Wildfire Season

Clary Ahn is from Chelmsford, Massachusetts and San Diego, California. Her work can be found in Epiphany, Another Chicago Magazine, and Parentheses Journal, among others. She is a fiction editor at EX/POST and a lead editor at Berkeley Fiction Review.

Last year, an older girl jumped off the balcony. She was almost eighteen, pretty and tall. Her bones shattered on impact, and we left her there—lying on the concrete. It was wildfire season, and an evacuation order had been placed the day before, leaving most of the neighborhood barren, the faint taste of smoke coating our clothes gray, chafing against our slick and desperate bodies, all of us clamoring to leave. There was no time to save her. All we could do was observe from afar. We slept at a nearby hotel. The children curled around the rough sheets; our mothers prepared tea and coffee without question, their voices quiet in the kitchen. Our fathers rapped their bruised knuckles on the walls, and let the wood echo, whispering to each other. Good bones. Good bones. They checked the closet doors and left plastic clothes hangers splayed out over the carpet. Asking if this place could one day be a resort. At dawn, an inevitable gust of wind blew the angry flames in our direction. None of us noticed until it was close enough to burn, scalding the air. We packed our bags and got into our cars. The hotel caught fire. As we drove away, we watched the building turn black and crumble to the ground. We watched it fall like a meteor hugged by the atmosphere—all flame, no shadow, wanting blindly for the earth.

Whale-Watching

Michael Conley is a writer from Manchester, UK. His first collection of short stories and flash fiction, "Flare and Falter", was published by Splice in 2018. His poetry pamphlet, "These Are Not My Dreams..." is published by Nine Pens.

While everyone else huddles astern, squinting at bubbles and whirlpools, I linger starboard, my elbows on the boat’s railings.

This kid sidles up next to me.  ‘I’m sick of whales,’ he whispers.

I look down at him. His face is a little screwed-up ball of paper.  The wind whips his hair across his forehead, and he’s shivering in his little yellow poncho, the one handed out for free by the captain before the voyage.

‘You and me both, kid,’ I say.

The light is metallic and unpleasant.  The boat creaks.  Behind us, everyone else gasps. “Was that a tail?” someone asks.  I look down at the kid. He doesn’t even look around, just continues staring out at the white sky.

My fingers itch. My cheeks and nose feel raw, stippled by the light rain and the raw sea spray. All four corners of my eyes itch, and I push down hard on my eyelids with my palms.

When I look again, the kid is gone. 

I don't think I heard a splash and I don't know if that's the top of his blond head churning in the surf.

If I shout man overboard and then he emerges, grinning, from the restroom, I'll be considered ridiculous. Do people still shout man overboard?  Kid overboard? I don’t know anybody else here.

I squint into the sea; the sea remains grey and inscrutable. I cross the big puddle on the deck to huddle among the ponchos, and I shout nothing.

Skipping A Generation

Michael Czyzniejewski is the author of three collections of stories. He serves as Editor of Moon City Press and Moon City Review and as Interviews Editor for SmokeLong Quarterly.

It starts the night before my son’s first day of high school. He’s in the mirror, trying to shave, not a whisp of a whisker in sight. My son is small and thin, more like a fifth-grader than a freshman. He is worried he will be an easy target, anxious about gym class, the locker room, the older boys. He will not have a beard by first period, but I help him in the mirror anyway, show him by shaving myself, then coaching him as he scrapes the lather from his empty face.

“He can have my beard,” my father says, appearing in the doorway. He has just moved in. Mom died over the summer, leaving him alone. My wife passed when my son was born so I know where he’s coming from.

My father takes scissors and trims his impressive mane to a manageable length. Then he shaves himself clean, the first time I’ve seen his chin or cheeks my entire life, thirty-three years. He takes the clippings and gives them to my son, who’s watching from the toilet seat. My father pretends to glue his hairs to my son and my son laughs, tells him to quit it. It’s a good moment, us together, all with identical smooth jaws.

My son wakes the next morning with a full beard. It’s as long as my father’s had been. He now looks like a fifth-grader with an enormous fake beard. We pull at it and he yells Ow! and tells us to cut it out. We send him to school.  Later, when I ask him about his first day, he says everyone talked to him, everyone asked him about his sudden facial forest. I told him we’d shave it off pronto, but he says no.

“I’m popular,” he says. From then on, my tiny son sports a massive man’s beard.

~

In the winter, my son goes out for wrestling. He’d be the lowest weight but that class already has a state runner-up. The coach likes him, how wiry he is, and says the beard will scare the shit out of everyone. My son has to gain thirty pounds, get into a middle class. He starts to eat chicken breasts and tilapia and do push-ups and pull-ups. I find my weight set in the basement and dust it off and he hits it hard. He takes vitamins. He sleeps ten hours a night.

He doesn’t gain an ounce.

Out in the garage, my son struggles with sixty pounds on the bench. My father comes out and tells him he can have his strength. My son lets my father take his place and Dad puts the sixty pounds up like it’s a pillow. I add fifty on each side: same thing. He gets up to three hundred and we run out of plates. He then rubs his biceps and chest, digging to the bone, and wipes the sweat on my son’s arms, pecs, and shoulders. Then my father says he has to lie down and disappears inside. My son follows to take a shower, his grandfather’s sweat all over him.

