They play poker on their phones during fire drills. They hold dead rats in their hands. They are apathetic with curiosity. Some have lost their heads, others have lost their shoes. In their pockets are ring pops and bullets and broken chargers and red lace thongs. That is not their real name. Assign them no sex, no destiny. They are distracted and tender and high on cherry, Molly, sweat. They like the way rain soaks into worksheets and lifts the perfume of deodorant and potential into the air. Has the city always belonged to them?

On the subway they are walking between cars, cutting each others’ hair, deciding who deserves a mauling. They are vogueing in the cafeteria, hands like black doves. They are painting murals in the third-floor bathroom, scratching flowers into the stalls, making shrines to Billie Eilish, knowing no God watches. They need only themselves, only dancing. They savor in 30-second spurts. This is their war against forgetting, their campaign for eternal life. Forget Achilles—look at her face today, eyelashes on point. There is no such thing as history, only bluetooth speaker and report card and loose-rolled joint and first kiss and second fuck and livestream and free throw and group chat and forever awake now here always.

The teenagers are bored to death with our lessons. They’ll remember what they want to. They stay out early and wake up late. They keep their hoods up. They wear all purple. They glide along the block, new Nikes like solar sails. They harmonize with pursed lips and two-inch fingernails and boners tucked into the elastic band of doubt. They smell of cranberry, punk show, detergent, Sour Patch Kid. They shoot webs from their wrists and lasers from their eyes and wear long sleeves to hide the scars. They fold the corners of books they never read. They slit holes in their jeans with shards of tradition. They expect justice and refuse to be punished.

They are afraid. They yearn to be cradled, hate to be touched. They curl up like cats on the counters of the food hall, unable to penetrate the thick glass, wanting. Some feast on the spilled bowels of trashbags. They are always hungry.

They interpret the color of each others’ auras—tangerine, mint green, hazelnut. They want a puppy, but their parents won’t allow it. They intimidate for approval, beg for responsibility. Their futures are still multiple-choice. They steal stray Citibikes, ridicule our choice of emoji, demean our syntax. They laugh at our expense. They are Cambrian, Jurassic, Postmodern, Metamodern. They are gaining experience points and preparing to evolve.

Driving with a temporary license, they steal stop signs and barricade driveways. They gather provisions. They wear beanies to avoid detection, eyeliner to expel optimism. Under the bridge by the river, while we sleep, they chew on their cuticles and rest heads in each other’s laps, dreaming of birthday cakes that look like coffins. When the meteors approach, they won’t pretend to act surprised.

***

Lauren Cassani Davis is a writer and high school teacher based in New York City. Her work has appeared in No Contact, Monkeybicycle, and Peatsmoke Journal. 

