Cirque Fernando by Lotie Parker

Standing in front of his uncle’s furniture store on Northumberland Street at 6.30am, this wasn’t what Clement had expected; a huge crate blocking the whole road.  ‘Cirque Fernando’ was written on the side and a procession of painted circus animals trooped around the foot of the crate.  At the front of the crate, right above two leather straps and the red painted letters ‘NE PAS OUVRIR SANS AIDE!’ was a round hole.  Clement considered the crate for a moment then, edging closer and, on tiptoes, moved his eye up to the hole.  He immediately jumped back, letting out a small ‘yelp’ and quickly moving his hands between his legs, (he feared he would relieve himself).   He tentatively edged forwards and raised himself again to look through the hole.  The giant, deep brown eye blinked back at him; its long, curled eyelashes brushing the other side of the crate.

Later, years later.  Clement would look at that photograph and not really believe he’d opened that crate, led the elephant the length of Northumberland Street and into the store where it had turned so slowly, instinctively sitting down on the waiting sofa. Clement did remember he’d looked into the elephant’s sad eyes and felt a change inside himself.  His future lay away from this store, this street, this town.  His life would happen somewhere else.

Lotie Parker was born in London, grew up in Newcastle and still lives in the North of England. Having finished her first novel, she is now working on her second alongside writing short stories and flash fiction. Her work was shortlisted for the Writers Retreat Award and has been published in The Daily Drunk Mag and Minute Magazine.

Forever by Jennifer Fliss

You cultivate negativity like it’s a fucking garden plant, I tell you. Not everyone can grow things, you say, calmly. Some people don’t have green thumbs at all. They can’t grow shit. You are addressing envelopes, stamping a return address, sticking forever stamps on the corners.

Soon after I lost the baby, you began to collect lint from the dryer in a shoebox. Then those balls of hair that look like desiccated spiders. On the windowsill, you lined them up with seashells and pieces of sea glass we had collected from trips in the before times. But now, you’re mailing the lint and hairballs to everyone on the spreadsheet entitled “wedding list B.” You say they didn’t send presents. I tell you we didn’t end up moving onto list B and they weren’t invited to the wedding; they didn’t have to give us gifts. 

Still.

You’re angry, I say. 

Should I not be? 

I don’t look at you and spill into the couch. Swipe through my feed. Death, destruction, violence, bigotry, death again. Murder sprees again. Plagues still. My thumb fatigues from brushing over all the corpses. I click to another social media app. Congrats! I type on a post where a friend announces she is pregnant. I add three balloons, one red heart, and a big yellow smile.

I can feel your eyes boring into me. It is sunny out and it reflects in the blues and greens of the sea glass on the sill, I can see it in my peripheral vision. The color of lakes, the color of envy. 

The sun hides behind a cloud, the sea glass grows opaque again. The light and the dark live so close together. You’ve rearranged the shells and sea glass and packaged up all the lint and all the hairballs. You are stuffing, sealing, stamping. These will be dispersed around the globe, these pieces of us. 

I toss my phone aside and head upstairs. Step into the shower smelling that overripe peachy mildew smell. Pink splotches color the ceiling. I collect the hair clinging to the walls that I’d left there. Proof of life maybe. I bunch it up into a big brown lump, it’s so light, my dead cells. Downstairs, I hand it over to you and I grab a pen. Address the next envelope.

We are all beachcombing for something, you say. 

Jennifer Fliss (she/her) is a Seattle-based writer whose writing has appeared in F(r)iction, The Rumpus, The Washington Post, and elsewhere, including the 2019 Best Short Fiction anthology. She can be found on Twitter at @writesforlife or via her website, www.jenniferflisscreative.com.

Bluegills by Ed Komenda

Lalo had blood on his face and blood on his hands and blood on his RC can. 

He sat at the picnic table in Grandma’s backyard with a knife and bucket of bluegills. He was back from fishing the Kankakee with Uncle Val and it was his job to gut and clean the fish. In the shade of the brick house, he sliced into the belly of a fat one.

With his thumb and index finger, Lalo pinched the internal organs and ripped them out quick and dirty and all at the same time. He tossed the insides into a plastic grocery bag and started on the next one. With every bluegill, he got a little faster, a little more efficient, a little bored. 

Lalo noticed me watching him. “Check this out,” he said. 

He cut into another bluegill, but instead of pulling out all the organs, he delicately picked through the fish with his fingers. The blood on his hands turned the same brown of the grime under his chipped fingernails. He picked around the organs until he found the piece he wanted. 

The heart. 

With a good grip, he plucked the heart out of the bluegill and laid it on the picnic table. It reminded me of a pencil eraser. It was detached from the body, but it kept beating.

Bump bump bump bump bump … 

I didn’t understand why it kept going like that, full of electricity and pumping life to nowhere. Next to the heart was the fish, nothing but a fold of meat with dead eyes.

“Pretty cool, huh?” Lalo said.

He scratched a mosquito bite on his sunburned face and left a streak of fresh blood. He stared at the heart and giggled with his mouth open enough you could see teeth.

“Now watch this,” he said. 

Lalo grabbed his RC can. He held it above the heart and lowered it down until the silver lip of the can bottom rested on the twitching tissue. He made a fist with his free hand and positioned it above the can’s mouth hole like he was lining up to hit a nail. 

He brought his mallet fist down hard on the can and severed the heart.

He lifted up the can and underneath there were two pieces on the picnic table. They both beat like two separate hearts. 

Bump-bump … 

Bump-bump … 

Bump-bump ...

We watched the tiny hearts beat together. We wondered how long the song would last, and I thought about the hearts beating inside us. 

What would happen if Lalo turned the knife on himself? 

What if I cut my own heart in two? Would the piece I kept beat soft enough to dull the pumping sound that kept me awake? 

Could Grandma and Uncle Val leave us pieces of their hearts so when they died me and Lalo could remember how their bodies sounded when they were alive? 

So we could know what they heard when they couldn’t sleep at night? 

Bump-bump … 

Bump-bump …

Bump-bump …

Lalo finished cleaning the last of the bluegills as the sun started to set over the railroad tracks and Grandma’s house and the backyard and everything. In the last minutes of light, we blasted the knife and bucket with the hose and cleared off the picnic table except for the hearts. We left them to finish their dance in the dark.

I cracked my bedroom window and crawled into bed with a belly full of fish. I spent a long time listening for the sound of the hearts beating below.  

