow surrounded their bodies.

“But Alice is – was – a hoarder,” Mr. Royce replied. We stood together in his musty, overcrowded living room in west Charleston – it was his first consultation with Estate Sale Genies after his wife’s death. Mr. Royce twirled his thumb around a stray thread on his shirt cuff while I popped the cap on and off my lipstick tube hidden in my jacket pocket.

A dresser peeked from behind stacks of naked aluminum cans; once we unearthed the piece it would go for at least one-fifty if the oak top wasn’t too scratched.

“All good, sir. We’ll make most anything work.”

Even 1920’s hand-lotion was collectible; who cares that it probably housed more bacteria than an abandoned petri dish? Antique junkies saw that shit and went bonkers. I’d even seen a frenzy over my late grandma’s stained childhood picnic blanket – they didn’t make them like they used to. Or, that’s what the tussle winner said when she handed me the five dollars in cash. Rock-hard blue gum stuck to the center of Lincoln’s face.

“It’s just – Alice,” Mr. Royce said. “I’m not sure how she’d feel about things getting sold.” He grasped his hands over his rounded belly, barely contained by the worn-brown leather belt set to the loosest notch.

“I understand,” I said, using my rehearsed speech. “Any family members who’d want anything before the sale?”

“No, Ms. Cathy,” he said.

“Cathy’s fine.”

“Cathy,” he amended. “I don’t want to hassle anyone.”

Family tension, then. I took a second inventory of his deep blue eyes. When I’d walked through the door he reminded me of someone I knew; I hated that feeling, when your brain couldn’t remember or your subconscious tripped you up, maybe for fun. Or, reincarnation is real, and we were lovers or dog pals in a past life.

7:00 PM. The nearest dispensary closed in an hour. “If it’s alright,” I said – my pay-grade only afforded so much consoling – “I’ll sweep through the house and note any big-ticket items.” I whipped out my clipboard: automatic respect. “Any rooms off limits?”

Mr. Royce insisted on giving a guided tour so I wouldn’t get lost. Twenty minutes later I checked my phone and ignored the three cracks that spiderwebbed across the front. The hard floors in the NICU hadn’t shown forgiveness towards my phone when I dropped it – nine months ago?

Time crawls like roadkill inching its way the side of the road.

“Alice had meant to send these to our grandbaby,” Mr. Royce said. “But she’s probably too big for them now.” He smiled as he held the pink onesie with a tiny white bow tacked onto the front collar.

“How old?”
“Just turned three,” he said. “Looks just like her mama.”

“That’s sweet,” I said and turned to leave the room. I felt eyes boring into the back of my lavender polyester blouse.

You’ll wish you kept the stained pink onesie in ten years, everyone had told me. The one from when Emily was two weeks old, when you’re sobbing on the bathroom floor because you’ll never see your baby again. I’d heard that phrase so many times, but it refused to leave me; I hated that my brain constantly dredged up that kind of shit.

USE DISCRETION; SOME THINGS NEED TO BE THROWN OUT.

Boiled water gargled as Dave poured equal sections into the two Styrofoam oatmeal containers – maple brown sugar for him and peaches and cream for me.

“What's on the agenda today?” he asked. “Going over to your client – Mr. Doyle?
“Royce.”

“Okay,” Dave said. “What’s he selling?”

“His wife died. Hoarder.” I took a long inhale from the joint between my fingers; I dangled it outside the open slider every time I removed it from my lips – Dave hated the scent it left behind. Honestly, so did I.

“It's either hoarder or minimalist,” he said. “Nothing in between.”

“Not now,” I said.

“Then when, Cathy?” he said. “Do you know how it feels to just wake up and –”

Should I have thrown out the pink onesie with the zipper instead of snaps? That’s what the targeted Facebook ads gave me at six months pregnant. But seeing the onesie – washed and folded for the final time – didn’t bring me an ounce of joy. But what about the hand-knitted blanket my mom made? We went together to Michael’s Memorial Day sale and picked out acrylic blue yarn seventy-five percent off; the sonographer had made a mistake at my fourteen-week scan so I thought Emily had been a boy. She still liked the blanket, though. Can babies see color?

Maybe my daughter never saw the color blue.

“I need a break,” Dave said.

“Hmmm?” I understood each word individually; together, they made zero sense.

“Exactly,” he said. “I’m tired of watching you throw your mind away by smoking weed and not caring about any worthwhile shit.” He slammed the Styrofoam oatmeal onto the table.

“Okay,” I said.

Dave grabbed me by the shoulders. “Just – fight with me,” he pleaded.

What about colors from the pink sunset the evening Dave drove me and the baby home from the hospital that very first time? I didn’t know then it would be twenty-three drives back and forth in only eleven months. The last departure from the hospital – just Dave and me – felt like some kind of fucked up relief.

GIVE ITEMS WORTH SELLING A PRICE.

Light streaked through distant gray clouds in the night sky. The stench of damp grass seeped into my nose, and my jeans and t-shirt felt cold and clammy. My head throbbed like my heart had migrated to my brain. I tried to remember the moments before I fell asleep – passed out? – but it was a blur. The budtender didn’t bluff when he’d said this would do the trick.

Face down in the grass. A raised dirt mound pressed against my stomach.

My vision cleared; I lay on the patch of grass where Dave had buried the cat four years ago. In loving memory of Blossom, 1993 – 2007 filled my vision from the headstone we custom ordered online for more than we could afford.

The back pocket of my jeans vibrated. I pushed myself onto my knees and answered the number without checking the caller ID.

“Should I put Alice’s socks in the 'sell’ pile?”

“I don’t – Mr. Royce?” I said and pulled the phone away from my ear to check the time. “It’s 4:00 A.M.?”

“I just figured young people stay up late,” he said. “But what should I do about the socks? Old baby clothes? Do people buy them used?”
“Just make sure –” My free palm dug into my right eye still throbbing from whatever shit coursed through my veins. “What if I come over later to help sort?”

“That’d be fine, but I don't want to trouble you.”

“Part of my job. No worries.”
“Alright. Call if you need anything.”

He hung up. Call if you need anything? What the hell. Mr. Royce probably thought he was on the phone with his dead wife. Or I hallucinated that call – the pot wouldn't fade for another few hours. I needed a shower.

Crunch. A garden snail met its end beneath my muddy slipper. I took off the sopping pink shoe and chucked it into the weeds spreading through the overgrown grass.

I could imagine Mr. Royce’s face when he smelled the weed that lingered on my clothes. Can’t believe they made that stuff legal now, he’d say. Yeah – tell that to my insurance that doesn’t cover my Zoloft for the month. It’s either weed or laying in bed for six weeks and my insomnia and depression having a heyday. Then he’d look away, uncomfortable because no one likes to talk about that kind of shit.

Six hours later – and a thirty-minute shower – Mr. Royce walked me back into his kitchen; a lime-green Pyrex set sat on the floor beside the olive-green archway. That could bring in at least two hundred.

His nose twitched the second I walked through the kitchen door. I’d put on fresh clothes and washed my hair but maybe he had some sixth sense.

“Eggs and toast?”

My gaze snapped to him. Two white plates sat side by side – overcooked scrambled eggs and blackened toast with jam. “You want me to eat breakfast with you?”

“Figured you haven’t eaten yet,” he said. “Most young people have too much on their plates to make the time.”

“Yeah.” My throat worked itself into a knot. Dave’s car was gone when I woke up; breakfast had always been on him because I liked cooking dinner more.

As we ate, he read a list of items he wasn’t sure to sell: antique hairbrushes, desilvered compact mirrors, 1960s Vogue editions – would anyone buy an original Ken doll without an arm? – faux palm trees, and a hip-height Santa holding a rifle and an American flag. I repeated myself fifty times: yes, people will buy it. I told him to use his best judgment, though. Not everything is worth selling.

He gave me a look, like he appraised my eyes this time. Mine were a muddled dark brown – the color of earth after it’s soaked up rain for a straight week.

“Everything needs a price,” I said. “You sort, and I’ll appraise.”

We started in the kitchen. Easy enough, since Alice deemed the kitchen the only place worth organization. My fingertips became smeared with black Sharpie from touching the plastic stickers before the ink dried. I caught Mr. Royce with his eyes closed every so often. His chest moved rapidly, and it looked like he tried to hold it together; for who, I wasn’t sure.

AN ESTATE SALE IS NOTHING WITHOUT BUYERS.

I smeared my lips with cherry red and tried to ignore Dave’s empty spot next to mine in the driveway. The receiver played a message last night – his voice sounded dull and tired and thoroughly over me. He crashed at a college friend's who I’d never met.

I took the main avenue down to Mr. Royce’s house. He insisted on being there for the actual estate sale, so we were meeting an hour before it began.

If I’d have kept the pink onesie – shit, all of it – Dave would have been reminded of Emily every day. Life was a living hell enough.  

Ambulance lights spun on Mr. Royce’s driveway and the front door swung on its hinges. I threw the car into park and ran.

A massive EMT put his hand in front of me to block the front door. “Ma’am, you shouldn’t go in.”

“What’d you mean?” I demanded.

“Heart attack this morning,” he said. “What’s your relation?”

“I – We were going to have an estate sale today,” " I said. “For his wife’s stuff.”

Two hours, I snuck into the house through the unlocked back door to take a final inventory. His daughter would decide whether or not to proceed with the sale.

In the kitchen, next to the pristine Pyrex bowls, a green hand-knitted baby blanket sat on the worn oak table, ready for buyers. Mr. Royce had told me Alice and he had bought the table two weeks after their wedding – their first big purchase together.

I took the blanket and breathed in the plasticky scent of unwashed acrylic yarn. Alice probably had knitted it for her grandbaby who was grown up and happy and breathing.

The blanket was chunky – if someone saw me with it would they know I’d stolen it? – so I slipped it under the front of my shirt and walked to my car with hands over my stomach; maybe they’d think I was still a mother.

---

Zoie Jones lives in the greater Los Angeles area where she is pursuing a degree in English literature. Her debut short story, “Natural Shocks,” was recently published in Drunk Monkeys literary magazine.

Jean Marie

I Want Bulbs

You are always overhead. Always overhead. I am looking for your services. I’m looking for an attorney. I need an electrician. My code name is Scooby Doo. My code name is Kermit. Psst: I'm here, under the limen. One phone call only. My ex, you see, he is stealing from me. He broke in, he had the code, not my name, but the combo for my gate and he took all my furniture, my beloved clawfoot tub, he came in and I have nothing; I need your oil change so I can float again. There was an injection, too. Inky, food for thought flew in–

It’s my neighbor. He sunk his syringes in the couch of my griefs. Just a catacombed fling. I need a lawyer, the daffodils are trying to divorce me, but: I want bulbs. You’re too soft for me. I want this depression, this big sea– look, I feel it, don't you? Feel that we are always overhead, but I want no head, that’s why I need a plumber. Let Zeus rain, go on: flood this skin. Deadhead me, cut the sea by its seams and slap it to the sky; pin it; excise this face, this whole sheen of life, lob it, leave a chair and a vas and the heirloom iron bed– an apocalypse sounds nice! – not the slow cooker again–please. I want it fast: I’ve earned that. My code name is Persephone. Clear the open space and replace it with something, a nothing that doesn’t suffocate. A dance, maybe.

Nevermind.

Do it already: guillotine me, golden rain me, snap my stem so I can rise, curl the light together in my fist; a bouquet, like I used to dream. Catch it. I am looking for you, your services. Rays and UV, a meet-cute asphyxiation. Then maybe I’ll tie shards to the clouds, burst like a cicada into life cycles, seventeen again

emerging

after all this time, I could rainbow the sky

here in storage, but God:

Don’t you know how to sing?

Fever Dream

What is a book, she asked? A fever dream, I said, but what is anything, what is a poem, a five-paragraph essay, what is prose, for godsakes, a sonnet, a song?

