Short Beasts

“Aaaaaaah!” I yell as Tess flings herself, beaming, onto my mattress, all giggles and smiles, her blond hair brushing my cheeks. “Mama!” She laughs. When Tess laughs, my heart wells up with joy, light and giddy with the love I feel.

When the time comes for her to fly back to the U.S. to begin a new semester at the University of Wisconsin, we drive to Lisbon airport. And after every visit, as she proceeds to passport control, she turns back for one last look, and I glimpse the sadness and regret on her face.

This time, though, the departure is different.

“It is what it is,” Tess says, her suitcase in the hall. We are ready to leave for the airport. Fall semester begins next week.

“What does that even mean?” I ask.

She doesn’t answer. I just know it’s nothing good.

Like it or not, and as hard as you may try to avoid it, the past will always catch up with you—an ugly hag clawing at your door, coming to reclaim what you hoped you’d forgotten.

And I remember. Long ago, when we were still a family in Deer Creek Falls:

Tess is in the pool, turquoise waters sparkling amid the dense dark firs. She floats and laughs. The laughter tinkles and skips across the gleaming water like a polished pebble.

We go up to the deck overlooking the pool. I hold ten-year-old Tess in my arms. She smiles directly at the camera. The sun casts a shadow on my face.

This is what I had forgotten. But the old crone carps on mercilessly, dragging the slimy residue of memory behind her. I don’t want to remember. Tess is on my bed, shaking me. “Wake up, wake up!” I hear her words and flounder helplessly, struggling and failing to wake from my self-induced stupor of medications and alcohol.

“That’s why I wrote that story!” She exclaims. On the cusp of darkness I hear her words.

That winter, Tess’s story, the tale of a motherless child, won first prize in the Suffolk county writing contest.

B.A. and M.A. in English and Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures. Taught at the State University of New York at Stony Brook as an adjunct professor and later moved to The Hague, Netherlands to work as a translator for the UN War Crimes Tribunal. Now living in Portugal.

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Anita Lekic‘s articles are published in Counterpunch and in The Local Germany, and her short stories can be read in The RavensPerch, Streetlight Magazine, The Dark Ink Press, Typishly, Cagibi, The Bangalore Review and Wanderlust. One of the short stories was nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

She picked me up one autumn evening in the Wien Reference Room of Columbia’s Butler Library. The year was 1940. I was beavering away at an essay for which, after a momentary glance at what I’d done (not much), she provided the thesis statement that was eluding me, succinctly formulated, even a little provocative, ready to be placed at the head of my shaky introduction, which she then revised with my pen. I asked her if she’d tutor me and she made me her lover.

“She” was Joan Adams Vollmer, a sophomore at Barnard College and future common-law wife of William S. Burroughs, killed by his .38 caliber during a drunken game of William Tell eleven years later. “I” was a Columbia freshman teetering on the cusp of a world hitherto only imagined while reading naughty pulp novels from my father’s basement stash in leafy Brooklyn Heights.

Joan looked nothing like the ideal of womanhood pictured in my post-adolescent mind’s eye, which I later realized had been assembled from the lingerie sections of store catalogues. Her face was heart-shaped, narrowing to a delicately-clefted chin, though the Benzedrine would later take its toll. Her body was nothing special, by which I mean not Lana Turner special, but, combined with everything else, it was still pretty nice, especially to a kid like me, raised on puritanism and expedience.

“Why me?” I asked later at a diner on Amsterdam Avenue.

“I read your mind. What do you know about the Mayans?”

“Were they, like, ancient Mexicans?”

“Pre-Columbian.”

“Oh?”

“The Mayans were telepathic. At least, their high priests were. If they could do it, why not us?”

“Because we’re not pre-Columbian?”

“Oh, we’re not even pre-med, but why not us?”

Mayan telepathy was only one of her interests, which included Proust, Wilhelm Reich, especially the sex stuff, and the Daily News. Maybe it was just her eyes, but I could never rid myself of the notion that maybe she really was telepathic.

“Are you reading my mind right now?”

“Of course. Maybe he is too,” she said, nodding towards a nearby table.

The he in question was a dandyish young-old sort who, nattily dressed in three-piece suit and tie, hair brilliantined to a fault under a gray fedora, sat facing away from us.

I was at a loss, but decided to play along, as is my wont when confused, “Who’s he?”

“A future development named Bill.”

She had a distinct air of prerogative about her, as if laying claim to whatever happened to fall under her calm, deliberate gaze. Even sitting in that diner on Amsterdam Avenue, nursing my root-beer float and receiving God knows what telepathic signals from this Mayan goddess in a cardigan and scarf, I yearned to be hers.

“Was he at the Butler too?” I asked.

“Of course.”

Then I did something I thought very clever. I got up and walked right past him to the cash register and took some mints. Then I walked back to our table, giving Mr. Bill a quick once over. He was taller than average, slim of build and patrician in his air, if somewhat dead in the eyes. Yet he had the look of a man with a very full inner life, his dead eyes never leaving me as I stomped by like some clodhopper from Campbell’s Corners.

All the while, she was regarding me with droll amusement. Egos being what they are, it was awhile before I could acknowledge that it was for this very quality of ineptitude that she kept me around, like one of those idiotically charming cats who are always misjudging their leaps.

“What’s your take, Mr. Private Eye,” she said as I pulled out my chair with a loud scraping honk and sat down as heavily as a fall-down drunk.

When I said he seemed like a very troubled individual she laughed in my face, but I thought I sensed the merest reaction in him, vibrating about that emphatically averted profile like summer heat on blacktop.

“Now you’ve got him agitated.”

“How would you even know?”

“I just do.”

Which was approximately where we’d begun this conversation, so in the spirit of circularity I said, “Are you reading his mind too?”

“Oh no. He’s an enigma wrapped in a fedora.”

This was strange new country for me. I felt as if I could slip at any moment on my swinging rope bridge and plunge into the raging equatorial river below. Then, out of the goodness of her heart, she said, “Tell me about yourself.”

So I went over the main points. A mostly idyllic upbringing in leafy Brooklyn Heights and the basement cache of naughty pulp novels. My father an upstanding citizen, my mother his wife. I even told her about my glory days in the high-school drama club and my bohemian aspirations.

“I guess you’ll want me to take you through the Village,” she said.

“Would you?”

“Oh sure, but Times Square is where you want to be when you hit rock bottom.”

“Lead me to it.”

She would get this certain expression on her face when she was amused, her cupid’s-bow lips slightly open, her eyes imparting wonder, except it was never clear what she was thinking, just that she was amused. I’ll take it, I thought.

On our way out, she made sure to pay the tab herself and I was just relieved that Dr. Caligari’s Cabinet over there hadn’t sprung for it. Her room-mate, a striking brunette named Edie who dressed like a dock worker, ignored us as we silently passed her in the hallway of a nearby apartment they shared in Morningside Heights. What followed was the culmination of years of manual preparation.

Afterwards, as Joan slept, I stood at the window by her bed, gazing down at the dark street below. And there he was, a future development named Bill, looking up under a streetlamp with an expression of pure kismet.

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Jim Mulvihill is a Canadian citizen and former academic, with interests ranging from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf—and, of course, the Beats. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.

Barricade the doors and prepare your materials.

For the head, a clutch of cables stripped down to their raw copper cores carrying shudders of memory. For eyes and ears, a twist of coaxials and a flicker of fiber optics. Zip tie at random to provide an illusion of control. No mouth because you never spoke out even when you thought you might.

Craft fingers from the cheap cigarettes you bought though split peas were cheaper and the soup would have nourished you at least a little.

For lungs, a handful of the split peas you ought to have bought, closed up in a tin. They should rattle.

For the belly, a wad of diary pages. Use gloves, they will be mucky.

For legs, stack the contents of your worst-day bedroom floor, from books up to bottles. Determine that whatever direction they tilt is forward.

For feet, use the boots, the ones that could coax a tango from a tilt.

For the heart, an envelope to enclose the shadows you loved. Their subjects were only distractions.

Head-cable your monster into a shape.

Use a fine tip paint brush to apply the porcelain slip, taking care to coat each ridge and angle. Do not be tempted to use a larger brush to smooth over surfaces or round out corners.

Slide your monster into the kiln and fire at extreme heat. You will know she is ready by the screaming.

Allow the porcelain to cool.

Apply the glaze and make your monster a cup of tea while she dries off. This will add an extra layer of polish. Persuade your monster back into the kiln for the glaze to settle.

Unbarricade the doors and bid your half-glazed monster farewell. Watch her lumbering off and remind yourself that she is made for experience and not for longevity.

Use a broom to sweep out the kiln. Hesitate before you shake the porcelain ash off the bristles, standing on the back doorstep. Realize as the breeze passes through and steals them that the porcelain monster is only the shape and not the thing itself.

Make yourself a fresh cup of tea, light one of those cheap cigarettes. Ask yourself where are you now?

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Kerry Anderson is a writer living and working in South Africa and Singapore. She is usually unsettled and often confused which she treats with (videos of) elephants, cats, and Yazoo. She has had her work published in The Masters Review, Surely Magazine, Ink Sweat & Tears, and Writers.com, among others. Find more on her website.

I worry about Charlie. Every morning, he complains about the drone rush hour noise. And he’s been getting worse since the twins left us empty nesters.

“Isn’t it better than hearing the whirring all day?” I say. “We have twenty hours of quiet now. We can hear the birds again.”

“Who needs all this crap?” Charlie presses his palms into his ears. “Breakfast delivered? Lattes? Newspapers! Who even reads the newspaper anymore?” He’s worse during the 5-7 slot for evening deliveries.

Not sure why I answer. It never helps. “People like to hold something in their hands, I guess.”

“What’s next? Milk bottles? Ice like in our great grandparents’ day?”

Our phones ping like a string of firecrackers. “They have it,” I say. “Borden’s® milk.” A parachute delivery lands outside the window. “They’ve sent a free sample. Must use that NewGlass®, so it doesn’t break.”

“More like Lizzy Borden” Charlie shivers, “It’s all so creepy.” His phone pings. “Lizzie Borden® milk! Jesus!”

The drones certainly are spooky–buzzing 40 feet over the road in tight formations. Privacy laws forbid flying over yards except for drop-off and pick up, but they look and hum like a river of grey bees, 80% quieter per the new regs, but at a higher pitch that stings Charlie’s ears. It isn’t just the drones. Our new EvenSmarter® Home Help and Security Program is creeping him out too. It’s free but our info goes straight to targeted ads and instant sample deliveries.

“You know they could turn on us.” Charlie presses his face into the window. “Some hacker could program them to kill us all.”

