Milk Candy Review

Boy wakes up in paragraph five, no backstory, no introduction. He would like to know who He is, some action that reveals character and age. It would be helpful to have a name, to know whether He likes football, or has learned to ride a bike. He taps the writer on the shoulder, but the writer shrugs Him off and continues roving his fingers over the keyboard.

Boy searches through sentences for Mother and finds Her back on page one. There She is dressing and climbing into a car. Page two, She is undressing and climbing into a bed. He sees climbing on every page and learns Her stockings are diamond-patterned, sheer and black. Her heels are tall, shiny, and toppling. Her hair is long and wavy. He wades through paragraphs and
pages. Sentences unspool about Men, Martinis, and Sex with no mention of Childcare. It occurs to Boy that He is not the protagonist of the story.

Boy tries again to catch the writer’s attention, whispering in his ear that He would like a puppy. He’d even take a little sister. But the writer is ignoring all calls from the story. An empty glass sits next to him on the desk.

By page twenty, Boy should be back in the storyline. Mother should be making Him breakfast, at least a bowl of cereal. But there are no mentions of Him. He wanders through the pages, searching the sentences. Mother puts her hair up and takes it down. Mother undresses and climbs. Boy wonders where the story is going.

The writer appears to have nodded off. On page twenty-five, Martinis grab hold of the narrative. Mother mixes and climbs and mixes again.

The writer lifts his head and returns his fingers to the keyboard. He backspaces over Mother and types in Woman. Then he scrolls back through the pages, cutting all references to Boy. Boy cries out, tries to hold on, but He is too undeveloped. The writer deletes Him altogether in paragraph five. Boy, like so many children, remains forever unwritten.

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Shira Musicant writes short fiction and creative nonfiction. Her current stories can be found in journals such as Fourth Genre, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Bending Genres, among others. Recently retired from her practice as a somatic psychotherapist, Shira lives in Southern California with her husband, a black cat, and five chickens. She writes early in the morning, chickens still roosting, cat on lap. shiramusicant.com

Stale beer and cigarettes. Chick-fil-a grease on my brown polyester uniform. Parking
deck lights and shadows. His blue pinto with the yellow hood. His eyes the same blue as his
Gyro Wrap uniform. The steering wheel against my back. His soft thighs, warm. The squeak of
his white leather jacket. His long, sun-bleached hair with black roots. The way he quotes
Outlando de Amour. The blue metal bench in the mall where he explains that I’m too skinny, too
young. The prick of sedative and the cold metal instrument followed by the overwhelming need
to faint. Followed by the overwhelming need to cry. The way his mother moves in their kitchen
that same afternoon. Like any old thing had happened.

***

Mamie Pound has stories in Smokelong Quarterly, James Dickey Review, Image Journal, Gooseberry Pie, Ghost Parachute, and Bath Flash Fiction Anthology 2024, among others. Her work was long listed for the Craft Fiction Award. Her chapbook was a finalist in Fractured Lit’s Chapbook Prize 2024. One of her stories was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is awarded a residency at the Kerouac House artist-in-residence beginning November 2025.

I want to write a story about a house sinking into a swamp, but I’m always writing a story about a house sinking into a swamp. Sometimes I’m unclear about the metaphor. Am I the house, slowly being devoured by my anxieties? By the volatile environment? By my poor choices of real estate investments? Or am I the swamp, ever hungry, slowly swallowing the young couple that couldn’t afford a pricier first home, because, let’s be honest, most people would kill for the mold-thick two bedroom that sits on the swamp’s border. They don’t care about the water in the basement, the way low-tide-reek creeps in once a day, the beards of moss draping their window casements. They don’t even care about the thing living out there in the depths, the one that calls shrilly every night in a near human voice. It sounds a little like his grandmother. It sounds a little like her first boyfriend. It sounds a little like me when I can’t sleep and need someone to talk to about my own dread, not realizing it will slowly become their dread, that it will become the thing that frays their tether to reality, sanity slipping until they drown one another, or set the house on fire, or re-list the property on Zillow at a loss. I’ll push them away like any good swamp should. People aren’t meant to live so close to fetid water. The phosphorus should be a hint, that creature living at its center an even greater indicator. I’ve tried to write so many stories where the couple stays, where they overcome their fears, or kill the monster, or fix up the property and double their money like they do on the Home and Gardens Channel. But that voice that is almost their grandmother/ex-boyfriend/me is always there, always whispering, never letting anyone rest. I’m always anxious that the house will be subsumed, that the swamp obscures something worse than I originally thought, that I’m actually there, nestled amongst the reeds, screaming and screaming.

