Anne sleeps on a grave every Tuesday. It’s a standing date, because Blake works the overnight shift, and there’s nothing good on tv. She wanders four streets over to the hidden cemetery on Glendale Avenue. The grave is old, and the dirt is unforgiving. She brings a blanket, two pillows, and a thermos of warm milk because a cemetery is not the easiest place to fall asleep.

In the morning the apartment building gossip waits like a gargoyle by the front door as strangers forced to be neighbors buzz through. She’s the gossip, but she’ll always tell you the truth.

“You’ve got a leaf or something behind your ear,” Diana remarks.

Anne returns home Wednesdays smelling like the outdoors. She waits until ten because she doesn’t want to run into Blake after an overnight. He’s sleepy and thoughtless. He says unkind things he doesn’t remember.

Tuesdays take forever to roll around. Wednesdays are taco and movie night. Anne hates spicy food, and Blake picks horror flicks where the girl never lives. Thursdays are a waiting game for the weekend. Fridays and Saturdays whir by in a rum-fueled haze. Sundays drip with regret for all the things Anne meant to do. Monday always slides in with a vengeance. Anne holds her breath until she’s back on the grave. Not in it. Ever since she started visiting the cemetery, she no longer wishes she was in the ground.

Anne only dreams on Tuesday nights when she’s lying on top of a dead body, separated by soil and mahogany. This is an intimacy she finds nowhere else, even though she only knows his name from the granite headstone. Ezra O’Reilly. Everything else, she makes up because he died in 1924. Ezra wore pinstriped suits, she thinks. He’s read every Sherlock Holmes book and loved a woman who didn’t love him back.

When she sleeps in their bed, Blake drags Anne towards him, towing her like a ship out to sea. He is the anchor, the barge, and when they’re finished, she showers because his sweat is a certain brand of sour. She wants to be like Diana the gossip and tell the truth. That she can’t stomach his smell or the way he tangles his fingers in her curly black hair. That she can’t forgive him when he’s never apologized. And she can’t leave, because no one taught her how.

Tuesday nights, she presses her lips into the dirt and confesses her secrets to the pile of bones beneath her. She imagines Ezra’s eyes are still intact. They are blue and endless, peering up. Anne wants her heat to transfer down to him. She pretends these are his favorite nights of the week, if time matters to the dead. He is gone below the ground. She is gone above the ground. Really, there isn’t a difference.

Blake and Anne’s anniversary falls on a Tuesday. Blake’s taken a rare night off and bought Anne a dress and heels for the occasion. He’s booked dinner at her favorite restaurant, the table by the fountain. He’s left her a handful of pennies on the counter – I’ll let you to make all the wishes you want. Normally, he knocks the pennies out of her hand and calls her a child. Still, Anne feels ungrateful. He is sometimes kind and warm. Flesh and blood pulsing, his eager eyes attached to her whenever she enters a room. He is a swarm, a hive surrounding her, but the ache for the cemetery bruises her heart.

She wears the new dress, spiked heels, and takes an uber because a steady rain beats down across the city. The driver is silent. When the car stops, he double-checks his navigation.

“Here? You sure?” The driver’s teeth are yellow from smoking. He wears a tweed cap and clicks his tongue against his teeth.

“Yeah. Thanks.” Anne hands him a tip. A twenty wrapped around Blake’s pennies, save one.

The heels aerate the ground as Anne sinks in with every step. No one thinks to put lights in a cemetery, because at night the graves are private. It doesn’t matter. She could find Ezra with eyes closed. Eleven steps past the gate. A sharp right at the angel statue missing her wings. His is the first headstone in the ninth row along the eastern field. She has forgotten her pillows, the blanket, a thermos. The earth is hard as ever. She lays there, one penny remaining in her fist, ready to make a wish.

***

Sarah’s work has been included in several dozen journals online and in print (including Milk Candy Review). A teacher, mother, and freelancer from central PA, her first middle grade fantasy novel, Delilah and the Cracked Cauldron, was released in June.

