By Arthur Pitchenik

Sunlight alone incubated an abandoned egg in a quiet corner of the coop—and I was born again. Unlike the other hatchlings, I would not—could not—peck for insects, no matter how hungry I was, and I longed, more than anything, to fly.

One day, I watched a caterpillar struggle to crawl toward a plant, contracting its body, wrenching itself forward. It then spun a silken thread and hung from a leaf. A chrysalis slowly enclosed it—fragile and still—for days. Then the shell cracked, and a butterfly wriggled free—wet and crumpled. Its wings unfolded slowly, fluttering with the promise of flight.

I was mesmerized.

“Can I fly with you?” I whispered.

The butterfly replied softly, “You’re a chicken. You can’t fly.”

“Why?”

“You’re too heavy, and your wings are too small.”

“Why?”

“You were bred that way—so you can’t escape. You were meant to lay eggs and be eaten by humans.”

I lowered my head.

“And you’re a grounded insect meant to be eaten by chickens—yet I let you live. Is there a higher authority for me?”

“I was meant to become a beautiful butterfly.”

“And I was meant to become a sleek bird with enormous wings–meant to escape.”

As dawn broke, I felt myself grow lighter. My wings stretched wide and strong. I lifted from the coop and soared above the trees, toward the rising sun.

I awoke to the beeps of my cardiac monitor and the  breath of my ventilator—

Tomorrow I’ll be a gazelle.

*   *   *

Arthur Pitchenik is a retired physician who writes poetry, short stories, and flash fiction about adversity, vulnerability, empathy, struggle, and triumph in fantasy, science fiction, and contemporary genres.

By Ella Torres

She put herself in that position. She had loved a man who didn’t know how to love. Really? Really, Cleo. We went over this a thousand times already. She reassured herself as she stuffed the expensive Ralph Lauren winter vest he’d gotten her two Christmases ago into a cardboard box full of other expensive clothes she’d never have occasion to wear now.

Cleo was twenty-five, broke and broken-hearted, and homeless, well practically homeless (she did not yet have a home) in New York City, the city she moved to seven years ago thinking she would make it as an abstract expressionist. Instead, she’d made it as a cautionary tale.

She looked at the high-ceiling NoMad apartment she’d shared with Eric for the past year and a tear fell down her face before she could stop it. This was never home, she whispered to herself, pressing the elevator button like it might argue back. Eric had never wanted her to move in. She’d pushed for it after two years together, and he’d finally said yes with the enthusiasm of someone agreeing to a root canal. 

Eric wasn’t cruel. Not text-book cruel but wallstreet jerk cruel, sure. He’d surprise her with flowers sometimes, daisies, her favorite and cook her dinner when he was able to get home from the office early. He’d watch Love Is Blind with her and tell her how she’d be the prettiest contestant, clearly not getting the show’s purpose. But Cleo didn’t care, all this flattered her. Sometimes Eric really saw her, made her feel like the only person in the world. Those moments were heroin. 

But Eric had turned thirty this year, meaning he had a new five-year plan and she wasn’t a part of it. She found the ring. His grandmother’s. Not for her. Not for anyone with a face yet. Just a placeholder in his timeline, a girl-shaped space waiting to be filled. The position could be filled by anyone who checked the boxes: finance girl, maybe a doctor, someone whose family summered somewhere with a capital S. Someone whose mother hadn’t worked the cosmetics counter at Macy’s. Someone who understood which fork to use without watching everyone else first. For Eric, marriage wasn’t about love it was a line item on a spreadsheet, scheduled between “make VP” and “buy property in the Hamptons.”

Cleo was the intermission. The warm body in his bed while he built his career, the convenient plus-one who didn’t demand too much while he wasn’t ready to look for someone serious. She kept his apartment from feeling empty, laughed at his colleagues’ jokes at dinner parties, and never complained when he worked through weekends. She was easy. Undemanding. Temporary. And she’d mistaken all of that for love.

She hailed a cab she couldn’t afford down to her older cousin’s condo in Tribeca, where she would be staying for the week. Minnie, who worked as an analyst at JP Morgan and hadn’t texted Cleo since someone’s wedding in July, had responded within minutes: “Of course you can stay. Stay as long as you need.” Which Cleo translated to mean two weeks, possibly three if she kept the crying to acceptable levels. 

As the cab turned onto Prince Street, SoHo spreading out like a promise she’d almost forgotten. The cast-iron buildings with their fire escapes like black lace, the gallery windows glowing warm against the November cold. This was the New York she’d fallen for at eighteen, before Eric, before she’d learned to make herself small. She used to walk these streets for hours, ducking into galleries she couldn’t afford to buy from, sketching in cafes, believing she’d make something that mattered. As she went past the street she loved she realized, Eric had made her second, but the city had made her first. She’d loved New York before she’d loved him, and she’d love it after.

