Crow calls puncture the icy air. In the silences between—our snowshoes punching a trail behind us—we make small talk like we have practiced in class. In my pockets I tuck his facts, the siblings and cactus-spotted landscapes of his youth, the book clubs and home brewing of his present. I save them like squirrel-stashed pinecones, as if the same snow-damp air that balloons my lungs might soften his details to something digestible, something familiar.
He will no longer be my teacher. This is what he told me after the asking, in the in-between of the classroom and the hallway, blurry chalk-print hands on his trouser legs betraying the nervous fingers he gripped in stiff fists as the other students streamed past to their night shifts, to their cramped apartments. He told me two times, as if I maybe did not understand the significance, as if I am wet behind the ears. We will be breaking no rules now if I agree to go on a date with him, he said. It was touching, his earnestness. His nerves shivered across his forehead while he waited for my answer. Like he no longer was the expert of verb tenses or slippery idioms sketching strange pictures in my head. Like this time I owned the words he needed to borrow. So I rolled the bones with my yes.
It is a yes I now wish to swallow back. We cross over our own tracks, looping a noose around an unmapped patch of forest. Shadows curl blue in the hollows, darker than they were on our first pass; dusk drops suddenly here. When I point this out, he does not worry. He dismisses my suggestion that we retrace our steps, like he ignored me when I told him his snowshoes should go each on the other foot.
“Just a bit further,” he insists. “This must remind you of home.”
I watch the teeth of his snowshoes bite through the crust and flick up powder from underneath. The sun no longer sparkles the snow. Nothing of this feels like home.
The trail unfolds to a field. As we cross the meadow, our talk becomes not so small. He tells me of the woman he says stole his job at the college, of the daughter he sees every other weekend, of the voting he will not do because too many contenders are corrupt. He tells me of his friend who believes immigrants are vectors of disease and crime, that they should be rounded up, imprisoned, shipped away. “Not the ones who came here the right way, of course,” he adds. He floats these ideas to me, swiveling his head to watch them land.
I ice my ears to them, ice my face to betray none of my thinking. It is not logical that out here, dwarfed by the expanse of white-frosted pines and white-blanket sky, he seems larger even than he did in the cramped classroom with walls the same ill green of the hospital tent, of the helicopter that plucked me from the fighting in the nick of time, of the uniforms on the men who stitched back together my skin and sent me into this familiar snow and unfamiliar syntax. A shudder—of cold, I pretend to myself—xylophones up my spine.
At the trailless far edge of the clearing, tree shadows stretch, warning us away. I wish to heed them, but I do not suggest again that we backtrack, do not use the word lost. It would change only his mood, I think, not his mind.
“Looks like a dog.” The print he points to is larger than my mittened hand, tipped with crisp triangle claws. Here, under drooping cedar branches, blood and feathers mark the snow.
“Wolf,” I correct him.
He smiles with too many teeth. “Good thing you’re with me. These woods are dangerous.”
The commotion now flapping inside me cannot be pretended away; I cannot tell myself it is only butterflies in the stomach. I breathe to trick my heart back into rhythm, breathe to grope toward some floating hope, but all the lift has left my lungs.
The snow crust holds a pink-stained scallop of wingtips where the bird pushed off. I know I cannot join in her escape; gravity has cracked me open and pinned down my pieces. I can only squint to the now-silent sky, wishing her safe in the deepening blue.
A native of the Pacific Northwest and a recovering English teacher, Lindsey James draws inspiration for her writing from the people and landscapes of eastern Washington State. You can find her published and forthcoming work in Necessary Fiction, The Saturday Evening Post and Penmen Review.
We must rewind to the glaring, too-bright, yellow-green lights of the PATCO train.
To the walk down a darkening Arch Street in the chill of a March evening. To my shoulders, draped in a white lab coat on weekdays, draped now with the heavy suede of his jacket, the sleeves hanging far below my hands and flapping against my knees as we walk, the streetlights blurring before my eyes, the lights of the bar where we’d met several hours earlier growing dimmer in the distance.
Let’s rewind further to the shots of Jäger he insisted I do despite my protestations that I was not a much of a shot girl. To him, handing me the glass and goading me to try it, his buddies behind him, urging me on, because, in his words, it “tastes like purple.” To me, it tastes like Dimetapp. They all circle around me, and I am holding court, the unlikely object of their attention.
