The writing jobs have been slow and cash flow is tight. The wife takes matters into her own hands to cut expenses. She’s talking to herself out loud and curt enough for me to hear: Eating out, gone. Unused gym membership, gone. Cable, gone. We adjust to this simpler way of life, which is more time at home, without cable. What she failed to consider was the effect on our donkey. Law & Order is on cable. We try to appease him with daytime network shows with a court-like environment: Judge Judy. Judge Mathis. Judge Joe Brown. None of them do the trick. Our donkey becomes unruly, kicking the back door each day around three o’clock, then taking his frustration out on the aluminum siding. I estimate the damage. It’s two-plus years’ worth of cable in repairs.
I restored the cable for our donkey. I know the math doesn’t work in my favor in this hard season, but it’s not about the math. That small gesture also restored our internet service, which prompted me to purchase a discounted box of Dutch Masters cigars online. I thought about writing our donkey a note, suggesting he might want to share them with the foxes and other wildlife who find their way to our firepit. But our donkey has never been a strong reader. Instead I left them without the cellophane wrapping by the remote control, which was another gesture worth more than words.
Thad DeVassie is a writer and artist/painter who creates from the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio. His collection, Splendid Irrationalities, was awarded the James Tate Poetry Prize in 2020 (SurVision Books). His recent chapbook, This Side of Utopia, was published in 2023 by Cervena Barva Press. Find more of his written and painted work at www.thaddevassie.com
I want to rot. I want to decompose. I want the furnace of my crumbling organs to burn so hot that it kills the grass above my grave.
Then I want it to grow back, slowly, around the edges.
Until tender shoots nestle against the downy pelt of a rabbit. Until velvet lips of a deer tear me out by my roots. Until the water in my stalks dissolve into its bloodstream and I spill through the chambers of its heart.
Thrumming as my petals unfurl and face the summer sun. Thrumming with wild, vibrating insects harvesting the pollen from my buds, dripping, sticky and viscous, down waxen walls.
Not the moldering sleep of the dead, but the explosive cacophony of an afterlife.
Laura Marden (she/her) is a speculative and weird fiction writer. Her work has been published in The Chamber Magazine, Creepy Podcast, and The Q&A Queerzine. Her short story “Until Prophecy’s End” can be found in the Seers and Sybils anthology from Brigids Gate Press. This is her first published poem. She lives in Maryland with her family and finds that the best time to write is when they’re all asleep.
Peel each piece of clothing off as if it was chainmail: heavy, protective. Look at yourself in the mirror and think about the person you were. Wonder who you are becoming.
Make the water hot, so you feel it, but not too hot. You are still trying to keep physical pain at bay. Step in and notice how the water’s spray feels on your skin. Feel a moment’s pleasure. Feel guilty.
Soap your hair with lavender shampoo. Hope it calms the column of despair between your womb and the hollow in your throat. Wash your swollen breasts gently. Wonder if they’ve realized they can stop making milk. Decide they have. Change your mind. Linger on the small curve of your stomach as you lather. Wonder why its stillness didn’t occur to you before.
Make a mental list of things to do: clip your six-year-old’s fingernails; clip your own; call your best friend. She doesn’t know yet. You are afraid to call her because the membrane is thin with her. But she will understand the mix of grief, anger, confusion, relief, and guilt. Feel grateful for your fortune in friends. Feel ashamed that you haven’t called yet.
Rub soap on your limbs. Hope you can rub away the film of fear, the dust of grief. Wash the shadowed spot between your legs. Soon someone will have to reach in and take death out. Consider the irony of being able to birth both life and death.
Remember, as a teenager, seeing the carved stone Sheela-na-Gig in the National Museum of Ireland. Recall your disgust at her ugliness, the rudeness of her gestures—open mouth to take in, open vagina to push out. Soak in the discomfort of unwanted understanding.
Flash back to yesterday, the 18-week ultrasound. Feel your husband and daughter huddled around the table, excitement and hope rising from your skin like steam. Six years since you were there before, giddy, with just your husband. Remember your living child saying, “I hope the baby doesn’t decide to die,” then your own twinge of intuition. Wonder whether telling her about the possibility was smart. Remember the screen, the absence of sound, movement. Remember the face of the technician, the doctor, the woman at the front desk. Let the moment of knowing wash over you. Lean your arm against the shower wall and allow yourself to weep.
