By Ted Scott

January 5, 021 PS (Post Singularitas)

They came for me last night. One of those new mobile AIs, on four feet like a headless dog but with two long thin arms coiled around eye stalks protruding from the two ends of the body. The 8 fingered hand at the end of one arm held a small cylindrical device with a slowly twirling wire loop at its end. I recognized the device as a metal detector.

A harsh male voice spoke. “We’re here to search your room. Please stand next to the door.” Before I could even say, “Why?” the “creature” moved to the center of the small room and started its search. It uncoiled the arm holding the detector and began moving the device around in a pattern, then more closely scanning the bed, the small bureau, the table, the waste box, and the chair. It even scanned the sink, the toilet, and the large screen on the wall facing the bed, but the detector failed to report any metal. “Thank you for your cooperation,” the voice said as the door opened and the “creature” left the room, closing the door behind it. I tried the door, but it was locked, then angry and annoyed, I took my pill and went to bed.

This morning, when the screen buzzed, I rolled over and slowly got out of bed. I touched the screen and the buzzing stopped. A moment later, the door chimed and the mid panel opened and folded out. A plastic bowl and spoon appeared, along with a plastic cup of dark, coffee-flavored water. From the smell, I could tell that the bowl held cinnamon-flavored corn meal. That was one thing I liked about the Box House. They did seem to know what flavors to give you when you wanted them, and I always mellowed out after eating. But, what about last night? What was that all about?

As I moved my breakfast to the table and sat down to eat, the door panel closed, and the screen lit up. Max, the humanoid AI that delivers the morning news, said “Hello, Jason. Some good news today. The Carbon Index is 441.81, down from 441.89 last month, but the local temperature is 313k, so those of you on a free pass day should be cautious if you venture out.” Then it went on to announce the standings of the various game competitions. I listened carefully to see how our section was doing in the Wormhole event. I heard Jackie’s name mentioned, but I didn’t get all the details. Maybe there would be more on the personal news.

I finished eating, brushed my teeth, and did my stretching. I managed to stay synchronized with Alfred, my screen trainer, for most of the session, and was awarded 4 points on my permanent score. I wondered what last night’s episode had cost me. When I checked my personal news. I discovered that some tools had been stolen from the factory. The CCTV had captured an image, but the thief had broken some lights and was heavily masked, so the only information was the thief’s body size and type. Three men in our section could fit the profile. One of them was me! They had searched my room for metal. Box residents are forbidden to have metal. All our belongings are made of plastic by 3-D printing machines using 100% recycled plastic.

When the AIs took over, after the floods, the fires, and the Great War, everything was different. Once there had been freedom and movement, parks and houses, airports and highways. Now the undestroyed landscape is covered with robotic farms, factories, and solar generators. Electric railroads are the only connections between human settlements. We nearly all live in tiny one-room apartments in giant box houses, and we wear the same clothes, eat the same food, and play the same senseless games every day. And we always take our pills at night. I shudder to think of that awful night when I didn’t take it.

But maybe it’s better than before. Over a billion people were killed in the war and another two billion died before and soon after. They say that when the population drops below four billion and the carbon index gets down to 400, our freedoms will increase and some form of Democracy will return. I can hardly wait.

                                                                   *    *    *

Ted Scott once was a physicist, but now reads and writes memoir, poetry, and short fiction. His work can be found in Boston Literary Magazine, Fear of Monkeys, Foliate Oak, The Journal of Quantum Electronics, and a variety of anthologies. He lives in western Massachusetts with his wife, but can sometimes be found windsurfing on Maidstone Lake in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom.

