By Clare Dean

The heat was unreasonable for June, even more so for that time in the evening, as I waited in the foyer of Paddington Station for my train’s platform to be announced. My final term of university had concluded with no sense of ceremony or even achievement, blurred by the stress of an unlikely impetigo. Spinelessly, I’d agreed to a final, deflating shift at Starbucks, before slugging my way to the station to make the final train back to Gloucester. I was hot, and dehydrated, my shoulder and back sore from lugging my heavy suitcase behind me. That old feeling of claustrophobia was starting to creep in now that the journey was imminent. I was really going back there – to that static cottage, that cozy conceit, and risk-less monotony that had stultified my childhood. How would I survive the summer?

Predictably, my train had been delayed by fifteen minutes, but the suitcase was too heavy to bother moving from the announcement board. I waited, eyes fixed ahead of me, hoping, implausibly, for a correction to the delay. 

“You alright?” I startled slightly as the man, tall and imposing, faced me, his large body too close. 

“Yep.” I answered quietly, continuing to look ahead. 

“You look hot,” he said, vaguely, in his thick London accent, leaving me clueless as to whether he was referring to the heat of the evening or my attractiveness. I assumed the former, given that I was a mess, and the remains of my makeup were sliding from my face.

“It’s a very warm day.” I murmured evasively. Too many words. I should have known better. The comment invited conversation.

“Shall we go for a drink before your train? Cool you down?” he asked. I looked at him fleetingly, caught his assessment of my chest. Early thirties, casually dressed, possibly athletic. Generic. I couldn’t have pulled him out of a lineup. But reasonable. In different circumstances, I may have said yes.

“I can’t, I’m waiting for the last train. It’ll be here soon.”

“Where you going?” I deflated another inch. Why was he asking? He must have known it was intrusive. But being rude felt more dangerous than answering.

“Gloucester.” I hoped he wasn’t waiting for the same train. I tried to convince myself he was just a chancer, trying to pick up a woman for the weekend. He’d probably just emerged from after-work drinks like most remaining commuters.

“You a student?” he asked.

“Yep.” I kept my eyes on a pigeon waddling in front of me, pecking at an Upper Crust paper bag.

“What you studying?” There was no harm in telling him. I’d finished the course. 

“English.” 

“What you gonna do with that?” he asked with casual curiosity. People without arts degrees always asked this. The question had plagued me for three years. It was the topic of every conversation with my parents, who pushed me towards a career in teaching. Respectable, not too high reaching. 

“Not sure yet.” Come on train. Give me a platform. 

“Job market’s tough. That’s why I’m here. Meeting a mate whose gonna hook me up with a new gig.”

“Ah.” I murmured again, tiredly. How hadn’t he understood that I wasn’t interested, that I was waiting for my train?

“Yeah, it’s tough, cos I just got out of prison.” He said it so casually, as if it couldn’t possibly be alarming. “Some bitch made up a story.” I tensed, and my stomach did something weird, unnecessarily flagging the danger. “Aggravated assault.” Get away from this man! “What’s your name?” he asked, and though I didn’t want to tell him, I knew I couldn’t chance angering the man who’d just got out of prison for assault.

“Sally.” My mother’s name. The first name that sprung to mind.

“Nice to meet you Sally, I’m Isaac.” He offered a hand, displaying slightly yellowed teeth in a barely bothered smile. We shook, the contact feeling too intimate in this thing we were both doing. Unwittingly unified. His skin was too skin-like, too much himself for me to touch. Acid bubbled around my esophagus as my stomach re-cramped itself. 

“This train’s taking a while to come up.” I sighed impatiently to stifle any signs of panic, while reminding him that I’d be leaving any moment, that I wasn’t worth the conversation.

“Yeah, but you know, you could come with me for a drink, and party after I meet my mate.” He suggested, looking around, distracted, perhaps looking for his friend, or maybe for the next woman to try, knowing I’d decline.

“It’s the last train.” I hated how apologetic I sounded, desperate to not agitate him. Tiny spots started crowding into the edges of my vision from heat, rising fear, and the constant crisscrossing of bodies in front of me.

“Yeah, I know but you could go tomorrow instead. Stay with me at my mate’s.” I wondered how often this tactic worked with women. Was he playing a numbers game? Asking every woman who was on her own to stay the night with him, figuring that eventually, someone stupid enough would agree? 

“I’m… expected. I can’t. Thanks though.”

“You’re Alison, right?” Silence. The spots in front of my eyes multiplied and multiplied again, twisting furiously like agitated maggots. How does he know my real name?

“No, Sally.” I reminded him.

“Ah, right yeah.” He sounded suspicious. Does he know who I am? Finally, finally, the board blinked back the number 8.

“Ah! That’s my train. Nice to meet you.” I garbled, not looking at Isaac as I grabbed the handle of my suitcase and yanked it behind me. Mercifully, he didn’t follow me, didn’t call after me. He just evaporated, like a threat I’d defeated on a video game before I moved onto another level. He was just a man who had happened upon my name by accident. All that panic ‘such a fuss about nothing’ as my mother would have told me. Surely, I wouldn’t see him again.

