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I drop our daughter off at your house After my weekend visit. The small talk we make at the foot of the stairs Just isn't easy, now is it? I've gotten so good at avoiding discomfort Weighing each question I ask. Meanwhile our child on a pile of toys Watches from behind a mask. Once when the wound was still throbbing and sore, The child made us play a game. "You stand here. And mom, stand here." "Interesting game. What's it's name?" "Now walk over here and stand next to dad." "No 'cause I know what you're doing." The game was Our Wedding. We were its pawns. Her parents she was regluing. Or with salt and pepper shakers She'd reenact the scenes From movies where weddings are thwarted by villains, While the jar of oregano keens. Then it was hugging. I'd hug her goodbye And with her arms still warm She'd instantly rush to her mother's embrace And like a magician perform A secret incantation there, Not even a whisper she'd risk. Then rope us both in, to hug as a trio, And off to her bedroom she'd whisk. That was fine for a while to embrace as a group If it helped while her feelings healed. But soon adult notions asserted themselves And all tenderness was repealed. The child secretly scrutinized us As we hugged at every parting. But as of now, into your arms I'm no longer pathetically darting. The next time she'll witness us hugging each other Will be when her grandfather dies. It forms a critique of the world that the kid Must see with unbonneted eyes. Her toy owl watches me from the stairs As I nervously chat with her mom. How did they know to put blinders on falcons To keep the predators calm?

Some nights I just want to talk to you. Get a true sense of us. Learn the ins and outs of your childhood stories. Take a brisk walk through those old Warhammer books. We’ll tell stories of the times we ran from cops and stole from Target. About the time we kissed boys who someone calls their daughter. About the times we were sons before we became children. About the times we made our bodies into pyres. How their glow was unlike any other. Amber flames. Yours and mine. Queer shared passions becoming the caulk of cisgender atrophy. Yes, neither of us get how this living thing is supposed to work. Indirectly asking you to tell me it’ll be alright. A paranoia, fueled by visions of bodily decay and societal malice, fills my every waking moment, save for when I listen to your exposition. Lovers are a good way of forgetting the world around you. A home of speckled skin and ample amor. Burying my head - broken skull - into the chest of someone makes it all go away. Ramble about nothing into the tear-stained shoulder of one of my emergency contacts. Most nights my brain tries to kill me. I’m told it's built wrong for being. The cracks, the ravines in the flesh have to be filled up with medications and pills and DBT binders and ad nauseam. I feel sick most days, my thoughts forming a pressure on my throat compressing it ever-smaller. One day it’ll snap. I’ll go bald at thirty and my voice will drop lower and my stubble with scratch against the chin when I try to kiss you but I’ll leave those fears inside you. Forget a world that hates our love and our bodies and our bodily love and we’ll just talk. So let me tell you about Chaos Space Marines and strange medical phenomena and the meaning of some French horror film that neither of us truly understand. Jubilee Finnegan (they/them) is a writer based out of Southern California. They hope their work will delight, amaze, and/or confuse you.

Let me tell you a secret: When I’m old with a mouth like a gravestone party(all tilted teeth and mossy gums)I’ll still know your face better than hands know a house-key in the dark. That face — something to carry in the palm, talismanic-smooth.A key* to unlock and relight a home room by room, entered and made warm from footsteps and good thoughts alone. *A key has many parts to love your fingers over. A moon-round head. A blade running to the tip that nuzzles the skin of your thumb. A plain of notches and teeth that feel like nibbled kisses beneath that round head, that marvelous unlocker. That opener of doors. Encore: Ten definitions of nostalgia To be lost in loss and like it. To construct a dollhouse youth and call it a golden age. Calling up each passing second, and with static on your tongue, calling it an anniversary. A feeling-delivery system that comes in just one flavor.* Silvery fish, a-gasp and slippysoft, pulled up from below. Now thrashing in a boat (and you too scared to kill them). A modern-day magic turning you into Houdini. Slipping the rope of now. Sheer stubbornness: the past refusing to dilute. Old shows, old photos. Shadows made to make you feel younger. That Grecian myth where the hero can get all he wants most, as long as he doesn’t look back. He looks back. A most visited vice, a sin that taps your shoulder and says: look back. Be lost in loss and like it. *Salty-sweet. A little sickly. Licked off of your fingers. Read that again. See if the feeling lingers. Fire/light after the riot Bonfire flames fuel double-decker fun / eating cars like snacks, crunching glass and / fire-light kissing tarmac into wax / beautiful in a way but the night is thin- / skinned alive, we're all / just / hanging / by a thread. You / know we are. So don't waste / a single matchstick moment.

