Milk Candy Review

They won’t tell you this, but you can replace the grits with a hash brown. And when you do, they’ll still make them however you want. Jalapenos and cheese, extra crispy with ham. They won’t tell you this, but you can buy one of the coffee mugs, heavy and emblazoned with the logo. You can bean an intruder over the head with one and do some real damage, but it’s truly suited to provide slow death by the best bad coffee. They won’t tell you this, but you can bring your gun, even though you won’t need it. You saw that video of the waitress who caught the aluminum chair someone flung towards her. These people are pros. They won’t tell you this, but they will stay open till the whites of the eyes of the muddy waters come rolling down the state highway, till you can see them through the smeary, steamy windows. They won’t tell you this, but you can shoot the gun you didn’t need in the first place at the deluge, or try to beat it back with your coffee mug, but you can also crack the crust of your extra crispy hash brown with your fork, a veteran of five thousand trips through the industrial dishwasher, and enjoy it.

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Abigail Myers lives on Long Island, New York, where she writes poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Her essays have appeared in the Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture series, with a personal essay (which was also a finalist for the American Literary Review Fall 2022 essay contest) forthcoming from Phoebe in winter 2023. Her microfiction recently appeared in Heart Balm. Her poetry recently appeared in Rough Diamond Poetry and Roi Fainéant, with poetry forthcoming from Sylvia, Poetry as Promised, Amethyst Review, Unlimited Literature, and Musings. You can keep up with her at abigailmyers.com and @abigailmyers (still on Twitter).

They play poker on their phones during fire drills. They hold dead rats in their hands. They are apathetic with curiosity. Some have lost their heads, others have lost their shoes. In their pockets are ring pops and bullets and broken chargers and red lace thongs. That is not their real name. Assign them no sex, no destiny. They are distracted and tender and high on cherry, Molly, sweat. They like the way rain soaks into worksheets and lifts the perfume of deodorant and potential into the air. Has the city always belonged to them?

On the subway they are walking between cars, cutting each others’ hair, deciding who deserves a mauling. They are vogueing in the cafeteria, hands like black doves. They are painting murals in the third-floor bathroom, scratching flowers into the stalls, making shrines to Billie Eilish, knowing no God watches. They need only themselves, only dancing. They savor in 30-second spurts. This is their war against forgetting, their campaign for eternal life. Forget Achilles—look at her face today, eyelashes on point. There is no such thing as history, only bluetooth speaker and report card and loose-rolled joint and first kiss and second fuck and livestream and free throw and group chat and forever awake now here always.

The teenagers are bored to death with our lessons. They’ll remember what they want to. They stay out early and wake up late. They keep their hoods up. They wear all purple. They glide along the block, new Nikes like solar sails. They harmonize with pursed lips and two-inch fingernails and boners tucked into the elastic band of doubt. They smell of cranberry, punk show, detergent, Sour Patch Kid. They shoot webs from their wrists and lasers from their eyes and wear long sleeves to hide the scars. They fold the corners of books they never read. They slit holes in their jeans with shards of tradition. They expect justice and refuse to be punished.

They are afraid. They yearn to be cradled, hate to be touched. They curl up like cats on the counters of the food hall, unable to penetrate the thick glass, wanting. Some feast on the spilled bowels of trashbags. They are always hungry.

They interpret the color of each others’ auras—tangerine, mint green, hazelnut. They want a puppy, but their parents won’t allow it. They intimidate for approval, beg for responsibility. Their futures are still multiple-choice. They steal stray Citibikes, ridicule our choice of emoji, demean our syntax. They laugh at our expense. They are Cambrian, Jurassic, Postmodern, Metamodern. They are gaining experience points and preparing to evolve.

Driving with a temporary license, they steal stop signs and barricade driveways. They gather provisions. They wear beanies to avoid detection, eyeliner to expel optimism. Under the bridge by the river, while we sleep, they chew on their cuticles and rest heads in each other’s laps, dreaming of birthday cakes that look like coffins. When the meteors approach, they won’t pretend to act surprised.

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Lauren Cassani Davis is a writer and high school teacher based in New York City. Her work has appeared in No Contact, Monkeybicycle, and Peatsmoke Journal. 

