Summer Requiem, Hudson River, New York

Susie Aybar received an MFA in creative writing from Manhattanville College. She has written articles for Psych Central and Westchester Senior Voice and has been a facilitator of writing groups for people living with cancer and their family members. Her essays and poetry can be found in The London Reader, Literary Mama and Inkwell. Her flash fiction is upcoming in the FlashFlood Journal in June. She lives in North Salem, New York with her husband and three sons.

In New York City, on the East Side, Meg breathes humid summer air, infused with garbage. She’s escaped the suburbs, so she doesn’t mind the stench. She and Jared stay at their favorite hotel, the one with the doorman and a concierge who asks why they are here, what special occasion? Meg tells him that it’s their anniversary, so they’ll get the free glasses of champagne at the bar. She doesn’t mention it’s more like a wake.

Outside they wait for an Uber. They stand in the brass-lined open door. They face forward, out of habit, Jared’s arm tucked around Meg’s shoulder. In front of them, they watch a person fall onto 55th Street.

“Holy crap, Jared, do something!” Meg yells. 

It’s rush hour Friday night traffic and a bus is stopped behind the woman on the ground. A parachute of people rush from the sidewalk, pull the ebony-haired woman from the pavement, right before the bus moves. A man shoves a napkin from his pocket in her bloodied face. A teenage girl calls 911. Jared offers the ebony-haired woman her earring from the road beneath her. The woman limps away, head down, thanking God and the other people.

“She’s lucky there was so much traffic. It just missed her,” Jared says.

“You should’ve done something.”

“I gave her the earring. Those people already picked her up. What did you want me to do?” It’s hard for him to stay calm. He looks ahead and sees the clementine orange sunset between the buildings. He takes a breath.

“You never do anything,” Meg sighs as she looks away, thinking about the other times he didn’t do anything. Like when Carrie broke her arm and he stayed in L.A. on his work trip or when the basement flooded and he let it keep rising until it was up to their shins, before he finally borrowed his brother’s wet-dry vac. 

They reach the Korean restaurant and the garlicky beef grills on the table and the kimchi burns their tongues. Jared grasps Meg’s hand across the table, even though she is being mean, even though he’s already moved out.

After dinner they go downtown and peruse books at the Strand. There are so many choices that Meg doesn’t buy anything. On the street, they get keyrings for the kids with their names on them. 

Their last day, they wander the High Line, searching for a water, which they find all the way at the end. Then they visit the Vessel. At the bottom, they choose a staircase, climbing the concrete steps up and around the interconnected steel honeycomb. 

Meg wonders whether the structure is going to be taken apart after all the horrible deaths that have happened there. 

They stop and look back at the railyards, the old paths for cargo, people. Then they go up again, the next eight stories.

“It’s so ugly over here,” Meg complains. 

“I don’t think so,” Jared says. She could be so negative. He peers down at the expanse of the Hudson River. It’s murky, but he knows there’s a whole habitat down there, fiddler crabs and crayfish, dragonflies and turtles. He watches the white sails of a boat catching the wind, the limitless beryl sky above it.

G1P0

Lindy Biller is a writer based in the Midwest. Her fiction has recently appeared at Ghost Parachute, Fractured Literary, Milk Candy Review, and the Bear Creek Gazette. She can be found on Twitter at @lindymbiller.

I woke with the sun and outstretched my body and found your slopes and valleys, fitting myself against them. Our topography rose and fell as softly as the moon. My heart was full then, no roots to crack it open, no small grasping hands to pry the chambers apart. We let the sun bathe us and we bathed in each other and then we cracked eggs into a pan, made coffee, sat in the breakfast nook which fit both of us easily, and the sound barrier of our table remained unbroken. Fear was like a pinch of salt. Like a pair of sandhill cranes gliding overhead, their bodies straight as arrows. There was a seed in me already but it hadn’t sensed water, hadn’t split open or started to reach. When the house plants died, we bought new ones and tried again. Our table was bright with orange peels and cut flowers. We curled up inside the morning, our lives an eggshell waiting to be broken.

Complementary

Sarah R. Clayville’s work has appeared both online and in print in several dozen journals. An English teacher and fiction editor for Identity Theory, she writes from the wilds of Pennsylvania and prefers stories that fit in the palm of her hand.

The paint mixer at Ace Hardware grips the brush like his job depends on it. He wears a ratty navy apron and coaxes Lu to be bold with her color choices. He sells her a painter’s deck so now she can tell the difference between eggshell and egg cream. Lu likes that with every can of paint he mixes, he divulges an insider secret as if she were an actual handyman. These are the things he tells her. Paint washes off skin easier with a soap vinegar mixture. Cheap paint is like cheap toilet paper. You’ll pay for it in the end. No color looks the same in the can and on the wall. You have to be brave and try a swatch to know if you love it.

Lu lives by trial and error.

Thursday morning, Lu calls off work. Friday’s forecast isn’t promising either. Her boyfriend stopped calling a week ago. He answers phones two cubicles away at the office but lately walks to lunch by the freight elevators, following his feet with his eyes. She wasn’t particularly attached, but the radio silence still stings. Adding insult to injury, Lu’s mother threatens a visit. No day, no time, just the hanging promise of an unwanted knock at the door. Lu needs an escape from unreliable people. So she traces the lines of the dining room in her apartment with narrow blue painter’s tape, lays out supplies on the snowy white tarp, and starts an offensive of English Country Garden because the color reminds her of clinging moss.

Lu paints her apartment to sort shit out.

