That Nameless Open Field

Abbie Barker lives with her husband and two kids in New Hampshire. Her flash fiction has appeared in Hobart, Monkeybicycle, Atticus Review, trampset, Cease, Cows and others. She teaches creative writing and is a reader for Fractured Lit. You can find her on Twitter @AbbieMBarker.

On the way to your house, I fall asleep in the field. The halfway point, we decided, on that foggy morning when we left our houses at the same time. Go, you texted, and I went. You were worried about the difference in our strides. Walk normal, you wrote. You liked to toss that word around like there was some average way to act. You’ve always wanted to blend in, fly under the radar. 

The walk to your house isn’t far, maybe a mile, along the dirt road that passes a corn field and the peeling, white farmhouse with two boarded-up windows. You used to tell me how one day you’d buy that farm, fix it up. You used to tell me how you planned to live in this town forever. 

Beyond the cornfields and peeling farmhouse is our field. The one that gets dry and brittle and yellow in the summer. The one that collects big puddles in the heavy rains and sometimes they freeze and sometimes kids skate on them. But now, in the still-spring-not-quite-summer, the grass is almost soft, and I haven’t seen you in more than a year because you didn’t buy that farmhouse, and you didn’t stay in this town. 

Years ago, on sticky summer nights, we would spread blankets beneath the lone maple. We would talk about where we saw ourselves in ten, twenty years, while we puffed stolen cigarettes and crushed them into the bark. You said, “is there anything wrong with staying where we are?” And I said, “Even if we leave, we can come back.” 

Today, I don’t have a blanket, and I plan to stop for just a minute, but how quickly a minute becomes an hour. As I sink into the grass, I dream of knocking on your parents’ door, only to find you aren’t there. What happened to meeting halfway?

When I wake, a shadow hangs over me—a man who isn’t you. A pair of binoculars dangle from his neck. I know you expected me at your house over an hour ago, but the man in the field is searching for a hawk. He says this particular bird is an expert at blending in. So, of course, I want to find it.

You and I never did decide on the halfway point between here and California, even if we knew it had to be somewhere in Nebraska. You never texted me, go. You never asked me to get on a plane and fly. It’s funny how you were the one who left. The kind of funny that doesn’t make anyone laugh.

Now, as I point these binoculars at far-off trees, you send a string of texts. I don’t have to read them to know what they say. Something about meeting Brian at the bar. Something about catching an earlier flight. Something about not waiting around any longer. Go, I write. Except, I’m not asking you to meet halfway. I’m telling you to leave.

Soul Bossa Nova Plays During My Ultrasound

Emily Behnke is a graduate of The New School's MFA in Creative Writing Program. Her work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions and can be found in Typehouse Literary Magazine and Shirley.

Frank bobs his head in time to the beat of Soul Bossa Nova. He takes his time scraping the transducer against the spot where a cyst dangles from my ovary, and it isn’t supposed to hurt but the way he uses it, it’s like an ice cream scoop, like maybe he’s trying to get the cyst out himself. He’s rough, but he needs to get the right sound out of it. The room is dark around us, save for his phone, a beacon of not just light but flutes and laughter and trilling piano and I’m trying not to listen, but that doesn’t mean the cyst isn’t. It bounces on Frank’s computer screen in time to the beat as he presses in time to the beat, as the walls pulsate in time to the beat, as the beat is fully transduced within me. As my heart beats to it, as I blink to it, breathe to it, become it, Frank hums and goes ah! in all the right places. The track is on a loop. His ahs get louder with every new beginning. I’m here because the cyst danced without music, twisted over my ovary and straightened back out in a span of hours and this wasn’t even the first time or the second or the third. Usually, technicians ask about my hobbies. This is worse. When he isn’t grooving, he’s clicking his tongue. These cysts balloon like a child inside me—some people ask when I’m due and I always say not soon enough and take the subway seats they offer me. I hold pillows when I sneeze, wait for my fallopian tubes to buckle under the weight of the cysts. Last time I was in the ER I chewed a straw until the walls of it fused together and no Coke would come through. That is what I imagine they look like. Frank barely looks at them, at the screen. He clicks his tongue then a button and the foreboding sound of my pelvis floats into the room, a pulsating white noise that grows and grows and grows. Presses between us. Presses us apart. It’s no different than how I usually feel, just louder. But he paws at his collar. Grows red in the neck. Curls like a fetus as my womb ripples against him. I know it’s crowded in here. Open your mouth, I want to tell him. Gum the cyst until it pops. Crawl out and drag whatever you want with you. I do not want a child. But I do want someone who will save me. Someone who will take the hard parts, the ones no one wants. All of these doctors could end this for me; ablate away until I’m basin hollow. Sweat glistens at his forehead. He reaches out, peeks at me, and I think he might give me a few welcome claws and let it all spill, but then sound stops. The cyst stills on the screen. He shuts the system down, heaves a big sigh and says get up. We’re done here. Clean yourself off. I do. The lights flick on. He taps at his phone and says they’re coming for you. I tell him I can’t wait. Transport brings me to the OR, where there is no music. But it doesn’t matter. The surgeon and his team stare down at me, their eyes crinkled with grins, fingers flexed in anticipation. They know I have the kind of body that will always put on a show.    

Country Music

Patricia Q. Bidar hails from San Pedro, California, with family roots in New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah. She is an alum of the UC Davis Graduate Writing Program and a former associate fiction editor at Northwest Review. Patricia’s stories have appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Sou’wester, Little Patuxent Review, and Pidgeonholes. When she is not writing fiction, Patricia ghostwrites for nonprofit organizations. She lives with her DJ husband and unusual dog in the San Francisco Bay Area. Visit Patricia at www.patriciaqbidar.com or on Twitter (@patriciabidar).

A Lyft driver with kohl-outlined eyes brought me to Saturn Street. Seeing me, she mashed her radio button to country. The fare seemed too meager to deliver me to my husband, who’s been working in California for seven weeks now. San Francisco, with all those hills and sidewalks and garage doors.

An hour later, my husband’s small room cannot contain our misery. He suggests taking the dog outside. He is ready first. I dip to tie my shoe, my shoulders still feeling the imprint of his dry hands. His shoulders have broadened. The swimming, he said. He sighs from the hallway. Now I understand: He suggested the walk as a break from me, from us.

One of our differences: Rather than run, I cling to misery as if its marrow sustains me.

My cup of wine tips. I use my husband’s white briefs to mop the red mess. I call out: Go on; I’ll start some noodles.

I know this man. He is already thinking ahead to where his dog will deposit his excrement. What will be the color and consistency. It is getting dark outside. Strong-jawed men are stepping down 17th street, smelling fine. My husband will be crouched, shining his cell phone flashlight to check his dog’s droppings.

I leave his sodden underpants in the corner, under a towel. After I am gone, my husband will find them and the red stain will make him believe he has a terrible disease. That something seeps from him while he dwells so far away.

This is not our home. Obviously, nothing magical remains. But the fibers of my husband’s briefs are marked by meager mystery. It’s really nothing, but it’s all I have. He will be scared, and then ultimately all right. Backstroke. Butterfly. Crawl. Introducing the dog around at work.

I will be far but present, a ghost with unfinished business. I will never let him move on.

Combat Zone

Jamy Bond’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Barren Magazine, The Forge, Janus Literary, Wigleaf, XRAY, Emerge, The Sun and The Rumpus, among others. Her stories have been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize and been awarded a Fulbright grant. She earned an MFA from George Mason University where she co-founded So To Speak: A Feminist Journal of Language and Art. She lives in Washington, DC.

A girl in Redrock Hills had gone missing that summer. We thought about her every time we pulled on our lacy halter tops, slipped into our denim shorts, straddled our bikes, and watched our mothers’ eyes swell with worry: “Stay on this side of Jackson Road. Do not cross it.”   

We’d been waiting all day to watch Pennywise rise from the sewers of Derry, but Jocelyn’s father turned off the tv before the movie even started.  

“There are some things you can never un-see,” he said. 

This was the most he’d ever said. After two tours in Iraq, he had a look that I recognized. I’d seen it in other fathers, the quiet ones with cropped hair, gun closets, and eyes like foggy blue globes, dead in their sockets. When I mentioned this look to my own father, he said, “what the hell do you know about combat anyway?”  

We often talked about what we’d do if a white van with no windows pulled up asking for directions or offering puppies.  

“Scream,’ Jocelyn said,  “and scratch his eyes out.”

“I’d run,” I said.  “I think I’m pretty fast.” 

