Learning to Breathe as the Zebra Fall

Heather Bourbeau’s work has appeared in 100 Word Story, Alaska Quarterly Review, The MacGuffin, Meridian, and The Stockholm Review of Literature. She is the winner of La Piccioletta Barca’s inaugural competition and the Chapman Magazine Flash Fiction winner, and has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has worked with various UN agencies, including the UN peacekeeping mission in Liberia and UNICEF Somalia.

This is not an origin story. 

This is a story about a girl and a pride of lions. It takes place the same year her father would try to commit suicide and her mother would try to love another man. In that order. Their mutual lack of success left them resigned to a life together. They settled into this at first awkwardly, then passionately, cultivating a love that ultimately became extraordinary and kind. But this story was months before her father’s sorrow overtook him. 

When the girl was four, she was well loved and neglected in the style of many well-off families. She was rarely alone, but she was rarely with her parents. They would eat most breakfasts with her and would often tuck her in at night, but continued their robust social lives revolving around adults, alcohol, and other aristocratic pursuits. 

She grew up tightly wrapped in the kanga of her nurse until she could walk. After that she would run and play with the cook’s assistant or the nurse’s children, and help collect the eggs and milk in the mornings, laughing when the chicken feathers tickled her nose or the goats nuzzled her. 

One night, during a large party on the estate of a family friend, the adults moved from dinner to drinks, and the children, the few that had been brought to the country, were shuffled off to sleep, safe under mosquito canopies in rooms far from their parents. However, the scent of royal jasmine on that clear night called the girl out of bed. No one noticed the small child wandering onto the patio and then further into the open savanna. She clambered onto a short rock and looked up at the sky. Had she been able to identify stars and planets, she would have marveled at Venus and Mars, the Southern Cross and the Big Dipper. But she was just a little girl, and so she smiled unaware what she was smiling at. 

She realized only then that she was not alone. She heard a small grunt and then the desperate run of dozens of animals previously unseen. They were not far from her, and yet more curious than afraid, she remained still, her breath instinctively held. By the time the lioness came into view, the girl had heard the supple landing of paws on earth, had sensed the heat rising from its back. She had been taught early to fear adders and mambas, black widows and scorpions. But having grown in the city, she had yet to learn to fear lions, and so she stayed rooted on her rock, transfixed by the unfolding drama. 

In response to the first cat that was herding a zebra, other lionesses surrounded and tackled the prey to the ground. Their bodies illuminated by the waning moon, the once stark contrast of stripes disappearing as the cats tore into flesh. The metallic tang of blood briefly filled the girl’s nostrils before the night wind blew it away. She heard the sounds of feasting quickly, the slow walks to new parts of the carcass, and the soft purrs of satisfaction. The girl licked her lips and felt her belly warm as if she too had just eaten. She stared as one by one the lions, now sated, fell onto their sides to sleep and digest. Her legs twitched to join the pride, to lie with the females. By and by, her body became heavy and despite her best efforts to stay alert, she too curled onto her side and slept, the deep and enviable slumber of children and hunters. 

She was found the next day by the gamekeeper, who had woken early to scout for a late morning safari tour for the guests. He first saw the paw prints, then the telltale signs of a struggle, and finally the bones and leftover skin and hair of the zebra. It wasn’t until he was tracing the steps back to make sure all the lions had left that he came upon the girl on the rock. He was stunned. She seemed unharmed, and despite being out all night, he noticed her small body was warm. 

When he picked her up, she almost imperceptibly smelled him, then wrapped her arms around his neck, her legs around his waist. He laughed quietly at the miracle of her survival, cradling her head as if she were fragile and had not just slept on a rock. It was still early enough that her parents would still be sleeping, so he went directly to her room, slipped her into her bed, kissed her forehead, and praised Ngai that she had been unharmed.

She woke to find she was a minor celebrity at the estate. Even her parents eventually learned and were delighted by the tale, having first heard of it from a baron who had heard it from his valet. 

After that night, her father made it a point to check on her at least once during the night, and her mother made time to have tea most afternoons with her. The girl, for her part, welcomed the added attentions of her parents. But at night she would dream of walking for hours in the grass, searching for wildebeest and zebra, elephants and impala; of feeling her muscles tense and relax as she lunged and tore; and of sleeping with family curled near each other, welcoming the breath of sisters and cousins on the back of her neck.

A Conspiracy of Lemurs

Dan Brotzel is the author of a collection of short stories, Hotel du Jack and a new novel, The Wolf in the Woods (both from Sandstone Press). He is also co-author of a comic novel, Work in Progress (Unbound). Sign up for updates at www.danbrotzel.com

‘Misha is the tallest boy in my class,’ said the boy.

‘Yeah, he’s tall,’ conceded his sister, who was older by two years. 

‘Yeah. Misha is up to Miss Galley’s ears, and he’s only eight.’

‘My best friend is 20 centimetres taller than me,’ said the girl proudly. ‘Ahhhh.’ 

They were walking up the bumpy path between the playing field and the allotments, the one that led to Asda. He needed to get them all some food; the children had finally agreed to come with him on the promise of a treat for now, and steak pie for dinner. Plus, of course, the car was parked there. 

The girl had stopped by the big, puffed-up ginger cat that was always preening and stretching out on the gravel here. It had no fear of humans, and no home, apparently. Perhaps you don’t need a home when you assume that the rest of the world loves you unconditionally. 

‘Ahhh.’ The boy had sat down and was stroking the cat too, which had sprawled across the path in a generous furry arc. 

‘We’ll have to give both your hands a good wash when we get back,’ their dad said, bored of his own voice. ‘All your hands, I mean.’ The children didn’t look up; nor did they when he added: ‘We don’t know where that cat’s been.’ 

‘Dad, when we get to the car, I want to show you that new app on your phone.’ 

‘OK.’ It was understood between them that the phone was really hers; he just paid for it.

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘You have to go along this railway and get all the golden coins and dodge the trains and not get squashed by them.’ 

‘Come on. Let’s go,’ he said to his children at last, who did not move. It was sunny but not warm. 

‘Misha’s brother’s friend,’ said the boy. ‘He’s got a friend.’ 

‘Can we get dough balls?’ the girl interrupted. ‘You said we could, and we haven’t had them for ages!’ 

‘Oh come on. You can’t have steak pie and dough balls.’ 

‘Misha’s brother’s friend’s got a friend,’ said the boy again. ‘He went on the railway.’ 

‘Let’s play that game again!’ she said. ‘I know: A circus of cats.’ 

‘A snap of crocodiles,’ said the boy. 

‘An army of frogs.’

‘That’s the official one!’ their dad protested, despising himself.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘But it’s really good.’

‘A circus of cats! That’s perfect. They’re always climbing up things and walking across them and jumping down again.’ 

‘I know, dad!’ she said. ‘I’m going to write a story about an army of frogs.’ 

‘A leap of panthers,’ said the boy. ‘A frame of dragonflies.’ His sister guffawed. 

‘That’s so good,’ his dad said.

‘Yeah dad,’ said the girl. ‘You’ll love it. You have to get 100 golden coins to get onto the next level.’

‘But it gets faster and faster as you go,’ said the boy. ‘He went on the railway.’ 

‘Who did?’ 

‘The friend.’ 

‘Of Misha?’ 

‘Misha’s got an older brother.’ 

‘Oh right.’ 

‘Yeah. His friend. And now he’s dead.’ 

‘That’s terrible!’ he said to his son. ‘Is Misha sad?’ 

‘A drill of wasps,’ said the girl. ‘That’s a good one. And I really like a murder of crows.’

‘He got hit by a train.’ 

‘Like in the game!’ she said. 

‘No!’ her dad said. ‘It’s not a game.’

‘No,’ said the boy. ‘Misha’s not sad. He doesn’t know him. But he’s dead.’ 

‘You’ve got to do Red Door Yellow Door, dad!’ she said. ‘I’m going to wake up at 3am in the night and lick some salt and ask the man with the bow tie what he wants.’ 

