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.

The psychic smells the fire before the smoke alarm goes off. A Molotov cocktail through the front window of her shop. She’s wearing all her important jewelry, has her car keys in her joggers, slips into her sneakers and grabs her rose shawl off the end of her bed. Douses the shawl in water and covers her head and mouth with it. Her important papers are in the bank. Her valuables are at her sister’s. All she has to do is make it out of the house alive. She has two to three minutes to achieve this. She feels like an actor in a movie. Going through the prescribed steps to get the hoped for effect. But she hadn’t thought about how the heat would feel on her skin. As she descends the stairs, watching her foot land each time so she doesn’t slip, she wonders how close you have to be to fire to get burned. For it leave a mark. The clock melts off the wall into pile of plastic on the floor sliced through with a sheet of glass that shattered on impact. At her back door, she uses the shawl as a barrier between her and the hot metal. Propels herself outside into the chilling night air. Drops the shawl. Coughs out smoke. Breathes in deeply. Feels the solidity of the earth, how far down it goes. Roots herself to the present. Touches the wet grass and lies down to watch the stars.

***

Chelsea Stickle is the author of the flash fiction chapbook Breaking Points (Black Lawrence Press, 2021). Her stories appear in CHEAP POP, CRAFT, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and others. Her micros have been selected for Best Microfiction 2021 and the Wigleaf Top 50 in 2022. Her second chapbook Everything’s Changing is forthcoming from ThirtyWest Publishing in January 2023. She lives in Annapolis, MD with her black rabbit George and a forest of houseplants. Read more at chelseastickle.com and find her on Twitter @Chelsea_Stickle.

The remaining weeks were fairly quiet. Their color was green, as mandated by the oldest cousin. Green was the color of grass and of her favorite sweater, she explained, and so we must all love it. The oldest cousin could be demanding and autocratic, but they all loved her, or said that they did. The second oldest cousin had dark thoughts about a game last year where she had always been “It” because the oldest cousin said so, but she kept them to herself. The boy cousin banged his head against the floor, because it was soothing, a little pain that he could own. The floor was patterned, “parquet” the adults said, and it left a mark on his forehead that he could trace with his fingers for some hours after the banging. They swam in the color green – the green of the cherry tree’s leaves, the green of the ice cream that the redheaded cousin wouldn’t eat (because she thought it was a disguised vegetable), the green of the sky on that one evening when there was almost a tornado. When we grow up, we’ll remember this always, the eldest cousin said, but none of them did. When we grow up, it will always be the same, the baby cousin said, but she was wrong, although she fooled herself about this for many years.

***

Mary Grimm has had two books published, Left to Themselves (novel) and Stealing Time (story collection). Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Antioch Review, and the Mississippi Review, and her flash fiction in Tiferet, Citron Review, and Helen.  Currently, she’s working on an urban fantasy set in Cleveland. 

It was almost impossible for Renaissance women to escape an ess: seamstress, murderess, goddess, mistress. The same s-sound that, when attached to the end of a word, multiplies it. But muse already sounded female. Muse demanded a singular bite.

In the same way that women blame their own big hands for making a cock look small, muses assumed responsibility for how their artists painted babies. Droopy babies. Emaciated babies. Benjamin Button babies. Babies who resembled smokers, drinkers, gluttons. Jesus babies, clawing at Mary’s cloak, half-animal, like they don’t want to be crucified. 

Muses squashed their babies between their poky breasts and begged artists to paint them. Proud artists wouldn’t look. They knew what a baby was: like them, only miniature.

Of course they didn’t want to see the babies with the little, floppy penises. Too often, they shared the same tubelike nose.

The girl babies grew up to share beds with artists. When the artists left to invent things, they dipped their fingers into the salty stain on the bed to learn how to finger-paint.

***

Nora Esme Wagner lives in San Francisco, California. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in JMWW, Litbreak Magazine, Flash Boulevard, and elsewhere. She is an assistant fiction editor at Pithead Chapel.

By now, we have learned the real story of one of our deaths. But back then, we only imagined. The stories we told were part of the game.

You’d arrive at your friend’s house, clutching your sleeping bag. Toothbrush and toothpaste stowed in your pillowcase. Maybe you’d still have a little-girl nightgown with rosebuds and ruffles. Or maybe you’d sleep in a t-shirt big enough for two girls. You’d smudge your face with smuggled eye shadow and blush and ask Lisa to give you French braids. Judy would show the trick for growing boobs by winging your elbows back and forth. You’d debate which Charlie’s angel was prettiest and if no one thought your favorite was best it somehow felt like maybe you’d never be beautiful too. And then Christine would gripe about crumbs on her pillowcase and Angela would turn on the soundtrack from Grease and you’d all shriek and sing greased lightning and summer nights and when it got to hopelessly devoted you’d rewind and rewind and rewind to sing it again until Pam’s dad yelled from the doorway that it was time to turn the music off and that’s how you’d know it was time for the game.

The lights would go off, and flashlights come out. When it was your turn, you’d lie down on the floor. Your friends would surround you, kneeling, heads bent. The girl at your head told the story of your death. A fall from a ladder. A murderous kidnapper. A bus with failed brakes and you in the crosswalk.

We didn’t know then how slow death could be. How a cell could go wrong and quietly spawn until it amassed a hard lump. We didn’t know about radiation, surgery, remission, recurrence. We didn’t know how long you could fight to stay, or what remained when the fight was lost.

In our nightgowns, high on sugar, clamoring to make our voices heard, death was a only story we told.

And the best stories had blood and fear and the moment you knew you were about to die.

Those were the stories that made your body want to float.

The stories that made you light as a feather.

