By Cathy Carroll-Moriarty

I’m surprised he came. But there he is at our usual booth by the window. Time hasn’t changed him much since our childhood days in Little Bohemia. Light colored hair with eyelashes to match. Indistinct chin. Small eyes set close together atop a small nose and thin line of a mouth. Only difference from middle school till now is that he can finally grow a moustache, though not much of one.

The years haven’t been as kind to me. But I haven’t been kind to the years I’ve been given, either.

He takes a drink of water and looks at his watch, probably one of the few people left our age who still wears one. I could leave right now. It wouldn’t be the first time I stood him up, in fact, he’s probably expecting me to.  Instead, I take a deep breath in and saunter over to the table.

He looks up when I sit down. His eyes don’t light up, nor does he smile like he used to when he would see me. There was a time when I could count on both.

“I ordered you a coffee and a piece of your favorite torte.”

“Thanks.”

“But I’m not staying long. Matthew has an appointment.”

I have no idea which one Matthew is; he has a whole brood of kids. Maybe he’s the one with Muscular Dystrophy? I don’t insult him by asking. There was a time when I would’ve delighted in watching the pain and annoyance take shape across his flaccid features. But not today.

“So, I guess I should say what I need to say right off the bat.”

“Yeah, guess so,” he checks his watch again.

I clear my throat, “so the thing is…I saw the doctor the other day. Got some news.” Good lord, he’s not even looking at me. “I’m dying. There’s no treatment, at least that my insurance will cover.”

His eyes flicker with what might’ve been emotion. No, it’s gone, now.

“So, you need money or something? Is that it?”

“No…” Although money never hurt.

“Cause I’m not doing this dance again. I’m still paying off the last loan I took out for you.”

“I, um, I just thought you would want to know, that’s all.”

“Why would you want me to know unless there’s some benefit in it for you?”

“That’s not really fair…”

“Not fair? No, not fair was me missing Cecelia’s baptism to bail you outta jail. Not fair was me losing my job because I vouched for you. Fair doesn’t exist between us anymore.”

“We used to be close. For old times’ sake, I want things to be like they were.” I lowered my eyes for effect. “For you to be with me at the end.”

Abruptly, he stands, at least as abruptly as someone can stand up from a booth. His face red, his unremarkable brown eyes narrowed, “I don’t know what you’re playing at. But I’m not doing this with you. When I said I cut you off, I meant it. I don’t even know why I came.” 

He shuffles through his wallet. “Use this to pay for the coffee and torte.” He tosses some bills on the table. “Don’t call me again.”

He stomps off, checking his watch again. Forgiveness and sentiment are among his many weaknesses, so I watch the door for his return.  I don’t care that he doesn’t shuffle back inside.  Andy could be a stubborn little brat and I don’t need him.

The waitress brings over the order, and I almost send her away. Almost. It is my favorite torte after all. The memories melt in my mouth with each bite. How he’d give me his lunch when he saw I was hungry during our days at St. Adalbert’s grade school. How he’d taken beatings for me from high school bullies. He’d never let me down until now; guess that’s how some people are.

I lick the fork to get every ounce of frosting. Setting the fork down and reaching for the money, I realize that he left two fifties. More than enough for coffee and torte. Smoothing the money flat and stacking the two bills on top of each other, I twist my face into a smirk. I could always count on Andy.

I pocket all of it and leave the cafe.

*   *   *

Cathy lives in the Midwest and has started a writing career later in life. When not writing stories and rewriting her novel, she enjoys book club meetings at a café in Little Bohemia , gardening, and luxurious Sunday afternoon naps. Her work has appeared in Ariel Chart, Adelaide, Grande Dame Literary, and Four Tulips.

By JJ de Melo

To get to my job—where I spend my days rejecting expense reports submitted by the incompetent and the would-be corrupt—I take the L train crosstown to Civic Center, on the more bustling side of San Francisco. This morning, however, the Twin Peaks Tunnel was shut down for maintenance. Again. 

I was forced to disembark the tram at the mouth of the tunnel—the “West Portal” we call it—where it normally slices through the base of Twin Peaks. I, along with the other commuters, was then shepherded by SFMTA staff onto a bus-shuttle-thing that would carry us in a crescendo over the intercity summit and back into the heart of downtown, where we all either worked or were otherwise shuffling to this A.M. 

The single benefit to this impractical detour came at the peak of the rerouted journey. It was a clear morning—the fog had stayed offshore for once—leaving an unobstructed view of the city I served as a municipal financial analyst, a role in which I ensured the taxpayer dollar was spent without error or regulatory violation. The morning sun reflecting off the towering high rises renewed my passion to serve. 

This bliss was brief. 

We soon hit the beginnings of Market Street, where the passengers boarding the bus diversified. To put it lightly. The second we reached the makeshift, street-level stop that had replaced Castro Station, a rotund, ruddy man boarded the bus without paying—an increasingly irritable habit I’ve noticed among riders. The fare-evading man plopped himself down between two of my fellow commuters. He belched loudly. Then a liquor bottle appeared from oversized sweatpants. I recognized it to be a brand of dry vermouth, which felt particularly absurd to consume by itself at eight o’clock in the morning. He took a long swig straight from the spout. 

