ISSUE 21 May 2021
Flash Editor: Francine Witte
Flash Editor: Francine Witte
Authors in this issue:
Sandra Cimadori Celesté Cosme Matthew Downing Sarah Freligh Soramimi Hanarejimi Sophia Ihlefeld Lorette C. Luzajic Breea Milburn Neeru Nagarajan Nathan Nicolau Mandira Pattnaik Boshra Rasti-Ghalati Blake Z. Rong Karen Schauber Robert Scotellaro Krishna Sharma Beth Stevens Raven Undersun Virginia Watts Thomas Weedman Janet Jiahui Wu
FLASH
Sandra Cimadori Miramar, FL
Save the Fox
1
Marjory, wearing sunglasses and a black one-piece Catalina bathing suit, is semi-conscious on
a lounge chair by the pool of the Dorado Hotel on Miami Beach. She’s thawing from the winter
of her marriage.
Her mother Irma is smoking a cigarette and talking about the furs. “Take whatever you need
out of cold storage when you get back to Chicago. Except the fox – save the fox. That will pay
for Andrea’s college and a wedding bigger than a movie star’s.”
Between them they have over three hundred furs. Marjory’s father was a furrier, and she sells
them when she needs money.
Marjory’s thirteen-year-old daughter Andrea sits next to her, brooding.
“Look, Vince’s daughter is waving to you,” Irma says. “The dance contest is starting.”
“She’s wearing a bikini. I look like a stupid baby in this dumb ruffled one-piece.”
“Go! Make friends while your mother rests.”
“That girl’s father works for the hotel.”
“And he is a lovely person,” Irma says.
“He gives your bubbe dance lessons,” Marjory adds.
“It’s better than playing mahjong all day. Andrea, they’re doing The Twist. Live a little!”
Irma drags Andrea over to a group of kids who are gyrating as if they are on fire. It makes
Marjory tired just watching them. Finally Andrea joins in. Good. Maybe
2
tomorrow she’ll take her shopping and let her pick out another bathing suit, and if she wants a
bikini she can have a bikini. It’s the 60’s – rules have changed.
And maybe Marjory will stop the Valium.
Irma says that’s the problem. Irma says, “What do you need pills for? Are you sick? Only
sick people need pills. If you’re nervous, have a cigarette and a shot of gin. If you’re sad, have
two shots or the whole damn bottle. Who cares? That’s all I’ve ever needed and the things I
have been through in my life, oy vey iz mir! Don’t forget how we lost your father, God rest his
soul. One minute he’s complaining that he doesn’t want corned beef again for dinner the next
he’s dead at my feet from a heart attack. Ten years he’s been gone. That was the worse thing,
and I managed. A cigarette, a shot of gin.”
But her psychiatrist Dr. Werner insists she continue taking her medication. He was concerned
that she planned to be in Florida for so long. “I would hate for you to
relapse after all the progress we’ve made.”
Progress. Progress for Dr. Werner means getting Marjory to admit she is jealous of her
brothers because they have penises and inherited the family business, and that she resents her
husband Stanley because he can’t provide for her as well as Papa did. It seemed plausible while
she was sprawled on a couch in Dr. Werner’s dark office with the frigid Chicago wind shrieking
outside. But now…
Sunshine clarifies everything. She’s going to stop taking those pills. Marjory pushes the
sunglasses to the top of her head and digs in her mother’s purse for a
cigarette, Pall Mall Gold 100’s The 7 Minute Cigarette. She lights one up and inhales deeply.
Seven minutes… that’s longer than sex lasts with her dear, sweet Stanley. Irma
3
is sitting at the bar with Vince, and Andrea is twisting her ass off with some little boy. Her
daughter should wear a bikini. Let her enjoy her young body. Marjory raises her hand and calls
the cabana boy, a handsome thing with teeth that gleam like a shark’s.
“A drink, please. What do you suggest?”
“Cuba Libre. Rum and coke with a twist of lime. Sweet, as I imagine you are Señora, but
with a little bite.” His eyes travel the length of her body. “Here in Miami, we drink to the
liberation of Cuba.”
Marjory laughs. He’s full of shit, but it’s nice of him to flirt.
Maybe she will try on a bikini, too. And if it doesn’t work, she could certainly pull off a two-piece,
something with bright colors, something with a loud tropical pattern.
Marjory lights another cigarette. Stanley says he loves her, he says he will do anything to
make her happy. Dr. Werner confused her, made happiness seem impossible.
When the cabana boy brings the drink, she tips him generously. Who cares? Her father left
the business to her brothers and their penises – but she saved the fox.
Sandra Cimadori was born in New York and grew up in South Florida in a multilingual home. She graduated from Florida State University. She teaches and writes, dividing her time between North Carolina and Florida. Twitter: sandracimadori@SandraCimadori
Celesté Cosme Burlington, NJ
Thief
1
The first thing
Stella steals
is money.
She is eight.
It is seven dollars
in quarters
from her mother’s
dented tin coffee can.
She uses it to buy
Lisa Frank folders
and Scratch and Sniff Stickers.
Psychedelic animal drawings
and perfumed decals
arouse her senses,
her desire
for more.
2
On Valentine’s Day, the cheerleaders hold a fundraiser where people can send
CandyGrams to students for the holiday. Girls in short skirts with high ponytails pass out helium-
filled pink balloons tethered to bags of candy. Pretty girls are sent more than one, and sometimes
no name is signed on the card, only “From Your Secret Admirer.”
When Stella is in the sixth grade, she receives two CandyGrams—one from her single
mother, the other from her mother’s best friend, who is the school secretary. Sixth-grade girls,
with names like Jessica, Jennifer, Amanda, and Ashley, receive at least five balloons apiece. Each
of these girls has enough money to buy one for a girl friend or two and enough popularity to
receive one from a boy or two.
During study hall, two girls who are laden with balloons ask to use the bathroom. Stella
watches them gently lay their pink parcels on the ground. When she is sure no one is watching,
she bends close to the bags and pokes a hole through the plastic with her pen. Quietly, she pulls a
few of the candies out of each bag. When they return, the Jennifers and Amandas don’t notice
their bundles are lighter, just like they don’t notice Stella trying to swallow half-melted bits of
chocolate.
3
Dear Jason,
I know who stole your Donkey Kong skateboard.
If you want to know too, wait for me to get off the bus.
You should probably wait for me every day anyway. We do live next door.
Stella
4
Senior picture day is tomorrow. Stella will wear the camel-colored sweater she begged
her mother to buy. It’s itchy and thin, but Jennifer Rousch told Stella last week that she has
“summer color” undertones in her skin, which means gold is a good color for her. Though
Stella prefers black, she accepts this advice because Jennifer is pretty, popular, and her bras aren’t
padded like Stella’s.
Last month, Stella stole a box of Crest Whitestrips. Tonight, she finishes her secret ten-
day regimen. Stella believes people have already begun to notice her whiter teeth. Even Jason
looks her way when she passes by his desk in Calculus today. She doesn’t know people are
looking at her more because she is smiling.
5
Stella and her college roommate
both wear size eight in shoes.
If Taylor never sees Stella
in her red heels
or black Nikes,
does it really matter?
6
Stella is home for Christmas. Through her bedroom window, she sees Jason on his front
porch, lighting a cigarette. She rushes downstairs and through the front door, barely closing it
behind her. Stella hears her mother call her to come back for her coat. Crossing the frost-bitten
lawn, she meets Jason on his driveway.
Surviving a few minutes of awkward conversation, they agree to walk to the bar on the
corner since they are both now twenty-one. On the walk, Stella notices his torn flannel jacket,
unkempt hair, and heavy stubble. She wonders if Jason’s beard would hurt her skin should their
faces rub together.
Stella watches as Jason downs three beers, curses at the Sixers game on the big screen,
and flirts with the waitress each time she passes. When the bill comes, Jason lays a credit card on
the check and leaves to use the bathroom. Stella reads his grandmother’s name on the card and
remembers she died that summer.
7
Earlier that morning, Stella walked across the stage to receive her college diploma. When
the announcer read her name, her mother beamed with pride and rang the cowbell that Jason’s
mother loaned her for the ceremony.
Now, she is in the hotel bathroom. Her mother is staying for the weekend to help her
daughter pack up her life and move back home. Stella is staring at her phone, waiting for enough
time to pass. A stolen box of pregnancy tests lies torn open on the floor.
Stella musters the courage to exit the bathroom and enter a new reality. She sits next to
her mother on the bed. Unsure of how to share the facts, Stella decides to tell a different truth.
“Mom, it was me who took the quarters from your coffee can all those years ago.”
Celesté Cosme has been teaching high school English for fifteen years. She is an MFA candidate at Rosemont College and is the Flash Editor for Rathalla Review. Her CNF essay "For Greenwood" appears in Pangyrus. Her current WIP is an MG novel about two kids whose best-friend is the ghost of Nina Simone. She lives in New Jersey with her photographer husband, curious five-year-old, and crazy tuxedo cat Rembrandt.
Matthew Downing Chicago, IL
Grand Teton
I wasn’t enough for her, so I drove to Wyoming. I wasn’t enough for me, so I tried to
climb a mountain. But rocks, birds, and trees didn’t cure my sorrow; failure and self-loathing
swallowed my curiosity.
Halfway to the peak, a herd of moose lounged by the river. I tried to enjoy them, but
people—loud, judgmental, and cruel observers—kept blocking my view. Free from a pack filled
with water, food, and the bear spray the trail signs insisted I carry, I wandered off the trail and
toward silence.
The sun started to set. The soft grass turned to steep ice as my two-legged climb
regressed to a wheezing crawl. If a bear found me here, maybe the fear would jolt me back to
life. I sat until I couldn’t feel my fingers, willing myself to imagine one good thing that could
happen to me if I climbed down the mountain. I decided to go one more rotation around the sun.
It turned out, sliding down was harder than sprinting up. Fighting my way back to my car, I
started a long drive home.
Matthew Downing is a graduate student in Chicago. He lives with his partner, Caroline, and their puppy, Ripley. He has been published in the Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Tribune, The Bangalore Review, and elsewhere.
Sarah Freligh Rochester, NY
You Come Here Often
And often alone since your best friend joined AA though she still calls you on the regular to
remind you about her sobriety and how grateful she is to wake up in the morning without a SWAT
team swarming her brain. She swears you to secrecy, promise not to tell?, before she tells you about a
woman in her group who, since getting sober, often has sex dreams in Technicolor about a bag boy
at Wegmans who’s half her age—hell, he’s younger than her youngest son—and now the woman
can’t look the bag boy in the face when he says, hello, may I be of some assistance, without thinking of
fur handcuffs and the word throb, and your best friend tells you again that you can’t tell anyone, not a
soul, and of course you don’t because who would you tell?
You come here often and often you wonder why you do. The bar stinks of smoke and
polyester BO from the softball teams that hang out here from April to November, the draft beer is
always flat. Also, the television chops characters into legless torsos and topless legs and unless the
Phillies are playing, the television is always tuned to a Law and Order episode and there’s something
about a legless/headless Lennie Briscoe that always undoes you, maybe because Lennie, like your
brother, is dead but lives on and on in reruns.
You come here so often that Jeff the Bartender has your beer poured before you sit down, a
20-ounce draft with just enough foam to moustache your upper lip on first swig, enough sparkle to
scald your throat. You often think that draft beer is like so many of the men you’ve known--
delicious on first sip, lukewarmer thereafter, bitter toward the end—and yet you go on ordering
drafts hoping that the next one will be different, each sip as delicious as the first one.
You often don’t go home because what’s home about it anyway—a tiny apartment with a
sinkful of dirty dishes, fist of hair clogging the shower’s drain, a scraggly orange cat that hangs out
on your back stoop, howling his terrible need and hissing when you get too close. Often you find
mice guts or a bunny heads on the steps, bloody evidence of animal love. Sometimes, but not often,
you go home with a guy who smells like your brother did, of warm flannel and corn chips, a guy
who has the same nervous curl to his hair. Sometimes you’ll smoke a bowl on the roof deck of a
rowhouse and stone out on the Philadelphia skyline, on the red PSFS sign burning the night and
beyond it the headlights of cars on the bridges stitching states together, on the lightless dark that’s
the Delaware River. And often if you’re high enough, you’ll wonder out loud why it’s the Delaware
and not the Pennsylvania River or even the New Jersey, and too often the guy will say Because it’s the
Delaware, dummy, instead of tuning into his own high the way your brother would.
Sometimes but not often you tell him that your brother is dead, that he was shot in a holdup
at a 7/11, that his last words were Is Sierra Nevada on sale? That he died in a strip mall. Sometimes
you wonder how someone can be here one second and gone the next, and often you wish there were
reruns.
Always you cry.
Sarah Freligh is the author of four books, including Sad Math, winner of the 2014 Moon City Press Poetry Prize and the 2015 Whirling Prize from the University of Indianapolis, and We, published by Harbor Editions in early 2021. Recent work has appeared in Wigleaf, Fractured Lit, and in the anthologies New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction and Best Microfiction (2019-21). Among her awards are a 2009 poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a grant from the New York State Council for the Arts.
Soramimi Hanarejima Portland, OR
Petrified Thought
Once the fervor of catching up over dim sum has run its course, we lapse into a lazy silence.
Each of us occasionally sipping what’s left of our tea. Until she asks me if I’d like to see some
old thoughts up close. Of course, I take her up on this rare opportunity to look at actual artifacts
from the psychological past. I’ve worked with plenty of models and replicas, but seldom do I get
to see the real thing, and when I do, it’s usually behind glass.
We walk down streets drenched in summer heat, back to the gloriously air conditioned museum.
After a stop at her office for her curator’s gloves and a guest pair for me, we’re in the stairwell,
descending numerous flights, passing multiple basements, finally exiting into a warehouse-like
expanse. She takes me deep into a maze of metal shelving units, striding briskly as though
navigating to our destination by muscle memory. When we reach it, she mounts a rolling
stepladder and removes a metal box from one of the shelves high above my head. Once she’s
standing on the floor again, she places the box on one of the ladder’s steps and opens it.
