The Domeless Palace

Janelle Bassett's writing appears in The Offing, American Literary Review, The Rumpus, Smokelong Quarterly, VIDA Review, and Slice Magazine. She is an Assistant Fiction Editor for Split Lip Magazine and she lives in St. Louis.

My father’s palace was constructed for a long ago World’s Fair using wood, plaster, horsehair and windows salvaged from obsolete factories. The other temporary buildings were either torn down and scrapped or left to deteriorate in the weather while being taken apart by nest-making birds. The city had preserved one of the plaster palaces (for history, for tourism) by encasing it under a huge glass dome. In the snowy months, the palace was called “The Reverse Snowglobe” and hot chocolate and dome keychains were sold to onlookers. After decades of dome upkeep, the taxpayers finally balked at the ongoing expense. There was a public auction. My father wore a vest. I knew nothing of it until he called to say, “Jilly, I am going to lay your mother to rest in the dome house.”

(My therapist told me that “grief bidding” is a studied phenomenon—an extreme version of retail therapy for the recently bereaved with massive bank accounts. She told me about a woman who bought a civil war cannon after accidentally running her pet ferret through the dishwasher.)

We had just lost my mother. Cancer. Slow. Her dying was our whole life for seventeen months. Mom refused to talk final arrangements even after it became clear that she wouldn’t outlast her illness, but Dad had it in his heart to go big with it. He’d always been showy with this affection for her, coming home with velvet robes or apricot scones or snowflake pendants he thought she might like.

The bidding was over and there was no reasoning with him. The idea of burying Mom in a common hole added horror to his grief. While I stayed mum on the subject, his battle to bury his wife in an impermanent relic located in the middle of a city park—ordinances be damned—became a Yahoo! News story. He lost this battle, of course, but won in his own way by (gingerly) moving the building onto his private property and taking up residence in the palace alongside Mom’s urn.

When I visit my father in his dilapidated palace, I come bearing tarps, eucalyptus spray, and fig jam—for the rain, for the bugs, for the toast. These are supplies I need for a three hour stay.

Dad receives me in his grand entryway and goes in for a big reconnection hug, but since my arms are full, he ends up doing all the patting and squeezing while I acquaint myself with the new shape of his ceiling. There’s been loss since my last visit, chunks of plaster goo that have fallen to the floor and been swept toward the corners.

He lets me go and we look at each other. His face is wet and I don’t know whether he’s been crying again or if he just walked under a patch of open sky on his way to let me in. He frowns at my supplies—he thinks wearing tarps inside a national treasure degrades its history.

“Sorry,” I tell him. “The forecast made me do it.”

I put the tarp around my shoulders like a barber cape and ask how his day is going.

“Merrily along. I’ve been installing towel racks in each room.”

Everything my father says could be met with the questions At what cost? and To what end?

“I brought the jam you like.” As the jam goes from my hand to his, I like feeling that we are sharing at least that much reality, a jar-sized amount. “Should we go to the kitchen, Dad?”

The kitchen is an eighty-foot-long room with a vaulted ceiling where a toaster and fridge have been hooked up to a generator. It’s one of the best preserved areas, dry and intact. Dad lowers the bread into the toaster slots and we sit on the floor. I hear a thump somewhere in the house, then the thump’s immediate echo.

“That’d be a chunk of the east hall going down,” Dad says. “When things dry out, I’ll see what I can patch back up. I’ve been having some luck mixing molasses with sawdust and... ”

“Who bought the dome? Is it too late to track it down?” I’ve stopped telling him to move outright, because I know that, to him, such suggestions are a betrayal.

“It was sold to the Pony Express museum in St. Joseph. They’ve already got the first station house and a team of taxidermied horses under there.”

The toast pops up and Dad gets a knife from the plastic bag of kitchen utensils he’s hung from the coat rack above us. He’s using too much jam. His hair has grown long. Mom would correct all this, put him back in context, make him be reasonable. Undo, undo, undo.

***

Later, in my hotel room with its safe roof, I text my therapist for emergency post-visit support. She answers: “You want your father to be reasonable for you. To conform. To thrive traditionally. To stop arguing with reality.” I nodded along until I read, “But he’s not going to.”

I highlight the word “not” and copy and paste it into a note I keep on my phone of things I need to remember.

When I get in bed and call Dad for my long-distance tuck-in, I’m on the fourth floor of a ten story building, and that number of ceilings feels right for me, personally.

“I’m not tired yet,” I tell him. “Tell me a bedtime story. Tell me more about what you’re using for patches these days. Molasses and what all?”

Snow Day

Kelle Schillaci Clarke is a Seattle-based fiction and creative nonfiction writer with deep L.A. roots. Her recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Superstition Review, Blood Orange Review, Barren Magazine, Pidgeonholes, and Lunate. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, but left the desert in favor of the rainy Pacific Northwest, where she can sometimes be found tweeting @kelle224.

It snowed. We ate brie in puff pastry for dinner, stove-top popcorn for a snack, drank Colorado Bulldogs while waiting for our socks to dry. We took pictures of the dog in his too-tight sweater, his neck rolls spilling over the seams. We posted them on Twitter making comparisons to our own expanding girths. We put the kid down, tucked deep in her sleep chamber, dreaming of the Loch Ness Monster. We ignored the dishes, stiffened our drinks, read poetry to each other written by a poet friend who waxed too eloquently about eggplants and peppers, and you revealed that your stomach can’t tolerate nightshades—something about the alkaloids and inflammation—and I revealed that if left on its own to dry, my hair is naturally curly, which surprised us both, the fact that we still had things to learn about one another. We flipped on the fireplace, moved on to shots, licked butter and salt from each other’s fingers until you tipped the bowl over with your bare foot, sending kernels like confetti dancing across the hardwood floor, which the dog lunged for as if starving, and you yelled No! Those can kill him! I gripped the dog while you collected the popcorn back into its red and white striped bowl, the one with the word Popcorn machine-painted across it, the same way our pasta bowls say Pasta and our cocktail glasses say His and Hers. We got a bit sloppy. You spilled your drink, I brought up the past. You heated up a bowl of chili, we turned on the TV. I twisted my hair into a tight knot, tucked it into the knit cap our poet friend made for me, years ago. It was still snowing. I put on my socks and walked out into it, lit as bright as day by the moon, hearing only silence and the crunch of snow beneath my feet, a sound I thought I had longed for, but now that it was here, I was already preparing myself for when it would melt away.

Sunday Morning

Selena Cotte is a poet, journalist & shapeshifter living in Chicago by way of Orlando. Her poems are published or forthcoming in journals such as Peach Mag, HAD, Sad Girl Review, 3 Moon Magazine & others. She can be found online @selenacotte, wherever you think that may work.

Devin walked out of the bedroom to see his girlfriend crying again on his couch. Even three years ago, he would have reacted very differently, but he had a lot to do today. There was no time to get sucked into a whirl of Bridget’s emotions, and even a pinky extended in support would be enough to pull his whole body in. If it were two years ago, he would have reacted differently from then too, probably saying “What is it now,” with some harsh, practiced voice, counterproductive in his attempt to make everything go away. Now, he stood with as blank a face as he could compose, remembering his readings on how to remain in control of a dynamic seemingly out of one’s hands.