I tried to ignore him. 

A few stops later—the bus was packed at this point—more silent, zombie-like commuters joined us. That’s one thing I preferred since leaving New York: the San Francisco commute is quieter. Of course, an exception to that observation boarded soon after. A woman. With a shaved head. Sunken eyes. Her defining characteristic? Her lack of shoes. And it appeared she’d been without shoes for a very long time. Her otherwise pale feet were absolutely blackened to filth. 

She entered through the back door. Without paying. Obviously. And to say she “boarded” the bus really puts it far too elegantly. I might actually say she stomped onto the vehicle. I was standing at this point—making room for more elderly riders—and she shoved right past me as she stormed in. Next thing I knew she had marched up to a petite, young woman—she looked to be fresh out of college—and was quite literally hissing at her. Glued to her phone up until the hiss, the young woman looked up at the barefoot one. Stunned. Terror painted her face. 

“Give me your seat,” the barefoot woman growled.

The other woman shot up instantly and headed for the back of the bus. She also shoved me as she passed. 

What was with all the shoving?

The seat free, the barefoot woman threw herself into it. Dared anyone else to say something. No one did. Myself included. But I couldn’t stop looking at her either. This barefoot woman. As the bus rolled along, I found myself questioning the label I’d mentally demarcated her with. Did her lack of shoes really define her? 

I mean, she was clearly homeless. Was she better described as the homeless woman? No, wait. Unhoused woman. Or was she a woman experiencing homelessness? Houselessness? Whatever it was you were supposed to say these days. I made note to look that up again. There’d been an e-mail about this at work. And I do try to stay on top of these things, working for the city. Optics and all that.

So, as I was saying, this homeless, unhoused, woman experiencing homelessness has hissed her way into a seat. And it happened to be right across the aisle from the man partaking in a bottle of morning vermouth en route. He too found himself entranced by the hissing woman. His gray, bloodshot eyes diverged in their expression. The right maintained an intoxicated glaze. The left twinkled with a predatory shine.

He scratched his stubbly chin. Belched shamelessly. And said, “Hey.” How eloquent.

The unhoused, barefoot woman glanced at him. She broke eye contact quickly. 

“Hey, girl,” he called again. 

A hissed “What?” followed.

“You need shoes?” he nodded coolly at her feet. 

He must have been handsome once. A cool nod and a pickup line probably used to work for him. Before he was drunk on a bus drinking vermouth in a faded Niners jersey and sweatpants. Wreaking of alcohol and body odor. Preying upon a shaved-headed woman with no shoes.

She wasn’t impressed. She just stared back at him. Dumbfounded. Looking quite like the petite, younger woman she’d scared out of the same seat moments ago. I presumed the woman’s hissing behavior earned her a sort of apex predator status amongst the city’s transit riders. She’d grown used to being yielded to by the likes of myself. This drunken man defied that status quo.

“Come on, girl,” he slurred. “Lemme buy you some shoes.” 

The bus screeched to a halt. Outside a man was beating the side of the bus with a bright, yellow umbrella, despite the sunny day. He was yelling, insisting the driver let him on even though I’m quite certain this particular intersection wasn’t a shuttle stop. The driver decided to reward the uncivilized, bashing behavior by opening the back door.

Before the umbrella’ed man could board, the barefoot woman was storming out the bus. She avoided addressing vermouth man as she departed. She did, however, growl at me and anyone else even remotely close to the exit. Then she leapt off, landing on her dirtied feet like some escaped zoo animal before darting across a lane of traffic to reach the main sidewalk. 

I’m not sure what compelled me at that moment. But I followed her off the bus. I needed to help her, I think. If I could. 

This was new for me.

I waited patiently for the traffic signal to flash the little walking man before I crossed from the bus median to the sidewalk. It took me a moment, so I had to hustle to catch the unhoused, shaved-headed woman with no shoes. She was surprisingly speedy, though I was back on her tail soon enough. Sensing physical contact might upset her, I made sure to get her attention verbally.

“Excuse me!” 

She continued walking. Feet slapping on the pavement.

“Hey!” I wasn’t sure how to address her. “Hey, lady!” Lady? Did I really say that? 

She stopped. Turned to stare at me. She seemed upset that I’d broken her stride. I wondered where she was going anyway.

“I… uh,” I muttered. “I saw you on the bus and… I noticed you don’t have any shoes.”

She looked me up and down. “So?” 

“Well, I…” I couldn’t believe I was doing this. “I’d like to help get you some.”

She scowled at me. The expression felt more confused than anything. I kept talking. Tried to explain.

“Would you like that?” I asked. “I work for the city. I know this support service that–” 

“What shoe size are you?”

“Huh?” Now I was confused. I didn’t need shoes. I answered anyway. “Size 8.”

“Small feet for a man.” She was staring at them now.

“What?”

She looked me dead in the eyes, said, “That’ll work.” 

And she punched me in the throat. 

My vision turned to stars. I keeled over. Grasped at my neck.

