Short Beasts

The rusted-out pickup rumbles down Main Street. A girl, all of five and all smiles, rides shotgun. The air is warm, the summer sun bright. The girl leans out the window the way her golden retriever, Lottie, often does. The wind twists and tangles the girl’s long, sandy hair and—

The passenger door flies open. The girl drops to the asphalt and tumbles to a stop.

Faulty door latch.

No seatbelt.

No broken bones!

No stitches!

The girl is lucky to be alive. Had she landed on her head and not the backside of her corduroys, she surely would have died.

Or so the story goes.

The bank teller, the barber, and the barmaid of Main Street will recount it for years to come, along with every eyewitness at Auchenbach’s Laundromat and Vi’s five and dime. Always they will tell the tale in the astonished, reverent tone reserved for the proclamations of miracles—the boy who walked away from the plane crash! the face of Jesus that appeared in a bowl of chowder!

“Happened right in front of the Glen Rose Tavern. Never seen old Scotty so torn up,” the bank teller said.

“That poor man! The way he carried on you’da thought his little girl had died after all,” the barber said.

“I’ve never seen a grown man cry like that. He was just a sobbin’ and a sobbin’ as he held her. And his little one? Not a single tear,” the barmaid said.

Six years old. Seven years old. Eight. Then nine.

The girl has come to cherish the story despite a diminished interest in herself as its protagonist. The truck’s driver is the character of her fascination. She has elevated her gentle father to hero status, despite her mother’s increasingly frequent and increasingly furious objections.

Ten years old. Eleven years old. Twelve. Then thirteen.

The story of the girl has changed as narratives do with time and retelling. That she survived, that she is a miracle, this part remains the same. (Unless the girl’s mother, a chronically unreliable narrator, tells the story.) The girl listens close, always, to the bank teller, the barber, the barmaid. She must bite her tongue to keep from interjecting, Tell me again how he sobbed as he held me! Had her story been recorded on a cassette tape, she’d have worn this part thin. She has never, to her recollection, seen her hero cry.

Nineteen.

The girl, now a young woman, has become the storyteller. Chasing lemon drop shots with ice-cold cheap beer, she holds forth at the college bar on Friday nights. A practiced raconteur, her version of her fall is comical. (She has honed a habit of costuming anecdotes from her childhood in humor.) It was the 70s! Who wore seatbelts back then? By this time the woman knows she’s not special, so she omits the bit about the miracle. She also omits how the grown man had cried when he held her. The passing of time has rendered this detail too precious to share. She saw him cry once when she was fifteen. It had terrified her and made her hate her mother more. Her hero had fallen.

Twenty-one.

The woman returns to Main Street, summoned home by a 3 a.m. call from her mother. All around the woman disembodied faces bob on a sea of black fabric. Behind them a supine and stony replica of her father anchors a bed of pale blue satin. The barmaid, now a waitress at the local diner, totters through the crowd and tentatively approaches the woman. The barmaid (the characters in the woman’s script are immutable) smooths invisible wrinkles from her black dress and hugs the woman. The woman hears the words “I’m so sorry” for the millionth time and bites her cheek to keep from screaming. Does she remember that day, the barmaid asks the woman when their hug breaks apart, the day she fell out of her daddy’s truck? The barmaid points in the direction of the door, in the direction of Main Street. (The event occurred directly across from the funeral home, a detail that until now had never seemed relevant to the woman’s story.) The woman nods. She’s come to understand that her memory is only a collage crafted from other people’s memories, a distinction that doesn’t trouble her. The woman listens, rapt, while the barmaid unspools her version of the event. The barmaid omits nothing.

“To this day, I’ve never seen a grown man cry the way your daddy did when he held you,” the barmaid says.

Fresh tears bloom in the woman’s eyes. She looks past the barmaid and out across the black sea to her father cast in stone, her hero again and irrevocably for all time.

---

 
R.L. Marstellar is a writer and live storyteller. Her career path is a circuitous one: structural engineer—marketing specialist—finance hack—personal chef—entrepreneur. Writing is the one endeavor she has faithfully pursued. Her work has appeared in Under the Gum Tree, Midway Journal, and Evening Street Review and earned Bacopa Literary Review’s 2018 prize for creative nonfiction. She is currently working on a novel based on her experience hiking the Appalachian Trail. When she’s not writing about bad mothers and the minefields of middle age, you’ll find her at a Chicago dive bar open mic channeling her inner rockstar.

Instead of circling the rows of parked cars by the entrance, Wren settled for a spot near the back of the lot. When she began running errands, the early spring sun was just above the horizon; presently, it cast short shadows. She slipped off her jacket and tossed it onto the passenger seat before stepping out of her vehicle and walking toward the big-box retailer.

From inside the store, an elderly gentleman watched the automatic doors pull apart and recognized the change in Wren’s expression as she entered. In his line of work, he had grown accustomed to this phenomenon. He greeted her, but his words failed to register.

She stood perplexed, partially blocking the store’s entrance. Other customers politely slipped around her, like water in a stream, redirected by a protruding rock.

“Something I can help with, ma’am?” the old man tried.

She looked at him, nonplussed by his question. “No, thanks. I, uh—sorry,” she sputtered.

“Forget why you’re here?” His close-lipped smile revealed a hint of satisfaction.

Wren’s mouth opened, then closed again. She looked behind her at the automatic doors, as if the answer was on the other side.

“It’s called the doorway effect,” he said. “You walk through those doors, and your mind loses its place. Something about the transition.” His explanation sounded practiced, like he had given it a hundred times before. “They say if you carry something across the threshold, it helps you remember.”

Wren remembered her last errand.

A spattering of raindrops clunked against Wren’s windshield as she returned to Tony’s apartment. Tony’s apartment, she thought—not their apartment. Wren put on her jacket, grabbed a brown paper gift bag from the backseat, and attempted to open her door, but a gust of wind thwarted her initial effort. She tried again, this time shoving with enough force. She hurried toward the entrance, head down, the brown bag tucked within her jacket. Sheets of rain now smacked the sidewalk.

Wren expected the apartment to still be a mess, and she was right. She slid off her shoes, hung up her wet jacket, and placed the birthday gift she had bought for Tony’s mother on the entryway table. “Tony?” she called out. There was no response.

She walked down the hallway, nudged his bedroom door open, and peeked inside. Amidst a pile of unfolded laundry, Tony had fallen asleep.

Wren had left once before, but second-guessed herself after driving several hours lacking an obvious destination. She thought she must have been overreacting, lost sight of why she had left.
Tony called, she listened, he said all the right things, and she deceived herself into believing he would change.

She couldn’t let that happen again.

Wren retreated down the hallway back toward the apartment door. She put on her wet shoes and slipped back into her jacket.

On the entryway table sat the birthday present she had bought Tony’s mother. She reached in the bag and pulled out a lemon-scented candle.

Wren closed her eyes, brought the candle up to her nose, and breathed in deeply. Tucking it under her jacket, she turned the doorknob, pushed through, and returned to the rain.

---

Chris Cochran is a high school English teacher who writes first drafts on an old typewriter in a small nook beneath his basement steps. He lives in Michigan with his wife and son, where he spends most evenings drinking tea and falling asleep to comedy podcasts.

Smell
He draws me closer; I take a breath. I love his earthy smell and want to store more of it deep inside my lungs, for nostalgia and motivation. I linger. I smell foliage. It is soothing and relaxing. No wonder he is falling asleep.