The cab parked outside Minnie’s apartment, a high rise with floor-to-ceiling windows and the kind of lobby where people said “good evening” instead of “hey.” The building had a gym Cleo would never use and a doorman who looked like he’d been hired specifically to make people like Cleo feel underdressed.

The meter hit $47 she didn’t have.

Instead of panicking she gave the driver a smile.

She’d figure it out. She always did.

*    *    *

Ella Torres is a Brazilian writer and translator and a graduate of Barnard College, where she earned a degree in English and Creative Writing. She writes editorials, fiction, and poetry, and is currently pursuing an MFA in fiction at The New School. Her work has appeared in Broad Ripple Review, Litbop, and other publications. Her upcoming novel, The Midnight Saints, won the New 2 The Scene Novel Competition 2025.

A Memoir by Alison Colwell

In the photograph, I am sitting with my kids, leaning back against the driftwood log. Emilie and Eric are ten years old. It’s my forty-fourth birthday and we’re having a picnic at Pebble Beach. I am painfully self-conscious in the first bikini I’ve owned since I was 14 years old. In the photo, dappled sunlight filters through the alder leaves above us; pieces of dried eelgrass stick to Emilie’s leg. Eric’s wearing the shirt he lino-printed himself. The kids and I collapse against each other, frozen mid laugh.

*

It’s just a tiny moment in time and I have carried it with me in my purse for the last year. I have stared at that photo so many times I only need to close my eyes to see the macrame necklace I was wearing, the friendship bracelets that circle Emilie’s wrists, see how Eric’s eyes crease in laughter. That photo is my talisman. That photo belongs to the time “Before”. It belongs to a time when my family was whole and healthy. When the only thing I worried about was whether I could wear a bikini at my age or my size. It’s not like everything was perfect in that time “Before”. The house was always a mess. Eric was coping with anxiety, and we never had enough money, but we were happy then. I know we were. That photo of arrested laughter is proof.

*

In that time “Before” I didn’t understand how corrosive an opioid addiction could be, and how the lies and deceit needed to hide such an addiction could undermine and unravel a marriage before I even understood what was happening. In the “Before” I am happy, but I was already living in ignorance. I just won’t know that for another five years. When he leaves in an explosion of guilt and rage, does that mean the happiness wasn’t real because the foundation it was built on wasn’t true? I don’t think so. But I often circle that dilemma in my mind. Wondering why I pushed for honesty when ignorance had made me happy.

*

In the time “Before,” the voice of anorexia hadn’t yet taken up residence in Emilie’s head, and turned our lives into a constant state of triage, where each day was spent battling the disease, forcing me to make one impossible choice after another. I hadn’t left Eric home alone at fifteen years old to go live part-time in the hospital with her, to sit with her, hold her while she struggled and slowly, so very slowly, came  back to herself. Emilie has three more healthy years ahead of her in this photo. 

*

In the time “Before” I’d never stood at the top of Lover’s Leap, tears drying on my cheeks. I’d never stared down into the water of Trincomali Pass below and wondered what the point of all this pain was. There had been laughter before. The photo was my proof. 

*

In the time “Before” the three of us had found laughter together on a beach in July. In what came after, laughter erupted at unexpected moments, like when Eric took the handles of Emilie’s wheelchair, bumping over sidewalks and doing wheelies on the hospital parking lots late at night. Laughter was edged with grief, as I watched the clock and counted the minutes until we had to return her to the hospital ward.

*

The photo served as my talisman, reminding me of a time of laughter, a time when our family remained intact. It acts as a promise, because if there is a “Before” then there must be an “After.” The easy laughter that I knew existed once can exist again in some future time. The photo of the three of us at the beach, leaning into each other, is hope.

*   *   *

Alison Colwell is a writer, mother, domestic violence survivor and community organizer. Her work has been published in several literary journals including: The Humber Literary Review, The Ocotillo Review, Roi Faineant Literary Press, Hippocampus Magazine, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes and is forthcoming in Grist and the Literary Mama. She lives on Galiano Island, Canada. Connect with her at: alisoncolwell.com.

By Don Tassone

I was taking a nap when my watch vibrated and woke me up.

“Time to stand,” it read.

I got up and decided to go for a run.  I grabbed a pair of socks.  They were labeled “L” and “R.”  I pulled them onto the correct feet.

Halfway down my driveway, my car started beeping like crazy.  I’d forgotten to fasten my seatbelt.

On my way home, my smartphone pinged.

“You have an appointment with Dr. Brown tomorrow at 11:00 a.m.  Reply C to confirm or R to reschedule.”

Over dinner, Alexa reminded me of a Zoom call with my boss at 7:00 the following morning.

