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I’ll never forget his face, wide open to the harsh light of the screen, drinkin’ it all in. At’s why it happened, Da said. He was all full up of film and his body couldn’t take no more. Stopped watchin’ the telly for a month so I did, in case at’s what happened when ye went square-eyed. His eyes and mouth yawned like they were takin’ in some miraculous stunt. At’s how I knew there was somethin’ wrong, because it was a musical and there’s no explosions in them’uns. There’s not much difference between the last gasp and all the others. His hands were crossed on his lap, charcoal anorak zipped right up because everyone gets foundered in the pictures, so they do. He’d near finished his carton of milkman’s orange, stripped all his Werther’s in advance n’all. Went to the pictures and couldn’t get a seat Used to see him takin’ his wee scruff over the park, so I did. The bitsa would scamper ahead while he sloped behind, all arms and legs glidin’ over The Grove, a dirty big black drip against a screen of grubby clouds. Auld Skinnymalink, the other kids called him. They’d sing it as he’d pass, actin’ the big man then gettin’ all afeared when he’d turn and glare. We’d chuck stones sometimes, too. One hit the wee dog once. It yelped and was away like two men and a wee lad and when he turned – at look would cut ye to the quick. Scundered, so I was. When he got a seat, he fell fast asleep For weeks after, I’d dream I was standin’ over him, peerin’ at the tongue squattin’ in his gapin’ gob. I’d pinch it between my finger and thumb, see it wasn’t grey and greasy like at the pictures and pull and pull and amber reel after amber reel would tick out from behind them aged Formica teeth and I’d keep on pullin’ and I’d hold the stills up to the dead stare of the screen and see shot after shot of him and his scruff over The Grove. And then he’d grab my wrist and gurn at me. Skinnymalink Melodeonlegs Big Banana Feet. His wee dog was still tied up out the front when they wheeled him out, so it was. Da said we could bring it home with us. Used to take it a dander over The Grove every day, so I did. Didn’t throw stones with them kids no more. Sophie (she/her) is an emerging writer and social researcher, originally hailing from Ireland. She currently lives in Essex, United Kingdom with her partner, young son and three chickens. She was a finalist in the WOW! Women on Writing Fall Flash Fiction Competition 2023 and has been longlisted in the Farnham Flash Fiction Competition February 2024.

He built a community book box located at the bottom of the drive. “Take One, Leave One,” said the sign. So, they exchanged books over the following months, getting to know about each other’s taste in literature. After he left a book by D H Lawrence, she visited his cottage. Chris Lihou is retired and writing short stories. His first self-published book of micro-fiction and poetry “Fifty More or Less” is now available via Amazon.

I don’t like the way my wife eats toast. I tell her this because it’s important. I say no rush, babe! Slow down the frantic crunching! Fuck you, she replies and takes her toast to the toilet. She breezes back in and brings up the rainy day we went to the aquarium in Plymouth when she kept having to pull my elbows off the railing and move me on. You spent so long looking at each stupid species! What’s that got to do with toast? She always does this. I talk about something I deem important, then she unearths a random artefact and gets flustered and woe-be-me and all I can do is stare. And so she stays still and breathes, then invariably removes a piece of her clothing. As if this is going to solve everything. As if I'm going to forget the original impulse by seeing her belly sway to some silent bass that bores into the marrow of me as her long buttery fingers slide down her gym shorts, beckoned by something beyond us, beyond our petty domestics, finger envoys sent from somewhere behind time to say you sodding useless mortals you. As if. Kik Lodge is a short fiction writer from Devon, England, but she lives in France with a menagerie of kids, cats and wabbit. When she is not writing, she is not exercising either. Her flash collection Scream If You Want To is out with Alien Buddha Press. Erratic tweets @KikLodge

At seventy-one years of age, Robert wasn’t sure if it was a good idea to climb to the top of the tower. His inhaler sat on the dresser of his hotel room about a mile and a half away, and he was already out of breath from the walk to the tower. But it was his first time back in Florence since he and his wife Alice visited fifty years ago for their honeymoon. After thinking it over for a few minutes, he decided to slowly make his way up the old stairs. The view from the tower of San Niccolo would be worth the leg-busting climb it took to get to the top. Rob’s lungs were frail, and his right knee cursed him for forcing it to cling to its ligaments for so long without a break. To help take his mind off his aching body, he thought about the golden sunset he'd encounter once he reached the top. He thought about the rays that would pierce his skin and inject their warmth into his veins. He thought about how beautiful Alice looked atop this very tower so many years ago. And he kept walking. *** The tower of San Niccolo was something they had stumbled upon during their first night in the city in the summer of 1971. After checking into their hotel and changing their clothes, they ventured out for a walk without any clear destination in mind. As the sun began to set, they discovered the tower. The guard at the door told them it provided the best place in the city to take in a sunset and that it was a must-see for anyone who had yet to take in its views. Alice accepted the young man’s offer without consulting Robert. The young man spoke in a way that made her feel as if she and her husband were the only two people he had ever shared such an intimate secret with. They made the climb with ease. Young legs and strong lungs are two overlooked cornerstones of youth. The couple reached the top, gazed out at the city and took in the skyline they had seen in travel magazines for the last year. Leaning against the tower’s stone edge wrapped in each other’s arms, they admired colors that seemed to have escaped from Botticelli’s palette and watched them dance in the sky, as if they were celebrating their newly found freedom. Yellow, pink, and orange. Some red and purple. They all collided with each other in a symphony of liberated emancipation. “Oh my,” gasped Alice, as she rested the back of her head against Robert’s chest. He draped his thick arms around her body and tucked his chin into her shoulder, so that the side of his face touched hers. “That little sucker wasn’t lyin’, was he?” responded Robert. “I don’t think I’ve ever even seen that shade of yellow,” observed Alice as she squinted her eyes against the liveliness of the sun. *** Robert stretched out his right arm and grabbed a hold of the edge of the tower. Pulsations ran down the entire length of both legs. His feet yelled muffled obscenities from inside his sneakers. The muscles in his right thigh cramped up into knots, and his heartbeat pounded in his throat harder than it had when he’d suffered his heart attack six years ago. But he made it. He inhaled deeply and slowly before exhaling through staggered wheezes. After wiping his brow with a tissue he had been using to blow his nose, he gazed out at the city with strained eyes. He had planned to stand in the same spot he held Alice fifty years ago, but it was occupied by another young couple who smelled of sweat and the inside of a small pizzeria. They held each other in an embrace that made his body shiver with the yearning of Alice’s touch. He smiled at them as he passed by and planted himself a few feet away, closer to the corner of the tower. He rested his elbows on the stone that had already begun to cool as the sun’s rays dipped below the city’s skyline. Looking around, he noticed that the tower hadn’t changed too much since he last saw it fifty years prior. The green that once grew in between the bricks of the walkway that ran around the top of the building had been cleared away, but everything else looked exactly as it had that night with Alice half a century ago. The skyline of the city hadn’t changed at all either, except for the few construction cranes that mingled with the aged red slate rooftops. Rob continued to breathe heavily but felt his heart rate finally begin to regulate. He wiped his brow again with his forearm and spit down between his feet. The young couple glanced over at him, looked back at each other, and then moved a little farther away from him. *** A bluish hue replaced the rambunctious collection of colors in the sky and brought a cooler air with it to replace the sticky heat of the August sun. Alice grabbed her husband’s arm, turned on her heel to face him, and got up on her toes to grace his lips with hers. The artificial lights of the city shone down onto the Arno River and bounced up into the sky that sat above them, showering the couple in a warm yellow gleam. Once their lips parted from each other, the guard popped his head up over the last stair that led to the top of the tower, as if he had seen what was happening and decided to wait until they finished. They turned around at the feeling of another’s presence and decided to leave their sanctuary in the sky upon seeing him. “I think he’s ready to lock it up,” Alice whispered. “Let him,” laughed Robert. “Let’s spend the night up here.” She grabbed his hand tightly