Lost Balloon

We’d been off the main route by ourselves in the Conservation and Marine Science Zone, and you’d been saying how we didn’t want to miss it as back at the main tank there’d be the mermaid show soon, but we’d been lucky arriving there as it was quieter and not as appealing to children, and as it happened the aquarium had set aside a pregnant seahorse for monitoring and I’d been lucky again to get to watch it agog, rocking back in the water, pulsing up its young, but you were looking at your watch, saying there’s loads left to see and we’d be busy with the move the next two weeks so let’s just keep going, we should drink this all in, and I was, and about to point out to you the newborns too, like commas scribbled in the water in white, but you rapped on the glass before I could speak and though it got my attention, it got one of their staff’s too, whose should-know-better glower embarrassed me enough we couldn’t stay, so you lifted my wrist and steered us onto the concourse to sit with the six-year-olds and my point is it wasn’t that I saw how you couldn’t conceal your annoyance the mermaid troupe proved all mermen instead, athletic in their tails and tasteful kelp, and it wasn’t that you saw me watching them, hardly agog but as I was there at least into it, and it wasn’t that I saw you staring at the only female performer, the girl on the beach looking lonely along ‘the sea,’ but perhaps instead because you’d said “Corinne, for God’s sake, you’re in a trance again” but maybe I was thinking about the seahorse again then, moved into its tank because the decision was made it was ready, or maybe I was listening to the announcer calling out the story, that the girl and her merman were from two different worlds and it wasn’t meant to be, or maybe I’d just zoned out from that plot.

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Stephen J. Bush was born in Bath, England, and lives in Xi’an, China, where he works as a biologist. His fiction can be found or is forthcoming in Bending Genres, BULL, Oyster River Pages, and Panorama.

I was sixteen, finished with school, and couldn’t see a way forward. Went to stay at Uncle Ray’s. He’d been clearing the guttering and had fallen off the roof. Mum and I went down to look after him. They played chess, and binge-watched Breaking Bad. The house was so loud, even with the TV off, the way they shout-laughed and rabbited on. Drank heaps of tequila. Ray said it was pain relief for his busted shoulder. Mum agreed, but she had a busted heart. She was stuck, just enough energy to hold a fag in one hand, drink in the other. I guess Ray was looking after her, too.

Dad called sometimes. Neither of us were chatty. I choked up when I was put on the spot, I guess it was the same for him. It was better when he gave me an iPhone and we began sharing photos.

There was a park down the road from Ray’s; sports fields, carpark, and a steep path up to the ridge where you’re eye level with billowy crowns of massive gum trees. I loved their minty disinfectant smell – I’d sit on the bench, scrolling through photos, hoping it would rinse the smoke stink from my hair. I was never going to puff away like Ray and Mum. She’d started after Dad left. Took up anxiety meds, too. I snuck her pills. They made me feel less tangled, although sometimes my heart wound down so much I’d wondered if it could switch off.

The swamp was near the carpark, and hidden. I only found it because I’d followed a duck across a field and it peeled away into flax bushes. I’d squeezed through and there it was, empties jumbled around the edge, Woody’s boxes flattened to sit on, lighters dropped on greasy strands of grass that lay across the mud like a comb-over.

I took pictures there because I could catch two views at once – the pool of water reflecting trees and sky; and what lay in the ooze underneath. Sometimes the top and bottom views fitted together: a cloud-balloon balanced on an ice-block stick, a flax spike bursting from a squashed can. I sent those to Dad.

That morning, I was sitting on the bench, skimming through photos, when I heard her talking on her phone. She glided into view, then along the path. She reminded me of the head girl at school, ballet dancer, cat-poised, high-achiever. I did not share those qualities. Mum said I stumped along as if I had bricks for shoes. Hadn’t passed an exam since Dad left. I’d been an okay student before, I just couldn’t think properly after that. Cat-girl had almost disappeared around the bend when the sun caught her ponytail’s flyaway hairs and turned them into a fucking halo. For a hot moment, I wanted to smash her. No, I wanted to be her. A kingfisher flashed past. Maybe I dreamt that? They’re so quick. I’ve pinched out photos and seen one perched on a branch – I hadn’t spotted it at the time, but the camera had.