The women at the graduation party, mothers of the graduates, wore hot-pink dresses and mint-green dresses and caftans, midis and lace and leather dresses, dresses that The Wall Street Journal and Vogue had declared to be warm-weather essentials, that sold for $1,599 or $59 (cheap-chic is smart-chic) and blended into the garden of the Wellesley home, which was studded with New Guinea impatiens in rainbow colors, the home itself featured in a recent issue of New England Homes, the hostess in a white chiffon with asymmetrical hem, her figure fit, her nails done in coral (the new red); in truth, all the women had had their nails done the day before at appointments made weeks earlier in anticipation of the party, done in French manicures and pastels, their hair too done that morning, in sleek or bouffant styles, and though their skins, beneath tinted foundation and loose powder, spanned a range of shades from pink-and-white to brown and browner, they all spoke the same language and said the same things: congratulations, what a beautiful evening, what a lovely house. That is, they blended in with the New England home, and if they made an effort—if they concealed Dr. Scholls in their high heels or downed anti-anxiety pills or Googled “garden party etiquette in America” and “what do Americans like to talk about”—it was not obvious; they did fit into the house with the lawn and pink-and-white hostess and new outdoor kitchen—yes, they fit in—but underneath their words (which fit in) you could discern traces of accents—a few rolled rrrrs, some lahs, a ze for the or f-ah-st for fast—Singaporean and Russian and Indian accents. One mother, in a straw hat and sunglasses she did not take off even when the sun went down as if she wanted to hide the strain in her eyes, revealed more than she meant to when she said, “This is the best country to grow up in, so many colleges, such good healthcare,” upon which the hostess turned pale blue eyes on her and looked puzzled: Were there other countries in the world? Another mother with a round apple figure beneath whose skin you could almost see the stacked pooris, the greasy ghee, kept pulling her tight dress over her round knees—she’d really have been far more comfortable in a salwar kameez in a hot, humid flat in Mumbai, fan turning lazily, masala tea at hand—and went on and on about her graduating son. In truth all the women talked about was their children, their past worries about their children (vaping, smoking, failing) and their future worries about their children (hazing, drinking, failing), and they all said, in those voices with faint accents—if only he had a friend at college, if only he knew someone—that is, underneath their clothes and skins and accents, they were all just worried mothers, who each managed to find another mother with a child in the same college to whom they talked and talked until they inevitably became hungry and, one by one, wandered to the outdoor kitchen and downed burgers and chips with an urgency brought on by stress—oh, how hungry they were!—they forgot their party manners and picked up the food with fingers and opposable thumbs, like they might a piece of roti, and popped it in their mouths and chewed with jaws and teeth adapted for cooked food only recently—twenty thousand years ago to be precise—because underneath it all, they were all warm-blooded primates that needed to capture energy in the form of grain and protein to keep warm, keep talking, keep living. Then they went home, calmed with food and talk, each clutching the number of a mother, thinking warm thoughts about her, thinking—now I have someone, now I don’t have to worry alone; that is, underneath the clothes and skins and words and accents and jaws and teeth and fingers, they were clusters of warmth-seeking atoms, they were beating hearts, they were the same.

***

Anu Kandikuppa’s short stories, flash fiction, and essays appear in Gone Lawn, Jellyfish Review, The Cincinnati Review (miCRo), Colorado Review, and other journals. Anu worked as an economics consultant in a former life and lives in Boston. 

The lady across the street spends six weeks fashioning wings, or so she tells us. Threads of fine gossamer woven with stardust. Her voice is like honey, sweet and pouring slowly from her open mouth. We think she isn’t beautiful, but was once, long ago before she married Captain Blake. We watch her sitting on her crooked front porch, right hand poised, raising and lowering a darning needle in the air, graceful as a ballerina.

Our father calls her Lady Blake, and we understand this is a mean joke, because although she is elegant she is very poor, like everyone else in our neighborhood. Our father tells us to stay away from her, but once he’s had his third cup of whiskey and his eyelids start to droop we slip carefully out the front door and dart over the fissured road to stand on her front lawn.

We’ve heard that Lady Blake’s son jumped out a window, but it was only the second story, so instead of dying he ended up with two broken legs. When his bones healed, he disappeared to the other side of the world and was never seen again. Captain Blake died at sea like a hero in a novel, and we imagine that when the giant octopus that ate him wrapped its slimy, tentacled arms around his ship, he laughed and dared it to come closer.

Lady Blake tells us she is sewing wings specially made just for us, and we count the days until they are finished. When they’re ready, she holds them up in the sunlight for us to inspect, but we can’t see a thing. She tells us solemnly to turn around, and gently places them upon our tiny shoulder blades. We glance at each other but keep our lips sealed because we love Lady Blake. She whispers in our ears that we can do anything now, go anywhere, that nothing is impossible. We dance across the patches of dry grass sprouting from cracked earth, barefooted. We feel like if the wind changes it will carry us up into the atmosphere and we will float away, and we don’t care at all because somehow, we are sure we can fly.

