Voicemail 3 by Elizabeth Walztoni

Voicemail 3

I can’t return everything on the list you sent me because I’m barred from entering the last  K-Mart in the state of Massachusetts now. It’s just that I had something to replace there. I know you’ll find this funny, but it’s not, so don’t laugh. You left behind the heart-shaped box of earrings you were going to give me for Valentine’s Day. I put them all in a shot glass of hydrogen peroxide to sanitize them of your hands and they dissolved. First they turned blue, like a shipwreck. Then they were dust.  

And I figured you would ask for them back once you realized you had left them–you were always so careful with your bank account–so I went to buy some more. You’d find someone else to give them to–you were always so practical. The K-Mart doesn’t look so good anymore, like it did when we were kids. I was one of the only people there and the color of the floor made me sad.

The Valentine’s jewelry was displayed on roundabouts in the aisle, circle tables tiered like wedding cakes. I wanted to cry. I remembered your mother telling me how when she was young she used to steal from this store so much that her classmates would place orders with her for a small fee. Our world was excess, she said. Shirts and perfumes and hairsprays and jewelry. I didn’t cry yet. She would get anyone shampoo for free. They never caught her.

I spun the carousel and found the last red heart with earrings inside. One pair was different than the ones you had bought for me. They were all so tiny and bright. The backing paper looked worn. I hoped you wouldn’t notice that the glass hearts were missing. 

Maybe somehow you never opened the box. I don’t know why I did this, but I put it in my purse and kept walking. When they caught me they told me that I could have just put the earrings on layaway and paid for them later if I didn’t have enough money. The security guard said it to me like it was the simplest thing in the world. Layaway, lady, while he took my picture in front of the claw machine by the door. I’m crying in the photograph.

I had this other picture in my mind of myself walking out of the yellow light into the day, past the religious store next door, winking at the statues in the window and getting into the car and putting those earrings on. I just wanted that picture for myself. It gets hard sometimes feeling like I live in this world where everything else is fading.

Anyway, I asked them to put the earrings on layaway under your name. I’ll mail a check to your mother’s house tomorrow. I have a few of your socks too which I will send separately. Don’t come by to get them, I might not be here.

Elizabeth Walztoni’s work appears or is forthcoming in Roi Faineant, scissors & spackle, HELL IS REAL, and elsewhere. She received a Nature in Words Fellowship from Pierce Cedar Creek Institute to complete her first short story collection. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net & the Pushcart Prize.

https://twitter.com/EWalztoni

Two From Mackenzie Doebler

Passing Through

(CW: Suicide)

“Walter Benjamin and his companions settled into the hotel.  Benjamin, exhausted, went to his room, no. 4 on the second floor… What happened over the next few hours is a striking illustration of all of the tragedy of barbarism” – Walter Benjamin Memorial

     It is a Catalonian sky tonight.  You can hear the trains passing through the Portbou.  My eyes are fixed and contemplating.

     I press my thumb against the glass bottle and listen to the medicine rattle inside.

     Looking up I can see my reflection in the mirror. I try to focus on the light in its center; the aura of a face.

     Two stories up, I am looking out the window and I remember: there is an infinite amount of hope.

     They seek justice and so the world will perish.  I know it.  I am a stain on their Reich.  This is why we pushed and strained over mountains and through vineyards to find this place where we are still like prisoners.

     I could go for a walk, see the Rambla, or watch that Badia and the sea out beyond.  But I am tired from the climb and this hotel is like a prison.

     Escape is hard to picture, I am in no state to leave. The remaining tablets rest in my hand.  A tiny village in the Pyrenees.

     A storm is blowing from paradise and the wings cannot close.  I take water from the tiny sink beside the window and wash them down.

     There is an infinite amount of hope. The trains pass through.  But not for us.

Thin Strip of Road

            Here there is a thin strip of road that runs along corn fields and small rectangular homes.  There, beside the little green house with the small garage, stone steps, and thin metal banister, is the field in which grandfather tended to carry his oxygen tank with him and disappear among the corn stalks.  Close by is the tree, thick at the base with branches that spread over the sandbox where Brother and I spent afternoons with brightly colored plastic cars and speedboats.  Ice cream.  Ice cream always came after.  I try to imagine his smile, and my own.

            Inside the little house there’s a patchy couch where Brother and I sat and ate sour candy until our mouths ached and we couldn’t taste sour anymore.

            There’s a watch strapped on to the support beam in the bathroom and an electronic solitaire machine.  I never understood how the lock worked and I remember crying inside while Grandmother tried to explain how to unlock it (push the knob against its base and turn).  

            Downstairs the carpet is thin and the air is cool.  There are instruments for baking and seats for Halloween.  Have you ever had a popcorn ball? 

            Family members I’ve never met wash into faces I’ve loved and kids I never knew (and wouldn’t know again) dare each other to climb the old thick tree by the sandbox, or jump all the way down the steps.

            And then they were old, which they always were, but suddenly I could see it.  We sit and watch TV, Grandfather points at the jukebox on the pawn show.  I love him and I wish the gulf of the years would go away.  Still, he calls Brother and I tiger and we know we are loved.  

            We used to eat pickles straight from the jar.  I was a clumsy child and the pickle always slipped.  Stupid pickle.  Grandma gave us Blue Bunny Ice Cream which we enjoyed at the dinner table, hiding away from the mid-summer Wisconsin heat.  I remember non-pareils in the candy dish, or Strawberry bon bons.  I remember trekking below the road through the drainage pipe with Grandmother on our way to the store for some kind of treat.

            There is the red SUV heading north on the thin strip of road, away from the little green home with the sandbox and the cornfield, the patchy couch and watch, and the cool basement.

Mackenzie Doebler is a writer and graduate student living in the mountains of North Carolina.  They write when they can, study when they need to, and relax by binging blockbuster flicks with their pet rat Seymour.

Paris of America by Scott Gannis

They met at a bowling alley in Northern Kentucky. 

Her high school sweetheart played for the Bengals. They’d winced through JuCo towns in Kansas and practice squads in Missouri until he ended up covering kicks along the Licking and Ohio rivers. Once you make it, you want to make more. That means dumping your long-time girlfriend. 

