1

            My family lives in a house full of mountains about to fall over. It’s not that they’re balanced perfectly on the right side of precariousness. These mountains do fall over, all the time. When they do, my mother shouts, “Avalanche!” and my brothers and father casually inflate their safety helmets. When I come over they’re raking the rubble against the wall, forming new mountains, smaller ones this time.

            After we’ve cleaned up we all sit around peering across the rolling landscape. Here are its contents: Yarns from grass-fed alpacas. Expensive books with mild water damage. Nine hundred and ninety nine cranes, their folds full of dust. In my chest, rocks begin to slip, these small golden dirt clods rolling downhill and bursting on the ground. My mother sniffs back tears. “I love this family so much,” she says.

2

            At the bakery, I order anpan and wait for the clerk to tell me how good my Japanese is, just for managing to pronounce two words.

            “Haha wa nihonjin desu,” I will say, and when she opens her eyes wide and says she can’t see it in my face, I’ll say, “Sou iwareteimasu.” So I’m told.

            I will take my red bean bun—warm, round, and filling my hand like a small creature, and leave it whole as I sit at a bench outside, reading a story about an acrobat and a rocket scientist who fall in love.

            Once, a scientist loved me too. At night, he walked into the forest looking for owls, cradling the smallest ones in his palms before clamping numbered tags on their spindly legs. In the afternoons, he brought me olive bread. I pulled it apart as we talked, and all our worries fell out, shriveled and covered in crumbs.

            In my new neighborhood, I have almost every kind of Japanese pastry I want, but I have to steel myself to buy them, wielding my rice and seaweed childhood, a soft memory pounded tough.

            When I finally bite into the glazed flesh, the black sesame seeds will graze my lips. The sweet bean paste will linger on my tongue.

3

            For parents I have an owl and a tanuki. I did not get my mother’s ability to fly, or my father’s voluminous testicles to use as a parachute. No, I live on the ground and spend my days delivering newspapers through the forest.

            Sometimes I dream about moving through the air, the wind pushing at my back, the fog opening for me like a hug. People stop me on my paper route to ask about my face: how did I get it, both beak and whiskers? They’re not sure it’s beautiful.

            Well, one of my parents flew and the other one floated, I say. They met at the top of a short tree and later they made me.

            When I tell them, people look at me as if I could fly, and I don’t correct them. I have the memory, after all. When I sleep, I’m closer to the stars.

***

Mia Nakaji Monnier is a writer in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in BuzzFeed News, Shondaland, The Rumpus, and more. Her essay “Kokoro Yasume,” published in Exposition Review, was a Longreads editors’ pick and a Pushcart Prize nominee. She is the 2021 Idyllwild Writers Week Nonfiction Fellow. You can find her on Twitter @miagabb and read more of her work at mianakajimonnier.com.

Baba Yaga

cuts carrots in her chicken-legged shack, the weight of the world no longer on her shoulders, peers out the window on a bright morning, the birds particularly precocious and loud, intrigued by seedlings, casts a spell on an old friend in Praha, a lady who reared a log for a son (and had it coming), remembers her first love, a solemn woodsman, a poet of sorts, though he never realized the power of words, ponders how age and wisdom are not mutually exclusive, wisdom is for the birds, knowledge consumed by animals, and shat out, stands and watches a young girl approach the flock of sparrows, a girl of only 10, no more than that, a tasty morsel, from the village of disbelievers, yearns as the girl brings her hands together (in prayer? in supplication?), cuts into her own finger rather than the carrot, just to see blood, to remember what it is to be young again.

***

Jonathan Cardew’s stories appear in cream city review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Passages North, CRAFT, and others. Originally from the UK, he lives in Milwaukee, WI.

