Dounia
Jon Doughboy is a lowly clerk at Bartleby & Co. Prefer not to with him @doughboywrites
In Tunis we roasted. A temperature Americans insist on calling 106 degrees outside and even hotter in our tiny apartment. When we found my favorite alley cat Dounia dead either from the heat or from a conservative neighbor I suspected of leaving out poison to spite me for shamelessly living with another man while not married—he knew I loved cats, Dounia most of all—I caved about visiting my parents in Sfax.
My boyfriend Rob had been pestering me for six months, practically since he arrived in Tunisia. He’s American which says it all. But an especially sheltered sort of American who hasn’t been anywhere outside his native New Hampshire, growing up spending more time with craggy granite than people. We met last summer while I was studying English and he was studying Arabic and my parents, proving themselves pragmatists, were glad I’d snagged an American. Tunisia is sliding into an economic recession lorded over by a new dictator so they were hopeful that Rob might be a ticket out of here for me, a far safer escape than what my fellow Tunisians were undertaking, braving the Mediterranean with rickety rafts trying to reach a Europe that didn’t want them.
We bought the train tickets and Rob said “inshallah” and we stopped for lunch and Rob said “inshallah” and we arrived and grabbed a cab and Rob said “inshallah” so that by the time we were at my parents’ doorstep I wasn’t surprised that Rob invoked Allah while kissing my confused, secular parents hello.
Rob wanted to learn some Tunisian expressions from my mother and Moroccan expressions from my father but I wanted to swim. Wasn’t that the point, to escape the heat of Tunis? Or was I just mourning Dounia’s death? Or the death of my country?
We went to the beach, the four of us. A beach: water, sky, sand. If you could forget about the state of the economy and the country and my life, you could call it beautiful. My parents hunkered under an umbrella and Rob interrogated them: “how do you say…” and “is my pronunciation…” and “what’s your favorite idiom?” I admired his Arabic, on the one hand, which was surprisingly good though he still butchered and conflated the rich variety of our “h” sounds. But he’d begun to annoy me as well. His vacation mentality. The way he found the disintegration of my country charming. The way, well, lots of ways.
“Dounia hania ou smah safia,” Rob said, repeating after my father. “Life is good and the sky is clear. Yes, I love it. It’s a beautiful expression. And look at the water. And the sky. Tunisia is such a blessed country.”
I left them to their language lessons and wandered along the water’s edge to an ice cream stand. I bought a vanilla but it melted too fast to eat and the vendor kept ogling my breasts like he was waiting for the cream to drip on them, like that would make his day, and I didn’t want to make anyone’s day because who would make mine? I dumped the ice cream and returned and found my boyfriend frolicking in the water like a child which is what all Americans are, what America is, in a way, historically and culturally speaking: a giant, dangerous child. He was saying something poetic about ancient Carthage in that classical Arabic I struggle to understand—my English is better, honestly—so I went to sit with my long-suffering parents beneath the umbrella.
My father repeated his phrase, proud of it now, glad to have taught Rob something, infected by his American enthusiasm: “Dounia hania ou smah safia.”
And I said in an English they couldn’t understand, “I don’t know about this life business but yes, the sky is clear, I’ll give you that.”
We Go Forest Bathing
Katherine Gleason is a writer whose stories have appeared in Bending Genres, Cheap Pop, The Drabble, Defenestration, Derelict Lit, Every Day Fiction, HAD, Juked, Jellyfish Review, and Menacing Hedge. She won first prize in the River Styx/Schlafly Beer Micro-Fiction Contest, garnered an honorable mention from Glimmer Train, and has been nominated for a Best of the Net award. Her play “The Toe Incident” won the Christopher Hewitt Award for Drama in 2020.
If a tree is the opposite of a cop, then what is a copse of trees?
What? you say, glancing away from your phone.
A breeze picks up. Leaves cackle, an army of green. We are surrounded.
Look, I say, face tilted skyward.
Defense, you mumble, holding one finger aloft, eyes trained on your screen.
Winning? I ask.
You shake your head.
Loosing? I wrap my arms around a dappled trunk. Now tell us what you dreamed at the seashore.
Your lips pinch together.
The street was full of kids in overalls. I begin.
Your eyelids twitch.
I hold my new friend closer, limbs softening. Cottonwood, poplar, elm, I murmur into gray-green bark. But this is London Plane. Plain Jane will never complain. I await your laughter.
The wind again, this time a whisper. Fall. Smoke. Of thee I sing, baby.
I will kiss the frog king. With my tongue, I staunch the willow’s tears.
A squeak, a croak. A quiver, commotion of air. Flying monkey, fallen angel, my landlord, no. An eagle, arrowing toward my head.
You rise, phone hidden, hands outstretched. You cradle my elbow, smooth my hair. Safe for now, we turn, watch the eagle fly away.
