Radium Girl Dreams in Technicolor
Nikoletta Gjoni is a writer living outside of Washington, D.C. Her work has appeared in the 2023 Rising Stars London Independent Story Prize anthology and has been previously nominated for the PEN/Robert J. Dau prize, Best of the Net, and Best Microfiction. She was a 2024 scholarship recipient for the Salty Quill Women's Writing Retreat where she worked towards completing her first novel. View Gjoni's publications at www.ngjoni.com or follow her on Twitter @NikiGjoni.
When I open my eyes, I’m back again. Long table after long table but no feast in sight. Brushes sit lined up like soldiers ready to work, each tip already blackened like a hollow and I know I’ve arrived mid-workday. The windows are as large as they’ve always been, but they overlook a gray veil of a world so thick and murky, I feel as if I’m already wrapped in a shroud.
Ashen light streams through in short bursts that barely reach us, dimming the room and my senses. My fingers wrap around a brush, and I bring it to my lips, stick the tip of my tongue out to wet the bristles, but to my dismay, the tangled muscled mess that sits heavy in my mouth forks like a road, neither of which lead me home.
Beside me on either end sit stooped figures; one with a head of curls thinning at the crown; the other with a sharpened widow’s peak like a premonition. The table goes on and so do the figures like a murder of crows hunched over golden bobbles with nowhere to take them and no one to show.
I open my mouth to speak but I can’t control my tongue, its mind separate from my body—a hydra with dueling heads that split just past my lips and when I seek the urge to speak, all I can manage is a hiss. The hiss turns to bird song and my throat lights up when I sing as if I have swallowed fireflies. The glow fades and grows and fades and grows and fades and grows, but each glow becomes fainter like a weakening pulse.
The song ends, my mouth widens, and I vomit out the aurora borealis, soaking the front of my smock. The neon greens and fluorescent purples and pinks are entrenched in my pores, tethering themselves to the coils of my DNA like bindings. When the colors spread throughout me like drops of blood dispersed in water, I feel a humming in my belly and the ceiling opens to sky, a robin’s egg blue spilling over me like an incantation. I balloon out of the room, the inky figures far beneath me, backs rounded like wintry hills. I grow beyond the brick building and break through the blue to reach the cosmos, the murky Milky Way a blurred thumbprint against the sky, it sits like a papery flower crown around my head.
My body pulses in rhythm with the stars, but no one told me that stars glow only when they die. I see my body as it is—my arms hang far below me like grand trees rising from the ground; fingers are the chartreuse grass blades blustering in the wind; pupils like sinking blackholes greedy for the universe. My torso is a trunk folding unto itself, all rot inside with a façade that’s a thin eggshell of a protective membrane. I am as alive as the constellations spinning in circles—that is to say, not alive at all, but only an echo of what we once were.
The Summer the Lake Flooded and the Alligator Drowned
My sister tells me that she knows the gator. The one that lives in her backyard. It’s why there’s no koi in the pond. “Why encourage him?” she says. She’s got a smallish dog and a smallish niece, and honestly, she’d like to keep both her legs.
And that all feels so far away, far away but familiar like how I know if the greens are cooked right by the tang — the fat and collagen rich smell that gets in the walls — even though I don’t cook greens myself these days.
I think about feeding the gator, making friends, because you can. They’re smart animals and they know which side their bread is buttered on. I wouldn’t try it, I tell myself. I’m not stupid and I’m not Florida brave; I was born a few hours too far north for that. But the idea of this wild thing in her yard has a lure like nostalgia.
Everywhere up here there’s a fence. Even the parks plant high chain links between you and the deep leaf fall, the bottom edges curled up at turtle crossings that I notice because my dog notices. We both stare through the wire at the woods cut up into diamond shapes, unattainable as travel magazine covers.
My sister isn’t on speaking terms with her gator, she’s on grouchy neighbor terms —respect and tolerance and avoidance. This year the storm comes in, cutting hard across the gulf and overland the way a hurricane isn’t supposed to, and when she goes out to survey the damage, she finds the creature belly-up by the fire pit. Neither of us knew a gator could drown. The whole neighborhood is flummoxed. Animal control says it happens sometimes, but no one believes that. Mr. Riley from down in the cul-de-sac blames aliens.
After that, my sister fills her pond with fish that aren’t as bright as she imagined they would be.
After that, I go to the park very early and climb the fence, shaky with the rusty but familiar motion of up and over.
I sit on stump where someone has stubbed out half a dozen menthols and remember how I wound up so far north — the fear of being unwelcome in my own home, of going belly-up for reasons no one would understand.