What is a stanza, a trochee, what is a noumenon? What is five, anyway, after it all, a kid on a playground, kindergarten, fuck critical thinking, what is anything, once thought critically, what is anything, criticized, what is anything, analyzed to dead, done and the book is alive– is it? Maybe stop being a bitch, is the thing, always the thing, right, stupid spoiled selfish bitch with books and pointe shoes, ain’t this satin doll blues, what is a word, letters, numeral, Roman characters, as if they’re the only, those sacred font-ed generals, oh– give me calligraphy and dances on pins, even some Comic Sans, for a laugh; so what is white space pinned by the throat to a page, what is color what is absinthe-driven insanity, what is everything and nothing ballooned at once, hot air at the ears, what is “at once” when you think about it, what is consonants and diction, the movement of tongue on the palate, the scrape of tectonic plates against the mouth’s thatched roof, the sea as it splits, the lap of waves, that froth of earth against your teeth. The dawn of agog. What is I’ll buy a vowel, all of them, to pull oxygen through gullets like oxen, traverse pocks grained by cleave and motion, a climbing wall of hand holds to the glottis, God; what is fubar, birthed up in this fiction —

What is a book? What is a pain in your neck, a tooth twirling from gums,

straining for loose, what is a loss you can’t hold, cue autophagy, a sore in your throat, choking you, ruthless; what is an asteroid, what is an apocalypse, at least in the suburbs or second grader’s gap-toothy smile, really, but blacked-out poetry? What is a fever but abnormal; what is normal, but a fever– that hiss of an immune system, normal disguised cagey in some textbook; what is the fever’s dream, redemptive; what is fever, but blood set to music, steamy, braided with iambs and gore and sweaty armpits, the exploded dream in shrapnel verse, to smite with high temps into abc’s and sentences; what is normal, but a farce. Absurd. What is something more real than what real is, what is real, but a pandemic pedicure, a function of collective Fahrenheit, jello-molded, an overplayed TikTok voiceover: all the pretty girls walk like this; what is narration and dialogue, what is category, please, don't start with first person, make it third, what is fiction, when you call second person POV demented? What is a book, come, tell me: what is anything, when alchemy, algorithm and alcohol all share the same mother, that grammatical confection, catalyst-ing reels that roll through your cerebellum, amygdalae gone wild! You’re sick. Looped into never-ending suggestions from DM’s and bots, bots, bots, who is to say the fungi haven’t already claimed us, beguiled hosts? Admit it. What is a book, but the antidote – to phone storage full: review your life in twenty-second video. What is fascia French pressed, ore separated from the hurt, hot stones melted like snow into sauce, what is anything, God, what rises from dynamite’s moan, love’s pilot light stuffed into vessels, overflow, fireflies caught in coffee cans, flickering–

what is loss, but the thing, really?

What is a book but drink me, slurp down this galaxy, what is a book but a daffodil’s reach, filament-y hands to the sky aboveground, screaming: pick me. The quick of Spring. What is a book what is anything what is a fever a dream a delusion; I mean, just publish me, daddy; what is anything when words can be contronyms; what is cockamamie then, enlighten me? Perhaps, well—what is per, what is haps? Oh it’s fate, really, so what is anything, then, what are you without category, without human, woman, wife, mother, stroller, she/her, pronoun heavy, judgment and genre-laden, alien, what if you come with nothing, not even snacks; what is a book but a shape for what’s been draped, ill-fitting, a paragraph for shit strokes on your palimpsest-y pot, an Elizabethan collar, a cadence, a boat of corsets and nomenclature to save yourself, all the sounds of the universe at once, OM;

what is a book, but a box of baby clothes in the garage that you cannot get rid of.

What is a book but afraid. The hark of angels. A cut, danced to death-spiral from a threadbare gum. What is a book but a transmutation, a gathering of lumen, before shards scatter into vapor and ocean, lightning strikes: baby teeth, constellations, mud, orgasms, nightmares, nail clippings, love, the final disco of existence: loss in boxes; they hang from gold around the neck, like fireflies aglow, threatened; it’s the child’s locket, cracked to the verse: Grass. Pitch. Dreams of Fahrenheit. Guts. Dirt. The science fiction of bug blinks in poked plastic, mom calling you home for dinner. A beckon. What is anything but a gift. What is a book; what, what, what.

---

Jean Marie is a recovered litigator turned writer and yoga teacher in Park City, Utah. She recently graduated with an MFA in fiction from Bennington. She won First Place for the Short Fiction category in the 2022 Utah Original Writing Competition, and her work has appeared in Bullshit Lit, Passages North and Five on the Fifth. She also stands up with one leg behind her head and talks to plants.

Patrick Michael Denny

Beanie and Todd

The fruit was no longer frozen. Todd’s Greater Dayton Regional Transit Authority bus had arrived ten minutes early and he was the first employee to stand next to Allyson to help her assess the walk-in freezer’s condition. Puddles of water lay dormant near the mop bucket; piles of defrosted bags stacked on green shelves. It was Saturday and the morning rush would soon be pressing into the windows of Tropical Smoothies, searching for frozen empathy that the July heat had exiled.
            Beanie arrived two minutes before eight, a twelve-speed bicycle barely supporting his tall frame and the Norseman-like amounts of bright orange hair covering his face and head. Beanie, who was nicknamed at an early age to help remind his single mother of their Boston roots, held a more confrontational stance than Todd, who was five inches shorter and frequently touched a fractured black mustache that he wasn’t entirely comfortable shaving. If Todd could be described as pressed down from the top, then Beanie was definitely squeezed in from the sides; his clothing barely containing a middle-aged man’s body. Despite both young men recently celebrating their twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth birthdays respectively, they were often mistaken for men in their early forties. This put them in the awkward position of having to explain to frustrated customers that they were not the managers of this Fine Frozen Fruit establishment.
            Allyson, the twenty-two-year-old weekend manager, held that position, and she would be leaving for Chicago at the end of the summer. The rest of the employees of Tropical Smoothies slowly filed into the store and circled around the former silver fortress of frozen fruit.
            Jessica quit on the spot. “This is horseshit,” she muttered while taking several pictures of her face framed by the yawning opening of the walk-in freezer. Her last day was going to be that Sunday anyway. She took off her pin and hat and grabbed a power bar from the counter. “Later everyone,” she said, moving towards the entrance, leaving the remaining six to contemplate their own employment. Beanie noticed Allyson frowning at her phone. “Hello Frank, it’s Allyson. The freezer isn’t working, and I don’t know what you want us to do. Give me a call.” She then dialed two more numbers and left similar messages. Erica, Tabbs, and Mikey had seated themselves in the customer section. Allyson would open the doors in twenty-three minutes, and there were already two people outside holding their hands up to the window and peering inside.
            Todd went to the window and signaled that they weren’t open yet, not realizing that the slight tint made it impossible for anyone to see him. He was glad that he had taken Thursday and Friday off, as his inability to verbally defend himself would lead to an onslaught of mistakenly perceived passive-aggressive accusations from the staff. Luckily, Allyson’s clearly written schedule would protect him from inevitable feelings of guilt regarding the expiring freezer. Todd had almost been fired three times but was saved by a sudden exodus of younger employees eager to gain more profitable employment at the nearby Fairfield Commons Mall. In his almost four years and three months of frozen fruit employment, he worked for nine different managers. He had saved the bulletin board pictures of twenty-three previous employees who had fortuitously departed near the exact time of his repeated failings. His continued employment was based solely on a lack of staffing, which he frequently acknowledged to Beanie. Although he felt protected from admonishment, he started to worry that a curious eye would be cast towards his best friend who had never received a favorable work review score above a 74 in the Tropical Smoothies’ Exemplary Employee Flavor Chart, despite having worked for the original owner, Mr. Figurski.
            The first Tropical Smoothies opened across the street from the popular Dairy Queen/ Orange Julius location on East Hills Road and was rooted in Mr. Figurski’s passion for juice store culture and his equal hatred of Dairy Queen. His dislike for the Dennis the Menace mascot’d ice cream parlor was emphasized through his attempts to hire away employees of DQ on a weekly basis. Beanie worked for DQ at age fifteen and a half when he first filled out a job application at the only restaurant that hired pre-sixteen young adults in the Dayton area. He quickly became adept at mixing frozen soft-serve with bits of colored sugar and was commended on the skill with which he twisted cones and applied sprinkles. He had heard of Mr. Figurski’s hiring tactics but was not approached by the pillager of frosty aficionados until a week after his sixteenth birthday, when Mr. Figurski approached him during the Friday night rush and offered him fifty dollars in cash if he left immediately to go work for Tropical Smoothies.
            “They are all bastards at the Dairy Queen,” Mr. Figurski spat as Beanie mopped up a mess near the slop sink. They tell you that you are stupid, that they know everything, but they are fools, and we are going to shut them down!” Most of Mr. Figurski’s monologues started with the word “they” and were quickly followed by a smoke break, which Beanie had learned to appreciate from his mother. It was the guaranteed smoke breaks, not the fifty dollars that moved Beanie to quit and follow Mr. Figurski across the street.
            It didn’t take long for Beanie to learn the reason behind Mr. Figurski’s disdain for Dairy Queen.
            “I work for Bob’s Big Boy. I was manager, very good. We have 50’s dance at my church, and I make frozen drinks, because the church don’t allow alcohol. I work really hard making drinks, and everyone is happy. Then this guy, he owns the Dairy Queen, he comes up to me and say that he needs ten of me, and that Bob’s Big Boy doesn’t pay me enough. He says, you come work for me, I pay you fifty cents more an hour, and make you head manager, but I say no. Bob’s Big Boy has been very kind to me. He just shrugs his head and says, okay, he pay me seventy-five cents more an hour and he let me in on a little secret. He is going to buy the Orange Julius and make it into one store. Orange Julius, it’s my favorite drink, so I say okay. The first month is wonderful. The Dairy Queen, it buys Orange Julius, and then I get to come in and work as manager of both. There was even this kid I know from school working there. One night, he ask me how much I’m making? I tell him how much. Why not? I am manager, I get free Orange Julius, everyone is happy. The next day, the owner, he stops by and asks me to talk outside. The slimy bastard, he tells me I’m fired because I tell someone how much I make, and now he has to either pay everyone that, or he has to fire me. The liar, he has enough money to buy the Orange Julius, but he doesn’t have enough money?
            ‘But I do a better job…and I left Bob’s Big Boy for this,’ I say. He just shook his head and said that this is a life lesson, and that I should never tell anyone how much I make. He then took my apron, and my name pin and my hat. He gave me a check right then and there for the time I worked and showed me the door. Do you know what I said to that Beanie?”
            Beanie blinked his eyes, mesmerized by the tale.
            “I said fuck the Dairy Queen. Do you know what I do here at Tropical Smoothies? I make sure that we solve any problem. No one gets fired when something stupid happens. That is what I going to teach you Beanie, how to solve the problems and not be slimy bastard.” As Beanie surveyed the current employees of Tropical Smoothies, he found himself slowly mouthing Mr. Figurski’s mantra… “Fuck Dairy Queen.”
            "How much do we have in the petty cash drawer?" he asked? Allyson opened the brown envelope that was kept next to the safe located underneath the register.
            "We have sixty-three dollars. That won’t buy enough frozen fruit, even if we could get it here fast enough." Beanie went into the frozen-less room and removed all the strawberry bags, placing them to the left side of each blender station.
            "Todd, I need you to get all of the fruit bags out of the freezer and separate them into piles like this. I'll be right back." With that he took the sixty-three dollars, adding it to a couple of twenties out of his own pocket. He winked at three people standing outside of the store, hopped on his bike and darted into the Ohio humidity, leaving his co-workers motionless and confused.
            Inspired for the first time in his non-employee-of-the-month career, Todd took Beanie’s lead and found his voice. "Okay everyone, let's get this going." More out of disbelief than obedience, the Tropical Smoothies crew carefully moved the sealed bags of defrosted fruit out of the walk-in and found islands of surface area around the store to place them on. To everyone's surprise, Beanie returned twelve minutes later, his face pouring with the red exhaustion of someone who had not exerted himself that much since his junior year of the Presidential Fitness Test.
            "Quick you guys, let's get these in before they melt." Strapped to the handlebars of his bike and stacked upon the basket behind his seat were bags of ice, newly purchased from the 7-Eleven up the hill. Todd grabbed the three bags behind the seat, while the others tried to figure out how to remove the remaining plastic bundles from the handlebars. Allyson keenly watched the long hand on the clock, aware that the growing crowd outside the door would be growing impatient.
            "Beanie, I don't know what you're doing, but we have to hurry." The red-headed, red-faced monster slowly started to breathe again, looking for words that needed the least amount of oxygen.
            "Okay, Allyson, you need to turn off the menu monitors, we're not going to make any of the smoothies we normally do. Todd, I need you to start dropping the ice on the floor before we let any of the customers in. Mikey, Erica, Tabbs, we've got six blenders. Let's make two of them strawberry, one of them mango-pineapple, one of them orange-banana, I need a raspberry-blueberry and let's use the last one for peach." Erica began shifting the bags around to match the flavor combinations as Todd ceremoniously dropped bags of ice onto the floor, the sounds of crashing tile intensifying the pace of Beanie's challenge. With the others engaged, he sat on a chair next to Allyson.
            "We're only going to let the customers come in one at a time, and they’ll have to choose one of the six flavors that we're making this morning. Todd is going to start filling up the blenders halfway with ice, and everyone else will top them off with the fruit. This is what we used to do at Orange Julius, but no one has to know that." Allyson nodded in acknowledgement, ignoring the knocking at the entrance door.
            The first four customers were confused and unwilling to separate their expectations from the harsh reality of the room temperature morning. Beanie took one of the portable whiteboards used for tracking the fridge inventory, erased that week's count of milks and yogurts and wrote "MANAGER'S SPECIAL $4 FRUIT SMOOTHIES ALL DAY." This was easily two dollars less than the curated items normally offered on the menu screen and helped to subdue the objections of the next fourteen customers. Slowly the team found a rhythm they had never achieved trying to serve up to sixty-three different smoothy combinations. Allyson hooked her phone up to the speaker system and began playing island music that an ex-boyfriend had introduced her to. Tabbs was the first to notice how quickly the time seemed to be going and Beanie kept track of the number of smoothies being sold. He went to the register, took out more ice-money, and was about to hop back on his bike when he heard the shrill echo of a woman’s voice who would not be placated by the Manager's Special. All eyes turned towards the Okapi-nosed woman who had not been told that zebra pants were not native to Ohio.
            "I am literally allergic to all of these choices," she commenced with an opening argument, her voice thrown in every direction. "Every time I come here; I order the Banana Sunrise. I see Bananas over there, so why the hell can't I get one of those?" Typically, Allyson would meet such a request with a steady mixture of self-assured tenacity and the tone of a seasoned babysitter. Perhaps it was the undue stress of the morning's discovery, or the unexpected connection she felt amongst her co-workers, but for whatever reason, Allyson found herself freezing up for the first time as the store’s manager. Everyone else halted as well, looking at Allyson as she glanced back and forth between the bananas and the orally allergic female who had been taught that raising your voice usually means that someone will allow you to get your way.
            "I am completely willing to pay full price, and I am willing to wait for as long as it takes to get a Banana Sunrise." Allyson tried to find the words needed to placate the request, but could only sputter out, "We can't..." This did little to lower the volume level of the banana-less belle, who started looking for a picture of the person in charge. "I want to speak with the manager. This is a Tropical Smoothies, isn't it? Every tropical place that I’ve been to has had a goddamn banana in it."
            To say that Beanie's voice changed would do a disservice to the complete transformation witnessed by the staff. It was as if old Mr. Figurski had flown directly from his retirement residence in Ft. Lauderdale straight into Beanie's body and taken over every aspect of the young man's demeanor. Beanie sauntered up to the counter, looked the woman up and down, and rested his elbow on the counter.
            "What is your name, dear?" he responded with the same belittling tone that she had established as her preferred form of communication. At first, she hesitated, but then looked at her ostentatiously large wedding ring, and coldly replied, "It is Mrs. Claire Gilderflunt."
            Beanie smiled slowly, lifted his elbow, and slowly moved towards the whiteboard, humming "A Spoon Full of Sugar," one of Mr. Figurski's signature tunes. He first took the black dry erase marker, and then exchanged it for the red one, carefully writing below the manager's special, "EXCEPT FOR MRS. CLARE GOLDERFLOONT".
            Despite the fact that he completely misspelled the woman's name, there was no mistaking that a Banana Sunrise would not be in anyone's immediate future. Beanie then moved slowly from behind the counter, opened the door and yelled in his best Eastern European dialect, "NEXT!" To the amazement of everyone watching, Mrs. Gilderflunt adjusted her moon bag and hastily left the lobby into the mugginess of the morning. If the employees of Tropical Smoothies had not been so ardently blending the ice and fruit for the new customers, a round of applause would have erupted. Allyson placed her hand on Beanie's shoulder as he made his way towards his bicycle, preparing to gather the next round of ice. During Beanie’s second departure towards the man-made palace of frozen jewels, an unusual calm soaked throughout the smells of mixed berries as the customers glanced below the Manager's Special at the misspelled deportee whose husband would be returning soon to re-establish his wife's honor.
            When Mr. Gilderflunt cut through the line to get to the counter, Beanie was still several minutes away from the store, leaving no one to enforce Figurski's rules of customer care.
            "I want to speak with the owner!" demanded the slightly balding, Cartier-watch-wearing patriarch of the Gilderflunt family.
            When Todd was a boy, his parents took him to church every Sunday in an attempt to quell a religious inadequacy that he had yet to experience. Rather than focus on the loquacious words of the person chosen to rise above the suffering Masses, he would play an imagination game where a "bad guy" or criminal would suddenly appear inside the church, with guns, or sometimes a bomb, demanding that the entire congregation donate to him their most prized possessions along with that day's collection. The adults inside the chapel would freeze in fear, but not little Todd, who's diminutive size would allow him to creep beneath the pews, unnoticed by the armed henchman who had an alternative reason to visit the Lord's home. Finally, Todd would sneak behind the bandit, who had mistakenly placed his gun next to the holy water station, allowing the young hero to snatch it and hold the perpetrator at bay until the police and members from the Vatican Swiss Guard could arrive, apprehending the burglar and awarding Todd a victorious medal of sainted bravery. As Todd got older, he believed that the dreams of his youth had faded away. Suddenly, the thought of owning a Tropical Smoothies store sparked his imagination.
            "I'm the owner," volunteered Todd, as he made his way past Allyson, towards the surprisingly short man across the plexiglass. "How may I be of service?" The man with the more expensive watch took out his phone and began typing a note.
            "What’s your name buddy?" the husband tried to lead with, but Todd, having witnessed Beanie's previous tactic, did not fall for the trick.
            "Are you related to the woman whose name is on our Specials board?" Todd couldn't tell if the man was amused or annoyed by the misspelling of his better half and quickly pointed to the surveillance cameras above the register. "I'm sorry sir, but we were about to call the police on her. She came in here micro-aggressing our employees and making rude comments about our industry to other valued customers. We found ourselves in a bit of a pickle this morning, the gosh-darn freezer broke, and we didn't have any way of serving drinks. Luckily, my manager figured out a way to get something across the counter so that these kids wouldn't lose a day of wages. You remember how it was sir, living paycheck to paycheck. Well, I'm sorry to say, but your wife didn't strike me as the type of person who could relate to that situation and became belligerent when we tried to explain our limitations for the day. That's when we had to ban her, but I'm hoping that she'll be able to recognize that we all have bad days. Heck, this morning started poorly, but we're making the best of it."
            The older man began to thaw, "You know, I didn't even want to come in here? It's the only forty-five minutes I get to myself when she leaves, and I think I was more pissed off that you guys cut it short. You're right, she's never held a crappy job in her life, and she doesn't know how hard it is to go to work every day. I'll tell you what, here's a hundred-twenty bucks. Can I go home and tell her that I raised holy hell, and that you agreed to let her come back tomorrow and get her stupid drink? If I don't get that forty-five minutes in the morning..." Mr. Gilderflunt stopped suddenly and looked at one of the blenders. "You know what, here's another twenty, can I have one of those strawberry looking things? They used to have something like that at Orange Julius when I was a kid. I'll wait until it's my turn. Lord knows I don't want to go back home right away."
            Todd took the money and went to mix Mr. Gilderflunt’s “Strawberry Special.” Beanie returned five minutes after Mr. Gilderflunt’s departure and asked why his red-colored customer ban had been erased from the board. Todd handed him twenty-three dollars and let the others describe how the events had unfolded. It was nearing the end of the rush period when Frank called and told Allyson that a repair person had been scheduled to arrive in an hour or so. He instructed her to let the staff take the afternoon off and agreed to pay them for the day. Frank was decent enough, Mr. Figurski would not have sold him the tiny franchise otherwise. As the rest of their co-workers left, Beanie and Todd went to the customer side of the counter and waited with Allyson for the repair person to arrive, relishing their remaining hour as both manager and owner of their favorite Fine Frozen Fruit parlor.

