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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The St James Place Bookshop Janice sat surrounded by Penguin Classics, sighing and sipping her Fanta. Traffic swished by outside the window. At the market, piles of cantaloupes, mangos and peaches touted for her money. Vegetable barkers pushed carrots, pumpkins and sweet potatoes. Merchandising was everywhere! Here there was none, as if her boss didn’t want to sell anything. *** Sometime around midnight, Janice stood in the shadows of a notorious, local underpass, watching out for one of the infamous taggers who flaunted their work on Instagram. Soon she saw movement and stepped forward. “The great Michelangelo II, I presume!” A man who would not have looked out of place in a downtown office said, “Who wants to know?” “Just someone who could use your talents and spread your fame. I work in a bookshop and you could paint pictures illustrating some of the books on the front window. You’d get the credit and we’d get the advertising. It’s a win-win.” Soon pictures of tigers, foxes, ladybirds and sunsets appeared on the front windows of the bookshop. *** Janice pulled to the roadside near a group of community-service workers who were picking up rubbish. A smile passed over her face as she got out, approached the boss of the gang and held out her hand. “Hello, I’m Janice Scott and I was wondering if your group could clean some graffiti off the window of the book shop where I work. In fact, it might need to be a regular thing because those pig-headed taggers can keep coming back.” Louis smiled back and said, “If it means I get the chance to see you again, I’ll make sure it gets added to the schedule.” Janice quite liked the sound of that, so they struck a deal. Every week the old group of pictures was removed and, sure enough, another group replaced it. Meanwhile, Janice and Louis got to know each other quite well. *** Janice’s boss, Mr. Sanderson, was a reclusive type who left everything to Janice. But, as more and more people were drawn to the pictures, they then asked about and bought the books which were illustrated. So, Janice decided to get in touch with him and ask for a raise. The increase in turnover certainly justified it. As usual, Janice got his answering machine, but oddly his message said he’d gone away on vacation. Janice was sure he’d told her that he hated traveling. *** Then one day a man came into the shop, turned around the Open sign and locked the door. Lifting his lapel, he revealed a filled shoulder holster. “About this shop,” he said, “I’ve come to make you an offer you can’t refuse.” Snail Mail Marge opened her letterbox and found a pile of confetti. She’d only been gone a week but the snails had munched their way through whatever had come. It couldn’t have been very important, she thought. A couple of years later she ran into her old boyfriend John in Coles and he introduced her to his new wife. While Sally was off squeezing the melons, he asked Marge why she’d never answered his letter two years earlier. ‘I never would have married Sally if you had,’ he said. Later Marge put several large boxes of snail pellets into her trolley. Susan Cornford is a retired public servant, living in Perth, Western Australia. She/her has most recently had pieces published or forthcoming in Ab Terra Flash Fiction, Across the Margin, Adelaide Literary Magazine, borrowed solace, Crow’s Feet Journal, Ethel Zine, Flash Frontier, Frost Zone Zine, Granfalloon Magazine, INK Babies Literary Magazine, Instant Noodles Literary Magazine, Mystery Tribune, The Mythic Circle, Quail Bell Magazine, The Short Humour Site, Thriller Magazine and Worthing Flash.