Maybe someday I’ll stop writing about a house on the border of a swamp.

Maybe someday I’ll understand and emerge from the reeds.

***

Corey Farrenkopf lives on Cape Cod and works as a librarian. His work has been published in Electric Literature, Strange Horizons, Nightmare, The Deadlands, SmokeLong Quarterly, Bourbon Penn, and elsewhere. His debut novel, Living in Cemeteries, was released from JournalStone in April of 2024. His eco-horror collection, Haunted Ecologies, will be published by them in February of 2025. He is the Fiction Editor for The Cape Cod Poetry Review. To learn more, follow him on twitter @CoreyFarrenkopf or on the web at CoreyFarrenkopf.com

The children are getting out of bed, they are putting on shorts and T-shirts. They are scarfing down their mother’s love, bowls clinking, they are meeting in the valley, the hills, the burnt out lot
where the supermarket used to be. They are waving to their friends, they are waiting for the kid with the ball to arrive. They are constructing a goal on each side, made of sticks and string. Their teams are decided by strength or by smarts or who the kid with the ball likes best and the game stretches like the shadows of the summer day until the children are running in the golden light. Not all of them. A curly haired boy or a girl with braids or a kid with a closely shaved head is kicking the ball toward the goal made of sticks and string. The ball is going to make it and the light falls on his curls, her braids, the curve of the neck where it meets the skull, and their mouths are open with laughter, with joy, and the children are running from the sky. The bomber so low the flag on the belly is visible. The stripes or circles or stars as clear as the children’s own panicked breaths.

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Sage Tyrtle’s work is available in New Delta Review, The Offing, Lunch Ticket, and Apex among others. Words featured on NPR, CBC, and PBS, and taught in schools. Read more at www.tyrtle.com.

We recently published Beth Sherman’s brilliant “Natural.”

Here, we ask her two questions about her story:

1) I love the interaction between the taxidermist and the boyfriend when the mother first appears. So much weight in these lines: ” The taxidermist thought she’d probably break up with him. She always dumped men before they did it first.” What, other than the obvious, makes the taxidermist think the boyfriend would be planning to break up with her?
“Natural” is part of a longer novella-in-flash about a fractured family and the fraught relationship this character has with her mother, who left when the narrator was young, and her father, who died young. At this point in the novella the father is gone, too, and the narrator seeks fleeting comfort in a series of unsuitable men. It’s always a bit dangerous to psychologize your characters, but in this case I think she’s trying to avoid getting hurt and losing anyone else. So she makes sure she’s always the one who ends the relationship. Her psyche is so fragile that she can’t imagine anyone would want to stick around!

2) Of course, the real relationship in this story is the fractured one between mother and daughter. Do you think the taxidermist has gotten (at least in some form) what she wanted from her mother now? Or has that ship long sailed?
This piece is part of a series of fabulist stories that the narrator in my NIF is writing to try and make sense of her life. As the “taxidermist,” I do believe she gets something from the interaction with her mother here. For one thing, she’s at least partially in control of her mother’s whereabouts (until the end, that is), and she’s able to care for her mother’s body — even if it’s weirdly after death. Interestingly enough, the mother is not actually dead while this is being written, but it feels that way to the “taxidermist.” Their relationship is strained to the breaking point because of the mother’s failings and the “taxidermist’s” unwillingness to understand or forgive. Although I haven’t finished the NIF yet, I’m hoping there can be some sort of reconciliation between them.

