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.

There’s a man with balloons at our park today, which is where we wait after school in the unguarded hours before our mother gets home. We’ve never seen this man before, but like usual we’re alone, my brother and me, two kids hunched atop the climbing dome like abandoned chimps. The man stands below us with his balloons, all playschool colors, a bright stained glass shadow hanging over the mulchy ground near his feet. He calls up to us: Kids. Kids. Want to buy one?

Today, I am ten-and-half exactly, and my brother is twelve-and-three-quarters. I’ve promised to be responsible for him because sometimes he gets ideas the way our antennae picks up the Spanish channel from Greenville, some elsewhere static he can’t unhear. My brother wants more than anything to buy a balloon from the balloon man, even though he doesn’t have a cart like an official balloon seller would; he keeps all the balloons tied real tight on his forearm, so tight they leave welts. My brother starts asking questions—Why doesn’t the balloon man float away when he has all his balloons tied to him? He saw a program on TV last Friday about a man in a lawn chair who did just that. I tell my brother that all balloon men have lower halves that are made of metal, that the only reason we have balloon men at all is because so many soldiers came back from war with their lower halves blown off by grenades and land mines and whatever, and the missing parts get replaced with metal like a steam-powered mecha. Lucky for them, that’s a basic balloon man job requirement. It makes them heavy enough to keep from floating away.

She’s right you know, the balloon man says, and I hate that he’s listening. My brother says he wants a yellow balloon, because yellow is the color of popcorn butter and also the pirate doubloons in a video game he likes to play. The balloon man says, They’re only a quarter, I’ll give you two for a quarter, and I tell my brother he doesn’t have a quarter moments before he pulls one out of his shoe and says yes he does. I don’t know how the quarter got in his shoe and can only hope he didn’t take it from somewhere he wasn’t supposed to. How lucky you are, says the balloon man, and I tell my brother that balloons are bad for the environment. Every time someone buys a balloon, a sea turtle dies.

For a while, no one says anything. Then the balloon man smiles and nods and trudges back toward the road, his wares bopping in the air behind him, his bald little head low on his shoulders. Stupid, I say to my brother. What is wrong with you? You can’t just buy things from strangers like that, it isn’t safe. My brother doesn’t reply. He watches the balloon man shuffle so awkwardly away from us it’s like his lower half really is made of metal. He might be in pain. Just as he gets to the curb, three high school girls whip down the road on scooters, swinging close enough to startle him. They shriek whoop-whoop and ride off, the balloon man blinking foggily after them, and now I feel bad because he could actually be homeless, a homeless veteran. I don’t know the high school girls’ names, but I remember last month when we saw them at the bus stop and I hissed at them, rope of spit scattering on the sidewalk. All year long my saliva has tasted funny. I think I might be turning into something else.

Are we going to get down now? my brother asks. I think it’s time to get down.

In a minute.

He looks at his watch. It’s time to get down. It’s five-oh-three. Time to go.

Just wait, I say, watching until the balloon man is out of sight. You can see three-sixty degrees on top of the climbing dome; in fact we’d probably be okay if we stayed up here all night, my brother thinking about balloons, heart all swelled with latex longing, and me growing my eyeteeth out and sucking down my spit. The balloon man, I imagine him at home, wherever his home is. I imagine if he has any quarters he keeps them in his big metal belly, that when he drops them in through the grate they clang and they echo.

***

Jen Julian is a transient North Carolinian whose recent work has appeared or is upcoming in Okay Donkey, SmokeLong Quarterly, Jellyfish Review, JuxtaProse, and TriQuarterly Review, among other places. She has a PhD in English from the University of Missouri and an MFA in Fiction from UNC Greensboro. Currently, she serves as an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Young Harris College in the mountains of Northern Georgia.

Alice is in love. This is a list of things she loves: a front tooth gap, a small scar on the left hand, a freckle above a top lip, the same haircut for 10 years. She bubbles up the courage to ask for a date but of course the answer is yes – Alice is in love with herself. She holds her own hand and buys yellow poppies on the corner, bringing the fragrance to her nose, running the softest parts of herself on the petals. Alice sighs. The air is hot and restaurants have opened their walls. She hears laughter and shrieking and only a little sorrow. She sees no one on a date with themselves, couples huddled together with phones in hand, some talking to one another, all furrowed brows. She ponders this while gently laying her jacket on the chair she pulls out for herself. Alice has been cheated and the cheater. She has been lost and loved and left in warm blue hues. Alice knows all love is not real love. She knows there is love for thighs and love for eyes and love for the taste of both. She knows people bend and break for hate masquerading as love, bending and breaking itself, trying to blunder to the light, trying to be the light. Alice orders champagne, toasts herself and drinks the fizz in one gulp. She orders two entrees and eats half of each, pairing steak with shrimp and a little arugula for balance, mashed potatoes every other bite. Wiping the corners of her mouth, she laughs at her own bad jokes and gets chocolate cake to go, for our treat, she teases. Alice leaves the restaurant full and high on love, on the silence of being alone. She is home by dark, humming herself a slow blues song, lights dimming with the sun.

