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On the days when I have miscalculated our groceries and we are unable to run to the closest store, my partner and I often decide to buy a meal at a nearby Nepalese Indian restaurant. I always order the same items: paneer tikka masala, mittelscharf, and a butter naan. The restaurant is not easily accessible by train. Before my partner purchased an e-bike, we used to walk fifteen minutes to the stop, where the wait for the train is longer than the actual trip to the restaurant, a special place for us. We might begrudgingly leave our apartment, but the destination gives us a reprieve from the problems that await us during the incoming work week, especially for my partner, a professor who holds the unwanted distinction of being a state employee. Universities in Germany are nefarious emanations of the disorganized and inhospitable state. On Sundays, grocery stores, shops, and general office businesses are closed, a cultural trait that makes Germans proudly boast of their work-life balance. Sundays, they will say, are a quiet day for rest—ruhezeit they call it. Yet such proclamations only describe a particular type of expectant Germans and assume a homogenized work culture, especially in hospitality. While stores are indeed closed on Sundays, there are many restaurants that remain open. Are they not allowed to rest? I ask myself when I’m on a walk nearby and see these restaurants on those purported quiet Sundays. Writing against Kant’s uncritical universal hospitality, Jacques Derrida observed that all forms of hospitality are based upon an assumed condition of perpetual peace, that even the idea of universal hospitality can only be guaranteed and expected under certain conditions.(1) Roles of the visitor, the host, the guest, the foreigner, the citizen, the transient, and the undocumented are classified under the cold, surveilling eyes of nation-states and countries. -------------- 1. Of Hospitality. Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida To Respond. Translated by Rachel Bowlby. (Stanford University Press, 2000). The banal rights discourse, then, becomes convoluted under these state-sanctioned regulations of who is allowed to stay, who can only visit, and even who cannot enter at all. Within these ethical concerns of hospitality and its roles, we can also ask, who is allowed to rest on Sunday? ~ We haven’t dined inside of a restaurant since the pandemic. In the winter, we pick up our takeaway order on my partner’s e-bike, designed for two people. Those bike rides during the early evenings can be quite chilly, but I try to keep warm by placing my hands in my partner’s coat pockets. Despite the design of the bike, car drivers and passengers must think we are a laughable sight. I see a lot of their peculiar and amused looks. I usually wave at them, unsmiling. They never wave back. Once, on a different route, we passed the police station, where a cop walking toward his car said something loudly. His tone was not kind, but he didn’t appear to ask us to halt. So my partner rode away from the ominous building. At a traffic light, we heard his voice heckle us again. We turned to our left and saw a cop car on the street. He continued to raise his voice at us. His colleague, a woman, was the driver and wore the same stern expression. When he realized we were unable to respond in German, he switched to fragmented English. One person on a bike, he said. I just stared at him, confused at what he was trying to communicate. My partner, who doesn’t fare so well during confrontations, finally spoke. When he did, it was utterly so banal and so obvious that I almost scoffed. The bike seats two people. The cop observed the bike with a critical eye again before they drove off. I have never seen a cop chase electric scooters that held two, even three, people. Those scooters, I know, are not designed for multiple person use. I went inside, leaving my partner to stand out in the cold. He didn’t want to spend all of the extra effort locking up his bike when I was picking up an order. Inside, there were a few occupied tables since opening half an hour ago.  The dinner crowd hadn’t yet appeared. At the bar, our young friend was speaking German on the phone. To me, he spoke English. We had been customers at his restaurant for a year now, yet we didn’t know each other’s names. Formal introductions never came up. I assumed it was a family-run restaurant but didn’t know his relationships with the other workers. Months ago, by chance I found out the older, stylish woman who almost always wears bright reddish pink lipstick was his mother. While he was busy transferring orders into the POS system, I stood silently waiting to make a payment. He looked up, startled, exclaiming that he thought I was his mother based on the silhouette from the corner of his eye. Your order isn’t ready, he apologized. After our usual quick chatter of how we were doing, I asked our friend if he eats butter. “Noooo,” he said, drawing out the negative word quizzically. I laughed at my imprecision. “I mean, if I baked a cake for you and the others here,” I waved a hand around the bar, “will you be able to eat something with butter and sugar?” “Oh!” our friend responded in relief, smiling. “I thought you meant, if I eat butter. I can eat butter and sugar in cakes.” I told him the next time we swing by, I’ll bring them something. I hadn’t yet decided what to bake for them, but I gave a list of the conventional baking ingredients. Flour, eggs, sugar, butter, milk, vanilla extract. “If you decide to bring us something, we’ll be happy,” our friend said. I heard a bell ring. The chef had finished my partner’s chicken momos and had placed the container at the window. I waved at him. ~ A few weeks later, I baked a lemon ricotta cake for the restaurant crew. It was simple and not too sweet. There was no icing, just a generous sprinkle of powdered sugar on the top surface. Using the sifter, I focused on trying to cover the slight crack in the center of the cake without clumping that area with too much sugar. When my partner returned from another workday at the university, I placed the cooled cake in the front basket of his bike. He fastened cords around the pie container, firmly tying it down. And we set off to the restaurant, this time bearing a gift. It was dinner time again. I rarely make it out of the apartment earlier than dinner time. I don’t have anywhere to be, no friends to meet. I spend a lot of time with my cat indoors. Our friend and his mother were standing at the bar, smiling at us walking toward them with the pie carrier. “You really brought us cake,” our friend said, amazed. “I said I would,” I reminded him. I took the cake out and gave the list of ingredients. His mother stood close to her son, looking at the cake appreciatively and softly murmuring wow. I watched her gently slide the cake off of the container and onto one of their restaurant’s white plates, the parchment paper intact. Her short, cropped hair was newly permed. Her red lipstick and beautiful gold jewelry stood out despite the dimmed lights in her restaurant. Both she and her son seemed unwilling to step away from the cake, continually speaking softly to each other in Nepalese. She looked up at me, remarking on its wonderful scent. Her son waved his hands in the air to catch more of the fragrance of the lemon. Out of habit, I turned to the dining area and was unsurprised to see the diners looking at us. Their expressions didn’t share the exuberance and joy our restaurant friends were displaying. A woman’s fork was in the air as she surveyed the scene unfolding. It was dark inside, but I didn’t think her eyes were narrowed because of the lack of lights. Months before, I had brought the same cake to a different family who operates a Thai restaurant downtown. When I came back to the outdoor table, my partner leaned across the table conspiratorially. “They,” he began, tilting his head, “watched you go inside and give chú the cake.” I only ever call our older friends uncles and aunts, and he had adopted the Vietnamese terms. “They narrated the entire scene to each other. They said, ‘She gave them a cake. That’s nice.’” “You understood their conversation in German? Is your German comprehension better today?” I glanced over his shoulder and assessed the two eating their rice dishes. “They spoke in English. One of them speaks German. Could be visitors.” He shrugged. “Was there judgment in their observation?” I was trying to make a comparison. “No. They seemed surprised because they probably don’t see customers bringing food to restaurant workers.” Before we left the Nepalese Indian restaurant, our friend said he wanted to give us a gift in return. He opened the refrigerator and handed me a container of mango juice. Out of habit, my first inclination was to decline the gift, but I wanted to avoid the performance of the back-and-forth gift wars. I needed to get away from the spectators, so I thanked him for the juice. As we walked toward the door, I noticed the woman continued to stare at our every movement. She leaned over to her companion and whispered something as I stared back at her with an arch of my left eyebrow. ~ My enjoyment of cooking in the apartment comes and goes in unexpected waves. Some days, I cook dinner consecutively for three days, making good use of our groceries. There are many other days I force myself to get up to prepare something for us. There are times when my partner returns home from the university and he winds up cooking something in haste. I once remarked that we should buy frozen food in case of emergencies when neither of us have the energy to rise from the bed or the couch. There’s a discount store right down the street from us, barely three minutes away. He