Maybe it was because she was blind and grew up on a farm. Maybe it was because she was unemployed. Either way, she was alone now. Six weeks of sitting without deliverance and she took a bus, sight unseen, to a bowling alley across the bridge. 

****

An adoptee from Cleveland with a cocaine habit and a GI father who returned from World War II but never recovered from being one of the only Jews at Bastogne. Life before her was flooded basement apartments and stolen vending machine sandwiches and flipping kielbasa for $2.65 an hour. Halfway house cigarettes, skipping from gutter to gutter. 

She needed a partner. He didn’t have one. He said bowling is golf for poor people, which made her laugh and him blush and the rest of the league snicker at the two broke and broken Midwesterners in the suburbs. They fell in love under the glow of a Cincinnati skyline. The rust had not yet taken hold.

****

I tell you all this—my brothers, my niece, anyone else who intuits how it might end for me—because they were happy once. And like so many love stories, their happiness peaked early, too early. 

Just before the peak, though, came a child. Born in Cincinnati the last time the Bengals made a playoff run. He grew up sad, because they grew up sad. And now his mom is dead and his father drinks every day but he got out, away, lives elsewhere, sees his dad once or twice a year, where they go bowling and don’t talk much. 

Just look at broad alleys like boulevards as the lights shine and pins crash.

Scott Gannis is a former asbestos abatement professional from Minneapolis and the author of Very Fine People (Atlatl, 2020). He tweets @scootergannis

One of a kind Warlock in primary palette by Sheldon Birnie

Bored, the boy built a rockin guitar out of Duplo. 

Earlier, we’d spent some time on a tower, or castle, or some such. But the endeavor failed to capture the boy’s attention. We gave it up, let the blocks of primary red, green, yellow and blue fall where they may. I puttered around, made coffee, tossed in a load of laundry. In that time, a guitar had taken shape.

It wasn’t functional (obviously). But it looked pretty deadly. Not unlike a Warlock whose angles have been squared off and brightened up. The boy wailed on it all morning, through the afternoon and into evening; strumming invisible strings, fingering imaginary frets; riffs recreated a capella, complete with distortion and wha-wha-whammy. More than once, I saw him strike a rockin pose, check his look in the mirror.

Hell yeah, buddy boy. Rock n roll.

Blocks detach, form dissolves, what once was is no more. Smashed to bits in the early evening, burnt out before it could fade away to gather dust in a corner. Pieces gathered, tucked safely away, waiting for the latest spark to bring them out of the shadows once again. Not unlike the brief, fleeting moments of bliss a song cranked up to 10 can provide a soul, young or old. You take what you can get when you can get it and hope you can hold onto that feeling through the brow beating slog that eats up the bulk of our waking moments. 

Sheldon Birnie is a writer from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada who can be found online @badguybirnie

Preserves by Rachel Laverdiere

I ladle piping hot apple butter into a sealer, hand it and a wooden chopstick to Mom and ask, “Could you get rid of the air?” 

            She frowns. Stabs at the centre of the jar, and in a small voice says, “How am I supposed to do that again?” 

            I close my eyes. Inhale. See myself standing on a stool in the small orange kitchen of my childhood. Maman places a warm sealer onto the Formica countertop and says, “On doit se se débarrasser des bulles d’air, ma chérie.” We chase the bubbles from behind the cucumbers polka-dotted with mustard seeds. Things were simpler when I was the little girl and Maman filled me until I brimmed with lessons she’d learned from her mother. 

            I want to dislodge the gaps in her memory. Instead, I take the jar from her hand. Ease the chopstick around the inner contours of the jar. Say, “Like this. You taught me how to do this. You said, ‘We can’t get a seal if we’ve got air.’” It seems neither of us knows what to say next. 

When Mom goes to bed, I call my son. Tell him I went a bit overboard with the cloves. Admit to being short-tempered with Granny. 

            He says, “For a smart person, you’re not very smart.” Explains: She won’t always be like she was. Her concussion, the radiation, the chemo—all change brain chemistry.

            Of course, I already know all of this. I’m just not ready to accept our changing roles. Will she forget each detail she once deemed important enough to teach? Will I bring her back to the orange kitchen—ask her to climb onto the stool, point out the cushions of air between the pickles? 

Mom goes home the next day after her medical appointments. 

            I want to throw myself onto the floor, flail my arms and legs, pull at my hair. Yell, “Sometimes I just want to be the kid!” The one being taken care of. I want to throw a temper tantrum because Mom is sick. I can’t imagine losing her.

            Instead, I stand in the middle of my kitchen and take inventory of what needs doing. It was Mom who taught me to suffocate worry with work. I carry the cooled jars of preserves into the basement. Bring order to my pantry shelves before I tackle the next batch. Who knows how long the results for her biopsy will take?

            As I fill the gaps along the pantry shelves, a memory of my young son and I pops into my mind. We’re unpacking groceries in our Rosthern kitchen. I say, Always put the new yogurt behind the old. Otherwise, the old one will go bad before we remember it’s there.

            I rearrange my handiwork, place last year’s preserves in front of the new. Roles begin to change so subtly we hardly notice. I tidy the rows of apple butter, apple chutney, sour cherry jam, chokecherry syrup and zucchini relish. At least for now, everything is as it should be—at least in this pantry.

            A week later, Mom calls when I’m half done packing pickled beets into jars. The kitchen is humid, the air sharp. I put her on speaker and continue coaxing out trapped air. Mom likes to start her stories from the beginning. She tells me again about how the mammogram detected nothing, but she insisted on an ultrasound. Apart from the bubbles fizzing at the surface, sound is suspended in the kitchen. I hold my breath and wait for her to tell me everything was negative. Slowly, she adds, “And just like I suspected, they found cancer clusters deep within the breast tissue.” 

            I want to scream and rant and rave because haven’t we all suffered enough? 

            Instead, I wipe beet brine from the counter before the stain sets—another of Mom’s lessons—and, as though on cue, the lid of the canner starts to tremble. I tell her, “The water’s boiling. How about I call back once I'm done with my beets?” I’m surprised how calm I sound. I steal a pickle from the jar, let the tears come with the tang of sweetened vinegar. 

