A few years into her wrestling career, when she was bad, Erica recognized that great unspoken truth about the way men see women. If they don’t get to love them—by which she meant, fuck them—they hated them. And if they loved them, it was only for as long as they wanted. Then they’d hate them anyway.

When she was bad, she stopped swimming upstream.

When she was bad, she teased men. Got up close to man in the John Deere hat in the front row, close enough that she might kiss, then whispered hot in his ear, In your dreams.

And that’s all it took. A little individual attention to a few key marks at ringside to get them hot. Then the constant cheating in the ring, pulling a girl’s hair on every lockup, and pulling on her tights for leverage with every pin. Cower away from the offense, then jam a thumb in her opponent’s eye as soon as this good girl gave her some mercy.

The booker put her under the tutelage of Molly Magdalene, the oldest heel in the territory, and Molly took her to finishing school. Taught her what was, in retrospect, the most important lesson of all about how to be bad. You’ve got to live your gimmick.

            The scene: a gas station outside Waco after midnight. They were just trying to make it to the next town, and Erica got the responsibility of buying coffees to keep the car—most importantly the driver—awake. They’d sing along to the radio, and they’d play twenty questions where the answer was always an old-time wrestler—one of the ways they’d been taught to preserve the tradition of the business. The penalty for falling asleep on an overnight drive was to lose bed privileges in the hotel rooms they’d share.

So Erica filled Styrofoam cups with the strong stuff. Thick enough to chew. Stuffed creamers and sugar packets in another cup and loaded them all in a carrier.

That’s when the little boy came up to her.

He had a Radical Robbie Jackson t-shirt, and green and black armbands, and it was clear enough he and his mother had come from the matches. Mom didn’t look like the wrestling fan type. Bushy hair, coke bottle glasses, a modest blouse over Blue Light Special dungarees. She must have gone to the show to make her kid happy. Maybe Dad was out of the picture and this was the best she knew how to do. And what luck, because here they’d stopped for gas and a snack, and there was real life wrestler—no mistaking her, six feet tall, tell-tale tattoo peaking from beneath her black t-shirt. That, and when he said her name, she’d looked.

He held out a crumpled receipt Erica could only assume had come from the pump outside, a ballpoint pen she could only assume his mother carried in an endless supply of practical items in her purse.

It would have been the easiest thing in the world to sign and leave that boy with the story to tell at school about seeing the wrestler out in the wild and having the signature to prove it.

But that wasn’t her gimmick.

She bent to him. Like she might give him a hug, maybe a kiss on the cheek, and she cocked her face up to look at mom when she whispered, In your dreams, loser.

            The boy cried. Loud, soul cries, and his mother was tougher than Erica would have guessed kneeling down and hugging the boy, but calling after Erica, too, that she was a no good bitch.

            Erica paid for the coffees and flashed Mom a smile on her way outside, knowing this was what mattered. This was the story that boy would tell for years to come—these moments when Erica wasn’t just bad, but the dirt worst.

***

Michael Chin was born and raised in Utica, New York and currently lives in Georgia with his wife and son. He has published three chapbooks: Autopsy and Everything After with Burrow press, Distance Traveled with Bent Window Books, and The Leo Burke Finish with Gimmick Press, and he has previously published short work with journals including The Normal School and Passages North. He works as a contributing editor for Moss. Find him online at miketchin.com or follow him on Twitter @miketchin.

 There’s a weight to this afternoon. It sags, the heavy mid-point of the summer holidays. Beneath us are the bones of dinosaurs; above us, the groaning bulk of a jumbo jet. We sit with grass-damp jeans in your back yard and watch it sink slow over the estate, thumbnails green from plucking blades free from the earth. Planes rarely fly over our town. This one hangs so low we can see it clearly, with its blue-striped tail and poppyseed windows.

“It’s going to crash,” you tell me. “Definitely. It’ll be on the news and everything.”

We wait. You’re listening for the impact of ground meeting metal, eyes closed in anticipation. I tell myself to do the same. Any moment now, the future will press itself into our present and we’ll want to remember where we were and what we saw The Day The Plane Went Down. I rehearse my answers. I was beside you, our knees only a blade of grass apart. I saw how pale your eyelashes were and how, as you closed your eyes, they laced themselves together like interlocking fingers. Here is the church and here is the steeple. I saw your fingers, stained with the permanent marker you used yesterday to give me tattoos: a shooting star on my back, your name like hieroglyphs down my leg. They linger on my skin, barely smeared from last night’s bathwater. I savour the thought of them lasting until we go back to school.

It occurs to me that I’ve never seen you so still. Those fingers of yours, always moving, plucking, drawing, always full of the next game you want us to play to pass the time. I’ve never seen them pause like this. I wonder if I’ll ever witness such a rare phenomenon again.

