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An impractical weapon: it drips, but never gore, and its birchwood hilt will hardly fill a child’s hand. I cannot eat a popsicle, though— not even a green I have to halve, two lime blades in one sheath— without a thought for the Zambonis hijacked at ice knifepoint and rumors of Good Humor trucks stuck-up with their own wares.

whiteout near waterville on the way to work, on the way home, a tunnel the road has disappeared, the snow ruts have smoothed & cold, you are cold go out of your way to let everything know you don’t care at all & then you want something mule deer are not trusting you & you saying why to their velvet & explanations for you again they run alone along white hills consider listening/ consider falling a voice in fog a feeling of of not being it becomes a list/they become lost & sad & it goes on enough that they leave tracks/ say no suddenly you aren’t quiet you call when you can & you say why & drag up some charm from a dirt basement & the deer are climbing across more fields eating grass in snow/ consider grabbing a life vest

The tinsel clad angels sing, open mouths black holes on a blazing lit stage. The families cluster outside the supermarket, watching, huddled together for warmth. Smaller children pet the donkey, their faces wide in surprise at the rank smell of real fur and the scratch and itch of the straw bales. We’re moved from our usual spot, usurped by a man selling rude pink hot dogs and frying cheap burgers. The fat hangs on the winter air. We’re standing on cardboard and newspaper to insulate our feet. Adults queue for mulled wine, hoping for alcoholic reprieve from the volunteers who rattle buckets and fumble with books of raffle tickets. “You selling or collecting?” A man eyes the confectionary packs in the cardboard box on our table. “Collecting,” we say. “For people in food poverty.” He shrugs, unimpressed and wanders away. I add brown tape to the collection box, healing the split in its side. The supermarket staff hand out blue helium balloons, branded with white and silver bold type. Older children grab and run squealing into the icy car park, weaving through shoppers wrestling their metal trolleys. “Let it go, let it go...” The singer wails, inciting the children who dare each other to release their balloons. “Let one go” sniggers my daughter, blowing a raspberry. She disturbs my concentration. I search the darkening sky, but I’ve lost sight of the balloon. I’m testing my eyesight. Without my glasses, I can’t see the balloons at all, and if I stare too hard, the floaters in my eyes disrupt my vision. But if I lock on one while it’s low and colourful, I can trace it for a while, rising over the rooftops, its string dangling, flying high on the wind current over the chimneys until it becomes a blot, a shrinking dot, then disappears. My daughter asks if the balloons will reach outer space. “Will they burst or deflate?” “Helium versus atmospheric pressure—you should know from your science lessons.” “Mu-um,” she groans, then asks, “How high is the highest that someone has jumped?” “Google the world record,” I say. “I know. It’s the men on the moon, leaping in their spacesuits.” She imitates a moon walk, sliding in her snow boots. I think of the umbilical cords, tethering astronauts, stretching taut when they bound over pitted craters, illuminated against the star-pierced black beyond. I suggest the highest jump might depend on the length of the cord, but she’s dismissive. “If you don’t mind dying, she says, you could jump high beyond gravity, you could just keep rising until….” “But there’s nowhere without gravity,” I say. “And until what?” “Just until,” she says, losing interest. I cup my mulled wine to warm my hands. I sip a little and grimace at the foul taste. ‘If you don’t mind dying’, I think, shrugging into my coat. No one my age would say such a thing. I mind. I mind, it might happen, before she has a daughter, flying helium balloons—if they’re still allowed then. I mind, knowing I won’t be able to see the grandchild, who won’t fly the banned balloon of indistinguishable colour. “Let’s jump, to keep warm. I’m so cold. My feet are frozen. I can’t feel my toes.” “I’m not cold, and you’re embarrassing,” she says, but laughing, she hops once on each foot. The supermarket manager takes the microphone. “Here is the moment we’ve all been waiting for!” he shouts at us. He counts backwards from ten. Beckoned, we all join in. “Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three...,” the shouting amplifies, and at ‘one’, we clap our gloved hands, cheer, and whistle as the tree sparks alight, a helium balloon is caught in its crowning star, twenty feet high in the air. Emily Macdonald was born in England but grew up in New Zealand. Fascinated by wine as a student, she has worked in the UK wine trade ever since. Since going freelance in 2020 she has been writing short stories and flash fiction. She has won and been placed in several competitions and has work published in anthologies and journals with amongst others, Fictive Dream, Reflex Fiction, Crow & Cross Keys, Ellipsis Zine, Roi Fainéant, Free Flash Fiction and The Phare. In writing and in wines she likes variety, persistence, and enough acidity to add bite.

