Author: Chelsea

i.

They meet in the summer camp where they are told there’s still time to return to the path to righteousness again, the girl with the knitting needles and the farm girl with the green rain boots. They giggle and listen to each other instead of to the Bible verses about becoming good wives someday to faceless men neither of them want. The instructor tells the girls to be quiet. They ignore her—always a her—because they see the other girls just like them sent here as punishment, and they understand they are not alone. After prayers, the farm girl asks the girl who smuggled in red yarn and knitting needles whether she can make socks for her. Needle girl says she will make the finest socks and finds a tape measure. At her light touch, the farm girl forgets every verse.

ii.

The morning their parents return to drive them back on cornfield-lined roads to homes that are not their homes, the farm girl pulls her boots back on for the mud-slick gravel paths to the parking lot. Before her parents’ truck pulls in and they ask if she’s ready to be a good girl again, needle girl gives her a hat of red yarn, a perfect fit on her head and soft like her cheek against farm girl’s calluses. The two of them promise to stay in contact. But this is how it goes: one email a week becomes one email a month, then two months, then half a year. Needle girl’s family moves to somewhere called the mainland, a land where every word has one of four tones and good girls are called guai yet the word for the strange or the off-kilter is guai with a different tone. Needle girl promises she will return for college, a fancy school with ivy crawling up red bricks that is as far away for the farm girl as the moon.

iii.

Once a year, the woman who was once a girl from a farm flies. She packs a red hat in her fraying suitcase and flies to a town by the sea, Boeing 737 soaring like a metal albatross. Always on July 7th, because she only has enough paid time off to extend her July 4 holiday each year and still have enough days left to visit her parents over the holidays. Every year is the same: farm girl hopes and hopes—they talk and talk over coffee and dinner, shoulders close enough to brush—then needle girl never makes a move. This year needle girl vents about a breakup, a failed relationship with a woman farm girl knows only as a pretty face in the magazines. Needle girl is a somebody, someone who clothes the powerful. Farm girl is a nobody, a nameless paralegal in a nameless law firm in a nameless small town surrounded by cornfields who sends most of her paycheck to keep her parents’ farm afloat amidst crashing crop prices and drought.

Farm girl promises herself this will be the last time. Yet she cannot bring herself to say so, and after needle girl kisses her goodbye and the scent of fake roses lingers on her cheek, she clutches the red hat to her chest at the airport gate, calculating how much to budget for next year’s trip.

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Tina S. Zhu is a Chinese American writer who lives in California. When she’s not writing prose, she sometimes also writes code. Her words have appeared in Pidgeonholes, X-R-A-Y, and Tor.com, among others. Find her on Twitter @tinaszhu or at tinaszhu.com.

The car crash happened in a nano second, in a stab of light. For years the boy would describe what had happened as a near-death experience to strangers in run-down piano bars, but the boy knew words wouldn’t do it justice; how they were empty vessels compared to what had happened on that frenzied Philadelphia thoroughfare.

It wasn’t just that the crash had felled acres of neuron-branches across the forest of the boy’s brain, having rattled his skull with vertiginous migraines and permanent memory loss. It wasn’t the uncontrollable rage the boy couldn’t keep a lid on in every serious relationship thereafter. The two divorces, the revolving door of therapists, the weight gain by virtue of his primordial hankering for chocolate milkshakes.

It wasn’t the fact that Ruthie Halpern, the boy’s best friend’s mother and semi-famous jazz pianist, who’d graciously agreed to schlep the boy to his travel soccer practice that morning while his own parents were off hiking Machu Picchu, had momentarily taken her eyes off the road, suffering fractured ribs and broken fingers, thereby shattering Halpern’s career and forcing her to hang up the ivory keys for good.

It wasn’t the fact that the clichéd expression life will flash before your eyes suddenly earned a fresh pelt of meaning as they tooled toward collision, each small triumph and remorse populating out of thin air like a kind of pretzeled mobius strip.

This story really starts now, a generation after the crash. After preschool teacher Madison Dust drummed at her wheel with restless glee, zig zagging lanes to catch her impending flight to Portland. The pregnant daughter in Portland whose water had just burst, and who’d be in labor bearing Madison Dust’s first grandchild. The baby girl who’d soon become her grandmother’s namesake. And later, decades later, the beloved girl who’d grow up wondering about her provenance, snooping through old boxes in the basement to discover the newspaper article with a browning photo of her late grandmother’s fatal crash.

The plume of smoke mushrooming over her grandmother’s totaled carmine-red Toyota Avalon; her flaccid body being lifted onto a stretcher by three first responders; an unidentified boy squeezing her swollen hands, a willowy boy whose mouth was ajar, as though adrenaline had flung him into an exclamation point, as though he’d tried his best to tell the soon-to-be grandmother both hello and goodbye.

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Ezra is a poet and journalist who writes in Philadelphia. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, his work has appeared in Philadelphia Stories, Identity Theory, and Bending Genres, among others. You can follow his writings on Twitter @SolwayEzra

for Sister and 2020

You’ve been making this trip more than 25 years. Christmas before last, though, it wasn’t like always. You drove out alone despite protests from your kids. Had to reduce risk for aging parents. You didn’t pack a suitcase.

You slowed down at Broadway so you can make the turn onto Easy Street. It’s a gravel road not a real street. The post at the corner says, “not as easy as it used to be.” Now you know this to be true.

