He sits before her like before the judge. He is an orange jumpsuit. He thinks maybe she thinks: he’s just a man, not the father I knew.  She knew what evil was before she knew it was him. Like a real dad, he wants to tell her all –  a day in 1952,  as if it began there, he still a boy helping her granddad carry the new television into the house to broadcast all things, both good and evil. He admits there were victims (pretty like her) who played pianos, owned dogs, and wrote in diaries. He can’t explain this, except to say: as a boy,  he too once did all that.  Each case presented a puzzle like a crossword at breakfast. She sees that in him. He wants her to know he is sorry his way. For a minute, she wants to wrap up a pretty daddy she knew with scotch tape and bright paper in her arms like Christmas, but this man reminds her of all the human in evil.

***

Paul Dickey won the Master Poet award from the Nebraska Arts Council. Paul Dickey’s first full length poetry manuscript They Say This is How Death Came Into the World was published by Mayapple Press in January, 2011. His poetry and flash have appeared in over 200  online and print publications. A second book, Wires Over the Homeplace was published by Pinyon Publishing in October, 2013.

They tell us about the veils. About the flowers plucked from ditches before they drown in rainwater. How they’ll tremble in our hands. About the sugar on our lips and the wine that feels like swallowed starlight.

They don’t tell us about the men standing in the yellow courtyard smoking. Leaning against archways, doorways, watching. How the ghost of smoke trails through parted lips. Or when the door is closed, the shutters locked against a violet sky. How rough an unshaven cheek feels. How it burns.

***

Linda Niehoff’s short fiction has appeared in TriQuarterly, SmokeLong Quarterly, Flash Fiction Online, and elsewhere.

There’s a picture of me somewhere, wearing a space suit. My little brown bob, grown out from the last time I got ukus, dusting the metal ring around the neck hole. I couldn’t believe how heavy it was, my arms and legs swimming in puffy whiteness. My hand shot up so fast when you asked who in the class wanted to try it on, my dreams of rocket ships and space, sparkling around me. I didn’t know who you were then even though I had visited your parents’ general store in Kealakekua after every coffee picking day, my back sore from carrying a basket of coffee beans around my waist all day. No matter how fast I picked or how many baskets I filled, I was never fast enough or skillful enough, each hundred-pound bag filled by my parents, extra money for school shopping and Christmas presents. Maybe you picked coffee too? Maybe you were never chastised because your best was good enough to get you out of Kona and into space. On the day you died, I cried. In that moment, when the Challenger exploded, I saw the end of all of our dreams, Kona boy made good. And I remembered the kindness of your parents giving me a free cup of vanilla ice cream and a bag of freshly fried kettle chips, my face sweaty, my hands sticky with sap.

***

Melissa Llanes Brownlee (she/her), a native Hawaiian writer, living in Japan, has work published or forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, Reckon Review, The Hennepin Review, Cheap Pop, The Razor, Cotton Xenomorph, Lost Balloon, and Atlas + Alice. She is in Best Small Fictions 2021, Best Microfiction 2022, and Wigleaf Top 50 2022. Read Hard Skin, her short story collection, from Juventud Press. She tweets @lumchanmfa and talks story at www.melissallanesbrownlee.com.

Everyone had a father who smoked cigarettes. Everyone had a father who smoked one, two, three, four packs a day. Everyone had a father who drank. Everyone had a father who drank one, two, three, four bottles of beer, wine, and whiskey a day. They smoked and drank. They drank and smoked. Everyone knew that fathers did these things. Everyone. Everyone had a mother who yelled. Everyone had a mother who yelled about the things we did. Everyone had a mother who yelled about the things we didn’t do. Everyone had a mother who beat them. Everyone knew that mothers did these things. Everyone. Everyone knew what the rules were. Everyone had the marks. Everyone had bruises. Everyone knew you count them up, one, two, three new ones on top of one, two, three older ones. Everyone knew who to tell things to. Everyone knew how to keep their mouth shut. Everyone.  And, in the summer, everyone played cigarette tag. Everyone. Bigger kids. Younger ones. All the kids played cigarette tag. One person was IT. IT chased everyone around and tagged them so they would be IT. The big difference was that if you wanted to be safe, you had to go down on one knee and chant the commercial for a cigarette brand. They came across the television day and night. Men on horses. People on boats. Happy and smiling and clean and as bright as a million stars. And everyone knew all the commercials. Everyone. Cigarette tag went on for hours. Eventually, everyone was IT, but everyone wanted to show off how many cigarette brands they knew. Filtered. Unfiltered. Menthol. Lights. Everyone knew them all. Rothmans. Marlboro. Kent. Player’s. Taryton. I’d rather fight than switch. Virginia Slims. You’ve come a long way, baby. Merit. Doral. Raleigh. Newport. Kool. Winston’s tastes good like a cigarette should. Pall Mall. Camel. Carlton. Vantage. Lucky Strikes. Chesterfield. You can take Salem out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of Salem. Everyone knew the magic to keep you safe from IT. Everyone knew. Everyone. As the game went on into the night, and everyone started getting called to come home, everyone wanted to be the last one. The final NOT IT in the cigarette tag game. Everyone wanted to be the last one to go home. To the mothers. To the fathers. Everyone.