The princess with blood on her dress paces along the water’s edge. She’s nervous. She’s also a newly-minted orphan, which is expected in stories like this. She didn’t expect it. The boy she pleads with is quick with a knife. It was an accident. He was trying to shuck oysters. She got in his way. It wasn’t an accident. Take me away, she says. You’re an orphan, the boy says, as if he’s just discovered this truth under a rock. That’s why I want to go, she says. Before they place my mother’s crown on my head and make me—Queen, he says. The princess with blood on her dress can’t see the ending. Not yet. All she sees is a dead home. She isn’t ready to rule. She wants to live first. She wants adventure and a boy with eyes like the tides. He draws her in again, a moon to earth. You will be queen, he tells her. I only want to leave, she whispers. We can’t blame her. We won’t blame her. We blame him. She is young, and grieving, and he knows this. He kisses her anyway. She jerks back and presses a hand to her lips. The princess with blood on her dress is bleeding. He bit her. You bit me! An accident, he says. Your lips are too soft. My teeth slipped. His teeth hungered. She sees it now. That he’s like all the other vipers? Yes. Her heart cracks, and he doesn’t care enough to notice. Fireflies illuminate the boy. The silver knife on his belt. The princess with blood on her dress gets into his boat alone. She trembles. She rows until her hands crack. Until she’s far away from the sight of him dying on the shore. Eventually, she steals a new dress. A new name. Eventually, she makes it to a new city. Eventually, she disappears. We don’t know how her story ends—if she’ll stay gone forever or one day come home—but we can guess. We’re often right. 

***

Jared Povanda is a writer, poet, and freelance editor from upstate New York. He also edits for the literary journal Bulb Culture Collective. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, multiple times for both Best of the Net and Best Microfiction, and he has been published in numerous literary journals including Wigleaf, The Airgonaut, and Full Mood Mag. You can find him online @JaredPovanda, jaredpovandawriting.wordpress.com, and in the Poets & Writers Directory 

      Not your aunt Frannie’s, hot and moist on each eyelid to help you see the brightest way forward. Twice on each eye because Frannie does everything twice, for luck, including two back-to-back marriages to men named Xavier and appearing at the funerals—ten years apart—wearing the same black-and-white checked dress, plus wedding veil. Afraid that someday she’ll snag an eyeball with an eyetooth, you run and hide when her car wheezes up the driveway. But she always finds you.

      Not Meemaw’s, her lips whiskered earthworms on your neck, collards-and-garlic breath making you hold your own as she mutters: Don’t grow up to be more man than good, hear?

      Not your babysitter Junebug’s, a dollop on the tip of your nose at bedtime. You worry that her armored teeth will tear into a nostril and change your face forever, but you can’t turn away. She says: When you put on some years and sprout a coupla hairs on that skinny chest, I’ll show you how girls like to be kissed so you don’t fuck it up when you’re at bat. The prospect terrifies and thrills you and makes sleep impossible. You never receive the lesson because, unbeknownst to you at age nine, Junebug will be found dead in a cow pasture three days after your eleventh birthday, pantyhose around her neck. During the next full moon, her boyfriend Doggo will beg for a priest, a cell, a sentence, swearing that Junebug torments him from beyond.

      Not your fourth-grade teacher Mrs. Lynch’s; hers are dangling hypotheticals. Ooh, law, if I was your mama, nothing on the fat green earth could ever pull me away. I’d kiss you till your skin looked like a tomato.  

      Not your mother’s, not anymore, not unless you count your cruel dreams that trick you into being sure of her. You don’t give voice to it, but Papa gauges the longing in you anyway, like a cool palm on a burning forehead, which he doesn’t do because he’s too busy telling you to quit bellyaching and go catch the bus already.

      He lifts a bluegill from its coffin of ice. One hand holds it still while the other slices it from chin to tail, in one clean sweep. A sharp, silver kiss. You avoid looking at the cold, complicated eye. At the mouth stretched wide in a silent scream. Papa opens the stomach cavity and commands you to watch. If you glance sideways and squinty, the jumble of pink and blue and gray is nothing more than a nest of waterlogged party favors that smell like rotten teeth. You gotta cut it out of you, boy, he says. Just like this. Whenever you think you miss her, you just cut it out.

      With his fingers, he scoops the slithery insides onto a square of wax paper, tells you to carry it to the trash. You are careful to grip only the edges of the paper. You hold your breath. You close your eyes. You take four steps forward. At first you think you trip over the dog, but no, Mama took Goose with her when she left. Then you think you trip over Waffles, the dog that lives in your mind, the one Papa won’t let you have because he says he doesn’t need another goddamn life to steward. You’ve tripped over Papa’s muddy shoes kicked off and left by the door. This was supposed to be a lesson on how to cut out the weakness of need, and instead, it’s become a demonstration on how far fish guts travel once they’re free.

      What starts off as a stumble turns into violent collapse. The floor, the cabinets, the walls, the screen door. . .all splattered with what you were instructed to throw out. Father’s footwear, and ghost of dog gone, and hope of dog imagined too. All flecked with the insides of a fish no bigger than a heart. Papa drops the scaling knife and hollers himself into hoarseness.

      A kiss from him has never been more out of reach.

