Milk Candy Review

When all the children’s sports disappeared, the swim mom locked the bathroom door, filled the tub with warm water and a few sloshes of Clorox, and sat on the closed toilet lid to inhale the bleachy, humid air.

The golf mom snuck a sprig of wooden tees into her pocket before tossing her pants into the wash. After the clothes finished drying, she crouched on the sticky floor of the laundry room to pluck the tees out from around the lint trap.

The softball mom, her face and neck slick with sunscreen, sat in her SUV with the sunroof open. In her driveway, she listened to the classic rock station, biting sunflower seeds and spitting the shells between her legs onto the waffled all-weather floormat.

At night, the sports moms dreamt of sweaty hair, hairsprayed into tight ponytails. Handwashing socks in hotel sinks and pinching the wet fabric into rolled-up car windows. Concession-stand coffee with powdered creamer. Unintelligible shouts echoing in the cathedral ceilings of gyms, pools, rinks, and nondescript steel buildings. Once, the basketball mom dreamt herself climbing the bleachers in high heels, losing her balance for just a moment before gripping the wobbly steel handrail and gasping awake. 

Some moms could subscribe and pay to see miniature two-dimensional versions of their children doing sports. They watched on phones in parking lots, laptops on the dining room table. But these flat children with blurred faces didn’t feel like the same ones who had years ago nursed at the moms’ breasts, grasping at the moms’ necklaces as the early evening sun sliced through the blinds of a dim nursery.

So the soccer mom knifed and quartered a dozen oranges and carried them outside to the bird feeder tray. The cheer mom added a few glittery dog collars to her online shopping cart. And in the backyard at sunrise, the tennis mom wrapped herself in a microfleece blanket. Shook open a portable canvas chair. Sipped her K-cup coffee from a travel mug cradled in the mesh cupholder. Watched through the chain-link fence as the neighbor’s cat chased a dead leaf in the wind.

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Jessie Lovett Allen is originally from western New York and currently teaches English at North Platte Community College in western Nebraska. She holds an MA in English and a PhD in Literacy Education. Jessie enjoys loitering around the MFA program at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, where she irregularly takes classes.  Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Bending Genres, The Forge, and JMWW. She was recently nominated for a Pushcart. Twitter: @jesslovettallen

The first sign had been taped to the garage door of the blue house with white shutters. It was crisp at first, big black letters on white paper, but the sun soon rendered it faded and soft and yellow, tender as its message.

            The family who had once lived inside the house had gone to the ocean, seeking sand and sun and salty air, it said. No one knew how long they had been gone before someone noticed the sign. It was like they had never been there at all.

            The next sign had been taped to a large green house with a maple tree out front. They’d gone to the mountains, it said, where the air was thinner but crisper, cleaner. They’d vacationed there once when the kids were young and had never been happier. They took nothing and never returned.

            The third sign appeared soon after, taped to a small brick colonial with a fenced-in backyard. There was only one word written on it.

            The residents of the street grew bolder.

            The Norwoods headed for a small town the father had visited as a child, where the ice cream cones were the size of his head and cost a nickel. The McCauleys were going to the house where their great grandmother had grown up, which had burned in a fire fifty years prior. The Greenes had taken off for a land that could only be found in the map on the inside cover of their favorite fantasy novel.

            One by one, signs appeared, stuck tight to empty houses full of dreams.

            Word spread of this modern ghost town. People came from the next town over, the next county, the next state. They came from around the world, seeking transport to the places their hearts most desired.

            One person fled to the setting sun. Another to a gray day full of soft rain and unread books. There was a sign describing a lilac bush in bloom, a tree with a crooked trunk, and an old canoe by the pond.

            The signs multiplied. Layers upon layers of paper coated in ink, memories and daydreams that had formerly been lodged somewhere in the stomach, the throat, the chest, deep behind the lungs.

            The walls of the houses began to bow, bearing the weight of longing. But when they finally fell, they fell outward, not inward, sending the hope they housed out into the world.

***

Rachel Abbey McCafferty has been writing since she first learned that was a thing people could do. She’s a newspaper reporter in Ohio whose favorite questions are ‘what if’ and ‘why.’ Her flash fiction has appeared in journals like formercactus, (mac)ro(mic) and Emerge Literary Journal.

1

            My family lives in a house full of mountains about to fall over. It’s not that they’re balanced perfectly on the right side of precariousness. These mountains do fall over, all the time. When they do, my mother shouts, “Avalanche!” and my brothers and father casually inflate their safety helmets. When I come over they’re raking the rubble against the wall, forming new mountains, smaller ones this time.

            After we’ve cleaned up we all sit around peering across the rolling landscape. Here are its contents: Yarns from grass-fed alpacas. Expensive books with mild water damage. Nine hundred and ninety nine cranes, their folds full of dust. In my chest, rocks begin to slip, these small golden dirt clods rolling downhill and bursting on the ground. My mother sniffs back tears. “I love this family so much,” she says.

