Issue Nineteen
-Spring 2024-
Welcome to Paradise Cove Beach Cafe
Elena Zhang is a Chinese American writer and mother living in Chicago. Her work can be found in HAD, JAKE, Exposition Review, Your Impossible Voice, Gone Lawn, among other publications, and has been selected for Best Microfiction 2024. You can find her on Twitter @ezhang77.
reads the hand-painted wooden sign, past the rainbow bar and strung-up lights, the restaurant where you can sit at a table on the beach, I mean right there on the dang beach! Sand swallowing your toes, sun baking your skin through straw shade, seagulls eyeing your golden fries with greedy eyes, the whole ocean thirsty for you. We’re on vacation; we’re giddy from the novelty, just the two of us away from Mom and Dad for the first time. Our white plastic chairs sink down into the plushy shore so we eat at a slant, but a good slant, the world atilt in Malibu, our very own dream house, because in a few months we will become strangers, but right now there are chewy pieces of coconut shrimp stuck in my teeth and syrupy drinks in hollowed out pineapples and coleslaw entrails dripping from your fish tacos. Maybe I should’ve known from the way your hand trembles as you swirl your straw, the way you already have a faraway look in your eyes, the way your smile is just a second too slow to spread before it ebbs away into the morass of your face. Maybe I should’ve known you were getting ready for an untethering. Maybe then I wouldn’t blame you for leaving me behind. You get up to visit the bathroom and while I wait alone, I press my soles into the sand, compact the crushed shells until they become golden chalk, like the ones you bought me for my eighth birthday and I colored the walls so loud I couldn’t hear you crying. Let’s meet here again in ten years and become acquainted once more, not as jiejie and meimei but as the salt in the air, right here in the roll of the tide. Here, between flickering torch lights and the blurring of who we were and who we are.
St. George and My Dragon
In 2011 Brandon Forinash received his Masters from the University of Texas in Austin. Afterwards he became a high school English teacher and Speech coach and put writing on the shelf. Coming back to it now, he's had some recent publications in Wigleaf, Necessary Fiction, JAKE, and Sixfold.
When I make my way to the Drunken Skunk a little before noon, Saint George is already going on pretty loud to Maisey behind the bar about his miraculous birth, lifting up a sleeve of his chainmail to show his birthmarked blood-red cross.
“I’m sorry, Maisey,” I say and pull Saint George away from the bar.
“And on my breast,” Saint George continues as I guide him to our booth, “a dragon! And round my thigh - “ and then drifts off.
Oh, George, I think to myself and look across at my friend in his golden tarnished armor, I’ve been an awful influence. I say to him, “George, I think I have been an awful influence.”
But Saint George only lifts his voice, “Woe betide, the earl did grieve, what brutish beast has savaged my daughter?”
Maisey brings over my regular and when Saint George orders another flagon of wine I shake her off and order him a coffee and cheesesteak.
It’s been a strange reversal for us, this one where I sober up the saint while pouring a few into myself. I have one while he recounts the years he spent in training torn between war and faith, until he became a warrior of the faith. I have another while he drinks coffee and dribbles sauce down his armor’s front while trying to slay a cheesesteak.
The third I have at the Skunk’s pool table, choral chants of Bruce Springsteen playing off the digital jukebox.
After I rack the balls, Saint George asks God to direct his mighty spear as he prepares to break. But he’s still a bit faded and duffs the shot.
This is the hard part for me. If I am going to get anything done today, I need to manage this next drink in this next hour. I look at the table, pick a spot on the ball, try to keep the cue on that exact spot. Right to the point where I almost can. A little less and I will anxiously overorder. A little more and I will confidently overorder.
Today I am perfect. I beat Saint George in a close game and leave a mouthful in the glass. I pay our bill and we leave the Skunk, and I am ready to do some work.
By the time we walk back to the studio, Saint George has become sorrowful, “What cruel treachery they, when I had toppled the pagan king, for all my good did reward me with evil, and most subtlelike and by much vile means contrived to kill me.”
I ask him, though I already know, if this was before or after the dragon, and he exclaims, “After!”
My hands are good now and I start mixing paints,”Tell me again what he looked like, George.”
