You were out in the yard when you found it. The back corner, where you used to play as a child, a place you thought you’d never return to. Never wanted to. You were pulling dead vines out of the lilly-pilly, yanking the ropes, and when a knot finally came loose there it was, a twig speared through one wing. It still had feathers but the eyes were gone and the little chest was empty. The ribs were clean. The butcherbirds, see. They’re territorial. They harry and chase, take trophies, leave heads on stakes. Sing.

And sing. And what else was there to do but fetch the rake? You: divorced and broke, back in the falling-down house of your ailing mother, doing yard work to earn your keep. You couldn’t leave it up there, hanging like that. And yet, that shame as you reached. Was it rotting? Would you be rained in bits? But despite all your flinching, it held.

You lifted it down, splayed on the rusted fingers of your rake. Such a light thing really. A crumpled chip packet. A rustle of grief. That wing pulled wide, that head all crooked. Still hanging, always hanging now. A gesture that can go no further, a sentence that can get no cleaner; its needle ribs like weapons, thrusting the sharpest kind of promise. Your insides ache, that old pressure pushing and pushing. You could tear yourself wide open. But the turf war is long lost, poor baby, and anyway, that’s not what bones are for.  

***

Jane O’Sullivan is an Australian writer. Her short stories and art writing have been published in Meanjin, Passages North, Going Down Swinging, Vault, Art Guide and the Spineless Wonders anthologies Pulped Fiction and Play, and her work has also won the Rachel Funari Prize and Joanne Burns Microlit Award. She lives on Bidjigal and Gadigal Land and can be found at janeosullivan.com.au and @sightlined.

We recently published Rachael Smart’s haunting “It May Stay at Sea for Up to Ten Years“

Here, we ask her two questions about her story:

1) I love the subtle ways you show us the differences between this pair. The way she hungers for “hot dogs and popcorn,” the way he desires “duck parfait.” The reader sees the imbalance, the mismatch between them that they might not see for themselves. What drew them together in the first place, do you think? Is it, even, perhaps, this disparity between them?
The very nature of humans is to lust for what we cannot have. Encounters without permanence, brief, rupturing intimacies. Here we find two characters who could likely never live off the same page but who admire a glimpse of what life could look like because of their differences. What ifs, once-upon-a -times. Chemistry is rarely concerned with common interests, is it?I have always been a little obsessed by the anonymity of hotels and the illicit encounters that one building can hold. All those breakfasts taken time over before people realign back into the rush of the ordinary and the mundane. The albatross can stay at sea for up to ten years. Perhaps this pairing can, too.

2) And, yes, this relationship — the line “He moves through her like a ghost in an abandoned building and she emerges less touched for all his touching” is so powerful. I love how you show that they don’t quite connect on any level, physically, emotionally. And it is such a beautiful line! She tells him this is a one-off, but do you think either of them imagine it could have been more than that?
I think they want more but she is this haunted house and him the spectre. I want to explore further the nature of abandonment, that absurd sense of an untouching. There is something so dispossessing about an affair and the impact on the human psyche: the adulterer trespassing in another body and this authentic partner elsewhere who carries so much validity, so much entitlement. There is real tragedy in that fragmented sense of an “us” where intimacy only ever exists within concealed moments. I’d like to believe she will wipe yolk from his beard again, but that relies on me writing another story.

The guest house is called The Wandering Albatross. 

She tells him that by the age of fifty, a single of these birds may have flown the equivalent of nearly 149 times around the globe. 
He tells her he has always wanted to fly in his sleep, but his brain is too hypervigilant.

The man on reception is coiled up with pussy-cat eyes, gifts them a cheshire grin with their keys. Paisley carpet climbs the stairs. The bed in the room is a gape of tartan. Lily soap white as stars. Two coloured glasses on the pristine sink to bring summer to their tap water. 

Far too late to eat, the tiger on reception informs when they emerge salmon-skinned from showering. They take in the dining room all the same as though domesticity is theirs for the taking. It has a fast-food feel with its red vinyl, gingham kitchen tablecloths.
She lusts for hot dogs and popcorn. He is after duck parfait. 
When she says she could murder something cheap he tells her how fast-food restaurants use car oil on pancakes instead of maple syrup: for viscous makes better billboards. Aesthetics are never what they seem, she says, even when it concerns gourmet.