responded rather tersely, that the refrigerator space is much too small. The freezer is even smaller and can barely store one box of frozen pizza. On another Sunday, we returned to the Nepalese Indian restaurant. For a time, my partner tried to avoid the police station, but he no longer cared. We haven’t had another encounter with another upset cop over the seating arrangements of an e-bike. Before I could return his greeting, our friend announced the cake was delicious. They’d eaten it all. “Did you eat some, too?” I asked his girlfriend, who was drying glasses. She smiled and nodded, never pausing as she continued with her task. She rarely spoke more than a few words to us, but I always tried to include her in the conversation even if I may be the only one talking. While I paid for our usual order, our friend quietly asked if I could make a cake without sugar for his father. “Your father can’t eat sugar?” He pointed to the kitchen window. I could see chú busy preparing multiple dishes. “My father ate a very small piece.” His thumb and index finger almost touched as he illustrated the size of the sample. “And he spent the night watching us eat.” All of my assumptions about the possible family tree in the restaurant were slowly crystallizing. “Sure, sure, I can try to make an apple pie without sugar for him. I’ve never made a sugarless pie before.” I looked at my partner. “Maybe I can just make the cake or pie as I would, except I wouldn’t add sugar.” Even though he wore a mask, I could tell my partner was making a face at my instant recipe consideration. “That sounds terrible,” my partner exclaimed in distaste. “Maybe you could try to use a sugar substitute?” Our friend said any fruit could be sweet enough, that I didn’t need to add an alternative. I remembered that there was leftover mixture of pecan pie in the refrigerator. I asked if he could eat pecans. I had to look up the word “nut” in German to describe it. “I am allergic,” he said, placing a hand on his throat. “But I can try to eat it.” Horrified by his extreme politeness, I decided that an apple pie would be the safest bet. I’d return with a pie baked specifically for his father, I promised before leaving. ~ My partner didn’t want to eat another pecan pie, so I decided to make one for our friends at the Thai restaurant. I prepped a pie dough on Saturday to bake the next day. We rarely take the train downtown on Sunday, unless we intentionally plan to see our friend P at the restaurant. She used to work on weekdays, but she was transitioning to another job as a nurse technician and would only be at the restaurant on Sundays. She shared this update with us when we were eating outside, after finishing her own meal indoors with the staff. The outdoor tables are arranged next to the shop’s large windows, and we can hear their cheerful Thai banter. I rarely see the chef-owner eat, but he always sits with the younger staff members when there are no orders to fulfill. As I typically do, I wonder how they all ended up in Germany, and when. The staff at the Thai restaurant had eaten one of my pies before. On Lunar New Year, a Sunday, I gave them a festive apple pie. Instead of a top crust, I had used the cookie cutter shaped as a cat to arrange five large cats on top. It was the year of the cat after all. We almost didn’t make it out. News about the mass shooting in Monterey Park, California, the day before had finally circulated on my news feed. The communities there had been celebrating an all-day Lunar New Year Festival. The apple pie had been cooling on the wire for some time. I didn’t want to leave the apartment, the space that I hesitated to call safe but which distanced me from the rest of the world, including our German neighbors. “Maybe we can give them the pie tomorrow,” I said to my partner. He was already dressed. I hadn’t even taken a shower after our run. I forgot the restaurant was closed on Mondays. And we barely had enough ingredients for sandwiches. I finally did get dressed, deliberately choosing a red jumpsuit and wore gold bangles and gold earrings. My color choices resembled a lì xí, the customary red envelope with money I used to receive from my parents. I hadn’t received a red envelope for years. My father used to mail me one, a ritual that lasted for six years until he passed away. I received his last lì xí when I lived in Boston for two years during my master’s program. The sun had gone down hours ago. At the train stop, my partner called in our order. I think he was slightly cross with me, at my indecision. And his blood sugar was low. The restaurant was packed. P was standing at the cash register when I presented the pie to her. It seemed that the entire staff had stopped working. The dishwasher peeked out from his small workspace and I waved at him. “Apple pie,” I announced. “Apple…pie,” she repeated. She looked up at me with her delicate features. Her long, silky black hair was brushed into a ponytail and she wore a black top and light blue jeans, her usual restaurant work uniform. “Like apfelkuchen, but it’s American apple pie,” I tried to explain. There is no word for pie in German, and the best word to replace it was kuchen, the German word for cake. “It’s for all of you.” I pointed to the slightly too golden brown cats. “These are supposed to be cats, for Year of the Cat.” “Year of cats?” “Do you celebrate the Lunar New Year?” “Oh! No, we don’t. But that’s okay. We will enjoy the pie.” P brought pie to the kitchen prep area and gracefully popped the pie out of its dish. “This is so nice,” I could hear her say in the kitchen. She handed the now empty dish to the dishwasher, who caught my eye and pointed his thumb upward. I nodded. I tried to pay for my tofu massaman curry and his tofu pad Thai, but P said chú wouldn’t allow the transaction. I insisted so much that chú stopped his cooking and came over and said in English, “no pay. Next time.” I heard his wife say something from behind me. I turned to her direction. She was sitting by herself at the table directly across from the bar. As always, she was immaculately dressed in designer clothes and heels, and her hair was pulled back into a bun. Not a strand of hair was out of place. “Pay next time. But don’t bring another kuchen, then we let you pay,” she said, laughter in her tone. I grumbled my acquiescence and placed my debit card back into my wallet. As we waited for the order to be packed, I saw a man with grey hair move his eyes from the aunty and to me, back and forth. He wasn’t even trying to be discreet. He mumbled something to himself, shook his head, and drained his beer. His entire expression was neither curious nor happy, but one of ambivalence that bordered in disgust. All of their clients were white Germans, seeking hospitality in a Thai-owned restaurant on the designated day of rest. They were allowed to be raucous and loud. I wasn’t. They made the rules. I had to follow them. The invasion of whiteness in non-white designated spaces makes the space even more unbearable. I felt suffocated by them, in this space that I appreciated and adored. I needed to leave, to grieve. When we returned to the apartment, I spooned some rice into a bowl and some of the massaman curry onto a plate. The food had cooled significantly, a usual trait of our takeaway orders. On another plate, I cut a small slice of apple pie. I chose only my bright red melamine plateware, hoping to add some festive spirit onto the black cooking range, my makeshift altar table. I placed three pairs of off-white melamine chopsticks at the center of the food and clasped my hands in prayer. I had remembered to include the spirits of my elder sister and brother. Ba, chị hai, anh ba, the year started badly, but I still wish for a better year. I hope you enjoy the food. The curry was a gift from a restaurant. I usually kept my prayers short. I never knew what to ask for and how much from my family, especially from my sister and brother. We were strangers, having never been fortunate enough to meet in this lifetime. We didn’t see P for many months since that Sunday in January, until we arrived with the pecan pie. It was lunchtime, and the restaurant was packed, indoors and out. Chú enthusiastically greeted me without stopping his cooking. “Pecan pie.” I thought better of it. “Kuchen mit…nuss,” I tried to translate. “I’ve never had anything like this,” P said gazing at the smaller pie. The crust was misshapen, some of its sides were more prominent than others. “It’s one of my favorites,” my partner endorsed. He seems to only ever call pies I make during the winter holidays as favorites. P dropped off the pie at the kitchen prep and I saw one of the dishwashers taking it out of the pan. I knew he’d wash the glass dish, so I waited. His peer stepped out and we communicated with our usual gestures. He gave me his approval, holding up a piece of the pie. “Do you want to eat here?” P asked. She surveyed the outdoor seating, and I followed her gaze. All three of the outdoor tables were occupied. “Not today,” I responded. “Next time.” P nodded her understanding. “See you next time!” I haven’t seen P since that busy Sunday. ~ The night before I left for London, I baked both a sugarless apple pie and a pan of spinach lasagna. A few months ago, I had agreed to be a panelist on a writing workshop aimed at Ph.D. students writing their doctoral theses. At the time, I had officially left my Ph.D. program in Germany and, with the support of my mentors, was looking into other options. I tried to keep my CV active. The pan of lasagna should last him for a couple of days if he didn’t want to leave the apartment or even cook for himself. He came home upset, after enduring yet another infuriating meeting. The pie was done. I hadn’t researched any sugar alternatives and had decided to