Everyone warned: do not go near the blue house, but that night, as the setting sun blazed across the sky in flames of orange, we did just that.  We crawled through Jocelyn’s back yard, a maze of emerald greenery, the grass so stiff it crackled like fire beneath our hands and knees. We maneuvered planter boxes filled with shit-scented mulch, pebble pits the size of rain forests, and garden beds walled in by stone. Once we cleared the Koi pond, we zig-zagged through sculpted bushes, mushrooming with lime-colored leaves, their ends so prickly they etched bloody waves into our pale skin. 

My mother said that Jocelyn’s father had spent $50,000 on that back yard.  And then he moved in next door.

We had seen the guy only twice. The first time, he blew a kiss, and the second time, he put two fingers up to his lips in the shape of a V and licked them. 

Peggy’s mom said that he had lived in the blue house years ago, before he went to prison, and that a baby had been murdered there. Also, a woman high on drugs had stumbled through the front door and died, face down, on the cracked pavement. 

We passed the evergreens that Jocelyn’s father had planted for privacy, and slithered into his yard where we faced an explosion of weed bombs: rampant quack grass, wild dandelion and pigweed.  The dirt was so porous it pulled us down like quick sand; and the air pulsed with the buzz of insects. As darkness fell, we made our way to his back porch where a door hung from rusted hinges, the wood so splintered that light from the other side made it glow like a hot ember. Cardboard boxes were stacked high in front of the windows; some as tall as humans, and crumpled, as if creatures inside had thrashed around, desperate for freedom.

The body of the girl in Redrock Hills was later found in an abandoned warehouse off Rt. 2. I saw her picture on the news. Blond hair and freckles. Green eyes. Someone said that she had been a good runner. A sprinter. Very fast. She won a medal on the track team. Why didn’t she run away then?  I often wondered about that. 

We inched up the mossy steps to a side window where we could see movement through slits in the mangled blinds. There was the shadow of someone tall, rushing around, and we could hear thumping: music, maybe, or the sound of a body being pummeled. 

“He’s either carving up kids or disco dancing in there,” I whispered.  

We cracked up so hard we snorted.  

And then a porch light flooded the darkness with an amber glow and a frantic figure burst through the wooden door.

“It’s you,” he said, “I’ve been waiting.”  

We pulled our heads back and held our breath in. But there was no hiding. We were right there, in the shadows between two boxes, and he was standing before us, his shirtless belly a hairy mound of dimpled white. 

“Don’t be scared,” he said, reaching for us, his fingers grazing our faces. 

I bet that girl in Redrock Hills fought like hell. I bet she screamed and scratched and thrashed and clawed, but somehow she missed her chance; there was a split second when she could have run and gotten away. And somehow, she missed it.  

Teenagers on the Moon Bounce

James Cato does environmental justice work outside Pittsburgh. He has stories in Daily Science Fiction, Atticus Review, Gone Lawn, JMWW, and Bending Genres, among others. He tweets humbly @the_sour_potato and his work lives on jamescatoauthor.com/fiction. He lives with a gecko and a snake. He'd enjoy a conversation with you.

Could rats inhabit the inflated negative spaces of a moon bounce? Possibly. But Dr. Leland gave me a firm chin wiggle no matter my concerns. You need to get out, he said, it’s been eighteen months since you’ve ventured past your driveway.

So against my better judgement, I proctored my son P.J.’s fifth birthday party at the “BounceU” in town. It was strange, seeing children somewhere other than my shadowy kitchen; they seemed sharper, thinner. Our group had the building to ourselves until three teenage boys entered. Mid-tier boys, in my estimation, which were maybe the most dangerous sort.

Their roving eyes found me immediately, the young mother, detected me really, and made flitting contact with the PINK on the butt of my sweats. I herded our celebration away. I was twenty-four, probably only five years older than the intruders, and not yet quite confident in my supreme authority over them. 

Mouthing Dr. Leland’s mantra, most problems we invent ourselves, I ushered my little partygoers to the bouncy dodgeball arena. I’ve always found moon bounces repulsive. The clammy leather of the floor, the firm seams almost like melon rinds, everything hissing—the rank rubbery sour in the crooks that smells the way I imagine a decomposing fairy would—yuck. 

And the rest of “BounceU” wasn’t much better. The thalassophobic horror of the ball pit, for instance. The notion that somehow you were touching urine. Of course, P.J. adored it, and dodgeball too. The kids hurled bright foam balls at each other and made dramatic sounds and announced selfish things loudly. All the while, I spied on the roaming teenagers, my nails hooked into the net. 

I noticed a few things. First, they were here for the same reason as the kids, minus the birthday. They hooted and shoved and flipped into the ball pit. Also, each wore a pocket knife clipped to his pocket. The loudest fidgeted with glasses that shrunk his eyes into little crusty tortoise eyes, and saw me. There was snickering and pointing and they ambled toward us. I was afraid. 

But I also understood their behavioral predicament. They hadn’t yet made peace with the unwinnable complexity of attraction, the universal truths and permutations and idiosyncrasies. Worse, they’d lost the concrete simplicity of children, which allowed P.J. to barrel through things like long silences and introductions to strangers that would paralyze me with dread. After all, even a casual adult interaction flows rich with subtext and context, not to mention racial undertones and conventions and systems to dismantle. 

Their new fragility came with dangerous bodies. 

When they parted the flaps to our moon bounce, I froze. Imagining their private troubles, those that fueled their unpredictable tension, those that made them menacing to a woman several years their senior. Finding lingerie and condoms in their parents’ drawers and closets. Parents becoming people. Reliving embarrassing moments and tomorrow I have to’s and semi-conscious routines. Stomaching transitions to different places, unable ever to relax.

But they bounced beside my children, laughing. These beings that had orgasmed and squeezed pores also yearned to climb like apes and dance sweaty in socks with kindergarteners. “You versus us!” they declared, manipulating the physics of the pressurized floor in order to launch one of my son’s friends into orbit, a girl named Myna whose special talent was turning her eyelids out. “We’re outnumbered!” 

And I was paralyzed in the corner, horribly old.

The two factions set up opposite of one another. That age-old trick of few big kids against many little ones, that false treaty of fairness. Usually, though, there wasn’t a crone petrified in the corner—not even bouncing—just visualizing rats in the inflatable tubes beneath our feet, windburned creatures skittering in circles.

The war lasted seconds. Balls snapped into tiny bodies. Rubber meteors curved midair like spitballs, following trajectories that factored in fear and fleeing, one hurtling into my birthday boy’s spine, splaying him forward. Some kids were crying, others hollering defiant clichés or pretending to die dramatically (why do little boys do this?). 

“You good, pretty lady?” said the glasses guy, kneeling in the aftermath, miniature eyes earnest. His buddies rubbernecked behind him, in the unnatural stance of cats forced to stand on two legs. I was a pinned beetle on a board, unable to save the game or myself.

“TAKE THIS!” howled Myna, chucking a dodgeball the size of her skull. Nobody expected the throw to strike perfectly as the glasses guy swiveled, shattering the spectacles on the thrumming floor, where shards jittered, tickled. Nobody expected that the impact would sting, wire cutting into his brow. Nobody expected his friends to laugh involuntarily.

Betrayal and hurt and property damage brought his knife out in a flash. He’d made his mother peaceful promises in order to buy it, I’d bet. Severed from my spell, I snatched the hilt, plunging the blade into the only sheath I could find, even though I knew what it would do to me. Myna was safe; the balloon floor was not: I’d cleaved a new smirk longer than a C-section. 

The kid looked embarrassed. I doubt he’d have done anything.

The fresh cut shrieked, flaps jabbering like a mother’s mouth giving a raspberry. We were all plummeting to the same mysterious place, shocked and curious and horrified and ready to meet the tube rats if they were real. It should have earned me another eighteen months indoors—sure showed Dr. Leland where he could stick his agoraphobia diagnosis—but P.J. loved his birthday party, hugging my leg like a hungry python, and the next morning, I stood in the lawn barefoot. Relishing it. Like I’d finally seen the easy emptiness of all the dark spiderholes in the world. 

Simmering

Sarah Clayville is a teacher and writer in the wilds of central Pennsylvania. Her work has been featured both online and in print, and you can read her other works and catch her literary adventures with her daughter at SarahSaysWrite.com.

Growing up, Jane believed her mother’s recipe book was a collection of polite curses. No one who ate at their table returned. When the woman died and Jane inherited her belongings, she tucked the book away on a high shelf where it couldn’t hurt anyone ever again.

“She’s still haunting you, isn’t she?” Alex frowns, turning over the steaks on the oven. The blood evaporates in the pan.

“Who insists on no funeral in their will?” Jane slices the tomatoes for the salad, watching the seeds and slime slip across the cutting board. 

“Someone who’s done with life and doesn’t need a party.” Alex moves behind Jane and guides her hand. 

“Slice them thinner. They’ll look better.” Jane thinks he could guide her hand to slice a tomato or someone’s throat. These are the ideas her mother’s death plants in her brain.

