Pancakes

Melissa Benton Barker's fiction appears in Atticus Review, Atlas and Alice, Best Small Fictions, and elsewhere. She is the flash fiction section editor at CRAFT. She lives in Ohio with her family. 

Jay drove us to the diner in his father’s pickup truck. He ordered the chocobomb pancakes just because he wanted to say the word. Chocobomb, he said to the waitress, but for me, it was only coffee after midnight, coffee that I lightened with a thin skin of cream poured from a tiny pot. I smoked cigarette after cigarette until I felt sick. Let’s face it, I was nervous. So looking back, I guess it was only Jay who ate pancakes.

*

Pancakes were a code word, a metaphor. Jay and I came up with this because the diner was next door to the Surf Motel, and the Surf Motel was the kind of place a person could go to have sex out of eye range and ear shot of their parents, a place where you could pay for a night or a few hours, a few thin walls and thin sheets, enough time for a few tries because that’s what it takes when it’s your first time. Even though we’d planned it out I was surprised to see him when I came out of the bathroom, naked and stretched out like a loaf - ready, though I hadn’t even touched him. I guess you could call it the power of presumption. Neither of us expected the ordeal to be complicated but it was, it was like trying to get some kind of new mechanics to fit together, we had to work it out just right, and until we did there was a lot of clanking and jarring, and then, just when I was about to call it off, a miracle.

*

The last time I ate pancakes we were both home from college, our first year on opposite coasts. Sometime after midnight, Jay drove me to the diner in his father’s pickup truck. He ordered, and I ordered, him the usual, me a perfect silver dollar, crispy at the edges, a buttery sun. I was so ready for sweetness. I glazed it with syrup poured from a tiny pot. Jay scooped up a forkful of whipped cream and chocolate. He told me friends were meant to be just friends. He told me this with his mouth full of the chocobomb. He told me something I hadn’t already known: that two people could hold onto opposite ends of the same cloth, and while one might call it love, another might simply call it pancakes.

Stuffy

Casey Wiley’s essays and stories have been published in Passages North, Hobart, Ep;phany, Barrelhouse, Gulf Stream, Salt Hill, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Pindledyboz, monkeybicycle, among others. He teaches writing at Penn State.

Mike Pipes was a sad wrestler, so he quit wrestling. Small-circuit, central Pennsylvania, twenty-five a match, if Steele showed to pay. Mike was never champ, but he could take a hit. He made other wrestlers look good. During the day, he was a plumber, a good, solid job. Or not a plumber, but sometimes one in Duncansville called him up to tear copper piping from abandoned buildings in Altoona, or Tyrone. When quitting wrestling didn’t work— alone in his empty apartment feeling sadder, watching Columbo reruns—he went back to wrestling.

Friday night, Altoona Area Shriners, pinned under Randy the Clown (day job: elementary crossing guard), couple dozen in the crowd whistling, Mike whispered, “I’m sad.”

“The fuck?” the old clown hissed, screwing his jowly face, white face paint caked like cottage cheese in the corners of his eyes.

“I cry all the time.”

“I don’t give a— You want to now?”

The face paint smelled like clay. “I can never when I want to.”

Randy grunted, pushed hard off Mike, grabbed him by the ears, tugging Mike to standing—pain ripping down his neck—the crowd whooping. “I’m gonna make you cry.”

A week later—or was it two? — his head swimming, vision shifting, Mike still couldn’t cry when he wanted to, the tears building up in him like water hosed into a plastic bag. But now he told everyone he saw that he was sad. Maybe it was the concussion talking, but it felt good telling people. The parking meter lady, a priest at a diner, a priest at confession, some guy with socks pulled over his shoes lying on a bench.

