Milk Candy Review

My grandson rests his gosling-down head on my chest, gurgles milk from a bottle in the soft gloom of the room. We’ve said our goodnight moons and goodnight rooms, started the white-noise machine so he’ll drift off in sweet, sanguine sleep while halfway across the world a distant cousin nestled in his mother’s lap startles from slumber as the buzz of drones enters the room, smoke shrouds the setting moon, steel rain falls all around. How can we bear that the building, the room, the arms that cradle him are shaking, trembling, threatening to fall? Can you tell me how?

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Kathryn Silver-Hajo writes, worries about the world, wonders how it will all work out, and writes some more.

We recently published Elena Zhang’s illuminating “Grandmother.”

Here, we ask her two questions about her story:

1) I love how there are three characters in this story, though we only really see the two. The grandmother is the ghost that haunts this entire piece as the narrator breaks apart (and puts together) things that belonged to her — in memory of a promise, in service of a daughter. What kind of weight do these things hold for the narrator?
I think the grandmother’s belongings definitely haunt the narrator, providing a sense of comfort and memory. But they are also a kind of burden, something the narrator hoards and holds onto too tightly, preventing her from really building something new.

2) Is it really a Tyrannosaurus Rex that the daughter wants? Or, more specifically, is it really a Tyrannosaurus Rex that our narrator is putting together?
The daughter has that kind of childlike desire and insistence for a wish to come true, no matter how possible or impossible it may be. Out of love, the narrator wants to fulfill that wish, feeding into their shared fantasy that dead things can come back to life and look just like how we want them to.

My daughter wants a pet Tyrannosaurus rex. Nothing else will do. So I go to the kitchen and take
out the cleaver, the good one, the one that you would always use to chop through pork ribs and
chicken bones when I was sick and wanted soup. I hack your antique coffee table to pieces.
These will be good bones, I think. Scratched and worn from years of use. Soon, they are
assembled into a skeleton, the splinters into teeth. Next, the skin. I take out your sweaters from
the back of the closet and shake off the dust before sewing them together. They still smell like
you, jasmine perfume and coconut lotion. I drape the blue and white quilt over the bones, closing
my eyes while I caress the seams. My daughter is still not satisfied. “What about the feathers?”
she asks. For that, I rummage through my bedside table drawer until I find the plastic bag filled
with your hair. I glue the gray bristles on, one by one. My daughter draws near, hugging the
dinosaur, but it doesn’t hug her back. She starts to cry, and I know it’s because there is something
missing. Something lost in the extinction. Remembering my promise to you, I tear the whole
thing down. Start again.

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Elena Zhang is a Chinese American writer and mother living in Chicago. Her work can be found in HAD, The Citron Review, Ghost Parachute, Your Impossible Voice, and Lost Balloon, among other publications. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee and was selected for Best Microfiction 2024.

We recently published Melanie Maggard’s glorious “Moonshine.”

Here, we ask her two questions about her story:

1) I love the personification of the moon here — there’s something so lunar about how you describe her! What made you choose the moon for this piece (or what made the moon choose you)?
Since I started writing a few years ago, I’ve become infatuated with the moon and find that she comes out in much of my writing. And I can’t help but think of the moon as a “she/her.” I’m not sure if this is because I personally identify with her or because of the tradition of relating the female cycle to the moon’s phases. There’s something very deep and sensual about this connection to the main reason we look to the sky at night. I’m guilty of deep diving into research on the moon, sometimes for hours (the best type of procrastination), and incorporating those little nuggets of wisdom into my pieces. With this piece in particular, I loved the idea of the moon being avoided or overlooked, much like how we feel when we don’t receive attention or love from others. The story idea came from a prompt where we were to imagine an everyday action being performed by something or someone extraordinary. 

2) The ending is so stunning and powerful! The idea of a darkness eclipsing the moon rather than the moon causing the darkness is such an intriguing (and beautiful!) idea! Do you think the man who has taken the moon into his house will ever let her know where he keeps his sugar?
I’d like to think that she takes the sugar and leaves, before it is too late and she burns out. I relate this ending to feelings of longing, discontent, and being unfulfilled. For me, it represents what we are willing to do in order to feel love, even if that means we may dim our light in order to get it. Maybe she’ll finally put her own needs above those of everyone else. Or maybe this man will just give her what she needs but there is more that she really wants. All of this gives me an idea of another story.

