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Tim Thiện Nguyễn (he/him) is a Vietnamese American scientist whose Ph.D. research interrogates how genes shape our face in the womb. He has published through Diode, bath magg,  and the Iowa Chapbook Prize ; additional work is forthcoming in Defunkt Magazine's Surreal Confessional Anthology.  You may find him doom-scrolling on Twitter/X as @7imng or Bluesky as @ 7imnguyen.bsky.social .

on what a negroni could taste like i think a negroni tastes like sweat / i think a negroni tastes like blood i mean come on it looks like blood watered down & poured over ice with an orange peel on the rim / i think a negroni tastes like tears / i think a negroni tastes like nyx liquid suede lipstick in the shade kitten heels / i think a negroni tastes like regret / i think a negroni tastes like i need to switch to water tonight / i think a negroni tastes like vomit / i think a negroni tastes like a gay bar & i mean gay not lesbian because i imagine that they would taste different / i think a negroni tastes like forgetting / i think a negroni tastes like the phone camera flash going off in a warm dark nightclub / i think a negroni tastes like pain / i think a negroni tastes like tucking a dollar bill into a man’s jockstrap & catching a glimpse of his cock / i think a negroni tastes like real love / i think a negroni tastes like a bar where the lights are all red on the inside / i think a negroni tastes like pee / i think a negroni tastes like forgetting that i peed but knowing that i did pee because i don’t have to pee anymore / i think a negroni tastes like hope / i think a negroni tastes like my friends groping each other behind my back on the dance floor / i think a negroni tastes like jealousy / i think a negroni tastes like sending a text to my lover that says i love you / i think a negroni tastes like water. it’s a terrible life! Dean Winchester is driving a Toyota Prius. Dean Winchester is listening to NPR Morning Edition. Dean Winchester is wearing a Bluetooth headset. Dean Winchester is eating salad. Dean Winchester is talking about spreadsheets. it’s okay, though, because by the end of the 40 minutes Dean Winchester will be Dean Winchester again. it’s all a joke played by an angel after all. no one really drives a Toyota Prius and listens to NPR Morning Edition and wears a Bluetooth headset and eats salad and talks about spreadsheets. no one really lives a life so empty of purpose, so devoid of monsters. such lives are jokes played by angels, jokes i try to find the humor in it as i drive to work in the morning. when the 40 minutes are up it will be over and i too will get to commune with angels and send demons back to Hell. when the 40 minutes are up it will be over and i too will be Dean Winchester. Michael, I— Michael, I saw you around the pooldeck before but I never noticed much until you set your towel down next to mine at the last home swimmeet of the summer. Michael, I think it’s a horrible miracle that we never talked before now cause we’ve got the same sense of humor when it comes to pranking our teammates. Michael, I want to watch the freestyle relays later if you’ll save me a spot on the steps to the brown waterslide. Michael, I wonder if you’re flirting with me when you offer me some veggiestraws from the bag you bought at the snackbar. Michael, I might be flirting with you too. Michael, I think I am. ​​Erica Leslie Weidner is based, in New Jersey, and based in New Jersey. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of underscore_magazine . When she's not writing, she's at her day job doing badass librarian stuff.

To the immersive theater experience you wear a slinky black dress, a hat with a tiny birdcage veil, fishnet stockings, T-strap heels. You curl your hair and color your lips scarlet. Your husband got snippy with you one night on the subway when he thought the neckline on your sheer turquoise t-shirt was too low, but you get a semi-enthusiastic You look nice  out of him tonight. And you feel like a Hitchcock dame stepping outside, even if you’re stepping out of your apartment in a long row of dumpy ticky-tacky duplexes in Queens.  You travel to the immersive theater experience on the subway in a snowstorm. People will talk about it for years, that freak Halloween Eve snowstorm. You have a coat, but your legs in their fishnet stockings are still cold, your T-strap heels wobble. Still, you don’t consider going home to change. It’s Mischief Night at the immersive theater experience, and guests have been asked to dress for a certain naughtiness. You’re surprised that your husband consented to go. You think he must have some desire, still, even if he hasn’t acted on it in almost a year. He used to like the sheer low-cut t-shirts and the T-strap heels. You used to go to shows of bands you barely liked and plan insightful observations to share on the way home. You saw foul-mouthed comics in basements at Edinburgh Fringe together. Tonight would be a return to form were it not for whatever darkness opened in him and occasionally roars out of him threatening to swallow you down with it.  