All I could hear was the sound of my own. 

Ed Komenda is a writer and journalist from Chicago’s South Side.  His writing has appeared in Retirement Plan Zine.  He lives in Nevada.

Flutters by Pat Foran

I work in a false-eyelash manufacturing plant in Poughkeepsie, New York.

The eyelashes we make are called Flutters.  

I'm in the hazmat compliance division.

I also work the company's drive-through window every Friday when we serve barbecue. 

It's a living, as they say. Or used to say. 

"It's a Living" is the name of an old TV show. 

Probably the name of a song, too. 

Flutters might be a good name for a song. 

Flutters "flit like beautiful butterfly kisses and nestle in with your make-up free, natural look," according to a print magazine ad the marketing department whipped up. 

I'm not sure I know what natural means.  

Or beautiful.

Not since I've been working here.

But I think I know what it is to believe in these things. Or, at least, I know what it is to believe.

I believe in the moon, like when you can’t see it, it’s a light you see, and you want to take a picture of it, this moon, this little light, but whatever picture you take, it won’t look anything like what you see, so you don’t take the picture. You sit beneath the light instead, that little moonlight, and while you’re sitting, you wonder where she might be at that hour. What she might be thinking about under that light.

I believe in the river, the one that rolls, the one that laps, the kind that takes you somewhere, or could. How beautiful it is. That kind of could.

I believe in the forest, the one you see when you see the forest and the trees, the kind of forest that conceals and reveals, like a moonlit city. One that frees up memory and helps you find an open field. Or another forest.

I believe in identity, how it can grab you something fierce yet clutch so gently, even when (especially when) you thought you knew. How that clutching can come calling without warning or wishbones. A self without wishbones! The beauty in that. 

I believe in trust, like when you’ve got a map and you lose count of the number of ways it can be folded. Or lose track of the sad-eyed salamander you think might need you. Or lose not faith not hope not heart but touch with the only one who ever saw you nearly get it right. And then there she is, in an open field, in natural light, while a river rolls in a rhythm all its own.

I believe in love, no matter the moon, wherever the light, however it's folded. 

I'm not sure I know for sure what any of these things mean. 

Or what's natural, or beautiful. Or false. Or true. 

But I believe I might know. 

Just like I might know the words to a song called "Flutters," if there were such a song. And there might be.

That might is enough for me. 

That might, that belief, is me, batting my lashes, giving butterfly kisses. Blink after beautiful blink.

Flutters (an excerpt from the anthology “What We Believe: North American Workers Speak to the Sky, the Way Soap Star and Pop Singer Rick Springfield Did About the Nature of Things, or Maybe He Was Speaking to the Sky About the Little Light That is the Moon”)

Pat Foran believes, and doesn’t believe. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tahoma Literary Review, Moon Park Review, Milk Candy Review and elsewhere. Find him at http://neutralspaces.co/your_patforan/ and on Twitter at @pdforan.

The Key Is Trying by KKUURRTT

Called my friend Willie today. I picked up the phone, cycled through my contacts and hit the big green call button that connects one to the other.  Rang straight through to voicemail, so I left one. ‘Hey Willie, just wanted to call and say hey. No need to call me back’  Few seconds later I got a text: sorry I missed your call. The next morning, I DMed him on Twitter, nbd about the missed call by the way, just wanted to say hey. He didn’t respond. A week or so after that he tagged me in a cartoon where a rabbit is talking to a frog and they simultaneously say ‘call your friends, duh.’  Eventually we made plans via email and scheduled a Zoom meet-up, but as that date approached we both forgot and ended up going to the hockey game instead. When he checked in at the arena on Facebook, I messaged him. The sheer irony. Emojis abound. I tried to send him a message over the Jumbotron but the cost per letter was very expensive so I capped it at a simple pleasantry: hey willie. He took a picture and posted it to Instagram with a caption this is friendship. I missed a call from him on my birthday, out and about with friends, and while I saw his name show up on my phone I didn’t swipe to answer. I did text him a couple days later something like sorry I missed your call. Eventually we both die. Then everyone dies. Cell phone towers are the last to fall, brush overtaking the base of it’s metallic infrastructure, looking quite magnificent in the springtime. 

KKUURRTT is glad you read his thing. His novel Good at Drugs is forthcoming from Back Patio Press. He can be found on twitter at @wwwkurtcom. 

Under The Kitchen Table by Rosaleen Lynch

Under the kitchen table was another world when we were kids. The solid wood legs we hung onto like our father’s. Nothing like the spindly metal legs of the turquoise Formica table I’m sitting at and can’t put a cup of tea on without it shaking. You could lay a body out on our old kitchen table. When our father’s was, to remain in the room Ma said we had to stay under there, on the rungs, on two cushions Ma made from our baby clothes, watching as they carried him in on the shed door, feet first, to swing him onto the table, as if shed doors and fathers belonged on kitchen tables. 

We both look up, feeling the weight of our father over us. Only we are left. Da and Ma and us. Ma warns us not to come out until she is done. So we play snakes and ladders with the board between us, careful not to knock it over or let the dice fall on the floor. I let my little brother win. He can’t count anyway, Ma says he never will. 

You will, I tell him under there, and we’ll show Ma what you can do. He nods and jumps his red counter up the snake and I hear Da say again, he’ll never learn if he’s not shown the rules, that’s what big sisters are for, when Das are gone. Now Ma is gone, my brother and I sit at this other kitchen table watching the tea in our cups shiver and he asks me if I want to go under this table with him and we can play snakes and ladders and he’ll let me win.

Rosaleen Lynch, an Irish community worker and writer in the East End of London, loves stories conversational, literary and performed. Words in lots of lovely places and can be found on Twitter @quotes_52 and 52Quotes.blogspot.com

The Trouble with Bob by Jo Varnish

Bob killed the cat on a Tuesday, following a fairly routine day at the office. Signing off on work permits, meetings, phone calls—a brief reprieve over mediocre tacos with Lydia and Sheila B, the office girls—more calls and work on a wayward spreadsheet. The cat’s demise wasn’t murder, as such, but it wasn’t not murder either. More of a game, shall we say, a case of if I keep the car moving slowly, the damn cat will surely get up and run out of the way. The cat didn’t, and felt to Bob, through rubber and metal and shuddering engine, as if it were a squelchy bump. The good news was that it occurred on the driveway of the modest townhome he shared with his wife Dee and their fourteen year old son Luther, so he didn’t have to continue driving the back wheel over it. The bad news was that now he had a dead cat leaking under his car. 

