Desire

Hugh Behm-Steinberg’s prose can be found in X-Ray, Grimoire, Joyland, Jellyfish Review, Atticus Review and Pank. His short story "Taylor Swift" won the 2015 Barthelme Prize from Gulf Coast, and his story "Goodwill" was picked as one of the Wigleaf Top Fifty Very Short Fictions of 2018. A collection of prose poems and microfiction, Animal Children, was published by Nomadic Press in January, 2020. He teaches writing and literature at California College of the Arts.

Desire manifests, turning into a flower-filled boat so that it may feel expressive upon the water, a specific pond with cattails and lily flowers, bullfrogs and dragonflies getting it on. Desire likes specifics: a couple of kids on the shore, one of them has a chemistry set. Natalie fills test tube after test tube with pond water; her brother Stephen is playing with the microscope. There’s a blanket and their mom with her boyfriend, a couple of clouds above, sandwiches and beer and boxes of slides.

Among the flowers on the boat Desire sits next to a kettle of gasoline, which wasn’t there before, but now it is, because Desire wants, and Desire gets. The wind puffs the sail, Desire scuds across the lake. But to separate is to forget who you are, Desire knows and wants to forget, so the boat forgets, and, realizing how flammable wooden boats crammed full of flowers can be, gets nervous and reconsiders its actions, of taking Desire and a kettle of gasoline out on the pond for a ride. “I know you’re hiding a motor,” Desire says. “I know you’ve always wanted to go faster.”

“Stephen, go see what your sister is doing,” Mom says.

Not knowing what to say to beautiful Desire sitting next to it, the kettle says, “I am a kettle.” Stephen asks Natalie what she has in those test tubes. She shows him the water she collected, algae green with little flitting things. “I bet this’ll look really cool under a microscope,” he says.

“I am Desire,” says Desire, to the kettle, to the boat. “I am going to put my hand on your handle now, and I’m going to open your spout.” Mom looks around to see if anyone is watching. She leans over and sucks on her boyfriend’s earlobe. “That tickles,” he says.

The brother takes out a slide that has a little dent in its center, and an eyedropper. He puts the slide in the microscope and places a drop. “That’s so funny,” laughs the kettle, “I just look like a kettle, just like you only look like a person, but both of our names are Desire.”

“I know,” says Desire.

“But I’m also full of gasoline,” says the kettle. “Are you full of gasoline, too?” Underneath the microscope lens protozoa come into focus, skittering around. “Take a look,” Stephen says.

“Isn’t this park beautiful?” the boat says, trying to distract Desire from her conversation about gasoline. “The flowers are so beautiful,” says the boat. “Look how well built I am! And have you seen the turtles around here?”

“Someone doesn’t know who they are,” Desire says. “Someone still thinks their name is Stop.”

“The little squiggling things look so weird,” Natalie says. “They’re everywhere,” says Stephen. “That’s what everything is made of.”

“I’m Desire too,” says the Boat. “I just think we ought to linger among all the beauty that surrounds us.”

“You’ve always been the one I wanted,” sighs the boyfriend, leaning into Mom after kissing her on the mouth.

“That’s nice,” says Desire. “but all I want to do is to catch fire.”

New Contact

Robin Bissett is a Teaching Artist and Writer from Central Texas. She enjoys absorbing and sharing stories and strengthening her surrounding literary communities. She tweets @rtbissett.

My emotional support rabbit is very dear to my heart. I adopted her nearly three years ago, and she has guided me through many panic attacks and has loved me for little in return.

Though, recently, Rabbit laid down on top of my iPhone 7 and broke it.

She is a Flemish Giant and weighs around fifteen pounds. I doubted she could have inflicted any lasting damage, but after she hopped on and off my phone, I found I was no longer able to receive or send iMessages.

Maybe it was her body heat or maybe she touched certain trigger points with her large feet, but something inside my phone reacted poorly. I watched a few YouTube tutorials and pushed the buttons I was formerly unfamiliar with to try and fix it, but nothing worked. So, I made sure Rabbit was safe and sound in her crate, and I drove to the nearest T Mobile.

There, I met a salesman named Lucas. He was unconventionally attractive with dark scarab eyes and a fraying mustache. He listened to the story of my broken phone with no discernible reaction. After I had nervously blabbered on for some time, he reached out to take my phone from my hand. While inspecting it for exterior damage and poking around the different blue, green, and red icons, he asked me if I was registered on a family plan.

No, I said. I have my own subscription.

Are you single? he asked, his eyes flitting over the cluster of dating apps that I had installed on my homepage.

I flushed and nodded. While balancing my phone on the palm of his left hand, he used his right hand to materialize his own phone, it seemed, from thin air.

He handed me back my phone and quickly clicked a few buttons on his own device.

Mere seconds later, my phone screen lit up with a new message from Maybe: Lucas.

There, he said. I’ve fixed your phone, and now you have my number.

I was pleased but surprised, not used to earning this kind of attention. I didn’t enjoy going out much as I was reluctant to startle Rabbit and I’s steady routine. I believed that some people, like Lucas, were performers, but Rabbit and I preferred to watch.

Thank you, I said. For fixing my phone, I mean.

I see you have an older iPhone model, Lucas added.

He gestured toward the sales wall of colorful rectangles of various sizes. Are you interested in upgrading today? he asked.

No, thank you, I said.

Lucas walked me out to my car, and I drove away feeling happy.

At home, I held Rabbit and stared at my iPhone, which projected a gripping magnetism. I could text Lucas or I could delete his number, but he would still have mine. After I finished brushing Rabbit’s soft brown fur, he texted me again and asked if we could hang out later. I tried to hold off for as long as I could, but my phone was a siren, never fully letting me go. I made it around an hour and a half before I texted him back, agreeing that he could come over.

Lucas came over that evening with a bottle of wine, and we quickly finished it and opened another. He didn’t ask many questions and didn’t seem too interested in checking out my home or in getting to know more about my life, but he did enjoy meeting Rabbit. He said he had always wanted one of his own. He asked if he could hold her, and I let him. He pressed his nose to hers, and she seemed to like him. After a while, I suggested we let Rabbit rest.

He opened his mouth as if to protest, and I leaned forward to kiss him.

At some point, after we had spent a lengthy amount of time making out on my bed, I must have fallen asleep, lulled into a sense of safety by the bottles of red wine and his body heat. When I woke up, he was gone. He was the first visitor I’d entertained in several months, and I found myself feeling a bit lonely.

I smoothed my hair and went to check on Rabbit. She wasn’t in her crate.

Frantic, I paced the length of my apartment and began to search. She hadn’t stuffed herself into the nook of the TV stand, wasn’t perched among my succulent forest, and wasn’t scurrying around my laptop setup. She was gone.

I called Lucas, and it went straight to his voicemail. I thanked him for the wine and for our time together, trying not to project just how anxious I felt. I explained Rabbit was missing, and then I asked him point blank. Did you take my rabbit? Did you take her?

I hung up and configured my phone to ring.

I returned to my room and searched underneath my bed, checked the empty pockets of my shoe organizer in my closet, and rifled through my laundry hamper to no avail.

At last, I pulled open the slightly agape drawer of my cubby nightstand, and there she was. Her big eyes peered back at me, almost accusingly. I held her to my chest and savored her damp wood chip scent, woozy with relief.

