Wake up alone in a bed that isn’t yours with your eyeliner melted down your cheek and one false eyelash fluttering by your left ear.
Smooth the silky covers over your frizzled head. Realise you lost your sequinned dress and found some boxer shorts. Boil with embarrassment. Hope you dressed yourself.
Smell the coffee by the bed, know it’s exactly the way you take it, feel for the fizzy water and paracetamol that will be there, and drink them. Remember the time you put a fingernail through the crimson paper lampshade hanging from the ceiling.
Make it to your feet and aim for the wardrobe that’s new to you, searching for any item of your clothing. Open a drawer full of expensive lace. Under a red satin teddy, see a photo of a delicate-featured woman. Find one of your stockings from last night laddered from heel to toe.
Know you’re supposed to drainthe coffee, be grateful for the paracetamol, and evaporateinto a taxi until your ex-boyfriend wants to ignore his engagement again, kiss you in an anonymous nightclub and dissolve your reclaimed self-respect.
Instead, this time, solidify your resolve. Leave your stocking in the pristine underwear drawer, grab your coat and shoes from the hallway.
Stomp down the road waving to all the neighbours you can spot, and wish, wish wish this time he won’t be able to wash you away.
Anita Goveas is British-Asian, London-based, and fueled by strong coffee and paneer jalfrezi. She was first published in the 2016 London Short Story Prize anthology, most recently by Fractured Lit. She’s on the editorial team at Flashback Fiction, an editor at Mythic Picnic’s Twitter zine, and tweets erratically @coffeeandpaneer. Her debut flash collection, Families and Other Natural Disasters, is available from Reflex Press, and links to her stories are at https://coffeeandpaneer.wordpress.com
I did most of the driving, from New Jersey to Niagara and on to Ontario; Nora in the passenger seat shuffling MapQuest printouts; Amy in the back, kicking her feet, Harrah to her right, rolling her window up and down.
“Stop farting,” Harrah told Amy, who kept farting, probably because she wanted to, not because she had to, probably because she liked making Harrah wrinkle her nose. That’s how Amy was back then, how they both were. They were still getting used to one another. I was trying to keep the car straight on the shiny, wet roads.
Nora kept forgetting to give directions, kept fiddling with the CD player instead. We listened to “Two Step” by Dave Matthews Band probably 36 times. It was playingas we crossed the border. And Canada must have hated it, hated us, I think, because the second my car rolled in, so did this cold front. Frost creeping up the windows, rain turning to sleet, and this wind, loud and strong. I thought, for sure, we’d go over a guard rail.
But there was a pirate ship. I mean, there couldn’t have been, but, yeah, there was. This tourist attraction or something. Nora remembers it, too. A giant pirate ship: four thick masts and a candy-colored hull. Dark but pillowed sails. I figured, well, OK, fuck the wind and the sleet (and the black ice), because if the car flipped over, we’d probably just land, unscathed, on that ship’s bow. So, Nora turned down the music and Harrah rolled up the windows and Amy, well, she kept on kicking, and I sped up and we got through the windstorm.
And then, yeah, we were in Toronto. And we did some stuff. Shivered on top of a space needle and thawed out (kind of) at an aquarium. Went to bars that served us beer, even though we were only 19. But Nora and I had miscalculated, because, sure, we wanted to drink on Spring Break (hence, Canada). We just hadn’t expected Toronto to be so damn cold. Hadn’t expected Amy would keep farting. Hadn’t expected Harrah wouldn’t un-wrinkle her now runny and red nose.
“What did you invite her for?” Harrah kept whispering to Nora, even though she knew that’s how Nora was. (That’s how Nora still is.) Always giving out invitations she assumed people would turn down.
And that’s how the trip was. Icy, I mean, right until that last night when we were too hungover to do anything other than hang out in the chain restaurant next to our hotel. And there were these dudes there, these older men. They were around 30 or 40 or something. And these guys, they kept sending over shots and pointing at their whiskey glasses, like that would make us drink up, like drinking up meant we should talk to them.
Nora and I hid our faces behind some laminated dessert menus, so those creepers couldn’t see us smile, couldn’t see us laugh. Because it was funny, I guess. It was weird, too. It felt weirder later. Like, I don’t know, that pirate ship, so big, so bright, so blunt, a port in the storm. For a while, it was mostly funny, at least until, four whiskeys later, the oldest guy came over, put his hand on the small of Harrah’s back and said, “I sell bonds. Does that mean anything to you?”
And Amy stood up, made like she was going to throw her hands. “You see this fist?” She said to the guy. And Harrah, who liked decorum almost as much as a reason to break it, stood up, too, held out an elbow and threatened to ram its point into the fleshy part of that guy’s temple. Told him if she did, she’d feel so gratified.
And the guy started swearing and his friends were still leering, so Nora stopped laughing, started gathering our coats, and I paid the bill, because it felt like something was about to come due. And I was scared, until we tumbled outside—me grabbing Harrah, Nora grabbing Amy, Harrah and Amy linking arms—because it was cold, so cold that no one followed us, so cold that no one could be bothered to bother us, so cold that we could trick ourselves into feeling safe and warm.