Some people Mike told about being sad ran from him, lots did, stumbling off the bus, leaving their food right there on the counter at Sheetz. But some listened. That priest at confession. And but he had to, the mail delivery person listened, a librarian who looked like a child listened. A few wrestlers listened, too. Or not a few, but one. Randy the Clown finally listened when they were alone in the locker room (really, a janitor’s closet). Randy chugged beer from the mop bucket filled with ice, said his son had a swelled head, swelling, size of a melon, two. That he cried, not the son, or maybe the son but he didn’t know, but Randy did, but only at home, and almost rarely ever. Really, he basically never cried, okay? His wife she’d leave a pussy, okay? So but not exactly listening, Randy, but at least sitting with Mike. Like a friend. And anyway helping those kids cross the street morning, their little cold hands, fingers so small and how do they not break in the cold? But none of them ever close to being hit by any cars, god damn assholes texting and driving, not even one eye on the road. But those kids are fine, fine. Gonna be fine. His son, Randy Jr., sometimes he’d come along, mute, walking slowly behind Randy holding these kids’ hands, Randy Jr. like a little kid himself, sweatpants, SpongeBob T-shirt, kitten stuffy tucked in his armpit, though a grown man, shaves and a gut and everything, spending the rest of his time, night and day, mute in the basement putting Legos together, Randy never allowed down there, and his wife, well, she wasn’t around much, and but the last time he tried going down there, Randy Jr. made  a sound like a tortured cow, swung at the old clown, Randy scrambling back up the stairs. Mike listened. He didn’t cry, but he was listening. Left the kid’s dinner that night on the top basement step, pudding, Cheerios, those goldfish crackers, and a note saying SORRY. He didn’t write in the note what he was sorry about, Randy told Mike, both of them sitting there in the locker room, the back of Mike’s ear throbbing and bloody like the ear had been ripped away from his head, but Randy he said he meant Sorry for going down to the basement and sorry for your head and this life, and then Randy went quiet, holding his beer bottle hovering halfway to his fat purple lips, bloodshot eyes distant, red wig askew, a terrible nightmare clown, and he said finally he meant to write THANK YOU as well, but when he limped downstairs in the middle of the night and cracked the basement door, the tray was gone.

Pre-Coital Hypothermia

Vi Khi Nao is the author of seven poetry collections & of the short stories collection, A Brief Alphabet of Torture (winner of the 2016 FC2's Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize), the novel, Swimming with Dead Stars. Her poetry collection, The Old Philosopher, won the Nightboat Books Prize for Poetry in 2014.  Her book, Suicide: the Autoimmune Disorder of the Psyche  will be out of 11:11 in Spring 2023. A recipient of the 2022 Jim Duggins, PhD Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize, her work includes poetry, fiction, film and cross-genre collaboration. She was the Fall 2019 fellow at the Black Mountain Institute:   https://www.vikhinao.com 

In the middle of the night, Maurona floats out of bed. Some say she is sleepwalking, wandering the desolate San Francisco streets with somnolent abandonment, a type of languorous amnesia. Upon first glance, it appears that the nocturnal is her ambrosia, sedative and even addictive and possibly medical. But as her lover’s gaze digs into Maurona’s somnific world, it appears that she is no oscitant walker. Maurona is urged, awaken by the unknown to travel in her sleep. The streets of San Francisco are not easy to walk as her feet begin to feel their assiduous labor. They are hilly and even on nights that exude warmth and heat, their sultriness is clogged heavy with fog. Some nights, when Maurona returns from her extended peregrination into Mar’s arms, she trembles with a hypothermic intensity that  frightens her. Mar speculates that if her lover continues to exist like so, her heart will  probably have no choice but to cease beating, even if her feet are still ambulatory. A dead heart but a functioning working body. In such a moment, Mar has no choice but to strip Maurona naked in a flush, to rush to the tub, run the hottest water possible while returning to rub wool against her body, to bring her  back to life. As Maurona soaks in hot water, Mar puts the kettle on the stove and when it hisses, she pours the water  into the tub, careful  not to burn the shivering figure. She would always notice how ghastly and  pale her lover’s face is, and how veiny purple her lips have become in such a short time. And then there is the incalculable, jarring nature of her hair ! Wild like a tree before a thunderstorm. This behavior has been occurring with intense frequency now. It used to happen only once every other month but now it’s every week, and Mar is worried. As she prostates on her knees to dry Maurona’s legs and pubic hair, an anemic feeling of hopelessness penetrates her. How to stop her? It seems cruel and even boorish to chain her to the bedpost with a handcuff. Must she resort to such a barbaric way of treating the woman she loves most in the world? Even the Alcatraz Island not too far from where they live has better sleeping conditions for their federal prisoners than the kind of flashes that pass through Mar’s mind. If she  hospitalizes Maurona, she is certain it  would be the end of  their romance. The hospital staff would tranquilize and then tape her to a metal bed.

