Milk Candy Review

We recently published Elizabeth Erbeznik’s shining “Outside.”

Here, we ask her two questions about her story:

1) I love how subtly the narrator reveals the difference between her life and her employers’ — that image of the mother telling her children “gold bars,” and how they can sit on their money “like dragons” is so brilliant! There’s a sense of envy here, but also … there isn’t. How do you think the narrator sees her employers?
I kept trying to experiment with different titles to this story, but “Outside” was always the one that seemed to capture the complex relationship that the narrator has with her employers’ world. She is not a part of it, but she can get through the gates, she can pass through the houses. In contrast, her employer is stuck (at least within the limits of this very short story), like a dragon, guarding her treasure. And while I wouldn’t say that my narrator doesn’t feel some envy or even resentment towards her employer, I imagine that there’s some relief mixed in with these feelings. She might want the gold, but I don’t think she wants to be trapped as the dragon – and it seems hard to have one without becoming the other. 

2) The contrast, too, between the narrator’s children as they ride in the car with her and exist in this momentary joy and the children of these wealthy families, sent off to treatment centers, is so stark and powerful! There are disadvantages in both worlds, but do you think the narrator’s children are, perhaps, luckier?
I think that they’re luckier, yes, because they’re closer to the warm, deeply human, imperfection of their mother. My narrator can’t be bothered to drive through the real streets of holiday displays. She’s tricking her kids into thinking that this fancy neighborhood is just as good. But she’s watching their reactions, making sure that they’re enjoying themselves. Life in the big houses seems colder to me. There’s more physical space, so the people within them are more alone. When working on this story, I kept seeing these houses as illuminated stages – with a version of life being performed in front of the bright curtain-less windows and a different version playing out behind scenes in the private spaces. I can’t imagine children thriving in that kind of disconnect.

We waited until it was dark, entirely dark, before leaving to look at lights. There are streets that everyone knows about, streets full of stop-and-go cars that crawl past colorful yards, impossible to pass. But I punch in a code and drive through gates, turning onto streets that glow. If the kids wanted neon displays of candy canes, snowmen who never melt, reindeer and sleighs flying across lawns, they don’t complain. They seem happy in the backseat, faces pressed against the windows, staring at strings of gold lights stretched across houses I clean. Pretty buildings, they say, staring at houses that are too big, too fancy, to fit into their vocabulary for home. Gold bars, one of my employers is always saying on the phone with her adult children, on voicemails when they don’t pick up. She wants to turn their money into gold, to lock it up, to keep it safe, so they can sit on it like dragons. As we drive past these houses at night, they look like elegant lairs, lit from within by treasure. Trespass is a word my kids don’t know, can’t attach to themselves as we roll through the streets and look. Lamps shine in picture windows, illuminating private places, but I know what these houses hide. I’ve seen the cupboards full of pills, the unmade beds in separate rooms, the bills sent by treatment centers for kids who are supposed to be spending the summer at camp. If there are shadows, they stay hidden on these streets where even the trees look gilded, bathed in dragon gold. The car is warm, almost too hot since the kids took baths before we left and their hair was still wet so I cranked up the heat, but these bright streets remind me that I’m always outside, where the lights don’t reach, moving unseen past guarded fortresses, past sharpened claws.

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Elizabeth Erbeznik is a writer and educator with a PhD in Comparative Literature. Her stories and poems have appeared in Best Small Fictions, Anacapa Review, Catamaran Literary, Los Angeles Review, Terrain.org, Split Lip Magazine, and elsewhere. Her forthcoming prose chapbook The Oboe is a Duck was selected for The Florida Review’s 2026 Jeanne Leiby Chapbook Award. Originally from Northern California, she lives with her family in Austin, TX. 

We recently published Angela James’ cutting “Before Turning the Gun on Himself.”

Here, we ask her two questions about her story.

1) I like how the story starts after what happens next door — their story is over and now our narrator’s begins. And yet the neighbors’ story lingers. Do you think the narrator’s life would turn out differently if the neighbors’ tragedy had never happened?
Yes, I see that tragedy as ultimately prompting the narrator to reject the sexist scripts set out for her. I didn’t specify a year for the murders but I mentioned Love Boat, which ran from the late 70s to the mid 80s. A cousin of mine became a police officer in the 80s and I remember him describing how the new officers were discouraged from laying charges over spousal abuse. So many sexist attitudes and controlling behaviours were accepted as traditional and manly, and are not always recognized as red flags even now, decades later. I imagine the tragedy would have been at the back of the narrator’s mind as a possible end point as the boyfriend escalated his control and abuse. 