I was struggling so hard to breathe through the pain—to breathe at all!—that I could do nothing else as she untied my laces and slipped my shoes right off me. Writhing on the ground as she pulled them onto her two bare feet. My business casual loafers looked ridiculous on her.

She clomped a few steps in them. They were a little loose. She removed them. Peeled my socks off too. Put everything back on. She took a few more cursory steps. Shrugged in satisfaction at the improved fit with the addition of my socks. 

All through it I was wheezing on the floor like an asthmatic. She didn’t pay me any mind as she ran off, stomping in the same direction to the same nameless destination as before. Defeated, I laid there. Catching my breath as she returned to the wild.

A passerby walked up a moment later. He looked down at me, flat out on the sidewalk. He didn’t offer to help me up or anything. Just asked me what happened.

“Some homeless lady stole my shoes!”

*    *    *

JJ de Melo is a queer, Filipino-American and Portuguese writer with creative writing training from the City College of San Francisco. He’s had work published in Fiction on the Web, Space & Time, Sci-Fi Shorts, and Literally Stories. In 2025, he won the editor’s choice award for fiction from Forum Magazine.

By Ashley Neary-Greenhouse

Graham hated his name because all the kids called him Graham Cracker. He asked his mom if he could change it, but she said, “No. I love the name, besides, who doesn’t like graham crackers? It’s the first ingredient in s’mores!”

Graham collected chocolate frogs and had almost all the cards that came with them until his dog ate every one of the thirteen he’d collected, and he lost interest. The dog had been a gift for his thirteenth birthday. He asked for a chocolate Lab, and she arrived early in the morning wearing a yellow ribbon around her chubby puppy neck. He named her Nutella, and they played together every day after school because Graham was a loner. 

He read books under a big sycamore tree in the pet cemetery by his house while Nutella bathed in the sun and peed on old headstones marking the graves of dogs, cats, monkeys, parakeets, and a horse. People thought it was weird that he hung out there, but he thought it was the perfect hiding spot. No one bothered him.

That was until a Sunday afternoon in May. He was reading Ancient Civilizations, absorbed in an article about the study of ancient fecal matter and the protozoan responsible for dysentery, when an old man approached. Nutella, toxically friendly, greeted him by violently slapping her tail into his thigh. The man laughed loudly, startling Graham so much that he tore the page he was reading. Irritated, Graham got up and walked away, ignoring him. Nutella hesitated, then followed her boy.

The next afternoon, Graham returned with a copy of National Geographic, looking forward to reading about penguins until the man appeared again. Nutella bolted toward him, muscular tail wagging. He knew dogs were good at reading people so he thought maybe he should hear him out.

The old man introduced himself as, “Stephen, with a ‘ph’.”

Graham didn’t introduce himself. He muttered “Oh, like the pH scale.”

Stephen explained that he had a dog named Plank who looked just like Nutella and was buried just a few paces from the sycamore tree. Plank lived to fifteen before dying of lymphoma. Stephen hadn’t been able to visit for weeks due to his own health, but now he was back and he had a plan. He was going to spray paint Plank’s headstone. Graham found this strange, but he appreciated strange.

“What color?” he asked.

“Taxicab yellow,” Stephen said.

“Why taxicab yellow? 

Stephen replied, “Because taxicab yellow is scientifically proven to be the easiest color to spot in a crowd. That’s why taxicabs are yellow! The pet cemetery is so crowded, I figured it would be much easier to find Plank if his headstone is taxicab yellow!”

Graham considered this. It made sense but he wondered if it was legal. 

“Are you allowed to spray paint Plank’s headstone such a bright color?” 

“Technically, it’s against the law. But what are they gonna do to an old man trying to find his dog? Fine me? Who cares! I’m old and not long of this world!”

Stephen asked if Graham had a pet buried there. Graham said he just liked to read under the tree. Stephen didn’t seem to judge him. 

“I can be your lookout if you want,” Graham said.

“I’d appreciate that,” Stephen said.

They walked to Plank’s grave. Stephen grew quiet but said Plank had lived a life full of adventures.

“Why’d you name him Plank?” Graham asked.

Stephen smiled. “It’s short for Plankton. He was found swimming in the ocean off Catalina Island. Authorities guessed he’d been in the water for some thirteen hours, just drifting with the current, the same way plankton do. They called him Max the Miracle. I brought him home, gave him a warm bed, and decided he deserved a better name. Plankton became Plank.”

Stephen, Graham, and Nutella met weekly to check Plank’s headstone, which had been repainted by cemetery employees like clockwork. Graham acted as lookout each time Stephen repainted it taxicab yellow. After a few months, the cemetery threatened to remove the headstone. This did not deter Stephen. He seemed to get a thrill from it. 

The repainting continued for almost a year until the day Stephen was a no-show. Graham saw that Plank’s headstone was restored to its original color again, but a bright yellow leash—the color of a taxicab—was draped over it, a note addressed to Graham pinned to it.