The next day was foggy and the swamp blank. I crouched, and focused on the underneath; the coppery glint of a coin, a yellow blob. Nothing moved. No bird flittered. No leaves drifted. A sliver of sunlight touched the water, and withdrew. It gave me a shivery feeling I couldn’t explain. I shimmied back through the flaxes, and clomped up the path. The bench was wet so I leant against the railing, and pinched out an image. The yellow blob was the head of a face-down Barbie. Her arms and legs had been yanked out. Creepy, but kids experiment. I once set a doll on fire to see what would happen. I’d felt sick watching it sizzle; and at the same time spellbound as it melted into a stump.

A boy found her that afternoon – a boy out walking his dog. The dog had galloped off around the swamp. Elvis couldn’t even bark, the boy said on the news. He just stood there, wheezing. I stared at her ID photo on TV, moon-coloured hair, false lashes that made her eyes look like flowers.

The swamp was barricaded this morning, and a police officer stood nearby. I headed to the carpark, circled back beneath the gum trees, and peered down. A churn of mud around the edge where the police had been – where the attacker had been, and her.

I thought about how I’d missed seeing kingfishers. Had I missed any clues? I scrolled through my photos hoping I’d snapped her gliding down the path. Nope. I might have been the second-to-last person to see her before the boy and the dog; and all I’d done in that moment was hate on her.

I slipped one of Mum’s ciggies from my pocket. I sucked in a lungful then let out the smoke gently; it swallowed my head – that’s the selfie I’d send Dad. For a heartbeat I wanted to shake him fucking arsehole. Wind thrummed in the canopy. Minty, clean-smelling leaves zigzagged down.

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Leanne Radojkovich’s short story collections Hailman and First fox were published by The Emma Press. Her work has appeared in Best Small Fictions, Landfall, ReadingRoom, Short Fiction Journal, takahē, Turbine|Kapohau, and more. Originally from Kirikiriroa, she now lives in Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa New Zealand. You can find her online at leanneradojkovich.com.

Doreen forces thick, unwaxed floss between your molars, between your bicuspids and your canines. She is always honest, no messing around, and she needs you to hear this: even two, three times a day, brushing is not enough. There’s inflammation, Doreen says. The floss slices between your two front teeth, and the pain is electric, sharp to your core. You can fix this, Doreen says, but you have to be consistent. Eyes shut behind yellow-tinted safety goggles, you grunt in assent. The floss comes down again, and a section of gum peels away from a tooth. Nice boots, says Doreen. The floss catches behind an old crown placed by an old dentist, and imagining that it will pop right off, fall against your tongue and tumble down your throat, you make a small, concerned noise. Doreen exhales behind her surgical mask. Every night, she says, even if it hurts. You want to tell her how you used to be so good: pre-rinse, whitening toothpaste, fluoride sluiced between your teeth and under your tongue. You read once that the best way to keep from snacking at night is to brush your teeth right after dinner. A clean mouth feels so good, you’ll think twice before ruining it. And you do, you always think at least twice, consistently, but even still: you ruin things. Manicures and photographs, birthday cakes and carpets. Countless opportunities, second chances first through last. Doreen hums, satisfied, and drops the reddened floss on the dental tray. She wants to know, any questions? You swirl water from the plastic cup, you spit. You want to know, can it be possible, please, for the important things to not hurt? But you say, no, thank you. Blood against your tongue, blood between your teeth. Every night, Doreen reminds you. Every night, you agree.

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Carol M. Quinn’s fiction has recently appeared in Five on the Fifth, Grist, The Tusculum Review, and others. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and currently lives in New York with her family.

A surprise spring snow. Enough for the neighborhood kids to get bundled up and mittened, for parents to get out sleds and plastic saucers. Morton watches from the window as they gather at the top of the hill.

The kids slide past, scramble back up to do it again. Morton waves, knows they don’t see him.

He remembers the big snow. Still a record: the forecast said three-to-five inches; two feet fell.

His office, the schools, closed for days. His wife made sausage soup with home-grown carrots and Cubanelle peppers. Morton braved the sidewalk in his gardening boots to get milk and red wine at the corner grocery. Their boy scattered sunflower seeds for sparrows. When the power went out for an evening, they ate doughnuts for dinner and roasted marshmallows over a candle flame.

