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I am a rational human, he says, tapping his chest. My eyes follow his fingers. I think, what does it mean then, that I am not? I had spent the hours before cleaning my fountain pens, dismantling tiny perfect pieces of machinery, dislodging intricate nibs. Quiet hours of a spring afternoon filled abundantly reveling in the ink bursting forth from metal washed in warm water, curtains of colors staining my sink, shadows blooming in the webs between my fingers. Sometimes, if I rush after and whir the pieces back together too fast, the shades seep out muted, watered-down versions of what they want to be. Something temporary and timid where there is space for something real. But if I leave them enough time to dry, to get the air they need, when they write again the hue emerges true, and strong, and they are themselves. You need to settle down, people tell me, even the ones who love me. What does it mean then, if I have yet to go to bed with a man who has not in some way, even not on purpose, taken his own measure against me and then chipped away to see if I could be made into a more comfortable size. Do you want to end up alone? What does it mean, then, to submit to his fingers but to be thinking of cages opened, a flurry of wings, ink blooming through the water in a thousand beautiful complexions. Flavia lives in Rome, Italy, where she writes microfiction and novels and works for an international humanitarian organization. She grew up bouncing back and forth between Rome and San Francisco and has lived between Italy, Tunisia, Libya, Palestine, and Niger, so her writing often revolves around time and belonging and is usually written on a plane where she inevitably apologizes to the person sitting next to her for bumping their elbow. She is the author of the novel All the Way to Italy. You can find her work published in Bending Genres, The Simple Things, Open Doors Review, The New Humanitarian, Pigeon Review, Writer’s Digest, and others. You can keep up with Flavia’s work and travels on Instagram at @whichwaytorome and flaviinrome.com.

This is not like the other times, of initial refusal, eventual acceptance, inevitable treatment. Unlike the times of womb, throat, and chest, this return bears no greeting of cautious optimism, no strategy of modern science and primordial hubris. Exposed in the illuminated void of hope and plan, left only with the deafening sound of cries, expressed, restrained, where are the perennial offers of assistance? What good is this silent acceptance? Fleeing, stomachs knotted below heavy hearts, mulling the lone roads of inaction and aggression, foggy allusions of dream demeaned by familiar trees, why mourn the meager vestiges that remained, knowing the only path is one of loss regained? Deron Eckert is a writer and attorney who lives in Lexington, Kentucky. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, Door is a Jar, Ghost City Review, Fahmidan Journal, Boats Against the Current, Sky Island Journal, Swim Press, Querencia Press' Winter 2023 Anthology, Treehouse Literary, and Rue Scribe. He was a flash fiction finalist in New Millennium Writing’s 54th Writing Awards. He is currently seeking representation for his Southern Gothic, coming-of-age novel while working on collections of poetry and prose.

Could you forgive me if I told you the air was warm as my skin, that there is no sound in the desert but your own shaking breath, that the mountains slouch like lurid black beasts against the night sky, that I had enough tequila to make my heart raucous, that I found myself on the roof under galaxies spread gossamer and glittering, that I traced your laugh lines from Castor and Pollux, that I curled my toes at the edge of the world and honoured a promise to a past self Could you forgive me If I thought of you And hit send Kirsti MacKenzie has published in Maudlin House, Autofocus, and Rejection Letters. She lives in Ottawa and can be found perpetually on her bullshit @KeersteeMack.

wraparound maybe it’s in the breath of It, how even menthol-wrapped, He can put life to it with a well-placed sigh, our arc a paper-thin thing under His hands, His tears forming an ocean mingled with the liquor, and the blood, and the sweat, and a semblance of a prayer, poured into His Being(s) He still doesn’t get it, being born to die in a way you don’t get to write, how He could decide when you kick it, and you would never see it coming, the smoky taste something too much, His breath in a bit too quick– did you anger Him? when you question, how His son’s blood could bear to be wine, to be consumed, when He seemed to lap every drop, hangover in their home, the bread and butter of it And He’ll sacrifice cigarettes on the wraparound porch, suburbia, butts between the slats, He’d much prefer this, the dinginess of it, what He built for us, because motel beds don’t need broken in They don’t need to be explained to, They’ll live with it. mothering you have not been “yourself”, been eaten by the passing of something– time, maybe fickle mistress you asked for a sign, or a vision you didn’t see the fissures a shared dream an omen for i picked your casket, lined plum plush and you thought it washed you out so you sacrificed your nails, dug through, to something that could be considered earth do you dream, still? when nothing lights that mind, no sun to seep in, do sepia-tinted minutes slip past, coherence no concern, slide on your sunday shoes, when i grew, did you wish that i bore you? could i teach you gentleness? To care for your body as a home, not a house, to breath life to your love, to raise a daughter? Zoe Gianfrancesco (she/her) is just a little guy. She runs Spillover Magazine and does a whole lot of writing when she feels like it. When she doesn't feel like it, she's usually watching aquarium build videos or thinking about bears. You can read her work in Stone of Madness, PULP: A Literary Journal, and LEVITATE.

