It’s Sunday morning and my wife and I are sitting on a beach looking at Lake Michigan, but it’s not relaxing. We’re listening to a sermon instead of the waves. Our church holds its services here in the summer, and our pastor, Dave Pickett, is going on about “God’s needs.” I’m not sure what they are. I got distracted by the man sitting in the chair in front of me who is getting a sunburn on the top of his head.
The man’s name is Henry, I think. I’ve seen him around. He’s north of seventy, I’d guess, and the top of his head is already dotted with moles that make me nervous to think too much about. It feels like looking at myself in twenty years. Maybe less at the rate I’m slowing down.
Dave leads a prayer, and one of the legs of my chair sinks into the sand when I shift my weight. Farther down the beach there’s a young couple throwing a ball into the lake for their dog. They’re not part of the service. Probably tourists. I was in the parking lot before the service started, and I heard the two of them talking about a boat in the harbor. The “U.S.S. Whatever the Fuck”, she’d called it. He’d laughed and then grabbed her ass, and then she’d laughed too. When the congregation starts singing, they look over at us, and I’m embarrassed by how we must seem to them.
After the song, Dave points up at the sky and says, “God needs us to need him.” I’m not sure what that means, but it reminds me of a story I read once about how God must be vain. My wife sits up straighter when Dave looks at her and says, “Amen.”
After that, I look out at the lake, over the concrete walkway that leads to the old lighthouse. You can’t tell from this distance, but the lighthouse is covered in bird shit. You only have to get about halfway down the walkway to see the white streaks against the faded red paint. A lot of tourists turn around before they make it all the way there.
Dave is wrapping up his sermon now. He’s talking about humility, or something. We’re going to sing another song, and I want the young couple to move on before we start. Instead, they sit next to each other in the sand and watch their dog swimming. My wife is watching Dave.
When we stand, I notice the top of Henry’s head is getting pinker.
Ben Lockwood is an ecologist at Penn State University. He’s also a socialist, unionist, and prison abolitionist. Ben’s fiction appears (or is forthcoming) in Little Blue Marble, Tree and Stone Magazine, Creepy Podcast, and others. You can find Ben wasting time on various social medias.
My father stands at the center of distant summers woven from spruce trees and knee-high weeds and sizzling streaks of honeybees. Alone.
I see the sapphire sky, his greying stubble, his scalp studded with sweat. I hear his voice in the prairie silence. Monosyllabic in most settings, he brims with words in the bee yard, unsolicited lectures on the curative effects of propolis, the difference between capped and brood cells, burr and bridge comb.
I nod through his lessons. He knows I’m not listening.
He lights the edge of a newspaper and furls it into a cone that he blows down, making it puff like an herbal healer’s pipe. He slips it into the smoker, followed by a handful of cedar shavings. The shavings cling to the fissures between his bratwurst fingers. His hands are graceless in any context but this.
He puffs the smoker three times. The leather bellows rasp. The spout groans cedar smoke that rises warm and sweet over the abandoned Philpott yard, where he keeps thirty-two beehives, and where he brought me today to see a queen.
I hate the Philpott house. The windows are smashed. The paint and shingles have peeled. Canola grows in the fields the family once owned, and my father’s bees pollinate their loss.
He comforts me. “Don’t worry. They were an ordinary family. Nothing tragic about them.”
“So why’d they leave?”
“Who knows? Maybe they needed a fresh start.”
Three boxes make a beehive, and there are nine frames to a box. Stitches of wax hold each frame tight to the wood, and bee glue turns the boxes into a single tower that he methodically deconstructs. Unbroken focus at every step. Never a centimetre off. An almost reverent precision that I wish my mother could see when he forgets their anniversary, or lets slip an off-colour remark he doesn’t apologize for, or coughs in movie theaters, or nods impatiently at check-out tills, or when she complains that he only married her because of her looks.