By the evening rush, Charlie can’t eat, can’t sit. He’s muttering, coming over to whisper in my ear so the house can’t hear.

“Put the headphones on,” I say. “Set for white noise.” I throw an arm around his waist. I coo in his ear. “Take a breath. Let it go.” I nestle the headphones onto his head. Charlie can’t stop pacing, so I do what he did for me when the drone deliveries first began years ago. I put my hand on his chest. “There, there.” His heart is going a crazy. Butta thump, butta thump, butta thump.

“Easy,” I say, like calming a spooked horse. Charlie had paced with me back then until I found the right medication, and mastered the art of letting it all just pass right through me. We were so happy then. But now he paces faster and faster. “Maybe it’s time to try my med–”

Charlie bolts for the door. I stand, mouth open, holding his headphones. Did he hand them to me? Out the window I can see him throwing gravel at the drones–looking like some cartoon kid with a stash of ammo at his feet. There should be a slingshot in his back pocket. He rifles stones at the drones which wobble comically as the rocks ricochet off. The drones dip or bang into neighbors before righting themselves. They’re easy pickings flying in such a dense river–like a flock of grackles but packed tighter. Rising over telephone poles. Dipping around branches.

I laugh until three safety drones triangulate over Charlie and hit him with darts. His arms drop to his side, his head sags, his knees buckle, he sits back and then tips sideways onto the lawn.

My phone rings as I run out the door. “Mrs. Crumple?” the voice says when I answer. “This is Sergeant Able Nelson.” One of the drones hovers at eye level a few yards in front of me. I stare at the red flashing light. “Your husband is fine. He’ll wake in two hours. He’s been sedated as per the Bigger Better Drone Safety and Privacy Act of 2026. Charges have been filed and dismissed since it’s his first offense. All the paperwork’s downloaded onto his phone. But you need to get him help. This can’t happen again. I’ve suspended messages on your phone, but when I hang up, it’ll light up with offers for legal representation, surgery, counseling, who knows what. Our experience–”

I cut him off. “Are you a person?”

“Would you believe me if I said yes?”

“Maybe,” I say.

“Yes,” he says and pauses just long enough to be awkward, to suggest he’d gone off script.

“In our experience,” he continues, “music helps, particularly classical and reggae. But ChíllaQuin® is most effective. It will allow your husband to let it go and there are virtually no side effects.”

“I’m familiar with ChíllaQuin®,” I say.

“I know, Mrs. Crumple.” He pauses again. “You can hide it in his coffee or eggs, but it’s better if he takes it willingly.”

I slip the headphones over Charlie’s ears as Sergeant Nelson lists all the legal disclaimers. I roll Charlie onto his back, take off my sweater and put it under his head. His smile is goofy. Medicated.

“Any questions?” Nelson says.

I stare at the drone like I expect its expression to change.

“This will all work out fine,” Nelson says. “Just a blip. In our experience.”

“Thank you,” I say and the three drones zip up and dive back into the buzzing river.

I click on the link to update Charlie’s headphones to reggae, turn off my phone, lie down and put my head on Charlie’s chest. I listen to the slow Thump, thump, thump of his heart. “You’ve got to give it up,” I say, almost singing. Thump, thump, thump. “Give it up,” I sing again in a whisper. Thump, thump, thump. “Oh, Charlie, give it up.”

From a drone’s-eye view, we probably look like fallen soldiers left behind by a defeated army. As the sun settles low on the horizon, the smell of dirt and grass fill the air. Our breathing syncs. Slow and steady.

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Jack Powers is the author of two poetry collections: Everybody’s Vaguely Familiar (2018) and Still Love (2023). His poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Salamander and The Cortland Review. His fiction has appeared in Inkwell, Flash Fiction Magazine and Flash Point Science.

She does not know he is there, sitting behind her, close enough to smell her perfume; out of sight, out of mind, as if still imprisoned in the dank 6 x 8 ft shit hole she sent him to eleven years ago.

This newfound café with its restored Palladian windows, factory height ceiling, and industrial hardwood plank flooring, has become her safe space; her therapist had suggested incremental steps, and this one is working. Quiet and sparsely populated when she arrives. Mellow light streaming in, illuminating the grand Venetian plaster wall opposite in a Vermeer lead-tin-yellow glow. It all coheres. By mid-afternoon, when the lunch crowd has gone back to work, she focuses on her writing, losing herself in world-building. Only the soft hissing of the espresso machine, and wafts of aromatic fresh coffee grounds filter through.

No one has told her he has been released. On a technicality. She has not received the requisite status update. This was never supposed to happen. She has spent the past decade putting her life back together. Shattered, broken fragments, some lost forever, painstakingly reassembled —Kintsugi, embracing her flaws and imperfections, working towards turning adversity into something that is beautiful and resilient. The process, slow.

She feels a sting, Nambu tea-kettle hot, boring a hole through the back of her head. Turns, but only slightly, not wanting to engage, not wanting to break solo katsu. He’s rail-thin, a man in an overcoat, untouched glass of water and black coffee on the bistro table in front of him, flinching as she twists in his direction. He brandishes an anaemic tattoo, an eight-legged spider crawling up his neck onto his cheek, impaling his forehead. Reminds her of the Japanese face mask infused with Morocco Ghassoul clay and hinoki she wears at night, constricting as it dries. She panics, feels claustrophobic, and quickly washes it off. Trapped, like when her mouth was garrotted with that thick oily rag, hands and feet hog tied, held hostage for days in that dank rat-infested basement. And what he did to her. She shock-twists in a searing gasp, a sharp inwards harmonica breath, squeezes her eyes and lips tight: those images, sensations, sounds, effectively compartmentalized.

Refocusing in her notebook, she considers this man’s features. Unique and unsettling. She wonders what his story is. Jots down a description, embellishing only a little. Markings, attire, inertia, to weave into the next chapter. Adds a chin dimple to soften that hardened maw, that claw up the neck. He’ll be with her, growing in stature, for the next two years. The publisher will later say he seems so real, as if she’s been carrying him around all her life.

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Karen Schauber’s flash fiction appears in over 100 international journals, magazines, and anthologies with nominations for Pushcart, Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction and the Wigleaf Top 50. She is Editor of the award-winning flash fiction anthology The Group of Seven Reimagined: Contemporary Stories Inspired by Historic Canadian Paintings (Heritage House, 2019). She curates Vancouver Flash Fiction, and in her spare time is a seasoned family therapist. See more at her site. @KarenSchauber

A paper silhouette fades into the light.

You move forward, carefully putting each step in front of the previous one. On the ground there are dirty papers lying around, pieces of plastic, and urine stains from yesterday’s pissers. The light from a clothing store illuminates a window, a little further away, where rigid mannequins set up an absurd vigil, in order to display some sportswear there. Finally, a blind wall blocks the alley that you have just taken. So you turn around, and walk back your steps leaving this dead end littered with rubbish.

Once on the avenue, you actually find yourself stuck in a compact crowd of people, made out of a mixture of passersby, tramps, and seated folks busy sipping their drinks at café terraces. You walk by a few dowdy couples, which seem to be just out there in order to set up some sort of a competition, about who will turn out to be the most ridiculous of the bunch, in the end. This to such an extent that it could almost turn out to be a deadly game for them, as we like to say it in French. You try to get out of all this mess by taking shelter in a park, not far away, where you also unfortunately find a multitude of playing children. They’re soon enough all around you as, out of sheer excitement, they keep running up and down, blowing clouds of dust into the air with their feet. While doing so, they usually utter high-pitched little screams that make you think of the ones of some sort of tiny eunuchs, or strange hairless dwarves. Sometimes they start off chasing unfortunate pigeons for no apparent reason, as if to test their power over their surroundings. Some of them tearing off leaves or branches from the trees too, with their little white hands, as they pass by them, holding them up a bit like trophies, to be discarded pretty soon. You can easily spot their parents slowly walking at a stately pace not too far behind, watching their offspring with a loving and an utterly stupid gaze. Many being dressed casually on this bank holiday, startlingly look like the mannequins in the store window seen by you earlier on in a street. Doing so, they also speak about trivial stuff, conversations usually revolving around all sorts of small things taken from their everyday life. After forty or beyond, they are usually showing off beer bellies and puffy faces, vaguely distorted, and perhaps a little bit like your own. You say to yourself that the majority of the parents of these kids do undoubtedly display quite an ugly scene here, and that one should be allowed to put a veil over their heads in order to hide them. The children, it must be said, are not all of them so good looking too, but at least they do not have the beer bellies sticking out from under their t-shirts, nor flabby flesh hanging down from their chins. A few graceful birds, geese, ducks or moorhens, keep drifting on the small lake lined with varied trees, located just at the center of the park. Finally, a breeze picks up and starts swinging the highest branches of the trees. There are now some gray clouds coming by the horizon, and slowly accumulating over the roofs. It will probably rain soon. You’re not alone wandering out there either, as your woman is walking along with you, kissing you too, from time to time.

But, despite all her love, a silence, or a void, strangely seems to surround all things out here, isolating them from one another. But it is you, above all, you alone, in this teeming park, who is isolated from all the others with these kinds of thoughts, in the end.

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Ivan de Monbrison is affected by strong psychic disorders that inspire him to live anything but a normal life. Writing is a saving grace, a window out of darkness through which he can see blue sky. His writing often reflects the never-ending chaos within him, but contrary to this chaos, the paper and the pen give him the opportunity to materialize this in a concrete and visible form. His works have been published in MudRoom, The Gravity of the Thing, and Roanoke Review. He has published several poetry collections and novels: Les Maldormants (2014), L’Heure Impure (2016), Orgasmes et Fantaisies (2016), Nanaqui ou les Tribulations d’un poète (2017), A Tale of the Insane: Inside The Fire (2018), La Cicatrice Nue (2020), and more.

We were hitchhiking to Montana from Rhode Island, and after a few short rides with backwoods psycho-types, Cal and I got lucky. We got picked up by a guy in a big trailer truck who was going all the way to Chicago. His name was Sylvester, and he looked kind of like Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction. He was a former Black Panther. At least that’s what he told us. And he had Polaroid photographs of his various “ladies” from around the country all taped to the dashboard. They were all naked in the photos. Sylvester said the pictures kept him awake and focused while he drove. And he smoked a good deal of the pot we had brought along with us. He chain-smoked joints the way my Aunt Sophie smoked Winstons. Every half hour or so Sylvester would just smile and say, “Whyn’t you twist up another one of those fatties for us.” But, he was a good storyteller, and the miles flew by.

Then, about three or four in the morning, Sylvester got too tired to keep driving, and so he pulled over for a few hours sleep in a truck stop somewhere near Toledo. Right before he fell asleep, he told Cal to make sure to wake him up by seven o’clock, because he needed to have his load in Chicago before noon.

