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“En un beso, sabrás todo lo que he callado.” — Pablo Neruda I have two things I have to do today. A local car show, where I’m parking my old truck, and a friend’s wedding that I will attend alone because I am single. I keep the weather in Cali on my phone and I look at it. I feel like it keeps me close to La Colombiana, who I miss. I would like to reach out to her and say that the year has been shit, but that I always think of her, and please understand that I can’t call her when I am down. No woman signs up for that. I’ll call when I am up if ever I am up again. The weather says it’s going to be hotter here than in Cali, if you can believe it. El Nino is real. I have my truck in the car show because I am hoping someone with money makes me an offer. I don’t even have to put it up for sale. People will see it and they will always ask, is it for sale? Maybe, I will say. But I will sell it. Why am I selling it? There is a song out there where a guy sings about writing his will out with a quill pen – the only thing he still owns. He’s sold everything else. Just like when Little Boy Blue, I need money, too. Remember: Anything you own that you sell is a living will. If you actually die you drop dead with all your belongings very suddenly an unfathomable distance behind you and no longer yours, as if they never were. If you can’t see it, you can’t miss it, but if you can see it, you will miss it. # It’s 30 degrees Celsius in the shade at the car show and there’s a lemonade stand selling fresh-squeezed for five dollars for a medium. Five fucking dollars. But it’s hot, and I would have paid ten, or even twenty. Me and everyone else in line. When you are got, you are got. The woman filling the lemonade cups is sweating like she’s in labor. You’re going to be rich, I say. I sure hope so, she says back. Buddy comes over to my truck. The guy is about five-feet-two-inches tall and dirty, like he just popped up from a garage creeper under an old Buick. He looks like a lot of guys here. What do you run in your truck; he asks? I’ve got a 302, I say, .060 over, Edlebrock manifold and carb, 525 CFM. A little cam, but nothing drastic. Nice, he says. I had a ’74. Four-wheel drive. Had a 390 in it. Used it for hunting. I had a guy put a transmission cooler in, and a shift kit, but the son-of-gun didn’t put any transmission fluid back in. Going up a little hill in the Porcupine Hills in November she crapped out. Couldn’t move ‘er. I knew right away what happened. It was a long walk back to the highway, let me tell you. I left that truck for eighteen months out there on that one-lane road in them hills. Finally, I got a tarp, some tools, some lumber, and a friend and I went out there and wrenched the tranny out, put ‘er back together, and we drove her back home. Eighteen months, he said, and no one touched my truck. Crazy, eh? Crazy, I said. I believed him about the transmission job. Once, many years ago, I’d worked in a campground and I saw four Vietnamese guys swap the transmission out on an old Ford Station wagon about the same way as he had done in that truck. They had coveralls on, and some jack stands, and they jacked the car up and went to work and did the job inside of an hour. Those guys could wrench. You know anything about Chevy 396s, he asked? Big block V8, I said. The O.G. of Chevy’s muscle-car area. A lot of people have been well-served by that engine. I have thirty-nine of ‘em at my place, he said. Thirty-nine, I said? Yeah, he said. Thirty-nine. I guess I’m a collector. Have you ever thought of selling any, I asked? He thought a little. No, he said, I never have. While we were talking an old guy came up with two young bearded guys. They talked among themselves for a brief second, then the two young guys got down on the pavement on their backs and shimmied under my truck. Are you looking for rust or cocaine, I asked the old man? Both, he said. I don’t believe I have either, I said, but if you find any let me know. Buddy continued. He told me he had bought a couple of old Cadillacs, a ’56 and a ’58. Found the ’56 In Florida and had it transported to the border for him to pick up. It cost him $3,800 to transport it. I knew this Mexican guy, he said, he’s working for some farmer for minimum wage. I never could figure why he’d do that, or even why he’d leave Mexico, but that guy could paint. He’d paint cars on the side. I wanted him to paint my ’56. He said he’d call when he was ready. Eventually, he called. I went over there and watched him prep. When he’d done prepping, he set out seven cans of paint. I told him none of the colors looked right. He told me that when he was done just how the color would look. He guaranteed it. He was very sure. Then he began to paint. He walked around that Caddy in a big circle, painting in perfect layers every rotation. I’ve never seen anyone who could walk that steady pace, and keep that steady hand. He’d stop only to switch paint cans and clean the gun. When he was done the color was exactly as he said it would be, and exactly what I wanted. Better even - better than what I’d imagined. Man, that guy could paint. That’s a great story, I said. He seemed happy. I work with your cousin, he said, at the Sugar Beet Factory. I’m in maintenance, she’s in the lab. True enough, my cousin did work in the sugar beet factory, in the lab. We shook hands, glad to have met, and he was off. Guys like that you only see once a year. At a car show. I walked around. I talked to another guy, he said he’d been doing car shows for fifty-one years now. He had a really nice ’57 Chevy Nomad, white and yellow, a really beautiful build. I have ten of ‘em he told me. Ten Nomads. I have other vehicles too. The people you meet. Everyone has a story. Todo va bien. Without even putting a for sale sign in my truck, I had offers. One of them I’m going to take. I have to. There’s one guy, he tells me that if I sell him the truck, he promises to never sell it as long as he lives. I believe he means it when he says it. # At the wedding, I ate well and drank a little. I took my phone out and took some pictures. My face was very sunburned from the car show. The bride and groom both cried – tears of happiness. I did not cry. I felt like I alone did not cry, but the bride’s mother did not cry either. I am running on empty, and I can’t cry. Crying, algebra, Spanish, these are all things you have to practice to be good at. Use it or lose it. The bride’s mom would understand this, I bet. The app beeped and I saw I had a message from La Colombiana. Quiubo que mas, como vas? Te echo de menos, I wanted to say. Hay muchas cosas en las que debería estar pensando, pero estoy pensando en ti. Las cosas no han ido bien, pero estoy tan contento de ella de usted. Sólo quiero enterrar mi cara en tus pechos y que me digas que todo irá bien. But I wrote Oi Dulce Cosa! Habla conmigo. Háblame. Todo va bien.

