You Look Beautiful!
by Hannah Berman
The dressing room mirror was plastered with the words “You look beautiful” in script. Heather looked right past the message, because of course she looked beautiful. She always looked beautiful, and she wasn’t there for a pep talk. She just needed to try on the bikinis she wanted, because her stepmom had asked her to do so before buying them. Even though she already knew the bikinis would all look great, Heather didn’t want to offend Linda, who had taken off work for this.
The first bikini was red, with cherries on it. Unsurprisingly, it looked great. Heather looked so good that she took a picture of herself in the mirror, retrieving her phone from the back pocket of her jeans and angling her body just so, although it didn’t even really need angling, since she was beautiful from all angles.
Next, she tried on the high-waisted bikini. It looked great. The bows were cute, and the light blue made her skin shine. She pulled out her phone again. More selfies. She stuck out her tongue and winked in one. It felt great to look so great. She scrolled through the photos, and idly considered posting one to her story.
Before she could try on the third bikini, a calico cat appeared in the dressing room, presumably having entered through the gap between the floor and the door. She only noticed the cat when he said, “You look beautiful, Heather.”
Heather was a little puzzled as to why the cat had entered her dressing room unannounced, but she wasn’t one to refuse a compliment. She smiled. “Thank you. How do you know my name?”
The cat gave a shrug and said, “I follow you on Instagram.”
“Oh, okay.” Heather had a lot of Instagram followers. She wasn’t actually profiting off the platform, but you could still pretty much call her an influencer, so that made sense.
An awkward silence had begun to grow, and the cat would not stop staring, so Heather pointed to the swimwear and asked, “Which bikini do you like best?”
“I’m more of a cherries guy myself.” His eyes traveling up and down Heather’s legs, the cat seemed to smile. Then he startled her by jumping onto the dressing room stool. He tucked his front paws underneath his belly, wrapped his tail around his body, and sat. He announced, “I’m ready to see the next one.”
Heather didn’t really want to get naked in front of the cat, but she couldn’t think of a good reason to refuse, and anyway, he was being very nice. She turned around and took off her bikini top.
“Turn around.”
Heather rolled her eyes—typical. She pretended innocence and asked, “Why?”
“I want to really be able to see how beautiful you are.”
That made her soften a bit. Heather cupped her breasts in her palms and turned. The cat’s eyes were narrowed, and his tail was swaying back and forth excitedly, almost like a dog’s. “Purrrrfect.”
“Thank you,” said Heather. She grabbed the black and white bikini top and rushed to put it on, fumbling with the clasp in the back. The cat was silent aside from the low rumble of his approving purr. Then she said, “I’m going to turn back around to change my bottoms.”
The cat yelped, “No! You don’t have to be ashamed in front of me, Heather.”
“It’s just that I don’t usually change in front of an audience.”
“Oh, have you never done this before?”
It was technically a question, but it sounded like an accusation. Heather was embarrassed to admit it, so she looked down at the ground and answered, “No.”
The cat flicked its ears. “Yeah, I can tell.” What did that mean? Was Heather really acting like she had never done this before? And what was “this,” exactly? The cat continued, “Well, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. I’m just here to appreciate you. You look so beautiful when you’re confused, by the way.”
Relieved, Heather turned back around to remove her bottoms, bending down slightly to step out of each leg hole. Then: “Yes, you look so beautiful when you bend over like that,” the cat hissed, his voice louder than before. Tiny goosebumps appeared on Heather’s legs. Was that a whisker she felt?
Pulling up the new pair of bottoms, she turned uneasily. The cat was still lounging on the stool—or maybe he had quickly jumped back into place. She made unsteady eye contact with his two yellow-and-black slits, and realized she was waiting for feedback.
“This one is… fine,” said the cat. “But… I just need to see one thing. Spin for me, Heather.”
Heather had just begun to spin when she heard someone enter the dressing room. “Honey, what’s taking so long?”
It was Linda. Heather felt herself go red. Instinctively, she yelled out, “Sorry, I was taking selfies. Almost done!”
“Alright, I’ll be sitting right outside,” her stepmom responded. The door to the dressing rooms closed with a thud.
When Heather turned back to the mirror, the stool was vacant. Where had the cat gone? And, not that she cared, but what was the one thing that he had said he needed to see? She spun for herself, gazing into the mirror, but couldn’t tell. What was the difference between this bikini and the other two? Was it the way it made her breasts fall away from one another? Was it her gut, bulging out more than usual?
The cat had lied. Or maybe he had just been so kind as to try to tell the truth. Heather reread the mirror’s false cheer absentmindedly, then looked back to the lines on her stomach, holding her breath.
As Heather left the dressing room, Linda raised one perfectly plucked eyebrow. “Where are the bikinis? Did none of them work?”
Heather assumed a neutral air and said, “They didn’t look good. Let’s just go home.”
Hannah Berman is a middle school teacher by day and writer by night based in Washington, D.C. Read more of her work at hannah-berman.com.
Metzgerhund
by Siena F-S
She ordered the least potent thing she could find on the menu - the most neutral - the least information.
That's all you want?
That's perfect.
Is that going to be enough?
I’ll get two then.
He ordered a pastrami sandwich, onion rings and a Pabst blue ribbon.
She thought that was inconsiderate.
It was, at best, careless.
At its worst, his order was pathetic.
So this was his true self? The sweat of overcooked onions and sweet vinegar?
It's not like she expected much more, but she forced a smile and sipped her vodka soda and pretended like she had to run pee.
She bumped into their waitress on the way to the bathroom.
Her breasts were hard.
Her face was frozen.
So sorry about that.
Oh, I’m so sorry.
She locked the stall door and pulled out her phone: I actually do want to go out tonight. I’m not busy anymore.
She waited for a response - a way out of the evening, but received nothing.
She flushed the empty toilet and washed her hands.
When she returned to her seat, he asked her if she had any siblings.
I have one brother.
Oh, I have two.
Are you close?
We weren’t when we were younger, but now we talk sometimes.
Me too.
The waitress with the ossified breasts and mulish face set her plate down in front of her.
Two white chicken breasts.
No sauce.
He asked for extra sauce and the waitress left.
He asked her if she wanted a bite of his sandwich.
She politely declined.
She checked her phone under the table.
Still nothing.
A large man with thinning hair and a mohair suit jacket entered the restaurant and stood by the door.
She didn’t know what compelled her to look up from her phone, but she did.
His face was red and his mouth was runtish.
He gripped a short black rope.
Her eyes followed its trail down to the floor where a wide-legged rottweiler stood panting in the doorframe.
The dog’s body moved with each breath.
His stomach would swell, sucking in air and compress when exhaling.
He was meat and pure muscle with legs thick and contoured
The sides of his body pulsated with each step he took.
It seemed like he could have been smiling.
The waitress sat the man and his dog at the table closest to the door.
The man sat, but the dog continued to stand.
He panted heavily.
You could hear him breathing from across the room.
He looked at her.
She noticed the dog’s penis and then quickly turned away.
Who brings their dog into a restaurant? He asked half jokingly.
His voice faded, drowned by the sound of the dog's hungry gasps for air.
It was all she could hear.
Maybe he has a disability? I shouldn’t judge.
She said nothing.
You’re insanely pretty by the way.
What?
You’re really pretty.
She looked up again at the dog.
He hadn’t moved.
He could’ve just been facing in her general direction, though she felt as if she was being watched.
Oh, thank you.
Yeah.
There was silence.
She delicately cut off a slice of chicken, skewered it with her fork, and placed it softly in between her lips.
What's your brother like?
He’s older.
Her eyes darted around the room.
She tried to stare at the man across from her, but she kept wandering.
How much older?
He used to play sports, but now he works for Amtrak.
Railroads, right?
Uh, yeah.
She felt around in her bag for her phone.
The dog’s eyes followed her hands.
He’s older, six years older.
That’s kinda a big age gap.
Yeah.
She felt the palm of her hand on the back of her phone case.
She pulled it up from her bag and held it out in front of her.
I’m sorry, I really need to head out.
Oh, already?
Yeah my friend just went through a breakup, she needs me right now.
Oh.
I’m sorry to run out on you so suddenly.
It’s okay.
I can pay for the meal.
Don’t worry about it.
Are you sure?
It’s fine. Don’t worry.
She stood up, already slipping on her coat.
I hate to run out on you, she just really needs me.
You don’t have to explain yourself. I said it was fine.
She gathered herself and picked up her bag.
I’ll see you, okay? She grimaced.
She headed towards the door.
She was leaving.
She locked her eyes on the outside.
