Short Beasts

In the stream I could see his heart flowing, touching a multitude of other hearts that went numb either by colliding or by choosing to stay so. Sameer cared too much for the skies that went wild with rage sometimes, shackling the scudding clouds, sending spears of lightning aiming to fracture the earth. He listened to the ache of the aging Banyan too.

He said “When I die I want to be close to a water body. I want the susurration of the stream to keep me alive, which I know is a way of claiming a part of something that is moving and yet holding breath, the air in the breath, and the life in the breath.”

I didn’t quite understand him but I knew someday I would. In a world that’s divided between good and bad, I want to keep faith, hold my tongue from moving too much, and reclaim my thoughts that go astray.

The day was nearing. I counted every little blade of grass as if that were a testimony to the gush of love within, to the fear that came unbidden and the moment of despair that flew from grief to grief. I met the doctor the other day. He said “Hold on to something. That’s the least you could do.”

I remember I looked into Sameer’s eyes with agony. I knew if I kept talking to him, he would keep listening to me. And I didn’t want to lose that part of the world where we felt alive, together, stitched by the same fabric of love, our eyes holding each other’s reflections.

I never left the room until the doctor sent me away. But that day I did otherwise. I ran away, into the wilderness where the Banyan stood tall, holding its roots from swaying too much. Then something stirred, something swished. I tried making sense of my immediate surrounding. It had gotten dark, the clouds were no longer moving, and the moon sent shallow beams of yellow light towards the stream.

After a while I decided to sit under the tree, and maybe weep or sing or talk to myself. When I sat down, I heard someone wailing. A man. There was no doubt the voice felt familiar. I couldn’t discern if it was an ache resounding through my heart or it was Sameer himself. I thought I was thinking of him too much when my phone rang and the doctor said “Sameer is no more. You’ll have to come back soon.”

After that all I could hear was the chirpy stream. So naturally I walked towards it in the hope that I will hear him again. But there was nothing. The stream glittered and rippled. I sat on the reedy shore and rested my chin over my knees.

I didn’t have an urge to run anywhere. I just wanted to be where Sameer wanted to be. In those quiet moments that don’t run a show. In those instances where he set his heart on the whiff of rustic air and sometimes taught me to swing over the prop roots of the Banyan.

The phone rang again. But I was fast asleep. The rustle of the trees, the petrichor of wet grass, the distant scent of his death, marooned me into a sleepy torpid world.

When the first ray of the sun kissed my cheeks, I realised I had a life waiting to live. So I sent my eyelids aflutter. Sameer stood on the other side of the shore, waving, smiling, breathing.

It was a difficult thing to believe. I didn’t know if I was awake or sleep drew pictures in my head. But then I heard the children crossing the stream and thought I should too – to the place that would glide past me if I ever thought of settling.

A former software engineer and a banker, Soumya Doralli is an Indian author of two books of fiction. Her third coming-of-age novel “Those Ripples Call Me Home” was recently released by Readomania. Her work has been published in Active Muse, Panoply, Mad Swirl, Ran Off With The Star Bassoon, among others. She was the Second Prize Winner of the Verse of Silence Poetry in Pamphlet Contest, 2025. Soumya loves capturing the heart of fleeting moments and painting beautiful imagery through her writing. See @soumyadoralli and on Medium.

Joe brings us sandwiches of cured ham on Portuguese bread. He takes us for a cruise at lunch hour in his mom’s green Grand Am. He tells us he just likes the way the losers watch him as he slows down by smoker’s corner—two hot chicks in the front seat eating blue plums he snuck fresh outta the fridge just a half hour before picking us up.

Joe’s twenty and has dark hair across his forearms. I’ve studied it carefully as he places his veiny hand on your thigh as he drives the car. Hair like that means business. Hair like that is up front and coarse for a reason. Joe is all there. He’d bring you flowers if you just mentioned it one day.

You don’t care about Joe because you’re not thinking of going away. I don’t care for Joe either because—because. I just like Joe ‘cause he’s so New York. He says sheer hose with strap heels are what’s missing from this town and I agree. He appreciates my acid mouth, says it makes a woman’s lips naturally red. And mine’s bleedin.’

Joe knows the swell of your boobs and each mole that sleeps there like the Lord’s prayer backwards. You claim he’s gonna give you a big surprise in a little box on graduation day and you won’t take it. You say you can’t take him too seriously, that he’s just a mama’s boy.

But Joe is more close to the real thing than you think. He’s big because he’s European and thinks it’s necessary to spend eight hundred dollars on a pair of shoes. Likes a woman to get all fancied up and be strong and loud. He may write stupid things in my yearbook like, “I never met a woman like you,” and I know he means it.

---

Mary Anne Griffiths is a poet and fiction writer living in Ingersoll, Ontario, Canada. She shares space with a spouse, a tortie and tuxie and is presently working towards her debut collection of poetry and microfiction. Her work can be found in Dark Winter Lit Mag, Bright Flash Literary Review, Macrame Literary Journal, The Lothlorien and Your Sudden Flash.

Nurses come and go like ghosts, checking vitals, updating charts. The sheets and walls are white. My brother lies in bed in a white gown. His skin is onion white, a shade darker than the paste-white bracelet on his wrist. The bracelet reads: Alex Parks, 12/10/65.

My sister sits with him, reading Jeremiah 29:11: “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the LORD, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

“Cam,” I say, “We need to go.”

“A few more minutes,” she says.

If Alex wakes, Camille will praise the almighty, call the ordeal part of God’s master plan, and Alex will tell her it was he who opened his eyes and besides, if God is responsible for waking him then God’s responsible for hurting him and that’s a pretty shitty thing, isn’t it? And what about all the other poor souls in St. Vincent Medical Center on a Tuesday night in Toledo?

The glasses, the mischievous grin, are gone. He’s never looked so harmless.

Camille, the middle child (I’m the oldest, Alex the youngest), is aging well considering all she takes on. Gray is frosting her thick blonde hair, which she wears in a ponytail, but her face—merry green eyes, dimpled chin—is the same face I’ve looked upon at holiday meals since the ‘70s.

“Cam, time to go. Come on, man.”

She shifts her weight on the bed, as if digging in.

***

Alex was different from the start: pigeon-toed, half blind, hairline receding to the crown. My father called him his “little Buddy Holly.”

He rode a unicycle all over the San Gabriel Valley. He spent most of 1975 trying to solve the JFK killing. In high school, he ran for class president, campaigning in a Gumby outfit for reasons he never explained.

He protested a civil war in Oceania, and marched for equal rights for women and gay people. His sign, the same roughed-up piece at every protest in Los Angeles, the one that offended those he was claiming to support, the one that made him an outsider even on the inside of a movement, and the one that sated his WTF compulsion to disrupt, read: “Equal rights for women and homos.”

After attending Long Beach State University for seven years, he ran for city council in Lakewood and lost. Then he ran for state assembly.

“Why don’t you get your degree?”

“In what?”

In time, he moved to Archbold, Ohio, of all places, and worked as a store clerk until the accident landed him in the hospital. He made his own beer and fought his fights. He focused on gay rights—we all knew by then that Alex was gay—and stronger legal protections for animals.

We rooted for him, but he was always broke, sometimes jailed, and generally frustrating, which brings me to his strangest habit.

It started at the dinner table when we were kids. Alex took a bite of steak, lurched forward, hands clutching his throat, and spun off his chair, gasping for air and banging his fist on the floor. My mother pounded his back.

He performed his act in the high school cafeteria, in crosswalks, during baseball games. The scenes got lengthier, more dramatic, more uncomfortable to watch.

At my mother’s sixty-fifth birthday party, he tore at his shirt, fell backwards into the oleander, limbs flailing, tongue wagging, pupils wheeling back in his skull. But even his nieces and nephews grew tired of it. Camille’s oldest daughter was eleven when she told him, “Uncle Alex, stop doing that, it’s not funny anymore.”

***

My family, Methodists, rarely talked about death, and when we did, it had to do with getting saved from the eternal kind. Alex fought the family and the church. He always said the best defense is a good offense.

***

It’s been three months since the crash on the Ohio turnpike, where a van stopped in front of him and, according to witnesses, Alex crouched on his handlebars and tried to Evel Knievel it over the van.

His brain stem was crushed and he will never be the Alex we knew. He lies there fallow, the bracelet too big for his wrist.

Camille, wearing a red scarf folded on her chest like a flag, cups his face.

“Time to go,” a nurse says.

Camille kisses her cross and presses it to Alex’s forehead.

“Come on,” I say. “That’s not Alex and you know it.”

“For I KNOW the plans I have for you, declares the LORD, plans to PROSPER you and not to HARM you, plans to give you hope and a FUTURE,” she repeats.

I make for the door and she claps twice, flips the cross, which I hold with both hands, and puts her mouth to Alex’s ear.

“Bravo,” she tells him. “Your best performance yet.”