The moon is going door to door and asking for a cup of sugar. Nobody gives her any. Most won’t even answer the door. They peer through peepholes, slits in blinds, around edges of curtains. They whisper to each other in the darkness. They wish her away. They’re offended by her light, a bright blue-white luminescence, like glowworms on cave walls in New Zealand, or so she hears. She palms a cool tin measuring cup in her hand, the only remaining part of a set her grandmother gave her, the others lost when she moved from one phase of her life to the next. She looks up at the stars and takes a deep breath. She doesn’t have much time left.

Some people are out walking when they see her, head down, curled into herself as she hugs the cup to her chest. When she sees them, she straightens, brightens like a firefly suddenly turned on. Their dogs howl as they pull at leashes. She pauses, waiting for them to cross to the other side of the road before continuing. Over their shoulders, they watch her light wane as the distance between them grows, until she’s half who she was before.

At the last house on the street, a man opens the door immediately after she knocks. When the moon offers her empty cup, he removes a flask from his pocket and pours her a shot of clear liquor, asks if she wants to “get tipsy” with him. A smile settles into the relenting scars on her face as she says, I’m always a bit tipsy. They laugh as she enters the house, leaving a dusting of rocks at the doorstep. With her mouth and throat burning, before the darkness eclipses her, she asks again, where he keeps his sugar.

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Melanie Maggard is a flash and poetic prose writer who loves dribbles and drabbles. She has published in Cotton Xenomorph, Ghost Parachute, X-R-A-Y Magazine, Peatsmoke Journal, The Dribble Drabble Review, Five Minute Lit, and others. She can be found online at www.melaniemaggard.com and @WriterMMaggard.

This man is fine, not like the man on the moor. The man in his van on the moor.

This man you can give him your pound coin and get your cone with the flake, and he’ll hand you one pence change; no fuss, no kiss on the mouth.

Mum’s here, so you can lick your cone and you can love it. This man won’t say why don’t you lick this.

Your mum takes a coin from her purse for you to hand the man, and she says can’t you be nice and smile for once, but you don’t tell her what the man on the moor did with his big face and big hands and big laugh you can’t get out of your head.

You don’t say that now when you skip school and buy a cone with a flake it tastes so much like fear you want to spit it off your tongue and drop it and run to a place, a fake place, where your mum stands with her arms wide and says what’s all this, pet, come on, let it all out.

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Kik Lodge is a short fiction writer from Devon, England, but she lives in Lyon, France, with a menagerie of kids, cats and a rabbit.Her work can be found in some lovely journals, as well as in the Best Microfiction 2024 Anthology. Her debut flash collection Scream If You Want To is out now with Alien Buddha Press. @kiklodge.bsky.social  

They did it beneath the sky in the purple saffron fields. They did it in the darkness and in the mirror and in the moonlight. They did it with babies strapped to their backs and naked children at their feet. They did it in honor of joy and in honor of God and the holy beasts. They did it with great flair and with colors, with the mingling of greens and golds and reds like the crowns of the queens. They did it locked inside tiny stifling closets. And in the hills where they hid from the men who didn’t know what to do with song. They did it burnt and broken and bruised. They did it hungry, their blue-covered bodies so thin their sisters worried that a gust of wind might carry them away. (But they made a meal of light.) They did it, never asking why the heavens had been hard on them. And the horizon tilted, and their eyes saw little sparkles everywhere, and this too they turned to verse, like rain upon the summer earth.

for the women of Afghanistan

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Donna Obeid is an award-winning writer and educator who has been nominated for Best of the Net and multiple times for the Pushcart Prize. She earned a BA with Class Honors in English and Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and an MA and MFA from American University. She lived and worked in Southeast Asia as a visiting scholar and currently lives in Stanford, California. Read more of her writing at: www.donnaobeid.com and @donnaowrites.