Category Archives: Flash

INVENTORY by Nicholas Claro

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

INVENTORY
by Nicholas Claro

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.

LINE COOK: A LOVE STORY by Madeleine Barowsky

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

LINE COOK: A LOVE STORY
by Madeleine Barowsky

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.

THE PRIZE FIGHTER by Lyn Chamberlin

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

THE PRIZE FIGHTER
by Lyn Chamberlin

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.

 

 

 

 

2020 APRIL by James LaRowe

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2020 APRIL
by James LaRowe

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. His flash fiction piece “2020 April” received Honorable Mention in Cleaver’s 2022 flash fiction contest judged by Meg Pokrass.

MOSAIC FOR MY MOTHER by Emily Hoover

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MOSAIC FOR MY MOTHER
by Emily Hoover

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. Her flash fiction piece “Mosaic for My Mother” received Honorable Mention in Cleaver’s 2022 flash fiction contest judged by Meg Pokrass.

THE TUMMY BRIDGE by Andrea Marcusa

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

THE TUMMY BRIDGE
by Andrea Marcusa

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. Her flash fiction piece “The Tummy Bridge” received Honorable Mention in Cleaver’s 2022 flash fiction contest judged by Meg Pokrass.

LET’S LICK IT by Amanda Hadlock

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LET’S LICK IT
by Amanda Hadlock

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.

THE RESTAURANT AT THE END OF THE WORLD by Sarah Freligh

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THE RESTAURANT AT THE END OF THE WORLD
by Sarah Freligh

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’s flash fiction piece “The Restaurant at the End of the World” was a finalist in Cleaver’s 2022 flash contest.

 

IMPACT by Lisa Lanser Rose

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Graphic design image of an airplane with a light purple background

IMPACT
by Lisa Lanser Rose

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.

 

A CONTENTED SUN RISES by Joe Alan Artz

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A CONTENTED SUN RISES
by Joe Alan Artz

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.

LOVE OF YOUR LIFE by Kris Willcox

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LOVE OF YOUR LIFE
by Kris Willcox

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. Her flash fiction piece “Love of Your Life” received Honorable Mention in Cleaver’s 2022 flash fiction contest judged by Meg Pokrass.

HIRAETH by Paul Joseph Enea

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HIRAETH
by Paul Joseph Enea

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.

IN-LAWS by Laura Tanenbaum

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Graphic design image of a multicolored fish

IN-LAWS
by Laura Tanenbaum

“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.

DARK MATTER by Meredith McCarroll

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DARK MATTER
by Meredith McCarroll

“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’s flash nonfiction piece “Dark Matter” was a finalist in Cleaver’s 2022 flash contest.

THE EGG by Dawn Miller

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THE EGG
by Dawn Miller
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. Her flash fiction piece “The Egg” is Third Prize winner of Cleaver’s 2022 flash fiction contest judged by Meg Pokrass.

WHALE CRATERS by K. T. Moore

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WHALE CRATERS
by K. T. Moore

“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.

SAFFRON AND BROWN SUGAR by Christina Simon

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SAFFRON AND BROWN SUGAR
by Christina Simon

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.

THE TALE OF MOLLY GRIMM by Janet Burroway

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THE TALE OF MOLLY GRIMM
by Janet Burroway
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. Her flash fiction piece, “The Tale of Molly Grimm” is Second Prize winner of Cleaver’s 2022 flash fiction contest judged by Meg Pokrass.

YOU SLEEP UPSTAIRS by Ron Tobey

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YOU SLEEP UPSTAIRS
by Ron Tobey

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.

THE PERSON FALLING HERE by Theo Greenblatt

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THE PERSON FALLING HERE
by Theo Greenblatt

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.

INCENDIES by Fannie H. Gray

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INCENDIES
by Fannie H. Gray

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.

WHEN WE KNEW HOW TO GET LOST by Sabrina Hicks

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WHEN WE KNEW HOW TO GET LOST
by Sabrina Hicks
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. Her 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.

PEACOCKS by Andrew Stancek

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PEACOCKS
by Andrew Stancek

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.

EIGHTEEN by Alison Sanders

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EIGHTEEN
by Alison Sanders

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 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.

MARILYN MONROE LETS THE LIVESTOCK IN by Emma Brankin

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MARILYN MONROE LETS THE LIVESTOCK IN
by Emma Brankin

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.

 

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE MEXICAN TETRA by Dan Shields

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE MEXICAN TETRA
by Dan Shields

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. He now lives in Washington, DC, reminiscing about most of it. He’s new in the nest at @DanDotShields.

ENOUGH FISH by Josh Krigman

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ENOUGH FISH
by Josh Krigman

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. He 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.

