In this story someone dies. Maybe they are already dead. You don’t know yet who dies or if they are already dead. That’s part of the trick. It’s very tricky.

In this story someone also loves a terrible person. It’s not clear why they don’t know that this person is terrible and we do. But that’s part of the charm of this story. They love because they are a decent person who embraces the quirks of strangers, unlike us, who are into this story because we are the sort of people who judge others and their decisions including their poor choice in whom to trust; who wake at night and stalk the kitchen in bare feet and use whiskey as a soporific; who watch “The Great British Baking Show” semi-ironically but can’t get past the endless first season and now require new entertainment having to do with the lives of others but in a way that we feel urbane but also a little connected to our own humanity. We laugh out loud sometimes. Not just the inside wry smile-laugh but loud and boisterous. Har har. We are not that bad. Just proved it.

You’ve guessed already who is already dead or about to die and who loves a terrible person, haven’t you? You are clever but also kind. This story confirms that.

***

Carly Berwick is a writer based in Jersey City, NJ, and has published stories in Hobart, Subnivean, and Bowery Gothic.

The woman is assessed on everything: her collegiality, her efficiency, the texture of the vegetables she cooks, her imagination, her warmth, the density of her breasts. At work, her boss reassures her that the expectation isn’t perfection. “No one is perfect,” he says. There will only be a problem if her ratings fall below 70%.

So she tries hard to please. At dinner parties, she listens carefully to the timbre of her laugh to evaluate whether it is resonant, dulcet, or braying.

The trouble is that some categories for which she is being assessed conflict. How can she contribute to the conference room discussion in a manner that is “animated” and “energetic” but avoids being “challenging”? To be “sharp” is sometimes laudable (when describing her insight) and sometimes critical (when describing a comment she made to sexist Marc Potronsky on the team-building retreat). Or with her husband, how can she both soothe and allure? And with colleagues, manifest both “groundedness” and “sparkliness”? (This last category is particularly perplexing, because when the woman imagines objects that sparkle, she thinks of tricks of light—the gleam of a gold band, the prismatic flash of a diamond’s facet).

Even simple tasks, like cooking bacon, confound her, since her daughter Eleanor prefers her bacon to be chewy, whereas her son Joey prefers it to be crispy.

And it is one morning, over a pan of bacon, that the woman’s attempts to satisfy counter-imperatives finally implode. She is standing over the pan, watching the bacon sizzle, waiting for the moment to remove Eleanor’s three strips. Then, instead of removing them, she keeps watching. The bacon transforms. It morphs from one kind of thing, a thick satin ribbon, to another thing, a strip of leather, to another thing altogether: something black and almost glassy. Obsidian perhaps. Her kitchen fills with the smell of scorched pork. The sensitive smoke alarm beeps. Her son opens the sliding glass door to the deck, shouts “Mom! What are you doing, Mom?” But though he addresses the woman, she is elsewhere, far beyond his grasp.

***

Kim Magowan lives in San Francisco and teaches in the Department of Literatures and Languages at Mills College. Her short story collection Undoing (2018) won the 2017 Moon City Press Fiction Award. Her novel The Light Source (2019) was published by 7.13 Books. Her fiction has been published in Booth, Craft Literary, The Gettysburg Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, and many other journals. Her stories have been selected for Best Small Fictions and Wigleaf’s Top 50. She is the Editor-in-Chief and Fiction Editor of Pithead Chapel. www.kimmagowan.com

It’s usually the little death of a temporary kind of beauty, that becomes the reason for the things that go on to fully break. 

But neither one of them had grown into an ugliness over the years. 

There was just the sweetness of age touching them in the slightest way. Like, her slightly-melting cheek. Like, his small wrinkled forehead. 

Subtleties so soft they never noticed them of themselves or of each other.

In their marriage, her belly had always snapped back after the babies she birthed, and his teeth remained white against dark-roasted coffee days. 