            In my mind, I follow Maman down the narrow wooden stairs into the musty cellar. My fingers bump along rows of cool glass sealers: carrots & peas, stewed tomatoes, rhubarb jam, mustard beans. I linger, write my name in cursive through the thin layer of dust on a jar of giant dills while Maman restocks the shelves—her dark wavy hair sways as she bends and reaches, bends and reaches. She is the strongest woman I’ve ever known.  

            I shake the memory from my mind and resume jostling each jar of pickles. Bang each on the counter before I do a final sweep for bubbles. As I lower the loaded rack into the boiling bath, one of the sealers wobbles. Mom’s voice pipes up, It never hurts to double check. I pop the lid of the questionable jar and prod the contents. Sure enough, despite my elimination tactics, pockets of air cling undetected. Like cancer cells. 

            I want to weep, throw my hands in the air and give up.

            Instead, I unload the rack, remove each lid. I’m not taking any risks. My hands, the floor and countertops bruised purple, I prep my pantry. I stand back and imagine this shelf come tomorrow—a jeweled row of mustard beans, pickled beets and dilled carrots. For now, everything is in order. I step into my new role and call Mom back.

Rachel Laverdiere writes, pots and teaches in her little house on the Canadian prairies. She is CNF editor at Atticus Review and the creator of Hone & Polish Your Writing. Find Rachel's prose in Grain, The New Quarterly, Atlas and Alice, The Citron Review and other fine journals. For more, visit http://www.rachellaverdiere.com.

Washington's Sestina by Maura Way

for 1979

When I was six, I spotted a rat behind the radiator in my classroom, but didn’t say anything. George Washington loomed over the class, unfinished, and glaring like a holy ghost or some smoky saint. Raoul threw up every day because of the thermos of milk his mom packed in his lunchbox. I looked away. I escaped into chapter books with Billy Jo Jive and Strawberry Girl. 

On the walk home one day, were piles of whole rooms, unfinished, on the sidewalk near the high rises. Was it free? No, chapter 8, eviction, my mom explained. The bed belongs to another girl, pink canopy, ruffles, and all? Where will she sleep? Jesus, Mary, and Saint Joseph, just remember it is not up for grabs. Men roll an electric radiator, and a port-a-crib full of toys down the alley. Landlord must have milked them dry. 

Back home, a cartoon man jams on a junkyard radiator. Our television set is enormous, but black and white. My unfinished comic books are more colorful. I pour myself a glass of milk and sit on the sofa that smells the least like cigarettes. There aren't girls in most of these superhero stories. I like Catwoman; she's no saint, but learns a lesson. 

And on the news, a man from our local chapter says my dad will strike soon because of some unfinished business. Teachers aren't just a bunch of sweet old ladies and milque-toast men! My dad teaches high school U.S. History, but he went to St. Anthony's. He had nuns who would hold his fingers on the radiator to make him be right-handed. 

What am I going to do with a little girl? my dad told me he said when I was born. Not repeat that chapter, I guess. They sent me to school in a public demountable where girls  don’t have to go to church, can wear pants, run for office, study radiation, fix carburetors, sing we could be engineers. We are free to be unfinished gems, win at soccer, not cross our Toughskins. 

We have new saints: Harriet Tubman, disco, and peanut farmers. There are chapters in our textbook the teachers said aren’t true at all. The milk of human reality, we’re soaking in it. Parents with the Saint-Exupéry philosophy want us to see rightly. Blizzards (like milk) are always good for us. Make us stronger. Moms of other girls' became subs called scabs. School goes on without me. 

The unfinished problems didn't disappear like our snowgirls in the spring. Radiator rats remain. We get a new president, go back-to-basics. My own chapters will melt and pond and spiral. A sweet territory of marvelous spilt milk dribbles over the sharp edges. Decades open and close, unfinished. Stateless songs strike broken accordion metal, still radiating—

Originally from Washington, DC, Maura Way lives in North Carolina, by way of Boise, Idaho. Her debut collection ANOTHER BUNGALOW (Press 53) was released in 2017. Her work has recently appeared in 100 Word Story, The Red Ogre Review, Crack the Spine, Unlikely Stories Mark V, and Poet Lore. Maura has been a schoolteacher since 1995. She currently works with the Classes of 2022 and 2025 at New Garden Friends in Greensboro @anotherbungalow & mauraway.com

Rooftops by Amy Lyons

The town was pubs and dry cleaners and side streets and teenagers kissing up by the dead train tracks. It was beer and backyards and chain links. Stay-at-home mothers who couldn’t afford to stay home, couldn’t drag their disappointed bodies off the couch, couldn’t scrounge up the strength to let loose their hair from foam curlers. The town had seasons and in winter the town was a cozy snow globe, except in the houses where the guys who fell from the rooftops lived.

Guys with families. Guys who climb tall ladders and run wire or lay shingles or clean gutters, paint. When they fell from rooftops, they went to the hospital. For a while there, in the mid-nineties, doctors were giving these guys OxyContin. When the prescriptions ran out, the guys turned to heroin. 

My mother wasn’t one of the stay-at-home mothers and my father wasn’t one of the guys who fell from one of the rooftops. She was a nurse and had short black hair, dignity. He was a mailman. Strapped to a satchel, his back bent like a rooftop. Discs bulged until they ruptured under the weight. A piece of his smile was delivered with every letter until it was no longer. A guy shook a pill into my father’s palm at the pub. “Prescription,” the guy said. Orange bottles infested our bathroom mirror’s belly. Then the doctor said “done,” and my father wandered the town, weaving the streets below the pretty rooftops. Down there, on the ground, he found that heroin  mimicked the relief of the doctor’s drugs. 

At night, when I was supposed to be sleeping, the fury of my father’s addiction laid waste to my mother’s dignity. They’d spill from the house, hoping I wouldn’t hear, but the window above my bed overlooked their unhappiness. Her sorrow crashed into his shame. They tore up the front lawn, until windows lit up in neighboring rooftops. “Charges?” said cops. My mother never said “Press.”   

In my bedroom with the poppy flower wallpaper and window carved into the rooftop, I kept a collection of mossy rocks. The rocks had submerged parts of themselves in the shallows of the pond near the dead train tracks. When my parents fought, I made a ring of the rocks and sat at the center. I imagined it would feel like safety, but I could still hear her wailing.

