Issue Eighteen
-Winter 2024-
Julia, Unrembered
Amy DeBellis is a writer from New York. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in various publications including Flash Frog, HAD, Pithead Chapel, Maudlin House, Monkeybicycle, Atticus Review, and JMWW. Her debut novel is forthcoming from CLASH Books (2024).
One day, a woman named Julia wakes up and becomes a stranger to everyone. Nobody recognizes her. Not her boyfriend, not her landlady, not her boss or coworkers. She’s an unwelcome intrusion, a crowbar pushing and prodding its way into their already complete lives. Her mother frowns at her, trying without success to place the nose with its bridge pinched like a pie crust, the brown eyes that are so like her own. Julia has record after record of where she’s been and what she’s done—CCTV footage, call logs, store receipts—and nobody says she’s lying, exactly, but nobody can confirm with their own memories what Julia insists is true. Yes, her boyfriend recalls the trip they took to Brooklyn Botanic Garden, but he remembers going alone: the sunlight speckling the path, the little curved bridge that made him think of a rib plucked from a giant, the ice cream cone—sheepishly bought, melting too quickly—that he ate in a few tooth-aching bites in a shady, leaf-strewn corner. No woman in the picture. Certainly no woman named Julia.
More and more often these days, she goes to the pier at the beach and stares out over the ocean. It’s getting close to winter now, but that doesn’t stop her. You can see her even from very far away: a tall figure in scuffed beige boots and a long navy coat she claims was won in a raffle she attended with the friends who no longer remember her. She walks all the way out to the very edge of the pier. Sometimes she sits, sometimes she stands, but she’s always motionless when she reaches the end. Just watching. Some people say that she’s looking for herself, that she’s waiting for another Julia—the one everyone would remember—to swim in from the ocean. But to the rest of us it looks like she’s waiting for someone to come up behind her and push her over. Daring them, even. As if anyone would commit such an uninspired act of violence on a person who is already less than a ghost.
The Wife
Devan Murphy is the author of I'M NOT I'M NOT I'M NOT A BABY (Ethel 2024), a chapbook of prose poems and abstract comics about God, loneliness, love, and animals. Her writing and abstract comics have been included in The Cincinnati Review, ANMLY, Diagram, A Velvet Giant, and other journals. Her illustrations have been featured in galleries throughout the Pittsburgh region. Originally from Northeast Ohio, she now lives and works in Pittsburgh.
All right. I met Hank and his wife on the bus. His wife was a lovely woman. I quickly befriended them both, but I fell in love with Hank.
I had no intention of becoming anybody’s mistress, at least not then; however, if I knew Hank’s wife would die in a matter of weeks I would have tried to get to know her better; as it was, I was sad when she died but also secretly relieved. I didn’t want to be a mistress. I wanted to be honest about this.
I helped Hank in the days that followed by smiling and crying and clearing out his wife’s wardrobe when he was out for the afternoon. Her coats were piled on top of the bed, as if they were going to be removed soon anyway. No reason he should have to endure the pain of doing this himself, I said to myself.
But when he came home he was not relieved to find the coats gone—he was terribly distressed. “Why would you take it upon yourself to do this,” he said.
“I didn’t want you to be upset,” I said. “I didn’t want you to have to be reminded of her.”
“Where are they? Where are the coats?”
“I’ve thrown them down the garbage chute; they must be gone by now,” I said.
“It’s only been a few hours; surely, they’re still there,” he said. “Please, go get them back. I can’t lose them! They smell like her: sage and mint and jasmine and cigarettes. Besides, many of the coats are quite valuable. The fur belonged to Claudette Colbert. Please, go get them back!”
I reluctantly went to the garbage chute and dove down it, expecting to land in the dumpster with the coats. Instead, I got stuck in the dumpster behind a large creamy-orange egg, in front of which were bunched up all the coats. I didn’t want to panic in the narrow chute, but the more I thought about not panicking the more I began to panic. What is this doing here, I thought. Who would throw away a giant egg!