Even after her hot bath, Maurona still trembles and continues to tremble as she lies on top, fastened in Mar’s arms. If time is a door and if every second into the future is irreversible, then what could she do to rivet something out of its prearranged and predetermined entity? Does the future always own itself to the past and present? And, where in the history of reality could Mar disrupt it, just enough, so that her lover is no longer hypnotic, comatose in her wakefulness, and damaged? Pressured to find a cure, Mar turns her neck lightly so that her lips are explicitly close to her beloved and in seconds, a massive transformation: her tongue is clued to Maurona’s cunt. How quickly and exponentially anchored they become in their fucking. Perhaps Mar is trapped by a paralysis: the desire to help, and then this magnificent carnal event that occurs after Maurona’s extended walk. They always make love so stunningly and so fixatingly. Perhaps the night has a way of altering the garment of her ardor, bestowing on her a hazy fleece, the kind that makes love nebulous but passion clear, and unambiguous. Maurona’s trembling and vulnerability also add another carnal depth of lucidity to their artistic performance in bed. As if in her pre-coital hyperthermia, she becomes more needy. More demanding. Her kisses become heightened, more urgent. Or perhaps the appetite has always been there, but the hunger has gone rogue. And Mar always reciprocates such swift ardor with a pressing asymmetry of her own. Regardless of the original source of the motive, fucking in such an electric fashion also quickly increases Maurona’s body heat. One second, she is hypothermic, the next she is lathered and soaked in hidrosis. They kiss, press, fuck, suck each other in a billion different recombination. Any doctor without insight into their fucking would misdiagnose the event as a clinical disorder of excessive perspiration. Perhaps there is nothing wrong with Maurona. Perhaps her long walk is her way of preparing her body for Mar. A type of foreplay. A long walk could be seen as a type of lingerie, of putting on something understated, something atmospherically sexy. For the grandeur about to come.  

Sugaring

Beth Hahn (she/her) is the author of the novel The Singing Bone (Regan Arts, 2016). Her writing is forthcoming and appears in Small Orange Journal, Milk Candy Review, New World Writing, Fractured Lit, HAD, CRAFT, and elsewhere. She is at work on a hybrid collection of flash and prose poetry. Her second novel was long-listed for publishing prizes with Mslexia and Regal House. Find her at beth-hahn.com and @be_hahn. 

Light from distant galaxies takes billions of years to reach us. We see these galaxies not as they are now, but as they were long ago.

A red mitten lies in the snow beneath the maple tree. Frost at night; sun in the day. It’s sugaring weather. The boy pours the tapped sap into wooden buckets. The smell of smoke lingers in the collars of men’s woolen jackets, the sweat and itch beneath the weight of the shoulder yoke.

Ann, the boy’s mother, the farmer’s wife, wears a brown dress, holds a bowl of the hot syrup, her blue coat open. She lifts the balanced spoon to Cousin Bertie’s lips for a taste. On the way over, with her face averted, Bertie said, Hooper will be there.

Bertie remembers Ann’s small hand stitching Hooper’s initials into the hem of a dress, whispering his name beneath the Hazel tree at full moon.

Farmers, as everybody knows, go to bed early, and these are no different. After the Bible. After the pipe. There is nothing beyond nothing in the night. Only the creak of pines in the wind. And the farmer and his wife asleep in an upstairs room. Ann dreams of Hooper tending the big black kettle of syrup. He offers her a ladle-full.

The pines, the wind, the wolves—two, the tail of a pack—chase a deer through the forest, their paws leaving dark prints in the snow. The wolves circle back, sniffing, breath visible in moonlight. They shake their coats and flatten their long forepaws in the snow. In the grove of the maples, they lick at the trees’ sweet spigots, they pad over the boy’s lost mitten.