She wears nice clothes to paint in because you never know how long you’ve got on this earth and there’s nothing sadder than an outfit hanging in the closet weighed down by a tag. Today it’s a strapless summer dress the color of a sunrise. With each stroke her demons come out to play on the 1920’s walls once wallpapered, then stripped, then puttied. In the house Lu grew up in, walls remain beige and mouths remain closed. Here, she sings at the top of her lungs or curses people. Either way her neighbors don’t mind. The apartment belongs to her, inherited from a Great Aunt who also fled the silence woven into their family. Here, Lu leaves scars to lovingly patch later. These walls are forgiving. At home, they are not. That’s why from time-to-time Lu scratches behind a piece of furniture with her chewed-up nails, peeling back color after color to see how far she’s come.

Lu hides from her family’s judgment.

When she inherited the apartment, the family demanded Lu sell. Downtown in the city with a view, it’s worth a million. Maybe more. The profits would release pressure on everyone, like turning a valve. Lu could pay mortgages, college tuitions, Bill’s gambling debt. Her mother tells her she can take the leftover windfall and sail to Bora Bora. Buy a Kate Spade bag. Start watercolor classes at the community center. Her mother means well but none of those things will make Lu happy. It’s been a year since her Great Aunt died, and they still hound Lu to return home. Sell the apartment. Stop being selfish. Pretend Great Aunt never existed in the first place because she was a broken soul. Let someone else paint the walls.

Lu prefers rooms to people.

Her boss leaves an inauspicious voicemail Friday afternoon. If she doesn’t return to work on Monday, the job evaporates like smoke. She tries to sell insurance to reckless people who prefer to take their chances and often tell her to fuck off. Lu interprets the message as an omen to paint another wall. Styrofoam blue, prettier than it sounds. Lu wonders if the rooms shrink with each new layer of color. She measures using a yellow tape measure and records the length and width. She drinks too many Coronas, measuring again. Her friends ring her Saturday night. She switches her phone to silent. They wouldn’t understand why she’s got to break out tomato soup red, a special occasion paint, and attack the foyer. She can’t stop painting. Despite winter’s chill the windows gape open so the smell won’t overwhelm. It’s not the ex-boyfriend or the lost job or the critical mother. It’s been a year, and her Great Aunt is still very dead. Lu fights daily the nasty pull back to those beige walls in Arizona.

Lu imagines a colorless life.

By Sunday evening, the apartment is entirely a different animal. New colors on almost every wall. Lu takes a scalding shower. After, her robe droops to her hips, catching each graceful curve. She passes a realtor’s card tacked to the fridge, more a cautionary tale than anything else. The day she stops painting, the day she stops trying to heal and calls that realtor is the day her heart will quit. And when the EMTs crack it open, there won’t be blood. Just black and white dust the way a volcano leaves an ashen goodbye after it’s exploded. Lu admires her apartment. She admires her Great Aunt for escaping terrible people, leaving a life raft for her niece even if it didn’t save the woman who tried. These walls are magic. They repel sadness. Lu stands by an open window letting the robe drop to her feet. The colors scream at her to step away. Come away from the edge. Lu refuses to repeat the history that stains her family. If only her Great Aunt had gotten around to painting a wall. 

Lu grips the brush as if her life depends on it.

Tricks to uproot a guest who has outstayed their welcome 

Judy Darley can't stop writing about the infinite possibilities of the human mind. She is the author of fiction collections Sky Light Rain (Valley Press) and Remember Me to the Bees (Tangent Books). The Stairs are a Snowcapped Mountain, is out now from Reflex Press. Find Judy at http://www.skylightrain.com; https://twitter.com/JudyDarley.

Wrap a herring gull wing in crumpled newspaper and plant it by the light of a Thursday moon. Dig deep enough to disturb the skeleton of an ex-inhabitant’s ex-hamster. Cover well with suspect mulch from the compost bin. For luck, add a teaspoon of overcooked Puy lentils the hue of a stormy winter sea.

Wait five days. Resist the urge to check in this time.

Avoid your guest’s attempts to broach topics any deeper than the unseasonal weather.

When the Tuesday sun dawns, hurry outside. Admire your new sapling’s reaching arms. Admire the lines of newsprint spiralling its trunk. Listen to the stories that rustle in the breeze, but remember not to believe all the tittle-tattle you hear.

Notice a disconcerting flapping sound arising from amidst the sickle-shaped leaves.

Track the commotion to a small round fruit the size of a walnut, but soft-skinned. Pick one by twisting it gently until the stalk lets go of its branch. Feel the vibrations within.

Place it on the closest piece of lightly rusted garden furniture (abandoned by aforementioned ex-inhabitant). Invite your guest to take a bite. Watch distrust and good manners battle.

See their jaw unclench at the unexpected deliciousness of the fruit. Observe them stretch up and up, until their fingertips touch the Tuesday sky. Listen politely as they report last month’s news (from around the same time your ex-inhabitant, aka ex-lover, departed). 

Thank them for caring enough to come and visit, but reassure them that you’re now fine to be alone and that the incident with the pills really was a drunken error.

Observe that their feet have already left your garden’s patchy lawn. Applaud as they swoop upwards into the faultless blue of the Tuesday sky. Wave them on their way. Breathe in the quiet of your freshly emptied home.

Begin to heal.

Your Neighborhood Deli 

Kate Faigen works as a copywriter in Los Angeles. You can find her on Twitter: @k8faigen.

Safta means “grandmother” in Hebrew

Hold Safta’s papery hand as you walk inside. Crawl into a sticky booth, your favorite one. Say hi to Margie, the curly-haired waitress who looks kind of like Safta and is warm and funny like her too. Smell the deli meat and coffee. Start coloring on the placemat they put in front of you, draw planets and swirls and a garden full of disco ball trees. Tell Margie you want the usual, grilled cheese on rye, side of fries please. Catch Safta smiling as you do. Grab half of the sandwich and swipe the juicy pickle spear between the bread, gathering as much yellow cheese as possible. Listen to Safta tell you that you’re special, that you’re good at more important things than soccer. Listen to Safta tell you that she’s proud of you, that while the other kids shoved each other after the game, you waited your turn for a popsicle. Listen to Safta tell you that you can be anything when you grow up—you like to eat cupcakes, open a bake shop; you like toy lizards, give tours at the zoo. After dinner, run ahead of Safta to the register where the candy is. Pick out two Airheads, grape for her, cherry for you. Her favorite and yours.