He promises they might have a slow bath together in the morning. 
An oxymoron she cannot answer.

When he goes in mouth on mouth, he is grabby, he is rushing. 
He moves through her like a ghost in an abandoned building and she emerges less touched for all his touching.

She plays at host. Tips two sugars, four buttons of milk into his post-coital tea. 
Doll’s house cups, he says. They play at being grown-ups. He chinks enamel against hers. Salut, he says, and when she says nothing, he says, now there’s a good girl, say Salut.

Building a roll up with peaty tobacco, he thumbs out lumps, he rolls, he licks. 

He tells her she would be easy to hide because she leaves no marks anywhere and she reminds him this is a one off.

There is poetry in his plush mouth. His voice is a cathedral.

When the street outside picks up with night noise and the fuzzy vocals of the passersby start unspooling, he surrenders to sleep. The thermostat in the room starts climbing. A belly of a moon blues up the sheets with light, but he is adrift elsewhere. 

She cannot comprehend a man sleeping without pillows. One of his legs is in the eiderdown, the other one out, the muscle in his buttocks a conch. Yin and yang.
Sleep gazing always makes her soften.
She watches him for an age. Outside, people get lairy. The city is a snapdragon: opening. 

Grizzle on a man’s face makes her admiring. Time has been taken with the art of his razor. He reaches an arm out to viper across her ribs and she wonders if his unconscious knows that he is not holding the woman he married, and if he bathes with her until the water feels glacial, their fingers and toes corrugated, or if his wife has ever taken a blade, delicately, to the rainbows in his beard to mark out rustic fields, lines of agriculture.

Eyes widening, he tells her he dreamt about the albatross. How its under-parts were clean white, feather tips arctic black. That in order to gain height it turned to face the wind, rising on the updraught until it could rise no more, then it tipped downwards, accelerating quickly, ready for another turn. He tells her he has never heard wingbeats like it.

In the red room, their eggs are served sticky, four lemon suns. An army of soldiers for dipping. She wipes yellow off his chin bristles, tongues her finger. 

She tells him he couldn’t have heard wingbeats in his sleep, because the albatross glides hundreds of kilometres a day without a single thresh of its wings.  

***

Rachael Smart writes short prose and memoir. Recent work has been published at Ink, Sweat & Tears. She is bang into issues of desire and ever so fond of neologies. 

X Link: @SilkOctavia_@smartrachael.bsky.social

When people ask what magic power you’d choose, you never want to fly, or be invisible. You want what you’ve always wanted, the power to make all lost things come back to you. You’d walk into the room of lost things, open your eyes, and there they’d be: the pet turtle you let loose in green grass all those years ago, the story your best friend tore up when she was mad at you, your mother’s Pucci dress, the one you loved as a child, its wild pattern like a monstera plant, moss-green leaves, pale celery background. Mommy, wear your dipsy-doodle dress! You were sure that dress had hung untouched in her closet for 35 years, zipped in its garment bag, but when you asked your stepfather, not two days after the funeral, he shrugged and said he’d sent all that stuff to Goodwill.

 You picture your mother’s eyebrow lifting. Just the one. The vintage designer dresses she collected, on wire hangers at some thrift store. But toward the end of her life she only ever wore sweatsuits, all her bright plumage faded. Maybe that dress meant nothing to her but a time she didn’t want to remember, a shadowy time almost lost to you except in gulps of vivid color, your mother chopping limes by the swimming pool; a bright yellow Big Bird toy you dragged with you everywhere that left bits of yarny fuzz in your hair; the man in a blue velvet shirt who came over and played the piano but never talked to anyone. There were stairs down to the living room, a red carpet. Look, I’m on the red carpet, your mother would say. There was a balcony on the second floor, and if you looked down all you saw was trees for miles, a dizzy-making canyon a person could disappear into, and people did. That was what you remembered most about that time: the sense of danger, of adult conversations that stopped when you walked into the room. The murders, people whispered. The trial. A nameless threat that might still be out there, in the hills. Faces would turn to you, guilty smiles, a sudden interest in coffee cups. You breathed it all in, the way Victorian children were said to breathe in arsenic from poison-green wallpaper. And then it wasn’t there: the house wasn’t there, the piano, the man in the blue velvet shirt. Your mother’s green dress, zipped away in a black bag, gone forever. In that room of lost things you’ll find it. Your mother will be there, wearing the dress, head thrown back in a model pose, long legs in knee-high boots. And sitting in the corner, by the piano, maybe a little shy, will be a man who looks just like his picture, the one picture of him your mother kept. A little slowly, a little haltingly, your mother will lead you to him. And then, for the first time, your father will take your hand.

