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

There once was an island off the coast of Florida’s big toe that was created by Hurricane Roberta in 1950 and called Cat Spit by the fishermen who discovered it through their binoculars. For so long its only inhabitants were crabs and seabirds until Tyra and the crew brought the girls auditioning for cycle 42 there and said, “Only 13 of you will continue on in the hopes of becoming America’s Next Top Model. The rest will be left here to figure out what went wrong.”

Seven is a fine number for a family, a little small for a colony, and though no one remembers their original names, we do know they came to be collectively called Melissa. First, they built lean-tos from hurricane driftwood. Melissa’s long limbs were perfectly suited to the climbing of the palmettos long ago planted there by seabird excretion, and they used those fronds to thatch their slanted roofs. At night there they slept, curled around one another like cats. Melissa cracked crabs with their wedges and heels, and eventually their feet hardened to the shells that littered their small sandbar. Their hands were wide but gentle and they deftly stole seabird eggs. They were fond of crab meat omelets. Sometimes they added algae for B12. They collected rainwater in emptied Caboodles, angled their compact mirrors to harvest the sun for campfires.

The Women’s Group of the Coral City Baptist Church visited them first, came with blueberry muffins and pocket bibles and a 24 pack of bottled water. They found Melissa seated crisscross in a row, bronzed shoulders and newly freckled cheekbones, braiding each other’s hair, singing “Doll Parts” like a hymn.

After that, whenever the fishermen and concerned Floridians came too close to their shore, Melissa greeted them calmly but would accept no aid. Still, the fishermen left them bouquets of jasmine, gardenias, lilacs. Chocolates that melted in the heat, peeled oranges. Lacy valentines that faded in the sun until the water reached out and pulled them back. It was said of them that they forgot they were women, that their smiles meant something different. One fisherman swore he saw Melissa jump from the top of a palmetto and catch the breeze before floating back to the sand. Another said that scales were forming on their sharp collarbones, that their fingernails had started to grow curved over, hard and opaque. Stories persisted on the mainland that Melissa swam laterally, serpentine, as if they had no legs or arms, only supple, strong spines.

Just as the rumors really got going and somebody decided someone should do something about Melissa, Hurricane Indigo spun off of Africa, moving westward, feeding on warm air and saltwater. The stubbornest of mainlanders boarded up windows and doors and filled up empty milk jugs with tap water. Most others fled upward, inland. In the aftermath of it all, in the leaving and coming back, amidst the rebuilding and grieving, it was weeks before the fisherman and concerned Floridians remembered Melissa. They loaded up their boats, headed east, and found nothing. As quickly as Cat Spit was created, it perished, as if a god had simply flipped the island back over on itself like a pancake. There was no Melissa, no debris, not even a crab shell or a Caboodle floating in the water—only the vague feeling of having brushed up against a life you could’ve had.

The fishermen had no place to put their yearning, their saliva dried up in their mouths. They all got used to having less. The hardened among them figured Melissa would wash ashore eventually, their bodies bloated and fish-chewed. Some hoped Melissa may have heard the storm was coming, built a raft out of their lean-to and made their way to the Keys or Cuba, even. They could’ve settled down around the Gulf of Mexico somewhere, had long-limbed babies with killer cheekbones, sold leggings to other moms.

If only the fishermen and the concerned Floridians had looked into the red sky the morning of the storm, after the night of the full Strawberry Moon. Maybe they would have seen, impossibly, Melissa rising like the tide, into the air, swimming through the dark clouds. The tails of their braids flying, flirting with the quick wind. If they were listening, maybe they would’ve heard Melissa sing ecstatic, a taloned bird call mimicry of laughter like soda bubbles, like summer vacation, like women who have finally figured it all out.

***

Janice Leadingham is a Portland, OR based writer and tarot-reader originally from somewhere-near-Dollywood, Tennessee. You can find her work in HAD, The Bureau Dispatch, The Northwest Review, Bullshit Lit, Wrongdoing Magazine, JAKE, Maudlin House, and Reckon Review, among others. She is a Brave New Weird and Best Small Fictions nominee. She is @TheHagSoup everywhere and also hagsoup.com.

Because he’d be upset if I didn’t save the right suits, but I couldn’t remember if his Kiton or Kired suits were the luxury ones. Because the twins’ favorite toys— legos and a train set—were scattered about and there was no time to gather them. Because although the sky was orange and the air smoky, I couldn’t see flames yet. Because the baby needed feeding and my nipples were cracked and bleeding and there was never enough time for warm compresses and lanolin. Because my mother-in-law’s dark oil landscapes my husband’s first edition Hemingways his collection of antique surgical instruments. Because singed pages of books hadn’t yet drifted from the sky into the children’s sandbox. Because Sunny, the standing human skeleton from medical school was too bulky to pack and when my husband and I argued he thought it was funny to bring her out and make her talk shit to me. Because embers and hand-sized ash flakes hadn’t yet fallen from the sky. Because once I got the twins and the baby and our bunny Sacha and our two cats in the car, maybe. Maybe I wanted everything else to burn.

