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Tuesdays in February Distracted, I stare blankly out the window- The frosted glass obscures The view I'm not even looking at. People pass by, their own lives busying them, Lock-step with their distractions Not looking in at me looking out. Heads down, hands shoved angrily in pockets Filled with coins and tissues and their own business Which I know nothing about. I dream of their lives, are they better than mine? What drives them through the streets? What lunchtime errands make them brave the elements On a cold Tuesday in February? Lost among my wonderings, I conjure myriad Scenarios of spies and assassins, and tradesmen and ladies-in-waiting. Of lives of others, with jet-setting and expense accounts, and poverty-stricken urchins begging for scraps. The world passes by my window, and every step a story, and Every bowed head no more than a collection of memories. Why do storms have names? Why do storms have names? Why do we need to personalise them? To make them our friends? They blow in...and blow us away. They uproot our trees and capsize our trampolines And knock down our wheelie bins They are not our friends When they blow our cars off course and The trees land in our living rooms And in our roads on our way to work. Dudley and Eunice and Franklin Came round this week like visitors round for tea. I haven't had this many people round for two years. Huffing and puffing and trying to blow the house down But the last couple of years Have given my house of straw a bricked-up base And I weather these storms And their names. Council Estates Building sites and welfare checks Put a fiver in the lecky Jumpers for goalposts Tyre swings on the big oak tree Stinging nettles and docking leaves Bee stings and a dab of vinegar Shinning up the lampposts Scraped knees and torn jeans Out too late sitting on kerbs Conversations long forgotten Curfews were 'when it gets dark' And mornings were lazily slept through. Sean Smith is a writer & poet from County Derry, and is currently finishing a degree in English Lit from University of Ulster after a 20 year absence. He spends entirely too much time shouting at the TV when Liverpool are playing and reading crime novels when he should be writing.

The Balloon Artist For many years, I was a clown traveling and performing with an infamous circus company. I enjoyed sparking smiles and laughs. However, as the years passed, the audiences became bigger and my connection with the show guests became smaller. So, I left the circus life to perform at children's birthday parties and the occasional adult birthday party. While working at birthday parties, I unexpectedly discovered my hidden talent: amusing children and adults alike with my carefully crafted balloon art. I brought to life the impossible: lush landscapes, gorgeous galaxies, and fantastical dreamscapes. The news of my balloon art masterpieces slowly drifted, like one of my lofty balloons, into the ears of people. People watched with wonder while I created my balloon art. In turn, I loved sneaking peeks at people’s smiles. I felt as ethereal as my creations. So, I stopped clowning around and became a balloon artist. I opened my balloon art gallery. From time to time, I travel around the world, showcasing my new balloon art creations and meeting other balloon art enthusiasts. To this day, many of my friends and family think I am full of hot air when I passionately talk about balloon art. They’re wrong. I am full of fiery passion. The Farmer and the Alien One day a farmer was struggling to sow seeds by himself. It had been a rough year for growing crops, and a rough year in general. He lost loved ones to an unexpected and awful plague. He was a lone survivor. As he was planting seeds and seeking a miracle, an alien spaceship landed on his farm. The farmer stood shell-shocked as the spaceship’s door slowly opened. An alien emerged and they were badly injured. Without hesitation, the farmer ran to the alien and helped the alien back to the farmer’s house. The farmer patched the alien’s wounds as best as he humanly could. The alien grinned with gratitude at the farmer, and then returned to their spaceship. As the alien’s spaceship departed, the farmer’s land was instantly populated with ready-to-harvest vegetables, fruits, and grains galore. The farmer uncontrollably wept. He frantically waved goodbye to the stranger-turned-savior in the sky. He believed. Oh, how he believed.

I was part of the joke as soon as I arrived: Nerve Rat had just gone big with their second album, Edge of Rain, and been on a world tour of all the dive bars in the world when they returned to Portland and rented—I wouldn't call it a mansion, but a big fucking house down in Oregon City overlooking the Willamette River, with three stories, including The Rat's Nest, which, since the house was set into a hill, was just a big basement that opened out in back to the lawn and river. They immediately had problems with hangers-on, groupies and randos in the house, all the time, at all hours, and shit getting stolen, so at a band meeting they decided to only allow authorized people most of the week, with Unauthorized Nights on weekends. That is, parties. And, only Authorized Girls—that is, girlfriends—were allowed to be (live) there the rest of the time. So, six of us. I was the Authorized Girl of Kant, the drummer. I gave them all philosopher nicknames because I was just finishing up a BA in philosophy at PSU and it amused me. Kant I guess because he was a drummer, was very logical, or tried to give the appearance of being so. The rhythm thing, I guess. The steady logical flow of rhythms. Aristotle was the bass player—he talked a lot and wasn't very interesting, though I got along with his Authorized Girl, Iris, a waif of eighteen, and they had been seeing each other for two years and Aristotle was twenty-four. Iris was a nerd, a gamer and cosplayer and all that, and she'd had three years of french in high school so we could have joke conversations like, —Ça va? —Oui! Ça va bien! —Qu'est que tu fais? —Rien! Et tu? —Rien! And everyone would look all impressed. And we would laugh to ourselves in a french way. Because we, the Authorized Girls, actually really didn't do anything there. Just fuck, eat pizza, and listen to the band rehearse down in The Rat’s Nest. I'd wash the dishes and the nearest bathroom to keep it from total filth. I could cook basic meals, like scrambled eggs. And spaghetti. I can still boil a mean pot of noodles. Sometimes at night (we were all nocturnal) I would wander down to the cliff edge over the river and watch the water and the lights from the other houses and wonder what people did with their lives that they could actually buy houses like that. Probably nothing good. I'd