Green, he says, emerging from the green-gray shadow of a terrible wood, and two red eyes above a flame-red mouth with yellow teeth. He said a prayer, lifted his spear into the heavens, and the blood-red clouds parted, divided by a shaft of golden light from God, which made the blue beast snarl and recoil, and for a moment he saw the black spot of an ancient wound, knew where to aim his silver spear. And then -
I can sense Saint George is fading as I label my various swatches. I’m in a good place, I’m in the flow, but I need George when I’m actually putting paint to canvas.
I ask him to wait a second while I go down the street, and he says, “Go hunt us a deer for our repast, my gentle lady did me ask; but lo what lions did lurk for her to chance my leaving.”
“I’ll be quick,” I say to him.
It’s a couple blocks, and a dangerous long time to think. I do get mighty thoughtful sometimes, when given the chance. Like, what am I doing with this next piece that is new? That’s what Simone had asked after the last piece I brought to her gallery. Not some color-theory bullshit, she said. What does this piece say that I haven’t heard before?
Sure, yeah, but I mean, the color-theory stuff sells. It’s easy for people to see if it fits next to their living-room ficus, in the light of their edison-bulb chandeliers.
I get a handle of vodka and a couple Diet Cokes for Saint George to mix with.
I start to notice things. A butcher shop’s collage of red and pink meats and an ad for a luxury taxi service. Roughly plastered posters for an upcoming desaturated action film. Various smiling busts posed on a pink beauty salon. On the storefront of a chain cosmetics store a short eco-manifesto in swirling green script. Various graffiti.
I don’t know how any of my work has to do with this. I think about how strange my work would look in my neighborhood. And when a mile over is Simone’s studio, in a better quality of neighborhood, where people are coming in and redoing old flats and apartments and they want to hang some statement piece on the wall. Something to talk about at dinner with their colleagues or when trying to impress their boss’ wife.
As if they would say, you see this, this was done by a local artist who, having shred so many nerves in his hands, asked God, prayed to God the way he did as a kid, to give him wisdom, a vision, some path. And He did! God sent down a warrior-saint to give this artist a subject for his work. And the artist made one painting he was really proud of and didn’t know what to do next, except change some of the positions, use different colors. And this one’s above their buffet from Restoration Hardware.
When I get back to the studio, Saint George is snoring on the futon. I look over my sketches and my color swatches. I make myself a drink.
And then I make another.
Cleave
Judy Darley lives in southwest England. She is the author of short fiction collections The Stairs are a Snowcapped Mountain (Reflex Press), Sky Light Rain (Valley Press) and Remember Me to the Bees (Tangent Books). Her words have been published in anthologies, collections and magazines, and performed on BBC radio and aboard boats, in museums, caves, a disused church, artists’ studios and a repurposed department store. Find Judy at http://www.skylightrain.com;
After Dad packs up and slams out, we can’t afford to stay in our city home so we move to a coastal town where things are cheaper. The new house is half the size of our old flat and most of our stuff stays in boxes piled in the lounge.
Mum says the town’s name, Clevedon, must mean something to do with things being cleaved in two. When I look out from the promenade I see the glimmer of distant hills and towers. Only waves separate us from this other country. Wales. It sounds like a giant sea-creature, or like a baby’s crying. Dad lives there now; on clear days I stand on tiptoe as if there’s a chance I might see him standing among distant wind turbines.
Dad used to call Mum his queen.
Clevedon Pier ends in a turreted building like a crown surrounded by tide-churned water.
There’s a bandstand like a crown, and countless jagged, holey rocks on the shore like the tippy bits of crowns with the gems sucked out.
Rummaging through boxes for my bike helmet, I find Mum’s tarnished tiara from her long-ago wedding day.
“Where shall I put this?” I ask, dangling it from one wrist like a big bangle.
She shrugs and hangs it from the fence that separates our garden from the road.
The bridal tiara sits there for three days, buffeted by gales. When it disappears, Mum grins in a way that doesn’t match her eyes and says a dog-fox must have taken it for his vixen bride.
That evening, one of the local kids cycles slowly past with Mum’s crown caught in his tangled hair. He laughs when he sees me staring.
I shout after him the worst C-word I know, the word my dad called my mum just before he left for good.
Octopus Day
Liana Johnson is a writer living in New York City. Her work appears in The South Shore Review and MoonPark Review. She is a reader at Black Fox Literary Magazine and has an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts.
