By Freya Ye

Speeding through the streets until your soles burned, you tightened a grip on the suitcase clattering behind you with your whole life on its rollers. One wheel hadn’t been quite right since knocking against a curb several blocks back, and your heart lurched at each ill-timed pop and scrape. It would make sense to turn back now. The place you left barely qualified as a shoe closet, but it had someone to share the bed with each night, to need and be needed by, to plead and prove yourself to—which was almost like love.

Past midnight, lights painted the streets in acrylic strokes, dashing the city with cold blues and acid yellows. Frost stippled windshields and wire fences. Tomorrow—today—should be the first day of spring, but for now each step crunched on salt and snow. Each breath rose in hot white curls. Tears singed your eyes as you ducked under the bus shelter and pried uselessly at the push timer, begging the heater to work, but the infrared slabs hung stoic overhead. Now it would really make sense to turn back. Somehow, every step you had taken in life had led you further away from yourself, with every attempt to find the way back flinging you even further still. If you weren’t frozen solid by the time the bus came, you would leave the city you knew, trading the grief of holding on for the grief of letting go.

And then?

Slumping under the overhang, you squinted ahead where urban grids blurred into smog-smeared periphery. Come morning, you could wake up who-knows-where doing god-knows-what with devils you didn’t know, going spectacularly right or wrong in ways you could never imagine for which there would be no one to blame but you.

Behind, fire escapes cross-hatched facades of steel and stone in the direction you had come. Faces you might know flitted down dim crosswalks and passed under the bleeding eyes of traffic lights: people you had tried to be enough for, ghosts you had given so much to bring back to life that you had become one yourself. Come morning, you could wake up in bed next to someone who was almost like love, stringing the same thoughts into the same stories that made love out of almost-love and meaning out of sunk time. Soon, everything meant something meant something else meant nothing, and you would find yourself comparing bus tickets online at some absurd, sleepless hour like now, weighing the devil you knew against the devil you didn’t.

Amber eyes turned the corner, punching tunnels through the smog. You screwed your eyes against the glare as the bus belched and moaned around the block, hearing the gravelly crunch of tires as it lolled against the curb with a sigh. When you opened them again, the faces you might know were gone, swallowed by the molten haze of headlights.

Some things weren’t worth waiting for. Some minds did not mean to change. Enough was enough was enough was enough.

One foot first. Then the next. Doors hissed. Coins clattered. A few other wacky wayfarers dotted the aisles of the coach, and you stomped off snow before joining the club. Inside, hot air plugged your ears like wool as you sunk into a seat near heat vents and sprawled gratefully across the grilles until you all but cooked. Your whole life on rollers bumped against your knee as the bus pulled out, and things stopped needing to mean other things.

Moments were moments. Ghosts were ghosts. Almost-love was almost love.

The lines and nodes that cinched all things loosened and dissolved. Time became moments and thoughts etched no stories. The liquid gleam of streetlights sped and slurred outside the window as the vehicle eased into a steady swing. Cheek tilting into glass, your head felt unnaturally heavy as your eyes began to droop. This moment had rehearsed itself in your head more times than you could count, but in no iteration had you ever nodded off first before it occurred to you to look back.

Come morning, you would wake.

*   *   *

Freya is a scientist-in-training who can’t stay away from writing. She needs to know why people do the weird things that they do, and science doesn’t always know either. Catch her on IG @your.no1.fannn

By Yash Seyedbagheri               

I wipe down the mahogany table. The cloth squeaks and shrieks. There are still too many little scratches and blemishes. Too much history. A series of zigzagging lines.

My sister, Nan, puts a hand on my shoulder.

“It looks nice, Nicky. But why don’t you take a break? You’ve been cleaning for an hour straight.”

My other sister, Colette, nods.

“You can’t get all the blemishes out, darling.”

I grunt and keep wiping. I have to make this table resplendent. Mom promised she’d join us this year. I know that sounds crazy, and I should grow up, since I’m twenty-six, but still. I think of her crooked grin, the way she doesn’t just walk, but saunters with attitude, making a space all her own. I’m more of a waddler.

Colette’s phone rings. I push the cloth harder and harder. The scratches stare up at me.

“What?” she says. “Again? Really, Mom?”

Words rise, a miasma of incoherence. A buzz.

“Nick’s cleaned things up for you. Did you know that? He’s killing himself for you here. I told him not to bother, but he’s still at it. You should be here for him.”

More words. I think I make out a “sorry.” I can’t tell.

“Why spend it with someone else, Mom? What the hell?”

She hangs up. Slams the phone down on the table, and sighs.

“I’m sorry, Nicky.”

“Why the fuck aren’t I good enough? Why aren’t we good enough for her?”

They both pull me into a hug; I love my sisters, but I miss Mom’s energy, her dirty jokes (especially the one about Hitler working at Costco). I miss her promises; they’re something to cradle, at least. 