                                                               *   *   *

Clare Dean is a British writer living in Vermont, USA where she is also a portrait artist and publishing consultant. Her first co-authored novel will publish in 2024 with Level 4 Press.

By Mike Lee

When we entered through the roof entrance, the interior of the abandoned Deluxe Theater was as dark as an Egyptian night. Our flashlights beamed like lasers while we descended the spiral stairs to the balcony on the left side of the stage.

The metal creaked with each step.

Price shrugged and said, “Look at the bright side of the abyss. Once you fall in, you won’t be here anymore.”

Hearing that sentiment is an excellent way to start the adventure. Price is fun like that. His favorite song is Beyond Belief, by Elvis Costello and the Attractions. He constantly plays it on the cassette deck of his gold Camaro.

Sometimes, he’s kind and rewinds to play it again. It’s like he’s always looking for the Alice mentioned in the song.

He once had a girlfriend named Alyce. She left him for better pastures.

In these ruins, he found his wonderland instead.

My first visit to the Deluxe was when I was in seventh grade. On school holidays, Mom would take me to her job at a surgeon’s office across from St. Joseph’s Hospital on Biltmore Avenue. She would set me loose, giving me bus money and an extra dollar.

On that day, I went straight to Pack Square, and after stealing cigarettes from the corner store, I saw some kids breaking into the just-closed movie theater on Patton Avenue. I joined in, and we trashed the place until a couple of cops walked in on us. We scattered through the rear exit into the back alley and got away.

That is when Price and I met.

The stench of urine and rotting wood permeated the landing. Jill Greene, a slight, freckled girl who habitually wore halters and track shorts in the summer and went heavy on the patchouli, yelped when the flooring cracked as she stepped into the balcony.

“Step lightly, people,” said Price. “Down this way.”

We followed him down the marble stairs. The carpeting was long gone, and the steps were slippery from water leaks.

The seats had been pulled out years ago; the floor was bare except for teenage and druggie debris. Jill immediately found a nickel bag of what turned out to be skunk weed when she unrolled it.

“Somebody just took a shit on the floor,” said Price. “No, really. Fresh shit.”

“Yeah, I smell it,” I said.

I turned my flashlight toward where the stench originated and spotted a figure behind the frayed rose curtain on the edge of the screen.

Jill flashed on something on the ground in front of her. “Somebody’s discarded works.”

“Probably who ran,” I said.

“Shouldn’t we leave?” Jill said.

“Nah,” said Price, scanning the floor with his flashlight. “Maybe the junkie left his roll somewhere.”

We joined him, wandering through the old theater, looking for anything like a bedroll or a backpack. I found nothing except more discarded needles and the remains of rotting half-eaten food in Styrofoam containers.

“He’s probably hiding behind the curtains or the stage,” Price said.

“I’m not going back there,” Jill said.

“Suit yourself, man,” Price said with an edge of confidence. He went behind the curtain.

We could see the light behind the curtain, moving like a giant firefly before disappearing behind the stage.

Jill moved closer to me and whispered, “I want to get the fuck out of here.”

“He’s our ride, so we stay.”

When we returned to the roof, we split the money. Price said he found the junkie on the nod, curled up under the stage. He told us he found 36 dollars in the junkie’s jeans pocket, folded—12 for each of us.

We shimmed down the ladder, moved furtively down the alley, made our way to Pritchard Park, and got in the Camaro.

Jill took the back seat. I sat shotgun, mulling over a few questions I wanted to ask Price. There was something not right about this.

Price pulled out on Patton Avenue and drove us into West Asheville. He made a left on Heywood Road.

Jill rolled a doobie and passed it to me. Took a drag and felt seriously zoot.

I offered it to Price. He nodded no, cracked the windows and pushed in the Elvis Costello cassette.

I slid to elsewhere, and passed the doobie back to Jill.

*  *  *

Mike Lee is a writer and editor at a trade union in New York City. His work appears in or is forthcoming in Bright Flash Literary Review, Wallstrait, The Opiate, Roi Faineant, Brillant Flash Fiction, BULL, Drunk Monkeys, and many others. His story collection, The Northern Line, is available on Amazon.

It was just supposed to be 

a quick zip through aisle seven and back. 

Somebody said she’d moved outside Rawston somewhere after, so it never occurred to him that Tuesday before New Year that he’d turn the corner with the laundry detergent in his right hand and there was Maisy. 

“Hey,” was all he thought to say. 

“My sister needed a few things,” she half-smiled. 

There was a baby strapped onto her in one of those carrier things he didn’t know the name of. She was someone’s mom now. That was weird, and new. Fifteen years together. They never. He never thought she’d wanted one. He didn’t. Doesn’t. 

The baby bopped legs and arms in herky-jerky movements. The baby had Maisy’s curls.  

“Just getting this,” and he held up the neon plastic jug like he was proving something, as if until he’d pointed it out it’d been invisible.

