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Wednesday. A day. Not unlike the middle class and its acceptance of subpar success. A perfectly overlooked day in the strictest sense. Hump day. I’m picking at my cuticles, sipping Bordeaux, and shunning suburbia’s sun. Daydreaming. I’ve always wanted to visit Paris. I know, a pitiable American turn of phrase, but nonetheless true. I have no kids to eat away at my excess brain matter because I loathe tiny humans. They stare, doe-eyed, questioning everything. My surplus energy expended, instead, on droll pastimes no one appreciates. You gave me Julia Child’s cookbook for our first wedding anniversary as a gag gift because “I burnt toast better than a bachelor.” You’d laugh each time you retold the story. But you ate the charred, carbon-infused substance because you’d eat anything. I read the book. I’d read almost anything: science journals, erotic fiction, sociopathic profiles. I spent weeks learning to crack the perfect egg with no broken bits of shell or slime clinging beneath neat, manicured fingernails, deftness in the wrist, and a clean break. Then, months to poach one. My indefatigable need to succeed proved Julia to be a liar. “The only real stumbling block is fear of failure.” I imagined her high-pitched trill inside my head. When I mastered those two things, I began to feel a transitory sense of accomplishment. I’m now sovereign over a delectable chicken breast, basil, cashew nut pâté. Not an actual foie gras, you feel force-feeding a little goose, shoving corn down its throat via a feeding tube to fatten its tiny liver, is cruel. I find it tasty. But you like my version. Sautéing shallots until translucent, the scent alone draws you into the kitchen. You press your nose in the crook of my neck. “God, you smell delicious.” “It’s the onions for the pâté.” “I hate onions.” “Well, they’re shallots, more specifically.” “They look like onions.” “Forget about the onions.” I lower my voice, and you kiss me. It’s a peckish kiss, and I know I need to feed you before your blood sugar drops. We haven’t had sex in weeks. Sheila comes for dinner. Midweek and her heart’s been broken again. But she has Jesus and designer handbags full of cash. Not to mention, she’s part owner of your start-up company. A start-up for start-ups or some other such nonsense. She’s invested all over town. Figures are looking splendid. But honestly, I can’t empathize. She’s my bestie. In suburban speak, it’s the fake friendship you can tolerate the most and participate in the least. We all sit to eat. French wine poured—you don’t drink it, opting for piss-label beer instead—I sip and dream of Provence. Your mouth used to make love to craft brews, then me. Sheila drinks my wine and produces an oral orgasm as she forks each mouthful of my pâté. We watch her, you in awe, and me with congealed contempt. You swig back your beer—it’s your “superpower,” you joke—and go to grab another. Your humor has changed, too. You fail to insert wit and have choked the life out of irony. I see it all. I watch Sheila’s large mouth and each indecent movement it makes as she babbles on, some inane drivel neither of us cares to hear. I nod and sip my wine as her best faux-friend. Another week, I’m sautéing shallots, daydreaming of the French countryside. You’re not home, so it’s lonely as I slice the liver into quarter-inch segments. With each slash of the knife, a metronomic scraping, I realize I’m humming “La Vie En Rose.” We sit to eat. “You’re late.” You don’t respond. I smile and pass the pâté. “I also have Boeuf Bourguignon, Julia’s recipe, but it’s still in the oven. I butchered all day. Hope you brought your appetite.” You smear the pâté on a toast point and chew like a machine, all gears and shafts, pistoning and pumping. “Mmm . . . tastes different,” you mutter with your mouth full. Bits of detritus food cower in the corners of your too-full mouth. I sip my wine and smile. “I omitted the onions. I know you don’t care for them.” “Hm.” You continue to shovel the perfectly toasted triangles into your mouth, piled high with smeared liver spread. “My passport arrived today.” “Great, babe.” “I booked a flight to Paris.” “Hmm.” “I leave on Friday.” “Mmhmm.” You’re fully invested in what’s on TV. I nod. You hear nothing I say. You don’t listen, but I do. I listened. I heard every moan Sheila made, spilling from her obscene mouth as you showered with her last Tuesday. You said you were going to fix her bathroom pipes. I needed you to get the mixer down from above the fridge. Guess you didn’t hear me enter her home, the bathroom, or the accidental air I choked on. Then Wednesday, she came to dinner and drank my wine as if she hadn’t screwed my husband in her shower the day before. No remorse. Sheila didn’t need the extra cash she carries, and I took the Hermès as a parting gift to myself. It’ll make an excellent carry-on for my trip. A commercial is on, so you glance back. “Aren’t you going to eat, babe?” “I’ve lost my appetite.” I bite a hangnail, sip my wine, and contemplate my French excursion. You smile and sip your beer, a microbrew, as if you knew this was a celebration. “Hmm, too bad, it’s delicious. Killer pâté tonight.” That’s the funniest thing you’ve muttered in months, and I laugh. Out loud. “Yes, I know. You always thought Sheila was rather delicious.” You swallow, and I watch recognition bloom in your eyes. Beads of sweat form at your temple like glossy bikes lining up for the Tour de France. My bet’s on the third from the left to win the race down your forehead. “Always knew you were fucking crazy.” You sputter and begin to choke. I smile. The rest of your side dish is in the oven. Grace Black mingles with words as she navigates this realm. A writer of poetry and flash fiction, she gravitates toward brevity. She is the founding editor of Ink In Thirds. Various journals and anthologies have published her work, including Maudlin House, Unbroken, Eunoia Review, Into the Void, Pidgeonholes, and Haiku Journal. Find her at  https://graceblackink.com/