The inside is partitioned in a manner reminiscent of a bento box, each compartment occupied by
a tangle of thoughts like a little knot of noodles. All of them are very old and very wrong—a
mess of misconceptions that hideously extend from flawed assumptions.
“Astounding,” I murmur.
“Yes, quite astonishing the kind of thoughts people used to have.”
“I know these are from a different time and all, but it seems ridiculous that they ever made
sense.”
“Want to try some?” she asks, her words more invitation than inquiry.
“Aren’t they fragile?”
“No, these are thoroughly ossified and unlikely to get damaged, unless rigorously challenged.”
“OK, I’ll try not to question them.”
We slip our hands into the soft, white gloves, and she picks up a bundle of thoughts about love.
When she places it on my open palm, I think I’m in for some old-timey folklore about romance.
But no. The moment I wrap my mind around them, these thoughts lock my attention in a vice
grip of beliefs about who can love whom and even who deserves love. The limiting perspective
repulses me, but a moment later, in sweeps the intoxication of complete certainty—the total
confidence that these beliefs are correct, part of the unequivocal order of the world. Utterly
exhilarating and deliciously comfortable, like being tightly snuggled up in voluptuously fuzzy
air. I revel in it, clutching the railing of the stepladder as euphoria swirls within me. My sense of
self wavers. Afraid the ecstasy will incapacitate me, I relinquish the antiquated thoughts.
“Wild, isn’t it?” she says.
“Yes. We’ve come a long way.”
“Though there’s still a ways to go.”
But is there even a road to weaning ourselves off the pleasure of feeling right? Ideas come and
go—instincts endure. These thoughts may be archaic, but the delight of certainty seems timeless.
Soramimi Hanarejima is the author of Visits to the Confabulatorium, a fanciful story collection that Jack Cheng said, "captures moonlight in Ziploc bags." Soramimi’s recent work can be found in Ab Terra 2020, Sunshine Superhighway, Pulp Literature and Vestal Review.
Sophia Ihlefeld Brooklyn, NY
Bone Dust
When humanity had no room left, they bulldozed the cemeteries. There had been protests, of
course, leading up to the demolition. The dissidents chose an intellectual argument over the
sentimental (the sentimental argument clearly being: How dare you disturb the peace of my
sweet, long-dead grandmother?) They made posters, wrote chants.
“What are we if we cull our ancestors from the ground?” MONSTERS. “Where will we be
without our history?” LOST.
There had to be anthropological repercussions, they contended.
But the Director would not budge. We had nowhere else to go, it was true. We’d built up and
down, sideways, diagonal, underground, in the trees. The cemeteries were the only plots left
untouched.
Look around you! commanded the Director. There were no other options! The decision was final.
One woman wept upon her child’s gravestone, clutching at it desperately. Wailing, threatening,
cursing, promising the little corpse she’d never let anyone get to him. She was easily removed.
The stones crumbled like cheese, offering little resistance. The guardian angels looked somewhat
relieved as they crashed to the dirt with fractured wings.
Everyone feared it would reek. Rot and decay. But it didn’t smell much like anything—mildew,
maybe. It was this lack of smell that hit home what none of us ever truly believed: they were all
gone—had been for quite some time.
Standing in the bone dust, we finally realized what we were: alone, desperately alone, and
jealous of the dead.
Sophia Ihlefeld is The Los Angeles Review's first-ever Flash Fiction Editor. Her work has been published in The Cobalt Review, The Los Angeles Review, Silhouette Press and more. She lives in Brooklyn, NY with her fiance.
Lorette C. Luzajic Toronto, Canada
The Nowhere Train
Since we’d left the red hills behind, I couldn’t shake the feeling that my newfound
freedom was an illusion. I was thinking too much. Hurtling through those epic canyons
had me reaching for more metaphors. No matter- there was no turning back. I had
already decided to play the odds and take my chances.
I was tired of the crossword puzzle digest and my mystery novel. When the late light
gave way to evening, I picked up some cards, started in on solitaire, and scrabbled
through my duffel for my flask.
That’s when the stranger appeared.
He pointed a chopstick finger at the seat across from me and I nodded. He was sharp
and long and rubicund, like the red rock cliffs this afternoon. I retrieved my cards and
Camels, made space for his strange narrow bones.
I’m too tired to sleep, he said, and gestured at my bottle. Do you mind? He reached for
my cigarettes, then waited for a light. I couldn’t read him at all, but I was sure he could
read me.
We puffed and watched the darkness rolling past.
After a long while, he gathered up my deck and shuffled. I noticed then that the watch
under his fraying cuffs was a classic Rolex. I was no expert on luxury bijouterie, but the
diamante signet wobbling loosely to and fro on his pinkie also looked like the real deal.
He followed my eyes and I shifted uncomfortably. Crushed my smoke nervously in the
window tray, lit another. The flask was still perched on the razor of his knee, but I knew it
was nearing empty, so I waved an attendant down. Asked for a double Jack neat with
ice on the side. I felt the stranger’s small eyes drilling into me as he shuffled the cards
methodically. Told the waiter to make it a round.
The stranger began doling out the cards. You can’t always outrun someone’s bluff, he
said, and it sounded like a warning.
I’m running already, I wanted to say. I’m on my way there now, wherever it is. But I kept
it to myself. I wondered how Adele would find when she finally forgave me, since I didn’t
know myself where I was going.
We played a few hands, downed our liquor. I got a cold feeling way down deep when I
caught the image of myself in the window. The stranger’s reflection wasn’t there.
Look, kiddo, my friend said, as suddenly as his glass was empty. The only way to win is
to figure what you want to toss and what you want to save. It’s not the hand you’re
dealt, but how you play it.
I was still mulling over everything in my mind, whether I should have cleaned up the
mess I made with Adele before leaving, or boarded the train at all. Every cryptic thing
the man said seemed to be on point. Even so, I resented the intrusion. I had wanted to
wallow on my own, not waste my whiskey on unsolicited advice.
There was something creepy and familiar about him, too, almost like a déjà vu. And yet
it felt in part as if he was a figment. As if he wasn’t there all.
I threw down my turn, just passing the time, not really into the game. In response, there
was no expression on his face. The gambler’s eyes in the night were twin beads,
glittering only the reflection of my hand, deuce diamonds and hearts in spades.
Lorette C. Luzajic is editor of The Ekphrastic Review, a journal she founded in 2015 that is devoted to literature inspired by visual art. Her prose poetry and small fictions have been published widely, including Cabinet of Heed, South Florida Poetry Journal, Miramichi Reader, Litro, New Flash Fiction Review, Unbroken, Cleaver Magazine, Fatal Flaw, JMWW, and many more. She lives in Toronto, Canada.
Breea Milburn Springfield, MO
June Times Five
Dissociative Identity Disorder is defined as multiple persons sharing one body. June had
the opposite problem: June was one person in several bodies---five, to be exact. This was not the
result of quintuplets, nor was it a cloning experiment gone right. June simply inhabited five
bodies that looked exactly alike, her consciousness occupying each one equally. There was no
benefit to this besides June having a larger range of senses. When she purchased a chocolate soda
from the drug store, each mouth sipped five separate straws, and June could feel the sweet
carbonation on five separate tongues. Her life was experienced in surround sound, which was
only beneficial when she walked across sandy beaches, listened to saxophone players at jazz
clubs, watched Fourth of July firework spectaculars, smelled fresh-baked bread wafting through
farmers markets, drank chocolate soda from the drug store.
Otherwise it was a nuisance.
Five bodies meant ten pairs of legs crowding the supermarket aisles. Five bodies meant
fifty fingers holding a lover’s hand. Five bodies meant five angles that she could view herself
from at all times. Five bodies meant one hundred-sixty teeth to feel with five tongues, and five
tongues to feel imprisoned by one hundred-sixty teeth. And yet five bodies still meant one mind
of overstimulation.
There was no original June; there was no June 1, June 2, June 3, and so on. There was
only June. So when June stared at her other bodies, she’d attempt telepathy: Anybody else there?
But all she ever received back was an echo: Anybody else there? Else there? There?
Breea Milburn graduated with her MA in English—creative writing—in Spring 2018. Her fiction and nonfiction work has appeared in Lunar Magazine, Moon City Review, Nixes Mate Review, and Razor Literary. When she's not writing, Breea is working in the youth services department of her local library.
Neeru Nagarajan Bowling Green, OH
How to Lose Weight in 30 Days
Day 1
She starts raising a snake about the size of her large-boned hand. She’s named it her name. It gets
called it more than she does. She has other names, ones she’d rather not be called.
Day 3
Every day she pulls on the snake like she puts on skinny jeans four sizes smaller. She inserts one
leg into its gaping, eager mouth, and then the other. Its hungry jaws stopped at her calves.
Day 7
A person in tights says, “You don’t have to cover your body.” They bless her with a generous
smile. They move quickly. They don’t stop to let her breathe. The hollow voice bounces off the
walls in the bedroom that barely contains her. Cover your body, cover your body, your body.
Day 11
On a good day, her face looks small in the mirror. Her cheekbones are visible. Her tummy looks
almost flat when sucked in. The man handing out flyers for the gym near the bus station does not
stop her.
Day 13
She starts with half-hour walks. She can feel the vibration from every step in her shins, calves,
and thighs. The more she feels each shock in unexpected muscles, the farther she wants to go.
Day 16
Frequently, she loses her way back home.
Day 19
Now, if she lays the snake flat, it’s longer and wider than her body. When she wears it, she looks
like an eel mermaid. The reptile’s fangs dot and cross the lightning streaks on her stretching
and contracting stomach.
Day 21
Every bite lies heavy in her stomach. She pulls each morsel out of her mouth like a thread she
unravels from a sweater until it vanishes. When she remembers food, she remembers to feed her
snake.
Day 26
The snake’s mouth accepts more of her, clamps right under her DD-cups. She’s pleased with her
progress.
Day 30
Today, when she wears her scaly cloak, her body slips and slides inside. Her hips, her breasts, her
arms. The snake doesn’t gag, doesn’t have to stretch its mouth open until the sides tear. The
deeper she goes into the willing tunnel, the more exhilarated she feels. She doesn’t need a mirror
to tell her she’s done it.
Neeru Nagarajan is an Indian Tamil writer. Her work appears in Flash Fiction Magazine, Cleaver Magazine, The Forge Literary Magazine, Hypertext, and elsewhere.
Nathan Nicolau Charlotte, NC
Branding
Inside the Chinese restaurant, a young girl came in to pick up her order. Telemundo was on,
showing kids younger than her tapping metal bars with plastic forks. There was a large family
taking up two whole tables, hand-in-hand with their heads bowed. They muttered something, but
all the girl heard were the words “find peace.” They looked up at the TV and asked the girl to
translate for them. She only knew English. The family laughed. She did too. It reminded her of
how she was called un-American because she didn’t know the lyrics to a Bob Dylan song. Or
how her older brother asked mommy and daddy if he could be Jewish because he didn’t want to
disappoint Moses. Or how World War II soldiers would heat up iron rods red hot to shove it
down a Japanese child’s throat while their parents groveled. The family kept shoving noodles in
each other’s mouths until they leaped from their seats. They held each other’s necks, darting their
bulging white eyes to the girl only to sing in raspy gasps. Peace. Find peace. As they danced for
forgiveness, she grabbed a spoon and asked how she could heat it up.
Nathan Nicolau is a writer/poet based in Charlotte, NC. He is currently an English student at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He released his first poetry collection in 2019. He is currently working on his first novel.
Mandira Pattnaik India
Unravelling a Rainbow
The window is shrouded by smoke billowing out of, what is possibly a hand-grenade, hurled on
the pavement below, and for a few anxious moments, blocks out the view of the carmine sky
leaking into the fudged horizon upon the water.
I rush to the window. It has certainly been thrown from somewhere inside our hotel, maybe the
floor just above ours. Screams and cries bleed into the chaos of the busy pedestrian crossing on
Marine Drive. Like air into a furnace. I can smell gunpowder. So thick, it singes my chest in spite
of the glass.
Who? Why?
In a giant leap, Rowan gets under the writing desk on our left. He had been undressing, and had
only barely removed his pants. Keys and purse neatly kept on the edge of the bed.
I see him texting away furiously, face glued to phone, eyes horrified. He didn't wait for me?
Make sure I was safe?
I withdraw from the window, sit on the bed, hear police sirens descend near, followed by sounds
of a posse of vehicles, doors being yanked open, boots rushing in.
Here we are, Rowan and I, redefining the landscape where our type of relationships goes. Or,
that’s what I thought.
He asked me a week ago, Would you prefer pastel wedding deco, and then, yesterday, looking
wistfully at the trees lining the boulevard, while we were sipping coffee, Pale pink, is what think.
Perfect for your ensemble, before squeezing my hand.
I rub my cold palms, swallow my spit.
Rowan is not Richard Gere, knight on a white steed rescuing Pretty Woman. Looks more a
chameleon at this inopportune moment, changing colors to suit.
I see him finally remembering me. Gazing up. Hope my eyes don’t reveal what I feel for him
now.
Come! he urges, almost a whisper.
I stay.
The intercom rings, piercing the hollow, precipitating silence.
With Rowan still crouched on the floor, I pick the call, replace it with, Okay!
I turn to Rowan,
Receptionist says our hotel is under siege, guests taken hostage, and we need to keep lights off,
and stay inside our rooms until the police instructs us otherwise.
He coughs. Asks,
I’m sweating under the collar. Are you sure AC is working?
I get up, fiddle with the remote, nod a yes, then move to the window again, watch the darkening
of the void above.
Minutes later, I hear gunshots, feet rushing down the stairs, sounds of a scuffle right outside our door.
Rowan crouches. Pulls bare legs to the torso as tightly as he can, and frozen in fright, returns to
typing like a maniac under the desk.
We wait. Time passes. The sapphire bay beyond Marine Drive turns into an impenetrable black
sheath.
I know Rowan is still texting his wife as the shadows in the room ferment. Magenta curtains,
chairs, the bedside lamp wake up from their slumber, and like ghosts, wander the room.
