By David Larsen

     It was over. Hampton Greer knew it. Eve had made that quite clear. To him and to all of their friends. Two years of bickering over every little thing should have been more than enough…and it was. But still, he didn’t much like the idea of Eve getting in the last word.

     Her house was dark but Hamp still had his key, one thing Eve had forgotten to demand that he return. I’ll go in and wait for her. If she’s out on a date I don’t know what I’ll do, but I’ll definitely surprise her…and her date. It just better not be anyone I know. I’ve always suspected that that weasel Gary, her fancy pants boss, has had his eye on Eve for some time. And she’s foolish enough to step out with a married man to help her along at that whoop-de-doo law firm. She won’t remain a runner forever. Knowing Eve, she’s got her eyes on a legal secretary position or whatever. It would be like her to sleep her way, if not to the top, higher than the bottom.

     “Would you like something to drink?” Hamp heard Eve ask someone in her best sing-song voice. He’d dozed off on her bed, the bed he’d shared with the tall attractive woman off and on for perhaps too long. 

     “I wouldn’t mind a shot of bourbon,” said a man in a slight Texas accent, the kind of good-old-boy twang Hamp detested. “Dinner was good. Wasn’t it? You can’t beat a good steak.”

    “The best steak I’ve had in years,” chirped Eve, “maybe ever. It’s been a long time since I’ve been anyplace classy. My boyfriend always took me to dives. Thank goodness, that’s behind me.” She laughed…a little nervously, thought Hamp. 

     He heard the tinkling of ice then the stereo go on with his…good God…his CD of the Best of the Eagles. How could she? 

     “I’ve always wondered why you wasted your time on Hamp,” said her date. 

     He could tell that they’d now moved from the kitchen to the den. Hamp held his breath. To make his getaway he could get out the back door easily without being noticed, unless they happened to look up at just the right moment. Yet, he remained still.

     But just who is this guy? he wondered. To talk about me that way.

     “Oh,” said Eve, “Hamp’s okay. He just doesn’t get it. He thinks everyone should live frugally. He worries about this, then he worries about that. Hamp works hard teaching that seventh grade class of his and he actually thinks he can make a difference in this world.” She sighed. “He’s pathetically naïve. I think he reads too much.” 

     Well, thought Hamp, why don’t you tell him how your own teaching career was cut short due to your drinking? Why don’t you tell him about that? Tell him how I was the only one at the school who stuck by you through that ordeal. Tell him. Or do you want me to?

     “I’ve wanted to ask you out for some time but I knew you had a boyfriend…I’m just glad we’ve had this opportunity to get to know each other better. Away from work.” The man paused. “When I heard you were now available, so to speak, I wasted no time.”

    “Hamp and I were no longer boyfriend and girlfriend,” said Eve. “We haven’t been, really, for a long time. We were merely hanging on a thread. Someone had to cut the thread. So, I did. It was long overdue. My sister told me that if Hamp didn’t show some initiative it was time to move on.”

     “I’m glad that you did.”

     Your sister? Hamp wanted to shout. Your goddamned sister, the one married to Tim, the only man to ever be fired at the refinery for racist jokes and comments? The goon so bigoted he got let go by a den of bigots. And you, you now take advice from Miss Vodka Collins?

     “Hamp will find someone.” Eve laughed. “Someone willing to listen to his whining about this or that, the state of the world, global warming, the education system. I agree with him on a lot of it, but he tends to go on and on. Sometimes you just want to take it easy.” She again laughed. “You should try going to a movie with him. Instead of enjoying the film he analyzes every little detail. It gets old fast. I just had to sit and listen to him blab and blab all the way home.”

     “I can only tell you that Hampton Greer is one of the best teachers at our school,” said the date. “I could use a dozen more like him. And you, Eve, you were a good teacher. I’ve always wanted you to know that I had nothing to do with that business the school district put you through. It was some of the other teachers who filed the complaint. Certainly not me.” 

     Good God, thought Hamp. Mr. Prade? That sanctimonious son of a bitch. Does his wife know he’s out with one of his former teachers? Wouldn’t everyone like to know? And he was directly involved in Eve’s dismissal. I was on the committee. He was the principal. Now he’s drinking her bourbon thirty feet from her bedroom. Fancy steaks. My ass. Don’t they know what raising cattle does to the environment. Eve knows better.

     “Another?” Eve asked.