“I’d be happier if a priest had said a few words.”

Jane sets the table and lights candles. When she turns, he is doing the unthinkable.

“You’re thirty-four and should get over ghost stories.” Alex reaches up for the recipe book, and Jane gasps. 

“Stop being dramatic, will you? I wanted to try a new salad dressing. That poppyseed one you said she made when you were growing up.” He carelessly flips through the pages as is they’re not heavy with sadness. 

Jane braces herself against the dining table, knuckles so tight the bones nearly jut through. She remembers that dressing. She also remembers meals that ate away at her father from the inside out. Meals that eventually starved him out of their family.

“Curses and ghost stories are two separate things.” Jane sees the shades drawn in his eyes and understands he refuses to entertain things that he cannot see or touch.

He hasn’t touched Jane in a month. It began the night her mother died, and she wonders if it is the woman’s parting hex. Or a sign that her mother still inhabits Jane’s life despite a few thousand miles of highway. Or the strict husband she ran to. Or death.

Over dinner, Alex ticks off their weekend obligations. A wedding. A book signing. A garden party. Events belonging to his friends. Hers live back in Pennsylvania. She hasn’t seen them in years.

“This is disgusting. Maybe it is cursed.” Alex tosses his salad into the garbage, spitting out a mouthful of dressing. 

Jane tastes hers once Alex has gone to the bedroom. The dressing is bitter, like chewing on a lemon rind, only she likes the taste. It reminds her of summers selling lemonade. Her mother reclaiming the porch that once only her father used to smoke cigars and yell at neighborhood kids. Memories are slippery things. With each new bite of the salad, Jane remembers her mother always cooking to avoid the rooms of the house where his presence covered every inch like unforgiving wallpaper. Memories take time to cook. She bites into her steak and spits it out, returning to the salad. Finishing it means something.

Once the dishes are washed and put away, because a dirty kitchen will only prolong the time Alex refuses to touch her, Jane sits with the recipe book in her lap. She drags her fingers along the cover three times the way she used to touch the bible in church. Unlike Alex, she turns each page with respect. She is reeducating herself about her mother as an adult now, rather than the child who blamed her. Who could be starved, of love and kindness, and make anything but bitter salads and parched bread?

When the bedroom light goes out, Jane carries the recipe book with her onto the fire escape. Jane and Alex live at the top of the apartment building, despite her fear of heights. This is the first time she’s stepped out alone, without Alex holding her hand to keep her tethered to the apartment. She brings the book to her nose. The smell of olive oil and lavender is exactly what a book of curses should smell like. Or a book of prayers.

One by one, Jane rips out of the pages. She’s brought matches with her and lights them, dropping the remnants into the metal trash can. These aren’t her mother’s curses. They are calls for help unanswered. When the book is empty, and the trash can is full of ashes, Jane lifts it over the edge and watches her mother drift silently through the night sky.    

Renee Ruins the Only Decent Bagel Place in Town

Emily Costa teaches freshmen at Southern Connecticut State University, where she received her MFA. Her work can be found in Hobart, Barrelhouse, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Atticus Review, and elsewhere. You can follow her on twitter @emilylauracosta.

Renee is telling me I’m a toxic person. She’s sitting across from me at the bagel place, the one with the Albanian girls at the register. She’s telling me her therapist suggested this. Somewhere public. All she said the night before was, breakfast tomorrow?

She’s saying I have all the telltale signs of toxicity.

But, I say.

Please don’t interrupt me, she says. One of her hands is a fist, a thin napkin wedged in.

Two old Italian guys sit near us, not talking, Styrofoam cups filled to the brim with milky coffee.

The main thing is your negativity, she says. Your inability to focus on the positive. I think part of you can’t stand to see me succeed in life.

They ran out of salt bagels so I got egg. I don’t know what makes it an egg bagel except it’s yolk-yellow. It might as well be plain, the way it tastes. I didn’t get upset about them running out of salt. I didn’t yell at the girl at the counter, didn’t tell her they should make more of the most popular bagels so they don’t run out. I just got egg. I think about this now, proof of me not dwelling in the negative.

But, I say.

Please, she says. Let me finish. When you interrupt me it makes me feel unimportant. Like what I have to say doesn’t matter to you.

I take a bite of my bagel, wonder if that’s rude to do. I maintain solid eye contact while I do it. She’s crumpling up the napkin more. The butter leaking from her bagel is congealing on the wax paper wrapper she’s ripped open. That’s what we’ve done, ripped them open to make little plates. Made the best out of what we’d been given. I picture myself glowing green, stink lines coming off.

You rarely answer me when I try to contact you, she says. You hate everyone we know.

I take inventory. What am I like? What kind of person am I, really? I tried to give up talking shit for the New Year, but I only lasted half a month. I take another bite. I try to dust a few errant poppy seeds off the table, but they’re stuck in a greasy smear. The people before us hadn’t properly cleaned up.

You delight in misery, she says.

I do, I say, mouth full.

She stutters, stops for a minute. I chew and watch her eyes, wait for something to flit across them, maybe for her cheeks to flush. She looks away, clears her throat. I can tell her bagel, untouched, is cold now, that it won’t be as good as the one I’m finishing, the one I’m chewing as I say, tell me more.

As In

Sarah Freligh is the author of four books, including Sad Math, winner of the 2014 Moon City Press Poetry Prize and the 2015 Whirling Prize from the University of Indianapolis, and We, published by Harbor Editions in early 2021. Recent work has appeared in the Cincinnati Review miCRo series, SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Fractured Lit, and in the anthologies New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (Norton 2018) and Best Microfiction (2019-21). Among her awards are a 2009 poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a grant from the New York State Council for the Arts.

Harvest (n), the process or period of gathering in crops, as in “We helped with the harvest.” As in the bushel baskets we filled with apples the birds hadn’t yet pecked or pooped on, the apples that hadn’t gone squooshy in their rot. Those you threw at me, chased me chanting dog poop, dog poop until our father roared out the back door, beer can in hand, and threatened to tan our fannies. We knew the belt, its hiss and whistle, its sting. Dog poop, dog poop, you whispered as we bent and heaved.

Harvest (v), to catch or kill (animals) for human consumption or use, as in “the quantity of shrimp harvested has risen.” As in you who starved for days after swallowing that tab of bad acid and imagining the chicken leg in your hand was pleading with you not to eat it. You who imagined the carrot screamed when it was yanked from the earth. You for whom even shrimp were huge and holy.

Harvest (v), to move (cells, tissue, or an organ) from a person or animal for transplantation or experimental purposes, as in, they take out your organs—lungs, heart, liver, spleen—and pack them in dry ice in small red coolers, the kind you used to fill with beer you’d snitched from the fridge, coolers carried to waiting airplanes and flown to wherever. Harvest, as in a field of sunflowers. I see you there, brother, I listen for whoever has your heart. I’m on high alert for its tick and pulse, its goodness and mischief. Watch me hug a total stranger, wish them a beautiful day, a wonderful life, see me wish you back.

A Flashing Chance at Bliss

Lucy Goldring is a Northerner hiding in South West England. She has been shortlisted by the National Flash Fiction Day (NFFD) three times and won Lunate Fiction’s monthly flash competition in 2020. Lucy was nominated for Best Small Fictions 2020 by both NFFD and 100 Word Story. Tweets @livingallover

Sven fancies himself a latter-day Jim Morrison. He makes casual allusions to chakras and shamans and Aleister Crowley. He writes her sensual spontaneous prose poems with weird symbols in the margins. Justine doesn’t know what they mean and isn’t bothered to ask. 

This new lover of hers is boyishly hectic, articulates his every thought. It’s charming – and annoying. The poems are a delight though. Justine feels sexy and powerful, expanded somehow.

Come to me, Justine! Fly me to the outer regions!  

The verses are best read naked, save for Justine’s vintage cardigan, which she refers to as her Starsky or her Marilyn subject to the mood. Either way, the air is cool against her backside as she soars.

For a boyfriend, Sven is girlishly attractive – an inch shorter than Justine with long dark hair and disarmingly brown eyes. His yin energy is balanced by the manifest yang of his enormous penis. Their first attempt at sex is uncomfortable. She wonders, defensively, if the truly enlightened are better judges of the vaginal angle, if they wield their gifts with greater prowess.  

One evening, she subdues Sven’s New Age babble with vodka and weed. They both relax. When they have sex it’s like her pelvis is submerged in foaming warm champagne – ecstasy! But then: an awful unfurling in her loins followed by… can you be flung, weightless, from your own body? Does the soul’s mortal vessel from time to time capsize?

That’s your Kundalini awakening, Sven explains, as if accounting for an unexpected knock at the door. Its uncoiling signals you are opening up to the cosmos. In her stoned stupor Justine feels smug, but a dawn hangover reframes this ‘Kundalini’ as a trespasser – a nuisance tenant.  