I return to the bed, dig into my purse through all those things that inhabit a hooker’s bag, pull out
the photograph.
In the glow of my lighter, I seek the six-year-old-girl in maxi dress holding her Mum’s hand days
before it all happened — the earth shook and the waters took Mum and Dad out to sea, never to
return them. After all these years, the paper has faintly yellowed, but colors of the day, our
smiles, have stayed intact.
There’s the sound of a hail of bullets, someone pounds our door with fists, kicks so hard it might
fall off its hinges.
Rowan emerges and leaps towards me, but instead of the embrace I was vaguely expecting, he
hunches behind me.
The kicks on the door turn violent, more vigorous. Someone shouts, Open!
I can hear the erratic pounding of my heart like a rhythm gone haywire just before the door falls
with a thud on the floor.
And then, all I can see are pastel pinks, blasted to smithereens, showering like confetti.
Mandira Pattnaik's work has appeared, most recently, in Watershed Review, NFFR, Passages North, Flash Boulevard, Bending Genres, Citron Review and Amsterdam Quarterly. Her writing has also been included in anthologies, and received nominations for Pushcart Prize '21, Best of the Net '20, Best Small Fictions and Best Microfiction '21. Upcoming are pieces in Flash: International Short-Short Story Mag, Timber Journal and Atlas & Alice. She lives in India.
Boshra Rasti-Ghalati Doha, Qatar
Unscathed
It was a camping trip in the desert - a one-off, or at least that is what one must hope it
was. It got out of hand. The drinking I mean. He got drunk and then one thing led to another.
There was a tent that gave them enough privacy, at least one would hope they didn’t groan out
in pleasure. It was uninhibited enough for their skin to mesh and do the deed. The broken bones
of fidelity on the ground, disintegrating into a warped, fast-forward until it was just dust in the
desert.
Despite the vastness, the desert hears and carries everything. The desert winds blow
every broken-down grain to its four corners and bring it back to the plot of sand where it started.
I would have liked it if he had told her. Men have a peculiar way of keeping heaviness to
themselves. Fooled by the solitude of the moment, believing the elements will carry it far and
wide and not return. Heedless enough to forget the web that nature entrusts itself with. But I
heard the whisperings first, or did I? That winter there was a fury of sandstorms; they never
happened without reason. And since my kind cannot carry heaviness, I had to tell her.
Discreetly, at first, nudging her towards the possibility. Hoping when her curiosity was piqued, he
would come clean, relieve himself of the dust that sat in the corners of his mouth, his brow. He
did not, but rather went about his day, red and proud, like the fire-body he had touched, with
only soot now covering his face, weighing his features down.
Then she noticed his comings and goings at odd hours. He blamed it on the job, on her
insistence that they come to this part of the world, but the sandstorms came again. This time,
sick of the haze, I carried her to the desert. At first she thought it was a mirage, but when we
moved towards it, the sand amplified sounds deafening us with what had happened and grains
assembled into a magnifying glass showing her that nobody escapes unscathed.
Boshra Rasti-Ghalati is a Persian-Canadian who writes and teaches abroad. You can find her work scattered over the internet and in print. Home is currently Doha, Qatar, where she lives with her daughter, Avah and dog, Ozzie.
She is querying for her first novel, Surrogate Colony. Her poems and other scribbles are on Instagram @boshrascribbles
Blake Z. Rong Brooklyn, NY
One Thousand Free Hours
it’s 2002. you walk home from the bus stop with Jon Bach, who is your neighbor, and Andrew
Mueller, who you still think is your best friend. they are juniors, three years older than you, and
therefore they are kings. from his L.L. Bean backpack Jon pulls out a picture of a naked woman
and waves it in front of your face. she is grainy and spread-eagled atop a shaggy carpet in a red-
tinted room. it’s the first time you see bush. they laugh their asses off.
you unlock the front door and turn on the TV just in time for Bill Nye the Science Guy. when it
goes to commercial you boot up your parents’ HP Pavilion and sign on AOL, and the modem
plays you the song of its people, and Caitlin Russell is signed on. her username is
dolphincrazed888. your heart skips a beat. from the living room Bill Nye is explaining static
electricity, and he rubs a balloon against his hair, and his hair stands straight up. “I don’t think so,
Bill,” says the deep-voiced announcer.
“hey,” you peck with your fingers, every keystroke as weighted as a pendulum.
and then you see her typing back. you sit there, staring at the keyboard, and the waves crash
against the rocks, star fuse from nebulae, continents bubble from volcanic ash, fish wiggle up out
of the sea and grow legs and eventually hunt men for sport. the world will never end, the world
has already ended. “what’s up!” she says, and you immediately run your calculations through
your head—she responded quickly, so you mean something important to her; she threw in an
exclamation point, she’s excited to talk to you again, after you said hi to her in homeroom--
and then she adds a ☺. and all your calculations leak out of your brain.
your parents won’t be home for hours. the new world has just begun. you microwave a Totino’s
Party Pizza and you eat it in one sitting and wash it down with a Sprite Remix and you feel pretty
good about it.
Blake Z. Rong is a writer in Brooklyn. He recently received an MFA in Writing & Publishing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. He is the author of the nonfiction work Beautiful Machines (Gestalten, 2019). His debut collection of poetry, I Am Not Young And I Will Die With This Car In My Garage, will be published with Atmosphere Press in 2021. His short stories and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetica Review, Vagabond City, and Isele Magazine.
Karen Schauber Vancouver, Canada
Heel Toe Kick, Heel Toe Kick
We hear the frenzied click-clacking and trumpeted honks before spotting the swelling throng, our
necks twisting in the wind craning to catch a glimpse; the gathering of birds advancing as one
entity—heel toe kick, heel toe kick—like Alvin Ailey dancers in hot pink leotard, the synchronized
clusters glide along the cerulean blue of the estuary, poised, straight-backed, noses thrust high into
the air, heads flagging from side to side, the ebullient mating calls deafening as the procession
advances; their dance fierce and without end until all have paired, for life—heel toe kick, heel toe
kick.
Marvin is missing the whole thing, futzing with his Nikon, beside me. Ultra-wide-angle, super-
telephoto, circular fisheye.... nothing new, he often misses the big picture and the little ones too.
Yesterday back at the hotel, when I asked him what he thought about the adorable young couple
sitting across from us at dinner recounting thrilling stories about their eco-tourism excursion whale-
watching, he hadn't heard a word. I spot the two of them farther down the river, so close—almost
standing in the same footprint—sharing the thrill of this event arm-in-arm.
Turning back to the pageant blushing and bleeding and blinding pink, I marvel at the devotion and
promise of this ritual. The effort these creatures put into selecting a mate, the fervour of their dance,
the ache in their hearts; hyperextended legs, petits jetés, flamboyant bobs, twerking and whirling;
flaunting the best they have to offer. Not giving up till the deal is sealed. No looking back, no cold
feet. I gesticulate and caterwaul for Marvin to look...Look...LOOK, as the procession sails on by.
But he is busy doing that clucking, tutting, and twisty thing he does with his tongue; head down
niggling and piggling with wide apertures and miniscule settings. There is a flurry of wings from the
left flank as matched pairs begin to take off into the wide expanse of sky, hurried pedaling with
elongated feet gaining initial flying speed; bright crimson and vermillion wings tapping, snapping,
flapping until airborne—forever in alignment.
I look over at Marvin clutching his SLR and wonder... what does he see.
Karen Schauber's work appears in sixty international literary magazines, journals and anthologies, including Bending Genres, Cabinet of Heed, Cease Cows, Ekphrastic Review, Fiction Southeast, New World Writing, Spelk; and a 'Best Microfiction' nomination. Schauber curates Vancouver Flash Fiction, an online resource hub, and Miramichi Flash, a monthly flash fiction column. In her spare time, she is a seasoned family therapist. http://VancouverFlashFiction.weebly.com
Robert Scotellaro San Francisco, CA
Chickens in the Parlor
Moat In Lieu of a Welcome Mat
When my mother felt her life had become drab and spark-smothered, her lipsticks became redder and redder.
And she built a moat around the house. Each day when my father came home from
scrubbing graffiti off subway station walls, he’d swim through a clinging storm of mosquitoes to
get to the front door with one hand paddling, the other holding his bottle of whiskey above the
brine.
Old MacDonald
Mother sprinkled feed on the rug for the chickens in the “parlor” (What she called that tiny room
with a convertible sofa in it.) The chickens hopped up onto the furniture knocking things over. I
was young and didn’t mind their ceaseless pecking. My father found a burial plot inside the
newspaper and started digging, so he never noticed the new dress Mother was wearing or the
candy apple red high heels. “This is what you get when you act like Old MacDonald,” Mother
said, sweeping her arm broadly and causing a few chickens to flutter feckless wings. “Ee-i-ee-i-
o,” she said.
Steam Scream
Mother rid the house of chickens, and Dad learned to cha-cha-cha. (It’s strange to think how old
they seemed then—how young they really were.) They were in the kitchen dancing when the
teapot started screaming. Father turned, but Mother said, “Leave it.” That she didn’t want to
stop for a single minute, that those red high heels were out of their coma. She was wearing a
flared sundress and Father had on his grey razor-creased trousers with high cuffs. I found a
quarter once in one of those cuffs as they draped over a chair. It was an archeological highpoint.
Father seemed to like the way that dress bell-shaped as she twirled, and the feel of it—the tea
kettle, not so much. A record skipped on the turntable, was stuck in a brassy repetitious snippet
over and over… Father turned again, sweating at that point.
“Leave it,” Mother said.
Robert Scotellaro's work has been included in W.W. Norton’s Flash Fiction International, NANO Fiction, Gargoyle, Matter Press, Best Small Fictions 2016, 2017, and 2021 (forthcoming), Best Microfiction 2020, and others. He’s the author of seven chapbooks, and five flash fiction collections. He has, with James Thomas, edited New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction, published by Norton. Robert is one of the founding donors to The Ransom Flash Fiction Collection at the Univ. of Texas. Visit him at www.robertscotellaro.com
Krishna Sharma Athens, GA
Daphne’s Perdition
His starfruit eyes were weepy in the morning sun. A pollen paroxysm.
No more phone today. The screens within screens had lost their tantalizing touch. The rapid fire
words he read just slipped through the creases of his brain like tepid, tasteless tea. Today he had
a mission. A destination. A pilgrimage.
In six hours he knew Venus would be throbbing in the sky again. He knew the sun would be
cupped in starry hands and slipped away, like a marble hidden in its black velvet case. He needed
to arrive before then.
He was on his way to see a goddess at the riverbanks.
He dreamt of this happening, almost dismissing it as delirium, but then awoke astonished to see a
snake on the floor of his bedroom bathing in sunlight. Aware of his cognizance, the snake exited
the room by slithering up the walls and disappearing in an air vent in his ceiling.
He took this as a sign from God. The dream must have been prophecy. Without packing
anything, he left for the nearest river.
A 12 hour journey. Much to think about. But he didn’t think about the dream at first. Instead, he
cultivated childhood memories in his head. Every day a few scenes of his youth would quietly
perish away without his notice. Sometimes he worried about it.
The sun was blazing. He began recollecting parts of the dream. Who was this woman? He
remembered her father was a laurel tree and her mother was a mechanic at the local barbershop.
No, wait. What? That can’t be right. He hadn’t eaten or drank water all day.
The horizon was colored as an orange peel when he got to the riverbank. There was a woman
in a black dress, embroidered with yellow flowers, reading. Her wrists were clasped with grass
and her ankles were soothed by the flowing river. Nearby lay a rented bicycle.
She attended a small university and worked as a waitress. She had a fondness for goofy animals.
She was afraid of getting Lyme disease and audited by the IRS. Her neck was freckled with the
constellation Ursa minor. Her eyes were heavy like the drawers of clothes she didn’t wear.
“Hello?” he cried out. Her eyes looked up with grace. They shared a pollen sneeze before
speaking again. “I’ve seen you,” he told her. “I know,” she gently spoke. He took a seat beside
her. Their ankles created ripples that compounded the river water into intricate patterns.
“Do you remember where we first met?” she asked. “In my dream,” he said. “Before that,” she
playfully chided. “No…” was his only response.
“Don’t worry,” she said softly as she grabbed his hand. Her other hand picked crimson petals of a
nearby flower. A flower, in fact, that he had never seen before. She looked at the river, opened
her palm, and said “Πηνειός” to the river below.
When the petals landed and floated round their ankles, their feet suddenly began sprouting twigs.
A cask of bark started growing around them. He looked at her, confused, still holding her hand,
and watched her hair begin to rise and morph into branches. She embraced him closely.
He felt his body expand and join with hers, twisting desperately into tree bark. Their lips
bloomed as fragrant leaves and their nipples shed as husks of seeds. Just when Venus made
herself apparent in the sky, the two of them on the riverbank finished becoming one.
For 300 years they lived on this riverbank, caught in the warm friction of their bodies sliding
together. After the tree was no more, their embrace endured ceaselessly through the propagation
of more laurel trees with every passing season.
Ceaseless, that is, until the river ran dry and all the trees were felled. All of them, gone, at the
hands of men.
With the perdition of their trees came the eternal loss of their embrace. But no human needed to
grieve that loss. For, like childhood memories quietly perishing away, mankind was spared the
very knowledge of their existence by the destructive act of forgetting it.
Another night falls. Another outer layer of the sun is eroded by its slipping away into that black
velvet case. And another throb from Venus illuminates the sky. But only briefly. For she shines a
little dimmer in the sky tonight. She is burdened with the tacit depths of loss.
Krishna Sharma is an ecology graduate student with an avid passion for creative writing. While he normally writes poetry, this piece is inspired by "Twitter Fiction," in which each passage is 280 characters or less. This piece is my creative approach to writing about human destruction of the natural world.
