Milk Candy Review

They announce it during an emergency broadcast – we can embrace once more.

I meet you outside the library where we first met. Your clothes are too big. You tell me a beard makes me look older. We do the pedestrian shuffle – step left then right, then left then right, then apologise awkwardly. Our arms waver, broken puppets, reaching and missing each other. The construct of a hug, so easily forgotten.

We hug. A boa constrictor hold. Arms so tight to bruise our backs. Tight and intertwined, an entanglement puzzle. Hours pass, unable to let go, unwilling to risk a future separation. Around us, the post-new world moves on. Birds make nests in our hair. People throw objects at us from passing cars. A billboard poster fading behind us. A performance art review in the local newspaper.

The first of many others join us. Seeking warmth after so long indoors – reaching arms around us, adding to our mass. Strangers stick to our bodies. New best friends. Hundreds of them, blocking the road, interlinking arms and bodies. Our structure becomes unstable, rocking as more people join us. Motion becomes momentum. We stumble down roads. Trample across rivers. People in our path absorbed. Traffic bouncing off our perimeter. Fields churned and pylons toppled. A new force of nature.

Over a thousand people, growing exponentially to a million. Our form eclipsing the low sun at dusk. People losing their grip, trampled underfoot. Missing persons leaflets pasted onto backs. People circulating food deliveries. Factions emerging. Social classes spreading from our centre. Rumours from the perimeter – we are now many millions, we have crossed the oceans, we are visible from space, we are impacting the rotation of the planet.

You pull me tighter into our nucleus. Our epicentre under the strain of the oceans. Bodies compressed in the squeeze – mixing atoms, skin eroding, bones interlocking. Our stampede a new species, an organism sharing limbs and memories. A new name in Latin. A future fossil perplexing experts, millions of years from now. We erode ourselves, lifting our feet, carried by the infinite embrace. Hovering across the surface of the earth, invisible and fading, like the ghosts we once were.

***

Paul is from Sheffield, UK. His stories have appeared in Okay Donkey, Spelk Fiction, and was recently on the Best British & Irish Flash Fiction list for 2019-2020.

This is not a story. It is a piece of fruit. Pluck the paragraph, hold its weight in your palm. Rub it against your cheek, let it linger under your nostrils as you inhale. Inhale with your eyes closed. Inhale. It can be any fruit that you wish. It is not a strawberry from your grandfather’s garden, half-eaten by birds. It is not an apple you set down in your child’s lunch box, its tap echoing in the tunnel of your ears these twenty-something years. It is not the mango you watched your soon to be lover slurp from the peel and hold in her mouth like two tongues. It is not the hairy kiwi. It is a new fruit, the likes of which you have never seen before. Let your gaze be the knife. Slice the paragraph into sections. Fan them out across a plate. You know which plate. Perhaps the sentences are juicy. Possibly they are dried out, having lost all sweetness through evaporation. Select one sentence and slip it in your mouth, bring your teeth down into it, the words squirt up against the roof of your mouth, or they seep into the soft place under your tongue, or they do nothing, just grave there pulpy and savorless. Choose one particular flavor, one specific word. It can be any flavor you choose. It tastes like the last time your mother said goodbye, with a wave of honeysuckle, and the subtlest itch of pepper. If your eyes have closed, open them, bring your attention to the seeds, the letters of the fruit, the “r’s” and the “b’s,” the “x’s” and the “e’s” pinch them from the fruit flesh, or scoop them clean, or shake them free, this is your fruit after all. Because this is your fruit after all, do whatever you wish with the letters. Put them in the trash, release them into the yard, throw them out of your moving car, but save one. Save one. Take the letter. Maybe it is a “t’, or it could be a “q.” Set it in a pot and cover it in soil. Put it on your windowsill or put it on the nightstand. Put it wherever light shines for you. Water it however you wish. It might sprout. It might grow. It might lie dormant for seven years, and then one day, a shoot of green! It might already be dead for you. Any outcome is okay. Any outcome is perfectly fine. You are okay. You are fine. You are perfect. If your hands are sticky, let them be sticky. This is not a piece of fruit. This is a story.

***

Caroljean Gavin’s work has appeared in places such as Pithead Chapel, Tiny Molecules, Barrelhouse and Bending Genres. She’s the editor of What I Thought of Ain’t Funny, an anthology of short fiction based on the jokes of Mitch Hedberg out from Malarkey Books. She lives in North Carolina with her two rambunctious sons, one goofy husband, and her one-eyed shih tzu named Moxie.

It wasn’t long before a hole opened up and swallowed several cars on Michigan Ave. Not a sinkhole or some road collapse. Just a hole. Like Wile E. Coyote slapped one of those ACME dots into a canyon wall that the roadrunner sped through. The cars just disappeared, devoured. A wedding photographer in Millennium Park captured her clients kissing when the hole appeared beyond them. She sold the photo for thousands. 

And my grandparents and two cousins were in one of the cars. They were on their way home from one of those dinners the whole extended family knew about. An ultimatum dinner. A “What I deserve” and “Who will look after the kids?” dinner. A whole SUV just down, down, and gone. Religious sects and cults contacted my family. Alien enthusiasts emailed me. When something so inexplicable happens, it sets a fire in the chest and head like a cold, and people need to find out why, they have to know. I had nothing to give them. There was nothing to give. The government dropped lights down the hole without finding a bottom. They sent people to drill in from the sides, underneath Michigan Avenue, and they only found rock and cement; what was supposed to be there, but on the surface there was still the goddamn hole. 

