Milk Candy Review

1.

My mother flashes the headlights on and off when we see the truck headed up the drive. We bounce in our seats and wave through the windshield, though in the slow rain and the overcast gray, a little fogging on the glass, I don’t know if he could see all that anyway. But he pulls to the house instead of turning toward the barn. Mother stands in the wet, tucks her hair behind her ear and explains to him that she locked the keys in the house. His red eyes turn us over a moment. He draws on a cigarette and then hands it to my mother’s grasping fingers. She takes a single drag and relinquishes it again. He runs the zipper of his coveralls to his throat and turns up the sidewalk. From an iron deckchair he boosts himself onto the lowest part of the roof. He disappears into the attic’s shaky old window, swift and smooth like he’s done this before, he knows our home that well. We wait.

2.

The water eats up the pavement. Mother slows us before a lost portion of highway, a dip between two pastures where the creek, or the trees of its normal banks, lies in sight across the flooded bottomland. Her old blue Crown Vic idles around us, smokes a little in the cold summer rain. The orange pump-shaped light warning of a low tank flashes on the dash.

I can still see the road, she promises. She eases us forward into the stretched, pried, flung-open jaws of Richland Creek.

Later I tell her to drive more slowly, save the fuel so we’re sure to make it to town, but she says we’ll burn it either way.

3.

In the sun we cast our lines out over the choppy lake and pull them back empty again and again. Once I snag a stick and loose it to the surface, panic and drop my pole thinking it’s a snake. I flee to the green, stilted house just back from the water. Everyone promises it’s nothing more than the lost limbs of a tree. They untangle the line and set me back to pulling the floater aimlessly along the bank. It happens again, another gnarled branch, and I’m just as scared. Someone shouts at me to cut it out. He leans over me, I can see his breath but not his face, and out beyond us somewhere geese and thunder call to each other across the breeze. There’s not a goddamn thing in this world to be scared of, he says, and with a jerk he rips my line free again.

4.

We drive down the Interstate and pull in at the rest area just across the state line. A tall rocket points skyward, and we haul a basket of food from the car to eat in its shadow. We’re not the only ones to have this idea—other families lie scattered around us. Most of them have sacks of fast-food hamburgers, buckets of fried chicken, plastic containers packed with salad or pasta. We have sandwiches wrapped in thin, slick paper and a glass dish filled with cookies. There’s almost nothing to clean up after.

We’re still between cities, but we’re closer now to Huntsville and the Arsenal and the secrets buried in their deep governmental halls. The archaic, decommissioned space missile arching overhead, painted the flat colors of an old cartoon, feels cosmopolitan. I imagine a world of them lined side-by-side, walking between them and passing in and out of them. Traveling. Nearby there’s the hulking frame of a World War II jet, but it doesn’t move me. Mother insists on a Polaroid snapshot of me in front of it after we’ve eaten.

Before we leave we walk through the Welcome Center, use the bathroom and poke at the screen of the boxy, blue-lighted computer map showing highways across the state of Alabama. While she stands comparing its digital readout against the paper map glass-mounted on the wall, I pull a thick stack of glossy brochures from their stands nearby: space and rockets, cotton, catfish, the river, civil rights, colleges, a battleship, the sea. There’s so much of the world so close it’s hard to believe. I carry it all to the door and watch out over the dimming light of the emptying lot. The wind picks up, and a few drops of water land on the windows. She checks her watch and says give it just a little longer.

***

Marvin Shackelford is author of a collection of poems, Endless Building, and a forthcoming story collection. His work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Wigleaf, Hobart and elsewhere. He resides in Southern Middle Tennessee and has no clue what he’s doing with his life, honestly.

The item was cast in bronze in two pieces: the handle and the disk, the latter held the mirror. The item has been broken apart. (As if the subject of the reflection and the hand that held it are now separate.) Presumably there had been a rivet holding the two pieces, but it has eroded to a small nub. The disk is more oval than circular; there are imperfections in the shape which indicate the artifact was hand-formed. The mirror itself has been abraded to no longer reflect. It is simply something that is held up in front of one’s face. (As if to hide.) On the back of the disk, hieroglyphics are too worn down and is indecipherable. (Perhaps once a name.) The handle is in the form of a stylized papyrus plant. Research has found this represents creative female power in Egyptian mythology.

It was found in a small coffin, as if for a child.

She closes down the museum’s website, pushes her laptop away, stands. She wants to see it. But the catalog says it is not on view. She goes to the mirror in the hallway. Tucks an errant hair behind her ear, smiles the way she would to a child, to her child. She will be the only one to see this smile, the way she tilts her head and her eyes scrunch along the edges. Wonders if she can do it again, handle it again, wonders where and how she can pack away this mirror that has caught a mother in its reflection.

***

Jennifer Fliss is a Seattle-based writer whose writing has appeared in PANK, The Rumpus, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. She is the 2018/2019 Pen Parentis Fellow and a 2019 recipient of a Grant for Artist Project award from Artist’s Trust. Recently, her story, Hineni, was selected for inclusion in the Best Small Fictions 2019 anthology. She can be found on Twitter at @writesforlife or via her website, www.jenniferflisscreative.com.

