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A true story about faith narrated by a faithless writer. Atheists frequently call on other people’s Gods when they’re desperate. Worn down by circumstance, my back to the proverbial wall, I accompanied my husband, a believer, to South Mumbai’s Mahalaxmi temple in the summer of 2022. In tight blue denims, a black Puma exercise t-shirt and a heavy mangalsutra, I looked every bit the modern-day Mumbaikar, playing it cool, but secretly eager to get Devi Ma’s attention that evening. There are many things a newly-wed Indian couple can pray for at the feet of Goddess Mahalaxmi, but that evening, the storm in both our hearts had everything to do with the American consulate. We went there to pray for my visa, one of the more commonplace prayers in the country, especially among the middle class. For us, at the time, my visa was the be all and end all of everything; we’d been married for three weeks and my husband was scheduled to board a flight to San Francisco, without me, in a few days. Our visa agent said I’d have to wait anywhere between 18 and 22 months before I could join him there. It usually doesn’t take that long; this was symptomatic of some post-covid red tape that the American embassy in India was notorious for, back then. The situation was hopeless enough to put a haughty skeptic in a long line at one the busiest mandirs in the city, just before the auspicious Maha Aarti. It was uncomfortable to say the least. The line I was in was flanked by two other lines. There was no elbow room in that disproportionately crowded area, full of aggressive devotees trying to out-pray one another, each one audaciously confident that She was actually listening to their inner voice in that cacophony of temple bells, mantras and chatter. I inhaled a concoction of sweat, mogra, agarbattis and Mumbai’s salty June air. Dizzy from the humidity and bored because my husband was in a different line, far away from me, I was losing patience. I started trying to squeeze my way out when suddenly there was absolute silence. The special 20-minute window for intense worship, that people had travelled across the city to experience, had opened and a new sound filled the room. I thought the pandit had begun a different song, but quickly realised it was coming from my left –haunting, guttural and distinctly female. One of the ladies in the adjoining queue – heavyset, 40-something, sunburnt – had begun to swoon as if possessed, screaming “Aaaaaaa, aaaaaa….” every now and then, swinging to her own music, arms raised above her head, eyes closed. She seemed to be in a trance, her long hair loose about her face, swaying this way and that, as she dipped her head low, then arched her back the other way and bent backwards. Thick strands of black hair clung to her face and neck as she moved around in circles, perturbed neither by the cleavage that showed as she danced with abandon nor the sindoor that was seeping onto her forehead. Her bindi fell off as did her dupatta. Her companion grabbed her purse just in time. Onlookers stared at this sweaty spectacle for a few seconds before making their way to her one by one, gingerly touching her head, her feet, muttering their deepest desires, as if to seek her blessings. That’s when it hit me – to them, she was the Goddess incarnate. There’s a term for this in almost every Indian language but the ones I’m familiar with are ‘devi angaat aali’ in Marathi and ‘mata chadh gayi’ in Hindi. It means, for those few minutes, the divine feminine energy of the Goddess had ‘entered’ the body of this lady, making her a temporary avatar of Mahalaxmi. Kamla, Padma, Aditi, Vimla, Siddhi, Indira… whoever she was, ceased to exist. For those few mad minutes, she had socio-religious sanction to go hysterical in public, she had a holy license to pause her templated life and let her hair down and… misbehave. The rules of social censorship were temporarily suspended. She, who was probably reprimanded by an elder for a peeking bra strap or untamed hair that very morning, could put up an unsolicited, wild performance for a roomful of strangers in such close proximity to her, allowing her flesh to shift around beneath her salwar kameez, only because that behaviour was... blessed. And just like that, her self-induced fugue state came to an end. Her mannerisms were regular once again – she adjusted her clothes, tied, then untied, then retied her hair, urgently took her purse from her friend, and wiped her face with a handkerchief. The people who’d gathered around to touch her suddenly felt they stood too close for comfort and moved away, reclaiming their original positions. Before I could process what was going on, my husband appeared out of somewhere and grabbed my hand, pulling me to the front. Suddenly the Goddess was back in the garlanded idol facing the crowd. All eyes looked at the golden murti once again. All but mine. After scanning the place for a few seconds, I saw her again. She was chewing something while looking at her cell phone – ordinary, human, mortal. When she looked up, she noticed my gaze and we locked eyes for a few moments. Cynical, questioning and piercing, my eyes challenged her. Appealing to the unspoken sisterhood that all women share beneath the surface, she held my gaze and smiled conspiratorially, aware that I was calling her bluff but telling me to let it go because she knew I understood. I heard her, loud and clear. Everyone went home. We got busy with packing my husband’s suitcases and he left for America as planned. My visa arrived in four months.