When my son sits down to breakfast in the morning, he’s huge. His shirt doesn’t fit and the cereal spoon looks tiny in his hands. He fumbles with the milk, squeezing the glass and shattering it, slicing his hand. I wash and bandage the wound and can’t get over how filled he looks.

Dad comes out of his room and can barely walk. What used to be a specimen is now a frail husk. He limps to the table, hitting his shin on the chair, felling him to the ground. We have to help him up, prop him straight, and even then, he slouches.

After practice that day, my son announces he’s moved up seven classes, will wrestle on Saturday. He doesn’t win—his body is too new, like he has to break it in—but he’s a quick study and by season’s end he’s conference champ. My father attends meets in a wheelchair, sits alongside the mats. It’s the same high school he’d wrestled for, decades earlier. His name is on a banner on the wall. After the title match, a girl from the school paper takes a picture of my son and father together, under the banner. She says she’ll write a story. She asks if I wrestled, and I say no, that it must’ve skipped a generation.

Senior year, my son, reigning state champ, has scholarship offers, then doesn’t: He’s not making the grades. He schedules the ACT, which will make or break him. We hire a tutor, sign him up for seminars, buy all the books. He gets a 14. He can retake, but some schools say it’s too late. 

The night before the retest, I catch my father leaning over my son in his bed. Their foreheads are touching. My father whispers in his ear. When I ask what’s going on, they both look away. We say goodnight and leave my son to sleep, turn out the light. 

“How bad will it be?” I ask my father in the hallway.

“I figure not to know you when I wake up.” 

I follow him to his room sit next to him on his bed. I ask him to tell me a story from when he was a kid. He tells me about the first time his grandfather took him to Wrigley Field. They bought two hot dogs each even though they’d had lunch. His grandfather gave him a sip. The Cubs won that day, a rarity in a terrible season. My father says he has the program and ticket stub somewhere, that I’ll find them when I go through his things.

My father tells me stories until he falls asleep. Or until I do. I wake early and let him be, knowing what’s ahead. I have to get my son to his test, where he just might get a perfect score.

Ski Country

Travis Dahlke lives in Middletown, Connecticut. His fiction has appeared in Joyland Magazine, Outlook Springs, Sporklet, and The Longleaf Review, among other literary journals and collections. His novella, 'Milkshake,' is forthcoming from Long Day Press.

The fan in my apartment’s bathroom hums in the same depressing key as a K-Ci and JoJo song. Whenever I smoke beneath it or see myself in the mirror, I’m overcome with dread. Today I'm pinching my hair into a ski jump because the lady from the low-rise apartments with pockets that hang out of her jorts asked for my help destroying the wasp nest in the playscape. She stopped me while passing in the stairwell with our shirts pulled over our faces to block out the urine smell. She told me this nest is tucked behind the slide. It's getting bigger every day. At dusk the wasps will be dormant and that’s when we’ll do it. 

I think about the lady from the low-rise apartments to help me fall asleep at night, like not in a sexual way but in a spending time together kind of way. There’s a movie that plays in my head of her in my Arnett Jr. jersey talking super fast about tattoo ideas, maybe trying them on with a Sharpie first. I see us falling asleep to country music videos because I heard she was once a dancer in them. I think she also has a son named Anthony. He's not part of the movie.

At sundown I'm skimming each stair with wild grape CBD oil clenched in my fist. She brings a homemade trap made from a soda bottle with the top sliced off and tells me her name is Valerie. She tells me there are so many great natural remedies for wasp removal online, and some people will even hang fake nests to repel them. She tells me if the super doesn’t clean up the leaf pile soon it could combust. “I saw it smoldering a little yesterday,” she says. 

Both of us sit in the swings, kicking brown trails through mulch chips. We wait for it to get dark. “Do you like K-Ci and JoJo?” I ask. “Are you ever overcome with dread?”

“I guess maybe in high school.” She doesn’t say anything about her past, dancing in country music videos, so I think maybe this was never true. A delivery person paces our building with a paper bag. The music playing from his open car door makes it feel like we're outside a gymnasium during someone else’s Winter Semi-Formal.

“My AP history teacher’s house caught on fire from a leaky furnace. Killed his whole family like that.” I snap my fingers. Valerie has one snaggletooth but I decide then that I like how it slants away from the rest. My history teacher didn't really die, but a man from the 23rd floor almost did when a space heater fell over in his apartment. So really it's not far from the truth. 

“That’s so sad,” she says. “My French teacher died. Car crash.” She looks over her shoulder like their spirit is standing next to the playscape's slide. She sets her snaggletooth to my vape and it makes her whole entire face green. The delivery guy comes over to say his delivery isn’t answering, and offers us the bag of food. We take it and say thanks. Inside there is shrimp carbonara and chunks of garlic bread wrapped in foil. 

Long after the delivery guy drives away and the swing’s greasy chains have gone cold, we're still talking about leaf piles that glow, teachers who've turned to ash, and Valerie’s son. His name is Anthony, I was right. I imagine us getting older and having more kids and taking them on family ski vacations. We'd stay at the most expensive winter resorts with the most expensive snow. I imagine us getting older and Valerie waging war on the hornets infesting the fancy playscape down the street from our home. Our home would be in a real neighborhood. 