Kate Tooley (she/they) is a queer writer originally from the Atlanta area, currently living in Brooklyn. They write about the sticky corners of gender and sexuality; complicated families; and the myriad ways in which we become haunted. They hold an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School and are an Associate Editor at Uncharted Magazine.
The Devil Wept
Andrew Bertaina is the author of the essay collection, The Body Is A Temporary Gathering Place, and the short-story collection, One Person Away From You. His work has appeared in The ThreePenny Review, Witness Magazine, Post Road, and elsewhere. His work has been athologized in The Best American Poetry, The Best Microfiction, and listed as notable in three editions of The Best American Essays. He has an MFA from American University.
God was taking time off then. Though to God, who was timeless, it felt like a mere moment. He liked to picnic sometimes under a hanging lake. He liked to forget that he’d made such a mess of things. Under the lake, swifts darted so fast even God couldn’t see them. But this sent him into a tailspin, just one more miscalculation or so He felt.
There was wind in the trees, and the leaves were swaying and shimmering, which always drew His attention, even though he’d made the shimmering and the wind. Still, He could be surprised.
This was something that angered the Devil about God. It beggars’ belief, he often said to some of those who had been damned.
It shouldn’t be possible.
All things are possible with God, one of the cheeky ones reminded him.
Sure. But not that, the Devil said, still miffed.
God was taking his time cutting the edges off a piece of rye from His egg salad sandwich. Though He could not find the salad, only egg. An error had been made.
Someone needed to be held accountable or so He felt. There was spray coming off the waterfall, cooling His face. It soothed Him.
The Devil felt He shouldn’t let anything soothe him. It wasn’t right. He’s made so many mistakes. There should be no rest for the weary, he said.
The damned person who was sitting next to him, who’s name was either Fred or Frank, the Devil could never get it straight, was watching everything unfold in front of him. He thought that the Devil might be distracted or maybe it was that God was finally distracted, so now he could ask the question he’d been harboring in his soul as a clam harbors a pearl. But Frank or Fred was unsure where he should direct the question.
Tadpoles were flickering in the pool at the edge of the waterfall, reeds of green. God was threading His toes through the water and trying to remember why He’d taken his lunch so far away from the universe, leaving everything up to the Devil, who was no doubt making everything awful again.
It was just his way though, God thought. Being angry at him would be like yelling at a baby. He wouldn’t countenance it.
Sure enough, when He looked back on the world it was a real shitshow.
The Devil, of course, hadn’t had anything to do with it. He’d been watching God jealously at His rest the whole time. It was the humans who had turned everything to ash. But he knew he’d never convince God of it. That was what came of a bad reputation or so Frank said. People come to expect the worst of you.
But I don’t expect anything at all? The Devil said, confused.
That’s the problem, Fred said.
The Devil stared at the long pool of water. The tadpoles were moving like comets across the bowl of the sky. There was a rock at the center of the pond, and they were like comets who kept missing their mark, who had forgotten that they belonged on earth, amid the tumult and hubbub of Fifth Avenue. They were supposed to make their way on the rock and eventually, develop lungs, intricated cosmologies and beauty pageants, art work and monogamy. But they were missing the whole of it, all the damnation and splendor of life. The Devil wept.
Fledgling
Katelynn Humbles is a writer and visual artist whose work emerges from the quiet rhythms of rural Dutch Pennsylvania. Her work, appearing in Welter, Wingless Dreamer, Shoofly Literary Magazine, and Essence Fine Arts and Literary Magazine, delves into the nuanced intersections of selfhood, connection, and the unspoken spaces between. Currently pursuing a Bachelor of Arts in Professional Writing at Kutztown University, Katelynn weaves language and art into explorations of identity, intimacy, and the threads that bind us to place and people. You can find her @katelynnhumbles on Instagram.
There’s a bird lodged in your throat. Its beak scrapes your esophagus when you swallow, its claws flex when you breathe. You don’t remember when it got there—only the taste of copper, the sharpness of it. Maybe it was after the fight, when your father hurled the radio into the wall and it splintered into static. You thought the noise had trapped itself inside you. You were wrong. It was the bird.
You wake with a tenderness at your collarbone, a phantom weight where its wings must tuck. In the shower, water ribbons down your spine, warm but insufficient. You scrub yourself with a loofah until your skin burns pink and clean. You pull a black turtleneck over your head. It snags on the brittle edges of your hair. You had cut it yourself last week, because you didn’t trust anyone with scissors that close to your neck.