___

The women at her office always teased her about it, about them.

Oh, you and John are so happy, just so happy.

And another coworker, Just so fucking happy! Doesn’t it scare you to be happy all the time like that?

Isn’t there something? Another asked.

Shouldn’t there be something? Another added.

And oh, honey…there’s always something. Another purred.

____

            It happened so fast, so immediately, the way she pulled herself into the sameness of others around her, because maybe it was the relationships tainted with a touch of badness that went on to outlive the others. 

John had thought that she was silly, when she asked him to cheat on her, just once, and with someone not as pretty. ‘When she told him to waste money meant for paying bills on scratch-off tickets, and impossible Powerball lotteries. ‘When, every night, at dinner, she would pour him one, two, three glasses of wine to possibly trigger addictions deeply buried inside. 

“This is crazy,” he said gently to her, he never yelled. “This is insane,” he never said she, only it, only the things that she was asking of him.

“I will crack this perfect thing,” she yelled at him with hopes of sparking a dormant anger. “I will hurt us just a little to make this more believable, to make this much more like the sameness of others before us, because this is how we save us, John. This is how this marriage can live on,” she said. “I am just the drive that you do on autopilot, John. So, good, so safe, you don’t even go on to appreciate it because of just how safe it always is.”

He was listening, not ignoring, not looking away.

“I don’t want to die in this drive. I just want us to get a little scratched up,” she pleaded. “I love this love the most. Why don’t you love this love the most like I do?” 

He started to say, still not yelling, staying instead of walking away, “Because, I love our love the most.”

____

            On the evening of their anniversary, she sat in the soft light of the restaurant’s candles, golden gleams bounced against her caramel curls, which glowed along with the honeyed hues of the present’s bow—a gift from her that he was now opening. He pulled away at both ends which fell apart with a muted snap.

In the months before, she had let it all go quiet, had let it all just be as it once had been.

So, when he opened the gift fully, where a beautiful watch from some time long ago waited, he looked at the engraved initials, but one of them was awry. He tried to put it over his wrist, but it would not fit. And she watched him struggle, struggle in all that soft, golden light, struggle in the surroundings of others who had watched from the beginning, too.

As a tear slipped down, the first one he’d ever given to her for the reasons that were right, he said— “You are a terrible darling,” he cried. “You are the worst darling that there could ever be.”

***

Exodus Oktavia Brownlow is a Blackhawk, Mississippi native whose writing aesthetic includes purposeful horror, character-driven fiction, and nonfiction writing that aims to create a healthier world for us all. She is a graduate of Mississippi Valley State University with a B.A in English, and Mississippi University for Women with a MFA in Creative Writing. Exodus is published, or has forthcoming work, with Electric-Literature, Barren Magazine, Booth, Fractured Lit, Hobart Pulp, Jellyfish Review, TriQuaterly, Chicken Soup for The Soul, and more. Exodus has a healthy adoration for the color green.

It was Juanita’s job to check each plate for a single strand of hair or, god forbid, a dead fly before we stacked them three deep on trays and carried them on our shoulders up a steep flight of stairs. Once she dropped a cigarette ash on a slab of prime rib and swiped it with a towel until you couldn’t tell what was meat and not. Had we done that, she would have given us what-for, made us stay late to scrub down the inside of the walk-in cooler. Which was fine with us. We’d sneak a six-pack in there and a bottle of vodka that we’d pass back and forth. We’d help ourselves to handfuls of fresh shrimp from a plastic can and call it dinner. We’d leave that cooler gleaming, leave it drunk, stopping long enough to shuck our shoes before heading out to dance. Eight hours on our feet and all we wanted was to dance.

***

Sarah Freligh is the author of four books, including Sad Math, winner of the 2014 Moon City Press Poetry Prize and the 2015 Whirling Prize from the University of Indianapolis, and We, published by Harbor Editions in early 2021. Recent work has appeared in the Cincinnati Review miCRo series, SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Fractured Lit, and in the anthologies New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (Norton 2018) and Best Microfiction (2019-21). Among her awards are a 2009 poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a grant from the New York State Council for the Arts.