Bridget had actually only been masturbating, unsure when Devin would be awake. She felt silly doing so, but couldn’t focus on any of the tasks at hand to get a headstart. Yes, the dishes needed done, but she was distracted by the dream she had last night, in which she had asked a strange older man, perhaps a stand-in for her father, to have sex with her. And he did, and it was far more interesting than anything Devin had done in months, maybe even a year or more. They were coming up on five years together, and it was always the same, even when she asked for variety. Now, she understood asking to be a trigger to another whirlwind of his emotions, and very much liked to avoid those whenever possible. She rubbed her legs together on the couch, reminiscent of her youthful forays into the matter, even though she now had vibrators and enough know-how to make her own fingers work. Nonetheless, it wasn’t working on its own, so she pulled up a porn site she tried to avoid. Disgusted by the first few suggested videos, which were all shock and no emotion, she typed in “Love,” feeling even sillier than before. A nice couple with a beautiful sunset appeared, and she scrolled to the comments to see what she was getting into. “This couple has so much passion for one another, it actually made me stop and re-evaluate what I’m doing,” the first comment said. “That pre-post-nut clarity is real here.” Bingo. She watched it and moved until she came, and while she came she noticed her awkward, crossed legs, how bizarre her toes pointed, the likelihood her face was too expressive or her body looked like a seal’s, and realized this was probably an embarrassing or disgusting sight, should anyone like Devin walk in on her. And so she cried, a deep but silent cry with real water, less embarrassed to be caught doing this than anything else. But then Devin walked in, and she realized she didn’t want this either, didn’t want to be perceived in any manner other than plain staring and useful, like a piece of furniture he had gotten a fantastic deal on.

And so Devin and Bridget looked at one another from across the living room, neither with any idea what the other could be thinking, both focusing their attention on their breathing and trying not to make the first move. Then, as if by cruel omnipotent joke, the video on Bridget’s computer refreshed and began playing, the audio now booming from her plugged in headphones. If there had been chatter, she might have been able to cover up the moans, but in the silence, it was fully audible, and unmistakable.

Devin raised his eyebrow, dying to ask a question but for some reason scared of the answer. Bridget, more embarrassed than before, wanted to laugh it off, but her attempt at doing so was confused inside her head, so she cried more instead. There was no choice but to tell him the truth, and it was then that the day of tasks and chores was then ruined. For another day had been consumed by the buried emotions that were once again wrestling their way to the surface, whether they liked it or not.

Three Stories

Jacqueline Doyle lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her award-winning flash chapbook The Missing Girl was published by Black Lawrence Press. Flash and hybrid essays from her work-in-progress The Lunatics’ Ball have appeared in The Collagist, Passages North, Sweet, matchbook, and F(r)iction. Find her online at www.jacquelinedoyle.com and on twitter at @doylejacq.

Eyes on Me

“Bridget do this” and “Bridget do that,” she was saying, all day long. “I’ve got my eye on you.” Who’s to say it wasn’t an Evil Eye? It followed me everywhere. Even when I was alone she was watching me. Never a moment to rest, time off only for church on Sunday morning, though I heard her say Papists were bog-trotting heathens. Hauling firewood up to the bedrooms, hauling chamber pots out of the bedrooms, dusting her infernal knick-knacks, polishing silver, sweeping, mopping, washing, ironing, mending, no end to what she had me do. She didn’t like the way her son was looking at me. Well, neither did I, the stupid sod. She didn’t like my tone of voice when I said, “Yes, Ma’am.” She didn’t like the way I curtsied and the way I rolled my eyes when I thought she couldn’t see and what she called my saucy backtalk and uppity ways. “My name is not Bridget,” I said once after she’d turned her skinny back, “it’s Deirdre.” And she spun around and fixed me with those pale blue eyes, the one all watery and filmed over. 

I did what I did and I ended up here at the Willard Asylum for the Chronic Insane with more than a thousand loonies and I wish to God she was dead. It’s still “do this” and “do that.” Up at half past five, washing dishes after breakfast, cleaning the wards and sewing all morning, doing laundry and housecleaning all afternoon after lunch. Ice cold baths, bad food, maybe a group walk on the grounds once a month, when the hills aren’t covered with snow. The wards are colder than a witch’s tit in winter, hotter than hell itself in summer, and smell like the inside of a privy. So many Irish girls here! So many of us were maids! They’re watching us day and night, and they still don’t know our proper names. 

It’s not just the keepers. Townfolk and tourists come to look at us, parading through the grounds and common rooms, crowds of people who call themselves sane. Sightseers with nothing better to do, they gawk and stare and titter—ladies clutching their purses close, nudging their menfolk like we can’t see them. Sometimes my friend Maggie and me, just for a lark, look up from our sewing and leap toward some wide-eyed lady, hissing like cats, just to see her jump. There’s little enough to entertain a body at Willard. Oh, once in a while we have dances, and music recitals. There’s a tenor works on one of the wards reminds me of Uncle John back home. But music only makes me cry.

I guess I wouldn’t have sloshed the gravy tureen into the mistress’s lap if I’d known she’d send me here. How she screamed and fussed! It was hard not to laugh at the time. Of course she didn’t believe it was an accident what with it happening right after she’d made that remark about the “dirty Irish” ruining the country. When all we do is clean up their dirt. There’s nothing crazy about me nor Maggie neither, but if we go away in the head, you can be sure it’s this country done it. Half the Irish girls at Willard are afeard of their own shadows.

I’ll surely die in this place and I’m thinking that walking into Seneca Lake with stones in my pockets might be better than waiting for it, who knows how many years, with the other feckin’ incurables. But there’s precious few days at the lake, no time alone, and no place to run away to, here in the middle of bloody nowhere. They’re always watching us. 

You can bet that when I die, I’ll be haunting them that put us here. I’ll sneak into their grand houses at night, slip around corners and under doors, climb into their beds and under the covers. That will be me, staring in their dreams, whispering in their ears. “I’ve got my eye on you.”