Baby, light my fire?

Back on the earthly plane, their union results in persistent urinary tract infections. The first time, she dismisses the burning for days, eventually calling her mother to the toilet. The Sex Detective looks at the bloodied bowl and delivers her diagnosis: ‘We used to call it honeymooners’ disease. Will you ring the surgery or shall I?’ 

But the next time, he magicks it away. Justine’s stepdad is taxiing them 300 miles to visit Mum (Justine will join her parents in the new house after A’ levels). The telltale throbbing outgrows her body; it fuses with the engine noise, creeps into the judder of their grey metal casing. Sven presses pause on his inane musings and shuffles forward in his seat beside her. He turns with softly-closed eyes, inhales deeply, and hovers his palms over her mons pubis. So he remains, cherub and sage, Junctions 22 to 23. And the pain is gone. 

This is the end

The sun is out. She finds Sven cartwheeling round the playing field on mail-order peyote. He continues to spin, communing with the universe, even as she breaks the news. Justine jogs alongside with a sore knee. She scans Sven’s eyes for animosity but sees only dimly reflected bliss. Her cameo in his trip lasts seven seconds: a blush tint on a white cloud, slo-mouthing, Are we cooooool thennn, yerrr? 

Perhaps Sven has astrally-projected. Perhaps he’s watching their floor routine from altitude – marvelling as his giant fractal spirals into pinks, greens and crimsons, while she churns up the inside track. Their collision, Justine realises, was but a brief wobble in orbits, a minute change in her vibration. 

Soon after, he goes to live in the woods with ‘Rainbow’. Justine knows her as nice-but-odd Rach from A’ level English. She wonders if Sven writes rainbow poems now and feels her desire uncoil like a stick-prodded snake. The crystal ship had sailed – but there was always the thrill of Psychology Simon and his tight but sensible chinos.  

The Hand Remembers

Erik Harper Klass has published stories in Europe and North America. His work has appeared in a variety of journals, including New England Review, Summerset Review, and Open: Journal of Arts and Letters, where he was a featured writer in December 2019, and he has been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes. He writes in Los Angeles, CA.

1

The hand remembers: I was a wing. 

I read that in an Aleksander Wat poem, I forget which. It stuck. Does the hand remember? Do the lungs remember they were gills? The skin scales? The bones cartilage? We fall back through the dark folds of ourselves—Filozoa, Holozoa, Amorphea—our skin becoming fur becoming scales becoming sponge. We lose our placentas, our jaws, our vertebrae, bone by bone by bone. Can you feel it? 

Eukaryote! 

Each of us, each of us, feels the dazzling dance of a single cell like a cold pin prick, a lightning flash, a fire’s spark, a starter’s shot.

2

Aleksander Wat (b. 1900) was a Polish poet. He fled Poland to Lvov in 1939, disappeared in a black limousine when the Soviets took the city, found himself in Kazahkstan, somehow survived the war. 

Rachel is her name and I read to her from a book, really a conversation, between Wat and the Lithuanian-Polish poet Czesław Miłosz. She has her toes up and she’s painting them. The color is dark red. She calls it cochineal, a color made, she tells me, from the bodies of cochineal insects. 

We live near the freeway, Rachel and I. We have a dog, whose ears perk up at the sirens. We named him Wallace, after David Foster. The TV’s on and on, the volume low, and I have a cold beer, too cold, so I take my time with it. My books are scattered on the coffee table, ones on Europe between the wars, for a novel I’m writing, books marked by tiny pieces of torn paper extending like the feathers of wings. Old books with asterisks and daggers. Another siren.

A strange thought: The past and the future happen in the present moment.

We sit here, listening hard. A hole in her jeans reveals skin as white as the petals of the hawthorn blossom. Through the window: a windy, feverishly orange, restless sunset. 

3

The hand remembers: I was a wing. 

I tell her: He was released from prison in ’41, wandered the streets of Alma-Alta, the poplar trees ice-covered and glistening like diamonds (his words). One night in the madness he slept in the lobby of an old hotel, in the corner behind a statue of Lenin.

She finishes a toe, admires her handiwork.

I continue: He found his wife in March 1942. On an old bed of horsehair, in a dirty room of a small wooden house near the edge of some city, Aleksander Wat and his wife lay side by side, her hand in his, and they talked of love. They survived the war, I say, and eventually returned to Warsaw, not yet aware that their city lay in ruins.

But I’m not so sure about all this. I take a long swallow from the bottle, still too cold, dripping to where it will be sponged up, a simple mess. 

I heard an old metaphor once, or maybe I read it, from the ancient times, something about seeing art in a pearl, how the glistening object is the creation of a diseased shell. Another one I heard or read referred to the nightingale who sings the most beautiful of songs because his eyes have been gouged out. 

She tucks a piece of hair behind her left ear. My books are facedown on the table like shotgunned birds. The smoke drifts like a Nezval poem. Wallace lifts his ears (the sirens). Disease lurks outside the door like a panther. So this is where we’ve come. This is our arrival. Now is no time to be alone. Alekander Wat (d. 1967) might have said: 

The hand remembers: I was a gun, I was a flame, I was a bomb, I was a four-finger salute. 

Yosemite

Dave Housley has published two novels and four collections of short fiction, most recently the short novel "Howard and Charles at the Factory." His work has appeared in Booth, Hobart, Mid-American Review, and some other places. He is one of the founders and all-around do-stuff people at Barrelhouse. He is the Director of Web Strategy for Penn State Outreach and Online Education, and tweets at @housleydave.

“I’ll be right back,” the sales guy says. He takes the pages from the printer and taps them as if they have just come to some sort of agreement. Sam pauses, pulls at the edge of his mustache. He gives the kid the look, eyes narrowed, mouth turning down into a scowl. He reaches to where his pistols would be and finds nothing but the phone tucked into the carrier on his right hip. He tugs at the brim of his hat. “Okay terrific,” the sales guy says. 

Sam leans back and shakes his head. He takes out the phone and stares at it. He has been running errands and his feet hurt. He wonders if he could slip off his left boot, get in a quick rub with the heel cream. He pushes at the boot, looks around. He hears hushed, excited voices. “Dude it’s him…with the mustache and the hat, the whole deal…” 

Perhaps they will ask him to sign something, to take a selfie, call a sister in Omaha and leave a message on a machine. Perhaps they will try to rile him up, make him pull at his mustache or leave the dealership in a torrent of threats. He knows about the youtube videos and the thread on something called Reddit. There is a reason he has gotten rid of the boot holster. Paulette says the time is right to remake his image, “modernize his brand.” 

The sales guy reappears, hesitant in the entryway to his own space. Sam had assumed that “office” meant a room with a door but this “sales manager” has nothing but a desk in the corner of the open dealership, not fifteen feet from a brand new Prius. There are two other guys behind him, both wearing Dockers and red golf shirts. “Mr. Yosemite?” he says. 

“I reckon,” he says, turning on the accent, pitching his voice up the way they have him do it on the show. He has never really considered himself an actor. More like one of those football players who winds up in Westerns or action films. The company had initially hired him to teach the Rabbit how to ride horses. 

“Of course,” the sales guy says. God they are so young, these boys, tiptoeing around their own showroom in their grown-up costumes. “The thing is, I mean, all of us,” he nods at the two boys, a fat one and a thin one that might have been ordered straight through central casting. He remembers when there really was a thing called Central Casting. “Huge fans. I was just wondering if…” 

He was hoping for a quick stop, a check on a price. He still has to pick up the cheesecake and something called kombucha for Ainsley. He wonders if his heel is fully cracked. Can he feel blood or is that just sweat? “I reckon,” he says. 

The fat one takes a picture with his phone. He holds out his hand and Sam shakes. The boy takes another picture. 

“Hey now,” Sam says. “Give me a minute son.” If he is being honest he has never been totally comfortable with the phones, the way they are everywhere now, everybody constantly fiddling at them. It was cigars and then cigarettes and now these telephones that aren’t just telephones. 

The boy takes another picture and taps away. 

“I say give me a minute, son,” Sam says. He stands, tugs at the mustache. He wonders what the boy is doing on the phone. Paulette thinks he doesn’t understand the technology but the truth is he understands it all too well. The boy could be emailing Buzzfeed or tweeting or calling for reinforcements. He could be doing anything. 

Sam looks to the original sales guy. He smiles and nods and makes a face like sorry. The fat one turns around and talks into his camera. “Hey guys,” he says. “B-Rad1776 here again. I have a real treat for you today, a bonafide celebrity and I bet a real patriot.” 

Sam feels for his pistols again. He reaches to where his lasso would be. He can hear Paulette’s voice in his head but also the blood rushing through his veins, the whispers growing louder in the crowded salesroom. 