     “Why not?” said the principal. 

     Hamp eased himself up from the bed. He slipped past the door to the den without taking so much as a glance. I should slam the damn door on the way out. That would give them a start. But then Mr. Prade would know what I know. But what can he do? Call me into his office? No way. I’ve got him.

     The door slammed behind him. 

     I might as well go out with a bang. And steaks, hell. Eve knows better.’

                                                *    *    *

David Larsen is a writer who lives in El Paso, Texas. His stories have been published in numerous literary journals and magazines including Cholla Needles, The Heartland Review, Floyd County Moonshine, The Mantelpiece, Oakwood, Nude Bruce Review, Canyon Voices, Change Seven, Literary Heist, Aethlon, Coneflower Café, The Raven Review, Voices, Dark Winter Literary Magazine, Mobius, Hares Paw, The Griffel Literary Magazine, Bright Flash Literary Review, El Portal, Hare’s Paw, and October Hill Magazine.

     

     

     

By J. Hess

“Would you please share your life with me?”

I stared at him across the table and set my fork down. In many ways, he was the ideal partner: kind, respectful, supportive, successful. He made me happy. Right? What was happiness? I thought of my parents, centering their lives around the family, their sacrifices, raised voices behind closed doors, quiet laughter over an inside joke, shoulders touching as they washed dishes together. Was I ready to commit my life to another person? I imagined having kids and growing old together. Was he the one? 

He looked at me expectantly. My vision blurred, a tear trickling down my cheek. 

“No,” I whispered. “I’m sorry.”

“But the waiter forgot to bring me one and you’re not even using yours,” he said, gesturing at my knife.

“Oh… I thought you said… never mind.”

We finished our meal in silence. 

*   *   *

J. Hess is originally from the United States but has lived in almost a dozen countries. J. enjoys writing flash fiction and travel stories.  

By Keith J. Powell

Flies zipped around the house like a sour mood. Always there and gone like a suspicion that couldn’t quite be squashed.

“There’s something dead in this house,” he said. 

“It’s your imagination,” she said. 

He clapped a fly out of the air. Its broken body landed between them. “Is that my imagination? Is that terrible smell my imagination?”

She sighed and sipped her wine. “I’m not having this argument again.” 

He pushed his face against the plaster wall, trying to sniff out the phantom corpse. She refilled her glass and turned on the TV—a dramedy about young socialites he couldn’t stomach. 

“It’s been getting worse for weeks,” he said. “A mouse or a squirrel must have died in the walls.”

“If something died in the walls weeks ago, you wouldn’t still be smelling it,” she said.

“Maybe it took a long time to die,” he said.

“That’s not how decaying works,” she said. 

“Oh, you just know everything,” he said.

“Okay,” she said, and sipped her wine.

He made a retching sound and spat on the hardwood. “A fly flew in my mouth.” He spat again. “These goddamn flies. I’m going insane.” He stomped out of the room and returned a short moment later, bouncing the handle of a claw hammer against his palm. 

“What’s that for?” she asked.

He pointed the hammer at her like a pistol. “I’m going to knock holes in every wall in this house until I find whatever it is that died.” 

“Do not put holes in my walls.”

“I’ve gotta find the problem.”

She rolled her eyes. He swung the hammer low like a bowling ball, burying its head in the wall with a dull thud. He lay flat on his stomach and tried peering into the ragged hole. 

“Tell you what, after I find it, whatever it is, we’ll take a trip. We’ll open all the windows and take a long weekend away to let things air out. When we get back, things will be good as new. What do you say?” 

She shrugged and returned her attention to her show. He swung the hammer at a new spot and repeated his inspection.

“We could go up to the lake,” he said. “Get a cabin on the water?”

Thud.

“Maybe drive down south and do some hiking?”

She placed a hand over her wine to block the grey plaster particles floating in the air. “How about a nice hotel?” she offered. 

Thud. “Or that. I guess.”

“There’s a nice one downtown overlooking the river,” she said.

 “Out of curiosity, how is a hotel overlooking a river better than a cabin on a lake?”

“The rooms have jet tubs for one.”

Thud. “The cabin has a hot tub.” 

“Does the cabin have a spa? Because the hotel has a spa. And room service.”

“Oh, she wants room service now.” Thud. 

“I like room service,” she said.

Thud. “Hey,” he said, setting the hammer down. “I see something.” 

