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On the Stones of the Temple Floors Incantations are Written There comes a time when most people start walking back, walking back to wherever it is they came from, trying to find the place where they were known. No one speaks of poetry or money or of left turns in front of trucks or the judgments of the courts or your second divorce, they speak of how shy you were when you were nine, or how the grade one teacher lived to be one-hundred and about the record-setting heat of the seventeenth of September and it is like walking towards the east and into the rising sun - just like walking into the old and empty cathedrals of Europe and being the first to arrive and it smells like a long time and the air tastes like many centuries but it is empty, no one is there, and pray for her, pray for her if you pray, and pray for me too, pray for me. Sweet love, these murmurs say, I have done no harm. My Next Ex-Girlfriend is Really Good Looking I told my parents, before I’d introduced her to them, that my next ex-girlfriend was really good-looking. Pre-Covid we’d sit on the deck and have a glass and she’d smoke Purple Kush and we’d look up and count meteors and satellites and the sisters in the Pleiades and look for anything interesting. When the International Space Sation goes over it’s quite a sight. Those days are gone. I miss the nights, not the person. I did not see any UFOs. She was a believer, but in and of itself that's nothing, I know tons of people who believe, like the guys that I work with, and the one doesn't even believe in wind chill. He does believe in ghosts. His wife says that one night he sat up in bed and talked steadily but incoherently for ten minutes and she couldn't wake him up. It scared her. Finally, he lay back down and she was able to wake him up. He told her he'd talked to his dead mother the whole time, he'd woken up and there she was. He had tears in eyes when his wife told me the story. My next ex-girlfriend is going to be really good looking, and it would be nice if she lived somewhere warm, but if there’s rough water on the coast of that tranquil place, we’ll be ok to spend the day alone and the light will last us like the light on midsummer’s eve, past the anger of that passing storm, and when I tell the story of that day, I’ll speak about speaking about ghosts. Go Ahead and Ask Me People ask what happened. I tell them she’s in the women’s prison, in Banning, California, or that she married a wealthy doctor. I say that she dresses well these days, and she’s active in Republican fund-raising circles. I tell them that she got back together with her high-school boyfriend, and that just last week she asked to borrow three-hundred dollars. She said it was for cocaine, for him. She’d pay me back when she could. I tell them that I have not seen her for years, but her son still calls me and he’s doing alright. He never speaks of her. I tell them that I saw she’d been promoted. She’s one rung below the C-Suite now. She seems to be doing well. I tell them I heard she’d found, and lost, Jesus, and I think she’s living with her mother again. I tell them that she’s driving truck. She’s quit drinking. She’s crafting candles from beeswax. She’s selling them online. She has at least three cats. She says she’s done with men. So, people ask me what happened, and I tell them I don’t know.

An aide told the press that his boss had rejected the idea of having His image added to Mount Rushmore because South Dakota was “a shithole state.” At a press conference, arranged for the following day, the aide had been compelled to kneel in front of the assembled reporters. He apologized to the good people of South Dakota and admitted that he had lied. The President Himself said that calling South Dakota a shithole state had been a joke and that He did not understand why some people had no sense of humor. Then He used the Presidential Saber to execute the aide, laughing when He failed to effect the beheading with a single stroke and then failing to remove the head with several more strokes because He was distracted by the need to watch the reporters to make sure they were laughing along with Him. In disgust, He finally threw the weapon down. He asked why His staff had failed to sharpen it. The Vice President knelt in front of Him. He apologized but asked the President to take notice of the fact that the treasonous aide was dead. The President assured the good people of South Dakota that once the Twin Towers had been finished He would indeed have His image added to Mount Rushmore. He planned to force California to pay for the work. At another press conference, a reporter asked if it was appropriate to speak of “Twin” Towers. After all, the one under construction in the nation’s capital, next to the Washington Monument, would be exactly twice the height of the latter. It would rise one thousand one hundred and ten feet into the sky. But the one being built in the city of the President’s birth would commemorate the year of His birth by rising one thousand nine hundred and forty-six feet. The President asked the reporter if her mother was still alive. Before she