Milk Candy Review

My mother taught housewives how to bake, and then she died. She made angel food cake so light it disappeared in my hands, pineapple upside-down cake syrup dripping down the legs of the table where I’d hide out of sight and watch legs, legs and the motion of slim calves, ever-reducing calves. A rainbow of nude hues. Stockinged legs of powder and pearl, porcelain and parchment. Little heels, too. Little feet in little heels.

I wanted those heels. I lapped at the syrup.

My mother’s kitchen was a monument to the all-American apple pie, black and white checkerboard floors, appliances buzzing hot and loud. And all those ankles, little birds. Eaglets in training. Flying, flour-covered hands fastening the straps of their Mary Janes and leaving white dust on the ground for me to gather and stuff in my nostrils. Flour, sugar, salt. I devoured them.

It was 1955 and the town was Augusta and the women went by other names. Heloise was Helen, Giulia was Julia, and my mother was Margaret, or Marge, but never Margaux. She had moved to New England from New Brunswick a decade prior. She married a man from Maine, an Irish man named Aiden that she had met in a record store in Quebec. He had reached for a Jimmie Rodgers record and she had reached for him, reached and clung hard and flew away.

Margaux became Marge and forgot her French fast and with a purpose as she rolled out dough and filled molds with strawberries and gelatin. There were still twinges: sip was seep, water was watair. She whacked me in the ear when I imitated her. She didn’t know. How could she? She thought I was making fun of her, but I was in the process of becoming her. All I ever wanted were those smooth, pale ankles.

On her deathbed, my mother became Margaux for a brief moment of delirium, re-learned her French in death knells of hushed prayers. She never taught me the language so I don’t know what her last words were. As she died, she became herself again, and became a stranger to us. I looked at my father. It was clear that neither of us had ever really known her at all.

From then on, I tried to know her. She had the slimmest ankles of all. I put on her stockings, broke her kitten-heeled shoes with my teetering weight. I baked angel food cake, dense and dark as the nightclubs where I looked for her. In my twenties I went to college and picked up a crude, unwieldy French, not in class but in the basements of The Roxy and The Anvil where French was whispered into ears and into the grout of the bathroom floors where I was bent over, an upside-down cake with my hands on the ground, syrup flowing thick-heavy down the back of my legs. The year was 1972 and the city was New York and I was in the process of becoming.

Je m’appelle Margaux, I said. I danced on the tables at Julius in the Village.

Je m’appelle Margaux, I said to a rainbow of nude hues as I pulled my stockings back on.

Flying, ecstasy-covered hands fastening themselves to their lovers and leaving white dust on each other’s lips. Confectioners’ sugar, the floor covered in powder and sweat. I devoured them, my open palms full of sweet, sweet apple pie.

***

Lior Torenberg is a young Israeli-American writer living and working in New York City, eager to get her work out in the world. Her writing centers around women’s personal and psychological growth with an emphasis on sexuality and family dynamics. She has had pieces published in Boston College’s student literary journal, “Stylus”, and received the 1st Place Prize in Bridges Together’s intergenerational story competition.

A singer on a TV talk show is sharing a story about her voice and how it’s changed. She wonders if longtime fans hear her new songs and realize she’s the one singing them.

“I get it if they don’t,” the singer says. “I mean, whose voice is this?”

“Maybe you could find it again, this voice you’ve lost,” the talk show host says. “You could go for walks with it, ask it ‘How are you really feeling?’, massage it like an open heart, take it to the movies, sing it some of the old songs.”

“I don’t know if it’s that kind of thing,” the singer says.

I change the channel and see Tarzan cradling a baby antelope. Tarzan, the Info button on the remote tells me, is being chased by poachers. He’s also lost his hearing.

“Easy now,” Tarzan says to the trembling calf. “I only want to borrow your ears.”

Tarzan studies the antelope’s eyes, watches her ears, feels her lungs heave. The antelope twitches, turns, stops. Freezes. Tarzan looks behind him and sees a motionless zebra. A wooden orangutan. A toucan statue. Something’s happening. The animals hear something. They’re transfixed. It’s Florence Henderson. She’s singing a soaring song about change as an inherent element of self-actualization. Or cooking oil. I’m not sure which. The melody rises, it falls, it splashes, it colors the rainforest sky slate blue.