“Arrggggggggghhhhhh!” I screeched, throwing my feet at the egg in an attempt to break the shell. The egg shifted and turned all the way around: it had a face.
“Who are you?” I asked. “What is waiting inside you to be hatched?”
“I’m no egg,” it said, “I’m the moon.”
“Of course,” I said, “you’re too big to be an egg—but so small for a moon!”
“That’s because I’m deflating,” the moon said. “That’s why I’ve been tossed down here.”
“Who tossed you?” I said, “Who could toss the moon?”
“The angels,” said the moon. “In between day and night, they evaluate my health to see if I’m still equipped for the job; in between night and day, they evaluate the sun to see if she’s still equipped.”
“And is she?” I asked.
“She always is. She’s been just the same since day one.”
“And you haven’t?”
“No, I’m number 407,268.”
“That’s so many moons!”
“A new one every 11,000 years. We aren’t born right, for some reason. Something happens to us. We grow smaller,” the moon said dreamily.
“Not small enough,” I said gruffly. “How long have you been stuck here?”
“Oh, a long time, a long time,” the moon said. “Since the coronation of the new moon.”
“I haven’t noticed a difference in moons,” I admitted.
“I forgive you.”
“Will you please move out of my way? Or can’t you?”
“Tragically I cannot. But why would I want to? I don’t want to be garbage.”
“You’d rather spend the rest of your life in a plastic tube?”
“Yes.”
“Well, won’t you grow smaller eventually? And simply roll down?”
“Yes, but that could take days.”
“I don’t want to be stuck in here for days!”
“Why are you in here at all?” the moon asked suspiciously.
“I threw away something very important to the man I love.”
“What was it?”
“His dead wife’s coats.”
The moon’s eyes narrowed. “You threw away his dead wife’s clothes??”
“I meant to be kind,” I said.
“You’re evil,” said the moon, “and he will never love you.”
“Not if I don’t get these coats back, he won’t. One of them belonged to Claudette Colbert!”
“Ah, she was one of the angels who evaluated me ‘too small.’”
“Claudette Colbert is an angel?” I asked.
“Everyone who dies is an angel. Yes, even the wife of the man you love. And I don’t know if she’d want me speaking to you,” the moon said, turning away from me. “I’ll never get my job back that way.”
“Like you were going to get it back anyway, you golfball!” I screeched, thrusting my legs back and then abruptly forward to donkey-kick the moon’s flesh in.
The moon crumpled, like paper shellacked in sugar, and there in the center of the sphere was sitting cross-legged the naked wife of Hank.
“I know what you’ve done,” she said. “You threw away my clothes, you tried to steal my husband, and you murdered me too!”
“No, no! I didn’t do any of those things!” The moon’s blood began to fill the tube, rising until it overtook me. I drowned.
I blinked one last time, and when I opened my eyes again, I was one in a group of angels. They—we—looked like people, only we were covered in feathers, all over our bodies. In the center of our group was a moon the size of a hot air balloon, wheezing.
The angels closest to it were standing with their palms over its crusty skin, willing it back to life. All of the angels behind them were standing with their hands on the shoulders of the angels in front of them. Claudette Colbert was among them. Two angels behind me had hands on each of my shoulders. The moon was looking at me with its crater eyes, breathing, lips pressed to the ground.
Reverb
Chris Bullard lives in Philadelphia, PA. In 2022, Main Street Rag published his poetry chapbook, Florida Man, and Moonstone Press published his poetry chapbook, The Rainclouds of y. His poetry has appeared recently in Jersey Devil, Stonecrop, Wrath-Bearing Tree, Waccamaw and other publications. He was nominated this year for the Pushcart Prize.
Too much talk: over, around, above. It changes the brain, you know, changes the process. The dendrites start gobbling information like cellular sharks. The neurons fire up and start sending miniscule bolts of electro-chemicals down multi-tangled pathways. With all that electricity, you can practically see the little cartoon zig-zag cut-outs shooting from your eyes, practically smell the ozone after some spasm of thought.
