Charcoal Husband // Tomias Keno

from judge Teresa Carmody: With humor and playfulness, “Charcoal Husband” explores the uncanniness of connection—how those closest to us can become the most unfamiliar: forgotten, strange, the ones we can no longer quite remember. And then it’s the whole community, trying and failing to help us see what we cannot—the full, shifting complexity of ourselves and of others.

They’d put her in the side room by the vestry, the dusty one, where spare chairs were stacked to the ceiling, and a faded poster declared “Welcome new believers” in a font last seen on a yogurt lid.

From the sanctuary came the soft rustle of people trying not to rustle, a few strategic coughs, and someone’s phone bursting cheerfully into “Angels” by Robbie Williams. There were one hundred and forty-seven people out there. She knew because her mother had mentioned it roughly one hundred and forty-seven times during the planning.

“You don’t want to come out because...?” asked Kaylee, the Maid of Honor, leaning in at a cautious forty-five degrees to keep her hair from brushing the doorframe.

“Because I can’t remember his face,” said the bride, as calmly as ordering a salad. She hoped the calm might make it sound less strange.

“But it’s just... it’s Dan.”

“Right,” the bride said. “Dan, sure.” She could remember Dan’s voicemail: Hi! It’s Dan! Leave a message after the beat! followed by truly terrible beatboxing. She could recall his handwriting, somewhat. His neck, definitely, five angles of it, especially the angle when thinking hard.

Kaylee smiled a smile that was sympathetic, but not so sympathetic that it looked like she’d chosen a side. “What if you close your eyes and try again?”

So the bride did. Tried again to find him. A sturdy nose, maybe. Lips with volume. Kind eyes? People always said kind eyes about men with nothing else to recommend them. And she needed a recommendation, a reason. Without his face, the man of her dreams was suddenly just... a man. And marrying any man wasn’t really her sort of thing.

From the hallway came a whisper, not nearly quiet enough: “How’s she doing?”

“She’s trying,” Kaylee answered.

The bridesmaids slid in then: three women in a colour that had been described in the email chain as “sage,” but in real life leaned more toward “unicorn pink.”

“Sweetheart,” said the one with the clip-on ponytail, crouching until her knees popped audibly. “We hear you’ve gone a bit... wobbly.”

“I can’t see him,” the bride said. It felt like confessing she’d started doubting the moon landing.

“Don’t be daft,” another bridesmaid said, whipping out her phone and scrolling through a gallery of men who all could plausibly be hers, each holding a drink. “There!” she said triumphantly, landing on one of him by a barbecue, squinting like sunlight was a personal enemy. “Face.”

“If that’s him,” the bride said, “then he’s better at being a photograph than a person.”

The bridesmaids laughed that particular laugh women do when something isn’t funny. Then they looked at one another, as if, between them, a solution might appear. Only silence did, and the distant sound of a flushing toilet.

When the bridesmaids drifted out, others drifted in: a slow procession of girlfriends and distant cousins, drawn by curiosity and duty, armed with good intentions.

“Honey,” Aunt Rita said, sitting so close their dress fabrics whispered against each other. “He’s a good man. He brought paper plates to my barbecue without being asked. Who does that? A good man.”

The bride nodded. She could picture paper plates, yes. But not the face handing them over.

“If you can’t remember his face, so what?” Aunt Rita continued. “What is a face, really? Nostrils. Holes! You’re not marrying holes.”

“Eyes too,” Kaylee offered, trying to be collaborative.

The bride wanted to say: But it matters that I see him. It matters that when I imagine him saying, “I do,” I see the particular shape of his mouth making it. That’s how you promise. Otherwise, it’s like promising to a crowd. But she only nodded.

Then came another woman, relation unclear, who pressed a hard caramel into her hand and said: “My Harold never had much face to speak of, and we’ve survived thirty-two years.” The bride wanted to find that comforting, but it only conjured an image of herself on a sofa beside a lifelong blur.

The room was filling fast with helpful women and unhelpful advice. Voices overlapped until the door opened and conversation dropped dead. The bride’s mother entered the room the way celebrities do in supermarkets. “I have been sent,” she announced. “Honestly, darling, this is melodrama. You’ll remember him the second you see him. You’re just having a moment.”

“I’m having a moment where I cannot recall his face,” the bride said, slumped in the only nice velvet chair, hair as defeated as her voice.

“That’s perfectly normal. I couldn’t remember your father’s face until well past the
honeymoon.”

The room went quiet. Even Kaylee stopped pacing. The bride looked at her mother
properly for the first time all morning.

Her mother adjusted her weight, resettled her handbag on her arm. “Well, I mean,
obviously I knew what he looked like... in theory. But if you’d asked me to describe him, really describe him, to pick him out of a crowd or what have you...” She trailed off. “The point is, faces are not what marriage is about.”

“What is it about, then?”

Her mother looked genuinely flustered now, a rare event for a woman who held strong opinions about the correct orientation of cutlery in the dishwasher. “It’s about partnership,” she said finally. Then, in a careful tone, like unlocking an old safety deposit box: “I have never, not once, kept a face for any man. They blur. But the senses make up for it. Smell gets heightened, for instance.”

“The smell of men?” Kaylee asked, brushing imaginary dust from her sleeve as if the very idea might stain her.

“Of course, men,” her mother said briskly, as though the question were indecent. “I can draw your aunt Susan’s pores from memory.” Aunt Susan nodded proudly.

Then the door opened, and in swept Dan’s mother, carrying the expression of a woman who might be about to lose a deposit. “Is she...?” she began, then saw the droopy bride and transformed the concern into a smile. “Sweetheart. He is beside himself.”

“Men don’t love being humiliated,” her own mother said, kneeling to tug at the bottom of the bride’s dress as if smoothing out wrinkles might restore her memory. “Think of Dan. He’s a catch.”

Everyone nodded. The bride thought of Dan catching things: a bus, a cold, the jar she’d once dropped, making pasta. “A catch,” she repeated, as if saying it might reel in his face.

Dan’s mother knelt beside her and clasped her hands. “I raised that boy,” she said. “He’s a good boy. Not perfect, nobody is, but good. He’ll never leave a thing half-done. Laundry? He’ll finish it. Conversation? He’ll finish it. If he tells you he’ll be somewhere, he’s there.”

“He was late to our second date,” the bride heard herself say.

“Traffic,” Dan’s mother said swiftly. “Probably a missed turn. He doesn’t do well with lefts. My family, we’re not a left family. But you know that by now.”

Her mother nodded. The two women stood like mismatched bookends: hers tall and
angular, Dan’s small and round. Different shapes, same expression: waiting for her to come to her senses. And she wanted to, she just couldn’t remember where they were.

“Describe him for me,” the bride asked. “Without saying, good boy. Without mentioning his job, his hobbies, or the way he makes roast potatoes. Describe how he looks.”

Dan’s mother lifted her hands, palms up, and made little sculpting motions in the air, as though kneading the idea of him. “He has a... warmth,” she said.

“So does a radiator,” said the bride, not unkindly.

“His eyes,” her own mother said, hand darting. “They’re very... present.”

“Eyes must be. It’s biology,” said the bride. “Otherwise, we call a doctor.”

The smallest bridesmaid, revived by the chance to finally be helpful, added: “He’s six foot.”

“That’s a length,” the bride said.

There was a small, sympathetic laugh across the room, then quickly suppressed, like a sneeze in a lift. For a moment, they all thought. The bride could feel it happening, the slow bloom of an idea, something subversive, a little oil spill spreading: maybe it wasn’t unreasonable to want a face to love. Without one, you were left with a man. And a man, as a category, was rather a lot.

The bride wondered what the groom was doing out there with his uncooperative face. She pictured a kindergarten drawing of a man: round head, two coin eyes, a line for a mouth. She hoped he wasn’t sad. She didn’t want to be the cause of male sadness, but she also knew men’s sadness had a way of expanding until it needed its own postcode. What about hers?

The vicar’s wife entered with the efficiency of a woman used to patching crises. “We’ll say there’s been a leak,” she said. “There’s almost always a leak in these old buildings.”

Aunt Susan tilted her head. “Well, he does have nice teeth,” she offered, but no one could quite picture them anymore.

***

Because women are a natural committee, they instantly formed a focus group. Within minutes, someone had fetched a cousin who used to draw criminals for the police and now did commissioned portraits of Labradoodles. She arrived with a charcoal pencil and authority, sitting on a folding chair as if it were a throne.

“Describe his face,” said the sketch-artist cousin, whom the bride mostly remembered for selling wax melts on Facebook. “Start with the top. What’s his hairline doing?”

A pause. No one wanted to say balding in a church. “It’s... tidy,” Kaylee offered.

“Eyes?”

“They’re a normal color,” said the organist’s wife, beginning to sweat.

“A nice smooth brown,” a bridesmaid added, cautiously. The bride pictured gravy and wished she hadn’t.

The cousin’s charcoal began to gather shape: a forehead, an earnest brow. Half a man, but more than a blur. It worked better than the photos, the bride thought. A drawing, even half finished, felt closer to memory; less about accuracy, more about point of view.

“His mouth,” one of the bridesmaids said. “Always thought it looked a bit... animal.
Moose-ish, maybe.”

The bride flinched hard enough for a curl of hair to spring loose. Everyone noticed.

“Teeth!” Aunt Susan blurted, with the false cheer of someone yanking a conversation back from the brink. “What about teeth?”

“We’ve acknowledged teeth,” the bride’s mother hissed. Never a good sign, the bride thought, when the entire room had already pictured them once and chosen not to revisit the experience.

A teenage cousin appeared in the doorway, eyeliner sharp enough to notarize documents. “I’ve always thought Dan looks rather like a man from a car insurance advert,” she said, leaning against the door frame. “No offense.”

“We’re being positive, Zoe,” hissed a bridesmaid.

“I am being positive,” said Zoe. “Someone somewhere might call that hot.”

The women sighed as one. They could all see it now: the man appearing on the paper wasn’t someone you’d cross a room to marry. He was someone you’d politely let merge in traffic. They began to argue, gently insisting that faces didn’t matter, composing small mercies for the chap on the paper. The bride recognized the tone: the same one women used when convincing themselves to keep walking: down aisles, into houses, into compromises shaped like people.

Aunt Rita tried her usual refrain: her husband could fix things around the house. But at least Rita could see the man fixing things, could recognize the face she loved and called hers.

“Listen,” said the bride, sitting up in her velvet chair. Her tone made them all lean in.
“You all know his face, but imagine him, as I must, without one. Picture just the blur of a man. Would you be thrilled to go home to such a blur? Every night? Forever? The blur will have opinions about shelving. The blur will say, ‘I don’t think we should get a dog.’ The blur will, at Christmas, buy you something with the word set on the box. But if there’s a dazzling face instead of the blur, or at least one that feels like home, you forgive him everything else, because you have something to hold, a place to rest your wanting. Without it, all you’ve got are the logistics of a blur. Do you see?”

They did. You could watch the understanding pass through them, a neat little relay. Yes, oh God, yes; Christ, the blur. The organist’s wife looked faintly ill.

Dan’s mother, bless her, made a final stand. “He has dimples,” she said, gripping the word like a handrail, but the damage was already done.

The room had the hush of women examining evidence from a crime they hadn’t realized they were part of. “He once said he makes a mean risotto,” Aunt Susan said. “I asked what’s in it, and he said, ‘Whatever she tells me to.’”

“He eats yogurt with a fork if the spoons are dirty,” said his sister, who had been quiet until now.

“He claims he’s vegetarian,” said Zoe, “except for kebabs.”

The vicar’s wife, who had seen many marriages up close and had a professional interest in them not collapsing, tried to perform a tiny reset. “All right,” she said, kind but brisk. “What we are confronting here is that attraction, specifically facial, is the lubricant that makes the machine go without smoke. And if the lubricant is gone...”

