Somewhere in the country, on an empty cul-de-sac, is a five-bedroom farmhouse. The farmhouse has clean, straight siding, and the morning is foggy but the sun is white and shining on this day that could be any day but is a weekday. You are home from school for a happy reason. Maybe your mother is on an upswing, or it’s snowing, or it’s summer. Sunlight puddles around the small dogs on the beige carpet, it bounces off the steaming surface of the swimming pool. From the inside looking out, you don’t know whether it’s a very hot day or a very cold one. Your arms and legs are small. You are happy and afraid.

Your life will be made up of moments like this, when the house is quiet, when you can only hear the dogs’ deep breathing and the drone of morning television behind your mother’s closed bedroom door. If her door is closed maybe she’s not on an upswing. But you are happy today. Are you happy today?

When you are an adult and you are happy you will remember this exact moment in time but you won’t remember why.

There are many things a child like you can do on a day like this. If it’s snowing you can make a fort with tunnels inside. If it’s snowing and the sun is shining, you will remember a thing your father said about the devil beating his wife. If it’s snowing and the sun is shining, the snowflakes taste like sugar when you catch them on your tongue.

If it’s not snowing, it is very hot. If it’s not snowing, you are afraid. If you go outside, your skin won’t know if it’s hot or cold at first, not until the conditioned air evaporates off the ends of the thin hairs on your small arms.

There is no time like the present. You remember that from television, probably. No time. In the beige living room, you aren’t sure.

Your breath fogs the window. Who is the devil’s wife? You don’t remember. Does anyone remember?

You don’t know how long you’ll be small but it feels like no time. It feels like forever. It feels like this single day, this moment when you are happy and you are afraid. You can feel the bones growing in your arms and legs. You are changing and you always will be.

You wonder how your father knows that thing about the devil but you’ve also seen the veins in his neck straining, his face flushing pink, his open mouth like a cave of wonders.

Outside is the surface of the sun and a frozen planet. There is no time like right now.

***

Taylor Gordon is a writer from the Southeastern US who came to Wyoming for graduate school and never left. She has published sparingly, and is the 2021 recipient of the Wyoming Arts Council fellowship in Fiction.

They say we’re domestic terrorists.¹ History textbooks and historical fiction novels always describe it as “bombs raining down from the sky,” well, we rained out of our mothers like bombs, that’s why they say that their water breaks. Except we don’t explode right away. We plant ourselves into the metal of cities like Edison, New Jersey, and watch and wait for the right time. We read Because of Winn-Dixie in the second grade and ignore our white classmates when they make jokes about eating dogs.² We learn to accept (read: not love) being different, eating congealed white rice with fried tomato and scrambled egg out of a shame-scratched thermos. After school, our mothers drive us to a hole-in-the-wall ballet studio where we are the only Asian students. We watch ourselves in the monitors they set up inside the studio, carefully studying how to point our feet, how to angle our arms, how to assimilate.³ Absorbing, observing, watching everything. In 8th grade, our teacher passes out copies of American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang. Even though we’ve read it before, and all of Yang’s other works, we’d never admit it. Instead, we turn up our noses and bemoan its inauthenticity, although most of us can’t even read the Chinese characters. Not like we know anything about being authentic. Sophomore year of high school is when “STOP ASIAN HATE” breaks out. We attend a rally run by a coalition of Asian high school students and liberal white women.⁴ Juliet Chen, sophomore, gives a speech on how we’ve been wronged. We clap.⁵ We pose for Instagram, caption our pictures with generic notes of gratitude. I drive real slow on the way home. I tell myself that this is the explosion I was engineered for. It’s not true. But the bomb feels so sweet, so lovely, so I let myself pretend that it is.

¹: Nearly all reputable sources define “domestic terrorism” with the words dangerous and violent. It’s just a little ironic, knowing that we were always depicted as fragile, as quiet, as subservient. At our core, we are oxymoronic: they are scared of the violence that silence can hold.

²: Except, we’re in high school now, and we crack those same jokes to our white friends. They make those jokes, too, but only when they’re with us. Like it’s our dirty little secret. It’s confusing to think about, though. It doesn’t actually bother me if someone makes a joke about Asian people eating dogs. Isn’t humor supposed to poke fun? But what if I’m thinking about this all wrong? What if I’ve been conditioned to think that mildly racist humor is funny?

³: Nearly all of us drop out of ballet class at the end of middle school for a variety of different reasons: tuition is too expensive, the way that the men stare at your pink-tights-clad legs and the shape of your blurry body in the streetlights when you’re walking out of the studio is a peculiar pain, but it’s mostly because our parents say that the arts are useless.

⁴: Everyone looks exactly like how you would expect them to look.