You have to—everyone has to—wear a black mask at the immersive theater experience, masquerade ball-style. Lace for the women, velvet for the men. The gender-expansive have to pick a side. So do you, as it will turn out. But to begin, you accept your husband’s offer to help tie the mask on. You should feel something—there should be some kind of frisson as he does so. You can imagine it: a lover pulling the grosgrain ribbon snug around your head, tying a firm knot, caressing your jaw or kissing your neck as they do so. (Lace or velvet mask for the lover? Who knows?) You could conjure a scenario, a roleplay. A stranger in a mask at a ball. And you should feel something, but you don’t. His own mask has an elastic band and he puts it on himself. The immersive theater experience is situated in an old warehouse, and you move through it Choose Your Own Adventure style. It is dark, occasionally lit dimly in a perverse primary palette: ember red, dusty gold, cobalt blue. There are notes on smoky yellow paper to be unfolded or slipped out of old manual typewriters, messages scrawled on cracked walls in lipstick or kohl, telegrams and ticker tapes, heavy rotary phones that don’t stop ringing. Everything is fascinating and full of potential, but your husband wants it to be linear, wants to figure out the right way to pass through each room and hallway to see if the show lines up with the old stories on which it is based. You don’t know or care if you’re going the right way. You just want to read the old notes and read the desperate scrawls and see how, or if, they converge. In this way you keep losing each other in the immersive theater experience. The disheveled rooms speak of violence that tore through moments before, though you never see it. All the actors are instead walking with light heads, looking through their masks at dark corners and nearly stumbling; or, in some cases, pouring tea with studied expressions, straightening books on a shelf, folding baby blankets, sorting mail, determined to maintain the double illusion that everything is real and nothing is wrong. You are both of these classes of actors with each other, you and your husband.  There’s a bar in the middle of the immersive theater experience, but it doesn’t serve drinks, not in the way you’d expect. There’s a bartender, but only one glass, which he dries slowly and interminably. There is sawdust on the floor and a single amber spotlight. There are bottles of liquor, all unlabeled and still. And there is a tinny jukebox— Billie Holiday singing Johnny Mercer, “If You Were Mine.” And there is a dancer in a velvet mask, a waistcoat, shirtsleeves. And he takes your hand and pulls you into the center of the room, and other guests recede toward the bar, including your husband. He takes a small wooden box from a plinth in what you suppose is a dance floor, there in the bar at the immersive theater experience, and opens it. Inside is a shotglass on a bed of wood shavings, and he offers it to you, and you bolt it without thinking—tequila, maybe? And then, If you were mine/I would live for your love alone/To kneel at your shrine/I would give up all I own, Billie confesses in her inimitable croon, and with one hand the dancer holds your hand to his heart while he encircles your waist with the other. He is warm, a bit sweaty. Between the mask and the dim light there’s not much to see of his face, but you can see dark hair that might need a trim, scruff on the chin. And you know that he can’t see much of you either, that the scarlet lips and curled hair are doing a lot of work, and you know he must have done this half a dozen times already tonight and will probably do it half a dozen more, but your hand is on another man’s chest, feeling his heart beat, in full view of your husband and all the other guests who Chose Their Own Adventures and found themselves there with you, with the dancer. The liquor was strong, and the dancer is warm, and the spotlight has found you—your cheeks are hot, and the Johnny Mercer song is short and sweet but Billie makes it sting, and the dancer bends his neck and lays his mouth beside your ear and whispers something you don’t understand, and then he lets you go and spins you back into the wave along the bar and he dances away into the dark. You can’t look at each other for a minute or two, you and your husband, at the immersive theater experience. You know it wasn’t real, right? That the dancer was an actor, that you don’t know what he told you? That’s what you tell your husband when he asks you, eventually, and you’re telling the truth when you say you don’t know. And you make your way through the rest of the dark warehouse and gather with the rest of the guests to watch the finale, a heap of bodies in various states of undress and unrest, the lights finally clear and icy alongside gasps and whispers.  The snow is still on the ground when you leave the immersive theater experience. You shrug into your coat, your husband shrugs into his. That was something, he says finally. Yeah, you say, wild, slinging your purse back over your arm. For some of us, he adds, giving you a look. Oh, that, you say. Part of the show, I guess. And he rolls his eyes and hails a cab, and you say little in the cab on the way back to the duplex in Queens, where he doesn’t watch you undress or put on some Billie Holiday or dance you into bed, where he just rolls over and goes to sleep and leaves you staring at the dark ceiling wondering if you will ever touch another man’s chest and hold his heartbeat ever again. It will be almost a year to the day after the immersive theater experience when you will leave him. You’ll never go to another immersive theater experience, but you won’t need to. You’ll give yourself time to linger among curious lighting and the smell of good books. You’ll drink audacious liquors. You’ll wear a white dress that makes another man say you look like an angel. You’ll know what the dancer said after all.  Abigail Myers writes poetry, fiction, and CNF on Long Island, New York.  Recent work appears with  JMWW, HAD, Discretionary Love, Tangled Locks, Farewell Transmission, Stanchion, Major 7th,  and The Dodge,  among other publications, and is forthcoming from Amethyst Review  and Atlas and Alice . Find her at abigailmyers.com  and on Twitter/Bluesky @abigailmyers.

