Day 1: We drive in silence to the place where they will aim radiation at the place where my ovaries used to be. The incision has healed but I feel concave. I don’t know how to mold myself to this loss. We hold hands. I look out the window at the leafless trees. 

Day 6: The drive is becoming a habit. We talk about the roof, which has developed a leak. We talk about the neighbors, who may or may not be splitting up. We talk about the cat, who we haven’t seen for days. We hold hands. Some of the trees have that red, fuzzy look they get right before the leaves pop out.

Day 14: The drive is becoming a burden—45 minutes each way for a 2-minute treatment where I lay under the machine like a sacrifice. I have nightmares about the machine. I have nightmares about something growing inside me. I have nightmares. We talk more about the neighbors, bless them and their craziness, they save us from a silent ride. We don’t hold hands. The trees are green now, except for the one right next to the road, the one that was probably struck by lightning. It has a gaping hollow so big I could hide myself inside. It must be dead, I think. What could survive that injury?

Day 21: We argue on the way to the place. He wants to make plans for summer, maybe near the ocean, he says, but laying half-dressed under the sun reminds me of the machine. I crave shade and soft clothing. The hollowed-out tree is still naked. He doesn’t speak at all on the ride back, until he does. That tree is a hazard, he says. It’s dead. They should chop it down. 

Day 25: I drive myself to the place; he says it’s too much for him. Squinting at the wounded tree, I see a red haze around the tips of the branches. On the way back I pull over and walk up to her, because I know the tree is a her, and rub my hands over her bark and look inside where she is empty. I climb in. The great bulk of her drowns out the noise of the traffic. There is a slow breathing, but is it her or me? Maybe it’s both of us. I stay a long time, nestled inside her, until I finally climb out of the blasted place and drive home. 

***

Beth Moulton earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Rosemont College, in Rosemont, PA, where she was fiction editor for the Rathalla Review. Her work has appeared in Affinity CoLab, The Drabble, Milk Candy Review, and other journals. She lives near Valley Forge, PA with her cats, Lucy and Ethel.

The caretaker of St. Mary’s church likes sweeping up the confetti most. He collects the colourful piles and imagines the travels of the missing pieces, how they end up around the world and nestle under lapels and in shallow pockets for years until they are brought back to life at another wedding.

He also likes to stand in front of the stained glass, closing his eyes, trying to guess what colour his face is bathed in, testing if it feels different in sea blue, or pasture green, or heaven white-gold.

When no one is looking, he scoops out a Princess Diana cupful of holy water from the baptismal font. And he pours a thumbful over the soil of the lichen-marked graves that are too old to have visitors.

He hopes someone will do the same for him one day, knowing his time as caretaker is nearly over.

The caretaker sits in the church’s quiet that is like no other. In the musky, partitioned box, he confesses to the silence the things he probably shouldn’t do with confetti, holy water, and stained glass. And as the last of it tumbles from his lips, he feels at peace.

When he leaves the church for the final time as its caretaker, he thanks it for taking care of him all those days, and he hopes he gave as much as he took from doing his work. He returns each year to pay his respects and visits for the last time a decade later in a modest pine casket. And when the funeral has finished, when the church and its grounds return to the peaceful quiet he always loved, the breeze catches a piece of confetti and sweeps it past his wreath-marked grave to a part of the cemetery only a caretaker visits.

***

L. P. Melling currently writes from the East of England after academia and a legal career took him around the UK. His fiction has appeared in such places as Typehouse, ARTPOST, Frozen Wavelets, and is forthcoming elsewhere. When not writing, he works in London for a legal charity that advises and supports victims of crime. 

This girl writes with glitter pens, draws little glitter hearts next to her name, adds XOXO. Doesn’t pick at her food and ask to be excused. Sings along to the radio, drums her fingers on the dashboard, catches her mother’s smile and blows her a kiss. Wears her sleeves pulled down to her fingertips, doesn’t look in the mirror when she undresses at night. Says “I don’t know what I was thinking” when her mother stares at her too long. Smiles at her teachers when tests are handed back, raises her hand when questions are asked. Draws little daggers in her notebook. Smiles smiles smiles. Thrashes at night, grinds her teeth, digs her nails into her stomach, her thighs, her upper arms, screams in her dreams. This girl dances when she’s opened. Spins until the lid is closed and she’s folded back into the beautiful dark.