Right now the world smells like wild grape. The swings are digging right into our butts. When I realize every apartment window has gone totally dark is when I realize there’s never been a point when everyone who lives in our building has ever been home at exactly the same time. 

Valerie places the soda bottle trap behind the slide, where the nest is. She secures it with a mounded ring of mulch. We spend the night at her apartment. While she showers, I check her garbage and discover beneath the sliced-off soda bottle top, the emancipated legs of various jeans, just how I imagined. The frayed ends are lined in black marker to indicate where they’d be cut. Her closet is full of cowboy hats. Dozens of them.

In the morning we check the trap. A couple wasps have begun to garner interest in the sweetness coming off the flat Coke inside.  

“I have to meet my ex in a couple hours, to pick up Anthony,” Valerie says. 

“I can bring you,” I say. “I don’t mind.” 

“It’s ok. You don’t have to,” she says. 

The bag of pasta and garlic bread is still outside but someone has moved it closer to the playscape. We both notice this, but neither of us are able to say it out loud. 

Summoned

Gary Fincke's latest collection is Nothing Falls from Nowhere (Stephen F. Austin, 2021). Flash stories have been published recently by Craft, WigLeaf, SmokeLong, Atticus Review, Pithead chapel, Ghost Parachute, and Best Small Fictins 2020.

One summer afternoon, a boy is lost in the public pool locker room. Not because he has forgotten his locker number, but because he never noticed it. Somewhere near the center, he thinks. Or at least not far from it and not near the door or the showers or the back wall. He is old enough to know his mother is not searching by methodically counting down the lockers, eliminating one row after another to find him. He is embarrassed.  Anxious. Not terrified, not yet, except of admitting helplessness to half-dressed or naked men, their bodies so impossibly hairy or fat that the boy, smooth and skinny, could not think of belonging to them.

The boy’s wet suit clings, clammy as fever flesh. His mother, who loves to swim, had changed elsewhere. She had talked his face into the water, lifting his legs into the miracle of floating. When she let go, he had panicked into splash and flounder. Now, by loudspeaker, the boy hears himself summoned, his name and age repeated just before a voice says, “Your mother is waiting for you outside the door that opens through the blue and yellow wall.”

The nearest naked man says, “That you, son?” but the boy shakes his head as if he can’t be lost. As if there are other boys alone among the rows of lockers who need to find their way by looking for colors.

Head down, the boy studies the floor as he walks away from where his mother waits. He turns into a vacant row of lockers and begins to count. Before long, he is somewhere else, someone not almost eight and helpless while strangers examine him, relieved or pleased or even amused by the happy end of a mother’s terror. When he reaches one hundred, the boy walks toward the door along the puddled corridor near the open showers where men are busy washing their bodies, the rush of spray smothering their voices as he passes like a boy who, unashamed, will soon peel off his suit and stand naked among them as if his father, instead of being dead, is just seconds behind him.

Barbara Prepares Her Husband’s Meal

Eliot Li lives in California. His work appears or is forthcoming in Smokelong Quarterly, Pithead Chapel, Lunch Ticket, The Pinch, Flash Frog, Juked, and more.

Barbara melts the pork belly, simmered in a clay pot until the layers of meat separated. She collects the lard, fries the chopped shallots in it.

She remembers, 50 years ago, Eugene tilling their Beijing courtyard with a spading fork and planting the shallot bulbs, which she later plucked from the dirt after they multiplied and grew tangled green shoots. She fried them in fresh lard the way his mother taught her. How Eugene’s handsome young face softened as he crunched the shallots between his teeth. “Barbara,” he said, taking her hand. “May I have some more?”

She marinates the beef before grilling it, sliced across the grain, in soy sauce, rice wine, and minced ginger. The small flat where they live now in San Francisco has no place for a vegetable garden, but every Sunday she leans on her cane at the bus stop and takes the #7 to the farmer’s market, where Sue from Green Gulch Farm sets aside her best ginger roots, with the shiniest skin and most pungent odor, just for Barbara. 

She juliennes the carrots, then stir fries them with snow peas and water chestnuts, almost toppling over as she tosses them high into a cloud of steam above her steel wok. 

The final step, into the blender. Beef, vegetables, ginger, shallots, rice. All ground into a gray paste. She scrapes the inside of the pitcher with a spatula, the contents oozing into a bowl for Eugene. This was the doctor’s order--liquified food only or else he could choke.

Eugene was sunken into his power recliner in the living room. She turned him onto his side 45 minutes ago, to keep him from getting bed sores. 

She sits him up, sets a tray with his dinner over his lap, raises the porcelain spoon to his mouth. He stares at the TV, Lawrence Welk and the bubbles. As he smacks his lips and swallows, he turns to her.

“Baba,” he says, the Chinese word for father.

After his stroke last December, when he first uttered Baba, she thought it was because he no longer recognized her. It was the only word he would say. Maybe he was yearning for his dead father. Yet he only spoke it when she sat in the chair next to him, feeding him the last remnants of his meal. 

“Baba,” he says again, looking straight into her eyes. “Baba,” he repeats, grasping her with his clumsy right hand, the side of his body that he could still move.

She puts the spoon down. 