Author’s Note: "Some Tracery of Stardust" maps one woman's history with cats, in parallel to her history with chronic illness. This is a story of resilience and determination, of five cities and six cats, of chronic illness and true love, of mortality and suffering, of whiskers and paws. As you move from one city to another with the writer, you will experience her increasing pain and suffering, but you will also experience immense joy and love, as she is taken care of in sometimes surprising ways by her genuinely life-saving feline friends. Ultimately, this is an essay about love triumphing over illness— if you've ever loved an animal deeply, you may find yourself nodding along as you read! Alexandria, Virginia Boo was my first cat, though if you’re at all like me, your first cat was also your first love. He was in my life from his infancy and from mine. As a kitten, he liked to jump out from behind bookshelves or potted plants, and startle people. It was a hop and a leap from there to his name. Boo was a striking seal point Siamese, with a meow that made people ask Do you have a baby in your house? when they called, and heard him hollering. Boo was not allowed to sleep in my parent’s room. I think this was my father’s rule more than my mother’s, and have always hoped it didn’t hurt Boo’s feelings. Every now and then, and always at midnight, as if to make a point, he would yowl pitifully at their door. This meant bedtime with Boo, who liked to sleep pressed close against you, burrowing into the warm circle of your arms— was split between Sister and I. On occasion, a fight broke out over whose night it was with him, but we managed pretty well. When she went away to college though, every night became a cat night for me. I missed Sister so much that I began sleeping in her bed with its hand-splattered comforter; red, yellow, blue. Boo followed me there, not about to spend a night alone. His naked trust, his dogged loyalty, his ample affection— in many ways, he taught me how to love. Eventually, I moved back to my own bed, and Boo followed me there as well. He taught me so much just by showing up and curling into my arms. He never questioned whether or not he was wanted. He never doubted that our love was rightfully his— just absorbed it, like oxygen. Boo made it almost twenty-one years with us, dying in the springtime of my junior year at Sarah Lawrence College. I remember lying with my head next to his, keenly aware this would be the last time I would ever see his lovely, regal face. One salt-slick tear after another dashed from my cheeks to my chin. The tears were lukewarm, but felt like they could burn me. When my mother took Boo to be put to sleep, I cried until there were no more tears left to give, face swollen and sore. Of course, there were plenty more tears to give. I cried into my pillow for weeks after Boo’s death. Arms empty of marshmallow-soft fur, ears void of sonata purr. My first cat— my first love— gone. New Orleans, Louisiana Melanie, my college roommate, found the kittens before my plane even touched ground in New Orleans. (We’d decided, on a whim and a wish, to live in Louisiana for the summer. It was Melanie, Micah, and myself— all three sensitive Sarah Lawrence students, all three artists, all three queer. Our apartment had no air conditioning or working oven, and I was the only one who’d set up a job in advance.) The kittens mewed at Melanie hungrily from behind the neighborhood post office— one sleek black, one gray with what we would soon realize was a fine coating of dust. She did the only sane thing. She gentled them home with her, tucked into the wicker basket of her lime green bicycle. They arrived the same day as me. Not yet possessing names, we called them by lazy shorthand, Black kitty and Grey kitty. Melanie and Micah wanted to name them something along the lines of Elephant and Montana. I rejected these outright. Within a day or two, Grey Kitty would reveal herself to be a soft cream, with the bandit markings of a Siamese just beginning across her face, paws, tail. A seal point, just like Boo. I’d thought I’d never have a Siamese cat again, less and less easy to come by without breeders. Thought I’d have to break my family’s forty-year Siamese streak. This streak began even before my parents married, with a cat named Petrushka who drew blood at random. My dad gave Petrushka to my mom; her first cat ever, tucked away in a small, buzzing building full of graduate students in Norman, Oklahoma. Later, Petrushka went to live with my mom’s parents; a stern, slim woman who wore meticulously pressed, hand-sewn wool suits, and a round-bellied, wink-prone man I swear to this day was the real Santa Claus. Away from the clamor of graduate students, Petrushka almost immediately stopped biting. Next came Ebenezer, who lived with my parents in Virginia before Sister and I came along. He was a private gentleman of a cat who would never dare chomp your ankle. So now, this new, minute seal point strikes me as the very gut of a miracle. I was still mourning Boo, would be mourning him for some time. When I saw friends snuggling with their cats, I had to subtly edge my glance away, occasionally biting my lip until it drew blood. Yet here was this unnamed marvel curled on my chest, kneading outsized paws into my sky-blue sleep shirt. Her purr, hesitant to get going, but when it did: The rumble of a tiny railroad yard. Impressive, really— something so huge coming from something so tiny. Wall cats, that’s what we called the New Orleans cats. Wall cats, because our very first night with them, they both appeared to escape. We briefly panicked, but quickly discovered that our sketchy apartment had sketchy holes scattered throughout its thin walls. We pulled the cats out of their respective holes, their bodies elongating as they resisted. Stuffed the holes full of paper towel rolls, cans of generic brand black beans, anything we could find that might serve as a barrier. We closed our bedroom doors, flipped over any furniture that wasn’t flush to the