Jeanine Skowronski is a writer based in N.J. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Lost Balloon, Janus Literary, X-R-A-Y Lit, Tiny Molecules, Five on the Fifth, (mac)ro(mic), Complete Sentence, Crow & Cross Keys, Fewer Than 500 and more. She placed 2nd in Reflex Fiction’s 2021 Winter Flash Fiction competition.
You move into the neighborhood and now all we hear are clown horns and foot slaps. Go-karts race down Yale Avenue, hit chuckholes and spit you up against concrete curbs. Just when we think we have you all counted, you multiply. Ragamuffins, Dad calls you. We think that’s your last name until our oldest brother, Eddie, yells out—Hey Ragamuffins!—from his GTO, and now you glare at him with cap-gun eyes.
You come over to play with us. We can’t help but stare at the scabs you have for kneecaps, your scarecrow hair. You are our fascination and you know it.
Where’s the creek? you ask, and you lead us there even though this is supposed to be our neighborhood. We are not allowed to go as far as Darby Creek without permission, but you herd us—the seven or nine or more of you—your soiled limbs waving in the August sun.
Darby Creek is a letdown. Can’t even float a stick in it! you scream, and then you are a pack of soldiers—you smear mud on your faces and whoop war cries across the water. Your troop plans its attack on ours. Get the Charlies! You crest the bank and splash through the creek, sticks raised like swords.
We stand frozen on the grass and observe you as if we’re watching the NBC nightly news broadcast from Vietnam. Eddie’s scared of Vietnam. You don’t know about his low lottery number; how Dad looked like a sponge cake when the draft man on TV pulled number 26 from the plastic capsule. You don’t see us sitting around the dinner table every night watching soldiers in the thick jungle, choppers landing on dirt pads. You don’t hear how we can barely breathe as our nightmare unfolds halfway across the world on the tiny screen of our tea cart television. You don’t notice our camouflaged tears. Instead, you point sticks at our heads.
Fight! Coward! You bang your chests as if there are centipedes trapped inside of your ratty tees.
We want to protest, but we know it won’t matter. You crave bloodshed. You skip over lumpy rocks in Darby Creek, bodies of the dead and missing. You approach; we feel the warmth roll down our legs. Your crooked teeth grin wide as you trip us, grind pinkies into our Good-Humor-truck bellies. We watch as our choker beads spill into the clover. We pray for Darby Creek to grow angry, leap the bank, wash you back to where you came from, though we have better things to pray for in 1972, and then the dinner bell rings and you surrender your weapons.
We retreat to the kitchen table. NBC’s cameras fly over mangroves and rice patties; we want to tell Eddie we survived the war of the Ragamuffins, but men are face down in the waterlogged field and somehow that seems more important. Mom spies the creek mud underneath our fingernails, and we are sent to the bathroom sink to scrub and scrub.
Back at the kitchen table, Eddie’s gone and no one’s talking. The newscaster flatly lists Vietnam’s daily count—37 dead, 81 missing—almost as if he’s reporting sports scores. Dad reaches over, switches off the TV. Finish your dinner, Mom commands, and we don’t dare mention the hunk of steak and full mountain of mashed potatoes still on Eddie’s plate. We slide green beans into our mouths, but they are cold, slimy water moccasins.
Outside, wheels rumble and scrape across pavement. We imagine sparks flinging down Yale Avenue, your helmetless heads free and loose, hands and feet stretched outside your go-karts, tongues flapping. We chew cold steak while listening to your wild shouts and laughter, the roar of your escape.
Michele Finn Johnson’s short fiction collection, Development Times Vary, was the winner of the 2021 Moon City Press Short Fiction Award and is forthcoming in 2022. Her work has appeared in A Public Space, Colorado Review, Mid-American Review, DIAGRAM, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her work was selected for the 2019 Best Small Fictions anthology, won an AWP Intro Journals Award in nonfiction, and has been nominated several times for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Microfiction. Michele lives in Tucson and serves as contributing editor at Split Lip Magazine.
I schlepped all the way out to Houston to see the Oracle. Not Houston, Texas—Houston, Mississippi. In Chickasaw County. It’s not an easy journey: six hours by road from our farm if you’re lucky, then eight miles through the brush to the Oracle’s godforsaken shack, which reeks of incense and smoked pig. You get one question for her every three decades. I don’t make the rules, that’s just how her powers work. Eileen and I had recently quit our teaching jobs to start the farm we’d dreamt about for years. I was there to ask whether we’d be able to hack it, whether we’d made the best or worst decision of our lives. I needed to know even if knowing wouldn’t change a thing. So I worked up the courage to ask my question, voice breaking like a prepubescent teen.
The Oracle went into that little trance she goes into, followed by the convulsions. At the end she stared at me, her eyes going pure white before settling back to brown. She composed herself, smoothing down her headscarf, and asked quietly if I wanted to know how I’ll die, her voice timid in comparison to her omniscience.