She could see her car parked across the street.
That was where she was going.
She was going to walk to her car and drive home or drive to the bar or to her friend’s or anywhere that wasn’t here.
She suddenly felt a rush of warmth.
It spread down her body, down her spine, into her stomach. It consumed her
Her arms went numb.
Her legs floated above the ground. Her feet detached themselves from her ankles.
Her chest expanded, exploded.
She stared at the ceiling.
She could only see out of one eye.
She was lying face up.
She was scattered across the restaurant floor.
She looked into the eyes of the dog, now hovering over her.
He breathed into her.
She heard people in the background. She heard the man. The waitress. Her date.
But she only saw the dog.
She only felt the dog.
Her blood in him, his breath in her.
Siena F-S is a writer and artist residing in Los Angeles. She spends most days buried in her chaotic studio with her beloved cat, Ramy. You can find her at www.sienafostersoltis.com and reach her at sienafostersoltis@alum.calarts.edu.
Half Moon Honeymoon
by Stephen Newton
In the spring of 1965, Jake married Betsy one week after Lisa told him she was pregnant. He would have happily married them both had the law allowed it. Instead, he bought Lisa a two-way plane ticket to Mexico City, where she could have a safe abortion, and enjoy a sunny, but brief vacation, while he and his bride were on their honeymoon.
Betsy’s oil-rich Texas parents, Frank and Ladell Starr, treated them to a luxurious week at the Ritz Carlton at Half Moon Bay, less than an hour’s drive from their San Francisco apartment. It was the Starr’s way of making up for not attending the hasty justice of the peace wedding in Sausalito. There was, after all, no time for a real wedding back in San Antonio, since Betsy was nearly 2 months along. Propriety was more important to all concerned, they decided, than a lavish formal affair. Besides, in a year or two, the couple would move to Texas, and Jake would become VP of the Starr of Texas Oil Company, so Frank could have more time for golf.
The drive along the Pacific Coast reminded Jake of Italy’s Amalfi Coast, which he visited courtesy of Uncle Sam’s Army during a glorious month’s furlough in Italy. He rented a car and drove as far as Positano, where he was spotted by an Italian film producer who offered him a job as a stand-in for the male lead, whom he closely resembled. He never saw the film, but the heady experience of being in the company of other beautiful people while it was being shot, left him wanting more of the good life.
Betsy said she was famished, and joked that she was eating for two. Jake smiled, but his thoughts were with Lisa in Mexico City. They stopped for lunch at a small restaurant along the Cabrillo Highway near Mavericks Beach. While they ate, they enjoyed a spectacular view of the Pacific.
Having grown up in Malibu, Jake loved the ocean, something he would miss in Texas. Before his stint in the US Army, he had been an avid surfer. What days of splendor those were, he thought.
Betsy reached across the table and took his hand in hers. “Jake, honey? Where in the world are you?”
“Love you, babe,” he said, squeezing her hand, and letting it go. “I’m just a bit overwhelmed. I’m going to be a father. We’re going to have a baby.”
After they ate, Jake paid the bill, while Betsy went to the restroom. “Meet you at the car, sweetie,” she said.
“You got it, love-bug,” he said.
Jake left the restaurant and crossed the highway to a service station, where be bought some breath mints for Betsy, and a pack of cigarettes for himself. The attendant, a teenaged boy in grease stained overalls and a tee shirt, rang up the sale and took his money. As he handed Jake the change, he looked out the window and exclaimed, “Hot damn! There she is again.”
Jake followed the attendant outside where a red convertible was sitting next to the gas pumps. He recognized the woman sitting behind the wheel as a TV star. He turned to the boy and asked, “Is that—?”
“Sure is,” the boy said. “Stopped here a couple days ago for gas. I think she’s got a beach house around here.”
Jake tore open the cigarette pack. He could hear the surf crashing on Mavericks Beach. There was still no sign of Betsy.
“Need a light, friend?” The celebrity was walking straight for him. “At this point in our relationship,” she said with a teasing smile, “you offer me a cigarette, or ask for my autograph.”
“I’ll do both,” Jake said, beside himself. He shook a cigarette from the pack and offered it to her, and then took one and put it to his lips.
She lit a gold lighter and held it up for him, cupping his hand in hers as he leaned forward. “It gives me great pleasure to give you fire,” she said, in character as the femme fatale she played on television.
“I love your show,” he said, by way of thanks.
“So, you’re a fan?” she said, blowing smoke at her sandals before looking him up and down. “But, you’re so gorgeous, you must be in the business. An actor? An agent?”
He shook his head. “I wish, but, no such luck,” he said modestly. “Long ago, I had a small part in a film I never got to see.”
She touched his jacket, pressing her index finger into muscle, and letting it linger an extra beat, while she looked him in the eyes and said, “Italian silk, if I had to guess.”
Jack smiled and shrugged. His heart was racing. He wanted to hold her and smother her with kisses.
She looked around. Hers was the only car at the pumps. “Where’s your car?”
Jake glanced across the highway, where Betsy’s VW was parked. There was no sign of her. “While I was inside, my date drove off and left me stranded,” he said, hardly believing he had the nerve.
“She is a seriously disturbed woman to leave a hunk like you behind. But you can’t hang around here. I’m headed back to LA, and I’d love to have you along for the ride.”
Jake took the car keys from her, and together they drove south. There was talk of spending the night at the Ritz Carlton. Jake couldn’t believe his luck.
Stephen Newton is a writer based in Southern Appalachia. His most recent fiction is featured in Two Sisters, Drunk Monkeys, Cagibi, The Ice Colony’s Lo-Fed Chronicle, The Write Launch, and Litro Magazine USA. Newton also wrote and directed two feature length documentaries: “Outcasts: Surviving the Culture of Rejection” (2014) and “One Night in January: Counting the Cost of Homelessness” (2020). For more information, please visit stephenanewton.com.
Run For It
by Chester Holden
Huddled beneath a dilapidated building’s overhang situated in one of the innumerable narrow alleyways of Hanoi’s Hoang Mai District, a foreign man and Vietnamese woman found considerable shelter from a sudden and torrential downpour. They hadn’t a raincoat, umbrella, or motorbike.
It wasn’t five minutes before the man became restless. “I’m not sure its planning on letting up anytime soon,” he said.
Frowning, the woman replied, “What choice do we have?”
“We could make a run for it.”
“Yeah, and we’ll get soaking wet and probably catch a cold.”
“Better than just standing around waiting.”
“Such an American.”
The couple went back and forth a few minutes more before running the half kilometer to the man’s apartment. And immediately after getting inside, they removed their saturated clothes and hung them to dry. The woman, however, kept on her underwear. The man could see she was agitated. “Ah man,” he said, “what’d I do this time?”
“What do you think?”
“So now it’s my fault when it rains?”
“You left me behind.”
“I was holding your hand!”
“Not at the end. You ran faster than I’m able to. You left me behind.”
“No. No. No. Seeings how we were going to the same building, I figured I’d run ahead to unlock the door for you. I mean, come on. I stayed out in the rain just as long as you.”
“I’m saddened by what I’ve learned about you today.”
“And what could that possibly be?”
“When a situation becomes difficult, you will think of yourself first.”
“You’re unbelievable. Okay, what if I promise to never run ahead and unlock another door for you again?”
“I know men by their actions, not their words.”
The man tightly embraced the largely unresponsive woman before laying down on the bed. “You simply just misunderstand my actions,” he said, lifting the covers and beckoning her over. “Come on, let me warm you up.”
“I’d rather freeze,” said the woman.
Chester Holden is a 26-year-old emerging American writer. He particularly admires the works of Flannery O’Connor, J. D. Salinger, Ring Lardner, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner.
Common Grounds
by Marijean Oldham
No one remembers when we started collecting grounds for Rob, but we got in the habit, setting aside the spent coffee in plastic bags near the back door, night after night.
We were all exhausted from the holiday rush; there must have been fifty pounds of grounds each night for weeks. The phone would ring about the same time each day and one of us would answer. “Do you have any grounds,” he would ask and one of us would confirm. “OK,” he would say, “I’ll be there in a bit.”
We all knew his voice; pulled the bags of grounds to the front when he walked in the door night after night. We asked one another what on earth he needed so much spent coffee for. Susie said he was a gardener, but by then he had enough coffee grounds to fill a swimming pool.
We were shocked, then, when, on a Monday, a woman called and asked for grounds. That’s when we met Anna, who came in right before the evening rush and collected what we had gathered earlier in the day. Clad in cotton overalls and wearing rubber boots, we figured Anna was a gardener, too.
