Milk Candy Review

The house is full of ladybugs like it is every spring, and I haven’t killed any yet. They are everywhere. One tangled itself in my hair in the dark last night. I saved two drowning in the shower this morning. They vibrate the warm air inside the light fixtures and knock themselves against the glass in all the windows and yes, I still don’t like them at all. But don’t worry. I am saving the silly soggy dizzy things. I’m trapping them like I promised I would last year after your second-grade class learned that they eat aphids and are good luck and something about fate and a complicated story from Japanese folklore that you couldn’t remember most of. I’m your mom, and I promised.

There are sixty-seven now, trapped in every shape of cup and glass. Mostly caught at the windows where they gather to watch the frozen dew melting in the sun, and the dandelions turning gold into exploding white puffs of reverse alchemy. You aren’t here to pick the flowers so they are taking over the backyard and Mrs. Wheeler next door is worried that the sea of fluff will blow in her direction and infect her perfect lawn and I hope they do. I haven’t mowed since you and your dad left to transfer to the better hospital. It hasn’t seemed important.

I did think about vacuuming, but there are too many inverted glasses full of bugs to weave between now, and all I want to do when I get home from my shift is check in to hear any updates about you. There are six cups on the living room floor – all pint glasses, mouths to carpet, sealing in the gentle bugs. There were four in the hall before I kicked one over on my way back from the bathroom last week (I’m not sure where the captive went, but he is probably fine). There are five rocks glasses and two highballs in my bedroom. In fact, every room is littered with glasses except yours because I haven’t gone in there. Every windowsill in the house is full, crowded with the stemware, bottoms up, trapping the fizzing crowd there like spotted champagne bubbles. Mugs were scattered throughout the house too, but I felt like a monster keeping the poor things in the dark, so I switched them all out for shot glasses and consolidated the inmates. They are crowded but happier, frozen in light.

Please keep your half of the promise like I’ve kept mine. I’m gently trapping each one so you can let them go safely in the rose garden. When you are well enough to come home maybe I’ll be brave too and help you release the buzzy prickly-legged things to fight the aphids that munch my flowers. The rosebuds are swarming with the tiny pests already. When I ran low on cups, I started collecting more insectariums from yard sales and ladies at church and resale shops. My backseat is full of mismatched drinkware wrapped in newspapers and I won’t run out. I may have to figure out soon what to feed them all – it’s been two weeks since you were admitted. I’ll work my shift and sleep alone and catch bugs until your father and you come home. The bugs will wait too, for you to get well and save us all from this lonely house, where we are stuck until you free us.

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Steven Hage is a writer, artist, and interloper living in Indiana. Steven studied photography and design at Goshen College, enjoys flash fiction for breakfast, and helps companies tell stories through marketing. To say hello and find out more, visit StevenHage.com.

I called you ‘anda’ when we first met. The pink shell of your mouth made a pearl of an assalamualaikum for me.  Our husbands were in the front room, and we went to the kitchen, sitting cross-legged with our feet tucked away for respect. I brought us a plate of piping hot jemput-jemput and you ate the sugary fritters, blowing through your mouth, using your hand like a fan. Your fingers seemed plump, juicy, like the succulents in my garden. I wondered if they would feel as soft and pliant to touch.

When we met at that satay place in Kajang, the air full of the smoky, earthy smell of roasting meat, I called you ‘awak’. I said, awak tak bosan? You said, no, you weren’t bored when your husband was away so much for work, and I wondered if I was a particularly ungrateful kind of wife. You said, can I try? pointing at my glass of pink bandung gently sweating in the humidity. You pursed your lips perfectly around the straw, taking greedy gulps. After you left, I fitted my mouth as closely as I could to the ring of bright red lipstick on the straw.

When I invited you to Port Dickson, I called you ‘kamu’. We bought rambutan from a roadside stall, and I made a joke about how the hairy fruit looked just like testicles. You frowned and swatted my arm, but your dimples peeked out anyway. We took a mat down to the beach, our bare feet crunching into the sand. I shelled the rambutans, handing them to you one by one. You popped the oval fruit, translucent like lychees into your mouth, making throaty sounds of pleasure. You pulled out clean seeds which you gathered in a pile on the sand.

I called you ‘engkau’ when you invited me to your place for lunch. We ate assam fish and rice, your right hand making a perfect bud when you gathered a mouthful together. Your food tasted like everything – spicy, sweet, tart, buttery. You called me ‘engkau’ then too. We reached for the dish at the same time, our hands brushing together, warm and soft. You didn’t snatch your hand away. You didn’t say the word ‘haram’. What you did say was, it’s beautiful, the Malay phrase for pronoun, ‘kata ganti diri’. A word to replace yourself.