Hearing
He yawns, and a quiet huff escapes into the air. I want to kiss him, so I bring my lips to his, but he is so peaceful, I freeze and listen to his calm, steady exhales. Like wind whispering through tall grass.

Sight
He is handsome; it is getting harder to suppress the urge to kiss. His face is expressive, powerful and strong, and I am curious if he is already seeing the dreams. Or if he ever does. He lies still, then hugs me. It is warm here, and soft.

Taste
I cannot resist anymore – I peck his nose, not sure if he notices. It is salty; now, my mouth is too. I lick my lips and swallow; I can taste the waters of a brine lake. He is my lake. Mysterious, precious, tranquil.

Touch
His coarse hair tickles my chin, my cheeks. I giggle but do not back away. Tight and soft, he is hugging me gently, and I tremble with love.

Us
We met when I started this job seventeen months ago. Feels like yesterday, really. I’m glad I am with him. It is our last night together.

Tomorrow, he is leaving for Africa. Starting a brand-new life. A long way away. I am excited for him, but I will miss our cuddling, fooling around and sprawling on the grass, his grunts and sighs and stretches.

I open my eyes. I hold my breath when he yawns—my majestic, rewilded, ready-to-be-released lion.

---

Tatiana Samokhina lives in the beautiful suburb of Surry Hills and works in the bustling City of Sydney. She is an English teacher and fiction translator, in love with literature. Her work has been published in 3 Elements Review, Jokes Review, Australian Writers’ Centre, Indignor House, Ironclad Creative and Little Old Lady.

It began as a hobby over lockdown. The sourdough starter was a gift from his watchful neighbour, Marge. Before that, David had no interest in baking. He’d always been perfectly content with his shop bought pan. But soon he found himself setting four-a.m. alarms, getting up to feed the culture with the attentiveness of a new father.

He liked that the starter needed him. A living being under the same roof. He could talk to it, like you might a dog or a houseplant.

The starter was pallid and frothy, like cottage cheese that had got a little too excited. Its smell: acerbic, eye-watering if he leaned in too close. Soon David found he was making more bread than he could eat. He gave fresh loaves to neighbours and visited soup kitchens and shelters with his surplus goods.

The more he fed the starter, the greedier it got. He couldn’t say exactly when it happened, but soon he was up four or five times a night, sleepwalking to the kitchen to feed his growing charge.

Then one day there was no space left for his other food. So David got rid of the jams and pickles, the tins of tomatoes, sweetcorn and beans that had once benignly shared the cupboard shelves. Eventually he had to get rid of the shelves altogether to make room for the starter, which bubbled contentedly like a yeasty cauldron.

They missed David at the soup kitchen and the shelter, when he stopped coming by, but life continued on. Everyone thought he must have given up the baking, gone back to the office like everyone else.

It was a warm day in June when Marge called round. Finding David’s door unlocked she pushed inside, curious to see the decor-choices of her unassuming neighbour.

Marge heard the sound before reaching the kitchen, the gentle hiss and slop of something wet moving. The smell was powerfully organic, like a forgotten rabbit’s hutch or week-old sweat. She stopped in the doorway when she saw him. David’s torso lay on the tiles, but his legs had been dragged to the open door of the press. Open mouthed Marge wanted to scream but in the warm kitchen no sound came out. The colour of David’s skin matched the grey hue of the bubbling monstrosity that surged towards her from the tiled floor.

---

Jennifer Lindsay Gray is a Scottish writer living in County Clare. Her writing has featured in journals such as Neon, Gutter, and Glasgow Women Poets. Her work has been shortlisted for competitions including The Mslexia Women’s Novel Competition, The Scottish Mental Health Awards Writing Competition and The Cheshire Prize for Literature. Her short story “A Green Glass Heart” was featured on RTÉ Radio 1’s The Prompt. Jennifer works as a Copywriter and holds a Master’s degree in Creative Writing from The University of Edinburgh. She is a member of the Clare Poetry Collective and the darkly-inspired Nocturne Writers.

Dad called people of a certain strain bullshitter. I listened carefully, but something was off. Bullshitters were always men over six feet tall with hair and confidence. Dad was five six, wore cowboy boots and a big buckle.

As a boy, looking around, figuring stuff out, I saw keeping up with the neighbors required smoke and mirrors. I felt uneasy about this dupery, like a grey cloud following me around.

Dad only ever had one friend, and he was shorter than Dad. That bothered me, not the height, but the fact that everybody has friends. Mom had friends, I had friends, the neighbor guys had friends. Those guys sat around in lawn chairs in the garage sharing a twelve pack and laughing at their own jokes. Dad never came around. How could they possibly be bullshitters? They weren’t hiding anything from anybody.

White lies became the norm in our household; we became a collection of parrots. Mom kept quiet. Her opinions were cut short, contradicted, eventually Mom stopped speaking up, too tired to push it. It’s a family tragedy because Mom could read the room. Mom had instincts, she had what they call emotional intelligence. Us kids eventually withdrew under the weight of untruths, hiding a closet of falsehoods. We marched on like good soldiers in Dads army, holding on to a self-branding that fronted a hidden person inside. Hell, we were only kids.

This dynamic played out and became a wound, a burden. Even today, sitting around the kitchen table, speaking half-truths out loud, we quietly accept them as full truth. Over time, we gave in like Mom, to uneasy silence. No longer parrots.

Anxiety now seeps into my dreams where a battle is waged and often lost to a murky presence, an undefined form that chases me through the treetops. A subconscious depression? A lingering malaise? Unfinished business? A grown man with uncertainty instead of hope. A melancholic, stuck in a place where the sun doesn’t shine through the canopy, tethered to a pharmacy prescription.

Dad is sitting in his tattered recliner, should I talk? Do I burden a dying bullshitter with a mirror? Hold up his carnival of misdirection when his clock is ticking down? Will it bring me relief from the Jungian shadow? When do I self-actualize? I want to share; I want a clean truth. I’m six foot one.

---

Rhett Arens is a writer/photographer living in Pasadena who loves travel. He appreciates how it connects strangers and deflates xenophobia. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, Travel + Leisure, Taproot, Fifty Grande, Boundary Waters Journal, Whitefish Review, Islands, ROVA and more. His fiction often addresses the negative effects of isolation and resulting self-delusion. He likes to say, travel is a peacemaker.

“I’m only ever satisfied when someone else is in pain. Does that make me a terrible person?”

“Honestly, Craig?”

“Yes, be enti—no! Not honestly! Who’d ever ask you that honestly!”

“It kinda sounds like you know the answer to your own question.”

“Like I’d take advice from a junior partner who’s my age.”

“Glad to see you’re feeling like yourself again. Okay, what. Stop grumbling at me. Stop it.”

“I wasn’t grumbling.”

“Uh-huh. And we both know that the only reason I’m a junior is because you got the first promotion and then the boss bit the bullet.”

“I’d have gotten promoted regardless.”

“Same. That’s my point. No. We are not doing the grumbling thing again.”

“John? Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Why do you stay here? You could do the law thing anywhere.”

“I dunno. Sunk cost fallacy? Or maybe the fact that every time I try to leave you bump my pay by enough that the wife convinces me to stay. At this rate, I’m probably making more than you are. It’s just the rank that’s different.”