When Rob called, one of us had to tell him the bad news; we had given someone else the grounds.
We wondered if they’d ever meet. Rob kept up his consistent call, appearing at our door, dressed in worn jeans, a faded fleece jacket, just as we started our closing routine. He hauled the bags out the door to his trunk. Sometimes there was enough to warrant two trips. Anna showed up more sporadically, even her appearance suggested a lack of consistency, far less commitment to the collection than our friend Rob. We started to wonder aloud at the two of them, their lives and circumstances. They both seemed to be avid gardeners, environmentalists. Neither one of them ever bought a cup to drink.
During down times, we started to fantasize about the meeting of Rob and Anna. Were they a love match? We’re not sure when our fantasies turned to conspiring, but one night we decided. It was time Rob and Anna met.
We consulted one another and put together that a) Monday was Anna’s night, generally, and that b) we had her phone number from that time she left it written on a napkin, hoping we’d let her know if there were grounds to pick up on the weekend. (There never were; we hadn’t told her about Rob.)
We elected Susie to place the call to Anna. “Hello, this is Susie from Common Grounds. We have A LOT of grounds and were wondering if you could come around 7pm tonight?”
At 6:55pm we all sort of stopped what we were doing and started watching the door. “I’m so excited,” more than one of us said.
And then it happened. Two sets of headlights poured into the glass storefront, then winked out. The bell over the door tinkled as Anna, in pink overalls and an olive jacket, entered the store, already chattering to Rob, who held the door. The pair came in, eyes locked on one another, not even paying any mind to us as we all stood, rapt, apron clad and staring openmouthed.
Rob and Anna made it to the counter and Rob stopped to nod at us. “Can I help you to your car,” he asked Anna, as he hoisted the bags of spent beans in his capable arms. She nodded and grinned, blond curls bobbing. The couple because, as we learned in the weeks to follow, did indeed become a couple, headed out the door with nary a look backwards. We grinned at each other and went back to cleaning and closing the store, another day in the books.
Marijean Oldham is a public relations consultant and writer. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in The Maine Review, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, the Fredericksburg Literary and Art Review, Burningword Literary Journal, Sad Girls Club, and The Lindenwood Journal. Marijean has written two editions of the guidebook 100 Things to Do in Charlottesville Before You Die (Second Edition, 2018 Reedy Press) and Secret Charlottesville, a Guide to the Weird, Wonderful, and Obscure (2021, Reedy Press). In 2003, Marijean set a Guinness Book World Record for creating the largest bouquet of flowers.
Alone
by Laura Johnson
The south Florida summer had never been kind to Marcy. Always heavier and slower than her peers, Marcy did not enjoy beachfront frolicking as a child. She had not had any saltwater romances as a teenager. No wavy sunkissed curls for Marcy; the damp heat flattened hair already matted by extra oils. Neither flaky scalp nor frizzy ends were among her problems.
Marcy’s mascara had always run into the sweaty corners of her eyes. Her orangey lipstick bled outside of her lip line. That’s how it was for girls like her. That’s how it would always be for her. At least that’s what Mother had always said. “Once a big girl, always a big girl, you can’t do nothing about that.” Marcy’s only hope was to be reliable. “Get a job and try not to be envious,” Mother had said.
Now, every day, regardless of heat advisories, Marcy walked to and from her secretarial job hiding under a skirt an ounce too heavy, a shade too dark, and an inch too long. She even wore long sleeves to conceal her fleshy arms that could turn red inside of 30 sunshiny minutes. Her inner thighs sweated, chafed, and bled as they rubbed together. She tried to make herself small inside her clothes as Mother’s refrains echoed through the years.
Marcy worked long hours for a pittance, and she carried too much sadness to visit the beach for any longer than a couple of heartbroken minutes a season. She knew the beach only invited envy as she watched thin, tan swimsuited lovers holding hands at the water’s edge.
Still, Marcy lived with Ralph who didn’t care what she looked like. Ralph said, “Goodbye, sweetheart” as Marcy left for work each morning, and greeted her cheerfully with “Hello, darling” every evening. After work, Marcy made them dinner and told Ralph all the office gossip. Ralph listened attentively. After Marcy did the dishes they watched air-conditioned television together. If Marcy was trapped in Florida, at least she had Ralph.
Last Thursday was a record-breaking 113 degrees with just as much humidity. Even the tried-and-true locals slogged through the boiling liquid air. Marcy returned home after stopping at the grocery store. She was overdressed and under-hydrated. Exhausted. As Ralph said, “Hello, darling,” Marcy collapsed.
Four days later, the police found Marcy, along with the ice cream melted out of the grocery sack, on the floor. Ralph, with his cuttlebone and nearly depleted fruit and seed mix, greeted them from his cage, “Hello, darling.”
Laura Johnson is a poet in Eastern Iowa who is a founding co-editor of the journal Backchannels. Laura is an MFA candidate at the University of New Orleans and is a graduate (BA, MA) of the University of Iowa. Laura’s work has appeared in Goat’s Milk Magazine, Thimble Literary Magazine, Prompt Press, and Wild Roof Journal, among others. Laura’s chapbook, Memento Vivere (Cabin Bear Books), is available at laurajohnsonwriter.com and wherever you buy books. Follow her on Facebook at Laura Johnson, Writer or on Instagram @laurajohnsonwriter.
The Museum-Goer
by María DeGuzmán
He has been wandering the dappled gardens of El Retiro in a cable-melting, climate crisis July afternoon in Madrid. He leaves the park, passes westward by the Prado’s north side. Remembering the two hours of free entry on late afternoons, he veers into the museum’s Puerta Alta de Goya entrance. Drawn as if by an invisible force, he walks southward down the wide, vaulted-ceiling, central corridor and turns left into Sala 12, a spacious octagonal prism displaying a core collection of Velázquez’s paintings. If he remembered an island of wooden benches in the center, there were none now, only an expanse of marble flooring. Swaying slightly on tired feet, in a trance of heat exhaustion and accumulated lifetimes, he stands before the portrait of a man on horseback.
He imagines the hand of the painter laying down the layers of oils composing the Rubenesque man—wide-brimmed hat, marshal baton in leather glove, wary eyes fixing the viewer in an over-the-armored-shoulder glance—atop a muscular chestnut horse in levade above a landscape of mountains, rivers, trees, and fields turned into battlefields. The painter’s hand closes in upon itself, calculating between eulogy and mockery of its patron. Now this closed hand seems to have become a set of knuckles knocking on the backdoor of the museum-goer’s mind. That mind is drifting past the horse and rider to an ambiguous landscape where ravine and field blend strangely and some figure is bent to the ground. Whether slain horse & soldier or exploited peasant deep in debt, he cannot tell. He wonders if a river is sliding past the distant mountains or whether the lighter stretch is a deforested plain—scrubland where vast forests once stood before they were slashed and burned by charging armies, chopped for charcoal, and cleared for grazing sheep, goats, and cattle. How oblivious to the dangers of these practices was the 17th century statesman? Swaying in a museum gallery in the second decade of the 21st century on a July afternoon of record-breaking heat, the man ponders these things. Though inside the museum, he still indexes, from the gallery’s translucent skylights, the white heat outside its walls. His attention shifts back to the self-assured figure on horseback, trying to read the inscrutable mustachioed face of a man courting the public eye. Perhaps because the museum-goer is, in fact, more dehydrated than he realizes, the scene unmoors from its canvas and frame.
Before his eyes, flash mountains and lakes, reservoirs of water, as well as different versions of the face of that mustachioed man—a ghostly head, a profile limned in light and shadow. Even a miniature of a horse’s head off to the lower right! The white haze over the mountains brings with it an electric shock centered in his chest. Then he knows. Honors, titles, awards, silver reales, gold escudos, estates, libraries, men, horses, armies, fleets, even the diamond-studded relic of a saint’s heart all disintegrate into the void. What does it profit a man if he gains the realm and loses a legacy of living water, life itself? The equestrian statesman and his wife outlived the children they had together. A daughter, their last hope, died a teenager shortly after marrying. The museum-goer finds himself staring at the face of a young woman regarding him from the shadows, her soul emanating from her mouth, about to push off into one of the lakes.