and led him to the top stair. After walking through the exit of the tower and thanking the guard, they lingered along the Arno, stopping to grab gelato for the first time since arriving in Florence. Pistachio for Alice and chocolate for Robert. “Of all the flavors, you pick pistachio?” teased Robert. “What’s wrong with pistachio?” “Nothing’s wrong with it, but don’t you want a real dessert?” “One of us has to stay healthy for the kids,” she quipped. “The kids, huh?” “Well, sure. We’re gonna have lots. What’d we agree on, five?” “Hah. Three. At the most,” Robert answered while trying to conceal a grin. “Three? You’re a slacker, Robert. We’re young and healthy and beautiful. And I’m smart. Our DNA mixed together? We’d be doing the earth a disservice if we didn’t produce at least five little Gilmores.” She began to laugh as she licked her gelato. “Five sounds like a handful,” Robert mumbled through a mouthful of ice cream. “Just eat your chocolate and I’ll stay healthy for our babies.” Alice swung her hips from side to side, bumped them into her husband’s, and erupted into a gelato-filled fit of laughter. *** The young couple that stood a few feet from Robert atop the tower left as the cool night air breezed across the river below. Robert watched the gentleman extend a hand to his lady and guide her down the first few stairs before he followed her, leaving Robert by himself. He slid over to the spot he came up to visit, ran his cold fingers along the stone, and looked out toward the sky. The colors weren’t as bright as they had been fifty years ago. Was it the sky that had turned dull? Or was it his own eyes that the color and vibrance had vacated, being replaced by a lazy gray? Maybe standing here with his new bride is what made the sky explode with color atop this tower fifty years ago. Now the heavens above resembled the color of Rob’s skin that drooped below his eyes; a tired, pale ash. He let out a long sigh, which brought on a coughing attack. As he pulled the damp tissue from his pocket to blot his eyes dry, a hand reached out and grabbed his wrist. “Robert, don’t use that tissue to dry your eyes! You’ve been blowing your nose with it for three days.” “Alice, it’s my nose I’m blowing with it, not a stranger’s,” answered Robert as if his wife had been there with him all along. She snickered at him and pulled a fresh tissue from her purse. As Robert brought it up to his eyes, the aroma of lavender curled its way into his nostrils. “I missed that smell. Where do you get these? I always ask Angela to pick some up when she gets my prescriptions, but she says they don’t make them anymore.” “Robert, they stopped making these fifteen years ago. Don’t you remember me complaining about it?” Robert dropped his head in defeat, embarrassed by his lapse in memory. “Yeah, no, I remember, darling. I just forgot.” “Robert, what are you doing up here?” asked Alice with a worrisome look in her eye. “I was thinking about you.” “You know you shouldn’t be walking by yourself. You aren’t even supposed to do this back home in Massachusetts.” Rob responded with a laugh, “I know. I just missed you.” Alice tried holding back a smile but failed. “Always the rule-breaker, aren’t you?” Robert tapped the stone edge of the tower as he looked over to the skyline. “You remember that night, though, don’t you? The colors in the sky. You remember the colors that night?” he asked with a rush of delight. “Oh, yes,” responded Alice. “Do you remember the yellow? I never saw that shade of yellow again.” “Never again,” he responded immediately. “I know I’m slipping, that I’m forgetting things now, but that night never grew dull in my mind. The city down below us across the Arno, there. The sky and its colors. Being with my new wife,” he emphasized. “First time out of the country, I don’t know. Magic.” “I cherish it even to this day,” Alice said in agreement. “You remember things you did down here, where you are now?” asked Robert innocently. “Oh, yes, honey. I can remember any single moment I choose to. Like picking a song from a jukebox.” “Tell me more,” Robert pleaded as he embraced his wife and laid his head against her chest. “Where I am now, there are colors you never even knew existed. Music you can’t describe with words. Your legs never get tired, and your lungs are full no matter how many stairs you climb,” she whispered into his ear as she ran her fingers through his thinning white hair. He smiled, knowing why she said what she did. “What about the food?” “Oh, Robert. Overflowing mounds of food. Ice cream never melts. The milk never goes sour. And allergies don’t exist.” “So, I can eat seafood where you are?” “All the shrimp you can find,” she said as she caressed his head. “It sounds too good to be true,” said Robert with a soft laugh. “It does, doesn’t it?” He lifted his head and looked into her eyes which glowed with a hazy luster. “How come you haven’t visited? Since you left, I mean?” The sides of her mouth curled as she prepared to answer. Her eyes twinkled with a renewed youth, though wrinkles still lay upon the sides of her face. “Well, you see,” she began tepidly. “We aren’t… by we, I mean… you know. The deceased.” Robert nodded. “We’re told that it’s best if we stay away for a while. To let you grieve and recover. Let’s face it, Robert. You and I both know you wouldn’t have been able to handle me visiting right away. You needed time.” Robert shook his head in understanding. “So, why here? Why today?” “Curiosity got the best of me, I suppose. I wanted to know what you were doing here. And who the hell let you go off on your own,” she said as she put her hands on her hips. “I told Ben I was going across the square to get a gelato,” he said with a wheezy laugh. “So, you and Ben took an excursion to Italy? I didn’t know I could still feel jealousy until now. How is he doing?” “Oh, you should see him, hon. Twenty-one and quick as a devil,” he said with wide eyes. Alice couldn’t help but smile. “Our oldest grandbaby – twenty-one years old. My,” she said as she shook her head and sauntered over to the edge of the tower. “Why don’t you come back with me? To see him! He’d love that, hon. We’ve talked about you nonstop since we got here. He doesn’t know about this spot, but I showed him everywhere I could remember. I brought him by that cafe where you pushed that cop the second night. Told him how you were a nasty drunk,” he said with a wild smirk. “He got a kick out of that one.” Robert wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. He had begun to cry and hadn’t noticed. Alice turned back to her husband once more, a melancholy look strewn upon her face. “I can’t, Robert. I came to visit you, seeing you were alone. I can’t just wander around the world, willy-nilly. That’s not how it works.” Robert frowned at this, not expecting her to object to his idea. “Not how it works? You’re a gh--… I mean, an… an angel. You’re an angel, right? Can’t you go wherever you want?” Alice laughed sweetly, and once more approached her husband to embrace him. “I missed your little tantrums the most, believe it or not,” she whispered into his ear. “I mean it, Alice. Come and see Ben. Don’t you want to see how he’s grown?” Sensing sincere sadness in her husband’s voice, she pulled away to look him in the eye. “Honey, I see all of you. I’ve had my eye on all of you since the day I left. Well, almost since the day I left. I had orientation for about… come to think of it, I seem to have lost all sense of time since I’ve left. Odd how I haven’t noticed that till now,” she said, almost to herself. Robert looked at her not knowing what to say. “I’ve watched you, painfully at times. I’m with you at your doctor’s visits. And I must insist, please listen to Dr. Malone. You give the man too much attitude when all he’s trying to do is help.” “I…I don’t think—,” “And stop eating so much pepperoni! We had that discussion ten years ago, Robert. Just because our daughter isn’t as watchful as she should be doesn’t mean you have to go and take advantage of it.” Robert began to laugh, much to the annoyance of Alice. “And what is so funny about that?” “I’m just so happy to see you is all. And to know you’re not, ya know… gone. I can’t believe you’re here, talking to me. I gave up on this possibility a few years ago,” he said with confusion in his voice. “I read that once we die, and we’re… where you are, we kinda forget about our lives down here. ‘Cause we’re in paradise, and what’s better than that? We’re with God, eternal glory. I remember talking to a priest about it, and he described it all so matter-of-factly that I had no choice but to accept it as fact.” “Well, until that priest passes on himself, his facts are only assumptions. Or regurgitations of what he’s been told. We miss our families, our friends. We miss the places that stuck in our memories, like this tower here. It’s why I chose to come back now. I can visit you in Massachusetts any old time. But we both know this is your last time in Florence, Robert. You’re seventy-one. Not old, but not young,” she said with a laugh so genuine, Robert had forgotten she had died a decade ago. “I saw you up here alone, and said, yes. Now is the time to see him.” Robert felt the breeze pick up atop the tower, heard the cars speed along the narrow road below. He looked to the right of his wife and saw the Duomo, dominating the Florentine skyline. “It’s been wonderful seeing you, my darling. But we both know you have to go. The young guard’s been kind enough to let you stay ten minutes past closing time. And Ben has probably filed a missing person’s report by now,” she said with a tinge of worry