Crow abandoned the snow for another time, for leaves growing and horizontal. He walked until he came to a chinampa floating in the sunlight. When he opened his mouth to greet the soil, the snow caught up with him and froze the lake beds, and when Crow stood over the ice, he did not recognize his reflection. Monique Quintana is a Xicana from Fresno, CA, and is the author of Cenote City (Clash Books, 2019). Her work has been published in Pank, Wildness, Lost Balloon, Okay Donkey, and The Acentos Review, among others. Her work has also been supported by Yaddo, The Sundress Academy for the Arts, The Community of Writers, and The Kimmel Harding Nelson Center. She was the inaugural winner of Amplify's Writer of Color Fellowship and is a contributing editor at Luna Luna Magazine, where she writes book reviews, artist interviews, and personal essays. Connect; moniquequintana.com and @quintanagothic on Instagram and Twitter.

He stole Addie as she hid in the pickle barrel. He hated pickles so it felt like the perfect hiding place. When we were dating, I protected myself by eating big garlicky pickles to repel him like he was a vampire. I kept her safe from him for years. Before she was born, I pushed her into a thimble in my belly. The Monopoly game piece turned her into Thumbelina on ultrasounds. My sonographer was confused and brought in the doctor. They compared notes and whispered. “It’s okay. She’s safer that way.” I told them both. When she was born, I taught her how to climb into bigger and bigger hiding places. First, Campbell’s soup cans. An igloo we made together in the front yard out of snowballs. My purse. Diaper boxes. TV boxes. A fish tank painted black. I crammed her into an ironic milk carton at some point, the kind with her face on the exterior. Artificially-aged until she looked so different no one would know it was her when she emerged smelling sour and curdly like Little Miss Muffet. Neither one of us were afraid of spiders sitting beside us, only of him. Her father. A venomous man that lurked next to ottomans and cheese factories and Crayola factories and schools and our cottage. We moved a lot but always found boxy houses, tiny ones covered in moss that blanketed the smell of both of us so he couldn’t bloodhound search us out when we slept under and behind creeping green. During the pickle jar months, bought at a warehouse store, Addie complained about the smell and having her face squished against the jar. But she always understood. Before she contortionisted into the jar, I told her bedtime stories about cucumbers and pickles. “Did you know pickles are made from cucumbers?” She told me all muffly and pickly gurgling the juice as she treaded pickle juice slightly green jaundiced nauseated from inhaling brine. We cooked and baked with pickles and pickle juice, her little face peeking up at me. Her favorite recipe was a pickle granita which sounded fancy but was really only pickle juice frozen and turned into a shaved ice cone. When she graduated to a pickle barrel for extra space to spread out her legs a bit, I honestly thought she would be safer behind the curved wood. I was wrong. While we slept he popped open the lid with a crowbar or so the police say. They didn’t help much, just stood there shaking their heads and eating pickles in their bare hands. I contacted Peter’s Pickles, the local pickle factory and brought them Addie’s most recent school picture. They made her into their label mascot. For every jar sold, for every barrel shipped to a country store or rural gas station, they sent me a nickel and a note. Tips and sightings came in for months but slowed. We lived in a small town and the factory didn’t have much reach. Best pickles in the county but not sold in major markets. I searched for her for years on my own once the police gave up. I knew she would still smell of milk and pickles. I played scratch and sniff on street corners and park benches and school crosswalks, running my finger along stair rails and windowsills trying to catch a whiff of her. On days when it snows and flakes fall on my face, I close my eyes and picture her and try to sniff her back into my life, even briefly. It never works. I fry her favorite food fried pickles now on the anniversary of her disappearance, opening the windows and sharing her with the neighborhood in case someone has smelled her, seen her. I still smell him and her on the bus some days and I watch for footprints of pickle juice green against the first snow. On my worst days, I scratch and scream her name at the sky until an artificial smell comes through that isn’t her, just some other girl who is lost on the bus or in the country sleeping next to cucumbers and cows that are blissfully unaware she is nearby. Amy Barnes is the author of three short fiction collections: AMBROTYPES published by word west, “Mother Figures” published by ELJ, Editions and CHILD CRAFT, forthcoming from Belle Point Press in late-2023. Her words have appeared in a wide range of publications including The Citron Review, JMWW, Cease, Cows, Janus Lit, Flash Frog, Complete Sentence, The Bureau Dispatch, Nurture Lit, X-R-A-Y Lit, McSweeney’s, SmokeLong Quarterly, and many others. She’s been nominated for Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, long-listed for Wigleaf50 in 2021 and 2022, and included in Best Small Fictions 2022. She’s a Fractured Lit Associate Editor, Gone Lawn co-editor, Ruby Lit assistant editor and reads for Retreat West, The MacGuffin, and Narratively. You can find her on Twitter at @amygcb.

