The Ugly Rest by M. Price

I only dreamt of your death—saw the news on Instagram—but now I am crying three dimensional tears for missing you like you are buried under dirt and shit, stiff like hard candy. After waking from the dream I kept scrolling and read about a blonde influencer who professionally fakes niceties. For $32 per word she would send a personalized note in her perfect bubble gum hand to anyone you wanted, plus shipping. I almost ordered one for you, but $201.75 was too much to let you know that I was glad you weren’t dead.  Then came the ugly rest: Smooth Operator (the live version), the deep plum liquid lipstick you gave me, love letters made out of playlists, a mustard crushed velvet couch on the internet that looked like the one in our second apartment, smoking in your bed on the silk sheets that I hated. They were deep golden. At the lake we did mushrooms for the first time. We laid face to face on a pull out couch, picking dirt out of each other’s teeth while friends around us were floating their come downs on thick clouds. The Medusa tattoo on your shoulder winked at me and all of her snakes laughed. The wall behind you was alive with yellow, shining a sour pineapple spotlight for you—you were glowing, girl. In our last June together, I came home from a shift at the grocery store to find a place with no pulse: you left me for a pre-war building on campus with other students whose parents paid the rent. I knew I was losing a best friend, but you could’ve told me you were taking the cat.

M. Price lives in Richmond, Virginia with her cat, Babycat. She writes and dances away the bullshit. You can find her forthcoming work in Rejection Letters and on Twitter @notmywurst.

We Know Just Enough by Erin Schallmoser

We stop at a footbridge over Whatcom Creek, where you like to check for salmon. It’s our first summer in Washington. There are many things we know to look for, like huckleberries and Bigfoot and whales, and many things we’ve seen already, like glaciers and evergreens and Mt. Rainier.

I make a show of gazing over to humor you, but all I see when I look down are browns and blues and then what rises to the surface is a memory of my grandma’s papery skin, pale with pinprick spots of brown and red. I continue to inspect the water, shouting when I see a swirl of plump silver speckled with brown. I point, helping you see it, too.

The longer we look for the salmon, the easier it is to spot them. We keep saying, “They’re swimming upstream! They’re doing it!” Neither of us scientists, we know just enough to be enchanted. We watch the salmon fight against the current. The smaller ones make daunting leaps over a prominent rock face. The larger ones find success flipping and flopping with brute strength across shallow water and mossy bits of rock.

Some fall short and get pulled back past where they began. When I hear their bodies make violent wet slaps against the rock, I wonder how their bones stay unbroken. I yell out encouragement, but what they are doing is beyond language. It is both a travel route and a destiny that spirals and curls with their DNA.

Watching the salmon, I think again of my grandma, her body diminished to a hum of pain. At the hospice, she slept, fidgeted, or struggled to speak, her sharp mind muddied with drugs and worry. The way that salmon swim upstream to spawn, that’s how my grandma is with worry. She’s probably still worrying now.

Eventually, reluctantly, we leave it behind, this spectacle of nature. I put my arms around your waist, kiss you on the lips, overtaken by the romance of watching creatures do exactly what they were born to do. I wonder if maybe we can do the same.

Erin Schallmoser (she/her) lives in Bellingham, WA, works by day as a naturopathic clinic manager, and delights in moss, slugs, stones, wildflowers, small birds, and the moon, when she can see it. She’s also a poetry/prose editor and staff contributor at The Aurora Journal and is still figuring out Twitter @dialogofadream. You can read more at erinschallmoser.com/. 

CIRCLES by Claire Taylor

He draws a blue circle. One loop and then another, and another. A red circle comes next. Right on top of the blue one. Then purple, orange, green, yellow. And one more blue for good measure. 

“Look!” He holds it up for me to see. 

“Beautiful,” I say. “What is it?”

“It’s the world.” 

Everything feels like it’s spinning these days. I wake to a morning indistinct from the one before it, as if time has doubled back on itself. Each day a blue circle on top of a blue circle on top of a blue circle on top of a red circle. Purple, orange, green and yellow. I want to bury my face in a pillow and scream. I want to pull him into my lap and cry into his hair. Tears filling the blonde whirlpool swirling around the crown of his head. The former soft spot. When he was a baby, I longed to press it. Sink my finger down into the gray matter mush of his brain. Now his soft spot is the word no, and I have to keep myself from pressing that too. 

“Do you want to play cars and trucks?” He asks me, and I say yes because I am his only playmate. 

“Can I sit in your lap?” He wants to know while we read books, and I say yes because I am his mother. 

“Should we have a dance party?” He suggests, and I say yes because there is nothing better to do. 

We clear the floor and put on music. He wears his tutu and I wear the same pair of pants as I have every day for the last four months. We spin. First him. Then me. Then the two of us together, holding hands. 

Around and around in circles.  

Around and around like the world. 

Claire Taylor (she/her) lives in Baltimore, Maryland and online at clairemtaylor.com. Her works has appeared in numerous print and online publications. She is the creator of Little Thoughts, a monthly newsletter of original writing for kids. 

An Auspicious Dawn by Hema Nataraju

There have been so many mornings when I’ve hated this song.

Every festival, especially Diwali when Mom put the Suprabhatam tape on while it was still dark outside--not to gently nudge Lord Vishnu from his deep slumber as the song intends, but to shake my sister and me out of REM sleep at 5 AM. No matter how many pillows I pressed on my ears, M.S. Subbulaxmi’s voice was a relentless gong. Mom would then plonk us in the bathroom to wash our oiled hair, don brand new clothes and rush to the temple. I’d curse this song under my breath--surely no God or mortal would be happy to be jolted into consciousness like this.