A flutter of cedar smoke. The bees grow louder. He assures me they’re calm, and I believe him. His word is as true as the maneuvers that clear away the excess wax and pry each frame from its container. He never wears gloves. When stung on the hand, he uses his metal hive tool to pinch out the venom sac without spilling a drop, a sober exactness that amazes me every time I see it.
Six frames in, he smiles behind his veil. “Here she is.” He pushes his index finger into the fizzing rectangle of bees. “She’s a beauty,” my father whispers. “See her?”
I see her. She’s marked on the head with a dollop of pink paint. While the drones vibrate madly, she strolls through them with elegance, hauling a thorax twice as long as theirs. Sunlight hits her back and spins a radial of gold that looks like a wedding ring, evaporating.
Owen Schalk is a writer from rural Manitoba. He is a columnist at Canadian Dimension magazine and has contributed to non-fiction publications including Jacobin, Liberated Texts, and Monthly Review. His fiction work has appeared in Quagmire Literary Magazine, antilang., Fairlight Books, and others. His book on Canada’s role in the war in Afghanistan will be published by Lorimer Books in September 2023.
Leave the office. Get in the elevator. Hold your breath as you feel your stomach lurch into your throat. Make a dash for the exit. In the car, wait for the traffic to move. Collapse on the sofa with a glass of wine. Try to let your mind go blank. It’ll be okay. Your therapist said things are getting better. The anxiety attacks, the mad runs to the toilet every few hours to throw up, they are beginning to subside. You are getting better. You are getting better.
Each day stretches into the next without much distinction. What few hours of sleep you do manage are plagued by scenes of faceless men drowning in a darkness that persists into wakefulness. Todd will be coming round soon. You tried to distance yourself, the unread messages stacking up on your hardly-used phone, but still he turns up each week: husband from a life you’ve left behind, now returning with guilt and flowers. It’s not him, you think. It’s the hayfever. It’s the stress of work.
You haven’t broken up. Not technically. You just can’t seem to remember where he fits within the chaos that your life has become. He moved out a week after your brother died. Wanted to give you space, as he put it, and the gap has simply never been closed. Now he is here again, unable to stay away when the only thing you need is time alone, and you have to remind yourself how to smile.
You take the flowers and, when he’s not looking, dump them in the trash. The smell of wilted roses masked by rotting fruit. He asks how things are going, and you say they’re getting better. The hallucinations have stopped, and you are beginning to picture your brother in a better light. Before the bridge. Before the water took his body.
”That’s good,” Todd says. You want to punch him. You want to grab him and tell him everything you’re feeling, and then you want him to fuck you just like he’s talked about fucking countless other women. You remember how alive they had sounded in his stories. The women back at uni with blond hair and big tits and a solid grasp of reality, abandoning themselves to the moment. How far removed they seem from your own attempts at a subdued life.
Could that really have been you? The makeup and expensive dinners. The countless dates while Todd pleaded for your attention. Those years existed, of course, hidden somewhere amongst the naivety of blossoming romance, but now they hardly seem real. As if you’re remembering a fiction of a life, played out on a theatre screen to an empty room.
You sit there listening to him talk, or rather not listening but imagining the two of you upstairs in the bed you’ve hardly used. ”I have tickets to a play,” he says, and you’re not paying attention, so you nod. ”It’s a date.” He seems happier after that. As if this alone is proof of your recovery. He tells you about a piece he’s working on—a new take on Cheval—and for once you can understand. It’s getting dark now, but he doesn’t make any move to leave. It’s okay. You weren’t planning on sleeping anyway.
Two days pass in a whirlwind of toilet stalls and terror. You long for the day you can find the mundanity in it all. The day when the world comes crashing down around you, and instead of filling you with blackness, it takes you with it, and you look back with every ounce of clarity that has been taken from you.
When it’s time to meet Todd, you think about backing out. But he’ll only come and find you. ”It’s for your own good,” he’ll say, and you won’t have the heart to say no, won’t have the guts.
You wish he would stop trying to help. He believes he can control everything around him. Every problem he sees, including you, is something to be fixed. How blissful it would be to live in such ignorance.
