The things we do to survive

Madeline Anthes is the Assistant Editor of Lost Balloon. Her chapbook, Now We Haunt This Home Together, was published in May 2020 with Bone & Ink Press. You can find her on Twitter at @maddieanthes, and find more of her work at madelineanthes.com.

The wolf says he is sorry, and I believe him. I do. What does a wolf gain from lying? He says he was starving and that my Nana and Poppy were the first bits of meat and flesh he’d seen all week, and that of course he didn’t want to eat them, of course he feels guilty about it – wouldn’t I feel guilty about it? – but this is the forest and we all do what we need to to survive; we’re just animals after all, and we eat to live, even when it doesn’t taste good. Though, he admits, they were a little tasty since they’d just finished eating a pot roast dinner that my Nana had cooked all day, roasting vegetables and letting them cook in the meat’s juices in her slow cooker until the meat was tender and the vegetables were dripping in oily sauce – but really he just needed sustenance, and anyway, they were old so their bones were brittle and snapped easily in his mouth as he ate them, which took a lot of the fun out of it. 

I tell him I forgive him, because that’s another thing we do to survive. We eat, we fuck, we kill, we forgive. I kiss his snout and he exhales in relief, closing his eyes and whispering a pardon in return as I press a knife to his gut and split him open to retrieve their bones. Nothing personal, we both say, as his blood pools at my feet. 

Self (defence)

Andrew Boulton is a lecturer in creative advertising. His flash fiction stories have been accepted and published in journals including Retreat West, Lunate Fiction, Flash Fiction Magazine, Tiny Molecules, Spelk, Reflex, Bath Flash Fiction anthology and Storgy. He lives in Nottingham with his wife, daughter and a chubby cat.

Mum died and I learnt jeet kune do (not at exactly the same time, but soon enough for people to think I’d gone mad).

More people ask me what jeet kune do is than how Mum died (a martial art invented by Bruce Lee and ovarian cancer, if you’re interested in knowing either, or both).

The reason I chose it is pretty basic. I just went to Wikipedia and liked what the name actually means (the way of intercepting the fist, which is the kind of thing you can only get away with if you’re naming your own martial art).

Also, when Mum was still writing, and still asking me to read her stories, there was one about Bruce Lee (or rather it was about Bruce Lee’s ghost who only one little boy could see, and the little boy was in a children’s home and the guy running it snuck into his room one night, presumably to touch him up, and Bruce Lee’s ghost kicked the crap out of the man and the little boy couldn’t explain to the police how this guy had gotten so beat up).

I can’t really tell you why I decided to learn it, or why I decided that was the time to start, but I’m actually pretty good (my teacher, Mark, tells us all to move like water but he says I’m the only one who seems to understand).

Since I learned to fight I think I might be actively looking for people to attack me (I know I am, I do it all the time).

Where I live is pretty nice, so I have to catch two buses to get myself into the dodgy parts of town (Mum used to ask me and Dad whether ‘dodgy’ was the complacent white people word for ‘poor’).

The truth is, no matter what I do, or where I go or what I wear, no one has ever said a word to me (not true. An old Rasta, on a skateboard that was too small for him, asked me what I was listening to and then laughed and said it was shit as he rolled away).

I can’t go out and start any trouble myself, I’d be betraying my teacher - and be sort of making him betray Bruce Lee (and I’m a little bit wary of whether Bruce Lee’s ghost is around now, because Mum’s stories were always about things she had actually seen).

One night I saw a guy shoving his girlfriend around outside a pub (not even a bad pub, it’s where I used to go to book club with Mum until she fell out with the organiser about Graham Greene).

I went up to the girl and asked her if she was ok, but the boyfriend told me to fuck off and mind my own business (but he didn’t try and push me or hit me and, with jeet kune do it’s all about parrying a blow and throwing your own all at once, so a lot of it depends on getting punched, which is slightly fucked up I suppose).

Me being there seemed to take something out of the situation though and the guy apologised to his girlfriend and she smiled and they went back inside (giving me a strange look as if to say I’d been the one being a shouty arsehole outside a nice pub that runs a book club).

So I just went home again and tried to get Dad to say something to me (thinking the whole time that, only if he wanted me to, I could probably kill him with one punch).

Long Past Their Darkness

Erin Calabria grew up on the edge of a field in rural Western Massachusetts and currently lives in Magdeburg, Germany. She is a co-founding editor at Empty House Press, which publishes writing about home, place, and memory. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize and was selected as a winner for The Best Small Fictions 2017. You can read more of her work in Milk Candy Review, Longleaf Review, Pithead Chapel, and other places. She tweets @erin_calabria.

If we grow beyond this story, then someday I will tell you of our vanishing into the wood.

There was so little I could carry, the bundle of you clutched close to me, closer than chill to frost.

The wolf saw us first by the river. Thick smell of fish roasting over fire drew her in, face peering out of green. Frost-colored.

She tracks us now among the trees. Faithful pad of paws sifting through my dreams. I wake with pressure of teeth on my throat. Or is that just a memory of hands? Bruises, I’ve heard, remember long past their darkness.

You never cry in these forest nights. No crash or shriek or turn of key to trouble you. Instead, only a rustle of leaves and wink of stars to sweep you into a song that matches your own breathing.

Full. Measured. The way love should never crush a softness, only hold it. The way wolf howl gently winds a silver thread around each winter night, never disturbing its glitter.

If we do not grow beyond this story, then you will know nothing apart from these woods. Your spine curled against mine, just more leaves withered to earth. Blood of some other animal, or else animal ourselves among them.

The wolf. She will see to that.

That Time of the Year

Christine H. Chen was born in Hong Kong and raised in Madagascar before moving to the United States where she currently resides in the Greater Boston Area. Prior to embracing her creative life, she worked as a research chemist in oncology for a pharmaceutical company. She is a 2020 winner in the Boston in 100 Words writing contest. 

The neighbors are at it again, my mother says, and she rushes to turn off the living room light where I am sitting, pulls the curtains together. She leaves a slice of space between the two panels, so she can sit in front of the window and spy on the group of Halloween costumed children and parents walking up from the end of the street. She tells me that at Halloween, she hides and pretends not to be home when her neighbors come around to trick or treat.

I roll my eyes without her seeing me; if I were thirteen and not thirty, she’d have slapped me across the face. Now, she’s the child and I am the grown up.

“I don’t understand these bak-gwei,” she grumbles, “why would you wear these awful looking masks, pretend to be these ugly creatures, parade on the streets? They scare the hell out of me! I can die from a sudden scare!”

I smirk at the irony of the word “bak-gwei” which means, white devils, way back when the Chinese laid eyes on the first white men who arrived in China, or so my grandma told me. My mother glances at me to get a reaction. I don’t give her the pleasure. I turn on the light from my iPhone and continue to read the latest news alerts. Fast as a cat, my mother slides next to me and snatches my phone. “Ow” is all I manage to say. My mother pokes at my forehead.