            “What’s for dinner?” Bob closed the front door behind him and put his briefcase under the hall console, as he did each evening. 

            No answer. 

            “Dee? Luther?”

            No answer. 

            After twenty minutes spent peeling a warm orange tabby body off the driveway, wrapping it in a bag, disposing of it in his trash (he considered the recycling with a wry smile, that would serve them right, with their incessant tickets for the wrong types of plastic) and hosing down the fluids so they ran off his property, Bob returned to the house.

            He took out his cell phone and typed a message to Dee. 

            - Where are you?  

            He didn’t hit send. He wasn’t going to let himself look so desperate. 

            By eight o’clock, he was irate. This was not okay.

            Half an hour later, Dee and Luther appeared, full of chatter about a baseball game. Bob remembered at that point: Luther’s league semi final. 

            “Ah yes,” he said. “Sorry I couldn’t get there. I was stuck with a work thing.”

            “It’s okay Dad, it was a tough loss.”

            “We did pick up dinner as a treat though,” said Dee. 

            “Oh no,” said Luther, his eyes on his phone. “I need to eat quickly, Lea’s cat’s missing. She needs me to help look.”

            Bob’s back stiffened. 

            “Where does this Lea live?”

            Luther and Dee both looked at Bob. 

            “Lea… Joe and Gill’s daughter, behind us?” Dee shook her head slowly, waiting for the recognition to strike her husband. 

            “I can’t keep up with all these names.” Bob pulled out his chair and sat. “What’s for dinner?”

            “Tacos.”

            “For fuck’s sake.” Bob stood up and went out to the driveway. Dee and Luther watched from the front door, mouths agape, as he entered the side shed and emerged moments later with a bucket, a bottle of car shampoo, and a thick yellow sponge. 

            “Bob, your dinner’ll spoil,” Dee said.

            From behind the wooden fence at the back of the garden, calls of, “Tiggy,” and “Tigger kitty,” and “Here, Tig,” rose like smoke. 

            Turning on the squeaky faucet on the side of the house, Bob leaned towards the bucket so all he could hear was the rushing water.

Originally from England, Jo Varnish now lives outside New York City.  She is the creative nonfiction editor at X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine and creative nonfiction contributing editor at Barren Magazine.  Her short stories and creative nonfiction have recently appeared in PANK, Hobart, Jellyfish Review, Pithead Chapel, JMWW Journal, and others.  Jo has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and Best Small Fiction, and is working on her PhD.  She can be found on twitter @jovarnish1.

We Eat by Victoria Buitron

Our sorrow away with sprinkles of paprika, warm ourselves with too much salt, slurp oysters down with a smidge of bitter lime while in isolation. 

My mother is the plantain expert. She molds the plátano like nature sculpts water into ice and snow and gas and effervescing droplets. Patacones are cut fat, cooked in oil, then flattened, dipped again into the scorching grease and served with gunks of ají. When her arthritic hands can grasp but not squash, she cuts the plantain thin and waits until they’re boiled a golden tan. Chifles. On a Thursday that feels like March, she uses pottery made of rock to concoct a plantain paste with sautéed shrimp. Sango de camarón. Some mornings the plantain is battered into a sphere with chicharrón and slivers of cheese. When her hands are as strong as ribbons, we each pitch in to mold the food into what she desires.

My father only says I love you in texts but shows it every morning. When I clack away on the keyboard in my home office, he knocks, hands me home-made juice or a smoothie, then walks away. The colors are different each day. The kiwi green overshadows the rays of crimson strawberries. The pale banana is erased by the sharp coral of melons. The orange’s pulp rises to the top with citrusy strips of yellow pineapples. I savor the fruits as the sound of cars is replaced by the chirp of birds. When he forgets to use milk, I say nothing, only gracias, Papi, gracias.

Mami and I hide the plantains when my father uses five in one day. She sighs at the fat wads of onion in the garbanzo salad he learns from social media. I laugh, but then yearn for it on days when I need the balsamic to tickle my tongue. My brother, who recovers from a cancer surgery he undergoes just a few weeks before the shutdown, gets whatever his taste buds desire. It becomes a joke. When helping my mother around the kitchen I use a whiny voice as she beats or swirls or batters over the stovetop to ask why that isn’t for me. Mija, because he’s sick, she says. Then we laugh at my fake gluttony. One day my brother overhears, and he says When you have cancer, there are perks.

Had, not have, I say. The only past in the dubious present. 

By June, my mom is back as the nanny who has accidentally taught her almost-children how to curse in Spanish. I’m no longer working from home but in my work building’s one-windowed office. My father and brother remain unemployed, and Papi only makes two juices a day. For the few months we are inside, we eat, we dine, and sometimes we cry—for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We use dense meat, copious grains, and fresh fruit to say what can’t be uttered in vowels and consonants and syllables. It’s odd, almost wicked, that a small part of me wants back the era of grim phone alerts and only the company of my family. If my warped feelings were scrumptious food, they’d be apparent contradictions. Maybe grilled pineapples with a side of honey ham. Slabs of jalapeño chocolate for dessert. Flesh-soft mangoes battered with fiery cayenne pepper flakes and a spritz of lemon. Reminders of our forced temporary togetherness, a time that all in my household exclaim and hope will never reprise itself while we’re alive. But I silently long for these moments—the laughter, the slurping, the sighs accompanying a sense of fullness—just like every so often my palate yearns for a bitter treat wrapped in a glaze of syrupy sweet.

Victoria Buitron is a writer and translator with an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Fairfield University. Her work has been featured or is upcoming in The Citron Review, Bending Genres, Lost Balloon, and other literary magazines.

When we raise our hands to begin Salaah by Liesl Jobson

Your mother works at her computer standing up while listening to Slavonic Dances. This should improve her posture and strengthen her lumbar spine, but it hurts her feet. She looks for images of isiXhosa text books for blog posts. She drops the hashtags #Setswana and #Sesotho in social media designed to titillate the woke without blowing up. 

She has bitten her nails and the tip of her index finger is bloodied. It will grow out if she stops picking at it for a day. She clicks the laptop shut with more force than she intends, glad to have clients who think she’s good at what she does.