The gas station is holding a squirrel cooking contest (prize: a plaque and a taxidermied squirrel trophy). It’s wearing a little flannel jacket– the squirrel, not the gas station (if the gas station were wearing a coat, it’d be a beat-up beige Carhart, with specks of motor oil and a flask duct-taped to the interior). You take your dog into the gas station– not the motor-oil-wearing-flask-taping-Carhart one, the nicer one around the corner, with the orange Welcome Hunters! banner and the 10-cent dog treats, the one where USPS drops the mail— and so you take your dog into THAT gas station, and they know him by name (Lil’ Pup). He’s six-months old and sixty-five pounds, feet pounding prints in the snow, and you could swear that they’re from a bear. A Great Pyrenees, like everyone has around here (you like to remind him he’s not just a good pyrenees, and he likes to remind you that he’s your best friend– like you’ve got many other choices, but still). Cold-hardy, hardy enough to at least put up a fight with anything else that lives out here. Tough dogs for a tough place, except when the neighbor’s 120-pounder gets out and pads down the road, crosses the train tracks and gets side-swiped by some hunter’s ATV, then bunkers down under a pine for a few nights. It’s getting down to ten degrees, and the whole community turns out, little foster-children girls crying this dog’s name (Tucker), peering into the woods, holding their own pups close at night, weaving fingers into fur that’s denser than snow drifts. And while the little girls are cuddling their dogs, yours is out hopping around in the snow, chasing down the neighbor lady, who’s yoked herself to a sledge and is cross-country skiing down the road, toddlers tugged behind her. The whole street is holding its breath, waiting on you to buy a plow truck, because they’re digging their way to the main road by hand, gloves patched with duct-tape, the geriatric wielding shovels like walkers. So you’re stacking firewood all day, hoping that burning that will save you from burning dollars, what with the weather this cold, and now your overalls are crusted in dirt from rolling logs on hands and knees, a method you switched to after your legs gave out, after your shoulders were so bruised you could barely keep anything hoisted onto them. All that, and you haven’t even put in the wood stove yet. You leave your overalls in a heap by the front door– no sense washing them– and pour a glass of whiskey, hope your kidneys don’t give out the next day (they do), and watch darkness sink into tracks criss-crossing the fields. You message your mother about squirrel-cooking recipes, make a joke about your cousin (Stanley), and wait for the reply. Selena grew up in the woods, making things. Now, she lives on the prairie with her husband and their 18 very excellent chickens. She still likes to make things. You can find her work in Cheap Pop and Autofocus, or find her online at selenalangner.com.

Father threw me off the sailboat, gripped the rudder with his left hand, did something with the rope in his clean, right palm. The boat swung around and went away, leaving me cold, kicking, sinking. Mother waved from the shore in white shorts and the blue-striped tee she had sewn in preparation for the trip. Sister, naked except for the diaper that sagged to her knees, squatted on the beach, shook her head, no, no. Come back, Katie, thought Sister at me. Sister picked up a handful of coarse sand, threw it. Each grain of sand became an animal in flight, a bird arcing and falling; several hundred sparrows swooped in the air over the lake, leveled their beaks to the surface to scoop a small, brief ring from its plane. Several hundred sparrows collected gray lake water in their bills, then spun, vanished into their own cool shadows. How many birds were required to drain the lake so that I might live? I didn’t know. I urinated, and the warmth felt good on my thighs. Come on honey, swim! called Mother. She held her arms out, fists raised. Sister sat on the beach, shook her head, no, no. Sister threw more and more sand at the water while I shivered, kicked. Eighty yards beyond me, Father fumbled with the rope in his clean right palm and swamped the boat. I could hear the tone of his curse but not the words. It wasn’t long afterwards that I was up in the sky, watching myself—my little chin above the lake’s surface, hair fanning behind, legs treading stiffly. I had no desire to return. Instead of reentering my body, I drifted toward the farther shore, where, up on a small rise in the mixed pine forest and in between three crisscrossed fallen trees, I found a boy crouched in front of a squat, concrete obelisk. The boy was about my age, possibly younger. He had straight brown hair that flopped into his eyes. The boy held a rusty nail in his right hand, pointed at me, then to the obelisk, a shape I had never seen before. Is it magical? I asked, and the boy nodded, crouched low, and scratched the image of an eye into the obelisk’s east-facing surface. When I asked him what he was doing, he pointed to a winter deer coming at us on the path; the deer had this bulbous, leathery growth on its face, and it approached us so closely that I thought it must be blind. Rain fell in the leftover spaces. The deformed deer picked its way along a chain-link fence containing a private graveyard. Let’s go, said the boy, and stood up. He threw the nail into the woods; it was then that I saw that the boy carried a plastic bag containing a brown box pillow—it