In the horror movie she calls a life, The Bad Girl gets cast as a camp counselor because she’s hot, she knows she’s hot, and every horror movie needs an antagonist to the virginal Final Girl, at least until the monster shows up. Also, Camp Silver Springs is desperate for counselors, lenient with job experience, and it’s like getting paid to party. So, although she never agreed to it, the newspapers will forever refer to her as The Bad Girl, because no one remembers anyone’s name besides the monster’s in a horror movie, not The Jock’s, not The Nerd’s, not even The Final Girl’s.

One night, drinking warm beer around a fire pit with the other counselors, The Bad Girl listens to The Final Girl once again complain they should follow the rules. Be better role models to the campers. The Bad Girl tells The Final Girl to Fuck off, that she hopes the campers are breaking curfew, telling ghost stories, toilet papering cabins, or sharing sloppy first kisses, because a little trouble is good for the little dorks. Following rules is bullshit, it’s all bullshit, and no matter what, the world’s going to try to kill you anyway, that’s the only thing for certain, so do what the fuck makes you happy with the little time you have.

During a game of Never Have I Ever, The Bad Girl finishes off a six-pack of Miller Lite on her own by taking a big gulp when someone says never have I ever: Kissed a girl, smoked a joint, had a threesome, had a black eye, buried a mother, got a tattoo, lived out of a car, ate food out of the trash, got a second tattoo, tried acid, crowd-surfed in a mosh pit, stole a car, broke someone’s nose, been in handcuffs, been in love.

The Final Girl didn’t drink to any of those, but it’s that last one, never having been in love, that makes The Bad Girl soften a bit. The same way she feels about the campers, she now feels about The Final Girl, wanting her to live a little. Wants her to break some rules. Do something stupid. Something she might regret. To make mistakes. Have no regrets because you never know when your time is up.

Millions of stars, and The Bad Girl takes a stroll to the lake with a girl following, a girl being led, a girl chosen, The Final Girl, because she needs this. They both do. Refracted moonlight on lake water, knees digging into the sand, straddling The Final Girl because The Bad Girl doesn’t fuck on her back, she wants the world to see her, young and beautiful, and her last thoughts are a mix of pleasure and philosophy, how life is short, how life must be short even to stars millions of years old, how at the end of their life even stars must wish for just a little more time.

The Bad Girl doesn’t get a chance to scream when the machete wielding monster steps out of the woods, sneaks up on her, and swings for her neck. It is inevitable. Everyone has their role to play. The Bad Girl’s role is to warn viewers to stay away from sex and drugs. And in this movie, this life, her death serves as the inciting incident for The Final Girl to enter her badass monster-killer era, but only after watching all her friends meet gory deaths. Except, the thing no one ever talks about, not the director, not the critics, not the audience, the real reason the monster kills The Bad Girl first, is not because she drinks, or gets high, or likes to fuck. No, it’s because if the monster doesn’t take her out first, she’ll run him over with the camp bus. Stab his eyes out with the sticks they use to roast s’mores. Take his machete and cut his fucking head off. The Bad Girl would save everybody. And what would the newspapers name her then?

***

Mario Aliberto III is an award-nominated writer whose work appears in SmokeLong Quarterly, trampset, The Pinch, and others. His debut chapbook, All the Dead We Have Yet to Bury, is forthcoming from Chestnut Review in early 2025. He lives in Tampa Bay with his wife and daughters, and yet the dog still runs the house. Twitter: @marioaliberto3

My grandson rests his gosling-down head on my chest, gurgles milk from a bottle in the soft gloom of the room. We’ve said our goodnight moons and goodnight rooms, started the white-noise machine so he’ll drift off in sweet, sanguine sleep while halfway across the world a distant cousin nestled in his mother’s lap startles from slumber as the buzz of drones enters the room, smoke shrouds the setting moon, steel rain falls all around. How can we bear that the building, the room, the arms that cradle him are shaking, trembling, threatening to fall? Can you tell me how?

***

Kathryn Silver-Hajo writes, worries about the world, wonders how it will all work out, and writes some more.

We recently published Elena Zhang’s illuminating “Grandmother.”

Here, we ask her two questions about her story:

1) I love how there are three characters in this story, though we only really see the two. The grandmother is the ghost that haunts this entire piece as the narrator breaks apart (and puts together) things that belonged to her — in memory of a promise, in service of a daughter. What kind of weight do these things hold for the narrator?
I think the grandmother’s belongings definitely haunt the narrator, providing a sense of comfort and memory. But they are also a kind of burden, something the narrator hoards and holds onto too tightly, preventing her from really building something new.