I frowned. “That’s not what I came here for.”
“I understand,” she said. “But that’s what I saw.”
“Okay,” I said, figuring it’d be better to prepare for that long night rather than crash headlong into it. “Tell me.”
“You’ll be killed by roving opossums,” she said, betraying no emotion. Just stating facts.
The words didn’t quite make sense given the context. Opossums? Roving? I asked her to repeat herself, which she did. I’d heard it right.
“What does it mean to be roving?” I asked.
“From what I could tell, the opossums were transient. They didn’t have a home. Maybe that’s why they go after you,” she said. “They’re lost and scared.”
It seemed like such a random way to go. No meaning to it at all. “So, I just want to double check,” I said. “There’s nothing I can do to stop it from happening?”
“No,” she said. “It’s fated.”
“Dang.”
I went home to tell Eileen the bad news.
She was horrified, worried about me, about living in fear of opossums around every corner. I suggested we plant some trees, give them a home.
“Why?” she asked. “It won’t do you any good.”
She wasn’t wrong. My death was preordained and the Oracle never flubbed a prediction.
“It just feels right,” I said. “I can’t explain it.”
Eileen sighed, perhaps more willing to deal with my whims given the revelation. “Okay,” she said, finally. “If it’ll make you feel better.”
Next morning, we brought home some oak seedlings from the farmer’s market. Oaks, I felt, were a particularly beautiful tree when fully grown. They had heavy graceful limbs that draped down shade, turning a hot day into a pleasant one. Any opossums in the area would surely appreciate these oaks—years from now. Maybe I’d even get to see them grown by the time the opossums came for me.
In the weeks that followed, I learned more about my eventual executioners. I came to respect them. Opossums are wily creatures. When they’re down and out, they mimic the look and scent of a dead animal. They wouldn’t be hoodwinked if I tried to play dead.
Over lunch one afternoon I asked Eileen, “Would it be macabre if we started a opossum sanctuary?”
“It would be ironic,” she said. “But I’m game.”
We made our farm as opossum-friendly as possible. Planted more oaks. Removed all the barbed wire fencing from our land. We kept an eye out for stray opossums, injured opossums caught in traps, baby opossums abandoned by their mothers, and took them back to our place. Once the opossums got here, we mostly let them be. But Eileen did have a favorite that she’d named Daisy, a rescue we’d found wandering alone down a highway a few hundred feet away from her mother’s flattened body. Eileen had sat up all night with Daisy—opossums being nocturnal—stroking her fur and feeding her blueberries until it was morning and they were both asleep.
Years later, we sat out on the porch with cold glasses of water and a bowl of fresh-picked blueberries, looking out over the beautiful things we’d grown. Daisy had nestled into Eileen’s lap, having grown accustomed to daily head rubs. The weather was warm and lovely, a gentle breeze going by every so often, and the sun was just beginning to set below the trees, painting the sky an otherworldly pink and lavender. We could hear bugs chirping or humming or whatever it is they do. I put my arm around Eileen and brushed her cheek. It was wet. I think I knew why she was crying. I kissed away the tears as the opossums skittered in the trees, our lives rich with possibility, our fates assured.
Matt Goldberg‘s fiction has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, The Normal School, Porter House Review, and Bending Genres, among others. His work has also been anthologized in Coolest American Stories 2022 and won first place for the 2021 Uncharted Magazine Sci-Fi and Fantasy Short Story Award. He earned his MFA from Temple University and lives with his partner in Philadelphia, PA. Find him on Twitter @mattmgoldberg.
The lights are out in the cabin where the boys and I sleep, but I’m not there. I’m awake in the backseat of a truck with a sleeping Mason whose face is smushed against the window.
“No favorites,” my boss commanded us during orientation, but Mason crafts ketchup art on his dinner plate, writes his own murder-mystery book series, and likes Schitt’s Creek as much as I do.
The driver flies down the two-lane road. I swallow a shout whenever a deer appears by the shoulder, not wanting to wake Mason without cause. I tell myself that if we hit a deer, he’ll wake up anyway. I remember the story my dad told me, how he totaled his Jeep before I was born.
“The deer came out of nowhere, and I couldn’t turn fast enough. I tried.”
At the hospital, a man asks the woman behind the desk to let him in the back to see a patient. “It was my fault,” he says. “I need to tell him.” She sends him away. Our turn.
“My stomach hurts,” Mason tells her. He tells her that it hurts less than it did an hour or so before. Our driver, an actual adult with copies of Mason’s insurance and a credit card, explains that the doctor at camp thought it might be appendicitis. I am the twenty-year-old counselor who was told to go with his camper to the hospital. I stand behind them both, useless.
In the waiting area, I’m on my phone. Mason asks if I’m texting my girlfriend. I laugh and don’t answer him, too embarrassed to tell a middle schooler that I’ve never even been on a date. Not counting prom when I took my sister’s friend. Mom was fussing with my tux while Dad instructed me, “Be sure to give her all your attention tonight. It’s her only prom.”