---

Brady Rhoades’s work has appeared in Best New Poets 2008, The Antioch Review, Faultline, Georgetown Review, Notre Dame Review, The William & Mary Review and other publications. Rhoades is a journalist and animal rights activist who works and lives in Fullerton, California.

The fishers watch her, but they’d never admit that, even if they were caught in the act. It’s too extraordinary for a girl to fish for a living; it’s uncomely and bad luck to fish with a woman so near, especially an unwed girl of twenty. To men diminished and brittle from long days and sore bones, her presence is a nuisance, so her abundant catches and exquisitely hand-crafted lures are hastily dismissed. Hints of witchcraft flit across their lips in whispers; suspicious good fortune and uncanny knowing of where and when to fish, especially by a girl-fisher, must have other-worldly explanations. It’s a good thing men are brave; otherwise, they’d be frightened by the wild, free, careless, fearless, cunning creature they saw in Magda.

“Nobody’s gonna help you out here,” one said.

“When ya gonna settle down and become a proper wife?” asked another.

“If anybody’d have her,” said a third, thinking she was out of earshot.

But Magda noticed and heard and felt every admonition, scolding, sideways glance, and furrowed brow. Any dangers posed by the river are trivial compared to what the men want for her — including becoming a proper wife.

But what will I do? she thought. Fish forever? No.

Always the same sequence of questions and answers, like a well-rehearsed dance, reflexive answers from endless repetition.

Give in to what’s expected? No, definitely not.

Leave. Possibly. But how? And what about Mama and Papa, it would kill them.

So then, swallow more of the fishermen’s venom. Get married like Mama and Papa want, then spend every day pretending, living a life that isn’t mine. Part of me dies either way.

Her only escape is the river, at night, alone. There, she can soak in the soothing warmth of the night air and the expanse of stars to become nothing more than a blade of grass, the resting place for a ladybug, protection for the dirt beneath her. Even the walk from the craggy cobblestone path behind the village to the river’s edge gave her reprieve. Through the grass that first consumed her feet and ankles, then knees and thighs, and finally her waist, she disappeared. Where the grass thinned and scattered, the muddy earth and rocks offered coolness and quiet. That’s where the river lived.

Taking the knife from her fishing bag, she threw it toward the ground so that it landed point down, sinking into the soft earth — a habit of hers when she fished at night. She dropped her fishing bag and plopped down on a low rock. Freeing her feet and ankles from the confines of soft leather and laces, she felt the mud creep between her toes, around her heels.

Searching for familiar constellations, she stared at the glinting winks that dotted the serene darkness. The tips of majestic pine trees that stretched their branches to the stars. She closed her eyes and listened to the gentle babble and spatter of the river. The cool night air, its breeze brushing across her skin, whispering across the tall grasses, tickling the ends of her hair.

Rhythmic swishing of tall grass in the stillness pulled Magda out of her trance. A low gentle voice called out, “Do you hear them?”

Nearly jumping out of her skin, she felt the ground for her knife, straining to see a face in the shadowy outline coming toward her.

“Oh, hi. I’m just enjoying the evening,” Magda said, seeing the familiar stranger’s face. Mars, at least that’s what people called him, roamed the woods or ambled along the river. He’d stand silently, face turned to the heavens, eyes closed, giving a faint smile or slow nod to the moon or whomever, whatever he thought was out there with him.

Reaching for her bag, she intended to stand up swiftly and get out of there.

Mars sat on a rock a good distance away, “No need to leave, I’ll be wandering downstream.” He paused and breathed in the cool night air. Then sweeping a relaxed hand across the sky, asked, “Do you hear them?”

“Who?” She waited, but his long silence demanded more, “The stars?”

“The stars, the moon, can you hear them?

“Sorry. No.”

“What if the stars talk to the moon and the moon talks to the stars?” He said in a relaxed lilt. “If the moon and stars communicate with each other, maybe they talk to the river and everything else. Trees. Fish. Crabs. Grass. Stones … Us.”

Magda looked away and rolled her eyes, “What would the stars tell us?”

“What are you asking them?”

Mars ran his fingers along a stem of tall grass, barely disturbing it, “What if we’re all here crafting our own experience, and in doing so, we all have different vantage points. The water in the river sees much more than any of us. The stars see vast expanses of time and space beyond what the river can imagine. Why wouldn’t we be a part of all this?”

Magda stared at the tufts of grass near her feet and ran a muddied toe across a single, fat, green blade.

“I’m Gwydion, by the way. Friends call me Gwyd. I talk to stars, but in all fairness, I talk to trees, the river … everything. And they talk to me.”

“Gwyd, what if it’s just you, telling yourself what you want to hear?”

Gwyd raised his eyebrows and smiled.

“How would I even start to …,” simultaneously sighing and laughing, her voice trailed off.

Laying his finger to his lips, he uttered a gentle “Shh,” as he stood up and meandered toward the river’s edge.

Suddenly, the sounds of the night became louder. Her thoughts blurred as if the mist over the river seeped into her mind and hovered between her ears.

Absurd, she thought. I’m taking advice from a lunatic.

Still, raising her face to the new moon, barely a glowing sliver against its dark roundness, she closed her eyes to listen.

---

Angela Young is a teacher and writer living in California. Happiest outdoors, Angela adores and respects nature and spends as much time as possible among the trees. Hiking, biking, organic gardening, cooking healthy concoctions of all sorts, and walking with her pup are all-time favorite pastimes. See her site.

There’s a dead pigeon in the gutter. It makes me sadder than it should. It’s not the death that’s most upsetting, or even the gutter of it all. It’s the mere fact of the pigeon, if you want to know the truth.

“Watch your step,” I say to Marky, tugging his little forearm like I could swing his whole body up and over the curb. His sneaker grazes a smear of viscera, but he misses the bulk of the bird.

“Oh,” Marky says. Squints. Shudders.

They’re seemingly infinite, pigeons. One goes down, a swarm flocks in to fill the gap. Gray, blue-gray, purple-grayish-gray, evoking soot and ash, the remnants of things you clean out of a flue. My father used to forget to do that, every time he made a fire. “Goddamn flue!” he’d shout, pigeon-colored smoke choking the room.

“It makes my elbows tingle,” says Marky.

“What?”

“Dead things.”

We trot south, skirting slow walkers to make the light. My eyes keep dragging to Marky’s left shoe. The laces aren’t untied, not fully, it’s just that they’re tied with radical inefficacy. Loose and dangling, both loops and strings kissing the pavement like fingers trailing through water off the side of a boat. Only, in this case, pigeon guts.

“Why was he flat?”

“Who?”

“The pigeon. The dead pigeon.”

How to answer? Because he’s disposable, I could say. Because no one else’s elbows tingle. “Who says it’s a he?” I go with instead.

When we get home, we won’t make a fire. Our fireplace is purely decorative, though it puts up a good front—even sports artificial logs in an iron grate. It embarrasses me, when others see it. Always having to disabuse. “Oh, no, it’s non-working,” I explain, with a stuttering laugh, like I’ve been caught doing something indecent. We ought to drywall over it, sell the mantle marble for scrap. When I mentioned that once, Marky cried.

Overhead, pigeons dive bomb pedestrians. Underfoot, pigeons peck at scraps. Pigeons remind me of bloated, feathered lesions, for in addition to cinders, they share the color of a bruise.

He was flat. The gutter-pigeon. Eventually he’ll be ground down entirely, those bird bones trodden and scuffed to dust. How many formerly alive things do we walk upon daily? How much blood is under our soles?

“Mom?” Marky’s face is open, questioning. He tugs my index finger. “Are you OK?” I’ve stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, it seems. A human eddy for the stream of commuters to flow around and past.

There is something I have to tell him. Something that will make his elbows tingle. Something that will make him cry. Across the intersection, two pigeons ignore each other atop a window air conditioning unit, stupid to their oncoming fate.

“I’m fine!” I assure him. Because largely, I am. Sad truths will still be true tomorrow. One solid step, and the gutter will be behind us. And a fake fireplace means never having to clean out the flue. I take his hand and we press on, sky full of flying, street built on backs and bodies and somehow bearing our weight.

---

Erica Ottenberg is an Emmy Award-winning writer and creative director. For over twenty years, she wrote and produced content for kids & families at Nickelodeon. She is also the author of three books in Madonna’s The English Roses series for middle-grade readers. Erica is the winner of Book Pipeline’s Unpublished Manuscript (Young Adult) for her novel, Confessions of a Ghostwriter. She is a winner of Writers’ Hour Magazine’s flash fiction contest.

Dread comes in as my daddy slinks out the door. He sits at the table with me and my mom eating up all the long labored over resentments that have been stewing all day. With his belly full he settles in daddy’s beige and orange flowery lounge rocking chair. He lights up a fat cigar and knocks it on the side of the ashtray stand, ashes floating to the shag carpet. He turns on the tension pole floor lamps like he’ll be reading the TV Guide, but my mom yelling at me and pacing the livingroom-hall-diningroom-kitchen is a better show. He turns her tongue into a rasp and it grates and grates and he laughs and laughs, and in my mind I am going someplace else.