The swaddled antelope shyly looks up at Tarzan, then in the direction of Florence Henderson’s floating notes.

“Thanks for letting me know,” Tarzan says. “For listening for me.”

I hear what Tarzan’s saying but I can’t take my eyes off the floating notes. How they hover, how they flutter, look at them flit, they’re going with the flow, they’re going it alone, these notes. They’re unselfconscious, these notes. They’re themselves.

These notes are what you, when you and I were together, would call The Truth.

“We’re going to listen to the water drummers,” the floating notes say to me. “They make the river sing. Come with?”
The notes and I spy the water drummers waist deep in the rush that is this rill. They’re playing the river with their hands and each scoop-clap-swish is in sync.

I think I get it: The rhythm is the song and the song is the thing and the thing is what’s true. But the thing is, all I hear and all I’ve been hearing for months is the sound of your voice. The voice I knew. The song you sang. The song I knew. The one I miss.

I try to focus.

“What are the water drummers playing?” I ask the floating notes. “What song are they making the river sing?”
“We don’t know,” the notes say. “We never know. We can’t hear.”

So comfortable in their own skin, these floating notes. I think this in your voice. Not the one I think I’ve lost, but a new one. It’s a voice that’s all you and all yours, one with a little Wessonality in it. It’s a voice with new songs in it, songs I’d think I recognize, in shifting tempos and unidentifiable keys. Songs I’d need a baby antelope’s help to hear.

“I heard that,” I say to the floating notes, who are humming a tune I can’t place. “Anybody know that one?”

The river shrugs. Tarzan sighs. The floating notes hum and hum and hum as the syncopated beat of the water drummers welcomes the soon-to-be scatting rainforest moon.

***

Pat Foran is a writer in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His work has appeared in WhiskeyPaper, Little Fiction, Anti-Heroin Chic, Gravel, Bending Genres and elsewhere. Find him on Twitter at @pdforan.

Ted Cruz Injures His Hand at a Party at the Governor’s Mansion

and it’s not really his fault. But whose fault is it anyway, when a man is injured? And why did no one tell Ted that there were still nail holes in the banister in the front hall from when Governor Hogg’s kids couldn’t help themselves and were constantly sliding down like some Leave it to Beaver nonsense? It seems like something the docent might have cared to mention before Ted wound up with a sliver of wood in his palm. Now he’s trying not to make a weird face while he picks at the skin, wanting badly to remove this aberration from his hand. And now there’s blood. Ted presses an off-white cloth napkin into his palm. It’s not that deep of a cut, really. Someone else might try to find a first-aid kit, but Ted just takes his bourbon into the restroom and pours it into his hand, pulls out the splinter. It stings, but it’s not the first time he’s injured his hand—his hand-shaking hand, even—on something mysterious and possibly unsanitary. He’s been fishing many times and there was that one incident where he almost sliced right through his thumb on his cousin’s rusty tackle box. He had to get stitches that time. At the ER. Wouldn’t let any of the guys on the boat sew him up with fishing line—though the bastards had wanted to try. Thank God they hadn’t. Ted still has his thumb, after all. He squeezes the napkin to his bourbon-soaked palm as he re-enters the party—what was this a fundraiser for again?—smiling at woman across the room. She quickly turns to look at the painting behind her. Ted backs himself up against a wall, making a mental note to get a tetanus shot.

***

E. Kristin Anderson is a poet, Starbucks connoisseur, and glitter enthusiast living in Austin, Texas. She is the editor of Come as You Are, an anthology of writing on 90s pop culture (Anomalous Press), and Hysteria: Writing the female body (Sable Books, forthcoming).  Kristin is the author of nine chapbooks of poetry including A Guide for the Practical Abductee (Red Bird Chapbooks), Pray, Pray, Pray: Poems I wrote to Prince in the middle of the night (Porkbelly Press), Fire in the Sky (Grey Book Press), 17 seventeen XVII (Grey Book Press), and Behind, All You’ve Got (Semiperfect Press, forthcoming). Kristin is an assistant poetry editor at The Boiler and an editorial assistant at Sugared Water. Once upon a time she worked nights at The New Yorker. Find her online at EKristinAnderson.com and on twitter at @ek_anderson.