“You can have them bring up a bottle of cold champagne right to your room.”

“Is that a feather? Are these bird bones?”

“They’ll even bring you chocolate strawberries.”

“I think it was a dove. I can still see some of the white feathers. But I don’t understand…”

“Six delicious strawberries lined up just so on a silver tray.”

He stopped and pushed himself up on his knees. He dusted pulverized plaster from his hands and slumped with his back against the meager opening, revealing the secret dead thing inside. He tapped the hammer against his thigh. 

“You sure know a lot about this hotel,” he said.

The room darkened under a black veil of flies.

*   *   *

Keith J. Powell is a writer and editor based in Ohio. He is co-founder and managing editor of Your Impossible Voice and the author of the flash fiction chapbook Sweet Nothings Are a Diary If You Know How to Read Them (ELJ Editions). Visit keithjpowell.com for more.

By Michael Degnan

Fear entered the house on a Tuesday night, twisting through two windows my parents had opened after the sun went down. It spread from one room to the next like smoke. 

I was young, only three or four. I was playing with my hockey figures in the living room when my parents screamed in the kitchen. They yelled for it to get off, to leave. I ran to them, expecting to see an intruder. Instead, there was nothing. Only my parents slapping the air and flinching.

My parents were different after that night. They worried about what could go wrong, especially with money. We started eating cheap sliced bread instead of fresh loaves from the bakery down the street. We stopped eating ice cream. We stopped laughing too.

The fear reached me, but somehow it made me more powerful. I could see so much more. When I saw a bathtub, I could see beyond the room. I could see the pipes that curved through the walls and into the ground under our house, the copper pipes that I feared one day would suck me into the darkness. 

As I got older, I could see whether others were similarly afflicted. If they were, their faces were always covered in shadows. No matter where they were or how they turned, a soft patch of gray followed. I never mentioned this to my parents, and I don’t know if they could see it too. Their faces were darker than most.

In college, fear was everywhere, but I never met a girl as afraid as Jessica. Our professor was talking about temperance when I looked at her and her gentle smile, softened by a dab of dark gray. 

I invited her to the soccer field a few nights later. We spread out a blanket and lay down to look at the sky. I asked her what she was afraid of. She turned, perhaps wondering how I knew. She told me that she was afraid of trees, of getting stuck at the top and being unable to find the courage to step back down. She said that she was afraid of being forgotten, anxious that a person she met the previous week wouldn’t remember her name the next time they met. She paused and then said that she was afraid that I wouldn’t like her.

I took her hand and, as I stroked it, I was able to see further, beyond that night, beyond the next four years, somewhere into the soft distance. My heart beat faster, and the night swirled around me. I closed my eyes and saw an image of Jessica and me, older, sitting on a bench by a rocky outcropping in Maine, holding hands as waves crashed into coves and seagulls squawked overhead.

It was then, as Jessica leaned over to kiss me, that I realized that it wasn’t fear that let me see so far.

                                                                 *   *   *

Michael Degnan lives on an island in Maine. His work has appeared in Bright Flash Literary Review, Maudlin House, Literally Stories, Flash Fiction Magazine, and elsewhere.

By Joan Potter

My cousin – I’ll call her Betsy – sends an email saying she’d love to see me. It’s been two years; she lives an hour and a half away. But, she adds, “I’m afraid we will have to wait for a bit to invite you to our home.”

The we includes her husband, whom I’ll name Nick. They used to invite my sons and me for lunch every summer. On our last visit, it was announced that Nick had prepared the meal. It included a bowl of something, possibly chicken, in a bright orange sauce. While serving himself, my son Jonathan dropped a bit of sauce on the tablecloth. 

“There’s turmeric in that,” Nick observed. “It will never come out.” I guess it didn’t, which might account for the two-year silence.

In her email, Betsy suggests that they might be able to see me in early November or early December “depending how we all are.” It’s now the end of July. She and Nick have a busy schedule; she thoughtfully tells me every detail:

Last fall they took a boat and bike trip to Provence. In June they returned home from a sail and bike trip along the coast of Sweden and Denmark. They spent July on Fire Island with friends and family. Home for the month of August. (Maybe she shouldn’t have told me that, since we won’t be invited for lunch.) Back on Fire Island in September. Away for the month of October.

“Anyway,” she closes, “I hope you are doing well and your family too.”

  I have to come up with a reply. Possibly something like, “Might see you in December if I’m not snowbound.”