Beth Stevens Westport, CT
Lunchbox Notes From My Mother
The lunch itself was always the same: turkey on wheat with mustard and two leaves of lettuce, a
Grannysmith, a handful of animal crackers in a Ziploc. The note was from the yellow memo pad
she kept by the kitchen phone. Her handwriting was compact and neat. Did you know the body
has 2.5 million sweat pores? Love, Mom
The “o” in Mom had a smiley face. No, I did not know about sweat pores. I imagined millions of
holes in my skin oozing a viscous substance. The idea of chewing suddenly turned my stomach. I
pitched the green apple toward the garbage can and missed. It rolled under the chair of the girl
who smelled like a mixture of my sister’s shampoo—Herbal Essence—and birthday cake:
Melissa Brooks. She had a spatter of freckles on her nose and blue jeans with a star patch at the
knee. She was missing part of her thumb. I loved her so much I could not look directly at her. I
kept her in my peripheral vision—blurred at the edges. The glands under my 2.5 million pores
pricked up.
Mom liked to have a theme to her notes. In October it was all about Halloween: Did you know
the word “witch” comes from the Old English wicce (meaning “wise woman”)? Love, Mom
Melissa Brooks had dressed as Dorothy. I’m guessing she was inspired by The Wiz, which came
out a week before the holiday. She wore white tights, long braids, sparkling slippers. She looked
more Judy than Diana. I wore a Fonz mask, but people kept asking if I was dressed as Richard
Nixon. It was 1978. No, I was not Nixon. Did you know samhainophobia is the fear of
Halloween? Love, Mom
Phobias were her specialty. Ablutophobia, fear of bathing. Bibliophobia, fear of books.
Metathesiophobia, fear of change. I’m sorry to report I took these notes personally. Just what was
she getting at anyway? I was 13—I could read between the lines.
When we moved away the summer before ninth grade, I called Melissa Brooks to say goodbye.
Her dad said she was at sleepaway camp in Vermont. The kitchen receiver was slippery in my
clammy hands.
Autophobia, fear of being alone. Athazagoraphobia, fear of being forgotten. Once I saw my
mother bent over the memo pad in the early morning light, a dictionary tucked into the crook of
her arm. Her hair was dark and curly like mine. I watched her tap the ballpoint to her lips.
Beth Stevens is an Emmy-winning writer, editor, and producer. Her work has appeared in The Cape Rock, Chiron Review, The Waverly Review, Time Out New York, American Theatre Magazine and others. She is a founding editor of Broadway.com, where she continues to serve as Managing Editor. She has an MFA in Dramatic Writing from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. There are many people named Beth Stevens. This one is not the Harvard neuroscientist, country singer, or young performer in Liverpool.
Raven Undersun Oxford, England
On the Bridge
I’d come back to the bridge as a pilgrim, revisiting my past, leaving surrender at its altar. I’d come to ponder how much I’d lived since the days we talked of jumping from it. It was a moment before I recognized him, poised beyond the blue-steel railing. He’d come back to finish our old dreams, alone. I cried out, wordless. How could I pour it all into one syllable?
Catching sight of each other for the first time from our windows on opposite sides of the street. A smile, a slow wave. The streets below, empty. And the message I’d stuck in the window, reeling drunk to pass the time, eleven digits. After that, we called most nights, to ask what the sky looked like from the other’s point of view. Death raged below, invisible, his scythe snapping out when strangers passed too close. I’d sit with my legs out the window, dangling them above the
chalky pink wall to catch some sun, drawing the heavy purple curtains behind my back. He’d play the piano through the phone line.
It’d been so long since the buskers fled, since I’d heard live music. I actually cried. It was a time of scavenging, of digging up old books from beneath the floorboards, straining to hear conversations through the walls, dipping fingers in vanilla paste for a taste of something sweet when the chocolate ran out. He put his plants in his window so I could see them. I drank the leftover liquor from the bar downstairs, where I’d worked before the borders locked down. It
fermented further and put up lonely bubbles inside its glass walls.
We could see the bridge from the corners of our windows. Once he’d said it, that if we ran, we could make it before anyone saw, that any escape would be better – the walls came down. A deluge of our deepest confessions poured out of us. We fell into a love driven by desperation.
“Without me? After everything’s back to normal?”
He blinked, a dreamer slowly waking. My hand circled his wrist, holding him.
“Normal was an illusion. Underneath, we’re alone, and nothing lasts.”
“We weren’t alone then.” Had the role I’d played in his heart then been incidental, not instrumental?
“That was...an intermission. We went our separate ways. And it was a coincidence, anyway. We just happened to be in the same place.”
“And what a coincidence!” The words had power, loosened some iron pin in his spine that held him still, and he turned towards my grasp willingly. “I don’t need you to love me. I need you to see how far we’ve come, how far we’ve yet to go.” My voice rose, helpless with old love and new hope. “That’s what we earned, sitting in our rooms, surviving. The going. That’s the point.”
I kissed him on the forehead, closing my eyes. To touch, after all this time, without glass between us, free of desperation, daring to step away from the brink. Finally.
Raven Undersun is an Experimental Psychology student at the University of Oxford. She has a Transatlantic background, growing up in California and later moving to England. She has recently had a short story, “As The Oracles Said”, published in Hypaethral Magazine and a longer story is forthcoming in the Scarlet Leaf Review. She is inspired to write by the hope that her depiction of human emotions and fictional worlds will move her readers in the way that literature has always done for her.
Virginia Watts
Discovery
You think you would be cooling down, growing colder, when you are newly dead. It turns out.
That’s not true. You are hot. Your lips spark as you set them gently and absent-mindedly
together. Absent-mindedly, because there is nothing alarming about being newly dead. You arrive
to this state as a matter of fact.
At first, it is fun having a body that is hotter than it ever was before. If you smack your
lips, you set off an endless light show of orangey red fireworks. Same thing when you blink
rapidly. Little fire tears fly out and fall. A special glitter.
Here’s another kicker. You can still breathe during the first seconds of being newly dead.
Don’t waste those seconds. I didn’t. I had an instinct. I sucked in air, closed my mouth, clamped
my hands over where I thought my ears might still be and blew with great force through my
nose. In other words, I became a dragon. Who doesn’t want to be mythical at a time like this.
That’s some of what I was doing newly dead. My car was there with me, accordioned as
it was, a crumpled tin can spinning on its roof like an out of whack compass needle. An object
about to explode near the concrete wall of an abandoned tuna fish processing plant.
The authorities would find nothing left of me, not even my teeth. Or maybe they did compare bite
marks. I’ll never know. I had to leave. We have only a few minutes before we are fully dead.
Wonder why I chose a tuna fish processing plant? It was the stories-high tuna painted on
the side of the building. The different shades of blue curving her fins. She was so realistic and
entrancing. She served as a bullseye. I aimed straight for her gaping mouth. Someone added long
eyelashes to the fish’s googlies and some Betty Boop cherry red lips. That fish looked like a
cheerful, irreverent honkytonk pick up. At peace with her life choices. A person with two names
for a first name, like Ruby-Jo.
I know, enough about the fish.
Okay, so I was dead. Newly dead. I had seconds to go some special place before one of
the celestials vacuumed me aboard. I’ll just tell you that part now and get it over with. What
happens when we die? The biggest mystery faced by mankind. Pretty simple. We do go straight
up, but not that way. We return to dark space. To the combustion of stars. In other words, we
return to our incendiary elements.
Know this. You won’t be surprised in the least by the last earthly spot you stop by before
you are fully dead.
I did make one pit stop. The last known address of a person I’d been close to. I wondered
what he was up to. He was actually in bed having sex and for a second or two, I folded my
energy into the woman’s frame so I could look up at him. He was definitely in the moment.
They were talking too much. A new relationship. He peered down into our eyes. Didn’t miss a beat.
Didn’t notice anything suddenly amiss and familiar. Just her there, under him. He’d forgotten all
about me, heart wise. I whispered an apology no one heard and left.
The last place I went? My old high school football stadium. A frigid wind battered my
cheeks. Whistled though the bones of silver bleachers. Golden stadium lights stood facing each
other like titans in opposing end zones. My footsteps crunched over a decayed running track,
then all sound was smothered by the field’s wet grass. I walked to the middle of the fifty yard
line and stopped.
As a live person, a girl of sixteen and seventeen, all I could ever think about when I was
inside that massive concrete structure were the stars in the oval cutout of space above my world.
I was obsessed with them or maybe, they were obsessed with me. The few random photos that
still exist of me there are of my chin, tilted back. Strange girl. Constantly looking up. Now, as
nearly dead, I finally understood why.
Virginia Watts is the author of poetry and stories found in Illuminations, The Florida Review, CRAFT, Sunspot Literary Journal, Sky Island Journal, Permafrost Magazine, Bacopa Literary Review, Streetlight Magazine among others. Winner of the 2019 Florida Review Meek Award in nonfiction and nominee for Best of the Net Nonfiction 2019 and 2020, her poetry chapbooks are upcoming for publication by The Moonstone Press. She has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize.
Thomas Weedman San Diego, CA
The Old Woman
The door chime sounds and you see the slight old woman with cotton hair hobble ably
into the store using a wooden cane. A navy blue clutch with kiss-lock clasp hangs from her
shoulder, a diamond wedding band slack on the bony finger. A still-pretty wrinkled face and a
touch of earthy red lipstick, she sports a gray tailored business suit with smart-looking flapped
pockets. Quite nice stitch, quite noiled. In stylish black Mary Jane’s with two-inch square heels,
a leather strap over the instep, and nylons, she approaches your bean counter, lisps, “I’d like to
buy two pounds of dark French Roast ground for a cone. That’s the number 5 setting on the
Mahlkonig,” she adds.
When customers instruct to that degree, it’s a bit grating and degrading. You know the
type and setting. But her voice gentles the coffee-sooted air, calms as a cello or sleepy BBC
documentary. Or Miss Marple murder mystery. Even a dreamy bedtime story for children.
You appreciate her vestal so-damn-cute elegance, immediacy, and specificity. There’s no
hand-holding. She means business, knows what she wants, and even the name of the burr
grinder. You wish more customers were that way, not asking what shade-grown beans or sun-
dried varietals or roast-style from what parts of the world won’t irritate their precious stomachs
or give heartburn.
It’s coffee!
Still, though she didn’t mention it, you ask, “Cup on the house while you wait?”
“Only if you add brandy,” she says.
Woman after your heart. Too bad she’s not younger and free. Not that you are either. “So
sorry, fresh out. Lunch was eventful.” You make a drinking bottoms-up motion.
“Was it, now?” she says, nodding with Irish approval. Or is it Dutch courage?
As you scoop from one a Mahogany-framed bin cleaned daily, she says, “Is it fresh?”
As you, you almost say but use the company line. “Yes ma’am. Very. Nothing over seven
days. Roasted yesterday, got 50-pound barrels and 5-pound Mylars in today. All date-stamped for
standards. The oils should bleed, come to maturation in a day or two.”
You press the tare button, then weigh two pounds on the digital scale – one try, down to
the last dropping second-cracked bean.
“You’ve done this before.”
“Once or twice,” you say, noticing you are both in straight-point collar dress shirts. So
much in common!
You search for the rustic French Roast handstamp. The rubber-bottom markers are never
in alphabetical order in the case – the undatable, slow scatter-brained but kissable nubile co-
workers. When you find and go to ink-pad it, she says, “Could you label the bag decaf?”
“But you want regular French Roast?”
“Correct.”
The beacon goes off, the bloody red flag up. You say you can’t do that, feeling your ticker
suddenly stomp violently. “Ma’am, that could kill someone with a heart condition.” You explain
with carefrontation that as a seller you are liable.
“I’ll find some other way then,” she says without hesitation.
As she canes out empty-handed, you wonder if you can hear right anymore and if you had
one-too-many nips at lunch. And then the door chime sounds again.
Thomas Weedman has a BA in English from Notre Dame and an MFA from Lindenwood. He’s been a seminarian, a forklift operator, barista, and a professional gambler. His short stories have appeared in the Acorn Review, TheWriteLaunch, The Paragon Journal, The Penman Review, Marathon Literary Review, Limited Experience Journal, Constellations, Bridge Eight and forthcoming at DLG Publishing, Running Wild Press, and Drunk Monkeys.
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-weedman-a9520b61/
Janet Jiahui Wu Adelaide, South Australia
Forgetfulness
The empty room. I can't bring back my memory. Everything I try to remember I forget.
Everything I remember I forget. Every room becomes a room of mystery. Every step becomes a
step into oblivion. I feel like a broken record. I feel like a tree without roots. I am borne away by
the lightest breeze and then I am rotting in a foreign country which is only the next street. The
empty room holds everything I have lost, yet everything echoes emptiness.
The table is bare. The chair is bare. My knuckles are red from the cold. There is no wood next to
the fireplace. The rain is solemn. The lighthouse on the hill is in disuse. The dreams I had are like
fallen heroes. They were big for a while and now they are nothing.
Half way across the world there is another person in exactly the same predicament as me.
Nothing makes sense. I write a letter. She writes a letter. There are letters that neither of us
remembers writing.
Love is fleeting in nature. So what if the world is blown to bits? It happens here every day at my
temples. Houses are burned down. Children and dogs get struck by lightnings. Helicopters crash.
Whom is the world built for? The hibiscus only blooms for less than a day. The pole dancers
make money from muscle memory. I cannot bear the emptiness of the room. I loathe the fork in
the road. I am stuck like the chewing gum on my sole.
Lately the grasshoppers destroy the crops. Something is always killing someone. You don't have
to say anything. There is a trick to every word. There are so many ways to forget, except this
one. It is automatic. You don't know why it happens. When someone explains the origin of your
amnesia, you feel insulted. Can't they leave me alone?
I think I was the one who set fire to the Notre Dame. I throw plums at the serious Parisians. I am
a tropical lunatic cyclone cutting down people. I am a false belief and a dint in the hope. I have
forgotten. How pressing the old can be.
A river to drown in. A bridge to jump from. A Napoleon for pigeons to shit on.
I am the chaste caress when there is no one else. Slap this cheek and renounce this breath. There
is no redress, when you are eternally wounded by yourself.