keep it simple. I had omitted all sugar and prepared the pie as I would. The top crust was a lovely golden color from the egg wash, but it lacked its usual sparkles from the sugar and cinnamon mix. But dinner wasn’t finished. The lasagna had only been in the oven for about fifteen minutes when he came home and recounted the meeting. He spoke louder than usual. I have heard it all before. Cruel professors. Unsupported students. A messy bureaucratic system that enabled administrators to treat their work casually while harming students desperately waiting to hear back. The students were on a tight schedule. The university workers were not. Both sides were buried in paperwork, but only one category of people did not have to worry about days and months. And so I listened as we stood in the kitchen, leaning on the counters. When there was nothing left to say, he stopped talking and stared into the oven. Apologetically, I asked if he could bike to the restaurant and give them the pie. I had miscalculated the time, and I had to watch the lasagna. And perhaps the trip would cool him off. “How’d you make the pie?” “No sugar.” Before he could protest, I quickly added, “The apples were very sweet. I sampled a slice from every apple.” He left. Fifteen minutes later, I received a text message. “I think we were just invited to their wedding.” I responded with a row of question marks. He came home with a Styrofoam container of chicken momos. The chef had boxed up a dozen dumplings that he deemed as unpresentable to paying guests. In between bites of the dumplings, my partner recapped what had happened. He found out our friend’s name was B, that his wedding was soon and was planned spontaneously. “When he took the pie to his father, he said he considered us his family.” Barely half an hour had passed, and my partner’s cadence changed. He seemed happier. “Pies make us part of their family?” I laughed at the oddly framed gesture to kinship. “That’s nice.” “The wedding will be at their restaurant, later this month.” Their celebration coincided on Pfingstmontag, the seventh Monday after Easter. Germans celebrate many religious observances. We know a holiday is the only possible answer to explain a seemingly random closure of a store’s usual operating day. There are no signs on the windows or doors, but the knowledge is assumed. My partner once came home after a quick walk to the discount store empty-handed on a Saturday. It was another holiday. “I was standing outside with some of the Turkish families who live across the street. We just stood in front of the door staring at each other. Only Germans would know that stores would be closed,” he unnecessarily commented. I wondered if our friends picked May 29 for their wedding because their friends would be off of work. Monday, too, was the day their restaurant closed. I assumed they would be open on Sunday as usual, another workday for our friends. ~ I returned to Germany from London on a Sunday. Ruhezeit must not be observed on the Hauptbahnhof. Noise traveled with me, beginning from the bustling London Underground to the airports to the Hauptbahnhof in downtown. Excited travelers, or excited Germans returning to their homes. Something changed when I finally sat on the train toward Lahe, my stop. As we crept closer to my stop, the noise ordinance seemed to be put in place. The few passengers in my cabin grew silent, even those who came in chattering. It was a couple of hours before midnight when I entered the eerily noiseless apartment building. I pushed the button and grimaced when I heard the elevator come to life loudly. As I unpacked, my partner told me about a procession that took place earlier that day, in the afternoon. Across the street, a Turkish family celebrated very loudly, very joyfully, and very colorfully. Musicians were banging on drums and playing traditional instruments as they walked to the wedding ceremony. He described the array of bright colors the wedding party adorned, in contrast to the usual neutral palette we tend to see on the streets. “Everyone in this complex was looking outside, to see what the commotion was,” he said, almost gleefully. “Some of the neighbors opened their blinds to poke their heads out. They didn’t look happy. Even the cars on the street were driving slowly, trying to make sense of what was happening.” “No one shouted at them, did they?” Germans expect others to follow the rules while they themselves are exempted. There have been many Sunday nights when we hear tenants on the first-floor party for hours into the morning. They had loudly blasted AC/DC on repeat. “I didn’t see anyone do anything. But you know what they were thinking.” “If B’s wedding is at the restaurant, it shouldn’t be a problem,” I said thoughtfully. Our cat had decided to sleep in the now empty, unzipped suitcase. “The location is in a business outlet.” “You know people here are unreasonable.” I had walked by the apartment building before crossing the street to my complex. Even in the dark, I didn’t see the remains of a wedding celebration from residents in Germany. No flower petals, no confetti, nor no signs of the color my partner had witnessed. Everything had looked the same as when I left the neighborhood and the country a few days ago. There’s a common misreading of Derrida. Readers cling to his aspiration of a universal hospitality, a traveler’s world, that hospitality is borderless. But they ignore his underlying complaint, about the state-enforced asymmetry faced by those who are not welcomed. Anna Nguyen abandoned her Ph.D. studies and is now an MFA student in Creative Nonfiction at the Stonecoast Program at the University of Southern Maine. She likes to blend theoretical creative non-fiction while thinking about food, science, and the mundane without enforcing academic conventions. She hosts a podcast, Critical Literary Consumption.

Sometimes, I wonder which stories are really mine to tell. Take, for instance, the night Raul thought the devil had climbed inside his cross necklace. The two of us were at this abandoned church out on FM 134, on the outskirts of Newell, next to a creek that’s been dried up since before my grandparents were born, even though it still shows up as a faint blue line on all the topographical maps. The church didn’t even look that much like a church—from the outside, you’d think it was an abandoned barn instead, with mildewed wood on each side and corrugated metal covering what had once been windows. It was a tradition in our town—going back to at least the 80s—to drive out there, pry the metal out of the way, and crawl inside. The rumor was that little ghosts were floating through the place and if you took a picture, you’d see the proof in the little orbs dotting the photo. The illuminated eyes of the dead, a girl at school said once. I didn’t believe it—it was pretty clear to me those “orbs” were just specks of dust reacting to the camera flash—but Raul did. It had to be haunted, he said, and we had to go check it out, experience it for ourselves. That wasn’t the only rumor about the place, though. My friend Christine, her older brother had told her that satanists sacrifice goats inside the place, that it was some kind of portal to hell. Someone else said that the Klan met out there and used the ghost story as cover to keep people away. Still others said it was just a building. The truth’s probably in there somewhere. *** Months before that, I was with Raul and his family at Mardi Gras in Galveston. His parents had been collecting beads for seventeen years, since the first Fat Tuesday after he was born. Raul told me a lot of crazy stuff went down on the Strand, but they weren’t there for any of that. Ignore all the debauchery. We were there for beads, and we’d be crawling under parked cars and sticking our hands into storm drains to get as many as we could. “All we do is collect things,” Raul said. “We’ve got a whole cabinet full of those free AOL disks that used to come in the mail. Dad says one day they’ll be antiques and we can get rich selling them.” “Is that why y’all are getting all these beads? To sell?” “I don’t know. I think we’re going to put together a Mardi Gras tree. It’s like a Christmas tree, but you take all the ornaments off and throw a bunch of beads on. Mom keeps talking about putting it up one of these years.” “My dad used to collect baseball cards. We have like six years of full Topps sets in the closet. He says it's my inheritance.” “It runs in our blood. My nana collects crosses and rosaries. She took them all with her a few years back when she went to the Vatican. Stuffed her pockets full and went to the Pope’s daily address, so when he blessed everyone there, all of ‘em became sacred.” *** I drove that night. Raul was conflicted about going, even though it’d been his idea in the first place. I guess he was scared something would go wrong out there. I told him we needed to have this experience together, before we graduated and went our separate ways. When we got there, we pulled into the ditch, right outside the fence that surrounded the land, and sat in the car for fifteen minutes, trying to psych ourselves up to get out. I don’t know about Raul, but my mind was going every which way. I didn’t believe in ghosts, but I did believe in things, like, getting arrested for trespassing, or getting shot if there really were some redneck satanists inside. Finally, we exited the car. There was a cemetery beside the church, with broken headstones dotting the night. I didn’t know it then, but years later, visiting home for the holidays, I’d go back to that church and scoop up dirt from that graveyard to give to a friend I met in college who collected unique jars of dirt. It was daytime when I did that though—the whole place looked different, freed from the pall that night