Milk Candy Review

Because he’d be upset if I didn’t save the right suits, but I couldn’t remember if his Kiton or Kired suits were the luxury ones. Because the twins’ favorite toys— legos and a train set—were scattered about and there was no time to gather them. Because although the sky was orange and the air smoky, I couldn’t see flames yet. Because the baby needed feeding and my nipples were cracked and bleeding and there was never enough time for warm compresses and lanolin. Because my mother-in-law’s dark oil landscapes my husband’s first edition Hemingways his collection of antique surgical instruments. Because singed pages of books hadn’t yet drifted from the sky into the children’s sandbox. Because Sunny, the standing human skeleton from medical school was too bulky to pack and when my husband and I argued he thought it was funny to bring her out and make her talk shit to me. Because embers and hand-sized ash flakes hadn’t yet fallen from the sky. Because once I got the twins and the baby and our bunny Sacha and our two cats in the car, maybe. Maybe I wanted everything else to burn.

***

Claudia Monpere was just awarded the Smokelong Workshop Prize and her flash appears or is forthcoming in many literary magazines, including Craft, The Forge, Trampset, Fictive Dream, and Atticus Review. 

When you fell, your night was over. Stumbling was ok, you’d blame your shoes that were a little bit high and a touch too new, or a wayward pebble on the footpath. You’d smile at the bouncer and flick the flame red hair that made the boys go weak.

He’d scrunch his eyebrows and pretend to be unsure, tipping his head in imitation of thought, then he’d step backwards, allowing you to enter. We’d follow inside, relieved, loud music pulsing inside us, blooms of club steam clouding our faces.

But you fell.

And the bouncer knows falling means drunk, means tears, means vomit on chairs, in toilets and queues snaking from doors angry girls bang for admittance.

No, you’re not getting in tonight, darling.

 In an ideal world we’d leave with you, share the unmarked taxi with broken headlight, ask the driver what caused the black eye. We’d notice his gaze creep over your bottle-tanned thighs, slither up to your face of smudged make up, gears grinding in his skull, noting your melting wax features drifting to sleep.

 Our skin would prickle as a lizard tongue stroked his chapped lips, tasting possibility, making a decision.

 And we’d shout as he took the wrong turn down the unlit road of lonely houses, their window-eyes blind with nailed plywood. We’d threaten police and our fists as he switched off the ignition, and with our new salon nails, rip him to shreds as he lurched towards you.

But we’d spent too long preparing for the night out. We’d shaved our legs and applied pearly layers of slow drying lotion. We’d curled our hair with heated tongs, added extra strands from the plastic packet.

And Thursdays were hopping. Everyone we knew would be there.

So we went inside.

We didn’t want to go home with you. We didn’t fall.

***

Marie-Louise McGuinness comes from a wonderfully neurodiverse household in rural Northern Ireland. She has work published or forthcoming in numerous literary magazines including Flash Frog, Gone Lawn, Bending Genres, BULL and The Metaworker Literary Magazine. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and enjoys writing from a sensory perspective.

Last look at my grandmother: a slim blue vase above the mouth of the fireplace. A final offering, a displacement of cinders.

A long time ago, she told me a story. When she was eight years old, living in rural Germany, she and two older boys came across three kittens in a ditch: mewling, clearly abandoned. The boys wanted to experiment on them—they had sharp sticks, rusty nails—but she screamed at them Don’t you dare. So one of the boys cut her instead, a slash on the arm. Predictably, the wound got infected. She cried in her bed, delirious with fever, the sheets turned translucent with sweat, and just when everyone thought she was going to die, her body fought it off. 

“I had mercy on the kittens,” she said, showing me. On her wrinkled arm, the scar tissue puckered like a disapproving mouth. “So God had mercy on me.”

I raised my eyebrows, because by that point I had already stopped believing in God, but I knew better than to say anything.

My grandmother never spoke about what happened during the war. Some secrets stayed unreachable, memories knitted closed like the scar on her arm. All I knew that by the time my mother was born my grandmother was long gone from Germany, out of there forever. But Germany would never be out of her.

