Milk Candy Review

¹Well, it happened. All the quote-unquote “Good Christians”—all the ones who’d affixed a Jesus fish to their bumpers; all the ones who’d gone to church every Sunday (except the Catholics); all the ones who’d given money to televangelists, if you can believe it—all of them disappeared one day, just like they’d said they would.

²There was a bit of disappointment at first, a bit of Oh. Okay then. But after a while, those of us who got left behind did what human beings have been doing ever since the first of us died, way back when: ³We got on with it.

⁴The rivers ran with blood, of course, but in this day and age, it didn’t take long for someone to discover how to filter it out. ⁵The water was left with a mineral tang that most of us got used to and some people found that they liked. ⁶Locusts swarmed to feast on our crops, but you can eat locusts, too, you know. ⁷We laughed when we first ate them because, really, they tasted like chicken.

⁸The Dragon came, every once in a while, courting us to follow him. Some people did, but most of us didn’t. Most of the ones who did came back. He was surprisingly even-tempered about it, just nodded, seemed to understand. ⁹Non serviam, we told him, and really what could he say to that?

¹⁰We found we didn’t miss the ones who’d been sealed as servants of God. Maybe if you were married to one or the child of one, you grieved, but soon you noticed how relaxed you felt, how much straighter you were able to stand. ¹¹There was no one around anymore to tell you who you could and could not to love. There was no one to say what your name had to be or what your body couldn’t do or what shames you should carry with you forever and ever, amen. ¹²The nights were longer than they had been, but through them, we had each other. You could hold someone if you wanted, but didn’t have to. ¹³We found that actually, we all wailed less, and most everyone stopped grinding their teeth.

¹⁴We found a cure for all the pestilence. ¹⁵We agreed that we were done with the wars. ¹⁶We looked and beheld a pale horse, and him that sat on him was Death, and while Hell did follow with him, he wasn’t nearly as bad as all that. More often than raking us over with his scythe, we would catch him simply watching as we cooked or built shelters or danced. He liked to hear our stories. The simplest of jokes made him roar. Wonderful, he’d say, while listening to someone whistle. Wonderful, he’d sigh when he saw you scratch a dog behind the ears. ¹⁷You can find him in the woods a lot, these days, birds alighting on his skeletal fingers. He is fond of giving children a ride on his horse; he seems to value their smiles most of all.   

¹⁸The demons are the same, for the most part. They like whiskey and playing cards and will often keep it down if you ask. They keep to themselves, really, just happy to be out of the flames.

¹⁹These are the things we’ve learned in The End Times: That even the trumpeting of the angels eventually fades into the background. That a lake of fire turns out to be as beautiful as it sounds. ²⁰That the stars are no longer fixed in the sky, but this has only made us look at them even more.

***

If luck were my lady, her fingers would weave like spindles in between my own. The warmth of her palm would radiate in my hand while we sat in the back of our cab, Chicago nightlights whirring outside liquor-fogged windows, our drive never ending. She’d let her nose graze the side of my jaw and I’d thank God I could call her mine, if only for the evening, if only for the hour, if only for this brief moment in time.

I wouldn’t worry she’d leave my side. We’d hit the lottery, the jackpot, buying homes and cars until our hearts were content. We’d pick and choose what property to stay at day to day—our villa in Paris? Our cabin in Spokane? We’d stay curled up in Egyptian cotton sheets all day, bare feet tangled together and eager hands always traveling north, south, westbound, eastbound, to every curve and crevice in between. The sex would be amazing.

I’d tattoo a horseshoe on the back on my neck in her honor. She’d squeal with excitement as the needle whirred, the artist’s hand always steady but never still—shading, perfecting, crafting until my lady nodded her head in approval. “Yes,” she’d say, “that’s exactly it.”

We’d use our endless fortune to pay for scientific discovery. Our money would pave the way to a miracle serum, carbonated immortality in a bottle and it’d taste like Vanilla Coke.  We’d sip until the fizz was in our nose, challenging one another to belching contests and wishing that we could burp bubbles like they do in the cartoons. We’d drink expensive scotch until it went straight to our heads, rolling on the floor watching the ceiling swirl. She’d begin to cry, softly, drunken tears she couldn’t reason with, and I’d ask her if she was thinking about someone else.