ground. Call it a kitten intervention. Black Kitty remained mostly aloof, allowing an occasional scritch under his chin. But soon enough, Grey Kitty turned Siamese Kitty took to sitting out in the open. Lounging on windowsills, batting at flies. Rubbing against our hands when we reached for her. She began taking naps on my chest, purring herself to sleep. The plan was to stay for the entire summer, but I was simply too sick to manage it. Melanie and Micah stayed, and both later had partners move into the apartment, but I only made it three weeks in New Orleans before I had to return to my parent’s home in Alexandria. I remember the city in flashes and glimmers— an evening here, a meal there. I remember riding the trolley to a doctor’s appointment, nauseous, folding in on myself with pain. I can see the trolley’s jovial reds and yellows with quartz clarity twenty years later. Breeze in my shoulder-length pink hair, it was impossible not to love New Orleans. I was equal parts nausea and glee. I remember the night we pretended to be British tourists, wandering The French Quarter. We scooped handfuls of change from fountains outside of gilded hotels, and used our dripping coins to buy lurid orange margaritas. British accents growing sloppier as we progressed down the street, alcohol dipping into our veins. I remember eating in the African restaurant across from our apartment, food flavorful but dry; remember going to the Latin market to buy plantains and pupusas; remember taking ice-cold baths daily. I remember long hours spent lounging in the living room, taking turns standing in front of the enormous black fan Micah found under an overpass. I remember a three hundred pound man fisting my lace-clad breasts in his enormous hands, seizing them like thick slabs of cherry pie. Casually, passing me on the street, as if this was just the sort of thing people did. I remember our bizarre lesbian landlord, her soot-rooted blonde hair in stringy waves to her shoulders, trying to bully us into dressing up as cartoon characters for her children’s entertainment company. I remember when we told her we needed a real oven. She brought a second microwave instead, and refused to admit all summer long that it was, in point of fact, absolutely not an oven. I remember cutting Melanie and Micah’s hair on the balcony at dusk. They each had short, ink-black locks, and I gave them vaguely different versions of the same haircut. Micah’s bangs slightly spikier, Melanie’s cut a shade more Tinkerbelle. I remember buying biscuits at Popeyes— which were everywhere, absolutely everywhere— for fifty cents. Devouring them, crumbs falling to the cheap plastic tables. We were always hungry. We were always hot. I was always sick. I took Bastien back to Virginia with me. That became the Siamese cat’s name. I started with Sebastian, but decided that sounded more like a Sheep dog’s name. On the flight home, she mewed relentlessly. The flight attendants let me open her carrier and murmur to her, whisper my fingers through her fur. Melanie and Micah would later have stories of a wild, madcap summer full of love affairs and drum circles, of dressing up as Barney during the day and cavorting in the neon-smeared city at night. I was sad I’d missed out. But I had Bastien now, didn’t I? Surely the precise reason I was meant to be in New Orleans at all. Bronxville, New York/Portland, Oregon/Alexandria, Virginia I snuck Bastien with me to college my senior year, and though she loved to sit in the single wide window, preening in sunlight, we were somehow never caught. By Spring semester, I was too sick to manage school. Between brutal abdominal pain and twice daily panic attacks, I’d stopped going to classes. At one point, I stayed in my room so long, eschewing calls and voicemails and knocks on my door, that my best friends had the campus police threaten to knock down my door. Bastien, smart and timid alike, ducked instantly under the bed. I frantically covered up her litter with a bath towel, opened the door with a polite smile, and promised I was fine, really, I was fine— and yes, I would call my friends. Sarah Lawrence is a fluffy sort of school, one where you meet one-on-one with professors every other week, and develop independent studies for every class you take. It’s very DIY, but it’s also sharply academic, and you do actually have to show up to class. I double majored in Psychology and Creative Writing, and those departments did not play. I remember sitting in the Dean’s office, pulse palpitating, abdomen constricting cruelly: I’m sorry, I’m too sick. I don’t think… I can’t finish school right now. What intense shame. It feels as if I remember the exact slant of my green eyes to the Dean’s expensive grey carpeting. What intense shame— what dizzying relief. After leaving college with just nine credits left to complete, I tried moving again, this time to Portland, Oregon. Sister was there, and I would live just a few short blocks from her and her partner. Reed College was in Portland as well— Sarah Lawrence’s sister school. I thought I’d have my degree in a year or two, easy. If you’d have told me that it would, in fact, be seventeen years before I held that holy, embossed paper in my hands, I’m not sure whether I would have laughed or despaired. Portland was amazing. The kind of city where strangers stop you on the sidewalk if you look sick; where you can still happen on a date by wandering through the aisles of a bookstore; where a worker-run, worker-owned vegan café has enough power to run a Starbucks out of business. Well-fed neighborhood cats don’t prowl through alleyways— they plop themselves onto your porch furniture, climb in your windows, ample bellies swinging. I lived first in the basement of a house that would be condemned not many years later, and later, in two different Victorian homes. Sharing large orange or pink Victorian houses with three to five roommates was how many of us made do in Portland— the rent just a few hundred dollars a month. I fell into a career as a pin-up girl; work