Milk Candy Review

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.

A fur trapper is deep in the woods with his grandfather’s gun. He sees a moose and fires his finest shot. The moose is quick. The bullet only takes the tail.

The fur trapper hangs the tail in his cave.

The fur trapper stares at the tail as he cleans his gun, certain to find the moose again.

The next day, with the tail stapled to his pants, the fur trapper finds the moose and again shoots his gun and again the moose is too fast. The bullet only removes an antler. The fur trapper calls his welder friend, turns the antler into a crown.

The next day, wearing the crown and the tail, the fur trapper hunts again. Stalks the moose. Assembles traps, follows tracks.

Day in and day out, the fur trapper takes a leg, takes a tongue. An ear, a tooth. He adds each item to his body. The fur trapper gazes at his reflection in the lake. He sees his enemy, the moose, looking back at him.

But the fur trapper isn’t satisfied, doesn’t like the way the moose stares. Like it has a secret, like it’s still winning. So the fur trapper returns again to the woods, hunting for the moose’s breath, the moose’s nightmares, the moose’s spirit. The ghost of the moose. Always a bit too quick.

The fur trapper refuses defeat. Has the phrase, “What makes a moose?” tattooed on his cheek.

No one talks to the fur trapper when he drinks at the tavern. When he weeps in the back of the church. When he cleans his gun by candlelight on his porch. No one ever asks him about the moose or why he’s covered in fur and blood. The rest of the town is terrified of guns.

***

Ben Niespodziany is a librarian at the University of Chicago. He runs the multimedia art blog [neonpajamas] and has had work published in Paper Darts, Fairy Tale Review (forthcoming), Cheap Pop, and various others. He has never fired a gun.

He needs a place to be other than the underbellies of ships swollen beneath the water. He spends all day sliding along anchor chains, twisting around mossy links, and comes home glowing green; I pick the kelp from his hair but still he smells of barnacles and rust.

Please give him a job where things are seen and touched, not yawning huge, hidden in depths.

He does not need smoke breaks, sunshine, or lunch; let him sort mail under harsh fluorescent bulbs in rooms where paper peels back from the wall.

My ghost boyfriend is loyal and steadfast; he cannot bear to leave this world and for you he will work silently, carefully, and eternally.

If you are nervous about hiring a ghost, please let me lay your mind at rest. He is not transparent but translucent, gathered more thinly than you or I. When he stands against sunlight his edges burn; close your eyes before a bright light and you will see where he starts to dissolve. He cannot disappear, or walk through walls—no disembodied sounds accompany him.

In fact, he makes no sounds at all, but you will quickly learn to interpret his eager, mournful smile.

My ghost boyfriend would be an asset to your company in any role involving repetitive tasks and few words; if he would stay at home when I left, I would leave him list after list of things to do.

But when I shut the door behind me he is suddenly restless, and must ride the trains for hours, silent straphanger, until he can no longer ignore the slow-sounding dance of the chains in the harbor.

Please give him a place to be when I am not around; ghosts, you see, cannot define themselves without another. When their presence is not confirmed, and confirmed again, they must slip into the water, tangle themselves in the unseen tethers that bind the ships to shore.

Respectfully Yours,

***

Rebecca Orchard is a recovering classical musician and professional baker. She has an MFA from Bowling Green State University and is in the PhD program at Florida State University. Her fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from Passages North, Tammy, Exposition Review, the Baltimore Review, The Pinch, and elsewhere. Her work on the Voyager Golden Record has been profiled in the Guardian, BBC World Service Newshour, and Atlas Obscura.

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.