Milk Candy Review

“A story is a flighty thing,” he’d say, “see how an open book looks like a soaring bird.”

The first sign that he was turning into one was the question mark at the corner of his mouth. Then the flashes of spidery black light above his head, as thoughts scribbled themselves into being.

She told him weighty tales of castles and oaks, monuments and mammoths, hoping they would bind him to the earth, to her. But she’d seen a word circling him while her hands shaped bread and her mouth shaped poems. A wanderer’s word. The day he vanished, it hung like imprinted smoke above his empty chair.

She searched the sunset for him, and the dawn. A page unfolded against the sky; fluttered to her window like a parchment moth. It settled on the sill with a high sweet chime, the flick of a fingernail on crystal. One word brush-stroked on the paper: Bellbird. Others followed in a flock, filling the air with crisp wing-beats. A solitary word or letter on each, rimmed with frost or leaf-mold, or scored, deep and red, trailing sparks.

She plucked them from the trees and the shore, breathing in their birthplaces.

Desire: the slip and glitter of panting deserts

War:  poppies, unpetalled

Quiet: chrysanthemums and cloud-shawled mountains;

H: the mouse-tracked dust of a hermit’s cell. He’d once told her how he’d woken from a dream and tried to remember a place called Home, and couldn’t.

She imagined him everywhere, writing himself into the future. She shouted stories of love and return as she scattered the pages on the table among half-eaten suppers and withered flowers. Her hands moving swiftly, she captured them under pebbles, seashells, and cracked china cups, fearful that they would fly away and leave her with only the blankness of his absence.

One morning, she found the papers curling in invisible fire. The wanderer’s word flickered once, starry, in the ashes, then went out. Her mouth shaping no, her fingers shaping hope, she ran to the place of wraiths and unfinished wishes; knelt and pressed her ear to the grey slab, afraid to hear the thud of a full stop. Heard instead the whisper in the grass. The rustle of a graveyard ghost is just the sound of another page turning.

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Donna Shanley lives in Vancouver, where she can see mountains and sometimes, a half-inch of ocean. Her stories have appeared in Vestal Review, Ellipsis Zine, and Flash Frontier.   

Our son came home with this nearly dead dog. He watches these videos on the internet where people find wounded, abandoned animals and rush them to a veterinarian, and before you know it a dog or a bird is running or flapping around its forever home. We tried to say no but looked at his face and lost courage. Sure, we said, let’s get this guy the help he needs. Then we put this flea-ridden bag of bones in the car, taking care not to touch any of its mange or its open wounds, and we drove to a place that said it could take care of dogs like this. It could die within the hour, the vet said, but asked if we’d like him to care for it anyway. He didn’t know what it would cost, but at a minimum, we were looking at several hundred dollars. We looked at our son and we looked at the dog and we looked at the vet. The vet was shaking his head just a little like he was thinking we should cut our losses. But we looked at our son looking at the dog, and we said do it, spare no expense, heal this dog. Later, we buried the dog in our backyard because it was cheaper than cremation. We asked our son what the dog’s name was, and he said he didn’t know. We asked where he found it, and he said he couldn’t remember. For his birthday, we plan to buy him an expensive video game system. Anything, we tell ourselves, that might distract him from the goodness of his heart.

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Stephen Tuttle’s fiction and prose poetry have appeared in Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, The Nation, The Gettysburg Review, and elsewhere.

At our 20-year reunion, we’ve gathered, this time in a courtroom, Meg at the defendant’s table, face as rough as tree bark, eyes like knotholes in her head. The prosecutor shows photos to the jury, one of Meg with a man at Twin Pines, a motel still patched with plywood from the EF5 tornado that tore through our southwest Missouri town when we were kids. Meg’s sitting on the floor propped against the bed, one hand holding a bloodied cigarette, the fingers of the other hand bent in a multitude of unnatural ways. The man lies behind her, impaled through the gut with a knife. What happened to Meg, we ask each other, we who only return home every 10 years.

After high school, we’d drifted apart, leaving town for college and careers, among us a gynecologist in St. Louis, professor of engineering at Washington University, and master contractor building monster cabins for the mega-wealthy at Lake of the Ozarks. Meg stuck close to our hometown, waiting tables after bouncing around from one aunt and uncle to another. We heard stories of Meg closing Donna Mae’s Diner each night and heading to the lake. We heard she’d pull out a lawn chair and drink whatever 12-pack of beer was on sale at Main Street Drive-Thru Liquor, chain-smoking Virginia Slims, the same brand her mother used to buy. We heard stories of a string of traveling salesmen. What happened to Meg, we asked the last time we came to town for our 10-year reunion, when she showed up, one eye tomato-red, her upper lip split, and purple splotches around her neck.

We’d all met at camp the summer before middle school. We were at the lake playing canteen bucket brigade when the sky turned eggplant and sirens pierced our skulls, prompting counselors barely older than us to shepherd the group to a nearby church basement. We spent the night huddled in humidity, clutching each other’s hands after the lone flashlight among us went dead, and crying for our mommies and daddies. When firefighters freed us the next morning into the arms of all but one set of parents, we blinked in the sunshine, the sky scrubbed clean, to find the church’s roof gone, trees stripped of leaves and life, a cow munching on grass, no mind to the metal fence post sticking through its midsection. 