could answer He said He hoped she was so that she could ask who her father really was. He said He could see by the way she was dressed—or not dressed—that she had acquired her morals from her mother. The reporter acted as if the President’s remarks had not affected her. She shouted another question. The President had already turned to another reporter but He turned back to her because her question interested Him. She had asked why the restrooms designated for use by the press no longer contained toilet paper. The toilet paper had been replaced by stacks of copies of her own newspaper. The President said it was because her newspaper was not good for anything else. She said that she understood the sentiment though she disagreed. But she observed that even those members of the press who supported the President had to use her newspaper instead of toilet paper, and the kind of paper on which newspapers are printed is unsuited for the task. She said she preferred not to specify the shortcomings of that kind of paper but she believed the President would understand. The President told her she had made a good point. He thanked her. Then He spoke to the Vice President. He instructed the Vice President to call the CEO of the company that made Charmin. The CEO should be instructed to manufacture a toilet paper that felt as soft as Charmin and did the work just as effectively as Charmin, but that looked like the newspaper under discussion. The President returned His attention to the female reporter. He said He wanted to tell her one more thing about her clothes. He said that ordinarily He liked short skirts but that her legs were not good enough to justify wearing them. However, He said, He wished to commend her for the smoothness of the skin on her knees. He said her mother must have taught her about the benefits of knee pads. As for the completed Twin Towers, in every respect other than height they duplicated one another precisely. Each depicted the President in a toga. He had mandated a departure from traditional representations of toga-draped figures. The garment flowed loosely over His body everywhere except at the groin. There, the toga had been pulled tight in order to reveal a conspicuous bulge. The mouth opened wide. Admirers thought this was meant to indicate the President’s good humor. The statues showed Him laughing, they said: perhaps at unpatriotic Californians, perhaps at idiot reporters, perhaps at the latest illegal immigrant to whom He had given the bum’s rush across the border. The inaugurating ceremonies, both staged on the same day, demonstrated that the wide-open mouth was not only expressive but functional. In the morning at the Tower in the nation’s capital, a number of the President’s treasonous critics were placed inside the mouth. The head, unlike the rest of the statue, had not been made out of stone. It was made of steel, the better to facilitate the mechanical operation of the great jaw, which crushed the traitors to death. In the afternoon at the Tower in the city of the President’s birth, the remains of the traitors were placed inside the mouth and burned to cinders. The President explained that they had deserved to be executed twice because they had not merely committed treason against Him. By doing so, they had also blasphemed. Don Stoll's fiction is forthcoming in A New Ulster and has appeared recently in Punk Noir (tinyurl.com/3ut3m7e7), Terror House (tinyurl.com/4tch459c),and A Thin Slice of Anxiety (tinyurl.com/fy9wer4h). In 2008, Don and his wife founded their nonprofit (karimufoundation.org) which continues to bring new schools, clean water, and medical clinics to a cluster of remote Tanzanian villages.

Resting Heart Rate The hollow heart pumps peace rhythmically, contracting and dilating, pushing calm methodically against the flow of fight. Peace is the absence of disturbance but it is not passive. Being the heart that pumps peace against the current of rage is as difficult as trying to hold up the sky, to keep it from falling down around us. We are weakened by our fear that someday it will - the sky- fall down. It keeps trying. To crash down on us. We know it on days when it is thick with layers upon layers of deep dark clouds in 3D glory that erupt into 4D with rain and sleet and hail beating down on us. That is the hardest sky to hold off, our arms tired, and we are soaked through but still we hold it all at bay because though it will drench us to our core for a while until we think we can’t take anymore, it will stop eventually and the clouds will clear and there will be a sky that is easier to hold again. Easier to live under. There are days that the sky fools us into thinking that it doesn’t need to be held off at all, like it can just be. Like we can just be. Days when it is just a painting of a specific shade of blue an artist spent hours of trial and error to get just right and it has a sun in it - sometimes bare, radiant, exposed and sometimes hiding demure behind white wisps of brand new cotton balls. We let our arms down then, to relax at our sides those days but we keep our eyes on it always - the sky - to see what it will do next while our hearts keep