***

L Mari Harris’s most recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in matchbook, Ponder Review, (mac)ro(mic), CRAFT, Flash Frog, among others. She works in the tech industry and lives in the Ozarks. Follow her on Twitter @LMariHarris and read more of her work at www.lmariharris.wordpress.com.

Now: an astronaut awakens according to London time. She has aligned her clock to those of her earthbound colleagues, even though she hurtles through space, even though the sun rises and sets in a burning blur, scarring the endless black sixteen times a day.

Then: the astronaut was just a daughter, just a girl. Watching the hospital clock tick, watching her father fade into pallor and wax. Inhaling antiseptic as he exhaled life. She scavenged the limp lines of his hands and tried to lay them over her own, like fresh cobwebs, like tattered gloves.

Now: the astronaut knows that the faster one moves in space, the slower they move in time. Each day heaves by as if through plasma and she wonders, how many seconds, minutes, has she been gifted? How many can she give away?

***

Stella Lei is a teen writer from Pennsylvania whose work is published or forthcoming in Gone Lawn, Whale Road Review, Kissing Dynamite, and elsewhere. She is an Editor in Chief for The Augment Review, she has two cats, and she tweets @stellalei04.

Nebraska in October. Autumn winds are the collective breath of a thousand withering corn fields. I think of home, I think of my older sister, her brown lossless eyes, her hair, the color of dried cornstalks, straight as a carpenter’s level. I’m ten and she’s sending me to go find her fingers, sliced straight off by the mower blade of the smallest of our John Deere tractors. She’s walking toward our farmhouse at her usual everyday pace, like she’s going out for ice cream or to get the mail. I need ice, she says. Go find my fingers. Hurry, she says. I run to the tractor. I look. I look everywhere. I get down on my hands and knees. The grass is thick and bloody. My hands and forearms are bloody too. I climb on the tractor, try to start it, try to move it, but I don’t know how. I want to scream, I want to disappear, but mostly I just want to cry. She’s my sister. My only sister. She holds her hand out to me. It’s ok. We have to go now, she says. And all these years later, when I visit the old farm, I still hunt for Beth’s fingers, along the edge of the field, left out there somewhere, alone, like a shriveled pair of cornstalks missed in the harvest.

***

Todd Clay Stuart is an emerging Midwestern writer. He studied creative writing at the University of Iowa. Recent work of his appears in New World Writing and Flash Fiction Magazine. He lives with his wife, daughter, and two loyal but increasingly untrustworthy pets. Find him on Twitter @toddclaystuart and at http://toddclaystuart.com.

The Balloon Retriever builds a Balloon Girl in secret. During her lunch breaks, she works in a shed at the edge of the Balloon Park, where there’s a breeze and the mild smell of latex. Today she uses leftover balloons from the Jungle Cats exhibit to make a pair of Mary Janes.

The Park frowns upon balloon people because they tend to look more like clowns. Real people don’t enjoy seeing themselves that way, freakish and monster-like. They want to seem stronger, or kinder, or more attractive than they are. But if the Balloon Girl resembles a real one, the Head Curators might change their minds. They might bring the Balloon Retriever on for an exhibit or two. Perhaps they would stop calling her the Balloon Retriever.

            When the town began issuing fines for every balloon that escaped the park, the Balloon Retriever became a fulltime employee and was given a red pickup with balloon animal decals on the sides. It’s the first fulltime job she’s had since getting kicked out of high school for being pregnant, even though it didn’t stick. That was four years ago. Her official role is Groundskeeper, but everyone knows her as the Balloon Retriever. She doesn’t care for the nickname. It’s not as if she’s one of those alpine mountain rescuers who digs survivors out of the snow after an avalanche. Most of the time, a balloon ends up in a tree on the park grounds.