looked to belong to someone’s sofa. I followed the boy along a gravel path until it split. The boy pointed to the path with the steeper slope. Does this path lead to the water? asked the boy. It’s a secret, I said. Then the boy pushed me to the ground, covered my mouth with the pillow. His hands were around my neck, too. Stop hitting me, I said. His hands softened, became my mother’s. Mother wrapped me in a large white towel and draped me over her lap in the front seat of the station wagon without a seatbelt and with the heat on high. At the cabin, I took a scalding shower, stole a bottle of vanilla extract, drank it in two gulps, and slept on the nubby brown sofa while Sister waited for me to thank her for saving my life. Sister squatted next to me and rubbed my chest: wake up, Katie! Hands on my legs and my feet, hands lifting my own above my head. What’s wrong with her? asked Mother. She’s pretending, said Father. He opened the front door—it was a knotty pine, flimsy. The sun was setting at the bottom of a hill behind the two small timber frame cabins across the way. The radiator whistled and the record skipped. On the carpet, Sister squatted rhythmically. I remember the low thud of the drums—da-da-da-da, da, da-dum. I remember the scratch of the needle on the record, and I think now about how difficult it is to describe what it is that I felt then. How we laughed at my sister, my small dancing sister, while she scowled, set her chin and clenched her fists, squatted deeper and with great control! She can do things with her body that no one else can do, said Father. A little of this, a little of that, sang Sister, and Mother turned to stare. Sister sang that song in a low voice, a man’s voice. A little of this, a little of that, sang Sister, squatting and bouncing. My parents approached each other, nodding, fingertips out, as if to dance. My father didn’t believe in God, said Mother. She touched her husband’s left hand with her right. My father didn’t believe in factors outside of his control, though everything was, said Mother. I’m sorry, said Father. This ambition, this arrogance. This testing of the world—what if you two had been alone out there? asked Mother. You’re a good swimmer, said Father. I should divorce you tomorrow, said Mother. I lifted my head off the brown, nubby arm rest and saw Father standing in the doorway of the small cabin, saw Father sitting in the sunfish on the lake, sailing away, away. Holding a rope in his clean palm, he looks back at my small wet head sunk to the nostrils forty yards from shore. The dry green leaves and the new evergreen shoots of the tree line on the far shore, they wink. Come back, Father, I gasp, but he’s off to the races toward the farther shore, doing something with ropes, and cursing. Looking back at me, looking at his hands, looking at the sky. Do it! says Sister, and she throws a fistful of sparrows towards me with her left hand. Several hundred sparrows arrow across the brown-gray water, swarm my eyes. Don’t ever forget the this and the that, sister whispers into my ear. She smells like sunflowers. I have a headache and my cold legs pain. Mother screams on shore, a hoarse and bloody noise. Mother’s fists in the air, white shorts wet now in the cold brown water. Mother dolphins into the space between us. Swim, Katie! Sister’s fingers in the coarse wet sand, flinging fistfuls of sparrows across the water to save me. Several thousand sparrows coalesce, transform into a large, diamond-shaped fish with blue and white stripes; it bites me on the neck and rafts me to shore. Years later when I was a teenager and no longer lived in that cold place but in another place nearly as cold, I would come home from doing the morning paper route and run hot water in the porcelain bathroom sink. I would perch on the countertop with my cold feet dangling in the hot basin, sipping vanilla extract. The thaw excruciating, joyous. Barbara Lock is a writer, editor, teacher, and physician. Her work appears in Invisible City, Superstition Review, Cold Signal, and elsewhere. There's more about her at barbaralock.com

John Stanley had a tear-off monthly calendar, the kind auto-repair shops give away. He’d taken off the cardboard backing or it had torn off, leaving a stack of paper the size of a business card stapled twice at the top. He kept it in his breast pocket. When I learned the date, I felt better. Each time I picked out John’s shape, standing as though he had one leg short a few inches, I’d ask. Even if I already knew. I did the math over and over. The Chinese were clever. Endless. They’d swoop down the frigid night, clanging and hooting deafening, confusing, banging off the ice, cracking and whipping flares flaming, trailing, staining the center of our vision. We could barely aim. Didn’t know where to aim. We thought of our deaths only when the first line topped the mountain ridge, bugles, horns, whistles blowing. By the fifth or sixth wave, they climbed over bodies three high. We didn’t think about death anymore. Just running. “Shooting fish in a barrel,” someone said. General Smith said, “Gentlemen, we’re not retreating. We’re just advancing in a different direction.” Night temperatures negative-eighty wind chill. What negative eighty feels like, couldn’t say. That low, you can’t feel anything. When we got there, we had different ideas. No doubts. We’d crushed enemies in two world wars—two fronts, the second. We’d do it again. Then we met Korea. Fell back from jump. This Patrick kid, though. Two weeks in Chosin, 