We sat in our rooms with the new Violent Femmes cassette tape, rewinding the part where Gordon Gano sings about why he can’t get just one screw and we act like our middle school selves are facing the same struggle. We stop, rewind, lay back into the shag carpet that holds the cigarette smoke of a generation before us, inhaling the second-hand rage and tar as it finds its way deep into our lungs, lifting our voices. We grab an old doll, sing into the top of her blond, matted hair, shouting the lyrics of appetites we have yet to discover, leaning into the ache and sickness of Gano’s voice, the permission of becoming. At camp, we have a counselor who won’t stop listening to “Blister in the Sun.” She plays it on her guitar until it feels like a song she wrote. We sneak a listen when she’s out of range but she catches us one day at the beach, lured by the whisper and rise of the drums and the confession of staining sheets. You little shits have no idea of what that means, she says, trying to assert her ownership. She is four years older, an eternity for us girls in cabins still named after woodland animals, stealing clove cigarettes from the confiscation box; girls who braid each other’s hair, practice open mouth kissing on our hands, stringing summers together like the friendship bracelets we’d make on cots with springs grinding into our hips, our flat chests. At night we make our way to the ocean where the moon unravels and waves ripple at our feet and we talk about boys and bases, our parents’ divorce, our messed-up siblings, the injustice of not being seen. The air is salted and we feel we’re on the precipice of something bigger than our bodies can handle, trying to decode the world in the quiet safety of darkness. Together we form a picture, vowing to remember each moment, each other, even as the tide recedes and the light silences us into morning. At the eighth grade dance we sweat in groups telling each other to kiss off into the sun before counting—take one, one, one; take two, two, two—taking note of the ways we think we’ve been wronged until it’s everything, everything, everything, and we feel it rise in our chest, this noose of adulthood coming for us, and we fall down on each other until the teachers pull us apart and tell us to behave and stop listening to music telling us there are no tomorrows not understanding we’d just had our first shelter in place drill, caught scenes of The Day After, watched the Space Shuttle Challenger blow up on live TV, and spent our mornings staring at the ghost children on milk cartons as we ate our Homecombs. They’re coming for our music, we suspect, and we bury our suitcase of cassettes deep in our closets. When the coast is clear, we wrap headphones around our ears, memorizing the lyrics, trying to understand everything, everything before Side B. Sabrina Hicks lives in Arizona with her family. Her work has appeared in both Best Small Fictions and Best Micro Fiction anthologies, Wigleaf’s Top 50, as well as numerous journals, both online and in print. More of her stories can be found at sabrinahicks.com.

Yesterday sadness hit me in the condiment aisle, my cart still empty save the unseasonal raspberries I will forget in the fridge, watch them mould and shrink into black bitterness. I was looking for vinegar, although once there I couldn’t remember which kind I needed. Was it the Modena one or the cleaning type, with its sharp, chemical smell? Did I need olive oil too? Or was it sunflower? Which was I supposed to use for mayo? I stared at rows and rows of ketchup, and I couldn’t choose. I gave up on the grocery list, and on all the others, too. I could never check all the items off anyway. There is always something out of stock. Green peppers. Intimacy. Time. I’ve heard people say how grief hits you in waves. One minute you’re fine, self-scanning your canned chickpeas and thinking about hummus, and a second later a searing pain in your chest stops you from breathing. You drop one can, bend to pick it up, slip, steady yourself against the cart, inhale, hope no one has seen you. A navy arm pushed my cart to the side to reach the truffle dressing and murmured an apology. She looked my age, but better. A double-breasted coat like the one I’ve always wanted to find somewhere, jeans, Converse. Hair up in a loose ponytail, blue eyes, long, pale hands. She quickly filled up her cart. Maldon salt, sesame paste, olive oil — the five litres can — three jars of chickpeas. She’s making hummus too. I followed her to the pasta aisle, enthralled by her confident stride. She knew where everything was. Her coat had pockets on the hips, the unflattering kind. Not on her. I wish she could teach me. How to shrink my hips. How to make good hummus. How to forgo lists. We parted at the self-check-out. I needed to think of something, something I could call dinner. I saw the rotisserie in the corner, by the exit. There was one bird left, and it looked like it’d spent too long in the heat, but it would do. It had to. Later, as I dropped my reusable bag on the passenger seat, I saw the navy woman again, carefully arranging her bags in her boot as in a game of Tetris. When she was done, she slammed the door shut with a strong hand, stronger than it’d looked when it had moved my cart aside. Then she straightened, fished a crumpled Kleenex from her pocket, and patted her eyes dry. She turned toward me, met my eyes, and hurried to get in her car but didn’t start the engine. Sitting in mine,  I wondered how it would feel, to listen to her story. Then I remembered that it all comes in waves. The illusion of closeness, and yearning for more, and love, and loss, and all the items that can never be crossed off a list.