I am in my mom’s closet with her pretty skirts and dresses swaying above me and I am playing Barbie. We are dancing to Queen because we are the champions and I’m gonna make Ken do what we want. Ken’s gonna stay home on a Saturday night and dress in his best striped shirt, shave and comb his Beach Boys hair. He’ll grill up a nice steak for us, even cleaning up afterwards all the time staring lovingly at her with that vapid grin. Ken is shit in my hands, easily molded, smelly like all the boys and just as easily flushed if he’s not careful. If it doesn’t work out the way Barbie and I think it should, she’ll lash out while she goes all Taekwondo on him looking great in a pristine white dobok with her jet black belt. We’ll teach him a lesson, smarten him up, because she owns the camper bus and lives in her dream house.

---

Mary Anne Griffiths is a poet and fiction writer living in Ingersoll, Ontario, Canada. She shares space with a spouse, a tortie and tuxie and is presently working towards her debut collection of poetry and microfiction. Her work can be found in Dark Winter Lit Mag, Bright Flash Literary Review, Macrame Literary Journal, The Lothlorien and Your Sudden Flash.

I recognized him as soon as he got off the Lake Merritt TRAB train. It was the same young brotha who always asks me for change as I waited at the Glen Park TRAB Station for the Blue Line train when I was on my way home from work. Lanky all over, even his eyes are long. Last time I saw him, he had on a green Polo shirt not long enough to cover the sag in his faded jeans. He seemed to be the same age as my students – sixteen or seventeen years old. He always had the same story: “Can you help me? I ran away from my group home so that I could see a friend. Now I’m trying to get back before curfew, but I don’t have enough money for the fare. Can you help me?”

He didn’t smell unhoused or seem like he was on drugs, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt. The first time, I gave him two dollars. The second time, I gave him a TRAB ticket with a couple dollars on it. But then, I watched him avoid paying the fare by walking out of the station through an emergency exit. So the third time, I told him, “I don’t have it, sorry man, I can’t help you.” This time when I was sitting on the marble bench waiting for the Green Line train on my way into The City, I turned my head away and put my nose in my book, avoiding eye contact.

But he came up to me anyway. He said, “Hey Miss, I just want to say…” I looked up, cocking my head to the side, making eye contact. “I just want to say,” he bent down to look me in the eye. He said, “Jesus loves you,” and held out his fist for me to give him a dap.

I’m not the praying type but I responded by tapping his fist with mine. “Thanks man.”

Then he said, “And he loves me too…” sauntering away, leaning back. It was then that I noticed his new shoes, stud earrings, and new haircut. Hoping that maybe he got involved with a progressive church, I watched in approval his head tipped back, long arms wagging, stepping onto the escalator and disappearing upward.

---

Christl Rikka Perkins is a bi-racial (Black/Japanese) writer living in Oakland, CA. She was published in American Fiction 17, God’s Cruel Joke, Half and One and the WriteNow!-SF Writers’ Workshop anthology, Essential Truths: The Bay Area in Color. Read more on her website.

As Art was nodding off in the living room with his bugle on his belly, the doorbell rang.

Can you answer the door, Art? said Helen, working at the thread spinning between her needles.

Art set down his bugle, rubbed his eyes, and watched his wife’s long, graceful fingers. He couldn’t tell what she was crafting or thinking. Her fingers tugged, poked and plucked as though each was machinating with its own brain.

Art dashed a few notes down on his music sheet, then opened the front door.

Hello, he said. What is the meaning of this?

‘sup.

Yup.

Yo.

(Nods)

Hey!

Art knew immediately that the Monosyllabists had come to visit. They nudged flaccidly through the door.

Helen? Art called. Hel!

Give them something to drink, Art! she called.

The Monosyllabists were young and slouchy and sported threatening hair. Yet they smiled sometimes and made curious gestures, too. Were they merely skulking loafers? Low-brow flaneurs? They meandered into the kitchen in a loose swarm. Art asked if they would like anything to drink.

Sure.

Yeah.

Cool.

(Shrugs)

Ah!

The Monosyllabists quaffed the variety of tropical fruit juices and caffeinated beverages Art proffered. While they drank, the Monosyllabists milled about the cabinets and the pantry and fondled bags of crunchy food snacks. Concerned the Monosyllabists might consume the vichyssoise Helen had prepared for the garden party later that afternoon, Art suggested they all make tuna fish sandwiches.

Sick.

Ill.

Fire.

(Holds hands up)

Huh!

They all crunched and squished their mouths around tuna salad, tomato, and potato chip sandwiches. They’re certainly strangerous, these Monosyllabists, thought Art. But they know their way around a tuna fish sandwich.

Art made more sandwiches and packed them into a paper bag for the Monosyllabists. OK, see you later! said Art.

Def.

‘kay.

Mrp.

(Stares)

Gee, those were delicious tuna fish sandwiches, Mr. Schnitzle! Thanks for everything, and have a great day!

The Monosyllabist covered his mouth in confused horror. Something shifted around Art. The air seemed to vibrate and crackle. Helen appeared in the kitchen doorway, wide-eyed. She clutched her sewing needles to her chest, and shivered into herself.

***

Decades later, Art lay on a pile of dead, crunchy foliage in his lean-to, hugging a battered and rusted bugle and peeking through the tarp at the endless nuclear winter: The dull orange sun sloughed through the soft gray blanket of poison clouds, the city below shriveled and crumbled under ice and despair, the rabid cry of radioactive wolves howled on the piercing wind; and as he caressed his few remaining memories like the mouthpiece of his horn—beautiful Helen, dream-notes of a lost composition, something about fingers, something about tuna—Art recalled the Monosyllabists’ visit and its shocking end, and it slowly dawned on him, like the Leviathan sun rising up over the horizon…that was the beginning of it all.

---

Eric Melbye is an associate professor of creative writing at Miami University Regionals in Ohio. He has published fiction and poetry in several literary journals, and a novel, Tru (Flame Books, 2007).

Jenny
I love my job. I love the endless shelves of multi-coloured books, the range of subjects. I love the smell of the pages when I walk into the library each morning. And I especially love helping our customers. The thought that the Council could include us in the cuts horrifies me.

June, the librarian, now the only librarian, said we have to fight to keep the regulars. I’ve no idea how we are supposed to get the footfall up, though. As her junior, I have followed her advice. I give extra help and friendly support to everyone that enters.

Most days, it is only the old men sitting in the newspaper section. But even those I try to befriend, by encouraging them to scour the bookshelves. I’m giving my closest attention to everyone. There is no problem being attentive to the elderly, young girls and older women, but it’s not so easy with the younger men. Yet for my job’s sake, I have made a great effort to overcome my discomfort. I know I can be professional.

One young man visits almost daily. He must be a student. He seeks my help with a multitude of subjects. I’m helping with his historical research one day, and the next day some engineering related subject. He certainly has an impressive broad range of interests. This is what energizes me about my job, giving exceptional service. I just hope that I am making a difference and we can keep the library open. Otherwise I’ve got no job.

My boyfriend Graham thinks I should be wary of being too friendly and giving the wrong impression. I have tried to make him understand the situation we face, and how important my job is to me. Sometimes I think he sees me as a naive airhead.

Harry
I joined the library for another place to escape. There was an item in the local newspaper saying it faced closure. I’ve never been a great one for books, but I thought I’d go along, anyway. Mum keeps nagging me to get a job, so I keep out of the house. What I didn’t expect was to meet the girl of my dreams.

Her name badge reads Jenny, and I have begun to call her that. She is about five feet two, coal black hair that goes great with her large cherry-red framed glasses. She has such a friendly welcoming smile and goes to great lengths to help with whatever I ask.

Most days, I find an excuse to go into the library. If I pretend I am interested in a subject, Jenny insists on leaving her desk and walking me to the appropriate aisle. She takes the time to discover something about my interests and shows appreciation for my reading matter. When I’m standing next to her and she opens a book to point out something, I put my face by hers and to follow what she is showing me. I’m so close I can smell her warm hair.

I am returning to the library every day now. Even though I am basically a shy person, I cannot ignore the signals Jenny is giving out. With every visit, I feel more excited in her company. As soon as I realise the library is open, I am thinking of Jenny. Yesterday, she waved at me through the window as I left on my cycle. Tomorrow, I am going to pluck up the courage to ask Jenny out. I feel so confident that she will say yes.

---

Dan Keeble hails from the furthest point East in the UK, and has enjoyed many successes with online and print publications of poetry, short stories, humour, and more serious articles. He has appeared in Fiction on the Web, Everyday Fiction, Turnpike Magazine, Scribble, Flash Fiction Magazine, Agape Review, and many others on a long journey to a stubby pencil.