“Yosemite Sam,” the boy says, “what do you want to say to my followers?” 

He is so tired. It has been so many years now. So many scripts, scenes, shows, appearances. He has to stop by Ralph’s and the health food store by the Barnes and Noble before he can fight the traffic on the101 to get back home in time for dinner. 

“Yosemite Sam?” the boy says. “What do you have to say to my followers?” People in the dealership are abandoning their transactions, wandering toward the small desk, lingering by the Prius. Every single one of them holds at phone in his direction. He remembers the first car he bought after he signed the original contract. Some kind of secret place. They had scotch in thick glasses, hand towels, a private showroom. It used to take a hundred people to broadcast even so much as a commercial and now every person in this room has him pinned down like a butterfly in a display, beaming Yosemite Sam out onto some cloud.

“I say…I say,” Sam says. If they were in Dodge or Deadwood the boy would be fumbling his draw within minutes. Dead on the street. Fed to the pigs. “Jiminy crickets,” he says. 

The boy seems to like this. “Jiminy crickets!” he says. Ain’t that something, guys?” The boy retreats to a corner and taps at the phone. A line has formed behind the Prius. He is pretty sure a pool of blood is forming in his boot. 

“Fifty-three views already,” the boy says. 

“I reckon,” Sam says. He nods at the first woman in line, waits for her to turn the phone around and click. He smiles. 

You Plural

Melissa Jenks was raised as the child of missionaries in southeast Asia. She now lives near Cape Cod where she farmsteads, writes, and believes we’re all going to die from climate change. Her story “Milkweed” was a 2020 Pushcart Prize nominee. Follow @marzipanj.

You learned to crochet from your mothers. You balked when they tried to teach you to knit. You played horse at recess, just the two of you, no one else, chasing each other around the playground, neighing, whinnying. Wearing caps that you crocheted.

You betrayed each other. In the back of a friend's pickup truck you told everyone about the boy you were in love with. You jumped from the back of the truck in a temper, running for snow-covered woods, and you followed. The pledges you'd made to each other hadn't worked. You met up, panting, below snow-covered trees, far from the pickup truck chugging exhaust in the distance. Chased each other again and again, until you stopped. You looked each other in the face. You hated. You twisted your arms and pressed your back into a tree—trees were always your companions—and you kissed. You blushed. You panted. You walked back together, hand in hand, to the truck where your other friends waited, confused. You piled in and drove home.

That day, you rested in your mother's kitchen and ate trifle, a dessert she'd made from a recipe book. You didn't talk much. Steam rose from your clothes. You missed the boy you were in love with, who'd already driven home. You remembered the taste of the kiss, smothered with trifle. Your mom asked if anything was wrong. No, you answered. You blushed. You pulled your crocheted caps around your ears. You went home.

In college, you copied papers off each other. You never spoke of the kiss, but both of you remembered. You were dating the boy you were in love with, who'd come to college too, and you were jealous. You'd been in love with him your entire life. You lost your virginity to him while you breathed steadily across the room, pretending to sleep. You didn't sleep. You grunted. You listened.

After college, you were roommates. You dressed up in tall heels, miniskirts, with dark eye makeup and crocheted see-through tops. You towered over men who tried to dance with you and bought you drinks. You laughed at them, and flanked them, and pressed your bodies against them, and smelled their European cologne and touched your tongues to the sweat on their necks. You took a taxi home together, bringing home none of the men.

That night, you slept in the same bed. Your mouths were soft and wet. Your bodies were yielding and utterly un-masculine and charmed and repulsed you. You touched each other's breasts. They were warm. You felt strange and drunk and excited and confused. You slipped your hands below the other's nightgown and fingered and kissed the smooth nipples. Your breath came faster and faster. You did not go below the waist. You stopped. You fell asleep on top of each other, your bodies twirled around each other, your arms against bare skin, your boozy breath on each other's faces. You never slept that way again. You never spoke of it.

You started seeing the boy you were in love with, again, and you married him. You were maid of honor. You wore a purple dress and threw rice and drank martinis and danced with the best man and decorated your car with shaving cream and tin cans. You were jealous, but you didn't know of whom. You waved goodbye, and you drove away on your honeymoon, to the Caymans.

You were neighbors. You had a book club, taught your children to crochet, babysat, took classes together at the college. You retired. Your husbands died. You sat together at the hospital, holding hands.

Muzak

Cecilia Kennedy taught English and Spanish courses in Ohio before moving to Washington state and publishing short stories in various magazines and anthologies. The Places We Haunt is her first short story collection. You can find her DIY humor blog and other adventures/achievements here: (https://fixinleaksnleeksdiy.blog/). Twitter: @ckennedyhola

CW: Tentacled monster/tentacles/mention of fire and broken windows

On the way down the carpeted stairs, the music starts up. The music has been playing ever since Lolly and Ryan moved in: that shoom-sha-shoom-sha-shoom-doo-ba-doo-song. Lolly could never figure out the melody exactly, but she was sure she’d heard it before in waiting rooms and elevators. Now, she hums along as she comes down the stairs each morning, hoping that Ryan will finally name the song, but he’s too busy sweeping the wooden floors in time to the drum brushes of the jazzy beats that make the swoosh swoosh sound. Every morning, the dust from the house settles from overnight, and Lolly and Ryan take turns sweeping. In between the dust, there are the tentacles—the odd clusters of tubes in faded shades of purple and pink.

“Ugh! So many!” Lolly says, as Ryan empties the dustpan, streams of tentacles pouring into the trash. 

“I swear they’re left over from the previous owner. Some kind of pet maybe?”

Lolly remembered having the ducts of the house cleaned. The workers removed large blocks of dust and tentacles, which seemed strange to her and to Ryan at the time, but the men from the heating and air conditioning company just shrugged their shoulders and said that nothing surprised them anymore. But then, there was that music. 

“It’s like I’m waiting for something all of the time,” Lolly says.

“I know what you mean,” Ryan replies, as he sets up his laptop to work.

Lolly takes her coffee upstairs to her office and begins her work as well—a desk job with lots of meetings, but she can’t complain. She appreciates all that she can get done within four walls—from delivered groceries to exercise in an indoor gym that she and Ryan built. She wonders if they’ll ever need to go outside, their daily existence punctuated by the shoom-sha-shoom song. 

After work, she and Ryan sit on the couch, tapping their feet in time—their toes bumping along dust and a few dried-up tentacles. 

“I just can’t get out of my head what it is. What are we waiting for?” Lolly asks.

Ryan takes out a deck of cards. The routine, the calm, the steadiness of it all—is wonderful—but the music—the music is a sign, Lolly has decided, that at some point, it will stop—and maybe the doors will open, a nurse will come out from a back room somewhere—or someone will say, “Thank you for your patience. What can I do for you today?” And Lolly won’t know how to respond. 

She turns on the news, but without the sound. Just the pictures stream past against the shoom-sha-shoom music, and she sees a familiar street, with familiar houses and addresses. Very close to home, fires have broken out. A large, squid-like monster shoots a steady stream of tentacles down the chimneys of the homes and devours victims in its path. 

“I see,” Lolly says, drawing in a deep breath. “It won’t be much longer now.” 

The shoom-sha-shoom sound begins to fade. 

Aviation Without Wings

Stella Lei's work is published or forthcoming in Honey Literary, Milk Candy Review, Okay Donkey Magazine, and elsewhere. She is an Editor in Chief for The Augment Review, she has two cats, and she tweets @stellalei04. You can find more of her work at stellaleiwrites.weebly.com.

That summer, heat buzzed like a jet engine, compressing the months into a single sweltering plane. It was the one where we stole your father’s pickup and you taught me how to drive. Where I nearly swerved off the road before you grabbed the wheel. Nearly wrapped that truck around a tree—steel taffy, freshly pulled.

Those afternoons, we laid in sun-burnt grass and watched planes gouge the sky into ribbons. Grabbed at contrails and watched them dissolve.

You closed your eyes and framed the clouds with your palm. “Do you think this is it?”

“Doesn’t have to be.”

This was your cue to talk about whatever new place you were obsessed with. Portugal and its healthcare. Sweden and its social welfare. Denmark and its free education. A million permutations of the same three things: us, adults, away from here. You’d keep your hand up like you were pressing our promises into the sky. Like gorging them on sun and exhaust would fill them up and make them real.

***

“Did you hear about Madison? From Stat?” 

We were at the Rite Aid next to the park—you, flipping through bags of nearly expired chips. Me, assessing a rack of greeting cards that glowed with glitter and pastel.

“No, what happened?”

Your fingers tightened around a bag of Doritos. “Died. The funeral’s in a month.”

“Oh. Shit.”

“Yeah.” You stepped back and the stickiness of tile crackled through silence.