“I am talking to you,” she says to me. She still thinks I am a little girl and that’s only one of the reasons I am annoyed with her. The excuse she got me to fly to Pittsburgh to see her before my yearly visit at Christmas was my birthday which we celebrated a few days ago, a demand laced with guilt.

“Ma, don’t be ridiculous, you know it’s just a disguise, they’re kids!” If my father were here, he’d probably be reassuring her, and then wink at me behind her back.

My mother takes hold of my arm and lists a series of ailments ranging from insomnia— which she’s always had since I moved away for college—indigestion, constipation, high blood pressure, irregular heartbeat, trauma, the PTSD she’ll suffer from if she sees too many frightful creatures like goblins, zombies, or vampires, even if they are fake. She hates vampires the most: the pointed teeth, the blood, the ghoulish eyes. She goes on to rant about her neighbor Mary’s teenage sons who’ve webbed the bushes with cotton, placed plastic spiders with red glowing eyes and pumpkins carved with angry smirks on their porch. Bob, the other neighbor across the street, has hung a skeleton on the stair railing that lights up at night and a skull with blinking eye sockets right on the doorsteps facing my mother’s front door.

“Hideous!” my mother says, “I don’t want that kind of morbid thing staring at me—how much do you think their electricity bill is?” She wants me to go and explain to the neighbors it’s a bad omen to have death surround the neighborhood. I tell her I can’t do that, the bad omen stuff, that’s a cultural issue; besides, Halloween is over after tonight, I’ll fly back to Philly tomorrow, and she’ll be fine as she’s always been.

“What if I faint? Who’s going to know?” my mother says. She mumbles something about me turning into a white person, no regards for elders, no regards for my Asian roots.

Voices and laughter from the street drift into our darkened room.

I peek through the wedge of space between the curtains. Outside, Bob’s plastic skeleton lights the faces of the children green, the lanterns casting amber globes on the streets, children and parents glittering away in happy chatter. No one glances at our house.

I turn around to see my mother’s back. She is gazing at the light on the mantel next to our family portrait and my father’s urn. It’s been ten years, but loneliness doesn’t age.

I turn off my phone and ask my mother if she needs help making dinner.

Healer

Travis Cravey is an editor at Malarkey Books (@malarkeybooks) and Editor-at-Large at Versification (@versezine). Mostly he’s a maintenance man. He is on Twitter a lot @traviscravey if you want to say hello or ask about his stories.

Kyle heard his father pull up in the station wagon. The soft, gravely sound of caliche crunching under the worn out tires was a pardon from the death watch he had been forced to stand. He heard the big driver’s door open, heard his father curse the dogs sniffing at him. Two days earlier, when Kyle and his father had pulled in from Lubbock, his father had seen the dogs coming and cursed them as “those goddamn hounds.”

Memaw Sabine sat on the porch, rocking back and forth, ignoring her son’s antics. “Any news, August?

“No, momma.” Kyle’s father stood with one boot on the first step of the porch and leaned on one knee. “I don’t think he’s coming, momma.”

Memaw Sabine leaned back. She rocked a couple of times, then looked over her shoulder through the screen door at the man lying in a bed in the middle of the front room.”He’ll be here. I called for him. He’ll be here directly.”

Kyle watched this from a window in that front room. He sat back down on the floor, flipped through his comic book. He was strictly forbidden to play with any toys while keeping Paint company, even though the old man hadn’t been awake since they got there on Tuesday.

Paint was his grandfather, Jesse August Schilling. Everyone called him Paint; his friends, his wife, his children, and his grandson.

Paint had collapsed in his garden on Monday. Memaw Sabine drug him, through the squash and tomatoes, up to the porch before making the long walk to the neighbor, Mr. Phillips, and riding in the bed of his ‘62 Dodge pick-up so as not to tempt him to sin. Mr. Phillips helped Memaw Sabine get Paint onto the old green sofa and covered him with throw blankets. When Kyle’s father came, he and Kyle pulled the spare bed into the room at Memaw Sabine’s insistence. “That room gets a cool breeze in the afternoon.”

Kyle’s father came up on the porch and looked through the screen door. Then he sat next to his mother. After a moment, he took a deep breath. “Momma, there ain’t Healers around anymore. This ain’t the old days. It’s 1977, momma, not 1877.”

Memaw Sabine never took her eyes off the road. “Healers always come when you call for them.”

Kyle’s father took his cowboy hat off and set it on his knee. “No one in town even knows who the Healer is.”

Memaw Sabine chuckled, finally turning towards Kyle’s father. “No one but the Healer needs to know who the Healer is, August.” She adjusted in her seat and looked back at Paint. “You been gone too long to remember.”

Kyle’s father pursed his lips. He stood, put his hand on his mother’s shoulder a moment, and then walked inside.

After his father had hung his hat up, he walked over to the old man and looked him over. “Well, Paint, won’t be long now.”

“Is he gonna die, daddy?” Kyle stood next to his father and stared at the old man’s withered face. It was loose and grey like wet campfire ashes. He wasn’t sure he wanted his father to answer him. He didn’t want to ever be lying in a front room, hoping for a cool afternoon breeze.

“Yes, son. He is. Soon, I think.” Kyle could hear his father’s voice breaking slightly.

“What about the Healer?”

“Come in here, Kyle.” His father led him to the kitchen. He poured coffee and sat at the table. He motioned Kyle to sit with him. He took a small sip of the cup, to test the heat, and set it down.

“Memaw believes... things,” he started. He fiddled with the handle of the cup. “She comes from a different time. When she was young folks believed things like that.”

“Like Healers?” Kyle was trying to understand.

“When I was eight, I got a fever, I should have died. Honest to God, son, I should have.” He stopped again. Drank coffee. Spun the cup. Kyle, for his part, was silent, waiting for whatever was to come next.

Finally, his father finished his coffee and sighed. He looked out the kitchen window, out into the garden Paint had collapsed in a few days before. “Momma,” he started, “Memaw Sabine called for the Healer. You couldn’t get to a doctor in time back then. So folks would call out for the Healer.”

“How’d they know where he was,” Kyle interrupted.

“Not by phone. It’s hard to explain or understand, But you just call for the Healer, and he comes.” He ran his fingers through his wispy, thinning hair. Paint called for him the night I should have died. Memaw Sabine called for him Monday.” Kyle’s father smiled. “No one calls anymore. Just goes to the doctor. But momma likes the old ways.”

“But people still died, right?”

“The Healer can only do so much.”

At this, Kyle’s father sat back, took a deep breath, and stood. He walked through the front room, past Paint, and onto the porch where his mother still watched the road. Kyle followed close behind.

“Momma,” Kyle’s father knelt by the old woman’s chair. “Let’s go in and sit with Paint. He hasn’t got much more to go, I think.”

Memaw Sabine sat up straight. “I called for the Healer, August. I want to watch for him.”

Kyle’s father took her hand gently, held it between his own. “I know you did, momma. And I came. But I can’t help him. It’s just Paint’s time.”

Memaw Sabine suddenly, for the first time, looked at her son. She began crying, grasping at his hands. “Please, son, please,” she whispered.