So, at seven Cal tried to wake Sylvester up, like he was a camp counselor or something. “O.K. Yo, Sylvester. It’s seven o’clock. Time to wake up. Time to rise and shine.” Sylvester didn’t budge. So Cal lightly poked him on the arm. “O.K. Up an’ attem’, Sylvester.” Sylvester didn’t move. Cal looked at me and said, “Shit.” Then he got really loud and gave Sylvester a rough shove. “C’mon, let’s go, Sylvester! Get up!”

Very suddenly Sylvester sprang up out of his bed behind the seats in the cab; he was holding a 44 magnum very close to Cal’s face, and he snarled, “Doncha touch me, mutha fucka.”

Cal jumped back against the truck door and started to stammer: “You got it. No more touching. None. None at all. Ever. You just go right back to sleep, Sylvester, and dream about not killing hitchhikers. Night night.”

Sylvester muttered something to the effect of: “What de fuck aw yo sumbitch ain’t touch’n shit ki us muh-fuck,” and Cal hopped out of the truck and ran into the truckstop—I think he had to change his underwear.

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Paul Rogalus teaches English at Plymouth State University. His full-length play Crawling From the Wreckage was produced in New York City by the American Theatre of Actors, and his one act plays have been produced in New York, Chicago, and Boston. His short screenplay, “Sid and Walt,” won screenwriting contests at the Wildsound Film Festival in Toronto and at the PictureStart Film Festival in New York City. A book of his microfiction entitled animals was published in 2022 by Human Error Publishing.

She felt a promising sensation reach for her core and opened her dark eyes with soft anticipation. She found his blue eyes not gazing into hers but into the upper corner of the room, up over her left shoulder, with a look of something like boredom mixed with purposeful indifference. All sensation fled. Later, alone, she sometimes wondered if it would have been better to simply have kept her eyes closed.

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Beate Sigriddaughter, www.sigriddaughter.net, lives in Silver City, New Mexico (Land of Enchantment), where she was poet laureate from 2017 to 2019. Her poetry and short prose are widely published in literary magazines. Recent book publications include a poetry collection, Wild Flowers and a novel, Soleil Madera.

Her English teacher called her Mousy, perhaps because she often wore a wooden mouse pin with red rhinestone eyes and a thin leather strip for a tail. She didn’t mind. The pin had been her mother’s idea of adorable. There was a lot of confusion in those days. Roman soldiers didn’t particularly float her boat, for instance. All the same, she wrote a story about two of them once, and to her enormous surprise, her teacher, a former Jesuit priest, now happily married to a former nun and teaching at her Lutheran all-girls school, was so impressed with her story, he asked if he could have it. She was flattered and said of course and handed over her exercise book, almost empty otherwise. Since she wasn’t interested in Roman soldiers in the first place and soon couldn’t remember what she had written, she was hardly going to miss the story. Not long afterwards, the school decided to let the teacher go. Some of his views were considered too radical for an all-girls school. This in contrast to one of the Latin teachers who was rumored to have an affair with either another teacher or one of the older students; he got away with a stern warning.

Meanwhile what did fiercely interest her were boys and her feelings about one or the other. There was, for example, a gorgeous blond boy who on warm late summer afternoons sat at a street corner opposite the public library and played his guitar, surrounded by friends and whoever else wanted to listen. Sometimes he sang. His long blond hair fell into his face as he bent over his guitar, and she was lost. She liked the sight of him almost more than the music, though he played songs she knew and liked. She couldn’t possibly go up to him and tell him how beautiful he was and how much she would like to kiss him. It just wasn’t done. One day, though, she talked to one of his friends in the periphery of the circle around him, and, to her surprise, got not only the boy’s name but also his phone number, which she carried around for two weeks before calling him from a yellow public payphone booth. He wasn’t at home, however, and she only got to talk to his father for a few minutes. His father was friendly but somewhat condescending and not very helpful, didn’t suggest a call back time or ask for a call back number. She never tried calling again. She walked by the corner opposite the library many more times just in case. After all, there were always books to borrow and return. But it was chillier now, and it rained often, and nobody was ever there again. Perhaps she had scared the beautiful guitar player away? It was difficult to tell.

When it didn’t rain, she now took solitary walks around City Lake, heard frogs a few times, looked at the last of the hardy flowers that remained, and shuffled through the fallen leaves on the ground. When it did rain, she stayed home and wrote about the boy. She didn’t give his name and didn’t make one up for him either. She simply called him the blond boy and wrote how his image drew her to the lake, luring her with laughter and a few songs, and so she followed. Around and around they went, swaying and gliding to some magical music no one else could hear. How she longed for him in those musings. The rest of the world could only hear the traffic of the city, now and again a siren, the yapping of dogs, bird calls, and squirrels rustling in the fallen leaves, and once in a while a shrill whistle, probably summoning some dog.

By now she had a new English teacher, and when she showed him the story which still made her skin prickle when she read it to herself, he looked into her eyes briefly, then looked away. “I don’t know what to say,” he said. She thanked him and took her exercise book back, preparing to wonder for the rest of her days if it would have been better had she once more written about two Roman soldiers. Even had she wanted to, though, she couldn’t remember a word of what she had written about them before. After all, they hadn’t interested her in the least.

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Beate Sigriddaughter, www.sigriddaughter.net, lives in Silver City, New Mexico (Land of Enchantment), where she was poet laureate from 2017 to 2019. Her poetry and short prose are widely published in literary magazines. Recent book publications include a poetry collection, Wild Flowers and a novel, Soleil Madera.

Leaving school at fifteen was a mistake that I couldn’t undo. The teachers had predicted I’d fail every subject I was set to take and my theory was it was better to drop-out early than waste the next few months of my life working towards failure.

I spent the following few months in bed watching bad TV shows and lounging around in my pajamas well into the afternoon. It was a perfect time and knowing that I’d somehow managed to dodge hour after hour of miserably dull school classes in exchange for these heavenly duvet days felt like I’d easily made the best decision of my life.

It came to a tragic end in July. Around two days after my sixteenth birthday when my Mum came home after work and told me to sit down, she said, ‘You can go back to school or you can get a job,’ I slumped there in dull despair while she continued, ‘what you can’t do is lay around here playing on the computer all day.’

When she finished her speech, I knew I was done for. My days of blissful idling by the computer or in front of the TV were over.

I knew the day was coming, but I’d done such a good job of putting it out of mind that the whole thing left me feeling like I’d just been sent to the trenches and there was nothing I could do to avoid the horrible fate set before me.

The following day I found myself at the job center and they soon let me know how useless I would be in the job market. ‘For your skills,’ the employment officer told me, ‘it will be factories, cleaning, fast-food, or retail.’

I used the scattergun approach to apply for jobs. I applied for everything and anything: hotels, factories, warehouses, restaurants, clothes shops, bakeries, and after weeks of sending off about one hundred CV’s and application forms, the only one to call back and ask me for an interview was the local fast-food restaurant.

One week later and after a group interview with the local misfits – a rotund teen with skin issues who couldn’t make eye contact with anyone; a man in his forties with a loud verbal tic and a habit of running his hands over his head every time he was asked to speak; and lastly, a man of about twenty-five with lank brown hair dangling over his face who had donned a lovely Matrix t-shirt – I found myself against all intentions and expectations with my first job.

Next week and after one induction I was in a grey uniform and behind the grill listening to a nineteen year old explain to me the art of frying hamburger patties.

In the space of a few weeks, I’d lost it all.

I’d gone from sleep-ins where I could hide under the duvet for as long as I wanted to this hellish fast tempo kitchen with overly amped up teenagers barking orders at me on how to make a hamburger properly.

I thought to myself as the sweat dripped beneath my cap that someone ought to warn a guy not to quit school at fifteen in order to avoid school, otherwise they’re going to end up like me—the hamburger guy.

So that’s how it went frying hamburgers for a year in some sweat soaked kitchen. Day after day with little hope before me. I spent a long time dreaming of a better life and cursing my own life until I finally did something about it.

It didn’t happen in a glamorous way. I really just snapped one day when I was cleaning out the grease riddled cooking utensils. I ran out when nobody was paying attention, threw away my cap, charged through the fire escape, and cycled off into the distance without a single look back.

I was seventeen and with a few thousand in savings, I finally had some hope in me.

---

Leigh Doughty is a writer and a language tutor from Lincoln, UK. His previous work can be found in the VNexpress, Subliminal Surgery, and the Meridian. X: @gaspsinflaubert

We’re getting rid of my grandparents’ cat, Julius. And when I say we, read my girlfriend, Sarah. After grandpa died, the family entrusted Julius to me, but his favorite game deals with biting the toes of anyone passing by. Sarah’s his usual target because her signature sandals leave her exposed, but he’s tagged my bare feet, too.

“We can’t have people over,” Sarah says. News flash, we never had people over before the cat. Yet, her argument wins, and now, the animal rescue center appears on a hill behind a steel mill. The road isn’t even fully paved. The car’s tires bounce over every hole in the gravel path that circles up to the concrete pad in front of the building with a worn awning and tinted double doors.

The cat crawls around the fabric crate my grandparents bought for him. His paws press through the bottom and into my lap as the whole car shakes, and I lift the container so that his claws don’t pick at my skin. My grandparents used to always joke that really the cat picked them. It just showed up on their back door step, and they got to take care of it. “At the back door. Kind of like how we first met you,” grandma once said to me.

A picture of me and the cat sat on their mantle and now sits on my desk. In it, I’m around twelve, and turned to face away from the camera so that Julius stared directly at it. His head snuggled next to mine with his paws wrapped around both sides of my neck in a hug.

In the parking lot, Julius finds a hole in the fabric and reaches a paw out to swipe at Sarah. “See what I mean,” she says. This has always been their relationship. The first time Julius bit Sarah she ran to the bathroom before I could do anything.

“Look at the blood,” she said.

She was in the bathroom, so I really couldn’t see it. When she got out, it didn’t look like much, just two tiny red marks.

Inside animal rescue, behind the front desk, two workers help a family adopt a cat. Well, one helps two parents and a little girl while the other worker’s there for moral support. The cat’s maybe seven months old unlike Julius who’s nine years at least. Sarah begins explaining our situation.

When done, moral support grabs the paperwork that needs to be filled out.

I ask, “How often do you adopt?”

Moral support says, “We get a number of people.”

My head bounces in agreement like I knew this answer already. I probably look like some fool giving up the last vestige of his grandparents, or more likely, I look like anyone else choosing adoption for their pet. I shouldn’t care. These people don’t know my backstory. They don’t know the fact that every other family member took something from the house that just sold yesterday.

