The girl’s mother named her Cousin, so people would love her from the start.

Her mother worried no one would take to the homely, wild girl otherwise. Babies were supposed to be pink and beautiful, not ruddy and coarse. Besides, her mother knew how painful love was to catch. Pins beneath nails. Gravel ground into knees. Smoke singed into palms.

The problem was, with a name like Cousin, everyone believed the little girl belonged to them. Her name simmered in people’s mouths the way apples turn soft under their skin in the heat of the skillet. And Cousin was trained to melt too quickly when people called for her. She learned to sit and wait. She believed she belonged to those people, too. The name was a curse.

The girl grew into a young woman the way she was supposed to. Her rough red braids smoothed out into soft curls. Freckles paled against bronze skin. She still waited for her name to be called, but now she passed the time with books. Fairy tales of frozen girls, trapped girls, patient girls who won their freedom through submission. Cousin secretly hoped better stories existed beyond the shelves her mother carefully curated in the study.

In the summer Cousin met a man immune to her mother’s spell. He refused to say her name right. His voice rested on the sin. His hands rested on her thighs.She gently corrected him, moving his hands, moving his tongue. She supposed all this time she’d been saying her own name wrong, leaning into his pronunciation. Curses can never be broken. But they can be sold. Her mother liked the man. That was all that mattered.

Cousin, now rebranded, felt herself change bone by bone. At first, she reveled in a world her mother didn’t create. She adopted the man’s long strides, his taste for foreign spices. Cousin read the man her fairy tales at night. Once he fell asleep, she deftly searched his apartment for new books, disappointed that beneath their exteriors he and her mother were identical.   

The man broke her heart on a starless Thursday night, with a letter written on crumpled paper. Scraps of other words were erased. At first, she thought maybe he’d had second thoughts. Tried to convince himself to stay. Instead, she made out the names of other lost girls he’d collected then disposed of like the decaying autumn leaves. She felt herself disintegrating as she read his words.

Her eyes drifted to the margins. The places where he’d never written, untouched, unworried. She pressed the paper to her mouth, then wrote Cousin in blood from her bitten lip. It was the first time she’d ever written her own name in a space that neither her mother or the man owned. It was the kiss that woke her. Curses can’t be broken, but they can be owned. She felt her heart stitching itself back together, and she realized it was time for a new name.

***

Sarah Clayville is a high school teacher and author who works from a small town in central Pennsylvania where she has lived forever. She holds a special place in heart for short fiction that stops people in their tracks. Find more of her work at SarahSaysWrite.com.

I know I need to move along. Shouldn’t be out in the open on the coast like this, but it’s not every day I get to see a sperm whale in Sister Lake. Not any day, actually. You have to wonder what would draw an animal like this into these shallows so close to marshland, its dorsal fin loafing back and forth along the mudflats like it’s trying to decide whether the water’s gotten too hot or too full of plastic to make all the swimming worth it. Maybe it just wants to belly up on the shore and watch the tops of those trees sway in the distance along the horizon until its own weight squeezes all the air out of its lungs. Maybe a day always comes when moving along isn’t the prettiest choice.

***

Jack B. Bedell is Professor of English and Coordinator of Creative Writing at Southeastern Louisiana University where he also edits Louisiana Literature and directs the Louisiana Literature Press. Jack’s work has appeared in HAD, Pidgeonholes, Heavy Feather, Okay Donkey, EcoTheo, MoonPark, Terrain, and other journals. His latest collection is Color All Maps New (Mercer University Press, spring 2021). He served as Louisiana Poet Laureate 2017-2019. 

1. The girl tries to focus. To hold still. The more she concentrates, however, the more she drowns in tactile sensations, all the things that chafe.

2. Now, all she can think of are the self-defense instructor’s arm muscles. So many veins standing at rapt attention. The girl wishes she could run her fingers over them, trace the paths of those green-blue rivers, see where they lead.

3. The instructor tells the class about the man who once stopped her on the street and offered instructions. You look lost. Where are you going? He was wearing a navy business suit, the creases in his pants so stiff they stood along their own axis. Right hand clasping a briefcase. Kind face, kind smile, kind eyes. So why did she run? Why, after crossing three streets, putting a hot dog vendor, a FedEx deliveryman, and a cluster of nannies between them, did she finally stop to catch her breath?