***

Sara Dobbie is a Canadian writer from Southern Ontario. Her stories have appeared in Fictive Dream, JMWW, Sage Cigarettes, New World Writing, Bending Genres, Ghost Parachute, Ruminate Online, Trampset, Ellipsis Zine, and elsewhere. Her chapbook “Static Disruption” is available from Alien Buddha Press. Her collection “Flight Instinct” is available from ELJ Editions. Follow her on Twitter @sbdobbie, and on Instagram at @sbdobwrites. 

The story ends with a boy, leaning against a barn door, squinting at the sun.

He steps out of the dark barn, his hair buzz-cut fresh, overalls hand-me-down big, one strap sliding off a bony shoulder.

The boy does not smile as he checks the cloudless sky. Does he notice the photographer taking his picture?

The boy in the photograph looks like someone you know. All cheekbones and pointed chin. Father? Uncle? But how can that be? He is young and you are old.

You lift the photograph from the box under your bed, careful to first remove a nickel and a leather-bound book. You could rub the coin’s smoothed ridges for hours, the weight of the book keeping you safe on the bed. But touch the black-and-white photograph and you float, not sure where you are.            

Holding the photograph, you scan the sky above the boy for a clue. Maybe a falcon will break the endless space, opening the story before it flutters away. But the sky remains indifferent to the scene below.

Why does the photograph scare you? It’s only overalls. A haircut. A boy. A barn.

Something you cannot stop is in the barn, in the picture that the boy will lock away long after the photographer opens the camera’s eye and lets the light in.

You count ten, nine, eight and come back, dropping the photograph to the floor.

The story begins with a boy, leaning against a barn door, squinting at the sun.

***

Phebe Jewell’s work appears or is forthcoming in numerous journals, most recently Across the Margin, Fiction Attic, Pithead Chapel, *82 Review, and Drunk Monkeys. A teacher at Seattle Central College, she also volunteers for the Freedom Education Project Puget Sound, a nonprofit providing college courses for incarcerated women, trans-identified and gender non-conforming people in Washington State. Read her at https://phebejewellwrites.com.

Evan Dando is haunting me, which makes this not only a ghost story, but also science fiction, for it’s a story about time travel, but only for ghosts, because he’s not dead yet, but someday he will be. Evan Dando is chasing me and he falls into my arms in a ghostly, terrifying, tender way, that’s where it’s safe, he sings, that’s where it’s warm, he sings and sings and he never gets me actually, he falls right through my arms and into the void, because that’s what ghosts do, they go through things, through matter, through flesh, they travel back and forth, in time and space. The ghost of Evan Dando is haunting me and I feel scared, but I feel flattered too, which makes this not only a ghost story, but also an eerie romance, like Wuthering Heights, a toxic love story people find romantic, about love lost and never found, about love doomed to die, only to come back stronger. He brings back my past, back when he stood by me, when I was taught how to adult, how to make the world tick, and now we’re both full-blown adults, with teeth problems and white hair, and we’re sick and tired of making the world tick, of making this world tick, tick-tock, tick-tock, closer and closer to the final boom, closer than ever to that last explosion. He brings me back to when I missed home, a safe place, or someone to whom I’d say, take me out of here, when things got rough, and they would, and they’d take over.

Evan Dando is haunting me and opens his ghostly heart to me and tells me I haunt him too, he’s haunted by many people, like I’m haunted by everything I ever loved and loved me, which makes this more than a ghost story, it’s also a philosophical story about the urge to immortalize everything that we love, the human urge to love, be loved, be seen, remembered and somehow stay here forever. His words are waves that travel forever, not fading out, they’re always loud, no friction can erase them, no law of physics can touch them, and I still hear them, they speak to me, like when I was young and the world made sense or didn’t, but someday it would eventually. He frowns sometimes, like he’s disappointed, like he wasn’t only a rock star, but also the Catcher in the Rye, and he speaks to me in a ghostly, terrifying, tender way, he says he failed, he couldn’t save us, but still that’s all he wants to do, to be an angel, protecting souls from disillusionment, like the Catcher in the Rye but for older people too, not just for kids.

