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She laces her cherry Docs and shuffles forward to knock A book tucked under her arm her heart ticking like a bomb Other side of that door is a mystery that will quickly become shared history She rubs at the mascara under her eye her eyes like stars dim in the winter sky A token in her pocket from a time before lies lies unwrapped by a time machine Her brain overthinking every promise sanguinely Not all stories have beginnings Nor endings Sometimes a middle is a killing Of a past in an unlit cave Even before they misbehaved And yet they build a new order They will be rooted in only what they foster No longer feeling like imposters in their own lives no need for detectives they unpack how they feel in luminous spaces no need to be suspicious because they become fresh air in broken lungs and tongue-tied laces Margot Stillings is a storyteller and cocktail napkin poet. She resembles a housecat most days: paws bare on hardwood floors and lounging in sunbeams.

I misheard write a tree poem, thought I’m not a tree person, I’m a bush person; I’m not a nature person, I’m a nurture person— which was what she wanted: words to help her sense love like baby talk she feeds her pug, more soft turns of phrase scented with cologne, a stanza or two on how she wears enchanting scarves & makes a tasty latte. She hopes to feel appreciated for her efforts. What choice but to give her what she wants.

Didn’t go to his funeral. Anxiety. Truthfully. Regretfully. I liked him. Counted out papers And betting slips Whilst the dog Lay black and Sunday lazy. Thin Until he quit smoking. When I returned From time away Was glad to see me around Chatted a good chat. Then one day he sat in a chair Mumbled nonsense And bled in his brain.

Lover, do you think the sun misses the moon the same way I ache for you? Do you think they’re long-distance like we are, with only an eclipse to look forward to? We, too, eclipse, and I, collapse into you like a dying star of a woman; the cosmos are funny like that. Make the two people that love each other the most two ships in the night, or, put the love of my life an hour behind and 1200 miles away because absence makes the heart grow fonder. And it does. And it sucks. Some nights I miss you too much to articulate, and even then I find you in the empty breath, which is to say you are everywhere and nowhere, everything and nothing— My darling, nothing lasts forever, except love, which is to say, we are all each other has in the end. So hold me tight. Love me tender, like the moon, empty, and full, and empty again. Love me like the stars, dead but still shining. Mo is a 25-year-old poet, who is an avid reader, and lover of all things art; Her passion has always been music, poetry, and the arts as a whole. Poetry is her truth. Being able to find healing through her platform as an artist, is a gift that she is truly thankful for. She can be found on social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr as @momothepoet.

The Holiday Party When friends asked me to join them at a Christmas party, I didn't want to go empty-handed, and I had no idea what the host liked or was like. Never met him or any of their new friends in Lake Amnesia, their new hometown, a remote mountain village just over the state line. So, I played it safe and brought a big basket of fruit. The store had done it up like a work of art. Plenty of apples—ruby, crimson, scarlet—and fat oranges and pears speckled with blueberries and green grapes, draped in bananas, punctuated with cherries, clementines, peaches, and apricots. Exploding with color, it looked like the centerpiece of a children's banquet catered by Julia Child. And did I say 'big'? It sat on my Nissan's passenger seat all those hundred-plus miles, a pyramid bent a couple inches under the roof. The seatbelt failed to reach around it, but it was too wide to fall between the seat and the dashboard, so no matter. Once there, for all its size and shape, I balanced it up the walkway to the door which I had to bang with my elbow. My friends had an ear out for me and let me in. I had to walk in backwards as they said hello, but when I turned toward them with the basket, they fell silent. From the middle of the room, I heard an indignant "What????" "Hi, I'm Evan and Helen's friend from their previous life. I thought you and your friends might like fruit." "No fruit! Apples! In this house we have apples!" "Good! Look, look, there are plenty of apples! See all the red?" "But you said 'fruit'!" "Yes, apples are fruit. You can look it up." "No! Apples are apples! Call them apples!" "Um, well, I don't much like grapefruit, and pineapples are a pain in the ass, so I can understand if you don't like grapes or peaches or blue--" "No! In this house, it's apples!" "You can have as many as you like! Honey crisp! Maybe your