One more trip to the pond, two more trips, three, four, five, my ring rose like a castle, a fortress, a kingdom. Walled off, my father’s screams sounded softer, almost like whispers, gentle murmurs of love. But unlike my house and the houses in my town, my stone structure had no rooftop. I’d robbed the rock walls of their water. They crumbled, unsound. I sat amidst sand, my parents roaring around me, and knew neither rock, nor rooftop, nor pill could protect. 

Amy Lyons has recent work in or forthcoming from HAD, Waxwing, Prime Number, Flash Frog, BULL, No Contact, and FRiGG. She’s a 2021 Best Microfiction nominee, and a 2020 Best of the Net and Best Small Fictions nominee.

Lucid breathing by Shelley Johansson

I’m in my parents’ living room, lying on the floor beneath an oil portrait of my dad that hangs high on a wall among paintings he created as a college student. I can hear Daddy talking on the other side of the wall, in the kitchen – he sounds happy but I can’t make out what he’s saying. As I watch, his face and body in the portrait rapidly age. He’s dying and I am paralyzed and I finally realize I am dreaming. The portrait, which doesn’t exist except in my mind, disappears as his voice goes silent. A grainy slideshow of his life appears in its place. I wake up gasping. 

**

A ringtone sounds, the mechanical quack, quack, quack of a duck call. Mom’s eyes are round, mouth open, her face glazed with shock. Quack, quack, quack, Mom set that ringtone for Daddy because he loved duck-hunting. I hold my breath as she moves with deliberation across the room to answer. From her end of the call I understand it’s someone at my dad’s office, the firm that bears his name -- they’ve finally boxed up his belongings, could she pick them up? Crushed, we resume our board game. After dinner she cries as she resets her phone so the office number will ring with the default tone. Nobody sleeps that night.

**

I’m in a noisy room full of people with Daddy but know that I’m asleep, that I am having a lucid dream. He’s right in front of you, I think to myself in the hubbub -- there he is. What do you want from him, you can ask anything, say anything, now’s your chance. I reach for him and exhale into his solid yet soft embrace and feel his chest rise and fall with his breath. Daddy never stopped hugging first and I hold onto the dream.

Shelley Johansson lives, writes and sews in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.. Her creative nonfiction has been featured in Rejection Letters, The Bitter Southerner, Points in Case, Lumiere Review, and the Prairie Schooner blog. Find her on Twitter at @shelleyjohansso.

April Notes: an excerpt from DUPLEX by Mike Nagel

It's getting warm again. At night the air conditioner runs. This duplex isn't sealed up very well. This duplex is kind of a shithole. It was built in 1953. A real low point for duplexes. The HVAC guy comes to check whatever needs checking and tells me that we're basically living in a worse-case scenario HVAC-wise.

"Uh oh," I say.

"Calm down," he says. "Be a man about it."

He walks around with his hands on his hips, shaking his head. His disappointment is obvious. It seems we could have been doing a better job at whatever it was we were supposed to be doing. He wipes some dust off a shelf with his fingers.

"Pets?" he says.

In Speedboat, Renata Adler says that when you live in the city anyone can call your life into question. But I live in a small town and it's the same thing here. At any moment you can be revealed to be a person who doesn’t know what's going on. It's a risky business even picking up the phone. It could be anyone calling. Lately I've been getting calls from a number that looks like mine. The person calling could be me.

“Why do you keep calling me?” they say when I answer.

“I haven’t been calling you,” I say. “You’ve been calling me.” 

I get the feeling we're both being scammed. But for what purpose? And at what loss? How is this even a viable business model, I'd like to know? It seems the scams have gone art house. They're all 501c(3).

"There's a sucker at every poker table," Matt tells me. "I never know who it is so I always know it's me."

Our ceilings are too high. Our ducts are too small. There is no room to expand the ducts. They'd have to knock out the bedroom wall. They'd have to get creative. Our ceiling fan, I find out, has been spinning in the wrong direction.

"Anything else?" I ask the HVAC guy.

"Yeah,” he says. “I know you haven't been changing the filter.”

"We have been changing the filter," I say.

"Listen," he says. "It's cool. You don't have to lie to me. I'm on your team."

"We've been changing it," I say.

"If you lie to me I can't help you," he says.

"Every month," I say. "Like clockwork."

"Don't think of this as an inspection," he says. "Think of it as a collaboration."

Lacking much else by way of plot, I watch the weather for rising and falling action. A few months ago it was all falling. Now it's all rising. The weather is a George Saunders short story. Over time, the weather is a George Saunders short story collection. The grass seems to be turning green again. The leaves are coming back. It's almost tempting to see some sort of pattern in all of it. I said almost. 

"I think sanity is the most profound moral option of our time," Renata Adler says. But that was fifty years ago. Fifty years ago and counting. 

During the day it gets up into the 80s. The air conditioner runs constantly and inefficiently. Eleven cents per kilowatt hour. Cooling down the neighborhood. A drain on natural and unnatural resources. I've heard the most environmentally devastating concept ever invented was human comfort. A close second was the atomic bomb. 

At night we drink Topo Chico on the patio and complain about our jobs. They're so much work, these jobs. They're so demanding. While we talk the dog hunts around the backyard for squirrels. Last night he found a snakeskin in the grass. It occurs to me that a house that lets so much out could also let things in. 

The light fades and then we’re sitting in the dark. Our next-door neighbor starts grilling something on his driveway. He listens to mariachi music and turns on his car headlights. Glowing white smoke floats up over the fence like a mushroom cloud. Later our whole place smells like brisket and hot sauce and I have some mariachi tune stuck in my head but don’t know any of the words.

Mike Nagel’s essays have appeared in apt, Hobart, Split Lip, Salt Hill, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere around the internet. His first book, DUPLEX, is now available for preorder from Autofocus Books: autofocuslit.com/books. He lives in Plano, Texas.

Vampire Girl by Robin Sinclair

She once told me that she was a vampire. She played BloodRayne a little too often and copied the mannerisms of what's-her-name from Underworld. She claimed to drink absinthe, but I think she just saw it in Van Helsing, the one with Hugh Jackman. I don't know, maybe she wasn't obsessed with being a vampire, maybe she just wanted to be Kate Beckinsale. 

This was the prime of the early-aughts commercialized mall-goth. A time when whatever people my age call “alternative” was being dragged behind the horse carriage of consumption to die the slow death of exsanguination in the town square. Also, people my age are probably too old to care about such things.