But my mother knew that slackers who walked into the temple late had to bear disapproving glances from the elders and worse--no tasty prasadam! It was a competition of sorts in the Tamil Brahmin community and I know now how much my mother wanted her girls to win at everything.

By the time I was seven, I stopped complaining about having to get out of bed so early on a school holiday. I knew what Mom would say. “I wish I’d had a mom to wake me up. My little brothers and I never even had Diwali or new clothes, so be thankful.” And then she would look up from the kolam she was drawing on the doorstep and add, “My mother, your paati, used to sing the Suprabhatam and many other songs on All India Radio in Palakkad. My aunts tell me she had the sweetest voice.”

I couldn’t care less. I didn’t understand the song--it was in Sanskrit. I had never known my paati or been to Palakkad (where was it?). All I wanted to do was run downstairs and burst firecrackers with my friends on the street and come back home to gobble up chakalis and laddoos my mother had made from scratch.

Now I’m many years and thousands of miles away from those memories. But I miss the smell of ghee those laddoos left on my fingers. Since I’ve moved out of India, Diwali only means a customary temple visit and a potluck with friends, where we reminisce about our childhood Diwali celebrations. We light diyas and play card games--something I’ve never been good at. My kids get new clothes all the time, not just at Diwali; it’s not special for them. They don’t understand why I’m so excited. Store-bought sweets and savories have become the norm--I have the will, but not the energy to make them myself.

Diwali or any other festival hasn’t felt the same in forever. But I wish to give my children a glimpse into my childhood and hope they make memories of their own.

So, I do the only thing that reminds me of my childhood festivities--I put on the Suprabhatam on Youtube, although not that early in the morning--I’m still not a morning person. M.S. Subbulaxmi’s clear, confident voice fills the house, but in my head, my paati sings. Magically, my house smells of camphor and sambrani. My kids and husband collect around the table where I’ve laid out sweets. I video-call my parents and my sister and bring the iPad to the table. The family’s all here--including my paati and my grandfather in spirit.

“What song is this, Mama?” My seven-year-old daughter asks through a mouthful of laddoo. “I don’t understand it, but it’s nice.”

“Venkateswara Suprabhatam.” I say. “Do you know your great-grandmother, my paati used to sing this on the radio?”

My mother’s face on screen breaks into a wide smile.

***

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-VzQZowjBE&t=122s

***

Hema Nataraju is a Singapore based flash-fiction writer and a mom of two. Her work has appeared or will be coming soon in Atlas & Alice, Mac(ro)Mic, Ellipsis Zine, Moria Online, Spelk Fiction, Sunlight Press, and in print anthologies including Bath Flash Fiction 2020, Best MicroFiction 2020, and National Flash Fiction Day. She tweets about her writing and parenting adventures as m_ixedbag.

Far From the Pins by Megan Peck Shub

Bow-ling—that’s how my daughter says it. “Bow” like the reverent folding of the body at its waist. She’s barely taller than the pins, whose hulls of molded plastic shine in primary colors: yellow, red, blue. On the patio tiles, I arrange them for toppling, one by one. 

My grandfather was a pin boy as a teenager, I recall, assembling the pins in a triangle. At a bowling alley he set the pins manually, probably with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. 

I didn’t cry when he died last year. The old man dropped dead just after midnight, the morning after Christmas. His staunch body must’ve buckled as he fell face-first onto the floor. Cardiac arrest. Again, I didn’t cry. 

Afterward I visited his house with my Mom and my Aunt, the only one of us who looked at the body. (I prefer not to see the dead, despite the advice about closure. I guess I just prefer openings.) 

Have you ever entered the home of a man who walked out the door thinking he’d return? And especially such a stickler? Who fashioned everything—and I mean everything—to his desires? Who left all of the items exactly as he did for the 25 years you knew him? Diet sodas in the fridge, Bakelite comb beside the bathroom sink, t-shirts starched (t-shirts starched!) and hanging in the closet, gun in his nightstand. 

Hey, it’s Uncle Frank, my Aunt said, opening the cherry wood drawer. Huh? 

The gun—he called it Uncle Frank. 

I had no idea about the name. 

As a kid, I helped him make his bullets in the garage. We sat at his work bench beneath a poster of a woman in an orange bikini. 

You’re young, my mother would tell me. When you grow up to be a woman with your own opinions, he won’t like you anymore. 

When I was seven he taught me how to mix him a Manhattan. I liked the kerplunk of the maraschino cherries, the syrup staining my fingers. 

Mom, look, my daughter says, the ball in her arms, ready for throwing, all of the sweetness and good in the universe compressed into her small form like carbon into a diamond. 

We would spend weekends at his house, my brother and me. He would take us aside before leaving for the night on his motorcycle. He told us he was riding off to visit the Dalai Lama in Tibet. 

On your motorcycle? I asked.

Huh? (He had such a nasal way of saying it. He took his vowels and flung them in the air like a juggler.) 

ON YOUR MOTORCYCLE? (He was hard of hearing, so you had to say everything twice.) 

You betcha. 

As he roared away, I’d watch through the vertical blinds, wondering about Tibet. It wasn’t until I was an adult that he learned he had it all wrong, and the Dalai Lama in fact lived in exile. He had almost everything wrong, my grandfather. And now I have my lifetime to consider his lifetime of errors. This is what we do to our children and our children’s children. 

