Short Beasts

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.

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.