As I was watching TV, my Romba rolled in and navigated its way around the room.  When it got to my feet, it stopped and beeped.  I picked up my feet and said, “Sorry.”

My watch buzzed.

“Breathe.”

Drifting off to sleep that night, I was jolted awake by a ping.

“Set your alarm.”

I reached over and did as I was told.

                                                                  *   *   *

Don Tassone is the author of two novels, one novella, 10 short story collections and one children’s book.  He lives in Loveland, Ohio.

By Sloan Richman

Harlan took a final drag on his cigarette, pondered whether to use the dying ember to light another or go back inside. The extra two minutes required to smoke the thing could make a difference. Erring on the side of caution, he dropped the butt to the ground, stomped it out, then readjusted the cuff on the left sleeve of the hooded sweatshirt to make sure his laminated ID bracelet was obscured. 

He strode back through the sliding doors, pointing at the visitor’s pass affixed to the sweatshirt, barely making eye contact with the guard, who waved him through. He headed to the elevator bank and patiently waited along with two other “visitors.”

He extended his bracelet-free right hand, making the ‘after you’ gesture when the elevator doors opened. The couple exited on the third floor, and he was alone for the remainder of the ride up to five. He ambled down the long corridor to room 5133, where he was greeted by Earl.

“Get your nicotine fix? Took you long enough.”

“Addiction is a bitch, my friend. You’d think a hospital would understand this and we wouldn’t have to go to such extreme measures.” He removed the hooded sweatshirt and handed it back to Earl. “Thanks for the loan, buddy.”

Earl slipped his sweatshirt back on, then took a closer look. “What’d you bleed on it?”

“Sorry. Probably from when they took blood before. I yanked the bandage off my hand so I wouldn’t look too suspicious.”

“Right. Like you didn’t look suspicious enough with that hoodie covering your face?”

“Anyone come by while I was gone?” Harlan asked.

“Nope. Nurse was busy with the old lady down the hall.”

“Perfect crime.”

“Except that you stink of cigarette smoke. They’re bound to ask.”

“If they do, I’ll just blame it on you. Your sweatshirt reeks of it.”

“That’s fine. Blame me for everything.”

“I plan to.”

Harlan crept back into his hospital bed and pulled the blanket over him. He patted the wad of bills that were secreted in his waistband. When the cops came looking, Earl would be wearing the hoodie with the victim’s blood on it. 

*   *   *

Sloan Richman writes mystery and crime fiction. Originally from Brooklyn, New York, Sloan now lives across the East River in Manhattan. He works as a technical writer by day, but at night, prowls the mean streets of the city looking for wrongs to write. He graduated from University of Pennsylvania with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and received a Master of Fine Arts degree in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University. His debut novel, Small Town Symphony (in Four Deadly Movements), is the first in the Daniel Cole/Nat Gilliam music and mystery series. His short stories, including the Detective Oswald Cox mysteries, have appeared or are forthcoming in Mystery Tribune, Big Smoke Pulp, Sci-Fi Lampoon, and The Bookends Review.

By Christopher Wiley-Smith

You said it while looking at a patch of dead mint in the planter, hands shoved deep into your Carhartt jacket. “Sometimes I just want to commit suicide.”

Your voice didn’t even shake. It was flat, bureaucratic. Exhausted. The way someone mentions they need to renew their registration.

I didn’t gasp. I didn’t reach for you. That’s the shame of it, the delay. I just stood there, annoyed by the cold, staring at the mud caked on the heel of your sneaker. It was dry, grey mud. Old mud.

“Do you have a plan?” I asked. My voice sounded too loud, a trespass in the quiet yard. “No.” “Okay.” We stood there. A neighbor’s dryer vent chuffed out a cloud of steam, smelling of artificial lavender. It hung in the air between us, ridiculous and soft.

Beside your boot sat the Havahart trap. The mesh was empty but still smelled of wet iron and rodent panic. Two hours ago, you’d driven a gray squirrel three miles to the underpass, obsessed with releasing it far enough away so it wouldn’t return, but close enough that it could find water. You’d spent twenty minutes researching the release site. You called it “ethical.”

You nudged the empty cage with your toe. “Is it work?” I asked. “Is it the house?” I was throwing categories at you, trying to sort the chaos into a folder I could help with. You blinked, slow. “It’s not a thing,” you said. You rubbed your thumb against your index finger, a nervous tic you’d developed that made a dry, rasping sound. Swish. Swish. “It’s just…too much.”

You looked at the back door. You wanted to go inside. I wanted you to scream, or cry, or let me fix it. But you were just checking the sky, calculating if it would rain. The asymmetry of it made me nauseous. I was terrified, and you were just bored of being in pain.