A timid knock interrupted her. One of the ushers poked his head in, smiling with the
earnest optimism of a Labrador. “Just to say: we can fit in another hymn, if that helps? Or maybe something modern? People like modern.”

The vicar’s wife guided him out gently, narrating an image of the women mopping puddles together.

“Life with a man can be delightful,” Aunt Rita said, attempting to finish the thought, but the sentence had the weary tone of someone describing a cat who sometimes comes when called. “There are... kindnesses.”

The women looked at each other with that frank, conspiratorial kindness they reserved for moments when the truth got out accidentally. The bride could feel them all tilting, gracefully, toward a shared realization.

“We are not against men,” the bride’s mother said diplomatically, to the air. “Men are fine. They’re like street signs: you’re glad they’re there. But you don’t take comfort from a sign you’ve never seen before. You want the one that tells you you’re nearly home.”

A bridesmaid giggled, then slapped a hand over her mouth, as if she’d just violated a church law.

“Does that mean we can start?” asked Kaylee. “I’ve got a thing at three.”

Before the bride could answer, the door creaked open with the slow hinge of someone afraid to interrupt. “Hey,” said a man, the word landing in the room just ahead of him. His voice had that soft, friendly register the bride remembered from so many small moments: post office lines, whispered jokes in bed, the time he’d spoken to a bird that flew into the house.

But when she saw him, the real, physical him, the remembered Dan refused to appear. A few parts clicked (oh, that chin; those eyelashes, yes), but mostly she saw someone new. The lines deeper; the hair slightly thinner. Not bad, she thought. For a stranger.

She noticed a scar on his left eyebrow she’d never clocked before, a pale line, as if
someone had taken a pencil to him and changed their mind halfway through. After today, she would always see that scar. She wondered how much else she had missed: maybe a crooked tooth behind his lip, or a twitch of the nostril when he was about to lie.

Dan said nothing. Just looked faintly panicked, as if he could smell what they’d been talking about. Then her brother barged in. “Sorry to bother you,” he said to the room full of women. “It’s just, Dan’s got this little problem with... memory.”

“Only the face,” said Dan. “I remember everything else.”

“Join the club,” said the bride.

Dan’s face did a small, familiar thing, an almost-smile that never quite made it. She felt a slight click of recognition. Not for his face, but the kindness that had always lived behind it. It felt like a relief in the stomach, something quietly untangling.

“I couldn’t pick out Harold’s eyes in a line-up,” Aunt Rita began cheerfully. “But he’s got this dent.” She tapped her forehead. “Says it’s from a cricket ball in ’84, though we weren’t yet acquainted in ’84, so I cannot verify. Still, I’ve loved that dent like a family pet.”

“Naso-labial fold,” Aunt Susan intoned, with the devotion of someone reciting scripture. “On Lilian, it runs deep, like the path water carves when it’s patient. Sometimes I dream of that fold.”

“Birthmark,” shouted the organist’s wife, her eyes bright. “He has one on his forehead. If it vanished, I’d be bereaved.”

There was murmuring, nods. Someone said, “Crow’s feet,” softly, like a pilgrim naming a shrine.

“Every one of you has a smaller nose than I,” murmured the bride’s mother, as if
confessing to a crime.

“I have one ear that’s lower,” said Kaylee, tugging her hair to show it. “In photos I tilt, like I’m eavesdropping on a secret.”

Bridesmaid Chloe began to cry. “I keep forgetting my children’s faces,” she said. “Google says hormones. I truly hope so.”

And then the litany gathered rhythm, a cadence. They spoke of freckles, eyebrows, and the myth of symmetrical nostrils. Of mouths not as kiss-machines but as small, unique puzzles: lips that met reluctantly, lips that gaped a little.

People who hadn’t been invited began to drift in, drawn by the strange electricity of
honesty. Someone laughed, and then everyone did, the kind of laughter that isn’t cruel, just human. A shared relief at the absurdity of all of us, walking around, wearing faces.

Through it all, the bride and groom stood together, as if posing beside a museum exhibit. Their hands found each other. Warmth flowed between them, carrying wordless messages. He fidgeted; so did she. She squeezed him. He squeezed back the exact amount, the honest clasp of someone with nothing to prove and nothing to hide.

The charcoal drawing lay on the floor: a faint smudge of a man, not yet trampled but well on its way to being forgotten.

---

Tomias Keno (1990) is a Dutch author, screenwriter, and singer-songwriter working at the intersection of literary fiction and science fiction. His work won first prize at the 2025 Dubai Future Stories Awards, held during the Dubai Future Forum. His literary fiction has appeared in Dutch literary magazines, including Op Ruwe Planken, DwB, de Optimist, and deFusie, and he is a finalist for the 2026 Indiana Review Prize. In 2022, he launched Astronaut, a multidisciplinary project combining a novel, a fiction podcast, and a pop album; the podcast became the most listened-to fiction series in the Netherlands and Belgium and was nominated for the Rose d’Or, the NTR Podcast Prize, and the Belgian Podcast Awards.

Seeing Him // R.A. Morean

When he died, he left his face behind. Not just in photo albums or in frames centered on walls, or in the soft feathery folds of early morning dreams, but concretely. Like now.

She stands in the aisle across from the cashier, trying to find a pen in the dark crevasses of a large chapped brown leather bag, digging through old receipts, a pacifier, used baby wipes, several crumpled prescriptions, a piece of granite, a clutch of creased cards with flowers or candles or doves or any combination thereof pictured on the front and inscribed with wide rolling script, a yellowed dog tooth, a scattered fistful of perfectly curled sandy sea shells and a wad of brown made-from-recycled-paper napkins from Chipotle.

Her concentration excludes the quiet toddler in the heavy shopping cart who is stretching over in his seat to grab anything brightly packaged on the candy shelf. She glances up quickly and moves the cart further away from his little outstretched arms with a push of her foot. In the next aisle over, a man is checking out as well, buying just a magazine with cash. She finds her pen, raises the checkbook to the counter, and then, in a breath, in a moment too minimal to even have purpose, she glances up. And there he stands.

It is not him, though. Of course.

But in that nanosecond—in that whisper moment—she sees him. There in profile, glancing down at the change in his hand, or something in the title of the magazine, or at their small son. Then he vanishes when the man looks up at her and meets her eyes. He smiles and nods goodbye to the ponytailed teenager who rang him up, and in another moment, the sound of automatic doors closing signals he is gone. She is left again, the pen pressing down hard on the paper, and as she signs her name, she sees both of theirs in print and reminds herself to order new checks.

He appears only when she is unprepared to see him. The first time was at the gas station around the corner. It was just a month after the accident, after the gas truck took the curve in the interstate too fast and plowed through a chain-link fence that was supposed to be replaced with a cement barrier, but the budget evaporated for that particular fiscal year. A shame. A tragedy. Just terrible. I am so sorry. We are so sorry. The driver, a man named George, was new and did not gauge the weight of an empty truck when he took the curve. She did not ever want to meet him. The attorney said his wife left him a week earlier—a week before the accident. She did not want to ponder how her life could be, how he might have lived, if a faceless woman had stayed in a marriage she knew nothing about.

Stepping out from the car to slip the nozzle into the slightly dented gray Subaru, she felt someone moving, and a sandy-haired man suddenly appeared on the other side of the pump, smoothly replacing the hose. That was the first time she saw him. Standing right before her, in the sun, looking away from her. But it was his cheek, his long nose, the same twist of sideburn, his strong throat. A whiff of gasoline scoured her nose, and she felt faint, and in the winter-cold, her breath came out uneven. She jammed the nozzle back inside the pump, tore the receipt as it was printing, and climbed back into the Subaru, dropping keys, grabbing them again, turning the engine over, pulling out too fast. Their son fussed in the back seat.

Since then, she has seen him at least once or twice a week every week for the last few months. Instead of growing tedious, each fleeting encounter leaves her drained and slightly more undone, as if a malignant purpose is guiding him back to her or her to him. It’s always the same, with him congealing in the periphery and then, as she turns, bringing him into focus, he vanishes. Completely—every single time. Street corners, the drug store, the children’s park, through a restaurant window, on the bus, in a doorway, in all these places, some force conjures him, and she is at a loss as to why. Or when it will end.

The only time she doesn’t see him is when she needs him. When Caleb is in the bathtub and someone knocks on the front door, or she’s finished loading groceries in the car and he’s strapped in his seat and she can’t return the cart, or he’s eating in his highchair and the phone rings upstairs—in each case, she doesn’t dare leave him even for a second because, now, anything might happen. And if it did, she knew she would be swallowed up by something so sinister in its anonymity that she herself would disappear. There would be no recovery from a toddler’s loss.

Her husband’s face never reaches her after a meal or in the car—even though in both cases she often glances to where he would be sitting, sure she will catch a glimpse of him. But no. He arrives only when there is a body present, another man, like a stand-in, or conduit.

In bed, in the dark, she can’t bear to roll to his place because she cannot picture his back. And, finally, in the deep night, just before sleep, after several months of waiting, when she can neither bear it nor stand it, when she is finally brave enough to try it, and her hands find the lost “v” of herself, she cannot summon him. She continues, caught in a perverse duty, and when she comes, the waves fan and oscillate interchangeably, rolling her over into an abyss of guilty betrayal and then the hopelessness of the betrayed. Afterwards, she cries, hard and long, and her face hurts for his complete and total absence.

Half of her life now is hidden.

“Come on, Caleb,” put your damn foot in the shoe.

“It’s time to go,” right now, right now, right now, I can’t believe this.

“I said no candy,” everyone’s looking at me.

“I can’t read. Mommy’s really tired,” get away, stop touching me.

“Just go to bed, go to sleep,” what the hell is wrong with you—go to fucking sleep.

The first half of her sentences comes out soft and measured, and everyone is amazed at what an incredibly resilient person she is. They shake their heads and say things like, “God only gives you what you can handle.”  The inside of her head screams the second half. They do not know she does not sleep or still cries or is succumbing to a dark wave of hatred for her son, the source of which is unknown.

She does not believe in God. And not because of the accident. She has never believed in God. The crash, his death, her unspoken half-life, all lead her to believe she is absolutely right.

Caleb is growing fast now. It is late spring, and he is finding frogs in the early soft mud in the lot beside their apartment. She watches him running around in the side yard, knees muddy, fingers splayed, talking to himself. She fingers the number she wrote down from the grocery store kiosk on the back of another prescription she refused to fill. It was just this afternoon, and the last place she saw him. Coming up behind her to grab some vitamins, there was someone with his smell—sappy cut limes—and she turned, knowing she shouldn’t, and there he stood, for just a singular moment, his light windbreaker brushing her bare arm. It was all too swift to say a word, to think, to do anything but hold so still she could stop time. She placed the folded paper near the phone in her bedroom. It’s Not About Fault. Every Parent is a Loving Parent. Call Us—is what the notice on the kiosk said.

It was certainly not her fault. But she was still a monster. When Caleb went to bed, it was all she could do to tuck him in and leave. She resented not being able to go anywhere without him, wrestling with the stupid car seat, packing snacks, milk, juice, diapers. She didn’t want to change one more single diaper, make another meal, stuff boneless limbs into jackets or socks, get up every night for one reason or another: bad dreams, diaper rash, hunger, something invisible in an eye, a splinter. She couldn’t stand watching him anymore and did not take him to the park.

But the thing that made her write down the number from the Kiosk was the night before, when she kissed him, she bared her teeth and pressed down on his face so hard he started to cry, and she had to turn and walk away. Later that night, she cried into her pillow.

Summer was hot. And though the heat made records, there were no jackets to contend with, or cold drafts in the apartment, or runny noses. The apartment complex had a shallow pool painted aqua marine, and it opened last week for the season. He loved to go and splash. There was a gaggle of young mothers who came with their children after work in the late afternoon, and she joined them. She had quit her job when he was killed, nine months ago. They had bought life insurance when she found she was pregnant with him, and she quit work as an assistant at a big law office. She was not going to work when he needed her. She did understand he needed her.