The first time I met Adina Milford I thought all witches were old and all ghosts were dead people. I was wrong on both accounts. Adina appeared in homeroom halfway through eighth grade. A velvety snow had fallen that morning, making the town look as gentle as a postcard. Bundled children stuck their tongues out and hurled snowballs at each other on the way to school. They crammed their boots and coats inside slim lockers before the first bell. Adina hovered in the classroom doorway. She was squatty and wore her hair in a long braid swung over her right shoulder. Hal noticed her first.

“DayDay, is that your Mom?” Hal asked me. Cody sneered and high-fived Hal who never let me forget my old stutter. When I told Hal to shove it, Mrs. Watkins overheard.

“Darren Ross, would you like detention?”

“No, ma’am,” I answered.

She’d already made up her mind. That afternoon I spent forty minutes organizing cabinets until Watkins released me. Hal and Cody were waiting in the lot behind the school. Cody knew a house where we could admire a young woman who undressed without drawing her shades. Darkness fell early, and I was a lonesome latchkey kid.

In the dimming twilight, the streets were booby-trapped with black ice and snow drifts. Cody rode in front. He popped wheelies and flew over mounds of dirty snow, one arm in the air. Hal followed close behind, his fingers barely tickling the handlebars of his ten-speed. I stayed in the center of the road. Hal kept me around because he needed a pecking order with someone else at the bottom. I stayed because I needed a pack. My dad had bailed on us for the third time since July. Mom said it was just “a break,” but “a break” got longer each time he left. Mom worked as a secretary and picked up a second job at an auto-parts store. Lately, she came home to cook and cry and fall asleep to Barney Miller reruns.

We stopped in front of a Queen Anne with thick icicles dangling from the eaves like stalactites. Cody motioned to us to duck down behind a row of boxwoods. We held our breath, anxious for a shapely silhouette to appear in one of the bedrooms.

A set of footsteps soon quickened their pace and slowed behind us. We turned and saw a bundled figure standing on a sidewalk, a single braid pulled over her right shoulder.

“What?” Hal demanded.

Cody gestured for her to scram.

Adina didn’t move. She eyeballed us like we were grubs in daylight. I crawled out from behind the boxwoods first and hopped on my bike. Not long after I heard the angry hiss of Hal’s ten-speed. I didn’t wait for Cody. When I got home, my mom was asleep on the couch, still wearing the green vest from the auto-parts store.

The next week, Cody and Hal hatched a plan to get Adina “set straight.” After she thwarted our peeping tom adventure, they followed her and spotted her reading in a busted treehouse behind the old Cooper place. Hal had taken stock of the hideaway: books, dried flowers, and a woolen blanket. Cody held out a palmful of matches. They wanted to pile up her treasures, make a bonfire, then take a leak on the flames. I was the lookout.

The road to vengeance was pockmarked with gravel and salt. Cody rode in front, smacking his bare-knuckled hands together each time he cursed Adina and her eyeballs and her old-fashioned ugliness. Hal hooted with laughter and hurried to keep up. I kept my distance. I had chosen between fighting two different kinds of shame: the burning bug-shame of Adina’s knowing gaze or the shame of a lonely coward who wouldn’t ride into danger with his friends. Fighting shame with other people was easier than fighting shame alone. But the closer we got to Adina’s treehouse, the more the bloated knot in my stomach writhed and swelled.

The Cooper property was a wooded patch of thistle and knotweed, which surrounded a blackened and hollow colonial. The house burned before I was born, but there were no buyers, so it stuck around, a jagged scar on the edge of town. Cody and Hal ditched their bikes behind a snowbank. I watched their shapes bound through the underbrush and set the brown stalks to twitching. The twilight sky was cloudless as the sun slipped behind the horizon. I leaned my bike beside theirs and followed the laughter through the bare trees.

Fat plumes of wet smoke quickly belched out every side of the treehouse. I clutched my stomach and crept closer, certain I could hear a crack of footsteps behind me. Adina? Nobody answered. My eyes burned with soot; above me the splash of urine signaled that Hal and Cody had finished and would soon descend the rickety stairs. I blinked to keep focus, waved my hands in front of me, and felt my fingertips brush against a thick braid. Adina? Cody called after her right before he scrambled down the tree so fast, he dead-dropped fifteen feet to unforgiving ground. Hal chased her next, but I soon lost sight of them both. The driver said Hal rode straight into traffic, his fingers barely touching his handlebars. Adina Milford vanished into cinders, rumor, and memory.

Hal and Cody have been gone for so long that some days I wonder if they were even real. But whenever I get behind the wheel of my car to leave this town for good, I feel a long braid brush against my neck, and the car heads home. Every wrong turn, shortcut, and straight shot leads me back here like a curse. I see the sun is shining today, and the road is flat and wide; lord knows I want to take it anywhere but here. But I was the lookout, so Adina Milford makes me wait and wait and wait.

---

Martha (“Marty”) Keller‘s work has appeared in Flash Frog, Fictive Dream, Fractured Lit, Milk Candy Review, Lost Balloon, Cagibi Literary Journal, Midway Journal, Bridge Eight Literary Magazine, Brilliant Flash Fiction and elsewhere. Her stories have been nominated for the Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions anthologies. Over the years, she’s worked in strip malls, skyscrapers, and high school classrooms.

JoJo and her mother Justine have a party every Thanksgiving Eve, so JoJo’s old high school softball friends can drop by. The entire party takes place in JoJo’s wheelchair-accessible bedroom. She sits by the huge flat-screen TV mounted on the wall by the bathroom door. Her long blonde ponytail hangs over the back of the wheelchair. Every few minutes, she reaches both hands under a thigh and lifts it from the seat, readjusting the leg. Then she lifts the other.

In her junior year of high school, JoJo dove off the rocks at low tide, six blocks from her home, and broke her spine. She’s fifty-three. She’s lived at home with her mother, 91, all this time, on Cordova Street, while her siblings, all older, got married, had kids, bought houses—some nearby.

Five years after JoJo’s accident, her mother’s house burned to the ground. A wiring problem. JoJo and Justine had been a few blocks away at JoJo’s sister’s house for a barbecue. They heard the sirens. No one we know, I hope, Justine said. With the insurance money, they rebuilt the house to accommodate a wheelchair.

JoJo’s bed stands in the center of the room—a regular full-size bed with a knobby wooden headboard and footboard, blue sheets, a brown comforter. One side of the bed has been slept in—the covers rumpled, thrown back the way you do when you get out of bed in the morning. On the smooth side, aging high school friends sit in a row, calling out memories. Remember, remember? I remember, JoJo calls back, laughing.

JoJo’s clothes hang in a closet without doors.

Justine sits on a folding chair a few feet from JoJo, her walker within reach. She wears a royal blue fleece zipped to her chin. Her luminous white hair is short at the sides and back, with a soft, thick wave towering above her forehead, almost punk-rock. One of JoJo’s brothers—a deep-voiced man wearing a t-shirt tucked into ironed jeans—brings Justine a paper plate of pizza.

“No, honey, I want that other stuff—isn’t there pasta or something? And get a bowl to toss that salad.” He returns with a small bowl of pasta and a small bowl of salad. “No, dear, I meant a big bowl for the whole salad, so you could toss it before people serve themselves.” He smiles, rolls his eyes, shakes his head. Justine says, “I know I irritate you. It’s my job, long as I live.”

The bathroom is getting retiled—JoJo’s siblings pooled their money. It was already wheelchair-accessible but hadn’t been updated since the fire, decades ago. The work’s been abandoned for the holiday weekend, but the workmen re-hung the mirror above the sink. They placed it at the level a standing woman applies make-up.

A Sticky Note with spidery script clings to the middle of the mirror: “Hey Einstein, my daughter isn’t up here. Hang this lower.”

I wash my hands with a Sticky Note for a face. I’m a stranger to JoJo until moments ago, a new friend of one of those high school friends, swept along on the way to yet another party, a different one, my evening’s actual destination.

But I never forget this house, where burning is a blessing and some jobs last as long as you live.

Halina Duraj’s work has been published in journals including The Sun, The Harvard Review, and Ecotone. She teaches literature and creative writing at the University of San Diego.

When my father died, I cleared his house. My mother was long dead; my sister lives half a world away. It was me or nobody. I took a few days off work, stayed in his empty home. In the silent evenings, alone, I missed my wife and kids, freshly aware of our mortality, the inexorable progression; child, parent, grandparent, finale.

He never used a computer; he used a typewriter or wrote longhand. In old age, he bruised his feet kicking the world forward by writing letters to the local Council’s minor functionaries. A dustbin needed here, a bike path required there. He kept copies of his letters; he kept the replies; a mountain of paper.

The papers went into 25 numbered boxes. I packed up his tools and some ornaments and shipped it all back home. Everything else was trashed. I cleared out his wardrobe and chest of drawers, stuffing his clothes into black plastic garbage bags. Under socks and underpants, I found a green leather journal held shut by elastic bands, a piece of paper secured beneath them. “Destroy Without Investigation”, it read.