That day we visited his house, the blinds were closed, swinging back and forth in the air conditioning, blowing at a practical 79 degrees. 

Memories dwell like rooms in the mind. When I trip one open, I have no choice but to walk through the door. Maybe I will be ransacked. Or rearranged. Maybe I will find everything untouched as a dead man’s home. 

My daughter heaves the toy ball. It lands in the grass, far from the pins. Not quite a strike, but I clap for her anyway. 

You’ll figure it out, I say. You’ll get there.

Megan Peck Shub is a producer at Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. Her fiction debut is forthcoming in the Missouri Review, and her work has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Maudlin House and The Independent. twitter: @meganpeckshub

Toll Booth by Holly Hagman

            Orange digital letters flash above the terminal, granting permission to pass through the toll booth. Brake-lights burn an angry red. A haze of heatwaves reflects off the scorching asphalt, blurry, a warped desert mirage.

            Texas, I yell. You scream Ohio. Your grip on my hand tightens – excitement at noticing a truck from Louisiana. I glance at our interlocked fingers resting on the center console. I notice the thin layer of dirt underneath your fingernails. I wonder if it’s from your succulents or the orchid pots. Mesmerized by your ability to hold life in your hands, I squeeze a little tighter, too.

            Through the white noise, I’m startled by a familiar bark.

            New York, I say, as I stare through their tinted windows at the man whose bitter words vibrate my tires, his hands off the wheel, clenched in fists, raised at the woman in the passenger seat. The tips of her ears are a warm pink, eyes wet and swollen. I wish I could tell her everything her body language reveals, her movements through the glass a visage of a past-self. The muffled sounds travel down my throat and into my stomach, slicing my gut, reopening a long-forgotten wound. You release your hand to wipe a tear from my cheek – a rough thumb, the soft flutter of butterfly wings deep inside.

            I inch the car forward. Above us, there’s a cloud that looks like an elephant. You see a dinosaur instead. I smile. You smile.

            We keep playing.  

Holly Hagman is a teacher and writer from a small town in New Jersey. She enjoys cooking, collecting coffee mugs, and spending time with her cats. Her work can be viewed on her website, http://www.hollyhagmanwrites.com/

Excerpts From My Memory

Vienna, Austria, 1988

There was bread—my dad was being chased by ducks.

Edmonton, Alberta, 1990

My place of birth, and this was the first time I visited after moving away when I was just one. At the mall, there was a car store, and there was also a water park—I ate a pretzel.

Munich, Germany, 1988

My only friend was named Bastian—we couldn’t understand each other so we just raced down the street each evening. I never won, and he punched me one time.

Singapore, 1987

At the Changi Airport, my parents bought my brother the first Guns N’ Roses album, Appetite For Destruction—on cassette. I wasn’t allowed to listen to it, but I turned the skull with the top hat from the cover art into a superhero in my stick figure drawings.

Kolkata, India 1999

We were standing outside Flurys, a confectionary and tearoom, waiting for it to open. There was a huge crowd, and people started to push each other, trying to get to the front of the vanishing line. My dad was pushed, and I started to shout, telling everyone to stop. They all just stared at me—not sure if they understood me or cared or both, but after a few seconds, they started nudging each other again. At this time, they didn’t have Coca-Cola or Pepsi, but a brand known as Thums Up.

Vancouver, British Columbia, 1990

My brother’s birthplace, and my first visit—we were with our relatives, and I watched Dead Poets Society for the first time, and it was the first time a movie made me cry.

Kolkata, India, 2003

There was Coca-Cola. My grandfather no longer used his typewriter—he stayed in bed for most of the time. His library was my imagination, and I started using his typewriter just so he could remember the sounds of his own imagination.

Manchester, England, 1993

Parrs Wood High School—my fellow classmate crushed a Sunkist can on my head and pushed me back. It was a pretty day.

Kolkata, India, 1999

My grandmother, on my mother’s side, was deep into Parkinson’s disease. She would put her palm on my face—it shook, but it was full of our past memories.

Athens, Greece, 1992

At the hotel where we were staying, late at night in the lobby, we watched the Dream Team play in the Olympics in black and white. Sometimes we couldn’t watch because someone else was watching soap operas—the goal was to get to the lobby before him. I also learned how to play chess.

Kolkata, India, 1994

At the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture, where my brother, dad, and I stayed—we ate toast and eggs every morning, and late at night, we watched soccer in black and white at an outdoor commons area on a semi-broken TV. I also read Jurassic Park and The Lord Of The Rings trilogy. We buried our grandmother on my father’s side.

Munich, Germany, 1988

On TV, at our flat, I watched for the first time the music video for Tiffany’s “I Think We’re Alone Now.” It made me want to go to a mall, and I remember falling in love.

Kolkata, India, 2003

They had a new donut store, and a mall which sold jeans. I miss the cows who controlled traffic rather than the traffic lights. I miss the scent of sizzling fish mixed in with freshly hand washed clothes hung out to dry on the balcony, right next to a bucket of marigolds. I miss my grandparents.

Paris, France, 1992

The Bulls were losing to the Knicks, and it was the first time I saw the works of Picasso, as we visited The Musée Picasso.

Kolkata, India, 1999

This was the last time I saw my grandmother.

Kolkata, India, 2003

This was the last time I saw my grandfather.

