Milk Candy Review

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.