The world is filled with so many people we will never know; everyone on this ship, for example.  See the family in matching T-shirts and sun-visors, the visors topped with cat’s ears.  Or the same child who keeps running the length of mezzanine at full speed, his clothes soaking wet from some source we cannot name.  The pool, most likely, although the pool is crowded with children riding the backs of parents, the parents affixed to straws noisily asked to convey the last of margaritas, mojitos, and Mai Tais to grateful mouths.  Attendants in neckerchiefs roll trash cans in from wherever and out to wherever.  Walking to obtain yet another self-serve ice cream cone, we bump into eleven new strangers, our only bond our habit of saying “sorry” at the same time.  Why do we want another ice cream cone?

            Surely this cruise was someone’s idea.  Someone—us, most likely—had to pay for all of this.  Which is probably how everyone else got here, too.  Pricey, we figure.  It had to be, otherwise how would we get the opportunity to watch so many “Broadway-quality” shows with so many agreeable people we’ve never known?  This one is top-shelf all the way, what with its seamless blend of acrobatics, rollerblading, and Sondheim tunes.  We’re either in awe or a little bored or maybe both; it’s hard to say with our ears ringing from the applause of strangers.  We’d add ours to the din, but our hands seem to be occupied by ice cream cones.  When did we get those?

            We tour the ship, hoping, we suppose, that we’ll turn the next corner and see someone we recognize.  Someone to return the world to the one we know.  But the world we know seems to have been commandeered by the world of strangers, who pass us by at an alarming rate.  The teenager in the neon top that proclaims MONOGAMY ROCKS!  The octogenarian in a wheelchair festooned with orange flags.  Not three, not four, but five adults cheerlessly dressed as Santa Claus, for reasons we’ll never know.  A white dog, apparently ownerless, fervently licking a fallen ice cream cone from the shuffleboard court.

            We ascend stairwells teeming with passengers headed the opposite way. 

            “Sorry!” we say.

            “Sorry!” the passengers say.

            We reach the promenade deck, where so many people we do not know stand shoulder to shoulder, staring out across the flat expanse of ocean.  The sun, that old standby, mysteriously hides behind thick clouds that threaten rain.  Should we speak of the weather to the couple next to us, each of them taking selfies?  Should we make small talk?  But, wait, the clouds part.  The darkness fades.  The sun re-emerges and permits us to see something we hadn’t noticed before: another cruise ship, exactly like ours, riding the horizon.  Those familiar funnels, those unmistakable masts.

            “Hello!  Over here!” we shout, and wave along with everyone else at what surely must be people just like us.

***

Anthony Varallo is the author of a novel, The Lines (University of Iowa Press), as well as four short story collections.  New work is out or forthcoming in The New Yorker “Daily Shouts,” One Story, STORY, Chicago Quarterly Review, DIAGRAM, and The Best Small Fictions 2020.

Deep in the belly of the furnace kicking on is the sound of winter. The farmhouse’s breath becomes cold and dry, making her wear two layers of clothes, especially wool socks to skim across the wooden floors, raising enough static electricity to stand every hair on her head on end. She likes to feel the tiny bristles rub against her palms, thinking her cap of white hair will be back by spring, if she survives whatever else might kill her.  She can still amp up her heart rate until she hears her private sea shushing back & forth, like snow.

***

M.J. Iuppa’s fourth poetry collection is This Thirst (Kelsay Books, 2017). For the past 32 years, she has lived on a small farm near the shores of Lake Ontario. Check out her blog: mjiuppa.blogspot.com for her musings on writing, sustainability & life’s stew.

Are careful not to style their own hair, realising chignons and soft waves will cause the bride distress. Instead they cover their heads with silk scarves, each one a subtle cream, while the bride’s is threaded delicately with rose gold, trickled with amethyst stones.

Decorate the church with posies in lilac and pink, make everything traditional, knowing it’s the things she thought she’d never have that matter most. Give her something old/something blue with a shimmering scale snatched from Poseidon’s tail, crushed to midnight powder in a locket at her throat.

Don’t ask why she’s walking down the aisle alone, or mention their own families, the mothers who would hand-stitch their gowns, the fathers who hold them longer every time they see them, cherishing each fragile second as though they’re dandelion-down, knowing any moment they may blow away.

Hold her and tell her she can have the church and the pure white gown, enraged there is no virginal colour-coding for the groom. Tell her it was not her fault, say over and over that she did nothing wrong. This man is good, this time she will be happy. Cry with her when she trembles, tell her she is perfect, that no one has worn white like her.

Make her promise not to cut her hair. It will only grow back fiercer. Instead, they charm the snakes with lullabies, wind them into coils when they grow sleepy, remembering the first morning they found her, how she howled as they hissed, slicing at the snakes with scissors, serpent heads sprinkling the bedsheets, slicing at her arm with blades, wanting to cut away the shame, screaming that they mustn’t look, their eyes would burn, their hearts would turn to stone, but all they saw was pain, all they felt was love for her.