When the meteor falls, I am watching Oona breathe. Mama hasn’t said it, but I know it is my job. To watch for earthquakes inside my little sister. To catch them, to read the fault lines of her sleep twitches.

I have a washcloth, twisted and readied in my fist. I’ve seen Mama do it before, but I worry I won’t be quick enough, that something will get bitten off. That I’ll fall asleep and miss the whole thing: eyes gone in search of something behind themselves, tongue left bloody.

So when the sky cracks open, I think it is Oona, rattling the windows, shoving a boom through my insides. As if earthquakes could escape bodies, walk into other bodies.

Mama says they may never leave her. Mama puts little drops under Oona’s tongue, little pills down her throat, little wires in her veins.

Mama says they’re not catching, but I wish they were. The way a sneeze comes out of you like a thousand dandelion seeds, settling and sprouting and making snot-rivers in other noses, while you get better.

Mama says Oona’s earthquakes don’t work like that.

When the sky splits open, so do Oona’s eyes. I am ready with the washcloth, but she just sits there, looking down at her hands, her body, which are still.  Not me, she says, running her fingers over quiet limbs.

The field outside our window is on fire. Oona sees it first, places her palms on the pane. It is nothing big. Smaller than the campfire Mama built for us last summer. I remember the way she cradled a lichen nest, the way her breath gave life to orange light, the way she wouldn’t let us get too close.

We should wake up Mama, but we don’t.

We hold our breath, unlock the back door, slide it open. I follow Oona, all shadow, toward the small flames. The grass is tall enough to hide her feet, and for a moment, I am convinced that she is flying. That she is something else. That the earthquakes have left her and in their place is a wildness I do not recognize.

We stand above it like witches. The lit grasses burn in little curls at our toes, and the tail of the thing lingers in the sky. I throw water from a bowl, and the thing hisses. Steam licks the air.

I think about dinosaurs and craters and ash-covered skies. Choking to death. But the thing in the field is no bigger than my heart.

Oona crouches. Picks it up. It must be burning—all that friction, all that falling—but she brings it to her chest like she were its mama, like it were a part of her once, and even in the dark, I can see the pink growing on her chest, dotted and splotched, like a galaxy unzipped.

***

Anna Gates Ha earned her MFA in fiction at Saint Mary’s College of California. Her writing, nominated for the Pushcart Prize, has appeared in Harpur Palate, Watershed Review, and Literary Mama, among others.

Just the right one swelled and grew; the other turned inward and sank, deeper and deeper, a mole’s nose, pink point digging its way into her chest. Other girls stuffed their bras with socks; she wondered if what they meant was this. The process wasn’t painful, thumbs pressed into wet clay, but she worried for her heart. She awoke to wings against her sweaty sheet, bass thrumming, whole body a subwoofer, her heart a drum inside a singing bowl, ba-buh-ba-buh-ba-buh-ba-buh. She ran to the toilet, hung her pounding head but nothing came. Cold tile kissed her knees, night’s breeze against a humid morning. The house hummed around her; the lawnmower and the weedwhacker—her parents were outside so early. Ba-buh-ba-buh-ba-buh. A drumbeat into battle, an auditory talisman, I-am-I-am-I-am. Back in her room, she undressed completely, lay atop her sheets, and felt summer air swirl within her basin. No more socks, no more pretending. Her mother sent her to a doctor and sent her to a shrink, but the girl wouldn’t think of changing, and besides, there was no pill for this. The bowl became a burrow, bored straight through, front to back. So her mother shut the blinds, pulled curtains tight, begged her to stop, please these topless days in the backyard, running fast to feel the rush of wind, falling, exhausted, on the teeming grass; she slept outside that summer, would forget to find her bed. While her parents were at church on Sunday, she dozed in late-morning sunlight until a bird cheeped from her chest. With tucked chin, she saw its bubblegum-pink beak, looked into its dark, dark eyes and knew it wouldn’t scratch her. She pulled up handfuls of grass, scattered them across her stomach, ran her fingers through her hair and offered up shed strands. The bird built its nest, settled down on the solid ground beneath her body, cozied up against her heartbeat. When a male nearby called bob-o-link-bob-o-link, there was a stirring in her chest, a rustling of feathers. She breathed deep, willed her bobolink to stay—I, just wear my Wings—and gave thanks to feel it settle.

***

Kate Finegan lives in Toronto. Her fiction chapbook The Size of Texas is available from Penrose Press. She is assistant fiction editor of Longleaf Review. Find her at katefinegan.ink or on Twitter @kehfinegan.

A magician removes their head during their final act. After the curtain falls, they leave the head on a stool on the stage and walk home. It is raining outside and each drop feels to the magician like swallowing used to feel. Only now it is as of their entire body is swallowing. Meanwhile, the head is packed up with the rest of the stage equipment and placed in a bucket of water in the storage room, hair growing like a spider plant in the low light.

***

Erik Fuhrer is the author of Not Human Enough for the Census, forthcoming from Vegetarian Alcoholic Press. His work has been published in Cleaver, BlazeVox, Softblow, and various other venues. His website is erik-fuhrer.com.