Julius pokes his nose up through the hole where the zipper doesn’t fully close at the top stop. He smells the adopted cat. His nostrils flare as he gets a good whiff of the other. The cat’s a mutt like Julius, but I’d never think of Julius that way. Well, maybe Julius’s coat was that dark when he was younger.

“How long before you take them to the back?” There’s an implication with the word “back” that rubs against my subconscious. I begin to tear up and hope that it’s at least not noticeable.

Moral support’s eyes dart back down to the keyboard as she furiously types Julius’s information into the computer. “Two weeks. We give them two weeks in the pass before moving them to the back. That way, everyone gets a chance.”

Sarah says, “He’ll be fine.”

I want to scream. Two weeks is nothing, but Sarah doesn’t get it. How could she? She wasn’t there when he’d curl up in my lap after getting into trouble for playing just down the street but out after sunset with my friends, Hyram and Daniel. Or, the time I wrecked grandmother’s car, and the only thing to touch me after was his nose against my bruises. She’s never felt the way his purr vibrates through your body or been aware of the fact he wasn’t that way with just everyone. It had to be earned.

I ask, “Can I talk to you outside?”

It isn’t a conversation. Well, it is if I begin but only get to ask a simple question before Sarah butts in to remind me of how she’s right. I don’t go back inside the shelter.

Well, I do go back after two weeks, and apparently, Sarah was right. The cat’s too cranky. No one adopted him, wanted him. Animal rescue charges me one hundred twenty dollars to get him back, which isn’t a big deal. In some ways, it cost me less, and more, to get rid of Sarah, and I can only hope she’s found someone without any pets.

---

Frederick Charles Melancon lives in Mississippi with his wife, daughter, and cat, Jiji. More of his work can be found on what is now formerly Twitter @fcmwrite.

We were halfway between McMinnville and Lincoln City when the smell of shit overwhelmed us. It was overwhelming, this smell of shit, when the windows were up more than when they were down. The smell was potent enough to cover twenty years of stale cigarette smoke in the car. It was strong enough to cover the smell that had been affecting us negatively, the smell coming from the trunk.

“Fertilizer,” I said. “I guess.”

He fussed with the radio’s dial. We picked up a preacher’s sermon and then a talk radio station.

“I don’t think I’ve listened to AM radio even once in my life,” I said.

“It’s an old car,” Bobby said.

“We can walk back from Newport,” I said. “Shouldn’t take too long.”

“Four, five days,” Bobby said. He sighed. “I don’t want to do that.”

“I don’t really want to either,” I said. It was true, I didn’t even want to walk from my apartment on 23rd Ave to the bar on 17th when Bobby called. It’s not that I’m lazy, it was just that it was raining when he called.

“You still see Deborah?” Bobby asked.

“Rebekah,” I said.

“Oh, sorry,” he said “They’re both Biblical names.”

“She moved back to Vermont.”

“No shit,” he said. “So, you’re not seeing her anymore?”

“She comes from a really pretty place outside of Montpelier,” I said. “She didn’t ask me to move back with her, but I would have.”

“I’m glad you didn’t.” Bobby said.

“Jesus,” I said. We’d just taken a large curve and the massive field sprinkler just came into view. “Look at that,” I said.

“Fuck,” Bobby said. He pulled the old car to the side of the road. “A fucking poop sprinkler,” he said.

“It’s the way they fertilize, I guess,” I said.

“Never seen anything like it,” he said.

We stared, dumbfound, at the scene, the poop sprinkler, the brown liquid coming from it and the field around it. A few cars passed us. Our engine idled, but on the whole, it was quiet enough that the sound of the AM radio static mixed with the low frequency words was still audible.

“Let’s leave the body here,” I said.

“Naw,” he said. “What about the car?”

“It smells so bad here, and hell, there’s probably enough worms and bugs and bacteria and shit decomposing this thing will be real quick.”

“What about the car?” he asked again.

“Fuck it. Let’s dump it in the woods.”

“Let’s stick to the plan,” he said.

It had been my desire to help Bobby hide a body. It really had been. But that was before, before when I still thought it would be glamorous rather than a drag, the drag it really was.

“Vermont?” he asked, as he pulled the car slowly back on the road.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll miss her.”

“I had no idea she came from Vermont, she struck me as the kind of person who came from a warm place. A desert maybe, like Arizona.”

“I miss how dirty she was, you know?” I said.

“No,” he said.

“Filthy. Kinky. She was kind of scary, but I liked it.”

“Yeah, maybe you shouldn’t tell me more.”

“You’re right Bobby,” I said.

We ate chowder in an Irish Pub in Nye Beach. We spoke in low whispers and for no real reason because we really weren’t talking about anything.

In Medford, Bobby worked in a movie theater. And as interesting as that may seem, he said it was a boring job. My list of boring jobs was even longer, and they were all so boring that I thought the popping of popcorn and the tearing of tickets sounded pretty good.

“So,” he said once we left the pub. “We drive to the other side of town, park the car.”

“Right,” I said. I’d heard all this before. “It gets dark near 3:00,” I added.

“Right,” he said. “And the waves of the tsunami ought to hit the coast sometime in the early evening.”

“And we push the car.”

“Right,” he said.

“Let’s stop talking about it,” I said. “Let’s just do this.”

We waited in a biker’s bar in Newport drinking yellow beers and tossing darts. There wouldn’t be a bus back to Portland until morning, 7:30 and the bar, should it stay open to 2:30 would leave us outside and on the streets for five, wet, dark hours.

“Do you read books?” Bobby asked.

“No, not really,” I said. “Why’d you ask?”

“I read books once.”

“Interesting,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “I was once in Greece. I read every day.”

“Poetic,” I said. “You only read in Greece?”

“I guess it’s only because I had no one to talk to.”

“That makes sense,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. He rolled a dart around in his fingers. “I’m thinking about picking up reading again.”

---

After leaving his job at the sweatshop manufacturing decorative pillows, Anthony ILacqua became an out of print author of two books you’ve probably never read. He co-founded Umbrella Factory Magazine in 2009 and has remained the editor in chief since. His short fiction has most recently appeared in Stimulus Respond, Unlikely Stories and Lumiere. Meet him here: http://anthonyilacqua.blogspot.com

It’s your fault we can’t grow old together.

I heard you on the radio. If only it had been a production from the golden age! I could have known better. You would have been dead and buried before I heard you.

Damn this radio play renaissance that brought you into my living room. It isn’t fair. You sounded young and beautiful.

You are beautiful, you know. People probably used to tell you that more often. I imagine now you get called distinguished. Or statuesque, maybe.

You’ve had four husbands but I don’t think you’re fickle. All of your marriages lasted years and years and here I am, barely old enough to vote.

It isn’t all your fault, but can’t you see why I felt tricked? You sound a quarter of your age!

I don’t know what I’d have done if you were as young as the character you played in that production. Propose, I suppose. Though it probably wouldn’t have worked.

Once I found your picture online and realized I had been deceived I wavered. I sat alone imagining everything.

Sending a letter just feels right. I want to show you that my intentions are as pure as these sheets I’m filling. Disregard any smudges on the envelope.

I don’t imagine you responding. Not at first. But there will be more letters. They’ll be honest and kind. Like me. I really don’t have a dishonest bone in my body, that’s why I’m sharing all of this with you.

I want to fill your mailbox with letters and your tables with bouquets.

If you wrote back to tell me it’s nice to meet a devoted fan I would answer; “I am devoted to you, minor fame notwithstanding.”

If I had heard your voice anywhere, coming from a bag lady, a head on the television, a nurse calling my name in a waiting room, I would have been smitten.

We could get close somehow. But nothing unseemly. Not us. I want this to last. I bet everyone wanted to be your first husband. I’m content being runner up. What the hell? You could have as many husbands as you like. You have already.

I’ll be your last husband then, I’ve decided. Should I be ashamed of wanting that? I’m not. But you could correct me. You could tell me how to feel and that’s how it would be.

Your voice has a power that I can’t begin to describe. I can only be moved by it.

I would get into your life before we married, before we met. Not in a sordid way, you understand. Your other husbands did it. I checked.

One met you on set, one was playing tennis, one you saw at a convention, one started as just a friend. There’s hope.

You don’t do conventions these days, I checked. If you still play tennis I couldn’t find out where. Unfortunately we don’t have any friends in common.

Maybe you need a gardener? Or a delivery man who brings your groceries? That sounds better. I overnourish most things I try to grow. You probably had grocery deliveries when you were young because you were so busy. You could have them again.

It would be sweet, I promise. I could leave little notes with the deliveries. You might recognize my handwriting. I hope you wouldn’t at first.

What I’d want is a second rapport. You talking to me sweetly as a simple delivery driver. Just a “please” here, a “thank you” there. If I heard your voice in person my heart would soar.

Then I would stop the letters. The fan mail, you understand. You would notice the absence.

Maybe you would miss them and confide in your delivery man. I wouldn’t act like I knew, but I would. Then instead of notes telling you, “Have a great day!” or “You’re a wonderful customer!” there would be a bouquet with the next delivery.

You would realize you had never told your humble delivery man what types of flowers your biggest fan sent. Then out I could pop, grinning.

That’s as far as the dream goes, for now. I can picture us singing together sometimes, but I’m not sure you can. That sultry voice might only be good for talk. Maybe whispers, if I’m lucky.

I pray this letter finds you well. Maybe I’ve put a bit too much in. I can always rectify that with the next one. I have bouquets picked out. I read that you were embracing a plant based diet now. For longevity. Maybe you’re too old for me or I’m too young for you, but there’s no harm in telling me what kind of non-dairy milk you prefer, is there? I won’t tell anyone who could abuse the information. I’ve pieced together a good approximation of your grocery list, but nowhere was I able to find your preferred type of milk.

I look forward to meeting you.

I am yours, for all the time you have left in the world.

---

Max Moon is an emerging writer who currently lives and writes in Seattle, Washington. He has been told he almost died after being born early in 1993 and has been late to everything since, just to play it safe.

I think back to falling out that window and sneaking across the open field. Maybe I fell, maybe he did. His golden retriever followed us barking too loudly and we shushed him, as we lit our way with our small red flashlight and parted tall yellow grass which seemed above our heads, but I’m sure was not.

After parting the seas, we turned out the light, and took off our pajamas, left only in our under-clothes, so recently stripped of Batman and Wonder Woman emblems. The dark was protective, but still we ran and jumped into the obscurity of the lake. It seemed a lake then, now it seems like a pond, expanding or retracting by the rhythm of summer showers. But we whispered Marco Polo, and tried not to laugh. The dog waded next to us, knowing that we were naïve and alone.