But at least I feel my sisters’ arms, strong, never wavering, the scents of soap and perfume and Camels and family.

When they let go, I look at where Colette’s slammed the phone down. Another scratch.

*   *   *

Yash Seyedbagheri (he/him) is a graduate of Colorado State University’s MFA fiction program. His fiction has been nominated for four Pushcart Prizes. Yash’s work has been published in Flow Magazine, Prosetrics The Literary Magazine, and Ariel Chart, among others.

By Karen Zlotnick

My mother’s ghost appeared to me three whole years before my mother left. 

Sitting over a cup of tea, I told my mother about the visit. I wasn’t too shaken, but I was a little concerned it meant something ominous. I was nine, still putting a drop of milk and a cube of sugar in my tea and stirring it with a tiny spoon, the way my mother taught me.

My mother smiled, what was left of her red lipstick bright across the lower half of her face. She asked me if she looked good in ghost form and glanced at her frosted nails. It was obvious she didn’t believe me, so I kept the rest of the visits to myself.

*

My mother’s ghost visited often. 

Sometimes she’d appear in my mid-awake state, just before I’d use the back of my hand to prevent my drool from wetting the pillow. I’d feel her arms wrapped around my shoulders. She never spoke, but one time she lay down facing me and put her breezy hands on my cheeks and looked into my eyes in a knowing way. Other times she’d catch me off guard, when I was coloring or Barbie-ing or trying on my mother’s spike-heeled pumps. She came to me silent and warm. 

My mother asked me why I stopped wearing my cardigans. I said I outgrew the look, but the truth is I was always warm.

*

My mother had patience for me and listened to my relentless storytelling and detailed ramblings about my latest drawings. She took me to the art supply store and indulged me with markers, colored pencils, crayons, and professional-grade sketchbooks. She pretend-introduced me to imaginary museum-goers as The Artist in Residence.

My mother’s ghost often stood over me while I drew, nodding and caressing the back of my hair. It wasn’t distracting at all. 

One time, over a cup of tea, my mother commented that my hair was particularly silky. If you only knew, I thought. Then she told me the marker stains on my fingertips made it look like I’d touched a rainbow.

*

One night, my mother’s ghost made a rainbow appear in my bedroom, only one end of it slithered behind the ceiling fan instead of landing on the floor. With a long, billowy finger, my mother’s ghost pointed to it and smiled so big that her lips touched my closet door. It was the first time I ever spoke out loud to her. 

I said, “I love it.” 

I couldn’t have imagined it, but her smile got even bigger.

*

My mother’s fading was slow at first. She complained of back pain, took pills to relax her muscles, and slept a lot. I visited her in her bed, bringing her new drawings, new stories.

One day, my mother’s ghost stood with me in our bathroom after my mother accidentally left out a bottle with this on the label: Use as needed. We stared at the bottle together.

That night, my mother’s ghost lay down next to me under my covers. She warmed my feet with hers, and before she had to leave, she grabbed socks from my drawer and slipped them over my toes. I wore those socks to school the next day; I didn’t even mind that they were a little stretched out from sleeping and dreaming in them. 

*

My mother made a joke about how thin she’d gotten, how her jeans might fall right to her feet if she didn’t wear a belt. Eleven years old, a fashionista with an artist’s sensibility, I convinced her to let me help her shop for new jeans, but right after she parked the car under the sign for The Cheesecake Factory, she panicked and thrust the car into reverse. My mother didn’t know it, but her ghost’s hands were on the steering wheel along with hers. I fell asleep with my head on the window.

We didn’t talk about it—the panic, the drive home. Instead, I sat on the edge of her bed and told her my newest story in which a young child had to walk a tightrope over a lake. In the lake was a school of child-eating fish, and on the shore was the warm embrace of two of the child’s favorite teachers. Also, the lake was purple. 

When I showed her the drawing for my story, my mother’s bottom lip quivered. I didn’t know how to respond, but my mother’s ghost helped my mother to close her eyes and rest. I slid the drawing out of my mother’s hand, went to my bedroom, and used a black marker to blot out any fish that could eat a child.

*

My mother’s body didn’t give out until I turned thirty, but she’d faded from me by the time I was twelve.

Often with her ghost by my side, I visited my mother in the facility where they kept her clean and calm. I liked that she seemed peaceful, even when I was old enough to understand that “as needed” had become her way of life.

My aunts—Dora and Dolly—stepped in where my mother had left off. Dora, a food chemist, taught me to resist sugar, to drink my tea black, to have one bite of a cookie instead of the whole thing. And Dolly, a successful textbook illustrator, read every single story I wrote, poured over each sketch with loving, instructional eyes.

*

Right before my mother completed her suicide, my mother’s ghost guided my hand in a drawing that would become central in my third children’s book. 