throws over everything. We barely took note of the cemetery that night, though. Instead, we walked over to the church itself and stared at the metal that covered the windows. I wanted to climb inside, get it all over with. I looked over at Raul and he was shaking a little. It wasn’t cold out. I couldn’t tell what that meant until he finally said something. “I think I’m doing it. I’m going in.” “Alright,” I said. “Let’s get this window open.” I grabbed a fallen tree limb and started to pry at the edge of the metal. It moved easily—we weren’t the first people to do this. Probably not even the first that week. Raul asked me if I had a flashlight. I didn’t, but I held my phone out to him, the blue screen glowed enough to give us at least a little bit of light. He put the phone through the hole in the window, lighting enough of a space to ensure we knew what we were crawling into. Once we both made it through the window, he turned to me. “I’m scared,” he whispered. “I’m fucking scared, bro.” We moved the metal slab mostly back into place, leaving just enough of an opening that some of the moon could shine through, giving us a little more light. Even though I’d seen some of the pictures people took, none of them had been expansive enough for me to get a real sense of that room. To even know if it was really an old church. But there were the pews, all hammered together out of wood that had long been rotting. “There’s an energy here,” Raul said. “I think Christine’s brother’s right about the satanists.” “Just kind of seems like an abandoned building,” I said. “I don’t see goat blood or anything.” “Bro, they probably cleaned it up after.” “My dad hunts. Blood ain’t easy to clean up.” “There’s some weird shit here.” He started to shake and it was clear something about that space was freaking him out and that we’d quickly reached a point where there was no use trying to reason with him. He turned toward me, then suddenly put both hands on his throat, the cross necklace held between his index finger and thumb. “It’s not strong enough.” “What are you talking about?” “My cross. It ain’t strong enough. I’m not blessed enough, man.” “Maybe we need to get out of here.” I stepped toward the window, but Raul wasn’t moving. His hands were still at his throat and he was looking up at the ceiling. I grabbed his arm and started trying to pull him. He was just dead weight. It took all the strength I had to shove him back out the window. He crashed to the dirt below, then sat up. “Take it off,” he said, pointing to the necklace, so I pulled it over his head and tossed it to the ground. Almost instantly, his body relaxed. “We’re leaving,” he said. “Right the fuck now.” He took off running toward the car, leaving the necklace there on the ground. *** I dropped Raul off at his parent’s house. He was silent the entire drive—didn’t even say bye when he got out of the car. It was weird. I knew he was pretty religious, but I didn’t know he was thought-the-devil-was-possessing-a-necklace religious. I hadn’t seen a thing inside that church, but he seemed to have felt something. I don’t know if he was just scaring himself or if there really was something else there, some kind of spirit. I was a couple blocks from home when I remembered we’d left his necklace back at the church. I figured that since it was one of the ones that his grandmother had gotten blessed, I should probably go get it back. Once he got over whatever had happened, he’d probably still want it, so I pulled a U-turn and headed back toward FM 134. When I got back to the church, it was just as quiet as it had been before. I pulled back into the same ditch and got out of the car. Went back over by the window where I’d thrown the necklace down. The only light I had was my cell phone screen and the moon but I was pretty sure I remembered exactly where I’d tossed it, so I thought it’d be easy to find. I was wrong. After ten minutes, I started to wonder if Raul’d been right. If it had been possessed and had just drifted away. The image of that was enough to make me laugh out loud, right there in front of this abandoned church. Then came five more minutes of fruitless searching before I gave up and left. *** Raul wasn’t at school Monday. Or Tuesday. When he finally showed back up Wednesday he acted like he didn’t want anything to do with me—he sat with a different friend group at lunch and when I asked if he wanted to head over to Nighthawks to grab a burger after school, he said he was busy. It wasn’t until Friday that he finally started to act like himself. “Everything good?” I asked him when he came up to my locker after history class. “Sorry about this last week, bro. I’ve just been out of it.” “Want to talk about it?” “Yeah. Can you give me a ride home?” I waited for him at my car after the final bell, and for a couple minutes, I started to think he wasn’t going to show until I saw him shuffling out of a side door. “I’m nervous ‘bout getting back in this car,” he said. He hesitated for a second, then finally pulled open the passenger door. “You got real spooked when we were out there.” “I never want to talk about this again after today, okay?” “No problem, man.” “I just knew as soon as we stepped inside that something was wrong. My necklace was getting real heavy. And then I looked over at you and I could just see it.” “See what?” “I don’t know. Some, like, dark red mist sneaking up behind you. I thought the devil fucking had you, man. Like you were a goner. I touched the cross and just thought about being strong and I guess whatever entity that was there heard me, because it went past you and came right for me. If you hadn’t been there to drag me out and cast that shit off, who fucking knows. I could be dead. Or possessed. It was scary.” I didn’t tell him I went back to find that necklace. I could tell then that he wouldn’t have taken it back anyways. We spent the rest of the ride back to his place talking about football. We never spoke of the night again—just moved forward like it never happened. I don’t want to say it was that night that made Raul and I lose touch. We hung out off and on for about a year after high school. But at some point, we just stopped meeting up. I’d come home from Austin and I’d forget to tell him I was in town, and then I’d do the same thing again, and again. He was working at his parent’s construction company then. He was going to run it one day. He used to tell me if I ever needed work, I could come drive a backhoe. I don’t know if that’s still the case. On my twenty-third birthday, I got a text from Raul, the first one in probably two years. All it said was “mom finally put up that Mardi Gras tree, happy birthday dog,” with a picture of a tree covered in beads. I texted back “haha, looks good, how you been,” and he didn’t respond. I was sitting in a bar that had a giant crucifix on the wall, but instead of Jesus’ hands being nailed to the cross, there were little Coors Light cans in each one, and that coupled with hearing from Raul took me back to that night. If his family was still collecting the beads, were they collecting the crosses too? And whatever happened to the one he lost—did he think about it still? I almost called him, but I didn’t know if there was anything else left for us to say.

ST. XAVIER’S ACADEMY The nun’s wooden ruler so big and white against my scrawny brown hands when my mind was enjoying the sleepy sky a free breeze ferried by boat-shaped clouds outside the school window And the paddle we got from Father Pinto for not sitting still was so giant that it could have steered that boat in the sky He had weary eyes All the brown bottoms he must have had to look at smiling smugly up at him DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS You shoulder these two red bars, head slumped. Your future plundered vilified because a pale seed has germinated wild in the lone-star’s property a week too many Sumit Parikh has been published in Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine. He has participated in a writing mentorship and workshops with Brian Evans-Jones, who is the Poet Laureate of Hampshire, UK, and winner of the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award from Poets & Writers. Sumit is a pediatric neurologist and also graduated with honors in English from Case Western Reserve University.

From the street, the house doesn’t ooze the unhappiness she had always believed it would. She sits in the car – fingertips drumming on the handle, radio so low she can barely recognise the tunes, – and waits for his wife to leave. Until a few hours ago, she’d been satisfied with what they had. She didn’t care if he had a family. She didn’t even want him to leave them. Everything was all right as it was. And then came the storm. And the thunder. And the tree that fell after the thunder and onto his car just as he was driving home from her village because she had insisted that it wasn’t safe for him to drive in a storm, better wait. She learnt about the accident by chance, a photo of his crashed car posted in the village WhatsApp Group. Her neighbours called it a miracle. When she texted him, he sent his address, the code to open the door, and what time he’d be alone. When the door opens, his wife comes out first, and it only occurs to her now that she has never seen any picture of her. She hasn’t asked, he hasn’t offered. When Paul and Martin appear, she feels a surge of fondness upon recognising the boys from all the photos she’s been shown. Paul has his eyes locked on his phone – typical Paul, she thinks – but Martin rushes to his mother, who stops to hug him, even though they are late for school already. Even from the safe distance of her car, she can sense he’s asking about his dad, his mother reassuring him that he is safe now. That he – they – will be okay. She watches them leave. She looks at the door. She looks at the digital lock. She waits. Then she starts the engine, double-checks her mirrors, and makes a U-turn. Slawka G. Scarso works as a copywriter and translator. Her words have appeared, among others, in Gone Lawn, Ghost Parachute, Fractured Lit and in the 2023 Best Microfiction Anthology. She was shortlisted for the 2023 Bridport Flash Award and for the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize. Her debut novella in flash “All Their Favourite Stories” is available from Ad Hoc Fiction. You can find her on Twitter as @nanopausa and on www.nanopausa.com