I could manage through pain, hours I could make myself. I looped limbs around other women’s threadlike waists or ample hips, pressed glossed lips to their breasts, and was paid handsomely for it. The photos went onto assorted alternative erotica websites— whatever they asked for, I played the part. Sometimes I was a goth girl, sometimes a raver, sometimes a nerd. By the end, I had my own queer, feminist pin-up girl website, populated by myself and thirty dreamy models or so. There I was just myself, and naked. Mostly, this career consisted of long nights entwined with cute girls, laughter fluting up to the ceiling— a beer cracked here, a line of cocaine there, soon enough it’s four a.m. I was the photographer as well, so we managed to avoid the predatory men too easily found in that field. There was Melissa, who looked like a modern-day Bettie Page, and whose heart I inadvertently smashed into pieces. There was Meret, who worshiped Hilary Clinton, and asked me to photoshop the I.V. drug marks from her arms. There was Aerlinn, whose pink hair matched mine and who could have ecstatic nipple orgasms, one after another. There was Luna, a ferocious redhead I adored beyond reason, and would later lose to suicide. There was Poppy, who kept chickens in her backyard and resembled a Renaissance painting. If you’d made a chart of who’d made out with whom, who’d had sex with whom, it would have resembled a very messy spiderweb. It was a funny sort of thing: To be in so much pain, and yet use my body to make a living. All day long, I would arch my back and tilt my sharp jaw. I would grind my hips and stroke my inner thighs. But at the end of the day, I would always collapse back into bed, where Bastien waited for me. I pulled my black and grey comforter up to my glitter-encrusted eyes. I pressed my heating pad to my abdomen until a mottled pattern of burns formed. Bastien slunk to my side, curling against my chest, eyeing me wisely. I know, I know, I sighed. She purred back loudly, inching closer to the heating pad. I turned the temperature level to low. Portland was amazing, it’s true. But no matter how many cute cafes and vintage clothing shops there were in this charming puddle town, I could not out-run my illness. I got the first of many abdominal surgeries there as well. I was given the diagnosis of endometriosis after nine years of steadily rising pain levels; of going to specialist after specialist; of being told the pain would go away if I ate a head of broccoli a day. The surgery changed nothing, and it would be another thirteen years before I got one that did. In Portland, Sophie— a gregarious tortoiseshell who purred if you so much as looked at her— joined Bastien and I. She had hypnotizing green eyes, white mittens on her otherwise black and orange explosion of fur, and came running like a puppy when you called her name. She and Bastien got along right away— not a hiss, not a growl passed between them. Just some cursory sniffing. They shared a bed by the second night they shared a home. The plane ride back to Virginia with two cats was a little trickier, the flight attendants a little stricter, but we made it. Back in Alexandria, I tried surgery again— this time with Tori Amos’ doctor, one who’d warranted a section in her memoir. I was sure he’d be able to help me as well. Instead, he told me I was too young for a hysterectomy, and when the surgery he was willing to do instead changed absolutely nothing for me, seemed to take it as a personal affront. Raising his voice, he told me the only option left for someone like me was a pain clinic. Eventually, I was so sick I couldn’t make it to appointments to get refills for pain medication. I went through cold turkey fentanyl and oxycodone withdrawal. Writhing on icicled bathroom tiles, vomiting until only thin yellow strings dripped from my lips. I’d already been mostly bedbound for seven years— but for the next four, would leave the house just twice, each of those in an ambulance. I saw no one but my mother and father, save Sister a few times a year. I’ll never forget her carrying her first baby, my first niece, into my bedroom. How struck I was by profound joy for her existence, and profound shame for mine, all at once. How instantly I fell in love even through the haze of pain. Throughout this entire sour rollercoaster, Bastien and Sophie watched over me. Most of the time, Sophie slept tucked at my feet, while Bastien kept watch by my pillow. Is it Bastien I’m telling you about the most because she was my cat alone, whereas Sophie was gladly everyone’s? Or is it something deeper, something a bit farther from the realm of explanation? Bastien was an actual miracle of a cat, finding me at precisely the right time. She contained, I suspect, slivers of Boo’s soul, something of the starshine he left behind. I did not realize when I began to take care of her that she would also take care of me. She slept by my head every night for fourteen years. She was a timorous cat, a one human cat, and I was very lucky— she had chosen me as that person. She heard me begging my mother to please let me die, please, and was having none of it. The second my mom left the room again, sobs still scraping from my throat, Bastien leapt back onto the bed. She pressed herself into my chest more firmly than usual. Blinked at me, twice and slowly— which in cat means I love you, I trust you. In Bastien, I think it also meant Don’t you dare think of leaving me. In the end, I did have to leave Bastien, though just geographically— moving to seek expert, ultimately triumphant medical care. For months, my empty bed in Baltimore seemed to actually ache, her absence as distinct as her presence. Five years later, when she died, I asked my parents to take prints of her paws. I wanted to frame them, or wear them in a locket. I lost the paw prints shortly after my parents gave them to me. Every now and then, I search for them frantically; tearing through drawers, tears streaking my flushed face; but nothing ever turns up. She is gone, her precious