“No, momma. It’s Paint’s time. Let’s go say goodbye to him.”

Kyle’s father helped the old woman through the doorway and the screen slapped behind them. Kyle stood on the porch, looking into the house, watching for a great light that never came.

Greening

Cameron Finch's writing has appeared in Entropy, Glass, Hayden's Ferry Review, Queen Mob's Tea House, among others. Her interviews with authors, artists, and indie presses can be found in The Adroit Journal, CRAFT Literary, Electric Literature, Michigan Quarterly Review, and The Rumpus. Find her online at ccfinch.com or on Twitter @_ccfinch_. 

She visits my island. Every day. She watches the rubber sun fold around my hand. Like the gulls who slalom the spikes of my crown, she circles me. Studies me, the sole of my right foot, with her roaming body.

She has never been inside me. I do not know her touch.

But I can read her like a boat. The way she stands before me, so familiar. So still and built and practiced. The way she seeks me like an answer.

Little Bird, I see you.

I see who you’ve been. Who are you becoming?

Every day after school, she’d peel off all her skin. Flesh islands exiled to the bathroom floor. 350 pieces, count them. Maybe today, the flash of green. Something mossy. Something oxidized. Our kind, there is always something rusty, something radical. Happening far beneath.

Every day after school, she’d dress herself in bedsheets. Adopt a new name she read in a book. Liberty or maybe its rhyme. Stand on an overturned milk crate. Drape a chain link leash across her sandaled toes. Plunge her hand into the air-bridged sky and count the minutes till her fingers fell asleep. Maybe today. Maybe today, she’d practice one minute more. Every day, here she is, one minute less alone.

Now here she is again, definitive as a door. She wants to turn into metal, or me, and all I can do is green all the time. And so I green to her: ​When were you something no one expected you to be. Which is to say I greened to myself.

***

I visit her. Every day. I trace the perimeter of her island. I practice her. The first woman I wanted to know everything about.

I have never been inside her. I have never been inside her.

I have read every book on her. I know how many men dreamed of her. How many hands nailed her together. How many crates were stuffed like a mouth with the pieces of her body. How the poet and the sonnet. How the yearning. How the harbor’s vacant lot glowed her worldwide welcome.

Reading solves nothing. Reading only wants more.

Every day, I want to lie beneath her, secured by robes on all sides. I breathe her in like yogurt, immaculate and spackle sour. Harbor fish in the air and her wind tastes of dogwood.

Every day, I want to lie beneath her. I pluck glass freckles, one by one, from my tongue because I crave her reflection.

I want to lie beneath her, but. The pedestal. It follows me home every night. On the subway. Through greasy streets. Into bed. I rock this pillow of concrete to sleep, and dream of her musculature. Of green and gravities. Who will go up, who will go down.

I stand before her and ask on the nature of statues. About the transformation of flesh to copper, and where to find such brutal magic.

But she knows nothing about herself. She cannot name her solemn structures. She does not speak to me. She does not sway her hips.
Instead she greens. A green ungreened to me before. This, too, is a kind of living.

She greens slowly at first, wanting it to last. And it does.
I will look for this green again in every where I go. But it will be impossible.
A fleck of my skin exiles to the ground. Feathers its perch on our island as she greens to me. Which is to say I begin to green myself.

Grovel

Jennifer Fliss (she/her) is a Seattle-based writer with over 150 stories and essays that have appeared in F(r)iction, PANK, Hobart, The Rumpus, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. She is the 2018/2019 Pen Parentis Fellow and a 2019 recipient of a Grant for Artist Project award from Artist’s Trust. She has been nominated four times for The Pushcart Prize and her story, Hineni, was selected for inclusion in the Best Small Fictions 2019 anthology. She is an alumna of the Tin House Summer and Winter Writers’ Workshops and can be found on Twitter at @writesforlife or via her website, www.jenniferflisscreative.com.

He stepped on her glasses and the crunch was the sound of a heart breaking. He had told her this was his experience, as a cardiac surgeon, when wrist deep into someone’s viscera. It echoed throughout the O.R., he’d said, and even the nurses shuddered. 

At night, she studied his skin to find any staining from all the hearts, but he’d been sterilized, wiped clean.

Let me check your heart, I’m a doctor, he had said, in that bar in that decade where things mattered less but everyone thought they mattered more. They replayed that moment over and over: engagement party, wedding, therapy, in her mind at that moment when her glasses were wrecked and she couldn’t see. 

She had no more new contacts. The insurance expired after he lost his job. They didn’t even extend it an hour. Fuck the administration. Fuck Babcock, he said. Sitting on the edge of the bed with her head in her hands, he paced. Off each of his fingers, he listed off someone else to fuck. She recalled the graveyard of pearly blue carcasses of dried out contacts beside the bathroom trashcan she could never be bothered to clean up. She left him pacing and shut the bathroom door. It smelled of bay rum and the hibiscus-like smell of mildew. 

On her knees beside the toilet, she felt the tacky coolness as her fingertips caressed the tiled floor. Tendrils of dead hair in whorls, the label off her Lexapro splatted to the tile like it had been glued there, the tossed aside stick of a pregnancy test – negative. Two contacts. Dousing them with saline, she knew it wouldn’t help. She looked into the mirror and only saw a blurry smudge. 

He came into the small room, encircled her waist, rested his chin on her shoulder, and she stared at the mangled image of themselves. The contacts were balanced on her fingertips, precarious as TNT. She jabbed one in her right eye, feeling the knife. She closed one eye and saw her and her husband more clearly. She then placed the other contact gently in her left eye. Maybe it would hurt less if she were more delicate. 

She was wrong. She scrunched her eyes closed and felt every fine particulate that was too small to see, but irritated and would eventually, probably, cause her to go blind, or at least have irreparable damage. 

“Here, let me see,” he said and took her chin into his hand. “Bend down.”

“No.” He let out a noxious breath through his nose. She felt the peeling of her eyes like an orange, the vitreous gel condensing.

 “Open.” 

She opened. 

“There’s an eyelash.” He brought his thick finger toward her eye. “Steady,” he said. “Steady. Don’t move.” His wedding band dulled. She didn’t recognize his fingerprints. 

She flinched. He swore.

Her eyes burned and burned and blurred until she couldn’t even see him.

What the Dreaming Town Says to You, You in This Only Love

Pat Foran is a writer in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Little Fiction, Milk Candy Review, WhiskeyPaper, Wigleaf and elsewhere. Find him at http://neutralspaces.co/your_patforan/ and on Twitter at @pdforan.

When the town feels like talking, it talks about the darkness — "it's there and it's there, and there, and there," the town says. It talks about the cold in cursive, in a spacesuit, under a day-for-night moon.

You and I are talking, too. We're talking together, we're sleeping together, we're talking without sleeping. Talking without telling, talking without telling anyone anything. Not about the masquerading moon, not about this spacesuited town. Not about us, this only us. Not here, in the dark, in this cold, on this night.