After the snow settled, packed hard, Morton got the sled from the garage, waxed the runners. At first their boy worried, watched from behind as the other kids left him. “Too fast,” he said. “You can ride on my back,” Morton said. They stayed out until dark.

Inside, the house smelled of spiced apple cider, hot and steaming on the stove. Morton’s wife filled mugs from a ladle, splashed in bourbon after their boy went to bed. They got drunk, fell asleep laughing.

His wife is gone now. A tumor she called “my uninvited guest who stayed too long.” Their boy builds rooftop gardens in cities on the other side of the world.

The day descends to dusk. Morton warms rice for dinner, remembers to stir in saffron like his wife always did, eats watching the news for the weather. They say the snow will last the night, melt away tomorrow.

He opens the window, feels the cold against his face. The kids go faster and faster in the fading light. Their boy will wake soon. He listens to the laughter, leans out and waves again.

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Scott Ragland has an MFA in Creative Writing (fiction) from UNC Greensboro. Before taking a writing hiatus, he had several stories published, most notably in Writers’ Forum, Beloit Fiction Journal, and The Quarterly. More recently, his flashes have appeared in Ambit, The Common (online), Fiction International, Cherry Tree, CutBank (online), the minnesota review, Brilliant Flash Fiction, Cutthroat, Bacopa Literary Review, The MacGuffin, and Allium, among others. He is a 2024 Pushcart Prize nominee and has served as a flash reader/editorial assistant for CRAFT. He lives in Carrboro, N.C., with his wife Ann, two dogs, and a cat.

I’ve always wondered, Papa—would you be this father if your mother had loved you?

*

I was visiting home after a year. This is how my father and I met, for days or a few weeks at a stretch since I left home for college, which was precisely seven days after my mother’s passing.

Every time we meet, it feels like we are starting over. We talk in pauses, short responses, and fillers, carefully treading around topics like Ma, my career plans, his post-retirement plans, and whether I’m seeing someone.

The silence had grown heavier in our small, overstuffed flat.

My father’s mother (an evil witch, as my mother called her) was coming to stay over.

She had to get some tests done for her ear in the city, my father told me from the kitchen, unwilling to meet my gaze or see my reaction.

It wasn’t difficult to imagine why. My father’s siblings couldn’t be bothered to make these efforts, even though she lived with them and gave them all her love—and everything else she had, including my mother’s gold jewelry, which she took soon after my parents got married.

The next day, I found him obsessively dusting the house.

He didn’t ask me about my investments, but instead asked what snacks I liked to take back with me. He acted like the boys I’d been on dates with, consulting invisible mental index cards.

He has been a good father—he sent me to an expensive school he barely could afford, never commented on my short clothes, bought me a computer in fifth grade before anyone else had one, proudly displayed my silly awards around the house, and occasionally shared stories from his village childhood—stories I wished were more about him than others, but I still cherished them.

He then began wiping the curtain rods in the drawing room. When he asked me about lunch, I lied about meeting a friend.

He didn’t pester me, no follow-up questions either. He wasn’t expecting me to greet his mother, for all I knew, he wouldn’t mind if I abruptly went back on the next flight.

I didn’t know whether to feel grateful for his understanding or betrayed that he sought no support from me.

I wondered if I was wrong in not opposing this. I couldn’t. I didn’t have that power over him anymore. I wasn’t a child who could throw fits. He wanted this familial duty so he could feel like a son. He lacked the lens to see it any other way.

I despised him for having no self-respect. For giving away his hard-earned money after a single phone call from her. For weeping and calling “Ma, Ma…” over and over when he was drunk. All this for a mother who didn’t care enough to visit him after his heart surgery. Who sat laughing over snacks at his wife’s funeral, and said nothing to her grieving granddaughter.

I had not seen him cry once for my mother.

Even when he reached for my phone to explain directions to the cab driver, he didn’t meet my gaze. When I stepped out, he didn’t say bye—just that the cab would be parked outside the block.

When I returned in seconds for my earphones, I saw him lying back on the sofa chair, the wet cloth dropped on his side, staring outside the balcony, as if he had let himself fall back and relax with me gone. He looked like he could finally think. For a moment, I had the urge to shake him out of it, but instead, I turned away and left.

