Category Archives: Flash

AN UNNAMED ESSAY by Samantha Padgett

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Samantha Padgett
AN UNNAMED ESSAY IN WHICH THE WORLD ENDS, BUT I’M TOLD EVERYTHING IS OKAY

My mother is panicking. I know this despite her insistence that she isn’t afraid.

After days of listening to the newscaster detail the refrigerator trucks being filled with overflow bodies, my mother buys twenty pounds of potatoes from a local farmer. She doesn’t tell us until it’s done.

◊

I spend hours sitting with my great-grandmother. The air in her room is thick and gummy. She keeps her space heater on high even after Easter passes.

She’s ninety-six and lonely.

But I’m right here, I tell her.

But you weren’t there. You can’t understand.

◊

My mother and I return home from our weekly grocery store run. We strip off our clothes at the door, take turns cleaning each others’ backs with Clorox wipes.

Together, we wash each item brought into the house. We soak the fresh produce in hot water and dish soap. Everything else is sprayed down with bleach.

◊

Another day passes, and my mother is still arguing with my sister. She wants her to drive up from Dallas to get her potatoes. My sister’s exasperated voice muffles out from the receiver.

Ridiculous. Ridiculous. 

How will you eat? My mother keeps insisting. One day, I’ll be gone, and how will you eat?

◊

Growing up, my mother tells me stories of her childhood dinners: On Mondays, we’d have beans, cornbread, and bologna. On Tuesdays, we’d have bologna, beans, and cornbread. On Wednesdays, we’d have cornbread, bologna, and beans…

◊

It’s summer, and the house always smells like sugar. My mother can make cookies out of anything.

We spend afternoons at the library taking turns reading books to each other. I’m young, so young, when my mother tells me I have to get out.

Don’t be like me.

◊

Every day feels a little more dystopian. I line up outside the Walmart and watch the worker deemed essential count each customer as they go inside the store.

◊

We stop washing the groceries.

◊

I’m seeing a therapist again. I talk to her in my bedroom over Zoom. I tell her about my childhood—how my mother never let me quit anything once I started.

I’m sorry I ruined your life, my mother says to me later in the kitchen.

◊

My great-grandmother likes to tell me about her brothers. She recounts their deaths like they’re little piggies—this one died in a fire, this one was hit by a train, and this one cried wah-wah-wah as he drowned in a lake.

Only once does she tell me about a brother that made it to adulthood.

The last month of my first pregnancy, he wouldn’t leave my side. Slept on the floor next to my bed. She pauses before adding, I don’t remember how he died.

◊

When my mother finally accepts that we’ll never eat through the potatoes before they rot, she brings what remains of them to the curb. I watch as she rocks the bucket of potatoes down the driveway, and, for a moment, she’s helping a toddler take their first steps. I see the hands wrapped around my mother’s fingers, their legs jutting out one after another as if they aren’t sure the earth will still be there.

She tapes a sign to the bucket of potatoes: Free. Feed your families.

Samantha Padgett received an MFA in Creative Writing, Publishing, and Editing from Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, TX. Her work has been featured or is upcoming in New Ohio Review, Poet Lore, New South, North American Review, and elsewhere. Samantha Padgett currently lives in Austin, TX with her partner and cat.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

LIFT by Mikki Aronoff

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Mikki Aronoff
LIFT

It’s our birthday month, leaves relinquishing their hold, and I’m thinking back to that rodeo, both of us burning for cowboys and leather, unaware of the suffering of cows, and afterwards, you climbed then tumbled into the bullpen, horns lowered at the clutch and shiver of you, so I doubled over the railing, muscles and blood and brain linked, just like Mr. James taught in Biology, bestowing a strength equal to that bull, and I, finding myself in some new and wondrous state, free of worry and doubt, hoicked you up, you light as a housefly; and today I hear they’ve found you cold on your bathroom tile, and I, too, have found myself old and vulnerable and am left wondering: when it comes my time to crumple, who or what might lean over, limbs outstretched, heave me up.

Mikki Aronoff has work published in Flash Boulevard, New World Writing, MacQueen’s Quinterly, ThimbleLit, The Phare, The Ekphrastic Review, The Fortnightly Review, Milk Candy Review, Tiny Molecules, The Disappointed Housewife, Bending Genres, Gone Lawn, Mslexia, The Dribble Drabble Review, The Citron Review, Atlas and Alice, trampset, jmww, Switch, and elsewhere. Her stories and poems have received Pushcart, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, Best American Short Stories, and Best Microfiction nominations.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

THE RIDE by Sarah Myers

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THE RIDE by Sarah Myers

Sarah Myers
THE RIDE

You’re buying tampons, brushing your hair, cleaning the crud off the kitchen table, and the sight of your own stupid fingers reminds you that the bottom has dropped out of everything. Then you’re talking to a colleague or a friend or a weird and lovely student, and you smile with every inch of your teeth because you’re there with them (you are, you really are), but you’re also not there, hearing, as you do, the constant low hum of am I real? and isn’t it strange we’re all just skin bags for cosmic particles? and how can someone you trust with every careful corner of your bones betray you? So you picture the time when you were eight and you managed not to die when your stepmother made you bike for miles with blood streaming down your leg from that fall through the rusty sewer grate because she said you ruined the ride, or that morning when she chased you around the house with an open palm and you barely managed to get your brother back in his highchair (screaming, screaming) before you ran up the stairs two steps at a time. And you remember that this is how you did it (not die)—by acing every math test, and singing Cyndi Lauper songs at recess, and giggling at the word boner with your best friend, but keeping every day at a distance, eyes hung heavy on the horizon, there, but not there, pedaling, pedaling, pedaling, trusting your small heart would hold. So you listen to that sweet student talk about her cat and her dreams of grad school and will you write me a recommendation letter? and of course! and thank you! and of course! and thank you! and of course! while your mind is moving through the madness of missing the body that betrayed you, or puzzling out (again, again, again) how you could’ve let your guard down at exactly the wrong moment, how you could’ve imagined that body would never leave you bloody and biking for miles. So you say, Yes. Yes! I will write you the most beautiful letter in the world.

Sarah Myers is a Minneapolis-based playwright, theater artist, and essayist. Her plays have been published by Playscripts, Inc., Spout Press, and New Madrid and produced in New York, Chicago, Austin, and Minneapolis. Her nonfiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Fourth Genre, New Letters, TDR: The Drama Review, Studies in Musical Theatre, among others. She holds an MFA in Playwriting and a PhD in Theater from UT Austin.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

RE-MARK THE BODY, BUT KNOW IT IS LITTLE MORE THAN KINDLING by Jennifer Popa

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RE-MARK THE BODY, BUT KNOW IT IS LITTLE MORE THAN KINDLING by Jennifer Popa

Jennifer Popa
RE-MARK THE BODY, BUT KNOW IT IS LITTLE MORE THAN KINDLING

When I wake, my moles are retreating across my drool-stained pillow, into my sheets and the afghan tangled around my ankles. Last week my ears began ticking, keeping time with the grandfather clock downstairs. I never knew my grandfather.

You see, my body has been slowly dissolving, retreating, conceding. But isn’t this how it happens? One benign symptom, then another, then you wake to your moles crawling across your sheets. I swipe my hooked hand like I’m dragging crumbs from a table and gather the moles in the empty glass from my nightstand. I place a book atop the glass to trap them.

The doctors say I am ill. Maybe illness floats around like pollen, in search of a body, the way stories search for busy hands to write them down. The who of it matters less than the ink, the paper, the listening ear, the body alert and ready at the desk.

Last night on TikTok, a stranger shared a video of her forearm. She said the freckles and moles on our right forearm tell us how many witches we are descended from. I tugged at the sleeve of my sweatshirt and counted.

Twenty-two witches.

I wonder if that is a lot. My body flecked with ancestry, a line of women ferrying each other into the next life. Only, I have no daughter, no child wanted or imagined, and no more time. Perhaps this is why the moles depart at dawn—their exodus just a prelude to an elegy. My great-great-great-lineage is giving up the ship. Summoned by sunshine, they want for skin that will not be lost to fire and dust. Who can blame them? But I want to keep these clusters of pigment—my grandmother called them beauty marks—I have so little left of myself anymore.

I go to the kitchen and rifle through the junk drawer, retrieve the Scotch tape. In my bedroom, I reclaim the moles from the glass, one at a time. I drag them with my fingernail and return them to my skin. I can’t remember just where they belong anymore, so I fashion my own constellations across calves, arms, chest. I remember the one on my toe. Perhaps this is the mother of the mother of the mother of my mother. And where will I make my home? On the wet eye’s edge. In the crack of a heel.

I pin them down one at a time with tape. I construct a draw-by-number where the hidden image is undefined, as intangible as a whispered hex, a forgettable woman. I pledge allegiance to this marked body, my home of thirty-nine years. And when the task is done, I lie down again, my skin taut with tape. I close my eyes and wait to burn.

Jennifer Popa earned her PhD in English at Texas Tech University and her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She now works as an Assistant Professor in Erie, PA, and as the Special Folios Editor at Pleiades. Some of Jennifer Popa’s most recent writing can be found in The Florida Review, West Branch, Ninth Letter, and Sundog Lit. She can be found at www.jenniferpopa.com.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

OUR HANDS TOO SMALL by Jody M Keene

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Jody M Keene
OUR HANDS TOO SMALL

We come home for Thanksgiving to watch our mom die. We get there to find the blinds drawn and the fridge empty except for cans of Ensure and Kraft singles. “We’re going to order Thanksgiving dinner,” we tell her, “so don’t worry about getting up,” as if she could get up. As if she could make mashed potatoes and two types of dressing and cranberry sauce and turkey gravy and deviled eggs. “We’ll take care of it,” we tell her. “Let us do it all for once.”

We put the turkey in the oven like the directions say and pop open a bottle of Gewürztraminer. Nothing goes better with grief, we agree. The kitchen fills with smoke around the time we shake the last drops out of the bottle—only we could fuck up an already cooked turkey, we say, as if it’s funny. At least there are still mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie. We open another bottle of wine and throw the turkey in the trash. The smoke, we say to each other as we drag sleeves across our eyes.

A few years ago, we’d be spreading the tablecloth over the table about now; we’d be hand-washing Grandma’s silver flatware and bitching about how the regular silverware was just fine before laying the table. We’d be sneaking slugs of wine in the garage and fighting over whose turn it was to wash, whose turn to load.

We eat Thanksgiving dinner on our mother’s bed, the champagne-colored pintuck coverlet unchanged for at least a decade. Her eyes flutter open now and then but mostly she sleeps, her eyes sunken in their pits and her skin stretched tight over her skull. Her lips twitch in her sleep. “Do you want something?” we ask. “Can we get you anything?” She grins like a feral animal, her lips pulled tight over her teeth, and goes back to sleep. In the kitchen, we put the pumpkin pie back in the fridge untouched and pop open two bottles of Ensure, mix them with vanilla vodka. We tap our bottles together and say, “To Mom” before our first drink. It’s disgusting, but we take another sip, and another.

The hospice aide comes to give our mom her bath. She brushes our mom’s teeth. Our mom’s body looks like the bones left from a plate of chicken wings, knobby joints with bits of skin attached, the meat all gone. The aide lifts our mom’s arm and slathers on the deodorant, first one armpit and then the other. “I wouldn’t be caught dead without my deodorant,” the aide says.

We look at each other, wide-eyed. She wouldn’t be caught dead, we mouth to each other. We look at our mom, a flimsy top sheet her shroud, and back at each other. Her eyes open and fix on us. She begins to laugh, silently, her lips tight over her teeth and her shoulders shaking. We whisper-shriek “caught dead!” over the aide’s mortified face, laughter bubbling up our throats, our hands too small to contain it in our mouths before it leaks out everywhere.

Jody M Keene is a writer with a healthy stack of rejections living in Arkansas with her family. She previously worked as managing editor for scissors & spackle literary magazine, and her work has been published in or is forthcoming from Flash Fiction Magazine, JMWW, Emerge Literary Journal, and Peatsmoke Journal. She is a Best Microfiction nominee and can be found on Twitter @JodyMKeene or on her website, jodymkeene.webador.com.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

MARK MY WORDS by Christine H. Chen

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MARK MY WORDS by Christine H. Chen

Christine H. Chen
MARK MY WORDS

Ah Ma tells me what a lucky girl I am, I am the only child, Ah Ba spoils me with toys I break within a week, dresses I dirty within minutes, shoes I muddy after one wear, what a lucky girl I am who has everything now that we live in America, the land of big-box stores with acres of surface and shelves filled with people’s dreams of things to buy and accumulate in their vinyl-siding homes with manicured lawns, who never had to fight for the last ladle of porridge with a brother or a sister, never had to watch Grandpa paraded on the streets by juvenile Red Guards, younger than Ah Ma, never had to be called dirty words like Bourgeois, never had rotten cabbages thrown on unwashed hair because there was no running water, never been denied to study because Grandpa was listed as Enemy of the Proletariat because he worked for a bank in Shanghai, never had to get up at four a.m., wake up the youngest brother, bundle him on her back sling to queue for rationed rice, never had to suck on an empty spoon for the last drop of watered-down rice because she’s the oldest who had to give up everything for the younger-than-her and the older-than-her, never had to watch your brothers and sisters being whisked away to labor camps to rid them of Capitalist Thoughts, never had to see your second brother return from the rice fields with leech bites all over his legs, never had to watch your little sister shrivel in size while her throat ballooned into a tumor, never had to fan the dying coal to heat cold feet, never had to bandage Grandpa’s beaten bloody head while Grandma whimpered under soiled bed sheets, never had the burden of the family like boulders on your shoulders, never had to accept to marry an old blind man to escape from the Communists, never had the luxury to throw tantrums, to pout, resist, frown, spurn, sulk, disregard, protest, shout back, defy like what I’m doing in this minute instead of washing the dishes, and that’s when Ah Ma slaps me hard right across the face leaving these four red finger marks.

Christine H. Chen was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Madagascar before settling in Boston where she worked as a research chemist. Her fiction work has been published in CRAFT Literary, Hobart, SmokeLong Quarterly, trampset, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of the 2022 Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellowship and the co-translator from French of the hybrid novel My Lemon Tree, forthcoming in 2023 by Spuyten Duyvil. Her publications can be found at www.christinehchen.com.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

church by Erin Pesut

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church by Erin Pesut

Erin Pesut
church

There came a time about three years after we moved to Vermont when I decided I wanted to go to church again. Really what I wanted was to go to church at Christmas. Really what I wanted was to go to church for the four weeks of Advent leading up to Christmas. Really what I wanted was to see how church changed for Advent. Really what I wanted was to hear familiar hymns. To make the sign of the cross and feel holy water on my face. Really what I wanted was for church to be a portal to being a small child, a little girl again, sitting in a wooden pew at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church on Devine Street in Columbia, South Carolina, with my mother’s arm around me. Where I went to CCD. Where the priest once blessed our corgi. Really what I wanted was to say the words to prayers and have my mouth move in the same way my grandmothers’ mouths moved. Really what I wanted was to feel the order of things and to know what to expect. Really what I wanted was to sing out loud among other people instead of alone in my car. To unearth emotion from this stuck place inside of me. Really what I wanted was to examine all the people in the pews in front of me, their hair, their coats and sweaters, their dark lipstick and lip liner when they turned their head to the side, their features when they looked up to the choir in the loft. Really what I wanted was to have a stranger say, Peace be with you, and for me to say it back. Really what I wanted was to marvel at the color that shined upon the carpet from the warmed-up stained glass windows. Really what I wanted was to talk to the dead, and I figured I could find them here. Really what I wanted was to feel an organ fill a sanctuary. To hear the glee in its sustained chords when we sang out the last verse of the final hymn and Mass came to an end. Really what I wanted was to be in this church and in every church I’d ever been in, to be everywhere, all at once.

Erin Pesut is a poet, essayist, and editor living in Brattleboro, Vermont. Her writing has appeared in Chautauqua, West Trestle Review, HeartWood, and Poetry South, and is forthcoming from Whale Road Review and Raft Magazine. Her essay “Groceries (The Longest Text I Receive All Week)” was a finalist in the inaugural CRAFT Creative Nonfiction Award. She received her MFA in Fiction from Columbia University, where she was a School of the Arts Fiction Fellow, and a BA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

MAGIC WINDOW by Anne Panning

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MAGIC WINDOW by Anne Panning

Anne Panning
MAGIC WINDOW (CHASING HOME)

What did you think when you cupped your hands against the glass and peered inside? Did you think the old wavy Victorian glass was a portal to the past? Did you see your mother in the kitchen, frying liver draped with onions? Was she listening to John Denver on her little boom box? Did she have a dish towel slung over her shoulder? Embroidered with kittens or vegetables? Was it soft with wear? Was the yellow-painted radiator leaking warmth? Was her heart a basket of needles? A tiny jar of yarn? If you sat at her table, might she fry you an egg? Pour you some red Kool-Aid in a juice glass? What might she tell you that you’d never heard before?

Try the other side of the house. The window back there, by the tiger lilies.

