Today, it’s nearly pleasant in the middle of nowhere, in wind skimming a bouncy road to town, to market, to the tired side of the trailer park. There, you’ll find dark lines of grit stuck under fingernails; in saggy skin’s deep creases. Someone’s mother sits on a broken porch, rocking up a storm. She’s been waiting for her son’s rusty F10 pickup to come get her. It’s been a week of beans & fruit cocktail. A pyramid of crusty cans clutter her kitchen table. She has real trouble concentrating. Today’s swarm of busy metallic green bottle flies makes it worse.

***

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.

Each of us will carry the seeds. They say we will know when to plant them. They say we must keep them safe.

My sister never wanted to be safe. She wanted to know things. It must have been unbearable not knowing what the seeds were for, because one day she swallowed hers one by one. They buried her for shame on the edge of the woods with a stone too small to cover her.

Most days now I go there when the crows gather before dusk. They watch me, flapping and croaking in the trees. I tell them about the day my sister got her sachet of seeds, how she dangled it in front of me, back and forth like a hypnotist’s watch in the room we shared with clenched spider corpses and blossoming mold. When she pretended to throw it out the window, I shrieked, and she put her hand over my mouth, laughing, resting the sachet on my forehead. I could just barely feel the tiny kernels while I breathed against her fingers.

My sister always smelled of forbidden things. Strawberry lotion and cinnamon gum and different kinds of smoke. Somehow she’d gotten to know the boy on the farm at the end of the road, over two miles from our farthest fencepost, and she claimed but made me promise not to say that he would take her in his rumbling truck to the town where you could find just about anything you’d ever imagined. And where no one carried the seeds.

One evening the crows cackle in unfamiliar rhythm as I approach my sister’s too-small stone. Sprouting from beneath the granite, a tongue of green trembles. Days pass, and a leaf unfurls, then two and three, till soon there are so many that the wind passing through them sighs just the way my sister used to when she stared out the window and I would ask her where she wanted to go, and she would say, Everywhere, everywhere. And when the plant’s buds burst into delicate stars, they smell of her shampoo.

I tell the crows about the night she snuck back into our room with that pearly bottle, a scent like the tropics, all sunshine and coconut. It comes from a store – a drugstore, she’d said and pulled a pair of chocolate bars from under her shirt. Even though they’d melted with the warmth of her skin, the taste made both of us cry until we’d licked the wrappers clean.

I don’t need to tell the crows why I do what I do next. I pick a leaf off the plant that grows from my sister’s grave. And then I eat it whole.

Each day I pick more and more, and the plant grows and grows like all it wants to do is feed me. I start to hear her, as if the roots have reached right down into what used to be her mouth. Only there are no words – just the language of cells changed into other cells, memories that could never be explained but that lived as flesh lives. A knowledge that cannot be known unless it becomes the body.

I am so hungry for it, so hungry for her, for the expanse of all she knew to consume my own unknowing. Bit by bit, she sows it into me. The deep smell of rivers. The freedom of bare feet on a dashboard. The sweet, brittle foam of milkshakes and the icebox dark of a movie theater in summer. The unexpected buoyancy of earth.

But there is always more and more I do not know. I eat and eat and eat.

Meanwhile they say I am getting tall, I am getting strong, my bones no longer puncture my skin. They say that soon I will be big enough to carry the seeds myself. But I am no longer waiting for that.

Above my sister’s grave, the flowers are turning to fruit. Perhaps they will taste like her kisses, cherry lip gloss and cloves. Or else like soil. Or death. The crows and I keep watch, waiting until they are ripe. I promise I will get there first, I will pluck and devour them all. And then she will tell me everything.

***

Erin Calabria grew up on the edge of a field in rural Western Massachusetts and currently lives in Magdeburg, Germany. She is a co-founding editor at Empty House Press, a small press publishing writing about home, place, and memory. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize and was selected as a winner for The Best Small Fictions 2017. You can read more of her work in Sundog Lit, Split Lip Magazine, Wyvern Lit, Third Point Press, and other places. She tweets @erin_calabria.