"Something there is about this darkness," we say to each other. It's the kind of darkness that flies a kite without a key tied to its tail. The kind that surprises you with cattails and bulrushes on your birthday. The kind you write song lyrics about on the inside of her left arm, along the vein lines, in a time signature only she can feel.

This cold. Its color. How it doesn't run, won't run. The shush of it. The us in it. How we miss it, how we miss us, this only us, when it starts to get warm. 

This night. How it scales Mount Perception when possibility nestles in the night's cliffs like an isotope that's half in love. How sure it is, this possibility. Cocksure. How sure we are. Sure as we're sitting (and not sleeping) here. 

This closeness. Closer than colorfast, faster than falling in Twitter love. How awkward it would be, this colorfasting, this falling, if it weren't so freakin' dark. If we weren't so geeked-out giddy because we're able to talk this way, together, in this only love. 

This town — it's sheepish, with certainty in its step, and blood in its bootstraps. A town without power chords, a town without pity. A town without. A town, in a spacesuit, that talks about springtime, sings about summer, and dreams about the only people not sleeping. The only ones not shivering. Especially when the not sleeping ones say, to each other, in the dark, in this cold, on this night: As if and If only.

"Welcome to our town," the dreaming town says to us, only. "Aren't we beautiful when we shiver? Aren't we beautiful when we sleep? Aren't we beautiful?"

New Mother

Jacob Ginsberg is a writer and tutor living in Philadelphia, PA. He earned his MFA at Temple University. His work has appeared in Boudin, the online home of the McNeese Review.

On my hands and knees, I grind the bristles of my old toothbrush back and forth over the grout between the tiles of my kitchen floor. The ammonia reeks, but I think it’s working. I’ve never done this before, usually resorting to the vacuum and Swiffer, but today the house must be immaculate. The fridge is fully stocked, and there are pink tulips in a blue vase on the kitchen counter. The tiles themselves look excellent, having been polished with a rag and Formula 409 after my first pass through the house, but by comparison the white of the tiles makes the grout appear dirty and moldy. Hence the toothbrush.

My appointment is in two hours, which, now that the kitchen’s done, leaves me ten minutes to clean the air conditioning vents, twenty minutes to recheck my smoke alarms, carbon monoxide alarm, and fire extinguisher, thirty minutes to crawl the floor, searching under furniture, picking up last pieces of lint, making certain that every outlet plug is properly secured and every wire is properly stapled down, then fifteen minutes to take out the trash, and forty-five minutes to pace anxiously in the baby’s room, where I’ll check the crib and bassinet over and over to ensure they’re assembled correctly, and adjust and readjust the parenting books I’ll leave conspicuously but casually on the end table by the armchair across from the bookshelf I’ve stocked with forty picture books — two hours until the state adoption representative evaluates whether or not my home is safe enough for a child.

If my existence depended on my own mother passing such a test, I doubt I would have been born. My childhood home in the desert town of Eloy, right in between Tucson and my current home in Phoenix, was like a museum of dangerous items, where the docents whispered, “Do not touch,” then winked. The kitchen was filled with rodent traps, and instead of a fire extinguisher we had a plastic water pitcher in case my mother fell asleep smoking. We had no air conditioning, instead implementing an array of fans and loose cords that I always tripped over. Once when I was ten, I fell face first onto the coffee table, which cut my right temple and flipped, scattering loose methamphetamine and a few pills across the carpet. There was no vacuum, so I used the back of my hand to brush as much as I could under the couch.

Now, on my freshly vacuumed carpet, I crawl from end to end with a pair of scissors to cut any strands coming up at the edges. It feels clean against the tops of my feet, but I find myself searching for something terrible, a forgotten mess or shard of glass or an aspirin that looks like an opioid, which would disqualify me. There’s nothing under the coffee table, under the sofa, behind the bookshelf. I run my fingers over a plastic insert protecting one of the four outlets in the room, then stand up.

With one hour left, I gather the trash from the kitchen and bathroom, bag it all, and walk it to the curb. Once the inspection is finished I will be interviewed, and I’ve prepared answers to explain why I’ll be alone. Walking back inside, I recite them to myself. “My mother is an addict; she won’t be part of the baby’s life. My father died when I was four. No, I don’t have any siblings. No, I’m not in any sort of romantic relationship. Yes, I believe I have an adequate support network. Yes, I have stable income. Yes, I am prepared to love and raise a child.”

In the baby’s room, I gather myself in the armchair. The parenting books are worn and filled with Post-it notes and dog-ears. The walls, the crib, the toys, the clothing, everything is gender-neutral and ready for use. My knees are bouncing, and I start biting my thumbnail. After I pass the interview and inspection, and all the paperwork clears, I could receive a call at any moment. I might be sitting in this chair with my child in forty- eight hours. Or, I might be sitting in this chair waiting, rereading What To Expect and every picture book on the shelf for nine months, checking my phone every few minutes while the children who may or may not be mine are born. My reading aloud voice, at least, will be perfected.

It’s almost time. I return to the kitchen to pour myself a glass of water, and I make a mental note to offer one to the inspector the moment he or she arrives. The tulips on the counter, I notice, need water, too. They’re alive and well and have started to open, but they need to reflect my ability to provide consistent care, so I gently angle my glass above the vase, careful not to spill as I transfer the contents from one container to the other. I lean in and smell the tulips, and the scent drowns out any lingering hint of ammonia. I hear a knock at the door. Startled, I drop my empty glass, and while it falls I back into the counter and suffocate. I shut my eyes and pray that the vacuum still has sufficient charge, that the dustpan is under the kitchen sink and not in the closet, that none of the shards will cut my ankles, that nothing will be stained with blood. When it hits the clean tile a loud sound fills the kitchen, but the glass remains intact.

What makes the dark so dark

Howie Good is the author most recently of Stick Figure Opera: 99 100-word Prose Poems from Cajun Mutt Press. He co-edits the online journals Unbroken and UnLost.

You didn’t look like you anymore. I wasn’t there even when I was. We were living a life of shadows, of echoes, and with some particles capable of switching between the two. “Hey,” the train conductor said, “you all right?” I was like yes, yes, yes, I want to do this. Out the window, I saw these arched backs, these women working side by side in the fields, and then an old barn sagging under the blood and gold of sundown.

&

We’re living in very unusual times, and more than a few women read true crime books about serial killers just to gather survival tips. “OK,” they silently remind themselves, “I don’t get into the Volkswagen.” Some know what a knuckle duster is. Some were named after characters in now-defunct soap operas. Some, as a joke, take selfies in the spotted mirrors of public restrooms. Some are depressed on Sundays. You want to find out if this is in you. I’m no psychologist, or any other kind of -ologist, but, before you go to bed at night, look at the darkness.

&

I’ve given up trying to translate bird language into English. Nothing can persuade the crows in particular to speak clearer, whether they’re confessing petty crimes, or bragging, or retelling jokes. This might be more bearable if the dark wasn’t so dark. When I strike a match, a confusing mist surrounds the flame. At times I resolve to become like the drunks who, sufficiently enraged, can just shrug off the effects of being tasered. Other times what interests me isn’t success, but love, how the next person adds onto it without knowing all its nimble and sinister tricks.

