Walking in Prospect Park, in the sun’s first warmth, magnolia trees seem to be involved in their own contagion, ignoring the rash of people, who hurry to get out of their heads full of worry. No one notices that the trees are congested with heavy pink buds, ready to unfurl.  The people rush past, with caps pulled down, trying to avoid eye contact with anyone who might tell them to go home. Where is home? The magnolia branches point in all directions. She stops and takes a picture of this profusion, in

spite of feeling nervous about being seen outside.

***

M.J. Iuppa  is the Director of the Visual and Performing Arts Minor Program and Lecturer in Creative Writing at St. John Fisher College; and since 2000 to present, is a part time lecturer in Creative Writing at The College at Brockport. Since 1986, she has been a teaching artist, working with students, K-12, in Rochester, NY, and surrounding area. Most recently, she was awarded the New York State Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Adjunct Teaching, 2017. She has four full length poetry collections, This Thirst (Kelsay Books, 2017), Small Worlds Floating (2016) as well as Within Reach (2010) both from Cherry Grove Collections; Night Traveler (Foothills Publishing, 2003); and 5 chapbooks. She lives on a small farm in Hamlin, NY.

First came the miracles: all the guns melted, the forest fires quenched, one child unwrecked, then three, four, thousands. When she appeared, her halo so deeply rainbowed it gleamed luscious black, the oceans shivered. Riot and strike, emblems of her right hand; text and rough song, emblems of her left. Tenderly, so tenderly, her holy gaze gathered beheaded mountains, plains soaked deep with oil, water-poisoned cities. She stung our lips with the nettles of her mercy until we whispered her newborn name over the bones of our untroubled dead, and rose to save our lives.

***

Carolyn Oliver’s very short prose and prose poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, Indiana Review, Jellyfish Review, jmww, Unbroken, Tin House Online, Copper Nickel, Midway Journal, and New Flash Fiction Review, among other journals. Carolyn lives in Massachusetts with her family. Links to more of her writing can be found at carolynoliver.net.

The meter starts, numbers twisting and ticking away, and it doesn’t matter because numbers are a made-up thing like love.

The city outside whirs by, men hammering buildings together, baby carriages, and store signs, all of it blurry and Monet. I’ll put this painting in my head with the others.

The cab driver is 55 or 80, a hug of gray hair around his head. I don’t think much about cab drivers. I figure they like it that way.

My mother, of course, is dying.

The cab driver drives past the hospital. “Wait,” I tell him, “I said St. Elizabeth’s.”

“I know, he says, switching off the meter. “Let’s go look at the river instead.” I’ve heard of things like this. Kidnappings, hijackings.

One minute, my mother was asking if I wanted my eggs scrambled or fried.

The cab driver’s eyes in the rearview. “Hospitals can wait a few minutes,” he says. “My daughter,” he continues, “she was only five.”

When we get to the river, the slap of an autumn morning as we step out of the cab. All around us, the usual joggers, the seagulls climbing the sky.

“Those birds,” he says, “they have this sense of direction. It’s built into their wings.”

We get back into the cab. We head to the hospital. I open the window and let in a whoosh of air, a sudden swoop underneath my arms.

***

Francine Witte is the author of four poetry chapbooks and two full-length collections, Café Crazy and The Theory of Flesh from Kelsay Books. Her flash fiction has appeared in numerous journals and anthologized in the most recent New Micro (W.W. Norton) Her novella-in-flash, The Way of the Wind has just been published by Ad Hoc Fiction, and her full-length collection of flash fiction, Dressed All Wrong for This was recently published by Blue Light Press. She lives in New York City.

When you drop your ice cream cone, you can ask your mom to share hers with you. Yours was a twist, but hers is vanilla, and even though it’s not your favorite, it’s sweeter now, more satisfying. While you’re still prickling with longing for the melting lump on the pavement, you’re okay. When you’ve used up your favorite watercolor brick – Prussian Blue – the color of the northern sky as it darkens, the sea when it’s deep, but not too deep, and the boat in your dreams, you can try to remake it with other colors. A different blue, a purple-r blue emerges, might you like that too? When your first boyfriend stops calling, you can put a dinosaur band-aid on your heart, tending to your pain, something tangible to touch, say, yes, this happened, but also, you will heal. When you move, when you miss all of your friends, when you even mourn your post office attendants, the trees you no longer see, you can begin again with new routines. Find a coffee shop where they always smile, find someone to go to a laughing meditation with, laugh it away until you’re crying, ha ha ha, ho ho ho, hee hee hee, and when you wipe the tears away, you feel a little better. When you get married, and your father isn’t there, you almost wish you had asked him to walk you down the aisle, but you thought it was too paternalistic, you asked him to read a poem instead, but now that he isn’t there, you wish you had given him that request. You can put one foot in front of another, and you can smile, you try not to cry, you look at all the people you love, you try not to cry. When your first pregnancy does not result in your first baby, you can hold a pillow at night. Imagine all the things that would have followed. When loved ones die, you can think of the good times, you think of their hard times. You wonder if they’re floating in the ether, if they’re meeting angels, if they’re mingling with grandparents, past pets. When you lose your job, you can make lists, reassess your strengths, try to reinvent yourself. In your doubt and your struggle, you try to find hope. When you lose your way, you can try to follow the breadcrumbs back to the beginning, and start again, with an ice cream cone.