HE CAME BACK YEARS LATER BUT I WAS ALREADY DAMAGED GOODS Bright parrots chirp glass songs near your lunette window <<>> I want to keep a California thrasher <<>> But I am afraid it will outlive me <<>> Like your Phoenix tattoo <<>> Over a flesh cloud of black ink <<>> I lay on your shoulder <<>> I know what is & isn’t real <<>> Know where myth & reality meet <<>> I’ve grown up & sex isn’t everything <<>> What I don’t know: did you really rise from the ashes and all that? <<>> Your three different bottles of pills <<>> Scattered like bird seed <<>> Azines & azepams keep you flying <<>> I’m still crawling along the ground <<>> Still wearing sparrow feathered masks <<>> Never did leave the party where we met <<>> All of eighteen & too virgin-nervous to walk the river <<>> We should have done this years ago <<>> Realizing who we are again to one another <<>> Waiting for birds to outlive us <<>> You want to know if time broke me <<>> If I only like things when they hurt? <<>> Not exactly <<>> When I was twenty-one <<>> A man asked to play my body like an instrument <<>> & I let him <<>> & honestly I haven’t been the same since <<>> Longingness Am I in a relationship with you or longing? <<>> I need to know how longing <<>> Is like the number 13 <<>> How the 3 bends <<>> But the 1 never does <<>> Like heartache <<>> Or a rough haunting <<>> Always reaching for the 1 <<>> But you belong to no one <<>> My longing three nets <<>> Is longing an emotion? <<>> What I really need is a good trepanning <<>> To rid the longing <<>> A hole in my head <<>> To cure the 3 in my heart <<>> Like the brain longs for bubbles <<>> Like the skull longs for metal <<>> That full heartbeat in the brain <<>> Brain pulse <<>> How 13 never touches itself <<>> Reach and reach <<>> Holes may bring relief <<>> What’s happening between us <<>> So beautiful <<>> And delicate <<>> Like you blowing a bubble in my mouth <<>> Is longingness a word? <<>> No <<>> But let the word voyage <<>> Let it long for touch as I write <<>>> I will keep adding letters to the word <<>> Let it touch you <<>> You <<>> My longingness <<>> Suzanne Richardson earned her M.F.A. in Albuquerque, New Mexico at the University of New Mexico. She currently lives in Binghamton, New York where she's a Ph.D. student in creative writing at SUNY Binghamton. She is working on a memoir, Throw it Up and a full poetry collection, The Want Monster. She is the writer of Three Things @nocontactmag and more about Suzanne and her writing can be found here: https://www-suzannerichardsonwrites.tumblr.com/

Coevolution I’ve never dreamed of wolves only of the stars above their ears. My dog sleeps next to me still green from a roll in fresh-cut grass. Thousands of years ago we chose some wolves to breed brought them along on our evolutionary journey and left the rest behind out beneath the stars. How did we decide to tame those silver-tongued wolves who permeated the membranes of our porous dreams? When we were running running running quadrupeds again seeing through their shining eyes until dawn broke and the wolves slept and we woke, hands and feet dirty with mud and grass. Staccato memories of stars vibrated above our ears and we had the strange feeling of having spent the night boca arriba, face-up all four limbs stretched out reaching reaching reaching for the moon. We saw through their eyes bright like mercury and said, we can make them better. Systems of Navigation I. There are no more explorers, not really. They died out long ago, once they’d mapped every inch of the earth’s surface. What is there left to explore, or even to see, after we have forced the others to show us everything that was theirs – and then we took it? II. The first real explorers are not remembered by name but only by the stars they became when they died. Their light became our light when we were still young enough to be given gifts for no reason as though there was still time for us to grow up to become something good, as though the cosmos gifted us things because we were children and there was no reason not to. The gods must have been crazy. But then, who could have predicted what we would become? Those first explorers trusted the stars, the constellations, to lead them where they were meant to go and the beautiful thing of it all is that they did. Second star to the right, and straight on till morning. Now we put our faith in GPS to lead us – not where we are meant to go, but where we have already decided to. The question is no longer, Shall we pilgrimage by land or sea but rather, What is the fastest route to my destination. Avoid tolls and traffic. III. To understand, we have only to look up at the stars and down at the earth. To understand, we can remember the Incas Manco Capac and Mama Ocllo, who followed a golden staff to where they were meant to be – a city they named Cusco: Navel of the World. To understand, imagine shining streets radiating out from your own navel. Imagine yourself streaming through those streets at night looking up at the black that holds the stars in place: you are lost, you are golden, you are free. Liana Kapelke-Dale is a poet and ATA Certified Translator (Spanish to English). She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Spanish Language and Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and a Juris Doctor from the University of Wisconsin Law School. She is the author of Seeking the Pink (Kelsay Books), a full-length book of poetry; Little words seeking/Mute human for mutual/Gain and maybe more (Irrelevant Press), a chapbook of personal ads written in haiku form; and Specimens, her first (self-published) chapbook. Her poetry has been featured in myriad journals, most recently in Cerasus Magazine and Full House Literary Magazine, and she has work forthcoming in Shorelines of Infinity. Liana lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with her lovely pointer-hound mix, Poet.