Damned for All Eternity

And he took me in the field amid the smell of grass and summer clover and the buzzing of the bees, oh, the sweet sharp pain of it, how our breaths quickened, how he whispered Sweet Jaysus in my ear, my skirt pushed up and knickers down, his trousers down around his knees and him saying he loved me, sure, me too scared to say no but wanting it, too. Forgive me Father, for I have sinned. Him already in America when I lost it, thick blood running down the inside of my legs, my guts twisted in a knot. And did I kill it by wishing it so, and was it a girl like I’d hoped for? I know what the neighbor women would say about what I done, how they’d purse their lips and narrow their eyes and nod like they knew all along. I know how the men at the pub would snigger. “You’re too sensitive altogether,” Mam always said, but what would she say if she knew? I cried and cried on the boats to Liverpool and to New York. I heard he’s married in Boston but someone else said No he’s not married, he’s quite the lad, and I guess it doesn’t matter either way. It was after I got here, when it started, Mr. Colter giving me sly looks and waiting to catch me in the upstairs hall, Mrs. Colter calling me a slut, that boy on the street who pinched me and whispered I know what kind of girl you are. The demons started coming at night, just a few at first, then more of them, whispering Sweet Jaysus and tugging at my hair and touching my privates. I could only see them out of the corner of my eye, not straight on, they scampered like mice when I turned my head. I prayed, I lit candles at church. Dear God, can’t you see them? I asked Kathleen, and she said No, are you daft? One night I woke surrounded by a lake of fire in our attic room, the demons scrambling up the walls, chittering. I screamed. I couldn’t stop screaming. I still don’t know whether it was God’s cleansing fire or flames from hell. At Blackwell’s Asylum I sleep in a dorm with the other lunatics, they moan and wail all night, and it’s bitter cold. I can’t eat, I can’t sleep for fear of rats, I’m thin as a rail, I know I’m not with child but I no longer bleed. They say no one leaves this place, we’re damned for all eternity. I dream of home, of the scent of grass and summer clover, the lazy buzzing of the bees, his head in my lap, the time just before it all began.

A Mary With Teeth

I thought I’d surely die in the ice cold baths, but worst was when the asylum doctors laid me out on a table under a bright light and put their fingers inside me and pulled the lips of my Mary apart and nodded at each other, spectacles shining, writing it down, what they said. “Very unusual,” one of them said, all excited, “quite remarkable.” Their faces blurred. My face burned, I was drenched with sweat, then cold as a corpse, so dizzy I almost passed out entirely from the shame of it. 

One night when the keeper with whiskey on her breath popped out for some air, me and Patricia and Maureen looked under each other’s nightclothes, comparing. Oh how we laughed. Maureen peed, she was laughing that hard. Patricia pretended she was pushing glasses up her nose, like Dr. Wright. “Remarkable,” she said. We looked different but the same. It’s hard to say what the doctors were talking about or what all their reports are good for.

What could my Mary possibly have to do with the fears come down on me, the nights I can’t sleep for visions of black devils, and yes, starry angels and flight, and days when anger fills me, big enough to topple houses, uproot trees? How could it explain those dark times when I can’t get out of bed, death my only companion?

My grandmam told me they used to strip off women’s clothes and search for marks proved she was a witch. “Not many women without a mark,” she said. “Better hide yours, whatever it is.”

Patricia saw an engraving in an old book once, a woman’s Mary with teeth. If only. 

Drying On The Line Outside

Rodrigo Duran grew up in Georgia. He is a Fiction candidate at the University of Wyoming MFA. His work has appeared in The Florida Review's Aquifer. Occasionally he tweets @Robotoduran.

I traded a bucket of dead flies for a dusty suit.

“Look at that dusty suit you’re wearing,” said Vincent; he was styling a beehive wig. 

He washed the suit in the bathtub with some animal bones and a sliced pomegranate wading in the water. 

When that didn’t work he plucked his nose hairs and tears fell down down the bridge of his nose. 

He cried into the tub. 

“Vincent, stop,” I said. “I can get another suit. This suit was just a novelty. It’s just dusty; that’s it."

“When you wear that suit,” Vincent said, “people will call after you because they’ll think you’ve just survived some dust related accident. Or worse you might make a little kid cough which is very sad to see.”

“And,” said Vincent, “if you wore this suit to a funeral someone would think you stole the body.”

“If I wore that suit around a funnel cake someone would say, ‘I think you’ve had enough.’ I’ve never been chided in that way,” I said. “It might do me good.”

“It might make you hate your own skin,” said Vincent and went back to work. 

Waymarks

E. A. Fowler lives in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her work has appeared in Lucent Dreaming Magazine, Storgy Online, The Cabinet of Heed, Reflex Fiction and Palm-Sized Press. She was the winner of Scribble's first annual competition for beginning and emerging writers.

The night I fell down beneath the lemon tree in the middle of the village square, I very nearly didn’t get up again. Stray dogs slunk out from beneath the chequered café tables and bounded over to snuffle at my ears. Children ran shrieking from behind the church, leapfrogging over my splayed limbs, while the locals rolled their eyes, the tourists snickered beneath their breath, and the Carabinieri, who had so studiously ignored me for the past several nights, decided enough was enough; there was only so much entertainment in a drunk woman before she became a totem of something else.

Oblivious, I lay prostrate on a bed of wind-fallen lemons and sang to the fingernail sliver of moon that peeked through the branches. I could have lain there all night, quite content, if not for the two police officers who materialised from behind the tree trunk. Instead, I found myself pinned between a pair of epauletted shoulders, hoisted and borne out of the square.

All along the cobbled street to the harbour we became a merry parade. Children, dogs, locals and tourists came shrieking and snuffling and rolling and snickering in our wake. Past the old woman shelling peas, a black cat coiled around her ankles, past the street fighters frozen in raised-fisted astonishment, beneath the clothes-lines flapping sartorial bunting, all the way out to the waterfront, where I was unceremoniously dumped over the harbour wall.

There, I fell asleep. When I woke up, the tide had come in and I was at sea. Drifting almost upright, my feet dragging across the slime covered rocks of the seabed, the current tugged me irresistibly out to where fishing boats groaned and creaked against their moorings. Water roared in my ears, as loud as if the ocean had washed up inside my skull.

One by one, I saw the lights of the bay blink out, a black curtain sweeping around the headland. The votive candles in front of the tiny chapel flickered and suffocated inside their glass cages. Looking up, I saw the crescent moon had become a silver scythe raised over my head. Looking back, I saw a woman standing on the jagged stones of the beach, a long bow and quiver of arrows slung around her neck. In spite of the darkness and the distance between us, I saw her as clearly as if she was standing right in front of me, and I knew her as everyone who ever has the misfortune to come so close to her does.

I knew then that I would die, but didn’t yet realise it was already happening. The part of me that registered water frothing at my nose, the marionette jerking of my arms, was baffled by my toes still brushing along the seafloor. The terror part of me had gone incommunicado; too busy worrying about stepping on a sea urchin, too complacent to doubt that air would be there when I needed it.

I remember the moment I discovered I could no longer feel the ground beneath my feet. The realisation that I was not holding my breath by choice. Those final seconds imagining the agony of inhaling saltwater, still not quite believing it would happen, and the agony of it happening anyway. How ridiculous it felt to be dying. And how that woman watched me with such dreadful hunger.

And then there it was, the milky way: waymarks from the edges of the world; fireworks blossoming over the ocean; cornflowers and marigolds in a desert of black sand; beads strewn across a skein of silk, so close I could have reached out and plucked one from its cloth, twisted it between my thumb and forefinger, a button, a star.

Fictions

Connor Harrison is a writer based in the West Midlands, UK. His work has appeared at Lit Hub, Anthropocene Poetry, Longleaf Review, and New Critique, among others.

