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.
Vast 