Janet Jiahui Wu is a Hong-Kongese-Chinese-Australian visual artist and writer of poetry and fiction. She has published in various literary magazines such as Voiceworks, Cordite Poetry Review, Mascara Literary Review, Rabbit Poetry, Plumwood Mountain Poetry, foam:e, Tipton Poetry Journal, Eunoia Review, Yes!, and Gone Lawn. She currently lives in South Australia.
Save the Fox
1
Marjory, wearing sunglasses and a black one-piece Catalina bathing suit, is semi-conscious on
a lounge chair by the pool of the Dorado Hotel on Miami Beach. She’s thawing from the winter
of her marriage.
Her mother Irma is smoking a cigarette and talking about the furs. “Take whatever you need
out of cold storage when you get back to Chicago. Except the fox – save the fox. That will pay
for Andrea’s college and a wedding bigger than a movie star’s.”
Between them they have over three hundred furs. Marjory’s father was a furrier, and she sells
them when she needs money.
Marjory’s thirteen-year-old daughter Andrea sits next to her, brooding.
“Look, Vince’s daughter is waving to you,” Irma says. “The dance contest is starting.”
“She’s wearing a bikini. I look like a stupid baby in this dumb ruffled one-piece.”
“Go! Make friends while your mother rests.”
“That girl’s father works for the hotel.”
“And he is a lovely person,” Irma says.
“He gives your bubbe dance lessons,” Marjory adds.
“It’s better than playing mahjong all day. Andrea, they’re doing The Twist. Live a little!”
Irma drags Andrea over to a group of kids who are gyrating as if they are on fire. It makes
Marjory tired just watching them. Finally Andrea joins in. Good. Maybe
2
tomorrow she’ll take her shopping and let her pick out another bathing suit, and if she wants a
bikini she can have a bikini. It’s the 60’s – rules have changed.
And maybe Marjory will stop the Valium.
Irma says that’s the problem. Irma says, “What do you need pills for? Are you sick? Only
sick people need pills. If you’re nervous, have a cigarette and a shot of gin. If you’re sad, have
two shots or the whole damn bottle. Who cares? That’s all I’ve ever needed and the things I
have been through in my life, oy vey iz mir! Don’t forget how we lost your father, God rest his
soul. One minute he’s complaining that he doesn’t want corned beef again for dinner the next
he’s dead at my feet from a heart attack. Ten years he’s been gone. That was the worse thing,
and I managed. A cigarette, a shot of gin.”
But her psychiatrist Dr. Werner insists she continue taking her medication. He was concerned
that she planned to be in Florida for so long. “I would hate for you to
relapse after all the progress we’ve made.”
Progress. Progress for Dr. Werner means getting Marjory to admit she is jealous of her
brothers because they have penises and inherited the family business, and that she resents her
husband Stanley because he can’t provide for her as well as Papa did. It seemed plausible while
she was sprawled on a couch in Dr. Werner’s dark office with the frigid Chicago wind shrieking
outside. But now…
Sunshine clarifies everything. She’s going to stop taking those pills. Marjory pushes the
sunglasses to the top of her head and digs in her mother’s purse for a
cigarette, Pall Mall Gold 100’s The 7 Minute Cigarette. She lights one up and inhales deeply.
Seven minutes… that’s longer than sex lasts with her dear, sweet Stanley. Irma
3
is sitting at the bar with Vince, and Andrea is twisting her ass off with some little boy. Her
daughter should wear a bikini. Let her enjoy her young body. Marjory raises her hand and calls
the cabana boy, a handsome thing with teeth that gleam like a shark’s.
“A drink, please. What do you suggest?”
“Cuba Libre. Rum and coke with a twist of lime. Sweet, as I imagine you are Señora, but
with a little bite.” His eyes travel the length of her body. “Here in Miami, we drink to the
liberation of Cuba.”
Marjory laughs. He’s full of shit, but it’s nice of him to flirt.
Maybe she will try on a bikini, too. And if it doesn’t work, she could certainly pull off a two-piece,
something with bright colors, something with a loud tropical pattern.
Marjory lights another cigarette. Stanley says he loves her, he says he will do anything to
make her happy. Dr. Werner confused her, made happiness seem impossible.
When the cabana boy brings the drink, she tips him generously. Who cares? Her father left
the business to her brothers and their penises – but she saved the fox.
Sandra Cimadori was born in New York and grew up in South Florida in a multilingual home. She graduated from Florida State University. She teaches and writes, dividing her time between North Carolina and Florida. Twitter: sandracimadori@SandraCimadori
Celesté Cosme Burlington, NJ
Thief
1
The first thing
Stella steals
is money.
She is eight.
It is seven dollars
in quarters
from her mother’s
dented tin coffee can.
She uses it to buy
Lisa Frank folders
and Scratch and Sniff Stickers.
Psychedelic animal drawings
and perfumed decals
arouse her senses,
her desire
for more.
2
On Valentine’s Day, the cheerleaders hold a fundraiser where people can send
CandyGrams to students for the holiday. Girls in short skirts with high ponytails pass out helium-
filled pink balloons tethered to bags of candy. Pretty girls are sent more than one, and sometimes
no name is signed on the card, only “From Your Secret Admirer.”
When Stella is in the sixth grade, she receives two CandyGrams—one from her single
mother, the other from her mother’s best friend, who is the school secretary. Sixth-grade girls,
with names like Jessica, Jennifer, Amanda, and Ashley, receive at least five balloons apiece. Each
of these girls has enough money to buy one for a girl friend or two and enough popularity to
receive one from a boy or two.
During study hall, two girls who are laden with balloons ask to use the bathroom. Stella
watches them gently lay their pink parcels on the ground. When she is sure no one is watching,
she bends close to the bags and pokes a hole through the plastic with her pen. Quietly, she pulls a
few of the candies out of each bag. When they return, the Jennifers and Amandas don’t notice
their bundles are lighter, just like they don’t notice Stella trying to swallow half-melted bits of
chocolate.
3
Dear Jason,
I know who stole your Donkey Kong skateboard.
If you want to know too, wait for me to get off the bus.
You should probably wait for me every day anyway. We do live next door.
Stella
4
Senior picture day is tomorrow. Stella will wear the camel-colored sweater she begged
her mother to buy. It’s itchy and thin, but Jennifer Rousch told Stella last week that she has
“summer color” undertones in her skin, which means gold is a good color for her. Though
Stella prefers black, she accepts this advice because Jennifer is pretty, popular, and her bras aren’t
padded like Stella’s.
Last month, Stella stole a box of Crest Whitestrips. Tonight, she finishes her secret ten-
day regimen. Stella believes people have already begun to notice her whiter teeth. Even Jason
looks her way when she passes by his desk in Calculus today. She doesn’t know people are
looking at her more because she is smiling.
5
Stella and her college roommate
both wear size eight in shoes.
If Taylor never sees Stella
in her red heels
or black Nikes,
does it really matter?
6
Stella is home for Christmas. Through her bedroom window, she sees Jason on his front
porch, lighting a cigarette. She rushes downstairs and through the front door, barely closing it
behind her. Stella hears her mother call her to come back for her coat. Crossing the frost-bitten
lawn, she meets Jason on his driveway.
Surviving a few minutes of awkward conversation, they agree to walk to the bar on the
corner since they are both now twenty-one. On the walk, Stella notices his torn flannel jacket,
unkempt hair, and heavy stubble. She wonders if Jason’s beard would hurt her skin should their
faces rub together.
Stella watches as Jason downs three beers, curses at the Sixers game on the big screen,
and flirts with the waitress each time she passes. When the bill comes, Jason lays a credit card on
the check and leaves to use the bathroom. Stella reads his grandmother’s name on the card and
remembers she died that summer.
7
Earlier that morning, Stella walked across the stage to receive her college diploma. When
the announcer read her name, her mother beamed with pride and rang the cowbell that Jason’s
mother loaned her for the ceremony.
Now, she is in the hotel bathroom. Her mother is staying for the weekend to help her
daughter pack up her life and move back home. Stella is staring at her phone, waiting for enough
time to pass. A stolen box of pregnancy tests lies torn open on the floor.
Stella musters the courage to exit the bathroom and enter a new reality. She sits next to
her mother on the bed. Unsure of how to share the facts, Stella decides to tell a different truth.
“Mom, it was me who took the quarters from your coffee can all those years ago.”
Celesté Cosme has been teaching high school English for fifteen years. She is an MFA candidate at Rosemont College and is the Flash Editor for Rathalla Review. Her CNF essay "For Greenwood" appears in Pangyrus. Her current WIP is an MG novel about two kids whose best-friend is the ghost of Nina Simone. She lives in New Jersey with her photographer husband, curious five-year-old, and crazy tuxedo cat Rembrandt.
Matthew Downing Chicago, IL
Grand Teton
I wasn’t enough for her, so I drove to Wyoming. I wasn’t enough for me, so I tried to
climb a mountain. But rocks, birds, and trees didn’t cure my sorrow; failure and self-loathing
swallowed my curiosity.
Halfway to the peak, a herd of moose lounged by the river. I tried to enjoy them, but
people—loud, judgmental, and cruel observers—kept blocking my view. Free from a pack filled
with water, food, and the bear spray the trail signs insisted I carry, I wandered off the trail and
toward silence.
The sun started to set. The soft grass turned to steep ice as my two-legged climb
regressed to a wheezing crawl. If a bear found me here, maybe the fear would jolt me back to
life. I sat until I couldn’t feel my fingers, willing myself to imagine one good thing that could
happen to me if I climbed down the mountain. I decided to go one more rotation around the sun.
It turned out, sliding down was harder than sprinting up. Fighting my way back to my car, I
started a long drive home.
Matthew Downing is a graduate student in Chicago. He lives with his partner, Caroline, and their puppy, Ripley. He has been published in the Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Tribune, The Bangalore Review, and elsewhere.
Sarah Freligh Rochester, NY
You Come Here Often
And often alone since your best friend joined AA though she still calls you on the regular to
remind you about her sobriety and how grateful she is to wake up in the morning without a SWAT
team swarming her brain. She swears you to secrecy, promise not to tell?, before she tells you about a
woman in her group who, since getting sober, often has sex dreams in Technicolor about a bag boy
at Wegmans who’s half her age—hell, he’s younger than her youngest son—and now the woman
can’t look the bag boy in the face when he says, hello, may I be of some assistance, without thinking of
fur handcuffs and the word throb, and your best friend tells you again that you can’t tell anyone, not a
soul, and of course you don’t because who would you tell?
You come here often and often you wonder why you do. The bar stinks of smoke and
polyester BO from the softball teams that hang out here from April to November, the draft beer is
always flat. Also, the television chops characters into legless torsos and topless legs and unless the
Phillies are playing, the television is always tuned to a Law and Order episode and there’s something
about a legless/headless Lennie Briscoe that always undoes you, maybe because Lennie, like your
brother, is dead but lives on and on in reruns.
You come here so often that Jeff the Bartender has your beer poured before you sit down, a
20-ounce draft with just enough foam to moustache your upper lip on first swig, enough sparkle to
scald your throat. You often think that draft beer is like so many of the men you’ve known--
delicious on first sip, lukewarmer thereafter, bitter toward the end—and yet you go on ordering
drafts hoping that the next one will be different, each sip as delicious as the first one.
You often don’t go home because what’s home about it anyway—a tiny apartment with a
sinkful of dirty dishes, fist of hair clogging the shower’s drain, a scraggly orange cat that hangs out
on your back stoop, howling his terrible need and hissing when you get too close. Often you find
mice guts or a bunny heads on the steps, bloody evidence of animal love. Sometimes, but not often,
you go home with a guy who smells like your brother did, of warm flannel and corn chips, a guy
who has the same nervous curl to his hair. Sometimes you’ll smoke a bowl on the roof deck of a
rowhouse and stone out on the Philadelphia skyline, on the red PSFS sign burning the night and
beyond it the headlights of cars on the bridges stitching states together, on the lightless dark that’s
the Delaware River. And often if you’re high enough, you’ll wonder out loud why it’s the Delaware
and not the Pennsylvania River or even the New Jersey, and too often the guy will say Because it’s the
Delaware, dummy, instead of tuning into his own high the way your brother would.
Sometimes but not often you tell him that your brother is dead, that he was shot in a holdup
at a 7/11, that his last words were Is Sierra Nevada on sale? That he died in a strip mall. Sometimes
you wonder how someone can be here one second and gone the next, and often you wish there were
reruns.
Always you cry.
Sarah Freligh is the author of four books, including Sad Math, winner of the 2014 Moon City Press Poetry Prize and the 2015 Whirling Prize from the University of Indianapolis, and We, published by Harbor Editions in early 2021. Recent work has appeared in Wigleaf, Fractured Lit, and in the anthologies New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction and Best Microfiction (2019-21). Among her awards are a 2009 poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a grant from the New York State Council for the Arts.
Soramimi Hanarejima Portland, OR
Petrified Thought
Once the fervor of catching up over dim sum has run its course, we lapse into a lazy silence.
Each of us occasionally sipping what’s left of our tea. Until she asks me if I’d like to see some
old thoughts up close. Of course, I take her up on this rare opportunity to look at actual artifacts
from the psychological past. I’ve worked with plenty of models and replicas, but seldom do I get
to see the real thing, and when I do, it’s usually behind glass.
We walk down streets drenched in summer heat, back to the gloriously air conditioned museum.
After a stop at her office for her curator’s gloves and a guest pair for me, we’re in the stairwell,
descending numerous flights, passing multiple basements, finally exiting into a warehouse-like
expanse. She takes me deep into a maze of metal shelving units, striding briskly as though
navigating to our destination by muscle memory. When we reach it, she mounts a rolling
stepladder and removes a metal box from one of the shelves high above my head. Once she’s
standing on the floor again, she places the box on one of the ladder’s steps and opens it.
The inside is partitioned in a manner reminiscent of a bento box, each compartment occupied by
a tangle of thoughts like a little knot of noodles. All of them are very old and very wrong—a
mess of misconceptions that hideously extend from flawed assumptions.
“Astounding,” I murmur.
“Yes, quite astonishing the kind of thoughts people used to have.”