By Ryan Babcock

In the bathroom, pregnant for the second time, Rosemary stared at the + on the plastic pregnancy test; she pondered the prospects of going through it all over again—during her first pregnancy she did what any excited new parent would do: she and her husband had the doctor tell them the sex so they could decide on a name together—Margot—and they decorated the nursery a pastel yellow, because she was to be their little light, at night they read to the child in her swollen belly and feigned interest in classical music, because a friend mentioned it soothed the baby; every night, Rosemary sought solace with her palm pressed against the swelling belly, feeling the gentle kicks—a connection to the burgeoning life within; yet pregnancy overwhelmed her, it cast doubt on everything her husband said, made her cry every time she saw children splashing through sprinklers or anytime her ice cream melted from the heat, and she became so hypervigilant of strangers that she’d stopped leaving her house for fear someone would slice her belly open and run off with her baby; she knew it was irrational, but she felt overpowered by a protective maternal instinct; then, one day, she got sick; afraid her baby would also get sick, she went to the hospital; they ran some tests and said it was nothing more than a common cold, the doctor wrote her a prescription and offered her felicitations on becoming a mother; she swallowed the medication like she was told; as the days passed, she felt something was wrong; the kicks slowed; they seemed to lose impact; eventually stopping altogether, which sent her into a panic; in the car, her husband called each of their parents and asked for them to meet them at the hospital; while they sped down the interstate Rosemary cried so hard she had to keep wiping snot with the back of her hand as she choked on every demand for her husband to drive faster and faster to the ER: there, they informed her she wouldn’t reach the end of her second term; the baby’s heartbeat had stopped; there had been a complication with the medication the previous doctor had prescribed; they needed to induce labor; the hospital staff went through the motions of delivery: providing her an epidural and instructing her to push until Margot was released; surrounded by their respective families, she held Margot in her arms, a fragile beacon bearing the weight of her maternal dreams; her tears blurred the baby’s body, making it look like Margot was reaching for her; part of Rosemary wished that were true, knowing it was a foolish wish; Margot, barely over a pound, had the same bulbous nose that Rosemary’s father had and the same extra-long second toe her husband had; they took photographs to commemorate the life that was meant to bring sunshine into the world; Rosemary was so disoriented, possibly even in a state of psychosis, that she thought the flash from the cameras was somehow Margot hugging her goodbye, her mother wiped Rosemary’s tears away for her, told her everything happens for a reason, which pissed her off, because she’d held her dead daughter in her arms for no good reason and no sentimental cliché would alter that opinion—so she sat on the mouth of the toilet for a long time, hoping it would swallow her whole, even when she made the effort to get up, her legs betrayed her, and she had to call her husband to carry her to bed; a lump formed in Rosemary’s throat as she told him she couldn’t suffer through a loss like that again; she didn’t want to get her hopes up that she could be a person who has a family; he told her to get some sleep, and they would talk more in the morning; but she didn’t sleep much that night: she had a nightmare she was the Angel of Death giving birth to a coffin, and her new baby’s ashes would sit on the mantel above the fireplace like Margot’s; when she woke, her body was slick, the sheets beneath her stuck to her skin, and she could hear her husband humming in the kitchen; without him there to talk her down, she made her choice: she wouldn’t keep it; he came in with a tray: oatmeal, strawberries, and a glass of water; he sat on the bed, placing his palm on Rosemary’s thigh; told her it was her decision, but he wanted to try one more time, and then they wouldn’t have to ever again; wouldn’t ever have to talk about it, if that’s what she wanted; grief’s claws sunk deep, but her husband’s optimism offered a fleeting respite; it provided possibility for another chance at motherhood; she wanted to be the accommodating wife, so, reluctantly, she acquiesced; and once again, they found out the sex of their baby—a girl they would name Aurora—they wouldn’t repaint the nursery, this time they would add flowers along the doorframe; at every prenatal check-up they cautioned her about her blood pressure, but Rosemary explained to them how every day she was swaddled in anxiety over fear her baby’s heart would stop and it wouldn’t go away until Aurora was in her arms, alive; five weeks before the due date, her water broke around midnight; she denied to her husband that she was in labor and insisted visiting the hospital was unnecessary, but he ignored Rosemary and argued with her to get out of bed and into the car until she consented; since she had Margot, they’d moved states for a fresh start, so on the drive to the hospital, she called and asked her parents and sister to fly out; her husband did the same; it became real for Rosemary and her husband when the hospital staff surrounded her, no other family present yet; but they all began flooding in to the state; first her parents; then his parents and siblilngs; then her sister; they all waited in the lobby, anticipating Aurora’s birth; after thirteen long hours of labor, Rosemary pushed Aurora out into the world; she had a full head of hair, the same bulbous nose, those same toes, and she was yellow; so yellow that the doctor explained to them how common jaundice was for premature babies; they would be sending her to the NICU to sleep under a blue light that would flush the bilirubin toxins from her body; her family arrived at the hospital and celebrated Aurora, told her about her sister Margot; after two sleepless nights in the hospital, the doctor cleared Aurora to leave with Rosemary and her husband under one condition: Aurora must come back the next day to recheck her bilirubin levels; however, when Aurora came back to the hospital, her numbers were frighteningly high, so they tell her, her husband, and both their families they must keep her overnight; it didn’t matter how many times the doctor told her not be concerned with the near zero chance of death, she was concerned that it wasn’t zero; her once-steady legs buckled beneath the haunting possibility, and her husband caught Rosemary before she collapsed from grappling with the potential loss of another child; they were all anxious; her family was undecided on whether or not to keep celebrating or start mourning while they kept her and her husband from the bottom of rock bottom; while they waited for a call they all distracted themselves with card games, movies, chores…calling the tired nurses for updates; at dinner, Rosemary’s mother shared a story about Rosemary as a toddler; once, at a toy store, Rosemary was told no when asking for a new Barbie; in protest, Rosemary bulldozed Barbies off the shelf, then threw herself on the ground; banging her fists on the dirty tile, her red face streaming with crocodile tears; in a moment of desperation, Rosemary’s mother got on her belly, next to her daughter, and began to imitate her: flailing arms and legs, fake sobs; Rosemary stopped her cries immediately and looked at her mother with a furrowed brow, realizing her chicanery had been discovered; the word no became less triggering after that incident and her mother explained the whole experience as mortifying for her; Rosemary liked hearing stories of her as a child; it made her feel maternal in some way she couldn’t articulate; the call came two days later, they could finally bring Aurora home; both families packed themselves into two cars; when Rosemary held her baby in her arms, she watched Aurora’s little heart flutter through her yellowish skin; Aurora clenched her tiny fist around Rosemary’s finger, slowly opening her ocean-blue eyes to gaze at the woman she grew inside; despite this radiant joy of holding her second daughter, a profound love both for the baby she now had, and once had, crumbled and shattered within her; the world, for a brief moment, felt brighter, a deceptive glow swiftly overshadowed by the encroaching darkness of postpartum depression; her husband snuck up behind her, embracing Rosemary and Aurora; he craned his neck to kiss away the worry etched on her face, we’re not going to fail her, he reassured, his words a soothing balm; she nodded, momentarily believing in his promise after everything they’d endured together.