4. Everyone, stand up. The girl complies. She feels unsteady on her feet. All she does is cardio. Treadmill belt unspooling under her feet. Pedaling, in a dark room, to the thunder of club music, so loud and dark she could sob without anyone hearing. She should incorporate more strength training. Swing a kettlebell over her head. Build muscles, enough to open a jar without needing to ask. Root herself to the ground. But all she can think of is how to gain distance.

5. The instructor teaches them a series of easy to remember moves. The girl forgets immediately. Was she supposed to jab the windpipe or the eyes? What is her other arm supposed to be doing? She flails. She stomps down to disable an imaginary foot and almost laughs. Who is she kidding? She is as weak as a child.  

6. Come on, the instructor snaps, squaring those magnificent shoulders. You can hit harder than that. Can I? the girl thinks and winds up again.

7. As if on cue, a man drifts over. His eyes rove and then fixate, like a dog locating the scent. He pauses at the perimeter and watches them, licking his lips.

9. Sir, hello. Hi. How are you doing? the instructor chirps. The girl and the others do what they should never ever do in these sorts of situations – freeze.

9. What you should actually do. Defuse – hi, how are ya. Divert – Hey, what’s that. Deflect – I got to go, can’t miss this appointment. The three Ds, the instructor explained. But all the girl hears is run, run, run.

10. The instructor keeps up a steady thrum of chatter. Underneath it, the girl can hear trembling. It reminds her of that time across a table, the boy had gripped her wrist so hard, he left plummy half-moons studding her skin, and still she couldn’t stop talking, hey, what’s worse than finding a worm in your apple, I don’t know, what, half a worm.

11. Distract.

12. Bored, the man eventually leaves. For the rest of class, the instructor speaks a little too breathlessly, as though her voice has sprouted legs and a ponytail switch-flicking in the wind.

13. After class, the girl buys a black plastic baton, half the length of a forearm, to attach to her key ring. She whaps it against her own arm, again and again, testing its heft and sting, until finally, the welt grows big enough to satisfy.     

14. As she is about to leave, the girl thinks to ask, why did you run?

15. The instructor blinks, then remembers. A scabbing gash along his left hand. From a cat, maybe, or a girl trying to get away.

***

Joy Guo currently lives in Manhattan with her husband. She is a white collar and regulatory defense attorney. Her work is published or forthcoming in Passages North, Pithead Chapel, CRAFT, Atticus Review, and SmokeLong Quarterly, among others. You can find her on Twitter at gojiberryandtea and www.joyguowrites.com. 

The day you sneak communion wine at Saint Mary’s, an overloaded truck barreling downhill brakes so it won’t hit Mr. Li biking uphill, a bag of lychees swinging from the handlebars, a gift for his niece after losing her job. The truck skids and seesaws all over the road to avoid flattening Mr. Li, hurtling with the kind of gravity you might recognize only after it breaks your nose or flays your kneecap, an inevitable trainwreck of weight leaving you with a badass scar to flaunt, proof you escaped another death. Some days you understand the indifferent stealth of a cat with nine lives, slipping between bars just as a guard dog snaps, jaws catching air. But when you drink red wine now you taste rubbery diesel, swallow truck treads leading to a side of the road, where a minute before your hound George squeezed through the gate, tracking fresh cat while you sipped Father Peter’s wine, tired of being the only non-Catholic at Saint Mary’s School, filing into chapel for Mass behind the others, your arms criss-crossed over your chest so everyone knows you want the priest’s blessing even though you can’t drink the Blood of Christ because you don’t belong like you do when you get home and Dad tells you George is dead and isn’t coming back.

***

Phebe Jewell’s work appears in various journals, including Monkeybicycle, MoonPark Review, Spelk, New Flash Fiction Review, Bending Genres, and The Cabinet of Heed. Her story “¿Cómo Está Tu Madre?” was chosen for wigleaf‘s 2021 Top 50 for (very) short fiction. A teacher at Seattle Central College, she also volunteers for the Freedom Education Project Puget Sound, a nonprofit providing college courses for incarcerated women, trans-identified and gender nonconforming people in Washington State. Read her at https://phebejewellwrites.com.