We get called into an exam room. A woman in scrubs sits at a desk littered with empty yogurt containers and blank forms. She asks Mason questions. “It doesn’t really hurt anymore,” Mason says. The driver huffs and rolls his eyes. The nurse says we should still run a test to be safe. Mason pees in a cup. Back to the waiting room.
At the vending machine, Mason makes fun of how many snacks I buy. I get him a Musketeers Bar, one of my dad’s favorites. We avoid the driver, he’s kind of weird. I look up “Would You Rather…” questions on my phone.
“Would you rather be in jail for five years or a coma for a decade?”
“Coma, definitely.”
“But you lose ten years of your life!”
Mason shrugs.
They call us back to a different room. There’s a bed for Mason and one chair. The driver is kind enough to sit on the floor. It’s three in the morning. “We need a blood sample,” the nurse says and Mason starts to shake. He’s never given blood. I put my hand on his shoulder as the needle slips into his skin.
I remember when my dad drove me to the hospital to have blood work done.
“You don’t have to look at the needle. You can if you want, but you don’t have to.” We stopped at Hardee’s for biscuits after.
The nurse pulls the needle out of Mason’s arm. His body calms. More waiting.
A doctor enters. They need a CT scan. If he has appendicitis, he will need surgery. Mason’s never had surgery. He lies back on his hospital bed and starts to shake again.
I pull out my phone and tell him he can watch Netflix. He takes it and sees my lock screen. A man is sitting on a couch wearing an LSU baseball cap, wrapping paper at his side, but the gift is out of frame. The man is grinning.
“Who is that?” Mason asks.
I don’t know how to tell him it’s a picture of my father. My father who I am named after. My father who drove me to swim meets and bought me ice cream whether I won or lost, who taught me to drive, who watched Seinfeld with me, who came to all my school plays and pretended to like even the bad ones, who said “I love you” every morning before school. My forty-six-year-old father who was in good health when he lay down on an operating table and bled out within an hour only a year ago.
I know I can’t tell Mason that. There is no reason to tell Mason that. The doctor will wake us up around six the next morning to say that the CT shows it is indeed appendicitis and that the surgery has to be today, and Mason will go in for the operation and come out just fine.
Mason’s parents will come down for his three-day recovery before he returns to camp. I’ll shake his father’s hand and tell him that his son is my favorite in the cabin. Mason will return to camp and see his friends and go swimming and walk on the beach and play basketball and read with a flashlight and leave camp and go back to school and grow up and go to college and get married and have children and see them grow up and he won’t die before they have a chance to say goodbye.
Mason is not my father. Mason is different because Mason is just like everyone else.
I stare at the screen, unable to return my father’s smile. “It’s my dad,” I say.
Mason nods. He turns on Schitt’s Creek, and without looking at me, tilts the phone so I can watch too.
Ray Lantrip is a student at Covenant College working toward his degree in English. He writes creative nonfiction, poetry, and drama. When he’s not wasting time on his phone, Ray enjoys performing on stage, going for runs, and trying out different energy drinks.
760°C is the optimal level for melting. They may go higher if you are too resistant, though this may make your vessel too pliant after cooling.
Once you are in a liquid state, they pour you into a mould where you coagulate and harden into your vessel.
They spray you with sand-coloured paint and stamp the pink on your cheeks, the red on your lips, the peach on your fingernails. They stitch long black hair to your scalp, curl it, spray it.
They inject you with earthly knowledge of mathematics and biology and celebrities and philosophy and mythology and history and the universe. You learn the rules to follow: Don’t be a slut, but don’t be a prude. Be strong, but not a bitch. Be maternal, but not a nag.
A white lace dress shrouds your face, catches on your breasts, and then flutters around your knees as they drop you down, down, down from the sky.
He texts you back after two minutes, so you follow protocol and wait four.
Record these numbers in your fieldnotes and report back.
Generate a sense of intimacy with your human target by exchanging flirty banter: an inside joke about peaches, an expertly placed winky face emoji sent no more than every five messages, overexaggerated disbelief at the fact that you have the same taste in music.
After a rapport has been obtained, he sends you paragraphs about his childhood and his past girlfriends and his thoughts on the current political climate. You reply thoughtfully—a good method to convince your target that you are kind, which is a very desired trait in women, you’ve learned.
You are already learning so much. Perhaps more than you should be.
His tales of summer camps and boarding schools suggest childhood neglect. Therefore, you must be loving and caring and sweet toward him. He says all his ex-girlfriends are crazy, so don’t be too high maintenance or question his judgement. If he explains something to you that you already know, do not point this out to him. Should he ask you about your opinions, do not say too much. (Incidentally, he doesn’t, you note.)
Before he falls asleep, he texts you, let’s hang at art gallery tom 3pm.
When you arrive at the art gallery, he is not there. If a target is late, you must wait at least thirty minutes before contacting him so that you do not seem needy. This is part of protocol. You are in control.
You do not want to bother him, so you wait an hour before calling.
His voice sputters from the phone, Hello?