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Sumitra writes in Naarm/Melbourne. She travelled through many spaces to get there and writes to make sense of her experiences. She’ll be the one in the kitchen making chai (where’s your cardamom?). She works in mental health. You can find her and her other publication credits on twitter: @pleomorphic2

Anne sleeps on a grave every Tuesday. It’s a standing date, because Blake works the overnight shift, and there’s nothing good on tv. She wanders four streets over to the hidden cemetery on Glendale Avenue. The grave is old, and the dirt is unforgiving. She brings a blanket, two pillows, and a thermos of warm milk because a cemetery is not the easiest place to fall asleep.

In the morning the apartment building gossip waits like a gargoyle by the front door as strangers forced to be neighbors buzz through. She’s the gossip, but she’ll always tell you the truth.

“You’ve got a leaf or something behind your ear,” Diana remarks.

Anne returns home Wednesdays smelling like the outdoors. She waits until ten because she doesn’t want to run into Blake after an overnight. He’s sleepy and thoughtless. He says unkind things he doesn’t remember.

Tuesdays take forever to roll around. Wednesdays are taco and movie night. Anne hates spicy food, and Blake picks horror flicks where the girl never lives. Thursdays are a waiting game for the weekend. Fridays and Saturdays whir by in a rum-fueled haze. Sundays drip with regret for all the things Anne meant to do. Monday always slides in with a vengeance. Anne holds her breath until she’s back on the grave. Not in it. Ever since she started visiting the cemetery, she no longer wishes she was in the ground.

Anne only dreams on Tuesday nights when she’s lying on top of a dead body, separated by soil and mahogany. This is an intimacy she finds nowhere else, even though she only knows his name from the granite headstone. Ezra O’Reilly. Everything else, she makes up because he died in 1924. Ezra wore pinstriped suits, she thinks. He’s read every Sherlock Holmes book and loved a woman who didn’t love him back.

When she sleeps in their bed, Blake drags Anne towards him, towing her like a ship out to sea. He is the anchor, the barge, and when they’re finished, she showers because his sweat is a certain brand of sour. She wants to be like Diana the gossip and tell the truth. That she can’t stomach his smell or the way he tangles his fingers in her curly black hair. That she can’t forgive him when he’s never apologized. And she can’t leave, because no one taught her how.

Tuesday nights, she presses her lips into the dirt and confesses her secrets to the pile of bones beneath her. She imagines Ezra’s eyes are still intact. They are blue and endless, peering up. Anne wants her heat to transfer down to him. She pretends these are his favorite nights of the week, if time matters to the dead. He is gone below the ground. She is gone above the ground. Really, there isn’t a difference.

Blake and Anne’s anniversary falls on a Tuesday. Blake’s taken a rare night off and bought Anne a dress and heels for the occasion. He’s booked dinner at her favorite restaurant, the table by the fountain. He’s left her a handful of pennies on the counter – I’ll let you to make all the wishes you want. Normally, he knocks the pennies out of her hand and calls her a child. Still, Anne feels ungrateful. He is sometimes kind and warm. Flesh and blood pulsing, his eager eyes attached to her whenever she enters a room. He is a swarm, a hive surrounding her, but the ache for the cemetery bruises her heart.

She wears the new dress, spiked heels, and takes an uber because a steady rain beats down across the city. The driver is silent. When the car stops, he double-checks his navigation.

“Here? You sure?” The driver’s teeth are yellow from smoking. He wears a tweed cap and clicks his tongue against his teeth.

“Yeah. Thanks.” Anne hands him a tip. A twenty wrapped around Blake’s pennies, save one.

The heels aerate the ground as Anne sinks in with every step. No one thinks to put lights in a cemetery, because at night the graves are private. It doesn’t matter. She could find Ezra with eyes closed. Eleven steps past the gate. A sharp right at the angel statue missing her wings. His is the first headstone in the ninth row along the eastern field. She has forgotten her pillows, the blanket, a thermos. The earth is hard as ever. She lays there, one penny remaining in her fist, ready to make a wish.

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Sarah’s work has been included in several dozen journals online and in print (including Milk Candy Review). A teacher, mother, and freelancer from central PA, her first middle grade fantasy novel, Delilah and the Cracked Cauldron, was released in June.

The princess with blood on her dress paces along the water’s edge. She’s nervous. She’s also a newly-minted orphan, which is expected in stories like this. She didn’t expect it. The boy she pleads with is quick with a knife. It was an accident. He was trying to shuck oysters. She got in his way. It wasn’t an accident. Take me away, she says. You’re an orphan, the boy says, as if he’s just discovered this truth under a rock. That’s why I want to go, she says. Before they place my mother’s crown on my head and make me—Queen, he says. The princess with blood on her dress can’t see the ending. Not yet. All she sees is a dead home. She isn’t ready to rule. She wants to live first. She wants adventure and a boy with eyes like the tides. He draws her in again, a moon to earth. You will be queen, he tells her. I only want to leave, she whispers. We can’t blame her. We won’t blame her. We blame him. She is young, and grieving, and he knows this. He kisses her anyway. She jerks back and presses a hand to her lips. The princess with blood on her dress is bleeding. He bit her. You bit me! An accident, he says. Your lips are too soft. My teeth slipped. His teeth hungered. She sees it now. That he’s like all the other vipers? Yes. Her heart cracks, and he doesn’t care enough to notice. Fireflies illuminate the boy. The silver knife on his belt. The princess with blood on her dress gets into his boat alone. She trembles. She rows until her hands crack. Until she’s far away from the sight of him dying on the shore. Eventually, she steals a new dress. A new name. Eventually, she makes it to a new city. Eventually, she disappears. We don’t know how her story ends—if she’ll stay gone forever or one day come home—but we can guess. We’re often right. 