I lowered my voice. “You going?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Probably.” You twisted your fingers behind your back. “We’ve known each other since elementary school.”

“Yeah.” I picked a card. Get Whale Soon! arced over a pink whale with a nurse’s cap on its head. “Do you know how?”

“Overdose, probably.” You kicked the bottom of the shelf. “You know.”

I put the card down.

You kicked the shelf again. “Let’s go.”

***

When the truck broke down that July, we spent a week popping up its hood and peering inside, taking things apart just to put them together again. Grease coated the manual’s pages as we flipped through it, squinting at instructions and age-blurred diagrams. Its stench sank into our skin, filled our nails and the lines of our palms with sharpness that lingered long after we scrubbed with soap.

On the last day, you ended up hurling a wrench at the garage wall, biting a dent into plaster. We gave up on the truck.

And our sun-dried cycle plodded on—grass-sky-air—the aridity of it pulling skin taut across bone.

***

We were lying in the park again, the sun burning through the sky like a cigarette butt jabbed through blue.

“I’m getting a job in the fall.” The words crawled across my tongue, floated shriveled and small.

You closed your eyes for a long moment. “Where?”

Gravel notched into my spine. “With my dad, you know.” I cleared my throat. “Continuing the family business.”

You turned away. “Continuing the family business.”

“Yeah, well.” I sat up. “I have to make money somehow.”

“Right.”

***

The last week of August, we walked to the lake on the edge of town, our arms a geography of mosquito bites and peeling scabs. By the time we arrived, the sun was balanced against the horizon, flame damped by dark, body quivering against its reflection.

I dipped my fingers in the water and felt the shadow of warmth slide against them. You walked along the strip of pebble beach, grabbed a stone, and tossed it until its edges blurred with dusk. It spun through the air before returning home to your hand. You tossed it a few more times, glanced at me, and sent it skittering across the lake—a flash of ripples atop a bleeding sun.

“Might be a new record for me.”

I stood, wiping my hand on my jeans. “A what?”

“Record.” You cracked your knuckles. “That was at least eight skips.”

“You been practicing in secret or something? Aiming for the rock-skip world championships?” 

“Maybe.” You shrugged and offered me a stone. “Wanna go?”

“I’ll pass.”

“Coward.” You wound your arm up and threw, the quiet of water breaking under the stone’s weight.

I shaded my eyes and peered into the horizon. “You ever wonder where they go? Like, one throw and we’ll probably never see that rock again.”

A thin smile cut across your face but your eyes stayed flat. Stagnant. “And I see you’ve become a philosopher in secret.”

“Fuck you.”

“But nah, it’s a man-made lake.” You threw another stone. “There’s probably a filter or something at the bottom, keeping the water moving. These rocks’ll wash back up in no time.” 

Your knuckles were white and bloodless around the stone, nails digging into its grit. You hurled it. It shot into the water with a crash, soaking us in spray.

“There’s nowhere else for them to go.”

***

I still remember the phone call. The way my cup shattered on the kitchen floor, glass bursting and sinking shrapnel in my skin.

I’ve imagined that night so many times it’s imprinted itself in my mind.

Streetlight glare on the pavement. The sky, overhead, a gentle embrace. Your body crumples on the roadside—aluminum can crushed flat. No chassis to shield you as the car spiraled into your side. In my head, copper and gasoline weigh down the night air, staining senses like oil splashed on clothes.

One match strike and you were gone.

Your father’s voice was strangled and hoarse over the phone. His words splintered around my head, a haze of questions, questions, questions.

Had you said anything strange to me that day? That week? That month? Had I noticed anything wrong? Were you high? Were you drunk? Did you mean to? Did you mean to? 

Where were you trying to go? 

Revolution

Matt Leibel’s short fiction has appeared in Electric Literature. Wigleaf, Diagram, X-R-A-Y, Cheap Pop, and Best Small Fictions. He lives in San Francisco.

I was thinking about revolution, but it was too soon: I hadn't even had breakfast yet. My lady-friend had just ditched me for good, not for another man, but for another country: how could I possibly compete with that? I knew what I would do. I would retreat into hobbies: gardening, entomology, stamp collecting, skeet shooting, ice sculpture, dog grooming, amateur detective work. Later that morning, I auditioned for a part in an historical reenactment, only to discover, to my horror, that it was my own failed relationship being reenacted. Over my lunch break, I successfully arbitrated a maritime dispute between neighboring South Pacific islands, bitter rivals—still, I remained unfulfilled. I was wracked with a hazy, indeterminate sadness and decided it was time to go about the ugly business of meeting someone new. In the evening I attended a party, a themed costume affair: we were all supposed to dress up like a famous person in their youth. The idea of escaping into blissful immaturity was an appealing one, I had to admit, but honestly it was well past time we all grew up: hell, even Peter Pan himself had moved on, having recently opened a successful chain of BMW dealerships. I stepped outside the party and sat on the front stoop, thinking about loneliness and loss, rebirth and second chances—none of this, I knew, would bring her back. Suddenly, a row of bright red roses sprung up magically through the cracks in the sidewalk. A guy dressed as the young Harry Houdini stumbled out the front door and sat down next to me. He smelled like a mash-up of Marlboros, Maker's Mark and salmon-dill hors-d'oeuvres. The would-be illusionist made a flourishy gesture toward the roses with his magic wand, and demanded that I give him ten bucks. I wish I could say I was as impressed with you as you seem to be with yourself, I muttered to him, not quite under my breath. Then I got up, fixed my junior-Napoleon tricorn hat on my head, and walked away, vanishing into the midsummer night’s fog.

The End of the World, Spain

Arielle McManus is learning as she goes and writing from a tiny, sunlit room in Brooklyn. She is an assistant editor at Atlas & Alice, and her writing has been published by a variety of literary publications including Passages North and Entropy Magazine.

CW: drug addiction

Apricot

We were sitting in O Gato Negro drinking glass after glass of Albariño – a wine as light as an autumnal breeze, as dry as a Spanish mid-summer’s day – when I thought of how I know nothing of taste, of smell, of touch. Of anything which can be subjective. All I can trust is the physical, the undeniable, the inalienable. I have no words for these florals, this citrus, these tender-fleshed fruits. I have no discerning palate. So little of what I know actually stems from some deep spot within.

X-ray

Inside of my body, I don’t imagine there to be blood, nor organs, nor bone. Instead I picture live wire, two jumper cables, an empty bowl. A black hole in the center of my chest. I imagine it sucks up all the texts to mom I’ve yet to press send on, all the gratitude, the laundromat quarters, and sunlight.

Yolk

With each glass of wine came a small plate of tortilla española. The sweet bite of onion, the subtle fruit of red pepper, the utter neutrality, the non-taste, of potato.

Finisterre

It was summer in Galicia and I was the luckiest person in the world and also the most miserable.

Arvo

4 glasses in and we’re both plastered, hanging off the counter of the tavern while the sun shows no signs of giving up any time soon. It glares down at us; I ignore it, tell you I want to have your babies, but how ridiculous! I don’t know you – I’m not sure I even like you, and I definitely don’t like babies, have never wanted any of my own. I’m too self-centered.

Self

Isn’t it interesting, how when you look at the root words of “self” and “centered”, the etymology of “self” comes from selflice "self-love, pride, vanity, egotism", selfwill "free will", and selfbana "suicide"? Is it self-love and ego that keeps me from wanting children, a desire for free will, or the fear of it leading to a certain inner death? All three?

Sorry

Look what I’ve done. I’ve gone off on one of these tangents, again, trying to explain that which is inexplicable.

Eden, TX

You used to live in Texas, smack in the middle of the state, in Santa Anna or Sonora or Lampasas. Maybe Eden. In those sun-bleached years, which you can count on one hand, you suffered from an all-consuming coke addiction, an affliction that nearly killed you. You say you’d never known such happiness, and fear that you never again will.

Discotheque

Walking through this little pilgrimage town after midnight, someone offered us a little packet of your personal kryptonite, and we both stopped. You, in fear of succumbing to some past weakness, me, desperate to know what it would be like to relinquish all control. 

Reverence

You’d told me once, at Bar La Tita over glasses of petal-hued wine, that I deserved someone that would go down on me for one whole hour, and I’d taken that to mean that that person could be you, and so that night, I invited you into my twin-sized bed.

Estrella

The following morning I woke up to an empty bed and vomit all over my bathroom sink, mirror, floor. The floral, the citrus, the tender-fleshed fruits. The onion, red pepper, potato. Jesus, you even got it in the bathmat.

Houdini

I will try to call you. You won’t answer. I will never see you again. What a convenient disappearance.