                                                         *   *   *

Ryan Babcock is a Virginia-based writer and educator. He studies creative writing online at UCLA Extension and UC Berkeley Extension, and is pursuing an M.A.Ed. in ESL and Bilingual Education at The College of William and Mary. He thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail in 2019. His poetry is forthcoming in Eunoia Review.

By Nancy Klann-Moren

It had been quite some time since I talked to Jennifer when she called to say her father had passed away. She said they had a small ceremony and buried him next to his first wife, Jennifer’s mother. 

“What about Ruby?” I asked. 

Even though I didn’t know the woman I had heard my share of disgruntled, ugly-step-mother stories and petty gossip about her. Nothing nice.

“Oh, she died last February,” she said. “She’s in my dad’s closet.”

“Oh?”

“She wanted her ashes spread along her favorite spot in the hills around Mulholland Canyon. Dad had intended to take her there, but wasn’t well enough to see it through.” 

“Why is she in the closet?”

“I don’t know. It’s just where he put her. And, right before he died he asked if I’d lay her to rest. What else could I do but say yes.”

“I’m sorry to hear all this.”

“The landlord’s in a hurry to empty the apartment and get some new renters in, and I have until Sunday to pick her up.” 

I had never been to a ceremony where the ashes were scattered, but had imagined how inspiring it would be for family and friends to gather and watch their loved ones’ remains being lifted by the wind and spread over the horizon. I envisioned a release of the soul into the sky. I must have seen something like that in a movie. 

“That sounds nice. You’ll be with family?”

“No, just me. I don’t know any of her friends. Don’t even know if she had any.”

“You’re going alone?”

“Yes.” She laughed. “Unless you count Ruby. It shouldn’t take too long.”

“I’ll go with you if you want.”

“Really? Great. I could use the company.”  

On the top shelf of the closet, next to the tube and face mask of a CPAP machine, sat the unadorned cardboard box, with the words Cremated Remains stenciled on the side. Jen stood on her tippy toes to teeter the graceless box down from the shelf and wipe the dust off the top. 

Outside, when she put the box on the back seat I thought I heard her say, “Let’s get this over with.” 

“You don’t want to strap her in the seatbelt?” I asked.

Jen shrugged. “She can’t get any more dead.”

