Milk Candy Review

Men of the mohalla—carpenters, electricians, factory workers—squatting around a bonfire, knees pulled close together, winter fog hovering over their shoulders. Men burning paper, wood, tires, anything they can lay their hands on. Men burping the paya curry cooked by their wives, cozying up in wool sweaters knitted by their mothers. Men smoking bidis, mixing tobacco and slaked lime in their palms, chewing paans that paint their mouths red. Men seeking companionship, men seeking recreation, men seeking validation. Men denouncing the rising price of tomatoes, the corrupt candidates for the MLA election, the increasing death toll in Ukraine. Men shooing away mangy dogs that move closer to the fire, hurling mud or rocks at them, calling them sister-fuckers, mother-fuckers, aunt-fuckers. Men interrupting the sleep of their mothers with their loud guffaws, throat clearings, and phlegm hackings. Men expecting their wives to answer the door at the first knuckle knock, whatever the hour, heat milk or prepare chai, whatever the desire.

Women scrubbing stubborn animal fat from pots and pans, kneading dough for breakfast parathas, soaking urad daal for lunch. Women warming up turpentine oil, massaging the pains of their mothers-in-law, placing pillows under arthritic knees. Women covering the cages of puffed-up parrots and mynahs with empty rice sacks, cooing kind reassurances to calm them down. Women hanging still-damp socks and underwear on indoor hooks and nails, ironing the beds to make them warm and sleep-able, adjusting cotton wool razais over sleeping children. Women cracking the window a slit, checking if the alley huddle will disperse soon, catching the slap of cold on their cheeks, the sting of smoke under sleep-heavy eyelids. Women watching the flame dance into shapes of a bitten apple, a tailless mouse, hands cupped in prayer. Women wrapping pilled shawls around their shoulders, crossing arms around their chests, bracing for the sandpaper incursion of the softest parts of their bodies.

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Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar is an Indian American writer. She is the author of Morsels of Purple and Skin Over Milk, and is currently working on her first novel. Her stories and essays have won several awards and have been published in numerous anthologies and journals. She is a fiction editor for SmokeLong Quarterly. More at https://saraspunyfingers.com, Twitter:@PunyFingers

There once was an island off the coast of Florida’s big toe that was created by Hurricane Roberta in 1950 and called Cat Spit by the fishermen who discovered it through their binoculars. For so long its only inhabitants were crabs and seabirds until Tyra and the crew brought the girls auditioning for cycle 42 there and said, “Only 13 of you will continue on in the hopes of becoming America’s Next Top Model. The rest will be left here to figure out what went wrong.”

Seven is a fine number for a family, a little small for a colony, and though no one remembers their original names, we do know they came to be collectively called Melissa. First, they built lean-tos from hurricane driftwood. Melissa’s long limbs were perfectly suited to the climbing of the palmettos long ago planted there by seabird excretion, and they used those fronds to thatch their slanted roofs. At night there they slept, curled around one another like cats. Melissa cracked crabs with their wedges and heels, and eventually their feet hardened to the shells that littered their small sandbar. Their hands were wide but gentle and they deftly stole seabird eggs. They were fond of crab meat omelets. Sometimes they added algae for B12. They collected rainwater in emptied Caboodles, angled their compact mirrors to harvest the sun for campfires.

The Women’s Group of the Coral City Baptist Church visited them first, came with blueberry muffins and pocket bibles and a 24 pack of bottled water. They found Melissa seated crisscross in a row, bronzed shoulders and newly freckled cheekbones, braiding each other’s hair, singing “Doll Parts” like a hymn.

After that, whenever the fishermen and concerned Floridians came too close to their shore, Melissa greeted them calmly but would accept no aid. Still, the fishermen left them bouquets of jasmine, gardenias, lilacs. Chocolates that melted in the heat, peeled oranges. Lacy valentines that faded in the sun until the water reached out and pulled them back. It was said of them that they forgot they were women, that their smiles meant something different. One fisherman swore he saw Melissa jump from the top of a palmetto and catch the breeze before floating back to the sand. Another said that scales were forming on their sharp collarbones, that their fingernails had started to grow curved over, hard and opaque. Stories persisted on the mainland that Melissa swam laterally, serpentine, as if they had no legs or arms, only supple, strong spines.

