Search Results

I worked at the deli counter at ‘The Dill’, a small gas station- slash-store in the middle of nowhere. We were a desperation spot for the folks with crashing low blood sugar; the last place to catch a bite before their traveling companions pushed them out on the side of the road. Full blown Snickers bullshit. I hated dealing with them. They usually got super picky in their panic. Like someone who is freezing to death taking off their clothes instead of putting on more. Makes no damn sense. You probably knew the place by the slight lean to the building, like the leaning tower, only with scuff marks on the linoleum floor and a bathroom that smelled like a shit-dipped Yankee candle. Pisa it ain’t, but you meet a lot of interesting people. Take Lars, he stocked the dairy for us weekly. He came in and made chit chat. He had one of those lined faces that you can’t pin an age on. Short and thin, but broad shouldered, like his name suggested. His front tooth had gone missing and he replaced it with a gold one. It gave him a pirate vibe that I found stirred my pot a bit. Sometimes when he’d come in around my break, we shared a smoke. I don’t smoke for real, but why the hell not, right? He’d let me bum cigarettes off him since I didn’t own any of my own. We’d get close up together so he could light it. I like the smell of his sweat. A little sharp but not unpleasant, like hay. Short, and juicy is how he described me once. I grew up in the era of thin thighs and even thinner eyebrows. Mine were plucked to a fair thee well and I have been on a ton of diets that were more like prison rations. Styles change and now I tattoo my eyebrows on. I don’t starve myself no more neither. I gained every pound back and had gums that bled every time I brushed my teeth or ate a hard apple. Calorie in calorie out type of thinking. But fuck, no one can excercise that much. Do you know how long you have to run to burn off a bag of chips? A wide ass is the thing now, thanks to that Kim Kardashian lady or whatnot. Except she had to pay money for what comes to me naturally. I’m getting off topic, I know. What did you ask me? “I asked how you lost your hand?” Oh shit, sorry! I can go on. “No worries, and I don’t mean to be rude.” No , actually it’s quite a story. I sliced the bologna, ham and the Swiss on the blade. We had other meats but they, for the most part, stayed in their original packages. Whole sides of prosciutto and marbled roast beef sit in the case like jilted prom dates dressed a little too fancy for their heartbreak. The tastes ran simple around here. But damn bologna is good, right? Sometimes the edges slice too thin for some and they send it back. They say “thin sliced” but that ain’t what they mean. Trust me, I have eaten my share of their cast offs, not that I’m complaining. “I used to eat the‘rind’ of the bologna before making my fried bologna sandwich with ketchup.” So you get it! As you can see, the job has a danger built right in, you get that, but what you get in return is a shit ton of safety procedures and mechanical safeguards that keep you from really being able to do too much damage. Where I’m going with this, is that the blade didn’t cut off my hand. Summers were our busy time being so close to the State Park. Rarely a local came in, just faces I’d never seen but look vaguely familiar. Like one of the regulars had their teeth fixed. We always needed seasonal help. A few years ago, they hired a girl fresh out of high school, Andi, with an i. She was what you might call conventionally pretty; an everyday, everyone can agree on beauty. This generation is so overtly nice, soft though. She couldn’t look me in the eye. Never occurred to me until right this minute she may not have wanted to. Andi had one thing going for her though, she was tiny, I mean diminutive-could-see-daylight-between-the-thighs little. We wound up on the same shift for about a month. Andi on the register, me on the blade. I noticed during this time that the number of conversations I had with folks were dwindling. I’d be slicing up the meat, I’d try to inquire about a day or a destination. Then slowly their eyes would shift to the right, and they would ask Andi a question. “How’s your day, sweetheart?“ or “You from around here?”. While the whole thing felt creepy I still found this incredibly rude. As a human, and not an apparition, disappearing before your own eyes can be soul crushing. Andi would smile, and nod, her eyes a void, pretending to be their best friend. As soon as their back was turned, bam! No smile. Am I right to think this is phony? “That’s customer service I guess.” Either way, it all came to a head when Lars made his weekly delivery. He shouted his greeting, “Hey Joules!” And made his way to the refrigerated cases. He let the load slam down, and looked at the deli/ cashier area and directly at Andi’s phony ass smile. ‘Hey there!’ Suddenly aware of how awkwardly sweaty he was. He took off his baseball cap and wiped his forehead. ‘Lars! Nice to meet you!’ “That’s too bad… I can imagine…” This is how it went, week after week, sometimes the two of them locked into a conversation, like they were the only two people there. Lars would feign including me now and then in their ritualized shared smoke, the one we used to have, but he knew I’d have to say no. Sometimes the customers would stand, arms full of Cheetos and Smart Water, watching Andi and Lars flirt. I’d say from behind the counter, “Sorry, can I help you?” Me, apologizing for them. I felt increasingly inconvenienced and yet somehow an inconvenience myself. The night it happened was one of those really sticky, horse-fly nights where I’d sit around my house after my shift in my underwear, my air conditioner far from adequate, dripping and buzzing in the window. My flesh, where it creased, sweats profusely. Suddenly I could feel the prickle/tickle of tiny beads of sweat with nowhere to go, itching to get out. I’d flipped on the television when I got home, watching some show where even the beautiful people have problems. Then, as if ordered by the devil himself and slipped in between romantic cliffhangers, was an ad for the magic berries some gorgeous older model was hawking. They want you to believe that berries are why, at her age, she looks like she has a painting in her attic aging for her. I shifted slightly to alleviate the discomfort and realized I was alone. I knew I was, don’t get me wrong, but this time it landed inside me with a thud. A heavy car door slam of an ah-ha moment. I hadn't had a single person address me personally, not even Andi, other than to order their meat, all day. I wondered if Andi and Lars were somewhere together, not thinking of me at this very moment. Then the stillness after the explosion. So quiet. Everything from there on out comes to me in flashes and shadows … like a dream you remember in the middle of the day. The can of gasoline, from my shed. The ‘aim-and flame’ from my junk drawer. The turn of my keys in the ignition. My underwear. My thighs sticking to the plastic interior of my car. The Dill. The combination of pity and disgust on Andi’s face when I burst through the door sending the chain of bells over it exploding in different directions, I will never forget. “Pity?” I can imagine how I looked in my overstretched underwear and bra with sweat stains at the arm holes, my hair, a mass of tangles, eyes wild. The fire was quickly out of my control. The heat of the fire and the burning inside my chest were indistinguishable to me. All I could see through the smoke and flames was the cash register where Andi used to stand. She had ducked down behind the register, instead of running. Like I said, this generation is soft. She never got up. When the ceiling fell, shearing my forearm off mid way, I barely noticed. I don’t know how I got out alive. I stumbled out of the building and got in the car. There was little blood. Seems the heat of the cross bar cauterized the arm as it sliced through. The building collapsed in on itself and onto Andi. It was halfway there anyway. And here I am, talking to you. It’s kind of a miracle don’t you think? The Lord works in mysterious ways, I guess. Anyway, enough about me. How would you like your meat sliced? “Thin.” Kellie is the AEIC of Roi Faineant Press. Google her, she’s been around.

woke up new / limbs less / charred & / hot head hot collared / lightning bugs wink / in out / the mountain’s curve / can you stamp / out the cinders / extinguish the spine / can you kill / each light / jimmy the switch the dead / outlet suspended / in danny’s room / whisper honeysuckle / golden tea kettle / a star a clenching / an empty barn / they won’t hear / you unfurl your jaw / unlax the hips / bones snap / under such stress / hairline fracture / hair tousled below fireworks / girls are thumbed / into women / bad lilacs bloom / in heat they wonder / who mothered this / devastation this smoke / whisper arson / begins with an itching / a mount Julia Watson earned her MFA from North Carolina State University. Her works have been published in The Shore, Voicemail Poems, Identity Theory, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, and elsewhere. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina with her grumpy dogs. You can read more of her work at juliawatsonwriter.com.