The day was clear as we drove up Laurel Canyon toward Mulholland and maneuvered the winding spine of the Santa Monica Mountains. She took the narrow curves and turns too fast for my liking as we passed celebrity homes and spectacular views. 

“Daddy made a big mistake when he married her,” Jennifer said, as if Ruby was out of earshot. My instinct was to tell her to stop speaking ill of the dead, especially when they’re in the same car on a famously dangerous road. Instead, I twisted around to check on the box, and winced at the sight of it balanced on the front edge of the seat, poised to drop to the floorboard. 

Not too long after that, Jennifer slowed as we approached one of the designated overlooks. “This is close enough,” she said and pulled the car off the road near a trail. 

“This isn’t the spot she wanted?”

“She won’t know the difference.” 

I followed as Jen carried the box down a dusty footpath bordered by sagebrush. It veered left, hugging the side of the mountain. She stopped at a spot with a sweeping view of both mountains and ocean. 

The beauty alone felt like heaven was close. I breathed in the fresh air and marveled at a red-tailed hawk gliding above the ravines, and anticipated the magnificence of Ruby’s spiritual flight. 

Jennifer placed the box on the ground and pulled out a vacuum-sealed plastic bag.

“Shit,” she said and handed it to me. “Can you hold her while I go back to the car? I think I have a pair of scissors in the glove compartment.”

It felt heavier than I expected. “Hi Ruby,” I said and introduced myself. “This is a beautiful spot. I hope you’re okay with it.” 

I looked through the plastic and tried to make sense of what I saw. Mixed in with the ashes were visible chunks of bone and jagged pieces that resembled charcoal briquettes. “What happened?” I asked no one. My mind went straight to the old dog food commercial. I’m gonna get me some Kibbles ‘N Bits and Bits and Bits. My romantic notions for the day were dwindling.

When Jennifer returned with the scissors I asked, “How come these aren’t soft and powdery like the ashes in a fireplace?” 

“How would I know? Maybe you have to pay more for those.”

She looked down the side of the cliff. “Does it matter?” 

“I think so,” I said.

Jennifer shrugged, cut the top off the bag, and said, “Good riddance, Ruby,” as she turned it upside down. Stunned, my stomach turned. 

Too heavy to catch what little wind there was, instead of soaring, Ruby’s Kibbles ‘N Bits plummeted down the side of the mountain. The heavier pieces clunked against the boulders. The clatter caused my brain to cloud, and the abrupt hush that followed when they reached their resting place in the abyss of indifference, heightened my bewilderment of how swiftly my expectations for the day had collapsed. 

I walked back to the car feeling unsettled and agitated. And foolish.

As she thoughtlessly tossed the empty Cremated Remains box into the trunk, I said, “I thought it would be nicer than that.”

She looked at me. “Really?”

*   *   *

Nancy Klann-Moren has published a collection of short stories titled, Like The Flies On The Patio, and two novels, The Clock Of Life, and Love and Protest, and has also contributed to several anthologies. She serves on the board of The Southern California Writers Association and teaches a short story workshop each year at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference. http://www.nancyklann-moren.com.

A Memoir by Naana Eyikuma Hutchful

I look over at you in the corner, your eyes trained on mine, back straight as a board. Your rigid body is unfamiliar. I wish you’d do something, anything. I miss the fluidity of you, not the arms crossed tightly over your belly, eyes dark and empty, frozen in place. A perfectly sculpted statue, but still a statue. These days, I like you better with my eyes closed.  I can feel your breath, hot and quick on my cheek, the side of my neck. I can run my hands through your thick chestnut hair, braid it into a rope down your back. 

Nikki’s key turns in the lock. I jump out of bed and throw the duvet over the sheets as smoothly as I can. I run over to my desk, brushing against the switch to turn the lights on. I think I may have fooled her this time but I am still in my fluffy grey bear pajamas, my bonnet still on, dried white streaks down my cheeks. She doesn’t comment on it; at least I am trying at something.

Today, she brought mandarins. Two bags of them.

I am not feeling so well, I say. Migraine. 

Nikki walks me back to my bed. She pulls the covers up to my chin. 

I coo and moan and drag my knees to my chest. She goes into the kitchen to make me a lemon and ginger tea. 

Nikki is running out of take your times. 

She wants me up and out. She wants me to look at people again. 