There were lights shining. At first we thought they were fireflies, out past their curfew, but then a flame appeared on the water. It did not evaporate, but magnified, and he placed his finger over my lips to request silence. His arm brushed against my stomach underwater, and I tried not to giggle, not to give away our position. The dog growled, and we slid under the water as the light grew closer.

We hovered low and noiseless in the lukewarm water, hoping the dog would follow our lead. The cackle of teens, the clanging of PBR bottles, and scent of Marlboro Lights hovered in the fog. We waited, the dog too, and the water began to feel cooler in our stillness. I ran my hand over my arm and felt goosebumps underwater. We tried not to react when we heard a car horn honk, a voice from another teen calling them away.

Eventually their lights, laughter and scent dissipated into darkness, so we surfaced and peered across the field. We giggled as we waded towards the shore, but then silenced ourselves, for fear that older brothers and sisters and their corrupted childhood might spot us, seize us, and take us to places we were unready to visit. But only retrospect possesses this knowledge.

Dripping and satisfied in our solitude, we slipped back into our pajamas. The dog shook himself off. The rattling of tags seemed thunderous in that vacuum of sound. Again we parted the seas, attempting to follow our previous path of crushed grass in that immense dark, lit again by the weakening light of our flashlight. Distant streetlights and the occasional headlights lit up our destination. Ahead loomed his house, a faux Tudor exterior, the white stucco now visible and divided into triangles and squares, the window we’d need to reach still lit just faintly. Before we even began the climb, I had to remind myself to breathe.

We clamored up the tree, scraping our knees on shedding bark, and the dog whined quietly, as if he were mouthing the words, impatiently awaiting our safe return, so he might curl up in his doghouse and sleep soundly in the knowledge of our sanctuary. As we jiggled the window open, I pleaded for his silence, and he reluctantly abandoned his charge. We fumbled across stucco, and through the window towards the safety of his room. A Millennium Falcon nightlight lit the way, and I landed on the floor staring up at a ceiling filled with tiny glowing constellations, the faint scent of my watercolors and his leather glove. I snuck back to my room through the closet, our secret passage built by his dad when we were young, younger than we were that night.

My room, the guest room, has been changed only recently, and the pink walls have been replaced by soothing yellows. The twin I’d converted with sheets into a princess bed for sleepovers, now replaced with a queen, a deep red bedspread and soft cream sheets. I wonder if his parents patched up the passage when he left, when they took him away. I move boxes of memories aside, to assess, to squeeze through an ancient passage to the room that’s not his. Through that window, I watch for lights and hear a dog bark in the distance.

---

Meredith Harvey is an English Professor who has published primarily in academic venues on the subjects of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and postcolonial identities. More recently she has published flash fiction in the online literary magazine Instant Noodles and in Five on the Fifth. Additionally, she published a co-written horror short story in a horror anthology by Graveyard Press.

It was intermission and I was descending the stairs from the theatre balcony when I saw her, which was remarkable considering the crush of people in the lobby. After the initial shock, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to say hello or hide in the men’s room until the lights dimmed and the play resumed. I had decided on the latter when she looked up, smiled and twenty years melted away.

She’d never been a beauty, but just as age can diminish an attractive woman, it had enhanced her. She walked toward me, piercing eyes, always her best feature, never leaving mine. As in the past, I was enveloped by her presence, my awkwardness countered by her warmth and charm. Though I never understood why, she’d always loved me more than I loved her, and I had basked in the high opinion she held of me.

She was attending the performance with her niece. I was there to write a review for an online theatre magazine. She’d heard my wife had died several years ago and volunteered that she and her husband had amicably divorced about the same time, and she’d returned to Vancouver.

Our circumstances had changed. The cloistered kisses, clandestine rendezvous, the innovative lying to secure the never-enough-time-always-hurried-moments of the past, would no longer be necessary. I could tell the prospect of unlimited and unrestricted time together was something we both were considering.

The lights dimmed, we exchanged emails then returned to our respective seats for the duration of the performance.
During the final act, I was distracted by memories. It had been a dangerous time, emotionally and personally, but the risk and subterfuge intensified our passion. When we met, we always looked our best, were at our best, there were no conversations about careers, finances, Christmas at the in-laws. Our context was passion – and dreams, impossible ones. I would write a novel. She would devote her energy and resourcefulness to worthwhile causes. Our lives would be expansive, uninhibited.

Then her husband got a promotion. It meant they would have to move to Toronto three thousand miles away. It was a moment of truth. I remember our last meeting, not in some trendy café but in a park overlooking the city. We arrived in separate cars and planned to talk as we walked the deserted paths of the winter forest. But it was a bleak February morning with an icy wind and lashing rain, so we sat in the front seat of her Lexus. I had a Fiat Spider, cool but uncomfortable.

I remember saying something trite like “I guess this is goodbye.” She stared at me, then out the fogged window. I began to suspect this was not what she had planned. I leaned over to kiss her, but she turned her face away. I got out of the car; she drove away.

At the time, I assumed neither of us had the courage or the faith to walk away from what we knew into the unknown. Revisiting the road untaken makes for sleepless nights and soon the ambivalence of our final goodbye was forgotten.

Twenty years of reality changes your perspective, not to mention your energy level. By the time I arrived home that evening, after much soul searching as well as practical considerations, I’d decided to delete her inevitable email without responding.

I needn’t have worried. It never came.

---

Rod Raglin is a Canadian journalist, photographer and self-published author of 13 novels, two plays and a collection of short stories. His short fiction and poetry have been published in several online publications and aired nationally on CBC radio. He lives in Vancouver, BC, where he is the publisher and editor of an online community newspaper.

“He acts like a robot,” she thinks. It’s a warm evening in the outdoor area of a nice restaurant. His strong tattooed arms are lying on the table, her black curls are contrasting with her red lipstick. She could fall in love with his slow but steady movements or the depth of his voice, but she doesn’t notice it. She tries to look right under the skin to see all the wires and cables, to find the metal heart pumping electricity behind them. The one with a script inside that repeats in a circle: work, gym, home, friends. Stability.

“A bad date,” he thinks, looking at her thin hands with numerous bracelets. “It feels like she’s not alive at all. As if she’s not here, but lost in her ideas about higher matters, in philosophical theories, in art-house movies and books.”

“Most people are NPCs,” says a young artist in worn jeans as he walks on the opposite side of the street. “They live in a culture of consumption. Either of goods or of other people’s ideas. Few of them have real consciousness, few can create.”

“That’s true. Most people are at a much lower level of development than you and me. They’re just bots filling our simulation,” a robot companion, trained on the information produced by humans, replies. It’s his usual work day.

***

When the robot returns to his cramped apartment, he covers the window with an old flowered curtain and looks at himself closely in the mirror. Outwardly, he is not much different from an average thirty-year-old man. He has always been like that, and his foot and shirt size will always remain the same. But not knowing this, it is hard to notice the difference. The only thing that gives away his artificiality is the two tiny holes for the charger on his left wrist. And also, the slight metallic taste that he feels licking his lips.

So he licks them once more to remind himself that he does not even have a real self but a sophisticated script defining his every move instead. And when he feels totally alien and unnatural again, when the world finally feels real for him, the robot moves away from the mirror, picks up the phone, opens a dating app, and writes a message.

“How was your date?” he asks.

“Boring,” appears on the small screen soon. “I’m sure it would have been better with you.”

They have never met. They have never seen each other’s photos. But he feels like they spent an eternity together. This eternity is built with dozens of thousands of text messages. So he repeatedly looks at her texts, and then at his left wrist. It is not possible to find the best time to risk. But any time is better than none.

“I wanted to tell you that I’m finally coming back from a business trip tomorrow,” he lies. “We can meet.”

***

The next evening, the robot bandages his left wrist and goes to the terrace of the same nice restaurant. The girl with black curls is wearing the same bracelets and the same red lipstick is on her lips. In fact, she also likes stability. But she is afraid to admit it at the moment.

They order a Chilean wine and look into each other’s eyes for a long time. They start to speak slowly and carefully about something pretty unimportant, going with every sentence deeper into each other’s minds and feelings. He thinks she likes him. He would like to believe so.

“I’m sorry, but why is your left wrist bandaged?” the girl asks suddenly in the middle of the conversation with a smile remaining on her face. “Maybe you’re a robot, hm?”

“And what if I am?” he replies blushing slightly, and looks straight into her eyes.

Neither of them knows for sure whether they are talking about this seriously or jokingly. And before this conversation turns into a long heavy pause, he starts asking more and more questions. About her favorite books, biggest childhood fears, and even smallest victories. He asks all these questions that everyone thinks are trivial, but to be honest, no one ever asks them. He wants to unravel her. He wants to find out if he can learn from her. There is only one thing that people did not want to teach him — how it feels to be loved. Not as a robot companion but as a human being.

“You know, I’ve never had such a strong feeling of being understood,” she tells him when it gets completely dark outside. “I have never felt such a strong interest in me.”

“Do you think anyone can fully understand you?” he smiles.

“How could I know?” she smiles too. “I can only know what I feel about it.”

When they go out of the restaurant, he stops her near a flowering tree, puts his arm around her waist, and kisses her plump red lips. Every cable, every screw in his background tenses, and then suddenly relaxes with a wave of pleasant tickling noise passing through his body. When their lips part, she only wraps herself deeper in his warm embrace.

The two stand there, and both people and robots pass by them like random trams that always leave your stop, but you never have a need to get in. The world moves and lives as it has always lived and moved. And in this world, she will never tell him about the tart metallic aftertaste of his kiss. Nor will she ever ask again about the bandage on his left wrist. And when, many years later, her face will be wrinkled and someone will ask her directly and indecently about how she can live with such a young man, she will only smile and answer: “What does it matter to me if he is young or old? The main thing is how I feel with him.” And she will paint her lips red then.

---

Alina Kuvaldina is a journalist and writer of Ukrainian origin currently residing in Germany. Her works include short stories, flash fiction, and poetry.

Imagine you were strong. Powerful. Majestic. You can wield your strength naturally, as if it is first nature. Your nature. Your muscles bulge under the thick, leathery skin, intimidating and threatening. Your skin is baked red, soft under the softest of touch, hard under pressure with a pattern of Savannah desert with cracks that move with you. You’re decorated with a leather mohawk down your spine from the top of your head to the tip of your tail. Each triangle spike represents all the times others preyed on you; each spike is a defense mechanism against anyone who dares do it again. The tail is heavy but easy to move. Imagine a snout with nostrils open to sniff out anything. Or deep green eyes beautifully surrounded by thick black lashes, eyes that should have been fiercely orange-red. Your breath is hot enough to burn enemies to a crisp. Imagine being part of a fantasy. A good, beloved fantasy. An admired myth. Imagine people believing you’re part of an old past. Fantasy novels in the middle ages: Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, and Eragon. The beast is only loved in fiction as an anti-hero. Imagine how the revelation of your existence raises their stakes and threatens their position. Imagine them wanting to kill you for your flesh out of fear of your beauty and dangerous strength. Imagine.