“Eugene,” she says, her eyes welling up. “Say it again. My name.”

“Baba.” He whispers it this time. He gently runs his tremoring fingertips across the back of her hand. 

She rises and goes to the kitchen, and begins to prepare him a second helping.

Buoyed

Brian McVety is a teacher who lives in Longmeadow, Massachusetts with his wife and three daughters. His fiction has appeared in Feed, Sinking City, New Pop Lit, Little Old Lady Comedy, Apeiron Review, and elsewhere. He can be followed on Twitter @bmcvety.

The man asks questions that I don’t have answers to, but the man asks them anyway. 

“What was it that made you so angry?” 

My father loved to say that persistence was the only path to success. 

The man looks at my forehead, at the scrape on my chin, at his diplomas on the wall over my shoulder—everywhere but my eyes. I stare at him until he answers his own question. 

“There must have been something that upset you.”

One time, my father tied a brass ring to a piece of twine and looped it over one of the maple tree’s limbs in the backyard. He screwed a rusted hook into the middle of the trunk. I shouted for him to stop because I thought he was killing the tree, but he just stood back with the ring in his hand and closed one of his hazel eyes in concentration, the same way he did when working the hobbing machine at the gear factory or trying to find the right words for my mother when she asked why he didn’t come home some nights. He released the ring, and we watched its perfect arc end by clasping onto the hook. 

Later, when my father came back outside to put me over his shoulder, the streetlights were on and mosquitoes teemed in sticky summer air. I beat his back and screamed that I hadn’t gotten it yet. In his laughter, I smelled my mother’s roast and realized she would have already put supper in the fridge, making me cry more. My father told me that if I didn’t stop fussing, he’d cancel my party the next day. I only hit him harder. 

I wait until the man speaks again. 

“Do you have any remorse for your actions?” 

I run my tongue over the blank space in my mouth where my tooth used to be and remember the coppery taste of the blood. I hear the sound of the boys laughing. My leg jostles up and down. This disturbs the man so he continues to talk. 

“She says you weren’t like this before. That you’re a good kid. Do you think you’re a good kid?”

The man’s nose whistles as he breathes. I clench and unclench my fists. 

“Do you feel badly about what you did?” 

I squeeze my eyes shut in a way that makes the blackness colorful. 

The boys are huddled by the tree. They beg for their turns, but Perry Dunkley’s father chooses Perry Dunkley, the biggest kid there and now a year older than the rest of us, to go first. He blindfolds Perry and spins him around and hands him the wooden bat, already dinged and dented. Perry’s wild swings make the parents laugh and the boys more impatient. When Perry finally connects, nothing happens, and he shrugs as his father tussles his golden hair and hands him an emerald balloon. During the next boy’s swing, the donkey ruptures, and the kids clamor for candy falling from the piñata, except for Perry and me. Perry just squeezes and squeezes the balloon until the green becomes translucent, and it bursts in his hands, the balloon’s carcass clinging to his fingers. 

I pick up the bat that’s been flung by my feet and keep swinging until the cries have stopped and his father is on top of me and my tooth is no longer in my mouth. 

“Your mother says that you fled. When she finally found in the basement, you had been down there for hours. She thought you were huffing drugs with all those empty balloons by your feet. Your mother said that she doesn’t go into that part of the basement anymore. She doesn’t know what made her look there. That she didn’t realize that you had kept them—”

I finally open my eyes. The man looks at me for the first time. 

“—from your last birthday,” the man continues as if he can see our living room filled with dozens of balloons, my father’s cheeks ruddy with exhaustion, that funny look on his face while I tell him I finally got the ring on the hook, how my father doesn’t answer when I ask him if he still has any breath left after here after blowing up so many balloons, as if he already knew he didn’t.  

The man tries to stifle a satisfied smile. He starts to scribble in his notepad, so I grab the bag they let my mother bring during her visit and rush to the bathroom on the other side of the office. 

When I take it out, it’s much smaller, the size of an overripe cantaloupe. I pull at the rubbery knot until the elastic loosens and remember how much my father hated the sound of fingers squeaking across latex. I pinch the end and ignore the pounding on the door. I bring it to my lips and savor the acrid taste of rubber. My mother whispered it was the only one left that she could find. I release my fingers and let his air out so I can take it in, no longer feeling the weight of the father lying on top of me or the sting of my missing tooth or the worry that nothing may ever sting again for Perry again. Instead, I only feel the lift, just a moment, of being buoyed again by my father’s breath. 

A Mower’s Invitation

Will Musgrove is a writer and journalist from Northwest Iowa. He received an MFA from Minnesota State University, Mankato. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in trampset, Versification, Rejection Letters, Unstamatic, (mac)ro(mic), Ghost Parachute, Truffle Magazine, Flash Frontier, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter at @Will_Musgrove.

I see my grown son standing on the last lawn of the day. Dressed in a black suit and tie, he plucks blades of crabgrass. He mouths something, but I can’t hear him over the engine. With my sunburnt, out-of-shape body bouncing atop the mower, I pull up next to him. Dust and bits of green blow onto his polished wingtips. I glance behind me: nothing but tan circles, then driveways, then circles again.  