read in our room if Kant wasn't around. I never told him I was a philosophy major. He would have freaked the fuck out. I never told anybody in that crowd—men get scared when they think a woman is smarter than them. That's why I never dated anyone in my department, even if I had wanted to, which I didn't because they were all, like, on the spectrum. Nice guys mostly, but not good around women. They would have loved Iris. The singer/songwriter/guitarist I nicknamed Nietzsche, because he had that earnest madness and, when I delved into his lyrics I felt like he had the one-liner aphorism and also a mockingness, mockingbirdness, towards christianity and societal morality. I had never listened to Nerve Rat before I met Kant. I am, or was, more of an americana gal: Joni Mitchell to Gillian Welch, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, and even a little bit country with some good ole cheesy (artists-formerly-known-as) The Dixie Chicks if I was in the mood. I met Kant at a party down off of Morrison, near the bridge. We were both along as friends of someone invited to the party. He was like, yeah, I'm in a band and I was like, Oh really, that's interesting—visions of some high school garage band I'd seen play back in Ann Arbor in high school. But, he was ruggedly handsome with his trimmed black beard (only in Portland were young dudes sporting beards in the 90s)(maybe Seattle too). And he had some ripping arms—not huge, but lean like a primal hunter. So I gave him my number and while he went into the kitchen to hit the keg, my girlfriend's friend, Tia, came over and whispered, —Do you know who that is?! So then I had to go home with him. Which was the first time I was at The Rat House, which felt creepy when we got there because we were the only ones, at least at first. I met Aristotle and Iris the next morning and we all had scrambled eggs and toast. Which I made. I can also make toast. Kant was even good in bed—he licked my pussy and liked me on top, which is where I really can come hard. And, a very decent cock. Plus he was funny and a little charming. I did let slip that I was in college and I could see his eyes grow wide with fear, so when he asked my major, I fluttered my lashes and said, —Communications. I didn't move into The Rat House as an Authorized Girl until the end of winter quarter—so, end of March—after about a month of us 'dating'. That is, fucking. But when he asked if I wanted to move in, I of course said yes, and wrote off spring quarter—what woman wouldn't? Which began my research into Nerve Rat. Like I said, I wasn't into grunge, so I focused in on the texts, the lyrics, as a way to find a connection. I even printed them all up, one song to a page, and put both albums together, stapled with underlines and marginalia. Which I guess sounds kind of stalky now. Nietzsche did all the songwriting, lyrics and main music 'riffs' and chords, though they as a band had an agreement that all three shared songwriting credits. Which wasn't fair: After a summer of observation, I could tell Nietzsche was the driving force of the band. Kant I grew to appreciate and, later, musician friends would tell me that he was good a good drummer. But the lyrics were what made Nerve Rat Nerve Rat. They were actually probably less like Nietzsche and more like some french poet like Baudelaire, but the name had already stuck, in my mind. Nietzsche was short and scruffy—he never seemed to shave but always had a two or three day stubble. Brown with some dark reddish strips. He mumbled when he talked. He even mumbled when he sang. I may be the only one to know what he was actually singing. I'm not sure he was a guitar god or anything. If he was noodling around, it was usually with his sound effects pedals, making his guitar sound weird, though I always felt their actual songs just sounded either what was called 'clean' (no distortion) or 'dirty' (with distortion) and mostly with distortion. It was like the weird sounds invited him to try weird chords. Or, weird lyrics too maybe. So, suddenly I was in the band family. Not a groupie—I became clear on the status of groupies versus Authorized Girls when Nerve Rat did shows in Portland and Seattle that summer, even though the record company wanted them to have a new album recorded before fall. It was all new and wild and all I had to do was amuse Kant. I mean, I liked him. I think he loved me, for some reason. He said he'd never really talked to a woman like me before. Which is odd. Maybe he never tried. He was twenty-five, had grown up in Salem, the state capital to the south of Portland, quiet and small—and had hardly ever been out of the northwest, out of the Willamette Valley, when they were suddenly touring Europe. I've been avoiding her, but Nietzsche's Authorized Girl, Hélène, was the sixth. I will say that I did not like her. And the feeling was mutual. Though she didn't seem to like anybody, not even the people in her band, The White Holes. She mocked them all the time at The Rat House. She too was a singer-songwriter-guitarist and latched onto Nietzsche after Nerve Rat's first album, Bubblebumbagoo (actually I guess it's an EP—not a full album, five songs) after it did well, though they'd known each other in the Portland music scene. She was my age and it was clear, to me and just about everyone, that she wanted to be a rock star. Which is great. Was great. But she would constantly demand that Nietzsche get his agent to come see The White Holes, or to talk to his rep at the record company, Middle I. And poor Nietzsche would kindly nod and mumble something. I swear he even said, —Yes dear. I don't know if he ever did those things. But, he loved her—she was full of energy, and even funny, and took care of him—got him to eat vegetarian and bought decent clothes for him, even though he was known for his jeans-and-flannel look. He told me once that he missed shopping at Goodwill: —You know, and you find something cool, some treasure that only works for you, and it comes from some stranger, but there's a connection! It's rad, dude. So sometimes the three of us Authorized Girls would sit up in the living room and get high and laugh and make popcorn (I do it all) while the guys rehearsed. I had learned quickly that watching a band rehearse gets old quick. But, if the band was rehearsing, you heard them anyways: they were LOUD. The whole house vibrated. And no one ever called the cops. Even the houses across the river had to have heard. As long as us three Authorized Girls were together, we could have fun, though Hélène was mean to Iris—kind of passive-aggressive, and talked smack when she wasn't around. Which of course she must have been doing with me. But poor Iris was the youngster, the 'young lass,' and was, I think, in love with Hélène