It’s an octopus day, and that means we don’t have to go into the office. I lay on the couch watching the long tentacles slither down my living room windows, suction cups kissing the glass. Many people hate when the octopuses emerge from the East River overnight and take refuge on buildings or parking garages or even in the middle of the street, but the creatures don’t bother me. I like working from home, and octopus days are better than smokey days, and much, much better than rat days.
My husband is an essential worker so he had to go out today. I’m not worried for his safety; the octopuses rarely harm people. They mostly block up traffic and the subway tunnels, creating a city-wide gridlock, so the mayor instructs anyone who can stay home to do so. Employers hate it, but what can we do?
In our messaging app, my little green dot indicates that I’m working as I doodle tentacles on a notepad. I’m still thinking about my conversation with Jesse last night. We’re trying to decide if we want to have children. We’ve talked on and off about it over the years, but last night was the first time we discussed granular details, like which schools are best, when we might start trying, and what vacations we should take now while unburdened. Would we need a bigger apartment? One that isn’t in a city that gets overtaken by octopuses a few times a year? But every place has its issues and dangers. I can tell Jesse knows what he wants, but the pressure of the decision feels like a weight dragging me underwater.
My coworker sends me a message, and I react with an emoji. Then I make myself an early lunch. Returning to the living room, I nearly drop the plate: A big googly eye presses against the window. I shut the shade and eat.
Still unable to concentrate, I start a ride on my indoor bike. The bike faces a window, with the East River in the distance. The water is a greenish color. That’s what makes the octopuses retreat first from the ocean to the river and then from the river to land. The green usually clears up in a day or two. When the octopuses return to the water a few of their bodies are left behind, moist and sluggish in the summer humidity. City workers scrape them up and load them into garbage trucks and then tip them back into the river for other critters to snack on.
Sometimes when you escape one danger, another gets you.
About halfway through my workout, the instructor starts laying on the positive reinforcement. “You’re already better than your best excuse.” “You showed up.” “Whatever you’re dealing with today, you’ve allowed yourself this twenty minutes—just for you.”
A tentacle slides down the glass in front of me as the ride ends. The instructor tells me to reach my hands up and then exhale as I let them drop by my sides. Then do it again.
As I get off the bike, the tentacle unsuctions from the glass and dangles wildly. For a moment I want to open my window, grasp the slippery appendage, and pull the octopus inside. But after a few untethered seconds, the tentacle flicks up out of sight. My gaze lands on the neighboring buildings, each with a few octopuses inching up and down their façades, and then on the big blue forever sky above us all.
The Saddest Donkey
Brian Mihok is a writer and filmmaker. His work has appeared in Fast Company, American Short Fiction, Cagibi, The Disconnect, Vol 1 Brooklyn, and elsewhere. His novel, The Quantum Manual of Style, was released in 2013. He also co-founded and edits matchbook, an online literary magazine of short prose. Find him, his writing, and his films at brianmihok.com.
Clay’s legs were short even for a donkey. He seemed to have a sense of this as he often spent time with the long-legged horses. At least this is what Famke figured each time she went out to feed the chickens. There’s Clay, she would think, wishing he was a horse. One time he was making such a wheezing racket that Famke went out to the stable to see what was the matter. Clay was nowhere in sight, but each horse was in its respective stall. Sapphire, Sugar, Aurora, and Moose were all standing there, still like four tall brown statues.
Out back she spotted Clay digging at the earth. She asked him what was wrong as she approached, placing a hand on his stringy mane. He let out a screeching bray. Famke shushed him gently. Near his front hoof was a rut but inside the rut was a figurine. She bent to her knee and picked it up. It was a donkey, made of wood and painted gray. You don’t like this? she asked. He hummed as if to agree. She could feel on her arm the hot breath through his nostrils. In that moment she felt a deep sorrow for Clay, for even now, as he should be resting, perhaps snacking on the scrub just beyond the corral, he was uneasy and desperate, longing to cover up even this smallest reminder of what he was.
Pick Me Girl
Sabrina Hicks lives in Arizona with her family. Her work has appeared in both Best Small Fictions and Best Micro Fiction anthologies, Wigleaf’s Top 50, as well as numerous journals, both online and in print. More of her stories can be found at sabrinahicks.com.
When the good old boys started to disappear, everyone went to the pick-me-girl to find out what she knew, though not telling was part of the code—no narcs, no spilling secrets, everything delivered should be done so brutally, especially honesty. And never trust anything that doesn’t sting.
