Issue Twenty-Four
Summer 2025
This is the Water. This is the Well.
Mallory Smart is a Chicago-based writer and the Editor-in-Chief of Maudlin House. She hosts the podcasts Textual Healing and That Horrorcast. She’s the author of I Keep My Visions To Myself and The Only Living Girl in Chicago.
I’m not writing a geography textbook. I’m writing emotional geography.
It’s broken neon and cold fries. Strip malls where the only thing still open is the vape shop with blacked-out windows. Parking lots that steam in winter like something underneath is trying to get out. Places where nothing fully leaves but nothing fully arrives either.
Cody, Wyoming had all of that.
We were on a road trip. Peak Americana. Patriotic monument here. National park there. This was just the static in between.
We stayed at a motel that smelled like industrial cleaner and melted ChapStick. The heat made a sound like someone whispering through a plastic bag. The mirror always looked fogged up. Even when dry.
The Wi-Fi didn’t work. Not even the fake kind that shows up just to disappoint you. We were trying to download Twin Peaks: The Return, Episode 8. I didn’t know what happened in it. Just had this feeling. Like it was the rupture. Like the air was holding its breath, waiting for something to split. Like if we missed it, something would be gone forever.
He said we could watch it tomorrow.
I said you don’t sleep on something like this.
I was wearing my black American Apparel hoodie. I always sleep in it at motels. I don’t let my face touch the pillow. That’s where they go first. Bed bugs are drawn to warmth and carbon dioxide. It’s not a theory. It’s biology.
I keep the hood up all night, pulled tight like I’m bracing for something. He once said I looked like the Unabomber. I didn’t correct him.
He wore pajama pants with little cartoon bears grilling, mowing lawns, reading newspapers. I told him he looked like a gas station mascot mid-existential crisis. He said thank you.
We headed to Walmart to walk the aisles until Twin Peaks finished downloading. That was our plan. Pilgrimage by free Wi-Fi. Cosmic dread buffered through aisle 12.
He hated Walmart. Said it felt like a graveyard of better decisions. Said Target was where he went to feel like he still had a future.
That’s when we heard it.
“Down in Mexico.”
Live. Not a playlist. Not a car stereo. Real instruments, bleeding across the road.
The guitar slide came in slow, like it had been waiting for someone to notice.
He said, “One drink?” but it came out too soft to mean it.
I didn’t answer. I was already moving.
The building looked like it used to be something else. A diner, maybe. Or a tax office. The kind of place where the ghosts of whatever came before still clung to the windows.
No bouncer. Just a screen door with a tear near the handle. The kind that sticks like it knows you’re not coming back out.
Inside, the heat hit hard. It was wet. Personal. The air felt used up.
The lights were low and yellow, the kind that make everything look already over. The floor gave slightly when you stepped. The band was crammed in the corner in front of a busted claw machine that still lit up, blinking in no particular order. No stage. No spotlight. Just a bass player in sunglasses and a singer who looked like he’d been chain-smoking through the end of something important.
The song hadn’t stopped. Maybe they’d started over. Maybe they were caught in it. Waiting for someone who still hadn’t walked in.
A stuffed panda sat at a table like it was stood up. Two beers in front of it. No one claimed them.
He ordered shots without asking what they were. They tasted like burnt caramel and fake cinnamon.
“This feels like we’re interrupting something,” I said.
He nodded. “Yeah. But it’s okay.”
It wasn’t. We both knew that.
I kept my hood up. Not just because of the motel thing. I needed something between me and whatever this place was.
A woman danced in a sequined top that caught the light like a threat. A man in a hunting jacket stood completely still, nodding like he didn’t want to be noticed remembering something. The room moved like water. Everything softened around the edges.
A good old boy with a sunburn asked me to dance. Called me sweetheart. I watched his mouth form the word and didn’t say anything. He smiled anyway, like I was just passing through.
I wasn’t planning to dance. But he was already on the floor, waiting like we had some scene to finish. And maybe I wanted it to matter.
I don’t remember the song ending. Just the lights blinking. Like they forgot someone was watching. The weight of his hand. The heat behind my knees. The smell of cologne and fryer grease and something else, something too faint to name.
The band kept playing.
