Issue Twenty-Nine
Autumn 2026
True Crime
Kathleen Latham is a short fiction writer and poet living outside Boston. Her work has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, The Ilanot Review, and Milk Candy Review and has received awards from Writer's Digest, the Bridport Prize, and Bath Flash Fiction. She is the author of the poetry collection The Ones (Kelsay Books, 2024). Find her at KathleenLatham.com or on Bluesky or Instagram as @lathamwithapen.
My latest murder obsession has me lying on the ground in a raging snowstorm. “Can you see me?” I ask. “If you didn’t know I was here, I mean.”
My son mutters something I can’t make out. His friend laughs uncomfortably from the warmth of the car. We’re at the scene of the crime because I need to know whether anyone driving by would notice a body in a blizzard.
“Go around the block and see,” I tell them.
When the sound of the car fades away, all I hear is ticking snow. My heavy breath. I stare up into the falling sky as if lying there might tell me something.
It’s an itch, I think. The need to know who to blame.
Women everywhere lying on the cold, hard ground. Scratching and scratching until they draw blood.
On the Mend
Brittany Pierce is a fiction writer based in Atlanta, Georgia and a graduate of Emory Law School. Her novels are represented by Eric Smith at Neighborhood Literary.
I know from the moment you sit down that it’ll happen today.
No good morning or nod. Not so much as a fucking glance in my direction. I tighten my robe, swivel around on one of four kitchen barstools, seething. As if we need more than two. We don’t have friends anymore.
“Hey,” I say, but you’re deep in your phone, sipping coffee, hunched over the screen like it’s feeding you.
A blur of neon pink catches my eye from the window. An old woman I’ve never seen before hobbles down our street in a blinding sequined dress, a flock of grackles flitting at her feet. She stops in front of our driveway and waves to me.
I get up, close the blinds, sit back down. Still nothing from you. I kick the breakfast bar, hard.
You look up with a furrowed brow and that sharp, rigid little mouth, as if I’ve disturbed you. You were my world, for a time. Suppose you still are.
“What?” you ask.
The thumping in my chest gets louder. How strange that it moves without me willing it. I try to imagine a lone heart muscle on my plate, slick and steak-like.
Would it taste like steak if you took a bite?
Would you take a bite if I offered?
You’re waiting for me to say something, half-glancing at the damn screen. But there’s an over-eagerness in your posture, the way you get when you’re nervous. You rub the back of your neck like always.
A decade of marriage.
I know what you’ll say before you say it, down to the last breathy sigh.
It rises in my throat again, but I can’t swallow this time. I become a spectator as the secret spews from my mouth like a busted pipe: “I don’t love you anymore.”
You drop the device, scowl. “Yes, you do.”
I’ve never had a voice you can hear.
The video that so enthralled you continues from the table, something about making your own rubber boots. You never wear boots.
I grab my duffel, already packed beside my feet.
Your what-the-hells and god-damn-its slice up—finally—the fat slab of silence that’s been sitting between us for years.
Remember when you would tell me things? Your wild theories about the stars, your boss’s hair plugs.
You double over when I stand, like I’m making you ill, but something in you has always been ill, or maybe something in me. We’re almost indistinguishable now, aren’t we?
You storm over to block the door, so close to my face that your eyes stop being eyes, just two green algae ponds, filthy.
“Stay,” you say.
“Move,” I say.
You start apologizing. Flailing hands, buckled knees.
Enough.
I shove past you and out the crooked screen door hanging loose on its hinge, stumble to my car. When I get in and slam the door, my stomach burns. Those invisible barbed wires that bind us slide from my middle, leaving only throbbing in their wake. I look down and see it, my seams ripped open like a ragdoll, black murk gushing and staining the shitty cloth seats. You glare at me from the window, holding your own gut like it may fall out.
I manage to get the key in the ignition as that old woman approaches, now holding a large bag of birdseed. She taps my window with a fluorescent fingernail, cracked down the center. Her sparkling dress is stained at the torso, too tight in the shoulders. She can’t lift her arm all the way.
I roll the window down as she picks at her bottom lip, staring at my leaky sides.
“I could have those fixed in no time, dear,” she says, flicking away a flake of skin. “Take me home. “ I unlock the passenger door.
Four blocks down, we arrive at her cottage, its warped wooden siding half-digested by hungry earth. I spill from the car. She helps me over rotted porch steps and into her living room, the air thick with mildew and soured grain. I take shallow breaths.
“Sit,” she says, switching on a lamp.
The dim light reveals a canary, electric yellow, perched inside a metal cage in the corner.
It watches me and begins to sing. I sink down in an armchair beside it, mesmerized by the sound.
The old woman kneels and begins to mend me with sewing thread. Her needle stings, but she’s quick, grunting softly to a tune all her own.
“I see you’ve taken a liking to my bird,” she says, scratching at her side.
I nod, distracted by her hand. She yanks her dress down to claw at what’s itching her, groans with delight.
The bird stops singing. I try to imagine what it would look like without its yellow feathers, but I can’t.
“You should see him when he takes his feathers off,” the woman chuckles, adjusting her neckline. “Isn’t that right, Hank? Who’s mommy’s special man?”
When my sides are sealed tight, the woman stands. “That’ll do it, then.”
