By Jacqueline Hyatt

Bugs like grains of brown rice shimmy up braids and bangs to the scalp and drain blood. Hailey’s hair is home to generations of mothers and fathers and babies. School nurse Candice prescribed a special shampoo. Scrub scrub scrub bubbles of poison into the louses’ houses. Squeeze those eyes shut for shower gel and genocide.

*   *   *

Jacqueline Hyatt is an undergraduate at Arizona State University. A member of the Creative Writing Concentration, she writes about the complexities of human relationships, growth, and the consequences of apathy. Her work has been published in Applause and Canyon Voices.

By Angela Joynes

Mum had insisted the mall was a good place to shop for a snazzy dress and hat for Ginny’s wedding. “I’ll need…as a grandmother…”

“Of the bride,” I finished her thought which I often did lately. “But, Mum, I don’t see any nice ladies shops.” The place was polluted by vape shops and Forever 21.

“I know it’s here somewhere.” She sounded peeved. “You know the one.”

Actually I didn’t, but indulging was another skill I was mastering.

Mum furrowed her forehead. “It’ll be beside the place…the cinnamon sugary place.”

“Cinnabon? Look, it’s over there but no dress shop.”

Mum’s new dentures impaled her thin lower lip. Then she brightened. “I know, it’s by the citron place.”

What citron, citronella? An outdoors woodsman outlet?

“Sour,” Mum spit.

“You mean lemons?” Just like Mum to recall a French word from high school but not which dress shop. “The lemonade stand?” The rather excellent enterprise of freshly squeezed lemons, icy, crisp, wafting lemon oil wasn’t here, not for ages.

After two more excruciating laps of the entire maze, upstairs and down, every wobbly step onto or off the squeaking escalator potentially my mother’s last, we finally stopped, thank God, in the T-junction center. Under those unflattering fluorescents Mum looked elderly, utterly exhausted. Disguising my obsessive thought that we could’ve already ordered dresses and accessories for the whole wedding party online by now, I said, “Let’s go.”

“No! We keep hunting. I know that boutique is nearby. I’ll know it when I smell it.”

I sighed. The neurologist had explained the incongruities of memory loss, how Mum might clearly recall long past people and events, that scents would trigger strong memories much longer than touch, longer than my face or my voice, longer than the reserves in my tank.

*      *     *

Angela Joynes (she/her) is a disabled Canadian writer who holds a BA, MD, and Certificate in Creative Writing. Words in The Ilanot Review, The West Trestle Review, National Flash Fiction Day Anthologies, Flash Flood, Fictive Dream, Susurrus Literary Journal, Trash Cat Lit and others. X@angela_joynes @angelajoynes.bsky.social

A Memoir by Lisa Lynn Biggar

Our cat knows to escape to the bedroom when we practice our music—even after thirty-five years of playing together, we lose patience with each other. They say you hear what you want to hear, but that’s not always the case, and that was the case that night in early December, during a new moon, when I threw on my flannel jacket, donned my warmest wool hat, put a headlamp over it, then walked briskly down our lengthy driveway, bordered by woods on both sides. There was no snow on the ground—rarely do we get snow anymore in December in Maryland—but it was cold, in the high thirties. I had reached the valley of our driveway, the low spot where Mill Pond lies off to the right, when the headlamp went out, and I was left in total darkness.

I grabbed for the headlamp, and it went flying to the ground, along with my hat, and for what seemed like hours, though surely was only minutes, I felt around for them in the darkness on my hands and knees, to no avail. I waited for my eyes to adjust to the pitch blackness, but they didn’t, and my sense of direction, never good, was now non-existent. I tried to make my way back up the driveway but ran into invasive bamboo and briars and barb wired fences. I yelled for my husband, but my voice was as lost as I was. It felt as if my cries were being sucked into the silent void of the night. It felt as if I was the only person left on earth.

I wondered now what it would be like to step onto the surface of a dark planet, not knowing what was out there, not knowing whether you could even survive in these conditions, and if so, for how long. . . I took one small step, gingerly, cautiously, and then another and another, and then I found a clearing that led to a grassy hill. I climbed and climbed, and the sky opened up, and I saw the most radiant stars I have ever seen in my life—constellations guiding me out to the road, where a neighbor’s porch light shone like the star of Bethlehem itself, and I was reminded of when my husband and I first fell in love and how the stars would guide us on our walks from our tent to my grandparents’ farmhouse to take a shower. It felt as if we were the only ones on the planet then, two souls destined to be together. But what is destiny other than walking blindly to a place you could never foresee?