Others were dancing too, but it still felt like we were the only ones stuck in playback. Watching ourselves blur at the edges like a copied tape.
Someone screamed. Not loud. Short. Like a test. No one turned.
There was no clock in the bar. I checked my phone. The screen stayed black. No low battery.
Just nothing.
“You okay?” Dave asked. The name hit weird in that bar. Like a borrowed memory.
“Yeah,” I said.
“You sure?”
“You just look… off.”
I said I was fine but didn’t finish the sentence. Something dropped out. Maybe from the song.
Maybe from me.
The bartender passed, out of focus. Like he was trying to forget himself in front of us.
The drink was there again. Warm, sweet, wrong. It belonged to someone I’d just stopped being.
Dave reached out to touch my hand and it felt like a shock, but on the inside.
The song was still going. Or something else had started. I couldn’t tell the difference, and maybe that was the point.
The rupture didn’t explode.
It just kept playing.
Philosophical Reflections Last Saturday in Luke’s Basement
Kim Magowan lives in San Francisco and teaches in the English Department of Mills College at Northeastern University. She is the author of the short story collection Don't Take This the Wrong Way (2025), co-authored with Michelle Ross, published by EastOver Press; the short story collection How Far I've Come (2022), published by Gold Wake Press; the novel The Light Source (2019), published by 7.13 Books; and the short story collection Undoing (2018), which won the 2017 Moon City Press Fiction Award. Her fiction has been published in Colorado Review, The Gettysburg Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, and many other journals. Her stories have been selected for Best Small Fictions and Wigleaf's Top 50. She is the Editor-in-Chief and Fiction Editor of Pithead Chapel. www.kimmagowan.com
First, Luke mansplains the Liar’s Paradox, which to tell the truth I still don’t get. Then we all start playing Two Truths and a Lie. Oscar is sitting next to Julia, per usual. Those two are the golden couple, prom court.
Oscar faces Julia, clasps her hands, and says, “I love you. I have always been faithful to you. I fooled around with your cousin Eve.”
Two of those are obviously incompatible, but which is the lie? We wonder if this is one of those glass-half-full-half-empty conundrums (“conundrums” is a Luke word). We reflect upon Eve’s not-exactly-pretty face, one eye higher than the other. (Behind her back, we call her “Picasso”). We wonder if there’s a tell to the lie, like generality versus specificity, or if there’s no way to know, so determining which is true is an act of faith. We think of Doubting Thomas, fingering Christ’s wounds.
Julia looks at Oscar and says, “I love you. I forgive you. I’m breaking up with you.”
Oscar sits, blinking.
Mirror Image
Arik M. is the pen name of a writer who lives in Los Angeles. He stole the line "Say Hey" in this story from Willie Mays, but he's not much of a sports fan. His writing (under his real name) has appeared in 100 Word Story, Gooseberry Pie, Lost Balloon, Milk Candy Review, and elsewhere, and he's a Best of the Net and Best Microfiction nominee.
I have no head. Or I should say: my head is my wife’s. Or I should say: my head is my own but it grew out of my wife’s throat. I live where I was born, bodiless at the base of her tonsils.
When her lips are shut no one can see me. If she opens wide she can hear me speak. I say only what she wants me to, because my air is hers.
Once she parked her bicycle on the sidewalk. A man she seemed to know approached her. I knew she had been riding a bicycle because I could feel the ebb and rise. I knew she stopped when I felt her descend.
“Hey,” the man said, as if they didn’t need words to say what their souls felt.
“Hey,” she said back, the same way.
I don’t know why I didn’t recognize his voice. Maybe when you’re inside someone you become deaf to the sounds she spends her days listening to hear. But here I was now, hearing them say Hey.
When they kissed I felt his tongue against my forehead, my left eyelid, the bridge of my nose.
When he reached my lips I made my mouth an O to gather him in.
It felt good, being kissed by this man who was kissing my wife. Like peering up into falling snow: suddenly the world is raining abundance. All this time with this woman, and only now I knew how her love felt.
