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Two Questions for Allison Field Bell

We recently published Allison Field Bell’s stunning “I Take My Clothes Off For Him.”

Here, we ask her two questions about her story:

1) I love the repetition of the title throughout the piece, almost as if the narrator is retelling the story for herself, or convincing herself — perhaps, even, trying to change the fact of what happens. How do you think this repetition affects the narrator?
I was thinking of several poetic forms as I wrote this: the pantoum, for example. I’m no formalist, but I love the way repetition can work in poetic forms to actually move a piece forward in a transformative way. Like the more times you read a line, the more meaning that line accrues. I see the meaning accruing here a bit differently of course. The meaning doesn’t derive from the words of the sentence itself (“I take off my clothes for him”) but rather from the narrator’s insistence on repeating it. The meaning forms through a kind of loss of meaning. Like saying a word out loud so many times, it actually loses its meaning.
The narrator is trying to simultaneously grapple with the importance of that moment and also refute it. Exactly what you say here: change the fact of what happens. In a way, the refrain also works like a rewind. Constantly restarting the whole evening, as if she could change it, but also because she’s obsessing over it. Because there are those moments that haunt us, that we replay over and over because we can’t not. Because we don’t understand our own motivation. Like a twisted mantra or incantation, a spell or a prayer. I think this is the experience of the narrator: the refrain is more of a question than anything else. Why this? Why take my clothes off? Why the cascade of events that follow—both on and beyond the page?

2) And this line: “Thinking about my body and what it’s capable of.” Almost as if the narrator is thinking of her body as something disconnected from her self. Does she realize she is doing this? Is it intentional?
I don’t know that she realizes she’s doing this. Not now anyway, in the continuous present of the story. I know that I realize. This is autofiction, and thus the narrator feels close to me in a way that some of my narrators do not. It took me many years to understand that my relationship to my body has often, in the past, been disassociated. This happens for so many reasons, and it took a lot of therapy to understand a fraction of them.
I wonder if there is some intentionality here though with this idea of disconnection. If part of what this narrator is trying to do is to put that distance between her mind and her body. Trying to inhabit that gap, a space that allows her to relinquish that control that she maybe never had to begin with. A space that allows for some morsel of agency in the face of the utter lack of it. I also think desire is a complicated thing. Sometimes we desire what is bad for us. Sometimes our desires lead us down roads we’d consciously choose to avoid. Sometimes desire is less about desire and more about curiosity. What happens if “I take off my clothes for him”? This again gets at the dissociative relationship between mind and body. Curiosity helps to distance the self from the self. As if watching a show or conducting a science experiment. Is the narrator here conscious of all of this? I don’t think so, but I do think she is struggling to become conscious of it. Like kicking hard upward underwater, wanting to surface. The narrator doesn’t surface here on the page, but I do think there’s maybe a tiny bit of hope that she can and will eventually find her way there.

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I take off my clothes for him ~ by Allison Field Bell

I take off my clothes for him. Imagine what he will tell his brother. The one I dated. Am I pretty? My body asks. I am 19. I suck in my stomach, slip into the water. A hot tub at a hotel on the edge of the sea. Santa Cruz. Waves slam against the shore. Moon ablaze overhead. I take off my
clothes for him. Later, we will tear through the hotel hallways in nothing but towels. I will eat a
rib from a tray outside someone’s door. I will hurl myself into a juniper bush, claiming it can
hold me. I will sink all the way down to the hard dirt earth. I take off my clothes for him. He
doesn’t look at my body at all. Just my face. He stares at me, and everything about him makes
me want to curl inside myself. My ex-boyfriend’s brother. My ex-boyfriend’s twin. On a Friday
night in Santa Cruz. I am 19. I take off my clothes for him. My problem is: I know I want him.
Not want but want. I take off my clothes for him. But I don’t really want to. I want to watch him
take off his clothes. I want to curl inside myself. Or maybe I want to run. Leave him here while I
climb back over the hotel wall. Dig my toes into sand. Feel the salt waves lick my shins. I don’t
run. I slip into the water. Santa Cruz. 19. Waves slam against the shore. I take off my clothes for
him. Am I pretty? Later we will tear through the hotel hallways. Later, I will eat a rib from a tray.
Later, the juniper bush. Later still, we will sleep together. Not sleep, but sleep. I will not sleep the
whole night. Staring at the ceiling. Thinking of my body and what it’s capable of. My ex-
boyfriend’s brother. My ex-boyfriend’s twin. Moon ablaze overhead. I take off my clothes for
him. Maybe I want to run. Dig toes into sand, feel salt waves lick shins. I take off my clothes for
him. Santa Cruz. 19. My body asks. I will not sleep. I take off my clothes for him. I take off my
clothes for him. I take off my clothes for him.