You say, I’m sorry—but—where are you?
He says, Oh, shit, uhhh—um, something came up, can we reschedule?
You say, It would have been nice if you could have told me that before I got here.
He says, Something came up, I forgot.
You say, I’m sorry. Of course, I understand.
He says, I’ll text you later. I’d really love to still see you.
Record this in your notes, make a chart.
When you see him two days later, he wears a dress shirt and jeans stained with greyish blue clay. He is older, lanky with flat dark hair, and you are not sure if you find him attractive or if it’s just how they trained you. When he shifts his body close to you, you feel inferior and powerful in your short lace dress.
He calls you beautiful and you watch him watch you as you look down and blush the way they taught you to.
You walk past paintings of voluptuous, soft, naked women that, as you progress through the gallery, shift from primitive spheres to sensual strokes to amorphous lines, bursts of colour.
The two of you walk through the gallery in silence. When a target is not contributing anything to the conversation, the responsibility falls on you to say something to capture his attention and remind him of your charm.
You say, I don’t get contemporary art. I like art like this.
You stare at a painting of a woman arching her white, hairless body toward a cloudless sky, eyes averted, arms passively extended toward the encroaching tendrils of a willow.
You don’t know if you believe it or not, but you think it’s the kind of sentiment he would find endearing.
You must watch yourself as if your target is always watching you. Perceive him perceiving you. Mean what he wants you to mean.
He says, Me too. Modern art is BS. Like, anyone could do that.
He glows when he feels seen by you and you glow in return when you catch him watching you.
On your way out of the gallery, you see a painting of an angry young man standing naked on top of the head of Medusa.
You ask him, What’s your type?
He says, I love strong women.
Before he goes, he hugs you so hard his fingers leave small whirlpools on your arms.
His house is at the bottom of a hill, behind a forest of pines, surrounded by a field of long grass and yellow wildflowers, not far from town. He leads you into his garage: large, with an equally large black car on one side and a studio on the other. There are pottery wheels, sharp wooden tools, a kiln. Clay sculptures—most of them of unknown women—rest on almost every surface..
He says he wants to sculpt you. He takes off your dress and places you on a stool and arranges your legs, arms, hair and begins to knead and chisel away at a small mound of clay.
A consequence of travelling through time and space is that your body may glitch and warp, flickering in and out of view for a brief second or two.
When you disappear from his view, his eyes will search for you.
Even when he cannot see you, remember he is always watching. Sit up straight, bat your eyelashes. Without him, you do not exist.
As the clay grows limbs and breasts and hair, you realize you do not know what you look like.
When he finishes the sculpture, you ask him if he has a mirror. There is a small one lying on a table, and he holds it up to your face. You touch your black eyelashes, your flushed cheeks, your long hair, and the woman in the mirror does the same.
As you gaze upon your reflection for the first time, you say, quietly, that you look strange.
He says, That doesn’t sound like something you would say. You are so confident.
Before you leave his garage, you take a photograph of yourself with your phone.
You study the photo and think your face, your body seem wrong. You want to split yourself open and spill out of yourself.
He catches you looking at the photograph and scoffs, God, you are vain.
You say, It was a bad photo. I don’t like it anyway.
He walks over to you and pulls you close and says, But you are so pretty.
He kisses you, rough, wet. You are supposed to close your eyes, but they stay open, look away, search.
You glitch and flicker.
When you aren’t engaging with your target, you slip into a nothingness suspended between sleeping and wakefulness. You cannot fall asleep. You can only think of him.
You enter his bedroom for the first time. Sunflower wallpaper, sculptures and art supplies scattered on a small desk, mattress on the floor. He turns on his stereo, and it hisses and warps with interference when you pass by.
He entangles a fist in your long hair and yanks it back, yanks it back. He moves in you so roughly you think your vessel might break, collapse in on itself. If you could bruise and bleed, you would. You know when to make noise and how to configure your body and how to make him feel good. If you could feel pleasure, you wouldn’t; this part of yourself is unknowable.
You stare at his wallpaper and count the sunflowers.
He turns to you and says, You’re not like the other girls. You are special. You are kind.
Your chest burns; something inside stirs, grows, no longer fits.
Leave this out of your notes.
You text him and he doesn’t respond for eight hours.
Write this down. Look for correlations, causations. He’s probably in a bad mood because there’s supposed to be scattered showers tomorrow at noon, and he hates the rain because it reminds him of the night his childhood dog ran away.
You are supposed to wait sixteen hours before responding, but you reply in two minutes.
He responds a day later.
Write this down, too. He is probably just busy with work. He doesn’t have a job, but sculpting is certainly work, even if he doesn’t sell anything.
If a target stops responding, it is protocol that you should not be emotional. Attachment is a sign of defectiveness. You should always be in control.
But you want to call him, you want to see him.
You do not know why they want you to feel bad for wanting. You do not know if this is something you are allowed to wonder about.
Don’t write this down. Eventually, he texts you, wyd?
You’ve counted all the sunflowers, so now you count the petals.
