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Aural Sex Your voice, wraps around me like strong arms holding me tight. My whole body opens to catch each thought as they fall from your lips. Oh those lips! I could drink in your voice and it would sustain me. Pour it over me and make me wet with your words. I don’t want those self-satisfied sexts.  Call me. Surround me with your vocal virility. Call me. Penetrate me aurally. I don’t need promises of love. Just keep talking to me and I’ll keep listening till I’m satisfied. Obsolete Sense Memories One finger to push in the lighter, unlit cigarette in same hand, the click it makes when ready, device popping to attention, the redness of the heated coil, its bright orange center a contained flame, the sharp scent of tobacco, the smoky ash on cooling filament, tapping ashes out the window or brushing them from your jeans. One hand on a cassette, the other holding the wheel, the whir of engagement, guitar solo screeching as it unravels, the tangle of grayish-brown tape drawn out slowly, spun back into place with a pen, the snap of a plastic case, the crunch as it breaks underfoot, reading microscopic liner lyrics or deciphering your writing on a mixtape. Left hand rolls up the window, right hand holding yours, the squeaky back seat with seating for three, embedded seatbelts rarely fished out, the thud as the back seats fold down, the station wagon becomes stationary, the windows fogging in autumn chill, the static audible from the radio, shifting position to move closer and exploring each other for the first time.          Summer’s Color Change I’m Not Her That will never be me Her smile 1000 watts The summer sun Her laughter filling you like a hug Images on a static screen  Collected and fragile Like butterfly wings Her memory caresses like kisses. I struggle to fill the void she left Painfully aware of what I lack A role I was not asked to play I step back to assess the damage. That will never be me I have my own smile  The crescent moon My laughter floating into the sky. Images of myself Insecure and hidden Like insect shadows  My reality falls like tears. Paper Girl Flurry of words brought us together  professing her love in inkjet staccato  or stilted penmanship  honest  raw between sheets of paper so much heat generates. A passionate penpal first-time romance she sent me her soul on eight by eleven but it wasn’t to be fleeting ephemeral when we step off the page once we actually meet boundaries blur desires cool. I keep my Paper Girl  in a collection of memories  to unwrap in old age tender fragile unfold cold brittle parchment where her warm heart still beats. Nina Miller is an Indian-American physician, epee fencer, and creative who made the Wigleaf Top 50 for 2024. She loves writing competitions and drinking chai. Find her flash and thoughts on writing within Flash Fusion, an anthology by Dahlia Books. Find her @NinaMD1 and her published pieces at ninamillerwrites.com .

Bright morning light streamed through the bedroom window, waking Ben from his dream. Sitting up, he rubbed his toes in the plush Berber carpet before standing and slipping on a terrycloth robe. A thin, scratchy yowl greeted him as he walked into the kitchen. He froze. It sounded like Kafka, his beloved seal-point Siamese. He had to be hearing things. Kafka was dead. Back at the old house, stressed by events, Ben had accidentally run over his cat in his driveway. The accident was the final straw for a shaky marriage. His wife had left, taking his daughter, Cathy, from him. Shaking off his malaise, he made coffee and toast and took them out onto his patio. Passing through the sliding French door, he scanned the yard, imagining what he’d do with it one day—and froze. Sitting among the scruffy weeds, amid brown patches of bare dirt and raggedy sunflowers, he saw a small, blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl of about three, maybe four. “Cathy?” he called. It looked like her. Exactly. She was the spitting image of her mother. Except that Cathy was gone and the horrible accident, his own fault, that took her from them also destroyed his marriage. His wife had moved on. So had he. And yet, there she sat, staring at him with a dirty, tear-stained face. Frozen, he stared back and watched as the girl opened her mouth and let out a thin, scratchy yowl. She sounded exactly like Kafka. He stared at the little girl, knowing now that the past moves with you. You couldn’t even leave its sounds behind. Ed Teja is a full-time writer and part-time martial arts instructor. He spent years traveling the world writing, working as a Caribbean boat bum, editing magazines in the US, Hong Kong, and Venezuela, and freelancing an odd assortment of stories, articles, and poems for a rather eclectic assortment of magazines and anthologies. Now he is in rural New Mexico where he writes stories that have little or no respect for genre and take place in one or more of the surreal worlds he lives in (rather happily).