I’m Sorry, Geraldine

Emily uses writing as an escape from reality and doesn't drink enough water. She has had work published with Barren Magazine, XRAY, Gone Lawn, Ellipsis Zine, Storgy, The Molotov Cocktail, Retreat West and Riggwelter Press to name a few. She can be found on Twitter at @emily__harrison 

Remember the story you told me about the singing harbour seal? A baritone? You said he wore a corduroy tie around his neck. You said he could be loose with his fists. Split your lip. I guess I didn’t know what to say to that. 

And what about that empty twenty-four-story house? Twenty-four seemed like a stretch at the time. Too ridiculous. Too high. As I tucked you inside your fresh sheets and lay your arms gentle above them, you said the rooms were spaced out like the gaps between your ribs. Twelve on each side. Enough room for a family. The one that never visited? Where were they? I apologise that I never asked. 

Then there’s the tale where you’d been taught how to ride a motorcycle by a slack-jawed pirate when you were seventeen. He rode a Harley. You wanted something a little less beefed. Not so muscular. Your parents didn’t like the sound of it. 

The blackbirds had been talking to you about shipping forecasts the day you told me about Maria. A woman you met on your year-long trip travelling Oceania. Mid 1960s? You’d caught each other’s eye in a twist of optic gravity at Auckland Airport – departures lounge – and couldn’t fathom a reason to let go. She was golden, a girl, no, a woman, you corrected, that corkscrewed her way through you. Carved you up. Hewed your heart. Made you extract wants you’d kept hidden. 

I rolled down the blinds and gave you your medicine, tilting the spoon to your wrinkled mouth. You said you followed Maria to the shimmering sands of Fraser Island. Medicine swallowed; I dimmed the lights. Put your slippers at your bedside. It would take a staff member to help you in the morning. 

Night I said. Maria was a probably a sylph, you replied. Maria said she knew the way of the water. The sharks wouldn’t touch her. The riptides wouldn’t drag. You could go beneath the salt. You could kiss down there and no one would see how you dared and danced. She disappeared not long after the first press of lips. Swam with your soul to a different shore. See, you smiled, eyes dilated, a sylph.   

I nodded. Said it sounded beautiful. That wasn’t a lie. But I claimed I had other patients to attend to, and that was a lie. You were my last of the night, but I was tired and smelt of anti-septic and my three-year-old son told me stories about flying dogs and beastly yo-yos and I didn’t always have room to analyse yours. 

Later, after you passed, I searched Fraser Island. Read of stolen babies in the mouths of dingoes and men stung fierce by jellyfish as they fished the coast. Boys bitten by tiger sharks. Jeeps rolling over. A girl near drowning in a freshwater lake. Tucked at the bottom of an article – a mere footnote – was Maria. An accident, it said. The woman didn’t know she wasn’t allowed to swim in the sea that surrounded the island. Too many dangers. Another woman – her travel companion – had tried to save her. She’d flailed in the water. Had blood dripping from her hair. There was nothing nobody could do.  

I’m sorry, Geraldine. I didn’t realise what they meant. The slivers of truth. The way it must have been easier to admit to such terrible things if you strung them up in a different light.  

My son is ten now and he says that sometimes the coffins near our home jostle from the earth. Sometimes they slide down into the belly of the sea. The perk, or the pitfall, of putting a cemetery on the edge of a chalk cliff. He says it only happens when the sky is pouring, and the soil gets saturated to a sponge. Well, it’s been falling a monsoon since Monday. Bouncing fierce. I hope it wakes your coffin, Geraldine. I hope it drives you down, deep, so you can sew yourself to a current and weave your way through the tumultuous waters. That’s the best way to find a missing sylph, so I’ve heard. 

Mister and Missus Sat Breakfasting

Zebulon Huset is a teacher, writer and photographer living in San Diego. His writing has recently appeared in Meridian, The Southern Review, Fence, Rosebud, Atlanta Review & Texas Review among others. He publishes the writing prompt blog Notebooking Daily and edits the journal Coastal Shelf.

at their checkered tablecloth the morning the tomato rose over the neighbor's side-veranda—first a huge green sprig—and Mister asked if a gigantic cherry had moved in next door. But before Missus could swallow her swig of orange juice, its bulbous red edged out the sycamore. 

Why, it's a tomato, Mister laughed and flipped his paper to continue filibustering his story. 

A tomato, how about that? Missus peeped. 

The tomato ballooned above the neighbor's weathervane and began taking the sky. 

It's awfully... daunting, Missus said, smiling at her word choice, sipping at orange. 

Mister looked up from his paper to see the tomato towering two hundred feet tall, forcing all neighboring houses from their foundations, bursting gas and sewer mains. Streets destroyed.

It's those geneticists. Mister said. Doomsday and all that—I shan't be surprised. I wonder if we will be drowned in produce. 

Oh I hope so. Missus set her glass still half-orange in the sink, grabbing a clean one, I simply adore tomato juice.

The Witch in the Weeds

Omar Hussain is a writer from the San Francisco Bay Area, transplanted to Ann Arbor, Michigan. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Jellyfish Review, X-R-A-Y Magazine, The Cabinet of Heed, Ellipsis Zine, Spelk, Lunate, and Dream Noir, among others. Omar's beta-test novel, The Outlandish and the Ego, debuted in late 2017. It received some praise, remarkably.

The Witch limps around her front yard, the bent tip of her black hat hissing against the wind. My three friends and I belly crawl over crusty leaves and twigs to get a better look at her. It has been two weeks of us venturing into the woods, tracking the sugary smells wafting out of her chimney. Watching each day as she does laps around her house, examining the same items over and over—a garbage can, a lawn chair, a concrete water fountain—sighing with grief each time she finds nothing.

“We could kill her, you know,” Tyler says. “We should come back tomorrow and dump a bucket of water on her—watch her fizzle like salt on a snail.” Roberto and Micah nod their heads in agreement. “We can’t all go at once, though,” Tyler cautions. “She’ll hear us coming.”

“I’ll go,” I say, digging my thumb into my chest.

We spend the rest of the day watching the Witch in her comatose walk, the methodical search still in process, her face drooping into a paralyzed grimace. The sun begins to set, becoming a faint glint over the barren trees in the woods. I hold my stare on the Witch until Tyler pulls on my shoulder, urging me to head home. I wonder if the Witch even feels pain. 

*

The next morning the sky is speckled with clouds the color of milk. My sweat, drawn from the summer humidity, sticks to my body as I carry a bucket of water. Tyler, Micah and Roberto follow behind me—all of us braver than ever. We stop when we hear the Witch, no more than fifty yards ahead, call out like a mama deer to her doe. She holds her hands cupped around her mouth. Calls again. Nothing returns her cry, so she circles the house more. 

“Okay, here’s the plan,” I tell my friends. “If anything feels out of sorts—if she attacks or it seems like I need help for any reason—you come for me. Otherwise, it’s best if you wait here.” They nod and get on their bellies. Micah takes out a pair of binoculars and trains them on our target. 

