Milk Candy Review

They say we’re domestic terrorists.¹ History textbooks and historical fiction novels always describe it as “bombs raining down from the sky,” well, we rained out of our mothers like bombs, that’s why they say that their water breaks. Except we don’t explode right away. We plant ourselves into the metal of cities like Edison, New Jersey, and watch and wait for the right time. We read Because of Winn-Dixie in the second grade and ignore our white classmates when they make jokes about eating dogs.² We learn to accept (read: not love) being different, eating congealed white rice with fried tomato and scrambled egg out of a shame-scratched thermos. After school, our mothers drive us to a hole-in-the-wall ballet studio where we are the only Asian students. We watch ourselves in the monitors they set up inside the studio, carefully studying how to point our feet, how to angle our arms, how to assimilate.³ Absorbing, observing, watching everything. In 8th grade, our teacher passes out copies of American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang. Even though we’ve read it before, and all of Yang’s other works, we’d never admit it. Instead, we turn up our noses and bemoan its inauthenticity, although most of us can’t even read the Chinese characters. Not like we know anything about being authentic. Sophomore year of high school is when “STOP ASIAN HATE” breaks out. We attend a rally run by a coalition of Asian high school students and liberal white women.⁴ Juliet Chen, sophomore, gives a speech on how we’ve been wronged. We clap.⁵ We pose for Instagram, caption our pictures with generic notes of gratitude. I drive real slow on the way home. I tell myself that this is the explosion I was engineered for. It’s not true. But the bomb feels so sweet, so lovely, so I let myself pretend that it is.

¹: Nearly all reputable sources define “domestic terrorism” with the words dangerous and violent. It’s just a little ironic, knowing that we were always depicted as fragile, as quiet, as subservient. At our core, we are oxymoronic: they are scared of the violence that silence can hold.

²: Except, we’re in high school now, and we crack those same jokes to our white friends. They make those jokes, too, but only when they’re with us. Like it’s our dirty little secret. It’s confusing to think about, though. It doesn’t actually bother me if someone makes a joke about Asian people eating dogs. Isn’t humor supposed to poke fun? But what if I’m thinking about this all wrong? What if I’ve been conditioned to think that mildly racist humor is funny?

³: Nearly all of us drop out of ballet class at the end of middle school for a variety of different reasons: tuition is too expensive, the way that the men stare at your pink-tights-clad legs and the shape of your blurry body in the streetlights when you’re walking out of the studio is a peculiar pain, but it’s mostly because our parents say that the arts are useless.

⁴: Everyone looks exactly like how you would expect them to look.

⁵: But in the back of our minds, we are trying to think about what hate crimes we have experienced. We think about the playground crimes, where white kids smeared the edges of their eyelids with their fingers, where they said “Ching-chong” like a soundtrack from hell. We think about the bathroom crimes, where we are humiliated by the ubiquitous mean girls. In isolation, nothing is ever so bad. Everyone tells us to get over it. We can. But we’re dangerously close to detonation. One more misstep and we explode. Shrapnel everywhere.

***

Senna Xiang is a teen writer. Her work is published in Superfroot Magazine, Peach Magazine, and other lovely places. 

When the sky fell, the adults screamed. After all, they were hit the hardest. Stock prices plummeted and soared as they crawled around on all fours collecting their papers, adjusting their spectacles, and trying to make bear or bull of it.

The children, on the other hand, quite liked the way it fell. It made a wonderful whooshing noise as it brought everything within reach. The clouds were exactly like cotton candy, despite everything they had been told. On piggy-backs, they could graze the stars and even rotate the moon. They assured it that it was pretty there too upon seeing its other side. With lassos, they rearranged the planets, making Tycho Brahe stammer in his grave. But he stayed put and wiped the spittle off his noble Danish mustache, because they paid him no mind in their fit of playful laughter.

The children’s collective growth pushed the sky back up, though it never did return to its original height. And so the people lived in a world without billboards, one in which the trees snaked around like vines and the biggest problem that faced humanity was which lampshade to put on the sun in the evening.

***

Alex Grejuc is a Romanian-American writer who lives in the Pacific Northwest. He recently graduated with a bachelor’s from Oregon State University, which means he now has to pay general admission prices at movie theaters and museums. His sole publication is a poem in his alma mater’s student magazine, Prism.

He conjures her from the perfumed page of a vintage magazine…

She has a body. She can wriggle its toes and pinch a floret of belly, turning this way and that in a clouded mirror. But still, she is paper thin somehow.

In the burnished theatre where she makes her debut, he folds her into a cherrywood box; tucks her up his sleeve. She crouches in the dark, listening to the audience gasp and murmur, sharp creases deepening in her origami heart.

* * * *

In a warehouse full of mirrors, there’s a locked room…

She lies on a table of ice, its fanged breath frosting her back. She is learning how to freeze and thaw her molecules — or rather, how to expand the emptiness between the atoms, how to hold them a sword’s width apart. The secret, he says, is for the body to be as cold as the blade.