***

Rina Palumbo came to writing after a career in college teaching and has published work in Survivor Lit, Beach Reads, and local magazines and journals. She is currently working on a novel and has two other long-form works in progress while continuing to write short-form fiction, creative non-fiction, and prose poetry.

The bombs fall from the sky and shatter a hospital. Through his camera lens, the photographer witnesses bodies scattered with blood. On the corridor is the figure of a boy. When the photographer is close enough, he sees the face of the dead boy. The pale cheeks remind him of his young son back home. His camera cannot record the rot and stink in the corridor, but it can capture the shape of the body. Snap.

The refugees are holding one another and listening to a violinist playing in the basement. The photographer listens with his camera down. Another thing his talisman cannot do is to document the tone of Adagio in G minor. As the elegy goes on, a mother comforts her crying son. Not far away from the crowd, two soldiers are resting. In melancholy, they relax as sleep takes over them. Snap.

A dead soldier lies on the pavement. And then there are more, five of them in total. Some of their faces are already beyond recognizable. The photographer takes another shot, and it is not until then that he realizes some are enemy soldiers. Blood and dirt have mixed the original colors on the uniform. Sometimes, nobody pays attention to the living until their bodies become part of a photograph. Snap.

The sniper from nowhere shoots a woman running on the street. It hits her leg, and she falls. The sniper and the photographer both hide in the dark and shoot their targets. They respectively play their parts on this stage call the battlefield: one’s shot triggers blood, and the other’s shot captures the aftermath. The photographer adjusts his camera to zoom in on the struggling woman. They used to say that if you can capture a cinematic shot of the abyss, it will be the apex of your career. But perhaps, the photographer says to himself, he can be more than a bystander. Before then, however, he needs to finish his task. Snap.

The camera is his eye. Ruins. Dead bodies. Soldiers’ backs afar. These are what the photographer sees on the battlefield. And when the photographer eventually falls, he becomes part of the scenes he took. His body becomes the new evidence to be shot by another photographer. “Tell the world this is what they have done to them. To us.” Another photographer will say. Snap.

***

Lillian Tsay was born in upstate New York and raised in Taiwan. After she graduated from college in Taipei, she moved to Tokyo and had lived there for four years. She is currently writing a dissertation on East Asian food history at Brown University. Besides her scholarly works, her creative writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Jellyfish Review, Atticus Review, amongst others. 

A23F11

There is a world that trades in stories as the dominant currency. Spoken, written, acted out. New stories are highly valuable. But old stories told in the old ways are worth even more.

4Z0000

Here is a world where the people harvest time from the bedrock. Digging deeper into layered lodes creates time-warping vibrations in the air. With special machines, the people capture this energy and process it into precious-stone seconds, occasionally finding a minute gem, or a diamondesque hour. Once, the whole mining crew took the year off after finding an enormous, glittering century in the depths of the Fifty-Third Time Mine.

L8EE27

Once I thought of a reality where really, really, really big giants come to our world and move us around like little dolls in a doll house. It’s like the hand of god, but really it’s just the hand of Jeremy, who thinks you would look better a little bit to the left.

24B899

Here’s one world I thought about recently: Grey rock extends around me, with me low in its belly. My feet are caught in clear, adhesive gel that leaks in veins from pustules here and there along the slopes. The green skin of these pustules swells and leaks, forming a strange not-heart beat to the land. I don’t resort to consuming it right away. Days into my utter isolation, unable to move my feet, then legs, then hips, I bend at the waist and try to ingest the velvet moss skin. The blood rushes to my head as I claw at the green bulbs around me. This world eats people like me. But I’m not willing to be the only one being consumed.

PH3509

A world that’s actually a video game. A card game. That simulation you run behind your eyes when thinking about doing something, but not actually doing it.

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In a world, I hop asteroids. Compare me to a skipper living in an archipelago. And each island is all wacky. There are carnivorous sheep creatures. Blue foods. Glowing rainclouds. A shell that screams at midnight. People who are not even one-percent cruel. Back in my ship, I wonder if all other travelers are this lonely.