Tara does not know what it is, this pouring forth that comes in gaps between time, always in the time when she is safely alone, never in company, though it has happened in crowds once or twice when you might as well be alone, always in bathrooms her bedroom the whole house when nobody is home, coming on before she knows it, arriving as naturally as pissing, which tends to be what she is doing when it starts, the pouring out, the fictions – this is what happens – Tara is in bed say, watching a nature documentary etc., on her phone, when without reason or rhyme she is, say, a mafia boss’s son, never the actual boss, and she is talking now as this man, this fabricated (from where though? She has no idea) criminal, this charismatic youngish smooth-talker, saying in full-to-life words, listen I know that last job was a disaster… pause for dialogue of father or older brother or subordinate…I’m well aware of that but there are contingencies in place. Like what? Like the deal we have with the Carson boys, the families across the river. Excuse me? Don’t fucking talk down to me and the spool unravels using Tara as a mouthpiece, she is so within this fluid incessant world where murder is real and she wears black ties and drinks whisky, until, there’s a few beats of silence, an ad break of sorts where Tara is Tara in her bedroom, texting her boyfriend Dan and watching a gazelle’s neck open up in a lion’s mouth, before switch and click, she is the first real-life superheroine, a woman born with the ability to heal the wounds of others, Jesus-esque, wearing normal professional clothes no spandex, no mask, in a meeting with the Prime Minister, friends even with him, they are eating food I think there needs to be more of us on the government pay, for protection, for safety, so if more people like this Liam Cross appear, start killing, we have a team in place…I understand the procedures but this is a matter of public safety…no not police, peacekeepers. Assurances. I’ve been to see a man who can transform into pure mountain spring water. He can slip through plugholes, don’t you think we should bring him in, and this is her constant, whenever she is alone and especially when she hasn’t talked to anyone for some time. For a while when she was younger she thought it was some form of Tourette’s Syndrome, until that is, she met someone for real suffering regardless of when or where, calling out obscenities in a supermarket, but then she understood her thing even less, leading her to ask her mother about it who was not shall we say supportive, who was not convinced mental health could kill you all while sipping vodka at work from an Evian water bottle, who told Tara it’s your overactive imagination, which Tara believed and knew there was maybe some truth to this, so she said yes that’s probably it, though she wanted to say, couldn’t it maybe be, y’know, something more? Like if maybe the way dad was might be important? The way he used to scream at me and at you to shut our mouths and sometimes turned all the electricity off and made us sit in the domestic abuse dark? But she never said any of this because she didn’t like to make her mum cry and it likely was just her overactive imagination, the kind where elaborate belief systems and organic loves randomly spark awake in her head, where her gender religion class race feel as fluid loose as milk, the kind that births a successful actress in the bath and kills her by the time Tara is getting dressed, to make space for an elderly widower struggling with his crackling body to put on his jeans God damnit this is ridiculous what kind of grown man can’t even dress himself…like a bloody baby…and where is that belt? Jesus Christ, and then there was that one memorable time at Dan’s house when she was in the bathroom and while she was sitting and waiting she ticked over into the mafia boss’s son, a recurring figure who by now Tara had found a soundtrack for, had a Spotify playlist of the songs the mafia son liked and listened to, and she went deep-end-head-over-heels into his situation, discussing with a rival the repercussions of stealing money, Don’t interrupt me, do not speak. Just listen. I am in no way violent, alright? It simply does not come natural to me. Not that it scares me or anything, I just don’t have the knack for it, I’ve got no real urge, no excess of anger to dole out, but that does not mean, look at me, that does not mean I won’t take those big, stop talking, those big fucking teeth one by one out of your donkey face, and just as he was bleeding into his horror graphic threats, a little nervous voice, Dan’s mother’s voice, who had been passing on the landing, had heard Tara talking full volume about violence and ripping teeth out and said, Um, are you alright in there darling, had mortified Tara from hair root to toe tip, just shot through bright red, who said to Dan’s mother yes I’m okay, sorry, I’ll be out soon, then listened with her head in her hands to footsteps going down the stairs and as soon as she couldn’t hear them anymore, looked up at the bathroom tiles opposite, straightened her back and said, sorry about the interruption. Now…where were we?

Resemblance

Marissa Higgins is a lesbian journalist and recent D.C. Arts & Humanities Grant recipient. Her fiction is forthcoming in The Florida Review, X-Ray Literature, Lost Balloon, and LEON. Her nonfiction has appeared in the Best American Food Writing 2018, Catapult, Atlantic, Washington Post, NPR, and elsewhere. She is working on a novel. You can find her on Twitter @marissahiggins_.

Miranda wants to please her mother, so they take up bike riding.  Miranda gets training wheels; her mother needs them too, given that she can’t ride a bike or rollerblade or hardly stand up right, what with the pills Mr. Cacks, the pharmacist, all white coat and skinny glasses, feeds her once a month. Miranda keeps such worlds to herself. In exchange, her mother lets her pocket chocolate almonds in the checkout lane. 

On the sidewalk outside their apartment building—don’t call it the projects, or Miranda’s mother will slap you, too, and a palm to the head hurts more than you might think; rage adds heft muscle would envy —their world burns green.. Not like sizzling cash, as, after all, the bikes were free from the place Miranda and her mother received groceries every other week. On days her mother wakes up on time, they line up while the birds are still picking at their feeders. Like the fowl, they get the good stuff: challah, vanilla yogurt, bagged applesauce, toilet paper that doesn’t scratch. When Miranda’s mother doesn’t wake until afternoon, Miranda sits on the couch and pedals her feet, bursting.

The afternoon they walk the bikes home they’re both moody. Late August in New England settles all personality into a damp waiting. On the Fourth, Miranda’s dad told her that mosquitos bring luck and that’s why they forged homes against her greasy scalp. They want you to be lucky, he said, talking heavy, like phlegm borrowed his throat. They want you to have a good life. Miranda liked that sentiment well enough but her mother told her father to fuck off with that shit, did he want the kid to get some disease? It’s not like he came around enough to know if she was on her deathbed. Miranda listened beside the payphone, rubbed pebbles into her pink knees. On the walk home, they sidestep sparklers and bangers, a quiet respect for fellow stragglers. They don’t talk about her dad and Miranda doesn’t look to the sky, even when the black cracks open. What is enchantment when her own body moves her. 

The bikes sit for a couple days while her mother sleeps. Then her mom takes just the right amount of her medicine and they’re off. Miranda thinks she’s a bit smoother than her mother. Neither can take a corner without tumbling into a bush.  Miranda is better at going down-hill. She’s slower, sure. But her mother pedals pedals pedals pedals pedals stops. Her mother laughs big and wide when she skids but it hurts Miranda’s stomach to watch. 

With her mother downhill, Miranda kicks her pedals till they spin. She tells the bike to eat shit. When her mother pedals back, shins peeled red, Miranda hollers—I missed you, you scared me, I was, I was scared, I was, wasn’t I, I was, I was—until she gets a quick smack about the crown. Shit, her mother says. It’s only me. 