Just as the rumors really got going and somebody decided someone should do something about Melissa, Hurricane Indigo spun off of Africa, moving westward, feeding on warm air and saltwater. The stubbornest of mainlanders boarded up windows and doors and filled up empty milk jugs with tap water. Most others fled upward, inland. In the aftermath of it all, in the leaving and coming back, amidst the rebuilding and grieving, it was weeks before the fisherman and concerned Floridians remembered Melissa. They loaded up their boats, headed east, and found nothing. As quickly as Cat Spit was created, it perished, as if a god had simply flipped the island back over on itself like a pancake. There was no Melissa, no debris, not even a crab shell or a Caboodle floating in the water—only the vague feeling of having brushed up against a life you could’ve had.

The fishermen had no place to put their yearning, their saliva dried up in their mouths. They all got used to having less. The hardened among them figured Melissa would wash ashore eventually, their bodies bloated and fish-chewed. Some hoped Melissa may have heard the storm was coming, built a raft out of their lean-to and made their way to the Keys or Cuba, even. They could’ve settled down around the Gulf of Mexico somewhere, had long-limbed babies with killer cheekbones, sold leggings to other moms.

If only the fishermen and the concerned Floridians had looked into the red sky the morning of the storm, after the night of the full Strawberry Moon. Maybe they would have seen, impossibly, Melissa rising like the tide, into the air, swimming through the dark clouds. The tails of their braids flying, flirting with the quick wind. If they were listening, maybe they would’ve heard Melissa sing ecstatic, a taloned bird call mimicry of laughter like soda bubbles, like summer vacation, like women who have finally figured it all out.

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Janice Leadingham is a Portland, OR based writer and tarot-reader originally from somewhere-near-Dollywood, Tennessee. You can find her work in HAD, The Bureau Dispatch, The Northwest Review, Bullshit Lit, Wrongdoing Magazine, JAKE, Maudlin House, and Reckon Review, among others. She is a Brave New Weird and Best Small Fictions nominee. She is @TheHagSoup everywhere and also hagsoup.com.

Because he’d be upset if I didn’t save the right suits, but I couldn’t remember if his Kiton or Kired suits were the luxury ones. Because the twins’ favorite toys— legos and a train set—were scattered about and there was no time to gather them. Because although the sky was orange and the air smoky, I couldn’t see flames yet. Because the baby needed feeding and my nipples were cracked and bleeding and there was never enough time for warm compresses and lanolin. Because my mother-in-law’s dark oil landscapes my husband’s first edition Hemingways his collection of antique surgical instruments. Because singed pages of books hadn’t yet drifted from the sky into the children’s sandbox. Because Sunny, the standing human skeleton from medical school was too bulky to pack and when my husband and I argued he thought it was funny to bring her out and make her talk shit to me. Because embers and hand-sized ash flakes hadn’t yet fallen from the sky. Because once I got the twins and the baby and our bunny Sacha and our two cats in the car, maybe. Maybe I wanted everything else to burn.

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Claudia Monpere was just awarded the Smokelong Workshop Prize and her flash appears or is forthcoming in many literary magazines, including Craft, The Forge, Trampset, Fictive Dream, and Atticus Review. 

When you fell, your night was over. Stumbling was ok, you’d blame your shoes that were a little bit high and a touch too new, or a wayward pebble on the footpath. You’d smile at the bouncer and flick the flame red hair that made the boys go weak.

He’d scrunch his eyebrows and pretend to be unsure, tipping his head in imitation of thought, then he’d step backwards, allowing you to enter. We’d follow inside, relieved, loud music pulsing inside us, blooms of club steam clouding our faces.

But you fell.

And the bouncer knows falling means drunk, means tears, means vomit on chairs, in toilets and queues snaking from doors angry girls bang for admittance.

No, you’re not getting in tonight, darling.

 In an ideal world we’d leave with you, share the unmarked taxi with broken headlight, ask the driver what caused the black eye. We’d notice his gaze creep over your bottle-tanned thighs, slither up to your face of smudged make up, gears grinding in his skull, noting your melting wax features drifting to sleep.

 Our skin would prickle as a lizard tongue stroked his chapped lips, tasting possibility, making a decision.