Should he have said something, asked about the baby—Maisy’s baby—a name maybe? An age? He hadn’t seen any teeth when the baby had grinned at Maisy, but how old are kids when they get front teeth? Do back ones come in first? 

Maisy had bounced a bit on the balls of her feet near the stacked boxes of soda crackers; the baby laughed in reply. They made a tableau together like he’s seen mothers and kids do on TV.

“Yep, everyone needs clean clothes,” she said.

She looked tired in her eyes, but happier than she ever was their last few years. Calmer somehow.

“Good…good point. Hey, great seeing you,” he said, because he could think of nothing else to say but random inanities. The baby’s hair the exact raven black of Maisy’s the night they’d met as freshmen. He’s got some grays now.

The baby had some other guy’s eyes. Weird. He’d turned away. 

“You, too, Darvin,” she said, using her sympathy voice.

The baby kicked into cracker boxes, and the front one wobbled but didn’t fall. 

“Look what you’ve done, little cutie. Yes, you, my little cutie,” Maisy cooed and laughed.

  He ducked into aisle four; he dropped the detergent onto a random shelf. No longer any energy left for waiting in line, for another possible sighting. He couldn’t. He was outta there. 

He lightninged through electronic double doors, out of breath but not running. 

He’ll grab another detergent at the QuickShop after work tomorrow and stew about Maisy tonight.  He leans back in the tan recliner; they’d picked it for their first apartment after college. He’d liked the red one, but Maisy said tan would go with more things. She’d been right about that. About more than that, he guessed.  

He should take his mother up on her offer to reupholster it. 

“Give it a new look,” Mom had said. “Or else donate it to charity, get something new.” 

Yeah, but the chair’s the last thing left from their years together. 

He keeps the living room lights off tonight; his laptop casts a pale green light that wobbles against the opposite white wall, the same color it was when he moved in. 

Is Maisy still at her sister’s on Root Lane? Seven miles is nothing; how easily he could jump in his truck, drive out that way. Just to see. 

He presses back into the tan upholstery, but there’s nowhere further to go. It was far easier when he could think of Maisy as alone, like him, near Rawston at night.

He feels it in his gut: Maisy’s gone home to the man whose eyes the baby shares. Their baby.

By Melanie Faith

                                                          *   *   *

Melanie Faith is a night-owl writer and editor who likes to wear many hats, including as a poet, photographer, professor, and tutor. Three of her craft books about writing were published by Vine Leaves Press in 2022, including her latest, From Promising to Published. She enjoys ASMR videos, reading, teaching online writing classes, and tiny houses. Learn more at https://melaniedfaith.com/ .

By Kellene O’Hara

It’s the bath we protest. Not the water. We like water. 

We like lakes filled with green goop and yellow goop that we scoop and pour over our heads, like shampoo. We get tangled in ribbons of life beneath the surface. 

We like streams, running water that runs between our fingers. We try to catch it, but never can. 

We like the ocean where we are filled with salt and sand. Gifts from the sea. 

Home, you fill the tub with suds. 

But, tomorrow, we’ll be back outside, where the world is wild and wet and where we’re alive. 

                                                                          *   *   *

Kellene O’Hara has been published in The Fourth River, Marathon Literary Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. Her story, “Words for a Puppet,” has been published in Intermissions, an anthology from Grattan Street Press. She has an MFA in Fiction from The New School. Find her on Twitter @KelleneOHara and online at kelleneohara.com.

By Danielle Woodgate

The bed is cool, at first a wonderful surprise. I reach across the space, shifting my hand every few seconds to chase the refreshing chill hidden between the sheets, and then I remember. The bed should be full, a shared space of bodies and warmth. Normally I wake with the sheets twisted around my limbs, a pillow pressed against my back, your balmy humid breath brushing across my face. This morning the kiss of air I feel comes from the clockwise spin of the fan on high, devoid of any comfort.

My eyes remain closed against this new reality. I roll over, groping for the pillow you used. My fingers caress and pull it near my face. Nostrils flaring, I search for the remaining tendrils of your smell. Pungent, you refused to shower the other night after basketball with your friends. A hint of the curry you ate in bed; I punished you with my silence for this infraction.

Then just you. 

A smell I cannot name, yet it evokes every tender moment. 

The scent I pushed away last night.

“I can’t do this anymore,” you said. The slamming door a punctuation mark at the end of our relationship.

The pillow isn’t enough. 

It doesn’t pull me closer.

It won’t nuzzle my neck and tell me everything will be alright.

Downy feathers quickly losing any echo of you.

The cream satin pillowcase has warmed from my exhalations. Now I smell salty tears and morning breath reflected back at me. Soon the bed will have no impression of the person who once crowded its other side. 

But I will not forget. 

I’ll long to wake in a bed held by you again.

A lover encroaching on my space.

I force myself to get up. 

“A body at rest stays depressed,” my therapist says. 

The shower is icy.

 I have neither the patience nor the inclination to wait for it to reach a tepid temperature. It serves to wake me. My thoughts clearing as I start to comprehend the finality of the choices I made. 

Those words I flung like rocks, skipping across the surface of you until they finally sunk in your heart. The ripples spreading through our bond. 