The search parties combed the forest with dogs while the pick-me-girl watched from behind the trees.
I can drink you all under the table, she said when she joined the campfire of men.
Never seen a girl pack them away like that.
They told her to smile and she did. They told her to lose weight and she strived for a thin disappearance. They told her to keep quiet and she silenced herself with cleaning. They asked her how to get girls and she told them where to move, where to touch. Practice on me, she said, as they murmured their love for her in her ear, their bodies hard against hers, pressing in a way that almost convinced her it was enough to hold their vulnerabilities in the dark.
They didn’t know she’d spent her childhood under the spit and rage of men, accustomed to bulging veins, the red ripened skin of violence peeling away from its flesh like the tomatoes her mother boiled in an effort to please the appetites of men. So many boyfriends, step-fathers, brothers and step-brothers, and her—pick-me-girl—the chosen one picked to diffuse their hair-triggered temperaments, set off by a misplaced pack of smokes, a dirty sink, empty fridge, a football loss, money clips short of a bill, and the aching disappointment that life tucked in their joints, raised to believe the world was theirs for the taking. Pick-me-girl ducked and weaved her way through the bramble of violence, shrinking herself into landscape. She told herself to blend, enter at the right moment—timing is everything.
There were plenty of moments when she failed and ended up with a busted lip, a bruised rib or eye to show for her misstep. She kept track of them in a tiny book until there was no room left, no place to store what her bones could no longer handle. Her timing had been off as of late. More and more she found herself alone, wandering the woods, following the bloom of moss-covered trees, catching deer slip undetected along the dissecting brooks. She’d watch the slick mirrored sky stretch clouds until they broke, a piece made whole upon its breakage. She felt the spongy ground lead and slope to a ring of rocks circling a hidden well, endless black spiraling into a pupil, and she knew she found the eye of the forest. A place where the brutality of nature, muted and underestimated, cloaked in beauty, rich in oxygen, is both muse and warden. There wouldn’t be a trace of her leading them, picking them off one by one for the fall. How the birds sang sweetly over their cries. How the clouds darkened the ground for the swallow, and the trees, accustomed to the swift blade of an axe, shook their leaves. And the girl, handpicked, chosen at last.
Oscars
Khalid Mitchell is a black and queer writer from Charleston, SC. He is a 2024 Periplus Fellow.
The fifth graders started a club called Oscars. They go around calling each other Oscar and say it’s an exclusive thing. I have a lot of fifth grade friends that don’t talk to me anymore because they’re Oscars now. Ethan’s an Oscar. Danny’s an Oscar. Jason’s an Oscar.
At recess, in a fringe part of the playground, they draw a big rectangle in the sand called The Tank and they stay within the confines of The Tank the whole time. And they run around. They tackle each other. They perform what look like old-school wrestling moves on each other. Sam-Oscar pins his arms to his sides and lunges forward, writhing in the air like a blubbering fish, and topples Ethan-Oscar over. They both fall to the ground laughing. I want to be an Oscar too.
After recess ends, I go up to Ethan-Oscar and ask.
No, you can’t be an Oscar. Too weak. Your bones would probably break, like this. (He picks up a twig and snaps it. I flinch.) Plus, there’s no more room in The Tank for another Oscar. And we don’t like change. We don’t like change.
The next day at recess, I watch them again. This time, they aren’t running around. They’re still in The Tank, but they’re standing in a circle. In the center is Sam-Oscar and Jeremy-Oscar. Sam-Oscar crouches down, then rushes forward, tackling Jeremy-Oscar to the ground. Everyone cheers. They both get up again. This time, Jeremy-Oscar crouches down, then rushes forward, tackling Sam-Oscar to the ground. Everyone cheers. They go back and forth like this for minutes on end. Tackling each other. Getting back up. Sand on their knees, scraped up and rubbing their eyes. Sam-Oscar crouches down, rushes forward, tackles Jeremy-Oscar. But the circle has opened up just a little bit. Sam-Oscar used too much force. They both go hurtling over the bounds of The Tank. The line drawn in the sand is broken. When they look up, the Oscars are staring at them, furious.