“You are, actually. Significantly.”

“Well, that’s reassuring.”

“But why else, Craig? You know you could be doing better somewhere else, even somewhere else in this city.”

“I know. But, to some degree, I like the people. All my friends are here.”

“All your friends and—”

“—and you, yes. I’ve heard that one before. Which kinda just proves my point—I know this firm so well. How would I leave?”

“Politely. You don’t want to burn bridges.”

“I’m too old to worry about burning bridges, John. Pretty soon I’m not going to be able to cross them anymore, with these back troubles.”

“You’re forty!”

“So’re you. Don’t tell me it doesn’t hurt to get up in the morning.”

“Fair enough. But seriously, Craig. You’d still be able to go somewhere else. Salvage that Harvard-grade career.”

“And you’d still be able to stop taking joy in others’ pain.”

“There’s a word for that.”

“Schadenfreude. They taught us that at—”

“Harvard. I know.”

“No, actually. They taught us that at a theater summer camp I did.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, John. You don’t know me well enough to interrupt my sentences. And I’m not just my college.”

“That’s true.”

“And you’re not just yours, John.”

“I guess that’s what I have trouble admitting.”

“Trust me, I get the title thing. My parents still aren’t thrilled they have to call me a junior partner to their neighbors. Forget all about that vacation to Hawaii I paid for last year.”

“How was that?”

“Nice to take a break from work.”

“Sounds it. Senior partners don’t really get to take breaks.”

“You can’t expect me to feel too bad.”

“Craig?”

“Yes John?”

“I’m going to offer you the promotion.”

“At a senior partner’s starting salary?”

“No. At what you’re making now. Don’t worry, you aren’t losing money on this promotion.”

“Sorry, John, I’ve been a lawyer for too long.”

“I know. Me too.”

“But it’s nice to know I have someone on my side. And you know what, John?”

“What?”

“It’s been nice to know it for the last twenty years. Promotion or not.”

---

Hazel Pearson is a young writer in Pittsburgh, PA. She enjoys petting her brindle pitbull, SuperNova Melody Willow Pearson, and making tasty baked goods that would probably be more delicious if she fully followed the recipe. If you can find her, she’s a bit creeped out by that fact.

When Mr. Roberts lost his hearing, he didn’t mind Mr. Grigg’s leaf-blower. It was pleasant watching leaves tumble in a steady gust of wind. Then Roberts miraculously recovered his hearing and lost his vision. Griggs and his leaf-blower became Mr. Roberts’ most hated enemies. Roberts kept a rifle in his garage, but he couldn’t find it. He might have asked a neighbor for help, but that would have been incriminating, no? Some say he died from scowling. Some say his liver gave out. But get this, the moment after Mr. Roberts died, his vision came back.

---

Daniel Coshnear is author of Jobs & Other Preoccupations (Helicon Nine 2001) winner of the Willa Cather Fiction Award and Occupy & Other Love Stories (Kelly’s Cove Press 2012) and winner of the Novella Prize for Homesick, Redux (Flock 2015), recipient of a Missouri Review Editor’s Prize and a Christopher Isherwood Fellowship. His newest story collection, Separation Anxiety was released in 10/21 by Unsolicited Press.

I’m going to tell you right now, chasing women’s clothing around the dooryard is what it’s come down to. All on account of four turtle eggs.

I work for Leon because social security ’ll only go so far, plus Leon’s seventy-five years old with more money than brains and fingers itching to get into every hole they can find, even when there ain’t a hole. That’s what his girlfriend Janey told him just before she drove her RV off to California.

Leon set himself up to the cabin for a couple of beers and aggravation. Thinking about Janey leaving him in Maine gets him hot and miserable until he spies this mother turtle dig a hole and bury a sprawl of eggs.

Then he’s huffing and blowing for me. “We got to fence them eggs. These guys,” he means his son and grandson that also live on the place and benefit from his money without working, “they get to drinking and running the four-wheel gators around, they’ll trample the eggs.”

I put thirty-five dollars worth of fence around the turtle eggs, which don’t satisfy Leon because it ain’t but four feet high.

“They’ll miss it,” he says. You got to put yellow tape on it.”

Before long we, meaning I, got the place looking like a crime scene.

But ever since Janey did her own wishes and left, the only pleasure Leon gets is sitting at the cabin with a beer waiting for them turtle eggs to hatch. Which they ain’t going to until maybe August.

“They ain’t going to hatch at all if I don’t keep an eye on ’em,” he tells me like he’s just discovered the secret of life.
Hottest day we’ve had, he’s sitting in the truck, AC going full bore, while I’m soaking the ground in sweat digging for turtle eggs. He yells for me to go deeper.

“Leon,” I say, “I’m down over four inches. It’s a turtle, not an excavator.”

After an hour I find the eggs and make up my mind that’s the last of this caper.

“They’ll never make it to the pond,” he says. “The crows will get them.”

We—meaning I—dig a new hole, closer to the pond but in eyesight of the cabin, fill it with special sand at twenty bucks a bag, and surround it with a four foot fence blazing yellow so Leon can sit in his Adirondack chair, drink beer, and watch for baby turtles.

A month goes by, and he’s left Janey alone long enough that she says she’s coming back from California. But just like I knew, he can’t leave those turtle eggs alone. He has me digging again, and we spend half the afternoon down at the barn setting up a basket in the trash trailed back of a gator with a droplight hovering over them.

I didn’t tell him these eggs in the basket was long past hatching. “Janey’s arriving tonight,” he says. “And I’m going to kick her ass if she don’t pull her own weight around here.”

“I’m going home,” I says. “If I hear anything on the scanner, I’ll come up.”

Next morning I see the droplight hanging lonesome in the barn. Soon as Janey drove in last night, Leon laid two or three commandments on her, so she got up early, filled the trash trailer right to the brim, and drove the gator over to the dump. Them eggs are incinerating even as he’s telling me. Next he’s in the upstairs window throwing Janey’s clothes in the air, and I’m in the yard picking’ em up at the rate of twelve fifty an hour.

When he comes out the front door, I hand him an armload of bras and slacks and such. I says, “Janey done you a favor. Them eggs wa’n’t ever going to hatch. She spared you looking at the dead bodies.”

I take my pay and leave to drive my wife to the cancer center for her chemo. Thank God for Medicare, or I’d’ve eaten them turtle eggs myself.

---

Merle Drown is a freelance writer and editor. He has published three novels, Plowing Up a Snake (The Dial Press), The Suburbs of Heaven (Soho Press), which was chosen by Barnes and Noble for its Discover Great New Writers series, and Lighting the World (Whitepoint Press). He has also published over 40 short pieces of fiction and received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New Hampshire Arts Council. He is working on a collection titled Shrunken Heads: Miniature Portraits of the Famous Among Us.

She had fitted herself into the corner booth, the one under the smeared window, the last one with the torn red 1956 leatherette seat.

She was sort of blonde, not bleached but just didn’t quite make it, dirty blonde, they call it, mousey. This girl ‘just abouts’ everything, can’t stop looking in the mirror until she can’t stand to look in a mirror and thereby never catching even a momentary glimpse of what she thinks she is looking for, disenchantment slowly filling her up and going hard, inspissating under the dry, brilliant, desiccant of perpetual disappointment. In another age she might have been drawing on a cigarette, taking in deep medicinal draughts and flicking ashes, a little self-conscious, maybe, sitting alone like that, a little defensive, a le old Eddy Hopper, you know, seared with stark electric outlines, the entire world jittering on neon gas—but not out of time.