The cement is burning, and small footprints evaporate quickly. There are four other mothers around the pool. One, the blonde, is smoking with her legs crossed on the lounge chair, looking very much like a 1950s movie star with bright red lipstick, a white one-piece bathing suit, and a matching big white floppy hat. The other mothers are talking about a reality show, while intermittently yelling directions at their children, some in Spanish. The children are older than Caleb, four girls, three other boys, all wet and slick like seals, and Caleb wants to play.

But that means getting into the water with him. The shallow end is still over his head, and she does not want to get wet. The bathing suit she wears is navy blue, a one-piece, and faded in spots. It gets loose in the water, and the straps fall down. She just managed a shower this morning, and if her hair gets wet, she’ll have to rinse the choline out later in the sink because Caleb isn’t sleeping well and has discovered how to climb out of his crib. And her hair will get wet. He will splash, and she doesn’t want to yell at him. He’s in a pool, for god’s sake.

“Mommy, go in. Mommy, go in now.”

“Mommy, go in, please?” Shit, shit, shit.

He is sitting at the edge, not looking at her, poking one chubby index finger into her thigh. “Mommy, please?” He quickly leans over and places his head in her lap for a second, and then darts to the water. She instinctively grabs his arm and relinquishes, slipping in quickly, the cold water making her inhale fast, and wrapping his arm over her shoulder. He turns fluidly and wraps his other arm around her neck, and gives a squeal. The other mothers look over. She has not gotten wet with Caleb since the pool opened, since he died at the end of last summer.

In the cool water, his small body is lighter than a bird’s. He is nothing. He stretches out one hand and slaps the water, laughs at the transparent chaos, turns at the waist, and slaps both arms against the surface, just delighted with himself. She walks around in a circle while he tests the surface tension again and again, and then, realizing she will have to rinse her hair in the kitchen sink anyway,  heads out to the deep end, thinking she will tread water with him, that she can tread water with him perched on her hip.

Caleb grows wide-eyed, laughs again as the water curls between them, and then throws his head so far back that she has to stop, or he will arch into the water. She tilts like a balance so he can still extend backward, but misses the surface, and she sees his straight sandy hair ropey with water, fall and fan out, and hiccup on choppy little waves. She walks around with him in his upside-down world and tries to ignore the singular idea in her head. The phone number is upstairs. It would take almost nothing. She could just let go. He would slip under.

The sun glitters on the surface of the water, and she makes her circles wider so she is really beginning to tread water going out. He squirms and laughs, and she must hold him tightly as his buoyancy grows. It is as if he is not even there, floating. He senses he cannot arch back anymore and watches the world through two fists held up to his eyes. Water fills her mouth, and he climbs higher, squirming to stay above the surface. She can feel his toes on her chest, pressing.

She knows she can never let go, and this is how it will be for the rest of her life. She will always have to be vigilant, and she doesn’t trust that she can be so strong, so focused, so in love for so long. Making the loop coming back from the deep end, his weight grows more substantial with each step, and he shimmies back down, an arm returned around her neck, and he tosses his head back again, looking once more for that upside-down world.

With his throat creased with baby fat, she tickles him, and he laughs and tries to protect himself and pushes himself upright against her shoulder again. He lays a wet head of new lank curls against her hot collarbone, and she turns in a straight line back to the shallow end, noticing two of the mothers are standing and watching her, and the one with the cigarette is half out of the lounge chair, clutching her hat.

But she is not looking at them. His wet hand found her cheek, and he looked right at her. And she sees him. Not fleeting this time, but real. Caleb does have his eyes, blue and green and like the sea, and when he turns, like now, to wave at one of the seal girls dancing in the water, she sees a ghost of a dimple. But it’s not a ghost, it’s real flesh. In the sunlight, she clearly sees that his hands, resting on her forearm, are his hands, and broad—everyone says Caleb will have large hands. And then he turns to her again, and she kisses him, smells him, he is a wet little boy, her boy, not his father but a part of him, and she can bear it. More than that, she can see him now, clearly, outlined against the blue of both sky and water.

And, as she moves to the curved edge of the pool, she understands she will never see Mark again, except when he is enclosed in those wooden frames and shiny albums—there will be no more fleeting moments of love, or desperation, or bewilderment.

She lifts Caleb up, still light, and as he leaves the water, his weight becomes real. Then they sit at the edge of the pool and count each other’s fingers and toes.

---

R.A. Morean (Rebecca Morean) is a Pushcart nominee, an award-winning fiction and nonfiction writer, and professor. She publishes literary fiction, romance, and mystery, and has two screenplays represented under a dazzling array of pseudonyms. Her own work has earned a Strand International Short Fiction Award, starred reviews in Kirkus Reviews and Publishers’ Weekly. Lee Martin, Pulitzer Prize finalist, describes her writing as “. . . spot on lyrical and full of grit exactly when it needs to be.” She continues to teach creative writing and publishing, and just recently relocated back to Vermont. A single mother of four amazing adults, she is left with one puppy and many empty boxes. Learn more about her and make contact at www.ramorean.com.

The Middle of the End // Elena Ender

I can smell the tar bubbling up and oozing down the street as a sign of the end times. The cars get gobbled, and the drivers climb out of their windows to sit on top of their hot roofs until someone brings them a small bridge to get them to the sidewalk, a mound of pillows, or a plank of wood, perhaps. Our death is inevitable, but at least we can help our neighbor get back to their lawn where they step on frogs, fallen from the sky, croaking over and over. I can hear the cicadas scream in chorus with the frogs, buzzing a harmony that only a mother could make you feel guilty about.

It’s because you had premarital sex, she says over her morning coffee, doing the crossword and hearing the pitter-patter of blood drizzling on the aluminum siding of my childhood home. And it was gay, she bemoans. I moved back in at the beginning of the end, but the apocalypse hasn’t fully taken enough time out of my day to keep me a safe distance from Mom’s grumblings. She is retired.

I don’t think the world is ending because I had premarital gay sex.

You never know, she shakes her head. But it surely wasn’t me. Dad cleans up the messes that seep indoors, but knows his favorite lawn-maintenance tasks are a lost cause. If I am the reason for the apocalypse, I’d mostly feel guilty for that; he loves taking care of the hydrangea bushes.

I still work remotely, writing social media ads for an agency that represents some questionable corporations. I’m getting paid, but not paying rent, and also going out much less, obviously. So if the world sticks around for another two years, I would maybe be able to afford a down payment on a condo in the city. It’s unlikely, but it would be kind of nice.

None of my friends live in the area. It’s all just people I knew from high school who never left. It’s embarrassing seeing them again after so long, especially feeling like I failed for not hacking it in the city through all of this. It was just so on fire.

I try to keep up with my friends from the city, but not many of them are in places with cell service or general livability. Everyone without a plan was invited to join me, but no one wanted to share a bedroom. I mean, I get it: I snore, and I am bad about putting laundry away.

The days move slowly as the world waits for a merciful close. After the initial uproar, we became and remained relatively quiet and level. I stopped dreaming a few weeks ago; I just sleep in static and wake up to an unfriendly alarm.

During the hours between storms, a hot, orange dusk, I take our old dog Benny for a walk. He sniffs the curb clovers and pulls at his leash to catch up to the creatures that have fallen from the sky or unearthed from below. He never tries to bite, though, and he never even growls. He just wants to play.

---

Elena Ender spends her time writing silly little stories, scouring local dives for live music, and clowning around with her friends in Portland, OR. Her debut chapbook, Still Alive, I’m Afraid. is available now thanks to Bullshit Lit. You can find her online as: @elena_ender.

Safety Procedures for Supposed Cadavers // Michael Murphy

Apartment C is wonderfully spacious relative to most safety coffins. And the amenities? Bathroom, kitchenette, Wi-Fi from Caruso’s Cafe – like a pharaoh’s tomb. A veritable house of eternity in comparison. The Taberger is representative of the norm. Coffin-sized. Reliant on a simple mechanism – a bell connected to a rope connected to the buried’s hand or foot. The moment a revived corpse stirs, a jingle and – teatime – prompt exhumation.

Replicating the function of the bell and rope with a mobile is easy enough, but the two-way nature of the communication remains troubling. I silence alerts, ignore texts, block the overly inquisitive, and pass unanswered calls to a message stating if I do not call back, I am likely dead, but the ever-present distraction of the world above reminds me I am likely alive even if my wish is to remain unclassified.

Taphophobia, the fear of being buried alive, although rare, is not nearly as rare as the fear of being discovered that you’ve been buried alive. A condition that, to this day, remains unfairly dismissed by certain armchair psychologists.

Safety Procedure #1: Never respond to a knock. Yes, it could be saag paneer. It could also be a grinning psychopomp, wellness check, or Maxine Jablonski from 1A.

The Vester improves on the Taberger by adding a laddered escape hatch that the plucky can use to scramble to blue sky. A built-in feature of Apartment C – the climb from basement to sidewalk, a twenty-six-stair ascent. I refer to the stairwell as a feature, but this assumes one values equally the ability to climb up and the fact that stairs can be climbed down.

So, yes, this – the fatal flaw of most safety coffins. Although they guard the presumed dead against premature burial, they do not guard against meddling by the confirmed living. This is where Clover’s Coffin-Torpedo gets it right – in its consideration of the bidirectional relationship. But his booby-trap device assumes the buried dead are dead or the buried alive wish to be dead. In either case, tampering with the coffin results in kaboom and dead, dead, dead. And although I’m not one to suffer intrusion, I also do not wish for passersby to pick pieces of concerned family or Maxine Jablonski from their hair.

Safety Procedure #2: Consider non-lethal devices to discourage snooping. Disable your doorbell. Post ominous notices: Self-Isolating - Return in 2 Weeks or Danger - Fumigation in Process.

Surprisingly, many early models fail to account for carcasses who wake and wish to remain resident. An appalling number lack air tubes or conveyances for food and drink. Inadequate life support, convoluted grave signals, pyrotechnic contrivances – in terms of safety coffin technology, it is clear we stand on the shoulders of toddlers. Historic miscues abound. Adopting even the most promising advances requires implementing workaround procedures for when and where they break the bounds of sensibility.

I am not a stupid man. I do recognize that early innovators were motivated by market demands and stymied by the limitations of their day – The Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick, an example. A windowed abomination was built on his behalf in the 1700s that invited gawkers to monitor his body for signs of life. To the good Duke’s credit, the two-way mirror was only invented in 1903. Easily implemented today.

Replacing the rectangular slash of a window set in the upper wall of Apartment C could be accomplished in an afternoon. A window that is blessing and curse. Through it, Caruso’s Wi-Fi flows, but so too do the unwanted stares of the occasional dog or child. And although the passing of shuffling feet has a meditative visual cadence, being forced to retreat into the shadowed corners is far too fishbowl. I remain confident the HOA will approve my request for a mirrored window. Quite confident.

Safety Procedure #3: Every effort should be made to convert bidirectional to unidirectional. In lieu of two-way mirrors, invest in blinds. Place tape over camera lenses. Disable read receipts.

Safety coffin pioneers - in their wildest imaginings - could have never conceived of the invisible, omnipresent communications grid that today’s not-quite-dead take for granted. And while the Internet has been a boon for the passive, like a boundless window, it empowers external monitoring and intrusion on a scale hitherto unseen. In many ways worse than the Brunswick. And despite its remarkable power, or perhaps due to it, the untethering of consciousness from the here-and-now remains aspirational – the illusion of escape, a bothersome tease. A game of hide-and-seek on a vast, barren plain.

