We plan to kick their heads in with the toes of our jelly sandals. They’ve come with Filas and skinned knees and bad bowl cuts to count us off the swings. Sharing, the teachers say. Taking turns. We pump our legs, pull at long rusty chains suspended from hollow metal crossbeams. Turf. Head. Sky. Turf. Head. Sky. Ponytails and pigtails whip the air behind us. Legs fan out, a murmuration of swooping and diving, cotton skirts and skorts flapping like flags in the wind.

30

They shout the number like a curse. The year we made a baby, had a baby, lost the baby. The year we wanted to be mothers: Grab tiny fingers. Hold a soft head in the palm of our hand. Wait. Watch. Wake. Hands on our bodies. Hands in our bodies. We’d cry. We’d grow tired. We’d stop listening. We’d stop watching. We’d walk out the door in the snow, at the conference, at our in-laws for the last time.

25

Getting braver. Getting closer. The year of tousled hair and Sunday brunches. Did he? Not yet. Maybe this weekend. Open toe. Invitations. We’re chiffon dolls in descending order. Are you sure? It’s forever. I do. I do. I do.

20

Wanna see my loft? No parents. Hook-ups. Solo cups stuck to tiled floors. Bunk Beds. Bob Marley. Shredded bill baseball hat collection. Little Black Dress. We hide from the RA, the ex, the roommate passed out in the Papasan chair on Parents’ Weekend. Will they? What’s next?

15

Halfway there. All the other girls got it first, didn’t they? Didn’t they? Fat one. Last one. Too thick. Stick thin. Eyeshadow. Lipstick. No make-up ‘til you’re eighteen. We’re tube tops in the bathroom. Bodysuits. Boy shorts. Will I feel different afterwards? I heard—she let—they are—bitch and slut and prude rolling off our tongues like Rain-Blo bubble gum balls. 

10

We’re back of the bus, Emergency Exit. Hot pink macraméd bracelets, bralettes. Pierced ears. President. Astronaut. Super Star. Sticker collection. Trade you. I’m coming. I’m coming. Wait up.

5                                                                                                            

Playing house. Mom and dad. Dry kisses next to monkey bars, water fountains, cubbies on carpet squares. First comes love. This is love. This is love.

1

We’re muscled limbs kicking a 3-2-1 countdown, sweaty thighs, skin stuck to skin, bare feet, blistered fingers balled into fists: Holding hard and fast to everything they’ve come to take from us.

***

Martha Keller’s work has appeared in Lost Balloon, Cagibi Literary Journal, Bridge Eight Literary Magazine, Brilliant Flash Fiction and elsewhere. She was a longtime reader for Flash Fiction Magazine. Her short stories have been nominated for the Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions anthologies. Over the years, she’s worked in strip malls, skyscrapers, and high school classrooms. 

The square classroom was on the second floor, the western side of the school building, which was also square. It was beside the large open space, also square, used as a study hall, which featured three different “classroom” configurations. Three teacher’s desks, two facing each other, one at the head of the space, the rooms themselves ghosts. Students sat in the desks most periods of the day, but always near the end of the day, when study halls were most common. The classroom where it happened was across the hall from the open area, separated from the hall by a laminate strip, the carpet of the open space on one side of the strip, the square tiles of the hall on the other.

The room was square, like all the rooms in the square building. There were square tiles on the floors. The desks themselves were square, the kind of desks with chair and writing surface attached, under the chair a hollow space that rattled if people put books inside. The desks were arranged in rows and there was a teacher’s desk, rectangular, off to the side of the front of the classroom. There were rectangular chalkboards. If it was a math class, which this wasn’t, there would be a projector for transparencies at which a teacher would sit and do problems while the light made their face ghostly. This was a social studies classroom so there were maps that unfurled. Topographical and political. Maps of Europe and Asia. It was an honors geography class, and for tests students had to draw freehand maps of individual continents, fill them in with the names of the countries and capitals. The teacher was a creep who wore white short-sleeve shirts and ties too tight and smiled in a way that appeared pained while looking up girls’ skirts. This was the room where it happened.

The rows of desks were precisely in and of their time period. This was 1987, maybe 1986. The students wore high hair. There were punks and jocks. It was like a John Hughes film, only less kinetic and amusing. There were thirty five students in the room when it happened. Bored and listless, they were surprised when Patricia Lang lost her mind, had her mental breakdown, started screaming. Nobody knew why she was screaming. Some of them assumed it had to do with Mr. Coburn, but, no, it didn’t seem to be about him, she was just screaming; when they looked in her face they could tell she was somewhere else entirely.