The sun was in his eyes now yet the cold was in his bones. ‘You’re not having those toffees for your snack,’ he said.

‘Oh,’ she moaned. ‘I haven’t had them for ages.’

‘They’re terrible for your teeth,’ he said righteously. ‘And you know how much trouble we’re having with your teeth already.’

‘Misha’s got a filling,’ said his son helpfully. 

‘What? In a baby tooth?’ 

‘His brother’s sad.’ 

‘Yes of course,’ he said. ‘He must be.’ 

‘Because of the filling?’ said the girl. 

Her dad wanted to speak but she was quicker. ‘Oooh! A glint of fillings!’  

‘Oh yes!’ said her dad. ‘That’s a good one.’

Cure-All

Celeste Sea lives in Washington, DC. She is knee-deep in student loans and her living room smells like turpentine. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Sine Theta Magazine, Maudlin House, perhappened mag, trampset, A Velvet Giant, and SmokeLong Quarterly. She is Always Online and sometimes on Twitter at @celestish_

Ye-Ye likes to show off the bruise behind his ear, the one that plums purple like sunbaked carrion. He swears the mark is the source of his headaches, that the color juices itself through his skull. We know this to be true because at night we hear him crying, Rancid! Rancid! It’s turning my dreams rancid! Each time we imagine his voice tightening the space between our floor and his ceiling until we’re sleeping on top of him, our beds bunked above his.

In the mornings, Ba and Ma fret. Their conversation dusts our cereal, sweetens our mouths. Ba tells us: Be gentle with your Ye-Ye. He has a wandering mind. We laugh. Of course we’re gentle. We’re extra-gentle with Ye-Ye. We do not say: Look at our nails, look at how we round them into smiles. We do not say anything about how we think of ourselves as considerate. How each time Ye-Ye shows us that ripened spot, we deny ourselves the itch in our fingers, the one that says: Maybe if we scratched at that tender place, the skin would break like a cyst or a seamed pouch or a fish stomach. We think: Maybe then his thoughts would bubble along our fingers like roe. Maybe then we’d dream dreams so pungent our brains would rot too. We do not say these thoughts out loud. Instead, we say what Ba and Ma have taught us to say, which is: How can we help? 

Ye-Ye tells us that he doesn’t need our help, that he already knows what to do. Watch, he says. He fills a pot with water, turns on the stove, and drops in an egg. We roll our eyes. We know what you’re doing, Ye-Ye. You’re boiling an egg. Last month, Ye-Ye forgot to turn off the stove, just plucked the egg out from the pot, swaddled it in Ba’s washcloth, and then pressed it to his birthmark before walking away. He could have burned down the house but Ma ran into the kitchen before the stove could spit fire. Since then, we have to watch the stove closely. We purse our fingers over the dials, turning them back-back-back after Ye-Ye makes his eggs. 

Ye-Ye thanks us every time. He likes to ask us: Do you know what this is for? And we like to say: Yes, the eggs are for your pain. For your headaches. But today Ye-Ye also asks: How do you think it works? This is a new question, and we treat it like a pop quiz, lolling around potential answers in our heads until we find one that fits. The heat, we finally say as we turn off the stove. At school Mrs. Murphy says that heat changes the size of many things, including metals and blood vessels and pores. Is that how it works, Ye-Ye? 

Ye-Ye shakes his head and tells us to try again, but we’re impatient. We say: We don’t know. Just tell us, Ye-Ye. But Ye-Ye only rolls the egg behind his ear and mutters, ahhh. For a moment, we mistake the sound for steam escaping the egg and so we lean in, ogling at the strip of braised skin that winks back between each roll of the egg. We wince. Ye-Ye, doesn’t that hurt? Ye-Ye shrugs. Come closer, he says, and when we do, he tells us that the egg is a kind of medicine, that it can sop up all the bad things, like pain or misfortune. It doesn’t always work though, we point out, but Ye-Ye says, that’s the nature of cure-alls. They don’t work all the time. 

We like this answer because it explains a lot, like how sometimes Ye-Ye jumbles ordinary words but still wins at mahjong. Or how one time he walked outside and didn’t come back for hours. That time, Ba found him on the other side of town, his feet slivered with glass, but Ye-Ye said it didn’t hurt. Later, he explained that he’d wanted to find us a fortune, that he believed fortune awaited us in the south, and that mopping up pain and misfortune with eggs could only do so much. When we told Mrs. Murphy, she frowned and said that eggs and pain and misfortune don’t work that way. How do they work? we asked, and we peppered her with questions the way we do with Ye-Ye now. Does misfortune change the egg’s insides? Does the yolk stay yellow like a coin? Do eggs become heavier after they’ve sucked up pain? And if so, which is heavier: pain or misfortune? Ye-Ye says: All pain is gold. Then he says no more. 

Ah, we frown, the egg has stopped working. Maybe Ye-Ye has lost his words again. We take over for Ye-Ye, boiling more eggs and rolling each behind his ear. We say: Maybe this one will help him find his words. Or this one. Or this one. But Ye-Ye stays quiet. Angrily, we throw the eggs onto the floor. We scream: Why isn’t it working? We stomp our feet, feeling the shells kiss our soles as we gild the kitchen with our misery. 

Months from now, as he’s boiling another egg, Ye-Ye’s eyes will somersault back until they’re twin whites, the color a glossy secret that we aren’t supposed to see, like the way Ba and Ma will cry only when they think we’re not looking. We’ll want to say: Please. Cry with us. We miss our Ye-Ye. 

And we will. We will miss his tender spot. We will miss his wandering mind. We will think of him when we boil eggs for ourselves in the deepest part of the night, standing by the southmost-facing window: the one in the kitchen. We will press the eggs to our heads and our hearts and the soft skin behind our ears, all the places for which our fingers will ache. We will smile, then cry out, at how much pain we pull from our bodies. How much gold. 

Throwing Stones

Michael Todd Cohen’s work appears in Barren Magazine, Columbia Journal, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, The Maine Review, JMWW Journal and HAD, among others. His writing has been nominated for Best Micro Fiction and a Pushcart Prize. He lives with his husband and two dogs, by a rusty lighthouse, in Connecticut. You can find him on twitter @mtoddcohen or michaeltoddcohen.com.

The Bastard Boy and his brother threw speckled stones — brick-red, tooth-white rimmed with yellow, mucus-green slicked with algae — into the angry swell of the Atlantic. The brother did not think of himself as a brother to this anxious bastard who knew nothing of baseball — What's a crow-hop? — how to arc his arm in a perfect parabola to send the stones as far into the cobalt blue as they could go, to land with a satisfying glug! a belch from the deep glug! glug! glug! One after another, the brother who did not think of himself as a brother, made an arc like a rainbow or a bridge or the door to a church and listened, seconds after: glug! and nodded at the incoming tide in satisfaction like a signal to a catcher crouching on the ocean floor holding up a web of kelp and waiting.

Crack! This is the sound made from rock on rock, when the Bastard Boy threw, never reaching water, like the meeting of a bat to ball, crack! so that even though he knew nothing of the game, one was being played in the pitch his brother, who did not think of himself as a brother, threw and the crack! that followed. Then quiet. And in this quiet the Bastard Boy thought of all the times he'd been thrown silence from the brother, who did not think of himself as a brother, when all he wanted was the crack! of his own name.

The Right Vintage

Bryan Harvey lives and teaches in Virginia. His writing has appeared in McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Bull, FlashBack Fiction, No Contact Magazine, Heavy Feather Review, and The Florida Review's Aquifer. He tweets @Bryan_S_Harvey. Most of his rough drafts begin on long runs and are never finished.

Hui stood before the aquarium’s golden hues, staring into a dead thing’s empty eye sockets. She found herself in awe that after the poachers had stripped the skeleton of all its muscle, sinew, skin, and fur they had left every bone—except for the teeth and claws—to marinate in a tank full of wine. And the final result of this prehistoric scaffolding that now welcomed her to the end of his quest was so much not to the scale of her internet searches and roaming imagination. 