inked paws are gone. But against all odds, I am alive. Bastien made sure of that. Baltimore, Maryland I have three cats now. We’re only allowed two pets in my building, so one of my babies is a fugitive. First came Sushi and Edamame, a bonded pair of tuxedo sisters. Originally called Joey and Rachel, they came from a litter named after the characters from Friends. I changed their names before even signing the adoption papers. Sushi is primarily interested in food and knocking things over, up to and including toasters and knife blocks. Once, she actually managed to nick my forearm, my mouth a pale pink “O” as I watched the blood well up. Sushi is a lap cat when it pleases her, ramming her way onto the pretzel of my thighs. Sometimes she is angelic, wrapping her white mittens around my legs and purring for hours. Lucifer was a fallen angel too, you know, I whisper with my face pressed to her cheek. She wiggles her whiskers in response, tickling my nose. Edamame is known to lick walls and floors. On occasion, I wake to find she’s gnawed apart a book while I was sleeping, chewed it to bits. She likes her chin scratched so hard that I sometimes worry I’m hurting her. She will rub her face in a frenzy against almost any imitation meat product— vegan hot dogs, shrimp, crab cakes. She’ll never actually eat any of it though. She, like Bastien, is a one-person cat— if you’re not me, she’ll sooner dash away from your reach than let you pet her. She also likes to hop up on my shoulders like the cat lady’s version of a pirate’s parrot, sometimes staying there for long stretches, needling her paws into my upper back. Ice Cream Muffin is a grey and white floof of a cat. A princess, easily startled. On occasion, she refuses to eat unless you feed her kibble directly from the creased cup of your palms. She fiends for bacon, but only from Five Guys. She’ll leap onto the dining room table, and yank a whole piece straight from your bacon cheeseburger. As my best friend feathers her bizarrely soft fur, he sing-songs softly: Meanie, you meanie, because she always prefers him to me, prefers my father to me, prefers anyone who identifies as male to me. She also poops in the bath tub. Once daily, twice on special occasions. When I get sick again, Edamame goes from being a mildly standoffish cat to a clingy cat, overnight. Maybe that’s not really how it happened. Maybe she had slowly, steadily been becoming a more affectionate cat, and I only noticed when my need became full and ripe as strawberry moon. She begins to sleep on the pillow next to mine. Every night, I crash into bed, curl fetal in pain and exhaustion. I begin crying or trying not to. Edamame announces her arrival with a chirp, hopping in after me. She meanders across the bed first. If this cat were a person, she would always swing her hips when she walked. She stops to nuzzle the rainbow owl my best friend gave me after my most recent surgery, pauses to paw at the cord of my heating pad. A tiny hop!, and she’s on my chest. Her purrs are quiet, but vibrate like a Harley-Davidson doing tricks on the highway. I feel as if I’m made of honey, warm gold drizzling through my veins. She rubs her face against mine almost aggressively, headbutting me, rubbing her gums against my cheeks. I like to think she’s saying something along the lines of: Look, I know you think I’m just a cat, but I really do love you, silly human. She stays there for a while, kneading my chest. Sometimes she stays long enough to fall asleep on my chest, tiny black chin tucked under mine. Even in the absolute ravages of pain, even in the moments when I’m questioning if I actually want to live through this: It is impossible to be anything but happy when Edamame is a small, dark curl on my chest. A sort of bliss that defies disease. When she sleeps next to me, Edamame likes it best when she has one pillow, and I have three. I think she likes this so I can prop above and curl down into her— tangling my trembling hands into her fur, scratching behind her ears, under her chin. She just keeps purring and purring, and every now and then, stares golden-eyed up at me. Then she goes back to sleeping, or perhaps bathing herself. She never runs away when I start to cry. She doesn’t even budge. To say that I did not grow up in a religious household is to understate the matter. My father is an atheist astrophysicist, who genuinely doesn’t understand how intelligent people can believe in a God. The closest you got to religion in our household was my mother’s bright orange yoga mat, her books of Buddhist poetry. I went to church a tiny handful of times as a child— church picnic when visiting West Virginia, Christmas Eve Mass with my best friend’s family, a charity dinner with another friend. I remember serving sweaty meatballs, moderately creeped out by all the wooden crucifixes on the walls. I tell you all of this, so you will understand a bit of my spiritual genealogy. So you will understand that I do not come by it lightly when I say that I think my cats are trading souls. I can’t tell yet if I completely and factually believe this, full swallow, or if I believe it like the memory of a feather’s touch. Something so exquisite that, even if it’s not happening, it can easily feel as if it is. But something is happening here— something I thought stopped with Boo and Bastien, those Siamese spirit siblings. Then I fell flat-faced into illness again, and Edamame proved me wrong. Boo ferried me into this life, in our home from shortly after my birth through my twenty-first year. Boo is childhood afternoons spent playing on sunshine-dappled hardwood floors; is adolescent memories of crying into brown-black fur after my first broken heart; is early adult memories of always being greeted eagerly by the front door when I came home from college. Bastien carried me through an illness I never thought I’d survive, carried me through eleven years that sucked the very marrow from my sanity. She was loyal to me long after I moved to Maryland, taking a full two years to accept my mother