Twenty years later, sulk your way inside on a Saturday afternoon. Roll your eyes as you tell the hostess that you’re a party of one. Hope for some pity. Hope she won’t pity you. Pull out your chair and look at your neighborhood deli from a new vantage point—the corner by the dead fish. Spot your old booth. Pretend you don’t realize there’s no sign of Margie. Order a cup of matzah ball soup and burn your tongue because you’re impatient. Dunk your bagel chips into the broth, decide that they’re stale. Make that another thing to be bitter about. Replay the moment your boss screamed at you on Monday—the vitriol, the spittle—until it embeds itself into your bad-memory reel. Curse yourself for becoming a CPA after a lifetime of hating numbers. Justify your choice as you think about exorbitant rent prices. Close your eyes and imagine Safta across the table. Get up and walk to the register, swipe your credit card, and leave without peeking at the Snickers and Twizzlers and Airheads.

Rest your callused feet on the couch and scroll through Grubhub. There it is—your neighborhood deli. They deliver now. Order latkes with extra sour cream and a hot pastrami, corned beef hash for your husband. Get up slowly to retrieve the food; it’s difficult now at eight months pregnant. Open the bag to find a jumbo sprinkle cookie at the bottom, a little gift. Brush your husband off when he squeezes the bridge of his nose, sighs deeply, tells you that the last thing you need is more cookies. Brush your husband off again when he reaches for your food. “Can I have some,” he says, not asks. Watch him walk up the stairs when he’s finished, leaving his plate on the table. Hear the FIFA music in your head although he hasn’t turned it on yet. Take the dishes to the sink, sit in front of the TV, search for The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Think of Safta. Tell your husband the next day that you’re done brushing him off. Tell him that you two are done. 

Fifty years later, the morning after Yom Kippur, hold onto the rail as you walk inside. You’re a Safta now, but today you’re eating alone. Smile as you tell the sweet hostess that you’re a party of one. Sit down and realize that you’re in your favorite booth. Tell yourself that a party of one is still a party. Tell yourself that Safta would’ve loved that. Open the menu—it’s almost the same as it was. Order a sesame bagel with lox and a black coffee. Look at all the people enjoying their neighborhood deli; new families, old friends. Lucky grandchildren with their grandparents. Do they know what you know now? Eat half of your meal and ask for a to-go container. Feel the styrofoam in your papery hands, listen to its creaking. Think about what you have to be sorry for, think about what you have to be happy about. Walk carefully to the register. Run your finger over the rows of Airheads like a rolodex filled with loved ones. Remember Safta.

Hockeytown or the End of the Line

Jason Graff’s debut novel Stray Our Pieces, published by Waldorf Publishing in the fall of 2019, concerns a woman extricating herself from motherhood. heckler, about lives colliding at a struggling hotel, was published by Unsolicited Press in January of 2020. He lives in Plano, TX, with his wife and their son.

Someone had left the TV on in the far room. It was a hockey game from the nineties, bubbling with the names of Russian Red Wings long since retired. The door stuck. You pushed open into darkness where a friend shook through the blue-black oblivion. Blurry at first like looking up from underwater. Dave’s old room came into being around him as his smile and body solidified; a TV perched on a stool with a rickety leg, the dresser with its half-pushed in drawers, socks like wagging tongues peeking over the edges. Pinched between his fingers, his cigarette trailed an anaconda of ash. The ashtray on his thigh was to be shared. When you went to use it, he pretended you’d burned him. Where had you gotten the cigarette? Hadn’t you stopped smoking? He offered a warm beer, just holding the can out. His eyes were fixed on the game.

You asked him what the afterlife was like. He smiled and shook his head. It wasn’t something he could explain nor you understand. Dave wasn’t someone you really got to know. He didn’t care for people even trying. Mysteries pleased him. Believing himself to be the only one to know or think certain things was how he made his bond with the world; his excuse for existing.

4-2, he said, which meant Detroit was winning. When had he died? When had you both died? Is this heaven, you asked. No, he said with a chopping laugh that sliced the smoke coming from his mouth into discreet little angels of hazy light. I don’t know what this is, you cried. With his foot, Dave hooked the bedside chair and brought it around next to him. You’re getting ash on the floor, he said.

So, this hell or whatever the middle place is called, you asked. He didn’t reply. There was a scrum for the puck in the corner. Dave hollered for a penalty. You wanted to touch him, pinch yourself, do something to find out how real it all was. They stink now, you said, meaning the Red Wings, you know that, right? Now, he snorted, mashing his cigarette out and handing you the ashtray, how long can that last?  

These Loving Spaces

Emily has spent the past two years studying for a Creative Writing MA and now she's not sure she has any creativity left​. She has had work published with X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Ellipsis Zine, Barren Magazine, STORGY Magazine, The Molotov Cocktail, Litro, Tiny Molecules and Gone Lawn to name a few. She is a onetime Best Small Fictions nominee, which is pretty cool.

Through a whisper, he tells her that he’s found it. His hands are tucked into his jean pockets. His spine is slouched. 

‘Found what?’ She should’ve worn shoes, she thinks. The grass is soaking into her socks.  

A few paces away, their son is burying his hamster in the soil. Frank II. There is no Frank I. For all her empathy – she likes to think she keeps it in glass jars and opens the lids on days where those around her might need it – the death of the hamster has been no more upsetting than standing on an upturned plug. Searing at first, then fading into the background. An irritation, mainly. The only connection they had was that she could often hear the thing running in its wheel on a night, stirring the quiet of the house, keeping her mind awake. 

‘You know what,’ he says.   

‘I don’t,’ she replies. 