So that’s it, she thought, as if reciting a poem, all that remains is the empty jail of the ribs—the heart more gone than still—the lungs evaporated—this beast of bone staggers at the end of the world. A tiger—  

Except this tiger did not appear entirely decorative—its body still stood upright, a prehistoric monument in mid hunt, supported by nylon ropes, lashed like riggings on a ship, around the bridge of its skull and the arc of its spine, and the way the wine refracted the light pouring in through the window—like a fingerprint of golden flesh—made the liquid in the tank look amniotic. Maybe this was the idea—the thing itself. You could convince yourself of that, thought Hui. And you could forget the thing encasing it. The glass propping it up in mid dash.  

She ran the numbers through her head again. She recited her bank accounts’ passwords. She pictured herself retired and old. She pictured herself. 

“So, are you going to buy a bottle?” This voice, from a white lab coat, had weight to it—like a boot applying pressure on the back of Hui’s neck.

“How much is it?” She asked, her voice catching in her throat, as if a sharp spear twisted in her Adam’s apple, as if she didn’t already know and had not already inquired through a helix of encrypted conversations.

“Well, this particular wine will be very strong. This tiger was quite virile, very hard to bring down. The hunter who snared and speared it is said to have one of its claws still embedded in his forearm if you would believe it.”

“How much?”

“From a kitten such as this—what are you willing to pay?” Hui’s counterpart in the white medical coat had sensed an opportunity to raise the stakes. Perhaps he had even sensed such a possibility before Hui spoke it into existence.

Hui stared into the tank once more and crossed her arms. She leaned back on her right leg, not quite ready to step into a universe where the world’s dead parts act as remedies. She ran fingertips through her hair. She felt the dandruff gather under her nails. Every cell that was part of her body was open to jailbreak.  

“You should have seen his coat, such beautiful stripes he had.” 

The man in the lab coat tapped the lid of the container, causing the bones to jiggle and bounce as a marionette's would. The whole world on a string. Like a song. Like a lyric not quite right.

And Hui took out her wallet. The lab coat grinned and clicked his tongue. Brushing Hui’s old habits into the ether, the man in charge assured his customer more secure pathways existed for stalking all the world’s acquired secrets. Money was promised with a rare handshake. The digital mollusk of the universe would process the economic orbits.

 “After you drink these, you will be made new in all the ways you wish to be.”

“Oh, they’re not for me,” and the truth out loud felt like removing a blade from her throat, “My wife is very ill, and she believes in this sort of thing.”

 “And you don’t? It’s a new formula.”

“No," the spouse sighed as she glanced sideways, "I am not a superstitious person.” Only desperate.

The opposition eyed her with a new sense of skepticism. There was no receipt. Only critical acceptance and time spent waiting for a world without tigers. 

A Long Throw to Third

Bethany Holmstrom is an English professor at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY. Originally from rural Appalachia, she now lives in Brooklyn. Her work appears in Appalachian Review, The Molotov Cocktail, MoonPark Review, and Rejection Letters.

Danny said he’ll eat one of us when the beans run out and all that’s left is tomato paste, and everyone laughed. I remembered: on our third date I cooked a ground lamb and pork ragù with onions and thyme and garlic and parmesan rind and tomatoes and anchovies and a whole can of tomato paste, piled on top of penne rigate. Danny ate it but confessed the next morning that he loathed tomato paste.

I share things like the ragù recipe – the bits I remember from before – with the dogs who come to the field by our camp. But not the dogs who are too dumb to know better and get too close; those, I inspect their tags and fraying collars for phone numbers. If I don’t recognize the area code, I make up where they’re from – give the dumb dogs back-stories and mileage.

I shape my memories into balls and toss them instead to the smart dogs that stay farther away: my college graduation, when I was hungover and every name was misery; when I landed a history job at the county high school and Mom took me to see the touring production of Pippin to celebrate; when I stared into a man’s eyes and broke his heart and a slight thrill punched through the pain.

Sometimes I lob memories as if I’m making that throw from deep in left field to third, to beat a runner who tagged up at second, and I get a side stitch. I drag my hands deeper across my empty belly to another tiny phantom tug. 

The smart dogs have forgotten how to play fetch — so spheres slick with psychoamniotic fluid litter the field. A few nights ago the dogs started to howl in conversation with the coyotes. 

“They’re turning wild,” Marisa said.

“Can we eat them then?” her son Jaime asked.

“Never,” I told him. Danny looked silently into the breakfast fire, scooping out two finger-curls of pintos.

“Here,” Marisa offered. “It’s better with some of the Ro-Tel.”

When I can’t sleep I go to the edge of our woods and watch the dogs roam — more of them, increasingly feral; the coyotes stay up on the ridge for now. But I can imagine the coyotes joining the dogs soon, the yips and bays becoming indistinguishable. The pack will step carefully around the parts of me being swallowed up by early spring grass, glistening under the sear of the night sky.

Flowers and Snow

Ulrica Hume is the author of An Uncertain Age and House of Miracles. Her flash pieces appear online and in anthologies. She tweets @uhume.

I am alone, about to fall asleep, when I hear a strange scuffling sound in the attic.

I think it is maybe an owl.

Or an intruder.

Soon I am moving through the house half dressed, hands held out before me. In the hall the congratulatory roses appear like magical lumps of coal but with petals. A crime they have no scent, that I played so poorly and the audience applauded so hard. My desire for perfection a shame.

I climb the ladder to the attic. In the flashlight’s beam there are traps here and there, cotton-candy-pink insulation. Then I see the shape of someone, crouched like an owl in their terrible wisdom.

It is the conductor of my old ensemble, long dead. I know him by the sad tuxedo, round spectacles, a certain musk. He lurches toward me, a flurry of arms or wings, which causes me to climb back down the ladder, little ladder of my soul.

The brain observing itself is obscene. What appears to be real is not always true and what is true is not always real—a terrifying equation. In my belly there is snow. In my heart as well. In my eyes there are ice crystals. This division of myself a synthetic violence.

A tsymbaly is a type of dulcimer, played by striking its strings with two hammers. The hammers are light in my hands. Hour after hour, the conductor stands behind me as I play. Whispering about hope, a fallen people. We tour Europe. My one black dress. His mercurial praise, his criticism. He presents me as his protégé at the open-air festivals. In Prague, he pushes me against the spiral staircase of a castle and says I am his.

I am not his.

After, as we walk along the river, I twist my ankle in the thaw. He proposes marriage. I say no, of course.

Concierto de Aranjuez. Rodrigo’s “Adagio” begins in a melancholy way, then devilishly builds. Its beauty is found between notes, in tremulous silences, semiquaver rests, the guilt of wishing for more than devastation. Its beauty is in acceptance.

Hear the English horn, the bassoon, the oboe. Hear him groaning like the ghost of Goya. His competence, his grave appeal—not for me but for the song.

This is the concussive finale. The kettledrum a provoker of depths. My solo an enchantment: angel’s proficiency, bees in the hive.

His incomprehension that I do not enjoy this.

A refusal to lie.

The conductor pulling notes from the air until he is sated.

Music, he once told me, is reparation, also curse, for to give one must first feel pain. He is teaching this still.

The applause a cruelty.

He carries me back to the hotel, ices my ankle. The narrow bed, his wagging, lunar head, his insistence.

Behind steamed-up spectacles, his gaze is a dead star. His sudden, unbidden passion meant to conform me.

I am instead radically still.

This moment opens to an imperfect flowering.

It is dangerous to love, even only music. It is dangerous to receive another’s aggression and then keep it for years, like a jewel in a box, because it is not a jewel and the amygdala and hippocampus and prefrontal cortex are dumb to such a haunting.

At the window, I slide my finger through the condensation.

Everything lightens, becomes quiet and clear.

An owl flies past.

