The scream of the alarms can be heard for two city blocks. So we flee our apartments, those boxes that stack atop one another like Legos. Eleven stories in total. We flee our apartments grumbling about testing the system on a Monday morning, a heads up would have been nice, an email, a note on the doors. Some of us still in pajamas, a rogue Cheerio stuck to our chin, others with wet hair and mis-matched socks, no shoes, all flooded out like roaches from behind toasters, microwaves and forgotten loaves of bread. We sit scattered about, under trees, on benches and cement stairs. Keeping our distance from neighbor-strangers, the men we smile at in elevators, the women we nod to in the mail room.

The scream of the alarms can be heard for two city blocks. They don’t stop after a minute like we expect. Or five or ten. We sit scattered about, under trees, on benches and cement stairs. Noses buried in cell phones. We watch our battery percentages like ticking time bombs, picturing chargers on nightstands, kitchen counters, plugged into laptops. Oh how we long for them. Noses buried deep in cell phones. We play Candy Crush, we text our mothers, we punch emails to bosses with trained thumbs.

The scream of the alarms can be heard for two city blocks. Some of us try to call management. This is unacceptable. We have Zoom meetings to attend, we have scared cats under beds, we have lives to live in those boxes that stack atop one another like Legos. Eleven stories in total. We watch our battery percentages like ticking time bombs. The numbers dropping fast, counting down like it’s goddamn Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve. What do we do with that last percentage? Who do we text? Which feed do we scroll? Which photo do we like? When the screens go black we look around and wonder which of these neighbor-strangers is the one we hear fighting on the other side of the kitchen, saying things to his wife we have only heard in movies. We look around and wonder which of these neighbor-strangers is the one crying at night above our bed. As we lay, scrolling ourselves to sleep, the sound of their sobs becomes the white noise that finally puts us under. We look around and try to match unknown faces to the lives we hear on the other sides of walls.

The scream of the alarms can be heard for two city blocks. We long for chargers, we worry for cats, we wonder for neighbor-strangers. And then we see it. Smoke twirling its way up from the rooftop like an angry ghost. This is not a test. We grab madly for our dead phones to snap photos, to Tweet in all caps, to text our friend in Boston.

***

Eric Scot Tryon is a writer from San Francisco. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Glimmer Train, Willow Springs, Pithead Chapel, Los Angeles Review, Pidgeonholes, Monkeybicycle, Cease, Cows, Longleaf Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, and elsewhere. Eric is also the Founding Editor of Flash Frog. Find more information at www.ericscottryon.com or on Twitter @EricScotTryon. 

Five boyfriends ago and I’m out in the backyard with my big sister, my beautiful big sister, Annie, and we’re shouting far into the night in our nighties, to hell with home, to hell with Dad, and we say hey you, clumps of blazing rock, bear witness to our words, never will we be anyone’s woman, we’ll be the dancing dead before we’re anyone’s woman, got it? and Annie whenever you are, I’m whispering this now, Doug’s upstairs, his fist in bentonite clay, he has a hole where his soul should be, I swear, and I’m out here, torn like Mama, and get this stars, I am enough on my own, I’m yelling that now, Annie, even if life’s a haze and the night is biting into me, I’m yelling that now in my nightgown.

***

Kik Lodge writes short fiction in France. Her work has featured in The Moth, Tiny Molecules, The Cabinet of Heed, Reflex Fiction Ellipsis Zine, Splonk, Bending Genres, Janus Literary and Litro. She likes cats and trumpets.

My Golem daughter packs for college. She packs her sweater sets, her sensible black boots, her button-down shirts. She never wears crop-tops or low necklines. She packs her jeans. She does not write on her jeans with a ballpoint pen, drawing hearts and lines from her favorite songs, the lyrics she knows make me blush. She does not worry holes in the fabric with her fingers. Her bed is always made military-tight, fairy lights strung over it in a bell curve, photos clipped on the wires spaced exactly three inches apart. My Golem daughter never sits in boys’ cars in front of our house, windows dripping with tears.