“I’m cold,” you said. Not an invitation. A statement of fact. You turned and walked toward the house. You didn’t wait for me. The motion sensor light flickered on. A harsh, halogen white, bleaching the color out of your flannel shirt before you disappeared behind the screen door.

I stayed in the gravel. I looked at the trap. The door was open, the trigger plate waiting for something heavy enough to spring it. The wind picked up, cutting through my layers, and I just stood there, listening to the plastic flap of the dryer vent opening and closing, opening and closing, breathing for a house that felt suddenly, terrifyingly airtight.

                                                               *    *    *

Christopher Wiley-Smith’s work centers on flash fiction and personal essay, exploring the psychological landscape of grief, the endurance of family bonds, and the ethics of witness. He is the author of the recently completed survival memoir, In His Absence.

By Tom Walsh

I thought about it all week, even practiced casting into a kiddie pool behind the garage. I watered the lawn at dusk and filled a milk carton with the night crawlers that emerged from their tunnels. Dad had never before asked just me to go fishin’; he’d taken each of the boys, Jay and Judd and Jack, on their own, but not his only daughter.

To be fair, I’m the youngest. 

Sunday morning, his one day off, finally came and we took the long ride to the Missouri; interstate to highway to rutted dirt road, then across a field with faded tire tracks through the tall, browning grass.

We unfolded two camp chairs next to the water, under a tremendous willow, the biggest I’d ever seen, on a patch of bare ground worn smooth by generations of fishermen. The whining buzz of heat bugs screamed August, the humid air rich with petrichor from a farmer’s newly turned field.

I unsnapped the poles from their rack in the pickup, grabbed the tackle box and the worms, and brought it all to the river’s edge in the willow’s shade. 

We’d taken a late start, which worried me because I always thought you were supposed to fish early. I didn’t know why, figured the fish must be hungry after a long night doing whatever fish do through the long nights. 

Dad wore a faded blue denim bucket hat that he’d stuck a dozen lures and flies into. I always worried he’d stab himself, but he said that kind of carelessness only happens once, and his happened long ago.

He lugged the Coleman cooler, set it between the chairs, and plunked into one. Strategizing, I assumed, pinpointing our approach. I asked if we’d start with worms or minnows, spinners or jigs, dry flies or nymphs. I laid out the case for each option, eager to impress. 

“First let’s sit here and watch the water a bit, see what they’re hungry for.” 

As he spoke, I heard a splash and saw a silver streak out the corner of my eye, about 10 yards offshore in a little eddy swirling around a fallen tree trunk just upstream. Excited, I asked if I should bait a line and use a bobber to catch that sucker or if he wanted to float a fly to it. 

I was anxious to show him I could catch something. But Dad just smiled and said to hold my horses and sit a spell. He popped open the cooler.

“Hungry?”

I was. I hadn’t eaten breakfast, and it was already lunchtime. From the faded green metal cooler, he pulled two cold BLTs wrapped in tin foil, a tinge soggy from the mayo and tomato.

“You eat these cold?” I asked. He nodded and took a big bite, said oops when a dollop of mayo dropped onto his shirt. He scooped it up expertly with his pocket knife, scraped it back onto the ragged edge of his sandwich, took another bite.

I wolfed mine down along with a bag of crinkle cut potato chips. Barbecue, my favorite.

He told me this was his father’s favorite fishing spot. I never knew my grandpa. Dad looked comfortable, showed no inclination to grab a pole. I was fidgety, but when I stood up, he told me to settle down, the fish weren’t going anywhere.

“It’s a hot one today. Beer?”

Now, being 16 in our little town, I was pretty sure he knew I’d drank beer before, but I felt like this was a trick, a test.

“Sure,” I said, as cooly as I could muster, thinking surely my brothers would have said yes to the offer. The ice cubes rattled as he dug his meaty mechanic’s hand into the bottom of the cooler and pulled up two wet, ice cold bottles of Shiner Bock. He handed me one, then twisted the top off of his. He wedged the quarter-sized piece of metal between his thumb and middle finger and snapped. The cap whizzed over my head, plunked in the water.

“How’d you do that!?”

He laughed and showed me. My bottle cap kept dropping harmlessly to the ground until, about the tenth time. It shot sideways from my hand, nicked his whiskered cheek and made a small cut, like the ones he’d put a dab of toilet paper over after shaving.

“There you go!” he guffawed, genuinely excited.

*

He asked me about school, about my job at Bert’s Groceries, about the Jeffries boy he’d seen me hanging around town with. I blushed, afraid he was going to give me “the talk” and tell me to be careful because boys only want one thing. But he just said they were a nice family and he’d known Bill Jeffries since grade school.