The men here used to grow on trees. Gentleman tree-dwellers in tweed suits and newsboy caps, perched upon the bone-white arms of giant sycamores, supping on squirrels and birds, wheedling catfish from the river when the water ran high.  These were not unlearned men and could be heard reciting Milton from the highest limbs, performing Hamlet beneath a Hunter’s Moon.  Occasionally, a townswoman would judder the branches, shake a tree man loose. But once they were felled, the men never stayed in place again. Without roots, they wagon-wheeled across the countryside like tumbling leaves, like seeds scattered in the wind. 

***

Audra Kerr Brown lives at the end of a dirt road in Iowa. Her fiction has appeared in the Best Small Fictions, Wigleaf’s Top 50 (Very) Short Fictions list, X-R-A-Y, People Holding, Outlook Springs, and more. She is a reader at New Flash Fiction Review.

When she takes off her shoes and steps into the Dojo; when she sheds her dress, the soft shell peels off her skin; when she winds a long, white band around her breasts before slipping into the Keikogi, its wide sleeves cut at her elbows; when she pulls the Hakama up her legs, tying the night-blue belt into a butterfly, tucking the wings just under her waist; when her hands reach into the Kote, the wrinkled leather cool to the touch; when she straps the Do in front of her torso, the hard and comfortable armor hugs her body like a lover; when she puts her head inside the Men, hiding her face behind the metal cage; when she wraps her gloved hands around the Shinai, the length of the sword extends before her; when she takes her stance, right foot forward, left heel lifted, the hem of her Hakama swishing on the springwood floor; she finally feels in Power. She could be Anybody — she could be Born Here, she could be a Man, she could be White, and people would be in her Mercy, for once. 

***

Yunya Yang was born and raised in Central China and moved to the US when she was eighteen. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in Heavy Feather Review, Brilliant Flash Fiction, The Los Angeles Review, among others. She lives in Chicago with her husband Chris and cat Ichiro. Find her at www.yunyayang.com and on Twitter @YangYunya.

We know the rules. When you’re a girl at a picnic lunch, it’s your job to stand, picnic basket in hand, feet aching, until a boy picks you. Remember: you can’t choose the boy; he chooses you. One by one, our friends are auctioned off. Crinkled dollar bills slide from the palms of grubby boys, money attached in envelopes and safety pinned to their back jean pockets by their mothers.

Before we left, we swiped our mothers’ lipstick. This made us feel grown up, like the older girls at school who were always puckering their lips in front of bathroom mirrors, then swinging their ponytails to hide the hickeys on their necks. Now we just feel like little girls. The lipstick is waxy, caked on our lips.

We try not to think about how the last girl chosen always has the plainest face or the worst food, the kind that tastes like a meal served in a nursing home. If our fathers were here, they’d try to make us feel better by saying that we are like samurai warriors, the last ones remaining in a fight. But they are not here, so we stand, eyes glimmering, teeth bared.

The boy who chooses us hands over a jangle of coins. He doesn’t stop to admire our mothers’ handiwork: the carefully folded napkins, the mouthwatering ham sandwiches with the crusts cut off, the thermos of pomegranate juice, the pomegranate carefully plucked from the tree in the backyard then juiced, staining our mothers’ hands mauve. Our stomachs growl as the boy wolfs down another sandwich. We wonder if this is why our mothers sometimes clatter the silverware drawer shut after dinner, complaining that no one ever appreciates them. The boy slurps down the juice and twists his mouth at the taste before ripping the saran wrap off the sandwich. When he softly kisses one of us on the cheek, she slaps him the same way women with sharp eyebrows and shoulders pads in old movies do. Then, she rubs a finger across reddened lips as if she’s trying to hold back a smile. He tears off a chunk of the sandwich and swallows. Hands brush crumbs off his pants. One final bite of the sandwich, and he’s gone, just a streak of boy running across the grass.