But... Some of them do.

Viciously. 

You can find them in bars, having a miserable time because the DJ played a song that was more Post-punk than classic Goth. I like to imagine a world where we all allow each other our peculiarities if it makes for a happier existence, but I can't imagine anyone who feels the need to berate strangers for not knowing Bauhaus deep cuts as “happy.”

We all need something we feel ownership of. Enveloped in. Tribalism keeps us feeling safe and warm. It might disgust them to think so, but the aging alt-moms rolling their eyes on Thursday goth nights have a lot in common with Vampire Girl. They need to feel different, they need to feel the same, and they need to hold onto a tribe, even if it doesn't exist. 

And, for both of them, the absinthe is just for show.


Robin Sinclair (they/them) is a queer, trans writer of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Their poetry can be found in various journals, including Trampset, Luna Luna Magazine, and Pidgeonholes. Their fiction and nonfiction can be found in Black Telephone Magazine, The Daily Drunk, and Across The Margin. RobinSinclairBooks.com

Spring by Kathryn Mayer

The girl taking the next clipboard at the front desk also picks up a fish. Reaches into the tank, soaking the edge of her shirt sleeve, takes a slippery orange fish in her fist, and pulls it out into the open air. She squeezes its wet, struggling body and laughs in a way that is too loud and too exuberant, like a tour guide. But she is picking up the next clipboard at the triage section of the psychiatric clinic.

“You got some of these bright-colored fish again,” she says to the man behind the desk. A standing fan hums next to the open window. Canned laughter on the television attached to the corner of the ceiling. Streamers blowing out of the fan like desperate fingers.

“Love these things,” the girl says. “Definitely need one. Finals week, you know. Do you always have these out or is it a seasonal thing? Last time I was here they had them too but that was last year. I’m glad, anyway. They’re so cute.”

The girl takes the fish with her to sit in one of the old brown woven chairs in the waiting room.

“Are you asking if I’d be jealous of Maria?” a woman on the TV asks. “She’s four hundred pounds!”

The audience laughs.

The girl squeezes her fish quickly and several times, as if she’s pumping the life back into it. Her dark hair is frizzing in the heat. We are both sweating despite the fan.

In the corner of the room, an overweight man in a pastel-colored shirt is pacing back and forth, shooting glances in my direction. A thin woman with gray hair comes in and greets the boy leaning against the wall by the window wiping the sweat from his brow.

“Hi,” the woman says. “I’m Jerry.”

She descends into hushed tones as she escorts the boy down the hall. Fifteen minutes ago, I asked the man behind the counter for Jerry, but he told me that Jerry was busy and already had a client and he would find me a different doctor. She would be out soon. I just had to wait.

The lack of artificial light in the waiting room, the manual air conditioning, the coarse thread of the chairs, and the sweat and raw sunlight in the windows makes it feel like a clinic in another era.

The fish slips out of the girl’s hand and onto the carpet, lifeless. She picks it back up.

Kathryn Mayer lives, works, and writes in Baltimore, MD, where she also grew up. She is a graduate of University of Maryland, College Park, and the Jimenez-Porter Writers House. Her work has been published in New World Writing and Pif Magazine. kathryn-mayer.com.

UPON WATCHING A GOOGLE PHOTO MONTAGE OF MYSELF ON MY WIFE’S PHONE BY Michael Wheaton

I age quickly: hair thinning until bald, waist expanding until thick. A low angle of a fretboard in my bare hand, a straight shot pose in cap and gown, a dozen candids of Amy and I until we’re in tux and dress, and then come the baby pictures—us and our two boys. I feel like I am standing invisibly behind my friends and family watching this on a screen at my own funeral. I’m wondering: is nostalgia a symptom of the fear of death? You look at life as if you’ve already died and cherish it to the point you negate the present. I think that’s why I’m drawn to it.

My toddler Vinny loves to watch the montages on Amy’s phone. Having not seen his grandparents in a while, he claps each time a montage of one ends and cries until she replays it. Amy tells me that small children want to do the same things again and again for two reasons: 1) It’s how they learn. 2) It’s as if they are trying to relive the same happiness repeatedly so they can avoid shifting back into their normal, which is chaos and confusion.

Sometimes I worry about Amy or the boys dying, especially all at once—in a car maybe. What would I do? Alone in the house, I would watch and re-watch every video I have of them on my phone. I wonder if it would help. Maybe it’s the only thing that could. 

I was stoned when I wrote the first draft of this. I’m stoned right now revising it. In between then and now I had stopped smoking weed for a little while. I quit smoking sometimes when the highs stop hitting like they should. I know if I quit for long enough, when I have it again, I’ll get that comfortable fuzzy feeling again just the way I want it. Already, I find myself smoking bowls again all day every day just to feel normal, by which I mean still utterly full of chaos and confusion but getting stuff done anyway. It’d probably be the same pattern if my family died and I was left with only pictures and videos: every time you attempt reliving a feeling, you lose more of the original, and with over-simulation, the feeling vanishes. You can’t escape the void.

Vinny’s crying again on my lap. He wants Amy’s phone. I do too. I think maybe nostalgia isn’t a symptom of the fear of death. It’s the fear of life.

Michael Wheaton is the publisher of Autofocus and host of its podcast, The Lives of Writers. For more to read, check mwheaton.net.

Diary Entries – 11/52 by HLR

Monday

super sad again today, choosing names for children that I’ll never have.

Tuesday

thinking about that time we took a bottle of rum for a walk through the churchyard & along the river at 5am & I had a secret packet in my jacket pocket & we sat among the sleepy ducks & snorted it as the sun came up & felt like we were properly in love with one another for the first time since the very first time.

Wednesday

I can’t remember if I sometimes behave badly because of all this psychiatric medication I take, or if I take all this psychiatric medication because I sometimes behave badly.

Thursday

I want to make a fish pie, but I do not have the strength to mash potatoes.

Friday
 
listless / restless / useless, will I ever be well???

Saturday
 
when I miss you, I hug [the memory of] your skeleton.

Sunday

10 hour zoom party (calculated euphoria!) then the morning devastation & my life still isn’t done… so why is yours? Would I want you to live through this? Of course. Selfishly. Of course.