The bird does not like your apartment. It complains against your ribs. You push yourself out the door before it finds its way to your heart.
On the train, you sit near the window, where the graffiti blurs into pastel smears. You watch the power lines slice the sky into uneven strips, black lines tugged against the morning like stitches trying to hold the whole thing together. Across from you, a man folds a newspaper along its crease and clears his throat three times before he speaks. The sound reminds you of something wet trying to climb out.
When the train lurches, the bird tightens its claws. You press a hand to your sternum as if you can keep it there. As if you can still contain it.
The office smells of coffee grounds and lemon cleaner. You sort emails into folders—URGENT, PENDING, UNREAD—without reading them. The bird flutters when you move too fast, its wings catching in the soft tissue of your lungs. You learn to breathe shallowly, carefully. You hold your breath when you stand.
Your boss leans over your desk. His tie is striped navy and red, the colors of a forgotten war. He asks if you have time for another meeting. You say yes, because you are a creature of habit. The bird pecks once at the soft lining of your throat. At lunch, you sit in the stairwell, where the ceiling smells faintly of mildew and the tile is veined with hairline fractures. You eat carefully. You press each bite of sandwich against the roof of your mouth before swallowing. The bird does not like bread, and it hates pickles. You spit the brine into a napkin.
In the evening, you take the long way home. You walk down the alley behind the liquor store where the streetlights hum at a frequency only insects and children can hear. You pass a man leaning against the cinderblock wall, his face pocketed with shadow. You smell his breath before you see him. The air between you is stitched with damp heat. He stares at you without recognition, but you feel the bird’s wings rattle in your chest. You pick up your pace.
By the time you reach your apartment, you are gasping. You lean against the doorframe with your mouth open. The bird thrashes. You can feel the shape of its small skull butting against the hinge of your jaw. You close your mouth before it can break loose.
You lie in bed without undressing. You do not sleep. You think of how your mother used to call you fledgling when you were small, how she would press her palm to your chest after you’d been crying, feeling the way your heart beat in gasps. Like something frightened and feathered, too delicate for its bones.
When you wake, the bird is still there. Its heartbeat thrums against yours, rapid, trembling. You touch your throat and wonder if you could cradle it. If it would settle. Or if it would peck at you with the same blind ferocity.
If it would ever forgive you.
The Other Goliarda
Katie Shireen Assef is a writer and translator of French and Italian living in Marseille, France. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in La Piccioletta Barca, 3:AM and Terrazzo Mag.
It must’ve been fatigue, that night in the library, sitting in the armchair with her legs tucked up under her, the lamp on the side table casting a greenish glow over the book laid open on her lap; it must’ve been a moment’s distraction or a general grogginess, a state she was often in back then, that caused her to misread, even as she underlined it, a brief passage in the introduction to a novel by Goliarda Sapienza, concerning a tragedy that had befallen the writer’s family several years before her birth. Another child born into that large, blended, fiercely antifascist family was found drowned, washed up on a beach near their home in Catania, a girl of thirteen or fourteen, as she recalled. The parents, in their grief, had soon conceived again, and in their folly had named their infant daughter for the sister she would never know. After reading that book much too quickly, as she often did then, first in the armchair and then lying on her side in her slim dorm room bed, for many years she hadn’t read another thing by Goliarda Sapienza, but on the rare occasion the writer was mentioned she would think of the other Goliarda, murdered, no doubt, by fascists or mafiosos, and how her ghost must have haunted her namesake. It wasn’t until some ten years had passed that she found a copy of the same novel at a beachfront bookstore in the city to which she’d recently moved, many hundreds of miles from her own family, and on a whim she’d bought it to reread, slowly this time, in this new life where she would buy books to read on the beach. This was how, drying off in the sun from a long inaugural swim, she discovered, coming to that same passage in the introduction, that she had feminized the drowned boy in her mind, that she’d made Goliardo Goliarda. Funny, she thought, how she then felt a pang of sadness not for the poor boy but for the other Goliarda, the one who had lingered, however discreetly, in her subconscious all those years. What would become of her now? The matter was made even more confused when, a few years later, at an English-language bookstore in a different city where she’d only just moved, this time across an ocean, she picked up a newly translated novel by the writer with a blurb from a major newspaper on its cover, pleased to find that Sapienza was getting some belated recognition, and, opening to a random page in its much more in-depth introduction, her gaze fell on a passage recounting the older brother’s death, as well as, later that same year, the death at birth of a baby girl named Goliarda.