Lafayette, Louisiana, 2020

I was in my room, time traveling, thinking about how the past has all led to this moment. And now, all I can see are marigolds. 

Shome Dasgupta lives in Lafayette, LA. Some of his previous books include The Seagull And The Urn (HarperCollins India) and Anklet And Other Stories (Golden Antelope Press), and his forthcoming books include Spectacles (Word West), and Iron Oxide (Assure Press). He can be found at www.shomedome.com and @laughingyeti.

Things Unsaid by Yunya Yang

Dear Professor Diaz,

I’m writing to say sorry that I dropped out of your creative writing class after the first session twelve years ago.

It had nothing to do with your teaching. I quite enjoyed your class. I wrote about my first home phone number in response to your “important numbers” writing prompt. I was four years old, living in an old apartment in 90s China. Our phone was bright red, installed next to my bed, just within reach. My father always called before he headed home, and fifteen minutes later, I could hear the crisp bell on his bicycle, a Phoenix made in Shanghai that cost him three months’ salary. He’d bought the bike to take me on rides around the city. He put me in a bamboo basket in front of him. “I didn’t want to have you in the back,” he said. “What if you fell off and I kept going?”

I read my story to the class in a low voice, hoping that any grammar or pronunciation mistake would escape notice. I was the only one whose native language was not English, and even though that was expected, it was still nerve-wracking.

After the class, I stayed to chat with you about the poems you shared, although I didn’t understand them. Those unexpected but delightful breaks in sentences, beautiful like all broken things. I was both fascinated and intimidated. I didn’t even know how to rhyme; how would I know how to write poems? Silly thought really, for much later I realized that you didn’t need to know how to rhyme; you only needed to know how to feel.

But I didn’t know a lot of things then. I’d only arrived in the Midwestern town two weeks before from across the Pacific Ocean.

The international student orientation started earlier than the regular one, so I had the luxury of exploring the campus when it was empty, absent of other students I was as eager to befriend as afraid to approach. When the American students poured in on the first day of school, I watched the SUVs and pick-up trucks rolling in from my dorm window. Parents and siblings carried microwaves, mini-fridges, and bean bags up to the rooms. I was glad that my roommate brought a fridge, for all I had were two suitcases half-filled with pads and instant noodles because my mother thought it’d be hard to find them in the US.

My mother started packing months before I left. Little by little, she filled the luggage with stuff I didn’t even know I owned and never ended up using. My parents flew with me to Shanghai from our hometown to see me off. I went through customs hours before departure because I couldn’t bear the drag of farewells. The remember-to-calls, the be-careful-with-your-stuffs, the would-you-eat-another-orange-before-you-gos. I hurried in without looking at them straight in the eye, as their smiling and crying faces faded from the fogged glass walls.

No time to be homesick.

In my first week of college, I put on my shortest skirt to go to a party. It was a tennis skirt I’d bought from the campus bookstore, not the height of hotness as I thought. The house was dark, slashed by white shooting lights, each time illuminating the sea of people dancing, their bodies sticking together like dumplings in a pot. The smell of alcohol filled the air, sweet like something rotten.

Everything was new. I was blinded by my ignorance of a culture with which I shared so little. I had much to learn, to catch on.

So I didn’t go back to your class, Professor Diaz, afraid that I’d be an outsider to a place I didn’t belong, and I couldn’t find the courage to tell you all the things that I feared.

Yours regretfully,

Yunya Yang

Yunya Yang was born and raised in Central China and moved to the US when she was eighteen. She is much more “Americanized” now. She lives in Chicago with her husband Chris and cat Ichiro. Find her on Twitter @YangYunya.

SVJ’s Most Read Work of 2020: Part 2 of 2

None of My Childhood Heroes Prepared Me for This by Marissa Glover

An Interview with Katherine Ramsland

The Nautilus of Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour” by Scott Edward Anderson

500 Words on the Bare Minimum by F. Scott Arkansas

Candide: Make Sure You Know What You Want by Greg Coleman

When I Think About My Mother by C. Cimmone

Interwoven Foliage by Susan Triemert

When You’re The Homecoming Queen’s Best Friend by Candace Hartsuyker

Ikea and its Muses by Margaret Thorell

THE MIDWIFE by Bill Whitten

Miracles: rare, fine, and everyday by Rob Kaniuk

SVJ’s Most Read Work of 2020: Part 1 of 2

Manayunk Steps: Climbing Hidden Staircases with a Friend by Barbara J. Hoekje

Looking Out, Looking In: Gary Snyder and Sourdough Mountain Lookout by Scott Edward Anderson

A selection of poetry by Joe Cilluffo, R.A. Allen, Katherine Hahn Falk, John Timpane, Ray Greenblatt, & DS Maolalai

Red Velvet Mayhem by Jay Whitecotton

Revisiting Emerson: Why His Ideas on Genius and the Everyday Matter Now by Brian Fanelli

Shaped Like Swans by Cathy Ulrich

By God Henry, That Woman is So Obsequious by Jenny Robbins

WILL-O’-THE-WISP by Rob Kaniuk

The Progressive Politics of Early Horror Cinema: Gender, Female Empowerment, and Sexuality by Brian Fanelli

Iron Maiden – Ellen Durkan’s Drawings in Steel

Don't Go Back To Rockville by Zoe Grace Marquedant

"Where are you from?" It's the question you wait your entire life for because it means you went somewhere. 

When asked, you’re supposed to supply some sort of playful anecdote. To accompany the answer with a claim to a forefather or punk band or even a grocery chain that has its humble roots in your hometown soil. The also-from-theres. With Rockville, there's isn't an answer. 