It’s cold out, and you find him smoking at the back of the queue.
”You look nice,” he says, and although you know it’s not true, you manage to smile awkwardly.
”I thought of you as soon as I saw the advert,” he says, ”it’s about a girl who grows up on a remote island. When she comes to the mainland, she has a breakdown and has to be sectioned.”
Is he joking? He must be joking. You were just telling him how much better you’re doing. Why would he put that in jeopardy now? But you don’t have the nerve to leave and so you slowly inch along until you’re sitting in the theater and the play’s about to start.
He was right, of course. You could see yourself in the girl on stage. You could see yourself in the tired way she moved, and the heavy bags under her eyes. You could see yourself in the countless times she had been through the same performance, repeated ad nauseam until everything lost its meaning. You are comforted in this way. Knowing that there are other people out there, forced into the same endless cycles, all trying to appear sane.
You try to tell him this, to thank him for bringing you, but he doesn’t understand. He thinks you’re disparaging the play.
”I knew it was a mistake,” he says. ”I should never have brought you.”
There is no point arguing, so you keep quiet, and then the two of you are back at your flat. He’s put a record on, and you’re drinking another bottle of Bordeaux. The sound and taste of all the sophistication that has lost its appeal. You try to remember a time long ago, when he was still young and the madness had not yet set in. It’s like trying to climb a pole submerged in tar. Unfamiliar faces appear, teasing you with memories that are not, and perhaps never were your own.
You’re in the bedroom now. The sheets crack with starch as he climbs in after you. You no longer want him as you did the other night. Passion and lust are now concepts made vague by a much deeper desire that has arisen within you. Peace.
Despite this, you do not protest as he climbs on top of you. In the darkness a world of possibilities calls out, unheard over the groans of something like passion.
Afterwards, he rolls over and falls into a deep sleep. It’s late, but you’re wide awake. You think about the girl in the play, and the hundred more times she will have to give the same performance. You think of the audiences that will fail to see how tired she has become. No one is coming to save the girl. Tomorrow will come and you will leave for work. The girl will walk out on stage and you will run for the bathroom. Your time will never come, and nothing will ever change. And nothing should ever change.
Rory Perkins is a British writer focusing on shorter works about the human experience. Currently working in the energy industry, he writes whenever he can find the time, and hopes one day to publish a collection of flash fiction.
My roommate thinks I’m gay, and I haven’t corrected her. I mean, sure, Kara and I met in our fashion design class, and sure, she knows I crush on Oscar Isaac, and sure, I told her fiancé as much so he wouldn’t be jealous, and sure, I might’ve kissed him when Kara was passed out on Malbec and he and I were sharing a joint, and sure, I told him—swore to him—I wouldn’t breathe a word to her.
And so I don’t. I mean, I swore on my grandmother’s grave, and maybe she’s not technically dead yet, but it’s not like he has anything to worry about. It’s not like I’m going to brag I kissed some guy with no chin and a lopsided franken-smile. I still don’t know how he got with Kara (unless it’s his trust fund; of course it’s his trust fund) because she’s way too good for him. That’s what I’ll say when she wakes, after I hand her some Gatorade and tell her to drink up. And when she says Stop, you sound jealous, I’ll let myself blush even though I’m good about hiding that sort of thing, have known how to hide it since eighth grade and that time with Jay behind the band room, but now—now I’ll let her see the desire coloring my face, turning my lips red like the time I borrowed her makeup. And I’ll want her to say she understands, to not pull away saying she needs a shower, to not shoo me out even though she’s been naked in front of me tons before, to not click the bathroom door shut so I can’t smell her body wash, leaving me on the other side thinking about my promise to her fiancé, about the word fiancé and how cloying it sounds—so fucking French and upper class—and I’ll realize they’re probably made for each other, right?
