Milk Candy Review

The day you sneak communion wine at Saint Mary’s, an overloaded truck barreling downhill brakes so it won’t hit Mr. Li biking uphill, a bag of lychees swinging from the handlebars, a gift for his niece after losing her job. The truck skids and seesaws all over the road to avoid flattening Mr. Li, hurtling with the kind of gravity you might recognize only after it breaks your nose or flays your kneecap, an inevitable trainwreck of weight leaving you with a badass scar to flaunt, proof you escaped another death. Some days you understand the indifferent stealth of a cat with nine lives, slipping between bars just as a guard dog snaps, jaws catching air. But when you drink red wine now you taste rubbery diesel, swallow truck treads leading to a side of the road, where a minute before your hound George squeezed through the gate, tracking fresh cat while you sipped Father Peter’s wine, tired of being the only non-Catholic at Saint Mary’s School, filing into chapel for Mass behind the others, your arms criss-crossed over your chest so everyone knows you want the priest’s blessing even though you can’t drink the Blood of Christ because you don’t belong like you do when you get home and Dad tells you George is dead and isn’t coming back.

***

Phebe Jewell’s work appears in various journals, including Monkeybicycle, MoonPark Review, Spelk, New Flash Fiction Review, Bending Genres, and The Cabinet of Heed. Her story “¿Cómo Está Tu Madre?” was chosen for wigleaf‘s 2021 Top 50 for (very) short fiction. 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 nonconforming people in Washington State. Read her at https://phebejewellwrites.com.

One hundred bottles, some green, some clear, some brown, some dug out of barroom dumpsters, some pulled from alley trashcans, but most just found, found resting against curbs, found on the street grates that carry the heavy rains away, found in the high weeds in Deadman’s woods, in the high weeds that border Griffin Park, in the high weeds in front of the vacant houses, in the high weeds behind the occupied houses, bottles all over like they were put there just so they could be found by the Scrap Boys, bottles like Easter eggs to be hunted, like this was all meant to be.

Scrap Boy 1, Scrap Boy 2, Scrap Boy 3, three backyard haircuts, three necks slick with grime and sweat, three right arms aching to feel the heft of an empty glass bottle, one shared heart. Neighbors by chance, brothers by choice, where one Scrap Boy goes, the other two follow, sure as heat follows the birth of a flame.

Today the Scrap Boys feel their shared heart swollen and buoyant as a hot-air balloon. The Scrap Boys told each other they were going to do it, and they did it. It took weeks, but they did it. One hundred bottles gathered and brought to the best shady spot on the ridge that runs above the railroad tracks, one hundred bottles waiting to be chucked.

Questions bloom in the Scrap Boys shared heart: How to start? When? At what cost? The questions weigh on the Scrap Boys, settle in their shoulders so it’s difficult to lift their arms. So they just stare at the pile. And this feels good. The Scrap Boys don’t know why it feels good, don’t know the way the light and shadows dappling the pile speak to them, tell ancient tales of creation, where there was once just sun parched grass and shadows, now there is this, tales of power and agency, you made this Scrap Boys, you and you alone, your six hands, your own damn selves.

The anticipation is building. This will feed the Scrap Boys. Give them the strength to shake the questions off their shoulders. They will move in unison, as they always do. One right hand, two right hands, three grabbing one bottle, one bottle, one bottle each. Those first bottles will be launched, arc through space catching the sun like prisms, carving light into rainbows as they whistle across pale blue sky and then drop, drop, drop, rush to kiss the gravel along the tracks where they will burst and bloom like fireworks, shattered and brilliant and gone.

Second bottles, then thirds, and fourths, faster and faster, five will leave their hands before four even kisses the ground. A barrage of bottles, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, and still so many more to go. Bottles kisskisskissing the dirt and gravel, the steel of the rails, the creosote rich wood of the ties.

And with each kiss there will be the sound, shattering bottles speaking with the voices of the Scrap Boys future lovers, their future children, demanding voices, insistent, look here, look here, look at the destruction you have wrought.

***

Tom Weller is a former factory worker, Peace Corps volunteer, Planned Parenthood sexuality educator, and college writing instructor. His fiction has appeared recently in Pidgeonholes, Barrelhouse, Booth, and X-Ray Lit, among others. His fiction collection And There Came Forth a Great Fish is forthcoming from Gateway Literary Press. He lives in Victoria, Texas.

Gone are the nets, the cages, the paraphernalia of pursuit; the call, the swoop, the gasp, the clank, the clink of silver (rarely gold); and then, later, the glug in the glass, again and again, tonic against the persistent stench: popcorn and pizza, graham crackers, Goldfish. But what did you do with them? People want to know, or think they do. His job was the catching, first with the nose and then with the net, the catching and that was all.

Now the fabled proboscis detects clotted gravy on boiled beef, scorched coffee, treacly pineapple upside-down cake: lunch. Now the only calls are to Shake those hips! because Motion is lotion! (Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings at 9 on the west lawn), and, on Thursday evenings, sequences of letters and numbers punctuated by screeches of Bingo! while the cage rattles on.