No one - neither friends nor family, the tea leaves, my horoscope nor the lines on my palm - have warned me to avoid you:  the attractive, charismatic, smooth-talking stranger.  Now, I’m completely entranced, following you to your bed in Hamelin, lured by promises of bliss as Mrs. P. Piper

I think that nothing magical can be accidental  I’m desperate for affection and attention and I’m convinced  every symptom’s gonna kill me, I can’t trust lingering instincts or epiphanies, not when my mind’s magical thinking wouldn’t  let me sing “If I Die Young” as a child because I was convinced it would be self-fulfilling and it would kill me, not when my  worries birth worries and I wonder if thinking about my mom’s  death will make it arrive quicker, not when I couldn’t listen to my favorite Hippo Campus song, couldn’t hear the lines  happy Valentine’s Day to you, hope it’s better than mine because my dog’s about to die  without thinking the cosmic irony of the universe would make it happen, I don’t know how to talk to god but in desperate moments I’ve sent wishes upward to dead grandmothers, dead dogs, mostly missing them and  hoping they’re okay, I don’t know how to talk to god or how to believe in something bigger than me, but I’ve been trying, see the energy of the universe in a tarot spread pulled by me and my sister, wear the Magician card on a necklace and my evil eye on my left side to ward off negative energies, try to  believe in coincidences and angel numbers but catch myself when I start spiraling, start thinking that the lyrics in these songs are spells, I don’t know how to talk to god but on bad days where  all my urges push me to drive away, I find myself in the parking lot  of my old church, a place I haven’t prayed in since twelve, and  I think about walking in, I think about kneeling, I think about confessionals and secrets and trying on religion for a spell, I  think about what’s left in this world to nurture me and if I can find it in the eyes of my old pastor, the woman who hasn’t  worked there for years but when I think about godliness kindly I still picture it in her eyes, her soft hands wrinkled over mine, I think about opening my mouth to receive the sacrament  and letting things in that might heal me, and I don’t walk in, I drive away, but I see my most faithful of friends on social  media and I don’t quite feel like I’m missing something but I  wonder about the feeling of being so compelled by someone’s  love, by the warmth of something that feels powerful enough to have made the universe just for you, and I wonder how  much longer I’ll keep searching for my own sense of belonging.  Seussian sonnet for omissions  I thought an uncle would have died by now, my family is riddled with disease on both  sides, death always hanging over me like a curtain to be pulled aside, a shoe to be dropped,  but the real delay is in the waiting, the months after diagnosis when the parents didn’t  tell us anything, me and my sister living blind as if our mother’s cancer wasn’t multiplying  by the second, but who knows, not us, it could’ve been doing anything, living peacefully in  our mother’s breast like we once laid upon it, usurping her good cells like we did for nine  months each, waiting to be popped or chopped out, her skin just waiting for us to be made  so we could scar it. I think often about which parent is going to die first, fathers are  always the first assumption, and he has plenty to worry about, but my mother’s body  has been broken and torn apart so many times I think she’s surviving out of spite  or maybe something softer. I can’t imagine myself at 45, torn apart by grieving them, I never think I’ll live that long, spent time with knives at thirteen like other  emo kids, had nowhere to put this anger, this energy, couldn’t trap or contain it or share  it with anyone because my mouth never learned the shapes of words and how to hold them.  Hallie Fogarty is a poet and artist from Kentucky. She received her MFA in poetry from Miami University, where she was awarded the 2024 Jordan-Goodman Graduate Award for Poetry. Her work has been published in Pegasus, Poetry South, Barzakh Magazine, and elsewhere.

The boyfriend is a Timothy McVeigh sympathizer, he said he knew McVeigh before he got the microchip in his buttocks. I think he’s possibly a member of the Michigan militia, but I don’t really know him. I know he dated my sister for a time. They were serious. However, things ended badly. He has a long thin face. His mouth is no wider than his nose. A face like a Byzantine Jesus. Now he’s dating Joyce’s daughter.  Joyce hates him. She wants her daughter to stop seeing him. But she knows how girls can be when their mother tells them to do things. The daughter is always dating fixer-uppers. Joyce worships her daughter, though she’s a daddy’s girl. Joyce knows not to talk about McVeigh and Oklahoma City. Or Ruby Ridge. Or Waco. Or Janet Reno.  I’m over at Joyce’s house for dinner. I’m only using her for her connection to the Jews. She got us both invited to a seder next week. She knows the local Rabbi quite well. I’m excited. I have a thing for the Jewish race. It’s odd now that I think of it. But I’ve studied just enough to know that Jews are God’s chosen people. That’s verified in my mind. God is a soccer mom to these people. He takes care of them. You take celebrities, for instance. The number of Jewish celebrities is disproportionate to their portion of the world’s population. I studied religions, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, et cetera, and I found them all lacking. I read their sacred texts, they were about as meaningful as a drugstore receipt—except for Judaism. I could be Jewish, I could believe in it, it made a certain amount of sense. It was the one receipt that made sense, your dollar really stretched.  Joyce is all dolled up and this is weird because I know how she’s supposed to look—I work with her at the grocery store. I think she is all dolled up on my behalf. She’s trying to look her best for me. Joyce is an older lady. I put her age somewhere near fifty-five. I’m twenty-three. She’s also morbidly obese. Joyce was formerly skinny and formerly a chain smoker. She quit smoking through incessant prayer and put on a few hundred pounds.  “I used to fit inside that chimney,” she said pointing toward the fireplace. I started thinking of the chimney sweep that Blake wrote about. Then I remembered there are two chimney sweeps he wrote about.   “People told me to eat a sandwich. They used to tell me to eat a sandwich wherever I went. They would buy me sandwiches.” Then she showed me a picture of herself inside a suitcase. “See how skinny I used to be?” In the picture, her ex-husband is standing over her. . I’ve seen this picture before. She must have forgotten. She carries it around in her purse to show people.  I notice the skin on her arm looks like worn currency that holds no value, confederate currency.  Joyce tells me how she used to drink men under the table. She said she would coat her stomach with a quart of buttermilk beforehand and that would allow her to out-drink them. Then Erin, the daughter dating the fixer-upper, comes into the room from upstairs. She said Michael Jackson just died.  My sister would be upset about that. She saw him in concert with my dad.  “That’s how skinny I used to be,” Joyce said pointing to Erin with a fat finger.  It’s true. Erin is thin as a rail. She dresses like a boy. She has a boy’s haircut. She’s a few years older than me. She’s pretty. The shirt she’s wearing shows her collarbone.  “I do not want you paying his child support,” Joyce tells Erin as she hands her money. “Why not, you pay God’s child support.” Joyce shakes her fist at this comment. It’s a small ham—her fist I mean.  “I get so angry when she says that,” she said to me. But Joyce can’t get angry.  When Erin leaves, I notice the noise the refrigerator is making. Joyce sees me listening to the refrigerator.  “That’s me,” she said. “That humming noise is me. That’s my incessant prayer.” “What did she mean, you pay God’s child support?” “I have a bit of a vice. I send money to Russian Jews to help them emigrate to Israel. That must happen for  Jesus to return. We need to get the Jews to Israel. I send money when I can. Anyway, that’s what she means. It’s not the same thing. Those Russians, they won’t even capitalize God. When we get the Jews to Israel— it’s  finished. And I get a new heavenly body.”  She seeks the end of the world. It can’t happen fast enough for her. She is force-feeding the end of the world. This is nothing less than doomsday I’m talking about. The end of all time.  The rapture. The judgement.  Joyce’s eyebrows are cave paintings. What I mean is that her eyebrows are drawn on. Joyce’s eyebrows are prehistoric brushstrokes, they are identical to the horns of the bulls in the Lascaux cave paintings. Joyce knows my dad and my bastard brother. She knows because she went to the same high school as my dad. The same school as the televangelist Jimmy Baker—this is some school. She’s a little younger than my dad, but she went to the same school. She knows I don’t want to talk about it.  We’re eating T-bone steaks which Joyce broiled. These are thick steaks. These are War and Peace steaks. I requested mine well done but Joyce said no way a butcher would request a well-done steak. This steak is rare. There is blood on my plate. I notice my steak is fighting me—it's seen what had happened to Joyce’s steak. One thing I know about Joyce that she doesn’t know I know is that she eats raw hamburger. I was at work in the cooler when she came down the aisle that leads to the meat department. She came into the meat room where there was a pile of eighty/twenty hamburgers on the butcher block. She scooped up a handful and ate it raw. She didn’t know I was in the cooler looking through the window in the door. She thought she was alone. It reminded me of that Emily Dickinson poem about the bird coming down the sidewalk to eat the raw worm.  I’m telling Joyce about college. I go to college. I want to be a journalist.  “Hemingway was a journalist.” The legs of her chair are groaning an incessant prayer of their own. A chandelier hangs over the table like a gaudy stalactite.  “Steinbeck too,” I said. “You know the story about those two when they met for the first time? Hemingway tells Steinbeck, he bets Steinbeck that he can break a stick over his head.” “Over Steinbeck’s head?” “No. Over his own head. You know Hemingway. He had to be tough in every situation.” “That’s interesting.”  I don’t think I can eat my steak. Joyce is done with hers. She’s chasing peas with her fork like that game with the hungry hippos.  “You like school?” “I do.” “I try to get Erin to go back to school.” “That reminds me. One of my classes is in the old wing of the college and it doesn’t have any female bathrooms. And the college is not planning to build any. My journalism professor calls the old wing a patriarchy museum. He says it’s like Hitler’s plans to turn that synagogue in Prague into a museum for an extinct race. The old wing of the college, is a museum like that.”   “I didn’t know that was allowed.” “It’s probably not,” I said. “One girl the other night didn’t come back from our break soon enough and the teacher refused to let her in the class. After class she was in the hallway in tears. She said it was because the girl’s restroom is miles away.”  An airplane roars over the top of the house, and the shadow it makes is like the house blinking.  “I try to get Erin up there, but she has no ambition,” Joyce said. She points up. She means she’s trying to get Erin to become a stewardess like her other daughter.  There’s a knock on the door. It’s the next-door neighbor kid.  “Hi Johnny,” Joyce said. The kid is selling candy bars and wants to know if Joyce wants some.  “You know I do,” Joyce said.  Joyce buys the box and tells Johnny to pick one for himself. He takes it like it’s a baton in a relay race and he’s out the door.  “I am a candy bar whore,” Joyce said.  A week later we are on our way to the seder. It’s Joyce and myself in her car. I see a cement truck which is always a treat for me. I always think of earth like that, moving through space in two directions at once. Cement trucks remind me, everything else makes me forget. Some assholes in the car next to us on my side are inflating their cheeks making fun of Joyce’s weight. I pretend not to notice. I do notice her hands on the steering wheel. The top of her hands are yeasty, risen dough awaiting a baker’s punch.  When Joyce turns off the highway ramp my Judaism for Dummies  book goes sliding across the dashboard and onto the floor.  