Rewind a little further to my emerging from a stall in the ladies room and finding him there, grinning in a more menacing way than he had out at the bar, pushing me against the cold, tiled wall and kissing me forcefully. Here is where you will say, why didn’t you know then? Where were your instincts? And here is where I won’t have an answer that will satisfy you. I was drunk? I didn’t want to make a scene? He was a friend of a friend? Would any of these answers satisfy you? Probably not, because they don’t satisfy me.
Do you have more questions? Do you want to know if I kissed him back? So do I.
Rewind all the way to the beginning of the day, to me, walking into the sparsely populated Irish bar, all dark mahogany and dim lighting, even at ten thirty in the morning. Zoom in on me, a walking juxtaposition, a bespeckled, bookish blonde with a Barbie doll body, clad in jeans, a navy zip up sweatshirt, and blue Payless sneakers, eating a bowl of Irish oatmeal—the first and only food I would consume on this day—and sipping a glass of Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA. I am looking for no one’s attention, but somehow, I have attracted his. Watch as he materializes next to me, his jeans brushing mine. Do you think I’m intrigued? Attracted to him? You’re not wrong.
He is the tall, tan, human embodiment of a redwood tree. His nose is crooked—perhaps from a rugby ball to the face, perhaps an elbow—but his smile is straight and Colgate commercial white, framed by the parenthetical laugh lines of someone who smiles easily and often and with confidence. Someone the opposite of me. He tries to explain what’s happening in the rugby game on TV—the one I’ve been invited here to watch by friends I’ve now lost track of—and he says he is rooting for England because he’s English, but with a name like Colleen, I must be Irish. I walk right into it. I say, “I have a little English in me.” He says, the grin spreading slowly across his face, “I’m going to make a really bad joke now.” He says, “Would you like a little more?”
Are you exasperated when I laugh even though his remark makes me slightly uncomfortable? Are you flabbergasted that I could have missed such obvious foreshadowing? So am I.
We arrive now at the moment in question. This is the moment where my eyes open and struggle to focus on the cracks in my shitty, eggshell white apartment ceiling. This is the moment, on the living room sofa handed down to me by my parents, that I become conscious of him moving inside me, the moment where the slow, cold panic of realization spreads across my body and I somehow summon my voice from the pinned down pit of my stomach to rise through my trachea, somehow summon my lips to move beneath the stubble of his jaw and force out the words, slurred and hazy and more whisper than protestation, “Hey, wait a minute.” He does stop. With a grin that now calls to mind the Cheshire Cat of Alice’s Wonderland, he says, “Oh, I guess we forgot something.” He thinks I mean he should put on a condom. My mouth is dry, and my mind is a gelatinous fog, and I don’t know what I mean.
All this rewinding has gotten us no answers.
Let’s fast forward through the part where I wriggle out of the jeans and underwear that are around my ankles, where I stand up, bottomless, and lead him to my bedroom where I have condoms in my nightstand—safety first, for I am nothing if not a sexually responsible adult—and where I consent to him completing the act I had not consented to in the first place. Let’s fast forward through that because my motivation is confusing to me even now. Because I don’t know what I was thinking, except isn’t this what I expected when I invited a stranger back to my apartment? Did I invite him? Onto the train? Into my car? Into my home? I don’t remember, but at some point, I must have. I must have expected this. Except I had probably also expected to be conscious.
But let’s also fast forward through the act itself, because I don’t remember it. It’s possible I enjoyed it, or parts of it. The next morning, he interprets the raw, red trails my fingernails left on his back as proof that I had. He emerges from my bathroom to show them to me with pride before he pulls on his white undershirt.
Let’s skip the part where we have breakfast at a diner and I drop him off at the train station, grateful he doesn’t ask for my number, because I am confused about what even happened between us and whether I want to lay eyes on him again.
Let’s skip ahead a few months later to me at a different bar with the same mutual friends I had been meeting to watch the rugby tournament. Here I am, still bespeckled, moving my way through the crowd to the bar to order my friend and myself a couple of beers, when I feel someone’s body pressing against me, trying to occupy the space I am in, and I realize it is him. I am dwarfed by his presence. His back is to me, and before I can decide if I should say hello or hide, he gestures with his hand to the friend he is talking with, and hits me in the mouth with the neck of his beer bottle. He doesn’t notice. No one notices. I swallow the pain silently. We don’t speak that night, and I never see him again.