and/or her glamour. And Hélène was glamorous—in a trashy way: Cleopatra eye-liner with fishnets and a brand new men's leather jacket, or green tights and a leopard-skin coat, and her hair color changed weekly. I saw The White Holes play a few times at Dante's, and they were good. She was good. They weren't great, and she wasn't a great guitar player or singer, but she had that charisma, that presence on stage where everyone in the club watched her. I never thought her lyrics, that I could understand, were that great. She kept notebooks, and scribbled, but I never saw what. I don't think she ever read that much though—she looked in Kant and I's room one time and said in her sneer voice, —Wow, that's a lot of books. What are you, a bookworm? And there were like, three. Three books on my side of the bed. In college, now even, I'd have five to seven. Nietzsche had read a lot earlier in life, I think, when he was a quiet nerd (so I picture him) before he became cool. Or, maybe he was an idiot savant. I never got to really talk to him since fucking Hélène wouldn't let me anywhere near him. If I even asked him to teach me a guitar chord she'd screech in like a harpy and physically place herself between us. Again, she did this with everyone, especially other women, but I felt like there was a personal extra distrust of me. Not like I liked Nietzsche. He was cute in a just-woke-up-with-a-hangover way, but Kant was the handsome one. (Aristotle was just kind of tall short-haired dork.) I just thought Nietzsche was interesting. And I wished he would have stood up to her a bit. Ok, I could have been a way better girlfriend to him. Ok, I liked him. I did not last long as an Authorized Girl. All it took was an Unauthorized Night at The Rat House and finding Kant in one of the extra rooms getting a blowjob from a lowly groupie for me to get the hell out. I suppose the super ability of wives and girlfriends of famous musicians is to put up with the outside sex, and today I even might be ok with it as long as I got to play around too. I certainly had offers that summer. I guess Kant did too. The bastard. The ripped amusing bastard. So I wasn't there at The Rat House for Nietzsche's suicide-by-jumping-off-the-cliff-into-the-river. Nor for the investigation about whether it actually was a suicide: Hélène was the only one at The House with him at the time. I’ve heard the 911 call, and how calm she was when reporting it. The police never called me—Kant had a acquired a new Authorized Girl by then. I was never even interviewed for the documentary five or six years later. What would I have said. Kant went on to form another band, with decent success. I've never talked to him again. Hélène's band got signed, did two albums, to minor success. She 'became' an actor, was in some Coen Brothers movie, one of the serious ones, and last I heard, married some record exec and lives in LA now. I ran into Iris about five years later, at Powell's. We laughed. We hugged. We said, Ça va? She had been at The Rat House until the end. I said, did Hélène do it or not? Iris said she didn't know. She left Aristotle after Nietzsche's death and went on to college, to study art at the PNCA and, amazingly, went on to write and illustrate a couple of well-known graphic novels—one adapted into a movie—about her childhood. She said she was going to do one about that time, our time, called The Authorized Girl Experience. Which sounds like a good name for a band. Born in Puerto Rico, John Yohe lives in northwestern Colorado. He has worked as a wildland firefighter, wilderness ranger and fire lookout. Best of the Net nominee. Notable Essay List for Best American Essays 2021. @thejohnyohe www.johnyohe.com

To a Photograph of Someone I Don't Know Named Orene Orene your name makes me want to sit down at an oilcloth covered table and eat buttered grits. It makes me want to climb out the window at midnight and elope with a man named Jasper Sam. Your name makes me want to hop a freight and sing out of tune in the cold. Orene. I want to move into your name. That O is a big round door, r is the walking stick in the elephant's foot just inside and ene is the scene the linoleum on the floor the cabbage rose wallpaper I want to live there, Orene, where it's quiet, like it's quiet inside your name, Orene, unpopulated, invisible, long gone. Sweet as breakfast frying in a skillet sweet as rain on the still dark roof. Recipe For Losing One thing I know about this street: it's not the sea. Whish of rain silences the weaponized light. It's a singular feeling, a lonely thing to not know the hour or what the day might bring if it comes. They always told me there was magic here and I think what magic there might have been stole any reality I had left. Walking forgets how. Even breathing wearies. Loss has no corners. There's no place to sit down. Kyla Houbolt currently occupies Catawba territory in Gastonia, NC. Her first two chapbooks, Dawn's Fool and Tuned were published in 2020. More about them on her website, https://www.kylahoubolt.com/. Her individually published pieces online can be found on her Linktree: https://linktr.ee/luaz_poet. She is on Twitter @luaz_poet.

Hedone I take pleasure in telling the truth, in not telling all the truth, in not telling lies, in hiding so everyone can have a good look at me. I take pleasure in biding my time. I take pleasure —and you know that— in swimming, sometimes in drowning too. I take pleasure, yes, in feeling pain all over my body, in crunching it for the wonder of my full conscience. Yes, I take pleasure in myself, my aloneness, but I take pleasure in being shared too, and I take pleasure in licking the velvety skin of the sweet fruit, but in bitter things, salty and acid too. The Cruise I walk down the corridors of my Ship as it cruises through the Night and Witches are sole witness to my nakedness from behind the clouds–– sometimes I peep from these portholes, they stare back and make eye contact: their emerald-green and chrome-yellow eyes! I fearlessly cruise this Expanse in the endless Night on my Craft. I walk up and I walk down and I walk along the paths of this cruising Ship. Little Beast Upside Down she’s wild untouchable she’s rabid she won’t compromise and she isn’t to be fed she’s here for the Winter only upside down furry and fiery she’s the One not the Nereid —far out of your depth— but the Lamia she’ll suck your blood capsize your life touch her the World will freeze Joan García Viltró is a teacher and emergent poet based in Cambrils (south Catalan coast). His poems reflect Mediterranean characters and mythologies, also Nature under human pressure; a few have appeared in online journals (linktr.ee/joangv). He curates a Twitter list (Poetry Matters) and posts and reads poems aloud on Instagram.