Among the permanent exhibits, there’s the Rose Garden, Jungle Cats, Antarctic Life, and Barn Animals. The newest exhibit is a fairytale-style Candy Cottage. Guests used to be able to walk through it, until one too many kids tried to eat a balloon gumdrop off the doorframe. Now the house sits empty.

The Balloon Retriever knows a thing or two about emptiness. She doesn’t plan to work at the Balloon Park forever, cleaning up after everyone else. She dreams of creating something in this life, of making her own messes.

With her shoes on, the Balloon Girl is complete. The Balloon Retriever brings her outside in the sunlight, tying one foot to the door handle for safe measure. In the wind, it looks like the girl is twirling herself around in her blue dress.

Before her next shift, the Balloon Retriever will seat the girl atop the slide next to the Candy Cottage, looking out over the park like the Balloon Retriever from her ladder.

***

Using her extendable grabber, the Balloon Retriever plucks a runaway penguin from the branches of a red oak. Following protocol, she makes small punctures just above the knots and releases the air slowly, so as not to startle the park guests.

The Head Curators were not pleased with her stunt. That was the word they used when they found the Balloon Girl. They were, however, impressed with the Balloon Girl’s likeness and granted her a trial period. If a week goes by without a single negative comment from a guest, they said, the Balloon Girl can stay, and they could discuss adding a sister. Every day this week, the Balloon Retriever has eaten her lunch on the bench across from the Candy Cottage, listening for a child’s squeal of delight at the sight of the Balloon Girl.

While she waits for the penguin to deflate, her radio beeps. A little boy tried to climb up the slide, causing the Balloon Girl to come untethered. She’s now gliding over the park toward the highway.

The Balloon Retriever cuts through the field in her pickup and barrels out the park entrance to try to head off the Balloon Girl. Swerving into the left lane, she floors it down the highway.

She is entranced by her airborne creation. She has never seen a balloon drift so impossibly far. The Balloon Girl will not survive the climb, she knows this. When the Balloon Girl gains enough altitude, the helium will expand until the pressure is so great, she pops. The prospect of losing her pains the Balloon Retriever, like watching a part of herself float away.

Yet in her final moments, the Balloon Girl will be the only balloon child to have reached such heights. A real child couldn’t do what her Balloon Girl can. A real child didn’t bring the Balloon Retriever such joy.

The Balloon Retriever collects herself and presses on. Eyes on the sky and grabber at the ready, she will recover the Balloon Girl, wherever she lands.

***

Alexandra M. Matthews is a teacher and writer living in the Hudson Valley. Her flash fiction appears in Jellyfish Review, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Barren Magazine, Atlas and Alice, and Fractured Lit.

Like Judy in the movie, you are a fallen woman. At home, men follow you in their cars. They form and change you. They see themselves as rescuers. When the rescue attempts fail you are left for the next one to dress and paint you.

On Third Street, in front of Doña Esther’s, you exit the car, pulling the back of your skirt away from sweaty flesh. Discarded pandemic masks are banked against the doors of the businesses, all closed.

An old man blocks the door of Doña Esther’s. He is stooped and skinny. He wears a battered t-shirt that reads “The First African American President of the United States.” Once he and you shared a feeling: excitement that Barak Obama had been elected president. President of the United States. But he is not the president now. He will not be the president again. The man regards your damp dress, your white go-go boots.

“What do you think you’re doing?” There is no seduction in this question. But there is no disapproval, either.

“I’m here for … the banquet. The one with the Halloween puppets.”  Afterward, you usually visit the mission to pay your respects to the Amah Mutsun buried there. Then you cool off and catch your breath in the red velvet sanctuary, under the gazes of wooden saints.

Jimmy Stewart has vertigo because of his guilty conscience. A policeman died because of him. He throws himself into the annihilation of height. A dreamed grave. The spiral hairdo of a woman whose personality he erases. A woman who startles at the sight of a nun, and plummets to her death.

The Vertigo Effect is achieved by zooming in fast, while pulling the camera back at the same time. You also get this feeling when you’re old, when looking up can throw you off kilter. Or when you observe an old man resting his hand on his hip-sheathed knife. A leather sheath, stamped with poppies. Like those barrettes and hard purses you used to see in the seventies.