In the bathroom, her mother lets her  sit on the side of the tub while she cleans her own cuts. Miranda wants to help. She reminds her mother she knows how—run some water from the faucet, pat with white towel, rub white cream, slap on a band aid—but her mother shrugs her off. I’m good, she says, picking her fingernails into the red. Miranda does an extra good job of washing her hands after her mother leaves the room, thinking her cleanliness will balance out her mother’s earth. When she dries her hands on her denim shorts, she figures her reflection shows up in the mirror. But, like mother, daughter doesn’t look. 

Come September, Miranda knows things. Infections breed interest. Her mother likes her cuts, and she likes them filled with green, so Miranda lets herself fall. Off her bike, down the front steps. In the school parking lot.  Her mother doesn’t clean her cuts but she admires. She says Girl, you have to be careful, and Wow, you really took a fall, and, like a real mom, Be careful, honey, you could  really get hurt. Miranda stills while her mother squeezes green and yellow bubbles from knees shins palms ankles thighs the right side of her collarbone. Together, they scream happiness. 

When leaves flip brown and Miranda has to wear jeans and a plump jacket to school, her mother rattles the bottles then swallows and sleeps long long long. When Miranda rattles them, they’re quieter. Miranda worries, and then she takes to the ice. 

Oceans don’t give you shit, and that’s why Miranda had to find herself a short lake on the other side of town. The fresh water froze over real well. Miranda scooted, slid, sauntered. Her boots glided circles. She thought, This is a good place to break my skin. She thought, This is a quiet place to slice. She thought, Wow, it’s cold. With her belly on the ice, she thought about  being found. Neighbors were around, she guessed. Cars made themselves known across the way. Miranda cracked her nails against the ice, chip chip chip . At second glance, she spotted a hangnail on her thumb. As the sun darted home, Miranda made quick work of the skin around her fingers. Flesh born too early tasted as good as it looked: salmon, then carmine bliss. As Miranda napped on the ice, she thought sage, sea, verdant, pea. She thought lime, viridescent, laurel. She thought grass. Yes, yes. Green. Just like mother.

Birds of Prey

Maria A. Ioannou is a writer based in Cyprus. Her publications include two short fiction collections and a fairytale (Emerging Writer State Prize 2012). Her short fiction ‘Pillars’ was a Best Small Fictions nominee and her work has appeared in The Cabinet of Heed, The Hong Kong Review, SAND, Asymptote, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing and she is currently an ECR Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Winchester.

One morning, you’ll drawl, ‘I’ll pop into the supermarket,’ but you will never come back. Poof! You’ll disappear like a brand-new product on offer. I know how much you love supermarkets. Dragging your feet behind the cart through those intestine-like corridors, sticking your beak on a buy-one-get-one-free with a wow in your eyes, plucking out cans from the second row of the shelf, as if those second in line items are better, fresher, even if they’re stuck in cans their whole life (and will most probably die in there, too). You’ll send a text message saying you’ll be late, endless queue at the bakery section, a wink emoji next to the word ‘kiss.’ You always had a thing for freshly baked bread, crawling into your nostrils even if the neighbourhood bakery was miles away, how that tickly smell made you feel you were good enough, that your parents actually loved you. You’ll tune your feet to the random beeps of the supermarket tills, will caress the blind eyes of lemons staring back at you from the produce section, illuminated by the fluorescent lamp as if they deserve a life of their own. You’ll ring me when they find you dozing in a corner, your arms wrapped around a baby cauliflower. You’ll ask me to pick you up from the police station, you’ll thank me for rescuing you from that terrible, terrible place, you’ll sob, how dare they snatch that baby and its fallen pieces from your arms like that. You’ll say you’re sorry, so sorry, you’ll repeat how people get carried away sometimes, that minds have corridors, moving in different directions, nothing a stroll at the beach won’t fix. ‘Let’s go to the beach, our beach,’ you’ll mutter, so we’ll go to the beach, our beach. But things will feel different. The waves will look confused, the sun rays too hard on your face, a hawk circling and circling above us, shadowing our entangled fingers. You’ll say you stayed too long in the meat section, thrilled by the sudden bang of the blade, the sound gave you goose bumps —that it was the first time you secretly licked a marinated rib and that the butcher found out, but wasn’t a snitch. He thought you were cute, that you liked someone watch you do silly things, that his fingertips had sticky blood stains on them, that he looked like he really cared and had the kind of hair that flapped. You’ll smile, you’ll kiss me, you’ll slide your finger on my zipper, you’ll whisper you love me, you want me, ‘more than anything in the world,’ the hawk still above us, fanning our light-bleached hair with its wings.  I’ll smile too, peck your forehead, kiss you, kiss you again and again, kiss you although I can smell the raw meat on your cheeks.

Swimming with Robert Rauschenberg; he erases a drawing of me; my teeth fall out of my mouth

Jiaqi Kang (亢嘉琪) is a Sino-Swiss editor, writer, and art historian. She is the founding Editor-in-Chief of Sine Theta Magazine, an international, print-based creative arts publication made by and for the Sino diaspora. Recent work is featured or forthcoming in X-R-A-Y, wildness, and Jellyfish Review. Find her online at jiaqikang.carrd.co.

My first linocut was at the weekly art lessons my mom took me to, at the mall. There was that little knife with its blade shaped like a C, made to scoop out rivulets like ice cream fresh from the freezer; its rounded wooden pommel reminded me of the tools we were given for crafts classes in kindergarten.

Before we were allowed scissors, we had fat needles that we pricked into colored paper, with a soft mat underneath to protect the table; if you lined up the punctures close enough as you outlined the shape of a heart you’d be able to press a finger into it at the end and push, and it would pop out with the faintest of ripping sounds. 

In kindergarten, we were given paper cutouts of knives, forks, and spoons, and we had to arrange them in a table-setting collage. My family didn’t eat with knives and forks, so I made abstract art –– steak knife balanced precariously off the edge of the plate, salad fork hidden by soup spoon, the two utensils chest to chest, kissing. The teacher’s face turned blue when she saw it. She took a ruler from her desk drawer and placed it diagonally across my page twice, her lips drawn in a line as she crossed everything out in red pen. Orderly, even when she punished. 

What she didn’t know was that Jasper Johns made a fork and spoon kiss, too. The painting was called In Memory of My Feelings. The canvas was hinged. On the left side were the lovers, hanging by a string, their bodies melded into one; a spork. All around them was murky grey-blue, like the sky before a summer storm. 

When I went to the swimming pool with Bob, he always made sure to check the weather. Twenty-eight, he’d say, throwing me an extra towel; thirty-three. One day, the sky opened its belly full of rain. Bob screamed as he struggled to get out of the pool, and I watched his back stretch, and tense, as he gripped the ladder. He went up, up. I stayed in the pool, floating on my back, and felt the water crash from above and cradle below, while Bob laughed at me from the edge, his chest heaving in time with the low rumbling of the thunder. 