2) The mother’s reaction to the boyfriend’s behavior is such a familiar one — that coddling, that excusal of his actions, that inability to understand her daughter’s. But do you think her reaction is shaped by the neighbors’ story, as well? That, perhaps, part of this reaction is out of fear?
I think the tragedy would have been seen by the mother as proof of her belief that women by nature have the potentially deadly burden of managing men’s emotions. When writing the story, I imagined a lot of the mother’s behaviours would still have been present, even without the tragedy. I know so many women who fought lifelong battles with their mothers over these issues. I remember a friend nicknaming her mother “The Defender of Men” which was surprisingly effective in making the mom think before she would interject in support of yet another badly behaved man.

It’s the day after what happened next door and Mom’s sobbing on the phone, speaking  gibberish about omens and the five roses she cut from the garden before it all happened.
It’s two days after and Dad’s in the driveway talking to a guy from up the street, saying it sounded like a blast of firecrackers or maybe a car backfiring.
It’s two weeks after and my parents fret I’ll get nightmares as I read every article I can find and recite every detail. How the neighbour drank Cutty Sark-and-sodas all that day at the Carousel Gentleman’s Lounge before coming home. How it would have taken six minutes or so for the wife to die of strangulation by her own bedsheets, newly purchased, the ripped bag and paper receipt left sitting on the counter. How the three boys’ pillows were still damp from their post-bath curls when the police discovered their bodies. How the officers stepped around scarlet puddles, tarry Hot Wheels and Lego pieces stuck to the floor.  How the daughter, who had been watching Love Boat in the living room, survived by running to her grandmother’s house as her father fired shots at her from the porch.
It’s one month after. I hear the adults saying out loud over beer, wine spritzers and barbecued hotdogs how they felt for the neighbour being driven to such rage, as everyone knew that wife of his was a runaround.
It’s one year after. The images I have of the family default to the photos that ran on the news. Like the one of the wife hoisting her five-year AA medallion. Or of the youngest boys grinning in an inflatable swimming pool.
It’s nearly six years after. I’m fifteen years old and my first boyfriend tells me he knew that poor doomed family through judo. His own father snapped one of the photos that was used in the news, the one with the oldest boy beaming in his stiff white Gi and yellow belt.
It’s six and a bit years after. My mother is pressuring me to cancel plans with my friends out of “courtesy” to my boyfriend. She tells me, “It’s a terrible thing to make a man jealous.”
It’s six and a half years after and I am trimming the stems from gas station roses after accepting my boyfriend’s apology for hitting me “in the heat of the moment.”
It’s nearly seven years after and I am writing a math exam, struggling to keep my eyes open after being kept on the phone all night by my boyfriend begging me not to dump him and threatening to kill himself.
It’s a little over seven years after and my parents are saying I’m being unreasonable. They don’t know how I can be so mean as to refuse to let my ex-boyfriend come in out of the storm. Through the front window, I watch him chuck another one of his apology bouquets into the gutter and stomp back to his car. The house shakes with a crack of thunder that’s loud as a firecracker, loud as an engine backfiring and louder than a girl’s bare feet slapping against asphalt as she clutches the hem of her white nightgown to her thighs and runs like hell.

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Angela James resides in a smallish Canadian community with her spouse and many, many pets. Her words have been published by many lovely people, including those at Claudine, Flash Fiction Online and Pithead Chapel.

We recently published Michael Degnan’s beautiful “Paper Airplane.”

Here, we ask him two questions about his story:

1) Even when Mikey does come down from the roof, do you think he will tell his parents (more particularly, his mother) why he went up there? Or is that something he will keep to himself?
Maybe it’s just that I was once a teenage boy, but I doubt that Mikey will tell his parents why he was on the roof. After staying there for at least several days, it will be too much for him to be able to explain, certainly to his mom, and possibly even to himself. I wouldn’t be surprised though, if later in life, after Mikey becomes a father, he tries to give his mom an answer. Maybe he’ll give her a call the day after his oldest daughter runs away. Or maybe he’ll give her a copy of The Baron in the Trees for her 75^th birthday and write about his reasons in blue ink on the title page, careful to not make any mistakes.

2) At its heart, this is a story about not understanding your child, as much as you might want to. Do you think the narrator will be able to accept that there are parts of her child that will always remain hidden from her?
I worry that she won’t be able to accept not understanding her son, at least not anytime soon. At the moment, I suspect that she still sees her teenage son as he was only a few years before, still as a boy, happy to tell her whatever was on his mind while eating frozen waffles at the dining room table. It may not be until her son is living on his own that she can fully accept that he has his own life, that he is not just a part of hers, that there are many things about him that she’ll never know. Maybe by the time he is ready to tell her why he went to the roof, she’ll no longer need to know.