I found our driveway then, my eyes finally adjusted to the dark, made my way carefully back home, and when I walked in the door, my husband was walking out of the bedroom in his robe, fresh out of the shower, oblivious to all I had seen. 

                                                                 *   *   *

Lisa Lynn Biggar received her MFA in Fiction from Vermont College. Her novella-in-flash, Unpasteurized, was recently published by Alien Buddha Press, and her short stories and poetry have been widely published in various literary journals, including The Minnesota Review, The Delmarva Review, Superstition Review Pithead Chapel, Litro Magazine, Kentucky Review, and Main Street Rag. She’s the fiction editor for Little Patuxent Review and she and her husband own and operate a cut flower farm on the eastern shore of Maryland with their two hard-working cats.  

By Elana Lavine

Women take their time. 

They sit, resting after a struggle with bra clasps and elastic waistbands, damp hair matted at their necks. Soon they will rise with brushes, turn on blowdryers. Or lean into mirrors, lips pursed in disapproval, unzipping bags of tubes and bottles, getting to work.  

Others do not sit at all. They walk, shaking and swinging, a proud parade of aging flesh. My daughter cowers by our locker. Mom, she says, eyes round. 

At the showers, curtains are optional. A woman reaches for a robe, her belly a map of scars. Another squats to flip her hair over and down, spraying the wall, wrapping a towel as turban, her only covering. I’m not showering here, my daughter says. I’ll wait until we’re home.

They make phone calls, play music. Cue up podcasts in their own languages, smiling at jokes. At the sinks, reunions and arguments. They brush teeth, spitting foamy blue. Cut nails. Tweeze eyebrows. 

Among these battered lockers, there are lessons to be learned: 

1. Anyone can wear a thong.
2. Flesh is prone to gravity. 
3. Tattoos should not be a surprise, ever. 

My daughter is absorbing the curriculum quickly, pulling on socks, eyes down. No sweaty clothes will be changed, not here. Nearby, two sets of hooded eyes flash beneath colored hair, one too red for nature, one too black to be believed. 

4. Duels may erupt in unlikely corners.

Can you move your things please

I just need a bit of space

You already have lots of space, see

You could just be polite and move over

No fists, just rising voices. Still, the lotioned air is somehow filled with violence. Other women look, and look away. It’s not so hard to be considerate, to make some room. You have three bags. No, that one isn’t mine, why would you assume it’s mine? My daughter’s face is peaked, heading for the door.  In the parking lot, I try to explain; there are only so many benches. 

They act like babies, she says. 

A locker room, a changing room. Everything keeps changing, no matter if we’ve walked or swam, swung racquets, flexed and extended to the beat. In a sanctuary of imperfection, every leg was once someone’s pride, every scalp full of remembered curls.  Every woman, I remind my daughter, was once a girl.

Sure, she says. Like, a hundred years ago. 

                                                   *         *        *

Elana Lavine is a writer and physician in Toronto. 

 By Denise Diehl

They floated in their life preservers, waiting. 

The water was warm enough; they were in the tropics.

It was a holiday weekend. Most of the thirty people did not know each other. Some were in groups, and the rest were in couples or singles.

Some blanched at the thought of the unknown. Teenagers laughed nervously. Couples and friends held hands, the macho men faked their bravado, and parents thanked God they had no children with them. Words of assurance rang out, and anxious faces gazed at the surface, pushing away images of what might be beneath. 

Then they felt it—the stirring from below. Bubbles erupted around them, making the water roil and fizz. A strong current began to pull on their bodies.

The first screams started. 

Like fish in a net, they were dragged together into a tight circle.

With kicking legs and flailing arms, a giant wave scooped them up and hurled them like Fruit Loops into the vast maw of an enormous plastic sea creature with round, shiny, black eyes and glittering teeth.

The screaming continued as they disappeared into its mouth and travelled down its dark gullet until they emerged in the light and safety of Gloryland.