There were bookshelves along the side of the room, under a bank of windows, and the windows looked out onto the courtyard where no one was allowed to go, and some of them could see cirrus clouds in a blue sky. They could see the tops of trees moving in a stiff wind. Patricia Lang kept screaming and Mr. Coburn called someone on a telephone nobody knew was in the room, and it seemed to happen both very fast and very slowly. People outside in the study hall, hearing the screaming, turned to look toward the room and a few of them smirked, but it was a defensive smirking, and the students in the room were aware that they had a privileged seat at this psychodrama, and they all recognized something inside Patricia Lang that could just as easily have been inside them, and maybe was!, and when someone official arrived and put Patricia into a wheelchair and wheeled her down the hallway she was still screaming until she stopped screaming and started whimpering, which might have been worse.

And then there was one chair left empty in that room where everyone was waiting to get out of high school and move on with their adult lives, which would no doubt be filled with pain and difficulty, and they saw the horror that Patricia Lang saw, which was way worse than the horror depicted in the horror movies of the time period. And they felt a new fondness for the squareness of the school and for the cinderblock walls that had always reminded them of prison before, thinking maybe prison wasn’t so bad after all, maybe it was okay to wall themselves off, and that night they went into basements and attics and found things they had once played with and put aside and for the briefest moment they played with them again, like a bunch of innocent children.

***

Jamey Gallagher lives in Baltimore and teaches at the Community College of Baltimore County. His stories have been published in many journals online and in print, including Punk Noir Magazine, Poverty House, Bull Fiction, and LIT Magazine. His collection, American Animism, will be published in 2025.

Like sad gladiolas, the drunken boys sway away from their late-night party, south toward the man-made lake, to sit on the little fishing pier near the shore. They settle with their backs against the wooden platform, take their money from their wallets and hide it in their pants, way down tight against their sacs. They know about thieves here, and they want to relax. After a while, other young men stumble by, older than the boys, but not by much, smelling of cheap weed, wielding gap-toothed grins that are more desperate than friendly. Sober enough to not want their skulls smashed or their skin sanded against gravel, the boys rise, walk away slowly but with purpose. They have numbers in their favor, but don’t want to take any chances.  It’s hot, and their hair sticks to their foreheads with sweat, pebbles in their shoes as they shuffle toward anywhere else, away from the dark. They toss stones at the windows of the shuttered Dairy Queen, but not hard enough to shatter them. The boy that looks the oldest and has the best fake ID buys them White Claws at the convenience store, and they sit on the curb outside to drink a little more, haloed in the fluorescent glow. They take turns watching for cherries and berries. One tells a story about school, something about a spider caught in the sticky sheen of a teacher’s hair gel. They whistle at a group of girls, girls from the same party they just left, forgetting their earlier failures. They don’t know a single thing about sex that they haven’t learned from a screen, but they act like they do. Bored and tired, they begin to walk down roads where street lights cast the shapes of them in black outlines, clear-edged and precise, as if they’d been singed onto the concrete. They pass a church whose signage reads “Jesus loves you—repent!” They change the letters to read “Jesus—nervous to pee” and pocket the l and the y for some future purpose. Their laughter follows them home like a guardian. Nothing bad can happen to them here.

***

Donna Vorreyer is the author of To Everything There Is (2020), Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016) and A House of Many Windows (2013), all from Sundress Publications. She hosts the monthly online reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey. Though primarily a poet, her small fictions and essay work have appeared in Cherry Tree, Thimble Lit, Sweet, MORIA, Lily Poetry Review, and other journals. (Editor’s note: She has also been on Jeopardy twice, which we think is so cool!)

If I lived in this house by myself, I would have dogs. Oh yes I love cats but I’d have lots of dogs as well. Big and very big dogs. German Shepherds, Bernese Mountain Dogs, Sheepdogs, Wolfhounds, Weimaraners without cropped tails, and all sorts of mixed breed dogs, but all quite large. Maybe a Maremma. I would have breakfast on the porch with all my dogs and the sparrows in the rhododendrons who want to nest in my mailbox and some chipmunks to add color to the scene. Snacks for the birds and chipmunks and tasty dog stuff for my dogs and maybe raspberries for me and an English muffin. Some coffee and then we would go out for walks together without leashes and they would all swoop around me like a big cape of dogs, all of us walking along in a pack, although once in a while one of them would wander away, like Shirley, that silly girl, she would always stray, and I would call her back, come back, and, William the Great Dane mix please come back to us, and he would. This would all be in the spring or summer or fall and I would lead them all back to the house, and give them all a bath, and then have to take one myself, and then a couple of them might sleep in my room, but most of them would just prefer to find their own lazy places around the untidy house. And  in the morning, I would go out and pick peonies, in the early morning of course, before their heavy heads had time to tip over, and Shirley and some of the other girl dogs would come with me while the boys wandered down to the brook and got their feet full of mud and their ears all stuck with wild roses. The winter would be a little less carefree, but still fun. We’d all sit around the fireplace in the evening and tell stories, false or true. I don’t really want to live alone all the time of course, but this is what I would do, I swear, if I lived here all the time all by myself.