in her voice. “Can you visit me again? Now that you have, you can’t just stop.” “I’ll come and see you again, Robert. I don’t know when, and I can’t promise it’ll be often. But I’ll come see you.” She glided to him once more and they held each other tightly. His wispy hair clung to her face as tears began to fall down his own. “I miss you, hon. I really do. I think about you every day,” he said through huffy breaths. “I know, Robert. I miss you, too. But we’ll be reunited soon. We’ll be together once again. I can’t wait to show you the colors up there,” she said in a lullaby-like tone. Robert felt the warmth that had engulfed him since she arrived vanish, leaving behind a distasteful chill. He reached for the crumpled tissue in his pocket, but instead felt the freshness of a new, full pack. He grabbed one, brought it to his nose, and inhaled the most intense wave of lavender he had ever experienced. The intake of it seemed to brush the chill away just as Alice’s presence had, and he felt a calmness begin to swim through his veins. He thanked the guard at the bottom of the tower and began his trek back to the hotel. Walking along a sidewalk that ran parallel to the Arno, he craned his rickety neck upwards, past the city skyline and through the clouds. He wondered where she was, where she lived. And just as suddenly as his wonderings began, they stopped. He realized it didn’t matter where she was. He trusted that she could see him, that she watched him, as she said. A.C. Francis is a copywriter from outside Philadelphia, Pa. He has a master’s degree in English from West Chester University, is an avid baseball fan, is fascinated by the arts, and longs for the day he can return to Italy. He has publications in The Bangalore Review and The Hyacinth Review.

So masculine, I could stare at you all evening. Rude me - probably because I missed seeing you the past 32 years. I gave up straight men when I was 40 and unaware of bi, assumed I would live like a nun. But here you are inhabiting both worlds with all the insight and tenderness and kindness and Ohhhhhhh……….! A note from the author: For more than 40 years, I have supported myself in Information Technology, primarily by designing computer databases. I have also been writing poetry, since I learned what a poem was and recently started publishing them. My first published poem, ‘Deskbound’ appeared in Oberon Magazine in 2019. My first chapbook, “Working Woman Poetry” was published by the gracious Leah Huete de Maines of  Finishing Line Press in October 2020. Also during Covid, I published a second chapbook “Plague Year Poetry,”  and one of my Covid poems was included in the on-line journal of the Writer’s Institute of Albany, New York, sponsored by William Kennedy (“Ironweed,” “Legs,” etc.).

“Hello, I’m Emmy Lu,” said a tiny woman with bright white hair cropped short and elegantly dressed in a sapphire blue cardigan the color of her eyes with a dangly sea glass necklace and earrings. “There’s a seat over there.” She motioned beyond where I stood in the coffee shop’s dim entryway to the wooden tables and chairs surrounding a smaller table that held a vase of peonies and a simple iron cross. She led worship, glowing against the dark wood paneling on the walls. Her voice ebbed and flowed, a full river singing, as she asked us to confess aloud and then to rise and join hands for communion and again to pray for those in need. Crone, Emmy Lu called herself. I imagined crow and crane together, the sleek dark strength of the crow married to the white smoke feathers of the crane, impossibly beautiful, impossible to hold. I fell in love with her immediately. She then 70; me 32. That Wednesday evening was my fourth visit to the coffee shop church in Washington, D.C. The church was and is unconventional, founded on principles of social justice and dedicated to the idea that members would get to know each other deeply and work to “be church” to each other and in the world. People attended services in small communities that met in various places around DC. Within a year of attending the church, I joined a small group Emmy Lu was part of that explored feminist theology. We sat in Rebecca’s living room with its plush floral sofa and green velvet chairs. A candle pooled light on the gleaming wooden coffee table. Wine glasses and cups of tea sat in front of us with small bowls of nuts and chocolates. After the hubbub of hellos and getting settled, we stood to open the circle. By the earth that is her body, by the air that is her breath, by the fire of her great spirit, by the living waters of her womb, the circle is cast. Then we shared one by one, putting out our joys, sorrows, hopes, and frustrations. There was no cross talk and no response when we were each done. Only the voice of one woman telling her story, opening herself to the rest of us, was fully heard. Not as part of a conversation, with the listeners readying their responses, but her story alone taken in. Each woman echoed back to herself more loved than when her words had gone out. Emmy Lu spoke aloud into the circle to tell us how she had failed. Her stories changed over the years, as she accepted what had happened, wove new stories. The guilt over leaving her young children years and years ago to follow a man to the Virgin Islands, who tempted her with the fine, expensive things she coveted and left her with nothing. How much she loved her adult daughter and son and they loved her in return. How greed had dogged her earlier life, made her follow that man to the Virgin Islands and others who promised wealth that never materialized. How poverty shaped her into a woman who freely gave and graciously accepted the gifts that others offered. How her almost violent relationship with the man she lived with for years bound her until she unknotted the ties and sent him away. How often she was angry, irritable toward coworkers and friends. I loved her for all of these stories, how righteousness was not in her wheelhouse. Honesty was. Authenticity. The spiral of learning, failing, learning again and better, failing less. Still, I struggled with this intimacy. In my early thirties, I was a jigsaw puzzle put together haphazardly, pieces jammed in where they didn’t belong. Other pieces flung to the floor. How much my mother had invested in raising us as a stay-at-home mom. My cousins marrying in their twenties, raising families, staying home. How afraid I was, always the new girl, moving every two and a half years, standing in classroom doorways wearing thick glasses and an A-line dress so I would look less chubby. How much I wanted my first kiss at 16 in an ice-green pool under a dark sky far above the suburban backyard. The next day he called to say I wasn't the kind of girl someone marries. Not the first or last time my appetite would be my shame. How I wanted to escape the narrow rectangle I grew up in, find a place I belonged, home finally in DC, this city of transients, in a neighborhood that I knew was my place the first time I walked in it. How everything with men was like walking in mud in the dark, slipping and dirty and wet and cold. How I threw a metal vase at a man who was late for a date, how I slammed a glass door at my office so hard, I was surprised the glass didn’t shatter. How many times I flung my phone across the room again. How that anger shattered me. How I drank red wine, dark enough to hide all the ways I wasn’t the person I wanted to be. How I wavered home from parties and bars, almost too drunk to remember where I lived. Week after week, into months, then years, Emmy Lu’s stories knitted my jagged pieces together. When a man I loved too much too fast broke up with me, she let me cry on her shoulder. Then she disappeared into the kitchen and brought back two cups of coffee and a plate of chocolate Milanos. “You’re too good for him. Don’t waste your time with men like him,” she said. I laughed. I almost believed her. She never stopped believing in me. She took me to thrift stores when I began freelancing and had no money for new clothes. Our favorite event, though, was an annual rummage sale at an Episcopal church in the neighborhood next to ours. We got up early on that Saturday, filled our travel mugs with coffee, parked as close as possible to the church, and got in line behind the other bargain hunters. Once in, we hurried to what we wanted most, sometimes in the same direction, most often scattering. We met up here and there, showed off our loot, and took off again. After we checked out, I carried whatever was heavy to the sidewalk, and Emmy Lu brought the rest. Then she stood guard while I got the car. How we loved reviewing what we found and congratulating the other on her finds. “That scarf, Emmy Lu, is you, so you. And a working microwave. Amazing!” “I can’t believe you found that black tulle skirt! You can wear it with those black boots you have.” Incorporating past lives, histories into our own, loving them again, like the stories we told and retold in our circle rewove themselves into who we were becoming. “Posture is everything,” she often told me. “Sit up straight. Stand up straight.” It was an almost too perfect metaphor for what I needed. The confidence took hold in my body even if my brain had no idea what the hell I was doing. Emmy Lu was my wise woman in the forest, the true compass ever pointing inward to what I don’t know I know. I looked into mirrors to ask, “Who will I be when I am old?” “If you are lucky, you will be just like Emmy Lu,” the mirrors whispered back. This past July, I visited her at the Armed Forces Retirement Home just before her 100th