Generally speaking, two things are true: the first is that, more often than not, reading poetry is only an incidentally tailored experience. It is often a portrayal, a glance through the lens of someone else’s worldview, a sometimes-brief, sometimes-brutal game of chance wherein both the writer and the reader hope that something that belongs to them catches with the other like little sticks kindling a fire pit. Maybe it’s a piece of their own experience, a shard of memory, a bridge connecting them and the author. Maybe it’s appreciation for the craft, for being gifted a moment where you think to yourself, “Wow, that’s cool as hell.” But the fire doesn’t kindle that way every time, so the reader pours through glue-bound verses and waits for the spark to ignite. It will always ignite, but not for every reader and not all at once. The other true thing? There really is no absolute truth in creative expression, and it’s there that we find Choose Your Own Poem by Candice M. Kelsey. If you, like myself, were a precocious and avid library patron in your middle school years, you may be familiar with the format. A certain YA series that cannot be named (I have heard from multiple sources that they are very litigious) allowed the reader to select from plot point options and treat themselves to the ending they wanted or thought they wanted. Candice has brought this adventure back in verse but tailored it to an introspective adult audience, weaving pathways through common experience with your choice of gutting, aching turns of phrase. The decisions you make throughout this book don’t always lead you to the outcome you want, but they will lead you to one that is shared, described eloquently or angrily, and is undoubtedly coming right for your throat (as the author has alluded to.) This collection’s only rule is that there are no rules; the one exception is that you must begin at the beginning. Kicking it off with a bang is The Cave of Misogyny, or Tips to Improve the Sex Lives of Christian Husbands, a brutal and appropriately cutting line-by-line deconstruction of female expectations, both human and insect. Vibratory signals & pheromones mediate the reproductive behavior of stinkbugs. Cultivate sexual responsiveness. The brown marmorated stinkbug wears a decorative shell adorned by two large eyes & red ocelli. Dress femininely. During diapause, the female congregates in warm, tight crevices like the folds of curtains—her period of suspended development. Practice covering offenses with grace. The appetite is voracious. Show respect. Foraging relentlessly, it leaves insufferable devastation across orchards & forests. Never walk around with a scowl. Where do you go from there? Far be it for me to tell you, but here are some standout locations along your potential journey: From Beyond Escape: Narcissist’s child that you are, you finally understand: You are a leprechaun captured in a kindergarten trap. The grass is made of felt, the rocks are painted coins, & the sky is held together by glue. Your usual tricks are useless. Even gray-rocking is futile—you will always be who they believe you are. The narcissist will forever blame you. From The Secret Treasure of Tibet: Yet cordyceps transform into nutraceutical panaceas that gallantly inhibit organ transplant rejection micro-biofactories. You are encouraged by how they kill—false offerings to the ants’ appetites they take over forcing marionette-like not a dance nor foolish flutter of wooden joints but a climb of ant terror. From Deadwood City, or Peacefully in Your Sleep: Every backyard cat understands mortality’s rhythmic licking, its bird-bone trail. We confront our own pulse, late night bats like tiny ticking shadows. Now you rest sideways, reader, a wing of pale feathers across death’s chest like ceremony. Whatever path you take, you will undoubtedly come away with a striking sense of what connects us, for better or worse. Beautifully written and captivating, you will know what carries your burdens and what causes them. So what are you waiting for? Pick your poison and your antidote. CANDICE M. KELSEY [she/her] is a poet, educator, activist, and essayist from Ohio and living bicoastally in L.A. and Georgia. Her work appears in Passengers Journal, Variant Literature, and The Laurel Review among others. A finalist for a Best Microfiction 2023, she is the author of six books. Candice also serves as a poetry reader for The Los Angeles Review. Find her @candice-kelsey-7 @candicekelsey1 and www.candicemkelseypoet.com. Tiffany Storrs is the EIC of the Roi Faineant Press. She is what one would call a phenomenon. Bio written by her biggest fan.

