Milk Candy Review

The men here used to grow on trees. Gentleman tree-dwellers in tweed suits and newsboy caps, perched upon the bone-white arms of giant sycamores, supping on squirrels and birds, wheedling catfish from the river when the water ran high.  These were not unlearned men and could be heard reciting Milton from the highest limbs, performing Hamlet beneath a Hunter’s Moon.  Occasionally, a townswoman would judder the branches, shake a tree man loose. But once they were felled, the men never stayed in place again. Without roots, they wagon-wheeled across the countryside like tumbling leaves, like seeds scattered in the wind. 

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Audra Kerr Brown lives at the end of a dirt road in Iowa. Her fiction has appeared in the Best Small Fictions, Wigleaf’s Top 50 (Very) Short Fictions list, X-R-A-Y, People Holding, Outlook Springs, and more. She is a reader at New Flash Fiction Review.

When she takes off her shoes and steps into the Dojo; when she sheds her dress, the soft shell peels off her skin; when she winds a long, white band around her breasts before slipping into the Keikogi, its wide sleeves cut at her elbows; when she pulls the Hakama up her legs, tying the night-blue belt into a butterfly, tucking the wings just under her waist; when her hands reach into the Kote, the wrinkled leather cool to the touch; when she straps the Do in front of her torso, the hard and comfortable armor hugs her body like a lover; when she puts her head inside the Men, hiding her face behind the metal cage; when she wraps her gloved hands around the Shinai, the length of the sword extends before her; when she takes her stance, right foot forward, left heel lifted, the hem of her Hakama swishing on the springwood floor; she finally feels in Power. She could be Anybody — she could be Born Here, she could be a Man, she could be White, and people would be in her Mercy, for once. 

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Yunya Yang was born and raised in Central China and moved to the US when she was eighteen. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in Heavy Feather Review, Brilliant Flash Fiction, The Los Angeles Review, among others. She lives in Chicago with her husband Chris and cat Ichiro. Find her at www.yunyayang.com and on Twitter @YangYunya.

We know the rules. When you’re a girl at a picnic lunch, it’s your job to stand, picnic basket in hand, feet aching, until a boy picks you. Remember: you can’t choose the boy; he chooses you. One by one, our friends are auctioned off. Crinkled dollar bills slide from the palms of grubby boys, money attached in envelopes and safety pinned to their back jean pockets by their mothers.

Before we left, we swiped our mothers’ lipstick. This made us feel grown up, like the older girls at school who were always puckering their lips in front of bathroom mirrors, then swinging their ponytails to hide the hickeys on their necks. Now we just feel like little girls. The lipstick is waxy, caked on our lips.

We try not to think about how the last girl chosen always has the plainest face or the worst food, the kind that tastes like a meal served in a nursing home. If our fathers were here, they’d try to make us feel better by saying that we are like samurai warriors, the last ones remaining in a fight. But they are not here, so we stand, eyes glimmering, teeth bared.

The boy who chooses us hands over a jangle of coins. He doesn’t stop to admire our mothers’ handiwork: the carefully folded napkins, the mouthwatering ham sandwiches with the crusts cut off, the thermos of pomegranate juice, the pomegranate carefully plucked from the tree in the backyard then juiced, staining our mothers’ hands mauve. Our stomachs growl as the boy wolfs down another sandwich. We wonder if this is why our mothers sometimes clatter the silverware drawer shut after dinner, complaining that no one ever appreciates them. The boy slurps down the juice and twists his mouth at the taste before ripping the saran wrap off the sandwich. When he softly kisses one of us on the cheek, she slaps him the same way women with sharp eyebrows and shoulders pads in old movies do. Then, she rubs a finger across reddened lips as if she’s trying to hold back a smile. He tears off a chunk of the sandwich and swallows. Hands brush crumbs off his pants. One final bite of the sandwich, and he’s gone, just a streak of boy running across the grass.

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Candace Hartsuyker has an M.F.A in Creative Writing from McNeese State University and reads for PANK. She has been published in Cotton Xenomorph, Heavy Feather Review, The Hunger and elsewhere. 

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.

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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.

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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.