We drive to the woods and let out my big brother. It’s his time, my father says. My brother dashes out the car and circles. His teeth are long and silver, but he doesn’t want to go. He doesn’t want to go into the woods. He smells like feral cat. He has those whiskers in his ears, that peach fuzz, that’s when it all starts. Don’t let me go, my brother says. He says it but it comes out wrong, like he should go, he should go into those woods. He should run like a feral cat and chase the jackals and run up in the trees, into the stars, into all the fairytales my mom’s told. About what happens, when boys grow to be a certain age, and run into the woods. When their dads drive them over there like feral dogs. My dad tosses him a lunchbox. There’s a ham sandwich, provisions. A hunting knife and Poland Spring. That’s his favorite brand. He can tell them apart, he says, he said so in his high chair. Poland Spring. Fiji bad! My mother took a picture. She posted it to Facebook. She told us stories, about the woods. How we wouldn’t get eaten. We wouldn’t, we would curl up in the stars. And there would be another mother there, taking pictures. There would be a Facebook in the sky. We would be warm, and happy.

***

Leonora Desar’s writing has appeared in River Styx, Passages North, Mid-American Review, Black Warrior Review Online, Wigleaf and Wigleaf’s Top 50, and elsewhere. Her matchbook piece “My Father’s Girlfriend” is forthcoming in The Best Small Fictions 2019. Three of her pieces were chosen for Best Microfiction 2019. She is fiction editor for Pidgeonholes and lives in Brooklyn. 

He had six fingers on each hand and played improvisational piano. The audience leaned in to hear his tinkling brook as it splashed around the fat stones of the double bass. The air at the club was dark and his hands were quick. Nobody noticed the extra digits. Later, at the after-party, a woman lingered beside his wine. She wouldn’t have put it this way, but she was weary of the five-fingered world. She wanted to hear herself say the chords that only his hands could form.

***

Charles Rafferty’s most recent collections of poems are The Smoke of Horses (BOA Editions, 2017) and Something an Atheist Might Bring Up at a Cocktail Party (Mayapple Press, 2018). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, O, Oprah Magazine, Prairie Schooner, and Ploughshares. His stories have appeared in The Southern Review and New World Writing, and his story collection is Saturday Night at Magellan’s (Fomite Press, 2013). He has won grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism, as well as the 2016 NANO Fiction Prize. Currently, he directs the MFA program at Albertus Magnus College and teaches at the Westport Writers’ Workshop.

Your chapstick, cash for tolls, the parking lot slip, a pack of Trident, car keys, a bouquet of daisies, a card, your best friend’s birthday, reservations, the restaurant he likes, his wife’s name, the conversation, a light tone, a glass of water when you order another cocktail, half my fries, the cup of coffee you refuse, a pleasant tone, the waiter’s eye, a smile that says “don’t worry, everything’s fine here,” another water, napkins to wipe the drink you spilled, your arm just above your fist, conciliatory words, petals from the flowers you smashed, an apologetic tone with the manager, our jackets, the passenger side door, your accusations, your tears, a pack of Kleenex, a pack of gum, your chapstick, my breath.

***

Kayleigh Shoen’s stories have appeared in [100-Word Story], Crack the Spine, Green Briar Review and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Emerson College and teaches writing in the Boston area. You can find her tweets about dogs, writing and TV at @whowantssoup or sign up for her newsletter at kayleighshoen.substack.com.

Patrick (Columbus, Ohio, June 1977)

Touching Once (is so hard to keep).  You were always the Boy Scout. We fumbled and made out in basements, cars, any dark corner, but we never saw each other naked. My Catholic upbringing wrapped around me more tightly that any chastity belt. Then I went away and tasted deeper desires, danced on the edge. When you came to visit, you saw how I took off my watch and laid it on the nightstand, and you knew there was someone else. When we met in the park that summer, I held out a shopping bag of all the albums I’d borrowed, even the ones you said I could keep.