guests would like the other fruit? Healthy fruit?" "No 'healthy fruit'! Don't say that! It's apples! Happy apples! We say 'Happy Apples'!" I turned to Helen: "Is this some kind of joke?" "Joke!" the inhospitable host exploded. "This is no joke! It's a war on apples!" I turned to Evan, but he grabbed my elbow and turned me around while Helen took my other arm. They told me to take the basket to their new home, giving me a key, where they would join me after they “calmed things down." Back at the Nissan, I resisted the temptation to send the apples back in. One at a time. Through the front windows. But they were honey crisp, and as we used to say when someone failed to show at a drinking party: "More for us!" The Wrong Turn Evan and Helen also gave me directions to the new pad they moved into just weeks ago. Upon arrival, I was more than surprised. Looked like they were planning to have kids, because it was one of those standard four-bedroom, two-floor, cookie-cutter, middle-class homes in a sub-division with nine other identical structures—though of various colors—lined on both sides of a semi-circular lane, generously spaced from each other and away from the highway. Behind it all gurgled the lovely Fox Run River. Since the trees were all saplings, I could see it all at once. More surprisingly, one of the other homes was ablaze. Three fire trucks were there and several hoses were aimed at it. I left the Nissan in the driveway of the home with their number and walked over with the basket of fruit, thinking the firefighters should have it when they got the fire under control. As I arrived, a resident from one of the other eight houses came over and started yelling at the firefighters: "Hey, what about my house?" The firefighters were too consumed to pay any attention, but I was too curious not to: "What are you talking about?" "My house deserves just as much water as this house! Why aren't the hoses on my house, too?" "Um, because this house is on fire?" "That's not a good reason! A fire in this house has nothing to do with my house! That's this house's problem!" "But fire-fighters exist to solve problems, and you don't have one, at least not now." "I pay just as much taxes as anyone who lives here!" "Would you like an apple? Here, have one. Honey crisp. In appreciation for your support of your local fire de--" Before I could finish and before my friends' new neighbor could speak, two more residents approached. Both were carrying signs: "All Houses Matter!" "Is this a joke?" I blurted out, vaguely shaken by the echo of my surprise at the party I just left. "No! Our houses matter just as much as this one!" "But this house needs attention that yours do not!" "That's housism in reverse!" A few more residents approached, all with the same signs. They started chanting: "Stop the Hose Job! Stop the Hose Job!" Over the noise, I heard a car horn and looked up to see Evan and Helen waving me to return to them. I took the basket and put it on a side of one of the trucks facing the blaze and the firefighters. I caught the eye of one and motioned toward it, and he or she nodded in thanks. I then motioned to the gathering crowd and turned my hands up in question. The firefighter gave a wave of a hand and went back to work. I went back to Evan and Helen who told me that I had made a wrong turn, and to follow them home. The Bumper Stickers When we arrived at their cozy two-bedroom cape, all by itself along a little-traveled back road with a wide view over a long, glacial lake, they apologized for my reception at the party. Turns out that the host had been living at his girlfriend's in a neighborhood where, as rumor had it, the drinking water had been poisoned by toxic waste from a chemical plant two miles upstream on Fox Run. They knew he was having problems, but they did not know, as the police charged, that he had set a timer that morning in his girlfriend's home that would start a fire, allowing him to use the party as an alibi. He was easy for the police to find. They put out an all-points bulletin, but all they really had to do was patrol the town for a car with bumper-stickers saying "Happy Apples!" and "All Houses Matter!" The Forgotten Curb Evan and Helen invited me to stay a few days, giving me the guest room with its panoramic view over Lake Amnesia. A side window offered a view of several McMansions that lined the shore not far from their relatively modest abode. “We have very rich neighbors,” they liked to say. One, a talk-show radio host in the mold of Rush Limbaugh, bought a brand new, bumblebee-yellow Hummer just a week before I arrived. My friends say that others in the neighborhood have jokingly tried to hail it as if it were a cab. The Rush-wannabe has taken it well, laughing as he races by. Once, he actually stopped to offer a lift to one elderly gent who had to admit he wasn’t going anywhere. A