The Searcher

Benjamin Kessler's work has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Hobart, DIAGRAM, Pithead Chapel, Entropy, and more. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Every other Sunday Abe sweeps the beach. Combing at low tide, he guides the detector coil in hope of finding buried treasure. He wants one big score before summer’s end. Most outings he discovers only empty cans and burnt nails from pallet bonfires. Such trash is abundant today, littered perhaps by the group of attractive young people circled up near the empty lifeguard chair. They’re the only other people on the beach. He changes course and meanders toward them, wanting a better look. He removes one of the headphone ear cups so that he may eavesdrop, but their sound is covered by the ocean roll. 

A woman wearing a striped swimsuit stands and brushes the sand from her thighs. She waves at someone attempting to surf and then walks away, disappearing into one of the concrete restrooms. Abe is distracted by her hair dyed pink as melon. He steps on the desiccated body of a crab and shatters it to fragments. A man in the group pantomimes tipping a beer bottle to his lips and then hikes his thumb toward the parking lot. His friends nod excitedly and he jogs away. Though he stops before the sand gives way to asphalt and scouts to make sure no one is watching before sneaking in and joining the woman in the restroom. 

Abe is way off his grid, close enough now to the group that he can hear the faint murmur of conversation. One of the men tosses a piece of driftwoodat a seagull eyeing potato chips from an open bag. The detector beeps. Abe crouches down and retrieves a rusted house key from the shallow sand, which he deposits into a fanny pack. 

Abe has never enjoyed the beach like these people do. He has other social outlets: the sports bar near the American Legion, the Lucky Bowl, a catalog of internet forums. Though watching the young people crowd together to fit into a cell phone photo makes him a bit wistful. 

Pointing his detector toward the parking lot, he sees a flash of color as the woman exits the restroom. She stops for a moment to adjust her bikini top and ties back her hair. She rejoins the group and wraps her arms around a man passing a football between his hands. She kisses him on the cheek and then sits beside him, entwining her fingers in his own. A few moments later the man from before leaves the restroom as well, running to the parking lot and retrieving a case of beer from a beige four-door. When he returns the group peppers him with conversation, as if to ask what took him so long. Didn’t he know how thirsty they were? The woman in the striped swimsuit tries not to make eye contact, instead watching faraway breakers collapse on themselves. 

Abe traces absentminded circles around a beached log with no success. Then, as though outside his own control, he is beside the group, his detector discovering a bracelet on the wrist of the woman in the striped swimsuit. The man with the football looks up and the group falls silent, their beach day interrupted. 

“Hey man, private party.” 

When Abe doesn’t respond the man speaks again. 

“Are you deaf? Get lost.” 

The group looks upon Abe as though he is repulsive, staring at his coarse shoulder hair, his filthy sandals, his bucket hat outlined with sweat salt. Abe contemplates telling the man what he has seen, but decides against. He will not ruin this moment further, make himself anymore of an ogre. Abe stares at the man who had joined the woman in the restroom. The way the man drinks his beer, nervously, in short, breathless sips, makes Abe think they share a secret. 

“Well?” the man with the football says. 

Abe puts his hands up in surrender and walks in the opposite direction, busying himself with the detector dials. When he is far enough away he glances back. The girl in the striped swimsuit is wading out into the ocean while the man from the restroom looks on. Perhaps he wants to join her, dearly, but cannot.

Still Alive that Summer

Margaret MacInnis lives and writes in Iowa City. Her essays, stories, and poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Brevity, Crab Orchard Review, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Gettysburg Review, Ghost Parachute, Gulf Coast Review, Massachusetts Review, Mid-American Review, River Teeth, Tampa Review and elsewhere. Her work has received notable distinction in Best American Essays and Best American Non-Required Reading. Since 2010, MacInnis has worked as personal assistant to Marilynne Robinson.

My father, five years before he shot himself, is standing over our beach blanket where I sit beside my mother and sister. He smiles down at us, so happy here on the South Shore of Boston, Nantasket Beach, the “Irish Riviera” he jokes. Bare-chested, freckled, in cut-off Levi’s, he’s sure to burn, which my olive-toned mother knows, so she offers him the sunblock, and he shakes his head, even though he knows too. 

“I want a little color,” he says, extending his hands, and I take them, for I always take them, until I can no longer take them, until they’re cold to the touch, folded over his chest, one hand over another, rosary beads wrapped around them. 

Still alive that summer at Nantasket Beach, he pulls me to my feet, and though the sand is hot, it’s not unbearable. Holding up my hands, he inspects the damage wreaked by my eczema. My hands throb and itch, the cracked skin between each finger exposing weepy pink flesh. 

“I’m going to heal your hands,” my father says.

“How?” I asked, longing for relief, willing to believe.

At the water’s edge he bends down to submerge his hands. “Like this. For as long as you can stand it.” 

“It stings!” I yank my hands from the salty water. I feel a pang of betrayal.

“I know it does, but it’ll stop, and your hands will be better, I promise.” Taking me by the wrists, he holds my hands under the water. “Trust your old man, will you?” 

I trust him more than I trust anyone, more than I should, my eyes watering from the stinging burn, but now I’m eleven, and he’s right. The stinging does stop, the open cracks between my fingers do close, and in time heal, leaving behind a delicate pattern of pale tangled webs that never seem to fade.

Better Comforts

Avra Margariti is a queer Social Work undergrad from Greece. She enjoys storytelling in all its forms and writes about diverse identities and experiences. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, The Forge Literary, Baltimore Review, matchbook, Wigleaf, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Longleaf Review, and other venues. Avra won the 2019 Bacopa Literary Review prize for fiction, and placed third in Reflex Fiction’ Spring 2020 Competition. You can find her on twitter @avramargariti.

“You need to name me,” the woman who came from my rib says. “I cannot become your wife until you name me.”

I tell the woman who came from my rib that she should name herself. It’s what people do: shredding, shedding one identity and donning another. 

The woman wails, as if my rejection costs her something she cannot spare. Perhaps it does. I’m not privy to the antiquated minutiae of parthenogeneses; of calcium-rich golems, gleaming unctuous white under my bedroom’s lighting. My surgeon failed to inform me of this biblical curiosity when he let me take the bone home. Perhaps he thought recuperation would go smoother with a wife willing to care for me.

I wander into the kitchen, leaving my nuptial ghost behind, distressed by the side of the bed that isn’t hers. Not unless I name her. 

I take my pain meds, swallow lukewarm water. Though I linger in the doorway, I cannot avoid the woman who came from my rib for long. The bone in question sits atop my nightstand on a black plinth. White now, my first rib, and scrubbed clean of the red-meat tissue that clung to it post-surgery.

The woman--bony djinn--has slunk back onto her plinth. Small again, and quiet, hugging the rib that only a few days ago lived inside me, compressing the nerves of my thoracic outlet. I wonder if there are eleven more women like her beneath my skin. If she misses her sister wives. Holding them, kissing them, the twelve of them, in tandem, cradling my heart and lungs. Able to hurt me so, so easily. 

Although she manifested from myself fully grown, in sleep she hugs our rib like a favorite teddy bear, a security blanket. I don’t know how to convince her she’s her own, separate person. That she should seek better comforts than my cast-off bone. 

I cannot name the woman who came from my rib. Once you name something, it is yours forever, burrowing down deep in your brain. A spook haunting the chambers of your memory palace; an innocuous-seeming body part holding you back, allowing no space for movement, no room to grow.

Once you name something, you belong to it as much as it belongs to you.

I turn off the lights, drape an old silk scarf over my rib and the woman who came from it. Even ghosts, I imagine, get cold. 

Brrr Dun Dun Dun

Brooke Middlebrook currently resides in Birmingham, Alabama but grew up in the hills of western Massachusetts. Recent work appears in X-R-A-Y, Waterwheel Review, and Unbroken. She can be found at bmiddleb.com.