I tossed a pebble to start, “It’s your fault I am so unhappy.” 

“I hate you.” Each stone growing larger.

“You have destroyed my life.” A boulder sinking immediately.

I thought we had an understanding. 

Didn’t you know the scathing words meant nothing?

It was stress speaking, not me. 

I blame my actions on an outside force. I’m not speaking these accusations; something wears my skin like a monster.

“I’m exhausted by your excuses,” you said last night.

“It isn’t me, it’s the depression speaking,” my hands fruitlessly holding onto your shirt while I push you away.

I am the creature in the bed we shared. 

You said things I wouldn’t want you to take back even if you could. 

“No one can love you if you don’t love yourself.” Your hands pulling clothes from our closet.

“You can’t rely on me for your happiness.” As you empty the medicine cabinet of your offerings.

“I cannot care for you at the cost of losing myself.” Your hand reaching for mine as I pull away first.

The truth of my life laid bare by the person I love most. 

I knew these things were inside of me; I never realized you could see them as clearly.

Forgoing my makeup, I peruse the sink for anything you left behind. 

A toothbrush. 

A fingerprint. 

A stray hair from shaving your beard. Covering the sink each morning, a reminder of our first argument, your imperfections.

Nothing, as though you never existed.

“There’s power in leaving, it’s not failing, it’s survival.” My therapist encouraged. As if she could see the things I hid even from myself. 

I dress without care for my appearance. Normally I perform my morning ritual knowing I’ll have a captive audience, a critic to express the issues with my execution. 

This morning I don’t trip on your shoes left in the middle of the hall, or reach for your damp towel over the couch, or stifle my steps in case you were out late with your friends.

The kitchen is cold. 

The coffee maker silent. 

I start to realize all the little things that are missing. 

The paper sitting on the table ready for my perusal.

A hot cup of creamer with a dash of coffee handed to my still sleepwalking body as I enter. 

You knew not to talk to me first thing in the morning. Yet you listened so well to my silence.

How did I not see this before? How did I not realize you heard what I never said? I blamed you for my melancholy, you weren’t making me better. 

Those moments of joy you gifted me, swept away so quickly with a harsh word or critique.

You lobed my insecurities back at me.

“I hope you find a way to be happy someday.” Your voice soft, an unspoken desire remaining.

My own words were filled with vitriol, why do yours sound like a dream?

You spoke as if you truly cared. 

As if you didn’t abandon me to my demons, alone in our bed. 

Only later will I realize the gift you left, of space.

*   *   *

Danielle Woodgate lives in Corcoran, Minnesota. She is a preschool teacher by day. You can find her on twitter at @woodgatewrites, her blogs daniellewoodgate.com and loudmouthmom.com, or in carline waiting to pick up her kids. She has previously published work with Factor Four Magazine, Maudlin House, and Tales from a Moonlit Path.

By Ming Wei Yeoh

When I wake up, I realize I’m looking at you. I thought it would be years before we met again, and that it would happen on a pillow of clouds, facing ivory gates. I saw it once in a dream: you, gray and repentful. Me, the same as always.

We’re in my bedroom. My arms and legs are bolted to the ceiling, but I don’t mind. Even if I could reach out and touch you—even if you begged me to—I wouldn’t. You’re stubborn, even now. Your shoulders look as hard and uninviting as I remember. 

You’re standing in the doorway and there’s nothing on your face, none of the fast, hot emotions that used to burn in the stern texture of your scars, eyebrows, chin, mouth. None of the expressions I fantasized might shoot cracks through your composure, the kind you wouldn’t be able to hide. You’re simply thinking. I wish I could read your mind. 

Mom appears behind you. She says something I can’t quite catch, and you turn and follow her out of the room. My pulse spikes. I flail in place, trying to loosen my frozen limbs. 

I’ve imagined you saying countless phrases in these first few weeks. I’m sorry, mostly, but ones that express your regrets, too. Down to the specifics—everything I’ve noted, tracked, and retained until now. I’m waiting for them to come flooding from your mouth, bitter and irrepressible.

After a minute of struggling, my body detaches from the drywall like a balloon cut loose. I drift along the ceiling until I reach the dinner table, where I find the two of you sitting over a familiar meal. Porridge, pickled vegetables, canned dace with salted beans. If I think hard enough, I can still taste the salty oil and feel the rough fish skin on my tongue. Mom cooked this on days that were especially hectic, when I had a piano recital or a soccer game or a big exam. Days we were all too preoccupied to think about food. 

She eats—in the small, slow bites of a tired woman—but your hands are in your lap. You stare out the window at the sun-bleached grass and the fluttering leaves. 

I remember a lot about that day. I remember how cold the pills felt, heaped in my palm like marbles. I remember my pulse thudding in my ears. More than anything, I remember thinking about how sorry I was going to make you—for the nights I spent studying instead of sleeping; the nights I cried until snot bubbled on my lips and my words were too botched by hiccups to decipher and you yelled and yelled. Stop crying. Get up. Keep going.