***

Kathryn Kulpa is a New England-based writer with stories in Best Microfiction, Fictive Dream, Flash Frontier, Ghost Parachute, and other journals. Her books include Cooking Tips for the Demon-Haunted (New Rivers Press), For Every Tower, a Princess (a micro-chapbook, forthcoming from Porkbelly Press), and the flash collection A Map of Lost Places (forthcoming from Gold Line Press).

In the cemetery Bobby counts dandelions drifting away from his mother’s site. He’s autistic and thirty and the count is up to hundreds. He never loses track, never counts the same one twice. He picks just one, which is special to throw in on top of her casket. His eyes shine the same yellow because everything he concentrates on becomes a part of him.

Rocking on his heels he counts the words of the pastor, too many to fit in the section of his brain where they could make sense, all forty-seven of them. Tumbled over each other.

Scobbity bobbity.

Bobby takes a shovel and tosses some dirt in. One is too little. Two is too even. Three is too odd. He hates four. Five is soothing, is getting somewhere. He’d fill in the whole grave if not stopped, and then pack it down four hundred times with his shiny shoes. But his father gently takes his arm. Bobby smiles in a sly way, tosses the shovel back to the dirt pile.

At the open casket he had rearranged her face in his mind. They didn’t get the nose right. You could tell it was smashed under the putty. And her cheeks were puffed out with stuffing. Her chin like a ledge, where it had been soft and tucked with humility. Her lips had been small and straight and pale, but here they had pumped them up like a clown. Bobby started to spin there at the wake, so hard he made a wind that moved his mother’s hair across her forehead and over her purple eyelids where it always used to be.

In his mind he held a photograph of the her he wanted. Even the large photo of her on the easel was not right. Her smile was even when really it always contained a frown on one side, and a biting of the lip. No, it was not right. He had slumped in the corner, rocking with his eyes closed, seeing her get into her new fast car and wave to him. He saw the tree come up, the wet leaves, the defective air bag. She was just going to get away from him and his father for a few days.Even if she did come back it was the leaving that carried as punishment to Bobby. As he rocked tears rolled down his cheeks.

In the church basement he ate two of everything, lining them up on an opened napkin. Between each bite, chewing thirty-two times, he took five swallows of root beer. Continued the cycle, unsmiling at the aunts and uncles who tried to talk to him. Cousin Charley, a fifteen year old, led Bobby outside behind some bushes and lit him a joint. Bobby drew exaggerated breaths and almost turned blue holding them. Charley had to hold him up.

Bobby felt himself float, over to his mother’s grave, where they were done. He laughed. He removed his shoes and socks and tamped the dirt with his bare feet. He knew she would feel and appreciate that. Forty-four times, a thumping above her still but alive soul. He then scattered the hundred dandelions over her.

The sky was huge and it welcomed him to fly up. He laughed some more. He walked and counted stones until some dark line in his head stopped him from adding more. The line was heavy and pressed him down to the grass. He couldn’t breathe. He saw his mother smashed into the dash and the wheel, some final pictures of him in her head. He saw her at twenty holding him in her thin arms. Even then he had counted her heartbeats. It began then. Her breath was slow and even and he was in awe of this rhythm.

On the hill he dropped and began to roll. That open sky was gray and flicked over him as he picked up speed. The universe was expanding and he waited for the end where there would be nothing left to count, what a time to rest.