The synagogue is in a building that is slowly passing away. I meet the Rabbi. This is the first Rabbi I’ve ever met. Rabbi kisses Joyce on the neck like it’s the wailing wall. Joyce is in thick with these Jews. We get to sit at Rabbi’s table.  He has a thinker’s forehead. Five lines of latitude never leave Rabbi’s forehead. Rabbi doesn’t want to shake my hand; it feels like I’m pulling open a dented filing cabinet. “Did you hear about Michael Jackson?” Rabbi asked us. I see a gorgeous Jewish girl who is approaching. She is something special.  “Hi Rabbi,” she said. “You look forlorn.” “Even Homer sometimes nods,” Rabbi said.  I’m possessed by a strange feeling that I’m supposed to be this Jewish girl. I’m supposed to be her, not the person I am, but her. This feeling is strong. I’m supposed to be in her brain, her body. She catches me staring at her. I’m supposed to own the world’s suffering, not her.  The girl goes back to the table she came from. She holds her chin up the rest of the night.  The seder plate is a test I had prepared for but I’m still apprehensive.  Joyce sits in her chair like she’s on the back of a motorcycle.  When Rabbi finds out I’m going to school to be a journalist, he asks me about Daniel Pearl, the beheaded journalist. I don’t know much about it. But Rabbi tells me about it in detail.  “Journalism is the deadliest profession in the world,” he said, like it’s large news.  Joyce has drool coming out of one side of her mouth, but she must not know. Like the cinnamon roll does not know about icing.  “You really know your way around a seder plate,” I said.  “We are getting our vegetables today,” Joyce said.  There’s a woman walking around with a picture that she’s showing everybody. She shows me and Joyce. It’s a picture of her mother when she was in Auschwitz. She is nothing but bones. The experience of the holocaust is in her eyes.  “I keep this picture in my purse. I show everyone.” I ask Rabbi about Kabbalah, and he quickly shovels answers on my questions like dirt on a dead body. I can’t catch any of it.  “The Torah is held together in the same manner as the French revolution—by beheadings,” Rabbi said. “Kabbalah attaches the wrong head to the wrong body.”  Rabbi has a great eye, what I mean is, one is larger than the other. He’s giving me the great eye. “You must talk to Fred,” Rabbi said. “He’s a writer. He is man of considerable accomplishment.” It turns out Fred is a great writer. He’s well-known for his history of the Bath Massacre.  “I wrote that book in a week,” he said.  He’s giving me all sorts of writing advice. Great advice. But he’s filled with two words he uses too much: therefore and however. “What are you doing here?” he asks after a while. He almost knocks over the entire table we’re at. He’s unaware of his height. He’s six foot five at least. Everything about the man goes on for miles. I thought it was obvious why I’m here.  “You know where you are don’t you? This is the armistice car. You’re in the armistice car. Therefore, you’re surrendering by being here at this seder. You’re surrendering to us Jews.”  He asks me what my last name is, he must have forgotten.  “I know your people. I know your dad. I know what he did. However, I don’t judge.”  He’s talking about my dad embezzling from the grocery store. He could probably write a bestseller about it in a week.  I start drinking then. I drink like Noah. I swallow wine the way Hitler swallowed Europe.  I deserved to get drunk. My book smart faith and I got stinking drunk. After four cups of Manischewitz, my bladder is about to burst. I go to the bathroom—its hell finding the bathroom—and I piss like Patton into the Rhine. I’m pissing into a great river. I feel like I’m marking some great victory. I try to open the window in the bathroom—I want to stick my head out the window, but it’s been painted shut. It’s a stubborn window for stubborn people.  It’s an old bathroom with lots of ceramic tile. The handles on the sink read C for cold and H for hot, only some wise guy carved the C into an A. Then I see that on top of the urinal, there’s an X that I had in mind I can turn into a swastika. I’m armed with swastikas, armed to the teeth with swastikas. When I get back out to where the Seder is, Erin’s there. I feel like I have half-lidded eyes, but no one says a word about it. Erin’s telling Joyce we have to leave. Luke has been arrested for threatening to blow up the Friend of the Court over his child support payments.  “You’re all man-haters. Find one person in this office who doesn’t hate men. Now I know why people blow these places up.” Erin said this is what Luke said that got him into trouble. It was perceived as a direct threat, and he was arrested.  He was going to be arrested anyway for child support arrears.  It’s then that I see the Chagall painting by the entrance. The one with the miniature Rabbi standing on a Rabbi’s head. That made me feel bad about the swastika in the bathroom.  The bail bondsman is not far. The sign outside said: “If I can’t get you out, you ain’t getting out.” He has his back to the door. He’s eating a burger and fries and wiping his hands on a napkin the way a mechanic does, finger by finger. As it turns out, he knows Joyce, he used to work at the grocery store, a long time ago. Joyce waves at him with two hands at once—I hate that.  “Why do you guys want to get him out? He’s scum. He hasn’t paid child support in two years. He’s going to jail one way or another.” Joyce is a little embarrassed. She looks toward Erin. Erin looks like a frightened bird caught in a grocery store.  “Never mind,” he said. “It’s none of my business if you want to throw good money after bad.”  Once we get Luke out, he wants to know what took us so long. He also wants to go directly to see his son. He said he needs to see his son before they put him back in jail. Joyce said that he can spend the night at her house, and she can take him in the morning.  “We’ll get you where you need to be,” she said. “If you’re a good boy.” I have swastikas in my head. I can’t get that swastika off my head. I’m thinking what I need to do is find another swastika that I can erase to atone for the one in the bathroom. I’m not drunk anymore. Joyce is driving, I’m in the front passenger side and the lovebirds are in the back seat.  