She never managed to get aboard the 1960s Dreamliner like those other girls with their shimmering hair and their generous soft looks, nestled in big, strong arms, encircled in a blue haze of patchouli oil and marijuana and the late-night flashing rendezvous and the glint of moonlight and beach fires and early morning rainstorms and mordent lightning orchestrating a gray, frowning day.

Now here she is, alone on the platform with an old-fashioned suitcase with straps around each end, like for 1949 or something, hair pulled back in a Geisha bun with a skewer through it, and good, sensible traveling shoes. No makeup, not even lipstick, just her raw, unvarnished self, bobbing around like a tethered helium balloon trying to escape.

The train lets out a long, mournful wail which lances back through the dust and dying light in a last attempt to remain but is pulled along in the smooth frequency diminution of the doppler. Silence rushes past in the slipstream, topsy turvy, tumbling over itself, sparking against the tracks glistening in a sudden, chill rain. Missed it again.

The suitcase is heavy, too heavy and she puts it down, but she can’t figure out what to do with her hands and picks it up again for a moment and walks over to the iron bench and sits, hands now folded in her lap. She glances at her nails but resists the urge to start nibbling at them.

The porter, the very last of his kind in a blue uniform with a cap bearing a red insignia of some kind is pushing a four-wheeled cart, head bowed, seduced by the rhythms of monotony, the stub of a cigar clamped in his jaws producing a diaphoresis of tobacco juice on the cavern walls of his mouth which he periodically expectorates to his left side leaving a trail of brown, oyster splatters at regular intervals.

“Nex’ train tomarra evnin ‘round six o’clock.”

Twenty-two hours. All this time between trains and the platform remains empty except for her and the porter whose owlish face seems painted onto a manikin, his skin dark and wrinkled under the gray-white fuzz growing like moss around his cheeks and jaw, eyes hard as marbles, cats eyes, vertical pupils, slits in a cave wall, all movement deliberate, calculated, slow, methodical, silent. His gait is confident, almost to the point of belligerence.

Twenty-two hours with nowhere to go.

Waiting. Waiting.

Time drawing out like soft taffy, caught in the web, struggling like a locust trying to pull away from the adamantine grip of the silk, but only wrapping herself more and more, fingers, arms, hair.

She wants to weep but can’t produce them, those little silver orbs that carry away the spent effluent of despair. She dry sobs, gasping, filling her lungs and expelling it like a bellows at the steel plant where father worked, bent and blackened, asthmatic, iron filings and coke dust magnetized around his heart and eyes, mother chained to a blue apron, squinting through coke-bottle lenses, skin like dry parchment, the veins dilated and pulsing, tortured lungs hacking through the phlegm of a million cigarettes in a million day kitchen salmagundis of hearts and gizzards stinking in a fulminating cloud of fat and destitution.

She inquires of the porter if she might leave the suitcase for a while, and he points without looking at her or the indicated banks of steel lockers against a brick wall.

“Dollah fo twenty-fo hours. Quawtez ony.”

She forces the heavy brown bag into No. 39 and has to push it several different ways to make it fit. It resists, fighting back, refusing the confinement, begging, pleading before finally releasing itself amid the lamentations of the unforgiven.

She pockets the key and walks through the monumental glass doors of the limestone building into the dying light, sucking in the perfume of honeysuckle and lilac.

Jimmy the Greek’s Athens Café and Pharmacy used to have those satellite juke boxes connected to the main Wurlitzer where you could see the 45 rpm discs selected by a mechanical arm and placed on the turn table. A dime for the longest time was all it took; then three for a quarter; then they just disappeared, like the entire decade, vanishing into the frozen aether at lightspeed to Led Zeppelin’s “How Many More Times”.

Now the café drifts in ignominy, Jimmy having sold out to a company that has painted the walls orange, tore out the satellite jukes and the Wurlitzer, replaced the old wooden tables with melamine. Behind the counter Marina’s ghost still stares out over the sea of disconnected dories bobbing in the clatter and clash of drug pushers and night girls, petty thieves and bent addicts, all rushing into the night, all waiting for sundown where they can pretend to be unnoticed.

She stands, leaving the coffee untouched, a little spiral of steam unwinding from the cup.

The suitcase was removed after seven days and stored in it’s own slot in a rookery of lost and abandoned artifacts, numbered and tagged, unopened, unremembered.

---

David Greenberg is a former newspaper reporter/editor, truck driver, folk singer and worm picker (a real job) now retired who lives with Miriam, his wife of 54 years in Costa Rica where he makes esoteric furniture.

Congratulations on taking the first step toward a better ecological niche, and a better you. I’m naturalist extraordinaire and personal trainer Chuck Darwin, here to welcome you to Evolutionary Fitness!

Whether you’re a middle-of-the-food-chain specimen in need of a confidence boost, or an apex predator who’s gone a bit soft, any organism can take advantage of the tips and tricks in this five-DVD box set.

So let’s crank it up a few notches, whip you into tip-top shape and attract the partner of your dreams – at least, for this mating season. Just clear out a nice roomy spot in your cave, grassy plain, or lowland swamp, and let’s get moving!

Routine 1: The ‘Run-For-Your-Life’
Let’s face it, we’ve all got predator problems. Talons swiping after your hindquarters? Razor-sharp jaws aiming for your jugular? Long, sticky tentacles dragging you down to a deep sea abyss? This first routine is a fresh twist on the classic Flight or Fright response. I don’t care if you’re a lowly rodent or a majestic blue whale – those propellers can be a bitch, right? – this simple move will save your skin, time and time again. Whew, now we’re working up a good sweat!

Routine 2: The ‘Freak n’ Sneak’
Sure, we all want lots of offspring – our own little platypi, squirrels, or earthworms that we can joyfully watch climb the evolutionary ladder. But producing all those babies can be downright dangerous. So you’ve done the deed, and now you just want to sneak back out of the nest without getting your head bitten off (literally). You black widows out there know what I’m talking about! This special trick will build up your stamina and help you live long enough to see your grandkids.

Routine 3: The ‘Hide n’ Bide’
I always like to say: You don’t need to be the quickest gazelle in the room, as long as you’re not the slowest. This exercise is all about laying low, playing it safe, and blending in – so pay attention, peacocks! Go ahead and burrow yourself a nice hidey-hole in the mud, hibernate a few extra weeks, or maybe even camouflage yourself in some jungle foliage. The possibilities are endless!

Routine 4: The ‘Scoop n’ Toss’
This final move, this one is more of a last resort – very simple, very self-explanatory, very humiliating. That’s right, just scoop up a big heaping paw-ful of your seed and chuck it as hard as you can in any direction.

That’s right, harder!

C’mon my creatures, I want to see some egg and sperm flying out there! You’re bound to fertilize something, right? Hey, it works for plants!

The Cool-Down Phase
Whew, it’s getting steamier than an equatorial rainforest in here! Good job everyone, we’ve finished the full circuit for today’s workout – just pop in the next DVD whenever you’re ready to rumble again. And if your motivation ever lags, try to remember my motto: Pain is just Nature selecting the weakness out of your body.

---

John McLaughlin is interested in the intersections of philosophy, science, and technology. See his X.