I forgot about fishin’ and asked how he met mom; I’d heard the story before, but only from her. I asked about his time in Vietnam, which he rarely talked about. I asked if he ever regretted not going to college, or getting married so young. Sitting under the willow beside the Big Muddy, drinking a beer, he answered everything.

He paused for a bit when I asked about grandpa, about if they ever went fishin’ together like this. 

“We fished, but not like this. He was quiet and we just fished.”

We talked all day and for the life of me I don’t remember if we ever did dip our lines in the river. It was late when we got home and I knew he had work early in the morning so I told him I’d put everything away.

My brothers came over to help, which surprised me to no end.

“Catch anything?” they asked.

“Not a thing,” I said.

                                                                       *   *   *

Tom Walsh writes these days from Cambridge, MA. His stories can be found in Emerge, Hobart Pulp, Lost Balloon, JMWW, Bending Genres, HAD, Flash Frog, West Word, and elsewhere. Say hi @tom1walsh.bsky.social.

By Jade Kleiner

Blahaj was mixing up an iodine packet when the maybe-body came flying down past her. She slightly looked up and saw someone in their 50’s – or maybe their 30’s? – plummeting, silently, with perhaps some dignity. But that was all Blahaj saw – a figure, dropping, instantaneous. On this nook of an outcrop on a bastard mountain, fingers shuddering in her gloves, Blahaj could not see where the figure had fallen from or where it had landed. A single meaty thump had hit her ears, signifying, at least, that something had in fact landed. But the meaty thump had left her ears as quickly as it came.

A little bit of snow drifted into the indent of the mountain she had made her camp in.

Blahaj took in the situation. Here she was, two days into the back country, a third of the way up the harsh side of a mountain. Mt. Slarr was known for having an easy side and a vertical side. She had, possibly, just observed someone free-falling down the vertical side. If that was the case, the plummeter was almost certainly dead.

The iodine packet was mixed in. Blahaj let the water bottle rest and tugged her hat and earmuffs a little tighter. Her left boot had gotten a little bit loose, so she dedicated two minutes to taking it off, changing her sock, and re-tying it. She ran a mitten along her backpack, her little tent half set up for the night. Her old climbing instructor had let her know about this nook, a little indent in the wall. It was cozy. Safe.

Very much not like the air that someone may have just plummeted down.

But why should she look? So she could see a body, down at the bottom, bent in ten kinds of askew, pooling with bile and skull flakes? Or perhaps the deed was not fully done. Maybe down there was someone who could truly, completely, fully use her help, a downed soul in need of a valorant rescue.

And what of that rescue? Blahaj was not medically trained. She was not a Wilderness First Responder.

She was not brave. She was not unusual. She was, sure, a solo hiker, and a climber, but she liked the solo part first. If there was someone down there, they only had a few minutes, an hour at best, before they died from their injuries.

Of course, she did have a satellite phone. She could call for help. Conveniently, however, it had stopped working last night, when she tried to call her Mom for good luck. Probably the batteries, and she had packed spares, but the speakers had warbled and given in. Now the technical malfunction could be life and death.

And this is, of course, a real problem. Not imagined. Blahaj had – she could swear – seen someone fall.

There had been a blur of a person, but within that blur, a distinct orange scarf just under two eyes full of terror. That had been a face. But did she see it? How rare that would be! Mt. Starr is not a tourist trap.

Only experienced hikers and climbers even cared about it. It wasn’t even particularly high, just sheer on one side – the side Blahaj had been climbing all day.

She could, of course, go and look. Peer down the mountain and see if there was a body, or someone cradling half a knee and calling up, relieved to see a friendly face. Blahaj could walk over, look down, and see if it resolved into a real problem. See if there was something to do.

Blahaj took a sip of the iodine. Then she took the poles for her tent out of their carrying case and spaced them out. Then she assembled the skeleton of the tent and pulled the weather-resistant fabric onto it. It was getting dark now. She took her headlamp out of her pack and lit the tent up.

She had to pee. Normally she would pee off the cliff face, but now was not normal. Instead she waddled over to the back of the cave-nook, squatted down, and pissed. She would have preferred to pee away from her sleeping quarters, but that would involve potentially looking over the precipice.

She tugged off her socks and replaced them. She put on her resting back country clothes. She lit her little heater. She went to sleep.

*

The sun came up. Blahaj woke and was struck by how lucky she was. She had a week off from work and her job as a bank teller was quite safe. She had all this nice gear. All her limbs still worked. Her mind was sharp. She really had it going on. And she was tired. So tired. She needed this vacation, and she had four days left before her boss, Mr. Sneebly, would be hitting on her again.

So Blahaj peeled off her socks and her pajamas. She put on her climbing clothes, snapped her tent up, packed up her bag. And she went to the edge of the nook. She did not look down. She started to climb.