Or maybe I do tell her about the kiss, but not until she has downed her Gatorade and three Advil and is munching on the avocado toast she loves, thanking me for being such a good roommate then pausing when she sees my face darken. What is it? she’ll say. Tell me. So I’ll sit down and hold her hands and say I didn’t mean to hurt her, because isn’t that what they say in the movies? And sure, she’ll laugh at first, as if I’m fucking with her, until I tell her it was all my fault, until I insist that I’m the one to blame, and maybe I am, though of course she won’t believe that. She’s seen the warning signs for months now—not that her fiancé likes guys, but that he can’t be trusted, could never be trusted. Wasn’t he in another relationship when they first got together? Wasn’t she the other woman, maybe she’s always been the other woman? That’s what her eyes will say when she says thank you, just murmurs it, then says she needs to be alone. And I’ll realize what a stupid thing I’ve done, all over a kiss, and not a very good one—lasted only seconds with barely any tongue—and her bedroom door will click shut like it never does and there’s nothing left to do but slide the remains of her avocado toast into the trash.
Or no, I really don’t tell her, not when she wakes up the next morning, her hair smelling of weed, a string of drool plastered across her cheek. I say she looks like shit, but she hears the love in my voice, so she showers and calls me into the bathroom to tell me I simply have to join her at her bachelorette party, and I sit on the toilet and smell her cantaloupe body wash and say sure, why not, even though I’m not up for it, even though the party will end with me crammed into the corner booth at The Eagle, empty shot glasses scattered around us, and her girlfriend Tiffany next to me, insisting I switch teams for the night. And sure, I might be tempted, but it’s Tiff. Tiff, who still attends Young Republican meetings, who’s engaged to some MBA who everybody knows she’ll divorce in two years, Tiff who wears fucking body glitter—and there’s no way I’d let that rub off on me even if she is hot—so yeah, I might be tempted, but by then Kara will be crying, bawling huge drunk girl tears about whether she’s ready—really ready—and I’ll want to scream NO! but instead I’ll say Look at me girlfriend and snap my fingers in my best parody of the queen they think I am, and I’ll say You’ve got this though of course she doesn’t, none of us do. And if I let anything slip about how I kissed her fiancé, it’ll be later, to Tiff, when I lean into her mouth even though I know I shouldn’t since Tiff can’t keep a fucking secret about anything, and it won’t be out of spite, no matter what everyone says.
Joshua Jones Lofflin’s writing has appeared in The Best Microfiction, The Best Small Fictions, The Cincinnati Review, CRAFT, Fractured Lit, Moon City Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. He lives in Maryland. Find him on Twitter @jjlofflin or visit his website: jjlofflin.com
He put his socks on first. I’d never seen anyone dress that way before. Standing in the middle of the wavy blue rug in front of his bed, he pulled on one after the other without losing his balance.
We lived two buildings apart in the same apartment complex, but to get here, we used Grindr.
Once we tapped each other, he made me comfortable and horny enough with dirty talk and dick pics to walk over—I wouldn’t have gone, if he wasn’t so close—then into the bedroom, to sit on the bed and kiss me mid-sentence.
I never knew when to shut up: You taste, like, so good.
So good that words crumbled into grunts and breaths and yelps so fast that I couldn’t stop, didn’t want to. Nor did he, until he found an angle that allowed him to finish.
When he pulled out, I didn’t feel lessened or empty or shamed, but open and relaxed and warm and—
He was dressing. After the socks, he found his underwear wadded at the foot of the bed, where I lay uncovered and easy.
“God,” I said, as he slid his tan, muscled leg into his jeans, “that was like… I don’t ever want to move.”
His shirt was on now, blotted and purple. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I have to pack. I’m moving tomorrow.”
“Like, to another building?”
“Another state. Out west, a fifteen-hour drive.”
I felt exposed only then, the sheets around my knees, the a/c’s chilling touch at my waist.
While I dressed, he put books into boxes and totes I hadn’t noticed earlier.
“If you don’t want to sleep alone, I’ll be just over there.” I pointed across the grassy courtyard.