Sfenj
Originally from the Deep South, Elizabeth Rosen now lives in small-town Pennsylvania. She is a proud member of the MTV generation and can still tell you all the words to “Karma Chameleon” and where the video for “Hungry like the Wolf” was filmed. Her work has been published in journals such as North American Review, Baltimore Review, Flash Frog, Pithead Chapel, and New Flash Fiction Review. Some of it has been nominated for the Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fiction Awards. Colorwise, she is an autumn.
“Did you know that you pump fifty percent more blood when you’re pregnant?” Jesse says quietly, staring at the half-planted vegetable garden from her chair. She and the stranger sit in the backyard, a catbird squawking in the nearby branches. She finds it hard to look at the man.
In each of her hands, she holds half a sfenj he has baked and brought with him as a gift. It isn’t just the discomfort of not knowing what to say to her donor’s father. It is the force of grief she can see etched deeply into the lines around his eyes, the way he clenches his fists. It feels familiar. “The doctors only discovered the damage to my heart when I miscarried,” she tells him.
That this stranger has also lost a child briefly interrupts the renewed grief Adrian has been feeling since he baked his son’s favorite pastry early this morning before setting out to meet her.
It is the second time today she has surprised him. The first had been when she opened her door and startled him by saying, “I imagine it’s awkward and terrible” before putting her arms around him and hugging him tightly. For a second, Adrian had imagined he could feel the terrible scar running between her breasts, but then she was just a young woman, her body pressed against his, the strength in her arms surprisingly steady. She seemed so healthy and vigorous.
And then Adrian surprises himself with the fleeting thought that maybe his son’s heart would be better off here. He grimaces with the familiar pain of thinking ill of his child.
From the corner of her eye, Jesse sees Adrian’s face screw up. Even though she longs to discuss it with someone who might understand, she hurries to change the subject. “I don’t bake. I garden.” She waves the half-pastry at the bed of rich soil and little seedlings. “Usually flowers, but this year vegetables.”
The memory comes on suddenly. The grocery store, several months after the surgery.
Hyperventilating in her bewildered husband’s arms, a red bell pepper crushed in one hand. She remembers the panic which had seized her. “What do they do with it?” she had gasped, sucking wildly at the air. “My heart,” she said. “Do they just throw them away?”
She blinks in the sunshine, reminds herself that she is not there now, and turns to Adrian. “I want you to know I won’t waste the chance your son has given me.”
The honeyed smell of fresh sfenj wafts through the air. Adrian’s mouth fills with saliva like it once had in his mother’s meager kitchen as he waited for her breads to cool. Those waiting times were different from the ones he came to know later, in the police stations, in the visiting room of the county prison, with his son.
Nothing in his son’s history could have predicted he’d tick the donor box on his driver’s license. Adrian can only imagine that he’d done it because it was a generosity that cost him nothing. So many nights since the motorcycle accident, Adrian has wrestled with the thought that he might have prevented his son’s death by preventing the sense of entitlement that had led him to steal the motorcycle he wanted, ride whatever speed he wanted. Take the things he wanted, do the things he wanted. All without expecting a reckoning. Or maybe not caring.
Adrian’s grief moves like a storm wave, cresting under him, lifting him high over the rest of the ocean, then moving on, leaving him to slide down the back into the trough where he spends most of his time now just treading water and trying to stay afloat.
He sees now that he’d been hoping – had brought Nick’s favorite pastry – hoping to see his dead child in this woman who now had his heart. But looking at the untasted sfenj in her hands, it becomes utterly clear how gone his child is. The pieces of meat that had been part of his body were just the cogs and cams of a biological machine that could be swapped out and reused on a different model. It was that simple. Adrian’s fists close around his grief.
There it is again. That bolt of pain electrifying his face. So quiet. Jesse fears she might wait forever for him to say something. Laying the sfenj on her thigh, she reaches out and takes his hand. She holds it tightly between hers. “Will you tell me about him?” she asks. “Your son?”
A cloud passes over the sun and the temperature dips. The back of Adrian’s neck, warm a moment before, ripples with gooseflesh as the cold shadow crosses the yard and retreats again revealing minute details: the tops of Jesse’s ears peeping through the curtain of her auburn hair; the sound of a faucet running inside the house; the way the returning sunlight catches the flour dusting the hairs on the backs of his wrists. He catches a whiff again of the sfenj and with it, one possible future. Adrian scans the unfamiliar emotion he is feeling, realizes it is pride. His son has done this good thing. His son is the reason for this woman’s good fortune. How unlikely.