Where could she be? It was snowing. Hard. And his sister was somewhere in the storm. Papa went to fetch the doctor—Mama’s baby was coming—and left Bobby at a crossroads, though you couldn’t see them cross because of the snow: Bitty’s not home, go find her. He watched the back of the wagon and its wheels, smaller and smaller until he saw only the angle-falling snow. Go find her. Bobby turned and looked across the white emptiness. Only angle-falling snow. Opposite angle. Papa had a dead arm. It hung at his side, lifeless, immobile, useless except for filling his sleeve. Bobby was afraid it was like blight in the field, first one stalk, then a patch, then the whole field brown and broken and everyone worried how they would eat. Go find her. My name is Bobby Frye, like fry with an e. My parents are Robert and Roberta Frye. My sister is Elizabeth. Everybody calls her Bitty. I live in the white house three-quarters of a mile northwest of Stephenson Road looking toward Hollis Woods. He began walking. Snow stung his face, a face that was just beginning to show the first fine signs of manhood. Maybe she went to get Mrs. Houndstooth to help your mother, Papa said. The wagon couldn’t reach the Houndstooth farm because of the snow-drifted road, so Papa went to get Doc Higgins, though he hadn’t delivered a baby in more years than anyone could count, Papa said. The Houndstooth farm and the Whittle farm and the Stephenson farm, they all touch here and there, and the woods—witches are in the woods and the devil and coyotes. And hunters and trappers. Plague doesn’t live in the woods, he comes at night, you hear the flapping of his wings then the children are gone. He’s black, even his beak, even his eyes. Black like the night but blacker. Then the mother and father wear black. But blacker. Like Mr. Michaels’s suit, the undertaker, and Pastor Wilson. Pray to Jesus and to the Virgin—they will protect you. And to God and to Mary. They also will protect you. The Hollis children didn’t say their prayers. They’re in the woods too. Their ghosts. They’re ghosts. There ghosts. Which? Witch. White sky white ground. Bobby had to look hard into the wind to see a difference. His eyes watered. He wiped at them with the back of his glove. He was supposed to have a twin. A brother just like him. An always friend and game-mate. But he went to Jesus when they were born. I’ll meet him someday. What will I call him? He doesn’t have a name. Will he look just like me now or when I’m old? What if he’s still a baby? Will I have to take care of him? Like Mama’s baby, the lost one that went to Jesus also, and this new baby Mama’s having. Sometimes babies smell good, like honeysuckle soap, and sometimes they smell bad, real bad, like the privy hole in summer. You can smell them five pews away. Even Pastor Wilson makes a face. It’s funny but don’t laugh. He stopped and considered the white-on-white horizon. Something was moving, something dark against the emptiness. He waited. Should he run? Go find her. Maybe it’s Bitty. Uncertainty froze him as he turned over again and again what to do, like cards in a game whose rules kept out of reach of his fingertips. The dark figure approached. Not Bitty. Cautious. A man in a black coat and hat, a rifle on his shoulder, a Savage like Papa’s, a hunter, pulling an empty sled by a rope. Snowshoes affecting his gait. Have you saw a girl? The man was silent. A little girl, by herself, my sister? No, haven’t seen anyone I’m afraid. There were boot prints, small, maybe a girl’s. Where? The man turned and waved his arm vaguely in a direction. Maybe that way, can’t say for certain. Bobby waited for the man to say more, to provide more helpful information. Instead, What road is this? Bobby didn’t realize he was next to a road. There were the ruts of wheels cut in the snow, and half-frozen dung. Maybe from him and Papa and Old Psalt (the p is like the e in Frye, p and e rhyme), when they tried to fetch Mrs. Houndstooth to help Mama and the baby. Whittle Road, he guessed, the fork to their place is just over there. He gestured as the man had. Go find her. Bobby set off in the hopeless snow. He tasted snot on his chapped lips and wiped his nose with the back of his glove. He squinted into the piercing white light scanning for boot prints. Prints the relentless snow had been erasing from the start. He walked into the featureless landscape until he was no longer bothering to find the boot prints. Bobby wondered if the hunter was real, or had his brain played a dirty trick on him? It always