She had closed the book then, unsettled by the sinister power of her misreading. Her second thought, as soon as she’d dismissed this one, was not for the baby or the mother or even for the poor girl named after two different dead siblings, but for the other other Goliarda, the one who’d haunted Goliarda Sapienza, however intermittently, in her mind all those years. None of her own siblings had died, though at times she was besieged by the fear that one of them would crash their car or leave the gas burner on or fall through ice, as a girl she had often lost sleep over it, she’d stayed up in bed imagining the myriad ways each of them might be taken away, the fear had receded over the years but when it surfaced it was overwhelming, she would reach for the phone and call the sibling around whom the feelings of panic and dread had gathered like crows, often waking them in the middle of their night. Her parents, for their part, had been prudent, it occurred to her now, in naming their children after no one, giving each of them the name that was most common for their gender, in their country, in the year of their birth.
The Store Will be Closing Shortly
Juniper White (she/her) is a red fox, a librarian, and a ghost haunting a house in Portland, OR, where she studies creative writing and theater. She is a trans author of Palestinian descent. Her work appears in Apex Magazine. Find her on X/Twitter @JuneWhiteWrites. If she was a plant, she'd be a wisteria.
When she finds the cat at the supermarket doors, Lucia will look to the skies and say, “Oh, now this is cruelty.” The sky will be silent silver.
The thing will be mottled, matted, scruffy, left paw limping, right eye watering, mewling just like a real kitten. When Lucia picks it up with fatigued arms, she’ll allow herself to pretend its vibrating warmth comes from blood and organs. They’ll have sent her a cat. She shouldn’t take it in, but she’ll know she couldn’t leave it outside and unloved. Her skin will plead to feel something soft and warm.
Past aisles of cereal boxes and expiring eggs, she’ll take the cat to the deli and place it in a sink. It’ll curl up and look at her. It will be filthy, crusted in dirt and blood and pollen, and she’ll melt. How long will it have been since she’s gotten to care for someone else?
She’ll be running out of water, so she will return to the entrance and force open the sliding doors. She’ll hoist the bucket she keeps out there onto her hip. The drought hasn’t been total. She should be using this as drinking water.
Beyond the smoke from the fires she’ll have lit in the parking lot, sacrifices of kerosene and weedkiller, the city will flower and vine. Cherry trees scattering petals, whipping the sky into a green and pink daze. Mosses parading through the streets, concrete cracking around their revelry.
Spores sparkling in the sunset. Orgiastic plumes of pollen. Behind her, the supermarket’s linoleum tiles grow dusty.
Looking at the dusking sky, Lucia will imagine a cloud as a cat. A withered paw and a dark spot by the eye, threatening rain. Should she pray for water? The city flowered during a drought: the first spring without rain in this city for centuries, on the heels of the eighth winter without snow. Lucia’s throat will ache by now for lack of water, but she’ll consider it better than drinking from the plants’ communal networks of mycorrhizae.
And yet, the plants would just thrive with more water. Would they pray for rain, or for the sun to shine until Lucia begged them to make her blossom, to give her roots they can water?
Weary with the effort of not spilling what little water she has, she’ll wedge open the doors and head back inside.
She stands between those doors now. The things stand outside, evangelizing in a conversational mimicry, matches for the forms of the store’s regulars. They’re speaking highly of the community gardens they’ll raise children in.
“Everyone knows everyone,” says Allison, who Lucia used to gossip with in the dairy aisle, shopping after work. “You should really come join us. No more Mondays. No more fear. No more pain. Real connections to other people.”
“You’re not a real person,” says Lucia. “You’re not a person. I won’t leave.”
“You’ve barricaded yourself in a supermarket,” says Allison. “Is that the world you want to cling to? Sterile, barren, fluorescent? Did we ever have time to see each other outside of shopping trips?”
Allison had always said goodbye with a kiss on the cheek. Lucia hasn’t touched anyone since barricading herself in the store. Allison’s skin looks so soft.
Lucia forces herself to think of thorns. “You’re not Allison. You’re just wearing her body.”
“It’s me,” Allison says. “They changed me, but I’m still me, and I’m happy. We deserve better than the old world.” Lucia can see the vines twisting beneath Alison’s flesh.
Lucia won’t allow them to enter the store, but she will bring the cat in, after a month of maple sap seeping through the streets. After a month of watching a botanical bacchanal from the window, pollen in the breeze, while she remains untouched and alone and uncared for, her hair as unkempt as the cat’s fur.