“I know these are from a different time and all, but it seems ridiculous that they ever made
sense.”
“Want to try some?” she asks, her words more invitation than inquiry.
“Aren’t they fragile?”
“No, these are thoroughly ossified and unlikely to get damaged, unless rigorously challenged.”
“OK, I’ll try not to question them.”
We slip our hands into the soft, white gloves, and she picks up a bundle of thoughts about love.
When she places it on my open palm, I think I’m in for some old-timey folklore about romance.
But no. The moment I wrap my mind around them, these thoughts lock my attention in a vice
grip of beliefs about who can love whom and even who deserves love. The limiting perspective
repulses me, but a moment later, in sweeps the intoxication of complete certainty—the total
confidence that these beliefs are correct, part of the unequivocal order of the world. Utterly
exhilarating and deliciously comfortable, like being tightly snuggled up in voluptuously fuzzy
air. I revel in it, clutching the railing of the stepladder as euphoria swirls within me. My sense of
self wavers. Afraid the ecstasy will incapacitate me, I relinquish the antiquated thoughts.
“Wild, isn’t it?” she says.
“Yes. We’ve come a long way.”
“Though there’s still a ways to go.”
But is there even a road to weaning ourselves off the pleasure of feeling right? Ideas come and
go—instincts endure. These thoughts may be archaic, but the delight of certainty seems timeless.
Soramimi Hanarejima is the author of Visits to the Confabulatorium, a fanciful story collection that Jack Cheng said, "captures moonlight in Ziploc bags." Soramimi’s recent work can be found in Ab Terra 2020, Sunshine Superhighway, Pulp Literature and Vestal Review.
Sophia Ihlefeld Brooklyn, NY
Bone Dust
When humanity had no room left, they bulldozed the cemeteries. There had been protests, of
course, leading up to the demolition. The dissidents chose an intellectual argument over the
sentimental (the sentimental argument clearly being: How dare you disturb the peace of my
sweet, long-dead grandmother?) They made posters, wrote chants.
“What are we if we cull our ancestors from the ground?” MONSTERS. “Where will we be
without our history?” LOST.
There had to be anthropological repercussions, they contended.
But the Director would not budge. We had nowhere else to go, it was true. We’d built up and
down, sideways, diagonal, underground, in the trees. The cemeteries were the only plots left
untouched.
Look around you! commanded the Director. There were no other options! The decision was final.
One woman wept upon her child’s gravestone, clutching at it desperately. Wailing, threatening,
cursing, promising the little corpse she’d never let anyone get to him. She was easily removed.
The stones crumbled like cheese, offering little resistance. The guardian angels looked somewhat
relieved as they crashed to the dirt with fractured wings.
Everyone feared it would reek. Rot and decay. But it didn’t smell much like anything—mildew,
maybe. It was this lack of smell that hit home what none of us ever truly believed: they were all
gone—had been for quite some time.
Standing in the bone dust, we finally realized what we were: alone, desperately alone, and
jealous of the dead.
Sophia Ihlefeld is The Los Angeles Review's first-ever Flash Fiction Editor. Her work has been published in The Cobalt Review, The Los Angeles Review, Silhouette Press and more. She lives in Brooklyn, NY with her fiance.
Lorette C. Luzajic Toronto, Canada
The Nowhere Train
Since we’d left the red hills behind, I couldn’t shake the feeling that my newfound
freedom was an illusion. I was thinking too much. Hurtling through those epic canyons
had me reaching for more metaphors. No matter- there was no turning back. I had
already decided to play the odds and take my chances.
I was tired of the crossword puzzle digest and my mystery novel. When the late light
gave way to evening, I picked up some cards, started in on solitaire, and scrabbled
through my duffel for my flask.
That’s when the stranger appeared.
He pointed a chopstick finger at the seat across from me and I nodded. He was sharp
and long and rubicund, like the red rock cliffs this afternoon. I retrieved my cards and
Camels, made space for his strange narrow bones.
I’m too tired to sleep, he said, and gestured at my bottle. Do you mind? He reached for
my cigarettes, then waited for a light. I couldn’t read him at all, but I was sure he could
read me.
We puffed and watched the darkness rolling past.
After a long while, he gathered up my deck and shuffled. I noticed then that the watch
under his fraying cuffs was a classic Rolex. I was no expert on luxury bijouterie, but the
diamante signet wobbling loosely to and fro on his pinkie also looked like the real deal.
He followed my eyes and I shifted uncomfortably. Crushed my smoke nervously in the
window tray, lit another. The flask was still perched on the razor of his knee, but I knew it
was nearing empty, so I waved an attendant down. Asked for a double Jack neat with
ice on the side. I felt the stranger’s small eyes drilling into me as he shuffled the cards
methodically. Told the waiter to make it a round.
The stranger began doling out the cards. You can’t always outrun someone’s bluff, he
said, and it sounded like a warning.
I’m running already, I wanted to say. I’m on my way there now, wherever it is. But I kept
it to myself. I wondered how Adele would find when she finally forgave me, since I didn’t
know myself where I was going.
We played a few hands, downed our liquor. I got a cold feeling way down deep when I
caught the image of myself in the window. The stranger’s reflection wasn’t there.
Look, kiddo, my friend said, as suddenly as his glass was empty. The only way to win is
to figure what you want to toss and what you want to save. It’s not the hand you’re
dealt, but how you play it.
I was still mulling over everything in my mind, whether I should have cleaned up the
mess I made with Adele before leaving, or boarded the train at all. Every cryptic thing
the man said seemed to be on point. Even so, I resented the intrusion. I had wanted to
wallow on my own, not waste my whiskey on unsolicited advice.
There was something creepy and familiar about him, too, almost like a déjà vu. And yet
it felt in part as if he was a figment. As if he wasn’t there all.
I threw down my turn, just passing the time, not really into the game. In response, there
was no expression on his face. The gambler’s eyes in the night were twin beads,
glittering only the reflection of my hand, deuce diamonds and hearts in spades.
Lorette C. Luzajic is editor of The Ekphrastic Review, a journal she founded in 2015 that is devoted to literature inspired by visual art. Her prose poetry and small fictions have been published widely, including Cabinet of Heed, South Florida Poetry Journal, Miramichi Reader, Litro, New Flash Fiction Review, Unbroken, Cleaver Magazine, Fatal Flaw, JMWW, and many more. She lives in Toronto, Canada.
Breea Milburn Springfield, MO
June Times Five
Dissociative Identity Disorder is defined as multiple persons sharing one body. June had
the opposite problem: June was one person in several bodies---five, to be exact. This was not the
result of quintuplets, nor was it a cloning experiment gone right. June simply inhabited five
bodies that looked exactly alike, her consciousness occupying each one equally. There was no
benefit to this besides June having a larger range of senses. When she purchased a chocolate soda
from the drug store, each mouth sipped five separate straws, and June could feel the sweet
carbonation on five separate tongues. Her life was experienced in surround sound, which was
only beneficial when she walked across sandy beaches, listened to saxophone players at jazz
clubs, watched Fourth of July firework spectaculars, smelled fresh-baked bread wafting through
farmers markets, drank chocolate soda from the drug store.
Otherwise it was a nuisance.
Five bodies meant ten pairs of legs crowding the supermarket aisles. Five bodies meant
fifty fingers holding a lover’s hand. Five bodies meant five angles that she could view herself
from at all times. Five bodies meant one hundred-sixty teeth to feel with five tongues, and five
tongues to feel imprisoned by one hundred-sixty teeth. And yet five bodies still meant one mind
of overstimulation.
There was no original June; there was no June 1, June 2, June 3, and so on. There was
only June. So when June stared at her other bodies, she’d attempt telepathy: Anybody else there?
But all she ever received back was an echo: Anybody else there? Else there? There?
Breea Milburn graduated with her MA in English—creative writing—in Spring 2018. Her fiction and nonfiction work has appeared in Lunar Magazine, Moon City Review, Nixes Mate Review, and Razor Literary. When she's not writing, Breea is working in the youth services department of her local library.
Neeru Nagarajan Bowling Green, OH
How to Lose Weight in 30 Days
Day 1
She starts raising a snake about the size of her large-boned hand. She’s named it her name. It gets
called it more than she does. She has other names, ones she’d rather not be called.
Day 3
Every day she pulls on the snake like she puts on skinny jeans four sizes smaller. She inserts one
leg into its gaping, eager mouth, and then the other. Its hungry jaws stopped at her calves.
Day 7
A person in tights says, “You don’t have to cover your body.” They bless her with a generous
smile. They move quickly. They don’t stop to let her breathe. The hollow voice bounces off the
walls in the bedroom that barely contains her. Cover your body, cover your body, your body.
Day 11
On a good day, her face looks small in the mirror. Her cheekbones are visible. Her tummy looks
almost flat when sucked in. The man handing out flyers for the gym near the bus station does not
stop her.
Day 13
She starts with half-hour walks. She can feel the vibration from every step in her shins, calves,
and thighs. The more she feels each shock in unexpected muscles, the farther she wants to go.
Day 16
Frequently, she loses her way back home.
Day 19
Now, if she lays the snake flat, it’s longer and wider than her body. When she wears it, she looks
like an eel mermaid. The reptile’s fangs dot and cross the lightning streaks on her stretching
and contracting stomach.
Day 21
Every bite lies heavy in her stomach. She pulls each morsel out of her mouth like a thread she
unravels from a sweater until it vanishes. When she remembers food, she remembers to feed her
snake.
Day 26
The snake’s mouth accepts more of her, clamps right under her DD-cups. She’s pleased with her
progress.
Day 30
Today, when she wears her scaly cloak, her body slips and slides inside. Her hips, her breasts, her
arms. The snake doesn’t gag, doesn’t have to stretch its mouth open until the sides tear. The
deeper she goes into the willing tunnel, the more exhilarated she feels. She doesn’t need a mirror
to tell her she’s done it.
Neeru Nagarajan is an Indian Tamil writer. Her work appears in Flash Fiction Magazine, Cleaver Magazine, The Forge Literary Magazine, Hypertext, and elsewhere.
Nathan Nicolau Charlotte, NC
Branding
Inside the Chinese restaurant, a young girl came in to pick up her order. Telemundo was on,
showing kids younger than her tapping metal bars with plastic forks. There was a large family
taking up two whole tables, hand-in-hand with their heads bowed. They muttered something, but
all the girl heard were the words “find peace.” They looked up at the TV and asked the girl to
translate for them. She only knew English. The family laughed. She did too. It reminded her of
how she was called un-American because she didn’t know the lyrics to a Bob Dylan song. Or
how her older brother asked mommy and daddy if he could be Jewish because he didn’t want to
disappoint Moses. Or how World War II soldiers would heat up iron rods red hot to shove it
down a Japanese child’s throat while their parents groveled. The family kept shoving noodles in
each other’s mouths until they leaped from their seats. They held each other’s necks, darting their
bulging white eyes to the girl only to sing in raspy gasps. Peace. Find peace. As they danced for
forgiveness, she grabbed a spoon and asked how she could heat it up.
Nathan Nicolau is a writer/poet based in Charlotte, NC. He is currently an English student at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He released his first poetry collection in 2019. He is currently working on his first novel.
Mandira Pattnaik India
Unravelling a Rainbow
The window is shrouded by smoke billowing out of, what is possibly a hand-grenade, hurled on
the pavement below, and for a few anxious moments, blocks out the view of the carmine sky
leaking into the fudged horizon upon the water.
I rush to the window. It has certainly been thrown from somewhere inside our hotel, maybe the
floor just above ours. Screams and cries bleed into the chaos of the busy pedestrian crossing on
Marine Drive. Like air into a furnace. I can smell gunpowder. So thick, it singes my chest in spite
of the glass.
Who? Why?
In a giant leap, Rowan gets under the writing desk on our left. He had been undressing, and had
only barely removed his pants. Keys and purse neatly kept on the edge of the bed.
I see him texting away furiously, face glued to phone, eyes horrified. He didn't wait for me?
Make sure I was safe?
I withdraw from the window, sit on the bed, hear police sirens descend near, followed by sounds
of a posse of vehicles, doors being yanked open, boots rushing in.
Here we are, Rowan and I, redefining the landscape where our type of relationships goes. Or,
that’s what I thought.
He asked me a week ago, Would you prefer pastel wedding deco, and then, yesterday, looking
wistfully at the trees lining the boulevard, while we were sipping coffee, Pale pink, is what think.
Perfect for your ensemble, before squeezing my hand.
I rub my cold palms, swallow my spit.
Rowan is not Richard Gere, knight on a white steed rescuing Pretty Woman. Looks more a
chameleon at this inopportune moment, changing colors to suit.
I see him finally remembering me. Gazing up. Hope my eyes don’t reveal what I feel for him
now.
Come! he urges, almost a whisper.
I stay.
The intercom rings, piercing the hollow, precipitating silence.
With Rowan still crouched on the floor, I pick the call, replace it with, Okay!
I turn to Rowan,
Receptionist says our hotel is under siege, guests taken hostage, and we need to keep lights off,
and stay inside our rooms until the police instructs us otherwise.
He coughs. Asks,
I’m sweating under the collar. Are you sure AC is working?
I get up, fiddle with the remote, nod a yes, then move to the window again, watch the darkening
of the void above.
Minutes later, I hear gunshots, feet rushing down the stairs, sounds of a scuffle right outside our door.
Rowan crouches. Pulls bare legs to the torso as tightly as he can, and frozen in fright, returns to
typing like a maniac under the desk.
We wait. Time passes. The sapphire bay beyond Marine Drive turns into an impenetrable black
sheath.
I know Rowan is still texting his wife as the shadows in the room ferment. Magenta curtains,
chairs, the bedside lamp wake up from their slumber, and like ghosts, wander the room.
I return to the bed, dig into my purse through all those things that inhabit a hooker’s bag, pull out
the photograph.
In the glow of my lighter, I seek the six-year-old-girl in maxi dress holding her Mum’s hand days
before it all happened — the earth shook and the waters took Mum and Dad out to sea, never to
return them. After all these years, the paper has faintly yellowed, but colors of the day, our
smiles, have stayed intact.