 

DEBT OF A DAUGHTER by Devon Raymond

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DEBT OF A DAUGHTER
by Devon Raymond

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.

 

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

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TWO MICROFICTIONS
by Jeff Friedman

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 Friedman’s co-written collection of fabulist microfiction, The House of Grana Padano, was published by Pelekinesis in Spring 2022.

DRUNKDADDY by Francine Witte

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DRUNKDADDY
by Francine Witte

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.

PLAYHOUSE by Tess Kelly

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PLAYHOUSE
by Tess Kelly

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.

IF YOU WANT TO BE LOVED, LOVE by Meg Pokrass

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IF YOU WANT TO BE LOVED, LOVE
by Meg Pokrass

 

  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.

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

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.

THE DRIVE HOME by Will Musgrove

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

THE DRIVE HOME
by Will Musgrove

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.

CONFESSIONS OF A CARELESS CABBAGE PERSON by Jamie Nielsen

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

CONFESSIONS OF A CARELESS CABBAGE PERSON
by Jamie Nielsen

“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. Her essays appear in The Sunlight Press and the Arizona Authors’ Association Arizona Literary Magazine 2021.

 

 

 

 

 

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

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. His collection Saturday Night and other Short Stories is available through Hobblebush Books. Find him on Twitter at @tcboudreau or at timothyboudreau.com

 

DECADENCE, ’94 (SOUTHERN) by Damian Dressick

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DECADENCE, ’94 (SOUTHERN)
by Damian Dressick

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

SHADOW WATER by Rosemary Jones

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SHADOW WATER
by Rosemary Jones

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. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut and currently teaches and tutors writing at Yale.

 

EVEN IN THE DARK by Cristina Trapani-Scott

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EVEN IN THE DARK
by Cristina Trapani-Scott

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.

SKATE HAVEN by Amy R. Martin

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SKATE HAVEN
by Amy R. Martin

I’m already roller skating when the DJ announces it’s time for a “Couples Skate” and I see the sign light up on the wall next to the clock and the rink lights dim and I feel a whoosh and Sean—the boy who pops wheelies in front of my house every summer morning on his Schwinn while I eat Lucky Charms and watch The Richard Simmons Show, the boy who one day soon will give me an ID bracelet that I will have to return because my mom will say I’m too young and won’t let me keep it, the boy who one day after high school will move to Texas with a red-haired girl who everyone will call a slut and far worse things besides—reaches his hand out to me. He is the best athlete at school, and he has light brown skin and hazel eyes and a ready white smile and a mini-afro and his mom’s white and his dad’s black and I think that’s cool and at his birthday party I won a jigsaw puzzle of the United States of America and in fourth grade he used to take a break from playing kickball to “rescue” me from the top of the jungle gym when I called his name and also in fourth grade he asked me to “go” with him and I asked him, “Where?” I take his hand, and we start to skate side-by-side to Lionel Richie’s hit “Hello” while the strobe lights make rotating geometric patterns on the polished wood-paneled floor, which is soft and sticky and luminous. I don’t look at Sean, not once, just feel the jostling of his sweaty hand in mine, the cool air on my hot red cheeks and neck, the deep dark stirrings of something curling in the pit of my stomach, and I look over at my mom sitting, still in her wool coat, at one of the garish picnic tables by the snack bar; she’s got a Kent cigarette between two fingers, a tattered black purse from Hecht’s Department Store beside her, and before her a Diet Coke in a Styrofoam cup, a yellow legal pad, and a thick stack of white paper, a medical manuscript that she’s copyediting with a red pencil. Sean and I go around and around and around, counter-clockwise, trying not to fall but falling just the same. It’s 1984, and I’m at Skate Haven, but it might as well be called Skate Heaven, because that’s where I am, heaven, or as close to it as I can get at thirteen. As Richie sings his last, we release our sticky fingers without once looking at each other and skate to opposite sides of the rink, where I dodge a creeper who years later will be arrested for pedophilia and I slam my body onto the bench across from my mother, the sweat from the ends of my hair flinging droplets onto my mother’s STETS and itals and pilcrows, her caps and her boldfaces and deleaturs, and there are tendrils of cotton candy floating in the air, sweetening it, I could catch one on my tongue if I wanted to, and I hear the staccato pop pop pop of the popcorn machine, the click of wheels out on the rink, and I wonder where Sean is before I feel the skin on my forearms stick to the Birch beer I spilled on the table earlier, and for a moment, a breathless moment, my heart is a disco ball, a whirling mosaic of mirrors, and inside me, through me, and all around is a kaleidoscope of color and light.