Glabella

Cleaning up this mess that is not my own, I am reminded of the time you told me about your childhood dog, and how it had leukemia, and how your family couldn’t afford the vet bills. Your dad handed you the G29 and simply said don’t miss. You took her out back, into the overgrown grass, and kissed her on the head while you sobbed, and she looked back at you, confused. Aim between the eyes, don’t miss don’t miss don’t miss. You were so close – told yourself you were doing the right thing – but you couldn’t do it. You threw her bone as far as your arm would let you, watched her run after it, and discharged the bullet into the gray clay of the Texan dirt so that you could go back to your dad empty-handed.

Reckoning

This is to say that I understand that sometimes it’s just easier to let things run from you rather than end things to yourself. I’ve never been interested in playing God either.

Wanted: Talented Architect Not Near Death

John Meyers lives and writes in Maryland. His work has appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, Spartan, the Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, The Louisville Review, and elsewhere. John was a 2018 Best Small Fictions nominee. His website is hammeredinmetal.com

There is an architect now almost dead who designed part of our office space several years ago. The main feature of her design is a bank of carrels in the shape of an S-curve. These carrels are quite popular among young research assistants who gather in the space to work, eat, laugh, and trade stories about their late night adventures. 

When it came time to renovate our laboratory area, the executive team called upon the architect now almost dead once again. Despite her impending death, the architect showed up on site to begin work. A week later she ended up in the hospital. The executive team met briefly to discuss the architect’s poor health and how esophageal cancer was killing her. They decided to hire a new architect who was known for his ability to design brew pubs, coffee houses, and other exciting spaces. 

The new architect arrived full of architect-energy and commenced working at high speed. He delivered preliminary plans that made the executive team very happy. The team convened a closed-door meeting and ate gigantic burritos while they pored over the plans. They had stars in their eyes -- the kind of five-point, white hot stars you see in the eyes of cartoon characters. I noticed this when I walked by the meeting room and looked through the glass. I also noticed how aggressively they ate, and this made me think of the architect now almost dead who probably could not eat much of anything, let alone a gigantic burrito, due to the cancer. 

I was still thinking about this when I met the new architect an hour later. He unrolled his blueprints and pointed to several possible locations for my storage racks. In the middle of our discussion, I asked: “Did you know that the lady who designed the previous space is dying of cancer?”  The new architect said:  “Yes, it’s really terrible,” and then he started talking about ventilation and air pressure. 

The following morning the new architect was hit by a car while crossing the street outside our office. Several bones in his right leg were crushed. The Institute's chief operating officer, Fred Peters -- a man known for finishing projects on time -- cursed the architect when he heard the news. Rather than assemble the executive team for an emergency session, he decided to call the old firm and ask if the architect now almost dead was healthy enough to get the project over the finish line. 

When the firm’s president heard the words “finish line” he imagined the architect now almost dead lying in bed at home waiting for the end. He called her and was surprised to learn that she wanted to return to work. 

The next day Fred Peters greeted the architect now almost dead and watched as she arranged things in her temporary office. While he watched he remembered a nightmare he often had as a kid. In the nightmare a black cat materialized and attacked Fred Peters as he slept in his racing car bed. The sharpness of the cat’s teeth and the pressure of her bite were real, and Fred Peters felt this as the cat first took a chunk out of his arm and then went for his neck. At this point in the nightmare he always woke up crying and drenched in sweat, knowing for certain that someday his life would end. The idea that the end would come, and that he would not be aware of its arrival, terrified him. 

The architect now almost dead reported to work every day. She impressed everyone with her ability to meet deadlines, and she never asked for help. Late one night on his way out, Fred Peters passed by the architect’s office. She was still there, hunched over a set of blueprints. He noticed her pale skin, her sunken cheekbones, and the prominent bones of her wrists. He could not understand how someone who looked like a living skeleton could manage to work so hard at the edge of death. 

Fred Peters enjoyed a quiet night at home alone. He drank several glasses of bourbon and drifted into a deep sleep. At three AM he awoke screaming, clutching his neck, unable to breathe. He stumbled into the bathroom and turned on the light. A quick check of his arm and his neck revealed no bite marks. His heart was racing and he could not catch his breath. He told himself that everything was fine. He was a grown man, he was healthy, and he was not going to die. 

Fred Peters spent the next several hours telling himself that he was not going to die.  When the sun finally came up, his heart was still racing.

Heterosexuality

Ryan Napier is the author of Four Stories about the Human Face (Bull City Press). He lives in Massachusetts. More online at ryannapier.net and @ryanlnapier on Twitter.

We had been together for about five months when K. offered to cut my hair. Her mother had taught her, K. said, when she was in middle school, and she had cut her father’s and brothers’ hair for years, until she left for college. K. assured me that it was like riding a bike: when she had the scissors in her hand, it would all come back to her. Because I believed that I loved K., I accepted her offer and hoped that there was some significance in this chain—father, brothers, me.

A week later, the clippers and scissors arrived in the mail from her mother, bubbled-wrapped, double-taped. K. showed them off, holding the scissors up to the light, snapping them in the air. When I heard the snick—steel on steel—I felt my insides contract: she would use the scissors on my head. 

I collected an armful of free newspapers from the box across the street from K.’s apartment and spread them on the floor of her living room; K. borrowed a full-length mirror from her roommate and set it up in front of a wooden chair. She wound one towel around my neck and draped another over my lap; in the reflection, my head appeared suspended, free of its body. K. told me not to watch, so I stared into my own eyes in the mirror. 

She worked silently, adjusting my head with the minute pressure of her fingers, to which I responded with perfect obedience. As the clippers buzzed behind my ear, I realized how much trust I had placed in her: I was a collection of protuberances that could be nicked and hacked and bleed. My stomach surged with something that was either excitement or nausea.

By the time she finished, I had been staring straight ahead for so long that my eyes had crossed. When they refocused, what I saw looked both familiar and, somehow, better. K. told me that I had a tricky ridge on the left side of my head; reflexively, my hand touched the area, and I recognized, for the first time, the shape of my skull. 

For days, I found myself staring into store windows and parked cars, admiring the person who was reflected back at me. The features were mine, but their proportions had shifted. I hoped that I would retain this slight unfamiliarity forever.

I expressed my gratitude in as many ways as I could. When, a week later, I was still thanking her, K. thought it was a joke. I wasn’t: my gratitude stung me like a cut. I wished I could do something similar for her. 

But what? Opening a jar or getting something from a high shelf lacked the intimacy of a haircut. Neither of us had cars, and if we did, I couldn’t even have changed the oil. K. had learned to cut hair from her mother; I had inherited my father’s uselessness.

I decided to shave K.’s legs. I knew how to shave, after all, though I had only ever done it to myself. How different could it be? I looked up videos on YouTube: the mechanics seemed the same, more or less.

At first, K. objected: she could shave her own legs, whereas I couldn’t cut my own hair. I countered that I could have shaved my own head. 

The following Saturday, I went to her apartment on Chapel Street. K. got in the shower first; I undressed and listened to her soap her hair and body. The mirror steamed, blotting out my reflection. When K. was ready, I pulled back the curtain. Her hair lay wet against her neck; suds ran down her belly. Closing the curtain behind me, I knelt on the tile at K.’s feet. She handed me her razor. It was bright pink. 

A grin tickled the corners of my mouth, but I suppressed it: I wanted to give K. the same seriousness that she had given me. After testing the razor on my own arm, I held it over K.’s skin and waited for my hand to settle.

Four Doors Down, It Poured

Jeanine Skowronski’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Reflex Press, Lunate Fiction, Fewer than 500, Meet Cute Press and Dwelling Literary. She was a finalist in NYC Midnight’s 2019 Short Story Challenge.

We were outside that day, at least that’s how we remember it. We were playing kickball in the bendy part of our street when a thick, black cloud rolled in, passed over our roofs, parked on top of that house, their house, the Green house, and started weeping. And we felt bad, you know? Because that house, their house, the Green house, already had overstuffed storm drains, frowning gutters, a pssst-daddy-gone-too-soon. But we weren't surprised. Because, well, it was like the porch moms said, if ever there was a house that deserved its own rain cloud. It was that house, we nodded, in between claps of Miss Mary Mack; that house, home to that girl, that naughty girl, who stole sour straws from our brown bags of candy and the chains off our bikes and the spare keys hidden under our welcome mats. That girl, that selfish girl, who bolted one full-mooned night, just like her mother, we parroted in between sips of our vodka-spiked quarter drinks, at least until Lark shrugged and suggested maybe that girl was just tired of lightning. Tired of that house, we half-conceded, with its Rorschach rain cloud, which still sobbed over Granny Green and that boy, that bad boy, who broke Lark’s sister’s nose on the playground plenty of summers before he broke in her hips, broke her heart; that bad boy, who ultimately became that poor boy after that one day, when the Green cloud was only sort of raining and he inexplicably decided to patch holes in their rotting roof; tripped, instead, into a barrel of tar, sloughed the skin off his hands and scarred his face. Tragic, the porch moms said. Terrible, just terrible. But they never offered condolences really; never visited that house, even after we told them Granny Green had started sitting outside, alone, on her sagging cement porch (yes, in the rain), staring up and over our houses, staring, we guessed, at the sun, while we stared only at her house, their house, that house, the Green house, the reason why many houses, many neighborhoods later, we all held our breath whenever a rain cloud appeared on the horizon.