Rabbit and I climbed into bed. A drop of light danced like a wayward moth on the edge of my cell phone, and I reached for it to see if Lucas had texted, but there were no new notifications. I refreshed my messages just in case. Still, none. I climbed into bed and fell asleep cradling Rabbit in one hand and my phone in the other.

The Country Stores Which Are Now Closed

JL Bogenscheider has had work published in a number of print and online journals, including Ellipsis, Cosmonauts Avenue, The Interpreter's House, Necessary Fiction, PANK and Ambit. Their chapbook, 'Fears For The Near Future', published under the name C.S. Mierscheid, is available from Neon Books.

FORTE’S

…the sort of place that was old when I was new: a relic from another age; the phrases bygone days and golden-era applied. My father taught me to shoot pool in the back room, then treated me to ice-cream in the parlor – a generous bowl of soft-serve served by Giuseppe himself – while he drank coffee and dotted ash across the melamine.

It never changed, which was part of its appeal and the reason for its fate. It only ever served coffee and ice-cream, and eventually its regulars died out, until only Giuseppe was left, polishing the urn, tinkering with the soft-serve machine, wiping down the melamine and gazing forlornly out the window.

One day it was closed, another day it was sold, and after an industrious few months, a new business opened on the premises, which called itself – I swear – Bygone Days, selling items described as vintage, but whose provenance could never be sworn. Later, even that closed down, and it became the shell for a series of restaurateurs to try their hand that many of us refused to eat at even once.

FIRST REGAL

…of course, it had a real name, but we only ever called it the Flea Pit. Some of us knew how to climb up the fire escape and slip into the balcony undetected, but only for the Rs – we had our limits – because without a ticket we couldn’t get into the lobby, which was where the soda counter was sold and the popcorn.

Before the main feature, someone would come round with a tray of ice-creams, then do the same part-way through, when the reel was changed. It went like this until the end, even when digital film was standard, and there was no need to pause the action or change much of anything. My brother had a brief stint as an ice-lady, even when the embarrassment outweighed the income, but we came from stock that emphasized the value – the power – of a wage, and he was generous to his friends.

It lost business to the out-of-town multiplexes and the site was bought out by a funeral firm. Even now, the company is known to everyone as the Flea Pit, even to those who never knew it as anything else. Some things change. Some things can’t.

STAR FOODS

(after Ethan Canin)

…and then there was the long-dormant and foreclosed Star Foods, which had been my father’s place of business until it lowered its shutters for good in the face of rising and unassailable competition from box-marts and shopping malls. The name had nothing to do with our family, but referred instead to the yellow neon star he’d installed upon the roof that revolved and illumined day and night, my father’s intention being for it to become a beacon, seen from far and wide, eventually becoming a landmark that would, in his lifetime, ensure its place in local lore.

But Star Foods wasn’t nearly prominent enough, and our father didn’t figure on certain zoning restrictions being loosened in order to allow several hi-rise apartments to spring up in the vicinity almost overnight, so that it became the least prominent building of all, and the chi-chi new residents kept complaining about the insistent hum and light, and yet my father – stubborn and aggrieved – resisted, so that he went back and forth to court to defend his primacy and spent more money on legal fees in support of the business than on the business itself.

When it finally folded, no-one wanted to buy up such aprime real estate and so there it remains, abandoned and unillumined, a symbol of my father’s failure and fate (and even on the day of his funeral, when certain sentimental members of the Chamber of Commerce tried to arrange for the star to be lit up one last time as the cortege passed, they found the neon gas inside its many-pointed tubes dissipated; its elements burned out long ago).

The Cat Funeral

Dan Brotzel’s first collection of short stories, Hotel du Jack, is published by Sandstone. He is also co-author of a comic novel with Unbound, Kitten on a Fatberg. Two of his stories have recently received Pushcart nominations. 

He won the 2019 Riptide Journal short story competition, was runner-up in the 2019 Leicester Writes contest, and was highly commended in the Manchester Writing School competition 2018. He has words in places like Pithead Chapel, Ellipsis, Reflex Fiction, Cabinet of Heed, Bending Genres, The Esthetic Apostle, Spelk, Ginger Collect and Fiction Pool. 

It was after they’d got back home, and Joe and Ellen had wandered out to the trampoline on the vague promise that Dad might join them at some unspecified point soonish, that the doorbell rang, and the unmistakable silhouette of Ms Vivas loomed through the front door’s frosted glass.

Ms Vivas was an elderly spinster with an elegant cane who fed the neighbourhood foxes, nursed hedgehogs and — rumour had it — was not above trying to steal other people’s cats by wooing them into her garden with food and treats.

Mike quickly saw that she was wobbly with tears. She was carrying something long, covered with a bin bag. Booboo — her Booboo, she kept saying — had passed on.

She’s not your Booboo, was Mike’s first thought. And he never goes into the road. But it was, and he had.

It wasn’t exactly a surprise. All that spring, the cat had been dying. Occupying odd places around the house, assuming awkward, unfamiliar positions of ever greater resignation and submission. Mewing piteously at walls, chasing his tail in painful circles, reversing into futile corners. In the end a car must have got him, because by the time Miss Vivas found him out in the road early that morning, Booboo was already half stiff, one eye hanging out, his mouth tightening into that death-smile familiar from stuffed animals. Mike took the package and wondered how to tell the children.

‘You shouldn’t have told me!’ was Katy’s take. She was furious in her denial. How could he do this to her? Why didn’t he just not mention it? Then it wouldn’t be real.

Joe was more scientific. ‘Where is he now, daddy? Where will he go? Can I see him?’

The discussion was making everyone anxious, so Mike prepared a hole for Booboo underneath the cherry tree, close to where they’d already buried two goldfish in matchboxes and a rigid squirrel Joe had found once in a flowerbed. Booboo remained covered, to prevent Katy having to see the unseeable.

Mike said a few words. Booboo had been a friend to them all, a wonderful cat, and they would miss him always. Katy read a poem she had written. She rhymed ‘kitten’ with ‘little’, and ‘cat’ with ‘gap’, as in ‘you really are a special cat/ Now in our hearts there is a gap’. Her piece of paper, decorated with a picture of a cat surrounded by stars and angels and tooth-fairies, went into the hole with Booboo. Mike had planned for each of them to drop a clod of earth into the hole, but in the end it was he alone who shovelled the clay soil onto the polythene shroud.

We can measure our lives in the deaths of our pets, he thought as he shovelled. A fish death is a small, almost trivial sadness, but the loss of a cat is a hole in our illusions of permanence. Our pets are our teachers, in so many things. Having cats before kids had made him a (slightly) less selfish parent; the departure of a beloved animal is a rehearsal for other, species-specific bereavements.

How many more cats did he have in him? As a child, he liked to ask his granddad to run through all the dogs he’d ever had. At the time it had seemed like an endless list of replaceable canine units, and he’d assumed that his granddad would live for ever; later, he realised there were perhaps half a dozen animals at most, over the course of a ninety-year span.

It was difficult to calibrate the relative sadness of things — especially as Mike was a notorious TV weeper, a man capable of falling apart at an insurance ad involving a confused toddler and a willing poodle — but as they walked back up the garden, Mike found himself crying heavily. BooBoo had touched every part of the house; he had glued them all together, insinuating his slinkily urgent affections into every heart. When the family could agree on nothing else, they could always agree on their love for BooBoo.

He tried to put a consoling arm around Katy, but she pushed it roughly away.

‘When can we dig him up again?’ asked Joe.