It’s not the kind of forsaken or fuckall nowhere that attracts eccentrics or cults. It just isn't. Neither North nor South. Squarely a piece of Mid-Atlantic that didn't grow up to become much. There's nothing remarkable about Rockville. It is a somewhere between somewheres. You have to take the Beltway to better things. 

I could always hear the interstate from the house. See the sound wall and the signs directing motorists. I spent years listening to the sounds of other people going other places. The stomach growl of tankers. Eighteen wheelers. The air escaping whistle of motorcycles. The bubbling mufflers. Car horns bickering in what must be traffic. I'd think, keep going. Nothing to see here. 

I'm not sure why Rockville was put on the map other than to offer something to go around. A crosshatch of roads with houses taking up the in-between. Bricks and siding. Every neighborhood has the same basic configuration. Front lawn, front door, hall closet, basement, bedroom, wood floor, storm doors, space for cars. Lawn ornaments, dogs on leashes, the swim team riding their bikes to practice. Inescapably suburban. 

The boundaries could be tested but what's the point. The cops have nothing to do but bust the teenagers and the teenagers have nothing to do but get busted. Some shoplifted. Took books without paying. Some took pills. One wrote "don't" on a stop sign. When I first saw it, I couldn’t help but agree. 

REM wrote a song called, "Don't Go Back To Rockville" and I've yet to prove it wrong. In 4:33, they said what I'd always suspected. Rockville was shit and someone else knew it He asks, in lyrics, his love interest to stay with him. Not go back to Rockville, not "waste another year." Lucky her, I thought. To be wanted. To not be in Rockville. 

We were all her, a girl getting off a bus from elsewhere. Or at least we could be, would be. Stuck in a loop of returning. We were convinced. It was our future. I wanted it and I hadn't even left yet. But I would eventually and then someone would say to me, "Don't go back to Rockville." 

So I did. I went and did not come back. For semesters, then summers, eventually years. And the elsewheres were as fast and crowded as the rest of my CD collection promised. I lived in a city where bands got their start, stars bought apartments, and no one knew where Rockville was. 

But there were holidays and birthdays and spring break with no money to go elsewhere. One thing Rockville has going for it was it was a hell of a lot cheaper than places that had earned their spot in history. I would find myself in line for the $25 bus home, the REM refrain playing in my head, cautioning against the visit, "don't go back to Rockville" and board.

I’d circle the idea for years. Never really staying, but not quite leaving either. I knew better than to go back with more than an overstuffed overnight bag. But still, I felt the pull of leftovers, radio stations, apple blossoms. Was I nostalgic? Or did I just need to touch everything, turn it over in my hand, and assure myself it was still boring? That I was right in leaving? 

On my latest visit, I lay in the backyard, watching the turkey vultures circle roadkill and in that hypnosis mistake the constant hum of highway traffic for the lapping of a distant ocean. Where is that rock-strewn beach and how do I get to it? Maybe that’s where I go next. I think of the song’s last verse, "I know it might sound strange but I believe you'll be coming back before too long." And I believe it too.

Zoe Grace Marquedant is a nonfiction writer. She earned her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence and her M.F.A. from Columbia University. Her work has been featured in the Analog Cookbook, VEE, SIZL, and Talk Vomit. She is currently a fellow with the Research Ecologies & Archival Development lab in Zurich. 

Rubble by Barbara Purcell

I’m getting out of here tomorrow my father tells me, two years after he was admitted. 

A nurse comes in and pulls the curtain which separates us from his roommate who never speaks. We are in the nursing home next to where they once lived, just past the graveyard; one of those old New England cemeteries with wafer-thin headstones. 

We can move from here to there my mother once joked, looking over at the building as we sat on their gleaming white porch, and from there, right into our graves. 

He stopped driving the school bus when they found out about his medication. They sold their house with the porch and moved to a complex on a busy road. Within a year he was found unconscious on the side of that road after having wandered off.

I kiss his forehead, and tell him I’ll be back in the morning before I drive to New York—just to visit though, Texas is my new home now. When did you move there? he asks. Five years ago. 

My parents retired to Cape Cod 20 years earlier, a permanent vacation to outdo all those Augusts we had spent in Eastham. Within a year, his diagnoses started rolling in like the waves on Nauset Beach: diabetes, hydrocephalus, cancer, dementia. Retirement was a slow slide into defeat. Money became intertwined with mortality. 

You’re only as happy as your saddest child. I was still in my twenties when my dad said this. New York was hard and lonely and I could hear traffic coming off the bridge at all hours of the night. Still, I stayed. 

When I was little, we used to count the cars of freight trains going to Port Jervis on the track near our house in New Jersey. Whenever I hear a train horn I think of you I tell him before leaving the nursing home. You’ll always think of me since there’s always a train coming. His eyes are clear and full of untampered love. 

It’s hard getting to sleep my first night back in Texas. I’m picturing that house in New Jersey for some reason, how the sun would break on the branches all around it. They destroyed our home, you know he tells me the next time we speak. I ask him how he can be sure. I’m standing on the rubble right now.

Barbara Purcell is an Austin-based arts and culture writer with work appearing in Texas Monthly, The Austin Chronicle, Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere.

I’m not sure this is what Tyler Durden’s alterego meant by single-serving friends, because I don’t think this guy would help me execute an anti-capitalist scheme...but maybe he would.