*   *.  *

Joan Potter’s nonfiction has appeared in anthologies and literary journals, including The Bluebird Word, New Croton Review, The RavensPerch, Persimmon Tree, Airplane Reading, Bright Flash Literary Review, and others. She is the author or coauthor of several nonfiction books. The most recent is the collaborative memoir “Still Here Thinking of You: A Second Chance With Our Mothers.”

 

 

 

By Doug Hawley and Bill Tope

Joe Jacobs spotted something lying in the road up ahead. Puzzled, he braked, and the car rolled to a stop about ten feet in front of the mysterious object. He peered curiously through the windshield. “What is that?” he wondered aloud.

Climbing out of his automobile, he approached cautiously and realized with a start that it was in fact a man, lying face down on the pavement. He wasn’t moving.

“Hey there,” he said nervously. “Are you alright? Mister?” Drawing near, Joe knelt and put two fingers on the man’s neck, the way he’d seen actors do it in police dramas on television. But this wasn’t TV, he told himself; it was real. There was no pulse, and the man’s skin felt cold. The driver regained his feet.

He turned the situation over in his mind for a moment, then purposely knelt before the man again, extracted the man’s wallet and a cash clip holding a thick wad of fifty dollar bills, and slipped the expensive-looking wrist watch from the man’s wrist onto his own. He hurried back to his car and stopped to observe a device affixed to a light pole along the side of the highway. He stared. Was that a security camera? he wondered.

Hurriedly, he reentered his car, fired up the motor and backed away from the fallen man. Then, laying a little rubber, he accelerated around the victim and sped on down the highway, wondering, how would he spend this money? Then he chuckled and said out loud “I’ll continue my winning streak.”

He was just a couple of miles from “Lucky Run,” an Indian casino. He pulled in and paid all of his money for a stack of chips.  After an hour he had doubled his chips while consuming a couple of roast beef sandwiches and four gin and tonics.  He continued his reckless gambling, eating, and drinking until after two hours, he was broke, drunk and bloated.

He barely was able to walk to his car.  A half hour later a driver found his car wreck. Jacobs was near death, but what surprised the driver who found him was discovering his father’s distinctive watch on the dying Jacobs’ wrist.

                                                              *   *   *

Doug Hawley lives in Oregon with editor Sharon. He is a retired mathematician. He volunteers for community projects and has about 1,000 publishing credits.

Bill Tope, Hawley’s co-author, is a retired caseworker, construction laborer, nude model for university art classes. He lives in the American Midwest with his mean little cat Baby. He has substantially fewer publications than Hawley, but has appeared in Bright Flash Literary Review before.

By Dean Charpentier

She says, I know what it’s like to be dead.

She runs her hand up the rough surface of the porch post, lets her fingers trace lightly over the curves, lets them catch momentarily on the splinters, the knots. Her hair moves slightly in the breeze off the lake, which ripples with the setting of the red sun.

She says, My organs are made of stone. My blood is a fine sand.

My feet are wet already with evening dew. My socks squeak inside my shoes as I stand below her.  I haven’t brought her here for this. Darkness gathers more quickly than I had hoped.  It presses on the corners of my eyes. Already she is dim on the steps above me, blurring into the outline of the cabin. The trees surround us, awkward, like friends trying not to eavesdrop.

She responds to a question I haven’t asked. There are no things, just symbols—the truth of me is in my spirit. My body is inconsequential.

I think, That’s not true. I can feel the memory of her body now, pressed against me, and the loud energy of her lips.

She says, My truth is the truth of the lake, of the trees, of the wind. She says, I am everything.

Her eyes close. Her white hospital gown rustles in the night air, and in the dimness it looks like her soul leaving her body, hovering about her. I envision her here an hour from now, when it is colder, when her breath will escape as vapor, disappear around her head in the dark like a bat.

She says, I feel the darkness.

I hear her breathe deeply, hold it, then exhale.

She says, I can taste the dark.

Then, I know why you brought me here. It’s okay. You can touch me. It’s what you want.

It isn’t all I want, but she is right like an unfinished symphony is right. I go up one step, she is still above me, and I press my head to her stomach, the unhealthy softness real through the thin cotton. She runs her hands through my hair, pulling me to her. She walks me up to the porch and to the swing, and she sits me down. She wears nothing beneath the hospital gown and sits next to me and lowers her head to my shoulder in the chill night.