*   *   *

Jade Kleiner is a writer from New England. Her writing can be found in manywor(l)ds, Haikuniverse, Neologism Poetry Journal, Gingerbread Ritual, and elsewhere. She istransgender and has practiced in the Plum Village tradition since 2020.

By Kevin Joseph Reigle

A beacon light strobed from the bolted top. Wayne lifted a finger, and the continuous miner ground to a halt.  The shift foreman yelled, “Time to head to the house.” 

Wayne grabbed his battered lunch box and duck walked to the mining buggy with the rest of the crew. Roof bolter, Crazy Sikes, pushed aside a plastic curtain and hunched down as he made his way over from the unsupported top in entry four. 

The miners lowered their heads as the buggy sped toward the light at the entrance of the shaft. As the first rays of sun washed over them, Sikes patted Wayne on the shoulder. “You going to the game tomorrow?”

“I never miss one,” Wayne answered as the buggy came to a stop.

“Great job today, boys,” Don, the outside man, yelled. “We got eight cuts.”

The men celebrated a day of hard work as they started up the rocky incline to the gravel lot. Wayne looked into the bed of his pickup truck before unlocking the cab. The body was rusted, and with almost three hundred thousand miles, the engine wouldn’t last much longer. He was past due for a new truck, but every time he looked into the bed, he saw Blaze, panting, tail wagging, excited to see him. Getting rid of the truck would be like losing Blaze all over again.

Wayne lifted the handle and gave the door a hard pull. He slid onto the bench seat, putting the lunch box on the floor.

“Great job this week,” Don said, approaching the truck.

Wayne put the key in the ignition and turned it halfway, letting the radio crackle to life. A John Fogerty song playing softly from an AM station. “I do what I can.”

“Oh, don’t give me that. We’d have to shut this place down if it wasn’t for you. Night shift ain’t worth a damn,” Don said, leaning in and lowering his voice. “When the company sent me down here, I didn’t expect there’d be someone as good as you running a miner.”

Wayne shrugged. “Thanks, I appreciate it.”

“How about that boy of yours? I bet he’s ready to follow in his pa’s footsteps.”

“He’s nine. I don’t think he’ll be operating heavy machinery anytime soon.”

Don squinted, looking at the sun. “Sorry, I thought someone said you had an older boy.”

“Just Tyler. Well, I’ll see you tomorrow then.”

“Bright and early,” Don said, stepping away from the truck.

While shifting into reverse, Wayne turned up the radio as Thunder Road filled the cab while the on-air DJ announced the station’s call sign; AM 1220, Home of Heartland Rock in the mountains of West Virginia.

Wayne coasted down the single-lane dirt road across the narrow Caney Creek Bridge, which stood just wide enough for coal trucks to cross on their way to the processing plant. A plant Wayne would pass on his twenty-minute drive home to Marshall Hollow. 

Rounding the bend and crossing the abandoned railroad tracks, remnants of a general store stood in the undergrowth. A cracked RC Cola sign hung from a rusted pillar. Sun-bleached wood planks supported cracked glass in a store window.

The Big Sandy Tabernacle Church of Christ departed from their usual practice of displaying fire and brimstone Bible verses and instead, offered good luck to the football team on their upcoming district championship game. Up ahead, the coal processing plant straddled the hillside like a colossus. A line of trucks waited to offload unprocessed coal onto the two-ton conveyor belt that fed into the breaker before being sorted and washed. 

A few miles down the road, Wayne’s doublewide trailer nestled on a hill just beyond the turnoff to Marshall Hollow. The road continued past his trailer and eventually ended at his parent’s house. The entire hollow filled with kinfolk.

Wayne pulled into his driveway. In the backyard, he watched his son, Tyler, trying to kick a football, but he flubbed it, sending the ball spinning across the grass. Tyler chased after the ball as it skidded through the mud and into the weeds.

Wayne leaned against the grill of the truck and lit a Marlboro. Tyler hardly looked fazed by his bad kick. He picked up the wayward football and began tossing it in the air. 

A sedan pulled into the driveway. Stones kicked up, pinging off the undercarriage. Wayne watched Allen roll down the driver’s side window and give him a nod. 

“You coming out tonight?” Allen asked.

“Yeah, after I get a shower.”

“Jesus,” Allen said, watching Tyler throw the football at a tree stump but missing badly. “Are you sure he’s part of your gene pool? Hey, I’m really sorry, man. I wasn’t thinking.” 

“It’s fine,” Wayne muttered.

Allen glanced at the darkening clouds through the windshield, looking for a way to change the subject. “Man, I hope it don’t rain. If this place floods again, I don’t know what I’ll do. I can’t miss any more work.”

“You’re not the only one. We needed a boat to get out of here last time.”

“The creek better start draining.”

