Milk Candy Review

Today, it’s nearly pleasant in the middle of nowhere, in wind skimming a bouncy road to town, to market, to the tired side of the trailer park. There, you’ll find dark lines of grit stuck under fingernails; in saggy skin’s deep creases. Someone’s mother sits on a broken porch, rocking up a storm. She’s been waiting for her son’s rusty F10 pickup to come get her. It’s been a week of beans & fruit cocktail. A pyramid of crusty cans clutter her kitchen table. She has real trouble concentrating. Today’s swarm of busy metallic green bottle flies makes it worse.

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M.J. Iuppa  is the Director of the Visual and Performing Arts Minor Program and Lecturer in Creative Writing at St. John Fisher College; and since 2000 to present, is a part time lecturer in Creative Writing at The College at Brockport. Since 1986, she has been a teaching artist, working with students, K-12, in Rochester, NY, and surrounding area. Most recently, she was awarded the New York State Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Adjunct Teaching, 2017. She has four full length poetry collections, This Thirst (Kelsay Books, 2017), Small Worlds Floating (2016) as well as Within Reach (2010) both from Cherry Grove Collections; Night Traveler (Foothills Publishing, 2003); and 5 chapbooks. She lives on a small farm in Hamlin, NY.

Each of us will carry the seeds. They say we will know when to plant them. They say we must keep them safe.

My sister never wanted to be safe. She wanted to know things. It must have been unbearable not knowing what the seeds were for, because one day she swallowed hers one by one. They buried her for shame on the edge of the woods with a stone too small to cover her.

Most days now I go there when the crows gather before dusk. They watch me, flapping and croaking in the trees. I tell them about the day my sister got her sachet of seeds, how she dangled it in front of me, back and forth like a hypnotist’s watch in the room we shared with clenched spider corpses and blossoming mold. When she pretended to throw it out the window, I shrieked, and she put her hand over my mouth, laughing, resting the sachet on my forehead. I could just barely feel the tiny kernels while I breathed against her fingers.

My sister always smelled of forbidden things. Strawberry lotion and cinnamon gum and different kinds of smoke. Somehow she’d gotten to know the boy on the farm at the end of the road, over two miles from our farthest fencepost, and she claimed but made me promise not to say that he would take her in his rumbling truck to the town where you could find just about anything you’d ever imagined. And where no one carried the seeds.

One evening the crows cackle in unfamiliar rhythm as I approach my sister’s too-small stone. Sprouting from beneath the granite, a tongue of green trembles. Days pass, and a leaf unfurls, then two and three, till soon there are so many that the wind passing through them sighs just the way my sister used to when she stared out the window and I would ask her where she wanted to go, and she would say, Everywhere, everywhere. And when the plant’s buds burst into delicate stars, they smell of her shampoo.

I tell the crows about the night she snuck back into our room with that pearly bottle, a scent like the tropics, all sunshine and coconut. It comes from a store – a drugstore, she’d said and pulled a pair of chocolate bars from under her shirt. Even though they’d melted with the warmth of her skin, the taste made both of us cry until we’d licked the wrappers clean.

I don’t need to tell the crows why I do what I do next. I pick a leaf off the plant that grows from my sister’s grave. And then I eat it whole.

Each day I pick more and more, and the plant grows and grows like all it wants to do is feed me. I start to hear her, as if the roots have reached right down into what used to be her mouth. Only there are no words – just the language of cells changed into other cells, memories that could never be explained but that lived as flesh lives. A knowledge that cannot be known unless it becomes the body.

I am so hungry for it, so hungry for her, for the expanse of all she knew to consume my own unknowing. Bit by bit, she sows it into me. The deep smell of rivers. The freedom of bare feet on a dashboard. The sweet, brittle foam of milkshakes and the icebox dark of a movie theater in summer. The unexpected buoyancy of earth.

But there is always more and more I do not know. I eat and eat and eat.

Meanwhile they say I am getting tall, I am getting strong, my bones no longer puncture my skin. They say that soon I will be big enough to carry the seeds myself. But I am no longer waiting for that.

Above my sister’s grave, the flowers are turning to fruit. Perhaps they will taste like her kisses, cherry lip gloss and cloves. Or else like soil. Or death. The crows and I keep watch, waiting until they are ripe. I promise I will get there first, I will pluck and devour them all. And then she will tell me everything.

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Erin Calabria grew up on the edge of a field in rural Western Massachusetts and currently lives in Magdeburg, Germany. She is a co-founding editor at Empty House Press, a small press publishing writing about home, place, and memory. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize and was selected as a winner for The Best Small Fictions 2017. You can read more of her work in Sundog Lit, Split Lip Magazine, Wyvern Lit, Third Point Press, and other places. She tweets @erin_calabria.

We drive to the woods and let out my big brother. It’s his time, my father says. My brother dashes out the car and circles. His teeth are long and silver, but he doesn’t want to go. He doesn’t want to go into the woods. He smells like feral cat. He has those whiskers in his ears, that peach fuzz, that’s when it all starts. Don’t let me go, my brother says. He says it but it comes out wrong, like he should go, he should go into those woods. He should run like a feral cat and chase the jackals and run up in the trees, into the stars, into all the fairytales my mom’s told. About what happens, when boys grow to be a certain age, and run into the woods. When their dads drive them over there like feral dogs. My dad tosses him a lunchbox. There’s a ham sandwich, provisions. A hunting knife and Poland Spring. That’s his favorite brand. He can tell them apart, he says, he said so in his high chair. Poland Spring. Fiji bad! My mother took a picture. She posted it to Facebook. She told us stories, about the woods. How we wouldn’t get eaten. We wouldn’t, we would curl up in the stars. And there would be another mother there, taking pictures. There would be a Facebook in the sky. We would be warm, and happy.

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Leonora Desar’s writing has appeared in River Styx, Passages North, Mid-American Review, Black Warrior Review Online, Wigleaf and Wigleaf’s Top 50, and elsewhere. Her matchbook piece “My Father’s Girlfriend” is forthcoming in The Best Small Fictions 2019. Three of her pieces were chosen for Best Microfiction 2019. She is fiction editor for Pidgeonholes and lives in Brooklyn. 

He had six fingers on each hand and played improvisational piano. The audience leaned in to hear his tinkling brook as it splashed around the fat stones of the double bass. The air at the club was dark and his hands were quick. Nobody noticed the extra digits. Later, at the after-party, a woman lingered beside his wine. She wouldn’t have put it this way, but she was weary of the five-fingered world. She wanted to hear herself say the chords that only his hands could form.

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Charles Rafferty’s most recent collections of poems are The Smoke of Horses (BOA Editions, 2017) and Something an Atheist Might Bring Up at a Cocktail Party (Mayapple Press, 2018). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, O, Oprah Magazine, Prairie Schooner, and Ploughshares. His stories have appeared in The Southern Review and New World Writing, and his story collection is Saturday Night at Magellan’s (Fomite Press, 2013). He has won grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism, as well as the 2016 NANO Fiction Prize. Currently, he directs the MFA program at Albertus Magnus College and teaches at the Westport Writers’ Workshop.