Was that your father there in his bedroom watching baseball, his ankles crossed on top of the log cabin quilt? Were the Twins winning? Could you see the score? Was his Food ‘n Fuel travel mug as stained and scratched up as ever? Full of old coffee he’d microwave throughout the day and night (and day and night)? Was he wearing his Wranglers or Levi’s? Dreaming of the lottery ticket with winning numbers? So he could quit his job at the cabinet factory and buy a little house on Lake Waconia? Did he still like his tiny sunfish filets floured and fried in butter? Was this before the rosacea would turn his face red with pain? Before Bud Light would slur his speech while he slurped hot dogs cold from the pack? Could he see you? Did he ever really see you?

Tap on the glass. Go ahead. Wave hello.

Anne Panning has published a memoir, Dragonfly Notes: On Distance and Loss, as well as a novel, Butter, and two short story collections: The Price of Eggs and Super America, which won The Flannery O’Connor Award and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Her short publications include Brevity (6x), Bellingham Review, Prairie Schooner, River Styx, New Letters, The Florida Review, Passages North, Black Warrior Review, The Greensboro Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Quarterly West, The Kenyon Review, Hippocampus, and River Teeth. She is currently working on a memoir about her late father. She teaches creative writing at SUNY-Brockport.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

SHAPES by Meg Pokrass

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SHAPES by Meg Pokrass

Meg Pokrass
SHAPES

He is kissing his wife goodnight on the cheek as she slips off to the spare bedroom with Tylenol and a hot water bottle. “I smell like a seal,” she says. Before that, she’d been at her surfing lesson while he waited at home in the big dog’s chair, listening for the snap of the car door. He was wondering why he could no longer remember the feel of her cold foot skin in the middle of the night, recalled that she used to press her toes against his shins, how he missed that ice. Before that, she had gone quiet after he suggested that they fix up the little room that was supposed to be painted with elephants and birds, but they had never wanted to jinx things, so they left the walls plain. “It can be like a hobby center,” he said, but he had no idea what that meant, and he didn’t have a hobby. Before that, they were trying and failing and trying again, and he remembered sitting in the cold car at the seafront, holding her hand, staring at distant shapes that were probably not really dolphins, saying, “Whatever happens next time, we will not let it hurt us this much.”

Meg Pokrass is the author of eight flash fiction collections. Her work has appeared in The Best Small Fictions 2022 and the WIgleaf Top 50 2022, and has been anthologized in three Norton anthologies of flash fiction: Flash Fiction International, New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction, and Flash Fiction America. She is the Series Co-Editor of Best Microfiction.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

BULLY BOYS by Gay Degani

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BULLY BOYS by Gay Degani

Gay Degani
BULLY BOYS

Her brothers are rough-and-tumble types roaming the streets after Mother and Father go to bed. They are expert at sneaking out, know every creaky floorboard, every groan in the front door hinge. Robbie greased their window sash. Willie blazed the perfect trail down the ancient oak. They say it’s important in any escapade to have a perfect plan. They learned this from Saturday afternoon movies, Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney, The Dead End Kids. They want to be tough. Too old to run around with tin-can tommy-guns anymore, they drink, they smoke, they swear. She wishes she could be tough too, a torch singer, a reporter, or a runaway heiress like Claudette Colbert. Her friends are tame, boring, all wishing to be Shirley Temple on the Good Ship Lollipop.

In bed at night, in the room next door to her brothers, she listens to the scuffles and grunts and titters as they make their great escape. The oak is their favored route, and she often watches them leap from the tree and scamper down the darkened street. Boys have all the luck and all the fun. She does not like it one little bit, so a plan begins to form as the moon shines through her frilly curtains.

She steals Willie’s striped T-shirt and baggy pants from the laundry, sneaks Robbie’s leather jacket out of the downstairs closet. Stashes her loot beneath her bed.

The next night, she listens for her brothers’ muttering. They always mutter, lucky for them mom and dad are down the hall. She quickly, quietly, dresses in their clothes, hides her hair under Willie’s baseball cap, and, slipping through her window, she shimmies down the oak the minute she sees them turn the corner. She races down the middle of the street, elation shivering through her, the cold night air feeling like freedom against her cheeks.

Several boys congregate in the darkest corner of the city park, her brothers, their pals, and a few she doesn’t know. Now that she’s here, squatting behind a shrub, she’s not sure what to do. She watches them pass around a bottle filled with yellow-brown liquid, taking sips, running their coat sleeves across their mouths. They smoke cigarettes. They talk in voices sometimes deep, sometimes squeaky. They fake-punch each other, left hook to stomach, fist to shoulder. Tease and taunt and laugh. They learned this, of course, at the Bijou, this daring, easy comradery.

The air grows cold, her legs begin to cramp. She straightens up. She wants to join them. She wonders how to do it. Curses heaven that she hadn’t been born a boy. They seem so comfortable, independent, daring. No stupid lollipops for them.

If her brothers weren’t here, maybe she could pull it off, but there they are, all blustery and loud. She stays in her hiding place until her toes feel frozen and her nose begins to drip.  Reluctantly she turns her back on the boys. Snaps a twig.

“Who’s there?” one of them asks, then stands and looks around.

She’s off, running fast, like she’s the sail of a ship, down the middle of Main Street, the Spanish Main, she thinks and grins, wind battering her chest, her hair a banner flying out behind her, glancing back as they begin to slow behind her, one by one, giving up.

She runs until she can’t run anymore and sprawls onto Mrs. Halloway’s front lawn.

She’s exhilarated, laughing, flat on her back, smelling grass, dirt, and her own sweet sweat. She rolls over, grabs a hefty stick, sits up, and shoves it deep into the soft spring turf and claims it in the name of herself. A girl, a pirate, on a daring new ship called, not Lollipop, but Her.

Gay Degani has received nominations and honors for her work including Pushcart consideration, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions, and won the 11th Annual Glass Woman Prize. Her story “Scablands” placed fourth in the 2023 Saturday Evening Post‘s Great American Fiction Contest. She’s published a full-length collection, Rattle of Want, (Pure Slush Press, 2015), and a suspense novel, What Came Before (Truth Serum Press, 2016). She occasionally blogs at Words in Place.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

MEDITATING IN HELL by Megan E. O’Laughlin

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MEDITATING IN HELL by Megan E. O’Laughlin

Megan E. O’Laughlin
MEDITATING IN HELL

Age 24. The Gambia, West Africa.

I do not pray five times a day like the people in the village. When I duck into my little house, the girls ask where are you going? I tell them to pray; I don’t know the Mandinka word for meditation. Most evenings, the gaggle of girls come over for gossip and help with their homework. They ask about my prayers, so I sit criss-cross-applesauce, close my eyes, and watch the space between my breaths.

“That’s not praying. She doesn’t know!” the girls giggle. But their laughter washes away, for I know how to control my unruly mind.

I meditate even more at the Stage House, where Peace Corps volunteers convene in the city. We drink skunky beers and stay up late watching DVDs of The Ring and Legally Blonde. Dishes pile in the sink, and we rip open packages filled with melted candy and coveted books.

I make a sign: I am in here meditating, in messy, cursive writing, and tape it to the dormitory door. I sit between the bunks and imagine a circle of soft light around my body. I inhale. My clamorous thoughts retreat to a downstairs place. Much quieter now. I exhale. The external world slows, and to that space, I retreat, over and over, with the same desperate fervor I once used to guzzle a beer or smoke weed all day long.

Meditation is my new drug.

◊

Later, my friend looks at my sign and says, “It looks like it says: I’m in hell, meditating.”

Age 41. Samish Island, Washington.
I pack a bag of soft clothes and books for my seventh meditation retreat. Upon arrival, the Zen teacher orients us to the usual: noble silence, daily chores, and this new one—no reading or journaling. Though I hate it, I comply and shove my books and phone under the bed for the five-day duration.

During breaks from the meditation hall, I walk the shore and breathe in the low tide sulfur as eagles whistle overhead. Multiple times per day, the neighbor sweeps her room and our shared bathroom, a jarring sound. At the retreat’s end, we will break our silence for lunch and the neighbor will tell all of us at the table how she left a cult. She says she fears a spiritual community, yet she is eager for solace, that quiet downstairs place.

Each night of the retreat when I cannot read myself to sleep, I stare at the ceiling and will my mind to avoid images from a movie I watched just weeks before, with the demon king and its group of naked cultists. I wonder why I watched it in the first place. I dare not glance towards the inky corners of the room, convinced I may see a demon or one of its worshippers, leering in the dark at my loneliness.

I am not sure if I believe in demons, but I know fanatic humans are real. While I haven’t joined a cult, I’ve searched for systematic methods to bypass life’s difficulties, placing faith in my teachers, not unlike cult members with their leaders. We all want peace, or we want more control, or perhaps both (although I’m not sure we can have both at the same time). Years of meditation practice—hours to observe my mind—have taught me how little control I have, and how unpeaceful I can be. Still, I can choose where to direct my attention and how I will respond. Perhaps peace can be found within such determination.

Now, in the midnight quiet, my fearful thoughts are here like a mental demon. I note my body’s reactions: the breath darts like hunted prey, the gut smolders. While I cannot stop this hellacious mental tantrum, it need not dominate me. I gently laugh at the deluge, so powerful and brief. I count the inhales and exhales until my mind slows and the breath deepens. I drift into a wordless sleep.

Megan E. O’Laughlin (she/her) is an emerging writer, psychotherapist, and MFA candidate at Ashland University. Her work appears in The Black Fork Review, Defunkt Magazine, Bright Flash Literary Journal, and The Bluebird Word. Megan lives on a peninsula by the sea in Washington state with her spunky child, spoiled dogs, and surfing spouse. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Black Fork Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, Defunkt Magazine, Bright Flash Literary Review, and others.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

INVENTORY by Nicholas Claro

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Four-square graphic design image with two male silhouettes, a female silhouette, and a handprint

Nicholas Claro
INVENTORY

My therapist asks me to create a list of people I’ve known who have died. To order their deaths from biggest impact to least and provide some details from when they were alive, or after they weren’t.

1.

I don’t use my brother’s name or say how he died. The therapist asks that I do both, but I refuse. Elementary through grad school, whenever a situation arose where I had to use his name, I’d write or say “narrator,” “character,” “protagonist.” It’s how I’ve always coped with him. A lot of the time I’d use the initial. Somehow, I always got away with this. I remember one time when I nearly didn’t. A professor accused me of “being too familiar” when examining the little boy in an O’Connor story, who I called “J.” She told me that when I speak like that, it’s easy to forget we aren’t talking about real people.

2.

Identical twins, and completely different. I skateboarded and smoked pot with Josh. Gabe was a water-drinking jock. Popular. Varsity football since freshman year. Always in his letterman. Josh was the one who found him. No note, nothing. He and his family moved after that. Months ago, we reconnected on Instagram. I scrolled his photos. Wife. Kids. Two boys. A girl with hair so blond it looks white. He’s smiling in every picture.

3.

My cousin Evan fell off scaffolding. He painted houses during summer breaks. At sixteen, he’d grown tall, lanky, had reach. Bragged how people held him by his overalls while he’d reach with a paintbrush to get to places everyone else had a hard time reaching. One afternoon, someone held him while he painted a gable vent three stories up and both clasps on his overalls snapped.

4.

My mother’s parents died before I was born. Car accident. I’ve only seen pictures; they looked nice. My father’s folks I barely knew. Few times they came around, they brought toys or comics, and my brother and I were encouraged to play or read in our rooms, outside if it was nice. Later, I’d learn my grandmother had Alzheimer’s. Near the end, she wandered into a golf course in North Albany. Picked golf balls up off the green and dropped them into a basket she made from her nightgown while golfers watched. She thought she was little again, collecting eggs on her parents’ farm in Brownsville. My father called it a blessing when she died. Not long after, my grandfather died. This, he called mercy.

5.

“Kristen isn’t dead,” I say. “We’re just divorced. Does that count?”

Headshot of Nicholas ClaroNicholas Claro is an MFA candidate in fiction at WSU and serves on the editorial board for Nimrod International Journal as a fiction reader. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pithead Chapel, Bending Genres, Heavy Feather Review, Cleaver, Fictive Dream, Identity Theory, X-R-A-Y Lit Mag, Necessary Fiction, and others. He lives in Wichita, Kansas. Nicholas’ flash fiction piece “Inventory” was a finalist in Cleaver’s 2022 Flash Contest.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

LINE COOK: A LOVE STORY by Madeleine Barowsky

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Graphic design image of a cutting board, knife, broccoli, and tomato

Madeleine Barowsky
LINE COOK: A LOVE STORY

For this task, your tools must be hot. They must be cold. They must be bone-dry or slick with hot water. Cold water. For this task, the item should be room temp. It should be completely frozen. It should be partially thawed, and I learned that lesson the hard way, goat cheese shattering with a ferocious bang of the knife. Be sure the plate does not have any hint of heat. Be sure it is still warm.

The buns should be sweaty and puffy. If the cheese is sweaty, it has sat too long. Bake them till they’re golden-brown on top. If you bake the fitascetta until they show color, they will be rock hard, unusable. Keep a constant tension on the chicken breast with the palm of your hand so it doesn’t shred as you cut. The trick to slicing loaves is a kind of looseness in the shoulder. Go as slowly as needed when streaming sugar into egg whites. Add sugar to the yolks as quickly as possible.

Lose yourself at the cutting board. Forget your body except for the hands, unfold an entire universe in the moment. Blink past individual vegetables and measure progress by the level in the big tub. It goes faster if you concentrate. It goes faster if you think of nothing at all.

During prep for dinner service, we mentally rehearse the hours ahead. Ready ourselves to be upstairs in the heat and action, feeling the flow, the push, the squeeze. You can love a thing and be afraid of it, like the roar of a freight train in close proximity. Brace for impact.

We stay busy until midnight sometimes. Saturday nights on the line are like a domino cascade that just keeps falling. The worst rush will feel like the world is ending, but the way out is through. Time passes. Do your best and time passes. Some days I do nothing but fail. I strip off my dirty whites and leave them stinking in the linens bag.

The night sky after twelve hours in a kitchen is like coming up from water for air.

Headshot of Madeleine BarowskyMadeleine Barowsky is a software engineer and line cook who lives and works in Massachusetts. Her writing has previously been published in The Florida Review and Fourth Genre. Madeleine’s flash nonfiction piece “Line Cook: A Love Story” was a finalist in Cleaver’s 2022 Flash Contest.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

THE PRIZE FIGHTER by Lyn Chamberlin

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Graphic design image of a spilled bottle next to the Eiffel Tower

Lyn Chamberlin
THE PRIZE FIGHTER

She would go to Paris.

When this was all over, this is how she would start again.

But today she would go back to caring for him, undo the hook and eye they’d put on the outside of his bedroom door so she wouldn’t find him in the middle of the night peeing into the kitchen sink or looking for the knives she’d stashed in her car.

When she unlatched the hook in the morning—she wasn’t sure how much longer it would hold, it was already loose—she would find him dazed, poised like a prize fighter in the middle of a ring, hands clenched in ready fists, feet in a “come get me” stance, his eyes wild and frightened.

He didn’t recognize her until he did.

Sometimes, she felt noble and kind.

On good days—hers, that is—she became the person she wanted to be. Stoic. Sacrificial. Indifferent to the melted ice cream pint in the oven and the television remote he thought was his phone, a leg into the arm hole of his t-shirt, the car keys, his, gone.

Days of rage and calling out. But to whom?

When he could still remember that the trash was Tuesdays, that the blue bin was for recycling, the green for everything else, she was hopeful. The neurologist called it “executive function.” Blue means this. Green means that.

Until the morning she found him kneeling on the front lawn, sorting through chicken bones, rank paper towels, rusty apple cores and frayed orange rinds, crusted yogurt cups, and greasy crumpled tin foil, staring at the array that lay all around him.

As children, they had fished for minnows on the Farm Creek bridge. String tied around the mouths of brown Borden’s milk bottles. Wonder Bread for bait. They threw crabapples at passing cars. He ran away before the car could stop.

He liked to confess things to her mother at the white formica table in that split-level Connecticut ranch with the sunken living room, next door and identical to his, after school.

Her mother drank Scotch and made him baloney sandwiches. She hadn’t known that.

These were the stories he could remember. As if she didn’t. Again and again.

Someday she would forgive herself for not loving him better. Wasn’t that what love was, really? Spoons didn’t have to be with spoons. So what if she had to tie his shoes?

Him. An empty bottle. Staring at the water as it seeped into the rug. As if it wasn’t too late to get it all back in.

Headshot of Lyn ChamberlinLyn Chamberlin is a writer and consultant living in Connecticut whose work has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Potomac Review, and elsewhere across the web. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Lyn’s flash nonfiction piece “The Prize Fighter” was a finalist in Cleaver’s 2022 Flash Contest.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

2020 APRIL by James LaRowe

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James LaRowe
2020 APRIL

My kids’ new favorite game is searching for signs of life in satellite photos. They crowd around the family computer to hunt for civilization in the most far-flung, godforsaken places on Google Earth. They’ve grown adept at spotting thin dirt roads etched along shorelines and valley floors, the needle-straightness of airstrips or docks, the unexpected glint of a lone, distant roof.

