Preserves by Rachel Laverdiere

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mom goes home the next day after her medical appointments. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Washington's Sestina by Maura Way

for 1979

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rooftops by Amy Lyons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lucid breathing by Shelley Johansson

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

**

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

**

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

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

April Notes: an excerpt from DUPLEX by Mike Nagel

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

"Uh oh," I say.

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

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

"Pets?" he says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Anything else?" I ask the HVAC guy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vampire Girl by Robin Sinclair

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

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

But... Some of them do.

Viciously. 

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

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

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


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

Spring by Kathryn Mayer

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

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

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

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

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

The audience laughs.

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

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

“Hi,” the woman says. “I’m Jerry.”

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

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

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

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

Arachnophile by Jillian S. Benedict

My yoga teacher dims the lights for savasana. I keep my eyes open. The last few years had not been what I had hoped and, tired of chasing dreams that weren’t “meant” for me—whatever that means—, I had done the “smart thing” and settled down following the advice of well-meaning family members. Most days, it’s fine. I wash my dishes, make my bed, pretend I’m happy with my purchases from Kohls. But lying corpse-like on the bamboo floor, in the purple-blue hue of evening, it’s not fine. I’m paralyzed with the knowledge that I will soon return to a house and a life I had never wanted. 

The windows catch a smattering of lights from the city outside—orange, yellow, and white—and refract them onto the ceiling. It’s galactic and, for a moment, I feel like I am on the edge of the world the way I had when I was eleven and reclining in the planetarium at the Franklin Institute. Under the dome of science I had felt alive, inspired. The skin on the back of my neck had prickled with heat. But I’m not eleven anymore. A dense spot forms in my sternum, pinning me to my yoga mat. Is this what it feels like to be a butterfly on display? Every breath airy, halved by a sharpness.

*****

I can see her through the black translucent box. She hisses and paws at the air holes, hair bristling. The pink of her mouth bright against her face as she screams and smashes her split body over and over: spit and venom, slick and vicious. She inches forward, the force of her frame propelling her prison in spontaneous bursts. Eight arms reaching toward me. She is raging. She is rage. She is not a butterfly. 

When I open my eyes, I grab my phone. 

Spider in dreams? 

Spirit animals.

Meaning?

Femininity.

Patience.

Creativity.

Fear. 

Your life may not align with your higher interests. 

If current reality doesn’t suit you, change. 

*****

At work, I bow to the corporate gods. Glowing screen bright with emails, our scripture. Buzzwords and bullshit tumbling from monitors like the word of the lord. Praise be the shareholders. 

I can walk away, I tell myself from underneath the weight of timesheets, dress codes, and approved vacation time—but I don’t. Everyone says I’m overreacting. “It’s a good job.” As if they know. As if it’s a fact. The American dream. My dream. 

I stand over my kitchen sink and break a glass. Then another, just to know I can. Scattered shards shimmer across the floor. I pool the pieces with my hands. Superficial cuts feel like control. Across the room, my computer casts a knowing glance. 

At night, on my bed, on my body—my chest—she takes me in with her eight obsidian eyes. A single leg moves, a question raised. My little creator. I bring her close and let her climb my cheeks. Up and over she goes into the back of my head for safekeeping, free to weave and reweave reality in the darkest corner of my mind. Spun silk draped like lace across the walls of the prison I built for us. Fingers, restless like so many legs, find their way to the keyboard. 

Fuck. 

She is raging. She is rage. She is ready.

Jillian S. Benedict is a creative writer living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In her free time she enjoys yoga, reading, and listening to music while people watching from her stoop. Her work can be found in Feels Blind Literary and on instagram @writerwithoutacause

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Diary Entries – 11/52 by HLR

Monday

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

Tuesday

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

Wednesday

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

Thursday

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

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

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

Sunday

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

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

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

i.

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

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

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

She was never going to let me catch her.

ii.

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

“Do you believe in aliens?”

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

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

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

iii.

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

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

Since You are Gone: I Dreamed You Laughing by Koss

Since You are Gone: I Dreamed You Laughing 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I follow him out the door.

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

Fish Heaven by Bram Riddlebarger

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

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

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

“Fuck you.”

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

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

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

“I think they’re carp.”