You’ve been here before. The sea nips at your toes, the sand cool after so much walking that your shoes have almost shredded away and your fine dress – its pearled train draping – finally in tatters. Exhale deeply. Wading out to the shallows, you find yourself singing obscenities so loud that the morning gulls and seals look up in surprise. The singing is new, a smooth-polished shell, reaching for blue skies and skidding clouds, and you revel in its clarion call. You're discarding your carapace – emerging true. You’ve been here so many times. There used to be such creasing laughter that time ebbed and flowed from day to twilight to night. You circled each other into every dawn, repeating old conversations, morphing from raised voices into screaming into threats and then apologies and hugs and tears and sobbing. You know each grain of sand here by name and shape now. Each one bounced against its neighbour, spilling secrets and crashing parties over and over again. This place is sacred, from when it was a new experience: now familiar, comforting, full of memories. No break-ups here, in the turquoise waters, only feelings of love and warmth, hugs held, eternal kisses enticed. There has to be a first for all things, you suppose. The slender arms of an octopus tickle your toes before billowing away, your decision this morning none of his. They baked your favourite cake – a sponge with raspberry jam and decadent ganache – flooding it with candles. So many candles you ran out of breath, and everyone laughed, you included. They paid for this holiday; the villa flowing out over the bay, the golden sand and sea-green waters far below. There were presents, but you couldn’t open more than the one, wearing the shoes you are still expected to fill. There was a five-course meal, a personal chef in the kitchen, a waiter to dole out champagne and drinks, and your feet aching from those diamond heels – gorgeous, sharp, uncompromising. You realised your nails have become too polished. This was not how your story started. You still love the people they used to be, how you used to be with them. But they’re not good for you now. There was talk of change, but nothing happened. And anyway, a cake cannot be eaten twice. You’d chew only air and spoiled decorations, stomach griping. You leave the shoes on the shore, let your toes curl in damp, claggy sand, the morning sun warm on your back. The water laps at your feet. Your prints will wash away. You waited until the drinks were past flowing, claimed a slight headache, packed a rucksack. Walked away from the money and bite marks. You’ve a little squirreled away, enough for a plot of land. Time to get the dirt and grime back under your nails. You’ve been here before, but you’ll not come back. Hanne is a British Swede who longs for the 95% humidity and hawker centre food of her childhood. Her stories are fed by environmental science topics, moss-covered rocks masquerading as trolls and what-if scenarios. Her words can be found lurking in various web-nooks and print anthologies.

We arrive at 9AM, and it’s already a sticky, sweltering summer morning. The cars are lining up as visitors come early to pick their berries, avoiding the height of the sun. This year, the blueberries are plump and ample, pleasing the folks who come here for their fill. Mothers, fathers, and children make their way through the narrow dirt rows, and babies are lulled to sleep by the subtle rocking of their strollers rolling along over the uneven dirt below. We see grandparents, too, wiping off their sweaty brows, wrangling their grandchildren, keeping them on task. This time, we come to pick berries for my mother’s blueberry pie, but really, we are here for the large old weeping willow tree on the far edge of the field. He brought me here a few weeks ago, picking our first berries of the season, later enjoying another sort of sweetness high up in the tree. He keeps pulling at me, desperate to get through the field to reach our tree, until I finally pull back and say, “Stop!”. “Let’s first pick some berries for our feast, just like last time,” I say “Oh, come on, before it gets too hot,” he says, pleading. “But what would my mother say if I come home without berries?” I innocently ask. He rolls his eyes and lets out an exaggerated sigh. But moments later, we are stooped down collecting berries for my pail, the same pail I used before. Soon berries are falling out and over the top. And so, he leans in and whispers, “Are you about done?”. I smile, nodding my head, and we begin a walk that is more like a dance toward our private leafy destination. He looks over his shoulder, checking three, maybe four times, until he is sure no one is watching. He pushes on my bottom as he lifts me up to the tree’s first landing, and then I pull him up to meet me. We climb up two landings more until we are surrounded and hidden by the thick green feathery canopy hanging all around the willow tree. I reach into the pail for a taste of berry, recreating what now feels like a dream, but he reaches in for a different flavor, in a different place. “Hey, what’s the rush?” I complain, pulling his hand away. “I thought we were here for the forbidden fruit?” he says with a wink. “But that’s not how I remember it,” I say. I remember a sweet yet tart and juicy burst in my mouth that started with berries and later filled with his lips and tongue. I remember we ate half a pailful before I blossomed, his fingers still purple when he pulled them out, ready to harvest my innocence. But this time, his mouth is dry and his fingers pale, rushing in to take what is already his; the forbidden fruit I gave away.