Lord Eadgar stepped through the grass with sudden caution, careful not to crush under his gait delicate white and purple lilies, nor bend under his long tunic clusters of yellow tansies and spider-petalled pennyroyals. His eyes circled the garden, the variety of specimens grown there, in the shadow of the château’s keep. Eadgar had never given much thought to plants. Not beyond their function to feed and heal and to provide shade from glaring heat. Too common, too trivial, always there and ready to be taken for granted. Animals were meant to be eaten or employed in chores, rivers to carry ships and lakes to be fished, and mountains to be crossed, for God had gifted Man the power to use nature. But on this morning, the gentle breeze was bearing scents of late spring that reminded him of something long gone, something undefined. An unfamiliar tremor of anticipation. The path that opened ahead was shaded by wooden arches, arbours with white and rose flowers opened in full bloom. And there, in the verdant shelter, a woman was tending to the blossoms, guiding the vines along the arches with her gloved hands, gently as if caressing a child. She was humming a song to herself. Gowned in a dress of dark emerald, she seemed to be one with the verdure surrounding her. Sunlight shivered through the dense foliage of the arbour, its tiny reflections shimmering like golden flowers in the woman's hair and rosy skin. Though he had expected to find her there, Eadgar’s feet stopped as if unprepared. He smoothed out the collar of his tunic and the cloak pinned on one shoulder, making sure the leather band that held his hair was still in place, then assumed his usual statuesque bearing. “Good morning, Lady Agnes,” he uttered in Norman. “I hope you’ll forgive my intrusion.” Startled, the woman turned. At the sight of the visitor, her visage lit up. “Lord Eadgar!” she exclaimed in flawless Northumbrian. “I did not expect you at this early hour. I imagined you’d sleep longer after your late night arrival.” Dawn had found him awake, reading The Good Book by candlelight. “A soldier’s sleeping habits, my lady.” Her gardening gloves were dirty but she must have forgotten, in her surprise, running her hands on her dishevelled headdress to make it neat again. Dirt now blemished the translucent embroidered linen, matching the smudges on her long sleeves and wrinkled white underskirt. Agnes caught his gaze and dusted it off in vain, awkward smile and rosy cheeks, like a little girl who finally shows up for dinner when the food is already cold, soiled, sweaty, and out of breath, trying to hide stolen fruits from orchards where hunger has won her over, tattered dress from trees she’s conquered, fur and dirt from pets she’s pampered. She put her gloves away to greet him, and Eadgar might have smiled, had he found it proper; but, instead, he took her hand for a formal kiss. There was something childish in Agnes’s compulsion to delve into nature – whenever it needed tending to or whenever it had something out of the ordinary to show – and lose herself there, and it felt so familiar to him; and there it was again, that something warm and heavy that had kept him awake. What was it? He hadn’t felt it once in the war against the Danes where resolution and faith had driven him, nor in his years of loyal service to King Æþelræd where commitments as thegn had kept him away from home for weeks on end, nor for his family whose memory sparked but feelings of duty. He had come to Ivry to speak to its lord with whom Northumbria had sealed an alliance fourteen years ago, but it wasn’t the prospect of their meeting that gave him the heaviness. “Goodness,” Agnes wondered, “have you even had breakfast yet? I told the maids to set the table outside – it’s much more pleasant in the sun than in those stone halls this time of the year - but I made them wait, lest it gets cold before your arrival. You must be famished.” “I’m not hungry in the morning, lady, so I thought I’d take a little walk through your garden.” “Parts of the château are still under construction, as you can see, but Rodulf and I had planned for us to give you a tour of the grounds after breakfast. But… now the garden isn't a mystery to you any longer.” Her smile betrayed a touch of disappointment, and offending his host would have made him an ungrateful guest, so he answered: “Nature is always mysterious to me because I know so very little about it, I’m afraid. It’s beautiful. Your hand was in all this, I can tell.” The smile waxed again. “It is the garden I’ve always dreamed of – my own Eden before the Fall, a God-shaped shelter from the wickedness of man! I think God loves flowers. Otherwise, why would He have made such enchantment spring from the ground, with giddying scents, with such intricately-woven patterns – like a labyrinth – and so unfathomably diverse!” She walked towards a rose bush and cupped one of the flowers in her hands. Its petals wound round and round the pistil, and her finger traced them, barely touching. “Look. Do you see? Each plant has its uses, but the fruits and roots and leaves are often more beneficial than the flower itself. And yet, it’s the flower that arrests the eyes with its shapes and colour and scent. I think God made them because He wanted our hearts to leap in admiration of nature's beauty.” She used the small knife hanging from her belt to cut off a stem. “Does your heart leap at the sight?” She held out the flower to Eadgar’s lips for him to smell. The perfume flooded his nostrils, and the blue of her eyes stared into his, zestful and expectant and carefree. But, instead of an answer, he swallowed, the corner of