as her new person; to nuzzle onto her blanketed knees every night instead of mine. And now I am sick again, and it appears Edamame has taken on the mantle of guardian cat. Edamame, who bathes her sister so zealously that sometimes Sushi has to yowl her objection. Edamame, who gets so excited about dinner that most nights, you have to guide her, spinning in half-circles, to her food dish. Each of these cats have had their own quirks and kindnesses. Boo’s passion for red yarn and sleeping, through the night, right in the warm circle of your arms. Bastien’s fondness for sleeping under the bed on the rare occasions she wasn’t busy guarding me. Edamame’s zeal for rubbing her face against vegan hot dogs; the way she meow-ows hello in the morning. They are clearly not the same cat— but do they share some piece of the same soul, some tracery of stardust connecting them through the tissue of time? Has this very stardust been protecting me for forty full years? I cannot pretend to know. I can only suspect. This new disease is even more brutal than endometriosis, and obscenely rare. Mesenteric panniculitis. It causes stupefying, zombie fatigue that leaves me stumbling, tripping over bare feet. It causes nausea so intense that I guzzle ginger beer for breakfast, keep a sliver of raw ginger in my mouth when even that doesn’t cut it. And the pain. The pain is surreal; unreal; more than I thought one body could contain. Eight months into living with mesenteric panniculitis, when I’m finally able to have a consultation with a specialist, he says: If the disease progresses to the next stage, the pain will never stop. We’re going to hope that doesn’t happen. It turns out this disease can also kill you pretty easily. Soon, I can’t even sit without stingrays sniping through my abdomen. My dining room chairs are bright orange, wooden and boxy, from IKEA. My parents bring me one of the family chairs I’ve long coveted. Blue mid-century modern wonders that now go for $900 a pop, which they dragged home from Europe for $35 apiece. It’s a warm chair, a soft chair, a chair that slopes sweetly around my lower back. I can eat meals at the dining room table again. Chronic illness never fails to humble you; to remind you that you’re breathless-lucky for a thousand tiny things which are, as it turns out, not so tiny after all. All three cats love the chair, instantly and obsessively. I can’t enter the dining room without finding one of them sitting in it. Sushi stares me down when I try to budge her, whines pitifully as I pull her off. Ice Cream Muffin eyes me cautiously, flicks her ears and looks away, then glances back. She lets herself be transferred gently into my lap, but soon leaps off. Muppet-mop of a tail raised high. And then, Edamame. She leaps off the chair the second I enter the room. Sways a few feet away, settling into a cardboard box. She protects me. She keeps the stingrays at bay. When I first learn the mortality rates for mesenteric panniculitis, I wail and wail. Inconsolable. Within a few days, though, I become calm and practical, banging out a will in under a week. (What other choice is there?) I leave my nicest vintage furniture to my soulmate from age fifteen, also leaving her my favorite (and most sapphic) framed art. I leave signed prints by my favorite artists to one best friend, and all my gorgeous vintage dresses and slinky pajamas to my other best friend. I leave my cats to Sister, who I know will either home them herself, or find homes where they can thrive. She will make sure Ice Cream Muffin has her favorite sherbet-striped blanket. Make sure Sushi, the most jealous cat I’ve ever known, gets petted when she pleads. Make sure Edamame has someone she can share a bed with, her small, black head nestled next to theirs. I do not like thinking about this part. I tuck my nose into Edamame’s neck, breathe deep the sweet smell of freshly bathed cat. I’m not going anywhere, I whisper into her velvety ear. She perks up for a minute, waggles her spray of white whiskers. Beams her golden eyes right into mine. It’s as if I can hear her speaking directly to me. Damn right you’re not, she says. You’re staying here with me. She curls back into a tight sphere in my arms, yawns enormously, rubs her face against mine. It's settled then. I have no choice but to live. Robin Kinzer is a queer, disabled poet, memoirist, editor, and occasional teacher. Robin has poems and essays published, or forthcoming, in Cleaver Magazine, Kissing Dynamite Poetry, Blood Orange Review, fifth wheel press, Delicate Friend, Anti-Heroin Chic, and others. She’s a Poetry Editor for the winnow magazine. She loves glitter, Ferris wheels, vintage fashion, sloths, and radical empathy. She can be found on Twitter at @RobinAKinzer and at www.robinkinzer.com

We have slipped on ice and toys. We have slipped out of our clothes, dog tired at the end of the day. We have slipped an extra tablet into our mouths. We have not had enough money to feed ourselves. We have not let the children go hungry. We have not had the energy to read a bedtime story. We have been told we are made in the image of Mary. We have been told we must try harder to roll that boulder up the hill. We might, if we’d had enough energy and not been stuck inside all day cleaning and crying, have marched with banners like we did back in the day. We need to learn to be all things. To all people. We need to learn to manage our time better. But maybe tomorrow, just for a change — We will stop bending over backwards. We will pause our saying sorry. We will give ourselves time to repair. We will seek help, grasping it gratefully with hands and hearts connected. We will lie down, nourishing body and soul. We will stand Amazon-tall and banner-broad. We will write our own futures. Bonnie is a British writer whose work has been previously published by, among others, Roi Faineant, Reflex Press, Ellipsis Zine, the Dribble Drabble Review, Ad Hoc Press, and Tiny Molecules. She loves the form of flash fiction - paring words down into molecules of beauty.