day before I arrived, he hired a crew to put some curbing between his spacious driveway and the street, only to forget, two nights later, that the new curb was there when he returned from his late-night show. I heard it all: BANG!!! Or was it Bang-Bang? Both front tires blew. The impact was so bad that the rims themselves were bent out of shape, but he managed to hit the brakes soon and hard enough that the back tires were spared. Before long, a large truck arrived to repair the damage. Why they always keep their engines running is beyond me, but whatever, I awoke to the commotion and went to the side window to watch the truck raise the front of the crippled gasguzzler. Clearly, Rush Jr. told the repairman to bring rims, as the new tires were already on them. Didn't take long at all to change the two sides, and I poured myself a tall glass of water to take back to bed. But then I heard more commotion. Instead of the truck driving off, it lifted the back of the Hummer. Back at the window, I watched the repairman remove the car's rear tires and rims, and replace them with two more out of the truck. I pinched myself. I sniffed my glass. I breathed on the window to see if it fogged. It did. I went back to bed wondering if I was going back to sleep or had been asleep all along. The Talk Show Next night, out of pure curiosity, I tuned in to All the Same, my friends’ neighbor's call-in show on the local station to see if he might chat about his mishap and, if so, how he would spin it as a crime committed by liberals—and how his tires were victims of "cancel culture." Occurred to me that he might prefer to keep the whole thing a secret. After all, if he applied his constant calls for "personal responsibility" to himself as he does to the world at large, then he would likely be embarrassed by his own mistake. What if I called in and started filling his airwaves with it? My guess is that, since I had to tell him I was awake, I'd be condemned as "woke." Never thought that awareness could possibly be a bad thing in a country founded on the principle of self-governance, but then I still marvel at how the American flag is used to sell beer and automobiles. On one radio station back home, the hometown’s baseball games begin after the announcer tells us that “the National Anthem was brought to you by…..” They never broadcast the song, but that doesn’t stop them from using it as a commercial to plug a regional “financial institution.” Anyway, what I really wanted to know was why the back tires and rims were also changed. Why did he discard two tires with barely two weeks’ wear on them? On the slim chance that he would explain it, I tuned in. But it was nothing more than his standard fare. It began with condemnations of "congress," which the first few callers reinforced, several of them spitting out the phrase "all the same," not as the title of the show but as what they think of any and all people in Washington DC. While doing this, he and each caller complimented each other on how wise they were to have this understanding of how things "really work"—or "don't work" as they seemed to mean. I kept waiting for him or any of them to make distinctions between the branches of government, between the House and Senate, between federal agencies, between federal and state governments, between the two sides in court decisions that uphold or strike down laws. Never happened. It was all a blur for as long as I kept myself awake. Nor was any distinction ever made between the two parties, much less between those within the parties. This one kept me awake a bit longer, as if against my will, as the callers kept complaining about what wasn't getting done regarding the economy, infrastructure, health care, education, and more. Every problem mentioned was one that most Democrats are trying to solve, but which all Republicans keep blocking. Regarding the few measures that Democrats have passed—such as unemployment stimulus to offset the pandemic shutdown—Republicans voted unanimously against, but then took credit for benefits received in their districts. No matter. Neither host nor any caller ever made a distinction. If I wasn't asleep having a dream, I was awake with the nightmare of All the Same—a term applied as mindlessly to our government as it might be to the tires on a luxury car. The Border Bridge When it came time to return home, I thanked my hosts for what was, overall, a pleasant and relaxing stay. But the lingering—or malingering—thoughts of Happy Apples Man, All Houses Matter, and Rush Reincarnate made me crave departure. Evan and Helen have a very nice home, and it will take no effort for them to avoid a crank who is now in jail or the in-your-face neighbors of that subdivision. And they have plenty of other places for their radio dial. But many of their new neighbors were at that party, and they are surrounded