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.

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