She wonders if the Chinese stem cell research team can develop a vaccine to stave off Alzheimer’s. Some days she says “clapped” when she means “chapped”. Words that sound the same come out when she speaks. Sometimes she writes things that don’t make sense. This is the first sign. She wants to believe that the spelling errors are due to her too rapid typing.

She practices bassoon. She meditates. She wears a light-blocking eye cover to improve her sleep. She sets her alarm for 4am to scull by moonlight, eager to retain fitness and muscle tone, to keep her weight down. Her partner is 25 years older than her. He says, Be careful, Darling. There are cowboys out there. They have guns and no ethics. In the dark she looks for cop cars parked at the end of the peninsula. She’s seen the arrest videos of joggers and surfers breaking lockdown – but hopes they only patrol in daylight.

Four mosques surround the lake. When the imams call the sleeping to Fajr she gasps at the shooting stars on the dark horizon. She tells herself she is lucky. She tries to memorise poetry. She tells herself the future is unknown.

As the chant ends she heads home. The dawn sky turns orange and she hoists her boat onto her shoulder and across the lawn. Pelicans fly overhead in silhouette against the dark mountains. Then come the flamingos and the distant cry of the fish eagle. She chants her own mantra as she washes down her boat, a prayer for neuroprotection: May there be self-renewal, proliferation, differentiation, and recombination…

Your mother buys Vitamin B and Omega-3, wanting to give you a bottle to protect your brain. She buys you a China coffee mug with a cartoon cat catching fish. She hopes you will visit. She is almost relieved that you do not. When she burps after swallowing the fish oil capsules, she wishes she could afford salmon.

Your mother has heard that no individual is responsible for another person's disease or recovery from it. If that is true, who is responsible for preventing her own neural decline?

Liesl Jobson freelances in the Cape Philharmonic Orchestra and is a communications consultant for JumpStart Foundation, a maths education NPO in Johannesburg. She has a MA (Creative Writing) with distinction from Wits University and is the author of Ride the Tortoise (Jacana, 2013) and 100 Papers: a collection of prose poems and flash fiction (Botsotso, 2007) which won the Ernst Van Heerden Award. She coaches novices at the Alfred Rowing Club, Zeekoevlei. Twitter: @LieslJobson

OILY DUCKS ARE HER SIDE HUSTLE by Jon Meyers

Listen.

An automatic compulsion is a large force of nature, not a baby duckling.

When she and her lover traveled down of the Gulf of Mexico, little did they know Edna would show up. They should have anticipated, there’d be an Edna. There’s always an Edna. 

Or someone like her.

Just this year, so far, there were four, not exactly like her, but getting closer.   Since everything happens for a reason, and since they were down there anyway, she and her lover volunteered.

It was the least they could do.  

Right.

An automatic compulsion is a tanker split in two, not a baby duckling covered in crude oil.

When she and her lover donned large yellow rubber gloves, little did they know Edna would show up.  Edna needed to tear her friend away from her lover because Edna was having another crisis.   Edna had been beat up by her abusive husband. 

Again.

Just this last year, so far, Edna had gone back to him four times.  It wasn’t five, but getting closer. Since everything happens for a reason, and since she was down there anyway cleaning ducks, sure, she’d take a break from her lover and listen to Edna.            

It was the least she could do.

Here.

“Hold my oily duck,” she said to her lover. “An automatic compulsion is an unwelcome interruption.”

When she and her lover were each mid-duck, half-cleaned with Dawn dishwashing liquid, little did he know she would hand hers to her lover.  Edna was having another crisis, again, which was bigger than an oil spill, bigger than contaminated wetlands. Edna needed help.  Before you argue otherwise, maybe this time Edna wouldn’t go back. 

Maybe this time.

Just this last year, so far, Edna got a job and her own car.  Not exactly leaving, but getting closer. Since everything happens for a reason, it just so happened that she and her lover were there at the right place at the right time.  Her lover would be splattered, er, flattered to hold her flapping oily duck for her. 

It was the least her lover could do.

Jon Meyers teaches First Year writing and Intro to Lit at Western Kentucky University.  He has a B.A. in Film, and M.A. in English, and is completing his M.F.A. in Screenwriting (June 2021).  He is the only US moderator for Into The Script, a London-based online writing advice hub with 6.8k active followers.  He has a dozen scripts available for film, TV, and radio – including Riding Aristotle, which was an Official Selection of the Atlanta Comedy Film Festival.  He has recently been named the 2022 Narrative Fiction Genre Manage for LitCon.org.

A Brief Summary of My First Week of Being Furloughed From Work -- by Leigh Chadwick

For the first three days I don’t leave the house. I spend them in bed, only getting up to use the bathroom or grab a granola bar from the pantry or pour a glass of water I forget to drink until all the ice has melted and the water grows lukewarm and the glass is sweating, like it just ran a marathon, or it’s stressed out about paying rent, and so the once cold water I poured into the glass tries to run away, and there it goes, the water cascading over the coaster and dripping onto the nightstand. During those first three days I Google hysterical pregnancies. I Google hot dads wearing BabyBjörns. I Facebook stalk all of my ex-boyfriends: four are married, one is engaged, one fell off a mountain, one is halfway to having a kid, one moved to Hollywood and was in a commercial for Crest Whitening Strips, and one doesn't have a Facebook account, which leads me to the assumption he also fell off a mountain. I Google ultrasound pictures. I Google does space cause death? while wondering if anywhere is safe if space isn’t even safe and space is above everything, constantly circling us, slowly swallowing us whole. On day four I dream worry. I dream nineteen black holes. I dream bloody chests and quarters fitting through the side of a missing cheek. I dream I climb through the hole in your throat. It is dark inside your throat. I don’t like it, so I leave. On day five of my furlough there’s a storm, something chopped up and raw and filled with lightning, thunder, tornadoes in my lungs, a tsunami off the coast of my neighbor’s pool, hurricanes forming in the wishing well at the mall—the sky a madness I trace like one of those pages covered with dots spread out inches apart, where you take a pencil and draw lines connecting one dot to another, creating miniature constellations. On day six I wake up to a gasp. On day seven I consider getting in my car and heading north on I-65. Halfway through a state I’ll never see again, I’ll toss my cellphone and half of my clothes out the window. I decide I will become the dictionary of birth. I will teach the world how to start over. I will smile every time a server refills my coffee mug. I will learn how to spell every country in the world. I will start a new life in some small town in Michigan. I’ll buy an old, abandoned lighthouse in this small town in Michigan. I’ll sleep on a single bed I carried up the winding staircase to the top of the lighthouse, and I’ll spend the rest of my days walking along cliffs and the rest of my nights in glow by candlelight, watching a spotlight scan the shoreline.