At first it was just Starbucks but then the old ones discovered the independent coffee shops. There were so many new patrons that the Millennials could no longer find tables to leisure over to work or play games. The old ones were there at opening time, there at closing time, seven days a week. The owners and baristas had mixed feelings. Business was booming. The old ones were good tippers, and open minded about dairy substitutes, but they missed the young crowd, the crowd that had basically originated and perpetuated expensive caffeine addiction. Isn’t it the old ones who criticize the amounts of money the young ones spend on designer coffee? The owner of an already popular coffee shop noticed an increase in reviews of his weekly specials on Facebook. One old geezer sounded as if he were a sommelier critiquing a fine bottle of French wine. His review read: The Autumn Macchiato, Barista Geoff’s latest creation, leaves dominant notes of caramel in the nose and on the palate. I ordered it on both Tuesday and Wednesday, substituting oat milk for the half-and-half the second time around. The body of this coffee invited a subtle difference with the oat milk, but its structure remained untouched, both rich and opulent at the same time. Run, don’t walk before it’s replaced by next week’s special! Bravo, Geoff! The young ones still drank their coffees, but they were forced to move to benches, hunched over their devices in parks and on roadsides. They were not happy. They viewed the old ones as fat cats who already had it all. Fat cats who had never experienced crippling student loan debt or inflated housing. Their retirement funds afforded the world’s riches and time. And now they had invaded their coffee havens. The world of baristas was not the only profession to notice something brewing. The tattoo parlors had never been so busy. The old ones were coming in droves. At first the artists had to charge deposits because in the beginning the old ones were noted for chickening out or changing their minds about getting sleeves. Then they would end up asking for the names of their grandchildren on some small inconspicuous spot. But after a short while, the tattoo thing really caught on. The coffee shops were now filled with the new regulars sporting ink that crawled halfway up their necks into their gray locks. The Zs couldn’t help but take note. WTF? Appointments at their favorite ink spots? Most Gen Zs preferred the walk-in to add a little of this and a little of that to their showcases. Standing in line with the old ones who could be overheard using all the lingo, words like “tats” and “ink slinger” made them irritated. They really weren’t interested in hearing old couples discuss their plans for matching tramp stamps, while sipping espressos. The old ones did not mind the wait. They had all the time in the world. It wasn’t long before piercings became popular, too. The piercings ranged from bites to philtrum rings to multiple holes crawling up ear cartilage. The old ones with already pronounced lisps became almost unintelligible if they added a gold stud to the center of the tongue. Ten-millimeter gauges were accomplished in record time due to the soft, aging earlobe tissue. About the same time that the piercings caught on, the shelves in the beauty supply stores were impossible to keep stocked with pastel hair dye. A trend that the old ones set was a rainbow effect. That way they didn’t have to decide on any one color, and they could share the boxes of dye with each other. Some people thought the old ones were LGBTQ supporters. That pissed the Zs off who knew the truth. The Millennials and Gen Zs became depressed. A lot of them had already been through therapy as children, but they went back. The conversations on the streets included resentments the young ones were feeling. “Who do they think they are? They already had idyllic childhoods, able to roller skate on sidewalks, playing outside until dark.” “Yeah, my grandparents talk about how they never had to lock their doors.” “And no one ever heard of AP courses in those days. If they wanted to get into college, they got into college. It wasn’t a big deal.” “They are all selfish pigs, stealing our identities. They need to stick to their own fads, like elastic waist bands, highlights, and clip-on earrings.” Some of the more outspoken young ones started to organize. It didn’t take long until the word protest was brought up. Before they could decide on a motto, a twenty-two-year-old APP designer who killed it with the sale of his product, donated a very large sum so the group could build a coffee shop/tattoo parlor/piercing place. The ultimate plan was to check ID at the door and no one over forty-two would be allowed in. Their lawyers advised against it, but they thought they would take their chances. A large, abandoned skating rink was purchased and the first thing the group did was to build a fence, ten feet tall, all the way around the parking lot. They also planned to charge for parking, hoping that would dissuade the old ones from even entering the area. The old ones were known for hating to pay for parking, but who knew if that had changed. When the skate rink was transformed the old ones continually tried to get into the new all-in-one spot. After all, the place had 5G which helped with their TikTok posts. But the bouncers kept them out. Then the old ones started to convene. They were much more organized than the young ones had been. Many had belonged to unions in the past and their experience paid off. Their plan was to storm the skating rink. But word got out. A Gen Z part-owner of the rink had hacked into his grandfather’s laptop when he was plant sitting at his house. The grandfather had spelled out the entire plan. The young ones would get ready. And boy did they. The fence was enhanced with a low voltage of electricity. Parking fees were doubled. A motto was chosen. Posters were made. When the old ones arrived, right on time at six in the morning, the young ones blasted the entire Beatles songbook, starting with ‘Get Back’ which doubled as the motto. Word spread fast not to climb the fence, after about ten of the elders got shocked when they tried to scale it by the entrance. The old ones quickly regrouped, sat down and linked arms, enough of them to surround the entire fence. Then they started singing, each one remembering all the words to every single Beatles song as if it were 1968. Eventually they unlinked their arms to stand up and twist and shout. Inside the skating rink, the young ones expressed their disappointment through cuss words and foot stomping. Stealing the old ones’ music had not exactly worked. Amid the groans a man shouted, “I’ve got it!” A group followed the shouting man, hoping he knew what to do. The man went over to the sound system and stopped the Beatles track, then chose some random indie tune. An uproar of praise swelled in the room. This egged the man on. He ran to the electrical box and cranked up the voltage on the fence. The young ones knew it was all they could do. Susan Andrelchik is an emerging writer of primarily literary fiction. Susan received the Terry Kay Prize for Fiction from the Atlanta Writers Club in April 2023 for the story "At the Beach". She resides in the Atlanta area with her husband and vegetable garden and is also an emerging cook.