More opened up all over the world, too, like the planet had become Swiss cheese. One swallowed a building that manufactured infant formula. Another one engulfed a Sequoia that was over 1,104 years old.  A slew of people willingly jumped into the holes, bypassing the security and barricades. One man wore wings strapped to his back. They called him The Angel. The public ate that shit up. The last thing people saw where the wings before the darkness ate him, too.

And I? What did I do? I couldn’t stop thinking of words I read in some book or another about being a person who spins on their own axis. Someone who could walk into darkness and not give a fuck where the lights are. I needed a nightlight growing up and God help me, I still have one now. A little lightbulb behind a single stain-glass shape of Saturn, burnt yellow and orange and white. I used to stare at it from across my bedroom. I knew Saturn is all gas but still, I imagined life there. Maybe that’s where my grandparents were, I thought, attending the funeral we planned for them. We laid empty caskets in holes in the ground, holes with bottoms, holes with an exact depth that we could measure, check, and measure again.

What a way, way down, to fall.

I’d like to think maybe they’re waiting for more of us to follow into it, be transported. Trust us, follow us, they might be yelling from the void. A few people have jumped in the hole with that very thought—to follow. There are rumors, they say, that items are beginning to appear at the lip of the holes. A wheel. A shoe. A feather. When I read in a chatroom of conspiracy theorists that a small lightbulb had allegedly been found by the hold in Chicago, I nearly wept for joy. Because maybe the darkness could give back after taking. Maybe it was confirming the lingering question. An affirmation. Follow us, see? We’ll leave breadcrumbs. We’ll leave footprints. See there, there, and there: a still-burning cigarette. A doll in mint condition. A watch. A necklace. And there, see? A light. There, a possibility. 

***

Lyndsie Manusos’ writing has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly’s 70th issue, as well as in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Hobart, and other publications. 

Day 1: We drive in silence to the place where they will aim radiation at the place where my ovaries used to be. The incision has healed but I feel concave. I don’t know how to mold myself to this loss. We hold hands. I look out the window at the leafless trees. 

Day 6: The drive is becoming a habit. We talk about the roof, which has developed a leak. We talk about the neighbors, who may or may not be splitting up. We talk about the cat, who we haven’t seen for days. We hold hands. Some of the trees have that red, fuzzy look they get right before the leaves pop out.

Day 14: The drive is becoming a burden—45 minutes each way for a 2-minute treatment where I lay under the machine like a sacrifice. I have nightmares about the machine. I have nightmares about something growing inside me. I have nightmares. We talk more about the neighbors, bless them and their craziness, they save us from a silent ride. We don’t hold hands. The trees are green now, except for the one right next to the road, the one that was probably struck by lightning. It has a gaping hollow so big I could hide myself inside. It must be dead, I think. What could survive that injury?

Day 21: We argue on the way to the place. He wants to make plans for summer, maybe near the ocean, he says, but laying half-dressed under the sun reminds me of the machine. I crave shade and soft clothing. The hollowed-out tree is still naked. He doesn’t speak at all on the ride back, until he does. That tree is a hazard, he says. It’s dead. They should chop it down. 

Day 25: I drive myself to the place; he says it’s too much for him. Squinting at the wounded tree, I see a red haze around the tips of the branches. On the way back I pull over and walk up to her, because I know the tree is a her, and rub my hands over her bark and look inside where she is empty. I climb in. The great bulk of her drowns out the noise of the traffic. There is a slow breathing, but is it her or me? Maybe it’s both of us. I stay a long time, nestled inside her, until I finally climb out of the blasted place and drive home. 

***

Beth Moulton earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Rosemont College, in Rosemont, PA, where she was fiction editor for the Rathalla Review. Her work has appeared in Affinity CoLab, The Drabble, Milk Candy Review, and other journals. She lives near Valley Forge, PA with her cats, Lucy and Ethel.

The caretaker of St. Mary’s church likes sweeping up the confetti most. He collects the colourful piles and imagines the travels of the missing pieces, how they end up around the world and nestle under lapels and in shallow pockets for years until they are brought back to life at another wedding.

He also likes to stand in front of the stained glass, closing his eyes, trying to guess what colour his face is bathed in, testing if it feels different in sea blue, or pasture green, or heaven white-gold.

When no one is looking, he scoops out a Princess Diana cupful of holy water from the baptismal font. And he pours a thumbful over the soil of the lichen-marked graves that are too old to have visitors.

He hopes someone will do the same for him one day, knowing his time as caretaker is nearly over.

The caretaker sits in the church’s quiet that is like no other. In the musky, partitioned box, he confesses to the silence the things he probably shouldn’t do with confetti, holy water, and stained glass. And as the last of it tumbles from his lips, he feels at peace.

When he leaves the church for the final time as its caretaker, he thanks it for taking care of him all those days, and he hopes he gave as much as he took from doing his work. He returns each year to pay his respects and visits for the last time a decade later in a modest pine casket. And when the funeral has finished, when the church and its grounds return to the peaceful quiet he always loved, the breeze catches a piece of confetti and sweeps it past his wreath-marked grave to a part of the cemetery only a caretaker visits.

***

L. P. Melling currently writes from the East of England after academia and a legal career took him around the UK. His fiction has appeared in such places as Typehouse, ARTPOST, Frozen Wavelets, and is forthcoming elsewhere. When not writing, he works in London for a legal charity that advises and supports victims of crime.