One hundred bottles, some green, some clear, some brown, some dug out of barroom dumpsters, some pulled from alley trashcans, but most just found, found resting against curbs, found on the street grates that carry the heavy rains away, found in the high weeds in Deadman’s woods, in the high weeds that border Griffin Park, in the high weeds in front of the vacant houses, in the high weeds behind the occupied houses, bottles all over like they were put there just so they could be found by the Scrap Boys, bottles like Easter eggs to be hunted, like this was all meant to be.

Scrap Boy 1, Scrap Boy 2, Scrap Boy 3, three backyard haircuts, three necks slick with grime and sweat, three right arms aching to feel the heft of an empty glass bottle, one shared heart. Neighbors by chance, brothers by choice, where one Scrap Boy goes, the other two follow, sure as heat follows the birth of a flame.

Today the Scrap Boys feel their shared heart swollen and buoyant as a hot-air balloon. The Scrap Boys told each other they were going to do it, and they did it. It took weeks, but they did it. One hundred bottles gathered and brought to the best shady spot on the ridge that runs above the railroad tracks, one hundred bottles waiting to be chucked.

Questions bloom in the Scrap Boys shared heart: How to start? When? At what cost? The questions weigh on the Scrap Boys, settle in their shoulders so it’s difficult to lift their arms. So they just stare at the pile. And this feels good. The Scrap Boys don’t know why it feels good, don’t know the way the light and shadows dappling the pile speak to them, tell ancient tales of creation, where there was once just sun parched grass and shadows, now there is this, tales of power and agency, you made this Scrap Boys, you and you alone, your six hands, your own damn selves.

The anticipation is building. This will feed the Scrap Boys. Give them the strength to shake the questions off their shoulders. They will move in unison, as they always do. One right hand, two right hands, three grabbing one bottle, one bottle, one bottle each. Those first bottles will be launched, arc through space catching the sun like prisms, carving light into rainbows as they whistle across pale blue sky and then drop, drop, drop, rush to kiss the gravel along the tracks where they will burst and bloom like fireworks, shattered and brilliant and gone.

Second bottles, then thirds, and fourths, faster and faster, five will leave their hands before four even kisses the ground. A barrage of bottles, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, and still so many more to go. Bottles kisskisskissing the dirt and gravel, the steel of the rails, the creosote rich wood of the ties.

And with each kiss there will be the sound, shattering bottles speaking with the voices of the Scrap Boys future lovers, their future children, demanding voices, insistent, look here, look here, look at the destruction you have wrought.

***

Tom Weller is a former factory worker, Peace Corps volunteer, Planned Parenthood sexuality educator, and college writing instructor. His fiction has appeared recently in Pidgeonholes, Barrelhouse, Booth, and X-Ray Lit, among others. His fiction collection And There Came Forth a Great Fish is forthcoming from Gateway Literary Press. He lives in Victoria, Texas.

Gone are the nets, the cages, the paraphernalia of pursuit; the call, the swoop, the gasp, the clank, the clink of silver (rarely gold); and then, later, the glug in the glass, again and again, tonic against the persistent stench: popcorn and pizza, graham crackers, Goldfish. But what did you do with them? People want to know, or think they do. His job was the catching, first with the nose and then with the net, the catching and that was all.

Now the fabled proboscis detects clotted gravy on boiled beef, scorched coffee, treacly pineapple upside-down cake: lunch. Now the only calls are to Shake those hips! because Motion is lotion! (Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings at 9 on the west lawn), and, on Thursday evenings, sequences of letters and numbers punctuated by screeches of Bingo! while the cage rattles on.

Only on weekends, sometimes, does he catch a whiff of something that pricks his memory: sugar and snips and spice and snails, and tails, none of it nice. He’s not permitted in the lobby during visiting hours, not since the incident with Peggy Price’s granddaughter, but he has the net still, they had to buy a new one for the fish tank. Oh, let him have it, they chuckle, it doesn’t matter, what can he do? He clutches it, alone in his room with the rain streaming in bars down the window. Is she here now, Peggy’s pernicious progeny, in her tattered princess frock and filthy trainers, with her preternaturally penetrating gaze? Is there still a mark on her cheek from where the net struck when he swung? Is she blathering through a mouthful of brownie, pointing and pestering someone else – the shivering specter in black-and-white fur, the briny witch with the siren warble, the hook-handed blowhard in gleaming Crocs – But what did you do? What did you do?