Only on weekends, sometimes, does he catch a whiff of something that pricks his memory: sugar and snips and spice and snails, and tails, none of it nice. He’s not permitted in the lobby during visiting hours, not since the incident with Peggy Price’s granddaughter, but he has the net still, they had to buy a new one for the fish tank. Oh, let him have it, they chuckle, it doesn’t matter, what can he do? He clutches it, alone in his room with the rain streaming in bars down the window. Is she here now, Peggy’s pernicious progeny, in her tattered princess frock and filthy trainers, with her preternaturally penetrating gaze? Is there still a mark on her cheek from where the net struck when he swung? Is she blathering through a mouthful of brownie, pointing and pestering someone else – the shivering specter in black-and-white fur, the briny witch with the siren warble, the hook-handed blowhard in gleaming Crocs – But what did you do? What did you do?

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Didi Wood has always found Lady Elaine (Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood) far more terrifying than the Child Catcher. Her work appears or is forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Jellyfish Review, and elsewhere. “Rattle & Rue,” originally published in Cotton Xenomorph, was chosen for the Wigleaf Top 50 in 2019. Find her on Twitter @DidiWood and read more stories at didiwood.com.

Forty-six handwritten pages, unbound but stacked carefully in the corner; a candelabra, wick molten down to the last centimeter; two fountain and three ballpoint pens, scattered over a dried-up bottle of ink; a matchbox shaped like a mousetrap; five fat cigarettes, wide as a thumb; a wax seal stamp; a watch with a faux silver strap; coke cans with soda left without the sizzle—that’s what the papers said the police found on her desk after she died. The forty-six pages turned out to be part of an unfinished story titled “Succession,” written in the author’s own hand, of which a single page was blurrily photographed and passed onto the morning paper. Not her best work, a critic wrote, but her last, abstract and almost incomprehensible, written in a private coded language with the repetition of rain and gray belladonnas, remarkable for both its impeccable penmanship and almost total disregard for its readership, as if its intended audience was of a population that was no longer human—but still significant, especially significant because of a certain passage sixteen pages in that describes a scene where a woman closely resembling the author herself is found dead on the road, rain slowly falling on her soft jacket, which was pretty much how they found her, the author, dead on the road, rain slowly falling. Script of angels, a reader mumbles during his lunch break, squinting with the newspaper in one hand and a soda in the other. His friend nods but ignores him. Not her best work, certainly, but fascinating: a long, winding road, gray belladonnas, the body floating upwards, the words floating upwards, trails into the air, wisps of cigarette smoke, barely there, nothing really, and the rain falling, and the soft jacket. 

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Christina Pan is a student from NYC with work published/forthcoming in Vagabond City Lit, FEED, and Interstellar Lit.

The rules of Bloody Mary are very simple when you’re a twelve-year-old girl. Just follow these five steps:

1. You must pick the darkest room with the biggest mirror — location is important. You go to the upstairs bathroom of your best friend Tara’s house and together you face the mirror. Tara switches off the light. Your reflections, gangly and wide-eyed with lingering sunburns from afternoons at the public pool, vanish as the room is plunged into darkness. For a moment you can still see your mirror selves, the impressions left on your vision. It’s like you’re the ghosts, bright leftover images looming behind your eyelids as you blink.

2. You must have the proper tools — after you summon Bloody Mary, you’ll need to light a candle to see her. A tea light candle stolen from Tara’s older sister, and the matchbook from the junk drawer in the kitchen. Tara takes other things from her sister these days too, like teen magazines with quizzes about who your future boyfriend will be. She makes you fill them out with her, and she takes the answers very seriously. Afterwards, you read all the options quietly to yourself and feel nothing. Now, in the dark, Tara takes your hand. You close your eyes; you focus on the feeling of Tara’s hand, the quiet of her breathing. The cold bathroom tile on your bare feet.

3. You must call her forth three times: Bloody Mary. Bloody Mary. Bloody Mary. There is power in the ritual of repetition. How many times have you and Tara pretended you were witches, sitting your stuffed animals in a circle and making up chants? Even if that was just make-believe, you were doing it together, and that thrilled you. You feel goosebumps rise on your arm. It’s like you’re the only two girls in the whole universe, just a vast darkness and your hands and peeling, sunburned arms touching. Tara’s palm is sweaty. Her fingernails are bitten short. You notice these details and your pulse kicks; maybe Tara’s nervousness is catching. You think if you opened your eyes and you really were in an endless black expanse, that would be okay. As long as you got to keep holding Tara’s hand.

4. You must believe, and maybe this is why you’ve had no luck so far. Because Tara is certain that when she lights the candle, she will see a blood-soaked figure in the mirror. Tara believes in Bloody Mary with the same certainty that she believes in the ability of a teen magazine to tell her future. But not you. You don’t think a magazine can make you love a boy and you don’t think a chant will make a ghost appear in a mirror. When you open your eyes, you know there will be nothing there, and Tara will let go of your hand because she won’t be afraid anymore.

5. So for now, you must keep your eyes closed. Imagine you can feel the presence of a third girl in the room with you, maybe phantom breath on your neck. And then hold Tara’s hand tight. Just a little longer. Just until you hear the match strike.

***

Audrey Hawkes is a desert rat living and writing in Arizona, and can often be found watching bad horror movies or on Twitter @audrey_hawkes. Audrey’s work has been featured in Ample Remains and Not Deer Magazine.