I was so close to having the entire row to myself, when he asked if he could sit in the window seat. I closed my book, so I could unfold my 6’1” body and grant him entry. I never ended up opening the book for the rest of the flight. Or maybe I did, until he started talking, at which point, I probably set my pen or index finger as bookmark, to clearly indicate that my attention is elsewhere.

He’s telling me about the island he lives on. And without prompting, he tells me that the Indigenous people that truly own the land his home is on have permission to use his coast to fish or something like that. He feels good about this and dirty about this. He doesn’t say this, because he has the bravado of a traveling salesman who has branded himself as a motivational speaker.

I tell him about my mentor who was just murdered, who introduced me to Native American literature. The book I finally put a bookmark in is one I never read when she assigned it to me in class a few lifetimes ago.

He takes this as a bond, a sign we were meant to meet, in the back of this Southwest airplane, going from Oakland to Seattle.

He tells me about how a Hollywood actress once accused him of rape the first time she met him. At some point, he touches my knee and makes a point to compliment me on my ability to accurately read the predatory intent—or lack thereof—of a touch.

I wonder what recourse I would have had up in the sky. I wonder what kind of person brings up rape allegations to a stranger on an airplane. I wonder if this Hollywood actress remembers this guy. I wonder if her then boyfriend feels bad for believing this guy over his girlfriend, regardless of the truth. I wonder if that’s why they broke up.

This guy has the shmaltz of my ex, so I can’t turn away. He is providing all the intimacy I could hope for from a stranger while floating up in the air, somewhere over the Pacific Northwest. I talk to him right through the landing, about all the things we have in common and how similar we are, even though neither one of us has revealed anything about ourselves, I suspect.

As we wait for 23 rows to deplane ahead of us, I tell him how everytime my brother and I say goodbye, we very dramatically scream out, “Goodbye forever!” Our mom hates the morbidity of it. We love the drama.

I break free first, because I had the good sense to stow my carryon in a logistically strategic overhead compartment. He had to fight his way back a few rows. As I moved down the aisle away from him, he lamented loudly, “Goodbye forever!”

Only to run up behind me in the airport a few minutes later.

We discuss my disdain for slow walkers—which is the kind of unkindness I don’t try to reign in when traveling—until Sea-Tac takes me left to rental cars, as it sweeps him up an escalator to the outside and all the people he will motivate I suppose.

As he boards the escalator, he cries out “Goodbye forever,” startling the person behind him. We stare at each other as he moves slowly to the next floor and appreciate just how long it is taking him to get out of my life.

Megan Cannella (@megancannella) is a Midwestern transplant currently living in Nevada. For over a decade, Megan has bounced between working at a call center, grad school, and teaching. She has work in or forthcoming from Versification, The Daily Drunk, (mac)ro(mic), Taco Bell Quarterly, and Perhappened.   

When I Think About My Mother by C. Cimmone

When people ask what my first childhood memory is, I don’t tell them the truth. I tell them my first childhood memory is opening Christmas presents. I talk about the warmth of the fireplace and cascading limbs of a Frasier fir. It is a delightful first memory, but it’s not mine.

My first childhood memory is a spinning box fan and my mother’s smooth breasts. My first childhood memory is just a flash, a short burst of a foggy shower, a mild disturbance to an otherwise seamless day. My mother would argue that she was not a good mother and that most of our days were volatile and intentionally forgotten with overflowing buckets of guilt and shame. To hear my mother tell it, my childhood was a broken heirloom, a fractured branch of an ancestry tree that she worked tirelessly to repair.

There isn’t much left of that day, only a piece of the night, which began with a yellow glow creeping from underneath the bathroom door. The box fan cooled my face; my long hair danced in the stream of cool air. My body was limp and molded by a heap of blankets. Our dog rested against my back; my brother twisted and flopped on the other side of the bed.

The shower began, as it did each night, and draining water paced itself with the hum of the box fan. I waited for the variation of falling water, my mother’s entry to the warm shower, but there was a delay - perhaps a forgotten rag or towel. My mother’s feet eventually sank into the shower and the water ran its course, over her body and down the drain.

The gentle chirp of my mother’s voice disturbed the running water and a clap of a dropped shampoo bottle scared me into easing the bathroom door open with a careful nudge. The light was low, and in my mind, after all of these years, the light is softly falling down on my mother. The rest of the hollow room is dark, and my brother does not exist. I see my mother, her large breasts caressing her chest, her swollen thighs leaning towards the shower wall. I see her hands clenching her face; I see her long brown hair, tacky with moisture, clinging to her back. Her brown nipples are large and caring; her bare arms are tan and shaking.

My first childhood memory is of my mother weeping; it is a memory I have carried with me all over. I have sprinkled it all over my relationships and I have unpacked it each Christmas morning. I hear my mother crying when I look at pictures of my father, a man who never aged. I hear her crying in my mind when I consider falling in love. I hear shower water running when I think about my mother on her knees, begging for peace, for closure, for just a second to see my father standing tall and telling her, “I love you.”

My mother carried her grief with her to her last hour. She struggled to find a light, to see a shimmer of him somewhere along the hospital wallpaper. She reached for my hand before her last few breaths. I knew her fear was that I would only remember her pain, her unfiltered discipline, and her second-hand shirts, so I leaned in as she closed her eyes and whispered, “You are the most beautiful woman I have ever known, and I know Daddy will be so happy to see you.”

This story was written for my daughter; a presumptive telling of her first childhood memory...of me.