The tractor-trailer coughed into life.

“Goddamn it,” said the man.

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

“Honey,” he began.

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

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

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

Silent Danger by Amy Bassin and Mark Blickley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hey you little dicky Nicky,

Clean that fat ass so sticky

But it might be a little bit tricky

So buy a dog to quicky licky

You into not smelling so icky

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wilderness by Rebecca Dempsey

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

You’re sick they tell me. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

To The Teeth by Michaella Thornton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ham and cheese on wheat by Kevin Richard White

Dad was at it again.

            “I miss that dog. He was friendlier than Mom, I’ll tell you that.”
           “That was eighteen years ago, Dad.”

            He was in the kitchen, fumbling around. A wisp in a tight flannel shirt. Not drunk, just acting fucking weird. Opening and closing cabinet doors, scratching a non-existent beard. He started fighting with the bread box. I walked into the kitchen, took my beer with me. I reached behind him and opened the bread box door. He softened yet wavered. I pushed him aside gently and grabbed the wheat bread, undid the tie.

            “You want ham and cheese?”

            “Will, everything that has lived in my life. It’s been alive. But now it’s…”

            “Come on, man.” I didn’t know what else to say.     

“I’m sorry, I…”

            “Don’t apologize, Dad.”

            “I know, but...it’s so weird. My memory...It goes like a wave. Sloshes around. And then it’s gone. I don’t know how else to word it.”

            I waited for him to at least try while I made his sandwich. But he didn’t talk. I looked out the kitchen window ahead of me as I did. Snow. Getting darker out and we had nowhere to go. I moved back when Mom moved on. Doing my part as the loving, doting son. Because no one else would. No one else could.

            “Look, I’m sure as God made little green apples that...I got a bad hand here. In life. Mom and that dog.”

            “Well, then if Mom’s a bad hand, then I’m the bad fucking card, because here I am, making your sandwich.”

            “Will, that’s not what I meant...I…” And I turned and there he was, scratching a non-existent beard. I almost yelled at him to rip that tight flannel shirt off. I gave him the unfinished sandwich with no plate. I sat there with my beer and watched him drop crumbs all over himself. I had a haze going.     

“The dog,” he said between bites.

            “Christ, who gives a fuck? Got hit by a truck. What other chapter do you want to add to that story?”

            I sat there and finished my beer while I waited. My dad was always a terrible shot. In the Gulf War, he missed every target. Said he never adapted to the weight of a rifle. But fuck, does he know the weight of a bullet. Because he went for the kill and it was gorgeous.

            “Well, then...what about Lauren?”

            “What about her?” My voice got hard, like a fall down the steps.
            He chewed. He sat stoic. “Shouldn’t you get over it, too? Isn’t that why you’re here?”

            “No, Dad,” I said quietly.

            “To get over your wife. Who I liked more than the dog, actually.”
           “Dad, shut the fuck up.”

            Dad knew he fired right. He sat in the chair, slowly eating the sandwich. I thought more about Lauren and her soft skin. My eyes expanded. Dad was not thinking about soft skin. He was thinking of dog hair and death. He stuck his hand out and I saw the sandwich half taunting me.

            “Want half?”

Kevin Richard White's fiction appears in Hobart, Rejection Letters, Soft Cartel and X-R-A-Y among many others. He lives in Philadelphia.

Baxter by Jill Spradley

Baxter didn’t know he was born for a job, had a job, and lost the job. Here are some things that Baxter knew: the couch, the bed, the preferred bed (rugs piled together), chicken skin, the mailman (good), the FedEx man (bad), the awful winter sweater. He didn’t know he had broken limbs and records and fortunes. He didn’t know why he ran over and over toward a rabbit that didn’t exist.      

Baxter had three legs but even on a bad day moved twice as fast as me. “I just don’t understand why you’d want to take care of something so large,” said my mom, once again pointing out the size of my apartment, that I knew no one. Once again pointing out the distance between us. “He’ll break everything in his way.” “Mom, he can HEAR you.” I looked at Baxter in the rearview mirror. He was far calmer than the voice coming out of my speaker. I had braced for barking. Howling, even. The drive home from the Bucks County Home for Retired Greyhounds was quiet, uneventful.  