I spent my last evening in that house seated at the kitchen table with a bottle of red wine and a pizza, the unopened journal in front of me. Did I want to know my father’s secrets or not?

I honored the wishes of the dead and destroyed the journal, unopened, unread.

Back home, I wondered about my father and his secrets. When the long winter evenings arrived, I settled down to read through the contents of box after box. The kids had their homework; I had mine. I wanted to know more about the man behind the curtain and the secrets that were to die with him.

I read his diaries; I read correspondence. I sympathised with a man who wanted to improve the world, but also with the clerks constrained by bosses and budgets. He was pugnacious and persistent. They were polite and patient.

After weeks I reached the end. Finished! There had been no secrets to blemish the family name, but I did understand my father far better; I had found the person in the parent. I admired his struggles, an old butterfly beating its wings against ancient stone. Each of the 7.5 billion of us chooses the tiny mark we make on our planet, whether to scar or sculpt.

A few days later, we were all together in the living room; my wife reading, the children doing their homework. Seated at my desk in the corner, my back to the family, I finally reached the end of my emails. I glanced around at the kids; heads down over textbooks, they ignored me. What did they see? A back turned on them? A parent? A person? Were they even curious?

I am going to buy a leather journal of my own to leave behind. Will my children honor the instruction, or will they open it? And what will be written in it?

Gordon Pinckheard lives in County Kerry, Ireland. Retired from a working life spent writing computer programs and technical documents, he now seeks success in his sunset years submitting short stories typed out with one arthritic finger. His stories have been published by Flash Fiction Magazine, Every Day Fiction, Daily Science Fiction, Cabinet of Heed and others.

I steered over to the public washroom, a freestanding hub of entrances and exits, to lean my bike against the cement-block wall. A bearded man standing under his ball cap gave me a dentist-approved smile. I micro-stepped toward him and said, “I forgot my lock.” He nodded. “I’ll keep an eye on your bike.” When I entered the building he stood beside my bike.

Over a million bicycles not reported stolen get stolen annually.
That’s a million owner-improved bikes, permanently disappeared.
Some with custom-fitted saddles.
Upgraded pedals and wheels.
Hi-visibility rear-light for safety.
Bottle cages and bell.
Signature rock chip on the down tube, painted steady-handed blue.
Lucky-Cat stem cap, a birthday present received last year.

I exited the washroom. The bearded man twisted the brim of his ball cap over the back of his unsmiling neck. He straddled my bike, hunched forward and gripped the handlebars. I yelled and he yelled. “My bike!”

On the pedals he stomped and angled my speeding bike between the public washroom and a timber-framed pond. His scum-water reflection flew from my pointing-pointlessly finger and disappeared behind a hedge.

I ran until my feet cemented to the bike path in two furious exclamations. One ear turned toward the faint distant whirring of my bike’s flywheel before leaning deeper into unwelcome silence. The path showed my abandoned shadow rudely contorting: the form resembled a cyclist without a bike.

At my back, an unsympathetic slap slapped the water. I defensively turned. A fetching-stick wagged the pond’s middle before it surrendered to the splash and sputter of a retriever dog’s jump. When the fetched-stick’s dog bounded to its dryland master, the pond-water bunted against unyielding edges, and I remembered. My bike!

Stepping forward, my face facing the freestanding building. I read the posted sign: “Please use the other entrance.” The sign arrowed where a bearded man stood. Still beside a bike.

Laurel Smith is a writer whose publications include Monsoon poems (Cyberwit), The Right Red: From Viewer to Learner (University of Calgary), and several magazine reviews of authors and artists. Writing is an expansion of Laurel’s visual art practice.

Between bites of biryani and samosas, she divulged the edited version of her childhood. He nodded in agreement and sighed, his eyes deep, inky pools, in frames of jet lashes.

Gazing into his right one she envisioned their baby daughter with his eyes, her red hair, and dimples, their Labrador and a terracotta brick house. In his left she saw heavy silence, raised voices, custody battles, siblings separated.

“Fancy a drink?” he said as they zipped up jackets.

“Not tonight, I’ve a deadline,” she said to his left eye, then hesitated. “Maybe next week?” she added to his right.

“Okay,” he smiled, then something flashed across his face, as she glimpsed him frowning into her left eye.

Ellen Townsend is an art teacher and writer. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Flash Fiction Magazine, Friday Flash Fiction, 50-Word Stories and Paragraph Planet. Her stories have been broadcast on BBC Radio.

You draw your shirt closed over your breasts, lining up the buttons until they kiss the soft spot beneath your chin, shoes abandoned at the doorstep. You are gifting me this truth: you have left willingly, and all that I am is tucked inside your skin. We rouse the same hour of dawn, with enough time to chase after you. We ready our rifle, the silver gleam of metal the color of your eyes. The rain softens the ground outside, and your tracks are easy to follow. We believe this to be your mishap.

You have named us Älskling in every iteration of your hunt and come into our houses invited. Into the red-paint wooden one with the apple trees, the one with broken windows, the stable where we slept on the hay, the yellow cottage by the brook with nothing but a bronze kettle in the kitchen. You appear in the yard, or outside the window with a knock, or by the maypole in your summer dress, or in the rain with your hair down to your ankles, or at the side of our kill in the woods. You bare your teeth in a smile too angular to be kind, and in our love for you we affirm your humanity.

We forget the hardness of your shoulder blades when we wrap our arms around you from behind, the scent of rotten wood seeping from the slope of your shoulder into your back. You tear our hair from our scalp with sharp fingers as we sleep and place the strands upon your tongue in ritual as the self that lives in our ribs and heart and eyes falls into the pit of your stomach. We dream of your hands scavenging our bodies for the only thing you want, a sheen of faith coating our tongues from half-hearted prayers. You try to salvage whatever bit of human you can from us. Enough to last the night and some.

We should have closed the windows and turned our backs when the door rattled. We should have let the rain soak through the linen of your dress until you yowled and chased yourself into the woods like other animals do, overturned into paws and tail and prowl. But before you tumble into the clovers and the cow parsley, before you lap the lingonberries from their stems with your ridged teeth and fatten yourself on the squirrels, before you seek out another lover for your list—know that come sunlight on the crest of pine trees, we have stirred in the absence of your hands rummaging through our bodies.

Shelter in the moss when our feet break the wet branches on the ground. Leap at the turning of our eye to your position. Trample the cloudberries beneath your paws and trap your breath between your teeth. Know as you close your lips around the pith you have scraped from the roof of our mouths, each man-burrow you upheave is another rifle seeking the perfect shot. Know your legs are swift. Know we are more numerous than you are quick. Know that we will find each other.

Know that as you pause, holding your tongue in your soot-color maw, all you have devoured longs to be killed.

[Editor note: The author suggests the wiki for the mythology of Tallemaja.]

Faye Wikner was born and raised in the lingonberry forests of Sweden and now resides in New Jersey with her cat, where she teaches Intro to Creative Writing. She is the Associate Editor of Map Literary and reads prose for the Adroit Journal, and her work has been published in CRAFT Literary, The Colored Lens, and elsewhere. She was the fiction runner-up of the 2025 Hayden’s Ferry Review Fiction & Poetry Contest and the runner-up for Feign Lit’s 2025 Reign Prize. See her site.

Boyfriend writhes around on top of me and gazes hungrily into my eyes. He exclaims that he loves me and life is amazing and this feels so great. I do not respond. I am traveling back in time, returning to the church where I first saw Him.

The height of summer, and yet I wear my small patent leather shoes and my woven white tights. I stand at the bottom of the basement stairwell, and my sweaty little hands rattle a doorknob. The metal is warm and the gold plating flakes onto my skin. Mother Mary looks down at me from the stained glass in the window, her eyes downcast. Sad Mother Mary.

I hear heavy breathing, turn around, and He is behind me. With His strong and capable hands, He turns the knob. We go behind the door. I see flashes: His long brown hair; His critical expression; His slender torso. Movements that amaze and confuse me, illuminated by His glow. It comes from within.

After a time incalculable, my hand grips the knob again. I am back on the other side of the door. It was cool and bright and clean in there. I wonder how long I was with Him. I rattle, pull, and push, but the door will not open. Pressing my ear to its wood, I strain to hear any sign of Him, but there is no sound. I am alone.

I learned when I was young that He is angered by what Boyfriend and I do. I know that when Boyfriend wriggles around on me, images of Him will appear in my mind. But this is not enough. I want Him to be there after. I pray that I will open my eyes and see His bare feet, His piercing gaze, His hairy fingers, His towering height, His patent leather shoes, His woven white tights, the bottom of the stairs, the doorknob, the—

Shades of blue, red, and green dance through the dust hanging around me. Looking over my shoulder, I see they are coming through Sad Mother Mary. I move my hands, swirling the particles around in the captivating light. Could this be a gift from Him?