by fans of that station. I wish them well, but I doubt I’ll ever return. I breathed a sigh of relief when I re-crossed the Attention Span Bridge and left Lake Amnesia. So glad to be back here in my home state where such things can never happen. A word from the author: I'm a life-long street-musician, a seasonal Renaissance faire performer, a guest columnist for the Daily News of Newburyport, Mass., a part-time movie theater projectionist, and a retired college English teacher. I have written and self-published two books titled Pay the Piper! A Street-Performer’s Public Life in America’s Privatized Times and Keep Newburyport Weird: An Atlas of Downtown Rhyme & Surfside Reason. My blog is: https://buskersdelight.home.blog/

I Sister Three was on the phone, and she was outraged. Sister Two had told her about the photos I had taken that afternoon of our mother lying dead in the open casket in the viewing room of the funeral home. Sister Three scolded me for my lack of respect and demanded I delete the pictures. She said Sisters One and Two agreed with her. We each have our own ways of grieving, I wanted to say, but I was too spent to argue. “All right,” I said, “I’ll do it.” One by one, I deleted the pictures, while my daughter, sitting next to me on the bed in the hotel room, confirmed it to my sister. “Okay,” she replied, mollified. I could see she’d been prepared for an argument I hadn’t given her. As soon as she hung up, I reinstalled the photos. “It’s none of her business,” I told my daughter. “These photos are precious to me.” II Nearly ten years after my mother’s death, I stare at these last images of her. She died soon after her cancer diagnosis. She had no time to waste away. In my pictures she is lying tranquilly against the white silk lining of the casket. Her eyes are closed, her face is made up, and her hair arranged. She looks like herself, and yet not like herself. She is wearing a dress of navy-blue velvet, and her hands are folded. On her left wrist is a silver link bracelet made by Sister One. I recall the mortician wringing his hands, speaking softly with the right note of sadness, yet clearly proud of his handiwork and eager for us to see what he had done. An impulse made me take the photos after he left the room. Even though I knew I never could solve the mystery of my mother, I knew I would want to keep these images close to my heart.

Only man, the pinnacle of creation, has the capacity to alter his world by wielding a sentence. Etgar Keret, trans. Jessica Cohen, “The Greatest Liar in the World” 1. Once again, Nadine reminds him that on the first of every month, one is supposed to say “rabbits, rabbits, rabbits.” If you wish for good luck for the whole of the month, this is how you begin. And if you hear these words on the first of the new year, you will have good luck for the whole of that year. Caleb looks down at his shoes. He has never believed in luck, other than as a function of happenstance and perspective. Luck presumes some larger hand at work in the universe, directing our movements and moments: as either punishment or reward, providing opportunity or karmic justice. At times, simultaneously. Too often, he’s realized, any notions of deities become confused with genies. God, if he or she exists, is not there to grant wishes. 2. His was a sequence of pragmatic gestures: ten years married to his high-school sweetheart. When they were in grade ten math class, one of her self-owns was that she had memorized her library card number. This was enough for him, right there. From this small, unremarkable fact, how he fell head over heels. 3. Caleb had developed their lot into a panacea of tulips, although he’d organized an assemblage of other flowers as well: hydrangea, roses, chamomile, cosmos, calendula, daylilies, dahlias. A small vegetable patch along the back hedge. The transplanted rhubarb. But at the heart of his enterprise: a flow of tulips, rolling up and along their suburban boundary. His mother had laid the foundation of what would be a life-long engagement. She’d always proffered a cavalcade of tulips in the front of their yard, a backdrop regularly featured in local newspaper photographs and family portraits. The tulip had evolved into a personal token for his grandmother, something she had clearly gifted to her own children. Caleb always remembers her site as more delicate, porcelain. Born in Amsterdam, she had landed here, five years prior to the Second World War. Around her small house in New Edinburgh, carefully curated red and yellow tulips lining her front step, and around the side by the hedge. On her part, Caleb’s mother had tulips on everything, from sweater patterns to plates to decorative spoons. “My mother had tea once with Princess Juliana,” she repeated. “Her daughters went to school with my sisters.” She mentioned this often, especially during those last few years, as she poured tea into her favourite mug: adorned with the logo for the Canadian Tulip Festival. Her home care support worker had recommended she retire her more elegant tulip china set, which Caleb’s eldest sister, Julia, inherited. In Caleb’s garden, a bedrock of tulips. Garden tulip. Parrot Tulips. Tulipa greigii. Flax-leaved tulip. 