When they stitched our lips together, not another ‘saheb’ or ‘mem-saheb’ did we have to utter, but there was nothing they could do about our noses—inhaling food, so they asked us for our stomachs—you can’t all have stomachs of your own. We took out our bones and laid them on our chest—but no, these were brown bones from brown men, brown women, brown children—what good was brown chinaware. We left, leaving the stomachs, the bones. We walked, and we walked, until some of us—turned to earth—told us to go on, but what good was it without stomachs and bones, tongues caged behind our stitched lips.

When we came back, the earth was forest. The wood folk asked for our names, each trying to find their own, until night fell. The faeries hurried into tree-trunks, urging us to join them. But try as we might, we couldn’t fit into their tiny living homes. The men came—men with brown bones still inside their brown bodies, and brown lips that had never been stitched. They didn’t have stomachs either, born of men and women who’d given up stomachs. But it mattered not when they plunged axes into our breath-like bodies, and we fell watching as the axes swung into our wood fore-fathers and they fell, and together we became earth.

***

Maria Zach is the pen name of an author who loves weird and quirky.

She lives in Kerala, a small but densely populated state squished into the southernmost corner of India. She is a dreamer, mother to a toddler, healthcare engineer, wife, whichever among these happens to be demanding her attention at any precise moment.

The mountains were burning in Southern California, as they do, ash falling on the hood of his Range Rover as he backed me into the door, his knee between my thighs, the music from the club muted. I’ll take you where you can see stars, he mumbled into my throat. His hair smelled of cigarettes and coconut. My car followed his red taillights west toward the Pacific. When I was a child, I played a game as my father returned me to my mother’s: there were devils in the taillights we followed, angels in the headlights coming toward us. Now, I snaked up switchbacks without guardrails, the road a thin thread between steep rock walls and dark pits. Orange limned the hills. The newscaster on KNX said that the fire was only 5% contained. His house stood alone on a hill, interconnecting glass boxes like those 3D puzzles I could never put together, with an almost-360-degree view of the Valley, Malibu, and the ocean. A thriller had been filmed here once, but I couldn’t remember the name. Smoke from the fire billowed above. As he swung open the door, he said, I’m in the voluntary evacuation zone. He swiveled a telescope in his bedroom to face east. No stars were visible. Viggo Mortenson lives there, he said. And Jason Momoa there. I squinted through the eyepiece at the twinkling lights from the stars’ houses. Ashes rained against the glass. He pressed against me, his tongue on my neck, his hands pulling up my skirt. Palms wide on the window, rocking against each other. Sometimes you feel empty and want the hollowness to be filled, even with more emptiness. Jason Momoa’s lights turned off. Helicopters strafed the sky. Afterwards, in his kitchen, he fed me cling peaches and I licked juice from his fingers. On one far wall, next to the Wolf stove, chunks of stones and other objects filled a small bookshelf. My fingers hovered over an empty bottle on the first shelf (labelled “O”), a Claddagh ring (“Ag”), a red pottery shard (“U”), a watchface with green gleaming numbers (“Ra”), a chunk of rock (“Po”). My periodic table, he said. Is this all the elements? I asked. No, some of the half-lives are too short, he said. A spotlight haloed the shelf; the objects glowed. I wanted to ingest them, to rub them on my skin. He stayed my hand. We fell asleep on the living room rug and woke only when smoke thickened the air and the walls reflected orange as if the drywall were made of fire. Firefighters pounded at the door. The flames moved toward us with the roar of a freight train. One firefighter in a respirator mask wrapped us in Mylar blankets, while the rest hung back, leaning against the side of their truck. It’s a goner, the firefighter said. Windows burst and steel twisted. I was beginning to think the puzzle could be solved. As the fire reached the kitchen, the flames turned apple green, blue, peach. Are you running a meth lab? the firefighters asked. I didn’t tell them it was all the matter in the universe.

***

Lori Sambol Brody lives in the mountains of Southern California.  Her short fiction has been published in Smokelong Quarterly, Tin House Flash Fridays, New Orleans Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.  Her stories have been chosen for the Wigleaf 50 and the Best Small Fictions 2018 and 2019 anthologies.  She can be found on Twitter at @LoriSambolBrody and her website is lorisambolbrody.wordpress.com.

We spent all of homeroom scouring the yearbook for pictures of mooners and Mary-Ann Shoemaker.

It was the last day of classes, one of those do-nothing days when all anyone wanted was to reminisce about senior pranks and under-chaperoned ski lodge trips and Mary-Ann Shoemaker stories.

Kayla asked if we remembered when Mary-Ann Shoemaker pierced her lip in the YMCA change room.