The stories that made the floor fall away, when with delicate fingers, your friends lifted you into the air.

***

Melissa Fitzpatrick lives in the Los Angeles area. Her work appears or is forthcoming in CHEAP POP, Scrawl Place, and Corvid Queen. Connect at Twitter @mfitzwrites.

Yesterday: we found a bird in Leila’s backyard. An injured brown towhee. She wanted to nurse the brown little bird back to health, like we’d seen other little girls do on TV, perfect little girls with pale skin and white teeth and straight blonde hair and blue eyes that sparkled. Our skin was dark, hair coiled, teeth crooked, and our eyes didn’t sparkle. They were wide black potholes that you could fall into, and that absorbed every bit of light that might shine on them. But they looked beautiful on Leila.

Today: her shitty abusive father warned us that the bird wouldn’t live. We don’t know how to take care of birds, it’s best to just put it out of its misery, let the poor thing not suffer, he said. But Leila didn’t listen, she had fantasies of saving the towhee, of watching the brown little bird take flight and disappear into the electric blue sky. And I had my own fantasies too. I wanted injured birds to live. I wanted my life to be like the girls on TV. I wanted Leila to be happy. I wanted us to heal all our wounds, sprout long strong brown wings, fly into the electric blue sky, and never return again.

***

Dilinna Ugochukwu (he/they) is a writer from California. He is obsessed with jolly ranchers and enjoys reading and writing all sorts of things.

The first hologram I made was of a tree. I thought of you as I made it, and how you said it’s hard to remember what a summer tree looks like in the middle of winter.

I made a hologram of our old street. I left out the barrier wall and bridge. You can see the river better, but since I don’t remember the other side of the river, I let it fall away. There are shapes in the darkness—an interior light that someone forgot, the blur of a red Exit sign.

I made a hologram of the bird that flew into our house that night. There are mistakes. One eye is higher than the other. We are eating dinner, and you’re telling me about the tree. I mean to answer, but the bird is a shock.

I made a hologram of the time we drove halfway across the country. You did all the driving, which is why we only got halfway. As for the horrible fight we had in the hotel parking lot, I made it, took it out, then put it back in. I moved it to behind the dumpsters, so if you don’t want to watch it, you don’t have to.

I made a hologram of the day we almost got married. We canceled early enough so that the chairs remained stacked and the cake unbaked, but late enough so that no one else took our day. That made it worth losing the deposit. When the caretaker goes in to turn all the lights off, he leaves the barn door open. It claps against its wooden frame.

I made a hologram in the shape of a glass paperweight. At the center of the weight, you can see a pressed violet. If you turn the weight one way, the violet fades, and soon, you will see your dear mother’s face again. When she laughs, refracted light tricks across the ceiling.

I made a hologram of Paris. We are standing on a bridge, squinting. How we loved the black ink and thick blue paper at the stationer’s shop, the churches with their stone floors and wooden chairs, the evening sky. This hologram is done like a reflection in water. Run your hand through it and we appear.

I made a hologram of the last time you came to find me. You stood beneath my window in the dark, in the rain. In this version, you’re holding a lantern—the sort signalmen used. The edges of the wet trees are illuminated and sharp shadows are thrown across the face of my house.

Before the bird flew in, I was going to describe the most beautiful summer tree, but after the bird, I forgot. Years passed. I remembered. Look here, in the palm of my hand. I made you a hologram. This is what a tree looks like in summertime.

***

Beth Hahn (she/her) is the author of the novel THE SINGING BONE (Regan Arts, 2016). Her stories can be found in New World Writing, Fractured Lit, HAD, and CRAFT, among others. 

Early on, the engagements and weddings and after that, the babies and the christenings and first communions. Each time we passed a white envelope from desk to desk, whatever we could spare, a buck or two, five if it was payday and we were feeling flush. Sometimes there was cake, and we’d flip a coin for the corner piece with the heap of sugared roses that went down sweetly with just the right ache.

Later on, the potluck lunches together in the breakroom where we learned to like Inez’s potato salad with its pucker of onion, Melinda’s tuna noodle casserole crusted with Saltines, the shortbread cookies Judy made from a recipe that was willed to her by her Scots grandmother. Sometimes, and only on Fridays, we sneaked in a bottle of something bubbly to sweeten our iced tea on last break, warm us up for the weekend ahead.

Soon enough, the sorrow. The kids moved out and never called. Parents died and husbands left us for women with clear skin and stomachs unpouched by babies. Cancer helped itself to breasts and ovaries, chemo took what was left of the feeling in fingers and toes, took the hair we’d spent our lives fussing with. We passed the envelope again, this time for flowers, and said what the hell. The few of us who were left started bowling together on Wednesdays, pretending the pins we scattered were second wives or the exes who were late again with the support. We pooled coins from our purses and split pitchers of beer afterward, something cheap and yeasty to wash down the baskets of stale potato chips we dipped into ketchup or drowned in malt vinegar. We clicked our plastic cups together before the first sip, saying one more week. Sometimes we closed down the bar and lingered in the parking lot, watching bugs swarm and bump up against the blue lights. Sometimes we went out for breakfast and cried into our over-easies, hold-the-toast. Sometimes we wondered who would pass the envelope for us.

***

Sarah Freligh is the author of four books, including Sad Math, winner of the 2014 Moon City Press Poetry Prize and the 2015 Whirling Prize from the University of Indianapolis, and We, published by Harbor Editions in early 2021. Recent work has appeared in the Cincinnati Review miCRo series, SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Fractured Lit, and in the anthologies New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (Norton 2018), Best Microfiction (2019-22) and Best Small Fiction 2022. Among her awards are poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Saltonstall Foundation.