Still Life with Frying Pan, Fight, and Flower Pot How beautiful it is to break an egg into the waiting pan to repot a plant grown too wild for its housing to see crumbs of soil spilled onto the just-cleaned floor How beautiful it is to see someone walk away in anger and swallow the words that would call them back How beautiful the bright lights that make of the window an opaque slate In the pan the egg yolk whitens like a cataract clouding an eye Outside the window darkness draws close like it wants something On the floor potting soil crunches beneath my socked feet From the next room my partner fumes like a kettle about to boil but in the kitchen I am unappeasing my mouth filled with egg Mr. S after Lydia Davis He wants to be a good manager. So in summer, for example, when he knows his women will swaddle themselves in slacks and sweaters, he slides the thermostat to 60, refusing to relent in his quest for goodness until he sees them shiver with gratitude, arms tucked in thick sleeves, hands like nervous centipedes emerging reluctantly to skate across the keyboard. He wants to be a good manager, especially to L., with whom he cannot make eye contact for more than a moment before he is completely enflamed. He likes her, likes the way her soft body fills sensible office-wear. She sits in view of his window, facing away, and he documents unyieldingly the time she has stolen from him as he stares at the roll of fat peeking out of each cap-sleeve. He wants nothing more than to lay his head in the rising dough softness of her armpit, smell the yeast of her body, warm on the embers of her glands. But good managers do not bake bread with inferiors and he wants, above all, to be good. So he is harsher with her than with the other employees; he asks more, gives less, speaks in short, clipped sentences that hide completely, he thinks, how badly he wants to knead her doughy stomach between his fingers. When he dares to look in her eyes he finds the spark of mirrored longing, and he loves her more for the noble restraint she shows, as he shows it. But then she gossips with the other women, there is talk of a first date, and he is scorched by the sudden realization that other men are not so good. Ignited by this fear he stands over her desk until she says, ‘sir?’ and the two of them live and die in that syllable, because in the moment after he tells her that he loves the smell of yeast, there is no flame of recognition. She is just puzzled, and he can’t hear her response over the roar of burning, loud as bonfire, loud as a pyre. Frances Klein is a poet and teacher writing at the intersection of disability and gender. She is the author of the chapbooks The Best Secret (Bottlecap Press, 2022) and New and Permanent (Blanket Sea 2022). Klein serves as assistant editor of Southern Humanities Review. Readers can find her work at https://kleinpoetryblog.wordpress.com/.

There’s a bovine fly on the screen-door, ripe as a gooseberry and glistening with blood. Mercy ignores the white-noise buzz, cuts the ryebread into slices. It’s scorching outside, the air heavy and parched; it’s barely cooler in the kitchen, wicker fan slowly pushing heat around the room like treacle. Prickles of sweat congregate on Mercy’s hairline, trickle down her back, as she butters the slices and adds ribbons of ham, tomatoes, a slick of mustard. The fly bangs the screen-door rhythmically, trying to tattoo its way into the house. Any minute now, Mercy thinks, I’ll hear the beat of hooves in the distance. She switches on the radio. An old country song is playing, and she hums as she breaks ice into a pitcher of lemonade - citrus tang filling the kitchen, antiseptic and cool. She places pitcher and sandwiches onto a tray and swings the screen door open with her backside. The fly takes its chance and sweeps into the room looking for food. Mercy sits in the porch shade and waits. Any minute now, she thinks, I’ll hear the beat of hooves in the distance, see a dust-cloud rising, rising. She pours herself some lemonade, it’s cloying. . She closes her eyes. It’s been a busy morning; it’s been busy mornings since Mama left and Mercy took over running the house. The truancy officer has visited twice, but Papa is always in the fields and Mercy lays on the floor as his shadow looms outsized on the wall. She thinks him gigantic, threatening, wolfish, a monster. Mercy was glad to leave school, but she’s not glad of her role as Papa’s packhorse. She hopes Kyle might come a-calling, she has plans in that regard. Any minute now, Mercy thinks, the earth will tremble with a timpani of hooves, and the rust-red dust will rise, and the sweet stench of sweat and tobacco will reach her. Her stomach growls and she reaches for a sandwich, chews. Salty ham pops, mustard burns, and her eyes fill. She feels awash today - a flood plain - her body compensating for aridity with sweat and tears, saliva and the blood that came that morning. Mercy is tired, tired of this day and tired of this life. She’d like to kick off her sandals, lie back, ignore the waiting chores. If Kyle comes a-calling she might let him take her all the way to Vegas; a shotgun wedding’s been on her mind for some time. If she’s gonna do chores better to do them for herself, her own man, her own child, than for a Papa as bitter as unripe corn and unappreciative as a goat. The fly pulsates on the screen-door, trying to escape. Switchgrass rifles in a passing breeze, giving momentary comfort; in the distance the boom of a shotgun resounds. Mercy looks for dust, listens for hoofbeats. The scent of creosote fills her nostrils, coats the back of her throat. On the horizon a column of smoke billows upwards. Maria Thomas is a middle-aged, apple-shaped mum of two from London. During daylight hours she works in technical control in financial services, a subject so mind-numbingly dull that she spends the witching hours writing. She has had work published by EllipsisZine, Funny Pearls, The Levatio, Fiery Scribe Review, Paragraph Planet, VirtualZine and Free Flash Fiction. Maria won Retreat West’s April 2022 Micro competition. She can be found on Twitter as @AppleWriter.

vapor-compression constant inside bedroom the hot condensed by water compressed then carried away by water every slight abnormal buzz keeps me up illuminated by glow-in-the-dark skeleton a light when I touch warmth of skin your hair prickled amidst the refrigerant though mostly alone these days it feels barbaric no sleep standing before the bare fridge slowly carving an avocado with a knife to eat anteriorly to the artificial bright with pinch of salt and nothing else the morning gathers clarity made unpalatable sun grows creeping stinging each eyeball and a dream lets go its memory despite hidden exchanges of gas to liquid at night Taylor Devlin is a poet and technology librarian in Boston, MA. She is an English B.A., Creative Writing graduate of the University of Massachusetts Amherst where she served as Senior Poetry Editor for Jabberwocky. Her writing has appeared in KGB Bar Lit.

