Once, Mona’s little sister Maribel almost touched the moon. Maribel pumped her legs harder and harder, sailing higher and higher on the playground swing, until the sky turned to ash and the rain pummeled down. Mona watched Maribel’s toes inch closer and closer to the moon, their little shirts and shorts stuck to their little bodies. Mona tipped her head back, stretched her mouth open, and fed on the rain. They knew they should head home, but Maribel chanted Almost…Almost…Almost and pumped her legs harder. Mama would be asleep on the couch anyway, one leg slipped to the floor, her hands opening and clenching in her sleep, like she was grabbing for something bigger than she could hold.

Once, Maribel’s big sister Mona pulled her into their closet, tucking a blanket around their bodies. She told Maribel to sing any song she could think of. Maribel sang Katy Perry songs, mixing up the lyrics, while Mona braided her hair. They switched, and Maribel sang sweet softness at Mona’s neck, roping Mona’s hair over and around to the tips. But they could still hear their mother’s faint mews—Stop, Brad, oh Brad, please stop. That surprised them. They thought this guy’s name was Brian.

Once, Mona’s and Maribel’s real dad came through town and took them to Burger King. He asked them if they liked school. Yeah. He asked them if they’d liked the Christmas presents he’d mailed to them. Yeah. He asked them if their mama was being good to them. Yeah. He said he wished things could have worked out differently, that he missed them to the moon and back, that he gave what he could but he had new mouths to feed now, too. They wanted to ask him if they could live with him and his other family, but it came out sounding like Can we have more fries?

Once, Mona and Maribel found their mama sitting at the kitchen table in the dark, a cigarette ember casting a faint glow along her jaw and cheek as she raised the cigarette to her lips. They shared a glass of water as their mama told them how bone-deep tired she was, how stuck she felt. How she tried so hard and just spun her wheels. How she wished their lives were different, that all it would take was just one good one to come along. Mona and Maribel hugged their mama and told her they loved her. Oh, girls, it’s just not the same kind of love, now, is it? They guessed not.

Once, Mona’s little sister Maribel whispered she wished she was old enough to run away. They could go to the moon for real and eat the expensive Kraft Mac & Cheese whenever they wanted, until their tummies couldn’t hold another bite. Their real dad would buy them little pink fishing poles and take them fishing with the boys he called their brothers. Where they wouldn’t have to remember which one was Brad or Brian or Chet or Marvin or Glen. Mona took Maribel’s hand and they tiptoed past mama on the couch, down the cinderblock steps that tilted a little deeper into the dirt every year, around the tree that pushed the sidewalk higher and higher until it broke open, roots rising to the stars. Mona whispered back, This way…This way…This way.

***

L Mari Harris splits her time between Nebraska and the Ozarks, and works as a copywriter in the tech industry. Her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have been published in or are forthcoming in Bird’s Thumb, cahoodaloodaling, Gravel, Lost Balloon, MoonPark Review, Silk Road Review, among others. Follow her on Twitter @LMariHarris and read more of her work at www.lmariharris.wordpress.com.

Dear whoever you are—

You know I think about you often. The way the edge of your coat was caked with mud. Mud that reminded me of chocolate icing and then I instantly felt stupid for the thought. Because what was going to happen next would be a lot more serious than chocolate cake. You left soggy footprints on the wool rug and I winced. I winced, and then I ran. At least I tried to. But you already know all this. I don’t know why I’m explaining it to you. You know. I should tell you what you don’t know.

Like, when you told me you only wanted money, you promised you wouldn’t hurt me, your throat closed up and your voice cracked. Not the most flattering tell, but that’s when I knew you were a liar. I heard you rummaging through my kitchen drawers looking for a knife.

I knew that when I sat mute and motionless on my couch for two hours you were still in the room with me even though you wanted me to believe you were gone. When I whimpered, you exhaled. I felt your hot breath brush across the back of my neck.

I knew when you closed the bedroom window you had opened to get in that you planned to kill me. You were afraid the neighbors would hear my scream. And it was a signal for me to move.

I knew I’d get out of the handcuffs because I have double-jointed thumbs. Lucky me, right? I waited until you left the room—for a glass of water you said—and fear and adrenaline, like an animal thrashing inside me, took over. You did not see me, even as I passed you in the hall as close as a ghost, and walked right out the front door.

***

Jules lives in Arizona. She likes to smell old books and drink red wine. Her chapbook ALL THE GHOSTS WE’VE ALWAYS HAD is out from Thirty West Publishing.