We have a slumber party where we decide, instead of fruit, to bring candy shaped like fruit to dump into a big bowl. Welch’s fruit snacks and Haribo peaches. Even Circus Peanuts had their place, we all agreed. Except for Rima, who isn’t agreeable about anything. She rolls her eyes as we dangle sour spaghetti from our teeth and press mounds shaped like strawberries n’ cream to our boobs so they look like puffy nipples. We hadn’t seen her eat food in weeks. She munched exclusively on ice chips and the occasional sugar free peppermint. When she goes to the bathroom, we all agree if we were fruit salad, Rima would be the banana Runts. 

We’re watching “A Walk to Remember.” Mandy Moore is dying and Shane West is sad because he is falling for a girl who is dying. Mandy wears a pale blue dress we all want a version of to wear to prom. We each imagine a version of Shane stabbing our left breasts with a corsage. In one scene, Mandy stands at the mic and sings a solo in front of the whole school, which makes us go quiet. The song is one we will each go home and download. Years later, we will wonder why it’s still on our iPods, until we forget about iPods all together. 

What we never forget about is Rima. She doesn’t end up going to prom. The sleepover is the last time we see her before her parents send her away to a “retreat” from which she never returns. We remember the look in Rima’s eyes, alert and darting like a feral cat’s, as she watches Mandy belting it out on the stage. We remember her hissing under her breath, “She doesn’t even look like she’s dying,” as the sugar crash hits and we fall into deep slumber, the sound of her teeth rattling together like a pack of loose Chiclets.

***

Stephanie Yu lives in Los Angeles with her partner Nate. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in BULL: Men’s Fiction, Eclectica, Hobart, X-R-A-Y, and elsewhere. You can find her tweeting @stfu_stephanie.

Ah, you’re an autumn, she says as I eye the shadows and mouth the names on the lipstick tubes, buttered rum, precious pearl, amorous rose, cool peach, every word a pucker.

What’s autumn? We had to clean the house spic and span before she came over because mom didn’t want her thinking we were dirty and poor.

She is carefully unloading her samples on the glass coffee table in the special living room for company, her soft white hands, tipped in a tasteful nude, she would later tell my mom. Oh, you know, it’s fall, when the leaves fall.

Leaves fall? My mother shakes her head. Her teased and permed hair hardened by hairspray. Her eyes rimmed black. Her brows brushed and darkened. Her lips an appropriate red for her job at the bank.

Yes, off of trees when they turn red, orange or yellow.

Leaves don’t change colors here. She stops and looks at me, seeing my dark brown skin and long tangled brown hair, my favorite rainbow t-shirt and not matching shorts, my long legs, scratched and scarred from playing in the sun all year long.

I guess you are right, but still, you are an autumn, dear. She clicks her emptied case closed.

***

Melissa Llanes Brownlee is a native Hawaiian writer who lives in Japan. She received her MFA from UNLV and has fiction recently published and forthcoming in The Citron Review, Waxwing, Claw & Blossom, The Lumiere Review, (mac)ro(mic), Micro Podcast, Bending Genres, 3Elements and elsewhere. She tweets @lumchanmfa and talks story at www.melissallanesbrownlee.com.

She swings from strand to strand often landing to sit on my left ear. At the grocery store, she waves to the cashier and asks about his day. His response is polite but disinterested. Later she’ll tell me that she thinks he’s sad. I’ll say that maybe he was just having a bad day.

When I’m at work, typing with my back curved, a spiral staircase to nowhere, she’ll remind me to sit up straight before taking a nap nestled beside my bangs. I’ll pull my shoulders back and feel the space open under my ribs.

At night, after dinner, when the neighborhood lights come on and the grass in the park across the street looks purple instead of green, she’ll make gasping sounds and tsk tsks while we read the next chapter of a cozy thriller. As my fingers shift to the top of the page and grab hold of the corner her voice stops me, Wait, wait, I’m not ready. At the end of the book she always announces, I knew that the weird woman did it. I could tell from the very beginning.

Sometimes when I drink coffee she’ll stroll along the rim of the mug, closing her eyes and inhaling the steam. She’ll say, It makes your breath stink but it smells so good when it’s still in the mug. I know the smallest poke from my finger would send her flying into the dark roasted lagoon she’s circling. I don’t tell her that. I resist the urge.