*   *   *

Denise Diehl spent the last forty-plus years working in Laboratory Science. After retiring with her husband to a small rural town in New Zealand, she wrote her first novels and short stories—a fun new adventure to match the latest decade of her life. Her writing tends toward the speculative and the weird, think The Twilight Zone.

Two of her stories were published in the Academy of the Heart and Mind and Bright Flash Literary Review, December 2024 and a third in Frivoulous Comma, March 2025.

By John Grantner

Having your first real drink is one of those firsts you remember. Like your first non-solo orgasm, it’s a milestone on life’s road. My first drink was on an early spring day in 1966, when I was in seventh grade. My buddy Terry approached me before school began.

“Hey, you’ll never guess what I got: booze!”

Of course, I was intrigued. 

“No shit?”

“Yup. It’s sloe gin.”

“How’d you get that?”

“Found it. Next to the railroad tracks. Almost half a bottle left. I stashed it in a safe place. We can drink it after school.”

“Cool. I stole a couple of my old man’s cigarettes.” Cigarettes, when we could scrounge them, were already part of our routine.

I’d never heard of sloe gin, which to the ear seemed like gin that is in no particular hurry. I’d heard of gin, of course, but not its lackadaisical variant. But that didn’t matter. Here was an opportunity to drink like a man—the dribble of wine my parents permitted on very special occasions didn’t count—to pass a bottle and swig from it.

Neither of us knew that sloe gin isn’t meant to be drunk straight up, that it’s a cheap, cloying liqueur intended for mixing into the sort of froo-froo cocktails one of our aunts might have ordered. Or, as with this particular bottle, to be tossed aside unfinished by a discerning bum, to be finished by undiscerning thirteen year old boys. And for all we knew the guy who threw the bottle away may have pissed in it before he did so, but who thinks of that, right?

After school we headed toward the C&EI spur that ran a few blocks from school. Terry led the way to a gully parallel to the right of way. There, among the weeds, brush,  junk and debris accumulated over decades, hidden behind a chunk of broken concrete, lay the precious bottle. He held it up to me, smiling proudly. We sat on a nearby stack of old railroad ties, and Terry opened the bottle and passed it to me.

“Have a taste.”

I raised the bottle to my lips and took a long pull of the sticky, sweet liquid. I didn’t know exactly what to expect, but it wasn’t this. It was like drinking candy, except for the warmth I felt growing in my core as the syrupy liquid passed down my gullet.

“Ah… Good!”

I passed the bottle to Terry and from my breast pocket produced the protective tube of notebook paper that held the cigarettes. We lit our cigarettes, and smoked and drank contentedly.

I was basking in self satisfaction and pride; I wasn’t a kid anymore. I had convinced myself that I now stood in the ranks of the sixteen and seventeen-year-old local hooligans who were so sophisticated in my mind, who dismissed me as a snotty nosed kid. Snotty nosed, yeah, but not a kid anymore, dammit. Here’s the bottle of booze to prove it.

We finished the bottle and tossed it into the weeds. Time to go home. I was slightly woozy as we made our way up the muddy embankment to the roadbed, and I slipped and fell and slid down to the bottom of the gully, grinding mud deep into the weave of one side of my pants, from the waist to the ankle. This wasn’t any kind of mud, mind you, but a particular mud. Where I lived at the time, just ten inches below the topsoil, was yellow ochre-colored clay: the residue of limestone dissolved eons ago, before any human beings ever lived anywhere, let alone in America. In my neighborhood, this clay laid on the surface wherever humans scraped through the topsoil to construct such things as railroad lines.

Terry laughed, of course, as friends are permitted to laugh at other friends’ minor misfortunes. I laughed too, as required, but thought to myself, oh, shit, this is trouble.

When I arrived at home, my mother stared at me wide-eyed.

“What happened?”

“Uh…I slipped and fell.”

“What? Where?”

“Just, you know, on the way home.”

Mom was enraged—not unusual for my mom, but in retrospect understandable in this case: These were dress pants, mind you, which, with a dress shirt and necktie, was part of the uniform required of Catholic school boys at the time. Not easy to clean.

“What do you mean ‘on the way home’? Where were you?”

“You know. Nowhere. Just on the way home.”

“You were hanging out with Terry. That kid is nothing but trouble, I’ve told you a million times. I want you to come straight home after school. No detours.”