The door to Doña Esther’s is locked. Earlier, you called. You chalked the unanswered phone to a busy lunch hour, and set off. Inside, you see the arched interior doorways. Long shadows streak the dining room’s red walls. You register the smell of something burning. Something that isn’t food.

“What do you want?” you ask him.

“My teeth. My work. My family,” he answers. “This restaurant was supposed to be a polling place.” This is a man who has felt pride. Who once stood tall, with a strong and lively skeleton inside him. Worked. Sired children. Are they safe now, these children?

Behind the man are the three chickens. They scratch and murmur. Far below, your boots are dulled with dust. The man is not as old as you first thought. He has no fingernails, you notice, zooming out and zooming in. He smells of sweat and lilac. His t-shirt is stained with a red sauce.

From inside Doña Esther’s comes the sound of a ringing phone. The bright echo of those rings hangs in the hot air. You and the old man stand there on the turning earth, not far from the San Andreas Fault. All around the two of you, the sky pulses purple.

***

Patricia Q. Bidar is a native of San Pedro, California with family roots in New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona. Her stories have appeared in Wigleaf, The Pinch, SmokeLong Quarterly, Sou’wester, Little Patuxent Review, and Pithead Chapel, among other places. Apart from fiction, Patricia ghostwrites for progressive nonprofit organizations. She lives with her DJ husband and unusual dog in the San Francisco Bay Area and tweets at @patriciabidar. Visit Patricia at www.patriciaqbidar.com.

Like most things now, it began as a meme.

Ashleigh Weingarten (@ashashbaby) posted a photo of herself biting a cheat-day cheeseburger and branded it with the caption Getting Ready for Hibernation.

In that way particular to memes and saints (right person, right place, right time, right witness) Ashleigh’s joke caught fire online and the format began spreading around the internet like rumor. People started posting larger and larger meals—nachos and steaks and great tureens of paella—and labeling them with hashtags like HibernationHereWeCome! Mukbang stars took up the challenge with gusto, calling out their friends and trying to top each other back and forth. A sorority in California filled the vases in their common room with foil-wrapped bouquets of burritos, while a broker’s office in Tokyo outlined an entire parking lot with baskets of steaming dumplings.

For hibernation we all laughed! and then suddenly realized we were serious.

The food, after all, was all being eaten. The jokes, after posting, were consumed. Veggie stir fries, and avocado bowls and plate after plate of full English breakfasts were being scarfed down continuously all around the world. Nuns and rabbis and frat boys doing service hours met up in parks to cook barrels full of soup, serving whole warm vats to the needy along with claymore-sized baguettes. Neighborhoods swelled and homes crisscrossed as families began inviting each other for potluck feasting every night.

If bears did it, if trees did it, if we—before the building of cities, before the coming of Henry Ford—had moved more with the seasons, had slept when it got dark, then why not now?

At what point, we asked ourselves, had we decided this was a bad idea? 

We became obsessed with all things fatty and deliciously protein-packed, with building the store of calories we’d take with us into the dark. Weight-loss content became entirely the opposite: Hollywood-gorgeous men and women telling their followers how to pack on the pounds.

When the first snow fell, we sighed to each other happily, knowing it was time. It felt good to finally be doing this, to give into the pull of the earth and nature, to reject caffeine and the drive to produce, to finally lay down for a while and at long last take a rest.  

The 1% wasn’t especially happy. Gone was their work force, off to bed for the next five months. They yelled about the economy, the stock market, Atlas Shrugged. We hung signs on the factories and slapped each other warmly on the back. We left them out there, yelling, the snow piling, the sky growing black.

We pulled the blinds and burrowed in, put on podcasts and YouTube videos, 4000 hours of rain sounds. We all breathed out together, warm and safe, some already snoring.  

We listened to the creaking of the universe.

We slept.

We dreamed of spring.

***

Derek Heckman was born in Peoria, Illinois, and holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Montana. His work has been published in Embark Journal, Ellipsis Zine, The Collapsar, and Wigleaf, and was also featured in the anthology “Teacher Voice” from Malarkey Books. He currently lives in Boston, Massachusetts, and you can find him on Twitter as @herekdeckman.

