Month: November 2019

The husband knew he was broken when he kissed his wife goodbye and left for work. He felt the crack the night before, on the back of his thigh where the wife didn’t notice, where it was hard for even him to see. Twisting at a cruel angle, he squinted into the bathroom’s full-length mirror to see what it was. The crack, like a stress fracture across a dinner plate, was thin and crooked and pinched a little when he walked.

But every day, a new crack. A jagged lightening bolt across his right shoulder blade, one below his left knee. The crack on his forehead was the most conspicuous, and he caught his wife looking at it during dinner. Looking, looking away. She didn’t say anything, but left a tube of KrazyGlue on the bathroom vanity for him.

Still, he cracked when he walked the garbage down to the curb, and when he stuck the electric bill into the mailbox, and when he sat on the toilet to take a dump.

When the wife cracked, it happened all at once. A sudden shattering like dropping an egg. Her cracks all radiated from one spot just below her clavicle. Unlike his, hers looked like a spider web, or a cracked windshield; every crack related to all the others. A solitary trauma that was woven together piece by piece, year by year, until it sprang from inside her.

After the wife shattered, the husband found her crying in the corner of the garage. She couldn’t find more KrazyGlue. Had he used it all?

After that, they sat together at the kitchen table every evening and smeared glue into each other’s crevices. They experimented with putty. Caulk. Tile grout. In a moment of desperation, the wife stapled the skin of her legs together. She used the stapler they kept in the husband’s home office, the one the color of a fire engine. Her blood was just as red.

While he slept, the wife listened to the husband crack, a high, whiny sound. She tried and failed to remember their life before. She couldn’t remember the first time he held her hand while he drove them to dinner in his rusting Cutlass, the one that bucked at every red light. And she couldn’t remember their house when they bought it, when it was empty of furniture. Some nights she wondered where her memories went. Were they lost in the cracks?

They kept their blinds drawn while they tried to fix each other, but nothing held them together. The wife tried needle and thread. Twine. She duct-taped her middle like a girdle.

The husband bought a nail gun. It was the first he owned. He kept it in its box in the garage where he told himself it was a last resort, but the wife found it one day. She laid a bath towel on the tile floor and set the nail gun next to it. She ran an extension cord from the outlet with the dim nightlight.

The husband thought of lazy Sundays. Of televised football and cold beer; the hum of the mower when he cut the grass, leaving a diagonal pattern. Those days were gone; replaced by ones filled with the constant binding and mending of bodies.

We shouldn’t— he told the wife when he saw the nail gun and the towel and her desperate face. But it will hold, she promised as she lay on the towel, her fingers linked over her belly. If we do it right, it will hold.

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Kristin Kozlowski lives and works in the Midwest US. Some of her work is available online at Longleaf Review, Pidgeonholes, Occulum, Flash Frontier, and others. She’s currently (and always) working on a novel. If you tweet: find her @kriskozlowski.

Because ghosts are dangerous things to keep inside my hollow stomach. To keep them from prodding around in there I drink fennel tea and refrain from cheese.

You are especially curious about my gallbladder. When I shift around, I feel you tossing from side to side. Talisman, basketball, that ball-in-a-maze puzzle I cannot solve.

You are all I eat in the morning because I’d rather not drink Ensure. And when I go to sleep, you and your friends rise up in my throat like bile. That’s a tease, you, that’s funny. Faking sourness to get what you want, which is to bother me.

When the water shut off in our apartment Monday, I waited for it to come back on. But I dreaded what it would look like because it is always so dirty when it returns.

Most new things are ugly. They need to be broken in. Most new things smell like rubber or chemical or plastic. You liked the smell of plastic because your father worked in a toothbrush factory. You liked plastic water bottles left out in the sun. Burnt CD cases I put too close to the fireplace. The handle of a microwaved takeout spoon. That is one of the oddest things you told me about yourself. One of the eccentricities that made you my favourite ghost. When I first met you, you smelled like bacon, which I do not eat.

I recoiled when you touched me.

Then you started to smell like fabric softener. Down at the laundromat, I stood by the machine and saw you swimming, fully clothed but shoeless. Dancing at home, rolled up in the carpet I clean once a month while thinking about it’s oldness. Sniffing up the carpet cleaner, my guilty pleasure, my eccentricity. My mother’s carpet, then my father’s carpet, then mine. Twenty years and it is ruined in three places and it smells numb. Numbness is that plastic emotion I feel when you enter my esophagus. I never told my mother I almost swallowed LEGO. I was not scared then or now. Even when your toes catch on entering my trachea, I don’t make a move.

Maybe you are not dead. Maybe you are just resting, like the pipes, lying dormant until I really call on you. On Tuesday the water returns, awakening slowly and breaking the newness in.

I will never recoil again.

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Hadiyyah Kuma is from Toronto, Ontario and no longer enjoys horror films. Her work has been featured in the Jellyfish Review, the Hart House Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, and Acta Victoriana. Find Hadiyyah on Instagram @hadiyyahaha, but please be aware that it is not as funny an account as it sounds.

At Gran’s, the vast luminous sky made me feel as if there was nowhere to hide because even if Gran or Mum couldn’t see me behind a rock – God could.

During the day I rambled around paddocks looking for creatures so I didn’t feel so alone. I pushed over rocks and skinks squirted off. I hunted cicadas whose whir mysteriously stopped when I drew near. Once, a rabbit dance-hopped on a pocket of grass until a falcon’s shadow slipped across the ground and it froze.

