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 …

Between bites of biryani and samosas, she divulged the edited version of her childhood. He nodded in agreement and sighed, his eyes deep, inky pools, in frames of jet lashes. Gazing into his right one she envisioned their baby daughter with his eyes, her red hair, and dimples, their Labrador and a terracotta brick house. In his left she saw heavy silence, raised voices, custody battles, siblings separated. “Fancy a drink?” he said as they zipped up jackets. “Not tonight, I’ve a deadline,” she said to his left eye, then hesitated. “Maybe next week?” she added to his right. “Okay,” he smiled, then something flashed across his face, as she glimpsed him frowning into her left eye. Ellen Townsend is an art teacher and writer. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Flash Fiction Magazine, Friday Flash Fiction, 50-Word Stories and Paragraph Planet. Her stories have been broadcast on BBC Radio.

You draw your shirt closed over your breasts, lining up the buttons until they kiss the soft spot beneath your chin, shoes abandoned at the doorstep. You are gifting me this truth: you have left willingly, and all that I am is tucked inside your skin. We rouse the same hour of dawn, with enough time to chase after you. We ready our rifle, the silver gleam of metal the color of your eyes. The rain softens the ground outside, and your tracks are easy to follow. We believe this to be your mishap. You have named us Älskling in every iteration of your hunt and come into our houses invited. Into the red-paint wooden one with the apple trees, the one with broken windows, the stable where we slept on the hay, the yellow cottage by the brook with nothing but a bronze kettle in the kitchen. You appear in the yard, or outside the window with a knock, or by the maypole in your summer dress, or in the rain with your hair …

Boyfriend writhes around on top of me and gazes hungrily into my eyes. He exclaims that he loves me and life is amazing and this feels so great. I do not respond. I am traveling back in time, returning to the church where I first saw Him. The height of summer, and yet I wear my small patent leather shoes and my woven white tights. I stand at the bottom of the basement stairwell, and my sweaty little hands rattle a doorknob. The metal is warm and the gold plating flakes onto my skin. Mother Mary looks down at me from the stained glass in the window, her eyes downcast. Sad Mother Mary. I hear heavy breathing, turn around, and He is behind me. With His strong and capable hands, He turns the knob. We go behind the door. I see flashes: His long brown hair; His critical expression; His slender torso. Movements that amaze and confuse me, illuminated by His glow. It comes from within. After a time incalculable, my hand grips the knob …

I called you Tsubomi when we first met, when spring was young, and the cherry blossoms still clenched their fists. Tsubomi—蕾, a bud, something waiting to bloom. You had a way of standing, arms folded behind your back, as if holding onto a secret. We sat on a stone bench, drinking amazake from paper cups, the warmth pressing against our palms. When you handed me my cup, your fingers trembled slightly, and I told myself it was from the wind. I called you Hana in the summer, when the cicadas screamed and the air smelled of wet pavement. Hana—花, flower, something in full bloom. We sat on your balcony, peeling the skin off peaches, the juice slipping down our wrists. You held my chin with two fingers and wiped a drop from my lip. The night was thick, our yukata clinging to the sweat on our backs. I told you, you are so beautiful when you laugh. You said, I laugh the same way every season. In autumn, I called you Kaze, when the persimmons …

Alone she sat alone, surrounded by all the world shouting buy-buy in the by-and-by from the black and white television, the three hundred twenty-nine channels clicking on one by one on, lasting five seconds, four, set on a timer that would occasionally hold for a count of six, then fall back to a three-second pause, so the next cycle, better behaving, would fast catch back up, but it never did. She felt beyond practice of use herself, but grateful redundancy in more than word alone. The blue chimes jim-jammed in the holiday chill due to the window open. The widow from Toledo told herself she admired the hot air. “It tries so hard, itself sweaty e’en indoors, dontcha know,” and Jim poured her another ice-popping fizzy drink. Her tongue was always hot from saved-up chatter. She lived for one. “You don’t have another doctor’s appointment ’til next month, Mama, so the diabetes should be in arrears or at least in check.” He laughed. “A check shall be in the mail!” “How is your di-a-be-tisss, son?” …