We are a strange and wonderful tableau. Her breath is hard, rasping, and implies distance.

I think of the red strawberry juice that ran down her chin as she laughed last summer in sunlight, in the field just through the woods.

Later, she stands and doesn’t notice that her gown catches above one hip.  Her white haunches roll like gears as she walks to the railing, leans on it.

She says, Do you feel better?

Yes, I say.

Then, Is that why you stole me away?

I didn’t steal you.

She says, You don’t own me. You took me. That’s stealing.

I don’t know if she means this afternoon when I took her from the hospital, or the night I first snuck her out of her parents’ house, the day after we met.

I like to think you had some part in it, I say.

She says, That’s true. I’m sorry. I make my own decisions. I didn’t mean to hurt you by implying it wasn’t my free will to go with you.

That’s okay, I say, but it isn’t okay. She has clearly forgotten our agreement. Her request, which seems quaint and ancient now. I join her at the railing and we watch the lake leak into the night. The hills across the water we can only detect with senses other than sight. Shapes morph into inferred presence, then finally into potential language. What word would I invent to speak the concept of hill? I wonder. What word for loneliness? For touch?

Stars appear.

She says, You’ll be okay. Then, Memory always recreates things in the present tense. 

I can smell the grass, the forest, but her scent is stronger because she hasn’t bathed recently, and she smells faintly of antiseptic too. I picture us having sex and I’m ashamed of the thought. But she knows that and takes my hand and leads me inside, to the back bedroom where we spent many summers and some autumns like this one.

She takes off her robe and the silver ambient light from a billion distant suns enters through the window and paints her flesh like mercury, fragile like winter’s first ice, or blown glass. Her thin skin is laced with blue veins like the scales of a fish, her bald head glows like her diminished breasts. I focus on the black bruise where the IV punctured her. She crawls between flannel sheets and I take off my clothes and join her, and I can’t tell where she ends and the sheets begin.

Later, while she sleeps, my bladder wakes me and I piss for a long time in the dark.

I walk to the kitchen, naked, get a glass of water from the sink and drink deeply. Suddenly I am hungry, but don’t want to eat while she can’t keep anything in her stomach, so I gaze out the window at the quicksilver landscape, primed now in moonlight. All is still. 

I go back to bed and pull her to me, enveloping her fragile skeleton, folding her brittle bones into my belly. Her shoulder blades slice into my chest. There is only her breathing to mock the cabin’s night sounds, the random cracks and snaps of the contracting frame. 

I lay still so I can listen to her breathe. I sleep.

The next morning, she is cold and stiff and a little blue. I pull my arm from under her head and slip from the bed, and I hurry to the bathroom to dry heave. 

I go back to the bedroom where predawn light has made the scene more bearable. I dress and wrap her in the sheet. Her face isn’t troubled, but also not entirely peaceful. Neutral. She is awkward to carry, already somewhat stiff and hard to manage, but I am able to get her out the front door and down to the dock. Mist rises from the lake like the souls of fish.

Once, after sex, she had said, I think when I orgasm my heart stops for a moment.

No, I had said, that’s when you sneeze, and she had laughed

But last night she had said, No, my heart is stopping. 

Or maybe I had imagined her saying that.

The boat’s waves are the first ripples of the morning, and they spread out from me like radiation to the far shore, where as slim shadows of themselves they caress the smooth dark stones.

Near the center of the lake, I tie her to the heavy cinder blocks we arranged together yesterday.  Awkward, I heave her up to the side, then drop her over. Then the blocks go in and they dive eagerly under the black water, then her body disappears with a quick sucking sound and then I am alone.

I watch small bubbles on the surface. Under me in the icy water lies her future and my past, intersected. I imagine her passing through our layered story on the way down, words and images like sediment, events both mundane and catastrophic, past faces and memories both bright like day and dim like the gloaming, and one finally as brilliant as the sunrise, and that is the memory of our meeting and parting in one.

                                                                   *   *   *

Charpentier is a writer and teacher of literature and creative writing living in North Andover, MA, where he was a recent winner of the Anne Bradstreet Poetry Contest. His poetry has appeared in BODY Magazine, Expressionist Magazine, Eunoia Review, Wild Roof Journal, English Journal; his fiction in Fiction Southeast; and his essay in Andovers Magazine. He has spent an over 30-year career in education attempting to chip away at the canon from the inside, like escaping from Shawshank. Accomplices in this mission are wife Lori, daughter Taylor, son JP, and pandemic goldendoodle Odin, whose barking would surely give them all up in a zombie apocalypse. Nonetheless, they will keep him.

