This is how we unlearn the foreign body:

We pick up glass bottles with our bare hands. We pick up cardboard—soggy. We pick up old takoyaki boxes, slick with grease, and splintered chopsticks stained with brown sauce. We pick up tea-stained newspapers and place bets on how much the tea and paper cost. We pick up charred wood, pick up used rags. We pick up Coca-Cola cans, their cold kiss on our fingers supplanting the nonexistent fizz in our throats. We pick up the flecks of spit that fly from our lips when we make our rounds, chanting kuzui oharai, kuzui oharai. We pick up the ju sounds that flick from our foreign mouths and twist them into a natural zu. We pick up grocery bags: cloth and plastic. We pick up Olympus Pen cameras. We pick up shoes without the laces. We pick up laces without the shoes. We pick up babies’ shoes, clearly worn, and scraps of clothing with too many holes to take home to our sisters. We pick up boxes of Hi-Lite cigarettes—empty, of course. We pick up Orion’s Cocoa Cigarette boxes (“we support your non-smoking”). We pick up Pinky Chicks albums. We pick up movie posters for Immortal Love and Go, Go, Second Time Virgin. We pick up old leather belts, the kind with the brass buckles. We pick up our mothers’ voices, the ones that say come home quickly instead of don’t forget to buy fish. We pick up snow shovels with jagged tears in the soft red plastic. We pick up see-through plastic PET bottles. We pick up the shrill screams of children at the park, half a block away, and the excited pulse of their running footfalls. We pick up the votes our fathers wanted to cast and stow them in our pockets. We pick up used Pilot ballpoint pens and all the words that drained out of them. We pick up how to recycle. This is how we recycle. We recycle. Recycle.

***

Rina Olsen, a rising high school junior from Guam, is the author of Third Moon Passing (Atmosphere Press, June 2023). She edits for Polyphony Lit, Blue Flame Review, and Cathartic Youth Literary Magazine, and she was invited to be an instructor for Polyphony Lit’s Summer 2023 writing workshop Around the World of Poetry in 80 Days. Her work has been recognized by the John Locke Institute, the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association, the Sejong Cultural Society, and Guam History Day, and her most recent writing has either appeared in or is forthcoming in The Round, Thimble Literary Magazine, and Sophon Lit. Visit her at her website: https://rinaolsen.com.

We recently published Francesca Leader’s powerful “Let Me Try To Make It Interesting.”

Here, we ask her two questions about her story:

1) “Let me try to make it interesting,” our narrator tells us, but she could also be saying “let me tell this story in a way I can bear to tell it. Let me share this story the way it could have happened instead.” Do you think it would be harder for her to tell her story in a way that wasn’t “interesting”?
That might well be the case, but it wasn’t what I had in mind. I actually started writing this piece as a subversion of “strangeness for its own sake,” which I think results from using surrealism/irrealism solely to add charm or novelty. I think this approach can render a piece of writing lifeless. I tend to write realism because I feel best able to convey emotion that way. To my own surprise, as I was writing this piece, I noticed the metaphors taking on a life of their own, and telling a story of trauma in a way that felt authentic to me. By the end of it, I thought the story really was more interesting told this way, as a sort of parable, than it would have been if narrated realistically.

2) And at the end, we learn the “real story.” One of escape and freedom and inner strength. Will our narrator keep telling variations of this (her?) story throughout her life? Or is she ready to move on to a new story?
I do see the narrator leaving this story behind and moving on to a new one. However, I don’t think this means she’s on an “onward and upward” trajectory, never to repeat the same mistakes. I don’t think understanding who she is and what she deserves will necessarily save her from being ensnared or hurt again. It will, however, empower her to more quickly and easily liberate herself the next time. 