It’s not that genuine escape was uncogitated. Karnicki’s ejector coffin showed promise as a Vester alternative. A wiggle of hip and, leaping Lazarus, you’re thrust up and out of the grave. Clever, but more jack-in-the-box than catapult. To suit my purposes, I would require propulsion far above the prying eyes of nearby onlookers, well over the skyline, and into another – equally well-appointed and preferably unmarked – safety coffin. This would require the fitting of powerful underfloor hydraulics – cost-prohibitive and necessitating yet another HOA approval. The very same association I am relying on for the two-way mirror, which proved hostile to even the suggestion of plumbing pneumatic tubes into apartments for mail delivery. An association with no resident quorum. No mandate. A star chamber wallpapered in red tape.

The mail idea is Gutsmuth’s. The Gutsmuth featured a feeding tube through which victuals could be supplied to the coffin from above. As proof of concept, the man himself enjoyed a subterranean meal of beer and sausages to the delight of an audience of Victorian dimwits. Distasteful showmanship aside, Herr Gutsmuth did understand that a fundamental-sustaining inertia requires the occasional schnitzel or saag paneer. It does not, however, require an audience. In this, the Internet proves useful.

Safety Procedure #4: Online instructions for the delivery of essential provisions should be written pseudonymously and state, Place delivery at door. Knock and depart. Do not wait for the door to open.

The Internet. The Internet. Even with its god-or-monster ambiguity, of this I am sure: Companion technology is the path to safety coffin perfection. Cryptographic privacy safeguards, A.I. doppelgangers to mollify above-ground busybodies, teleportation. But of this I am also sure: Now is now. We cannot set our status to unknowable. Our toasters are watching us. We are pushed, prodded, measured, and reminded. Forever taking on-ramps that are off-ramps. And the horizon remains on the horizon. And we are not where we want to be.

Safety Procedure #5: Be mindful of operational risks. Do not become overly reliant on any one feature.

Never assume evolution knows where it’s going – seek improvement and never stop. Because when you stop, you will find and find. You will find that procedures must align with physics. That high energy seeks low. You will find the super will enter uninvited. You will learn that the fumigation of individual apartments breaks HOA bylaws. You will be told they tried to call, but it went to voicemail, that you never participated in the resident group chat. You will say this, sir, is a sacred space. You will attempt and fail to send a strongly worded email. The Wi-Fi network “Carusos_Cafe” requires a WPA2 password. You will find yourself queued in Caruso’s. You will find yourself pursued by Maxine Jablonski. You will find yourself forced to pay for a cheesy zucchini muffin to obtain a small slip of paper. And you will say, to be crystal clear, Maxine, accusing me of being cataleptic is accusing me of being happy. And there is such a thing as happy, Maxine, there is such a thing. And she will tell you your life is a lie. And you’ll ask how she recognizes a lie when she doesn’t know the truth. And the string of characters on the paper reads Coffee!Cafe!JOE! And you will find a finger buried in your chest. You’re a beating-heart cadaver. You might as well be dead. And you will say there is no agreed-upon definition of dead. Or you will ask about the two-way mirror. Or you will say, yes, you are right. And she will sigh a sigh. And you will know that you are right. And your thumbs will fumble Coffe!Cqfe!JOE! And each refined procedure is a step closer to gliding undisturbed in the ether. And Coffee!Cafe!JOE! and Hot Summer Deals and Reminder: Your Opinion Matters! and We’ve Updated our Terms of Service and Last Email Attempt and Critical Security Alert and Vital Message for You.

---

Michael Murphy’s fiction has been featured in the Notre Dame Review, Squawk Back, Sunspot, and MONO, among others. He was a finalist for the 2024 Oxford Flash Fiction Prize and a semifinalist for both the 2025 Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize and the 2025 John Gardner Memorial Prize for Fiction. While living in London, Michael wrote an award-winning satirical column for the Hampstead Village Voice.

Sit and Spin // Brian Conlon

The concierge told us to “sit and spin,” which we didn’t really appreciate at the time.

We booked with the hotel’s proprietary cryptocurrency through an app we were required to download and authenticated our sense of self by listing, under oath, all the subscription services we had used in the last ten years. The app reassured us in no uncertain terms that our booking was complete, and if we wanted balloons sent to our home as confirmation, we could do that with our leftover Bonsai Bucks. We declined that invitation, my wife and I not really being balloon people. According to the concierge, we did not read the fine print, which said that the only acceptable proof of booking was the batch of balloons we declined. Otherwise, he said, we’d have to go home, accept the balloon delivery, and come back.

“We’re not close to home,” I said.

“That’s why we booked a hotel,” said my wife.

It was our first trip in years. A road trip to somewhere young people lived, and people like us sometimes visited. Recommended by our therapist to spice things up, to give us some perspective on what he called our co-dependent relationship with our cat Alex, who slept in our bed, and whose feline malaise we’d both, according to him, to varying degrees, co-opted.

“I’ve experienced situations like this before, and it almost always ends with the hotel winning a corporate defamation lawsuit,” said the concierge.

“Let me speak to your manager,” said my wife, outraged.

“She went on vacation some time ago, some years ago. I still have her cell if you want it. She responds to texts,” said the concierge.

“No thanks,” said my wife, “Let me speak to someone in charge.”

“The app is in charge,” said the concierge.

We tapped at our phones and realized we could not access it.

Apparently noticing, the concierge said, “Once you leave the premises, you can re-log in through someone else’s wi-fi.”

“What about the hotel wi-fi?” I asked.

“It is immaculate.”

“Great,” said my wife.

“It will not be sullied by your online presence.”

We were insulted. Our online presence had never been questioned before, and was, in fact, as tame as Alex, whom we tamed before he could walk, and now was so tame that though his gait was majestic when he chose to use it, he generally chose not to.

Just then, a man walked out of the elevator.

“Are you a guest?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“How’d you book?”

“The app.”

“You accepted the balloons?”

“Of course.”

“And you brought them here?”

“Of course.”

“Of course?”

“It was seamless.”

“Balloons rarely have seams,” said my wife.

“Some do,” said the concierge, “but not ours.”

By the time we turned back around, the guest was gone. I told my wife that I thought he had nice khakis and that, for Christmas, maybe she could get me a pair like that. She said she didn’t remember the man’s khakis, but if I sent her a link, she’d look into it. I told her I didn’t have a link to those khakis at this time, but if she reminded me to research where to find the link, I’d look into it. She told me that she didn’t have the bandwidth right now to remind me about anything, let alone researching pants links, but when all this was resolved, I could remind her about reminding me to look into the khaki link, and she’d look into it. I asked her what she meant by all this resolving, and she told me that she chiefly meant the booking, right now, but also climate change, world hunger, the national debt, war, both as a concept and those ongoing, and our marriage. I told her all that would have to wait for now. She agreed.

After the guest left, the concierge said, “Our lawyers say I have to take a lunch break soon. Do you want a copy of our employee handbook?”

“No,” we said.

“We’re going to tell all our friends about this,” said my wife.

“You don’t have any friends,” he said.

“We don’t appreciate your tone,” I said, rather than detail our extensive friend list. There were several, at least four.

“My voice is quite lovely, I’ve been told,” he said.

We thought about it for a while and responded that we had no desire to insult him personally, though we would if that would help. He told us it might. We told him that his tongue split in the middle like a snake or a satan. He told us that if it were, which he officially denied, it was intentional, mandatory at his level of hotel management. He also told us that his lovers liked it a lot, which was an added bonus we should be aware of.

Stepping away from the desk to cool our nerves, my wife told me that she believed he was exaggerating about how much his lovers liked his split tongue. I confided in her that even though we had been married for many years, I did not consider her my lover, and that the only thing that loved me the way I thought a lover would was our cat Alex, but not in that way, of course. She agreed that we were not lovers, and that Alex was a much better lover than she was to me and that I could ever be to her, but that Alex preferred fish really. I nodded. She credited me for not being jealous of her or Alex, no matter how many people or things they collectively and individually preferred to me.

“Your eyebrows are uneven,” I said, upon returning to the desk.

Rather than respond verbally, he spat into a cup filled with cheap hotel-branded pens. He offered us the wettest pen. We declined. It was at this point that he invited us to sit and spin.

“On the pen?” we asked.

“If you like,” he said.

“No thanks,” we said.

“No, please, sit and spin,” he said again.

“No,” we said, resolute in our resistance to the idea.

“I have things to do,” he said.

He then refreshed his email seven times, flipping his screen to be sure we saw that he had no new messages.

“You see, there’s no way around it,” he said.

“The balloons?” I asked.

“Yes, then. Now, the sitting and spinning.”

“Don’t worry,” he continued. “None of this is sexual, legally, cannot be. Would you like to see the handbook?”

“No,” we said.

“We’re not even thinking about that,” said my wife, looking at me with fresh eyes.

“You know,” he said, “I’m not attracted to either of you. I don’t really like the way you look.”

“Your eyebrows don’t really do it for us either, so it’s fine,” I said. I looked at my wife. She nodded.

“That’s weird. Previous lovers, many say my eyebrows are fire.”

Skeptical, we asked to see the data. He refused and recommended we take an online tutorial available exclusively through the hotel’s app, Modern Sexuality and You: A Guide to Hotel Etiquette.

“If we agree to sit and spin, will you check us in?” I asked.

“The app will ultimately decide unless I employ a manual override, but I don’t want to, so I won’t,” he said.

Noticing that none of the lobby chairs were spinnable, I asked if we could sit on the floor and spin. He said, technically, yes, if we were strong enough. We knew we weren’t. We asked if he had any spinnable chairs we could borrow. He said that they had two chairs specifically for that purpose, but insisted that they had to be reserved at least twenty-four hours in advance via the app. We had done that, he said.

“You sure?” we asked.

“Of course,” he said.

He invited us behind the counter because, according to him, the chairs were too heavy to lift and too annoying to drag. The chairs were red, leather, high-backed, and swivelly. We sat. We spun. I saw a lilt of joy in my wife’s eyes I hadn’t seen in years. It was the lilt I hoped for when we planned the trip months ago. The lilt I fell for all those years ago, before Alex, before apps. Was I lilting too? We spun and spun until the concierge physically stopped us. I’m worried you’ll vomit, he said. We would never, we assured him. After regaining our balance by grabbing each other by both shoulders, we kissed.

“Gross,” said the concierge. “I told you it couldn’t be sexual.”

“It wasn’t,” we lied. Hand-in-hand, we walked out of the hotel and into the neighboring pet shop, where they were selling cat beds and live fish.

---

Brian Conlon is a fiction writer from Rochester, New York. He studied at Harvard Law School and the University of Rochester, where he learned to name-drop the academic institutions he attended. His fiction has appeared and disappeared in various still-going and defunct literary magazines, including Prime Number, Blue Lake Review, and The FictionWeek Literary Review. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and three illiterates—two young children and a Samoyed named Mookie.

I’ve an Idea Where to Put the Babies // Adam Peterson

It’s a very comprehensive plan, so I want you to listen carefully when I tell you what I think should be done with all the babies—

Step one—we put the babies on an island.

There is no step two.

I knew it was the perfect solution to our baby problem because the instant I thought of it I could breathe for the first time in years. I wasn’t crying. I wasn’t shaking. I calmly started packing tiny baby socks.

Before you can object, here’s why the baby-island can’t fail—

The babies will have a puppy on the island. In fact, I’ve already got a puppy, and I sent him ahead. And I know, I know, puppy is just another word for baby, but this puppy is responsible. This puppy gets it.  

His name is Max. The babies have many names, and we’ll no longer have to apologize for the ones we forget. In fact, maybe it’s even better this way, confirmation of the idea that there are things we need to keep and things we need to let go.

Babies and history—let go.

Freedom and adult situations—keep.

So we’ll charter a ship. We’ll cram it full of babies and send it to the island. There, Max will welcome the babies with wet puppy kisses. There, the babies will grow up far away from our world, the world where I will almost certainly be regarded as a hero for solving our baby conundrum.  