⁵: But in the back of our minds, we are trying to think about what hate crimes we have experienced. We think about the playground crimes, where white kids smeared the edges of their eyelids with their fingers, where they said “Ching-chong” like a soundtrack from hell. We think about the bathroom crimes, where we are humiliated by the ubiquitous mean girls. In isolation, nothing is ever so bad. Everyone tells us to get over it. We can. But we’re dangerously close to detonation. One more misstep and we explode. Shrapnel everywhere.

***

Senna Xiang is a teen writer. Her work is published in Superfroot Magazine, Peach Magazine, and other lovely places. 

When the sky fell, the adults screamed. After all, they were hit the hardest. Stock prices plummeted and soared as they crawled around on all fours collecting their papers, adjusting their spectacles, and trying to make bear or bull of it.

The children, on the other hand, quite liked the way it fell. It made a wonderful whooshing noise as it brought everything within reach. The clouds were exactly like cotton candy, despite everything they had been told. On piggy-backs, they could graze the stars and even rotate the moon. They assured it that it was pretty there too upon seeing its other side. With lassos, they rearranged the planets, making Tycho Brahe stammer in his grave. But he stayed put and wiped the spittle off his noble Danish mustache, because they paid him no mind in their fit of playful laughter.

The children’s collective growth pushed the sky back up, though it never did return to its original height. And so the people lived in a world without billboards, one in which the trees snaked around like vines and the biggest problem that faced humanity was which lampshade to put on the sun in the evening.

***

Alex Grejuc is a Romanian-American writer who lives in the Pacific Northwest. He recently graduated with a bachelor’s from Oregon State University, which means he now has to pay general admission prices at movie theaters and museums. His sole publication is a poem in his alma mater’s student magazine, Prism.

He conjures her from the perfumed page of a vintage magazine…

She has a body. She can wriggle its toes and pinch a floret of belly, turning this way and that in a clouded mirror. But still, she is paper thin somehow.

In the burnished theatre where she makes her debut, he folds her into a cherrywood box; tucks her up his sleeve. She crouches in the dark, listening to the audience gasp and murmur, sharp creases deepening in her origami heart.

* * * *

In a warehouse full of mirrors, there’s a locked room…

She lies on a table of ice, its fanged breath frosting her back. She is learning how to freeze and thaw her molecules — or rather, how to expand the emptiness between the atoms, how to hold them a sword’s width apart. The secret, he says, is for the body to be as cold as the blade.

She nods, ready, and he saws her in half. She doesn’t feel a thing, though she can still wriggle her toes.

* * * * *

He takes her on tour in a suitcase made of glass…

In Monte Carlo, she becomes the rustle of satin as he’s sleeping, the parchment scuff of slippers sheathing feet, the tender click of a hotel door. She walks into the sea until his magic pulls her back, waves thickening around her like rope.

On the casino floor, she drifts between blackjack and baccarat, slots ringing in her ears. Here, she is already invisible: no illusions required. Here, their eyes are fixed on other tricks: the flick of red, the flash of black. Here, in smoke and shadows, she lingers, watching how Lady Luck is both everywhere and nowhere, how the Queen of Hearts hides in plain sight, how jackpots slip through fingers like water, how ice melts in bourbon, never to be seen again…

* * * *

He dreams of a mermaid, trussed in a tank…

When she curls into bed hours later, the ends of her hair are still wet – telltale tendrils inking dark sigils on the sheets. Only then, sparking with secrets, does her heart billow and start to beat.

***

Lynda Cowles writes fiction in small doses, alongside murder mysteries and video games. You can usually find her on Twitter @lyndacowles.

1.

Once, in a department store, I pulled on my mother’s arm and it came off, like she was one of the mannequins. This was an early introduction to the idea that parts of my mother were destined to come off without warning.

2.

I was only a little older when both her legs came off at a summer garden party where she had been drinking wine for some hours. “Your mother has had a bit too much sun,” my father explained to us, as he carried her inside like a rag doll, with shiny buttons for eyes.

3,

The next thing to go was her heart. She lost it to Mike, the husband of her colleague at the school where she taught. There was a lot of shouting in our house that week and, soon after, she left for Canada with Mike.

4.

Over the years, postcards would arrive with pictures of grizzly bears and Mounties, telling us things we didn’t want to know, like Mike found a job, and Mike built a treehouse for their new kids and Mike saw a grizzly bear in the garden.

5.

One day a postcard arrived telling us the doctors had found something and they were going to remove some more parts from her, and then the postcards stopped.

6.

A couple of months back I googled her number and called it. It was her voice that answered, but it wasn’t her and she didn’t know who I was. An older male voice came on.