She folds her clothes in her suitcases as if she were the one who worked at Brandy Melville. She packs her two sets of extra-long sheets. She packs the new shower caddy she’ll bring to the dorm showers to haul her Pantene conditioner for dry hair, her Jergens Extra-Dry Healing lotion, the hair gel she uses so her bangs will lie just so. She packs she packs she packs.

My Golem daughter is always focused.

Her eyes are now on her suitcase, her bangs covering the word I wrote on her forehead, אמת, truth. The truth is: I can destroy her, erase the letter aleph, א, to change the word truth to death, מת. The truth is: for my Golem daughter, I hold her life in my hands. How easy it would be. I watch from the doorway to her room, examine the soft pad of my thumb: I can rub aleph off with a light touch and she will turn back to what she’s made of. I thrill at that power, I wonder if. I’ve had only two years with her.

I bring her a set of towels, because she will need those too. Thanks Mom, she says, and her voice sounds like running water, like dirt and magic and crawling things. I shiver; I love the way she calls me Mom. Are you sure you want to go away? I ask. She knows that she’s the first Golem to go to college. An Ivy League, no less. It will not be easy: will my daughter’s roommate notice the truth inscribed on her forehead, will she seek to brush the letters away, will there be an aura of uncanniness that repels her? Or will they stay up all night whispering in the dark under her Ikea duvet, talking of classes and dreams and boys? Oh, Mom, she says, and she shakes her head, high ponytail swinging.

That night they found her, I knelt on the banks of the creek. The water ran winter-fast and the wet earth smelled of decay. I howled and even the coyotes were afraid. I formed my Golem daughter with tears. I formed her with clay and algae and foam. Mud crusted under my nails. The police found no DNA under hers. I lumbered from the creek bed and my Golem daughter followed me, naked and solid. Her flesh like my flesh, transformed from mud. In the bedroom, I pointed to her canopied bed, to her desk. This is your room. I slipped a dress over her head, zipped the back, tied the belt. Her hands up as if she were still a toddler. You are my daughter.

My Golem daughter does not bleed and she cannot break. She tells me, I will always love you. I grip her tight with hands that formed her from fistfuls of mud and magic. Hands that made her stay.

***

Lori Sambol Brody lives in the mountains of Southern California. Her short fiction has been published in Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Craft, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her stories have been chosen for the Best Small Fictions and Best Microfiction anthologies, Wigleaf Top 50, and the Longform fiction pick of the week. She can be found on Twitter at @LoriSambolBrody and her website is lorisambolbrody.wordpress.com.

The ash in the backyard is dying. My wife and I could see it from our second-floor window, could hear the groan of its hollow limbs as they cracked and swayed in the cold March winds. Widow makers, the limbs are called. The branches of the tree once held waxy, green parades of leaves, but are now weighed down full of silent space left in the wake of the slow march of death. It could be said the tree is more of a wooden sculpture of a tree than anything else. Yet, still it stands, as a monument to things I won’t let go. Water, air, fire, they take on the form of our bodies, like shadows, like mirrors, anything made of light, your hands, your face, translucent in repose, the light moving through you like the opposite of a storm, the reverse of a hurricane, everything made of light, the accoutrements of the illusionists. The bedroom window is new and arched to better frame the night stars since we discovered our favorite constellations were out of view just above the top of our old window. About the stars: we forget they are still there during the day. We just can’t see them because the arrogant sun demands our full attention. My wife’s hair went gray, then white in a matter of seconds. I want to believe she prematurely made herself look like her future ghost, so I would more easily recognize her spirit after she died, so I would be less startled if one day her ghost appeared beside me and hooked her arm through mine during a funeral or a parade or the opening of the first tender buds of spring.

***

Todd Clay Stuart is an emerging Midwestern writer and poet. He studied creative writing at the University of Iowa. His work  appears or is forthcoming in X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, FRiGG, Milk Candy Review, New World Writing, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife, daughter, and two loyal but increasingly untrustworthy pets. Find him on Twitter @toddclaystuart and at http://toddclaystuart.com.

