Issue Twenty-Six
Winter 2026
An Oratorio and a Cantata
Angel T. Dionne is a surrealist author and professor at the University of Moncton's Edmundston campus. She obtained her PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Pretoria in 2021. She is the author of Garden-Body (Radiant Press, forthcoming) as well as Bird Ornaments (Broken Tribe Press, 2025) and Sardines (ClarionLit, 2023). Her writing and art have appeared in several experimental publications. She takes her coffee black and her fish tinned.
Uncle woke up just the same as any other day, with his eyes sown shut by the little men who lived beneath his floorboards.
He felt his way blindly around the bedroom he’d memorized. Antique bureau. Window that laughed when he tickled it with his fingertips. Old TV where he kept his dust. In the bathroom, he used a needle to pluck the sutures, then pulled his eyelids down and looked at his semilunaris to check the phase of the moon. No full moon for another week. Uncle sighed and let his shoulders drop. He turned his bodily inspection to the color of his iris, hoping to forecast the weather—pale blue today. It might rain. But at the moment, the sun was an auspicious sand-dollar and not a wisp of cloud in sight. Satisfied that he now knew what to expect, he combed his hair back, washed his face, and slippery-slipped into his favorite denim and sweater made of dead grass.
A week earlier, on a regular soupy-breathed Sunday, Uncle had received a call on his red rotary phone. He first thought the caller had the wrong number or perhaps was trying to reach the previous tenant. But the voice knew his name and the exact depth and shape of Uncle’s navel.
He hoped today’s call would come early. He sat at the kitchen table waiting with his coffee that smelled of coffee but tasted of disappointment. Outside, the sky grew heavy with new clouds until it splintered loudly and rain fell from the cracks. Uncle’s eyes took on the color of the Mariana Trench. By the time he’d finished his coffee and begun mapping a direct route through the Darién Gap in the leftover coffee grounds, the phone chirruped.
“Hello?” he said, putting the red receiver to his ear.
“Hello,” replied Uncle’s own voice from somewhere else. “You really should do something about the pipes at night.. They’re keeping us all awake.”
Uncle thought for a moment. It was true. The kitchen pipes had been making an awful noise lately. It didn’t bother Uncle, though. He’d taken to sleeping with his ears stuffed full of wax; otherwise, the little men beneath the floorboards might crawl into his head and build altars while he slept.
“I’m not sure what you’re on about,” he said flatly, “and I’m sure I won’t spend any of my time worrying about it.”
“Suit yourself,” said the voice, taking on the quality and shape of a woman. “But the whole city has started to complain.”
The conversation went on like this for some time, with the voice prescribing one remedy after another. One idea was to gift every resident with two pinecones with which to plug their ears against the noise. But who had the time? And besides, it wasn’t morally justifiable. The most obvious solution was to call the plumber, but that might cost more than Uncle was willing to spend, and the plumber always left a trail of crumbs.
A piece of sky broke loose and shattered loudly against the pavement, splitting open the head of a young child who’d run from his mother. Uncle watched from his window as the oblong woman fell to her knees and wept beside the body. The street sweeper came and swept them both to the end of the street, where they joined a mound of bodies, some dead and some only half-dead, that had been maimed by the storm. Uncle shuddered and resolved to remain indoors for the day, or at least until the weather meekened. The electricity belched a blasphemy before going out.
That night, the sky grew back its skin, and the rain ceased. The mayor climbed his ladder and pressed stars into it using his hole puncher while the city tossed and turned. In Uncle’s kitchen, the pipes sang an oratorio followed by a perfect musical retelling of earth’s creation. He packed his ears with wax and slept soundly.
Daylight wafted in as the city janitor wiped the sky clean of night with a wet rag and spackled the stars blue. Uncle unraveled his eyelids. Wormlike strings of yellow wax wriggled from his ears.
The pipes were louder now. The sound beat like a heart in his head. Someone lobbed a rotten apple at the window and screamed at him to stop the racket.
The noise ballooned, flattened cars, and caused the buildings to plump with sound. People’s heads inflated and then burst. Uncle decided, finally, to investigate. He punched holes through the kitchen walls and stuck his head inside, trying to decipher the exact source. But the room had become a cavernous maw of music and hot breath. He wrenched and pulled and hammered at the pipes, dismantling the kitchen’s skeleton. Soon every wall had been dissected, yet the noise persisted.