“Now tell us what you dreamed at the seashore,” is a quote from Fernando Pessoa, “The Mariner,” page 26, The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa, translated by Richard Zenith, GrovePress, 2001.
In The Boathouse
Catherine Roberts is always writing something strange or bittersweet. Her work has been published/is forthcoming in Flash Frog, Maudlin House, Bending Genres, and Gone Lawn -- among other places. Find her on X under the handle: @CRobertsWriter
In the boathouse, you mapped out my nervous system with your thumb. You told me our soft tissues mattered, they were life and love in form. You told me you wanted to be an archaeologist, that second-hand stores made you sad. It was because the objects in them had outlasted the people who owned them, those first hands, now incapable of holding or snatching back. The store owners, the buyers, never handled the items with the same reverence as those found in the earth – softened trinkets and unwadded bone.
Over years, we only did two things in the boathouse. Body-warmed, we dropped things into the water under your father’s boat – a model airplane, sneakers and tennis balls, an ornamental vase – if it smashed on the waterbed we wouldn’t have known. We didn’t want to.
We brought different objects every week. And each time you coloured in more of the details of your life – how your father switched his hearing aid off for weeks at a time, took extended trips on the boat in the strangest silence, how your mother was afraid of moths and flightless birds and cleaned your feet with soap-water whenever you came home, how sometimes, you pinched your skin fuchsia as a reminder that you were alive and you wouldn’t always be.
Then, we dropped more things in the water – a tiger lily paperweight, creased baseball cards and lip-printed beer bottles, a papier-mâché planet covered haphazardly in UV paint that glowed and glowed in its watered descent.
I told you how my parents smoked things from a bubbling vase in our back yard day after day, while us kids looped around the house like snails leaving glittered trails of toys and food and sticky, unwashed fingerprints. It was easy to think our lives didn’t mean much. You held my cheek between your thumb and finger and told me as long as I had a body, I was full of life, to hold on to it.
We never took our children to the boathouse – the property was sold with your father’s last breath, the boat stripped for parts. We wanted to give our kids the attention we never got, the kind of attention given to meteorites and beautiful skeletons. We never told anyone about the objects we’d sent below the water. Though, we hoped they would be found one day. We hoped people would ask questions, place them behind glass to be wondered at, never churned through and mishandled in sickly-lit, dust-streaked shops.
Because although our fingerprints will have washed away, our bones and our parents’ bones will be elsewhere, holding up the earth, although no one will know much of the lives we lived, we held these things. We gave them life while our bodies were bright with it.
Wounded Little Sparrow
Hema Nataraju is an Indian-American writer, mom, and polyglot based in Singapore. Her work has most recently appeared in Best Small Fictions 2023, Emerge, Barrelhouse, Booth, Wigleaf, and 100-word Story, among others. She is a Submissions Editor at Smokelong Quarterly and she tweets as m_ixedbag.
Let’s just say Leela happened to be at the right place at the right time. Or the wrong place at the right time. Right place, wrong time, plong rime, pight race--it didn’t matter anymore. As her mother often said, it’s all karma.
Let’s say karma made Leela skip violin class that evening (she wanted a breather from all those after-school classes her mom made her go to) and meander over to the deserted Jubilee bridge, at the exact moment when Jo was teetering on the metal railing, swaying like a twig in a storm, ready to jump.
Leela used to see Jo--her senior by a year, with her mane of frizzy ginger hair in the school hallway--always alone, an outcast like Leela, but they’d never spoken to each other.
In the fading evening light, Jo’s watery eyes and Leela’s scared, saucer eyes met for a few brief minutes before Jo jumped. And Leela did nothing to stop her.
Because...because, she hardly knew her. There was nobody else on the bridge. What could Leela have possibly said that would make her reconsider her decision? Nothing.
So, Leela turned and ran all the way home, as if nothing had happened. Nothing happened, she told herself.
But her heart was hurtling like a derailed train down a ravine. Jo’s rain-eyes were everywhere. Leela needed to tell someone or else she would drown. At bedtime, Leela broke down before her mother, who was going to ground her for skipping violin.
But by then, news that Jo had jumped spread through the neighborhood and beyond.
Leela sobbed and her mother rubbed her back and Leela basked in this rare episode of undivided attention from her perpetually-busy, glamorous mother.
“I really tried to get her off the bridge, mama, I talked to her, even tried to pull her back, but she wouldn’t listen,” Leela said.
Because if her brain and body hadn’t frozen in fear, that is exactly what she would’ve done.
“My brave girl,” her mother kissed her head and brought her some warm turmeric milk.
After Leela slept, her mother messaged the class parents group--how badly shaken Leela was, but how heroic she had been (not so directly though--she slipped it in coolly like the attorney she was).
The next day, Leela’s star was on the rise. Everyone wanted to know how she was doing-the poor kid had witnessed something so terrible. So much trauma at such a young age.