The man in the gallery, 7 o’clock shadow on his chin and his head wrapped in a strange wave of emotion, is feeling quite peculiar. He does not want to admit it, but, with a slight buzzing in his ears, it dawns on him that he might faint. At first the buzzing is like faint radio static. Then, he swears he begins to hear words, anguish washing in on the spectral tides of history whispering a confession in his ears: “If only I had done this, if only I hadn’t done that … if only, if only, if only.” Echoes of the death-bed regret of a dying man or an undead one. The museum-goer blinks his eyes to clear them. He notices a person in a sable diving suit clutching an orb like a pearl. A pearl diver diving for the pearl of great price? For the Philosopher’s Stone? Effective remedy against the realm’s decline? Or one mistaken for such? How can you tell when your eye is in darkness?
The scene shifts again. What was previously a long face with an eclipsed eye has become a half shell. In the sheen of the shell’s inner surface, the museum-goer glimpses his own anxious face, on the right, peering out from behind a curtain, one eye visible under a thick eyebrow. Beside that intent eye, a column, or perhaps a funnel of dark air, moves across dusty plains under white glare. He hears the sound of the wind, the fierce winds over the plains of Castilla, the winds that rattled the window blinds of the capital’s buildings at night, the winds that made their way into his childhood dreams. And, then, silence. Silence and stillness. Stillness in the eye of the storm. Stillness punctuated by the cries of migrating swallows circling the skies, diving down to drink from rivers as they fly. All at once, he spots a personage like something escaped from a royal aviary. But, it is not a bird. It is a person, holding a globe of water in one hand and gesturing toward him with the other, like Judith holding the head of Holofernes. An emissary from elsewhere transfixing him with her stare, motioning to him with compelling signs that exceed his present capacity to comprehend.
María DeGuzmán is a scholar, conceptual photographer, writer, and music composer / sound designer. Her photographic work has been exhibited at The Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston, MA, USA), Watershed Media Centre (Bristol, England), and Golden Belt Studios (Durham, NC, USA). She has published photography in Abstract Magazine, The Grief Diaries, Coffin Bell, Typehouse Literary Magazine,Map Literary,Two Hawks Quarterly, Harbor Review, The Halcyone, Gulf Stream Literary Magazine, Ponder Review, Alluvian, streetcake: a magazine of experimental writing, Galdrar of Tempered Runes Press, The Closed Eye Open, and Gone Lawn; creative nonfiction photo-text pieces Oyster River Pages, La Piccioletta Barca, and Tiny Seed Literary Journal; photo-text flash fiction in Oxford Magazine, Bombay Gin, Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices, and Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality and the Arts; photo prose poetry in Landlocked Magazine; visual poetry in TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics (forthcoming) and Roanoke Review (forthcoming); poetry in Empty Mirror; and short stories in Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas, Huizache: The Magazine of Latino Literature, Sinister Wisdom, and Obelus Journal. Her SoundCloud website may be found at: https://soundcloud.com/mariadeguzman.
Gold Plates
by Grant Price
Find a place by chance. Courtyard back door on the latch, an invitation in any country. Press face up to glass, nose leaving a smudge, see building hallway. Staircase, corridor, front door to street. Lights off, no movement. Big risk to head inside, but perhaps no greater than seeking a warm spot elsewhere. Fatigue like concrete, fat wet darkness lying on everything. Snow started a few minutes before. Fingers grey and clumsy as they push the door, clumsier still as they close it tight shut afterward.
Button circled by red light next to the door. Click. Indoor world jumps out in orange. Letterboxes with mouths closed line the space under the stairs. Follow corridor to front door: on the right an elevator, silver and shiny; on the left plates of gold arranged in rows. Thin, polished, embossed with surnames in block letters. Light overhead makes them look deep as a river.
Floor under the stairs is clean and dry and hidden from view of the front door. Rucksack leaves grateful shoulders. Pull sleeping bag from rucksack, lay it on the ground. Light clicks off, darkness shrouds. Ease off shoes, climb into bag, put rucksack under head, draw bag up to chin. Knife within easy reach. Snow collects like bits of paper on the back door window.
Eyes fall shut.
Light explodes. Front door swings open. A sigh, the kind not meant for other people to hear. Plastic bags rustle. Don’t move, don’t breathe, don’t look. Don’t even think.
Hello.
Woman standing by the stairs, bags in both hands. Hat, glasses, scarf big enough to drown. Young. Asks a question full of foreign words. Waits.
Need to say something, anything.
Okay, okay.
Another question, more foreign words. Gestures work sometimes. Rub hands together, point to furred window.
Cold. Very cold outside.
Her turn to not understand. Shifts from one foot to the other. Time to leave. Roll down sleeping bag, sit up, pull rucksack from behind head.
No, no. She puts her bags down, raises her hands. No, no.
Not sure what to do. Give rucksack a push back to where it was.
She nods.
Draw sleeping bag up again, lie down. She picks up her bags.
Okay?
Okay.
She goes to the silver doors, looks over her shoulder, disappears. Elevator rattles the building’s backbone.
Timer light switches off. Like it had been waiting for her to get away safely.
Bag damp, cold air coming through cracks in door. Still, space is dry. Eyes close. Exhausted muscles throb.
Light explodes, elevator coughs, doors slide open.
Good afternoon.
Young man, hair slicked back, beginning of a beard. Speaks the same language. Accented, wobbly, but the same.
Hello.
He crouches down. In his hands a steaming mug, a bottle of beer, an apple.
Tea. Black.
Thank you.
And beer.
Thank you.
Puts mug and bottle on the floor, places apple on sleeping bag. Reaches into pocket, draws out a pair of gloves.
Here.
Thank you.
Three times now, a stuck record. He stares. Cracked, clumsy fingers touch the mug. Hot, like a bowl of sunlight. Hold it to chapped lips. Steam leaves a watery moustache.
He smiles.
Okay?
Okay.
Don’t want to do it. Better to hold tongue. But no other option. One full foreign sentence, learned by heart.
Have any coins?
A frown, perhaps a small sigh.
Cradle the tea in my hands. Smile. Thank you.
He stands up, retreats to the elevator. Gone.
Shouldn’t have asked.
Returns before the tea is halfway finished with fist balled tight.
Here.
Drops a handful of coins that chime like tiny bells. A quick, shameful glance. A few silver, a few copper, a few gold.
Silence except for a subway train burrowing underneath the earth. Suspended like that for a moment, the dull coins stepping stones connecting lives.
Thank you.
You are welcome.
Holds his hand out. Muscle memory kicks in. Hard, cracked palm against a warm, soft one. Up, down, grip strong but not uncomfortable. He smiles, warm enough to burn away a shadow. Gestures to lie down. Returns to elevator. Timer light switches off.
Eyes as heavy as they will ever be.
Boot in ribs is not gentle. Try to escape gluey sleep as quickly as possible. Sit upright. Two men: one old and round, moustache like cake frosting, one young and fresh with eyes that dance. Not the police.
Moustache speaks the same language. What are you doing here?
Pantomime arm rub. Cold. Very cold. Snow outside.
Dancing eyes pulls back his sleeve, reveals watch.
How long have you been lying here?
Always choose the easiest number. One. Hold up a cracked finger. One hour.
Moustache clicks his fingers together.
Get up. Get your things.
Bag off, boots on, rucksack packed on hands and knees, bottle of beer and apple on top for later. Ease gloves over fingers. Dancing eyes says something, but the time for listening is over. Snow crowds the back door window. Swing rucksack onto back. Moustache clamps a big hand on tired shoulder. Firm, not aggressive. Dancing eyes keeps distance, his discomfort clear.
Gold plates wink, outlines of greasy fingerprints visible around embossed names. Reach front door. Sound as elevator doors slide open. Glance over shoulder. Young man emerges. Locks eyes. Looks pained. Shrugs. Goes to space under stairs and retrieves mug.
A shove into the street. Door closes in face. Wind and snow jostle for superiority.
Disappear into darkness, looking for another place to sleep.
Grant Price is the author of climate fiction novels By the Feet of Men (Cosmic Egg, 2019) and Reality Testing (Black Rose, 2022). He has lived in Berlin, Germany, for too long.
THE POUT
by Christopher X. Ryan
The girl I’ve just lost my virginity to wants to show me some home videos. We get dressed from the waist down and sit up in bed, which is jammed against the cold wall of her dingy apartment over the family garage in Old Town, Maine. She presses play with a finger sticky with sex. The video leaps sideways and pops before settling. I am thusly introduced to her history.
The context is the local airport. The subject is soldiers returning from Operation Desert Storm. She refers to them as heroes (her eyes became glazed with these words). Cee-Cee herself appears in the videos; her mother or grandmother is the cinematographer. Once the men clear the gate, a babyfaced soldier with ragged hair takes leave of the procession to give Cee-Cee a hug. At the time of filming she is 17, an asthmatic track runner who never wins. She kisses this soldier on the cheek but lingers a beat too long. Even in the jittery and grainy VHS tape that has been played far too many times, a tendril of spittle can be seen connecting her soft pink lips to the soldier’s jowl.