“Believe it or not,” I say, hoisting the ice chest over my head, “I cannot control the river.” “Yeah, whatever,” Samantha says. “Just get us the fuck out of here.” She stands on the levee in a black and purple bikini, rubbing her arms across her chest. Her eyebrows furrow and her freckles have already darkened in the six hours we’ve spent on the water. Today’s adventures are not gaining me any points as a potential boyfriend. “Why’s it always my fault?” I balance the ice chest on the rocks by her feet. Our 1975 jet boat sways back and forth on the Sacramento River like a tightrope walker testing a rope. The boat glitters like the fool’s gold in the shallows. Every few minutes a jet skier zooms by, shattering the river’s glass surface. If water skiers or fishermen stopped to chat, they would notice that the boat is filling with water from the inside, the river is claiming it as its own. “It’s not always your fault,” Samantha says. “Today it’s your fault because you’re the one who backed over the fucking tow line.” “She’s right,” pipes in a voice from above. “It’s your fucking fault.” Riley, my 11-year-old cousin, balances her feet on two big rocks at the top of the levee. She still wears her canary yellow life jacket strapped over her oversized t-shirt and board shorts. Her nose is bright orange from the Zinc Oxide sunscreen that she smeared all over her face. She looks like Hagar the Horrible. “Ri, don’t cuss,” I say. She is only here because Samantha and I needed an observer to spot us when we tow each other behind the boat. According to California law, observers must be at least 12. We were so desperate to get on the water that I accepted my Aunt Patsy’s babysitting plea on the condition that Riley pretended to be 12. On the car ride over, she recited her new birthday beneath her breath, chanting “January fifteenth nineteen ninety-four January fifteenth nineteen ninety-four.” “Whatever, ” Riley says. She wiggles her hips side to side and sticks out her tongue. “At least I didn’t sink my dad’s boat in front of my girlfriend.” “For the last time,” Samantha says, “we’re not—” “Either of you two feel like helping a guy out?” I open the ice chest and pull out some Tupperwares of carrots and celery sticks. The silence is real as both girls pin their eyes on me. I remove each object from the ice chest and place it on the rocks. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches wrapped in cellophane, sticks of string cheese, strawberry yogurt, Dr. Pepper and bottled water. Beads of sweat trickle down my neck. There’s sunscreen in my eye. “What are you doing?” Samantha swings her weight from one hip to the other in an effect that is alluring and at times dangerous. Now it is the latter. “I’m, uh, taking inventory,” I say. “These could be useful.” “You’re going to fix the boat with Tupperware?” “These things can do everything,” I say. “They keep your food fresh and double as bailing tools.” I pick one up, open the lid and dump the carrots onto the riprap, then walk back into the water to the boat. “You’re pathetic,” Riley calls from her perch. “We’re going to die out here.” Some part of me has already resigned. The August heat weighs on my bare back. The climbing temperature makes me feel like I’ve developed another layer of skin. Birds of prey circle and weave above us, leaving shadowy trails along the levee. “You’d better move, Riley,” I say, “or else those vultures will think you’re dead.” “Whatever, Timothy,” she says. But she does scuttle off the rocks. We’d removed all our towels, skis and wakeboards from the boat the moment we noticed it sinking. They decorate the shoreline now like goods set out for a garage sale. I approach the boat, armed with Tupperwares, and all I see are mismatched ski gloves, bottles of Moose Juice and wadded up bags of chips. The water level inside the boat has risen about a half-inch. I scoop water with the Tupperware and pour it into the river. “You bailing out the boat with Tupperware is a little like George W. Bush cleaning up after Hurricane Katrina with a vacuum,” Samantha says. She blows her bangs out of her eyes. I used to think it was sexy. “It’s working,” I say. “That’s what FEMA said.” There are sweat trails crawling down Samantha’s shoulders. I’d like to follow them with my eyes but know I shouldn’t. “Hey! Look what I can do!” Riley picks up a rock and arches her arm back, flinging it forward. It hits me square in the shoulder blades. “God damnit Riley! If you’re not going to help, could you at least not attack me with rocks?” She reaches into her pocket to reapply sunscreen. Aunt Patsy made me promise to keep her daughter well-protected. With her fair skin and red hair, Riley is at high risk for skin cancer. Because Aunt Patsy is a woman who fuels on fear, it’s never surprised me that the threat of one disease carries over to countless others. According to her mother, Riley could get Lyme disease from ticks, AIDS from an infected toilet seat, diabetes from increased doughnut intake. Aunt Patsy believes science exists to frighten us. How would she respond when she found out that Riley was lost not to disease but to her own cousin, certified EMT and rescue lifeguard? Samantha moves down the rocks to the water. “I’ll help,” she says, emptying out a Tupperware of radishes. “Look, they’re like little red buoys.” The vegetables float on the water. The heat lessens. “Thanks,” I say. I clear my throat whenever I lean over; a nervous habit. There’s something about Samantha Jefferson in a purple bikini with popsicle stains on her stomach that reduces me to funny noises. When she transferred to my school in eighth grade, she made my voice skip octaves. She could braid hair the way some people speed-read. During silent sustained reading, she would prop her book up on her desk with her hairbrush and divide her hair into sections, which she would braid without looking up. Her beckoning fingers made me relax. I wish she would braid her hair now. Our movements are soon interrupted by the mind-numbing thump of bass. A sleek white ski boat is drifting our way, music jiggling the wakeboards strapped to the central pole. A crowd of sunburned teenage boys loom like characters from a Dr. Suess book, long and lean with puffs of bleached hair like human Q-tips. My forehead sweats. “Ooh! Look! A rescue party!” Samantha straightens, places her Tupperware inside the nylon siding of the boat, and pulls her hair back into a ponytail. “Ship’s ahoy!” Riley yells, scrambling down the rocks. She slips, and I wince for the howl of pain that’s sure to follow. Her head bobs as the cries come. “There, there,” I say, hopping up the levee to where she sits, tears streaming through sunscreen. I wish I could see what Samantha is doing. Riley’s knee is bleeding. “My leg’s gonna fall off!” Riley’s back shudders with sobs. “I’m gonna get gangrene and they’re gonna cut it off!” “You’ll be fine,” I say. “One Band-Aid should do it.” I turn around to the pile of goods on the bank, where the first aid kit sits between the ice chest and the umbrella. I get a good, long look at the approaching boat. Four guys, all maybe 16 to18 years old, wiry and tan. I don’t recognize any of them. Thank goodness. Someone turns down the bass and Samantha wanders into the shallows. “Hey boys,” she says. I shiver. “I’m gonna die and it’s all because-a you!” Riley holds her knee between her hands. I return to the bank, straining to hear Samantha’s conversation. “Thank goodness there’s someone out here who can manage a boat!” Samantha says. I should be used to this. I should be comfortable with rejection. This is why I should clarify my feelings sooner, but I never do because I’m a gangly guy with a squeaky voice who has never had a girlfriend because girls who make me doubt what I know make me scared. I like that fear, the shiver in my stomach that makes me realize that I’m not going to rescue every person who jumps in a pool, nor might any girl I fall in love with love me back. I like that shiver because it’s a risk, like waterskiing. “—and then when I got in from the water, Tim started up the boat before I could pull in the line. Sometimes he gets nervous around me.” Am I that obvious? “Are you about done?” Riley has stopped crying and looks annoyed. “Are you paying attention to anything today?” She waves a hand in front of my face. “Can you see my hand?” “Riley, stop,” I say, pushing down her hand. “Of course I can see.” “And then what happened?” A boy with a Neanderthal voice asks. “Well, the rope got stuck in the propeller, so when we cut the engine—” “—water could come in but couldn’t flow out,” Neanderthal says. He sits on the engine cover in his boat surrounded by his cronies. He’s ugly. I hope Samantha thinks so too, but it’s hard to tell. She swings her arms by her sides. “Do you think you can tow us?” she asks, her voice rising. “Sure thing,” Neanderthal says. “Phil here is just getting our fishing knife to cut your line out. Once we get the rope out from under the prop, the water should be able to flow back out.” “If you still have trouble starting,” the boy named Phil pipes in, “we can tie our rope to your bow.” “I’m Tim.” I step into the water and extend my hand. “Thanks for helping us out.” Their boat is a few feet away and so Neanderthal doesn’t attempt to meet my hand. “Lance,” says Neanderthal. “No worries, brah. Happens all the time.” Phil finds his knife and hops out of their boat to swim over. He balances the fishing knife in his teeth while doing the doggy paddle. He’s missing a few front teeth. Wakeboarders. “How lucky we are to find these nice guys!” Samantha grins, wider than she’s ever grinned around me. “Yeah, no kidding,” I say. I wish the sun would hurry up and go down because the heat is smacking me in waves. “You could use some of Riley’s sunscreen,” she says, grabbing me by the nose and giggling. “Need any help?” I ask, turning to Phil, who is nosing around underneath the propeller. He grins. “So, pretty lady, I never caught your name,” Lance says, picking up a can of Bud Light. “I’m Samantha,” she says, smiling into her stomach. “He means me!” Riley rushes into the water, disregarding her bandaged knee. “I’m Riley.” Lance and his friends laugh. The other two guys look like extras from a surf video. One has a full beard and a beer belly and he can’t be more than 18. The other has an arm covered in tattoos. Did one arm beg redecoration or was it hiding some body flaw? If tattoos are meant to hide scars, then I should be getting a big one across my chest any day now. “I’m going under,” Phil says, then dives below the prop. He wrings the rope free from the propeller, but the engine won’t turn over, so Lance and company have to tow us to the dock. Samantha squeezes in between Lance and Phil, braiding her hair as a Bud Light jiggles in her lap. I get stuck with Riley in our gold boat, covered in Zinc Oxide sunscreen, watching the trail of radishes follow us home. Vultures circle and I play dead. Julia’s work is forthcoming or has appeared in Mayday Magazine, Okay Donkey Mag, Cutleaf, West Branch Wired, Oracle Fine Arts Review, Fourteen Hills, California Northern and elsewhere. A graduate of UC Davis' master's in creative writing program and alumna of Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Mendocino Coast Writers Conference and the Tomales Bay Writers Workshops, Julia is the co-founder and publicity director of Play On Words, San Jose's collaborative literary performance series, and a 2021-2023 Lighthouse Book Projecteer.