The nurse will hear her say something biting and reassure me that it’s the dementia. It makes them say things they don’t mean. But I’ll look at my mother and she won’t be an elderly, Catholic field mouse. She’ll be a leopard that just realized the electric fence is down. The coast is clear. I’m not accepting feedback on that at this time. That’s how you’re supposed to respond to your family member when they say something hurtful,judgmental, or gross. As if the feedback has not already been delivered. I think the better approach is to announce that you’re currently closed to feedback first thing - the moment you walk in the door for Thanksgiving dinner, shoes on, green bean casserole in hand - before anyone has the opportunity to say anything shitty. Set the boundary proactively. But my mom doesn’t need to provide her feedback, anyway. I always know what she wants to say. I’ve heard that the way you talk to your children becomes their inner voice, which is a pretty heavy thing to say to a parent. But that’s parenting for you, and in my experience this is accurate. In high school, they came up with the idea to give certain students a special, perpetual hall pass that they could use at any time. These students could just get up and walk out of the classroom without asking permission. Teachers were getting sick of the constant interruptions to approve bathroom breaks or trips to the nurse or whatever. Students with good grades and no disciplinary infractions received the first round of golden hall passes, and the rest could earn theirs through good behavior and improved academic performance. Pretty fucked up to base a kid’s access to the bathrooms on their grades if you ask me, but it was 1999 and they weren’t asking. Maybe they’re still not. I wonder if they’ve figured out by now that honor students also smoke weed and buy Adderall in the bathrooms. When her mother’s dementia got to That Point, my mom was mostly embarrassed by the things she said. She was like a little kid who was boggled by the variety of sizes and shapes of people and hadn’t yet discovered her inside voice. Child-like is the best way to describe who she became. Sometimes unkind, but not intentionally. Hard to manage in public. My mother has earned her golden hall pass. She has been meek and pious. She has worn her naivete as a signet of her sin-free life. Instead of telling me that I’m a stoner and a failure (I never said she was wrong), she says I look tired and asks how my job is going. It’s the affect in her benevolent tone that gives her away, but also the inner voice thing. She says what she says and I hear what she means. She’ll wait for the diagnosis before softballing in her next form. She’ll start with things like that shirt doesn’t flatter you before moving on to you’re selfish and entitled, then You walked away from God and you deserve the hell you’re living in and the one that lies ahead. I can’t imagine how satisfying this will feel for her. One day, she’ll look me in the eye and say I don’t like you very much. And I’ll say I know. And then, maybe, hopefully, we’ll set it all down and have a nice visit. Emily Baber (she/her) lives in Cleveland, Ohio and loves Lake Erie, the intricacy of natural systems, and Pee-wee Herman. She writes for work, but only started writing for fun again a couple years ago. She is a late bloomer and she is not a serious person. @EnemyBaber on Twitter.

May awoke with a start in the middle of the night and felt a presence—a shadow, something—looming beside her bed. She clicked on the lamp and looked to her left where her date blinked awake in confusion. “What’s wrong?” he said, squinting, foolish. He was too nice, a boy really. “Bad dream?” “There was someone,” May said. Her heart thudded in her chest. “I saw.” “Who?” her date said, sitting up. He glanced around the room, rubbed May’s back. “No,” she said, shrugging from his touch. She reached for her glasses on the nightstand where a fine meadow of dust awaited her fingertips. She nearly closed her eyes and screamed. “I need you to leave,” she said. “May,” her date said, startled by the look in her eyes. “It’s four in the morning.” “Please,” May said, on the verge of desperate tears. “Please. Please.” He looked about the room again. “What did you see? Maybe you’re having a panic attack.” She knew what she saw, but she couldn’t tell him. “I need to clean. Like, right now.” He raised his hands in innocence and she could tell he was wondering if he was witnessing a breakdown. “Okay,” he said. “I’m going. I hope this passes. Whatever it is.” He gathered his things in silence and left without another word. When he was gone, May put her face in her hands and tried to cry, but no tears came. She felt dried out. Fraudulent. The dust. It was everywhere. No matter how much she cleaned the apartment, the dust seemed to come back thicker, as if to say, Tiny parts of you are dying, faster every day. She had met him on the app, like the others, an attempt to set her life in motion, take control the way her mother always had. There was the consultant with the forest green polo and steak in his teeth. The bassist with stringy hair. She knew as soon as she met this one—Ben was his name, not that it mattered anymore—that she would invite him back. He had slate-grey eyes and a too-open face, and listened earnestly as she told him about her gig in film PR, that the city had been her dream since she’d been little, since that rare trip with her mother on a bank holiday to see the hottest Broadway ticket. This was only a few months before the stress of the market swings finally killed her. “I’m so sorry,” Ben had said and reached across the table for her hand in such an unselfconscious and gentle way that May felt guilty knowing she’d ghost him, knowing she’d never tell him that the only reason her new apartment, her new lifestyle was even feasible was that she’d finally been granted access to the trust. They had climbed four flights and made out sloppily, breathlessly on her landing. He was a bad kisser, searching and desperate, but he had seen more than half of her favorite films. He went down on her until she came and snored loudly after they fucked. May got up and shook dust from the duvet, ran a finger along the surface of the nightstand and tasted it like a drug, flat and bitter and dead. She ignored the