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Patrick Michael Denny has written plays: A Wisp of Air, American Scream, Lady Anne and Debtor’s Shoes. His films include Tom and Francie and Chrisha. Mr. Denny is the co-founder of the Yellow Finch Project and spent several years as both the Editor in Chief of Insecurity Ragazine, and Artistic Director of The School House Theater. His work has most recently appeared in The Rathalla Review and The Valparaiso Fiction Review. Read more at PatrickMichaelDenny.com.

Doug Jacquier

Signing off

The kettle in the fridge. Calling everybody ‘darling’. Copying the young women’s craze for ash-blond streaks in her hair. Sending money to the man in Africa that she’d met on a dating site. Filling her rooms with goods that she’d bought online, boxes unopened. Only when she bought a gleaming white sports convertible and drove it into town to browse the clothes shops, wearing only a fur coat and her underwear, did we put her in a nursing home. In her garage we found her collection: No Stopping. No U-turn. One Way. Steep Descent. All the signs were there.

This piece was first published at The Dribble Drabble Journal in April 2022

The Contract

He was up early and well gone to his work on the farm, as always. She found the envelope on the kitchen table, propped up against the tomato sauce bottle that was already attracting flies in the burgeoning heat of the day. Well, that’s a bit romantic, she thought. Hadn’t picked that up in their limited conversations to date. She put the kettle on and added fresh tea leaves to the pot. They were both old-fashioned that way.

Sitting down at the Laminex table, she opened the envelope and began to read.

Kate (no Dear she noted)

Talking’s never been something I’ve had much use for and the only way I know what I think about anything is if I write it down.

Unless I’m mistaken, and I don’t think I am, you’d like this occasional weekend thing to become a permanent arrangement. I can see the sense in that but I want you to be clear about what that will mean for our future. Women say they want honesty in a man but in my experience they don’t really mean it. Now’s as good a time as any to find out if you’re different.

I don’t want to marry you but I do want to spend my life with you. Instead of getting rubber-stamped by the Government or the Church, we’ll have this contract and we’ll have each other’s word that we’ll stick to it. Without that, life together would be pointless. And, besides, nothing about me will ever change. There will be no negotiation.

I’ll work hard all the rest of my life to keep a roof over our heads and put food on the table. You will be responsible for the household. I’d prefer you didn’t work but if you do, the household mustn’t suffer. I want plain traditional food. You can eat whatever your like.

If you want children, that’s fine with me but you will raise them. I will never mistreat them but I will not coddle them, because the world will not when I’m gone. They will learn tasks appropriate to their age and take responsibility for their actions.

If you have visitors or relatives to our house I won’t be interested in talking to them. You and the children will be all the society I need except for necessary business arrangements.

We will continue to have sex as long as we both want it but I won’t be ‘making love to you’.

I will never say ‘I love you’. I have no idea what ‘love’ is except people say that there wasn’t much of it around in my house when I was growing up. I guess you can’t miss what you never had.

We will be faithful to each other. I know myself well enough to know that will be true for me for all time. If you are ever unfaithful to me, the contract is ended.

I will almost certainly not remember occasions such as birthdays and anniversaries and I will ignore all attempts to rope me into Xmas.

There won’t be any cuddling on the couch and watching TV and I won’t be interested in going anywhere to be entertained.

There won’t be any deep and meaningful conversations about books or what’s in the news.

You must be thinking, “Where are the good things about this contract?”

You will have financial security as long as you live. The farm produces well and is pretty much drought-proof. If I die before you I don’t expect you to keep the farm and the place will fetch a good price.

You will have children (if you want them) to love and nurture as you wish and they will grow up knowing how to be resourceful and resilient, putting them well ahead of the pack.

You will have a faithful and respectful partner that barely drinks, doesn’t smoke, is rarely ill and will stay strong for years to come.

You will live in a community that has kept its values and its connections tight and in that sense you’ll never be alone.

And we will sit on the back porch at dusk and look over our land and not have to say how much it means to us. We will know what we’ve done together and that’s enough peace for anyone.

So, if that’s a contract you can live with for the rest of your life and never reproach me or yourself for the choices you have freely made, let me know tonight.

She put down the letter, made herself a pot of tea, took it out to the back verandah and sat in her favorite cane chair, gazing at the landscape that could be hers forever.

As Kate sipped her tea, she mulled over what he’d written, let the landscape in to her mind until the horizon was clear and mapped out how she would provide her answer.

She returned to the kitchen, poured a second cup of tea, sat at the table and began to write. She didn’t bother with a salutation; who else would she be writing too?

I’ve heard people say that honesty can be a weapon. However, in your case I think you’re using it as insurance or, at the very least, assurance that I won’t try to change you.

Life doesn’t work like that. No matter how we isolate ourselves, the world will have its way and we have to deal with the consequences. Even for people like you who don’t follow the news, either the grapevine or the bank will tell them when there’s no longer a market for what they grow or what stock they raise; at least not at a price that they can live on.

You talk about the farm being drought-proof but you know such a thing has long gone and last year was the driest on record. In that sense, I’m not assured by your promise to keep a roof over our heads and provide well for me and any children we may have. To be blunt, that’s the sort of promise I’d expect from a townie, not a farmer.

Like you, I can take or leave marriage. It doesn’t seem to have made relationships any stronger or otherwise amongst people I’ve known. The fact that you want to spend the rest of your life with me fills me with peace and hope. But I won’t have a life without love from my partner and promising to be faithful entirely misses the point.

You know I don’t mean romance novel love or love that has to keep telling itself over and over again that it exists. That would scare me even more than what you’ve proposed. However, at the very least, I would expect you to look me in the eye and tell me you love me enough to want to spend the rest of your life with me and promise to let me know if that ever changes. (By the way, the sex doesn’t need to change – no complaints in that department.)

But here’s the real rub. We (as distinct from me alone) need to decide if we’re going to have children. And if we decide we will, you will be their father in all the important ways; comforting them, tending to their needs, teaching them patiently and defending them to the death. Don’t worry, I’m perfectly happy to take on the traditional mothering roles but I’m not going to let the cold distance of child-rearing that you inherited from your father and grandfather enter my bloodline.

How you are with others is fine with me. In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m not much different. Besides, think of the money we’ll save on presents. But we will talk, especially about the important things and we will talk about them at the time it’s needed, not when it’s too late.