***

Didi Wood has always found Lady Elaine (Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood) far more terrifying than the Child Catcher. Her work appears or is forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Jellyfish Review, and elsewhere. “Rattle & Rue,” originally published in Cotton Xenomorph, was chosen for the Wigleaf Top 50 in 2019. Find her on Twitter @DidiWood and read more stories at didiwood.com.

Forty-six handwritten pages, unbound but stacked carefully in the corner; a candelabra, wick molten down to the last centimeter; two fountain and three ballpoint pens, scattered over a dried-up bottle of ink; a matchbox shaped like a mousetrap; five fat cigarettes, wide as a thumb; a wax seal stamp; a watch with a faux silver strap; coke cans with soda left without the sizzle—that’s what the papers said the police found on her desk after she died. The forty-six pages turned out to be part of an unfinished story titled “Succession,” written in the author’s own hand, of which a single page was blurrily photographed and passed onto the morning paper. Not her best work, a critic wrote, but her last, abstract and almost incomprehensible, written in a private coded language with the repetition of rain and gray belladonnas, remarkable for both its impeccable penmanship and almost total disregard for its readership, as if its intended audience was of a population that was no longer human—but still significant, especially significant because of a certain passage sixteen pages in that describes a scene where a woman closely resembling the author herself is found dead on the road, rain slowly falling on her soft jacket, which was pretty much how they found her, the author, dead on the road, rain slowly falling. Script of angels, a reader mumbles during his lunch break, squinting with the newspaper in one hand and a soda in the other. His friend nods but ignores him. Not her best work, certainly, but fascinating: a long, winding road, gray belladonnas, the body floating upwards, the words floating upwards, trails into the air, wisps of cigarette smoke, barely there, nothing really, and the rain falling, and the soft jacket. 

***

Christina Pan is a student from NYC with work published/forthcoming in Vagabond City Lit, FEED, and Interstellar Lit.

The rules of Bloody Mary are very simple when you’re a twelve-year-old girl. Just follow these five steps:

1. You must pick the darkest room with the biggest mirror — location is important. You go to the upstairs bathroom of your best friend Tara’s house and together you face the mirror. Tara switches off the light. Your reflections, gangly and wide-eyed with lingering sunburns from afternoons at the public pool, vanish as the room is plunged into darkness. For a moment you can still see your mirror selves, the impressions left on your vision. It’s like you’re the ghosts, bright leftover images looming behind your eyelids as you blink.

2. You must have the proper tools — after you summon Bloody Mary, you’ll need to light a candle to see her. A tea light candle stolen from Tara’s older sister, and the matchbook from the junk drawer in the kitchen. Tara takes other things from her sister these days too, like teen magazines with quizzes about who your future boyfriend will be. She makes you fill them out with her, and she takes the answers very seriously. Afterwards, you read all the options quietly to yourself and feel nothing. Now, in the dark, Tara takes your hand. You close your eyes; you focus on the feeling of Tara’s hand, the quiet of her breathing. The cold bathroom tile on your bare feet.

3. You must call her forth three times: Bloody Mary. Bloody Mary. Bloody Mary. There is power in the ritual of repetition. How many times have you and Tara pretended you were witches, sitting your stuffed animals in a circle and making up chants? Even if that was just make-believe, you were doing it together, and that thrilled you. You feel goosebumps rise on your arm. It’s like you’re the only two girls in the whole universe, just a vast darkness and your hands and peeling, sunburned arms touching. Tara’s palm is sweaty. Her fingernails are bitten short. You notice these details and your pulse kicks; maybe Tara’s nervousness is catching. You think if you opened your eyes and you really were in an endless black expanse, that would be okay. As long as you got to keep holding Tara’s hand.

4. You must believe, and maybe this is why you’ve had no luck so far. Because Tara is certain that when she lights the candle, she will see a blood-soaked figure in the mirror. Tara believes in Bloody Mary with the same certainty that she believes in the ability of a teen magazine to tell her future. But not you. You don’t think a magazine can make you love a boy and you don’t think a chant will make a ghost appear in a mirror. When you open your eyes, you know there will be nothing there, and Tara will let go of your hand because she won’t be afraid anymore.

5. So for now, you must keep your eyes closed. Imagine you can feel the presence of a third girl in the room with you, maybe phantom breath on your neck. And then hold Tara’s hand tight. Just a little longer. Just until you hear the match strike.

***

Audrey Hawkes is a desert rat living and writing in Arizona, and can often be found watching bad horror movies or on Twitter @audrey_hawkes. Audrey’s work has been featured in Ample Remains and Not Deer Magazine.