She nods, ready, and he saws her in half. She doesn’t feel a thing, though she can still wriggle her toes.

* * * * *

He takes her on tour in a suitcase made of glass…

In Monte Carlo, she becomes the rustle of satin as he’s sleeping, the parchment scuff of slippers sheathing feet, the tender click of a hotel door. She walks into the sea until his magic pulls her back, waves thickening around her like rope.

On the casino floor, she drifts between blackjack and baccarat, slots ringing in her ears. Here, she is already invisible: no illusions required. Here, their eyes are fixed on other tricks: the flick of red, the flash of black. Here, in smoke and shadows, she lingers, watching how Lady Luck is both everywhere and nowhere, how the Queen of Hearts hides in plain sight, how jackpots slip through fingers like water, how ice melts in bourbon, never to be seen again…

* * * *

He dreams of a mermaid, trussed in a tank…

When she curls into bed hours later, the ends of her hair are still wet – telltale tendrils inking dark sigils on the sheets. Only then, sparking with secrets, does her heart billow and start to beat.

***

Lynda Cowles writes fiction in small doses, alongside murder mysteries and video games. You can usually find her on Twitter @lyndacowles.

1.

Once, in a department store, I pulled on my mother’s arm and it came off, like she was one of the mannequins. This was an early introduction to the idea that parts of my mother were destined to come off without warning.

2.

I was only a little older when both her legs came off at a summer garden party where she had been drinking wine for some hours. “Your mother has had a bit too much sun,” my father explained to us, as he carried her inside like a rag doll, with shiny buttons for eyes.

3,

The next thing to go was her heart. She lost it to Mike, the husband of her colleague at the school where she taught. There was a lot of shouting in our house that week and, soon after, she left for Canada with Mike.

4.

Over the years, postcards would arrive with pictures of grizzly bears and Mounties, telling us things we didn’t want to know, like Mike found a job, and Mike built a treehouse for their new kids and Mike saw a grizzly bear in the garden.

5.

One day a postcard arrived telling us the doctors had found something and they were going to remove some more parts from her, and then the postcards stopped.

6.

A couple of months back I googled her number and called it. It was her voice that answered, but it wasn’t her and she didn’t know who I was. An older male voice came on.

‘You’ll have to leave it there, Sport,’ it said. ‘Too much gone.’

7.

The next postcard was in unfamiliar writing and said she had died. It gave the date of the funeral, which had already passed. On the front was a picture of a grizzly bear rearing up on two legs, and for a moment I wondered if it was the one Mike saw.

***

Tim Craig lives in London. His short-short stories have appeared in many fine litmags and also the annual Best Microfiction Anthology. He is a previous winner of the Bridport Prize for Flash Fiction and has been placed or commended four times in the Bath Flash Fiction Award. @timkcraig

After “Other Babies” by Meredith Alling 

Some of the grandmothers swim laps in bathrobes and flower petal swim caps. Their lungs are full of fish. They point at each goldfish in its plastic bag pond and name it, Linda, Anoush, Isabel, one for each grandchild. Other grandmothers never learned how to swim. They lay on the bank like moss-covered stones until their legs fuse back into tails. Some grandmothers unfold their bodies like tents in the shade of an apricot tree. They have trained their whole lives for this. Other grandmothers are the tree, and mostly this feels good to them—the leaves always whispering, so that they’re never lonely, the smooth turquoise eggs tucked in carefully-arranged nests. Sometimes the nests fall and the eggs crack like crème brulee and then the grandmothers would rather not be trees, would rather have limbs that move, fingers, soft hands, like the other grandmothers, but it’s not up to them. Some grandmothers are full of magma. The magma boils and bubbles in the mantle of their stomachs until their insides are nothing, only fire. When these grandmothers erupt, entire villages die. Some grandmothers have never felt heat. They are always cold, cold, cold, fingers blue, joints scraping like crochet needles. Some grandmothers are in the kitchen, slicing the heads off figs, pinching dough lifeboats around orphaned lambs, praying that blood is thicker, after all. Other grandmothers are the kitchen and all their cupboard doors have been left open and fruit is rotting on the counters. Some of the grandmothers are too scared to move. Their ears twitch like rabbit ears. They know the shadow of the hawk when it moves over them. Other grandmothers are the hawk. They gulp down rabbits like butter mints. They have barcode veins, so they can be returned to the store if damaged or broken. They count babies like old pennies, tilting them out of a milk bottle and dropping them back in one at a time, each one a wish, knowing how easy it is to lose things. How hard it is to keep them. 

***

Lindy Biller is a writer based in the Midwest. Her fiction has recently appeared at Reservoir Road, Cheap Pop, Flyover Country, and Nurture Literary. She can be found on Twitter and Instagram @lindymbiller.