I move toward her house, the bucket of water sloshing from side to side. The Witch picks up the same overturned garbage can as the day before, looks underneath it, sets it back down and groans. I close the distance to a few yards, raising the bucket like a spear. 

The Witch turns around, her face breaking out of the tranquilized stare, her eyes lock onto me. I stumble back, trip over a rock. The bucket of water—my only weapon—splashing across the grass. I hear my friends scream in the distance. They sprint in the other direction. The Witch moves toward me, her hands held like a T-Rex, scrunched at her armpits. She leans over me, her breath bitter with a foreign foul. Crows caw and take flight. She holds out her hand. Smiling, she whispers, “Now I’ve found you.”

*

The inside of her home ticks and tocks from several clocks, some the size of car tires and some as small as coffee mugs. There are TV’s stacked on top of TV’s, a waist-high bookcase pushed up against a refrigerator with a taller bookcase on the other side. The pastel yellow wallpaper, oxidized by the stale aroma of the Witch and her loneliness, offers the only color to pop within the living room. 

The Witch, in the kitchen, opens the oven door. Checks on the cake she’s making. “This was your favorite recipe,” she tells me. I try to tell her that we don’t know each other, but she ignores me. 

Her sofa coughs up a plume of dust as I plop down on it. I wave the dirty particles away from my eyes as I look out the window. One porch light illuminates the front yard—a perfect golden beam striking out into the night. But nothing seems familiar. The trees now arch their trunks, twisting and wrapping around each other like snakes in a pit. The grass now stands several feet tall. There are no signs of the garbage can or lawn chair. In the distance, I see my friends as they wave flashlights through the woods. I pound on the window, palms bludgeoning unbreakable glass. I scream for them. Tyler stops and points his flashlight right in my direction. For a moment, I’m sure we’re staring into each other’s eyes. He then turns back around, Micah and Roberto following, their flashlights aimlessly searching in the other direction. The Witch laughs from the kitchen.  

I turn back around, wiping back silent rage tears. On the coffee table is a black vinyl photo album. I open it and flip through several pictures, stopping on a black and white one. In it, the Witch stands proud on her front lawn, grinning wide from one large ear to the other, with her arm around a young boy. He looks like me. 

*

Heart-shaped bugs land and buzz on the outside of the kitchen window. The Witch sets the plate down in front of me. Slides a fork my way. 

“You hid so well, my little boy,” she says. “I’ve been looking so long.” 

Again, I tell her it wasn’t me, and still, she ignores me. My eyeballs drown in a rising tub of tears. My nose stuffs with snot. “Please, can I go home?”

“Eat, my boy. You’ll feel better—I promise.”

The cake, fluffy vanilla and buttercream, cultivates saliva and seduces me with craving. I hold the fork in my hand, using it to break off a perfect bite of cake. Ignoring various fables, I bring the fork to my mouth. 

“Will you hide from me again, my son?”

I swallow the bite down. My mouth waters for more. I take another bite of cake. And another. I look the Witch in her black eyes.

“No ma’am. Never again.”

We Landed Sunny-Side Down (and Our Yolks Did Not Break)

Colin Lubner writes (in English) and teaches (math) in southern New Jersey. His work has either appeared or will appear, temporally speaking. Recent pieces can be found through his Twitter: @no1canimagine0. He is keeping on keeping on.

While Nate killed himself ad infinitum in the third-floor study, I cooked eggs. Sunny-side-up; scrambled; poached; boiled, both soft- and hard-. The house was haunted; this we knew, or, at least, hoped. But for now the quotidian endured and grease snapped and the cutting board answered the arcs of my paring. Sliced bell peppers, grease-leaking bacon. The unmistakable schink of finished toast. The toaster hot steel, steam rising from pans still caked with the charred evidence of shit we’d eaten in college. 

The camera above the spice cabinet tracked my efforts.

This was what audiences wanted, we’d found. Not the horror upstairs, the meters trained to register and measure various pseudo-scientific initialisms (EMF, EVP), nonsense spelled across a Ouija board’s mass-produced length. In the third-floor study: finger-twitch, chair-kick. Null. No: what they wanted was the activity below. Before Nate, before the house—there had been this. Heat, a true-crime podcast played through an iPhone’s speakers. Tinny, tiny. Perfect. An excess of salt. Me, alone in a kitchen, aping mom. 

I danced for our viewers, my socked feet frictionless against the floor’s peeling linoleum.

The eggs were done. I removed the pan from the heat. Four eggs, yolks like some sci-fi B-movie alien’s CGI eyes. Denaturing macromolecules in the interstices. There was no smoke, but the detector in the foyer (I realized, dimly) was going off, and it was impossible to describe the sound, the animal shock I felt at hearing the alarm for the first time. Shattering, otherworldly fury. The sound of a thing about to give away. The din I’d heard upon learning for the first time what Nate had done. The dial tone of a dropped phone. The pan was falling, had fallen, an awful clatter; the eggs—the very idea of eggs—sliding away, the yolks jostling beneath their egg-white cauls like things with a chance at life. 

And upstairs, in the bedrooms, unrecorded: fists against headboards. The dragging footsteps of those angered to have been awoken, awake.

Barefoot Astronaut

Jess Moody is a Wulfrunian in London, UK. She likes her words and worlds a little weird. Short fiction in Lunate, Ellipsis, Storgy, Reflex, Retreat West, and Cabinet of Heed. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, & listed in the 2020 BIFFY50. www.jmoodywriter.com. Tweets @jessmoodhe

No one counts to one hundred. We find the boots two clicks from base. Then, just over the ridge, the end of him. Frozen soles buried into the dust. He sits crouched, elbows leaning awkwardly on his knees, in that bulky way the suits just allow. 

Kowalski takes it in grim silence. The Commander curses as she recalculates our odds. Only Takada thinks that gasping tears might warrant the extra O2. He's been moaning for hours anyway. How he'd missed the signs: the hands tracing patterns on the table, the 'jokes' about the sound of surf in the roar of stale air. 

I laugh across his grief, not quite hysterically. 

"Keep going with those tears Tak," I say. "And we'll be able to give him his beach." 

Did those toes get a chance to wriggle in the red? Maybe. Some last asphyxiating twitch of childish glee. 

The Commander kneels down next to this, our collective failure in humanity. She flicks a switch on his helmet to lower the sun visor. The expression of joy, replaced with the reflections of ourselves in judgement: we burnished mallow-men.  

She stays kneeling down, but I hear her voice right in my ear. 

"The last thing this rock needs right now - " she warns me, "- is another goddamned poet."

Eric’s Brother

Vincent Poturica lives with his partner and kids in rural Northern California, where he teaches at Mendocino College. His writing appears in New England Review, DIAGRAM, Western Humanities Review, and other places.

Eric lived in a sunny attic apartment with his girlfriend, who is still alive, and his brother, who was already dead.