How do you settle down after that? How do you get that glowing fluorescent spotlight out of your head? Dad read the cerebral flash card that said his wife was cheating on him. After that, he was a different person, they all said, a changed man, a charged man. But who is ever the same man twice?
Down at the 19th Hole, where the IT guys and insurance salesmen who think of themselves as Southerners because they speak with a bit of a twang, even though their daddies moved down here from Ohio, congregate to swap stories about their exploits in the sand traps, brother Bill said Dad was a fool because he couldn’t see how Mom was fucking around with Frederick.
He said it out loud and to Dad’s face which was not as the others had been doing for some time in many quiet and subtle permutations. Dad made the connection like he had put a screwdriver into the wall socket while trying to adjust the switch plate.
In setting Dad off, Bill relied on the tongue touching the front teeth to pronounce triply and trippingly the “f” which, according to scientists, early man, hunter and gatherer that he was, could not say.
Only a million years of a diet of milled grain and domesticated animals allowed human front teeth to shift forward into that overbite that allows everyone to make “f” and “v” sounds. Modern man can say “Fuck you.” Hunters and gatherers couldn’t. That’s why we’re civilized. With everyone saying “Fuck you” to everyone you have to come up with some rules before the stone axes come out.
So, when Dad said “Fuck you” and threw his scotch across the room (at Bill) he was really being very civilized, just as he was when he confronted Mom at home (Mom and home, two “om’s,” the two words sounding so alike, it’s no wonder everyone confuses them) and demanded to know what was going on between her and Fucking Frederick.
“Don’t lie,” he shouted, though in employing that particular imperative, he was contradicting the very reason for language itself.
Your average hunter-gatherer was limited to drooling one word declarative sentences like “Look!” or “Bad!” but Mr. Modern Man has employed language skills that allow him to prevaricate. He has the ability to communicate concepts such as “I say, old man, your shoelaces are untied,” so that, when a hunter-gatherer looks down, our teeth-forward ancestor can bash him on the head with a stone ax and take his food, his cave and his wife.
No one was more the modern man than Fucking Frederick, that thin-mustached, big head of hair, con-man preacher politician, who employed multi-syllabic words to dazzle the ladies like a bower bird setting out his lure of bright plastic thingies though he had them at “Praise the Lord,” as he raised his manicured fingers above his coiffure like a magician levitating a piano from the stage.
In the verbiage that followed Dad’s injunction, it was unclear whether Dad was going away or whether he wanted Mom to go away. What he wanted really was to have her out of his sight. He wanted her to disappear, or, perhaps, he wanted to disappear. Every year more than 2000 people disappear in Alaska. More than 60000 have disappeared since 1988. Perhaps, Dad was suggesting that Mom go to Alaska, or, perhaps, he was telling her that he would.
In the event, it was Dad who went away although only partially. Something got clogged in his brain (can words clog your brain? I often think that they can) and a million or so neurons went away Alaska-ward. Dad grabbed his head and fell on our almost new Montgomery Ward stain-resistant oriental carpet.
“Watch your brother,” Mom screamed at my sister, who somehow got the idea that I had something to do with all of this and that Mom’s command as she dragged my Dad’s slumping carcass out to the street and into the car was really a warning that she should be on the look-out for me, that I was dangerous.
And this is what she did for the rest of her life, treating me as enemy, acting as though I was likely to sneak up behind her with a stone ax. Perhaps that’s what she thought I had done to Dad, who soon would be delivered into the hands of what we called home care aides.
I can’t blame her for her misconception. It was tough to see what was really going on in our ranch house out in the exurbs of the suburbs. Lies permeated our neat, rectangular rooms like gamma rays from a disabled nuclear power plant. Our absorbed doses could be measured in mrem. Our brains luminesced with the blue light of Cherenkov radiation. People could hear us crackling like Geiger counters.