his lips pulling into a faint smile. She laughed: “Of course it doesn't. What a silly question! You have more useful passions than flowers and gardens.” “A passion that makes one admire God's creation is the best kind of passion, lady.” “So grave and serious you still are,” she exclaimed, “just like when we were children – as if the weight of the world pressed upon your brow!” She pinned the rose into the gold brooch decorated with garnets that held his cloak on one shoulder. “Can you imagine – fourteen years have passed since I left England! Goodness! You were almost the same age as my son is now!” “Truly?” Eadgar exclaimed, a greater surprise in his words than in his mien, which remained unchanged. In truth, he knew it well. “Yes, my little angels have grown up. My daughter is six and – ” she whispered, “I’ll let you in on a little secret, one that Rodulf will soon spoil, anyway: I am with child again.” Eadgar’s glance briefly slipped from her smiling face down to her midriff. Behind the loose dress, one could not tell that she was pregnant. But, then, her frame had always been svelte. “The Lord keep them. How time flies...” “And yours?” “Oh?” “Your children.” “Ah, yes. My girls are four and six.” “How wonderful! They’d make perfect playmates for my little Maud, she’d befriend them right away to show them all the nooks and crannies of her house and garden. I hope Godgifu is well, too – I haven’t seen her since your wedding day, and how lovely she was then! You must all come and stay with us when the château is finished!” Hands pressed together, she looked at him intently. “I don’t know what matters bring you here to discuss with my husband but, I hope you know, you’ll always find safety here, should you need it.” He did not want her concerned, so he thanked her only. She went on to ask about his father, the Earldorman, about his brother Edmund who had fought at London by his side, about young Aidan – such a sweet tiny thing when she’d seen him last! – who was now taking the path of the Lord in the newly-erected monastery on the island of Dun Holm, about the deceased Lady Merwyn, Eadgar’s stepmother – what a beauty she was, inside and out! Agnes spoke about them all with such familiarity and fondness as if she were part of the family herself. Before he could elaborate an answer, she gripped his arm and cried out: “Heavens, Eadgar, how blessed we are! I thank God for it every single day, for keeping us safe during these troubled times, for gifting us… this,” she pointed through thin air, arms open as if to embrace the garden, the château. “As much as I miss Bamburgh, Normandy is my home now. And you... you must be so happy, too, Eadgar, with your perfect little family!” He stared at the hawthorns shedding pale petals in the light wind. “Of course,” he nodded. “Of course.” Still leaning on his arm, Agnes led him on the path shaded from place to place by trees forming arches above them. She would tell him a little something about plants they met along the way and how she had acquired them, about gardens she had encountered during her travels and of her ambition to set up her own, about Rodulf’s estate before the garden had enriched it so wonderfully, about how he had endorsed her passion, having rare plants brought from abroad for her to nurture, about their children who would play there. Eadgar would nod and every now and then, his free hand reaching a few times under his copper cloak to something hidden in his bad – something meant for Agnes – but then, whenever she mentioned her husband with such delight, he would decide to wait. So, instead, he would sense her hand wrapped around his arm, the corners of his eyes catching the play of light and shadows on her face. They reached the pond and stopped by its surface reflecting the May light like a mirror. “Eadgar, do you remember the day I left? We went into the orchard and the linden trees were in bloom. They used to spread such a wonderful smell, I can feel it even now. And then...” she chuckled, “I can't believe you climbed all the way up in that high tree to carve your name on the bark! Those were our trees – our lindens – planted in the year of our births. We had built that little bridge between them, remember? We used to climb there and hide.” She frowned at him in jest, as if looking at a child: “You silly boy, why would you try to drag me up there with you? Treating me like a child when I was about to travel to meet my future husband. I was wearing a new dress and I only met you to say goodbye!” “It used to cheer you up. You were sad to leave, and I didn't want a teary farewell.” “I was, wasn’t I? How foolish we are to doubt His choices.” She smiled again. “Well, you made me climb with you and I watched you carve your name. And you carved mine in the linden beside it... in runes, so that it would be our secret. And then you said... you said those linden trees were you and I, and they would stand side by side forever, no matter where our paths may take us...” She let go of his arm and they were now standing further apart under the shade of hawthorn trees in bloom that quivered in the breeze, staring along the bright surface of the small lake. The wind had begun to blow stronger and pale petals of hawthorn fell thicker and thicker off the branches, swirling and soaring like scented rain. Agnes arranged the shawl that covered her shoulders and hair, pulling it tighter around her, and Eadgar shook some fallen petals off the sleeves of his tunic; but their eyes did not meet. “Well met, Lord Eadgar!” a voice sounded behind them, in Norman. They turned to the sight of a robust auburn-haired man, moustache twisting in