“Who are you?’ The gentleman had demanded abruptly. He appeared as though he could have been framed forever with one hand in his suit pocket, a pipe balanced between his lips. Not having expected to be addressed so directly, Kaya looked around, assuming it was a case of a mistaken identity. Looking at him again he asked, “You! Boy! Who are you?” Stumbling on his words he blurted, “I’m Kaya. Who are you?” “I’m the train manager.” He calmly replied. “Why are you sitting in third class then?” “Don’t you know it is rude to ask questions like that! But since you ask, I am hiding from my wife. She wouldn’t dare step foot in a 3rd class carriage, so she’ll never think to look in here. Perhaps she will even assume that I’ve alighted the train at an earlier stop and try to pursue me, or someone like me, through the streets of Kayseri!” He chuckled at the thought. “What do you mean, someone like me?” he gently inquired. “Ah well, aren’t we all …

Life starts with the urge to be swallowed. Then follows the want to pulse, then the need to hurt, to kick to prove our existence. Around the seventh week we grow the most crucial parts of our eyes and by the thirty-ninth – we learn to scream. It’s been plenty of time since I first used my voice and I think my voice box is starting to rust, because I haven’t used it since. Not the way I should anyway. “Hi.” The Jacobite Train rolled straight through my life. Your eyes make me want to be swallowed again; dark like abysses. More stars twinkle in the right one than in the left. It’s hard to differentiate between “Hi.” (with the intention of making an acquaintance) and “Hi.” (with the intention of absolute devotion) when you look at irises like that. So void of colour and yet in the most striking of shades. And then I see all the hypotheticals of us in other lives, right on the greyish whites of your eyes. The one where …

When I see the map of China, for some strange reason, I am reminded of Madeleine de Scudery’s Map of Tenderness. In 1653, this lady drew a map of an imaginary land that represents the path to love. All the place names on De Scudery’s map refer to a mood or an emotion. On the map, there is a lake called The Lake of Indifference. It is certainly Xi Hu, the West Lake, in Hangzhou. This body of water makes the city unique. It seems that nothing can be done without the imposing presence of this lake. Paradoxically, being a constant feature in the city makes it, indeed, indifferent. I walk in the historic area of the city near Nan Shan Lu. It is infested with tourists. There is a mosque of the Hui people and a monument dedicated to printing. In the West, few know that printing was born here before Gutenberg. For a foreigner, except for Beijing, Xi’an, and Lhasa, all Chinese cities, especially the centers, are pretty much the same. Tall skyscrapers, …

Carrie’s mom died at age thirty-six. Her dad when he was thirty-eight. Six to eight years. A red semi blared its horn when Carrie corrected the brief swerve out of her lane. While the semi passed, drenching her windshield in a wake of dirty water, the wipers thumped across the window like a metronome in double time. Or perhaps that was her heart. She gripped the wheel until her slim knuckles resembled vellum stretched over bone. Today was Carrie’s thirtieth birthday. She stole a glance at Jeremy, her oblivious husband, currently muttering the contents of his cue cards in the passenger seat. He was defending his dissertation today, and she wished that was the reason he hadn’t acknowledged her birthday, but it wasn’t. Valentine’s Day had been overlooked too. The fog forming on the inside of the Toyota’s windows didn’t clear with heat or cold, or her harried swipes. Everything but inaction made it worse. It condensed on her neck, in her lungs. She turned off Forbes Avenue and into Pitt’s dreary campus. Jeremy had …

Papa makes peppers and onions. He lets them get brown and slimy before he puts me in. The oil boils me up before I can feel it—not that I can feel it—I can’t feel where I begin and where the peppers and onions end. Papa pulls a wet sniff in through his nostrils like jumbo jet engines with black hairs bushing out. I smell so good, Papa says, I smell so good there in the pan. Papa breaks me up with the wooden paddle. He uses it to swat the fat flies away from my good smell. I leak my juices into the peppers and onions, and everything in the pan is wet. When they took me away, did the wet creep down Papa’s nostrils like jumbo jet engines, and get caught in the black hairs that bush out? Did the wet roll down his spidery red-veined cheeks? After they took Brother last week, I heard Papa in the house, tearing in two. It did not rain that night. Just a cold damp. I laid …