What happened to us?

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Kim Steutermann Rogers lives with her husband and 16-year-old dog Lulu in Hawaii. Her essay, “Following the Albatross Home” was recognized as notable in Best American Travel Writing. Her journalism has published in National Geographic, Audubon, and Smithsonian; and her prose in Gone Lawn, The Citron Review, Atticus Review, CHEAP POP, Hippocampus, and elsewhere. She was awarded residencies at Storyknife Writers Retreat in Alaska in 2016 and 2021 and Dorland Mountain Arts in 2022. Find her @kimsrogers.

Because Thanksgiving is next week. Because in the back seat is a grocery bag full of glossy college pamphlets that came to the house. Because last month you mailed your sister a birthday card and it came back undeliverable. Because your dad said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if your mom is using again.” Because your mom’s most recent Facebook post was about how “Pluto is shifting into Aquarius for the first time in over 200 years and the Good Lord knows I’m ready for a fresh start and transformation!!” Because your mom moved up there last summer with a boyfriend she met in rehab. Because your dad yelled at your sister, “If you’re so smart, why are you so fucking stupid?!” Because your sister scored a freakin perfect score on the National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test. Because your sister’s name is written on all the walls of all the boys’ bathroom stalls at school. Because you were jealous when your sister got to move to Florida with your mom after the divorce and smug when she came back halfway through the school year. Because your mom always took your sister out for pedicures but she never took you anywhere. Because your mom promised to help build train tracks for your Thomas the Train set but she didn’t, she put on a video of Thomas the Train instead, then sat on the sofa with your sister, teaching her how to french braid her Barbie dolls’ hair. Because your mom read you Goodnight Moon every night at bedtime until one day your sister was born and she stopped because was so sad all the time.

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Dawn Tasaka Steffler is a fiction writer from Hawaii who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She stopped in Yreka once for sandwiches while on a road trip. Her work appears in Heimat Review, SoFloPoJo and Many Nice Donkeys; upcoming in Flash Frog, Pithead Chapel, Alternative Milk Magazine, and MicroLit Almanac. Find her on Twitter @DawnSteffler.

Lot’s Wife

When newcomers came the people of the city would take an axe to their legs. Not to amputate their limbs but to cut anyone new down to the right height, the height they were meant to be. The people of the city would chop their legs or else stretch their backs until they grew.

That is the story anyway. I cannot confirm it. It didn’t happen to us when we arrived. But I know why they tell it: because the springs flowed gently there and brought fresh water. Because the crops grew in endless sweet rows. Because that place was Eden, and everyone who lived there was Adam and Eve, there to till the garden and to guard it. And if you are the guardian of the Garden, your job is to keep it just so.

When we took the strangers in our neighbors enveloped us like an angry wall. They gathered around the house in the night and clawed to get in. When my husband begged our neighbors not to hurt our guests everyone told him Shut your mouth you foreigner shut your mouth.

In Eden, God set angels with flaming swords to block the entrance path. You should have seen our neighbors that night, all those angels.

When I was a girl my mother taught me how to salt meat. Scoop up the salt just so, she would say, and rub it across the flesh. Salt the meat right and you can keep it fresh for what seems like forever.

I’m thinking of my mother as I’m following my husband and my daughters, the strange new men leading us all. They’re leading us to a brand new city. My family – my husband and daughter – are up ahead. If I follow them I can start again. My husband is old but my daughters can walk quickly. They are going to where they can find new men, raise new babies. I can help them. 

I can help them but I’m thinking of the salt. I’m thinking of how our sons-in-law laughed when we told them the end was here. How when it was his turn to go my husband tarried and then begged they take us to somewhere not far away. Spread the salt like this, my mother would tell me. The flavor will stay. Block the path, God told the angels, and Eden will stay like Eden forever.

Back home the brimstone is raining down. The men of the city are hollering and running to and fro. They were the angels with the swords ablaze but suddenly they are on fire themselves, they are the new flaming swords.

I’m watching the men even though the strangers warned us not to look back. I am doing what I have done so long, what we all did in that place: I’m keeping my gaze fixed just there.

When my mother taught me about salting she would say Be very careful. Too much salt, she would tell me, and your tongue could burn. Too much salt and you’ll ruin the meat. Too much salt, my mother would tell me, wiping the excess off her fingers and off mine—too much and the dish can last and last, but you’ll dry the life away.

Author’s note

This piece plays with Biblical and Midrashic depictions of the wickedness, destruction – and lushness like the garden of Eden – of Sodom; as well as Biblical depictions of salt as both tied to posterity (the Covenant of Salt) and also a weapon of war that left soil infertile (sowing the land with salt). I invented the character of Lot’s wife’s mother.

The piece is in conversation with Sabrina Orah Mark’s amazing essay Children with Mothers Don’t Eat Houses.

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Abe Mezrich is the author of three books of poetry on the Jewish Bible, most recently Words for a Dazzling Firmament from Ben Yehuda Press. His words appear in Lost Balloon and elsewhere. Learn more at AbeMezrich.com. Follow him at @AbeMezrich_Alef.