a smile as he gave Eadgar a hefty embrace. “Forgive my delay, a little errand kept me away longer than I had intended. Thank God you were in good company, at least,” he beamed. “My Agnes is always gladdened by Northumbrian guests, and I know you were close as children. Like siblings, am I right? But you haven't given her any bad news, I trust?” he glanced now at Eadgar, now at Agnes. “Not at all, I hope. In case I have, the gift I brought may bring some cheer.” “Don’t tell me you kept the lady waiting for my sake!” the man wondered amused. “Come, I’m sure it’s nothing unfit for a husband's eye, now, is it?” Eadgar produced a leather-bound book. “On plants,” Agnes read the title, running her fingers over the smooth decorated leather. “With excerpts of Pliny’s Naturalis Historia and Bede’s De Rerum Natura,” Eadgar added. “Decorative plants... rosa alba, rosa gallica, honeysuckle, rue, iris, ivy,” she leafed through the illustrated pages, her smile wider and wider as she did so, “spices, medicinal plants, horsemint, sage, fennel, cumin, rosemary...” “A book! And a book on gardening too! Such fuss for a bundle of words about plants – as if a garden full of them wasn't too much already. Women!” Rodulf gestured in feigned exasperation. At this, Agnes elbowed him, so Rodulf took her by the shoulder in a half-embrace which she leaned into, both chuckling as they glanced into each other’s eyes, looking, for a moment there, like happy youths teasing each other to mask feelings they are too sheepish to express. Hearing Agnes speaking of Rodulf with such fondness during their tête-à-tête moments before, a part of Eadgar had hoped it was something like a façade. Not a mask for some dark secret – no, nothing of the sort, he wished no darkness on her – but simply a way to say It’s not perfect, but it is what it is. Because that would mean that, in the course of those fourteen years, she had asked herself What would it have been like…? A garden path dotted with forget-me-nots, what-ifs, and might-have-beens that may never be discovered, but the simple knowledge that it was there brought some comfort. But, seeing them together like this, Eadgar felt a pang of guilt for having hoped for such a thing. Perhaps Agnes had asked herself that question, but nothing more. The path not taken, forever overgrown and unfindable in the garden. She was happy; and he was happy to see her so. Then she turned to Eadgar and bowed her head shortly: “It shall be a pleasure to read it, and in my mother-tongue too. Thank you, Eadgar.” She excused herself to go see to the preparations for the meal then went away, book in hand. “This shall keep her happy and occupied for the foreseeable future,” commented Rodulf, but his amused tone turned serious. “This was thoughtful of you. Thank you.” As Rodulf told of the costs of stone and mortar and of his architect from Paris, Eadgar glanced aside. Leafing through the book as she walked the path towards the house, she stopped at a certain page: a tiny branch of linden was inside it, pressed, with two yellow flowers sheltered by leaves. Her feet slowed their pace for a moment as she took the leaf to her lips to smell it. She looked back and her eyes met Eadgar's, face lit up by a bright smile, and nodded with friendly gratitude. R. N. Roveleh is a Transylvanian writer and an artist, a doctor in medieval literature, an explorer of thoughts, emotions and experiences. Though the settings of her stories are often historical, the workings of the human mind are always at the centre of her tales.

So then, you take a toothpick, some tweezers of course you don’t want to clean your teeth, you just want to tear yourself apart. Building this small little heart made out of consolidated dust, come on, now, you can do better you can build yourself from scratch from the blood that has built up in clots, every place where you’ve been touched. I was a boy who thought he could taste colors, smell his dreams— vanilla and flowers. I was a boy who put his blood in music— playing his piano during the night. I was a boy who crashed like a tornado— bit the hand that fed him, the hand bit him back. Lachie Kairo is a poet in parenthesis. And a queer, middle eastern guy, just trying to make the best out of his life.

In your kitchen it will always be late summer, Bessie Smith churning through the blues, some piano fluttering to keep up. A CD whirs through its moment of near collapse, opts to skip over scratches — a delicate thing, technology, so susceptible to cracks or bumps; she hates to see that evening sun go down. She hates to see that evening sun go down. A child of rationing, you recalled scraping the last suspicion of jam out of a wartime pot, entire focus on mining that sweet vein trapped in glass, music sounding on the wireless, your feet tapping to some sturdy melody, bombproof, something anyone could sing to, not to hear the evening sun go down, covering your mouth as you said, as though embarrassed by another generation of dentistry, we hate to see that evening sun go down. Child evacuated from memory, membrane tinged with whiskey, a mystery of unpeeled years, ripe as nuts, perfect in their past completeness on a table, bare wooden back of another time. Stains of fat on a plastic mat must have been mine, only because there’s no one else left hating to see that evening sun go down. I hate to see that evening sun go down. Inspired by the idea of the bumblebee, which should not be able to fly and yet does, Simon Leonard has recently discovered that, in reality, bumblebees are ok with physics. He is currently in search of a more fitting metaphor while he works on his second chapbook.