The crayons are hard to write with. They catch and drag on the walls. I want the red crayon, red, but it keeps breaking and my hand hurts more and more trying to hold it. The janitor washes away the word of God every night while I sleep and Dr. Frey pretends I never heard it in the first place. He gives me an Underwood with a red ribbon but I must promise to behave, promise not to write on the walls, and give him my red, red crayon. The typewriter hurts my hands too but it's different. God speaks, and I type. WILDFIRE DESTROYS RESORT TOWN. Dr. Frey says it’s fire season and anyone could have predicted that. UNHOUSED PERSON FOUND DECEASED IN LOCAL PARK. Dr. Frey says I’m just playing the averages now. He has no faith, even though everything God said has come true. Then God is quiet for a while, so Dr. Frey says words like “discharge” and “halfway house.” But before I can leave, God tells me PSYCH PATIENT ESCAPES FROM LOCKED WARD and Dr. Frey says words like “restraints” and “shock therapy.” God never told me to type those words. In the morning Dr. Frey stands at the window of my tiny room while I watch him from the trees near the fence. He shouts and points and pounds the glass like a crazy man. Dr. Frey’s God may be dead, but mine is not. Linda M. Bayley is a writer living on the Canadian Shield. Her work has recently appeared in voidspace zine, Five Minutes, BULL, Short Circuit, FlashFlood Journal, Underbelly Press, Stanchion, Does It Have Pockets, and Tiny Sparks Everywhere, the National Flash Fiction Day 2024 Anthology. Find her on Twitter and Bluesky @lmbayley.

Do you crave your other half? Yes, when the storms come and the animals have spread themselves far from the croft, out across the dark hills. They seem uncountable, unfindable, gone from my care. I wish that he was still here, sometimes, if only to help me catch them in. Yes, when I am wakeful, and the bedroom bloats with shadows. Yes, when the night is bleak as a crypt, full of ghouls . How  did it feel when that hole was eroded through your shell? It began as no more than a pinprick. A thing I did not notice. It  grew bigger. I began to imagine my thoughts as creatures, aching to escape. Each dream became a radula, grinding its way out. There has always been pain in my head. One day, I felt my mind passing through the back of my skull like a calf slipping from its mother’s womb. Did you ever worry that you might drown? The Sunday parlour has curtains, swirled the colour of sea. Blue-grey drapes to close against the blue-grey dusk. After his funeral, folk came to gorge the tiny sandwiches I had made. They touched my things, said how they were sorry for my loss. I didn’t lose him. I knew exactly where he was. The last time he touched me has faded from my skin. Their prattle rose like a flood. It closed above my head. Was it easy for you to find love? I used to watch him as I walked back over the fields. His whistle would carry like a kite’s shriek upon the sky. The sun made him a false saint, lit him from behind with light. The hearth-flames made him a vision of hell. I would think, this is not my house. When did I marry? Who knitted him that scarf? Who chose that wool? Who dropped that stitch? I cannot remember casting it on . Do  you know that you are unhinged? I remember a knowledge of growth. A swallowed secret. I used to stand at the window with hands across my stomach and a smile upon my face. There was something inside me, once. I saw myself in the bubbled glass door – how I laughed at the lady with untidy hair. Her fistful of flowers seemed a sad thing. If unhinged be the clasping of foxgloves, then yes, I know this word well.  Jane Burn is an award-winning poet and hybrid writer and working-class person with autism / person with a disability. Her poems are widely published. Her current collection, Be Feared , is available from Nine Arches. The Apothecary of Flight  is due in 2024, also from Nine Arches. She lives off-grid in a Northumberland cottage. Jane is the Michael Marks Awards Environmental Poet of the Year 2023/24, with her winning pamphlet A Thousand Miles from the Sea.

What’s it cost? The cost of living, that is. How many of us are struggling? Why is my life considered valueless? No matter what we do, the struggle is real! No matter what we choose, are we uplifted? It’s too much to bear, the cost of living is tightening. Not releasing its chokehold of death or to the brink of it.  What does it have to take, for us to be and feel ok? Counting bills that keep coming. Reorganizing in the sense of Importance, picking and choosing if I make it today. Picking and choosing if I pay this bill or the next one that comes later this month. It’s not ok.  The cost of living is changing, changing for the worst. I’m really trying, god knows I am! Trying to lift myself up again! But even then it requires me to cough up money, money that I don’t have. I can’t go to school to better myself, without paying an arduous amount that isn’t always forthcoming and easy to spend. Because yes in the end it’s worth it. But can I even get to the end? I mean putting food on the table, and a roof over our head is more significant in the short term right? The cost of living is too high! It’s taking a lot from me. Everything that I can muster, everything that I have, and it’s never enough. I don’t get paid enough, yet I’m expected to pay more than I have or even make. Even if I choose to live better, the cost of living chooses the latter. Even if I’m ready to sacrifice, it almost requires my life. When is enough enough? Do I have that choice in my hands?  Is it really in my making that I stand a chance? I’ll be honest, you may call me a bitch and maybe I am, but right now it feels like I don’t have the power to stand… Moises Flores is a Poet and Blogger based just outside of Chicago in the town of Cicero. Through his poetry, he explores themes of love, fatherhood, and everyday life experiences, often through the lens of personal growth and self-love. A single father to two young daughters, much of his work is inspired by his journey through the new life experience of divorce. He actively shares his creative process on his blog, poeticdad.com

the last time anyone saw her  she was smoking Pall Malls in the back of a town car and ashing into a green glass brick. now, rising from the surf like a giant,  taller than Capitol Records, wearing the broken Hollywood  o like a halo, she is barefoot and  crushing all the studios. she is picking up executives and  hurling them into the Pacific Ocean. later, their bloated bodies return with the tide, bobbing like pin-striped manatees, later pushed back out to sea  by a great gray whale who doesn't give a shit about  movies. DJ Wolfinsohn’s first published work was a riot grrrl ‘zine. Her fiction and poetry can be found in Gone Lawn, HAD, Variant Lit, Brawl, Lost Balloon, Jake, Vestal Review, and on her website,  debbywolfinsohn.com . Her 'zine can be found in the rock 'n roll hall of fame in Cleveland. Born in Detroit and raised in Wisconsin, she currently lives and writes in a 70's ranch house in Austin, with a large collection of rescue pets, rescue plants, too much yarn, and her wonderful family.