***

Candace Hartsuyker has an M.F.A in Creative Writing from McNeese State University and reads for PANK. She has been published in Cotton Xenomorph, Heavy Feather Review, The Hunger and elsewhere. 

They announce it during an emergency broadcast – we can embrace once more.

I meet you outside the library where we first met. Your clothes are too big. You tell me a beard makes me look older. We do the pedestrian shuffle – step left then right, then left then right, then apologise awkwardly. Our arms waver, broken puppets, reaching and missing each other. The construct of a hug, so easily forgotten.

We hug. A boa constrictor hold. Arms so tight to bruise our backs. Tight and intertwined, an entanglement puzzle. Hours pass, unable to let go, unwilling to risk a future separation. Around us, the post-new world moves on. Birds make nests in our hair. People throw objects at us from passing cars. A billboard poster fading behind us. A performance art review in the local newspaper.

The first of many others join us. Seeking warmth after so long indoors – reaching arms around us, adding to our mass. Strangers stick to our bodies. New best friends. Hundreds of them, blocking the road, interlinking arms and bodies. Our structure becomes unstable, rocking as more people join us. Motion becomes momentum. We stumble down roads. Trample across rivers. People in our path absorbed. Traffic bouncing off our perimeter. Fields churned and pylons toppled. A new force of nature.

Over a thousand people, growing exponentially to a million. Our form eclipsing the low sun at dusk. People losing their grip, trampled underfoot. Missing persons leaflets pasted onto backs. People circulating food deliveries. Factions emerging. Social classes spreading from our centre. Rumours from the perimeter – we are now many millions, we have crossed the oceans, we are visible from space, we are impacting the rotation of the planet.

You pull me tighter into our nucleus. Our epicentre under the strain of the oceans. Bodies compressed in the squeeze – mixing atoms, skin eroding, bones interlocking. Our stampede a new species, an organism sharing limbs and memories. A new name in Latin. A future fossil perplexing experts, millions of years from now. We erode ourselves, lifting our feet, carried by the infinite embrace. Hovering across the surface of the earth, invisible and fading, like the ghosts we once were.

***

Paul is from Sheffield, UK. His stories have appeared in Okay Donkey, Spelk Fiction, and was recently on the Best British & Irish Flash Fiction list for 2019-2020.

This is not a story. It is a piece of fruit. Pluck the paragraph, hold its weight in your palm. Rub it against your cheek, let it linger under your nostrils as you inhale. Inhale with your eyes closed. Inhale. It can be any fruit that you wish. It is not a strawberry from your grandfather’s garden, half-eaten by birds. It is not an apple you set down in your child’s lunch box, its tap echoing in the tunnel of your ears these twenty-something years. It is not the mango you watched your soon to be lover slurp from the peel and hold in her mouth like two tongues. It is not the hairy kiwi. It is a new fruit, the likes of which you have never seen before. Let your gaze be the knife. Slice the paragraph into sections. Fan them out across a plate. You know which plate. Perhaps the sentences are juicy. Possibly they are dried out, having lost all sweetness through evaporation. Select one sentence and slip it in your mouth, bring your teeth down into it, the words squirt up against the roof of your mouth, or they seep into the soft place under your tongue, or they do nothing, just grave there pulpy and savorless. Choose one particular flavor, one specific word. It can be any flavor you choose. It tastes like the last time your mother said goodbye, with a wave of honeysuckle, and the subtlest itch of pepper. If your eyes have closed, open them, bring your attention to the seeds, the letters of the fruit, the “r’s” and the “b’s,” the “x’s” and the “e’s” pinch them from the fruit flesh, or scoop them clean, or shake them free, this is your fruit after all. Because this is your fruit after all, do whatever you wish with the letters. Put them in the trash, release them into the yard, throw them out of your moving car, but save one. Save one. Take the letter. Maybe it is a “t’, or it could be a “q.” Set it in a pot and cover it in soil. Put it on your windowsill or put it on the nightstand. Put it wherever light shines for you. Water it however you wish. It might sprout. It might grow. It might lie dormant for seven years, and then one day, a shoot of green! It might already be dead for you. Any outcome is okay. Any outcome is perfectly fine. You are okay. You are fine. You are perfect. If your hands are sticky, let them be sticky. This is not a piece of fruit. This is a story.