A face so beautiful you’d hate seeing it age. He had to die young. Almost. Fingers, hard-knuckled yet so delicate, at once pulling and not pulling the trigger, like the soft spots of my body. Someone had to tell him. Someone had to kill him. Before it was too late. Funny when you think about it. How he downed one Bud Light after another like it was nothing. How it was all that it took for me. Just the hour before, those cops bothered him with all their silly questions, ruining his mood. Mistaking him for some other douche. He’s guilty of many things, but not this. He’s guilty of the burn holes on my bed. He’s guilty of murdering the plants on her momma’s grave. He’s a guilty father, a clueless partner. “I gotta find Rat.” His fingers probe the bowl on the bar counter like the scoop of a gift machine. One nut. Two nuts. Three nuts. “He’s gotta know what to do.” I think: Why would anyone call himself Rat? He says, without knowing: “Why would you rat me out anyway?” The truth is, I didn’t know better. He didn’t know I didn’t know better. Not yet. Devil got the better of you, that skinny-ass priest in Ma’s favorite TV show would tell me if he knew. If he knew me. How stupid and uncareful I can be. “I didn’t know better,” I say, clinking my bottle to his in apology. “I love you.” Those cops. They didn’t happen to be just passing by. I was the one who called. Watching that poor girl getting her ass beat by that motherfucker was just too much to bear. What with this new critter in my belly. All those screams and tears. Motherly tears. Babyish tears. They couldn’t stop me from getting hysterical. That was when my man got hysterical, too. Their fight had turned into ours by the time the cops arrived. They just couldn’t wait until we left now, could they? He’s the baby papa, I couldn’t say when they asked. “I love you,” I now repeat. He leaves his beer on the counter and gazes about the bar. Patrons are dancing and kissing all around us as if to sate a certain kind of thirst. The birds in the corner cage are chirping the tunes to a classic Fleetwood Mac song like a pair of organic jukeboxes. Old people moving in younger clothes. Young people sporting old teeth. We’re nothing like them. We’re more. “Let’s bounce,” he says. Outside, the sky is already claimed by dirty-looking clouds. We walk and walk along the highway until time becomes one thing and we another. We count all the blue cars to kill time. He tells me at one point that his mother once forgot him in the back of her Camaro when he was a kid. Where were the cops back then, he says—and for the right reasons. It turns out that if it weren’t for the snoopiness of a passing-by carjacker, he would’ve been dead by now. Nada. Gona. Banana. I nod along the way, pretending to be interested in whatever he has to say. I wonder when we’re going to kiss next. Watching his lips move, I crave a vanilla milkshake. We stop by a drugstore past a water tower, which, as the sign reads, doubles as a public toilet. “Just wait,” he says, then whips into the store before I can talk back. Waiting for him, I watch my copy in the shop window. My reflection in the frosted glass looks thinner than the last time I checked, getting wavier with each new move as if to mirror my anxious mind. I can’t tell if my belly has started to show already. I can’t tell if he noticed. I can’t tell if he still finds me pretty. That girl in the park. She, too, was pretty as a peach. Yet it didn’t stop her from getting hurt by her man now did it? Right in front of all those buggers and coppers. And what about Ma? As the story had it, she was the prettiest gal in her class. In that asshole of civilization she had the misfortune of calling home. I know she was just as gullible as me but too proud to admit it. Why in the hell wouldn’t she tell me who my papa was otherwise? Why keep silent for all those years? Then, out of nowhere: a gunshot. Bang. One shot. Two shots. Three shots. Bang. Bang. Bang. Seven. Another bang—this time from the front door slamming open against the wall. My man plunges out of the store, the packs of baby diapers tucked in his armpits. His neck hangs low while running as if he pulled a muscle there. “Let’s bounce,” he yells. We start dashing about the highway like stray bullets. Cars honk at us as they pass by. Some of the diaper boxes fall on the ground along the way, but I don’t care. Watching him carry all those fluffy pink boxes fills my chest with such warmth I could scream. “I love you,” I