The floor throbbed with the heat of it.
He at last turned to the remaining pipe beneath the sink. Peering up, he found the culprit—a single fat pigeon roosting in the bend. He pressed his lips to the opening and sucked the bird out whole. Outside, the citizens who hadn’t been flattened cooed then dispersed, while Uncle gagged on the flailing bird. His belly swelled into a feather pillow upon which the little men rested and later built an entire civilization. The red phone chirruped.
Eventually, Uncle’s mouth was sold to a local church and installed as a gramophone for cantatas.
Calamansi
Nora Esme Wagner is a junior at Wellesley College. She lives in San Francisco, California. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Smokelong, Wigleaf, JMWW, Milk Candy Review, Flash Frog, Vestal Review, and elsewhere. Her stories have been selected for Wigleaf’s Top 50. She is an assistant fiction editor at Pithead Chapel and the Co-Editor-in-Chief for The Wellesley Review.
To help my sister’s teeth settle in my mouth, I’m supposed to wear a retainer for ninety days, taking it out only to eat, floss, brush. Valerie is lax with the rules. She bites into lemons like they’re peaches, makes peanut butter and marshmallow fluff sandwiches, never once inserts her retainer. It’s glittery blue with silver pincers like a scarab beetle. “Can you treat my teeth with a little more respect?” I ask. Deadpan, she stares at me. “I’m dying, Juno.”
Feeling bad, I back off. She remains on the couch, rotting her tumor-infested brain with mindless television, rotting my teeth with a bowl of sour, yellow-orange fruit. Calamansi, I learn through googling. With the retainer in, I can’t pronounce the word. “Galamanshee.” Softened, like teeth soaked in a cup of vinegar. The surgery was her idea. After a pack-a-day habit and a four-year-long stint of depression, when oral hygiene fell to the bottom of a shrinking list of priorities, my teeth were totally fucked. Valerie had teeth like Shelley Duvall, giant, front-slung, but from a dental perspective they were gold standard. “Let’s swap,” she said, like we were trading sweaters.
No one really understood but me. Mom dismissed it as brain-cancer kookiness; Harry, my boyfriend, said it was sweet, how she wanted to look after me. More than that, though, I think Valerie liked the idea of hybridizing herself with me, becoming like calamansi, half-kumquat, half-mandarin. The spleen exchange she suggested, I rejected. Too invasive. But teeth—teeth were already so visibly exposed.
Side by side, we were knocked out. I woke up after Valerie, to her alert, unblinking gaze.
She seemed strangely unaffected by the anaesthesia, less groggy than I’d seen her in months. I leaned against her as we left the hospital. The days of recovery, we vegged. Sharing ice packs, rolls of gauze, plain broth, practicing our smiles for each other. Valerie knew how to make my screwy teeth work—she smirked like a rockstar, like a funky jack-o’-lantern. I could only manage grimaces. My mouth felt full of stones.
One of her last good nights, she asks me to take her to the bar. Already wearing her pastel wig of soap-bubble curls, she refuses to be refused. The drinks at the spot I choose are infamously weak, watery. That doesn’t stop Valerie’s eyes from going glassy, from ordering another, another. When the wig slips, revealing the pale craters of her scalp, I slip away to the bathroom, ashamed of my shame.
Valerie’s teeth in the mirror look huge and unnatural, clamped by a silver bar. I lift up my lips, searching for the incision, some seam to pop out her teeth like plastic vampire fangs. But they’re stuck, so stuck, no less a part of me than my tongue.
When I emerge, Valerie is chatting with an okay-looking guy, his receding chin redeemed by pretty green eyes. Her wig sits perfectly now. From across the bar I watch her laugh with her whole mouth, flashing teeth. Dissolved enamel, brown stains, all invisible in the dim, sooty light.
She wants to be cremated. Says a burial would be claustrophobic. Though why she’s fine with lodging her bones in the small, wet cavern of my mouth, I don’t know. Skin flushed with gin, smiling so big. It’s impossible to imagine that almost every bit of her will soon be powder. I touch her teeth. My teeth. Picture us as one fine ash.