Amy R. Martin is a producer and screenwriter, essayist, and medical and science writer. Her work has appeared in Literary Mama, Pithead Chapel, and Hungry Ghost Magazine, and is forthcoming from Variant Literature, JMWW, and Atlas + Alice. She is the Stage & Screen Editor and a contributing writer for the Southern Review of Books. She has an MFA in stage- and screenwriting and creative nonfiction from the Queens University of Charlotte. After living for fourteen years as an expatriate in the Netherlands, she now resides in Vienna, Virginia.

WHAT MIGHT HAPPEN WHEN YOU’RE STUCK by Louella Lester

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WHAT MIGHT HAPPEN WHEN YOU’RE STUCK
by Louella Lester

On the fifth day of the heat wave, even though the asthmatic air conditioner is faltering, Char stops going outside. Not to get fresh air. Or to exercise. Or to soak up the sun’s Vitamin D, of which a lack could cause her to…well, she isn’t sure what it will cause, but people are always talking about it like it matters. She just doesn’t give a shit anymore.

When Seth left, two months before, she lied about her feelings—told friends it was over long ago. “If he didn’t leave, I would have. Don’t worry, I’m enjoying the time alone.” So, the heat is a relief. A real excuse to stay home. A simple explanation. Wearing only panties and a tank top she melts into the chair nearest the aquarium that Seth left behind, getting up only to go to the toilet. Or drag delivery boxes through the door. Or feed the fish, though she doesn’t like fish.

On the twelfth day of heat, Char gives up reading books. Spends her time scrolling the phone, reading nothing longer than a tweet, until the screen is so smudged her finger can no longer glide, just stutters across it. When she finally looks up, the aquarium glass reflects her unblinking eyes and open mouth. In the background, plants wave above pebbles and the school of blue-backed tetras darts between bubbles.

By the seventeenth day, Char finds it difficult to get out of the chair. Arms stuck to her sides, she’s only able to flap her hands and flutter her fingers, her mouth pouting with the strain.

On the nineteenth day, when Char moves she feels a tug and her white fish-belly thighs can’t be pried apart. She rocks until the momentum sets her standing, toes facing out like a fish tail. She hobbles to the aquarium. The tetras stare side-eye as she heaves herself up and lands with a splash.

After the twenty-second day, Char would kick herself if she still had legs because she’d made no plan for food. Through the window she sees lamb’s wool clouds in a baby-blue sky. Pelicans glide on air pockets above the water. Song birds echo and gurgle. She knows it was stupid to jump into the aquarium, no guy is worth it, but now she’s stuck in the damn thing and the scruffy blue-backed tetras aren’t exactly thrilled either. They’re ramping up the side-eye, sticking to their school, and whispering. It reminds Char of her teen years, so she hides in a patch of hornwort and hears only snippets of their conversation, “…food flakes right over there…she doesn’t care…selfish…could all die in here.”

On the twenty-eighth day, when Char can no longer remember if Seth said he’d come back for the aquarium, the door knob rattles, giving her hope. “No one’s seen her since her boyfriend left, and neighbors have been complaining about a smell.” It’s the building manager, followed by two police officers.

One officer ambles off to the bedroom, while the other peers into the tank and sniffs. “This tank is the source of the smell,” he says. The tetras freeze against the glass in a clump of fear. Char, tangled in the hornwort, can’t move either.

The first officer returns from the bedroom. “Nothing else seems amiss. But that tank really is a health hazard.” They offer to help, then heave the fish tank up between them.

“Blub…blub…blub!” say the tetras, as the officers shuffle towards the bathroom.

“Blub…blub…blub!” says Char, as they drain the fish tank into the toilet bowl.

The building manager hears something as one of the officers pushes the toilet handle but tells herself it’s just the flush and swirl.

Louella Lester is a writer and photographer in Winnipeg, Canada. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in MacQueen’s Quinterly, Litro, Five Minutes, The Drabble, SoFloPoJo, Daily Drunk, Dribble Drabble, Grey Sparrow, Six Sentences, New Flash Fiction, Reflex Fiction, and a variety of other journals and anthologies. Her Flash-CNF book, Glass Bricks, is out there (At Bay Press, April 2021).

 

WHEN YOU’RE THE CONTORTIONIST by Candace Hartsuyker

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WHEN YOU’RE THE CONTORTIONIST
by Candace Hartsuyker

It happens like this: your sister is skipping with a jump rope, her feet slap slapping the sidewalk. You go into the house to get a glass of water, and when you come back, your sister, her sneakers that are bright as Wite-Out, and her sparkly pink jump rope are gone.

After her disappearance, your father’s restless hands will hold a length of rope: he’ll tie and untie it, reconstruct the sailor’s knots he learned when he was a boy. The figure eight, the bowline, the clove hitch.