“Mom, it’s not running away when you’re 37.” 

“You’ll be back. Everyone comes home.” 

Baxter, do you miss Florida? Do you miss your competition? Were you and your competitors running together or racing alone? Me, I miss designated parking, I miss not spending a half hour looking for something I can parallel this bad boy into. And yes, I guess sometimes I miss my family but do not tell them that, you hear me? Baxter sat silent. 

That first winter was bad. We both hated our sweaters, and  three legs don’t mix with four inches of snow. Once around the block and it was “you’ve got this buddy,” but we looked at each other knowing we definitely don’t got this. As the snow melted we began to make inroads, loops widening. Maybe Baxter was still chasing the rabbit, but the rabbit started to look like other things: a pee-soaked tree stump, a discarded chicken wing, golden retriever puppies all inexplicably named Finn. 

It’s hard to be the new kid when you’re already several lifetimes old. I sat in the corner of the dog park and watched young couples unleash drooling balls of energy into the fold. Baxter towered above these other dogs, unsure how to engage but happy to be there. He bobbed in haphazard circles, avoiding dust ups while taking in each fence link and overgrown bush. The people dotting the perimeter spoke to him and he spoke back: 

“Hello,” said Baxter, “I am surprisingly smooth and easy to the touch.” 

“Hello,” said Baxter, “Are you prepared for this much eye contact?”

“Hello,” said Baxter, “Can you remove my sweater so that I may feel everything?” 

“Hello,” said Baxter, “I am being instructed to keep the sweater on but do not listen, instructions will not take us very far in this world, we must do what we feel is right and just.”

Homing instincts hold fast, no matter how many finish lines or state lines we cross. It’s summer now and the heat reminds me of lazy afternoons in a slow town. It’s the same sun, I tell myself, I brought it with me. Baxter sits on the patio, taking in his home, wind blowing warm from the gulf. Baxter holds his head toward it and sighs deeply. Tomorrow morning the world will be soft and bright and new.

Jill Spradley is a writer and creative director living in Philadelphia. When not awkwardly composing her bio, she can be found on twitter @sprads. 

Dead End at Moon Canyon by Lexi Kent-Monning

The best place we lived was the house that had 67 steps, or was it 76 steps? I used to know it so precisely. I could hear the sound of your soles change to a duller tenor, five steps from the top, because it was a few centimeters higher than the others. In 30 more seconds you’d come through the door.

Because of Italian grandmother tradition, you grew a fig tree in our front yard. For that first summer, I picked one perfect fig two times a week, always growing just one at a time, like the tree was concentrating so hard on that one that it forgot to grow others. The raccoons ate most of the persimmons from the tree outside our bathroom window, but sometimes we managed to pick one before they got to it. I liked the star-shaped designs that revealed themselves when I cut it open, and secretly watching your face as you tasted the first one of the season.

The street dead-ended into Moon Canyon Park and we walked our dog up the slope every morning, before the fog burned off. Our favorite neighborhood dog was named Grandpa. The first night we moved into that bungalow you cooked and we didn’t have any chairs to sit in, so we ate steak in bed. The museum down the street went bankrupt and whoever locked it up forgot about the underground corridor. We snuck in to look at the light boxes with artifacts, you took photos of me dancing, and we yelled from opposite ends to hear our echoes. Our landlord fell in a hole he dug while gardening and called our dog’s name for help because he always mixed up your name and the dog’s, so he thought he was calling for you.

Our ancient next door neighbor asked us to mail letters for him, and we went to the post office feeling virtuous about being helpful until a week later when another old man furiously knocked on our neighbor’s door about the hate mail he’d been sent.

Because we were in a canyon, the sun went down and the chill came in by 3pm. The next door neighbor and Grandpa the dog died in the same week. The persimmon tree now barren, the raccoons moved to our orange tree. The tunnel under the museum was finally remembered by someone who held the keys. It was still fall, but the coyotes started coming out earlier and earlier. They used to wait until winter.

Lexi Kent-Monning (she/her) is an alum of the Tyrant Books workshop Mors Tua Vita Mea in Sezze Romano, Italy. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tilted House Review, X-R-A-Y, Little Engines, Neutral Spaces, and elsewhere. https://www.lexikentmonning.com/