HLR (she/her) is a prize-winning poet, working-class writer, and professional editor from north London. Her work has been widely published since 2012, most recently by Hobart. HLR is the author of prosetry collection History of Present Complaint (Close to the Bone) and micro-chapbook Portrait of the Poet as a Hot Mess (Ghost City Press). Twitter: @HLRwriter

The Reason I Left at 1pm on a Monday by Dayna Copeland

i.

Clay-caked boots, sour stomach, starving, yellow bile churning. Cold enough to make the knuckles in my hands burn and radiate. Frozen bones banged around against crude barn tools felt hammer-struck. Barrels and latches. Blood and shit. Alone on the mountain, at the end of a disintegrating driveway. 

The barn doors were blocked high with heavy, spring snow. Mud and rocks that fell loose from a steep slide. The moist leather bridle bands were frozen into the metal latch around her face, impossible to undo with blunted, numb fingers, split at the nails. Impatient puffs erupted in little fits from her velvet nostrils. 

We wrestled, and when I finally broke the latch free, the same second she went sideways like a thunderbolt; stepped on the toes of my right foot. Her metal-tooled hoof, packed with shit, crumbled over my wet, leather boot. Some part of me throbbed- broken underneath. A whip snapped in the sand, put a hand to my own throat, adrenaline bath.

She was never going to let me catch her.

ii.

Garnet Pontiac Grand Am blazing across the Nevada desert, twenty-four-years-old with a five-stone diamond ring on my left hand, married on the last day of July. Constellations of airplane lights twinkled at dusk. Purple and gold sand dunes melded a cloud-blurred horizon and the rocky earth below. Losing radio stations, only the scientology preacher coming in clear.

“Do you believe in aliens?”

Driving all the way through the night to meet the wildfire at mile marker 119; smoke syrupy, so thick. A buck elk panicked by the roadside––swerving and weaving between the lines like a drunk––bolted into the burning woods at the sight of me. A wall of ashy, orange light cut the darkness where he disappeared, smoldering bark popped and squealed in a dance. A neon-vested road worker in a gas mask waved me through the barricade as though to promise it was safe to continue on alone, forever. 

The sun came up over Vegas. Amusement park rides and water features unveiled themselves before me. But first, pulling over by the side of the road to nap- to curl up in the fetal position with a woven Mexican blanket bought at the gas station, I planned to sober up at 5am. 

Reeling to be a Newlywed, to be alone, wandering the Southwest shanty lands. I was looking for edge and independence, clinging to a fleeting youth. I was dire to be red-wine-drunk through the night, still afraid of being hunted by dangerous men, confronted by wildfires. The morning belonged to me, though, the danger of it. 

iii.

I loved him. I always loved him. Soft, wide hands and a voice that vibrated low in his chest when he laughed, doe-brown eyes and an engineer’s mind. A kiss on my front porch at seventeen, warm neck, boney, blonde-freckled nose pressed into my cheek. He was good, truly good, and safe. But after a decade, I just didn’t feel like safe was enough. It wasn’t his fault. When I married him, I wasn’t done being wild. I wasn’t done wandering. I was only just discovering. 

Dayna Copeland writes experimental and narrative non-fiction from the perspective of a woman stuck somewhere between poverty and privilege. A mother, a wife, a middle child- Dayna seeks to offer a window into the humanity of the female experience beyond the pursuit of partnership. A graduate of writing programs at Yale and Florida State University, Dayna writes about the woman's pursuit of legacy, purpose, honor and spirituality.

Since You are Gone: I Dreamed You Laughing by Koss

Since You are Gone: I Dreamed You Laughing 

Dream One, 2019 - Torrents. Mudding the hill around your stuccoed home. Rain dream of unknown towns. Your suburb. Never entered. No reason to go there. Ever. Gray, swamp green, and water washing and spraying its warnings. No baptism. No redemption. No cleansing. What kind of girl are you if you are, indeed a girl, to live here in this doomed place? Rain. Glooming the swamp with no stops. Doors closing everywhere and biblical rushing rain in eyes, ears, and lungs. Floating muggy and without body in the downpour as clay cascades down your hill. Hovering above the snake, its blacking skin twisting, then slipping invisible into its hole near your window. We had just met.

Dream Two - Hovering weightless above the faceless man’s bald spot in the room’s whiting. Skin like a peach sun poking through thinning pubic hair, his pudgy flesh stretched over a once-muscled frame. Don’t open the doors, sir, but of course he does. Or they release themselves like bleached eyes when the night arrives. Yes, the cabinets holy, white, and inviting, open themselves. Inside a fat black snake, human-female size, as if roped inside with hands tied behind, a shiny wiggling, a damsel on a railroad track without a railroad track. The snake, for certain, is a she and he is standing in the stillness of my dream in the shock of white. Then I’m gone. 

Dream Three, March 2021 - I am traveling, in England, perhaps, or India, or both. My luggage is late, just as it was in Manchester, when Max told me they couldn’t have lost it. Waiting as empty conveyers chatter and silver their disappointment, but then the snake arrives, thick and black, and wiggling. The size of a woman, a particular woman I have known but never have met. The snake scaling my dreams. I imagined her laughing as she lay there, bare and wet on the track.

Dream Four - I rush to my luggage which is trapped in a conveyer. Max is nowhere and I’m panicked. Must act fast. My wallet slips from my grip into the conveyer, but when I reach to pick it up, there are writhing bundles of snakes cascading from a log riddled with holes. The conveyer clanks and moves. I plead with a worker to help me get my wallet which has vanished. He smiles and proceeds down a corridor. 

June, 2021 - Heat. Inertia. The yard that overcomes. Thigh-high grass. The smell of gasoline. I am mowing, finally, and sadly, killed some things. The whipped weeds and seeds of dandelions. Milkweed stalks who didn’t need me. Then the snake, caught in the blade, slung to the gravel bed near the house. 

July, 2021 - Fumbling with the keys to the shed. I’ll master the grass and keep the snakes away. But they love to sun on the warm wood. And they are patient, can wait all day for their prey. I open the doors and the tiny snake coils near my feet, then races into the shed. Two weeks later, same thing. The snake spiraled in the meeting of two swinging doors, inert in the summer heat, but ready.