Outside, summer is having a party. Birds whistle and sing, insects meander. They socialize by your apple tree, drawn by the scent of the honey-sweet fruits. On the other side of the glass, you and Mom clear the table in silence. The clunky AC whirs in the background, shouting over all other noises. You scrape your untouched porridge back into the pot. 

After dinner, you and Mom pull away from each other, drifting to opposite ends of the house. You used to spend more time together. On summer evenings like this one, when the sun still peeks over the trees at eight or nine, the two of you would pull weeds together in the garden, speaking to each other through silence and dirt-smudged fingers.

I follow you to your office, floating almost close enough to brush the white-dusted tips of your hair. This room is so familiar, from the blinds you always kept halfway closed to the desk that sits against the far wall. You used to sit at that desk like a king on his throne, so terrifying and alluring at once to your little girl. As you shut the door, I remember the way you used to shut it every morning after breakfast and every night after dinner. I remember the tricks that enabled me to sneak past it, that white wood wall: breaking the tip of my pencil so that you’d let me use the sharpener on your desk, asking for your help on math problems I already knew how to solve. And I remember, forever ago, standing on my tip-toes by your desk, trying to stick my pencil into the sharpener, and feeling your arms wrap around me and lift me into the air. Your laugh, a rare gift, is tucked into a pocket of my mind, as clear as though I heard it yesterday.

You sit down at your desk. Watching you, my chest squeezes and releases and squeezes. I wonder if you’re going to sit and think again, letting your grief leak through quietly, subtly, stubbornly. Instead, you power on your computer monitors. One by one, they blink awake from the darkness, as startled as I am. You replace your regular glasses with your farsighted ones, and start working through spreadsheets and data tables like it’s just another day. Like I’m not even here. I look at the calendar hanging above your desk. Tuesday, July 14. To you, a weekday means work—means hiding away in your office—above all and anything else. Above even the one-week anniversary of your daughter’s death.

My body shrinks into the ceiling corner again. I close my eyes. For a moment, I simply listen—to the sound of plastic keys clattering, the gentle tick-tick-tick of the clock, and the insistent, muffled chirping of the birds outside your window. I guess, in the end, my expectations didn’t make sense. The tears, the sentiments, the dramatics: those aren’t you, are they? When you’re so stern and tough and unbendable, the father who shouts at tears instead of pausing them with his thumb. When I’ve only ever heard you laugh twice.

Then I hear you, clearer and louder than the keyboard, the clock, the birds. A sound like a mourning animal’s wail. I open my eyes. Your back is turned to me, hunched over your desk and shuddering with each sob. For a moment, I don’t believe it, but I blink and the scene doesn’t melt away. Your crying doesn’t fade into silence. 

I’ve won. The statement pangs through my body. It’s almost too much, a feeling like a plastic bag puffing up inside me, crowding ribs into muscle. This is what I dreamed about for months on months, my “sorry” wrapped up in a bow and popped in my face like confetti. But it takes a moment for it to burst and collapse; and then all I can think about is how gray your hair looks, how your shoulders don’t look so hard anymore. How I want to put my arms around them and squeeze. 

The noise in my chest skips and sputters. I can’t feel my limbs anymore.

Your back stays turned to me, even when I call out your name. I feel something in my nose, rising into my eyes. My regrets pour down my cheeks, slip between my lips, salty like the oil from canned fish. Outside your window, nature enjoys herself, and we cry.

                                                                        *   *   *

Ming Wei Yeoh is a writer from Minnesota. She is a national Scholastic medalist in writing, 2024 YoungArts Winner with Distinction, and Semifinalist for 2024 US Presidential Scholar in the Arts. Her work has been featured/is forthcoming in Bending Genres, The Apprentice Writer, Blue Marble, Kalopsia Lit, and more. She has participated in several youth writing programs, most recently the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio. When not writing, you can find her fangirling over her favorite romance manga, obsessively taking walks, and watching home barista tutorials. 

By Carl Tait

Max looked up from his Kafka and across the playground. He didn’t see Rachel on the swing set where he had left her. How many times had he told her not to wander off by herself?

His eyes shifted to the neighboring play areas. On the tall silver slide, the girl who screamed as she went zooming down the incline wasn’t his daughter. Nor was Rachel in the oversized sandbox full of children creating lopsided sculptures. Where was she?

Max grunted and stood up from the bench, reluctantly relinquishing his prize seat that was sheltered by a leafy tree. He noticed the chubby man at the end of the bench already eyeing the shady spot.

Max clutched his book and went in search of his daughter. He began at the swing set, hoping he had missed her there. He had not.

“Rachel? It’s time to go home,” he called. No one answered.

He walked over to the climbing pyramid, which was made of thick oak beams rubbed smooth by countless small hands. There was a cool, dark spot under the structure that made a convenient hiding place. Kids loved the little cavern and parents hated it.

With difficulty, Max bent down and poked his head under the pyramid. A boy stared up at him with wide eyes. No one else was there.

Max stood up. “Rachel?” he called again.

A man who resembled an adult version of the boy in the cavern spoke up.