Millie or Timothy or Gwendolyn, but we’d call her Gwen
Emily Rinkema lives and writes in northern Vermont, USA. Her writing has been selected for the Wigleaf Top 50, Best Short Fictions, and the Best American Nonrequired Reading anthology, and has appeared in journals such as Vestal Review, JAKE, Flash Frog, and SmokeLong Quarterly. You can read her work at https://www.emilyrinkema.com/ or follow her on X, BS, or IG (@emilyrinkema)
Skitzy texts me to meet her up at the old tent and to bring a chocolate cake and a pregnancy test. I call my mom and tell her I’m staying late for math club, I’ll be home for dinner, my day was fine, and yes, I revised my chemistry test and have an A again. The only cake left at Kroger’s says “Happy Birthday Benjamin” in blue cursive, and I know Skitzy will love it. I grab a quart of milk and head to the pharmacy section.
This is not the first time I’ve bought a pregnancy test. Skitzy always thinks she’s pregnant. But this is the first time I’ve had to buy one in the middle of the afternoon while a half dozen of my classmates and my old kindergarten teacher are working. I slip the box into my coat pocket and checkout in Jason’s lane because Skitzy says he has a crush on me, which means he’ll be distracted.
He asks me who Benjamin is.
“My Uncle from Reno, just visiting for his birthday. I haven’t seen him in six years,” I say, and realize I shouldn’t have been so specific. Skitzy says that’s how you know people are lying, that they add details no one asked for. Jason doesn’t seem to care. He just stares at my breasts as he hands me my receipt.
Skitzy is sitting on a log outside the tent. It was her dad’s tent, a long time ago, heavy canvas with a zipper that sticks because of rust. We put it up in the woods behind my neighborhood every spring. It’s been our secret place since middle school.
“Who’s Benjamin?” she asks when I hand her the cake.
“Some lonely, forgotten kid,” I say. I sit down next to her and open the pregnancy test.
“Or maybe some asshole who left his family before his birthday,” Skitzy says, setting the cake on the ground by her feet.
Skitzy takes the plastic wand from me and walks behind the tent. I hear her unzip her jeans.
Here’s how this always goes: Skitzy will come back with the stick and set it between us. She’ll tell me she can’t be pregnant and I’ll assure her that I’ll go with her to get an abortion if she is, and then I’ll offer to raise the baby with her instead and we will spend the next two minutes coming up with names for the baby we’re going to co-parent. Then I will check the stick, tell her she’s not pregnant, and we’ll eat most of the cake to celebrate.
“I can’t be pregnant,” Skitzy says. She sets the stick down next to her on the log. I start to assure her it’s okay, but she stops me. “No,” she says. “This time it’s real. I’m two weeks late.”
She’s never been this late. It’s usually a day or two. And usually she hasn’t actually had sex, at least that’s what I think. I’ve never met her boyfriend. The only thing she’s ever told me about him is that he works with her at the casino. Honestly, I thought she made him up. And I thought she knew I thought that, that it was just another game we played.
“Have you told Stella?” Stella is Skitzy’s mom, a mom who’s more of a roommate, a terrible roommate who pays half the rent, who brings strange men home, who eats the food Skitzy pays for since she dropped out of school last year and started working full time.
“Sure,” Skitzy laughs. “I told her last night while we were watching Gilmore Girls.”
“Right,” I say. “Stupid question.”
“Pass me the cake,” she says.
“You don’t want to wait?” I ask. We never eat the cake before we check the stick.
“If I’m pregnant,” Skitzy says, taking off the plastic top, “I’m going to have the baby.” She rips off a piece of the pregnancy test box and uses it to cut us each a chunk of the cake. I open the milk.
And then Skitzy tells me about Lance as I eat. She tells me he loves her, that he wants to buy a house near the river, that he wants to have three kids, just like her, that he’s going to build a fence because he’s handy, that he has money, lots of money from his family, a big family that lives outside Indianapolis, that she’s going to meet them soon and that Lance says she’s going to fit right in. I finish my cake and lick my fingers to clean them. She hasn’t even taken a bite of her piece.
“It’s time,” I say, but Skitzy doesn’t move. I wipe my hands on my jeans. “Want me to look?”
“You should go,” she says. She runs a finger through the frosting and brings it to her lips.
“No,” I say. I reach for her hand, but she pulls away.
“I want to be with Lance when I look at the results,” she says.