Peach juice trickles down fingers, to knuckles, to wrists to elbows on a sweltering Northwest Indiana day. The steel in the air suffocates—asthma squeezing can hardly breathe. Aluminum Tupperware tumblers’ sugar cracks teeth in ice tea. Even The Magician’s Nephew cannot distract— Mustache of sweat, the Lake with its diapers full of shit two miles away, and the library the same distance. Best to lie here—try not to move. We could ride our bikes, but Hector at the end of the cul-de-sac has air conditioning, a huge television, MTV and a penchant for taking us all in. You do not ask questions when the sweat finally dries in itchy, ropy strings and the cucumber sandwiches with cream cheese, cool as a swimming pool, make you feel safe for now.

I tasted summer on her lips. Cotton candy, chapstick, cherry Coke with rum. Her hands met the shorelines of my hips and I was done for. I would let Juliet crash into me any day, any night, whenever she liked. The flashing lights of Coney Island had never seemed more romantic, despite all of the cacophony that swallowed our words whole. “Kiss me?” I asked, and her enthusiastic “Of course” was nearly devoured by the overenthused screams from the coaster. –Beautiful, I heard her say amidst it all. My heart thrummed in my chest. Grew three sizes too big and could barely stay inside of me. Maybe it bled out in my smile, wide enough to make my cheeks hurt. Our hands grew too clammy and sweaty to hold onto one another, but we did not let go. Her thumb brushed my knuckles with a tenderness I’d not known in years. For a moment, my eyes averted downwards to this holy union of touch and I silently marveled at it. “Are you okay?” she asked, her voice resonant like a song blaring through an old radio. “Huh?” I looked back up. She caught me right under her thumb. Deep woodland eyes stared back and saw the sky in me somehow. My heart skipped a beat, and that shit never happened. Not ever. “Yeah. Yeah. I’m great. Never been better.” She arched her sharp brows upward and didn’t take a single moment to look away. “Arabelle.” She scrunched her nose – and my eyes wandered there too, over the full and slightly crooked slope of her nose. It was begging to be kissed. “Juliet.” The three syllables of her name slipped off my tongue like it was the only thing I knew how to say anymore. “You’re thinking a lot, aren’t you.” It wasn’t a question, not in that tone of hers. Conviction was her second language. I exhaled slowly and gently swung our hands back and forth. “Yeah.” I was too aware of how my heart still raced. Of how the sweat beaded along the crown of my forehead. Of how this wouldn’t last. “What gave it away?” Her features softened. She squeezed my hand and began to lead me away from the crowd, and out onto the sand. “You get this look in your eyes. Like – I know you’re here, but you’re also a million miles away. Sorta glazes over.” She paused, however, and shook her head. “It’s not a bad thing, by the way. I’m just nosy. If you don’t wanna tell me though, don’t worry about it.” I almost didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t sure of the last time someone bothered to give me space for myself. Not to mention, this was the last person on Earth I wanted to leave me alone. The sun could have been closing in on us right there and then, hurtling towards the planet, and I still would have wanted to hold her hand. The tears that burned at the corners of my eyes were warm too. “No. It’s okay. Just – sometimes it feels like you aren’t real. Like none of this is – or will stay – real,” I admitted quietly, almost hoping she wouldn’t hear. She did, though. I knew that because she closed in again and pressed her lips to the curve of my cheek. Her arm gently wrapped around my waist. “Do you wanna talk about why, or –?” “Not now.” I frowned as Juliet frowned, but she nodded back anyway. “Not yet. I wanna pretend for a little longer like I’ve got my shit together.” Her fingertips fidgeted with the linen of my dress. She opened her mouth, like she wanted to say something, but then it shut. She tucked her head into the curve of my shoulder instead and pressed a kiss into my throat. My eyes shut. A small, private smile appeared on the curves of my lips. Moments went by before I finally opened my eyes, and before she spoke up. “It’s too fucking hot still,” she admitted, a dry laugh trailing off of her words. “Yeah.” I smiled up into the night. I looked out into the night sky, and wondered if any of those were actually stars, or just friendly satellites. “It’s disgusting.” Summer would end but the skies would stay the same. The world continued to burn and melt away, but – she stayed. E.M. Lark is a writer/book reviewer/frequenter of overpriced theatre, currently based in NYC. Reviews found in Defunkt Magazine, words found in Roi Fainéant Press, oranges journal. Follow them at @thelarkcalls for regular shenanigans.

Esther was beginning to see what had happened. What had happened to the day; what had happened to the sun outside on the rooftop deck beyond her picture window, where the cats crept along from the neighboring roofs to forage for stray baby pigeons; what, in short, had happened to her life. First, there was the day. She’d risen at dawn, to a bright but anemically pale sunshine coming in from the right side, where the northern kitchen windows caught a hint of reflections from the eastern side. She’d have been in the full eastern light if she’d been in her bedroom at the back, but she’d once again slept in dismal comfort on her large bed-sized divan in the living room just inside the picture window area, a habit which was becoming more and more frequent. It made her feel young again, younger anyway, as if in memory of the days spent with Rodney and the nights spent swilling and swiving to his odd musical choices. His divan had been half-collapsed in upon itself by the time they parted ways, but no one could say a rollicking good time had not been had on it by all, meaning the two of them. He hadn’t cared. He slept in a hammock hung up from two rafter beams in his loft apartment most of the time when alone, anyway. In passing, she wondered if he still did, or if he was now fucking someone vigorously in the hammock, with somewhat the same results. But the day had been “good enough for government work” (as a friend of hers had used to say, that meant a “C+” effort). Up until the pale sunshine bolloxed itself all up into a half-convincing windstorm that scuttled summer clouds in dark slate and puffy gray across the sky, and she’d had to close the kitchen window and the picture window because it got simply too cold for June, as cold as April when April didn’t know it wasn’t still March. And that’s what had happened to the day and the sun, interconnected as they were. Now her life, that had been a haphazard occurrence, or series of occurrences, too, which had scooted across her inner vision like the clouds. She now saw as she huddled into her gray woolen raggy sweater that those clouds were dropping huge, fat, summer raindrops on the deck, insisting that she notice that they weren’t the spring ones of hit-and-miss she’d been used to, but a preparation for a thunderstorm, cold though it was: thunderstorms were only supposed to come along when the temperature rose. That was global warming for you, a masterly illogic where things had previously happened in set ways. And her life, too, was beleaguered with melting polar ice caps and rising sea levels and dying coral reefs and scarce species of feelings she’d always had comfortably before without thinking about them. What had happened, for example, to her affection for long evening walks with her friend Beth Ann? Beth Ann had always been a hoot and a holler to talk to, a person who laughed easily and joked readily, and when Esther was in-between men, they’d spent a lot of time together. Beth Ann, too, had commitments in the shape of a younger husband who was starting a company and a recently adopted teenager who, though being amazingly free of the problems and complexes that Beth Ann had anticipated his having due to his early life, was going through the trials of an advanced placement program to graduate college in two years, before he was seventeen. But even that had not kept Beth Ann from her generous support and easily shared joy. Yet now, Esther was disinclined to continue the walks, with or without Beth Ann: she felt somehow that the friendship had run its course. It seemed unhealthy to be sprouting blooms that were brown in the bud, dying as soon as they were open. And she didn’t feel like pretending to enjoy nature alone, as she was for years now away from natural things, cooped up in city apartments and making do with potted plants and window boxes. It was too much of an effort to re-engage a natural human capacity for appreciation of her Mother Earth. She found herself even sneering silently at the name, as if it were a misnomer of gigantic proportion. Secondly, she felt no urge to contact her anxious family, who called at least once a week but whose inquiries she gave short shrift to. Finally, two weeks back when she was in a surly mood and she answered the phone to her brother David, he asked with interest when she might be coming home again, home to the small town two counties away where he still lived, in a house on one side of their parents and across the street from her sister, Rose. “Probably never,” she answered, curt. “What’s wrong, Esther? What do you mean? We haven’t seen you for two years now. Not for a holiday or anything.” When she responded with silence, even the gentle David became irritable. “Mom and Dad aren’t getting any younger, you know.” She had said, finally, “I’m well; you’re obviously well, or you would’ve said. If anyone else there is ill, there’s no point in calling me, I can’t do anything about it. See you in the funny papers; tell Dad I said that: he always used to say that; it’ll give him a crazy thrill and keep him off your back with complaints about me. Got to go now.” And she’d hung up. There was the point, she thought a bit melodramatically to herself, she was dying not from a leaf or branch, but from the root. That self-serving piteous idea had crossed her mind the last time she’d headed her marigolds, two weeks ago, when she saw they weren’t looking well. But heading them was all she knew how to do by way of repair, and