I thank her and trudge to the door. She bows. Hank squawks a goodbye from her wrist as a single feather floats to the floor.
I leave but linger beside my car, thinking of you, of our beginning. That time we visited your Aunt Bess’s cabin, and she fed us quail eggs and whiskey. That time we danced barefoot in a Texas hailstorm at Dad’s, covered in happy bruises.
But I feel nothing. You’ve been carved from me.
I pull a loose thread from my stitches, and the black seeps out again. It drips down my legs, pools on the sidewalk beneath my feet. The throbbing returns, too, then the blissful burning, and I sit smiling in the puddle, making sticky handprints on the concrete as Hank soars overhead, yellow specks trailing behind.
Playground Space
Tom Weller is a former factory worker, Peace Corps volunteer, Planned Parenthood sexuality educator, and college writing instructor. His fiction has appeared in Booth, Flash Frog, Barrelhouse, and Milk Candy Review, among others. His fiction collection And There Came Forth a Great Fish: Stories was published by Gateway Literary Press in 2022. He lives in Corpus Christi, Texas, with his wife and his ill-mannered but big-hearted rescue dog, Beans.
Knuckles seek flesh. A soft belly. A jaw speckled with downy stubble. A throat, fragile as a robin’s egg. Six Scrap Boy fists, wild as fire, desperate as hunger, hum through the air. Six fists one purpose, Scrap Boy1, Scrap Boy 2, Scrap Boy 3, swing and swing and swing and swing to create space. The Scrap Boys are like God on the first day, conjuring the heavens.
The Scrap Boys fight to create space between themselves and the sweat-slick hands of the high school boys that grab at the Scrap Boys’ arms and shoulders, at the Scrap Boys’ robin’s egg throats, grabbing to control the Scrap Boys, to pick them up, to separate the Scrap Boys from the earth before driving them down into the dust and the weeds choking this slumping rustbelt town. The Scrap Boys swing to create space between themselves and the cackles and howls of the high school boys, a sound big as thunder, bouncy as calliope, swing to create space between themselves and the creeping knowledge that on this playground, amid the swings hanging from jangling chains, the basketball rim lacking a net, space is liquid, flows and shapeshifts slick and unpredictable as mercury, and that there is no fist hard enough, no punch big enough to produce all the space the Scrap Boys crave. Six Scrap Boys’ fist fly anyway. Six Scrap Boys’ feet dance and faint and juke.
Three backyard haircuts, six eyes narrowed, Clint Eastwood cowboy style, three mouths spitting curses like bullets at the four high school boys who are after the Scrap Boys again just because they can be, just because what else is there to do? Neighbors by chance, brothers by choice, where one Scrap Boy goes the other two follow, sure as the shadows that trail every fading light.
The high school boys surround the Scrap Boys. The high school boys are a geometry lesson. Four independent points forming a changing whole, now a rectangle, now a square. Two of the high school boys angle closer, now a trapezoid. The heat and stink of high school boys fill the empty space the Scrap Boys are swinging so hard to create.
The Scrap Boys are surrounded by the high school boys. The Scrap Boys are a Zoology lesson. The Scrap Boys are trapped, but they are not rats in a cage. Scrap Boy 1, Scrap Boy 2, Scrap Boy 3, they are a single stray dog backed into a corner. They each know this, feel this in the prickly hairs rising on the back of their necks, in the grinding of their back teeth, in the growls brewing in each of their throats, and they hear it in the beating of their one shared heart, and at first that beating sounds like footsteps to follow, and then it sounds like a marching cadence, and then it sounds like a single sharp command that the Scrap Boys all hear, all feel, exploding in their chests: Go.
And the Scrap Boys Go. Dust and spit and fists fly as all three Scrap Boys rush one of the high school boys, the biggest one, the loudest one, his face narrow and sharp as a hatchet, his teeth grey and pointy, a barbed wire smile.
Zoology becomes mythology. The Scrap Boys are howls and growls and gnashing teeth as they charge and swing and swing and swing, three bodies, six fists, one heart.
The Scrap Boys are Cerberus, violence unleashed, acting on instinct, not attacking but protecting, protecting their treasure of possibility that they barely know they own, protecting what might be, what can be away from these high school boys, away from this space.
The wind blows behind the Scrap Boys, rushes them toward the biggest high school boy. The chain-link fence surrounding the playground chatters like a tangle of bones.
These Blazing Maples
Emily Hall's flash prose appears, or is forthcoming, in places such as Passages North, 100 Word Story, Gooseberry Pie Lit, Bending Genres, The Disappointed Housewife, The Palisades Review, FlashFlood Journal, Blood Orange Review, and Five Minutes, where she won two of their 2026 MicroMarathon Contests. A prose editor for Pictura Journal, she lives in North Carolina with her husband.
There’s a fire in every room. One in the den, where my cousin is talking about senior prom. Another in the kitchen, where Aunt Brenda hands me Noah, like he’s a bag of groceries I need to put away.
Mom carries three cups of hot tea on a tray. Around her, Noah and I extinguish the flames. I grab a laundry basket and tell him it’s a firetruck. He readies his hose and calls out through the sooty air, “Over there!”