The drain gurgled. The husband kept telling her the drain did not gurgle. The drain was fine, he said. Must be her ears. She lifted up the wire strainer and they stared into the pipe together. It’s not gurgling! the husband said. All day she would hear it. He was sure it was fine, though. Pretty soon the husband told her there wasn’t running water, the sink didn’t exist, there wasn’t even a house. They lived in a palace! And it was filled with sunlight and love and clean corners. Keep telling me, she said. I don’t see it. That’s because her eyesight was failing, he explained. 

At the end of this story is a woman with no eyes, no mouth, no nose, no fingers or toes. And she lives on the moon. The end.

***

Ashley Hutson’s writing has appeared in Granta, Electric Literature, Wigleaf, Fanzine, and other places. Her debut novel is forthcoming from W.W. Norton. She lives in Sharpsburg, Maryland.

One.

Plato was not terribly surprised when the time traveler arrived. There was something otherworldly and strange about the mountaintop where the time traveler appeared. Plato had always known something would happen there. Now he knew what it was.

#

Two.

Plato was not terribly surprised when the time traveler arrived. He knew that they would ask him on an adventure. He knew he would go on the adventure and it would be a disaster, so disastrous that the time traveler would travel back further, to last year, and warn him to say no to the adventure. Beg him, plead with him, cajole him to please, please say no. Their eyes were wild as they explained. He knew they had seen terrible things. He knew the adventure would bring him to his end. But he also knew that he had to say yes, because if he said no, the time traveler would not have come to warn him.

#

Three.

Plato was not terribly surprised when the time traveler arrived. At the time, Plato was angry at his philosophy teacher, Socrates, who is credited with the conceptualization of irony. Plato had lost track of time when the time traveler appeared, which he would have considered ironic were he speaking to Socrates. As it was, when the time traveler invited him on an adventure, he told them yes without hesitation.

#

Four.

Plato was not terribly surprised when the time traveler arrived. He had seen this before, as a boy. He had been waiting.

#

Five.

Plato was not terribly surprised when the time traveler arrived. Perhaps he should have been. He’d never considered the possibility of time travel before, but as his great teacher Socrates was fond of saying, he knew that he knew nothing. Sometimes Plato repeated this—I know that I know nothing—with a little rhythm, like a song that he sang to himself. He knew nothing, and therefore he knew that time travel was just as possible as anything else. “Welcome,” he told the time traveler.

#

Six.

Plato was not terribly surprised when the time traveler arrived. One is rarely surprised when one is living backward in time.

#

Seven.

Plato was not terribly surprised when the time traveler arrived.

“Socrates,” he called. “He is back.”

“Which one?” Socrates asked.

Plato shrugged. The time travelers all looked the same to him.

#

Eight.

Plato was not terribly surprised when the time traveler arrived. Time, he concluded, was a loop. No sooner did he return home from adventures through time than the time traveler arrived again. They never remembered him. They never remembered their adventures. It was always the first time for the time traveler. Plato thought that it ought to be the other way around, but he knew that he knew nothing.

#

Nine.

Plato was not terribly surprised when the time traveler arrived. He should have been surprised. It was a very surprising thing. But he felt no jolt of surprise. He merely saw the time traveler and thought, ahh. The time traveler has arrived.

#

Ten.

Plato was not terribly surprised when the time traveler arrived. He had been waiting. He had been waiting, and hoping.

“You came back,” he said to the time traveler.

“I have never been here before,” the time traveler assured him.

“I see,” Plato replied. “But you will. In my past, and your future, you will come and ask me to travel through time with you. I will say no. But I will regret it until you come and ask me again, in your past and my future.”

“You mean our now?” the time traveler asked.

“Yes,” Plato answered.

***

Annika Barranti Klein is a writer in Los Angeles and a contributing editor at Book Riot. Her fiction can be found in Craft Literary and Hobart After Dark, and is forthcoming in Asimov’s. She is currently knitting socks instead of working on her novel.