      You’re certain it would feel like sunshine on the crown of your head, that kiss. That it would tell you what you’re desperate to hear. But it never, ever comes. Nine is not too old to want that. Nine is a hundred years away from too old. (And even then.) You’re not better off learning to be hard. That’s just a thing you’re told by someone too afraid to admit that there is some kiss we want.  

***

Lucy McBee is a former high school English teacher who currently works as a copywriter and ghostwriter. Her work has appeared in Indiana Review and the minnesota review. She lives in Austin, Texas.

“A story is a flighty thing,” he’d say, “see how an open book looks like a soaring bird.”

The first sign that he was turning into one was the question mark at the corner of his mouth. Then the flashes of spidery black light above his head, as thoughts scribbled themselves into being.

She told him weighty tales of castles and oaks, monuments and mammoths, hoping they would bind him to the earth, to her. But she’d seen a word circling him while her hands shaped bread and her mouth shaped poems. A wanderer’s word. The day he vanished, it hung like imprinted smoke above his empty chair.

She searched the sunset for him, and the dawn. A page unfolded against the sky; fluttered to her window like a parchment moth. It settled on the sill with a high sweet chime, the flick of a fingernail on crystal. One word brush-stroked on the paper: Bellbird. Others followed in a flock, filling the air with crisp wing-beats. A solitary word or letter on each, rimmed with frost or leaf-mold, or scored, deep and red, trailing sparks.

She plucked them from the trees and the shore, breathing in their birthplaces.

Desire: the slip and glitter of panting deserts

War:  poppies, unpetalled

Quiet: chrysanthemums and cloud-shawled mountains;

H: the mouse-tracked dust of a hermit’s cell. He’d once told her how he’d woken from a dream and tried to remember a place called Home, and couldn’t.

She imagined him everywhere, writing himself into the future. She shouted stories of love and return as she scattered the pages on the table among half-eaten suppers and withered flowers. Her hands moving swiftly, she captured them under pebbles, seashells, and cracked china cups, fearful that they would fly away and leave her with only the blankness of his absence.

One morning, she found the papers curling in invisible fire. The wanderer’s word flickered once, starry, in the ashes, then went out. Her mouth shaping no, her fingers shaping hope, she ran to the place of wraiths and unfinished wishes; knelt and pressed her ear to the grey slab, afraid to hear the thud of a full stop. Heard instead the whisper in the grass. The rustle of a graveyard ghost is just the sound of another page turning.

***

Donna Shanley lives in Vancouver, where she can see mountains and sometimes, a half-inch of ocean. Her stories have appeared in Vestal Review, Ellipsis Zine, and Flash Frontier.   

Our son came home with this nearly dead dog. He watches these videos on the internet where people find wounded, abandoned animals and rush them to a veterinarian, and before you know it a dog or a bird is running or flapping around its forever home. We tried to say no but looked at his face and lost courage. Sure, we said, let’s get this guy the help he needs. Then we put this flea-ridden bag of bones in the car, taking care not to touch any of its mange or its open wounds, and we drove to a place that said it could take care of dogs like this. It could die within the hour, the vet said, but asked if we’d like him to care for it anyway. He didn’t know what it would cost, but at a minimum, we were looking at several hundred dollars. We looked at our son and we looked at the dog and we looked at the vet. The vet was shaking his head just a little like he was thinking we should cut our losses. But we looked at our son looking at the dog, and we said do it, spare no expense, heal this dog. Later, we buried the dog in our backyard because it was cheaper than cremation. We asked our son what the dog’s name was, and he said he didn’t know. We asked where he found it, and he said he couldn’t remember. For his birthday, we plan to buy him an expensive video game system. Anything, we tell ourselves, that might distract him from the goodness of his heart.

***

Stephen Tuttle’s fiction and prose poetry have appeared in Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, The Nation, The Gettysburg Review, and elsewhere.

At our 20-year reunion, we’ve gathered, this time in a courtroom, Meg at the defendant’s table, face as rough as tree bark, eyes like knotholes in her head. The prosecutor shows photos to the jury, one of Meg with a man at Twin Pines, a motel still patched with plywood from the EF5 tornado that tore through our southwest Missouri town when we were kids. Meg’s sitting on the floor propped against the bed, one hand holding a bloodied cigarette, the fingers of the other hand bent in a multitude of unnatural ways. The man lies behind her, impaled through the gut with a knife. What happened to Meg, we ask each other, we who only return home every 10 years.