Maud Lavin’s latest chapbook Silences, Ohio  (Cowboy Jamboree Press) is set squarely in the Midwest, a place I’ve spent very little time. As a native Californian, who grew up on the rural edge of Silicon Valley, I didn’t expect to relate to these tales from the middle of the country. But in this collection of essays, I recognized the silences, and the exclusion that often comes with them. These are the same silences that my grandmother carried with her from Wisconsin when she moved to the West Coast, and that she taught her California-born children to hold onto, that I learned from my mother and her siblings.  In her powerful collection, Lavin moves through the decades from her youth to more recent high school reunions, and offers glimpses into her Ohio home from different points in her life. I was especially struck by “4-H Church Basement Meetings,” in which she recounts time spent in a 4-H sewing club. She includes the pledge in the story that I remember from my own stint sewing and raising a rabbit as a kid. But the kick of the story is that Lavin learned decades later that while the other girls were often invited over to someone’s home for dinner, she never received an invitation. I know that silence of exclusion, and the way it gets filled up with extrapolation about what might be wrong with you, or what you might have done to deserve the exclusion. I have my own tale of a friend whose parents would not allow her to visit my home, but never gave a reason for it.  “I really really liked 4-H,” Lavin writes. “If I’d known how much I was left out of the dinner social scene around it, that would’ve ruined it for me. I would’ve felt horrible.” Lavin chooses to hold onto the positive memories, and to cherish the adult relationship she has with a friend who attended 4-H with her. She doesn’t ask her friend about the dinners, or the why she wasn’t included. The silence in this instance provides a protective buffer. In “Night Swim or Silence Only Goes So Far,” Lavin recounts an encounter with an old crush from high school when she returns for a visit in her late twenties. It harkens back to the first piece by her I ever read, “Bodies, Water” a vulnerable CNF piece published in Roi Fainéant’s “Heat” special issue. In this new body of water story, Lavin flirts with the idea of a romance with this old crush, though stays faithful to a boyfriend she has back east. The next they meet up, the boy has become a man who has shifted into a new being, a conservative who openly uses racist slurs. This time, Lavin speaks up and calls him on the inappropriate language, a rebuke he brushes off by calling her a “humanitarian.” The encounter is the last one she has with him.  While most of the 14 short essays focus on a specific person or encounter, in “To Someone Moving to the Midwest,” she offers some advice for how to break silences, and how to speak up for your ideals. “The bigotry spreads wide. Be prepared to say, ‘Oh, I have a really good friend who is X.’ Make that friendship unassailable, ‘We grew up together. She was my neighbor, we’re still in touch decades later.’ Cast aside prejudice for the moment.” Like Lavin, I have been silent for much of my life, and like her, I have found a voice through writing. In times such as the ones we are living through now, post-2024 election, we must use our voices to speak up for ourselves and for those around us who may not have the power to break their silences. Lavin provides the beginnings of a blueprint for what we can find in the quiet if we let our words out. Silences, Ohio  (Cowboy Jamboree Press, 2024) Available from Amazon.com. Melissa Flores Anderson is a Latinx Californian who lives with her son and husband. Her creative work has been published in more than two dozen journals or anthologies, and she is a reader/editor with  Roi Fainéant Press . She has a chapbook “A Body in Motion” (JAKE), a novelette “Roadkill” (ELJ Editions), and her first full-length short story collection “All and Then None of You” (Cowboy Jamboree) is out fall 2025. Follow her on Twitter and Bluesky @melissacuisine or IG/Threads @theirishmonths. Read her work at   Melissafloresandersonwrites.com .

