Milk Candy Review

Midnight, and Sam is burying the spoons again. Because he thinks burying the spoons is the trick to getting me pregnant.

“Why spoons?” I asked the first time he did it. It’s not just the delicate silver teaspoons that he buries, the spoons we inherited from his mother and that look like they might actually hold some magic. He buries every spoon in our kitchen. The plump soup spoons that are too wide for a small child’s mouth. The sweet little clay spoons I made in pottery classes back when I still took pottery classes. The soft wooden cooking spoons, too.

“Spoons are sensual,” Sam said.

“I guess,” I said, but I knew what he meant. I used to think when I was shaping them out of clay about how the curved scoop of the spoons felt like breasts, the handles like weirdly slender penises. Like a cat penis maybe, only longer.

They’re a fertility symbol if there ever was one.

After Sam buries the spoons, we have sex. Is the sex good? Sometimes it is. Sometimes I’m so tired I practically sleep right through it. Other times I can’t relax. Can’t stop picturing him burying those spoons. His fingers digging in the dirt. The way sweat beads on his forehead.

Sometimes he sounds like a raccoon scurrying around in the moonlight. That past February raccoons plucked the fruit I’d left on our orange tree. They peeled those oranges as neatly as any human. The rinds scattered beneath the tree made me think of shed exoskeletons.

Every morning just before sunrise Sam digs those spoons up again. Because that’s part of the ritual. The spoons must be unearthed before light touches the soil, or the trick won’t work.

How long as has he been doing this? Eleven weeks now? Seventeen? I don’t know anymore.

I know this: the only thing that’s changed shape around here is the spoons. Every day they look a little more worn, a little more bent. And every day they make the food in our mouths taste a little bit more like dirt.

***

Michelle Ross is the author of There’s So Much They Haven’t Told You (2017), which won the 2016 Moon City Press Short Fiction Award. Her fiction has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, Epiphany, Fanzine, The Pinch, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, and other venues. She is fiction editor of Atticus Review. www.michellenross.com.

Mom wants to take a road trip, like we used to when Mitch and me were younger and dad was still alive. I miss the sense of adventure, she says. Mom manages to hold her form to the point where you could see the crow’s feet around her eyes; she’s getting better at remembering her body every day.

I remember being more bored than thrilled on long car rides. Dad was cheap with the air conditioning, even when we crossed through states where it felt like we were swimming more than driving. I won’t wear shorts anymore when I’m driving because of how the backs of my legs stuck to the upholstery. I hate when Mitch drives. He’s like our dad, taking his time to get to wherever it is that we need to go. Mitch deliberately slows us down when he can tell I’m getting pissed.

Can we get a gas tanker truck or something to hold her, Mitch asks.

Mom might eat through the metal, I say.

We could use the body we built for her.

I look at the glass house we have mom living in, her form spread throughout, her color a deep forest green. I wonder if she’s dreaming about rest stops and stale sandwiches and fireflies and sore biceps from all the punches we gave them when we caught a VW bug before she could.

***

J. Bradley is the author of Greetings from America: Letters from the Trade War (Whiskey Tit Books, 2019). His flash fiction piece, “How to Burn a Bridge Job Aid” was selected for Best Small Fictions 2019. He lives at jbradleywrites.com.

Children in the schoolyard throw rocks at the scarlet letter sewn upon my chest. Brick by brick a thousand sins build a wall. Blackbirds swoop and dive, pulling ribbons and strands of golden hair to line their nests. There is no escape.

*

The therapist tells me to call her Mary as though it somehow makes us friends, comrades, partners-in-crime. She places a protective hand over the growing mound that is her child, while she tries to convince me to give up my own. Snowflakes fall like molting feathers.

*

From the belly of the old cypress, a blackbird calls out to his flock, warning them about the dangers that lie ahead. He mimics the cat’s meow, the scrape of bone against bone, the cries that can’t be soothed.

*

Lying in bed I watch your knees knead my womb like soft dough. The vibrato of your tiny heart beats in tandem with mine. You are the pupa and I, the chrysalis waiting for you to break free.

*

The moonlight shines upon the blackbird perched on the concrete sill. I reach out to touch a glossy wing, but the rapier pecks and tears deep into my skin, ripping layer after layer until I am transformed into a Madonna dressed in a flowing blue gown, my head crowned with stars and daisies.

*

Squeals erupt from this little girl in pigtails who is flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood. I press my hand into the warm hollow nestled between her shoulder blades. Her legs pump hard against gravity as I launch her into the stratosphere. She smiles down at me standing amongst the thinning mulch where feet have dragged their path. Look Mama, I can fly! I can fly!

***

Kristin Tenor enjoys writing short fiction and poetry. Her work has appeared in The Midwest Review, Spry Literary Journal, and The Peninsula Pulse. She lives in Northeastern Wisconsin with her husband. Learn more @ www.kristintenor.com or find her on Twitter @KristinTenor.

What on Earth does my son’s name matter? There are three of him—four at most—and they all look like their worthless father, who comes and goes. Why take pills when I can make my grandmother’s apple crisp by heart? I don’t need to remember—I know. Grainy clumps of brown sugar stick to my fingers, I lick off the excess. Ripe red fruit beneath knife crunches in my ears. I’m with her now, mixing bowl on the seat of a chair. The kitchen counter’s still too tall for me. She bakes apple crisp, always. I come and go. I may not remember, but I know.

***

Becky Robison is a Chicago native and a graduate of UNLV’s Creative Writing MFA program. Her fiction has appeared in PANK, Paper Darts, Midwestern Gothic, and elsewhere. She also serves as Social Media and Marketing Coordinator for Split Lip Magazine. She’s currently working on a novel.

Midnight on the Moon

is a lonely place, black as the end of hope, like a rocket that ran out of fuel and places to go.  Like a man who, down on Earth, just swore undying love to his wife and sees his lover’s face on the wall behind her.

The wife is a trusting thing, a planet hanging in the sky of his life, faithful and constant.  She will always be there for me, he thinks.  The man is happy, and the wife is happy, and, miles away, even the lover is happy.

Only the moon is lonely.  Only the moon sees the truth.  Even with the sun shining all day on its squinty eyes.

The man swears his love again.  The wife believes him.  And then, later, much , much later, in the white gauzy near-morning, he will enter her, like doubt.

***

Francine Witte is the author of four poetry chapbooks and two flash fiction chapbooks. Her full-length poetry collection, Café Crazy, was published by (Kelsay Books.)  Her play, Love is a Bad Neighborhood, was produced in NYC this past December. She is a former English teacher. She lives in NYC.