For some reason, I grew up thinking all ladders were wooden; that metal ladders were simply painted to look that way. I also thought that the word ladder meant anything involving wood pieced together perpendicularly –– I know the reason for that, which was the Wednesday English lessons my dad used to drive me to, when everyone thought I was going to go to private school. The teacher there made us all sit on the floor in a circle and taught us ‘Heads, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes’; I thought chicken was kitchen; and I learned ladder wrong. When I saw a canvas for the first time, the back a wooden frame supported by a wooden cross, I thought, ladder. 

When I was thirteen I cried and asked to quit English; I told my dad I was old enough to make my own decisions now. He said that when we moved back to China I would need to know English; what was the point of a son grown up overseas if he couldn’t speak English? No one in Chaoyang District would hire me to tutor French. 

Bob wanted a French tutor. In French, his name was pronounced Beub, like the sound a kindergartener makes after he’s finished gurgling his milk at breakfast. Until my parents discovered I was lactose intolerant. Soy-milk bubbles were never the same.

Learning how to stretch my own canvas, pulling it taut, gritting my teeth, the cloth groaning across the ladder-frame. It was always too loose; the art teacher used his hammer to drive little wooden shards into the corners. I smeared gesso across the surface with a fat brush larger than my hand, but it came out lumpy in the end, foundation covering acne. That was okay; I used the canvas to paint the moon. I ran my hands along the craters.

I refused to graduate from linocut to woodcut. The grain of the wood scared me. I thought it would make the blade slip; Instead I made a drawing that looked like a woodcut, all jagged lines hatched together and dirty negative space. No blades, just red ink and the still sharp nub of the pen, chittering as I scratched it against watercolor paper and pressed too hard. I drew my heart, a diagram of lump; I carved it out for Bob. Framed it. I pointed at the label that said, Vena cava. Bob said, Vin. Cave. Viens boire les bouteilles de vin que j’ai dans ma cave.

I made spaghetti Bolognese with the wine. I dropped sprigs of thyme into the  pot and said, Thym. Temps. Thyme. Time. I made the sauce too spicy.  Bob drank milk from the bottle, a hand on the open door of the fridge. After we washed the dishes, I couldn’t figure out where to put the forks and spoons. Bob’s family kept them in cupboards, not drawers. and while he rinsed our bowls,  I opened cupboard after cupboard, but none of them were the one he’d mentioned. I held the entwined sporks and waited for him to dry his hands and show me; I left the cupboard doors, half-open, creaking on their hinges, like ladders.

The Last Friendly’s in Cattaraugus County

Kristen Zory King is a writer and teaching artist based in Washington, DC. Recent work can be found or is forthcoming in Electric Lit, Emerge Literary Journal, Rejection Letters, mac(ro)mic, Past-Ten, and SWWIM, among others. Learn more or be in touch at www.KristenZoryKing.com.

CW: eating disorder

We never thought to ask her name but she loved us anyway, made sure we got at least a spoonful of the ice cream she brought from the back, whipped cream and hot fudge melting into a lukewarm puddle at the bottom, gummy bears floating belly up. No charge for the extra scoop even though she knew we’d tip in change. Two of us weren’t eating and the rest of us would soon follow, though only one ended up in rehab, a white walled place north of Pittsburgh. We traded tips we’d found on the internet—drink hot water to fill your stomach until it rounds, cut your food into tiny pieces and push it around the plate so your parents think you’ve eaten—but saved the best ones for ourselves, pushing our collarbones forward in photos and disappearing into the pilled fleece of oversized sweatshirts. But with the waitress we ate, sneaking bits of Black Raspberry or Hunka Chunka PB Fudge or the Monster Mash Sundae she would bring even though we were old enough to eat off the adult menu. Honey ​she’d hum to any spoon left untouched, raising her eyebrows until each bowl was clear, even the sweet, tender meat of the cherry nose, gone. If she was flirting with the grill cook we’d get broken waffle fries, onion rings charred dark and crispy in the fryer. We even went to see her during prom, our eyes meeting across the damp, glittering room in agreement. We were different girls by then, splintered by the futures sitting right in front of us. Ditching our dates, our dresses whispered, ankles tangled together, as we climbed into the car, whole once more in anticipation of a memory made. But as we reached the restaurant the windows glowed empty, a sign on the front door saying Thanks for 28 years, l​ights out and the waitress gone, as if we’d dreamed her.

Snow Tangerines

Lorette C. Luzajic is the founder and editor of The Ekphrastic Review, a journal devoted entirely to literature inspired by visual art. She earned a degree in journalism from Ryerson University, but went on to pursue a more creative path. Her prose poetry and small fictions have been published widely, including Brilliant Flash Fiction, Unbroken, Cleaver, New Flash Fiction Review, Bright Flash Review, Fatal Flaw Journal, and many more. She has been nominated for several Best of Net and Pushcart prizes. Her flash story recently won first place in a contest at Macqueen’s Quinterly. Her work has also been translated into Urdu. Lorette’s most recent book is Pretty Time Machine: ekphrastic prose poems, and she is at work completing another collection of prose poems and small stories that respond to art. A greatest hits collection is coming soon from Cyberwit Books in India. Lorette is also an award-winning visual artist with collectors in 25 countries from Estonia to Peru. She lives in Toronto, Canada. Visit her at www.mixedupmedia.ca or www.ekphrastic.net.

You are surrounded by spindly stilettos, fit to flit on stilts-y legs, women in pricy and papery little dresses. Thoroughbreds, Miko called them once, his face just an inch from his canvas, scrutinizing flecks of white and pale peach paint. Miko could make mountains out of a smudge of orange and sometimes he liked to mix the pigment right there in the palm of his hand.  Said it felt elemental. You loved that, how he always touched everything, every window, every door, every utensil, everything he browsed when shopping, every Mourvedre, every sweater, every clementine. Your bookshelves have his finger trails across their topography, and every ornament and tea miniature in your clutter bears his DNA.  

Now they are here to see him, the horses, and they shift and flutter with nervous electricity and something more vicious, something hungry. They don’t see you. They don’t see you at all. Their eyes sweep right past your paintings in search of his. They don’t see your cruel and precise wedges of winter, the impasto of frost and silver. 

But so? Your work speaks for itself, to those paying attention. Look, Miko is saying, with both of his hands right up against the texture of your painting. He wags against a lacquered nail fast approaching: only he can touch you. See here? he says. See how the world stops inside her frame, how you are frozen in a dream. You love how Miko sees you and sees right through you. Your oldest friend. There are tangles of rich and ready mares juggling Carmenere and Instagram, and still he only sees what you see, the red wheelbarrow, the spill of tangerines in the snow.

Big Sur

Jessica Lyn Harper is a writer living in Washington, D.C. She grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, and lived in Seattle before moving to the other coast.

I knew the exact moment she decided to leave me: Mile 25, the penultimate mile, when she said, “Do you want to go ahead?” This was after we had scaled the gale-force winds of Hurricane Point, after she had caught up with me at Mile 13 high above the Pacific Ocean on an arch bridge befitting of Venus, after we pounded across the cantankerous cant of the slanting pavement of the Carmel Highlands.