she didn’t have the energy, these days, to call the garden center or go by on a sprightly outing, as if she were someone who cared a damn, to see what to do with them. She was dying from the root herself, like the marigolds, like the pigeons (whose eggs had been too thin-shelled to store their young lately, as she saw when she looked up into one of the nests the cats hadn’t managed to get into, up on one of the chimney blocks by her southern wall). Even the cats themselves, though they still prowled with energy and groomed themselves with handsome abandon in the sun outside on her deck, looked mangy and skinny and frail and old when you tried to lure any of them close to pat or feed; they were wary, it seemed, from being already shat upon by nature, who’d produced them in such overwrought and copious numbers in a desperate bid to keep at least one species alive. They fought both for and against their own survival, only agreeing to eat what she left out for them where they roamed in all weathers and wilds. She still did leave bowls of wet food and dried food out, even took the trouble to buy it specially, because they were the one living kind she felt any responsibility towards; she’d started feeding them, and they cried when they were hungry, thin, wheedling cries like their persons, so she fed them, she told herself, to get some peace, some quiet, from her own inner howlings. The one thing she couldn’t do was assign a beginning or a cause to this disease of her life, knowing neither correlative nor causative data for sure. Prodding herself made her sore, so she just maintained a certain equilibrium, as she thought of it, though she wondered if her friend the scientist, who’d made the remark about things being government work and mediocre, would instead accuse her of fostering entropy. But one day there came a time, an hour, when instead of feeling the same nothing she’d felt for months now, she felt passion, a passionate intensity of grief and sorrow and ill-doing such that she could only decide to look deeper inside herself for the answer, an answer, any answer. It was of a sudden too painful not to. First, she gingerly probed the notion of whether she needed some sort of help; dutifully for her, since she hadn’t done anything productive other than go to her office job and make necessary trips to grocery stores and supply shops when forced to by necessity, she roamed the Internet. First, she read up on clinical depression, then deciding that the symptoms that the self-help sites and online clinicians’ offerings mentioned didn’t fit the case, as she’d never had this problem before, she deserted that option. Next, she resorted to some of the philosophers whom she’d studied in school when she was an undergraduate, but whereas the psychological help had been too specific and precise and didn’t fit, the philosophers were too vague and huge and didn’t fit. She was about to call a halt to her search, when a certain disharmony attracted her attention, annoying her and saying something important to her, somehow, at the same time. A bird outside somewhere, one in distress, was shrieking out of all rhythm and time to a piece of music playing on her old-style alarm radio, which she’d simply left on hours before while she worked, as it was a Saturday and there was no place to be. The bird and the music were just oddly enough close in pitch and yet off in tempo, in rhythm, to be disturbing. She swore and got up to turn off the rhythmic contortions of the music, but as her hand switched the dial off, an abrupt memory of a genesis flooded into her brain: she’d started feeling this way one day when she and Rodney had been near the end of their relationship, and he had suggested they screw to Pachelbel’s “Canon.” Yes, that was it! That was when what had started out as a discomfort and ended with this moment of pain-filled revelation had begun. Now, why? She asked herself. True, she had never liked the piece, found it simply goopier and soppier than cotton candy or strawberry soda, disgustingly sweet and sentimental. She’d tried to laugh it off at the time, but Rodney had kept insisting, so against her inclinations, she’d agreed. She was more biddable then, she told herself, when things still hadn’t gone on the skids. And the result had been much as the screeching bird and the recorded music she’d just heard, not Pachelbel’s melody this time, but it made no difference: the disharmony of rhythm and timing was related, was the same. They’d neither been pleased with the results, but whereas Rodney kept trying to be soothing and wanted to say something else, as he insisted, she had been full of scorn for the experience and had cut him off and left soon after. He was miffed, and their relationship didn’t last much longer; as a matter of fact, they’d never made love after that day. Now she wondered again, why did that bother her so that months later, she was worrying about whether she had a serious depression? She considered again her experience of the piece. The interior pain became a little sharper, warning, threatening what would happen if she kept probing. She ignored it. What was so strongly associated with the music for her that it produced this reaction? Well, all she really knew about it was that it appeared in a great many movies and real-life situations alike in wedding and engagement scenes. But why should that matter to her? She and Rodney hadn’t been the types to marry each other. Had they? She thought again. Rodney had been urgent about the music, certainly. And he was a bit immature and conventional at the oddest moments, in spite of his offbeat lifestyle. He had tried to tell her something very important to him, clearly, after the sex had failed, had even restarted the piece of music and put it on repeated play, and taken her hand, and started to talk again. That had been when she’d reached her limit, because Rodney was not a gifted talker. She’d been afraid of being so bored with him that she couldn’t tolerate him anymore; the sex had been pretty good so far; and so, she’d bailed on him before he could produce the expected ennui. Evidently, as she had seen, the desertion had seemed plenty big enough of a reason to Rodney to end the relationship. Clear now on something she’d never bothered to process before, as clear as the sky was once again outside the picture window, in these now blistering days of June heat that had finally come and seemed ready to scorch the earth with the sun’s unrelenting beams, Esther felt a hint of remorse. She knew that tears weren’t far off, but it wasn’t because she wanted, too late, to marry Rodney, or even that she was missing him, or felt sorry for his mediocrity, which she did now as never before. She only regretted the waste, the human experience of having wasted emotion and passion and sexual freedom, for the two of them. They had lacked their own wise counsel, and neither would have considered the opinions of others to be important, going their own ways, doing what they thought they pleased, accountable to no one. Rodney by now, of course, might have found someone who for all she knew could move in correct timely motion to that stupid piece of music, as she once again blamed the messenger for the message, but she was alone. And who knew, after all, but that in another time and place, one not cursed with a world dying bit by bit around it, they might have been together happily, herself the wiser partner, Rodney bowing over course of time to her ideas, as couples had often worked things out in other days? There was so little time left for saving things, so little time left for the earth, for living, no matter how old a person you were, so slim a chance to find happiness or even contentment. She heard a triumphant wail outside; a cat had caught the bird, had put it out of its sad shrieking melody. And she thought of herself, and her own life. It was time, she thought, to head to the garden store with a cutting from the marigolds. To call her brother back? To make a trip home? No, she thought, I’ll start with the marigolds. Beginners at humanity and gardening need firm support. And who would feed my cats? Maybe, she thought, my family could come and see me. It’s worth asking; after all, I’m not asking them to listen to Pachelbel’s “Canon.” Victoria Leigh Bennett, (she/her). Living Greater Boston, MA, born WV. Ph.D. Website: creative-shadows.com. "Come for the shadows, stay for the read." Print publications: "Poems from the Northeast," 2021; "Scenes de la Vie Americaine (en Paris)," 2022. Between August 2021-June 2022, Victoria will have been published at least 19 times, with another to come in September 2022. Publishers include: Olympia Publishers, Roi Faineant Literary Press, The Alien Buddha Press, The Madrigal Press, Discretionary Love, Winning Writers, Cult of Clio. Current WIP: 9th Novel/Poetry/CNF/Fiction. Twitter: @vicklbennett. Victoria is a member of the disabled community.

For Lyuba Yakimchuk In a vast bomb shelter, hundreds of citizens cup candles. The soft light gives a warm hue to the coldness, and the girl scribbles in her notebook, trying to distract herself from the current images around her with a pleasant one from last month: A bike ride down a hill near her church, a steep one, where she cranked the pedals until her legs were rubber and the tires bounced, causing the chain to jingle against the frame. She sped into an overgrown patch of weeds, mostly wild brush, where dried twigs jammed and dinged in the spokes of her wheels. Then she slammed the brakes and watched a little cloud of dirt rise and sweep over her, the dust sparkling with bits of dandelion seed heads. She made a wish. She tries to capture this moment in a little poem, one that was assigned for class last week, the last day of school before the invasion. She thinks it is silly to write a poem while bombs strike the old brick in her village. She thinks it is stupid to think of another word for “green” when bodies in her neighboring town are being carried out on stretchers as air raid sirens howl. She thinks she is dumb for trying to write a cute poem during a war. But, as another bomb is dropped and the shelter shakes again, she drops her pen, and her father wraps her hard before reaching down to pick it up. He passes it back to her. He gives her his candle, too. He asks her if she has enough light to keep going.