He slides across the living room carpet, roughing up his dimpled legs. Sadie frowns at him briefly before telling Mom,
“He’s going to take me, Aunt Lou, I know he will. I found a dress with straps like this.”
She sweeps back her dark hair and traces a line from shoulder to chest.
“And he doesn’t mind, about, you know,” Sadie continues, picking at her shirt’s raveled cuff.
“I want juice,” Noah interrupts. He’s all sweaty, hair plastered to his forehead.
“Ask Grandma,” Sadie shrugs. Aunt Brenda stands and swiftly moves through the motions. Sippy cup. Apple juice. A kiss near Noah’s blood-brushed knee.
“Of course, when Lacey went last year, she went alone,” Mom says. She’s sitting elegantly in her rocking chair. The wall above her is empty; my senior picture hanged there until last week. She took it down when I used a word that made her feel dumb.
Sadie and Brenda look over and through me.
“More!” Noah shouts before catapulting into the laundry basket. I push him as hard as I can, running the whole length of the house. On our third lap, Noah climbs out, places a fifty-foot ladder against a building.
“What do you see?” I yell, shading my eyes.
“Smoke!” He yells back. I quickly climb the rungs.
“Enjoy these days, they’re the best you get,” Mom’s voice drifts from the other room. I hear the clatter of a mug and my aunt’s emphatic, “Mmmhmmm.”
Noah and I stand on top of the burning building. As he fights the fire, a blazing maple crashes, trapping us on the roof.
It looks impossibly heavy. We should wait for someone to rescue us, but there’s no time.
Noah runs ahead, lifts the tree by its enormous trunk. Then he tosses it away like it’s nothing.
Like it’s easy.
Falling Leaves
Swetha Amit holds an MFA from the University of San Francisco and is an active member of the Writers Grotto, where she chairs the Literary Salon series. She has authored a memoir and three chapbooks. Her stories have appeared in Bending Genres, Ghost Parachute, McNeese Boudin, Gone Lawn, and others. Her works have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and Best Small Fiction.
It was the summer after my twelfth birthday that the itching began. At first, I blamed the heat.
Long, sticky afternoons made everything uncomfortable. Sweat pooled beneath my thick, shoulder-length hair, and my scalp prickled. I scratched without thinking until my mother noticed.
“Hold still,” she said.
She leaned closer, then gasped.
“You have lice.”
She sat me on a chair and wrapped a white towel around my shoulders. Warm coconut oil slid through my hair, dripping down my neck as a wide-toothed comb pulled through every knot. My mother worked patiently, section by section, lifting the tiny insects onto her thumbnail before crushing them. Each one left a dark red smear on the floor.
“They feed on blood,” she whispered.
I stared at the stains until my stomach turned.
Summer faded into fall. The lice stayed. Medicated shampoos. Coconut oil. Fine-toothed combs.
Hours spent in the chair as my mother separated my hair strand by strand. Nothing worked. My scalp burned from scratching. Sometimes I scratched until it bled. I watched worry gather in my mother’s eyes.
One evening, she placed the comb down.
“It’s been four months,” she said quietly. “They’ve made a home in your hair.”
Outside, a cyclone was moving toward the coast. The wind shook the windows, and trees bent beneath the storm. My mother looked at me.
“It’ll be easier if we cut your hair.”
My heart sank.
“How short?”
She hesitated.
“A boy cut.”
That night, I cried into my pillow. I twisted my braids around my fingers, holding on to their familiar weight.
The next weekend, my mother took me to the salon. I sat in the oversized chair, my feet swingingabove the floor. A dark blue cape draped over my shoulders. Then the scissors began. Slicing through my hair.
Snip.
A thick lock fell into my lap.
Snip.
Another fell to the floor. I watched my hair tumble in clumps around my feet. When the hairdresser turned the chair toward the mirror, my neck felt strangely cold. My ears seemed too large. My cheeks looked rounder.
“You look cute,” she said gently.
My mother smiled.
“It’ll grow back.”
At home, the cheese pasta tasted like rubber. I ran my hands over my unfamiliar hair, wishing it would return beneath my fingers.
“It’ll grow back,” my mother repeated.
I looked at her long, dark hair spilling over her shoulders like a cascade of waves. That night, she sat behind me with a bottle of medicated oil. Usually, when she massaged my scalp, she told stories from her childhood—monsoon rains, sailing paper boats on flooded streets, summer afternoons spent biking to the ice cream shop, munching on chocolate cones until they dripped onto her fingers. But that night, she told me a different story.
“The day after my sixteenth birthday, my throat started hurting.”
She told me about the diagnosis, the hospital visits, and the radiation treatments. Then she whispered:
“My hair started falling.”
Her fingers rested gently against my scalp.
“Chunks at a time. I couldn’t bear to look in the mirror.”
She told me about scarves and wigs. About the people who stayed beside her. About waiting for her to return to normal life.
“Eventually,” she said, “it grew back, like leaves on trees.”
I reached up and touched one of her curls. For the first time, I imagined my mother as a sixteen-year-old girl—not the woman who always knew what to do, not the woman who fought armies of lice with patient hands, not the woman who made tomato soup when I battled the flu. Not the woman who comforted me when I cried over bad grades or when I fell off the bike and scraped my knees. But a girl standing before a mirror, afraid she had lost part of herself.