After dinner, Mom asks me if I want to watch a movie with her and I tell her I have too much homework. I lie in bed with the lights off but can’t fall asleep. I keep thinking about Benjamin, waiting for his mother to come home with his cake. I imagine him sitting on the couch, staring at the front door, thinking this time it will be different.
On Auditioning to Become the Next Cadbury Spokes-Bunny
Patrick Thomas Henry is the author of Practice for Becoming a Ghost: Stories (Susquehanna University Press, 2024), which was longlisted for the Story Prize. His work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, West Branch online, Carolina Quarterly, Lake Effect, and others. He teaches creative writing at the University of North Dakota, where he also directs the UND Writers Conference. He’s also the fiction and poetry editor for Modern Language Studies. You can find him online at patrickthomashenry.com or on Instagram @Patrick_T_Henry.
Before the depressed director waves his dried-up ballpoint pen and monotones “No bunny knows Easter like—” you must strip your hide, melt yourself down, and temper the molten dregs of yourself. With stage makeup and grit, candy yourself into a husk, so pure and polished that you reflect the hot stage lights, yet so brittle and frail you’ll shatter at the slightest touch. Don’t think about Bunny, what the rumors said remained in her dressing room: tufts of poly-fiber fur and a basket of crushed candy-shelled eggs and shavings of milk chocolate.
Remember what your agent said: chocolate should melt in the mouth, not in the hand. A vile phrase—your gut churns a custard from bile and the stale wafers you’d scarfed down minutes before taking the stage.
No, quick: think of anything else. Remember instead the wisdom of your friend, her eyes grey as steel wool, bristling with feral wisdom: to make a rabbit, she said, you melt down squares of pure-cacao despair (add condensed milk, butter, sugar crystals white and sharp as teeth) over a bain-marie. Decant the confection into a pliant, silicone mold. Then pour some of it over a pair of tiny plastic eggshells, let them cure, then inject them with a cream fondant of dread. Scalpel out space for the rabbit’s eyes; insert the tiny eggs. Devour it, the sooner the better. Bunnies expect death. Bunnies perk up when anyone mimics that whiskey-voiced song, croons we were born to die. No bunny knows Easter like—well, Bunny. This is—was—her gig, but in this industry?
Take your chances. No one knows where Bunny really is, what might have happened, why this audition is necessary. Your agent told you not to ask. Questions, he told you, were verboten.
The stage is hot. The searing lights—it’s like settling inside the plastic hull of an Easy-Bake Oven. You’re ribboned with sweat; your outfit is patterned with licorice coils of perspiration. Too much more of this, and you’ll melt, lose the mirrored sheen of your tempering.
The director clicks his pen—retract, extend, retract—yet he never records anything on his clipboard. He delivers the line: “No bunny knows Easter like—.” Touch your headband with the realistic ears, make sure they’re intact, make certain nobody has chomped your ears. When you’re ready, he says. So, you follow the director’s instructions: it’s all on the script, so short your agent gave it to you on a three-by-five card. Cluck and wriggle your nose, squint your milk- chocolate eyes as only Bunny could, lift your hand like a popstar feeling the air for her note, stroke the felt of your fake ears and wonder how it would feel, what Bunny certainly felt: teeth gnashing sharp as a barrette and cracking open cartilage and bone molded from chocolate, a carnivore sucking a marrow of sweet air from a candy skull.
As Good as Can Be
Judith Shapiro is a writer from Washington, DC who spends half the year on the California coast marveling at the sun that sets on the horizon instead of rising. When the memoir she’s writing looks the other way, she secretly delights in flash prose and poetry. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Citron Review, The New York Times, The McNeese Review, Bending Genres, The Sun and elsewhere. See more at PeaceInEveryLeaf.com
Cammy holds onto stuff, figuratively, literally, fiercely. Junk piles up on tables and countertops, in doorways, leans against walls. She keeps hurts, slights, painful shit inside. From childhood, from ten years ago, from yesterday. When I notice the time is 11:11, I make a wish for her okayness. I enter the HGTV Dream Home Sweepstakes in her name.
I picture her demons locked up in a dark vault. They escape sometimes, wreak havoc. I don’t know what holds the key. I know my transgressions are in there, small compared to others, but I wonder, do they find each other, nestle together like pretzels? Maybe they’re like rubber band balls, different colors, thicknesses, all of that tension, rigidity, strapped in. Rubber bands get old, dry out, lose their elasticity, break. I don’t know. I guess it’s a dumb idea. And anyhow, rubber band balls are fun.