4. No one is going to want to read novels set during the pandemic, he tells her. Nadine disagrees, although she isn’t necessarily in a hurry to read fiction from this particular period, either. What might that even look like? A sequence of stories from hospitals and nursing homes examining political inaction, preventable death and hero front-line workers, or the unending days in enforced isolation, and how it breaks down the body and erodes our spirit. Perhaps a political thriller, where an anti-masker gets Covid-19, and their small group receives their comeuppance. Why would anyone care? Perhaps it will be a book about time itself, and the realization that time is elastic. The realization that the possibilities of positive change were there the whole time; it was just there for the taking. 5. After a particularly warm stretch of days, another thick snow. Ten to fifteen centimetres. It coats every surface. Caleb notes that it covers their garden, the birdfeeders, and the wheelbarrow left out by the woodshed. Caleb’s mother sleeps. After his mother died, he spread her cremated remains through the flowerbeds, as they had discussed. She liked the idea of feeding his flowers. Grey ash and bone, turned into the roots. For Caleb, it was the opportunity to keep her compartmentalized, close. If she was ever too much, he could return to the house. He came to think of her as Demeter, set to wake, once again, with the warm weather. Nadine doesn’t care to think about the garden, nor of Caleb’s mother. But for waving her hands to show off as part of her summer garden parties, Nadine doesn’t spend much time back there, preferring to spend her free time during the warmer months on the front verandah, whether reading a book or working a crossword. She greets passers-by. The tulips held none of her interest. The tulips, and his creepy dead mother. 6. When he was thirteen years old, Caleb’s parents sent him to spend New Year’s Eve with his widowed grandmother. They watched Gone with the Wind on television, timed to end just prior to Times Square, as the ball dropped to signal the annum, turning its yearly page. Once it landed, she crooned “Auld Lang Syne” and danced around the living room, slow hands into soft air. She opened the back door of her bungalow to sweep out the old year, before returning to open the front door, to greet the new. Wooden shoes, set by the side entrance. The idea was to remove all the negative energies of the old, so the positives of the fresh, new year could properly enter. It was 2003, and his grandmother would be dead before the first bloom of spring.

Open and Closed Doors The door of my childhood home is now worn, too many scratch marks from this dog or that one before we put a hole right through the wall so they could go in and out. Now the porch is more of a breezeway, no 4 seasons, or even 3 about it and I wonder how much else has changed. The door of my first apartment still smells of weed floating down from upstairs. There’s a couple lost coins buried in the loose soil where that kid got shot over a dime bag. The door to my in-laws’ basement was once our front door, when money was tight and it was convenient enough. We didn’t lock it and they didn’t lock theirs, but I wonder if they got sick of our cat sneaking up when we went to the laundry room or if I ate a slice too much of the pizza when they invited us up. The door of our house now is glass because there’s a view…something we always wanted and birds picking at scattered seeds around a feeder and a lawn that needs cutting because there’s always something more important to do. To My Hand Scrawled Lines in the Hospital You’re typed now and moved out, making a home in this magazine or that one and have an added http before your title, but I think I liked you better back then: written in rough handwriting in a notebook with a couple curling pages and the spiral binding catching on an overstuffed backpack; the missing e, misspellings and a scratching from a pen that wouldn’t quite work. The words that came quickly even after 36 hours without sleep, written in a pen and mind that didn’t care about tired eyes anyways. Matt McGuirk teaches and lives with his family in New Hampshire. BOTN 2021 nominee and regular contributor for Fevers of the Mind with words in 50+ lit mags, 100+ accepted pieces and a debut collection with Alien Buddha Press called Daydreams, Obsessions, Realities on Amazon. http://linktr.ee/McGuirkMatthew Twitter: @McguirkMatthew Instagram: @mcguirk_matthew.

