Milk Candy Review

In Alice’s stories the mother always dies. Or is dead already. Or is absent in a way that suggests, to the perceptive reader, that she is likely dead. There are mother figures, maybe a step-mother or a grandmother or an aunt or a motherly neighbor, but no actual live mothers by the end of her stories.

In one story, the mother, an old woman, dies in a plane crash, and the tragedy is that when the list of victims is published, they misspell the old woman’s name and her daughter, who is estranged, reads the names while waiting for a haircut and abstractly mourns all the losses before asking her stylist for bangs like that French actress in the movie about the war.

In another, the mother, who is young and beautiful, dies of brain cancer, and the death is quick, painless mostly, and the family, all four kids and the father and the extended family and the neighbors, gather around her in the hospital and one at a time they name a thing they hope is in heaven, only the youngest daughter, who is just eight years old, can’t help but list two things she hopes are waiting for her mom: olives and meerkats.

Alice has a soft spot for the story about the taxi driver, the one where a daughter is on her way to the airport and the taxi driver asks where she’s going and she decides to lie and say she is going to visit her mother, even though her mother is dead, and then the driver says his mother is dead too, and the narrator says she’s sorry for his loss and they sing a song together as the snow falls outside.

The mothers in Alice’s stories die in many ways. There are the sudden deaths–the plane crash, two car crashes, a wrong-place-wrong-time murder, an escalator accident, a choking death. There are the illness related deaths–four types of cancer, a heart attack, an undiagnosed syndrome following an insect bite in the islands off South Carolina, kidney failure, dementia. There are the assumed deaths, absences that have gone on so long that the family or the lover or the parents or the spouse or the daughter can no longer cling to hope, can no longer hear the sound of her voice or imagine the way she looks when she’s sleeping or when she steps through the front door carrying too many grocery bags for one trip.

And then there’s the story where there’s just no mother at all. No death, no loss, no estrangement, no grief, no searching, no longing, no anger, no questions, no memories. Just a general absence so inconspicuous that even Alice sometimes forgets what the story is really about.

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Emily Rinkema lives and writes in northern Vermont, USA. Her writing has most recently appeared in X-R-A-Y, Variant Lit, Flash Frog, and Mudroom Magazine, and she has stories in the Best American Nonrequired Reading, Bath Flash, and Oxford Flash anthologies. She won the 2024 Cambridge Prize and the 2024 Lascaux Prize for flash fiction. You can read her work on her website (https://emilyrinkema.wixsite.com/my-site) or follow her on X, BS, or IG (@emilyrinkema)

He lines the Furbies’ computer corpses up on the half wall between the kitchen and living room of his one-bedroom apartment. He starts with two, then it’s three, then four. Each time you go over, there’s another one, and whenever you stay the night, you can hear them, whimpering, slurring their words like they’re drunk, calling out for someone or something.

I think they’re crying, you say. Maybe you should put them back together.

But he doesn’t, and now they’re multiplying. There’s another five, six, seven.

Now they’re on the kitchen counter. Now they’re in the bathroom. Now they’re under the bed.

He moves to a different apartment, says it’s because he needs more space.

Because of the Furbies? you ask.

For lots of reasons, he says.

But when you go over to his new place, expecting to see the dissected Furbies, they aren’t there.

Now there are only bones.

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Jessica Klimesh (she/her) is a US-based writer and editor whose creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in Flash Frog, Gone Lawn, Ghost Parachute, Gooseberry Pie Lit, trampset, and Many Nice Donkeys, among others. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, and Best of the Net. Learn more at jessicaklimesh.com.

In the horror movie she calls a life, The Bad Girl gets cast as a camp counselor because she’s hot, she knows she’s hot, and every horror movie needs an antagonist to the virginal Final Girl, at least until the monster shows up. Also, Camp Silver Springs is desperate for counselors, lenient with job experience, and it’s like getting paid to party. So, although she never agreed to it, the newspapers will forever refer to her as The Bad Girl, because no one remembers anyone’s name besides the monster’s in a horror movie, not The Jock’s, not The Nerd’s, not even The Final Girl’s.

One night, drinking warm beer around a fire pit with the other counselors, The Bad Girl listens to The Final Girl once again complain they should follow the rules. Be better role models to the campers. The Bad Girl tells The Final Girl to Fuck off, that she hopes the campers are breaking curfew, telling ghost stories, toilet papering cabins, or sharing sloppy first kisses, because a little trouble is good for the little dorks. Following rules is bullshit, it’s all bullshit, and no matter what, the world’s going to try to kill you anyway, that’s the only thing for certain, so do what the fuck makes you happy with the little time you have.

During a game of Never Have I Ever, The Bad Girl finishes off a six-pack of Miller Lite on her own by taking a big gulp when someone says never have I ever: Kissed a girl, smoked a joint, had a threesome, had a black eye, buried a mother, got a tattoo, lived out of a car, ate food out of the trash, got a second tattoo, tried acid, crowd-surfed in a mosh pit, stole a car, broke someone’s nose, been in handcuffs, been in love.

The Final Girl didn’t drink to any of those, but it’s that last one, never having been in love, that makes The Bad Girl soften a bit. The same way she feels about the campers, she now feels about The Final Girl, wanting her to live a little. Wants her to break some rules. Do something stupid. Something she might regret. To make mistakes. Have no regrets because you never know when your time is up.

Millions of stars, and The Bad Girl takes a stroll to the lake with a girl following, a girl being led, a girl chosen, The Final Girl, because she needs this. They both do. Refracted moonlight on lake water, knees digging into the sand, straddling The Final Girl because The Bad Girl doesn’t fuck on her back, she wants the world to see her, young and beautiful, and her last thoughts are a mix of pleasure and philosophy, how life is short, how life must be short even to stars millions of years old, how at the end of their life even stars must wish for just a little more time.

The Bad Girl doesn’t get a chance to scream when the machete wielding monster steps out of the woods, sneaks up on her, and swings for her neck. It is inevitable. Everyone has their role to play. The Bad Girl’s role is to warn viewers to stay away from sex and drugs. And in this movie, this life, her death serves as the inciting incident for The Final Girl to enter her badass monster-killer era, but only after watching all her friends meet gory deaths. Except, the thing no one ever talks about, not the director, not the critics, not the audience, the real reason the monster kills The Bad Girl first, is not because she drinks, or gets high, or likes to fuck. No, it’s because if the monster doesn’t take her out first, she’ll run him over with the camp bus. Stab his eyes out with the sticks they use to roast s’mores. Take his machete and cut his fucking head off. The Bad Girl would save everybody. And what would the newspapers name her then?

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Mario Aliberto III is an award-nominated writer whose work appears in SmokeLong Quarterly, trampset, The Pinch, and others. His debut chapbook, All the Dead We Have Yet to Bury, is forthcoming from Chestnut Review in early 2025. He lives in Tampa Bay with his wife and daughters, and yet the dog still runs the house. Twitter: @marioaliberto3

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.