While living, Eric’s brother liked to skateboard, garden, and shoot crystal meth. He’d once tried to tattoo Demiurge—the Gnostic god responsible for keeping us separate from the spirits—onto Eric’s right hand while he slept. He told Eric he was trying to relieve him of the darkness he’d been unable to escape. Not long afterward, Eric received a call from the County Coroner to I.D. him. Though he’d been dead for over a week, his brother looked painfully innocent on the cold, metal table, with his bluish skin hanging loosely, as though he were a child wearing a hand-me-down body—he was twenty-three.

Years later, Eric began to hear his brother mumbling, as he did when he was still alive. Usually Eric heard these murmurs in the morning while showering or making coffee. He initially assumed they were coming from the water rushing over his head or from the swirling echoes of the noisemaker that his girlfriend used to combat her insomnia. A week or so went by, and he discerned a few words—silence, Eric, grapefruit—that he copied neatly into a notebook. He dated and transcribed these lists for over a month before he showed them to his girlfriend. Even though he knew the words were coming from his brother, he asked her what she thought.

It’s definitely trippy, she said.

But what do you think it means? Eric said. Am I crazy?

Maybe, she said. Then she laughed nervously, took his hand, and said, This is making me horny. 

They made love the way she liked: with his hands around her neck.

Eric didn’t hear anything the next day, or the day after that.

But, on the following morning before he left for work, he saw something strange before he kissed his girlfriend goodbye. She was sleeping, wrapped up in a blue quilt her grandmother had stitched. After he kissed her cheek, the quilt’s edge near her feet rose into the air, pointing like a finger toward the French doors and the smoggy horizon beyond them that hid the mountains Eric’s brother had once climbed. Eric had been with him. They’d been in their late teens, backpacking, swimming in rivers, making small fires each night to cook their simple meals. For those few weeks, his brother had seemed almost peaceful. He’d talked about the future as if it wasn’t a curse. The quilt fell.

Eric continues to listen in case his brother wants to talk. The sky seems larger than it did before. The red leaves shake loose from the maples. In the backseat, Eric’s young daughter plays with her toes. His girlfriend is now his wife. The leather smell of her new car makes him happy. Today is Tuesday. Tomorrow is Wednesday. Even those who sometimes hear them don’t know how the dead pass their time.

Today’s Accident

Originally from the American midwest, Suchi Rudra is a nomadic writer of fiction, articles and songs. Her novella Kitaab, published by Six Gallery Press, is based on a year spent in India. Her journalistic pieces can be found in The New York Times, BBC Travel, October and other publications. She is currently seeking representation for a literary fiction novel.

There he is again. Out for his walk. Today is everywhere, on all our streets, in every window, at the top of every building looking only halfway down. Everyone knows Today, he always wears his furniture buttoned up, creased and polished, opens his mouth in predictable creaks, light and food inside, darkness when it closes. He takes what he wants, stabbing with fork fingers, collecting with spoon palms. He breathes in and out without a thought.
But if you have been watching, you know Today's hair smells less fresh, he's forgotten to vacuum. He’s drawn the curtains across his eyes, seems to be sleeping, maybe tired, maybe bored, while his brain glows out of its blue glass case, muted. His desires are framed upon his walls, gathering dust. His resolutions and obsessions are magnets slipping and sliding.
Today crosses a road he has crossed many times, but Today collapses before he reaches the other side. A truck quivers loudly to a stop before Today's flailing, drooping parts. Passersby pause and turn toward the disheveled body. Some come close. Some keep going. It looks like Today, they shrug. There must have been a tornado, a violent upheaval of a storm, picking up and dropping this hopeless house into many pieces. Everyone starts to laugh at the broken house, the bathtub stands embarrassed in the midst of perfectly designed destruction, showing its cracks, filling with fresh dust. The truck driver is relieved it wasn't his fault, he laughs with the others. 

Night Music

Melissa Saggerer has been a bellhop, a museum curator, and a library director. Her flash fiction is featured in Leopardskin & Limes and Milk Candy Review. Follow her on twitter @MelissaSaggerer.

Forty-five minutes to midnight, Linda listened to the rhythmic pulling of something through the walls, a repetitive whoosh, scrape, stumble. Probably a mouse. Or a flying squirrel. Maybe they’re collecting acorns again​, turning this old balloon frame into a pinball machine of nighttime clatter. Her stomach turned, remembering the squeals of previous tenants caught in a glue trap. Beady eyes and the frantic scurrying with a foot lodged in a snap trap. ​Do we have to start this again? I thought this was over.

In the morning, eyes rimmed with blue and purple, spheres of bloodshot white. Her head hung lower than ripe fruit. Linda looked out the kitchen window, first to the tall grass, then to the garden. No groundhog. The greatest nuisance, she had thought, then. She missed the familiar nibbling now. The sleek fur, the chubby waddle. She’d let him eat everything, everything. Or would she? This year she wanted to make mixing bowls full of fresh salsa, to harvest pea pod buntings on trailing vines. She was looking for quiet, and order. Tomato juice dribbling down her chin. Bounty, and not pests.

Linda dipped horsehair into pots of iridescent indigo, painted herself into snakeskin. Shimmering scales glittered in the daylight, as she slunk along cool stone, surveying the edges of the crumbling foundation. She found a dime sized hole and pushed her head through, slithered along, finding slumbering mice, eating them, one by one, as hungrily as pac man pebbles, munch, munch, munch. If she caught them all now, she wouldn’t have to worry about lunch. Maybe, maybe she’d leave one. Because she might miss the night music.

In the Mockingbird’s Own Voice

Michael Grant Smith wears sleeveless T-shirts, weather permitting. His writing has appeared in elimae, The Airgonaut, The Cabinet of Heed, Ellipsis Zine, Spelk, Bending Genres, MoonPark Review, Okay Donkey, trampset, and elsewhere. Michael resides in Ohio. He has traveled to Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Cincinnati. To learn too much about Michael, please visit www.michaelgrantsmith.com and @MGSatMGScom.

Jimmy Tightpants lived by his own rules, no fewer than two hundred and nine of them.

Number Forty-three:

"If you make noise and waste plenty of motion while doing nothing, it gives the appearance you're doing something."

Jimmy's cowboy boots were constructed of cardboard coated with rendered crayons and baby oil, the lines on his flannel shirt hand-drawn with a felt-tip pen. Pressed gold foil harvested from inedible chocolate coins gleamed on his belt buckle. He'd fashioned a hat from empty cereal boxes and memories of television programs.

He was a natural leader, in much the same way a wounded moose is followed by coyotes. His truck's windshield refracted the night's brilliant moonbeams, which melted a pack of breath mints, a plastic compass, a tire air-pressure gauge, plus seven pennies in a cup holder. Funny, thought Jimmy, to watch copper turn soft and drip like years.

"Girlfriend, look at how the metal is so willing to alter the boundaries of its own existence."

"Don't call me that. I have a name."

"The label you give yourself has nothing to do with my perception of you."

"Jimmy, I will use the palm of my hand to break your nose."