10,000-plus forms slip-sliding down valleys past mountaintop encampments of Chinese with machine guns and mortars, longest retreat in American history, constant chaos, rarely saw the same guy, but this Patrick kid, always this Patrick kid. Somehow. Dirt’d settled into hollows a face his age shouldn’t have had. In the dark, you couldn’t distinguish the blue of his irises, pupils holes in his skull. He talked. Even in the fighting, he’d talk. Then we’d return to pick up the dead, throw them on trucks. Half-naked bodies congealed midmotion, struggling to get up when turned to ice or pedaling feet and beating arms when their world froze. The Chinese would loot, then retrench. No appropriate clothing for the weather, either side. And Patrick, he’d talk. About his eighth birthday party, say. The cake, a frog a neighbor’d whittled, his mom’s flowers. Generic man in overcoat, hood, helmet: “Shut up, kid. Just shut up.” Patrick said he’d meet the right girl in church, where his mom told him any boy’d do right finding a wife. Generic guy—same one, different one, same time, different time—pressed his eyes closed, looking inside. “Hey, Patrick,” I said. No one wanted talk about wives. “You know it’s December 20?” Then he’d go back to birthdays, maybe, about one year his fell on Sunday, about how that year he’d had a joint birthday–first communion party. Generic guy held himself on the edge of the truck: “Please.” Stories passed how someone’s nose dropped off. I carried awhile a soldier with legs frozen to midcalf. Later, a whole town of men front and behind, one guy stood so still I thought we’d stopped and he’d kept moving. I peered into his eyes. “I can’t feel my face,” he said. Patrick was talking about Christmas. Had been since I’d said it was Christmas Eve. Mom hung red glass globes. Dad bought flocked trees, the kind with powder snow. The soldier said, “I can’t walk.” We weren’t leaving the dead, so I grabbed him and had Patrick grab him. We got back in line. Five minutes or two hours later, the Chinese again. We held the soldier like a hammock, tossed him behind rocks. Found him again after. The adrenaline had warmed our ears to throbbing, screaming. Grenade’d got him. Pieces strung the rocks. Blood in the snow looks black until it fans, dilutes. Blood didn’t dilute much at Chosin. Froze first. Two-three days later, a valley. Blinding vastness. We’d slithered for days through serried mountain crevasses, peaks blocking the sky. Here men and trucks had space. Here we huddled. Felt safer. Could see things coming, we figured. The sun beamed but didn’t warm. The air breathed shallow. We had cold-thick skin, insensible limbs, fingers. Caravan halted to let laggers arrive, tighten the line. Some men talked. Most stared. We passed cigarettes, lighting them end-to-end. Down a ways, John Stanley stood alone. I lumbered up. Asked the date. He didn’t extract the calendar. He squinted into the sun. “December 30,” he said. His lips refolded around his lit cigarette; he held the index finger of one hand hooked over. The thumb rubbed the scarf snaking to his chin. Sister’s birthday, December 30. Until she died, I’d sometimes stand alone at her parties. Everyone had conversations about it with their eyes. John Stanley must have gotten my address from the Marines. He wrote how it’d been forty-five years and he couldn’t quit thinking about me. He didn’t mean me, meant “it.” Some people think talking pales ghosts away. Second paragraph, I dropped the letter behind my worktable. December 30 in Chosin, I stood with John Stanley and watched men, trucks slide into the valley. Black beetles, white landscape. Patrick stood catty-corner behind, talking about his past, or his family, or home. Soon enough we had a circle, each man looking into his distance. We adjusted and readjusted scarves and helmets. One man flung his rifle over his shoulder, hand gripping muzzle, stock pushing past neck. He had a dense brown moustache distinguishable from an unshaven face for its length, volume. The guy opposite me had his barrel in the snow; he leaned against the stock. This man said his feet hurt. All our feet hurt. All our canteens belted our waists. All our duffels hung from our shoulders or lashed our backs. Groups of guys at a short distance, bundled, clustered, a murder of scarecrows. A horde of boys stacked three-high under matching overcoats. Lumpy. Synonymous. My palm wrapped my hand guard, held the rifle against my hip. I moved to pass it across my shoulders, rest my wrists over the ends. Thumb looped the trigger. Rustling through the masses. I wondered at my firearm, the recoil in my wrist, elbow. Looked up. Out on one arm now, the guy who’d said his feet hurt. Our circle observed for a slowed-down time. The point-blank dot on his olive overcoat grew into a black half dollar. His mouth worked, teeth red. His jaw parted, stretched a sticky crimson line. Reaching fingers clutched the mustached man’s pant leg, one-arm wrenched up the torso, tumid eyes on a wobbly head seeking, needing, pupils vibrating. Scared. The guts let go. The cold air fell back for the warm smell. A moment. Then retrenched, shoved the remaining blood from his face. Snapped him to wax. Patrick flumped in the snow, an unsteady toddler. Stopped talking. The men looked at me, the lips of their helmets curling, exposing their eyes. Leslie Farnsworth has published short fiction, journalism, and essays in literary journals and national publications. To discover more of her work, visit www.lesliefarnsworth.com.