***

Diane Wald is a poet and novelist who has published five chapbooks, four full-length poetry collections, two novels, and hundreds of poems in literary magazines. Her most recent books are The Warhol Pillows (poetry), Gillyflower (novel), and My Famous Brain (novel). Her next novel, The Bayrose Files, is forthcoming from Regal House Publishing. You can learn more at www.dianewald.org.

We recently published Jessie Metcalf’s glorious “Your Blessings.”

Here, we ask her two questions about her story:

1) Throughout this story, there is a sense of knowing and being known, of coming into a kind of belonging. How important is that feeling of being known (and knowing) for the narrator to make this place their home?
The narrator is caught between the desperation to belong and the uncomfortable process of actually being known; I think that’s a pretty universal tension! Here, the narrator’s preoccupation with “fitting in” is both heightened by her foreignness, and sort of quelled, too. The language barrier isolates her, but it also exonerates her from some of the tricky and tedious parts of communication. The connections that she does make, in spite of or because of this isolation, are that much more valuable and special to her.

2) I love the wonderful details that really bring this place to life for the reader (and the narrator!). From the cold apartment to the “seven a.m. stretch of sidewalk” to the salt flats and the puddles and broken glass surrounding the church — every detail feels so true and, if not, perhaps, welcoming, real. How real is this place for you, the writer?
I’m so glad the details stand out in this piece! This place is very real for me. The setting of the story is pulled from a city I’ve lived in before, where I felt similarly to the narrator. I love (and sometimes hate) to write from my own life; I get scared to lose the richness of real places and feelings in fiction.

1. Your cold apartment; its heating like someone sighing. Its Spanish washer-dryer, too small for your big American clothes. Its guest bedroom with one window to the laundry room with one window to the inside courtyard; this russian-nesting-doll withholding of light.
2. The steam from your electric kettle that you hold your hands over like you’re praying. The mug you wrap your hands around to pray into. The tea your prayers sink in.
3. Spanish people who know your name, or even just Spanish people who know your face and smile at it. That you can hold being known at this distance.
4. Men congregating at the cerveceria, smoking cigarette burnt offerings and ignoring you.
5. The seven a.m. stretch of sidewalk and the four days a week that you walk it. You meet your coworker who drives you to the school through salt flats. You must kill your embarrassment to photograph them but more often your embarrassment kills you.
6. A church in the warehouse district, warmed by propane, surrounded by puddles and broken glass. That you almost left but didn’t. That God was a beautiful girl translating Spanish to English through a microphone and headset. That faith ebbs and flows and Spain is many tidal waves.
7. Two children learning English. When they say “sister” they turn the “i” into “ee.” When they say “brother” they turn the “uh” into “oh.” Your living is language and grammar.
8. The student to whom you cannot teach English feelings. The word odiar offends him; he crosses it out and tells you that he loves kebabs and hates nothing. You would love to hate nothing. You want to tell him that you remember being so sure, that your sureness was water you walked on, but neither of you have enough language to convey this.
9. Five girls who translate el odio into la tranquilidad. Five girls in a kitchen saying “amen.”
10. The holy trinity: mountains, castle, sea. Las montañas whose names you don’t know. El Mediterranean mar. Castillo de Santa Barbara and her north star nature; the first time you don’t need a map to show you the way.

***

Jessie Metcalf is a writer from England and Texas currently earning her MFA in fiction writing at Emerson College. She is a senior reader with Redivider: A Journal for New Literature.

She and him stopped by the river, got bitten up by who knew what. Making alligator memories, her in a swim top and shorts. He in denim and a cotton tee, his beard as thick as the air was the night they met. Months ago, at a bar in the newly redeveloped part of town. They had a word for that, and it was a mouthful.