Elements of my Undoing

Kate Campbell is a Belfast native living in Ireland. With 3 kids, a husband and an assortment of animals, she writes and paints in between the gaps.

Air

After the dance, you lay beside me in fresh mown hay and told me the names of every star. I was entranced, fluttering like a moth in the lamplight. Later, my fingers traced a message on your back, tried to rake the skin off your bones and the weight of you left me breathless, although the hand over my mouth didn’t help.

Earth

Bitter roots had turned to ashes on my tongue so Mammy wrapped the sheet tight as bark on my swelling trunk and I skulked, red-eyed and mute, seeking shelter in the warmth of her apron. When the priest knocked, she turned her face to the wall and Da, roaring, hurled me out into the muck by the hair. “Take the hoor, for she’s no daughter of mine”.

Water

We are silenced. Nameless. Reduced to the thump and wallop of wet cloth, the hiss of a tap. The mangle gives a muffled shriek of protest as I force a sheet between its clenched teeth and crank the handle. Hard. The steady stream of freezing water can never drown the screams or the thin wails of someone else’s guilt.

Fire

At night I hold my hand over the candle, dance my fingers through the flame, casting spells and dark shadows on the walls, my flesh sears but I cannot cauterise the rage that burns inside my head.

Spirit

Broken. Eventually.

My Baby Husband

Megan Carlson is a writer and nonprofit communications professional living in Chicago. She is a fiction reader for X-R-A-Y Magazine, and her short stories have been featured in Bluestem, Hypertext, The Blue Nib, and others. Find her on Twitter at @MegsCarlson.

You are my husband. I mean, you will be my husband when you’re grown. But right now you are a baby. I don’t know why you came to me this way, fussing in a basket on the porch, smelling like Johnson’s and sour milk. I carried you in from the heat and soothed you as the fan spun lazy circles overhead. I sniffed your downy head and whispered little nothings in your ear. You were mine. 

No one else knows you are my baby husband. In the future, young women will coo, “Your boy is so cute!” and “He looks just like you!” I will roll my eyes, and you will giggle in your stroller. We’ll share conspiratorial laughs later over cereal. As you grow, you will adopt my habits of speech— odd turns of phrase like “grinds my gears” and “get your ducks in a row!” that are cute coming from someone so small. My friends will clap in delight, but never guess how understood I feel in those moments. How appreciated. I’ll feel the same when your chubby hands select some well-worn favorite from the shelf for bedtime story. I’ll fight the urge to squeeze your face between my fingers—to crush your tiny, adorable skull— and settle for tucking the blankets extra snug, just like you like.  

One day, earlier than I expect, you will become embarrassed of your parts. I’ll know by the way your eyes scan the floor when I pass. It will hurt that you are avoiding me, but I will give you space and, when you are ready, I will let you know that you are a beautiful boy. You have no need to be ashamed of who you are. I love who you are.

A few months later, you’ll be gone. The crumpled sheets in your race car bed will tell me all I need to know. I’ll hiccup sobs on the toilet and dog-ear self-help books I have no intention of returning to the library. I’ll take showers so hot they scald my skin. 

Then, I’ll find the note underneath your pillow. “Later, ‘gator.” I’ll dry my eyes. You will be back. And because of the bricks I laid when you were my baby husband— bricks that could have erected a wall or smashed a window— you will be ready. You will invite me in. You will share your secrets. You will hold my hand and kiss me in the park. You will see me. You will stare into my eyes and see me. You will whisper, “I love you,” and I will finally believe you. 

I feel that love now, as you rest your head on my breast, thumb in mouth, eyelids fluttering. I rock you gently. You are so loved. So safe. Remember.

At 5pm

David Calogero Centorbi is a writer living in Detroit, MI. Recently published work in The Daily Drunk, Dreams Walking, Versification, Brown Bag Online, Horror Sleaze Trash, Anti-Heroin Chic, Crow Name, and Crepe & Pen. He can be found here on Twitter: @DavidCaCentorbi.

I would go to my bedroom window and wait to see grandmother on her white and pink Schwinn bicycle ride past on her way to the Medicine Store, as she would call Algers Liquor Store, four blocks from our house.

Grandmother only lived two blocks from us, and mother had already left with the neighbors for bowling night as she did every Friday at 5.

I would wait until around 5:25 or so, then open the window in the den that faced the terrace. I would sit in my father's green leather wingback chair until I smelled the smoke from grandmother’s cigarette.

Once I did, I would go out to the terrace where she would be sitting with her medicine glass and ashtray. Most of the time the wind would be blowing through her long white hair. When that happened, she would close her eyes and hum.

“What did you bring from the Medicine Store?” I would always ask. It was a Snickers bar for me and always Twizzlers Black Licorice for her. Grandmother would grab a piece of licorice and bite a little bit off at a time while she smoked.

“Well, did you bring your glass?”

I always did. It was one of my plastic cups—The Partridge Family or The Monkees on it from the TV shows.

She would open her brown canvas Cowgirl Satchel, as she called it, pull out a cold 7 Up she bought at the liquor store and pour it into my glass—“You know Grandmother doesn’t like to drink alone,” then add a little “tan color” from her bottle that was always wrapped in a brown paper bag.

Sometimes she would bring her cigarette between her fingers to my lips and say,

“Ok, your turn.”

The first time she did that, “because you look so curious,” I coughed. “Oh honey, you took too much.” But after a while, I got good at it. I inhaled just enough to blow out a little smoke, so we could smoke together.

When it started to get dark she had me empty the ashtray into a plastic bag she kept in her satchel. She would leave the empty ashtray and empty glass on the table and walk me up upstairs.

“Well, thank you, honey. Did you enjoy our Happy Hour together?” she would say as she tucked me in.

I would always nod yes.

‘All right now, go to sleep, and if you need me you know where I’ll be.”

Then she would kiss me on the forehead, then on the nose, and then on the lips—I always loved the smell of black licorice on her breath.

Attraction

Deirdre Danklin holds an MFA from Johns Hopkins University. Her flash fiction chapbook was a semi-finalist in this year's Black Lawrence Press Black River Chapbook Competition. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals including Hobart, The Nashville Review, The Jellyfish Review, Longleaf Review, Pithead Chapel, and Typehouse Literary Magazine, among others. Her experimental book review newsletter, Living Book Reviews, was picked up for the month of October by CAROUSEL. She is currently a reader for Fractured Lit. On Twitter @DanklinDeirdre.

My cousin moved to a forest in the Pacific Northwest.

“There are no other Jews in those woods,” I told her on our weekly phone call.

“No, but I can hear the darkness breathe,” she said.

I didn’t understand the appeal of breathing darkness or mossy trees or being all alone, but I had to admit that my cousin’s voice sounded happier over the line. She liked branches so thick that they blotted out the sky. She liked shadows so deep they could hide a body. I, in the illuminated city, was anxious in a way that made me feel virtuous. My street was flooded with lime-sulfur safety lights. I never stood in the dark. I worried that my cousin was lonely.

“No, a man comes to visit me sometimes,” she said.

“A man?”

My cousin had never had a man before. Or a woman. She’d been solitary by choice, I thought. The kind of person who doesn’t feel incomplete on her own.

“Well, he’s made out of moths,” she said.

The man made out of a cloud of white moths visited my cousin’s cabin on evenings when the darkness felt most alive. She waited for him, naked in the night. The woods around her breathed out a darkness so black she couldn’t see her toes. She knew her man was on his way when she heard his body flapping its wings in the still air. He, so white, appearing like stars. His touch like a flower petal falling over and over on her skin.