I want to say yes, yes, yes. The way the light enters the green of her eyes, ring-scattered spots of yellow like gold gleaming. I capture every frame of it: the slight tilt of her brows, the lines in the corners of her eyes tightening, her lips splitting apart, first a crack, then wide open, her eyes begin to water, there’s a slow vibration to her hands, twisting around each other, unsure of what to do next.

I know you are not real; the sharp edges of you against the wall. But when I close my eyes you beg me not to leave you again.

Nikki looks right into the corner. It’s almost as if she can see you too.

                                                             *   *   *

Naana Eyikuma Hutchful (they/them) is a Ghanaian writer with work appearing in Pithead Chapel, Bending Genres, Gone Lawn, Maudlin House and forthcoming elsewhere. They like sunrises, yearning, and Wong Kar Wai films.

By Neil James

The air is heavy in the room where my great-grandfather died. I wait – for a whisper, a chill, a flicker in the darkness. But there is nothing. Only shadows, crumbling brick and the weight of silence. Fate finds a place for everyone, and this dank factory basement was his. Hopstone Pottery Factory, Stoke-on-Trent, 27^th March, 1929. Three men trapped in this shadowy vault as the building above them burned. I read Ernest Shaw’s story in the library archive, traced his life on microfilm, downloaded his death certificate. But words and numbers don’t hold what I’m searching for. I need to feel. To connect. To make sense of his life. 

I close my eyes to imagine the moment. The second he smelled the first curl of acrid smoke and saw the glow of flames creep under the door. Did he cry out? Beg? Try to bargain with God? I need to feel his fear, to slip through the centuries, but all I grasp is more distance.  I’ve watched countless celebrities cry on genealogy shows, and I feel guilt for not doing the same. This man’s genes are within me. Without him, I don’t exist. But the pictures in my head are just that: pictures.

Lindsey is our tour guide at the Hopstone Museum. She speaks with the youthful conviction of recent study, and I wonder which books shaped her grasp of this city’s industrial past. Her bones are not fired from Staffordshire clay, and her stories are recited not lived, but she’s doing her best to bring history to life. 

She’s good at her job. I used to be good at mine too – until I wasn’t. Nine months have passed since I held my P45, but it still feels like last week. The manager’s well-rehearsed speech, the silence in the office as I packed my things, the handshakes from colleagues who promised to stay in touch but never did. People say a lot of things, don’t they?

When our group of six reaches the basement, shelves still stacked with pottery wares, Lindsey’s soft Irish lilt shifts from sprightly to sombre. 

“In 1929, the factory caught fire, and three men died in this room.”

A respectful hush descends.

“They were stacking saggars, containers for firing pottery, and had no way of knowing that flames were sweeping through the rooms above. By the time they realized the fire was outside the door, it would’ve been too late.” A half-smile creeps across her lips. “Some people say this room’s haunted, but I’ve never experienced anything down here myself.”

I can’t resist interjecting. “One of those men was my great-grandfather.”

There is an audible gasp, and the group turn towards me. 

“Really?” says Lindsey. She bites her lip.

“Yes,” I say. “His name was Ernest Shaw. I only know because I’m researching my family tree.”

“Oh wow!” says one of the Americans, a man with white hair and a goatee. “Imagine finding something like that!”

“I’ve been using on an ancestry site for the last six months, and I’ve found so many names and dates, but I wanted to actually see the places my ancestors worked and lived.”

“Literally walking in your great-grandfather’s footsteps…” Lindsey adds.

“Absolutely. It makes him more real to me.” 

But does it? Because despite walking the same cobbled ground that he did, and breathing the same musty air, I feel no closer to knowing him. If there are ghosts in this room, I cannot see them. 

The tour ends in the gift shop, where Hopstone bookmarks and pottery trinkets sit in neatly arranged rows under tasteful ceiling spotlights. Lindsey wishes me luck with my ancestry research and the American and I chat about local history as we cross the car park. I recommend two more pottery museums nearby and he shakes my hand warmly. 

“You take care now,” he says before rejoining his companions who trail behind. From my car, I watch them shuffle towards the bus stop as the digits on my dashboard clock change. Instead of chasing the past, I try to root myself in the present – the hum of traffic, modern jazz on the stereo. Anything to remind me I can still feel. That I’m not just a redundancy number. 

*

Early afternoon and the traffic’s light as I head in the direction of home. My wife Helen’s long since moved on from ‘You need a project’ to ‘You need a job.’ My dole money isn’t contributing enough to the household, and my days and evenings spent hunched over a laptop, while she watches Love Island, are apparently adding even less to our marriage.      