I’m all for meaningful silences but when they end I want to know what they mean.

I want this life. Since the beginning I’ve felt I’m coming home when I come here and I feel lost when I’m not. I love you and I want to spend the rest of my life with you, provided you are prepared to accept what I’ve asked for in your ‘contract’ (that word is so wrong my first impulse was to take off, forever.) If that much is too much then it says a lot about our chances of survival.

I think you will because I believe you are the strongest and most honest man I have ever met and that you have finally met the woman that you need to survive what’s coming.

You can give me your answer, face to face, when I come next weekend.

Signed, guess who?

Flynn read the letter several times over, climbed on to the ancient TD-18 International Harvester tractor with its metal seat shined by three generations of ample backsides and drove out to do some ploughing. His plan was for the concentration on straight lines to bring him the peace to think clearly about what Kate had said. What wasn’t helping was the ‘love’ part.

His father had been a hard and harsh taskmaster and he found it difficult to recall any words of praise passing his lips. The most anyone could hope for was the odd grunting nod and a mumbled ‘Not bad’. His mother was only slightly better, with hugs disappearing by the time he went to school and a relentless ticking off of tasks when he came home.

He understood they were hard years when they were trying to get the land into the condition that it needed to be in for long-term sustainability and there was little time for anything peripheral. And as he grew older he imagined that they thought that leaving him the legacy of the farm was, in the end, the only love that counted.

Breast cancer (deliberately left untreated he discovered later) took his mother in her late forties and five years later he found his father dead from a heart attack while repairing fences on a boundary paddock. When he picked him up, he half expected to be told to bugger off and get back to his work. Flynn made the necessary arrangements and stood dutifully solemn at their funerals, accepting condolences, but felt nothing. One day they were alive, the next day they were dead. That’s how life worked.

On his first night alone, he went through some old photos and lingered over a picture of his Mum, clipped from the local paper, holding one of her prize cakes at the annual regional agricultural show. Mum’s recipes were a local legend and she kept them, written in immaculate copperplate script, in a re-purposed school exercise book, kept from her teaching days. He decided to keep it safe, without knowing why.

Women rarely entered his mind as he continued to develop the farm, with some occasional hired help. Those he had met at school seemed weak or unapproachable. After he left school, he would see them again in town, usually either flaunting what he imagined were country town fashionable clothes or pregnant or walking along with a tribe of whining kids trailing behind them.

A couple of girls had pursued him (or his property) and once he had found himself suddenly engaged to Cheryl Clarke, not that he could recall popping the question. The next thing he knew was that has being paraded around the district like a prize bull with a ring through his nose. He hibernated for weeks before that blew over.

Then one day, when he was collecting his mail from the post office, in strode a statuesque female stranger. The coat and slacks could only belong to a city type and her long red hair hung in waves down her back. Her face contained eyes and a fixed smile that spoke of openness while still conveying concealed steel.

Having collected her mail, she strode out again, unfolded herself into a dusty, dented hatchback and sped off. In the background he could hear fragments from the tongues wagging. ‘ … new schoolteacher  … not married … bit of a tyrant in the schoolroom I’ve heard but the kids seem to like her … asked for wine in the pub the other day… drives like a maniac’. This woman had certainly entered Flynn’s mind and he was totally uncertain as to how to deal with that.

Up until then, he’d go into town for the mail and shop at random times, when the opportunity arose between jobs. Now he found himself on schedule to be there, coincidentally, when she came into the post office. She’d started nodding to him, as country people do, but with an odd, crooked smile on her face when she did it.

Kate made the first move. Instead of nodding, she asked him ‘I’ve heard that sometimes you take animals for agistment.’ After a moment, from the side of a barely opened mouth, he said ‘What did you have in mind?’

‘I have an ageing horse that I’d like to have close at hand.’

‘One horse?’

‘Sum total.’

‘Not sure my fences are high enough to contain a horse.’

‘Oh, her fence jumping days are over. Besides, you could ride her. If you wanted to.’

They pretended to haggle over an agistment fee and then Kate said, ‘I’ll bring her up at the weekend.’

And so it began.

And now here he was, sitting on his veranda, waiting for Kate, who was waiting for an answer.

Kate’s traveling car wreck pulled up at the veranda. She emerged, climbed the steps and sat in his Mum’s rocking chair and waited.

‘Not sure where to start’, he said.

She offered no help.

Silence.

‘I love you and want to spend the rest of my life with you’ he blurted, as if fearful that if he didn’t get it out quickly his words would be strangled at birth.

Silence.

Kate smiled but said nothing.

‘About kids’, he nervously continued, ‘I want to be able to leave the farm to a next generation. I’m just not sure I’d be much good at the raising bit. You might have to give me a few tips.’

Kate laughed and said ‘I can always work with a willing pupil’.

They watched a pair of kookaburras land in the giant redgum that dominated the front yard.

Kate’s voice softened and she said, ‘That’s settled then.’

Now the silence between them was easy.

Later, she said, ‘Thought I might make a cake tomorrow. What did you do with your Mum’s recipe book?’

Finn smiled and said ‘Think I might have put it somewhere in the bedroom. Want to help me find it?’

This piece was first published at Grain in April 2022

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Doug Jacquier writes from the Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia. His work has been published in Australia, the US, the UK, Canada, New Zealand, and India. He blogs at Six Crooked Highways and is the editor of the humour site, Witcraft.

J. Drew

Barber Shop

“Lean back,” she said, massaging her fingers into his neck.

Her fingertips turned in thick, intentional circles, finding all the spots on his neck that hadn’t felt a touch in months.

After his transition, he learned that it was not appropriate to ask for touch as a man. (Very few people offered.) Before his voice had dropped, and all the other aspects of masculinity appeared, he remembered other’s touch, effortless embraces, a hand on his back or arm for reassurance, compassion or friendship.

Now, several years after testosterone, Dylan was in a new, strangely isolated, and touchless world.  He slowly learned something that had never occurred to him in the past. Men weren’t touched.

“What are we doing today?” the stylist had asked when he first walked into the store, hands on her hips, her body forming into a question.

“Zero to mid-fade, finger length on top.” He responded with the words he had learned to start the process. Her hands touched Dylan’s head again to move the clippers. He felt embarrassed as her hands on his head reminded him that he hadn’t been touched in a month, but it was true; he, in fact, hadn’t been. He had wanted masculinity. What he had not known was that it would be so isolating. At the expense of strength and virility came an ocean of separation, where the original quarantine occurred without tactile togetherness.

For so many men, this is one of the few times they are touched. What is lost when men aren’t touched? Would touching men increase their compassion and empathy? Would it mean men understand touch in a healthier way? To use touch for positive, productive moments, touching women (and other men) in generous, thoughtful ways - instead of the violent ones so many women (and men) had come to know.

Clearly, men were not touched for so many reasons – because men were dangerous, because men interpreted touch the wrong ways that then made them more dangerous, because touching a man meant getting close to him and getting close to a man meant getting touched. He remembered what it had been like to touch a man (as a woman); it had been a dangerous, fraught territory. He didn’t have resentment against others for not wanting to touch men. And, still, he longed for touch.

The stylist came up behind him with a mirror, her voice jolting Dylan out of his trance.

“Will this work for ya?” Her hands had left his neck and were back on her hips, asking for an answer.

He peered into the mirror and saw his reflection looking back at him. He grazed the back of his neck with his hand, feeling now his touch there instead of another’s.

“It’s perfect”, he said. She brushed against him to remove the barber’s cloth.

“Great hon, we’ll see ya next month. Don’t get up to too much fun until then.”

He nodded, paid at the register, and rejoined the other men walking the street in their collective isolation.

Santa Barbara, June 2, 2024

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J. Drew, who writes under a pen name, is a transgender man from the American Southwest. Contact: https://jdrewbooks.wordpress.com/

Kathleen Thomas

The Distance Between Stars

(To Caroline Herschel)

I.

The first time we meet you, my mother and I are in a room at the shelter. On a small table by the window, someone has placed a storybook and cups of hot chocolate. I taste the sweet warmth as my mother reads to me.

In the story, you are sick with typhus. You have been ill before, once with smallpox. After you recovered, you were told to hide your face, so your scars did not show. 

But tonight, when your fever breaks, my mother turns the page, and we see a drawing of a child looking at the stars. “Caroline,” my mother whispers, as though you are in the room with us. “We will be safe here.”

II.

Spring is here and the days change into the bluest blues. My mother finds a job at a nearby library. After school each day, I wait for her inside the large rooms with high ceilings, long bookshelves, tables and chairs. On days when it is raining so hard we cannot leave till the storm ends, Mother shows me books with photographs of people from long ago. In the one of you, your face is turned to the side as if part of you is lost, like a note left pressed between pages. Or are you looking for someone who walked out into the rain?  

III.

The photograph my mother showed me was taken by Julia Margaret Cameron who received her first camera after her children were grown. Years later Julia said, “I felt my way through the dark.“  

Once late at night Mother tells me she believes photographs reveal unseen distances, immeasurable spaces.

The light bulb in our room flickers, and then goes dark.  Mother rests beside me. I feel her fingertips draw imaginary circles on my arm “We must find another place soon,” she says.

But I want us to stay here, inside the circles she draws in the dark.

IV.

The first book of Julia’s photographs is published fifty years after her death, by her great grandniece, Virginia Woolf.  

When I find a copy of this book, I see the photograph my mother believed was you, is not you but your great grandniece, daughter of your nephew John, the only son of your brother William.   

There are no photographs of you, only drawings, lines without dimensions.

V.   

In fragments from your diaries, I read that you recorded what William saw as he looked through the telescope with you by his side. When he retires at the end of each day, you calculate stellar movements and compute the distance between stars. 

On rare occasions you and William go to visit other astronomers. They offer scones and tea. They discuss recent discoveries of the universe with William. You are barely noticed. 

Only later are you recognized. Only later when I read your diaries do I begin to understand. double stars, the formation of comets, all you went through. 

VI.

On our last evening in the shelter, my mother and I look through the book we read the night we first arrived. She hesitates before turning each page.  When we reach the end, I ask, “Why are we leaving tomorrow?”

She brushes back wisps of hair from my forehead. “It will be good to have a place of our own.”

Before tomorrow I must tell her I want to stay in this room where we met you. 

Sometime during the night, I hear a rustling sound. I call for Mother, but she does not answer. Outside our window, I see her in the moonlight. She raises her hand, waves to someone in the distance.  I see the silhouette walk toward her. I am sure it is you.

VII.

There is an image I hold onto from a time we first met: In the image a young woman walks on a winter night with a child by her side, their belongings in a paper sack the woman carries.

“Hold tight to Mother’s coat,” she says, “So we will stay together.” 

  Somewhere in the walk, the woman begins to cry. “It is just the cold,” she says and turns her face aside.

When they reach the shelter, a lady opens the door, takes them to a small room with a table by the bed where they will be warm. On the table they will find a book.

Inside the book they find a story. Inside the story they find a young girl who looks through the darkness to measure how close the stars are.

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Kathleen Thomas is a nurse and teacher who combines the healing and creative arts in her practice. Her fiction has appeared in MoonPark Review, Apple Valley Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Sleet, The Ekphrastic Review and other publications. She is a past recipient of a Florida Individual Artist Fellowship in Fiction and has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Sometimes she teaches creative writing to children, and they teach her about dinosaurs and moonlight.

Noah Leventhal

A Perfectly Normal Afternoon

The rag was in my hand and the dust clung to it thickly, transformed by accumulation into some new object, nearly cloth. People milled about here or there, picking books up off of shelves, or counters, or display tables. They opened them, peeled pages back individually or in great incoherent clumps and returned them to spaces not entirely unlike those from which they were taken. Light shifted. Sounds emerged from and faded into the day’s light murmur. The dust gave an ashy complexion to the air.

Over in the corner by the entrance, at the edge of a long desk that stretched nearly from one wall to another, but for two small swinging doors admitting – by implication – the employees alone, a phone began to ring. It rang once, twice, thrice, four times evenly before elevating in pitch to ring again once, twice, thrice, four times evenly in its nearly human wail, and I turned to find the front of the store as empty as I have ever seen it. Neither customer, nor colleague; just the books left slightly out of place and ever so slightly askew.

I walked to the phone as it continued its harshened singing and lifted it from its cradle.

Hello, I said into the microphone. A voice returned to me from the receiver.

Finally, it said.

My apologies, I replied, it was quite a walk.

How far? the voice asked, and I considered, not having counted steps along the way.

Well you know how it goes, I said, one foot follows another and eventually you either reach the place you were aiming for or you don’t.

It seemed the entity on the other end saw no need to contest the point.

I would like to complain about something if you can spare the moment, said the voice from the receiver. Would now be an appropriate time?

Well, yes. I suppose, I said in a voice I hope suggested a preparedness to contend with disappointment. There is no one else about. Things appear to have ground down to their baser elements.

I won’t bore you with the details. That is, unless you would like me too? she said.

I thought for a moment, but opted against the idea.