2) Is it really a Tyrannosaurus Rex that the daughter wants? Or, more specifically, is it really a Tyrannosaurus Rex that our narrator is putting together?
The daughter has that kind of childlike desire and insistence for a wish to come true, no matter how possible or impossible it may be. Out of love, the narrator wants to fulfill that wish, feeding into their shared fantasy that dead things can come back to life and look just like how we want them to.

My daughter wants a pet Tyrannosaurus rex. Nothing else will do. So I go to the kitchen and take
out the cleaver, the good one, the one that you would always use to chop through pork ribs and
chicken bones when I was sick and wanted soup. I hack your antique coffee table to pieces.
These will be good bones, I think. Scratched and worn from years of use. Soon, they are
assembled into a skeleton, the splinters into teeth. Next, the skin. I take out your sweaters from
the back of the closet and shake off the dust before sewing them together. They still smell like
you, jasmine perfume and coconut lotion. I drape the blue and white quilt over the bones, closing
my eyes while I caress the seams. My daughter is still not satisfied. “What about the feathers?”
she asks. For that, I rummage through my bedside table drawer until I find the plastic bag filled
with your hair. I glue the gray bristles on, one by one. My daughter draws near, hugging the
dinosaur, but it doesn’t hug her back. She starts to cry, and I know it’s because there is something
missing. Something lost in the extinction. Remembering my promise to you, I tear the whole
thing down. Start again.

***

Elena Zhang is a Chinese American writer and mother living in Chicago. Her work can be found in HAD, The Citron Review, Ghost Parachute, Your Impossible Voice, and Lost Balloon, among other publications. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee and was selected for Best Microfiction 2024.

We recently published Melanie Maggard’s glorious “Moonshine.”

Here, we ask her two questions about her story:

1) I love the personification of the moon here — there’s something so lunar about how you describe her! What made you choose the moon for this piece (or what made the moon choose you)?
Since I started writing a few years ago, I’ve become infatuated with the moon and find that she comes out in much of my writing. And I can’t help but think of the moon as a “she/her.” I’m not sure if this is because I personally identify with her or because of the tradition of relating the female cycle to the moon’s phases. There’s something very deep and sensual about this connection to the main reason we look to the sky at night. I’m guilty of deep diving into research on the moon, sometimes for hours (the best type of procrastination), and incorporating those little nuggets of wisdom into my pieces. With this piece in particular, I loved the idea of the moon being avoided or overlooked, much like how we feel when we don’t receive attention or love from others. The story idea came from a prompt where we were to imagine an everyday action being performed by something or someone extraordinary. 

2) The ending is so stunning and powerful! The idea of a darkness eclipsing the moon rather than the moon causing the darkness is such an intriguing (and beautiful!) idea! Do you think the man who has taken the moon into his house will ever let her know where he keeps his sugar?
I’d like to think that she takes the sugar and leaves, before it is too late and she burns out. I relate this ending to feelings of longing, discontent, and being unfulfilled. For me, it represents what we are willing to do in order to feel love, even if that means we may dim our light in order to get it. Maybe she’ll finally put her own needs above those of everyone else. Or maybe this man will just give her what she needs but there is more that she really wants. All of this gives me an idea of another story.

The moon is going door to door and asking for a cup of sugar. Nobody gives her any. Most won’t even answer the door. They peer through peepholes, slits in blinds, around edges of curtains. They whisper to each other in the darkness. They wish her away. They’re offended by her light, a bright blue-white luminescence, like glowworms on cave walls in New Zealand, or so she hears. She palms a cool tin measuring cup in her hand, the only remaining part of a set her grandmother gave her, the others lost when she moved from one phase of her life to the next. She looks up at the stars and takes a deep breath. She doesn’t have much time left.

Some people are out walking when they see her, head down, curled into herself as she hugs the cup to her chest. When she sees them, she straightens, brightens like a firefly suddenly turned on. Their dogs howl as they pull at leashes. She pauses, waiting for them to cross to the other side of the road before continuing. Over their shoulders, they watch her light wane as the distance between them grows, until she’s half who she was before.