fact that she was shaking, teeth chattering like a wind-up toy, and set to work. Using a tattered cross-country t-shirt from high school, she went for the surfaces first, aiming to leave a spotless sheen in her wake. Never mind that she’d done this a dozen times in the month she’d lived in the place. She began with her dresser, moving aside the music box her father had given her for Christmas as a girl, which held her jewelry. When it opened, a tiny ballerina spun on a mirrored pedestal to a plinking rendition of “Für Elise.” Her father—who didn’t cry at the funeral, with whom May hadn’t spoken in months—had advised her against buying the apartment. “You’re like your mother,” he’d said. “Rushing into things you aren’t built to handle.” Her mother and father had started the family firm together, young optimists, then drifted apart as May’s mother—who had come from nothing—lost herself in the momentum of success. Next were the bookshelves, the countertops. The low-slung bench that supported her TV and a framed photograph, the last one the three of them had taken together. She cleaned until her knuckles ached and her fingertips were raw from the solution.  She fetched the vacuum from the kitchen and ran it through the rest of the night, through the pounding from her neighbor below, until wan light framed her futile windows, until at last, exhausted, she slid to the floor and began to cry, real tears this time. All this time, she had hoped to become the woman her mother would never get to see, one that would make her proud. But what can you really earn when you’ve already been given so much? She opened her eyes and felt a flash at the base of her skull: a twirl of dust motes caught the blade of morning sun. No. She went to her nightstand where it had begun to accrue afresh. She pictured it collecting unchecked on every surface forever, filling her nose, ears, and mouth as she slept, coating her tongue, her lungs, these particles of her past, future selves that were already dead. And then she began to laugh, frightening herself at the brittle force of it. She laughed at her mother and her father, their petty arguments. She laughed at her gaunt reflection in the mirror. She laughed at who she’d never be. All of it. And the next time she awoke to the looming shadow? She would embrace it, inhale it. Because fuck. The dust was coming for us all in the end, whether we liked the taste or not. Brendan Gillen is a writer in Brooklyn, NY. He is the recipient of the 2023 Mythic Picnic Prize in Fiction and his work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions. His stories appear, or will appear, in the Florida Review, Wigleaf, Necessary Fiction, Maudlin House, Taco Bell Quarterly, New Delta Review, X-R-A-Y and elsewhere. His first novel, STATIC, is forthcoming from Vine Leaves Press (July '24). You can find him online at bgillen.com and on Twitter/IG @beegillen.

The lure of the footlights drew him here and taught him to befriend himself. The gently sloping stairway to stardom kept him here. Adulation mushroomed to occlude other concerns. The chorale of their reverence and their waterlogged eyes when he gave his all sustained him. Here he knows where he is. He desperately dreads when the curtain falls and he begins to end. He has his father’s eyes with their eyelashes imitating dragon wings but none of his sticky but sugarless words. Robert has been described as a fine specimen of a man and an accomplished actor. He likes these compliments but finds it hard to believe they bear any proximity to the truth. He also likes performing comedies as they feed you nothing but leave you feeling full. Robert has never suffered from stage fright but he has been frequented by a phenomenon he knows as throat scratching. It is triggered by direct engagement, in particular eye contact, with his audiences. He is fine when they are a morass of blurry faces but if he locks eyes with a beautiful stranger the itching begins and doesn’t tend to end. He often curses what he perceives as God’s negligence in choosing to forego a small inlet so tears don’t streak your cheeks. Sometimes he spirals into thought for days on end. He wonders how his father left, if he looked back, and if so, how many times. How many times would be enough? It’s been thirty years. How many tears have flowed in slow motion from the end of their shared aquiline nose? He has pictures and has age-progressed them in his mind as if it were a digital photo frame. He is a benign-looking older man who throws a stick for his dog in the park every day around noon and allows his shoulders to slump as he waits for his reward. He is the eccentrically dressed man on the tube who always has a quizzical look on his face as if one of the other commuters may possess the piece that would move the jigsaw into place. He is the yoga teacher whose small frame belies a bizarrely strong physique which enables him to fight a forest fire and become a local hero. He is the smiling man who doesn’t allow others to sway his view and sets his sun in the south. “Nothing really matters but making yourself happy”, he is speaking the lines aloud because that is how he learns. He’s proud that he has never faltered and needed to be prompted from off stage. The stage is his, he’s hypnotic there, and while he remains at one with the words it stays that way. Staying is important. There he can confidently hold hands with the rhythm of his soul in the interlude. There are dark days when he needs to vent. He does this onstage. He fashions himself a victim and lives their life for a few hours. Their hurt is his and though he would never admit it, there is something strangely soothing about the uniformity of universal suffering. Sometimes it is necessary to deflect so the past doesn’t make a comeback through the broken clock of his memory. The comeback contains an apology “super sorry, buddy’. It’s vague and certainly no masterpiece but it’s something. It’s something he was never offered and it’s something that has painted its stain on every day. Catherine O’Brien is an Irish writer of poems, flash fiction and short stories. Her work has most recently appeared in Comhar, Splonk, Fractured Literary, Flash Boulevard, The Gooseberry Pie Literary Magazine, Firewords and Bending Genres. You can find out more about her and her work on X @abairrud2021.