A child walks over a colossal bridge which is in danger of collapse. In the sky, ghostly clouds hover. In the water below, fish form an expansive net in case the child falls. On the other side, two women stand ready.

*   *   *

Born and raised in New York, Karen Zlotnick lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband and their Newfoundland dog. 

Some of her work has been featured in Pithead Chapel, Typishly, jmww, Stonecoast Review, and Moon City Review. In addition, one of her stories was nominated for Best Small Fictions.

 

By Maria Warner

“DO NOT ENTER”-bold black letters flare against neon-yellow ribbon stretched across my front steps.
 The immediate area is cordoned off with caution tape. Neighbors and delivery drivers are being turned away for everyone’s safety.

We’ve been instructed not to make any sudden movements.

My husband, Mike, and I shelter in place. We stay away from the windows. Mike sits in a recliner reading his book, The Northern Spy. I fidget on the floor, trying to relax, failing at my yoga-corpse pose. Deciding to take matters into my own hands, I slither down the hallway from the kitchen to the laundry room, army crawling along the floor. I pull a black shirt and maroon pants from the dryer. A ski mask, forgotten since our last mountain trip, lies on a shelf. I slide it over my head.

Leaning against the wall, I try to devise a plan. Think. Think. Think. I tap my forehead with my palm.

Ah-ha. I stuff four washcloths into my pants and stick the roll of tape in my mouth. Inching my way back to the family room, my progress stopped when Mike stuck his foot out.  

“What are you doing?” he asks as he flips a page in his novel. 

“Silencers,” I say, waving the washcloths. 

He rolls his eyes and returns to reading. 

MacGyvering a chair, I wrap a washcloth on each leg securing it with the duct tape.  I slide it back and forth a few times to ensure it’s soundless.

“Psst,” Mike whispers. I turn to see his eyebrows raised in disapproval.

“I want a closer look,” I say. “I need to know what we’re dealing with.”

“Don’t cause a disturbance,” he says. “We don’t want to irritate the professionals.”

I waved him off. An inch at a time, I rise from my crouch until my eyes meet the glass pane of the front door. I scanned the yard for the two people who wrapped our deck in caution tape.

They are nearly invisible in their khakis, camouflaged among the evergreens. A flicker of light. Their binocular lenses trained-on me.

“Oh,” I gasp.

They point with authority, motioning for me to look down.

There, tucked deep inside our evergreen wreath, rests a cradle of twigs and down. Four junco chicks-fuzzy, fragile, their throats pulsing with hunger-stretch their beaks toward the sky, pleading for a miracle that will come in the form of their mother’s wings.

I stop breathing.

All the noise, the caution tape, the silent commands fall away. What remains is something ancient and holy: new life, small and trembling, asking to be fed.

My bird-loving neighbors hadn’t sealed us in to keep danger out. They had created a sanctuary-so these tiny, sacred hearts could keep beating, undisturbed, into the world.

                                                                   *   *   *

Maria Warner is a memoirist and flash fiction writer whose work explores transformation, resilience, and the unexpected turning points that reshape a life. A former corporate professional turned artist and storyteller, she draws inspiration from family memory, sobriety, and the natural world to uncover moments of quiet revelation. She is the author of Family Camp: S’more Than a Vacation and her work has appeared in Isele Magazine and other publications. When she’s not writing, Maria is a pastel painter, hiker, and lifelong learner based in Arizona.

By Kip Knott

I write to remember. At my age, every tick of my watch could be forgotten in the brief silence between it and the next tick. So here is what I did today: I awoke to the sound of my alarm, which imitates church bells like the one that rang when I first took Holy Communion in ‘42. The wafer is stuck to the roof of my mouth. What do I do?  I can’t reach in and scrape it off. Daddy’s gonna whip me good. What do I do?  

  I write to remember. Everything is fading. Here is what I did today: I woke up this morning and took a shower. I had oatmeal for breakfast. The kitchen here makes the best oatmeal I’ve ever tasted. It’s almost the way my sweet Jenny used to make it. I think they add cinnamon, though, which I love. Jenny, honey, can you add some cinnamon to my oatmeal tomorrow?

I write to remember. Here is what I did today: I awoke to the sound of my alarm, which rings like church bells. I took a long shower to loosen my aching back. Damn, I forgot my towel.  Jenny, honey… Jenny… I forgot my towel again. Can you bring me a towel?  

I write to remember. Jenny? Jenny? What did I do today?

*   *   *

Kip Knott is a writer, photographer, and part-time art dealer living in Delaware, Ohio. His writing has appeared in Bending Genres, Best Microfiction Anthology, Bright Flash Literary Review, The Greensboro Review, HAD, Mid-American Review, The Sun, and Virginia Quarterly Review. His most recent book of stories, Family Haunts, is available from Louisiana Literature Press.