He leans forward and opens his mouth to speak at last.
“Yes,” he says. “I will tell you. His name was Nick.”
The Operation
Noah Leventhal is a graduate of the Great Books Program at St. John’s College, Santa Fe and the MFA program in Poetry Writing from Boise State University. Noah writes poetry, fiction and hybrid works. Sites of his recent and forthcoming publications include Action, Spectacle; Ghost City Review; Your Impossible Voice; and The Inflectionist Review. Find him on Instagram @neithernoer.
It was the morning of the operation when Friend Two called to tell me there was someone inside his house. This call interrupted my call with Friend One whose body was submerged in a black hole in his bedroom.
There is someone inside my house, Friend Two whispered. Call the police! I croaked. I can’t, he exhaled. It’s Erin. Meaning his girlfriend. Erin? Yes, she’s here beside me. Then what’s the worry? I asked. She’s rummaging through drawers, stealing pills from my medicine cabinet. I catch glimpses of her traipsing over thresholds. She’s fast asleep, he said, but when she sleeps, she’s also robbing me.
My least charitable thoughts redirect me to the operation. 11:00 am was barreling towards my esophagus. Try as I might, I couldn’t keep anything in my stomach. Now a surgeon wished to determine if the same would happen to a camera.
I had attempted consumption of all substances animal, vegetable, extraterrestrial, synthetic and fungus before diverting to less digestible objects: Rubik’s cubes, origami swans, pink stick-and-poked erasers, enneagrams and autism self-assessments, rocks, coins, new age Tamagotchis, chunks of fossilized coral, a length of electrical wire, and (when I was particularly desperate) a can of new-recipe coke.
After these, I supposed a camera would make little difference.
I monologued as Friend Two held Erin tight to his chest:
The real distinction between a rock and a piece of technology has less to do with its shape than with its circuitry. Circuity itself is not an alteration in metaphysics, but rather a transitory stasis between one form of matter and another. Or rather it is the same form of matter ouroboroed to material consciousness.
I had more to say on the matter, but three versions of the same sentence clogged the threshold of my throat. I needed something other to regurgitate.
Eventually, I made my excuses. The operation and all that. I told him every experience is a lesson. I love you, he replied. I burped. A Lego plopped into my palm.
There have been developments, said Friend One. One black hole has become many. My head hovers by the hardwood, but my hands and feet have emerged in other loci.
Hold tight, I said. Reassembly is a matter of will. The world is a product of observation. I’m sure things will eventually recollect. How wise, said Friend One. A calving at my interior. A calculator crossed the threshold of my gut.
I called an Uber, reached the medical center, checked in, disrobed, discussed The Naked Gun and road rage with a sweet goth nurse. The iv was in my arm. I was asked to bite down on plastic. How was I feeling, asked the doctor. I fractured at the threshold of a sentence.
I have been thinking of ways to articulate the experience of going under. It is neither the panic-tinged reality pinch of swift, unanticipated unconsciousness; nor is it the swampy, oneiric substitution of legitimate sleep. We suppose it is like merging onto a highway, where the privacy of a vessel joins the common of the road.
We, which for now refers to the three of us, are distended amorphisms. Objects at the instant of convergence. We are stroking Erin’s hair from her forehead’s sweaty convex. Our toes stretch past the subterfuge of space. We are in our expectation, at the threshold of our will.
Who am I to say what we are becoming?
Civil Address About Civic Places: The Statue Statutes
Ryan Boggs is a writer in southwestern Ontario.
Your worship, elected councillors and esteemed committee members, I represent a delegation that would like to see the Queen Victoria statue in Willow River Park replaced by a statue cast in the likeness of local celebrity, Lois Ruth Hooker, also known as Lois Ruth Maxwell, who, amongst other roles, played Miss Moneypenny, secretary to M, in the first 14 films of the James Bond franchise, from Dr. No through to A View to A Kill.
We believe that the Queen Victoria statue needs to be removed because it is a constant reminder of the cultural and physical genocides involved in the British empire’s objective of subjugating foreigners as disposable property. Its enduring permanence, as is the nature of statues, is a monumental celebration of the inherent, institutional racism and lamentable pursuits, policies and practices of colonialism.