I’m thinking, if we could find a payphone there would be a swastika there, but a genocide of payphones had occurred. There are only a few left. Just think of all the swastikas that left this world when we got rid of the payphones.  We see a broken-down motorist by the side of the highway.  “You have to turn around,” Luke said. Luke orders her to turn around, to go back, to help. “It’s the decent thing to do.” Joyce did it without complaint as if she had a miniature Luke atop her head. We helped the motorist, an elderly guy, change his tire. It took us some time to do that. My hands are little black things from changing the dirty tire. I wash them with some leftover snow. The motorist is appreciative. We all pat ourselves on the back after that. We look smart.  “Whose book is this I’m sitting on? Judaism for Dummies ?” Luke asked. “It belongs to me,” I said.  “Tell your sister I said hi.” Luke seems to notice me for the first time.  He turns on the overhead light and starts reading my book.  Just a few miles further down the road, we see another car on the side of the road. It’s a family. The father is waving us down. He’s holding a gas can. He gives us money to get him some gas.  At the gas station, I go into the bathroom and find a swastika (right beside a pentagram). It makes me cheerful to erase it.  There’s a man set up outside the gas station selling Michael Jackson memorabilia. He has everything. He has posters, photos, records, cassettes, compact discs. I bought a sequined glove for my sister.  “Why didn’t you buy a newspaper? You’re a journalist.”  “I should have,” I said. “I didn’t think of it. I will tomorrow.”  “How can you bring that glove in this car?” Luke said. “The guy was raping little kids.” “At least he didn’t blow up a daycare,” Joyce said. “In a way, he did. In a way he did blow up a daycare,” Erin said. “He wasn’t trying to hasten the end of the world,” I said. And so, we have an argument, we have a debate about the lesser of two evils.  When we get back to the stranded family, the man raises his arms upon seeing us like it’s some great victory. We handed off the gas can to him. He snatches it like it’s a trophy.  “You see?” he said to his family. He’s in rapture. “They came back! My wife and my family said I was wrong to believe. They said, ‘what is taking them so long? When are they coming back? I don’t think they are coming back.’ I said, ‘have faith. They will return.’”  He’s scaring his family—you can tell he’s a family tyrant.  He wipes the corners of his mouth with his thumb.  “I should leave them here,” he said. “They should be left behind as a special judgement.”  Jason Escareno is a writer from Seattle. His other works can be found in Bristol Noir, The Rumen, The Opiate, Variant Literature and BULL (forthcoming).

CW: CSA and suicide. These pieces explore themes of trauma, grief, and the burden of memory, confronting the emotional weight of personal experiences. The Weight of a Name It wasn’t the violence depicted on TV, not bruises, nor scars. Just fear and shame              of what              I let happen to my body; I knew I was wrong. I knew I’d be in trouble. I knew I was impure. I knew I became damaged goods. At tender six, I didn’t want to tattle. I longed to be swallowed  whole, to be palatable,                           ignorable. There is no beauty in chewing  childhood wounds. I never imagined the term. It only happens one way: she asked for it. I felt complicit, burdened. The burden, complicit, too, in my silence. With words on my tongue, the weight  of expectation presses me  to cloister pain  with pretty little words. I quantify the unspeakable,  unable to assign a name, even  though I see an r-word, as clear as Rumpelstiltskin. Will speaking it give me power? Your Suicide was Searing Steam from a Pressure Valve After you, brother, the constant  question mark answered. No more sweating, no more creaking under your strain,  no more swinging tightrope begging, “stop me.” The news erased you, lifting weight from my heart, cell by cell, unloading baggage, beat by beat. No more conversations prematurely ended. Your connection, a permanent dial tone  between my ears. Your line, dead. No more pleading  with strangers  to knock on your door, to check your breathing, if you’re still holding on by that fragile thread. No more prayers tossed into the void. I felt the guilty tingle  of relief, of no more  sleepless nights. I felt the guilty truth of this final call; I released a shameful breath of fear put to bed. Driving Home from the Festival While the road stretches ahead like a silver thread, unspooling endless veins  of a sleeping giant, we drive, headlights seeking to outrun  the past,  the present, the future  waiting to unfold velvet dark. In the hush of twilight, it is not the stars that fail us, but our internal flames, dimmed by the weight of living. Stars cradle moons in lullabies, a celestial balm while souls sail on stardust to escape earthly tides, this gravity well  of sorrow.  A cosmic disappointment drapes over the rearview: the sky mirrors  a canvas of unfulfilled  desires. It is not the stars that fail us, but the road, ever winding,  that tethers us to unyielding asphalt, the here , the now . A constant movement; this ceaseless  journey without end. Maudie Bryant (she/her) is a mother, educator, and multidisciplinary artist living in Shreveport, Louisiana. Her work explores the complexities of memory and identity, often looking into the depths of human experience and surveying the disquiet that lurks beneath the surface. A graduate of the University of Louisiana Monroe with an M.A. in English, Maudie’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Anodyne Magazine, Susurrus,  and Spellbinder .

There’s something beautiful about December, as she slinks from the sun. And, we climb to our roofs with cracked knuckles and chapped lips, to fumble with knots to untangle our light to banish the dark. Joseph Lezza is a writer in New York, NY. Holding an MFA in creative writing from The University of Texas at El Paso, his work has been featured in, among others, Variant Literature, The Hopper, Stoneboat Literary Journal, West Trade Review, and Santa Fe Writers Project. His debut memoir in essays, "I'm Never Fine," is due out February 2023 from Vine Leaves Press. When he’s not writing, he spends his time worrying about why he’s not writing. His website is  www.josephlezza.com  and you can find him on the socials @lezzdoothis.