You will deal with your grief by tying yourself into an intricate pattern of knots. You’ll step onto the living room coffee table and slowly go into a backbend. It will remind you of the game of Twister you played at parties, a foot sliding backwards and to the right, a leg crossing under someone else’s arm. Your feet will move toward your hands until you are grasping your ankles. Your head will move back until only your throat is exposed. Then, you’ll stand back up.

Next, you’ll drag your father’s suitcase from out of the hall closet, twist and bend, contort your body into its smallest shape. You’ll move as gracefully as a Slinky that is being cradled from one hand to the other. Once you are safely inside, you’ll close your eyes and pretend the suitcase is partly zipped up, leaving a small pocket of air so you can breathe. You’ll practice twisting your body into smaller and smaller knots until you are a balled-up knot that can’t be untied.

You’ll spend nights imagining your sister being picked up from the patch of sidewalk, then thrown into the trunk of a car. You’ll fold yourself into a myriad of animal shapes: a frog, a swan, a wolf. You’ll imagine what it is like to be kidnapped. On the days you are the saddest, you will tangle your limbs until your body is not flesh but rough and fibrous, a snarl of grief, a human knot. You’ll practice becoming a girl who can squeeze into spaces smaller than a fist.

One day, you’ll arch your arms over your head and turn your body into the shape of a key. You’ll find your sister behind a locked door. She’ll be there, waiting.

Candace Hartsuyker has an MFA in Creative Writing from McNeese State University and reads for PANK. Her work has been published in Fractured Literary, Cheap Pop, Flash Frog, and elsewhere.

ABLATION by Lisa Lebduska

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ABLATION
by Lisa Lebduska

Faced with a choice between freezing or burning, my mother chose burning. Her decision surprised me because she hated Florida, where she had never lived, and she hated summers in New York, where she spent July and August with a crochet-edged hankie tucked behind her ears to catch drips of perspiration.

Never known for her tractability, my mother, daughter of an odd-jobs man, had a heart that insisted its own wild beat, and a passion for cheesecake, chianti, and despising my father, who had, as she put it, “traded her in for a newer model” at the age of sixty-five. The cardiologist diagnosed her with both tachycardia (beating too fast) and arrhythmia (irregular beating) and prescribed a phalanx of pills to block the renegade signals in her atria. Over time, the meds stopped working. “She’s breaking through,” her cardiologist said. I pictured her driving a motorcycle through a barn-sized paper ring. “She has to be ablated,” he added.

“Burned?” I asked.

The cardiologist narrated the procedure in the third person, as if neither of them would be involved: The patient will be mildly sedated. The doctor threads a needle through the groin and triggers an arrhythmia, so that he can identify misfiring cells and destroy them, by either freezing or burning.

Like “Fire and Ice” I thought. The end of the world.

“No,” she said. “Just let me drop dead.”

The doctor looked to me for back up. I faltered. How could I urge her to lie awake while a stranger pierced her heart with a wire until it trembled?

I put her on the phone with my doctor brother, who had been following her condition at a safe distance.

“A heart attack might not kill you,” he reasoned. “You could have a stroke that incapacitates you. Please, Ma,” Stephen said. “You’ll have it at my hospital, with someone I know. Do this for us.”

I nodded.

“OK,” my mother bargained. “If you’ll stop cutting the cake so thin I can read the newspaper through it.” We agreed on summer, when I had a more flexible work schedule and she could convalesce outside. I stocked her refrigerator with low-fat milk and roasted broccoli.

“Go home. You have your own life to lead,” she said, touching my cheek. Her hand was thick from years of labor but still soft and dimpled like a baby’s. I left wondering where the line fell between my life and not hers. Did other people slice away their loved ones with surgical ease?

A month later she called. “It’s a sign from God. No sheesh-ka-bab.”

Eyes swollen, skin scarlet from scratching, and blisters weeping from her cheeks to her ankles: a raging case of poison ivy.

“She made a salad with it,” my husband offered.

“My mother doesn’t eat salad.”

Over the phone my brother shouted that he was resigning as her personal physician and cancelling the procedure.

“That’s good,” my mother said. “You should rest.”

I felt the same relief that twists through me when I find a sprung mousetrap and no corpse. She had escaped our best intentions.

Two weeks later, my mother’s heart rate spiked to 232 beats per minute, landing her in the Emergency Room.

We arrived to find her propped in bed, pink-cheeked and complimenting the nurse’s manicure. “Have some applesauce,” she said to me.

“You have to have the operation. This will take care of everything. I’m sorry,” I added.