U00327

One sci-fi world I make is completely flooded, and people survive on the backs of giant birds. Did humans cause the flood? I think it’s likely.

X4S2SQ

There’s a place that is affected by my dreams, but only on February 29^th. Every four years, all that’s happening in my subconscious infects the people, the land, and the sky. The animals appear to be immune.

BB6781

A world where there are small people in all the refrigerators. They’re cold.

YRC590

Imagine a world where objects inevitably evolve into beings. Some forks turn into brothers and sisters. Some diapers become small rodents. Some skateboards are later seen as gods, hovering, six-armed, and many-winged.

G3280K

If we whisper, I can tell you about the words-world. Over the pitted, barren planet, sounds given meaning – also known as words – have physical, tangible force. Saying something, anything, could literally smack someone in the face. Words obey new laws of physics, momentum and power. I say, I am here. The ground rips open and gains a new rift.

O0W228

Think about who you’d be if you lived in this world: when the sun is up, you are one person – you have one body, one life and one soul. When the sun is not visible, you inhabit a different body, possess a different soul – you’re someone else. The two people you are are unrelated to one another. I don’t know where the other goes when you are the one.

F926RU

In a world like my own, humans spawn feelings. The feelings appear soft like Jell-O. Each feeling is a different color – an embarrassment recalled at 3:47 am (which woke me up) forms as an orange-and-green. The feelings follow the person who spawned them around for the rest of that person’s life. The world is so full and crowded.

EARTH1

A world where I imagine other worlds, other beings, other problems. A world that contains every thought I’ve ever had, contains as in “jails.” A world where my thoughts don’t work right, or don’t work how I imagine they could. Where thinking of the refrigerator people doesn’t make them visitable. I always dream that it should. If I imagine time as a stone, words as a gut-punch, why can’t we try that for a while?

***

Taylor Card holds an MFA in fiction writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and haunts her home in Michigan, making trending coffee beverages and wearing blue. Her fiction has been published in Button Eye Review and Digging Through the Fat. Besides writing, she enjoys making ceramic animal sculptures – you can see a few at taylorvcard.com.

We would always stub out our candy cigarettes on the mulberry leaves in our tree house, fingers and lips stained purple from berries, watching our parents drink gin and tonics after sets of sweaty tennis. Mia’s mother with the long legs saying her daughter would soon need a nose job. Her whisky voice rising into the branches when she asked my father to join her for a shower. My mother giggling and pouring her gin to overflowing.

***

We would always track down the nearest bar no matter what continent. Mia’s huge grin getting us in even when the place was full. Waiters competing to refill her perfect martini. Refusing the men buying her drinks, she’d pull me from my chair to slow dance, her fingers smoothing my hair, holding my body tighter with each passing city and year, as we’d sway and sing Piano Man in every language we remembered from school.

***

We would always write letters; Mia’s perfect cursive detailing her affairs with married men. Her nib ripping the page when she wrote of her mother whose hatred still stained her no matter how far she travelled from home. We’d write monthly until Mia checked into a hotel room on her own in Morocco, flirted with the doorman, triple-tipped the waitress, danced on the hotel bar, her arms wrapped tight around herself, the hotel manager told me after.

***

Lisa Alletson grew up in South Africa and England, and now lives in Canada. Her writing is published or forthcoming in Crab Creek Review, New Ohio Review, Bending Genres, CLOVES, Moist Poetry Journal. You can find her on Twitter @LotusTongue.

The whole town slept outside on cots set up in their yards. They had to, with houses that baked all through the stifling day and remained hot ovens throughout the night. Everyone spied on each other’s nightshirts, cracked jokes, and asked about the latest telegrams delivered about the loved ones of that neighbor or this neighbor. Those loved ones who traveled overseas. Those neighbors still shut inside their dark houses, despite the unbearable temperature. Everyone called out their good nights, their sweet dreams, their don’t let the rattlesnakes bite. When a bull escaped from his pen one night, his hoofbeats and snorts roamed the narrow dirt streets. Nowadays everyone sleeps inside, setting their cots under swamp coolers mounted to their front room windows, oblivious to what wanders the pitch black beyond. But back then, everyone sat up on their cots, alert. Everyone called out to each other, “Here he comes. Here he comes!”

***

Dan Crawley is the author of Straight Down the Road (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2019) and The Wind, It Swirls (Cowboy Jamboree Press, 2021). His writing appears or is forthcoming in Jellyfish Review, Lost Balloon, JMWW, Atticus Review, and elsewhere.

Where’s The Love?