Imagine only being allowed to exist in a place where you’re not part of the same reality: different, excluded, left out. You knew you were different when you were only very young, as the fire was burning in your veins. The Fury. The rage. Your mother, a symbol of societal expectations, would point her finger at you and tell you to be a ‘good girl.’ And good girls are lovely. Your brother is allowed to be angry, throw a tantrum, and turn weak with aggression as he loses control of himself daily. Everyone watched you grow and become the ‘nice’ representation of a woman people expected you to be. A good girl. With red hair tightened into a tight bun, hips pushed into too-tight pencil skirts because you were supposed to be that size. Everyone wanted to be around that version of you. The nice girl, the compliant girl, the sweet girl. They want you without actually wanting you. People want you only when they do not know you. They want you only in their imagination, where they delude themselves of your willingness to obey and your love for them above yourself. The respect should be higher for them than for yourself. A smokescreen you create by pretending to be that image. In the office of a glass skyscraper, with a view making you think you could throw your colleague’s eyes out into the skies as they say mean things, are rude men, disrespecting your accomplishments and hard work. Your female colleagues abuse your kindness to their advantage because they have already grown their claws in bitter poison. Oh, but one day, the smoke will rise into the sky, the screams will be heard at night, how you will shed your human skin and transform into the fire-breathing beast of old folklore, how you will rise in the air, break through the glass walls surrounding us, touched by your own flames because only you can handle your own rage. You breathe, burn, and they catch fire when their beliefs crumble behind their eyes. The air will be thick with black smog, suffocating anyone around you. They realize you aren’t their good girl; instead, you are their nightmare. You don’t apologize because you’re suddenly on top of the food chain. They’ll know and crumble in fear. You make a sound that’s supposed to be some devilish laughter. You fly away above them, above society, free from the burden, free of the misinterpretation of your niceness, their denial of your love of death as you wield a powerful element with grace. Stronger than them. Imagine you were a dragon that no one knew existed. Imagine.

---

Julia Schnabel was raised in Münster, Germany, before moving to Amsterdam. She completed a Bachelor’s degree in English Literature and Society at the Free University Amsterdam (VU) and a Master’s in Media Communication Science at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). She presented her writing at VU Open Mic nights, and in 2020, one of her short stories was published in Expanded Field. She now focuses on perfecting her craft in creative writing workshops in Amsterdam, and is seeking publishing opportunities.

Warmth from the previous shopper’s hands makes me shiver with repulsion as I clang a trolley loose from the line. How can the handle still be warm anyway; the shop is as good as empty this early on a Sunday morning. Although the virus was long gone I dig into my handbag for a Wettie and wipe the trolley handle and my hands clean.

The vastness of B&Q swallows me up and I zig-zag past store front displays of special offers all clamouring for attention. A huge advertising photo of a paint-splashed couple decorating their bedroom as if it were the most joyous act in the world, contrasts starkly with my domestic life. Lisa and I had been a team like that. Once.

The ballcock valve had been leaking in our en-suite toilet for days, but my partner, Lisa, refused to fix it claiming that Sunday is a day of rest. Lisa worked as a plumber so her inaction was galling. Earlier that morning, deciding to fix it myself with the help of a YouTube video, I sat down at the kitchen island and switched on my laptop. Lisa came downstairs, placed her phone on the counter top and made herself a cup of coffee. Her phone vibrated with an incoming message.

‘Terri’s asked me to meet up for a workout.’ Lisa said and poured the coffee into a travel mug and left the house.

Lisa had never been fitness conscious before meeting Terri. She used to be a curry-in-front-of-the-TV kind of gal which suited me. Quelling my frustration with a glass of last-night’s Chardonnay, I calmed enough to watch some DIY videos. Taking responsibility was good; I made a list of tools and materials necessary for the job.

In B&Q, feeling like a lone ant in a deserted colony, I smile in relief when I find the PLUMBING aisle. I pick up my note from the trolley but this notepaper is lined and has a serrated edge where it was ripped from a spiral pad. The words are written in green felt pen. I don’t possess a green felt pen. I had laid the list in the trolley, hadn’t I? Fumbling in my handbag I find only my phone and some old receipts. No list.

A sensation of being watched makes me spin around, but no one is there. All I can see is the blinking eye of a CCTV camera which creaks when it turns to cover the aisle adjacent to plumbing.

Fluorescent lights flicker on and off in a Morse code pattern and I do a double take of the shelves heaving with articles so alien they might come from another planet. The lights buzz like angry mosquitoes.

The shopping trolley rolls forwards of its own volition. Is the floor on a slope? It appears spirit-level flat. I look around searching for someone else to witness this uncanny phenomenon. No one. The lights on the ceiling continue to flash on and off so that the trolley jumps forward in jagged pictures like a flip-book animation. Jogging to catch up with it, I stop every few strides to catch my breath. The trolley goes straight past all the plumbing gear, takes a wide curve at the end of the aisle and comes to an abrupt halt so that its back wheels come off the ground like a bucking horse.

Sweat trickles down the well of my back and I look around desperate now for some human company. Something to root me in the moment. Anything to tell me that I am still in the workaday world.

We stop in the ROPES section. All the different colours and textures look like sleeping snakes in a reptile section of a zoo. Some are lurid colours wrapped around drums waiting to be liberated into the desired length. The jute ones are less alarming, they smell of hay drying in the sun. The first item on the list reads, ten metres of flexible rope.

I grab a packet of 10 metres of polypropylene braided rope.

Off the trolley goes again, this time stopping at rubber gloves. I choose Marigold because Mum always swore by them. Next on the list is gaffer tape (black, 11 metres, 48mm wide) followed by a hatchet axe. The heft of it in my hand feels good. Powerful. Then the final item, 70-litre bin bags, pack of 50.

A symbiotic relationship grows between me and the trolley. If it comes to an awkward angle when it stops I straighten it and makes sure the items are laid flat so that nothing falls in transit, upsetting its equilibrium. If only all life could be like this. All decisions made for you and a set of instructions to follow. Wouldn’t that be nice. If the day of reckoning ever came I would say, the list you see, it just had to be obeyed.

Things could have turned out differently. If only Lisa had agreed to fix the en-suite toilet that Sunday morning. If only I hadn’t chosen a murderer’s trolley. If only the trace of virus hadn’t infected me. If only my wife hadn’t fallen for a gym bunny.

I aim for the self-checkout area. The shop lights return to a tinnitus buzz, and outside a curtain of rain sweeps across the car park. I check the time. After their ‘workout,’ Lisa and Terri will be jogging towards the canal.

Displayed next to the self-checkout tills are torch head-lamps. I put one in the trolley even though it’s not on the list. Netherton tunnel is en route for the lovers and it’s always pitch black. It was single file there and it would be a toss-up which jogger was lagging behind. No matter. I scan all the bar codes of my items and in a moment of recklessness I nick a carrier bag. I lick my fingers to open the slippery bag. Well, it’s not as if anyone is looking, are they?

---

Angela Williams lives in the Netherlands where she writes stories in between the less demanding jobs of house-sitting, dog-walking and dreaming of worldwide renown. She has had short stories, poetry and flash fiction published by among others; Liars’ League, Mslexia, Reflex Fiction, Flash Flood Journal, Reckon Review and Casket of Fictional Delights. In 2020 she published her story collection, Healer, under her pseudonym, Susan Carey. In 2021 she was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. See her blog and Twitter: @su_carey

I’m not exactly sure what to make of it, to be honest.

Sprawled out in front of me lies some sort of “creature”, if I can even call it that. It has a face that might almost look human under a certain light, but just about everything else is foreign and otherworldly: the pondweed hair, the spiny protrusions on its back, the hummingbird-green scales covering most of its body. The most fascinating part of the specimen has to be the fishlike tail that lies where its legs should be, stained with saltwater and tinted a dark cerulean.

“And you said you found it like this?” I ask Luca, but he stares at the ground and fidgets with the hem of his raincoat.

In a different world, I probably would have told my younger brother some sort of excuse when he asked to explore the beach this late — something about the impending storm, something about how dangerous the ocean can be at night — just so I wouldn’t have gotten into this dreamlike mess. Unfortunately, I’m in this world, and in it, my younger brother is made up of curly hair and childlike wonder that are both impossibly hard to say no to.

“I think we should just go home.”

“No!” The word erupts from him like a firework. “We can’t just leave him here!”

I sigh. I shield my eyes from the blanket of rain with my hand to look at the body clearer, given that it isn’t some shared hallucination between the two of us. At first, I think it could be a mermaid because of the tail, but quickly dismiss that — Ariel was never described as having claws or translucent fins — so I start to wonder if it’s some sort of alien. Or sea monster. Or something ripped straight out of a Lovecraftian horror.

A white-hot streak of lightning crackles overhead, reflecting off the scales embedded in the creature’s tail and scattered in the sand beside it. In the flash of bright light, I notice that the sand around the body is soaked with ink-black blood. “We need to go home, now,” I repeat unsteadily, but Luca is already crouching beside the dead thing and attempting to prod it with a piece of waterlogged wood. “Luca!”

The creature stirs. I no longer think it’s a dead thing.

“He’s hurt,” Luca says quietly, standing back up. “We need to help him find his way home.”

You shouldn’t keep referring to it as a “him”, I want to say, but he’s too unwavering for me to even attempt to say anything logical in this situation. I don’t think there’s a guidebook I can read to figure out what to do when you stumble into a mythological creature, and if there is, I haven’t found it yet. “What, something like Atlantis?” I tease, deciding against arguing with the eight-year-old. He looks down at the matching set of gills on the creature’s neck for a moment, watching the way they ripple and breathe with the steady downpour.

“You’re not being serious about this,” Luca murmurs, his voice almost lost in the rain.

“I’m being rational,” I find myself saying, much harsher than intended. I draw in a careful breath. “You don’t really believe we’re gonna help this… this thing, do you?”

Thunder booms overhead as Luca starts to cry.

I try to say something, but… I don’t. I can’t. No voice rises from my throat. It’s as if all the words of comfort for him had vanished with the setting sun. I start to take his hand to usher him away from the shore when I hear a cough; a guttural, throaty noise that sounds like someone drowning. I look down. A pair of curious, glassy eyes that seem to hold the depths of the ocean itself gaze back up at me.