‘The old letter. The one from your lover.’

The way he speaks sounds comical. Almost. Yet there’s a thin thread of threat that she knows would spill over if their son weren’t now saying a prayer to whatever God it might concern. No one in this garden is religious.  

She plays outwardly for ignorance. ‘The old letter?’ Inwardly her stomach has slipped to the floor. She wants to ask what he was doing, rifling through her stuff. The satchel she hasn’t used since she was in her early twenties. The satchel she buried in the basement amongst a stack of shoeboxes and hard back books, tucked into the very recesses behind other less interesting items. He rarely goes down there. Finds it too dark in the unlit corners. 

‘Want to tell me about it?’

‘No.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s passed.’  

It hasn’t. Not really. Not at the very heart of it. But she’s sure he wouldn’t understand, not what it means to have a lover. To share something so raw that you put it in writing and then bury it where the light can’t find it.  

‘I don’t get it,’ he says.

She feels momentarily vindicated, except now their son has started crying. She steps forward and leans down a moment, brushes his soft curls and says it’s okay to be upset. She wants to say the same to her husband, but her mouth won’t let her. Why has he brought it up now? 

When she returns, he asks, ‘Passed when?’  

There is no time frame. It exists outside the confines of any clock or calendar year. 

‘Had it passed when we got together?’ he follows up. His tone shifts mid-question. Stretches to its end. Perhaps he senses the gravity of what he’s discovered. That he should’ve waited for a different moment. He likes to act in the heat of things.   

On her first date with her husband, she’d only thought of her lover. How her lover couldn’t put their hand on the small of her back as he had. How her lover would’ve caused trouble if they leant across the table to swipe a finger across her cheek. He had no reservations when it came to touching her. Her lover said it felt like being on fire.   

Their son rises from his mourning then, all tear-stained and wet-lipped. The boy shuffles to them and pauses. 

‘You okay, son?’ he asks. He holds out a hand, but she can sense his tension. 

‘I’m gonna be sad about it forever,’ their son replies, not taking the hand. Instead, he steps to her, and pushes himself against the softness of her body. 

She wraps her arms around her boy. 

‘That’s not true,’ he says.

She tells him he’s wrong.  

‘You can’t be sad about things forever,’ he adds. 

Her voice is quiet. ‘You can be.’  

Relikviya

K.A. Honeywell lives in the Pacific Northwest and wrote a book called Damn Wilds. She can be found online at kahoneywell.com.

Three weeks into the season of the siren, somehow, despite our precautions, we lost Anton. At first we thought he’d escaped to the city. We all wanted somewhere else to be, and the city was one of the finest places we could imagine. There were cozy bars with fireplaces, shops that stocked bright bouquets, and laughter coming from tall apartments that flooded the alleyways. Sometimes when Anton came back, we’d ask him about the movies he’d seen—the fantastic stories with fast cars and dancing and people with everything at their fingertips. The movies were part of a world that was moving forward, shining bright with promise. A world that we knew was beside us, all around us, but not for us. We were anchored here in gray-blue Relikviya with our wind that screams across the sea like angry serpents and strips paint from our houses and warmth from our souls. Bit by bit, we had become relics, and so our seaside town’s name had changed to match. We were what the old world clung to, refusing to be forgotten. And we could not forget while in its clutches. The sirens, as ancient as anything, come to us once a year, and most people have left Relikviya because of them, one way or another.

It always happens later in the season of the siren, when we are tired and sometimes mourning, that we complain to each other and we admit that we want to be away from this place. And then there’s the one person who wishes for a longer night, for the tide to reach our houses, and we’d know that they’ve been caught up in the siren song. Despite their earplugs, a sliver of song has gotten through and nags under the skin. When this person tells us that the sea at night is like a womb, and that they long for its warmth when we’re in the dead of winter, we lock them in a room without a window or chimney.

Anton had never said any such things. It happens. Sometimes the longing takes hold all at once. Sometimes someone is alone at night and they decide to listen. The sirens make promises: A moment that would be a million times happier than cold, colorless Relikviya.

When we’re not certain where someone is, we look idly for them at first, as we did for Anton. We all wanted to believe he was somewhere warm and dry in the city. While on the beach in the safety of daylight, we would nudge a lump in the soft sand to find driftwood. We would stand a little longer to observe a shape in the water and watch what became seaweed pushed inland. Even without a body, it had been too long and we had all but decided that Anton was dead.

“Do you think it’s peaceful?” Marie asked. Her eyes were red and pleading with us.

Some of us sighed thoughtfully, and some of us nodded.

“I think I hear them,” Alice said, leaning against a window. “Am I hearing them?”

But it was too early. It was only noon, and the sirens’ golden voices would rise from the water at sunset. Just in case, we took her away from the window, stuffed wax in her ears as she stared at us wide-eyed. Her sister brought her home, saying, “You’ll be alright,” even though she could no longer hear.

We found out that several of us had been dreaming of Anton. Before they could be stopped, the descriptions pooled like choked up salt water at our feet.

“He said he was in heaven, over and over.”

“His face was blue, his eyes were black.”

“His tongue was an eel between her bits.”

Marie left in tears. If she’d had any dreams, she wouldn’t tell us. We worried that the dreams were dangerous. We vowed to wake ourselves from them, but silently doubted it was possible.

When we found Anton on the beach, his face wasn’t blue nor were his eyes black. But he did somehow look more sea than man, so wet and sand-crusted. Like if we cut him open all sorts of shells, crabs, and fish would spill out of him. We buried him carefully in the cemetery far from the water. Then, we moved through his house, collecting what we wanted. Relics moving from one house to another. Somehow there were never any arguments. There were some books that were amicably split up, some cookware, a pair of boots. Marie took the clock from his bedside table and held it, still ticking, to her cold cheek. We left the house empty. Like the long-hollowed out homes on either side of it, it wouldn’t be claimed by anything human ever again.