I’m sorry I can’t find the tiny hole in the metal contraption in the back of your mouth. Even with a flashlight and your head tilted back, I still can’t make contact. The opening disappears. I’m sorry I keep stabbing your gums with the key that is meant to turn the device, to expand your palate.

Ow, you say each time I miss. Other parents don’t hurt their kids, you say.

I won’t tell you what my friend shared the night before at dinner. A carving knife laid beside an uneaten red velvet cake.

Each time I see a knife, my friend said, I imagine picking it up and slicing my tongue. I can’t stop having this vision.

I nodded because I understood. I’ve had such visions with other objects, or with you, when you were a baby. I imagined how easy it would be to snap your tiny arm in half. Another friend back then confided she fantasized about throwing her screaming baby out of the window. Not that we’d ever do any of those things, but those of us who were honest shared our darkest thoughts.

When I finally get the key to stay in place, I take a deep breath and push it up. They say turn the key as if you’re unlocking a vault, but really it’s more like opening a garage door. As I push it back, I imagine you getting smaller, younger, shrinking back to that helpless baby who couldn’t talk back.

Ow, you say again, your voice deeper — closer to my tone than a baby’s squeal.

I’m almost finished, I say.

Your eyes look in mine, as if searching for a different key. Maybe you wish I would turn it the opposite direction. To speed things up, to give you a growth spurt.

But that’s what I’m doing. I’m widening your jaw. I am making you bigger.

There was another time I remember sitting in a window seat in my bedroom nursing your baby brother. You were playing with a ball outside, and I heard the squeal of rubber trying to stop on pavement. I ran outside and saw that your ball had rolled down our steep driveway and into the center of the road. You’d run after it. A man driving a pick-up truck had pounded on his brakes hard enough so that he’d just missed hitting you.

I could have killed her, he yelled.

I know, I yelled back.

You held tightly on to your ball and we both stared at the thick black skid marks that the tires had made on the road. Your baby brother cried by himself inside, and I couldn’t wait for you both to grow up.

Have you ever looked at a person’s face, you ask with your hand covering your sore mouth, and seen exactly what they’ll look like when they grow up?

I nod. I have.

That happened to me yesterday, you say, with a boy at school while we were doing math.

I wonder what that means.

It doesn’t mean anything. It was just weird.

Then why did you bring it up, I want to ask as you turn away, as if you’ve turned a key in my mouth that caused me to regress to your age.

Instead, I shrug and tuck the thought away. I stare at your face and try to imagine you as an adult turning a key inside the mouth of your child.

What are you looking at, you ask.

Nothing, I answer, and pull you towards me so I can kiss the top of your head.

Though you squirm, you lean in to me and say: Don’t lose the key again.

***

Liz Matthews received her MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Brain Child, Quality Women’s Fiction, Brevity, and is upcoming in Spelk and The Tishman Review. She teaches writing at Westport Writers’ Workshop in Connecticut. 

It’s 2011 and I’m in Brooklyn, staring at the mirror. Or through the mirror. Or into the mirror. I don’t know but all I can see is myself nodding my head and shrugging my shoulders as I roll my eyes out of my head and onto the floor that’s in the mirror of myself or yourself.

There are so many dreams found in this mirror–one includes a payphone while it’s raining outside. I’m calling my dead mother…mother…mother…mother…dead.

“Hi Mom!” I shout, excitedly, jumping up and down. And there is nothing but death and I think to myself while living inside this mirror that is a dream and I thought to myself how the air is so so thick that I can use the knives I once used to try to kill myself to cut the air…or myself…or myself.

And when I hang up, the coin return slot clanks and there’s my quarter, as if it had never been used before.

I’m dreaming that I’m wondering about imagining what I had thought about years ago, when I was just a child sitting at the kitchen table, with my dead mother–so much to walk through when entering a mirror with your eyes or body or mind. She’s sighing as a distant alarm clock goes off, making a shrilling noise to remind us all that this was all just a dream in a mirror full of nothing.

I am rich. I am straight. I am white. But no matter, because the illness doesn’t care about those things, it only cares about taking over at the slightest sense of vulnerability. And it knows that I am that vulnerability, that I want to latch on to that which wants to take over me or the mirror or the dream.

“Be happy with yourself,” mother says, as I look into the mirror, wishing for larger breasts, a prettier face, and slenderer elbows, and the mirrors sighs and the dream yawns.

Sometimes I just wish I could put my head in a rucksack, sometimes I wish the mirror isn’t a dream and that the dream is real, and someone would pick up the rucksack and throw my head in a ditch full of moths and butterflies fluttering around a tin can thinking that it’s the flame of the sun.