Bert swung down the hill road, careful to place the rubber tips of his crutches on sand that had been scattered over the hard snow-packed surface. It was Friday, fifteen degrees below zero, so dark at noon it felt like 4 p.m. And more snow on the way – as if six and a half feet weren’t enough. The left crutch skidded, his cast foot banged down and he yelped. He had broken his leg Thanksgiving day, two months ago, the beginning of their fifth winter at the cabin. The road curved and rose slightly before running its last half mile steeply down to the river. Bert hung in his crutches, staring at Brownie Smyth’s house, a conglomerate of rooms, sheds and porches which had sprouted from the core of an old mobile home, no longer visible. Tucked against a spring-fed hillside, the structure reminded Bert of a cubistic fungus. A thin column of smoke rose from a stovepipe in one of the roofs. Bert was encouraged to see Brownie’s Ford station wagon out front. He had a toothache. He had a dental appointment in town at three. Thirty-one years old and he felt like he was falling apart. Trudy and he had saved enough money to get through this winter so he could finish the play. But first the leg. Now the tooth. Josie, the Smyth’s beagle hound, began to howl. Bert could never take a walk without being announced. Brownie stood on the open front porch in his slippers and undershirt, suspenders dangling. “Cold enough?” called Bert, turning in to the shoveled path. “I guess.” Brownie was a small, shy man of thirty-five with a stiff right leg from an accident with a chain saw clearing brush for the town. He hadn’t worked since Bert knew him, drawing workman’s comp each month. Bert  carefully mounted the salted wooden steps and entered the overheated kitchen where Louise was dicing potatoes into a pot. Brownie’s wife was a pale, kindly mountain of a woman; her colorless hair stood out from her head in a kind of ruff. Bert greeted her and laid a packet taken from his coat pocket on the table. “Little something,” he said. He leaned the crutches against a chair and, balancing on one leg, struggled out of his coat. When he finally got settled at the kitchen table, Brownie sat down. “Last of the hive honey.” Bert tapped the packet which neither of them had acknowledged. Was a simple ‘thank you’ so much to ask? Gifts of fresh bread, homemade jam, surpluses from the garden – all vanished without a sign. “You eat honey?” Bert couldn’t help himself. “He likes it,” said Louise, setting a mug of coffee before Bert. “It gets in his false teeth.” “Fresh-tasting,” Brownie said. That gave Bert the opportunity to explain how honeycomb was honey packed and sealed by the bees: “You get it fresh, pure and unadulterated, with natural pollens and enzymes which aid digestion and even help with allergies.” Louise wiped her hands on her apron and sat at the end of the table. “Got forty pounds off the hive,” said Bert. “it’s about all we use for sweetener.” It sounded like bragging when what he’d meant to express was his awe with the abundance. A curly golden-haired girl appeared in a doorway, where she leaned. One of the Smythes’ five. The face of a cherub on an old-fashioned Christmas card. “Hi there,” said Bert, forgetting her name. “No school today?” “May’s got a cold,” said Louise. The girl came out and climbed into her mother’s lap, and regarded Bert solemnly. “Near lunchtime,” said Louise. “Stew’ll be ready.” “Oh, thanks,” said Bert, “but – uh – you’re not going into town this afternoon, are you, by chance?” Brownie rubbed his chin and said, “Car’s acting up. Generator light was on on the ride out from town yesterday.” “Ah,” said Bert. “Brother-in-law’s gonna give it a look.” Bert tried to fight down the rising feeling of claustrophobia and despair – he stood so abruptly that Brownie glanced up at him, sleepy eyes widening. “Have some more coffee,” he said. “No, ah – thanks – Trudy and I—” Bert knocked a crutch over. “Well, stop in anytime.” Brownie stood in the open door and watched Bert descend the porch steps one at a time. Bert crutched back up the hill furiously, twice coming down on his cast. As he turned to go down the path to the cabin, the mailman’s pale blue Rambler came over the rise. He handed Bert several sale flyers and an electric bill through the open car window. “I wonder, if it’s possible . . . can you give people lifts?” “Insurance doesn’t allow,” said the postman, adding, “What’s killing this country.” Bert crutched down to the cabin. He sat at his desk and stared at the scene notes. Work on the play had gone poorly since the accident. As if concentration had snapped with the bone. Thanksgiving had dawned with the year’s first real snowfall, a couple of inches. Trudy had started a duck roasting, then they took the toboggan down to Evelyn Johnson’s. Her meadow rose like a rumpled blanket from the river road up to the base of a cliff. Wayne Martin pastured his dry cows in the meadow during the summer, so the three strands of barbed wire enclosing it were in good repair. Billy, Evelyn’s lanky son, had been out with his old Ski-Doo when they arrived. Bert recognized Homer Kneeland sitting behind Billy, glasses fogged, orange day-glo flap-hat tied under his chin. Trudy wished the boys a Happy Thanksgiving while Bert frowned at the clattering machine with its oily stink of blue exhaust. “We gotta push ‘er uphill sometimes,” exclaimed Homer. “But it goes down real fast!” The light cover of snow did little to cushion the meadow’s rocks and frozen cow paddies: the wooden toboggan chattered and banged over the short test run. Then Bert and Trudy pulled it to the top of the hill. Almost immediately the sled was going too fast, and when they tried to  turn, there was no snow-base to cut into; they tore on straight for the barbed wire fence. Bert eased his left foot out to brake, touched against something under the snow and – pole-vaulted them, snapping his leg with a ‘pop’. “Goddamnit!” he’d shouted, spinning around on his back in the snow with his broken leg in the air, “How are we going to pay for this!” Bert heard the dog whine at the door, then Trudy stamping snow off her boots. “It’s cold!” she exclaimed. “We only got as far as First Bridge.” “No luck.” “Did you tell them you have a toothache? You have a dental appointment?” “Something’s wrong with their car, so what would have been the point – make them feel guilty?” He sat on the sofa with his cast leg up on the hassock. “Will you please go down to Granny’s and phone the dentist and say I can’t make it? No car, no money, no telephone! You know how I felt showing up at Brownie’s with a bar of honey in my pocket?” “Should I make another appointment?” “My tooth hurts!” “I bet you could get a lift in on the school bus that drops Brownie’s kids.” “Insurance,” Bert pronounced blackly. Trudy pulled her mittens on. “Make it for Monday – around noon. I’ll leave after breakfast and crutch the five miles.” Fifteen minutes later Trudy returned, followed by Homer Kneeland, the untied flaps of his hat hanging like a hound’s ears. “Homer has kindly offered to run you in.” “Got me a car.” Homer settled on a stool at the kitchen counter. “Nineteen fifty-nine Cadillac.” Trudy was slicing  a loaf of fresh oatmeal bread. “My father would love it,” she said. “It must be two blocks long.” “Rides like a loaded hay wagon,”  Homer said proudly. Trudy set a thick slice before him, with butter and elderberry jam. Homer drove, sitting on the edge of the seat with both hands on the steering wheel. The floor was so rusted out Bert watched the road streaming beneath his feet. “I’d like to give you some gas money.” “Ah,” said Homer, “wasn’t doing nothing. Besides, Ms. Beston wants me to pick up potatoes and milk.” Homer, twenty-three, lived with his folks and three sisters in an old house below Brownie’s. He’d worked for a prefab house company. But there was no winter work. The sidewalk had been shoveled but not salted or sanded, and Homer walked behind Bert holding onto the tail of his coat. Bert felt like a dog on a leash; he was sadly touched. Waterbury was Doctor Marvell’s first practice out of dental school. His wife was his receptionist and hygienist. He laid Bert out almost horizontal, rigged a rubber funnel-like ‘dam’ in his mouth, and donned rubber gloves and an operating mask. With his leg in a cast, his numb jaw being drilled into, wondering how it would be paid for, Bert listened to Homer Kneeland out in the reception room flirting with the dentist’s wife. That evening as they sat near the stove reading, there came a knock at the cabin door. Alex Jensen stood in the porchlight smiling diffidently behind a red beard and wire rim glasses. Fay Jensen’s pretty oval face, framed in a black furry W.C. Fields hat, beamed at them almost painfully over Alex’s shoulder. Beside her, Harv Moskowitz stood, encased in a new puffy down parka. “So,” he said, “are we invited in, or do we get flash-frozen right here?” Bert had been working on plays since they’d settled at the cabin.  