Creation Myth

Christopher Locke’s fiction has appeared in such magazines as SmokeLong Quarterly, Jellyfish Review, Barrelhouse, Flash Fiction Magazine, New Flash Fiction Review, Maudlin House, Noir Nation, The Literary Hatchet, and elsewhere. He won the Black River Chapbook Award for his collection of short stories 25 Trumbulls Road. His latest poetry collection, Music For Ghosts, (NYQ Books) and a memoir, Without Saints, (Black Lawrence Press) are both due in 2022. Chris lives in the Adirondacks where he teaches English at North Country Community College and SUNY Plattsburgh.

Nothing made Lorraine feel more alive than rainstorms. The roof applauded like a concert hall as water streamed the windows and gut-busted the drains. The bird bath tilted its head like a patient drooling. Fog settled between the elms and filled the backyard like a summer cookout. Lorraine missed the summer; she thought about last July and the blue dress her boyfriend gave her, satin ribbon announcing its surprise. That night, she told her husband Jasper she bought it on a whim, that Lord & Taylor had a sale. She’d barely had enough time to change the sheets before he came home, but Jasper was pleased with how the dress hung from her shoulders and accentuated her neck as she turned in the light of his approval. 

Lorraine now opened the front door and stepped barefoot into all that weather; the deluge made it seem like she had entered a giant, primordial room: the air coursed with hundreds of wet thumbprints touching every inch of her body, and shrubs and flowers and vines spattered loosely around her. Rivulets drained under her feet as she walked onto the prickly tar and down the driveway. 

Her hair clung to her forehead like plastic wrap. Lorraine pushed her bangs aside as she stepped into the middle of the road and walked the yellow line, away from the house and all its small sufferings. Her black bra became visible under her white t-shirt. She closed her eyes and put her hands out at either side, imagining a tight rope. 

She counted to ten and stopped. When she  opened her eyes, she felt born and then reborn, several lives in a single moment as thick streams ran muddy on either side of the road—a sluice of anxious sticks and desiccated leaves tipping up and under a flow going somewhere Lorraine could only dream of.

Earlier, her boyfriend sat in his truck and cried when she told him it was over. Right there in the parking lot of the Circle K. Lorraine was repulsed by his weakness. What did I do wrong? How can I make this right? was all he would say, and he tried to hold her hand and she kept pulling it away. Nothing, she said. You disgust me. Which made him cry harder until she had to get out and call an Uber to get home. Waiting for her ride, Lorraine sat at a table inside next to the hotdog rollers and heard the old timers talk about the upcoming storm. Should be a doozy, said a man tufted under a green baseball cap. His coffee steamed his chin as he smiled and took a sip. .

Lorraine stepped off the road and swung her leg over a guardrail still warped by the Halloran boy after he shattered his parents’ SUV last Easter. Glass had littered the road like diamonds and each morning Loraine went out to sneak a call to her boyfriend, she wondered how much they would be worth if real. After a week they vanished, and Lorraine was afraid someone knew she’d been eyeing them.

Stepping down the loose embankment, she heard thunder and was disappointed the rain was lighter in the woods; all those trees throwing their arms up to catch whatever the sky offered. She came down to a boy-sized culvert and peered inside. It was dank until the end shined a perfect circle in the middle of all that blackness, like at the beginning of those James Bond movies Jasper loved so much. 

After he found out about the boyfriend, Jasper took the boys and left for his mother’s downstate in Utica. Lorraine wanted to stop him but she felt she had already lived through that moment before, and that she would continue to live it, would continue to hear Jasper curse and smash an armload of groceries onto the ground, tub of banana yogurt cracking open like an infant’s skull; the note he waved at her like a gun that the boyfriend sent him, telling him about his love for Lorraine and that he refused to be silent anymore; the way the boys cowered against the living room door in the heat of Jasper’s rage, Lorraine holding up her hands like he was a levee; the tires spitting rocks as the Denali tore away from the house and the boys crying through the car windows at her; and later, the methodical way she took down the Thanksgiving decorations she’d hung with her sons, placing them neatly in the woodstove for later. 

Lorraine ducked low and crept into the culvert. She hunched and moved slowly until she got to the middle. Rainwater streamed around her ankles. She remembered how she’d bathe the boys when they were babies, making sure the water was just warm enough but not scalding. How they looked up at her with nothing but belief. Their trust was unbearable.

Her shins and the bottom of her ass were now in water. The growing current mumbled, and sticks began touching her. Every raindrop that pushed past her took something else away. Is this what it means to be forgiven, she thought. In Bible school as a kid, her favorite story was about the Great Flood—all that denial until it was too late, and the helpless fists came pounding at the ark. Lorraine closed her eyes and braced herself against the corrugated sides. She wondered how long she could stay there, quiet inside the Earth. For a day. A week. Or until the night animals found her, and picked at what was left.

Mugshot

Colin Lubner writes from Harlem, where he is an MFA candidate at the City College of New York. You can check in on him on Twitter: @no1canimagine0. He'd love it if you checked in.

The night we caught him, as I was adjusting my uniform in the mirror, you told me, “I think you love yourself more than you love me. And I think there’s only one person who loves you more than you.” I didn’t think about this, or at least not much, until a little later, when I was taking the guy’s mugshot. We had been on the rocks for a while—you talking about what you needed, me about what I thought I’d already provided. But the guy had killed his entire family a week ago. He took a nail gun to each of their heads as they slept. He started with his wife and ended with their two-year-old daughter. The whole thing was over in a matter of minutes. He had been on the run ever since. (He had hidden in the woods to the west of the ShopRite, we later found out. A couple of employees out on a smoke break came across the collapsed tent.) For our minor suburb, this was the arrest of the century. It was important that I was there. But I also wanted to be there, I realized, steering the guy toward the wall where we took our mugshots, directing him to pull his shoulders back. I wanted to be taking a quadruple murderer’s photograph far more than I wanted to be home. 