The divan in the posh fitting room wasn’t the place to have a good cry, though the even posher attendants were used to brides, mothers-of-the-grooms, funeral attendees, and such like having them there. But there was no comfortable place to lie down, as the divan itself was hard and contemporary in design, not like a bed or couch. And there was no tissue dispenser, and after Katie had used up all her own tissues from her purse, she was reduced to wiping tears and snot on the inner sleeve of her coat. Nor, obviously, was there ice cream to eat from the carton, as was the time-honored custom among her friends. Lastly, on a darker note, there was no friendly male neighbor, the interior designer Bartleson Barnes, to bring over some weed, soothe her into another form of oblivion, and listen. She hadn’t known him that long, but to Katie, this was real friendship, though she knew he was too well-heeled for it really to matter to him. The attendant, in the process of helping the seamstress pin up Katie’s dress for the wedding, had in fact gotten very sniffy and left her to her own devices when she’d exclaimed, “Just stop buzzing around me like a hive of bees, can’t you? I don’t like this dress, and I don’t want it, and what’s more, I don’t think I want to be married. So, why should I keep being annoyed with this, that, and the other bit of stuff that you want to fit on me? Trousseau! Who does that anymore? I’d like to just hop a bus for the beach and get tanned and have drinks with umbrellas in them for a honeymoon! Only his mother would insist on all this fuss!” Of course, Adelai adored his mother, thought that rainbows came out of her asshole, and until Katie could get him off by himself and rearrange things, she had no hopes of a happy marriage anyway. She sucked snot up her nasal passages and wiped her face off again. Did she really love Adelai? It had seemed so simple when it was a matter of an office flirtation, and then of casual lunches, and then of the romantic dinners, oh, yes, those dinners, at the places Adelai could afford to take her. She’d had to insist to him that he not take her to the finest ones, as she said because they were too, just too pricey, and he should be saving his money, but really because she just didn’t feel comfortable with multiple waiters hovering around her, and multiple bottles of wine being brought, and multiple courses, one right after the next, being presented. It was always a matter of multiples, it seemed to her. On an impulse, she picked up her phone and called Bartleson, the neighbor with the weed. To her gratification, he answered right away. She moaned into the phone, acquainting him with her problem. “Oh, Katie, honey, you know I told you this was going to happen! That mother! That son! Maybe you’re better off without either of them. No, I’ll apologize, you’re a girl in love. I shouldn’t have said that. Well, just take a break. What would you rather be doing? Think of that…do you want me to come down and get you?” “Oh, could you, Bart? That would be so wonderful!” “Where are you, exactly?” When she told him, he said, “Yes, I know that place. Very frou-frou. It figures. Not your type of place at all. I’ll be there in a shake. And you said you’re in the dressing room?” “Yes, but I don’t think they’ll let a man in.” “Oh, Katie, they’ll let me in. I bring them lots of customers.” “You do? I mean, how? I thought you were in interior design.” “In this town, all the designers know each other, Katie. I’ll be right down, shall I?” And from that point on, things had somehow been magically smoothed out. Not only had Bart made her feel better (he had even sneaked in a couple of weed gummies for her to nosh on, and a chocolate croissant, without a single objection from the dressers and fitters, who fluttered more around him than they had around Katie); he had also magically gotten her attendants in line and made all the fitting problems go away. Now Katie was happy with Adelai again, even felt she might be able to tolerate his mother at a reasonable amount of distance and had most of her trousseau all planned out and fitted. She almost wished she could marry Bart, she was so happy, though she knew women weren’t for him. “Get dressed, and we’ll go for a quick bite at our café round the corner, Katie. Let me go and see Ruth, the owner. I’ve done work for her in the past.” She acquiesced and put things on over her underclothes again. She was so eager to thank Bart, and she picked up her things and got to the door of the dressing area in no time. He had his back to her, as did Ruth, and they were laughing in a certain way that didn’t seem like the Bart she knew. “Well, yes, not quite quite, I know, a little of a hometown girl. But her fiancé has already spoken to me about the estate, in Downings, and you just know, I mean! No problems with getting her to go along, right?” And they laughed together again, in warm complicity. Katie couldn’t cry now. She ducked back into the dressing room for a second, made a quick reevaluation of her feeling for Adelai, his mother, Bart—whom she now realized she hadn’t known well at all—and the whole situation, aided, she suspected, by the gummies she’d just ingested. After a minute, she felt a little wobbly, but all right; better than ever. She waited until Bart and Ruth were at the other end of the store and then dashed out, looking up schedules on her phone. There was a bus to Altamont Beach at 3:30; she made quick tracks down the sidewalk towards the cab stand at the corner; that beachfront was one celebration she wasn’t going to miss. Victoria Leigh Bennett. (She/her). Ph.D. Degrees in English & Theater. Website since 2012, now containing 8 novels & many articles/reviews of a literary nature. "Poems from the Northeast," Aug. 2021. Repub'd. poetry, @winningwriters, Sept. 2021. CNF & Fiction @press_roi, Jan. 2022, Poetry @cultofclio, Jan. 2022. CNF @LovesDiscretion, Feb. 2022. Fiction @press_roi, Feb. 2022. Print ed. CNF @thealienbuddha, Feb. 2022. CNF repub'd. @winningwriters, Feb. 2022. Poetry @madrigalpress, Feb. 2022. Feature on work in May, 2022 @thealienbuddha. Flash fiction acc'd. for pub. @thealienbuddha, June 2022. Also completed 1 collection short stories. Current WIP: 9th novel/CNF/Fiction/Poetry. Twitter: @vicklbennett. Victoria is a member of the disabled community.