Everyone Deserves a Holiday
Craig Foltz is the author of three books of poetry and/or prose (via Ugly Duckling and Compound) and his work has appeared in numerous anthologies and journals (Conjunctions, Fence, The Diagram,etc.). His forthcoming book, "Petroglyphs" will be out sometime in 2024. He currently lives and works underneath a somewhat lonely mountain on the west coast of New Zealand.
Words are a mix of toxins and venom warding off meaning, but generally harmless to humans. Still, even with their assistance, it's difficult to assess and articulate things clearly. You reach out to three writing professors to tell you how you might use language to more clearly represent the world.
The first writing professor is a corduroy-wearing killjoy. He claims to come from a distant future where face recognition is no longer necessary. He gives you the good news first. “Everything,” he says, “Is totally fucked.”
His limbs are detachable and he hovers in the air a little bit above you—his arms and legs have been removed, and slung into a sort of leather rucksack which is draped from his shoulder. His face is obscured by a pink mist that hangs over the ocean every night. There is the faint smell of sulfur in the background. He says, “Your only hope of survival is to hold onto how things were in your past.”
A few items pop up in your recollections, emissaries of a distant youth you barely remember—tree bark, micrographia, orange construction cones and chicken coop wire.
The second writing professor is neither human nor sea creature, but some glowing, hybridized version of both. There is a faint hint of seawater about her and the illusion of a seabed underneath her feet. She has luminescent blue and green tentacles which extend and retract as she talks. She uses these motions to indicate that it is your turn to transform.
“Your identity, much like your conception of language, is a crutch.” She scuttles across the room in one motion and adds, “My suggestion? Begin to familiarize yourself with incremental shifts in time and other, more concrete items.”
The beginning of your transformation, it turns out, is the most difficult. First you must stop looking for yourself in others. Then you must become a partial variant of yourself. The writing professor assists by holding the mirror for you while you rearrange your hair.
“You must remove every unnecessary item from your life, including the people you know and the memories you associate with them.”
You disregard most of her advice, except the part about dissolving your body in a greenish alkaline solution, something she happily provides.
The third writing professor is neither literate nor professorial. She says, “Only dreamers can become radicalized.” She tells you that she is a dreamer herself, but, because her dreams are monochrome and lack depth, she doesn't qualify. She tells you to reach out towards the person next to you, even if they pretend that their sovereignty is absolute.
But now that she mentions it, you realize there is no person next to you. “That person is gone,” you add. But you aren't certain if you are talking about yourself now, or one of the writing professors, or somebody else who was there previously. In truth, now that you look around, all four (or five) of you have gone, simply vanished.
The wind gently modulates your form and soon you find that you have stopped breathing; an action that—despite its obvious benefits—seems like it is just far too much work. Your physiological material is transitory, perhaps printed. This is where the world goes wrong. Something is not quite right here.
And so, even sleep begins to elude you. Your body has become hollowed out and replaced by a small, glowing inner filament. Something soft and pleasing to the touch. You allow the reflections of a particular beam of light to envelop you and in so doing you become the pink mist you sometimes see hanging over the ocean, levitating above the waves and gently transmitting a series of signals to someone you are no longer in contact with.
Liars
Patricia Q. Bidar is a working class writer from the Port of Los Angeles area. Patricia’s book of short works, Pardon Me For Moonwalking, is coming from Unsolicited Press. She lives with her family and unusual dog outside of Oakland, California. Twitter is @patriciabidar. See more at patriciaqbidar.com
Our mother took us to see Great-Grandma Rosa and her best friend, Isabel. Rosa had recently lost her longtime beau, Big Pete Zamora. Isabel's husband died years before. Liver. Now the two women lived in adjoining bungalows in parched San Diego.
I was struck by the pretty curved concrete walkway embedded with old crockery. The chickens loose in back. My mother had told us on the ride over what beauties the two ladies had been in their New Mexico youth. About a handsome stranger had come to a town dance, and that after the dance, he’d removed his boots and had chicken feet. That Rosa’s pitted cheek was from a jealous woman who’d cast on her the evil eye. That Isabel affixed needles taped in the shape of a cross above the door to her bedroom. The devil came and had sex with her at night.
Great-Grandma Rosa fixed us tortillas she’d made, and scrambled eggs from the chickens. The yolks were bright orange. We asked about two silent men walking from the backyard to the front and my mother translated Isabel’s answer: she rented a couple of rooms to workers from Mexico.