I drink rosé in the kitchen doorway, waiting for the lasagna to cool, flicking through news on my phone: New symptoms have been identified…stores are running out of toilet paper and water…the stock market is up…the President tweeted.

“Guys, look, buildings,” Emma says. “On an atoll.”

“And a clay tennis court! They must be French,” Grace says.

On the monitor, a dented sandy ring floats in azure, pocked on one side by a red smudge and a cluster of beige buildings.

I walk over to kiss my kids’ heads. “I’m so sorry,” I say.

“Why?” Quinn, my youngest, asks without looking up.

I refill my wine glass.

“What’s the northernmost settlement in the world?” I yell from the kitchen.

Emma googles. “Dad, it’s called Alert,” she says. “In Canada.”

A map appears on the screen with a dot on the upper rim of the great northern archipelago. Emma clicks and zooms us down into Nunavut and Qikiqtaaluk and further still until the tiny arctic settlement of Alert emerges—a nestled clutch of buildings half-buried in snow.

“Kids,” I say. “This summer, let’s escape to Alert.”

◊

After dinner, Grace mentions an online survey a friend texted her which supposedly assesses the degree to which someone is a psychopath. We each agree to take the test separately.

“Answer honestly,” Quinn chides us beforehand.

Quinn scores the lowest: four out of forty. Grace gets an eight. I get nine. We’re all rated Minimally Psychopathic. But Emma scores a ten, just over the line into Mildly.

“That test wasn’t meant for kids,” Grace assures her. “Especially the parts about promiscuity, delinquency, and criminality.”

I start to say, “Yeah guys, had I known…”

“And that question about ‘parasitic lifestyle’?” Grace cuts me off. “Aren’t kids supposed to live off their parents?”

I help her clear the plates.

After dessert, the children decide to retake the test together to see if they could become Moderately Psychopathic without stretching the truth too much—an act which, Emma jokes, seems moderately psychopathic.

Soon the synth-xylophone chime of an incoming FaceTime fills the room.

“Mom!” my kids sing at the computer. “We miss you!”

“Hey, guys,” Sandra says, looking tired and grainy on the screen. She has changed out of her scrubs and into a sweatshirt. Anodyne hotel wall art hangs behind her.

“We took a test to see if we’re psychopaths!” the children shout.

“Don’t worry. We’re not,” I add, sipping my wine.

Sandra smiles. “Rosé in April. Everything okay?”

I consider how to reply as Quinn tells her, “Mom, this summer, we’re escaping to Alert.”

James LaRowe is currently pursuing his MFA at the Bennington Writing Seminars where he is working on his first novel. He writes fiction that explores privilege, loss, and evolving notions of masculine identity. He lives in the suburbs outside of Boston with his wife, three children, and dog, Cali. James LaRowe’s flash fiction piece “2020 April” received Honorable Mention in Cleaver’s 2022 flash fiction contest judged by Meg Pokrass.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

MOSAIC FOR MY MOTHER by Emily Hoover

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Emily Hoover
MOSAIC FOR MY MOTHER

1.

When I was a teen, she’d sit on the porch cloaked in a cloud of cigarette smoke with pruning shears in her hands. She’d whisper to herself while cutting photos of George W. Bush out of the newspaper because she couldn’t stand to see his face on the front page, especially after 9/11. I thought it was normal, but my friends’ moms cut chunks of cookie dough into hearts while baking. They didn’t talk politics, especially when no one was listening.

She’d open mid-day beers in the closet and fall asleep on the porch at dusk, her hair kinking from the humidity. Smoke plumed from the ashtray, a grayish ink.

Dad would watch reruns of Seinfeld, laughing at the same jokes while piecing together the sports section.

2.

I am twenty-eight when she is diagnosed for the first time and prescribed a cocktail of mood levelers and antipsychotics. In other news, Dad says, her aloe plant had pups, and her garden swells with eggplant. 

We end the call. I end up on Facebook and see an Amazon ad for Birkenstock two-strap sandals with a Monstera deliciosa print. Plant parenthood is her tether to reality, so I order them, choose the option for two-day shipping.

On her birthday, Dad calls. He passes her the phone.

What if it’s the same people who are poisoning the food?

We talk for an hour about Amazon and government surveillance. She tells me she understands the purpose of the box and my gift.

She wants to gain some weight.

Then, after a beat, she tells me there are people living in the attic. She can hear them shuffling.

3.

Dad calls. She is tending to the echeveria wearing the Birkenstocks with socks. She has put on ten pounds after quitting drinking, and she is smoking less than a pack a day.

He passes her the phone.

She tells me the therapist looks just like Huey Lewis. I hear Dad’s laugh, like thunder, in the background.

She wants to make the eggplant dish I like, the one with the capers, the next time I’m in Florida.

No one remembers it’s my twenty-ninth birthday, not even me.

4.

She calls. It startles me. She believes someone has stolen the car. I ask for Dad, but he’s at the store. She tells me there’s no more chatter, but I can hear her whispering to someone no one else can hear.

5.

The window is open. The sheer curtains sway. I argue with acquaintances on Facebook, denouncing Donald Trump’s foreign policy.

Later, I stand in the mirror, my grayish blond hair kinking in desert monsoon mist, and wonder what else I have inherited. Monstera cuttings root in water near the bathroom window. I wiggle my toes in Birkenstocks. I listen for the phone, Dad’s laugh, her sigh. My own voice echoes in my head.

Emily Hoover is the author of the novella in stories, Snitch (Wordrunner eChapbooks, 2021), and the zine of micropoetry, Portrait of My Mother Living with Mental Illness (Rinky Dink Press, 2022). Her poetry, fiction, and reviews have been published by or are forthcoming in Sundress Publications, The Disappointed Housewife, The Citron Review, FIVE:2:ONE, Bending Genres, Limp Wrist Magazine, BULL, Necessary Fiction, The Los Angeles Review, Ploughshares blog, The Rupture, and others, and her fiction has been nominated for Best of the Net. She lives in Las Vegas. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter as @em1lywho. Emily Hoover’s flash fiction piece “Mosaic for My Mother” received Honorable Mention in Cleaver’s 2022 flash fiction contest judged by Meg Pokrass.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

THE TUMMY BRIDGE by Andrea Marcusa

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Graphic design image of a gray bridge resting on top of a bare stomach

Andrea Marcusa
THE TUMMY BRIDGE

Right now, it’s an old wooden bridge spanning railroad tracks, a rickety structure that’s fun to cross on her way to the beach. Its steep incline causes her car to jump when she zips over it too fast, and then her stomach to lurch into the air. Her two children and husband love the bridge. When she calls out, “Here comes the Tummy Bridge,” they wait in anticipation holding their stomachs and then erupt into gales of laughter.

She presses the brakes, and her husband, who is in the passenger seat, reaches his hand across the gear box onto her knee and travels up her thigh to her bikini bottom and says, “I can’t help it when you pump your leg and arch in that wet suit,” and doesn’t leave her thigh until she swats him away and whispers, “Later!”

After the kids are asleep, she’ll lower herself onto him, the room flooding with a chorus of crickets and the ding-donging of wind chimes outside their bedroom window. The sheets soon a damp tangle, her hair matted, they’ll both collapse euphoric, out of breath, feeling each other’s hearts pounding along with their own. Propped on her side, she’ll trace the outlines of his face, the cleft in his chin, strong jaw line, and touch his dark, thick eyelashes with her pinky.

This is before arrhythmias send her husband’s heart racing and skipping like mosquitos swarming at dusk. Before his stricken look with each erratic beat sets her teeth on edge. Before the arrival of his tan box filled with life-saving morning, noon, and evening pills, colored discs that dull his eyes and puff his lids. Before physicians, five separate times, thread probes up a vein in his thigh to his heart where they make tiny burns, scarring the tissue from which love had once flowed so freely. Afterward, he still climbs the stairs nightly to their bedroom but gasps at the top, the sound thrusting into her like a blade.

This is before sleepless nights spent wondering if she could have foreseen some weakness years ago when, after lovemaking, she held her head to his chest to hear his heart’s reassuring thump, thump, thump. Was there something they could have done?

This is before wildfires destroy the bridge and nearby barns that dot the region and clapboard houses with quaint, listing front porches and baskets of hanging geraniums. Although their home is spared, the charred ruins nearby are sold off in small lots and rebuilt with tract houses and tiny, cedar chip yards. The bridge, remade in cement, now provides a smooth, ordinary ride, no fun at all.

Today, none of these changes have happened. Wildfires and his weak heart are years away, the smell of summer perfumes the air, the motor shifts gears as it starts up the hill, the kids in the backseat chant, “Tummy Bridge!” under a wide, blue summer sky, as fields of corn sway and baskets of pink geraniums swing, and they are still young.

Headshot of Andrea MarcusaAndrea Marcusa’s work has appeared in Gettysburg Review, CutBank, Citron Review, Cherry Tree, and others. She’s received recognition in a range of competitions, including Smokelong, Glimmer Train, Raleigh Review, and Southampton Review. She studies with Philip Schultz at The Writers Studio. For more information, visit: andreamarcusa.com or see her on Twitter @d_marcusa. Andrea Marcusa’s flash fiction piece “The Tummy Bridge” received Honorable Mention in Cleaver’s 2022 flash fiction contest judged by Meg Pokrass.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

LET’S LICK IT by Amanda Hadlock

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Amanda Hadlock
LET’S LICK IT

The first night I spent with the guy I dated last summer, he told me we had just snorted the last of our coke when I asked for more, so I said, “Turn the baggie inside out and let’s lick it.”

So, we did. We tongued the corners and crevasses of the sandwich bag to save every last bit of residue we could, and my teeth and lips went so numb I couldn’t even feel it when he kissed me.

◊

In the beginning, not much happened: We would meet at his apartment, stretch out on his bedroom carpet, and snort lines off the cover of the physics textbook from the class where we’d met that spring, which he would have to retake the next fall. We would take turns playing songs on his laptop we thought would make the other like us. And it worked for a while: sniffing lines, singing off-key, fucking on the bedroom carpet. It was great on nights when we weren’t too numb from drugs, and nights when we were too numb, we were content just lying there, side by side on the floor, sharing the silence as we came down.

◊

Then, suddenly, something did happen. As it turns out, it is dangerous to mix your prescribed SSRIs with uppers you got from some line cook at the Applebee’s where your boyfriend who you barely know works, and there is such a thing as “serotonin syndrome.” The body, ironically, can produce too much of the thing that makes it feel happy, and hurt itself.

A build up of serotonin in the brain can cause a hot, sweaty fever, and muscle rigidity so severe your hands curl up like pincers and are rendered useless, and diarrhea so sudden you find yourself shitting your favorite Eeyore pajama pants in your sleep on your new boyfriend’s bedroom carpet, waking both of you up from a come-down at the ass-crack of dawn and necessitating a drive to the Emergency Room. Likely, he’ll hardly be able to hide his disgust. He might offer you a shower and a pair of his basketball shorts to change into, after you ask. He also might make you sit on one of his crusty towels the whole way to the hospital, and never call or text you back again after dropping you off.

Anyway, serotonin syndrome can cause all these things. That doesn’t mean any of these things will happen to you.

Amanda Hadlock is an MFA candidate in fiction at Florida State University, where she also serves as Assistant Editor for Southeast Review. She is originally from Missouri. She received her MA in English from Missouri State University, where she also worked as the Graduate Assistant for Moon City Review. Her fiction, nonfiction, and graphic narrative work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as The Florida Review, Fractured Literary, WFSU/NPR’s All Things Considered, Essay Daily, Hobart, Wigleaf, New Limestone Review, Past Ten, The Lindenwood Review, Esthetic Apostle, and others. Amanda’s flash fiction piece “Let’s Lick It” was a finalist in Cleaver’s 2022 flash contest.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

THE RESTAURANT AT THE END OF THE WORLD by Sarah Freligh

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Sarah Freligh
THE RESTAURANT AT THE END OF THE WORLD

They come from everywhere, come to us hungry. They wheel in suitcases that they park tidy under tables, drag in trash bags or carry backpacks that they ease off and set on chairs. Sometimes they bring pets—dogs and cats and once an iguana in a plaid harness—though they’re told not to. They’ll claim the damn dog just jumped into the car and wouldn’t budge, and what was I supposed to do about it anyway? We tell them we understand completely and send for the Pet Whisperer, who pulls up in her dusty grey Jeep with endearments and a pocketful of treats and sits with the owners until they’re ready to let go.

The restaurant at the end of the world never closes. We serve eggs-over-easy late at night, bowls of chili with extra spices, and pitchers of beer at daybreak. Our customers will often tell us that this is the best meal they’ve ever had, and we smile and say we’ll tell the chef. Sometimes the chef himself appears, but only after changing from his stained apron into the pressed white jacket he keeps for such occasions. They ask what was in the eggs—chives? mint?—that gives them that extra something. Sometimes they stand and shake his hand or write down a recipe and stick it away for later.

We’re taught never to ask questions—What brings you here? Where are you from?—instructed instead to listen if the customer tells us why they can’t bear to live in this world anymore. Sometimes they show us things they’ve brought from their old lives: a jeweled brooch that belonged to a wife who died of a lingering illness or a crayon drawing of the school where a couple’s six-year-old son was gunned down. There are always stories. Sometimes they ask us what it’s like at the end of the world, and we smile and tell them their slice of pie is on the house.

Afterward, they pay at the register, help themselves to wrapped mints or a toothpick, and take a last, long look around—at the busboy tenderly collecting glasses in a rubber tub, at the couple waving and blowing kisses into a cell phone, at the waitress unfurling a fresh linen tablecloth on a corner two-top. When it’s finally time, we point to the back of the restaurant, tell them to walk past the men’s room and the ladies’, to the red door at the end of the hallway. Goodbye, we whisper.

Hello, we say to the customers who come to us hungry.

Sarah Freligh is the author of four books, including Sad Math, winner of the 2014 Moon City Press Poetry Prize and the 2015 Whirling Prize from the University of Indianapolis, and We, published by Harbor Editions in early 2021. Recent work has appeared in the Cincinnati Review miCRo series, SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Fractured Lit, and in the anthologies New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (Norton 2018), Best Microfiction (2019-22), and Best Small Fiction 2022. Among her awards are poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Saltonstall Foundation. Sarah Freligh’s flash fiction piece “The Restaurant at the End of the World” was a finalist in Cleaver’s 2022 flash contest.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

IMPACT by Lisa Lanser Rose

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Graphic design image of an airplane with a light purple background

Lisa Lanser Rose
IMPACT

A voice above proclaimed: No automobiles may be left unattended within three hundred feet of the facility. I blinked; an imaginary avalanche of flame slammed through the airport.

“Where is everybody?” I asked at the empty ticket counter.

On board at Harrisburg International, the flight attendant lectured us on safety features, and I relished my front-row seat in the almost-empty puddle-jumper. Fifteen days after 9/11, and so far I avoided the news blazoning Bin Laden’s face in satanic black and red. Limp children draped over firefighter’s arms. Immune, I knew not to give it too much thought, even when ashes from Manhattan dusted my Pennsylvania town like plant spores from outer space.

“Which emergency exit do you want?” I asked my seatmate. “That one’s mine.”

“I hate prop planes,” the big guy said.

“Why? Because those propeller blades could zip through this aluminum can and cut our legs off mid-thigh?”

“That’s one reason,” he said. “I’m with the Air Force.”

“Pilot or bombardier?”

“Manager of the commissary.”

“So you’re an expert,” I said. “Everyone told me to cancel this trip. Should we be afraid to fly?”

“Nah,” he said. “Odds are it’s safer now than ever.”

“That’s what I thought,” I nodded. “I teach critical thinking.” So much to not fear. Lightning. Shark bite. Columbine.

Conversation prevents boredom, loneliness, and the temptation to dwell on what my daughter’s schoolteacher cried to the kids, “My best friend ran the daycare in the Twin Towers.”

In a halting, disembodied voice, our pilot reported altitude, weather conditions, and flight duration. He paused. “Folks? Can I just talk to you a moment?”

“Sorry.” The flight attendant shook her head. “He’s Southern.”

“Let me ramble,” said our pilot. “I know you’re thinking about recent events. And I want to say. . . if any of you are thinking about. . . this cabin—”

I strained to hear him over the engine thrum.

“You can use blankets to deflect knives. . . Throw things at the hijackers. Aim for their faces. . . I agree with our president that. . . if anybody gets into this cockpit. . .”

“What the actual fuck,” said the big guy.

“He’s having a tough time,” I said. “But he’s pragmatic.”

The plane banked, lifting the twin cooling towers of Three-Mile Island into view.

“I used to fish there as a kid,” the big guy said. “I was there the day it happened. We got a whole week off from school. We didn’t have to make it up.”

“Silver linings,” I said.