‘Compassion was the most important, perhaps the sole law of human existence. ~ ‘The Idiot’ by Fyodor Dostoevsky The realisation he is sleepwalking comes to me abruptly, with a slightly delayed sense of eeriness and confusion. Soon I realise what sort of a sleepwalker he is, and it scares me. I came to London after the hysteria with Covid, which was not taken seriously in my home country, was replaced with another, this one coloured in yellow and blue. I don't want to sound cynical, I just want you to understand me: I am angry, and I am sick of it all. Because of this I leave my own country, a no-longer-young professor of history and language, left to start over from nothing in a country I deeply respect but am still an alien in. I would love to come here in prosperous times, with a confident smile on my face and friends extending their arms in greeting. Instead, I arrive alone, depressed, broke, and broken. I still consider myself lucky when I move into this little room on the first floor. There are four rooms and a shared kitchen. Right on top of me lives a man from Kyiv — Mikola, we call him Nick. We share Russian as our native language, so I am glad to have him around. He also appreciates I know some Ukrainian and greet him saying ‘dobrogo ranku’, which means ‘good morning’, so we get along. Two other rooms are rented by quiet and reserved English guys who work for a construction site nearby, and we rarely see or hear them. Nick, though, says he is more English than Ukrainian. He settled in London long before the invasion, six years ago, works in a law firm, cut all ties with his homeland, and stays away from the news. ‘What is happening there is horrible, of course,’  he says to me once, ‘but I am no longer a part of that world and I cherish my feeling of being local here; this is why I don’t get mad over the war — I help when I can, I donate some money, but I still treat it as just one of the inevitable things happening in a globalised world.’ I don’t doubt his words, which amplifies my surprise later. Most of my time is spent either searching for a teaching job or working on my academic writing. I don’t spend much time in my flat to avoid the acute sensation of loneliness, which is always lurking around me. I am just glad I can  sleep here for a reasonable price.   The first couple of nights at the new place are quiet —  I don’t hear or feel anything because of how tired I am. Then, during my second week here, a strange shuffling noise from above wakes me up;  like someone slowly pacing about their room. I glance at my watch: it is one in the morning. I think that maybe Nick has just returned home from somewhere, but then remember saying ‘good night’ to him around three hours ago.  I lie without moving, breathing quietly. The noise doesn’t stop. I think it is all nonsense, but soon I hear steps. I calm myself with the thought that Nick probably just can’t sleep and decide to go downstairs for a cup of tea. However, as soon as he gets down he starts to go up. I am lying in my bed, all sleep gone,  listening to footsteps creaking because my neighbour is going up and down the stairs, up and down, up and down, and then again, up and down. He never pauses. Then I pick up another noise — a steady murmuring.  I am afraid to move —  Nick is a friendly and chatty type, but what is happening now is something else, but the Nick just behind my door now is a different man. It takes him about half an hour to calm down and to return to his room. The noise ceases. I can’t fall asleep for an hour  before my tiredness takes over.   In the morning we greet each other like nothing happened — he doesn’t say a word about that night, and I am not confident enough to ask. Next night is calm, and I decide it was a one-time accident enlarged by my frayed nerves. I blame myself for being paranoid and aim to forget it.  But then it happens again. And again. Four weeks in and I am starting to develop insomnia fuelled by  the unrest this strange case of sleepwalking is causing. I read Wikipedia about whether it can be dangerous. I start to think I can distinguish words – and these words scare me.  Finally, it all culminates  to an even more grotesque encounter.  It is late at night. I try to finish my paper on the Russo-Japanese War — my area of academic interest — and the final point of my argument keeps eluding me. Well after midnight I get up, pick my empty cup and go to the kitchen for some peppermint tea.  It is dark in the corridor and even from afar I see the light is off in the kitchen. However, when I come closer, it becomes obvious someone is inside: soft blue light is sinking from under the shut door, and there is noise, as if someone is watching a TV. I gently push the door open. What I see there doesn’t look too grim at first: Nick is sitting at the dinner table, his staring face illuminated by his laptop screen. The sounds the laptop is making are strange, though: it seems he is watching some kind of reportage with shouts, crashes, and something resembling gunshots.  What is even more ominous is that Nick is murmuring something to himself, as if he repeats what he can hear on his laptop. ‘Hey mate’, I say in a low voice.  He pretends he doesn’t see me.  ‘Is it alright if I switch the kettle on? Need more tea.’ No answer.  Only then do I pay attention to what Nick is watching, suddenly distinguishing a mix of Ukrainian and Russian in his murmurs. On his screen there is GoPro footage from the camera mounted on a soldier’s helmet. The owner is sitting in a trench, peeking out to shoot automatic fire over his head. Next moment he sees a soldier running towards him and fires at him without taking time to aim. The soldier falls to the ground. The shooter comments on his kill. A dreadful realisation: this is real footage of one man killing another in a war happening right now in Ukraine. The soldier is shouting and swearing, and Nick is glued to the screen watching this ravenous display and repeating all the words he can hear in a half-whisper.  He looks like a zombie. I glance at him: a glassy stare, his hands hanging low along his sides, he is dressed in his sleepwear. ‘Nick’, I call in a low voice and wave at him. Nothing. He behaves as if I am not there. I become scared. I forget about my tea, rush to the door, and, closing it behind me, lock myself in my room.   