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.
If you catch a frog, eat its legs. If you’re hungry, eat the rest. It doesn’t matter how cool the frog is—its little balloon eyes, how its skin is alien green, how its neck bulges and smooths, how it chime-burps on early spring nights, how a clump of grass transmogrifies into a frog. None of that matters. Frogs are food. You can eat them raw and use the bones to make arrowheads or stilettos or gigs and get yourself more. Frogs aren’t companions, not the way say, a dog, or a cat, or a rat, or a squirrel, or a raccoon is—even if you could grab one of those, and drag it close, and cocoon it in your arms, and tuck your chin over its back, its hot heart twitching next to your chest, you would have to eat it, eventually. This is the apocalypse. You are surviving.
If you encounter manufactured goods—congratulations! If you can get into a car, you can sleep in it; if you curl up tight enough, no one will know you are there. The radiator fluid makes an effective euthanizer, always handy. The glass and gasoline are good for starting fires. The tires make sturdy sandals, and you can dress yourself in the cloth or, if you’re lucky, the leather from the seats—but don’t get used to the foam padding. It will pack down, and then you’ll miss it and be sad. If you come across something that was desirable in the before-times, be careful. Be objective. A ring may have been important once, may have been precious, even—but in the after-world, it is dead weight.
If you encounter other people, be really careful. You may have compatible skills and interests, you may want help getting shelter or provisions—you may be lonely. This is understandable. But remember: other people caused this apocalypse. If it were up to you, your plans would have worked out, people wouldn’t have suggested taking a little time or reconsidering things. But the apocalypse happened, and here you are, collapsed in this empty lot, half-submerged in a puddle, soaked with freezing dew, wearing the same clothes you’ve had on since it happened, your stomach grinding dry, a sticky grit coating your neck and chest and hair and teeth—spurned and gazing at a frog.
Anne Louise Pepper is a writer and former educator who lives in the Pacific Northwest. Her work can be found in failbetter and The Citron Review.
I fail the antonyms quiz. One question asks if my father is absent or present. I circle both. Another asks if my mother is kind or unkind. I write, “I don’t know.”
My teacher’s eyes narrow behind her black-framed spectacles. She tosses my paper on my desk. “Your answers are not funny.”
“It’s the truth. My father is mostly absent,” I tell her.
Her nostrils flare and she snorts. “Just because he’s gone temporarily doesn’t mean he’s absent.”
After Appa calls to say he’ll be late returning from work, Amma says we’re going to Kavi Aunty’s. She asks me to wear the purple-and-yellow-checked pinafore―an outfit she sewed using a magazine picture and her trusty Singer―because the lady is foreign returned. Amma also instructs me to be on my best behavior.
Aunty shows me her golden-haired, blue-eyed doll. When I pull on the string attached to her back, the doll blinks her dark lashes and sings, “I love you.” I pull-pull on the string. The doll repeats the words, again and again, until the string comes off in my hand and she doesn’t speak any more. Amma watches me through narrowed eyes, clenches and unclenches her fists.
On our way home, she mutters through tight lips, “You were so good today. Such a well behaved girl. Of course Kavi will invite us again.”
Some opposites are easier to understand. For up and down, our teacher puts a book on top of her desk and then on the floor. For short and tall, she makes the tallest student in the class stand next to the shortest one. She taught us the opposite of responsible is irresponsible with the story The Ant and the Grasshopper. I like that opposites are also called antonyms.
I’m coming home after returning a book at my friend’s when I see the fox―beady eyes gleaming, teeth bared in a snarl―just inside our door.
“Amma, there’s a scary animal in our house,” I scream.
She smacks her forehead, then picks up the animal; she, who doesn’t even like our neighbor’s little Pomeranian.
In the living room, Appa’s glued to the news.
“What a wonderful gift you’ve brought your daughter,” Amma says. “A stuffed animal! Just perfect.”
Appa turns up the volume. “There’s talk of rain and floods,” he says. “They say this one will be big. I must go to my mother’s.”
Amma walks into the kitchen, turns the faucet on full force.
Appa spends weekends helping my grandmother. He takes her shopping. He helps her find a plumber or an electrician, waits while they repair things. On Fridays, he goes to her place from work so he can take her to the bank and then stays over.
Amma rushes out of the kitchen. “Of course, you should go to your mother’s. She’s important.” She drops a pan. It clangs against the floor.
I want to ask Appa why he hasn’t learned about Amma’s opposites. But he’s listening to the news.
Sudha Balagopal‘s writing appears in CRAFT, Split Lip, and Smokelong Quarterly among other journals. Her novella-in-flash, Things I Can’t Tell Amma, was published by Ad Hoc fiction in 2021. Most recently, her novella-in-flash, Nose Ornaments, was chosen runner up in the Bath Novella in Flash Contest. She has had stories included in Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions and the Wigleaf Top 50.
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
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.
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.
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.
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