We landed in Philly. Everyone phoned someone, and the rubble of Ground Zero still emitted 1600 cell phone signals. Already slipping into anonymity, my seatmate lowered my carry-on, making me almost love him. Dust motes danced in the gangway, and I remembered how my daughter and her friends sang, “It’s snowing!” running across the sunny September lawn, catching ashes on their small pink tongues.

Headshot of Lisa Lanser RoseLisa Lanser Rose is a trick dog trainer and the author of the memoir, For the Love of a Dog and the psychological mystery, Body Sharers, which was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award for Best First Novel. Other honors include the Briar Cliff Review Nonfiction Award, The Florida Review Editor’s Award, and a Best American Essay Notable Essay. Founder of the award-winning blog co-op, The Gloria Sirens, she gets lost on dog agility courses throughout Tampa Bay. Her flash nonfiction piece “Impact” received Honorable Mention in Cleaver’s 2022 flash contest judged by Meg Pokrass.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

A CONTENTED SUN RISES by Joe Alan Artz

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Joe Alan Artz
A CONTENTED SUN RISES

Envelopes of Very Small People keep arriving in my mailbox. I bring each envelope in and gently slit open the top flap. The people come out slowly, gasping in awe, looking all around. They spread out across my apartment. They explore, find small nooks and crannies, settle in. They raise magnolias in tiny pots. The peculiar charm of a magnolia breeze wafts through my four rooms along with Celtic music, or something similar, that the people play and sing.

The settlers, hardly aware of my presence, require nothing of me. Farmers plant small grains and leafy greens in the soil built up in the gaps between floorboards. Shepherds tend flocks of dust bunnies in the gloom beneath the couch. Come spring, they shear fleeces of lint from the bunnies that others weave into fabrics to be scissored and stitched into clothing, using patterns centuries old.

The Very Small People prosper. Market towns spring up. I live in terror of crushing people underfoot, but as they establish fixed roadways between settlements, I adjust my routes to theirs. Where our paths must cross, they set flashing red lights on poles, turned up at an angle to catch my eye as I approach.

Every new envelope that arrives increases their population. The economy and birthrates grow apace. The roads grow congested, a trend that continues until butterflies begin arriving in small boxes, delivered by Amazon. The boxes have air holes and are labeled “FRAGILE: Living Things.” When the Very Small People get a text saying a box has been delivered, they text me to bring it in. Those knowledgeable of butterflies gather round as I lift the flaps. “Stand back,” they shout as butterflies burst forth in iridescent swirls. Floor traffic dwindles as travel goes airborne. The smallest butterflies carry one passenger, lying prone along the thorax. Larger ones carry up to seven, seated, bent knees gripping the thorax tight. The largest—tropical giants—carry cargo.

Population and prosperity increase at Malthusian rates. Very Small People inhabit every flat surface in my apartment, anywhere gravity allows. Butterflies spangle the airspace, everywhere that gravity has no influence. Wherever I choose to stand or sit, suburban sprawl encroaches. In the end, I find myself crowded into a corner with only my laptop, minifridge, and a chemical toilet. Sitting cross-legged on the fridge, I gaze, mesmerized, into and across an exuberant New World in motion. I feel bliss. I’ve never known what it’s like to belong. I’ve never felt so much at home.

A group of developers clusters below, debating whether to demolish the minifridge and build houses or convert it to luxury apartments. “Apartments,” I call down. “Great view from the top floors.” The developers look up, astonished. Their generation has forgotten I exist.

Gravity lets go. I rise to the ceiling, the only place left where I’m not in the way. Lying there, on my back, hands behind my head, I beam down on their realm, the contented sun of Very Small People.

Joe Alan Artz, a native of rural Kansas, is a retired archaeologist. He writes short fiction and poetry in the coffeehouses of Iowa City, Iowa. His published work has appeared in The MacGuffin, Beecher’s (now Landlocked), Prompt Press, Wapsipinicon Almanac, Daily Palette, and Diverse Arts Project. Joe’s flash fiction piece “A Contented Sun Rises” was a finalist in Cleaver’s 2022 Flash Contest.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

LOVE OF YOUR LIFE by Kris Willcox

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Kris Willcox
LOVE OF YOUR LIFE

They say you fall in love with your children the moment they’re born, although this was not my experience. Paul was a nice baby, but his needs and insistent gestures confused me. Fifty years ago, it was normal for fathers to feel that way. Babies weren’t worn in pouches from dawn to dusk, and no one had ever thought of a jogging stroller. Paul’s carriage looked like a tiny hearse, and I’m sure I never pushed it.

One Saturday, when he was not quite two, Carol went shopping during his afternoon nap. She left me with instructions for the casserole (into the oven at five) and for Paul (wake him if he sleeps past four). I spent an hour circling the house with a push mower, and when I noticed that the light had become golden, I knew it must be time to wake him. I removed my shoes at the front door and went upstairs to his room.

He wasn’t there.

I spun around as if someone behind me had spoken, but there was no one—just Paul’s bed, and blankets. Panicked, I gave myself simple directions: Remain calm. Look. He’s here somewhere. I checked the closet, his toy chest, behind the curtains. I looked in our bedroom and in the bathtub.

“All right, Paulie,” I said, running downstairs. My socks slipped on the wooden treads, and I grabbed the railing to keep from falling. I jammed my feet into my sneakers and rushed around the first floor, then again upstairs. I got on hands and knees to look under the claw-foot tub, a space even he could only have fit by crushing himself, but how could I know his mind? Each night, he’d wave to me as I came up the driveway, then hide when I tried to talk to him.

Now he simply refused to be anywhere—not in the garage, the cabinet, the cellar. My limbs were heavy; the blood was silting up in my veins. I couldn’t think. That’s how Carol found me, grunting like a bear and yanking keys from the pocket of my overcoat.

“He’s gone!” I shouted. She bounded upstairs with me directly behind her, yelling that I’d already looked there, for Christ’s sake.

“He’s right here,” she said. I stumbled in.

And there he was, so small I’d mistaken him for a twist in the blankets. Our voices woke him, and he began to cry. Carol soothed him against her shoulder, and I shuffled downstairs, a fool gripping my keys.

Paul’s sneakers were beside the door. A blue pair, and a red. When I saw them, I realized what Carol must have known from his birth: that if he left us, by choice or by accident, we’d have to rid ourselves of every trace of him, starting with those shoes. It was the only way we’d survive.

That’s what they mean when they say you fall in love. It’s true. It’s terrible.

Kris Willcox lives in Arlington, MA with her family. Her writing has appeared in Crazyhorse, Kenyon Review online, Beloit Fiction Journal, Cimarron Review, Tin House online, Vela, Molecule, and elsewhere. Kris Willcox’s flash fiction piece “Love of Your Life” received Honorable Mention in Cleaver’s 2022 flash fiction contest judged by Meg Pokrass.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

HIRAETH by Paul Joseph Enea

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Paul Joseph Enea
HIRAETH

Ever since she’s lived in the village, Hanna’s floor fan sounds more like static than white noise. She’s certain the static taints her dreams, which used to be innovative, like prestige television. But these days her dreams are closer to reality TV than a nuanced narrative. They play like reruns of her day at work, where she blurs through long corridors dispensing meds to post-ops. Every day, she rests her hand on the shoulder of a doomed patient. She wonders why she doesn’t dream about people she knows and loves. It scares her that she only thinks about Oliver when she’s awake. She misses him in her dreams. When he was alive, smooth white noise filled every room in their home.

At one-thirty in the morning, it’s hard to tell the difference between bored and haunted. Hanna rolls out of bed, dresses in jeans and a pullover, then walks three uphill blocks to a park perched on a bluff. Sitting on a bench outside the glow of a lamp post, she watches a bright moon scan the surface of an ocean-like lake. A breeze carries the sway and scent of rye grass and wild flower. Hanna forgets her eyes are closed until a chorus of teenagers enters the park, headed for a railed platform jutting off the bluff. If Oliver was here, he’d say, “Let’s hope they survive their youth.” He’d say this because he said it before, when they were on a different shore, gazing at people. He enjoyed speaking his mind in her company. By the time the teenagers reach the platform, she’s sorry she can no longer hear their voices.

The following afternoon, Hanna skips her nap and goes for a walk. Besides locating the grocery store and hospital, she hasn’t explored the village until today, even though this is where Oliver was born and raised and where she felt compelled to live soon after he drowned. But when she first arrived she had a hard time identifying the casual village he often described. Her apartment building sits kitty-corner to a church compound and a middle school. On weekday afternoons the cutthroat traffic of minivans and cyclists diminishes her faith in people. Taking refuge on the sofa, she wakes from naps with a dry throat and a longing to be elsewhere.

Today, however, the sky is vintage blue and she remembers Oliver liked to say the next best thing to sailing was walking. He had wanted Hanna to visit the village, certain she’d experience some sort of communion with the lake. Once, during sex, she received on a prescient frequency a sense of life without him, as if he was already a ghost. He noticed the abrupt stillness in her eyes and became very still himself, waiting, as if someone should say something. Today, the distinction between ghost and flesh is tenuous because she can still feel the pulse of his gaze. “I’m pregnant,” she says, beneath her breath, in case he’s listening.

Paul Joseph Enea’s poetry, fiction, and journalism has appeared in various literary journals and anthologies, including Porcupine Literary Arts, Portals & Piers, Blue Canary Press, Verse Wisconsin, Brawler Lit, and The Irish American Post. His flash fiction piece “Hiraeth” received Honorable Mention in Cleaver’s 2022 flash fiction contest judged by Meg Pokrass.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

IN-LAWS by Laura Tanenbaum

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Graphic design image of a multicolored fish

Laura Tanenbaum
IN-LAWS

“In five years, I’m going to fall in love with a fish,” the four-year-old declares, over hard-boiled eggs, on a ninety-degree day, to no one in particular. “They will be rainbow-colored with gray and black stripes. I will teach them to walk on their fin so they can come to our house. And I will teach them how to breathe. I will say, ‘It’s easy, fish. Just breathe like you did in water; only, it’s air.’ ”

His brother tells him he might need to compromise. Maybe six months on land, six months in the water, like the high-powered couples do. No, he says, concerned. The fish has to come to him. I’m watching his concern, trying to see which plane of reality he’s accessing, except that I no longer know what I mean by this.  I know only that the words “imagination” and “metaphor” are insufficient to the task. And so I take his side. After all, we’ve learned from David Attenborough that evolution has carried countless creatures from the sea to us, not one has reversed course. When you forget how to make gills, they stay forgotten.

All of this may be why, the next day, after the temperatures had plunged thirty degrees overnight and the NYC Parks department and I both failed to adjust—me without a jacket, them, blasting the sprinklers—I was the only one who didn’t rush to pull a child back from the flood. He stomped on every fountainhead, threw himself on the ground. When he came to me, shivering, and the only change of clothes I had was shorts, and I saw the mother who had frantically been calling her Juniper back from the brink shoot me the look reserved for the parents of bad-example children, it took everything I had not to shout, You don’t understand! He’s looking for his fishwife! Wants to learn to live in her world! Learning to be flexible! And aren’t they going to need that what with the world and everything. . . Because I’m sure that Juniper’s mother would understand. That, like me, she has trouble imagining the future these days. That she would be comforted as I am by the thought of my future self, a crone in a cave, welcoming in any creature still capable of both tenderness and survival, teaching my son to tend to her scales.

Headshot of Laura TanenbaumLaura Tanenbaum is a writer, teacher, and parent living in Brooklyn, NY. She has published poetry and short fiction in Aji, Catamaran, Trampoline, Rattle, and many other venues. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, Dissent, Entropy, and elsewhere. She teaches at LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York. Her nonfiction flash piece “In-Laws” received Honorable Mention in Cleaver’s 2022 flash contest judged by Meg Pokrass.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

DARK MATTER by Meredith McCarroll

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Graphic design image of an ornate black and white flower with a yellow burst in the background

Meredith McCarroll
DARK MATTER

“You know how dark matter is like the absence of space, but it, like, takes up space?”

“OK.”

“Well, what if dark matter could be contained and it’s like an anti-gravity solution. In a gas form. It takes up the space that is the absence of space.”

“Dark matter?”

“Yeah. Which is different than dark energy.”

“I don’t know what dark energy is.”

“Oh. Have you heard of the Big Bang, Mama?”

He is fourteen. I am in the bathtub. He is wearing the new sweatshirt he saved to buy that is still so soft on the inside that I rubbed my cheek against it when he asked me to feel it.

He is four and he explains centripetal and centrifugal force to my mom. She records it on her flip phone that is stashed now in a drawer with misfit cords, lost memories, and unanswered texts.

He is eleven and we move him from his childhood home. He stands in the center of a magnolia tree that touches the ground all around him. He slowly pulls red berries from the cones, their white threads stringing behind, and shuts quietly down.

He is twelve and the red berries sit on his bookshelf with the pottery shards from before and a handful of sea glass from now. He stops asking to visit, and learns to ski.

Some nights, we lay together and cry. About algebra, but always eventually about distance and loss and why Mom had to die and that magnolia tree.

“I like to imagine that our energy disperses and mixes with other energies when we die. Some part star. Some part tree. Some part mosquito.”

“Is that why you don’t like to kill mosquitoes?” he asks.

“No. I just figure it’s not my right to kill another living thing.”

“It’s not like you think it’s your granny or something?”

We laugh.

“Maybe it is like that,” I say as we grow quiet.

“Yeah. I think we just die and that’s that.”

He is one and I am nursing him. He grins at me so that my nipple slips out of his milky mouth. I guide him back to nurse and his eyes flutter shut. I rub my hand over his soft head, brushing the wispy dark hairs away from his face. He drifts off and I pull my shirt back down, propping my arm against the sofa so that he can rest against me for as long as he will.

“Anyway, you know about the Big Bang?”

He isn’t sure where to rest his eyes, so I lean over so only my bubbly back is visible.

“I mean, I know the theory, yes.”

“It isn’t a theory. And the way we confirmed that the Big Bang is true is that we were able to confirm that everything ever is constantly expanding outward, getting faster and faster. Dark energy is the name that we’re assigning to the force that is doing that.”

“We are?”

“We are.”

Headshot of Meredith McCarrollMeredith McCarroll is the Director of Writing and Rhetoric at Bowdoin College. Her work has appeared in Bitter Southerner, Avidly, Southern Cultures, Still, Cutleaf and elsewhere. McCarroll is the author of Unwhite: Appalachia, Race, and Film (UGA Press) and co-editor of Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy (WVU Press). She lives in Portland, Maine. Meredith McCarroll’s flash nonfiction piece “Dark Matter” was a finalist in Cleaver’s 2022 flash contest.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

THE EGG by Dawn Miller

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Dawn Miller
THE EGG
Third Place, Cleaver 2022 Flash Competition

“The Egg” is a story of conjugal love gone rotten. In this frightening study of betrayal, the author’s fine use of startling and original metaphor is something that knocked me out. Reading this story, I imagined staring into the raccoon’s terrible, crazy eyes. I couldn’t get the image of the egg-sucking animal out of my head. And though the plot might be familiar, this writer treats us to a fresh engagement with the subject through a horrific outside-the-body vulnerability that I have rarely read in such a compact flash. It is in the tiniest creepiest details that the heart of this story lives. —Meg Pokrass, Contest Judge

Graphic design image of a raccoon's face against a navy blue background

The raccoons are at it again, shuffling under the deck with their bandit faces and jailbird tails. Wanting. They think I don’t hear them, but I do. A snuffle. A scrape. An I’ll-knock-this-over-before-you-run-me-off skittering below the wooden boards. They’re after the robin’s nest tucked in a niche under the floorboards.

In the daylight, I hoist everything out from beneath the deck.

Why bother? Jay says, hands on his hips while I wash the items, stack, and rearrange them.

I pull out a split hose, a broken hockey stick to soldier limp tomato plants, a half-empty propane tank, two mismatched lawn chairs, and a storage box full of nothing.

They’ll find a way, Jay says.

The mother robin squawks and flaps from its treetop perch as I clomp under the porch, shuffling items, putting sticks inside the box, shoring up nooks and crannies because I don’t want raccoons living under there. They’re pests. Scroungers. Scoundrels and cheats. They’ll damage the foundation. Chew the wood. Keep me up all night with their rooting and rummaging.

Jay goes back into the house and I’m glad of it.

On top of the storage box, a tiny half shell, blue as Peyto Lake in Banff where we honeymooned, rolls off the lid onto the ground. Craning my neck, I glimpse three newly hatched birds, tiny as tulips, mouths hinged open, and the gentle curve of one unhatched egg dotted with brown freckles.

3 a.m. I push aside our let-nothing-come-between-us mound of blankets. The mattress dips on either side—our separate weight imprinting the foam. I pull up the blankets to mask the distorted shape and creep past the study. Jay sits at his desk, his pale features ghostly blue. A flash of skin flickers across the screen—an arm, maybe a leg—and he pivots the laptop shut.

Can’t sleep, he says, and I murmur something about raccoons.