Bad News You seen them boys before? You know the ones, those three boys from the borough of Queens who pedal down the street machine-gun fast like a blender from hell. On a hushed night in Little Manila, their wheels crunch up the pavement the closer & closer they get. Everybody knows trouble follows them wherever they go. It’s always something with them boys, so naughty & ungrateful, talking smack all disrespectful to their elders & all them boys can do is laugh like it’s something funny. Even their moms & dads got tired of trying & who could blame them? They sneak off late at night, use the moon as their flashlight & tag their names all thru the barrio letting everybody know they don’t care. They steal shit from bodegas & knock over trash cans & wear their Catholic school uniforms but still can’t find Jesus. They toss pop-its at peoples’ feet & ring doorbells before vanishing into the dark. Watch what happens when you try to check them, they just bark at you & say Mind your business. Them boys are bad news & got tons of growing up to do. If you see them around, best to cross the street. Little Manila The neighborhood is noisy, half-hidden below the high-rise tracks of the number 7 train station rumbling over us like a warm thunderstorm. Sidewalks slick with city grit. Spices, smoke & subway funk coalesce into the air as motorcycles & taxis surf the avenue like ocean waves. A woman in a visor cap & vinyl gloves lugs a stuffed garbage bag, collecting bottles on the block until she hits the lotto; men scatter mahjong tiles across a folding table & sling their shiny beer bottles up toward the moon; a knockoff Mister Softee ice cream truck blares dame más gasolina; a row of construction workers holler at girls with the needy gaze of someone thirsty; the girls hiss at them & flutter off like angels with pigeon wings; dumpster rats come out to play, scuttling the street like furry apostrophes; the final church bells ring, almost like a kiss goodnight from God; when the sun goes down, the house lights blow out like candles on a cake; the Mets lose, again. Boys We them boys—Jordy, Paco, & Mike—three teens from the sunny side of Queens together as one like a well-oiled machine. So fly, flames rise beneath our feet each time our sneakers hit the street. At school, we rock fresh skin fades & handsome faces & skin the color of autumn. We move like we carry stars in our backpacks. We became one six years ago when the nuns kept mixing us up. Now Jordy’s in the eighth grade, Paco & Mike in seventh. Jordy is Mike’s big brother, a goon & a clown, running around with the kind of pep that suggests he’s been waiting for something to happen his whole life. He can put on one hell of a Bambi act too, talk his way out of any mess whether we’re caught shoplifting or skipping mass or hopping the subway turnstile. But Paco’s quiet & acts real shy, every sentence that leaves his mouth is so beautiful it makes us wanna cry though we would never do such a thing in public. Especially not Mike, who’s serious & also smart, but even the smart kids don’t have the answers sometimes. We them boys from womb to tomb. We stand together. We have dreams too. Alex Romero is the Founding Editor of Speakeasy Magazine. A second-year MFA student at Columbia University, he holds a BA from Sarah Lawrence College. He is a staff writer for Surging Tide Magazine. His words have been recently published or are forthcoming in Drunk Monkeys, Maudlin House, Fleas on the Dog, The Coachella Review, and BULLSHIT LIT, among other places. He has been long-listed for Uncharted Magazine's Novel Excerpt Contest. His short story, “Our Little Manila,” was selected by Tia Clark as a finalist for the Plentitudes Prize in Fiction. He is the recipient of scholarships and fellowships from Lambda Literary, Key West Literary Seminar, the Joseph F. McCrindle Foundation, Tin House, and more. A Queens native, he is a lifelong resident of New York, where he is writing his first book.

The Horror The monster's mouth is giant, yet invisible, with teeth crushing us daily until we call it living. The monster is careful to eat politely though: no elbows on the table, counting its chews, and gingerly spreads its salt because its dead parents believed a clean floor the best sort of love. But the monster never even looked as it swallowed us, instead it sighed at eating alone again. Music Turned Up So Loud You Know No One Is Listening No one will love you the way Leonard Cohen could, not even me, but he's dead now, so what does that leave? All the lovers must sing a final song, and the beloved bed down with the belief in the lie of forever, if they're lucky. No one will love you after the worst funeral of your life, like that one person, who stood next to you and held your hand, but that isn't the passion that smokes cigarettes and writes love poems at 3 AM, among closed curtains, keeping you safe from yourself. All the lovers must sing, even if it's out of tune on a Tuesday, when you dropped your only Leonard Cohen CD and expected someone else to pick it up.