played tricks when he still went to school. He would study hard until he knew his number tables, or the capitals, or Mr. Lincoln’s speech, or how to spell the state with all the s’s and p’s. He knew them dead, or nearly dead, until the teacher put a slate in front of him and told him to write them, then his brain played its dirty trick and all he could remember was my name is Bobby Frye, like fry with an e, my parents are Robert and Roberta Frye . . . he could feel his classmates’ eyes laughing at him and worse he could feel his little sister’s eyes feeling sorry for him wanting to tell him the answers secretly like someone talking to you in a dream. Bobby could still think his times threes up to four, easy, but only because the teacher wasn’t telling him to write them, and the class wasn’t waiting for him not to be able to. He stopped in the white nowhere and relieved himself writing 12 in tall yellow figures. The sky was sour-milk gray. Dark was coming. It was cold. The 12 was already fading back to white. The contrast of the dimming sky helped the outline of Hollis Woods to stand out on the horizon, so Bobby began trudging toward them. Normally you avoided the woods but they were at least something he knew, a point of reference that softened the feeling of being lost. A new teacher had been coming to the farm just to teach Bobby, Mr. Folger. He and Mama were friends. At church people said Mr. Folger was teaching Mama some new lessons. Mrs. Anthony said no, Mama was teaching him. People thought that was funny. Mr. Folger gave Mama a book she liked to read. She kept it in a drawer until Papa was in the barn or the field. The book wasted a lot of paper—there was only a small block of words on each page. Mr. Folger stopped teaching Bobby at the farm. Then Mama was expecting the baby. Mrs. Anthony said it was a bone-filed miracle, Papa making her that way. Worth every Joseph, she said. At night Mama sat in the parlor by herself reading Mr. Folger’s book. After Papa was in bed, Papa and his dead arm. It didn’t matter that Mr. Folger quit teaching him. He had to help Papa more and more. The ground slowly tilted down making walking easier, which was good. His legs were tired from the high snow. He wished he had snowshoes like the hunter was wearing. For a moment he forgot why he was out in the storm, lost, cold, then he remembered Bitty, then Mama and the baby, then the boot prints. Then there they were—prints of some sort in the snow, dark partially frozen impressions that may have been made by small boots or shoes, or maybe they were paw prints, a dog or a coyote. They came along the hill crosswise before turning down, on a path directly toward the woods, close enough now to see the vertical outlines of tree trunks, the vanguard before breaching the monochrome of hopeless endless white. Go find her. Bobby wiped his nose with the back of his glove and began following the vanishing prints. He heard things—someone calling, a girl’s voice, laughter, a girl’s, howling, a dog or a coyote—and at each sound he paused, looked through the angle-falling snow for its source, and each time found nothing. The wind, he decided, banking against the hill. Or carrying the sounds from Hollis Woods and laying them upon the snow, one by one, like the cards Mama used to show him, Mama or Bitty, to teach him words: horse and dog and moon and witch and boy and girl—he remembered the pictures clearly (he could draw them dead if they wanted) but the words jumbled their letters the second Mama or Bitty turned them facedown. Grandpa Hab, Papa’s Papa, lived with them, and sometimes he forgot and spoke his other language, from when he was a boy. The words on the cards were kind of like that. The pieces sounded right but they were put together in ways that wouldn’t make sense. Sometimes Grandpa called Bitty a funny name, the name of a girl from his other language, when he was a boy. horse dog moon witch boy girl Girl, like the one from the card, was there, in the snow, before the woods, dark clothes, yellow hair wrapping itself in the wind. Not Bitty though little bitty like her. Not little young so much as little small. Bobby had stopped, studying her from a distance. He raised his hand in greeting. The girl turned and walked into the woods. She wasn’t wearing a coat. Or a hat. Only a coarse blue dress hardly suited to the weather. The facts required time to register. Bobby hurried after her, the girl who was quickly being obscured by the snowy woods, swallowed by them, hidden away. Hello! He could hardly