Hours after I’ve turned off the lamp in the bedroom and settled under flannel sheets, my eyes won’t close. More than a hundred sheep have bounded over a low wooden gate to the soundtrack of her deep and even breathing. Still, my eyes won’t close. I let my hand slip down my body, between elastic and warm skin. I think about the cashier from the grocery store. The sandpaper stubble on his jawline against my thigh. My fingers fly and I moan. She stirs, rustling in my hair. I stop. She pats my head, and before going back to sleep says, Go on I know you need this. I finish what I started, but the last thing I remember before falling asleep is not the cashier. The last thing I remember is a dainty finger dipping into a honey sample cup at the farmer’s market, and her voice, as she licks the golden drops, This is perfection.  

***

Veronica Klash loves living in Las Vegas and writing in her living room. Her work has appeared in Cheap Pop, Ellipsis Zine, and X-Ray Lit, among others. You can find her on Twitter @veronicaklash.

There are 8.399 million people living in New York City. Of these, 47% are male. If 53% of these men are currently single, 26% prefer latte over cappuccino, 10% can tell a difference between a Leica and a Fuji, 7% are remotely attractive, and 3% can find you attractive with makeup running down your face, please calculate the probability of meeting the love of your life on a rainy Tuesday in April, outside of Dashwood Books, after you have forgotten your umbrella on the subway.

#

The wedding band is a circle of metal around emptiness. To calculate the radius of a circle by using the circumference, take the circumference of the circle and divide it by 2 times π. Without using any measurement instruments, estimate the correct size of the wedding band for a person whose hand you’ve been clutching on a roller coaster ride you shouldn’t have gone to in the first place.

#

Add up the 6.5 lbs of a newborn girl and the combined 10.8 lbs of the twins that came two years later, subtract 2.25 hours a day spent cooking and cleaning, multiply by the number of times the spouses quarreled and then made up, legs intertwined, divide by the number of Lego parts found in unexpected places and, finally, take a square root out of every difficult conversation to find a formula of a perfect marriage.

#

Imagine that Car A leaves from point X and Car B departs from point Y. Car A travels at 55 mph, in line with the maximum posted speed limit. Car B travels at 65mph for the first two hours of its journey and then speeds up to 90 mph for the last 22 minutes. Calculate the force of their collision at intersection Z.

#

There are 206 bones in the human body. The femur is the strongest and the trapezium bone in the left wrist, injured in the skating incident at the age of nine, is the weakest. Calculate how many bones will break when the side impact airbag doesn’t deploy. For extra points, estimate which one of them will break first.

#

The average life expectancy of a man is 77 years and the average life expectancy of a woman is 81. Calculate how many times she will stand outside Dashwood Books alone after her husband dies in a car crash two days before her 36^th birthday.

***

Laila Amado spends her days teaching, writing, never quite catching up on her own research agenda, and trying to get a teenage kid through a global pandemic. In her free time, she can be found staring at the Mediterranean Sea. Occasionally, the sea stares back. She is on Twitter @onbonbon7.

We recently published Nick Perilli’s delightful “Our Dog Most Recently.”

Here, we ask him two questions about his story:

1) This is a story about a dog stuck in a time loop. Right there, that begs the question — what was your inspiration for writing a story about a dog stuck in a time loop?

I’d say my biggest inspiration was our dog Gabby. She’s getting pretty up there in years so she has a very specific routine in how she lives her life and goes about her day to day, which I really took notice of when my partner and I settled into a house we bought after living in rentals the entire time we’ve had her. That’s another bit of inspiration, too—the knowledge that this house is where Gabby and our other pets (and us, if we never move) will likely live out the rest of their days going about their routines. So, a combination of considering (and regretting) our dog’s mortality, as well as the space where that mortality will play out alongside ours, brought this piece into being.