***

Melissa Saggerer has been a bellhop, a museum curator, and a library director. You can find her flash in Leopardskin & Limes. On twitter @MelissaSaggerer.

No one asked her if she wanted to be real. Just as Pygmalion tore her from the earth, battered her shapeless form with his chisel, scraped her skin smooth, dressed her (undressed her) all without asking, he had not thought to ask if she wanted to come down off the pedestal. The fickle goddess, too, had forced breath into her, had given her no warning.

And now she knows that she is not the first woman to dress as she’s told, to smile the smile someone else has given her, to stand, silent as stone, watched by people who think they love her. She is not the first and this company is the last thing she wants.

Sometimes at night, when the wind is hot and salty, she imagines going down to the water as it laps hungry against the sand. (Oh, she hates the hunger). She imagines walking into the waves. Letting the water drag her down like the rock she was.

Maybe she could once again become stone, like the white fingers of so much coral. Maybe, in the secret dark, where he cannot see her, she will be crushed into some finer gem.

***

R. A. Matteson lives on Lake Superior with a cat who often sounds lost even when all the doors in the house are open. She has been published in Molotov Cocktail and would like to tell you a story if that’s ok with everyone.

Her mother clicks the cartoon off. She ignores her daughter’s pleas. She was in mid-chorus; singing along with the princess, dancing when the TV’s screen went blank. Now her mother heads to the bins where she keeps her toys. In her arms she carries all her dolls with their pretty dresses, the princesses and princes. She follows her mother to the kitchen. She plops them on the counter and one by one removes the dolls’ clothes. The pink heart-shaped dresses and golden tiaras lie next to the naked dolls piled on top of each other. It’s an obscene scene and the little girl blushes. Her mother ignites the burner. Under the flames, the tiny-stitched clothing melt. The smell of burnt plastic stinks up the kitchen. When the mother finishes, she turns around to reprimand her daughter. “Don’t cry.”

She takes the girl’s hand. Out in the backyard she places her daughter’s hands on the oak tree. “This is your husband,” she says. She plucks a flower. “This is your lover,” she says. They lie their backs on the wet grass and watch the wind blow the clouds. “These are your friends,” she says. In the kitchen, she removes the Diet Coke from the fridge and takes a half of a packet of Mentos. Dropping the Mentos in, the soda explodes twenty nine feet high. “This is your life,” she says. Days afterward the floor tugs the bottom of their feet and their arms are covered in the sweet brown liquid that drops from the ceiling.

The girl grows up. She forgets. When she arrives home crying over a broken heart, when she bursts through the front door sobbing over her divorce, the woman takes her by the hand and leads her toward the backyard. She spreads her hands and says, “This is all yours.”

  Years pass. The girl remarries and gives birth to more children. They both grow older, but the mother grows older still. And when the girl, now a woman not worth your salt, hears the news, she arrives at the burial site. Her hand reaches up. From the sky she plucks wisps of clouds and sprinkles them over the grave. The grandchildren standing by her side grow impatient. “Nana, why must we be here?” they ask. She leads them to the tree standing nearby and wrap their hands around it. “This is your spouse,” she says. Among the weeds, she collects flowers and twists them into crowns of glory. Placing them on their heads, she says, “These are your lovers.” They run to the creek that sweeps along the graveyard’s edge. There they fall on their backs to count the clouds. When they reach a thousand, she rises and spreads her arms. “These are your friends.” They laugh and laugh and laugh, for never before have their hearts been filled with so many good things. It feels wonderful.

***

Xenia Taiga lives in southern China with a cockatiel, a turtle and an Englishman. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions and is part of Best Microfiction 2019 Anthology. Her website is http://xeniataiga.com/. Her abstract artwork is available on Etsy.