Roland Nevins adjusted the waistband of his shorts, rearranged his gut. There was a second band of flab down there these days, the skin a shade greyer than the rest of him. It was cold in his front room and goose pimples bumped beneath the liver spots. “All bought and paid for, Rollie. Sign of a life well lived,” said Danny the Neck. Danny had been there since 6AM, having drifted over from the festive lock-in at the Brown Cow. Waves of whiskey kept washing by, and Roland suspected his friend was there less for support and more to keep the hangover at bay for a few precious hours more. “Life well lived,” he replied, his smile faint. The sad thing was that his bulk wasn’t proof of anything beyond poor diet and exercise. A well-lived life would have seen his wife and daughter with him that morning rather than the neighbourhood alcoholic. It would have given him more than this inherited bungalow besieged by black-backed gulls. There had been times when he had been flush, it was true, times of high living and expensive dinners, but now he was stuck in an out-of-season seaside town, freighted with half-memories, mildew and adipose tissue. Roland Nevins. King of the polar bears. As he pulled on his towelling robe and hunted for flip-flops, Roland tried to count how often he’d done this event. The first time was in ’98, when Mira, his daughter, was still small enough to be swaddled and carried to the beach, her grandma fussing over her. There had been a few times he hadn’t taken part – six months in Pentonville, the aborted fresh start in Ibiza – but otherwise this had been a Boxing Day ritual every year since. At first it was a natural addition to the Christmas visit to his parents, and then a kind of remembrance after he moved alone into their empty home. And even though the crowds were smaller, and the horizon was dominated by wind turbines and the sea a dirty brown, it was still a thrill as he strode across the promenade down to the shingle. Danny the Neck stumbled along behind him, wafting in and out of commentary. “Will TV be there, do you think?” he asked, before breaking into a bronchial cough. Roland scanned the crowd. No sign of media, although that didn’t mean much. Mira had explained the workings of these fancy new smartphones during the last of their civil conversations, and it seemed like every other person holding their device up could be a reporter from the local paper or one of those websites. “Rollie!” A high-pitched squeal. Barbara Andersson. He had been to school with Babs, had spent his life bumping into her on shopping trips and hospital visits. She had never moved beyond the street of her birth and had the convict’s delight in seeing others come home. Babs was one of those women who would touch you instinctively and share local gossip without waiting for invitation. “Your beard looks majestic, Rollie,” she said, shivering in her swimsuit. “Like a king of old.” “I told him. He looks like Grizzly Adams,” said Danny. Barbara flinched when she noticed him, all too aware of the Neck’s reputation. Aside from Barbara and Danny, there were only a few other familiar faces. Devon from the Cow was there (changing out of his barman’s clobber right there on the beach, a towel for modesty) and Winston with the yellow eyes, still drunk from the lock-in. Blinker, who used to be a policeman, and Turkish Dave. Fewer in number than previous years and older. Not many supporters, either. Blinker had brought his family with him, which was a relief since children generally made this event feel less futile, although the two boys were both sulky and clinging to their mother’s legs. It wasn’t really their town any longer, Roland thought sadly. The Brown Cow was the last pub standing after The Dominion and Empire had given up the fight. People like Blinker and Devon were doing their level best to find work elsewhere, desperate to abandon the hopeless cases too rooted to escape. Hard to say who it all belonged to now. The hotels along this part of the seafront all had ‘No Vacancy’ neon glowing in the windows beneath the fairy lights, but they weren’t welcoming holidaymakers, not anymore. Instead, the Home Office stacked each one with asylum seekers in lieu of alternative accommodation and placed security guards on the doors. Runaway people from faraway places – Eritrea, Uganda, Afghanistan, Ukraine. Roland knew what his neighbours thought of the situation, heard their gripes in almost every other conversation. (“You should complain to the council,” Babs had said. “People respect you around here.” “We should get paraffin and some matches,” Danny slurred one time. “Give them a proper welcome.”) But why fight a losing battle? The tourists weren’t coming, not anymore, and the attractions grew shabbier year-on-year. They’d closed the crazy golf and the boating lake would be next. At least the hotels had found purpose, and the refugees a home, however frigid and temporary. Everything else was nostalgia and ritual. “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the annual Boxing Day Polar Bear Plunge.” Turkish