Milk Candy Review

1. Any water can be living water. Be it in a strip mall church, or a river, or a lake, or the ocean, according to my father. Even if it was brackish and slimy and smelled of soggy dead leaves. My father never baptized me or my brother in any of the churches where he was a pastor; in the summer he would launch me off his thighs and shoulders into overbleached pools, I came up churning water, eyes red, lips blue and body numb, shouting again! again! until the end of the day.

2. A strong swimmer can still be pulled under by currents. The river was rushing and swollen after ten days of rain, and there were too many beginners in our group, including me. I didn’t drown, but when we tipped over, I was trapped under the canoe, which was wedged under a branch, and when I came up, my lungs were burning, and I was afraid of water in a new way.

3. The brain and heart are over 70% water. I fell in love with a girl in high school who loved to swim as much as me. We went so far out in Lake Michigan that nothing on the shoreline made sense, it dissolved into distant shouting. There we could cling to each other, treading water and making out where no one could see us. And that was the thing: we were both raised to be fearful of queerness, of this kind of baptism by women.

4. The surface tension of amniotic fluid can be measured. My mother, who was raised Catholic, and who I swam in so violently she vomited every way, taught me to wash dishes using water so hot it begs the skin to blister. I wonder if washing dishes this way ever makes her think of being scoured clean by holy water, which, forbidden to me, I once sipped from a font, the edge surely filthy from the touch of so many hands. I learned to plunge my hands in plate after plate after bowl after pan after cup after knife, fork, spoon, removing all traces of food or spit; she taught me to scrub things so clean my knuckles come out red and raw, so my skin dries out and cracks like a wilderness.

5. The opposite of baptism is funeral. We used to play Pentecostal baptism with our Catholic cousins at the beach the summer I was nine. I insisted on being the minister, tipping everyone backwards one after the other, saying I baptize you in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, then slapping them on the forehead. When it was my turn, everyone held me under, together, until my soft palate, throat, and nose were burning, even my brother’s small hands were a part of the net, trapping me until I was thrashing around, fish-like with panic. After, I let them bury me up to the neck in damp sand.

6. A car can hydroplane on one-tenth of an inch of rainwater. My brother died in a car accident on a rainy afternoon at sixteen. He almost drowned in a pool when he was two, and a few more times after that in lakes and ponds as he got older. It never made him afraid of water. I can picture the silvered sliver of scar on his forehead from careening into table corners, water splashing as we played, him veering towards the edge of the pool as if magnetized by danger. My dad pulled him out and beat on his back until he threw up a mouthful of water and undigested cheerios. After that, I dragged my brother around the shallow end, his arms around my neck, letting him half-choke me so he could kick his feet and pretend he was swimming.

7. If a person is drowning, they should try to keep their head up and try to breathe
normally. I learned the basic safety rules for swimming late, long after my parents dropped me in the water, long after it could have become muscle memory. I am too used to being flung out this way, backwards, no time to take a breath. I am used to no warning, used to hitting the surface hard, and used to sinking to the bottom, which is why I force all the air out and drop as fast as I can, because I am also used to getting it over with, and I am also used to coming up shouting again! again!

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Ani King (they/them) is a queer, gender non-compliant writer, artist, and activist from Michigan. Ani is the first place winner of the 2024 Blue Frog Annual Flash Fiction Contest, a SmokeLong Grand Micro Competition 2023 Finalist, and has had work featured in Split Lip Magazine. They can be found at aniking.net, or trying to find somewhere to quietly finish a book without any more interruptions.