Whenever I dream of my grandmother now, I picture her growing the tumor that killed her. She is lit from within, the clump of cells building in her skull, blooming white in the interior darkness: first the size of a zygote, and then turning to things the size of food—a pea, a cherry, an apricot—and finally something too large to be edible. Something almost like a fist. Maybe it bloomed there, in the airless dark. Maybe it shone out through the bone of her skull, lighting up her bedroom, lunar. Her own earthbound moon.

Eventually I move out of my mother’s house and to Chicago, a city that careens wildly between heat and cold, like it can’t figure out exactly how it wants to make your life miserable. My apartment is small and clean and pet-friendly, but I don’t get a cat. Something about them. I paint all the walls white, as if they might glow in the darkness. But they don’t, and a week later I paint them black. 

I imagine the true end to my grandmother’s story: the kittens dying not long afterwards, forgotten. After all, how could they survive without their mother? I can’t figure out why she never mentioned telling her parents where they were, or at least making sure someone took care of them so they wouldn’t starve. I can’t figure out why she acted like her story had a happy ending.

Sometimes I buy cigarettes, ignoring the raised eyebrows of the cashier, his low accented rumble You’re too beautiful to be buying these. I believe that my grandmother was beautiful, once, but eventually she wasn’t, and so it was fitting for her to die. Right?

Sometimes I snap my lighter into flame, touch it to one cigarette and then another, burn them all right down to their filters without so much as touching one to my lips. Smoke fills the air, curls over on itself as if indignant at the waste. No one else is here to smell it, so it crawls unnoticed and unremarked-upon into my surroundings. My hair, my clothes, the cracks in the paint: they all smell like poison.

My body is only the ellipsis of my ancestors, a continuation no one asked for.

Years pass and turn to layers on my skin and I don’t dream of my grandmother anymore. Instead I dream of crows coming down from the sky, a few at first and then more and more of them, descending in soft black sheets. They litter the fields, perch on my shoulders, talk to me in their dead voices. They tell me that my grandmother’s story was a fable meant to guide a child, and that she got the scar on her arm from something much worse: the careful burning away of six numbers stamped into her skin. The flame, the heat, the agony. An experience I could never even imagine. They tell me that there never was any such thing as mercy.

***

Amy DeBellis is a writer from New York. Her work has appeared in Pithead Chapel, Flash Frog, HAD, Pinch, Monkeybicycle, and others. Her debut novel is forthcoming from CLASH Books in September 2024. Read more at amydebellis.com.

Sue is a drunk. Georgette is a flirt. Fiona wishes she’d never come to sports night, but here they are again, huddled in the kitchen playing Hearts while their husbands—buddies since college—whoop and holler over the football game on the large-screen TV in the living room. Sue slips into the mudroom at Georgette’s house—it’s her turn to host—and fills her glass from the mickey in her coat pocket. Her liver is fatty, and she’ll die in seven years, but she thinks the news articles about zero alcohol being the only safe amount is a conspiracy fueled by tree-huggers and people who actually like yoga.

Georgette pretends she doesn’t know what Sue is up to and rolls her eyes at Fiona. They get a strange enjoyment watching Sue implode, but they’d never admit it, not even to themselves. It makes them feel better about the extra pounds they each carry around their middle, and the cigarettes they sneak at night on their back porches when everyone’s asleep, even though Fiona will be killed by a drunk driver in twenty years, the day after she quits smoking for good. When Sue’s eyes and skin turn yellow, they’ll drop off casseroles and send cute cards to placate their consciences with sayings like Fuck Cancer and You’ve Got This! and only sometimes wonder if they should’ve stepped in.

Fiona wishes she had better friends, but finds it exhausting to keep up with lunch dates, birthday wishes, and Instagram posts. It’s easier to hover along the edge of this little group stitched together by time, their husbands, and convenience. The truth is, Fiona doesn’t like most women. She finds them petty and competitive. She’d rather sit with the men in the other room, but then she’d come off as standoffish, and she’s always prided herself on being polite.

Georgette envies Fiona and how her husband touches the small of her back when he passes her in the hallway. Last month, Georgette kissed him when they went to the basement for more beer, and later wept in the locked bathroom of her own house, hunkered on the cold ceramic tiles, because he didn’t kiss her back.

Later, after the football game is over and yawns pepper conversation, the couples retreat to their own houses and unstitch the evening in minute detail. The women wonder—but never out loud—if this is all there is to their lives, if they’ve reached their true potential, or if their higher self spins somewhere out in the universe, one inch out of reach.