A few minutes after my parents had left the house, I appeared in the living room pushing a toy car across the carpet. “Fuck you. Fuck you,” I chortled as I shoved the car across the saffron and red threads. I was happy to have learned a new word that soon enough would allow Mom to shout at me, “Watch your language,” which I have. My sister sat in an armchair and glowered at me. Suspicion arced in her eyes like electricity. She was a new person.
Time Travellers
Sheldon Lee Compton is the author of ten books of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, including the novel Alice, named one of the 25 Best Books of 2023 by the Independent Fiction Alliance. He also edits the blog collective Poverty House.
Spring birds chirping on a cold morning in March. She took in the sight of death in its excellence, those birds scrounging for food in the vast parking lot, empty at this hour, and barren of both life and food. The birds, chirping more loudly now, were frantic. She could see this in how they darted fast from one place to the other, their heads jerking left to center to right and back so fast it was as if this single part of their bodies were teleporting, no movement, only the landing left to center to right and back. The woman wondered if they missed something in the in- between moments when their heads were invisible, turning through a time we couldn’t see. What else was in that time? Did other beings share those moments unseen here? It had to be true, the woman thought. It was likely these others also thought about the baby birds waiting, pecking at each other and the cording of twigs surrounding them, grabbing and holding for a couple seconds the fallen feathers covering the base of the nest. She imagined these baby birds also existed in two places, and that the second place they existed, in which we couldn’t see, was entirely different from the places their parents disappeared to in bursts and back again. So then what was in that time? And the time after that? Multiplicitous possibilities were like stargazing to ponder the universes. She opened the dozen donuts she bought at a Marathon gas station less than a half hour ago. The sides crinkled as she eased back the top and took one out. She ate it in three bites. Watching the starving birds gave her a keen appetite. But it didn’t take long, once her hunger eased, to feel guilty for eating while the birds searched without success over and over again across every foot of the parking lot. When they made it to the edges of the lot they simply flew the short distance back to the middle and started all over again. She opened the car door and turned the box of donuts onto the ground. In an instant nearly all the birds quickly fluttered toward her and fell on the donuts, eating in those bursts, left to center to right, while the woman strained to see even the slightest hint of mass, a blur of feathers that might exist in those half-seconds of what seemed to her invisible. She hoped to see something there that would save her from some in-between other life. There was so much chirping, though. And now the sun was coming up and soon the private dark would slip away. She couldn’t see another Thursday; she couldn’t see another week. The birds hopped from the donuts and continued to peck, disappearing and reappearing, disappearing and reappearing.
Melancholy City In Which There Are Three Moons In The Sky
When it rains here, you can summon a telephone straight down from a cloud if you go up high enough. I am often talking to the gods, a direct line, twirling my black fingernails though the pink curl-cord, asking after love spells and at-home abortion tonics. Today Anne Boleyn says through the red telephone that I have to keep my head on my shoulders, that sometimes you have to be the sad lonely thing that feels as trite as it truly is. But I really must insist on a walk in the rain in thigh high stockings, she says, so I obey her counsel. Fiona Apple would never hurt me unless it was for art, you know, so them’s the rules. Fiona told me about the bolt cutters, I keep them in my tote bag as a talisman. A raccoon eating cigarettes, a beret salesman, a saxophonist outside the liquor store: unchangeable scenes of my city block. Blaine, the fruit salesman who looks like a leek, tells me his vegetables are grown with water from Mars to make them more vibrant, make them last longer. Why not. I am procuring pieces of my identity I can fry up and season with rosemary and garlic. Yes, there are three moons in the sky, one for each of the muses, and I pray to each one on my knees in the graveyard of my dreams, my pink bedroom. There are dried roses hanging from the ceiling, because a rose is a rose is a crying, naked, wannabe librarian licking the pages of Anaïs Nin and slipping into fever dreams with my hands between my legs. I want to draw flowers on my knees like the flappers, so I do. I want everything to be heart shaped, even my own body, but it never did contort well enough for love to inhabit it for long. I want to be my own firefly, lighthousing to the world my compatibility with storm-souled princelings, in hopes of mating and a good, luminous match. Instead, I buy a red candle and place it on my windowsill for someone to see and wonder about the kind of girl I must be. I wish I was receiving love letters by paper airplane from the building across the street. That the letters would contain locks of hair, trimmed candlewicks, traces of flour or cornmeal to connote ovens sensate with coziness, wholeness, cinnamon, would be idyllic. I am making lists and asking for things like bowls of pasta delivered to me by bespectacled lovers, to chat with the ghost of Saint Lucy, to meet the devil and ask to borrow her horns for awhile as an accessory. I would offer my patellas in return; I am tired of meeting gods on my knees. They can come up to me for once. Tonight the sky is an under-ether indigo. Tonight I am floating above the quaking echos of my body, asking to be touched delicately and exquisitely, like a harp, and not to be made blue anymore. Teach me, I am asking Joan of Arc, how does a femme float above the world? Soon, she says, I will be able to levitate like my spine is not a ouija board but a roadmap of my molting, a skinless topography of all the people I will be. Soon, she says, I will become my own sword. In the meantime, she lets me borrow hers to cut my bangs.