Dear Graham, 

I hate to surprise you like this, but I figured it was the best way to break the news. If you’re reading this letter, it means I have been reunited with Plank. I have asked to be buried here next to him. I would appreciate it if you and Nutella attended my service. My wife and daughter will attend. I’ve told them all about you. They look forward to meeting you. They know something that you don’t—how much happiness you and Nutella have brought me in my final months. You have been a faithful friend. You have made me feel young again. You have performed heroically as lookout on our repainting missions. Please do not be too saddened by my passing. Try to remember that, like Plank, I have lived a long life filled with adventures. Stay close to Nutella. Cherish each moment with her. When the time comes for Nutella to join me and Plank, please consider burying her under your sycamore tree. 

Always faithful,

Stephen J. Pless

P.S. This leash belonged to Plank. I know you’ll appreciate the color.

The day after Stephen’s headstone was installed next to Plank’s, Graham painted them both taxicab yellow.

            *   *   *

Ashley Neary-Greenhouse studies creative writing at Boise State University. Her work has appeared in Maudlin House, Paper Plane Press, Jackdaw Press, The Sheepshead Review and The Lindenwood Review. She is the winner of The Lindenwood Review’s 2025 undergrad flash fiction contest.

By Huina Zheng

I went to the reproductive medicine department to have my eggs retrieved. The doctor told me to spread my legs and rest them on the stirrups. I bit the inside of my cheeks, forcing myself to expose the most private part of my body in front of a strange man. All I could see was the pale blue of the surgical gown. The anesthesiologist pushed the drugs into my vein.

I stared at the ceiling and felt myself float above the operating room, looking down with the doctor at my legs, parted. I know there are things you don’t tell even your closest friends, but my mouth was no longer mine. I heard myself telling the doctor that infertility was the fate of the women in my family. My great-grandmother had been barren. My grandmother was bought as a daughter. My mother was my grandmother’s stepdaughter; her biological mother starved to death during the famine. And me? My mother says she found me in a trash bin.

I want to believe it’s a joke. But I was the only only-child in my village, during the one-child policy, when pregnancies were hidden and women disappeared into the mountains, all for the chance of a son. 

The doctor told me to close my eyes and relax. His voice came from far away, like from underwater. I had studied every step of the procedure online, but I still turned my head toward the monitor beside me. On the black-and-white ultrasound, the dark circles were my follicles.

“Good follicles,” the doctor said. “Eight on the left, six on the right.” 

Then the needle came in. I had seen pictures of it online, as long as a forearm. When it appeared on the screen, my body should have tensed, but instead it went slack, like a wet rag. The tip of the needle was a thin line of light. It aligned with one of the dark circles and pierced it. 

I didn’t feel pain, but I could feel its length, as if someone were digging a well inside my body, and at the bottom of the well an eye blinked. 

I smiled at the black-and-white version of myself on the screen. I said that one of them was my daughter. 

“Which one?” the doctor asked. 

“The one on the far left,” I said. 

The circle blinked at me, lashes long, almost smiling. When the needle withdrew, I could hear her humming to me, Mama is the best in the world, her voice soft and sticky, like rice cake. “She can’t wait to meet me.” 

The doctor didn’t respond. His eyes stayed fixed on the screen. 

The needle went in again. This time, the nurse pressed harder on my abdomen. I lifted my head and looked at her eyes. Single-lidded, clear, a young face hidden beneath the mask. The curve of her eyes told me she was smiling. She told me it would be over soon. The coolness of her latex gloves felt like a fish just cut open, still twitching, against my skin numbed by disinfectant. She began telling me about another patient. A woman who had spent eight years going from one fertility clinic to another, across Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou. She had taken over a hundred injections; her abdomen was mottled with bruises, like it had been kicked. She tried herbal medicine; the bitterness stayed in her throat, people could smell it when she spoke. Later, her husband had an affair. The other woman got pregnant. He said it was her fault, that he had no choice but to find someone else to give him a child. The day they divorced, she drank half a bottle of baijiu, and slept with a stranger in a bar. A month later, she found out she was pregnant. 

“In the past, people would call it fate,” the nurse said. “Modern medicine calls it immunological infertility, the sperm and egg attacking each other.” 

I wondered whether the hands inside her gloves were warm, whether her nails were neatly trimmed. I imagined her slender fingers moving across my chest and abdomen, the way my mother used to, telling me that we all have breasts and a uterus, that our bodies are made to carry life. 

There was a dark mole on the nurse’s neck, a long hair growing from it, out of place against her pale skin. 

“This is fly droppings,” she said. “When I was six, I didn’t wash it off in time. It sank into my skin and fed on my blood.” 

I thought she was trying to distract me. How could fly droppings grow? But as she spoke, the mole trembled, like a fly beating its wings. 

“Those three days when the embryos are in the dish,” she said, “whatever you eat, they can smell.”

“So should I eat spicy?” I asked. “Sweet? Sour? Salty?”

“Anything,” she said. “Think about the tastes you want them to have when they’re born. Then you won’t mind if they’re different from you.”

That night, I went back to the apartment my husband and I had just bought and opened the fridge to see what I could cook. Everything inside was something my mother had told me to buy, foods that were supposed to help with conception. Black chicken, fish maw, pig stomach. They made me nauseous. Red dates, longan, lotus seeds. I was sick of them. Even pomelo and pomegranate tasted like nothing.