Leigh Chadwick's writing is forthcoming in Salamander and Milk Candy Review. She is at work on her first novel.

Sparkle Laundry by Sy Holmes

            I go to the Sparkle Laundry because I have no laundry machine at my apartment. Maybe I’d go even if I did. I love the Sparkle Laundry. They sell pizza by the slice and energy drinks, and soda and “Dew Can”, which has its own line item on the menu beneath general-purpose soda and is seventy-five cents. I see sad middle-aged men here and students who live in the cheapest apartments and older Native and Mexican women and all the other people here who’ve ended up without a washing machine for some reason. I like it because I’ll never see my friends or ex-girlfriends here. All my friends and ex-girlfriends own washing machines. If it was socially acceptable, I’d invite my friends and dates here on Friday nights because I like it better than the bars.

            I like watching the machines go round and round. I like the smell of the driers and detergent. I like the smell of clean laundry mixed with cheap pizza. I like the muzak. I like the western loneliness. I like how the washing machines get the ballsweat and floor glue and sawdust and ash out of my clothes. I like how the spare quarters jangle in my jean pockets all week afterwards. I like how they fall out in front of the cute barista at the coffee shop when I reach to pull out my wallet to pay by card. I like how they end up wedged around my apartment. If I had a washing machine, they would mostly end up behind it.

            The Sparkle Laundry makes me feel clean and Catholic again. When I buy the tide pod from the tall, awkward guy behind the counter, I wish he would crush it and anoint me with it like the Most Revered Peter J. Jugis, bishop of Charlotte. I want the Blood of Christ on the menu right under the Dew Can. I want to be rebaptized in the Maytag Double-Load washer. I want to kneel with the derelicts at the folding table. I want “Oh God Beyond All Praising” over the speakers. I want something other than the dirt in my hair and the old, tired guilt.

Sy Holmes is a writer from western North Carolina. He lives in the mountain West with other people's dogs.

I WAS TRYING TO DESCRIBE YOU TO SOMEONE by AJ Buckle

(After Richard Brautigan)

I was trying to describe you to someone not long ago, but you don’t look like any other woman I’ve ever seen before.

I couldn’t say “You know, she looks like that one actress from that movie, except she’s got more freckles, and her hair is this cute kind of bob. Actually, she looks like the singer from that band, but of course her lips are a different shape and her eyes are prettier, but hard to read behind her glasses.”

I couldn’t say any of those things because you don’t look like anyone else at all.

I finally ended up describing you as a memory I had from the summertime, a year ago. My brother and sister-in-law brought my niece to see fireworks for the first time and I went along with them. It was May or June or maybe even July and a very humid night, but not unpleasantly so. The fireworks weren’t for any particular celebration or anything, but it was still beautiful to watch.

As I stood there, next to people I love, I took extra care to watch my niece who had never seen this type of magic before that point. I thought about how I would explain fireworks to her when she is older. I thought about how I would tell her that the Tang Dynasty in 9th-century China were among the first people to use them for celebrations. I thought about how that explanation might be a little too technical, might remove some of the mystery.

Instead, I made sure I was looking at my niece’s face as the first blasts were shot off. I looked into her big, beautiful, blue eyes and saw the wonder of her experiencing something so incandescent and seemingly ethereal for the first time. Her beatific expression made me think of how I will never again experience anything like that, but that I’d always follow that feeling. Much of my life has been spent diving in headfirst, ignoring the potential for pain. 

Listening to the oohs and ahhs of my niece though, I became acutely aware of the fact that sometimes this world holds moments so beautiful that they can break a person apart. Standing there that humid night, I was glad not to be a cautious man. That breaking into millions of pieces  when faced with beautiful things wasn’t something I’d ever want to give up.

And as each firework shot off, my niece was completely engrossed in the sublime ineffability of it, oblivious to everything else, save for the dazzling beauty of that which she had never seen before.

I watched the pop and fizzle of the reds and blues and yellows and greens reflected in the dark pools of her eyes, and there was a familiar swelling in my heart that seems to resurface every time I experience something like this. And that was my focus, simultaneously the spectacle, but also the quiet tenderness I was feeling. That luminous space I get lost in again and again.

It felt beautiful to be a part of that; seeing this new person who was incredibly and unabashedly amazed by something that I’d taken for granted for most of my life. That wonder and excitement and notion of so much more to see.

And that’s how you look to me.

AJ Buckle is a poet and teacher living in and writing from his apartment in Ottawa, Canada. He holds an Honours BA in Literature and enjoys listening to records and tending to his houseplants when not having an existential crisis. You can read his shitty tweets at @buckle_aj

Staff Picks: February 2021 -- Ghost or Haunted

Jen Rouse’s creative non-fiction piece entitled Ghost or Haunted is, just as the title would suggest, hauntingly beautiful. In just under 700 words, Rouse manages to transport her readers through time and space until even they don’t know what is real and what isn’t.

Ghost or Haunted pushes the limits of creative non-fiction by making the reader wonder what is truth and what is flawed memory--which in a way, is still a form of truth. This piece takes all of the complexities of creative non-fiction and rolls them up into one short, but so poignantly written piece that you are bound to feel compelled to read it over and over again.

— Zoe Musselman, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Online Architect / Producer

Oskasha by Damon McKinney

          I hear coyotes yapping in the distance, singing their song to the moon mother. My heart yearns to learn their song, but my voice can’t match the notes or rhythm. The only noise I make is a low hum-growl, throaty and guttural. They don’t hear me and keep yapping, singing, and dancing on the Oklahoma red earth. Car lights flash and their singing stops. Back to work.

         The sun leans heavily on us redskins working the road crew. Paving highway roads, patching potholes, and getting hollered at for making an honest living. We get paid fifteen bucks an hour to hold a Slow Down sign and yet the locals call us drunks, crackheads, and lazy freeloaders. Most people think it’s court ordered community service, but it ain’t. Just regular work for the county. I make more money selling dope, except that business doesn’t offer insurance. The county does.