Leia K. Bradley (they/she) is a backwoods Georgia born, Brooklyn based lesbian writer, performance artist and an MFA Poetry candidate at Columbia University, where she also teaches Writing in Gender & Sexuality. She has work out now or forthcoming in POETRY, Variant, Aurore, Ghost City, JMWW, trampset, Peach Fuzz, Full House Literary, West Trade Review, and more, with her poem "Settle(d)" chosen as the Editor's Choice Best Overall pick for Penumbra Magazine's 2022 Pride issue. She was nominated by Miniskirt Magazine for a Pushcart Prize for her lesbian werewolf short story "Moon Pie," and is the 2023 Featured Author of Anodyne Magazine. After climbing out from the coffin of her first divorce, she is accepting love and lust letters through her twitter @LeiaKBradley or instagram @MadameMort.
Orchard
Claudia Monpere writes and teaches in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her flash appears in Smokelong Quarterly, Pidgeonholes, The Forge, Fictive Dream, Trampset, Ghost Parachute and elsewhere. Her poetry appears in such places as The Cincinnati Review, New Ohio Review, Plume and Hunger Mountain. She's a recipient of a Hedgebrook residency and her flash was recently shortlisted for The Smokey and awarded second place in Vestal Review's food themed flash fiction contest. She tweets @ClaudiaMonpere.
We liked the man, though he rarely smiled and spoke even less. He tended his small orchard—summer apricots, crisp fall apples— and sold them at the farmer’s market, donated them to the soup kitchen. His apricots were golden, juicy and sweet, his apples even more so. We bought them by the dozens, making bread, cobbler, pie. We liked the man even though he politely declined offers to share our baked goods. When he wasn’t in his orchard, he made dioramas, displaying them at our arts and crafts fairs. Silk fall foliage and polyresin stone walls, a fern grotto with plastic Pacific giant salamanders, a family picnic in a meadow: peaceful nature scenes. Year after year he won awards. Accepting them were the only times he managed a smile.
We liked the man even though he rarely attended Sunday service. Even when his dioramas changed to winter scenes. We thought, that’s okay. Winter’s got cardinals perched on snowy branches, hot chocolate and cozy fires, children sledding. But his winter dioramas became bleak. And he’d begun taking long walks at dusk when people should be making supper.
One diorama shocked us. There were couples holding hands, skating on a pond, but in the corner, one couple had fallen through cracked ice. The Council met. We like him, we said. But this is troubling. Pastor John offered to pray with the man. He declined, polite as always. The dioramas grew violent. After one featured a wild boar chewing a man’s leg while another man flailed in quicksand, we told him to stop displaying his dioramas at our fairs.
What caused his decline? No deceased wife or child—he never married. No bankruptcy, no health problem. (The local banker and doctor were drinking buddies of his.) People speculated. Maybe he murdered someone, and the FBI’s on his trail. Maybe he’s a serial killer. We laughed. But.