The next morning, I stood before the mirror in my pink shirt and blue jeans. My hair barely reached my ears, but I put on my pink headband anyway. Outside, the trees were changing colors. At school, my stomach tightened. A couple of boys gave me curious looks. I almost tripped over a stone and fumbled with my backpack. I waited for laughter, for hushed whispers, for the name-calling. Instead, they just walked towards their classrooms. When my friends saw me, they stared at first. Squeals erupted in unison, and they gave me a hug.
“You look cute.” One of them ruffled my sparse hair.
“Your face is glowing,” another added.
I kept noticing my friends’ long braids and swinging ponytails throughout the day. I touched my short strands many times. I thought about trees, trusting that spring would arrive soon. An image of my mother at sixteen flashed in my mind, and I heard her voice again.
“It’ll grow back.”
Outside, the sky was gray, and the trees were shedding their leaves.
Theif
Jorden Makelle is a writer and entrepreneur based in Oregon. Her short fiction has appeared in X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine and Underbelly Press. When she's not writing, you can find her hiking with her Chihuahua or working on her novel. Connect and read more at jordenmakelle.com.
Truth is, I’ve been stealing since I was 7 years old.
The only time I ever got caught was at Denny’s. I stuffed a metal fork down the back of my blue jeans as we were leaving and forgot to tuck it under my t-shirt. Mama saw it, and boy, was she pissed. She yanked my arm up like it was a weed and dragged me over to the lady at the cash register so I could fess up and apologize for what I done.
When we got home, Mama told me I was a thief just like my good-for-nothing Daddy and said to go pick out a switch from the back yard. Then she whipped me something fierce, like she thought she could beat the habit out of me. Well, so much for that, because I stole a quarter from her purse the next day.
Now that I’m 10, I’ve gotta be a lot more careful about my stealing. I heard at school that boys my age get in big trouble for that sort of thing. Like, sent to juvie. Which is why I haven’t added anything to my box in a while.
Right. My box. I lock my bedroom door and pull out the beat-up shoebox from under my bed. I flip the top open and shuffle through some of the things I’ve stolen: a toy race car, a pair of men’s socks, a handful of dollar store lollipops, a pepper shaker from some restaurant, and a busted wristwatch I found in Mama’s nightstand. I’m thinkin’ that watch is from one of Mama’s men.
That’s the thing about Mama. She is always bringing around strange men at night. I mean, not always, but plenty of nights, she does. Like tonight. I can hear Mama just laughing away outside my room, some man’s voice making her do it. I put my box back under my bed and head out to see what the cat dragged in.
Sure enough, there’s a man I never seen before standing in the kitchen. He stinks like cigarettes and grease, and he’s got on a stained white t-shirt that looks like it came from the bins down at Goodwill. He’s looking at Mama the same way I look at the things I want to steal right before I take them. And Mama? Well, she’s looking at him like he’s some kinda TV star. If he is, he sure ain’t dressing the part.
The man’s eyes meet mine, no smile on his face. Beat it, kid, he says, his voice all gruff-like. I don’t know what to say, so I go back to my room. Mama follows me and tells me to stay put. Then she leaves.
Sometimes on nights when Mama brings a man home, I have this nightmare about a wolf chasing me through the woods behind our double wide. I’m pretty fast myself, but wolves are too. I run and run, those big teeth just chomping at my heels until I find a tree I can climb up to get away. Mama never comes out after me, and that ol’ wolf stays at the bottom of the tree, growling with its teeth out until I wake up.
Nights like tonight, I can watch the ceiling fan spin for hours thinking about being up in that tree, no way to escape. And well, thoughts like those just don’t go away on their own.
I wait ‘til I’m pretty sure Mama’s asleep to sneak into the living room, being real careful to avoid all the spots in the floor that creak. Her favorite coat hangs on the rack by the front door.
It’s navy blue with gold buttons. The fanciest thing she’s got. I tiptoe over to the coat and run my hand over the fabric. It’s scratchy, but Mama says most nice coats are like that. She always wears it out on nights she brings a strange man home.
The middle button on the front of the coat catches my eye, like a gold coin in a treasure chest.
Here’s the thing about coat buttons. You can pretty well hide a missing top or bottom button. I know because I’ve had to do it with my button-down shirts. But without that middle button? Well, you’ll have a big gap smack dab in the middle that everyone’s gonna see. No hiding that.
I wrap my fingers tight around the edges of that middle button, and just thinking about putting it in my box makes me feel wild. I’ve gotta have it. I take a deep breath and yank at the button, but it holds tight. I pull again, harder this time. No dice.
I go crazy yanking at the button until the threads start to give. One more pull, and the button pops off, leaving nothing but a couple strands of thread dangling off the front of the coat.
Seeing that gold in my hand sends my heartbeat into a frenzy, like there’s a fireworks show going off inside my chest. I hurry back into my room, my newest treasure clutched in my hand as I climb into bed. When I finally settle in enough to close my eyes, I drift off to a place high up in the clouds, way above the woods. A place no wolf could ever get me.
Sunlight and Rust
Dennis Michael has been writing for more than 20 years. His flash fiction has been published or is upcoming in Fractured Lit and Flash Fiction Magazine. He grew up in New England, spent nearly a decade in Los Angeles, and currently resides in Massachusetts.