There’s the sound of a hail of bullets, someone pounds our door with fists, kicks so hard it might
fall off its hinges.
Rowan emerges and leaps towards me, but instead of the embrace I was vaguely expecting, he
hunches behind me.
The kicks on the door turn violent, more vigorous. Someone shouts, Open!
I can hear the erratic pounding of my heart like a rhythm gone haywire just before the door falls
with a thud on the floor.
And then, all I can see are pastel pinks, blasted to smithereens, showering like confetti.
Mandira Pattnaik's work has appeared, most recently, in Watershed Review, NFFR, Passages North, Flash Boulevard, Bending Genres, Citron Review and Amsterdam Quarterly. Her writing has also been included in anthologies, and received nominations for Pushcart Prize '21, Best of the Net '20, Best Small Fictions and Best Microfiction '21. Upcoming are pieces in Flash: International Short-Short Story Mag, Timber Journal and Atlas & Alice. She lives in India.
Boshra Rasti-Ghalati Doha, Qatar
Unscathed
It was a camping trip in the desert - a one-off, or at least that is what one must hope it
was. It got out of hand. The drinking I mean. He got drunk and then one thing led to another.
There was a tent that gave them enough privacy, at least one would hope they didn’t groan out
in pleasure. It was uninhibited enough for their skin to mesh and do the deed. The broken bones
of fidelity on the ground, disintegrating into a warped, fast-forward until it was just dust in the
desert.
Despite the vastness, the desert hears and carries everything. The desert winds blow
every broken-down grain to its four corners and bring it back to the plot of sand where it started.
I would have liked it if he had told her. Men have a peculiar way of keeping heaviness to
themselves. Fooled by the solitude of the moment, believing the elements will carry it far and
wide and not return. Heedless enough to forget the web that nature entrusts itself with. But I
heard the whisperings first, or did I? That winter there was a fury of sandstorms; they never
happened without reason. And since my kind cannot carry heaviness, I had to tell her.
Discreetly, at first, nudging her towards the possibility. Hoping when her curiosity was piqued, he
would come clean, relieve himself of the dust that sat in the corners of his mouth, his brow. He
did not, but rather went about his day, red and proud, like the fire-body he had touched, with
only soot now covering his face, weighing his features down.
Then she noticed his comings and goings at odd hours. He blamed it on the job, on her
insistence that they come to this part of the world, but the sandstorms came again. This time,
sick of the haze, I carried her to the desert. At first she thought it was a mirage, but when we
moved towards it, the sand amplified sounds deafening us with what had happened and grains
assembled into a magnifying glass showing her that nobody escapes unscathed.
Boshra Rasti-Ghalati is a Persian-Canadian who writes and teaches abroad. You can find her work scattered over the internet and in print. Home is currently Doha, Qatar, where she lives with her daughter, Avah and dog, Ozzie.
She is querying for her first novel, Surrogate Colony. Her poems and other scribbles are on Instagram @boshrascribbles
Blake Z. Rong Brooklyn, NY
One Thousand Free Hours
it’s 2002. you walk home from the bus stop with Jon Bach, who is your neighbor, and Andrew
Mueller, who you still think is your best friend. they are juniors, three years older than you, and
therefore they are kings. from his L.L. Bean backpack Jon pulls out a picture of a naked woman
and waves it in front of your face. she is grainy and spread-eagled atop a shaggy carpet in a red-
tinted room. it’s the first time you see bush. they laugh their asses off.
you unlock the front door and turn on the TV just in time for Bill Nye the Science Guy. when it
goes to commercial you boot up your parents’ HP Pavilion and sign on AOL, and the modem
plays you the song of its people, and Caitlin Russell is signed on. her username is
dolphincrazed888. your heart skips a beat. from the living room Bill Nye is explaining static
electricity, and he rubs a balloon against his hair, and his hair stands straight up. “I don’t think so,
Bill,” says the deep-voiced announcer.
“hey,” you peck with your fingers, every keystroke as weighted as a pendulum.
and then you see her typing back. you sit there, staring at the keyboard, and the waves crash
against the rocks, star fuse from nebulae, continents bubble from volcanic ash, fish wiggle up out
of the sea and grow legs and eventually hunt men for sport. the world will never end, the world
has already ended. “what’s up!” she says, and you immediately run your calculations through
your head—she responded quickly, so you mean something important to her; she threw in an
exclamation point, she’s excited to talk to you again, after you said hi to her in homeroom--
and then she adds a ☺. and all your calculations leak out of your brain.
your parents won’t be home for hours. the new world has just begun. you microwave a Totino’s
Party Pizza and you eat it in one sitting and wash it down with a Sprite Remix and you feel pretty
good about it.
Blake Z. Rong is a writer in Brooklyn. He recently received an MFA in Writing & Publishing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. He is the author of the nonfiction work Beautiful Machines (Gestalten, 2019). His debut collection of poetry, I Am Not Young And I Will Die With This Car In My Garage, will be published with Atmosphere Press in 2021. His short stories and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetica Review, Vagabond City, and Isele Magazine.
Karen Schauber Vancouver, Canada
Heel Toe Kick, Heel Toe Kick
We hear the frenzied click-clacking and trumpeted honks before spotting the swelling throng, our
necks twisting in the wind craning to catch a glimpse; the gathering of birds advancing as one
entity—heel toe kick, heel toe kick—like Alvin Ailey dancers in hot pink leotard, the synchronized
clusters glide along the cerulean blue of the estuary, poised, straight-backed, noses thrust high into
the air, heads flagging from side to side, the ebullient mating calls deafening as the procession
advances; their dance fierce and without end until all have paired, for life—heel toe kick, heel toe
kick.
Marvin is missing the whole thing, futzing with his Nikon, beside me. Ultra-wide-angle, super-
telephoto, circular fisheye.... nothing new, he often misses the big picture and the little ones too.
Yesterday back at the hotel, when I asked him what he thought about the adorable young couple
sitting across from us at dinner recounting thrilling stories about their eco-tourism excursion whale-
watching, he hadn't heard a word. I spot the two of them farther down the river, so close—almost
standing in the same footprint—sharing the thrill of this event arm-in-arm.
Turning back to the pageant blushing and bleeding and blinding pink, I marvel at the devotion and
promise of this ritual. The effort these creatures put into selecting a mate, the fervour of their dance,
the ache in their hearts; hyperextended legs, petits jetés, flamboyant bobs, twerking and whirling;
flaunting the best they have to offer. Not giving up till the deal is sealed. No looking back, no cold
feet. I gesticulate and caterwaul for Marvin to look...Look...LOOK, as the procession sails on by.
But he is busy doing that clucking, tutting, and twisty thing he does with his tongue; head down
niggling and piggling with wide apertures and miniscule settings. There is a flurry of wings from the
left flank as matched pairs begin to take off into the wide expanse of sky, hurried pedaling with
elongated feet gaining initial flying speed; bright crimson and vermillion wings tapping, snapping,
flapping until airborne—forever in alignment.
I look over at Marvin clutching his SLR and wonder... what does he see.
Karen Schauber's work appears in sixty international literary magazines, journals and anthologies, including Bending Genres, Cabinet of Heed, Cease Cows, Ekphrastic Review, Fiction Southeast, New World Writing, Spelk; and a 'Best Microfiction' nomination. Schauber curates Vancouver Flash Fiction, an online resource hub, and Miramichi Flash, a monthly flash fiction column. In her spare time, she is a seasoned family therapist. http://VancouverFlashFiction.weebly.com
Robert Scotellaro San Francisco, CA
Chickens in the Parlor
Moat In Lieu of a Welcome Mat
When my mother felt her life had become drab and spark-smothered, her lipsticks became redder and redder.
And she built a moat around the house. Each day when my father came home from
scrubbing graffiti off subway station walls, he’d swim through a clinging storm of mosquitoes to
get to the front door with one hand paddling, the other holding his bottle of whiskey above the
brine.
Old MacDonald
Mother sprinkled feed on the rug for the chickens in the “parlor” (What she called that tiny room
with a convertible sofa in it.) The chickens hopped up onto the furniture knocking things over. I
was young and didn’t mind their ceaseless pecking. My father found a burial plot inside the
newspaper and started digging, so he never noticed the new dress Mother was wearing or the
candy apple red high heels. “This is what you get when you act like Old MacDonald,” Mother
said, sweeping her arm broadly and causing a few chickens to flutter feckless wings. “Ee-i-ee-i-
o,” she said.
Steam Scream
Mother rid the house of chickens, and Dad learned to cha-cha-cha. (It’s strange to think how old
they seemed then—how young they really were.) They were in the kitchen dancing when the
teapot started screaming. Father turned, but Mother said, “Leave it.” That she didn’t want to
stop for a single minute, that those red high heels were out of their coma. She was wearing a
flared sundress and Father had on his grey razor-creased trousers with high cuffs. I found a
quarter once in one of those cuffs as they draped over a chair. It was an archeological highpoint.
Father seemed to like the way that dress bell-shaped as she twirled, and the feel of it—the tea
kettle, not so much. A record skipped on the turntable, was stuck in a brassy repetitious snippet
over and over… Father turned again, sweating at that point.
“Leave it,” Mother said.
Robert Scotellaro's work has been included in W.W. Norton’s Flash Fiction International, NANO Fiction, Gargoyle, Matter Press, Best Small Fictions 2016, 2017, and 2021 (forthcoming), Best Microfiction 2020, and others. He’s the author of seven chapbooks, and five flash fiction collections. He has, with James Thomas, edited New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction, published by Norton. Robert is one of the founding donors to The Ransom Flash Fiction Collection at the Univ. of Texas. Visit him at www.robertscotellaro.com
Krishna Sharma Athens, GA
Daphne’s Perdition
His starfruit eyes were weepy in the morning sun. A pollen paroxysm.
No more phone today. The screens within screens had lost their tantalizing touch. The rapid fire
words he read just slipped through the creases of his brain like tepid, tasteless tea. Today he had
a mission. A destination. A pilgrimage.
In six hours he knew Venus would be throbbing in the sky again. He knew the sun would be
cupped in starry hands and slipped away, like a marble hidden in its black velvet case. He needed
to arrive before then.
He was on his way to see a goddess at the riverbanks.
He dreamt of this happening, almost dismissing it as delirium, but then awoke astonished to see a
snake on the floor of his bedroom bathing in sunlight. Aware of his cognizance, the snake exited
the room by slithering up the walls and disappearing in an air vent in his ceiling.
He took this as a sign from God. The dream must have been prophecy. Without packing
anything, he left for the nearest river.
A 12 hour journey. Much to think about. But he didn’t think about the dream at first. Instead, he
cultivated childhood memories in his head. Every day a few scenes of his youth would quietly
perish away without his notice. Sometimes he worried about it.
The sun was blazing. He began recollecting parts of the dream. Who was this woman? He
remembered her father was a laurel tree and her mother was a mechanic at the local barbershop.
No, wait. What? That can’t be right. He hadn’t eaten or drank water all day.
The horizon was colored as an orange peel when he got to the riverbank. There was a woman
in a black dress, embroidered with yellow flowers, reading. Her wrists were clasped with grass
and her ankles were soothed by the flowing river. Nearby lay a rented bicycle.
She attended a small university and worked as a waitress. She had a fondness for goofy animals.
She was afraid of getting Lyme disease and audited by the IRS. Her neck was freckled with the
constellation Ursa minor. Her eyes were heavy like the drawers of clothes she didn’t wear.
“Hello?” he cried out. Her eyes looked up with grace. They shared a pollen sneeze before
speaking again. “I’ve seen you,” he told her. “I know,” she gently spoke. He took a seat beside
her. Their ankles created ripples that compounded the river water into intricate patterns.
“Do you remember where we first met?” she asked. “In my dream,” he said. “Before that,” she
playfully chided. “No…” was his only response.
“Don’t worry,” she said softly as she grabbed his hand. Her other hand picked crimson petals of a
nearby flower. A flower, in fact, that he had never seen before. She looked at the river, opened
her palm, and said “Πηνειός” to the river below.
When the petals landed and floated round their ankles, their feet suddenly began sprouting twigs.
A cask of bark started growing around them. He looked at her, confused, still holding her hand,
and watched her hair begin to rise and morph into branches. She embraced him closely.
He felt his body expand and join with hers, twisting desperately into tree bark. Their lips
bloomed as fragrant leaves and their nipples shed as husks of seeds. Just when Venus made
herself apparent in the sky, the two of them on the riverbank finished becoming one.
For 300 years they lived on this riverbank, caught in the warm friction of their bodies sliding
together. After the tree was no more, their embrace endured ceaselessly through the propagation
of more laurel trees with every passing season.
Ceaseless, that is, until the river ran dry and all the trees were felled. All of them, gone, at the
hands of men.
With the perdition of their trees came the eternal loss of their embrace. But no human needed to
grieve that loss. For, like childhood memories quietly perishing away, mankind was spared the
very knowledge of their existence by the destructive act of forgetting it.
Another night falls. Another outer layer of the sun is eroded by its slipping away into that black
velvet case. And another throb from Venus illuminates the sky. But only briefly. For she shines a
little dimmer in the sky tonight. She is burdened with the tacit depths of loss.
Krishna Sharma is an ecology graduate student with an avid passion for creative writing. While he normally writes poetry, this piece is inspired by "Twitter Fiction," in which each passage is 280 characters or less. This piece is my creative approach to writing about human destruction of the natural world.
Beth Stevens Westport, CT
Lunchbox Notes From My Mother
The lunch itself was always the same: turkey on wheat with mustard and two leaves of lettuce, a
Grannysmith, a handful of animal crackers in a Ziploc. The note was from the yellow memo pad
she kept by the kitchen phone. Her handwriting was compact and neat. Did you know the body
has 2.5 million sweat pores? Love, Mom
The “o” in Mom had a smiley face. No, I did not know about sweat pores. I imagined millions of
holes in my skin oozing a viscous substance. The idea of chewing suddenly turned my stomach. I
pitched the green apple toward the garbage can and missed. It rolled under the chair of the girl
who smelled like a mixture of my sister’s shampoo—Herbal Essence—and birthday cake:
Melissa Brooks. She had a spatter of freckles on her nose and blue jeans with a star patch at the
knee. She was missing part of her thumb. I loved her so much I could not look directly at her. I
kept her in my peripheral vision—blurred at the edges. The glands under my 2.5 million pores
pricked up.