Dave was this year’s commentator, standing on a stepladder that had half-sunk in the sand. He had one of those portable speakers they use at street markets, although it seemed unnecessary when the throng was this sparse. “Our rules are very simple. The polar bears need to line-up behind the markers and wait for my whistle. You can only take the plunge in your bathing suits. No everyday clothes, please – no t-shirts or trousers,” he said. There was a groan at the back, some newcomer unused to the almost alpine conditions. “You can walk or run into the water, but no diving – it’s not that deep. If you see anyone get into trouble, make some noise, point them out. We have lifeguards ready to help.” Roland looked at the assembled support staff, jowly-looking men in Santa hats. He sent up a silent prayer that no-one needed them. “Keep your heads above water. No horseplay. When we blow the whistle a second time, you must get out.” That was smart, thought Roland. Last year, a foolhardy couple had tried to last more than 10 minutes out there, and an ambulance had been called. “Now, if I could ask our polar bears to assemble. As a reminder, we are raising funds for the lifeboats…” That raised a boo, from people so embittered they were offended at the idea of saving specific lives from rough seas. Roland shot the offenders a hard look, watched them go silent. “…for the lifeboats,” continued Dave, “so please give generously in the buckets.” Turkish Dave had done a decent enough job. Roland was pleased. He strode to the centre of the starting line, smiling as the others filed in behind him. Babs was there, jostling to be as close as she could, and Winston with the yellow eyes, breathing raggedly already. The collective noun for a pack of polar bears is a ‘celebration,’ but there wasn’t much to celebrate. Around 20 people in total, pink and vulnerable and exposed, and a fraction of what this event used to attract. “All right,” echoed the speaker, feedback fizzing at the edges. “I am going to blow the whistle in 10… 9…” Roland crouches into a sprinter’s pose, alive in the moment. He doesn’t move fast, he knows that, but people are generally happy to stand back and let him take the lead. He never has a heartbeat’s hesitation, never lets the anticipation of cold shock prevent him from experiencing it. “8… 7… 6…” For one intense instant, it feels like a bolt of lightning, each nerve ending suddenly alive and howling. Then your body compensates, redirecting blood flow to your core and away from the skin, pumping out dopamine to prevent a full shutdown. “5… 4… 3...” And the fact that he still does this, that people buy him pints in the Cow after and slap his back, is proof of something. He thinks of his ex-wife, his daughter, how proud of him they had been. That period of his life, when he was both father and son in parallel, was the best of times, he knows that now. It had to mean something that he could still do the plunge, could still show the world what he is capable of, despite everything it has taken from him. “2… wait, wait, wait.” Another group has arrived, latecomers. He hears Barbara’s angry tut, sees Danny the Neck try to remonstrate with them. It is a group from the beachfront hotel, younger than the polar bears by at least a decade, and darker, less vulnerable. They begin stripping, there on the beach, organising their clothes into neat piles on the pebbles. Men and boys who arrived by small dinghies, who risked drowning to get here, ready to face the sea again. “It’s not right. They can’t swim in their underpants,” says Barbara, but the men move with determination and outnumber the organisers by three-to-one. Roland sizes up the one he takes to be the ringleader. He is a big man, almost as tall as Roland himself, and built. There is a belly there, sure, but his arms and chest have a concentration to them, a tautness that speaks to years of hard labour. He has a beard, too, not as groomed and imposing as Roland’s perhaps, but capable of making a statement. He senses the crowd is waiting for him to pass judgement, can see Turkish Dave pause, the microphone limp in his hand. There are far more bodies on the beach now, a full colour palette of skin tones, and none of the newcomers are laughing or jostling, none of them are drunk from the night before or doing this for a dare. The ringleader turns and looks at him. There’s just this flash of connection, as Roland recognises the pleading in the man’s eyes, the urgency. He has a swirling pattern of old scar tissue on his chest, as though someone has taken a rake to a zen garden. “Let’s go,” Roland shouts, turning back to the waves as they break upon the shore. “We’re catching our deaths out here.” “OK. 3… 2… 1…” The pack moves with him, ready for the plunge, holding its breath in unison. After so much time, it feels like a celebration. Edward Barnfield is a writer and researcher living in the Middle East. His stories have appeared in Ellipsis Zine, Retreat West, Third Flatiron, Strands, Janus Literary, Leicester Writes, Cranked Anvil, and Reflex Press, among others.