Koss is a queer writer and artist from the MidWest. Find their work in Diode Poetry, Hobart, Cincinnati Review, Gone Lawn, Bending Genres, Anti-Heroin Chic, Prelude, Best Small Fictions, and many others. Keep up with Koss on Twitter @Koss51209969 and Instagram @koss_singular. Her website is http://koss-works.com.

‘Screaming Infant’ Oil on Canvas 9 in x 12 in by Nick Fairclough

I see myself in the portrait. Not how I look, but how I feel. How I feel I should look but don’t.

Can’t.

Yet, this picture feels more accurate than looking into any mirror.

My son screamed when he came bursting out of the womb. His naked body glistened. Dollops of pinks, reds, browns, and yellows. Unblemished skin covered in bodily fluids and mucus. The doctor said it was his way of announcing himself to the world. I disagree. I think he was confused, in shock. He too could make this thing called noise. This phenomenon he’d been listening to for the last few months, albeit distorted in the chamber of his mother.

“He’s got a good set of lungs,” the midwife remarked.

He continued to make this fantastic noise as the nurse laid him on the table and struggled to clean his wriggling body. Stubby limbs flailing about in the resistanceless air. He heard a familiar voice, my voice, and the scream subsided. It was over. 

After all these years, all the attempts I’ve made, I’m still unable to produce the primeval scream I witnessed that day. 

I strive to reach this state of expression. A polar contrast to me, wooden, as unmoved as a tree, standing in a gallery like still life.

Why don’t I just go for it, let loose, give off a howl? That’d add salt to the occasion.

“Are you done looking, dad?” My son calls from the foyer. “C’mon, let’s go.”

I follow him out the door.

Nick Fairclough is a writer on the cusp. His stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions. He’s been shortlisted and longlisted but he’s not quite there, not yet. He lives in Aotearoa New Zealand with his family. https://nickfairclough.wordpress.com/

Fish Heaven by Bram Riddlebarger

On the Montana highway, just west of Missoula, they pulled their truck into a rest stop before the heavy mountains. It was very hot, but they knew the snow could come at elevation. Shade covered the hood of their truck.

A broken-down tractor-trailer took up much of the lot. The driver stood over the engine, looking into the heat. He had not made the mountains. The couple watched the driver from a bench in September. It was good to rest before Idaho.

The St. Regis River flowed beside them. The woman stood and walked over to the water with the dog. There were fish in the clear water of the river. The man left the bench. Spoiled fish, he thought. We only have to pee and to rest a little. We aren’t manna from fish heaven. “Come on,” he said, “let’s go.”

“Fuck you.”

The dog stared at the fish. The man watched a motorcycle gang roar past. Each bike the same: man front, woman back.

“Do you see all these fish?” the woman asked. “I wish I knew what they were.”

The dog was in the water. The fish didn’t mind. They were used to traffic.

“I think they’re carp.”

The tractor-trailer coughed into life.

“Goddamn it,” said the man.

“If there’s enough time today, I’d like to buy a bathing suit.”

“Honey,” he began.

She turned around. The fish swirled around the dog’s legs.

They passed the hazard lights of the semi, first gear grinding, climbing climbing climbing, up the near side of the mountain.

Bram Riddlebarger writes, plays music, and lives in SE Ohio.

Silent Danger by Amy Bassin and Mark Blickley

It was starting again.  His father slammed the bedroom door so hard Nicholas could feel the vibrations travelling down the hallway, searching for him. He jumped off the kitchen chair.

Nicholas knew those vibrations. Like lightning, they were attracted to metal and it didn’t take a genius to know that the new kitchen set his mother recently bought had chairs with aluminum legs.

After the vibrations wobbled the chair, the yelling began. His mother Lucille, and his father Charlie, were now locked in their bedroom.

Nicholas liked living in the city but when the yelling started, he always wished he was living in the country.  It wasn’t the trees or grass or fresh air Nicholas longed for, it was a house. A big house far enough away from his neighbors so his parents’ yelling couldn’t be heard. Everyone in the building could hear their screaming and the next day at school Nicholas would be teased about it.

No one called Nicholas by his given name, not even his parents. His father was always asking, “Hey, Nick, how’s it going?”  Nicholas would answer, “Things are going swell and my name’s Nicholas, not Nick.”  That’s when his mother would laugh and say, “Lighten up, Nicky.” 

The first time Nicholas realized he hated the name Nick was one morning at the breakfast table.  Nicholas was busy scooping out raisins when his father burst into the kitchen with his hand on his throat. Blood was seeping through his fingers.

Lucille jumped up from the table.  “My God, Charlie, what did you do to yourself?”

“I didn’t do anything!  It’s these cheap razors you buy.  Even when I use a fresh blade, I nick myself.”  Charlie pulled his hand away so his wife and son could admire his wound.  The sight was so ugly that Nicholas’ cereal stopped tasting sweet, so he pushed it aside. 

“If you stop buying such expensive liquor, I might be able to spend more on razor blades!” shouted Lucille.

“Since when have you complained about the quality of booze I bring into this apartment?” Charlie shouted back.

“Since it’s given you the shakes so bad in the morning you cut your own throat!”

“Ha!  You’re the cut throat in this house!” snapped Charlie.

“How dare you say that to me, especially in front of Nicky!” cried Lucille. But she need not have worried.  Nicholas was already running down the apartment stairs, heading for school.

As much as Nicholas disliked the name Nick, he hated Nicky even more.  It rhymed with sticky, tricky, sicky and much worse.  More than once he was the subject of some other hot-shot fifth grader’s rap song.   

Hey you little dicky Nicky,

Clean that fat ass so sticky

But it might be a little bit tricky

So buy a dog to quicky licky

You into not smelling so icky

But be careful its teeth don’t give you a hickey 

No, you could keep Nick and Nicky, but Nicholas he liked.  It had dignity. Long enough that people had to make an effort to say it.

Nicholas tip-toed down the hallway as he made his way to his room.  He didn’t want his parents to hear him.  Despite all the loud arguing coming from their bedroom, he still had to be careful if he didn’t want to be detected.  That’s because a strange thing happened whenever they started their shouting matches.  Whoever was doing the screaming had the other’s complete attention.  The two voices never overlapped, never collided.  When one parent stopped yelling there’d always be a slight pause before the other parent started in again.