Beside me Cee-Cee leans forward, the skin of her flat stomach bunching against her small breasts. Her gaze tracks herself onscreen where she is following the men out of the airport toward a gray bus decorated with yellow ribbons. In both the video and life Cee-Cee is knock-kneed and her ears jut from the side of her head, but there’s a sultry small-town poutiness to her. College freshmen adore it. Soldiers adore it. Old men make toothless sucking sounds at it.
“I wanted to show them how thankful I was for protecting us overseas,” she murmurs, borderline catatonic with lustful nostalgia.
Cee-Cee is a townie. She grew up in the shadow of the state university yet managed to be stunningly unclever. Our first date, which was chicken nuggets in the campus grill, she’d told me she had Native American heritage but had declined free admission. She’d also said Democrats were evil and hockey was sacred. She passes out at the sight of hypodermic needles. I am a freshman who is away from home for the first time. Cee-Cee is not just my first fuck but my first kiss.
When the video ends she gets up to use the bathroom. Because I can hear her piss hissing against the porcelain, I walk around, humming. Pictures of her boyfriend occupy the dusty dresser and card table where she eats Pop Tarts and sips Nescafe every morning. The boyfriend lives on an island about an hour away, a little blob of land a stone-skip from the mainland. He works on a lobster crew and, according to the photos, wears a leather jacket and rides a cheap motorcycle. I quiver at the thought of his pubes clinging to the sheets we’ve just soiled.
By the time the bathroom door swings open, I am dressed. We sneak down the narrow rickety stairs and slip into her grandmother’s Lincoln so I can return to campus. A light snow has fallen. “I’m thinking about pancakes,” she says, and that sounds good to me too. It’s weird how little politics matter when you’re young and desperate to fuck and eat. I can fall in love with a flag-waving bigot with a splash of Passamaquoddy blood in her veins and not even lose my appetite. I can ignore the fact that she is slinking around in the shadows with an inexperienced out-of-stater while her boyfriend is dunking his arms into a frigid eddy to retrieve a lobster pot. “Maybe some eggs too,” she says.
Our destination is Dysarts, a truck-stop that serves all night. We bypass the school and hurtle down a breathtakingly pot-holed back road, the town car’s shocks juddering so violently the noise drowns out the everyman radiorock that accompanies Cee-Cee wherever she goes. At the restaurant she parks at the edge of the vast lot, giving us a long walk in the virgin-white precipitation—like me, untrodden until now.
Cee-Cee wants to sit in the middle of the sprawling barren restaurant. A far-right pundit natters on TV somewhere behind us, and after pulling me close to nuzzle a moment, she turns her attention to it. I’m still thinking about the soldiers in the videos though, and the look on her face when they appeared. The pout. She said she had dabbled with modeling, and I believed it. Everyone loves sad girls who live near paper mills, even the knock-kneed ones.
A forlorn waitress who should have retired a decade ago shows up. “What’ll it be?” she asks without lifting her eyes from her pad.
I’m no longer hungry, but I order a short stack. Cee-Cee orders a platter full of carbs and meat.
“Ten minutes.”
Once we’re alone, Cee-Cee picks up her knife and presses the blade to the back of my hand. She saws back and forth until the skin gives, letting a single thread of blood weep out onto the Formica tabletop.
“You’re real after all,” she says, then turns back to the TV.
We’d met in an online campus chatroom a couple weeks earlier, but it turned out we were both sitting in the library. I liked her shy demeanor and of course the pout and she liked my eyes and posture or something like that. She didn’t tell me she had a guy and I didn’t tell her I’d never had a girl.
She wads up a napkin to staunch my blood just before the self-hating waitress returns with our food. We eat. The right-wing talking head changes topics. Now it’s about the auto industry, China, steel, etc. It quickly segues to hockey. Cee-Cee turns, tunes in. She squints with focus as the men ram into one another. Her eyes glaze over. I have tasted better pancakes.
Born on the island of Martha's Vineyard, Christopher X. Ryan now lives in Helsinki, Finland. His debut novel HELIOPHOBIA is forthcoming from Montag Press in late 2022. His stories have appeared in dozens of journals, including Grist, Baltimore Review, Pank, and Copper Nickel. He can be found at www.christopherXryan.com.
Slinger
by Jasmine Ledesma
I love the smell of fresh, pure manure. That sickly sweet burning. That earthen perfume. It wakes me right up.
I arrive at Buckles dressed for a violent storm. Big sweatpants and a thick blue sweater and then a waterproof coat over that. Red like a cock’s comb. Last night, the weatherman insisted that it was going to rain incessantly all through today late into the evening. His voice was urgent. He recommended extreme caution. But when I dropped the kids off at school this morning, the sun was still stomping down upon our heads like an axe upon the wheel. And still the streets were parched as I puttered down the highway listening to the pitch of the road beneath the tires. And even now as I pull into the parking lot, there are only a few isolated clouds above me. One is shaped like a sleeping rabbit, the other like a Daddy long legs smashed beneath your palm.
Buckles is the name of the riding academy for another hundred miles. It sits on the cusp of town. Far from the strip malls and nail salons and metropolitan-sized power plants pumping out diseased plumes into the skies. It is a simple, lonely patch of land. Ten stables house ten horses. Grass grows in excitable, mute bunches. On the weekends, classes are held for children. Some hold promise. Some have not much else to do. I’ve known the owner Kate for five years. Her and I are the same. I met her when I was still dreaming of shotguns and she was only beginning to forget the touch of delirium. She has known what it is like to stare down the throat of forever and see absolutely nothing. She has let me ride for free once a week for the last three years. In return, I bring her a birthday cake from the supermarket each spring. Flowers made of buttercream.
I strip off my coat and head inside to greet her. She’s washing out one of the stables with a power hose, the water shooting at the shit and bugs spread across the floor. She only realizes I’m there after I hit the wall a couple of times with my fist. And then she laughs.
You must be burning up, she says, turning off the hose and shaking her head at my sweater.
It was supposed to rain.
It’s always supposed to rain. C’mon.
She sets the hose down and leads me to the back. And then, there he is. My champion of zeros, Magic Eight. He is a Tennessee walking horse with a coat made of black silk. He’s not very pretty anymore. Flies poke at his lashes. But he used to stun. I’ve seen the photos. For most of his life he was a proper racehorse but has since retired. He hasn’t competed in eight years. Where he used to flaunt his lightning bolt muscles for a crowd of brilliant drunkards he now lives in a house of repeated comforts.
Kate sets us up. A saddle made of death leather and a frayed bridle are placed on Magic Eight. I put my helmet on and hoist myself onto his back. Then we go. I move slowly, easing into the stirrups. All I want to do is pace. From this part of the fence to that and then back.
It is a beautiful day.
The weatherman is an escaped loon and we should know better than to listen to him. But suspicion guides us. When you’ve been caught in a rain so cruel you couldn’t see but three feet in front of you, you do not ignore even the slightest of mist. Anything can happen.
After all, everything has.
I was thirteen with a pair of amphetamine wings. I knew darkness. And then twenty-four and laying in the same spot on the floor. I used to walk to die. I was more tar than person. Every time I drank, there was a criminal in my glass looking back at me. But I have been cool to the touch for eleven years. Learning how to ride Magic Eight — how to decide what you want, how the smallest movements warrant reactions, has been pivotal. This goddamn horse. Lead me to water. See if I drink. Make me.
I’m getting old. My kids are off learning about planetary movements and geometrics. Getting smarter than I ever was. It makes me proud to see. And my heart is still the hunk of meat it has always been. A piece of tin clanking within me. And maybe it will rain at the last second as nighttimes comes sauntering down the road. Maybe the rain is inside me.
But as I look out into the flat spine of the horizon and feel the light grind of wind and listen to the soft thudding of his hooves against the dirt, I am filled with a blonde, sterling sense of love. An assuredness. God set me down into my mother’s arms. I was wanted then. I can still be wanted. Kate watches me from beyond the fence. Mosquitos crown my head.
I am a slutmother. And I’m going to Heaven.
Jasmine Ledesma is a writer based in New York. Her work has appeared in or is set to appear in places such as Crazyhorse, Rattle, and [PANK] among others. Her work has been nominated for Best of The Net and twice for the Pushcart Prize. She was named a Brooklyn Poets fellow in 2021. Her novella Shrine was listed as a finalist for the Clay Reynolds Novella Prize. Her poem was highly commended by Warsan Shire for the Moth Poetry Prize.