“I wouldn’t count on it,” Wayne said, dropping the cigarette and crushing it under his boot. “I’ll let you know when I head out.”

“Sounds good,” Allen said, rolling up the window.

Wayne gave a two-fingered salute as he watched Allen back out of the driveway. It startled Wayne when the football bounced up and hit his leg. He grabbed the ball and spun it before resting his fingers over the laces. “Go long for me, bud.”

Tyler screeched with excitement as he ran across the yard. A perfect spiral flew through the air and arced into his hands. The ball slipped through Tyler’s fingers and thumped off his chest.

“Can I try again?” Tyler asked hopefully as he retrieved the ball. 

“I have to get a shower. Maybe we’ll throw some tomorrow.”

  Tyler held the ball above his head. “Why don’t we play like we used to?”

Trisha’s voice came from inside the kitchen. She had the window over the sink open and could hear their conversation. “Yeah, why don’t you?”

Wayne stepped up on the deck. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” 

“Sure you don’t,” Trisha said.

Wayne ignored her and opened the trailer door. He walked through the kitchen as she stood at the sink washing dishes. “You don’t have to make me dinner. I’m going out with Allen.”

Trisha raised a soap-covered hand and turned off the faucet. “Is it because he’s not good at football?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“He’s not Johnny,” Trisha said, her voice trailing off.

“You don’t think I know that?”

Trisha grabbed a towel and dried her hands. “Don’t you think this has been hard on me, too?”

“Has it? Looking at you, I’m not so sure.”

“It’s been five years, Wayne. Tyler needs you. There’s nothing to be done about Johnny now. Don’t go losing two sons.”

Wayne wiped the coal dust from his face and extended a hand for her to see. “I’d like to get a shower, if that isn’t too much to ask.”

“You’re going to regret this.”

“Regret what?”

“Not spending time with him. Tyler’s allowed to be good at something other than football. Don’t toss him aside just because he isn’t Johnny.”

“I’m getting a shower,” Wayne said.

Trisha threw up her arms. “That’s fine. Go to the bar and cry with Allen about the state championship you lost when you were both eighteen. Jesus, move on.”

“Allen can move on, he has Roddy.”

“What, so if his son wins state this year Allen’s loss has been avenged? What the hell is wrong with you?”

“You don’t get it.”

“Johnny was our son. He was nice and thoughtful. His sole purpose in life wasn’t to win a state championship that you couldn’t.”

Wayne opened the bathroom door without saying a word. He laid his cell phone beside the sink. He tapped the screen and found the last picture of him and Johnny taken beside the car just minutes before the accident.

                                                                      *   *   *

Kevin Joseph Reigle’s fiction has appeared in The Brussels Review, Bridge Eight, Drunk Monkeys, Beyond Words, Bristol Noir, Bright Flash Literary Review, Midsummer Dream House, and several anthologies. He is a student at The New School.

By Robert A. Cmar

“The stove, the wood stove at the old farm, that was a good stove,” he said, lifting the kettle off the electric burner. “This one, it’s easy, sure, but the old stove? That was a good stove.”

He poured hot water into a teapot and pulled two chipped mugs from the cupboard. 

“Please don’t.” She glanced up from her book. “The farm, I want to forget all that. Thirty years gone; you still talk like it was paradise.”

“I grew up there,” he said, “if you could have seen back when ….” 

“I grew up there, too. Remember?” she said, staring up at him. “Seventeen, I married you and moved in with your family. I was a young, stupid girl.”

“We were both young,” he answered, dropping a teabag into the pot.

“So young,” she said. “And so stupid. I didn’t know, when I married you, that I married it all: your father, your mother, your brother, the cows, the bank loan, all that is what I married.” She turned a page in her book. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“You never want to talk about this,” he said. “We had good times, kissing in the barn. And the food, my mother, her cooking. Remember the fresh bread?”

“The bread?” she said. “I had to keep the stove going for hours. And who fetched the wood? Me! Your father never lifted a hand, not after he had his drinks.”

“I worked, too, you know,” he said, placing a mug before her and pouring out the tea. “The cows ….”

God, you’ve forgotten everything. You and me, we had less than a year together on that farm, then you got drafted and I was alone with them.” 

He sat and sipped from his mug.

“Those two years you were away,” she continued. “Work, only work. In the barn, the fields, to the well, over and over. In the winter it was so cold, that’s why my fingers are what they are now.” 

She held the warm teacup in both hands, blowing across the hot water, sending a whiff of steam across the table.

“So much work,” she said. “The first fall, after you went to the war, the well went dry. I had to beg for water from the neighbors, then put the barrels in the truck, like a pioneer. All winter, we couldn’t take proper baths.”

“My brother was supposed to help.”

“No” she said. “We’re not talking about this.” 

They sat in silence, facing each other, both looking down into their mugs. 