What Can’t Be Carried Should Be Left at the Side of the Road

Chelsea Stickle lives in Annapolis, MD with her black rabbit George and a forest of houseplants. Her flash fiction appears in Monkeybicycle, The Molotov Cocktail, matchbook, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and others. She’s a reader for Pidgeonholes. Her story “Postcard Town” was selected for Best Microfiction 2021. Breaking Points, her debut chapbook, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press (fall 2021). Read more at chelseastickle.com/stories and find her on Twitter @Chelsea_Stickle.

Aly had driven past the handmade sign that said “Scream Here for $3” alongside an empty field with waist-length grass every day that summer. The unsteady letters made her discount it as some kid’s summer scam to get enough money to buy comics or a bike. Easy enough to ignore. But cars journeyed down the gravel path. People plodded into the field. Red-faced, tears-streaming, knees bent. Sometimes Aly rolled down her window to hear their testimony. All the horrible things they pushed down. Declarations of love and hate. Cruel confessions. At the moment they stopped, a beatific calm appeared on their faces. It made the ever-tightening cluster of knots in Aly’s belly wiggle with recognition.

Her stomach wasn’t the only place full of knots. Aly had spent a fortune in the last year at the chiropractor to untangle the shapes she contorted herself into attempting to please everyone. Her back spasmed randomly, her neck ached, her limbs refused to stay in their sockets. As if the box she’d always imagined herself shoved, taped and reinforced into had become real. Her efforts not to cause a disruption were destroying her possibility of any moment of peace. She wanted what the people in the field had. 

Aly followed the gravel to an abandoned farmhouse and stopped in front of a card table with two girls, sisters it looked like, braiding friendship bracelets scotch-taped against the table. She knew that chevron pattern. Had used it herself when she was a girl. The smaller one said, “It’s three dollars, miss. Lemonade is two dollars. Might want to drink something after.”

Aly trailed the most-trodden path to the center of the field. The bomb her body had become was shaking with the effort to hold it all in. At the center she slipped the safety pin ring over her finger and yanked. The wordless scream started at her navel and radiated out. Further than she could’ve imagined. Decades of screams raced out of her. It pressure washed her insides. Long screams, short ones. Her internal rhythm externalized. She danced to it. The knots that had been growing and tangling began to loosen. Her body was lighter, and in the place of that weight, she found a moment of peace.

Little Heart

Star Su grew up in Ann Arbor and is a recent graduate of Brown University. Her fiction appears or is forthcoming in The Offing, Jellyfish Review, Pithead Chapel, & elsewhere. They read flash for Split Lip Magazine. Find them on Twitter: @stars_su.

Last time we visited Gigi, we rode all the furniture bareback, the sofas barren of cushions, the futon a kayak of popsicle sticks. Mama and I have pointy butts; maybe it hurt too much to sit in Gigi’s house to visit her again. Gigi is my grandma’s sister, though she says she is too young to be grand-anything, and if she’s grand, we can call her after a movie star. 

Gigi sent me long letters that Mama opened before I did. She passed the envelopes to me, cut and canined, and that’s how I thought letters were supposed to be delivered: half-chewed by the people you loved, their saliva sweetening the words first. While most of my aunties attached magazine clippings—of motorcycle accidents that may have skewered my father or a sliver of phone numbers, plump with fortuitous sixes, to bless our week—Gigi wrote her letters on the magazine, ballpoint bubbling between spreads of geese hop-scotched between burning skies and celebrities who went begging for more. Mama says you can avoid suffering if you never beg, never kneel to the gods on TV, who never aged, never changed. 

Gigi always addressed the envelope to Xiao Xin. Little Heart, I thought of you reading about these poisonous frogs. You used to beg me to buy you frog gummies, tangerine and sour-apple, keep them safe on your tongue. They never stayed in your pockets—remember? You made me stitch extra frog-pockets onto your dresses. Here is a coupon for Crayolas: I want you to hold the colors, draw me your secrets. I ask Mama if it’s true, if Gigi knit my dresses, and she says no, no I bought all your clothes. Little Heart, Gigi writes on Mother’s day, remember when I sunned your butt cheeks until the diaper rash left, remember when I took you to see girls ride goats until they were bucked off. You wondered how they held on so tightly with nothing but their bare hands, held on even after the timer sounded off a record. Mama says both of us must have been dreaming—Gigi never took me to see goats. 

Mama won’t use the coupon, buys a 64-pack and a sketchpad with pages as soft as milk pudding without telling me how. That night, when we watch palace dramas, the TV has shrunk to a small black cat. The static furred, the lines yowled through the speakers. After we watch the queen behead a painter for giving her son a nose as endowed as a radish, I open my new sketchbook, choose my crayons as carefully as chess pieces. 

After I finish, my knuckles are glitter-blued and some of my crayons lost their spines. I lick a stamp to send the drawing to Gigi. Mama shakes her head at the Scooby-doo stamp, says Gigi doesn’t have kids, because she still is one. I put my hands in my pockets, feeling for some luck I can seal in the envelope, but there is nothing except a ribbon of Kroger coupons Mama abandoned. 

The next morning, someone has beheaded the sun, its rays sweating the sidewalks. On our lawn, there are goats and sour-apple frogs leaping over each other. They come inside, chew the futon and sofa until there are only plastic bones left. Mama and I sit, hoarding our letters until they stick to our elbows like wings. I reach down into my pockets but they have disappeared into milk-white goose down, my feet as firm and blooded as tangerine skin. I kneel in front of Mama, a princess on the TV behind me raising her ribboned sleeves to do the same, our arms carving a well from the sky, through which we lower our filial heads. We beg our mothers to let us love without her help. 

Oasis

Sean Winkler lives in Southern California and currently works as a lecturer & researcher in philosophy and as a freelance copy-editor. He received his PhD in philosophy from KU Leuven in Belgium and later worked as a postdoctoral fellow in Russia and Austria. His other published work of short fiction, “Shark Therapy”, will appear in the upcoming volume of Great Ape.

Wandering about the desert one day, I came across the fossil of a great whale. ‘What was it doing all the way out here,’ I wondered, ‘so many miles from the sea?’  Perhaps, the desert had once been a great ocean, miles deep? Or maybe, the whale once had appendages that it could run great distances, and sloughed them off for its fins and tail when it settled here. Then, it learned to swim gracefully, effortlessly through the dunes, just as it had through the water, coming up now and again to puff sand from its spout and to breach in a magnificent sight of shimmering dust, though without a single spectator to see. I didn’t recognize it as I was no expert on whales. All I knew was its size; so grand, in fact, that it must have dwarfed even the mightiest of blues. Perhaps it wasn’t really a whale after all. Whatever it was, its rib cage peaked majestically out of the sand, like the arches of some long abandoned palace. I imagined whole peoples dwelling inside; that their inscriptions were once etched in the bone, but had now been eroded by millennia of desert winds. When I had traversed the entire length of it, tail to skull, I found myself staring into the hollow socket where its eye had once been, as big around and deep as a well. As I gazed through it down into the sand, it struck me most curiously that I hadn’t yet even stopped to wonder: ‘How did I get here?’ and ‘What was I doing?’  Had I rambled out all on my own? Had somebody just driven me out here, kicked me out the passenger side and laughed riotously as they sped away? I knew it once, but somehow hadn’t the faintest memory of it now. So, I paused and looked around, but in every direction, there was just golden sand, yawning off into forever. I knew, though, that I had to wait here for someone; or was it something? Either way, I reached for my box of cigarettes to pull out a smoke, flicked my lighter and watched as the flame, slanting 45 degrees from the wind, lit the tip aglow. Drawing a puff, I sat atop the jaws of my mighty friend; the dearest I had now. The embers of cigarette after cigarette burned down, and the sun descended slowly, leaving blue, orange, pink and purple hues to marble the evening sky. The desert chill began to set in. I wondered when whoever or whatever might arrive. And I thought, perhaps the very same ponderous feeling had dawned upon my friend out here, however many years ago it was. Of course, even if they were  on their way now, they surely wouldn’t arrive until long after I had turned into a fossil myself. I asked my friend if I might know them when I saw them, but the thought struck us both as absurd; and the two of us there, exiles in the desert sand, just reared back our heads and laughed.

Cover photo by Jake Blucker on Unsplash