Poor Leela.
And, also Jo. Yes, poor Jo. But Jo, was gone.
Leela was the one everyone wanted to protect.
“I begged her to climb down, I told her it would be all okay, if she only got off the edge.”
Leela said to everyone who asked, fingers crossed behind her back. In future iterations, it would come easily, no finger crossing needed.
At school she was a star. The cool kids wanted her at their lunch table. The teachers treated her like a wounded little sparrow.
Local newspapers and the TV reporters wanted stories. Leela’s story. Were Leela and Jo friends? Yes, said Leela. How did it feel to lose a friend like this? To this, Leela shed tears.
How did you talk to Jo? How long did you talk to her? Why didn’t you call for help?
Leela had all the answers. It was everything she would’ve done if she hadn’t panicked on the bridge.
Her mother shared Leela’s interviews and news articles on her social media accounts and Leela was everywhere.
Her picture splashed across newspapers and TV channels. First alongside Jo’s photo, and after a few days, it was only Leela. No Jo. Every night Leela thought of telling her mother the whole truth, but her mother always sat close to her and gave her pointers for her next interview--almost like she was reading Leela a bedtime story.
Once again, Leela wrote “I’m sorry, Jo,” in her journal, like she’d written on every page since that day.
When a private school offered Leela a scholarship for her bravery, her mother said she was proud of her, for the first time ever. Once again, Leela put off telling her mother the whole truth.
“Dear Jo,” Leela wrote that night. “I’ve decided to take the scholarship. My mom says I deserve this. And I’m sorry but I agree. I really have been through a lot. Every day I wish and wish I’d really tried to save you, but it’s too late now. For what it’s worth, I haven’t forgotten you.”
One Room
It’s the time of night in Berlin when the sky shifts from black to blue and bars open their mouths to disgorge their remaining patrons into the streets. A light rain is falling and the slick dark of the cobbled sidewalks double every light. Two people come out of a club tucked under a train station. They’re holding hands, though awkwardly, because the man is much taller than the woman, and it makes their walk swaying and off-balance. The man is British and the woman is American, and they are both only staying in the city for three days, something they discovered on the hostel bar crawl as they shouted over the sizzle and throb of the club’s music. They’d had to get very close to talk, and when the man put a hand on the small of the woman’s back, she leaned into it, the strength and pull of his fingertips, because it made her feel important. There was a kiss, then, the kind of kiss where each of them was searching, really searching.
“I have an idea,” the man says as they walk.
The woman loves the lilt of his vowels, the crispness of his consonants. It’s probably because of how much Doctor Who she watches. “Okay,” she says.
At the next block, the man points to a hotel, white and floodlit and mist-haloed. “Shall I get us a room?”
She’d expected them to walk, hand-in-hand, the final two miles back to the hostel, maybe make out a little more against the bricks at the door or something, before she collapsed into the tiny bed in the room she’s sharing with five other women, hoping she could touch herself quietly enough not to wake any of them. They don’t seem to like her. She first tried to make conversation with the ones traveling alone, then the group of them who are always laughing, but they gave her one-word responses, eyes skittering away. It had been like this in the hostels in Paris and Brussels, too, and likely would be the same in Cologne, and Vienna. She thought when she’d set out that traveling alone would lead to sudden and intimate friendships with fascinating people, but it seemed so far to be just as lonely as her little loft in Ohio. She doesn’t want to go back to the sleep-sounds of people who would prefer her bed empty. She wants to go to the hotel with the man. He’ll probably expect her to have sex with him, which is fine, because afterwards she can press herself against him, loop one of his arms around her like a seatbelt that will hold her fast, and they can talk all sleepy-intense about childhood pets and the jobs they actually wanted and the nightmares they have where when they speak, people don’t understand them and give up and walk away.
He kisses her again, just outside the doors, and it’s careful, persistent, like he’s working a lock. Then, his mouth against hers, he says, “Listen, this will have to be a one-time thing, okay? I can’t like follow you on Instagram or anything, because I’m still technically married.”
“Technically married?”
“Well, you know, it’s over. I took this trip by myself. To find myself.”
“I understand,” she says, though she doesn’t, and thinks it’s better to let it slide off her mind. As he’s been talking, he’s taken something that glints in the light out of his pocket, put it back away.
“Good,” he says, and his hand is around her waist again, and the air inside smells like a pool and is crisp after the rain-damp. The man approaches the sleek red desk and asks for a room “For my wife and I.” My wife and me, the woman corrects in her head, automatically.
“I’m afraid I don’t have anything available tonight, sir,” the hotel clerk says, her English sharp and near-perfect.
“Danke,” the woman says. She tries to assemble the German words she learned, before coming, to ask for a recommendation. There must be another hotel nearby where she can also be a wife.
“Bullshit,” the man says. The woman realizes how heavy and drunk his voice sounds, how loud.