Tom says there is an old man named Scotty and that Scotty has seen the Devil. Tom tells this to the new hire. You ask him, Tom says, and he’ll tell you. Scotty has been sitting in the same pub every second Friday for ten years now. He retired, but he kept to the rhythm of his workplace and attended the informal after-work socials common to the drones that filled the cubicles. He’d be there before any of the unretired arrived, and when they came in, he’d have a sit and a chat and watch the same sports highlights they watched. The company of individuals of similar circumstances, without the circumstances, is a balm to the soul. When Tom and the others including the new hire get to the pub there’s Scotty. He wears the jacket with the logo of his favorite team, like he always does, and he has already ordered. Tell us Scotty, Tom says, tells us about the time you saw the Devil. Scotty waves his hand. Not again, he says, that’s an old story and you’ve all heard it before. For the new hire, Tom asked. One more time. Have you really seen the Devil; the new hire asks? Yes, Scotty says. Yes, I have. Right here in the Heart and Garter, on a Friday night long before the sun went down. You see, we used to have a woman working with the company named Sandra. Sandra’s husband had left her and she hated him. When I say that she hated him, it was Hate with a capital “H”, white hot and enduring - and she’d tell you about it. She had few other topics of conversation. She had a son too, but the boy had, at some time, chosen to live with his father. We’d talk about work but she’d turn the conversation to her ex-husband. We’d talk about sports and she’d bring up the former spouse. We’d talk about elections - she’d curse the memory of a man none of us had ever met. It was, in a word, tiresome. I just want to sit in here in my jacket and watch the boys on TV, see if they can win the division again. I want to drink my shandy. I want to relax. But Sandra had an agenda, or, more accurately, an agenda had her. The new hire nodded and asked: But what does that to do with the actual Satan? Scotty continued: One time a woman from Human Resources came with us. Her name was Candace. She was a quiet, dignified woman. She had not come before, and hasn’t been here since. She actually left the company shortly thereafter, but there is no story there, only here. She came because I’d mentioned to her that the Heart and Garter was a place where you could get a proper shandy – that’s what I drink – and she wanted to try one, so she came along with some others and of course, Sandra. We ordered our shandies, the others ordered their whatever’s. Immediately, as was her practice, Sandra raised her glass and toasted her own anger. The son-of-a-bitch is still alive, she said, here’s to nothing, and she tossed back her vodka and Coke. Candace said nothing. Sandra turned to Candice and asked in order her if she knew anything about fibromyalgia, then chronic fatigue syndrome, then something called Lyme. Candace demurred to all. I am not sure if she even tried her shandy, but she made her goodbyes shortly and left without finishing it. (She probably tried it, Tom interjected, they are bloody awful – terrible, even – and I don’t know how anyone can drink them,) but Scotty continued on his own: Time passed; Candace was gone. Sandra changed her name to Sandrine, or at least told everyone to start calling her that, and began to … descend, if I can use that word. Yes, descend. De-evolve. She shrank. She became small, and less than she could be, less than she should be. She was dying I thought, of vodka and Coke, anti-anxiety medications, and of sitting alone and thinking too much. She continued to toast to the hated – and apparently living only out of his spite for her - ex-husband. She showed us pictures of a grandchild. She spoke of resenting her son, who was now far away. I can only imagine what Sandra (now Sandrine) was like to live with. Unspoken at the table was the sense that the Chinese water-torture of her complaints, the endless drip-drip-drip of her bitchery, had driven those men off. I can’t actually remember a single specific complaint she had against this unknown man. I thought of her complaints – all of them - as generic. I seem to remember that she once said he chewed noisily, or that he had a child’s handwriting. One or the other or both or neither, I cannot remember the specifics but I marvel that there were so many. I am sure my wife had some of the same complaints, all wives even - men are men after all, and women, women - but they were forgotten as soon as they were uttered, and did not possess my wife in the way that Sandra (Sandrine) had been possessed. Then one day, she and I alone of the every-second-Friday-crew were here, I with my shandy, she with her vodka and Coke. She raised her glass, I demurred. I will not toast to that I told her, give it a rest. The boys – my team, I mean – were doing well. They had a chance at winning the division. I didn’t want to sit there while some woman rehashed old miseries the provenance of which I could never know, even had I cared to find out. She rolled her eyes at me and went up to the bar and then, the Devil. How do you know he was the Devil, the new hire asked? Scotty ignored the boy and continued: The Devil came in and sat at Sandrine’s elbow. To be sure, I did not know at first that she – for the Devil is a She – was the Devil. But from her entry I knew something of the infernal was in the room. The woman looked in no small way like our few-year’s-gone Human Resources director Candace, but more so a more perfect rendition of Candace. Candace was tall, this woman an inch taller. Candace had ruddy hair then just begun turning to grey, no longer than the base of her neck, while this woman’s hair was a cascade of red-blond like honey and cinnamon that flowed down her shoulders. Her eyes too – I have to speak of her eyes. Candace, as I remember, had green eyes turning to brown, a hazel really – this woman’s eyes were green turning to yellow, the light of the sun seen from the bottom of a well. They were marvelous. They were frightening. Maybe it was Candace, the new hire said. No, Scotty said, this woman was a more perfect rendition of Candace, but not Candace. She was to Candace what tigers are to housecats, or eagles to sparrows, each of the former the more perfectly idealized version of the latter. She was mythic, and so, Satan. She sat with Sandrine a while and they spoke intently, heads together. They possessed a familiarity I would have thought born of relationship, and I assumed that they knew one another. I imagine that when the Devil comes to men, she comes in some way particular to their interests, and brings other things with her, but when the Devil came to Sandrine she came as a sympathetic ear and a kindred soul - a Mother, a sister, a daughter - a friend. Sandrine spoke to her new confidante, and the Devil listened. Sandrine ranted and the Devil held her peace, Sandrine cried and the Devil gave her a shoulder. When Sandrine was done crying the Devil spoke to her, softly and at some length, and then gave her something in a manila envelope. Sandrine looked very far away at that moment, like a woman who had lost her sense of location amid the fury of her own thoughts. The Devil walked out, passing just by me and my shandy. She stopped briefly and looked at me sitting there with my drink and told me that she had always wanted to try one, but hadn’t had time yet. Maybe someday, she said, then she was gone. Was there no scythe, the new hire asked? No stench of sulfur? Well no, Scotty said, of course not. The Devil is not Death. The Devil comes not to harvest but to gather. It should go without saying. At any rate, the Devil walked out and left me there with my shandy and my hopes for a division title for my team. Sandrine came back with her envelope and sat down. I asked her about the contents of course, and she opened the envelope and shook out a newspaper clipping – an obituary in fact. It was her ex-husband’s obituary, and although not long it spoke well of him in the way that obituaries do and was gracious about his good character as a son and husband - he’d remarried evidently - and as a father and grandfather. I shrugged and told Sandrine that it appeared that she’d got what she wanted after all, but that surely this was unfortunate for her son and grandchild no? Look again, she told me. Look at the date. She pointed to it with a shaking finger. I looked and the date was over six years into the future. I stammered and harrumphed. There must be some kind of mistake, I said. A typo. Maybe, she said, but most likely not. She took the obituary and put it back in the envelope. She left the bar and I was alone there with my shandy. A strange gift. the new hire said, and as you might say, impossible to provenance. Did you keep a copy? What of Sandra (Sandrine) today? Sandrine died within the year, Scotty said. She died of pancreatic cancer. It works fast. I believe the seed of it was in her well before the Devil came. I believe the Devil came with news both good and bad. The Devil spoke of the bad first, to tell her that she’d be dead before her husband, but hold on there, Sandrine, here’s the good news: he dies too. Here’s what you asked for. Read it, it is all there. I think back on the scene now, Sandrine and the Devil up at the bar, Sandrine railing and crying, and I wonder if she cried only for herself or if maybe she cried, even little, for him. I doubt it. At any rate, I have seen the Devil, she is very near to six feet tall, has hair of fire, and eyes the green of a sacrificial well. The obituary, the new hire said, would there be any way to find it? You can look it up, Scotty said. I know the man’s name. So yes, he died at the appointed hour, years after she passed. Of this I am sure. If you mean the obituary, the Devil’s gift to Sandrine, of that I can’t say where it might be. Sandrine was cremated, so maybe it was consigned to the crematoria fire with her. But I think not. I think more likely her son, who came out to sort through her estate and her papers such as they were, shredded it without even scanning it. Of what use is a gift of the Devil to anyone other than the one who prays for it? Especially if it’s someone else’s obituary. If you must pray to the Devil, pray for money, like everyone else. Living well is the best revenge as they say. Prescience is not worth as much - at least that kind of prescience. But I have seen the Devil, in particular circumstances, and she is exactly as I tell you she is. A word from the author: If you must pray to the Devil, pray for money, like everyone else.