          Once, I heard a wolf howling.

Damon McKinney is an Indigenous writer from Oklahoma and he is the former Associate Editor for Likely Red Press, a former Contributing Editor of Fiction for Barren Magazine, and the Managing Editor for Emerge Literary Journal

Dancing Shoes by Beth Moulton

Once I passed the rest area, it was closer to continue to mom's place than to turn around and go home. On most trips I hit the gas at that spot and speed past, outracing the desire to turn back. But I'd had too little sleep and too much coffee and I had to pee. As I signaled my turn, I caught sight of the hideous green and orange platform shoes lying on the passenger side floor. Six-inch heels, high tops, with green laces and a side zipper. "Oh, fuck. I'll hold it." I hit the gas and swerved back onto the highway.

The home health aide had called last night saying mom had been cursing all day about me taking these shoes. And by the way, she says, I quit. That's the second home health aide this month, at least a dozen since Mom entered hospice care. Her doctors had solemnly recommended hospice, saying she only had a few weeks left. That was ten months ago.

When I arrive, Mom is sitting on the couch, walker planted in front of her as if she has somewhere to go. Her cat Pumpkin, eighteen pounds of pure rage, hisses at me from Mom's lap.

"You better have brought my shoes back," she says, while petting Pumpkin. The beast closes its eyes and purrs.

I drop the shoes on the floor at her feet, startling the cat. "Glad to see you, too."

"You had no right to take them."

"The last time you wore them you ended up in the ER with a broken hip."

"It wasn't the shoes that broke my hip; I tripped over Pumpkin." She kisses the top of the cat's head. "He felt bad about it, so we let you think it was the shoes."

If I left now I could be home by dinner time. Maybe call Jeff, have a few drinks ...

"Put them on me."

"Mom--"

"None of my clothes fit me anymore, just shoes. Put them on me."

I study her then, as I might study a stranger. I finally notice how her clothes pool around her, as if she's melting, her eyes huge in her gaunt face, her fingers bony and trembling. Only her personality is still larger than life.

"Ralph died last week."

"Ralph?"

"My senior prom date. I wore these shoes. We showed up on his Harley and danced all night. He was the best dancer I've ever known."

"I'm sorry about Ralph."

"They buried him without shoes."

I struggle with the zipper on the left shoe. "Well, Mom, maybe they--,"

"His sister, the stupid one who dances like her hips don't bend, said he wouldn't need shoes, said the undertaker draped the blanket so no one would know, but I looked under that blanket and there he was in his stocking feet. No matter where Ralph lands in the afterlife, he's still going to need dancing shoes."

"Mom, grief makes people do strange things."

The zipper finally slides up, snugging the shoe against her bony calf.

"Did you know I took these shoes with me to college? I was wearing them the night I met your father. It was at a disco. The place is torn down now; they built a CVS. I won't go there."

"I never knew that about Dad. Or why you hate CVS." The second shoe is more difficult to get on than the first. I start to sweat. Pumpkin is batting at my hair, or perhaps trying to claw my eyes out.

"So I need you to promise me that you'll bury me in these shoes."

When they're in hospice, you've moved past the point of pretending that there is still a lot of time left. Still, it's one thing to know something in your head, but another thing to admit it with your heart. The zipper slides under my fingers, and if I squint a little I can see how my mother looked when she was younger than I am now, a dancing teenager, wearing shoes that I have always been afraid to wear.

"Well, Mom--" I swallow and try again. "Mom. Is there any dress that goes with these?"

Beth Moulton earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Rosemont College in Rosemont, PA, where she was fiction editor for the Rathalla Review. Her work has appeared in Affinity CoLab, The Drabble, Milk Candy Review and other journals. She lives near Valley Forge, PA with her cats, Lucy and Ethel.

DRIVING WITH FINGERS by Michael McSweeney

This guy students call Fingers demands McDonald’s so we hit the drive-thru he doesn’t ask if I want anything splatters McChicken mayo on hairless legs slurps soda through fish lips long-nailed sandal-foot above the e-brake like a looming act of God expels noxious Bud Heavy funk can’t roll down the windows because this driving school-owned sedan is a shitbox we bang down the hometown expressway past rust-junk ghost factories dust kingdoms bad memories good memories bone-black fire pits too many no-sleep nights people you want to love forever forget hellos kisses breakups goodbyes.

***

This other guy never says his name doesn't know what happened to Fingers says I gotta visit my cousin I'll only be like five minutes so we zoom to a lonely cul-de-sac south Montford by stale brown pond goes inside for forty-five minutes driver's manual only thing to read still encased in American plastic doesn't actually teach you how to drive so fucking useless guy stumbles back to the sedan face sweat-scarlet blood-dagger eyes not like he's high but like he's finished crying out of breath maybe he's at the edge of a heart attack flooded fingers palms he wipes streaks on tight khaki shorts says Hey man I’m hungry as hell let’s grab some food, take you back home.

Michael McSweeney is a writer and editor based in Brooklyn, where he lives with his partner and cat. His tweets stuff at @mpmcsweeney. 

Honey’s Eternal Shelf Life by Michael Grant Smith

Two weeks ago he’d stopped shaving -- not to grow a beard, but because he hated the razor. Tim soon despised his facial hair even more than removing it. Now he avoided mirrors.

Tim plowed the breakfast bar’s clutter as if the documents were drifted snow. He propped an elbow on the flower arrangements’ sour, dry petals and forked up the first meal he’d eaten in days. Again he skipped saying grace.

Baked tilapia for supper. The fillets were deliciously light and flaky, but he’d made too much tartar sauce. He covered the bowl, turned to put it away, and stopped when he realized he ate fish once every six to eight weeks. The refrigerated condiment wouldn’t see daylight again before devolving into gray fuzz, or toxic gas, or worse.

Why not shortcut to the inevitable and get rid of the excess sauce? Throw it out. Toss it. Tim didn’t want to “waste” food, but all he’d accomplished previously was to defer discarding leftovers until time and a strong sense of destiny (and smell) forced him to take action.

Tim rinsed the creamy goo down the sink drain. His chest flexed. He was in control! Unchained from the drag of years! He could create and he could destroy; he’d shape his own future in much the same way he whipped up tasty gravies and dips. The existential, whatever he deemed either hurtful or inconsequential, could be dispatched to a swirling, grinding abyss. Buh-bye! Thank you for your pungent flavor accent!