***

Allison Field Bell is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Utah, and she has an MFA in Creative Writing from New Mexico State University. She is the author of the poetry collection, ALL THAT BLUE, forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. She is also the author of two chapbooks, WITHOUT WOMAN OR BODY (Poetry, Finishing Line Press) and EDGE OF THE SEA (Creative Nonfiction, CutBank Books). Allison’s prose appears in Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, SmokeLong Quarterly, DIAGRAM, The Gettysburg Review, The Adroit Journal, Alaska Quarterly Review, West Branch, and elsewhere. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Smartish Pace, Passages North, THRUSH Poetry Journal, RHINO Poetry, The Greensboro Review, and elsewhere. Find her at allisonfieldbell.com

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Two Questions for Melissa Benton Barker

We recently published Melissa Benton Barker’s gleaming “Matriculation.”

Here, we ask her two questions about her story:

1) I love that Gabrielle “(gives) forth,” that her giving is “generous.” I adore that she isn’t shamed (except maybe for the theater incident). How do you think her contemporaries looked at her? Did they see something shining and golden as well?
I think that Gabrielle is ahead of her time. She’s claimed and prioritized her pleasure as if it is her birthright—which it is! Her contemporaries may not know it yet, but if they are lucky, they will follow her.

2) At the end, Gabrielle walks into an ocean of her own creation, “somewhere deep and fascinating and beyond.” Is this a place anyone might go, if they had the will? Or only Gabrielle?
Gabrielle’s ocean is a private place, but it is also a place anyone could claim. It’s like the proverbial sandbox, full of individual meaning for anyone who allows themself to step inside.

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Matriculation ~ by Melissa Benton Barker

Her last year of high school, the thought of someone wanting Gabrielle made the image of her own body, naked and golden, rise up inside her mind’s eye. Her handful-sized breasts, the slope of her thighs—once shameful, now a pride—and then between her thighs, waiting darkly, her soft, thrumming prize. 

Everyone wanted her. She was famous at the high school, her name looped across the bathroom stalls. She generously gave forth in bedrooms and on sofas, once in a tent, once under the bleachers, another time in the light booth of the high school theater while rehearsal was going on. That’s when people said she crossed a line. That’s enough, Gabrielle, they said. People have work to do. People have to sit there. What about “Our Town?” they whined. We don’t want to think about you naked, they said. Or even partially disrobed. We don’t want to think about your fingers on the lightboard, your hair lashed over the guardrail. We don’t want to smell the smells, we don’t want to hear you sigh. 

From that point on, school was off limits. It was decided. That part of her life was done. Other students went on about whatever it was they went on about, lockers and exams and letter grades that went home to parents who would congratulate or else ground them, and all the while Gabrielle felt herself walking out into the depths of an ocean. An ocean of her own accord. Somewhere deep and fascinating and beyond. An ocean filled with phosphorescent eels and glittering, winking schools of fish and also the mysteries of the dark, the misshapen globes of the deep dangling their own tiny lights before their eyes. Gabrielle smoked imported cigarettes and wore silk robes, even when she was alone. The golden body dangled somewhere just behind her eyebrows. The golden body spun like a helix in her mind. 

***

Melissa Benton Barker’s fiction appears in Longleaf Review, Citron Review, Best Small Fictions, and other publications. She has edited fiction at Lunch Ticket and CRAFT. Melissa’s debut flash fiction chapbook, Beauty Queen, is available at Bottlecap Press. She lives in Ohio with her family. 

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Two Questions for Emily Rinkema

We recently published Emily Rinkema’s brilliant “The Story Where the Mother Dies in Childbirth.”