You know, we better not risk it, I said. Time is not extended so frivolously to everyone. I saw a man the other day with a nail driven through his hand and I’m not sure what I might be expected to carry. Let’s assume the details have been appropriately conveyed and get along to the complaint itself.

Well, if you insist, the voice replied. Though I assure you, you would have been suitably bored by my recounting. It would not have been exciting in the least.

I appreciate you candor ma’am, I said, for I had come to think of the speaker as an old woman and she did nothing to correct the assumption, and as much as a good dose of boredom might be a satisfying alternative to the ceaseless excitement of dusting shelves in an average sized bookshop in a small college town, I’m afraid I just don’t have the time.

Well, she said, to get down to the thick of it, earlier today a book was purchased by a man I know intimately – though that is the full extent of what I shall say about him – but it wasn’t the right book.

I see, I said, for I thought I did. So he was looking for a book of a different name.

Well, he was looking on my behalf, she said. He was my eyes and my hands, although I could not see or feel what he had done, and moreover it was not the title that differed, but the language.

And what was the name of the book?

“The Non-finite Compendium of Genocide, Spermicide, Herbicide and the Controversial Art of Erotic Crochet” by the esteemed warlock Geoffrey R. Beelzebub and published on tanned camel hide and papyrus, bound together with the beard hairs of a pregnant she-goat by May You Fester In Purgatory For A Thousand Centuries Before Ascending To An Underwhelming Enlightenment Ltd. I was searching for it in Aramaic but your tadpole-brained employee managed to mix it up with Ancient Sumerian instead. 

And did your unmentionably intimate companion happen to look inside the book first to see in what language it was written?

I can’t say, she said. I wasn’t there.

Of course ma’am, I said, and what exactly would you like me to do about this?

Well, I’d like to return it, she said, to make an exchange for the book I intended to use him to buy, but the problem is I am absolutely decrepit, ancient if you will, in possession of a body in a perpetual state of decomposition and disrepair. I couldn’t vacate the coffin if there was a fire in the building and a wheelchair but a centimeter from the casket. And beyond that I’m blind as a bat, visually incoherent and utterly incapable of coming to make the exchange, and the man to whom I have before referred – but shall say no more about – is practically a ghost himself. He’ll need a week or two to recover from the voyage into town and we are stranded on a small island in the middle of a moat of piranha fish that haven’t been properly fed in several decades. Might it be possible for you to send your most expendable delivery person to traverse the moat and make the exchange at our location?

Well ma’am, I said, I would certainly like to help, but as I understand it there is a specific anti-piranha fish clause written into our contracts, and our only delivery driver is currently on vacation in the Galapagos in search of an especially ancient tortoise from whom he hopes to gain the wisdom of the earth.

Oh, how inconvenient, she said. Perhaps an exchange could be made via carrier pigeon.

All our current pigeons are on assignment, I replied, and unfortunately the anti-piranha fish clause applies to them as well.

Oh never mind, never mind, she said in exasperation. I’m out of ideas. What would you suggest?

Well, I said, it hasn’t been used in several generations, but I could check to see if the old delivery trebuchet is still functional. Of course you will have to provide me with an exact measurement of your home’s location by longitude and latitude, as well as elevation; and be precise as you can, mind you, as I would like to avoid dropping the package directly into the piranha moat if possible. Considering weather patterns and air currents, the humidity and the time of day, and the corresponding locations of sun, moon and stars, the calculations should take approximately a month to complete. And accounting for the angle of trajectory and the time the package might spend drifting in near earth orbit, it seems reasonable to assume it will come plummeting through your front window sometime in the middle of autumn.

Can’t you run the calculations on your computer? she asked.

Well, we’d like to ma’am, but the computers are down for the foreseeable future due to a catastrophic oversight on the part of Corporate. It’s not our preference either, but it is the situation at hand. And our resident expert in dynamics and medieval machinery is currently on holiday as well.

Couldn’t you ask the sun moon or stars to alter their trajectories a bit, she asked, just to speed things up?

Sorry ma’am but that isn’t my department, I said. Though you’ve got a better chance with them than with Corporate.

Fine, she said. I suppose it will have to do.

Now, I replied, as for the matter of payment, it appears the options available to you are: a million dollars cash paid in infinitesimal installments with an hourly increase in interest, your remaining life in indentured servitude – though as it stands I can’t imagine corporate finding that option too appealing, a drawing of the earth’s ley lines done with your weak hand, or a secret so shocking no one will ever look at you the same again.

For a moment there was silence on the line. A single mote of dust settled on the tip of my nose and I subtly flicked it away.

I think I’ll go with indentured servitude, she said.

I’ll pass it up the chain ma’am, but it may be shunted along to your descendants as a matter of inheritance should you expire before the package falls out of the sky.

What else is youth for? she asked.

An excellent question ma’am. I filled out the final boxes of the order form. We are almost finished now, but since this is a direct exchange you are planning to make, I must inquire, do you have a trebuchet of your own, or some comparable delivery system to convey the erroneously purchased item back to the store?

Well, we’ve been saving this for some time, she said, but we have a vial of blood of an ancient deity and a summoning circle I carved into the floor of the foyer after losing a bet on Christmas back in 1632. There should be just enough power left to open a one-way rift in spacetime between your place and ours. If my calculations are correct, my package should arrive at the very moment your package departs, though I won’t send it at all until it is received.

A most reasonable suggestion, ma’am. I’ll put a layer of salt around the delivery bay in anticipation of the arrival. But one last question, are you perhaps a paying member of our eternal and secret order of tome deliveries and artisanal lattes? If not, a membership might provide you with a ten percent reduction in years of servitude required to regain your family’s freedom.

I’m sorry, she said, I don’t give out that sort of personal information to anyone. If you insist on asking again, I shall introduce you to the piranhas.

Very well ma’am, I said. Everything seems to be in order. With all good fortune you shall die long before I have to hear your voice again.

Indeed, she said, and if the package misses its mark, I shall haunt you beyond the boundaries of this life and well into the next one.

A fair exchange as ever, I said.

Good day, she said.

And a good day to you as well, ma’am.

I hung up the phone in my normal mood. It was a typical phone order if ever I had completed one. I returned to the labyrinthine shelves and began again to dust, the softened rain from the vertiginous ceilings filling in the spaces I had just managed to wipe away.

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Noah Leventhal is a graduate of the Great Books Program at St. John’s College, Santa Fe. He also earned an MFA in Poetry Writing from Boise State University. He was recently published in Red Ogre Review and has pieces forthcoming from Bending Genres, Eunoia Review and The Inflectionist Review.

Alison Wassell

In Praise Of Angelica Valentine 1974 - 2024

Angelica Valentine, who has passed suddenly at the age of fifty, is believed to have been one of the first ever Girl’s World Styling Heads. Although the exact date of Angelica’s birth is unknown, she was manufactured by the Palitoy company in 1974. Her early days are undocumented, but it is safe to assume that they involved incarceration in a cardboard box, alongside multiple identical siblings, awaiting her forever home.

In December of that year, she was given as a Christmas gift to Judith Dobson, aged 8, by her favourite aunt. It was Judith who named her Angelica Valentine. Angelica came with her own cosmetics and hair styling tools. Judith did her best with these, but could not muster much enthusiasm, and her skills remained undeveloped. Even today, on the rare occasions when Judith wears make-up, it looks as though it has been applied by a young child. But this is about Angelica, not Judith.

As the years passed, Angelica became less of a toy and more of a confidante. On the face of it, she and Judith had little in common. While Angelica’s PVC complexion was flawless, pre-teen Judith’s skin was prone to breakouts at inopportune moments. There is not one single school photograph that is unblighted by a large spot. The most striking difference between the two, however, was Angelica’s ability to rest comfortably on her four suction feet as Judith was forced to contend with her pubescent body, and the gradual realisation that she was not destined to be shaped like Barbie, or Sindy, or any of the other dolls she had long since consigned to the bottom of the wardrobe.

Ever patient, Angelica provided a sympathetic, listening ear throughout Judith’s high school years, which were filled with sporadic episodes of bullying about her weight, her lack of sporting prowess, her awkward gait, which was due to the fact that her left leg was slightly shorter than her right, the corrective shoe she was forced to wear, her slavish devotion to Kate Bush and, in fact, anything that set her apart from her classmates.

In 1984, Angelica’s life took an unexpected turn when she accompanied Judith to university. Many of Judith’s fellow students found the presence of a plastic head on her bookshelf unnerving. Judith explained her away as an ironic statement or a convenient hat stand. In truth, Angelica remained her only true friend, and she continued to confide in her, late into the night, cataloguing her inadequacies, berating herself for her inability to overcome them, and not realising how thin the walls of her student residence were. Judith quickly developed a reputation as that slightly weird girl in room 16. But this is about Angelica, not Judith.

Angelica’s darkest hour came shortly before the Christmas break that year, when a group of inebriated students invited themselves into Judith’s room on the pretext of an impromptu end-of-term party. Little is known about the events of that evening, from which Angelica emerged with an unwanted haircut and several scars inflicted by a permanent marker.

Life was never the same again for Angelica although she quickly came to bear her scars and her shaven head with pride. The incident was also a pivotal moment for Judith who, for perhaps the first time in her life, found herself more angry than afraid, on her own behalf as well as Angelica’s. In solidarity with Angelica, she shaved her head and acquired a small tattoo of a dolphin on her neck. Taking inspiration from her faithful childhood toy, she learned to love her imperfections and could often be seen limping proudly around campus in clothes that were striking, if not exactly fashionable.

Post university, the newly confident Judith had little need of Angelica, having acquired a small circle of like-minded friends and embarked upon a successful career as a child psychologist. Angelica is thought to have gone into retirement, spending the rest of her days in the attic at the home of Judith’s parents where she was discovered recently during a house clearance. Judith was delighted to be reunited with her old friend, but her happiness was to be short-lived.  In a tragic accident Angelica, left unattended for only a moment, was thrown into a rubbish skip by Judith’s husband.  The mistake was not discovered until she had been transported to her final resting place, a landfill site. Judith’s husband has not, at the time of writing, been forgiven. But this is about Angelica, not Judith.

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Alison Wassell is a writer of short and very short fiction from Merseyside, UK. She recently won the Books Ireland Flash Fiction Competition, has twice been shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award, and has had work published by Fictive Dream, The Disappointed Housewife, FlashFlood Journal, Gooseberry Pie and elsewhere.

Juliet Waller

I Had the Light

I had the light, so I crossed. It was the blind spot, the undeployed airbag, bulky and ironic, rolled up into the frame that kept him from seeing me. He wasn’t on his phone, he just, truly, did not see me. He needed to make the light and, going fast, he hit me full on.

1. I was named from my grandfathers, Jewish Sam and English Sam, the Jewish one dead before I was born, making the name available.

2. Lost in London aged nineteen, a hippie gave me free reiki then took me down into the tube station and showed me how to get home. I bought him a roll of Murray Mints from the machine.

3. English Sam liked numbers.

The car stopped. The driver, a young man, did not flee. He got out and saw his future soar in, meet his past and bend, cutting off the flow, a sudden tourniquet for possibility.  I saw my life flash inside my mind, strobe like, all jumbled, fighting for my attention.

4. In the seventh grade Spring orchestra concert, I started too early and played eight bars solo on my violin. A mediocre player, my vibrato came in right then. I’d never sounded better. I got my period that night. My mother slapped me gently.

5. My father, angry that I had not done any of my chores on a summer day when I was too old for camp and too young to work, used two fingers to rap on my sternum. I pretended to faint.

6. When Jewish Sam arrived in New York at age twelve, they put him in kindergarten to learn English. One month later, he didn’t even have an accent.

The police asked for the driver’s license of the man who hit me. The young man’s hands shook so hard, he could barely get it out. The policeman called him Samuel, though he was Sammy to everyone else. Samantha and Sammy and our grandfathers. So many Sams brought together on this street corner.  The policeman said, “Have you been drinking, Samuel?”

“I’m not twenty-one,” Sammy replied and though this answer might seem funny to some, the policeman felt Sammy’s earnestness, literally felt it, like a burlap sack swiped across his face.

I had been on my way to the shop called Reimagine. It’s a gift shop where all the goods are repurposed from things discarded. I wanted to buy my friend a birthday present, maybe a candle that used to be the ends of several candles. When the car hit me, I kept my eye on the door, spotting it pirouette-like, and thought, “I’m discarded, repurpose me.” Then I smiled because that’s a silly thought. Then I screamed and all the thoughts and smiles went away. 

So many people began to yell at once that it hurt my ears. I tried to cover them, but my hands didn’t know where to go. I searched for the door to Reimagine again, but my eyes caught two crows on a wire staring at me instead. One of them opened its mouth, and I realized I could understand it. It said, “Dinner?” and the other bopped it with its wing and said, “It has a mother!” and the first one said “So?” Then they started yelling, “Help!” More crows joined in. They were just out of sync with each other at first but the louder they got the more in sync they were until finally they were all in unison. Help. Help. Help.

7. My first real boyfriend had had sex with three girls before me. This propelled my need to have sex with him as soon as possible. I did not yet understand how to be my own person. I let whatever thought or emotion stroll in and take over. He was gentle with me. It didn’t hurt. It didn’t feel good. It just was.

