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.

Children in the schoolyard throw rocks at the scarlet letter sewn upon my chest. Brick by brick a thousand sins build a wall. Blackbirds swoop and dive, pulling ribbons and strands of golden hair to line their nests. There is no escape.

*

The therapist tells me to call her Mary as though it somehow makes us friends, comrades, partners-in-crime. She places a protective hand over the growing mound that is her child, while she tries to convince me to give up my own. Snowflakes fall like molting feathers.

*

From the belly of the old cypress, a blackbird calls out to his flock, warning them about the dangers that lie ahead. He mimics the cat’s meow, the scrape of bone against bone, the cries that can’t be soothed.

*

Lying in bed I watch your knees knead my womb like soft dough. The vibrato of your tiny heart beats in tandem with mine. You are the pupa and I, the chrysalis waiting for you to break free.

*

The moonlight shines upon the blackbird perched on the concrete sill. I reach out to touch a glossy wing, but the rapier pecks and tears deep into my skin, ripping layer after layer until I am transformed into a Madonna dressed in a flowing blue gown, my head crowned with stars and daisies.

*

Squeals erupt from this little girl in pigtails who is flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood. I press my hand into the warm hollow nestled between her shoulder blades. Her legs pump hard against gravity as I launch her into the stratosphere. She smiles down at me standing amongst the thinning mulch where feet have dragged their path. Look Mama, I can fly! I can fly!

***

Kristin Tenor enjoys writing short fiction and poetry. Her work has appeared in The Midwest Review, Spry Literary Journal, and The Peninsula Pulse. She lives in Northeastern Wisconsin with her husband. Learn more @ www.kristintenor.com or find her on Twitter @KristinTenor.

What on Earth does my son’s name matter? There are three of him—four at most—and they all look like their worthless father, who comes and goes. Why take pills when I can make my grandmother’s apple crisp by heart? I don’t need to remember—I know. Grainy clumps of brown sugar stick to my fingers, I lick off the excess. Ripe red fruit beneath knife crunches in my ears. I’m with her now, mixing bowl on the seat of a chair. The kitchen counter’s still too tall for me. She bakes apple crisp, always. I come and go. I may not remember, but I know.

***

Becky Robison is a Chicago native and a graduate of UNLV’s Creative Writing MFA program. Her fiction has appeared in PANK, Paper Darts, Midwestern Gothic, and elsewhere. She also serves as Social Media and Marketing Coordinator for Split Lip Magazine. She’s currently working on a novel.

Midnight on the Moon

is a lonely place, black as the end of hope, like a rocket that ran out of fuel and places to go.  Like a man who, down on Earth, just swore undying love to his wife and sees his lover’s face on the wall behind her.

The wife is a trusting thing, a planet hanging in the sky of his life, faithful and constant.  She will always be there for me, he thinks.  The man is happy, and the wife is happy, and, miles away, even the lover is happy.

Only the moon is lonely.  Only the moon sees the truth.  Even with the sun shining all day on its squinty eyes.

The man swears his love again.  The wife believes him.  And then, later, much , much later, in the white gauzy near-morning, he will enter her, like doubt.

***

Francine Witte is the author of four poetry chapbooks and two flash fiction chapbooks. Her full-length poetry collection, Café Crazy, was published by (Kelsay Books.)  Her play, Love is a Bad Neighborhood, was produced in NYC this past December. She is a former English teacher. She lives in NYC.

A fur trapper is deep in the woods with his grandfather’s gun. He sees a moose and fires his finest shot. The moose is quick. The bullet only takes the tail.

The fur trapper hangs the tail in his cave.

The fur trapper stares at the tail as he cleans his gun, certain to find the moose again.

The next day, with the tail stapled to his pants, the fur trapper finds the moose and again shoots his gun and again the moose is too fast. The bullet only removes an antler. The fur trapper calls his welder friend, turns the antler into a crown.

The next day, wearing the crown and the tail, the fur trapper hunts again. Stalks the moose. Assembles traps, follows tracks.

Day in and day out, the fur trapper takes a leg, takes a tongue. An ear, a tooth. He adds each item to his body. The fur trapper gazes at his reflection in the lake. He sees his enemy, the moose, looking back at him.

But the fur trapper isn’t satisfied, doesn’t like the way the moose stares. Like it has a secret, like it’s still winning. So the fur trapper returns again to the woods, hunting for the moose’s breath, the moose’s nightmares, the moose’s spirit. The ghost of the moose. Always a bit too quick.

The fur trapper refuses defeat. Has the phrase, “What makes a moose?” tattooed on his cheek.

No one talks to the fur trapper when he drinks at the tavern. When he weeps in the back of the church. When he cleans his gun by candlelight on his porch. No one ever asks him about the moose or why he’s covered in fur and blood. The rest of the town is terrified of guns.

***

Ben Niespodziany is a librarian at the University of Chicago. He runs the multimedia art blog [neonpajamas] and has had work published in Paper Darts, Fairy Tale Review (forthcoming), Cheap Pop, and various others. He has never fired a gun.

He needs a place to be other than the underbellies of ships swollen beneath the water. He spends all day sliding along anchor chains, twisting around mossy links, and comes home glowing green; I pick the kelp from his hair but still he smells of barnacles and rust.

Please give him a job where things are seen and touched, not yawning huge, hidden in depths.

He does not need smoke breaks, sunshine, or lunch; let him sort mail under harsh fluorescent bulbs in rooms where paper peels back from the wall.

My ghost boyfriend is loyal and steadfast; he cannot bear to leave this world and for you he will work silently, carefully, and eternally.

If you are nervous about hiring a ghost, please let me lay your mind at rest. He is not transparent but translucent, gathered more thinly than you or I. When he stands against sunlight his edges burn; close your eyes before a bright light and you will see where he starts to dissolve. He cannot disappear, or walk through walls—no disembodied sounds accompany him.

In fact, he makes no sounds at all, but you will quickly learn to interpret his eager, mournful smile.

My ghost boyfriend would be an asset to your company in any role involving repetitive tasks and few words; if he would stay at home when I left, I would leave him list after list of things to do.

But when I shut the door behind me he is suddenly restless, and must ride the trains for hours, silent straphanger, until he can no longer ignore the slow-sounding dance of the chains in the harbor.

Please give him a place to be when I am not around; ghosts, you see, cannot define themselves without another. When their presence is not confirmed, and confirmed again, they must slip into the water, tangle themselves in the unseen tethers that bind the ships to shore.

Respectfully Yours,

***

Rebecca Orchard is a recovering classical musician and professional baker. She has an MFA from Bowling Green State University and is in the PhD program at Florida State University. Her fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from Passages North, Tammy, Exposition Review, the Baltimore Review, The Pinch, and elsewhere. Her work on the Voyager Golden Record has been profiled in the Guardian, BBC World Service Newshour, and Atlas Obscura.