birthday, August 4th, the same as President Obama’s, she often pointed out. She had moved recently to the assisted living wing, two floors down from the fifth-floor room she had lived in before, where she had loved looking out into the trees. “I don’t know why I need be here. I was fine in my old room,” she complained. “I don’t need someone to give me my pills.” But she was unsteady on her feet, scaring her daughter, me, all of us who loved her. Her eyes lightened, still gleaming, still forceful, as I came in the door of her small room. It was cluttered with furniture, walls covered in paintings, some her own, and small modern quilts of brightly colored fish in the sea made by a friend. Photos lined up on shelves, the desk, bureau, and nightstand. A pot filled with deep purple shamrocks sat in the window, near a vase of Gerbera daisies. She rose from the black desk chair she wheels around the room to avoid falling and reached out her arms. I hugged her gently, worried about her thin skin and bones like pencils beneath, light enough to lift her where I cannot follow, a day that is coming soon. We took the elevator to the coffee station on the ground level where a machine made us cappuccinos then took them out to a patio, polka-dotted with sun amid the shade from bayleaf magnolias. She sat in a shady chair, I in a sunny one. “I sang in the talent show here a few weeks ago. Did I tell you?” she asked. “I sang Here’s to Life.” She had a musical act for a while when she was in her 80s, performing as the Golden Miss M for retirement and nursing homes mostly but also in other places when friends requested. She sang songs from the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. Here’s to Life is her signature song. “I bet you were a big hit,” I said. “I wore the gold sequin top and my mother’s jeweled shoes, probably for the last time.” She showed them off to me every now and then, told me her mother had bought the shoes when she was old and living with Emmy Lu’s brother in Maryland, having moved from Minnesota after her husband died. “She loved to go shopping at Garfinkel’s,” Emmy Lu said. “When she saw those shoes, she bought them, even though she couldn’t really afford them.” I don’t demur when she says “probably for the last time” as I have so often before, insisting that she is fine, just fine. At our women’s group Christmas dinner in January when we asked whether anyone was planning a birthday party for her, she said, “I don’t know if I will make it that long.” “Of course, you’ll make it. It’s only seven months away,” I retorted, anger masking my dread at the thought of her death. Now I am not sure that my insistence that she is nowhere near death is doing either one of us a favor, especially her. It takes an effort to let go of the idea that she will always be here, always be my friend. That day on the patio I said, “I hope you will. I can imagine living to a hundred if I were doing as well as you, but it must be hard. I know you must be tired.” Then she sang the first few lines of Here’s To Life in her low, slightly raspy voice. “No complaints and no regrets/I still believe in chasing dreams and placing bets/But I had to learn that all you give is all you get/So give it all you got.” I wished she would keep singing so I could memorize her voice, her deeply wrinkled, deeply beautiful face. She is phosphorescent with grace. Like the ocean as we saw it, brilliant green against the night black sea, from a house on Assateague Island on a long ago weekend in early spring, running toward it laughing and saying look, look, look. Until we stood where dark water met sand, white foam lapping at our feet, until it was gone. A freelance writer for more than 20 years, Sherri Alms recently began writing creative nonfiction. Her essays have been published in Wild Greens Magazine, Five Minutes, and A Plate of Pandemic. After years of urban life in Washington, DC, and Baltimore, she now lives with her husband and two cats in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

The toddler stands barefoot in his nappy on the warm tarmac. Or in his diaper on warm asphalt, if I were to use the North Americanisms my husband does from growing up in this tumbleweed town in the Canadian Badlands. Over a decade in England now means words like bloke, cuppa, and aggro have osmosed into his daily vernacular, but his lack of chatter and his uncomplicatedness show where he’s really from. We are visiting his family, who’ve all stayed in Vauxhall, Alberta, and I’m nipping to the Co-op alone when I spot the toddler in the middle of the crossroads, finger in his mouth, watching a car turn off Highway 36, paused at a stop sign several blocks (not roads) away. If I was back on British soil, I’d have bolted to the child, rushing him to the pavement, not only because of denser traffic, but because if I’d been mistaken and shouldn’t have picked up a stranger’s child, I would have the confidence to explain myself. Vauxhall, Alberta is home to Plattdeutsch-speaking Mennonites, farmers with digits lost to machinery, and mothers in snapback caps who dig trucks out of snowdrifts for the school run, teenagers in plaid shirts who gawp at my tea dresses, unsupervised children who throw rocks from their front porches, and baseball spectators who spit sunflower seed shells onto the bleachers so that they crunch when I take my seat. It doesn’t matter anyway, because none of those people are here right now by the crossroads, just a man further up the street, walking with a cane from his truck into the Co-op, swaying with the effort and taking no notice of us. The car is getting closer, so I pick up the toddler and go to the sidewalk (not a pavement). I keep my back to the driver, so they don’t see the face of the woman who plucked a child from the road. There are no twitching blinds from the surrounding houses, or anyone running up the street calling desperately for their baby. The little boy takes his finger out of his mouth and places his hand on my cradling arm, his spit in a string. ‘Where did you come from?’ I know he can’t speak yet. He leans down the street in the direction of the highway and houses, likely because he wants the stranger to put him down, rather than understanding my question. If I was back home, I’d call 999 on my mobile. There’d be witnesses, dashcam footage, CCTV from home security of me finding the stray child, but here, I’m uncertain how convincing my story of I just found him would be, especially as an out-of-towner. In this town’s population of twelve-hundred, people keep themselves to themselves, inconvenienced when the Canada Day Show n’ Shine brings a crowd that clogs up the single-row parking lot outside the only bar for an evening. ‘Let’s find where you belong.’ As I carry him down the street, I investigate the windows of the houses we pass beyond yards of crispy grass with hardworking sprinklers, chintzy curtains drawn again the midday heat. Despite my desperation, holding the little boy’s fair body, his soft hair tickling my cheek, is like slipping into a soothing bath while listening to a familiar song. His breath is raspy, and he smells a little cheesy. I wonder if I’m taking him back to a good home. About twelve houses down, a side gate in a fence is open to a yard (garden). On the lawn is a plastic slide and one end of a wooden board resting on bricks for a ramp. The toddler wriggles so much that I put him down, and he totters to the slide. He climbs up the slope instead of using the steps, the bare skin of his tummy screeching as he slips down. He repeats this process over and over. At a window of the house, a woman watches me, haube headscarve knotted on, dishtowel in her hand. She’s wearing large, owl-like spectacles. My mother-in-law used to be like her, staying home and making clothes for her six children before she moved here from rural Cuauhtémoc in Mexico, and discovering Target and paid overtime. Over the past fortnight, I’ve seen the local Mennonites going into the specialist store opposite the Co-op. My husband took me in there to buy foods from his childhood; Gansito bars, de la Rosa peanut marzipan, and packets of powder for creamy gravies. It’s set up in someone’s converted living room. There’s floral wallpaper, freestanding shelves, and the shopkeeper sits in a rocking chair with a cash tin and notepad. I wait for the woman in the window to wave to me and dash out. You’ve returned my offspring. Thank you! Or would she talk in Plattdeutsch? Even if I didn’t understand, I’d sense her gratitude from hugs, looks of relief, and being pulled inside for homemade lemonade. Tyres shriek behind me. A boy in a cowboy hat has pulled up on a push bike. He can’t be more than twelve. He looks beyond me into the yard at the toddler. ‘This yours?’ I point my thumb at the little ‘un. Bike boy nods. Then he shakes his head at the toddler, who’s stopped sliding to look at the boy, presumably his older brother. I look up at the woman in the window, unmoving, still clinging to her dishtowel. We stare like the other is in a zoo behind glass. Then the woman turns away from the window like I did from the road, and I understand why she isn’t coming out. The boy wheels his bike into the yard and closes the gate, and I carry on to the Co-op. Rebecca Klassen is co-editor of The Phare and lives at the bottom of the cheese-rolling hill in Gloucester. When she's not standing at the bottom with a handful of crackers, you'll find her feeding her axolotl, and broadening her mind with reality television. She has won the London Independent Story Prize, and recently had one of her stories performed on BBC radio.