“So, he’s elusive,” I said.

“No, he comes pretty regularly and he stays a while. White satin moths, specifically, is what he’s made out of. Leucoma salicis.”

We weren’t the kind of cousins that talked about our sex lives. I, long-married, she, uninterested, we talked about our dreams instead. Maybe, I thought, the moth-man was a dream.

“I had a dream that you died in a wildfire,” I told my cousin. I often dreamed that my cousin died, or my husband died, or I died. All of my dreams were little nighttime catastrophes. She, wearing a long gown of white satin, died in a landslide, in an earthquake, she was carried out to sea, she was swallowed up by darkness. I told her every time I had one of these dreams as if by relaying it I could prevent her death. Shine a light. My cousin told me about her dreams too. She kayaked across still waters. She floated in a blue orb of pulsing calm. She was alone in her dreams, but safe.

“It’s too wet here to burn,” she said.

“Would your moth-man fly you to safety?” I asked. “If something terrible happened?”

“I don’t think his wings are strong enough to carry me. Mostly, he just hovers.”

“Why does he keep coming back?” I asked, suspicious of the softness of these visits, of the tranquility of their nights. “What does he want from you?”

“You know, I asked him that,” my cousin said. It was raining on her end of the line. The soft pat pat of water on leaves. The dark green light of her midday. She paused to listen, maybe she forgot I was there.

And Even Still the Blues

Kate Finegan is editor-in-chief of Longleaf Review and novel/novella editor for Split/Lip Press. She lives in Toronto. You can find her at katefinegan.ink and on Twitter @kehfinegan.

You told me blue is usually the last color given a name. Goethe called it the color of “enchanting nothingness;” the Assyrians simply borrowed the word for lapis lazuli and gave it the power to name water and sky. In Icelandic, blue and black share the same name, and when we traveled over that blue and black at night, descended above fingers stretching to the sea as the sun climbed, making a mirror of the pinks and reds; we drove and drove, circled the country too quickly, walked across the black of lava, peered across vast expanses to the blue. Now we look to the sky, the too-bright sun, with tired eyes; we live for dawn and dusk, those smog-emboldened brushstrokes. I used to paint heat, but now all the paint that’s left is blue, stuck in the bottoms of the bottles, so I have to spit to bring it back to life, to make it blue and blue and blue that I can squeeze onto these walls, to cover up this beige. And I painted with a brush until you told me you’d like nothing better than to live surrounded by the whorls of my fingerprints, forever.

Anything Under the Moon

Caroljean Gavin's work has appeared in places such as Barrelhouse, Pithead Chapel, X-Ray Literary Magazine and Bending Genres. She is the editor of "What I Thought of Ain't Funny," an anthology of short fiction based on the jokes of Mitch Hedberg published by Malarkey Books. She can be found on Twitter: @caroljeangavin

Trampling the asphalt highway in a milk white, cream thick, sedan stinking of gasoline from the filling station. I had made myself glossy like the Pall Mall ads in one of the TV Guide Magazines Pop shuffled round the coffee table. Eventually they were all used as coasters. I felt that too, a ring sogged into my middle, somewhere near my stomach. I wasn’t even wearing my manure-covered sneakers. I had dolled up to chase the grad student in my wedding guest dress and Sunday shoes with their tight ribbon bows, determined to find the roadside motel where she had retired after painting all of Pop’s cows in long cooling strokes to calm them, to make them more docile, to relax all of their pains and make them feel cared for, so Pop could get what he wanted from them easy, and Pop didn’t care, long as it was free. She was conducting a study. I watched her work, bucket hanging over her arm, quietest thing I had ever seen. Every night for three days I dug my thumbs into my bruises as I thought of her. I thought of her even though I was filthy, worth less than anything under the moon, like Pop said. I thought of her, and I thought of the cows that seemed happier. I thought of her lab coat, and the grand finale she might have hidden up her sleeve. If she could make a stupid cow happy maybe she could make me happy too. I snagged Pop’s car keys as I thought of her stroking a wash of paint on my hide in the field behind a screen of bushes, the back of my throat already easing open to low and I became restless, reckless, battering the asphalt highway with my burning, aching tires, blinding the night with my bright lights, my taillights bleeding behind.

What We Say to Our New Friends

Ariel M. Goldenthal lives and writes in the Washington, D.C. area where she teaches college students how their academic writing can be creative. Her writing has appeared in several journals including Emerge Literary Journal, MoonPark Review, and Fiction Southeast. Follow her on Twitter @arielgoldenthal and find more of her work at www.arielgoldenthal.com/

She lived at the end of the long hall with dust in her mouth and mold beneath her skin.

“Boba,” we would call, “come out and play with us.” She was our favorite playdate: unassuming yet filled with wonder. Her pliable personality absorbed everything we fed her.

Our parents gossiped with neighbors about the decaying state of humanity in our town, on our streets, and even in our classrooms while we poked holes in Boba’s flesh and watched her rotten innards clog the gap.

“They’re taught to question,” our parents said. We heard their concern through the cracks in the floorboards.

“Our town is changing,” our teacher told us. Families moved into the once-abandoned homes and children joined the chorus of our narrow classroom. New blood for the town. The parents shuddered, but we drank in the idea of fresh life.

“Isn’t that nice, Boba?” we asked. “More friends for you.”

The Invisible Woman

Kinneson Lalor likes writing, walking, gardening, and her dog. She followed a PhD in Physics from the University of Cambridge with an MSt in Creative Writing from the same institution while writing her first novel, teaching mathematics, and co-founding a supercomputing start-up. She is Australian but has lived in the UK for ten years. Her work has appeared in The Mays and she writes a regular blog about sustainable gardening for edibles and wildlife.

The crunch of gravel wakes her.

She runs into the kitchen, still tugging on her dressing gown. The barstool is against the fridge and her salad tongs are on the floor. He’s a mastermind when he needs to be. A warm swell of pride absorbs the fear, then her chest is cold and heavy again. The keys are gone.

She runs down the hall. The front door is open. She runs outside. She stops. She exhales a rush of air. He’s safe. He’s in the middle of the front yard, in his Batman pajamas, in the middle of the night. But he’s safe. She breathes in the night air slowly, unseasonably warm and humid, watching him.

He limps across the driveway, the tiny yellow bat signals drawing up the dew. He’s lop-sided, a bag of flour cradled under his arm. A trickle of pale dust traces behind him.

She searches for the right question. Do you know what time it is? Where’s your coat? Why do we shut doors? What are the rules about bedtime? But the books said these were the wrong questions, that he wouldn’t understand the implications.

‘Jacob, what are you doing?’

He gives her a crooked smile then looks down at the wide arc of flour he has made. He tilts his head as if he’s waiting for her to make the obvious connection. He continues dragging his feet, the bag, completing the curve. Flour seeps under the garden gate. He marches the curve, tipping out deeper piles if he spots a gap. When it’s seamless, he paces the arc once more then comes to her, the bag of flour offered in outstretched arms. She takes it.

‘Forcefield.’ He grins. ‘But I left enough for breakfast rolls. I promise.’

He brushes past her and skips back to his room, leaving small, wet footprints on the lino. His bedroom door clicks shut, his bed creaks.