I hunt through the soft cheeses for a chunk of Roquefort. Cheese shouldn't be the focus—not French cheese, not at Whole Foods—the priciest store—not when my checking account balance is so low. But the comfort from the green neon sign and the promise of health and fulfillment soothes me like a balm.  Palming cheese, I picture stashing it in my pocket, anticipating the chill against my thigh through the fabric. It's small enough, just a wedge. I could walk through the swoosh of the automatic doors into the sizzling sun and scrape gooey cheese off my leg during the drive home—all to avoid charging $5 to the credit card.  I cradle the hunk against my fluttering heart and recall my latest promising audition—a promo for a pharmaceutical company in which I played a doctor recommending a new eczema drug. I’ll (hopefully) hear from my agent very soon about a callback.  Oh, to not feel the terrible twist in my belly whenever the balance receipt shoots out from the ATM, the thermal paper warm with judgment. The hairs on my arms stand to attention. I check the price of the cheese: $5.75 for a bleu. Well, cheaper than bail for shoplifting. The cheese is tiny all alone at the bottom of the basket.  My cell pings as I head for the grapes. The screen displays a flower emoji and a heart emoji. It's him, and I smile. Heart emoji . That’s a step .  A fellow actor - also broke - we met while performing in a play. What is he, exactly? Boyfriend? Occasional lover? He doesn't like labels. I text: Nice… hearts to you. Come over for dinner later?  He texts: … Can't. Working until 1 am.   Miss you tho. He moonlights as a DJ for his cousin's Bar Mitzvah business. We say "hearts" instead of love. I mean love but I’m not sure he does. I glance at my scuffed shoes. Yesterday, I hiked up the Palisades Canyon to the cliffside. The ocean was a glimmering shade of aqua dotted with white sailboats. It looked magical, the breeze light enough that not even a ripple danced across the water. Everything seems possible when you are that high up.  I text back: Aw. I wanna relax with wine, cheese, TV & you. (Sad face emoji) I shouldn't have mentioned wine because now I want wine. Is there a $10 bottle or less that won’t remove the enamel from my teeth?  A frizzle of ache shimmies down my spine as other shoppers casually place items in carts, oblivious to price, their clothes cost more than I probably make in a week as a part-time caterer.  Every night I bolt awake: How can I make more money? How many more jobs can I do? I read somewhere that Tom Cruise once tipped a server thousands because he knew she was going through a rough time. Where can I find Tom Cruise??? The DJ didn’t return my text. The three dots appear and fade away to nothing. His communiqués offer slivers of hope but are reminders that I only get crumbs.  I drop the basket and crouch. An untamed hunger thrums through my body, pulsing to the beat of the piped-in music. I unwrap the cheese and shove the creamy mound into my hot mouth. My fingers are stained slate blue and smell like gamey socks, but I lick off the cheese. Every. Last. Bite. I stalk the snacks aisle, which is usually off-limits for me but I don’t care. A frivolous box of vegan crackers, truffle mustard, canned octopus. Fancy pre-packaged eclairs. Dried porcini mushrooms and Ponzu sauce. A frenzy builds inside me, like a poked beehive. The stink of Roquefort taunts me.  Up in that canyon yesterday I promised to the air, to the ocean, to the squirrels lurking in scrub brush: I will get out of debt and I will be an actor!   Oh, yesterday.   Aisle by aisle, I rip things from shelves until the basket heaves. And I get the damn wine.  Michelle Furnace Brosius is a writer, recovering former actor, and occasional French speaker, newly transplanted to beautiful Oregon with her husband and two cats. Her stories and essays have appeared in Bending Genres, Scarlet Leaf Review, the (late) personal finance site The Billfold, Medium, and other various places.

Standing on the front porch is a little bright-eyed wren of a woman with a nimbus of untamed white curls; she’s wearing a black dress that has seen better days. “My deepest condolences, dear. Amanda was a very special friend, and her loss is incalculable,” says Sarah Lincoln to the woman who answers the door. “I’m one of her friends from the book club. And you must be the beautiful daughter Jennie she bragged so much about.” “No, I’m Melanie, Joshua’s wife. Please come join the visitation.” Stepping in, the old woman beams, “The one with the twins! They delighted her so.” “I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name,” Melanie says as she ushers the woman toward the living room where thirty or so mourners, family members, and friends are gathered in quiet groups or around a potluck spread laid out in the adjoining dining room.  “My name is Helen McAdams,” is Sarah Lincoln’s well-rehearsed reply. “Helen? I don’t remember her mentioning –” She trails off as she catches the flash of disappointment in the woman’s eyes, adding, “I didn’t know she was in a book club.”  The older woman confides, “Our guilty secret. We read trashy romances and call ourselves ‘ Nine Shades of Gray’ and –” Her voice catches. “Now it’s just eight. Poor Amanda!” Blinking away tears, “And I’m worried about Jenny Endrich. She looked so frail at the last meeting.” “Yes, so sad. Thank you for coming.” Melanie is saved from further book club drama by the bell. “I need to get that, er –” “Helen,” Sarah Lincoln reminds her. “Yes, Helen. Join her other friends and family, and please help yourself to something,” gesturing toward the food. “Oh, I will. I will. Could you please point me to the bathroom first?”  