Gwen picked up the levee trail behind the high school after the early morning rain stopped. She hadn’t put in contacts in the rush to beat the next storm that hovered over the hills in the distance, so everything looked slightly out of focus. She should have grabbed her glasses, but if her 2-year-old daughter saw her, she knew it would cause an inevitable delay. So she ran out the door and out of the cul-de-sac with her vision impaired. She knew the route by heart from her cross country days, when she would follow teammates mid-pack out the back of the campus near the football field up onto the then-newly paved levee. Like she had done at 15, she ran down the steep hill at Miller Avenue. The backside of the park used to be a mess of bamboo, wild reeds and grasses that grew up to her knees. Now part of it had manicured grass for a baseball diamond and soccer field, and the swaths of dirt were cut through with a circuit of cement bike paths. The weather was warm that morning, unlike the frosted days of the week before. High 40s— comparatively warm, anyway. The air smelled of wet compost, not the diseased decomposing scent one might expect, but an earthy, rich odor of transformation. Gwen looked up toward the white-washed boards of a horse corral in the distance. The mounted police unit used it for training exercises, but never so early in the morning. She lost her footing on some brush across the walkway when she noticed someone on a white horse in the distance. She swiped the debris from the path and squinted at the figure. She made out the silhouette of someone with shoulder-length hair and a silver or gray top. She moved past them, keeping to her pace and route. As she rounded the corner back to her house, the first heavy drops of rain hit against her shoulders. She rushed upstairs to insert her contacts and shower, kissed her daughter Maddy and husband Tony goodbye, and headed out the garage door for work. She rummaged through her purse with one hand in search of her key fob while she juggled a laptop case, a plastic grocery bag repurposed as a sack lunch, and a refillable water bottle. As she clicked the trunk open, she looked up and saw the white horse at the edge of the cul-de-sac. Gwen couldn’t be sure it was the same horse or the same person she had seen before. She saw a man now, with brown hair that fell to his shoulders and a jaw that jutted out toward the Stop sign at the end of the block. He wore dark leather pants and a burgundy tunic with what looked like chain mail around his neck and shoulders. Gwen thought perhaps he was headed to the high school for a history lesson. She waved as she drove off in her SUV. The next morning, the man on the horse was there again as she rushed to her car, perpetually in a state of lateness. But this time he approached her. “Maiden, please join me on my steed and I shall whisk you away from this monstrosity,” the man said in an English accent as he held a sword in the direction of her car. Gwen laughed and wondered if she’d missed an announcement of a Renaissance Faire in town. “I’m quite alright,” she said. “What are you? Into cosplay?” The man gave her a quizzical look and lowered himself from the horse. “What is ‘cosplay?’ I’m here to rescue you, Guinevere,” he said. “I found your letter and I’ve been searching for you for years. I apologize for the delay.” “Okay, enough shenanigans,” she said. “I’m late for work. And I don’t need to be rescued.” Gwen threw her laptop bag into the passenger seat and started the car. She watched the man from the rearview mirror as she connected her phone to the Bluetooth. She waved as she exited the cul-de-sac. At the end of the day, Gwen collected her daughter Maddy from daycare and they played a silly song called “We are the Dinosaurs” when they got home. Maddy stomped around the dining room table, her torso bent forward in velociraptor form, while Gwen cooked. Tony came in just before bedtime and whisked Maddy up into his arms, and nuzzled his nose against hers. The toddler giggled and shouted, “Maddy daddy tickles.” Gwen cleared away the plates and leaned in to kiss Tony. “Hey, have you seen someone on a white horse around the neighborhood lately?” she asked. “A white horse?” Tony said. “Around here? What do you mean?” “Nothing.” Gwen lifted Maddy from his arms to carry her upstairs. After the bedtime routine that seemed to grow longer every night, Gwen sprawled out on top of the comforter of her own bed, to have a moment of quiet to herself. When she went back downstairs, Tony had changed out of his suit into basketball shorts and a t-shirt. He had on a similar outfit when they first met at a boot camp class when she was 26. The other men in class couldn’t take their eyes off the platinum blonde, bronzed instructor who had a perfectly sculpted body, but Tony had his eyes scrunched closed for most of the class as he lunged around the room, his white calves flexing. That’s how he bumped into Gwen and almost knocked her into a treadmill. He apologized and pulled his face into exaggerated exhaustion as they neared the end of a set. “Sorry for knocking you around. Let me make it up to you. How about a shot of wheatgrass?” he said. And when she realized he was joking, she had let him take her for coffee. Sometimes it hardly seemed possible they had been together 10 years. “How was work?” Tony asked as she sat down with him on the couch. “Okay,” she said. “There’s some talk about another round of layoffs on the horizon. Sometimes I wish I could be next. I don’t know what’s more stressful—being unemployed or being left behind to take on all the extra projects?” Her husband turned away from the TV. “Being unemployed, definitely,” he said. “Want to watch something together?” Gwen shook her head and went back upstairs to read alone. The layoffs came the next week and Gwen’s boss gave her three more projects to manage. “You’ve done such a great job in the last quarter, I know you’ll be up to the challenge of adding to your portfolio,” he said. Gwen looked out the window of the skyscraper she stood in, out toward the eastern foothills. “And will this extra work come with extra compensation?” she said. “Come on, Gwen, we just had to lay people off. If we get our earnings up, maybe we can reevaluate in six months.” “Okay, but I can’t do the overtime anymore. I have a kid now, and a commute.” “Don’t make me think I made a mistake keeping you on. You’ve always been a team player.” Gwen walked away, toward the elevator instead of her cubicle. Her eyes stung and she didn’t want the tears to erupt in the office. She texted Tony to ask if he was free to chat, but he didn’t respond. She walked out of the office and midday sun bathed the Plaza de Cesar Chavez. She sat on a bench near the fountain and lowered her head into her hands with a deep sigh. As she lifted her head, she was startled to see the man on the white horse again, even more out of place in the city than in her cul-de-sac. “Guinevere, please don’t weep.” “What are you doing here? Are you stalking me? Leave me the hell alone.” Despite her harsh words, Gwen stayed seated on the bench as the man dismounted the horse. “Guinevere, please, pause for a moment to listen to me.” He held his hand out with a crumpled piece of paper. “A letter, to prove I am here at your behest.” “It’s Gwen,” she said as she took the letter. She unfolded a crumpled piece of pink paper, faded Lisa Frank lined rainbow heart stationary that almost made the looping purple ink impossible to read. The note held a faint scent of candy apple body spray. October 10, 1990 Dear Lancelot, I wish you were real and you could come here, and take me away from everything. I hate everything about my life. I thought Jay liked me, but now he’s going to the harvest festival with Cati who is perfect and blond and skinny. She’s like a princess and I’m not. My best friend says maybe Jay doesn’t really like her because he’s always sitting next to me in math class, but I know it’s because he’s just not good at math and I am. I wish for once I could be pretty instead of smart. Then someone would like me and my life wouldn’t be so miserable. Sincerely, Guinevere “Gwen” Alexandra Garcia Her name hadn’t been Garcia for almost eight years and her handwriting hadn’t looked like that since she was 12, when she wrote in cursive every day in paper notes to her friends. Gwen didn’t recall writing this particular letter, but she remembered Jay. Her first crush in middle school, he had blond hair, sleepy eyes, and rosy cheeks. He wasn’t particularly cute, but he had been nice to her, and back then that was all it took for her to fall in love. Back then, when she was round with pimples across her cheeks and greasy hair, and a deep-seated belief she would always be unlovable. She had never told her friends she thought the only reason Jay was nice was because he wanted help in math class. She’d kept that in for this imaginary correspondence