When Hanson sang where’s the love, I was in her room, the two of us sewing doll-sized sleeping bags in ivory wool. We collected beanie babies and boy band lyrics, imagined our future loves with hair as long as ours, watched the stick-on stars on her ceiling glow. In her dollhouse, each pink room was furnished with couches and tables, a blue glass spiral staircase that shot straight through to heaven. We had dinner on the first floor. Passed around porcelain dishes of warm meatloaf and spaghetti and I felt like one part of a sitcom family where everyone was loved.

Everlong

When she moved out of state, I played freeze tag with white kids in the Catholic school parking lot. I adapted to this new logic, understood that to be touched meant to stop all motion and speech, to tell your heart be still, tell your body be still, to vanish and hope someone would undo what had been done.

That was the summer of my retreat, where I listened to girls retell the worst years of their childhoods. How did they get through it? Some of them shared poems they had written. Some of them shared music. Crossfade, Foo Fighters. One of them brought pieces of shell and cut glass she had found on a beach, each one tucked into a velvet-lined box and separated by tiny compartments. One of the fragments was smooth and curled, like a baby’s finger.

We all sat in a circle after that, dropped notes we had written into a black velvet sack that was passed around. I don’t remember what the counselor told us to write. If it was something I wanted to let go of or hold onto. Maybe both.

Spring Days

Fourteen years later, I made my first attempt. In recovery, I slept. In the summer, I looked for music to wrap around me like two arms. I searched videos in bed. Watched seven boys dance in perfect synchrony and sing of childhood, of first loves and coffee shops, of running and running and all I know how to do is love you. They held my hand through the night. They did. And they sang while I took pictures around my neighborhood like a tourist: sunflower stalks, rabbits, little gnome statues in conversation with each other.

I couldn’t stop eating onigiri in those days. I had everything I needed. Koshihikari and Kewpie mayo and nori and tuna. I would click-click-click my phone until I found BTS and the recipe I bookmarked. Sometimes I think this is all I know how to do, cultivate devotion in small, tender acts so I try to do it well: cup the rice and mold it into a ball, feel the warmth of my own hands and god I swear it’s like holding myself.

***

Jessica Cavero is a writer living in New Jersey. Her work has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Barren Magazine, Jellyfish Review, Wigleaf and elsewhere. Her short story “Toguro” won the 2017 Katherine Anne Porter Prize from Nimrod International Journal. You can find more of her work at fightfayre.net.

The invisible woman likes to perch in people’s windows. She likes to sit on the other side of a pane of glass and watch the visible men and the visible women eating dinner with their visible children. She likes to listen to the muffled chatter, the pinging of cutlery against plates, the low rumble of the radio. She likes to press her nose to the cold glass and watch the visible fog formed by her invisible breath.

When there is a cat on the other side of a window, it inevitably meets the invisible woman’s gaze. Its sharp eyes narrow, its back ripples into a towering hump, and it shows its needle-sharp teeth. As she sulks away from its silent hisses, the invisible woman thinks that she can almost remember what it felt like, to be seen.

Sometimes the invisible woman sits in the picture window of the big red house on the corner. She presses her back to the brick frame, stretches her arms above her head until her fingertips graze the lintel, and points her feet into perfect arches. She feels every muscle in her body, taut and primed, and she imagines the thick coils of rippling fiber, the unseen landscape of herself.

Inside the big red house lives a couple with two teenaged children: a girl and a boy. Recently, the invisible woman has noticed that the girl is flickering. Every morning, the girl stands in front of her full-length mirror and runs her hands over the curves of her breasts, her hips, her thighs, as they waver in and out of clarity. The invisible woman watches, breath held painfully tight in her chest, afraid to exhale until the girl settles once again into solidity.

The invisible woman begins waking up early so she can follow the girl out of the big red house. She trails the girl down busy pavements, whispering encouraging words into her dark hair as it flutters in the invisible woman’s face. She tells the girl that she is stronger than she knows. She tells her that the world is a lonely place for an invisible woman. She tells her to be brave. These are all the things the invisible woman wishes someone had told her.

The invisible woman thinks it’s working. The girl’s footsteps are growing firmer, louder. She looks people in the eye as she passes them, and they look back. Not up or down, but straight back. Sometimes the invisible woman makes believe that these people are looking at her, too. Sometimes, she thinks they really are. Sometimes, she looks down at the place where her hand should be, and she’s sure she can see it, quivering in and out of her field of vision.

***

Rachel O’Cleary studied creative writing at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, and lives with her husband and three children in Ireland, squeezing her obsession for flash fiction into the spaces between school runs. You can find a list of her published work at https://rachelocleary.wordpress.com, and she occasionally tweets @RachelOCleary1.