***

Claudia Monpere was just awarded the Smokelong Workshop Prize and her flash appears or is forthcoming in many literary magazines, including Craft, The Forge, Trampset, Fictive Dream, and Atticus Review. 

When you fell, your night was over. Stumbling was ok, you’d blame your shoes that were a little bit high and a touch too new, or a wayward pebble on the footpath. You’d smile at the bouncer and flick the flame red hair that made the boys go weak.

He’d scrunch his eyebrows and pretend to be unsure, tipping his head in imitation of thought, then he’d step backwards, allowing you to enter. We’d follow inside, relieved, loud music pulsing inside us, blooms of club steam clouding our faces.

But you fell.

And the bouncer knows falling means drunk, means tears, means vomit on chairs, in toilets and queues snaking from doors angry girls bang for admittance.

No, you’re not getting in tonight, darling.

 In an ideal world we’d leave with you, share the unmarked taxi with broken headlight, ask the driver what caused the black eye. We’d notice his gaze creep over your bottle-tanned thighs, slither up to your face of smudged make up, gears grinding in his skull, noting your melting wax features drifting to sleep.

 Our skin would prickle as a lizard tongue stroked his chapped lips, tasting possibility, making a decision.

 And we’d shout as he took the wrong turn down the unlit road of lonely houses, their window-eyes blind with nailed plywood. We’d threaten police and our fists as he switched off the ignition, and with our new salon nails, rip him to shreds as he lurched towards you.

But we’d spent too long preparing for the night out. We’d shaved our legs and applied pearly layers of slow drying lotion. We’d curled our hair with heated tongs, added extra strands from the plastic packet.

And Thursdays were hopping. Everyone we knew would be there.

So we went inside.

We didn’t want to go home with you. We didn’t fall.

***

Marie-Louise McGuinness comes from a wonderfully neurodiverse household in rural Northern Ireland. She has work published or forthcoming in numerous literary magazines including Flash Frog, Gone Lawn, Bending Genres, BULL and The Metaworker Literary Magazine. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and enjoys writing from a sensory perspective.

Last look at my grandmother: a slim blue vase above the mouth of the fireplace. A final offering, a displacement of cinders.

A long time ago, she told me a story. When she was eight years old, living in rural Germany, she and two older boys came across three kittens in a ditch: mewling, clearly abandoned. The boys wanted to experiment on them—they had sharp sticks, rusty nails—but she screamed at them Don’t you dare. So one of the boys cut her instead, a slash on the arm. Predictably, the wound got infected. She cried in her bed, delirious with fever, the sheets turned translucent with sweat, and just when everyone thought she was going to die, her body fought it off. 

“I had mercy on the kittens,” she said, showing me. On her wrinkled arm, the scar tissue puckered like a disapproving mouth. “So God had mercy on me.”

I raised my eyebrows, because by that point I had already stopped believing in God, but I knew better than to say anything.

My grandmother never spoke about what happened during the war. Some secrets stayed unreachable, memories knitted closed like the scar on her arm. All I knew that by the time my mother was born my grandmother was long gone from Germany, out of there forever. But Germany would never be out of her.

Whenever I dream of my grandmother now, I picture her growing the tumor that killed her. She is lit from within, the clump of cells building in her skull, blooming white in the interior darkness: first the size of a zygote, and then turning to things the size of food—a pea, a cherry, an apricot—and finally something too large to be edible. Something almost like a fist. Maybe it bloomed there, in the airless dark. Maybe it shone out through the bone of her skull, lighting up her bedroom, lunar. Her own earthbound moon.

Eventually I move out of my mother’s house and to Chicago, a city that careens wildly between heat and cold, like it can’t figure out exactly how it wants to make your life miserable. My apartment is small and clean and pet-friendly, but I don’t get a cat. Something about them. I paint all the walls white, as if they might glow in the darkness. But they don’t, and a week later I paint them black. 

I imagine the true end to my grandmother’s story: the kittens dying not long afterwards, forgotten. After all, how could they survive without their mother? I can’t figure out why she never mentioned telling her parents where they were, or at least making sure someone took care of them so they wouldn’t starve. I can’t figure out why she acted like her story had a happy ending.

Sometimes I buy cigarettes, ignoring the raised eyebrows of the cashier, his low accented rumble You’re too beautiful to be buying these. I believe that my grandmother was beautiful, once, but eventually she wasn’t, and so it was fitting for her to die. Right?