At the bottom he was stopped by the small black stones.  He traced numbers with a finger. 10 months, 2 days. 2 years, 4 months. 1900, 1910. Little Albert. June Marie. He lay on his back and watched as that sky dropped and from the gray shape his mother came and folded him in her arms so he felt safe to sleep, free from the life which demanded he account for every little thing.

***

Gary Moshimer has stories in Frigg, Smokelong Quarterly, Flash Frog, Eclectica, Necessary Fiction, and many other places.

Do you remember Jennifer who used to drink lattes at the Socialist Worker Coffee Shop, to compensate for the calcium deficiency caused by the formula her mother fed her throughout primary school? Did her mother wince when Jennifer accidentally poured milk in her tea? ‘We’ll have no milk in this house,’ her mother always said.

Did Jennifer lack personality as well as calcium, which wasn’t as easy to replace? Did her ex, Simon, a psychiatric nurse, believe he could fix her, even with the open compass on her nightstand, its wide legs stabbing outwards like a dancer’s? Did the compass protect her from groaning wraiths that poured through the walls at night? Did she quit wearing jogging bottoms and muddy trainers, and instead spend hours twisting her hair into ribbons?

Did her sister make noises when she was inside the fridge? Who had found the abandoned fridge first? Had it been Jennifer’s or her sister’s idea to hide? Had she dragged the armchair by herself and managed to heap it on top? Had she gone away to swim and not heard the kicking and soft moans? Had she opened the door afterwards by herself? 

Had Simon and all the therapists told her that it wasn’t her fault? That she was too young to be left alone for days on her own taking care of her sister. And was that why there was never any milk?

***

Katie Coleman is a British writer living in Thailand. Her work has appeared in Roi Faineant Press, Ghost Parachute, The Sunlight Press, SoFloPoJo, Bending Genres, The Odd Magazine, Ilanot Review and more. She has received nominations for Best of the Net and Pushcart prizes and can be found on Twitter @anjuna2000 and Instagram @kurkidee

The Second Lead is Fate’s favorite.

He knows this should make him the hero if he were living in another story, but for this genre, that only means being bound in an inextricable fortune of misery: cruel family, mountains of debt, whatever’s most thematically suitable. He comforts himself with the thought that being hated by Fate in this much meticulous detail must be some kind of special favor, compared to the promiscuous happily-ever-afters flung haphazardly at the lucky First Lead. The First Lead doesn’t even realize how lucky he is. The Second Lead is certain, at least, about the superiority of his character arc.

•

The Second Lead is the audience’s favorite.

The camera caresses him, and he twists his beautiful face into an expression of distress carefully hidden from everyone else. Nobody watches except for the viewers’ voyeur eyes. To them, he will play up, lay all his cards on the table. It might be a losing game, but that doesn’t mean he can’t go out in style. He shouts at his father and spends the night out in the cold, gets into fights, so that blood can be artistically smeared across his cheekbones and in the plush corner of his mouth. The Second Lead is certain, at least, about the superiority of his bone structure.

•

The Second Lead is having a bad day.

It’s the same as every other bad day, arranged so that he comes close, so close, to his cure, but the solution to this equation is an impossible one. He can’t bury his sorrows in someone else as a false answer, because fate and this story demand that he remain true. He cannot create any opportunity that might alter the course of his destiny. He is cursed to meet her, the reason for his existence, in every other scene; but she turns away behind a curtain of hair and disappears into the arms of the First Lead. Caught in their own ephemeral bad days as the music swells and the cameras swoop around to catch their kiss in many frenetic angles, neither of them notices him lurking under the trees. The Second Lead, wearing an expression of more sincere distress than usual, goes home and stares at his reflection in the lens to make sure he’s there, that he hasn’t disappeared yet. He is certain, at least, that he’ll last until the final credits roll.

•

The Second Lead is allowed one wild card confession.