The deer jumps over the hedge. The wolves chase, baying. The wind moves through the pines.

Lying in bed, the boy listens to the wolves, and rubs the raw edge of his quilt against his lip. He likes the feel of the patched fabric on his skin. Mother will bake sweet tarts. Bertie will knit a new mitten. The quilt edge has been repaired three times. See how the moonlight coming through the high, square window makes visible the crooked stitches?

Light from distant galaxies takes billions of years to reach us. We see these galaxies not as they are now, but as they were long ago.

A Miniature Girl

Ruth Joffre is the author of the story collection Night Beast. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Lightspeed, Nightmare, Pleiades, khōréō, The Florida Review Online, Wigleaf, Baffling Magazine, and the anthologies Best Microfiction 2021 & 2022, Unfettered Hexes: Queer Tales of Insatiable Darkness, and Evergreen: Grim Tales & Verses from the Gloomy Northwest. 

Once, she pretended she was a doll. Hurled herself on a pile of Batgirls and Barbies at the first sight of a human and held her breath until the giant was downstairs and she could scurry into a hole in the wall with what little she had scavenged. Her parents told her it wasn’t her fault—the human child had been away for a week at summer camp and her room should have been empty, but the mother had decided to get ahead on laundry and wash the girl’s sheets, and no one could have predicted that; no one could fault her; in fact, everyone said how clever it had been to hide in plain sight—but even knowing that did nothing to shake the sickly, lingering feeling that she had made a mistake. Those bodies had felt wrong. Stiff. Hollow in places where blood should be and peeling in others. Quite a few Barbies were naked, and after the mother had gone with her wad of bedsheets, the girl returned to herself to find her face pointed straight at a doll’s behind. What she found most disturbing was that the doll’s butt was neither cracked nor smooth, neither plump nor flat, but embossed repeatedly with a capital B. Not all in a line but at regular intervals, like cross-hatching. B. B. B. B. Like branded cattle. For years after, she refused to step foot in the bedroom. She watched the human child grow from a distance. Waited for her to leave her toys lying around at night and then quietly damaged them (pulling an eye off here, a clump of hair there) so that the humans would later find them and blame the dog; and then, one day, the dolls disappeared. At first, she thought the human girl had gone away, been sent to boarding school or graduated off to a job or to college, but when she checked the room one night the girl was still in there, all bad skin and limbs longer than she knew what to do with. Her father was the one who told her: the girl just got tired of the dolls, boxed them up and chucked them into a corner of the attic to collect dust. “That’s why we scavenge,” he said. “They have too much; they own things without even wanting them.” She couldn’t bring herself to visit the box, but she heard stories sometimes. About the big pile of dismembered dolls. The tea party one expedition found while scavenging some linen. How when they left the dolls were just sitting there. Silent and naked. Like the manufacturer wanted.

Time After Time

Rebecca Field lives and writes in Derbyshire, UK. She has work in several print anthologies and has also been published online by Reflex Press, The Daily Drunk, The Phare, Ghost Parachute, Fictive Dream and Ellipsis Zine, among others. Tweets at @RebeccaFwrites 

Seconds

The clock at the pool has a red second hand that sweeps continuously around the dial. I glance up each time I get to the deep end, counting off the lengths I’m being sponsored to swim. I’m supposed to do thirty, but at number twenty-six Mr Barraclough taps me on the shoulder, tells me to get out, everyone else has finished. There is a rolled up length of bunting in his hand. Dad is waiting by the vending machines when I come out of the changing rooms. He takes my kit bag from me and we drive home in silence.

Minutes

Dad played the piano when he was a boy, so I do too. He stands behind me as I practice, turning the pages. The metronome ticks back and forth.

In my recurring dream I am late for a piano exam and I ask my teacher to give me a lift in his Morris Minor. He drives too slowly and keeps making wrong turns. No matter how much I urge him to speed up he seems unable to grasp the urgency of the situation. The car breaks down at the traffic lights, and when he opens the bonnet there is a nest of baby starlings in the engine all chirping and demanding to be fed. In the dream I never make it to the exam. In reality, Dad would never let that happen.