Lather your face, while gravity pulls at you. Wash the tears away. Feel the words bubbling up in you, begging to be born. Wonder how it is that you can choose to pour words and not blood. Feel the burn of fear. Imagine the blood, red and hot, pouring into the water at your feet. Rinse the soap away and turn off the water.
Take a deep breath. Step out. Wrap yourself in numbness. Pump cocoa butter into your hands and spread it over your aching breasts and quiet belly. Wonder if your body will still bear the marks of pregnancy. Berate yourself for your vanity.
Pull on your clothes quickly, covering as much skin as you can. Know the sense of protection is a placebo. See yourself in the mirror and immediately look away. The reflection does not tell the story. Shake your head at the inadequacies of sight, of language.
Think about the dark and borderless space inside you. Absorb your lack of control. Feel the tears well again. This time, don’t let them spill. Instead, tell yourself you can replace sadness with anger. Tell yourself you are made of stone. Tell yourself you were made for this. Turn toward the world, taking in, pushing out.
Lauren Harr earned her M.F.A. from the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing and her writing has appeared in The Daily Lobo, 3Elements Review, and elsewhere. A former independent bookseller turned publishing professional, she lives in Western North Carolina with her husband and daughter.
Sara sneaks to the bathroom, washes the beer off her hands, adjusts her apron, and calls her son. She asks if he found his Easter basket. “Dad didn’t even give me one hint!” his smiling voice rings out, echoing across the tile. Ten years ago, when he was stretching her belly and the daffodils were slowly threatening to penetrate the dirt, she got up in front of her congregation and begged for forgiveness. Today, she apologizes to nobody.
Peter is using a thermometer on burgers, something he hasn’t done in years. The young ones on the line cannot stop laughing about it. Peter had woken up at three that morning to smoke the ham, and, despite her tie-dye hoodies and John Lennon posters, was completely flabbergasted to find his daughter up too, slouched on the front porch with a joint and a Fanta. So, there they were, one up too early and one up too late, both there to smoke, neither of them saying what they wanted to say.
Laila stripped in her car, throwing off her dress and tying up her hair, racing time and humming that Alleluia, Christ has risen today. When she gets to work, a pastor that lives in a 2 million dollar house looks at her with eyes somewhere between the scornful ones that stared at Sara from the pews and the glazed ones of Peter’s daughter. It is as if Laila has sinned in every plate she serves, in every cup she fills. The pastor tips her 10%.
In the back of house, where the hordes of after-church-diners can’t reach them, the servers have prepared a feast. There are casseroles that were assembled after close the night before, cakes soggy with melted frosting that didn’t have time to cool, and enough deviled eggs to feed a small militia.
As they scarf down bits between running food, between wiping tables, between stirring sauces, they laugh and praise and forget, for just a moment, that everyone hates them for working Easter Sunday. Sara tells Laila why this is the one day a year she doesn’t mind leaving her son to work. Peter eats a piece of cake before sneaking a piece into a to-go box for his daughter. Mike, the dishwasher, catches him and says nothing.
Janey, who never messes up anything, accidentally doubles three separate tickets. “I must need new glasses!” she says with a wink as she walks out from behind the line and plops buffalo wings next to an assortment of cookies.
For these people, today is a celebration. Today is a gathering. Today is a communion.
Today they are serving others, today they are late on their rent, today their daughters are smoking weed and their tables aren’t tipping and their babies are opening baskets without them. But today, Easter Sunday, they share a holy understanding. Today, they are all indisputably aware that they are not alone, and that they have each other.
Raised in the land of snow and lakes, Lilia Anderson mainly writes about stubborn people in stubborn towns. She currently lives in Denver with a lot of books and a very handsome man. Her work can be found in 86 Logic, Feels Blind Literary, Blood & Bourbon, and more.
I’ve always loved the way the witch alders, studding the bypass shoulders by the airport, grow red in the fall, their scarlet tentacles the shade of afternoon. It’s too bad they belong to you.