When all the children’s sports disappeared, the swim mom locked the bathroom door, filled the tub with warm water and a few sloshes of Clorox, and sat on the closed toilet lid to inhale the bleachy, humid air.

The golf mom snuck a sprig of wooden tees into her pocket before tossing her pants into the wash. After the clothes finished drying, she crouched on the sticky floor of the laundry room to pluck the tees out from around the lint trap.

The softball mom, her face and neck slick with sunscreen, sat in her SUV with the sunroof open. In her driveway, she listened to the classic rock station, biting sunflower seeds and spitting the shells between her legs onto the waffled all-weather floormat.

At night, the sports moms dreamt of sweaty hair, hairsprayed into tight ponytails. Handwashing socks in hotel sinks and pinching the wet fabric into rolled-up car windows. Concession-stand coffee with powdered creamer. Unintelligible shouts echoing in the cathedral ceilings of gyms, pools, rinks, and nondescript steel buildings. Once, the basketball mom dreamt herself climbing the bleachers in high heels, losing her balance for just a moment before gripping the wobbly steel handrail and gasping awake. 

Some moms could subscribe and pay to see miniature two-dimensional versions of their children doing sports. They watched on phones in parking lots, laptops on the dining room table. But these flat children with blurred faces didn’t feel like the same ones who had years ago nursed at the moms’ breasts, grasping at the moms’ necklaces as the early evening sun sliced through the blinds of a dim nursery.

So the soccer mom knifed and quartered a dozen oranges and carried them outside to the bird feeder tray. The cheer mom added a few glittery dog collars to her online shopping cart. And in the backyard at sunrise, the tennis mom wrapped herself in a microfleece blanket. Shook open a portable canvas chair. Sipped her K-cup coffee from a travel mug cradled in the mesh cupholder. Watched through the chain-link fence as the neighbor’s cat chased a dead leaf in the wind.

***

Jessie Lovett Allen is originally from western New York and currently teaches English at North Platte Community College in western Nebraska. She holds an MA in English and a PhD in Literacy Education. Jessie enjoys loitering around the MFA program at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, where she irregularly takes classes.  Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Bending Genres, The Forge, and JMWW. She was recently nominated for a Pushcart. Twitter: @jesslovettallen

The first sign had been taped to the garage door of the blue house with white shutters. It was crisp at first, big black letters on white paper, but the sun soon rendered it faded and soft and yellow, tender as its message.

            The family who had once lived inside the house had gone to the ocean, seeking sand and sun and salty air, it said. No one knew how long they had been gone before someone noticed the sign. It was like they had never been there at all.

            The next sign had been taped to a large green house with a maple tree out front. They’d gone to the mountains, it said, where the air was thinner but crisper, cleaner. They’d vacationed there once when the kids were young and had never been happier. They took nothing and never returned.

            The third sign appeared soon after, taped to a small brick colonial with a fenced-in backyard. There was only one word written on it.

            The residents of the street grew bolder.

            The Norwoods headed for a small town the father had visited as a child, where the ice cream cones were the size of his head and cost a nickel. The McCauleys were going to the house where their great grandmother had grown up, which had burned in a fire fifty years prior. The Greenes had taken off for a land that could only be found in the map on the inside cover of their favorite fantasy novel.

            One by one, signs appeared, stuck tight to empty houses full of dreams.

            Word spread of this modern ghost town. People came from the next town over, the next county, the next state. They came from around the world, seeking transport to the places their hearts most desired.

            One person fled to the setting sun. Another to a gray day full of soft rain and unread books. There was a sign describing a lilac bush in bloom, a tree with a crooked trunk, and an old canoe by the pond.

            The signs multiplied. Layers upon layers of paper coated in ink, memories and daydreams that had formerly been lodged somewhere in the stomach, the throat, the chest, deep behind the lungs.

            The walls of the houses began to bow, bearing the weight of longing. But when they finally fell, they fell outward, not inward, sending the hope they housed out into the world.

***

Rachel Abbey McCafferty has been writing since she first learned that was a thing people could do. She’s a newspaper reporter in Ohio whose favorite questions are ‘what if’ and ‘why.’ Her flash fiction has appeared in journals like formercactus, (mac)ro(mic) and Emerge Literary Journal.