She shifts the bag of flour onto her hip, the plastic sack molding to her like the legs of a child. She locks the front door and takes the keys back to the kitchen, returning them to the ‘safe’ place on top of the fridge. The books suggested that, too.

His words press against her. Breakfast rolls. Her body aches for the rhythm of weighing and kneading and rolling. She takes out the scales. The dough needs five hundred grams. He has left five hundred and one.

She draws the water through the yeast and flour with her fingers, remembering an anecdote from one of the books. A child in care drew massive, single boobs on every wall of a house. His foster parents didn’t react, just calmly asked him what he was doing, as she had done, as the books instructed. The boy explained the circles were a network of lasers—activation nodes, not breasts—to keep his new family safe. The foster parents recorded the incident then bought a cheap doorbell. They told him it was a single but powerful activation point. Ding-dong and everyone was safe. They hid the pens. They repainted their walls.

She depresses the dough with her knuckles. She’s always been uncomfortable with lying. What tools will be left when his make-believe barriers turn out to be exactly that? Her skin itches but her fingertips are covered in clumps of sticky dough and she can’t scratch at it. She keeps kneading. The dough forms a soft skin under her palms, holding its own shape. She puts it in a covered bowl to rise. She goes back to bed.

At breakfast she explains triple glazing, strengthened and laminated glass. She draws diagrams of seven-point locking systems and outlines the methods used for stress-strain analysis. He eats the scrolls of bacon and cheese and eyes her drawings skeptically.

She changes tactics. She shows him how to pick the padlock on the shed then makes him try the doors. He fails, of course, but he doesn’t seem convinced of their infallibility.

She tries to get him to throw a brick at the window—She urges and urges until he closes his eyes and tosses the brick like a shrug, and when the block scratches against the glass, and tumbles over her pansies, she tries not to cringe. She has made her point.

She thinks she has made her point.

From the kitchen window she sees him with the unlidded salt-shaker, dragging his circle into an ellipse to include the unprotected shed.

She goes to the supermarket to buy more salt and flour. And a shitty doorbell.

She shows him how to activate the forcefield whenever he comes home. Ding-dong and we are safe, except the cheap piece of crap doesn’t even manage a solid ding, just slurs out a whine. But he grins so widely at the sound she worries his teeth will shatter.

She installs security cameras. She makes more bread. His circles wash away with the rain. And every day there’s the drone of the forcefield, only now she’s almost convinced it sounds like comfort.

Scream if you Want to

Kik Lodge is a British teacher/translator based in Lyon, France, where she lives with her two kids. She writes personal essays for Huffington Post UK and Litro Magazine, and is currently working on a short story collection about the churchgoers next to her flat. She is also part of the Found Fiction adventure where stories are hidden in trees and other unexpected places.

The slide is a Helter Skelter and Minkey goes down it faster when he’s sitting inside one of those wicker bags that Bernard gives out after he's whipped one up from the pile at the bottom of the steps because wicker on metal slides magnificently. You whip up a bag from Bernard and all the way to the top you go, two steps at a time, and you're not allowed to swear on your way down or cause a pileup, but you can scream if you want to.

Bernard said he'd buy an ice-cream for the one who screamed the loudest and Minkey got a Calypso from Bernard's pigeon money once. Today though, Bernard's not here, probably because of the snow, everyone's scared of the snow apart from children. Houses, cars, roads, everything's covered. Chunks of snow on top of the eyeless horse, it's all over the railings and benches too. And of course it's been collecting on the Helter Skelter. That's why Minkey got up early and asked his mum if he could go to the park for ten minutes because of the snow and his mum says just ten darling and don't speak to the tramps because they're nutjobs.

Minkey wonders if she's talking about Bernard and he shakes the confetti off the wicker bag at the bottom of the steps and makes his way up to the top.

When he sees the white neighborhood from way up high, Minkey feels like he's the only one alive. Even the pigeons don't adventure out from the trees in this white new world. He wonders how much snow he'll be able to plough all the way to the bottom. A small mountain maybe.

Later on in life, every time he’d be about to do something momentous, like get married or win, he'd think back to this beautiful moment, this me-bubble that stayed unpopped for just a handful of seconds before his feet hit something at the bottom which wasn't a snow mountain at all because Bernard was under it, stiff and blue.

And how Minkey screamed when he finally understood! And how the pigeons flapped!

Holy Ghost

Kim Magowan lives in San Francisco and teaches in the Department of Literatures and Languages at Mills College. Her short story collection Undoing (2018) won the 2017 Moon City Press Fiction Award. Her novel The Light Source (2019) was published by 7.13 Books. Her fiction has been published in Booth, Colorado Review, The Gettysburg Review, Hobart, Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, and many other journals. Her stories have been selected for Best Small Fictions and Wigleaf's Top 50. She is the Editor-in-Chief and Fiction Editor of Pithead Chapel. www.kimmagowan.com

When Clarissa was twenty, she dated a former seminarian named Paul who liked to pretend, when they were having sex, that she was the Virgin Mary and he was the Holy Ghost. She didn’t know what was in Paul’s head, how he pictured their copulation: was he corporeal? Or vaporish, more of a diffuse cloud?

“That’s so disturbing,” her sister Tanya said, a pronouncement Clarissa could hardly dispute, especially after Paul walked through a glass sliding door and spent two weeks in a Psych ward.

Now, age thirty-six, Clarissa often finds herself thinking of Paul. She thinks of him when her husband gives her the injections in her thigh that will supposedly stimulate multiple egg development (Clarissa imagines her fallopian tube as a dropper, extruding each delicate egg). She thinks of Paul when she tacks curling ribbons of flypaper on the ceiling that become studded with flies. Gummed into balls, the flies look like the sheets of candy buttons (which were yellow, blue, pink, and lavender, so pretty to look at, though they tasted like sugary paper) that her parents used to put in her Christmas stocking, when Clarissa still believed.

Fizzy

Erin Lyndal Martin is a creative writer, music journalist, and visual artist living in Blacksburg, VA. Her work can be found at http://www.erinlyndalmartin.com.

There’s only so much champagne you can drink alone.

Soon you sink lonely and end up brushing your teeth and rinsing with the stuff, feeling proud that you rinsed them at all.

*

I bought a bridesmaid’s dress, but I’ve never been in any wedding.

I told the dress shop lady the pretty plum one, the one with ruffles, was for me.

She gave me free champagne and petit fours.

I couldn’t lie down in the dressing room, so I pressed my head against the mirror, blurring everything.

*

Back in the city, a few days after the first snow, I met a man who cooked at a Greek restaurant and smelled like baklava.

Seated at the bar with bottle caps and silver coins lacquered onto it—I swear it wasn’t just the snow— I looked at him and thought I could have this if I wanted it.

They got our drinks wrong. Gin instead of vodka, dirty instead of dry.

He said he might break the bar so we could do laundry with the quarters.

There was nothing wrong with him.

*

I bought the plum dress and wore it to buy a few $12 bottles of champagne. I’ve only ever had the Veuve Clicquot once.

Back home, still in the plum dress, I took my shoes off and held a champagne bottle like a teddy bear.

The exhaust fan like the memory of a classic rock song, all that whistling and long lost skin on skin.

I squinted at the light over the bathroom sink. It was beautiful it took my breath away.