By Kris Faatz

The face in the mirror was mine, once, but it isn’t now. Where are the crows’-feet, the faded grace? This girl is lovelier then I remember, but her eyes are full of ghosts.

In the glass, I see the weight she drags. Whispers and hisses bind her limbs and stop her mouth. Shameful. Waste of space. Burden.

My strong old fist shatters the mirror. I step through the empty frame with a brilliant shard in my unscathed hand. 

Don’t you listen, child. That’s nothing but lies.

With the fragment of glass, I cut her free of her shadows: one stroke, then another. Her wide eyes stay on my face. 

I toss the glass away. My hand closes around hers. She catches her breath, and in the next heartbeat, she dissolves into my body like quicksilver. Her youth sparkles along my veins.

“Come, my girl.” I say it aloud, in the wide-open silence. “It’s time to take you home.” 

*   *   *

Kris Faatz (rhymes with skates) is a pianist and award-winning writer. Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in journals including South 85 and Bewildering Stories. Her third novel, Line Magic, was shortlisted for the Santa Fe Writers Project’s 2023 literary awards and released in 2025 by Highlander Press. Kris and her husband serve as staff to three cats and enjoy hiking and outdoor exploration. Visit her online at krisfaatz.com. 

By Nadezh Frank

Mid-afternoon sun covers half the passengers with a thick duvet of light, banishing shadows to the other side of the suburban express. A soft-tempered swing sways her, sways him, like a mother rocking her babies to sleep. Shhhh, wheels fondle the rails. He’s old—a nod, a jolt; she’s his age—a nod, a jolt—crossing the chasm by a needle-thick bridge; dreams flow below. He walks on, she follows him, their shoulders lower, their breathing slows as they’re falling, falling, falling, fallen; asleep.

Wrapped in sunshine, they fall asleep on the train, on the side of light, on a double seat, chins on chests, his hair grey and thin like hers, her hair cut as short as his. The synchronicity of the whole thing would surprise no one who knows them. For forty-one years, they did everything together: went to bed at a quarter to eleven, woke up at half-past six. Together, they brushed their teeth. Together, they ate. He a pain au chocolat. She jam, butter, and bread. They watched the morning news together, or the weather forecast, or a sunrise, sometimes; sometimes it rained.

When they were young and recently married, he dropped her off at the nursery and picked her up after her working day was over. Sometimes it was she who drove him to the office. Oh, how she loved driving. The feeling of control that came over her, the certainty of the road ahead, the clarity of the destination; unlike the goddamn trains, cars changed directions.

Sometimes they went to visit his mother in Quimper or her brother in Salerno. On weekends, if the weather allowed, they went to the park just outside the city center. Once, he noticed a ladybug on a blade of grass, and lay down, and watched. They were alone in a quiet corner, so she lay with him, tracing the lines running from the outer corners of his eyes. A deep inhale. He smelled like the sun. No one was around, so, when they kissed, he whispered, “Let’s try again.”

“When?”

“Now. Ladybugs bring luck.”

Eight months minus a day after they’d lain in the park, they rushed. 

After another month, they ran. Together, they ran—left their one-bedroom in downtown, moved to the countryside, away from the sounds and the sight they ached to forget. Those whitewashed walls. The walls of white. The cold. The stone. The electric light. They ran to the house of their own to forget. 

Forget? 

Could they ever forget how they’d rushed? 

That night—eight months minus a day since the park—he drove like mad, and she sat, panting her lungs out, in the back seat of their car.

And he was there.

He was there when she pushed, when she cried, when she sent him to hell—she was going to die, she thought. He was there, squeezing her hand, when she begged, first the midwife, then God, for an end. He was there, he was everywhere, when the pale angel arrived. Nameless—they wouldn’t dare to name her—she came, nameless she went, leaving the white hospital walls and the cold and the stone and the bed, rejecting the screaming world; oh, how they wept.

And she was there.