I prowl the perimeter of the house, waiting for the onslaught. I’m armed with two high-beam flashlights and a bicycle horn because the rascals only stare at me when I clap or stomp my feet. They act like I’m invisible. No different than a tree or a stone.

Curled on the wicker loveseat on the porch, I rouse with every shuffle, every pattering of feet. I shine my light. Blow my horn. Yellow spills over the horizon and I check the silent blue egg in the nest. The baby birds’ mouths stretch wide in perpetual need. Wanting. Wanting. Wanting.

Beady eyes peer around the broken pot. It’s not afraid. It scuffles across the gravel, curls a dexterous paw around the smooth, speckled egg, and scoops it from the nest like plucking a berry from a vine.

I blow my horn and the raccoon pops the egg into its mouth and chews, mouth dripping stringy albumen and yolk as it watches me.

Headshot of Dawn MillerDawn Miller’s most recent work appears in SmokeLong Quarterly, Fractured Lit, Ellipsis Zine, Typehouse, Jellyfish Review, Guernica Edition’s This Will Only Take a Minute anthology, and The Maine Review, among others. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives and writes in Picton, Ontario, Canada. Connect at www.dawnmillerwriter.com and on Twitter @DawnFMiller1. Dawn Miller’s flash fiction piece “The Egg” is Third Prize winner of Cleaver’s 2022 flash fiction contest judged by Meg Pokrass.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

WHALE CRATERS by K. T. Moore

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K. T. Moore
WHALE CRATERS

“Had one come down overnight.”

Eden was waiting for him in the car park. Tayne felt himself sweating by the time he reached her, and as the wind kicked up, a shiver started between his shoulder blades. Eden had her hands tucked into her jumper sleeves; Tayne peered at what remained of the lookout and he wished he’d thought to bring a pair of mittens.

“One landed in Port Chalmers a few months back,” he said, staggering as he joined Eden at the cliff edge. Along with the rotted kelp, all of Matakaea smelled like an abattoir floor rinsed in brine. “Nearly crushed a group of students doing the crags.”

The whale had landed at the tideline; the impact had gauged a hole in the headland large enough to reshape the anatomy of the coast, an entire promontory crushed to rock dust beneath fat and bone and blubber. The one at Port Chalmers had fallen far enough that when it landed, the force of impact did half the disposal team’s work for them; for weeks meat chunks were turning up as far south as Dunedin.

Eden passed Tayne the pair of binoculars hanging at her throat, and looking through them, he could make out the shape of the whale’s head. The tail and fins were still intact, but the rocks had split its stomach, exposing red and slippery muscles, intestines as thick as anchor chains and already covered in gull shit. It hadn’t fallen as far as the one in Port Chalmers.

“A juvenile, I reckon,” said Eden, nodding at him. “I’ve got Terry coming in from Otago with the earwax kit, but going by its size and the fact it didn’t splatter from here to Oamaru, it didn’t fall from any real height. Young, or maybe sick.”

Tayne smacked at the sandflies, stirred to a frenzy by rotting flesh. “I think it’s the new smelter on Taiaroa Head that’s doing it. Putting toxins into the air.”

“A biopsy will tell us if it’s got any particulates in its blood.” Eden took the binoculars back. “Provided Terry gets a move on.

“At the rate they’re coming down,” she smiled, tight and bloodless, the same shade of white as the fat and viscera tangled in the kelp, “we’re going to have to re-survey half the country’s beaches and foreshores, the whale-shaped cracks in the coast…”

Tayne tugged on his hood; the palls of gray rain passed a faint pearlescence, washing clean the carcass pitched across the point. He shivered again.

The horizon churned winedark, the same color as the sea, swollen with its dense forests of rimurapa. Waves dashed themselves to spray against the body of the whale, its innards coiling in the tide and its blood gathering in crimson foam at the edges of the sand.

The wind buffeted Tayne’s back and lowed forlornly against the cliffsides, as though rushing in to fill the air left empty by the whale’s fall.

Kaitlin “K.T.” Moore (they/them) is a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison whose dissertation considers how plural cosmological systems might move towards realizing relations within and across physics, literature, ethics, and sustainability. They are an acclaimed amateur astrophotographer, and their photography has been featured by LiveScience and the Overture Center for the Arts. Between dissertation research, stargazing, and video games, they write the occasional poem or short story. K. T.’s flash fiction piece “Whale Craters” was a finalist in Cleaver’s 2022 flash contest.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

SAFFRON AND BROWN SUGAR by Christina Simon

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Graphic design image of a horse rearing with greenery in the foreground

Christina Simon
SAFFRON AND BROWN SUGAR

My first horse, a palomino mare; horse shows from Del Mar to San Francisco; high school when possible; ran from the red-haired, freckle-faced bully who called out oreo, zebra, half-breed, fucking mulatto; pretended his blows to my head were no big deal; learned to care for my dying mother at home when we were both too young; saved those acquired skills for later; figured out there was a dark side to their hippie life, the darkest possible color in all the universe; twinkle twinkle little star/I know what the hell you are; scheduled a courthouse wedding, just the two of us; married the blue-eyed guy from Philadelphia who is in the Harvard Law Review 1990 photo with Barack Obama; we hung the picture on our apartment wall, the sign of a historic first yet to come, one we dared only dream about; President Barack Obama; gave birth to a baby boy, brown skin and blue eyes; baby girl, pale skin with hazel eyes; at last, hands to hold tight; learned to cook as the symbol of a functional home; noodles with lots of chopped garlic; curry with golden-red saffron; big salads with four types of delicate lettuce; Barefoot Contessa’s roast chicken; her baked shrimp scampi; her beef pot roast; her lobster potpie; her organic turkey meatloaf; her coffee cake topped with crumbled brown sugar; cooked my way through her first cookbook, then her second; memorized the details of her perfect Hampton’s home with the chef’s kitchen; stopped; exhaled; made Hoppin’ John from a soul food cookbook, but only on New Year’s Day; said screw it, Hoppin’ John whenever we wanted; framed family photos all around the house, the sign of a functional home; sent kids to a fancy prep school with uniforms and AP multivariable calculus; made Los Angeles my forever home after a magnificent palm tree winked at me, saying, there’s beauty here, as she batted her long-lashed green eyes, fronds of lush hair blowing in the warm Santa Ana wind; told the doctor I wouldn’t sue him because my sister’s death was not his fault; she hoarded the pain pills; listened to the relief in his shaky voice, realized he was younger than my thirty-eight-year-old sister; buried pain deep in the dirty beaches of Venice and Topanga, hippie towns where I grew up. Never left a marker, a headstone, a place for my grief. It will find me, always.

Headshot of Christina SimonChristina Simon is the former nonfiction editor for Angels Flight Literary West. Her essays are forthcoming in Slag Glass City and have been published in Salon, The Offing, Columbia Journal (winner of the 2020 Black History Month Contest for Nonfiction), Another Chicago Magazine, The Citron Review, PANK Magazine’s Health and Healing Folio, CutBank Literary Journal’s Weekly Flash Prose, (Mac)ro(Mic), The Santa Ana River Review and Barren Magazine. Christina received her BA from UC Berkeley and her MA from UCLA. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee. Christina lives with her husband in Los Angeles. She misses her son and daughter who are away at college. www.csimonla.com. Her flash nonfiction piece “Saffron and Brown Sugar” received Honorable Mention in Cleaver’s 2022 flash contest judged by Meg Pokrass.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

THE TALE OF MOLLY GRIMM by Janet Burroway

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Janet Burroway
THE TALE OF MOLLY GRIMM
Second Place, Cleaver 2022 Flash Competition

This story is the one I kept rereading because it stuck to my brain. I thought I had finished with it and then it pulled me back into its surreal world again. It is a dark fairytale-like piece that haunts the reader and asks us not to look away from the parts of our spirits that refuse to be exorcised. There is a great deal of dark humor in the story, particularly in the end. It is told like a cautionary tale, as if we’re hearing it over a large pot of tea in a strange neighbor’s home, a neighbor who we’re not sure we trust. I marveled over this brilliant little horror story with a funny, happy ending. —Meg Pokrass, Contest Judge

Graphic design image of a front facing silhouette with gray and red hair

“I won’t go,” said Molly Grimm.

“Sweetheart, we’re overdue.”

“The girls from the Country Club have a flip or a page boy.”

“But we aren’t from there, are we?”

Breda was the mother and had all the cards. They went over to the Polly Beauty Shop, which had a neon parrot on the front, and where Mae Willcox put Molly in a Naugahyde swivel chair and flung a circle of lavender orlon over her blouse.

“Now, then. Here?”

“Shorter,” said Breda Grimm. “It grows like a weed.”

Molly said nothing. But when Mae began to clip, she winced—as when you cut your finger or scrape your knee.

The blood began to flow, dribbling first out onto the lavender cape, thin rivulets that splashed on the lino. Molly watched as each individual hair, swollen with it, began to drip and then to flow.

“Oh, my God,” said Breda, “What have you done?”

“Nothing!”

“You nicked her neck! You cut her ear!”

“I did not!” The scissors shook in Mae’s fingers.

“Oh! Oh!” screamed Breda Grimm.

The blood flowed, now seeming to thicken and become sluggish, pulsing as it descended; shoulders, arms. Molly hunched forward and her face took on a look of endurance and—what was it? A dark joy?

“Get her to the hospital!” Breda screeched.

“Are you crazy? They’d arrest us for child abuse!”

Panicky, they swiped up handfuls of cold cream and cradled the bleeding hair—here, here, here. The blood mixed with the white grease, plopping onto the floor. It made interesting swirls, red on white.

Molly whimpered from time to time, but mostly just looked at herself in the mirror, eyes murderous and—what was it? Somehow triumphant?

Little by little, lock by lock, the blood coagulated, as blood is meant to do, and in the end mother and daughter went home, leaving Mae to deal with the mess. Molly’s hair was greasy now. She’d have to put off washing it until they were sure the shampoo wouldn’t open the—what? You couldn’t call them wounds, could you? It was hair.

I’d like to tell you Molly Grimm broke free that day and went on to heroic exploits. But that’s not the case. She led an ordinary white life: B.A. in anthropology, married a C.P.A., two boys and a girl, retired to Florida, lost her husband in ’04. The only extraordinary thing about her, her “crowning glory” as people often said, was the vibrant silver-and-pepper fall of hair, down to her ass, upswept into a chignon, or over one shoulder at the annual luau in the condo recreation center.

“It hasn’t been cut since ’56,” she would modestly brag to the admirers. She would stroke the silver cascade where it hung, one blood-red hibiscus tucked in the thick of it, behind her ear.

Headshot of Janet BurrowayJanet Burroway is the author of nine novels including The Buzzards, Raw Silk, Opening Nights, and Cutting Stone (all Notable Books of The New York Times Book Review). Her Writing Fiction is now in its tenth edition, and Imaginative Writing is soon to be published in its fifth edition. She is the author of the memoir Losing Tim and the winner of the 2014 Lifetime Achievement Award in Writing from the Florida Humanities Council. She is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor Emerita at the Florida State University.Janet Burroway’s flash fiction piece, “The Tale of Molly Grimm” is Second Prize winner of Cleaver’s 2022 flash fiction contest judged by Meg Pokrass.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

YOU SLEEP UPSTAIRS by Ron Tobey

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Ron Tobey
YOU SLEEP UPSTAIRS

The annual flood of green from West Virginia’s vast Appalachian forest drubs me senseless. I feel lightheaded. I check my Fitbit. Why does my blood oxygen level drop? My mortality, I wonder.

At midnight, the rain slips off the ridge peak, settles, as a hen fluffs, spreads her nether feathers, wiggles a little dance, nests upon our hollow.”I lie in bed from two-thirty to four-thirty in the morning, listening to her contented cackling drip off the eaves of our log cabin.

You sleep upstairs in the guest bedroom. The foam mattress is better for your hip and leg, injured when trailering your horse, but the ache keeps you awake. Frequently, you pace in staggered rhythm the plank floor boards above me that creak like crickets. Outside, the remnant of June’s fireflies rises into the steamy clouded night sky. I worry you will become confused, fall down the stairs. It’s not a good summer. I had forgotten I love you.

Ron Tobey grew up in northern New Hampshire, USA, and attended the University of New Hampshire, Durham. He and his wife live in West Virginia, where they raise cattle and keep goats and horses. He is an imagist poet, expressing experiences and moods in concrete descriptions in haiku, lyrical poetry storytelling, recorded poetry, and in filmic interpretation. He occasionally uses the pseudonym Turin Shroudedindoubt for literary and artistic work. Ron is active on Twitter, where he announces publications, discusses projects, posts personal notes and photographs, and converses with other poets and writers.  His Twitter handle is @Turin54024117. Ron’s flash fiction piece “You Sleep Upstairs” was a finalist in Cleaver’s 2022 flash contest.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

THE PERSON FALLING HERE by Theo Greenblatt

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Theo Greenblatt
THE PERSON FALLING HERE

The drink is called a Cape Codder, he tells me. Vodka and cranberry juice, two ingredients; too simple to warrant a cocktail name, I think.

Cranberries are grown in bogs, he explains, and Cape Cod is famous for cranberry bogs. I already know this. When the fruit is ripe, it rises to the surface and the bogs look like giant pools of bubbling blood.

The Cranberries were an Irish band whose singer, Dolores O’Riordan, had a haunting, hiccupping voice that gave me chills. She drowned in a hotel bathtub “from alcohol intoxication,” the paper said. Meaning, she drank herself under.

Sitting at the hotel bar, staring at the drink in front of me, I picture Dolores O’Riordan submerged in a cranberry bog, her dark, spiky hair, not unlike my own, the only part of her visible above the surface.

He places a fat, warm hand over mine. Wiry black hairs sprout between his knuckles; his diamond pinky ring reflects red from the drink. Taste it, he says.

I lean forward and sip from the tiny red straw. He leans forward, too, and looks down the front of my dress. The drink is tart and bitter and a little sweet, all at the same time.  It’s only two ingredients and still it is too many things at once.

You’re a nice girl, he says. He slides a keycard under the damp cocktail napkin.

I pull out the straw and take a big gulp directly from the glass, feeling the vodka burn down my throat; like Dolores swallowing bathwater, out of control.

I am not a nice girl.

Theo Greenblatt’s prose, both fiction and nonfiction, has appeared in The Columbia Journal, The Normal School Online, Tikkun, Harvard Review, and numerous other venues. She is a previous winner of The London Magazine Short Story Competition. Theo holds a PhD in English from the University of Rhode Island and teaches writing to aspiring officer candidates at the Naval Academy Preparatory School in Newport, RI. Theo’s flash fiction piece “The Person Falling Here” was a finalist in Cleaver’s 2022 flash contest.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

INCENDIES by Fannie H. Gray

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Fannie H. Gray
INCENDIES

On our honeymoon, I never even noticed an acrid smell. The langoustines, the salade gourmande, the tartare de boeuf, the shimmering, perspiring glasses of sublime rosé, all served with the efficient careless attention which is inherently French. All the while, French woods that had escaped bombings and marauding splintered and hissed, seemingly spontaneously combusting.

If I had taken off my shoes, pressed flesh to earth, would I have felt the stampede, the hooves, and claws, frantically searching for safer soil? If I had strolled from the glorious auberge, would I have noticed the townsfolk buying hoses and pitchforks, the Peugeots queueing for petrol?

I let you pour me another glass of La Chapelle Godonne.

Secretly, I seethed when you couldn’t put the rental car in reverse in Marseille. As you pounded the wheel, your face a proper Provencal rouge, I calmly left the vehicle and using my rusty schoolgirl French beseeched the fire truck driver—s’il vous plaît aider! Aider!—until his partner patted my hand. A steep hill—a road that should only run one way, but France, n’est-ce pas, and so he left his hulking vehicle facing our car—Oui Madame! I practically yanked a trembling you from the driver seat, let the virile Jean-Luc back our ridiculous SUV down the hill, so his fire truck could pass. Infirm, on the corner, you clutched your back, coughed phlegm into the street.

Later in Arles, you howled—I took it for indignation—No parking! No parking! My back, my back! Only a wavering haze, like an oil slick smudged across the morning clouds, indicated suffering on the horizon.

Finally, asleep in our ark—Corsica Linea ferry—we left the mainland and I thought perhaps you might be OK.

I preened in Corte, the rugged little mountain town, as the shopgirl insisted, Mais non! Tu parles bien! But when I looked for your admiration, I saw heat and ruin. We could not outrun it.

The doctor back in Maryland wants to run more tests. It might be fluid, perhaps pus in the right lung. It could be a tumor. Bien sûr, this would explain the back pain.

In your hospital room, horror-stricken, we watch Toulon in flames. I hold your grey hand; how did we not know?