Hours

When I finish college for the second time I move into a flat share above a barbershop. The hallway telephone is mainly used to order takeaways and taxis. I call my parents each Sunday afternoon when I am less hungover. I report news items to my mother and she repeats each one to my father like she is handfeeding a tiger. He chews each over carefully, spitting out those  he doesn’t  like.

Years

Dad gives me an old Rolex watch in a leather box for my 21st. He tells me he bought it with his first bonus cheque, slaps me on the back and says it’s mine now. I am shocked that he would entrust it to me. The kind of man who wears a watch like this has a job in the city and a golf club membership, maybe a company car and a nice house in the suburbs. He doesn’t have a job replacing tyres on cars he will never drive and a collection of sci-fi DVDs. I decide that maybe I will grow into the watch.

Decades

I iron a shirt for the dinner, pick out my least-scuffed shoes, spritz on some afterthought aftershave. The black oil beneath my fingernails remains a permanent fixture.

‘Nice shirt,’ he says as I sit down. ‘Where’s the watch I gave you?’

‘I don’t want to damage it. I keep it safe, for special occasions.’

‘Isn’t your parent’s ruby wedding anniversary a special occasion?’

I picture the watch at the back of my sock drawer along with the cufflinks I also have no use for. I want to say, ‘I’m not really a watch person, Dad,’ but the moment passes.

Moments

My mother calls the service desk at work while I am changing the brake pads on an Audi. ‘I found him in the garden,’ she says. ‘They say something burst in his brain. He isn’t going to wake up.’ I think about burst tyres, cars veering off roads. When I get to his bedside his skin is pale, and his eyes are closed. I look at his hand on top of the white sheet - it doesn’t look like his. I am glad to be spared the awkwardness of having to talk him. ‘He did love you,’ my mother says. ‘He just didn’t know how to show it.’

Lifetimes

I put on the suit, tie the black tie, find the Rolex in the drawer. I am halfway to church when I realise the watch is an hour behind. I drive in a panic, miss the eulogy where Uncle Frank talks about my father’s work achievements, how he met my mother and his love of golf, German shepherds and The Eagles. I miss the singing of his favourite hymns, the prayers for his soul. By the time I arrive, the mourners are gathered by the graveside, a cousin drafted in as a last minute pall-bearer. I stumble across the overgrown grass, hear the clotted earth hit the coffin lid, catch the final words of the priest: Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. I have all the time in the world.

The Martian’s Job, After All, Is To Interpret the World

Gabriela Denise Frank is a transdisciplinary storyteller, editor, and educator living in the Pacific Northwest. Her work has appeared in True Story, HAD, Hunger Mountain, DIAGRAM, The Bureau Dispatch, Baltimore Review, The Normal School, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. The author of the chapbook Pity She Didn't Stay 'Til the End (Bottlecap Press 2020), she serves as the creative nonfiction editor and managing editor of Crab Creek Review. www.gabrieladenisefrank.com

He tells his daughter octopuses have three hearts: one for love, one for breathing, one for exercise.

It looks like an alien, she says, wrinkling her nose at the gentle beast curling and unfurling its fiddlehead limbs.

Aliens should be so lucky, he says. Octopuses are marvelous. Every body part is designed to do two or three things. They’re built like boats, with redundancies.

Like what? she snorts, pressing her forehead to the cool glass. She huffs half-moons on the aquarium wall.

Well, he says, octopuses can breathe through their skin and siphon, and they use their siphon to breathe and swim. An octopus can even run on six legs.

So what? she says. I can breathe through my nose and mouth while I’m running on two.

He tells her octopus eyes not only sense light and color, they tell octopuses when to make babies. He says octopuses have chitinous beaks rather than mouths and raspy tongues called radulae, and everything gets scooped inside the octopus’s head, which is really its body where it eats, digests, and mates. Now he’s on a roll. He says that octopuses change the hue and texture of their skin during courtship—like dressing up for a date—and they can alter the color and pattern of their flesh to match their surroundings, too. They’re so good at camouflage, predators often miss them completely; they have the biggest brains of all the invertebrates. They use deceit to escape attackers, tricking them by hiding in crevices or blasting off with their siphons, and, when pursued, they squirt sticky clouds of ink to conceal their getaway.