When later I hear the stairs creaking, I think my heart is going to blow up right inside my chest. Nick, still swearing and murmuring about recharging arms and fighting the invaders, gets into his room. The rest of that night is black and silent.  When we stumble upon each other again in a few days, I am not brave enough to ask if he knows he is a sleepwalker. Instead, I say: – Did you start following the news about the war in Ukraine, by the way? – No. Anything happened in particular? – Nothing, same stuff, basically.  – I see. As I’ve said before. It is a terrible thing, but I don’t feel I should be too concerned about it — my home is here now, and here we have our own troubles. Thank God my relatives are not there  anymore. Why do you ask?   – Ah, nothing, just… wondering when it all ends. – Man, do as I do: stop reading news, and start thinking about what you actually have influence upon. Worrying about stuff you can’t change never brings any good. – Yeah, you’re right, one hundred percent.  – There you go! You’ll see you’ll sleep better at night. I wish him a great day. He has absolutely no clue.  In a few days I finally manage to get a job as a tutor, and decide to leave that place for a small flat in the outskirts of London, exchanging shorter commutes for the right to cope with my own demons only. *** After I settle at the new place, my routine of long commutes via the Tube starts. I am used to it, so it doesn’t bother me: most of the time I am just reading without paying attention to what is going on around me. However, there are encounters that both trouble and resonate with me.  Like this girl with a duffel bag.  She is standing right in front of me, and as soon as I glance at her face I know she is from Ukraine. I can spot a war refugee by the look of their face . She is in her early twenties, dressed in an old hoodie sweatshirt with worn out ‘NASA’ logo, a military-style khaki-green jacket on top of it, sweatpants, and heavy boots.   In her hands she holds a small women’s bag, and with her she has just one duffel bag. I can say she is cold, but I can understand why it doesn’t seem to make the top five of the things bothering her right now.  That look on her face, on all of their faces — let me try to describe it. First thing you notice is deep, boundless tiredness. Second is fear, fear of two kinds: of the unknown, and fear for those who are still there . Never for themselves. Third is homesickness. Right from the moment you are forced to leave your home, the longing starts, and with time it only becomes stronger.  Quite unintentionally she glances at a woman sitting across from her, who looks either Russian or Ukrainian, but is very different: she has lush black hair, wears a lot of makeup, a rather exposed dress, and a Gucci bag. The girl only briefly gazes upon her and stares away. When the train stops, the announcement says it terminates here and won’t be going further. With occasional grumbles, people start to leave. The girl looks around, disoriented, hesitant about what is going on. Train announcements are hard to understand even for those with a good command of English. Finally, when everyone leaves, she also gets to the platform, still trying to figure out what is going on.   When the train starts moving, there is a sudden harsh noise followed by abrupt shouts. The girl screams and kneels down, covering her ears. Nothing out of the ordinary has happened: just an unusually loud crack of train wagons, and two agitated men joking between themselves about it. However, I think I know what is happening with her at the moment. The cracking noise could have reminded her of mortar explosions shattering and smashing in all the windows in a place that was her home. And men shouting… well, it is rarely a good omen.   When the next train arrives, a man gently touches her shoulder and helps her to her feet. – There you go, it was nothing, just an old train. Here comes the one you need — you can board it. She is hesitant at first. Slowly, she grabs her belongings. He accompanies her.  – Thank you, — she says with a strong accent. — Thank you very much.   – No worries, there you go. When the doors close, she realises a pleasant gentleman has not followed her. A feeling of not being alone that illuminated her soul for a fraction of a moment is now gone. Her shy smile gave place to a familiar look of tiredness, fear, and homesickness.   I hurry to leave the platform, feeling sickeningly powerless. It is all unjust. I want to scream. *** A few weeks later my younger cousin, who at the moment lives in the Netherlands with her husband, comes to London to spend a weekend with me. We have been close friends since the time I visited their family in Kherson when I was just a boy. Between visiting Hyde Park and Tate we pop in a supermarket. My cousin is a wide-smiling, chatty, and charming type; she manages to make friends everywhere.  – Where are you from? — one of the store clerks asks us. He is an elegant, neatly dressed man in his fifties, wearing glasses with golden rims. He is more polite than curious now.  – I am from Ukraine, — my cousin says, — and this is my brother, he is from Russia.  The man does not look surprised. – I could say you are from Eastern Europe by your looks. Very beautiful. And a gentleman as well, — he slightly bows to me. His compliment is nothing but respectful. We smile. He adds, — I am sorry for what is happening, — after a nod of acknowledgement from my cousin, he is addressing me, — I have been to Belarus, you know where it is? Minsk? Of course I know. I say so.  – I studied physics at the Belarusian State University, in the nineties. I am myself from Syria. I have got a PhD in astrophysics there as well, and have been teaching physics to students for fifteen years! Optics, quantum physics, biophysics — you name it. — He looks proud, but most of all — he looks pleased just having an opportunity to remember it and to share it with someone.    – This is serious, — I say. — And very difficult. — I don’t feel it would be right to ask him why he is here, working in a store at a low-paying job. I know it should be a sad story.  – Yes, I guess so, — he smiles. — It has been ten years already since I came here.  