Sustainable eating eggshells for calcium – crushed to mush, watered down is this the future, we pray for? wanting not to waste as waste fills our needs Did you know? Eggshells are painted white for uniformity? for aesthetics? for supremacy! (so even ask the produce section at Acme is against diversity) Loop in your life, you will have something that you cherish and you will nurture it, tend to it, love it, call it beautiful because you made it beautiful that’s human nature in that same life, some people will come along destroy what you made, rip it, tear it, crush it, stomp on it, mar it, turn it ugly… because that’s human nature Allison Whittenberg's novels are Sweet Thang, Hollywood and Maine, Life is Fine, Tutored (Random House 2006, 2008, 2009, and 2010). Her work has appeared inColumbia Review, Feminist Studies,J Journal, and New Orleans Review. She is the author of the full-length short story collection, Carnival of Reality (Loyola University Press, 2022). Whittenberg is a six-time Pushcart Prize nominee.

So, yes, Goliad, population 2,000, where I had last been perhaps 60 years before — a kid roaming the orchard behind my great-aunt’s old, white frame house. My great-great grandfather’s grave is there, right where he lay as he was shot, according to family lore, by Jesse James in 1869. My great-grandfather and one of my great-aunts are also buried there. My grandmother met my “rat, no-good, so-and-so” grandfather there. The town historian knew part of my family history, which was featured in at least two Texas history books. I had to go, and I had to take Dad with me. Goliad’s own past is fraught with death and intrigue. It was the site in 1836 of the Goliad Massacre as well as the scene later in the 19th century of bloody post-Civil War conflicts between posses of the law, Confederate sympathizers and desperadoes, my relatives included. I was traveling to that very place, my dad in the backseat of my rental car, silent for once, perhaps listening for once,the dilemma of where to scatter his ashes at last over. They showed up from Shreveport, LA, via UPS some years before. Inside the package was a decorative wooden box with a T.J. Maxx sticker on the bottom and a strange but familiar smell. “Your Dad used to buy those little half-pint bottles by the case,” his widow said in explanation of the tequila that had spilled inside. “It seemed like a good tribute when I first put one in the box. But when I mailed it to you, I forgot it was there. I’m sorry it got broken.” Monte Durward Walker’s presence intermingled with the distinct odor of cheap booze seemed perfect – dark humor worthy of Dad. The ashes’ stewardship fell to me. They stayed in my basement near Washington, D.C., for several years but after research on my family history, Goliad beckoned, and kept beckoning – the name grafted onto my identity, my father’s destiny there now so obvious. But there were loose ends. Where to deposit them? What to say? How to be? I feared I would choke, as my family tended to do when stakes were high. ** Help came in a writing assignment involving a pretend correspondence with Audre Lorde in which I told her about my dad’s roots in Goliad, though I discovered he wasn’t at all “rooted.” I explained he was the only child born of an affair to his young mother and never knew his father, an older, married man reviled by my great-aunt who gave him the “rat” moniker. I revealed to Lorde that I could push his buttons like no one else and that he struck me hard once, hurling me across the room in an unsuccessful effort to control my teenage defiance. The black eye was slight, to my disappointment. I also told her that I never won an argument with him until, when at 34, I quit drinking and confronted him about his own, which meant he never again found ease with me as his funny and outrageous self. “You turned on me like a viper in my chest,” he said. I noted to Lorde that the wonderful irony of the words coming from me through her — also a confrontational woman — likely wouldn’t be lost on a man who once played jazz sax, sometimes took the less fortunate under wing, read voraciously and grudgingly tolerated his feminist daughter. My “correspondence” with Lorde included a poem, which stood ready when I spread Dad’s ashes. I read the words out loud under a grand, gnarled tree in Goliad’s Oak Hill Cemetery in sight line to my great-aunt’s grave: Trees without roots must search. Trees without roots struggle to support branches. Trees without roots burn quickly with their ashes packed but waiting to burst, dependent in your hand in the flat heat where you say what goes. Where love can erupt where restless ideas cast shadows in the violent light of Goliad. ** Because of my dad, I grew up thinking it normal for men to flout rules and ignore convention. I understood that men weren’t beholden to others, and they didn’t admit to harboring guilt or regret, or need the acknowledgement of anyone, even in death. I also knew from my bedside scene with him just hours before Dad died of liver disease that he remembered we connected during our lives when it was most important, even though he had no model for doing that in his own formative years. After scattering the ashes – all that was left of Dad’s 6’2”, 190-pound frame, crooked smile and graceful, long legs and feet -- I cried openly for my loss for the first time. I figured it wasn’t the last word where he was concerned, but I had