Milk Candy Review

Everyone had a father who smoked cigarettes. Everyone had a father who smoked one, two, three, four packs a day. Everyone had a father who drank. Everyone had a father who drank one, two, three, four bottles of beer, wine, and whiskey a day. They smoked and drank. They drank and smoked. Everyone knew that fathers did these things. Everyone. Everyone had a mother who yelled. Everyone had a mother who yelled about the things we did. Everyone had a mother who yelled about the things we didn’t do. Everyone had a mother who beat them. Everyone knew that mothers did these things. Everyone. Everyone knew what the rules were. Everyone had the marks. Everyone had bruises. Everyone knew you count them up, one, two, three new ones on top of one, two, three older ones. Everyone knew who to tell things to. Everyone knew how to keep their mouth shut. Everyone.  And, in the summer, everyone played cigarette tag. Everyone. Bigger kids. Younger ones. All the kids played cigarette tag. One person was IT. IT chased everyone around and tagged them so they would be IT. The big difference was that if you wanted to be safe, you had to go down on one knee and chant the commercial for a cigarette brand. They came across the television day and night. Men on horses. People on boats. Happy and smiling and clean and as bright as a million stars. And everyone knew all the commercials. Everyone. Cigarette tag went on for hours. Eventually, everyone was IT, but everyone wanted to show off how many cigarette brands they knew. Filtered. Unfiltered. Menthol. Lights. Everyone knew them all. Rothmans. Marlboro. Kent. Player’s. Taryton. I’d rather fight than switch. Virginia Slims. You’ve come a long way, baby. Merit. Doral. Raleigh. Newport. Kool. Winston’s tastes good like a cigarette should. Pall Mall. Camel. Carlton. Vantage. Lucky Strikes. Chesterfield. You can take Salem out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of Salem. Everyone knew the magic to keep you safe from IT. Everyone knew. Everyone. As the game went on into the night, and everyone started getting called to come home, everyone wanted to be the last one. The final NOT IT in the cigarette tag game. Everyone wanted to be the last one to go home. To the mothers. To the fathers. Everyone.

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Rina Palumbo came to writing after a career in college teaching and has published work in Survivor Lit, Beach Reads, and local magazines and journals. She is currently working on a novel and has two other long-form works in progress while continuing to write short-form fiction, creative non-fiction, and prose poetry.

The bombs fall from the sky and shatter a hospital. Through his camera lens, the photographer witnesses bodies scattered with blood. On the corridor is the figure of a boy. When the photographer is close enough, he sees the face of the dead boy. The pale cheeks remind him of his young son back home. His camera cannot record the rot and stink in the corridor, but it can capture the shape of the body. Snap.

The refugees are holding one another and listening to a violinist playing in the basement. The photographer listens with his camera down. Another thing his talisman cannot do is to document the tone of Adagio in G minor. As the elegy goes on, a mother comforts her crying son. Not far away from the crowd, two soldiers are resting. In melancholy, they relax as sleep takes over them. Snap.

A dead soldier lies on the pavement. And then there are more, five of them in total. Some of their faces are already beyond recognizable. The photographer takes another shot, and it is not until then that he realizes some are enemy soldiers. Blood and dirt have mixed the original colors on the uniform. Sometimes, nobody pays attention to the living until their bodies become part of a photograph. Snap.

The sniper from nowhere shoots a woman running on the street. It hits her leg, and she falls. The sniper and the photographer both hide in the dark and shoot their targets. They respectively play their parts on this stage call the battlefield: one’s shot triggers blood, and the other’s shot captures the aftermath. The photographer adjusts his camera to zoom in on the struggling woman. They used to say that if you can capture a cinematic shot of the abyss, it will be the apex of your career. But perhaps, the photographer says to himself, he can be more than a bystander. Before then, however, he needs to finish his task. Snap.

The camera is his eye. Ruins. Dead bodies. Soldiers’ backs afar. These are what the photographer sees on the battlefield. And when the photographer eventually falls, he becomes part of the scenes he took. His body becomes the new evidence to be shot by another photographer. “Tell the world this is what they have done to them. To us.” Another photographer will say. Snap.

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Lillian Tsay was born in upstate New York and raised in Taiwan. After she graduated from college in Taipei, she moved to Tokyo and had lived there for four years. She is currently writing a dissertation on East Asian food history at Brown University. Besides her scholarly works, her creative writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Jellyfish Review, Atticus Review, amongst others. 

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There is a world that trades in stories as the dominant currency. Spoken, written, acted out. New stories are highly valuable. But old stories told in the old ways are worth even more.

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Here is a world where the people harvest time from the bedrock. Digging deeper into layered lodes creates time-warping vibrations in the air. With special machines, the people capture this energy and process it into precious-stone seconds, occasionally finding a minute gem, or a diamondesque hour. Once, the whole mining crew took the year off after finding an enormous, glittering century in the depths of the Fifty-Third Time Mine.

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Once I thought of a reality where really, really, really big giants come to our world and move us around like little dolls in a doll house. It’s like the hand of god, but really it’s just the hand of Jeremy, who thinks you would look better a little bit to the left.