It all started when my cunt of a roommate, Christine, brought a tropical crab home. She called us up and asked if it would be all right if she purchased a tropical crab. I was busy and missed the call. Gary told her no. She already had a cat, Arthur, a vomit-white Siamese she’d bought for two dollars from a lady in a cardboard hat at the Ashby swap meet last summer. He turned out to be the meanest cat alive. I don’t say this because I have a problem with cats—generally, I never have. But my fearful distaste for all felines was slowly assembled, refined, and crystallized in the three years I lived with Arthur. He had no tail. Just a lump at the end of his butt curving like a broken bone into a loggy stump. His fur, post-kittenhood, quickly morphed from off-white to crusty gray to a swimmy discharge color. His claws ripped like talons through whatever he could grab onto at any given moment—a pantleg, a chest, the side of a couch. He especially loved to tear apart the fuzzy alpaca blankets Brook had brought back from Ecuador. There was absolutely nothing cute about this cat whatsoever, but Christine insisted on cooing at him, berating him in a disgusting child-whine and calling him “Meow-Cat,” over and over, ostensibly because he had a constant, thimble-stretched yowl (it hardly substituted as a meow). She’d try to pick him up and hold him, lovingly pressed against her breasts for the three or four seconds he’d allow before yowling and scratching the shit out of her arms, until she finally dropped him and he could scamper away, probably to spray all over the bathtub, which he did whenever feeling scared or aggressive. He hated her and he hated the rest of us. It was unfortunate, for Christine, being so blinded by love that she was never able to recognize the inability for compassion deep inside his cat heart. It was also unfortunate that she only came home every two or three days to feed him. This meant that he would starve for two days, then get a dump truck-size serving of kibble on his kitchen floor platter, eat it all in one sitting, and then starve again for two more days. She hadn’t cleaned his litter box in about three months. We kept her bedroom door closed religiously, so the thick wafts of stale feces and urine wouldn’t permeate the entire house. Gary said no. I said no. Politely, of course. You have Arthur already, and we don’t want the distraction and responsibility of a second animal, we said. Thanks for understanding. She seemed put out, but grudgingly, no crab was brought home. We found out a few days later she’d indeed gone and bought the crab, opting to bring it over to her boyfriend’s place. A week later they broke up, and the crab arrived on the scene. We were a little peeved at this. But she was in a delicate state, given the breakup. She promised to keep the crab in her room. She made a place for it inside the top shelf of her closet. Its heating lamp lit up the dark interior around the clock; shuffling to the bathroom in the middle of the night, I could always make out the yellow light filtering through the crack under her door. The crab stayed graciously in place like this for a couple of months. Out of sight, out of mind. We left to go visit our families for a week or so during the holidays, and when we returned, the litterbox had been restationed in the living room (urine pellets scattered across the floor) and the crab was set up on the kitchen table. With passionate indignation, we moved the litterbox back into her room ourselves. Then we called her up and asked her to keep both the crab and the box in her room. She said of course. She’d only brought them out because no one was there. A few days went by, and the crab remained in the kitchen. Its head was bluish purple, while its claws glowed bright red, extremely tropical (I figured), with two liquid-black eyes flustering on tiny stalks poking from the top of its head. Its claws groomed the glass back and forth with a shiny squeak that made my teeth hurt. It seemed to be always sitting in a pile of wet and soggy sand, its mottled back glistening in the kitchen light. I started to get a sick feeling whenever I sat down at the table to eat. The cage smelled faintly of moisture and other excreta. We asked her to move the crab back to her room again. She said okay. A week went by. Then two. On a Monday morning, when we were in the kitchen together, I asked her again. “It’s a little unhygienic to have it in here,” I said. Her back was turned away from me, her torso half-hidden by the open refrigerator door. Her head swiveled, her expression ruffled. “Well,” she said. “He’s completely contained in the cage. He’s not hurting anything in here.” “You didn’t seem to mind having it in your room before,” I said. “I hate keeping him in there. It’s not good for him.” She said we could compromise by putting him in the living room. I decided to remain obstinate. “That’s not a compromise,” I reminded her. “The compromise was letting it be in your room, because we asked you not to bring it to the house at all. We asked you not to buy it, and you did. We asked you not to bring it here, and you did. That was the compromise.” Her soft face wrinkled into a sneer. She said that all of that had been weeks ago, aspects of the past she’d already apologized for. She said that I had been holding a grudge against her crab for months. I left the kitchen. The crab remained for two more days. Then, when I came home on a Wednesday, it’d been positioned on top of a wooden crate in the corner of the living room. The yellow heat lamp shone down on its host, haloing the crab. Rarifying it. She’d chosen a corner of the wall where a painting of mine had hung. Looking around for it, I found it lying face-down on top of the television. A couple of nights later, I was sitting on the couch watching a movie when Christine marched into the living room with a slice of ham in her hand. She went to the crab and slid back the cage’s grated opening. She dangled the ham above its head, cooing at it in the same tone of voice she used on the cat. “You hungry? You want it?” The crab didn’t move or respond in any fashion. “It’s a special treat,” she chided the thing. “You don’t want a special treat?” I knew she was putting on the show purely for my benefit. I pretended to be very interested in the elastic of my sock. “You sure you don’t want it?” I wondered if she half-expected it to tell her it was having a stomachache at the moment. “Okay, well if you’re sure. I’ll try again later…” She cooed at it for a few more seconds and then slid the opening shut. She sauntered back to the kitchen, the piece of slimy meat still clutched in her hand. Lying in bed at night, I found myself brainstorming different ways of murdering the crab. I was shocked by my violent thoughts. I’d never been the kind of person to impose cruelty on animals. And I knew I wasn’t angry toward the crab itself. It was what the crab stood for. I lay in the dark, my head cooking. The rationalizations she made up in her head were amazing. She never believed she was wrong. She always thought she was innocent. Even when she apologized for something, I could hear in her voice: it wasn’t sincere. The words were spoken with a