keep shouting. “I love you I love you I love you.” “We gotta find Rat,” he keeps saying, disinterested in what I have to say as ever. “He’s gotta know what to—” —Bang. Of course. Bang. Bang. Bang. Those coppers. They just wouldn’t let go now would they? They blockade the road before we even know it. They withdraw their guns and start yelling at us without even bothering to find a middle ground. I stand and look. I think of all the things I can tell this critter about her papa. I can tell her all the half-truths and half-said love-you’s. How pretty didn’t do him any good. How the cops didn’t like the look of him. How one glance was all it took. How there was no changing their mind. How he pointed his gun at me and yelled, “Let’s bounce.” How I didn’t reply. A writer of Turkish descent, Sarp Sozdinler has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Masters Review, DIAGRAM, Normal School, Vestal Review, Maudlin House, and HAD, among other places. His stories have been selected or nominated for anthologies (Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, Wigleaf Top 50) and awarded a finalist status at various literary contests, including the 2022 Los Angeles Review Flash Fiction Award. He's currently at work on his first novel in Philadelphia and Amsterdam. Find him online at sarpsozdinler.com or on Twitter @sarpsozdinler.

The Titillation A bird has left an azure feather on our cold red cement sill. It corroborates the curiosity's tale about the bird, about me. The bird must have probed the room, bearings, belongings, my chair, my father's table, crime-club book of the month and the silk flower you crafted in-between the pages fifty two and three. A breeze levitates the feather. My palm stays open, impoverished. The whistle from the nearby train track asks, "Why do you never desire to know where I go and with whom?" I shake the window-frame and flip it. Mistral The leaves gossip to the vardar, mistral. One white hair entwines a reed. It is the time for our winter jackets albeit not quite, not this year. I try to cheer you up, "We know the end, yes, but the ways are endless." Moody Swamp The plant stuck in its tub, in an ever youth, bears the burden of my mate's dry-weather norale, flow state. The other week he brought a brook, softened the dirt, that sunk an inch. The hardest part of the bole rose up a little. I hold the tub, lift the plant. The old leaves yellow the circle. Sun flares up an will-o'-the-wisp in the swamp of the room. In bokeh my friend sits in front of the tarots spread on the table of fate. They show nothing but a hand-fan pattern. Rays spatter like a chicken's sacrifice. As The Memory's Vultures Circle "Where are you going?" He cannot answer me for the first time or the second. He has to rake his head before he can say, "I don't know." His voice sounds autumnal. A pale wind brushes the tips of the streetlights. The sky will not tell us if it is an evening or a morning and the city has forgotten to turn off the lights. The posts remind me of cacti in a deserted path. Kushal Poddar is the author of 'Postmarked Quarantine' and has eight books to his credit. He is a journalist, father, and the editor of 'Words Surfacing’. His works have been translated into twelve languages, published across the globe. Twitter- https://twitter.com/Kushalpoe

After First Frost Let’s be unrealistic. I’ll pretend the armadillo isn’t dead in the ditch, it’s half burrowed hole beneath the hostas filled with leaves, that the white aster in the spent raised beds matter still to anyone, the fritillaries long gone, only the buzz of a thousand Asian lady beetles leering from the garage window in the brief warm midday sun. Subdivisions Below the red barn the red hills run tilled for the last time reaching the creek slipstream into eddies and are gone. I want to say stop. Stay with me longer than the morning stratus filled sky, a language deeper than blood that dries it’s eyes knowing the storm isn’t here yet, isn't here yet. Sam Calhoun is a writer and photographer living in Elkmont, AL. The author of the chapbook “Follow This Creek” (Foothills Publishing), and a collaborative work “The Hemlock Poems” (Present Tense Media), part of the Conservation Through Art: Saving Alabama's Hemlock program and exhibit. his poems have appeared in Pregnant Moon Review, Westward Quarterly, Eratos, Boats Against the Current, and numerous other journals. Follow him on Instagram @weatherman_sam, or his website, www.weathermansam.com.

