Milk Candy Review

Write a story about my beautiful mother: A petite, light-skinned Puerto Rican with dark hair and shocking green eyes. Write about her nervous breakdown.

Write about the doctor recommending she terminate her latest pregnancy. That he knew somebody who could do it discreetly and safely. For more money than she had saved. More than Dad made in a month, and how he would never permit it anyway.

Talk about Rh incompatibility. But try not to sound clinical about it.

Talk about a wife’s duty to her husband.

Talk about the abomination of contraception.

Have a scene where she makes the mistake of confiding in the wives of the church elders. Where she’s told only God holds the reins of life and death, and she’s made to feel like a sniveling idiot.

Write about the impromptu trip to visit friends in Arizona, just an hour north of the Mexican border. How her friends figure out her plans, and drag her back to Jesus.

Tell us about her fourth fruitless labor, and how she added this stillborn’s name to the others in the family Bible, as if they would grow up, move away, and simply forget to call.

Show us how her green eyes dulled, how her mind went places we could not go.

Yes, write a story about my beautiful mother. Then tell it from her young son’s point of view. Highlight the epic road trip without Dad. Include the greasy roadside stands, the singalongs with the radio, the bugs swarming motel lights, the friendly strangers who talked funny. How flat and tedious America was. The promise of the desert after rain.

Write of the son’s disappointment at cutting the trip short, about the drive north before heading home, how he stood at the south rim of the Grand Canyon and watched his beautiful mother weep at God’s perfect creation.

***

Bill Merklee’s work was included in Best Microfiction 2021 and nominated for Best Small Fictions 2022. He lives in New Jersey. Occasional outbursts on Twitter @bmerklee.

We have failed at Lincoln/Douglas debate. We have failed at Speech. We have failed at Hygiene. We have failed at Square Dancing. We have not been invited back to Improv. We have not been invited back to Taxidermy. We have not been invited back to Surgical Procedures 101. We have been whooped upside the head. We have been whipped into a frenzy. We have been told we lack initiative. We have been told we must learn to finish what we start. We might at one time have said, let’s start a formal club, association, society, or religion. But of course, as we’ve been told, we lack follow-through. We have been told we take up too much space. We have been told that, at times, we appear to be in our own world. We have been told we need to stack the blocks in the corner neatly before we take our turn at the easel. We need to learn the skills of being invited back to formal clubs, associations, societies or religions. We need to learn the skills of judging distances. For example, distance can be judged by sound. If we see a gun fired in the distance, we can count the number of seconds between the flash and the sound of the explosion reaching us. In this way we can tell how far we are from danger. If we see a gun fired close up, judging the distance will not be necessary and won’t help us anyway. We have been told these are good skills to learn if we wish to make a solid contribution. We will learn the skills of basic survival. We will learn to tuck and roll. We will learn to make ourselves invisible.

***

Kathy Fish’s stories have most recently appeared in Ploughshares, Wigleaf, and Washington Square Review. Her work has been widely anthologized, notably in the Norton Reader, Best Small Fictions, and Best American Nonrequired Reading. She is a recipient of the Copper Nickel Editors’ Prize and a Ragdale Foundation Fellowship. 

A hilltop conversation with the ghost of my brother. His image threadbare, glowing like some deep ocean creature.

“How many people do you think have ever lived?” he asks.

Always a numbers guy. Some strange statistic or guessing game. I snuggle into him, aligning as best I can, propping myself up to maintain the illusion.

“It’s billions,” he says. “Hundreds of billions. We outnumber the living; you are in the minority, little sister.”

Still little sister, despite me now being ten years older.

“Down there,” he says, pointing towards a field. “A man in the wildflower, still in army uniform, one arm missing. Do you see him?”

I see nothing but shadows. He laughs and prods at me, his finger slipping into my shoulder.

“Can you see them all?” I ask. “Right now, how many do you see?”

Before his reply, he does a mock scan of the horizon.

“We are sparse, despite our numbers,” he says, “We cover only a fraction of the planet’s surface. Imagine – the current living population could fit shoulder-to-shoulder in the city of Los Angeles. Did you know that?”

He pauses now, deliberate. Something is distracting him, far beyond the rocky edge where we sit.

“I brought you here to show you the dinosaurs,” he says. “You asked me why no one ever sees their ghosts.”

I sit up, confused. Did I ever ask him that? Maybe a joke or passing observation from our childhood, kept close all these years.

“The reason you never see them, is because you actually see them all the time,” he says. “Think about how many dinosaurs ever lived. Now think of their size – they were massive! They cover the entire planet, many times over. Everything you see is through the filter of a prehistoric ghost, sometimes more than one! They surround you like a blanket.”

He is bursting, enthusiastic, more alive now than ever before. I touch the air, trying to imagine the oldest of ghosts. Sensing my curiosity, he hovers an arm across my shoulder.