True enough that Terry was trouble to some degree, but he never pressured me to do anything I didn’t really want to do. But Mom didn’t see it that way: Any divergence of mine from the straight and narrow path could, of course, have only been caused by a bad influence she couldn’t control.

“Take off your pants. This is going to take me hours to clean, if I can clean them at all. There’s going to be hell to pay when your father gets home.”

I felt like a kid again.

*   *   *

John Grantner is a lifelong visual artist and designer who has been crafting narratives and character studies his entire life. He has been a painter in oil and acrylic since his early teens. He’s also a fine art photographer and an abstract digital artist with a penchant for manipulating imagery to tell a story. Grantner is an observer of human behavior with a love of literature. When he escaped the workaday corporate treadmill, these traits came together to help him explore the written word as a creative medium.

By Stephanie McCarthy

Once the alcohol wore off, she was back to her usual scared, vulnerable, and insecure self. She’d stumble out into the light of the morning sun that was always way too bright for her squinting, sensitive, and mascara-smeared eyes to adjust to. She now hobbled home in the heels that she had expertly worn the night before. The shirt with the plunging neckline and the skirt that hardly went past her butt—both of which she had confidently donned the prior evening—were not only rumpled, but they also made her feel self-conscious now. They elicited catcalls from the opposite sex that rang in her ears and wouldn’t let up until she was back at her dorm, safely behind closed doors.

                                                                       *   *   *

Stephanie McCarthy’s articles have been previously published on Movie-Blogger.com and The Movie Buff. She has a Bachelor of Science in Mass Communication, with an emphasis in Film and Journalism, from Towson University. Stephanie lives in Silver Spring, MD with her husband, their daughter, and their two orange tabby cats.

By Tessa Aldridge

My daughter comes home with two lopsided pigtails and a scraped-up knee. She’s an active girl, so typically I’d assume she just got a little rough with soccer, but the tears in her chocolate brown eyes tell a different story.

“What is it, Pen?” My girl comes racing over and hugs my legs so tightly, the way she used to as a toddler.

“I embarrassed myself in front of Olivia. I told her I thought she was pretty and she said that only gay girls say that. I said, ‘Well, what’s wrong with being a gay girl?’ and then a bunch of kids laughed at me.”

“There’s nothing wrong with liking girls. You know that. Otherwise, why would Mama and I be married?”

“I know, mommy, but it still hurts my feelings. I thought maybe she would like me back.” I pout my bottom lip and scoop my daughter up into my arms. I release the Barbie pink scrunchies from her strawberry blonde hair and comb the tangles with my fingers. 

“Why don’t we get you all cleaned up with a nice bath, and then we can cuddle in bed, okay?” I ask, and she nods at me. 

I load up the bath with lukewarm water (Pen’s preference… which she once cried over us judging her for) and cotton candy scented bubble bath. When the tub is filled, I throw in a few vibrant rubber ducks, the color of a beautiful childhood. Once she’s all settled, I leave the bathroom door open so she can holler if she needs me, and get some laundry started. My wife always references me as a clean freak, but someone has to get all the stains out of our child’s clothes. 

She wore one of her least favorite dresses today, a pungent orchid with sparkles that enchant one’s vision, but for my girl, the lack of “fluff” makes it “no fun.” Ever since she started first grade this year, she decided she doesn’t like flat dresses. She says it reminds her too much of her mama’s clothes… which are a routine of pencil skirts and button ups.

I hear the drain running by the time I head back to the bathroom, and Pen is shivering in the water. I get her all wrapped up in a neon yellow bathrobe, then carry her to my room so she can lie in the king size bed. She often sleeps with her mama and me in here, so we had to upgrade from a queen to a king once we realized this sleeping arrangement was not temporary. Of course, maybe it would’ve been better to swap our crisp white duvet for something darker, now that we have stains from chocolate muddy buddies and grape juice.

I thought the bath would calm my girl down, but her sobs begin as she lays her head on my stomach. Her little hands wipe at loose boogers, so I grab a few tissues to blow her nose and clean her up. I cradle her head as I lift her up to lay her head on my chest.

“How did you get so lucky?” Pen cries as her choked sobs continue. Her tears stain my ‘Proud Mom’ grey hoodie as she digs her head further into me.

“What do you mean?”