On Cadence’s 12th birthday, as she blew out the candles on her cake, one of her uncles told her it was time she learned to smile. The other relatives around the table nodded their agreement and formed a chorus. ‘Girls and women look more beautiful when they smile.’ ‘Even the plain ones, ha ha.’ ‘Been to any good funerals lately, ha ha?’ ‘Cheer up, it might never happen, ha ha.’ ‘Smiling puts people at ease.’ After that she made a point of observing women on the buses she rode to school each day and noticed that that many of them had lips stretched across their faces in what, she supposed, could be termed a smile. She didn’t think they looked beautiful. She thought they looked a bit insane. She also noticed that men on the buses didn’t smile. Nor did her male relatives. She asked her aunt if boys and men should smile too. ‘Stop trying to be a smarty-pants! That’s not attractive in girls.’ Throughout her teens and 20s she dumped every boyfriend who told her she needed to smile more. In her 30s, long after she’d given up on men, she met Triton, who never mentioned any absences on Cadence’s countenance. She married him. Over the years they found plenty to laugh about. Much of it grew from a shared love of wordplay and this was how they passed the time on long car journeys with their three children. If they passed a building with letters on the outside they asked the children to come up with a silly definition. When they passed a hut belonging to the New Zealand Deerstalking Association with NZDA on the door, the children competed to come up with the best silly sentences: ‘Never Zap Dancing Ants.’ ‘Nice Zebras Don’t Atrophy.’ ‘No Zombie Deaths Allowed.’ ‘New Zoologist Dads Apologise.’ ‘Needy Zoomers Demand Answers.’ ‘No Zealous Disputatious Adults.’ In the outside world, the children were straight-faced, but inside that car, their laughter bounced off the roof, the windows and the floor. When the relatives started to say what a pity it was that the children had inherited their miserable expressions from their mother, Cadence’s icy stare froze them in mid-sentence. When they thought of retaliating by asking her where her sense of humour was hiding, they changed their minds when they saw icicles forming in Cadence’s eyeballs. As the children grew into young adults their facility with words was impressive. That facility, along with their impassive faces, served them well in their sometimes tricky travels around all corners of the world, and later, for two of them, in their professions as prosecution lawyers. And so the years passed, some filled with laughter, some filled with tears and some filled with both. All the old relatives eventually died. A few friends died. One of the children died. There were grandchildren, some of whom were smilers and some who weren’t. They all enjoyed creating silly sentences. When Cadence and Triton retired they bought a piece of bare land near a lake and built a log cabin. They dug and planted and filled their garden with fruit trees and flowers. They filled their house with stray dogs and cats, all of which shared their bed at night. Each morning Triton opened the curtains when he brought in cups of tea. They lay in bed watching the sunrise and making jokes. ‘Hair today, gone tomorrow.’ ‘Ooh, That was a bit toey.’ ‘Okay, I feel a bit of a heel now.’ ‘Eye knew you would.’ ‘Oh, thigh, you think you nose everything, don’t you?’ ‘You scraped the bottom there.’ ‘Now listen ’ear, just give it a wrist.’ ‘That’s a waist of a good joke.’ ‘I’m only trying to keep abreast of your humour.’ ‘Such a cheek!’ ‘No ’arm done.’ ‘Okay, I’ll back off now.’ ‘Oh? So you don’t have the stomach for it?’ And they lay curled together in their warm bed, gazing out the window over their garden at the gold-streaked sky reflected in the lake, sometimes laughing, sometimes smiling, sometimes watching in silence. Then one day, inevitably, there was only one of them lying there, with the last of the cats and one old dog on top of the bed. There was the sound of the animals breathing, but no more word play, no more laughter. Until one morning the remaining person in the bed whispered to the breaking dawn. ‘You were always so very fanny, weren’t you?’ And the room filled with a sound that might have been laughter.

i know dreams are your house parties. i am like a teenager stealing mom’s vodka, getting wasted for the first time. you walk without striding, you leap from dream to dream and shadow to shadow. i follow, but i haven’t quite learned to walk without legs, how to live in the abstraction. “try to keep up,” you say as you drag me into your old kitchen. everything is how i remember. captain crunch on the counter. you open the fridge and grab a cold piece of pizza. your dog leaps up on my leg and i scratch him between the ears. your dog is dead too. “let’s make a deal,” you say, turning to me. “i’ll teach you how to walk through a dream, if you let me remember what it is like to walk barefoot in the sand. i will teach you how to breath without breath if you let me take a deep draw of air.” i’m about to answer, i’m about to say i will, i’d do anything to trade places, to have you here sipping coffee, and i wake up to a siren wailing outside jonny is a poet from maine and yes he is sad.