This morning, after last night, in a moment of clarity, I let go of my Cammy judgements, irritations, frustrations that flourish in my own inner vault. I say to Cammy, “I get it. I know it’s hard. We humans are all so fucking flawed. I’m sorry.” It feels corny, and I don’t know how it’s gonna land, but I mean it. She stares at me suspiciously, like where is this going; waits for the inevitable qualifier, the but. When it doesn’t appear, she smiles, her half smile, says, “Thanks. We’re good.”
And she’s right. We are good. As good as we can be. There’ll be days when we’re less than good, sometimes exceedingly less, and then the glorious ones when we’re amazing. When we take Lucy to run on the beach at dusk. Watch her play chase with the waves, daring them to catch her paws, come sit beside me, lean against my thigh, panting, vibrating, spent. Cammy and I will stand still, staring, transfixed, the sun, an otherworldly orange halfmoon. We will not look away, willing it to last one more minute, knowing it will disappear, swallowed by the horizon in a blink.
On the way home, Cammy will wonder out loud if the setting sun would still be special if it never vanished. “Is it the ultimate cliche, like a Hallmark movie?” she’ll ask. “John Green gives sunsets five stars. What’s that Roberto Bolaño quote—"The sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower’?” Sunsets, damn. Fucking amazing.” I’ll say nothing in response. Cammy won’t care. She’s not talking to me.
She’ll point to the bright-red neon Trader Joe’s sign as we drive by, struck by its beauty against the darkening sky. We’ll marvel at that, like we did yesterday when she showed me textures and colors, greys, whites, browns, rivulets of black in the sidewalk.
As we walk to the front door, shoulders touching, backs of our hands grazing one another, we’ll stop. Look up. Geese overhead, honking as they make their way north, will take our breath away.
What She Came to See
Grey Traynor (they/she/he) is a transfemme writer who has been published in XRAY, beestung, and BULL. They attended the Tin House Workshop and they read at the 2025 Portland Book Festival and are currently querying manuscripts. Find them on IG @greytraynor & at www.greytraynor.gay — Also, check out their gay romance podcast, Baby, Don't Shoot (feat. a Luigi Mangione type), wherever you listen to pods!
The young woman stepped off the bus. A ray of light, the rising early afternoon sun striking an oily puddle just so, shone on her freckled face until an old man pushed past her—“MOVE!”
She had talked to this man when he got on the bus in Cleveland. He had sat across from her and peeled an orange, offering her two slices. The scent of citrus comingled with the sweat of the Midwest passengers and the dust dandruffing off the bus’s carpeted walls.
The old man had talked about visiting his son in Greenpoint and asked her where she was headed in New York City (“Where the fashion is,” she’d replied). And then the old man had slept the rest of the way, his brown bowler perched in his lap, hiding a pile of orange rinds.
Stepping out of the way, onto the sidewalk, she could only explain his barking “MOVE!” as a sign that they had arrived in a new place with different terms, a place full of rushing strangers, anonymous and on a mission.
She still didn’t fully understand this man’s turn in behavior toward her, but she could respect it—that’s what she’d been taught to do above all else: respect others. It was instilled in her by her stoic father and mother who was known to tip her head to the side and nod silently.
Scrunching her nose, the wrinkles hiding away some of her freckles, the young woman stood on a curb with faded red paint and tried to orient herself while the other bus passengers spilled from the bus like fish out of a net upturned.
In one direction, a narrow church painted olive green peeked out from two blocks down with stacked trash bags and puny, naked trees lining the way. The other option was clogged with a crowd, all its people trying to out-strut and sideswipe one another.
The young woman’s heart began to thump at the possibility of joining the throng and her head swam a drowsy backstroke from the thick scent of gasoline and a salty sourness in the air.
Still, she chose to aim herself toward the masses because they were wearing what she’d come here to see: fashion.
And the way they were barging down and up the street didn’t have to be intimidating.
She’d been born on a farm and used to chase her family’s silly, dumb cows for fun. They had been fast like these city people.