Now they found themselves in a heavy-tree moment all sticky, nasty, sweaty, so very sweet they couldn’t hear the voices in the wind, the cries in the water gushing South.

He pinned her along the muddy shore, kissed her forehead, and said he would love her forever.

“’Forever’ and ‘rivers’ not friends.” She laughed at the way he frowned when she said it and doubled down, “Rivers are for crossing and passing through.”

He shifted upright, suddenly stiff-backed like a grouchy cat. He searched his pocket, probably for something to smoke. He shook his head all the steamy while.

“I could imagine you living here,” he said, aiming his hand at everything there was to see—branch cover, moss, and tangly undergrowth, the rotting claw-like-roots of a fallen tree.

He wouldn’t have known here existed if she had not begged him to take her there.

“Living here in what?” She sat up too. “The trees, fox hole, beaver dam?”

He lifted an eyebrow and said, “You’re more creative than that.”

They could not be the first ones to lie down in half a foot of ryegrass with brown bags of beer and ribcage baskets’ worth of expectations. History had been her least favorite class in high school, and she barely passed the prerequisites at the local college, but she knew enough. Shit had undeniable gone down right where they sat.

Wasn’t any alligators to see, though. She had never spotted one in all her years. When she was younger, her mother had warned her to keep away. Warned her about crushing jaws. Slicing teeth. Barreling rolls. Gators that liked the taste of black skin.

“You never see them gators until it’s too late, but trust, they see you.”

She turned to him now as he lit his blunt.

“If I had to build a house on a river, I sure wouldn’t,” she said, pressing him the way she liked. She enjoyed his company the most when they disagreed. Then he would kiss her to keep her quiet, and so he did, and so she let him.

And they did not see the pairs fleeing between tree trunks, so fast their feet would never kiss the ground, certain and never looking back. They did not see those seeking refuge from policing dogs high in the branches. They did not see the plump brown babies being dropped like rocks in the water rush for the waiting alligator teeth.

They did not see that loving on the river’s edge brought them so close to death it could have pulled them under time itself.

***

Ra’Niqua Lee writes to share her particular visions of love and the South. She is an ATLien by birth and mother to magical twins.

Regular vampires. Vampires who cannot be seen in mirrors. Vampires who live inside of mirrors. Flowers. Hallucinations. Dracula. Also, the other type of Dracula. Do you prefer when I chew with my mouth open or closed? Vampires who wear silk capes. Vampires who can shape-shift. Whatever it was that appeared at my window last night. Children’s cartoons from the 1980s. Water. Shadow work. The idea of the cock, but not the cock itself. Wolves and spiders. All the things that pretend to be wolves and spiders. The discourse of the hysteric. When I was young, we had a paper castle we’d put on the table at Halloween time. I loved to open the little windows and look inside. Vampires who sleep in the earth. Vampires who crawl on their hands and knees. Sex dungeons. Teeth. Particularly, white teeth. Representations of ideas. Dinners that are too early or too late. Orders and registers. Nosferatu, especially the part where he rises up out of his coffin without bending his legs. Everyone I’ve dated. Things that can be killed with wooden stakes. Wounds. Seeping wounds. Sleepwalking. Barbers. Old Saxon Fortresses. There’s something I should tell you. Something I haven’t said. Vampires who drink blood. Vampires who drink other things. The unforgettable-but-already-forgotten. Last week, I had a dream. You were in the dream. I think you were dead, but you weren’t acting dead. That sort of thing.

***

Adam McOmber is the author of three queer speculative novels, The White Forest (Simon and Schuster), Jesus and John (Lethe) and Hound of the Baskervilles (Lethe), as well as three collections of short fiction, Fantasy Kit (Black Lawrence), My House Gathers Desires (BOA) and This New & Poisonous Air (BOA). His work has appeared recently in Conjunctions, Fifth Wednesday, and Hobart. He is the co-chair of the Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts and the editor-in-chief of the literary magazine Hunger Mountain.

We recently published Wendy E. Wallace’s devastating “I’m Not Doing Great but Will Probably Get Back on Dating Apps Anyway.”