At Least He Enjoyed the Coleslaw
by Jeff Foster
Leslie Dennison sat alone at his table inside Shelly’s Clam Shack. He sipped on his raspberry iced tea and then took a bite out of his buttery lobster roll. The coleslaw dish was licked clean. Around him, diners shoveled clam strips, clam fritters, fried shrimp, and other Clam Shack delights down their throats.
Behind him, Leslie noticed a lobster tank. A lobster stared blankly at him.
This unnerved Leslie for some reason, so he turned his back and picked up his lobster roll. But before he took another bite, he paused and felt a pang of guilt. He looked back at the lobster in the tank. It kept its black eyes on Leslie. “I could be eating one of this lobster’s relatives,” he thought. “Perhaps its wife or husband or father or mother!”
Leslie decided then to change two lives: his and the lobster’s. So, he stood up, turned to the tank, and fished out the lobster (who he decided for no real reason to name Lilly). He then ran out of the restaurant and onto the beach toward the ocean. Clutching the lobster, Leslie jumped into the water and began swimming. The waves batted him around, but he was determined to get Lilly home.
He swam as far as he could. Eventually, he tired himself out and just sank to the bottom, where a small group of lobsters was milling around.
“Here,” said Leslie, placing Lilly in front of the biggest lobster, who appeared to be their leader. “I saved one of your fellow crustaceans.”
Lilly, who couldn’t care less, scuttled away in a poof of silt.
The head lobster stared at Leslie for a moment then said, “Who gives a fuck?”
Jeff Foster, who holds a Ph.D. in English, teaches at the University of New Haven. His work has appeared in such journals as deComp, Confluence, Bending Genres, NanoFiction, Foliate Oak, and Ampersand Review. If he weren't a teacher, he would probably be an assassin. Or maybe a barista. Whichever offered the most flexible hours.
Teratoma
by Veirs Tallis
When stomach pains sent me to the hospital for an emergency operation, I learned that my female plumbing had scrapped together a golf ball-sized tumor that when sliced open showed signs of human design. The hospital staff presented it to me bisected and floating in ether, long mousy hairs dragging from the center in it like seaweed on a manatee’s tail. Inside its beige interior, I counted six small teeth and spotted a seventh crowded against one large tooth. In a moment of joy, I realized that the crowded little tooth looked like the one in the center of my own face. I had not only been capable of creating a scrap of life with no interference, but I had even managed to create a family resemblance.
“You’ve got a talent for these,” the nurse said. “It’s called a dermoid cyst. There were three others on your ovary, but this was the biggest one. Might want to change birth control to avoid growing more of these, they’re highly dependent on artificial hormones.”
“I want a high-hormone, low testosterone pill,” I told my OBGYN at the earliest appointment I could possibly get with her.
“Are you sure? Most girls say the hormones make them feel nuts. You might enjoy a low-hormone IUD.”
“Oh, well, I’m allergic to copper.”
“You might try a Depo shot, that’s pretty high hormone,” she said, not looking up from her laptop. “It’s literally a shot of progestin you take every 90 days.”
I hesitated. “How long would that take to kick in?”
“Oh, it works instantly. I can double-check, but I also think it’s fully covered by your health insurance. You’ve got a good plan.” She finally looked up.
“Um…. Could I get a prescription for a high-hormone birth control too? Just in case it didn’t work out?”
“Sure.” She was already standing and fiddling around a drawer for rubber gloves. “Just don’t take the pills until the window of time between your shots is over.”
I didn’t even wait to leave the CVS before I stuffed three pills into my mouth like candy.
Those first 90 days were memorable. After the Depo shot, the pain was so bad in my arm that I took a painkiller and went to sleep for a whole weekend. I woke up Monday with two hard pimples the size of frog eyes on my chin. The nausea was something else entirely, and even romanticizing it as morning sickness didn’t help. As those first 30 days progressed, I gained clogged pores, a tweaker’s edginess, and perpetually swollen breasts. Near the end of the month, I tore into a Costco supply of NuvaRings I obtained from a second gynecologist outside my network.
Waiting in the OBGYN for my second Depo shot, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror some nurse had hung near the coats. I saw an unmistakable natal roundness in my lower abdomen. Certainly no one would have thought I was pregnant, but it might not be long now until they did.
In my sixth month of this experiment, I found myself drawing eyes on every surface I could drag a pen across: large eyes fat with tears, fanned with bovine lashes, and alluringly lidded. In my dreams, I was pursued by them the way princesses are flocked by woodland creatures. Large wet eyes landed on my outstretched fingers like birds and snaked around my ankles like cats. In month eight, my dreams were only of water and I knew something was awake in my womb. In these deep dreams, the thing and I would find each other and swim in the drifting dark together, talking without words and drinking each other.
In the grocery store, an older woman looked past my hormonal chin explosions and eye bags to put her hand encouragingly on my crescent gut. “Boy,” she insisted, grinning. I smiled warmly, touched the space above my eye and then the space above hers. We both laughed.
My due date was when the pain became excruciating enough. “Are you pregnant?” the nurse taking my vitals asked, staring hard at my stomach when I said no. They took a blood sample from me anyway, baffled when it came back negative. “Honey, you must have a watermelon in there,” one nurse said, shaking her head as she pulled my gurney into the operating theater.
I counted down with the anesthesiologist. I had long ago made peace with the fact that I wouldn’t be awake for the main event, but I was still giddy for the delivery. “See you soon,” I said to the room of inattentive, fretting professionals before retreating down into myself.
The surgeon was sawing now, holding the cyst by a full head of hair while he dragged the scalpel back and forth across the largest cyst in the history of the hospital. Beneath the cut was a layer of pure white. Eventually, the cyst popped with an enormous sudden give. The flaps retracted. The cyst, a little startled, blinked.
Veirs Tallis is a hobbyist writer living in Washington, D.C. She received her B.S. in Psychology from Villanova University. When she is not writing and working, she keeps bees at a Victorian garden cemetery in D.C. She can be found on Twitter @Veirsly or via email at tallisveirs@gmail.com.
How to Wreck a Marriage
by Brian Christopher Giddens
Start by finding the right partner.
Choosing the appropriate partner will help you to grow into the best bastard you can be and is key to a successful outcome.
Someone who is too giving, too kind, too enamored of you to draw a line in the sand when you behave badly.
Someone who loves you. Who believes you have some inner goodness, just waiting to emerge.
Move on to setting up your mise en scene. Start with disrespect. Ignore her and then question why she gets so upset having to repeat, remind, and re-plan everything she had arranged for the weekend. Include an abundance of humiliation. Discount what she says at dinner parties by pretending to listen, and then, just as she finishes, launch into your own unrelated story. Don’t show up at her family gatherings after promising you would attend, even though she attends all of yours. Flirt with the waitress in front of her friends. Have the neighbors see you come home at seven in the morning in your work suit from yesterday, and then leave an hour later in a fresh suit after grabbing a shower and an orange juice.
When she cries, turn away. When she reaches out for you, shake her off, as if she's a pest, wanting to suck you dry.
Mix in an ample portion of indiscretion. Start lightly, to sow doubt, to confuse, to make her question her own judgement when she should be questioning yours. Then whip it up to a higher speed with a blatant level of sex on the side. Vigorously shake it up by blaming her for your infidelities.
Sear just to the burning point the last of your intimacy by telling her she doesn’t excite you anymore. Increase the intensity by kneading out what's left of her ego, criticizing her clothes, her hair, her dress, those extra five pounds that, in reality, you've both put on in the past year.
Check for doneness by inserting the tester into the heart of it all until its devoid of any crumbs of hope, of reconciliation.
Let it rest. For reckoning.
Serve with a generous scoop of shame.
Brian Christopher Giddens is returning to a life-long love of creative writing after a career as a social worker, professor, and administrator in health care. Brian has studied writing with the creative writing programs at University of Washington and Stanford University. He has completed several short stories, one of which was recently published in Silver Rose Magazine and is currently working on a novel. Brian is a native of Seattle, Washington, where he lives with his husband and Jasper the dog. Brian can be contacted at BrianChristopherGiddens@outlook.com.
On Communicating with Pleasure
by Carol Parchewsky
Consider this email my resignation effective Tuesday 1:29 pm. In effect, I will no longer smile when I meet you outside the office in the lineup to see the latest superhero movie. I will not greet you as sir, nor will I fetch you coffee with one point five brown sugar packets and a hint of cream. I will not sign overseas deposit slips and cheques with your name. I will be the top story bigger than the fugitive skunk on Elm Street. I will smile widely, show the fresh veneers. I signed your name on the NDA not my own.