Brian (Avalon, New Jersey, July 1981)

Don’t You Want Me? I took a job to be near you and all that summer we screwed and fought. I saved every slight, turning them in my mind, polishing them with my insecurity. I knew you were sleeping with a married woman, but I pretended I didn’t care. Late nights I called to see if you were home. That July night at the shore, we went to a bar where we danced and I had enough beer to make me free and fearless. I whispered in your ear and you led me to your car where I tried to change your mind.

Miguel (Brooklyn, New York, June 1983)

Making Love Out of Nothing at All. I allowed myself to forget that it was only an affair, that you weren’t supposed to matter. When you took me home to meet your family, your abuela asked if I spoke Spanish, said she’d teach me. I wished she’d taught me the word for betrayal.

Daniel (Chesapeake Bay, August 1989)

Nick of Time.  You said we were complete, that children would ruin us, and I believed you. But the summer after my parents died, I realized it wasn’t enough. I wanted to sing lullabies, and I had hoped you’d change your mind. That last weekend on your boat, you revealed your secret, the decision you made long ago in a cold operating room. I whispered enough before I dove into the cool murky water and swam for shore, leaving your lies behind.

***

Barbara Buckley Ristine escaped from the law years ago, but she has no regrets. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in the Mojave River Review, Flash Flood, and Bards & Scholars Quarterly, among others. She lives with her family in northern Nevada, where she is (slowly) working on a novel.

The bottle-green car rumbles through sleepy streets, chugs along the squeaky cobbles, shrieks every time my mother tries to shift it along.

“I need a cigarette,” she says. “I can’t function without a smoke.”

We reach the outskirts, the meadows, and goats come running, stumbling, to watch us cough and sputter past. “I’ll be back to pet you soon!” I promise them in my mind, and they flop their ears, For real? and show me their crooked baby teeth.

Then Mom’s going faster and faster and we’re beyond all the pastures, zooming around Stop-sign curves. We grunt up every-last furzy hill and grind and brake back down.

If I were a goat, my eyes panoramic, I would look at everything, stare down everything, until it roared with flame–until the choices were forced to claim me, make me soft and warm.

The beach is cold, a bandage-strip of seagulls wheeling around tangled clots of debris. Sanderlings hustle like doctors and nurses: scurry and poke, scurry and poke.

Mom spreads a picnic blanket and pops champagne. She fishes her old wedding flutes from a basket and pours for two. She sticks the second glass in the sand and clinks. I am dry-mouthed, thinking about what it means to feel constantly stabbed.

The bottle spent, waves arrive–liquid ice–and Mom strips to her bra and panties. She wades in, and farther in. Her aim is clear and strong and stern as a vintage stem of glass.

When she is no longer bobbing and gasping, I rise and return to the bottle-green car. I will lock her wet-wool shawl into its old-tired trunk. I will start the motor and go.

Oh, how things never work as planned. Nothing but fun, that’s how driving always seemed. Now, the wheel is larger than a liar’s moon. The gear shift is a stubborn stork.

Mom shimmers into the back seat. I gnaw my cheeks, try to breathe. My lungs fill with knives that want to leap out and slice curses into the nearest brain. But you can’t just go full craniotomy on some person’s freshly-drowned ghost. Not after they’ve just stooped to bequeath you their shit-box bottle-green car.

Mom lights a Tareyton, rolls her window down.

She’s ignoring my presence. I’m ignoring her smog.

I think: I should heave a boulder onto the Gas. Send this crap-heap off a cliff and just hitchhike up the coast.

“Don’t be an ass,” says Mom’s ghost–but she’s not even looking at me. She’s studying an anemic fringe of mountain pine. Nestled within: a scrawny osprey on a spindly heart of sticks.

Mom stubs out her spent butt. And, miraculously, doesn’t light another. She mutters, “Let’s go pet your fucking goats.”

In the dream version, I am floored: my mother finally gets love right.