There’s no other option. We’ve tried everything else, and there’s simply nowhere we can put the babies where they won’t continue to ruin our lives.

They wail when we show them French cinema. They roll into the street when we set them outside. They destroy our credit when we rent them apartments.

Even the wolves won’t raise them, not anymore, not after the horrors those last babies wreaked upon this Earth.

But Max—

He’s a good boy.

Probably.

I assume.

And it’s not like the babies will be gone forever. Someday, surely, they’ll learn to swim and return when we’re shriveled and grey. It will be so good to know them then when they can help us work our phones and tell us the names of celebrities we don’t recognize but hate all the same.

Only then will they understand why we did what we did. Only then will they know what they must do themselves.

Because the world has many islands.

Someday, darling, we’ll find ourselves on one, sent away by those we once sent away ourselves, those who’ll swear—

This is the only one of our sins they will ever repeat.

---

Adam Peterson’s fiction has appeared in Epoch, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. He can be found online at www.adampeterson.net

Her Cherry Aftertaste // Danielle Roberson

I am made of the ocean, but it is not made of me. I know this because it refuses to mix with my body, its many micro-organisms keeping me firmly on the surface. It’s best not to mix ill-matched things like us, like men and power or sour milk and eager tongues. It’s best not to infect the ocean, so full of nature and balance, with my manufactured sadness and hunger for absolution.

I won’t stay human for long, at least, that’s what they say. That’s why I’m here, because I don’t want to exist like this anymore. Everyone would be too sad if I chose to die, so I’m choosing this. I wonder what form I’ll take; they say it doesn’t always make much sense. You just float for a few hours, then the ocean sucks you under, transforming you into something alien along the way.

One woman turned into an octopus, she was a waitress. Another into a moray eel, she was a sex worker. The last I heard of turned into a sand flea; she was a banker.

I don’t think I ever knew these women personally, but the world acted like it did after they disappeared. This is not new, but that doesn’t make it less disappointing. There are many names for women like us. Survivors. Victims. Selfish. Overly-ambitious. Monsters. Deserving of our fate.

I wonder what will come of me, of this body I didn’t consent to inhabit. I wonder what I will become as my back hardens, turning to a dense helicoidal staircase of chitin. I don’t know how I know what that means, but I wish I had an exoskeleton like this when I lived on land. Maybe I wouldn’t be here now. Or maybe this is how it was always supposed to be. It’s better than what I had before, not because it’s stronger, but because it’s not me.

I dip my head under the sea surface, only my nose and lips touching the air now. I want my mind to go next, for the water to smooth the cracks in my brain, valuable surface area for the anxiety tunneling itself so deep it burns. I want to feel nothing but nothing.

I need to flip; the air isn’t enough anymore. I gasp, my mouth gaping, cells begging for oxygen. I’m trying, I tell them.

I push myself underwater and breathe in. I never expected it to taste like this. I expected brine, for the water to needle my throat. But the sweetness is incredible, intoxicating. I used to give sweetness like this, used to rip my heart out just to dip it in gold. Just to raise it high to watch the passersby marvel. I used to –

I need more water. All my arms current more toward my new gills.

All my arms? Legs? I wriggle them one by one. I think they’re all here. Eight pairs. I have eight pairs of legs. Arms? I wish I’d had this when I was younger. Or maybe I don’t. The more I can reach for, the more I can lose. And I’ve already lost so much.

My hair once fine but coiling out of me in endless follicles, is gone. I used to hate this gift, one of the few my father left me. I had his tight curls, hair brown and lightweight. So I burned it. Painted it copper. Made sure it fell straight against my shoulders and never so much as waved ever again. 

But then I loved my curls. I don’t remember why, but I do know that once I did, the world heard, and hysteria answered. That’s when a man threatened to set my hair on fire. Took out a lighter and flicked it in the middle of the metro car. I didn’t flinch because I knew I could learn to hate what he singed off. I could twist something like that into an act worthy of gratitude. But then he took his pants off, threw them at me. Took out his penis and stepped forward so it sat in my face. No man had ever done that before, and no man since. Not because the world got better but because I learned to keep my head down.

My eyes, they’re above water now, sticking out of my head. And I can see heat. Life. It’s swarming around me. But not in me. I’m a dead zone. I don’t know if I’ve ever been alive at all.

There’s something sprouting from my joints. Large smashers pushed into my body, although I can feel them fighting to spring out. I let them loose, watch the water turn to steam around me as it bubbles to the surface. The surface? I look around, my eyes shifting independently in different directions. When did I sink? When did I lose the sun?

The ocean floor is rough but oh-so-beautiful. This is exactly why I burrow beneath it, digging a small hole where I can listen to the world sing above me. I’ll come out only to eat, I decide. But something is moving out there. Something larger than me. I come out of my burrow, ready to defend my new home, something I never would have done before. Not because I didn’t care about where I lived but because I’ve only ever lived in an organized collection of rooms.

Lingering outside is an octopus with a human leg kicking independently of the tentacles. A moray eel swimming clumsily behind with human eyes. Its sclera bloodshot, probably from all the salt scratching the surface. And then, hardly visible, a sand flea. I only see it well because of the heat pushing from its body. It doesn’t have any humanity left, though I suspect that happened long before it came to the sea floor.

I should know these people. They are familiar, but I cannot remember where I’ve seen them before. I cannot remember what makes their leg and eyes human. Is it the tiny hairs covering the leg, flowing in the water, slowing this creature? It’s not too bad now, but what will happen when it needs to escape? And these eyes, inferior to my own, make me pity the moray eel. I want it to be able to see like me. To see everything around it all the time. To be ready for anything, all the time.

And the sand flea. It approaches my burrow, too eager to enter. I wouldn’t know this small thing used to be human if it wasn’t for the rage it ignites inside me. Memories of being human pass by in vignettes, playing like a TV across the room only in the corner of my right eye. I see a woman’s face. She’s telling me I’m smart for someone with such dark skin. Asking if my wife still thinks I’m pretty with a bean-shaped lump under my eye. She’s snapping at me because she can’t stand that I am braver than she will ever be. Another vignette: the same woman is in front of me, apologizing in a glass room. Asking for forgiveness. Forgiveness for what? She’s done something to me, it was just in my mind. I’ve lost it now.

But the body does not forget, human or not.

The sand flea comes closer, the eel and octopus watching us from afar. My new back shifts to accommodate me as I rise and then stare down. As I let the flea know that I am the predator now. And it is my prey. The smashers move so fast when they release from my body. The flea doesn’t even realize what’s happening until it’s too late. And then it’s stunned, abdomen cracked in half on a small rock I didn’t notice until now.

The eel and octopus swim away, scared they’re next. The sand flea twitches, body cooling slowly. I take a bite, and again, I’m surprised by the cherry aftertaste of my new world. Or perhaps it is the sweetness of revenge. It is of no difference to me. Because I am nothing but a small thing burrowed beneath the sea.

I am not human anymore. I’m not sure what I am, but that’s not for me to know. The ocean knows me, and I suspect I’ll come to know it. It’s made of me, her, them. It’s where the women go when we get tired. Where we come to control our fate. And eventually, it comes for all of us.

---

Danielle Roberson is a writer living in Texas. You can find her short stories in The Word's Faire and Magpie Zine. She is a 2025 Writer's League of Texas Fellow.

A Shadow, a Snake // Lisa Piazza

It’s not every day you see a bald eagle at Serene Lakes, but I’ve seen a few before. Flying, perched in trees, their white feathers showing or skimming the lake to grab some trout, then speed off.

Today the one above me keeps its distance. Circling, circling.

The kayak I’m in belonged to my dad back when my parents owned the cabin together. After the divorce, my mom owned it, and now I share it with my sister, her husband, and their three kids. My sister’s already said she will pass her part on to her kids, and if I ever marry (and God forbid that person has a kid), the cabin should stay in the family. I’m told it’s cheating for someone else’s kid to end up with half of something that isn’t theirs.

My sister prefers my future loneliness.

My present sadness, too. Next to my life, hers is more than fine. Fully formed and growing.

The lake water is cold. In June, the mosquitoes take over, and there’s not much you can do to avoid them. Snow melts. Puddles form. Mosquitos breed. Even now, in June, there is more than a little snow left. Hiking yesterday, I lost the trail for a bit due to a pack of snow knee-deep. Next to it, clumps of wildflowers – purple, orange, pink.

If I knew the names, I’d name them.

Wild Iris is one.

Back at the cabin, a meadow mouse is gnawing on a crust of toast. Later it will chew through the box of Life cereal in the cupboard. Knowing this doesn’t mean I can stop it.

I forgot mosquito repellent, but the real mistake I made was calling my sister this morning to ask her to bring some up. It would have been easier to drive to Soda Springs and buy my own.

“You’ve been there how many days, and you’re just now calling about repellant? I mean, did you even check the master bathroom? I’m sure we left some there last summer.”

Sure enough, there it is.

“You must really want those bug bites; that’s all I can say!”

“Sure, yeah.” I always agree – even when she’s joking. Even when I am the joke. It’s an old habit.

“We’ll be up around 5. All three of my boys are coming, FYI. Hope your guy doesn’t mind! Can’t wait to meet him.”

One of the easiest ways to kill a mouse is to set out the sticky traps; that’s also the least humane. That and poison. The mice get too smart for the snap traps after the first kill. Up here, poisoning a mouse means poisoning everything. Maybe that’s everywhere. Being in the mountains, it’s easier to see the connections – tree roots, streams, rocks, run-off, branches, pinecones, mountain lions, bears. Mosquitos. Trout. Eagles. Mice.

That I know the mouse is here doesn’t mean I’m going to kill it.

From the kayak, the bald eagle takes its time circling. It could come my way. Or not. My sister’s been trying to see a bald eagle up here for years. She sees bats, hears frogs. But no eagle. She’s told her husband about the time I was a baby out on the grass by the water, and our mom swears an eagle dipped down, talons out, and almost carried me away.

I don’t remember it, but a story is true if someone tells it enough. 

I want the eagle to fly this way, glide down to the middle of this lake where I am now, dive, dig its ---

                    No.

                                     That’s an old thought.

                                                                                    The kind I am trying

                                                                                                                            to

                                                                                                  break.

There are other ways to escape.

When she arrives, my sister will see that my guy, Grey, isn’t here. Her boys will barrel in, unaware. If she told them to be on their best behavior to meet someone new, they’ll have forgotten all about it. They’ll get out the paddle board, root around in the garage for the fishing poles, ask about bait. Their dad will set up his work computer in the master bedroom where he and my sister always sleep, and we’ll see him for meals and the occasional card game.

This is his idea of a vacation! My sister will laugh.

The problem with Grey isn’t a problem. It’s just that he’s a good guy. We have known each other for seven months. That sounds like a long time, but we only make time to get together once a month, so over seven dinners, what I can tell is he’s a nice person – has a job, two kids, drives a Tesla, pays his taxes, likes art films and 80s punk.

I never invited him up to the cabin, so I wouldn’t have to bail at the last second. I know myself at least that well now. It’s progress. I didn’t want to end up lying to him, saying the cabin trip was off for all.

It’s the overlap I’m not ready for. One self meshing with another. Who I am alone, meeting who I am with my sister, meeting who I am with Grey.

Happiness is there somewhere in the middle, but I am not ready for it yet.

I can’t say why yet, and I don’t expect my sister to understand.

Now, I watch the eagle home in on something, dive down as I dip my paddle in the lake, and pull back. Dip and pull. Let the water make its own movement.

Later, when my sister asks how it’s been going all alone up here by myself, I’ll lie easily to her: she missed an eagle swooping down, pulling a rainbow trout from the lake right next to me in the kayak. Wings wider than you’ve ever seen. She’ll gasp, but only because the mouse is tiptoeing across the kitchen counter, half-hidden by the tile backsplash she put in when she decided to remodel the kitchen.