Fast forward now to the next morning when I wake up alone in my bed with an ache in my mouth and go to the bathroom mirror to locate the small, almost imperceptible chip in my tooth.
We could end here. We could fade to black on all this ambiguity, but let’s press on. Let’s fast forward four years, to me in a car with my husband and our infant son, running mundane errands on a mundane afternoon. We are stopped at a light and half listening to the Kavanaugh hearings on NPR. My stomach drops and my skin goes clammy as Christine Blasey Ford describes in detail what Brett Kavanaugh (allegedly?) did to her on the night in question. Something in her words, in this thin, small voice emerging from this educated, accomplished woman, stirs the long buried discomfort of the encounter that I had filed away as a one night stand borne of my poor judgment. The memory had been buried in the recesses of my brain, a VHS tape collecting dust in a basement. Blasey Ford’s voice pressed play on the tape. The cracks in my ceiling, the weight of his body are suddenly a humiliation so visceral that my forehead breaks out in sweat and I have to force back the bile in my throat. I stare at the dashboard. I say to my husband, “I just remembered something I haven’t thought about in years.” I say, “I think I’m going to be sick.”
When I tell him the story, his knuckles go white on the steering wheel.
Switch scenes to later that night, and zoom in on me alone on my living room sofa, my husband asleep, the baby asleep for now. Always a night owl and now plagued by postpartum, anxiety-induced insomnia, I sit in the darkness and scroll on my phone. I open Facebook. I find him. He is easy to find, his last name so unusual that I still remember it, though he never told me. I found it on his driver’s license when I woke before him the next morning, found his jeans on my sofa and went through the pockets looking for clues about the stranger snoring in my bed. Here I am, years later, still sleuthing for clues.
Facebook informs me that he now lives in Colorado. In his profile picture, he stands shirtless in front of the ocean with his arm around a pretty, tan brunette. He is still tan. His nose still crooked, his smile still disarming. Somehow, seeing his face again, I feel unsafe in my own home.
The comments beneath the picture congratulate him on his engagement.
It’s about time, his friends write. Congrats, dude.
I don’t wonder if he ever thinks about that night in my old apartment; I’m fairly certain I already know the answer..
I wonder about her. I feel strangely worried for this smiling stranger.
Did their first meeting go like ours had? Or is she a woman he handled more delicately?
How would she react if she knew about the night I woke up with her fiance inside me? Would she forgive him? Would she think there was anything to forgive?
Do I?
Colleen Ellis’s work has been featured in Philadelphia Stories, The Schuylkill Valley Journal, and Epoch. She was a finalist in the 2024 Q4 Wow! Women on Writing Creative Nonfiction Essay Contest. Originally from Philadelphia, Colleen lives in southern New Jersey with her husband and two children. She works as a pediatric speech and language pathologist and spends her free time reading, writing, fighting the patriarchy, and having her heart broken by Philly sports teams.
My nephew Moe is hungover. Even though he’s only 17, I had him sample the product last night. That way, he knows what he’s hawking. Before he took each Troll Shot, he stroked the Troll’s long, colorful hair as if apologizing for unscrewing the top of its head and downing the liquor inside. Moe moves in slow motion, but he’s a good kid.
From behind the steering wheel, I explain All 4 Fun’s business model to Moe as he loads the final box of Troll Shots in the back of the company van. “Nostalgia sells, baby,” I say, turning the key in the ignition. Moe climbs into the passenger seat. I agreed to hire him last week when his dad, my younger brother, threatened to kick him out if he didn’t get a job after dropping out.
Moe unfolds the day’s itinerary and reads aloud the first stop, Pair-a-Dice. I mostly deliver to dive bars. Their clientele fits our demographic of both remembering these things and liking to get plastered. I pull away from the curb, the sound of whiskey sloshing inside the Trolls’ plastic bodies.
I told my brother it was an orientation when he dropped Moe off last night. I almost invited him up for a drink before I thought better of it, thought of the ensuing lecture. Instead, I flipped my punk-ass little brother off as his BMW rounded the block.