We did. Mary-Ann Shoemaker had leaned close enough to the mirror to fog it up, staring at herself through the mist, sticking a safety pin through her pouting bottom lip. It bled too much, all over her bitten-nail hands. She wiped the blood onto the speckled concrete walls, like a cave painter. She left for the swimming pool to do the butterfly-stroke in a Las Vegas t-shirt and boys’ swim shorts, leaving behind a trail of dripping blood. One drop fell into a puddle of chlorinated water, spreading across the grout, looking like what happens when you forget you’re pressing down with a fountain pen.

“Weird shit,” said Tawanna. “She’s weird as shit.” Tawanna asked if we remembered what Mary-Ann Shoemaker did on January’s Taco Tuesday.

Mary-Ann Shoemaker had walked into the cafeteria carrying a plastic knife and an army backpack. She declared that she was a militant vegan and would slash us up if we even thought about eating our tacos. Ten minutes later, she pulled two pepperoni sticks from her backpack’s front pocket. She ate them, her lips greasy and wet with non-alcoholic beer. Mr. Valleti tried to suspend her but since she wasn’t really drinking, he couldn’t.

“Well,” Kit said, picking bits of dandruff off her scalp and dropping them onto the floor, “She did get drunk. At Sadie Hawkins. Remember?”

We remembered. Mary-Ann Shoemaker had holed herself up in the custodian’s closet with seven miniature bottles of rum. When she emerged, she wobbled her way to the dance floor. She threw up on Mr. Valleti’s shoes, her vomit pink and smelling like dead things. Mr. Valleti yelled at her in the courtyard. We peeked through the crack in the gymnasium door, arguing about whether or not Mary-Ann Shoemaker was crying.

Cassie slapped her strawberry-skin legs. “Oh, God, yes! Remember when Jacob tried to kiss her after the football game? Gross. Like, beyond gross.”

Jacob smelled like Pizza Pockets and jerk-off tissues. He declared his love for Mary-Ann Shoemaker after our school lost the football game. She told him to follow her under the bleachers, and he did, mosquitos buzzing around his head. Jacob leaned towards her and when their mouths touched, she bit his tongue so hard it bled. She sauntered away, spitting onto the just-watered grass and laughing like the Disney hyenas.

“She’s psycho,” Kayla said.

Rosalie nodded like a dashboard bobblehead. “My dad is a prison psychologist,” she said, “And he says Mary-Ann Shoemaker is mentally disturbed. She hits herself. She breaks glass and cuts herself with it. Remember when she slammed her head against the mural?”

We all remembered. Mary-Ann Shoemaker whacked her face against the atrium sculpture of St. Jerome until her face looked ready to split. She kept slamming, holding her breath like she was underwater, until Mr. Valleti pulled her into his office. She cried, talking about her dad and her blood. We could hear her from the atrium. We could hear her all day long, even after we went home, even as we ate dinner, even as we watched that night’s Teen Wolf.

“Bizarre,” Kayla said. “She cleaned out her locker this morning and it looked like a freakin’ war-zone. Did you guys see?”

We had. Mary-Ann Shoemaker pulled out hot-glue popsicle sticks, cigarette cartons, dirty menstrual pads, non-alcoholic beer cans, and alcoholic beer cans. She shoved her artefacts into a black garbage bag and left it on the senior table.

Tawanna tapped her manicured finger against the window, jumping in her seat. “Wait, look! There she is. On the smoking hill. See?”

We all rushed to the window, our teacher not minding, and looked.

There was Mary-Ann Shoemaker, smoking a cigar, her mouth opening and closing, looking like she was screaming. There was Mary-Ann Shoemaker, standing all alone in the middle of the field. There was Mary-Ann Shoemaker, lonely as all hell, wondering if anyone was looking at her.

There we were, too, peering down from the third floor, our eyes forever-shocked, saying everything about her to each other, never saying anything at all to her.

***

Sarah Priscus has published short fiction and poetry in a number of journals, including Barren Magazine and Rookie Mag. She has received a 2019 Best of the Net nomination for a story published in Atlas and Alice. She writes in Ottawa, Ontario, where she attends the University of Ottawa for English and Theatre. Priscus can be found on Twitter at @sarahpriscus.