Carol Parchewsky is a writer based in Calgary, Alberta. She received her MFA in Fiction at Queens University of Charlotte. She is working on a short story collection and her first novel. Her fiction is published in and forthcoming in Flash Boulevard, Drunk Monkeys, and The Drabble Advent Calendar. She can be found on Twitter @ca_parchewsky.
Merv
by E.P. La Brecque
To get a better view of the desolation of what was once said to be the most beautiful city in the world, we climb a nearby hill—the only hill for miles in a landscape of fine, dry dust. “The inhabitants,” our tour guide says simply, kicking at the elevated ground.
E.P. La Brecque is a writer and essayist who splits his time between Northern California and Detroit. He makes a living as a brand strategist and namer. His story "What Will You Be?" was published earlier this year in Wingless Dreamer. Read a sampling of his work at eplabrecque.com.
Madam
by Marcella Peralta Simon
“Madam, that alligator has been fed. He is no longer afraid of people. Feeding him is a death sentence. Madam, listen to me…”
Her neighbor’s voice grew shriller and more insistent as he mansplained at her. She sat in her camping chair, sketchbook in hand, gazing at the horizon on the bank of their shared lake. Why was he calling her Madam? she wondered. He knew her name.
The alligator in question nonchalantly basked in all his eleven-foot snaggle-toothed glory on the opposite shore, ignorant of the accusations hurled against him.
Once upon a time she had named the grizzled grandaddy alligator Gary. The lake supported at least two others, which she occasionally saw gliding across the water as she sipped vanilla tea on her lanai at dusk. She imagined Gary in a love swamp triangle with Gertrude, the dark fetching eight-footer, and Girard, the spikey juvenile. It was a better story than the ones on TV, which had been taking up too much of her time since her husband died.
After the conversation with her neighbor, she feared for Gary’s life. It would only take one phone call to Fish and Wildlife—any gator over four feet could be deemed a “nuisance gator,” a target for trappers to kill, skin for wallets and shoes, and butcher for “gator bites” for local eateries. No trial, no evidence, no ID. She’d seen the trappers in years past with their hulking vehicles, wire nooses and floppy eared hounds, bright lamps flashing over the swamp at night, looking for the telltale red glow of eyes.
The next day on her way to her yoga class she asked her neighbor if he’d actually seen anyone feed Gary. Her neighbor only became angrier and more insistent, chasing after her golf cart on foot. “Sooner or later he will attack someone, a kid fishing,” he yelled shaking his fist in all his crotchety fury. “And MADAM, YOU will be responsible!”
Is Madam code for any woman who questions a man? she mused. And why did he specify “kid” when there were hardly any people, let alone fishermen, under the age of seventy living in this senior community?
On the third day she was in the kitchen baking her signature apple pie with graham cracker crust to take to her weekly bridge club. She heard the laughter of small children. When she peered out the curtain, she spotted her neighbor and his small grandchildren taunting Gary by throwing rocks in the water. The neighbor’s big dumb son, the children’s father, just stood there watching.
Her fingers curled with fury around her rolling pin. She swung her tattered screen open and marched up to them, clutching the pin like a weapon. Forgetting children were present, she let a string of words slip from her mouth, words she hadn’t used since epic shouting matches with her late husband: “Leave him the f— alone, he’s living his life and not bothering you!”
The human brood gaped at her and at once stopped throwing. Her neighbor snarled under his breath, “That alligator is a goner, I tell you. A goner.” Gary was a safe distance away, his snout and eyes peeking above the surface of the water.
My neighbor must be going senile, she thought. Did he just he endanger his own grandkids so he could claim that this alligator no longer feared people?
That night, she went out her front door with a lantern and stood in the moonlight, hoping to have a little chat with Gary.
“Oh ancient one…” She addressed him reverently, knowing his cousins, the crocodiles, were once worshipped as gods by Egyptians. “I know your kind have been here before the dinosaurs and will still be here for the second Flood, when we drown the earth with our stupidity. By your size I can see that you have lived a long life and fought many rivals—and eaten many rats and snakes, for which I am grateful. Seeing you sunning yourself on the bank every day has made me feel more connected to nature, a little less lonely, especially this past year. But you cannot survive the trappers, they are coming for you, and I am helpless to stop them.”
She waited for a few minutes, her nightgown flapping in the night breeze. She heard something in the woods on the other side of the lake and turned up her hearing aids. She just made out the faint but distinct bellowing of alligators mating. That’s odd, she thought, mating season ended months ago. She waited a few minutes more and held up her lantern, casting an eerie orange glow over the rushes and palms. Two unmistakable long dark shapes were lumbering through the woods away from the lake. Good for you Gary, she thought. You and Gertrude find a nice new lake, away from housing developments and human foolishness. God speed.
The next morning, she did her stretches, scrambled her eggs, took her blood pressure pills, and brought her coffee out to the lanai. There he was, all four feet of him, the crown prince Girard, cruising across the lake like any teenager no longer supervised (or in fear of being killed and eaten) by his elders.
She opened her dusty cabinet and took out a cream-colored stationery set with her initials embossed on the cover, the cards and envelopes she used for her grandkids’ birthday checks and sympathy notes for widowed friends. In spidery script she wrote a note to slip under her neighbor’s door:
We are presently down to one small alligator, and by the time he is big enough for numbskulls like you to try to kill him, you and I will be dead. Enjoy the rats and snakes.
Sincerely, Madam
Marcella Peralta Simon is a retired Latinx grandmother, splitting her time between Cambridge, UK and Kissimmee, Florida. She has been a diplomat, university professor, and instructional designer. Her poetry and short fiction pieces have appeared in The Weighing of the Heart, An Anthology of Emerging Western Australian Poets, Pank, Poets Choice, Flash Fiction Magazine, The Acentos Review, and Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine. She also teaches online and paints landscapes and abstracts. She can be reached at msimon313@gmail.com.
Meaning
by Pernille AEgidius Dake
“You know it meant nothing.” Bert’s eyes narrow.
“With guilt gifts like these—” Samantha jiggles both the brown vinyl case that contains the cubic zirconia tennis bracelet and the cellophane-wrapped Chance perfume. “She must’ve meant something.”
Bert shakes his head low, clearly contrite, needing to erase past cravings, his sleeping with someone named Lizzie, fucking Lizzie, then coming home and lying down and snoring next to Samantha, lying, fucking lying.
“And here I’d thought I had a surprise for you,” she says. “Do you even fish?”
“You know I do.” His lips tighten, same as at restaurants when his tongue will roam for a rogue salmon bone while, in stifled speech and cheeks full, he’ll joke that that isn’t the boner he wants. “It was just a moment of— passion.”
“A crime of passion!”
He inhales, readying yet another round of apologies, of simplifying and chopping his wandering lust into even more negligible details.
Samantha scoffs, “But like you never brought any fish home for dinner, always claimed you set them free, have you let her go?”
“I only used my catch and release-fishing as an excuse for the past year. But not lately.”
“Then, what’s your justification for my gifts?”
“I know you know it meant nothing.”
“Which ‘it’ do you mean? Because—” She reaches behind the couch and pulls out a box of Old Spice aftershave and a new fishing rod. “I’ve no excuse either.”
Pernille AEgidius Dake winter bathes in the Baltic and knits afghans without dropped stitches. Her work has appeared in Adelaide Literary Magazine, Dime Show Review, Glassworks Magazine, Typehouse Literary Magazine, Burningword Literary Journal, and elsewhere. She can be reached at pernille.dake@vcfa.edu.
Love in the Time of COVID
by Jeremiah Beaty
Jaqueline twirled the wine glass via its long stem. Her thumb rolled the stem across the tips of her first two fingers. She stared at the red contents, from a recently opened bottle of some no-name pinot noir. She smiled at me. She sniffed and then sipped the wine. “Edward,” she said. “Thanks for the wine. You know me so well, what with the cheap stuff and all. You never disappoint.”
I squirmed in my chair to settle in. Jaqueline’s patio furniture was not the most comfortable. I couldn’t even say if it was decorative. I never asked why she picked out such uncomfortable pieces. I held up my own glass in salute. Mine was stemless. I had broken more than I care to remember. Jaqueline banned me from her stemmed glasses over a year ago. “What are good friends for?” I asked. I sipped my own red liquid. It was decent, for its price. “You know I love social visits. But you mentioned something really funny to tell? I always love a good story.” I sipped again, holding the wine in my mouth for a few seconds.