It was these pauses that were dangerous.  As soon as they were aware of their son’s presence, they’d stop yelling long enough to ask Nicholas to judge which one of them was in the right.  No matter what Nicholas said it always made things worse. 

One night at the dinner table he asked his parents about their fighting style.  “Mom, Dad, how come when you fight you never scream at the same time?”

His mother straightened up in her chair. “It’s because we’re civilized people, Nicky.” 

New York interdisciplinary artist Amy Bassin and writer Mark Blickley work together on text-based art collaborations and experimental videos. Their work has appeared in many national and international publications as well as two books, Weathered Reports: Trump Surrogate Quotes from the Underground' (Moria Books, Chicago) and Dream Streams (Clare Songbird Publishing House,, New York). Their videos, Speaking In Bootongue and Widow’s Peek: The Kiss of Death represented the United States in the 2020 year-long world tour of Time Is Love: Universal Feelings: Myths & Conjunctions, organized by the esteemed African curator, Kisito Assangni.

Wilderness by Rebecca Dempsey

What am I? Drugs dissolve all the boundaries, doctors’ probe and question – but the forest is silent for now. Severe voices echoing in bland, echoey rooms say adjust the dosage, before the frowning professionals, shaking their heads, ask more questions. Aloof with their studied, practiced scepticism, they are fencing me in. What’s a ‘wallaby’ they ask, what do they symbolise? What is the function of what you call this ‘forest’? They tap away at their keypads but I can’t make them understand we are; the forest is for itself. It exists. They don’t like when I ask what they are for. They pinch their noses: make us understand. They demand function, utility, and definition, and I give them feelings, memories of eucalypt scents, and impressions of my mind. When I do try to tell them, they say: no trees, no magpies, and no koalas. There’s no place like that on earth. 

You’re sick they tell me. 

I’m endangered I reply. Protect us else I’ll die.

I tell them this place is wrong. It’s pastel walls killing us. The forest fights their words, repels invasive species at its edges, reflects the fear projected into its perceived blankness. The wilderness… they want me to tell it. Tell on it. Tell of it. How can I show the sound of the wind whispering through rustling leaves, or snakeskin shrivelling on a sun-warmed volcanic rock? How to describe how their timid human perspectives are violating borders they set? 

They stopped me attending art therapy. I painted charred remains: orange suns through smoke haze, flames twisting through broken branches, burned animals caught on wire fences they bounded us with. They said if you can’t paint something real, something natural and good, then you shouldn’t paint at all. My hands shook as they pried the brushes from my hands. What are they made of? But they refused to answer. I couldn’t stop the tears running down my face, like rain over charred bark. 

They stole my colours and teach what is left of nature is dead, dissected, desiccated, and safe behind glass. My prints smudge the panes and I smash this barrier too, because although I don’t know much, I know I’ve always existed on the edge. I laugh at the bright red staining the clean tiled floor, watching it run along straight grout lines, blood as real as resin dripping from wounded trees. 

When I get better, they’ve promised me an apartment. Wonderful views they say, of the city’s streets, the skyline. You’ll have everything you need, they say, once that forest is cleared away.

Rebecca Dempsey’s fiction, poetry, and articles have been published around the world, recently in Elsewhere Journal, Miniskirt Magazine, Muddy River Poetry Review, and The Raconteur Review. She lives in Melbourne, Australia, but can be found at WritingBec.com. urne, Australia, but can be found at WritingBec.com.

To The Teeth by Michaella Thornton

Milk teeth tucked away in velvet-lined earring boxes in the top dresser drawer, or has she buried our incisors and molars in the dirt with the portulaca and morning glory?  

Instead of diamonds and toads falling from our lips like the French fairy tales she once read to us, our 60-something mother saves—still?—calcified remnants of what were once breast milk, formula, bananas, green beans, apple butter, biscuits and gravy, sweet corn on the cob, blackberry cobbler, cube steak dredged in flour and fried in a cast-iron skillet, the fluoride-treated tap water of rural Missouri. 

Twenty primary teeth each for two sisters three years apart: root hidden in gleaming pink gum and crown—enamel erupted from bone. Internet descriptions like koans: “Both teeth and seashells are more complex than they might first appear.” 

When I lost my first tooth, I set out a small rose-patterned porcelain and brass doll chair and a handful of jelly beans. I wrote a note to the tooth fairy. I wanted proof of her existence more than money. In the morning, I awoke to find a colorful self-portrait on yellow construction paper with tiny bites taken from each jelly bean.

My senior-year picture shows me wearing an off-the-shoulder formal black wrap all the girls wore over tank tops with jeans. Behind my closed-lip smile I wear metal in my mouth because my divorced parents fought until junior year about who was going to pay for braces.

Undergraduate anthropology classes in the mid-90s, whereby I learn our mouths are now too small, teeth too plentiful, overcrowding eventual. Our masseter muscles no longer as massive because we don’t rip flesh and crack nuts like we once did. We, the professor laments, have gone soft. 

Meanwhile, some true-crime drama airing late at night tells the story of an unidentified child whose teeth reveal where she was raised within a 100-mile radius, how old she was when she died, who misses her desperately and wants her home. 

In 2019 archaeologists discover lapis lazuli in the tartar of a 10th-century German nun’s mouth, which proves women wrote and painted illuminated manuscripts, too. We know female artists exist in the Middle Ages because this particular nun bit the tip of her pen like Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club. 

What we sometimes say: Cut your teeth. A kick in the teeth. A gnashing of teeth. To grit one’s teeth. To sink our teeth into. To bare our teeth. To take the teeth out of us. Armed to the teeth.

My granddad, a Depression-era son of a bootlegger, chases us around the house with his dentures. We squeal in morbid delight as he turns the corner. He has worn dentures since his early 20s, after stacking bodies like cordwood on the beaches of Normandy. 

When seven-year-old me tells my suburban dentist I can’t wait to have dentures, he pauses and gently laughs before asking why. 

“Because,” I say, “that is what happens when you grow up. You lose all your teeth.” 

Michaella Thornton's writing has appeared most recently in Bending Genres, Essay Daily, Fractured Lit, Hobart After Dark, mac(ro)mic, and Reckon Review, where her fiction was nominated for Best of the Net (2021). She loves the fun fact that some meteorites contain ancient grains older than the sun. She tweets @kellathornton.