He said thanks, and I walked home through the sticky, pulsating night, wondering how long he had wanted me out of there.
Lukas Tallent is the author of The Compromising Position. His work has recently appeared in Fast Pop Lit, Door is a Jar, Maudlin House, and many other places. He writes the substack, LTXXX, and lives in New York City.
Mama always called me a lost little bird. Said my first month of life I held my mouth agape in colic, chirping for more but never getting enough. As a child, I lived with all my belongings sprawled out on the floor, preferring my drawers and closet empty, opening and shutting them endlessly, looking for something.
And so I moved through life with my breadcrumbs trailing to nowhere. I watched other people’s lives. I could tell you what petiteSami19 wore last week in every outfit video, or the story of live_luv_heal chronicling her cancer diagnosis and the exact moment she started losing her hair, or every step professorcrafter took to transform an old pair of jeans into a mini-skirt, but could I do it myself? Nope.
What did I want in life? Perhaps if I scrolled a little more, I’d find an answer. That’s how I ended up in this drippy black-lit basement of a forgotten, boarded up house near campus.
“So what’ll it be?” Dr3amM4ker said, voice soft, almost imperceptible. A friendly painted face smiled, fluorescent in the black light. A midnight blue starburst surrounded one eye, bright pink the other.
“I’m sorry?” I said.
“What dream do you want?” The pink eye looked at me.
“Isn’t that why I’m here? Isn’t that why I’m paying you?” My finger poked the foam through a crack in the vinyl chair.
They sighed. “When you were a kid, what did you wanna be when you grew up?”
I’ll never forget Mama’s red-hot face at career day in fifth grade. I stood before the room full of parents, lacking a costume, and proclaimed my desire to remain a child the rest of my life. I felt the heat radiating off of Mama’s face on the drive home. Her silence burned deep.
I ripped out a piece of foam and rolled it between my fingers. “Nothing.” I said.
“Hmm.” Dr3amM4ker’s neon nails drummed the cooler top they used as a desk. The blue eye surveyed me. “That’ll cost you more. A dream from scratch. I can’t remember the last time…”
“I’ve given you all the money I have.”
Maybe I should have listened to Mama. She told me to study pharmacy. Her feeds touted job security, decent pay, the good it will do for the aging population. She told me this while scrolling on her phone.
She said, “You might as well do something that lets you enjoy life a bit.”
What life? I thought. My whole life was out there already, hundreds of childhood photos Mama posted. Me at my first soccer game, huddled with the team, her caption Future Mia Hamm! But I only remembered plucking dandelions on the field, leaving with pockets full of dirt, the scent of earth lingering on my fingers. After one game, a worm escaped my pocket and crawled across the car console and onto Mama’s arm. She yelped and reached for it, but I beat her to it. I shoved the worm in my mouth. She told me to spit it out. I swallowed.
My major remained undeclared.
The vinyl moaned beneath me as I shifted to extract my wallet. “I have meal tickets. I’ll give you my card.”
“No. I can’t do that. What will you do with yourself then, without food?” Dr3amM4ker said.
“What will I do with myself, living a life I don’t know how to live?”
The drumming nails stopped.
The pink eye engulfed me.
“You dream.”
I never told Mama I failed two classes last semester. What was the point of attending if the work only fed the entangled path of breadcrumbs that lead to nowhere? I couldn’t bear to see Mama’s red-hot face again. For her to see that I was nothing but a mockingbird, faking my way through. That I wasn’t bold and strong like the goddess Diana, as she called me, saying my moon blood would make me move tides, be fertile, bear children, change the world.
A burden had pressed so heavily on my chest all I could do was empty my closet and crawl in. A burden that perhaps a dream, any dream would lift.
“Occasionally, I allow an exchange of dreams but…” Dr3amM4ker drummed their nails again.
We agreed the meal tickets would suffice.
“Lie back now and close your eyes.”
“Will it hurt?” I asked.
“Maybe a little tingle. Although, not all dreams are painless.” They affixed tubes to my nose. The pink and blue starburst eyes shimmered in the dark.