My son’s lips, her lips, move, and I point at my blistering ears. They’re close to popping. We all are. He reaches for the Deere’s ignition, and I almost slap his hand away. The engine gurgles before quieting with a sigh. I climb off the mower, my t-shirt sticking to the vinyl seat, and instantly miss the buzzing, the bees just out of stinging range. 

When there’s no noise, that’s when you get stung. 

“You really ought to wear more sunscreen,” he says.

I don’t mind being burnt. I make a game of peeling off the dead skin like a shedding snake. I’ll flay a piece, stretch it thin, then try to beat the size. And when I press on myself, forcing the blood out of the capillaries, there’s the former me for at least a second or two.

“I’m fine.”

He bends over and clumps another fistful of crabgrass into his hand. How old is he now? Early twenties? But when he throws the weed into the humidity, he’s nine—or maybe eight—and she’s yelling at me not to yell at him. We’re arguing in a field somewhere, and I’m mad because he’s afraid of the ball, that he’s not having any fun. She retorts with: “Let him be afraid of the damn thing. Why does it matter if he’s afraid?’

“Mom wanted me to invite you.”

“Of course,” I say, pretending to check the mower’s fuel gauge.

“Despite how things ended up, she wanted you there. She just couldn’t tell you herself. Now she can’t, so I figured: Why not come get you?”

We’re driving to the hotel. We’ve just gotten married. She’s sitting in the passenger seat of my beat-up Ford. All she wants to talk about is butterflies, about how some of them migrate, about how they tend to only live a couple of years. Why can’t we celebrate first, have a few drinks? We spent our wedding night apart: her in the hotel room packing up her dress, me in the hotel’s bar listening to country music and sipping domestic beers. 

“When is it?”

“At four.”

“I don’t know, son. I have to finish this lawn, then a buddy’s paying me a few bucks to help him move. Plus, I don’t want to see her like that, you know? I want to remember her as she was.”

“She hasn’t been that for a long time.”

“She still is to me.”

My son rubs his neck. He looks above me like he does when he’s nervous.

“Did you ever really love her?”

She wraps her feet around mine. We’re kids. A sheet covers our sinewy bodies. In the corner of the room, the blinds cut the sun into rectangular strips. Outside, the sound of construction—beeping trucks, pounding hammers, braggadocious voices—threatens who we are. But we’re safe inside on our mattress island. If we just don’t venture too far, the world won’t demand anything from us. I crawl out of bed for a glass of water. When I return, she’s staring out the window, and I know I’ve lost her, that she’s drifting away to something I can never be. 

“Sure, we had some fun, but that’s all I’m good for.”

I step back onto the mower. My son’s shouting, but the comforting swarm drowns him out. Yesterday, I ran over Ms. Johnson’s roses, shredded them into confetti. She forgave me, told me to act like it never happened. Why can’t he?

I want to be married, want to be a good father. I want to be different. However, each morning I watch squirrels and birds stab at an empty feeder hanging from a tree outside my house. Each morning I whisper to them that there’s nothing there, that they’re wasting their time, that I haven’t filled the thing in years.

I push the mower’s arms forward. Behind me, my son is still standing where I left him. In front of me, there’s a patch of dandelions. Without hesitation, I cruise over the yellow puffs, hopeful my son will see and get in his car and leave.

What else can I do but keep them forever as pressed flowers inside me? 

Magus Frustrated 

Benjamin Niespodziany is a Pushcart Prize nominee and Best Microfiction nominee and Best of the Net nominee. His writing has appeared in the Wigleaf Top 50 as well as in Hobart, Pithead Chapel, Cheap Pop, and various others. He works nights in a library in Chicago.

On stage, a magus tries a new trick. “It's a spell,” she says, “not a trick.” The magus shows the audience a tiny puddle in the middle of the stage. A sign sticks out of the puddle and reads, “Pond!” When the magus points her wand, the pond disappears. The audience is encouraged to clap but the magus, unpleased, curses and paces the stage. “The pond was supposed to grow, not disappear,” she says. The backdrop swaps. An unnamed cast member brings out a patch of grass. A sign sticks out of the patch of grass that reads, “Lawn!” When the magus points her wand, the lawn is overrun with sunflowers. Massive yellow bastards. The audience is encouraged to clap and, this time, cheer. The magus is furious. She snaps her wand in half and, in her fury, trips over the sunflowers. “The grass was supposed to become sand,” the magus says, “not sun, not flower.” She retrieves another wand from the back of her cloak. She points her new wand directly up, into the sky, beyond the cardboard clouds, into a place the audience doesn't know, can't see. “Imagine an emptiness,” the magus says, “an endlessness. A window to the moon.” Soon, rain falls onto the stage. Heavy, dense rain. Heavenly rain. The front row can feel the splash. The crowd is encouraged to stand on their seats and applaud. The magus drop-kicks her wand. She sits in the pouring rain and cries. “It was supposed to be a surprise,” says the magus, weeping. “It was supposed to be a spell. Not sunflower, not pond gone, not tricks. It wasn't supposed to be like this.” Despite the plight of the magus, the audience is encouraged to continue their cheers.

Seaside Embrace

Ken Poyner’s latest collections of speculative poetry, “Stone the Monsters, or Dance” and “Lessons From Lingering Houses”, emerged in mid-2021. He spent 33 years working in the information arts, and lives with his power lifting wife, several rescue cats, and multiple betta fish in the lower right-hand corner of Virginia.