with Lancelot. Jay had moved away at the end of middle school to a town in the valley and she hadn’t thought of him after. She handed the letter back to the man. “I wrote this a long time ago,” she said. “I don’t need to be rescued anymore.” Lancelot folded the letter and placed it into a leather satchel that sat across the horse’s flank. “I will be here for you when you are ready, Guinevere.” He rode up the plaza and disappeared from sight behind the Tech Museum building. *** On a night when Tony put Maddy to bed, Gwen headed out the side gate dressed in a loose pair of sweatpants, flip flops, and a tank top. She dragged the full blue recycle cart down the driveway to the curb in the last light of the day. Lancelot, or Lance as Gwen had started thinking of him, stood next to the Mexican lavender bushes. She had stopped being surprised when he turned up. He didn’t have the horse with him that night. “A beautiful maiden such as yourself should not be doing such an undistinguished chore,” he said. “Let me do this for you.” Gwen shook her head no, but Lance rushed ahead, his chain mail clanking in the evening air. He grabbed the gray garbage cart and wheeled it out to the street, his long, dark hair whipping behind him in a sudden gust of wind. “If you depart with me tonight, we will have an entire court to manage these mundane activities.” She did hate taking out the trash, but she didn’t say that to Lance. It just happened to coincide with one of the weeknights Tony could be home early enough to put Maddy to bed so it became her job. “Right, and no indoor plumbing.” She smiled up at Lance’s earnest face. “I don’t mind this. It’s a small thing.” “If you will not come away with me, then I am sworn to stay and protect you.” Gwen became used to Lance showing up in random places. He turned up on a Monday night at the grocery store, his dated attire replaced with a pair of dark wash jeans and a button-down shirt in a pale shade of green. “Guinevere, we could have gourmet meals prepared for us daily, if you come away with me.” “I like to cook.” Gwen did like to cook, but she hated grocery shopping. “Give me half your list,” Lance said. “I will fetch the game and cheese to help you out of here sooner.” “Don’t you have a dragon to slay or something?” “I am sworn to protect you, Guinevere.” “I don’t need protecting, though. My life is fine.” Lance walked her out to the car in the dark and loaded the groceries into the back of the SUV. “Thank you,” she said. He took her hand and kissed it before he turned to go. *** In late winter, Gwen got up early one day and left before the sun was up. As she approached the levee, she spotted a man in a green jacket with blue running shoes, short hair tucked under a beanie. The man jogged in place at the head of the trail and as Gwen switched from her warm-up walk to a run, she recognized him. Lance, with his hair cut short and workout clothes on his lanky frame. “Don’t you worry about being out alone in the dark?” he said in his posh accent. “No. I don’t. Women shouldn’t have to limit their lives to daylight hours in crowds.” But when she went out alone at first light, her eyes darted across the landscape until the sun brightened the park. On dark mornings she ran at a slower than optimal speed in case someone approached and she needed to sprint away. Once when the park was near empty and dim across the plateau, a man in a torn jacket had approached her. She changed directions and he changed with her, cutting across wet grass. Gwen picked up her pace and tried to discreetly glance over her shoulder to gauge his distance. Her heart raced that morning and she’d sped toward a couple walking a dog in the far distance. But now, this morning, she had Lance next to her and her heart rate went up just because of the cardio. They ran to the end of her three-mile route and she told him about running cross-country in high school. “It was the only sport I was ever any good at,” she said. “Running away from things.” “Or perhaps you were running toward something,” he said. Before she turned the corner to her cul-de-sac, he touched her hand. A light sweat made the golden hairs on his wrist glisten. He pulled her hand up to his rosy lips and kissed it like he’d done once before. She pulled her hand away. “Don’t,” she said. “I have to go.” That night while Maddy slept and Tony watched TV, Gwen sat at the dining room table and checked her work email. Despite her protests to her boss about working overtime, she spent uncompensated time trying to keep her inbox under control. If the unread messages crept up above 100, Gwen’s chest tightened when she opened up the app on her phone or in a browser. “Are you okay?” Tony asked as he passed her on the way into the kitchen. “Yeah, just trying to get caught up.” She rubbed her eyes, her contacts itchy, as she yawned. “I’m going up to bed,” Tony said. “Early morning. I have court tomorrow.” “I’ll be up in a bit,” she said. She read thirty more emails and Maddy started crying over the baby monitor. “What’s wrong, sweetie?” she said into the dark room, then lifted the baby out of the crib. “Water, Momma. Water.” Gwen filled the pink cup from the bathroom, the one they used when Maddy brushed her teeth twice a day, and held the cup up to her daughter’s lips. “Here, baby. Take a drink.” In the rocking chair that she had nursed Maddy in for a year and a half, she sat with her daughter in her arms and patted the toddler’s small back. Gwen sang an out-of-tune lullaby and felt her daughter’s body go heavy in her arms as the girl fell asleep. Maddy’s breathing became still and even as Gwen placed her back in the crib. In her own room, Tony snored on his side of the bed. Gwen brushed her teeth in the dark and undressed, pulling a tank top over her bare skin before she climbed into bed. Just as she drifted off to sleep, Maddy cried again and Gwen jumped out of bed to settle her. The rest of the night continued on repeat and when the sun came up, Gwen saw Maddy’s cheeks flushed red with fever. “What does your day look like?” Gwen asked Tony when he got out of the shower. “We can’t send her to daycare.” “I have court today. Can you stay home today? I can do tomorrow if she’s still sick.” Gwen and Tony took turns at home after three days, slipping work into the gaps of the day while Maddy napped. By the fourth day, Maddy was well enough to return to daycare. But by then Gwen’s throat burned and she knew she’d caught whatever virus her daughter had carried into the house. As Tony departed with Maddy, Gwen turned away from their kisses. “Don’t want to get you sick.” Without showering or putting her contacts in, she settled on the couch to check work email on her laptop until fatigue caught up with her. She stretched out on the couch “just for a moment,” she told herself, and didn’t know how much time had passed when she woke up to the smell of chicken soup wafting from the kitchen. Someone had taken the laptop away and plugged it in by the end table and covered her with the soft throw blanket Maddy used for pillow forts. Gwen sat up without her glasses on and swiveled around toward the kitchen where Lance stood over a pot. “What are you doing here?” she said. “You can’t be here.” Without her glasses on, she watched the outline of Lance’s shoulders as he ladled soup into a bowl and carried it to the table. “I thought you needed someone to take care of you,” he said. “You always take care of the rest of us.” Gwen moved to the table where Lance had laid out a cloth napkin. She dipped a spoon into the bowl and it tasted the way her mother used to make it when she was a girl, with chunks of chicken, carrots, celery and a squeeze of Meyer lemon. While she ate, she watched Lance move around the kitchen, emptying the dishwasher, wiping down the counters. “When you are feeling better, we should get away,” he said. “No. I told you. I don’t need to be rescued. I’m fine.” The man walked toward the end table and picked up Gwen’s glasses and brought them to her. She put them on and he came into focus. The short brown hair, the blue eyes, the nose with the same curve as Maddy’s, the lips she had kissed a thousand times. “I don’t want to rescue you,” her husband said. “But I know how hard you work, how much you do for Maddy. You don’t have to do everything alone. I just mean we could rent a place by the coast, leave Maddy with your parents, and take a little break.” Tony came up behind her and put his hand against her warm forehead, then leaned down to kiss the top of her unwashed head. Gwen took another bite of the soup and relaxed into the comfort of his touch. Melissa Flores Anderson is a Latinx Californian and an award-winning journalist. Her creative work has been published by Rigorous Magazine, Moss Puppy Magazine, Variant Lit, Twin Pies Literary,Roi Fainéant Press, Chapter House Journal and Voidspace Zine. Follow her on Twitter @melissacuisine or IG @theirishmonths