She was there when he pushed her away, when he cried—there was nowhere to rush anymore, there was nowhere to hide. She was there, wrapping his head in her arms, when he cursed the white walls and the coldness surrounding the cot he’d bought only a week before. She was there with him on the floor. Together, they lay there curled up like a pair of larvae waiting for the winter to pass; endless. Gravity didn’t hold. It clutched at their heavy bodies, pulling them down to the center of all in the middle of nothing, empty, never, empty, never, empty. They swore to each other, never again.

She quit her job at the nursery. She quit tiny noses, long lashes, pink lips. There were too many. They were too much.

And he was there again when she, dry and downtrodden, stared in the mirror, her breathless voice stealing the meaningless “Why this? Why us? Jacques, will you forgive me?”

“It’s not your fault, Sophia. Come to bed now. You must sleep, all right?”

That’s when they moved to the countryside.

Never mind.

All that happened long before this day on the train. Forty-one autumns have come and gone. Time passed by, slowly making things finer and, finally, fine. Oh yes, they’re fine, asleep on the train that carries her, that carries him as it has done so many times for everyone and everything, carrying persons and things through the brittleness of life, from station to station. They travel together, as they’ve always done. Togetherness has been their shield, their pride, their flag, their roof, their Northern Star, their coffee with milk, their lavender bath, their second nature, their safety net, their bed, their kiss, that of a lover and a mother’s kiss too, a lifelong journey, theirs, herhis.

Everyone knows them like this. So no one expects it to end. But it ends. Just like that, he betrays her. For the first time in their side-by-side lives, he betrays her.

Like a child playing with a bug, Gravity unclasps its fist. The train slows down. The driver’s voice announces their station. The sound of it awakens her from sleep. 

“Jacques?”

The man slouching at her side doesn’t react. 

“Wake up, Jacques. We’ve arrived.”

He doesn’t move. 

She doesn’t know. 

Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.

*   *   *

Nadezh Frank is a Switzerland-based writer of Russian and French heritage. She is represented by Kat Foxx at The Rights Factory and is the author of the debut novel The Benefactor of Snails. Her work explores love, loss, self-identity, and the quiet resilience of the human spirit. (www.nadezhfrank.com)

By David August

Where do you go to find an enlightening truth that probably doesn’t exist? If you were Ralph Goodall at the age of thirty-five, you might set out one day with no destination in mind, check into a hotel in a city you’ve never been to, and lie on the bed staring at the ceiling, determined to solve the mysteries of existence or die trying.

By midnight, having uncovered no wisdom other than his inability to uncover anything else, Ralph was forced to realize two things in quick succession. First, he was still very much alive. Second, he was also very hungry, which was inconvenient since the hotel kitchen had stopped taking orders an hour earlier. 

Instead of trying to find a restaurant open this late at night, he settled for the snacks in the minibar. It contained nothing more than two small packages of salted peanuts and a bag of chips, which he wolfed down with a can of beer. He couldn’t sleep afterwards, and when he looked at himself in the mirror, his lower lip seemed twice as big as normal. His mouth started to tingle.

He went to the lobby where the receptionist was watching TV. “Good evening,” Ralph said, dizzy after coming down two flights of stairs. “I’m sorry, I feel a little sick. Is there a hospital around here?”

The young man looked at him with mild concern. “Uh, yeah, man, you look kinda pale. What are you feeling?”

“I ate the peanuts from the minibar,” Ralph said, then touched his earlobes, which were burning hot. “I’m having a little trouble breathing.”

“Peanuts?” echoed the other man. “I thought they got rid of them last year.” He checked himself and was back on point, “So, about that hospital, it’s super close. Just two blocks down the road, you can’t miss it.” After studying Ralph some more, he added, “You want me to call you a cab?”

Suddenly anxious to feel the cool night breeze on his face, Ralph said, “Two blocks, you said? No, I think I can walk it.”

“You sure?” the clerk asked, his eyes already back on the TV. Ralph nodded and left, eager to be outside.

The night was cold and he didn’t have his jacket, but the chill on his skin was a blessing. He found it easier to breathe as he walked the first block, and only the tingling in his tongue kept him from turning back. The relief was short-lived, however, and by the time he reached the building with the big red cross on the front, he was breaking out in a cold sweat.

He sat on a bench outside the hospital and waited for the wave of discomfort to pass. All the while he could hear voices inside, once over the loudspeaker, but no one entered or left the building. When he began to feel better, he picked himself up and stepped through the sliding door.

