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.

This is not legal advice. I am not an attorney. (I am definitely not your attorney.) Your mileage may vary.

Do not talk to cops. Do not give them any unnecessary advice or answer any unnecessary questions, even if they seem benign. Even if you think you aren’t doing anything wrong. Even if they seem nice. Even if they tell you that your friends already talked. Even if you just want to clarify, if only you could explain, if only you could make them understand. Even, even, even.

I’m telling you a joke: How can you tell when a cop is lying to you? They’re talking! We laugh, because it’s true. (Then we stop laughing, because it’s true.)

Do tell a cop who has arrested you before, who has a kind face, despite the fact that he has been trained to lie to you, despite the fact that you are not to speak to him, that you are pregnant so that, just in case, maybe he won’t drop you on your face while you’re in handcuffs.  Tell him this, and watch his face congratulate you. Tell him this—not to make conversation or to receive those congratulations. You say this, not for yourself. But for everything that stirs inside you, for everything in you that yearns for a future. When we say we are doing it for future generations, we mean it.

And then, after you and your friends have your arrest citations in hand, the cops thank you all for being so cooperative and professional. You and your friends will talk about this for years to come. How odd it was. How it may have restored your faith in humanity. (Just a little bit. Against your better judgment.) But ACAB, y’know. Because we haven’t gone soft and forgotten our history over one small kindness and act of dignity.

The window did not feel pain when it was shattered into a spider web, cracking under the pressure of a brick, which also did not feel pain. And yet, the cops will avenge these symbols more readily than they would a child’s life. They will ascribe pain and meaning and intention and fucking symbolism to it. They will make false equivalencies and fashion straw men and demand obedience. They will not come to save you. They cannot protect you because that is not how this country’s history fashioned them.

Do not talk to the cops because maybe one day it will take two of them to arrest you and if you are feeling cheeky, you might ask them whether it makes them feel like big strong men that it takes two of them to arrest one of you. You are 110 pounds soaking wet after a summer of lawbreaking recklessness and chopping wood. They are decidedly not. Do not talk to the cops because if you ask them whether it makes them feel like big strong men, they might (because they are big strong men) then dislocate your shoulder. Do not talk to the cops because range of motion is nice to have and because if you talk to the cops, it will hurt when it rains. (And because, my god, you think, aren’t I lucky, really. It could have been so much worse.)

***

Christy Tending is an activist, educator, writer, and mama living in Oakland, California. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Ms., The Everymom, Scary Mommy, The Mighty, and trampset, among others. You can learn more about her work at www.christytending.com or follow her on Twitter @christytending.

We recently published Felix Lecocq’s shining “Wedding Video.”

Here, we ask him two questions about his story:

1) I love how the details here give us a sense of time and place — the VHS tape, the leather couch and that great line “You got married in a time before sound.” How necessary for this story was it to be set in this specific time?

To set the tone for myself while writing this piece, I watched many home videos on Youtube of strangers’ weddings from the 70s. My favorite part is when someone looks into the camera and laughs in surprise. I highly recommend looking these up.

It was important to me that the wedding took place before digital cameras. I’ve always loved the materiality of old videos—their grain, their spots, their decay. This story is about grief and wanting to preserve the memory of a dead person, both in the world and in yourself. The “you” in the story lives on our side of the television, and he’s looking through the grain, into a memory. But there is so much texture to old videos that you can’t ever forget that they’re not real.

2) The way the white space works in your favor here is so effective! For me, I think of the characters watching the video as being a younger sibling and an older sibling, but I suspect other readers might picture a different relationship — which doesn’t take away this story’s beauty at all. Did you ever consider adding more information to this story? Or was it always this tiny, beautiful snapshot?

“Wedding Video” is from the point of view of a child who doesn’t understand grief but is looking directly at it. I wanted to write about that uncanny childhood feeling of knowing that the adults around you are upset but no one has told you why. The reader knows as much as the child knows.

This story is actually semiautobiographical. It is informed by a childhood memory of visiting the house of a distant relative in California. After his wife passed away, he sat on his couch for weeks, unable to do anything else. As my mother cooked for him, I sat with this relative and watched a video with him, which I remember to be a wedding video.

Recently, I was informed by my family that it was, in fact, a video of his wife’s funeral. I may have misremembered this because Vietnamese people often wear white to funerals, which I could have interpreted as a wedding dress, but this is just speculation. In my memory of the video, I had resurrected his wife. I remembered her alive.

The VHS tape hisses & you’re married. A grainy summer day. You & her in the black doorway, fuzzing. You looking at her & her looking at you. A handful of rice flies across the screen. On this side of the television, you & me alone in your living room, Mom in the kitchen. It’s summer here, too & California is the house where I watch you watch you. On this side of the television, you don’t move. The reflection in your eyes, blue. Flickering. You got married in a time before sound, when everything had to be said in color, bodies shimmering like air above the road on a hot day. The leather couch squeaks under my seven-year-old thighs, but you’re not even blinking, not even as you’re crying, looking at you & her looking at you & her, the lens flares like a firework, her white dress floods the screen & she’s laughing so hard her mouth might swallow her face.

***

Felix Lecocq is a Vietnamese American writer and copyeditor living in Chicago. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in HAD, Peach Mag, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and elsewhere. His chapbook of lyric essays, Mosquito: A Memoir (2022), was published through the University of Chicago Migration Stories Project. He is working on his first novel.

Had another waitress served you, she might’ve sashayed to your booth, called you honey. Your coffee would have been hot, your cherry pie warm, a scoop of vanilla ice cream unfurling like a flag.  You’d grabbed utensils from my hand, broadcasting swastikas on the backs of yours. Later, I asked Lucy to give you your check and fled to the lockers to change. Outside, moon frost on truck cabs, gas pumps, a hungry mama cat. Light sliced through the room’s mesh glass window, casting a grid over the dark blue numbers inked on my arm, the same as my grandmother’s.

***

Mikki Aronoff’s work appears or is forthcoming in The Ekphrastic Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Intima, Thimble Literary Magazine, London Reader, SurVision, Rogue Agent, Popshot Quarterly, The South Shore Review, The Fortnightly Review, Feral, The Phare, Sledgehammer Lit, Flash Boulevard, New World Writing, Emerge, The Disappointed Housewife, Tiny Molecules, Potato Soup Journal, and elsewhere. Her stories and poems have received Pushcart and Best Microfiction nominations.

She looked at their little coats hanging on their hooks, the little arms dangling emptily on the wall, and she thought, as every parent before her had thought, that someday their arms would grow and fill coats with long empty arms, and how she wished that she could wrap her own long arms around theirs and they would be like pads of butter on warm bread and they would melt into her and they could be one person again, though not exactly one, but certainly not two, or three, rather they could be like the matryoshka dolls that lay halved and scattered on the floor, and they could nest within her again, being themselves but also being her and never having to worry about which empty coat arms they would fit into because her arms were the only arms that ever felt the cold.

***

Emma Tessler is a psychotherapist and writer living in New York City. She is on Twitter @emmatessler.