pumping out peace, hoping that peace will echo off the heavens all over the earth. The Northeast Direct I board a train in Hartford the Northeast Direct to Philly find a boy playing banjo serenading from the back row long plaited hair, kind eyes, and a golden voice I figure he’s there just for me not having been on many trains I can’t be sure but I don’t think train car concerts happen everyday I don’t feel the train start only know when it’s moving I know this song and I wonder if we’ve met in the midwest yet I want to talk but the song doesn’t stop eyes that won’t leave mine alone tell me words get in the way and his smile says it all before it ends, another song begins I could stay all day on the Northeast Direct And listen to where this goes but I’m not that girl who drops everything to stay on a train I wish I was carefree enough but something waits for me a plan with a job and a suit this may be the right song but it’s the wrong tune I can’t follow him but he could follow me he only keeps singing I drift off at my stop looking back as the Northeast Direct rolls on so do I Walking Around walking around in the night in the cold in the dark walking around again not with me this time but not alone either i saw it coming i knew it was only a matter of time before i was replaced what was mine is hers what i was to you she is now and yes it hurts because you don’t really care anymore go ahead and walk her around and drop her cold it isn’t my heart anymore It Could Be a Love Story Once you’ve had the sort of passion that is alarming it’s hard to get there again and you find you spend more energy trying to love than actually loving trying to imagine what it could be instead of seeing what it is If you put what you want the most inside what you have it could be a love story When love is what you want you can take what you have watch it endure call it love and live in its illusion Squint and spin it watch what you want and what you have swirl and blur and blend As minutes turn to hours hours to days days to weeks weeks to years year after year you will be what they call happy or you won’t know any better anymore Beth Mulcahy is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet whose work has appeared in various journals. Her writing bridges gaps between generations and self, hurt and healing.Beth lives in Ohio with her husband and two children and works for a company that provides technology to people without natural speech. Her latest publications can be found here:https://linktr.ee/mulcahea.

Fledgling The way you smell brings me back To the feel of your smile against my hair, The sound of breath on my cheek. The feel of your fingers against my back, Like a bird, a fledgling, Learning to flap its wings against the wind. Your callow hand spreads to embrace mine, So young and naïve, and full of intent. I’ve never been held by anyone The way you are holding me with your eyes. But nocturnal desire fades with the light, And with the dawn, I am a diurnal creature Who needs much more than you. Your emotions slide From your fingertips to mine. My love weighs more than yours, Drags us out of the sky into a depth of oceans, Where your eyes dry out with salts. I tear out my heart in recompense, Hold it above waves undulating in sunlight, While you dive away, unaccepting. Voice-over Mine The hooded perfume of a voice-over just like how you talk me down from the heights of hysteria breath with mint melted on your tongue. I know you don’t know me like you used to know the taste of something more than love, when you took these thoughts of mine changed them rearranged them. I know you will never smell the way you once did, the way you once closed your eyes and could only see my language. Not the words how you follow them now, wanting them to be other than the truth, wanting them not to take me home. When we speak, I cannot talk you down from my heights of hysteria, I cannot drop you down and take that taste of mint from your tongue Your voice over mine I shout, am not heard. Drift At 15, I wrote poems on trig homework and declared 35 too old to have a child. My best friend fell in love and it was requited. I could not quell my envy and certainty That every boy would eventually break my heart. At 42, I write poetry on the back of meeting agendas, and wonder if 43 is too old to have a second child. I fell in love and it was requited. But I cannot quell the envy and certainty Of our 4-year-old only child who is sure he needs a sister. I try to squelch the truth I’ve known all these years, That this man I love will someday break my heart, Or I will break his, At the end of this life that will never be long enough. I weigh this knowledge against the weight of an arm Around me every night as I drift into sleep, Anchoring me in place. Melissa Flores Anderson is a Latinx Californian and an award-winning journalist. Her creative work has been published by Rigorous Magazine, Discretionary Love, Pile Press, Variant Lit, Twin Pies Literary,Roi Fainéant Press andChapter House Journal. It is forthcoming in Void Space Zine and Moss Puppy Magazine. She has read pieces in the Flash Fiction Forum and Quiet Lightning reading series.