“With mama, you just got it right on the first try.” Her statement causes me to wheeze. My laughter hits me so hard that my stomach hurts more than when my daughter kicked my ribs from the womb. “Why are you laughing at me?”

“Sorry baby, I’m not laughing at you… but no, I didn’t get it right on the first try.”

“You cheated on mama?”

“What? No!”

“Mama cheated on you?”

“No one cheated, honey.” I laugh again as I realize her comprehension skills make sense for her age. “Mama dated girls before me. And I dated other girls too.”

There were lots of girls before her mama. There was my Olivia, who I tried to kiss during Spin the Bottle and called me the f slur in front of all our friends. Then there was Rachel, who liked me and was sweet but never was going to come out. Then Maggie, Lucy, and Lainey. Pen doesn’t need to know all those names, just that the first try isn’t the only one that counts.

“But why?” she asks.

“Because it took some time to figure it out, girl! Mama and I both had our own Olivia’s, but you might be unlucky that you got yours a little younger than us.”

“I hate being young.”

“Don’t, darling. There is plenty of time for heartbreak, and it comes at all ages.”

Pen sits up now, her breathing regulated and calm. She tilts her head at me and looks side to side. 

“What, what is it?”

She gnaws on her bottom lip, a habit she got from me, as she says, “so, I still have to go to school tomorrow?”

I chuckle before replying. “Yes baby, heartbreak isn’t an excused absence.”

                                                             *   *   *

Tessa Aldridge is the author of The Psycho in my Heart and The Ones in the Background. She lives in New Jersey, where she just completed her Masters of Fine Arts at William Paterson University.

By Stacey Lounsberry

I didn’t see the hook right away. Those first few days after her birth, we were enshrouded in a hormonal high, in that mother-child bonding as old as millennia. And I had already promised many times to devote the entirety of my life to her, unasked. I had learned this from my own mother, who believed she’d put a patent on good mothering. Mother’s reproduction quickly became exhibition under the watchful social media eye, the likes and loves and floating hearts. The endorphin-producing comments. Within an hour, I myself had posted the first photo of Delia, my baby: washed and ready for her closeup, in the dusk light that would make her, at least appear, artsy. Her beauty campaign had begun.

Then, from beneath the pink cotton blanket, appeared the hook. Its sticky, sharp end dusted in lint, loose curly hairs, the torn plastic wrap of a small hospital straw, it hovered at face level like a cobra preparing to strike. A scorpion, angling its stinger. A man, waving his gun.

Behind me, the nurse quieted her cries, covered the hook as if it did not exist, tucking it back beneath the blanket with her perfect row of red, pea-pod toes. “There, there,” the nurse said. Aren’t you a cutie pie?” Then, to me, “And how is your pain, Mom?”

“Don’t you see it?” I asked, incredulous.

“Perfectly normal,” the nurse assured me, without talking about the hook by name.

That same afternoon, a new mother in the room next to me was caught leaving without her child. “Please,” she begged. “I have five others at home. It’s too many. It’s too many.” I imagined her clawing out of her sheets, the sutures, like mine, frowning across her stomach.

Through the open doors, I heard my nurse’s voice shush her. “At least yours doesn’t have a hook,” she said. And that must have been consoling enough, since I didn’t hear from the escapee mother again.

 When Delia fed, galaxies lived and died in the neural network of my brain. Our bodies communicated beyond either of our comprehension, newborn mouth to nipple. Each suck, I felt a pull in my back shoulder as if the milk were stored there, each cry sent a washing letdown that ballooned inside my breasts. I recorded each feeding on my phone, the time and amount. I used an app to transpose a tree of life onto a photo of us nursing: the tree blooming from the white of my breast, with limbs stretched across Delia’s cheek in the way her hook looped around my wrist when I held my phone. I posted this on every possible social, and others followed suit, including, I believed, the mother who tried to leave.

No one came to the house. Not one, to see her in person. No one to hold her. Send pics, my mother texted on the drive out to the vacation house at the beach. 

Yeah. have fun, I texted back.  

Wish I could squeeze those widdle toes, someone wrote beneath Delia’s picture. A friend from school whose face at the grocery store looked unnatural compared to the face in her profile picture.  

Don’t babys smell be the best? Wrote another. I leaned in, sniffed the brown whisps of hair flat to her head. They do <3, I answered.