hear himself in the howling whipping swirling wind and the crunching dampening deepening snow. Bobby paused before entering the woods and thought again of the card images horse dog moon witch boy girl. He thought of the Virgin in his Sunday picture book, only a girl cloaked in blue, her blond hair against a yellow disk, a girl with a baby white as snow. He looked back at the sour-milk sky above the pure white rise. Maybe the moon was there, hidden, risen as it can before earnest nightfall. Hidden like the girl now. Go find her. He wiped his nose and stepped into the forest. Instantly the wind was cut. Snow instead fell gently from the forest canopy—like the snow during the Nativity play on Christmas Eve. One Christmas, the Christmas Mama lost the baby, during the play Mama’s tears fell slowly like the snow when Baby Jesus was placed in the manger—not the real Baby Jesus, the Mesmores’ baby but too big for Baby Jesus. Light too fell lightly from the forest’s invisible ceiling. The girl had entered the woods at a place where there was a rough but discernible path, a narrow but consistent space between trees. Bobby saw no prints in the snow, yet she must’ve come this way. He started following the crude path. He remembered the witch’s hooked nose and her single overlarge eye that watched you no matter where you moved in the room. Until Mama or Bitty put the stack in the drawer. Even then you knew the witch was in there, and her staring eye was staring in the dark. In the forest’s half-light the jutting trunks and crossing limbs, all brushed with shadow, seemed to form any number of unlikely shapes. Bobby’s snow-weary eyes worked to make them out. There was a sow with her shoats in the almost-dark, and a bear rearing up on his hind legs, and, most improbably of all, an elephant whose trunk was crook-shaped like the witch’s nose. They appeared one after another just off the wandering path. They were not real, Bobby knew. Yet their presence in the woods unsettled him. Each vanished as easily as it appeared, a trick of his trouble-causing brain. The girl he saw, she must have been a trick too, one that fooled him into entering the woods. Bobby turned to undo his mistake, to right his wrong—and she was on the path, facing him, her hair aglow in the waning light. Her eyes a luminous blue, staring at him. In fact not blinking at all. Bobby spoke the only words that came to him: Have you saw my sister, Bitty, little like you? Then he said, Are you lost too? Then, Where’s your baby, the baby white as snow? He watched for the yellow disk to rise behind her like the moon. Maybe it was there, in the sky, but concealed by the trees and the storm. She opened her mouth and spoke. The pieces of her words were jumbled, perhaps half of them not reaching him at all, falling to the snow-covered ground between them. Bobby had an impulse to gather them and try to fit them back together like pieces of a broken bowl. On the floor mixed among wax beans still steaming in the cold kitchen. Or the bits of a ripped letter, like the one Mr. Folger gave Mama—Bobby recognized the oblong loops and slanted sticks of his teacher’s writing. Mama tore it up damp with her tears and threw the pieces at the fire. She hurried away crying and didn’t see some of the biggest pieces missed the fire and were scattered on the parlor rug. Papa and his dead arm were in the barn. Bobby picked up the pieces and wished he didn’t have such a bad brain—but he knew Papa’s good brain didn’t need to read them. So he put them in the fire for Mama. And for Papa. And Bitty. And the new baby. Bobby was staring at the ground, at the pieces of the girl’s words that were not there, and knew she wasn’t either even before looking up. He felt the witch’s eye staring at him. Maybe then she wasn’t watching Bitty, wherever she was, or Mama and the baby, or Papa, for surely it was her evil eye that had blighted Papa’s arm. Her eye was overlarge and powerful, yes, and grim, but still only singular. Out there, beyond the edge of the woods, some daylight remained. Bobby wiped his nose and began again. "Oxen at the Well" is part of a work in progress. Other pieces have appeared or are forthcoming in/at North American Review (two pieces), Sequestrum, Belle Ombre, Pangyrus, and The Bookends Review; in anthologies/collections from Wordrunner e-Chapbooks, Adelaide Books, Something or Other Publishing, and Indie It Press; as podcasts from 9th Story Studios; and dramatic video readings from NY Web Publishing. See tedmorrissey.com for way too much information.