The women at the graduation party, mothers of the graduates, wore hot-pink dresses and mint-green dresses and caftans, midis and lace and leather dresses, dresses that The Wall Street Journal and Vogue had declared to be warm-weather essentials, that sold for $1,599 or $59 (cheap-chic is smart-chic) and blended into the garden of the Wellesley home, which was studded with New Guinea impatiens in rainbow colors, the home itself featured in a recent issue of New England Homes, the hostess in a white chiffon with asymmetrical hem, her figure fit, her nails done in coral (the new red); in truth, all the women had had their nails done the day before at appointments made weeks earlier in anticipation of the party, done in French manicures and pastels, their hair too done that morning, in sleek or bouffant styles, and though their skins, beneath tinted foundation and loose powder, spanned a range of shades from pink-and-white to brown and browner, they all spoke the same language and said the same things: congratulations, what a beautiful evening, what a lovely house. That is, they blended in with the New England home, and if they made an effort—if they concealed Dr. Scholls in their high heels or downed anti-anxiety pills or Googled “garden party etiquette in America” and “what do Americans like to talk about”—it was not obvious; they did fit into the house with the lawn and pink-and-white hostess and new outdoor kitchen—yes, they fit in—but underneath their words (which fit in) you could discern traces of accents—a few rolled rrrrs, some lahs, a ze for the or f-ah-st for fast—Singaporean and Russian and Indian accents. One mother, in a straw hat and sunglasses she did not take off even when the sun went down as if she wanted to hide the strain in her eyes, revealed more than she meant to when she said, “This is the best country to grow up in, so many colleges, such good healthcare,” upon which the hostess turned pale blue eyes on her and looked puzzled: Were there other countries in the world? Another mother with a round apple figure beneath whose skin you could almost see the stacked pooris, the greasy ghee, kept pulling her tight dress over her round knees—she’d really have been far more comfortable in a salwar kameez in a hot, humid flat in Mumbai, fan turning lazily, masala tea at hand—and went on and on about her graduating son. In truth all the women talked about was their children, their past worries about their children (vaping, smoking, failing) and their future worries about their children (hazing, drinking, failing), and they all said, in those voices with faint accents—if only he had a friend at college, if only he knew someone—that is, underneath their clothes and skins and accents, they were all just worried mothers, who each managed to find another mother with a child in the same college to whom they talked and talked until they inevitably became hungry and, one by one, wandered to the outdoor kitchen and downed burgers and chips with an urgency brought on by stress—oh, how hungry they were!—they forgot their party manners and picked up the food with fingers and opposable thumbs, like they might a piece of roti, and popped it in their mouths and chewed with jaws and teeth adapted for cooked food only recently—twenty thousand years ago to be precise—because underneath it all, they were all warm-blooded primates that needed to capture energy in the form of grain and protein to keep warm, keep talking, keep living. Then they went home, calmed with food and talk, each clutching the number of a mother, thinking warm thoughts about her, thinking—now I have someone, now I don’t have to worry alone; that is, underneath the clothes and skins and words and accents and jaws and teeth and fingers, they were clusters of warmth-seeking atoms, they were beating hearts, they were the same.

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Anu Kandikuppa’s short stories, flash fiction, and essays appear in Gone Lawn, Jellyfish Review, The Cincinnati Review (miCRo), Colorado Review, and other journals. Anu worked as an economics consultant in a former life and lives in Boston. 

The lady across the street spends six weeks fashioning wings, or so she tells us. Threads of fine gossamer woven with stardust. Her voice is like honey, sweet and pouring slowly from her open mouth. We think she isn’t beautiful, but was once, long ago before she married Captain Blake. We watch her sitting on her crooked front porch, right hand poised, raising and lowering a darning needle in the air, graceful as a ballerina.

Our father calls her Lady Blake, and we understand this is a mean joke, because although she is elegant she is very poor, like everyone else in our neighborhood. Our father tells us to stay away from her, but once he’s had his third cup of whiskey and his eyelids start to droop we slip carefully out the front door and dart over the fissured road to stand on her front lawn.

We’ve heard that Lady Blake’s son jumped out a window, but it was only the second story, so instead of dying he ended up with two broken legs. When his bones healed, he disappeared to the other side of the world and was never seen again. Captain Blake died at sea like a hero in a novel, and we imagine that when the giant octopus that ate him wrapped its slimy, tentacled arms around his ship, he laughed and dared it to come closer.

Lady Blake tells us she is sewing wings specially made just for us, and we count the days until they are finished. When they’re ready, she holds them up in the sunlight for us to inspect, but we can’t see a thing. She tells us solemnly to turn around, and gently places them upon our tiny shoulder blades. We glance at each other but keep our lips sealed because we love Lady Blake. She whispers in our ears that we can do anything now, go anywhere, that nothing is impossible. We dance across the patches of dry grass sprouting from cracked earth, barefooted. We feel like if the wind changes it will carry us up into the atmosphere and we will float away, and we don’t care at all because somehow, we are sure we can fly.

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Sara Dobbie is a Canadian writer from Southern Ontario. Her stories have appeared in Fictive Dream, JMWW, Sage Cigarettes, New World Writing, Bending Genres, Ghost Parachute, Ruminate Online, Trampset, Ellipsis Zine, and elsewhere. Her chapbook “Static Disruption” is available from Alien Buddha Press. Her collection “Flight Instinct” is available from ELJ Editions. Follow her on Twitter @sbdobbie, and on Instagram at @sbdobwrites. 

The story ends with a boy, leaning against a barn door, squinting at the sun.

He steps out of the dark barn, his hair buzz-cut fresh, overalls hand-me-down big, one strap sliding off a bony shoulder.

The boy does not smile as he checks the cloudless sky. Does he notice the photographer taking his picture?

The boy in the photograph looks like someone you know. All cheekbones and pointed chin. Father? Uncle? But how can that be? He is young and you are old.

You lift the photograph from the box under your bed, careful to first remove a nickel and a leather-bound book. You could rub the coin’s smoothed ridges for hours, the weight of the book keeping you safe on the bed. But touch the black-and-white photograph and you float, not sure where you are.            

Holding the photograph, you scan the sky above the boy for a clue. Maybe a falcon will break the endless space, opening the story before it flutters away. But the sky remains indifferent to the scene below.

Why does the photograph scare you? It’s only overalls. A haircut. A boy. A barn.

Something you cannot stop is in the barn, in the picture that the boy will lock away long after the photographer opens the camera’s eye and lets the light in.

You count ten, nine, eight and come back, dropping the photograph to the floor.

The story begins with a boy, leaning against a barn door, squinting at the sun.

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Phebe Jewell’s work appears or is forthcoming in numerous journals, most recently Across the Margin, Fiction Attic, Pithead Chapel, *82 Review, and Drunk Monkeys. A teacher at Seattle Central College, she also volunteers for the Freedom Education Project Puget Sound, a nonprofit providing college courses for incarcerated women, trans-identified and gender non-conforming people in Washington State. Read her at https://phebejewellwrites.com.