Open to the mirror. Sun coming through the shades in bands. There’s a crown of rust on my left front tooth. Thick today. Every morning it gets bigger. When it started a few months ago there were only a few specks each morning, which could be easily scraped away with a fingernail or toothpick. Now it takes a nail file or tiny strip of sandpaper to get it off. If I’m not going anywhere I don’t even bother; we’ve come to love the taste. Diane sits up from her side of the bed and stands in the sunlight by the window. She twists her head from side to side and swirls her hair. A cloud of sparkled rust puffs out and glitters in the sunlight, like a swirl of stars from two galaxies colliding. She joins me in front of the mirror and puts on her eyeliner, cream white with glinted brown flakes we’ve added from collected floor sweepings. As she turns her head the sparkle has a rhythm to it. I notice my own blue eyes turning hazel. Rust around the iris bleeding in.
Down at breakfast the sun finds other windows. Near the table is a bucket of wrenches and old tools we brought in from the garage. Each tool with decades of rust accumulated on it, some millimeters thick. Pass me a wrench sweetheart. I pass her a ratchet wrench with a 3/4” socket and she twists it like a pepper grinder over her yogurt, a shower of brown dust decorating the fat free pure white canvas. She spoons it in between sips of coffee, taken from an old mini paint can. It still has some solidified drips of bright yellow paint running down the side, matching the upstairs bathroom we painted twenty years ago. I spoon my cereal from a chrome bowl. I notice some milk leaking out of the bottom where the metal is thinning. Some of it runs down my arm, hesitating on my elbow before dropping to the tabletop below. It makes a pattern on the tarnished surface, like an abstract painting or inverted Rorschach test. Better eat it fast, she says.
Just outside the window our car sparkles in the driveway. We scraped all the paint off of it with a metal sponge a couple of months ago and after a few days in the rain and it grew a crisp brown hue. When I take it out on the highway it sheds a layer of powder and it feels like I’m driving a different car. It’s nice, a change every now and then. Do you want to hear some music?
I switch on the boombox, tune the antenna, and get some delta blues between the static. Only one speaker works. The early Beatles records sound very strange if you only can hear one channel. Sometimes you just get the vocals, other times just the drums.
We’ve stopped recycling. Our backyard is large enough that we were able to dig large cylindrical holes in the ground and line them with PVC. We break down all our glass and pour it into one of the holes, then there is one for crushed plastic, cardboard, and of course, scrap metal.
The only one that gives us trouble is the cardboard. The smell can get quite strong and things start growing. Sometimes we have to pour in some kerosene and throw in a match.
The scrap metal started to overflow into the yard, so we started making sculptures out of it. For the sculptures, we polish all the metal first to give it a nice sheen. We try to keep the rust off of the art. I polish the finished works once a week on Sunday afternoons, making sure not to miss an inch. When it rains, I cover everything with a blue tarp. It’s a lot of work, but I need the exercise. I like to make large versions of technologies that aren’t really used anymore. Cassette tapes, rotary phones, typewriters. Neighborhood children sometimes stop in front of our house and ask me what they are supposed to be. They are interested at first, but then they get bored and walk off. Diane makes more abstract sculptures, things that can’t really be described with words.
She likes to use the polished metal to focus and redirect the light from the sun. She says that the sunlight is an essential part of the sculptures, and if the metal were ever to rust, the sculptures would lose their identity and just be random heaps of scrap metal. Sunlight itself cannot rust; it has no atoms to react with. That’s why she uses it. It’s said to be eternally stable. Pure energy. It can be absorbed though, or be born from an electron, but it cannot change. It either is or it isn’t.
It’s Sunday and I’m tending to one of my typewriters. I wipe the sweat from my forehead, brown with a faded gleam. Diane is returning from her evening jog, rust falling from her armpits and out of her gym shorts. One of Diane’s sculptures is directing sunlight to the side of a copper kettle, heating our morning tea. Suntea, we call it. She grabs the kettle, fills two chrome cups with the steaming liquid, and sits down next to me. Next to our lawn chairs is a bucket of rust with a spoon sticking out of it. Diane adds two heaping spoonfuls to our cups. We stir the rust into our tea. A cloud passes and momentarily turns one of Diane’s sculptures into meaningless scrap metal. I think of the days before the rust. We’d go to the beach and just lie in the sun, absorbing the rays. Some tea is leaking out of a tiny hole in the bottom of my cup. Better drink it fast, Diane says.
Wings
Emma Rowan is a writer from New York. She recently received her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Miami University and is a Prose Reader for Beaver. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net, and she is forthcoming or published in matchbook, BRUISER, orangepeel, and other places.
When I went to the East Village, there was a line of tents in the middle of West 32nd street. Bodies under blankets beside them. It was snowing. I could see my breath as flakes caught on my eyelashes. A thin layer of white formed on the tent roofs like fallen ash. Feather-less.
Footprints covered faster than they could form.
We used to have a table outside of the store where I work. A gray-haired long-hatted woman used to come every night dragging a laundry cart filled with bottles and boxes and talking heads and vials of glowing liquid and write furiously. She would come in and ask to borrow a marker and smile at me with missing teeth. I would give her them and would not get them back. When we ran out, my boss told me I wasn’t allowed to do that anymore.
