Milk Candy Review

She and him stopped by the river, got bitten up by who knew what. Making alligator memories, her in a swim top and shorts. He in denim and a cotton tee, his beard as thick as the air was the night they met. Months ago, at a bar in the newly redeveloped part of town. They had a word for that, and it was a mouthful.

Now they found themselves in a heavy-tree moment all sticky, nasty, sweaty, so very sweet they couldn’t hear the voices in the wind, the cries in the water gushing South.

He pinned her along the muddy shore, kissed her forehead, and said he would love her forever.

“’Forever’ and ‘rivers’ not friends.” She laughed at the way he frowned when she said it and doubled down, “Rivers are for crossing and passing through.”

He shifted upright, suddenly stiff-backed like a grouchy cat. He searched his pocket, probably for something to smoke. He shook his head all the steamy while.

“I could imagine you living here,” he said, aiming his hand at everything there was to see—branch cover, moss, and tangly undergrowth, the rotting claw-like-roots of a fallen tree.

He wouldn’t have known here existed if she had not begged him to take her there.

“Living here in what?” She sat up too. “The trees, fox hole, beaver dam?”

He lifted an eyebrow and said, “You’re more creative than that.”

They could not be the first ones to lie down in half a foot of ryegrass with brown bags of beer and ribcage baskets’ worth of expectations. History had been her least favorite class in high school, and she barely passed the prerequisites at the local college, but she knew enough. Shit had undeniable gone down right where they sat.

Wasn’t any alligators to see, though. She had never spotted one in all her years. When she was younger, her mother had warned her to keep away. Warned her about crushing jaws. Slicing teeth. Barreling rolls. Gators that liked the taste of black skin.

“You never see them gators until it’s too late, but trust, they see you.”

She turned to him now as he lit his blunt.

“If I had to build a house on a river, I sure wouldn’t,” she said, pressing him the way she liked. She enjoyed his company the most when they disagreed. Then he would kiss her to keep her quiet, and so he did, and so she let him.

And they did not see the pairs fleeing between tree trunks, so fast their feet would never kiss the ground, certain and never looking back. They did not see those seeking refuge from policing dogs high in the branches. They did not see the plump brown babies being dropped like rocks in the water rush for the waiting alligator teeth.

They did not see that loving on the river’s edge brought them so close to death it could have pulled them under time itself.

***

Ra’Niqua Lee writes to share her particular visions of love and the South. She is an ATLien by birth and mother to magical twins.

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.

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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