gotten him home with those who loved him in ways flawed and raw. Him – the outsider, the one with the history, the stain of his secret birth that made him separate and special -- not with the others in the ground but already drifting into the elements, just as he always had. Danna Walker has published pieces in The Washington Post, Months to Years,  American Journalism Review, Sixty and Me, and other publications, and been featured on NPR’s “Tell Me More” and in other venues. She has studied with memoirists Amanda Montei and Stacy Pershall, poet Marcelo Hernandez Castillo and author Beth Kanter through The Writer’s Center, Gotham Writers Workshop and Electric Literature. She teaches at the university level after having graduated 24th grade. She also writes a semi-regular personal development column for older women inspired by her Vietnam-vet friend’s philosophy that “if you live long enough you come to realize you’ve been a total ass.” She lives in Kensington, MD, with her partner and schnoodle and has two adult children and a son-in-law. Find additional writing at https://rustedcadillac.substack.com/.

Of course, she was an artist. Of course, she was a writer too. Kyp could tell that by the way she pirouetted around the office pulling files from cabinets and putting them in bins on desks, then circling back around to the coffee cup she’d set on Kyp’s desk with a breathy, is this okay? His desk. S-sure…sure it was okay. There was an artistry about her The way she moved. The skinny jeans she wore. The Chuck Taylors. An over-sized cardigan that hung loose on her slight frame. Those big round glasses. That nose ring. The way she bunched her hair on top of her head in a sloppy mound with a single clip. Clarice. Clarice Laine. An artist’s name. Poetry and photography online; stuff that Kyp read and viewed each and every single time, she danced away to fetch more files, leaving that coffee cup lonely and stained with her light, red lipstick. And it wasn’t great poetry. And the photography was a bit pedantic. City scenes that Clarice had intentionally made black and white with her phone. But Kyp was no critic. He’d worked in this medical library for fifteen years. And Clarice was… Kyp looked her up again online. Clarice was… …twenty-seven. Christ, that’s twenty-one years younger than me, Kyp thought. Born in 1996. Kyp broke up with his girlfriend of two years in 1996. Kyp and his friends cruised the city that summer, going from bar to bar, meeting women. Chasing women from bar to bar. Going to clubs. Going to strip bars. Kyp could remember whole days from the year 1996. Whole weekends. And Clarice was just coming into the world then! This temp who wrote poetry and took photographs. If he could just talk to her. If he could just… …but…ugh…those twenty-one years. But what did age matter when you were an adult? And Clarice was approaching thirty, kind of. Too old to be a temp…maybe. And Kyp wasn’t that out of touch. He listened to interesting podcasts. He still made year-end best of lists. He knew all the young musicians, and didn’t hate them. He still liked to find new bands out there online, and tell people about said group on the social medias. Kyp had Facebook. He had Instagram. He posted all kinds of cool memes and GIFs on Twitter. “More files, sorry,” Clarice said to him, smiling, rolling her eyes empathetically. Pirouetting away again. Kyp wanted to say something interesting. Something witty. Maybe bare his soul. All week he’d wanted to. Clarice’s last week. Clarice’s only week as a temp here. Nothing but awkward smiles. Awkward glances. No real conversation at all. It could be now or never. Instead… “Okay, sure,” was all he said in response. Kyp went to his ramen joint for lunch. He had visions of Clarice walking in and coming to sit with him. All week he’d hoped she’d find this place. He was going broke on ramen. His blood pressure had to be through the roof. Still…if she’d just come in. They could talk about books. Or movies. He’d just seen this strange one with Emma Stone. Paintings. Kyp had been an art major in college once, long ago. He graduated in 1997. When Clarice was one. But Clarice never found the ramen joint. Being older just meant more experience, Kyp thought, sitting back at his desk, watching Clarice move around the room pulling those medical library files. When he and Johanna had been married, Kyp had a healthy bank account. And guess what? He did things. Like plays and symphonies. He went places. He traveled. That’s right, Clarice, Kyp thought. I’ve been to London. I’ve been to Madrid. I walked in Miller’s shoes in his blessed Paris. I’ve seen Tokyo, Amsterdam and Vienna too. I’ve stood before Guernica. I’ve stood before The Kiss. Kyp imagined walking the Louvre with Clarice, aching to get a glimpse of the Mona Lisa with all of those other tourists. I’m a wealth of knowledge and experience, Kyp said to himself. “More files, sorry,” Clarice said, smiling, rolling her eyes. “Okay, sure,” Kyp said, slowly. But she was already dancing away from him again. For the rest of the afternoon, they passed each other like that. Like smiling strangers. Only Kyp played out their whole new lives in his head. Clarice would stay and work permanently at the medical library. A desk across the room from him, Awkward smiles becoming friendly ones. Stilted phrases becoming long and sprawling conversations about everything. An undercurrent of passion and excitement