***

Olivia Kingery is a writer in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where she also teaches, farms, and swims.

After I was assaulted, I spent the night at my mother’s house. She asked me what I wanted for dinner. I know this because that is what she said to me, what do you fancy? She said she made some dangerous chili, that was her mistake. I told her that it would be fine for me. I sat in two of her sturdy chairs. Both of them hurt. I stood up and looked outside at the teenage girls smiling at me from across the street. Be safe, I thought. My mother was telling me about a mystical friend named Sonja, a beautiful woman, she said, a fortune teller. At least you’re okay, she said. I was trying very hard to listen to her story about being vaguely in love with the woman. I remembered how she had once admitted she was bisexual as if she were telling me what a perfect mother she really was. This was after Dad left, around the time that my breasts grew in, before I ran away. Don’t tell me this kind of stuff, I said. Act like a parent, if you don’t mind. At the time, I remember how I felt about my body, watching it bloom from above. I resembled the kind of girl a father would be proud of. My mother was depressed during that time.

Today, she cries only because I’m safe. She says she’s making plenty more food in the kitchen. I curl up on my mother’s floor, imagine a switchblade in my hand. Would I have used it on him, would he have turned it back on me? I say, sorry about Dad. I look at her and try not to bleed on her rug. When she pulls me up, my mind is a diamond, hard and brilliant— a thing she can finally understand. I try to breathe. You have to get treated she says. I love you. I let her hold me, let her extinguish my hair.

***

Meg Pokrass’ fifth collection, ‘Alligators At Night’, was published by Ad Hoc Fiction (2018). Her work has been anthologized in Best Small Fictions, 2018 (edited by Aimee Bender) and two Norton Anthologies; New Micro (W.W. Norton & Co., 2018) and Flash Fiction International (W.W. Norton & Co., 2015). Meg is the Founding Co-Editor of Best Microfiction, Editor-in-Chief of New Flash Fiction Review, and Festival Curator for Flash Fiction Festival, UK and recently became the Flash Fiction Focus Editor for Mslexia Magazine.

We rode our bicycle after the butterflies. Granny in front, pedalling so hectically I worried her flimsy scarf would get caught in the spokes. ‘Not the purple ones,’ she yelled above the noise of the soft soil under the wheels, the wind in my ears, and the lambs gambolling in the fields. I looked past the flock of purple and gold butterflies that gulped up the summer sun, and I saw the nettle patch by the ditch. A butterfly the colour of moonshine on marble rested on the stinging leaves.

‘The pale butterflies will bring us home,’ she had always said to me while she knitted blankets, her needles clacking like a blundering clock. And what a home it had been, so she said: turrets so tall you could pluck feathers from gliding condors, windows so wide whole sagas shone in a single stained-glass pane. I curled under a knitted blanket beside her and sank into her smell of wool and peppermint. Glass jars crammed our shelves in place of books, blocked our windows in place of views, filled our cupboards in place of food. And in the jars, pale butterflies shone. Every evening, after our supper of carrots baked until they seeped caramel, we counted the butterflies. Then we shook daffodils, collected the pollen in a chipped china bowl, and dropped a pinch into each jar.

‘Careful,’ Granny said as we propped the tandem against the hedgerow. She hitched up the waistband of her skirt, unbuckled her satchel, and pulled out a glass jar. ‘The last one,’ she said as she handed it to me. I inched forward. ‘Hurry.’ Everything smelled of green warmth. Nettles stung my wrist, but I didn’t flinch. I lowered the jar over the butterfly. Its wings beat against the glass. ‘Now, we wait for the full moon,’ Granny said. And as we cycled back, she said, her voice as low as field mist, ‘my bedroom ceiling was a golden map and I read the names of hills and ports until I fell asleep.’

On the day of the full moon, Granny tethered a cart to our bicycle, and I filled it with the butterfly jars. ‘Careful,’ she barked. We cycled on the smoothest paths, the jars rattling in the cart, the lowering sun soft on our faces. We cycled in a silence that felt like peacefulness. And when the horizon was copper and gold and the silhouettes of geese were fast shapes in the sky, we stopped in a vast field. The hedgerows were so far away they merged into the blue dusk. I picked up one of the jars, but Granny shook her head. ‘Wait,’ she said. And when the full moon flushed the sky in fat light, we unscrewed the jars and let out the butterflies.

They flitted and swooped, the moonglow weighting them, the night brushing their wings. And then they were settling one atop each other. And they made the shape of a great castle, towers tall as winds, windows wide as seas. In the moonshine, Granny’s face was all crags and shadows, her eyes tear bright. ‘What did I tell you?’ she said, hitching up the waistband of her skirt. There was a sound like hounds chasing through autumn leaves, and then a stilted shiver passed through the butterflies, and then they were gone, and in their place, marble stretched, smooth and cool. Granny pushed the great door open and we stepped inside.