The impact should have happened by now, but you haven’t given up waiting so I won’t either. I want you to have your moment for as long as it will hold, until one of us moves and the anticipation snaps into disappointment and this summer’s day sinks away like every other. If the future you’re waiting for isn’t coming, I want this present to last for as long as possible before it folds into the past. And so I stay still, barely breathing, even though all I want to do is to thread your grassy, ink-stained fingers through mine and find out what happens next.

***

Amy Slack is a cookbook editor from the North-East of England, currently based in London. Her work has been published by Ellipsis Zine, FlashBack Fiction, Idle Ink, Spelk, and The Cabinet of Heed. You can find her on Twitter @amyizzylou, or on her blog, amyizzylou.wordpress.com.

After I built my time machine, I collected lovers across millennia – women with mechanical arms and regenerating cells, thick-bearded men perfumed with cave damp.

One by one I carried them home with me. We threw parties, traded knowledge, made love in unthinkable configurations.

A Sumerian prostitute soon fell pregnant with the child of a Union solider. We named their daughter Palimpsest, for the stories layered in her blood. Each child born thereafter we called by that same name – Palimpsest – because it never stopped being true.

Once our children had grown, brilliant and well-loved, we scattered them like stars across the black sky of time.

Some we flung backward to unmake old evils. On occasion their names turned up in our history books, the text rewriting itself to tell happier tales. Our children unmade some of us along the way, too, descendants of atrocities they’d erased. We grieved but never judged too harshly.

We worried more for the children we’d flung forward, for we never saw them again. In our many tongues, we whispered prayers into the future. We hoped each prayer would find them out and write the proof of our love onto their skin in luminous overlapping tattoos.

***

Sutton Strother is a writer and instructor living in New York. Her work has appeared or will soon appear in Pithead Chapel, Atticus Review, CHEAP POP, Jellyfish Review, and elsewhere. Find her @suttonstrother on Twitter.

Our timing is perfect, a three-minute distraction.

We pass, we flirt, I drop a handkerchief; he bends to retrieve it (the sway of his exaggerated bottom! The laughter!); the return, the curtsey, the bow; our dance, a farcical mazurka, faces pushed close together, bodies angled out; he produces from one of his innumerable pockets a rose; we kiss.

Josef’s face is so close to mine I can smell the greasepaint, see where sweat has left tunnels like tears. His plastered makeup smells like egg whites, that shiny gloss stage, when you’re done beating and ready to bake.

Or maybe it just looks like egg whites, and I imagine the smell. I remember bakery windows full of tiny iced cakes in every color, pillowy loaves of challah, crusty boulders of rye. I remember when anyone could buy eggs and sugar. Could buy a train ticket and go wherever they liked.

Marta is good as gold through the whole act, not a poke, not a peep. I sewed the harness in Josef’s costume, showed her how to fold in her arms and legs, tuck her head between her shoulders. Like doing a somersault, I said. She’s watched the tumblers; she knows.

Curled up in her harness, quiet as a rabbit, she knows. But no one else knows. She disappears. They see a clown with a huge, padded bottom, a ridiculous fat figure swaying and dancing his clumsy dance, and everyone laughs. They don’t see Marta.

You were good, I tell her after. Everybody clapped!

May she be so good when we cross the border.

***

Kathryn Kulpa is an editor at Cleaver Magazine and has work published or forthcoming in Smokelong Quarterly, Longleaf Review, and Pidgeonholes. She was the winner of the Vella Chapbook Contest for her flash fiction collection Girls on Film and a finalist in the Black Lawrence Press Black River Chapbook Competition.

Open the cardinal and see what comes out. Is it sand is it fur is it hollow bones? Pumpkin seeds spit from your car’s exhaust? Cut a finger on its feathers drop red onto red. Squeeze out a lemon and spit in the shell. It worked when I waved my wand, squeezed mice into something beautiful. Knock twice on the  belly. Smile for your host. Climb inside chew your lemon peel swallow the seeds. There is a church under the cardinal’s wings made of pews made of feathers made of red glass light. There is a church, would I lie to you? Walk down the aisle, follow your dirtiest fingertips if you get lost. Follow them, follow them, find a ring on your stepsister’s finger find your hands on your stepmother’s pearls squeeze your lemon into something beautiful.

There is cheese in the belly of the cardinal. Find it red and eat until you fall asleep. Wrap yourself in your eyelids and crawl. Here is the dress from the ball. Here is a smudge. Here is shaving cream and a stolen razor. Pull your eyelids tighter so it stings. Here is a bottle of blue pills. I made it just for you. Swim through the bottle come out the cardinal’s beak.

There might have been a slipper and there might have been a knife. Spin in a circle pull it out of your chest. Pull it out of your chest. Listen to me when I am speaking to you.

Blink your eyes and dream of little hands. Dream of hands spilling from the door in your birdcage. How tiny they are, how dirty how sweet. How they long for anything but themselves. Crouch in the fireplace little Cinder, crouch in the fire and watch them play. There were hands at the ball too. We all saw what they were after, though they hid in their cow skin suits. How hard it was to walk in shoes that had never been alive.