The black gum trees across from the police station crawl like wooly tarantula legs into the pale sky, but I rarely see them now, the way I don’t see the fog-breathed gas station beer cave, the red sushi sign.
I have the grocery store that never had your pretzels, the car wash with the spidering palm tree logo, the small manmade lake near the gas company that in late fall collects ducks like misshapen stars.
I can’t go to the bigger hardware store, the one cottoned with spring flowers on the sidewalk next to the Italian place. You could be there, although you weren’t one for fixing things.
I gave up the library; you gave me the new liquor store. I know you shop at the supermarket lined with evergreens; you may as well live there, so I never go. Instead I watch the sunrise, knowing the sunset will become yours.
Devon Neal (he/him) is a Kentucky-based poet whose work has appeared in many publications, including HAD, Livina Press, The Storms, and The Bombay Lit Mag, and has been nominated for Best of the Net. He currently lives in Bardstown, KY with his wife and three children.
I hope you are with me when the long sleep comes. The thick warmth of memory on our eyelids, like sunlight pressed to the backs of leaves. The faces we have known blurring into gentle shadows. Words, frozen like footprints in evening snow, still behind us in the dark valley. The love that we have been, rising, naked, into the air.
Jane Hahn lives and writes in the Midwestern United States. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Concord Ridge, Detroit Lit Mag, The Other Journal, and Theophron, among others. More can be found at janethegrey.wordpress.com.
Fifty naked women are marching down Fourteenth Street. Their bodies are a symphony, rounded like cellos or sleek and silver as flutes. Their chant is a chorus, rising to crescendo, their voices cured in oak. Through intersections and insults, over cigarette butts and tossed paper cups of cold coffee, the women swerve, swoop, resettle, a flock of starlings.
From the sidewalk, a man in a pinstripe suit and a starched cotton shirt is filming the march. He traps the women’s images for the same reasons he once trapped hibernating cicadas in a pickle jar: to rip them from context, to expose their hideous angles and ungainly bumps to his followers.
In her cubicle, the man’s assistant is watching the video. The naked women are a stand of trees, dappled and leafed, reforesting the gray city blocks. She wonders what it would be like to wear her skin like the women do, like it is a pinstripe suit or a starched cotton shirt. What it would be like to care about something so much that she would march her clotted thighs and the inked name of her dead mother past a man like her boss, knowing this presentation of herself and her nerve will make him want to fuck her and kill her in equal parts. Doing it anyway.
The march is rolling south, but before their bodies leave the camera’s view, she sees a woman lift her long, gray braid from where it hangs down her back. She flings it upward like it is a string on a kite, like it might catch the wind and send her sailing through sky.
Joanna Theiss is a writer living in Washington, D.C. Her short stories and flash fiction have appeared in publications such as Peatsmoke, Bending Genres, The Florida Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, Fictive Dream, and Best Microfiction 2022. Before devoting herself to writing full time, Joanna worked as a lawyer, practicing criminal defense and international trade law. You can find book reviews, links to her published works, and images of the collages she makes from tiny squares at www.joannatheiss.com.
it was just a fling, we tell ourselves as our brains ramp up and spiral down, our hearts shooting blood through our veins, racing past our hyperventilating diaphragms to our toes and back around to our heads, and we can’t believe our bodies can feel so high and so low at the same time—telling ourselves they won’t call or text or send smoke signals no matter how much we stare at our phones or out our windows, hoping for some hidden message in puffed clouds
but all we see are a scattering of dead black flies on our windowsills, and we want to join them: our legs up in the air, our bodies, empty husks, drained of fluid and need.
Melissa Llanes Brownlee (she/her), a native Hawaiian writer living in Japan, has work published and forthcoming in The Rumpus, Fractured Lit, Flash Frog, Gigantic Sequins, Cream City Review, Cincinnati Review miCRo, Indiana Review, The ASP Bulletin, Craft, swamp pink, Pinch and Moon City Review, and honored in BestSmallFictions, BestMicrofictions, and Wigleaf Top 50. Read Hard Skin from Juventud Press and Kahi and Lua from Alien Buddha. She tweets @lumchanmfa and talks story melissallanesbrownlee.com.
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