The halls smelled of crowns and legends. I could hardly feel my feet, hardly feel myself moving. Ceilings glided over us, golden and high as clouds, and I felt as if I might float up and bump my head. ‘Didn’t I tell you it was like this?’ Granny said as she wiped away my tears. I could only nod. And her laugh was soft in the gilded spaces and in the moonlight that turned red and purple and blue as it filtered through the stained glass.

I didn’t feel tired, I only felt swoopy and far away, so I didn’t feel the night passing, or the moon fading. And then there was a sound like wild poppies in summer gusts, and a ripple passed through the walls, the ceilings, the windows coloured by myths. And then the castle was just butterflies again, pale and flickering, and then they flew up into the morning skies and away across the fields. I sat on the damp grass, Granny’s arm around me, and watched them until they were gone.

***

Rebecca Harrison sneezes like Donald Duck and her best friend is a dog who can count.

The Scrap Boys scurry among the young trees of Dead Man’s Woods, maples no thicker than baseball bats, naked and skeletal in the late fall haze.

Scrap Boy 1, Scrap Boy 2, and Scrap Boy 3, one follows another sure as night follows day. They jog the narrow trails, keep their heads down, bend at the waist as if lunging toward an invisible finish line. Crisp yellowing leaves crunch under their too-big hand-me-down sneakers. Three pairs of prepubescent jug ears, three sets of crooked teeth too broke for braces, three matching wounds in the palm of their hands, three bloods mingled, neighbors by chance, brothers by choice.

Scrap Boy 1 leads the cadence: Rangers!

Scrap Boy 2 and Scrap Boy 3 call back: Rangers!

All the way.

All the way.

Here we go.

Here we go.

It’s all they know, all they have to sing, seven words, but it’s enough. They sing them over and over and over again, fill the greying air of Dead Man’s woods with their song, their voices rising, mingling like smoke until it’s impossible to tell who is calling and who is repeating, until there is just one great Scrap Boy voice rumbling like thunder in Dead Man’s Woods.

Lengthening shadows of branches reach for the Scrap Boys, tiger stripe their skin as they run and sing to the rhythm of the lighters rattling in their pockets. So many lighters. Each Scrap Boy carries a couple. There’s a green one and a red one, two blue and a yellow. There’s one with a Metallica logo. That one is special. That one’s the best. All of them are plastic, none paid for, filched from gas station counters, relatives’ purses, and strangers’ coat pockets. The Scrap Boys know fire is free if you know where to look, if you’ve got the heart to grab it.

When the Scrap Boy commandoes reach their bunker sides ache and their throats are raw. Their song tastes like iron, like blood, but a lightness enters the Scrap Boys. Their lungs become helium balloons caged in their chests.

They throw themselves down the short hill, Scrap Boy 1, Scrap Boy 2, Scrap Boy 3, awkward somersaults, ass over tea kettle, sky giving way to dirt giving way to sky again, until they come to rest on flat earth, sweat damp and mud stained and home. Their pit is still there, a circle of stones pulled from the creek a hundred yards away, a circle of stones it took the Scrap Boys a whole afternoon to assemble at the start of summer.

They gather fuel without speaking. It’s all around them, there for the taking. Fistfuls of dry leaves, twigs that snap like matchsticks, sticks that break over Scrap Boys’ thighs and crack like a gunshot. The build looks chaotic, but it’s not. The Scrap Boys know the science. It lives in their heart.

Start small. Leaves and twigs. Lighters out. Every Scrap Boy put a flame to the kindling. Hit it together. Hit it from every angle. Use hands, use bodies, use hoodies and coats, use whatever you’ve got, whatever it takes, to block gusts of wind, to block anything that threatens to those first flames. Use mouths, use breath to feed the young flames. More leaves, more twigs. Then bigger. Sticks thick as fingers and toes. Bigger. Sticks thick as arms and legs.

The Scrap Boys sit in the dirt and watch the flames. Watch the flames flash and destroy, watch the flames dance and create. And in the pop and hiss of the flames the Scrap Boys hear the voice of the fire, hear a song. Rangers! All the way. Here we go.

The earth underneath the Scrap Boys is cold and damp, but in the heat of the flames they Scrap Boys feel their skin tightening, hardening, clay in a kiln. Like recognizes like. Each Scrap Boy, 1, 2, and 3, feels the wound in his palm tingling as the fire grows and grows.

***

Tom Weller is a former factory worker, Peace Corps volunteer,and Planned Parenthood sexuality educator. He currently teaches writing at Pennsylvania College of Technology and lives in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania. His fiction has appeared most recently in Pidgeonholes, Synaesthesia, The Molotov Cocktail, and Booth. He has work forthcoming in Barrelhouse.