We understand the other delegation’s objection to just removing the statue, due to its vague historical significance - though she never actually visited here -, so we hope that our suggestion is a reasonable accommodation as there is still a connection to the British empire, albeit by a fictional character engaged in defending supposed intelligence against fictional villains.
We have collected over 700 signatures from community members who agree that the following points provide sufficient reason to change the Queen Victoria statue to one depicting Miss Moneypenny as portrayed by Lois Maxwell.
Queen Victoria is a controversial subject for a statue as she represents imperialism which has resulted in the decimation of populations, languages and vital cultural practices worldwide.
Queen Victoria was a passive regent, born into her position, who did not intercede appropriately to stop or discourage the horrific and dehumanizing international affairs and agenda under her jurisdiction as leader of the empire.
These are the reasons why we believe that the statue should be replaced by a more suitable subject. If anyone deserves a statue in our park, it is Miss Moneypenny as portrayed by Lois Ruth Maxwell, for the following reasons:
Lois Ruth Maxwell was born here and through adversity demonstrated independence, integrity, tenacity, resilience and success in her chosen career.
Miss Moneypenny - the character Maxwell played - was an officer in the Royal Naval Service who worked as the private secretary to the Chief of Secret Service Intelligence. She was cleared to work with “top secret” reports and was dedicated to preventing the world from being taken over by fanatical egomanics, regardless of their nationality.
In closing, please remember that our parks are for the public. Our town is increasingly multicultural and our public places should be welcoming to all, including those who have been negatively affected by the colonial practices of the British empire under the rule of Queen Victoria. This is why we think the statue should be removed. And we’re fine if the spot remains empty to encourage all to enjoy the natural beauty of our surroundings unobstructed by ostentatious pageantry. But if the space is in need of a replacement, for what it’s worth, we believe a statue of Miss Moneypenny is a wise compromise.
False Teeth
Marijean Oldham is a public relations consultant and writer. In 2003, Marijean set a Guinness Book World Record for creating the largest bouquet of flowers. When not writing, Marijean is a pie enthusiast and competitive baker.
Before she left us for St. Louis, Mother told us she believed Nana lost her teeth because babies were born through the mouth. And she laughed and said, of course, that wasn’t true, but she never said what was.
Dad said she was gone for good this time. After a month passed, then two, we believed him.
Nana kept her teeth in a jam jar on the side of the bed and we looked at them in wonder. Mother said those teeth, the ones in the water that caught the morning light seeping through the curtains while Nana snored, were false. We wanted to know: if real teeth were traded for real babies, what could we get for false teeth? But we knew better than to ask.
It was Bethany, the eldest, who wanted a baby, but Vickie had the smallest feet, so we sent her sock-footed into Nana’s room late one night after the rumbly rhythm rose through the air ducts.
“Take the whole jar,” Bethany cautioned, and we held our breath as we watched Vickie tippy toe down the hall.
Jar acquired, we three crept outside: Bethany, Vickie, and me and danced like loons under the moonlight, around the jam jar with the teeth upon an altar stump.
“What are you going to do if a baby comes?” Vickie asked Bethany, after we stopped, panting in the dirt.
“I’ll love her and keep her safe,” Bethany said, staring up at the man in the moon. It was the same as Dad told us, that he’d keep us safe, when he said that Mother wasn’t coming back. Not this time. Not ever.
“What if it’s a boy?” I asked, wiggling a baby molar with the tip of my tongue.
“Then I’ll take it to the river and throw it in.”
We squealed and kicked our feet in the dust, till we smelled Dad’s smoke from the front yard, saw it wafting up above the cupolas of the house. We each nodded, silently wishing with birthday candle breath, as we passed by the jar, crossing the yard to the house. Then we crept inside, our hands clasped tight as we waited to see what kind of baby Bethany might get.
The Difference
Kathryn Petruccelli is a Pushcart-, Best of the Net-, and Best Small Fictions-nominated writer with roots in spoken word and a degree in teaching English language learners. Her work has appeared in places like The Southern Review, Whale Road Review, RHINO, Fictive Dream, and SWWIM. Kathryn recently relocated with her family to the west of Ireland. She teaches pay-what-you-can workshops and writes the Substack newsletter, Ask the Poet. Say hi at poetroar.com.