Gerty He had a binder clip holding his hat together. It was one of the first things people noticed when they met him, though most were too polite to say so. The tweed hat was old and frayed and obviously had run into some kind of mishap somewhere causing it to rip, and it seemed the clip had been applied, and that had been that. The metal arms of the clip were rusted and there were orange stains in their shape pressed into the wool so that even if you took it away, it would still be there. He didn’t eat very well, as evidenced by his teeth and gauntness about the face, but he made up for it in his own way with supplements. When people saw him tucked into the corner of a cheap diner, that might be the second thing they noticed – that alongside fried potato skins and fried onions and fried fries, he washed down a handful of colourful pills and a sachet of powder with a swig of full-fat milk. Nice, kind, well-meaning people had tried to explain proper nutrition to him in the past, but all been given the same mulish response: Gerty said I need to take my supplements. Something very few noticed, a very, very few, was that the supplements for the day came out of a grubby metal box. It was probably a pretty metal box at some point before it spent many years in his ancient pockets, but despite its current appearance it still produced a certain reverence in him. Those very, very few might see him pull out the box, turn it over in his hands, rub a dirty thumb over the dirty lid, while the other hand reached up to tip his rusted hat. A little touch, a ‘doff’ as they used to say, long ago, when he had Gerty. His fingers might meet the binder clip and cause a rueful smile to twist his lips, but then he’d take his vitamins and supplements from inside his little box, because she’d said he needed them. The day after she’d clipped his hat together as a ‘temporary solution’, she’d slipped out of his life in a screech of tires and smash of glass. The box held his vitamins and supplements, and the clip held him. A small thing to do such heavy-lifting; but these things often are. Spit She used her spit to clean my face. Yours probably did too. A pre-recital ritual, this spit-and-rub. No thought to her saliva, it was the rubbing that was best avoided: blunt fingertips dragged over cheeks and chins so hard that the bones felt their passing. The rosy glow of throbbing skin was the aim, I assume. It wasn’t to clean anything anyway because there was never anything there: faces were washed and primed and ready to go before we even left the house. Bonding, then. Mothers and spit and daughters. Saliva rubbed into pores, marked as mine. This one is mine - watch how it shines. You can see how I care in those red rubbed smiles. She might not be the best ballet dancer but do you see how polished she is? How well-combed her hair? Hear how the ribbons squeak as they are pulled just that tight so blue lines remain blooming on ankles? She would beam with pride at her creation while other mothers nodded knowingly. They all knew what kept this show going, what they were really looking at. The daughters may be dancing, but they held it all together. Mothers cleaning their daughters: pretty ribbons and hairpins and spit. Blush The mortician rubbed the brush over the brick of rouge. She made sure to get enough on there so it could be ground in properly: dead skin is far more resistant to creams and powders than that of the living. She made sure to move it back and forth rather than in circles in order to prevent the loss of bristles. The last thing anyone wanted to see was an extra-long animal hair on the face of their dearly departed. The mortician rubbed the brush over the brick of rouge. There was enough on there now for her purpose, but she kept going. Forward and backward the brush travelled on, blush-red powder creeping further into the hairs. A fine dusting of red began to settle on the table on either side, and over the other cakes and compacts of concealers and colours. She supposed if she kept on rubbing, eventually it would coat her in red as well. The mortician rubbed the brush over the brick of rouge. With a great sigh that sent the excess floating away to one day fall on other cheeks, she swivelled on her stool to face her mother. The mild and meek mousy woman would never have dreamed of wearing make-up in real life. What they were doing together here was all a sham; an injustice somehow. The mortician’s art: to enliven the dead. The others had argued that she shouldn’t be the one to do it for her own mother. She had argued that she was the only one it could be. The mortician rubbed the brush over the brick of rouge. Her mother’s face was finished – creams and contours applied just-so, to give the illusion not of someone off to take on the town, but of someone merely sleeping. A filmstar of old who woke up already bedewed with gloss and shimmer. When she had enough rouge on the brush, she swivelled again to look in the mirror. The brush was pleasantly soft as she drew it over her cheeks, leaving the suggestion of life in its wake. Arden Hunter is an aroace agender writer, artist and performer. They have three books coming out: 'Pull Yourself Together', a collection of poetry, 'Drifting Bottles', an erasure/collage/narrative hybrid, and 'Stop Fidgeting', a vispo/concrete/ekphrasis collection. They also run a free online generative writing workshop and poetry reading every weekend and anyone is welcome to join. Find them on Twitter @hunterarden, Instagram @thegardenofarden and at ardenhunter.com.

Tallboys, Tony told me, came in dove grey and Chantilly grey and London oak and Rutland oak and more varieties than most people might imagine. If, say, tallboy identification wasn’t a major part of their Friday morning curriculum, as it was now mine. The subject fitted neatly into the gap between the hunt for the latest dictionaries in Waterstones (at no later than quarter to 11 in order to ensure that nice Friday Roxanne was still on the till to smile at him) and the 10:30 am single Americano in Costa with the giant-sized Jammy Dodger biscuit to follow. Indeed, it went beyond mere tallboy identification. Tony was keen on words, and he was keener still on the correct application of said words. Thus, our Friday morning tallboy discussion would inevitably veer towards the controversial non-tallboys to be found on display in the High Street – those that were not the combination chest of drawers and wardrobes, as required by the definition. Was this carelessness on the part of those selling them? Or was this an attempt to strike at the very heart of our collective understanding of reality? After all, if they could get away with calling any old chest of drawers a tallboy, knowing that no one really cared anymore what word was used, then what did that say about all the other words? And what kind of world would that leave us with? An interesting question. And one I could have spent some time musing over ona Friday morning if Tony wasn’t already doing much of the musing himself. Until, that is, he took us to see the tallboy. The one that had started the obsession. “I could have been a tallboy,” Tony said. Not for the first time. We were once again in the community furniture store in the old shopping centre. The only shop worth visiting amongst the boarded-up clothing stores, the chain pubs, and a branch of Poundland in which every other item seemed to cost more than a pound. (I’d had to keep that from Tony in case of a major meltdown). Such was the state of the country now. Tony didn’t share my town centre despond, however. If you didn’t know him – if you just saw him out and about, say, with his newly purchased books or his 1 o’clock doughnut, or in the library browsing the World War II section – you’d recognise the enthusiast in him that lived side-by-side with the pedant. You’d see the joie de vivre which, first time I’d used the phrase, he’d amended to joie de livre (not that he’d ever formally studied French) before determining that joie de libre was maybe more appropriate. And, no, he wasn’t joking. He rarely did. It all came from his love of words. A shame, I thought, because he might have enjoyed a