shrug, a smirk on her lips. It was the kind of apology a child makes when they spill grape juice all over the floor. Oops. I don’t know at exactly what point I hit the corner—or the bottom—and decided I was unequivocally going to kill the crab. For weeks I played with the idea, compiling different scenarios in my head (just for fun, of course). I could boil it in a pot and eat it. I could walk up to the cage with a knife and spear it in the head like it was a baked potato. I could poison it. I could trap it under the heavy plastic log in the far corner of the cage. I could throw it out the window. I kept thinking about how good it would taste in a salad or a risotto dish. My mouth began to water whenever I imagined its brain, creamy and braised, melting on my tongue. I finally decided on poison. If Christine didn’t notice the mold growing on the underside of Arthur’s food dish, I doubted she’d be willing to probe so far as to recognize what kind of particular ingestion had led to the death of her crab. It would probably sit for weeks in the cage, dead as a doorknob, before she even noticed. As far as I was concerned, I was putting the little thing out of its misery. As far as things were concerned, she was the one enacting animal cruelty, not I. I waited for an afternoon when everyone was out of the house. I’d read on the internet that crabs will eat almost anything you give them, so I spent some time in the kitchen preparing a special meal for the little guy. I pounded ten aspirin tablets into a powder and rubbed this into a piece of tangerine I’d sliced open. I dropped it into the cage and waited for the crab to go at it. The fucker didn’t move. So what, I thought. Maybe it wasn’t hungry. Its ugly little tentacle eyes swung up toward the window, then drooped into the sand. I couldn’t quite figure out where its mouth was. I put on a movie and decided to keep an eye on it. Halfway through, it sauntered toward the tangerine and ate a bit of the side, shoving it under its stomach. I supposed its mouth was down there somewhere. It refused to eat any more of it, though, and the half-shredded tangerine lay pressed against the glass, half-covered in sand. It resembled some kind of tropical shrimp companion, bright orange and pulsating in the water. Braving the terror of the cage, I lifted the  lid off and scooped the thing up in my fingers, throwing it down the garbage disposal. Coming back from the kitchen, I eyed the crab. It was looking fit as a fiddle,  and if crabs can appear as such, practically jubilant. I glowered at it until others started getting home. The next morning, I went to check on the crab while my cunt of a roommate was in the shower. Awake and docile as ever, it stood perfectly still on its mound of soggy sand, not unlike a Buddha meditating. It occurred to me that the crab might be an enlightened spirit who saw all the wickedness festering in my heart. I turned away from it. On the drive to work, all I could think of was my utterly failed attempt. The fact that it hadn’t worked seemed to deepen the evil of the plot. I observed my hands on the brown steering wheel, thinking, are these the hands of a killer? Am I capable of these thoughts and these actions? I was fascinated and mutually disgusted by the lengths I’d already gone in this melodrama. I vowed to never act on a bad feeling, ever again. ***** When I got home from work that night, the crab was dead. He was lying on his back ; not a very traditional pose for a crustacean. His claws jutted out like twin bottle openers. I opened the cage and poked him a few times, just to make sure. No response whatsoever. I flipped him over to his sitting position. From far away, he appeared pretty much  alive . If Christine were standing at the opposite end of the room, she’d never notice. It wasn’t until one got right up to the cage and realized his stalky eyes were glazed over, no longer shining with liquid ink, that something might be wrong. I could’ve hurled. Instead, I microwaved a burrito for dinner and set myself up on the living room couch with a book. The scene of the crime. Thoughts raced through my head: maybe it hadn’t been my fault. Maybe the crab had died of natural causes. The other week a friend’s hamster had died, completely out of the blue. It was two months old and one morning she’d found it with its feet sticking up in the straw. Animals were just a mystery of life we humans couldn't fathom. I sat there, sweating, my nose in the book, until Christine came home. She didn’t come into the living room right away. I could hear her fussing around in her room—a space that  was easily a prime  example of a hoarder’s den. I don’t know how she ever found anything in there. Everything stinking of cat piss, the piles of clothes on the floor mixing with the stenchy pellets. Arthur had carved a trail to go back and forth to the bathroom. Where he was at the moment, I didn’t know. I’d been so busy with my crab-killing plot I hadn’t been paying as much attention to him. I used to open all the windows in the house, hoping he would jump out of one of them. He never did. It took about two hours for Christine to notice. She made dinner, ate off the coffee table, and complained  to me about her day and the fact that her boss was making her work on Saturdays. She futzed in her room for a little longer and then came back out and started rolling a tiny joint. I stared at the coffee table’s surface, the glass sticky in spots. It was littered with old cardboard coffee cups, bowls of soup from three or four days ago, a couple of dusty art books forgotten to be replaced on the shelf, a water glass, a pair of AA batteries, and some grimy-looking scissors. Christine lit the joint and offered me a hit before smoking the rest herself. She leaned back in the chair, her elbows resting on her stomach. She had bobby pins thrust into her greasy hair, but at the end of the day they’d slid enough so that she was tucking and re-tucking the slimy hairs behind her ears. Even though I hated everything about her, I knew she didn’t deserve to have a dead crab. I slouched on the couch, hunkering lower into my misery. Ice Road Truckers was on TV. We watched two episodes in a sticky, conspiratorial silence. Christine sighed ostensibly a few times, the moist joint pinched in her fingers, which she eventually abandoned in one of the coffee cups. At a certain point, I let my eye wander over to the crab cage. I cleared my throat conspicuously. “Does the crab look all right to you?” I asked, my voice uncharacteristically conveying mild interest. Christine glanced over to the corner. “What do you mean?” “He just…looks. I mean, he hasn’t moved in a while.” Christine hefted herself up from the couch and crossed the room. She stood in front of the cage and bent her head to the glass. She smiled and waved at the crab. “No, it’s fine.” Aghast, on the couch: “Are you sure?” “Yeah, he’s just sleeping.” “How can you tell? Do they close their eyes?” “This is his prime sleeping time. They’re nocturnal, you know. He’ll be frisky later, when we’re all in bed.” I left it at that. The next morning: the crab had not moved. The following day the crab had begun to secrete a black liquid, trailing out