For the icebreaker activity at the workshop we have to introduce ourselves to the group by imagining that our life is summed up in a four-square photo booth strip. There are so many ways to do this it paralyzes me from the neck down. Four animals that have mattered. Four teachers that curved my destiny. Four favorite pasta dishes. Gemini, Monkey, INFJ, Enneagram 5. Four apartments. Four things I never understood: barley, bangs, how I got tennis elbow from whipping cream by hand, remote controls. Four moments of shame. Four trophies. Four train rides. Wyeth, Hopper, Wright, Rothko. Four things everyone else in this room will say that will make me vomit just slightly: high school basketball, finance major, marriedwithtwokids, going to the movies. Four things about you that I miss but I can’t tell anyone because I wasn’t supposed to be looking: your hand on the cat, your hand on the steering wheel, your hand pouring me tea, your hand reaching out. Four dream destinations. Turns out there’s only one: back to that hand. A native of Westminster, Maryland, Sarah Kartalia moved to France at twenty-one, where a six-month contract turned into three decades and counting. Today, she coaches multicultural teams and teaches Leadership and Business Storytelling in companies and MBA programs. She was the Grand Prize winner for Short Fiction for INKWELL Magazine, was shortlisted for the Fish Flash Fiction Prize and was a finalist at The Writer’s short story competition. Stories have also appeared in Flash Fiction Magazine, Kerning, and Sky Island Journal.

At a work function, Brad, our resident brown-noser and office know-it-all, told our general manager that Earth harbors more trees than there are stars in the Milky Way. “Look it up,” he said so that one of us would have to admit he was right. “How do they know how many trees there are?” I asked. No one heard me, so I imagined a guy named Johnny, Johnny Tree Counter. It was Johnny’s job to count all the trees on the planet and then compare his number with the astronomer whose job it was to count the number of stars in the sky. Why, you might be wondering? For science. So that people could attend parties or work functions and repeat the numbers and reassure themselves that things weren’t so bad. How could they be when there are so many trees? Earth: 1. The rest of the universe: 0. Anyway, Johnny started counting in his backyard. One, two, three. Then he moved to his neighbor’s backyard and counted the trees there. Then their neighbor’s backyard and so on and so on. “Great insight, Brad,” our GM said, shaking Brad’s hand like he’d forgotten about the vast emptiness of space between stars, about all that scary darkness. Within that vastness, I thought about how people cut down and plant trees every day. I thought about how maybe a recount was due, about changing my name to Johnny. Staring at the fluorescent lights, I wondered, not about pointless shit like Brad, but about how many times I could pretend to miscount and not get fired, about how many times—one, two, three, one, two, three—I could start over. Then it was five o’clock, and I drove home to count the trees and whatever else was growing in my backyard. Will Musgrove is a writer and journalist from Northwest Iowa. He received an MFA from Minnesota State University, Mankato. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Penn Review, Wigleaf, Passages North, The Florida Review, X-R-A-Y, Tampa Review, and elsewhere. Connect on Twitter at @Will_Musgrove or at williammusgrove.com.