‘You’ll have to leave it there, Sport,’ it said. ‘Too much gone.’

7.

The next postcard was in unfamiliar writing and said she had died. It gave the date of the funeral, which had already passed. On the front was a picture of a grizzly bear rearing up on two legs, and for a moment I wondered if it was the one Mike saw.

***

Tim Craig lives in London. His short-short stories have appeared in many fine litmags and also the annual Best Microfiction Anthology. He is a previous winner of the Bridport Prize for Flash Fiction and has been placed or commended four times in the Bath Flash Fiction Award. @timkcraig

After “Other Babies” by Meredith Alling 

Some of the grandmothers swim laps in bathrobes and flower petal swim caps. Their lungs are full of fish. They point at each goldfish in its plastic bag pond and name it, Linda, Anoush, Isabel, one for each grandchild. Other grandmothers never learned how to swim. They lay on the bank like moss-covered stones until their legs fuse back into tails. Some grandmothers unfold their bodies like tents in the shade of an apricot tree. They have trained their whole lives for this. Other grandmothers are the tree, and mostly this feels good to them—the leaves always whispering, so that they’re never lonely, the smooth turquoise eggs tucked in carefully-arranged nests. Sometimes the nests fall and the eggs crack like crème brulee and then the grandmothers would rather not be trees, would rather have limbs that move, fingers, soft hands, like the other grandmothers, but it’s not up to them. Some grandmothers are full of magma. The magma boils and bubbles in the mantle of their stomachs until their insides are nothing, only fire. When these grandmothers erupt, entire villages die. Some grandmothers have never felt heat. They are always cold, cold, cold, fingers blue, joints scraping like crochet needles. Some grandmothers are in the kitchen, slicing the heads off figs, pinching dough lifeboats around orphaned lambs, praying that blood is thicker, after all. Other grandmothers are the kitchen and all their cupboard doors have been left open and fruit is rotting on the counters. Some of the grandmothers are too scared to move. Their ears twitch like rabbit ears. They know the shadow of the hawk when it moves over them. Other grandmothers are the hawk. They gulp down rabbits like butter mints. They have barcode veins, so they can be returned to the store if damaged or broken. They count babies like old pennies, tilting them out of a milk bottle and dropping them back in one at a time, each one a wish, knowing how easy it is to lose things. How hard it is to keep them. 

***

Lindy Biller is a writer based in the Midwest. Her fiction has recently appeared at Reservoir Road, Cheap Pop, Flyover Country, and Nurture Literary. She can be found on Twitter and Instagram @lindymbiller. 

But it’s a story about leaves. How they chase one another with noise, discreet noise, or no noise, a delirious crunchiness, twisty, hard, soft, wrinkled, leaves like dysmorphic kids in a minefield, with squashed greenish veins, how leaves fall, how leaves fall all the time, it’s ok to fall, leaves do that every day and nothing terrible happens, nothing monstrous. This is a story about leaves that are still leaves, no matter what, flying, shaking, lingering, whipping window glass, committing suicide while chasing rainbows, hurricanes, the burning sun, reaching out, touching other leaves, sliding on frowned, happy or in-between faces, escaping from roofs or mother trees, snatched on roofs or mother trees, benches, garbage bins, piling up on moth-covered graves, mourning like leaves mourn, by changing colour, by flapping on cold marble, leeched on broken flower pots, not letting go, squeezed in the corners of yards, transported in large groups, naked bodies in containers, mask-wearing sardines in the subway, pushed and pushed by rusty shovels and brooms, suffocating, screaming “Why are you doing this? I’m just a leaf, I’m supposed to fall, I’m supposed to stain your yard, this is what I do for a living.” This is a story about leaves aching, aching by the power of metal and sole and rain and wind and wheels and foot and boot and tank and rank, leaves, big, small, green, orange, yellow-white, broken, stepped on, migrating leaves, baby leaves, floating, falling like tired snowflakes, tangled in thin air, in thin dehydrated hair, sucked in high-tech vacuums and laughing mouths, leaves standing still for a moment, pulsating on the wet ground, dying, like leaves die, leaving tiny traces on a perfectly mowed grass, sinking in perfectly heated pools, leaves, leaves, slowly deteriorating, waiting for spring.

***

Maria A. Ioannou is a writer based in Cyprus. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing (University of Winchester, UK) and in 2019, she received the Vice-Chancellor’s Excellence in Research Award. She has published two short fiction collections and a fairytale in Greece (Emerging Writer State Award 2012 / shortlisted for the 2016 Young Writer Award by the Greek magazine Klepsydra. Her short fiction “Pillars” was nominated to be included in the anthology Best Small Fictions. Her work was longlisted in the Smokelong Quarterly Grand Micro Contest 2021 and the Bath Flash Fiction Award 2021 and has been published in SAND, The Hong Kong Review, Tiny Molecules, The Cabinet of Heed, Asymptote, Litro, The Daily Drunk, FlashFlood 2021, and elsewhere. More info: www.maria-alpha-ioannou.com.