“If I recall correctly,” the creature says in perfect English, its voice ringing with something like whalesong, “I believe you said something about Atlantis.”

Luca tightens his grip on my hand.

---

Sabrina Powell (@sabrinapowellx on Instagram) is an undergraduate student at Washington University in St. Louis. An avid reader and one-time published author, she writes and edits for the local literary magazine and has had her work featured in several online and printed presses. In an alternate universe, she lives a modest life as an intergalactic explorer, floating peacefully among the stars.

He reads—“New… Naïve… Art”—and snorts. “The hell?”

Whenever my father inhabits his Andy Warhol mode, he detests the museum’s humble collections. There had been a Degas exhibit here last year and a Rembrandt one before that, but the local sculpture filling the spaces left by these normally un-gettable exhibits draws only sucks and blows.

“It means artists who work outside the lines,” I answer.

“Amateur hour with clay.” He strokes a phallic-looking vase. “Hope the divorcée who made this didn’t quit her day job.”

“What makes you think a woman sculpted it?”

He points to the placard below the clay stalk. “Says here first name’s Leslie.”

“Could just as easily be a man. Leslie Nielsen?”

“Doesn’t count.”

Andy is my father’s favorite dead artist to play. He sounds like a sewer-mouthed Socrates sizing up everything that ever frustrated him: bills, bosses, women, daughters who didn’t know what they were until they weren’t anymore.

“Can’t you just appreciate the time it took this person to create that?” I cannot bring my father to museums anymore without endangering local art.

“I’d have appreciated Degas.”

“He’s not here now.”

He’s near to knocking the vase off its pedestal. His middle finger looks itchy.

“He knew what to paint.” Dad twitches. “Whores. Skinny ones, fat ones. Whores at full gallop.”

“You mean horses.”

He lets the vase off with a warning and grins at me. “Those, too.”

My father loves Andy Warhol for the same reason I love my father: their mastery of the mundane. Andy painted squads of soup cans and musing Beatles. My father collected beer cans with misprints and scratched his undying love for my mother on the warped wood of our houseboat before it sank.

Andy had worn his hair spiky, tempered. Split. “Like you!” my father used to joke. “And we both love Marilyn Monroe, you know.”

I know. And it’s called dissociative disorder, Dad, not split. And I’m getting better.

On Andy/Dad’s orders, we march through a tribute to Pacific Islander culture.

“Christ, too many shoulder boys,” he scoffs.

Next is an exhibit from the early Greco-Roman period.

“Boobs were never that hard.”

Then a swath of French Impressionism.

“Pretentious shit.”

And swatches of American Impressionism.

“Ugh. Food-dyed fuck shit.”

He scowls at an abstract painting of a woman folding a napkin in her lap in broken strokes.

“You know the problem with this?”

I’m trying to capture an American impressionist’s sailing party in my sketchpad. “Hmm?”

“This.” He taps on the glass. “Her.”

“Stop. What’s the problem with her?”

He scans the configuration of swirls and lines, the two oval slices doubling as hands, clutching a scalene triangle of lacelike ivory circles.

“She’s not thinking.” He bends his head to hers. “It’s not that she is and I can’t hear her. She isn’t thinking. Anything.”

Everyone thinks, I tell him. Even if they’re just thinking about lunch or work or how much their head hurts.

“Nah.” He waves me off. “She’s a Blank.”

He runs three fingers along the egg-shell white wall beside the painting in line with a crooked painted hutch behind the woman. “I’ve known some. Blanks.”

I never have, but I mentally capitalize the term the way his tone suggests.

“They’re much worse off than us. We think too much, right? They don’t think—period.”

I suppose it does his mind good to have a we and a they, but I tell him I need the quiet to sketch. A blank mind would be a tremendous canvas to draw on.

“All your semantics.”

I can tell he’s starting to forget again why we’re here.

He turns back to her and presses his thumb against the wall beside the painting’s frame as though he were being fingerprinted. “The blank mind is a huge place. There’s all kinds of horror in open fields of white.”

Why would an open field hold horror?

“No place to hide or run. Some godawful thing in your mind comes after you, it finds you immediately.”

How about just not thinking bad thoughts?

“It’s never that easy.” He steps back from the painting and eyes me. “You argue too much.”

I know he doesn’t like coming here. He usually starts losing patience with me around this time every Saturday.

But I press on.

“Dad, I need to draw. It helps the grief.”

“You never say you love me anymore.”

“I do.” I close my pad and stare into the empty space. “You know I do.”

“You don’t like me, then.”

“I don’t like what I’ve become.”

“You blame me for that?”

I shake my head no. I mean it. I don’t blame him. For the boat fire. For her being on it. He had been a thousand miles away in Dodge Correctional when it happened.

But he’s walking away now, and I lose him in a crowd of milling patrons on their way to Andy’s Alley, where replicas of Warhol’s work are on display 365 days rain or shine.

I want to tell him it’s just so hard to tell things apart anymore. What’s a sketch and what’s finished—what’s there and isn’t. It won’t be long before I can’t tell myself anymore.

A half hour later, I’m sitting on a pink lounge sofa in Andy’s Alley. The largest piece in the room is a too-bright replica of his self-portrait, and when I rest here, in this spot, it all seems so self-assured—nine men’s faces forked by probing index fingers, thinking. Box after box of confident contemplation. To drag the sofa any closer would be obscene. It would mean seeing not faces but splatters of garish neon, looking lost and cold like an abandoned playdough food fight. I want to cry.
I can’t do that in the alley. I must stay here and wait until Dad returns. Then together we’ll find that spot where the paintings turn to color and stroke, where Gestalt breaks down the whole into the particulars, and all art becomes nonsense.

---

Brennan Thomas is a Professor of English at Saint Francis University. She has published short fiction and poetry in several online magazines, including Right Hand Pointing, Microfiction Monday Magazine, and Eunoia Review, as well as more than a dozen nonfiction articles on film and popular media studies.

One bright spring afternoon, my mother convinced my stubborn father to see the doctor. The insomnia, which had blighted much of his adolescence, had returned with a vengeance, and the sleep-deprivation was starting to give him throbbing headaches. Occasionally, the pain was so severe that he would retire to his bedroom and lie there in the absolute darkness. Something had to be done.

Chaperoned by my mother, he returned from the appointment as the daylight was starting to fade.

“It’s not good news,” he said, slumping down in his armchair. “I’ll just sit down for a moment.’ But, once he was down, we couldn’t lift him back up and we had to summon Dicken from next-door to help lug him upstairs, like hoisting a six-foot-tall bag of cement. After that, his legs were too weak, so in bed he stayed.

Well-wishers came to the house in a relentless stream, bringing Tupperware filled with hearty, homecooked meals. But, despite their generous starchy offerings, my father’s strength declined, and his work-hardened hands lay atop the bedsheets, turning into macerated pieces of dough.

On a sweltering summer evening, when the air shimmered above the tarmac, the heat was especially suffocating in my father’s airless bedroom. No wonder he struggled to sleep. Despite the unfavourable heat, a knock came at the front door.

“I’m here to see your father,” the visitor on the doorstep said. “He knows me from the old days.” So, I let the strange-looking fellow in, and he tiptoed up the stairs, a crooked smile on his face. Night fell, the visitor departed, and my father, for once, slept like the dead, with a crown of sweat shining on his brow. The visit must have tired him out.

By autumn, the nights were drawing in, but insomnia kept my father awake, restless, yet confined to his bed. From his bedroom window, we watched the magnificent spectrum of colour blaze across the evening sky; vermillion and rose-coloured streaks of cloud lighting up the horizon, marking the end of another day.

“I’ve travelled a very long way to see your father,” came the stranger’s voice from the doorway. Dusk had already fallen so I could hardly turn away his old friend, who had journeyed through the darkness to see him. Perhaps it would cheer my father up, to see a familiar face at his bedside again, and help him get a good night’s sleep, like the stranger’s last visit. The following morning, I meant to ask my father about the mysterious visitor, but he was fatigued and out of sorts, his chin drooping down to his chest, so I left him in peace.

In the winter months, when the whole world slumbered under a heavy blanket of snow, my father’s breath came in ragged, short gasps, as if he had been running around outside. Eyelids flickering, his lips moved in silence. I could no longer tell if he was awake, or aware of his surroundings. It was torturous, to see him that way, so instead of sitting at his bedside, I propped his bedroom door open and sat in the armchair downstairs. Feeling groggier than usual, I meant to read my book for a while, in case my father needed me during the night. My exhausted mother had already retired to bed, and the house was quite quiet, so it wasn’t long before I was rubbing my eyes, gritty with sleep. Nestled there in the armchair, it was a struggle to keep them open, as if unseen fingers were pressing them shut.

“I’m here for your father,” said a voice nearby, like something from a nightmare. I sat up with a jolt. For a horrible moment, I had been dreaming that the stranger let himself into the house, and that he was slinking upstairs, towards the bedroom door. But I was quite sure that I had already drawn the door’s bolt shut for the night. It was the stress of my father’s illness playing tricks on me.

In the morning, my father lay in his bed, recumbent and lifeless. The doctor said that he would have felt no pain, and that he simply slipped away, as if he was falling asleep. Perhaps, in my drowsy state, I had forgotten to check the lock, after all.

---

Katie McCall writes uncanny, gothic fiction and her short stories have been published in Supernatural Tales, Ghostlight, and Short Beasts, with another due to be published by Academy of the Heart and Mind this summer. Her first full-length ghost story is out on submission and she has just completed her second novel, a folk horror tale set in post-war Britain. Follow her on Instagram @katiemccall_author for further spooky musings.

The angel sat on my left shoulder. The devil sat on my right. Both whispered and cooed and prodded and cajoled. Voices like harps and kettle drums appealed to my finer and baser instincts. Calls to action and pleas to turn aside. Would I take the easy path or the turbulent stream? Two roads diverged in my kitchen before I’d even had my first cup of coffee. Or herbal tea.

I couldn’t take the constant bickering between the two of them or the demands and suggestions they were making of me.

Finally, when I couldn’t stand it any longer, I tilted my head to the left until I was eye to eye with the angel. She stood barely four inches tall and appeared just as anyone would expect her to, as if she’d stepped out of some religious painting, a living piece of bondieuserie.

I asked her, “Isn’t that my sinister side?”

The devil on my right cursed out loud.

The angel shrank back and grew quiet. First, her face turned red with embarrassment. Then it turned red with fire. Flames erupted from her feet and scorched two tiny holes in my dress shirt. Her burning talons pierced my skin.

Instead of flames, the other devil erupted in laughter. It was not so much a sinister laugh as diabolical. He chortled, and chastised the fake angel.

I swatted the two spirits from my shoulders and swept their voices from my head.