Here, we ask her two questions about her story:

1) I’m a sucker for a story that’s about a story (or stories, in this case). Bit by bit you reveal Alice to us, as she reveals herself — I love that! Do you think that Alice realizes how much of herself she is truly revealing with these stories? Or does she feel safe because she is only being shown in bits and pieces?
I think that Alice has no idea, consciously, what she’s revealing. Subconsciously, I think she’s working through some pretty deep stuff about what it means to have a mother, to lose a mother, to not have a mother to lose. In her stories, she creates mothers that she then kills off–or kills them off before the stories begin–I imagine her wishing she had known her mother well enough to truly grieve her, if that makes sense, and so she tries out all different kinds of death–detached, slow, sudden, expected–and what it might be like for a daughter to experience those deaths, to be able to grieve in some way. As writers, we don’t need to experience something to feel it–that’s the point of writing fiction, and reading fiction, right?–to be able to experiment with feelings and scenarios and worlds and relationships without actually having to live them. And I think for Alice, she desperately wishes she had a mother to lose, so she keeps creating them and losing them in different ways, believing she can’t grieve something she doesn’t feel she ever had. 

2) Of course, I have my own ideas about Alice’s mother and her place in Alice’s life — I think anyone with a mother (that’s pretty much all of us, isn’t it?) will have their own ideas. What is your idea about their relationship?
A few years ago, my husband pointed out that I didn’t have any live mothers in my stories. It made me laugh at the time, and I went back through to see if he was right. He was. With a rare exception, there were no live mothers. My mother died when I was 15, so I knew my mother well enough to grieve her, but I still clearly needed to work through that grief in my fiction. 

So many people I know have complicated relationships with their mothers, and watching them lose those mothers at different stages in their lives and through different circumstances, made me think about this particular relationship and how fraught it is for so many reasons. While Alice may not have been able to have a relationship with her mother, I wanted to show that the absence of a mother was equally as complex for her–that in not being there, she was in some ways, always there. There’s a geometrical shape called a gnomon that is a parallelogram with a missing parallelogram in the corner–it’s a shape that is actually defined by what it’s missing. That’s always stuck with me–and I think that’s what I wanted for Alice, that she’s defined by what’s missing. 

Ever since my husband pointed out what was likely obvious to others, I have tried to add live mothers into my stories (sounds like a science experiment!). Strangely, all of those stories so far have been about dark, complicated mother-child relationships…seems like I might have some more writing to do to figure out what that’s all about!

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The Story Where the Mother Dies in Childbirth ~ by Emily Rinkema

In Alice’s stories the mother always dies. Or is dead already. Or is absent in a way that suggests, to the perceptive reader, that she is likely dead. There are mother figures, maybe a step-mother or a grandmother or an aunt or a motherly neighbor, but no actual live mothers by the end of her stories.

In one story, the mother, an old woman, dies in a plane crash, and the tragedy is that when the list of victims is published, they misspell the old woman’s name and her daughter, who is estranged, reads the names while waiting for a haircut and abstractly mourns all the losses before asking her stylist for bangs like that French actress in the movie about the war.

In another, the mother, who is young and beautiful, dies of brain cancer, and the death is quick, painless mostly, and the family, all four kids and the father and the extended family and the neighbors, gather around her in the hospital and one at a time they name a thing they hope is in heaven, only the youngest daughter, who is just eight years old, can’t help but list two things she hopes are waiting for her mom: olives and meerkats.

Alice has a soft spot for the story about the taxi driver, the one where a daughter is on her way to the airport and the taxi driver asks where she’s going and she decides to lie and say she is going to visit her mother, even though her mother is dead, and then the driver says his mother is dead too, and the narrator says she’s sorry for his loss and they sing a song together as the snow falls outside.

The mothers in Alice’s stories die in many ways. There are the sudden deaths–the plane crash, two car crashes, a wrong-place-wrong-time murder, an escalator accident, a choking death. There are the illness related deaths–four types of cancer, a heart attack, an undiagnosed syndrome following an insect bite in the islands off South Carolina, kidney failure, dementia. There are the assumed deaths, absences that have gone on so long that the family or the lover or the parents or the spouse or the daughter can no longer cling to hope, can no longer hear the sound of her voice or imagine the way she looks when she’s sleeping or when she steps through the front door carrying too many grocery bags for one trip.