Mother and Father once promised that if I grew up to be smart and sweet, and if I fattened my brain at church and school, I would meet a man like Him. They promised that the man and I would have lots of smart-sweet babies together. Our smart-sweet babies would grow into smart-sweet children. We would live in a big old house with spectacular stained glass windows. Our smart-sweet children would run around in the captivating light, all with their patent leather shoes on and wearing their woven white tights, all at the bottom of the stairs, all rattling the doorknob, all turning around, and—

Boyfriend rolls off of me. I look out at the elm beyond my window, and I can see the edge of every leaf illuminated by the street light. Boyfriend turns over, pretends to sleep, and wonders what I think about in my fattened brain. I think about how Boyfriend is not the man my mother and father promised me. Boyfriend is what I must settle for.
I drift away as I watch the elm. I dream that Boyfriend and I are getting married, and that I am in the church. Under my dress I wear woven white tights, too warm and too small. In the mirror I practice what I will say another day, far in my future, when I tell Boyfriend about Him. Tears drown the words in my mouth. I know He will leave me forever if I marry Boyfriend.

I hear footfalls thundering in the church and people shouting at one another. My reflection is gone. The mirror has become a door. Looking over my shoulder, I see the shouters emerge at the top of the stairs. They stare down at me in my small patent leather shoes and my woven white tights. My little hands wave at them. I wonder what they were shouting about. I wonder why they are staring.

Everyone must have someone like Him who lives out of sight, tucked away in the corners of their eyes. I wonder, without these Hims, what would we think about when our Boyfriends are up there squirming? What would we cry about on our wedding days? What would we remember about those basement doors?

Polished wood, gold plating, and the blues, reds, and greens of Mother Mary.

---

Madison Ellingsworth likes walking in Portland, Maine. She has recently been published in Fractured Lit, Apple Valley Review, and Gargoyle Magazine, among others. Links to Madison’s published works can be found at madisonellingsworth.com.

I called you Tsubomi when we first met, when spring was young, and the cherry blossoms still clenched their fists. Tsubomi—蕾, a bud, something waiting to bloom. You had a way of standing, arms folded behind your back, as if holding onto a secret. We sat on a stone bench, drinking amazake from paper cups, the warmth pressing against our palms. When you handed me my cup, your fingers trembled slightly, and I told myself it was from the wind.

I called you Hana in the summer, when the cicadas screamed and the air smelled of wet pavement. Hana—花, flower, something in full bloom. We sat on your balcony, peeling the skin off peaches, the juice slipping down our wrists. You held my chin with two fingers and wiped a drop from my lip. The night was thick, our yukata clinging to the sweat on our backs. I told you, you are so beautiful when you laugh. You said, I laugh the same way every season.

In autumn, I called you Kaze, when the persimmons ripened and the river carried red maple leaves downstream. Kaze—風, wind, something that shifts, something that cannot be held. We stood at the train station, our shadows stretched thin under the paper lanterns. You held my wrist when I turned to leave, and I thought, maybe I had misheard the way your voice curled around my name. You asked if I wanted to share a persimmon, splitting it open with careful hands. The flesh was sweet, but there was something bitter underneath.

In winter, I stopped calling you anything at all. I saw you on the other side of the bridge, your breath forming soft ghosts in the cold. The river was half-frozen, the koi moving sluggishly beneath the ice. I thought of your hands, of the way they once pressed warmth into mine. You turned away before I could raise a hand to wave.

The wind still carries your name to me, sometimes. And every time, I wonder if you ever learned the one I never had the courage to give you.

---

 
Asmi Mahajan is an emerging writer who finds reading and writing to be deeply cathartic. Beyond the written word, she enjoys café hopping, experimenting with new styles of matcha and bubble tea, and practicing calligraphy and brush pen lettering. Whether it’s through ink or experience, she’s always looking for new ways to express herself.

Alone she sat alone, surrounded by all the world shouting buy-buy in the by-and-by from the black and white television, the three hundred twenty-nine channels clicking on one by one on, lasting five seconds, four, set on a timer that would occasionally hold for a count of six, then fall back to a three-second pause, so the next cycle, better behaving, would fast catch back up, but it never did. She felt beyond practice of use herself, but grateful redundancy in more than word alone.

The blue chimes jim-jammed in the holiday chill due to the window open. The widow from Toledo told herself she admired the hot air. “It tries so hard, itself sweaty e’en indoors, dontcha know,” and Jim poured her another ice-popping fizzy drink. Her tongue was always hot from saved-up chatter. She lived for one.

“You don’t have another doctor’s appointment ’til next month, Mama, so the diabetes should be in arrears or at least in check.” He laughed. “A check shall be in the mail!”

“How is your di-a-be-tisss, son?” She sipped cold. She needed no help.

Her only son and child childless drank his water, iceless.

Jim stood, performing more of his last calisthetics of the morning. He had trouble with certain words and more, come from genetics, the talk. This was his warm-down after a morning run of cruisin’ past the nearby campus, all on break.

“I do not have the diabetes, Mama, you know I do not.”

He had flown home two days before, direct from Idlewild, with all his bags by then their tags the JFK like that, transferring to LaGuardia and/or Teeterboro for show— “JFK a president, not so good, a louche, not a very kind or generous president even, and father? What with his own time, money, energy profligate prostate prodigal like that.” He breathed hard, and stretched. He was proud of his alliterations and his physique for his age. They paid well back East for such, the fancy advertisers for his copy. He almost said penis, but not in front of his aged mother. His mind and more upon p’s and q’s.

“Diabetes done.” One of them. “Dog-tired daggard.” Talked over the other.

“You don’t need to set up that threadmill again, I hope, not after all that huffin’ ‘n’ puffin’ right before turkey.” She made her way to the kitchen like an antiquated conveyor belt, plodding for a reason out of rote or else, but unknown top-of-mind to her by then if ever she’d rightly understood the passage of time, its bequeathing more than burnt meat. “Bad for the heart,” she kept repeating as she griddled hotcakes and sausage, loaded with thick gravy sauce of peppercorn flecks and coarse-salt flakes, mired in thought within and talk without, spilling her mind and mouth across the tiny room, finally:

“Junior, why you got to leave again so soon? I wish I could see you more often, even without a wife in tow.” It slipped out. “More ‘cakes?” She almost said kid. He had stopped caring.

She set the chipped plate on the makeshift dining table, recent gift of a good-wish donation outlet (thanks to a church-lady’s phone call). She did not let Jim fuss over her with gifts but so much, and he eww’d over the grease dripping off and out onto his mama’s paper napkin “borrowed” from the fast-food joint a block away, her standby restaurant in shuffling distance when funds were tight and days not so snowy. His mother, long forgotten of the Senior Jim, folded two of those serviettes up her kitchen-coat sleeve, ignoring Jim’s last of innumerable grunts, his lack of real-world rest, no more verbal response yet. He bent another time or two. She ate, but in the kitchen, free hand on the counter wiping, efficient and productive. Already her thanksgiving meal, her boy home, regardless of his ways or hers. Countless reasons over grace, bowed, praying.

“I’ll be back by suppertime,” he said, primed for action outside the house. “I love you, don’t you forget, don’t stay up if past your bedtime. I’ll get mine, don’t you worry.”

---

A rural native of the southeastern United States, R. P. Singletary writes across the genres of fiction, drama, poetry, and hybrid forms – and dabbles in other media. His short monologue “MONO fe in gratitude” appeared Off-Broadway this past autumn as part of the 2024 Apron Strings project at AMT Theater in Hell’s Kitchen (NYC). His solo show of 50 literary+visual works “ONE OF US” filled the ATL-Fulton Library Headquarters Gallery in autumn 2008. Published fiction, poetry, drama, and hybrid works in LITRO, Feign Lit, The Wave – Kelp Journal, Worktown Works (U.K.), en*gendered, The Collidescope, Rathalla Review, Wicked Gay Ways, Cowboy Jamboree, Stone of Madness, 100subtextsmagazine, and elsewhere. Affiliations: Dramatists Guild, Authors Guild. See his website and socials @rpsingletary.

“Who are you?’ The gentleman had demanded abruptly. He appeared as though he could have been framed forever with one hand in his suit pocket, a pipe balanced between his lips.

Not having expected to be addressed so directly, Kaya looked around, assuming it was a case of a mistaken identity.

Looking at him again he asked, “You! Boy! Who are you?”

Stumbling on his words he blurted, “I’m Kaya. Who are you?”

“I’m the train manager.” He calmly replied.

“Why are you sitting in third class then?”

“Don’t you know it is rude to ask questions like that! But since you ask, I am hiding from my wife. She wouldn’t dare step foot in a 3rd class carriage, so she’ll never think to look in here. Perhaps she will even assume that I’ve alighted the train at an earlier stop and try to pursue me, or someone like me, through the streets of Kayseri!” He chuckled at the thought.