“You used to be so thin,” he said. “Like a ballet dancer.”

“Or a girl who’s sick?” she answered.

“Not fat,” he said. “Not exactly, but definitely different than you were.”

Her next meal was salad and the memory of bread. She held her sugar-loving tongue. By the third day, when she finished her meals, she moved through the smorgasbord of her house, inhaled each candle-scented room, swallowing the idea of pies made from their apple, cherry, and peach.

He told her how eating late-afternoon dinner helps the body cool earlier in the evening, preparing for deep sleep sooner. How extending that kind of sleep lessens the opportunity for calories. How the absence of light is an asset. How a warm shower tricks the body’s thermometer.

Like Beauty, she pricked herself with darkness. She rose to the mirror to ask the questions about waist and thighs. When it answered, mouthing the drab adjectives for size, she understood the anger of queens.

Once, after midnight, she woke and saw him sitting up and gazing at her in the night light’s glow. His watching brought a rush of desire. The sheet he’d drawn up to her throat for warmth was bunched by her side. She lay in a negligee so sheer the near darkness felt like a tongue upon her skin. It tasted the spaces between her ribs and the stubborn mound of her stomach before settling on her rising and falling breasts. He said, “Go back to sleep.” 

He warned that she shouldn’t wake so easily. The sounder, the better, he said, and gave her pajamas to wear to keep her warmer. When, days later, she woke to him standing and staring, the sheet to the side again, she caught her breath and stiffened. “You scared me,” she said.

“Why?” he answered, smiling, she thought, in a way designed to make her doubt herself. He said he was in love with her sleep, the way it lessened her. Her closed eyes and steady breathing were time travel. When he watched, he imagined her retreating until she retrieved her childish shape, her princess body. “Give it time,” he said, and more weeks went by, so long that she believed he desired a stranger. So long that she imagined herself gone.

At last, when she opened her eyes, the sheet at her feet, he was standing on her side of the bed, his body so close that she couldn’t see his face until she rolled onto her back and looked straight up. “Oh yes,” he said. “Perfect.” But when he reached for her, she curled and faded like a long- forgotten photograph.

***

Gary Fincke’s flash stories have appeared recently in WigLeaf, Craft, Vestal Review, Atticus Review, Pithead Chapel, and Best Small Fictions 2020.

Kira heard seagull eyes have an extra cone, they can see UV light, they see under the banana boat slather– see bruises, sun spots, your skin– peeling like a mask. She wanted to hug a seagull. She wanted the seagull to spread its wings wide, hug her back. She wanted to feel its grey-tipped feathers touch her scapulas. She wanted her own wings to sprout, growing quickly. She wanted to fly away with the seagull. She would name him Wallace. Wallace would give her a seagull name. She would learn seagull language. Kira heard the red spot on their beaks is a target; for their chicks to tap and make them spit up their food– remember to feed them. She wanted to eat dropped sandwiches, raw eggs, fish. The Kira-gull would dive through the sky, dropping towards the earth, plummeting till inches from a mass of water, knowing she could glide along at any moment, free. 

***

Melissa Saggerer puts strawberries on pizza. She has flash in Coffin Bell, Barren, Tiny Molecules, and elsewhere. Follow her on twitter @MelissaSaggerer.

The Northern shrike population is in decline, she says, her voice a tongue on his ear. They are solitary and wary, maybe that’s why. They can’t even trust each other.

It’s the males who sing: as defense, to protect their nesting territory, sometimes to attract a mate. She eyes him out of the slashes she’s blackened on her lids. They pretend they are other birds until their imitation of reality becomes the new reality.

Their dead, all those amphibians and rodents, are placed on thorns, to be eaten later. She laughs, her mouth a wet red flame. It isn’t a beautiful bird because power is better than beauty. No, don’t try to tell me they’re the same.

Look, there it sits, alone in the open field, on a scrubby little tree. She points with the tip of her knife and says, watch it watching, perched as still as dirt, as the tree’s skin. You’ll see, it can wait for hours. It can wait for as long as it takes.

***

Katie DePasquale enjoys telling a good story and making sure it’s correctly punctuated. Her writing has appeared in The Worcester Review, Atticus Review, and Tin House online, among other publications, and is forthcoming in Grist Online. A Pushcart Prize nominee for fiction, she has an M.A. in writing and publishing from Emerson College and works as an editor at Berklee College of Music.