The man started to look disheveled on his long twilight walks. He continued making violent dioramas. (His neighbor peeked into his workshop.) We worried. About him, of course, but also about us. Our children. Seasons came and went. Few of us still bought his fruit. On Halloween we told tales about the bodies we decided were buried in his orchard.
Eventually he stopped tending his orchards and roamed the streets at all hours, politely talking to himself. One New Year’s Eve when he was home in bed—he always declined the invitation to the church’s Resolutionary Prayer Marathon—the Council made a difficult decision. The orchard burned slowly. But the house went quickly. The air vibrated with consequence, the smoke and flames a testament to our righteousness. We liked the man. But he needed saving.
The Knife Can’t Cut Deep Enough
Heain Joung is originally from South Korea. She holds an MA in Creative and Critical Writing from Sussex University. She now lives in the UK. Her short fiction has appeared in Virtual Zine, Fudoki Magazine, Full House Literary, Flashback Fiction, FlashFlood Journal and elsewhere. Follow her on Twitter @heainhaven
My mother is troubled with ghosts. She wants to be free of them, her memories, her past, all of it. She wants to be free of me too; I can see it in her tired eyes. She thought a cat could help her. She heard they could catch our troubled spirits and carry them away. So she got a cat, but it didn’t help. Maybe it wasn’t in the mood or had too many troubles of its own.
She made a new plan. She decided to go to the house of an old lady, a lady that some people called a shaman. I decided to go as well, although I don’t like the old lady much and I am sure she doesn’t like me either. She would always look at me strangely and make a face when she saw me, so I would make a scary face back, which I could see she didn’t appreciate at all.
My mother starts talking to the shaman the moment she sits down, reciting like a mantra the story of her life, the unending labor of my birth, her unhappy marriage to a man broken by life. He is dead now, a drunken accident some said. Smoke and fire I remember, but nothing more. He is not at rest though. He is still troubled, and troubling others. She tells the shaman about me and about my father. That she feels empty and numb, but also too full and too much at the same time. She says she is scared to sleep, that when she closes her eyes they come to visit. Then she weeps for a short time, and says, “I think I’m going mad.”
The old lady looks at my mother with sad eyes, then at me as if it is my fault. It’s not fair, I’m going to ignore her, pretend that she is not there. Maybe then she will understand. She starts talking to my mother in a quiet voice. “There is a cord tying you to the other world now. You must cut it, cut it deep. So listen carefully, when you get home you must find a knife; the biggest and sharpest one you can. Then put it under your pillow. When you fall asleep you will be able to cut yourself free, and the visits will stop.”
The old lady, gazes into my eyes. “You shouldn’t look so worried,” she continues, “This is not to harm you but to cut the bridge connecting you, so you yourself can be free.” I am not sure what bridge she talks about, a bridge I have never seen, but my mother seems convinced.
Every night my mother tries to sleep with the knife. She tosses and turns, neither one of us can rest. She can feel its hard body under the pillow. She thinks about the cold sharp blade. She sits up half asleep, half awake. I can see she is desperate.
I feel scared to be alone, and I wonder about the bridge. I don’t know if she can hear me, but I tell her how much I need her. I tell her that however deep she cuts, the knife can’t separate us.
Saint Hair
Nic Luc is a writer from California. You can find him on Twitter @postponedly.
This guy tried to sell me a scalp. He said it wasn’t a normal scalp, it was of a Christian martyr from Roman times. They found this out by doing something called isotope analysis. This was a process of following special residues, he told me. Apparently, hair was crucial to this whole operation, but hair wasn’t hair. It was dense, unelaborated content. The whole body was transfigured in it. From a strand of hair, they could find out where you were born, where you died, where you traveled in life. Basic elements of human life had somehow been transmitted into hair.