At three o’clock, I park outside the school and position myself amongst the other parents idly chatting on the yard. As the school doors open, and the children are dismissed, my son smiles the instant he sees me, knowing that, as he runs, I will scoop him into my arms, swing him skyward, then kiss his cheeks as I lower him down. 

Josh is my flesh and blood. My anchor. The flicker of light in the haze. He doesn’t care that I’m unemployed and doesn’t yet realize that both of us will one day be nothing more than names on certificates. For now, we have each other, and these are the moments I live for. 

When I bury my face into his mop of blonde hair, I inhale the same scent I’ve known since he was born. As he lifts his head to grin at me, I suddenly see the resemblance. There’s something about the tilt of his smile, the shape of his eyes that reminds me of a grainy photograph I found in my father’s attic. The resemblance is only passing, but for the first time since my search began, Ernest Shaw isn’t just a name or story. I see him in the curve of my boy’s cheek and the sparkle in his gaze. 

As I stare into my son’s eyes, generations stare back.  

*   *   *

Neil James is a writer from Stoke-on-Trent, England and the author of ‘Stoke and I:The Nineties’ (Pitch Publishing).  His fiction has been published by Literally Stories, Twisted Sister Lit Mag and The Fiction Pool. He can be found occasionally talking writing, but mainly complaining about football on Twitter/X at @TrouserdogSCFC 

A Memoir by Frances Scott                                                                                    

In my childhood home nights were filled with cigarette smoke, ice clinked in tumblers while my parents drank their bourbon and water before dinner, during dinner and after dinner.

My three older siblings, the closest one seven years my senior, chatted amongst themselves at the dinner table while I sat silent, eating.

To the fault of no one, it was the structure of our menage and dysfunction of living with an alcoholic/bipolar father that left me feeling left out, not a part of the pedigree I was born into. Runts of the litter face challenges and have trouble competing with their siblings.

Mama would say, “I tried to have a friend for you.” The result was five miscarriages, three before me and two after. Somehow, I was the embryo that stuck.

Daddy raised and trained black Labrador Retrievers, blue ribbon trial dogs. Our big fenced-in back yard down in Mississippi often housed a litter of black squirmy pups.
It pleased Daddy when I would sit on the ground with the puppies, picking them up, petting them, holding their faces close to mine. I socialized his blue-ribbon hopefuls, while receiving uncommon attention and praise from him.

My parents didn’t know I ached with loneliness at night, that as young as five, I crept out to sleep with the puppies, their sapphire little eyes asking me to join them. We whimpered together, speaking the same language of longing. Everything about them exuded softness and warmth, even their breath, sweet from mother’s milk. The pups and their mama welcomed me into their family as if I was born into it.

In my youth I was either rolling around with a bunch of puppies or alone in our house surrounded by people who looked right through me.

In my adult years, I had my own pack: husband, daughter, and Nick the tuxedo kitty. Divorce broke up our family wounding my relationship with my daughter.
My side gig of pet sitting fulfilled my care-taking tendencies and need for comfort and connection.

Years later my daughter told me she didn’t see any hope for our relationship in this lifetime, then she stopped talking to me. It was cold out and I lay alone on my bed after I realized she’d taken all the photos of me and my grandchildren off her social media. My last email had gone unanswered.

There was no living thing in my home, but off I went to care for a dog, Ollie, while his family was on vacation. The handsome husky met me at the door, tail wagging, happily barking. At nighttime, I welcomed Ollie when he invited himself to nestle on the bed beside me, warming the chill of my despair. His blue eyes looked into mine; his balmy breath fell on my cheek as I wrapped my arm across his warm soft body and fell into a deep sleep.

*   *   *

Frances Scott is a native of Mississippi who lives, pet sits and writes in Missoula, MT. Her writing has been published in the New York Times, Huffington Post, Next Avenue and more. 

By Andy Gambell

They are building nests out of bones – femurs, shins, clavicles, jawbones, skulls. There is a clinical feel to the room I am waiting in. The room feels like an outdated doctor’s office, or a place to draw labs. They build nests to nurture the young. It is the most directly obvious connection to the cycle of life, using old dead things from the previous generation to build a home to incubate the next. Spiders and octopus come to mind subconsciously, but I’m not sure of the connections. Death and new life embroil together. I am waiting and I am cold and I know that I will be useful as the incubator needed for the next generation. I have had a nice life, and am, if not ready for it to be over, am at least at peace with the idea that it will be soon.