The Ying Yang Twins tell me to get low, so I oblige. It’s easy if I think of that climate report that says we’ll all be cooked in twenty years. Get low, the Twins insist, though I’m not sure what my ass has to do with it. And yet, if I’m being honest, the parameters of my ass could stand some improvement, to be perhaps rounder or have more of a cherubic lift, to make it something you’d see and just have to grab with both hands. And, being honest, I can’t remember the last time there was anything I just had to pull towards me in great gulping handfuls. Oh ok. Cleverly done, Ying Yang Twins. And yet they implore me again! Perhaps I’m being too metaphorical. I lay on the floor, but it may not be enough. I go outside. I lay on the ground and press my ear to the earth. This is as low as I can go, I say. But it’s not, comes a chorus of worms. We’re down here, burrowing; we bet you could too if you tried. I ponder; I do want to fulfill my imperative. But what happens when it rains? I ask. I thought worms were prone to drowning. They laugh a bit; it sounds like crinkled cellophane. You think a lot, they reply. It’s scary, but you know how you feel after a good cry? When you tunnel up to the surface, slippery and loose, and the air spills open and you wiggle with it.

Pantoum for Edinburgh

Kim Murdock is an emerging writer living in Ontario, Canada. Her work has appeared in Ellipsis Zine, Bending Genres, Janus Literary, FlashFlood Journal, 100 Word Story, Blink-Ink, and elsewhere. She tweets from @herselfKim.

The landlady at the Bed and Breakfast serves tea, and now it seems I can't drink coffee anymore, it's too bitter, it makes my chest tight. I map the city with my feet, the castle rock my compass, the cobbles smooth the tread of my boots, my heart already snagged on the jagged coast beneath the plane's belly on descent. There are bookshops hidden everywhere in this city, and every day I discover more of them. The stack of books in my room grows taller, it's embarrassing, I don't know how I'll ever get them all back home.  

I map the city with my feet, my heart snagged, I explore every narrow close, every park, every wynd, through Leith to Craig Millar. I send postcards to friends and family back home, like a proper tourist, saying things like I lost my umbrella at the castle! because it's true, yet sounds slightly exotic. The stack of books in my room is now shoogly, it's embarrassing, but the landlady's husband has brought me a small, 3-shelf bookcase. Everyone is so kind I'm unsure how to behave. 

I send postcards to people, pretending I'm a tourist, writing things like Can you believe, I still haven't found that umbrella! even though I no longer use an umbrella--nothing dampens my spirits. Some bookstores are a labyrinth where I lose track of myself, prowling the stacks like some dust-fed bookish beast. Everyone is so kind, they invite me to their homes for tea, the meal and the drink. On Tuesdays, I hang my laundry in the back garden and on Sundays I walk to the Queen's Arms for their neeps and tatties soup served in a tiny cast-iron caldron.  

I lose track: of myself, this city a labyrinth, bookshops hidden everywhere. Each day I discover more and more. I hang my laundry in the back garden before walking to the Queen's Arms for book club, served in a wee cast-iron caldron, where we blether until closing. At the B&B, Ailsa serves tea--milk, no sugar--and even the thought of coffee churns like a rot, gives me the boak.

Elena’s Letters

Genta Nishku lives in New York and grew up in Tirana.

Elena sent me letters every week. She wrote about how much she had cried that day. She felt alone, she missed me, her mother, our friends. She missed eating rice cooked in chicken stock and herbs. Many of the people in her new life were kind. They came to visit her often and told her she was beautiful, they took her to the stores on the weekends, they watched soaps with her in the humid afternoons. Her new mother-in-law taught her how to make involtini di cotoletta, and showed her where to buy the frozen calamari and fish that her son liked. She was too old to be a new bride but she still needed their help and they gave it to her freely. Her letters jumped from topic to topic without much warning. Not even a paragraph break separated her news about the first wife’s photo on the mantle, which had disappeared after her first day there, and the news about the pair of blue jeans that her husband had bought her. The jeans were so cheap, she wrote, that she wanted to buy me a pair as well, but she had no way to send packages to me. (The first wife had been beautiful too, and now that she had made him a widower, was even more pious and perfect.) Every evening she took a walk with her husband. He was gentle with her. He had given her a book for learning Italian, and often came back from work with small gifts and flowers. The letters never gave name to her condition, never called it alienation or isolation, or even just loneliness. She only laid out in front of me detailed descriptions of her days, from morning till night, and the fits of crying that broke up that monotony. 

I tried to excavate the messages she was leaving for me in the details. I tried to make sense of the excruciating precision in the descriptions of her life’s minutiae. Once, she wrote about going to the coast with her husband and his teenage sons. It was a Sunday and they had strolled through the ruins of the ancient port. They had seen the old theatre, mosaics and baths in Ostia. These details, she breezed through. They had eaten gelato and she had tried the pistachio flavor. It was here that she concentrated, taking care to explain the procedure for acquiring the gelato. If you wanted to order, she wrote, you first needed to tell the person working the register how many scoops and which type of cone you would like, pay them the amount, acquire a receipt, walk over to the glass counter, hand the receipt to another person and tell them which flavors you would like, and then, finally receive your treat, a cone wrapped with a small, colorful paper napkin. 

You couldn’t let your guard down, she wrote, you needed to pay close attention at every step, but you needed to act natural, too, so no one would suspect you were ignorant and unprepared. I never told her that I had gone to the seaside, too. I had looked across the distance, filled only with wavy sea and the reflection of the sun, and wondered about her on the other coast. I had sat down on the sand and watched the waves come and go, foam smoothing over rocks and seashells. All of the shells, somehow, were covered in small, precise holes. This made them almost unusable as decoration, unless you took the effort of arranging them so carefully that the holes would face the back of a wall or wooden panel. Later I learned how the holes would form: predators like sea snails drilled into the shells to get to the soft bodies of the mollusks inside, leaving behind more than one kind of absence. 

I didn’t know what Elena wanted from me. 

She must have assumed I knew about loneliness— making meals for one, having conversations with silence, finding contentment in the transformation of the sky’s colors at dawn and dusk, things like that. But I didn’t know about the loneliness of beautiful women, those who were supposed to have had everything and, for one reason or another, through no fault of their own, hadn’t been able to. The house with the yard, the garden full of flowers and vegetables, the husband who thinks of her while he works all day, the children who’ll care for her in old age. The years of feeling a sense of absolute and total accomplishment. By virtue of never having had any, I didn’t know what happened with expectations that weren’t met. I didn’t know, either, what happened if these expectations were fulfilled, even if belatedly, and the emptiness intensified. 

I was afraid her letters came with a tacit agreement that the two of us were miserable in the same way. I resented the misplaced solidarity she extended me. Every sorrow is different, I wanted to tell her. I didn’t know the first thing about being alone in another country, just like she didn’t know anything about being alone at home. Neither of us could be helped through pity— however shared the feeling was. But I never wrote this in my letters to her, I never told her what I was really thinking. Instead, I replied with detailed accounts of the triviality of my own life, my monotonous days, the people I ran into in the street, the friends I had coffee with, the amusing things my neighbors would say. I was certain that the unsaid spoke loudly and clearly in our correspondence. This is where I found comfort: even if I never told her, even if I never hinted at it, she still must have known how long I had imagined the mollusk inside its shell, the drilling threatening it, so slow it would take days. Its utter lack of awareness of what was poised to happen, what had happened already.  

Dark Age

Eden Shulman is a former journalist and currently fiction editor at the Arkansas International. His stories and poetry have appeared in Boulevard, The Carolina Quarterly, and Up the Staircase Quarterly. He is an MFA student in fiction at the University of Arkansas, where he was the recipient of the Carolyn F. Walton Cole First-Year Fellowship and the Baucum-Fulkerson Prize in Fiction.

Browntooth is Browntooth because of her brown tooth. I am Roundbelly because of the stones. They distend me. I am always full. What I chew I cannot swallow.

We are curled in our favorite spot, in the shadows of a poplar grove, when Browntooth begins to give birth. She scratches at the dirt and whimpers. I drag myself to her, my belly sliding beneath me like a snake. It curls dust and fur at its hem and splits a double trail. 

Browntooth growls at me. She chews at her paws, cracks her nails. Black grows beneath her legs and out.