Sometimes I snap my lighter into flame, touch it to one cigarette and then another, burn them all right down to their filters without so much as touching one to my lips. Smoke fills the air, curls over on itself as if indignant at the waste. No one else is here to smell it, so it crawls unnoticed and unremarked-upon into my surroundings. My hair, my clothes, the cracks in the paint: they all smell like poison.

My body is only the ellipsis of my ancestors, a continuation no one asked for.

Years pass and turn to layers on my skin and I don’t dream of my grandmother anymore. Instead I dream of crows coming down from the sky, a few at first and then more and more of them, descending in soft black sheets. They litter the fields, perch on my shoulders, talk to me in their dead voices. They tell me that my grandmother’s story was a fable meant to guide a child, and that she got the scar on her arm from something much worse: the careful burning away of six numbers stamped into her skin. The flame, the heat, the agony. An experience I could never even imagine. They tell me that there never was any such thing as mercy.

***

Amy DeBellis is a writer from New York. Her work has appeared in Pithead Chapel, Flash Frog, HAD, Pinch, Monkeybicycle, and others. Her debut novel is forthcoming from CLASH Books in September 2024. Read more at amydebellis.com.

Sue is a drunk. Georgette is a flirt. Fiona wishes she’d never come to sports night, but here they are again, huddled in the kitchen playing Hearts while their husbands—buddies since college—whoop and holler over the football game on the large-screen TV in the living room. Sue slips into the mudroom at Georgette’s house—it’s her turn to host—and fills her glass from the mickey in her coat pocket. Her liver is fatty, and she’ll die in seven years, but she thinks the news articles about zero alcohol being the only safe amount is a conspiracy fueled by tree-huggers and people who actually like yoga.

Georgette pretends she doesn’t know what Sue is up to and rolls her eyes at Fiona. They get a strange enjoyment watching Sue implode, but they’d never admit it, not even to themselves. It makes them feel better about the extra pounds they each carry around their middle, and the cigarettes they sneak at night on their back porches when everyone’s asleep, even though Fiona will be killed by a drunk driver in twenty years, the day after she quits smoking for good. When Sue’s eyes and skin turn yellow, they’ll drop off casseroles and send cute cards to placate their consciences with sayings like Fuck Cancer and You’ve Got This! and only sometimes wonder if they should’ve stepped in.

Fiona wishes she had better friends, but finds it exhausting to keep up with lunch dates, birthday wishes, and Instagram posts. It’s easier to hover along the edge of this little group stitched together by time, their husbands, and convenience. The truth is, Fiona doesn’t like most women. She finds them petty and competitive. She’d rather sit with the men in the other room, but then she’d come off as standoffish, and she’s always prided herself on being polite.

Georgette envies Fiona and how her husband touches the small of her back when he passes her in the hallway. Last month, Georgette kissed him when they went to the basement for more beer, and later wept in the locked bathroom of her own house, hunkered on the cold ceramic tiles, because he didn’t kiss her back.

Later, after the football game is over and yawns pepper conversation, the couples retreat to their own houses and unstitch the evening in minute detail. The women wonder—but never out loud—if this is all there is to their lives, if they’ve reached their true potential, or if their higher self spins somewhere out in the universe, one inch out of reach.

Sometimes, Georgette wakes in the night in her sexless bed and counts the number of Saturdays she imagines she still has left, and fantasizes about finding a lover who’ll cup her face in his palms and kiss her oh, so deeply.

Sometimes, Fiona wonders if Georgette fancies her husband and vows to watch more closely the next time they get together because Fiona knows that what she has could disappear in a second. A millisecond.

Sometimes, Sue wishes somebody—anybody—would notice the clink of bottles in the recycling bin, the extras she squirrels in the back of her closet, or the mini-bottles she keeps in her desk at work, and care enough about her to say stop.

***

Dawn Miller is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Best Small Fictions nominee, and Best Microfiction nominee. She is a recipient of The SmokeLong Quarterly Fellowship for Emerging Writers 2024. Her work is published in many journals and anthologies including The Cincinnati Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Forge, and Fractured Lit. She lives and writes in Picton, Ontario, Canada.

The Christmas Moon is a moon that appears twice in one December that occurs on Christmas Eve.  The internet tells me that this is not possible because a moon’s cycle is 29 days just like mine (I have always been exact). The impossibility of the Christmas Moon does not stop it from appearing. Its impossibility doesn’t make it more beautiful at all. The man sitting across from me has been beautiful since 1904. The impossibility of his existence makes him more beautiful, I think.