The flooring in here should be concrete, I think, but is a linoleum that was popular in the eighties and nineties. It’s strange how fads change, even fads about what is fashionable in a house. I tap my foot in boredom and fatigue and anxiety. I am anxious about death. 

The nests used to look truly like bird nests, but now they’ve changed. Now they are closed in, dark, one tunneled opening to get the precious child inside. The bones are structured in a way to keep the roof closed, a ball of bones. Some bones are bleached white, some are old. I do not know why the change. I do not know what grows inside.

The butcher stands in a leather apron in the center of a room. There is a drain in the floor. He smiles. He is a small man with inviting eyes and a warmth about him that puts one at ease. I will take care of you, his smile says. He motions me to the center of the room and begins to measure my limbs with his eyes. It is obvious that he is an expert. 

I will be useful. Whatever the state says should be should be. Nobody should question the state; nobody should question the state; nobody should question the state. A mantra from retraining.

I step into a ring of light in the slick center of the room. I will begin my next journey soon.

                                                              *   *   *

Andy Gambell lives is Floresville, Texas with his wife and daughter. His work has appeared in Hawai’i Pacific Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Bluestem, and other places. He could be anything.

By Ken Shelton

“Don’t sleep well,” I said to my date.

“You need to quit drinking coffee,” she said

“‘Need’ implies necessity,” I replied. “And quitting coffee is sufficient for a good night’s sleep, but it is not necessary. It’s a common confusion. You see, in propositional logic, If P, then Q. Q. Therefore, P.”

She had the glazed-over look of a deer caught in the headlights.

I went on. “If Q is the result, a good night’s sleep, and P equals quitting coffee, then quitting coffee is sufficient for a good night’s sleep but not a necessity because P does not actually equal Q in a necessary sense. If you diagram the necessity and sufficiency of quitting coffee and a good night’s sleep in a Venn diagram, you will find that Quitting coffee is not necessary, but it is sufficient, for a good night’s sleep.” I tossed in enough jargon to impress her with my knowledge of propositional logic. I took a sip of coffee and watched her over the rim of the cup. She was speechless with wonder and awe.

I called for another date. This time to go see a Billie Eilish live concert. I am something of a walking encyclopedia of rock music lore. I’m sure she would like to know of some of that history and culture.

“Sorry,” she said. She had reunited with her former boyfriend.

*   *   *

Ken Shelton is a writer of short fiction and min essays. He lives in Dallas, Texas with his cat Talon.

A Memoir by Eve Eismann

It’s strange (confusing) that something can remind her of joy and pain at the same time, that her body can be magnetically drawn to something like the delicate leaves of a sprout to the sun and also revolted, retracting in disgust from the green wafts of stench, reeking of trauma and misunderstanding. She’s sitting in a black pleather chair next to the window at the airport, and her AirPods are playing Everybody Loves Somebody. Her heart swells up and she feels the warmth of summer in Europe, sitting on the train to go to the harbor to sunbathe as the conductor calls out the next stop and she turns the page of her book. Her stomach lifts and drops on the Tower of Terror as she sits on an apartment step in Little Italy as the large man sings too loudly on the street to a crowd of dancing drunks. She feels like crying as she sits on the plane flying home with sand still in her hair as she looks over at her parents backlit against the oval window. This doesn’t make sense and she misses when emotions stood alone, clear in their intentions. Now love, happiness, sadness, and confusion stood together, holding hands, linking arms, and intertwining themselves until each memory melted into one another, until she could not feel the purity of a moment that once sat undefiled in her mind. She cursed the blueness that seeped in wispy tendrils, climbing like vines over her house, obscuring the windows she could once see neat lines of manicured trees out of. She looked at the dense blanket of clouds dripping from hangers in the sky and saw herself melting into that grey oblivion, giving back what she had borrowed too long from this life. She saw her fingers reaching out to the God she does not believe exists as Michelangelo paints her empty expression, devoid of understanding and complete with the delusions she has collected from years of feeling a world ambivalent to its own idiosyncrasies. Her pointer finger brushes God’s (the one that is not meant to feel, that is not meant to touch a flesh that burns from both ends), and she shivers as she feels everything. The empty golden halo that is filled with a mess of inconsistencies that taste more of life and feeling than anything she has had in her world of carefully compartmentalized boxes and people that stand apart, hands dropped to their sides, fingers that could be brushing against someone else’s picking off her burning skin, skin that reminds her every day that she is irrevocably mortal, uncharacteristically untethered from the atmosphere of a world whose air scratches reminders in her lungs that she is too much and not enough to exist here. She drenches herself in the pool of immortality and feeling, consumed as if by the addictions that brought her here, as the roads of a thousand lives weave through and around her body, accelerating her to a kind of twisted acceptance. She drops her hand and looks into the eyes of her nonexistent God; it is something like forgetting, holding hands. 