Tired of technocracy clear-cutting the valleys, a mountainside necromancer brings home the teeth from several steam shovel buckets, throws her welding goggles onto her couch beside railroad spikes, engine parts, blood encrusted car parts pulled from lost wrecks, and begins a spell. Lighting strikes the surrounding peaks as the necromancer dances amidst a rockslide, asking the range of tors and aretes to expose Mesozoic fossils in an alliance between dying earth and entrapped death. The necromancer’s smithy glows magma red. Visitors (locals) begin to visit and leave. A forgotten hiker with a crushed leg watches the blacksmithing from the doorway her mouth parched – too dry to speak. A cross-country skier leans on a tree no living creature able to look at the location of his septuagenarian infarcted heart. A child, one of hundreds, from a lost school looks into the barrel of salmon blood the necromancer uses to quench hot metal but still cannot see his own reflection so, he wanders away again (he pauses only to take the exsanguinated salmon to his classmates). The necromancer consecrates the fossils with her own blood mixed with the sap of each tree species that grows in the valley. The necromancer makes sprockets that ride the teeth of five carnosaurs – three sets of car door wings spikelated with ribs of T Rex – red brake lights, orange blinkers, splay beams radiant and burning from a center mass of crunched engines and sauropod shins – so many moving parts moved by bones meant to be eternally rock-still. Under the next new moon, a logging camp shrieks with chainsaw and protest, those who flee discover that roadblocks have returned. Terry Trowbridge’s poems have appeared in The New Quarterly, Carousel, subTerrain, paperplates, The Dalhousie Review, untethered, Quail Bell, The Nashwaak Review, Orbis, Snakeskin Poetry, Literary Yard, M58, CV2, Brittle Star, Bombfire, American Mathematical Monthly, The Academy of Heart and Mind, Canadian Woman Studies, The Mathematical Intelligencer, The Canadian Journal of Family and Youth, The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, The Beatnik Cowboy, Borderless, Literary Veganism, and more. His lit crit has appeared in Ariel, British Columbia Review, Hamilton Arts & Letters, Episteme, Studies in Social Justice, Rampike, and The /t3mz/ Review. Terry is grateful to the Ontario Arts Council for his first writing grant, and their support of so many other writers during the polycrisis.

Jahanara stood sentry outside a place she had never visited. A place she had never had reason enough to visit. A bank. In her browned hands that were no stranger to fire, a piece of paper burned like cinders. It was a piece of paper she had never had reason enough to hold. A cheque. Signed in her name: Jahanara Begum. Jahanara cast a glance at the now sweat-drenched cheque: Jahanara Begum, it said. She could not read it—could not spell—but she had to have faith. Illiteracy is never an impediment in the counting of money, though. Jahanara could spell out the amount very well: 15,000,000. Fifteen lakhs. After her brother’s death, she had paid many rickshaws a hefty sum to drive her thence, had taken many a leave from work at Myra baji’s. And every time had been told the same thing: Bibi, you cannot go inside. “But… I have a cheque,” she’d stammer. “Haha,” they’d say, “suuuure. Where’d you steal this from?” The guards who turned her away and denied her entry were not much different: their hands, too were browned. They also could not spell. They, too, had never been much inside a bank, despite working right outside. They felt, straight away, in Jahanara, a kinship. And they knew their kind had no business inside a bank. Jahanara looked at them now, in their dirty blue uniforms outside a clean white building. They held the door open for the bank’s distinguished patrons and salaamed these folk. Nobody ever salaamed back. They hadn’t salaamed Jahanara when she had first tried to walk into the bank. She had observed the goings-on from across the street. Slipperless children; unremarkable young women; tired young men went about with arms extended, fishing for a few rupees. Outside the bank, cashflow was unregulated and sporadic—there was no need for cheque and balance. It was from there that Jahanara had watched. She could not get to her money, sure, but nobody could stop her from watching the building wherein it was housed. So she watched. She watched shiny cars pull up at its lofty gates. She watched the car doors open and the emergence of perfect, glossy, flawless feet—one after the other. She noticed what those feet were enshrined in: usually a kind of flat chappal, peep toes, in dull off whites or browns. She turned her nose up at the women who these feet carried: on their legs, trousers that ended an inch or two above their ankles; their shirts loose and lightly colored, often with no patterns on them. She noticed their fluidly flowing, open hair, atop which a pair of large sunglasses were perched. She scoffed at their lack of bangle-wearing and the laughable insignificant size of their purses. Jahanara had never understood this about the rich: why were they so averse to color and clank? These women walked a fearless walk. They did not, like Jahanara had done, strut and fret before the guards. They strode with purpose. Straight into the bank. They sometimes had their phones hooked to the sides of their faces, and they were always saying things like yeah yeah, riiiight, yeah no, NOOO, o yeah, right right. They always spoke in English. Jahanara knew some English. She had heard Myra baji