His hands knead, scratch, dig at your flesh. He says, I think you’re the one.
He slaps, punches your face. He says, What music should we play at our wedding?
He wraps a belt around your throat and pulls. He says, I think you were made for me.
You’ve counted all the petals, so now you count the seeds.
You aren’t sure if you like it, if you want it, but you never tell him to stop. He never leaves a mark, anyway: you are flexible.
You’ve looked at the sunflowers so much that they no longer look like sunflowers, just a wall of melted yellow.
When you see him next, you ask him why he’s been ignoring you.
He turns away and covers his head with the blanket and groans.
You ask him if you could spend more time together.
He gets up from the bed and says, You’re not the dictator of this relationship.
You say, Okay, I’m sorry.
He says, Not everything is about you. You can really be brainless sometimes.
You say that you know, you know, you’re acting crazy. You’re sorry, you’re sorry.
You put on your dress and head for the door.
He gets up and stands in front of the door and says, I shouldn’t have said that. I’m just sad you’re so mad at me.
He grabs your wrists and looks in your eyes and it feels so good to be seen.
You aren’t sure if you want him because this is how you were trained or because you love him.
You cannot possibly record this in your notes.
Weeks later, as you lay next to him, you ask him if he’s seeing other girls.
He says, Why do you care?
You say, I just want to know.
He scoffs and mumbles, You really are kind of crazy, huh?
You are angry and you are not sure if you’re allowed to be, so you cry.
He tells you to stop being so pathetic. He says that just because a boy acts like a boy doesn’t mean you’re some kind of victim.
You say, I know, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
When he goes to shower, you pick up his phone. Fingerprint protected. But you would never. You are not like the others: you are not crazy.
He wraps you in his arms, all wet and dewy, and says, I didn’t mean to yell. I just get angry sometimes because I like you so much.
He whispers in your ear, I’ve always wanted four kids. I’d name them…
His breath is deep and even and the ridges of his spine ripple as he curls away from you. On the bedside table, his phone vibrates and lights up, bathing the yellow walls in blue. You slither out of bed and grasp his finger, place it on the backside of the phone.
His camera roll is full of pictures: most of them selfies, some of them with friends, some of them with girls. The girls are stacked on top of each other in little squares like a collection, like the sculptures in his garage.
There is a girl with vanilla blonde hair plastered all over his Instagram. Pictures of them go back 58 weeks: embracing, kissing, wearing matching sweaters.
You want to hit her and make her bleed and put a belt around her throat and pull her hair.
He stirs in his bed and you aren’t sure how it happens, but you blink and then he’s on top of you and he’s ripping the phone from your hands.
The words spew out of him, hot and sticky. He asks you what’s wrong with you and why you can’t just be sweet like a normal girl. He tells you that you’re a bitch, you’re such a crazy bitch.
You say that you’re sorry, you’re sorry.
He tells you to get out of his house and that he wants nothing to do with you and that he never did.
He lets you go, but as you head for the door, he grabs your arm and pins you to the floor and rips the sleeve of your dress.
You want the rage to flow out of you in tears. You cough and sputter and choke, trying to exorcise your anger like a demon.
He twists your hair and jerks your head back, over and over and over. The stitches on your scalp loosen, your neck stretches out.
He stops and flings you away and says, What are you?
He stares at the black coils in his fist, at your plasticine head lolling in front of your breasts.
He covers his eyes and staggers into the wall and calls you a monster, he yells it over and over and over again.
You cradle your head in your hands. You scratch the paint off your face, claw at your eyes.
When he looks up to face you, his body stiffens and his skin turns the colour of oxidized marble. You strike him and strike him and strike him and he crumples to the floor like dust.
You run into the garage and grab the sculpture he made of you from the top shelf and smash it. You topple his shelves and his tables, leaving his collection in shards on the floor. You run out the back door and dawn follows you across the field, painting the long grass with pinks and reds. You sprint through the grass and wildflowers, kicking up pollen and tardy fireflies, and the hem of your dress gathers up mud and twigs as it peels off you like a chrysalis. The pines bend with the wind and clear a path for you into the forest. Orange sunlight seeps through the leaves and into a pond.
You peer down at your reflection and then splash it away with your feet. Your feet sink into mud, and moss and vegetation curl around your toes. The water, thick and warm, envelops you and guides you under.
They beam you up, up, up from the water, arms raised, coated in slime, trembling and then shrieking and then laughing from the crooked mouth of your lolling head.
Boils bubble and blister under your skin. As you whirl past stars and floating rocks, the rest of your vessel ruptures into chunks and then melts into a pool of black liquid, thick like tar. Parts of you bob to the surface and parts of you spiral and sink: a battered arm, a fingernail, a face you would not recognize and no longer feel the need to see.
Sophia Savva is a writer who has lived in Toronto, Tokyo, and Halifax.