The man from 1904 with beautiful blue eyes has a face for 2020. It’s his chin that makes it a modern face. A chin that I can see because his face is not masked. The pandemic never happened in this walkable town. Once, I thought to ask — I decided that it was best just to let it be. There was never a pandemic, there is an impossible moon, and there is a man sitting across from me that I love.  I have to love him because a magical clock brought him here to me. When you rewind the clock, it brings you to your soulmate. He told me this and I believed him. There is an improbable full moon. There can be a magical clock. If there were no magical clock, we would have both died – dead and alone. It is January 2nd and you can still see the Christmas moon hanging low in the sky. 

He sits across from me picking at his pancakes. They are green and red because they still have food coloring left over from the holiday season. Everyone he loved has been dead for at least 80 years. He hates pancakes. He hates colors. His beautiful blue eyes fill with tears. Sometimes, I get the sense that we weren’t supposed to get to this point. We were supposed to exist in one shining magical moment under a Christmas Moon. And yet, I am here. Sitting across from a man who is pretending not to cry. Men didn’t cry into 1904. Tomorrow, I will tell him that’s okay to cry now. He looks so handsome when he tries to be strong.

I don’t know what comes next. He sleeps on my couch because he won’t share a bed with a woman. I think that he thinks that I am a whore. It is okay. He still loves me. He has to love me because a magical clock brought him here and who is he to deny a magical Christmas Clock? After he finishes his pancakes, we will go to the DMV and try to figure out some things. Maybe, we’ll tell them that he has amnesia and I found him on the side of the road. We can’t get our lies straight anymore. I found myself telling a woman that he is a prince from a small European country and he is my boyfriend. I like the idea that in another universe, I could have been a queen.

I am happy where I am.  I will be happy forever because I found my one true Christmas love. We have been blessed under the Christmas Moon. Time is something that bent its head to me, and I am happy about it. This man is a stranger to me, but I know that he will always be my one true Christmas love. When we talk, we talk about the future in vague terms. He was always a man of the future, he tells me. I don’t have the heart to tell him that the future has already passed. There is a different future for both of us now.  We will be married. We will have children. We will have a mantel where the Christmas Clock will go. The future has been decided.

My future husband sits across from me. When I used to look at his portrait in the hall, I thought that he looked like someone that I would see on the street. I was correct. He was meant to be here with me. We were always meant to be this way. The Christmas Clock decided it and who I am to deny the power of a Christmas clock. Outside the window of the diner, the moon sits in the middle of the horizon. My Christmas Moon, forever.

***

Margaret Roach is a writer who lives and works in the Hudson Valley.  She is halfway through a master’s in Library and Information Science. She works as an evening library assistant who does her very best to not lock people in the library. Her work has been published in Bourbon Penn,  Corner Bar Magazine, Had, and Does it Have Pockets. 

The drizzle smothers the campfire, leaving the contestants to scramble to save their marshmallows. We of the producers and crew wonder what Jessica would do. Would she go after Allison? This season’s hero, a twentysomething finance bro, has a type—either Allison, the All-American girl next door, or Jessica, the blond corporate bitch from Seattle. 

We had caught Jessica scoffing at Allison’s dream of becoming a good housewife and mother on Day 1. We watched as Jessica apologized but Allison only nodded as we hid around the corner armed with our phone cameras during the snack break. We deleted the footage from when they played video games together after bonding over their favorite TV shows later after we shooed away the other girls from the rec room for one-on-one footage.

We zoom into Jessica’s marshmallow dripping gloopy tears in the rain. She holds her lighter in the other hand and a wet cigarette flickers in her mouth, and she resembles a Virginia Slims model post breakup. She waves, then gives us the finger. The other girls think the finger was meant for Allison. We pan to their outraged reactions. 

Yesterday, we needed more footage for Jessica’s downward arc to foreshadow the hero choosing Allison over her in the final episode. When we asked them to fight over the final pancake, they were giggling like old friends the entire way through. When it was time for the orange juice, Jessica refused to knock the glass over. We knocked it over for her. Just a gentle flick was enough. The juice bruised Allison’s white sundress with orange she couldn’t wash out, and both their faces made for perfect shots.

The other girls gather around Allison, armed with soaked marshmallow sticks, protecting her from the rain and Jessica. Jessica flings her marshmallow stick with as much force as Marlboro Man punching a cowboy. The stick heads not toward Allison, but towards us. It breaks cleanly into two at our feet. 

You’re the real villains, we think she says, as the rain drowns out her voice.

We pick up the fragments of the stick. We take it back to the producer cabin to get a better shot under studio lighting. 

Once the rain stops, let’s film another take of the campfire scene again tomorrow, we say to ourselves. Let’s get the storyline right this time.

***

Tina S. Zhu writes from her kitchen table in NYC. Her work has appeared in Lightspeed, X-R-A-Y, Lost Balloon, Sundog Lit, and other places. She can be found at tinaszhu.com.