“Yes, my father was getting old,” he said, “but my brother, he could run that farm all by himself.” 

“Oh god, you want to do this? Your brother.” She looked out the window, through the lace curtain, at the lights of the apartment building across the wide avenue. “Your brother. Those first months, yes, he did his work. His ‘work.’ You want to talk about that? What happened? No.” 

“They say he’s in California,” he said.

“I say …” she paused. “I say he’s in hell. He never came back, not for your mother’s funeral, not for …”

“They should have buried mother in the churchyard,” he said. “Not at the farm. We should go out there, see what they’ve done, maybe find the graves.”

“We went back there, remember,” she said. “Years ago. We drove up and down all those new streets, where the farm was, all those new houses that we could never afford. We never found the graves, we never found anything.”

“My brother,” he asked, “was he still there when my mother died?” 

She sipped her tea, looking out the window, then at her husband.

“Your brother,” she said. “I told you, stop it. He wouldn’t talk to me, and once I started to show, he left. You were gone, he was gone, your mother, dead. I had to give the baby to the neighbor for days and days, so I could take care of the farm and your drunken father.”

“We didn’t get mail out in the bush,” he said. “Mother was already dead six weeks when I found out.”

“Two days, you stayed with us on leave,” she said. “Gone over a year, and you stayed two days. You didn’t even pick up the baby. He was so beautiful, little Michael. You never picked him up, even after your discharge. No wonder he hates you.” 

He looked up from his tea, to see her staring into his eyes. He looked away, and stood, putting his mug into the sink.

“We should go back to the doctor,” he said, “show him your hands. Maybe there’s something?”

“Aspirin,” she said. “That’s all the doctor says.”

“Have you heard from Michael?” he asked. “Do you think he’ll come back?”

She looked up at him. “I don’t know. I don’t know. He’s on his second tour, that stupid boy, like you. Maybe he’ll come home. Maybe he’ll go to California, like he always said he would.”

“I got a bonus for re-upping,” he said. “I wanted to save the farm.” 

“A few hundred dollars,” she answered. “That didn’t even cover the interest. The truck broke, I had to hitchhike to town to get diapers and formula.”

“Nobody told me it was so bad,” he said. “I was ten thousand miles away.”

“Tell you? On your visits,” she said, “you seemed so angry; I was afraid you’d never come back. What was I going to say? Leave the army, help us, we’re in hell?”

“I’ve said I’m sorry, so many times,” he said. “And the farm, I didn’t know it was gone until you sent that letter.”

She looked up into his eyes, then back down to her tea. 

“After the sheriff threw us out,” she said, “the bank, they put it all up for auction, all I could keep was a few old pictures and some beat-up furniture. God, that dirty apartment I found, so small, your father sleeping on the sofa, Michael and me on a broken old bed.” 

 “When I got back,” he answered, “I got a job the second day, remember? Things were hard but it got better. We had some good times. Remember Niagara Falls?”

“Michael was so scared,” she said, “on that boat, all that water, he held both our hands, so tight. But then when it was over, he wanted to go back for another ride.” She smiled.

“I did my best to raise him,” he said. “I did what I could.” 

“You never said a positive thing to that boy,” she said, “No wonder, the day he graduates high school, he joins the army. That’s what you did for Michael. He didn’t even say goodbye, only that damn little note.”

“You should have told him,” he said. “Maybe things would have been better.”

“Tell him?” She answered. “Jesus. Again with this. Tell him? What, that you left me alone with your dying mother, your drunken father, and your pathetic, perverted brother? Michael figured that all out, long ago. You never treated him like a son, like a father should treat a son. No more,” she said, standing, the wooden chair legs scraping across the floor. “All this talk won’t change anything.”

She walked to the sink, ran water to wash the mugs.

“I’ll do it. Your hands,” he said.

“It’s just these two. I’m already done.” 

He stood next to her, picked up a towel and began to dry the mugs.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m stubborn. When Michael comes back, I’ll talk to him, I’ll make it right.”

Standing there, together, at the sink, she put her arm around his waist. 

“Not again,” she said. “About the farm, no more talk about those days.” 

“No. Never again,” he said. “You must be tired. Let’s get to sleep.”

“Yes,” she said, her voice softer now, as she returned to the table, “But first I’m going to finish reading my story.”

“Yes,” he said, his back turned as he moved toward the bedroom. “Don’t stay up late.”

                                                                 *   *   *

Robert A. Cmar is a Brooklyn-based writer whose work ranges from depressing to bleak to emotionally scarring. His writing has appeared in publications including The Offing and Silent Writing Happy Hour, and he is currently working on his first novel. He recently retired from a 35-year career in technical writing, having also held more stimulating jobs such as steelworker, line cook, and gravedigger.