Before,

back when Blockbuster was a thing, when Fridays were family movie night, when Father still knew your name and Mother could still read the fine print, back when Sister linked her arm so tightly into yours her pulse screamed and you ran to the New Releases section in sync, back when the biggest argument you got into was which movie to take home – you, romcom, she, comedy – so you rock-paper-scissored to decide, when you knew her tell was a crinkled forehead so you were guaranteed the win, back when Mother’s keychain held the coveted membership card that made the purchase, back when you waited in line begging her to sink your teeth in fun dips and baby bottle pops and pop rocks and gummy worms and air heads and twizzlers, when your stomach didn’t protest when you started inhaling them, back when you asked to turn up the radio on the ride home, when Britney Spears’ ‘Lucky’ was a number one hit, when you thought you were a good singer and didn’t look around first to start belting, back when your legs didn’t know disability and were rooted the strength to sprint you to the couch, when you could shelter your entire self with a blanket Gram crocheted, back when you could fast forward through the previews but you couldn’t fast forward through the FBI notice that warned about copyright, back when you thought, why would anyone ever break the law?, when you thought the law was always right, when you didn’t have a reason not to question them, back when you watched a romcom where the guy was able to stop the love of his life right at the gate of the terminal, when you thought stopping someone from following their dream was a romance, back when the landline rang and you were all farthest from a phone, when you let the machine pick up the message, when you could hear your family’s voices say in one collective hymn this is the home of your last name, back when you all had the same last name, back when kindness seemed spilled and love was the laughter of your family in one room, back when you sprawled across Mother’s lap, head under the roof of her hand, feeling safe enough to dream and sprout and church yourself into the universe, you remember you couldn’t wait to grow up. You couldn’t wait to grow old. 

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Aysha Mahmood is a Pakistani and Dominican writer, artist, and disability advocate based in Connecticut. She is currently the editor of a nonprofit organization and her creative work has been published in Salamander, Leon Literary Review, and Troublemaker Firestarter amongst others. When not writing, Aysha can be found binge-watching Bob Ross videos, eating an unhealthy amount of chocolate, or growing her vegetable garden.

We recently published Martha Keller’s nostalgic “Good Girls.”

Here, we ask her two questions about her story:

1) I remember those days — rushing out to the swings, hoping to beat the boys, being told to share, being pulled off, being knocked to the ground (we didn’t have a countdown like this). I love how the girls plan to fight for possession. How long do you think they can hold on?
 Yes! The swings were such a battleground. Weren’t they? I don’t know how long the girls will fight for the swings, but I think the girls’ relationship with the swings will unavoidably change. I love writing about liminal moments in time—the flash of a transition, the shift in the way the girls are viewed or the way the girls view themselves. The last line “holding hard and fast to everything they’ve come to take from us” has a defensive tone. Given everything that we’ve already read, there’s also a nagging question: What will they let them take? The swing itself hovers over a space in time. While on the swing, the girls stay in the same spot. Nothing has been decided yet. Nothing has been given or taken away. Throughout the story, I feel like the girls are fighting for power: power over the swings but also power to hold on to themselves. In that sense I hope the girls keep fighting to hold on forever.  

2) I love the way the countdown pulls the girls into the future awaiting them and then back to this moment on the swings. And in all these future moments, the boys are there. Do you think the boys will always follow the girls like this?
The boys’ role in their lives grows and swells until it nearly suffocates the girls and pushes them to find something new. But in the years that follow the girls have given the boys a greater role in their lives. They have followed the boys into a life they’re not sure they ever wanted. I like to think the girls reach a wiser and more hard-won sense of themselves and what they want and need. When they’re young, they’re too quick to accept what’s expected of them—to embrace (and enforce) restrictions on appearance, behavior, even their life goals. Their choices start to feel like they’re chasing someone else’s milestones.  I like to think the girls and the boys have the courage to stop following (or dragging) someone else down an unwanted path so that they can finally find something closer to a partnership and a life that truly belongs to them.    

We plan to kick their heads in with the toes of our jelly sandals. They’ve come with Filas and skinned knees and bad bowl cuts to count us off the swings. Sharing, the teachers say. Taking turns. We pump our legs, pull at long rusty chains suspended from hollow metal crossbeams. Turf. Head. Sky. Turf. Head. Sky. Ponytails and pigtails whip the air behind us. Legs fan out, a murmuration of swooping and diving, cotton skirts and skorts flapping like flags in the wind.