The ER waiting room was empty, with no patients or staff, so he decided to sit again until the attendant returned. He could still hear people talking nearby, though he couldn’t make out the exact words. He assumed it was coming from the next room, labeled “Triage Nurse,” since the door leading deeper into the hospital was closed.

After five minutes of waiting and no one showing up, Ralph became impatient. He called out, “Hello?” and got no answer. He finally went to the triage room to ask for help and was surprised to find it empty. There was a murmur in the background, but it was faint, perhaps from an adjacent room. This was puzzling because there were no other doors, and he was sure that no one had come out.

As he searched for air ducts that might explain the noise, he heard hurried footsteps behind him. He spun around and looked back at the waiting room. Again, no one was in sight, but now there was the sound of wheels turning, like those of a gurney. It came and went in the blink of an eye, the source nowhere to be seen. Ralph felt a shiver run down his spine even before the automatic door to the hallway opened by itself.

On any other night, he might have left at this point, gone back to the hotel, waited outside the hospital until someone else showed up. On this night, however, with his heart aligned with the urge to grasp something, anything, beyond the ordinary, he reluctantly pressed on, following the sound of the unseen wheels.

There were footsteps all around him, people talking, some urgent, some languid, and machines humming and beeping, the sounds you’d expect to hear in a busy hospital. Only there was no one around. Though the lights were on, the beds were all empty, the nursing stations deserted. 

Ralph shouted several times, “Hello? Where are you?” to no avail. Clearly none of the voices could hear him, and when he tried to locate their exact source, they just drifted away. He could half discern what they were saying, someone calling for a doctor, a boy talking to his mother, though he caught the emotion conveyed more than the actual words.

After walking through most of the hospital and finding no one, he didn’t know what else to do. He was sure that there was something important going on that he should try to understand, but as the minutes ticked by, no flash of insight came. He was out of sync with the people in the hospital, that much was clear, or maybe it was they who were out of sync with the world at large, but what did that mean? Try as he might, he couldn’t tell. It was like staring at the ceiling all over again, only ten times more frustrating.

Without planning, he found his way back to the waiting room. It was quieter than before, and to compensate for the eerie atmosphere, he began to whistle. It took him a few seconds to realize where his mind was going, but eventually he recognized the tune he was struggling with. It was “Hotel California,” and the creeping thought of not being able to leave the hospital gave him butterflies in his stomach. He ran to the door and, with more bathos than release, managed to get out unhindered.

He stopped at the curb at the sound of laughter, not from behind him, but from across the street. Two men, obviously drunk, were staggering along the opposite sidewalk, shouting and cursing at each other. A motorcycle came by at top speed and honked at them, setting off the barking of a couple of dogs.

The night was chillier than ever. Ralph glanced at his watch and it was earlier than he had imagined, not quite one o’clock yet. When he looked back at the hospital, nothing had changed, there was still not a soul to be seen. Dispirited, he made his way to the hotel, his allergies over or simply forgotten. 

The next morning, after checking out of the hotel, Ralph parked his car near the hospital and walked over for a last look. He didn’t know what he was hoping for, but even from a distance he could see people coming and going. An ambulance pulled out of the garage, sirens wailing, and he had to run out of the way. He crept cautiously into the waiting room, as if expecting the building to swallow him up at any moment.

Most of the seats were now taken, and at least two disgruntled patients, including a man with a nasty bruise on his head, were yelling at the lone attendant manning the front desk. A security guard stood motionless off to the side, blocking the path to the restricted area.

Barely aware of what he was doing, Ralph wandered around the room, taking in all the faces and sounds. Voices came from every direction, loud and soft, punctuated by the occasional announcement over the loudspeakers.

As he moved from wall to wall, no one paid him any attention. They were too wrapped up in their own aches and troubles to notice another stranger. He began to think, only half-jokingly, that the tables had turned and he was now the invisible one.

When he got to the entrance of the treatment area to inspect the rest of the hospital, the guard at the door barked at him, “Hey, where do you think you’re going? You have to wait in line like everyone else.”

Ralph was mumbling his apologies when he heard a new sound over the chatter. He scanned the room, but couldn’t find what he was looking for, even though it seemed to be coming his way. In an urgent tone, he asked the bewildered guard, “Listen! Do you hear that? Is that a gurney?”

*    *     *

David August lives in São Paulo, Brazil, and works in human rights advocacy. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in 3:AM Magazine, Apocalypse Confidential, and LatineLit, among others.