Milk Candy Review

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.

Let’s say, just for one night, it won’t rain. Let’s say the stars shine down on us, like crinkled balls of tinfoil in an inky sky. Let’s say we take a walk along the foreshore, like we used to. Let’s say our fingers entwine, like a fishtail braid; and you lean into me as the wind wheeples through the trees, an eerie dirge. Let’s say the things people like us normally say, do what they normally do, when they take a midnight stroll. Let’s say the lights on the water look like glowing Greek columns, in a temple to some goddess of passion. Let’s say we’re invincible, two creatures constructed of diamond, sparkling the way your blue eyes did the first time you looked across this same path and into my own. Let’s say no to all the things we’ve said yes to that didn’t happen, to all the people who’ve asked the unforgivable time and time again, to everyone who judged us on our eventual silence. Let’s say, here in the darkness with the waves sighing as they drop gently on the sand, that in spite of it all we can still love each other.

***

Amanda McLeod is an Australian author and artist, and the Managing Editor at Animal Heart Press. Her fiction and poetry can be found in many places including Not Very Quiet, Ellipsis Zine, and Mojave He[art] Review. She loves quiet places and learning new words. Find her on Twitter @AmandaMWrites and on her website amandamcleodwrites.com

The two kissed at the end. So enamored and in radiant love, they held on to that swell of contact until the skin on their lips and tips of their noses fused together.

They didn’t mind. After everything they’d been through to get to this moment—the loss, the danger, the revenge and the lesson—they both felt they could stand to spend the rest of their lives moving as one through the world. Arms on each other’s hips, legs shuffling between the other’s. They learned. The hardest thing to do was eat, but they figured it out.

In time, their brains sliced the other one out of their vision as irrelevant information. Like a nose, ever necessary but in the way. One could see the world beyond the other, but as much as they tried, one could no longer see the other.

Still, they know their other is there. By scent and sound and memory, yes, but more so by the stray weight at the end of their noses and the slight taste of the annual winter blood from the other’s chapped lips.

***

Nick Perilli is a writer and librarian living in Philadelphia, PA with loved ones who have yet to watch Gremlins 2 with him. Work of his has appeared in Pidgeonholes, XRAY, Maudlin House and elsewhere. He tweets @nicoloperilli and spared no expense on his very cheap website nickperilli.com.