Rule Number Seventeen:

"Unconditional love is worth paying for."

Jimmy turned the pages of old black & white magazines he found at thrift stores and flea markets. He gaped at movies from the Golden Age of Cinema. His eyes stung with tears he shed for the beasts, especially cats and dogs -- those once-cherished pets now dust -- along with anyone who'd adored them. He contemplated the layers of decomposition and constancy; the spent devotion. Why had no one figured out how to exploit this energy? He caught a whiff of a hint of the scent of an opportunity.

Rule Number One Hundred Eighty-nine:

"Take chances and don't be afraid to gamble on your own happiness."

Jimmy loved to feed a pocketful of dimes into vending machines and push the change return button. He scooped out quarters and shoved them back in until his thumb and forefinger bled.

"I'm a winner every time," he'd say. "Some machines even give you paper dollars!"

Jimmy Tightpants built monuments to himself because no rule addressed his dread of uncertain endings, nor could he risk being forgotten. Obscurity's abyss overflowed until it puddled underfoot. The cuts on Jimmy's skin were grinning mouths. Always in his ears, the whine of high-tension wire whipped by wind. He wrote treatises in languages he understood but couldn't speak, and planted trees -- here, to shelter the birds; there, to raise cool shadows. His spade disappeared into soil as if steel thirsted for the groundwater beneath. 

Fondling Fruit

Tara Van De Mark is a recovering attorney now writer based in Washington, DC.  She was recently published in the Flash Fiction Magazine and the Closed Eye Open.

I used to carelessly caress fruit. From cardboard boxes at the corner stand on my way home to multilevel mega-markets that require an entire morning to peruse, I would tenderly stroke it all. Without any inhibition or cause for hesitation I would fondle them, likely hundreds of fruit a year. Feeling for the perfect elasticity in a mango, the firmness in an apple, the heaviness of an orange. Smelling for the fruity aroma from the stem of a cantaloupe or pineapple. Blindly squeezing peaches and kiwis, tossing back the hard or the overripe. Knocking on watermelons and coconuts hoping to hear a hollow reply. Tasting a blueberry or a strawberry, straight from the box, hoping to feel the flavor of early summer on my tongue. Of course, for some fruit a visual examination would suffice, light yellow towards the stem of my bananas to ensure they last a few days, or raspberries with the skin fully intact. My real obsession though was avocados, a nutrient dense fruit, I could pick out a week’s worth of varying greens that would ensure a new one was perfectly ripe each day.

Now though, I long to be able to touch them and search for the perfect ripe sweetness. Instead I am living a sterilized life full of sanitizer and no touching. I look on my computer screen for fruit now and use a delivery service to bring it to my door. Roaming aisles has been replaced with scrolling and clicking. Further disappointment sets in when I learned that the banana pictured is not to be the banana delivered. I tried to include instructions on how to best select my fruit; “Choose only the plumpest bunch of dark purple Concord grapes. Skin should be thick and grape dense and full of juice. Taste for verification of a pop upon biting.” It did not work. Now I simply write, “Please make sure grapes aren’t brown or smell like vinegar.” I still got a cantaloupe that took a month to ripen, mangos so hard I used them as door stops, and squishy apples that I leave in the park at night for the squirrels, or the rats. Even the fruit that I might have selected myself, just tastes used. It has been touched by too many hands.

Some Sort of a Code

Tara Isabel Zambrano works as a semiconductor chip designer. Her work has been published in Tin House Online, The Southampton Review, Slice, Triquarterly, Yemassee, Passages North and others. Her full-length flash collection, Death, Desire And Other Destinations, is upcoming in Sept'2020 with OKAY Donkey Mag/Press. She lives in Texas.

The Beginning

Frieda tells me this is our fifth life together, she has been my kid in two, a mango tree in my backyard, my lover in another. I look at her while she knits and then gazes distantly. She repeats the same words as if she’s a prophet, the space between us a territory where our past lives sit. Then she gets up, casting a long shadow in the afternoon light, her stilettos clacking on the hardwood floors. Outside, it’s spring, some sort of a code to start fresh.

The house becomes completely silent at night. I wonder if I was happy with Frieda in our past lives. I wonder if she’s happy with me.

In my hallucinating sleep, she smiles and paints my name across the floor. It’s a new, unexpected language.

Umbilical

Oneta sits across me, her nails tapping on the screen of her phone. She looks up and stares at me when I ask what’s she doing, the whites of her eyes barely visible under the stark liner, her mouth all gloss, slick with silence. “I feel bloated with all that food,” I say out loud. No reaction. What if I scatter all her personal belongings across the house? Will she notice?

Late at night, I go past her room, the light is on.

“Oneta,” I say and knock lightly.

What do you need, Mom?

“Nothing,” I say.

Then I text her, “Goodnight.”

“Gross,” she whispers.

I needed to say her name, I needed to hear her respond.

Breach

Adira is petite. Adira likes to go on long drives with me, Adira is my other woman. In my city apartment, after we fuck, she watches the transition of the lights: bright, brightest and then dim, until just before dawn. Somewhere in between, she claims she can hear a laughter or a smooch of a couple from a downtown bar, another home or a hotel room.

“Like us?” I ask, sounding sarcastic.

“The lights convey all the secrets, the melancholy and the hope,” she retorts, her eyes narrowed slits. “Will this ever work?”

I press myself to the corner of the couch knowing it will only worsen from here. In the morning, she raids my closet and finds a shirt, her hair curled below the oversized collars. She denies coffee. As I lean in to kiss her, she says my name as if it’s forbidden. We both stay quiet until I no longer hear her long, furious breath. The windowsill is dusted with the season’s first snow. She never texts me back.

I drive to my suburban home swollen with heater air. When I call my wife, she’s excited I will be staying home for next few weeks.

Span

The tree is unusually tall, greenish-yellow mangos amidst its leaves like a group of shy children. There is no wind, the clouds are tight with rain. The long stick I use, barely touches an almost ripe one. I know the tree would let it go, once it’s ready, but I want it now. My neck hurts. I start carving a heart on its trunk knowing that it will live longer than mine.

At night when the storm melts, I watch the tree, swaying hard. The heart on its trunk is a mouth, calling me. I want to hold it close, want to keep the mangoes from falling, but the violence is forever. In the morning, the tree is hugging the soft breeze, willing to give the exact sweetness it offered before. Before, I pick up the mangoes, I run my fingers on the carved wood, they are wet with tears.

Descendants

Asher comes to pick me up from the airport, his car full of coffee cups, architectural journals. I hug him, he smells like a long night – baby spit and dirty diapers. We drive for a while, the windshield wipers barely working. I want to ask him about his newborn and the origin of her name, about his thesis. Instead I stare at my hands in my lap, holding the infrastructure of our differences between us, not letting it go.

“Is there a Starbucks on the way?” I ask. He looks at me: the color of his eyes pulling me, something deeper than anything I’ve ever seen. Feels as if we’ve skipped forward in time.

He clears his throat. “Sure Ma, if that’s what you want.”

image by nathan dumlao