Here, we ask her two questions about her story:

1) Dating apps are the literal worst, aren’t they? And yet here our narrator is having to deal with something more painful than that — this devastating loss. And their grief is somehow interconnected with their lack of a relationship (the way the aunts ask about relationship status at the funeral! I know those aunts!). How do you think they will navigate the devastation of both this loss and, well, dating?
People are always saying that you need to be content and happy alone before you should start dating. I think this is ridiculous, and, thankfully, so does my therapist. It’s hard enough to face things with a partner, and infinitely harder when there isn’t someone who will bring you a glass of ginger ale and put it in the dishwasher afterwards because, today, the part of your brain that makes your arms and legs do stuff seems to have turned off. I think that even if the narrator is struggling, the hope of finding someone can be a buoying distraction, a reason to brush their hair and call a friend to ask whether they should buy that blue jumpsuit, and maybe do a couple of sit ups while their cheese heats up. Little steps.

2) And the loss of the mother becomes intertwined with this need for companionship — the narrator remembers being cared for in childhood, and caring for their mother in return. And somehow it comes back to these godawful nachos with Velveeta cheese. Do you think they might ever meet someone who will provide this companionship for them (asking for a friend)?
I imagine the narrator goes on several pretty awful dates. And then they go on one to a brewery where, improbably, the song  “Hollaback Girl” will come on, a song their mom loved to shout-sing along to in the car even though she didn’t know most of the words. And our narrator will start crying into their very hoppy IPA. I would like to believe, though, that the person sitting across from them reaches out her hand, and is only the tiniest bit alarmed. That she says it’s okay and means it, and gets a paper towel from the bathroom for the narrator to blow their nose into, and that the night ends with some very hot making out and a promise of a second date, because sadness and loneliness shouldn’t always be terrifying. Let’s say this person is very good at cooking, and, for the second date, makes them some excellent ramen. Because she loves to cook, but hates cooking for one — what a bummer — and is gratified by the narrator’s ecstatic slurping. Let’s say she also hates doing dishes, something our narrator finds cathartic, and they fall into a supportive, Velveeta-free rhythm. Let’s say this is what happens. It’s my story, so I get to decide, right?

Because I’m afraid without someone to sleep next to, I’ll sleep through the shrilling of a fire alarm and wake up just as the flames are consuming the copy of Anna Karenina I keep trying to finish and the dolphin-shaped sex toy I’m too afraid to turn on and I’ll be instantly crisped. Because when I’m eating microwave nachos while hunched over videos of cats opening doors, one of the chips could lodge itself sharp and permanent into my trachea and the blood would pool into my lungs. Because I need someone having dinner across from me who will spring up and tenderly but firmly compress my stomach so the chip flies out of my mouth like a red angel. Because I once posed for two hours in a sequined thong that left angry pink trails on my ass waiting for a guy who finally texted that actually he wouldn’t be coming over because things were getting a little too intense for him and could we maybe take like a break. Because this was when my mom was still alive and on the chemo that made her hiccup all the time, which my mom and I thought was funny, how she sounded like she was sitting in a wheelbarrow being pushed through a bumpy garden. Because the guy got uncomfortable when I laughed about things but also when I cried. Because, before he broke up with me over text, his best attempt at comfort was a head pat that tangled my hair and seemed to say I hope you stop. Because at the funeral my aunts kept asking if I was seeing anyone special and I had to keep saying No No No, and I noticed how everyone was standing in comforting twos except me. I was floating and bumping around the clumps of people and flowers like a detached atom. Because eventually people stop calling and bringing over chili and chicken pot pie and assume you’ve sorted yourself out. Because without someone else to help me cook or to cook for or to say, Shouldn’t we order something healthy like Thai?, I will keep making nachos in the microwave which are a bag of Tostitos with chunks of Velveeta. Occasionally, to be healthy, I add half a jar of salsa, though I usually forget to pick it up at the store because I see someone who looks nothing like my mom but smells like her detergent or laughs in her shoulder-jump way. Because when I eat by myself I think too hard about my mom saying You are what you eat, how everything going in  my mouth becomes a part of me and how my fingernails and hair and the arch of my feet and the weird whorls of my brain and the folds of my vagina are made up of chips and plasticky cheese and maybe cancer and I start hiccup-breathing and there’s no one there to say, Hey, hey, calm down, and rub that place between my shoulders where I used to imagine wings would sprout before I realized life doesn’t give you what you want just for wanting it hard enough.

***

Wendy Elizabeth Wallace is a queer disabled writer who lives in Milford, CT. They are the editor-in-chief of Peatsmoke Journal and the co-manager of social media and marketing for Split Lip Magazine. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly , The Rumpus, Brevity, ZYZZYVA, The Carolina Quarterly, Okay Donkey,and elsewhere. Their writing  has been chosen as a finalist for several prizes, including The Hudson Prize from Black Lawrence Press, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.