Have known her since she was a little girl, when her hair was saffron curls, when they practiced getting married in the garden, promised eternity to each other in breathless whispers, talking turns to slow-step down the pathway as the other girls threw daisies, squealing as they reached the end, projecting bouquets backwards to begin again, again.

Were the ones to teach her how to dance, giggling as they took her hand, twirling her beneath their outstretched arms, rolling her one step, two step, to the side, pressing their shoulders over her protectively, flinging her between them in dizzy pirouettes, catching one hand then another as she whirled awkwardly, then nervously, then gracefully, hair billowing behind, laughing, laughing, as they pulled her close, slowed things to an almost standstill, circling their arms around her as he will do tonight, hips swaying softly, not a wisp of space between them, looking down at her like she is blessed, looking down at her like she is whole.

She’d had a tiny baby. She hadn’t seen it. At least, not that she could remember. She thought there must have been a moment when the baby was leaving her body that she would have looked down and seen the top of a head, maybe a foot, or a lump held up to her in the arms of a doctor or nurse, in that unforgiving overhead light. But she remembered only the room and herself, and even that was in pieces, splinters of a body like close-ups in a movie. Her hand, clenched. The top of her stomach. A ceiling tile with little dots like pairs of eyes that looked like they were blinking.

Nobody had touched the baby. Not directly. Only through layers of gloves and blankets, and even that not very much. They tried to touch the baby as little as possible. She hadn’t touched it at all. The nurse with the cheeks that always looked like they were blushing told her the baby was being taken care of in another room. The baby had to be separated from everything and everyone as it gained strength. She was lucky to be alive. She, and the baby. The baby was also a she, but everyone called it the baby. 

The hospital sent her home, but the baby stayed.

She pretended that she didn’t have a baby at all, tiny or otherwise.

She took cold showers. She ate peanut butter sandwiches, drank chocolate milk, and watched re-runs of Bewitched. Maybe she could be a mother, after all.

She became obsessed with small things. She began cataloging them. Stamps, pennies, violet petals. A miniature porcelain statue of a cat. She found these things all over the house. She had never noticed them before, but now they seemed to jump out at her. She kept a photo album and in the clear, plastic sheets she slipped scraps of trash—movie ticket stub, ripped receipt, half-charred match. She couldn’t bear to throw these things away.

The baby arrived. Or, it was ready for pick-up. That’s what the hospital said on the phone. Or something like that. Of course they weren’t going to deliver it.

When she went with her mother to pick up the baby, nobody had ever held it. She was going to have to touch it. Of course. She stood in the hospital hallway just outside the room where the baby waited. She longed to be home, watching TV. She did not want to touch anything. She did not want anything to touch her. When her mother nudged her towards the door, she flinched.

The nurse lifted a bundle of cloth that most likely had the baby inside it, wrapped like a gift. The cloth held the baby the way she had held the baby inside her, only then it wasn’t a baby but sleight-of-hand. The nurse was passing the cloth to her, the cloth was heading towards her arms that did not know how to hold a baby. Maybe it was so tiny it would slip through her fingers. Maybe it would crumble in her hands, like a clump of dirt. Maybe it would disappear. Maybe the baby was not inside the cloth at all. Maybe the baby was not real. Maybe it was too small to be real. Yes, maybe it was too small.

***

Quinn Forlini has been published in The Greensboro Review, The Vassar Review, and The Journal. She received her MFA from the University of Virginia and teaches creative writing at Ursinus College. 

We are learning to make fire but we aren’t very good at it. It’s not even a Survivor-type fire with the sticks and stones and rubbing things together. The counselor gave us matches, but the wind keeps chugging at us and the matches flare but won’t hang onto a flame. I can see Michael out in the trees, smoking. He has a lighter, but he’s not supposed to. That’s not the assignment. He should get in trouble, but he won’t. He’ll keep standing just far enough away that it would be a nuisance for the counselor to go get him, and the wind snatches away any attempt to call him back. He’s not close enough for me to tell, but it’s safe to assume anything Michael is doing must be at least vaguely illegal. Otherwise, why would he bother? He eats hash brownies, he gives his friends “prison” tattoos with a ballpoint pen and a Swiss army knife, he claims to have fucked his biology teacher at school. He stole three Kit Kats from the 7-Eleven where the bus stopped for gas on the way here. Nobody cares. Even our counselor seems to accept his need to do things that are bad.