Aria for Need The night is a parched dog and I quench it, skate my feet so you will not hear me peel my toes from the kitchen’s stained linoleum. Skin: the first thing to catch and caution. The sudden way mine reddens a perfect tell. I make like my desires walking around you, watch you from the bedroom doorway while the summer air settles its mouth upon my neck. I don’t hate it, the feeling, the wanting for others it brings. I say “others,” I mean people you could become if you cared for me enough. I love you which means I’ve become lethal to my own happiness. My chest is full of fingers struggling to undo laces, straps, belt buckles in the dark. A stuttering sound, like someone about to give a secret away. How different to search for you in these dreams now. Aria You remind me there is a reason for singing when you tell me not to—leave, leave me to my fantasies, the most naked part of me the inside of my throat. Soft geography. Inspired in lust as well as rebellion. Even when you are not on stage there is a man I sing to. Notes ringing with the tenor of my bones. Draped over a fainting couch, the seams of my bodice threatened but not yet torn; kneeling by the one I desire, an applicant for love. My song is not what I am, but all I have left. In dictionaries I look up aria hoping someone will notice, write see: supplication, see also: begging at the end. Each time the descriptor: an accompanied, elaborate melody sung… a single voice. Aria means by yourself but not alone. A mouth opened to the listening dark, emitting a tune so lovely that later I will hum it. And you will find me, set your lips upon mine, so you don’t have to hear. You Leave Me to Weep at dogwoods. The petals of their blossoms split at the ends, curled like burning paper. If you were here, you would say this is just nature, beg me not to look for a different reason, insist it will get me nowhere. I imagine your hand outstretched, its promise of forever slowly returning to your pocket, a flower out of season. Months after you’ve gone, I think how dangerous it was for others to say we were ever inevitable. We smiled in agreement. Aware that what we had was just another fate of the body, we still believed it good. Beautiful things bloomed from your mouth. You looked at me one day and said dogwood would make a perfect middle name for a boy. The corners of your mouth turned and for a minute I expected tears. This was the edges of what we had dying. This, I realize now, was nature. After a bad dream, I find myself consoled by a man whose voice strains to sing me back to him His is a song that will end mid-verse. Fall asleep before I do. I listen until he slows like the tired spring of a music box. Whatever sings, needs, and whatever needs does so specifically. Even the simple call of an unseen bird, just two notes descending, a white key’s distance between each other. I lean my head out, pitch my whistle. The bird repeats, and I smile like we’ve spoken. I’m sure I have not fooled it. A song is not noble, giving, it is not grace content with itself. A song is not single, it is hope for a lover. The lover is a response, an answer. Answer could mean reason, but now things are getting dangerous. Enikő Deptuch Vághyis a poet whose work has been recognized by the Academy of American Poets College Prize in the graduate division. She is currently a PhD student in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

On the way to the airport on the edge of the city, he had asked the driver to pull over. He needed a break, just a moment, from so much flashing past. Outside his tinted window, the roadside ditch was covered with Queen Anne's Lace and its spring whiteness reminded him of a sneaky boy's sugary mouth. “Out of the sugar bowl,” she'd snap, and turn her head away so he could scoop a final mouthful. Other flowers had seized the small field beyond the ditch; what he thought were morning glories and some types he didn't recognize. He knew little about flowers. Everything else was covered with red dust. He was alone in the backseat of the big car. His ex-wife and children had gathered without comment in the second, identical car idling at the graveyard and hadn't waited to join the procession back to the funeral parlor. He had asked his driver to take him to the airport. It was the least the driver could do for the money the undertakers had squeezed out of him. Now he asked the driver to pull over. He looked at the back of the man's well-manicured head and sensed his impatience. It angered him for a few seconds. In the city he will never return to much had died. Factory whistles he once thought of as pressure screams were silent, the sirens racing to drunken Friday night paycheck fights had moved on. None of the noises and rhythms that once filled the old mill town remained. There were dandelions, he noticed. Somehow he had missed them. The sky was turning red, and he had a plane to catch. There were never flowers, little excess of life of any type, in that old house he only slightly remembered. Feet stomping, lamps hurried off, sidelong glances, spite for its own sake, but never lilies or mums or even a Valentine rose. For a sharp second, he thought of pushing open the car's big door and picking a bunch of Queen Anne's Lace to leave in her room, then realized with a roll of his stomach that surprised him with its force that he was being a fool. The hospital room was three days cleared of her, the next human already rolled in, an oxygen mask attached while the body finished emptying. Today had been too full of flowers. He still tasted their stink on his tongue. The driver shifted his weight, adjusted his backbone. Poor man no doubt wanted to get home, out of his funeral suit. I hope he has children to welcome him, the single man thought, and said, “Thanks for stopping. We can go now.” Then he lied and said, “I needed a moment alone.” John Riley is a former teacher. He has published poetry and fiction in Smokelong Quarterly, Eclectica, Banyan Review, and many other journals and anthologies. EXOT Books will publish a volume of 100 of his 100-word prose poems in the fall of 2022. He has published over forty books of nonfiction for young readers.