As she crossed the street, ready to breach the wall of bodies, the young woman tightened the hand on her brown leather suitcase, prepared to break into her cow-chasing run to keep up with the people who were now her neighbors, her new community.
And she made her way in.
Only, she lost her inertia and any gumption at the sight of such visual splendor: textiles and distinct style choices. It was like living in the style magazines she perused at the library with their outdated ads for record players and defunct airlines.
But who cared about wrinkled pictures in a place where one couldn’t gasp. There on the street, the young woman stood still and gasped.
Maxi dresses, silk ties, cashmere, wool, pork pie hats adorned with feathers, chartreuse, argyle, gingham, paisley, fur coats that nearly kissed the chipped sidewalk, leather jackets that couldn’t keep a bear warm, plunging necklines, Nehru collars, wide lapels, and towering shoulder pads.
It was all coming at her fast and so were the insults telling her to, once again, MOVE!
But she was swimming in the allure, being held by such grace; the young woman had got everything she’d come to New York City to receive.
She hit the ground, but the people kept coming, going this way and that. There were penny loafers, spool heels, stilettos, riding boots, slip-ons and slingbacks in suede and leather, all of which was imprinting on her face and body, kisses from her one true love.
Her Very Dark Window Upstairs
Anne Louise Pepper is a writer and former educator who lives in the Pacific Northwest. Her work can be found in Vast Chasm and The Citron Review.
We text Ester about shopping for prom dresses, but she ghosts us, so we go to her house, and we’re knocking and ringing the bell, and the house smells like cinnamon and lavender, like, so good, like, we want it, so even though no one answers, we keep knocking and ringing the bell, and then Ester’s mom opens, and she lights a cigarette while we’re asking for Ester, and she blows the smoke over our heads.
She tells us she’s really, very sorry, but there’s been a terrible tragedy, her ex-husband, Ester’s dad, passed away, so, as we could imagine, Ester’s in no state.
She says she and Ester have to lay him to rest properly, even though, as we probably knew, she and Ester’s father weren’t together, he had his own apartment on sixth street over the bakery, but when you make a commitment to a person, you promise to be there for them, even if you’re not married to them anymore.
She says we probably wouldn’t know, being so young, but when you fall in love and get married, and you put down roots, well, then you imagine your future will be bright, and you never imagine people will get sick, or anything bad will happen, but, anyway, they are taking him to the land of fog and lakes—that’s Minnesota, where her family and Ester’s dad’s family are, though, really, it’s the land of lakes, but there’s also fog that burns away in the sun.
She tells us she and Ester will leave tomorrow, and they have to wash the dishes and vacuum the mess and call people about moving the body and cleaning the apartment, and get the flowers and the funeral home set up, and bake things for the reception because that’s their tradition, and tradition is important, sometimes all you can rely on is tradition.
She takes a drag from her cigarette and says maybe we don’t understand about losing people, being so young, with our nice, normal lives and families, and we’ll be going off ourselves after graduation, but maybe, if we think of it, we could send a card to Ester or write her a note with our condolences, to help her remember happier times, and we could ask our mothers or our grandmothers for proper words to say, and how to spell condolences, and how to help her be hopeful for the future, because this whole thing has been really, very hard—the split up was hard, and finding him was really hard, and you want to let those bad things go.
She tells us Ester had been close to her dad though he had a sickness—alcoholism is a sickness where you lose everything—and it’s hard when someone you love disintegrates like that, and everything you know is pulled out from under you, and she’ll need support from her friends, if that’s who we really are.
And then she tells us that Ester was with her when she found Ester’s dad, that they’d gone to his apartment to give him a loaf of fresh baked bread, because he always loved fresh baked bread, but when they went in there, he was on his living room couch— and then Ester’s mom looks off into the dark sky over our heads and takes one last drag off the cigarette butt.
She tells us that he had been there for a week at least, decomposing into the cushions, and there were flies, and a smell, and Ester had to open the windows and let it all out, and she’s glad that Ester is so strong.
We tell Ester’s mom that we’re really, very sorry, and that we would, for sure, be there for Ester, and she thanks us, and she flicks the butt into the bushes where it bursts in sparks that disappear, and she vanishes into the house, and we head back to the car, and that’s when we see Ester watching us from the dark window of her upstairs bedroom, but we can’t see her eyes or mouth, just her shadowy chin and shoulders, so we tell her to open the window, but she doesn’t, she doesn’t even move, so, finally, we yell that we’re really, very sorry, and that we would get together with her when she got back, and for her text and not to ghost us, but she just looks down at us from her very dark window upstairs.