talk to the children: Beta, Rufus is not a kutta, beta, he is a doggy. Say doggy… Yeeesss, that’s right. Doggy, not kutta. Kutta is a bad word, and you aren’t a bad boy, are you? Then Myra baji had had a word with Jahanara, forbidding her from using the word kutta at home. “But baji,” Jahanara had protested, “Roofass is a kutta.” “No,” baji had said sternly, “please only use the word doggy.” “What does doggy mean, baji?” “It means… kutta.” Jahanara watched a stray kutta—doggy—cross the road. The stray kutta’s intrepidity and indifference stood against a fashionable woman’s pet doggy. “Ewwww,” the woman wailed when she saw the kutta, and the guard came trotting to shoo the beast away. The kutta found refuge at Jahanara’s feet—neat feet, polished with some alien ointment, bestride in open chappals. Cream in color. The kutta sniffed and eyed Jahanara in confusion. Jahanara stepped away and distanced her high-trousered, loose-qameezed, open-haired, sunglass-toting figure from the kutta. She said a small prayer thanking God Myra baji was not built much differently from her. Although on her part it was more starvation than personal trainers. From a miniscule purse Jahanara whipped out a phone, and paraded right up to the bank’s doors. “Yeah yeah,” she said, looking ahead but not at anyone in particular, “right. Yeah. No no. yeah. Right right.” The guards threw a cursory glance at her as they opened the doors. “Salam mam,” they said. Jahanara did not respond. She was in. She had triumphed. “Good morning, ma’am,” a banker said, “can I help you?” She didn’t understand a word. So she handed him the cheque, saying “yeah, yeah.” The banker examined the cheque, click-clicked on a computer, took some time, and said, “Right. You’re good to go. Just fill up this form.” He was beaming at her the way no tie-decorated, pinstripe-shirted man had done, and his hands held a pen and a stack of papers. In English. Jahanara smiled back, said right. She leaned against a glass wall. Through the glass she could see the kutta: stray, starved, and strange. It looked so out of place there, on bank premises. some kinds of glass, she found herself theorizing, could not be broken. You could look at and look through, but you could not shatter them—even if they opened for you and salaamed you on the way in. This was one of those, this glass wall. But wait—why was the kutta dressed in hitched trousers and a loose qameez, with sunglasses stationed atop its head? Jahanara took a moment to realize it was no glass wall. It was a mirror.

The moon is a vacancy sign, and I want to pull in for a rest. But the parking lot is full of stars, their headlights blinking through the dust my tires kick up. No room, no room. I must drive to escape the darkness, a mouth ready to swallow me whole from this lonely road. I fade into the crumpled map in my hand. No Google Maps police directing traffic on my phone, this is a moment of silence. Forced to proceed, guided by the eyelids of shadows. Slits of moon gaze. Night eats the gas, and I hope to make it before dawn. Some food left. Why don’t I plan? Nut bars, a half thermos of coffee, sliced apples. A short trip, they said. But the road stretches like a rubber band, ready to snap. The farther I drive, the farther away I feel. In the woods along the road, eyeshine follows me into a mist. And then a thick fog. A hazy amber halo shines through the fog. A gas station. I pull in for gas, coffee, and something to quell the queasiness in my gut. Maybe hunger, maybe anxiety. I’ll know which in a few minutes. The counter guy asks how much gas. His skin is sallow, his face gaunt under the fluorescent lights, his eyes shining emerald green. I think zombies, and my stomach does a backflip. Definitely anxiety. Driving at night is another one of my terrible ideas. Just as I’m hopeless at planning, I’m hopeless at not listening to the warning bells vibrating this saggy old body. I pay for a jumbo-size coffee, some candy bars, and gas. This road will either boomerang me back home or snap me to my destination. The fog finally lifts like a balloon rising. The road darkens into the shadows of trees lurching toward me like zombies, but do zombies’ eyes reflect headlights? I shake off the image of the man at the gas station. I wouldn’t be here were it not for my grandmother passing, and her memorial service is on Sunday. I’m not used to traveling alone, especially at night. Cataracts. Up ahead I see someone walking alongside the road. A young girl? Out here alone at night? “Are you OK? Do you need a ride?” I notice that she’s shivering in a red windbreaker. Her car has broken down. I don’t recall seeing one. Maybe the fog swallowed it. “I could use a ride to my grandmother’s.” “You too? Hop in.” I brush the candy wrappers off the passenger seat. In the washed-out glow of the overhead light, her thin, pale face looks barely held together, a vanilla cake with the top layer sliding off. Something about her is familiar. I don’t know what. My stomach somersaults. “Wait a sec,” she looks down, fishes in her pocket. I raise my hands in surrender. “Take whatever you want, just don’t hurt me.” She looks up, her feral eyes glowing green. And morphs into the gas station counter guy. “You forgot your change.” He puts a quarter and two dimes on the dashboard. The counter guy opens the car door, looks back at me. “Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to pick up strangers?” His grin is toothy, lupine. “Drop by on your way back. Coffee is on me.” The door slams shut. In my rearview mirror, I watch a wolf lope into the fog. Author Nolcha