We are silent for a moment. My cousin saves us from an awkward pause: – We are going to Tate! Do you remember how to get there? Should we turn left or right from here? A former physics professor turned supermarket clerk explains how to find the way to the gallery. I marvel at his patience, and at how he hasn’t lost an ounce of his dignity. I felt we have something in common with him. Was it because this big city and the reasons we are here made us both aliens? A man from Syria with a degree in astrophysics and a Ukrainian with a Russian passport fleeing the reality in which two of my motherlands are sending their sons to be shelled and killed by each other. We are of the similar kind. The rest of the day we enjoy art, we walk, we laugh, we recall the past.  My cousin says she is glad I am here. She has been to St. Petersburg once, she knows it is much safer there than in Southern Ukraine, but still she feels better knowing I am far from there. I know we both keep thinking about that man, wondering where we are going to be in ten years after life has banished us from our homes.   She leaves the next day for the Netherlands. When parting she asks me if I follow the recent news. No, I say, I don’t follow it. But I still know.  She nods. We both cry in our souls.  *** When I feel particularly lonely, I come to Holland Park’s Kyoto Garden, a tiny island of contemplation and beauty with its small ponds and a toy waterfall.  I am here now. I would love to say it is lovely weather, but it is not: a grey sky hides any glimpses of sun, and the wind keeps reminding how precious our warm scarves are. However, I feel better here. Everything and everyone is still. People are slowing down. A stately heron stands right outside the pond overseeing the surroundings.  I sit at the bench. There is a girl not far from me, reading a book. I quickly glance at it and see that it is ‘Idiot’ by Dostoevsky. I also see it is in Russian.  Very soon I cannot restrain myself from approaching her.   – Excuse me, — I say to her in Russian, — I am sorry, I hate to bother you when you’re reading. I… just wanted to say, it is a great book. And I admire people who read it so carefully, with such concentration, as you. I hope it cheers you up.   She smiles and says it is all right.   – I’m reading it for the third time, — she confesses. — It gives me hope in times of despair. We exchange words about where we come from, but very sparingly. We are always careful when talking to strangers — old habits die too slowly even in the youngest of us. She is from Mariupol, once a beautiful romantic city on the shores of the Black Sea, now lying in ruins after becoming a battlefield for the opposing Ukrainian and Russian forces. She managed to escape it before the siege. She is lucky, although it sounds sacrilegious to use the word ‘lucky’ here. Her home is obliterated, its history and good name wiped out. Google ‘Mariupol’ now and instead of sun-drenched seashores you’ll only see occasional splashes of smoke and fire breaking their way through the dead dark-grey ruins. She is alone and she is much less welcome here than she would like to be — it is just the way it works. She doesn’t need to say it, I know it. Instead, she says: – I love this novel because of Prince Myshkin’s character. He is from another world… so different. An outsider. And yet he stays true to his nature and principles. This… life, it doesn’t change him. After everything that he goes through, he is the same: kind, intelligent, sincere. He possesses such a beautiful soul. She turns to me. – I’d love to have a beautiful soul.  Our smiles are sad, but we are smiling nevertheless. Soon I leave. While on my way back to the place where I currently live, I feel a pleasant warm light inside. We don’t need much: a couple of kind words and an understanding gaze is enough to grant us hope.  If only more people would notice how beautiful the souls of every one of us are. Mark Marchenko is a writer and a scholar of Ukrainian origin, born in Moscow. Mark writes both in English and in Russian, and has six short stories published recently, including several in English in 3:AM and New Pop Lit literary magazines. Mark has also recently received his MSc degree in Mediaeval Literature and Languages at the University of Edinburgh.

Driven What a strange word “driven” is, none the stranger for being hummed in a dream of driving a DeSoto with three on the column,  the shifter tipped with a thimble. “Too long a throw,” my father said, driven from store to store on rain-black streets, staggered  stop-lights every other block.  “Driven driven driven driven,”  he said, frowning. “You liked  Nash Ramblers best, right?  Brightest showroom in town!” Absurd Ode Why didn’t I write you after the one night we had? Five times a day I should’ve written to conceive the slightest hope of doing justice, a correspondence Victorian in its detail though not in the least circumspect.  If this were a voice-over, wind would rush through the leaves, “dappled”  the only word for the light, a four-note theme fingered on the gut strings  of a dreadnought guitar the aural embodiment of the rivulets coursing  the skin of two spent strangers no one will ever see. Your letters   would’ve found me with nothing but time in the motel five states away— mushy apples, cellophane-sealed cupcakes & a permanent quart of beer  nestled in a trash can heaped with ice. I wouldn’t have tried to entice you, just asked whatever questions I had, propped against the headboard, inscribing my best block script on page after long yellow page,  the manager due his dollars each day, his phone never ringing with news of a place to land where I’d come for reasons you made me want to forget.  I could’ve said anything I wanted, shaken out another day’s pages dented with words I never before had meant so hard then folded them in two they made such a fat parcel. It’s forty years now. It’s never yet gotten any harder to think “If only”—one phrase among a geometrically replicating profusion that earn the truest adjective of age: “Absurd.”  Still, once I’d found the converted carport in Shepherd, Michigan,  I should’ve strolled to the drop on, yes, Main Street, shoved that day’s  packets into the slot & unlocked the P.O. box packed with things you had  to tell me, along with the clippings, feathers & pine needles of home. John Repp is a poet, fiction writer, folk photographer, and digital collagist living in Erie, Pennsylvania.