Just Bailey

Gabrielle McAree is a reader, writer, and cereal enthusiast from Fishers, IN. She studied Theatre and Writing at Long Island University Post. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Dream Journal, Versification, Thereafter, and Second Chance Lit. Twitter: @gmcaree_

For my twenty-ninth birthday, I go to the driving range to watch old men hit golf balls. It started off innocent—my fascination with the golfers—a small birthday celebration, but then it became important, this holistic ritual no one knew about, something that got me through my shift at the corner store. The golfers became my something to look forward to, and every day became my birthday.

To be fair, I have Daddy Issues, and am tired of being lonely.

I make up grand, farcical stories about the golfers in pastel polos and brown belts with matching leather shoes. I fill in the gaps of their lives :their wives, children, dogs, stock market values, shoe sizes, refrigerator inventory, liquor cabinets. I think about how it would feel to hold their dark, calloused hands and cook them dinners and what they look like without their hats on. I wonder if they’re bald by choice or biology. But I don’t care either way—bald or not. I have no business being picky.

1) I’m dangerously close to thirty.

2) I can’t produce eggs.

3) I have no health insurance.

4) I make minimum wage at the corner store.

I’m also getting uglier by the day. Pretty soon I will be written off by menopause and saggy skin and adult diapers, wearing clothes I shoplift from the Goodwill and wash at a communal laundromat.

All I want is to be a mother, someone’s wife.

I stare at myself in the mirror and practice what I’d say to them—the golfers. I look up words in the dictionary and invent an alter ego—named Sylvia—who I can be proud of. Sylvia has a laughably rich husband who’s never home, a poodle named Jeff, and a big, green, yard with a white picket fence. Sylvia’s kids are nine and four. She has a live-in nanny. Sylvia’s car has a working radio and automatic windows. She wears white gloves and sun hats and all the golfers find her irresistible.

Sometimes, the golfers tip their hats to me. Sometimes, they look through my windshield, ignoring the mountain of McDonald’s cemented into the dash, and smirk. Sometimes, they wink and adjust their crotches as I melt into the ripped interior of my Hondo Sedan. Sometimes, I touch myself as they smack golf balls into the blue, blue sky.

When the men arrive at the driving range, every day is my birthday.

After weeks of surveying them, a golfer invites me into the club house for dinner. It’s a golfer I haven’t noticed before. He’s average height, skinny everywhere but his stomach. His thick, ink-black mustache dominates his face, a stark contrast to his graying hair. He walks over to my Honda Sedan, opens the door, and says, “Hello, I’m Andrew.”

Andrew wears the whitest pants I’ve ever seen. It’s obvious he hates himself, just the right amount, and that makes me want to crawl inside his mustache.

I smile. “I’m Sylvia.”

Andrew escorts me inside, putting his hands on the small of my back and tells me to order whatever I want. I’m overwhelmed by his kindness. It has been so long since someone’s touched me. At the corner store, I make contact with customers by placing change in their hands and it rejuvenates me, like dial-up internet—. Andrew touches my spine through my dirty tank top, and I remember that I’m a person, a human being, someone who exists, real.

I order two cheeseburgers with extra pickles, two sides of fries, and a strawberry milkshake. I suck the juice off my fingers and lick the plate clean. It’s my first real meal in weeks. I’d forgotten how much I love food that doesn’t come in a paper bag.

Andrew leans back, crosses his left leg over his right, and watches me eat. Every time the waitress asks him for his order, he shoos her away with the flick of his wrist. I know then, just how powerful he is. How rich he is. How much I want to slip his gold watch off his wrist and pawn it off at the local Cash for Gold store.

He says I look beautiful when I eat , that he likes a woman with an appetite.

Nothing about Andrew is distinct, besides his caterpillar mustache. He looks like every other old, white, rich male—wrinkled skin, two sockets for eyes, a collection of sunspots, and chapped, paper-thin lips. But he could be anyone—the Pope, Brad Pitt, my father’s raunchy friend, Vic—and it wouldn’t make a difference. I just like the attention he’s giving me.

I smile at him through my second cheeseburger. I want to keep ordering meals. I want a Styrofoam to-go box and another milkshake, but I also don’t want to come off poorer than I already look, sucking hamburger juice off my fingertips without pausing to make conversation.

Andrew unravels his cloth napkin and wipes the leftover ketchup off the corner of my lip. He smiles this charitable smile, and I let out a deep, animalistic moan, so deep I’m not sure the noise is coming from me, and when I do, he stands up and walks away, leaving me alone at the two-person table. I set my own cloth napkin down, run to my car, and throw up the entire meal in the parking lot. I don’t care that the golfers watch me.

Andrew doesn’t come back to the driving range for three weeks. When he finally returns, he walks right up to my Honda Sedan and motions for me to roll down the window. He’s wearing a pale pink windbreaker and a white hat. He smells like springtime and money, and I know I love him. “What’s your real name?” he asks, his voice presidential.

“Uh, Bailey. Just Bailey.”

He clears his throat. “That’s a nice name.”

I turn my head away from him so he can’t see that I’m crying.

“Do you have a place to live, Just Bailey?”

I stare at the dash and shake my head. I’m living in my car. I have been for weeks.

“Would you like to come live with me?” he asks, rotating his gold watch.

To be fair, I’m almost thirty and infertile. I wear Goodwill clothes and wash them at the communal laundromat. I have Daddy Issues, and I am tired of being lonely.

A Mostly Northern Direction

Anna O'Brien is a writer and veterinarian in central Maryland. Her fiction has most recently appeared in Cheap Pop, Sweet Tree Review, and Spelk Fiction. She likes bicycles and dogs and bicycling dogs. You can find her on Twitter @annaobriendvm and on her blog: www.annascuriocabinet.com.

Tamara tells you to put rhinestones on your zits. She calls them rhinedstones and you don't correct her, thinking instead that maybe you yourself are wrong, that you yourself thought this whole time, your all-inclusive fifteen years on this planet, it was rhine, like the river. The river no one else has heard of in geography. The river you yourself say is wonderful despite Tamara's whispered shut ups and paper cuts, so delicate in motion no one notices she's hacking at your arm, so tiny they don't bleed until after class.

The Rhine flows in a mostly northern direction, you say. Like the Nile.

Only the Nile and the St. John's here in Jacksonville flow north, Tamara recites. The teacher recites. Everyone recites.

You yourself know this is wrong but a zit you're fingering pops and you ask to go to the bathroom for a tissue.

What is a river, the teacher asks the class as you walk out. What is a bay? A sound? A quay?

No one answers.

Later, on your way home from school, you yourself stop at the five and dime and debate in the arts and crafts section:

Silver?

Gold?

Rainbow?

In the reflective glare of the small plastic baggies, you yourself count your face's miniature molten volcanoes that require bedazzling. What is a caldera? What is a fumarole? What is a river of lava called, pure raw heat bubbling up from . . . ?

You yourself decide three packs of 100-count dime-sized silver self-adhesive craft-quality rhinedstones will about do it.

Then you yourself walk home and lay on your twin bed, contemplating the popcorn ceiling. It taunts you every night, relentless in resemblance to you yourself's own uneven, scarred complexion.

Pizza face.

Zitzilla.

Pus monkey.

You hear Tamara's voice with every name. The paper cuts itch.

What is a fissure? What is a fault line? What are tectonics?

You yourself yank open one baggie on the bed and immediately lose half the plastic stones to the depths of your comforter. You pretend they are diamonds. You pretend you are rich, so rich you can afford to glue gemstones to your body. So rich you can buy that face cream locked under glass at the pharmacy. So rich you have a maid dispose of your blood-smudged tissues wedged between the mattress and the wall.