Gross, she says.

She spins in a circle, twice, wiggles, and darts a look at the next tank. He’s losing her. He must choose his words carefully. He winks at the octopus, who flirts back through the glass, her skin blushing blue to match his shirt. To his daughter, he says, Did you know that when an octopus swims with its siphon, its heart stops beating? It’s like how the engine of our Prius shuts off at certain speeds.

Her questions bubble to the surface:

What’s a siphon?

What’s chitinous?

What’s a radula?

What’s redundancy?

How can an alien with a thousand outfits live without a heartbeat?

He doesn’t have all the answers, but he knows some. He doesn’t say benthic, he says bottom-dwelling; he doesn’t say appendage, he says leg. When he finally gets to middens, she shrugs and says it’s just a pile of empty old shells.

Time to move on.

He doesn’t tell his daughter most octopuses only live a few years, or that the fathers die soon after they mate. He doesn’t tell her that octopus mothers starve for five to nine months while they tend to their brood. Because the daddies are dead, there’s no one to watch over the pride, like lions, so the octo-moms forego self-care to guard against predators.

That night, his daughter draws an accurate portrait of her mother with black ink, though she couldn’t possibly remember. He sees that she’s given her mother the right number of appendages, but instead of one heart she has three.

It’s so she can breathe when she swims, his daughter says.

He doesn’t tell her octopus mothers die soon after their babies hatch. He doesn’t tell her  they grow up fending for themselves, that they are, by design, a solitary species that primarily  meets to mate. He doesn’t tell her scientists have discovered that removing the ocular glands actually extends an octopus’s life. That, without the call to procreate, octopuses stop brooding, resume eating, grow larger, and live longer, albeit alone in their dens.

He doesn’t tell her that’s how octopuses prefer it.

He kisses her goodnight and turns off her light without saying that alone and lonely aren’t the same, that despite sharing a root their meanings are different. This simple yet elusive truth he never has to explain. Somehow, the little alien was born already knowing.

Pluck

Alexandra M. Matthews is a writer from New York. Her work appears in X-R-A-Y, Fractured Lit, Milk Candy Review, Gone Lawn, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for Best Small Fictions.

The tweezers were Louisa’s idea. We found them in a medicine cabinet that first night while our mothers were asleep. The tips were tarnished and the embossed leaves had started to rust. Whoever left them behind clearly didn’t miss them. Louisa tested the tweezers on a reluctant Edith, and with a single pull produced several hairs from her arm, follicles intact.

We were thirteen. Our mothers were childhood friends who brought us together once a year for a mother-daughter weekend on Lake Champlain. It was the summer my mother finally let me wear a bikini, black and white gingham, just like hers. Though when I asked, she still wouldn’t let me shave my legs like Edith and Louisa. I was too young, she said, I would end up cutting myself, and what was the big deal, sporting a little peach fuzz?

Edith rejected sneaking her mother’s razor, since my leg hair was so long and thick it could dull the blades. Neither of them had brought theirs, having shaved before the trip. But the decision was mine. I knew I couldn’t go on wearing a bikini with caterpillar legs, not if we wanted to hang out with high school Tabitha four cabins down, who wore glitter lip gloss and toe rings to the beach, or her twin brother, Cute Seth. Louisa had been waving to him from our porch for two days. She would blame me if he brushed us off.

The three of us huddled on the floor of the musty bedroom we shared, bathing our legs in light from the only lamp in the room. Tweezers in hand, Louisa leaned over to examine the chestnut hair on my right leg, her black curls tickling me. The syrupy cabin air gave Edith a halo of blonde frizz that swayed when I exhaled.

Louisa decided they would each pluck the lower half of one leg, where the hair was darker, since I wouldn’t be able to finish if I was the one inflicting pain on myself.

Well, it can’t be that bad, I said, sweat building on the back of my neck. My mother plucks her eyebrows all the time without flinching.