I waited on a hard chair in a dim room. When it ended, they brought me to her. “We got it,” her cardiologist said.

My mother looked up at me, dazed. “They gave me the sheesh-ka-bab.” As the sedative wore off, she whimpered, and I gripped her baby hand.

A year later, my mother’s internist suffered an incapacitating stroke, and his family sold the practice. I did not tell her.

My mother never had another palpitation, though afterward she said that her heart wasn’t firing right. “Something is missing.”

Scarred tissue cannot conduct electricity, the medical books say.

When meteors enter the atmosphere, friction usually ablates them before they can reach the Earth. We need to understand this, or we will squander our days like errant signals, running amok.

Lisa Lebduska directs the College Writing Program at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, where she teaches courses in expository writing. Her work has appeared in such journals as The Forge, Lunch Ticket, Writing on the Edge, and The Tishman Review, among others. She lives in Salem, Connecticut, just around the corner from Devil’s Hopyard, where she and her husband enjoy hiking with other people’s pets.

 

WALKING ON THE FURNITURE by Jessica Klimesh

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WALKING ON THE FURNITURE
by Jessica Klimesh

In fourth grade, after Ellee and I learned how thin the crust was, how hot the mantle and core were, how fragile Earth in general was, we spoke in cautious whispers. What if? You think? Shh. We spoke of boys the same way. Curiosity mixed with innocence and fear.

At sleepovers, we held tight to the covers of our shared bed and to each other, our dreams fixed and frantic. Where were we safest? In a few years, we would explore the softness of our own bodies, the way it felt to press into another’s. But in fourth grade, shielded by darkness, we simply lied about the boys we had kissed, speaking in wary whispers, our bodies delicately intwined. And when the sun came up, we floated from footstool to coffee table to easy chair, walking on the furniture and tiptoeing lithely if we had to touch the floor. We were determined not to fall through, not to break the earth open. At school when the other kids ran, their footfalls hard and rugged, the earth shook, and Ellee and I would look fearfully at each other. Should we tell them? Shh. No. It’s our secret. But it wasn’t. After all, they’d learned about the Earth—about the crust, mantle, and core—same as us. We just understood it differently.

One Saturday afternoon, we decided to chance it. Just once won’t hurt, would it? What if? Shh, it’s fine. But as we ran for the swing set, our feet broke through the crust, and the mantle swallowed us up like quicksand, our feet melting, our legs turning to rubber and char. We fell deeper and deeper into the abyss of Earth, into the core, a hot rush of gold and darkness and light and silver. This is it, isn’t it? It is, yes. And as we fell, we grabbed hold of each other’s hands and laughed. And for a moment, life was glorious. For a moment, life was true.

Jessica Klimesh is a US-based writer and technical editor whose creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in Brink, Variety Pack, Ghost Parachute, Bending Genres, FlashFlood Journal, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Cedar Crest College and an MA in English from Bowling Green State University. She is currently working on a novella-in-flash.

WE WERE NOT SO BIG by Windy Lynn Harris

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WE WERE NOT SO BIG
by Windy Lynn Harris

There were three marriages and three sets of children, a pair for each union. For some reason, my father could only hold four children at a time. He told me this once, really tried to explain it to me. What I remember most was his sincerity in that moment. He wanted me to know things were different for me.

When my father called, I would listen to him tell me what he wanted me to know about his life and then I would ask about his family. He would tell me what he wanted me to know about them, too. He’d ask about me, politely, and I knew he’d report some of my things to the rest of them, but that wasn’t the same as being part of a family. It wasn’t the same thing at all.

It was a while before we visited the house where he and wife number three lived. My sister and I were invited to dinner one Saturday, and I saw their wedding photo for the first time. I’d imagined the ceremony we weren’t invited to as something plain-clothed, quick. A judge or some official-looking man from Town Hall, but in the framed photo, I saw elegance and planning, the whole lot of them smiling. There was space in the photo, off to one side, and I thought, We could have squeezed in. We were not so big.

Windy Lynn Harris lives in Phoenix, Arizona, surrounded by cacti, lizards, hawks, and sunshine. She has received fellowships from the Dorland Mountain Arts Colony and The Maribar Writer’s Colony, and has been supported in part by professional development grants from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, which receives support from the State of Arizona and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work has been featured in The Sunlight Press, JMWW, Brevity, and other places.

CLEANING HOUSE by Andrea Lynn Koohi

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CLEANING HOUSE
by Andrea Lynn Koohi

“Right there,” I say, pointing to the spider on the wall before leaving the kitchen. I’d rather not kill things, so I make my husband do it.