“Now, look,” he says, pointing to the valley. “I can show you proof, by showing you where they are not.”

And then I see it, without his help – a tiny square of light, pulsing and bending above the crop. It vanishes before expanding outwards, a rip in the atmosphere, hints of green and yellow.

“It’s a gap,” he says, “Between the ghosts. Sometimes, very rarely, you can make one out. That’s how you find them – you find the gap, the bit that is missing.”

He opens his arms out wide.

“Ta-da!” he says. “That’s the actual world you are seeing, without the filter, without the obstruction of ghosts. Beautiful, isn’t it? Now hurry.”

He runs ahead, beckoning me to follow.

 “I thought you were stuck on the hilltop!” I shout, trying to keep pace.

 He ignores my question as we approach. Up close, the gap is fragile in definition. A glare of rainbow; no heat, or sound, or shadow – a space between ghosts, an inverse of everything. It skips in the air, the illusion of being alive.

“It’s not the gap moving,” he says, “it’s the things around it. An Apatosaurus, late Jurassic, a whole herd of them.”

Before I can respond, the gap lunges forward, consuming our position. Our hands go in first, an incredible warmth, the true heat of the sun, unfiltered on our skin. We become illustrations, figures in a stain-glass window. Raw colour fills my brother, an oily volume, swirling within his form.

Looking outward from within the space, the ghosts are everywhere, now visible without obstruction. Crunching and writhing around us, a mist both alive and dead. Species from every period, compressed many times over, smudging the atmosphere.

“Amazing,” he says. “I’m so glad you got to see this.”

And with that he leaves me once more, the almost tangible feel of his fingers brushing my hand. I turn back to the hilltop, to the spot where he fell, looking for his image – a faint pencil sketch, a dream within a dream.

Around me the spectral herd begins to shift; the colours fading in its wake. Invisible giants fill the space, smoothing into a fog and smudging my vision. The gap implodes around me – reforming up ahead, flickering and thin, barely able to maintain its presence. I run toward it, toward the colour, keeping pace with the dead, and the gaps they create.

***

Paul is from Sheffield, UK. His stories have appeared in Milk Candy Review, Okay Donkey, Ellipsis Zine and Janus Literary.

To Saturn and back, you said. Told me about seven rings made of ice, a wedding ceremony in space. Braided constellations into my hair. Aquarius. The Big Dipper. I left the window open at night. Sometimes, your sock feet and black-hole eyes. Other times, nothing but stars. Where is Saturn? I asked, drunk on moonlight. It must be so far. Light-years away from our luminescent breath. You took my hand. My heart, you said. This is Saturn. Seven rings of ice. Frostbite. I thought of elastic hair, stomach kisses. What made a body. Wished you were made of anything else.

***

April Yu is a young writer from New Jersey with an affinity for language, running, and human anatomy. Although she was indeed born in April, her favorite season is winter. Her work appears in The Aurora Journal, Ice Lolly Review, and Lit. 202, among others. She is a graduate of the Alpha Workshop for Young Writers. Visit her on Instagram @aprilblossom, Twitter @aprilgoldflwrs, and at aprilyu.carrd.co.

The psychic smells the fire before the smoke alarm goes off. A Molotov cocktail through the front window of her shop. She’s wearing all her important jewelry, has her car keys in her joggers, slips into her sneakers and grabs her rose shawl off the end of her bed. Douses the shawl in water and covers her head and mouth with it. Her important papers are in the bank. Her valuables are at her sister’s. All she has to do is make it out of the house alive. She has two to three minutes to achieve this. She feels like an actor in a movie. Going through the prescribed steps to get the hoped for effect. But she hadn’t thought about how the heat would feel on her skin. As she descends the stairs, watching her foot land each time so she doesn’t slip, she wonders how close you have to be to fire to get burned. For it leave a mark. The clock melts off the wall into pile of plastic on the floor sliced through with a sheet of glass that shattered on impact. At her back door, she uses the shawl as a barrier between her and the hot metal. Propels herself outside into the chilling night air. Drops the shawl. Coughs out smoke. Breathes in deeply. Feels the solidity of the earth, how far down it goes. Roots herself to the present. Touches the wet grass and lies down to watch the stars.

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Chelsea Stickle is the author of the flash fiction chapbook Breaking Points (Black Lawrence Press, 2021). Her stories appear in CHEAP POP, CRAFT, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and others. Her micros have been selected for Best Microfiction 2021 and the Wigleaf Top 50 in 2022. Her second chapbook Everything’s Changing is forthcoming from ThirtyWest Publishing in January 2023. She lives in Annapolis, MD with her black rabbit George and a forest of houseplants. Read more at chelseastickle.com and find her on Twitter @Chelsea_Stickle.