Milk Candy Review

We rode our bicycle after the butterflies. Granny in front, pedalling so hectically I worried her flimsy scarf would get caught in the spokes. ‘Not the purple ones,’ she yelled above the noise of the soft soil under the wheels, the wind in my ears, and the lambs gambolling in the fields. I looked past the flock of purple and gold butterflies that gulped up the summer sun, and I saw the nettle patch by the ditch. A butterfly the colour of moonshine on marble rested on the stinging leaves.

‘The pale butterflies will bring us home,’ she had always said to me while she knitted blankets, her needles clacking like a blundering clock. And what a home it had been, so she said: turrets so tall you could pluck feathers from gliding condors, windows so wide whole sagas shone in a single stained-glass pane. I curled under a knitted blanket beside her and sank into her smell of wool and peppermint. Glass jars crammed our shelves in place of books, blocked our windows in place of views, filled our cupboards in place of food. And in the jars, pale butterflies shone. Every evening, after our supper of carrots baked until they seeped caramel, we counted the butterflies. Then we shook daffodils, collected the pollen in a chipped china bowl, and dropped a pinch into each jar.

‘Careful,’ Granny said as we propped the tandem against the hedgerow. She hitched up the waistband of her skirt, unbuckled her satchel, and pulled out a glass jar. ‘The last one,’ she said as she handed it to me. I inched forward. ‘Hurry.’ Everything smelled of green warmth. Nettles stung my wrist, but I didn’t flinch. I lowered the jar over the butterfly. Its wings beat against the glass. ‘Now, we wait for the full moon,’ Granny said. And as we cycled back, she said, her voice as low as field mist, ‘my bedroom ceiling was a golden map and I read the names of hills and ports until I fell asleep.’

On the day of the full moon, Granny tethered a cart to our bicycle, and I filled it with the butterfly jars. ‘Careful,’ she barked. We cycled on the smoothest paths, the jars rattling in the cart, the lowering sun soft on our faces. We cycled in a silence that felt like peacefulness. And when the horizon was copper and gold and the silhouettes of geese were fast shapes in the sky, we stopped in a vast field. The hedgerows were so far away they merged into the blue dusk. I picked up one of the jars, but Granny shook her head. ‘Wait,’ she said. And when the full moon flushed the sky in fat light, we unscrewed the jars and let out the butterflies.

They flitted and swooped, the moonglow weighting them, the night brushing their wings. And then they were settling one atop each other. And they made the shape of a great castle, towers tall as winds, windows wide as seas. In the moonshine, Granny’s face was all crags and shadows, her eyes tear bright. ‘What did I tell you?’ she said, hitching up the waistband of her skirt. There was a sound like hounds chasing through autumn leaves, and then a stilted shiver passed through the butterflies, and then they were gone, and in their place, marble stretched, smooth and cool. Granny pushed the great door open and we stepped inside.

The halls smelled of crowns and legends. I could hardly feel my feet, hardly feel myself moving. Ceilings glided over us, golden and high as clouds, and I felt as if I might float up and bump my head. ‘Didn’t I tell you it was like this?’ Granny said as she wiped away my tears. I could only nod. And her laugh was soft in the gilded spaces and in the moonlight that turned red and purple and blue as it filtered through the stained glass.

I didn’t feel tired, I only felt swoopy and far away, so I didn’t feel the night passing, or the moon fading. And then there was a sound like wild poppies in summer gusts, and a ripple passed through the walls, the ceilings, the windows coloured by myths. And then the castle was just butterflies again, pale and flickering, and then they flew up into the morning skies and away across the fields. I sat on the damp grass, Granny’s arm around me, and watched them until they were gone.

***

Rebecca Harrison sneezes like Donald Duck and her best friend is a dog who can count.

The Scrap Boys scurry among the young trees of Dead Man’s Woods, maples no thicker than baseball bats, naked and skeletal in the late fall haze.