I remember us at the beach.  You wore one of those one piece bathing suits with the cut-out sides, and I had full shorts and a t-shirt.  The rapt pier lights kept us far enough away.  The water was muscling in crabs.  The crabs started picking at the fish.  Then, they noticed us.  I could see their eyestalks waving.  They collected themselves, claws clacking out what only just then I understood was language.  You did not recognize it.  I could not translate it for either of us, but I knew it was a terrible language of injury and dissolution and that surely its contents were directed at us.  And then they came:  dozens, perhaps hundreds, perhaps thousands.  You did not see the danger, but, ever the dutiful lover, you ran when I said run and we sped parallel to the shoreline, a gathering of crabs carving the sand behind us.  You seemed excited by your breathing.  I was thinking we could not run with only the water at our side:  we needed to turn and run inland.  Likely you were never there and I have never been to the beach, but I have been smuggling crabs into the old barn out back, trying to translate the awful clack they make between themselves, a language perhaps speared at us:  crabs clumsy but dangerous with their fearsome claws and untranslatable pounding speech.  Understanding why we would be the subject of their conversations might be precious to us.

Functional Memory, as a One-Act

Kellie Rankey is a genderfluid writer from Saginaw, Michigan. Their work has been published in The Normal School and longlisted for the American Short(er) Fiction Prize. They have worked as an editor for their campus literary magazine, a freelance editor, a writing tutor, a student researcher, and a community workshop facilitator. Outside of the realm of writing, they dabble in wildlife rescue, passively study quantum physics, and frequent estate sales.“Functional Memory, As a One-Act” is part of an experimental novella titled Boy Toys.

Context: New Year’s Day; Movie plans (Ladybird )

Lighting: Early morning. Dim. Blinds drawn but cracked.

(At 9AM WOMAN wakes up. She is tired. He is asleep.)

Decision: Let him sleep.

9:30AM: MAN wakes up. (groans)

Condition: Chills.

(10 minutes later)

Condition: Sweat.

Consensus: Flu.

Decision: Let him sleep.

10AM: The theater begins running commercials.

Possibility: She goes alone.

Benefit: She sees the movie. (ignored)

Consequence: No one’s home to help him.

Possibility: He doesn’t need help. (ignored)

Possibility: He doesn’t want help. (unlikely)

Decision: Let him sleep. Stay home*.

*not her home

10:20AM: (Lighting: Morning. Dim. Slightly brighter. Blinds still drawn but cracked.) The movie starts in the theater, where two adjacent seats do not know about the ditched plans to fill them.

He is awake. Moving slowly.

(MAN walks weakly down the stairs. WOMAN is already downstairs, hears him coming, begins to worry about justifying her presence)

Lighting: Morning. Brighter. Different room, blinds open, white light off snow.

Possibility: He wants to be alone. He wishes she would leave. He wishes she wouldn’t have come yesterday. He regrets inviting her. He regrets letting her stay. He regrets

MAN: (carrying laptop, charging cord trails behind him) We can stream it if you want?

WOMAN: (nods)

(MAN begins to set up the laptop. WOMAN is still worried about justifying her presence, but lays comfortably on a red couch with her feet up. They have discussed this. He is bothered, angry when she worries.)

Possibility: He is hungry. (unlikely)

Possibility: He is thirsty. (unlikely)

Possibility: He doesn’t want help. (ignored)

Decision: WOMAN fills a red plastic restaurant Coca-Cola cup with water.

Possibility: He will puke (very likely) before he can make it to the bathroom. (likely)

She looks around the kitchen. First, at the trash bin, whose push door is stuck inside with overflowing trash. The smaller bin to its right: recycling. Full of bottles. She considers Tupperware and checks the cabinets, then realizes how dumb that would look (as an offering, filled with vomit, overflowing).

MAN lays beneath a window (blinds drawn) on a red couch against the wall, positioned perpendicular to where she will sit. WOMAN passes him on her way upstairs.

Possibility: He chose that couch because he’s sick. (actual, ignored)

Possibility: He chose that couch because he wants to be as far from her as possible she makes him sick when she feels too much he feels too much (lingering, 

likely (if she believes herself)

unlikely (if she trusts what he says)

She finds the yellow bin of clumping cat litter, now empty, in his room and brings it back downstairs. She sets it near his face, on the floor.

WOMAN: In case you gotta puke?

MAN: (laughs, breathes deeply, does not puke)

Possibility: He needs to eat or he’ll start dry-heaving. (likely)

Possibility: He doesn’t want to eat. (very likely)

Possibility: He doesn’t want her (help)

Decision: The fridge is empty, save for a few roommates’ takeout boxes, rot, air. WOMAN goes to her car, grabs her dinner (black bean chili, one can). Outside: snow. Contents of can, in car, overnight: frozen.

Almost noon: MAN starts to load the movie. It needs time to buffer. The movie is a new release so the resolution of the pirated picture is grainy and blurred.

WOMAN runs water in the kitchen til it gets hot (about 2 minutes) and runs it over the frozen can (about 5 minutes). She opens the can and dumps half-frozen chili into a tan ceramic bowl. Microwave instructions (from experience): 2-3 minutes with paper towel over bowl.