from below and ringing around him in a watery puddle. Gary and I did a closer inspection. He looked dead, in fact, he looked like he was falling apart. We inquired with Christine, who said that he was molting. He ate yesterday, she told us. Reassuredly. We look at each other. “Really?” “Oh yeah,” she says, “It’s totally normal. This is his molting season.” “I didn’t know crabs molted,” Gary said, all politeness. “He smells,” I added. “It’s all totally normal,” she repeated. A week or so went by like this, and the crab remained motionless. Food Christine had tried to entice it with started to pile up in the tank: bits of meat and soggy apple slices. He appeared now to be separating from his shell, his body conforming to the glass. She still insisted he was molting, but at some point did decide to take him, cage and all, to a vivarium in Berkeley. I decided to go with her, because it was a Saturday, it was beautiful out, and I had nothing else to do. Plus I was terrified of what they’d tell us at the place. Would they be able to tell the crab was poisoned? I pictured a pimply guy around our own age, eyes widening with dawning realization, stabbing a finger at the cage and saying, “Do you know that any kind of medication isn’t allowed? This crab was fed painkillers. It’s a classic presentation of toxin ingestion.” Instead, with the cage on the counter, Christine began her molting story but before she could finish, the guy waved a hand. “THAT,” he told us, gesturing to the cage, “is a very dead crab.” No other explanation required. ***** We carried the empty cage out to the parking lot, shoving it into the back of Christine’s red Toyota Yaris. She was thoughtful, frowning, as she leaned against the hood, still eyeing the cage. “I just don’t understand,” she said, after a beat. “I fed him on a schedule. They said they love meat, and I made sure to give him plenty of protein. I just don’t get it.” I felt my mouth, amazingly, unglue. “Sometimes these things just…happen.” “I know,” she said, sighing again. “But they’re supposed to have upwards of 30-year lifespans.” I noticed that she was never one to blame herself. Despite the facts, the sheer amount of ham she probably fed that thing, she never once rationalized into the realm of personal responsibility. For all I knew, she was the one who’d killed it. With an elevated protein diet, perhaps. I realized that I was trying to take responsibility for someone else’s lack of accountability and foresight. Christine would always be a threat to her own pets. My part, in the end, was most likely negligible. I put an arm around her and squeezed. “Let’s go get a beer or something,” I said, “Huh?” My guilt  somehow entirely resolved. Wiped clean. Pure. Christine agreed. Always open to a drink on the house. “To the little creep,” she said proudly, holding up her peanut butter stout. I conceded, lightly tinking my martini against hers, “To the little creep.” Chloe Noland is a fiction writer and information professional. She received her BA in Literature & Creative Writing from California College of the Arts, and her MLIS from San Jose State University. Her work has been previously published in Acid Free Magazine, Medium, Sequestrum, and Action-Spectacle. Her first novel, The Cataloguer, was completed in 2023, and she is now working on a second novel. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Birds on a Bus The guy behind me squawks at his seat mate. "I used to live just over there until my wife tried to knife me and I got put in jail.” Heads bob. Ears stretch back and flap like wings. “The bitch! She attacks me and I'm the one who gets charged.” Heads freeze face-forward. Alert. Ears snap back into place above jaws. Oh, I so want to turn and gawk at him. To see if he has scars. Missing teeth. Taped glasses. Greasy hair. A beer belly topping spindly legs. The bus stops. I hear him skitter out the door behind me as bits of feather float and land. Squinting side-eye through the real-estate ad opaquing the window I wait for him to strut past. Hoping he will somehow surprise my cliches. Waiting. Waiting. Until I realize he must have winged it back the way we came. Spring Training A cloud, shaped like a baseball bat, squats on the horizon, blocking the sun that’s rising over the playing field. It shadows the sun all day. Hovers over the stands at mid-morning. Stares the fans down at high noon. Sweats out into the mid-afternoon. In the evening, the sun softly pushes back, bleeds orange and pink light around both sides of the bat-shaped cloud. The cloud angles back. Stops. Lets the sun move forward without it. But a strong wind, confusing the sun with a baseball, whips around, sweeps the cloud back, then forward, knocking the sun out through the night. Louella Lester is a writer/photographer in Winnipeg, Canada. Her writing appears in a variety of journals/anthologies and she has been included in Best Microfiction 2024. She is a contributing editor at NFFR. Her Flash-CNF book, Glass Bricks, is published by At Bay Press.

On Wednesdays, we pound wine. By six o’clock, my wife and I are three or four glasses deep six depending on who you ask), as we lie in bed, our bodies a half-foot apart. There is no talking between us, for there is nothing left to say. Silence has become the dog at the foot of our bed, a creature we’ve come to accept as the glue that keeps us together. Once we’re loose and ready, we shimmy out of our clothes and lazily fiddle with each other’s genitals. It always starts this way. Ten minutes and a seventh glass later, I’m inside her. Missionary position, of course. There isn’t much else nowadays. She groans with each thrust while the mound of my belly flattens her into the bed. I can see that she’d like to comment on my recent weight gain but stops herself. She knows there’s no point. Instead, she tries to spur me on by whispering sweet, filthy nothings into my ear, but, as we both know, dirty talk is hardly her forte. I close my eyes, thinking about someone else to stop myself from going soft. The young blonde with the pert breasts and forever puckered lips from the office, Alicia, comes to mind. I close my eyes and pump faster, dominating. I feel like a God. A sweaty, disgusting God. But neither of us have ever been religious so she doesn’t expect much. A few pitiful pumps rob me of my breath and leave me helpless as I lie on top of her. She rolls her eyes and squeezes out from underneath me. As I suck in air by the mouthful, I ask her if she came. “Yes,” she says, lying as always. “How about you?” “Of course, I did,” I say, still dreaming of Alicia. “That was amazing. It always is.” We smile and peck each other on the lips before inching back over to our respective sides of the bed. She flips open a book in which she never seems to make progress while I pull out a years-old crossword puzzle that I still haven’t figured out. After a few minutes of gnawing on the pen and coming up short, I decide that I’m too tired to pretend tonight. I kill the lamp on my bedside table and get comfortable under the covers, knowing I’ll sleep well for once. Until a soft, timid voice floats through the darkness and says, “Good night honey. Tell Alicia I said hello tomorrow.”