“No bullshit,” the hotel clerk says. “You’ll have to try somewhere else.”
“Let’s go,” the woman says, “babe.” She doesn’t remember the man’s name.
But the man doesn’t seem to hear her. He’s started to argue. He is becoming even louder.
He’s chopping the air with his hands. He’s pointing at the elevators and then at the clerk. He’s taking out his credit card, slamming it on the red desk. He’s leaning towards the clerk with his mouth open like he will bite, and the clerk is stepping back – one step, two – shoulders at her ears. He’s no longer holding onto the woman, so she can move away, slowly, quietly. He doesn’t notice, shouts and shouts. And then she’s back outside, and it is really raining now, and she is running, and her breath tastes rancid and boozy, but she’s moving away in long loping strides from the man, from what she would have done with the man, what he would have done with her, if there had been a room, just one room.
Wendy Elizabeth Wallace (she/they) is a queer disabled writer. She grew up in Buffalo, New York, and has landed in Connecticut by way of Pennsylvania, Berlin, Heidelberg, and Indiana. They are the editor-in-chief of Peatsmoke Journal and the co-manager of social media and marketing for Split Lip Magazine. Their work has appeared in Okay Donkey, ZYZZYVA, Pithead Chapel, SmokeLong Quarterly, Brevity, and elsewhere. Find her on Twitter @WendyEWallace1 or at www.wendywallacewriter.com.
Persephone
Allison Field Bell is a PhD candidate in Prose at the University of Utah, and she has an MFA in Fiction from New Mexico State University. She is the author of the poetry chapbook, WITHOUT WOMAN OR BODY, forthcoming in 2025 from Finishing Line Press. Allison's prose appears or is forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, DIAGRAM, The Gettysburg Review, The Adroit Journal, New Orleans Review, West Branch, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Passages North, THRUSH Poetry Journal, RHINO Poetry, The Greensboro Review, Nimrod International Journal, and elsewhere. Find her at allisonfieldbell.com.
Geography is a trap. The way place can confine you. A whole world below your feet, below a flower. Petals so fragrant, you can’t help but breathe them in. Your mother always telling you what you don’t want to hear: where not to go, who not to please. A man is a man is a man. The way the earth crumbles at your feet, the flower floating above you. Half your life now belonging to a stranger. This is love, he insists. This is your body in a place you don’t want it to be: Indiana / Arizona / New Mexico / Utah. You’ve watched the monsoons roll in over cacti, over dust.
You’ve heard the crack of thunder and seen the splitting of the sky. You’ve felt snow in its silent falling. You’re not afraid of heat. You’re just tired of travel. You want to settle. To live in a way that belongs only to you. A house with a tiny kitchen and a twin bed. All wooden like a boat. A small garden full of pomegranates. Their pink orbs, their jeweled centers. You want a bed of narcissus too. Their sweet scent in the air. You want a pot of tea on a table set for one. A teacup.
Milk swirling and sinking to the bottom. Steam rising up in slender wisps. You want nothing to do with your mother or your lover. Your body wherever you want it to be. In a garden, in a house. In California along a coastline rocky and turquoise, water crashing into sand. No one to depend on you. Just the sea salt, the pomegranates, the narcissus, you.
The Vanishing Hitchhiker
Nora Nadjarian is a poet and writer from Cyprus. Her work was included in anthologies such as Europa 28 (Comma Press, 2020). Her short fiction has also appeared in Sand Journal, FRiGG, Milk Candy Review, Ghost Parachute, Gone Lawn and chosen for Wigleaf‘s Top 50 Very Short Fictions of 2022 (selected by Kathy Fish).
In my mother’s dining room, our toddler is on all fours doing his inquisitive act. He finds a grain of rice on the carpet, pops it in his mouth and scrunches his face in disgust. He is an old man already.
My father sneezes. We find the pills scattered everywhere, parts of them, or whole ones. At the end of every meal he lines up his multi-coloured pills – sweet pink, baby blue, angel white – on a napkin just before filling his mouth with them, like M&M’s. He gulps them down with a glass of water, then smiles at us like a child.
The clock is breathless with all the running and I’m listening hard. When somebody’s dying it’s always much later than we think and from a distance we’re all eavesdroppers.
My mother overhears my sister talking to my father’s doctor on the phone. She asks What was all that about, my sister says Nothing, her face bubbling like soup with the lie and the knowledge. The validity of lie detectors is yet to be proven. The truth is, she meant to say, time is running out but the afterlife is Time, too. My husband writes I miss you, baby, from a conference hall in another continent. The meaning of Baby ping-pongs in my head.
I make a mental note of other things leading up to an incomprehensible event, like death. My mother’s unsharpened knives and the criss-cross patterns on the chopping board, the dog sniffing with understanding, moonlight coming back night after night. My father’s face as if he’s about to make a grave decision though he hasn’t said much in a month, his head framed by the mauve wall behind him and that cheap reproduction of an Impressionist painting (Lilies/Monet/Manet? Does it matter?)