For a test, you yourself place some stones over a few small moles on your arm that you always thought looked like the constellation Cassiopeia. If you covered all the paper cuts, you'd look like a disco tiger. If they were diamonds, you'd be so rich you could buy armor, be your own Lancelot. You could buy better friends.

What is the stratosphere?

Finding the adhesive satisfactory, you aim the faux jewels at a recalcitrant sunbeam that has snuck through the closed but broken blinds. Rainbows cling to the wall and dance when you rotate you yourself's wrist.

What is a wavelength? What is roygbiv?

You yourself have created something beautiful. You smile for the first time in weeks.

The next day, a hush blankets the main hall of the high school. The river of students parts as downstream kids push themselves up against their lockers. Sunlight enters through the eastern wall windows. The beams bounce off your face. Your glittering, dazzling, rhinedstoned face.

What are facets? What is a brilliant cut?

You yourself move forward against the flow of bodies, in a mostly northern direction.

Broken Ride

Meg Pokrass is the author of six flash fiction collections, an award-winning collection of prose poetry, and a 2020 collection of microfiction, "Spinning to Mars" which won the Blue Light Book Award. Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, Washington Square Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Split Lip and McSweeney's, and The Best Small Fictions 2018 and 2019. She serves as Founding Co-Editor of Best Microfiction 2020.

Let’s say I’m coming down, coming down from the hills, the cows not killing me yet, not running past the cows or being chased by the cows, but at home, where I spend every indoor minute, my man doesn’t want to spare the time. There isn’t anyone else to be with out here in the land of meat pies. The dog here is not old, not waddling or gentle like my childhood dog. The man next to me here so quiet and busy, saying nothing.

And let’s say you’ve been on my mind all day, all day up in the hills flying past heaps of sheep, and that it’s a surprise to me, how a day turns. Friday becomes a Friday, let’s say. How when you talk to me the circular cage feels like a Ferris Wheel and the carnival sounds start up again—lighting up.

Let’s say that here in the land of meat pies, his presence is like a dog who no longer recognizes me but comes, sits and stays. The sound of his ragged breathing no longer feels like music.

***

Let’s say that talking to you reminds me of a time I was stuck up at the top of a Ferris wheel with a friend who said she felt sick, felt scared, she was going to throw up, she was sorry.

“I should have known myself better than to get on this thing,” she said. I held her hand.

“Will it ever fucking move?”

“You can throw up on me,” I’d said. This closeness that could only live at the top of a broken ride.

***

Let’s say these nights, zooming across the world with you, we can spin around and yet neither one of us feels stuck. I don’t mind if it moves, or if it never moves again. Let’s say we’re both about to throw up on each other, and instead, you take my hand.

The Special

Michelle Ross is the author of There's So Much They Haven't Told You (2017), which won the 2016 Moon City Press Short Fiction Award. Her fiction has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, The Southeast Review, Wigleaf, and other venues. Her work has been selected for Best Microfictions 2020 and the Wigleaf Top 50 2019, among other honors. She is fiction editor of Atticus Review. www.michellenross.com

Inside the burrito place where I get lunch every Tuesday, I spot my nemesis. She’s in the far back corner of the burrito place, her puffy lime green coat taking up about as much space beside her as her ego.

None of us local photographers really like Annie, other than Nadia, and that’s because Nadia’s like that kid who was the totally unexceptional friend of the popular girl in grade school, the girl who was the keeper of the popular girl’s secrets, the girl whose job it was to listen.

Annie is infinitely more successful than the rest of us, but that’s not why we don’t like her. We don’t like her because she’s smug about it. When we all meet up at the whiskey bar, which we do once a month, and which we always hope Annie won’t show up at, but she nearly always does, Annie regales us with the latest evidence of her superiority. She’ll say, “Anybody have any news?” and those of us who do have news will hesitate because we know that whatever news we have will soon be made to seem small and insignificant by Annie’s news. Better not to share our news on those evenings. On the rare occasions Annie doesn’t have news to share, she doesn’t pose the question, which then means that those of us who do have news have to find a way to artfully wedge it into conversation.

Also, Annie has this cat that she never ever refers to by name or simply as her cat; she calls it her “Maine Coon,” as though the particularity of the cat’s species trumps all other identifiers. “I woke up this morning, and my Maine Coon was wrapped around my neck like a stole,” she said at our last Whiskey Night. Annie is the kind of person who uses words like “stole,” words the rest of us only vaguely know the meaning of.

When Annie doesn’t show at Whiskey Night, there’s an entirely different feeling to those nights. The rest of us laugh more easily, more authentically. It’s a driving-home-from-dinner-with-your-pants-unbuttoned feeling.

At the burrito place, Annie is eating a salad of all things. The burrito place always smells of warm tortillas, and I think, who chooses a salad in a place that smells of lard and flour?

I feel Annie start to look in my direction, so I fix my eyes on the menu board. Today’s special is a new burrito I’ve not seen on the menu before, and I’m not sure how to pronounce its name. Not knowing how to pronounce something I want has deterred me many times in my life. I confessed this recently to Danny, the guy I’ve been dating. We were at a bar where half the cocktails on the list had pretentious, made-up sounding names I couldn’t pronounce. Danny said, “What are you afraid of?” I said, “That I’ll sound ignorant, I guess.”

Of course, not even Annie is without flaws. She sweats a lot, for instance—sweat stains under her arms as conspicuous as floodlights. Food is almost always stuck in that little gap between her top right lateral incisor and her top right canine. But I’ve always felt that people like Annie, people who are highly successful, can get away with faults the rest of us can’t. It’s like how what we call a mole on a regular person gets rebranded as a beauty mark if it’s on the face of an exquisitely beautiful person.

To my comment about being afraid of sounding ignorant, Danny said, “Because there’s something in this life you don’t know?” Then he said there’s freedom in admitting ignorance, that if I’d just embrace not knowing and not try to hide it, I’d be much more relaxed in the world.

Danny hasn’t met Annie, but he’s heard plenty. Last night he learned that my #1 fantasy of late is to mock Annie—to stop her in the middle of one of her boasting sessions at Whiskey Night and say something like, “Wow, you’re so amazing, Annie!” or when someone else starts to talk after one of Annie’s long boasts, I say, “Hold up, Lydia. Annie may not be finished yet.”

Turned out Danny had something else in mind when he asked what my #1 fantasy was. We were in his tiny double bed, sheets tangled about our legs, me feeling that weird combination of hungry and sleepy like I always do after sex, and Danny studied me like I was some kind of bug he was trying to identify. Then he said, “What does that say about you that your #1 fantasy is about hurting another woman?”

“Correcting her bad behavior,” I said. “Huge difference.”

Danny got out of bed and showered. Then he brushed his teeth for the second time that night. I felt insulted by his rush to clean himself after sex with me, but I didn’t say anything. Instead I sulked quietly in bed.

At the burrito place, when I reach the front of the line, the guy in the striped beanie says, “What would you like?” I consider attempting the unfamiliar word on the menu board, but instead I just say, “I want the special.”