Fox’s Note: This collaborative flash fiction piece started out as Zuihitsu, a form Barbara and I wanted to explore. I don't know if we succeeded at the form, but we had lots of fun, and came up with a story that surprised us both. We alternated writing paragraphs (excluding dialogue immediately following the paragraph, which we considered an extension of that paragraph) I started and ended the piece. Nolcha’s poems have been curated in Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Alien Buddha Zine, Medusa’s Kitchen, and others. Her poetry books are available on Amazon and Dancing Girl Press. Nominee for 2023 Best of The Net. Editor for Open Arts Forum. Accidental interviewer/reviewer. Faker of fake news. Barbara’s work appears in online and print literary magazines, journals, and anthologies, and her poetry has won awards and recognition. Her debut poetry collection, Three-Penny Memories: A Poetic Memoir (EIF (Experiments in Fiction), which is about her relationship with her mother, who suffered from Alzheimer’s, is a best seller on Amazon. Also, on Spillwords, Barbara was voted Author of the Month of October 2021, nominated Author of the Year for 2021, and recognized as a Spillwords Socialite of the Year in 2021. Barbara is now Editor for MasticadoresUSA. She enjoys bringing writers together and has been sponsoring open mics and readings on Zoom during the pandemic.

CW: Abuse The chili was burning. She had set the burner too hot and hadn’t noticed. Her own mother would have called her a terrible cook. Took one to know one, but that was a weak counter. But the chili was burning, and one of her kids was screaming at the other kid. All the while, a third kid was stuck on her hip, and whenever she tried to set him down, he screamed. She had often wondered to herself if that was a sign of separation anxiety. But certainly, being only three, he hadn’t had time to develop a mental illness. The chili was burning and when she finally took it off the stove, she did it with one hand and the hot pot knocked against her forearm. A searing, shooting pain jumped through her arm, but she readjusted and walked the pot to the table before realizing that she had forgotten those silly little cork circles that would keep the lacquer from melting off her cheap wooden table. She set the pot back on the stove. The chili started to bubble again. The burn on her arm hurt, so she walked over to the faucet, flipped on the cold water and ran her singed arm underneath it. Relief was immediate, but it would smart for the next week or so. This wasn’t the first time she had burned herself. No, that was when her mother saw her standing too close to the stove, holding her palm above a heated coil for warmth. Her mother smacked her palm down into it, leaving insistent, painful welts that ran circular like a seashell for weeks. She was only eight. She shut off the water and the memory went too. The chili was burning so she picked it up off the stove and moved to the table before realizing she still didn’t have those damn cork circles. She put the chili back down when Luke came into the room. He was all snot and teary eyes. “Mom, Jenny pushed me,” the seven-year-old said. “And changed the channel to what she wanted to watch.” She yelled from the kitchen into the living room, “Jenny! I need you to come out here.” Jenny came running and looked at her mom with doe eyes, innocent and free from wrongdoing, an eleven-year-old who thought she knew how to work the system. “What’s up, Mom?” “Did you push your brother?” “No.” She shook her head slowly as if to add gravitas. The mother sighed and pushed her hair back with one hand. “Just go back in there and behave for a second so I can set the table.” The chili was burning again, and she almost picked up the chili before stopping and grabbing the table protectors and throwing one of them onto the table. She grabbed the chili, and carefully balancing it with one hand, set it down on the table. It was a little burnt around the sides, but that didn’t matter. It was a win to get it on the table. She’d take that. She looked for her wooden spoon that she had gotten at Goodwill. A dollar fifty for something that usually was close to six bucks. She loved a good bargain although sometimes she felt a little silly getting excited over four dollars and some change saved. She found the spoon where she’d left it, although she didn’t remember putting it in the dish cabinet. She gave the pot a stir, leaving the spoon sticking out because she couldn’t be bothered to find a new spot for the spoon. James fussed to be let down, and so she did. He toddled into the living room. It would only be a matter of time before he forgot that he wanted down in the first place and began to cry. There was a loud smack accompanied by a hysterical, keening wail. Luke came running out again. Now, two rivers ran from his eyes and fed into the two great and more viscous rivers that ran from his nose. When he tried to speak, he blubbered, “Jenny hit me.” He carried the “e” so perfectly long that she wondered if the child might pass out from lack of new air in his lungs. “Jenny!” she yelled from the kitchen. “Come in here.” They stood side by side, the boy furiously wiped his eyes and nose on a shirtsleeve that she would have to wash later. “I didn’t mean to!” Jenny’s voice rose into an exclamation, a child’s defense that some adults never unlearned. She crouched down to their level. “I told you both to behave. Now, what happened?” The floodgates poured out of both of their mouths and like God on the forty-first day of His flood, she