She’ll pocket a bottle of shampoo and get to closing up. Night will be setting, so she’ll light a candle and flip the door’s sign to closed. She’ll wander the checkout lanes and test the locks on the registers, then press the intercom button to say “the store is now closing”, ignoring how the speakers refuse to project her voice.
At the deli, she will pet the cat, apprehensive at its passivity. Bushes will rustle in the wind outside and she’ll slow her breath, listening for rain on the roof.
She will cover the drain and pour water in the sink. The cat will take a step, trying to move through the water, and trip. Lucia will mutter, in spite of herself, “Oh, you poor thing.”
She will rub shampoo into the cat and feel its mangy fur soften beneath her fingers. The thing will be so fragile. Its skin will be so thin.
She’ll have survived this long by holing up and keeping everything out of the supermarket. She’ll have watched the revelry from the window, watched the pollen in the breeze, and she’ll have kept herself safe inside, alone, untouched. But now there will be a cat, or something that looks like one, and all she will want is to care for it.
The fluorescent lights will no longer function and the plumbing will be defunct. She’ll have no way to fix these things. A broken window will be boarded up because she’ll have nowhere to get glass. Eventually, the foods will expire.
She won’t want to be alone anymore. She’ll yearn for an ecosystem. To be filled with flowers and life.
She will pray, but she won’t know for what.
She will drain the sink, pour the last of the water on the cat, and scrub the shampoo out. She will towel it off, comb its fur, and then she’ll be done. The cat will be able to heal. It will purr and lilies will erupt from its mouth, white petals vomiting from its jaws, flowering out of its throat, stems puncturing skin as it blooms.
How About Damascus?
Christopher Murphy is a Professor of Creative Writing at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, OK. His work has been published at Gulf Coast, This Land, The New Territory, and Necessary Fiction among others. He has a collection of flash fiction, Burning All the Time, from Mongrel Empire Press. His forthcoming collection, Territories, will be published by Belle Point Press.
“How about Damascus?” Albert said. “The fellow from the Mossad Caesarea, that baton of a man with the big bushy eyebrows.” John Paul stared at Albert like he was a rude waiter.
“But you remember Damascene apricots?”
John Paul’s face softened a little, wax melted inside an old lantern. “I would take a whole spoonful of jam if you had some. You don’t do you?”
“Afraid not.”
“It was probably stolen.” John Paul motioned with a hand that still held elegance. Albert had listened to him play piano in his foyer while drinking scotch and refusing the looks of John Paul’s wife, Elena. “There’s a cabal of thieves in this place, led by that one.”
John Paul pointed to an orderly dispensing butterscotch pudding. Albert thought he might look like an agent, one of the little guys from Sudan.
“How about Sudan?” he said.
He had lost John Paul’s attention.
“You’re very nice for coming,” one of the nurses said to Albert at the check-in desk. “He’s a sweet man but has very few visitors.”
Albert thought of John Paul as many things—club champion squash player, adequate pianist, cuckold, station chief for pockets of the Middle Eastern and Central Asian theaters from the reign of the Shah to the end of the mujahideen. He wouldn’t classify any of them as sweet.
“How about Cyprus?” Albert said. They sat in John Paul’s room, all fluorescents and beige speckled linoleum. Many of the guests at Piney Shade had pictures of loved ones, greeting cards, artistic renderings of terriers on their walls. John Paul had the score to Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No.2 and the cover of Khalil Gibrain’s The Prophet. He’d always been precisely that sort of prig. “There was a woman who ran that pub in Larnaca, hair you’d get lost in for days.”
“I’m a married man,” John Paul said. “You of all people should know that.”
Albert felt the thrill of his cover being blown, one of his oldest and most ruptured. John Paul once told him, “I don’t prize loyalty. I am not a collector of dogs. I prize initiative and fungibility.”
“I know who you are,” John Paul said. “And I want my Hermès back.”
This had been a theme lately. Albert was apparently in cahoots with the Sudanese orderly, the one with his fingers in all the butterscotch.
Everything Albert asked John Paul was classified. No one cared anymore.
The head nurse told Albert that John Paul had been skipping meals. He was irregular with his medication. “It might be time to think about conversations you want to have with him.”
“How about Sajjad?” Albert said. He’d run to the end of proper nouns to feed John Paul.
He’d kept this one in pocket. It was not a name he was supposed to say out loud.
John Paul leaned in, “But my boy, that was our greatest success.” John Paul put his hand on Albert’s knee, a movement shadowed across decades, and smiled that old, knowing smile.