Great-Grandma Rosa was religious in her old age. Maybe it was Isabel’s influence. But she'd hung up her dancing shoes for good when Big Pete died. He was fat and his legs were made of wood, but he could really move.
When we went to dinner at McDonald's that night, Great-Grandma Rosa asked me if I'd finished my burger, and I said yes. Really, I'd hidden half of it in the wrapper. With her apple doll mouth, Isabel told us that all liars went to hell. She said this in Spanish. Our mother translated, trying not to smile. Then we dropped the ladies off. The two in their black dresses tottered the winding path to Great-Grandma Rosa’s door. My mother and brother bickered over the radio dial. I watched the silhouette of the widows embracing behind the bedroom drape.
How Do Crows Say I Love You?
Beth Sherman has an MFA in creative writing from Queens College, where she teaches in the English department. Her stories have been published in Portland Review, Blue Mountain Review, Tangled Locks Journal, 100 Word Story, Fictive Dream, Flash Boulevard, Sou’wester and elsewhere. Her work will be featured in The Best Microfictions 2024. She’s also a Pushcart, Best Small Fictions, and multiple Best of the Net nominee.
The dead bird has been lying in the bushes for eight days now. You know you should get a pair of rubber gloves and a shoe box, but every time you walk over you end up crouching next to him, talking until you run out of words and you finally go home.
In the bushes by the side of the road, a crow, lying on its side, its face mashed, one wing torn loose, the other mangled. Hit by a car. Murdered.
You and he communicate well. One caw means hello. Two means where are you? Three means danger – a hawk gliding overhead, the kid down the street who likes to throw rocks. Four means nice to see you again.
He doesn’t have a mate.
You listen closely. Hear coos, rattles, clicks. A secret language only you understand.
When you say hello, he mimics you. Caw-lo.
When he walks, he waddles.
He never sounds rushed.
He appreciates you.
His name is Thoreau. A lively fellow with glossy black wings and an eye for mischief. You feed him almonds and green peppers. Sometimes blueberries.
You walk out with your coffee to say hello.
His voice a muted banjo string, like a frog with a cough.
Out of nowhere, you hear it first thing every morning from the top of the sycamore. A rambling, improvised song like a treetop sonata. You grab your binoculars and look out the window. There, on the third branch from the top.
Crow.
Take It Like a Medicine
Gaby V. Everett is a mixed-race writer from Sin City. She possesses a BA in creative writing from Columbia College Chicago and an affinity for coffee at midnight. She also enjoys hiding secrets in plain sight; they can be found in Allium, Dream Noir, Hot Pot Magazine, The Acentos Review, Fatal Flaw, and more. She is currently editorial staff for Mulberry Literary. You can find her on Instagram @gaby.v.everett
I take my fun seriously. Lethal-like serious. Extra-shiny dangerous. Baton-and-blazer serious. Like the world is going to wither if I don't get these launch codes to the head honcho; everyone needs to be nuked into Saturday with an extra shot of something saucy worn under sweatpants. Or, fuck it—go commando.
I take my fun seriously—clowning around is no joke. I never went to college, but I saw a plane go by in a dirty mirror as if it was flying backward, and it told me all I needed to know. I’m a professional professer in the sheets: I’ll call your name on the good and bad, make you laugh until at least one orifice ejects something pure, something ecstatic.
I take my fun like a seven-year-old on Adderall, that electric-blue gem coated with the taste of batteries. I snort it; I cook it; I inject it with a tourniquet taut between my teeth. The shivers and comedown are a glow—I can feel the halos wheeze above us when we sing show-tunes and commercial jingles, lamenting the resurrection of cable via the ghost of streaming. They’re implementing ads now, trying to worm back into our heads and wallets.
I take my fun like I am staring down the eyesore of eternity. What else is left when we're stripped and thrown into the cesspool of pleather, MDF boards, and mirco-phones/plastics/transactions/aggressions? When life knocks at the door, who am I to stay hidden on tiptoes behind the peephole? When I was a child, I carried a knife to greet strangers in the doorway; who's to say I can't take it to the sunshine, out to the damp grass and blooming birds of paradise? I’ll cut their heads off and place them in a Goodwill vase. I will immortalize them with half-peeled, nubby crayons like a little girl, for I know the answer to living forever: I take it seriously, take it like a medicine.