The neighborhood infiltrated us, penetrated our skin, became an invisible infection coursing in our blood. The narrow streets and cracked sidewalks, those claustrophobic houses with low ceilings, made us who we were: the people who lived on that side of town. Like the trees that somehow found room to grow on the small curb lawns, the neighborhood also grew within us, its limbs crowding our own, tangled roots squeezing our lungs so we could never take a full breath. We smelled of the sulfurous steel plant in the summer and of moldy leaves in autumn. Little by little, we were decaying, seeping into the ground and becoming a permanent part of the place. The neighborhood knew everyone’s secrets. It still whispered the name of the child who had stolen a toy from the five and dime years ago, and spoke of whose older sister went to visit a relative for months and came home sad and tired. It knew whose garbage can was filled to the brim with empty beer bottles on trash day, and whose car was repossessed because of gambling debts. And it knew that secret, my own, about the day I’d come home from school and found my best friend’s father in a bedroom with my mother. I never told anyone about the shrieked threats and promises made that day, but they live in that house, in the cracks of its dingy walls. They lurk still behind the cellar steps where I hid the day my father discovered the secret for himself. I meet people who tell me they love to go back to their childhood neighborhoods and relive their earliest memories. Their expressions are soft with nostalgia when they ask if I feel the same. I nod and hope I look wistful while thinking how I fled the neighborhood but never escaped. I’d fooled myself now and then, those scattered years when I was excited about a new job or a new woman, but the neighborhood always tracked me down, put a foot out and tripped me. People recognized my name, remembered reading about a mother who was murdered, a father who committed suicide. One person recalled, “Oh, you’re that boy. The one they found under the stairs.” That’s me; that will always be me. My children, adults now, have never set foot on those streets, but they bear traces of it, the DNA of those two square miles passed from me to them. The neighborhood shows up in my son’s debilitating self-doubt and my daughter’s recklessness. My therapist tells me to go back, to “just drive around for a few minutes” but I never do. He can’t fathom the grip that place has on me, how it tightens with each passing year. Still, I sit on his couch and pretend I’m considering his advice. I don’t want him to tire of me and suggest I go somewhere else. I like this office with its bright white walls and high ceiling. There’s an aquarium with small orange fish moving purposefully and calmly through the water. They’re so content living in that glass box, I could watch them for hours. In fact, I’d like to stay here even after the therapist’s gone for the day, when he’s locked the door and I know no one can get in. Kerry Langan has published three collections of short stories, My Name Is Your Name & Other Stories, the most recent. Her fiction has appeared in more than 50 literary magazines published in North America, the U.K. and Asia, including The Saturday Evening Post, Persimmon Tree, StoryQuarterly, West Branch, Cimarron Review, Other Voices, The Seattle Review, Literary Mama, Rosebud, TheBlue Mountain Review, The Fictional Café, JMWW, Reflex Fiction, Fictive Dream, Capsule Stories, The Syncopation Literary Review, Café Lit Magazine, Cloudbank and others. Her stories have been anthologized in several publications, including XX Eccentric: Stories About the Eccentricities of Women and in Solace in So Many Words. She was a recently featured author on the podcast, Short Story Today. Additional fiction is forthcoming in Sky Island Journal and The Hooghly Review. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and two Best Small Fictions 2023. Her drama has appeared in The Hooghly Review. Her nonfiction has appeared in Working Mother and Shifting Balance Sheets: Women’s Stories of Naturalized Citizenship & Cultural Attachment.

Late 50s: I was a Middle Child. Just a middle child. Special in that way. I was a middle child, by default. One of seven, the fourth in line, the first boy. Oh glory, a son to take over the farm! That never happened. But not really and truly in the middle, not the only one in the middle. By default, I became the middle child of seven, when there really were only six. Default. Whose fault? Late 60s: Middle, muddle, all in the mix. Pitter patter, what’s the matter? The oldest sister changed the order by an act. She became a mother when in her early teens. What to do? Where to go? The parents said that she and her unborn baby would always be loved and would stay in the family home. The family first, to hell with what people thought! The family would have a new baby. She would be special. She would have a home and a family. Within a few years my oldest sister left home; she could not bear being a teenage unwed mother. She wanted her wings; she took to flight. The baby was raised by my parents. My niece became my sister. Late 90s: By then both mother and father had passed away, before their time. I was still a middle child, with three siblings older and three siblings younger. A middle child by default. Middle, muddle, get in a huddle, there are storm clouds on the horizon! Tick tock. Time is passing. Click clock. Time passes. Lives pass over to the other side. Too soon. Still a middle child, but now one of four. I was a middle child. John RC Potter is an international educator from Canada, living in Istanbul. His poems, stories, essays, and reviews have been published in a range of magazines and journals, most recently in Blank Spaces, (“In Search of Alice Munro”, June 2023), Literary Yard (“She Got What She Deserved”, June 2023), Freedom Fiction (“The Mystery of the Dead-as-a-Doornail Author”, July 2023), and The Serulian (“The Memory Box”, September 2023). The author has over a dozen upcoming publications in the coming months, including an essay in The Montreal Review.