I used to be a beast like her. I slobbered. I ran my nose across soft rotted ground. I chased cats. I caught cats. I hunted by barns in the night; Browntooth and I tore into burlap for crumbs, tore fleeing mice to pieces; we scattered at human shouts and the arrows that ripped through my fur. 

We lived at the edge of a small village that tumored from the heart of our dell. Each morning, the humans left to work in the fields beyond the trees. We waited until they were gone, then we hunted. With our snouts we furrowed rat holes. As they squeaked to life we ripped them from it. We swallowed bones and fur and the sightless nubs they called babies. We talked with our teeth. 

It was on a bright winter morning when I scented the kittens. Slobbering, I dug under a mud-brick wall and found the basket beneath a forsythia bush. The kittens crawled about, stretching past their squeezed eyes. They were slower than rats, stupid and loud. They were so small that when I lifted them up by their heads, they slid down my throat whole. That was the last time I was free with hunger. 

After eating the kittens, I felt sleepy, and I curled in the basket. The stillness was cut with cries. A human approached from the house, wild, brandishing shears. I tried to fit in the hole I had dug under the wall, but I was too full, and too fat, so I stuck. The cats inside me squirmed. I opened my mouth to bark, but their insistent cries emerged from my throat. The human grabbed me by the tail and dragged me down to the river. I tried to bite her, but I was too weak. She cut me open, tail to chest. She pulled the wriggling kittens out of my belly and into the emptiness she piled river stones, black and slick. Then she sewed me up and rolled me into the water.

The kittens in her basket mewled with triumph. I struggled to keep my head above water. I paddled and gasped, but weighed down by the rocks in my stomach, I sank. The river rushed, digesting me. 

Then my tail rose, and I was lifted out of the water, dragged onto the clinging bank, my entire swollen mass: Browntooth, shaking water from fur.

From that moment, I became a useless dog. The rats scampered when I slithered toward them. I snapped, my jaws clicked, and they mocked me. Browntooth brought me chicken carcasses. She brought me moldy bread and soft carrots. I chewed the food; I let it fall from my mouth. I slept beneath the poplars. My stomach grew raw and bald from dragging on the ground. Even when Browntooth’s belly started to grow, she still fed me. At dawn, she waddled to the village, and returned at night with gnawed sausages, beef gristle, onion skins. 

Now, she huddles in the shade, clenched in birth. She growls and pants. I whine — mother, mother! I dip my snout and I lap Browntooth’s blood. It crusts my lips, my whiskers. Eventually, the first puppy slips from her, slick as meat. Browntooth tears into the cord, severs it from her body. Then she cleans the puppy, licks it shiny, head to tail. The puppy squeaks. Another comes, then three more — all cut, all clean. They squirm toward her and she, exhausted and empty, curls around them. 

I am cold on the other side of the grove. The puppies are warm and wet. The scent of blood and bile shrieks — nothing, now something! 

I stand, and the stones clack inside my stomach. They grind my innards, rattle and gossip. I am filled with cold things. I remember the kittens and how they moved inside me; how, after they were swallowed, they climbed toward my throat, desperate to be in the world again. In my stomach, they were mine. I would have made them me. 

I slide over to Browntooth. She shows me her teeth. I nose the mass of placentas heaped beside her. Its crackling scent of guts and earth blackens me snout to tail. I now understand: this to chew, this to swallow; my fullness broken, my hollow gained. I mouth a placenta, soft on my tongue, and I chew. It tastes like blood. It tastes like babies. The rocks rise furious in my throat but I force myself to swallow. Browntooth growls. She stands, shaking, and plants herself above her children.

I become nauseous. I cannot hold it in. I dip my snout beside the puppies and I vomit up their mother’s life. Then, with another heave, I expel the stones, one after another. They tumble from my mouth into a pile, wet as river, black as blood, perfectly smooth and dead. 

Temple Lake

Dylan A. Smith is a writer with work in Maudlin House and (mac)ro(mic) and Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and is apprentice to a woodsman named Art in upstate New York, and also tweets sometimes as @dylan_a_smith.

The temple lake lay stagnant in the middle brother’s memory. 

No river fed it; it did not drain. 

Haunts of black gnats hung darkly above the murk, and when at night this brother’s thoughts crept back to childhood winters coming—and to the thin temple windows burning red, as if with fever—his memory of those holy waters froze into a single, black, immoveable thing within him. 

Years later, and as men, the three brothers have returned to their hometown for reunion. 

The mountain is the same—tall pines twisting like spires in the summer dark—but the bar in the basement of the renovated temple is new, and their father, the famous painter, is dead, and there are homes and hotels all along the road now, and everyone on the television above the bar is either competing in the olympic games or dying from the plague. 

The eldest brother looks mostly like their father, his hair red and burning in the mirrors behind the bar. 

The youngest brother—more wane, but with eyes burning blackly, sickly, even saintly with a fervor not unlike their father’s—looks least like him. 

And this middle brother, well; this middle brother has reflected nothing. 

Nothing, he insists. And not a thing yet even of their father. 

Later, inside the cabin where their father had raised them, there is a startled young mother screaming, scratching. 

All three brothers act confused by this collision. They have their hats in their hands, their hands raised on high in the kitchen. 

Forgive us, wrong house, we’re sorry. 

The brothers are no longer young; they do not proceed to throw stones at the windows of all the hotels and storefronts along their familial road in frustration; they do not hike the hill to the cemetery, where their father is buried, to overturn headstones and to piss. 

Instead, they hustle drunkenly into the clear-cut dark, returning to the lake beside the temple for a swim. 

The middle brother twists his ankle inside an unfilled fencepost hole as he approaches the edge of the lake; he senses wolves on the mountain in the nearby night. 

Everything is so wild, the eldest brother thinks. He is naked in the moonlit water. 

And so unbroken, and so blue with the night, and so free. 

But the youngest of the brothers has declared their reunion a wash. Pointing his heart to the stars, he recites something sort of tiresome from the bible, something familiar about end times and envy, and about the brotherly injury inherent, and then he throws his cell phone into the lake. 

If we’re able, he suggests, we ought to return to those seats we kept at the bar. 

Please, the other brothers agree. Yes, please, by god—and quick.

The eldest and youngest hoist their injured brother between them athletically. Inside the temple bar is memory; inside is music, and mirrors; and inside is candles and screens keeping light. 

With hair wetting the wood of the bar top, the eldest brother remembers trees; remembers their father’s maple wood burning through winter as he worked; the sawdust smells, aromas autumnal and red; or the solemn sound of oak, or hickory, or ash being felled in red clearings forever widening on the mountainside. 

The youngest remembers the meadow-like linens of spring; he remembers full moons reflected in warm water, and white flowers, and he remembers hymns quietly sung buy their father’s gorgeous guests.

The middle brother’s ankle aches simply on the barstool beneath him.

Shapes twist and spin on the television above the bar. People all around them are eating meat. 

Outside, alone, the middle brother smokes. 

A family of deer are grazing in a glade of queen anne’s lace on the roadside. 

The night smells of honeysuckle and mud.

Each flower is its own little moon in the moonlight, the middle brother thinks. Each tail of each leaping deer like its own little crescent when, abruptly, a fawn is struck by a truck that does not stop driving. 

Limping, the middle brother removes the ruined deer from the road, it’s hind legs and hips in puddles. 

And it is there, in the flowers and mud beside the creek, that he is moved by a memory of his father. 

It was the day after Thanksgiving. The eldest brother had just gone away to war. In his painterly poverty, the father had insisted the middle brother learn to hunt for deer for dinner; and so, days before, the middle brother had learned; and he had killed; and now they had hung the deer from butcher hooks in the cabin’s kitchen to skin it. 

This, their father said soberly, is but one way we prepare for winter here. 

The middle brother remembers the smells of the inside of the deer steaming; he remembers the intricate folds of pink inner flesh, and how it all had felt like wood grain against his newly sharpened knife. 