building between the two of them. A combined future coming into view. It has been so long since Kyp had felt that. Passion. For anyone. For anything. Oh, how he’d take Clarice to that Ramen joint. Then the Indian place he loved. Holding hands and stopping for small kisses. They’d go to the art museums. They’d stand before van Gogh’s and Picasso’s together. Clarice would call Picasso a misogynist. Kyp would nod in agreement. They’d see art films. Find books for each other in bookstores. Maybe Kyp would help Clarice with a line in one of her poems. Help her frame a photo. They’d travel. Together. And the love they would make. It would be unreal. It would be like… “Well, goodnight,” Clarice said. “See you around.” She already had her coat. Her hat. That tattered knapsack with all of those political buttons on it. She was already walking toward the glass exit doors. They’re love would be magical, Kyp thought, fleetingly. “Yeah,” he said. “See you around, too.” John Grochalski is the author of five poetry collections and three novels. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York

We learned to live without things during the devastation that generations before ours insisted were essential, like flying on airplanes, or slurping ice-cold creamy milkshakes, or getting measured for a bra at Victoria’s Secret. I used to know a girl who wore the remnants of a black VS lace pushup. Made her look like the goddess Venus flown down to Earth. Nick never mentioned it; simple living suited him, but for me, not having a bra settled in like a depression, and some days, a dim haze consumed me for the ache of having one. “Okay, baby, if anybody can naviguess the mall, nab a genuine VS strap-up, and get out alive, it’s you.” Nick passed me the can of flat grape soda we shared. “It’s your seventeenth b-day,” he said. “Everybody does crazy ass shit on their seventeenth. You remember me doing those sick board tricks last year–Ollies, 50-50s–up in the parking lot formerly known as the 10 West. All those Not Deads just waiting for me to fall–haha!” “Is that supposed to make me feel better?” “Aw, babe. Seventeen is special. Likely none of us’ll see the future—wait, I might.” He thumbed his chest. “Eighteen at midnight. But seriously, there’s your sister and Rishe, and don’t forget about Tam—all snarling Not Deads by the big one-eight. Facts.” “No–just bad luck.” “I support you, but now that we’re here, it’s dangerous, this quest. A lot at stake.” Nothing moved except foul air over the acres of mall sidewalks. “For you, maybe. I’m going.” “Yeah,” he said. “Okay if I stand guard?” I kissed him and crossed beneath fluttering awnings into deep shadows where storefronts loaded with merchandise flirted with me in total oblivion to the big yellow cleaning cart and its mop heads stiff with blood splayed like fallen soldiers around it. A novelty store’s neon sign winked off and on. Inside, the shelves remained perfectly ordered. A former employee turned ND kicked and growled in the central aisle, its ankle hooked on some impediment. Stink rolled over me, and fear skittered up my spine. I bolted to the map kiosk, my head swirling. Nick was right; I shouldn’t have come, but merely surviving didn’t compare to Venus. Moonlight sliced between the mall’s murky layers, capturing papers in flight and drawing my gaze to Victoria’s Secret. Radiance framed a curvy mannequin wearing bubble gum-colored butt floss in an ethereal glow. I wanted to fall on my knees in worship; instead, I fled inside the tumbled store exploding with color and lace and froth. Here was my solace at last. I wriggled out of my grimy tee and tossed it aside to try on padded bras. Unlined ones. Bras with straps and strapless bits of nothing. I stood naked from the waist up, rotating through a dozen bras like I might shuffle cards, trying to decide which one to take and which would give back what my generation was owed. I wanted them all, but Nick and I traveled light. A putrid breeze wrinkled my nose, and I whirled. The ND from the flashing neon sign store hissed at me through broken teeth. Its juices splattered and seared my skin. Decay coated my taste buds with yuck when I swallowed. It lunged. I swung a fistful of bras—a white VS lace, a red boyfriend demi-cup, and a tee shirt bra in turtle green. The ND snagged bony fingers in the mess of straps. Its bloody teeth chased the turtle green bra, snapping, and I moved aside, letting it high step into a rounder of underwear on sale, four for twenty bucks. I raced out past the glorious full-figured mannequin and the shattered storefronts. I didn’t stop running until Sixth Street’s sultry air kissed my naked skin. I sucked oxygen into my shaking lungs, half crying, half laughing over my near miss. It was midnight. Nick’s eighteenth birthday. He’d made it and so could I. Nick! Nick! I whispered, but that’s when I saw him, what he’d become, and the prize I’d gone after fluttered from my fingers, and I edged away. Time with him was all I’d ever needed. Us. To hell with Venus. Rhonda Schlumpberger writes speculative fiction with themes coalescing around dystopias, rebellion, and consequences. Her stories appear in Space and Time Magazine, New Flash Fiction Review, All Worlds Wayfarer IX & XV, and elsewhere, as well as anthologies such as When the World Stopped. She's the EIC at Intrepidus Ink. Rhonda drinks coffee only when doctored with hazelnut creamer. On X @rhondaschlumpb.