My only complaint is that he doesn’t kill faster. He has this habit of pausing an inch over the target, then moving in slowly with a gentle scoop and a delicate squeeze. I never understood why he prolongs the trauma. He says I shouldn’t criticize unless I want to do it myself.

But today I leave the room for the moment of death. I sit on the sofa and scroll through my newsfeed while I wait for the deed to be done. It’s been reminding me too much of my own mortality. How easy it is to kill and be killed.

Scroll.

Plus, there’s that mouse still lounging in the attic, nestling undisturbed in the insulation. Jake doesn’t say anything, but I know he’s thinking I’m some sort of hypocrite.

Scroll.

It was almost a week ago that I sent him to the attic with one of those humane box traps with the skylight on top and the chunk of peanut butter inside. In less than a day, I found the mouse-bearing box on the kitchen counter, which really annoyed me because why did he think I wanted to see the damn thing?

I peered through the glass, and the mouse peered back, its dark beady eyes reflecting kitchen light. Its tail was repulsive but its ears were adorable, and that had me feeling a bit disjointed. Yanked in different directions.

To quell the guilt, I fetched a larger box, black Amazon tape still adorning the sides. I filled it with bits of mozzarella cheese, two generously sized lettuce leaves, and a handful of peanuts.

“A mouse hotel,” Jake joked. Why did men never see the gravity of the situation?

I asked him to release the mouse into the bigger box and then drop it off in the park down the street.

“You know he’ll probably get eaten by an owl, right?”

I ignored his comment and grabbed the dishtowel from the kitchen sink. Placed it the box for added warmth. 

That night was tough, and tougher still at 11:30 pm. That was the time I was used to hearing it—the faint scratching and rustling in the attic above my bed. The stirring and stretching of my mini Mickey Mouse as he commenced his routine of nocturnal activities. I missed the alignment of our opposite schedules. Against my will, the picture formed in my mind—the little mouse shivering in the November cold, sharp owl eyes tracking from above. I cursed Jake for putting the image in my head.

But the very next night, I heard it again—the same exact rustling in the same exact spot. Fumbling for my phone, I consulted Google and quickly discovered that mice are geniuses. They can find their way back over a mile after being relocated.

I smiled at the ceiling as my husband snored.

Andrea Lynn Koohi is a writer from Canada with recent work appearing or forthcoming in Pithead Chapel, The Maine Review, Ellipsis Zine, Idle Ink, Cabinet of Heed, Lost Balloon, and others.

 

 

 

 

Cover design by Karen Rile

THE UNDERSIDE by Eric Scot Tryon

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THE UNDERSIDE
by Eric Scot Tryon

It was an exceptionally hot Saturday in April when my sister and I zombied our way through the tedious chore of packing Mom’s house. A twisted, cruel part of the grieving process, but we refused to give in. No tears were shed as Wendy carefully bubble-wrapped the brown-stained coffee mugs we gave her as children. And I didn’t break down as I folded and packed her clothes even though her smell was dizzying. Wendy and I hadn’t spoken in hours—each sweating in a separate part of the house to avoid nostalgia and the “remember when’s”—when I heard my name.

“Everything okay?” I was in the middle of tossing out towers of junk mail catalogs.

“Just come here.”

When I arrived in the doorway of the den, Wendy was holding a framed photograph. The one from Yosemite. Dad, Wendy, and I sitting around a campfire holding up bent metal hangers. Dad’s marshmallow a blazing ball of fire. His smile, open-mouthed. Always the clown. But before I could say anything, she turned the frame over and handed it to me. On the back, taped with small squares of masking tape, was another photo. A smaller one. Creased and faded. It was Mom. Mom and a guy. A guy that wasn’t Dad. They looked to be in their early twenties. Both his arms were around her as he held the camera out in front. She, nestled into his chest, beaming.

“OK,” I said. “But this was before us.”

“Not before Dad.” Wendy shook her head with resolve. “And there’s another one.” She pointed to an overturned frame that lay by her feet.

We held eye contact. Wheels turning. Questions rising.

“Do you think…” but I let my eyes finish the sentence as I scanned the room. The walls of the house were suffocated with framed pictures. Our lives, the four of us, documented in frozen five-by-seven moments.

Wendy and I began tearing them down one by one, ripping out nails and screws and chunks of drywall. We couldn’t claw at the walls fast enough, white paint embedding itself deep under our nails.

Each and every frame we pulled off the wall held a photo on the underside. Every one meticulously held with four square pieces of masking tape in each corner. Once we unchoked the walls of the den, we moved to the living room, then the bedrooms, the kitchen, the bathrooms, even the long hallway, especially the long hallway.