good pun. The first time we’d stopped off at this furniture store, he’d been drawn in by the different hatstands in the window (“coat racks,” he’d corrected me), being especially taken by what he told me was a vintage bentwood. And who was I to disbelieve him? There’d been a moment or two amongst the hatstands (“coat racks,” he’d corrected me again) and some fun, too, with my use of the incorrect name. It was only later that I worked out that hatstand really was a word for pencils up the nose and underpants on the head style mental wibbling. A breakdown, if you need the more formal appellation. As in, “you’ve gone all hatstand”. God alone knew where Tony had found that definition. He wasn’t allowed the internet at home, so there was no way it was the Urban Dictionary. And it wasn’t a gag. I should have learned not to doubt him when he got into definitions. Nor to doubt his choice of words, either. “I could have been a tallboy,” he’d said, clutching his dictionaries, staring up at the item that had attracted his attention. We’d come in that first time for the hatstands (“coat racks”) but we’d stayed for the tallboy. And now it was part of the routine. Because this wasn’t just any old tallboy. This was his tallboy. This it seemed, if you haven’t already spotted it in his always deliberate phrasing, Tony himself in tallboy form. This Friday was no different from any of the other Fridays in recent times. I had hold of Tony’s clammy, moist hand, as he insisted I always did, and I gave my studied unselfconscious, “yeah, you got a problem with this?” smile at the over-interested old ladies with the M & S shopping bags full of meals for one and cat food as they tut-shuffled their way around us. What to say to him in response this time? Yes, perhaps you could, Tony. Perhaps this is the very one your folks would have bought, back when this shop wasn’t the local Community Furniture Store but the local branch of Big Name Furniture or whatever. “Could be the same one,” Tony told me, as he’d told me last time at precisely the point I’d left it too long for any kind of response. “I doubt it, Tony,” I replied this time. Which was wrong, of course, because how would I know? Could I prove it? Could anyone? It wasn’t the kind of thing we could look up on the library computer. When Tony wasn’t watching old episodes of “Grange Hill” on YouTube (other 1980s children’s TV shows were available, and he always knew precisely where to find them, too). He pulled his sticky hand out of mine, reaching out to pull open one of the drawers, placing his palm flat on the bare wood inside and closing his eyes. “Was meant to be underwear,” he said. I was long past the point of worrying what any of the other customers might think. “Good use of a drawer,” I told him. He opened the drawer next to it. “Socks,” he said. “Indeed,” I replied. “Never was,” he said, closing the drawer, hesitating over the wardrobe door before opening that too. “School uniform probably,” he said. “Shirts?” Now, that was a question, and I was ready for it. “Not hoodies,” I said. These days, Tony was keen on his hoodies. Not that he had too much choice in the matter. Today’s was a skull and barbed wire affair. The kind of thing you might have thought was for a heavy metal band or some such, but I knew was, in reality, an ersatz knock-off produced in a sweatshop somewhere for one of the cheap clothing stores. Maybe a decade or two back. Like all Tony’s clothes, it would have come from Oxfam or the British Heart Foundation or any one of the other massed charity shops that now made up the High Street. “Not hoodies,” Tony said. “White, you think?” “Depends on the school,” I told him. “But, yeah, white’s usual.” “Could be blue.” “Could be.” “You think a blazer? School crest on the pocket?” I’d thought this before. He remembered me saying so. Like he remembered everything else I ever said to him. “I think perhaps a blazer.” “With a motto.” “Very likely.” Tony nodded, reassured either by my words or by the colour. It was sometimes hard to tell. What I did know, though, was that he needed his moment, his oneness with the wood. A phrase he would not have found amusing even if I had tried for the euphemism. As I say, a literal chap, Tony. Literal and yet always the same phrasing. “I could have been a tallboy.” And maybe he could, I thought. Why not let him have that belief, I thought. There were worse beliefs to have in the world, I thought. “Home?” I asked him, when we’d been there long enough, when he’d determined today wasn’t the day for the library PC and the kids shows. “The House,” he told me, as he always did. No, it wasn’t for me to tell him that he couldn’t have been a combination chest of drawers and wardrobe. It depended very much on what a combination chest of drawers and wardrobe meant to him. He was, after all, the one with the definitions. I watched him riffling through his dictionaries on the bus on the way back to the House on the edge of town. Where Jan and Dave were on today, at least until shift change, and where his friends Nick and Roger would most likely be playing chess in the communal living room with precisely none of the right pieces. “Can come in,” he told me at the door, because there were minutes left, because Jan and Dave were out back smoking something other than tobacco, because the House was otherwise quiet apart from the sound of the knackered pump on the fish tank and the squeal of the fridge in the kitchen that had seen better decades. This was new, so of course I accepted. Why not accept the offer? There were plenty of reasons why I shouldn’t. There was part of me that wanted to see how many dictionaries equalled a Tony number of dictionaries. Several hundred, it turned out, by the looks of it. And I wanted to know if there’d be any clue as to the tallboy. “Not how they’d have done my room,” Tony told me. Which was a lot in one go for him. He was looking at the dictionaries. He was contemplating the new dictionaries to somehow add to his wall of dictionaries. “Not the furniture they’d have chosen,” Tony told me. And the sadness was, in the House, no one had really chosen any of it. Just as they hadn’t chosen him. And vice versa. “No,” I agreed with him. So here we were, I thought. Heading to tallboy territory, I thought. This might be my only opportunity to find out what it meant to him, I thought. And Tony looked up at the tower of dictionaries again. Several hundred was not an exaggeration. There was no hope of putting today’s purchases at the top without help. “I could have been a tallboy,” he told me, still looking up, his back to me, so it was a moment before I saw his shoulders move. And I thought the emotion had got too much for him. Thinking back to the room he might have had in the house with the parents he had never had. Forty-something years ago now. Maybe longer. It was so difficult to work out his age. Whatever happened had been so very long ago, but how much of it did he still carry with him? I moved towards him, thought of putting a hand out to “there, there” him in precisely the way I shouldn’t do as his supporter. And then his shoulders heaved and what I took to be a Tony brand asthmatic sob was most definitely not a Tony brand asthmatic sob. He was laughing, the bugger. “Yeah, I could have been a tallboy,” he said. They weren’t even shelves. Just books piled as high as physics would allow them to be piled. Which was a hell of a lot higher than anyone might have expected. “But I’d settle for a ladder,” he said. Mike Hickman (@MikeHicWriter) is a writer from York, England. He has written for Off the Rock Productions (stage and audio), including 2018's "Not So Funny Now" about Groucho Marx and Erin Fleming. He has recently been published in EllipsisZine, Dwelling Literary, Bandit Fiction, Nymphs, Flash Fiction Magazine, Brown Bag, and Red Fez. His co-written, completed six-part BBC radio sit com remains frustratingly as unproduced as it was the last time he updated this biography. So here it is, line by line (we're going to be here a while): "What happened to your lovely new uniform, then?" "My robes met with a slight accident, if you must know. In the members' entrance." "Ouch. Nasty."