That rabbit stillness stole through me when Mum and Dad argued. My heart would be bursting, but I’d appear composed on yet another crazy-angry drive from town to Gran’s. I didn’t realise how young they’d been, high school kids when I came along, cornered by Gran to do the right thing. When they yelled at one another at her house, she’d peel potatoes for tea without skipping a beat. I’d peel at her side, grateful for a job. After tea she’d sit at her special seat at the kitchen table, facing the front steps. I sat next to her overlooking a straggly mānuka that had grown backwards, almost flattened by wind whooshing across the cleared land. Gran chain-smoked Cameo Mild’s and we spent the evenings playing rounds of Scrabble and cards in silence, bar the click of tiles or whisking of cards. I’d look out the window between turns. I could have been gazing out the porthole of the spaceship in Lost in Space. The Robinson family had been marooned on a similar blank landscape.

Bored, during one especially long visit, I’d tried peeling a Barbie from a lump of wood. She ended up with stump-arms, bean-bag-body, and knob-legs – just like the Robinson family’s robot. I slipped into the sour crawlspace under the front steps where the earth was cool and soft as fur. Dug a hidey-hole with a spoon and left her there.
It wasn’t until I returned from overseas for Gran’s funeral, years later, that Mum told me about the baby. “That’s why she insisted your Dad and I make a go of it,” Mum said. “When she got pregnant at 14, her father had whacked her so hard she fell down the front steps and lost it. Buried it right there, later, to spite him.”

I remember sitting with Gran in the kitchen. Bunny grass grew through the mānuka and the morning sun made a Milky Way of their trembling tips.

Mum and Dad were in an uproar in the back room. He slammed the door on his way out – for the last time, although we didn’t know that then. There was just me and Gran pretending we didn’t hear his car roar down the driveway spitting gravel.

I told Gran about the ugly Barbie in the ground. Gran froze, then half-smiled when I told her I felt less lonely knowing she was there.

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Leanne Radojkovich’s début short story collection First fox was published by The Emma Press in 2017. In 2018 she won the Graeme Lay Short Story Competition and was a finalist in the Anton Chekhov Prize for Very Short Fiction. Most recently her stories have appeared in Landfall, takahē, and Bonsai: Best small stories from Aotearoa New Zealand. She lives in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland, but her flash fiction street art has travelled the world. Find her online at leanneradojkovich.com.

Oskar and Cole were tweaking on meth when the shit went down. Oskar’s mom had organized a private search party, fully expecting we’d find them flanked by trouble. We hunted for the boys round-the-clock for two full days before giving up. Cole’s mom said, If they wanted to be found you’da found ‘em. We knew she didn’t give a damn but she had a point.

The boys emerged from the woods a day later, clear-eyed and hungry. When they were ready to talk they said the town was going to change, although they couldn’t say how. But they’d known it as soon as they reached the heart of the grove and spotted the amber fingers on the white birches lit up a cold neon green. Foxfire fungus, we said, full of ourselves.

We interviewed them separately and they both claimed that seconds after seeing the eerie glow a rust-colored light split the sky in two and it sucked them both in. They couldn’t say how they came back to us, only that the mushroom and green apple scented wind from the rotting birches foretold change.

We were skeptical; we knew those boys’ mischief. Cole’s mom clucked and said what
we’d all told ourselves, Those boys been doin’ too much crank.

We’d been asleep at the hour the boys swore the events had transpired. But we read that it hadn’t stormed that night. And the moonless sky had produced no heat lightning.

Now the town was on edge.

For weeks we watched both boys closely. We had to admit they seemed changed. The sores on their bodies cleared. They weren’t so pale. Their eyes weren’t moving a mile a minute. They smelled of fresh cut grass. Oskar’s mom cooked them schnitzel and sauerkraut and buttered noodles. They ate every morsel and asked for more.

Cole borrowed the community push mower and went door-to-door offering to trim our lawns for free. Oskar applied for a paper route and got the job. Every week around dawn we heard the thwack of the New Glarus Post Messenger Recorder hitting our front doors. Cole’s mom whispered, Wait a month or so, we’ll see.

We searched for signs the boys were taking drugs again but there were none. After six months they were still clean and hard-working. They weren’t doing meth or any drugs. But aside from their behavior, as far as we could tell, the town hadn’t changed.

A year after the boys emerged from the woods a gusty wind encircled the town, the air braided with the pungence of mushrooms and green apples. We followed its path and hiked ten miles northwest to Mount Hebron, where we stumbled upon an old water storage tank flipped on its side. A corroded section had crumpled and created an entrance. One at a time we climbed inside. We knew at once it was the boys’ refuge though to us it felt stifling.

Small plastic bags were strewn around the bottom. It stank of rust and sweet smoke. A
waterlogged H. P. Lovecraft poetry collection was open to the poem, “The Ancient Track.” Scrawled in permanent ink along one wall of the hideout were the words, Please make it stop.

We climbed from the tank without disturbing the contents. We didn’t know if the boys might return and we didn’t want them to learn we’d uncovered their lair; we wanted to protect them.

We followed the winged seeds of the rotting white birches as they were carried on the wind toward New Glarus. As we rested beneath the moonless sky we smelled the intensifying earthy, sweet air. And we’d wait, wondering what would happen to the boys when the town changed.

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Jan Elman Stout writes short stories and flash fiction. Her work has appeared in Literary Orphans, Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Jellyfish Review, Pithead Chapel, 100 Word Story, and elsewhere. Her flash has been nominated for the Best Small Fictions anthology in 2017, 2018 and 2019. Jan is Submissions Editor for SmokeLong Quarterly. She is currently working on a flash collection. Jan can be reached on Twitter at @janelmanstout.