Mean Moon

Anthony Varallo is the author of a novel, The Lines (University of Iowa Press), as well as four short story collections. New work is out or forthcoming in The New Yorker “Daily Shouts,” STORY, Chicago Quarterly Review, One Story, and The Best Small Fictions 2020. He is a Professor of English at the College of Charleston in Charleston, SC, where he is the Fiction Editor of Crazyhorse. Follow him at @TheLines1979 or www.anthonyvarallo.com

Last night I met the Mean Moon. It was watching me from behind my blinds, the way it sometimes does, on nights when I can’t sleep. I stood from my bed and walked to the window, ready to confront the Mean Moon, but it hid the moment I pulled the blinds. The sky was dark, empty.

“I saw you, Mean Moon,” I said.

Outside, the wind picked up. Branches swayed and rocked.

“Don’t think I didn’t.”

Later that night, after I had finally fallen asleep, after I was in the middle of a dream about my high school girlfriend, whom I hadn’t seen in years, and whom I’d always meant to keep in touch with but had somehow never contacted, I heard a sound from downstairs. A sudden, thunderous rumbling.

Isn’t that your automatic garage door? my high school girlfriend said—and that’s when I woke up and realized, in an instant, that the Mean Moon must be up to something.

Downstairs, I could see moonbeams shooting out from the door that led from my kitchen to the garage. The beams were fantastically bright. Piercing. When I opened the door, I was temporarily blinded. Tears sprang from my eyes, one after the other; I couldn’t stop them.

“I’m not crying,” I said, into the brightness. “It’s just that it’s so bright in here.”

And that’s when I heard the Mean Moon’s voice for the first time. “Good evening,” the Mean Moon said. Laughed.

What did the Mean Moon’s voice sound like? Exactly like what you’d expect. Except deeper.

A moment later I was able to see well enough to observe the situation: the Mean Moon had opened my automatic garage door and had sat itself down in one of the plastic Adirondack chairs I’d been planning to put out on the back porch once the weather got nicer, except the Mean Moon wasn’t so much sitting in the chair as sort of lumping part of itself into it, while the rest of the moon stretched out into my driveway, into my neighborhood, and presumably up into the night sky—but it was impossible for me to see.

“You’re going to break that chair,” I said.

But the Mean Moon didn’t listen. Instead it laid into to me about all of my shortcomings, failures, and limitations. About everything regrettable I’d ever said or done. The Mean Moon told me what a difficult person I could be, thoughtless at times, and described the ways I had alienated those around me. The Mean Moon gave several examples. The examples were sharp and specific. Turns out, the Mean Moon had been watching me for years.

And I would have maybe agreed with the Mean Moon on a few points, if the Adirondack chair didn’t break at that moment, dropping the Mean Moon to the floor.

“Sorry,” the Mean Moon said.

“I tried to tell you,” I said.

But the Mean Moon had already risen, back into the sky, watchful, observant, but not so bright.

Umbrella Girl

Francine Witte is the author of four poetry chapbooks and two full-length collections, Café Crazy and The Theory of Flesh from Kelsay Books. Her flash fiction has appeared in numerous journals and anthologized in the most recent New Micro (W.W. Norton) Her novella-in-flash, The Way of the Wind has just been published by Ad Hoc Fiction, and her full-length collection of flash fiction, Dressed All Wrong for This was recently published by Blue Light Press. She lives in New York City.

Jen decides to give it a go. After all, Charley had fallen for a girl who did nothing all day but wrap packages on a website. Said he couldn’t get enough of the long blue fingernails gliding over the happy birthday paper, all frilly with cakes and balloons. So, Jen thought it might just work with umbrellas.

When he never calls her again, Jen figures okay, it’s time. Let’s get started, she tells herself, when no one else will listen anymore. Not her mother, who uses a rainbonnet, not her friend, Min, who thinks online is y’know, icky.

Jen orders a nice variety - minis and bubbles, pom-pom-ed and tasseled. When they arrive, she lines them up on her bed. Then she turns on the web-cam that she also got online.

She wets her head and enters the scene. Oh what oh what will I do in all this rain? She tilts her head, she pouts her lips, she looks right into the camera. If only I had…Then she throws up her exclamation hands as she sees the umbrellas. She picks one that is patterned like a beach ball. Nice and cheery, she thinks.

She is about to spring it open when the webcam ticker goes one, then ten, then 100. In the comment section, Sillyrabbit23 writes Go on, open it, you know you want to. And she does want to. She is seen. She is needed. Right now, out there, not hers, but someone else’s Charley is unable to look away. The full circle of the umbrella above her now, then behind her, then a twirl.

One Summer, by Iceland

Isaac Yuen's work can be found in Orion, Tin House, Shenandoah, Newfound, and other publications. He is interested in voices emanating from the non-human world, from lichen and clams to islands and gravity. Isaac lives in Vancouver, Canada, on unceded Coast Salish territory.

At Skógafoss where the sea used to be. The lupines in bunches as high as knees. Where our breaths caught the mist stirred your face shrouded until the moment the instant you leaned in. Leaned in to burn it all away. At Skógafoss is where the sea used to be.

Your fingers raking through my field hair. All the coarse pale straw mess of it. Flame crown slotted between collar and bone. Ice palm against the breast to jolt the beat. I was soaring then and sure as sure but you were you and needed convincing. I thought you might think things through and sail away. Leave me erupting in pure sunlight. But you saw through and sank down and cinched me to this good earth. I know you had hoped for more than those trifle summer days but I tell you if they were the only things that came of us it would almost be enough. If they were not glorious those moments in their making then nothing in this world or any beyond matters. How the tides came in to quench each raw and half-formed thing. Silver streams tracing down hip and slope. Water flowing over flowing through and on. I drank and drank and discovered to my joy that you could not be used up.

I didn’t expect to meet again. Why anyone would return in the afterdays. Then at Reynisfjara the black beach where the coast now lies. There your pulse again against my stone cheek. You there with eyes closed facing the sleet I wreathe myself in. Smiling as if recalling an old familiar sting. Then you walked off and I wondered not for the first time how it was possible for so much soundness to reside within a soul.

I could never find the way in. Always you came and left without a trace. Free and whole as the true isle among us. The wilderness we were and craved together you trod alone. No way to get around that fact not ever. Maybe for a spell in the light but not through darkness that long-toothed gnaw. Not when the seasons here cycle so hard so fast.

So you were right and things were doomed from the start. Expected some might say given the gap we crossed to come together. I offer this as comfort as if anyone would want to lay claim to this. Even so. Even after the day I shuddered free and tore off our foundation. Changed my face and hurled myself numb against every stale and spent man. Buried everything in ash and left you with the wreckage of broken gestures. Even so.

Yesterday for the first time this spring the rains died the clouds broke and the sun held taut in the sky. The waterfall foam-frothed and rose the way it did and up arced a rainbow. Light pouring over fresh basalt curving out of the ground like a wing plume. Soon the terns and puffins will return to nest above where you stood. Soon the rock and salt and shit will meld and craze into life. As I watch this future happen I will nestle into the cleft between our two stones. When I lay down I will sigh my breath into the wind and take in your old scent.

Things I wish I did when we were.

Tell you that I am learning to walk in the dark.

Ask if you now know how to let the light in.

I hope that when you are low you still climb in search of the right wind and song. I want you to know when autumn comes and winter falls I still draw down to the root the source of what we once were. Up there on the ridge of an ice-rimed canyon. By the crag flecked gold and cinnamon with moss. On the cliff speaking its tongue to the sea. Above all the unnamed abysses we used to hold each other tight and sway.

Would you care if I said those places still existed? Each now an isle wild and whole and sure? Shored and summered with flowers forever in bloom?

cover image by asoggetti