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Melissa Darcey Hall is a writer and high school English teacher in Southern California. Her work has appeared in Gulf Coast Journal, no tokens, phoebe, Nimrod, and elsewhere.
One week in Paris, Katia bartered with her boyfriend. There was an airline deal. She took French in high school. She knew someone who knew someone whose cousin owned an apartment with a spare room in which she could crash for free.
None of this was true, of course. All of it would go on a credit card she would pay in installments for the next eight months, but it was a tidier answer than explaining what she hoped to find: another version of herself living a life where things had gone differently. An Oz or Wonderland or metaverse where she never slid into that green convertible last summer; where she went to Paris for her semester abroad; where she hadn’t confused complacency for contentment.
Paris, Katia imagined, would be magical. She would buy a one-euro baguette and share her bounty with the birds under the Eiffel Tower; experience an epiphany regarding the meaning of life in the d'Orsay; fall asleep to the sounds of the quaintly European ambulance siren—an out-of-tune French horn wail as opposed to the pitchy scream of its American counterpart—and wake up to the faint pattering of piano keys from an upstairs neighbor. She would drink red wine that slipped down her throat with the fluidity of water. She would find a criminally underpriced first edition of a Victor Hugo novel at one of those wooden huts along the Seine and then get a haircut that suited her face perfectly.
Yes, she would become whole again and cosmopolitan, confident in voicing her opinions on art and politics and gluten, both in English and en Français. She would forget about The Incident from last year, the heat of the leather seats in the green convertible, the cramping and bleeding the doctor warned would happen, her mother’s accusation on repeat: what an ugly thing you are.
Mostly, she wouldn’t be the girl she left behind in California: an assistant manager at the local Best Western with a failing ceramics shop on Etsy, bored but too terrified to return to art school and finish her degree some six years after dropping out, and living with a boyfriend frustratingly content with a life so small Katia could hold it in her palm.
This trip will be good for me. For us, she said the morning she left for Paris.
Wherever you go, there you are, her boyfriend said.
Her boyfriend was in AA, where they brandished mantras like the chips they collected. Katia hated these cryptic phrases, especially the way he tossed this one at her with increasing frequency lately.
She’d ended the affair with the man with the convertible the same way she ended the pregnancy: decisively before her emotions had the chance to catch up to her. In return, her boyfriend had gotten sober. A clean slate for both of them. And yet the bathroom mirror remained shattered from her boyfriend’s fist, they never played music on the stereo anymore, and when they had sex, his eyes roamed her body as if searching for the fingerprints of the other man.
Then at least I’ll be in Paris, she threw back at him.
But Paris felt haunted. It was too quiet this time of year, the tree branches bare and arthritic, the city still and gray. Shadows crowded the street like hooded menaces whenever she took a walk in the late afternoon. Jet lag fogged her head for days and the furnace in her Airbnb rattled all night like a baseball bat dragged against pipes, back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and—
The d’Orsay was closed for renovations, she couldn’t afford a first edition anything, and the wine was too dry and earthy and what she imagined a fresh grave smelled like. Only the hair appointment happened, though the result was a copper bob with bangs instead of blonde highlights with Brigitte Bardot layers, her high school French rustier than she remembered.
When Katia looked in the salon mirror, she didn’t recognize herself. She searched her reflection for signs of familiarity—her uneven eyebrows, the single, dark freckle under her left eye, the faint scar on her right cheek. Instead of finding comfort in the change, she found it unsettling, like she’d stumbled into one of those horror movies where, instead of serial killers and burglars and zombie infestations, an invisible presence lurked in the corner, just out of frame, incapable of eliminating with brute force.
And then the week was over. Her flight home arrived late in the evening, the plane cutting through ashen clouds as it descended onto the black tarmac. She didn’t look for her boyfriend in his pickup truck outside the airport. He would not be waiting for her at the exit, would not be awake when she stumbled into the pitch black apartment.
In the bathroom, she flicked on the light. Her boyfriend hadn’t replaced the mirror yet. The broken glass fractured her reflection into six faces, a Hydra doomed to the gates of the Underworld but never crossing over. She looked closer at this still-unfamiliar woman, all twelve eyes staring back.
Who are you, she whispered, and the woman in the mirror mouthed it back.