¹Well, it happened. All the quote-unquote “Good Christians”—all the ones who’d affixed a Jesus fish to their bumpers; all the ones who’d gone to church every Sunday (except the Catholics); all the ones who’d given money to televangelists, if you can believe it—all of them disappeared one day, just like they’d said they would.

²There was a bit of disappointment at first, a bit of Oh. Okay then. But after a while, those of us who got left behind did what human beings have been doing ever since the first of us died, way back when: ³We got on with it.

⁴The rivers ran with blood, of course, but in this day and age, it didn’t take long for someone to discover how to filter it out. ⁵The water was left with a mineral tang that most of us got used to and some people found that they liked. ⁶Locusts swarmed to feast on our crops, but you can eat locusts, too, you know. ⁷We laughed when we first ate them because, really, they tasted like chicken.

⁸The Dragon came, every once in a while, courting us to follow him. Some people did, but most of us didn’t. Most of the ones who did came back. He was surprisingly even-tempered about it, just nodded, seemed to understand. ⁹Non serviam, we told him, and really what could he say to that?

¹⁰We found we didn’t miss the ones who’d been sealed as servants of God. Maybe if you were married to one or the child of one, you grieved, but soon you noticed how relaxed you felt, how much straighter you were able to stand. ¹¹There was no one around anymore to tell you who you could and could not to love. There was no one to say what your name had to be or what your body couldn’t do or what shames you should carry with you forever and ever, amen. ¹²The nights were longer than they had been, but through them, we had each other. You could hold someone if you wanted, but didn’t have to. ¹³We found that actually, we all wailed less, and most everyone stopped grinding their teeth.

¹⁴We found a cure for all the pestilence. ¹⁵We agreed that we were done with the wars. ¹⁶We looked and beheld a pale horse, and him that sat on him was Death, and while Hell did follow with him, he wasn’t nearly as bad as all that. More often than raking us over with his scythe, we would catch him simply watching as we cooked or built shelters or danced. He liked to hear our stories. The simplest of jokes made him roar. Wonderful, he’d say, while listening to someone whistle. Wonderful, he’d sigh when he saw you scratch a dog behind the ears. ¹⁷You can find him in the woods a lot, these days, birds alighting on his skeletal fingers. He is fond of giving children a ride on his horse; he seems to value their smiles most of all.   

¹⁸The demons are the same, for the most part. They like whiskey and playing cards and will often keep it down if you ask. They keep to themselves, really, just happy to be out of the flames.

¹⁹These are the things we’ve learned in The End Times: That even the trumpeting of the angels eventually fades into the background. That a lake of fire turns out to be as beautiful as it sounds. ²⁰That the stars are no longer fixed in the sky, but this has only made us look at them even more.

***

If luck were my lady, her fingers would weave like spindles in between my own. The warmth of her palm would radiate in my hand while we sat in the back of our cab, Chicago nightlights whirring outside liquor-fogged windows, our drive never ending. She’d let her nose graze the side of my jaw and I’d thank God I could call her mine, if only for the evening, if only for the hour, if only for this brief moment in time.

I wouldn’t worry she’d leave my side. We’d hit the lottery, the jackpot, buying homes and cars until our hearts were content. We’d pick and choose what property to stay at day to day—our villa in Paris? Our cabin in Spokane? We’d stay curled up in Egyptian cotton sheets all day, bare feet tangled together and eager hands always traveling north, south, westbound, eastbound, to every curve and crevice in between. The sex would be amazing.

I’d tattoo a horseshoe on the back on my neck in her honor. She’d squeal with excitement as the needle whirred, the artist’s hand always steady but never still—shading, perfecting, crafting until my lady nodded her head in approval. “Yes,” she’d say, “that’s exactly it.”

We’d use our endless fortune to pay for scientific discovery. Our money would pave the way to a miracle serum, carbonated immortality in a bottle and it’d taste like Vanilla Coke.  We’d sip until the fizz was in our nose, challenging one another to belching contests and wishing that we could burp bubbles like they do in the cartoons. We’d drink expensive scotch until it went straight to our heads, rolling on the floor watching the ceiling swirl. She’d begin to cry, softly, drunken tears she couldn’t reason with, and I’d ask her if she was thinking about someone else.

She’d begin to sleep with her back to me. It’d be too hot to be close, our bodies too accustomed to comfort. She’d sleep with her feet curled, legs pulled to her chest, mine still searching for her at the end of our California king. Our trips would slow, the thrill long gone after visiting every country in the world. She’d begin to feel distant. She’d start saying things like “eternity is just a long time” over dinner.