A lady slapped me like we were on a tv show. She said, “Stay with me, stay with me.” 

A male voice said, “For her head.” And something soft was pressed to the side of my skull. It smelled of cigarettes and detergent, just like my Uncle Jello, obviously not his real name, obvious also, in its origin.

8. When I got stung by a bee in the fifth grade the PE teacher sent me to get a cigarette from the principal. I held the cigarette while the secretary walked me to the water fountain where she showed me how to open it up, get the tobacco wet and put it on the sting.

I heard an ambulance approaching. It seemed I could understand Siren now as well as Crow. While the sound an ambulance siren makes is plaintive, if you speak Siren – like me – you can hear that it’s actually singing the theme song from the 1960’s TV show, The Monkees. I realized, as I lay on the ground, Uncle Jello’s smell all around me, that this is exactly what you want to hear when you know the ambulance is coming for you. It’s jaunty, goofy. Just before the gorgeous people jumped out of the ambulance – anesthesiologists who administer epidurals and EMTS are always the most handsome people in the world – everything went quiet.

9. We sat around on the grass in a London park.  Jewish Sam, who spoke Yiddish but we still understood him, offered all of us a cigarette and English Sam ate his. That was weird, even for this situation.  Although I sat on the grass, another me stood over by a trash can that said, Litter, playing Voluntary on my junior high violin, a rental. My father strolled by with my first boyfriend. My father died from pancreatic cancer and my first boyfriend overdosed and even though I couldn't hear them, I knew they were comparing deaths. The hippie who’d given me reiki thirty-five years earlier came and sat down. He also ate a cigarette, so I started to realize that I did not have all the information. The hippie, his mouth full of tobacco and a spongy filter, said, “I’m Simon. Thanks for those Murray Mints by the way.”

10. I looked around at my grandfathers, only one of whom I’d met in real life. “I don’t understand. I don’t believe in heaven. I don’t believe in afterlife stuff.” The other me continued to play Voluntary on repeat by the trash can as the men on the blanket started to laugh. A bee as big as a robin, swooped down and stung my arm. It hurt and I sucked air in through my teeth. Simon and English Sam spat their tobacco on the sting. Other me stopped playing Voluntary. My dad walked by once more and waved.  English Sam said, “Numerals rule the world.”

I returned from London and found myself in an ambulance with two supermodels. Back in front of Reimagine, the policeman let Sammy call his parents. They were divorced but still got along. They said they would be there as soon as they could. They called each other from their cars on the way to worry if their son had any more future left.

11. Simon sat at the end of the gurney in the ambulance giving me reiki. He told me that he died at Covent Garden while talking to an old French woman. He’d had a heart attack right there. The supermodels tended to me. They didn’t notice Simon and he didn’t seem in the way.  A tube came out of my arm in the same place where the giant bee had stung me. Simon pointed to the tube and said, “Some chemicals are necessary chemicals.” I felt calmer from his reiki. I heard the ambulance siren singing the Monkees’ theme song again. I smiled and opened my eyes. One of the Supermodel/EMTs looked down at me.

“Hey. Hey, there,” they said. “Glad you’re awake. You’re going to be ok.”  Simon echoed these words until he went back to London.

I said, “I thought I might see Uncle Jello.”

The EMT touched my hand and said, “You can eat all the Jell-o you like at the hospital. It’s their specialty.”

I quietly sang along to the Monkees’ theme song as we sailed down the street.

As soon as I was able to articulate it, I said that I didn’t want Sammy to be charged with anything. I didn’t know how those things worked, having not been hit by a car before but I hoped it would have some influence. It seemed to have worked because he ended up paying a fine and taking an online class about safe driving.

When I could get around on my crutches well enough, I went back to Reimagine. The woman behind the counter screamed when I came in. Her giant mane of blue streaked black curly hair bounced as she ran up to me. She squeezed my shoulders, talking quickly about how she’d run out of the store when I’d been hit, that she kept me awake by slapping my face, how she was sorry for slapping me but glad that I was ok.

I bought the candle that I’d originally come in for and decided to also get a candle for Sammy. He’d written me a letter a few weeks after the accident, when I was finally home, leg immobilized, incisions itching. He’d handwritten it and put it inside a Get Well Soon card from Trader Joes. My friend, the intended receiver of the candle, read it to me. She visited me regularly both because she was a good friend but also because she had some guilt, knowing that if I hadn’t been headed to get her a gift, I wouldn’t have been hit.

Sammy told me how sorry he was, how people had always told him that your life could change in a moment but he’d never really believed it. He said he was so, so sorry for changing my life, too. He told me he’s working through stuff that’s been going on since the accident, that he’s been having kind of a hard time dealing with everything so his dad found him a therapist and his mom makes him check in every day. He doesn’t drive anymore. His therapist told him he could always try again later, that there was no rush.

I realized that we both have our scars. If you unzipped the ones on my right leg, you’d see the reason for my subtle limp, the scar tissue that took root around bone and metal screws. Sammy’s scar tissue wound around his heart and squeezed it until anxiety squirted a little out of his pores.

My friend wrote him back for me. I thanked him for his thoughtful apology. I told him that I'd had the same experience of truly understanding that life could change in a moment. I asked him to keep me posted on what he was up to.

I never told anyone about my grandfathers, my first boyfriend, the cigarettes. I told my mom about seeing my dad because I thought she might like to know. It made her uncomfortable so I didn’t bring it up again. I almost always sing the theme to the Monkees when an ambulance goes by, but I can’t speak Siren or Crow any longer. I’m glad the crows didn’t try to eat me. I’m glad I survived. Getting hit by a car is such a loud experience and having those dead people around brought some quiet to the noise. Dead Simon’s reiki also helped. I knew you could give reiki remotely but this was more than I imagined.

The candle I got for Sammy was shaped like a squirrel. The wick came out of its little squirrel head. It did not feel appropriate, but it also didn’t feel inappropriate. The lady from Reimagine asked who the squirrel candle was for and when I told her, she said, “But he maimed you!”

The expression on my face must have been one of horror because she apologized and gave me twenty-five percent off.

I left with my candles, my limp, and gifts for people I cared about even if they hit me with a car. I felt a little out of sorts so, while I waited for the light to change, I slapped my own face gently.

---

Juliet Waller is a Seattle based playwright, short story author, and playwriting & theater teacher. Her pieces have appeared in, among others, Gold Man Review, 3Elements, Third Street Review, and New Delta Review. She has an upcoming piece in Mountain Bluebird Magazine.

Mark Wagstaff

Burning the Chairs

One of the cheap hotels. Three stars, on someone’s rating. What she saw was a man ill at ease in tight space. Who pushed the door on the glass, not the wood. Who stared at the modest Christmas tree five seconds before looking at her.

What he saw was a nicely broad young woman, round face, big glasses. Who pleasingly didn’t rush to pay him attention. Whose striped shirt stressed all the right motions. Whose badge, bigger than need be, said Jackza.

He wondered how people landed in these backstreet places.

She wondered if he needed direction.

“I don’t have a reservation.” He made it a positive statement, like a thing to avoid from the get-go. “I know it’s late.”

Jackza checked the screen. But that was for show. “We have a single available.”

“I use a double.” Another glance at the tinseled foliage. “You assume I’m alone?”

“We don’t have parking. I see no one outside. How many nights?”

“One night.” He answered her eyes. “No luggage.”

“Spontaneous?”

“Business.”

What she saw, he seemed deep with detail.

“Is it not still November?”

“Our guests like a festive greeting.” She had an interesting voice. Those East European shapes of harsh light against frosted concrete. The cadence of mildewed spires in tourist towns. Fluent enough to survive the last shake out. That inflection, though, the knotty flavor of home that put everything in quote marks.

“They like festive early?”

“We provide the comforts of home. On a budget.” The set up was old, she still had to print the sheet of tight-bundled data. “This is the rate. These are the taxes. Fill your name, address, contact number. You have identification?”

“Identification?”

“We are required. For walk-ups.”

“Because I might be wanted someplace? Because men in sweat stains and baffled expressions might have done mileage to find me?” He was satisfied with her smile.

“We stay the right side of the rules. That is good for us all.” What she saw, he took time filling the form, like its questions were a surprise. He made physical business clutching the pen, compressing his moves to feed ink to lines and boxes. Rabid tension across his shoulders barely contained by that coat. From a cold climate, she knew the measure of warm material. “You pay digitally?”

“There another way? Is cash possible?”

“We are not equipped.”

With a show of cramp he signed the line. “Well, that’s a pity. I could pay cash.”

“We have no facilities for it.”

“I pay cash in your hand.” He saw eyes green as the sea.

She saw weariness and caution. “What would I do with that?” When she woke the keycard it gave a small shiver, as though dismayed at this late hour.

For a fraction of time, they shared a touch through its plastic. “If I want something to eat?”

“We have no facilities for it. There’s a bar down the block.”

“I saw. It’s a dump.”

“It’s only one night, Mr. Richards.”

“Jerry. Says Jerry right there.”

“Third floor. Left from the elevator and keep going.”

“I’ll be back presently.”

“There’s no rush.”

What he saw, a room that hadn’t been painted a while. Perhaps cleaned, the carpet bore vacuum scars. But fittings so old, so grimed with wear, cleaning could make no difference. The door to the safe was loose. It rattled as he walked by. Took ten minutes of spit and wadding to chew a paste from the vanity tissues, for makeshift cement to hold the door steady. Once he shut the window and smelled the damp he knew why it was left open. But the night was cold and with machine noise from neighbor yards, the smell was a lesser inconvenience. He cranked the heat and the old pipes seethed and whistled. The shower stall floor was yellow and it pleased him, like always, to see stray hairs by the drain. A sense of connection to those before. A legacy to those after.

By malevolence or stupidity the toilet seat was set skew, bolted to the ceramic at a comical angle, so to sit on it squeezed one leg to the wall. No sense to it, the bathroom had space enough, the pipes weren’t intruding. The seat could have been fitted normally from the start or adjusted later. The task poorly-finished, no doubt with a trail of complaints about it unactioned. He wondered how anyone could think they achieved a good job with it. Or maybe, in all sincerity, they didn’t care. That would be better. The TV’s glowing standby light watched him. Maybe a camera, easy to hide, picking up smut from these casual sleeping arrangements. “Is that right?” he asked the red beam. “Is that factual?”

Heading back to the lobby, the elevator smell more apparent. An accident of polish and grease and spilled sugar drink: a child’s, or adult that drank like a child. Sickly, becoming synthetic.

She was still there. Still busy with not much. “Jackza?”

“Jerry?”

That was familiar, that rise, that spit of light on her chin. “I’ll be at that bar. Two drinks, if that. Do you arrange connection?” Whenever he said it, it tasted like dirt he ate as a kid. Dumb and curious. Wanting to taste the whole world. His mom, with her hair down over her shoulders, leaving flesh wounds of love and despair.

Jackza had options in this situation. Play the foreigner, that was a strike. Not knowing the language, not knowing where to begin. But she couldn’t deny what cost her so much to acquire. “I think the bar may be better for that.”

Her solidity brought him, unexpected and unasked, a hopelessness, a cold mist through his skin. “These bars, they’re not always clean, you know.”

What to tell him? His discomfort annoyed her. Sympathy was for mothers. “We have no facilities for it.”

“But you know people.” He wasn’t used to his voice landing so dead. Irreligious, almost, spitting chewed dirt on his aesthetic. He deserved that shrug of her wide shoulders. That look she gave him.

“We are a small establishment. For one night. Two nights. For business sleep. Convenience. Not this.”

If he said, ‘How is this not convenience?’ he’d complete her picture of him as an apparition of night, desperate for substance to fill his frame. That he asked at all was already listed among the failings his mom – her shoulders bare, with intimate light in her hollows – told him would stalk his life if he didn’t fix up. Circles of glass cased Jackza’s face, her hair gabled across thin plastic. “I understand,” he said. Though understanding fixed nothing.

In meager, dead end November, the bar’s few takers were tenants of one night hotels. They drank and talked, unwillingly, with strangers. The women were all civilians.

Again, stunted festivity – in hanging chains, in fiery scenes of hoodwinked hospitality – dutiful and painted-on, not eager but premature. Too quiet for staff, the older man working bar most likely the owner. Jerry Richards recognized and hated the man’s despondency. “I’ll take a draft. Whatever’s strong.”

Suds bellied over the glass. “You starting a tab?” Roughly, the landlord tried a friendly maneuver.

“It’s late.” Cold sweetness, empty carbon, riled him. “In fact, I’m looking more for professional input.” He frowned at the landlord’s blank face. “Connection.”

Gesturing round the bar, plain the man disliked all he saw. “I can’t tell you what we got here. You see this? It’s not your requirements.”

This moment came too soon. With too little endeavor. Jerry slid cash across the stains. “That do to make things happen?”

“You can’t land it yourself?”