Everybody Knows In childhood father said I was indelicate, clumsy, straw bristles for digits and feet like oil drums. About these things he was never wrong. Yes, I’m a homewrecker. That is, measure once, cut twice. Patience left in the pocket of my other jeans. But I persist, inserting crooked planks in the gap-toothed decking, smearing caulk on the surgical backsplash, twisting backwards the marrettes of ceiling lamps to throw some 60 flickering Watts into cobwebby corners of a marriage. I’m trusted not to burn us down and I don’t know why. On the ladder as I curse in French I can’t believe I’d risk us all before I’d call an electrician, one who’d rob us blind for a job a chimp could do. Me, whose greatest fear is burning alive. So much that I’ve never used the sun in a poem, leery of metaphors around an H-bomb the source of all creation, a thing which blinds us into silence so that only lesser lights are speakable: candles, coals in a wood stove, fridge bulbs. Illumination that makes the things I can relate to. Like a welder’s torch and rod, fusing means toward an end in white hot lust. Or the crackle of socks removed in the dark: little blue gods deserting dad’s drunken feet before the heft of his head could topple him—the room as quiet as a clearing once a blaze has claimed a forest at the speed of gossip. Fatal Flaws I’m plummeting as we speak, a cherub bucked from a thunderhead before I fledged. I won’t land at mother’s feet, she who gave so much that what remained cast no shadow. I will splatter the shoes of the man she married, who built a house on a pillow too small for joy. From him I learned to treat the world like a G.I.’s chocolate ration, as last-ditch energy or currency for sex. He taught me that if kindness hugs a man beside his sons it must be picking his pockets. I was due to meet him at the place where children say of the quivering aspen, Look dad! That tree ate the wind and now it’s full! but he was too busy dying so slowly it looked like natural causes. I missed his end because hamartia is not a flaw but a missing of the mark. I never heard his final words, which were to wait till he was gone before I burned him, before I cast him to the lake and buried him in water. Performance poet and songwriter Richard-Yves Sitoski is the 2019-23 poet laureate of the city of Owen Sound, Ontario, on the territory of the Saugeen Ojibway Nation. He has given performances in industrial ruins, has read poems to earth worms, and has written verse on snow with biodegradable food dye. He's got poems in Arc, The Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire and elsewhere. His most recent works are the chapbook How to Be Human (Bywords.ca, 2022), and his Don Gutteridge Award-winning full-length collection Wait, What? (Wet Ink Books, 2023). He is co-editor, with Penn Kemp, of Poems in Response to Peril: An Anthology in Support of Ukraine (Pendas Productions/Laughing Raven Press, 2022), profits from which went to assist displaced Ukrainian cultural workers.

First, don’t even be at the zoo during a forecasted storm even though your mum guilted you into taking your Tita, her not-so-favourite sister, there. Second, don’t catch the ferry swaying about like a drunk at a King’s Cross bar. Don’t listen to your Tita when she says, “They won’t ferry us back if it wasn’t safe enough.” She always assumed every non-Filipino person knew what they were doing. Third, don’t let your Tita convince you that upstairs on the ferry would be better than being downstairs. Remember, she also said it’d be a good idea to hide in a coffin and surprise people… when you were 10 years old. Fourth, don’t sit close to her when the waves throw the ferry about like the rag doll you pined for back in Manila, which your Tita kept kidnapping, so she could get you to do chores for ransom. Fifth, do not under any circumstances giggle when she prays. Never shout you’re an atheist when she forces you to kneel on the dirty ferry floor. Sixth, don’t tell her about the life jackets because she would panic and pluck them from under her seat, while you contain your nervous laughter. When the ferry is tilting at a 45-degree angle towards the sky, you’ll feel you’re flying to the heavens, and have escaped the blighted day with your auntie, until the ferry’s bow smacks into the angry water. The dry chips from the zoo cafe, escaping your system. Seventh, when your Tita whisper-cries and you hear her promising not to gamble ever again, sit way out of earshot because she’ll be in confession mode preparing to die. Keep your distance before she says things like, “Mae, you know you’re adopted right?” Eighth, don’t scream at her, accusing her of lying. Lastly, when the ferry docks at Circular Quay, both you and your Tita would have jelly legs. Don’t leave while she wobbles an apology, it was all a joke.But you’ll be far gone, wiping your tears, safely retreating into yourself. Elisa is a proud Filipina living in Wurundjeri Country, Australia. She studied fiction-writing during strict Melbourne lockdowns in 2021; and won a prize for the second Writers' Playground Competition for her speculative fiction, "Free range". Her poems have been published in FromOneLine Anthology, and Musing Publication's "The nuances of new-age feminism". Her micro fiction stories have been included in NFFD's UK Write In 2023, 101words.org, and ParagraphPlanet.com. Someday she would like to write a book her daughters would love to read.