THE ASK It's easy to spot a man who's having an affair. At least now it is. Absence where the was once presence. It starts out benign, nothing unusual. Just a new friend. The excuses mount, the change dramatic, adoration replaced with distraction, an empty, hollowed-out gaze. Not present, no longer interested. Then there’s the ask. Even though he wasn't asking, just telling, and not telling. Do you mind if I pick her up at the airport? Yes, I do mind. He did it anyway. And then I really knew. It all fell apart like an overstuffed bag of groceries, when the soggy bottom gives out and its contents spill everywhere, embarrassingly so. Broken eggs all over the sidewalk, the now bruised pear, so lovely and protected only moments before. Splat went my life, for everyone to see. And me, on my hands and knees, scooping up the slimy yolks with my bare hands. There's a beauty when it all falls apart. Strangers look with compassion, their eyes tell me, “It’s gonna be okay, you're gonna be okay." THRILL Her thrill, my fear. It used to be my thrill, her fear. My mother’s, that is. And so it goes. The swing’s four feet hopping off the ground, just a little bit, like a toddler playing jumping bunny. I remember the day, watching, holding my breath, as that magical rhythm clicked into place, the top half and the bottom half of your tiny body in conversation. Bend, straighten, pump, bend, straighten, pump. So high, the few seconds of slacked rope, when the stomach drops, and the trees are sideways and the smile is ear to ear. The sheer thrill of it Kimberly Reiss currently lives in Austin, TX by way of Los Angeles (a pandemic left turn). She is a licensed psychotherapist, creator of the MOTHERHOOD SELFHOOD workshops and is currently writing its accompanying workbook. Kimberly is the co-author of an award-winning play entitled, Man In The Flying Lawnchair, which was included in Best Plays of 2000, and also appeared in The Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2001 (winner of the Fringe First Award). The play was re-recorded as a radio play for the BBC. Kimberly also created and produced The Go Girl! Film Festival; focusing on films that resonate with teenaged girls. Kimberly’s current writing projects include memoir, flash fiction, and poetry.

Dennis knocks on my door before 8 a.m. It’s a relief to see him. Like it is when Doug’s cold nose greets me in the morning. My older brother is sick. My old greyhound is sick too, though not with Dennis’ liver trouble. That’d be a metaphorical bridge too far. Dennis stretches long and skinny on my couch all day, his nose periscoping above blankets and scrunched pillows. The couch is a never-made bed. Never-made because Doug sad-sacks on it when Dennis isn’t there. My brother doesn’t share. Snappy and growly even as a kid, he never has. I wasn’t allowed to play with the Lego. Now I play nurse. I dispense pills. The dog gets two of the white, then, four hours later, one of the red. The brother gets big blue and yellow capsules before and after the dog’s meds. Complicated. I dreamt one night they were on the same thing, that Dennis got his in a cheese ball as the vet suggested. I think about family-size bottles of pills. Economy-size because I pay for them all. Sometimes I say how about a stroll while I go out for the prescriptions? Dennis, take Doug! Doug, take Dennis! They teeter to the corner and back. There can be coughing, retching. I once found blood-speckled vomit beside the couch. Dennis was pale and breathless. He panted he’d clean the rug, that Doug had barfed and was, apparently, really sorry for the mess. Embarrassed. My brother’s round brown eyes were wet. He grabbed my hand and told me — as gently as he had ever spoken — Doug could be close to running his last race. He wanted me to know. I hugged Dennis, petted Doug’s knobby head. Or maybe it was the other way around. Hard to know because I was sobbing, and they had dissolved into teary blurs. But it wasn’t true. Not yet. I still have them. Karen writes in a basement. Her words are in or forthcoming in Scapegoat Review, FlashBack Fiction, Reflex Fiction, Bullshit Lit, Briefly Zine, The Ekphrastic Review, Versification, and others. She/her.