Once upon a time in a village by the river, lived Suku and Dukhu, sister and brother. Suku and Dukhu wasn’t their real name. It was their father’s loving call, which they grumbled was lame. She played ludo in the tree and dipped in the pool, little Suku wore her brother’s shirt to school. Mother packed them fish-rice and a pickle of lime, and sent the kids off with a bottle and a dime. Seasons came, seasons were gone, and many a trendy dress she wore. But grown up Suku could love none the way her brother’s baggy shirt she’d adore. She did well, went to the fashion college in town. But oft she wondered how to make a pretty gown. She went on tweaking until the day it dawned— the key was the village by the river that held her memories fond. My childhood memories I’ll weave on my gown! Suku lit up as a smile soothed her frown. Loose baggy silhouettes she made, cut in her notebook’s geometric shape. She styled her dresses with badges and ties, drawing from her childhood as she wondered how time flies. Checks and stripes she borrowed from her brother, thought long and deep to match one with the other. Here and there she put some ruffles, to keep it together she made fabric buckles. She coloured her dresses in memories of yore, going back in time as they flashed and wore. Some came off vague, some were fresh, hence the black and white, and ludo colours in her dress. She styled her dresses, tried with a pony and a bun, until it was fit for any woman. And thus with much work and fun, Suku stitched her Spring Summer Collection. About the poem - I wrote this piece as a fun experiment while watching my fashion designer wife fret for weeks on end over her college design project (we were dating at that time). I took it upon myself to calm her and we travelled places and met artisans and craftsmen looking for inspiration until she found her project idea in her childhood. I have deliberately used a childish voice and amateur rhyme as an homage to every creative person out there who has managed to keep the child in them alive. Hold on. Did I tell you that she went on to win the Best Design Collection that year! She actually read this poem to the jury when asked to explain her project which also has the same title. Ankit Raj is an assistant professor, rock vocalist and former software engineer from Chapra, Bihar, India. He teaches English at Government College Gharaunda, Karnal and is a PhD candidate at IIT Roorkee. He has poetry and short fiction published/forthcoming in Roi Fainéant Press, The Bitchin' Kitsch, The Broadkill Review, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Streetcake Magazine and The Dillydoun Review among other venues. Ankit's articles have appeared in Routledge and Johns Hopkins University Press journals. He tweets @ankit_raj01

It’s best to pick an object or an animal or a place and its weather; no one will understand you otherwise, if ever. I chose an ocean. It was strange not to be afraid to ride in a car on the surface of the ocean, to build a fire at night of road-spent tires, splayed and glowing in the middle of the ocean. Such power we had over danger under the bright she-bear Ursa Major! Of course, I know what you mean. How is it we took pleasure from the formidable, from the less-than-zero nether-lean of Fremont County February? How is it we should measure the many trucks and cars and fires like ours on an ocean? So solidly deep the reach of flaming bars, the shimmering embers from the milky highway of fishermen above to hungry pike beneath drawn to danger by our many shiny objects dandling through holes we sawed in the ocean. * Ocean Lake is located in Fremont County, Wyoming, 6,100 acres surface size. Mary Kathryn Lowell was born in Western Kentucky but reared in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming where words became her correspondence with the world of mountains and rivers. She has written poetry all her life. Her career as a poet is less known, if at all, than her articles on icon painting in journals such as the Orthodox Arts Journal, and Another City where she is a contributing author.

Part of my training was to learn how to smile as my mind secretly plotted your undoing, to agree and nod and make nice and keep quiet then light a candle and poison the well. I may not sew but I can visualize a voodoo doll. Admittedly, I haven't done that for a spell. But inside, I've sunken more sailors than a manatee; and blinded more eyeballs than a welder's sparks; Of course I'm just mumbling nonsense, sotto voce as the saying goes. I self-implode like Narcissus: to myself, for myself, by myself, self-important, self-amused. My powers are limited, not super. I'm neither a prophet nor a master strategist. Can I do harm? Everyone can. It's so easy. I try to default to Love but some days it's hard. A literary grantee of Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation and Curious Elixirs: Curious Creators, Drew Pisarra is the author of "You're Pretty Gay" (2021), a collection of short stories, "Infinity Standing Up" (2019), a collection of sonnets, and "The Strange Case of Nick M." (2021), a radio play commissioned by Imago Theatre.