Albert remembered John Paul’s Beirut field office, the single slow-turning fan, the blistering square of sunshine that fell across the decorative chairs. Albert stood behind the chairs in a merciful patch of shadow. He’d looked down to check but the sweat evaporated before leaving a mark. John Paul looked cool, Casablancan, in command.
“We got him,” Albert said.
“Of course, my boy. We don’t fail.”
What I Can Give
Elizabeth J. Wenger is a queer writer from Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her works have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Anthology. She is the winner of the Baltimore Review Winter Prize in flash nonfiction. She was shortlisted for the Breakwater Review Fiction Prize. Currently an MFA student at Iowa State University, Wenger is writing a collection of essays about desire, violence, and belonging. Her website is wengerwrites.com
I spent much of that spring lying on my back on the carpet and envisioning your head teetering above me held by the thinnest string. There you were, a floating globe, about to fall and come to pieces like the watermelons we used to throw off the bridge on 6th street.
When I wasn’t lying down, I drank unsweetened applesauce from huge jars until my stomach distended. It made lying down more interesting since from out of the bottom of my eyes, I’d see the hill of my stomach and palpate it with my forefingers, pretending they were two hikers on a long journey. One can find the dullest things interesting if one is alone.
And I was alone, despite all the encouragement from friends about how I could find company in the memory of you. Though my memories were of you, they weren’t you—just a series of images in which your features were obscured, as if erased by the rubber tip of a #2 pencil.
It took about 4 weeks of this lying down before I got the call that saved me from a lifetime of sipping applesauce and trying to close the gap between memory-you and the physical reality of you: your out-of-proportion monkey arms, your Adam’s apple sitting like an olive pit in the center of your neck, the way you’d tug at that patchy beard.
“Is this Llewellyn Scott?” came the voice of my savior from the landline I never bothered disconnecting.
“Yes. Who may I ask is calling?” I always replied that way — like my mom taught me —and you always made fun of me saying, just ask who the fuck it is, gets to the point faster!
“This is Dr. Frank,” the voice replied. “I’m with St. Paul’s Charity for the Sick, Blind, and Otherwise Terminally, Chronically, or Occasionally Disabled.”
“I’m not familiar with that charity.”
Assuming a scam, I almost hung up then, and where would I be now if I had? But this Dr. Frank seemed to sense the phone traveling in my hand away from my ear and back to its cradle because he yelled then, so loud it transformed the telephone into a megaphone: “Wait, for Goddsake, we need you!”
Oh, to be needed. I had the phone back to my ear within seconds.
“What do you need me for?”
“It’s your eyes, sir. We need your eyes.”
I rubbed them, remembering they were there. We have all these pieces and parts, it’s easy to forget them individually since they melt into the rest of our bodily beingness. Do you ever think too long about where your tongue is sitting? you once asked me. I couldn’t sit still for days after that. The weight of that wet muscle in my mouth became so uncomfortably present. But eventually, I forgot about my tongue again; it became an inert object sleeping behind my teeth between meals and conversations.
“What do you need with my eyes?” I asked.
“We would like to give them to someone else.” Dr. Frank didn’t elaborate further, which somehow endowed his voice with greater wisdom.
“They can do that now? An eye transplant?”
“We can transplant most anything.”
“Well, I need my eyes, don’t I?”
“That’s a matter of philosophy,” the good doctor said.
“Whose philosophy?”
“It doesn’t matter whose philosophy. It matters whose eyes. And we need yours.”
I remember you saying that everyone has something to give, but that no one is willing to give the thing that others really need. Everyone’s just giving and giving, but never the right thing, you’d said. I didn’t know what you meant or what classified a gift as right or wrong.
This was sometime after we stopped throwing watermelons from the bridge, but before you got so bad you would only speak to me through the mail slot in your front door.
We were sitting on your stoop that day—one of the last days, though I didn’t know it then—and you wouldn’t look at me. You kept flicking the tab on your beer can. That sound, the light, metallic thunk of it, punctuated your words.
What about you? I asked pleadingly, I feel like you’re always giving the right thing. You shook your head and said that was the other half of the problem—you didn’t know how to take the things you needed. So I always end up carved out. That’s how you put it, like you were a hunk of wood someone was trying to hollow with crude swipes of a knife.
“Llewellyn, are you still there?” Dr. Frank asked, and I realized I’d been quiet, wondering if what you’d really needed was a new set of eyes since near the end you said everything was so dark. I offered to buy you one-hundred lamps, but you kept saying that wasn’t enough.
“I’m here Dr. Frank,” I said at last.