30

They shout the number like a curse. The year we made a baby, had a baby, lost the baby. The year we wanted to be mothers: Grab tiny fingers. Hold a soft head in the palm of our hand. Wait. Watch. Wake. Hands on our bodies. Hands in our bodies. We’d cry. We’d grow tired. We’d stop listening. We’d stop watching. We’d walk out the door in the snow, at the conference, at our in-laws for the last time.

25

Getting braver. Getting closer. The year of tousled hair and Sunday brunches. Did he? Not yet. Maybe this weekend. Open toe. Invitations. We’re chiffon dolls in descending order. Are you sure? It’s forever. I do. I do. I do.

20

Wanna see my loft? No parents. Hook-ups. Solo cups stuck to tiled floors. Bunk Beds. Bob Marley. Shredded bill baseball hat collection. Little Black Dress. We hide from the RA, the ex, the roommate passed out in the Papasan chair on Parents’ Weekend. Will they? What’s next?

15

Halfway there. All the other girls got it first, didn’t they? Didn’t they? Fat one. Last one. Too thick. Stick thin. Eyeshadow. Lipstick. No make-up ‘til you’re eighteen. We’re tube tops in the bathroom. Bodysuits. Boy shorts. Will I feel different afterwards? I heard—she let—they are—bitch and slut and prude rolling off our tongues like Rain-Blo bubble gum balls. 

10

We’re back of the bus, Emergency Exit. Hot pink macraméd bracelets, bralettes. Pierced ears. President. Astronaut. Super Star. Sticker collection. Trade you. I’m coming. I’m coming. Wait up.

5                                                                                                            

Playing house. Mom and dad. Dry kisses next to monkey bars, water fountains, cubbies on carpet squares. First comes love. This is love. This is love.

1

We’re muscled limbs kicking a 3-2-1 countdown, sweaty thighs, skin stuck to skin, bare feet, blistered fingers balled into fists: Holding hard and fast to everything they’ve come to take from us.

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Martha Keller’s work has appeared in Lost Balloon, Cagibi Literary Journal, Bridge Eight Literary Magazine, Brilliant Flash Fiction and elsewhere. She was a longtime reader for Flash Fiction Magazine. Her short stories have been nominated for the Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions anthologies. Over the years, she’s worked in strip malls, skyscrapers, and high school classrooms. 

The square classroom was on the second floor, the western side of the school building, which was also square. It was beside the large open space, also square, used as a study hall, which featured three different “classroom” configurations. Three teacher’s desks, two facing each other, one at the head of the space, the rooms themselves ghosts. Students sat in the desks most periods of the day, but always near the end of the day, when study halls were most common. The classroom where it happened was across the hall from the open area, separated from the hall by a laminate strip, the carpet of the open space on one side of the strip, the square tiles of the hall on the other.

The room was square, like all the rooms in the square building. There were square tiles on the floors. The desks themselves were square, the kind of desks with chair and writing surface attached, under the chair a hollow space that rattled if people put books inside. The desks were arranged in rows and there was a teacher’s desk, rectangular, off to the side of the front of the classroom. There were rectangular chalkboards. If it was a math class, which this wasn’t, there would be a projector for transparencies at which a teacher would sit and do problems while the light made their face ghostly. This was a social studies classroom so there were maps that unfurled. Topographical and political. Maps of Europe and Asia. It was an honors geography class, and for tests students had to draw freehand maps of individual continents, fill them in with the names of the countries and capitals. The teacher was a creep who wore white short-sleeve shirts and ties too tight and smiled in a way that appeared pained while looking up girls’ skirts. This was the room where it happened.