Sometime after I died, I came back as a button. An ordinary, four-holed flat from one of my well-worn sweaters, buried inside the pickle jar of buttons my daughter kept on her bedside table. Co-mingled with so many elbowy fluteds, fleshy cloths, cold-skinned celluloids. My new purpose unknown to me except to wait. Sometimes my daughter dug a finger deep and grazed me. Sometimes she turned the jar in such a way we all tumbled like the innards of a kaleidoscope. Many times, she let the jar drop in anger and land with a thud on the carpet. Why did none of my fellow castoffs squirm or shift at the sound of her crying? Were there no souls in here but mine? Today, she shook the pickle jar like a can of whipped cream before plonking it down on the nightstand, leaving me splayed against the glass, my eyes and lips in damsel Os. I could see her, finally, in full. 

And she could see me back. 

My daughter had always made the world into faces. Appliance knobs, wall sockets, river rocks, sewer grates, water-stained plaster, rust marks on a bicycle, urine bubbles in a toilet bowl. The thread-hole buttons she snipped and horded were the most expressive of all things. They returned an infinitude of gazes. More than I could ever match or mimic, for all my trying. I’d catch her in animated conversation with her specimens arranged in small families on the ledge of the bathtub. And when I’d enter the bathroom, she’d look up at me and go silent. Still smiling, but distantly, as if she were mirroring what I couldn’t express. As if I were faceless.

One snowy night, I stayed with her anyway, filling the tub with warm water as it cooled, as she shivered from waiting for her father who wouldn’t be home for hours. Or days. I don’t remember. She let me watch her kissing games with buttons stuck to puckered fingers and thumbs. Her pretend car wrecks and ambulance runs on slick ceramic roads. Her tsunami waves pinwheeling the buttons to the depths. But at my time for bed, she pounded the water with her fists, dashing the mothers, daughters, fathers. She fought me as I raised the drain stopper, screamed as the tiniest collar buttons were drawn down and left juddering at the trap by the suction, dozens of tiny cries for help bubbling up into her ears and mine. She saw that I could hear them. She saw my terror. I lowered the stopper and together we scooped up the babes, toweled them dry—their eyelashes beaded, cheeks flushed—whispering there, there.   

On Kleenex beds beside her own, the buttons slept and slept. My daughter shushed my goodnight with a finger to my lips. They had earaches from all the water, she whispered. They needed quiet. Her finger stayed, tracing my features. The face that was there, a little less faceless. I watch her now through the thick glass. Her lids damp with sleep. Does she recognize her mother? I think tomorrow will be my rescue. She’ll reach in and scoop me out, or dump the jar and pick through the ocean of scowls till she finds my smile. She’ll feel a hint of warm blood, a human heartbeat. She’ll pull away the faint ghost threads still looped tight through my holes, like scales falling from my eyes. She’ll bring me to her ear so she can hear me whisper there, there.

***

Eileen Frankel Tomarchio works as a librarian in a small New Jersey town. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in The Forge, Longleaf Review, Pithead Chapel, Lost Balloon, Maudlin House, trampset, and elsewhere. 

at your mother’s funeral

your name is one of the things your father can’t stop thinking about. it is why street children see him, carrying a massive dusty hair with empty tins of milk clanking against the other around his neck, and run after him to clap and chant:

papa Gozie dance for us.
dance like your mama’s daughter.
dance like your papa’s daughter.
like your daughter’s daughter.

it is why his madness is bigger than the weight of his problems. your father’s madness began at your mother’s funeral. at the funeral, your father was the first to throw earth over her casket. to sit on the floor and tell the crowd of the names he’d thought of naming you. to cry. to wish you were with him. to throw himself at the foot of your mother’s grave and shout, ‘my Chiasoka, you were not supposed to die too.’ to hold the pastor by the neck. to spit on his face. to demand that he resurrect your mother like Lazarus. to ask the pastor the reason he could not move like Jesus, why could he not be like the son of God? why was he not God so his slaps could carry the weight of his grief off his shoulders. to chase away everyone who came to pay homage to your mother. to cane these people with the dried dogo yaro tree branches littered on the floor. to return home and make himself a hot cup of bland tea. to sip the tea. to throw the mug at the wall. to pack the broken pieces. to unpack the broken pieces. to call your mother’s mother over the phone—your grandmother—and call her a witch. to end the call. to call her back and apologize. to laugh at himself. to sleep. to wake up and go back to sleep. to trail the walls of your mother’s room, looking for signs from God, a writing on the wall. to find nothing except the last scan of you in your third trimester, fully formed, ready to come to life. to pack his clothes. to unpack his clothes. to write a note to your mother’s mother saying:

You should have left Chiasoka for me. My wife was coming to see you when she died. You took her and our daughter. You should have left Chiasoka for me.

to send the letter. to unsend the letter. to sit at the foot of your mother’s wardrobe. to flip through the photo album. to hate himself. to blame himself. to decide to unalive himself. at your mother’s funeral, your father was the first to never let go of the grief of losing you both. to never stop living in his imagination. so, he let his hair befriend dusts on the street. and marvel at the name he would have called you had you not died. and snarls at street kids who chant and clap for him. your name is one of the things your father can’t stop thinking about.

***

Mustapha Enesi is Ebira. His story, ‘Kesandu’ won the 2021 K & L Prize for African Literature, he was a finalist for the 2021 Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize, theme winner in Aster Lit’s 2021 Fall Writing Contest, shortlisted for the 2021 Arthur Flowers Flash Fiction Prize, and his flash fiction piece, ‘Shoes’ was highly commended in Litro Magazine’s 2021 summer flash fiction contest. His works appear in The Maine Review, Kalahari Review, Litro Magazine, Eboquills, The Story Tree Challenge Maiden Anthology, and elsewhere.

for Frances Glessner Lee

The teacups have roses on them, rims gilded. Loose tea leaves float at the bottom. A wedge of squeezed lemon tossed on a matching plate. Half-eaten scone. Lavender crumbs. The tablecloth is heavy, clean but with faded stains. An unopened letter sits next to the plates. A scarf hangs from the back of the carved wooden chair. Purple. The bodies are everywhere. Almost no room to walk. Looks like a child’s slumber party but there are no pajamas or sleeping bags. The house settles, little creaks and moans. A radiator clanks loudly, starting up. The ouija board is on a table next to the couch, planchette still clutched in the old lady’s hand.

***

Georgia Bellas is a writer/artist/filmmaker. Passionate about puppets and plants, she is a ventriloquist and plays theremin in the hypnagogic band Sugar Whiskey. Her teddy bear is host of the podcast Mr. Bear’s Violet Hour.

Inspired by Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks”

There’s something about the night, the way it lays on my shoulders like a silk blouse. Like the silk blouse I was wearing the night we met, at that 24-hour diner down the block from the place I used to live. There were just a few of us, sitting alone in the same place, when you walked in. You sat next to me. I didn’t like it. You were a stranger and you were too close. I tried to catch the eye of the waiter, but he was elbows deep in the sink, glasses clinking in the soapy water. So I ignored you.

There’s something about the night, the way it makes people do strange things, things they would never do in the daytime. I drank coffee, I fixed my lipstick, I nudged my cup towards the waiter for a refill. You took out a cigarette but didn’t light it, just held it like you were waiting for something. Our hands brushed together—perhaps an accident. I turned then and looked at you for the first time; I have looked at you thousands of times since. Yesterday I looked at you for the last time.

There’s something about the night, how I can stand at a window in a brightly lit room, with people talking and laughing and clinking glasses behind me. All of us, alone in the same place. Or maybe it’s just me. I try to look out at the night, but the whole time the night is looking in at me.

Editor’s note: Prior to this story being published, we learned the devastating news that the talented Beth Moulton has passed away. We will miss her and her beautiful stories so much — it means the world that she has shared her work with us. If you would like to honor Beth’s memory, a scholarship has been established in her name via https://creativelightfactory.org/donate/. Thank you so much!