The dried crunch of seaweed brought a crowd of swarming flies, the buzzing intermingled with gull calls. The tang of salt and iodine laced the stench of decay. I wandered past drifts of storm-thrown seaweed and wrecked branches. They drew me, those broken pieces, recognising kindred, the chaos of my life fusing here, to this moment. When I reached the firm water-laden sand, bathed clean, I could breathe again, perhaps I too could be renewed. Sand hard-rippled under me, I crushed the occasional razor clam navel hole and worm cast. I sang to the rhythm of the sounds as the waves made sand clouds in the water which were thrown up and sucked back into the surf. My shoulders relaxed inside my Hi-Vis jacket, the day not so wearisome, memories softened, melding between my toes. The abandoned concrete gun emplacement smelled of urine. My steps faltered, I forced them onward, I had work to do, redemption to gain, community service to pay back. High storm-tide had left a human mess of assorted plastics tangled in fishing nets and rotting seaweed. The gentle colours of the dunes, the delicate pink flowers, peered up between the lurid cans and luminous plastic packets. My litter grabbers worked away, my bag heavier with each snatched piece of human life, my thoughts lighter. I looked back at the community crew, most of them had gone in the other direction away from the gun emplacement. I preferred it this way, on my own, away from the jibes about getting caught shoplifting pic-a-mix. In the distance ahead I thought I saw a large seal lazing on the sand. As I approached, shining silver scales were scattered around the sand. A gold crown lay encrusted with periwinkles, its peaks sand-capped, it had made wide circles as it had rolled. A trident covered in limpet shells was embedded in a dune. It was no seal but a giant of a man, his green thongweed beard drying out. His bladderwrack clothes were in shreds and a large gold belt dragged at his waist. His mouth was open and rough snores emerged from between his huge lips. The smell of alcohol hung heavy around him. I backed away, my bin bag of waste rustled and smacked against my calf. His chest heaved and he spat out a gallon of seawater, missing me by a few seashells. He was still retching when I reached the gun emplacement. Ignoring the stink and unspeakable litter, I stepped inside, the skin of my soles cringing within my boots. He picked up a large clay pot and drank deeply, rum spilled from his sand covered beard. Belching he hoisted himself up, and stood wobbling, looking out to sea. He roared at the waves, shook his fist at the foam, called for more rum. Around us clouds gathered, purple and blue lights flashed within. He thrashed into the water and was carried away by a cresting wave. I collected the golden shells fallen from his belt, tucked them away in my shoplifting pockets. I stood in the hollow his body had made, but no clouds called, the sea caressed the sand ignoring me. Carrying the bag of waste like it was a bubble of opportunity, I laughed at the waves, only the gulls heard me, and I walked on picking up litter, salvation weighing down my jacket. Joyce Bingham is a Scottish writer whose work has appeared in publications such as Flash Frog, Molotov Cocktail, Ellipsis Zine, Raw Lit, and Sci-fi Shorts. She lives in Manchester, UK and when she’s not writing, she puts her green fingers to use as a plant whisperer and Venus fly trap wrangler.