Trust us, Edith said.

Louisa closed the tweezers around a tuft of hair below my knee and yanked. I yelped. 

Shh, Louisa snapped, flicking my lips with her index finger. She let slip a smile, which I hoped meant it got easier.

Edith swung around to hold my bent legs down at the ankles, as if spotting me while I did sit-ups. I clenched my fists around the hem of my nightgown, braced for the sting of Louisa’s next pluck, and bit down on my lip until I could taste blood.

***

They swore I’d begged for it. Said I gave them no choice.

The next morning my mother took one look at the red, painful patches on my shins and grounded me for the rest of the trip. You could’ve gotten an infection, she said. She stammered as she scolded me, like when she said a watermelon would grow in my stomach if I swallowed a seed.

But it was my summer, I said through tears, and they were my legs.

From our bedroom window I watched the girls pace the shoreline along our row of cabins, giggling into each other’s shoulders. Once I saw Louisa turn her head in my direction. I sat up on the sill, ready to wave back. She tucked a couple flyaways into her braid and they continued on, coverups flapping in the breeze against smooth legs as they walked up to the twins’ cabin.

It would take only a swift tug to snap the tie in her hair.

***

From my bed I overheard our mothers arguing.

They barely get their periods, my mother said, pausing after each word, enunciating her consonants.

You’re overreacting, said the other mothers.

Louisa and Edith were asleep in their cots, pushed together on the opposite wall. I needed to pee so bad I was cramping but the bathroom was on the other side of the kitchen and a sea of linoleum. I ran my hands across the shiplap walls until I found the doorknob, turning it completely before opening.

Halfway across the kitchen, my shadow dipped too far into the living room.

Go back to bed, my mother hissed. The bags under her eyes appeared deeper in candlelight, immune to her freezer eye patches. There was worry in her face.

I nodded and scurried into the bathroom.

What’s next? she whispered, palm to chest, though no one answered.

***

The girls came over to our station wagon Sunday afternoon to say goodbye. Louisa gave me an air hug, as if my t-shirt were covered in dirt that would stain her spaghetti strap tank. But Edith gave me a real one, and the perfume of her pear-scented shampoo filled my nostrils. Before she let go, I felt her drop something into my pocket.

I waited until we reached the highway to take out the tweezers, holding them low so my mother couldn’t see in the rearview mirror. There were green specks of pesto on them from being in the trash and they smelled faintly of rotten food.

Running my hands over my furry knees and thighs, I was surprised by how silky they felt compared to the coarse hair of my lower legs. Every time we passed an exit sign, I plucked a hair from the back of my left thigh. It felt good. The twinge of each pull sent tingles up my spine.

By the end of the ride, there was a soft, hairless spot so small, only I knew it was there.

Post-Colonial Sediment

J.D. Robertson's work has appeared in Landfall and other publications. He lives in a little-ish house on a sort of prairie, but it'll do. He enjoys watching the hawks and herons, and experimenting in his greenhouse.

Years later, we'd recall that first date, amongst the rabbits and ruins: the day you almost sank in the bottomless waterhole. An abandoned cementworks—what better place for a picnic, you’d insisted. Well, and why not. Your tartan blanket, spread across the dandelions and buttercups; my pork gyoza, readymix sangria poured out in plastic party cups. Both of us, barely more than kids, still long-limbed and golden furred, still enjoying long, lazy summers. The sun not yet sunk beneath distant blue hills. We drink in the long grass, drink to the bottomless waterhole: once, Northland’s busiest quarry—till some poor bastard broke through. Straight into the water table. So much for workplace health and safety? I joke. And you laugh long and hard at that… maybe a little too long and too hard, and blame it on the cheap sangria. That stuff’ll really sneak up on you. But it’s okay, it’s fine. We’ll just walk it off.

You take my hand. We trek down to the fenced-off ruins, wading through thigh-high summergrass, fallen chunks of factory wall black with mildew. Wild sprays of Mānuka sprout from crumbled concrete blocks, like a shock of armpit hair. I say, maybe an odd place for a date and you say, well maybe I’m an odd date.

So.