spare. We paint her old house creating constellations of black holes in dormant spaces where things collected dust once A shade of lilac akin to that skin we wear masking walls layered with seventy years of history I’m assigned the little bedroom barely used bar dirty washing a dampened box lies like a dead fly still half twitching with life I hold a Geisha statue awhile freshly plucked from the treasure trove thinking of the places she’d never been but pretended to go all the same i like the way the cat feels on my back, paws dipping away deep into spine, claws sometimes nipping, catching skin. I’ve laid here six hours. The light outside has crept away from the window, burrowed itself in the moonlight’s hammock. The pigeons have risen and gone to bed again as I’ve stared at the ceiling’s crevices, rolling over from one end to another. Not hearing my voice all day for any moment, only speaking to thoughts that cloud the head. I think she wants to be fed. on that. Everywhere I look it’s there. Through sleepy eyed streets Midnight doorways caked in whispers In frosted over windows In darkened dead fingers Hanging from dying trunks In mirrors cracked with awful luck Down sinks sunk with daydreams and it laughs // howls // sniggers deep from a belly big with orange and purple air it sucked away from the horizon, snatched from our closing hours the walks home, the stroked head, the hands held, the word never said Cus we’ll never even get close To what it means What it is Why we crave it Or what it could be And maybe that’s enough Maybe that’s all it has to be Don’t go easy on me this poem won’t end with a rhyme But it’ll talk about how you might Sell my pieces in a market of mirrors Brand my ankles with dark prices Bid on these bones In dingy internet corners Rock me out to sea Clobber my brain with a settee Mush, London’s comfiest smoothie Don’t let me rest I’ll never sit down And this poem won’t end with a rhyme. Each day I’ll pick out a smile to wear Saturate my cheeks in it, Apple bob every muscle, joint, fibre in it Rub it round Moisturise Drown In and amongst the saddest glee You or I ever did see Just don’t let this poem end with a rhyme. Georgie Bailey is a multi-award-winning Playwright and Poet, originally from Bordon, Hampshire. He recently completed an attachment to the Oxford Playhouse and studied at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School’s MA Dramatic Writing. His works have been published in a various collections such as Ropes Literary Journal, The Lake, Horizon Magazine and Trouvaille Review.

I spent $100 on pizza and gas today. It was nice pizza and regular gas. I don’t really have $100 to spend in this way because I owe a lot of people money. They’re not regular people though, they’re corporations. I owe them so much because I bought nice things from them — things nicer than the pizza, like my car or an education. Arguably the car is not actually nicer than the pizza, although it can do more things. You cannot drive a pizza to work. The pizza needs no gas, though, and leaves me in only a little more debt, to a credit card company that just upped my limit. Now I can owe them more for gas, for fancy pizza, but not for the education, which I cannot charge. Some people (almost certainly not the people reading this, but definitely some people — they are out there, making decisions) might argue that I should not get the nice pizza while I am in the unclean state of owing money to all these entities. It is those people who I’d like to remind that Snorkmaiden, daydreamer though she be, can (according to Moomin.com) “be very resourceful when she's in a tight spot.” If it comes to it—and I hope that it won’t—I will sell my gold anklet.

The Heart, The Mind Often, these two will have tea together. Turning in the sun, devouring fields of bluegrass. I won’t lie sometimes you will be the bluegrass, plucked with brute force and poised at the mouth of a god. Often, you will be swallowed. And only in your unmaking will you be so sweet so light. Crates Each day, you will set out to collect grudges to hold against the world, then lug laboriously through dusk. You will think to protect yourself against every ailment besides silence, which will seep through the field of your mind like gasoline. You will label thousands of crates and tuck them under your synapses, thinking they are utterly whole. You will never be able to revel in a happiness infected with a tinge of melancholy, The dusted labels now reading more like prayers than testaments to the contents inside. You will long for anything truly even, rind and all. You will long for a longing truly even, rind and all. You will long for a haze so thick it could estrange you from your own hands. The words following “I am—” will hold your throat hostage. They will hold a timeless possibility That will be shattered by “—a pig,” or worse, nothing at all. We Shared Only This Earth They had been two forces present at the dawning of my life, so naturally, I took them to be extensions of my life, sentient beings that came simply with the house, always at arm’s length. In the later years, even as my arms grew gaunt, they could not equip the new space between the three of us. The first farewell posed the most detriment to the fickle heart squirming in the fickle body. Slowly, the apartness accumulated enough to barricade the tears, reduced to a shifting sheen in the eyes. The Going sipped the inevitability out of Staying‘s palms. The only thing we shared, the Earth, most literally. On a day deep in summer’s pit, I truly didn’t need them. The starkness of it hinted at a Before, but their rooms, indistinguishable from the others, hinted otherwise. Longing was a locket, long lost, vanished like the dead do. It was so odd, I’ll tell you. Her eyes surveilled mine, yes, and her mouth distorted into the shape of words, directed at me. Two metres away, too close to be a vision filling her absence- she was certainly there, though my mind took her to be half a world away, still. All My Selves— —coalesce to get a good night’s sleep. And how unfortunate, this brotherhood in the night, when everything looks one and uniform anyway. Ali Nasir is a writer from Lahore, Pakistan.