Hope Street
Ari Koontz (they/he) is a queer trans writer and artist with an MFA from Northern Michigan University, where they also served as associate nonfiction editor for the journal Passages North. Their work has been published in Hayden's Ferry Review, Storm Cellar, Under the Gum Tree, and elsewhere. Ari currently lives where the water meets the woods and can be found at arikoontz.com or on Instagram @ari.koontz.
Our cathedral has no ceiling.
The songs we sing, the ideals we worship - it’s all so much bigger than that. Too large to be contained, too lofty to put a roof on top. In fact, our religion cannot exist at all without the open, looming heavens.
It started off with just two of us. Strangers bumping into each other in a crowded blue-lit room, exchanging clumsy, apologetic glances as we waited for our turn. Oh, I’m sorry… no, my fault… A pause, a recognition. Do you come here often?
Two of us at first, then three, then four. A few soft words here and there, a nod of greeting, an invisible smile. As our numbers blossomed, we remained nameless and faceless. But we don’t need to know each other in order to claim solace here; we are united in the dark because we know the importance of avoiding bright lights. We press our eyes to the glass one after the other, knobbled fingertips sliding across smooth metal, and we see the grand design that has pulled us into the same orbit.
We come from different families, different neighborhoods. We come from different traditions of faith. Some of us are atheists, some agnostics, some of us Catholic and Buddhist and Orthodox. All of us come here out of necessity, one way or another: we work on the weekends, we live too far of a drive from the mosque. Tuesday evenings have become our Sunday mornings, and our attendance records are immaculate. One way or another, we all make this weekly pilgrimage.
We are amateurs, almost all of us. There are a few students among our mass, the ones who came here with clearly outlined objectives and crisp pads of paper, and then there are those who keep this place oiled and take our tithes--the tour guide, the physicist, the archivist, the groundskeeper. Most of us, though, are here not because we know anything but because we want to know something. We are writers, doubters, mothers, artists, neighbors.
Together we have witnessed the star-wheel turning, through every season and moon and meteor shower. We’ve watched as Mercury inches across the sky, a bit more to the right every week, another slight turn of the gears that creak as we lean forward eagerly. We’ve seen things so sublime that no one else would believe it, and things so small they must be whispered about softly, behind wrinkled hands and between restless bodies.
Look, have you seen… it’s so bright tonight… that cloud of stardust, just like a wool scarf…
The first night of autumn, it rained. We’d read the plaque on the door enough times to know it by heart - open 7:30 to 9:30, weather permitting - but we’d forgotten what weather permitting really meant until we turned up on the stone steps to find those doors locked, the lights off inside. There were no greeters to spot us and welcome us in. Yet there we were, after a long walk up the hill or a short drive down the block, huddled under raincoats and peering up at the drizzling sky.
We did not leave the steps. We were there to observe our night of rest. We muttered to each other, not to say anything in particular, just to hear the familiarity of our voices in the dark.
The night of the lunar eclipse, we came out with blankets and binoculars and hot cocoa.
We spread out on the lawn and whispered and laughed, and turned the event into a communion, drinking in the moonlight that passed over our heads. We made our confessions to the open sky:
I’ve never seen anything so beautiful in my life. I’m so glad I’m not the only one. We stayed there far past when that pale orb slid down to meet the horizon, stayed and stayed and stayed until almost no one could keep their eyes open, and then we helped each other up with strong arms and warm hands and made sure nobody left their blankets behind.
The night after the disaster, the night they were still playing reruns of that terrible footage and those terrible words, it wasn’t a Tuesday but we showed up anyway. Somehow we knew it would be open, or we just needed it to be, and so we filed through the door in a procession of stifled whimpers and clenched fists. This world’s too far gone, one of us said, shaking in anger or fear. No, another said, we’ve got billions of years left. Some of us couldn’t see past our tears when we finally figured out how to work the machinery and open the lens, unsheathing our only escape. Some couldn’t look away from the emergency exits, calculating galaxies of worst-case scenarios and wondering if this, our sanctuary, could become unsafe.