I liked my mother’s cracked sink, the wooden countertops. I liked the way my mother could stand on the deck and point to things in the distance. Rowton Peak, and that other one whose name I can’t remember. She would explain the different types of rocks: granite, volcanic, sedimentary. Metamorphic.

At dusk, my mother would water her potted flowers, and the water lines looked like snakes making their slow way across the patio. A shadow can be a snake, she would say. Now that she’s gone, a shadow is a shadow again. A snake, a snake. 

My sister will buy mouse traps in the morning. They’ll sell her the sticky ones, and she’ll cry when the poor thing is caught. One of her boys will put it in a bag and carry it out to the trash. She’ll throw her arms around her son, taller and stronger than she is now: “What would I do without you?” she’ll coo, and he’ll shrug.

About Grey, she’ll say, “We’ll have to meet him the next time.” And I’ll almost shrug, too. Old habit. A child again in her presence, believing the future to be a circle. Like it makes any sense to say you can have whatever you want as long as you’ve had it before. 

It doesn’t.

Lisa Piazza is a writer, educator, and mother from Oakland, Ca. Her work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions, Best of the Net, and the Pushcart Prize. She is an Assistant Poetry Editor for Porcupine Literary and a poetry reader for Lit Fox Books and The Los Angeles Review. She has recently finished writing a collection of linked stories.

RE: Canaries // Nathan Nicolau

for Yasunari Kawabata

Dear sir, 

I have to confess that there are still things I do not know. My Japanese is not very good; please forgive me. I was told there was a word in your language with no English variant, which is strange because the word means “please treat me kindly.” I learned this word by reading about you killing your canaries in their tiny cage. What type were they? I do not know much about birds or animals or living things like us. I did not even know there were canaries in Japan. Are they still yellow? Did you bury them yet? I am asking because I want to write about them. I want to write about their soft little bodies as you gripped them in your hands, the way you buried them with the soil given by the sun. I need your help with my story. I am unsure if the main character should be you or the woman you killed them for. I cannot write from the canaries’ point of view because I must confess that I knew those birds dearly. The truth is that one day, those canaries landed their little feet on my window while I was reading, and I knew you were trying to reach me. I am writing to you now with those canaries in view (excuse my poor handwriting). Their heads twitch around so innocently, not knowing their fate or purpose. As I finished that last sentence, they flew away to you. So how it goes. I can never write about them again. Only you know their fate as much as I do—using their blood to fill your inkwell, their feathers as your brush.  

I am sorry for disturbing you. Please treat me kindly. Would you like me to bury this letter with them?

Nathan Nicolau is a writer based in Charlotte, NC. His poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in numerous publications. His debut novel, TWO, is out now on Amazon. Find more about him at nathannicolau.com.

Screamer // Julian George

Warren didn’t think of it at the time, but the idea of screaming in public was planted in his head in the boys’ room in high school (Marist). Lester "The Molester" Harris (nicknamed after his sort of lookalike, Oakland Raiders’ great Lester "The Molester" Hayes), who was standing next to him, told him of his habit of screaming into a pillow, loud as he could, till he could scream no more, dead to the world and all the pain in it (and all the pain it caused him). Lester was usually stoned.

Lester had picked up on this from a popular self-help book, The Primal Scream, which Warren had also read, except Warren "forgot" the pillow part and screamed his damn fool head off as if being attacked by wolves. His parents, serious professional people with all the right credentials, sent him to Dr. Mantis, a child psychiatrist, after that episode, which meant skipping the odd class or two, no sweat. Dr. Mantis, a Thirtysomething similarly credentialed but covered in corduroy, said it was a case of post-childhood, early-mid-late-adolescent hysteria, or perhaps a case of very early premature early-adulthood agoraphobia, fear of life, rare but nothing to be worried about unless it stemmed from an unconscious or semiconscious or fully conscious childhood or infancy trauma he was too ashamed to talk about or confess to, Catholics, (go figure), I’ll get to the bottom of his shame and trauma and expose it to the light of reason and hygienic scrutiny. Was he properly toilet trained? Was Warren a bed-wetter? Did he masturbate? If so, how often did he masturbate? Where and when? (Put that down!) Had he started seeing girls yet? Was he interested in girls or was he in a latency phase? Would he like to talk about this lack of interest in girls or was he perhaps interested or not interested in boys? And if he didn’t want to talk about this interest or lack of interest in boys or girls, why didn’t he want to talk about it? What was he hiding and where was he hiding it? Would he feel better talking to the hand, puppet-gloved, of course (blue dogs for boys, pink cats for girls), he didn’t want Warren to get the wrong idea or the right one. Spill! (Or words to that effect.) Warren smirked. What a --

He started to daydream about screaming "fire" in the cinema where he worked weekends, but thought better of it. The law took a dim view of such pranks and might put him in "The Cooler" (an expression picked up from Hogan’s Heroes) or, disregarding his status as an underage outpatient, in the "Laughing House" (from Kiss Me Deadly, a blast). Worse, his boss, whom he had a crush on, might give him the axe; she’d indulge Warren’s rudeness to customers ("the customer is always wrong," she’d chirp, "even when they’re right"), but wouldn’t indulge a catastrophic loss of turnover.

His chance came one slow frigid evening, a Woody Allen double-feature, Annie Hall and Manhattan (Woody wasn’t terribly big in Burt Smokey and the Bandit Reynolds country), as he worked the box office, a cubicle in front of a shabby art deco cinema from the silent era.

Rubbing his mitts and clearing his throat, he warmed up with a few mi-mi-mis, the Caruso of Camp Bowie Boulevard. Finally, a truck rumbled past; he let out a scream. Not a soul heard him.

The second time, however, his boss, who was poking around behind the candy case, wondering what she could scarf that wouldn’t add to her waist, did hear and rushed outside.

What was that?

Nothing.

Are you alright?

A nod.

It’s too cold for you out here, with your chest. Come inside to the candy case and let Stu take over. He won’t mind. (He drinks.)

Driving him home that night, she told him she knew what he was doing. She did the same herself, into a paisley cushion. Screaming was a fun – and liberating -- way of letting off steam. Then she sighed, the words of a song he was unfamiliar with, Angel Eyes, escaping her violet breath. Warren examined her face for a clue as to her feelings and reckoned he could steal a kiss, which, to his surprise, she welcomed with a warm, wet mouth.

A decade later, on a half-empty DC8 flying over the Big Nowhere, he fantasized about screaming, "We’re all going to die," and the ensuing pandemonium. He snickered, amused with the notion of this Surrealist act. OK, he wasn’t running down a street with a pistol, firing blindly into a crowd, but by gum Dali and Buñuel would be proud to claim this young provocateur as one of their own. A timid-looking, straw-faced man seated across the aisle winced. Was he a mind reader?

That Christmas, Warren and his ex-boss, now alcoholic and burdened with caring for her deteriorating father all on her lonesome, became lovers for a few overcast weeks, any port in a storm.

Years passed. Warren was ensconced in the City of London, gainfully employed in some financial chicanery or another, an insufferable ass in a nice English suit. He’d hear from home, happily in the form of cheques, bribes to buy his long-distance love. Thank you. (Keep ‘em coming.) One day, shutting the door on the moist chilly air, slitting open the latest missive, a clipping instead of a cheque fluttered out: his ex-boss, his sloshed, quick, back to my blue room far away upstairs playmate, had died after a long illness. Bam. He reeled back, bam, as if shot, bam, as in his favorite old gangster movies, Cagney, Bogie, Eddie Robinson, they died so well, crumpling into an uneasy easy chair, gasping, nothing coming up the pipes, a howling, blood-curdling scream, a catharsis that would leave him floored, would have done him a world of good but nothing, the stuffing knocked out of him, for real.

---

Julian George’s writing has appeared in Perfect Sound Forever, New World Writing, Slag Glass City, McSweeney’s, Panoplyzine, Ambit, The Journal of Music, Film Comment, and Cineaste. He’s been a wine merchant, a UN translator, an auctioneer, and a carer. His novel, Bebe (CB Editions), appears this autumn in the UK.

Do Not Resuscitate // Ashleigh Rajala

It started with the cure for cancer. I didn’t believe it at first; no one did. It was impossible to think it was anything but fake news, and plus I was wary of getting my hopes up. We’d gone through everything you could think of with Sarah. Chemo. Experimental drugs. Naturopaths. Even positive fucking thinking.

She was more positive than I was by the end of it. I guess she had to be. It was her life on the line, not mine. I was just the husband. But it was there, all over Twitter. Facebook. Every TV channel. Texts and notifications were popping up on my phone. Is it real? Is it true? How is Sarah feeling?

Everyone says that now. “It started with the cure for cancer.” But it wasn’t really a cure.

Cancer just… stopped. Everywhere. All at once. I had my phone in my hand, staring down at the messages in disbelief. Even people I hadn’t heard from in months, those who avoided us under the pretext of “giving us space.” You know, those who are really just scared and don’t want to face it. They reached out now. Is Sarah’s cancer gone? Just like all the others?

I walked into the bedroom that I still thought of as ours, even though I hadn’t slept in there in months. Sarah had always wanted to die at home. Nothing was making sense; it all felt like a sick joke, but then I saw her, sitting up in bed, grinning.

“It doesn’t hurt anymore,” she said. I wanted to say it was the morphine, but I saw the drip dangling, useless. She’d ripped it out. I didn’t think she’d had the strength.

But it wasn’t just cancer. It was everything.

Well, almost everything. Nurses and doctors in hospices reported the terminally ill just suddenly feeling better. Emergency rooms had no more casualties. Heart attacks, car accidents, anything. They still happened, but everyone survived.

Even the very old clung to life.

For a while, any death made the news. People were still getting the hang of what was going on. No one quite knew “the rules” yet.

That is, until doctors, I guess, got cocky. With patients unable to die, what was the point of stressing out to save their life?

So this was the kicker, the thing no one saw coming: no one could die unless under someone’s express intent. Murder and suicide were still on the table. Someone jumping off a bridge with the intent to die would die. Someone with poison slipped into their wine would die.

And negligence, as it had all come to show, was equal to intent. A doctor not stepping in to save a life was effectively ending it. A paramedic dilly-dallying on their response. A parent leaving their baby in the woods.

That came like a second wave. First, no one dies. Then, too many die. Half were ruled accidents. The courts ate themselves alive with the question of culpability. If one didn’t believe their victim would actually die, how could one prove intent?

The news was too much for anyone to bear those days.

Not least of all Sarah.

And she had nothing to do but sit at home, watching the news.

She’d tried to get her job back but couldn’t. She’d quit when she’d got her diagnosis six months previous and when she was cured, they’d filled her position. There was no precedent for not dying when everyone thought you were going to. There was just a, “You quit. Sorry. New person is past their probationary period,” and a casual shrug.

At first, it was easy to say, “At least I’m alive,” but then, I suppose, the pain of living creeps back in. At least it did for her.

The rest of the world carried on. Now that we all knew “the rules,” that is.

Nurses had to keep nursing. Safety regulations had to stay in place. Food still had to be consumed.

I’d come home from work myself and find Sarah red-eyed on the sofa. She always had questions for me. “Why they’d stop calling?” I didn’t know how to answer that one. Whom did she mean? Those who stopped calling when she got sick or those who stopped calling now that she was all better?

Another day, she asked, “What will happen when we all get too old? Who will deal with us?”

And another: “Why is this happening?”

And then she couldn’t ask anything at all.

The inevitable catches up and we all act surprised though we should’ve seen it coming. But we all have to live on and live with each other.

Whatever that looks like. I can’t quite tell myself yet.

We can’t die, but that doesn’t mean we’re gonna make it out of this alive.