The man asked me when I became aware of how thin hair is. “For me I was four,” he said. “I picked a hair off the ground. I held it at a distance, like this.” He pinched his thumb and index finger, held them out in front of his face. “It was almost invisible, but I could feel it between my fingers. What was this stuff? Keratin, that’s what people told me. Dead proteins. I always knew there was more to hair though. Fortunately, I went into forensic archaeology and not cosmetology. Cosmetologists have very naïve ideas about hair.”
I told him I had my own hair story. I was in Italy once. They were parading some saint’s hair around in a box. I saw the crowds first, this hot, slow-moving whirlwind. I didn’t know what was happening. They kept getting closer and I just stood there in the middle of some plaza until I was surrounded, incorporated into that pulsing mass. I stood against them at first, watching their faces gliding past me. When it didn’t seem like the crowd would move on, I turned to face what they were facing, to see what they were surging towards. But all I saw were the backs of heads. I understood on some level what was happening. It was encoded in all that body heat. I was becoming part of a long-range yearning. I don’t remember how long I was in that crowd or where it went afterwards. I walked back to the hotel, dazed. I imagined I was one those survivors of powerful earthquakes. Your home collapses around you and all you can do is wander the wreckage, some kind of chalky toxic soot on your face. On the TV I heard them say that the hair was incorruptible. “That’s a holy property of saints,” I said.
“There is a classical way that all saints are depicted,” the man told me. “They’re always in the process of dying and being killed. For them, dying is a continuous affair. It happens even after they die. You’ll see them with swords bisecting their heads and daggers in their chests. The beheaded saints carry their heads in their hands, the ones who were flayed hold their skins.” I looked back at the scalp sitting in his open hand, outstretched between us. Decalvatio, he said. That’s the punishment the martyr underwent. It can refer to shaving or scalping.
Patriarchy I, II, III
Monica Sharp is a writer whose essays and poetry have appeared in Inspired, Across the Margin, Writer’s Block, Mediterranean Poetry, Bosphorus Review of Books, Fevers of the Mind, Adamah, The Florentine, and Firenze: Rome-ing. She is also a poetry editor for the literary magazine Open Doors Review, based in Livorno, Italy.
Welcome to the Patriarchy
The value of a frosting rose lay in careful preservation. Mine cleaved from my birthday cake. I imagined myself as the youngest bride: special, chosen. Waiting. I wrapped the rose in plastic and placed it in my play kitchen. A secret. My secret. A wish. My wish. A promise.
I took it out to triumphantly eat it. But something went wrong, something completely unexpected. The pink rose decayed. No one told me to put it in a real freezer. It swarmed with a colony of tiny black ants. I tapped it and furtively nibbled its pinked petals.
Grand Traverse County
The Michigan spring heaves soggy and dark, sky scattered with heavy-bellied clouds. Father and I walked further than I’ve ever walked before on this path. We now find ourselves in an abandoned apple orchard. Dark trunks, wet bark, soft moss. Birds sing. Then silence. Soft earth sucks at our shoes. Trees festooned with delicate blooms recall a fairy tale, the stamens freckling each center. My father says, these flowers will be autumn apples. He nods. I look forward to the sweet crunch of later months, of my freedom on the familiar path with my brothers. The orchard holy and hopeful.
The Heart Wages Its Confused Battles
Late morning. The coldest winter in France since the Revolution has finally ceded to spring. She waits in position at the Gare du Nord, the espresso’s gunpowder bitter on her tongue. Her Napoléon will come to this battlefield too. Wind blows over the tracks, propelling cigarette butts and a front page of Le Monde. Their love: struggling, wan and hungry, fed on letters, long distance. Suddenly he alights, expansive, warm, larger than life, grinning below unruly forelocks. Uncertainty wrenches her gut. The connection must end even though energy persists. How can she comb out the tangle of the past?
Our Lady of the Snows
Catherine McNamara grew up in Sydney, ran away to Paris to write and ended up running a bar in Ghana, working in Mogadishu and Milan along the way. She is the author of the short fiction collections The Carnal Fugues, The Cartography of Others, Love Stories for Hectic People and Pelt and Other Stories. She is Flash Fiction Editor and a Masterclass tutor for Litro Magazine, and was the Guest Editor for the Best Small Fictions Anthology 2023. Catherine lives in Italy.