Drunk, Moe and I talked about how I came up with the idea after seeing an old photo of his dad’s Troll village, about how his dad had built the village outside our house with tree bark during a summer in the early ‘90s, about how I’d kept the neighborhood boys from destroying it and him.
“Old meets new,” I said, bringing a Troll and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s together.
Moe crashed on my futon. I texted my brother that Moe was spending the night so we could get an early start in the morning, and he just sent back a thumbs-up. I wanted to reply with how hammered Moe had gotten, with how we’d shit-talked him the whole night. I even typed a few words before deleting them.
My little bro wasn’t always such a dick. When we were kids, he was tethered to me like a shadow. I’d sit on a lawn chair inside our parents’ old garage, and he’d show me his Trolls, would tell me what job each of them had in the village. When we got older, we even hit the bars a few times. I’d order a pitcher of Budweiser, never letting him pay his half, and we’d discuss some sports team’s chances and other pointless bullshit that wasn’t so pointless since we were together.
Then he got a job selling insurance, started drinking red wine, started pretending he came from somewhere he didn’t. He started telling me to buy this insurance policy or invest in this mutual fund as if he knew what was best, like a little bit of money somehow made him better than me.
After stopping at McDonald’s for a greasy cure to Moe’s hangover, I drive into Pair-a-Dice’s parking lot. On their signage, dice hang like coconuts from a faded palm tree. Inside, a few drunks are already sipping on tallboys, surrounded by license plates mounted on the walls. Moe carries in a couple boxes of Troll Shots stacked one atop the other, while I head to the back to collect our check.
I knock on the door to the back office and imagine the bar manager handing me a check with a one followed by an infinite number of zeros written on it. I imagine tearing the check in half in front of my brother to show him how much I care about money, to show him that who he’s become isn’t that special.
Someone shouts, “Weren’t you ever taught to share?”
I rush back into the bar. One of the drunks has Moe pinned in the corner next to the ATM with one hand while he paws through a box of Troll Shots with the other. I grab the drunk by the back of his shirt and fling him to the sawdust-covered floor. The box of Troll Shots he was digging through rips open, and Trolls scatter everywhere like fleeing villagers.
“I’m here,” I say, trying to put the box back together, trying to fix what’s broken.
Moe looks at me, but I see my little brother. Old meets new, I think, and I’m back in my parents’ garage. A bully dusts himself off, staggers to his bike, and pedals away. I promise my brother I’ll always be there for him, no matter what, and I gather up the trolls, careful not to grip them by the hair.
Will Musgrove is a writer and journalist from Northwest Iowa. He received an MFA from Minnesota State University, Mankato. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Florida Review, Wigleaf, The Pinch, The Cincinnati Review, The Forge, Passages North, Tampa Review, and elsewhere. Connect on Twitter at @Will_Musgrove or at williammusgrove.com.
Not prayers nor writing lines nor even palms caned bloody would be enough to discipline Savvas, the worst student of our class, Ms. Antoniou said. So she made him stand in the corner of our classroom balanced on one leg with his back turned to us, and this lasted for years.
This is the only way children like him learn to behave,Ms. Antoniou said regretfully as she sealed the classroom from the rest of the school, and the world. Seated dutifully at our desks, we watched her swallow the key.
Christmas holidays came and when it snowed outside, we made miniature snowmen on the windowsill, then saved the water in empty crayon baskets for drinking. Easter followed and a bird left us its eggs to decorate with pastel watercolors before frying them on hot metal during a sunny day. School closed for summer break, and we stayed then also, sending paper planes out to our parents, saying we hoped they had fun on their vacations to seaside villages or mountain ones, kiss our grandparents for us but, no, we can’t come with because we’re being obedient, we are good examples for bad classmates to mimic, and aren’t our parents proud of us?
They sent back postcards sometimes, if their busy schedules allowed them, until they too forgot about us like the janitor and head teacher and principal already had. And we forgot about ourselves, our former selves, growing taller, surpassing every marking on every height chart of past first graders, then that of the second and third and fourth graders, the fifth, the sixth, and then there were no charts left in this classroom to surpass. But despite our best efforts, our bodies were diligent things, they didn’t stop growing until we wondered if we would be tall enough our heads would pierce through the roof.