One night, I took out the garbage and found she’d left a sheet of soiled cardboard on the table. Damp and covered in shapes and symbols, jagged arrows and zig-zagged lines. A map to a cursed city of gold. Hieroglyphics from some lost civilization. I left it there, but she never came back for it.
While I waited for the 2:27am train, I watched a man sitting on the floor surrounded by three people with the same face. The same makeshift wings. The man had on lots of jackets. Maybe thousands. Soot smudges on his face. I would’ve looked away so as to not embarrass him, but he did not look embarrassed. He looked tired. A sign above his head advertised flying contraptions. The same-face same-taped-up-wings people crossed their arms and pointed away at somewhere else. I watched as he vanished, the jackets deflating into a dark heap on the dirtied tile. They swept the pile off the platform. The C train ran it over, blaring.
When my boss got rid of the table, customers came in smiling, relieved it wouldn’t attract any of those people anymore. I didn’t hear footsteps when they left, just saw the door hit their waxy, feathered backs while the bell sounded.
Yesterday, a man fumbled in his pocket for a couple minutes after not buying anything.
He pulled out his innards and loose guts spilled to the floor. Shoved the bloody chunks into the tip jar, his red fingertips slimy and gleaming.
“You really don’t have to do that,” I said.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
His hair matted and knotty. Thin limbs in muddy, mauled pants.
“Someone gives you money, and you’re gonna tell them not to?”
The bloody stuff hit the glass with the clank of copper. He dragged his feet to the door and left, leaving dark scuffs. My coworker dumped it out on the counter, counted it wearing gloves.
“It’s all pennies,” she said.
I scratch at my shoulder blades, wait for a piercing pain.
“It’s barely a dollar,” she said.
I yawn. No feathers.
The Cat Came Back
Dina Perthakines is a writer and psychologist in Queens, New York City, and a former AFL-CIO union organizer. Her flash and micro work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Fictive Dream, Bending Genres, Maudlin House, and Passages North, where one of her pieces was a finalist for the Neutrino Short-Short Prize.
The cat haunting our courtyard wasn’t black. It was a mottled grey. With two full-moon eyes dipped in cuttlefish ink. Whether tom or queen, no one could say. Not even the three maidens on the ground floor who attended it, offering tuna sacrifices in chalices. Cat always waited, listening for the tumblers to roll into place as the maidens’ doors snicked shut. Then lowered its head to the food, gorging delicately, tail twitching behind. Most of us in the building ignored it. Not a pretty kitty. And when looked at directly, it shimmered and shifted, eyes glowing from the back of its head. But the boy down the hall was transfixed. Spent hours tiptoeing in front of his living room windows. Hoping to see the feline pick its way over the asphalt to spook the pigeons. And stare down any rodents dancing around.
I know.
I would visit the boy’s mother on occasion. She served me hot cocoa and brandy to bide a while.
The boy was thirteen, but couldn’t go to school. She’d tried for years. He was shy of human eyes, easily sliding out of doors, flying to the local lake dotted with ducks. And plastic bottles.
When the sun angled itself to hit the skin of it right, the boy spied spectrum-hued starfish swaying in waves, caught manta rays softly chanting his name, and answered.
I see you, I hear you. Please let me come with you. It’s so noisy up here and the sun is too bright.
He says it talks to him, the mother confided. Doctors don’t know why. Only thing that keeps him here is that damned cat and my piano, she said, nodding at the rosewood square grand eating up most of her floor space. And oh, that woman could play. After the cocoa, she’d sit on the bench and weave melodies of creatures living in sea bubbles, building palaces in the sand beds beneath all those leagues. Coral twisting to shade octopus flashing a thousand different colors. Clever silver fish swimming in schools, the mother sang to her boy who flapped at the cat.
When she wasn’t spinning water music, the mother toiled in the kitchen. And oh, could she cook. Fed her boy, not the cat, though her son would often beg her. She’d say, little girl next door just adopted a pair of sweet kittens. I bet she’d let you pet them. The boy waved both hands, paddling through air, and opened his mouth like a tunnel with no train rolling out. The mother returned to her chopping and sighed. That cat has its tuna, no need of this brisket.
Thwack went the carrots.
Thwack went the tomatoes.
Thwack went her left thumb. In a crimson spray all over her counter.
Did the cat lick its chops? I should know this. I was there, but didn’t trust my eyes. She’d invited me for Seder. Just her, me, and the boy. A lamb’s blood to pass us over. Seeing a detached digit in real life is nothing like movies. There’s tendon and fat, reminiscent of meat stew simmering in wine. She tried to play with nine fingers, tunes flat and dry as matzoh. Tossed out all her sharp knives and ordered from menus. Napped for hours on her couch. The cat started stalking a square of concrete right under her window, sepia eyes fixed on that couch, perhaps wondering where all the tender aromas had gone. Boy stayed at his window, still in the silence while his grey sentry stood guard.
I’m lonely. Come take me. My clothes are all scratchy, the oven is sleeping, and the piano is dead.