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Jared Povanda is a writer, poet, and freelance editor from upstate New York. He also edits for the literary journal Bulb Culture Collective. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, multiple times for both Best of the Net and Best Microfiction, and he has been published in numerous literary journals including Wigleaf, The Airgonaut, and Full Mood Mag. You can find him online @JaredPovanda, jaredpovandawriting.wordpress.com, and in the Poets & Writers Directory 

      Not your aunt Frannie’s, hot and moist on each eyelid to help you see the brightest way forward. Twice on each eye because Frannie does everything twice, for luck, including two back-to-back marriages to men named Xavier and appearing at the funerals—ten years apart—wearing the same black-and-white checked dress, plus wedding veil. Afraid that someday she’ll snag an eyeball with an eyetooth, you run and hide when her car wheezes up the driveway. But she always finds you.

      Not Meemaw’s, her lips whiskered earthworms on your neck, collards-and-garlic breath making you hold your own as she mutters: Don’t grow up to be more man than good, hear?

      Not your babysitter Junebug’s, a dollop on the tip of your nose at bedtime. You worry that her armored teeth will tear into a nostril and change your face forever, but you can’t turn away. She says: When you put on some years and sprout a coupla hairs on that skinny chest, I’ll show you how girls like to be kissed so you don’t fuck it up when you’re at bat. The prospect terrifies and thrills you and makes sleep impossible. You never receive the lesson because, unbeknownst to you at age nine, Junebug will be found dead in a cow pasture three days after your eleventh birthday, pantyhose around her neck. During the next full moon, her boyfriend Doggo will beg for a priest, a cell, a sentence, swearing that Junebug torments him from beyond.

      Not your fourth-grade teacher Mrs. Lynch’s; hers are dangling hypotheticals. Ooh, law, if I was your mama, nothing on the fat green earth could ever pull me away. I’d kiss you till your skin looked like a tomato.  

      Not your mother’s, not anymore, not unless you count your cruel dreams that trick you into being sure of her. You don’t give voice to it, but Papa gauges the longing in you anyway, like a cool palm on a burning forehead, which he doesn’t do because he’s too busy telling you to quit bellyaching and go catch the bus already.

      He lifts a bluegill from its coffin of ice. One hand holds it still while the other slices it from chin to tail, in one clean sweep. A sharp, silver kiss. You avoid looking at the cold, complicated eye. At the mouth stretched wide in a silent scream. Papa opens the stomach cavity and commands you to watch. If you glance sideways and squinty, the jumble of pink and blue and gray is nothing more than a nest of waterlogged party favors that smell like rotten teeth. You gotta cut it out of you, boy, he says. Just like this. Whenever you think you miss her, you just cut it out.

      With his fingers, he scoops the slithery insides onto a square of wax paper, tells you to carry it to the trash. You are careful to grip only the edges of the paper. You hold your breath. You close your eyes. You take four steps forward. At first you think you trip over the dog, but no, Mama took Goose with her when she left. Then you think you trip over Waffles, the dog that lives in your mind, the one Papa won’t let you have because he says he doesn’t need another goddamn life to steward. You’ve tripped over Papa’s muddy shoes kicked off and left by the door. This was supposed to be a lesson on how to cut out the weakness of need, and instead, it’s become a demonstration on how far fish guts travel once they’re free.

      What starts off as a stumble turns into violent collapse. The floor, the cabinets, the walls, the screen door. . .all splattered with what you were instructed to throw out. Father’s footwear, and ghost of dog gone, and hope of dog imagined too. All flecked with the insides of a fish no bigger than a heart. Papa drops the scaling knife and hollers himself into hoarseness.

      A kiss from him has never been more out of reach.

      You’re certain it would feel like sunshine on the crown of your head, that kiss. That it would tell you what you’re desperate to hear. But it never, ever comes. Nine is not too old to want that. Nine is a hundred years away from too old. (And even then.) You’re not better off learning to be hard. That’s just a thing you’re told by someone too afraid to admit that there is some kiss we want.  

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Lucy McBee is a former high school English teacher who currently works as a copywriter and ghostwriter. Her work has appeared in Indiana Review and the minnesota review. She lives in Austin, Texas.