Past noon: The movie has buffered. MAN lays on the red couch perpendicular to her red couch, covered in blankets that are at times cast off and then reapplied. A bowl of chili sits on the glass panel table in front of him, getting cold.

WOMAN feels calm watching the television screen glint off the chili, laid again on the red couch. The movie is drilling out a cavity, filling the gap. The movie is building a memory. Caring for him feels good. She is glad she stayed home.*

*not her home

Possibility: She feels good because she is being helpful.

Possibility: She feels good because the flu explains his distance (today, last night, yesterday, the day before that, the day before

Possibility: She feels good because he needs her while he’s like this, because she can do simple things that aren’t wrong, like grabbing water or chili or a bucket or asking him how he’s feeling or what he needs or what he wants but only in sick-context only simple this-talk not that-talk he doesn’t like

(Lighting: Outside the sky is overcast with white clouds seamlessly bound to each other so that where one ends and the other begins is indistinguishable. This cloud ceiling has dimmed the light, but what reflects off the snow into the window and sidles past blinds is still punch-white light. MAN and WOMAN do not notice the change.)

Decision: The house is warm she feels warm she is smiling to herself she feels good.

In the movie, Ladybird gets careless and loses her best friend.

In the movie, Ladybird drinks until she wakes up in a hospital.

(MAN eats a spoonful of chili)

In the movie, Ladybird has sex for the first time.

In the movie, Ladybird regrets having sex.

(MAN gags, throws blankets to floor, slides chili back onto table ceramic on glass clack swings legs out hands over mouth stumble-runs to the bathroom. He can be heard, vomiting, not dry-heaving.)

In the movie, Ladybird, things ended up alright.

Wing-less Victory

Julia Rust has been published in Nightscript Volumes 3 and 6, Bull and Cross, Many Mountains Moving and The Cortland Review. A story co-authored with David Surface, ‘TallDarkAnd’, appeared in the Swan River Press anthology, Uncertainties III, and was included in Ellen Datlow’s “Recommended” list in Best Horror of the Year for 2019. David and Julia's YA novel "Angel Falls" has been accepted by Haverhill House Publishing and will be coming out mid-2022.

She stands at the top of pale gold marble stairs.  Headless, armless, proud breasts thrust forward on twisting torso against thin fabric, carved marble so delicate you can almost see it move.  The wings outstretched, more display then pre-flight, feathers etched row on row the detail after two millennia clear and striking.  They are not proportioned could not lift the body, but the sculptor knew true wings would cause her to topple, so a compromise was made, but not to beauty.

Something about wings.  All around me.  Unfurling, stretching out wide, the tips opening like spread hands, soft sounds of quills moving against the meat of muscle.  Air on my face.  Weightlessness.

I wake at 3:00 am, earthbound, bed-bound, a man I don’t love lying next to me making steady, unsteady noises in his nose and throat.  The sound is sporadic and I can’t un-hear it.  But my back aches and the bed feels lumpy and silky, strange, and I turn to my side and stretch and one wing opens with a crack and whoosh of air.  I picture a calm refurling as it comes to rest around my body, a soft embrace, I feel your body pressed against my back, and I sleep.

In daylight my feet shuffle across the ground like magnetized boots on steel.  Gravity is a cruel companion, I feel the skin of my face sliding down.  Nothing is ever finished.  I clean out the coffee pot and filter to make fresh and lean my head against the wall.  A clean house soon collects dirt, the hamper is always full, piles of sorted cleaned clothes dotting furniture, picked through and worn and tossed into the dirty piles.  Refrigerator is full of food rotting, nothing fresh, the grocery a daily visit now, fresh purchase eaten instantly, something always missing.  My kids tumble in opening and closing every door.

“Mom, where’s the—?”  “Did you get—?”  “Why don’t we ever have—?”

I hear a rustling, my shoulder blades prickle like a cat perking up its ears.

At work I answer the phone and questions answered lead to questions and they never stop.  I am taunted by birds.  The great window behind my desk is full of them.  Their flight is erratic, sometimes pressed so hard against the wind they look painted on the sky, sometimes ducking, swooping, jerky ups and downs saved only by the open spaces where they fly.  A seagull glides by making its graceful flattened “m”.  The phone rings and there’s another question leading to a question and the growing stacks of papers on my desk flutter suddenly, and lift, and for a moment I can see space and light before they settle back, overlapping the way feathers do but looking more like scales.

A slender woman in a tight-fitting gown walks down the steps while a man at the bottom holding a camera says “Stop, stop,” and she says “Take the picture, take the picture,” spreading her arms, causing the scarf around her shoulders to billow like a sail.

The pots are dirty and must be washed before I can start dinner.  A dinner which I haven’t chosen yet.  But washing pots, that’s an easy decision.  The water scalds my hands and brings tears to my eyes and I have to pause and shift weight from one hip to the one that’s not as sore, and every part of me aches, and my skin yearns for yours.  And my brain beats against its boundary of bone, my skull pounding, and my heart flutters awkwardly beneath my ribs, tiny fists rattling bars.

I cough and see a small fluff floating on the air.  I catch it and press it’s downy silk against the hollow of my throat.  I can imagine my breasts covered in a wealth of these, your hands running up to find the warm skin beneath, ruffling and smoothing as you go.