His mind fizzed with possibilities. He opened the refrigerator door and appraised the overabundant contents. He'd prepared chicken salad last week, scrumptious chicken salad, but as a rule he never ate anything more than three days old. Now he was a Roman emperor endowed with the authority to determine which gladiators lived or died. Or perhaps he was the distant-past Inuit chief who banished the tribe’s elderly to remote ice floes. With a smirk Tim seized the tub of chicken salad. 

Dawn painted pink the wall-clock and calendar. Knickknacks glowed. Tim’s face unstuck from the breakfast bar’s laminate surface and he peeled plastic stretch-film from his forehead. Like an artist’s palette, food stained his aching hands. Bleary-eyed he surveyed the kitchen until his gaze rested on the remains of a ten-pound sack of Russet potatoes he'd apparently banished one-by-one via the garbage disposal. Scattered across the horizontal surfaces were bottles, storage containers, jars of jam or honey, curries, bags of crunchy snacks, canned goods; a few unopened, most of them emptied. He'd run out of leavings and eliminated almost everything else from his pantry.

Tim had showed food who was boss.  

The death certificate and insurance forms survived amidst the jumbled perishables and culinary accoutrements, a post-tornadic theme park of the savory and the sticky-sweet. Tim reflected on honey; its taste pleased him, the shelf life was eternal. Bees and their role were transient. Beauty shouldn’t be traded for durability, not ever, but maybe the fear of losing goodness exaggerated its value. A sunrise -- now, there was something to admire, undiminished despite our confidence another one will follow, and another after.

Michael Grant Smith wears sleeveless T-shirts, weather permitting. His writing appears in elimae, The Cabinet of Heed, Ellipsis Zine, Spelk, Bending Genres, MoonPark Review, Okay Donkey, trampset, Tiny Molecules, and elsewhere. Michael resides in Ohio. He has traveled to Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Cincinnati. For more Michael, please visit www.michaelgrantsmith.com.

An Interview with Brandi Spering by Jenna Geisinger

In Brandi Spering’s forthcoming poetic narrative, This I Can Tell You, the narrator roots through the wreckage of memory, holding each one up to the light—for examination, for truth—to understand her past and how one moment defined the rest. She urges us to look closer—beyond the expanse of time and the dust rubbed away by sleeve—at the swept-up secrets that bind families. 

Brandi Spering was kind enough to talk to us about her new book, writing process, and ghosts. 

1.    First, how is Brandi Spering doing in the age of Zoom?

Whenever I ask my grandma—over facetime now, which amazes me—how she is doing, she always says Why complain? I have aches and pains like everyone else. I feel the same, except my aches and pains seem very insignificant compared to those of others’ right now. I’m grateful that I can say I’m doing ok! And I’m grateful that I’ve been able to reconnect with friends / have been able to virtually participate in workshops and readings with writers from different places.

2.      What sparked the idea for This I Can Tell You? Is art a compulsion, a goal, or something different for you?

I probably would not have written This I Can Tell You when I did, had I not been required to write a manuscript as my thesis, senior year of college. However, I’ve always written about my life because writing is what I use to process. At the time, I was not confident that I could write a book about anything else, and I needed an outlet for all that was boiling over. In these scenarios, writing is a compulsion, but at times it can also be a goal, to keep structured. When I’m in the swing of writing and reading every day, it is easier for me to generate an idea and quite honestly, function better cognitively and emotionally. The compulsion still exists if the structure isn’t there, but it is faint, and the result will often resemble mush. 

3.      What does your writing process look like? What is your ideal writing environment?

I tend to read before I write as a general warm-up, like starting your car ahead of time in the winter. This can result in writing as a response, whether I get inspired by a theme, a subject, a concept, or even the language itself. When I take the short cut of diving in, my writing process frequents the same thought through forty sentences until it feels right. Before I know it, three hours have passed, and the intended point still isn’t made. Part of that is because I distract myself by editing while I write.

If I could, I would write outside year-round.

4.      Writing can be a lot of work, what's the worst job you ever had?

I can look back semi-fondly about most of my jobs, even the ones I hated, because they gave me writing material or helped me learn some sort of skill. So by that definition, my worst would have to be when I worked at Five Below, eight years ago. The schedule changed each week, which wasn’t unusual, but we would also have an additional “on call” shift, which really was unnecessary for a job that paid about $5 an hour after taxes.

The only thing that got me through each shift, was that my coworkers were all kind and friendly people. The managers on the other hand, were unhelpful and rude, belittling at whatever chance they got. I’ve experienced that at almost every job I’ve ever had, but never—in any other situation—while the High School Musical Soundtrack played on a loop in the background. I did not stick around long enough to learn interpersonal skills to tolerate or combat it. It probably says more about me than the job, but besides learning how to work a register and properly fold a t-shirt, I don’t remember taking anything away from that experience besides free glitter lip gloss and my first public panic attack.

5.      I loved how the speaker is constantly evaluating and reevaluating the people in her life, her experiences. Has writing This I Can Tell You changed the way you understand your childhood? 

When I first began writing This, I had a steady chip of bitter on my shoulder. Each time I returned to edit, I revised. I suppose some of it started because I did not want to put negative energy out there about my family—I felt a need to protect them. My mentality shifted. I started justifying why the beginning of my life was the way that it was, and why the people in it were and are who they are. As I wrote, I understood everything and everyone a little more; I wasn’t just telling the reader, but myself. Gradually with each draft, I felt myself heal as my perceptions changed.  

6.      On pg 107, you wonder if your “anecdotes are smoothing out fine detail like a pumice stone on foot,” speaking to a fear we all have about documenting the facts of our lives, and in doing so, neglecting the stuff that slips through the cracks. How do you find that stuff? How did you strike a balance between honesty and story?

It was important to keep within the concept of memory, especially to keep myself accountable. I made note when I was unsure of something, even if that meant contradicting myself. To archive it all is way to gain a reader’s trust in a narrator that admits to fault. I knew I was trying to make some sense out of what I knew, but also that there was so much I didn’t know or remember. The intention was that if I doubted myself within the text (the way I have a habit of doing in life) it would send the signal of ‘take it with a grain of salt,’ since the reader is only getting one perspective in the narrator. That’s why there are shifts in the tone of the speaker, when they are breaking the fourth wall and addressing the writing within the writing. I never felt inclined or pressured to embellish anything for the sake of the narrative. If anything, I had to tone it back, to redact.  I don’t feel as though those omissions are lies, but more so intended cracks you can peer into. 

