Milk Candy Review

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. 

But it’s a story about leaves. How they chase one another with noise, discreet noise, or no noise, a delirious crunchiness, twisty, hard, soft, wrinkled, leaves like dysmorphic kids in a minefield, with squashed greenish veins, how leaves fall, how leaves fall all the time, it’s ok to fall, leaves do that every day and nothing terrible happens, nothing monstrous. This is a story about leaves that are still leaves, no matter what, flying, shaking, lingering, whipping window glass, committing suicide while chasing rainbows, hurricanes, the burning sun, reaching out, touching other leaves, sliding on frowned, happy or in-between faces, escaping from roofs or mother trees, snatched on roofs or mother trees, benches, garbage bins, piling up on moth-covered graves, mourning like leaves mourn, by changing colour, by flapping on cold marble, leeched on broken flower pots, not letting go, squeezed in the corners of yards, transported in large groups, naked bodies in containers, mask-wearing sardines in the subway, pushed and pushed by rusty shovels and brooms, suffocating, screaming “Why are you doing this? I’m just a leaf, I’m supposed to fall, I’m supposed to stain your yard, this is what I do for a living.” This is a story about leaves aching, aching by the power of metal and sole and rain and wind and wheels and foot and boot and tank and rank, leaves, big, small, green, orange, yellow-white, broken, stepped on, migrating leaves, baby leaves, floating, falling like tired snowflakes, tangled in thin air, in thin dehydrated hair, sucked in high-tech vacuums and laughing mouths, leaves standing still for a moment, pulsating on the wet ground, dying, like leaves die, leaving tiny traces on a perfectly mowed grass, sinking in perfectly heated pools, leaves, leaves, slowly deteriorating, waiting for spring.

***

Maria A. Ioannou is a writer based in Cyprus. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing (University of Winchester, UK) and in 2019, she received the Vice-Chancellor’s Excellence in Research Award. She has published two short fiction collections and a fairytale in Greece (Emerging Writer State Award 2012 / shortlisted for the 2016 Young Writer Award by the Greek magazine Klepsydra. Her short fiction “Pillars” was nominated to be included in the anthology Best Small Fictions. Her work was longlisted in the Smokelong Quarterly Grand Micro Contest 2021 and the Bath Flash Fiction Award 2021 and has been published in SAND, The Hong Kong Review, Tiny Molecules, The Cabinet of Heed, Asymptote, Litro, The Daily Drunk, FlashFlood 2021, and elsewhere. More info: www.maria-alpha-ioannou.com.

“You used to be so thin,” he said. “Like a ballet dancer.”

“Or a girl who’s sick?” she answered.

“Not fat,” he said. “Not exactly, but definitely different than you were.”

Her next meal was salad and the memory of bread. She held her sugar-loving tongue. By the third day, when she finished her meals, she moved through the smorgasbord of her house, inhaled each candle-scented room, swallowing the idea of pies made from their apple, cherry, and peach.

He told her how eating late-afternoon dinner helps the body cool earlier in the evening, preparing for deep sleep sooner. How extending that kind of sleep lessens the opportunity for calories. How the absence of light is an asset. How a warm shower tricks the body’s thermometer.

Like Beauty, she pricked herself with darkness. She rose to the mirror to ask the questions about waist and thighs. When it answered, mouthing the drab adjectives for size, she understood the anger of queens.

Once, after midnight, she woke and saw him sitting up and gazing at her in the night light’s glow. His watching brought a rush of desire. The sheet he’d drawn up to her throat for warmth was bunched by her side. She lay in a negligee so sheer the near darkness felt like a tongue upon her skin. It tasted the spaces between her ribs and the stubborn mound of her stomach before settling on her rising and falling breasts. He said, “Go back to sleep.” 

He warned that she shouldn’t wake so easily. The sounder, the better, he said, and gave her pajamas to wear to keep her warmer. When, days later, she woke to him standing and staring, the sheet to the side again, she caught her breath and stiffened. “You scared me,” she said.

“Why?” he answered, smiling, she thought, in a way designed to make her doubt herself. He said he was in love with her sleep, the way it lessened her. Her closed eyes and steady breathing were time travel. When he watched, he imagined her retreating until she retrieved her childish shape, her princess body. “Give it time,” he said, and more weeks went by, so long that she believed he desired a stranger. So long that she imagined herself gone.

At last, when she opened her eyes, the sheet at her feet, he was standing on her side of the bed, his body so close that she couldn’t see his face until she rolled onto her back and looked straight up. “Oh yes,” he said. “Perfect.” But when he reached for her, she curled and faded like a long- forgotten photograph.

***

Gary Fincke’s flash stories have appeared recently in WigLeaf, Craft, Vestal Review, Atticus Review, Pithead Chapel, and Best Small Fictions 2020.

Kira heard seagull eyes have an extra cone, they can see UV light, they see under the banana boat slather– see bruises, sun spots, your skin– peeling like a mask. She wanted to hug a seagull. She wanted the seagull to spread its wings wide, hug her back. She wanted to feel its grey-tipped feathers touch her scapulas. She wanted her own wings to sprout, growing quickly. She wanted to fly away with the seagull. She would name him Wallace. Wallace would give her a seagull name. She would learn seagull language. Kira heard the red spot on their beaks is a target; for their chicks to tap and make them spit up their food– remember to feed them. She wanted to eat dropped sandwiches, raw eggs, fish. The Kira-gull would dive through the sky, dropping towards the earth, plummeting till inches from a mass of water, knowing she could glide along at any moment, free. 

***

Melissa Saggerer puts strawberries on pizza. She has flash in Coffin Bell, Barren, Tiny Molecules, and elsewhere. Follow her on twitter @MelissaSaggerer.

The Northern shrike population is in decline, she says, her voice a tongue on his ear. They are solitary and wary, maybe that’s why. They can’t even trust each other.

It’s the males who sing: as defense, to protect their nesting territory, sometimes to attract a mate. She eyes him out of the slashes she’s blackened on her lids. They pretend they are other birds until their imitation of reality becomes the new reality.

Their dead, all those amphibians and rodents, are placed on thorns, to be eaten later. She laughs, her mouth a wet red flame. It isn’t a beautiful bird because power is better than beauty. No, don’t try to tell me they’re the same.

Look, there it sits, alone in the open field, on a scrubby little tree. She points with the tip of her knife and says, watch it watching, perched as still as dirt, as the tree’s skin. You’ll see, it can wait for hours. It can wait for as long as it takes.

***

Katie DePasquale enjoys telling a good story and making sure it’s correctly punctuated. Her writing has appeared in The Worcester Review, Atticus Review, and Tin House online, among other publications, and is forthcoming in Grist Online. A Pushcart Prize nominee for fiction, she has an M.A. in writing and publishing from Emerson College and works as an editor at Berklee College of Music.