Another semi-sleepless night and unfinished morning and you call, you’re on your way, and gravity relents.  I walk on the balls of my feet like a toddler I knew, the joy of her new ability to walk making her tall, moving her always forward.

The wings are in my chest, my heart straining to break free, my breath catching and stopping.  I have to tell myself to breathe.  The lightness in my head could hurl me from Earth’s atmosphere and I feel that first embrace like an anchor hitting the sea floor.  I become happily body-bound, you calm me and it isn’t till we’re naked and moving together that I feel again the itch of wings.

The ease and joy of you, of us, slams against the hardness of these other parts of me, my life, and it’s like a battle I am losing, but I can’t see the flags, I don’t understand who is fighting.  Deep within my brain lie memories of victory, but who were those armies?  Whom did they represent?  They are all long dead. 

Demetrius sails from Cypress the freshly hewn statue at his back, victory done, victory abandoned, to his next battle and the war wound which will be his death.  She watches with smooth marble eyes the vanishing fleet and dreams of flesh and feathers.

Caleb’s Last Stand

Karen Schauber's flash fiction appears in seventy international literary magazines, journals, and anthologies. She is editor of the award-winning flash fiction anthology 'The Group of Seven Reimagined: Contemporary Stories Inspired by Historic Canadian Paintings'. Schauber curates Vancouver Flash Fiction, an online resource hub, and Miramichi Flash, a monthly literary column. In her spare time, she is a seasoned family therapist.

Caleb is beside himself with worry. Another killing spree. At four, he has seen it all. 

Molly's swollen belly is drooping. She is restless; panting, pacing, shivering, refusing food. Little’uns pressing to come out. Granny marches in ankle-length Sears catalogue cotton housedress and flea-bit army boots, dragging the hosepipe to the water barrel. She is fix'n for a whelping. The possum stew and batch of moonshine left on the potbelly to slow burn. 

In the hey of the sweltering afternoon, Caleb tracks Molly crawling through clumps of bindweed and thistle, under the roughhewn clapboard porch to her nesting spot. He follows on knees, elbows, and palms, only slightly grazed —his skin still wrinkled and raw from wading through the tangled maze of roots in the mangrove swamp digging for carp fingerlings; chubby little fingers clamoring to hold on to the slippery silver fry. Granny refusing to let him out until the bucket was full; his heat rash blistering from fright each time she wrenches the bucket to check the tally—as he maneuvers with skill around brown recluse spiders and water moccasins, nestling in the insect swell and wood rot close to the dog. 

Granny is stomping like thunder along the fetid slough, jabbing long canes into recessed hiding spots, hollering for the boy and dog. The rifled burrows lay bare discarded and decomposing critters. Seasons of doing and undoing.

At the far end of the slough well beyond Granny’s reach, Molly's soft panting muffles the outside world. The air beneath the ramshackle porch is stale and cool. Time slows. Caleb nibbles on found bits of dried pawpaw and maypop fruit. The twisted eel knot inside his belly slowly unfurling. Whispers and coos let slip. The space between boy and dog floats like dandelion puff. The afternoon sun bends low, light all but disappearing. 

In the black maw of night, the pups squeeze out one after the next, squirming, warm, and velvety. Caleb nuzzles in with the brood, falling into a deep newborn sleep. Days slide by, dreaming and suckling. The bitch grooming her offspring indiscriminately, teats flowing a-plenty. Thick downy pigmented hair sprouts all over Caleb's body. He grows small, curling like a cashew, exchanging low-pitched squeals and grunts with his canine siblings. He is soon indistinguishable from his littermates. Content.

When Granny discovers the scruffy pack, they are yanked out; all the fuzzy ones culled.

Elevator Pitch for a Dystopian Young Adult Book

Sage Tyrtle's work is available or upcoming in X-R-A-Y, Pithead Chapel, and Cheap Pop among others. She started writing on an IBM XT in 1986, had an online journal in 1995, a podcast in 2005, and hasn't owned a smartphone since 2014. She hopes she's still an early adopter, but this time of an analog-based life.

The hero is not slender. She does not have butterscotch hair or sapphire eyes. She does not fumble for words to say to Silky Bangs Sullen Boy or wonder if Big Muscles Bouncy Boy thinks her breasts are full enough.

The hero does not wear lipstick for the first time. She does not bridle under the uniform restrictions because she wants so much to reveal her long coltish legs. There are no shy smiles from under long eyelashes. She does not wait for Sullen Boy or Bouncy Boy to tell her if she is worth loving. She already knows she's worth loving. She does not wait for Bangs or Muscles to turn her into something strong. She is already strong. 

She does not. Wait.

At the climax of the book the short, size XXL hero's mind is not filled with Silky's irate voice or Big's roaming hands. If you were to ask she'd say she last saw the two of them in... chapter two? They were off to buy skinny jeans at Abercrombie & Fitch.

At the climax of the book, the hero's hands are slick with sweat. She is the head of a phalanx of girls between the ages of 12 and 17. Her throat is scratched from chanting.

At the climax of the book, the hero is running on jittering legs toward a city block of faceless helmets pointing guns.

At the climax of the book, there is no choosing. No kissing.

There is just rage.