Even here, I’m sat across from another screenwriter sipping his coffee and scrolling through his tablet. The sticky sweet smoke from his pipe wafts over to me. He puffs with his left hand, scrolls and sips with his right. Still, it’s preferable to the clouds of cigarette smoke which choke me on most patios.

He’s taunting me with his air of accomplishment. His buttercup yellow button down. His relentless pipe smoking. I think he’s watching dailies. Definitely a director then. And I am the ghost of a screenwriter, haunting him.

He hails a waitress without looking up. One slender finger in the air. Another coffee. Yes, I think I’ll have one too. Though I can feel the buzz in my veins already, I cannot bear the thought of sitting here without one. I look to catch her eye, but she has gone back behind the counter. Fine, he’s more important. That’s almost certain. I can tell from his degree of focus, something is being made. That rare result.

The world’s cafe bars are our office, the Writer-Director and I. We are at the cafe and we are at work. The distractions are constant and necessary. It is of vital importance to be in the world. Novelists hide themselves away in cabins, screenwriters haunt cafes.

New York. Los Angeles. Toronto. Barcelona. London. Istanbul. Always the same. The chatter around us shifts into more or less foreign language, but always we sit alone, staring at the page. The people mill about in much the same ways. No, that’s wrong. The point is to look closer. There, a handshake, there, a kiss on the cheek. Here, two. Vessels morph from oversize mugs to slender ornamented cups. The coffee inside them weaker, stronger, now muddy. Lipstick stained the Parisian glasses (a cliché to be sure, but apt). The English drank their pints and the volume steadily increased. And here, the drinks are fewer; the smoke much thicker.

Suddenly he’s gone. I look up and he isn’t there anymore. He’s left without my noticing. Gone too is the pungent, fruity smell of pipe tobacco. I don’t know how I missed his departure. He must have swept up his tablet and whisked himself off into the afternoon. I hadn’t had a chance to note the color of his scarf. I miss him a little. He was one of my kind.

---

Lyla Porter is an international writer and filmmaker. A passionate scribbler since childhood, she studied creative writing at Vassar College and has co-authored several plays and short films. Her work spans fiction and nonfiction, film and television, on and behind the camera.

The evening air had cooled considerably as the sun set over Rome. The brisk breeze floating in through the open door of Il Flagello gave Max chills as he sat at the bar with a cold beer half drank, thinking. He was lost in thought and lost in his beer. He wondered what he was going to do next and how was the outcome going to pay off. A pang hit him in the heart, and he felt lousy again. He drank his beer half-heartedly registering the chatter between the regulars and the bar owner, Sergio.

“Did you hear Sergio? Eh, hai sentito?”

“Sentito? Heard what?” A man asked.

“They’re closing la Lombardia,” Sergio said assessing the thick white foam rising on top of the yellow liquid pouring into the tilted glass, waving like a yellow flag in a desperate wind.

“Non e’ posssibile;” another man said with a long hiss from a chipped tooth. “La Lombardia is a region, not a ssstore.”

“Cosi ha detto, Mort. They just closed Lazaretto,” Sergio said. All the men leaned heavy into the bar to hear better like the disciples in Da Vinci’s Last Supper. “That’s what Mort told me,” Sergio said.

Sergio said, “A total lockdown. I just talked to him. Lazaretto is closed and they are going into quarantena. We’re next, in my opinion.”

Max was lost in thought, far away, and he wondered how did he do that, and where did he go when this happened. He had been thinking hard but had gotten no answer. Max had gotten nowhere trying to wrap his mind around a country closing, tourism completely shut down in a country dependent on that industry and he had gotten nowhere on Sergio’s question of how he was going to survive if there was a lockdown and no tourists or tours. It is unimaginable Rome without tourists, he had responded.

“You will have to evacuate and return to America. What a shame, too; so early in the season.”

Max had gotten nowhere on any answer about anything he was concerned about because the solutions were out of reach still and he was flying through a deep empty space looking for an answer somewhere in his mind. Hearing the gasps of the regulars stunned that they had closed Lazaretto brought Max out of his concentration. There was a certain jet lag to it, a sort of lost time or a time warp as if his thoughts held their own mass and pulled at the fabric of the universe as a planet or star. He was adrift again in his worries and was startled when Hope walked up to him. Had it been an hour?

“Oh, hi,” he said.

“Sorry,” she said. “Didn’t mean to startle you. You looked like you were in another place.”

“I was. I was in a very different place,” he said.

She said, “Hmm,” and then caught the bartender’s attention. “Ciao Sergio, una pils.”

Sergio began the long pour. Max looked for another bar stool so that Hope could sit with him, but they were all occupied by gossiping and worried patrons, so he got up.

“Please, have a seat. I need to stand anyway.”

“Are you sure,” she said. “I am pretty tired. Been on my feet running all day. Had a tour earlier, my last one.”

“How do you feel?” Max finally asked once Hope had settled. Sergio placed her beer before her.

“Lousy,” she said. “Very lousy.”

Lousy, that was the word, Max thought. Everybody is feeling lousy and scared.

“I’m sorry to hear about your company; if it’s true.”

“Yes,” she said, “it’s true.”

She sipped her beer and rearranged her things so they weren’t in the way. Max watched Hope and wondered how she felt about leaving Italy. He wasn’t sure if she was sorry or happy or probably a little of both; but mainly, he thought, she must be relieved. It’s not easy making a living in Italy. Especially as a foreigner. Especially as a female and a foreigner. Italy wasn’t a friendly place to make money. Earning a living is a battlefield in Italy. You have to fight on all fronts. Your main enemy is the government officials with boosted egos high on their power to interpret the laws as they see fit for themselves, the power to be paid to do the bidding of a cousin or a competitor and too often used as weapons against businesses for another’s gain and their own gains, an income made through a battle of attrition every day. And then if you were a foreigner and then a woman where you are dismissed, and Hope, a smart, educated, American woman who never got the lead roll no matter how innovative because the cultural moats in Italy are insurmountable and Max wondered, would quarantining the country shake things up. He was back in his head again, thinking too much and he was far away, and he became conscious of it and stopped. He looked at Hope, but she was somewhere else, somewhere maybe safe, or someplace she could not escape. And she stayed there for a long time before she came back to the bar and to Max and their last beers in Italy in this bar without Sergio.

---

Bryan Jansing is a pioneer of Flash Fiction whose works include, “Like Clumps of Dried Dirt,” “Bridge Party,” and “A Number on Reality,” in Fast Forward Vol. 3, The Mix Tape (2010), which was the finalist for the Colorado Book Awards. He was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2019. He has written for Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. His book Italy: Beer Country is the first book about the Italian craft beer movement. Bryan Jansing currently lives and writes in Rome, Italy. More @BryanJansing

The incandescent lights beam silvery glows in every direction, while the sunlight pierces through windows and bounces from stainless steel machines to clean white walls. You smell the scent of detergent clashing with lavender dryer sheets, rose petal fabric softener and hear the trickling waterfall of coins from the change machine.

It’s Saturday. Appliances purr loudly announcing that they’re brimming to capacity. You see the usuals walk in. Andrew gives you his typical head nod while leaving no strand of his clean, tapered mane out of place. You surmise he’s single, working in an office, by the way he hangs up his dress shirts in rows like color-coded file folders.