“What do you mean, someone like me?” he gently inquired.

“Ah well, aren’t we all so similar in the end, does it really matter if it is me, she is chasing after? Or just someone like me?”

Kaya thought hard about the question.

“You see, I can try my hardest to convince myself that I am me. Me.” He pointed at himself with the newspaper.

“I can say ‘This is November! Not yesterday, or tomorrow! This is I, not Mehmet or Orhan! I am here on this train, not on the moon!’” He gestured to the moon outside, faintly visible in the purple smoky dusk above the plain.

“I have a scar on my hand, a mole on my chest. I can look at my watch and tell you it is four in the evening.”

“Is that the time already?”

“No, boy! Aren’t you listening! Don’t you feel it as well? The uneasiness?”

Kaya asked all his senses one by one to see if he could find the uneasiness, the lie.

“Don’t you see! After all that, I am Mehmet! I am Orhan! I am the train manager. I’m that girl over there, flicking the ash from her cigarette out the window with the thoughts from her mind. I’m that man over there, sweetly dreaming about his first love as his nostrils flare.”

“Don’t you feel it, as we hurtle from one place to the next? This strange place where we are nowhere at all? Where time doesn’t exist? Not until we arrive at the next station anyhow, at 16:46 exactly. We are nowhere my friend, apart from in an elastic moment, stretching from one infinity to another.”

Time had taken on a different quality on his journey, it was true. Though twenty hours had already passed, it felt more like two.

Just when Kaya was preparing to announce his agreement, the man abruptly got up from his seat and hurried along the carriage.

---

Hannah Katerina is a writer based in Palermo, Italy.

Life starts with the urge to be swallowed. Then follows the want to pulse, then the need to hurt, to kick to prove our existence. Around the seventh week we grow the most crucial parts of our eyes and by the thirty-ninth – we learn to scream. It’s been plenty of time since I first used my voice and I think my voice box is starting to rust, because I haven’t used it since. Not the way I should anyway.

“Hi.” The Jacobite Train rolled straight through my life.

Your eyes make me want to be swallowed again; dark like abysses. More stars twinkle in the right one than in the left. It’s hard to differentiate between “Hi.” (with the intention of making an acquaintance) and “Hi.” (with the intention of absolute devotion) when you look at irises like that. So void of colour and yet in the most striking of shades.

And then I see all the hypotheticals of us in other lives, right on the greyish whites of your eyes. The one where you are unconditionally mine and the ones where you aren’t. That’s when the itch spreads from my shoulders and down to my fingertips. I want to hug you. Tighter. Preferably forever.

Take your sorrows off and give them to me. I will hang them by the fireplace, as if they are a rain-soaked coat and listen. Talk to or ask me to do so. And I will. I will speak all the words I never was courageous enough to write about you.

Isn’t it comical, my own devastating God? The one who spends every eve spewing her ink-coloured guts on paper can’t tell the difference between lust and ardour.

And all this to say I love you, perhaps. For I don’t know how to sound out the words, I let them suffocate in my throat and pray that the you-shaped hole in my heart will be just a birth defect the pathologist will discover upon my death, and not the cause of this incessant lusting over the one I could never call my own.

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Eva Axelle Moller is a writer, poet, and university student. Her work explores the intersections of memory, love, and the self, often blending lyrical intensity with narrative clarity. She has won national awards for creative writing. Beyond her academic and literary pursuits, she is building a career in storytelling and visual arts. She shares her poetry and projects at @evaaxellemoller_.

When I see the map of China, for some strange reason, I am reminded of Madeleine de Scudery’s Map of Tenderness. In 1653, this lady drew a map of an imaginary land that represents the path to love. All the place names on De Scudery’s map refer to a mood or an emotion.

On the map, there is a lake called The Lake of Indifference. It is certainly Xi Hu, the West Lake, in Hangzhou. This body of water makes the city unique. It seems that nothing can be done without the imposing presence of this lake.

Paradoxically, being a constant feature in the city makes it, indeed, indifferent. I walk in the historic area of the city near Nan Shan Lu. It is infested with tourists. There is a mosque of the Hui people and a monument dedicated to printing. In the West, few know that printing was born here before Gutenberg. For a foreigner, except for Beijing, Xi’an, and Lhasa, all Chinese cities, especially the centers, are pretty much the same. Tall skyscrapers, luxury brands, perfectly identical perimeters. But that’s not the case in Hangzhou, thanks to the lake.

Of course, there are modern buildings here too, even a Nikola dealer and endless McBurger’s outlets. But the lake prevails and dominates everything, as if to remind us that China is vast and different. When I first moved to Hangzhou, of which I didn’t even know the existence, my Korean colleague, very kind, took me to the city center because I was already in crisis after a week. I needed Western food. Well, Western food doesn’t really mean anything. I needed edible food, and especially without meat and fish. So, he takes me to the Terry Centre, probably the largest shopping mall in the city.

Beautiful, spacious, clean. When I entered the supermarket on the ground floor, I felt like a child in a toy store. Overwhelmed by excitement and my colleague’s smiles, I dive into the products: peanut butter, all kinds of cereals, pizza, gluten-free pasta, packaged dried fruit, but above all, olive oil. It’s my favorite and the healthiest. It’s quite expensive, but I think it’s better to spend money on food than on buying the latest yPhone.

Happy and reassured to have found my refuge, I fill up the cart and head to the cashier. 1200 RMB. Shocked by the amount, I ask the cashier if she added everything up correctly. She, too, smiles and says, “Yes!” Not at all pleased with my silly spending, I leave. This time, the Korean doesn’t smile but laughs, “You couldn’t resist, right? It happens to everyone.” I start to think that maybe my salary isn’t that high after all. But I was wrong; I just needed to adapt, understand, and embrace where I live. That day was also my first encounter with Xi Hu. Thinking about the expenses and the crowd around (it was a Saturday afternoon), my face indicated that the lake is just a lake like any other.

I couldn’t understand why my fellow countryman, Marco Polo, was enchanted by it. It was a different time; there were no shopping malls and selfies. He must have appreciated it in all its splendor. The poet Ouyang Xiu also mentioned it. I have read some of his poems, including the one about Hangzhou. It goes like this:
“The beautiful spring breeze has arrived. I return to West Lake The spring waters are so clear and pure. Green they could be lately…..”

And then I stopped. I love poetry, in the broadest sense of the term, but this one was definitely boring and didn’t help me understand the beauty of Xi Hu. Disappointed, I return home. I ask the Korean colleague if he wants to go out for dinner. He tells me it’s already late. It’s 5:30 pm. He’ll have a bite at home and then read a book. Another lesson learned in the first month. Chinese people eat earlier than me. They have lunch at 11:30 am and dinner between 5:30 pm and 6:00 pm. Usually, I don’t eat before 1 pm and before 9 pm. In the first few months, I missed out on any invitations. Either it was too early for me, or it was too early for them. After all, I couldn’t eat unless I was hungry.

Moreover, my diet is not really understood around here. Once I was invited to lunch. I didn’t know that Chinese people share all the dishes. Being picky, I was initially disgusted. I was afraid of getting hepatitis every time I touched the chopsticks. Another habit to remember. The other guests, being kind, reassured me, seeing my awkwardness, “Do you want a fork?” No, I replied, thinking that was the problem. I’m in China; I have to do as the Chinese do.

I love potatoes, especially those cooked Sichuan-style or those from northern Beijing. The first ones are sautéed in a small wok with oil, garlic, onion, and chili. The second ones are cut julienne like carrots, lightly fried in a pan, but always with chili. My mother is right: anything with salt, chili, or fried is good. It was a struggle to pick up just one potato with the chopsticks. Having grasped the technique, I still couldn’t manage to hold it properly. Was it too much oil, or was it my poor skill? So, I just impaled it, to the amusement of the other diners.

My favorite food is jiaozi. Near my home, close to the Xixi campus, there is a small JiaoziDian (the “dian” at the end of Chinese words is like our “-eria,” for example, pizz-eria) that has four vegetarian options: tofu, tomatoes, eggs, chives, and mushrooms. It’s inexpensive, but I consider it much better than those expensive places where you pay a lot and eat very little. Jiaozi are similar to Italian ravioli and tortellini.

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Italian-born Australian Matteo Preabianca (Matt Bianca), is a linguist, lecturer, and translator whose work reflects his extensive travels across several countries. Fluent in Italian and English, he channels his dual cultural identity into a diverse portfolio that includes published English poems, experimental music albums, and novels. He holds a PhD in Socio-Education applied to languages and an MA in Advanced Buddhist Studies. He works with English, Italian, Mandarin, and Pali, and is the creator of The Gentle Law, a platform exploring Early Buddhism and Western philosophy. He writes on culture, languages, philosophy, and animal rights, blending intellectual depth with contemplative insight.