It took me a long time to take the shot. At first it was because the man wouldn’t stop playing with his hair, running one hand through the front’s fall of unwashed auburn. I told him it didn’t matter what he looked like, only that he looked like himself. He told me he was only doing what I was doing, copying me. He said I thought I looked very good, didn’t I. He said I probably had a very pretty wife waiting for me back home, didn’t I. A very pretty house, a very pretty life. He said he bet I thought it was all very, very nice. My life.

I got very still after that, and dropped my hands to my side. He got very still, too. We stood there like that, staring at each other, until one of the newer officers—Dan, the one whose wedding we went to last August—interrupted us. “Everything okay?” he asked. And I said it was not. And I took the shot.

Blue Light

Paul Luikart is the author of the short story collections Animal Heart (Hyperborea Publishing, 2016), Brief Instructions (Ghostbird Press, 2017), Metropolia (Ghostbird Press, 2021) and The Museum of Heartache (Pski’s Porch Publishing, forthcoming in 2021.) He serves as an adjunct professor of fiction writing at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia, USA. He and his family live in Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA.

I had a blue-light bug zapper on the back porch and on extra humid nights, the thing went ape shit. Bzzt! every other second, frying up loads of biting flies and mosquitoes. Still, me and whoever was sitting out back with me would always come away with at least a pair of red welts, on bare shoulders and thighs, on the snaky veins along the tops of our feet. Credit the vermin for persistence. We sat out back in the dark, sweating our asses off, with cups of half melted ice and gin and lemonade in hand. Hillbilly highballs, we called them. Hell, I sat out there damn near nightly with whoever came along to join me. The lawn chairs were theater seats, the highballs refreshments, the bug zapper the main attraction. It was not unlike the upper crust folks, at their concertos and performance art, slurping Dom Perignon. I don’t guess they’d pick up on the similarities, but we were smarter than they’d give us credit for. And we could recognize a half-decent parody, especially since we lived it.

One night, my pal Wayne and I were sitting out back. It was July, late in the month, and the bug zapper was gorging itself, cooking up a million bugs per second. The bigger critters would pop and cast an arc through the safety cage. One hit actually set the whole zapper rocking. I took a sip of my highball, mostly gin and ice, since we’d used up the Wyler’s an hour back, and said, “What do you figure that was? A full-on vampire bat?” 

“Pair of dragonflies fucking in midair?” Wayne said. 

“A drunk sparrow?”

“Suicidal chipmunk with wings?” 

I snorted, my drink shot out my nose, and in half a second, my whole face was burning like a mine fire, from the inside out. I tottered to the edge of the planks that made up my back porch and blew lines of snot out into the yard and ran the back of my arm across my face.

“Next thing,” Wayne said, “some deer is going to leap out of the woods and knock its antlers on it.”

“Critter would barbecue itself.”

“Hell yes. Venison steaks, medium rare.”

Our conversation trailed off, and we sat staring at the bug zapper and out past it, into the dark woods. The porch and Wayne’s face and the first ten feet of back yard glowed blue. It was that electric tint that drew in the bugs. It was mesmerizing, truly. I couldn’t blame a mosquito for careening toward it like it was possessed of some kind of heavenly call. Our back porch evenings seemed always to start with booze and jokes and end with me and whoever staring at the zapper, while the zapper kept on slaughtering insects in standard time. Zap! Pause. Zap! Pause. Zap! 

Then, Wayne said, “Shut up a minute,” even though I hadn’t said a goddamn word. 

“How about you shut up, you big fucking loudmouth?” I laughed. I was feeling my drinks. 

“No, I’m not kidding,” he said, “Listen. Ain’t somebody knocking around front?”

“What are you talking about?” I strained my ears into the night, past the spattering bug zapper, into the heart of the woods where, I swear, I could hear every beat of every moth wing, the possum’s dry tail crackling as it curled, the roots of the pines twenty feet down, spreading like machinery, plowing and reaching.

“Nobody’s knocking,” I said.

“Yes, they are.” Wayne was whispering now. “On your front door.”

We stared at each other. It looked like he was spray painted the color of evening campfire smoke. Me too, I guessed.

“It’s the lemonade,” I said, and held up my cup, “You’re feeling it too, buddy.”

“It ain’t that,” he said, “Be quiet.”

Maybe he’d nodded off, a little slip under the covers of consciousness. A dream about vacuum cleaner salesmen or Girl Scouts or Papa John’s. Me, I felt like I was floating along on a half blown up raft in a creek made of molasses. Or quicksand. I let my eyelids droop shut. 

“Let’s take a look.” The voice startled me. Wayne’s? Wayne’s. I opened my eyes. There he sat, straight up in his lawn chair with his knife open, trimming ribbons of icy blue light off an infinite spool. He was shimmering now, like the lines that made up the boundaries of his skin, his hair, his t-shirt were permeable. He was oozing photons. 

“What the hell,” I said. I wasn’t in any state to keep resisting. 

“I’ll go this way and you go that way,” he said, pointing beyond with his knife. 

So, on floppy ankles, I stumbled around the side of my own house, past the overgrown hostas that looked like gnarled fists in the dark. I tripped over roots that rose from the grass like the humps of surfacing whales. Finally, I crashed face first into the dirt under the baby ash tree. I rolled over and opened my eyes and stared at the night sky like I was trying to eat it with my eyes—the stars, the planets, the satellites—the entire expanse, in a single blink. I opened my ears or, rather, they were opened again for me, and I lay there laughing, listening to my heart pound  every inch of my skin on the inside, a mad beast trooping up from a cave, hellbent for the civilized world. 

“Wayne,” I hollered, and laughed, and hollered again, “I hear it now. It ain’t knocking, Wayne, but I hear it. I swear to God I hear it.”