Mom liked to have a theme to her notes. In October it was all about Halloween: Did you know
the word “witch” comes from the Old English wicce (meaning “wise woman”)? Love, Mom
Melissa Brooks had dressed as Dorothy. I’m guessing she was inspired by The Wiz, which came
out a week before the holiday. She wore white tights, long braids, sparkling slippers. She looked
more Judy than Diana. I wore a Fonz mask, but people kept asking if I was dressed as Richard
Nixon. It was 1978. No, I was not Nixon. Did you know samhainophobia is the fear of
Halloween? Love, Mom
Phobias were her specialty. Ablutophobia, fear of bathing. Bibliophobia, fear of books.
Metathesiophobia, fear of change. I’m sorry to report I took these notes personally. Just what was
she getting at anyway? I was 13—I could read between the lines.
When we moved away the summer before ninth grade, I called Melissa Brooks to say goodbye.
Her dad said she was at sleepaway camp in Vermont. The kitchen receiver was slippery in my
clammy hands.
Autophobia, fear of being alone. Athazagoraphobia, fear of being forgotten. Once I saw my
mother bent over the memo pad in the early morning light, a dictionary tucked into the crook of
her arm. Her hair was dark and curly like mine. I watched her tap the ballpoint to her lips.
Beth Stevens is an Emmy-winning writer, editor, and producer. Her work has appeared in The Cape Rock, Chiron Review, The Waverly Review, Time Out New York, American Theatre Magazine and others. She is a founding editor of Broadway.com, where she continues to serve as Managing Editor. She has an MFA in Dramatic Writing from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. There are many people named Beth Stevens. This one is not the Harvard neuroscientist, country singer, or young performer in Liverpool.
Raven Undersun Oxford, England
On the Bridge
I’d come back to the bridge as a pilgrim, revisiting my past, leaving surrender at its altar. I’d come to ponder how much I’d lived since the days we talked of jumping from it. It was a moment before I recognized him, poised beyond the blue-steel railing. He’d come back to finish our old dreams, alone. I cried out, wordless. How could I pour it all into one syllable?
Catching sight of each other for the first time from our windows on opposite sides of the street. A smile, a slow wave. The streets below, empty. And the message I’d stuck in the window, reeling drunk to pass the time, eleven digits. After that, we called most nights, to ask what the sky looked like from the other’s point of view. Death raged below, invisible, his scythe snapping out when strangers passed too close. I’d sit with my legs out the window, dangling them above the
chalky pink wall to catch some sun, drawing the heavy purple curtains behind my back. He’d play the piano through the phone line.
It’d been so long since the buskers fled, since I’d heard live music. I actually cried. It was a time of scavenging, of digging up old books from beneath the floorboards, straining to hear conversations through the walls, dipping fingers in vanilla paste for a taste of something sweet when the chocolate ran out. He put his plants in his window so I could see them. I drank the leftover liquor from the bar downstairs, where I’d worked before the borders locked down. It
fermented further and put up lonely bubbles inside its glass walls.
We could see the bridge from the corners of our windows. Once he’d said it, that if we ran, we could make it before anyone saw, that any escape would be better – the walls came down. A deluge of our deepest confessions poured out of us. We fell into a love driven by desperation.
“Without me? After everything’s back to normal?”
He blinked, a dreamer slowly waking. My hand circled his wrist, holding him.
“Normal was an illusion. Underneath, we’re alone, and nothing lasts.”
“We weren’t alone then.” Had the role I’d played in his heart then been incidental, not instrumental?
“That was...an intermission. We went our separate ways. And it was a coincidence, anyway. We just happened to be in the same place.”
“And what a coincidence!” The words had power, loosened some iron pin in his spine that held him still, and he turned towards my grasp willingly. “I don’t need you to love me. I need you to see how far we’ve come, how far we’ve yet to go.” My voice rose, helpless with old love and new hope. “That’s what we earned, sitting in our rooms, surviving. The going. That’s the point.”
I kissed him on the forehead, closing my eyes. To touch, after all this time, without glass between us, free of desperation, daring to step away from the brink. Finally.
Raven Undersun is an Experimental Psychology student at the University of Oxford. She has a Transatlantic background, growing up in California and later moving to England. She has recently had a short story, “As The Oracles Said”, published in Hypaethral Magazine and a longer story is forthcoming in the Scarlet Leaf Review. She is inspired to write by the hope that her depiction of human emotions and fictional worlds will move her readers in the way that literature has always done for her.
Virginia Watts
Discovery
You think you would be cooling down, growing colder, when you are newly dead. It turns out.
That’s not true. You are hot. Your lips spark as you set them gently and absent-mindedly
together. Absent-mindedly, because there is nothing alarming about being newly dead. You arrive
to this state as a matter of fact.
At first, it is fun having a body that is hotter than it ever was before. If you smack your
lips, you set off an endless light show of orangey red fireworks. Same thing when you blink
rapidly. Little fire tears fly out and fall. A special glitter.
Here’s another kicker. You can still breathe during the first seconds of being newly dead.
Don’t waste those seconds. I didn’t. I had an instinct. I sucked in air, closed my mouth, clamped
my hands over where I thought my ears might still be and blew with great force through my
nose. In other words, I became a dragon. Who doesn’t want to be mythical at a time like this.
That’s some of what I was doing newly dead. My car was there with me, accordioned as
it was, a crumpled tin can spinning on its roof like an out of whack compass needle. An object
about to explode near the concrete wall of an abandoned tuna fish processing plant.
The authorities would find nothing left of me, not even my teeth. Or maybe they did compare bite
marks. I’ll never know. I had to leave. We have only a few minutes before we are fully dead.
Wonder why I chose a tuna fish processing plant? It was the stories-high tuna painted on
the side of the building. The different shades of blue curving her fins. She was so realistic and
entrancing. She served as a bullseye. I aimed straight for her gaping mouth. Someone added long
eyelashes to the fish’s googlies and some Betty Boop cherry red lips. That fish looked like a
cheerful, irreverent honkytonk pick up. At peace with her life choices. A person with two names
for a first name, like Ruby-Jo.
I know, enough about the fish.
Okay, so I was dead. Newly dead. I had seconds to go some special place before one of
the celestials vacuumed me aboard. I’ll just tell you that part now and get it over with. What
happens when we die? The biggest mystery faced by mankind. Pretty simple. We do go straight
up, but not that way. We return to dark space. To the combustion of stars. In other words, we
return to our incendiary elements.
Know this. You won’t be surprised in the least by the last earthly spot you stop by before
you are fully dead.
I did make one pit stop. The last known address of a person I’d been close to. I wondered
what he was up to. He was actually in bed having sex and for a second or two, I folded my
energy into the woman’s frame so I could look up at him. He was definitely in the moment.
They were talking too much. A new relationship. He peered down into our eyes. Didn’t miss a beat.
Didn’t notice anything suddenly amiss and familiar. Just her there, under him. He’d forgotten all
about me, heart wise. I whispered an apology no one heard and left.
The last place I went? My old high school football stadium. A frigid wind battered my
cheeks. Whistled though the bones of silver bleachers. Golden stadium lights stood facing each
other like titans in opposing end zones. My footsteps crunched over a decayed running track,
then all sound was smothered by the field’s wet grass. I walked to the middle of the fifty yard
line and stopped.
As a live person, a girl of sixteen and seventeen, all I could ever think about when I was
inside that massive concrete structure were the stars in the oval cutout of space above my world.
I was obsessed with them or maybe, they were obsessed with me. The few random photos that
still exist of me there are of my chin, tilted back. Strange girl. Constantly looking up. Now, as
nearly dead, I finally understood why.
Virginia Watts is the author of poetry and stories found in Illuminations, The Florida Review, CRAFT, Sunspot Literary Journal, Sky Island Journal, Permafrost Magazine, Bacopa Literary Review, Streetlight Magazine among others. Winner of the 2019 Florida Review Meek Award in nonfiction and nominee for Best of the Net Nonfiction 2019 and 2020, her poetry chapbooks are upcoming for publication by The Moonstone Press. She has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize.
Thomas Weedman San Diego, CA
The Old Woman
The door chime sounds and you see the slight old woman with cotton hair hobble ably
into the store using a wooden cane. A navy blue clutch with kiss-lock clasp hangs from her
shoulder, a diamond wedding band slack on the bony finger. A still-pretty wrinkled face and a
touch of earthy red lipstick, she sports a gray tailored business suit with smart-looking flapped
pockets. Quite nice stitch, quite noiled. In stylish black Mary Jane’s with two-inch square heels,
a leather strap over the instep, and nylons, she approaches your bean counter, lisps, “I’d like to
buy two pounds of dark French Roast ground for a cone. That’s the number 5 setting on the
Mahlkonig,” she adds.
When customers instruct to that degree, it’s a bit grating and degrading. You know the
type and setting. But her voice gentles the coffee-sooted air, calms as a cello or sleepy BBC
documentary. Or Miss Marple murder mystery. Even a dreamy bedtime story for children.
You appreciate her vestal so-damn-cute elegance, immediacy, and specificity. There’s no
hand-holding. She means business, knows what she wants, and even the name of the burr
grinder. You wish more customers were that way, not asking what shade-grown beans or sun-
dried varietals or roast-style from what parts of the world won’t irritate their precious stomachs
or give heartburn.
It’s coffee!
Still, though she didn’t mention it, you ask, “Cup on the house while you wait?”
“Only if you add brandy,” she says.
Woman after your heart. Too bad she’s not younger and free. Not that you are either. “So
sorry, fresh out. Lunch was eventful.” You make a drinking bottoms-up motion.
“Was it, now?” she says, nodding with Irish approval. Or is it Dutch courage?
As you scoop from one a Mahogany-framed bin cleaned daily, she says, “Is it fresh?”
As you, you almost say but use the company line. “Yes ma’am. Very. Nothing over seven
days. Roasted yesterday, got 50-pound barrels and 5-pound Mylars in today. All date-stamped for
standards. The oils should bleed, come to maturation in a day or two.”
You press the tare button, then weigh two pounds on the digital scale – one try, down to
the last dropping second-cracked bean.
“You’ve done this before.”
“Once or twice,” you say, noticing you are both in straight-point collar dress shirts. So
much in common!
You search for the rustic French Roast handstamp. The rubber-bottom markers are never
in alphabetical order in the case – the undatable, slow scatter-brained but kissable nubile co-
workers. When you find and go to ink-pad it, she says, “Could you label the bag decaf?”
“But you want regular French Roast?”
“Correct.”
The beacon goes off, the bloody red flag up. You say you can’t do that, feeling your ticker
suddenly stomp violently. “Ma’am, that could kill someone with a heart condition.” You explain
with carefrontation that as a seller you are liable.
“I’ll find some other way then,” she says without hesitation.
As she canes out empty-handed, you wonder if you can hear right anymore and if you had
one-too-many nips at lunch. And then the door chime sounds again.
Thomas Weedman has a BA in English from Notre Dame and an MFA from Lindenwood. He’s been a seminarian, a forklift operator, barista, and a professional gambler. His short stories have appeared in the Acorn Review, TheWriteLaunch, The Paragon Journal, The Penman Review, Marathon Literary Review, Limited Experience Journal, Constellations, Bridge Eight and forthcoming at DLG Publishing, Running Wild Press, and Drunk Monkeys.
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-weedman-a9520b61/
Janet Jiahui Wu Adelaide, South Australia
Forgetfulness
The empty room. I can't bring back my memory. Everything I try to remember I forget.
Everything I remember I forget. Every room becomes a room of mystery. Every step becomes a
step into oblivion. I feel like a broken record. I feel like a tree without roots. I am borne away by
the lightest breeze and then I am rotting in a foreign country which is only the next street. The
empty room holds everything I have lost, yet everything echoes emptiness.
The table is bare. The chair is bare. My knuckles are red from the cold. There is no wood next to
the fireplace. The rain is solemn. The lighthouse on the hill is in disuse. The dreams I had are like
fallen heroes. They were big for a while and now they are nothing.
Half way across the world there is another person in exactly the same predicament as me.
Nothing makes sense. I write a letter. She writes a letter. There are letters that neither of us
remembers writing.
Love is fleeting in nature. So what if the world is blown to bits? It happens here every day at my
temples. Houses are burned down. Children and dogs get struck by lightnings. Helicopters crash.
Whom is the world built for? The hibiscus only blooms for less than a day. The pole dancers
make money from muscle memory. I cannot bear the emptiness of the room. I loathe the fork in
the road. I am stuck like the chewing gum on my sole.
Lately the grasshoppers destroy the crops. Something is always killing someone. You don't have
to say anything. There is a trick to every word. There are so many ways to forget, except this
one. It is automatic. You don't know why it happens. When someone explains the origin of your
amnesia, you feel insulted. Can't they leave me alone?
I think I was the one who set fire to the Notre Dame. I throw plums at the serious Parisians. I am
a tropical lunatic cyclone cutting down people. I am a false belief and a dint in the hope. I have
forgotten. How pressing the old can be.
A river to drown in. A bridge to jump from. A Napoleon for pigeons to shit on.
I am the chaste caress when there is no one else. Slap this cheek and renounce this breath. There
is no redress, when you are eternally wounded by yourself.
Janet Jiahui Wu is a Hong-Kongese-Chinese-Australian visual artist and writer of poetry and fiction. She has published in various literary magazines such as Voiceworks, Cordite Poetry Review, Mascara Literary Review, Rabbit Poetry, Plumwood Mountain Poetry, foam:e, Tipton Poetry Journal, Eunoia Review, Yes!, and Gone Lawn. She currently lives in South Australia.