Carrie’s mom died at age thirty-six. Her dad when he was thirty-eight. Six to eight years. A red semi blared its horn when Carrie corrected the brief swerve out of her lane. While the semi passed, drenching her windshield in a wake of dirty water, the wipers thumped across the window like a metronome in double time. Or perhaps that was her heart. She gripped the wheel until her slim knuckles resembled vellum stretched over bone. Today was Carrie’s thirtieth birthday.

She stole a glance at Jeremy, her oblivious husband, currently muttering the contents of his cue cards in the passenger seat. He was defending his dissertation today, and she wished that was the reason he hadn’t acknowledged her birthday, but it wasn’t. Valentine’s Day had been overlooked too. The fog forming on the inside of the Toyota’s windows didn’t clear with heat or cold, or her harried swipes. Everything but inaction made it worse. It condensed on her neck, in her lungs. She turned off Forbes Avenue and into Pitt’s dreary campus. Jeremy had moved back in a month ago. He said things would be different this time.

Students and professionals with umbrellas skirted around their vehicle, clambering to eight a.m. classes while Jeremy packed away his cards. Six to eight years wasn’t enough. While the dappled throng of headlights, rain slickers and rain drops dulled her vision to a glittered haze, Carrie contemplated how to make the most of her remaining life. Suppressed longings and bloated dreams gurgled to the surface, almost forming an agenda before her eyes, then Jeremy said something. He sounded muffled as though under water.

“What?” she asked, blinking back into the present with a gasp.

“I said, can I have a kiss for good luck?” Then planted his lips on her before she could refuse.

The soured chocolate milk on his breath blasted the last of her domestic reservations away. Jeremy never remembered to brush his teeth unless she told him to. Morning and night. There were so many other things she wanted to do.

“Pick me up at five?” he asked.

“You know I schedule appointments until six,” she said. “Take the bus home.”

“I hate the bus. It’s so uncivilized,” he said. “Can’t you reschedule and skip out early? Let’s go out and celebrate. I’m thinking, the Cheesecake Warehouse.”

Her eyelid twitched. He knew she hated chain restaurants. “Celebrate what?” she asked, as the last threads of her patience unraveled.

“Umm, the end to this long overdue dissertation? Me successfully defending it? Me getting my PhD? What else is there to celebrate?” He scoffed. “See you at five.”

In a flurry of blue suiting and red Charlie Taylors, Jeremy ran towards Posvar Hall, a brutalist concrete building that was as grim and soulless as March in Pittsburgh. She pulled up the Travel Dealz app on her phone.

***

Carrie touched down in San Diego three hours past the time she was supposed to pick up Jeremy. She had only the clothes on her back, her purse, and the in-flight magazine that featured the Instantaneousgram-worthy Carlsbad Flower Fields—a surreal landscape that looked like a real life Candy Lane board. While in line at the rental car’s outdoor kiosk, she wondered if Jeremy had given up and taken the bus. She hadn’t checked her phone, hadn’t even taken it out of airplane mode, yet. The sky was big here. And the air was so dry, the perspiration at the nape of her neck had crystalized, feeling like chalk on her fingertips. He would be furious.

She arrived at the flower fields around sunset, when the Tecolote ranunculus blooms were bathed in the golden hour light. The flowers stretched across the hillsides in rows of burgundy, magenta, orange, yellow and white, bobbing and swaying in the coastal breeze. Each flower starts its journey as a bud, the size of a shooter marble—she learned this from overhearing a tour guide—and expands into a palm-sized blossom containing one hundred and thirty petals. When the tour ended, the field fell silent. The only sounds were the crinkle of bouquet cellophane, the distant river of Interstate 5 traffic, and the buzzing of Carrie’s silenced phone. The buzzing halted as soon as she blocked Jeremy’s number.

A spark of finality arced through her. She was in California, all by herself. She’d never done something so brazen or independent in her entire life, and it filled her with the yearning to press forward, see even more, do even more. First, she wanted to stop at the outlet mall butting up against the flower fields and get herself a suitcase and some new clothes; a new identity. Then, she’d stop by the hole-in-the-wall Cantina she’d driven past and get a burrito the size of a newborn. And a jalapeño margarita too. She wanted so badly to hit the gas and never look back. But.

Carrie propped her phone on an irrigation pipe for a timed picture of herself among the orange and pink ranunculus, her face and arms turned up to the apricot sky in a jubilant stretch, long auburn hair blown backwards. Four tries, and a bunch of judgmental looks from tourists later, she got her Cartier-Bresson decisive moment, and posted the image to her Instantaneousgram, writing only:

I was thirty years old when I learned #YOLO. Goodbye Jeremy. P.S. Congratulations on your PhD. If you can find the car in long term parking, you’ll never have to take the bus again.

As the last of the sun dipped below the riffling flowers, Carrie took a deep breath, let it out slow, fully planting herself in the moment. She could feel the layers around her loosening and expanding in a slow acquiesce. Death was inevitable. Fact. One day she would die. Fact. But until then, she would bloom.

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Meryl A.H. Franzos grew up primarily in California and the Bible belt of Michigan, plus a few other places salt bae-d in there. She now lives and writes in Pittsburgh. Her work has appeared in Litbreak Magazine and soon, The Fourth River.

Papa makes peppers and onions. He lets them get brown and slimy before he puts me in. The oil boils me up before I can feel it—not that I can feel it—I can’t feel where I begin and where the peppers and onions end.

Papa pulls a wet sniff in through his nostrils like jumbo jet engines with black hairs bushing out. I smell so good, Papa says, I smell so good there in the pan. Papa breaks me up with the wooden paddle. He uses it to swat the fat flies away from my good smell. I leak my juices into the peppers and onions, and everything in the pan is wet.

When they took me away, did the wet creep down Papa’s nostrils like jumbo jet engines, and get caught in the black hairs that bush out? Did the wet roll down his spidery red-veined cheeks?

After they took Brother last week, I heard Papa in the house, tearing in two. It did not rain that night. Just a cold damp. I laid in the barn with the straw warming underneath me.

I could have guessed that Papa spilled a pan of boiling oil onto the bushy black hair of his toes again, but I knew. I was all alone out in the pen. No more Brother to help me warm up the damp straw.

Papa douses the peppers, onions, and I in white table salt from a shaker shaped like a green John Deere tractor. The fat flies scurry around on the cabinets, wet with steam, above the stovetop. I am boiling away. Can Papa see me in the steam? Can he feel me when he breathes in my good smell?

The rain came three days after they took Brother. Papa was wet when he fell into the barn door. He did not see me at first. I watched him from the dark corner of the pen, but I could smell him all the way back there. His breath smelled like Brother.

Was he thinking about how hungry he would be with Brother still in his belly? Did he already know that I would be next? Had he already made the call?

It was not long before Papa saw me hiding. He drifted over, hands gripping the metal fencing, wet rolling down his face. I tried not to breathe too deeply but I could feel the whites of my eyes bulging out. I could not hold my breaths in.

Papa put his bulging hand like a meat mallet on my ribs next to where my heart was thumping. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Papa said, the wet coming faster. I’m sorry, Papa whispered. I’m so sorry. Every S was a hiss. No other letters made it through.

I could not ask where Brother had gone. I took deep breaths and waited for Papa to tell me. Every time he spoke, it was a hiss, and more wet would come out. Papa kept trying and trying, and kneading his meat mallet hands in my sides, until he finally pushed himself away into the fence. He made his falling way out of the barn. I stayed there in the dark while the rain scraped against the walls.

There is not much of me left. It is time for me to leave Papa’s pan. He scrapes the sides with the wooden paddle, and ushers the peppers, onions, and I onto a curved plate. Spidery cracks like the ones in Papa’s red cheeks run through the center. He moves us around to cover them up, then brings the plate with him to the couch and sets us on his lap.

Papa sighs like he is going to tear in two and stares down at the plate. I know he can feel me now. He can see me in the peppers and onions. Still he grips his fork and shoves it into the pile. Wet comes out of his bushy jet engine nostrils. The wet comes closer and closer as I move towards Papa’s mouth.

Papa’s lips peel back and I can see that his tongue is yellow. The betweens of his teeth are browned like he has been eating mud. There is so much pink and red and brown and yellow in Papa’s mouth; his mouth is a painting. Papa’s eyelids sink closed and he takes another breath as he slides the fork between his teeth.

The peppers and onions settle with me on Papa’s wide yellow tongue. He seals his lips closed, and it becomes dark. Dark like the cold damp of a rainless night. Dark like the barn without Brother. Dark like the back corner of the pen.

Papa gnashes his muddied teeth together, and moves me around with his wide yellow tongue. He mixes the peppers, onions, and I with his spit. Then he swallows us down.

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Madison Ellingsworth likes walking in Portland, Maine. She has recently been published in Fractured Lit, Apple Valley Review, and Gargoyle Magazine, among others. Links to Madison’s published works can be found at madisonellingsworth.com.