A switch clicked.
A machine hummed.
A warmth coursed through my body and beads of sweat dotted my skin.
“Tell me, what do you see?” They asked.
I inhaled. Let the air fill my lungs. Let it seep into my mouth and cool my tongue. The scent left me breathless. “Earthworms emerge from their winter sleep. And the rain is warm, the first of spring.”
“Good. Keep going.”
But my throat caught. Words wouldn’t form. All I could do was chirrup. Pink and blue swirled around me. I was in the air, then on the ground. I smacked my lips. I kissed the soil. An earthy taste squished in my mouth.
I awoke to darkness. To an ache in my head that ran down my spine. I groaned and rolled over. My fingers held the scent of the earth. The moon cast pale light across my bedroom floor and to my closet. The door ajar. Standing up, I cradled my aching head in my hand and stepped carefully over my belongings scattered across the floor. I reached the door. I slid it open. What I found released from me a barking laughter, sent my belly aflutter. A single dandelion laid on the closet floor, glowing in the moonbeam like a miniature sun.
Abigail Kemske (she/her) is a writer from the suburbs of Minneapolis, Minnesota. She finds endless inspiration for her stories wandering around the forests surrounding her home. When she isn’t writing, she can be found hiking, biking, or spending time with her spouse, two children, and their cat.
Wrapped in blankets that smell like soap and soft bread, my baby comes home with me. This bundle, this speck of a thing, looms so large and heavy in my arms. Right now, mountains of expectations—to do right by him—make my breath shallow, my throat dry.
The nurse says I must breastfeed, but I can only squeeze a few drops of colostrum, and I’m told that’s good—that’s something. But it’s not enough, and I’m drying up. They tell me to drink more water. I drink gallons. Still, nothing—and the baby screams for food. So, I express what I can, a few drops, a teaspoon maybe, but the milk is running out.
The nurse calls every day. She tells me to keep trying—that women who resort to other things just aren’t trying hard enough—not drinking enough water.
From my window, I see dust rise up over the mountains, entering through the tiny cracks in my house. It feels like rain, settling on my countertops, lightly coating the bathtub. I gather it in my hands and mix it with the drops I can pump, but it’s still not enough. I resort to eating the dust, mixing it with water, but nothing suffices. Water’s not the problem. It’s not the answer, either.
Each day, the dust falls thicker. It covers the floors, the windowsills, the bedsheets. The baby and I need a jacket. Not because it’s cold, but because we need shelter from the particles that keep falling. They cover our skin and make us itch, the skin flaking like more dust, our flesh raw.
Driving into town for a jacket, I see a restaurant sign that says, “Eat Big Food.” I stop in to see if more food will help because water certainly doesn’t. My tiny baby shivers and coughs while people around me shake their heads and murmur, “Poor baby. Looks like your mother doesn’t feed you.” Grease drips from their burgers while dust mounds in heaps on the floor. The plates and napkin holders on the tables are caked in it. A woman in a booth near the window chugs a carafe of water and wheezes. Two others slump at the counter, gripping empty glasses.
The wind picks up when we go outside, and the dust swirls like entire deserts set loose. I search for the horizon, but the wind and sand—all the particles of everything around me—press so hard, so compactly against my body and the one I carry. They push us, and all of the people around us, together into one tall mound, until our lungs fill with dust and each particle becomes a new cell that closes our breath. The baby crumbles. A voice in the wind whips itself around, still asking, “Did you really try?” Its hollow sound echoes, reverberating through the bones in my now-empty arms.
Cecilia Kennedy (she/her) is a writer who taught English and Spanish in Ohio for 20 years before moving to Washington state with her family. Since 2017, she has published stories in international literary magazines and anthologies. Her work has appeared in Maudlin House, Tiny Molecules, Rejection Letters, Kandisha Press, Ghost Orchid Press, and others. You can follow her on Twitter @ckennedyhola.
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.
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.
Vast 