2) I love how, in this world you’ve created, time loops seems to serve a Groundhog Day sort of purpose to improve the people caught in them. But, the vet says, there’s no need for the dog to improve. That is such a great touch! Did you have a specific dog in mind here, or could this be any dog, as they’re all wonderful?

Gabby again! But, yes, all dogs are equally wonderful and I hope the dog in this piece reads more as all dogs rather than just one specific wonderful dog. It’s the dog that you want it to be. While writing the piece, I almost swapped in another, slightly more eccentric animal for the dog just to see what that would read like. Everyone writes about pet dogs all the time but rarely about pet bearded dragons, you know? While the story may have stood out more on some level with a reptile in a time loop, I realized I needed all the connections readers would make with the simple fact that the narrator is talking about a dog. I think most people agree that their dogs and dogs in general don’t really need to improve themselves, so right there is a positive connection that people have with the dog in the story. Some people probably do think reptiles could stand to improve on themselves in some ways, so I might have lost a reader or two if I tried to pass off a bearded dragon as this paragon of wonderful like I do with the dog. It would have been a much different story.

Our dog is stuck in a time loop, living the same day on repeat. Our children first noticed it when they went to give her a bath and realized she wasn’t dirty after weeks without a cleaning. The evidence mounted from there. She ate at the same time, slept until the exact same minute, went outside only three times a day. No more, no less.

A cosmic trick has been played on our dog by the universe, and even the vet has no idea why.

“She has always been a good dog,” they told us over the phone, “so this is especially strange.” In cases like this, according to the doctor, the universe is usually forcing someone to improve themselves, but there is no need for our dog to improve. “Just give her treats when you can,” the vet said, “and don’t get in the way of her routine too much, otherwise you might get swept up in the loop.”

My husband immediately decided to enter the loop with our dog, which he’s still trying to do. He has shadowed her for three days and counting. He sleeps next to her in the living room on the worn gray couch that has absorbed her smell. Eats his breakfast at her level. Rolls in the grass and lays in the sun for half the day.

Now he sometimes repeats his last few minutes, most recently explaining to me how he wants to paint the wall behind the entertainment center a darker color twice in a row. Most recently explaining to me how he wants to paint the wall behind the entertainment center a darker color twice in a row. But that is about as far as he’s gotten.

The world moves and ages around our dog. The children are getting older and so are we, but the dog is still stuck in her loop—not that she minds. Time now dilates when we approach her, so I keep my distance. Our daughter Mirren, who was always closest to the dog in every way, is now younger than our son and I don’t quite remember them being born that way. I am concerned they won’t have families of their own to care for our dog when we finally go. That she will continue in her loop far beyond us and them and this house.

We have sent the children to my parents’ home to ease the time dilation. I watch our dog at the end of her daily loop, dozing on her gray couch with my husband repeating his last four minutes of sleep beside her. He looks younger. The mantle over the fireplace holds one framed memory after another. I can’t help but crawl on all fours across the rug and press my face into our dog’s pristine, slowing fur.

***

Nick Perilli is a writer and library person living in Philadelphia with loved ones and a Netflix DVD plan. His debut novel, ‘Cul-de-sac,’ is forthcoming from Montag Press in late 2021. His chapbook Child Lucia and Other Library Fabula will be released by Ethel Zine Press around then too. Short work of his can be found in Breadcrumbs, Toho Journal, and elsewhere. He tweets @nicoloperilli and spared no expense on his cheap website nickperilli.com.

Flowers, I met you in a field of flowers. In the field of flowers you were dressed like a child’s lost balloon. You pointed to yourself and told me to hold on. “Everyone is waiting,” you said. I looked all around us—to the north and to the south and to the east and to the west—but I saw no one. We were alone, all ghosts and charm. Still, you insisted they were there, they who had come to see us marry the sky, they who were waiting patiently to watch as the sky swept past us, as if the clouds were on a conveyor belt. 