Years passed in clusters of hours and days and weeks. We learned arithmetic until we discovered our own math theorems; soon we could recite all our classroom’s books forward and backward, and we invented new directions of recitation until we needed no other nourishment to sustain us; we could chew inked paper and spew out answers to the universe. Early on, the other teachers had climbed rickety ladders to our barred windows to slip us food and water and other contraband, but those offerings had trickled to a stop long ago. We watched the class’s pet rabbit grow old and die, and we sucked the marrow from its skeleton, fighting over the most fragile of bones.
What else did we do?
We danced, we bickered, we married each other and made fake flower crowns out of colorful paper. And someone put a wreath on Savvas’s head too as he wobbled on his one-legged perch. We thought he might fall but he didn’t. There, on the white-chalk-dusted and pencil-shavings-strewn floor, he flamingo-balanced as we slept curled under our desks with our old backpacks as pillows.
And when Ms. Antoniou grew old and died like our pet rabbit had, we wheeled her corpse upon her teacher’s chair so that it faced the opposite corner Savvas did. This was the only gift we knew how to give him. Soon our teacher was bones and we fashioned flutes out of them. We sang, we all danced together while Savvas swayed. But no one dared talk to him, if he could still talk, and some of us thought he might not have a face at all anymore, on account of us not having seen it in so long, his features slipping away from memory. And Savvas’ crimes? His mischief, his disobedience, the reasons behind the prayers and the written lines and even the palms caned bloody, why Savvas stood in the corner on one leg facing the wall? Well.
We forgot those, too.
Avra Margariti is a queer author and poet from Greece. Avra’s work haunts publications such as SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, The Rumpus, Best Microfiction, and Best Small Fictions. You can find Avra on twitter (@avramargariti).
No matter how much you beat it, the heart is a dog. It will lick any man who looks on with adoration. I know because it’s inevitable. I too have beaten myself at the threshold of desire and have tried dragging this body back. But look, here I am, naked knees grazing the floor of yet another room. He says, You look like my childhood friend, by which he means I could be loved if I were someone else. Oh, trust me, I know, like a new dog in the family
after the first one has died.
Ashish Kumar Singh (he/him) is a queer Indian poet with a Master’s Degree in English Literature from the University of Lucknow. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry Wales, Frontier Poetry, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Fourteen Poems, The Texas Review, Atlanta Review, Foglifter Press, Diode Journal, and elsewhere. Currently, he lives in his hometown of Amethi, Uttar Pradesh, where he teaches English to high schoolers.
Comegys Elementary smells just like my grandma’s old classroom—disinfectant and potato chips—and probably like my father’s classroom in Florida, where I’m not very welcome, not with the stink of the world on me where Christianity used to be.
I walk a flight of stairs and then another. I need cash before grad school starts in the fall so I ask two different people how to get to room 203, circle back through another set of double doors. I finally settle into a classroom that looks just like ones I remember: bags of bright, waxy crayons; dingy linoleum; a poster in the shape of a thick pencil explaining what great writers do (Use a beginning, middle, and end! Check spelling!); the teacher’s desk in the corner with a thick notebook amidst the stacks of papers.
Before I ever said the word gay aloud, when the world was shrunk as small as the distance from the cul-de-sac to the church, my mother took my sister and I to the teacher supply store, probably because she was teaching preschool at the church back then, or maybe just for something fun to do during summer break: the pool, the playground, the teacher store. We clambered into the shop, which was dark and dusty and smelled like cigarettes and erasers. Out of the summer sun—so hot and bright the sidewalk shimmered—we found treasures down the aisles: slick pink folders stacked tall, purple pencil toppers by the fistful, a planning book with clean, crinkly pages. My mother bought me that thick planner and all summer I played school with my best friend, drafting lessons in reading, writing, and math in its pages.
The students start to arrive, impossibly tiny, sliding into their seats. My father doesn’t know where I am today, my head bent over a desk helping a little girl in a pink t-shirt with her multiplication tables. Maybe I didn’t really come here for money, or not only for money, anyway, but to find a last tether between us, wrap it loose around my neck, slide my nametag inside its plastic pouch. My badge is outdated, still says Johnson, same as his. Quinn and I changed our names last week and it’s no longer my name, not at all, not even a little. But he wouldn’t know that.