“It’s late. I’ll take that second beer.” Waiting, he skimmed his phone. He had business, genuine reasons. The morning would come, he’d dress and go. No luggage, no onward itinerary. But this moment, this would stay. Set in the walls, seeped with dregs in the cellar. These opportunities, stark and resistant, sank as each day diminished. Where once was grandeur, now was routine.

“Where shall I say?” The bar owner stomped out to find him, a heavy tread as though gaining weight with each step. The phone patterned his face with uplight.

“The hotel by here. How long am I waiting?”

“Long enough to spend money.”

Jerry would have been satisfied with a shift change. But Jackza was the all-night welcome, keeping sharp with zombie movies. If anyone asked why she watched that stuff, she said to remember home. Nearly, she asked if he had his two drinks, if that. But this man wouldn’t play. Just a cordial greeting, the receptionist standard. He hesitated at the counter. She paused a bloody wound ripped wide. It refreshed her.

“Someone may call for me soon.” He didn’t want to sound certain of it. These guys in bars worked grifts. “If they get here, call my number.”

“Your number?”

“On that piece of paper. My number. It’s important I see them.”

“Connection?

“You know it.”

Just past the point where the hero takes vengeance for the death of a friend, the survivors still in peril, a middle-aged woman, dressed young, tired-looking, twitchily jangled the door. She glared at the Christmas tree.

Jackza paused a scene of flight, blurred figures slicking the screen. The warmth she felt for this woman held her voice low. Back home she sang contralto in the church choir, appreciated for her tender, masculine sound. She hadn’t sung in anger for years.

The woman approached the counter with reluctant fervor, eager for something important she didn’t want to share. “I have a meeting,” she spoke jagged. “Mr. Richards. I think he stays here?”

“Jerry Richards?” Jackza, thinking how she looked, the light of screens on her pale skin. “He just got back. He said to expect an associate.”

The woman seemed knee-deep in nettles. Her mouth chewed air. “Yes, I have an appointment with Mr. Richards. Business, you see that.”

“Always be closing.”

“Pardon?”

“I saw that in a film. Always be closing. I learn much English from films.”

“Your English is very good.” The woman slapped stinging bugs from her arms. “Where do I find Mr. Richards?” 

“Yes, it would be best to tell him you’re here.” Needlessly, Jackza shuffled papers. “I have his number. I’ll call.”

“I’ll call.”

“It’s no trouble. Who shall I tell him?”

Robotic, the woman’s head pivoted, her neck racking tongues of flesh. “The decorations, they some corporate thing? It seems early.”

“We get into the spirit. Our guests appreciate the season.”

Red nails, chewed and sharpened, tapped the laminate. “You work Christmas Day? Here, with whoever’s staying? Who stays here on Christmas?”

“Many people.” Jackza shifted up. “People can’t be home. They need to travel. We make festive, everyone welcome. I will be here. Who shall I tell Mr. Richards?”

“Tell him Misty.”

Pleased she held her mouth on that, as system noise told Jackza Jerry Richards stalled on taking that call. Wary not to seem keen. When he answered, his voice was steamed, like he filled with air too fast. “I have your business here.” Jackza made it pretty. “It is Misty. Shall I send her up?”

“Misty?”

“It is.”

“Please ask her to my room.”

He’d rush. Jackza could see it. Tidy his clothes, brush the thin blanket smooth. Sweeten his beer breath. Make the toilet bowl clean as it could be. He might make a joke of the off-kilter seat. They all noticed, who stayed in that room. No matter how experienced the man, they suffered doubts. Jackza felt sorry for them. What would Jerry do, what would any of them do, among zombies?

That embarrassing wait for the elevator. She watched Misty on camera. A woman old as Jackza’s mother, that pained, striving female. Jackza had seen things in the rooms, but always the hotel was hers. Not this nomadic life: new places, new voices and hands, all the same. What would Misty remember, except the carpet was tired and headboard came loose? Jackza unfroze the movie. Zombies never learned.

Jerry wedged the door, so she’d not have to knock. His courtesy pleased him. And it meant she could find him arranged to some advantage, in the sagging armchair, checking reports. Casualness spoke of affluence, that unconcern for discovery that said a man was paid in full. Not true. Not yet. But should be.

She gauged the room like a supplicant at the wrong church, trying to see it all at once, despairing of the familiar. She kept one thigh, one leg and foot, out the door. Someone just mildly curious.

He waved her in and kept her on the end of those fingers, maneuvering her without touch. She found the edge of the bed with the back of her knees. It jolted when she sat. Long ago in another city, Jerry Richards, one Ash Wednesday morning, swam in a crowd replete with ritual. Women with crosses of ash on their skin, mouths babbling redemption. Fervid ill-ease, and so this woman. Her pattern keen as religion. “The lobby girl said Misty.”

From habit, maybe, of doing this well, Misty lifted corkscrew hair back over one ear. The intention seductive, her skin geographic. “It expresses me. Mysterious. But revealing close-to. The magic you half-perceive.”

“It’s pretty. The bar guy said you work rate.”

“You want to close now?”

He felt no reason why she should look puzzled.

“I mean, we could talk some. It’s girlfriend experience.”

“You give in the end.”

She pinched her knees something dainty. “Some guys like call-and-response.”

“I don’t.” He stood, then realized he had nowhere to move to. Absurdly taller than her, his arms hung dead, real zombie. “I don’t want your whole night.”

“I’m on call. You want the rate?”

He backed to the inadequate desk, rearranged stuff, to give reasons for motion. “I want to know what I’m in for.” Not that he cared for the money and her price points were a fair median of the market. For that city. That time of night. On call. “You need cash with this?”

She scowled, like he suggested her shoes were a season late. “It’s all through the connected worker app. I got nowhere for bills in this blouse.”

A few swipes the transaction was done. “Let’s get started.”

“You want lip-locking first? Close holding?”

“I’m okay if we just get on.” An hour went too fast. A new day spawned through the digits. That crank on the desk would still be streaming her blood shows. Sweet shift, paid to watch movies all night. Morning would bring things to do. Already, he was late.

“Some guys like a mood.”

“Some guys like coleslaw.”

They got started and worked her options for two solid hours. Strong, with surprising agility, Misty could pull a head of steam, more than her light frame and distracted manner suggested. She got respectable mileage out of him and didn’t complain at anything. 

Long ago, when he started nights like these, they’d share a cigarette after. Now people only smoked fruit pipes the scope of chivalry was diminished. He made coffee on the little machine. But the water was gritty and not hot enough and the blend in the pack was sour. He could order in coffee. But silence against the window drew the night off-limits. Who knew what tedious dangers might waylay the delivery boy.

He got dressed and told her she couldn’t, playing at power. It had less endurance than stains round the sink. “What you do with your Christmas?”

She rotated the cup, pulling noise from the saucer. “I’m on call. It’s a busy time. Men get cooped with family. Stacks blow if they’re not vented.”

“You understand that.”

“Men need an outlet. You don’t lock a dog in the house. Does the heat in here work any better?”

The radiator’s failing warmth no challenge to his skin. “Maybe they switch it down at the main.”

“Just when you need it.” Light from her phone trawled blue veins through her chest. “I have a three a.m. Close by here. Maybe they have heat.”

“I can speak to the desk.” 

“I doubt she’s concerned. See? My skin puckers all here. These bumps. I always had this.”

He stewed more coffee. “It’s vile but it’s warm.”

“I grew with cold. You have sugar for this? It’s nearly okay with sugar. When I was a kid we were always cold. We had a big house. Big and cold. There never was heat.”

Not what he wanted, this talk about stuff. They should do their job, drink their coffee and leave, not talk about stuff. “Your parents say it was good for you? Some kind of strict observance?” Next time he’d specify one with no stories.

“They should have had money. There was some, before.” She folded empty sugar packs in a neat shape. Soon as she set them down they unraveled. “Alcoholics. That’s the start and end of it. Nobody cared, there’d been drunks in the family forever. It went with money and a big, cold house. Hard working, hard drinking. Till work faded out. Each drunk year they made a new baby they couldn’t pay for. I only had summer clothes because girls look pretty in summer. I’d go grifting coins in the park. That was my start in this business. One day I got home, they were burning the chairs.”

Grotesque, that stillness, the hiss of cold pipes, her voice on and on. Her body perked but off-rate. She should get dressed. It was too late to give her permission. He should dump her outside, sling her down the hall. This was madness. “They did what?”

“The gas was off. The bill not paid. Always someone chasing for money. And dad was drunk and invincible. So he cleared the grate and got burning the chairs. Mom broke them up. She could swing an ax. These chairs that her mother and grandmother oiled and polished and flattered with lace. Best parlor chairs, grandma once said. Chairs to make visitors royal. Twenty minutes they were chopped to bits. They didn’t burn well. The rot was in. There was no heat.”

“When did you start working rate?”

“When I realized there’d never be heat.” Frowning, she picked at the phone screen. “I have a three a.m.”

“You getting dressed before you leave?”

“You want that I don’t?”

“You do that?”

“It’s all on the rate card.” But she hitched her lingerie.

This floored him, this waiting for them to go. Misty went better than most. A quick dresser, she fixed her makeup and hair without fuss. She didn’t say, ‘When you’re next in town’, none of that crap. But she used the bathroom and that kept him waiting. And there was nowhere to move in the poky room and nothing to hear but darkness. 

“You should complain, with that seat in there.” 

“It was put in wrong.”

“It’s ridiculous. I nearly peed the floor with that stupid angle.”

Making game of their dying seconds, he said, “I should ask if that’s on the rate card.”

Her bag slung neat from her shoulder. “Everything’s on the rate card.”

Hallway light painted her with tense, spiny glamour. He’d not seen her walk, not properly. She moved like distance was nothing. “What happened to them? Your parents.”

The elevator was right there waiting. “Me.”

Under a lamp that was only off or on, Jerry Richards saw the future. Each day, each year stretching to cemetery road. He’d continue in this fashion as long as money and health allowed. He’d settle only when a reason to settle became compelling. If he had to buy furniture, chairs and such, he’d get steel.

No one believed how many zombie movies. Hundreds, thousands maybe. She never minded watching a movie again. Always something refreshing, some gore, some necessary humiliation of the dumb humans. Without checking the security feed, Jackza knew that woman was in the elevator. Who else would it be? Nothing was open and guests had early calls. “You have a satisfactory meeting?” She liked how she knew English so well, she could mess with the verbs to sound artless.

This Misty – why such names? – saw no need to conceal her resentment. “We made progress. You have a good evening watching cartoons?”

“I am in charge here.”

“Nice for you.”

“Can I get you a cab? There are dangers at night.”

Misty gripped the counter, staring at the over-big name badge. “Jackza? That it? What you think those dangers are? Some crowd of rabid sub-humans might pull me apart and eat my brains? You think that’s the risk?”

Those glasses came off nearly never. A sacrament, unhitching them from her ears. Her eyes stained with nights awake. With awful attention. “I think that is exactly the risk.”

“Then I’ll walk.”

---

Mark Wagstaff’s work has appeared in The New Guard, Open Doors Review, Abraxas Review and Shorts Magazine. He won the 39th Annual 3-Day Novel Contest with off-kilter romcom Attack of the Lonely Heart' published by Anvil Press. Mark’s latest novel On the Level was published in 2022 through Leaf by Leaf, an imprint of Cinnamon Press. www.markwagstaff.com

Ann Graham

Crapshooter

Gambling on a Tuesday morning // parking lot full // gives people a rush // I, we need a jump start // Cynthia’s been on my back // keeps saying Knowlton we should do this // Knowlton we should do that // Knowlton, Knowlton, have sex go to a party go to a movie // work every damn day // what am I doing at the casino // last thing we need is money trouble // I should confess to Cynthia // wish I could leave //

Hey that’s Knowlton —  haven’t seen Knowlton or Cynthia in a while — can’t believe she married herself a greenhorn — have to say he’s done pretty good — I should give up these cigs — let in some air — I didn’t know he gambled — he’s always so righteous — so busy doin’ one thing or ‘nother — he’s got new fencin’ — new barn on their ranch out there —  a 2020 Ram — a beaut of a truck —

I should go to work // if I shake things up maybe Cynthia’ll be happy // can’t believe I actually fucked Iris // what was I thinking // can’t shake this sense of doom // damn damn // I hope to hell she never finds out about Iris // Cynthia’s not one to mess with // Iris always acting hot for tips // then she whispers it’s me she wants // now I’m sitting in the parking lot of a casino instead of going to work // a woman I don’t give a damn about has something over me //

I’m not goin’ in yet — don’t feel like chattin’ with Knowlton — he hasn’t spotted me — well I’ll be a sumbitch Knowlton is still sittin’ there in his truck — sumthin’s up —

I might as well go on in // aw damn text from Cynthia // wants to know where I am // shit // busybody // if  I say running errands she’ll ask what errands // can’t say I’m at the casino // she knows I don’t believe in gambling // I sure wish I hadn’t messed with Iris // stupid stupid // I cried in front of her // I hate myself for breaking down // won’t hurt to go in // I’ll stop at a hundred bucks // sad looking saps in here // who, who // taps me on the shoulder // geez // Iris //  

I’m gonna call wifey — hey lovey how’s yer mornin’ goin’— I’m at the casino — haven’t gone in yet — feelin’ lucky — you know who’s here — come on guess just guess — Knowlton — yeah that Knowlton — how many you know — you might give Cynthia a ring see what's up — yeah I’m nosey — he’s just sittin’ there in his truck, kinda slumped over — yeah me too sittin’ here — don’t look right — don’t look right — he’s finally goin’ in — wait a sec — he’s comin’ back out —  you won’t guess who he’s comin’ out with — come on guess you never wanna guess — no — no — Iris — yeah that Iris — shit they gittin’ into his truck —

---

Born in Kansas, Ann Graham (she, her) is a retired Visual Resources Curator. She attended the Community of Writers workshop. Publications include: Texas Observer, Press Pause Press, October Hill Magazine, Grey Sparrow Journal, Digging Through the Fat, The Oddville Press, Panther City Review, and Writer’s Garret. She comments on some short stories at www.ann-graham.com/

Phebe Jewell

 Hemispheres

Sofia shivers through twelve months of winter in wool socks and sweaters while I bounce around the house in shorts and tees, my arms and feet scored by summer tanlines. She only leaves our bed to go to the bathroom or plod into the kitchen draped in a down comforter, warming her hands over the kettle. Most days I am out before it gets too hot, meeting friends for ice cream or a cold beer after a swim in the lake. I come home late from the beach, a damp towel on my shoulder, opening the door to a dark house - windows shuttered and locked.