CW: Sexual assault

I know the real story would bore you, so let me try to make it interesting. Instead of saying I was molested at eleven, I’ll say a boy with laser-red eyes opened a rat cage in his grandmother’s cellar, and the rats ran all over me, nipping and scratching my skin until I had none left, and when my skin grew back it was transparent and permeable as water. Instead of saying I was assaulted at nineteen, I’ll say I awoke one night to discover my tangled bedsheets had become boa constrictor coils, and the harder I fought, the tighter they squeezed, and I survived only by breathing the thin straw of moonlight between the curtains until the first rays of sunrise shot through, turning the vampire boa to dust, which my waterlike skin soaked up hungrily, hardening and scaling a bit as a result, but remaining transparent. Instead of saying I surrendered my whole being, at twenty-five, to a man who was also a boy—the same kind of boy who’d molested me, the same kind of man who’d assaulted me—I’ll say I walked naked and barefoot into the wilderness, believing I wouldn’t be hurt if I gave myself willingly this time. But the beast I met wasn’t a rat, nor a snake, nor a lion, nor a bear, nor any cutting or strangling creature, but a handsome-faced, limpid-eyed parasite who pushed his way down the slippery slide of my throat and opened up inside me, flattening my essence against my body’s walls until it bonded to the bone-and-blood bricks, until I was little more than a container in which the beast could hide himself, looking out with my eyes, smiling with my lips, speaking his words with my voice. I’ll say it was years before I realized what was happening. I’ll say that just before the parasite absorbed the last remnants of my self, just before he discarded my useless husk to move on to a fresh host, I began, with my mind, to tell him “no”—just “no”—and didn’t stop telling him “no” until, repulsed by the newly-bitter taste of my atoms, he shrank up and withdrew, and my skin grew back as it had been in early childhood—fresh and soft, but opaque and strong, providing a safe home for my heart, my soul, and my secrets. The real story is that I’m here. The real story is that I’m free. The real story is that I’ve learned—finally—the difference between being loved and being consumed.

***

Francesca Leader is a self-taught, Pushcart-nominated writer originally from Western Montana. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in HAD, Wigleaf, Fictive Dream, Barren, the J Journal, Bending Genres, JMWW, Drunk Monkeys, Bright Flash, and elsewhere. Learn more about her work at inabucketthemoon.wordpress.com.)

Mr. Z

Back in high school, persuasive writing class. The assignments were flimsy, a waste of time. Who should be the next president? What’s the most useful college major? I wrote an essay arguing against apologies. Apologies are the most selfish form of persuasion, I wrote. I put in little effort beyond that point. In that class, I broke pencils against the desk and dreamt of a big future where doodles had no place on my hands.

Assistant Professor J. Mittleman

Last month, I skimmed some study that explained why, on average, gay boys do best in school. When I showed the study to my husband, he said, “Yeah, you did stay in the closet way longer than me.”

Mrs. F

In third grade, I tried hard. We wrote short stories. I wrote of a jungle, a gorilla, a trapper. My gorilla knew Swahili and English and had manicured nails. I cried when writing of his fall over that mossy cliff; he was pushed. Dad and I revised the story for six hours, the longest I’d ever sat with an assignment. My grade: E for Excellence. Mrs. Fritz submitted my story to a statewide writing competition, which Lydia Davis won. I was expecting my story to appear in a book. Life was moving too slow for me.

Mrs. Y

Now when I help my daughter with her homework, I mourn the years when I neglected and discouraged my brain. My daughter is in fourth grade. She is the fastest at division in her class.

Puzzle Master W. Shortz

My coworker and I used to do crossword puzzles on the bus home from work. She had a quick brain, or quick compared to mine. While we filled in answers, her brain sat on top of my soggy one, getting higher, peering over the fence at the world.

Mrs. P, Mr. T, Mr. N

There was that time in tenth grade when I let Jen cheat off of my chemistry test because I’d already cheated off of Sam’s. There was that time I aced an English test because I’d read To Kill a Mockingbird back when I was eight years. There was that time I convinced myself to be curious about chi-squares and bell curves. There were those months I brought an empty backpack to school. So light and floppy.

Judge K

In jury duty fifteen years ago, I was thirsty. I asked the bailiff for orange juice, no pulp. We were told of the woman who cut off her boyfriend’s toes. Like most, I made excuses to be dismissed. “Knives have a mind of their own,” I said. I said, “Knives are notoriously hard to wield.” I must’ve been less convincing than the other slippery people there because the judge told me to stand up. “You’re not taking this seriously,” he said; “Write me a five-thousand word essay on the importance of jury duty and leave.” “That’s not how this works,” I said. But he held out a pen and legal pad for me. After sulking, I wrote how the court could improve its image. I was unsure how to best craft my argument.

Mr. K

Before my daughter was born, I signed up for woodworking lessons and made her a crib. Working with my hands barely tamed my fears of fatherhood. But the geometry helped soothe me. I carved repeating triquetras on the planks of the crib. I felt so smart, so superior, explaining vesicae piscis lens shapes to my husband. It takes great effort now to keep the information from slipping out of my head.

HMS, HSS, UMass Amherst

In middle school, in high school, in college, I promised myself to start trying hard whenever the assignments began to feel real.