The doorbell chimes again, and Melanie points to a side hall. “Two doors down on the right.” Once locked in the bathroom, Sarah washes her face and touches up her minimal makeup, appraising herself in the mirror for a moment. How did it come to this: the vibrant, daring, live-for-the-moment hippie chick devolved into a decaying crone whose life now consists of funeral after funeral? She frowns as she opens the medicine cabinet. Then she smiles. There’s a partly filled prescription bottle of Eliquis, retailing for up to $500 without insurance, and another unopened bottle! Those go in her handbag first. They’ll fetch probably $300 at a good nursing home. And look, a full 90-day supply of Oxy. She can get $15 apiece for them on the street. She tucks these down in her purse, too. Leaving the bathroom, she checks the hallway. It’s clear, so she moves down to the largest bedroom. A quick scan tells her that, unbelievably, no one in the family seems to have grabbed up the good jewelry yet. There is a gold ring with a sizable sapphire and some ruby and pave diamond studs in the jewelry box; those she tucks into a small pocket hidden along the seam of her dress. She takes the pearl necklace, too, though her fence gripes the resale market for pearls is shit. If nothing else, she can wear them to the next funeral, add some pearl-clutching cred to her front.  Looking as if she lost her way, she wanders back to the dining room, but no one is paying attention. The solitary superpower of being an old gray woman: invisibility.  She loads up a plate with her first meal of the day. She can afford to be a bit picky in her selections; the newspaper’s obituary for Peter O’Donnell says the wake starts at five, so there’ll surely be something for supper along with the drinks and speeches. She nods and murmurs condolences to the few mourners circling the table, but mentally, she’s running through the details she gleaned from the O’Donnell listing. Three sons. Ten grandchildren. Wife predeceased. Donations in lieu go to the Humane Society.  So, I’ll be Helen from the Humane Society. She suppresses a smile . Then, grab the goods and I’ll be Helen Gone . She never tires of that joke. Once her plate is full, she finds an overstuffed chair to sink into. Eat, rest her feet for ten minutes – it was a long bus ride and walk to get to the visitation, and another coming up in a few hours. She’ll be Helen Gone from here before anyone starts missing loot, though. Besides, she’s going to be stuck in a chair plenty tomorrow, sitting Shiva at the Rosenfeld home. Very tony neighborhood. Art collector, according to the write-up. Should be some treasures to be found there. Between bites of marinated mushrooms, she sighs, thinking again for the umpteenth time: It’s criminal how hard you’ve got to work to be retired. Boyd Blackwood has earned his living from writing for his entire career in the fields of advertising and magazine non-fiction. These days, his passion is “less is more” fiction.

How long had we been staring at her tiny body? Twenty seconds? Twenty minutes? She was doing her magic trick: breathing in through her chestnut nose, swelling and deflating. We were leaning over the cot, inhaling her second-hand air; it did us no good, but we didn’t care.  Brought us closer together.  Us. You and me and her.  She was our queen to be protected. She was an enemy, bent on our destruction.  I made a ‘T’ sign with my index fingers. You smiled, and we tip-toed to the kitchen, weary and defeated and happy. I boiled the kettle.  Six o’clock in the morning. We should have slept. She’d had us up since five.  You’d leaped from the bed like you’d been half awake waiting to feed her. I’d been half asleep. I followed you in useless solidarity. She screamed as I held her while you unpacked a babygrow, dry and white and new. Did you tut when you took her from me? Annoyed that I’d failed to soothe her? Hard to tell in the dark.  She wouldn’t latch, you said, demanding explanations from me with your eyes. Why wasn’t she hungry? Was the nappy too tight?  ‘I could make a bottle,’ I said. ‘Try the breast again in the morning?’  You burned me alive.  And then, without reason, she locked her lips to you, and the consumption began. Her mothwing eyelids fell and twitched, her cheeks pulsating in their hungry rhythm. Your shoulders loosened.  We sipped the tea in silence.  She woke again as I tidied away our cups. In the hours most people call mid-morning, I ran errands to busy away the last days of my paternity leave.  * Handshakes in the corridors, slaps on the back, a gentle cheer in the canteen. Like I’d just returned from war. Steven brought a box of mini muffins from Tesco.  ‘Welcome back, Karlo,’ he said. ‘Fair play to you.’ ‘Ah thanks, it’s been brilliant. Glad I took the full month.’ It was over the top, embarrassing and lovely.  Nobody asked me to do anything until lunchtime. Then I was back in my cleanroom coveralls, facemask and goggles for the first time since she was born. Back to watching an automated production line fill sterile syringes by the thousand. Would anyone notice if I slept standing up?  She was napping when I got home. I thought you’d be happier to see me.  ‘Should we not wake her so she sleeps tonight?’  ‘Don’t you dare,’ you said. ‘That’s the first decent nap she’s had.’  I told you about the new antibody we’d started making, but you seem distracted.  ‘It’s a TNF inhibitor?’ I said. ‘For arthritis, but there’s trials in psoriasis and Crohn’s.’  ‘That’s another language from another planet.’ ‘No worries,’ I said. ‘You’ll catch up when you come back. What’s for dinner?’ You looked out the window.  * We zombied our way through the days and nights until she was six months and sitting up. From the spare room, the night feeds sounded less frequent, but you said her sleep was as bad as ever.   ‘I’ll move back into the bedroom next week when we’re both working,’ I said. ‘Fair’s fair.’ ‘I can’t.’  ‘Can’t what?’ ‘Put her in the creche. Not yet. Look at her.’ She was sitting in an inflatable ring, trying to eat a large plastic ball that eclipsed her tiny face.  ‘You kinda have to,’ I said.  It wasn’t an argument because we weren't shouting.  *   Our queen gave us an awful night. Like she knew her world was on the cusp of disruption. I’d been getting up to her all week since we got her onto the bottle.  