She’d begin to sleep with her back to me. It’d be too hot to be close, our bodies too accustomed to comfort. She’d sleep with her feet curled, legs pulled to her chest, mine still searching for her at the end of our California king. Our trips would slow, the thrill long gone after visiting every country in the world. She’d begin to feel distant. She’d start saying things like “eternity is just a long time” over dinner.

If luck were my lady, it wouldn’t last. I’d beg, I’d plead, I’d buy her every gift she’d ever asked for, every flower known to man, a diamond for every day I’d been able to call her mine. She’d tell me we never had anything in common.

***

Tayler Karinen lives in Saginaw, Michigan. She graduated from Central Michigan University with a MA in English Literature and Creative Writing. Her fiction has previously appeared in Hot Metal Bridge, The Roadrunner Review, Cardinal Sins, The Harpoon Review, and Cease, Cows. One day, she hopes to pursue a MFA, publish a collection of flash fiction, and make her cats proud.

The Clown King’s throne is a folding chair in a one-room apartment with a dripping faucet and starbursts of mold crawling across the walls. Her face is a roadmap of origami wrinkles, the laugh/frown lines of her mouth, a balloon animal knot. The tiny apartment can fit a troupe of forty. Clowns, as showcased by the physics of clown cars, are known to bend space and, occasionally, time.

The Clown King lives in a city of baguette crumbs gobbled down by oil slick-plumed pigeons. She spies the geraniums on balcony flowerpots along Main Street and thinks they look durable enough, if a little droopy, to squirt water out of their pollen hearts. The Clown King, ever-vigilant, rides her velocipede around the city in order to look after her people as they work. Lately, there have been some coulrophobic incidents in the gray-stone streets. They make the Clown King wary. A group of factory workers called one of her harlequins la féerie, while the mimes, in their striped uniform and tear-painted faces, have been told repeatedly they’d look prettier if they just smiled more.

The pierrots down by the riverfront are faring better, the Clown King is relieved to find out. They play their weeping violas and the tourists toss coins in their ripped-velvet cases. Most popular of all are the regular clowns hired for birthday parties of rosy-cheeked local children.

Life in their city of canals and towering monuments hasn’t always been all fun and games, but they manage. The Clown King pedals home before her troupe arrives, bags of groceries hung from either side of the handlebars. She’ll be making pies, filled with days-old cream and discount strawberries. She sits at the table and waits, a stolen flower in a tin can, pie-crust perfume covering the odor of mold.

In the evening, after her troupe of clowns and pierrots, mimes and harlequins, have broken bread around the kitchen table, the comedy and tragedy masks come off. The Clown King slips into a threadbare nightgown and washes the pancake makeup off her face.

They sleep stacked one atop the other, warm bodies a shield from the damp and cold, red noses brushing together in kaleidoscopic dreams.

***

Avra Margariti is a queer Social Work undergrad from Greece. She enjoys storytelling in all its forms and writes about diverse identities and experiences. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Flash Fiction Online, The Forge Literary, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Argot Magazine, and other venues. Avra won the 2019 Bacopa Literary Review prize for fiction. You can find her on twitter @avramargariti.

Will I find you in the future?

Maybe you’ll sneak up on me, watching from a marble gallery in an old library with green-shaded reading lamps. Maybe I’ll be reading about you.

Maybe I’ll have a pebble in my shoe. Maybe my eyes will sting. Maybe a sparrow will hurl itself against the glass. And I’ll look up, and there you’ll be.

You belong to the past, like nips of peppermint schnapps at the vampire girl’s grave, like a cedar chest filled with heavy 78 RPM records, records so old they’re not even vinyl but whatever came before vinyl, solid black discs that break but don’t bend. You belong to the upstairs theatre that only showed black and white movies, nights walking around looking for places that still served dinner at ten o’clock, it was a college town, surely we weren’t the only ones still awake, but we’d always end up at the same Chinese place, scorpion bowl cocktails with tiny paper umbrellas we’d have sword fights with, and one night we found a puppy someone left tied to a shopping cart. How long had he been there? Every other store in the plaza had closed. He nipped our fingers and howled like a baby wolf. We took the puppy home, your studio with the Murphy bed that flipped up instead of staying down, like something from the Three Stooges, mattress so thin I could feel metal bars underneath digging into my back. We had no dog food so you fed the puppy leftover pork fried rice from your own plate and I thought, here is a man who would give his last meal to a starving dog, and it was true, you would. When did I learn that was all you had to give?