In the end, I made a pot of porridge, adding salt, sugar, vinegar, and soy sauce.

When I set it on the table, my husband stared at me.

“It has every flavor it’s supposed to have,” I told him. I took a spoonful and swallowed it without chewing. Warm, sliding down my throat, like the length of the needle inside my body.

My husband said nothing. He just watched me as I reached into the pot with my hand and stirred. I pulled my fingers out and licked them.

It had every taste.

It had none.

*   *   *

Huina Zheng either writes as an admission coach at work or writes for fun after work. She lives in Guangzhou, China, with her family.

By Amelia Díaz Ettinger

Inspired by Gabriel García Marquez, Un Señor Muy Viejo Con Alas Enormes

Maybe it was true, the land had turned angry against the rabbits that were eating all the carrots on the planet. Maybe that was why, on the least important day of the week, on a long line of unimportant days, while the rabbits ate the carrot, the thin part of the root, where all the taste collected, wasting the green tops and most of the fleshy part, the soil began to liquify. 

During those days, before the earth decided to get rid of the annoying rabbits, there were a few, and by some accounts, only one, but most were certain there were at least three coyotes in those parts. Squalid creatures with ribs so prominent the wind played songs in them as if they were harps. They were the last of the predators left.  

The coyotes, with their languid countenance, lacked the energy to lick their own dirty coats, let alone try to chase and kill the abundant rabbits. Rabbits who had grown so accustomed to the lethargy of the coyotes that they laughed at them, mocking them in shrill, loud calls. Their taunts were akin to a child screaming, “Come and get me.” The coyotes never did, and not by deafness, but they seemed incapable of knowing where to turn or what to do. Their numbers dwindled, and the music from their rib cages grew louder and louder.

This all took place until the Earth’s soil thought She had had enough. Turning herself into a liquid mud that smelled of rotting meat, the rabbits began to dwindle too. What have we done? Their nervous eyes began to question as they turned into large, bulging orbits in their head as they looked frantically around themselves and found no comfort. There was no place to stand as they scampered on top of their once-abundant carrots. Their soft bodies were trapped, drowned in the excrement like soil. They screeched agonizing screams for help, swearing they could do better as they held on to their precious carrots. They convulsed and scampered on top of each other, making a hideous spectacle with their twisted, decomposing bodies, without avail.

When the earth realized that She had gotten rid of those uncaring rabbits, She began to grow strong again—little by little, She regained her sensual texture and aroma of fertility. The carrots again grew plenty. The green tops hid and twisted among the bones of the abundant rabbit carcasses that lay strewn in the open fields for many centuries to come. They stayed there in the landscape as gruesome mummified reminders of the time when the land grew sad on an unimportant day in a line of unimportant days

The balance She was hoping to regain finally came. And the coyotes grew fat and danced and howled under the light of the full moon and avoided the fossilized corpses of an enemy they no longer remembered.

*   *.  *

Amelia Díaz Ettinger is a Latinx BIPOC poet and writer. Amelia’s poetry and short stories have been published in anthologies, literary magazines, and periodicals. She has an MS in Biology and MFA in creative writing. Her literary work is a marriage of science and her experience as an immigrant. Presently, she resides in Eastern Oregon.

By David Lanvert

You still walk faster than I do.

But you run faster. 

I know, it’s always been that way.

You should take it easy.

Don’t worry, I’ll slow down if I get winded. 

I mean you don’t have to push yourself. 

I’m okay.  We used to do more than this.

I know.

All those marathons.  But we could never run together. 

You’re right, we’re too competitive.

But we’re okay now – side by side. 

Yes, because we’re not really running. 

It will come back.

Of course.

But the conversation’s nice. 

                                                            *     *     *

David Lanvert writes literary flash and short fiction. His work has appeared in Flash Fiction Magazine, Fiction on the Web, and Stanchion Zine, and his story “Come Wednesday” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He lives in Nevada.

By Jinjia Grace Hu

Every morning when I open my door, a pigeon waits on my doorstep. It might have been mundane—New York has more pigeons than straight men, according to my friend—if it hadn’t been the same pigeon every day, following me around with the obedience of a Victorian butler. The emerald plumes on his chest bounce with each step as he trails me. He doesn’t chirp or coo, asking for no food or attention; he simply follows. 

During the fifteen-minute walk from my place to the subway station, I know that whenever I turn around, I’ll see him teetering behind me, patiently shifting his weight from one leg to the other. His head is always kept low, as though surveying the ground before trusting it with his toes. In those moments, the early sun bakes my half-awake face, and I’m filled with the reassurance of this small consistency in an ever-changing world. 

When I step out of the subway after work, usually late afternoon, he’s waiting outside the station. Does he ever leave? I never know, yet I hope he does. I hope he has pigeon friends to play with, to talk about the day, to tell about us. As the lingering sunlight softly tickles the back of our necks, he chaperones me just as he does in the morning: same street, reverse direction. Only this time, rather than trailing me, he waddles in front of me, head still low, as if he’s leading me home. He stops right in front of my doorstep as we arrive, and I know I’ll see him again the next morning. 