I plod down the street to the corner a walker as my guide careful to navigate the cracks on the sidewalk, heat bouncing off the pavement. Inside the store sweat drips down my back and my chest in rivers I pass by aisle one and two sharp right tugging open the glass door at the end of aisle three I stick my head in the freezer. I suck it all in, chest tightening exhale, small misty clouds the air is heavy and dense, cooling the heat on my cheeks towers of frost-covered boxes, glassy crystals line the metal shelves underneath. Ice cream, sandwiched between cookies floating on root-beer with cake topped with browned meringue. creaminess coats the inside of my mouth, no rules, no restrictions no shame numb tongue, dancing on my tastebuds. My mood soars Closing my eyes, brain-inducing dopamine fuels the fire of gran’s homemade gelato, dense smooth delight dad’s sorbet, sweetened with fruit and liqueur sundaes drowning in chocolate sauce, Snow cones and slushies, crushed ice with flavoured syrup I created for my kids, long scattered across the globe now memories of making friends, courting lovers, family around the table counting blessings- Ma’am? the clerk mops his brow, that door’s been open over thirty seconds Through the cloudy glass, I agree but he’s wrong it’s been unlatched for decades, emotional well-being, flashes of a lifetime Still, I smile, he’s too young to understand how at my age it’s a slog even to get out how for people the likes of me? all we have to grasp onto are reminders caches of recollections freezer therapy Karen Grose is a writer from Toronto, Canada. Her first novel, The Dime Box, was selected by Amnesty International for its 2021 book club to represent women’s issues. She has recently begun to write poetry. Aisle Three honours elders, the hearts of building family, who in later years strive to keep knowledge and memories alive.

The bedside clock flips to 12:00 am as I lay and watch the changes that occur in the span of a second. Wednesday becomes Thursday. November becomes December. Today becomes yesterday. So much time moved into the past tense. Yet my mind still hangs on to too much. Those conversations I should’ve had, but fumbled and passed. Emails that were so imperfect, they write and rewrite themselves in my head but are too late to be sent. In this midnight hour, anything can become sharp, little shovels to bury me inside myself. I never used to be like this. As a kid, when December rolled around, I would lie awake and think of Santa. And now, I am thinking about garbage men. Not the regular ones who lounge inside their side-loader dumpster trucks. I know their sound. Grumbling up and down alleys. Big haul tires crunching gravel. Flexing bent mechanical arms every few feet to toss a bucket of weekly suburban waste into an open metal gut. Coffee pods leached of their dark roasted flavors. Single use contacts removed from sensitive dry eyes. Air fresheners dispensed of all their natural fresh scents. No. The garbage men I’m thinking of are the ones I never hear. The ones who tend to park bins bolted to cement slabs. Monuments to the wasteful in the middle of wind-chilled fields. Things that are emptied while I’m tucked beneath my quilt, worried about the growing inches of snow pressing on the eaves overhead. As I get older, accumulation becomes a form of burden instead of delight. And December’s miracles are no longer carried out by an imaginary man with a penchant for red velvet in the form of cookies, cupcakes, and coordinating knits. Just regular people who float through the night, black plastic sacks on their back, taking away all the things we no longer need. JENNY WONG is a writer, traveler, and occasional business analyst. Her favorite places to wander are Tokyo alleys, Singapore hawker centers, and Parisian cemeteries. She resides in Canada near the Rocky Mountains.

I am a snow-capped mountain, my flesh—old Himalayan terrain. Weathering winds from the poles I lay barren—uprooting seeds before they can dream. Pablo Neruda’s nightmare, I am a snow-leopard clawing at man’s musky scent. A guarded fortress alchemizing silver into gold at dawn, my jagged crown and cannon balls keeping lovers—looters at bay. But when a lone wolf, torn from his pack, howls at the waning moon, the geometry of snowflakes reflecting in his deep brown eyes, I can hear my frozen heart thump. I twitch a little, dropping icicles on that veined thing I thought was long dead, attempting to kill it again, but instead, I feel a tinge of guilt when faultless cities scream into the night. Tejaswinee is a Pushcart-nominated writer and poet from West Bengal, India. Founder of The Hooghly Review, she has/will have work published in Dreich Magazine, Setu Bilingual Magazine, Amity: Peace Poems (Hawakal, 2022), Muse India, Taco Bell Quarterly, The Unconventional Courier, Paddler Press, Misery Tourism, Roi Fainéant Press, Maw Poetry Magazine, and others. Tejaswinee is also a lawyer and can be found tweeting at @TejaswineeRC.