The Ghost of Evan Dando is haunting me, although he’s not a ghost yet, or maybe he has always been a spirit, a soul above all else, and I haunt him too, at least a part of me that died long ago, only to come back stronger, a part of me that has already turned into a ghost, or has always been a ghost, the spirit of youth, of a world that once made sense, or didn’t but someday it would eventually. They say you’ll meet the same person in different bodies for eternity, until you learn enough to break the pattern and I did, I found someone who would jump into my arms to get home, which makes this more than a ghost story, it’s also a love letter, but he’s a ghost and he falls right through my arms, into the void, for that’s what ghosts do, they go through things, through matter, through flesh, like bullets but slower, like bullets that don’t kill, like bullets we carry inside and keep us together.

***

Mileva Anastasiadou is a neurologist, from Athens, Greece and the author of “We Fade With Time” by Alien Buddha Press. A Pushcart, Best of the Net, Best Microfiction and Best Small Fictions nominated writer, her work can be found in many journals, such as Chestnut Review, New World Writing, trampset, Lost Balloon and others.

i) How quickly time flies on a council estate and I tell you it’s a kind of freedom because you can have a fight and a baby sleeping in a crib in the same scene, or a polar bear and a sinking ship. It can all be both ethereal and real. The heroine grows up pretty. I wish the director would hurry and juxtapose her, in this chilly, crisp, almost scene, with a boa or a fox. Woman, fox, woman, fox. The audience thinks: Aha, woman! Therefore foxy.

ii) The waitress in the diner, burger and fries. Someone has lived this moment before, a million times in this scene and the ketchup has dried at the edge of the table. Can I take your order? Your order is here. She hates being told, a sudden quagmire, she’s nervous in her mini skirt. Close-up of a wolf whistle. Wolf whistle, spot of ketchup, wolf whistle, spot of ketchup. The implication is: He kills her. The blood, the blood of it, the bloodiness of it.

iii) A fairy-tale forest. Mushrooms, leaves, a quizzical silence. A bushy tail the colour of henna, dream, dream, a sort of dream. A bushy tail, a leaf, a bushy tail. There is a house, a grandmother, police. But when she left the house she was a girl, says the grandmother. The mouth of the wood where she lives is pursed and stubborn and silent. Were there any witnesses? ask the police. Question, silence, question, silence.

iv) Over and over in the story the girl was a fox, was a creature, was a colour, was wild, was devious. When the man stroked her she bit his hand, when he tried again, she bit it again. The blood was courageous and the girl was relieved when he walked out pressing his hand to stop the gash of it. The owner of the diner sacks her: Too fierce for my liking.

v) The girl gets home and the grandmother says: The police said you’d gone missing.  The grandmother cries and hugs her with relief, her chest rising and falling. With her high cheeks and pointed chin, the white patch under it on her glossy thick fur, the girls looks almost different, the girl looks almost the same.  

*The Kuleshov Effect is a film editing effect invented by Soviet filmmaker, Lev Kuleshov. It is a mental phenomenon where the audience derives more meaning from the interaction of two back-to-back shots than from one shot in isolation.

***

Nora Nadjarian is a poet and writer from Cyprus. She has been commended or placed in numerous competitions, most recently in the Mslexia Poetry Competition 2021 and Live Canon International Poetry Competition 2022. She was chosen to represent Cyprus in the Hay Festival’s Europa28: Visions for the Future in 2020. Her short fiction has appeared, among others, in the National Flash Fiction Day anthology 2020, Reflex Fiction, FRiGG, MoonPark Review, Ellipsis Zine and was selected by Kathy Fish for Wigleaf‘s Top 50 Very Short Fictions of 2022.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

Write a story about my beautiful mother: A petite, light-skinned Puerto Rican with dark hair and shocking green eyes. Write about her nervous breakdown.