Jaqueline sat unmoving, a veritable statue. She had crossed one leg over the other, crossed at the knees. She looked very demure holding her dwindling wine glass. Jaqueline loved a decent, no-frills pinot as much as I did. More so, if I had to guess. One of her quirks, one reason I loved her so well. Her summoning me last minute for a story was another reason. She always did this. I never regretted partaking in this ritual.
“You remember that guy, Thomas?” Jaqueline asked. Thomas could be any number of guys. Jaqueline was prolific with her men. She wasn’t a slut per se, she just liked to go on lots of dates. If I looked like her, I suppose I would too.
“Forgive me, my dear Jaqueline. Who?” I asked. I refilled my glass. Wine flowed easily on Jaqueline’s porch.
“The one who loves to Facetime me and get dirty. I mean, we did that the first night we met.” Jaqueline refilled her own glass. “We’ve never actually met. Facetime was good enough and infrequent enough that maybe I figured he had a piece and I was a distraction. C’est la vie, right?”
That narrowed it down. Jaqueline shared a lot. I remembered this one, although not the name.
“I saw him last night. He got me so hot and bothered on Facetime that I couldn’t contain myself and asked to see him.” Jaqueline flashed a wan smile and then shook her head. She looked off into the distance, probably staring at the October sky. The weather was great for patio wine. Not hot. Not cold. The weather never deterred me from any patio wine. She knew this.
I sipped my wine. It really grew on me. I thought one bottle might be enough before I arrived. I should have brought more. “And?” I asked.
“He texts me the address and says to come in the front door and just keep walking and I’ll see him. I did. It wasn’t well lit, but looked like a clean place. I walked and came to the living room. It was dim but I could make his outline on a couch. I could make out boots. Attached to legs. Looked like he was sitting kinda wide-legged. I was getting excited.” Jaqueline smiled wide and took a sip of wine.
“He was ready for action,” I said.
“It gets better. I was getting that warm and wet fuzzy feeling down there. He was wearing boxers. Mind you, it’s very dim in there. Light coming in from some window from the outside. I could barely see anything.”
“Mm hmm,” I said. “He was waiting for you. In boots. I know guys that fantasize about women in cowgirl boots. Or heels. It’s a thing. I guess it is for y’all, too.”
“His cock was at full attention, poking out through the boxers. He must have been playing with it. It was dim and I so wanted to see more of it. What I could see, it wasn’t ugly.”
“Wasn’t ugly,” I chuckled. “Is that the bar now?”
“They’re cocks, Edward. They’re not beautiful high art. They’re utility in the flesh.”
“You would say that.” I winked and drained my glass. She was nearing the dregs of hers.
“My eyes adjusted more. Get this Edward – he was wearing a mask! And I’m not talking about a flimsy N95 mask. A full-fledged, gas-mask looking thing! I didn’t know to run or what.”
“Oh my god, Jaqueline,” I said. “You did.”
Jaqueline nodded. Her face was flushed, whether from the wine or this embarrassing disclosure I wish I knew. “It turned me on. He kept it on the whole time. We didn’t even talk. I just rode him hard and came twice. Edward, what is wrong with me?”
I stared at my glass. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I really wanted to ask Jaqueline if she even knew it was Thomas underneath the mask. I didn’t want to ruin the moment.
Jeremiah is an aspiring writer of flash and very short fiction, an out-of-work accountant, and recently paroled after serving four years, ten months, and three days inside. He fell in love with the flash format during that time and still scribbles out stories when he finds inspiration. His incarceration experience sometimes bleeds over into his fiction work. Jeremiah can be reached for inquiries about his work at zornundox@yahoo.com.
Evening on the Porch
by Vincent Casaregola
He sat on the bottom of the two front porch steps, watching and listening. The cement felt damp and cold under his worn walking shorts.
Officers were walking back and forth in the street out front, bending down to place yellow markers on the asphalt, each resting by a shell casing. The casings were scattered randomly, like seeds or pollen.
The bright red and blue lights made him squint, but above them, and above the roofs, he saw the western sky darkening.
Mentally, he counted the times before, then he added this one to the list.
Vincent Casaregola teaches American literature and film, creative writing, rhetorical studies, and composition at Saint Louis University. Recently, he has published poetry in a number of journals, including The Bellevue Literary Review, The Examined Life, Natural Bridge, WLA, Dappled Things, 2River, Work, Lifelines, and Blood and Thunder. Some time ago, he had published creative nonfiction in New Letters and The North American Review.
Story of a Happy Thought
by Loredano Cafaro
I am the last happy thought. No others were born afterward. I came into the world by chance, as often happens to those like me. A Saturday morning, a bakery, a blond girl walking towards the exit with the shopping bag in one hand and the bread bag in the other. Dad holds the door open for her, she responds with a smile. Well, I am that smile.
I wasn’t the only happy thought back then. There were the unlikely tales of Funny Man, as I call him, Dad’s best friend. There was the aroma of coffee in the backroom on the mid-morning break. There was even the image of her, an angel in black in the front foyer, on the night of their first date. There were many of us. But most of my brothers were not at all; happy, I mean. Day after day, growing in number, intrusive, arrogant. The back of Funny Man, vanishing through the crowd towards the boarding gates. The soap rubbed on Dad’s left ring finger and the wedding band that refused to slip off. The dismissal letter shaking in his hands.
“The smile of a stranger: come on!” mocked me, the ‘no’ to the first and only woman’s invite after the divorce. It was the meanest; even now, locked up in here, I can hear its snigger.
I have seen the other happy thoughts succumb, one after the other. The sad brothers hunted them down and imprisoned them in the labyrinth of oblivion: that is where I found them again when my turn came.
I’d been keeping Dad company for a long time before the sad brothers managed to catch me. I had to hide, to move fast. I found shelter among the nuances of a reflection on love tangled up in itself. I could have stayed there forever; they would never have found me. But Dad needed me, so every now and then, I peeped out: when he stared at the unlit television, when he huddled in the dark, searching in vain for sleep. And then, one day, they took me. They were led by it, the ‘no’ to the first invite after the divorce.
It was a Friday night in mid-December. Dad was on the Maria Teresa bridge, looking out over the parapet at the reflections of the Christmas decorations on the water below. He pulled a note and pen from his coat pocket, then wrote three lines in shaky handwriting. He folded the paper in two, placed it carefully on the parapet, then sited a metal nut-shaped paperweight he had brought from home on top of it so that it wouldn’t fly away.
Fearing the worst, I put so much effort into getting Dad to notice me that I forgot all caution. That’s when the sad brothers surrounded me. “The smile of a stranger,” I heard behind me, then that damned snigger. How much time has passed since then, I don’t know. But now Dad is alone with them.
“I have to get out of here.”
“No one has ever escaped from the labyrinth,” a Smiths’ song shakes its head.
I go down every corridor, every nook and cranny, ignoring the brothers I meet along the way who keep telling me it’s useless. I follow every curve, every ramp; I go right, I go left, I go up, I go down. All I find is its voice: it is still there laughing, that bastard. Yeah. Maybe I don’t need to find the exit. Maybe the walls aren’t so thick. I choose one and bang on it with both fists, hitting it again and again until it turns red.
“Dad, I’m here!” I scream. “Dad!”
Then something bangs on the other side. From outside, a hand breaks through. Another one appears, both grabbing mine and dragging me out. Free? I am free! I look at my savior.
“You’re new!”
It is a golden retriever pulling Dad by the end of his jacket and then reaching out to lick his face, there on that bloody bridge.
“Come with me,” it says. “Eventually, we will free them all, but now run, we have to go and help the others.”
“The others?” I ask incredulously.
The others. The warmth of the shower after the first day in the workshop, the knowing glance of the cook in the canteen, the energetic handshake of the new neighbor.
I take my place among them. We are no longer alone, Dad. You are no longer alone.
I close my eyes and listen to that damned laugh fade away.
“Make room. I’m here too!” A new arrival joins us: Funny Man’s phone call from the other side of the world.
We exchange a look of understanding, form a circle, and prepare for the fight.
There is still hope.
[The original Italian version has appeared in October 2021, as “Storia di un pensiero felice”, in Breve Storia Felice. Translated from the Italian by Sabrina Beretta and edited by Kate Seger.]
Loredano Cafaro lives in the hills of Turin, Italy, with his wife and two children. In the little free time left to him by his work as a computer scientist, every now and then he imagines stories. Sometimes he writes them down. You can find him at www.loredanocafaro.com.