Louise sat, elbows in, coat on, purse in lap. She’d never understood why theatre seats had to be so uncomfortable. So small. They were not in the air, after all, trying to conserve space while people in smoothly arranged hair and scarves served soft drinks from a tiny rolling cart pretending doing so at 35,000 feet up was normal, and other people, crushed into seats where strangers reclined into their laps and were told when they could and could not stand up, had paid a pretty price for the privilege. But apparently, that’s what it meant to live “the life.” Especially if the crushed people were going anywhere with temperatures even slightly higher than the place they left, or that had the promise of a coastline or a mountain or a monument other people had heard of. Louise hadn’t indulged in such living for some time now. At the very least, Louise thought, on the ground they should be able to spread out. At the theatre, no less.
She brought to mind the small painted plaque that had hung in her parents’ kitchen when she was growing up: “Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
Everyone was applauding. The famous writer was on stage now. She would read from her newest book. Louise didn’t own it. She’d gotten it out of the library, but had to return it before she’d read very much at all. Louise wanted to be the kind of person who read books easily, but anymore she was asleep in half a page. She was coming up on one of those “big birthdays,” as people called them, and she wondered if that was the problem.
Both her parents were long-dead well before they’d reached the age she was now. They were older when they became parents and troubled genetics didn’t help. She and her sister had spent the better part of their school days going to family funerals. Aunt So & So. Cousin This & That.
And their father’s. He’d always been a distant figure at best, concerned with the cleanliness of Louise’s fingernails. Or maybe there was more and she just didn’t remember after all these years.
The day he arrived home from work in the Studebaker, Louise and her sister watched from the backyard where they were skipping rope. How he started up the walk in his suit but never made it to the house. How they didn’t quite get what was going on at first, but then, how she understood while her younger sister kept singing:
Cinderella dressed in yella
Went downstairs to kiss a fella
Made a mistake and kissed a snake
How many doctors did it take?
1, 2, 3, 4…
Her sister would call from Seattle on Louise’s birthday. They’d chat about their gardens and their doctors’ appointments. She wouldn’t mind seeing her sister in person some day, but it would require one of those cramped planes, and now with even the theatre seats hardly bearable…Well.
She’d put on a few pounds indulging her sweet tooth. She wasn’t stupid. She knew the brownies and the seating were related. But, I mean, if you couldn’t live a little.
The famous writer had finished reading a passage from the book and everyone applauded again.
She was talking now about her characters. And of course, the writer explained, the main character was dead. People laughed. Death was a funny thing alright.
Louise was named after someone who had died before she was born. Her mother’s mother. Her mother had kept a picture of that Louise on the dresser in her bedroom, a black and white portrait of a woman looking like a movie star next to the fancy perfume bottles. Louise wondered if it was the black and white film that made everyone of that day into a star. Or maybe the hairdos.
The poses? You could be fooled by photographs. They weren’t real life. Someone caught in the instant of a laugh and we imagine glamour. But what about the rest of the time?
In their twenties, before their mother’s funeral, Louise’s sister had stood in front of the dresser and announced she was going to put on Mother’s perfume, ranting about how it was wrong not to use it, how their mother always thought it too good to use for everyday and now look: she’s gone. During the funeral, Louise’s attention was overtaken by the smell of her sister—a pungent floral with a hint of mildew, like tuber roses left to sweat behind glass on a hot day. Every so often Louise would be in the grocery store or an elevator and smell that perfume on someone else. It smelled to her like death.
The famous writer talked about the ease and difficulty with which she inhabited different characters and that the dead one was enjoyable to take on. Not because he was dead, but because she understood well who he was; she’d known many people over her life who were like him. A product of his time, shall we say.
Louise had briefly considered buying the book in the lobby but then thought, no. Hardcover.
When whomever it was going to be came to clean out her house after she was gone, they wouldn’t want to be dealing with hardcovers. Impossible to sell back to the used bookstores and no one wanted to bring them on trips, to stuff them into the bag they’d just about wedged under those terrible plane seats, or to have to hold up all that hardcover heft while on the beach or at a café outside the well-known monument they’d flown to see. She wished for these people she didn’t know more freedom, a life well-lived.