7.      This leads to my question about family in memoir. How did you navigate the issue of respecting their privacy while telling your story? 

I initially wrote very bluntly as I was nestled in the safeness of my writing class. My approach shifted over time as I noticed the neglect in my language, through writing “my” rather than “our.” I had to make sure I was only sharing what I had agency to share. I’ve tried to be as open about it with my family as I could, often asking for them to clarify or confirm specifics of a memory, etc. By their reactions and the various answers that I’ve received, I was able to see where fogginess lingered, but also what they were comfortable with. I imagine it’s easy for them to expect the worst, knowing I’m spilling some sort of bean. For the most part, my family is very private, so I know there is some uneasiness, but it comes mixed with immense support—so I suppose it really is an unfair position to put them in. For months, I handed my siblings redacted copies until I realized that if they couldn’t read a certain page, no one else could either. I didn’t want shock value or to be explicit for the sake of it. Over time, I scaled back certain details as it was triggering, even for me, to read my own words.

8.      In your book, you mentioned some supernatural experiences. What has been your most memorable?

Whenever I would go on break from college, I would stay in my old bedroom at my mother’s house, like everyone else, but each time I would regret not bringing sage. (I of course already knew the house was haunted at this point.) One night, I could hear someone walking up and down the stairs. As soon as they reached the bottom, they turned and came back up again. And it would repeat. I could hear the distinct creak of each stair, of the weight placed on it. The first few times, I figured my mom went downstairs, forgot something, went back upstairs to get it, then down again. But every now and again, the footsteps would reach the top of the steps and therefore my closed bedroom door. Again, I would hear weight being balanced on old wood, and the slight shuffle of a slipper. I thought maybe my mother was trying to listen to see if I was awake—maybe I made a noise that I didn’t realize? But as it continued, the process over and over, I knew it wasn’t her. To make sure, I opened the door and checked. No one was there. The next morning, she asked me what I was doing walking up and down the stairs all night.

9.      Speaking of ghosts, which ghost of literature would you want to hang out with for a night?

I would hang out with the figurative ghost that is Munis, from Women Without Men: A Novel of Modern Iran, by Shahrnush Parsipur (translated by Faridoun Farrokh). I say figurative because technically, Munis dies twice but comes back to life each time. Refusing to follow the confinements of women under Iranian patriarchy (taking place in 1953, I believe), Munis’ only escape is death. When she returns to life, she returns more powerful, with abilities she never had before, such as an awareness of herself and others. It is a really beautiful novella as a whole; I wish I remembered more of it, but it has been about eight years since I have read it. I cannot forget Munis though, or her incredible fight and journey, for a self and soul-fulfilling life. The strength and courage of her character overall, have remained with me.

10.  Your lovely book reminds me of those giant wall mosaics composed of hundreds of photographs that, when arranged together, form a bigger picture. What inspired you to use this structure?

It happened organically, because of what I had to work with. My memories did not flood to me in any order; I had to figure out where they belonged in the timeline I was trying to piece together. In the earliest drafts, pages and chapters had to be swapped/rearranged until they made sense. It was also difficult because I would often unlock more memories, often having to distance myself for clarity.

Amongst the chaos of my navigation, my professor lent me her copy of Jane: A Murder, by Maggie Nelson. It was my first time experiencing that type of hybrid genre. Nelson’s book took many forms—from poetry, to uncovered journal entries, to prose, etc. It felt like a bible; it opened me up to a whole new way of writing.

Preorders for This I Can Tell You are open at Perennial-Press.com. The official release is March 31, 2021. Follow @perennial_press on instagram & twitter to stay tuned about upcoming announcements, including (virtual) readings, which are in the works with two Philly bookstores!

More info about Brandi Spering and her work can be found at Brandispering.com / Instagram: @brnd_sprng

            Other recently published chapbooks by Perennial Press:

                        How to Stop the Burning by Zubaida Bello

                        The Odds Against A Starry Cosmos by Abby Bland                      

Millennial Dogeater by Marinna Benson

Brandi Spering resides in South Philadelphia where she writes, sews, and paints. Favoring non-fiction and poetry above else, her writing tends to sway between both, carrying a little over each time. Spering has received her BFA in Creative Writing from Pratt Institute. Her work can be found in super / natural: art and fiction for the future, Forum Magazine, Artblog, and elsewhere.

Jenna Geisinger is the Online Editor for SVJ. She is a fiction writer from South Jersey with an MFA from William Paterson University. Her short stories have been anthologized in The Masters Review and Philadelphia Stories.

Mamas by Tyler Dempsey

In Papa’s bedroom, I was emptying what naughty girls like best into Jane’s lips—when Mama—hands by her puckered up cheeks, stepped in. Where are your clothes, she said. You hole-in-the-wall kids.  

I said, Mama.

Let’s get dressed, she said.

She stepped boots to my box and flicked her hand. The box’s lid opened, like this.

Mama’s hips bent, and she looked, way down. When Mamas look—they look. When Mamas see, inside of things is what they see. Other people, see outsides.

Not Mamas.

Mamas and Papas are different in this wooded, hole-in-the-wall place. When Papas look, they see outsides. The road, is all the road looks like, to Papas. When Mamas listen, they hear leaves swirl by the made from dirt road, but not the road, itself, whispering.

But, insides, have nowhere to hide from Mamas.

What should you wear, Mama said, looking at Jane on her knees. What she saw made her giggle. She reached, and the inside of this box seemed different, than how this box, on the outside, looked, while Mama reached her hand down inside.

Don’t worry, she said.

What she brought up, was like an apple. On the outside. It was round. Red, this thing.

On each of its sides, things hung. Like things do.

It was not a collar. But that, it also looked like, on the outside.

Mama walked with it to Jane.

She held each of its sides, this not a collar thing. In its middle, between Mama’s hands, pressing Jane’s puckered up lips, this inside was not an apple thing pressed.

Open up, Mama said.

Tyler Dempsey is the author of a book of poems called, Newspaper Drumsticks. His work appears in Heavy Feather Review, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, trampset, Bending Genres, and the like. He's a fiction reader at X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine. Find him on Twitter @tylercdempsey.