Eryn Sunnolia (she/they) is a queer writer living in Philadelphia, PA. Their writing has appeared in Electric Literature, HuffPost, Well+Good, and others. She is in her first year of the Rutgers Camden MFA program in creative nonfiction. She also likes making quilts. You can find them at erynsunnolia.com.
I’m curious why you have binoculars hanging from your neck on a faux pearl string. I kind of hope you’re not looking past the swelling dawn to watch tenants in the student building across the street eat dry cornflakes with their fingers, a buffering screen in front of them. Not that I know anything, but if you wait until dark, you might be able to see into their half-furnished, unintentionally ascetic living rooms even without the binoculars, provided the blinds aren’t drawn, though it seems like they always are.
I’ve lived in three apartment buildings and have known exactly none of my neighbors. Sometimes, as I’m locking my front door, I hope one of them will pass in the hallway just so I can see what they look like. I hear their music, their breakups, their snoring, but I don’t know their names, their faces. Sometimes, as I babysit my boiling pasta, I hear footsteps outside, and I run to the peephole for a glimpse. I never see anything but the beige wall and stained carpet, and my water boils over.
I think what I’m trying to say is the binoculars might not be enough. You may have to enter the building and sit in the hallway, waiting for someone, anyone, to emerge. They have to appear at some point, don’t they? If you give me some signal, look at me looking at you for long enough, I can take the elevator downstairs and let you in, and together, we can find out who lives beside me. Just give me a sign.
E.C. Gannon’s work has appeared in Peatsmoke Journal, Assignment Magazine, SoFloPoJo, Olit, and elsewhere. Raised in New Hampshire, she holds a degree from Florida State University and is pursuing another at the University of New Mexico.
The wild thing about an apocalypse is how quickly we forget. See if you can refresh your memory with a little matching game.
We’ve pulled a few words and matching images from each piece in this issue and laid them out for you to pair together. Remember playing this game as a kid? Trying to divide the world up into neat little copies of itself before the clock ran out?
How to Play Click on cards to match a word or phrase from one card with the image from another. Can you match them all? Can you remember the world as it was?
there are no worries on the beach; we can flaunt our near-naked forms, as we build derelict sandcastles that we pretend will last forever on a shore lit by our ancestors’ sun; we can find this ancient comfort, this primal escape, only here, now
it is as if we’re reminded by the vastness of the ocean how frail and powerless we are, so we set aside our conflicts, instead choosing to navel-gaze and sunbathe and permit ourselves to forget the two degree goal, less than two minutes to midnight,
the world is so fucked; sometimes i just want — need — a cigarette an indulgence concealed by a sea breeze; we can linger until each dune takes on meaning, shaped by wind, insects, you, you from weeks ago, us from years ago, us here now
FelixGrygorcewicz (he/him/his) is an experimental writer, mostly of fiction, though he dabbles in poetry and non-fiction. He has worked in education for over 10 years on the East and West coasts of the U.S. and is currently residing in the middle of the country where he teaches. He is often inspired by nature and people.
Beside me on the sofa, my daughter is playing a video game. Only her eyes and fingers move. When I ask her how her day was, she doesn’t answer. Or maybe my middle-aged ears have lost her frequency. On the screen, another version of her in a glittering lilac bodysuit is slaying skeletons and scaling cliffs. Set limits, they tell me. Keep trying to connect in the real world; she’ll come around. I’m tired of picking my battles with a trained warrior. She has the controller, but I hold the remote. I press the up arrow. Beside me, her body flickers. On the screen, her bodysuit deepens to violet. I wave at the screen; she waves back. She looks so happy. I keep pressing up up up, until beside me on the sofa, the daughter I always wanted fades away.
Angeline Schellenberg is the author of the Manitoba Book Award-winning series of linked poems about autism, Tell Them It Was Mozart (Brick Books, 2016), and the KOBZAR-nominated elegy collection, Fields of Light and Stone (University of Alberta Press, 2020). Angeline’s work was selected for Best Microfiction 2024. She hosts the Speaking Crow open-mic poetry series in Winnipeg, Canada, where she lives with her husband, two children, and rescue dog. A contemplative spiritual director, photographer, and mudlark, Angeline will launch her third poetry book, Mondegreen Riffs (At Bay Press), in September 2024.
Vast 