There is a forest at the end of our garden. Years ago, when I was a scrawny youth, decorated in scrapes and bruises, I ventured through the trees in search of wisdom. I never walked alone – Henry followed at my side. A blue-furred hippopotamus, he held my hand, his soft fur as warm as sunlight against my fingers. His eyes were golden pools of joy and laughter, his mouth pulled upward in an endless smile. We stepped into the shadows, the air growing chill away from the sun's smouldering gaze. When we grew tired, we came to rest against a tree trunk, pink flower petals pirouetting around our shelter. I crunched on ready salted crisps with Henry pressed against my side, looking upward at the branches swaying in the breeze. “Where are we going?” Henry asked. “To find the wise woman of the forest,” I said. “She’ll know what to do about Lucy.” My cousin, Lucy, was five years older than me. For years she had been my companion on quests into the deepest, darkest edges of the garden. We would sit cross-legged in the grass, constructing daisy chain crowns to protect us from the Raven Lord in the nearby castle. We would search for treasure amongst the wilderness, then count our riches as the day drew closed. Lately, she had forsaken our forest. Her mind had been corrupted by the scholars and the princes. They lured her away with promises of a future in their gilded halls, far from the wilds of the woods. I knew I must rescue her, but how? As we stood and dusted ourselves off, preparing to continue our journey, the Raven Lord alighted on a nearby branch. His obsidian feathers gleamed in the light and he opened his beak to cackle with joy. “He thinks Lucy is lost for good,” Henry said. “He says he’s won, if we’re all that’s left.” “No!” I replied. “She’s not lost!” I reached down for a fallen branch and aimed it at the heartless corvid above us. He spread his wings and danced away, returning to his castle. We walked on and I held Henry close, missing the comfort of my cousin’s voice. “You’ll be okay,” Henry said. “Will I?” “You are the Lady Alexandra, defender of the forest. Why wouldn’t you be?” “I just wish she was here. It’s more fun with her.” “I know.” When we reached the edge of the forest, there was no wise woman. A metal barrier barred our passage, hedges twined around its horizontal lines. My stomach churned with disappointment – would we have to return in failure? “Look,” Henry said. Alighting on an emerald leaf was a harlequin ladybird, black shell and red spots its badge of honour. She did not belong on our shores – an explorer just like us. Her tiny legs tapped against the leaf and her wings fluttered as she turned to watch us. “Can you help us?” I asked. Henry relayed her words. “She says magic never dies. She says the forest will always be here, waiting.” “But what about Lucy?” “She has bigger adventures ahead of her. Forests with no boundary except her own imagination. You will too, one day.” Her wings fluttered and her body lifted into the sky. She disappeared over the hedge, moving beyond our reach. I cuddled Henry to my chest, tears filling my eyes. My limbs trembled and my lip shuddered outward. I’ve failed. My feet grew wings and I raced back the way I came, chased by doubt and fear. I emerged into the sun’s embrace and stumbled into my mother’s arms. She dropped her gardening trowel and held me close, though she knew nothing of my fruitless quest. When she asked what was wrong, I brushed her concern away and left with Henry to hide in our climbing fort. I am Lady Alexandra, defender of the forest. “Be brave, my lady,” Henry said. “And nothing will be lost.” From the patio doors, my gaze sweeps over the grass to two old crab-apple trees, branches reaching up to the sky. Pink petals drift through the air and fall in a carpet around their feet. Lucy never returned to the forest. For weeks the Raven Lord danced jigs above our heads, cackling his glee over our lost companion. I hunched under a tree, my heart in shadow and my spirit fractured. A dunnock's voice interrupted my gloom. Her feet tapped a rhythm on the grass as she sought help in searching for a mysterious bramble, whose juice was a sweet ambrosia upon the tongue. My spirits rose like a flower in bloom. I smiled at Henry and he smiled back – he had never doubted me. My baby brother runs ahead of me, clothes caked in dirt, tiny fingers gripping the arm of his fluffy rabbit companion. Now I am Lucy, my head turned by other adventures, far from the forest of my youth. A new defender has risen to take my place. Henry rests atop a shelf, his adventures over, but his eyes filled with pride. My brother turns to smile at me, mouth open in a gap-toothed grin, and I lift my hand in a wave. He leaves me behind as he ventures into the shadow of the trees. Fare thee well, brave adventurer. Caroline Ashley is a clinical psychologist who works for the NHS in Scotland. She has previously been published on Spillwords.com and Fiftywordstories.com and has also been a finalist in three Globe Soup writing contests. Caroline is currently posting a young adult fantasy novel on her website, where you can find links to her other published work: www.carolineashleystudio.wordpress.com

“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.