The house in Madison was loud and crowded with my aunt’s granddaughters, who were home indefinitely from school. Mom and I ended up eating lunch alone in the kitchen, while my aunt attempted to corral the girls into the living room for homework time. Mom was keeping nervously quiet; she had told Jimmy that he would have the house to himself for once, and so she didn’t know what else for us to do but hang around my aunt’s house until it was late enough to head back. It was Sunday, and a pandemic; there was nowhere else for us to kill time. I suggested, then, that I could make something for dinner that evening, which would require us to stop for some ingredients. Mom agreed immediately. “You could make your pizza,” she said, suddenly excited. “I’m always so jealous when I see the pictures.” I was about to say that I’d like to make something else, but then I thought about it. We had been hard pressed since I’d arrived to find anything that Jimmy and I would both enjoy, and pizza was vague enough to be just about anything. So I said, sure. Let’s do it. By two o’clock we were riding down the long stretch of Wisconsin dairyland back to their house in Illinois, looking for some good cheese. My phone led us to a farm store on the side of the highway amidst a sea of rolling hills. They appeared to all be different shades of green, varying by distance and the amount of sunlight. There was a small patch of dark cloud over the field ahead, but which appeared to be passing us by, like a ship sailing quietly in the distance. The store looked crowded so Mom and I waited around for a few minutes in the unpaved lot, looking this way and that over the hills and trying to keep the wind out of our hair. Wisconsin was turning out to be less flat than I’d thought. We used to drive out here when I was a kid, spending what felt like days trying to escape the same endless field of corn. That was the way I came to imagine the vast majority of America, from Pennsylvania all the way to the Rockies, one flat expanse with a road running through it. She asked what kind of cheese we should get for the pizza. I wanted to say something surprising—curds filled with briny olives; havarti infused with flakes of red hot pepper. But I knew it was just a question. Mom liked to hear me talk about cooking, which I had never enjoyed as a kid. I told her we should get something that would actually melt, and plain enough that Jimmy would consent to eat it. She allowed herself a chuckle. I was surprised how spending the day doing nothing could feel so pleasant. Our only objective had been to see the family, so now anything else felt like a surprise. The bell rang over the door and a couple came out with a large paper bag. We threw on our masks, peeked through the window, and went on inside. Mom was our designated shopper, so she went by herself into the Food Lion to grab the rest of the ingredients: canned tomatoes, assorted toppings, a few more packets of yeast. From there we rolled across the street to the gas station, where we chewed gum and sucked on Tic Tacs with our doors open, waiting for the pump to click. “We should watch something tonight,” I said, my thoughts having already wandered to that idle point after dinner when Mom and Jimmy watched television until they were tired enough for bed. “Sure,” she said, always amenable. “What do you wanna watch?” “I don’t know,” I sighed. “Whatever Jimmy won’t hate.” She scoffed, either at me or at Jimmy, I couldn’t tell. “You watch what you want to watch,” she said, “and he’ll be fine.” I didn’t think Jimmy would really hate anything, but he didn’t seem to care for much other than his lawn and watching old Westerns. He had each and every episode of Gunsmoke recorded on the DVR from when they’d aired on cable—rather than, say, owning them on DVD. The previous week I had put on a gritty sci-fi flick from the 70s, the old and grainy look of which I thought would appeal to the two of them; and Jimmy had clammed up, went off to bed early, as if I had made him watch something lewd. Since then I’d backed off, spending my nights outside taking walks around the neighborhood. On the final stretch of the drive I tried to make a mental list of the Westerns I wouldn’t mind seeing, but could only think of Back to the Future Part III and soon lost focus. With eyes closed I watched myself preparing the pizza, walking through each step and sorting out which could be done first and which would have to wait. I saw an empty kitchen with clean counters, all ready to be used. When we finally pulled back into the driveway, we saw that Jimmy had mown the lawn, laid down a fresh layer of mulch, and put up the new birdfeeder. In the garage were his dirty work boots, resting neatly beside the door. Back in Mom’s newly remodeled kitchen I cleaned up the detritus from breakfast, threw together my quickest recipe for dough, and checked the refrigerator to make sure we had everything. There were still hours before dinner, and I was trying to stay quiet so that Jimmy might feel like he still had the place to himself. He was in the living room watching his reruns, from which I could hear the faint buzz and bang of revolvers. Eventually I allowed myself to start on toppings, slicing up the vegetables and a pack of sausage and doling all of it into convenient little bowls. I had given up trying to think of something to watch, but then out of nowhere I remembered The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, which my father had shown me in middle school. It struck me as one of my oldest and fondest memories, and yet I hadn’t thought of it in many years. I pictured Clint Eastwood squinting into the Spanish sun, a fedora casting shade across his face and a burnt cigarillo tucked in the corner of his mouth. It had all the hallmarks of Jimmy’s kind of thing: the outfits, the guns, the bleak waterless vistas. It felt strange to consider that we might both enjoy it. I figured that our enjoyment would be for completely different reasons—for all Jimmy would see was the imagery of the American West, while I would be privy to something else, some kind of art—and then I stopped. It all felt rather petty. Mom stopped in the kitchen to find some beer as