At the last house on the street, a man opens the door immediately after she knocks. When the moon offers her empty cup, he removes a flask from his pocket and pours her a shot of clear liquor, asks if she wants to “get tipsy” with him. A smile settles into the relenting scars on her face as she says, I’m always a bit tipsy. They laugh as she enters the house, leaving a dusting of rocks at the doorstep. With her mouth and throat burning, before the darkness eclipses her, she asks again, where he keeps his sugar.

***

Melanie Maggard is a flash and poetic prose writer who loves dribbles and drabbles. She has published in Cotton Xenomorph, Ghost Parachute, X-R-A-Y Magazine, Peatsmoke Journal, The Dribble Drabble Review, Five Minute Lit, and others. She can be found online at www.melaniemaggard.com and @WriterMMaggard.

This man is fine, not like the man on the moor. The man in his van on the moor.

This man you can give him your pound coin and get your cone with the flake, and he’ll hand you one pence change; no fuss, no kiss on the mouth.

Mum’s here, so you can lick your cone and you can love it. This man won’t say why don’t you lick this.

Your mum takes a coin from her purse for you to hand the man, and she says can’t you be nice and smile for once, but you don’t tell her what the man on the moor did with his big face and big hands and big laugh you can’t get out of your head.

You don’t say that now when you skip school and buy a cone with a flake it tastes so much like fear you want to spit it off your tongue and drop it and run to a place, a fake place, where your mum stands with her arms wide and says what’s all this, pet, come on, let it all out.

***

Kik Lodge is a short fiction writer from Devon, England, but she lives in Lyon, France, with a menagerie of kids, cats and a rabbit.Her work can be found in some lovely journals, as well as in the Best Microfiction 2024 Anthology. Her debut flash collection Scream If You Want To is out now with Alien Buddha Press. @kiklodge.bsky.social  

They did it beneath the sky in the purple saffron fields. They did it in the darkness and in the mirror and in the moonlight. They did it with babies strapped to their backs and naked children at their feet. They did it in honor of joy and in honor of God and the holy beasts. They did it with great flair and with colors, with the mingling of greens and golds and reds like the crowns of the queens. They did it locked inside tiny stifling closets. And in the hills where they hid from the men who didn’t know what to do with song. They did it burnt and broken and bruised. They did it hungry, their blue-covered bodies so thin their sisters worried that a gust of wind might carry them away. (But they made a meal of light.) They did it, never asking why the heavens had been hard on them. And the horizon tilted, and their eyes saw little sparkles everywhere, and this too they turned to verse, like rain upon the summer earth.

for the women of Afghanistan

***

Donna Obeid is an award-winning writer and educator who has been nominated for Best of the Net and multiple times for the Pushcart Prize. She earned a BA with Class Honors in English and Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and an MA and MFA from American University. She lived and worked in Southeast Asia as a visiting scholar and currently lives in Stanford, California. Read more of her writing at: www.donnaobeid.com and @donnaowrites.

You are queen of misted sunglasses on the night of the Perseids that are about to dive behind the braids pinned like a Heidi crown on your head. You are queen of silk slip luxuriating on grass, insect-less because they’re all, almost all, scorched. This morning you read your teenage letters to your cousin that her sisters handed you back, and you’re upset that you remembered almost everything about your side of the story. You are queen of the pink potted orchid that needs water only once a week but seems doubtful about a next bloom. You are queen of wishing for the bare details of your life to have been shared with your sister and cousins and to have ended differently, or to have gone from cracking seaweed on the beach to sharing a rollercoaster that doesn’t buckle and drops its most loved passenger. You are queen of pauper peas, so green and little. You are queen of sleeping through the Perseid meteor shower on the cheapest, but comfortable Ikea mattress, with a glow on.

***

Jacqueline Schaalje has published poetry and short fiction, most recently in Five South, Wildfire Words, and The Ocotillo Review. She won the 2022 Florida Review Editor’s Prize and has been a finalist in a few other competitions. She is a translation editor at MAYDAY Magazine.

We recently published Drevlow’s amazing “Friends, Family, Neighbors, & Co-Workers All Shocked.”