“You have pretty green eyes and seashell ears,” my mother says, “like the ocean but they look so sad, like the ocean under a grey day.”

Sacre vérité.

Thinking about then now or now then, my mother is depressed, sad, like the only reason she would leave her room was because of me. I am my mother’s daughter.

Once, a long time ago, inside this mirror, I’m in love with someone who wears flannel and thick sideburns, but he breaks up with me because of my breasts. So the mirror tells me. So it goes in the dream of glasses and windows.

Very little did I know. Very little did I know.

“You have movie star good looks,” my mother says, as she sets down a plate of pancakes in front of me. “…You’re curvy in all the right places….”

She says this so I wake up from my dream. She says this so I stop looking into the mirror. She’s dead though.

Lipstick, blush, mascara, eyeliner, shiny hair, hips, thighs, ankles, bracelets, necklaces, and all the other ways to cover my scars and memories that only mirrors and dreams are made of.

I am singing and the walls are chuckling back at me. I am singing and there’s no one listening to me. I’m so special. I’m so special. I’m so pretty.

One day I’ll be a writer and the mirror will dissolve into words that will become a dream full of nightmares for everyone to laugh at. Laugh at.

When me and my mother are talking, we don’t speak to each other for long periods of time during our conversations.

“How are you doing today?” she asks.

And there’s nothing until the sound of nothing is too overwhelming.

And then, “I…I…I….”

And there’s nothing again. Just a pause. A long pause full of eternity and crystal blue eyes.

I won’t make it, I think to myself, but my mother says, “You’re so beautiful but you don’t know it.”

And that’s how it ends. Just me, and the mirror, and a dream from which I wake up when I close my eyes.

We are all such beautiful ghosts.

***

Shome Dasgupta is the author of i am here And You Are Gone (Winner Of The 2010 OW Press Fiction Chapbook Contest), The Seagull And The Urn (HarperCollins India, 2013) which has been republished in the UK by Accent Press as The Sea Singer (2016), Anklet And Other Stories (Golden Antelope Press, 2017), Pretend I Am Someone You Like (University of West Alabama’s Livingston Press, 2018), and Mute (Tolsun Books, 2018). He currently serves as the Series Editor for the Wigleaf Top 50. He lives in Lafayette, LA, and can be found at www.shomedome.com and @laughingyeti.

She (they thought that she was floating — a universe in herself, encompassing the magic of the unknown and no one dared to ask her, talk to her, look at her as she emitted an aura of such wonderful power, there was nothing but silence, and in that silence, the world was rotating in such a magnitude, that the earth shook a bit, causing the seismologists, who were just getting ready to eat lunch, to glance at their machines) watched the storm approach while holding an avocado in her left hand.

***

Shome Dasgupta is the author of i am here And You Are Gone (Winner Of The 2010 OW Press Fiction Chapbook Contest), The Seagull And The Urn (HarperCollins India, 2013) which has been republished in the UK by Accent Press as The Sea Singer (2016), Anklet And Other Stories (Golden Antelope Press, 2017), Pretend I Am Someone You Like (University of West Alabama’s Livingston Press, 2018), and Mute (Tolsun Books, 2018). He currently serves as the Series Editor for the Wigleaf Top 50. He lives in Lafayette, LA, and can be found at www.shomedome.com and @laughingyeti.

Apple and Sunny always emerge when the weather becomes warm. Half the town is convinced neither of them exist in the fall and winter, simply materialize at the first flower’s bloom, slim feet in roller blades, skin glowing, shirts just short enough to make the boys stare.

They are always on the move, Apple and Sunny. Rushing past the beauty salon, the overpriced boutique, the post office, the bookstore. They stop in front of the church on Main Street to look up at the scaffolding. Their arms wrap around each other’s waists, and sometimes they do this, they entwine their limbs so tightly together they are like one writhing animal, pink and brown skin melded into one. And then they are off again, laughing at the cars that honk at them.

Honey wishes she could be a part of them, could have once been a part of them. A three-headed beast to take on the world, but Honey does not exist in the summer. Apple and Sunny lie on the grass in the park, flat stomachs facing the sun, soaking up Vitamin D, their fingers twisted together, and Honey watches them from the library window. She could have been that once, proudly girlish and open to the world. But doubt unfurls in the pit of her stomach, whispers the things she knows to be true, and Honey buries her face in a book again.