Write about the doctor recommending she terminate her latest pregnancy. That he knew somebody who could do it discreetly and safely. For more money than she had saved. More than Dad made in a month, and how he would never permit it anyway.

Talk about Rh incompatibility. But try not to sound clinical about it.

Talk about a wife’s duty to her husband.

Talk about the abomination of contraception.

Have a scene where she makes the mistake of confiding in the wives of the church elders. Where she’s told only God holds the reins of life and death, and she’s made to feel like a sniveling idiot.

Write about the impromptu trip to visit friends in Arizona, just an hour north of the Mexican border. How her friends figure out her plans, and drag her back to Jesus.

Tell us about her fourth fruitless labor, and how she added this stillborn’s name to the others in the family Bible, as if they would grow up, move away, and simply forget to call.

Show us how her green eyes dulled, how her mind went places we could not go.

Yes, write a story about my beautiful mother. Then tell it from her young son’s point of view. Highlight the epic road trip without Dad. Include the greasy roadside stands, the singalongs with the radio, the bugs swarming motel lights, the friendly strangers who talked funny. How flat and tedious America was. The promise of the desert after rain.

Write of the son’s disappointment at cutting the trip short, about the drive north before heading home, how he stood at the south rim of the Grand Canyon and watched his beautiful mother weep at God’s perfect creation.

***

Bill Merklee’s work was included in Best Microfiction 2021 and nominated for Best Small Fictions 2022. He lives in New Jersey. Occasional outbursts on Twitter @bmerklee.

We have failed at Lincoln/Douglas debate. We have failed at Speech. We have failed at Hygiene. We have failed at Square Dancing. We have not been invited back to Improv. We have not been invited back to Taxidermy. We have not been invited back to Surgical Procedures 101. We have been whooped upside the head. We have been whipped into a frenzy. We have been told we lack initiative. We have been told we must learn to finish what we start. We might at one time have said, let’s start a formal club, association, society, or religion. But of course, as we’ve been told, we lack follow-through. We have been told we take up too much space. We have been told that, at times, we appear to be in our own world. We have been told we need to stack the blocks in the corner neatly before we take our turn at the easel. We need to learn the skills of being invited back to formal clubs, associations, societies or religions. We need to learn the skills of judging distances. For example, distance can be judged by sound. If we see a gun fired in the distance, we can count the number of seconds between the flash and the sound of the explosion reaching us. In this way we can tell how far we are from danger. If we see a gun fired close up, judging the distance will not be necessary and won’t help us anyway. We have been told these are good skills to learn if we wish to make a solid contribution. We will learn the skills of basic survival. We will learn to tuck and roll. We will learn to make ourselves invisible.

***

Kathy Fish’s stories have most recently appeared in Ploughshares, Wigleaf, and Washington Square Review. Her work has been widely anthologized, notably in the Norton Reader, Best Small Fictions, and Best American Nonrequired Reading. She is a recipient of the Copper Nickel Editors’ Prize and a Ragdale Foundation Fellowship. 

A hilltop conversation with the ghost of my brother. His image threadbare, glowing like some deep ocean creature.

“How many people do you think have ever lived?” he asks.

Always a numbers guy. Some strange statistic or guessing game. I snuggle into him, aligning as best I can, propping myself up to maintain the illusion.

“It’s billions,” he says. “Hundreds of billions. We outnumber the living; you are in the minority, little sister.”

Still little sister, despite me now being ten years older.

“Down there,” he says, pointing towards a field. “A man in the wildflower, still in army uniform, one arm missing. Do you see him?”

I see nothing but shadows. He laughs and prods at me, his finger slipping into my shoulder.

“Can you see them all?” I ask. “Right now, how many do you see?”

Before his reply, he does a mock scan of the horizon.

“We are sparse, despite our numbers,” he says, “We cover only a fraction of the planet’s surface. Imagine – the current living population could fit shoulder-to-shoulder in the city of Los Angeles. Did you know that?”