We have your grandfather’s blood, their father said. He was raised in the desert with no trees for shelter; with wolves and thieves, and with no sound of water. 

We are evil, the youngest brother screamed. He wept and wept beside the fire. We are sinners, and we are all hell-bound-dead. 

Raising himself out of the flowers now, the middle brother limps back toward the stained-red windows and kneels at the edge of the lake. 

As if dismantling his reflection in the moonlit water, he washes the blood from his hands, the dead deer steaming simply in the cold, dead dark behind him. 

Then he returns to his seat beside his brothers inside the bar where, on the television above them, the olympic game being displayed is swimming. 

The House of Grey’s Anatomy

Jennifer Todhunter's stories have appeared in The Forge, Hobart, Monkeybicycle, and elsewhere. Her work has been selected for Best Small Fictions, Best Microfictions and Wigleaf’s Top 50 Very Short Fictions. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Pidgeonholes and founder of Trash Mag. Find her at www.foxbane.ca or @JenTod_.

A few hours before I find out my co-worker and mentor M is dead, I ask Z, another co-worker who already knows what’s up, to reopen a cut on my thumb because I'm worried it's infected. A week or two earlier, I sliced my right thumb pad open with a kitchen knife and some dirt must’ve got in because it's red and hot and tender and throbbing. 

Z scours the office for a boxcutter while I boil water in the kettle to sterilize its blade. I ask where M is because M’s health has been questionable since I met him a few years ago and he’s sort of become a low-key father figure to me, my own father dying when I was teenaged like M’s kids are now. 

Have you spoken with him? Is he okay?

I don't know, Z says. I don’t know.

Z tells me he's watched a lot of Grey's Anatomy, a lot of House, while he prepares the dodgy surgical implements we’ve gathered up. He suggests freezing my thumb pad with an ice cube and dabs a little polysporin on a tissue for when he's finished. 

Reopening the cut is a painful experience and Z slices through the wound three times before drawing blood. I clench my jaw, make a fist with my other hand like I’ve seen people do in the movies. Z tells me the infection bubble might have moved away from the cut, might have travelled, and when I ask him if that's a thing that happens, he says he doesn't know, but he thinks he saw it happen one time on House. I ask Z how that turned out for that patient and his face goes still. Not good? I ask and Z gives me a weak smile, which is the opposite of how M used to smile, no matter how busy or bad things were.

I press around the wound once it’s open and try to squeeze out the infection, but it stays angry and warm under the surface, only the red of my blood pooling where Z’s sliced the skin. I think about the infection bubble, wonder where it will go, if it will dissipate on its own or become more troubling in a few days or weeks. I wonder if it will hit my blood stream and take me out in my sleep, and I almost ask Z if that’s what’s happened to M but I don’t want to put him on the spot like that, because what if M if just taking a well-deserved break. What if he’s lying on the couch watching Grey’s Anatomy and eating potato chips.  

You really don’t know where M is? I ask instead.

Z looks at his desk and shrugs and, in hindsight, I don’t blame him because how do you formulate words to communicate someone else’s death if it’s not all scripted-up like on the television.

Let me know when you hear from him, I say as I wrap the polysporin-blotted tissue around my thumb and stand. 

As soon as I can, Z says. Let me know about your thumb, okay?

I will, I say. I will.

We stare at each other for a second, and I almost ask after M one more time, but turn and head back to my desk to work, pour another cup of coffee on the way, the heartbeat of my thumb throbbing in a constant knocking.

How to Survive a Superstorm

Eileen Frankel Tomarchio works as a librarian in a small NJ town. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in Longleaf Review, Barrelhouse Online, X-R-A-Y, Pithead Chapel, Lost Balloon, Pigeon Pages, and Maudlin House. She holds an MFA from NYU Film. She's on Twitter at @eileentomarchio.

Ignore the news van driver thumbing inland as he passes you, mouthing Wrong way.

Wait for Meg’s cue to turn around, to go home to your families hunkering from spite, all because the governor called holdouts stupid and selfish. When no cue comes, copy her standing pump on the banana bikes you found playing dead outside the WaWa. Dodge the panicked trash barrels and deranged stop signs, the skateboarders in briefs and Phillie Phanatic heads rattling balls in spray paint cans. Steer clear of the light tower groaning on its scabby legs. Strain to hear Meg through the wind as she rambles some shit about dualism and how your mind can trick your body into not even feeling the wind anymore. How you can train yourself so that pedaling feels effortless and moving feels motionless and natural disasters don’t scare because they’re blameless things.  

Slip behind her, since you’re out of your element and don’t know what to say. Coast in her wake where it reeks less of salt and diesel and bunker fish, where you can sniff the Cherry ChapStick she ran on your knuckles during Trig. Watch her dead brother’s hi-viz jacket lift off her hips, stiff as a pizza box. This girl with her binoculars and her Did you knows? This girl whose lunch tote you stomped on weekly in seventh grade. This girl leading you into a storm the same name as an aunt who saw to it your just-widowed father was dunked in a superfund lake until he came out a dim, irradiated Born Again.

Ditch the bikes where blacktop becomes sand. Follow Meg because she must know where she’s going and what she’s doing and you’re that sure she’s forgiven you. Grab the flap of her brother’s jacket because you’re fucking weaving around blinded and she’s treading the beach tall like a mast of flesh and bone. Don’t freak when she picks right now for a Did you know? Something about a land of eternal spring called Hyperborea, somewhere off in the far, far north, where people build houses from beeswax and feathers, where they never grow old or die. Resist the urge to crack that people grow old and die plenty up in Iceland, Greenland, Bangor. Remember that too many in this place have died before ever getting close to growing old, and come back with a Did you know? of your own, the only one you can think of at the moment, that birds steal lint from dryer vents in beach houses to pad their nests, you’ve seen it yourself. Swallow hard when she stops at the spit’s tongue-tip and looks at you—the rain like buckshot against the pale searchlight of her face—and says Duh, Jess, I know that. Everybody knows that.

Clutch her since there’s nothing else to anchor you, to keep you from blowing away because there’s nothing inside you, really, because you know nothing, nothing at all.

When she flings her binoculars into the ocean like she’s throwing chum, when she says Did you know that where we’re standing was a mile from the sea three hundred years ago? believe her.  

When she pulls you close and tents you both with her brother’s jacket, when the surge at your shins looks like nothing you’ve ever seen, a trick of the mind or something storied, a thing solid and marbled and palatial, when she says that this can only mean the earth is about to carry you together to Hyperborea, believe her.

Grandpa’s Going Toothless Again

Francine Witte’s latest books are Dressed All Wrong for This (Blue Light Press,) The Way of the Wind (AdHoc fiction,) and The Theory of Flesh (Kelsay Books.) Her chapbook, The Cake, The Smoke, The Moon (flash fiction) will be published by ELJ in Fall 2021. She lives in NYC.

Mouthgape like the door of a cave. When we were little, he’d point to his choppers on the nightstand. “Look!” he would say, “I’m everywhere.”

Little Alice, the teeniest of us, would run screaming from the room into the wall of Grandma’s skirt. “Harry,” Grandma would cluck, “you’re scaring the children.”

When Grandma died a year ago, Grandpa didn’t say a word. Didn’t even go to the funeral. We worried about him, of course. Little Alice, grown now, made him casseroles and pies. He would open his mouth. No teeth, he would say. 

Alice soon gave up. Moved herself to another state because it was safe like grandma’s skirt. She writes us every now and again, but we all know she doesn’t mean it. 

Meanwhile, the rest of us watching Grandpa now, wasting away, day by day. Foodless, toothless. 

And from the bedside table, the smile of him staring at us all the while. 

Periodic Elements

Jenny Wong is a writer, traveler, and occasional business analyst. Her favorite places to wander are Tokyo alleys, Singapore hawker centers, and Parisian cemeteries. Recent publications include The Night Heron Barks, The Adriatic, and The Shore Poetry. She resides in the foothills of Alberta, Canada and tweets @jenwithwords.