***

Beth Moulton earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Rosemont College, where she was fiction editor for the Rathalla Review. Her work has appeared in mac(ro)mic, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Milk Candy Review and other journals. She lives near Valley Forge, PA with her cats, Lucy and Ethel.

The apartment was advertised as a one bedroom. My last studio was more spacious. 

The front door is pearly white wood with long narrow rectangles embossed on the exterior and a bulbous bronze peephole. The hinge whistles when I turn the handle. 

Across the threshold, the walls of the vestibular front room are pomegranate. 

I will put the loveseat here, flush with the front door. I will call this purple red room the den. 

I will make a friend who has plants so I can get cuttings and put them in glass jars under the window in the den. When my friend visits, I will ask them to remove their shoes and tell them this is customary in my culture. I hope this will also be customary to my friend’s culture and I won’t have to ask. My friend will walk through the archway separating the den from the kitchen-bedroom. The bed will be tucked away in the west wing, as far from the fridge as possible. Thank god the fridge isn’t white. The black is sleek, better for mounting art. My friend will tell me they love how I have utilized the space, and I will put on a kettle for tea. The stove is slim and gas operated. “Fire is what separates humans from other animals,” my friend will say. We drink in the den, on the loveseat, and there will be a coffee table. My friend will visit regularly, preferring my apartment to their group house where they share a bathroom with their ex. After strangers stop trying to chat us up in bars, we will leave the city and move into a farmhouse. The farming will magically be taken care of and we will only have to worry about keeping the inside tidy. There will be animals, of course, this is a farm. Chickens, geese, cows, sheep, shepherd dogs, barn cats who don’t need litter boxes. There will be other human friends living with us on the farm too, other people who will have tea in this den. 

This time, I’ll keep coasters. 

***

Parth Shah is an MFA candidate in creative writing at the University of Wyoming. Prior to graduate school, he produced podcasts at NPR. His work is logged at parth-shah.com. 

I am not a ghost story, is the first thing she says each time I see her.

She is, though, a ghost. With the lank, dripping hair of a drowned woman, and a mottled green tinge to her bloated cheeks. Sometimes I catch her in the corner of my gaze and think, for a moment, she is still alive. This is where I should give you a detail that will make you care, make you love her; but I can’t ever maintain the trick of my seeing past that one moment, when I think her in the world and then realize my own wrong.

I need your help, she says, but because she is not a ghost story (or because she is) she cannot tell me how she needs my help. Instead she follows me into meetings and onto crowded buses and through the lunchtime salad lines. This is called haunting, I tell her. You are haunting me. But she shakes her head with a scatter of drops and says no, it is only that we are always headed in the same direction. We are still simpatico.

I want her to have a happier moment. Sometimes, when I catch her unawares, she is holding her own throat like she has forgotten how to breathe. She coughs a wet rattle and nothing comes up. She is in a bad way to be a ghost, locked in the worst moment of her life, and I want to pull her hands from her throat and tell her to leave.

The other thing I want to tell her is that I am not a ghost story either, I do not want to be in a ghost story; but the words feel even less true from me. I am nothing but a ghost story, colleagues and strangers edging away when they sense her at my side. I am nothing but a collection of places I will not go and words I will not say. When the leaves are turning I take her back to the lake and tell her I would slick gasoline over its skin and drop a match. I would burn it all, if such a thing were possible—I believe it could be possible. I point to each dropped red leaf and tell her how they are memories of the flame I’ll one day set, revenging her. This is what ghosts want, isn’t it?

I am not a ghost story, she says to me, though a ghost story is the only thing we are. But I’ll tell her she isn’t, I’ll tell her back her version of the truth, any truth, if it only means that one day I turn and she is gone. One day I turn and there is no patch of damp on a dry street. One day I turn, I have said the right words, there is no water clinging to my hem.

***

Ellen Rhudy lives in Columbus, where she’s an MFA candidate at The Ohio State University and Fiction Editor at The Journal. Her writing has been published in Story, The Cincinnati Review, and Cream City Review, and previously in Milk Candy Review. She’s working on a collection of stories and a novel.