she and Jimmy moved out to the porch for the remainder of the afternoon. The sun hung just over the neighbor’s roof, casting the backyard in a lazy kind of glow. “How you doing, hon?” she asked as she opened the fridge. “What does he want on his pizza?” I asked, looking up from the cutting board. “Like I know he only likes meat. But does he want the cheddar we bought? I think we have mozzarella in there, too.” She considered it for a moment, staring down at the case of Miller Lite on the bottom shelf. “Let me go ask,” she said, making a little rush out to the porch. I knew there was a stack of burger patties in the freezer that Jimmy would enjoy more than anything I might spend my afternoon preparing. It felt important for me to try. Mom came back into the kitchen without a word and went right back to the fridge. She began rummaging through the drawers, moving jars and tupperware to see into the depths. I didn’t know what she was looking for, but felt like I knew something about what she was going to say. “Do we have any slices of American?” she asked. “He says he only eats American cheese. I swear that I’ve seen him…” I thought about saying that American was not actually cheese, but I did not. I had put down the kitchen knife and was looking out the window above the counter. Jimmy was leaning back in his lawn chair in the middle of the porch, bathing in the warm light of the stained wood while behind him spread the canopy of an oak that stood at the end of the yard. Down the street would be the main road where there stood the general store, which would surely have big orange blocks of American cheese for burgers or sandwiches or whatever people used it for. Mom continued to mutter into the light of the refrigerator. “Didn’t we have some in here this morning?” “It’s fine,” I said, without looking away from the window. “I’ll run out.” “You don’t have to,” she said, unconvincingly. “He’ll be fine.” A few minutes later I was patting my pockets, checking for a wallet and phone. I continued to feel unsure of myself until I was out the back door, launching off the porch and already halfway across the freshly hewn lawn. It was a relief to really move, to stretch the legs, the blood rushing from head to toe. I felt the blades of grass, a pleasant kind of bristle, through the thin material of my shoes. “Make sure you have a mask!” Mom hollered, her voice drowning in the open air. I thought about how it must have sounded to the rest of the neighborhood, like a parent’s call to their child heading alone into town. I waved my hand through the air to show that I’d heard. I had yet to enter a grocery store since I’d left New Jersey. It felt strange to drift so absent-mindedly through the automatic doors, to not be rushing to get out as quickly as possible. The place was empty. How unbelievably pleasant to loiter in the snack aisle, debating with myself over the different varieties of chips. The alcohol here was slightly cheaper, and the dairy section felt incongruously large. My basket filled itself with unexpected purchases, and I left with bags in both hands. The sun had finally disappeared behind the houses and trees, while heat continued to radiate from the blacktop. I would have said there was a universal pleasure in the feeling of heading home to make dinner. Along the walk I reflected that my time with Mom and Jimmy had been restorative, if nothing else. It had given me so many long walks and good hours of sleep. I imagined saying these things to the two of them over the dinner table that night, because it was the kind of thing that would make Mom smile. It was after six by the time I got back into the kitchen. I went straight to work, cranking the oven and removing the cheese from the fridge. I thought about putting on some music but quickly forgot. Once I’d dusted the counter with flour and threw down the dough, all the extraneous thoughts fell obediently away. I struggled to get the first piece of dough into shape. The shortened rising period had made the texture slightly unfamiliar, though I was also out of practice. I knew the crowd wasn’t picky, but still I decided to make the second pie for Jimmy in the hope that it would come out looking more professional. I threw down the remainder of dough and topped it with sausage, the necessary layer of American cheese, and some shredded mozzarella which I was sure wouldn’t kill him. In the oven, the grease from the sausage spread out across the melted cheese, giving it a mouth-watering sheen that reminded me of late nights in New York. In the end some rather large bubbles rose in the crust, which pushed the toppings and cheese into piles and ruined my attempts at aesthetics. “Don’t worry,” Mom said, as we looked down at the pizzas on the table. “Your father used to love the bubbles.” She said this in a lower voice so that Jimmy, who was fetching the paper plates and an assortment of condiments from the fridge, didn’t hear. She was trying to make me feel better, but I’d heard this story before and wasn’t quite so sure that it was true. I gave a grunt and went back to making even slices with the pizza cutter. I took the slice with the largest and most unappealing bubble and dutifully set it on my own plate. Jimmy ate continuously and in silence, as usual, while Mom and I took time between each bite to smack our tongues and take sips of water. I kept my eyes to myself, as if I did not care what anyone thought. After a few bites I realized that the pizza was good. Maybe it was even really good. You couldn’t taste the difference between the varieties of cheese—they had all melted together and were now indistinct—but the crust had come out crispy and fluffy and flavorful, despite all the confidence I had not provided. Pizza speaks for itself, I thought. You just have to give it the chance. Finally I looked over to Jimmy’s plate. He was working diligently on his third slice and was heading for a fourth. I couldn’t help but notice the small lake of Ranch on his plate, into which he dipped each bite. I told myself this was understandable—everyone liked pizza differently. Even I used hot sauce every once in a while. “Good pizza, hon,” Mom said finally, wiping her hands after her first and only