“Looking for your child? Happens to me all the time.”

Max nodded. “Yeah. Her name’s Rachel. Wait, I have a picture.” He pulled out his wallet and extracted a photo. Rachel was grinning in the picture, unashamed of the gaps in her smile where baby teeth had fallen out.

“Cute kid. Hey, I can help you look. Just let me tell my son to stay where he is. We don’t need another lost one.”

Max said nothing.

“Oh, God, I didn’t mean it like that,” said the man. “I’m sure we’ll find her. By the way, my name’s Herman.”

“Max.”

Herman admonished the boy to stay under the pyramid, then set off in search of Rachel.

Max began to walk in the opposite direction. Was it his imagination, or had Herman been staring at his grey hair? It wasn’t the first time. Too many people thought he was Rachel’s grandfather. You had children too late, Max could hear them thinking. You can’t chase after them when they’re lost.

Not lost, Max reminded himself. He knew Rachel was nearby.

Unless she had been taken. He tried to suppress the thought but could not. Pedophiles loved playgrounds.

Why had Herman called Rachel a cute kid? Wasn’t that odd? No, it wasn’t. The man had a son under the pyramid. Or claimed he did. The boy even looked like Herman. Didn’t he?

Paranoid rambling, Max told himself. He kept searching.

Heckscher was a large playground. Max thought he knew it well but could never keep all the details in his mind. It was a place for children, and his days of being a child were long past.

Max had made a wide circle and was back at the bench where he had started. The shady spot was now occupied by the chubby man, who was doing a crossword puzzle. Exhausted and distressed, Max plopped down into a broiling seat in the direct summer sun. He stared at the ground.

“Hello,” said a voice.

Max looked up into the smiling face of a young blonde woman.

“Did you find Rachel?” he asked, smiling back.

The woman’s smile faded as Herman ran up.

“This man’s little girl is lost,” he said. “Can you help us look for her? Her name is Rachel.”

“She’s not lost,” said the woman. “I’m Rachel.” She pulled out her driver’s license and showed it to Herman, who stared at Max in disbelief.

“He has early-onset Alzheimer’s,” said Rachel. “I’m afraid it’s getting worse.”

Max was puzzled. “You’re not my daughter,” he said. He opened his wallet and showed her the photo.

Rachel sighed. “Dad, that picture was taken fifteen years ago when I was little. That was a great day at the park. I still remember it.”

Max closed his eyes.

“I’m in college at Vassar,” Rachel continued. “Home for the summer. Try to think.”

Max drew a breath. “Vassar. I remember. You’re older now.”

“I am. Let’s go home. I’ll get your Kafka.” Rachel took her father’s hand and picked up his book.

The cover image was a cockroach lying on its back, waving its legs in confusion.

                                                                     *   *   *

Carl Tait is a software engineer, classical pianist, and writer. His work has appeared in After Dinner Conversation (Pushcart Prize nominee), Mystery Magazine (cover story), the Eunoia Review, the Literary Hatchet, the Saturday Evening Post, and others. Carl grew up in Atlanta and currently lives in New York City with his wife and twin daughters. For more information, visit carltait.com.

By Jen Ippensen

When she gets off work, Charlie will stop for gas at the Quick Shop on 13^th, not her usual filling station but one she passes twice a day, every day, once on her way to the plant and again on the way home. She could probably make the trip another day, maybe two. But today, she will feel as if she’s running on empty. The banana bread and lemon muffins her friends baked to commemorate her thirty years of service will have done nothing to fuel her.

When she pulls alongside the pump, she will think, briefly, about Hank, anticipate his disapproving look. If she waited until the weekend, he could get her eleven cents off per gallon with the Hy-Vee rewards card in his wallet. Instead, Charlie listens for the automatic shutoff, pumps the handle two, even three times, sure to fill the tank until it can’t hold one more drop.

When the pump screen asks if she wants a receipt, without thinking, she will touch Yes only to lift the thin sheet of paper, tear it against the metal teeth of the receipt printer, then noticing it in her hand, drop it in the trash can next to the pump before opening the driver’s side door and getting behind the wheel. She will turn the stereo down, click it off, back on, off, on.

When she pulls out of the parking lot, she will hit the green light at the corner of 13^th and High. Rather than turning left on 26^th and heading toward paint-chipped slat boards and Hank in his recliner, waiting for her to make dinner, Charlie will accelerate through the intersection and head out of town. On the highway, she will reach top speed and crack the window to feel the air all around her. 

This time, when she crosses the state line, she will sit a little taller, breathe a little deeper. She will turn the radio dial until the static fades and a new station comes in strong and clear. 

                                                               *   *   *

Jen Ippensen (she/her) lives and writes in Nebraska. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Nebraska. You can find her at www.jenippensen.com or on Twitter (X) @jippensen.