Sometimes, Georgette wakes in the night in her sexless bed and counts the number of Saturdays she imagines she still has left, and fantasizes about finding a lover who’ll cup her face in his palms and kiss her oh, so deeply.

Sometimes, Fiona wonders if Georgette fancies her husband and vows to watch more closely the next time they get together because Fiona knows that what she has could disappear in a second. A millisecond.

Sometimes, Sue wishes somebody—anybody—would notice the clink of bottles in the recycling bin, the extras she squirrels in the back of her closet, or the mini-bottles she keeps in her desk at work, and care enough about her to say stop.

***

Dawn Miller is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Best Small Fictions nominee, and Best Microfiction nominee. She is a recipient of The SmokeLong Quarterly Fellowship for Emerging Writers 2024. Her work is published in many journals and anthologies including The Cincinnati Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Forge, and Fractured Lit. She lives and writes in Picton, Ontario, Canada.

The Christmas Moon is a moon that appears twice in one December that occurs on Christmas Eve.  The internet tells me that this is not possible because a moon’s cycle is 29 days just like mine (I have always been exact). The impossibility of the Christmas Moon does not stop it from appearing. Its impossibility doesn’t make it more beautiful at all. The man sitting across from me has been beautiful since 1904. The impossibility of his existence makes him more beautiful, I think.

The man from 1904 with beautiful blue eyes has a face for 2020. It’s his chin that makes it a modern face. A chin that I can see because his face is not masked. The pandemic never happened in this walkable town. Once, I thought to ask — I decided that it was best just to let it be. There was never a pandemic, there is an impossible moon, and there is a man sitting across from me that I love.  I have to love him because a magical clock brought him here to me. When you rewind the clock, it brings you to your soulmate. He told me this and I believed him. There is an improbable full moon. There can be a magical clock. If there were no magical clock, we would have both died – dead and alone. It is January 2nd and you can still see the Christmas moon hanging low in the sky. 

He sits across from me picking at his pancakes. They are green and red because they still have food coloring left over from the holiday season. Everyone he loved has been dead for at least 80 years. He hates pancakes. He hates colors. His beautiful blue eyes fill with tears. Sometimes, I get the sense that we weren’t supposed to get to this point. We were supposed to exist in one shining magical moment under a Christmas Moon. And yet, I am here. Sitting across from a man who is pretending not to cry. Men didn’t cry into 1904. Tomorrow, I will tell him that’s okay to cry now. He looks so handsome when he tries to be strong.

I don’t know what comes next. He sleeps on my couch because he won’t share a bed with a woman. I think that he thinks that I am a whore. It is okay. He still loves me. He has to love me because a magical clock brought him here and who is he to deny a magical Christmas Clock? After he finishes his pancakes, we will go to the DMV and try to figure out some things. Maybe, we’ll tell them that he has amnesia and I found him on the side of the road. We can’t get our lies straight anymore. I found myself telling a woman that he is a prince from a small European country and he is my boyfriend. I like the idea that in another universe, I could have been a queen.

I am happy where I am.  I will be happy forever because I found my one true Christmas love. We have been blessed under the Christmas Moon. Time is something that bent its head to me, and I am happy about it. This man is a stranger to me, but I know that he will always be my one true Christmas love. When we talk, we talk about the future in vague terms. He was always a man of the future, he tells me. I don’t have the heart to tell him that the future has already passed. There is a different future for both of us now.  We will be married. We will have children. We will have a mantel where the Christmas Clock will go. The future has been decided.

My future husband sits across from me. When I used to look at his portrait in the hall, I thought that he looked like someone that I would see on the street. I was correct. He was meant to be here with me. We were always meant to be this way. The Christmas Clock decided it and who I am to deny the power of a Christmas clock. Outside the window of the diner, the moon sits in the middle of the horizon. My Christmas Moon, forever.

***

Margaret Roach is a writer who lives and works in the Hudson Valley.  She is halfway through a master’s in Library and Information Science. She works as an evening library assistant who does her very best to not lock people in the library. Her work has been published in Bourbon Penn,  Corner Bar Magazine, Had, and Does it Have Pockets.