I never knew they were so vulnerable, energetic little tykes. All I’d ever heard is how mischievous and resilient they are. The tiny rubber bands stretch the limits of my patience as I hold the bridles with a stoic forbearance. Welcome to Motherhood, whispers continue from deep inside my head. I realise that had I paid more attention in Psychology class, I would have been better prepared for that altering mind-blowing moment when all the control evaporates like the morning’s mist. The words lamented under my breath that it wasn’t my fault, faded away in the fog of trillions of synapses trying to comprehend what had happened. I should have anticipated her minuscule forehead splitting in two. A grike forming upon a clumsy impact with the marble edge as she launches full speed ahead. The collision - unavoidable. Time standing still, a slow-motion sliver, erroneous and out of place. And all I had to do was child-proof the edges. Had I paid more attention like a parent should, I would have been ready for the silence setting atop the room, a quiet ringing in the ears before sh** hits the fan. Her scream ripping through the air. The ruby colour of blood gushing out from a deep cleft free of the skin’s confinement. My heart, imploding. My vision veiled with vapour, fighting the urge to faint. Panic creeping in. And all I had to do was child-proof the edges. My home attire soiled crimson, no patch left unscathed. On autopilot pressing the laceration, I enwrap my body to swallow her whole (as if that would stop the lifeblood). Fragile, like porcelain dolls I remember mishandling in childhood. But she’s no doll. Her chubby cheeks roofed with a mixture of tears, snot and blood. The gauze in my hand soaked. Bulging doe-eyes searching for me, plump fingers touching my nose while I try not to let go of the fissure on her forehead. Relentless voice on a loop: ‘And all you had to do was child-proof the edges.’ *** In a hospital bed, attached to a series of smothering tubes, unconscious on the way to the operating room, I hold her lifeless hand. My thoughts invaded by the memory of the invasive scandent shrubs overtaking Grandma’s picture-perfect garden. It’s weird how the mind plays tricks on you. In a trance, I listen to White Coats chatting about last night’s game, oblivious to the guilt eating me away. The cracks opening in my soul, never to be fully sewn again. *** Years later I still wake up with a gulping dread, restless bubbling in the gut. And I rush to her bedroom just to find her blissful in the Land of Nod. I know she doesn’t remember any of it as she continues on her roguish path of being a child. I also know that the twin sisters, Relief and Anguish, ingrained inside my heart are forever entwined, an aide-mémoire of how much I am not in control. And I remind myself to breathe. Andrea Damic, born in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, lives and works in Sydney, Australia. She’s an amateur photographer, writer, and poet. Her education is on the opposite side of creative expression (she's an accountant with a master's degree in economics). She writes at night when everyone is asleep; when she lacks words to express herself, she uses photography to speak for her. Her literary art appears or is forthcoming in Roi Fainéant Press, The Ekphrastic Review, the other side of hope, Sky Island Journal, The Dribble Drabble Review, Your Impossible Voice, and elsewhere. She spends many an hour fiddling with her website damicandrea.wordpress.com. You can also find her on X @DamicAndrea, Instagram @damicandrea and FB @AndreaDamic

When I finished Yellowface's eleventh chapter by R F Kuang, my armpits were sweaty, and my mouth was dry. I was astounded because, after over ten years, I recollected the first few days when my ex cyberbullied me. I was just 19, in the closet. Yellowface is Kuang's satirical novel on the publishing world. It is about the people it comprises and the ways they operate. It included two primary characters: Athena Liu, a young New York Best Seller Asian author, and June Hayward (aka Juniper Song), Athena's college Yale contemporary/friend who craved Athena's literary success. Written from the perspective of Hayward, a white woman from the US, Kuang took us to the harsh realities of the publishing world and writers' exploitation through various stages of their writing careers. Through her gripping narratives, Kuang's Yellowface, written in Hayward's voice, takes readers to Hayward's publishing journey, which came along with a series of dark, uncomfortable, and deeply unconceivable scrutiny and solitude after an alleged Twitter rumor that Hayward secretly stole Athena's unfinished book, the Last Front, and published Athena's book as her second book. Though Hayward's character already had established in the story how she secretly stole Athena's manuscript and the circumstances around it, Athena's ex from eternity past spread this rumor without concrete proof through a ghost Twitter account for his financial benefit and a tinge of jealousy when Hayward's book became an overnight hit. Kuang's story plot becomes even more interesting when Hayward's character, throughout the novel, maintains the claim that she is the sole author of The Last Front despite knowing the stakes for her writing career. To stand firm on her claim, Hayward survives a series of public bullying and a series of harassment moments. A substantial part of this harassment was online. The novel later depicts the complex culture of bullying on alleged theft and plagiarism accusations, delving further into racial, privilege, and cultural appropriation allegations Hayward encountered, specifically on Twitter. Though a satire, Kuang's novel reminded its readers how social media could be emotionally debilitating and cause a public debacle if someone is bullied and trolled in cyberspace without any potential proof. Yellowface's eleventh chapter is the descriptive testimony of such online attacks. The eleventh chapter of Kuang’s recent novel closely describes social media's 'dark side' in the modern world and how one can be made uncomfortable or publicly humiliated. In my late teens in India, I confronted my bully ex about his possessiveness and micromanaging, and I finally broke up with him. It was also the time when being gay in India was a punishable offense according to Indian Penal Court Section 377. Though it was a one-sided breakup, I was naive enough to think it was over.  Then, he showed up at my place within the next few hours and told my parents I was "gay." Unfortunately, it was not all. ALL MY SOCIAL MEDIA WERE GONE when I got on my computer the next day. Passwords were changed. My registered email accounts had been hacked. I troubleshooted using my mobile, but the number associated with the accounts was changed. "This number is not associated with this account" would appear on my screen. My college friend told me he saw a LinkedIn update on his wall that I now work as a "professional Gigolo."  This friend did not know I was gay, and after a long pause, he disconnected. He avoided me for the rest of our freshman year. I was taken out of all college WhatsApp groups, after all, those friendships were just a few semesters long. A few other friends called out of frustration to ask if I was in my senses because they were being sent porno clips from my FB account. Everyone knew it was out of character for me to do something like this, but cyberbullying is an almost unheard phenomenon, at least among the public. To take matters into my own hands, I made another FB account to spread the news that all my original accounts had been hacked. When I read Hayward saying in the eleventh chapter, "I should have stopped looking once I'd glimpsed what I thought was the bottom of the pit of internet stupidity. But reading discourse about myself is like prodding at a sore tooth. I'm compelled to keep digging, just to see how far the rot goes." I could not agree enough. But little did I know bullying was about to heat up. I started getting random phone calls from people asking my rates to sleep with them and messages telling me they got my number from my LinkedIn and FB. The water went up my head when my acquaintances and professional contacts phoned to confront me about my alleged rude and vulgar behavior on social media. A few female colleagues even got rape threats from my account. That was when I could not do anything else but stay glued to my laptop to see what my ex had been misusing my original account, just like Hayward's character in the eleventh chapter. Though Hayward did steal Athena's book and was afraid of being caught, and my situation was radically different, Kuang's fiction shed light on the under-explored phenomenon of cyberattacking and its detrimental impact on one's mental health and well-being. Reading (and then re-reading) Kuang's eleventh chapter of Yellowface reminded me of my unreachable urge, such as Hayward's, to control all the cyberbullying I witnessed myself or what people sent to me. Every day, my original accounts would have fake claims and secrets that I did not want to share publicly. Secrets and matters of my past that I confided in my partner were out in the public sphere. My account would send threats to connections and friends. People called my friends, parents, and relatives to find out what was happening. People I did not get along with said, "We always knew something was off with him." or some version of it. This cyberattacking would ultimately loop into me and my family receiving threats. I received my first death threat on a phone call when I was 19 from an anti-LGBT group from an FB account with no photo. My nose bled thrice later that night. No matter what one says, who says, using what language,  or how many times, the bullying victim does not want to get away from social media despite its toxicity. I know I could not, just like Kuang's character Hayward. Every notification would make me gulp my saliva, even if there was none. I lost hope for my old life. My fingers used to tremble while operating my computer's mouse. I uttered the exact words when I read what Hayward said while confronting cyberbullying on Twitter for allegedly stealing Athena's work (alleged because it was never proved) The eleventh chapter of Kuang's book is about the bitter reality of how our compulsive dependency on social media becomes the cause of how people's rationality gets compromised. In her work, Kuang evoked the language of terror, betrayal, and embarrassment I had to face in my own life. While reading Hayward's anxieties in the moments, I often reminisced about the deep quandaries and mental scars cyberbullying left me for the longest time of my life afterward. Kuang did an exceptional job of curating a victim character witnessing baseless cyberbullying scenarios, which led the character to think only the worst versions of their life would possibly be if not taken charge of control. This immediate and anxiety-inducing human instinct overpowers intuitive human reaction to think positively and the power of manifesting a brighter future despite everyone being overly trained to do so. I recalled how cyberbullying changed my mindset of looking at the world with the tendency to distrust everyone. It took me years to find my bearings and look for a cheaper therapist I would secretly hire (because most in India then thought only those with mental illness go for therapy.) and learn the art of controlling anger and not retaliating. After a decade, I do not blame myself for what happened and am comfortable with my sexuality. When I read Hayward's cyberbullying experience in Chapter 11, I felt juxtaposed. I was sad that the character had to deal with gaslighting and the online whatabouttery. However, I felt heard and soaked in the denouement, thinking at least there are cautionary tales now of what Hayward, a fictional character, and I survived online. Born in Delhi, Saurabh Anand is an Assistant Director at the University of Georgia's Writing Center. He is a linguist and writing teacher. His creative works have appeared in Washington Square Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, the Community Literacy Journal, The Autoethnographer, and the Journal of International Students. To access his work, visit anandsaurabh.com.