By David Capps

I have been pregnant since 1987. I was living in Paris and finishing my dissertation, the calling card to enter academia. I was excited at first even though it had been unplanned and didn’t occur at the most opportune time. But after the nine months elapsed and I had gone to every doctor I could afford, had lost my partner to an affair, had had to continually replace my wardrobe, threw out the baby clothes and cradle, and become the subject of friendly ridicule after compassion had run dry, I was tired. I’ve been the butt of every possible pun involving storks and water breaking. Endless back aches. Useless therapy. There have been benefits: I rarely get sick. Prior to the pregnancy, I’d get the flu every year. Not anymore. It’s also still entertaining to share that knowing look with other moms-to-be, it’s a pure sort of happiness anticipating you will be the source and subject of unconditional love; except in my case that look is, for lack of a better term, a nice piece of acting. When I am not distracted with my own thoughts (I can’t describe how horrid of a mother I must appear to be when I fail to acknowledge them), sometimes they will stop and chat: ‘When are you due?’ and in my beneficence I will allow them to feel it kick. ‘It has a will of its own,’ I say, ‘it will come out when it wants’. But I’m no spring chicken, and when they notice the wrinkles on my face they assume that I’m a medical miracle, not a medical anomaly. Funny how people notice the baby bump first and the person second. And yes, I’ve had several romantic entanglements since 1987—the worst were with men who tried to impregnate me as a solution to my condition. Someone I truly loved once told me that every great idea is born of necessity, and he wasn’t talking about devising some stupid thing for sake of survival. Rather, Beethoven’s ‘es muss sein’ motif, the immoral necessity of the atomic bomb, the geographical location of the next Dalai Lama, that sort of thing. Logically, this meant that if an idea didn’t come off, or did but just as easily might not have, it wasn’t great. The thing is that all my ideas had seemed this way, unnecessary. So I began to collect them, to store them up within myself, my bodily oomphalos, witnessed how they lost some of their original subtlety by being reduced to a name, like Athena. At first they formed a hardened mass, which I carried like a benign fist, invisible to everyone but myself. But then something happened, they began to grow, felt like a life of their own for which no individual part was responsible. I’ve become a parent of sorts, to this thing I’d never unleash onto an already overpopulated world. I don’t bother looking myself over in the mirror anymore, and Paris these days is a shit hole. Maybe it will still happen one day. Maybe when I’m a corpse it will crawl out of me.

                                                                   *   *   *

David Capps is a philosophy professor and poet who lives in New Haven, CT. He is the author of four chapbooks: Poems from the First Voyage (The Nasiona Press, 2019), A Non-Grecian Non-Urn (Yavanika Press, 2019), Colossi (Kelsay Books, 2020), and Wheatfield with a Reaper (Akinoga Press, forthcoming). His latest work, On the Great Duration of Life, a riff on Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life, is available from Schism Neuronics.

 By Robert P. Bishop

I got a job when I was in grade eight setting pins in the bowling alley at night. My father didn’t protest that I was too young to work when I got that job. His divorce the year before had run him off the rails, and I wasn’t much on his mind. When he wasn’t working at the refinery south of town he was hanging out in bars, boozing it up and carrying on with the local whores. I think he was pleased I got that after-school job; it kept me off the streets at night, relieved him of being a responsible parent and let him carry on without worrying too much about me. We scarcely saw each other between school and my job, but when we did, he was usually drunk, maudlin, and incoherent.

Setting pins wasn’t a difficult job, but you had to have agility and strength. Lifting fifteen-pound bowling balls to the return rails three or four hundred times in a busy six-hour shift wasn’t easy, and picking up the heavy pins and putting them in the correct slots in the reset machine wasn’t easy, either.

I started out working one alley. JJ Willton, who was into his thirties and had been setting pins for years, helped me get the hang of the job. With his help, I learned quickly and soon was skillful enough to handle two alleys at the same time.

JJ had several limitations, one of which kept him from passing the driver’s license exam, so he rode around town on an old bicycle with a canvas bag hanging on the right side of the rear wheel. JJ had another, more serious limitation; he stole women’s underwear from clotheslines and stashed the pilfered garments in his bedroom in the house he shared with his aging mother. 

Everybody in town knew JJ did this, but excused his behavior as one of those quirky things people did who weren’t all there. The more tolerant folks said every small town had its colorful but harmless eccentric. 

A few concerned people urged the authorities to intervene before he did something ugly. The people who expressed these concerns were usually mocked into silence. After all, JJ’s defenders said, his aging mother looked after him. 

What harm could he do?

Fifteen-year old Amanda Cooper and her friend, Lillian Kamp, had gone to see Rebel Without A Cause, starring James Dean. Amanda and Lillian chatted excitedly about Dean’s good looks and smoldering sex appeal as they walked home that Sunday night. They parted after a few blocks and each went on alone. 

Lillian arrived home safely. 

Amanda’s body was found the next day behind lilac bushes in the small park near her home. Amanda was fully clothed, but one piece of clothing was missing; her underwear.

Amanda’s rape and death shocked the town. These things didn’t happen in Stillwater. Sure, people quarreled and had disagreements, but the rape and murder of a young girl? No, not in a normal town, a good town like Stillwater.

Speculation on who killed her swept through the town like a wind-whipped storm. Tongues wagged, people talked. Because of Amanda’s missing underwear, everybody named one person; JJ Willton.