The starving osprey beats its wings. It rises, then plunges towards liquid glass.

***

C.B. Auder’s writing and art have appeared in Bending Genres, Atlas + Alice, Pidgeonholes, OCCULUM, Longleaf Review, and elsewhere. Find Aud on Twitter at @ClawAndBlossom.

1.

My mother flashes the headlights on and off when we see the truck headed up the drive. We bounce in our seats and wave through the windshield, though in the slow rain and the overcast gray, a little fogging on the glass, I don’t know if he could see all that anyway. But he pulls to the house instead of turning toward the barn. Mother stands in the wet, tucks her hair behind her ear and explains to him that she locked the keys in the house. His red eyes turn us over a moment. He draws on a cigarette and then hands it to my mother’s grasping fingers. She takes a single drag and relinquishes it again. He runs the zipper of his coveralls to his throat and turns up the sidewalk. From an iron deckchair he boosts himself onto the lowest part of the roof. He disappears into the attic’s shaky old window, swift and smooth like he’s done this before, he knows our home that well. We wait.

2.

The water eats up the pavement. Mother slows us before a lost portion of highway, a dip between two pastures where the creek, or the trees of its normal banks, lies in sight across the flooded bottomland. Her old blue Crown Vic idles around us, smokes a little in the cold summer rain. The orange pump-shaped light warning of a low tank flashes on the dash.

I can still see the road, she promises. She eases us forward into the stretched, pried, flung-open jaws of Richland Creek.

Later I tell her to drive more slowly, save the fuel so we’re sure to make it to town, but she says we’ll burn it either way.

3.

In the sun we cast our lines out over the choppy lake and pull them back empty again and again. Once I snag a stick and loose it to the surface, panic and drop my pole thinking it’s a snake. I flee to the green, stilted house just back from the water. Everyone promises it’s nothing more than the lost limbs of a tree. They untangle the line and set me back to pulling the floater aimlessly along the bank. It happens again, another gnarled branch, and I’m just as scared. Someone shouts at me to cut it out. He leans over me, I can see his breath but not his face, and out beyond us somewhere geese and thunder call to each other across the breeze. There’s not a goddamn thing in this world to be scared of, he says, and with a jerk he rips my line free again.

4.

We drive down the Interstate and pull in at the rest area just across the state line. A tall rocket points skyward, and we haul a basket of food from the car to eat in its shadow. We’re not the only ones to have this idea—other families lie scattered around us. Most of them have sacks of fast-food hamburgers, buckets of fried chicken, plastic containers packed with salad or pasta. We have sandwiches wrapped in thin, slick paper and a glass dish filled with cookies. There’s almost nothing to clean up after.

We’re still between cities, but we’re closer now to Huntsville and the Arsenal and the secrets buried in their deep governmental halls. The archaic, decommissioned space missile arching overhead, painted the flat colors of an old cartoon, feels cosmopolitan. I imagine a world of them lined side-by-side, walking between them and passing in and out of them. Traveling. Nearby there’s the hulking frame of a World War II jet, but it doesn’t move me. Mother insists on a Polaroid snapshot of me in front of it after we’ve eaten.

Before we leave we walk through the Welcome Center, use the bathroom and poke at the screen of the boxy, blue-lighted computer map showing highways across the state of Alabama. While she stands comparing its digital readout against the paper map glass-mounted on the wall, I pull a thick stack of glossy brochures from their stands nearby: space and rockets, cotton, catfish, the river, civil rights, colleges, a battleship, the sea. There’s so much of the world so close it’s hard to believe. I carry it all to the door and watch out over the dimming light of the emptying lot. The wind picks up, and a few drops of water land on the windows. She checks her watch and says give it just a little longer.

***

Marvin Shackelford is author of a collection of poems, Endless Building, and a forthcoming story collection. His work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Wigleaf, Hobart and elsewhere. He resides in Southern Middle Tennessee and has no clue what he’s doing with his life, honestly.