*   *   *

Eve Eismann is a recent graduate of NYU Tisch working as a writer, photographer, and Editorial Intern at CR Fashion Book. Her analog photography series titled GOSSIP was an Official Selection in the International Photography Awards, and her short animation titled Feeding Climate Change won Best Animation at the International Cellphone Cinema Showcase in the Cannes Film Festival. 

By Mark Connelly

We all know jokes.  Most of us have an anthology of one-liners, gags, bits, and funny stories collected from TikTok, the Tonight Show, coworkers, and friends.  Some jokes we can’t wait to share, and some – wildly inappropriate and deeply offensive – we keep to ourselves, like a guilty pleasure. There are the jokes suited for banquets and those better told in bowling alleys. There are the innocent amusing ones we tell to liven up a dull party or comfort a doleful chum. And there are the ones we only reveal to trusted friends of the same gender and only after three drinks.

I recently added a joke to my collection and tell whenever I can. I share it with fellow passengers waiting for a flight or people in line at the DMV. And it’s not a new one.  I heard it my freshman year in college over fifty years ago. Nick Pantazis – who insisted on being called Greek – shared it our first week. He had the room across from mine, and we and our roommates had spent the day unpacking. Around three o’clock we took a break and ordered a pizza.  It arrived burnt and brittle but piping hot. We sat on suitcases and chugged Cokes from the vending machine. We were all strangers and broke the ice by telling jokes and stories.  

Greek had spent the summer in Athens on an exchange program and told us how the locals were bemused by American students tossing firecrackers on the Fourth of July.  The night of the moon landing, their Yankee celebrations reached Bacchanalian pitch with teenage couples from Highland Park and Great Neck jumping naked into a fountain.  I had nothing that good to share. I spent the summer mowing lawns but remembered a few quips I heard from Jean Shepherd on WOR. Our break ended with Greek relating a final joke.  It sounded dated even then –- like a lame Henny Youngman crack — and I wondered if he got it from his father or an uncle.  Mildly sexist by today’s standards, it was amusing at best, hardly a winner.  Nobody laughed.  I think I smiled.  Then we crushed the pizza debris into a trashcan, finished our Cokes, and went back to work.

Greek and I parted ways at the end of the semester. He pledged a fraternity and left the dorm for the ramshackle Delta house on Wilson Drive. We had separate majors and only saw each other in passing over the next four years. The alphabet separated us at graduation so that by the time his name was called, I was already backstage chugging shots of Jameson with a girlfriend.  

But his joke, for some reason, lodged in my mind, but I never shared it. I never heard it again or saw even a vague reference in print. Then two months ago Greek’s obit appeared in the alumni magazine. Nick Pantazis had died months before in Chicago, having operated the family catering business inherited from his father. The Facebook link showed him, heavier and graying, beaming beside a towering wedding cake. Services had been held at St. Basil’s on Ashland Avenue.  There was no mention of a spouse or children.  

And so now, waiting for a delayed flight or a shareholder meeting to start, I tell strangers Greek’s joke. No one breaks up or even chuckles. At best it earns a nod of amused recognition or a thin smile.  But I pass it on as his legacy.  And, given my age, if it’s shared by others in the future, it may soon be mine.

                                                                  *   *   *

Mark Connelly’s fiction has appeared in Indiana Review, Milwaukee Magazine, Cream City Review, The Ledge, The Great American Literary Magazine, Home Planet News, Smoky Blue Arts and Literary Magazine, Change Seven, Light and Dark, 34th Parallel, The Chamber Magazine, and Digital Papercut. He received an Editor’s Choice Award in Carve Magazine’s Raymond Carver Short Story Contest in 2014; in 2015 he received Third Place in Red Savina Review’s Albert Camus Prize for Short Fiction. In 2005 Texas Review Press published his novella Fifteen Minutes, which received the Clay Reynolds Prize.