Someday perhaps the doors will no longer open for us. There are rumors of defunding -no surprise, there always are. Someday all of us will die or move away from here, and our children will choose their own religions, and someday that blessed blackness will press down heavier and heavier until it crushes all of our world into dust. Ashes to ashes - we have seen dozens of dead suns already, and we know ours is no exception. Maybe no faith can last, we think to ourselves. Maybe this was doomed from the start.
But that’s the thing about this cathedral. What matters here is not the future but what we have here in front of us, between us, above us. Sometimes it’s enough to turn off the lights, feel a familiar hand squeeze yours, shuffle to the side to make sure everyone gets a chance to see.
When the Dust Gains Memory
Khayelihle Benghu is an emerging author. She resides in Johannesburg South Africa. Besides poetry, she has a passion for photography, particularly of the natural world.
The woman upstairs waters her plants every morning at exactly six-fifteen. The sound reaches me through the ceiling like a soft glug, pause, glug again, as if the building itself is swallowing carefully. I set my kettle on the stove when I hear it. This is how the day begins with her watering and my waiting.
I live alone in a one-room flat that once belonged to my mother. The landlord never removed the old cupboards; their hinges sigh when opened as if tired of remembering what they used to hold.
When my mother was alive, she stored flour in one and peppers and spice in the other. After she died, I washed both out with vinegar and salt, but the smell lingered anyway.
Dust gathers here faster than elsewhere. I wipe the shelves every evening, and still it returns by morning, pale and insistent. I’ve begun to think it comes from inside the walls, that the building sheds itself slowly, the way bodies do.
At the bus stop across the street, a man sells mirrors from a blanket. Hand mirrors, compact mirrors, a few cracked bathroom ones with dull metal backs. He arrives later each day, like someone slowly losing faith in time. I have never seen him sell one.
I watch from my window while eating toast. The toast always burns on one edge no matter how carefully I turn it. My mother used to say this meant the house was hungry. She said many things like that, as if the world were always on the verge of speaking and only she could hear it.
After breakfast, I work at the municipal Archive. I catalogue objects that have lost their owners.
Today it was a watch which stopped at 3:12, a child’s pink shoe, letters written in a careful hand to someone who never replied. We log them, photograph them, and place them in drawers. Some objects grow heavier over time. Others seem to thin, like paper left too long in the sun.
At lunch, my colleague Jeanne asks if I’m still cleaning my flat every night.
“You don’t have to fight it,” she says, meaning the dust. “It’s only dust.”
But she doesn’t live with it. She doesn’t hear it settle after midnight, a faint sound like breath held too long and finally released.
That evening, the woman upstairs knocks on my door. This has never happened before.
“I think something of mine is in your ceiling,” she says. She smells of damp soil and mint tea.
I tell her that ceilings do not belong to the people above them. They belong to no one.
She smiles politely, as if indulging a child. “Still,” she says, “I hear it move at night.”
We stand in my room, listening. The pipes tick. The fridge hums and the dust waits.
She leaves without insisting, but the next morning her watering comes earlier, impatient, the water striking the pots harder than before. The kettle boils too fast and screams.
That night, I dream my mother is standing in the archive, filing herself into a drawer too small.
She looks relieved when the drawer shuts.
I wake to the sound of scraping. Not upstairs inside the walls.
I press my ear to the plaster. There is movement, slow and deliberate, as if something is rearranging itself. I think of the mirrors across the street, all those faces waiting to be claimed.
In the morning, the dust is thicker than ever. It coats the table, the chair, my hands. When I wipe it away, it leaves a faint outline, the suggestion of fingerprints that are not mine.
At the bus stop, the man is gone. In his place lies a single mirror, face-up on the pavement. I pick it up.
The glass is cloudy, but I can see myself faintly, layered my face, my mother’s behind it, the flat stretching backward into rooms that no longer exist.
Above me, the woman waters her plants. The building swallows.
I take the mirror home and place it on the shelf. The dust avoids it, leaving a clean, bright square.
For the first time since my mother died, the room feels full. Not crowded complete.
That night, the walls are quiet.
The dust, finally, rests.
Lotel
Glen Pourciau is a writer whose fourth story collection, Under, was published in September by Four Way Books. His stories have been published by AGNI Online, New England Review, New World Writing Quarterly, The Paris Review, Post Road, and others.