Mrs. L

My husband and I have a meeting with our daughter’s elementary school guidance counselor. She hands us a blank form to fill out with the extracurriculars we wish her to take. My husband suggests gymnastics and Spanish. “Yes, Spanish,” I say, “and German. Mandarin. French. Chess club. Math club. Student government. More?” My husband writes down some of these. I accept his revisions to my list. And at home, I look at my daughter. For social studies, she’s writing down amendments she’d like to add to the Bill of Rights. She is taking herself so seriously. I take her so seriously. I read over her list and speak to her as if I’m a person who knows how to think. 

***

Max Kruger-Dull holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. His recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI, Litro Magazine, Roanoke Review, Quarterly West, The MacGuffin, Hunger Mountain Review, and others. He lives in New York with his boyfriend and two dogs. For more, please visit maxkrugerdull.com.

The summer our parents threw the word divorce like it was a dart—puncturing the hell out of their target, but always just missing the bullseye—we spent our days in the woods. This was before extinction meant anything other than trilobites and saber-toothed cats. The woods seemed to us then anything but delicate. We poked sticks into holes, hoping to rouse whatever lurked inside. We practiced standing still as rabbits until we believed we could become invisible if we needed to. We believed we might need to. We picked and ate blackberries, so plump and so sweet, straight from their prickly vines. Sometimes we plucked them pale pink, even though the pinks were more bitter than sweet, much too hard to bite through. We rolled those unripe berries around in our mouths, imagining they were somebody’s brains—not so much like we were eating them but like we were keeping them safe there in the dark of our mouths. Something soothing in it. We named the banana spider whose gigantic web stretched between two scraggly oaks Charlotte. We stopped to ask what she caught in the night. We inspected the entombed bodies strung from her pantry like ornaments—always placid and stiff, until one dewy morning, a fresh catch, still heaving in and out with desperate breaths. Impossible to tell what was trapped underneath all that white gauze. We watched the victim’s dwindling breaths for longer than we’d watched anything in our lives, except television. We felt we were seeing something secret. We felt excited, but also guilty for feeling excited. We whispered of bringing our mother’s tiny hangnail scissors into the woods to cut the victim free. Imagined snipping the tight, gossamer threads of bondage. But we never did go get those tiny scissors. We didn’t want to leave, didn’t want to miss a thing. Also, we feared the operation wouldn’t go smoothly. It was one thing to watch a thing die but another entirely to kill it with your own unsteady hand.

***

Michelle Ross is the author of There’s So Much They Haven’t Told You, winner of the Moon City Press Short Fiction Award (2017), Shapeshifting, winner of the Stillhouse Press 2020 Short Fiction Prize (November 2021), and They Kept Running, winner of the 2021 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction (April 2022). She is an editor at 100 Word Story. More can be found at www.michellenross.com.

Appa would have reminded you about the latest airline covid restrictions, even though he hasn’t stepped inside an airplane for over ten years, he would have been getting on WhatsApp every day after you booked the India tickets – to ask you to send him the itinerary (which he would have printed with the help of the apartment manager fellow, bugging him until he exasperatedly gave in and printed it, and put it up on the refrigerator), to ask if your daughter will visit India this time with the white boy whose name (Joe) he can never remember so he makes up a different name each time, like how’s Edward, or has George finished college, to bring him Fruit of the Loom underwear, just that, just that for him, no amma doesn’t need anything, just a six pack, maybe twelve, but no more than that, to remind you to call the taxi company, whose contact he would have forwarded to you, and who he would call to let them know his daughter is coming from America, and she will need taxi services from and to the airport, to check if you called the taxi company, to ask how much the tickets cost, to tell you to bring nothing for any of the other relatives, maybe just chocolates for your niece and nephew, to check if you landed in Dubai, to check if you left Dubai, to ask what you would like for lunch as you stand in the immigration line filling out forms, because breakfast would be at Adyar Anand Bhavan (A2B) where he would always take you the morning you arrive in Bangalore, jetlag be damned, telling the maid, your amma, anyone who would listen for days before your arrival about breakfast with his daughter at A2B, calling your cell phone to give the taxi driver directions when you get close to Fortis Hospital on Bannarghatta Road even though the driver has plugged in appa’s address in the GPS and is perfectly capable of finding it, and finally pacing in the basement garage with a towel wrapped around his head to stave off the early morning Bangalore chill, looking like the milkman of your childhood days, having woken up the watchman, making you cringe at all the commotion as your car enters the apartment complex, but appa died the previous week, and you would give anything to respond to his WhatsApp messages with anything other than silence, a thumbs up sign, or an exasperated ok appa I’ll let you know, but all you can think of is how you got mad at him the last time you visited because he asked if you had gained weight, and so you get down in an empty basement, the watchman has no idea who you are, and as Raj unloads the suitcases, you take out your phone and check if your daughter responded to your reminder to make her doctor appointment.