You can’t help but notice Helen, reticent to make eye contact. You know she works or lives nearby as she traipses to and from a neighboring building and hurriedly so. You revere her appearance, always perfectly polished with subtle makeup and beautifully coiffed curls.

Mrs. Johnson came by, her round frame moving with short quick steps. She loved when you complemented her on her new crimson hair. She was picking up her patchwork quilts which you take immense pride in cleaning. You completed the transformation of these exquisite tapestries of tartan and stripes, florals and flannels that she left in your charge to gingerly launder, air dry and fold. She’s a loyal customer, and you’ve been warmly rewarded over the years.

The day continues as you wash, dry, fold, repeat. Before closing, you gather the misfit garments left either forgotten or rejected. You’ll arrange them on the lost-and-found bench another day.

Being a Monday, you notice that the whirl of the washers and the dinging of the dryers whisper like a delicate waltz. These is no crescendo as the morning nimbly unrolls into noon. Mondays are the quietest of the week. You enjoy having Sunday off.

As you sort the rejected regalia from Saturday, you hear a slight thunk and something slumps to the floor. It’s a pocket-sized booklet with appealing penmanship inside. You notice the outside cover, a dark, pebbled, gray leather with inner pages made of thick cellulose each numbered in handwriting as distinct as a fingerprint. The cursive is like fine embroidery connected with smooth strokes and slants as it tickles the earthy fibers. What is not apparent is its owner. You don’t see a name or moniker of any kind.

You decide to put it aside and assume its proper keeper will visit to retrieve it. You want to steal a closer glimpse at its pages though, like a kid swiping a freshly baked cookie when no one’s watching. Perhaps inspecting it will provide the clues you need to identify its owner. After all, it appears well-cherished. The day continues as you wash, dry, fold, repeat, like the glitzy banner clamors. Again, before closing you assemble abandoned apparel, and it occurs to you that the booklet still awaits its rescuer. You wonder still, who owns it, do they know it’s missing, and do they know where to find it.

You conclude, one way to decipher the puzzle is to bury yourself in the volume. As you unfold the leather cover, you see April – May written on the inside, with dates at the top of each page, and passages labeled with names and initials.

“April 7, Harold S.: Mrs. S. has been gone now for two years. He misses her. Happy event is coming; his daughter’s getting married next month. Keeps it short.”

You wonder what this means, then inspect a different passage.

“April 16, Andrew H.: Wants to move out-of-state to be with his girlfriend; waiting to hear about a job offer there. Remember to ask him about it next time; the usual again; coffee, light and sweet.”

The usual what, you ponder. The usual sandwich maybe? You suppose these may be notes of a waiter or waitress perhaps, but why write them in a notebook, you wonder. It’s not clear.

Rustling forward, you inspect more entries. And then you’re abruptly frozen in place. You realize you’re able to identify not just one of the individuals, but also the craft of the booklet’s proprietor.

“May 16, Harriet J.: She’s been traveling again to another competition where she won first place. Ask the category next time; She wanted it red today.”

Harriet J., why, that’s Mrs. Johnson, you marvel. She revealed her first name to you the first time you both met. And you noted on Saturday that her new hair color was red. She raves to you about her quilt competitions every year. You glance at the calendar. Today is Monday, May 19th. Yes, that’s it, since you know Mrs. Johnson was last in on the 17th with her new ‘do. So, the owner of this booklet must be a hairdresser, you surmise. How charming, that he or she writes down the clients’ preferences in styles and beverages. But who composed the excerpts? You know it must be someone who frequents this locale.

Confiding in Mrs. Johnson seems reasonable. It’s late today, so you’ll call her tomorrow.

Upon locking up for the night, you nearly bump into Helen leaving the building next door, just the one you’ve seen her enter and leave many times before. As usual, she avoids eye contact, but does manage a kind greeting. You ask her if she lives there, and her reply brings you to a jarring halt. She says sometimes it feels like she does, but no, she owns the salon inside. Your heart races while you retrieve the tome from an inner pocket. Helen’s eyes expand like a balloon, and then her face softens. You tell her how you found it. She makes it clear she’s grateful as she looks you in the eyes warmly.

Weeks roll in and out. Another Saturday with the melody of motion. The usuals come and go, although you realize that Andrew hasn’t been in for quite some time. The day continues as you wash, dry, fold, repeat.

---

A former mechanical engineering professor, DML Meyer writes fiction for middle grade readers. Proof that even engineers have imaginations. She crafts stories where fantasy, art, and science intersect, and curiosity remains the best kind of magic. Find more here.

When winter break came around, Noah and Jeffrey flew back to find their childhood home completely torn up. Boxes of kibble were scattered around the rooms, family photos were flipped over and strategic shits from Pernille, the pug, were everywhere. Jeffrey trudged through the mess while Noah checked the carpet, wondering how much it was going to cost to repair. The biggest change was Mama Z’s half-finished project of turning their old bedroom into her new office. Financial documents intermingled with signed sports star posters; a cherrywood desk was pressed against the old steel bunkbed. Their first warning of these changes was the verbal flurry they received on the drive back from the airport. The passenger seat had been off limits and empty for years, so Mama Z glanced over her shoulder at her now-grown boys squished in the backseat and tried to compress all the parenting she’d missed into rapid-fire life updates: “Never start a business, this ad campaign is going to be a total nightmare,” she said. “But at least the dog treats are deductible.”

Nearing the house, she slowed at an intersection where a few people circled the car with signs.

“Ugh, they’ve been out protesting for weeks,” she said in disgust, “Don’t ever be like that. Disappearances happen, eventually you just have to move on. Sorry, Noah,” she whispered in consolation.

Ten years ago, Noah’s best friend Mikey Newell—who Mama Z never approved of—was disappeared while leaving the town’s Walmart. At first the papers said he vandalized something, but they never showed any proof; later, the official statement brushed it off as a mistake, an unfortunate case of human misplacement. All that noise just amounted to rumors and gossip. No words could’ve changed the dread Mikey felt when he was plucked out of space, or the emptiness that followed.

Back in the house, Noah bent to check beneath his old bunkbed for the cigarettes he used to hide. There had been a lot more Mikeys recently: people jammed up or vanished completely; the pace was quickening, and fear and menace rippled through the air.

But the anxiety inside the house felt more ominous—something Mama Z had done her best to keep hidden until Jeffrey was out of high school, long after dad left and it became just the three of them. Unfortunately, the coddling didn’t do him much good. He had his own fixations, always aware of people’s sensitivities and delighted by the sections of thin skin he could find and prick with words he wasn’t supposed to say. In the aftermath of those moments, Noah felt sick—like his little brother had turned out all wrong, but Mama Z always reminded him that when she died and his friends let him down, Jeffrey would be all he had. So, Noah held onto him as tightly as he could, thinking, one day his little brother would go out into the world and life experience would mellow him out. But, he couldn’t help noticing the way Jefferey nodded intensely to Mama’s manic rants, sneering through the balcony window when she pointed out the man sleeping on their street corner.

While Jeffrey was as spiteful as ever, Noah seemed to have shrunk even more into himself. As the world panicked, he let it all move past him, like a big, dark—but distant—cloud. He picked this up in college: the idea that suffering only deepened as much as you let it so the cleanest response was detachment, and that people left whether you were ready or not. So, when dinner rolled around and Mama Z sweetly tried to get him to cook the side dishes like when he was little, he just quietly refused and slunk back to the office-bedroom, avoiding the dog shit along the way. He caught a look in Mama’s eyes—unblinking, watery, the corners pulled tight as if she were bracing herself. She was too expectant, too sad for him to be around.