As Delia grew, so did the hook. In photos, it had easily been tucked behind, locked down by a foot, hidden from the camera lens. But that was becoming more difficult by the day. Many times, it shook the phone from my hand, and her water drop eyes would meet mine, and I would be forced to look into them. No one told me that this would hurt. No one told me the mirror she would hold. 

When she slept, the hook remained alert. Darting among the crib bars like a watchdog, repeatedly knocking the internet-connected baby monitor off its mount. One night, in a fit of exhaustion, I eased myself down on the carpeted floor. I sat just outside the nursery and typed into my phone’s search bar: born with hook.

The AI search summary was unhelpful: The pronghorn uses its hooked horns mainly for defense. I leaned past the doorframe, eyed the hook that hovered near Delia. Did that make sense, though?

I kept going. Several entries down, lonelyrevolution posted in r/HookBaby: my newborn came out perfectly normal, except for a hook??? Wtf? It won’t let us use our phones. My husband left. I’m writing this in the bathroom while she’s asleep, I hear her waking now—

Bruhgold replied, it’s evolution on steroids.

SigmundandRoy: it happens to people who used too much 5g during pregnancy. Its worse than drugs, what it does to the brain. Poor kid.

Others referred the original poster to conspiracy sites. The moderator bot ended it there.

Delia woke suddenly with short, hiccupping cries. I dropped the phone to the carpet and scrambled sideways into the room to see the hook jabbing its pointed end at her face, marring the vital outward beauty. Her pale skin dotted red with beak marks. An orchestral hiss, like a rally.

“I’ll put it down. I’ll stop. I’ll never post again,” I cried, thinking of the internet posts. “Please.” I bowed low, a believer begging relief at a temple, ancient and upheld. From the hallway, my smartphone dinged notifications, begged me to lookLookLOOK.

The hook dared me to.

“I’ll show you,” I said to it. “I’ll prove it.”

So quickly, I took the phone from the hallway, the hook levitating—a stone-cold glare if it had a face. I bit into the corner of the phone until my teeth crunched glass. “See?” I said, taste of coins, metal and blood. My blood. “I love her more. I don’t need it.” My teeth dug, scraped, tore. I spat miniature wires that singed my tongue, mic, speaker cells. The 8 GB ram stuck between my back molars; 128 GB memory sliced my gums. I swallowed a corner of the ion lithium battery shell, but accidently inhaled the eSIM card. It attached itself to my airway. 

As I choked, the hook lowered, gently. Tucked itself behind the blanket. Slithered from sight. Somehow, the beak marks on Delia’s face had healed. It was a miracle I was looking at. The dawn sun peaked through the curtains, lending the kind of shadow the best instafluencers would die for. I mourned my half-bitten phone. It would have made the perfect photo post. 

*   *   *

Stacey Lounsberry is a prose reader at the upcoming literary magazine Broad Ripple Review, and her work has appeared in Heavy Feather Review, Liminal Spaces, Appalachian Places, SBLAAM and others. Her flash fiction, “The Bet,” (first published by The Mersey Review) is a 2025 Best of the Net nominee (Sundress Publications). She is a full-time mother and writer and holds a BFA in Creative Writing and an MAT in Special Education. Find her in Eastern Kentucky, online at http://www.sglounsberry.com, or on twitter @sglounsberry.

By Devan Erno

The first good shoes Jesse ever owned were a deep red with blue stripes running midway along the sides. He had picked them out himself, in a fancy shoe store where someone carefully set his feet in a giant metal footprint, which told them exactly what size was best. All the shoes he’d previously owned had come from stores that sold a little bit of everything, all of it faded and worn. No others had ever fit properly. And none of them had come in a box. 

It was plain cardboard with a small black logo printed on it. A hinged lid opened and closed over and over again, yet it remained new and unspoiled. The possibilities were endless.

“Please, Dad?” Jesse said.

Dad sighed, for a moment looking faded and worn, like Jesse’s old Velcro shoes that he’d never have to wear again. Then he smiled in resignation. “Alright. Let’s get going, then.”

He winced at the counter when he paid. Jesse wondered if his leg was hurting again.

*

Jesse sat with Dad at the brown dining table, sunset through the window revealing the thick layer of dust on the unused side. They silently ate their plain pasta. He didn’t really remember Mom, but Dad always said she had been a better cook. 