Here, we ask him two questions about his story:

1) I adore the voice in this! So powerfully oblivious and yet also so powerfully aware. How closely do you think this narrator is really looking at their own motivations here?
I think one of the reasons I watch as much Dateline and true crime as I do (for better or worse) is that my very complicated brother killed himself when he was 18 and I can remember all the people who came out of the woodwork then—to tell their stories, to become a part of the story, to weave this story of my brother that didn’t seem at all true to me because I was on the inside of it. At the time, I was very cynical and kind of bitter toward these people, because in my mind, they were all somehow complicit in my brother being alienated and treated like a weirdo. I come from a small town and an even smaller school, where literally everybody knows each other and knows their stories—at least the outward stories. And at the time, I would go through my mind and think of the teacher who had been condescending, the preacher who had thoughts about suicide and sexuality, the friend who stopped being his friend. They don’t know who my brother was! Only I know truly who my brother was!
But 35 years later and after a lot of Datelines, I’ve become a lot more forgiving. This is one of my defenses for watching these types of shows and all the clear ethical implications of them. If nothing else, these shows reveal that everybody’s complicated, everybody’s hypocritical, that as the cliche goes—nobody comes out a winner in any of these things. Even for the ones who are doing it to insert themselves as part of the story or distorting the story to make themselves seem more important, I think a lot of them feel like they are doing it for the right reasons. They are the ones to help tell the full story, keep the story alive, or they are “speaking for the victim and the victim’s family”—even if their real motivations might be a little sketchy. 
Mostly my story “Friend, Family, Neighbors, Co-Workers All Shocked” is trying to show both sides of the coin here—the way that with my brother and the narratives that people came up with has a lot of sides, including my own motives which were sometimes selfish and sketchy in their own way. Nothing’s binary or black or white. It’s all complicated, we’re all self-serving, but we also all try to have some sort of moral code for the good of the people even if this moral code is often highly suspect. Even if knowing all that means knowing that the true story of my brother got lost in the process.

2) And I love how it speaks to the viewer too — so much of reality (“reality”) documented in this true-crime format can be taken at face value, but everyone watching comes into it with their own beliefs and prejudices. Here, you’re really calling those beliefs into questions. Just how much of the narrative we’re given can we trust? What do you think?
Yeah, before I get done with my teaching career, I’d really like to teach a class on the rhetoric of true crime. It’s always really interesting to watch multiple versions of the same crime—whether it’s Dateline v 48 Hours v 20/20 v Snapped v whatever documentary they have come up with. And these days there are a ton of documentaries coming out about cases that I’ve already seen on Dateline or one of the other shows or vice versa. I think the one that really sticks out was Making a Murderer where the documentary series was clearly all about trying to show that Steven Avery might not be guilty and even if he was, that the criminal justice system had to bear some of the blame. And with that, they really vilified the police and the prosecution and showed how sketchy and kind of slimy they were (depending on your perspective). Then the Dateline version basically just focused on what a monster Avery was and how his defense was pretty weak. I remember I got into an argument with a friend online (which was a dumb idea in the first place for obvious reasons), but he was from a nearby Wisconsin town from Avery and he was pointing out how biased and distorted it was, and my whole argument was: Of course. All these shows are arguments—are narratives—and narratives mean editing certain things out, piecing together other things that make it sound like they were connected. Narratives, by nature, are always going to be distorted. But on the other hand, small towns and small town criminal justice figures are also just as biased and distorted in the narratives they use for treating people the way they do—especially poor people on the outskirts of the community (as I know firsthand from growing up in a small Wisconsin town myself).
Which of course, doesn’t take into account how much worse it is for people of color, especially women of color, who usually don’t even get shown on true crime shows, because the “narrative” about them from police officers, lawyers, and judges are just too damn morally and ethically heartbreaking to make for “entertaining” TV.

Mostly I just come out of all of these thinking it’s scary the way everything works—the way these true crime shows will vilify police one episode and then make them out to be heroes in another episode. Same with the defense attorneys and the prosecution. And of course the victims vs. the suspects. It’s interesting to see different versions to see how they decide who the “good guys” are versus the “bad guys.” And what scares me the most is that it’s these same narratives that police and lawyers are using in court to try to convince the jury to find one way or the other. A jury who is basically like the audience of Dateline, a jury who is probably made up of a lot of people who watch Dateline, influenced by Dateline in the way their mind works, susceptible to the same narratives, the same rhetoric, and the same gaps in the story that get withheld. I guess it’s the paradox that gets me. The same way that the Datelines of the world play with the facts and distort the truth to create a false narrative to entertain–that’s actually what makes them a good case study in how our judicial system works, except with lawyers and judges as producers and hosts and jury members as the viewers trying to sort out all the false narratives and rhetorical fallacies to figure out the facts. As someone who writes stories and teaches rhetoric, that’s why this all is so interesting to me and also so disturbing with its real life implications.