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Garima Chhikara is a fiction writer from Bangalore, India. Her stories explore themes of emotional depth and personal transformation. Her work appears or is upcoming in Forge Literary, Hobart, La Piccioletta Barca, and Halfway Down the Stairs. Find her at garimachhikara.com.

Each day, six classes: Numbers, Classifications, Letters, Names, Functions, and Deep Listening. All our parents wanted a nontraditional education or were otherwise indifferent and let us fall into the strange pedagogy, the same way they let their cigarettes burn out in stolen hotel ashtrays.

But we learned.

Numbers taught us how to steal. How to make things add up even when they didn’t. Eve pawned calculators from the storage closet. Nelly bashed the vending machine until it spit out enough quarters to buy us all lipstick—we wore Neon Orchid. Jessie coaxed a few sympathy dollars out of her father when she saw him on weekends. I took the remainders and invested, my mind toward the future.

We were made to understand the classifications into which we might fit. Keynesian. Figment. Daemon. Gas station attendant.

Jessie loved Letters. Calligraphy in bathroom stalls, on fogged windows, or traced out on my bare shoulders. Once, she set fire to the school’s front lawn—a series of scorched symbols only Nelly could decipher. It’s a curse, she said. Eve and I called it a love letter. It looked like this: ∆≈∆.

Eve was nameless until her fifth year. Her parents disagreed on a name until their disagreement segued into a kind of patience. They opted to wait for the right name to arrive. Nominal determinism was in vogue, and no parents, even ours—lazy, abstracted, churlish—could risk the wrong name. Eventually, Eve’s great aunt died and her name became available and irrefutable. But more than ten years later, she’d still refer to herself as namelessness. When Eve and I first kissed, she said I kissed the nameless part of her. When Nelly gashed a spiral into Eve’s knee with a fountain pen, Eve said it was the nameless part of her that bled. Jessie wrote letters addressed to no one, and Eve read them all. The class though, it didn’t teach us anything we didn’t already know.

Here’s an example of a function: Me⇒  Eve⇒  Nelly⇒  Jessie⇒  Eve⇒  Jessie⇒   f(X). And another function might be: Our parents⇒  the school⇒  my memory⇒  bruises⇒  f(neon orchid). I barely passed.

Imagine us on the carpeted floor of the auditorium, arranged in the shape of a plus-sign, our four faces glinting with sweat, our half-tamed acne, fingernails ragged and trembling. To listen deeply—we were instructed—was to hear from outside of yourself. Like the sea in a conch shell or a dopplering siren ricocheting through subsidized apartments. I wanted to hear through Nelly, because she’d disappeared during our last semester, and we heard from our parents that she’d married a cowboy in Montana. We knew it wasn’t true. She’d taken the remainder and ran. What could she hear, out there in the future?

When they called her name at graduation, Nelly did not appear. Eve cried on my shoulder; Jessie flicked a match. I only remember the applause, not the faces of our parents or what happened after.

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Vincent James Perrone is a writer from Detroit. He’s the author of the poetry collection Starving Romantic and a contributor to the experimental fiction anthology Collected Voices in the Expanded Field. His recent and forthcoming work can be found in Split Lip, The Los Angeles Review, Action Spectacle, and Pithead Chapel. Vincent is currently based in Charlottesville, VA, where he is pursuing an MFA at the University of Virginia.

The platter with the tea trembled in my hands. The teaware was glass, our finest, translucent rosebuds rising out of the sloping sides, rounded and gentle under cupped hands. If I dropped it, my skin would bear the cuts. Aromatic chaii kissed the rims of the delicate glass as I breathed in deeply. The heat rising from the burning liquid stroked over my knuckles and caressed the backs of my hands. I had carried the platter before. The weight of it held me down. I was holding my future in my hands.

I walked in. I didn’t look at him. I set the tea down. My mother beckoned me to sit beside her. We lived in the city, so it was common for suitors to visit themselves instead of sending their mothers. I learned his name, and that he was twenty-one. I was fifteen. I learned that his smile was attractive. I learned that the shape his mouth made when he placed a sugar cube between his teeth and poured chaii down his throat was not. I learned that his voice was soft, and he had a habit of anxiously fluffing the frizzy curls of his hair as he spoke. He told my mother he liked the way I walked.