Clifton Hill is awake and pulsing, moving like a living, breathing thing. A voice radiates from a loudspeaker inviting tourists into the Movieland Wax Museum of the Stars. Couples pull wagon loads of children into the great Canadian Midway, the Guinness World Records Museum, the Rainforest Café. Loud music emanates from a rooftop bar where karaoke singers croon ballads for their friends. It’s early springtime, and Mary-Jane can’t believe how many people are here. It’s still cold enough for a toque and gloves, the sky is a dreary grey. Mary-Jane watches the Maid of the Mist struggle through choppy waves. She’s been on it only once when she was small. She held onto her grandmother for dear life as the boat tossed through the waves in a fury of thunderous noise. Oversized yellow slickers did nothing to protect them from the soaking they endured. When family visited from far away, Mary-Jane and her grandmother took them to see the Horseshoe Falls, to observe them through the famous coin-operated binoculars that line the boulevard. They ate pizza and ice cream and watched fireworks explode in the sky. They bought t-shirts and keychains and fridge magnets and took a thousand photographs. Mary-Ann still doesn’t believe there is a more wonderful place on earth. Extricating herself from the tourists, she wanders into Queen Victoria Park at the base of the Falls. There is a particular bench she wants to sit on, the one where she met Matthew in the eighth grade. Her class had been sent on a weeklong retreat to Loretto Academy, an old convent nestled amongst the trees right next to the Falls. Under the vigilant eyes of the nuns, mentors taught them about God, showed them how to make friendship bracelets, and took them hiking in the gorge. When the nuns granted them free time for sightseeing, Mary-Jane went off on her own, vying to get a better view of her beloved Falls. She sat on the bench watching people enjoying picnics and a group of boys playing hacky sack nearby. After much gawking and huddling, one of them approached her. “The guys dared me to talk to you,” he said. Here with his family for a week, he and his cousins could do whatever they wanted while the adults drank too much and gambled at the casino. Mary-Jane watched the play of shadows and light filter through the trees on the skin of his arms, his face. He promised to sneak out of his hotel and stand outside the convent that night. She agreed to open a window on the third floor and drop a letter down to him. They plotted to see each other every day that week, concocting elaborate schemes for the secret pleasure of waving to each other from some location or another. On the last day, Mary-Jane broke away from the group to say goodbye to Matthew, and they made a pact. “Let’s meet back here in twenty years,” he said. “If we’re both single, we’ll get married. It’s the honeymoon capital of the world, after all.” They set a date and time, and now Mary-Jane is sitting on the bench and Matthew is not here. Of course she knew he wouldn’t travel across the ocean after all these years, he probably doesn’t remember she exists. She sits all afternoon, nonetheless, under the spell of the rolling mist, the dull roar of the waterfall. Thinking about all the people who went over the Falls in a barrel and lived, all the people who jumped and didn’t make it. The best time to see the Falls, she knows, is at midnight in the dead of winter. The stone walkways lining the river will be empty, ghostly compared to the thousands of bodies that fill them in the height of summer. The road, normally jammed with traffic, will be a blank space, so you can park for free. You can lean over the wrought-iron curlicues decorating the wall, to hear the deafening rush of millions of tons of water. Ponder the ten inches of rock that have eroded each year, every year for a millennium. In high school, Mary-Ann had done all these things with a boy who took her there to tell her he didn’t love her anymore. After he said those words, he asked her what she was thinking. “I’m thinking about the Falls,” she said. And she was. She was thinking, in the depth of the vacant night, that this was as close as she could get to understanding how the Falls felt hundreds of years ago. Before the blinking lights of hotels and motels advertising heart-shaped jacuzzis, before the giant caricatures of Dracula and Frankenstein perched atop haunted houses promising thrills and chills. No hot dog vendors or bowling alleys or extreme mini putting. Just lush forests cut through by a wide gash of surging water. Mary-Jane gets up from the bench and walks back to the bottom of the Hill. She knows she will return countless times because the waterfall pulls her with an invisible tether, offering a solace no one else can give. An emotional balm, a restorative treatment, reminding her that nature is more powerful than anything, even her loneliness. She stands in line for the Sky Wheel and purchases one ticket. She glides high into the air inside a fiberglass bubble. At the top, she watches a hawk circle above the rapids, the people below moving like insects around a fathomless wonder of the world.

Fear It isn’t the tumor then but the tumor remembered cut from the breast the breast chiseled from the bone rising in dreams or at the margins of whispered denial when, startled, she feels it how it might, again, pull at her nipple and slip through her ribs like a cat prowling Forgiveness In Santa Fe you find me late afternoon sun at my back hips wider than yours gathering skulls We roam red hills— ocher orange purple earth cracked by hot blowing sand A solitary penitent dark veil over torso trudges near You kiss my scars ghosts of my breasts under the evening bells of St. Francis Scent of Sorrow Grief is something you can smell like the rose petals my mother kept in a blue bowl their essence growing over time attaching to the words she spoke so when she passed her breath gone her voice scattered through the house in particles of fragrance Rose Petals in Your Mouth You spit out love songs only I hear my cochlea hollow bone spiraled waiting for you to slide through your sweet tongue muscular & soft I sing & shriek & sometimes talk in tongues Chella Courington (she/her) is a writer/teacher whose poetry and fiction appear in numerous anthologies and journals including DMQ Review, The Los Angeles Review, and New World Writing.A Pushcart and Best New Poets Nominee, Courington was raised in the Appalachian south and now lives in Central California. She has a recent microchap of poetry, Good Trouble, Origami Poems Project, and a forthcoming microchap, Hell Hath, Maverick Duck Press.