After high school, we’d drifted apart, leaving town for college and careers, among us a gynecologist in St. Louis, professor of engineering at Washington University, and master contractor building monster cabins for the mega-wealthy at Lake of the Ozarks. Meg stuck close to our hometown, waiting tables after bouncing around from one aunt and uncle to another. We heard stories of Meg closing Donna Mae’s Diner each night and heading to the lake. We heard she’d pull out a lawn chair and drink whatever 12-pack of beer was on sale at Main Street Drive-Thru Liquor, chain-smoking Virginia Slims, the same brand her mother used to buy. We heard stories of a string of traveling salesmen. What happened to Meg, we asked the last time we came to town for our 10-year reunion, when she showed up, one eye tomato-red, her upper lip split, and purple splotches around her neck.

We’d all met at camp the summer before middle school. We were at the lake playing canteen bucket brigade when the sky turned eggplant and sirens pierced our skulls, prompting counselors barely older than us to shepherd the group to a nearby church basement. We spent the night huddled in humidity, clutching each other’s hands after the lone flashlight among us went dead, and crying for our mommies and daddies. When firefighters freed us the next morning into the arms of all but one set of parents, we blinked in the sunshine, the sky scrubbed clean, to find the church’s roof gone, trees stripped of leaves and life, a cow munching on grass, no mind to the metal fence post sticking through its midsection. 

What happened to us?

***

Kim Steutermann Rogers lives with her husband and 16-year-old dog Lulu in Hawaii. Her essay, “Following the Albatross Home” was recognized as notable in Best American Travel Writing. Her journalism has published in National Geographic, Audubon, and Smithsonian; and her prose in Gone Lawn, The Citron Review, Atticus Review, CHEAP POP, Hippocampus, and elsewhere. She was awarded residencies at Storyknife Writers Retreat in Alaska in 2016 and 2021 and Dorland Mountain Arts in 2022. Find her @kimsrogers.

Because Thanksgiving is next week. Because in the back seat is a grocery bag full of glossy college pamphlets that came to the house. Because last month you mailed your sister a birthday card and it came back undeliverable. Because your dad said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if your mom is using again.” Because your mom’s most recent Facebook post was about how “Pluto is shifting into Aquarius for the first time in over 200 years and the Good Lord knows I’m ready for a fresh start and transformation!!” Because your mom moved up there last summer with a boyfriend she met in rehab. Because your dad yelled at your sister, “If you’re so smart, why are you so fucking stupid?!” Because your sister scored a freakin perfect score on the National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test. Because your sister’s name is written on all the walls of all the boys’ bathroom stalls at school. Because you were jealous when your sister got to move to Florida with your mom after the divorce and smug when she came back halfway through the school year. Because your mom always took your sister out for pedicures but she never took you anywhere. Because your mom promised to help build train tracks for your Thomas the Train set but she didn’t, she put on a video of Thomas the Train instead, then sat on the sofa with your sister, teaching her how to french braid her Barbie dolls’ hair. Because your mom read you Goodnight Moon every night at bedtime until one day your sister was born and she stopped because was so sad all the time.

***

Dawn Tasaka Steffler is a fiction writer from Hawaii who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She stopped in Yreka once for sandwiches while on a road trip. Her work appears in Heimat Review, SoFloPoJo and Many Nice Donkeys; upcoming in Flash Frog, Pithead Chapel, Alternative Milk Magazine, and MicroLit Almanac. Find her on Twitter @DawnSteffler.

Lot’s Wife

When newcomers came the people of the city would take an axe to their legs. Not to amputate their limbs but to cut anyone new down to the right height, the height they were meant to be. The people of the city would chop their legs or else stretch their backs until they grew.

That is the story anyway. I cannot confirm it. It didn’t happen to us when we arrived. But I know why they tell it: because the springs flowed gently there and brought fresh water. Because the crops grew in endless sweet rows. Because that place was Eden, and everyone who lived there was Adam and Eve, there to till the garden and to guard it. And if you are the guardian of the Garden, your job is to keep it just so.

When we took the strangers in our neighbors enveloped us like an angry wall. They gathered around the house in the night and clawed to get in. When my husband begged our neighbors not to hurt our guests everyone told him Shut your mouth you foreigner shut your mouth.

In Eden, God set angels with flaming swords to block the entrance path. You should have seen our neighbors that night, all those angels.

When I was a girl my mother taught me how to salt meat. Scoop up the salt just so, she would say, and rub it across the flesh. Salt the meat right and you can keep it fresh for what seems like forever.

I’m thinking of my mother as I’m following my husband and my daughters, the strange new men leading us all. They’re leading us to a brand new city. My family – my husband and daughter – are up ahead. If I follow them I can start again. My husband is old but my daughters can walk quickly. They are going to where they can find new men, raise new babies. I can help them. 