Scrap Boy 1, Scrap Boy 2, and Scrap Boy 3, one follows another sure as night follows day. They jog the narrow trails, keep their heads down, bend at the waist as if lunging toward an invisible finish line. Crisp yellowing leaves crunch under their too-big hand-me-down sneakers. Three pairs of prepubescent jug ears, three sets of crooked teeth too broke for braces, three matching wounds in the palm of their hands, three bloods mingled, neighbors by chance, brothers by choice.

Scrap Boy 1 leads the cadence: Rangers!

Scrap Boy 2 and Scrap Boy 3 call back: Rangers!

All the way.

All the way.

Here we go.

Here we go.

It’s all they know, all they have to sing, seven words, but it’s enough. They sing them over and over and over again, fill the greying air of Dead Man’s woods with their song, their voices rising, mingling like smoke until it’s impossible to tell who is calling and who is repeating, until there is just one great Scrap Boy voice rumbling like thunder in Dead Man’s Woods.

Lengthening shadows of branches reach for the Scrap Boys, tiger stripe their skin as they run and sing to the rhythm of the lighters rattling in their pockets. So many lighters. Each Scrap Boy carries a couple. There’s a green one and a red one, two blue and a yellow. There’s one with a Metallica logo. That one is special. That one’s the best. All of them are plastic, none paid for, filched from gas station counters, relatives’ purses, and strangers’ coat pockets. The Scrap Boys know fire is free if you know where to look, if you’ve got the heart to grab it.

When the Scrap Boy commandoes reach their bunker sides ache and their throats are raw. Their song tastes like iron, like blood, but a lightness enters the Scrap Boys. Their lungs become helium balloons caged in their chests.

They throw themselves down the short hill, Scrap Boy 1, Scrap Boy 2, Scrap Boy 3, awkward somersaults, ass over tea kettle, sky giving way to dirt giving way to sky again, until they come to rest on flat earth, sweat damp and mud stained and home. Their pit is still there, a circle of stones pulled from the creek a hundred yards away, a circle of stones it took the Scrap Boys a whole afternoon to assemble at the start of summer.

They gather fuel without speaking. It’s all around them, there for the taking. Fistfuls of dry leaves, twigs that snap like matchsticks, sticks that break over Scrap Boys’ thighs and crack like a gunshot. The build looks chaotic, but it’s not. The Scrap Boys know the science. It lives in their heart.

Start small. Leaves and twigs. Lighters out. Every Scrap Boy put a flame to the kindling. Hit it together. Hit it from every angle. Use hands, use bodies, use hoodies and coats, use whatever you’ve got, whatever it takes, to block gusts of wind, to block anything that threatens to those first flames. Use mouths, use breath to feed the young flames. More leaves, more twigs. Then bigger. Sticks thick as fingers and toes. Bigger. Sticks thick as arms and legs.

The Scrap Boys sit in the dirt and watch the flames. Watch the flames flash and destroy, watch the flames dance and create. And in the pop and hiss of the flames the Scrap Boys hear the voice of the fire, hear a song. Rangers! All the way. Here we go.

The earth underneath the Scrap Boys is cold and damp, but in the heat of the flames they Scrap Boys feel their skin tightening, hardening, clay in a kiln. Like recognizes like. Each Scrap Boy, 1, 2, and 3, feels the wound in his palm tingling as the fire grows and grows.

***

Tom Weller is a former factory worker, Peace Corps volunteer,and Planned Parenthood sexuality educator. He currently teaches writing at Pennsylvania College of Technology and lives in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania. His fiction has appeared most recently in Pidgeonholes, Synaesthesia, The Molotov Cocktail, and Booth. He has work forthcoming in Barrelhouse.

When they stitched our lips together, not another ‘saheb’ or ‘mem-saheb’ did we have to utter, but there was nothing they could do about our noses—inhaling food, so they asked us for our stomachs—you can’t all have stomachs of your own. We took out our bones and laid them on our chest—but no, these were brown bones from brown men, brown women, brown children—what good was brown chinaware. We left, leaving the stomachs, the bones. We walked, and we walked, until some of us—turned to earth—told us to go on, but what good was it without stomachs and bones, tongues caged behind our stitched lips.