She heard the loud noise, moth-eaten words reaching her ears again this time. Sometimes she focuses on condensing her listening, other times she lets the chitchat find her unsuspectingly. Mithali accepts chatter that gives monotony a character. She had found herself telling someone, in the middle of a realization, that she does not recall the oddities of growing up, but she feels an ambivalent pull towards consistency, and that’s the most anyone can sum up the nature of home as. She hears it in the azaan at the crack of dawn and the one at six in the evening. It doesn’t matter what Mithali is doing at the time; if she is attentive, she can transport herself to the laxity of home as if she is waking up from her afternoon sleep at fourteen. That feeling grounds her, all the way here. Mithali’s father used to complain about toothaches that went all through the night. He refused painkillers till he had crossed the threshold of pain into a controlled bearableness. The hurdle to invincibility, he knew, was giving in. He must have carried these battles with nightly terrors to his mornings, they made him obstinate about his foresight in poverty. It didn’t let anyone find a better course of action than persistence. Had she been patient, she would have heard something more than repetition in his voice. In a cramped space of three people, Mithali marked one room as hers, though it contained nothing of significance that was really hers. She made small cuts on clothes out of frustration. She wrote with glitter on one of the walls, to keep that room as a young girl’s bedroom, but she couldn’t persuade her parents to buy anything of value to represent that room still. She was insistent on dividing that house into three rooms, but nobody else cared about personal space as much as her. In the end, Mithali devised a lie to hide that house altogether. She told everyone she knew that she lived in the house that theirs shared a wall with. It was bigger, had three floors, and didn’t look like it was tethering on its last legs. The lie gave her mind a secret, and she let it blend into her like second nature. She looks back at these trivial moments with uninterest. They don’t stand up to the weight of importance. They were relieved of their nostalgia when they were hidden for so long, they could have disappeared as some urban myths that she recalled till she moved away, and Mithali would not have cared about preserving them. When someone asks her how she feels these days, her answers seem like a sequel in the making of times gone by, temperate and loyal. She is careless about the influence of steering a conversation. As it happens with tawdry sequels, she too would not be able to carry anamnesis through the stages of life’s development with the same vigour. Most of her memories are not truthful, and for the sake of empirical record-keeping, one has to stick to what they have actually lived through. When they follow her around while she is busy, she tells herself, “These are just mild disturbances, they don’t make up the formula of what didn’t work.” Her mother did that a lot. She held onto things till all Mithali could associate with her relatives was the times they slipped up. That one time, he showed up to that birthday party drunk; this one time, he met with an accident because he felt like he could outsmart everyone else. Such was the ridiculous heights of the charges she pressed against them; Mithali didn’t think of relationships as normal. She stayed away from them and blamed it on her proclivity for aloofness. She doesn’t know how far you have to graze from the herd to call it a search for greener pastures. She lives only five hundred kilometres away, the least she can do is call them about their day. The thing with nostalgia is that it feels like it might help if it is so distinct. What were you up to last week? Where did it begin? Why do you think one thing leads to another? Mithali is at a place where she feels, life has come full circle, for everything. She listens to 90s music, looks up punk aesthetics, and tries to bring up the dead. She lacks determination and she is looking for some kind of attachment. She has admitted as much to her mother, but Mithali is wary of her mother telling her, “this one time, I had to overcome things in order to stay happy.” She doesn’t roll her eyes at her mother anymore. Moving around in a potpourri of emotions as she has, like a kid flirting with a bland bowl of soup that he has been instructed to drink, Mithali found a tolerance for people’s ways maybe. On the other hand, she could just be considering life an extraordinary feat. There have been times when she has seen people point out with evidence that encore fix lapses in judgement. If her parents had enough, her mother would not pry open those relatives, and so forth, until you reached the