He pauses now, deliberate. Something is distracting him, far beyond the rocky edge where we sit.

“I brought you here to show you the dinosaurs,” he says. “You asked me why no one ever sees their ghosts.”

I sit up, confused. Did I ever ask him that? Maybe a joke or passing observation from our childhood, kept close all these years.

“The reason you never see them, is because you actually see them all the time,” he says. “Think about how many dinosaurs ever lived. Now think of their size – they were massive! They cover the entire planet, many times over. Everything you see is through the filter of a prehistoric ghost, sometimes more than one! They surround you like a blanket.”

He is bursting, enthusiastic, more alive now than ever before. I touch the air, trying to imagine the oldest of ghosts. Sensing my curiosity, he hovers an arm across my shoulder.

“Now, look,” he says, pointing to the valley. “I can show you proof, by showing you where they are not.”

And then I see it, without his help – a tiny square of light, pulsing and bending above the crop. It vanishes before expanding outwards, a rip in the atmosphere, hints of green and yellow.

“It’s a gap,” he says, “Between the ghosts. Sometimes, very rarely, you can make one out. That’s how you find them – you find the gap, the bit that is missing.”

He opens his arms out wide.

“Ta-da!” he says. “That’s the actual world you are seeing, without the filter, without the obstruction of ghosts. Beautiful, isn’t it? Now hurry.”

He runs ahead, beckoning me to follow.

 “I thought you were stuck on the hilltop!” I shout, trying to keep pace.

 He ignores my question as we approach. Up close, the gap is fragile in definition. A glare of rainbow; no heat, or sound, or shadow – a space between ghosts, an inverse of everything. It skips in the air, the illusion of being alive.

“It’s not the gap moving,” he says, “it’s the things around it. An Apatosaurus, late Jurassic, a whole herd of them.”

Before I can respond, the gap lunges forward, consuming our position. Our hands go in first, an incredible warmth, the true heat of the sun, unfiltered on our skin. We become illustrations, figures in a stain-glass window. Raw colour fills my brother, an oily volume, swirling within his form.

Looking outward from within the space, the ghosts are everywhere, now visible without obstruction. Crunching and writhing around us, a mist both alive and dead. Species from every period, compressed many times over, smudging the atmosphere.

“Amazing,” he says. “I’m so glad you got to see this.”

And with that he leaves me once more, the almost tangible feel of his fingers brushing my hand. I turn back to the hilltop, to the spot where he fell, looking for his image – a faint pencil sketch, a dream within a dream.

Around me the spectral herd begins to shift; the colours fading in its wake. Invisible giants fill the space, smoothing into a fog and smudging my vision. The gap implodes around me – reforming up ahead, flickering and thin, barely able to maintain its presence. I run toward it, toward the colour, keeping pace with the dead, and the gaps they create.

***

Paul is from Sheffield, UK. His stories have appeared in Milk Candy Review, Okay Donkey, Ellipsis Zine and Janus Literary.

To Saturn and back, you said. Told me about seven rings made of ice, a wedding ceremony in space. Braided constellations into my hair. Aquarius. The Big Dipper. I left the window open at night. Sometimes, your sock feet and black-hole eyes. Other times, nothing but stars. Where is Saturn? I asked, drunk on moonlight. It must be so far. Light-years away from our luminescent breath. You took my hand. My heart, you said. This is Saturn. Seven rings of ice. Frostbite. I thought of elastic hair, stomach kisses. What made a body. Wished you were made of anything else.

***

April Yu is a young writer from New Jersey with an affinity for language, running, and human anatomy. Although she was indeed born in April, her favorite season is winter. Her work appears in The Aurora Journal, Ice Lolly Review, and Lit. 202, among others. She is a graduate of the Alpha Workshop for Young Writers. Visit her on Instagram @aprilblossom, Twitter @aprilgoldflwrs, and at aprilyu.carrd.co.