His father had gotten one produced at the Van Rensselaer Players where it was well-received. Bert had another done at Goddard College and then “Oli’s Ice Cream Suit” at South Coast Rep in California. They’d even flown him out for the rehearsals. Then a series of rejections. Bert had applied to the Yale Drama School – and to his surprise been accepted. There he met Harv Moskowitz, another writer, and Fay Jensen, a second year acting student. And then her husband. Alex, who attended Yale Law, wrote poetry, took fiddle lessons, and sculpted. Bert had left after a year, wanting to spend full time writing. In the two years since leaving New Haven, Bert and Trudy often had their friends up. Inside the cabin, Fay shook out her hair, releasing a warm scent of Channel. On an impulse, they’d left New Haven at five and driven up. “Yes,” said Fay, “one of Alex’s brainstorms. I told him you don’t just burst in on people. Of course, you don’t have a phone.” “You’re welcome - believe me!” Trudy laughed. “We were bouncing off the walls,” said Bert. “I was  getting ready to build snowshoes for the crutches.” Alex went up to the car for their sleeping bags. Harv handed Trudy a paper bag. “Bagels, six varieties. Not from Brooklyn, but what can I say?” He crowded the iron stove, holding his hands over it. “Christ, six hours in an unheated Saab – I know what Sam Magee’s all about. It is colder out that door right now than inside my freezer.” Leaning in his crutches, Bert opened a bottle of dandelion wine he and Trudy had made the previous Spring. Alex built a fire in the big fireplace, and they gathered before it on the rug and sofa, sipping the sweet, amber-colored wine. “We thought maybe you could  use a little cheering up . . .” Fay was zipped to the waist in her sleeping bag, and lay gazing into the fire. “I know about cabin fever, having spent the better part of a Montana winter holed up in one.” ”It was great,” said Alex, “I’d shot a deer and it kept frozen hanging in the shed. I’d go out and cut off a steak.” “The good old days,” said Fay, “A steady diet of stringy meat and roots. You should have seen my figure by Spring.” “It wasn’t so bad,” said Alex, “We had rice and flour, beans—” “Yes, yes,” said Fay. “Can I have some more wine?” They shared work they’d been doing. Alex showed sketches of a chair he’d begun sculpting from an oak stump; it looked like a waiter’s hand held up for a tray. Trudy read from her journal, an encounter with a deer and fawn in deep snow. Harv acted out a scene he’d written about Thomas Jefferson’s invention of the lead condom and how George Washington thereupon required wooden teeth. Bert recited the names of the vegetable seeds he’d ordered for the Spring garden. Fay yawned: “Remind me tomorrow and I’ll do my audition monologue from ‘The Taming of the Shrew’.” Bert poured the last of the wine. It was quiet. Once in a while a tree could be heard popping with cold. ‘Moon of Popping Trees’ the Indians called January. Frost not only rimed the insides of the cabin windows, it came right through the walls and sparkled on the pine paneling furthest from the heat. Alex put on a chunk of dry beech. Harv was talking about ‘Mahogany’ currently at Yale Rep. Bert stared at the blue fingers of flame curving up the log’s grey back. He wished he could go back with them to New Haven – sit in Clark’s and have a coffee with Harv; go to a movie; catch a jazz concert at Yale. The dog yipped in her sleep. The brook running beside the cabin was silent under the snow. Everything out there was under the snow: asleep, dormant, suspended. Just them, close to the fire, like sleepers keeping themselves awake. “You guys know about the wind harp?” Alex asked. He was sitting cross-legged on the rug, facing the fire. “There was an article in the Register a couple weeks ago, with pictures. It looked pretty neat.” “There’s supposed to be a wind harp over in Chelsea, I think,” said Trudy. “On some farmer’s back meadow.” “Maybe we ought to check it out,” said Alex. “Tie the toboggan on the car, bring Bert along.” “Now you know,” Fay leaned up on an elbow, “We didn’t come to visit you guys, we came so Alex could see a wind harp.” “I thought it might be fun to do,” said Alex. “Why don’t we ever do what I want?” asked Fay. “I’d like to go down to the city and see the Joffrey.” “You can go.” “I bend over backwards to accommodate you – clomp around the woods, get bitten, get rashes – because I know you like it, and I want to be with you. Do you ever do one thing you don’t want to?” Fay’s gestures had grown sweeping: she looked like a mermaid with her bottom half in the green sleeping bag. “Funny, all the while I thought she actually liked being out in the woods. I go to dance concerts with you,” Alex finished reasonably. “Oh!” Kay flopped down. “You can stay here tomorrow.” “That’s exactly what I’m going to do. I brought Anna Karenina and I am going to read in peace and quiet – and warmth.” “Tempting though it is,” said Harv, “I think I’ll sit this one out, too, right next to old stovie here.” “Oh, no,” said Bert, “If the broken leg goes . . .” “It’ll be great,” said Alex. “In twenty years, you’ll look back—” “It is thirty degrees below zero,” Fay’s voice rose from the sleeping bag. “Do you want to freeze the man to death?” “Bert’ll be fine,” said Alex, “We’ll bundle him up and zip him into a sleeping bag.” “Along with a pint of Jack Daniels,” Bert added. “Does anything change?” asked Trudy. She and Bert were taking the dog for a quick walk after breakfast. “Punch and Judy. Last night the same as when we stayed with them in the fall.” Bert chuckled. “That’s Fay and Alex. If they weren’t shooting at one another we wouldn’t recognize them.” “What’s the attraction? Mountain man and ingénue?” Bert laughed. Trudy didn’t. “Fay can be such a wet blanket. And now she’s coming.” They were all standing in the turn-around waiting for the Saab to warm up when an old black Cadillac nosed over the hill pulling a homemade cart with a Ski-Doo on it. After Bert had introduced Homer and Billy, Fay asked if they would like to join the Great Wind Harp Expedition. Homer blinked at Fay’s pretty china-doll face framed in a black fur version of his own hat. She wore a matching bear-like coat. “Sure,” he said. “Thought we were gonna make a run up above?” Billy spoke to Homer. We ain’t got a license on the cart.” “Hell,” said Homer, indicating that didn’t bother him. “That wind harp’s the Ninth Wonder of the World,” said Fay. “And it’s just over in Chelsea.” “Might’ve heard of it,” said Homer. “The more the merrier. Right, Alex?” Fay was having fun. “I’d rather ride up the valley,” said Billy, barely audible. Homer smiled at Fay: “We got about an acre of extra room in the Caddy.” “Why not keep the boys company?” said Alex who had climbed behind the Saab’s wheel. “I bet they even have a heater.” “Burn your boots off,” grinned Homer. “You go, Harv,” Fay said. “A heater?” Harv popped open the rear door of the Cadillac. “You guys wanna hear the true story of how Washington lost his teeth?” They pulled into the yard of a stark white farmhouse. Alex got out and knocked on the front door. It opened a foot and he spoke with someone who remained hidden except for once when a bare arm emerged, finger pointing to the white immensity behind the house. Bert lay on the toboggan, cocooned in the mummy bag while Alex pulled, forging ahead through the knee-deep snow. Trudy followed behind the toboggan, then Harv, and Fay brought up the rear – a hundred yards back. She’d started complaining in the car that her stomach hurt, but wouldn’t stay behind at the farmhouse. She wouldn’t try and keep up either, and Alex didn’t slow the pace. The two boys were still in the farmer’s yard trying to start the Ski-Doo. Bert leaned up on an elbow. They were crossing high, rolling meadowland; wind raced over the fields, sometimes enveloping them in whirling snow. Bert could barely see Alex’s back then. And cold. As soon as they had left the farmer’s yard it felt like they’d been dropped into the Arctic. How like Alex to get them into something like this – with a palpable hint of danger. Like last winter when he’d led them up Mount Abraham, lost the trail, and had to build a fire a la Jack London. Trudy, with old boots, had almost gotten frostbite. And, finally, the view from the top: whiteness: they’d climbed into a cloud. A memorable experience. Bert felt absurdly privileged, a Roman emperor being borne along. His sense of helplessness vanished. Once again he could appreciate his life – see it through Alex’s eyes. The rich, solitary, subsistence life. Garden. Cutting firewood. Putting in time at the food co-op. The genuineness of the hill people. Granny. Bert laughed out loud making Alex glance back, beard and mustache frosted white. “That harp’s gonna be singing!” he shouted over the wind. Bert held out the whiskey but Alex shook his head. Trudy took a swallow, then Bert. Harv came up to them: “Jesus, how much further?” Alex pointed to where two woodlots came nearly together, with a passage between: “Through there, I think.” Fay joined them and Harv handed her the whiskey, saying it felt like they were being followed by the Abominable Snowman. Fay took a long pull. “If we don’t spot the damn thing in ten minutes,” she said, “I’m going back.” Her coat was silvered with snow driven into the long fur. “I’m glad I wore clean underwear this morning,” said Harv. “When they find us in June and thaw us out—” Fay suddenly began to cry. Trudy touched the fur coat: “C’mon, we’ll go back together.” “You don’t have to do anything for me! You’re all so palsy-walsy – reading from your diaries, tromping through the woods. It amazes me you haven’t learned to yodel,” she glared at Alex. “It was your idea to come—” “That’s right. And I am going to be the first one to that fucking harp!” “Can we mosey?” Bert asked. “The old cold’s starting to seep in.” In no time Fay had fallen behind again. The passage between the woodlots was sheltered from