LAST DAYS OF MAY After my last exam, I stopped to see my brother, who’d just invented a holiday that required him to call off work. “Eponymas?” I said. “The holy day of self-titled debut albums!” I sat, enveloped by the smell of marijuana and whatever it was that wafted from his work-friend Mab, who brooded inside a hoodie on the cat-killed couch. “Today, my brother said, “it’s BOC.” When I named my favorite song of theirs, Mab cackled. The smell reminded me of roadside decay. “Seriously? ‘Burning for You?’” My brother palmed off his bandana and shook out lawless hair. “Buck the popular opinions.’” He slid the disc into his hand. “The early stuff’s what’s real. When a band’s still faithful to themselves.” He dropped the needle. Crack and fizz. Then came the clear, austere lead. “First verse,” my brother said. “Story’s all there. Naïve dudes, desert landscape, cash for dope, the hint of inevitable betrayal.” He glanced at Mab. “That right?” While listening, I studied the curtains—a tattered flag with the words “NO SURRENDER” slapped across red and black. Mab drew the strings of his hoodie before offering me a joint. When I shook my head, he said, “Your loss,” the room blooming again with that corpse-like smell. “No—his gain.” My brother squeezed my shoulder. “He’s not going to go along with the crowd.” The boys were now dead, the song nearly done. Eyes flickering, my brother stood to twist the lock on the door. “Trust, faith,” he said. “All’s well and good until someone loses a life.” Mab passed his stink with the joint. My brother inhaled and held his breath, eyes fixed on the shadow beneath the hood. At the end of the month, hauled in by his boss for theft, he’d let it all out for good. BREAK ROOM, SMITTY’S ON THE LEVEE “There oughta be a rule,” Angelica said, jabbing a shoe into the space between his boots. “At least three steps for a dance.” “You can’t even...” He touched her shoulders, showed her where to put hands before moving her—one-two, one-two. She studied his eyes. He couldn’t believe how little there was between them. “Quick-quick, slow-slow.” Last week, on his way from break back to Dairy, he’d noticed her in Meats. The next day, she grinned crazily behind the glass, raised a cleaver for effect. “Maybe—” “Follow my lead.” Yesterday evening, sent to the lot for carts, he gawked at a parade of tight jeans and ten gallons striding toward the Cactus Club next door. Ridiculous or cool? Maybe they could scoot their way into the spree in between? “You smell like a baby.” “Huh?” “Milk.” Her bloody apron spoiled the picture he’d conjured of them dressed to the cowpoke nines. She grinned. “One-two percent.” Hurt, he stuck thumbs into belt loops. He pantomimed a cheek with chaw. “But you’ve got a few moves,” Angelica said, sideways punching his arm. “I’ll give you that.” One, two—such stupid simple math. But she, although sharp, would never add them up. THE WARDROBE I’m sipping coffee at a bar in Schöneberg when this man slaps down across from me. Swigging his Kindl, he tells me he’s in Berlin for the year. “Such history,” I say. “You a tourist?” He tips his beer toward memorabilia behind me. “I’m looking for a new start.” “You and the world. You know Bowie, though?” “‘Changes?’” “If that’s the best you can do. In the 70s, this was his favorite bar.” I say I’d just wanted a place to rest. “He’s coming back, you know.” “Who?” “Bowie.” “Isn’t he—?” “Listen, mate.” He scrapes his chair toward mine. “I bought that wardrobe at an auction. The one from ‘Lazarus.’ Last video he made.” I remember. “Someday, he’ll step back out, dressed in some slick new skin. Not Ziggy, not the Thin White Duke.” When the coffin closed, I forgot my mother’s face. “I’ll be front row for something never seen.” As a teen, attempting to come close, I’d sneak into her closet, slip into dresses and precipitous heels, items she’d saved for occasions that never came. Now, those clothes are gone forever. At Goodwill, some spaced-out guy shrugged and said, “Guess you can chuck ’em on that heap.” Michael’s flash and microfictions have appeared in online journals such as Fictive Dream, Fiction Kitchen Berlin, Cabinet of Heed, and South Florida Poetry Journal.