Let’s say, just for one night, it won’t rain. Let’s say the stars shine down on us, like crinkled balls of tinfoil in an inky sky. Let’s say we take a walk along the foreshore, like we used to. Let’s say our fingers entwine, like a fishtail braid; and you lean into me as the wind wheeples through the trees, an eerie dirge. Let’s say the things people like us normally say, do what they normally do, when they take a midnight stroll. Let’s say the lights on the water look like glowing Greek columns, in a temple to some goddess of passion. Let’s say we’re invincible, two creatures constructed of diamond, sparkling the way your blue eyes did the first time you looked across this same path and into my own. Let’s say no to all the things we’ve said yes to that didn’t happen, to all the people who’ve asked the unforgivable time and time again, to everyone who judged us on our eventual silence. Let’s say, here in the darkness with the waves sighing as they drop gently on the sand, that in spite of it all we can still love each other.

***

Amanda McLeod is an Australian author and artist, and the Managing Editor at Animal Heart Press. Her fiction and poetry can be found in many places including Not Very Quiet, Ellipsis Zine, and Mojave He[art] Review. She loves quiet places and learning new words. Find her on Twitter @AmandaMWrites and on her website amandamcleodwrites.com

The two kissed at the end. So enamored and in radiant love, they held on to that swell of contact until the skin on their lips and tips of their noses fused together.

They didn’t mind. After everything they’d been through to get to this moment—the loss, the danger, the revenge and the lesson—they both felt they could stand to spend the rest of their lives moving as one through the world. Arms on each other’s hips, legs shuffling between the other’s. They learned. The hardest thing to do was eat, but they figured it out.

In time, their brains sliced the other one out of their vision as irrelevant information. Like a nose, ever necessary but in the way. One could see the world beyond the other, but as much as they tried, one could no longer see the other.

Still, they know their other is there. By scent and sound and memory, yes, but more so by the stray weight at the end of their noses and the slight taste of the annual winter blood from the other’s chapped lips.

***

Nick Perilli is a writer and librarian living in Philadelphia, PA with loved ones who have yet to watch Gremlins 2 with him. Work of his has appeared in Pidgeonholes, XRAY, Maudlin House and elsewhere. He tweets @nicoloperilli and spared no expense on his very cheap website nickperilli.com.

I had every intention of answering your angry email, the one in all caps where you called me names and promised to haunt the crap out of me. I kept trying to think of a response, but I ended up with a whole book of things I was eventually going to say, but never did.

On the day of your escape, a gentle, mad dream lingered: a flock of birds moving as one body; a cloud dispersing an undiscovered kind of rain. I couldn’t ponder the meaning of the dream for long, because the pipes burst and we had to call a plumber.

The rest of the day dragged as if through flood waters. Pinpricks of your darkness decorated the sky like black stars. I guess I knew there was something wrong.

Still, I didn’t know for sure until three days later when Mom called at an unusual hour. Small hairs stood up all over my skin when her number lit the screen. She spoke with soft bravery about the policeman who found you and how kindly he broke the news. We both knew how it happened; you had been trying to tell us for years. When I finally hung up the phone, I ran outside, through the cold, toward the mailbox to see if you had reached out one last time. The box was empty. I felt the blade of my guilt and measured its sharpness against your death.

So, I can’t tell you I wasn’t mad or that we loved the nice version of you. I call Mom every day now. She has a new habit of saying “I love you” at the end of our conversations. I know she speaks to both of us.

Together we took out the quilt you made for her so many years ago. We admired your stitches. We love the vintage fabric. We ran our fingers over the satin trim, touched the bumpy, white knots of flowers. We agreed that you were the most talented of all of us.

But I am the one who always notices signs, symbols and omens. There are tiny flowers stitched into the pocket of the quilt, along with the words ‘pride and joy’. I am the one who noticed that there is one for each sister except you. You stitched yourself out, like you never existed at all. I folded up the quilt that had the wrong number of sisters, and bit my tongue to keep my observation from Mom.

I haven’t shed tears. I am outside myself. I like to hear the things Mom remembers. We keep turning you over in our palms. We turn you this way and that, so we can watch your facets flash and dim. We look at your manic joy. We remember the little depressions. I wanted to tell you I remember that time when I was ten when you tried describe your sadness, and the time you tipped a pine log toward the light to show me the tiny green world that grew there. We look at your miracles and the flaws all at once. Sometimes I can tell that Mom is crying in the phone.

We see your pain now, we see what you were trying to say. We saw both the beauty you brought, and the damage you caused, and we tried to separate them. We saw the quiet. We felt the wind stir and pick up force. We saw the sky darken and get ready to open. We witnessed the pipes burst. We saw your last emails blinking, threatening us from our inboxes. We heard you scream into the phone and instead of slamming it down, we hung up quietly, because we were not angry.

We saw you gather yourself and disperse like a flock of birds, all noise and motion, here for a moment, and every moment after, and never truly gone.

***

Shawn McClure writes short fiction from her kitchen table in a house in NJ and sometimes publishes it on the web.