“Well, what do you say? Can we take them?”
I started nodding before I remembered I needed to speak. “Yes,” I said. “Take my eyes. Take whatever you need.”
Floating
Melissa Fitzpatrick lives in the Los Angeles area. Her writing has appeared in such places as Five South, Milk Candy Review, MoonPark Review, Flash Fiction Online, Atlas + Alice, HAD, Lunch Ticket, and Flash Fiction Magazine. Find more of her work at melissa-fitzpatrick.com. Bluesky @melissafitz.bsky.social
It’s the only way she knows how to quiet her mind. When she is floating, everything falls away.
Gone: the lap swimmers, the lifeguard, the chattering ladies who linger after water aerobics.
Gone: her weaselly boss and his smug little grin. Gone: the paperwork, the emails, the to-do list.
Gone: the look on her husband’s face when she asked him for money for her mother’s care. A look that made her feel like something he’d scraped from bottom of his shoe. Gone: the humiliation, the treacherous tears that leaked out when she told him she’d find more work, she’d ask for a raise. Gone: her husband’s blank stare when she reminded him of all she’d done for his mother. Gone: the sting when she realized that none of that mattered to him, because she’d done it all for free.
In the pool, it’s all gone. There is only the water. The sound of her breath. The silent blue sky.
The first time she came to the pool, the lifeguard came down from his perch and told her it was lap swimming time. She had to swim or get out of the pool.
That lifeguard must have seen something crack — some sign of impending eruption —because his expression changed to something like fear. He told her she could float as long as a lane was free.
By now, all the swimmers know that the lane belongs to her. They don’t know why she needs to float. They just know that she does. She smiles to them as she enters the pool. Nods to the lifeguard. And then she lies back and lets the water support her.
In the beginning, she came to the pool to let the world float away. But now, in the silence of the water, she is working it out in her mind. How to get gone. How to get free.
She is floating.
She is held by the water.
She is almost weightless.
With the Pirate
Vallie Lynn Watson is the author of the novel A River So Long (Luminis Books); her Pushcart-nominated short stories appear widely in literary journals such as Hobart, PANK, and Bending Genres. Watson teaches fiction in the MFA program at McNeese State University, where she edits the magazine Boudin. She hunts for seaglass in her spare time.
Pirate glass, in sea glass speak, is black sea glass that, with a strong light source behind it, shows a color (olive, maybe, or amber, maybe garnet); the lore behind the nickname is the notion that pirates hid their hooch in black glass bottles, and while it is perhaps the unlikely case that some of the so-called pirate glass I’ve found has in fact been touched by the hand of a pirate, much of the black glass that litters my seashore--pieces made frosty by the saltwater’s reaction with the lime in the glass, giving it a rock-like appearance and making it so difficult to spot--is from pedestrian items like lightbulb insulators.
Until this one piece. This one piece, it was touched by the hand of a pirate! I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life. It wasn’t even the first piece of pirate glass I found that day.
Nor was it the biggest, chunkiest, or frostiest (all the things you want out of your sea glass). But it was the most pirate-y.
I fingered it out of the sand then dropped it in my bulging right pocket with the rest, but I immediately knew. About the pirate. He was a song I’d never heard before, a song I jingled in my hand as I scooped the last four hours’ worth of sea glass out, jingled and jangled the pieces until my scrumptious new piece of pirate glass surfaced among the less-interesting greens, blues, browns, and whites. I lifted him out of the bunch, and tucked him away by himself in my left pocket.
That night, we had drinks, the pirate and I. I bought the drinks. I wasn’t worried about looking uncool. He wasn’t worried about mentioning his wife. I did mention that I was working my way up the peninsula but would work my way back down, the next afternoon.
After too long, the pirate and I walked out of the bar, drink glasses in hand, not listening to the bartender yell at us, and the pirate and I walked through the dark until our bare feet found the sand, and then I told the pirate I’d try to find him as I worked my way back down the peninsula, the next afternoon.
The next afternoon, I worked my way back down the peninsula.
The Sea Monster
Dexter Pahmer is a writer and journalist from Montreal, Canada. He has worked as a features editor for The Link and holds a degree in English Literature from Concordia University.
Smoking his pipe, he’d begun to tell the story of a sailor on shore leave.