Face the glass cardinal and open your eyes. Push it to the ground, and walk out with red slippers. Walk into the forest walk into the trees. Make a nest. There are birds in the forest, red feathers and brown. Here is a robin’s egg, here is a stone. Here is a woodpecker, here is a worm. Here is a ring and here is a dress. You can have one without the other, if that is what you want.

Remember the pumpkin I made for you? Remember the ball? Remember the cuts above your lip, the first time you shaved? Remember the men that I made for you, remember how they helped you up the stairs? Remember cracking the eggs for me, the cake with three candles? Remember what you wished for?

Here is a bottle of little blue pills. I made them just for you.

***

Jenny Fried is a writer living in California. Her work has appeared previously or is forthcoming in Bad Nudes, X-R-A-Y, and Jellyfish Review.Find her on twitter @jenny_fried.

The Daisies remove their seedling shawls, use their leaves to unfurl tender white petals slick with dew. Whisper greetings to the sun, vying for his attention shown in the warm caress of his rays, before scoping out their new home. They were born of railroad soil, some blossoming amongst pebbles or between the grooves of footprints. Those who blossom close enough to the rails rest their heads upon chilled metal, their roots tingling from the chill.

Dandelion trembles from her place between wooden slats of railroad tracks, losing several of her seedling hairs in the wind. This bothers the Daisies, some reaching to ensure their beautiful white petals remain attached to their yellow faces. All flowers know Dandelions are common things, prone to play with unruly children with false promises of delivering wishes on the wind. Whose leaves claw at unwanted things and that they always travel in hordes, suffocating the innocent who are trying to make a home in freshly overturned soil. Why else would a flower sprout spikes if not to commit acts of murder?

Besides, only Dandelions attract unwanted things.

Dandelion strains against her roots to gain the fleeting attentions of the Daisies. When they continue to ignore her, Dandelion counts how many seedlings comprise her white Afro. Appearances are important to Daisies and a bald Dandelion would be unsightly. Her sigh mixes with a gentle ping, one of her seedlings balancing on the rim of an inkwell, close enough for Dandelion to touch. She is sure the inkwell wasn’t here yesterday. She shoos her seedling from the edge of the inkwell’s lips, begins to ask if any of the Daisies might have misplaced it. But the inkwell glistens in the light, the scent of diesel oil rising from its center.

Since none of the Daisies care about the inkwell, Dandelion decides to claim it for herself. At least, for the time being, since she is unsure of how long she has left between the railroad tracks. She apologizes for her appearance and constant shedding, her barbed leaves, and overall lack of beauty. Dandelion doesn’t believe she’s ugly but knows she is not considered to be beautiful because the Daisies remind her every blossoming season, which is also the reason they refuse to sprout anywhere near her.

The inkwell doesn’t reply.

Because it’s an inkwell and all sensible flowers know inkwells can’t talk.

Dandelion giggles, twiddles her roots over her foolishness. She bends her stem to peer inside, gazes at the specks of glass puncturing holes in the dark. Dandelion remembers a time she was considered to be beautiful with wild strands of gold that honey bees loved to nap on. Weather and wind withered her roots, turning her yellow top into a puff ball that the Daisies can’t stand to view. When one of her leaves caresses the insides of the inkwell, a smear of blue appears. Dandelion thinks the inkwell’s beauty has perished due to years spent drinking oil.

Besides, only Dandelions attract unwanted things.

***

K.B. Carle lives outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and earned her MFA from Spalding University’s Low-Residency program in Kentucky. When she is not exploring the realms of speculative, jazz, and historical fiction, K.B. avidly pursues misspelled words, botched plot lines, and rudimentary characters. Her stories have appeared in FlashBack Fiction, Lost Balloon, formercactus, and elsewhere. She can be found online at http://kbcarle.wordpress.com/ or on Twitter @kbcarle.

This is the highway that leads, no matter how dark it is and no matter how few taillights there are in front of you and no matter which exit you take, to five million Beethovens.

They’re out there, not all doing exceptional things.

One is probably making coffee badly… Another is most likely doing sexual intercourse badly… And yes, of course, there is another Beethoven who is doing his taxes badly.

At night, when everyone else goes to sleep, they go to their composition books and pick up their quill pens and begin composing sonatas and symphonies you can feel in your blood…

One of the Beethovens says he is composing the color blue, for that is what he heard in the dream with the woman with the tongue like a red scarf…

But all of the Beethovens are deaf. They can only hear in dreams. So they can’t hear the other Beethovens doing what they are doing. They think they are the only Beethovens in existence, if they think about being a Beethoven at all. It’s strange and sad. If you watch them just before your eyes soften into sleep, they look like Christmas lights on a house where the family dog has just died.

If you come across a Beethoven that can hear, that means you are dreaming…

***

Shane Kowalski is a lecturer at Cornell University. His work appears or is forthcoming in Electric Literature, Puerto del Sol, The Offing, Hobart, Wildness, and elsewhere.