When we came back, the earth was forest. The wood folk asked for our names, each trying to find their own, until night fell. The faeries hurried into tree-trunks, urging us to join them. But try as we might, we couldn’t fit into their tiny living homes. The men came—men with brown bones still inside their brown bodies, and brown lips that had never been stitched. They didn’t have stomachs either, born of men and women who’d given up stomachs. But it mattered not when they plunged axes into our breath-like bodies, and we fell watching as the axes swung into our wood fore-fathers and they fell, and together we became earth.

***

Maria Zach is the pen name of an author who loves weird and quirky.

She lives in Kerala, a small but densely populated state squished into the southernmost corner of India. She is a dreamer, mother to a toddler, healthcare engineer, wife, whichever among these happens to be demanding her attention at any precise moment.

The mountains were burning in Southern California, as they do, ash falling on the hood of his Range Rover as he backed me into the door, his knee between my thighs, the music from the club muted. I’ll take you where you can see stars, he mumbled into my throat. His hair smelled of cigarettes and coconut. My car followed his red taillights west toward the Pacific. When I was a child, I played a game as my father returned me to my mother’s: there were devils in the taillights we followed, angels in the headlights coming toward us. Now, I snaked up switchbacks without guardrails, the road a thin thread between steep rock walls and dark pits. Orange limned the hills. The newscaster on KNX said that the fire was only 5% contained. His house stood alone on a hill, interconnecting glass boxes like those 3D puzzles I could never put together, with an almost-360-degree view of the Valley, Malibu, and the ocean. A thriller had been filmed here once, but I couldn’t remember the name. Smoke from the fire billowed above. As he swung open the door, he said, I’m in the voluntary evacuation zone. He swiveled a telescope in his bedroom to face east. No stars were visible. Viggo Mortenson lives there, he said. And Jason Momoa there. I squinted through the eyepiece at the twinkling lights from the stars’ houses. Ashes rained against the glass. He pressed against me, his tongue on my neck, his hands pulling up my skirt. Palms wide on the window, rocking against each other. Sometimes you feel empty and want the hollowness to be filled, even with more emptiness. Jason Momoa’s lights turned off. Helicopters strafed the sky. Afterwards, in his kitchen, he fed me cling peaches and I licked juice from his fingers. On one far wall, next to the Wolf stove, chunks of stones and other objects filled a small bookshelf. My fingers hovered over an empty bottle on the first shelf (labelled “O”), a Claddagh ring (“Ag”), a red pottery shard (“U”), a watchface with green gleaming numbers (“Ra”), a chunk of rock (“Po”). My periodic table, he said. Is this all the elements? I asked. No, some of the half-lives are too short, he said. A spotlight haloed the shelf; the objects glowed. I wanted to ingest them, to rub them on my skin. He stayed my hand. We fell asleep on the living room rug and woke only when smoke thickened the air and the walls reflected orange as if the drywall were made of fire. Firefighters pounded at the door. The flames moved toward us with the roar of a freight train. One firefighter in a respirator mask wrapped us in Mylar blankets, while the rest hung back, leaning against the side of their truck. It’s a goner, the firefighter said. Windows burst and steel twisted. I was beginning to think the puzzle could be solved. As the fire reached the kitchen, the flames turned apple green, blue, peach. Are you running a meth lab? the firefighters asked. I didn’t tell them it was all the matter in the universe.

***

Lori Sambol Brody lives in the mountains of Southern California.  Her short fiction has been published in Smokelong Quarterly, Tin House Flash Fridays, New Orleans Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.  Her stories have been chosen for the Wigleaf 50 and the Best Small Fictions 2018 and 2019 anthologies.  She can be found on Twitter at @LoriSambolBrody and her website is lorisambolbrody.wordpress.com.

We spent all of homeroom scouring the yearbook for pictures of mooners and Mary-Ann Shoemaker.

It was the last day of classes, one of those do-nothing days when all anyone wanted was to reminisce about senior pranks and under-chaperoned ski lodge trips and Mary-Ann Shoemaker stories.

Kayla asked if we remembered when Mary-Ann Shoemaker pierced her lip in the YMCA change room.