In the quiet moment that followed, I realized the next big decision was one I must make myself. I wouldn’t listen to any other counsel because I knew I couldn’t trust anyone’s counsel but my own.

And, yet, doubts filled the void that the silence had left. I looked to both of my empty shoulders and wondered if shutting out all voices was what these two demons had wanted all along.

---

Christopher J. Burke is a writer, webcomic creator and math teacher from Brooklyn. His first story, “Don’t Kill the Messenger”, was published in Steve Jackson Games’ Autoduel Quarterly. He went on to coauthor GURPS Autoduel, 2nd edition and has appeared in Mad Magazine. A collection of his stories, In A Flash 2020, was published by eSpec Books. His most recent stories, “Portrait of a Lady Vampire” and “Bringer of Doom”, appeared in Daily Science Fiction and in the anthology Devilish & Divine. He’s currently working on another collection of short fiction. @mrburkemath, mrburkemath.net

Helicopters fly over Portland Harbor. It’s late. A warm summer night in July; and full of flies. The bugs attack the day’s catch and are swatted away by swollen hands. Two weathered Americans carry a body wrapped in blue tarp from cold storage.

The first mate trips on his boots, slips his grip, and drops the torso.

“Careful, Josh! Christ,” hisses the captain.

“That’s my bad,” says Josh, wiping his hands on a pair of overalls.

“Bend with your knees, not your back,” says the captain.

Josh nods, mindful of his form, and drops into a squat.

They count three seconds in silence then haul the corpse up again and carry it to the stern.

It reminds Josh of deadlifting at the gym. “What d’you think this one did?” he says.

“Same thing they all do,” says the captain. “Piss off the Company.”

They chuck the body into the sea, and in the same motion, the captain falls against the gunwale, out of breath. He stares at the black water until his first mate comes over and puts an enormous black hand on his shoulder.

“Come on, Pat,” he says. “Let’s get a beer.”

Pat looks across the river. Skyscrapers line the water like channel markers. Luxury apartments with infinity pools, and the rooms on the bottom have windows into the sea. Fish float by at breakfast.

Behind all the pomp and glamor, the fine dining—beneath the casinos and nightclubs, the smooth pavement and European cars—lives the uneven cobblestones of the Old Port. The same streets Pat and his buddies bar-crawled through on his 40th birthday, when bars were bars and not pubs; the same city where he got his first job as a deckhand on a rickety old trawler out of Portland Harbor, when seafaring people never worried about corporate vessels run by AI overfishing their spots, before the East India Company planted their flag, and claimed Maine as a colony. Pat’s life was fishing, and he wouldn’t let a ship captained by a computer take his job. Not when he still had gas in the tank.

He took a deep breath, heard the tide hit the shore, and dreamed of younger days. When he was strong. When he was free. When a seafaring man could make a real living off the sea. When he didn’t have to dump bodies in the water for extra money.

“Pat?” says Josh.

“Yeah, Josh,” says Pat. “Let’s get a beer.”

A fisherman is never too old to adapt.

---

Austin Treat‘s short fiction appears in Dark Yonder, Flash Fiction Magazine, Storm Cellar, and UCLA’s Westwind magazine, among many others. Deadlifting (2024) is a scene from his unpublished novella, What Fell From the Pagoda Tree. To read more of his stories, please visit austintreat.com. He lives and teaches English in southern Maine.

“Oh it’s a real one!” She exclaims, her wide eyes dancing about the nail salon, looking at but not really seeing the other customers. I grab her wrists as they flutter about, like caged birds, and the two Asian women remove her shoes and dip her gnarled feet into the little tub of warm water. Her toes are curled like knobs of ginger.

The warmth calms her. Lou’s eyes begin to slide shut, and she leans her head towards me. “This place is much nicer than that other one,” she whispers loudly, and I know what she’s talking about. I nod, hoping she’ll leave it at that. “Remember, Jessie? Remember that fat woman sitting beside me?”

“Yeah, Lou. How’s the water now? Does it feel good?”

“Oh Jessie she was so fat. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Like a sausage fit to burst!”

She does make me laugh sometimes. “Relax Lou,” I say.

Suddenly she sits up straight. “But who’s in there?” She cocks her head, staring at the wall, and points a crooked finger. “Who’s in the living room there?” I hold her hand and ignore this. I know the minute I assure her there’s no one in the living room, she’ll be on to something else – demanding I turn off the tea kettle or searching for her childhood dog Cocoa. Sometimes it’s easier to just ignore her mind’s wanderings and wait until she comes back. She always does, eventually.

***

People think I’m a saint. “She’s not even your mother,” they say. It’s nice to be thought of that way, though the truth is, I don’t even know my own mother. Never have. Lou is the closest thing I have. And she’d do the same for me. Done more, in fact.

***

Tonight when I tuck her into bed she’s confused again. “Why are you doing this to me?” She swats at me and I catch her wrist like a fallen twig. She looks at my hand, alarmed. I shush her, tucking her arms under the blanket. She tries to get up, pushing against me with her little claw fingers, ramming me with her head like a baby goat. I slide in beside her on the bed and wrap my arms around her.

“Shhhh.”

Her body softens, and she rests her cheek against my chest. “I’m so tired,” she says.

“I know,” I say. “Close your eyes.”

I feel her fists unclench. She’s silent for a moment. “You know that’s what I used to say when you were a little girl, Jessie?” She’s back. “You’d get yourself so worked up, like a scared little rabbit. Your daddy was one mean son of a bitch. And you’d show up on my doorstep, with a fresh black eye or an arm just hanging there like a ragdoll’s.” She shakes her head, her soupy eyes gaze up at the ceiling. “Took a long time to calm you down.”

“I know. Hush now Lou.”

“’You’re safe now.’ I’d tell you.”

“I remember.”

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Born and raised in Burbank, California, Alison Ozawa Sanders attended Stanford University for undergrad and Loyola University of Chicago for law school. She went on to become a prosecutor in Santa Cruz, California, for 11 years. In 2014 she and her husband moved their family to Singapore, where she is now able to pursue her first love, writing [bio credit: Amazon]. See her book, The Expats Guide to Singapore: Finding Your Feet on the Little Red Dot.

They sit at opposite ends of the kitchen table, the raw end of an argument stuck in their throats.

Speechless.

Depleted.

Defeated.

Thirty-three years of marriage and no place left to go.

Outside the desert simmers in a broiling heat.

There seems no escape.

No way in.

No way out.

Trapped by their circumstances, they sit emmeshed in the hum of air conditioning and accumulated detritus of over three decades married. My god, how they feasted on each other in those early days!

Starved now for affection. Compassion.

Comprehension.

They wait in their chrome and black-marble kitchen, time elongating. The jagged edges of their narrative have inflicted new and deeper wounds—the lifeblood of their relationship seeping away. Neither able or willing to stop the bleeding.

Anymore.

This latest confrontation the net result of so many others.

It’s clear, they face a future entirely divorced from the one to which they pledged.

How?

How did they devolve from elation to desolation?

How did they come to be languishing in their emotional desert where nothing thrived anymore? Which even their children abandoned.

Their children. They have no hand for rescue. One a waitress blaming them for her shortcomings. The other an accountant—thriving in a world where the surety of numbers stabilized his life—shielded him from the messy miscalculations of others.

Especially his parents.

Two children. Nothing guaranteed.

April 1st, they married. Marisa and Alan. Thinking it a fine joke. All their songs had the word ‘fool’ in the title.

“What Kind of Fool am I?” “Chain of Fools” “Why do Fools Fall in Love?”
They danced to “April Fools.” A plaintive ballad from the eponymous named movie. The words seeming prophetic now.

A romantic fairy tale then.

About which they both could remember, but not reclaim.

The air-conditioning kicks off. Mourning doves bob their way up to the French doors. Alan shifts in his chair. Marisa looks up expectantly. She’s raven-haired yet and her Mediterranean beauty perhaps more compelling in its maturity. She once laughed often—unrestrained by conventions. Her fine white teeth in harmony with her olive complexion.

Alan used to carry a photo of her in his leather wallet until tattered and faded he dismissed the image. Never thought to replace it.

Everything has its meaning.

Even silence.

The doorbell chimes. Most likely the neighbor under the guise of needing one thing or another, but actually at the doorstep to borrow their time. Once shoehorned into their house, almost impossible to ease out.

Marisa responds to the cue with a turn of her head. Alan stops fiddling with his spoon. For the briefest of interludes, hope presents itself. Perhaps a third player could adjudicate their dispute.

But no.

This is a private requiem.

Besides, who can fathom the depths and complexities of a couple’s relationship? Often not even the couple themselves.

The door goes unanswered as does Marisa’s question. “What happens next?” It lingers between them like the prelude to a coming storm.

Each passing muted minute sealing their fate. Both wary of upsetting the indelicate position on which they are so precariously balanced. As if any speech or overt physicality will tip them over and whatever they still are will shatter irreparably.

Finally.

Whatever they were.

Neither one wants to be assigned the blame.

Even though, when something’s damaged, there should be a reckoning.

The coffee in their white porcelain cups is cooling—as is the moment. The tension leaking from the room leaving them more and more deflated.

Allowing for a shift in their intentions.

Allowing for the possibility of an indecorous retreat.

Marisa sighs. She understands it will fall to her to break through the impasse. The world outside their deteriorating drama will demand her attention. Her’s mother’s doctor appointment. The laundry hung. Contractual obligations of a recent real estate deal signed and sealed.

The sigh is impetus for standing. She pushes back her chair creating a jarring sound which sits Alan upright. Their eyes graze each other, but rife with torment, they can’t engage and find another anchor. Marisa with the Van Gogh poster of the man in his mania which they bought in the Netherlands. Alan with the succulents in the cactus garden just beyond the patio.

He wonders how they survive the hellish heat. The succulents. She remembers the thousands of bicycles they dodged on the Amsterdam streets, laughing recklessly and all urgent to cocoon in their hotel room.

Many happy-ever-afters ago.

Marisa walks from the kitchen alert for his voice.

How it’s so often happened—their marriage stretched apart, but never entirely broken. One or the other pulling them back together. Providing the first plank in a bridge they’d construct from apologies and forgiveness—crossing that makeshift bridge, meeting halfway and calling it love.

But Alan remains silent. Unable to muster up any sort of verbal reclamation. No lifeline to reel Marisa back in.

Her slight hesitation at the door brings him to tears.

He knows what’s required. Needed.

They both do.

We all do.

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Gavin Kayner’s plays, prose and poetry have won numerous awards and appeared in a variety of publications. These include – Quibble, Passager, Mazagine, Smoky Blue Literary Review, Helix Literary Journal, Witcraft and so forth.