stopped them both with a wave of her hand. “We should never resort to hitting unless it’s necessary. Jenny, did you need to hit him?” “He was trying to take the remote, and I wanted him to stop!” “You are not answering the question I asked you.” Jenny paused for a moment and in this moment, the three-year-old, James, stumbled back into the kitchen, saw the scene playing out in front of him and high-tailed it back into the other room as if he’d been spooked by a ghost. “I’m sorry,” Jenny said. Luke sniffled a little more, wiped his sleeve on his shirt again and gave his sister a hug. “Okay,” was all Luke said. The door opened and the screen door slammed shut behind it. “Look at this big strong man!” came her husband’s voice from the living room. The two children rushed into the living room. There was joyous noise and she listened to it as she bustled the rest of the kitchen plasticware onto the table. She remembered the bread in the oven and removed that. It was slightly black on top, but she fixed that by taking a knife and scraping the top part off. John came into the kitchen and smiled at her. “Smells good, honey.” “It’s been a shit day,” she said back. “Mine too. Wanna talk about it?” “No, not really. Let’s hurry up and eat, I’ve got class in an hour.” John spooned out the chili into a plastic bowl while she took the bread and placed it on the table. When she finished, she walked back into the living room and saw all three of them sitting on the couch together. The two siblings had probably helped the three-year-old up, Jenny and Luke’s fight already forgotten. “Come on, guys. Food’s ready.” John played the fool at the dinner table. He made silly jokes that Luke thought were incredible and made Jenny roll her eyes, but still, she smiled. The three-year-old was fussy and ate hardly anything so she tore the bread into small pieces and fed him from her hand. That, he seemed to like fine. When dinner was finished, she grabbed her notebook and World Literature anthology off the shared desk and kissed everyone goodbye, promising she would be home by midnight. After class, she was going to read and write in the campus library. John promised they would be bathed and in bed by nine, but she knew it would be closer to nine-thirty. That was okay. Before she left, John said, “I’m sorry you were having a rough day, Katelyn.” How long had it been since he had said her name? Since anyone had? She was mom or honey or you in the back. She almost broke down into tears then, but she just hugged him and soaked up his warmth before finally letting go and walking to her car. In class, they discussed Iphigenia at Aulis. While the rest of the class debated whether they felt it was right for Iphigenia to willingly go to her death, she contemplated what kind of woman allows another woman to be killed just to appease herself. And was that what it took for her name to be remembered? A tragedy? Her mother would have told her that she was being dramatic, seeing things that weren’t there. That the story wasn’t meant to be read with such a modern lens. When class finished and another Greek tragedy was assigned, another woman killed, she packed her things and walked to the library where she read the play and began to take notes, but she put her head down and slept until a librarian, a very old woman who smelled of smoke and cedar and whose face was wrinkly and kind, nudged her with a few fingers and ushered her on her way home. There, she found her husband sleeping on the couch, a book resting on his chest, laundry folded in a basket and some reality TV show playing. It was the kind of show where no one had to cook or clean or put children to bed. They did not have to balance work and play and personal relationships and dreams. They didn’t have to do anything but exist. She watched for a few minutes, chuckling a little at the antics on screen and then woke her husband and led him by hand to their bed where she dreamt of burnt chili, how sweet it tasted on her tongue, and her husband calling her by name again and again. Elijah Woodruff is a middle school ELA teacher who does it for his students but wouldn't mind being paid a little more.

What I should have said to him that night on the bridge is Don’t let go, but what I actually said is Do it and whether he would have done it anyway — full, as he was, of being seventeen and a crate of Special Red — went down into the black water with him. And for weeks the adults wept, and the teams of frogmen combed the silt as far the estuary where the river spools into the flat Atlantic, but no trace of Stu would ever reward their efforts. We hung around, the rest of us, though we avoided the bridge and the river and talking about him. We sat on the wall of the race track; we skulked in the churchyard and threw stones at the cans we balanced on gravestones. And for all our strut and disbelief, not one of us back then would have predicted Stu would show up again all of thirty years later, tangle-haired and bearded, having lost his memory in an Ashram in Rishikesh. And of course he didn’t. But now, on those occasions late at night when his sister – my wife – stares into her glass, and clinks the ice around, and asks me what I think really happened to him, I make up stories like that for her, and for me, and this is one of them. Tim Craig lives in London. A winner of the Bridport Prize for Flash Fiction, his small stories have appeared three times in the Best Microfiction anthology and in many literary journals in the US and UK. His debut collection, ‘Now You See Him,’ was published in 2022 by Ad Hoc Fiction.