2

            At the bakery, I order anpan and wait for the clerk to tell me how good my Japanese is, just for managing to pronounce two words.

            “Haha wa nihonjin desu,” I will say, and when she opens her eyes wide and says she can’t see it in my face, I’ll say, “Sou iwareteimasu.” So I’m told.

            I will take my red bean bun—warm, round, and filling my hand like a small creature, and leave it whole as I sit at a bench outside, reading a story about an acrobat and a rocket scientist who fall in love.

            Once, a scientist loved me too. At night, he walked into the forest looking for owls, cradling the smallest ones in his palms before clamping numbered tags on their spindly legs. In the afternoons, he brought me olive bread. I pulled it apart as we talked, and all our worries fell out, shriveled and covered in crumbs.

            In my new neighborhood, I have almost every kind of Japanese pastry I want, but I have to steel myself to buy them, wielding my rice and seaweed childhood, a soft memory pounded tough.

            When I finally bite into the glazed flesh, the black sesame seeds will graze my lips. The sweet bean paste will linger on my tongue.

3

            For parents I have an owl and a tanuki. I did not get my mother’s ability to fly, or my father’s voluminous testicles to use as a parachute. No, I live on the ground and spend my days delivering newspapers through the forest.

            Sometimes I dream about moving through the air, the wind pushing at my back, the fog opening for me like a hug. People stop me on my paper route to ask about my face: how did I get it, both beak and whiskers? They’re not sure it’s beautiful.

            Well, one of my parents flew and the other one floated, I say. They met at the top of a short tree and later they made me.

            When I tell them, people look at me as if I could fly, and I don’t correct them. I have the memory, after all. When I sleep, I’m closer to the stars.

***

Mia Nakaji Monnier is a writer in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in BuzzFeed News, Shondaland, The Rumpus, and more. Her essay “Kokoro Yasume,” published in Exposition Review, was a Longreads editors’ pick and a Pushcart Prize nominee. She is the 2021 Idyllwild Writers Week Nonfiction Fellow. You can find her on Twitter @miagabb and read more of her work at mianakajimonnier.com.

Baba Yaga

cuts carrots in her chicken-legged shack, the weight of the world no longer on her shoulders, peers out the window on a bright morning, the birds particularly precocious and loud, intrigued by seedlings, casts a spell on an old friend in Praha, a lady who reared a log for a son (and had it coming), remembers her first love, a solemn woodsman, a poet of sorts, though he never realized the power of words, ponders how age and wisdom are not mutually exclusive, wisdom is for the birds, knowledge consumed by animals, and shat out, stands and watches a young girl approach the flock of sparrows, a girl of only 10, no more than that, a tasty morsel, from the village of disbelievers, yearns as the girl brings her hands together (in prayer? in supplication?), cuts into her own finger rather than the carrot, just to see blood, to remember what it is to be young again.

***

Jonathan Cardew’s stories appear in cream city review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Passages North, CRAFT, and others. Originally from the UK, he lives in Milwaukee, WI.

We have a slumber party where we decide, instead of fruit, to bring candy shaped like fruit to dump into a big bowl. Welch’s fruit snacks and Haribo peaches. Even Circus Peanuts had their place, we all agreed. Except for Rima, who isn’t agreeable about anything. She rolls her eyes as we dangle sour spaghetti from our teeth and press mounds shaped like strawberries n’ cream to our boobs so they look like puffy nipples. We hadn’t seen her eat food in weeks. She munched exclusively on ice chips and the occasional sugar free peppermint. When she goes to the bathroom, we all agree if we were fruit salad, Rima would be the banana Runts. 

We’re watching “A Walk to Remember.” Mandy Moore is dying and Shane West is sad because he is falling for a girl who is dying. Mandy wears a pale blue dress we all want a version of to wear to prom. We each imagine a version of Shane stabbing our left breasts with a corsage. In one scene, Mandy stands at the mic and sings a solo in front of the whole school, which makes us go quiet. The song is one we will each go home and download. Years later, we will wonder why it’s still on our iPods, until we forget about iPods all together. 

What we never forget about is Rima. She doesn’t end up going to prom. The sleepover is the last time we see her before her parents send her away to a “retreat” from which she never returns. We remember the look in Rima’s eyes, alert and darting like a feral cat’s, as she watches Mandy belting it out on the stage. We remember her hissing under her breath, “She doesn’t even look like she’s dying,” as the sugar crash hits and we fall into deep slumber, the sound of her teeth rattling together like a pack of loose Chiclets.

***

Stephanie Yu lives in Los Angeles with her partner Nate. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in BULL: Men’s Fiction, Eclectica, Hobart, X-R-A-Y, and elsewhere. You can find her tweeting @stfu_stephanie.