C. Cimmone is an author, editor, and comic from Texas. She’s alive and well on Twitter at @diefunnier

Static by Kimberly Glanzman

My mom and I are watching TV, and I’m like, I don’t know, six, seven maybe? We’re in this little apartment with train tracks nearby & the trains shake us awake every three a.m. Through the grimy window I can see a row of ants or mites or something marching along the side of the building.

This is before she met my stepdad and we had anything like money.

It’s the 80s so the TV’s got a pair of rabbit ears and a line of static right through Murphy Brown’s eyes, and no remote. (Well, I’m the remote). We’re two peas in a pod, me and my mom, cross-legged with open books on our knees because there’s no such thing as fast-forwarding through the commercials yet. I’ve got a Sweet Valley book with a blonde girl on the cover named Elizabeth – like the Queen, or like Ms. Taylor who played the Queen. Elizabeth-in-the-book has a twin & a big brother & two parents & a split-level ranch in California; she’s basically a princess. Or an alien. I pretend my middle name is Elizabeth, which it almost was, if my mom hadn’t lost that argument too.

My mom’s reading a book I’m not old enough for, the cover black with a white chalk outline of a body, her feet up on the coffee table. The sitcom comes back on, and Murphy Brown stumbles around, being frazzled in her big clean house, in her jacket with the shoulder pads. My mom’s got a jacket like that; she stitched the shoulders in herself, but it’s a dark blue while Murphy’s is yellow with gold buttons.

My mom studies this show as though there’s going to be a test. I don’t know why. Sweet Valley, Murphy Brown – no one lives that way. For example, none of these fictional people read books. They’re always off doing things. I guess that’s the difference: when you have money, you can gas up the car and drive away, but the rest of us are stuck here, on this old brown couch in this old grey building with the bugs sweeping up and down next to the rain gutters, and we just have to make it all up.

Kimberly Glanzman was a finalist for the 2019 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize, and a 2020 Pushcart Nominee. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Sky Island Journal, Sleet Magazine, Stonecoast Review, Jet Fuel Review, Pretty Owl Poetry, Blind Corner Literary, South Dakota Review, Harpur Palate, Iron Horse Literary Review, perhappened, and Electric Lit, among others.

Swim at Your Own Risk by Sara Dobbie

  On a Sunday morning in late November, I get in the car and drive to the edge of Lake Erie.  

     Not to the beach, where we spent sun baked summer afternoons spurning responsibility, but that parking lot where the rocky shoreline shows like a warning sign through a rusted chain link fence, where sometimes on clear days we bring takeout from the dive on the main drag.

     Howling winds tear up the water. Seagulls circle and squawk. A lady with a tiny dog on a leash struggles to tame her wild, whipping hair. All these living creatures are scurrying to safety, but I sit idling, hesitating, stuck. Struck, maybe.

     The voice on the radio says a storm is coming, but a van load of people shows up. They spring out of the Volkswagen and gather their wetsuits and surfboards. I don’t talk to them, don’t even get out the car, but I imagine them saying things like We don’t need no ocean, man, we don’t need the sun. I watch, fascinated, as they bypass the fence, and run down to a stretch of gravelly sand. They wade out to knee deep water, throw themselves belly down on bright boards, a shock of color in the granite waves, and front crawl into treacherous, frothing crests. 

     A slanting rain begins to pelt my windshield and I think about how sometimes the best thing any of us can hope for is to be in exactly the wrong place at the right time.

Sara Dobbie is a writer from Southern Ontario, Canada. Her work has appeared in Maudlin House, Menacing Hedge, Trampset, Ellipsis Zine, and elsewhere. Look for stories forthcoming from Emerge Literary Journal, Drunk Monkeys, and Fiction Kitchen Berlin. Follow her on Twitter @sbdobbie.

Deep in South Jersey by Jason Love

            The snack bar was out of hot dogs. I bought a soda instead. I was not really feeling a hot dog anyway.  

            “My boy is going to be the next Mike Trout,” this middle-aged mom said to anyone who would listen. During the winter months she took her 12-year-old to an indoor batting cage. This former minor league baseball player gave him personal lessons. Her son was good. But he was not Mike Trout good.  

            Our boys’ baseball team was dragging through the dog days of summer. We travelled throughout small towns in South Jersey. We won one. We lost one. The team was neither good nor bad. My son enjoyed playing, but he was one of the worst kids on the team.  

            Some of the parents were upset the team was not playing better. A few of the kids also played on an elite travel team. They hated losing. Half the kids on the team were named Chase. Some yelled at the umpires over a borderline call. A lot of the parents hung their own dreams and aspirations onto the kids.  

            My son came up to the plate. He had only two hits so far this season. The season was half over. I noticed a few parents roll their eyes. He was one of the smaller kids on the team. The other team’s pitcher was tall for his age. His fastball was probably close to 70 miles per hour. He had a moustache.  

            My son dug in and tapped home plate with his bat. Although he could not hit, he never showed fear. The first pitch was a fastball on the inside part of the plate. Strike one. My son stepped out, took a practice swing, and then stepped back into the batter’s box. The pitcher kicked and unleashed another fastball.  

            This pitch was also inside. In fact, it was too inside. My son did not bother to get out of the way. The ball drilled him in the back. The umpire told him to take first base.  

            “He didn’t bother to get out of the way” the opposing team’s coach called out. The pitcher looked upset. 

            I watched my son trot to first base.  