---

An award-winning fiction writer and indie role-playing game designer, Ashleigh Rajala lives and works in Surrey, BC, on the traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples.

Trickle Back, Sad Sack // Lisa Piazza

Late December, the end of another year. Time keeps Rae going. She turns the key. Drives and drives – four freeways, and a grey bridge. She watches the ruddy ducks circle the salt marshes. Follow the western gulls to each onramp: 580 to 280 to 880 to 101. The tires turn a rhyme in her mind: Black cat, Cadillac…Trickle back, sad sack… The words don’t matter. It isn’t a real song, anyway. Just like Rae isn’t headed to a real first date, a real person waiting at a trailhead for her. She has decided to keep a part of herself out of it – the main part. She will show up as a simpler version: part shadow, part shade. Unformed, an outline.

Rae agreed by text to meet her date at the marshes on the peninsula side of the bay. Halfway there she regrets her new pair of jeans from the bargain rack at Target. She feels like someone else wearing them. Come summer she will cut them into shorts and hate them still, then discard them at the curb, but tonight, she drives and watches herself watch herself – an old magic – a practiced art – to be both in the car and above it. Birdseye. Side eye. Goodbye.

She keeps her fingers tight on the wheel. Gray sky, gray gulls, gray road. She drives and lets the sound of the tires guide her: Black cat, Cadillac…Trickle back, sad sack… When Mona was little she sang her a song like this. To pass the time, to change the tone when P.’s rage took hold. Back then, she could still wrap Mona in her arms. She would whisper a made-up thing. A golden net. Always low, always smooth and conspiratorial. She made it sound like magic: an enchanted web that linked them together no matter what tried to pry them apart. It was the only form of protection Rae had as Mona climbed into P.’s black Acura three Saturdays a month as required by the court.

Rae was a gray woman then. Shadow-self. Seldom-felt. Gray night, gray sight. Out the window now she imagines the clouds form a window. A door. She could walk through it if she believed there was anything on the other side.

From the parking lot, Rae texts her date: I'm here. He is a decade younger, has three sons still in elementary school. I’m the tall one, by the lighthouse, he texts. Do you see me? She feels ridiculous walking toward him. Past due. Overdone in her Target jeans, limp brown hair. What will he notice first: the deep wrinkle between her eyes or the horizontal rows on her forehead like the empty lines on a piece of paper?

She walks the trail near the small Silicon Valley airport. As the sun sets, private jets line up. It is loud and windy, but not unpretty with a colorful sky of blinking lights. Still up for dinner? He asks. From a mile up, Rae sees herself nod. The night begs to unfurl into the future. It forces her forward.

Sure.

Rae follows his pale blue minivan from the trail to his house. When he speeds through a yellow light, she stops at a red sure he will drive on. But he pulls over on the other side of the intersection and waits. Rae considers being the one to ditch, to turn left onto the onramp, merge from 280 to 880 to 580 home.

But she doesn’t. He has a pot of soup on the stove and a warm loaf of bread. He asks Rae to toss the salad. His old black lab clumps along at his side, wary. Aloof. When Rae bends down to pet him, he cowers then growls. Emits a timid cry and her date rubs the dog’s ears. Leans in. Looks up at Rae like the stranger she is.

What? Are you some kind of witch?

From above, Rae sees her haggard self, her half-here, half-there heart. Her chin hair gray as bath water left too long. After a second, he laughs – a regretful chuckle. Rae laughs, too. A cackle. She almost says: It’s true, I know some magic. Watch me disappear right here, but she is already doing that - hiding her own mind, tucking a small silence under her tongue to savor on the drive back over the black bay.

This night will fade like the others. Rae will barely be changed by it. Still, the thought gives her an opening, a space. She understands a woman is allowed multiple lives. And a witch? Well, even more.

---

Lisa Piazza is a writer and educator from Oakland, California, whose work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions, Best of the Net, and the Pushcart Prize. socials: @lisampiazza

Avocados // Tana Buoy

“I still don’t understand why the forks don’t go in the same way as the knives,” I say while loading the dishwasher. Stabby ends down. Three prongs are just as sharp, just as painful on a careless palm reaching in blind for a spoon for sneaking late-night ice cream straight from the carton. You don’t answer, yet I hear your cheeky voice say, then stay out of the ice cream. In the living room, the television flickers with one of your favorite food shows. They’re all the same to me: renovated restaurants, mystery baskets, bad cooks, soggy bottoms, the pressure cooker. Is it cake or is it cancer?

I open the fridge, inhale cold air tasting of leftover egg salad, search the door for lime juice. The oat milk for your matcha lattes expired weeks ago. I’ve continued to push it further back on the shelf with the excuse the trash is already full. Next time. Always next time. I’m sorry I yelled when you hammered nails and pinholes into the wall without levelling, measuring, searching for studs. You always were trial and error—a little less of this, a little more of that—just go for it and try again as you put up the pictures I was always too busy to hang: Finny as a puppy, the grizzly in Glacier, honeymooning in Maine. Our wedding portrait. My god, we were babies then. I thought we had time.

I open the cupboard above the stove and fight through all your cookbooks for the Ziplock bag containing the recipe for your great-great gran’s guacamole. Set it on the counter safe inside the plastic. What started as oral tradition passed through your matrilineal ancestry is now on a notecard which you repeatedly told me was blasphemous as you wrote down the ingredients, stopping at every letter to rest your shaky hand. Scared the words wouldn’t be legible. Scared it would die with you—In case you meet someone new, you offered.

“Stop it,” I’d said. “You’re not dying. I won’t let you.” Pinky promises.

I want you to know I’m still finding your hair balled in my hoody pockets and stuck like Velcro to the back of my t-shirts and the bottoms of my socks. I’m pulling it out of my ass crack. I don’t know how it gets there, and I slap the long strands onto the shower tiles like you used to do and watch them slither down like thin snakes into the drain.

I’m already fucking this up, aren’t I? Not using the fresh limes, and I think I grabbed the wrong kind of onion. Trying to dice the tomato, but the cutting board quickly runs bloody with tomato guts. Try to stopper it with my hand from bleeding out onto the counter. Fail. These days and nights are an endless fog, thick and gray and void of sunlight, and Finny doesn’t sleep at the end of our bed anymore. Still waits by the door. How do I explain to the goddamn dog you’re never coming home and that I’m a liar? With the crook of my arm, I wipe away the tears burning my face. Definitely grabbed the wrong onion, and my cilantro cuts are atrocious. You once held this knife in your hand, rocking the blade in smooth even strokes. I should have been more present.

I remembered to cut the avocados last because you told me that once exposed to air, the fruit begins to lose its bright green color. Like a doctor performing life-saving surgery under duress, I tear the plastic baggy open from the side, pull out the three avocados one by one. At the grocery store, I’d selected them from the box labeled RIPE because I couldn’t remember how to tell the difference between a good avocado and a bad one. Something about squeezing and being too proud to ask for help. The blade presses against the first and the insides give way before the leather skin does. Same with the other two. My throat constricts. Shaking, I drop the knife onto the counter, pick up the avocados and press them between my hands, a non-bright green mush oozing from between my fingers, shedding their suits and seeds in my fists. You were in remission. RIPE is supposed to mean ready to go, and I can’t stop feeling cheated. We were coming home from dinner and a movie and rocking out to '90s ballads and finally planning that dream trip to Scotland when a black Nissan pickup jumped the median into our lane. I mix the ingredients together right there on the cutting board, bits of cilantro and onion and tomatoes all sticking to my palms. Pour on the lime juice and the salt and slap it into the bowl. I felt your soul leave, slip between my fingers. I wipe my hands, the counter, and load the cutting board and the knives into the dishwasher, press the quick cycle button. The machine groans and gurgles to life, and I swear I hear your giggle. That looks like diarrhea, Mikey. There’s a half bag of chips in the pantry.

I drop onto the couch just as Anne Burrell is coloring a contestant’s finger red with a marker for holding the knife incorrectly, and you’re laughing at the uncanniness of it all. I dip a chip into the bowl of guacarrhea, bring it to my lips. Surprisingly, it’s not as horrible as it looks. Finny walks out from the shadows of the entryway, shoves his muzzle into my crotch for pets. I glance at the wall where you’d hung the large canvas of my favorite sunrise from our last beach vacation, where crooked sunlight pours through the holes in the storm clouds moving across the Atlantic. Seagulls fly in form along the coastline and fishing boats are scattered across the dark blue ocean like mini marshmallows and the silhouette of the freighter teetering the edge of that burning horizon.

---

Tana Buoy received her MFA from the University of Nebraska Omaha in 2021 and is a micro/flash fiction editor for The Good Life Review. Twitter: @ThrowMeABuoy

Strawberries // Kevin Clouther

Andrea knew it was a bad idea. That wasn’t the question. Sometimes you had to go through with an idea, not to confirm whether it was good or bad, but to see what happened. That’s how you knew you were alive, she decided, watching the suitcases spit out of the wall and onto the conveyor belt.

Why had she checked her suitcase? She never checked her suitcase, preferring to haul it through the whole miserable process, so as to avoid the step she’d arrived at now. Maybe she was punishing herself. That made sense, given the circumstance. The circumstance was this: she was going to visit her ex-boyfriend Nick. They weren’t having an affair—she didn’t think so, not yet—but they weren’t exactly friends either. They hadn’t seen each other since high school.

“Excuse me,” a man said. “I just need to get my bag.”

Andrea looked at the man and then the conveyor belt, which was pushing a series of evenly spaced suitcases in her direction. She stepped aside, and he rushed into the space she vacated.

She checked her phone. Nick had offered to pick her up, but she declined, thinking the setting would lead to theatrics they would regret: a messy hug, hands left too long on shoulder blades, all the unfamiliar smells they’d acquired or learned to disguise. Better to rent a car, to be in charge of when she arrived and departed. That car felt a long way away now, which was okay. She wasn’t ready for whatever happened next.

Her suitcase was among the first to appear. She scooped it off the conveyor with one arm. With her other arm, she cut through the air, not realizing everyone had gotten out of her way. Was there something frightening about her here?

She’d taken out her phone to call her husband. It was an instinct. But also she wanted to talk to him. As always, he picked up right away.

“How’s Florida?” he asked.

“Is that where I am?”

“That’s what you said.”

She winced, not because it was an accusation but because it wasn’t. She heard at least one of her boys crying in the background. Or, if not crying, then asking for something in a way that was indistinguishable from crying.

“I’m in the airport,” she said. “I might just stay here.”

“Airports have bars.”

“How are the boys?”

He paused as he debated what to tell her. The longer he paused, the worse the boys’ crimes became in her mind. How much trouble could they have caused since she left? She knew the answer: a lot.

Plus, her husband was permissive. He permitted any number of things she wouldn’t, which made her the bad guy, which she resented. She tried to focus on her resentment as she made her way to the rental car counter.

“The boys are fine,” her husband decided.

“I’ll bring them back something stupid.”

“Bring me back something stupid too.”

Andrea nodded into the empty air. She hung up the phone and placed both hands on the empty rental car counter.

“Is anyone here,” she asked loudly.

Why was nobody else in line? She might have loudly asked that too.

She rubbed the handle of her suitcase and felt suddenly sheepish over its contents, including—humiliatingly—the bra she’d bought. She left on the tags. And there was—it was so stupid—the plastic bag of strawberries, already swimming in their own tawdry juices. She would throw out that bag before she got in the car, provided she got a car.

She unzipped her suitcase, and it was worse than she remembered. Not one but two bathing suits. Three floppy hats. Did she think that by flying back to Florida she would transform into a wearer of floppy hats? The sandals she didn’t regret. She was momentarily overcome with a desire to plunge both feet into hot sand. Then she allowed herself to imagine—just for one moment—the ocean washing over her feet. She felt the sudden cold, the scratch of salt. Already the sun was restoring something. Her skin? That would be good. She reached for the skin beneath her eyes, which was the skin she worried about most. She worried about a lot of skin.