Once we make the fire, we are going to have to forage for something to eat. This might be why we’re so bad at making the fire. Fire-making is preferable to foraging. Plus, Michael and his friends ate the Kit Kats so they aren’t hungry. I still try, though. The counselor says if we run out of matches we’ll have to do things the old-fashioned way, which I think might mean we’ll have to die. This might be okay if I also don’t have any friends and I don’t have any food and I don’t have any fire. It’s getting cold.

This trip is just a long weekend. The upside is we get a day off of school, and most of the kids are here so nature might teach them some sense of responsibility, but I don’t have the luxury of saying my parents forced me. They didn’t. I needed something to do other than sit in my room and stare at the things my friends are doing on Instagram that I haven’t been invited to. I take a photo of my little pile of sticks and leaves on my phone. I add a filter, so it looks sort of artsy. I upload it to Instagram, #nature #survival #fire but I close the app before I hit share. In the woods where Michael is I hear laughter, someone falls down.

I had planned go to Australia next summer. I still might, you know. My parents could give it to me as an early graduation gift. I could write my college essay about it. When I was in ninth grade this girl Ruth went to Australia on a youth trip. She talked about it for an entire year. It was all Great Barrier Reef, surfing, and kangaroos. This mate did this and that mate did that. The whole thing was truly sickening, but I envied her. It was like she’d been given a free pass to a whole life. She could say anything she wanted. How would we ever know if it was true?

I strike the last match. I don’t believe in God because the stars don’t seem that cool, even out here in the woods. They’re not as cool as the picture of the Christmas lights Hannah strung up around her room, all glowy with their 1,472 likes. I lean over and take a picture of the saggy tent, making sure I get Michael in the background. This might not be Australia, but when this thing is over I can say I climbed a mountain, I can say I waded across a river with a thirty pound pack that tried to drown me. I can say I met a guy who was a criminal. I can say he let me drink his vodka and he kissed me and called me a fire slut when I asked to borrow his lighter.

But I probably won’t do that. But I will tell them that I learned to make fire, because how will they know the difference?

***

Christina Kapp teaches at the Writers Circle Workshops in New Jersey and her work has appeared in Passages North, Hobart, Forge Literary Magazine, The MacGuffin, PANK, Pithead Chapel and elsewhere. Her fiction has been nominated for Best of the Net awards and a Pushcart Prize. She welcomes you to follow her on Twitter @ChristinaKapp and visit her website: www.christinakapp.com.

She says she once shot a thief, right in the hand, on the beach in Florida.

Where the thief came from, how she caught him, why she had a gun on the beach? Where he stored his stolen treasures, tied to the drawstrings of his shorts or tucked beneath one arm? Where the police were in this scenario, a man spurting blood as he rushed the white-tipped waves? At a certain point, maybe too late, you realize that asking questions only closes the story, and you return to this photo: striped bikini, hand on hip, sand sprawling into the water, smile wide enough it cracks her cheeks, everything gray gray gray—except her lips, painted red, and her eyes, painted blue though brown in truth. Spinning like she’s in a cowboy movie just after the shutter clicks, eyes narrowed against the sun, gun raised in right hand. Pow, pow, pow, clouds of smoke and sand erupting, screams flush with joy—and there’s the story, yes: the one true story, the only one you need her to tell, the one you will tell for her, laughing, when she’s no longer there to tell it herself.

***

Ellen Rhudy’s fiction has appeared in journals including Story, Split Lip, Cream City Review, Okay Donkey, and Pithead Chapel. Her story “A Writer’s Guide to Fairy Tales,” first published by Milk Candy Review, is a Spotlighted Story in Best Small Fictions 2020. She lives in Columbus, where she recently began working toward her MFA at The Ohio State University. You can find her at ellenrhudy.com, or on twitter @EllenRhudy.

We made up our minds to try all the flavors of Slurpees, even the ones that sounded gross: hot blue Margarita, coffee-banana jolt. Life is boring but we’re not, is what we told everybody, flashing our toe rings and our Slurpee-colored hair, and when Todd Paquette dared us to take off our tops we said we would, told him to meet us at the shut-down skate park, and flashed him our painted chests: FUCK, said yours, the U teasingly cradling your nipple; YOU, said mine, our t-shirts held to the sky across the cracked and empty cement bowl, red letters big enough for his watching friends to see. We stayed long enough to see his jaw drop, linked arms, raised middle fingers, ran home with all their too-late slams following us like wind, skanks, lezzies, hos, nothing could catch us, not even the news next morning, Todd with his father’s gun, we heard that and kept running: whatever he’d tried to prove to them and failed, the crushed look in his eyes when our shirts came up, what he felt when we were gone and his friends hurled their words at him instead of us: none of it would find us if we just kept running.