Earlier today, he asked for baklava. My mother’s eyes turned syrupy for a second. I remember one of his birthdays when she made a whole mountain of sticky, gooey baklava. Such gifts, such laughter.
We paid no attention, baby, we were too young.
Around the dining table decades ago, my father recounted an urban legend which made us shriek with horror, same way we did with laughter when he tickled us. The vanishing hitch hiker was picked up by a driver and then, simply, disappeared.
My Mother’s Green Thumb
Amethyst Loscocco writes both fiction and nonfiction. Her work has appeared or is upcoming in Electric Literature, The Pinch, Catamaran Literary Reader, and elsewhere. She was a finalist for the 2024 Page Prize in Creative Nonfiction. She has an MA in Science Writing from Johns Hopkins University. She lives in Oakland, California. Find her online at http://amethystloscocco.com and @amethystwrites.
My mother asks me to cut off her right thumb when she dies, to keep it safe, to let it dry out on a sunny windowsill. She pulls her arm from under the shaggy wool shawl I’ve swaddled her in and points to the kitchen cleaver. She makes a swift chopping motion above her right thumb. I flinch.
The cleaver hangs between the boning knife she last used on a hare and the paring knife she uses in autumn to peel the golden apples that grow outside her bedroom window.
“Why?” I ask.
“You might need it,” she says. “To grow a beanstalk, a strangler fig, a pomegranate tree, or maybe belladonna.”
“I doubt that will be necessary,” I say. I pour hot water over the fresh peppermint leaves in her teacup.
“You’ll need a proper garden too,” she says, as if I haven’t spoken, as if she is short on time.
“Tomatoes, squash, beans… Be prepared to cook a feast for a mad king at any time.”
“We don’t have a king.”
“There’s always a greedy king,” she says. A thick stack of unopened bills sits on the counter below the knives.
“And don’t forget kitchen herbs,” she continues, “Rosemary and thyme sprinkled on red meat to catch a silver fox or maybe a bear. You’re still unmarried,” she reminds me, again.
“I’m okay, mom.”
“But I won’t be here to protect you from… from…” she trails off.
I’m disappointed. I want her to name my fears, to salve future stings. Instead, her eyes cloud and I think she’s forgotten about severed thumbs and strangler figs. But after a moment, she inhales a rasping breath of peppermint steam and says, “Just, promise me.”
And so, I do.
Dependency
Colin Lubner is an MFA candidate at the City College of New York and a STEM teacher in southern New Jersey.
An ornithologist and a linguist are collaborating on a poem about bats. They are crossing their backyard to the bat house, which the linguist nailed together following their last and final disappointment. The ornithologist offers, “In the summer, when raising their young.” The linguist responds, “Oh, no. Look.”
What began as a bad joke has tilted, in the ordinary instant, into crisis. In the high grass below the bat house pants a nut-brown lump. The linguist kneels, her hands fluttering. Asks, “Can I—should I?” There is a thing, she has heard, about mothers, an interloper’s stink. The bat’s eyes are closed, its features concentrated to a snuffling point. The ornithologist nods.
The linguist almost broadsides a fawn on her drive to the wildlife refuge. In a rustic backroom she presents the swaddled thing to a balding young man. His voice is gentle. He calls the bat a little guy. He thanks her. She says, “My husband’s an ornithologist. He said—” She forgets what her husband, the ornithologist, said. The young man says, gently, that this little guy is a mammal, that he is not a bird.
The ornithologist, while the linguist shifts out of park, while she wonders about the bat, whether or not she herself can go on, teaches elementary-aged campers about the nesting habits of raptors versus those of songbirds, why and in what ways their mating patterns differ. “Nuthatches,” he says, but pauses when an eight-year-old with a smiling sun on her shirt raises her hand. “Were dinosaurs,” she asks, “real?”
The following afternoon, the ornithologist exits a blind and opens his phone to a voicemail. He waits until he’s in his truck and homeward-bound to call the linguist back.
“Hey,” he says.
“They called,” she says. “We’re good to go.”
This is wonderful news. The ornithologist assures the linguist she’s going to be a wonderful mother. He asks about that evening’s lecture, whether she’s anxious or not.
She has told him, just last night, that she’d rather he stay home.
“Yes,” the linguist says, and laughs. There is an egg in her chest, cracking, the yolk molten. “How’s your day been?”
“Okay,” he says. “I thought of a line.”
It takes her a moment to remember. The joke, the poem.
“Lay it on me,” she says.
And he does, and it is dissonant. She cannot help it: she laughs.
