Milk Candy Review

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