Dad broke the silence. “Do you remember going to the sea?”

Jesse thought hard. “Nope. Don’t think so.”

Whenever Dad smiled, he seemed even sadder. “It was your Mom’s favorite place. Tomorrow let’s get in the car and go there. She always liked collecting seashells.”

Before bed, Jesse decided what to use the shoebox for. With a black marker, he wrote in stuttering letters on its top: PRESHUS THINGS.

*

The sea and sky were both the same shade of grey, as if that had been the only colour left when the world awoke and painted itself that day. But grey or not, there was magic in the shoreline. Jesse watched the steely waves coming in, pulsing to unseen rhythms. He strolled down the pebbly strand, occasionally stopping to gather a dried-out shell. He placed them in his box, carefully folding the lid over each time. Each one was unique, pretty in its own way.

After exploring for a time, Jesse looked back. Dad was seated on a colourless log, bark stripped off, washed up years ago by a relentless high tide. 

“Dad! Over here!”

Slowly, Dad got to his feet and walked over. His face was red for some reason, even though it wasn’t sunny enough to burn.

“What’ve you found, Jesse?”

“Look!” Jesse waved a hand at the tidal pool that had formed where the sand and pebbles made way for a patch of rocky ground, its centre sunken as if a giant’s fist had punched it down.

Both of them knelt. Little crabs scuttled sideways in the water, some taking cautious steps out of the pool, others moving quickly, as though running errands. Mussels and sea urchins sat motionless; a lone sea star’s purple brightened the pool, the only creature that wasn’t trying to conceal itself.

“Which one’s your favorite?” asked Dad. 

“Hmm, I’m not sure. Maybe the crabs, because they move around a lot.”

“The sea star’s pretty. Too bad it’s alone though. I guess in this pool I prefer the crabs too.”

“I’m going to look around more,” said Jesse. 

“Okay. Just for a few more minutes. We need to head home soon.”

“Can you hold my box? It’s full enough.”

It wasn’t until the next morning that Jesse noticed the lid of his box didn’t close all the way. But he had taken great care not to overfill it. Slowly opening the lid, he saw a small chunk of wood, twisted and gnarled, its corrugated surface rough in places, smooth in others. A thin, spiky shard had nearly pierced the smooth surface of the shoebox lid.

“Dad! Why’s this thing in my box?” Inexplicable tears filled his eyes.

Quick footsteps as Dad stepped into the tidy room. “It’s driftwood. I thought you’d like it. Mom always picked it up on the beach, along with shells. Every piece is unique, you know. Precious. Hey, what’s wrong?”

“It’s for my things! Not the things you say! I don’t even remember Mom. And it doesn’t fit!” Jesse threw the box into his closet.

*

It sat, untouched. Not forgotten, but unwanted. Jesse still didn’t know why the driftwood had made him so angry, but looking at the box made him feel bad. So he buried it all under school projects, art assignments, broken hand-me-down toys. Like layers of sediment, crushed under unbearable pressures into stone, the strata of childhood waited for an excavator. 

One day, after he had outgrown his good red shoes, Jesse began to dig through the rubble. Not with any specific purpose in mind. A stack of papers fell to the floor, revealing the box. He flipped it open. There was a bump in the lid, but it wasn’t ruined. Maybe it was even better than new. After all, the small flaw allowed it to hold more things.

Jesse carried it to the kitchen, where he knew Dad would be this morning, fingers of one hand twined around a chipped coffee cup, other hand absently tracing a path along the dusty table as he looked out the window.

“Dad?”

“Yeah, Jesse?” The tired smile again. “Oh, that old box?”

“I’m sorry. About the driftwood. I looked again, and it fits perfectly.” It was hard to get the words out. “Dad? Can you tell me about why Mom liked driftwood? I get the shells, they’re pretty. But this is just wood.”

Dad had trouble speaking too. “She said it was like looking at clouds. Everyone could look and see something a bit different.”

“It sort of looks like a dinosaur skull.”

“Interesting. I see a mountain peak, if you turn it this way.”

“Can we go back to the beach sometime?”

Dad’s smile wasn’t sad at all this time. “How about tomorrow?”

*   *   *

Devan lives in Calgary, and writes in a variety of genres. When he’s not writing, he runs marathons, plays board games with his family, travels, and works as a database administrator.