For Roja Azadian Everyone in the group chat voted. A committee of girls, three of us, were chosen to pick out the jewellery, a goodbye gift she would take with her to the new country, a new home. No dark colors, nothing reminding her of the days in jail, everyone agreed. The committee suggested we go either with a semicircle necklace in gold and pink, a triangle shape of her birthstone, or an azure necklace, almost shapeless. The three choices upon which most of us agreed. The triangular one was immediately crossed off the list. It didn’t celebrate her diamond face. The semicircle was eliminated right after. Too bright for her skin. We bought her the azure necklace which she wore immediately in the airport under her scarf. “My lucky charm,” she called it. Sarvin Parviz (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and poet from Tehran. Her work has appeared in Roi Fainéant Literary Press and L’Esprit Magazine. She enjoys bending genres and trying different media. Her focus is on the intersection of diaspora, identity, language and belonging. She was serendipitously introduced to micro-fiction which led her to leave her training and pursuit of opera behind to explore media arts and writing. She is a graduate student in the MFA program at Southern Illinois University (Carbondale)

Hunting boots all wet and muddy, Following the trail, most bloody, Found some tracks, now stop and study. There’s my quarry, freshly dead! Who’s that stranger standing, waiting? That’s my deer, there’s no debating! Move aside, quit agitating! Then a blow straight to my head… …Wake up in a cave-like dwelling, Gun is missing, head is swelling, Dying embers glow, foretelling What awaits me on this night. Rub my eyes, now seeing better: There’s a knife! And there’s a letter! As I read, my face turns redder, Angry words I now recite: Once the hunter, now the hunted. You’re the prey, don’t feel affronted When at midnight you’re confronted By the beast who’ll take your life. Ev’ry day and ev’ry hour You’ll be hunted by this power Till your bones it has devoured. You’d be wise to take the knife. Sensing that midnight is nearing, Out I run along the clearing, Duck behind a tree, now peering, Crouching in my hideaway. From the wood, a beast advances ’Cross the field, its shadow dances, Crimson eyes cast hungry glances, Seeking out its promised prey. Drifting toward my former dwelling, Creeping slowly, nostrils smelling, Each aroma is propelling, Guiding it to where I hide. It’s for blood the beast is yearning, Stomach churning, head is turning Toward my tree, and now discerning, Quickly breaking into stride. Fight or flight? I choose the latter: Bushes rattle, branches clatter, Dirt disperses, pebbles scatter As I race to save my skin. Moving swiftly, muscles straining, Lungs on fire, legs complaining, Yet the beast is quickly gaining, Drawing nearer, closing in. Wond’ring now amidst the fleeing, Should a man die without seeing Evil which would end his being? Should he not stand firm and fight? If I am to be devoured, I’ll not go down as a coward! Stopping then, I turn, empowered, Ready now to face my plight. Curled back lips show teeth like daggers. I feel faint, my heartbeat staggers As the beast assumes a swagger, For it knows my death comes soon. Pouncing on me, bodies thrashing, Teeth are gnashing, claws are gashing, All the while my blade is slashing, Flashing underneath the moon. Just before my life is ended, Thrust the knife, with arms extended, Through its heart, left undefended, Blood comes pouring from the hole. Dead… it’s dead… it’s dead! I’ve killed it! Evil blood - now I have spilled it! Once warm body - I have chilled it! Triumph fills my tired soul. There’s the stranger standing, waiting In the shadows, calculating, Coming forth, now indicating He has something yet to say: Bullets from your guns have slaughtered Mothers, fathers, brothers, daughters, Creatures of our lands and waters. Time has come for you to pay. Suddenly a howl arises, Blood runs cold, fear paralyzes. Two more sinister surprises: Hungry, hateful, hellish beasts… For my sins, I must atone. Face my demons all alone. Time to pay my debt of bone. I am yours, commence the feast! Wesley Zurovec is the author of The Cavern (1997). He lives in Austin, Texas, where he devotes time to writing short prose and poetry, playing board games with his family, and coaching youth sports.