That evening, the stage blinds the linguist. Her words, contralto units of laboriously constructed meaning, carry across the auditorium, fold their metaphorical lexical wings, drop with raptorial precision into her trapped audience’s suspecting but helpless ears. She is speaking of structural dependency. She is speaking of the Russian poetry she shared with the ornithologist when she was first trying to tell him of the things for which she hoped. In Russian, she explains to her audience now, word order is freer, hence that country’s long and yet vibrant history of poetry. Contrast this against English, in which sequencing is stricter. Closeness matters more. Clauses, when embedded, or nested, like this one, become barriers to meaning. Take, for instance, the sentence, “She loved her husband.” Legible. Interrupt it? Less. “She, an infertile linguist, who had built the bat house, which looked a little like a human house but smaller, in a fury four months prior, loved, although perhaps less than she loved the solidity of him, the sureness of his presence, which in turn she loved less than their house, which itself she loved less than the bat house, from whose foot one recent morning she had lifted a needful mammal, her husband.” Very much, she adds, when her audience is silent. Very much.
The lecture is recorded. The ornithologist hears nothing of it until after it’s done, and only then that it went well. Only years later, when Yeda, twelve, turns her tablet toward him and says, “Mom was hot?” does he at last watch the YouTube upload and listen and think: yes, that was her, him, them. In many ways, still is.
For now the ornithologist has fled through the dusk to the bat house. He feels he’s missed something. Misstepped, or misspoken. If he can find another suffering thing, he thinks. Prove to the linguist that he too will do, when the time comes, what she has done. But the high grass below the bat house knots still and empty in the going light. He tilts his face to the sky, listening for—what? The ornithologist knows nothing of these hairy things. When they come, when they go.
The ornithologist calls the linguist. Her phone is, as he knew it would be, off. He leaves her a voicemail. He tells her to call him when it’s over. He tells her he’s very proud of her. He tells her he could not do this alone.
He spies a solitary blur, descending. A pair of jittering dimnesses, rising above the treeline, their outlines growing clear. He stoops, craning his head so he can see up and into the bat house’s guts. The inverted bodies there overlap and blend, fungal in their fibrous oneness. Their small clenched claws remind him of a spiral notebook’s coils. He reaches out, damn the chance of rabies, intending to grasp the closest bat, take it, make its life hinge upon his. But before he can do so the small thing shifts, separates itself from its fellows, unfolds, and he withdraws his hand, watching it to see if it will let go.
Die Hard
Rachel Lastra is a writer whose stories have appeared in Barrelhouse, Smokelong Quarterly, Apparition Lit, and other places. In 2023, she was highly commended in the Bridport Flash Fiction Prize and was a finalist in the Flash Frog Flash Fiction Contest. She is a student in the graduate writing program at Johns Hopkins University and is working on a novel. Find her at rachellastra.com.
Preschool, you in red rain boots, me never wearing a coat, arms entwined, jam-sticky, together, together. Elementary, different classrooms, magnets coming together at recess, tears, playground bullies, skinned knees, my die hard. Middle school, you bloom bright, me, a bud still lagging behind you. Waiting for spring, watching you get the wrong kind of attention—hey girl, short skirt, want a ride—wish I was getting that wrong attention, too. High school, the beginning, small, awkward, united, your hair grown long, mine chopped short. We rent movies, prank call, go to the mall. You put your head in my lap to watch Die Hard. We kiss, kiss, kiss in your parents’ bed when they’re out of town. High school, the end, you play volleyball, surrounded, distant. I smoke in the parking lot, hang with the theater kids. A guy named Greg feels you up at prom. I watch Die Hard alone with the lights off, our movie, that Bonnie Bedelia, yippee-ki-yay.
College, so far north it’s like a different country. Fall in love with my lit professor—red lips, blue blazer. Learn about power dynamics. Fall out of love with my lit professor. Get a job, pay the rent, learn more things, apart, apart. Wonder what the sky is like, wonder if it’s raining. Tell me what the sky is like wherever you are. Twenty-six, back home, see you at the grocery store, your round pregnant belly, your hesitant eyes. We exchange numbers, I stare at the phone too long, wonder what to say, don’t say anything at all. Years, years, years, a text on a birthday.
Years, years, years, happy holidays. Years, years, years, heard you bought a house, congratulations. Years, years, years. I heard your mom died. Back in town for the funeral, there you are, black dress, hair still so long—lines a round your eyes now, mine too, mine too. The past in your eyes now, mine too, mine too. Your heels dig into muddy grass. My arms around you shivering. Wish I’d been here. All those years. Where have your red rain boots gone? I still forget to wear a coat. Hold me close, please, hold me close, my die hard, it’s so cold out here.
The Museum of Memory
Travis Price is a fiction writer and translator whose work has appeared in Gulf Coast, The Massachusetts Review, Hobart, and Wigleaf, among other publications. After completing a Fulbright in Uruguay in 2018, Travis has translated the work of several Uruguayan writers, including Ana Pedraja, Marcelo Damonte, and Andrea Durlacher. Travis lives in Philadelphia. His work can be found at travisprice.net.