the wind; a little way back in the trees stood two horses: great, shaggy-coated, deep-chested beasts with wild eyes and clouds of steam hanging about their nostrils. Alex got a camera out of his backpack, but the horses bolted into the woods. “It feels like we’re on Holy Pilgrimage,” called Trudy, “Bringing the cripple to the Shrine of the Harp!” Alex grinned over his shoulder: “The Shrine of the Miracle of the Holy Harp!” Bert was grinning too. It felt like he was floating dreamlike through the black and white landscape, safe between wife and friend. Alex shouted. There was the harp, stark on the crest of a hill like the figurehead of a Viking ship, long snow-white hull riding behind it. It looked like a harp but ten times larger, mounted into the wind on an outcrop of ledge. “Do you think Fay’s okay?” Harv broke the silence. There was no sign of her. “Maybe we better go back,” said Trudy. “Fay’s fine,” snapped Alex. “The only thing you can do is ignore Fay.” “It’s a little cold to ignore—“Harv began, when the snowmobile appeared, running toward them over the snow like a yellow bug. They could see it was Fay sitting behind Homer, her coat bulking out on either side of him. Homer pulled up beside the toboggan, gunning the engine to keep it running. Fay was exuberant: “It’s wonnnnnderful! Like riding a magic carpet!” “What happened to Billy?” asked Harv. “He offered the lady his seat,” said Homer. “He’s coming along.” “Billy’s a sweet fellow,” said Fay. “What about me?” Homer grinned over his shoulder. But Fay had seen the harp: “My God, the Grail. Last one to it is a rotten egg!” Homer goosed the snowmobile and it fish-tailed away, Fay whooping. Alex resumed on the trail the machine had broken. He hadn’t gone twenty feet before Homer and Fay were already at the harp. Homer left the machine beside it and disappeared over the crest. Fay waved to them, then pantomimed playing the harp, throwing back her head as though singing. Homer reappeared and the two of them climbed onto the machine;  it fled down the steep prow of the hill, wind carrying away the sound while behind a white plume fountained. They heard a metallic humming and moaning as they came up the hill. Half the harp’s wire strings had been cut or broken, and swung in the gusting wind. Someone had spray-painted graffiti on the laminated wood body. Alex went around taking pictures from different angles. Bert climbed out of the sleeping bag to pose in his crutches. The site had been well-chosen for its wind; he climbed quickly back in. Since reaching the harp, Harv had huddled away from them. Suddenly, without a word, he started back. “Hold on!” Alex called. “Fuck you!” yelled Harv, turning. “You dragged us out here, now we gotta get back!” “What’s your problem?” said Alex. “I didn’t make anyone come.” “Right – another ‘experience of a lifetime’. Here we are in the middle of a goddamn icebox.” Alex raised his voice to be heard over the harp: “Sometimes you have to give yourself to something—" “No guarantees, right?” Alex opened his mittened hands. “I’m fucking here, that’s the point! I don’t wanna be!” Harv looked like he wanted to throw himself on Alex. Maybe it was the way he leaned into the hill, face distorting in the wind. “You’re the hero. The guy who decides what to do, then sees to it everyone has a fabulous time – come hell or high water!” “Fine, fine . . .” Bert could hear Alex muttering under his breath. “And you’re so fucking nice about it, no one knows they’re being jerked off!” Harv turned abruptly and stamped down the hill the way they’d come. Trudy pulled the toboggan with Bert on it to the back side of the summit, out of the wind. There was a pee hole. Homer had written in the snow beside it: DON’T EAT YELLOW SNOW. It was better out of the wind. Trudy sat on the toboggan with Bert while Alex dug cheese and bread out of his pack. They ate in silence. The harp whistled and whined, thundered in strong gusts, loose wires scratching and clicking. “I wonder if he thought about casting it in concrete?” Alex asked. “Concrete?” Trudy snorted. “It might have lasted that way.” “Maybe it’s not supposed to last.” “He put in all this work . . . It’s like leaving a piano outside.” “Maybe we ought to get going?” said Bert. He couldn’t stop shivering. Alex looked at him. “You’d be in a fix if we left you here.” Bert couldn’t read his expression through the frosted whiskers. “We live such safe, predictable lives—” Alex flung away a rind of cheese. “Running up East Rock the other day I got hit by a car – actually just touched – flipped over the hood and landed on my feet – and kept on going.” “W – w – what’s the point?” Bert said through chattering teeth. “A miss is as good as a mile, maybe?” “Bert would get back if he had to,” said Trudy. She pulled the toboggan to the front of the hill where it dropped steeply, kneeled behind Bert and held the rope. They flew down silently and fast, Trudy lifting the scrolled front so no snow sheared up over them. They flew almost as if snow were air, the waxed wood planks whispering. They could crash in this softness and not be harmed. From the top of the next rise they saw Harv ahead, starting through the alley between the woodlots. Trudy yelled, but he couldn’t hear. The two horses had come back as if to watch him pass. Beyond, the white fields merged without transition into sky. Richard Ploetz has published poems and short stories in The Quarterly, Outerbridge, Crazy Quilt, Timbuktu, American Literary Review, Hayden’s Ferry, Passages North, Nonbinary Review, Literary Oracle, RavensPerch, Front Range Review, Lowestoft Chronicle. His children’s book, THE KOOKEN was published by Henry Holt. www.richardploetz.com

Over a low soft hill is a black forest. Weave your way through the dark tangles to the forest’s heart. There springs a river of blood and at its mouth, a scar, sewn for a second time. Follow that thread to this story, to a mother’s birth story. In my dreams, I have never given birth. I yearn for you to touch me, to insert something in me, as if for the first time. In my dreams, I am a woman. But not the kind of woman I am now. Sally Anderson Boström is the author of the chapbook, Harvest (2021), and numerous poems, essays, and short stories. Her most recent work can be found in Ms. Magazine, Humana Obscura, Sweet, and an anthology with Gunpowder Press. Much of her work centers on themes of motherhood, sensuality, and ancestral inheritance. Originally from California, Sally has spent the last decade living in Sweden and has recently relocated to Czechia where she is writing a novel about her ancestors. She is legally blind.

Raul searched obituaries and wrote down names of funeral homes and cemeteries for almost a year. He tried making sense of it all but couldn't. Instead, Raul created a twisted reality where he could be kept safe from the truth, and the exaggerated fabrications he told his co-workers and family became a narrative prescription for what ailed him. Raul ingested his reconstructed existence daily to stave off the smell and sound of burned rubber and shattered glass. But sometimes, his drug wore off, and memories of his son reinfected his heart like a virus until it unleashed bits of truth from his mouth as suddenly as a cough. Today, Raul arrived to work late again, and he rummaged through his brain for one of his usual lies, like: 1.       My battery died, 2.       I had a flat, 3.       I got stuck behind... •        …a school bus, •         …a trash collection truck, But, feeling exceptionally exhausted this morning, a little truth sputtered out: •           …a young boy's funeral procession. Later, Raul put on his headset and pretended to make the same collection calls on his list from days and weeks before. He dialed numbers on his call sheet, and when someone answered, he put them on hold just long enough for the office switchboard to register his call, and then he hung up. Raul often exaggerated his progress and fed his co-workers his made-up lines for lunch, like: 1.         I already hit my quota, 2.         I gave her an extension, 3.         Had a doozy of a call today, But, feeling particularly frustrated this afternoon, a buried resentment poked out of Raul's self-imposed shell, and a bit of cruel reality slipped out: 4.      I told her, "Ma'am, if you don't pay by the end of this week, we're coming for your dead son's car." Raul timed his arrival home with precision, careful to avoid any version of truth his wife might serve him for dinner. Tired, he placed his hands over his ears as he went upstairs and passed by Mikey's bedroom door but failed to block out the sound of emptiness inside. Sometimes, he paused by the entrance of the bedroom he once shared with his wife and whispered through the crack of the door excuses for his tardiness, like: 1.        There was a rollover on I95, 2.        The boss took the team out for drinks, 3.        I stopped at the mall to pick up a gift for my mother's birthday, But this time, a sadness so heavy dragged his heart back down to the second-floor hallway where Mikey once crawled and later, ran and jumped, when Raul revealed a rare, painful truth to his wife: 4.   I stopped by Mikey's grave. Most nights, Raul grabbed onto his lies like helium balloons and floated away, depriving reality of oxygen. But tonight, Mikey's framed face looked out at him from the walls, and a familiar scent from a sweatshirt that hung on a hook in the hallway filled up his senses and tethered Raul's broken heart to the truth. Margo has worked in public education for over thirty years and is the mother of two daughters and the best rescue dog ever, Harley. Her work has appeared in places such as Bending Genres, Maudlin House, The Dillydoun Review, MER, HAD, and Roi Fainéant Press. You can find her on Twitter @67MGriffin.