It got channels from overseas.  Grandpa: “Can’t understand those languages anyways.”  His favorites were westerns and wrestling, no news or sports.  Best not to play music while he was in the house.

*

Her garden was filled with dianthus, sweet Williams and Johnny jump-ups.  “Always a gob of Johnnies where you don’t expect.”

*

Shelves of records, eight-tracks, cassettes: Hank Snow Sings the Golden Greats; Merle Haggard; Hotel California; Def Leppard, Pyromania.

*

After Grandpa left for work, she made us French toast.  Cinnamon, nutmeg, vanilla; as much syrup as we wanted.

*

“Your Gramp always had a temper.  First I was afraid of it.  Then I got so I didn’t pay any attention.  Just let him rant and rave.”

*

Once we were tall enough we had to help her reach the top shelf.  When she was a girl she drank some vanilla because it smelled so wonderful.  “Worst thing I ever tasted.  Got me in big trouble.  In those days your daddy took you out back with a switch.”

*

Her favorite shows: Little House, American Bandstand.  “I need something, I’m to myself all day.”

A row of VHS tapes, labeled in wobbling blue cursive:

“The Net, good drama, Sandra Bullock”

“J. Roberts, The Stepmom”

“Goldie Hawn, 3 funny comedies”

*

The bedsheets changed each night during our sleepovers; their freshness after drying on the clothesline between her garden and the garage.

*

Six months after the wedding she was at Great Grandma’s door with her bag.  She didn’t have to walk, Grandpa drove her.  She was crying.  Couldn’t get her words out.  Great Grandma called Grandpa to come take her back.  “You made your bed, now go lie in it.”

*

The dish groaned on windy days.  Sparrows made nests in it, raised their young.  It took up half their side hill.  After they got cable they couldn’t find anyone to take it away.

*

In her hospital bed she held out her hand.  Grandpa pretended he didn’t see it.

***

Timothy Boudreau lives in northern New Hampshire with his wife, Judy.  His work appears or is forthcoming at Lost Balloon, Memoir Mixtapes and Fiction Southeast. His collection, Saturday Night and other Stories, was published in 2017 by Hobblebush Books.

They passed a law that everyone had to constantly stand in paint. They didn’t care about the colour, but you absolutely had to be barefoot. The announcement came over the tannoy one day; and was repeated, in every country, in every language. Nobody knew why…of course, that didn’t stop them pretending. It’s to get the kids moving again – and cut childhood obesity. Not it’s not – it’s to boost our country’s manufacturing, by making all that paint! Can’t you see that this is what happens when we have artists in government? You could hop-scotch; Fox-Trot; march; shuffle; pace; heel-to-toe… nearly anything went. Those who liked to bend the rules, bent themselves and tumbled, hand-stand first into the coloured emulsion. If you had no legs, or legs that meant you were less able to get around – you were allowed to create imprints with your prosthetics or mobilising aids. If you were yet-to-walk, your parents could legally take your tiny little feet and plunge them into any colour they wanted – it didn’t matter that the hue would make your nauseous, or anxious, or overwhelmed in years to come. Those whose digits danced, only left fingerprints so far. Nobody knows what happened to them, after their thumbprints disappeared. Maybe they suddenly ran out of energy – after all, nobody could get by, walking on their hands for a long time (all the blood would rush to their head). Yes, that was definitely what happened.  The wheelers and walkers; the little baby not-yet-walkers – their imprints only lasted so far. In the end, everyone was the same. It didn’t matter if the colour you’d chosen was daffodil yellow or midnight black. In the end, everyone walked all over one another – until there was no trace of a single individual – and every colour, however once-bright, had merged to a forgettable-mud.

***

Liz Wride is a writer from Wales. Her short fiction has appeared in The Ginger Collect, Okay Donkey Magazine and Occulum Journal. In 2015, her short story ‘Potato’ was shortlisted for the ELLE UK Talent Awards. Her newest pieces will pop up in Turnpike Magazine and Pop To..Magazine in 2019.