Fannie H. Gray writes fiction inspired by her southern American childhood and her abiding affection for dark fairy tales. Her most recent work has been included in The Molotov Cocktail, The Moon City Review, and Stanchion. All of her published work can be found at www.thefhgraymatter.com. @fannnster on Twitter. Her flash fiction piece “Incendies” received Honorable Mention in Cleaver’s 2022 flash fiction contest judged by Meg Pokrass.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

WHEN WE KNEW HOW TO GET LOST by Sabrina Hicks

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Sabrina Hicks
WHEN WE KNEW HOW TO GET LOST
First Place, Cleaver 2022 Flash Competition

This story bursts with tragic urgency and it simply stuck to my heart. The author builds a feeling about a young love relationship from the inside out, moment by moment. We’re reminded of the way it feels when every new adventure is branded on our spirits. The reader feels trusted in an intimate way, so much so, that we are placed right there with the lost-yet-happy couple. How could such a unique and personal story seep under the skin and begin to feel like our own? And yet it does. We are shown a flash of life’s uniqueness before adult real life occurs and understand that this beautiful way of being in the world will die. The author accomplishes this with a mastery that left me breathless. —Meg Pokrass, Contest Judge

Graphic design image of a large cactus next to an empty winding road

Fifty miles out of town, on a road with no name, I hitched a ride after we argued about your Chevy running out of gas, our first argument, and came back with two candy bars as a peace offering, a gallon of fuel, and an old guy named Mitch who ended up knowing your mom and got in a bar fight with your dad once. It was the first time I told you about my family, about the cancer that took my mother.

When, spur-of-the-moment, we drove the I-10 from Tucson to El Paso because we’d never been to Texas. We dipped our toes in the state, ate at a diner, found out it was an eleven-hour drive to Houston, nine to Dallas, and we didn’t have that kind of time so we turned around, drove back through the desert singing Johnny Cash songs, eating gas station beef jerky and corn nuts, throwing our heads back to howl at the moon every time we passed a billboard. That night you told me you couldn’t imagine getting lost with anyone else.

When we were going to your older brother’s cabin near Flagstaff with unmarked signs and instructions to look for a fork in the road, then a tree with a knotted trunk that looks like Steve Buscemi. We drove past every tree cursing your brother’s name until you told me how he protected you from your father’s fist, and when I saw your face crumple in pain I made you stop and held you with the windows open and the smell of pine thick in the air. When we pulled apart I saw Buscemi’s face clear as day and yelled, there!

When we drove through South Carolina and you were too embarrassed to pull over and ask where the World’s Largest Peach was so I stuck my head out the window and shout-sang “Peaches” by The Presidents of the United States until you did. At the gas station you said you would marry me one day and I said, only after I find a million peaches for free!

When we were trying to find a farmers’ market outside of Denver but ended up driving along a mountain that twisted into the clouds. I said, watch the gas gauge. I doubt your mom knows anyone I can hitch a ride with here, but I sure as hell will run into someone your old man pissed off. There was an unmarked road we pulled into, and when we walked to the bottom there were two chairs and a lake and a hundred miles of land stretching over a horizon. You said, who needs a market or money or cars or a home when our eyes can see this. This! Your arms outstretched. Who needs anything but this? We watched the sky ripen around the sun, bruising into a plum, not knowing it would be our last time getting lost together, a last time before direction ruined everything.

Headshot of Sabrina HicksSabrina Hicks lives in Arizona with her family. Her work has appeared in Five South Journal, Flash Frog, Pidgeonholes, Trampset, Monkeybicycle, Reckon Review, Split Lip, Milk Candy Review, with stories included in Best Small Fictions and Wigleaf’s Top 50. More of her work can be found at sabrinahicks.com. Sabrina Hicks’ flash fiction piece “When We Knew How to Get Lost” is First Prize winner of Cleaver’s 2022 flash fiction contest judged by Meg Pokrass.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

PEACOCKS by Andrew Stancek

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Andrew Stancek
PEACOCKS

The show we are not watching is on Buddhism. Your hand dips absently into the plastic bowl of Colonel Redenbacher’s; my ketchup chips are long gone. The Knicks are playing the Lakers, but I don’t suggest switching the channel. Another game, I can hear you snort. We play our own.            

When you came home, I beamed at your new short curls; your lips vanished as you looked through me. You dropped your purse like an anvil, opened a can of Heineken, pressed the cold beads to your forehead, didn’t ask if I wanted one or how the job search went. The door of your office slammed—stood by the door, shamelessly eavesdropping.

All your words sizzle, especially when you talk to Mama Python. I heard you call Hydra his dog, say she piddles on the kitchen linoleum and you’ll be damned if you wipe any more messes. My piddles are next to the toilet, the daisies of my affection.

I don’t mention your new smell, a waterfall, whooshing with success, martini lunches, the partnership track.

My head throbs: Why no, Olivia, I did not get that call-back. No, the agency did not get in touch. The secretary at the headhunter’s disconnected my call by mistake.

The narrator says, “Die to old judgments and opinions, and fly free. Soar in the freedom of desirelessness.”

I say, “Bought a new bottle of cologne, a little musky, sporty. Trimmed my hair a bit.”

You don’t hear: the TV volume is too high.

Your popcorn smells of butter and red pepper flakes, but I don’t reach in.

On the screen, peacocks strut and preen outside a monastery.

“If I applied to a plumbing course at Meridien, they might offer a mature student discount or a deferred payment schedule. Always work in the toilet trade.”

The monks’ humming is most soothing.

I stare at you, drinking in peacocks. They’re no more than overgrown chickens with showy feathers. Bet they’d make a tasty stew, simmered all day. They don’t fly much, wouldn’t be hard to catch. We could go to the zoo this weekend.

“At Mario’s, they’re looking for pizza deliverers.”

After the show, your feet thunder on the way upstairs. I don’t follow.

Andrew Stancek describes his vocation as dreaming—clutching onto hope, even in turbulent times. He has been published widely, in SmokeLong Quarterly, FRIGG, Hobart, Green Mountains Review, New World Writing, New Flash Fiction Review, Jellyfish Review, Peacock Journal, and The Phare, among others. He has won the Reflex Fiction contest, the New Rivers Press American Fiction contest, and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His flash fiction piece “Peacocks” received Honorable Mention in Cleaver’s 2022 flash fiction contest judged by Meg Pokrass.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

EIGHTEEN by Alison Sanders

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EIGHTEEN by Alison Sanders

Alison Sanders
EIGHTEEN

I hear her in the shower. There’s a gulping sound like she’s drinking straight from the faucet, or she’s trying to but she can’t keep up because the water is coming way too fast. It sounds like she’s drowning. She thinks she’s hiding in there—that no one can hear her. And when she comes out, she thinks that eye drops can hide the angry scarlet in her eyes. She thinks makeup can conceal the swelling of her eyelids and the redness at the tip of her nose. She hopes that putting on clean clothes will hide the way her shoulders hunch in defeat, in surrender.

Mom says she’s not disappointed in me; she’s just disappointed in my actions. She says it carefully, as if it really matters. That’s a difference without a distinction, I tell her. See, she yells. You say shit like that but you’re not graduating from high school? And idiots like Chris-fucking-Swanson are graduating? She shakes her head and rubs her face like she’s washing herself clean. Now she has mascara smeared all over, and it just makes me sad. I don’t get it, she says. Her sigh quavers, and I am hollow. I don’t know what to say, again. Still. So I look down at my hands, big useless slabs of meat. My thumbnail is bleeding a little from biting.

Mom says she loves me, that she’ll always love me. She’s leaning against the door frame and she hardly even looks at me for more than a second before her eyes flick away, staring at something out my window—a cloud maybe. She used to just watch me. I remember that. Whatcha doing, sweet boy? Not anymore. Now when she does look at me, there is hurt in her eyes like a pool, and it is so deep that I want to fill my pockets with stones and step in and drown.

Mom tries to hug me, but I don’t fit anymore. I am too large, too stiff, too big a failure, and her arms are so small. Our bodies remember when I fit in there perfectly, like a little bean nestled in its pod. Our bodies ache with that memory.

After a while, she pulls back and wipes tears off her face. She says it’s going to be OK. I know I should nod, but my head won’t do it. She says we’re going to get through this. We both know we don’t believe that. She finally leaves, and my door clicks as she pulls it closed, and I hate the silence that follows. I look out the window and there’s not a cloud in the sky.

Alison Sanders is a mother of three and an Assistant District Attorney in Santa Cruz, California. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Expat Living Singapore, Stanford Magazine, Seaside Gothic, and Bluebird Word. She was a finalist in Bellingham Review’s 2021 Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction. She is working on her first novel.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

MARILYN MONROE LETS THE LIVESTOCK IN by Emma Brankin

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Emma Brankin
MARILYN MONROE LETS THE LIVESTOCK IN

When her husband tells her no, you can’t invite the wet, bedraggled cow caught in the rainstorm into their house overnight, Norma Jean kicks him out. She’s had enough—why are decisions something other people get to make?

So she pours herself a bourbon and listens to his cursing as his pick-up truck drives down the dirt-track to his mother’s. Then, she swings open the front door and gently clucks her tongue as the creature slowly trots its way inside.

There, in her small, floral-wallpapered hallway, beauty and beast hover, uncertain. Norma Jean eyes the animal’s fluorescent ear-tag, runs a nervous hand through her brunette coils and makes a tepid joke about liking its earring. The animal shivers, doubt in its black beaded eyes. She knows it now questions her kindness, the belief that comfort can ever last for long.
Slowly, she reaches out her hand to its soaked, bulky body. She wants it to wince. To not be so trusting, naïve and kind.

Don’t be that fostered child smiling at the adult they think will always stick around.

Don’t be that sixteen-year-old girl marrying the man she barely knows.

Don’t be that obliging woman closing the door during another meeting with the boss.

“It’s good to be afraid,” she says to the animal. “Take your time. Get to really know me.”

Norma Jean gives the cow its space, lets the water melt from its body beside the glow of her fireplace. She stands by her kitchen window watching the rain lash down like strikes of a palm. She finishes her drink and considers what’s next, wonders where she can buy some hay.

Emma Brankin is a teacher from Glasgow, Scotland with a Masters in Creative Writing and Education from Goldsmiths College, University of London. She was recently shortlisted for the Bridport Prize’s short story contest as well as won Fugue Fiction’s short story prize and the To Hull And Back short story contest. Other work has appeared in places such as SmokeLong Quarterly, Reflex, and X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine. You can contact her on Twitter @emmanya.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE MEXICAN TETRA by Dan Shields

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Dan Shields
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE MEXICAN TETRA

Earlier in the day, before the ambulance whisked me off school grounds, I crawled under my desk during recess, untucked my shirt, and squeezed my skin as hard as I could. I squeezed and twisted, trying to reach my organs like they could be juiced like fruits. Like they could be wrung out as sweat rags, and all the pain would flow in snarling, tarlike rivulets out of my ass, and I’d stand up straight again once everything had a chance to dry. I squeezed until my ribs turned red, tore at me, my body, the thing I’d always been told only wants to love and protect the person rattling around inside it. The bell rang and the kids returned. Flush-cheeked and sweaty, they got their science books out while howling gossip dredged from the monkey bars. I heard Cindy Glover ask where I was to nobody in particular. She peeled a scab off her knee and told everyone to make a wish.

The nurse waddles in the room, doesn’t bother turning on the light—there’s a TV hung on the wall playing reruns of Family Feud, and the flashes onscreen illuminate enough of my fragile body for her to know to frown. “Let’s get you squared away,” she says. The standard dose of morphine is ten milligrams every four hours, administered through the tube threaded in my arm. It’s a drug that sounds like a species of whale, and after D.A.R.E came in to talk about opioids, Cindy Glover latched onto it as a funny, if not unlikely, vehicle to rib the other kids in class. Your mom must have been on morphine when she had you. Bro, are you high on morphine right now? The syringe slips in and my veins crystallize like pipes shored through a frozen house. She erases “11:00 PM” from the whiteboard above my bed, writes “3:00 AM” then leaves me to ferment once more in the shadows with Steve Harvey and the smell of latex.

In a cave in Eastern Mexico, there’s a fish that swims without eyes. The kids gasped when they saw it, pointed and laughed at what looked like a translucent necktie floating in the underground lake on the projector screen. The fish had eyes once, but for all the years they did, they never saw a thing. The cave was that dark. Time eventually decided they wasted too much energy trying to use these broken parts, these eyes that wouldn’t see, so evolution pinched them. Excised of their defect, they now glide like ghosts, the mannequins of fish, guided only by vibrations and changes in water pressure.

My vitals collapse. A host of masked phantoms burst into my room and shove me onto a gurney. They rush me around sharp corners and through long, veiled hallways. They hover with the crooked necks of vultures. They finger my IV bag and flip through my medical records on a clipboard as I arrive in a beeping room with more masked people, igniting high-pitched instruments designed to gouge through membranes and myelin. I begin to cry, no more out of fear or pain or sorrow than it is a signaling that I can. So they know not to take what still works. It reminds me, as the walls fuse with the lights, of how I had just hit the floor when Cindy Glover raised her hand during the video, saw I wasn’t there when she looked back, but still asked if the fish ever knew they even had eyes, and if the cave became a different kind of dark when they finally lost them for good.

Dan Shields is from Middletown, Pennsylvania, home of the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown of 1979. In former lives, he was a college athlete, library aide, meal prep worker, Bed Bath and Beyond customer service representative, and 2015 Atlantic City Beach Olympics push-up champion. Dan Shields now lives in Washington, DC, reminiscing about most of it. He’s new in the nest at @DanDotShields.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

ENOUGH FISH by Josh Krigman

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Josh Krigman
ENOUGH FISH

The important thing was whether she had enough fish. Rose stared at the open refrigerator, its fluorescent-lit innards threatening to overflow. Stacks of plastic containers and tinfoil-covered dishes formed a towering puzzle without a single piece missing. It was a familiar dance, this waltz between the shame of waste and the pride of excess, all in search of that elusive pleasure of accurately anticipating the precise depth and breadth of her guests’ needs. But she hadn’t been eating and worried that along with her own appetite she’d lost her eye for everyone else’s. It was just after eleven. People would begin arriving within the hour. Yes, she might have enough. It was possible.

She began unloading, opening lids and inspecting contents as she made a mental inventory. There were gold cardboard plates of pre-packaged lox, two unopened, one rewrapped in cellophane, another bound in wax paper and taped shut, the good stuff, hand-cut; two tubs of whitefish salad, one fresh, the other (Rose, checking) half-full, its smoke and oil rising like a fog; a single jar of pickled herring, the grey-blue hunks of it, light winking on the scales; also kippered salmon, a wedge of sable, chopped liver in a shallow metal tin. She looked at the food on the counter and the food in the fridge and arranged the table in her mind.

Outside, dull blue clouds continued to threaten rain. It had been like this for days, since before Howard died, the heavy sky always about to let go and never letting go. At the funeral, they stood dressed in dry rain jackets, umbrellas closed at their sides. It’d been the same on Saturday, Rose remembered, the day Sarah found him, collapsed at his desk in the back of the store, a heart attack, instant according to the doctor, dead before his head hit the table. A bruise had still developed and formed a blue blur under the skin above his right eye, like deep water darkened in the night, the way its depth suggests movement beneath the surface. Rose touched it with her hand, touched him there on his face, the dark skin above his eye. The mortician had tried to cover the bruise, but she could tell, could see it there beneath the powder. She’d touched the bruise, the dense blue of it, broken, and then she touched his cheek, felt his skin give, touched him one more time, the last time anyone would ever touch him—his skin, the bruise, the blue dark like the day had been and still was, the depth a sign of something more but still not rain, not yet.

She sliced tomatoes and arranged them on a plate. Cut pickles lengthwise into quarters. There had been at least thirty people after the funeral, funneling through her kitchen and living room. Impossible to know who’d come today. Visiting hours were twelve to five, but other than Sarah and Allie, she didn’t care to see anyone. Still, they would come; some with platters of store-bought goods, others a home-cooked meal. For all the kindness, she preferred the platters. It was as though the ones who cooked were saying here, can you wash this later? though she was appreciative all the same. Her sister would arrive at precisely eleven-fifty-five with her specialty: a foot-wide plastic-domed dish of pastrami, roast beef, and corned beef laid out in a pinwheel of rolled reds, pinks, and dark, well-done slices. All Rose needed was everything else.

Josh Krigman is a writer and teacher in New York City. His work has appeared in Necessary Fiction, Akashic Books, The Summerset Review, and elsewhere. He received his MFA in fiction from Hunter College. Josh Krigman is also the co-founder and New York host of Club Motte, an international storytelling series that holds events in New York, Oakland, and Berlin.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

DEBT OF A DAUGHTER by Devon Raymond

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DEBT OF A DAUGHTER by Devon Raymond

Devon Raymond
DEBT OF A DAUGHTER

A man who is your father tricks you into believing that there is no price to pay for being his favorite—that you are free to accept all of his attention, and presents, and praise. So you delight in the laughter you provoke during games of I Spy, and you abandon yourself as he sweeps you across the living room in dance routines worthy of Fred and Ginger. You don’t yet know the cost of seeing yourself sparkle in his eyes.

Your father plans all along to extract payment, and when he does, you block it out. There is no place for his act in your ten-year-old mind. You live with it unknowingly as it twists the wires in your brain and paints blackness where there might have been light; your first kiss is not a crackle of joy but a wave of dread. You grow yourself around the sleeping knowledge, never intending to wake it.