And then there’s the story where there’s just no mother at all. No death, no loss, no estrangement, no grief, no searching, no longing, no anger, no questions, no memories. Just a general absence so inconspicuous that even Alice sometimes forgets what the story is really about.

***

Emily Rinkema lives and writes in northern Vermont, USA. Her writing has most recently appeared in X-R-A-Y, Variant Lit, Flash Frog, and Mudroom Magazine, and she has stories in the Best American Nonrequired Reading, Bath Flash, and Oxford Flash anthologies. She won the 2024 Cambridge Prize and the 2024 Lascaux Prize for flash fiction. You can read her work on her website (https://emilyrinkema.wixsite.com/my-site) or follow her on X, BS, or IG (@emilyrinkema)

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Two Questions for Jessica Klimesh

We recently published Jessica Klimesh’s haunting “For Fun, Your Boyfriend Dissects Furbies.”

Here, we ask her two questions about her story:

1) So, Furbies. Furbies are terrifying, right? I mean, they’re terrifying! Why do you think the boyfriend focuses on Furbies?
I see the boyfriend as rather aloof, troubled, in need of direction in his life. He perhaps bought a Furby and was initially just curious as to how it worked so he took it apart, but then one thing led to another. The interesting thing about Furbies, which came out in 1998, is that they started out by speaking “Furbish,” apparently “learning” their human’s language over time. I did some research and found that, supposedly, they were capable of learning a number of languages. Not only that, but in 1999, the NSA apparently banned Furbies from their premises, over fear that they might record sensitive information. The FAA was also leery of Furbies’ technology. In general, there was a lot of suspicion surrounding Furbies. All of this feels very symbolic in this story, given what I see as a profound lack of communication between the two people. Perhaps the boyfriend is willingly (and metaphorically) destroying language/communication, or perhaps he’s worried that his secrets, whatever they are, will be exposed if the Furbies are put back together and able to talk. Or perhaps his lack of trust is so encompassing that he simply wants to try to “kill” them all.

2) I love that the narrator assumes that the boyfriend needs more space literally, because of the Furbies — it shows such a disconnect between the two. Is there any chance they could reconnect? Or will it just be the boyfriend and the bones of the Furbies all alone?
I think that even if the two stay together, they will be alone; they are in two different worlds, whether they realize it or not. It’s like every dissected Furby represents a chasm of sorts between the two. I see the narrator as too blind, either willingly or simply naively, to see what’s really going on.

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For Fun, Your Boyfriend Dissects Furbies ~ by Jessica Klimesh

He lines the Furbies’ computer corpses up on the half wall between the kitchen and living room of his one-bedroom apartment. He starts with two, then it’s three, then four. Each time you go over, there’s another one, and whenever you stay the night, you can hear them, whimpering, slurring their words like they’re drunk, calling out for someone or something.

I think they’re crying, you say. Maybe you should put them back together.

But he doesn’t, and now they’re multiplying. There’s another five, six, seven.

Now they’re on the kitchen counter. Now they’re in the bathroom. Now they’re under the bed.

He moves to a different apartment, says it’s because he needs more space.

Because of the Furbies? you ask.

For lots of reasons, he says.

But when you go over to his new place, expecting to see the dissected Furbies, they aren’t there.

Now there are only bones.

***

Jessica Klimesh (she/her) is a US-based writer and editor whose creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in Flash Frog, Gone Lawn, Ghost Parachute, Gooseberry Pie Lit, trampset, and Many Nice Donkeys, among others. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, and Best of the Net. Learn more at jessicaklimesh.com.

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Two Questions for Mario Aliberto III

We recently published Mario Aliberto’s brilliant “Something Out of a Horror Movie.”

Here, we ask him two questions about his story:

1) I love that this is a Final Girl story that focuses on The Bad Girl (or what I like to think of as “the first girl”). You give this character so much weight, so much truth, so much power. What drew you to The Bad Girl as your heroine?
As a horror movie fan, I love the genre’s tropes, and so many movies are based on The Final Girl. What drew me to The Bad Girl was the idea of Jamie Curtis playing Laurie Strode in Halloween. In the recent sequels, Laurie Strode is older and wiser, and very much a bad ass. And it made me think, had she been this much of a bad ass from the beginning, Michael Myers wouldn’t have stood a chance. And on a theme side, I’m infatuated with the idea of how scared everyone is of a woman doing exactly what she wants. How powerful she is, and how the monster (society) has to destroy her, because God forbid a woman lives her life exactly how she wants.