We did. Mary-Ann Shoemaker had leaned close enough to the mirror to fog it up, staring at herself through the mist, sticking a safety pin through her pouting bottom lip. It bled too much, all over her bitten-nail hands. She wiped the blood onto the speckled concrete walls, like a cave painter. She left for the swimming pool to do the butterfly-stroke in a Las Vegas t-shirt and boys’ swim shorts, leaving behind a trail of dripping blood. One drop fell into a puddle of chlorinated water, spreading across the grout, looking like what happens when you forget you’re pressing down with a fountain pen.

“Weird shit,” said Tawanna. “She’s weird as shit.” Tawanna asked if we remembered what Mary-Ann Shoemaker did on January’s Taco Tuesday.

Mary-Ann Shoemaker had walked into the cafeteria carrying a plastic knife and an army backpack. She declared that she was a militant vegan and would slash us up if we even thought about eating our tacos. Ten minutes later, she pulled two pepperoni sticks from her backpack’s front pocket. She ate them, her lips greasy and wet with non-alcoholic beer. Mr. Valleti tried to suspend her but since she wasn’t really drinking, he couldn’t.

“Well,” Kit said, picking bits of dandruff off her scalp and dropping them onto the floor, “She did get drunk. At Sadie Hawkins. Remember?”

We remembered. Mary-Ann Shoemaker had holed herself up in the custodian’s closet with seven miniature bottles of rum. When she emerged, she wobbled her way to the dance floor. She threw up on Mr. Valleti’s shoes, her vomit pink and smelling like dead things. Mr. Valleti yelled at her in the courtyard. We peeked through the crack in the gymnasium door, arguing about whether or not Mary-Ann Shoemaker was crying.

Cassie slapped her strawberry-skin legs. “Oh, God, yes! Remember when Jacob tried to kiss her after the football game? Gross. Like, beyond gross.”

Jacob smelled like Pizza Pockets and jerk-off tissues. He declared his love for Mary-Ann Shoemaker after our school lost the football game. She told him to follow her under the bleachers, and he did, mosquitos buzzing around his head. Jacob leaned towards her and when their mouths touched, she bit his tongue so hard it bled. She sauntered away, spitting onto the just-watered grass and laughing like the Disney hyenas.

“She’s psycho,” Kayla said.

Rosalie nodded like a dashboard bobblehead. “My dad is a prison psychologist,” she said, “And he says Mary-Ann Shoemaker is mentally disturbed. She hits herself. She breaks glass and cuts herself with it. Remember when she slammed her head against the mural?”

We all remembered. Mary-Ann Shoemaker whacked her face against the atrium sculpture of St. Jerome until her face looked ready to split. She kept slamming, holding her breath like she was underwater, until Mr. Valleti pulled her into his office. She cried, talking about her dad and her blood. We could hear her from the atrium. We could hear her all day long, even after we went home, even as we ate dinner, even as we watched that night’s Teen Wolf.

“Bizarre,” Kayla said. “She cleaned out her locker this morning and it looked like a freakin’ war-zone. Did you guys see?”

We had. Mary-Ann Shoemaker pulled out hot-glue popsicle sticks, cigarette cartons, dirty menstrual pads, non-alcoholic beer cans, and alcoholic beer cans. She shoved her artefacts into a black garbage bag and left it on the senior table.

Tawanna tapped her manicured finger against the window, jumping in her seat. “Wait, look! There she is. On the smoking hill. See?”

We all rushed to the window, our teacher not minding, and looked.

There was Mary-Ann Shoemaker, smoking a cigar, her mouth opening and closing, looking like she was screaming. There was Mary-Ann Shoemaker, standing all alone in the middle of the field. There was Mary-Ann Shoemaker, lonely as all hell, wondering if anyone was looking at her.

There we were, too, peering down from the third floor, our eyes forever-shocked, saying everything about her to each other, never saying anything at all to her.

***

Sarah Priscus has published short fiction and poetry in a number of journals, including Barren Magazine and Rookie Mag. She has received a 2019 Best of the Net nomination for a story published in Atlas and Alice. She writes in Ottawa, Ontario, where she attends the University of Ottawa for English and Theatre. Priscus can be found on Twitter at @sarahpriscus.