He must’ve found the hidden key while the mother lay resting. Followed the cat to the lake in the moonless night. Flashlight was missing from the knife drawer. And all six batteries. But he’d forgotten his shoes. The cat came back the very next day. The boy did not.
I imagined him trailing the cat to shallow dark waters. Torchlight trained on the surface, searching through ripples. Then diving down to meet the seahorses as quiet as him. We sat on the mother’s couch, she and I, for what felt like forever. Food left untouched on the table, square grand’s mouth closed up tight. I finally summoned the three maidens to witness. But the mother never spoke a word to anyone. Until the cat slunk back to condole with her through the window. Shoo, she screamed at it. My boy is gone. I can’t bear you! Shrieked for hours at the animal until it slipped away. But the cat came back. Day after night, night after day. For seven sunsets and rises. The whole shiva week long.
I know. I kept count.
On the eighth morning, the patch of concrete was bare. The mother called me over to see. Her voice on the phone was the tiniest scratch. Not from crying. She’d never cried. Didn’t even eat its fish, I said, as I gazed out her window. The three maidens keened. And the mother howled with them.
Jesus Attends My Birthday Party
Tammy L. Evans is a writer, teacher, and professional curator living in a tiny house on a peninsula with her husband, fuzzy adventure cat, and a parkour-loving black kitten. Her location device is her loud laugh. Her fiction has been published in Gone Lawn, Bending Genres, South Florida Poetry Journal, and others.
Three days ago, I received an RSVP from Jesus. In his hard-to-read handwriting, He scribbled in pencil, I’ll bring the cake! Love Jesus. I don’t want a cake, and He knows that. Today, He strolls out of my kitchen with the confection, grinning. It is impossible not to grin back, but the skin over my knuckles is as white as the marshmallow frosting from gripping the edge of the table so hard. It’s summer, and Jesus practically sets the house on fire with the oven. Friends are stretched out at the seven-foot dining table to celebrate that I am still here , but my brother is not. Everyone is singing off-key except Jesus.
When I flung open the door to greet Him, Jesus handed me a small wrapped blue box. “It’s a miracle, but one is never enough,” He says. I tell Jesus His attendance is a miracle, but who am I to be telling Jesus anything? I want to tell him to bring my brother back, but I won’t.
Jesus’ melodious voice vibrates off the walls, and the candle flames reflect in his eyes.
All the fire makes it look like I am turning 100 years old. It is a miracle I am not having a panic attack. I grip the table harder and feel the pulse of the large muscles of my body. It is so hot. Did they add verses to the song? It is taking forever. My brother had the most beautiful voice, like birdsong, before the fire.
Before Jesus gets to the head of the table, he trips over my friend Simon’s foot sticking out weirdly because he is trying to capture the perfect Instagram shot. The cake flies like a comet and lands in a pile of frosting and raspberry filling. At least the candles are out.
“No bother,” Jesus says, snaps his fingers, and the cake is on the table. Look how simple that is. He loves the drama. Before I blow out the candles, Jesus makes a speech to insist He never left, that people insist on multiple miracles, and that He finds humans’ slow belief in what is right in front of them exhausting. Then He opens his hands to heaven and tells me to make my wish. My friends are nourished by his words, snapping pictures and posting Jesus is here on their social media. When I look later, there are no pictures of me. No mention of my dead brother. Only Jesus and the cake.
After the flames extinguish from my exhale, I open my eyes to an empty and considerably cooler room. I watch the black smoke reach the heavens and smell sulfur and sweet. I sit on the floor and throw one fistful at a time of Jesus-made cake against the wall until it’s gone because that is what my brother would have done.
Other Losses
Mo Gardner is a writer living in New York. He is currently pursuing his graduate studies in English. His work has previously appeared in ARCH.
Meetings are held on Tuesdays in the basement of a Methodist church. Other nights, it hosts a support group for bereaved parents and Bible study for the incarcerated.
Nine people shamble in, tight-lipped, eyes lowered. Anonymous by design, we grab pre-written name tags off the card table by the door. I get Heather. It isn’t my name.
A retired dentist gets Betty. “There weren’t enough male ones,” he meekly explains. The dentist had fallen for a Ukrainian violinist who loved the 24 Caprices, but she turned out to be three men in Lagos working shifts.
Peter loved a woman who was probably AI; one of her hands had six fingers. He hoped it was just a genetic quirk. “It’s so convincing these days,” Denise, the facilitator, offers.
Mabel sends money every month to a handsome widower in Ohio. There is no handsome widower. There is, however, an Ohio.
Then there is me. “I haven’t actually sent him much,” I say.
“Yet,” says Denise.
My guy says his name is Eli. The photo he sent me is of a man with dark hair and a gentle smile. He stands beside a horse. (“It’s always a horse if it’s not a cat or a dog,” says Denise.) It is the only photo I’ve seen of him. Whenever I ask for another photo or bring up the horse, he hedges.
For three months, Eli has told me he loves me. He says he works offshore. He says his mother is sick. He says his bank account is frozen over an international tax issue, which sounds fake but not impossible. He’s never asked for money, but I send it anyway. “He’s not really a scammer,” I tell the room.
Everyone looks at me. Peter looks at the six-fingered woman on his phone, then shuts the screen off.