She touches your fingers across the table. Talks about her art, the way the brush veils the canvas, how paint clings to the heels of her hands, the chiaroscuro figures of women at work, children at the border. The waiter brings oysters on the half-shell, plates of veal glazed with butter and mustard, a raspberry torte to share. A young man plays contrapuntal notes on a cello, Bach’s Suite in D Minor. She says, the sea. She says, the Palamora Motor Court. She says, soon.

You smooth a curl from her brow. Outside, the harvest moon sags over tree tops. Her face gleams amber. Across town, your husband dozes in your bed, one ear cocked for the children.

***

Kathryn Milam lives in North Carolina. Her most recent stories have appeared in Appalachian Heritage Magazine, Lunate Fiction, and Flash Fiction Magazine. She’s the founder of Readings on Roslyn, a literary salon that has hosted forty writers and more than 3000 readers in her home. Her MFA is from Bennington College. Follow her on Twitter @MilamKathryn.

The holy roller girl who writhed with the fever of Jesus on Sunday while her pastor daddy twirled snakes like lariats over the heads of sinners crying to be cleansed. Who bused in from out-county on Monday, undressed for gym in a mop closet. Who stuffed a transistor radio down her pants while her pastor daddy handed out salvation in front of Sears. Who believed she’d ascended to heaven whenever Diana Ross sang in her ears, all gauze and sequins, whenever Smoky baby baby-ed her down rows of corn where she danced with her tall green partners. The nights her father came to sanctify her. The day she collapsed in gym class and sang to Jesus in her gospel tongue, an arpeggio of gibberish, all amen and hell yes. How she came back to us a ghost girl, rinsed of all but the hard, high notes.

***

Sarah Freligh is the author of Sad Math, winner of the 2014 Moon City Press Poetry Prize and the 2015 Whirling Prize from the University of Indianapolis; A Brief Natural History of an American Girl (Accents Publishing, 2012), and Sort of Gone (Turning Point Books, 2008). Recent work has appeared in the Cincinnati Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, diode, and in the anthologies New Microfiction and Best Microfiction 2019. Among her awards are a 2009 poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a grant from the Constance Saltonstall Foundation in 2006.

in this essay you are a ghost & I am in the kitchen, boiling a pot of water. I look out my kitchen window & watch a ladder fall from the sky. it lands directly into the middle of my backyard. your ghost doesn’t climb down the ladder. instead, your ghost parachutes out of a cloud in the shape of a cloud. these days I am finding it difficult to not find things difficult. I fear the mundane like you used to fear spiders, snakes, dark alleys, losing your car keys, & affording your insurance deductible. do ghosts need health insurance? I ask your ghost. your ghost shakes her head as steam rises from the kettle on the stove. I pour a cup of chamomile tea & think about looking out the kitchen window. instead, I pour the tea down the sink & go back to bed.

***

Lee Patterson’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Hobart, Gone Lawn, Unbroken, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, and Entropy, among others. His chapbook, I get sad, was published by Ethel Zine in late 2019.

Finally, the time machine was finished, and I could go back.

I start on your third birthday at the beach. The tide folds back on itself, sandcastles shifting and unbuilding. I taste salt, hear sky. I dig deep to find the best sand, compact it into every turret. You search for shells like gems, blonde curls dancing. We play until sunset, until orange darkness turns the world sepia. We wander closer to the ocean, watch as tiny, silver fish jump luminescent rays from the upside-down moon.

As the months and years unfurl, I am kinder, softer. I read longer at bedtime, listen harder when you laugh, never say I’m busy or tired or things can wait.

But at eighteen, pills pull you under and the world falls silent.

I start on your third birthday at the beach. The tide folds back on itself, sandcastles shifting and unbuilding. We shape high walls of sand, dig a moat so deep that water seeps through sediment, so deep that your arm can’t reach the bottom, so deep that nothing will pass.

Over months and years, I watch closer, care deeper. I hold your mittened hand through every storm, steady the shakes from every fever, balance every disappointment.

But at eighteen, you swallow silence and the world fragments.

I start on your third birthday at the beach. The tide folds back on itself, sandcastles shifting and unbuilding. You bob clumsily through silk-soft sand towards the foaming ocean, longing to feel its gossamer froth caress your toes. I catch your hand and hold you close, noticing the speckled pebbles beneath the tidal foam, the thousands of tiny pointed edges.

I bend low, begin to collect them one by one.

***

Jo Withers writes micros, flash and poetry from her home in South Australia. Recent work has featured in FlashBack Fiction, Molotov Cocktail, Spelk, Ellipsis Zine and Mythic Picnic.