Hold tight. Let go. Paper cuts. Finger pricks. Knuckles jam. Bones smash. Muddy nails. Palms on an oak burl. Dandelion yellow. White snow on red skin. Scar from a pocket knife. French manicures. Lavender soap. Fingers dipped in cake batter. Your fingers untangling my hair. The intimacy of our hands interlaced. I remember when your hand engulfed mine. It was aged with lines and wrinkles, covered in skin that I could pull into little teepees before watching it retract back over your bones. My hand was soft and small in comparison. You traced the life lines on my palm and predicted joy; caressed each finger lovingly as a half part of your own creation. You brought my palm to your lips to brush a kiss across the center, curled my hand beneath yours to seal it in. You spoke the words I knew by heart, having heard them from you so many times before: “I will always love you, my Justine Rose.” I could feel your voice echo internally, the deep burrowing of a mother’s love. Then years passed. My hands slick with fear. My fists clenched. Nails scratch on my naked body. I tried to push away, push away, push away. Did you see this on my palm? Did you know that I would fail to push him away? In darkness, I hold myself together with my own two hands. I wrap my arms tightly around my body. I am grown now. My hand is bigger than yours. I can pull my skin and watch it transform into little teepees. I trace the lines that zigzag across my palm, but they lend themselves to a different interpretation. And I wonder how you missed the deep grooves of pain, the trials and devastations that would come. I wonder if, when your fingers traced those paths, you thought you could protect me from it all. In the forests of my childhood, I catch ripples in the river and watch as sunlight dances across its surface. My hand curls to bring you near, deep into the sanctuary you helped build for the times I would become lost in life’s dark and empty spaces. You, who with each kiss imprinted a reminder. You, whose voice I can always hear  —  “I will always love you, my Justine Rose.” It is you whose love is engraved on my hands. It is your hope etched along these birth-given lines. Justine Payton is an MFA candidate at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, as well as managing editor of the litmag ONLY POEMS. She has been published in the Wild Roof Journal, HerStry, The Corvus Review, The Masters Review and The Keeping Room. An avid hiker and ecofeminist, her writing most often focuses on the themes of resilience and finding wonder in the small things.

“We can compute an ephemeris for it,” I suggested. “What is that?” “It’s charting the path of a celestial object.” So I collected paper, pencils, calculators, diagrams, and opened an excel spreadsheet. We didn’t really need the paper. I thought it would make her feel more involved. She has nice handwriting. Just in that little dash-line trail of the projected path, there is careful consideration in her penmanship. The lines are steady, well-formed, like her thoughts must be something solid. Maybe she’s one of those people who thinks in concrete images. Seeing the world through her memories like a movie broken down into its separate scenes. Some people think in words. If you are like me your mind does both. There is a movie, a soundtrack, a voice-over, and closed captions but these separate elements are not always on the same page. In fact, I daresay my planets rarely align. I was drawn to her for her simplicity. Beauty is a surface thing. It cannot go deep. Or so I thought. She turned out a sharper line than I expected. She composed my image in a way I’d never seen myself before. It was like looking into a mirror from an angle I’d never had access to. “You’re more human than you think you are,” she told me. “I don’t want to seem like a douche and tell you you’re not special, but I think you give the rest of humanity a bad rap. We’re not all simple-minded beasts.” “Jesus, are you charting my astrological sign?” She hunches up her shoulders and looks away in a comical exaggeration of shame. Because shame is something she doesn’t really feel. Not like I do. I want to ask her if she can tell through the charts that I’m queer, that I want her, that I see her now from this different angle, that she is gorgeous beyond the surface. The opportunity comes and goes like a meteor across the sky. Too fast to catch in image, or words. A syllable started that goes nowhere. Dried up in my mouth. Like a dash mark, too vague. Line unconnected, never fully formed. She slips away, gets caught up in a new orbit, some handsome boy. The math was right, hypothesis confirmed. I follow the chart. A course that was always clear. I see her path projecting out of reach, out of sight into the future. Kate E Lore is a queer, neurodivergent, she/they, born to a single widowed mother, youngest of four, second to graduate high school, first bachelor's degree, first MFA in the family. Kate E Lore is a writer of both fiction and nonfiction with many publications including Black Warrior Review, Longridge Review, Bending Genres, and Door is a Jar. A jack-of-all-trades Kate splits their time between fiction and nonfiction, screenplays, flash prose, full-length novels, painting, and comics. Kate strives to appreciate the small things in life but has been known to throw down hard at an EDM rave.

While the lads Kurt used to play football with raised their glasses to toast his life, I hammered a For Sale sign into the lawn. My mother said, ‘You’re out of your mind to leave now.’ Kurt and I had lived together for ten years. He was a builder and I worked in recruitment. We’d talked about moving away, but he always dug deep arguments and cranked out complications. Without him, I had no anchor, so I drifted with my boxes all the way to St Ives. I dyed my hair shades of sapphire and started wearing florals and fishnet tights. Every evening, I played nineties music in the backyard and reclined on a lounger. I found that, if I tried, I could tune into the movement of the ocean, the way it inhaled like breath. It pulled me back to the mountains and back to Wales, back to when we were students. I closed my eyes, and we were dancing in the woods. His shoulders were firm and I felt his skin brush my lips. We danced carelessly and I knew then that I would never say goodbye. Katie Coleman is a British writer living in Thailand. Her fiction has appeared in Ghost Parachute, The Sunlight Press, Briefly Zine, The Ilanot Review, SoFloPoJo, Bending Genres, The Odd Magazine, Lit 202, Five on the Fifth, Bright Flash and others. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart prizes. She has a master’s in creative writing and loves teaching English.

Amid the solemnity of Qingming, I ventured up the mountain, a lone pilgrim on a path of remembrance. Winding upwards, the trail was a verdant tapestry, embroidered with spring’s tender rain and the delicate, snow-like white of tung blossoms. These blossoms, clustering in profusion on the branches, fell like a soft flurry of spring snow, carpeting the path with their ethereal beauty. The breeze, a cool and gentle consort to the rain, whispered through the leaves, refreshing as it caressed my face. Atop, before a monument cloaked in moss’s green embrace, I arrayed the offerings and kindled the incense. Spirals of aromatic smoke rose, sketching delicate patterns against the somber sky. A wail, forlorn and piercing, sliced through the mist. Eyes lifting, I beheld under a tung tree’s shelter a spectral figure in dark red. Her gown, adorned with peonies stitched into the fabric, fluttered in the wind’s melancholic dance. A phoenix crown, faded yet echoing past magnificence, crowned her pale, sorrowful visage – eyes brimming with a solitude profound and ancient. Tales had spoken of such forsaken spirits, condemned to wander these woods, unacknowledged, un-mourned. A chill of fear touched me, yet within me, empathy bloomed. Are you the lone spirit of this mountain? I whispered. No words returned, only a gaze upon the offerings in my hands. Summoning bravery, I offered, these are for you, may they grant you peace. Her eyes, pools of the forgotten, flickered with surprise, then a slow nod – a silent thanks from the realm of shadows. In that hushed mountain stillness, a mortal and a ghost shared an ephemeral connection. Around us, the forest deepened into twilight, the persistent rain a gentle symphony. I’ve navigated the realms of the living and the spectral with differing strides – cautious with one, unexpectedly bold with the other. Was this the destined moment? As my homage drew to its close, her form began to blur, merging with the mists of time. Preparing to depart, her whisper, a gratitude as ancient as the hills, brushed my ear. Turning for one last look, she had vanished, leaving only tung blossom petals and the fading wisp of incense. In that fleeting encounter, our worlds – one of flesh, one of spirit – touched, before diverging once again into their solitary journeys. Huina Zheng, a Distinction M.A. in English Studies holder, works as a college essay coach. She’s also an editor at Bewildering Stories. Her stories have been published in Baltimore Review, Variant Literature, Midway Journal, and others. Her work has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize twice and Best of the Net. She resides in Guangzhou, China with her husband and daughter.

It may be directed by a hive mind or synergist contrary to my cogitation, but that doesn’t diminish its dignity. Those eyes tune in little-known ditties in a diction I don’t follow. But there is an inexplicable truth to them. A reality that wipes my wanting bits. Sanjeev Sethi has authored seven books of poetry. His latest is Wrappings in Bespoke (The Hedgehog Poetry Press, UK, August 2022). He has been published in over thirty countries. His poems have found a home in more than 400 journals, anthologies, and online literary venues. He edited Dreich Planet #1, an anthology for Hybriddreich, Scotland, in December 2022. He is the joint winner of the Full Fat Collection Competition-Deux, organized by Hedgehog Poetry Press, UK. In 2023, he won the First Prize in a Poetry Competition by the prestigious National Defense Academy, PuneHe was recently conferred the 2023 Setu Award for Excellence. He lives in Mumbai, India. X/ Twitter @sanjeevpoems3 || Instagram sanjeevsethipoems