A thousand or so orgasms later, many mutual and others not, they split up. They were gutted, but eventually learned to come together again, for coffee say, and to speak about their new partners and several of the disorienting dating experiences both had undergone along the way. During their story, a dear friend had died of leukemia, so they sometimes met at the church where Serena’s funeral had been held, as it was near to Via Farina where their bus lines crossed. Serena had been cremated and her ashes strewn in the mountains by her brothers, so there was no other place to remember her.
Roland was now seeing an Umbrian woman called Patrizia. What he neglected to tell Betta was that Patrizia was an astonishing, black-haired woman, and that he had never held such a bundle of curves in his life; Patrizia had a current of dark hairs on her lower back that she had waxed, and each time Roland could feel the soft prickles returning. It electrified him.
But Betta, in his reticence, understood as much. Betta wore whatever her hands fell upon and had an early configuration of lines on her forehead.
Last week Betta had met Serena’s older brother Daniele at a railway station in the mountains. She had walked over to his beaten-up car and they hugged. The family had wished for no one when they disposed of Serena’s ashes, and when she called Daniele to ask if he would take her there she was a little undone when he said yes.
Betta and Daniele stood at the head of a slope surrounded by trees. There was a wood pile at the bottom, and one suspected that deer came here to gather in the sun. Fresh snow had fallen, though she thought she could see an underlay of tracks that moved to the centre, then returned. Into that long ellipse of open whiteness Serena’s incinerated matter had dissolved, and fresh sobs hitched through her.
She and Daniele turned to each other and kissed, and kissed.
Polyglot, How Delicious the Air, and Brothers / A Cento
Réka Nyitrai is a spell, a sparrow, a lioness's tongue — a bird nest in a pool of dusk. She is the recipient of a Touchstone Distinguished Books Award for 2020 for her debut haiku volume While Dreaming Your Dreams (Valencia Spain: Mono Ya Mono Books, 2020). She is the coauthor of "Barking of the coming rain", surreal haibun collection published by Alba Publishing. Her full length poetry collection will be out with Broken Sleep Books in September 2024.
Polyglot
As soon as my mother gave birth to me, she noticed that she had given birth to a baby rabbit. I was bald, blind and deaf, but my incisors were fully grown. At first mom was worried that breastfeeding would be painful for her, but that wasn't the case because I refused her milk. Instead, I demanded carrots in three languages: my mother's, my father's, and the official language of the country where my parents fled from the war.
How delicious the air
Once, a pair of sparrows held me captive for fourteen days. They plucked me from my crib and took me into their nest. They groomed me and fed me soft food. I was confused. I didn’t know if I liked being preened. I didn't know if I liked being fed. All I knew was that I missed my parents - they argued all day but they were my parents. Eventually, I jumped out of the sparrows’ nest; dragged myself to my parents' house only to find them in the middle of an endless fight. I held my breath…, when I inhaled again, I was surprised by the deliciousness of air.
Brothers / A Cento
If you put our names together, they spell something like “The fish that walks on the sea” or “Angels swim in the blue school of the night”. What one party calls grotesque – god’s blood, lightning, boneless crumbs – the other admires. One of us hides in the mirror’s invisible stomach. The other is sitting beside the window, shrinking. One more memory to explain to ourselves, then the moon is ours to name too.
"Brothers / A cento" patches lines, syntagm from Elizabeth Robinson's "Brothers" and "Quicksand" , from Peter Markus' "XI" from "The fish and the not fish" and from Barton Smock's "Soonism"
Missing in the Small of Dreams
Pat Foran has visited a person or two in their dreams. His work has appeared in various places, including Fractured Lit, Jake, and Best Small Fictions 2023. Find him at neutralspaces.co/patforan/ and on Twitter at @pdforan.