Pictures of Mom and this guy at baseball games, restaurants, peeking out from under hotel sheets, sitting on trunks of cars that overlooked a lake or a beach or an IHOP. In some photos they were glowing, youthful. In others they were graying, tight-lipped. In some pictures there was only my mother, smiling in places we had never been. In others, there was only this man, smiling at a woman we no longer knew. His clean-shaven face a stark contrast to Dad’s unruly beard. His blue eyes were kind but didn’t hold the warmth of our father’s brown eyes. Wendy criticized his clothes. I called him short. Reduced to pettiness, but this is all we had.

By the time the sun had set and the sweat on our backs had started to dry, we had all the photographs laid out, lined up, and ordered in our best guess at chronology. The trail of photos started at the front door and wound its way past the armoire where Wendy once chipped her tooth on the corner and down through the living room where we used to eagerly sit cross-legged on the floor on Christmas mornings, and then down the hallway, through the laundry room, and up to the edge of the back screen door, the one Dad would fix every time we burst through it. A trail of photos. Like a long winding vein. Underneath the surface, hidden. Keeping you alive.

Eric Scot Tryon is a writer from San Francisco. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Glimmer Train, Willow Springs, Pithead Chapel, Los Angeles Review, Fractured Lit, Monkeybicycle, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Longleaf Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, and elsewhere. Eric is also the Founding Editor of Flash Frog. Find more information at www.ericscottryon.com or on Twitter @EricScotTryon.

 

 

Cover design by Karen Rile

A PLACE OF COMFORT by Eliot Li     

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A PLACE OF COMFORT
by Eliot Li


Dustin, whose adolescent spine curved gently to the right. He hardly ever wore his corrective brace to school because it was so obvious under his polo shirt. Whose bedroom equaled comfort, Phoebe Cates on the wall and Steve Perry looking vaguely Asian with his long black rock star hair. He searched for his face in the poster.

Dustin, who rode his bike downtown and asked the barber to curl a wave in his straight Asian hair, because he thought it might make him more like the white kids. Who washed his Levi’s five times on Saturday afternoon so they would fade. Whose father grabbed him by the shoulders and slammed him against the mudroom wall because he was wasting water, and the utility bill was already so goddamn out of control.

Dustin, who liked his mother’s slow-roasted curry, the soft carrots and the fatty clumps inside cubes of short rib that melted in his mouth. Who folded his hands on the dinner table and told his father that no, he completely disagreed, Hispanics and Blacks are not inherently lazier than the Chinese, as his mother spooned more curry into his bowl, and his father raised a fist and told him to shut up because he was just a dumb teenager who didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, then screamed Get the fuck out of my house. Who lay in the storage shed, next to the rusty chainsaws, and squinted up at the rafters looking for black widows because he read that black widows live in outdoor shacks.

Whose mother stepped into the shed in her nightgown, blanket in her arms. She slid his shoes off and made a nest in the dirt for the two of them.

“You don’t deserve it, the way he treats you,” she said, holding on to his toes.

◊

Dustin, who chose Cal Poly over UC Berkeley, because Cal Poly was a longer, four-hour drive south along 101 rather than fifteen minutes up 580. “You’re a moron,” his father said. “Would’ve flunked out of Berkeley anyway.”

“I’m not a moron,” he whispered, loading the last suitcase into the car.

◊

Dustin starts a job as an English teacher in Okinawa. He buys posters from Takashimaya, covers the walls of his classroom with Arashi, Morning Musume, and other J-Pop stars with flamboyantly styled hair. The boys in those bands have his face.

The night at the Izakaya hanging out with the other teachers. He towers over them. “Hearty American diet,” they say. “My mother’s curry,” he replies.

Would’ve been even taller if you wore the goddamn back brace.

Yumiko, the math teacher, cinches the cherry blossom tie around her hair and touches his shoulder. They eat taro-flavored soft serve. She giggles and dabs her napkin at the purple spot on the tip of his nose.

Dustin, who holds her on the tatami mat in his apartment. Who marvels at how the spiders in Okinawa are as big as his hand. He’s watching one under the eaves, shiny belly with yellow stripes, vibrating on its web.

Dustin, who writes his mother a letter, wonders if she’s well. Prays that she’s safe. Who’s sorry he can’t come home but knows she understands. Who tells her how he almost cries when he eats the local donburi, so delicately prepared, the way the ikura salmon roe bursts in his mouth, leaving a splash of ocean water on his tongue.

Eliot Li lives in California. His work appears or is forthcoming in Smokelong Quarterly, Pithead Chapel, The Pinch, Flash Frog, Gordon Square Review, Lunch Ticket, The Margins, and others. He’s on twitter @EliotLi2.