You tied your wrist around mine as I told you about how, as a child, I would rub dirt on my shins so my grandmother would have to rub the dirt off. I would say mother, but my mother never existed. These were the days when I wanted nothing more than to be held, to hold, to be on my own conveyor belt as I moved through every definition of touch, everything that followed hold, the once upon a time, and wherever my mother went before she decided she never wanted to have to rub dirt off my shins. 

“Everyone is waiting,” you said, again. You were smiling, all gapped teeth and lips gone U-turn. I didn’t care that you were wrong, that we were alone, that there was no one waiting to watch us turn starling. It was in that moment I wanted nothing more than to crawl through the gap between your two front teeth. I wanted to grow fur and burrow inside you. I wanted to audit a class on how to hibernate inside a lover who moonlighted as a balloon. I wanted to stay a while, maybe forever, but I knew I wouldn’t fit. Instead, I reached for you, grabbing on to as much as I could hold. 

It only took a blink and then we were floating. We were floating so high we were above the ghosts and the ghosts of their ghosts, above their stained white sheets—now nothing but clouds beneath us.

***

Leigh Chadwick is the author of a chapbook, Daughters of the State (Bottlecap Press, 2021), a poetry coloring book, This Is How We Learn How to Pray (ELJ Editions, 2021) and the full-length poetry collection, Wound Channels (ELJ Editions, 2022). Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Salamander, Heavy Feather Review, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Indianapolis Review, ONE ART, and Bending Genres, among others. Find her on Twitter at @LeighChadwick5.

You know the story: office worker gets hit by a truck, gets reborn as the villainess in a fantasy world, tries to convince the crown prince / ex-fiancé that she’s not in love with him, watches the prince and female lead triumph in ironclad plot armor.

You know the story: out of jealousy, the villainess dumps granules of arsenic into the female lead’s tea. The female lead drinks, thumb and forefinger pinching the handle, pinky curled and tucked under her ring finger, an extra limb that has to stay hidden. It isn’t good to use too many fingers—people might assume the worst: that you cling, grasp, hold things afloat. But the female lead has healing powers hidden within her sternum, so deep arsenic must catalyze cellular apoptosis, amp up oxidative stress, knock down organs to drag out holy light. The female lead sits back up, healthy like a horse. The mouton catapults past the lunette. The villainess’s head soars. The tea goes cold.

I would just like to live quietly, says the reincarnated villainess. Retired at a seaside cottage, growing scallion on the window sill, baking ube milk buns in the summer heat because there’s no chiffon dress to ruin with sweat, belting out lyrics from an idol group she stanned several lives ago. In a previous life, she ate pork rinds rather than loins, flushing fat down her digestive system like water, the muscle meat and proteins too tough to digest. This is why your blood is weak, that life’s mother said. Unfulfilled bodies make unfulfilled souls. The villainess wishes to tell the female lead: you can have the prince, I think I’m asexual anyway. But confronting the female lead is like talking to the auntie who sizes you up against their daughter: fairer skin? Higher grades? Better handiwork at rolling and wrapping tangyuan so sesame paste doesn’t leak? Prowess in the kitchen seems desirable these days.

After the villainess packs her bags, changes out of her crimson dress (red is the shade of evil, said someone somewhere), and writes a letter to her parents about breaking off the engagement, she heads off to the countryside. There, she occasionally thinks about the demon lord soon-to-be slain by the prince, the female lead who’ll rescue the prince from the brink of death, the royal garden lined with rows and rows of camellias, serrated and glossy—the perfect backdrop for a love confession, an execution. It will only be a few seconds of thought before the villainess decides to sleep in, hoping she has escaped the death flags this time around. 

***

Lucy Zhang writes, codes and watches anime. Her work has appeared in Hobart, Invisible City and Five South, and was selected for Best Microfiction and Best Small Fictions 2021. She edits for Barren Magazine, Heavy Feather Review and Pithead Chapel. Find her at https://kowaretasekai.wordpress.com/ or on Twitter @Dango_Ramen.