Jeffrey pulled his chair out and sat down. The fourth chair at the table stayed pushed in. Over roast chicken, carrots, and mashed potatoes, Jeffrey claimed the disappearances were intentional. He said he heard things about the CIA clearing people out before they did real crimes. Or that it was divine intervention that scared the press into covering it all up. The explanations came quickly—overlapping into a crazed Venn diagram, as if truth might be found somewhere in the middle. His ideas seemed like they would never stop, until he noticed Noah’s disapproval.

“What,” Jeffrey bristled. “We’re still here, so what’s wrong with a little theorizing?”

Jeffrey had known Mikey, though he was probably too young to remember when they played hide-and-seek in the same room where the family now ate dinner. Looking at his brother, Noah felt the same sickness rise again and, against his better instincts, spoke up, “If no one explained anything, if the rules and conspiracies of annihilation keep changing, how could anybody be happy with that or talk about fairness? It’s fear pretending to be logic.” Jeffrey just shrugged, quipping back, “Don’t get butthurt.” He leaned back in his chair. “And honestly, are you saying the world wouldn’t be better off if that guy out on the corner was gone?”

Noah studied Jeffrey’s face then and saw it—the same wide, fixed look as their Mama’s, the same tightness around the eyes. Maybe there really was pain in Jeffrey—something like her loneliness—that caused him to be so angry. Maybe he did remember Mikey, maybe he remembered their dad.

---

Elijah A. L. is a writer and former engineer currently pursuing an MFA in Fiction at The New School. He serves as a fiction reader for LIT Magazine, a fiction editor and digital designer at Inquisitive Eater, and digital designer for Back Matter. His writing explores strained connections, race, selfhood, and the pressures of secrets withheld within a twisted modern world. His work balances grounded mundanity with moments of surreal absurdism. He publishes short stories, poetry, and excerpts at Wordblend on Substack.

I will never be strong enough to hate you and your barbed wire arms swathed around my body. You sink splintered shards of sorrow into my asthenic flesh. It would take a love you’ve never had to will the sorry I’ve starved for past your chapped sangria lips. You won’t let me forgive you.

I remember our first spring when stars floated around my eyes like lilies as you took my face between your hands and taught me that love was something to borrow. Love was slipping off shirts when you’d ask. Love was staying when you grabbed and threw me against the bathroom door. I’m a bullet casing without a gun to fire back.

Your lies like mosquito stings I force myself to forget, tucking that shred of truth in the limbo of space that I wish I could keep between you and I. As we waltz in and out of the lie of forever, I wonder if I have ever been my own.

---

Jia J. Johnson is a high school senior enrolled in the creative writing program at Barbara Ingram. She hasn’t stopped writing since she could speak, enlisting her mother to write down her stories for her. Her favorite genre is poetry, though she enjoys them all. She is the president of her school’s newspaper, and has been awarded several Scholastic silver keys at both the regional and national levels. Jia credits her parents for supporting and encouraging her writing, her friends for inspiration and peer review, and especially her teachers for assisting in the creation of pieces she is proud of.

Hosea came to his truth in March. He was the elder, his legs almost useless, and the farmland hives were dying.

“I must be given.”

As soon as he spoke, everyone roused from a kind of walking sleep. The community began to feed Hosea a diet of honey and water, bathing him gently and telling him old family stories. The farm’s remaining hives were raided and every last comb taken.

The old man ate less and less as the days passed. Most of the gathered honey was stockpiled.

The community lived in an old restaurant on the edge of the farm, over the hill from the hives. The members slept in the booths, in the stock room, in the kitchen. After Hosea could no longer walk, a broken freezer in the back was pulled open and cleaned. It was laid down and filled with hot lavender-scented water, then scrubbed again and again.

Hosea began to smell of honey. He wept honey and that is what his bowels gave up. He’d been made clean.

On the day, the community filled their pots and pans with what they’d taken from the hives. They warmed the new honey and poured it into the bottom of the freezer and, when he was ready, helped Hosea down into the golden mass.

Sighing, he said he was warm. He could sleep now. The elder spoke one last time:

“Wait for a year. Not before then.” He let out a breath and remained still as they began pouring again.

A year passed and it was a hard year. No more than a few hives were left. Little grew that could be eaten. Life on the farm was winding down to stillness.

Finally, the freezer was unchained and opened as the community watched. Seen through the crystallizing honey, Hosea was blurred, his eyes slightly open. He looked like an insect in amber. Desdemona, heavily pregnant, reached into the old freezer. She pushed through the honey to the changed flesh and closed Ringo’s eyes, holding down the lids, lest he see how hungry his children had become.

The freezer was closed and tied to a wheeled cart. Then every starving man or woman jack pushed and pulled it up the low scrubby hill. From the top of the hill rows of hives could be seen in the valley, a city for insects grown strangely quiet. Then the freezer got away from them and rolled on its own down the hill, like an eager child racing, until the incline flattened in front of the first rank of hives. There the freezer stopped, dust boiling around the cart’s wheels.

Desdemona, running behind, threw open the freezer door. Revealed, the honey glowed under the sun and buzzing became audible from everywhere. Bees rose up from every still-living hive and coalesced into a black mass before descending onto Ringo’s sepulcher. Desdemona fled through a curtain of bees, unstung, her baby lively in her belly.

On the hill, the community waited for her and for the coming of newly-made queens.

---

Julie McNeely-Kirwan‘s work has appeared in Five South, Flash Fiction Weekly, Every Writer’s Resource, Spine, Show Us Your Shorts, and Overtine, among others. She lives with two elderly rescue dogs in Harrison, Arkansas.

The plane began its languid departure down the runway, the whirring of engines abrading his ears. He looked out the window towards the clear path, an empty runaway unencumbered by thunder, rain, or even clouds. “Looks like smooth sailing,” he thought casually to himself. The steady movement was almost hypnotizing in its monotony.

Without thinking he pulled out the photo, the last one that he decided to keep, from the back pocket of his wallet and looked—no, glared—at it. He felt fire in his temple, his brows furrowing. The urge to rip it to shreds was as strong and hot as the tears he refrained from shedding.

I saw you there, like a whirling firefly against a pitch-black sky. You were dancing above the lilies that hung daintily along the pond as we watched the fireworks shooting from a festival far off in the distance. You floated there like you barely belonged to this earth. I thought that’s what I was searching for; I thought you (and I?) were destined for great things.

The routine voice of the pilot thrust him out of his daydream, explicating some inane details about flight times and landing procedures. “In the case of an emergency—” he heard it drone. Rest assured, everything would be fine, the featureless voice insisted plainly.

How I love(d) you, he opined. You devoured me and all my passion, fusing it with your own, overwhelming me until I was but a shadow of your being. I thought I would drown in the radiance that emanated from your flesh. That smile that stretched to the ends of the earth, that laughter that skipped and hopped and pranced away, that I would try futilely to grasp, to possess. I should have known from my endless pursuits that I would never catch you.

The airplane lurched predictably towards the sky, a steady rising motion that was all too familiar, safe, and benign. These machines were built for comfort, assuring all in their belly that they had nothing to fear.