            “Don’t rub it,” I mumbled to myself.  

            My son did not rub his back where the ball hit him. It would leave a mark. The first base coach gave him a high five. They were both smiling.  

            If the snack bar made more hot dogs, I would buy my son one along with a soda after the game.  

Jason Love lives in New Jersey. He is working on a novel tentatively titled Hey, Jay Bob (you're an @sshole): A Love Story. Thank you for taking the time to read his story. 

A prayer for fireworks by Evan James Sheldon

It’s not that I didn’t like the way the clown looked. Creepy clowns provide a much-needed service to society. I tried to make him understand that, I tried to make him understand so many things.

He was in full regalia, and spinning a sign, like you see on a street corner advertising Taxes done cheap! or Sale. Today. Big. Except we weren’t around any stores, we were just at the park. I was avoiding my father by feeding dried rice to pigeons and hoping. We had gotten in a fight about emptying the dishwasher when it was clean, but it was really about how he wanted me to move out. He loved to do that, to pick fights about inconsequential things, but I always knew what we were really fighting about.

I wondered how long the clown had been there, but I guessed it had been quite a while since his eye paint was beginning to run. I didn’t hold it against him. He was working really hard. The sign practically blurred.

No one else seemed to care about the sweaty clown spinning a sign we couldn’t read. Children weren’t amused. They flicked bits of sand in the air to watch how small things fall. Mothers avoided eye contact like he was asking for money. After a while it became kind of sad, and I told him that. A sad clown is better than a creepy clown. You’re really moving up in the world.

He kept on and his red nose fell off, and then he stepped out of his floppy red shoes. One gaudy suspender broke, then the other. Soon he was just a guy twirling a sign. If you had known he was a creepy clown before, there’s no way you would now.

He was getting tired; I could see him straining. So I went, and in one smooth motion traded the spinning sign for my bag of dried rice. He looked thankful, if a bit surprised, but that could have just been the remnants of his original getup. I spun and spun, grateful for my natural dexterity.

My father, who had been pretending not to watch, came up, chuckling a bit to himself. What are you doing? he asked. I didn’t have the breath to speak really, but I managed to squeak out, trying to get the pigeons to explode. He didn’t chuckle after that. It’s almost as if he wasn’t paying attention, like he couldn’t see the trajectory of an initial action, like he didn’t know that something begun continues even if its form shifts. 

My arms grew tired and the creepy clown left with my bag of dried rice. I looked around frantically for someone to take over the job, but nobody came. I stayed at it until after dark, until the park had emptied except for two lovers necking on the bench where I had first fed the pigeons. My forearms began to cramp. I set the sign down and it was too dark to read what he’d been selling.

Evan James Sheldon's work has appeared recently in the American Literary Review, the Cincinnati Review, and the Maine Review, among other journals. He is a senior editor for F(r)iction and the Editorial Director for Brink Literacy Project. You can find him online at www.evanjamessheldon.com. 

The Position of the Jungle Gym by Linda McMullen

The woodchips molder at my base, tingeing my cheery scarlet plastic the color of blood.  Insects and grubs slither among the organic waste – reclaiming, they believe, their kingdom.  The wind chases itself through my hollow passages, for want of other options.  The sun frowns overhead, pulsing with an unspoken rage.  If I had a touch of poetry, I’d borrow from Verlaine, a man capable of conjuring autumn austerity out of high summer. 

I heard about that particular lyricist from one of the mothers – not one of the PTA warriors or the hesitant foreign brides or the minivan marauders – a sloppy-ponytail-and-hoodie model doing an expensive and, she said, “pointless” MA.  She read aloud en français while her little Quinn dared the sodden monkey bars and promptly broke her ulna.  But the verse stayed with me.  And it sings in me now, reverberating through my plastic shell.

Quinn isn’t here.

Neither is Hank, or Sara, or Elizabeth with those great grey-green eyes.  Nor is Gio, or Morgan, or any of the other screeching, thumping, half-feral...

…glorious…

…children. 

They left on a drizzling Friday in March, huddled against their parents’ waists, clutching hastily assembled packets of worksheets that drooped in the damp.  How could I know, then, that their scuffing sneakers and shrill delighted voices would vanish? 

And who knows when they will come back again?

It’s raining, now; teardrop shapes evanesce on each of my abandoned faces.

Je me souviens de jours anciens et je pleure.

Linda McMullen is a wife, mother, diplomat, and homesick Wisconsinite. Her short stories and the occasional poem have appeared in over seventy literary magazines.

Uncle is Gonna Get You by Jerica Taylor

Kids should remember birthdays more vividly than they remember the crumble of instant coffee granules finger-sifted into the sugar.

More clearly than they remember the timber of their uncle’s voice, the twitch of his moustache and his furious red cheeks as he yelled at them for not making decaf coffee for their grandparents. Kids should be proud of being given responsibility, finally old enough to boil water in the whistling kettle on the electric stove. They should not be screamed at about avoiding caffeine for heart health because they don’t understand and they are eight.

They should remember the bitter lick of the spoon, the drip of half and half, more sharply than the voices that reverberated through the house long after everyone had gone home. They should put on the Gloria Estefan cassette and spin circles in the living room as Missile Defense loads on the Sega. They should have their gun ready.

Jerica Taylor is a non-binary neurodivergent queer cook, birder, and chicken herder. Their work has appeared in Postscript, Dream Journal, and perhappened. She lives with her wife and young daughter in Western Massachusetts. Twitter @jericatruly