The taxidermist began stuffing her mother on a blindingly sunny morning in South Florida when the temperature was pushing triple digits. She knew it was all about looking natural. Erasing the sags and droopiness her mother had fretted over. The taxidermist had been choosy about her palette  – selecting flesh tones that harmonized with LED lighting. Careful to avoid the sallow complexion her mother would have hated. It was similar to sculpting. After a while, her fingers became part of the clay so it was easy to forget where she left off and her mother began.     

The taxidermist was sleeping with someone named Jason. When he walked into her apartment and saw her newest creation, he let out a yelp.  

“I didn’t know you had a mother,” he said.

Not surprising. They mostly talked about which movies he’d seen and which vacation spots he’d visited.

“What the hell?” he said. “She’s not a white-tail deer.”

The taxidermist thought she’d probably break up with him. She always dumped men before they did it first.  

The taxidermist and her mother had never been close. Her mother disappeared when she was twelve, relocating to California in an unsuccessful attempt to . . . what? Recreate a youth that never existed? Shed the constraints of motherhood with its endless dirty dishes and laundry, its relentless messy feelings? The taxidermist tried to ask but never got a straight answer. By the time her mother returned 15 years later, she wasn’t a kid and couldn’t hide her scars with Band-aids.

The taxidermist liked to position her mother near the kitchen table while she made dinner, describing how her day had gone. She knew her mother couldn’t move, yet sometimes when she came home from work a hand would be higher than it was before or the chin would tilt at a different angle.

The taxidermist made a list of how she and her mother were alike:

1. They both were stubborn.
2. They liked the color green.
3. They were persistent.
4. Regretful.
5. Rarely satisfied.
6. Quick to anger, slow to forgive.

The taxidermist brushed her mother’s hair to gently remove dust. Cleaned her mother’s eyes with a Q-tip dipped in Windex. When her mother’s nose began to crack, she dabbed on petroleum jelly. Kept the blinds drawn so the harsh Florida sun wouldn’t cause any damage. Caring for her mother softened the hollow place in her heart.  

The taxidermist talked to her mother all the time. Sometimes she thought she heard someone talking back. She studied her mother’s mouth – the teeth she’d crafted, the pink velvet tongue – and words tickled the air. No. Help. Escape. Gone. It was like watching a ventriloquist, the way she couldn’t be sure how sounds were produced, where exactly they came from. 

The taxidermist lay in bed at night and tried to forget how things used to be. How when her mother ran away, the taxidermist wrote her a letter each day describing what had happened in school. Tests she’d taken, boys she’d liked. Hundreds of letters tied with green ribbon, buried in a box in her closet because no one knew where to send them. Now, in the half-dark, she saw her mother had left the kitchen and was standing in the bedroom.

The taxidermist plucked one of the letters from the box and began reading aloud.

Dear Mom,

It’s raining out. I had pizza for lunch. Soon April will be over. Do you miss me? I put a little of the perfume you left behind on my neck so I can remember what you smell like.

xo

The taxidermist watched her mother’s eyes gleam silver. Moonlight spilled onto the wood floor, like spoiled milk. She felt it would be a good time for her mother to apologize and imagined accepting the apology. Not right away, of course, but within a reasonable amount of time. After her mother explained she wished to God she’d never left. After the apology hug. After they traveled to Disney World, where they would spin in teacups until they got dizzy. Instead, her mother extended both arms, palms raised, fingers splayed, not to embrace her only daughter – to wave goodbye.

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Beth Sherman’s writing has been published in more than 100 literary magazines, including Flash Frog, Gone Lawn, Tiny Molecules, 100 Word Story, Fictive Dream, and Bending Genres. Her work is featured in Best Microfiction 2024 and she’s the winner of the Smokelong Quarterly 2024 Workshop prize. A multiple Pushcart, Best Small Fictions, and Best of the Net nominee, she can be reached on X, Bluesky or Instagram @bsherm36.