Most parents think Apple and Sunny are too everything. Too loud, too happy, too shameless, too—

Sometimes Honey follows them to the top of the hill at the edge of town where she realizes why she so wants to be Apple-and-Sunny. Their pink mouths press against each other, soft and open. Hands in hair, thighs interlocking, their short shirts pulling up higher, higher, and Honey has never felt another girl’s breasts before, but Apple and Sunny make them look soft, welcoming. Honey sometimes touches her own in response, imagining the weight of somebody else’s in her palm. She touches her knees, wondering if Apple and Sunny’s are smooth like hers or scraped and calloused, relics from years of rollerblading. They are wild and they are alive, and Honey thinks if she could just taste it, she could be, too.

After Apple and Sunny are finished, they race down the hill. Faster, faster! they urge each other. Honey’s heart leaps into her throat, threatening to land on the asphalt in front of her. The hill is not steep, but it is high, and her nightmares are filled with visions of long limbs and pretty hair tangled up and speckled with blood, there at the bottom of the hill.

But Apple and Sunny make it, turning off into the grass where they fall over each other laughing. Big laughter. Solid laughter. Honey imagines she could join them, cackling up to the sky as if daring it to tell her she cannot.

One summer, the girls disappear just as the humidity becomes oppressive. There are whispers about it among the town. Where have they gone? Good riddance, some people say when they think nobody else can hear. And then after a few weeks, they say it louder. In the beauty salon, the overpriced boutique, the post office, the bookstore. Girls are not meant to be so proud, they say.

Honey alone is devastated, though she dare not say this in front of her parents. Instead, she goes to the top of the hill at the edge of town, stands on the spot where Apple and Sunny would be. She touches her lips. Perhaps Apple and Sunny needed more space and more air, somewhere their open laughs to the sky would be greeted with joy, where girls are meant to be proud.

Honey has never seen where the road goes at the bottom of the hill. She imagines she could toss something down and it would keep rolling and rolling and rolling, on forever.

***

Camille Clarke is a Midwestern writer currently living in the South. She is working on a novel in between cups of tea. Find her on Twitter where she mostly tweets about how adorable her nephew is: @_camillessi.

The father sits down on the floor near the bed and says Now I am going to tell you a story. But then: he doesn’t tell a story. He sits there in the near dark looking lost and breathing with his ragged half-drunk filling up the room. The daughter waits, staring up at him, her father who does not tell stories. Who is not telling a story now.

The room is lit by the slant of light from the closet door. The father entered the room with some ill-formed goodnight notion. Perhaps he thought inertia would carry him through. Now he is here on the floor with his little girl turned toward him and she is the most gorgeous thing he can imagine. The brightest star, and no words for it. No way to push this feeling out of himself and into the world. His daughter looks at him, tentative and waiting, and nothing comes. The father wonders if a bird could grow so fat with seed that it could no longer fly. And what would happen to that bird? Something terrible, probably. Gutted by some cat. Washed down a storm drain and starved by its gluttony. Connected forever to some patch of earth. Something fathers can’t bear. Something to be avoided.

Finally, the daughter speaks up, saying Once upon a time. But she doesn’t know what comes next either, being small, having never felt the burden of planning out logical sequence and consequence. Embarrassment settles in the room and weighs on both of them. The father rattles ice in his glass, the daughter flicks the corner of the blanket that’s she’s wrapped into her little clenching fist. And maybe this is now the story: that for fathers and daughters it isn’t often easy. That to say we never really see each other is untrue, only that when we do, something makes us look away. A good story is one that sometimes has a lesson in it. The two of them sit there and wait for this thing they’ve made to pass them by.

The father knows he should be better at father. The daughter will know this too, but later. Later, when she is grown, later when her own child sleeps in this bed, and it is summer vacation, later after much strain and silence that has happened between this first moment and the new one and the father comes in again—perhaps fatted on seed—glass held offhand and that same sour breath whiskey clinking man still, rounder now, yes, and frailer now, and all those old man things that happen very slowly and then all at once. And there, beyond the conception of a little girl sitting up in bed in the slantlight from the closet, way out past what that light can reach, is a man named Gary who wonders where his brightest star went and who these people are in her place. And is that the story.

***

Zach VandeZande is an author and professor. He lives in Ellensburg, Washington (sometimes) and Washington, DC (sometimes). He is the author of a novel, Apathy and Paying Rent (Loose Teeth Press, 2008), and a forthcoming short story collection, Liminal Domestic: Stories (Gold Wake Press, 2019). He knows all the dogs in his neighborhood. Find him at zachvz.com.

Maybe I could have done things differently. The ladybird on the bathroom wall was probably escaping the first snow fall, looking to hibernate but I crushed it inside toilet paper. I wiped away its orange guts with the ball of tissue that contained its wings, legs and tiny heart. I threw it all into the toilet where it’s normal for bodily fluids to get forgotten. Normal.