I slip in bed beside Sofia and we touch each other like blind strangers traveling from far off seasons. Our fingers trace lips speaking words we don’t understand. Sofia drops ice cube adjectives into a never ending darkness; I open my mouth and chili pepper verbs fly out, rising to join the sun. Her sentences are weighed down by wet snow. My phrases are shaped by days without rain. My body is a beam of light, reaching for the sun. She is a fern, curled into her own darkness, not ready for the journey toward light.

One morning I pass Sofia in the hall and call her name. She cringes, as if my greeting will singe her hair and skin. I retreat to the garden, searching for words we planted years ago, words small enough to put in a pocket. Spare keys that neither freeze nor burn. Looking around our yard, neglected for months, I hesitate. Did we hide them under a rock, or in the corner that remains in shade? 

Keys to the City

Marcus sees the couple first. They stand just inside the park entrance, taking in the blaze of red and orange leaves. Good thing Harry’s with him, sniffing for rabbits. The white couple will read him as just a man out early, walking his dog. Marcus wants to let Harry off his leash, but not with this couple walking through the park. Too unpredictable when spooked. He urges Harry toward the path to the red arched bridge. It’s early enough they might see a great blue heron.

The man and woman don’t mind the soft rain. They breathe in the moist air, the scent of evergreen. Their new city, just as they imagined. The man squeezes the woman’s hand as the path curves.

On the red bridge, Marcus scans the vista for herons. They blend in with the brush, so it’s hard to see them unless they take flight. His gaze lands on the woman and the man, and he raises a hand in greeting.

When the woman spots Marcus, she links her arm through her husband’s. She knows she shouldn’t be nervous. When her husband sees Marcus he slows, then waves back, and the woman lets out her breath.

Marcus asks if they would like him to take their picture. When he graduated high school his father insisted they take senior pictures here, with the red bridge as backdrop. Bridges symbolize connections between worlds, he tells them.

He takes three pictures, just to make sure. The woman smiles and asks if he comes here often. Every day before work, Marcus says. He suggests they follow the rocky path up along the waterfall to the highest point in the garden. With all the rain the stream should be full now.

Harry picks up his pace, hungry as they head home. Standing on his front porch, Marcus reaches in his pocket. Coins, a receipt, but no keys. Of course. On the kitchen counter. Again. Marcus hurries to the side of the house, kneeling as he lifts the rock hiding his spare key.

A police cruiser slows to a stop, flashing lights. Dammit. The cops flash the lights again, and a bullhorn orders him to stand still, hands up. Marcus freezes. Safer to stay on his knees than to turn and face them, telling him this is his home.

Years later the woman will hold a framed photograph in her hands. The first morning in their new city. The Japanese garden, gravel paths winding behind screens of maple and spruce. The sweet young man who took their picture.  

---

Phebe Jewell's work appears in numerous journals, including Milk Candy Review, Your Impossible Voice, New World Writing, Bending Genres, Molotov Cocktail, SoFloPoJo, Reckon Review, and elsewhere. A teacher at Seattle Central College, she also volunteers for the Freedom Education Project Puget Sound, a nonprofit providing college courses for incarcerated women, trans-identified and gender nonconforming people in Washington State. Read her at https://phebejewellwrites.com.

Pat Foran

In a Nest of Kindly Arms

In a nest of kindly arms, your trembling heart tells me you love me. You’ll hear it in her song, your heart tells me. Your song says you’ve never known how to sing it, that you hate the sound of your voice. Especially the way it sounds when you sing your song. To you, it sounds like people walking away, your heart tells me. To you, it sounds like not being loved.

In a nest of kindly arms, my restless choke hold of a heart tells you I love you. You’ll feel it in his kiss, my heart tells you. My kiss tells you I can misread kindness for love. That I don’t articulate my thoughts very well. That I don’t speak clearly. That my nights can be the nullifying kind, like an Ibis you send to yourself COD. Or a heart transplant you talk and talk and talk about but never schedule, and you and your Ibis catch a bus to Reno instead.

In a nest of kindly arms, you work on listening to your singing, on feeling better about your voice. I sound Ok I sound Ok I sound Ok, you say and say and say, until you think you might believe it and fall asleep. In the nest, you dream about a singing heart, a heart that might be breaking, but at least it’s out there, this heart, out there singing. Singing and feeling. So soothing, this singing, you think. So gentle, this breaking. If this singing heart is actually breaking. Either way, it’s Ok, your trembling heart tells you in your dream. It’s Ok.

In a nest of kindly arms, I work on my elocution skills — sentence stress and intonation, in particular. I love YOU, I say. I-I-I love you, I say. I LOVE you, I say. I WON’T walk away, I say. I WON’T, I say. Not bad, my restless choke hold of a heart tells me. Listen and absorb. I’ll take it from the top: “I love YOU …”

In a nest of kindly arms, our hearts cheer us on while we do nestwork. I bring big sticks, you bring small ones, to reinforce the structure. We both bring moss and lichen to line the nest. Our hearts bring baked ranch zucchini strips and cucumber wasabi martinis. Sensing a party, people gather below.

Kiss me, you say to me.

Sing me your song, I say to you.

Tell me you love me, you say.

I won’t walk away, I say.

This could work, your heart says.

It could, yes, my heart says.

The nest extends its kindly arms, one hand gently reaching for my heart, the other reaching for yours. Gently, the nest holds our hearts, holds them and kisses them.

As you sing your song, night falls. The crowd leaves. A Greyhound bus arrives, an Ibis with a ticket in his bill ready to board.

It’s Ok, the nest says to us, restless and trembling, and to our hearts, possibly breaking. It’s Ok.

---

Pat Foran lives in a nest in a hemlock tree that isn’t anywhere near Reno. His work has appeared in various places, including Tiny Molecules, JAKE the Anti-Literary Magazine and Best Small Fictions 2023. Find him at neutralspaces.co/patforan/ and on Twitter at @pdforan.

Karen Chaffee

Fellow Traveler

“I had a dream about the mountain.”

The young woman who’d announced this wore a raincoat covered with wet splatters. I’d noticed this as she climbed aboard the bus, and I’d wondered about it, because the sun shone brightly now. Perhaps she’d had a long walk or waited a long time. She stood in the aisle now, a bulky, much-used paper bag, slightly damp, clutched in both arms.

Opposite my seat, a woman of ironed smooth clothes gave our newcomer a disapproving look. Life hadn’t given me the option to be that kind of woman. I don’t know whether that is good or bad. I shifted to take the window seat and patted the place where I’d been. “Here’s room.”

She shrugged out of her wet coat and made a neat little bundle of it. Bag and raincoat in lap, she perched on the seat, head forward, nervous. The bus pulled onto the highway and picked up speed, rocking us in our seats. I finally asked it. “What mountain?”

She spoke quickly. “You’ll see. It’s about halfway to Clarksburg. It’s a big landmark around here. You’re not from around here?”

I’d been traveling seven hours already. “I’m going to Wyoming. I’ve never been here. Or there.”

She turned full and looked at me then. Heart-shaped face, brown hair, thin features. A decade or more younger than me. She said nothing, but I suffered her gaze only seconds before I added, “My friend has a job for me in a hotel. In a resort town.”

“A resort. Ranches. Horses, like. And tourists.”

“Yeah, I suppose.” What it was: I was starting over. At almost forty.

She said, “Well, then. That’s a connection, there. Between you and me. Horses. I knew we had a connection before I even sat down. There were all kinds of horses, running and jumping. And others. Maybe a zebra.”

I remembered. “The dream on the mountain.”

“Yes. Squirrels. And a mountain lion. There was a puppy. A real precious sweet little thing. Her name was Kat. Little Kat. Katherine.”

An unusual name for a puppy. I didn’t ask.

Outside, sloping hills curved up to meet sunbeams, the after-rain, foggy beautiful up high. Lower down, sharp-edged shadows across the hills suggested the presence of an immense rise in the distance, still hidden in the window view. The bus shifted to a lower gear.

We rode in silence for a while, she clutching her hands together, me just thinking.

Finally: “I just said that.”

I looked at her.

“I said it but it wasn’t true.” She stared down at those hands, nervousness furrowing into her brow. “She was real. Young, real young. Not a dream. I wasn’t going to tell you.”

If I’d lived a different life, I would have asked, “Who?” But I’d lived my life. So I asked, “When?”

Not too recently, I thought. She’d lived with it a while.

She shook her head, her answer to my question. “She was real enough. Animals are, too. Real, I mean. Around here. Out in the country, you know. Maybe not zebras. I wasn’t going to tell you anything. But I guess I just did.”

Now the mountain appeared, immense, unreal, overshadowing everything. I imagine that she eventually told everyone, or at least anyone who would listen long enough to let her work her way to it. Kat. Katherine. It didn’t matter. As for me, someone moving across three states to a place she’d never been wasn’t leaving behind happiness. Was leaving behind nothing. And here was this young woman next to me. I’d heard the ‘was.’ I knew that place, that place that had her now. I turned and gave my seatmate the smile of welcome I save for my kind.

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Karen Chaffee lives in New Jersey. She has published stories in Orca and Bending Genres. Her story will appear in the upcoming June edition of Utopia Science Fiction Magazine.

Lisa K. Buchanan

Window Dressing

She lifted an obedient chin to the white, hot light. Tears trickled over her crowfoot wrinkles while her eyeballs swooped down across the tray of tiny instruments, then fixed on the tip of her own nose. Having ditched my mother’s grasp, I hid behind scented ladies and observed the procedure through an eye-level clearing between two unacquainted sleeves: one, fur; the other, something silky. In reverent silence, we watched the white-coat technician place a clamp on the eyelashes and attack the brows with a sharp, gleaming tool. The lady was docile, but for the toes curling in her sandals.

“Edna,” said the white-smocked technician, “you’ll be transformed.”

The sleeves wandered off. Two ladies behind me rustled their shopping bags and whispered about lunch. Nobody held Edna’s hand or gave her shoulder a reassuring squeeze. Why was this gruesome procedure not happening in a hospital? Why had they not put her to sleep as they had done for my brother when they took out his tonsils?

When a second technician appeared, I fled. A lady with rabbit teeth and big hair tried to spray me with something. A baby in a stroller screamed to spare her life. Hurrying past a row of velvet, decapitated, pearl-strung necks, I found an upholstered platform and sat down. Just inches from my fingertips, was the pointy toe of a black evening shoe, its owner a tall beauty, gazing straight ahead. Her eyes were dry and unblinking and her lips were parted, but fixed. Even her hair was stiff. No heat rose from her body, no perfume or perspiration, or smell of breakfast. The backs of her legs had seams. Her fingers were petrified mid-air, as if reaching to open a door. Never again would she eat a drippy tuna melt, talk on the phone, or braid a daughter’s hair. How long before her kids would find her, sealed and mounted, a human trophy?

Rummaging through a sale table in the lingerie department, my mother was annoyed that I had strayed. But I didn’t mind her frown. Behind her on the escalator, I checked her legs for seams. I pressed my cheek to her freckled arm: warm. When she wiped her wet, sneezy nose with the back of her wrist, I knew the technicians hadn’t come near her. After lunch across the street, I pestered my mother for an ice cream I didn’t want, knowing the errand would take us past the store’s grand plate windows where even now, I expect to find Edna—fingers splayed, eyes painted open.

“Window Dressing” first appeared in Flashquake, December 2005

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Lisa K. Buchanan (www.lisakbuchanan.com) lives in San Francisco. Her writings can be found in Bending Genres, The Citron Review, and The Ekphrastic Review. Notable, Best American Essays 2023; First Place, Short Fiction Prize, CRAFT, 2022. Current favorite book: Music Stories, Editor Wesley Stace