When the first half ends and I’m done with the popcorn, I put the glass bowl on the side table and ask my husband why Mikey is living on the roof. He shrugs and leans back further on the couch.

“He’s been up there for days,” I say. My husband grunts, and then laughs at a commercial, one of the “are you becoming your parents” ones.

I type “Why do kids live on roofs?” into my phone. All I get back are articles about the dangers that migrant youth face working on roofs on construction sites.

In our dining room, I write a list:

• He’s bored
• He wants to be independent
• He read The Baron in the Trees
• I yell too much
• He wants to look at the stars
• He started smoking
• He doesn’t love me
• He’s preparing for the floods
• He knows something I don’t

I fold the sheet into a paper airplane and write, “Is it any of these?” on the side. I go to the porch and throw the airplane. It glides above the gutters, twists and falls out of sight, onto the roof.

I go back inside and clean the kitchen. I wash the popcorn bowl several times, much longer than necessary. It’s so clean by the end that it’s almost sticky. I pick it up with my palms to not get fingerprints on it and put it on the counter.

I walk back upstairs to check on the game. Halftime is probably over, and someone is going to win.

***

Michael Degnan lives on an island in Maine. His work has appeared in Bending Genres, Emerge Literary Journal, Maudlin House, and elsewhere.

All the boys say it’s dumb. We roll our eyes when the girls talk about the Insta account they’ve set up so no one gets the same dress. We smirk at the way they shy away like nervous ponies when we pass them in the hall—as if they expect us to break into song or whip flowers out of our ass—but really, we’re just as bad. Each of us trying to outdo each other. Jackson plastering Sofie’s locker with a hundred Post-It Notes. Zach cruising through the parking lot towing a bunch of balloons. After school today, Mikey played his guitar on Hallie’s front porch while a group of us held signs that spelled P-R-O-M-? I was the question mark. You wait too long, all the good ones will be taken, Mikey says. As if they’re essay topics. Or seats in a theater. As if we all want the same thing. So, yeah, I’ll pick some girl and come up with a plan like the rest of the guys, and everyone will pat me on the back and say it’s about time, and then we’ll move on to the limo plan and the after-party plan and the what color cummerbund plan and I’ll keep pretending. Maybe my whole life. Because it’s only a dance, right? And I’m only a question mark.

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Kathleen Latham is a poet and short fiction writer living outside Boston. Her work appears most recently in The Cincinnati Review and electric pink and has received awards from Writer’s Digest, the Bridport Prize, and Bath Flash Fiction. You can find her at kathleenlatham.com or on Instagram @lathamwithapen.

We recently published Brittany Redd’s haunting “Basement.”

Here, we ask her two questions about her story:

1) I love the speculation as to why the basement was closed off — but what I really wonder is where is this basement? What kind of building hosts it?
This story was inspired by my old middle school. I started middle school in the historic old building, but finished it in a new building that had substantially less character and looked more like a hospital than a school. The old building was more or less just left vacant to rot. One of the features of the old building I never got to enjoy was a pool that was supposedly in the basement. There were all kinds of rumors going around about why we were changing buildings and why we couldn’t use the pool. Most of them involved drownings and hauntings, which I could never corroborate with any news articles when I looked it up later.

2) Of course there’s one true answer to all the questions, one true reason why the basement was closed off. Or is there, really?
I think there is an answer, but the beauty of this story is that whoever knows the truth never bothered to share.  The mystery created a need to mythologize in the absence of answers and the speculation is almost certainly more interesting than the truth.  

Because it was too expensive to clear out the mold.  Because some rich kid got hurt in the pool down there and the parents threatened to sue.  Because they kept catching kids trying to smoke down there.  Because they found a body down there and needed to cover it up.  Because even after they’d cleared it out, people could still hear voices, screaming.  Because the lights were always flickering.  Because they thought they could get more government money out of a new building.  Because they worried about terrorists sneaking in through the Red Scare tunnels.  Because they got a lot of money to hide some MKUltra shit down there.  Because the last place they ever saw those moms that went missing a few years ago was close to that building.  Because the kids who snuck down there last summer never were the same when they came out, glossy-eyed and vacant.  Because people kept having the same dream about it every time there was a full moon.  Because the HOA thought there might be homeless people living down there.  Because of geocaching and Pokémon GO.  Because they built a containment lab.  Because they found too many skeletons, too many ghosts. 

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Brittany Redd is a teacher and writer in Thailand. Her work appears in Funicular Magazine, Pithead Chapel, Heavy Feather Review, and elsewhere.