The rows of desks were precisely in and of their time period. This was 1987, maybe 1986. The students wore high hair. There were punks and jocks. It was like a John Hughes film, only less kinetic and amusing. There were thirty five students in the room when it happened. Bored and listless, they were surprised when Patricia Lang lost her mind, had her mental breakdown, started screaming. Nobody knew why she was screaming. Some of them assumed it had to do with Mr. Coburn, but, no, it didn’t seem to be about him, she was just screaming; when they looked in her face they could tell she was somewhere else entirely.

There were bookshelves along the side of the room, under a bank of windows, and the windows looked out onto the courtyard where no one was allowed to go, and some of them could see cirrus clouds in a blue sky. They could see the tops of trees moving in a stiff wind. Patricia Lang kept screaming and Mr. Coburn called someone on a telephone nobody knew was in the room, and it seemed to happen both very fast and very slowly. People outside in the study hall, hearing the screaming, turned to look toward the room and a few of them smirked, but it was a defensive smirking, and the students in the room were aware that they had a privileged seat at this psychodrama, and they all recognized something inside Patricia Lang that could just as easily have been inside them, and maybe was!, and when someone official arrived and put Patricia into a wheelchair and wheeled her down the hallway she was still screaming until she stopped screaming and started whimpering, which might have been worse.

And then there was one chair left empty in that room where everyone was waiting to get out of high school and move on with their adult lives, which would no doubt be filled with pain and difficulty, and they saw the horror that Patricia Lang saw, which was way worse than the horror depicted in the horror movies of the time period. And they felt a new fondness for the squareness of the school and for the cinderblock walls that had always reminded them of prison before, thinking maybe prison wasn’t so bad after all, maybe it was okay to wall themselves off, and that night they went into basements and attics and found things they had once played with and put aside and for the briefest moment they played with them again, like a bunch of innocent children.

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Jamey Gallagher lives in Baltimore and teaches at the Community College of Baltimore County. His stories have been published in many journals online and in print, including Punk Noir Magazine, Poverty House, Bull Fiction, and LIT Magazine. His collection, American Animism, will be published in 2025.

Like sad gladiolas, the drunken boys sway away from their late-night party, south toward the man-made lake, to sit on the little fishing pier near the shore. They settle with their backs against the wooden platform, take their money from their wallets and hide it in their pants, way down tight against their sacs. They know about thieves here, and they want to relax. After a while, other young men stumble by, older than the boys, but not by much, smelling of cheap weed, wielding gap-toothed grins that are more desperate than friendly. Sober enough to not want their skulls smashed or their skin sanded against gravel, the boys rise, walk away slowly but with purpose. They have numbers in their favor, but don’t want to take any chances.  It’s hot, and their hair sticks to their foreheads with sweat, pebbles in their shoes as they shuffle toward anywhere else, away from the dark. They toss stones at the windows of the shuttered Dairy Queen, but not hard enough to shatter them. The boy that looks the oldest and has the best fake ID buys them White Claws at the convenience store, and they sit on the curb outside to drink a little more, haloed in the fluorescent glow. They take turns watching for cherries and berries. One tells a story about school, something about a spider caught in the sticky sheen of a teacher’s hair gel. They whistle at a group of girls, girls from the same party they just left, forgetting their earlier failures. They don’t know a single thing about sex that they haven’t learned from a screen, but they act like they do. Bored and tired, they begin to walk down roads where street lights cast the shapes of them in black outlines, clear-edged and precise, as if they’d been singed onto the concrete. They pass a church whose signage reads “Jesus loves you—repent!” They change the letters to read “Jesus—nervous to pee” and pocket the l and the y for some future purpose. Their laughter follows them home like a guardian. Nothing bad can happen to them here.

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Donna Vorreyer is the author of To Everything There Is (2020), Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016) and A House of Many Windows (2013), all from Sundress Publications. She hosts the monthly online reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey. Though primarily a poet, her small fictions and essay work have appeared in Cherry Tree, Thimble Lit, Sweet, MORIA, Lily Poetry Review, and other journals. (Editor’s note: She has also been on Jeopardy twice, which we think is so cool!)