Only later do I notice how low he keeps his head, his red beak nearly grazing the pavement—tracing the dark contour on the ground. He isn’t escorting me. He’s in love with my shadow. 

*   *   *

Jinjia Grace Hu was born in Nanjing, China, and lives in New York with her cat, Almond. She is an MFA candidate in creative writing at Columbia University. Her stories appear or are forthcoming in The Bloomin’ Onion, The First Line, and elsewhere.

 By David Larsen

Lucy McBride grimaced as she studied the picture on her bedroom wall. The sweeping landscape of the plains of western Nebraska, a gift from her aunt and uncle in Grand Island, had been swapped out without her knowledge, replaced with a pen and ink sketch of Tom’s former girlfriend, Susan, naked as a jailbird, leering seductively at the artist and the world. What in the world can Tom be thinking? she wondered.

Tom Bracewell had moved in three days earlier, lock, stock and barrel, including the disturbing piece of art. Lucy was far from a prude, yet this seemed to push anything goes beyond its limits. The nicely-framed piece—the nude—was well done, or so she supposed. What did she know about art? She was a first-grade teacher. She knew crayoned stick figures and finger-painted swirls and smudges. To have a naked woman wantonly glancing over her bare shoulder at her, and, of course Tom, from the wall of her bedroom seemed to be asking for more open-mindedness than she was prepared to offer. And not just any naked woman, but a slender-hipped woman Tom had slept with up until six months ago, a woman he might retain feelings for.

“Couldn’t we hang it someplace else?” asked the divorced thirty-two year old. “Not in the bedroom.”

“But where?” Tom laughed. “You don’t want it in the living room for my poker buddies to ogle when they come over, do you?”

“Your poker buddies?”

“Yeah,” said Tom, “I’ve told you about that. I get together with some of the guys from work every Tuesday…for cards.” He grinned. “I hadn’t mentioned it but I was hoping that you’d be willing to fix something for us to nibble on. Something simple. It doesn’t have to be much. We rotate the game, so we’ll only be here every fourth or fifth week. The wives and girlfriends of the other fellas throw something together, chili, nachos, pizza, whatever. It can be anything that would be easy for you to prepare, something that goes well with beer. It doesn’t have to be fancy. The guys aren’t fussy. This Tuesday will be my turn to host.”

“Where will you sit,” asked Lucy. “I don’t have a card table.”

“I assumed we’d play at the dining room table,” said Tom. “There are only six of us, sometimes seven. We’ll use a folding chair or two if need be.”

“That mahogany table belonged to my grandmother. It’s an antique.” Lucy bit at her lip. She wanted to cry. “I’m not sure I want a bunch of men playing cards around it…gorging themselves on God knows what and guzzling beer.”

“We’ll use coasters…and ashtrays.”

“Ashtrays?” 

“A couple of the guys smoke. Most of us just like to chomp on a cheap cigar. Jinx Morgan smokes that godawful pipe of his but he’s the only one who’ll stink up the place.”

Lucy sighed. A pipe? In my dining room? “The rest of you don’t smoke the cigars?”

“We do…and we don’t. We light ‘em, of course. But nobody inhales a cigar. We just like to have a stogie in our mouths for effect. You know how it is…with men.”

Lucy didn’t know. Her father, a Baptist, never smoked…or played poker for that matter. Nor, for heaven’s sake, drank beer. Her ex, in spite of all of his faults, didn’t smoke or gamble. Although, Ronald did have a thing for other women. Damn him.

“I don’t get it,” said Lucy. “You sit around with a lit cigar in your mouths? What’s the point, if you don’t smoke the thing?”

Tom grinned. “It’s just the way guys are.” He shrugged. “That husband of yours didn’t like to hang out with a group of his friends?” He tilted his head then smiled.

Lucy’s lower lip trembled. For some reason, she felt defensive when it came to her ex, even if he was a jerk. “Ronald preferred the company of women,” said Lucy.

“Unfortunately.”

“Don’t we all?” said Tom.

Lucy winced. Just the thought of her boyfriend chasing after women like her ex made the room spin. Now what? she thought. Cigars? Poker? What else?

“Do you lose much money?” she asked. Tom’s job at Smart Fashions didn’t pay all that much. How could he possibly afford to gamble—on his commissions, paltry as they seemed to be?

“Not really,” said Tom. “We just like to get together and tell stories. Locker room talk as the president called it.”

My dining room isn’t a locker room, she wanted to tell him, but she held back. She desperately wanted everything to work out with Tom.

Tom looked at his cellphone, frowned then scraped his keys across her dresser, another antique. “Can we hold off on supper for another hour or two?” he asked. “I’ve got to run over to Susan’s house and pick up Rowdy.”

“Rowdy?”

“I’ve told you about Rowdy. My dog. You’re gonna love him.”

“You’re bringing your dog here, to my apartment?” She paused. “You never said anything about your dog.”

“Where else would he go?” Tom blinked. “He’s no trouble.”

“What kind of dog is he?”

“He’s a mutt, part hound, part terrier.” Tom shook his head. “If one of us walks him, and cleans up after him, he’ll be happy. He doesn’t shed…not much.”