“Well then, it must’ve been the middle of the night when Augusto’s tattoos began speaking to him. First it was only a whisper, the freehand frog Frederico, with whom Augusto’d shared his arm since the age of 17:
‘Augusto,’ he yelped. ‘It’s me, Frederico! Up! Up!’ But Augusto didn’t awaken, no he didn’t and so Frederico got up and walked around to the young man’s omoplata—that’s a fancy word for shoulder blade—and he prodded up the sea monster who lived there. ‘Go yonder in that head of his and stir him up some.’ And the sea monster loosened his fat jowls and salivated layers and layers of unctuous black bile onto the sedate lagoon of Augusto’s dreamscape. God, what a nightmare! He was straightjacketed by fervid fears of sudden illiteracy, dreams more real than real itself wherein he forgot how to produce sound from his mouth, dreams where his mouth was sown shut by some 16th century explorer, dreams where he himself was swallowed up by some big fish.
“So he startled up and then he heard them. Those little voices told him to meet them in the bathroom and so he did and, undressed, facing the mirror, he listened to the inky critters, them that had progressively settled his body like landmarks along the anticlines of his muscles, the jagged cuestas of bone and the great vellum basin of his pouchy stomach. Go on and fetch me my bedpan, will ya?” It was frightful thunderous outside; I fetched it and placed it beside him. “So he was looking at all of them, Frederico the frog, the palm tree, the island child, the caravel, Alfonso the lion, the unnamed pin-up girl, Nelson the camel and, then, exactly one year before this night, there’d remained an empty patch on his back. And like the uncharted sea of an antique map, he’d horror vacui’d—abhorrence of the vacuum, mind you—a thick-lipped sea monster, smack dab on the omoplata, with big sharp teeth and bulging eyes bared in an eternal show of hunger.
“Ghaaaak—puh!” That was the sound he made as he spit blood, then he coughed.
“Put that back where ya found it, will ya? Now guess what them tattoos tell him. No, that’s not it. They all faced him and they said, in perfect unison: ‘You are not who you think you are.’
“Now Augusto opened his mouth but his words sunk into oblivion. Nevertheless, the tattoos knew what he was about to say, and they all shook their heads. ‘You’re wrong,’ they said. It wasn’t more than an assertion now.
‘You’ve always been wrong.’
‘We have decided,’ the sea monster added, ‘that you hate us, and that we hate you too.’
‘So!’ said the kid. ‘So what if I do hate you! You’re all ugly! What do you want me to do about it!’ Now they cried in unison. ‘Feed us! Feed us your insides, just as you have fed us your outsides!’ The tattoos began to jeer and ululate like the engraved pagans of a folio print.
‘How…? How can I feed you my insides,’ asked Augusto, who enjoyed his insides.
‘Open your mouth. Let us in.’
“Instead, sly Augusto snatched a roll of scotch tape and, lightning-quick, placed it over his mouth, his mustache, and even his soul patch, and he headed right on back to sleep.
“But! What he hadn’t reckoned was that the tattoos weren’t just presenting him with a request, but an ultimatum,” the man exclaimed. “Therefore, as Augusto was snoring his dainty little young man snores, the tattoos began to huddle together, whispering in an inky tongue no human ear can make out, nor mine nor yours, and that was how they decided. One by one they journeyed down to his hand, carefully stepping over the ring of barbed wire he’d set around his bicep, until this ring itself joined its comrades at the edges of the young man’s fingers. There, on the precipice of some great adventure, they huddled and hugged each other, and one by one they slipped off the body. They coalesced outside, on the white linen. And there the tattoos decided to form their own body, or rather the ink-patterned outline of one, and this mobile schemata walked into the dawn, and it went ahead and found itself a job, health insurance, love, children, grandchildren, and in the end more people were at its funeral than Augusto’s, I tell you this.”
How to Meet Someone
The Author: Anita Harag, the author of “How to Meet Someone”, was born in Budapest in 1998. After finishing her first degree in literature and ethnology she completed graduate studies in India Studies. Her first short stories that appeared in magazines earned her several literary awards and prizes. In 2020 she was the winner of the Margó Prize, awarded to the best first time fiction author of the year, for her first volume of short stories. Her second collection, including this one, was published in September 2023.
The Translators: Walter Burgess and Marietta Morry are Canadian; they translate fiction from Hungarian. In addition to stories by Anita Harag (fourteen have been published), they have also translated fiction by Gábor T. Szántó, Péter Moesko, Zsófia Czakó, András Pungor and Anna Gáspár-Singer; many of these translations have appeared in literary reviews, including in the Singing Fly, the Southern Review, the New England Review and Ploughshares. Gábor Szántó’s book “1945 and Other Stories” (six of its eight stories translated by them) was published in August, 2024.