Milk Candy Review

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.

Alice is in love. This is a list of things she loves: a front tooth gap, a small scar on the left hand, a freckle above a top lip, the same haircut for 10 years. She bubbles up the courage to ask for a date but of course the answer is yes – Alice is in love with herself. She holds her own hand and buys yellow poppies on the corner, bringing the fragrance to her nose, running the softest parts of herself on the petals. Alice sighs. The air is hot and restaurants have opened their walls. She hears laughter and shrieking and only a little sorrow. She sees no one on a date with themselves, couples huddled together with phones in hand, some talking to one another, all furrowed brows. She ponders this while gently laying her jacket on the chair she pulls out for herself. Alice has been cheated and the cheater. She has been lost and loved and left in warm blue hues. Alice knows all love is not real love. She knows there is love for thighs and love for eyes and love for the taste of both. She knows people bend and break for hate masquerading as love, bending and breaking itself, trying to blunder to the light, trying to be the light. Alice orders champagne, toasts herself and drinks the fizz in one gulp. She orders two entrees and eats half of each, pairing steak with shrimp and a little arugula for balance, mashed potatoes every other bite. Wiping the corners of her mouth, she laughs at her own bad jokes and gets chocolate cake to go, for our treat, she teases. Alice leaves the restaurant full and high on love, on the silence of being alone. She is home by dark, humming herself a slow blues song, lights dimming with the sun.

***

Olivia Kingery is a writer in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where she also teaches, farms, and swims.

After I was assaulted, I spent the night at my mother’s house. She asked me what I wanted for dinner. I know this because that is what she said to me, what do you fancy? She said she made some dangerous chili, that was her mistake. I told her that it would be fine for me. I sat in two of her sturdy chairs. Both of them hurt. I stood up and looked outside at the teenage girls smiling at me from across the street. Be safe, I thought. My mother was telling me about a mystical friend named Sonja, a beautiful woman, she said, a fortune teller. At least you’re okay, she said. I was trying very hard to listen to her story about being vaguely in love with the woman. I remembered how she had once admitted she was bisexual as if she were telling me what a perfect mother she really was. This was after Dad left, around the time that my breasts grew in, before I ran away. Don’t tell me this kind of stuff, I said. Act like a parent, if you don’t mind. At the time, I remember how I felt about my body, watching it bloom from above. I resembled the kind of girl a father would be proud of. My mother was depressed during that time.

Today, she cries only because I’m safe. She says she’s making plenty more food in the kitchen. I curl up on my mother’s floor, imagine a switchblade in my hand. Would I have used it on him, would he have turned it back on me? I say, sorry about Dad. I look at her and try not to bleed on her rug. When she pulls me up, my mind is a diamond, hard and brilliant— a thing she can finally understand. I try to breathe. You have to get treated she says. I love you. I let her hold me, let her extinguish my hair.

***

Meg Pokrass’ fifth collection, ‘Alligators At Night’, was published by Ad Hoc Fiction (2018). Her work has been anthologized in Best Small Fictions, 2018 (edited by Aimee Bender) and two Norton Anthologies; New Micro (W.W. Norton & Co., 2018) and Flash Fiction International (W.W. Norton & Co., 2015). Meg is the Founding Co-Editor of Best Microfiction, Editor-in-Chief of New Flash Fiction Review, and Festival Curator for Flash Fiction Festival, UK and recently became the Flash Fiction Focus Editor for Mslexia Magazine.