I was on the way back with the dog, last street. People don’t know neighbours in other streets. The man started the conversation about dogs. This is the only reason anyone can strike up a conversation with a stranger. If it was just a man standing in a field it is doubtful that you would walk over and strike up a conversation. Especially if I was carrying a length of rope and shouting “come here, come here, do you want a treat?” at you. I had never seen this man out with a dog before although he clearly owned one. I spotted the dog jumping up to the window. I could not be sure of the breed, however this was certainly the largest dog I had ever seen. It was monstrous, a bear. A black hulking mass of animal. “He’s a Caucasian shepherd,” the owner nodded. “Bet you never heard of one of those. I don’t dare let him off around other dogs. I don’t think he’d do anything but…,” he shrugged. “Not worth the risk is it?” He eyed me up as if I was about the size of the Caucasian’s lunch with my little dog acting as an amuse-bouche to the main dish. “He’s a big softy, honestly. He’s just big”. I was glad the dog was inside, I tried to step away with the casual demeanour of someone who had to be getting on. “Were you round here when they started that building work down by the canal?” I shook my head. “No? Surprised you couldn’t smell it when they started digging over there. If you aren’t from round here, you probably wouldn’t know. Used to be factories. All covered over in concrete.” I did remember that, miles of concrete block, and the noise as they broke them up for months on end. “Bet you don’t know why they was digging at night though do you? I do. I went down there, I took things.” “What things?” I replied, regretting it instantly. Curiosity was a bitch at times, no matter how half-baked the tale. You can’t get away from that. “Well, like I say it was factories. One was a glue factory. The Bone ole they used to call it. In the old days you had to wind up windows on the train, it’d stink, melting down for glue. Melting bones. I had heard this. Or read it in Animal Farm. I couldn’t remember now. “Yes, but what I took from down there, weren’t what you’d expect. If he starts talking about human bodies, I am on my way right now, I thought. “They was chucking all this stuff straight into the canal. If it ain’t natural to this country it’s got to be contained, processed. He rubbed his thumb and finger together to indicate money. “So they chucked it all in the water.” He folded his arms in conclusion. He took a long drag on his roll up, then coughed. He kept his eyes on me the whole time. It was unnerving. “I have a thigh bone from a rhino, a giraffe's neck and a bison skull in my back room. I can show you if you like.” I glanced at the massive furry face glaring at me from the window. “It’s alright. I believe you” “So they knew you see, they knew I had it and it were evidence. If I showed it around they wouldn’t let them build the houses on it, costs money. It’s just a big fraud” he folded his arms again as if his point was made. “Anthrax out of them bones, other stuff too, benzene, mercury, not tested, that’s why it was covered up”. “So what did you do?” I asked. I was still curious, but had to draw the conversation to an end somehow. “What did I do? I took them to court, to high court in the end. It’s cost me my house to do it. Them flats is built on a bone yard, pal. Them people down there don’t know that – and that’s wrong” he spat. The story hung in the air between us for a moment. I thought of the people, hoovering their carpets, making brunch, stepping over a zoo-like graveyard. “Well, I must get on, things to do," he shrugged and sloped back to the house. I stood for a few moments outside, thinking about what had just happened. The crazy old fellow, his bear dog, and the museum of bones down by the water. But it got me thinking, about all that stuff in the air, the ground, the water. If this was real, or just a way to start a conversation with a stranger. I googled it later. There really was a glue factory down there for many years and it certainly used to stink. I just hope the people who live down there now aren’t too keen on gardening. Gavin Turner is a writer from Wigan. He has published numerous short stories and poems with JAKE, Punk Noir, Voidspace and Boats against the current. He has released two poetry collections, The Round Journey (2022) and A mouthful of Space dust (2023). You can reach him @GTurnerwriter on Twitter.