***

Srilatha Rajagopal lives in Florida with her husband of thirty plus years. She was born and raised in Chennai, India. She loves to read, write, cook, garden, experiment with her iphone camera, and watch birds in her backyard. She was an IT Project Manager and software programmer in a former life. She has been published in Identity Theory, Pithead Chapel, Off Assignment, Tree and Stone Magazine and in the national flash flood journal 2022. She has a recipe/cooking website at rasaala.com.

I wrote a story about my father once. He was alive at the beginning. It was about the time
he came into my room to tell me that my mother had died. He said it just like that.
“Your mother has died. We knew it was coming. You know she’s been sick for a very
long time. She doesn’t want a funeral. You’ll stay home from school for a week, and then it’s
back at it.”

When he closed the door and left, I knelt on my bed and said a prayer for her beneath the
crucifix with the hidden Holy Water compartment she had given me on the occasion of my First
Communion.

I wrote a story about my father once. He died in the middle. Some might have called it a
widow-maker heart attack, but because my mother was already dead, I called it a thunderclap
heart attack—just a flash of pain crossing his face at the Thanksgiving table, and he was gone.
There was no time for goodbyes, which I know is how he would have wanted it.

I wrote a story about my father once. He was a ghost at the end. Not the apparition-kind
of ghost that would hover over me at night in the half-life between consciousness and sleep. He
was the kind of ghost who spoke to me in an undeleted voicemail message: “This is your father. I
need you to come over this weekend and blow the leaves off the roof.”

The kind of ghost that appears without warning in the photostream on my phone when
I’m trying to find a particular picture of my son. In the photo, he’s wearing the same non-smile
that he chiseled into the bedrock of his face the day he came to my room to tell me Mom had
died.

The kind of ghost who has no choice but to haunt me because so much of me is so much
of him. The flecks of gold in my gray eyes: his. The cleft chin and slightly upturned nose: his.
The voice I use to discipline my son: his. And no matter what I write, all I see are his hands
drifting over the keys like two planchettes on a Ouija board spelling out words that come from
Heaven knows where.

***

Kip Knott is a writer, teacher, photographer, and part-time art dealing living in Delaware, Ohio. In his spare time, he travels throughout the Midwest and Appalachia taking photographs and searching for lost art treasures. His third full-length book of poetry, The Other Side of Who I Am, is available from Kelsay Books.

Crash of foam against the jetty and you feel like your heart has been swallowed again. Everything craggy around you, the rocks, of course, but also love. You came here on vacation to lose yourself for a week. You watched the birds, almost too large, you thought, lugging themselves in the humid air and finally pressed down from the sky. One was trying to warn you. Instead you lapped around in the cooling blue, laid yourself out on the beach like a sheet of white paper and later, you went the hotel bar with its drinks all pink and ice cube with umbrellas too small for the rainstorm of the stranger three stools down. How his eyes, themselves, were a cooling blue and looked at you, then down to his finger tracing the saltless rim of a margarita, the same tracing motion he would later use on you, on your stomach, your thighs, and into your own deep salt ocean. And you fell in love so hard, so jetty crash that even after he checked out cold without even a text, you couldn’t answer this bird who knows more about love than you ever have, and was trying so hard to warn you, it fought its own natural need to be in the sky. And when the bird gives up, sees you are the lostest of causes, he skitters away, plops up on the jetty and hefts himself upwards till he becomes cloud and unspoken fleck of rain and anything else that belongs in the sky, you watch him getting smaller and smaller finally fading like a warning, like a wrong love beginning to die. 

***

Francine Witte’s flash fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous journals. Most recently, her stories have been in Best Small Fictions and Flash Fiction America. Her latest flash fiction book is Just Outside the Tunnel of Love (Blue Light Press.)Her upcoming collection of poetry, Some Distant Pin of Light is forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press. She lives in NYC. Visit her website francinewitte.com. 

Ghost with a gun. Ghost in the desert. Ghost wearing a cool hat.

Ghost who can phase through the earth but prefers to walk. Ghost who wears a white sheet sometimes, and sometimes has shadowy feet, which sometimes make a slight noise, just for fun. Ghost with a good sense of humor that’s lost on almost everyone.