“I have a cat you know. What about Cheeks?”

Tom nodded. “If Rowdy bothers Cheeks, just give him a whack on the nose. He’ll learn.”

“I don’t want to hit your dog.”

Tom laughed. “He’s used to it.”

With Tom gone Lucy went into the bathroom. Tom’s wet towels and washcloths, strewn across the tiled floor, smelled mildewy. She collected them, gagged then tossed them into the hamper.

When he gets back, she thought, he’ll be more than surprised to find his clothes, his golfclubs and his precious girlfriend’s picture on the front porch. Then I’ll call Ronald. We can work things out, I hope. He always said we could. He called just this morning.

*   *   *

David Larsen is a writer who lives in West Texas, two miles from the border with Mexico. His stories have been published in numerous literary journals and magazines including Cholla Needles, The Heartland Review, Change Seven, Literary Heist, Aethlon, Pattern Recognition, Coneflower Café, The Raven Review, Voices, Smoky Blue Literary Arts Magazine, Mobius, The Griffel Literary Magazine, Bright Flash Literary, Floyd County Moonshine, The Mantelpiece, Oakwood, Nude Bruce Review, Canyon Voices, County Lines: A Literary Journal, The Word’s Faire, Rundelania, Red Dirt Forum and October Hill Magazine.

      

     

A Memoir by Johanna Elattar

The television in our living room showed a unicorn that summer—a pearlescent creature with a single, spiraling horn—destined for Madison Square Garden. I was eleven, and unlike the adults around me, I still believed in the possibility of a miracle. I didn’t know about surgical grafts or the grim theater of animal acts. I only knew that I wanted to see it.

My father’s youngest brother was staying with us then, the youngest of my grandmother’s five sons. When I asked him to take me, he answered without thinking. He was lost in his own thoughts.

“Yeah, okay. I’ll get the tickets,” he said.

A week passed. The circus was moving closer, the ads getting louder. “Did you get them?” I asked.

“They’re in the mail,” he told me, his voice flat and practiced. “Any day now.”

That was the start of the ritual. Every afternoon, I’d leave the apartment and head for the lobby. The Brooklyn heat was a physical weight, smelling of hot asphalt and the briny ghost of the harbor. I’d stand before the bank of dented metal mailboxes, my small key slick with sweat.

The sound of the key in the lock was a hopeful click. The sound of the box swinging open was a hollow clack.

Clack. Utility bills for my mother. Clack. A circular for the supermarket. Clack. Empty.

In those first weeks, the key felt different in my hand — lighter, charged with what might be waiting on the other side. I’d take the stairs fast, my heart already moving ahead of my feet. Every afternoon was a small beginning, a door that hadn’t been opened yet.

By July, the “any day now” had become a mantra. I’d ask him on Mondays, then Wednesdays, then only on Fridays. He never changed his story. He never looked guilty. He just kept promising the arrival of an envelope that didn’t exist.

By August, something shifted. The key didn’t feel like possibility anymore. It was just metal. I knew the box was empty before I even turned it. I could feel the vacuum of it through my palm. Yet I didn’t stop. I didn’t confront him. I didn’t ask why the mail was taking six weeks to travel from Midtown to our hallway. I just kept the ritual alive, a silent, daily pilgrimage to a metal box.

I kept the ember of expectation burning because I refused to be like the people who surrounded me—the ones who had allowed the world to break their wonder until they were as hollow as that mailbox. I went down every day because I chose to believe in the unicorn, even after I stopped believing in my uncle.

One evening I was alone in the living room when the commercial came on. The same music, the same pearlescent horn — but the words had changed. Last week in New York City. I sat with that for a moment. The circus was gone. The window had closed while I was still checking the mail. I got up, went downstairs, and turned the key anyway.

Clack.

I didn’t tell anyone what I’d seen. There was no one to tell.

The day before school started, I went down one last time. I couldn’t have explained why. The ritual had become its own reason by then — separate from tickets, separate from unicorns, separate from anything he had or hadn’t done. I just went. Because I was the one who went.

I stood before the metal box. There was nothing left of the feeling that used to carry me down those stairs — no flutter, no forward lean, no small voice saying maybe. Just the key in my hand and the knowledge of what I was about to find. But I turned it anyway.

Clack.

Nothing but a supermarket circular. No tickets. No miracle.

I stood there holding the circular, the paper soft from the heat. The unicorn on the television, the goat with the bone-graft horn, and the man who had promised me tickets — they were the same thing. A performance of something that wasn’t real.

I locked the box and walked back up the stairs. I passed him without a word. He didn’t look up, and for the first time, I didn’t need him to.

                                                                  *   *   *

Johanna Elattar is a professional writer and Pushcart Prize nominee whose investigative reporting on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) is featured in the Oxford University Press textbook Race and Racisms (4th Edition) and Unheard Voices Magazine. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in Santa Fe Literary Review, and Yellow Arrow Publishing. She was a finalist for the Diana Woods Memorial Award at Lunch Ticket (Antioch University), where she was shortlisted by Michelle Tea.

after A House with Bottle Trees, Simpson County, photography by Eudora Welty (USA) 1941

It was their third night in the new house, and Walter still couldn’t sleep. His wife was restless, too, tossing and turning and constantly sitting up to fiddle with the fan.