“Do you have any questions for me?” he said.

He hadn’t spoken to me since I entered the room, which I took to mean we weren’t allowed to address each other at all. My mother shot me a look. Answer the man.

“I’m sorry?”

He smiled again. I nervously rubbed the fabric of my chador between my finger and thumb. He had a nice smile. “Is there anything you’d like to ask me before we get married?”

Every morning for as long as I could remember, I would walk into the kitchen sleepy-eyed and frizzy-haired, and have the same breakfast my family always had. Nan-e barbari, flatbread, fresh and warm from the market or hardened and day-old from the cupboards, with butter. My father took half of the morning’s share of butter. My mother, my two brothers and I shared the rest. I swallowed injustice with my breakfast.

My mouth felt ashy, like the floury underbelly of unbuttered bread, as I began to speak.

“In the morning, we will eat bread and butter,” I started. He nodded. I glanced at my mother. Her mouth was pinched and white like undercooked tah deeg, like she’d give, not crunch, if someone bit into her one more time. Her gaze was fixed at the wall.

“Some butter will be for you,” I continued. He nodded again, eyebrows slowly coming together. His eyes were brown and sincere, gold settling into the crevices of his irises, clarity in the blackness of his pupil. “How much butter will be for me?”

His were the kind of eyes you can always forgive. I would come to learn that. He told me, “You can have as much butter as you’d like. I’ll take whatever you leave behind.”

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Annabelle Taghinia is an Iranian-American writer from New England. She is a junior in high school and spends her free time writing fiction, including a collection of stories about Persian women. Her work has been recognized by Scholastic Art and Writing, and has appeared or is forthcoming in Pithead Chapel, South Florida Poetry Journal, BULL, Yellow Arrow Journal and others.

Nigel’s mother wants you to wear the lily-white wedding gown with a tiara headpiece and a thin gauzy veil. She is a Catholic Brahmin matriarch. Your mother, a Hindu Brahmin matriarch, wants you to wear a red and yellow Kanjeevaram silk saree with a shiny zari border in paisley design.

You wear a cream raw silk saree with a golden border. With risqué flair, you tie it below your navel.

Nigel’s mother wants you to wear her own mother’s short 24-carat gold chain with a simple gold cross. The cross is the size of a little finger that would rest comfortably in the dip between your collarbone. Your mother wants you to wear a lengthy 22-carat double strand wedding necklace made of gold, and black onyx beads. She wants the groom to clasp it around the bride’s neck in front of the altar.

You wear a pearl necklace, costume jewelry, from the Met Museum shop.

Nigel’s mother wants you to wear plain gold stud earrings, two gold bangles on the right wrist and a jeweled watch on the left. Your mother wants you to wear jhumkas made of gold and rubies to dangle from your earlobes like mini chandeliers. She wants your forearms to be filled with the happy bangling of green glass and gold bracelets engraved with images of Goddess Lakshmi.

You wear pearl ear drops, a graduation gift from your college roommate’s mother, and a rice pearl bracelet given to you by Nigel for Valentine’s Day.

Nigel’s mother wants you to wear your long hair shorter and straightened; your mother wants you to wear a braid or a voluminous bun woven with fresh jasmine.

You wear your curly hair half up-half down held together with a pearly rainbow hair comb.

Nigel’s mother doesn’t want you to wear the traditional symbol of Hindu marriage on your forehead. Your mother, of course, wants your forehead adorned with a traditional circle of bright red kumkum powder.

You wear a dainty stick-on bindi-flame hoping it would ignite the energy of your third eye and cause you to levitate beyond the chaos of a Catholic groom-Hindu bride wedding, and strong mothers who hail from India.

You and Nigel stood in front of an altar with a towering crucifix at Immaculate Conception Church. It was a block and a half away from the exit ramp off of the roaring turnpike. Twenty-two wedding guests were in attendance. Twenty-one were from Nigel’s family and one was from yours: your brother-in-law who walked you down the aisle.

 

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Brunda Moka-Dias works as an educator and has studied writing in a few workshops including at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. She is an emerging writer and her first story will be published in Image journal.