Ghost with a new gun. Stolen! Ghost who can drink you under the table. Old ghost in the wild west who suddenly shows up in a Honda Fit and is like hey oh sorry I time-traveled I can do that. ’Bye! Ghost who comes back to town later riding a buffalo and pretends none of that car stuff happened.

Ghost sitting out in the open eating stolen food it can’t even digest or taste but who hangs out all day at the food court ruining the food with ectoplasm and when a teenager finally gets up the courage to yell at it the ghost says, “Good-bye, cruel world!” and crawls away very slowly into a video arcade.  

Ghost having a bad day. Ghost wearing the jersey of that team everybody hates. Ghost with a shoe on its head. Ghost watching Ghostbusters and crying.

Ghost clearing its head getting away from it all, riding a horse, and the horse is pretty freaked out but later, after the ghost sets it free, it dreams of an island in Montana where wild horses used to thrive and actually makes it there, but dies the same day.

Ghost sitting at a bar in Bozeman with a few serious drunkards who are laughing and yell to the other scared patrons and ghost tourists, “See! We told you. But no, you said. Shut up, you said.”

Ghost who used to pop up out of the ground in the middle of showdowns and shout la-la-la and dance in a circle right when the duelers drew their pistols just to get a laugh out of its buddy death.

Tired ghost. Ghost of my heart. Ghost of my old self. Ghost of my old selves’ hearts. Ghosts who got lucky. Ghost who will probably be fine. Ghost of the woods and the rivers and good carpets and perfect coffee. Ghost of good luck. Ghost we hope to have, to help us cross over when it’s time.

***

Matthew Jakubowski’s flash fiction appears in JMWW, The Brooklyn Rail, 3:AM Magazine, and Spelk. He lives in West Philadelphia and has a blog at mattjakubowski.com.

After the funeral, your father is the first

to eat. to shower. to watch T.V. in the dark. to have his sister call. to silence the phone and refresh his messages for the third time that hour. to drive to the train station. to come home around midnight when you’re already in bed, untucked but not asleep,never asleep. to call your mother. to end up in voicemail. to call her five times after, ten times after, fifteen, twenty…until his thumb starts to cramp. to cook her favorite meal of fried rice on the dusty stovetop of your home. to cry in the bathroom while the burnt grains soak in the sink. to cleave a smile when you open the door. to ask how you’re doing and for the first time, not listen to the answer. to fall asleep on the icy marble tiles.to yell at you when you wake him. to sigh. to apologize without looking to see the dam in your six-year-old eyes. to skip work and return to the train station. to ask strangers if they’d seen his wife with the red summer dress and almond eyes so homey they could caulk a fractured family. to spend thirty minutes in the driveway with the windows rolled up to shield in his sobs. to slam the car door. to slam the house door. to slam the bedroom door. to throw her picture frame at the rose-pink walls, a color she’d chosen but he’d grown to love. to pack up all her clothes. to unpack all her clothes. to return to the station for the fourth time. to return to the station for the fifth time. to return to the station for the sixth time. to sleep at the station. to dream of your mother running up to him after the train doors slide open, arms semi-circled in the expectation of a hug. to stop seeing half her body stuck between the tracks and the other half still in the train. to stop hearing the words of the Imam as they lowered her cloth filled with salvaged parts into the muddy ground. to cry in public. to be dragged home by your mother’s family. to throw a tantrum in the living room, toppling the scattered remainders of her—the plush peach pillows, the couch with the strawberry lip-gloss stain, your baby photo album. to blame her family for inviting her over last weekend. to blame himself for not driving her there. to blame you for surviving. to blame you again for surviving. to blame you over and over until he’s slapped shut by his now-ex-mother-in-law. to hear a muffled whimper behind your adjacent bedroom wall. to taste a guilt so acrid it stings the back of his throat. to knock on your door. to not get a response. to knock harder on your door. to still not get a response. to burst into your bedroom, heart strangled by the threat of a multiplied absence. to find you folded up like a clam, gripping the nicked edge of your mother’s picture frame, hiding behind the shadow of his grief. to swear to fix this. to return to the train station the very next day.

***

Olabisi Aishat Bello is a chemistry and engineering nerd from Nigeria who still somehow finds space in her heart for fiction and poetry writing. You can find her works in Trampset, the Blue Marble Review, Atlas & Alice, among others, and you can follow her on Twitter @OlabisiBA and Instagram @olabisi_ba.