But when the truth is pressed so tightly within you that it seeks air through random bouts of crying, when your rage erupts without perceivable cause, then you crack yourself open for a therapist you barely know. And there it is. The crime you buried for the man you called father.

Pain floods your days as you try to recognize your new self—the self who can barely hold on at times. You panic at the sight of your own Christmas tree, its branches dangling remnants of the past. You lose touch with what’s real, nearly calling the hospital you’ve chosen to come take you away. Unable to shake the blame you have pinned to yourself, you are convinced that relief lies only beneath the folds of the ocean’s soft eternity.

But you resist.

Instead, you gather up the terror and the tears of the young girl who shook beneath her covers after it was done. You stop drowning her voice with alcohol and allow for the possibility that she owed her father nothing.

Then slowly, as you smooth the broken clay of the past inside of your edges, you soften, lighten. You almost feel whole. You are less afraid to engage in the present. And in the present it’s a shock, but not a surprise, when your father pulls the trigger on his Smith & Wesson after writing Have a happy life to his girlfriend—the girlfriend whose apartment he bloodies.

It’s not a surprise that he leaves no words for you—that he has robbed you again.

And it’s no longer a surprise, but a triumph, that you are still here.

Devon Raymond earned her BFA from The Juilliard School and worked for many years as a professional actor before turning to writing. The manuscript of her full-length memoir, If I Hung the Moon, was selected as a finalist in the Autumn House Press nonfiction contest. She lives in Los Angeles, where she began her adventures in nonfiction with the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

PET PIRANHAS & DREAM OF PARAKEETS, two micorfictions by Jeff Friedman

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PET PIRANHAS & DREAM OF PARAKEETS, two micorfictions by Jeff Friedman

Jeff Friedman
TWO MICROFICTIONS

PET PIRANHAS

Jess and I loved to watch our pet piranhas swim back and forth, weaving through the lush greens in our aquarium. Though we had seen the James Bond movie in which a pool of piranhas had stripped a man to the bone in seconds, we believed that if they were treated well, the piranhas would be loving pets. We kept them in a tank under the window so that they could get direct sun as well as the nourishing light from the multicolored lights we installed. We’d sprinkle in food, and the piranhas would rise to the surface at once to eat it as if they were a single body. Often Jess would wiggle a finger in the water to see if she could lure a piranha to curl around it, but before they could get to it, she lifted it out. “Not today,” she would say. “But I’m not afraid.” Once she left her finger in a little too long, and a very small piranha caught the tip and clung to it. Jess felt a barb-like sting and scraped the piranha against the glass. When she lifted her finger, blood oozed up out of a tiny cut. She took the blame for it and said she had learned her lesson.

But what was the lesson? Then they started killing each other. Every day, there were dead bodies and blood in the water. “Let’s get rid of them,” I said, “before they’re all dead.” But Jess wouldn’t have it. “We can’t abandon them,” she said. “They’re our pets. We’re responsible.  It wasn’t long before we were down to one piranha. “He’s a murderer,” I said. “He’s beautiful,” she answered, “and now there’s no reason not to keep him.” I considered pouring him into the garbage disposal while Jess was sleeping, but I knew she would never forgive me.  Day and night, the piranha swam joyfully from one wall to the other as if happy to be alone.

◊

DREAM OF PARAKEETS

Dozens of parakeets had invaded the room, landing on her shoulders and head. She remained still, afraid to move because they might start biting her and tearing out her hair. Then she screamed. He had been afraid to wake her, but now he touched her arm lightly and whispered, “It’s a dream.” She couldn’t see him. He told her a few jokes, but she didn’t laugh.  She said that she followed a map of lies to a cave in which a troll lived, and that the troll somehow reminded her of him. When she pleaded with the troll to let her go, the troll got out of her way. She came to a bright place in the cave, where she found a chest full of orange sand. She grabbed handfuls of it and threw it in the air, and the next thing he knew, dozens of parakeets flew through the room, and though he struggled, he couldn’t open his eyes.

Jeff Friedman’s tenth book, Ashes in Paradise, will be published by Madhat Press in Spring 2023. Friedman’s poems, mini stories and translations have appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, Poetry International, New England Review, Flash Fiction Funny, Antioch Review, American Journal of Poetry, Flash Fiction Funny, Flash Nonfiction Funny, Hotel Amerika, Best Microfiction 2021 and 2022, and The New Republic. He has received an NEA Literature Translation Fellowship and numerous other awards. Meg Pokrass and Jeff Friedman’s co-written collection of fabulist microfiction, The House of Grana Padano, was published by Pelekinesis in Spring 2022.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

DRUNKDADDY by Francine Witte

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Francine Witte
DRUNKDADDY

Punches a hole in the cakey window. The hole is the size of a woman’s head. My mother’s head. Tells the window, good, now you are broken, too. Blames the window for being so gooked up with grime he couldn’t see my mother driving the hell out of our lives. If I’d seen it, Drunkdaddy says, I could have stopped it. He takes off his t-shirt and wraps it around his bloody knuckles. Suck it up, Drunkdaddy tells his nakedchest self. He looks around the living room, stained glass lamp and pom pom pillows. My mother’s piano with the photo gallery on the top. Head shot of her like a movie star. Drunkdaddy picks it right up like he’s gonna break that too, but doesn’t. Blood drop after blood drop falling on the rug. He puts the photo back and walks over to the liquor cabinet. Walks right by me and my sister who have been standing there the whole time, too scared to just walk over and tell Drunkdaddy we want to take him to the hospital. But another drunk is about to come on and so we stand there, like all those other times, fear caking up our hands, our legs, and all we can do is watch Drunkdaddy swig the brandy down his throat, his neck going ropey with veins as he sucks it all down, and him wiping his mouth clean with the back of his good hand, turning and looking at the wall behind us and saying, “You’re next.”

Francine Witte author headshotFrancine Witte’s poetry and fiction have appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Mid-American Review, and Passages North. Her latest books are Dressed All Wrong for This (Blue Light Press,) The Way of the Wind (AdHoc fiction,) and The Theory of Flesh (Kelsay Books) She is flash fiction editor for Flash Boulevard and The South Florida Poetry Journal. She is an associate poetry editor for Pidgeonholes. Her chapbook, The Cake, The Smoke, The Moon (flash fiction) was published by ELJ Editions in September, 2021. She lives in NYC.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

PLAYHOUSE by Tess Kelly

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PLAYHOUSE by Tess Kelly

Tess Kelly
PLAYHOUSE

It arrived on a surprise Saturday in the bed of Uncle Tony’s pickup. The wooden playhouse our grandfather built had cedar shakes, a rooster-topped weathervane, and real hinged windows that opened wide like our astonished mouths. Soon enough my sisters and I busied ourselves among the little wooden sink and stove, the little wooden table and chairs, all manufactured in Grandpa’s basement, where mounted tools stood ready to serve and the smell of wood shavings imbued the air. And one day, while we pretended to be grown-ups fixing lunch for invisible children, half a boy’s face appeared through a glass pane, his hair the color of baby chicks, his eyes full of June sky. A boy attached to a name that’s drifted from me, afloat on a raft of lost memories. We unlatched the window to offer cheery greetings. Hello, he whispered in return. Then he ran back to his split-level house, which was just like our house. I could see him through a peephole that someone, maybe me, bore through a playhouse wall. A hole about the size a bullet would make. You could look through that hole and see our apple tree, its green fruit pocked and uneaten, its gray branches worn smooth from climbing. You could see my mother’s garden, lush with vining cucumbers and plumping tomatoes, and the boy’s backyard on the other side of a split-wood fence. Perhaps we’d have made friends with our shy neighbor had his family not left. After they moved away, the music teacher and her husband moved in. Mrs. Brown taught at our school and asked me to perform at an assembly when I was in fifth grade. My fingers raced across the piano faster than the beat of my nervous heart, and who knows if anyone recognized “Claire de Lune” at that speed. Ten years later, while playing Debussy for my mother, I thought of Mrs. Brown. I thought of her house in the neighborhood where we no longer lived and of the little boy who had lived there before her. When I asked my mother whatever happened to that family, she told me they left after the little boy found his father’s gun, pulling the trigger as he played with it. Our almost-friend died the next day. My hands froze on the piano keys and his June sky eyes peered through a real glass window, broken long ago. Then I saw him in the peephole, his back to me, running toward home.

Tess Kelly’s essays have appeared in Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, HerStry, Ruminate, and other publications. She’s the First Prize winner of the 2020 Women’s National Book Association Awards in the flash prose category. She lives and writes in Portland, Oregon.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

IF YOU WANT TO BE LOVED, LOVE by Meg Pokrass

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IF YOU WANT TO BE LOVED, LOVE by Meg Pokrass

Meg Pokrass
IF YOU WANT TO BE LOVED, LOVE

  1. “If you want to be a horse, be a horse.” Her father said this when he talked about the family infrastructure, how weak it was. When she was little, she wanted to become strong as a horse to make him happy, so she tried to become one, but it never worked.
  1. Later, there was the shock of loving a man with the soul of a tree. She had always wanted to be a bird, at least in her dreams. But when she was with this man, she didn’t want to be anything, she only wanted to fly to him.
  1. The doctor told her that if she wanted to be loved, next time she needed to love. She didn’t understand what he meant, so she stared into his eyes. They looked like the eyes of a sad, old horse. A horse that knew it was going to become glue for some child’s special art project. This was the day she fell in love with her doctor.
  1. “If you want to be a horse, be a horse,” she said to her son when he tried on his Halloween costume and stared in the mirror as if he had failed. “How can I be a horse?” the child said. “Stand there like this,” she said, “as if you are stuck in the middle of a field, but it doesn’t worry you.”
  1. When her father walked into the ocean, her mother started painting birds. It felt like a dream, her mother waving a paint brush at 6:00 a.m. Blackbirds and sparrows all over the kitchen walls and her mother up early enough to catch a worm. She said, “Your father never believed we were strong enough. Can you imagine how much he would have hated these birds?”
  1. When she became an artist like her mother, she gave up the idea of being okay. She stood like a not-stuck horse in her kitchen and remembered her mother surrounded by birds. Her son, who had been a successful horse on Halloween, watched her with love in his unknowable eyes.

Meg Pokrass is the author of nine collections, and her work has appeared in over a thousand literary journals. Her flash fiction, “Back on the Chain Gang,” will appear in The Best Small Fictions 2022. Another flash fiction story, “Pounds Across America,” will appear in a new Norton anthology, Flash Fiction America, edited by James Thomas, Sherrie Flick, and John Dufresne, in 2023. She is the Founding Editor of Best Microfiction.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

DR. WILLIAM’S FAMILY FIX-U SHOP by R. C. Barajas

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DR. WILLIAM’S FAMILY FIX-U SHOP by R. C. Barajas

R. C. Barajas
DR. WILLIAM’S FAMILY FIX-U SHOP

Youngest Daughter
Services and Pricing

For Middle Son and Eldest Daughter, see separate price sheets.
Limited services available for Eldest Son

Overall Assessment of Youngest Daughter………………………$45

Dr. William will give a quick but thorough visual inspection.
This inspection will include but is not limited to:

    • Estimate-by-glance of current weight (accurate to within 4.3 grams) and advisement on how to lose a few pounds
    • Evaluation of current educational achievements and goals with expression of disappointment/resignation that Youngest Daughter seems to be just floating around in life
    • Feigned interest in work/art/academic activity (as appropriate by current “phase” of Youngest Daughter)
    • 3-point shift in conversation to determine degree of self-absorption
    • Exhaustive recounting of Dr. William’s own activities/food consumption/health and that of his wife Nancy and of their current dog(s)
    • An invitation for Youngest Daughter to stay for dinner

Tune-up of Youngest Daughter………………………$65

Customer testimonial:
I’ve had the full cut-down service
and boy did it do the job!
—Middle Son

The following services/adjustments will be performed:

    • Standard cutting down to size, as needed
    • Recalibration of confidence levels
    • Application of withering looks/quelling glances/back-handed compliments
    • Derisive references to clothing and the observation that the loss of a few pounds would certainly help.
    • Reminders of embarrassing things Youngest Daughter has done/said which were widely witnessed and which may still be recounted approximately monthly as part of family lore, including but not limited to:
        • the fact that her spelling as a child was the worst ever known to humankind
        • that once, when Youngest Daughter was quite young and had sought refuge in the downstairs bathroom because she was very constipated, her mother Nancy repeatedly yelled through the door, “Push! Push!” for the entire household to hear.
        • Wistful comparisons of her charming outgoing 3-year-old self to her terrified sharp-tongued teenage self
    • Reignition of adolescent rage

Acute Attitude Adjustment………………………$75.50

Customer testimonial:
Got the smile wiped
off my face many a time!
—Eldest Daughter

Acute Attitude Adjustment includes but is not limited to:

    • Slapping
    • Spanking
    • Throwing bodily into chair and breaking chair (Middle Son only)
    • Roaring
    • Fuming
    • Terrifying blue-eye bugging
    • Towering/looming over
    • Belittling
    • Mocking
    • Crashing furiously down hallway naked in the middle of the night, even though Youngest Daughter is not the target of his rage but still she sees his penis swinging as he passes her room making the event an effective deterrent
    • Menacing throat-clearing aimed at Youngest Daughter with laser-like precision
    • Humiliation at the dinner table in front of siblings and guests

Specific attitudes/actions to be adjusted include but are not limited to:

    • Surliness
    • Sullenness
    • Sharpness
    • Prickliness
    • Unhelpfulness
    • Any sign of religious affiliation
    • Swearing (pre-college)
    • Lack of appreciation for music (classical only)
    • Disrespect (Faintest whiff of)
    • Disregard of dinnertime (25 seconds or more late)
    • Disregard for prescribed dishwashing technique resulting in greasy dishes in dish drainer
    • Disregard of after-hours noise ordinances

Reminders………………………no additional charge

Dr. William offers basic reminders
which include but are not limited to:

    • Youngest Daughter is ignorant on all subjects, except those that are inconsequential
    • Youngest Daughter’s spelling is still the worst ever known to humankind

Limited Restoration………………………price on request

Customer testimonial:
How can you restore what was
never whole in the first place?
—Eldest Son

Limited Restoration includes but is not limited to:

    • A soft place to land when life is unsettled/disappointing/terrifying/shitty
    • The implied promise that his house is your forever home
    • Not too many questions asked as food and drink are plied
    • Small infusions of cash, if needed, sometimes even if not needed
    • Hugs that are awkward and sometimes oppressive because he is not good at hugging since his own father sure as shit never hugged him
    • Gently, with forbearance, assuring that you probably don’t have whatever horrible disease you’d heard/read about most recently
    • Jolly phone calls on Sundays at drink time, that, no matter where you are in the world, make you think of California sunshine and the smell of his garden
    • Reading aloud from Sherlock Holmes or Dickens
    • Telling, upon request, favorite stories and jokes, complete with accents
    • Expression of fatherly affection toward your partner—unless that person wrongs you in which case Dr. William will want to flatten that person
    • Admission in old age that he knows his sons are better fathers than he ever was
    • Admission in old age that he could have been more loving to his mother
    • Admission in old age to Youngest Daughter that she sometimes writes quite well

Additional Restoration services always free of charge:

    • Never being turned away from the house, even if Dr. William is angry with you
    • Invitation to stay for dinner, even if it’s just leftovers
    • A movie and a doggy blanket on an old couch after dinner and dishes are done

The following Restoration Services are no longer available:

    • Equally functional relationships with all four children
    • The house as forever home
    • Any doubt that Dr. William will always be the smartest person in the room even as his body fails him

We are sorry for any inconvenience.

R.C. Barajas was born in Stanford, California. She (eventually) garnered a degree in art. For ten years, she worked as a goldsmith. While living in Colombia in the early ’90s, she began writing nonfiction and short stories. She has published in magazines and newspapers including the Washington Post and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Her fiction has appeared in Cleaver Magazine, Fatal Flaw, Please See Me, and Defenestration. She also spends more time in the darkroom than is strictly good for her. Her photography has been published and exhibited in the US and Canada, which perhaps gives her an overblown sense of justification. She currently lives in Arlington, Virginia with her husband, a son or three, two crazy dogs, and occasionally a cat from Laos.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

THE DRIVE HOME by Will Musgrove

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

THE DRIVE HOME by Will Musgrove

Will Musgrove
THE DRIVE HOME

In the distance, black clouds blanket the sky like cake frosting, and streaks of rain shade the warm air. Strong winds jostle my buddy Jake’s rusted sedan, make minor corrections to our trajectory, whisper to us through cracked windows. We’re quiet. Making a sound might scare away the time we have left. Then lightning licks the ground, and we begin counting. We reach twelve Mississippi before we hear the boom. Three or four miles of sun-filled highway remains in front of us, but we continue toward the storm because it’s the way home, the only place we have left to go.