I leaned against the wall, strung out, watching you pack a bag of bottles and nappies and soothers and clothes and a long list of what she likes and doesn't like and how to comfort her and how to contact us.  ‘It’s fine, it’s three hours,’ I said, flat-voiced. ‘You can pick her up at lunchtime.’ ‘Why don’t we just start properly tomorrow?’ you said. ‘What’s the point in putting her through this when I’m home doing nothing?’ ‘Let’s not, okay? You know the answer.’  A ‘dry run,’ the creche called it. A half day to get her used to the place, then six hours tomorrow and the full eight next week when you’re working full tilt again.  We barely spoke as you fixed her into the car with her silk-trimmed blanket and squeezy giraffe. I listened to the radio while you double-checked that everything was in the boot, gave her another kiss, made promises in a sunny voice and waved us off.  Morning rays warmed my face through the car window. She was asleep by the time we rounded the corner, before you had decided what to do with your half day of agonising freedom.  * The coveralls can be sweaty. I like to take mine off when the eleven o’clock break comes. Step outside the cleanroom for a breath of new air, even if it means I have to repeat the aseptic protocol before reentry.  A phone vibrated and sang in my locker as I pulled blue booties from the dispenser. Nobody ever called me except charities and scammers. I had one shoe covered in blue plastic when it rang again. I sighed and dragged my body over to the locker.  Three missed calls from you.  Stephen rapped on the window of the dressing room with boiling urgency. I pressed the door release button.  ‘What?’  ‘Little Princeton rang.’ He spat the words.  ‘Little Princeton?’ ‘The creche,’ he said.  ‘I know Little Princeton is the bloody creche.’ ‘Your wife’s trying to get through to you.’ ‘Yeah, I saw ‒ what’s up?’ ‘The creche was expecting your little one this morning.’ Gary Finnegan is an Irish writer whose work has appeared in Litro, Bull, The London Magazine, HOWL and elsewhere. He is working on a novel.

on television to capture you they show you a countdown  to christmas a countdown  to elections all pretty much interchangeable like some demented form of survival of the fittest bottled-up instant-gratification can  make in 3 easy payments  to attempt to achieve that  unreachable holy happiness that high school sweetheart  or god just couldn’t get while most just try to top it all off with either a bottle of bourbon  or bottle of opiates or if so choose to be one of those brutish one-upping competitive  extroverted idiots at health club  where can relive your whole half  witted childhood all over again  with real-life reflections in the  he-man mythological mirror as  some sort of bully or jock or stud slut bending over for the father  next door but best of all got that countdown to elections that countdown to christmas can conveniently collapse & store all safe & secure right below your bed where that monster once lived in your head Joseph D. Reich is a social worker who lives with his wife and teenage son in the high-up mountains of Vermont. He has been published in a wide variety of eclectic literary journals both here and abroad, been nominated seven times for The Pushcart Prize, and his books include... If I Told You To Jump Off The Brooklyn Bridge (Flutter Press) A Different Sort of Distance (Skive Magazine Press) Pain Diary: Working Methadone & The Life & Times Of The Man Sawed In Half (Brick Road Poetry Press) Drugstore Sushi (Thunderclap Press) The Derivation Of Cowboys & Indians (Fomite Press) The Housing Market: a comfortable place to jump off the end of the world (Fomite Press) The Hole That Runs Through Utopia (Fomite Press) Taking The Fifth And Running With It: a psychological guide for the hard of hearing and blind (Broadstone Books) The Hospitality Business (Valeviel Press) Connecting The Dots To Shangrila: A Postmodern Cultural Hx Of America (Fomite Press) A Case Study Of Werewolves (Fomite Press) The Rituals Of Mummification (Sagging  Meniscus Press) Magritte’s Missing Murals: Insomniac Episodes (Sagging Meniscus Press)  How To Shoot A Tourist (with a bow & arrow) In A Hot-Air  Balloon (Sagging Meniscus Press) How To Order Chinese During A Hostage Crisis: Dialects, Existential Essays, A Play, And Other Poems (Hog Press) American Existentialism (Tuba Press) An Eccentric Urban Guide To Surviving (Analog Submission Press) The American Book Of The Dead (Xi Draconis Books)  From Premonition To Prophecy (Delinkwent Scholar Press) Statutes Of David (Pen & Anvil Press) Aphoristic Variations: a trilogy (Makeshift Press) I Know Why Old Men Sit In Front Of Windows All Day, Sighing & Crying & Living & Dying When The Sun Goes Down On The City At Night (Kung-Fu Treachery Press) A Case Study Of The Amerikan Dream: the secret life of lounge singers (gnOme books)

Loading the Truck Sweat glistening on my forehead like some family heirloom I've always thought worth more than it truly is, while the rain  drops pelt me, as if spit  from a broken hearted lover, who refuses to accept grey clouds never last, and my hands weaken just enough to give me the strength to finish a chore done  because of love.  A Thriving Virus Death shaped flowers  bought with a credit card that needed a sad phone call a few hours earlier to increase the card's limit, and they say living isn't cheap, but I've learned that dying isn't either, especially as a case of beer jingled a dirge in our backseat, or was it a hymn to St. Matthew? Regardless, the interest grew like a thriving virus, smart enough to only spread sickness, and not to kill. The Folly of Being Quenched Whisky yellow like the sun, while water bottles are full  as coffins on a grey day,  when guilt louder  than a fierce rain, and we all know water is needed for life, yet underestimate thirst (literal or otherwise), grabbing us by the throat just rough enough to make us forget whatever we did wrong.