The early morning silence in the gas station is unbearable. It makes even the low hum of the fridge against the back wall feel like a jackhammer on my ears. My eyes glaze over cans of coffee in black and white and every imaginable shade of brown, searching for something to get me through the next ten hours. An unsweetened black cold brew should do the trick. I open the frosty glass door and reach toward the back of the fridge to get the coldest one. Only then do I catch a glimpse of something bright pink screaming for my attention behind the cans. Curious, I push them aside and pull out a bubblegum-colored milk carton. On the front is a drawing of a smiling cat with a milk mustache. It’s a carton of Miyabi Strawberry Milk. I can’t remember the last time I saw one of these at a store. Not since I was a kid, I think. Has it really been that long? I turn the carton over, looking for the expiration date. …

It’s our first holiday together and you’re all excited because we’re about to take off, but you have no idea that I’m holding on to the armrests like I’m holding on to the earth, stuck in a cycle of intrusive thoughts, too afraid to move my body in case I move in the wrong way and trigger a catastrophe. As the plane begins to move, I turn to you and feel a sudden sense of dread rise in the pit of my stomach; the kind of dread I imagine a parent would feel for their child when sensing they were in danger, a dread which my therapist tells me is born out of a love stronger than the love I have for myself. Before it’s too late, I want to capture the feeling of being here with you, existing in the world at the same time. I want to tell you how much I love you, but when you hold my hand in yours and say, don’t worry, everything is going to be okay, there’s …

My first night in Morocco could have been different. Sitting in my riad, alone, I am staring at a fresh soup made from some vegetable I have never heard of. I smile, thinking about the woman I met on the plane. While my eyes are still reflecting those bright colors we don’t have back home, and my ears still echoing with prayers of this alien language, I hope that my stomach does not get upset by the tap water I drank, despite my mother’s multiple warnings. I try the soup, making some noise while eating it, as I remember that’s how it’s done here, and I don’t want to disappoint the locals. Or am I thinking about Japan? In between my slurps I hear a sound, a rhythmical tick tick, like water hitting a metallic surface. I look around, searching for the source of the noise but then I am distracted by the waiter who brings some delicious fried bread, which I garnish with low-quality packaged cheese. Shukriya, I say, although I will learn only …

The yoga studio I go to has a small paved garden at the back. Pinned to a window overlooking the garden, there’s a notice that says they are creating an urban wilderness. The best way to nurture a flourishing ecosystem, it says, is to stand back and let nature take its course. So far the urban wilderness is an empty birdhouse, a patch of nettles and what looks like a rotting Christmas tree. I joke that I’ve had the same philosophy with my garden for years. My instructor does not find this funny. She shakes her head like I’ve misunderstood something important, like she’s disappointed, like there’s no point even trying to explain something profound to someone like me. I feel her disapproval for months. She whispers gentle encouragements to everyone in the class but me. She praises someone’s Flying Pidgeon that is clearly nowhere near as good as mine. She walks past my mat with heavy feet, correcting my posture by prodding my shoulders a bit too hard. Sometimes I have problems with online …

My very first memory – I was three or four. My mother’s girandole earrings (I later learned it was pronounced “jeer-an-dou-lee”), with three green stones dangling at the bottom, the centerpiece slightly lower than the other two. Not Swarovski, but Jablonex, mass-produced behind the Iron Curtain in the neighboring Czech Republic. All year round, Mom kept them locked in a box wrapped in a handkerchief smelling of “Pani Walewska,” a fragrance sold in ultramarine bottles for 5 zloty (also the price of a Shane Nuss chocolate on the black market). She wore them only for New Year’s Eve parties. Dressed in a brocade gown trimmed with lace, with Mary Quant makeup applied to the eyelids but with her nails bitten to the quick, she let me hold them for a few moments before vanishing with a puff of an oh-so-delicate scent like a Communist-era Cinderella. No pumpkin carriage with horse-mice was waiting for her, but an Ikarus bus provided by the steelworks where she worked. The second – the age of unreason. I was six. …

“I know you know a lot of musicians,” he says out of nowhere as we’re hugging goodbye. “But I want to sing at your funeral.” 