If luck were my lady, it wouldn’t last. I’d beg, I’d plead, I’d buy her every gift she’d ever asked for, every flower known to man, a diamond for every day I’d been able to call her mine. She’d tell me we never had anything in common.

***

Tayler Karinen lives in Saginaw, Michigan. She graduated from Central Michigan University with a MA in English Literature and Creative Writing. Her fiction has previously appeared in Hot Metal Bridge, The Roadrunner Review, Cardinal Sins, The Harpoon Review, and Cease, Cows. One day, she hopes to pursue a MFA, publish a collection of flash fiction, and make her cats proud.

The Clown King’s throne is a folding chair in a one-room apartment with a dripping faucet and starbursts of mold crawling across the walls. Her face is a roadmap of origami wrinkles, the laugh/frown lines of her mouth, a balloon animal knot. The tiny apartment can fit a troupe of forty. Clowns, as showcased by the physics of clown cars, are known to bend space and, occasionally, time.

The Clown King lives in a city of baguette crumbs gobbled down by oil slick-plumed pigeons. She spies the geraniums on balcony flowerpots along Main Street and thinks they look durable enough, if a little droopy, to squirt water out of their pollen hearts. The Clown King, ever-vigilant, rides her velocipede around the city in order to look after her people as they work. Lately, there have been some coulrophobic incidents in the gray-stone streets. They make the Clown King wary. A group of factory workers called one of her harlequins la féerie, while the mimes, in their striped uniform and tear-painted faces, have been told repeatedly they’d look prettier if they just smiled more.

The pierrots down by the riverfront are faring better, the Clown King is relieved to find out. They play their weeping violas and the tourists toss coins in their ripped-velvet cases. Most popular of all are the regular clowns hired for birthday parties of rosy-cheeked local children.

Life in their city of canals and towering monuments hasn’t always been all fun and games, but they manage. The Clown King pedals home before her troupe arrives, bags of groceries hung from either side of the handlebars. She’ll be making pies, filled with days-old cream and discount strawberries. She sits at the table and waits, a stolen flower in a tin can, pie-crust perfume covering the odor of mold.

In the evening, after her troupe of clowns and pierrots, mimes and harlequins, have broken bread around the kitchen table, the comedy and tragedy masks come off. The Clown King slips into a threadbare nightgown and washes the pancake makeup off her face.

They sleep stacked one atop the other, warm bodies a shield from the damp and cold, red noses brushing together in kaleidoscopic dreams.

***

Avra Margariti is a queer Social Work undergrad from Greece. She enjoys storytelling in all its forms and writes about diverse identities and experiences. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Flash Fiction Online, The Forge Literary, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Argot Magazine, and other venues. Avra won the 2019 Bacopa Literary Review prize for fiction. You can find her on twitter @avramargariti.

Will I find you in the future?

Maybe you’ll sneak up on me, watching from a marble gallery in an old library with green-shaded reading lamps. Maybe I’ll be reading about you.

Maybe I’ll have a pebble in my shoe. Maybe my eyes will sting. Maybe a sparrow will hurl itself against the glass. And I’ll look up, and there you’ll be.

You belong to the past, like nips of peppermint schnapps at the vampire girl’s grave, like a cedar chest filled with heavy 78 RPM records, records so old they’re not even vinyl but whatever came before vinyl, solid black discs that break but don’t bend. You belong to the upstairs theatre that only showed black and white movies, nights walking around looking for places that still served dinner at ten o’clock, it was a college town, surely we weren’t the only ones still awake, but we’d always end up at the same Chinese place, scorpion bowl cocktails with tiny paper umbrellas we’d have sword fights with, and one night we found a puppy someone left tied to a shopping cart. How long had he been there? Every other store in the plaza had closed. He nipped our fingers and howled like a baby wolf. We took the puppy home, your studio with the Murphy bed that flipped up instead of staying down, like something from the Three Stooges, mattress so thin I could feel metal bars underneath digging into my back. We had no dog food so you fed the puppy leftover pork fried rice from your own plate and I thought, here is a man who would give his last meal to a starving dog, and it was true, you would. When did I learn that was all you had to give?

The record store we worked in is a Starbucks now. The theatre was a hookah bar, then a yoga studio. The tenements on your street were knocked down for condos, all the streets we walked too bright, too clean for ghosts. Still, someday, I think, I will see your shadow. I imagine you catching my eye. I imagine myself looking away. I imagine us in a room of windows grown yellow, light brittle as celluloid, air that might break but won’t bend around our silence.

***

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.