You filled me with tremors and jolts, casting shock waves into my body. You hurled me, time and time again, into your multitude of abysses and countless heavens. All I wanted was to, just once, lay on the twirling grass with you and look up at the motionless night sky and throbbing white stars.

The airplane pierced through the clouds, reaching its designated altitude. The vision ended as he opened his eyes, staring out the window. He sighed, a deep and heavy and resigned sigh, accepting his fate. Hand cupped to his mouth, his eyes roamed the quiet and serene nothingness that surrounded him now. He peered again at the photo. At that smile stretching on and on.

Time ambled on like the movement of the airplane as he placed his index fingers on one corner of this final image and tore it from one end to the other. In his mind, her hair aflame, she screamed from far away, sending echoes through his heart, as she fell eternally into darkness until only the light emanating from her fiery hair was visible, slowly becoming infinitely less so.

Goodbye, my love.

He looked out the window again, at the thin crimson sky, and the white clouds beyond it expanding for thousands of miles, tainted by the sun’s burning hot rays.

He wiped away vicious tears, put his head on the white polyester pillow sitting pertly at his side, and slept.

---

Brian Connelly is an English Lit major dropout who has returned to writing after a twenty-year hiatus. He was published in several poetry journals and won a local short story contest as a youth and has recently been published in Down in the Dirt Magazine.

Eight minutes left.

You wake.

You don’t remember anything.

The teary-eyed woman squeezing your hand says the Sun just died. Mere minutes until cosmic dark coldly cloaks everything you can’t recall.

Six minutes.

She says you were comatose. She says she’s your wife. But, despite a twinkle of familiarity, she seems a beautiful stranger.

Four minutes.

Your heart swells, a Red Giant. With the same woman you don’t know, you fall in love again.

Two minutes.

You imagine the marriage you’d like to remember for a few moments more. And connected to her you are a constellation.

Eight minutes was enough time.

---

Alex Rafala is an actor-turned-writer based in NYC. His debut short film, “Farewell Old Stringy” (Writer/Director), lauded for its full heart and exemplary performances, screened as an Official Selection at film festivals nationwide, most notably the 2014 Virginia Film Festival. His short horror screenplay “Harvest” placed as a Second Rounder in the 2020 Austin Film Festival Screenplay Competition, a Second Rounder in the 2020 ScreenCraft Film Fund, and a Quarterfinalist in the 2020 ScreenCraft Horror Screenplay Competition. Alex graduated from the University of Virginia with a Bachelor’s Degree in Drama.

She rushed through the door and strode toward the only open seat at the bar, the stool next to mine. Just like the boss said she would. She was in her mid-twenties. Short hair accenting her oval face. Audrey Hepburn cheekbones. Anya Taylor-Joy eyes. Tiny mole left of her lips. No obvious piercings or tattoos. A kind aura.

Some days I hate my job.

She waved the bartender over, ordered a cheeseburger and fries with a double Scotch on the rocks. She showed him her ID before he asked, told him she was in a hurry, promised a fat tip for fast service. She tapped her phone to check the time and sighed in exasperation.

“What’s the rush?” I asked.

“Like it matters to you.”

It did matter to me, but I couldn’t tell her why. Couldn’t tell her I’d been thinking about bucking the system. So I said, “This isn’t the kind of place most people run in and out of.”

“Yeah, well I’m not most people. Fast-food chains are evil. I like local and I need a drink.” A pause. “And if that’s your best line, no wonder you’re alone.”

“Line?” I laughed. “Don’t worry, I don’t troll girls as young as you.”

“Troll?” she laughed right back. “That’s not what the word means, grandpa.”

I laughed with her. Vulnerability goes a long way, I learned a long time ago. “Ah, the problem with slang. I can’t keep up.” I gave her my best smile.

“Hit on. That’s the term you want. And you can’t hit on me ’cause I have a date.”

“A date?” I looked around for effect. “Where is he?”

“He’s a cheapskate. Said he couldn’t make it to the theater until right before the movie. You know that place that shows old movies for two bucks? That’s my date. Cheapskate.”

“So why rush?”

“I promised a friend. Stupid me. Her brother’s not my type. Three lip piercings! How do you kiss that? And tattoos everywhere, even on his face. Letters in his hairline that spell D-A-N-G-E-R. Yuck!”

“More ink than the daily newspaper, huh?”

“Whatever that is. But it gets worse.” She was warming up. It hadn’t been as hard as I expected.

“He’s into gore. The movie’s a horror flick. Something about a crazy guy who thinks he’s the Grim Reaper.”

“But you’re going?”

“I can’t say no to my friends. I know I need to. There are so many things I’d rather be doing tonight. Instead, I’m meeting a bizarro for a gross movie I’ll probably cover my eyes the whole time. Is that pathetic or what?”

“Sometimes, you have to put yourself first,” I said as kindly as I could.

She grunted, turned away, downed her drink. She lifted the empty glass toward the bartender, and he nodded. I picked up my phone, found the theater’s website, looked at the ad for the movie. Sure enough, it pictured a dark figure carrying a scythe, black cloak, face menacingly obscured. What a cliché. Gabriel never gets treated this way. Michael and Peter and all the rest, they get the flowing white robes and wings and shiny halos. Maybe that’s too pretty for the angel of death, but why can’t he ever be shown as a regular guy. Short graying hair. Unremarkable face. Glasses. Polo over khakis. Penny loafers. Like me.

I guess I said it out loud because the girl snorted. “That wouldn’t be very scary.” The burger, fries, and her second Scotch arrived, and she dug in like she was training for Nathan’s July 4th hot dog contest.

“It’s not death that’s scary, it’s dying before you’ve had a chance to live,” I mused. “When you grow old, you die with decades of memory. You’ve had your time. Maybe you’re lonely, with all your friends and brothers and sisters past tense. But to go young? That’s tragedy. It’s cheating you of so much.”

She squirmed and scooted as far away from me as the stool allowed.

“Sorry,” I said. “I can get a little morose.”

She chased another huge bite of her burger with a swig of Scotch. She was doing her best to ignore me.

“It’s just, no one is guaranteed tomorrow. Treat each second, each minute, each hour as the precious gift it is. Don’t waste your time on losers …”

“Cool the sermon, old man,” she said curtly and stood up. Half the burger remained on her plate.
Such spunk. She deserved better. “Don’t walk out that door,” I said quietly. “Don’t rush off to gore and darkness. Stay for dessert, my treat. Enjoy a long and happy life.”

“Who do you think you are!? You’re creepy as hell! I’m outta here!”

She gulped the Scotch, slammed the glass down, stormed out. The bartender chased after her, waving the unpaid check, my silent cheers urging him on. But it was too late. The girl fishtailed her Mustang into the street without looking, ran a red light, slalomed through traffic.

Just like the boss said she would. Damned omniscience.

I dropped a Franklin on the counter. A good tip for the bartender, just like the girl promised. I nursed my IPA until I heard the ambulance coming, lights and siren blaring. Time to get on with it.

---

Robert Leger is in his third chapter as a writer, spinning fiction after stints in newspaper journalism and public affairs consulting. He served as national president of the Society of Professional Journalists in 2002-03. A member of SouthWest Writers, the Arizona Authors Association, and the Phoenix Writers Network, he lives outside Phoenix with his wife, Cindy.

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.