The police questioned JJ. He admitted he had Sunday night off. When pressed, JJ said he got bored at home with nothing to do so he rode his bike around town. 

The ambitious county attorney was not going to let Amanda’s murder slip through his fingers. A trial and a conviction would elevate him from obscurity to prominence throughout the state. And getting a conviction for the murder of a young girl would pave the way to the US Senate seat up for grabs the following year. 

Citing JJ’s history of stealing women’s underwear, it was easy for the county attorney to convince a judge to issue a search warrant for JJ’s belongings and the house where he lived. The police turned up enough evidence for a warrant. JJ was arrested, charged with Amanda’s murder, and held in the county jail until his trial began.

 People packed the courtroom, eager to hear the sordid details of Amanda’s murder. Amanda’s friends attended and sat together, weeping and sobbing. The first day of the trial Lillian Kamp stood up and shouted, “You bastard! You killed her.” The judge had Lillian removed and barred her from attending the trial. That squashed any further outbursts. Most of us pin boys wormed our way into the courtroom  and sat together, but none of us yelled at JJ. 

The county attorney opened by discussing JJ’s well-known fixation on women’s underwear and what this perversion indicated; a suppressed sexual desire so powerful it often erupted violently when it could no longer be controlled. 

JJ’s defense attorney objected, saying it was speculation on the prosecuting attorney’s part and without merit. 

Sensing the jury had absorbed his damning accusation of sexual violence, the county attorney moved on to JJ’s lack of a credible explanation for his whereabouts and what he was doing the night Amanda was, according to the county attorney, “brutally assaulted and murdered.” The county attorney hammered on this point, asserting that JJ had seen Amanda and Lillian leave the movie theater and followed them, riding silently behind them in the dark, like an animal on the hunt, waiting for an opportunity. When Lillian and Amanda separated, JJ struck.

The county attorney moved on to the most incriminating piece of evidence against JJ; a pair of women’s panties found in that tattered canvas bag hanging on the back of his bicycle. JJ, the county attorney asserted, kept the panties in his bike bag as a trophy, a reminder of a successful hunt.

JJ’s attorney objected, saying anyone could have put those panties in that bag. 

Throughout the trial, JJ said over and over, “I didn’t do it, I didn’t do it.” JJ and I were the only people in that courtroom who knew he was telling the truth.

The defense attorney called several people to testify on JJ’s behalf. The common theme of their testimony was JJ was incapable of committing this crime. In all the years he had been stealing women’s underwear from clotheslines, he had never done anything that even came close to violence.

The trial lasted three days; JJ was found guilty of murdering Amanda Cooper. The county attorney demanded the death penalty for such a barbaric crime, then, because he knew the death penalty was rarely enforced in Montana, asked the judge to require JJ to undergo a mental competency evaluation. The judge agreed and thanked the county attorney for his magnanimous treatment of a vicious murderer who, the judge said, deserved to die for committing the most sordid crime ever in the fine town of Stillwater.

Three mental health experts testified JJ lacked the ability to comprehend the severity of what he was being accused of. Instead of being sentenced to the state prison in Deer Lodge, the experts said a mental health institution was a more appropriate setting for him.

The judge agreed and sentenced JJ to an indeterminate length of incarceration in the state mental hospital in Warm Springs.

It’s been sixty-eight years since Amanda Cooper was murdered. Most of the people alive at the time she was killed are dead. JJ died forty-three years ago, still an inmate in the state mental hospital. I doubt anyone in Stillwater even remembers him now. There is only one person alive who knows who killed Amanda Cooper. Me. I know.

My father came home that Sunday night, drunk and babbling incoherently. It took me a while to piece together what he had done.

I found Amanda behind the lilac bushes. Her panties were down around one ankle. I pulled them off, put them in my pocket and went home. My father was passed out on the couch. He wouldn’t remember any of this in the morning, and I wasn’t going to say anything to him or to anybody else.

I didn’t know if the cops would discover enough evidence to accuse my father of the crime, but I knew who those missing panties would implicate.

The next evening before I went into the bowling alley, I stuffed Amanda’s panties into the canvas bag hanging on JJ’s bike. 

I’ve got pancreatic cancer and will be dead in a week, maybe two or three at best, so why speak out now? Am I seeking forgiveness? No, I’m not. There isn’t anyone who would forgive me for what I did, so I’m not looking for it. I’m not looking for a clear conscience, either. After sixty-eight years who is left to care if a conscience is clear or not? Maybe it’s time for the truth to be known about that Sunday night.

Yes, the truth, at least for JJ. It’s as simple as that.

And the county attorney? He won that Senate seat and held it for thirty-six years.

                                                        

                                                            *   *   *

Robert P. Bishop, an army veteran and former teacher, lives in Tucson. His short fiction has appeared in Ariel Chart, Bright Flash Literary Review, CommuterLit, Ink Pantry, Literally Stories, Mysterical-E, Scarlet Leaf Review, Umbrella Factory Magazine and elsewhere.