You covered yourself in kerosine. Grabbed a box of matches. Took one out. Even as a child I saw through the act, knew it wasn’t a real threat, just an immature cry for attention. Another way to breed fear in all of us. One more way to get our mother to look at you and not us, to pick you over us. Beg for your life over her own no matter how many times you’d tried to take it. That night included. She got on her knees in front of you and I had the urge to take the match from your hand, light it and let it ignite against your skin. Even if it killed us all. So long as my mother’s suffering would stop. So long as she was off her knees, and you were the one screaming in pain for once, begging for your life for once. So long as the fire allowed my mother to feel the warmth she never got from your touch.
Jasmine Griffin is an emerging black queer author. Jasmine currently serves as the Adult Program Manager at the Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati. Jasmine was recently published in Eunoia Review, Genre: Urban Arts, and Cleaning up Glitter. She received her MA in Creative Writing from Wilkes University. In 2022, Jasmine was selected as a Voodoonauts fellow. In 2020 she participated in AWP’s Writer to Writer Mentorship program as a mentee of Maisy Card, debut author of These Ghosts Are Family and was also a Pitch Wars mentee paired with YA author Aiden Thomas who’s best known for, Cemetery Boys.
this is how you cast a spell, child: pray your hands together, weave your grimy, fruit-stained fingers into a basket tight enough to hold the serpent hissing at its seams. this is how you pull your eyelids tight to your skin. this is how you resist the temptation of sight, resist defiant pupils that wander where they shouldn’t and talk out of turn and ask too many questions and echo a heartbeat that catches in your throat like a prayer half-digested. this is how you swallow bad Scripture: mouth the words down and keep your gaze on the ground until the Father in heaven and the father at home are one and the same. this is how you fold yourself thin like Sunday School sheets: pastor’s kid, lightweight, not down to cause any trouble. this is how you smile and nod when Pa and Ma rant about the liberal gay menace (but what if the menace is living under your roof?) this is how you sneak onto Yahoo Answers when Pa and Ma are asleep to find out whether you’re gay in ten simple questions (is it okay to look without touching?) this is how you close the window and shut down the computer before they catch their son in the sinful act. this is how you dodge questions about what girls from youth group you’re crushing on. this is how you hold the shame in your lungs, then your stomach, then your entire body. this is how to curve your back into the shape of an apology that will never be enough. this is how you live with your eyes closed—no boys to tempt you into ruin, no pastors to root out your sins. this is how you cast yourself out of the church before they can: drift downstream, tread water, clasp your chafed hands into a straw vessel sinking faster than you can bail, rock them together like a rowboat in a never-ending storm, pray for the miracle worker to come and change you like they say he will. father, don’t you know you raised me right out of your home? where do i go but away?
this is how Father answers your exile: with a wave of good Samaritans washing over you. this is how, in the first week of college, you meet PJ, then Claudia, then Reverend Jordan (and if a loving creator did not make people like this, who did?) this is how you find God in a family of outcasts; find yourself back on your knees on a chapel floor for the first time in four years. this is how the ocean swallows a prodigal son and spits them back out, salt water welling at stubborn eyelids, flooding them open. this is what tough love tastes like: a rush of light in your mouth, sharp enough to blind at first, too brackish to digest in one gulp. this is how to throw somebody into the deep, baptize them in grief and heartbreak, pull them back out gasping alive. this is the story of Moses and the burning bush, Jonah and the whale, Paul on the road to Damascus, Jesus speaking in tongues. this is the riddle you have left us breathless to untangle. this is how you cast the spell anew. this is how to sing the song in your own voice: i was blind, but now i see. this is how you believe in magic, how you still find light in this world when it is cracking apart. this is how you untangle your hands, feel your grief flood out until all that is left are the fingers, ready to weave together something new. this is how you learn to touch, to embrace, to cast the words out and pray they kindle a path forward. (but Father, what if i never find my way to you?) child, you mean to tell me you have not yet seen me in the searching?
m.o. (or Mo) is a high-school educator and writer in the East Bay. In college, he self-published his first book, speech therapy, in order to fundraise for the Asian Task Force Against Domestic Violence. They have also published work in the Hypocrite Reader, Gnashing Teeth Publishing, Porcupine Reader, and Lake County Bloom. When not teaching or writing, Mo loves hanging out at the local rock climbing gym, scream-singing to the latest K-pop hits in the car, and curating a sick collection of discount frozen dinners. You can find them on Twitter @mokngpoetry and online at mokng.com.
When I was young, I loved minerals. My favorite corner of our local natural science museum was home to the gem vault and its glass cases full of sparkling stones. I was so small in the beginning that I had to stand on tiptoe just to catch a glimpse of them on my own. My second favorite place was the gift shop where miniature synthetic replicas were sold. Each time we visited, I was allowed to buy one, until soon I had my own collection at home in a tiny, clear plastic container. I liked the way their bright colors jumbled together. I liked the rattling sound they made when I gave the box a gentle shake.
When I was young, I had beautiful hair. At least, that’s what everyone on the playground always told me. My long locks were straight, shiny, silky, and blacker than a bottomless hole. All the popular girls, who would never acknowledge me otherwise, came up to ask whether I washed with kids’ shampoo or shared a bottle with my mother. As if those were the only two options. I told them the tangled truth, that neither theory was correct.