 

 

 

 

Cover Design by Karen Rile

ENOUGH by Margaret MacInnis

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ENOUGH
by Margaret MacInnis

When my infant daughter turns her face from my nipple and stiffens in my arms, I panic, imagining my lungs filling with water. I’m drowning on my living room floor, where I sit topless, still in my pajama bottoms. As the afternoon sunlight slants across the room, I need help, but no one is coming, not yet. It’s too early in the day to expect my husband, who isn’t my husband at all, but a man I barely knew before we made our daughter, made a home; but we’re trying, so I try to nudge my daughter back to my breast, then try a little harder, while she grows stiffer, more resolute, but she has to eat, and I have to feed her, and no one told me how hard this would be, so I pump and pump some more, then feed her with a bottle.

While she naps across my chest, I Google, and when my husband-not-my-husband returns home, I explain the rebirthing process.

After filling the tub with warm water, I’ll get in and lie back. He’ll float the baby on her back beside me while I softly talk to her, gently stroking her at the same time. When she relaxes, calm at last, calm in a way she seldom is at three months, for she is always howling, always hungry, he will move her, now on her belly, to my belly, where she will stay—for as long as it takes—until she begins moving toward my nipple. If the rebirthing works, she will resume breastfeeding.

“It’s worth a try,” he agrees.

Everything we try and fail at is worth a try, so with a heart full of the kind of hope that keeps you believing in something much longer than you should, and with lungs slowly draining, I prepare the bath, strip down, climb in, and call for him.

My baby and I float side by side while he watches, his index finger lightly pressing into her back to help her float, while I whisper, “I love you, sweet girl, only girl, please let me give you what no one gave me.” Let it be enough. Enough to save us both. Save him too. I try not to sound frantic, desperate, not knowing it’s too late, the damage done, and I’ll be pumping for twelve more months.

For a few glorious moments, it is not too late, and when he places our daughter on top of me, she inches her way toward my breast. It takes everything I have not to move, not to shriek, it’s working, it’s working.

When she latches, finally drinking, he whispers, “Stay still, don’t startle her.”

I am the startled one, but somehow I stay still, so still, until she’s had enough, until she lifts her head.

Margaret MacInnis writes and raises her daughter in Iowa City. Her recent work appears in Brevity, Diagram, Fifty-Word Stories, Ghost Parachute, Mutha Magazine, Potato Soup Journal, The Rye Whiskey Review, Thrush Poetry Journal, and Tiny Molecules. Other work appears in Alaska Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast Review, Mid-American Review, River Teeth, Tampa Review, and elsewhere. Nominated for three Pushcart prizes, she has received notable distinction in Best American Essays and Best American Non-Required Reading. Since 2010, MacInnis has worked as personal assistant to Marilynne Robinson.

Cover design by Karen Rile

 

 

MAKING A CAKE by Grace Kennedy

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

MAKING A CAKE
by Grace Kennedy

Today is my father’s birthday and I am making a chocolate Guinness cake.

I am making this cake by hand because I do not have a stand mixer and do not want to spend two-hundred and seventy-nine dollars on a twenty-pound gadget I will only use once a year.

I am making a cake even though I do not really like cake and do not have a stand mixer because my dad is turning seventy which I know is not so old but feels very old when I watch his hands shake as he pours his beer into a tall glass.

Three years ago on his sixty-seventh birthday when we found out why his hands were shaking I got so drunk off wine and port that I do not remember if there was any cake at all.

I am making a cake but I have gotten distracted by a video of a baby eating vanilla ice cream and now there is flour all over my phone but I do not wipe it off and I wonder when or if I will have babies and when or if my father will get to hold them.

Yesterday he walked into the kitchen and told me that his friend is dying and he usually does not tell me these things for example he never told me that his mom tried to commit suicide when he was nineteen.

Last week my friend got on a plane to visit his mother in Hungary who can no longer swallow and is planning to kill herself and he would like to sit by her side when she does.

Today is the first day of spring and soon my father will dig his shaking hands into the soil and plant lettuce and in the summer we will make salad and if we don’t wash it thoroughly enough we might bite into an insect who had thought they’d found a home.

I am making a cake because my dad is turning seventy and his hands are shaking and his friend is dying and he is planting lettuce and my friend’s mom is killing herself and when I was six years old I slipped out of my dad’s hands in the ocean and I thought I might drown and that my lungs would fill with water and wouldn’t that be a terrible way to die but then he picked me back up and I did not die and now I am making him cake.

Grace Kennedy is a writer, cook, and educator based in Philadelphia. She has previously been published in Bon Appetit, Oh Reader, and more. For pictures of the food she is making and the books she is reading, follow her online @gkennedy18.

 

 

 

 

Cover design by Karen Rile