Born and raised in California, the heat was not new to them. But there was a restlessness here somehow, a nervous undercurrent thrumming from the floorboards. The house needed work, which they would get to, once they were finished unpacking. In time they would get used to the new place and feel at home.

Walter shuffled to the fridge and poured a tumbler of lemonade, standing in his undershirt and nothing else in darkness. The humid air was thick with perfume; mimosa, magnolia, myrtle. The moon was high. He leaned over the sink, close to the screen, and saw it glinting off the rainbow of glass bottles on the tree in the neighbour’s yard, light dancing through them like fireflies.

Celia. A peculiar, spindly old woman. Now he remembered: “No one sleeps in that house,” she’d warned cryptically when they’d made small talk before moving in. “Bet you got the place cheap. The old maids didn’t last a year. Carried out together with their eyes frozen open. Who knows what they seen.”

Walter shuddered recalling it. No wonder he’d been wide awake for days. According to their realtor, the Jones’ sisters had passed of ripe old age, and that made sense, one each of them being on either side of ninety years. 

The yards on the block had lush, colourful gardens and an eclectic assortment of whimsical oddments and doodads, wrought-iron chickens and seashells and chubby angels. And most of them had the requisite tree strung with cobalt blue bottles, some adding green and purple and red. It was a popular decoration among southerners. Some old timers still believed the bottle trees enticed the restless spirits into the glass and kept them from entering their houses.

Celia had the biggest tree, with hundreds of dusty old liquor glass, flagons, and jugs rigged up with twine. He and Beth both liked the folksy vibe of it all. Since they’d moved in, they’d mostly seen Celia rocking on her wraparound porch with iced tea and the Scriptures in hand.  Her house was, fittingly, painted haint blue, the same pale colour as a sleepy sky. “This tricks ‘em into passing through and flying away,” Celia had said. “Otherwise they keep at you until they tire you to death. Only the word of God and the old ways can save you.”

By the second week, Beth had set everything up nicely inside and Walter had cleaned out the Jones’ leftovers from the garage and yard. He had taken a mountain of empty boxes to the recycling depot in town. They both had dark circles around their eyes. Walter was growing concerned: he would be starting the new job come Monday and needed to be sharp to learn the ropes. Beth was jumpy, unnerved by the rattlings of the old house. They both heard strange noises, staccato yelping from the edges of the woods behind the yard. Walter was sure these were sounds from the feral dingoes that ran the swamps.

One early morning when he went out to retrieve his newspaper, he saw Celia sweeping glass shards into a dustpan under her tree and he went over to ask if he could help. She shook her head. “Many bottles broke during the night,” she explained grimly. “Sometimes that happens. When the evil is strong enough, the glass bursts open because it cannot contain them.” 

She busied herself tying new ones to the lower branches. Walter helped to steady her as she reached awkwardly to tether her twine to higher spots. He suggested gently that perhaps the rain overnight had loosened some of the vessels and broken them. Her black walnut eyes darted sharply about. “The stubborn don’t believe,” she said finally, and returned to her task. “And they endanger their neighbours, too, inviting these spirits.” 

After a moment intent on tying a knot, she turned to Walter. “How are you sleeping, child?” And then, “Don’t you hear them at night, growling from the swamps?”

Walter felt uneasy. But he didn’t believe in ghosts. “What would the spirits want of me?” he asked. “Did something happen in the house?”

Celia snorted. “It’s not a ‘me’ thing,” she said. “It’s not personal. The elders know that the air is filled with all manner of ancient darkness. Did you know that more ten percent of the men enslaved here died within a year of getting off those ships?” She waved her skinny brown fingers to the north. “Just a mile from here were the rice fields. More than half of the children died working those wetlands. Malaria. And worse. They’re still rattling away, hoping to be heard. We forget, but they remember.”

Walter walked the old woman to her front porch, where she resumed her favourite perch in her rocking chair. “The haints chase us, begging us to listen, to our exhaustion,” she said. “They want to find a home, but our homes are not their homes. My advice? Listen to them. But don’t let them in.” And she snapped at the rolled up paper under his arm, so he gave it to her, and turned back to his own yard.

There were just a few of Beth’s empty wine bottles in the blue bin in the garage. But it was a start. He would head into town later and look for others. He found an old clothesline and cut it into pieces. 

Walter was just finishing with what they had when Beth came into the front yard and asked him what he was doing. 

“It looks nice, don’t you think?” he asked. He stepped back to admire the way the green glass bottles glowed in the rising sun. 

 Lorette C. Luzajic

Lorette C. Luzajic is a writer, editor, publisher, educator, and visual artist in Toronto, Canada. Her work has been widely published, nominated, taught in workshops, and translated into Spanish, Urdu, and Arabic. Two of her stories have been selected for Best Small Fictions and another is forthcoming in Best Microfiction. She is the founding editor of The Ekphrastic Review and The Mackinaw.