“Sorry,” a woman said, rushing behind the counter.

“I have a reservation.”

“Of course.”

The woman got to work on a computer. Andrea took comfort in the speed of the woman’s typing. It felt good to be taken seriously. Few things bothered her more than being ignored. She consulted her phone to see if her husband had written. He hadn’t. Neither had Nick. Increasingly, she thought of them together, not as competitors but as different aspects of the same life. She shared some things with one and some things with the other. There were few things she shared with both.

Hideously, they had the same name.

“Okay,” the woman said, “I see the problem.”

“There’s a problem?”

The woman produced a look of professional pity. “When your flight is more than an hour late—”

“That wasn’t my fault.”

“No, but when a flight is more than one hour late, the computer—”

So the computer was going to take the heat. Andrea was familiar with—strangely comforted by—this strategy.

“When is the soonest I can get a car?” she asked.

“I might be able to help,” a man said.

The woman looked at him. So did Andrea. She thought she recognized him. Did they sit next to each other on the plane? Did they go to high school together twenty—God, more—years ago?

“You let me get my bag,” the man clarified. “From the thing. What’s it called?”

“Carousel,” the woman said.

Carousel! The whimsy was incongruous. Andrea thought, unwillingly, of her boys at home.

“I don’t need my reservation,” the man said.

“What’s your name?” The woman was already typing.

Good news: it was no problem to transfer the reservation.

“How come his car wasn’t given away?” Andrea asked.

The woman gestured toward the computer.

“Glad I could help,” the man said before disappearing forever.

“Do I get the keys from you?” Andrea asked.

“You’ll need to take the shuttle,” the woman said.

The shuttle arrived every fifteen minutes, except when it didn’t. The air outside was thick. Andrea hadn’t prepared herself for how different the air would feel. It seemed a harbinger of all the things she hadn’t considered, which, of course, there was no way to know about in advance. She began to worry about these things, not one by one but all at once.

She’d thought, many times, about seeing Nick for the first time. Or for the first time again. But she hadn’t thought, not really, about the next hour or the hour after that. Her flight back wasn’t until Sunday evening, and it was only Friday morning. The number of hours between now and then seemed larger than anything she’d accounted for at home, where the trip raced from idle flirtation to reality.

She tried, standing at the shuttle stop, to retrace her steps. The only other person waiting was a teenage girl. Andrea wondered why this girl was traveling alone. Where was she going? Andrea didn’t ask. The girl wore enormous black headphones. She moved her head steadily to whatever music moved through them. When Andrea was younger, boys always wanted her to listen to music with headphones. How eager those boys were to share their secrets! So many people told her then how hard it was being a teenager that she began to believe them.

Now she looked back at those years fondly as a time of colossal self-involvement. It was unimaginable to think of her concerns first without denial or compartmentalization. Indeed, denial and compartmentalization—especially that—had accompanied every aspect of this trip, starting with the purchase of plane tickets.

Are we sure this is a good idea, she’d written Nick.

Of course not, he wrote back, and her heart thrilled.

It was a problem. Because she was married. Because he also was married. Because, worse, she liked her husband. Did Nick like his wife? Andrea didn’t ask. They didn’t talk about their spouses. They talked, almost exclusively, about the past.

The shuttle arrived in a huff of exhaust. It made her tired just looking at the shuttle. The door opened loudly, and the girl got in first. She had no suitcases, only a backpack, which she wore with both straps, criminally uncool in Andrea’s day. Andrea sat across from the girl on the shuttle. They were the only two passengers. The driver was an enormous man squinting beneath a translucent green visor like the ones croupiers wear. At least, they wore those visors in movies. Andrea had never been to Las Vegas or any casino. She’d never been to most places. She could drive the rental car anywhere.

No way the girl was old enough to rent a car. Andrea was pretty sure you have to be at least twenty-five. What would she do to be twenty-five again? She thought about it, though doing so was more unpleasant than she’d expected.

At twenty-five, she had her pick. Men wanted to take her on dates. Friends wanted to meet her for drinks. People were always paying for things. She reached into her purse. She would give two dollars to the driver, one for her and one for the girl, who was really jamming out to the headphones now. Andrea smiled at the girl, which she ignored. Surely, it was good that this girl didn’t feel pressure to acknowledge a stranger’s curiosity.

Although it seemed a little rude.

The shuttle opened its door in the middle of an expansive parking lot. Andrea handed the driver two dollars, and he thanked her so profusely, she suspected—but couldn’t confirm—irony. At the edge of the parking lot was a little hut. Andrea followed the girl into this hut. Andrea worked her way to another empty counter. The girl sat in the only chair.

“Where is everybody?” Andrea asked.

The girl didn’t answer, of course.

“I’ll take whatever,” Andrea said. “Whatever color, whatever size.”

She spread her arms, resisting the temptation to put her hands on the empty counter again. There seemed a finality to that repetition. She might be tired, but she wasn’t giving up.

Because things stay the same for so long, it’s easy to forget how quickly—how often—they change. Like that, a woman was behind the counter, retrieving the reservation. Like that, Andrea was inside the sedan with all its comforting scents: fake leather, black rubber, disinfectant. All she had to do was tell the car where to go, and the computer pointed the way. The accent of the GPS was unplaceably—British-adjacent, robot-British?—elegant. The highway was wide open. She was at Nick’s house before she knew it.

Was his house what she expected? It turned out she hadn’t expected anything. You can only expect so much, and she’d directed her attention elsewhere: to his appearance, for one thing. She studied both the photos online and the few photos she’d kept from high school. He didn’t send her any pictures directly, and she didn’t send him any either—their exchanges were shy, even polite in this regard.

Nick’s house was neither big nor small. It was both nice and not, a single man’s house. But he wasn’t single. He had a wife. How hard Andrea had worked not to think about his wife! Andrea parked on the street, though the driveway was empty. Absurdly, she almost checked the mailbox.

What was she doing? The enormity of that question roared into her consciousness. She was sitting behind the steering wheel of a rental car. She was applying lip balm in the rearview mirror. She was depositing keys into her purse, but she wasn’t opening the door. First she needed to decide a few things, such as who she would be when she knocked on his door. It had been a long time since she made that decision.

She could be fun. Wasn’t she fun once upon a time? Didn’t she produce joints from her bra and light them in the passenger seat of cars going very fast? Didn’t the people in the backseat—beautiful people, men and women, all eighteen-, nineteen-, twenty-years-old—bend their slender wrists to retrieve the joints from her? Not two years before she couldn’t hold one without burning her fingertips. She wished she had a joint now, or at least a lorazepam. She considered driving somewhere else, maybe a pharmacy.

She could drive to the apartment where she’d grown up with her mother. Like most people Andrea went to school with, Nick hadn’t moved far. She could get to the apartment, if it still existed, in ten minutes.

Andrea was tired of thinking. She was tired, period. She returned to the rearview mirror to confirm what she already knew, that she looked desperate. That was okay. There was no pretending anymore. Or there wouldn’t be as soon as she knocked.

But there would be no knocking because there Nick was, standing before his door. He was taller than she remembered. Or maybe just taller than her husband. Of course, Nick had been watching her. Everything she’d been worrying about, he’d been worrying about in his own unknowable way.

Andrea hurried out of the car. She smiled or attempted something approximating a smile. He attempted something similar. There were, between her car and his door, about twenty-five feet. At some point he would walk to her, or she would walk to him. Maybe they would walk to each other. Or maybe this was a dream, an entirely reasonable performance of the unconscious mind. She would think, upon waking, that was something.

But it wasn’t anything, not yet. She was still deciding who she would be, and he was deciding too. He couldn’t control how tall he was, but he could control what he said and didn’t. He wasn’t saying anything, and she wasn’t saying anything either. They remained frozen, almost smiling.

Then she realized she’d expected the seventeen-year-old version of him. No matter how many times they texted—they rarely spoke by phone—she carried the high school version of Nick in her mind. What did he see in his private dream? They still weren’t saying anything. Of course, she’d expected to become the seventeen-year-old version of herself, the Andrea who was more than fun, who possessed a brain full of ideas, who wasn’t about to spend the rest of her life circling the same half-empty parking lots. That Andrea was gone first chance she got. So what was she doing back?

“You want to come inside?” Nick finally asked.

Andrea locked the car doors with her keys, and the car produced a conclusive beep, triggering an unexpected panic over the girl from the rental car counter. Before leaving, Andrea had neglected to make sure this girl was okay. What if she were still sitting inside the little hut, waiting with her giant headphones? If nobody came to get her, would she try to rent a car, or would she start walking? When she got where she was going, would she stay, or would she go back to where she started?

“Let me grab this one thing,” Andrea said.

She unlocked the trunk. She hadn’t meant to get to this point. Things had gotten away from her. Everyone had flirtations. They were healthy insofar as they kept you from doing something worse. But here she was, on the precipice of something worse. Her husband was at home with the boys. Nick’s wife was out of town—girls weekend, Nick had said. All of this effort for what? She shook her head, which was inside the trunk. The rest of her body was outside the car. She was sweating more than seemed reasonable for one human body.

“Do you want help?” he called.

She grabbed her suitcase and thought with horror about the strawberries. There was nowhere to jettison them without Nick’s seeing.

“Do you think I could have a glass of water?” she asked. “I’m not used to the heat anymore.”

He disappeared into the house. She closed the trunk and moved quickly to the driver’s seat, where she inserted the keys into the ignition. She turned the radio loud, but only she could hear it. Only she could smell the strawberries. The windows were closed, and she was on her way back to the airport. She could go home, anywhere.

Or she could find the girl. They could get coffee and a donut. Andrea had a few things to say, but first she would listen. The girl had her own story to tell.

Please, take off your headphones. Tell me where you’re going. Tell me what you’re leaving. Maybe I can help. I’ve seen things—I’ve made mistakes! But I’ve fixed them too. Maybe we can help each other.

---

Read our feature on University of Nebraska at Omaha MFA Program Coordinator Kevin Clouther. ➔

Sonar // Michelle Quick

By the time April rolled around, Daddy and Uncle Johnny were still missing. It was already 100 degrees, the grass was fried, and the paint peeled up like Sunday ribbons from Mr. West’s Chevy. What little air there was to breathe boiled around us in waves.

Mr. West, Daddy’s friend, honked the horn outside Aunt Iris’s house. Momma waited a beat and then opened the car door.

Mr. West held up his hand. “We said 9:30. It’s 9:30.”

My baby brother crawled around in the front seat.

“Iris knows when Easter service starts.”

Momma closed the door.

I had spent the morning submerged. My fists pounded the sides of our metal tub, vibrations chasing circles around me before fading into nothing. I wondered if that was what sonar sounded like. Daddy said submarines had a special way of seeing, so even in the dark they could find their way.

I met Momma’s eyes in the rearview.

“Aunt Iris might need help with the food,” I said.

Mr. West positioned my brother on the seat beside him before responding. “Five minutes.”

Dandelion puffs hung like ghosts along the front porch. The house was silent. Seven peach pies cooled in the kitchen. Aunt Iris was out back, lying on the ground in front of Uncle Johnny’s shed, her blue dress darkened with sweat. Overalls lay neatly beside her. Her hand was in one of the pockets.

“Hey, Short Stack,” she said, her eyes closed.

“Mr. West gonna leave us if we don’t get. C’mon, we can sit together in the backseat.”

“Wanna sit together now.” She patted the dirt.

I brushed dust from the lace tops of my white socks as I reclined. The sun was smothered.

“Why’d you make all them pies?” I asked.

“Couldn’t sleep.”

“Momma put you down for potato salad.”

“Salad don’t keep.”

Clouds started to crisscross, headed straight for each other. I braced myself for collision.

Sonar was originally published in Don't Take Pictures Magazine.