Mistaken

Catherine O’Brien is an Irish writer of poems, flash fiction and short stories. She writes bi-lingually in English and Irish. She holds a Ph.D. in English Literature. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Eunoia Review, Mystery Tribune, Comhar, Janus Literary, Ellipsis Zine, Splonk, Flash Boulevard, Tether’s End Magazine, Indelible Literary Journal, Tír na nÓg & more. Twitter: @abairrud2021.

The day had worked its strange alchemy on her, birthdays can be precocious and forward like that. She sat astride the big blue slide and surveyed the skirmishes of the playground from afar. Her pockets were turned out like a floppy canine companion had lent her his ears. It used to be ‘our’ things now it was ‘hers’. There was no one to see what she saw. The trees had rewilded themselves as mutant cauliflowers hiding in plain sight, the fence was dotted with octopus tentacles designed to vacuum off your nose, the swing was carving silly faces in the air and a teacher stood by the water fountain tossing lozenges back her throat like a seal at an aquatic show.

Trisha had been playing hopscotch with Holly Webster when Clara had tipped her on the shoulder. She had wheeled around with her face caked in sedimented rage and disgust. 

‘Uh, it's you!’

Two runaway eyelashes formed a ‘T’ on her cheek, Clara should have known. Her mouth filled with a noxious perfume that featured notes of bile-infused potpourri.

‘Don’t you get it? I hate YOU! Go away!!’

The words were bad but the sepulchral tone that schooled them how to hurt was worse.

Clara couldn’t and didn’t respond. She went back to her perch and waited for the smile she had been plastering on for days to renew itself. Her head hurt as it had when her mum combed her hair into a high ponytail last week. She sat motionless, a perfect prevaricator. Her sadness her only surety, an implacable force she could feel it darting to and fro above and below her collarbone. She was proud of one thing, that there were no histrionics on her part. The tears had learned to quarry to a place so remote and unforgiving that they knew there was no coming back.

That wasn’t the day the die was cast. That was a Saturday. She had returned to her bedroom and spotted the peach-tinted strands caressing her pillow. She didn’t move her; she didn’t dare to. Something about her countenance was too familiar, a stern expression, a caged bluster hidden behind rosy cheeks. There was a friendship bracelet circled multiple times around its wrist and a note affixed to its chest. It simply read

We aren’t friends anymore.

Her hope capsized itself, each word formed a fold of hurt which snapped and crackled as it concertinaed. This must have been bookmarked. She must have flipped through her entire catalogue of horrors to find this, the perfect symbol to underscore the pathology of the lies. 

Clara was conscious of her breathing which had been shallow building in rapidity. She felt constricted and panicked. She could have rushed downstairs and fetched her mother. They would have driven to the hospital, sought help but her feet were leaden blobs on the floor. That was when she saw the cut, a thin ribbon of rouge where the doll’s larynx should have been. She saw it all then, her body on a makeshift table at the doll hospital, the doctor’s stethoscope swinging like a pendulum across his chest while she counted backwards from ten. 

It wasn’t like this around adults. Trisha only unsheathed her daggers when the moment was right. Until then, there were smiles, arms around shoulders, conspiratorial winks and elbows and the occasional skip. None of it real, none of it constituted a peace, rather it was a stage costume she wore to woo the approval of the world. 

Clara wonders if there’s injustice in being condemned to being alone. She doesn’t recall being avaricious. No, she hadn’t eaten the caviar of happiness. She doesn’t comprehend where it all went wrong but she does know that overheating a diamond can turn it into a vapour. She races to the mirror and checks for signs of a murder. 

‘Honey, what are you doing up there? Your dinner is ready!’

‘Thanks, Mum. I’ll be right there.’

She hadn’t time for further forensics. Her laundry bag called to her from across the room and she stuffed her unwelcome guest inside before taking the stairs two steps at a time. 

The next morning, she walked ahead keeping two lamp posts between her and Trisha at all times. Yesterday’s events still rankled and refused to sink to the bottom of her consciousness. 

‘She still wets the bed. I’ve seen the sheets.’

Holly stopped mid-step, snorting laughter into the morning’s promise and slapping her knee. 

Clara had enough. She marched back to them and stood in Trisha’s personal space. She didn’t leave space for any luminosity to pass between their noses. 

‘What are you so hungry for, Trisha?’

‘What are you talking about, you freak?’

‘JUST TELL ME WHAT YOU WANT’

‘I want my face back. I want to be a version of me that exists without everyone’s perception of you. Okay?’

Clara nodded and shuffled her backpack off. She burrowed in its depths and retrieved a small pair of scissors. Without a word of explanation, she proceeded to carefully snip every thread connecting each of the beads on the bracelet she had removed from her wrist. When she was done, she handed her twin her handiwork of misfit pieces and continued on her way, a cavalcade of obsolete memories trailing in her wake. She was alone but that was no harm. She knew she was walking away from something that was best left undone, unsaid and that in so doing, she gave them the greatest chance for a sisterhood to re-emerge someday unharmed. 

Don’t Tell Me

Holly Pelesky writes essays, fiction and poetry. She received her MFA from the University of Nebraska. Her prose can be found in The Normal School, Okay Donkey, and Jellyfish Review. Her collection of letters to her daughter, Cleave, will be released by Autofocus Books in August. She works, coaches slam poetry, and raises boys in Omaha.

I’m not going to tell you what day it was because then you’ll think of something else. I’ll tell you “Drops of Jupiter” was playing when I woke up. I don’t remember turning it on although it’s exactly the song I would have chosen. It was a Tuesday, which I had just learned in French class was mardi. Somehow, I had never put it together before with Mardi Gras. I hadn’t put a lot of things together before. 