He hoards it, biding his time, spinning out the spool of friendship as long as it lasts, until the perfect moment. Of course, his timing won’t matter, perfect or not. Whatever he might say or feel or pretend will come too late to change her mind. This doesn’t keep the Second Lead from hoping that, this time, perhaps he will get it right. Perhaps he will get her on a day when she’s just a little extra pissed at the First Lead for what he has or hasn’t said; perhaps he will arrive at the hagwon just a few minutes earlier with an umbrella to catch her as she leaves; perhaps they will sit talking about nothing on the swing set like they have so many times before—but, this time, their laughter will fill the night sky overhead, so that there is no room for the audience, for the First Lead, for the story to snatch them apart.

Perhaps, once, he will be able to make her choose him. He hopes, nothing certain, but if he gives up hope, he has no function left.

•

The Second Lead ponders his future.

After the last scene he’s grateful to get a few lines in, he catches up on sleep. Takes a vacation and allows himself to smile at another pretty girl that, blissfully, he will never see again. Does passably well at work or school and stays out of trouble. It’s a quiet life, revived from time to time by discussion threads, fanfictions, demands for a spin-off. He’s gone through it so many times before.

After all, a happy ending is not the true ending. Neither is an unhappy one. So long as he is remembered, he may persist.

***

Cressida Blake Roe is a biracial writer of speculative and literary fiction, with work appearing or forthcoming in The Baltimore Review, Chestnut Review, Lightspeed, Tupelo Quarterly, XRAY, and elsewhere. Recent stories have been nominated for the Best Small Fictions and the Wigleaf Top 50 Longlist. www.cblakeroe.wordpress.com

Mr. Sutton invited boys to his ranch for what he called throw-downs. We were in junior high, nervous, loud, and desperate to please. My first time, I wore the slacks my mother had pressed and a button-down shirt with a stiff collar. I stood out in the pasture, hot dogs and burgers sizzling on the grill, and watched the other boys smoke cigarettes and sip the beer Mr. Sutton provided. I waited. Each time, I waited and waited and waited.

His rec room boasted an endless array of photos taken when he was on the college swim team twenty years ago. Image after image of long, lean young men with shaven bodies and toothy smiles. Not every boy was invited to this room. You had to be special. Perhaps that’s not the right word. While we mingled in the pasture like old women after a sermon, we wondered what Mr. Sutton called us when we weren’t there. When the last paper plate had been trashed, when his dog Apple barked after the last departing Suburban.

He knew magic. We realized these were cheap tricks, the sort of feats any moron could learn from the back of a magazine or a kit ordered over the phone. But when Mr. Sutton fanned a deck of cards before me and asked in his soothing, FM-dial voice to pick one, I did. I held the card facedown against my chest as he shuffled and scattered the other cards, promising me in his dulcet tone that he would guess the card I held. I bet it’s the queen of spades, he said. You look like you could handle a real woman. Come here, show me your hand.

***

Thomas Kearnes’ career in indie fiction started almost 20 years ago. His recent appearances include BULL: Men’s Fiction, Tiny Molecules, Bodega, Ghoulish Books’ “Bury Your Gays” anthology, Coastal Shelf, jmww journal and elsewhere. He is currently seeking a publisher for his third story collection, “What Happens Here Does Not Happen to Me.” He is currently working on a series of shorts and novelettes about his recent ex-lover and how finally experiencing a relationship end by choice (his other two long-term affairs ended in death) afforded him an emotional awakening that he will celebrate by getting the fuck out of Texas.