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Here’s one world I thought about recently: Grey rock extends around me, with me low in its belly. My feet are caught in clear, adhesive gel that leaks in veins from pustules here and there along the slopes. The green skin of these pustules swells and leaks, forming a strange not-heart beat to the land. I don’t resort to consuming it right away. Days into my utter isolation, unable to move my feet, then legs, then hips, I bend at the waist and try to ingest the velvet moss skin. The blood rushes to my head as I claw at the green bulbs around me. This world eats people like me. But I’m not willing to be the only one being consumed.

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A world that’s actually a video game. A card game. That simulation you run behind your eyes when thinking about doing something, but not actually doing it.

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In a world, I hop asteroids. Compare me to a skipper living in an archipelago. And each island is all wacky. There are carnivorous sheep creatures. Blue foods. Glowing rainclouds. A shell that screams at midnight. People who are not even one-percent cruel. Back in my ship, I wonder if all other travelers are this lonely.

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One sci-fi world I make is completely flooded, and people survive on the backs of giant birds. Did humans cause the flood? I think it’s likely.

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There’s a place that is affected by my dreams, but only on February 29^th. Every four years, all that’s happening in my subconscious infects the people, the land, and the sky. The animals appear to be immune.

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A world where there are small people in all the refrigerators. They’re cold.

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Imagine a world where objects inevitably evolve into beings. Some forks turn into brothers and sisters. Some diapers become small rodents. Some skateboards are later seen as gods, hovering, six-armed, and many-winged.

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If we whisper, I can tell you about the words-world. Over the pitted, barren planet, sounds given meaning – also known as words – have physical, tangible force. Saying something, anything, could literally smack someone in the face. Words obey new laws of physics, momentum and power. I say, I am here. The ground rips open and gains a new rift.

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Think about who you’d be if you lived in this world: when the sun is up, you are one person – you have one body, one life and one soul. When the sun is not visible, you inhabit a different body, possess a different soul – you’re someone else. The two people you are are unrelated to one another. I don’t know where the other goes when you are the one.

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In a world like my own, humans spawn feelings. The feelings appear soft like Jell-O. Each feeling is a different color – an embarrassment recalled at 3:47 am (which woke me up) forms as an orange-and-green. The feelings follow the person who spawned them around for the rest of that person’s life. The world is so full and crowded.

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A world where I imagine other worlds, other beings, other problems. A world that contains every thought I’ve ever had, contains as in “jails.” A world where my thoughts don’t work right, or don’t work how I imagine they could. Where thinking of the refrigerator people doesn’t make them visitable. I always dream that it should. If I imagine time as a stone, words as a gut-punch, why can’t we try that for a while?

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Taylor Card holds an MFA in fiction writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and haunts her home in Michigan, making trending coffee beverages and wearing blue. Her fiction has been published in Button Eye Review and Digging Through the Fat. Besides writing, she enjoys making ceramic animal sculptures – you can see a few at taylorvcard.com.

We would always stub out our candy cigarettes on the mulberry leaves in our tree house, fingers and lips stained purple from berries, watching our parents drink gin and tonics after sets of sweaty tennis. Mia’s mother with the long legs saying her daughter would soon need a nose job. Her whisky voice rising into the branches when she asked my father to join her for a shower. My mother giggling and pouring her gin to overflowing.

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We would always track down the nearest bar no matter what continent. Mia’s huge grin getting us in even when the place was full. Waiters competing to refill her perfect martini. Refusing the men buying her drinks, she’d pull me from my chair to slow dance, her fingers smoothing my hair, holding my body tighter with each passing city and year, as we’d sway and sing Piano Man in every language we remembered from school.

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We would always write letters; Mia’s perfect cursive detailing her affairs with married men. Her nib ripping the page when she wrote of her mother whose hatred still stained her no matter how far she travelled from home. We’d write monthly until Mia checked into a hotel room on her own in Morocco, flirted with the doorman, triple-tipped the waitress, danced on the hotel bar, her arms wrapped tight around herself, the hotel manager told me after.

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Lisa Alletson grew up in South Africa and England, and now lives in Canada. Her writing is published or forthcoming in Crab Creek Review, New Ohio Review, Bending Genres, CLOVES, Moist Poetry Journal. You can find her on Twitter @LotusTongue.

The whole town slept outside on cots set up in their yards. They had to, with houses that baked all through the stifling day and remained hot ovens throughout the night. Everyone spied on each other’s nightshirts, cracked jokes, and asked about the latest telegrams delivered about the loved ones of that neighbor or this neighbor. Those loved ones who traveled overseas. Those neighbors still shut inside their dark houses, despite the unbearable temperature. Everyone called out their good nights, their sweet dreams, their don’t let the rattlesnakes bite. When a bull escaped from his pen one night, his hoofbeats and snorts roamed the narrow dirt streets. Nowadays everyone sleeps inside, setting their cots under swamp coolers mounted to their front room windows, oblivious to what wanders the pitch black beyond. But back then, everyone sat up on their cots, alert. Everyone called out to each other, “Here he comes. Here he comes!”

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Dan Crawley is the author of Straight Down the Road (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2019) and The Wind, It Swirls (Cowboy Jamboree Press, 2021). His writing appears or is forthcoming in Jellyfish Review, Lost Balloon, JMWW, Atticus Review, and elsewhere.