Milk Candy Review

Crash of foam against the jetty and you feel like your heart has been swallowed again. Everything craggy around you, the rocks, of course, but also love. You came here on vacation to lose yourself for a week. You watched the birds, almost too large, you thought, lugging themselves in the humid air and finally pressed down from the sky. One was trying to warn you. Instead you lapped around in the cooling blue, laid yourself out on the beach like a sheet of white paper and later, you went the hotel bar with its drinks all pink and ice cube with umbrellas too small for the rainstorm of the stranger three stools down. How his eyes, themselves, were a cooling blue and looked at you, then down to his finger tracing the saltless rim of a margarita, the same tracing motion he would later use on you, on your stomach, your thighs, and into your own deep salt ocean. And you fell in love so hard, so jetty crash that even after he checked out cold without even a text, you couldn’t answer this bird who knows more about love than you ever have, and was trying so hard to warn you, it fought its own natural need to be in the sky. And when the bird gives up, sees you are the lostest of causes, he skitters away, plops up on the jetty and hefts himself upwards till he becomes cloud and unspoken fleck of rain and anything else that belongs in the sky, you watch him getting smaller and smaller finally fading like a warning, like a wrong love beginning to die. 

***

Francine Witte’s flash fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous journals. Most recently, her stories have been in Best Small Fictions and Flash Fiction America. Her latest flash fiction book is Just Outside the Tunnel of Love (Blue Light Press.)Her upcoming collection of poetry, Some Distant Pin of Light is forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press. She lives in NYC. Visit her website francinewitte.com. 

Ghost with a gun. Ghost in the desert. Ghost wearing a cool hat.

Ghost who can phase through the earth but prefers to walk. Ghost who wears a white sheet sometimes, and sometimes has shadowy feet, which sometimes make a slight noise, just for fun. Ghost with a good sense of humor that’s lost on almost everyone.

Ghost with a new gun. Stolen! Ghost who can drink you under the table. Old ghost in the wild west who suddenly shows up in a Honda Fit and is like hey oh sorry I time-traveled I can do that. ’Bye! Ghost who comes back to town later riding a buffalo and pretends none of that car stuff happened.

Ghost sitting out in the open eating stolen food it can’t even digest or taste but who hangs out all day at the food court ruining the food with ectoplasm and when a teenager finally gets up the courage to yell at it the ghost says, “Good-bye, cruel world!” and crawls away very slowly into a video arcade.  

Ghost having a bad day. Ghost wearing the jersey of that team everybody hates. Ghost with a shoe on its head. Ghost watching Ghostbusters and crying.

Ghost clearing its head getting away from it all, riding a horse, and the horse is pretty freaked out but later, after the ghost sets it free, it dreams of an island in Montana where wild horses used to thrive and actually makes it there, but dies the same day.

Ghost sitting at a bar in Bozeman with a few serious drunkards who are laughing and yell to the other scared patrons and ghost tourists, “See! We told you. But no, you said. Shut up, you said.”

Ghost who used to pop up out of the ground in the middle of showdowns and shout la-la-la and dance in a circle right when the duelers drew their pistols just to get a laugh out of its buddy death.

Tired ghost. Ghost of my heart. Ghost of my old self. Ghost of my old selves’ hearts. Ghosts who got lucky. Ghost who will probably be fine. Ghost of the woods and the rivers and good carpets and perfect coffee. Ghost of good luck. Ghost we hope to have, to help us cross over when it’s time.

***

Matthew Jakubowski’s flash fiction appears in JMWW, The Brooklyn Rail, 3:AM Magazine, and Spelk. He lives in West Philadelphia and has a blog at mattjakubowski.com.

After the funeral, your father is the first

to eat. to shower. to watch T.V. in the dark. to have his sister call. to silence the phone and refresh his messages for the third time that hour. to drive to the train station. to come home around midnight when you’re already in bed, untucked but not asleep,never asleep. to call your mother. to end up in voicemail. to call her five times after, ten times after, fifteen, twenty…until his thumb starts to cramp. to cook her favorite meal of fried rice on the dusty stovetop of your home. to cry in the bathroom while the burnt grains soak in the sink. to cleave a smile when you open the door. to ask how you’re doing and for the first time, not listen to the answer. to fall asleep on the icy marble tiles.to yell at you when you wake him. to sigh. to apologize without looking to see the dam in your six-year-old eyes. to skip work and return to the train station. to ask strangers if they’d seen his wife with the red summer dress and almond eyes so homey they could caulk a fractured family. to spend thirty minutes in the driveway with the windows rolled up to shield in his sobs. to slam the car door. to slam the house door. to slam the bedroom door. to throw her picture frame at the rose-pink walls, a color she’d chosen but he’d grown to love. to pack up all her clothes. to unpack all her clothes. to return to the station for the fourth time. to return to the station for the fifth time. to return to the station for the sixth time. to sleep at the station. to dream of your mother running up to him after the train doors slide open, arms semi-circled in the expectation of a hug. to stop seeing half her body stuck between the tracks and the other half still in the train. to stop hearing the words of the Imam as they lowered her cloth filled with salvaged parts into the muddy ground. to cry in public. to be dragged home by your mother’s family. to throw a tantrum in the living room, toppling the scattered remainders of her—the plush peach pillows, the couch with the strawberry lip-gloss stain, your baby photo album. to blame her family for inviting her over last weekend. to blame himself for not driving her there. to blame you for surviving. to blame you again for surviving. to blame you over and over until he’s slapped shut by his now-ex-mother-in-law. to hear a muffled whimper behind your adjacent bedroom wall. to taste a guilt so acrid it stings the back of his throat. to knock on your door. to not get a response. to knock harder on your door. to still not get a response. to burst into your bedroom, heart strangled by the threat of a multiplied absence. to find you folded up like a clam, gripping the nicked edge of your mother’s picture frame, hiding behind the shadow of his grief. to swear to fix this. to return to the train station the very next day.