***

Kathryn Kulpa is an editor at Cleaver Magazine and has work published or forthcoming in Best Microfiction 2020, Atlas & Alice, X–R-A-Y Literary Magazine, and Women’s Studies Quarterly. She was the winner of the Vella Chapbook Contest for her flash fiction collection Girls on Film and a finalist in the 2020 Digging Press Chapbook Competition.

There was a double rainbow. I called to tell you to look out your window, to share, to bear witness, but it went to voicemail and even if you had checked your messages right then, you still might have missed it. You never check your messages, so I don’t leave any. I delete details of when you call me back. I’m sure you do the same. In a million years, a decade, ten minutes from now there will be no known connection between us, no trace, no artifacts left to probe for meaning. Passion dissolves, love disappears. We’re stardust. As flimsy as the colored air.

***

T. L. Sherwood’s work has appeared in New World Writing, Jellyfish Review, Page & Spine, and The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. She often dreams of birds trapped in rainbows, lives in Springville, New York, blogs at https://tlsherwood.com, and is currently working on a novel.

It had been many years since she last returned. By then there were no family or friends left in town to greet her. One by one they had all exited – this one from divorce, that one from disease, and still others who had simply headed down the main street, around the bend and into the fog.

It was this same fog that she walked through from the bus station to the edge of town. She crossed the freight tracks and stone bridge, then turned south down the dusty road bordering the family land. In the opaque air it seemed nothing had changed, even now after her father’s demise. The land rolled with unmown hay, the fence posts stood sentry, awaiting mending. But as she drew nearer the homestead the fog thinned, and she saw there were no more trees left in the yard except one. Jagged stumps betrayed the wild swings of his drunken rages, timber poorly bartered when the crops failed again, and again.

Only the weeping cherry remained. The tree beckoned her to shelter beneath its outstretched arms anew, and to see his last words in the hatchet half buried in its trunk. She wiggled this back and forth until the blade dislodged, and the leaves rustled in relief. Above the fresh notch, the weathered bark bore witness to her childhood carvings. She traced her fingertips along the shapes and figures she had first conjured in the old shed to which her father was prone to banish her. For unfinished chores, or untimely manners, or no misdeed at all when fever took her mother and he wished to despair with drink unmolested. The shed still stood behind the tree, bare before the horizon. She unlatched its door, and peered inside.

There were his rusted tools hanging on the wall. There was the damp smell of earth and cobwebs, the same cracks between the planks that would tease of an outside that was forbidden. There had been the silence as well, save her shallow breaths and whispered pleas, the vise gripping her chest while daylight slowly smudged away until the unseen night things rubbed their eyes, began to stir, and she knew he had forgotten to retrieve her again. How she yearned to open the door right then, or to hack it into a million pieces. Not to creep back into the house, no, but so that she might slumber beneath the weeping cherry like a wayward sprite in the olden times, with branches canopied above her and the world pitch black despite a bejeweled sky promised in the just beyond. She asked once more for the intoxicating blossoms to cast the spell for sound infant sleep, notwithstanding the miles she might someday travel to leave that place or return, with her thin limbs curled and her tiny fists clenched, an axe head cradled against her chin.

***

Hun Ohm is a writer and intellectual property attorney. He lives in western Massachusetts. His fiction has appeared in New Flash Fiction Review, JMWW, Bull, Necessary Fiction, The Citron Review, Literary Orphans and other publications.

We loaded up tanks & fastened them with chains to blimps & rocket ships, secured their chambers with krill & oxygen & trained marine biologists in little green suits. We hauled them through the exosphere, defied all laws of safety & science as the whales tugged behind us in their glass boxes. Over the growing years, we spent hours in our classroom writing their names with yellow-orange crayons on cardstock paper, sang stories about the orcas & other types of whales. Blue. Beluga. Humpback. Fought over the plush Narwhal in the reading corner. Narwhals have always been the most loved. At night, our fathers read us bedtime stories as we gazed out the porthole glass & pointed at the nearby cubes of water, smiling at the aquatic creatures from our quarters. After months & months of watching whales from our windows, their numbers started to dwindle. We lost Sabrina &Thomas & Kenji & held a funeral for them before their lifeless bodies were launched into the blackness of space. Verses of our song were cut for concision’s sake. We forgot about the Long-finned pilot. The Sei. The Amazon River Dolphin, which yes, was actually a whale. When we finally arrived, to the new home with the new ocean & the new sand colored like cadmium, it was time to say goodbye to whoever was left. Each surviving whale was plopped into the swirling waters. We sang them our whale songs, waving from the shore as the tide lapped at our bare skin. They swam away, calling back in a language we would never learn to speak.

***

Hannah Cajandig-Taylor resides in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where she reads for Passages North and Fractured Lit. Her work has appeared in journals like Drunk Monkeys, Kissing Dynamite, and Pretty Owl. She loves to play Nancy Drew games on her computer and recently ordered a rock tumbler online.