slice. Jimmy looked up, taking his cue. “Yeah, great job on the pizza, Jackie. You know I grew up with that deep-dish stuff—now that’s real good.” He paused then, mid-bite, worried that he had said something rude. “But I like this a lot, too,” he amended. “Really, really good stuff.” He continued on to his fourth slice. In a few minutes he was finished, wiping his fingers with a paper napkin. Then he stood up and began removing things from the table. Mom lingered for a moment, then got up to help. Together they put the kitchen back in order, moving things from one place to another until the counters were clean and the dishwasher was running. I sat in silence at the table under the slightly dim light of the chandelier, nibbling at my slice that was no longer warm and staring absently out the dining room window. I was imagining what we would look like from the street, my silhouette centered in that square of light while the profiles of Jimmy and my mother crossed through the smaller and more narrow rectangles of the kitchen. Surrounding it all would be nothing but a bluish darkness, that fuzzy world of a Polaroid taken at night in summer. Mom returned to her spot at the table, holding a bag of baby carrots she used for snacking. She offered them and I said no, thank you. We heard the TV come to life in the next room. “How’d you like the cheese?” she asked, finally. “It was good,” I said, trying to sound enthused. I looked down at my half-eaten slice, at the little air bubbles in the crust. I tried to say something, paused, then tried again. “The crust was pretty damn good, wasn’t it?” Mom smiled. “Yeah. I liked that it wasn’t too thick.” She bit in half a miniature carrot. “Did you still want to watch a movie?” I took my time wrapping up the leftovers and running my hands under some warm water at the sink. I brought a fresh bag of popcorn out to Mom on the couch, and she unironically gasped in excitement. She seemed too distracted to notice that I’d put on a hoodie and a pair of old flip flops. For a moment we all just stared at the television, waiting for me to decide whether I’d sit down or just walk away. “Jimmy said we can pause it whenever,” she said. “Just let us know what you want to watch.” Jimmy’s focus didn’t break from the screen. It was no longer Gunsmoke but still the American West, only newer and more colorful. A figure rode on horseback across a grassy field, with mountains in the background. It struck me as being Montana, to which I’d never been. I tried to imagine what it might be like for the three of us to stay up and watch a three-hour movie together, and it made me aware that I was very tired. I looked down and saw the part in Mom’s hair, her eyes lit from the screen, and a handful of yellow kernels. I looked back to the screen and saw a shiny pickup truck riding in the grassy field, which suddenly shattered the illusion of fantasy.

get rid of that picture convince my parents i’m fine kiss someone take apart an eraser put the eraser back together stop time make the perfect sandwich remember how to breathe restart time touch something i’m afraid of take something leave something lose something find something Abby Coe-Sullivan is a young poet/short story author based in California, U.S.A. Growing up, her best friends were Anne Shirley and Alice (formerly in Wonderland) and she adores a good grilled cheese sandwich.

The demon walks into the coffee shop and moves toward me, his cloven hooves tapping on the ceramic tile floor. He is late, and I will have to console him. For now, he is still walking, walking toward me. I stare at the stringy goatee hanging down from the indent beneath his lower lip, I stare at the patchy fur on his torso, I stare, I stare. He grins, and it tricks me. I forget why I am staring. His face. It is a blur. Blondish, reddish hair, pasty skin, and pinkish grin, a flash of wet shiny teeth, too white, too white to see. And all the while, he continues to move toward me. He gets closer. His pendulous belly, his round rump, his knobby knees sway with each clipped step. His blurred face smiles as if he’s won. I know what he is. I could banish him. I have a choice. I have a choice, and I let him stay. Let him slide next to me, let him knock a knee into me, let him press one furry thigh against me. I was never cursed, so I never knew I could be. The demon says. The demon says that I am pretty, and I am hungry so I eat his words. And his face is too close, and his body is too warm, and his breath is too dense, and he pushes the air down around me. He. He holds the air down around me. Shirley Chan is writing a memoir about growing up in a Chinese restaurant. She is an alum of Tin House and Writing by Writers Tomales Bay, a Rooted & Written fellow, and assistant prose editor for The ASP Bulletin. Her work has been published in Longleaf Review, Paranoid Tree, HAD, (mac)ro(mic), UX Collective, and NYC Midnight. When the words part of her brain needs a break, Shirley embroiders. Learn more at irleywrites.com and hang out on socials @irleywrites.

Here at the epicentre of all I sought are a million things I long to avoid, salvation only arriving through danger, suffering merely receding from my causation. Here in this green-tinted, fog-filled sprawl slipping beyond horizons whichever way I turn, let there be something, anything, that understands and have it guide me to where clarity might take over. Lawrence Moore writes from a loft study overlooking the coastal city of Portsmouth where he lives with his husband Matt and nine mostly well behaved cats. He has poetry published at, among others, Sarasvati, Pink Plastic House and The Madrigal. His first collection, Aerial Sweetshop, was released by Alien Buddha Press in January 2022. His Twitter handle is @LawrenceMooreUK

Abbie Hart (she/they) is a 19 year old poet from Houston, TX currently living in Worcester, MA. She has been published over 30 times, and is the editor in chief for the Literary Forest Poetry Magazine. In her spare time, she learns useless skills, daydreams about pottery, and does her best to be a nice warm soup. Her first chapbook, “head is a home,” is forthcoming through Bottlecap Press. Her website is abbiemhart.wordpress.com.