He’s strangely insistent and repeats himself twice.

 Oh, good god, I think. Because while I’m quite ill, my death isn’t imminent, he hasn’t sung professionally in decades, and he’s getting worse—now he’ll even make my last hurrah about himself. 

 I want an alternate reality, a better one, where he’s just the kind guy who’s my close friend and not somehow this stranger, as well. 

But his moods keep pivoting faster than a cheetah on Dexedrine and his fits of grandiosity are ballooning like a Macy’s parade float gone rogue. 

Later that night he sends a 15 paragraph email comparing himself to Bob Dylan. 

I reply, “I love you, but you need some fucking help.” 
 I sleep for a little while and wake up at 3:00am exhausted. 

I know he’ll ignore me again. 

In the morning I wake to a 20 paragraph email in which he’s now both Placido …

Sending you a prayer all the way from a memory of lovers on a beach in the middle of the Pacific waiting for the sun to fall, waiting for sea levels to rise. There is a bar in Kihei on that same Pacific island where we eat fried food with the burnouts and alcoholics. Drink a cocktail. Have some fun. Sending you a prayer from my backyard in Albany, CA. How is the weather in Amsterdam? How late does it stay light outside in the summer? Where have all the people gone? Do you go to Bruges the way that I want to go to Bruges? Does Colin Farrel’s ghost wander the streets? I pray for you while I walk the canals with the boats’ low grumbling across the water. The very small wakes they leave rippling behind them. The tall Dutch men, the blonde Dutch women. They drink icy riesling by the bottle. Oh how I’d love a glass of icy riesling from the bottle with you in a boat while we gently motor …

Your father died an hour before you were born. There was a lot of screaming that day. Your mother, air hissing through her clenched teeth and hands grasping at empty air, pushing while surrounded by white walls and the bitter smell of antiseptic. Garbled words of a foreign language grabbed her by the cheeks and shook her. There was no familiarity in this cold hospital. No family waiting outside for her. Only two nurses and a supervising doctor clad in white who watched through deep set eyes as she struggled. She was only twenty, and the stack of her two decades seemed pitiful in the grand scheme of things. Four miles away, your father’s car sped through a red light. It was promptly t-boned by a semi and flipped twice in a blinding arc of light and screeching metal that momentarily lit up the night. Stained pieces of baby blankets, a stuffed bunny, and his body were among the things scraped off the cold concrete. Later, your mother told you his death registered as a …

They sprint up the dusty stairs. Nestle their bodies into a damp bed where he strokes the mole on her left hip as she kisses his YOLO tattoo. Soothing familiarity. After twenty-seven years they love each other just as much as they love their spouses, but not more. Not yet. Julia McNamara is a working-class writer and poet from the wilds of rural Cork in Southern Ireland. She received her MA in Creative Writing from the University of Limerick and is exceptionally skilled in the ancient Japanese art of Tsundoku.

Counting photos, I have three or four. First, a picture of sea stars, purple and glistening, then a field of flowers—both of which I’ve framed. Then, there’s the same family pose: just our heads, mine barely in view, my son and husband making faces, and they wonder why I never frame it or place it on my desk at work—why they’ve been replaced by sea stars and a lone flamingo at the zoo. “Can we please try?” I beg, but the effort is just the same. Strangers have offered to take our pictures on vacation, but a stranger’s gaze will always be a stranger’s gaze: temporary generosity, the lighting off, a blurred line, my hair whipped into a frenzy, the stain I didn’t know was on my shirt. But then, I’d heard that families were snapping photos on the ferry, timed just right with an orca pod, down the strait at around 8 a.m. on Sunday, so I booked a trip. Melvin, my husband, and Ross, my son, wander about, looking for tater tots or …