The problem being: I did want to go ahead. After I crossed the finish line and threw my arms into the air, I turned my head, sweat splashing over my shoulder, my ponytail swinging aside. Between me and her, a couple crossed the finish line, holding hands that they, together, lifted into the air. I looked at my lover’s face, only yards behind me, and I could tell by the way she looked and was looking away: she had seen the same thing.

Months later, after she had moved out and moved on, we ran into each other in a dream. She told me that the second-to-last mile wasn’t the beginning of the end but rather the ending had begun far earlier, at Mile 3, when I briefly broke ahead and she watched my glutes galloping in the early morning light. She imagined the rise and fall of my breasts as my chest pumped air and wondered: Will she ever stop running?

Frustrated by her revelation, disposed in a dimly lit basement beneath our old house with no basement, I demanded she give me 26.2 percent of her time. But she misunderstood that I wanted her awake, her olive-toned skin tinged blue beneath the moonlight, not a black-and-white roll reeling in my subconscious. Yes, she said, it’s true: Your subconscious has a nasty sense of humor. So 26.2 percent of the time she appeared in my dreams refusing my invitations to dine and dance and amore, and instead led me into dark hallways, through burgeoning rooms, down stairs tilted like slick water slides where she birthed theories on our rise and fall.

On rainy nights when I fought sleep like a toddler, I remembered her smell, on her skin, between her legs. I remembered her readiness, her body plump with possibility, stimulated by hormones. I remembered the first time they inserted the sperm and she lay there, hopeful as a caterpillar, her fine blond hairs like follicles reaching into the air. I remembered the second time, her hairs slouched in discouragement; the third time, her hairs slumped flat against her skin. 

So we ran. And ran. And ran.

Years later, I read in the paper that part of the mountain near Big Sur had slid into the sea, covering the turnaround point where dozens of buses shuttle thousands of runners from Monterrey and Carmel down the Pacific coast on Highway 1, winding like someone tracing her finger along the constellations of freckles on her lover’s back. Mountains move, I thought, more often than we think—they rise and fall and slide and explode, form and come undone. So I wanted to go there, to where the mountain had moved and see what I could see.

As I stood at the edge of the road where the pavement buckled beneath the weight of the sloped land and rock, I felt the power of this newly formed mountain, both majestic and destructive. I felt something else, too: a Sadness. I peeled back the edge of the mountain like a blanket and peered underneath. There sat my lover, holding a microscopic ovum the color of her skin. She inhaled deeply and exhaled gently, blowing as if at an eyelash. I would have carried it, I told her. She nodded toward the sea, and I could tell by the way her gaze drifted in the waves before returning to shore that she disagreed. You couldn’t even carry yourself, she said. But I did, I said. I did carry myself, all the way to the finish line—and I finished first. She tittered as she pulled the blanket of roots and grass and dirt over first her back and then her shoulders and then her head, molding her body into a smaller mountain in front of the larger one covering Highway 1.

I watched and waited, wondering what subterranean room she’d lead us to. But she didn’t rise or fall or slide or explode. The mountain sat, immovable as my ego, and I awoke, with the remnants of dirt on the backs of my eyes.

Neighbor Man

Alice Maglio’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in DIAGRAM, Black Warrior Review, Wigleaf, Pithead Chapel, and others. Her work has also been included in Best Microfiction 2020. She is the book review editor of The Rupture, and she holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College.

The man rumbles just a few feet away. The man shifts and cries out, Tom! Just a few feet away, but through a wall. A wall so thin. If the wall had a mouth I could part its lips from where I’m lying and touch the man, touch his rumbling. My cool palm on his distended stomach. I know what he looks like because I’ve seen him move past my window, plowing down the sidewalk with a small boy galloping behind. His voice an ugly siren through the still afternoon air. No, no, I want to say to the small boy. Bolt! Instead I hide behind my curtains.

Tom! cries the man again. His son. Where is his son? It’s midnight. Sleeping in the other room? Sleeping in the man’s stomach? All curled into a ball. A thumb in his mouth to stop him from responding. But he’s old enough to be angular, so elbows and knees must be poking and straining the skin—it can’t be as perfectly round as I thought.

Tom! cries the man again, this time louder. The wall vibrates against my palm. I sense the heat of his breath and its stale, meaty odor trying to creep through.

I place a hand on my stomach and push it out as far as it will go. If I could, I’d make a space for the boy. Let him rest without any screaming. No miasma of rotting molars, aging veal bits stuck in the grooves. But before long I have to exhale, and I’m flat again, of little help.

I drift slowly, ears attuned for another cry, but nothing comes. I drift and dream of little hands clawing, little teeth biting a passage out.

My Mother is a Garden Where Other People Grow

Leonie lives in Manchester and has an MA in Gothic literature. Her debut chapbook, In Bed with Melon Bread, is available from Dreich, and she is Editor-in-Chief of The Hungry Ghost Project. She has recent work forthcoming in Wrongdoing Magazine, Pareidolia Literary and Not Deer Magazine. You can visit her website at http://leonierowland.com.

When I was born, I grew out of her: seeds from a flower, catching the wind. 

When my grandma died, she grew into her: violets spilling into roses, purples replacing pinks. Watching from a distance, I learnt that death repurposes rather than uproots, that the ground does not mean silence, that everyone needs somewhere to go.

At first, I plucked the violets. They grew on her arms, her chest, blooming like bruises. I tied them together and made a garland, placing it on her head. ‘There,’ I said, ‘repurposed.’

After that, they spread to her mind. I blamed myself for planting them too close, for closing the circle like one of my grandma’s fairy rings. My mother spun through the house like a tiny storm, twirling, turning. The garland was a halo, a glowing crown of thorns.

Once, I found her naked, standing in front of a full-length mirror. She pressed her hand to her heart and said, ‘She’s here.’ Purple spread from her fingers, mottled her skin. I knew then that I would have to bury her, cover her with soil so she could start again. I was scared that my body would look like hers, uprooted and trembling. There was no more room.

Do we become our mothers, or do we become the dead? These days, when I undress, I have them too: purple flowers scattered across my chest. I cut their stems and place them in vases, but there are too many now, and my room looks like a funeral parlour. My mother wouldn’t know if she saw them—she would think they came from her.

Sometimes I imagine her floating through a field, just above the ground. My grandma is there too, drifting beside her, not quite touching. Below them, the earth is full.

Birdbath

Laura Wang lives in New York City, where she writes stories and teaches human beings about molecules. She is currently an MFA candidate at Sarah Lawrence College.

After Leonora Carrington

The bird was sick. That was what had wakened Yiming. In the dark, Yiming had felt the bird’s temperature rise, shooting past 37 to a glowing 38, maybe even 39. And when Yiming opened her eyes, it wasn’t dark after all. The bird was glowing red, and Yiming threw off her blanket.