We departed as underdogs and will return as failures. Fans of walk-off home runs, of late-inning magic, we’d gone to become baseball players. The night before the open tryout, we watched the Red Sox break the Curse of the Bambino, the Cubs the Curse of the Billy Goat on our motel’s television. We love when losers become winners. We’d forgotten, however, to spend the years and years mastering our swings, so baseball stayed a religion to be practiced in our living rooms instead of on the field.

It’s okay. We still have the rest of the drive.

Another bolt like a stripped tree branch touches down. We count again, this time reaching nine Mississippi. The windshield rattles. Jake glances at me, then at the fuel gauge. His eyes dart back and forth like a wild pitch. He taps the brake. He knows we’re getting close. Speed up or slow down, it doesn’t matter. We’ll get to where we’re going.

I slap the dash.

Why do we have to be so gloomy?

Why squander the here and now?

Why not have a little fun?

I insert the mix we burned for the trip and crank the volume. Our theme song blares from the sedan’s speakers, and we sing along like we used to as kids. Let me root, root, root for the home team. If they don’t win, it’s a shame. I roll down my window and stick my head out. The electricity in the air tickles the roof of my mouth as we cruise up a hill, Jake’s head bobbing to: For it’s one, two, three strikes you’re out at the old ball game.

At the top of the hill, a man paces next to a broken-down minivan. We pull onto the shoulder, park, and get out. Zap. Lightning strikes the pasture to our right. We make it to six Mississippi. Not much time left.

“What’s the problem?” Jake asks the man.

“I must have run over a nail or something sharp,” the man says, gesturing toward a flat tire.

“Have a spare?”

“Unfortunately, no.”

Jake pats my chest, and I follow him to the sedan’s trunk, where we retrieve a jack and a donut. I position the jack under the minivan’s undercarriage as Jake twists off the flat’s lug nuts. Lightning flashes behind us. One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Boom. Once the minivan’s elevated, Jake slides on the donut and tightens. Then I lower the vehicle, a mist wetting my hair.

“I wouldn’t drive too far on that,” I say, kicking the wannabe tire. “Might not be too safe.”

The man thanks us, offers us a few dollars. We decline. Waving, we watch him hop into his minivan and peel away, heading opposite the storm. He vanishes down the hill.

Darkness covers us like a closing door. We rush to the sedan and get inside. The rain starts slow, like a leaky faucet, then ramps up, transforming into thousands of tiny, pummeling fists. We creep onto the highway, but the downpour makes it impossible to see. Jake lies his hand on the console, and I link my chapped fingers into his.

We’re trapped in the storm.

For how long?

I don’t know.

At least we were able to help one person escape.

At least, like our favorite ballplayers, we got to be last-second heroes.

Will Musgrove is a writer and journalist from Northwest Iowa. He received an MFA from Minnesota State University, Mankato. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in TIMBER, The Lumiere Review, Oyez Review, Tampa Review, Vestal Review, and elsewhere. Connect with him on Twitter at @Will_Musgrove.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

CONFESSIONS OF A CARELESS CABBAGE PERSON by Jamie Nielsen

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CONFESSIONS OF A CARELESS CABBAGE PERSON by Jamie Nielsen

Jamie Nielsen
CONFESSIONS OF A CARELESS CABBAGE PERSON

“There’s only one kind of trap that works. It’s the five-for-a-dollar, old-fashioned kind with a spring on a piece of wood.”

My sister raises and trains horses in the mountains outside Reno, Nevada. She’s a single mom of three small humans, nine rescue dogs, two rescue cats, and up to thirty-something horses, depending on when you ask her. She traps mice in two barns full of hay and grain, dog chow, and sundry equine medications. Her days begin and end with the hard physical labor of feeding and watering. Doctoring, shoveling, scrubbing, hauling. Foals are born here in the earliest, blackest hours of the new day, slippery, fragile, and steaming in the cold. There is no room for gnawed electrical wires or contaminated feed. No question, given rodent-borne hantavirus and Lyme disease. There is no safe cover for a mouse under the slim profit margins of this life my sister has chosen.

“Use peanut butter and rub it under the curved part of the bait plate. It works every time.” She has an unrelenting sense of humor, but this is no-nonsense advice.

I thank her and tell her I love her. Press “end” and sit a moment longer in my car, parked in the garage that is now the territory of a mouse, utility shelving visible through the driver’s side window, stocked with non-perishables: corn, beans, apricot jam. The labels are shredded, cans and glass jars liberally anointed with sticky urine and tiny black feces like grains of rice.

The mouse didn’t glean any nourishment from the cans, however. It was the cabbage.

This is the part of the story I didn’t tell my sister when I called her: I left a cabbage in the garage overnight, thinking the cold would keep it fresh. It was dense and firm, bright white-green like a model of the moon: crust, mantle, core. The next morning the plastic wrapping was breached and a deep crater carved by tiny teeth. It must have been ecstasy—the pungent crispness, layer upon layer after months of winter scarcity.

My father’s mother’s people farmed the rich Miamian soils of Ohio. My grandmother was one of seven sisters with names like Beulah, Ida, and Elnora; they were Depression-era farm women who quilted and put up preserves. “They’re pests,” she says matter-of-factly, sitting here half-invisible at the kitchen table. She doesn’t look at me directly, but there’s no room for discussion, no space for questions. “There’s nothing else for it.”

So I disinfect cans while my husband baits and sets traps, the five-for-a-dollar, old-fashioned kind, and the next morning we find that one of the traps worked. The peanut butter worked, terribly.

My carelessness taught a small being to love the garage and come back, ending an entire story we only caught a glimpse of in the signs left after a single night of glorious exploration and cabbage feasting.

I’m not getting any work done. I can’t bring myself to go out and throw them into the garbage bin: the thin metal striker bar clutching the soft, white-bellied body, the delicate toes. I close my laptop. I’m considering a live trap if this ever happens again. This will require driving with a mouse and releasing it miles away in some wild place in the national forest. Maybe a grassy meadow with decent cover for a small mammal—a downed tree, a tangle of branches.

I text my sister:

Well the traps were effective but now I feel awful

Can’t blame him for wanting to be in a warm garage chewing on canned goods

…

And a cabbage

I left a cabbage out there

…

I’m just a careless cabbage person and that’s what lured him in

…

CCP – careless cabbage person

I hadn’t intended to confess about the cabbage, but it feels good to put it out there into the SMS ether where my sister will find it. My three-fold penance is already clear in my mind: purchase a live mouse trap from the hardware store, search out any garage entry points and seal them with caulk, and never leave produce out there, ever again. Amen.

She answers my text an hour later, probably taking a short break from chores to step inside and warm her roughened hands on a cup of coffee:

Yeah I’ve always thought of you that way, but I never wanted to say anything

Jamie Nielsen is an ecologist and returned US Peace Corps volunteer. She lives and writes in Flagstaff, Arizona with her husband, two children, and their rescue dog, Rainy. Jamie Nielsen’s essays appear in The Sunlight Press and the Arizona Authors’ Association Arizona Literary Magazine 2021.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

LIFE IS TOO SWEET FOR THIS LEVEL OF IDGAF by Timothy Boudreau

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LIFE IS TOO SWEET FOR THIS LEVEL OF IDGAF by Timothy Boudreau

Timothy Boudreau
LIFE IS TOO SWEET FOR THIS LEVEL OF IDGAF

We’re here too short a time to shuffle grumpily to work, we’re missing opportunities. Donny scowls at Mrs. Levinson when she asks him to cash her check in small bills; while I’m grumbling, tearing up the updated rate sheet, Maura aims a kick at an empty box someone left in front of the vault—guys, why are we living this way? Lenny can’t even think about Wealth Management anymore, he’s got tumors squirming inside his organs like maggots through old meat. We don’t deserve to be luckier or live longer, but maybe we are and maybe we’re going to. The wind is low today, the sun is like the kiss itself of heaven so why can’t we feel it.

The saddest thing isn’t that Lenny’s gray face can’t manage a cracked smile, that on his off days his bald head ducks behind the curtain when we wave from his porch. It’s that this pain-wracked mask is his brave face, the very best, which is what Lenny wants to offer, he can give us.

We’re stressed, we’re burnt out, it’s understandable. When Upper Management says, “This is a challenging economic environment, we’re trying to manage expenses,” the expense they’re managing is us. If the numbers bend the wrong way, Donny gets sent home with his three pairs of boots from the breakroom closet, his family pictures in a shoebox; Maura leaves pissed, tears in her eyes, car keys in her fist, with a check for two months’ severance. The Crawford Office employees love each other, we come together when customers are jerks, but Management can split the family whenever they choose.

It’s only Lenny now, but who are we to think we’re exempt? Tomorrow it might be my heart or Donny’s headache thing he’s meaning to check into. Donny’s sweet husband Tanner, who draws him red hearts on everything, might crash off a cliff, his slim hairy limbs scattered and splintered below. Imagine sweet Maura, who keeps everyone laughing, doing her laundry when the furnace blows up, in seconds her body a heap of melting freckled skin and fat.

The slow salt truck that holds us up on the way to the office, splashing puddled water that blackens the snowy yards—we need to forget about it. Take that road we’ve always wondered about, Log Cabin Lane. Pull off anywhere and take a picture, an ice-crusted pine, snow bending the spruce limbs. Post it to our IG, never mind how many Likes it gets, move on with our morning. Let’s already be thinking of the book we tucked in the spare office, our lunch walk, the candy bar we’ll buy for a treat, which photo to take on our way home, maybe the sunset’s final embers over frozen Carroll Pond, because soon enough Time will pull over the covers and all will be darkness.

It doesn’t take much to make a Saturday plan. I’ll cuddle my kittens before I leave; Donny and Tanner, give each other a kiss on your way out the door. Maura, be ready, we’ll pick you up at one. If he’s up for visitors we’ll go to Lenny’s, help his frail body up the hall to the kitchen table where he’s planting bean seeds in tiny pots, help adjust their position beneath the grow lights, afterward tuck Lenny back in bed, tell him happy stories we’ll have to make up as we go along, each healthy one of us taking our turn to warm his icy hands in ours.

Timothy Boudreau’s recent work appears in Reflex Press, Cease, Cows, and MonkeyBicycle, and has been nominated for Best Microfiction and a Pushcart Prize. Timothy Boudreau’s collection Saturday Night and other Short Stories is available through Hobblebush Books. Find him on Twitter at @tcboudreau or at timothyboudreau.com

Cover Design by Karen Rile

DECADENCE, ’94 (SOUTHERN) by Damian Dressick

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DECADENCE, ’94 (SOUTHERN) by Damian Dressick

Damian Dressick
DECADENCE, ’94 (SOUTHERN)

Rounds in quick succession at Café Lafitte in Exile bleed into slave quarters on Iberville. A sofa included in his rent. New Orleans lore. Amyl nitrate. Fan of porn mags spread across the cocktail table, Honcho, Blueboy. We’re talking the same shit over and over. One of us is embarrassed. By the time it’s light, we’re pressed together in the cramped bed. Exposed brick walls. Framed Nagel print. His cock is thick, easy to get off. I’m verging on sober, uninterested. Birds make their noise outside the window. Truck drivers bang barrels onto Royal Street. I close my eyes. The sheets are clean.

Damian Dressick is the author of the novel 40 Patchtown (Bottom Dog Press) and the flash collection Fables of the Deconstruction (CLASH Books). His writing has appeared in more than fifty literary journals and anthologies, including W.W. Norton’s New Micro, Electric Literature, Post Road, New Orleans Review, CutBank, Smokelong Quarterly, and New World Writing. A Blue Mountain Residency Fellow, Dressick is the winner of the Harriette Arnow Award and the Jesse Stuart Prize. He co-hosts WANA: LIVE!, a (largely) virtual reading series that brings some of the best Appalachian writers to the world. Damian also serves as Editor-in-Chief for the journal Appalachian Lit. For more, check out www.damiandressick.com

Cover Design by Karen Rile

SHADOW WATER by Rosemary Jones

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SHADOW WATER by Rosemary Jones

Rosemary Jones
SHADOW WATER

This is how I heard the story. The this. The that. The this and that.

I was at the hospital with my daughters to visit their grandpa, Geoff, who had fallen playing indoor bowls. One small, ambitious move and he was a hip disaster. Maybe they could operate. Maybe they couldn’t. He had a lung condition. I don’t know the medical details. Just two nights before when we’d had dinner together, he announced that it looked like he’d make it to ninety. Sheepish grin. For the past two, three, no, four generations, the fathers and grandfathers and greats had died aged eighty-nine. At his desk some years before, he’d unfolded a family tree, his gnarly finger confirming the facts of the matter. But he was going to break the record.

From his hospital bed by the window, he stared longingly at his granddaughters as I’d never seen him stare before. Inhaling the sight of their dark, glossy heads of hair into his bad lungs. He never talked about the war except to say he’d had a good one. But while the girls were playing, he started a story. A chink opened. He was in the RAAF, his troop ship leaving from Sydney headed to Newport News. From there he’d make his way by train to Prince Edward Island for further flight training, then to Calgary, where he got his wings.

On the ship, a group of airmen shared a bathroom, the bath already filled with water. An  airman from a wealthy suburb of Sydney presumed it was for him. Stepped in, soaped, and soaked himself. What he didn’t know: this was their freshwater ration for washing and shaving, expected to last the three-week journey.

My father-in-law crinkled his eyes and gave a wheezy laugh. “We were furious,” he said. His balding head on white cotton, handsome face cracked and lined, still glancing over, drinking in his granddaughters. What happened next? I had to know. The men made him replace the water. Beg for a bit here, a bit there from other men’s baths. Ladle by ladle, cup by cup. After that, they didn’t have much time for this fellow. Maybe he never properly filled that bath up.

This and then that. Consequences. Filling, not filling.

Unthinking privilege, yes, we can say that. I imagine that young man, erect in his smart new uniform. Short back and sides. How he must have carted that body of wasted water around in his head, sloshing in his dreams, for the rest of his life. Guilt and dread. Did he die thinking of bathwater? Couldn’t someone have forgiven him?

Geoff sucked on a fruit pastille. Smiled. I kissed him on the forehead. And gave him another on behalf of my husband who wasn’t there, in case they didn’t see each other again. That two-day journey across the skies. Well, he did make it, winging in to drink a last whisky with his father, who died—aged eighty-nine.

Yet always that water in the shadows, dark water, ladle by ladle, filling our lungs—how to bring life to land.

Rosemary Jones is an Australian whose nonfiction has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Cimarron Review, and Sweet, and was awarded first prize in Alligator Juniper’s nonfiction competition. Her fiction has appeared in magazines such as Denver Quarterly, Sonora Review, Gargoyle, Corium Magazine, and Brilliant Flash. Rosemary Jones lives in New Haven, Connecticut and currently teaches and tutors writing at Yale.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

EVEN IN THE DARK by Cristina Trapani-Scott

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EVEN IN THE DARK by Cristina Trapani-Scott

Cristina Trapani-Scott
EVEN IN THE DARK

1.

You make sourdough bread because it’s easier to focus on the simplicity of water and flour than on anything else. You marvel at how water and flour blended can start life. You think of science and the way this pairing draws yeast from air. You remember the air in the hospital waiting room, the sour chill, and the way your yeasty thoughts bloomed faster than you could breathe, faster than you could form sentences, so the words came out lonely florets. Please, won’t walk, will walk, maybe, I don’t know.

2.

Now, you speak to flour and water in full sentences. You whisper to yeast the way you might a plant, like you did your child lying in the hospital bed. You cajole it with a gentle voice, urging it to expand and breathe, to grow and move.

Bread sustains us, you say.
I will love your crust, you say.

You told her to move, to find her space and take it even before you worried she might never walk again.

3.

Her left toe moved first, after you called her name, after you sang it to her because songs draw life from air, and she knows. You ignored the tubes that snaked from her and the thick paste of uncertainty. You focused on her feet, her beautiful feet, her toes poking out the end of the thin hospital blanket. As slight as the movement was, you wondered if the floor shook.

4.

You pour bubbling yeast into flour, add salt, sugar, oil, and hot water, and you knead. It will take hours for the yeast to expand, for the dough to double in size, but you wait like you waited for her toe to move and then her leg and then her other side. You are good at waiting. You’ve spent hours in waiting rooms. You count the hours and think they could add up to months, if not years.

5.

You wonder if the events of that week doubled in size rather than shrunk like you thought they would. You see yourself as you waited, the way you tucked your legs under you at night, knees and hips aching on the cold hard bench. Nurses appeared and disappeared like shrill ghosts. The clock ticked. Out the window from the eighth floor, you could see the front range spread for miles, even in the dark.

Cristina Trapani-Scott is the author of the poetry chapbook The Persistence of a Bathing Suit. Her work has appeared in Hip Mama Magazine, Paterson Literary Review, and Entropy Magazine, among other publications. She holds an MFA in Writing from Spalding University, and she serves on the leadership team for Northern Colorado Writers. She is at work on her first novel, and when she is not writing she likes to paint, bake, and hike mountain trails with her partner and their blind Lab/Chesapeake Bay Retriever. Follow her on Twitter at @CristinaTrapani.

Cover Design by Karen Rile