2) And yes! YES! All those things that the story tells us The Bad Girl would do, she would do. And that’s why she has to be stopped.But still — I think I’d like to see this movie. The one where she lives. The one where she conquers. Where she saves everyone. Don’t you think it would be marvelous?
I want to see that movie desperately! I’m sure someone will tell us that the movie probably exists out there, but I don’t think I’ve seen it. But if the movie is out there or ever made in the future, I want The Bad Girl to slay the monster and keep on living life by her rules. She deserves it. All The Bad Girls do.

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Something Out of a Horror Movie ~ by Mario Aliberto III

In the horror movie she calls a life, The Bad Girl gets cast as a camp counselor because she’s hot, she knows she’s hot, and every horror movie needs an antagonist to the virginal Final Girl, at least until the monster shows up. Also, Camp Silver Springs is desperate for counselors, lenient with job experience, and it’s like getting paid to party. So, although she never agreed to it, the newspapers will forever refer to her as The Bad Girl, because no one remembers anyone’s name besides the monster’s in a horror movie, not The Jock’s, not The Nerd’s, not even The Final Girl’s.

One night, drinking warm beer around a fire pit with the other counselors, The Bad Girl listens to The Final Girl once again complain they should follow the rules. Be better role models to the campers. The Bad Girl tells The Final Girl to Fuck off, that she hopes the campers are breaking curfew, telling ghost stories, toilet papering cabins, or sharing sloppy first kisses, because a little trouble is good for the little dorks. Following rules is bullshit, it’s all bullshit, and no matter what, the world’s going to try to kill you anyway, that’s the only thing for certain, so do what the fuck makes you happy with the little time you have.

During a game of Never Have I Ever, The Bad Girl finishes off a six-pack of Miller Lite on her own by taking a big gulp when someone says never have I ever: Kissed a girl, smoked a joint, had a threesome, had a black eye, buried a mother, got a tattoo, lived out of a car, ate food out of the trash, got a second tattoo, tried acid, crowd-surfed in a mosh pit, stole a car, broke someone’s nose, been in handcuffs, been in love.

The Final Girl didn’t drink to any of those, but it’s that last one, never having been in love, that makes The Bad Girl soften a bit. The same way she feels about the campers, she now feels about The Final Girl, wanting her to live a little. Wants her to break some rules. Do something stupid. Something she might regret. To make mistakes. Have no regrets because you never know when your time is up.

Millions of stars, and The Bad Girl takes a stroll to the lake with a girl following, a girl being led, a girl chosen, The Final Girl, because she needs this. They both do. Refracted moonlight on lake water, knees digging into the sand, straddling The Final Girl because The Bad Girl doesn’t fuck on her back, she wants the world to see her, young and beautiful, and her last thoughts are a mix of pleasure and philosophy, how life is short, how life must be short even to stars millions of years old, how at the end of their life even stars must wish for just a little more time.

The Bad Girl doesn’t get a chance to scream when the machete wielding monster steps out of the woods, sneaks up on her, and swings for her neck. It is inevitable. Everyone has their role to play. The Bad Girl’s role is to warn viewers to stay away from sex and drugs. And in this movie, this life, her death serves as the inciting incident for The Final Girl to enter her badass monster-killer era, but only after watching all her friends meet gory deaths. Except, the thing no one ever talks about, not the director, not the critics, not the audience, the real reason the monster kills The Bad Girl first, is not because she drinks, or gets high, or likes to fuck. No, it’s because if the monster doesn’t take her out first, she’ll run him over with the camp bus. Stab his eyes out with the sticks they use to roast s’mores. Take his machete and cut his fucking head off. The Bad Girl would save everybody. And what would the newspapers name her then?

***

Mario Aliberto III is an award-nominated writer whose work appears in SmokeLong Quarterly, trampset, The Pinch, and others. His debut chapbook, All the Dead We Have Yet to Bury, is forthcoming from Chestnut Review in early 2025. He lives in Tampa Bay with his wife and daughters, and yet the dog still runs the house. Twitter: @marioaliberto3