It’s a Seiko wall model hung in the middle of the waiting room. The battery is still working, but the second hand is stuck. It jitters in one position, halfway between the 11 and the 12 on the dial. I keep forgetting, and every time I look up, I think, “It’s still  12:45?”  After looking up at the clock for the umpteenth time I start to wish someone would fix it. I am half-tempted to fetch it down myself and peak into the insides. In the end, I don’t, but I imagine what my downstairs neighbor might have done with it. He could fix anything. I remember bringing him one of our bedside clocks that was slow and kept losing five minutes every day. I knocked on  his door and a moment later he opened it and smiled. I was just going to drop it off, but he told me to come in, it would only take a minute. He made the pun as he held up the clock and winked at me. His apartment had an entire wall filled with different tools. He put the clock on his workbench and selected a small screwdriver. Once the clock was open, he peered inside using a small flashlight.  “Here’s the problem,” he said. I stepped closer and looked down into the clock. The gears were clicking and turning; I couldn’t see a problem. He could, though. His old eyes were sharper than mine. He nudged at a gear that was buried down deep in the workings of the clock. A few moments later he clicked the cover back into place and handed it back to me. “Good as new,” he said. He died last year. The word passed up through the apartment building, like a cold wind. Soon everybody was down on the first floor. It was the bus driver who found his body. “His heart just gave out,” the ambulance nurse said after he arrived a few minutes later. “Sorry to say, it’s not uncommon for someone at his age.” Why am I thinking about this? Oh, that’s right. When the doctor comes back out, I’m going to tell him about the broken clock. It’s an unnecessary additional burden that weighs on those of us who are out here in the waiting room.  I hold my wife’s hand and we wait.

When I was 24, I got an email forward that changed my life.  I was working in middle management at a finance company and was increasingly listless at work. The company had just opened several offices outside of New York, where they were able to hire much more experienced people for less money. A pall hung over the office as we wondered about the implications of this. I welcomed distraction. I opened the email. It was from a friend. It contained a thought exercise, bundled in some new agey something or other, but the thought exercise was -- if you don't know what to do, ask your future self.  I was bored enough at work that I gave it some thought.  All of a sudden, a burst of courage came to me out of nowhere. I stood up, all 24 years of me, and walked into my CEO's office. "You have a morale problem on your sales floor," I said. "And if you don't do something about it, I'm going to quit." His mouth was agape. But he listened. Later that evening, me and my burst of courage were sitting in my father's living room, watching TV. My Pakistani father, whom I was not out to. We weren't especially close, but he had moved to New York the prior year and we had been spending more time together.  My mind ticked over to my future self exercise from earlier. I was still feeling the exhilaration of what I'd done that day.  A thought came to me, resoundingly clear, that took me aback: "Just tell him."  I argued with this inner voice. I couldn't imagine going through with it. The thought hadn't crossed my mind once before this. My father, a Pakistani man who had tried in recent years to coax me into meeting people with the possibility of marrying them because I was THAT age, who had simultaneously believed in and supported my education but tried to point me to medicine and learning the language properly and fitting into Pakistani culture-- because, I thought, he believed it would make me more marriageable-- my father with whom I had clashed terribly, whose stubbornness I had inherited, and whom in pushing up against him and running away from the things he wanted for me I found out who I really was... my father had given me no indication that coming out was in any way a good idea.  I had heard no good stories of coming out to Pakistani parents. In fact, I had heard no stories at all. It was hard not to editorialize into the silence. I can't do this, I thought.  "It's not like it's going to be different for you," the thought came back, "that you're ever not going to be like this. You've tried that." I can't, I thought. But then, at least I was making my own money, even if it wasn't great money. I mentally prepared myself to walk out of the apartment and not walk back in again. I could always change my name, go into hiding. There were options.  This pitched debate was raging inside my head while I was sitting mute next to my father on the couch. He was placidly watching TV after his long day at the hospital, as usual. I was sitting next to him feeling, and possibly looking, like a shaken soda bottle about to burst.  He flicked through the channels. Quite often, he'd settle on a Hallmark or Lifetime movie-- programming oriented toward women, low-level life drama stuff. On this particular program, someone was pregnant who shouldn't have been.  Aha, I thought. Here's my opening.  "Dad," I said. "Would you ever disown your children for any reason?" He looked at me. "What are you talking about?"  "Just answer the question," I said. He got quiet. "Well," he said. "I might not agree with all your decisions, but you're an adult." The answer surprised me. Even so, I spent the next what must have been thirty minutes fumbling for what to say. "We've had a hard relationship for a long time…" I said, and it went on from there. I talked about my stepmother, and the havoc she had wreaked on our lives and our relationship. I talked about how I had been afraid of him for most of what I could remember. These were sore topics, but still easier to talk about than telling him. Eventually, we were at the dining room table, him with his hand at his temple, his fingers a visor over his eyes as he looked at me. Mercifully, he interrupted.  "You're trying to tell me something," he said.  "Yes," I said. "And you think I'll be angry if I know."  "Yes," I said again. He shook his head. "Just say it," he said. "Fine." I paused. Finally I choked out, "I'm gay."  A wry half-smile from him. "I know," he said. "I'm not stupid. Parents have intuitions about their kids. You I've known about for a year, your brother for 15 years."  This was so far removed from anything I expected from him that my head immediately started hurting. He spoke more. I don't remember much of what he said.  I do remember though how he walked me to the door that night, after I told him I was getting a migraine and I needed to go. I remember that he hugged me, and I remember marveling that even though the earth had shifted under my feet and I existed in an entirely new world, his way of being with me felt the same. Leena Sulahri is a recovering academic with an eye for how the mundane, the absurd, and the sublime frequently occur together. She is a muslim-ish, diasporic South Asian raised in the Arab Gulf region, and very, very gay.