beginning and you could have a do-over in your imagination. Some of it could help fight the mediocrity that holds her back. These are just hopeful scenarios to combat what is over. --------------------------------- The final girl makes a comeback. She is writing unfinished plots. The killer is still running amok, twenty years later, and this is a viable opportunity to clear her name. She has no use whatsoever if the killer has been put to rest. Unlike other revisionist storylines, Mithali is still alive and refers to herself as a superficial person. There is no compulsion to accomplish. Mithali’s mother, surviving her father’s death, can demand a retelling of who she used to be. The haunting that plagues someone after a loved one dies enables them, but she is not able to find her mother inside that dilapidated house. She would have shared with her the times she lied about their family. They are both moving away from each other, and they need to own something specific to tie them together. —------------------------------ She swings her left leg over the balcony wall. She saw someone do that in a movie once, and it looked like they were being lifted with a buoyant force that prevented things from sinking. She relies on that image to digest the panic of sitting astride the boundaries of the fifth-floor building. She has other images helping her through. Mithali loves old westerns and anything that has to do with horses and ranches. She is swaddled by rodeo cowboys, reinforcing courage in her mind, and she becomes unconcerned about the dangers of falling. She sits there without breaking a sweat as the rest of the celebrations continue, in packets of four and five, mostly inebriated and shielded from interferences. Nobody is looking for her. Someone made a mess on the bathroom floor and they were handed a mop. She doesn’t want to clean up after herself, and the balcony felt like a safe option to vomit, in case, and watch it splatter on the roof of a fancy car. Mithali pendulates her weight and estimates the pivot of her balance. It's easy for anyone to let go. It also should be easy for someone to rebuke the readiness of such thoughts. She must have sat there long after her glass was empty. She was listening to the jaggedly flow of the music from the building, opposite the one she was sitting in while keeping one ear out for the mirth originating from behind her. Mithali has managed to divide her ears into two skilful bipennate leaves, sensitive and alert. She cannot pinpoint the moment this happened, but it could have been around the time she was ploughing old apothegms; the ones that we don’t sincerely remember unless absurdity presents itself and someone thinks a worn-out proverb, like “a drowning man will clutch at a straw” will help summarise it as frequent. She has not fully established herself in any kind of life; her coping abilities are paragon responses, that one should fight uncomfortable situations, valiantly. This was influenced by unresolved time; though I find that I will never find an answer to missing someone because there might not be any, especially when one seeks memories. I have been published in Muse India.

Greg Burton kicked an empty beer can up and down a freezing subway platform. His sister Carol complained about the noise he was making, but the noise didn’t bother her. She was too embarrassed to join him and that’s what really upset her. Greg looked like he was having so much fun. He didn’t even seem to care what the other people on the platform thought about the noise he was making. “Stop banging that can around, Greg,” said his mother. “The train’s coming. You can’t be late for school again.” Carol ran in front of her brother and gave the beer can a final kick. They both smiled as it scraped across the yellow line and dropped on to the train tracks. “Is Daddy going to die in the war,” asked Carol. Mother shook her head. “Your father’s an airplane mechanic, not a soldier. I doubt he’ll see much action.” As the subway doors were closing behind them, a dirty man in sunglasses, carrying a handmade cardboard sign, threw himself at the door. The sliding doors crushed his body like a pair of hungry teeth, but he managed to squeeze his way inside the crowded subway car. “Ladies and Gentlemen,” the man shouted as the train pulled out. “I am not a thief or a mugger. Could you please spare some change for a Vietnam Vet who’s hungry? Show your support for the boys over in Afghanistan by helping one of their brothers at home.” When the man held out his cup to Greg the boy grabbed Carol by her arm and mumbled something. “What’s that you say, son?” asked the beggar. “I said you smell,” answered Greg. Mark Blickley grew up within walking distance of New York's Bronx Zoo. He is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild and PEN American Center.