When I was young, my best friend tried to strangle me with her bare hands. She did so repeatedly, each time taking me to what felt like the brink of death. I didn’t understand then what I’d done to provoke her. I didn’t understand then that I was only a stand-in for monsters at home that she herself was too young to fight. Most of all, I didn’t understand then why I never even considered confronting her until her family had moved away and left me without the option. I never saw her again, though later, much later, I desperately wished I could.
When I was young, I was afraid of snakes. My father and I regularly took weekend walks down by the creek behind our house, during which we’d swap stories about our weekday lives. On one excursion, he pointed out the dark, cylindrical shapes near the water, like coil pots made of unbaked clay. “Snakes in hibernation,” he warned me. Five poisonous varieties roamed our region, so we had to stay vigilant: “Remember, by the time you hear that telltale rattle, it’s already too late.” I wasn’t afraid of their venom, though. I wasn’t afraid of their fangs. I was afraid of their entire bodies, the way they looked like they could wind themselves around my neck like a garrote, stealing both my breath and my voice in one swift movement.
When I was young, I started losing my beautiful hair. At first, I only found a few stray strands curled around my hair elastics, or little nests in the drain strainer of my bathtub. But by ninth grade, I had a bald spot the size of a half dollar on top of my head. I began parting my hair to the other side. Instead of spending weekends at birthday parties, I spent them at doctors’ offices. Everyone there told me I was perfectly healthy. They wondered aloud if maybe I was putting too much pressure on myself. “Relax, Medusa,” they said. “You are young. You have nothing to worry about.”
When I was young, we dissected earthworms in Biology class before moving on to larger, more anatomically complex animals. I tried not to think about their snake-like bodies as I ran the blade of my scalpel down their cold bellies. In that classroom, my hair continued to betray me. My lab experiments were often tainted by wayward strands. I became so notorious for this dubious feat that if the same problem befell anyone else, our teacher would call it “pulling a Medusa,” and she always watched with a crooked smile as my cheeks burned at the taunting remark.
When I was young, that same teacher informed us that she could tell whether a girl was a virgin just by looking at her fully clothed. She uttered this proclamation in front of the boys in our class, too. They spent the rest of the semester ogling us girls from each and every angle, their x-ray gazes hunting for the key that unlocked the puzzle box of our bodies. My hair only grew thinner after that. I began wrapping a scarf around my head to hide the patches of exposed scalp. No one ever called those thinning tresses beautiful anymore.
When I was young, I woke up one morning to the soothing sound of sibilant voices inviting me back from the depths of sleep. “It’sss almosssst noon, Medusssssa,” they hissed, in a Greek chorus of collective sighs. Earnest. Filled with expectations. I opened my eyes to find myself face-to-face-to-face-to-face-to-face with a seemingly endless parade of rattlesnake heads crowding my personal space. I thought I must be dreaming. I thought I was trapped in my worst nightmare. But I couldn’t wake up because I was already awake. I scrambled out from under the covers to escape the hotbed of slithering creatures that must have somehow invaded my pillow during the night. But when I did, they followed. Because, I quickly realized, they had sprouted from the back of my head the way my hair once had. I screamed.
When I was young, I thought this new development was a punishment. A punishment for my vanity. My fear. My ssexuality. Some cruel act of puberty. I avoided mirrorss, refussed to look at what was right in front of me. Until an amazing thing happened: I opened my lidss in the middle of Biology classss and found my teacher sstaring back. As ssoon as she made eye contact, she turned to ssstone. Gemssstone, to be exact. Not a ssstatue, but a perfectly sssmooth pebble of mottled green-and-black ssserpentine that rocked gently in the ssspot where she once ssstood. The whole classssss ssscreamed.
When I wassss older, I realized my new head of hair wassss actually a gift. Because of it, I was eventually able to overcome my fear of baldnessssssss, of ssssnakessss, of humanssss and their threatening pressssencessss. I managed to ssssusssstain fulfilling relationshipssss without face-to-face communication. But ssssometimessss I encountered people who reminded me of that teacher, thosssse boyssss, my childhood friend. When these unfortunate souls looked me in the eyessss, I wassss still richly rewarded. With ssssstunning cutsssss of authentic amber, opal, sssssapphire, aquamarine, onyx, garnet, emerald, amethyssssst, and cubic zirconia. Very sssssoon, I had to find a much bigger box for my ssssstonesssss. And the delicioussssss sssssssound they produced when agitated echoed like the ghosssssstssssss of my new friendssssss’ missssssssssssing tailssssss.
Susan L. Lin is a Taiwanese American storyteller who hails from southeast Texas and holds an MFA in Writing from California College of the Arts. Her novella Goodbye to the Ocean won the 2022 Etchings Press novella prize and is now available to purchase at susanllin.wordpress.com, where you can also find more of her published work. In her spare time, she enjoys sewing summer dresses, dancing to ’90s hits, reading mystery thrillers, and streaming TV.
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