***

Caroljean Gavin’s work has appeared in places such as Pithead Chapel, Tiny Molecules, Barrelhouse and Bending Genres. She’s the editor of What I Thought of Ain’t Funny, an anthology of short fiction based on the jokes of Mitch Hedberg out from Malarkey Books. She lives in North Carolina with her two rambunctious sons, one goofy husband, and her one-eyed shih tzu named Moxie.

It wasn’t long before a hole opened up and swallowed several cars on Michigan Ave. Not a sinkhole or some road collapse. Just a hole. Like Wile E. Coyote slapped one of those ACME dots into a canyon wall that the roadrunner sped through. The cars just disappeared, devoured. A wedding photographer in Millennium Park captured her clients kissing when the hole appeared beyond them. She sold the photo for thousands. 

And my grandparents and two cousins were in one of the cars. They were on their way home from one of those dinners the whole extended family knew about. An ultimatum dinner. A “What I deserve” and “Who will look after the kids?” dinner. A whole SUV just down, down, and gone. Religious sects and cults contacted my family. Alien enthusiasts emailed me. When something so inexplicable happens, it sets a fire in the chest and head like a cold, and people need to find out why, they have to know. I had nothing to give them. There was nothing to give. The government dropped lights down the hole without finding a bottom. They sent people to drill in from the sides, underneath Michigan Avenue, and they only found rock and cement; what was supposed to be there, but on the surface there was still the goddamn hole. 

More opened up all over the world, too, like the planet had become Swiss cheese. One swallowed a building that manufactured infant formula. Another one engulfed a Sequoia that was over 1,104 years old.  A slew of people willingly jumped into the holes, bypassing the security and barricades. One man wore wings strapped to his back. They called him The Angel. The public ate that shit up. The last thing people saw where the wings before the darkness ate him, too.

And I? What did I do? I couldn’t stop thinking of words I read in some book or another about being a person who spins on their own axis. Someone who could walk into darkness and not give a fuck where the lights are. I needed a nightlight growing up and God help me, I still have one now. A little lightbulb behind a single stain-glass shape of Saturn, burnt yellow and orange and white. I used to stare at it from across my bedroom. I knew Saturn is all gas but still, I imagined life there. Maybe that’s where my grandparents were, I thought, attending the funeral we planned for them. We laid empty caskets in holes in the ground, holes with bottoms, holes with an exact depth that we could measure, check, and measure again.

What a way, way down, to fall.

I’d like to think maybe they’re waiting for more of us to follow into it, be transported. Trust us, follow us, they might be yelling from the void. A few people have jumped in the hole with that very thought—to follow. There are rumors, they say, that items are beginning to appear at the lip of the holes. A wheel. A shoe. A feather. When I read in a chatroom of conspiracy theorists that a small lightbulb had allegedly been found by the hold in Chicago, I nearly wept for joy. Because maybe the darkness could give back after taking. Maybe it was confirming the lingering question. An affirmation. Follow us, see? We’ll leave breadcrumbs. We’ll leave footprints. See there, there, and there: a still-burning cigarette. A doll in mint condition. A watch. A necklace. And there, see? A light. There, a possibility. 

***

Lyndsie Manusos’ writing has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly’s 70th issue, as well as in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Hobart, and other publications.