***

Olabisi Aishat Bello is a chemistry and engineering nerd from Nigeria who still somehow finds space in her heart for fiction and poetry writing. You can find her works in Trampset, the Blue Marble Review, Atlas & Alice, among others, and you can follow her on Twitter @OlabisiBA and Instagram @olabisi_ba.

What if you lived in Elko, Nevada? What if this was the summer when a swarm of Mormon crickets invaded the town? What if they engulfed your house, clinging to the clapboard, blacking out the windows so you could hide? What if the sound of their chirping was the reason you can’t sleep at night? What if their stench is why you spend hours retching over the toilet? What if they could bore their way in through the tiny cracks and infiltrate your house? What if they congregated in the holes he punched in the wall? What if they invaded his room, crawling under the door you keep shut? What if instead of feeding on their own dead, they ate away at the musty clothes in his closet, his soccer jersey? What if they consumed his bed you left untouched, unmade? What if the crickets had arrived the previous summer? What if they could crawl into his ears and get inside his head? What if they fed on the thoughts that made him lash out, brought him to tears? What if they didn’t stop until everything that made him hurt was gone? What if then you could finally sleep, knowing he’d be there in the morning when you woke up in Elko, Nevada, or any other place in that universe?

***

Suzanne Hicks is a disabled writer living with multiple sclerosis. Her stories have appeared in Maudlin House, Roi Fainéant, New Flash Fiction Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Las Vegas, Nevada with her husband and their animals. Find her at suzannehickswrites.com and on Twitter @iamsuzannehicks. 

Which finger was it that I should use to measure water for rice? Was it up to three quarters of one segment of my ring finger? Not my left ring finger though, not the finger I will tie myself to a man with, but the right ring finger that I will use to measure the rice that will keep me and that man alive. Mom, I’m sorry but the man I married did not come with a rice cooker, how do I cook rice on the stovetop? What is the name of the heart shaped herb in English? What is it in Vietnamese? Can I serve it with everything now that I am my own cook? And if I grow it in my backyard like you used to, will it purify the poisoned ground that we live on? Can we live on it when I’m too tired to cook? Mom, when did you hit menopause? Does breast cancer run in the family on my father’s side? Or was that a myth that I misheard as a child? Why did my father’s mother die so young? Did she die in the first war of her lifetime or second? Did she ever know peace? Will our family forget me since I’m all the way across the world? Will I be able to speak with them if I only learn a child’s Vietnamese? Mom, what was the humidity of the city you grew up in? Is that when my hair will look its best? Mom, what are the toxins you were exposed to? What about your father? And your mother? What about my father? My father’s father and father’s mother? Mom, what do you remember and what do you miss? Mom, where is home? And now, Mom?

***
Thao Votang is a writer. Her work has been published in Salon, Hyperallergic, Sightlines, Southwest Contemporary, and Lucky Jefferson. Her debut novel will be published July 2024 from Alcove Press.

We recently published Sara Freligh’s stellar “1986 .”

Here, we ask her two questions about her story:

1) I love the juxtaposition of the two tragedies here — the larger (?) one that affected so many people and this more personal, small-town loss. The narrators in this story seem to feel the Challenger loss more, but do you think, as time goes by, they will be equally (or perhaps more) affected by the missing little girl, the way their parents are?
Years ago, I wrote a poem, “Wondrous,” about my mother reading Charlotte’s Web to us kids, how she always cried when she got to the part where Charlotte died and we always laughed at her because “we know nothing of loss and its sad math,/how every subtraction is exponential, how each grief/multiplies the one preceding it.”
I’m thinking that’s at work in the story, too, where the parents are already familiar with grief on a personal level, whereas the kids just aren’t – they’re fascinated by the salacious details of the Challenger explosion and the little girl disappearing isn’t registering yet because they have no metric for loss. The parents, though: They have children. They understand the “what if” of fate and how danger is everywhere.

2) That ending imagery is so powerful. What might be a “television turned up too loud.” Do you
think that is what the sound is? Or is it only what it might be?
It could be a television or it could be something else, which is exactly what I was going for, that
ambiguity. Jayne Anne Phillips, whose book Black Tickets is the bible for generations of flash writers, has written about how an ending for a very short piece has to be “Over. But not over.” Meaning, I think, that while the ending is a fitting conclusion to the story, the characters’ stories are never over – they must linger on in the reader’s head and a good ending maybe does just that.
What’s changed from the beginning to the end in “1986” is that the narrator “we”– the kids in this story — have gone from being blithely unaware of the world and its dark places to understanding that the bad stuff is everywhere and as close as next door. So they’re hearing a television – or are they?