That morning I was thinking how Train started playing. Maybe wondering would be a closer word although I was too hungover to come up with it then. The sun was bright in my dorm room even though I hadn’t opened the blinds. You might speculate it was my roommate but I had no roommate. I was a freshman at University of Wisconsin and mom had sprung for me to have my own room since I never had one as a child. 

Last night I was at Applebee’s. I had picked up a shift since my morning Psychology class was canceled. The restaurant had been slow, so I spent most of my shift standing at the bar, shredding cardboard coasters while I listened to Anna tell me about California as she made drinks. She mixed me a Grasshopper which she poured into a Styrofoam cup since our manager kept walking by. On my second drink, she told me Chandra Levy had been her babysitter. I didn’t know who Chandra Levy was but I wrote her name on a coaster to ask Jeeves later. 

Anna told me first. She told me that Chandra wasn’t in California anymore either. She was working in DC and had gone missing and how didn’t I know this? It was all over the news and I said I didn’t have TV and I mostly used the internet for AOL chat rooms I didn’t belong inside of. I’m not sure if I admitted that to Anna. Anyway, Chandra was having an affair with her Congressman, Anna said. Your Congressman? I asked. Anna nodded and leaned toward me, adding, I think he killed her. 

No way, I said but by then my words were sliding together, even just those two had but she barreled right past me and said, well I’m not sure if he killed her or had her killed but it was definitely one of the two. I didn’t know what to say about her babysitter maybe being dead somewhere although no one had found her body yet; I only knew that when Anna said Chandra had taught her how to ride a horse, I pictured the girl who had come before this bartender being helped into a saddle by her babysitter with the wild hair, too wild for Modesto, as Anna said. I thought I could never love anyone the way I loved Anna right then. 

I’ll tell you now I know that isn’t how love works but this was then. This was the first time in eighteen long years on earth I’d ever wanted to kiss someone. The century had just turned and something in me had too. I didn’t know what to say about Chandra so I told Anna I was from Colon, Michigan. She laughed at the name like I knew she would and she made me say it again and the second time she made us each another Grasshopper. There is no drink like it, I am yet to find one at least. 

I told her my town was the magic capital of the world and she didn’t believe me so I told her about the stores with ventriloquist dummies in the windows and the cemetery full of magician corpses and if she had said, let’s go there and I would have said, tonight? and if she had said, yes I would have left that restaurant without clocking out, stopped at 7-11 for sour cream and onion chips and a Barq’s root beer, and driven through the night to prove it to her. And “Drops of Jupiter” would have been playing then too. 

Maybe you’ve figured out by now that it was Anna who turned on my CD. I know now it was a CD. If it had been the radio I would have known the world outside that room. But then I only knew the way the sun gleamed across her hair as she sat on the radiator beneath my window and looked out at what I saw every day. Maybe she believed it beautiful. She had butterfly clips in her hair and when she saw me out of bed she smiled. 

I walked to where she was and wrapped by arms around her neck like she belonged to me. I whispered into her hair, they’ll find her. This is just a disappearing act, I said. She’ll come back, I said. And it’s possible she didn’t believe me; it’s likely she thought, you’re from a magic town, of course you’d say that, but there was a moment before we knew better when maybe we both believed there was a chance.   

You probably want to know what happened after. I would, if I were you. But believe me when I tell you: it’s better we stop right here. All you need to know is there was a September morning when everything changed or maybe I mean while everything was changing but before I knew it. Dew was still lifting off the grass and there I was: in love with this girl from California who knew already what it was to lose someone she once loved. 

Dilly Dilly!

Joel Streicker’s stories have been published in a number of journals, including Great Lakes Review, Gravel, Burningword, and New Flash Fiction Review. He won Blood Orange Review’s inaugural fiction contest in 2020 and his winning story in Cutthroat's Rick DeMarinis Short Story Contest will appear in the spring of 2022. He has published poetry in both English and Spanish, including the collection El amor en los tiempos de Belisario (Bogotá: Común Presencia). His translations of such Latin American writers as Samanta Schweblin, Mariana Enríquez, and Pilar Quintana have appeared in A Public Space, McSweeney’s, and other journals. Streicker’s essays have appeared in The Forward and Shofar, among other publications.

At home I’ve labeled every object with a Post-It to help me remember its name. This morning I have the nagging feeling I brushed my teeth twice. I put my undershirt on over my dress shirt. I make my lunch and leave it on the kitchen counter.

At work I can’t remember what I went there to do, so I imitate my peers: I sit up straight in front of the computer and wiggle my fingers over the keyboard. The words and images on the screen dissolve and reassemble in colors and patterns I don’t recognize. When I get back from the bathroom, I feel air on my private parts and realize my fly is open and I’m not wearing underwear. And everyone else is gone.

I wait. For how long, I can’t tell. I roll up my sleeves and ink tattoos on my forearms with a Sharpie. I create a chain out of paperclips and loop it around my neck. I snip the flower off the orchid on my co-worker’s desk and stick it behind my ear. It’s cold, so I decide to set a fire in my trash can but as I’m striking the match Gwen comes in. She’s one of the good ones. She crosses her arms and smiles slightly. “Come on,” she says.

Gwen leads me to the conference room. My colleagues are sitting around the long table. She deposits me in a chair against the wall, in the outer ring with the support staff. Matt, the boss, is droning on about sales and productivity. Heads droop. I hear a discreet sigh. The assembled are a single organism on the verge of an immense yawn. 

I’m thinking about the curious commercials I saw on TV last night. What looked like a short detective story turned out to be a car ad. A big, smiling black man with a shaved head sold fawning, fortyish white women pills to make their husbands more energetic like him. A medieval kingdom was besotted with lite beer. Suddenly it’s quiet and everyone is looking at me. Matt clears his throat and asks me, “What do you think of the new Q4 sales goals?”

My life has been marked by vacillation, but I don’t hesitate now. “Dilly Dilly!” I cry and walk out the door, not bothering to close it behind me. I just know Gwen will be right behind me.