Nicole Kidman says she doesn’t kill spiders or even ants. I wonder if that’s because she has people to do that for her? There comes a time when we all question our humanity doesn’t there. I once had a roommate who said she had a woman who had her periods for her. Once a month her mother sent her chocolate cake in a tin and she’d eat it (while on the phone to her mother) directly from the tin, using her forefinger and thumb, careful not to allow cake to collect under her manicured nails. I almost believed her because her hair was so silky and she wore matching underwear sets that she hand washed in the basin in the bathroom. I saw her at a reunion last year, she carried her baby son on her hip.

Ladybirds actually have an open circulatory system, they don’t have a heart as we know it. I don’t know whether they have tears.

It was wrong of me to take a life.

I could have made a warm matchbox bed for it. I could have checked on my ladybird from time to time when I couldn’t sleep.

It isn’t normal to forget.

I should have held it close, listened to it breathing, lay beside it in case it woke up, carried it on my hip, even sent it a chocolate cake in a tin when it grew up, done anything to protect it.

***

Marissa Hoffmann is recently published in Bending Genres, and is variously long and short listed in competitions. www.marissahoffmann.com She occasionally tweets @Hoffmannwriter and welcomes an annual loveliness of ladybirds on the south facing wall of her home.

Midnight, and Sam is burying the spoons again. Because he thinks burying the spoons is the trick to getting me pregnant.

“Why spoons?” I asked the first time he did it. It’s not just the delicate silver teaspoons that he buries, the spoons we inherited from his mother and that look like they might actually hold some magic. He buries every spoon in our kitchen. The plump soup spoons that are too wide for a small child’s mouth. The sweet little clay spoons I made in pottery classes back when I still took pottery classes. The soft wooden cooking spoons, too.

“Spoons are sensual,” Sam said.

“I guess,” I said, but I knew what he meant. I used to think when I was shaping them out of clay about how the curved scoop of the spoons felt like breasts, the handles like weirdly slender penises. Like a cat penis maybe, only longer.

They’re a fertility symbol if there ever was one.

After Sam buries the spoons, we have sex. Is the sex good? Sometimes it is. Sometimes I’m so tired I practically sleep right through it. Other times I can’t relax. Can’t stop picturing him burying those spoons. His fingers digging in the dirt. The way sweat beads on his forehead.

Sometimes he sounds like a raccoon scurrying around in the moonlight. That past February raccoons plucked the fruit I’d left on our orange tree. They peeled those oranges as neatly as any human. The rinds scattered beneath the tree made me think of shed exoskeletons.

Every morning just before sunrise Sam digs those spoons up again. Because that’s part of the ritual. The spoons must be unearthed before light touches the soil, or the trick won’t work.

How long as has he been doing this? Eleven weeks now? Seventeen? I don’t know anymore.

I know this: the only thing that’s changed shape around here is the spoons. Every day they look a little more worn, a little more bent. And every day they make the food in our mouths taste a little bit more like dirt.

***

Michelle Ross is the author of There’s So Much They Haven’t Told You (2017), which won the 2016 Moon City Press Short Fiction Award. Her fiction has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, Epiphany, Fanzine, The Pinch, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, and other venues. She is fiction editor of Atticus Review. www.michellenross.com.

Mom wants to take a road trip, like we used to when Mitch and me were younger and dad was still alive. I miss the sense of adventure, she says. Mom manages to hold her form to the point where you could see the crow’s feet around her eyes; she’s getting better at remembering her body every day.

I remember being more bored than thrilled on long car rides. Dad was cheap with the air conditioning, even when we crossed through states where it felt like we were swimming more than driving. I won’t wear shorts anymore when I’m driving because of how the backs of my legs stuck to the upholstery. I hate when Mitch drives. He’s like our dad, taking his time to get to wherever it is that we need to go. Mitch deliberately slows us down when he can tell I’m getting pissed.

Can we get a gas tanker truck or something to hold her, Mitch asks.

Mom might eat through the metal, I say.

We could use the body we built for her.

I look at the glass house we have mom living in, her form spread throughout, her color a deep forest green. I wonder if she’s dreaming about rest stops and stale sandwiches and fireflies and sore biceps from all the punches we gave them when we caught a VW bug before she could.

***

J. Bradley is the author of Greetings from America: Letters from the Trade War (Whiskey Tit Books, 2019). His flash fiction piece, “How to Burn a Bridge Job Aid” was selected for Best Small Fictions 2019. He lives at jbradleywrites.com.