Be - 4

1219...

1220..

1223...

The only words Becca’s parents say to each other are the house numbers on either side of the street.  The search continues for the home of yet another summer barbecue.  Her dad’s foot nurses the brake pedal, slow-maneuvers the family Volvo around street corners guarded by white picket fences and little signs that warn of herbicide lawns.  Her mother’s salon-fresh nails tap against a ceramic container in her lap. The oily smell of canned tuna leaks out beneath the white silicone lid. The nicoise salad has begun to sweat.  For now, Becca’s world is sweet and round. A cinnamon lollipop presses on her tongue.  In a calm voice, her mother points out all of the clipped and chemically-treated things, and calls them beautiful. 

O - 8

Oaklee spends her time reading labels. Shampoo bottles.  Night cream jars.  Girl Guide cookie boxes.  She admires the neat rows of letters that always begin with the tag Ingredients.  She loves how the words begin with simple things she knows like water or  sugar or salt and transition into more mysterious elements with complicated letters. Cocamidopropyl Betaine.  Citrus Grandis.  Carnauba wax. Her mother taught her that ingredients are listed in descending order of quantity.  She wonders if labels ever lie.

Sugar.  Spice.  Everything nice.  

Mg - 12

In chemistry class, Meg learns the definition of a compound.  It is not just another word for a prison, but a joining of two elements to make something new.  She tells Lucy about this and other molecular facts while they do sit ups in gym class, their faces almost meeting, then parting.  Sugar is also known as C₁₂H₂₂O₁₁. Magnesium burns the hottest and brightest.  But that is not Meg’s favorite element. She envies balloons, imagines them lifting off to touch the outlines of blue and sky. But whenever she fills her lungs with helium, her body remains tethered to the ground.  Instead, only her voice rises and squeaks out small vowels when startled.

S - 16

By her sixteenth birthday, Sage has already learned how to keep a hurricane in her throat and breathe out only dust and smoke and smiles.  

Ca - 20

Cara’s mother-in-law stands at the sink and skins carrots with a knife.  There is a craft to what the old woman does while she preps food, whittling down words until they are subtle and sharp.  Her mother-in-law always bears an arsenal under the tongue.  Cara listens.  A barrage of words make pinholes in her skin.  Sun spots.  Small wounds.  Her bones are still young enough to grow straight, yet something inside begins to hollow.  

Cr - 24

At night, Crystal stares at the TV screen to distract herself from the quills in the goose down blanket that prick at her neck. Eventually, sleep comes to unlatch her from consciousness.  The body begins another night of reluctant repairs. Eyes closed, her fingers twitch, searching for handholds to keep her dreams from being drawn into well-manicured boulevards and the narrow squeeze of one way streets.

Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit

Lucy Zhou is a technical writer living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Rejection Letters, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, and Sublunary Review. In 2020, she received an honorable mention for the Felicia Farr Lemmon Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets. She loves long-haired cats, labyrinths, and endlessly revising her pieces. You can find her on Twitter @lrenazhou.

Susan, with the cornhusk hair, was the one who told me about the rabbit, rabbit, rabbit tradition. On the first day of the month, whisper rabbit, rabbit, rabbit as soon as you wake up, she said. Then Jesus will grace you with good luck for the rest of the month, pinky swear.

I went home and told Mother this. Don’t be ridiculous, Mother said. Everyone knows there’s a rabbit on the moon. If you squint, you can see its two ears and bushy tail there. She pointed out watercolor splotches on the moon, and I nodded, suddenly seeing it in a new light.

So it’s the moon goddess and her rabbit you’re praying to, she continued. Your friend is mistaken. I bet if Jesus told her to eat cat shit for good luck, she’d do it.

But I wasn’t so sure. It was March 31st, and before I went to bed, I got on my tippy-toes to pet the moon rabbit’s ears. The next morning, when I woke up, the first thing I did was close my eyes and whisper: rabbit, rabbit, rabbit. 

The moon was tracing paper against a blue sky. I felt luckier already. 

Nai-nai’s coming to visit in two weeks, Mother said during dinner a few days later. She picked at the po chai she spent a month fermenting while I cheered; the moon rabbit goddess had heard my prayers!

But when Nai-nai finally arrived on a wet Sunday, I hesitated before her. 

Last year when she visited, she brought two suitcases full of clothes, books, and bags of hua mei, my favorite, and carried them all by herself. She would hum old Chinese folk tunes and read me passages from her Little Red Book before bed. She gave me piggy-back rides and smiled big watermelon smiles. This Nai-nai, however, looked like a sunbaked radish, old and sad. Her hair had turned all white and was falling out in tufts. She brought only one carry-on bag, and even that seemed like a burden. 

Dou-dou, Mother said. Where are your manners? 

Nai-nai, I said when I hugged her. She still smelled like Nai-nai, slightly sour. How come you look so old now?

Mother almost smacked me right there, but Nai-nai just laughed her usual full-bellied laugh. Dou-dou, you’re so tall now! She pulled back to get a good look at me. 

Nai-nai asked me about school, if I’m making a lot of friends. I am, I said. I have this friend, Susan. She tells me funny things about Jesus. Oh, Nai-nai asked, like what? Well, I said, she told me that if you say rabbit, rabbit, rabbit first thing on the first day of the month, Jesus will love you and make all your wishes come true.

Oh, how interesting, Nai-nai said. She closed her eyes; somehow, that made her look even older. Thank you for telling me, she said, with her eyes still closed. 

Ma, come on, Mother said. Let me help you unpack. 

It was strange to hear Mother call Nai-nai, Ma, as if she were once a child. 

Nai-nai still smiled big watermelon smiles and went on walks with me, although she would get all wheezy halfway. Once she walked me all the way to school and met Susan, and we stood together on the sidewalk, teaching Nai-nai how to pinky swear until the bell rang. 

When Mother was working late at the restaurant, which seemed to happen more and more often, Nai-nai would sit by my bed and tell me made-up stories.

Once, she began, there was a mountain surrounded by water, so a living island. The mountain, however, was stubborn. Instead of going elsewhere when the flooding got worse, and it did, up to her knees, she stayed put. Today, in the South China Sea, you can still see her fingertips above the water; and if you close your eyes and listen carefully, you can hear her heartbeat go badum badum like any other animal. 

But why didn’t the mountain move? I asked. Now she’s half-underwater.

The moon behind Nai-nai’s head winked once like a god. 

Because, Dou-dou, Nai-nai said, she knew if she left, she would never be able to go back. Nai-nai smiled a fox’s smile before continuing, and a half-life is more than enough for a mountain like me. 

One day, as Nai-nai was slicing wet peaches, she fell over, almost loping off the pink tip of her thumb. I came home from school to an empty house, cold and sad. I almost started crying before Old Man Fan knocked on the door and told me that Mother had taken Nai-nai to the hospital. 

He said to stay put, Mother’s orders, but I walked to the hospital, all six miles. When I finally got there, the sky was already dark and oily. Inside, the halls glowed white like teeth. Nai-nai tried to smile from the cot when I opened the door, but it looked like it hurt. Mother seemed to be asleep by the window; a ghostly curtain of hair covered her eyes.

Nai-nai, I ran to her side. She was so thin. I held her hand so she wouldn’t fly away. 

Do you remember my friend, Susan? I asked. And the rabbit, rabbit, rabbit tradition?

She nodded.

Well, you don’t have to worry, okay? Because today is July 1st, and I said rabbit, rabbit, rabbit as soon as I woke up. I even dreamed of the moon rabbit goddess last night, and she promised me that all my troubles would disappear like smoke because I was so good. 

Somewhere behind me, I heard a choked cry, animal-like. So you have to believe, okay, Nai-nai? I continued. In the moon rabbit goddess. In me.

In Nai-nai’s pupils, I saw a softness that would crack even mountains in half. But I wasn’t afraid. I continued holding her hand, pushing back the saltwater that lapped at our knees, and prayed for the moon rabbit goddess to take my Nai-nai home.