To Photograph
Giselle Gerbrecht is a writer and photographer based in the American West. A proud Jersey Girl, she is intrigued by contradictions, matrilineal bloodlines, and the fallibility between memory and pictures. Her work has been published in The New Flash Fiction Review. She was recently named a finalist in the Very Short Fiction contest at the Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival. She is currently at work on her debut novel.
Because to freeze time is to ward off death, even if only for a fraction of a second. Because she refuses to forget.
Because light is magic. Because life is a composition; a rule of thirds. Because images are symbols for understanding humankind. Because we don’t always need words to communicate. Because an honest picture can stand in for the rest of your life.
Because the one she loved could not see. Because forgiveness is a science, the perfect exposure. Because images are never truly honest. Because something is always being cropped out of frame. Because there is chaos in family snapshots. Because we cannot take back what we print. Because nitrate film is highly flammable. Because art is meant to be destroyed.
Because she made two humans. Because her children became the artist statement. Because an infant cannot remember their own likeness. Because a film canister can be recycled to hold baby aspirin and hand lotion and loose beads. Because the camera made him behave. Because the lens is the eye of god. Because the aperture is a pupil and the shutter is a blink.
Because she wants to see her life chronologically, at the end. Because a camera beats against a chest like a second heart. Because the past is something to hold in the hand, something to flip through. Because she wants you to know she was here. Because the dead can still see.
Taken
Ryan Bender-Murphy received an MFA in poetry from the University of Texas at Austin and currently lives in Seattle, Washington. His fiction has appeared in Entropy's "The Birds," Hobart, Hominum Journal, and Johnny America. He is also the author of the poetry chapbook First Man on Mars (Phantom Books, 2013). Find him on Instagram at ryan.bender.murphy.
They attended movies that nobody had ever heard of, at times when most people were working or asleep, so as not to attract the bad actors, so that they were not targets of bad acting, merely observers.
They never sat together. They told each other that husband and wife can sit apart because their love is strong and made stronger by distance. He kept to the back row, then, and she sat front and center. If something bad happened, he’d see it unfold, or he’d be taken out silently, with nobody knowing, which would be less embarrassing for him – to be dragged out and slaughtered, kidnapped, beaten to a pulp, while everyone continued watching the movie, as if a sacrifice for the greater good; that’d be ideal. Conversely, she wouldn’t know catastrophe until it was too late, or it wouldn’t even bother her, depending on how bad it was, or she’d have time to escape.
Their arrangement offered them different angles of the same films, which offered them different angles of the same murders, same war crimes, same heists, same failed states, same broken marriages, same drug-addled parents . . . Everything was criminal on the screen. And it was a form of escapism to believe that, like at a zoo, the crime could not come out and wallop them, not even during the 3-D flicks.
One day, however, the number of theaters started shrinking – people were going out less, making due with rentals and streams, and those who could go out were packed together, crowding spaces that once had been cozy and safe. She and he noticed, but what choice did they have? Going to the movies was how they kept breathing, heads beneath smoke. To stay home was to close the coffin lid.
She later texted him on a weeknight long before the trailers ran, “Strange men are coming closer. I can smell their cologne. And an old woman wearing a mask keeps calling me dearie.” And he texted back, “Don’t move.” He then joined her at the bottom of the auditorium. And at some point, though it is hard to say exactly when, given how natural it felt, she held his hand, and a little while after, though how long after is anyone’s guess, since it happened without any consideration, he leaned his head onto her shoulder.
Darkness eventually confined all types into the same room, types on first dates and high on mushrooms and babysitting kids, lonely types, elderly types, natives and immigrants, rich and poor. The screen was like a set of eyes for all of them to see with, perhaps as it is with angels looking down from heaven, or witches into cauldron water – it was a single plane operating as sight for the horde. Yes, she and he were part of a horde now. And it no longer mattered what they were trying to avoid because the theater was always full.
Juliets
Adelina Sarkisyan is a poet, writer, and editor. With written work appearing in CRAFT Literary, Atticus Review, hex literary, Rust + Moth, HAD & elsewhere, she is a multiple “Best of the Net” and Pushcart Prize nominee. A therapist in a former life, she has certificates in Jungian fairy tale analysis at the Assisi Institute and is on the editorial team at Undivided, which supports families raising children with disabilities. Sarkisyan was born in Armenia, once upon a time, and is a first-generation immigrant daughter. She lives and writes in Los Angeles.