The same year a school board member threatened to shoot up our middle-of-a-cow-pasture, K-12 school—all seven hundred of us hunkering down, subsisting on the meager snacks in our bookbags as the hours rolled by, our eager eyes too ready to mistake cattle for attackers—that same year, Katy Perry released I Kissed A Girl and things were never quite the same, for grown women and young women and everyone else, but especially for us, the cow-pasture bisexuals who in our burr-filled patch of central Kansas didn’t yet know that that word existed, bisexual, that identity/threat/promise tingling behind our lips all summer; for so long we had been lied to, told that if you liked boys or men, if you welcomed their hot-breath, quick-fingered advances with the smallest pleasure, or at the very least, indifference, then you could not like women, too—our entire world up until that moment all sharp edges and black-and-white and godly restraint; Katy Perry changed things for us more than that school-board-sitting, could-be school shooter ever would, and after that school day passed and he never showed, didn’t even have the decency to apologize or step down from the school board, we prayed for the day we would get the chance to show him—that sorry excuse for a farmer/a Kansan/a husband—exactly where he factored into our world; but then we grew up and moved on, claimed acre after acre in the name of late-blooming bisexuals everywhere, and eventually we divorced ourselves from Katy Perry because of the geisha thing and the corn-rows thing, and we found better anthems, holier idols, but we never forgot where we started, in that middle-of-a-cow-pasture school where our could-be school shooter’s poor, sweet wife, an elementary-school teacher, eventually left out of shame, that whole incident originating from her husband’s controlling fuckery, his threat to shoot up the school just another desperate attempt to expand his domain over her, over us, and in a way he succeeded, because she would be the one to take the brunt of the blame, and we would live with that specter of violence until we graduated and left for greener, less-shit-spotted pastures; we thought often of that elementary-school teacher, and even sometimes imagined that, when she was finally free of her could-be school shooter husband, when he would be arrested (which never happened) or removed from the school board (nope) or banned from the school grounds (yeah right), or when he finally just let his sweet wife go, maybe she would get out there and find love again, remove herself from that burr-buried hell, too, and maybe, just maybe, she would kiss a girl and found that she liked it; after all these years, maybe she would join our ranks, sing our anthem, spread our influence, say fuck you to this country and conceive of something better; maybe she would prove our most accomplished leader yet, declaring this land our own—of the bi’s, by the bi’s, for the bi’s—and maybe, finally, after all these years and more-than-daily mass shootings, thousands of deaths and millions of assault rifles hiding in plain sight, their reign of terror and our burning world would end; then maybe, just maybe, we would finally have a nation worth celebrating, a home worth sticking to.

***

Chloe Chun Seim is the author of the illustrated novel-in-stories, CHURN, which won the 2022 George Garrett Fiction Prize from Texas Review Press. Her fiction has appeared in Split Lip Magazine, McNeese Review, Potomac Review, LitMag, and more. She received her MFA from the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Men of the mohalla—carpenters, electricians, factory workers—squatting around a bonfire, knees pulled close together, winter fog hovering over their shoulders. Men burning paper, wood, tires, anything they can lay their hands on. Men burping the paya curry cooked by their wives, cozying up in wool sweaters knitted by their mothers. Men smoking bidis, mixing tobacco and slaked lime in their palms, chewing paans that paint their mouths red. Men seeking companionship, men seeking recreation, men seeking validation. Men denouncing the rising price of tomatoes, the corrupt candidates for the MLA election, the increasing death toll in Ukraine. Men shooing away mangy dogs that move closer to the fire, hurling mud or rocks at them, calling them sister-fuckers, mother-fuckers, aunt-fuckers. Men interrupting the sleep of their mothers with their loud guffaws, throat clearings, and phlegm hackings. Men expecting their wives to answer the door at the first knuckle knock, whatever the hour, heat milk or prepare chai, whatever the desire.

Women scrubbing stubborn animal fat from pots and pans, kneading dough for breakfast parathas, soaking urad daal for lunch. Women warming up turpentine oil, massaging the pains of their mothers-in-law, placing pillows under arthritic knees. Women covering the cages of puffed-up parrots and mynahs with empty rice sacks, cooing kind reassurances to calm them down. Women hanging still-damp socks and underwear on indoor hooks and nails, ironing the beds to make them warm and sleep-able, adjusting cotton wool razais over sleeping children. Women cracking the window a slit, checking if the alley huddle will disperse soon, catching the slap of cold on their cheeks, the sting of smoke under sleep-heavy eyelids. Women watching the flame dance into shapes of a bitten apple, a tailless mouse, hands cupped in prayer. Women wrapping pilled shawls around their shoulders, crossing arms around their chests, bracing for the sandpaper incursion of the softest parts of their bodies.

***

Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar is an Indian American writer. She is the author of Morsels of Purple and Skin Over Milk, and is currently working on her first novel. Her stories and essays have won several awards and have been published in numerous anthologies and journals. She is a fiction editor for SmokeLong Quarterly. More at https://saraspunyfingers.com, Twitter:@PunyFingers