Council warning signs dot the perimeter fence, yellow and black triangles flapping against chain-link, citing hazards and certain prosecution for any would-be trespassers—

DO NOT ENTER

—and yet, rabbits do enter, rabbits hop right on through, rabbits trespass all over the place: rabbits rabbits and more rabbits. Never, not once in our whole lives, have we ever seen so many rabbits as we have here, loping around these cementwork ruins at the brink of sunset.  The rabbits hit the fence running; they show us the hidden gaps. We crawl, on our knees, beneath chain-link diamonds rattling in the summerbreeze, following these wise rabbits down under into the ruins. Well, and why not. Inside the ruins, graffiti streaks everything, any surface it’ll stick to. In huge, bloodred letters, someone’s scrawled:

FVK U salinnnger

And you laugh long and hard at that. But won’t say why.

A crescent moon waxes over the waterhole. We’re drawn to the water, its dusky borders. Wavelets lap quietly at the pale skirt of soft, gleaming clay, and at the sharp, limestone edges exposed beneath, raw in the moonlight—and slippery, beneath worn sneakers—

You bail right over and in.

But it’s okay, it’s fine. You’ll just walk it off. Still, I dab at the beaded red line zipped right down your creamy shin, admonish you to take more care of yourself: don’t you know, they say this waterhole’s twenty metres deep, at least? But you say no. And that every local knows, truth is? It’s bottomless. You can just dive, dive, dive… and keep on diving, right on down, and never ever hear yourself hit rock bottom. They say big fish swim these depths: black bream, longfin eels— Parore, or Tūna, back before there was a quarry here, before there was a cementworks; before rabbits, even. Way down, the old eels still swim, massive Tūna like Mānuka trunks, heavier than a grown man and longer than three. Make no mistake, these ancient Tūna sing, they’ll take your arm clean off, bite it off for free, should you ever so much as think of coming down here.

Lemonade

Minette Cummings studied English Literature and Creative Writing at Rice University and studied under Elizabeth Benedict and John Montague at the SUNY Writers Institute. She also holds a Technical Writing Master’s from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Currently, Minette lives in upstate New York, where she spends her days as a librarian surrounded by stories and her nights writing her own. You can read more of her work in The Atticus Review and Flash: The International Short Story Magazine.

My husband’s mind is cutting in and out. He puts cookies in the freezer and ice cream in the cupboard. He feeds the dogs, and then he feeds them again. When I come home from work, the door is locked. When I knock, he yells I don’t want God’s news! Water spews from faucets. He’s forgotten how to flush toilets or close cabinet doors. 

At night, he dreams of flying. I see his arms stretch out on the coverlet, hear the thrum of engine sounds  in his throat. When he wakes and sees me next to him, his eyes go wide. He says that thing you sit on when he means chair. He puts the remote where no one will find it and asks me where the bathroom is. 

I tape a calendar on the kitchen wall, a schedule on the refrigerator, notes on the door, the mirror, the phone. When I come home, he’s halved the lemons from the drawer to make me lemonade.

My daughter says, He’s got to go. She thinks he will play in traffic or take shiny things from stores. She’s found a place for him close to her house. She doesn’t say, but I’m sure there’s room for me there, too. It took her only days to solve this problem.

I play his favorite music: Warren Zevon, Johnny Cash. He sings off-key while I fry pork chops. His walk becomes a shuffle. His body thins and bends. His beard grows long.

He’s on the waitlist, my daughter says. She once took her dog to the pound. Her cat didn’t make it past fatty tumors.

He lets me pick our TV shows. I choose the flat side of the bed. When I cut on plates with the knife he keeps so sharp, he doesn’t say a word.

He’s top of the list, my daughter says. You really need to pack. I fold sweatpants and towels, place wedding pictures and shampoo into the suitcase my daughter bought. 

My daughter waits now in the car outside. My husband and I sit together on the loveseat, looking at the blank TV. I hear my daughter honking. She used to alphabetize her records. My husband smiles and nods his head. Always in a hurry, that one, he might have said. I know, I tell him. Let’s sit a while longer, I tell him. We don’t have anywhere to be. 

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