I can help them but I’m thinking of the salt. I’m thinking of how our sons-in-law laughed when we told them the end was here. How when it was his turn to go my husband tarried and then begged they take us to somewhere not far away. Spread the salt like this, my mother would tell me. The flavor will stay. Block the path, God told the angels, and Eden will stay like Eden forever.

Back home the brimstone is raining down. The men of the city are hollering and running to and fro. They were the angels with the swords ablaze but suddenly they are on fire themselves, they are the new flaming swords.

I’m watching the men even though the strangers warned us not to look back. I am doing what I have done so long, what we all did in that place: I’m keeping my gaze fixed just there.

When my mother taught me about salting she would say Be very careful. Too much salt, she would tell me, and your tongue could burn. Too much salt and you’ll ruin the meat. Too much salt, my mother would tell me, wiping the excess off her fingers and off mine—too much and the dish can last and last, but you’ll dry the life away.

Author’s note

This piece plays with Biblical and Midrashic depictions of the wickedness, destruction – and lushness like the garden of Eden – of Sodom; as well as Biblical depictions of salt as both tied to posterity (the Covenant of Salt) and also a weapon of war that left soil infertile (sowing the land with salt). I invented the character of Lot’s wife’s mother.

The piece is in conversation with Sabrina Orah Mark’s amazing essay Children with Mothers Don’t Eat Houses.

***

Abe Mezrich is the author of three books of poetry on the Jewish Bible, most recently Words for a Dazzling Firmament from Ben Yehuda Press. His words appear in Lost Balloon and elsewhere. Learn more at AbeMezrich.com. Follow him at @AbeMezrich_Alef.

            I wake up here and I want to die. My mom says don’t leave the AC on. My mom says eat breakfast before school. The TV says there’s a war going on. My mom says pull your pants up and stand up straight. Maybe I don’t want to die, just to disappear.

            I’m failing Algebra but I have my own pair of headphones and I can wake up early without an alarm. My mom says I am lazy and she sits at the table smoking and reading her horoscope. The newspaper says Libra will get lucky this week, a large amount of money could be headed your way – just make sure to keep your eyes open. The TV says there’s a war going on, so I put my headphones on and turn the radio to 98.9 FM, 60s Thai Funk Radio.

            The girl who sits in front of me in English class wears her hair up in a ponytail every day, so tight I can imagine that little piece of elastic pulling her hair out of her skull and her brains falling out all over the desk. My English teacher says wake up and please stand for the pledge of allegiance, but I don’t feel like standing up so maybe my mom is right about me being lazy. My mom says if you’re going to stand around stand up straight. My mom says look me in the eye when you talk to me.

            I skate down the sidewalk after the sun goes down and I don’t think about dying. My mom hates the desert, says her skin has been dry since ’77 but she won’t move. Says she’s stuck. I’ve never been further than the county line so I learn to love it, I put my headphones on, turn on the radio. My mom says don’t go further than the old barn. My mom says don’t skate after sunset and I do it anyway. I skate down the sidewalk and I imagine the sand eating the sky.

            I go to sleep here. My mom falls asleep in her recliner with the TV on. The TV says the earth is going to burn. I leave the AC on.

***

Ayla Marsden is a multidisciplinary artist from Southern Oregon. Her work is inspired by horror comics, distorted synths, and the experience of being in a body (among other things).

The glow from a chandelier above the bar bathes the two in warm light, reflects the shine of his gold watchband as she absently strokes the back of his hand, her knees angled toward his, his hand resting on the back of her chair and when he leans in to speak over the din of the happy hour, he brushes her hair back with his hand, slides his arm around her shoulders and his lips touch her ear and, behind them, at a table for one, a woman watches, stops breathing, and remembers, remembers having someone to stroke her hair, whisper into her ear, to rub her back, zip the zipper on her dress, kiss her neck, to spoon at night and nuzzle in the morning, to lace her fingers with and feel the warmth of his hand as their palms meet; and remembers being held—real hugs, not the quick ones from friends, nor the ones where you slide your arm between your breasts before leaning in, but long embraces, pressed together, burrowing into each other, his face in her hair, and for so long the thought of holding someone else made her feel sick and it still often does—but she orders one more, and she thinks, maybe it wouldn’t with him—the bartender with the soft eyes and tattooed birds flying up his arm, or the man at the end of the bar, leather jacket and two-day scruff, nursing a ginger ale and reading the Times, or even perhaps with you, perhaps you’ll do, your skin, your hands, your warm breath on her neck, your heart thumping against hers might just keep her from shriveling up and floating away, weightless.