Names don’t always travel well.
Mine, for example, never failed to stump the locals. They’d try once or twice to shape their mouths around it—and then promptly give up. David’s, at least, they recognized, cheerfully swapping his American pronunciation for their own.
David, they said, conferring on him a kind of sophistication.
David, they said, as though talking about someone else.
It takes me a while, five years later, to realize the message is from him. The number is unsaved, the little profile picture a close-up of an unfamiliar tattoo: a spiraling sea serpent. But the app he’s used tells me it’s someone from that group of expats. Friends, to stretch the word, whom I haven’t spoken to in years.
What was the name of the prostitute we met at the bar that one time
That’s all it says. No greeting. Not even a question mark. I set down my ham-and-nothing-else sandwich atop the scattered papers on my desk and stare at the phone. David. I’d rather it was almost any of the others, but a tremor passes through me all the same. Some periods end so completely you can wind up forgetting you even lived them. If I laugh, as I suddenly want to, heads will shoot up over cubicle walls.
She was a trapeze artist, not a sex worker. For whatever reason David had refused to believe it. Maybe because of the way she carried herself, with what I took to be simply the aloof poise of a performer. That I might recall her name, that it might somehow still matter, years later…now the laugh does escape, strangled and abrupt, and I bolt from my desk.
Outside, in the sunbaked parking lot, it’s like a jar has been overturned. The scenes tumbling out have nothing to do with the trapeze artist; they are of David. His glassy eyes and bleached-blond hair. He never offered to pay when we shared taxis, never tipped enough at restaurants.
“Tipping’s not in the culture here,” he used to tell us. Anything he didn’t want to do was “not in the culture.” Picking up litter, arriving places on time, keeping any sort of promise. The things that were part of the culture, he took to selectively. Weed was legal and he smoked a ton of it. Impressed by street displays of candombe, he bought a large drum and lugged it around with him sometimes, always fiddling with the tautness of the skin, as if that was what kept him from having musical talent.
He had some deep childhood aversion to soccer, though. And he never joined us at the popular Sunday market on Tristán Narvaja. His Spanish was surprisingly decent, especially when he was drunk, but sometimes I thought he botched it on purpose just so people would switch to English out of pity. He always talked about traveling to Antarctica, with the earnestness of someone who wished people to think he actually might, who already wanted credit for having done so.
I find a bench. The asphalt radiates heat and the sky is almost blinding.
Hunched over, I have to shade my screen just to see it. Left inside the jar are the remnants, congealed and misshapen, waiting for the tap that will dislodge them. I could ask what he’s up to now. I could ask if he ever did make it to what the locals considered the fifth and final continent.
I think of the tedious, soul-shriveling work that awaits me back at my desk. The weight of days upon identical days, the vanish of all adventure, and my Spanish dwindling to nothing. On the off-chance he has seen Antarctica, I don’t want to know about it.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
One time, our group of expats visited the Museo de la Memoria, David included, even though I knew he would find it boring. At some point in our somber tour, among the torture instruments, decades-old propaganda posters, and black-and-white photos of chaos in the streets, he wandered off. We assumed he’d gone out to smoke a joint, but later I found him, standing alone in front of a wall of names and crying.
It was just a list of the desaparecidos—the disappeared—alphabetized and running across three glass panels. When I reached his side he pointed to it, finger prodding the glass, oblivious to the notice—in both Spanish and English—asking visitors not to touch.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
He made no move to hide his tears. The name he indicated meant nothing to me. Nothing more than any of the others. As far as I was concerned, that museum—meticulously kept, remotely located, rarely visited—was a failure. In spite of its name, these people had already been forgotten. But David pressed insistently on the glass, the oil from his skin a tiny asterisk on this one entry.
“Who is she?” I tried again.
He never did answer.
Standing from the bench five years later, an uncanny thought comes to me: This is who David is asking about. Not the trapeze artist, but this lost woman. I feel it in my chest. And suddenly I see her name with such startling clarity, David’s finger hovering nearby like a beacon.
It’s a peculiar name. A rather beautiful name. A name with no English equivalent.
I have to go. I press send.
Only, squinting into the sun, I want that day to continue, not this one. And I seem to recall now the bus ride home, our sweating in the traffic, feeling oddly jubilant. We called to one another in English, not caring that we were drawing attention, buoyed by a sense of having survived something, or perhaps having been absolved by it. We were young, after all, resilient, elastic. Ahead of us was another strange and charmed night of dissociation, a life lived in a country that was not our own.
When we reached the city’s main thoroughfare, perhaps I found a pedestrian in the crowd. It was an old game I used to play with myself: Find the face of a complete stranger and try to cement it forever in my memory with will power alone. Years later, of course, I retain none of the faces. I had no sense, then or now, for the things I would let slip away, or those that I would keep.