Out in the yard the sunlight was leaking in and Yiming was hauling water for the birdbath. Splash: the bucket sloshed onto her cotton slippers. Splash: now her forearms were drenched. So much for rosy dawn; her own fingers were ice white in the half-light of early morning. And inside, getting hotter by the moment, the bird was glowing red. Even through the floorboards and doors, Yiming could feel the bird’s heat, little pulses of it, like heartbeats. Soon Simon would wake up. How he hadn’t yet, how she hadn’t heard the loud creak of his morning voice scrape its way out from under the doorjamb, Yiming didn’t know. She just ran faster to fetch water, sweat pooling on her upper lip between her bird-hood, even as her fingers grew stiffer and whiter in the brightening dawn.

At last she was finished. The bath was full: a large stone pool, almost overflowing its own gray lip. The ground beneath was dark brown mud where Yiming had sloshed her bucket. Or perhaps the hungry bath had simply salivated itself, soaking the soil beneath. Yiming was now too feverish with birdheat to know. 

Still stiff-fingered, she rotated toward the center of heat in a haze. Each pulse from the incandescent bird drew her closer. First, she was at the garden door. Then she was in the kitchen, then she’d skipped the stairs and was in the upper hall. Now the bird sat in front of her, too hot to bear staring, so Yiming closed her eyes and plunged her stony hands forward, ignoring the birdburn as fingers met fiery feathers. And then she was downstairs, and then she was outside, and then the bird was in the hungry bath which wasn’t a bath at all but which was a great cloud of steam, and Yiming could feel every cell inside herself scream because the sky had lied, clouds were not soft, they burned like a swarm of hot needles, but before she could open her throat to berate the mendacious heavens the round brow of the sun emerged over the woodshed and scared off the hot steam and Yiming could breathe again, and her hands were human-colored again and soft, and the bird was a serene pink, paddling delicately in the birdbath, which was no longer hungry but merely, transparently, clear water and gray, accommodating stone.

Postcard from a Sepulchre

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!, Gone Lawn, SCUM, Poetry & Covid, South Florida Poetry Journal, and so on. She currently lives in South Australia.

These people don't make bread the way you do. The seat is hard. The bed is salty. The tears feel insincere and dry. You have always been right when you said, "the dead aren't worth nearly as much as wheat flour." I want to tell you, "I wish I had listened to you."

There are some obscure facts that the living neglect as they go about their business from day to day. The dead do not dream. It is one of my worst nightmares. I sleep. I weigh as much as a mountain. My eyelids are glued down. My eyes are like two unspeakable rocks. They do not sink but float like in space. As you can imagine, the sleep is terrible. My neighbours flit about in their pigeon cages, while I try to stay still in mine.

I hear a war is brewing in our country. It must be like an infested body hanging over your head. It is a bad omen, the stench. But you will get used to it. The worst might never come.

To tell you the truth, the nights are tranquil in the cemetery. The worst is the heavy traffic in the daytime. Trucks rock up and down the busy road while everyone in the cemetery trembles. No one dares to mention the rain that has excavated some of the graves. Those souls have gone out to the sea. They will be unhappy forever.

You know, of all the things I miss the most, it is the feeling of warmth in your leg when we used to lie down in bed at night. Remember how I used to push my leg against yours, and sometimes you threw your arm across my chest? This is what I lament the most. I cannot remember how it felt, since now I am always cold.

When you have the time, write me a letter. You can put it in the letterbox behind my headstone. I go to check it every day after dusk. If you are busy, do not trouble yourself.  

Above all, do not worry. If the war really comes, I will watch over you. And if you die, I will find you no matter where you may be.

God’s Country 

Becca Yenser was born in Iowa and raised in Oregon. They are the author of the poetry collection Too High and Too Blue In New Mexico (Dancing Girl Press) and the creative nonfiction flash collection, The Grief Lottery, forthcoming from ELJ Editions in December 2021. Their work appears in Hobart, Heavy Feather Review, Madcap Review, Fanzine, and elsewhere.

I used to fish with my dad way up in the mountains of the Frank Church Wilderness of No Return. He made me kill the trout I caught with a miniature baseball bat made from splintered wood. Their lips were wide and white and reminded me of sinew.

My dad was different when we got out into the woods. He hummed to himself and let the windows down while the A/C went full blast. God made these mountains, he told me. Dad had an artificial heart. It was weird, sometimes, looking at him with that machine deep in his chest, pumping away.  But mainly we were quiet. I liked to walk the river like a road, looking straight ahead into the water, which was shade and sun and inside out. We used to fish to get away from Mom, too, because her craziness was starting to form a point that neither of us could deny. Last time I was home, Mom would seem normal for so, so long. She would wash the dog’s dishes, water the cherry trees. She would watch TV and laugh at the right time. And then, almost too slow to notice, she’d start to say some shit,  

“Where’s my egg carton?”  

“Mom?”  

“I had it. Words,” she’d shake her head, “You probably don’t remember. Just like in Missoula, when we had Nixie.”  

It was best to nod your head, then go into the kitchen and make yourself a quick drink, no matter if it was ten in the morning.  

No one knows what it’s like to go from living in God’s country to living in the mess of the midwest. Even the birds hate it here. I can tell by the way they roost in the trees in the shade as long as possible, before fishing in the shallow, stinking water for god-knows-what. 

The last time I went back home, my dad got us two fishing passes from Wal-Mart. We fished in desert canyons, in arroyos filled with cold rainwater during the monsoon season. We were taking the San Pedro highway up to the village of Tijeras. I kept looking around, out every window of the car. The place was like a painting that wouldn’t stop. Dad had on gym shorts and black circulation socks. The road got more and more windy, the higher we climbed, and narrow, too. Every few miles he swivelled his head to see what other fishermen were doing; what fly they were using or how many fish they had in their tackle box. Every time he did this he swung over the center line and I’d yell at him to get back into his lane. Finally we stopped at a gate. 

“This is it,” he said, “you’ll want to walk up ahead on this dirt road and turn left at a big cabin. Meet you a little later on the river. I’ll come up your way.” I nodded. The sun bore into my eyes and the green of the meadows looked like a joke with the desert bluffs all around us. I walked slow, listening to the stillness. The river was small and almost not worth fishing, but I looked for spots that might have a trout or two. A minute down the road I came to a deep hole. Wading up to my hip, I cast sideways to let the fly carry around the quiet part under a rocky ledge. I think too much time passed. I should’ve already headed downstream to Dad. The trees got darker as I walked. They seemed almost black on the edges. I picked up my pace. It felt like animals were watching me from the woods. As I came around the bend, I saw his bright red vest flung open over some white rocks. I ran to where he should be. He was lying in a deeper pool, over the edge of a boulder. His machine had stopped. 

Mom got real bad after that. She watched TV with the sound off and slipped herself more and more Vicodin. I lived like a ghost in the casita behind the house, until I couldn’t take it anymore and got myself an apartment a few miles away. It smelled like cockroaches, but I never saw one.  

About one year after my dad’s accident, my girlfriend and I went fishing up near Tijeras. I was standing right there but she slipped real bad; fell backwards instead of catching herself with her hands. She sat up in the water, her skin goosebumping on her arms. “You ok? You alright? You ok?” I moved my finger for her to follow with her eyes. A spot of blood on a pale rock beside her. Her pupils matched in size. She smiled. A tremor of joy, like cold water, electrified me.