My Impertinent Evening
Mandira Pattnaik's work can be found in mandirapattnaik.com.
It means so little to find you, Yang Sang—you’re not-my-type-but-still. You’re looking dashing handsome—snug in a Khaki overcoat, again, not- your-color-but-still, must be a girlfriend’s gift, oversized like it was my grandfather’s—as you stand just out of your black sedan after pulling up like some stranger in my front yard, but it’s only the parking lot of a supermarket that I visit only rarely, and I’m thinking how I loved you, Sang, since I was little—which is why it concerns me—that it still means so-little and so-much at the same time, just to stare at you, in this early evening, homebound birds dissolving in the sky, neon signage of a spa opposite just lit up, you walking towards me, climbing the stairs, and I’m on the topmost landing, done with shopping, a cart full of groceries and things for my kid, but remember when we were kids? we were deskmates, and lunchmates, and playmates, but brawled at the school gym per routine, and once, I knocked you out with a punch so hard you wouldn’t believe a girl could strike like that, and the teacher called my parents to school and demanded to know if I was fine at home and I wanted to tell them, love sometimes hurts, and when it hurts too much, you hurt the one that hurts you. Because—you wanted love the way boys got loved, begged for it, but I meant to love you more, but not the way you wanted it. Now ten more steps and you’ll bump into me, while I’m still trying to tackle my feelings, as though the years in-between mean nothing; we as grown-ups, as responsible adults, mean nothing; and what remains is the flush of youth, and staring at you as I do now, from kindergarten to high-school, and thinking you’d recompense, prove the rumors among friends about our affair true, fight me to get me to reveal my true feelings, and not just watch me fade away, so all my life I’m thinking how I chased you, and how you chased me too, but we were on different paths, all the way down in life.
The Wishmaker
Shauna Friesen (she/her) is a mountain climber and author living in Los Angeles, CA. Her words have appeared in Best of Net 2025 and have been featured in Gone Lawn, Variant Lit, Chestnut Review, Foglifter Journal, and The Forge, among others. She has been previously nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Shirley Jackson Award.
The Wishmaker comes to town on a Friday.
Her rules are simple. Our offerings must fit into jars. We have until Sunday to bring them to her. Only those with the gifts deemed worthiest will have their wishes granted.
Preparations begin immediately.
Gracie-May bottles the blood of the sunset, knifing a slit in the cirrus and siphoning red out of the sky.
Jesse-Owen plucks all the leaves off of his favorite tree. (He weeps while he does it.)
Sue-Meg uses pliers to work one of the vertebrae free from the stack of her spine.
I catch my schoolmates’ wishes in snatches and whispers:
“To be able to sing pretty.”
“For Daddy not to drink anymore.”
“I want to fly away from this stupid town.”
A waterfall’s mist rainbow is caught between clapped palms and jarred like a butterfly.
A bruise is pared off of the low-hanging moon, throbbing silver-violet behind an Atlas label.
When a songbird reels rib-crunching and skull-thunking into Carl-Christopher’s window in the morning, he scrambles outside to seal her final, startled breaths between lid and container.
“I want to be able to run faster than anyone in the world.”
My own wish burns like I am holding a hot coppery star under my tongue. Like I’ve swallowed a stellated dodecahedron that stabs no matter which way it turns. Like if I could make myself vomit, I’d puke solar flare and razor blade and aurora char.
It feels so trivial compared to some of the others’ wishes.
(I wish the war ended.)
(That I never got sick like this.)
(Bring my little sister back. I’ll do anything in the world.)
It feels so important that I wonder if not getting it might kill me.
(I wish I was a boy instead of a girl.)
On Saturday, Lark-Ellen asks for my help knotting a thick cord around her waist.
“For the Wishmaker.”
I hoist her into the mouth of the cavern at our town’s edge, and she is down for so long I rope-burn my palms descending after her. When I find her grinning and mud-caked in the buzzing gold of her headlamp, she looks so pretty I want to kiss her.
“It’s taking longer than I thought,” she says.
She is filling a jelly glass with stalactite tears. We listen to the calcite plink-plink-plink.