 And we’d shout as he took the wrong turn down the unlit road of lonely houses, their window-eyes blind with nailed plywood. We’d threaten police and our fists as he switched off the ignition, and with our new salon nails, rip him to shreds as he lurched towards you.

But we’d spent too long preparing for the night out. We’d shaved our legs and applied pearly layers of slow drying lotion. We’d curled our hair with heated tongs, added extra strands from the plastic packet.

And Thursdays were hopping. Everyone we knew would be there.

So we went inside.

We didn’t want to go home with you. We didn’t fall.

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Marie-Louise McGuinness comes from a wonderfully neurodiverse household in rural Northern Ireland. She has work published or forthcoming in numerous literary magazines including Flash Frog, Gone Lawn, Bending Genres, BULL and The Metaworker Literary Magazine. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and enjoys writing from a sensory perspective.

Last look at my grandmother: a slim blue vase above the mouth of the fireplace. A final offering, a displacement of cinders.

A long time ago, she told me a story. When she was eight years old, living in rural Germany, she and two older boys came across three kittens in a ditch: mewling, clearly abandoned. The boys wanted to experiment on them—they had sharp sticks, rusty nails—but she screamed at them Don’t you dare. So one of the boys cut her instead, a slash on the arm. Predictably, the wound got infected. She cried in her bed, delirious with fever, the sheets turned translucent with sweat, and just when everyone thought she was going to die, her body fought it off. 

“I had mercy on the kittens,” she said, showing me. On her wrinkled arm, the scar tissue puckered like a disapproving mouth. “So God had mercy on me.”

I raised my eyebrows, because by that point I had already stopped believing in God, but I knew better than to say anything.

My grandmother never spoke about what happened during the war. Some secrets stayed unreachable, memories knitted closed like the scar on her arm. All I knew that by the time my mother was born my grandmother was long gone from Germany, out of there forever. But Germany would never be out of her.

Whenever I dream of my grandmother now, I picture her growing the tumor that killed her. She is lit from within, the clump of cells building in her skull, blooming white in the interior darkness: first the size of a zygote, and then turning to things the size of food—a pea, a cherry, an apricot—and finally something too large to be edible. Something almost like a fist. Maybe it bloomed there, in the airless dark. Maybe it shone out through the bone of her skull, lighting up her bedroom, lunar. Her own earthbound moon.

Eventually I move out of my mother’s house and to Chicago, a city that careens wildly between heat and cold, like it can’t figure out exactly how it wants to make your life miserable. My apartment is small and clean and pet-friendly, but I don’t get a cat. Something about them. I paint all the walls white, as if they might glow in the darkness. But they don’t, and a week later I paint them black. 

I imagine the true end to my grandmother’s story: the kittens dying not long afterwards, forgotten. After all, how could they survive without their mother? I can’t figure out why she never mentioned telling her parents where they were, or at least making sure someone took care of them so they wouldn’t starve. I can’t figure out why she acted like her story had a happy ending.

Sometimes I buy cigarettes, ignoring the raised eyebrows of the cashier, his low accented rumble You’re too beautiful to be buying these. I believe that my grandmother was beautiful, once, but eventually she wasn’t, and so it was fitting for her to die. Right?

Sometimes I snap my lighter into flame, touch it to one cigarette and then another, burn them all right down to their filters without so much as touching one to my lips. Smoke fills the air, curls over on itself as if indignant at the waste. No one else is here to smell it, so it crawls unnoticed and unremarked-upon into my surroundings. My hair, my clothes, the cracks in the paint: they all smell like poison.

My body is only the ellipsis of my ancestors, a continuation no one asked for.

Years pass and turn to layers on my skin and I don’t dream of my grandmother anymore. Instead I dream of crows coming down from the sky, a few at first and then more and more of them, descending in soft black sheets. They litter the fields, perch on my shoulders, talk to me in their dead voices. They tell me that my grandmother’s story was a fable meant to guide a child, and that she got the scar on her arm from something much worse: the careful burning away of six numbers stamped into her skin. The flame, the heat, the agony. An experience I could never even imagine. They tell me that there never was any such thing as mercy.

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Amy DeBellis is a writer from New York. Her work has appeared in Pithead Chapel, Flash Frog, HAD, Pinch, Monkeybicycle, and others. Her debut novel is forthcoming from CLASH Books in September 2024. Read more at amydebellis.com.