The record store we worked in is a Starbucks now. The theatre was a hookah bar, then a yoga studio. The tenements on your street were knocked down for condos, all the streets we walked too bright, too clean for ghosts. Still, someday, I think, I will see your shadow. I imagine you catching my eye. I imagine myself looking away. I imagine us in a room of windows grown yellow, light brittle as celluloid, air that might break but won’t bend around our silence.

***

Kathryn Kulpa is an editor at Cleaver Magazine and has work published or forthcoming in Best Microfiction 2020, Atlas & Alice, X–R-A-Y Literary Magazine, and Women’s Studies Quarterly. She was the winner of the Vella Chapbook Contest for her flash fiction collection Girls on Film and a finalist in the 2020 Digging Press Chapbook Competition.

There’s a man with balloons at our park today, which is where we wait after school in the unguarded hours before our mother gets home. We’ve never seen this man before, but like usual we’re alone, my brother and me, two kids hunched atop the climbing dome like abandoned chimps. The man stands below us with his balloons, all playschool colors, a bright stained glass shadow hanging over the mulchy ground near his feet. He calls up to us: Kids. Kids. Want to buy one?

Today, I am ten-and-half exactly, and my brother is twelve-and-three-quarters. I’ve promised to be responsible for him because sometimes he gets ideas the way our antennae picks up the Spanish channel from Greenville, some elsewhere static he can’t unhear. My brother wants more than anything to buy a balloon from the balloon man, even though he doesn’t have a cart like an official balloon seller would; he keeps all the balloons tied real tight on his forearm, so tight they leave welts. My brother starts asking questions—Why doesn’t the balloon man float away when he has all his balloons tied to him? He saw a program on TV last Friday about a man in a lawn chair who did just that. I tell my brother that all balloon men have lower halves that are made of metal, that the only reason we have balloon men at all is because so many soldiers came back from war with their lower halves blown off by grenades and land mines and whatever, and the missing parts get replaced with metal like a steam-powered mecha. Lucky for them, that’s a basic balloon man job requirement. It makes them heavy enough to keep from floating away.

She’s right you know, the balloon man says, and I hate that he’s listening. My brother says he wants a yellow balloon, because yellow is the color of popcorn butter and also the pirate doubloons in a video game he likes to play. The balloon man says, They’re only a quarter, I’ll give you two for a quarter, and I tell my brother he doesn’t have a quarter moments before he pulls one out of his shoe and says yes he does. I don’t know how the quarter got in his shoe and can only hope he didn’t take it from somewhere he wasn’t supposed to. How lucky you are, says the balloon man, and I tell my brother that balloons are bad for the environment. Every time someone buys a balloon, a sea turtle dies.

For a while, no one says anything. Then the balloon man smiles and nods and trudges back toward the road, his wares bopping in the air behind him, his bald little head low on his shoulders. Stupid, I say to my brother. What is wrong with you? You can’t just buy things from strangers like that, it isn’t safe. My brother doesn’t reply. He watches the balloon man shuffle so awkwardly away from us it’s like his lower half really is made of metal. He might be in pain. Just as he gets to the curb, three high school girls whip down the road on scooters, swinging close enough to startle him. They shriek whoop-whoop and ride off, the balloon man blinking foggily after them, and now I feel bad because he could actually be homeless, a homeless veteran. I don’t know the high school girls’ names, but I remember last month when we saw them at the bus stop and I hissed at them, rope of spit scattering on the sidewalk. All year long my saliva has tasted funny. I think I might be turning into something else.

Are we going to get down now? my brother asks. I think it’s time to get down.

In a minute.

He looks at his watch. It’s time to get down. It’s five-oh-three. Time to go.

Just wait, I say, watching until the balloon man is out of sight. You can see three-sixty degrees on top of the climbing dome; in fact we’d probably be okay if we stayed up here all night, my brother thinking about balloons, heart all swelled with latex longing, and me growing my eyeteeth out and sucking down my spit. The balloon man, I imagine him at home, wherever his home is. I imagine if he has any quarters he keeps them in his big metal belly, that when he drops them in through the grate they clang and they echo.

***

Jen Julian is a transient North Carolinian whose recent work has appeared or is upcoming in Okay Donkey, SmokeLong Quarterly, Jellyfish Review, JuxtaProse, and TriQuarterly Review, among other places. She has a PhD in English from the University of Missouri and an MFA in Fiction from UNC Greensboro. Currently, she serves as an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Young Harris College in the mountains of Northern Georgia.