Milk Candy Review

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.

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.