Take turns catching droplets of milky dissolved fossil on our tongues. Sound coyote howls that the walls toss back at us.
(Stop staring at her. Stop staring at her.)
“What are you going to wish for?” I ask.
Lark-Ellen leans close enough for my heart to miss beats. “For Jacob-Douglas to like me back. You?”
I want to crawl out of my skin. Molt the way the bleached salamanders that live in the cave’s emerald pools do. “I’m not really sure yet.”
Night comes, and I still haven’t settled on what to bring the Wishmaker.
(All my baby teeth?)
(Stardust I got under my fingernails clawing at the sky?)
(The blood that beads purple when a worm is cut in half?)
I think about the pocket of ancient air inside of an unsplit geode.
About the future tulips impatient in the bulbs Dad digs up every winter.
(If he forgets to do it they don’t survive.)
I think about the goo in cocoons where caterpillars soak to grow moth wings.
It starts to get late, so I close the blades of Dad’s garden shears around my pair of braids, sawing them scalp-close and balling them to make them fit in my jar. When my mother catches me inscribing the lid, she pitches my offering into our fire.
“This again? You’re sick, Amelia-Jean. This isn’t you.”
(This has always been me.)
Shards of glass blacken in the hearth. My braids writhe and hiss in the flames like twin snakes.
I run through torrential rain to leave a gift with the Wishmaker.
A baking powder tin that I scream into until the metal glows neon in the dark.
(Mother hid all the jars in the house.)
(Won’t you please let me have this.)
Lark-Ellen lets me in through her window when I knock at the pane near midnight.
“AJ. You’re soaked. Come on. I have dry clothes here you can borrow. Or I can go get some from my brother?”
(If I speak I will start to cry.)
Lark-Ellen raids her cupboards for sweets. Puts on songs we used to dance to in her room when we were younger. Evens out my chopped ends with silver clippers in her mirror, and tells me the new cut suits me better.
“Did you hear Mary-Therese wished for world peace? That priss.” She laughs. (I want to jar the sound.)
I am aching to hold her hand while we fall asleep together under the pink frills of her comforter, but I turn to her wall instead. The weight of my wish sits like a second self on my ribs. “What are you going to do if the Wishmaker doesn’t pick you tomorrow?” I ask, soft in case she has drifted off.
“Same thing I’d do if she never came,” Lark-Ellen whispers. “I won’t give up that easy.
Not for something so important.”
A Moonroof Full of Stars
Karen Crawford lives and writes in the City of Angels. Her work has been included or is forthcoming in Best Microfiction Anthology 2025, National Flash Fiction Day Anthology 2024, Ghost Parachute, Bending Genres, and elsewhere. She is a multi-Pushcart, and Best of the Net nominee. Find her on Bluesky @karenc.bsky.social and X @KarenCrawford_
Did you know you were conceived in a car? A Cadillac, your father’s pride and joy. Buttery chocolate seats that stretched way, way back. A moonroof full of stars. Elvis crooning on the 8- track, all cruise but no control. I remember talking about what we might name you at his favorite Italian restaurant. The one with the checkered tablecloths, candles melting in Chianti bottles. We talked about if you’d have my green eyes or his thick hair. My legs, his arms. It was small talk.
Make-up talk. Talk that was ‘after.’ After he’d asked if it was his. After he’d missed the appointment. After I lay home alone bleeding on empty. But that wasn’t the end of us, not then. It was a year later, after the dream. The one where you brought me a cake and placed red roses in my lap. I woke up crying because I’d buried you so deep, and I couldn’t remember a time he’d ever bought me flowers. The next night, we went back there: The same candles on the tables, only ours kept blowing out, and he kept trying to relight them, but I needed to lay it to rest, lay both of you to rest. He sent me flowers the next day and every day for a week until my cubicle smelled like a funeral home.
How the Wife and Mother Disposed of Herself
Molly Andrea-Ryan is a fiction writer living in Pittsburgh, PA. Her work can be found in Overheard Lit, Roi Faineant, Idle Ink, trampset, Okay Donkey, and elsewhere. She is also a fiction reader for Split Lip Magazine and an enjoyer of many hobbies. Find more of her work at mollyandrearyan.com.