Sitting quietly, a few seats away from me: David, staring out the window, too, struck, I imagine, by the curious fact of life still going on.
Belén de los Santos.
Be Your Own Fireworks
Ani King (they/them) is an artist, activist, and writer from Michigan. They can be found at aniking.net, or trying to find somewhere to quietly finish a book without any more interruptions.
At the end of her molt, Pearl will use the last of Mom’s meager life insurance payout for a huge takeout order of sushi. But first, the manager at the local supply store, where she gets salt for her baths, will say give my best to your mom, y’all enjoy your big vacation. Pearl won’t say that there is no vacation, or that Mom passed almost a year ago. She’ll say thanks, Pete, I will. At her apartment building, which lacks many things, but especially an elevator, Pearl will slug up the stairs, a bag of salt in each hand, her body softening in the early summer heat, sagging inside of her exoskeleton, bunching up at the ankles and knees.
She’ll layer the bathroom floor with dollar store towels before filling the tub with cold water and adding handfuls of salt. Mom’s beloved vacation bathrobe--kimono sleeved and a riot of flowers in her favorite hues of sunset pink, orange, red, gold--will hang like a garden on the door hook, draped to cover the cheap mirror. Pearl will still be able to smell Mom’s lavender lotion when she presses the worn fabric over her face. Mint from her shampoo. The faintest odor of sweat and burnt match heads, the memory of Mom saying isn’t it amazing that bruises, scars and scratches leave with your old exoskeleton? Can you say goodbye to inside things that made you sad too, little Pearl? Together they lit sparklers down on the beach and spelled out things they looked forward to, hissing light looping into words like friends, camping, swimming.
Before she’s saturated enough for her shell to crack open, she’ll be water-swollen as a tick floating face down in the tub to relieve pressure along her cervical groove. She’ll be numb with waiting until hours later when the nerve endings in her thorax will fizz and wake up again all at once. Jackknifed in half, face pressed into the ceramic curve of the tub, Pearl’s carapace will finally give way with a last exhausted twist and underneath, she’ll be bruise-tender, soft as raw egg.
Flopping into the soggy embrace of soaked towels, she’ll be overcome by hunger. First she will eat her old exoskeleton, a brittle ghost with a dull black tail, bite by small crackling bite, chitinous slivers stabbing into her gums, sticking between her teeth. She’ll lurch from bathroom to the couch, missing when Mom greeted her with bowls of cold, fat shrimp, freshly deveined and peeled, how she said hello shining Pearl, you wiser and more beautiful you! How she held Pearl close so the bathrobe draped around them both as they shared salmon filets, tuna sandwiches with a hint of dill, crawfish on skewers, smelt battered and deep fried.
This year, Pearl will devour cans of plain, undrained tuna, scooping it out with her fingers. After that, a whole bag of frozen, candy-sized salad shrimp, inhaled too quickly to savor the crunch. She’ll lick the ice crystals from the torn bag and move on to a package of krab sticks, followed by a box of uncooked fish sticks. Pearl will imagine doing this same thing year after year after year and how much Mom would hate that, how much she hates it right now, and she’ll remember how on bad days Mom would say you have to be your own fireworks, Pearl! She’ll cry as she places the online order for all her favorites, and Mom’s too.
When the sushi arrives, Pearl will sit on the floor surrounded by plastic containers. Eating with her hands, she’ll feast on slick, fresh nigiri with salmon pink and firm as tongues, ikura sake with soft, round eggs bursting salty as she swallows, battered crab rolls, fusion rolls in bright commotion like flowers. She’ll eat purple-frilled tako and red tobiko. She’ll toast herself at midnight, saying hello, wise and more beautiful me, and she’ll truly want to believe it. Pink roe, tempura crumbs, dark brown eel sauce, pale orange spicy mayo, and leaf green wasabi will smear across her face and belly, the soft bits of her body blooming with color like the robe, her hardening exoskeleton glossy black, neon-orange markings exploding across its field of darkness.
3 a.m. Coyote Sighting, ABQ, Knocking for Jesus
Brett Ann Stanciu is the author of Call It Madness (Regal House Publishing, 2026), Unstitched: My Journey to Understand Opioid Addiction (Steerforth Press, 2021), and Hidden View (Green Writers Press, 2016). A recipient of a 2020 Vermont Arts Council Creation Grant, her essays and fiction have appeared in The Rumpus, Memoir Monday, 101 Word Story, Vermont Almanac, Taproot, Vermont Literary Review, The Long Story, and The Seraphic Review, among other publications. Her story, “The Geese Fly South,” was awarded first place in Nine Muses Review 2024 prose contest. She is the Treasurer for the Town of Greensboro, Vermont, a contributing editor at Vermont Almanac, and received a 2024 Fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center for the Arts. Stanciu lives in Hardwick, Vermont, in a 100-year-old house surrounded by lilacs.