Denise has us pair off and read affirmations to each other. She puts me with Peter. Across the circle, the dentist and Mabel tell each other they deserve unconditional love. In my head, I wonder if there shouldn’t be a few conditions, at least.
The line Peter and I have is, “I am in control of my reality.” Instead, I ask him if the six-fingered woman is his first girlfriend.
“Was.” He says the last word quickly, as if spitting it out. “Do you think your guy loves you?”
It didn’t occur to me that he’d ask a question back. “I don’t think so. But sometimes he stays on the line to listen to me breathe while I sleep. That feels like enough.”
“Huh.” Peter looks at my name tag. “I knew a Heather.”
Next, Denise has everyone go around and share when they knew.
Sylvia did when her grandson traced her fiancé’s IP address to a different country. She still hasn’t forgiven her grandson. Gary knew when his woman blinked on the same seven-minute mark, but not before he’d sent ten grand. While they’re talking, my phone buzzes intermittently in my pocket, surely glowing with new texts from Eli. I tap my foot.
Denise knew when her man’s face appeared on a local billboard.
“What did you do?” asks Mabel.
“Nothing. My heart sank.” Denise clenches her jaw. The billboard, she tells us, was replaced by an ad for a personal injury firm. “Cosmic joke.”
We sit quietly.
“Next week,” she says, “we’re talking about boundaries.”
On my way out, Denise gives me a peppermint. Maybe she senses my wariness. “I’m not going to tell you to block him.”
I take the sticky, warm candy. “Why not?”
“That’s not the point of this.” She pulls on her coat and leaves.
Peter offers a ride, but I walk home. I focus on the peppermint’s weight in my palm rather than the phone-sized bump at my hip.
As soon as I get in, Eli calls. I put my phone on the counter and let it buzz. I kick off my shoes. I wonder what I’ll order from Chinese takeout. Eventually it stops. When I turn around, the kitchenette is dark except for streetlight angling through the blinds.
A few minutes later, my phone lights up again. “Hello,” I answer, a little breathless.
There’s a pause. Then Eli says my name. Not sweetheart like Sylvia’s fiancé, or beautiful like the widower in Ohio. My actual name.
The peppermint begins to melt.
The Mountains Have Fallen
Alexei Raymond, shaped by life and love in the Middle East, chases visions of unspeakable loveliness. Find pieces of him in a variety of publications. https://alexeiraymond.com/
Out the window of the bus, I notice that the mountains are gone.
The bus is going down some corso, and soon I will get off at the next station. Yes, there are no more mountain ranges occupying the horizon—Turin’s blue Alps. I push through passengers standing between me and the door, get off, and it’s true: faraway flatness stretches.
I’m unsettled and tired. I’ve gotten so used over the past eight months to the local mountainous embowering, it giving the landscape meaning. And now this distant void. Does the world spill over, rimless?
I look at my phone and make sure I’m crossing over to the correct street, the one that leads to Bernini Cafe. Hefty grey clouds tease that it might suddenly rain, despite it being late July. These spells of rain and thunder amidst the unbearable, muggy heat are still new to me, but I wouldn’t mind getting wet on the way. I’m quite numb and stony as I walk down the street. The palazzi around me either diminish in height or were always this squat and unimposing—I’m not sure. But this way they do not obscure the unimpeded horizon, and I see more of it when I glance rightward, into these streets I pass without the intention of entering. It yawns there. Curves off.
She told me to meet her outside the school, but truth be told, I don’t feel like meeting her there, where her colleagues might linger, parents, children. I prefer to delay and wait till she puts some distance between herself and the school. I’m in no mood for niceties, courtesy hellos, downturned smile. I think that street is just up ahead, and already my surroundings are more of a nearly emptied piazza. Some trees still stand and sigh, some people pass by, cars parked, but this flattening I dread. It leaves me exposed, immediately visible, awkward and reluctant. I finally stand at the street’s lip by a car as a lady unlocks her bicycle and rolls away, her dress billowing, away from the direction of the school. I briefly wonder if she’s some colleague, then look ahead.
She should be here, it’s already 2:00 pm. I check my phone but there is no message. I text I’m near. I’m relieved she’s late.
I attempt to take a few steps into the street, or whatever’s left of it. Nearly all is flattened now, though some low structures still stand. A persistent wind blows against me. I linger this way, making no real effort to approach, mock resisting the wind, until not much else stands aside from me.
Before I attempt to imagine her, she is there, emerging from seemingly nowhere. She walks toward me briskly in her prim summery dress. We’ll go through with it, I suppose. The incongruous normality of her gait, her speed, somehow offend and add to the desiccation of my heart. There are but a few moments left until we’re within earshot, within somber greeting’s range, and I look back, around, to the left, then right.
Nothing remains, no trees or residents, no city at all, much less Alps, for it is she; desolate Ground Zero, stubborn Cataclysm, fair Hypocenter.
“Hi.”
“Hey.”
I’m toppled, then, too.
Addictionary
Shawn Nocher’s work has appeared in Atticus Review, The Forge, SmokeLong Quarterly, Moonpark Review, Moon City Review, Pithead Chapel, and more. She is the author of two novels, A Hand to Hold in Deep Water and The Precious Jules (Blackstone Publishing), and currently teaches in the MA writing program at Johns Hopkins University where she received her MA in writing.