As you slowed, the mules trotted over to the fence and stretched their necks to check if you belong. When someone didn’t, the peacocks screeched like a child being tortured with bedtime or bath.

You drove slower. Didn’t wanna dust-out Neighbor’s trailer. He kept the windows open for fresh air even on cold winter nights and sometimes pesticide fumes wafted over on a hot desert breeze, mixed with his breakfast, choked his breath.

After the heavy rains, you knew not to park in the empty lot because the mud would suck the tires off your little city car. You got in trouble when that one boyfriend drove his four-wheel-drive truck across the muddy lot. He left deep tracks and when the sun dried the earth, Daddy had to borrow Mr. Brown’s laser machine to level out that mess. He’d cussed and hollered and that boy wasn’t welcome on Easy Street anymore.

So you parked inside the gate. When strangers did, Freckles would growl a soft warning, her blue-black hackles on end, before she leaped into the air and tried to chew their faces off. She only allowed family and kids with sticky hands. Since she died, Mamá had to lock the doors whenever they went out of town.

You couldn’t stay long. Just a quick gift exchange on the front porch. A bag for Daddy, a box for Mamá, and your handmade ornaments to put on their tree. You saw it through the living room window as you cruised down the road. Framed by poinsettia curtains Mamá had made that matched the ones she’d sent you last year. All the twinkly lights on in the middle of the day. Knew Daddy did that just for you.

No sleeping in the sewing room, giant television watching you, reflecting your tosses and turns. No squishing on the bottom bunk with your husband and youngest who is too tall now. No hip bone wedged in the crack between mattress and wall, face smashed into the wood paneling. No bougainvillea vines scratching the window in a haphazard rhythm. No rooster crowing as you’re about to doze off—it doesn’t know how to tell time. No heavy metal lyrics blasting when Neighbor’s son cruised home after the Horny Toad had kicked him out.

You couldn’t be on Easy Street when the sun came up Christmas Day 2020. Couldn’t turn the couch around to face the tree, open one gift at a time and pose for pictures. Instead, you blew Daddy and Mamá goodbye kisses through your mask and took the kids’ empty Christmas stockings home to fill yourself for the first time ever. You wanted to stay on Easy Street, but you had to go back to your kids and your job, back to undusty roads and different night sounds.

---

Chicana Feminist and former Rodeo Queen, Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera (she/her) writes so the desert landscape of her childhood can be heard as loudly as the urban chaos of her adulthood. She is obsessed with food. A former high school teacher, she earned an MFA at Antioch University Los Angeles and is a PhD candidate at the University of Southern California. Her play Blind Thrust Fault was featured in Center Theater Group Writers’ Workshop Festival. Her flash fiction has been included in Best Small Fictions 2022. Her debut young adult novel, Breaking Pattern, is forthcoming with Inlandia Books. She is a Macondista and works for literary equity through Women Who Submit. You can read her other stories and essays at http://tishareichle.com/

(Photo credit: Rachael Warecki @camerarawphotography)

I started a list of things I would like to discuss with you if we ever speak again.

1. The Dark Web. This is a thing? A place for people to demand illegal, terrible things that don’t belong to them like someone else’s kidneys and child pornography? Why hasn’t somebody – the government, vigilante hackers – stepped in to shut it down? And how does it work? Is it a structured hierarchy with an org chart and gatekeepers, or a free-wheeling Craig’s List market, rife with randomly capitalized letters and terrible grammar? More importantly, can I find you in it? And if I do, can it translate the words I said to the meaning I intended?
2.  Infinite monkey theorem: if you have an infinite number of monkeys typing randomized sequences of letters, they would eventually create the text of Hamlet in its entirety. The proofs tell us we would need a ridiculous number of universes and an unfathomable amount of time (three hundred and sixty thousand plus orders of magnitude from the Big Bang to the end of the universe) to achieve a shot at Hamlet. This seems like a stupid thing to quantify. In this theoretical exercise, you have an infinite amount of time, infinite supply of typing monkeys. Isn’t that the whole point of infinity? The absence of limits?
3. My mother was born in the Year of the Monkey. According to every guide, description, and magazine column I have read on this, Monkeys and Tigers do not get along. This could be a coincidence or it could explain a lot about my relationship with her. Yet my mother loved you, a Tiger not of her own blood, biologically alien to her. We have been told two Tigers cannot coexist without fighting. For a long time I thought our friendship debunked this. We rode the bus to high school together, Febrezed the cigarette stench from our clothes, went to prom ironically and slow-danced the final song without making eye contact, co-created an epic playlist to  help you assimilate in the midwest, e-mailed through two years of graduate school—you from your tundra in Wisconsin, me tucked in an overheated fifth-floor Upper West Side walk-up. We were close enough to draw blood from each other on a daily basis, but we didn’t. Our friendship lived in defiance of zodiac predestination for a decade and now, now we cannot be in the same room. I would rip you to shreds and you know it.
4. In middle school, my best friend taught me about the pink elephant theory by tricking me into thinking about a pink elephant. It’s an annoying way of saying that among the many things you cannot control are your own thoughts. When high school started, my best friend’s family moved, forever swallowed by the suburban beast that is Long Island. Before cell phones tethered us together and force fed us information like a relentless placenta, this kind of distance was the kiss of death for friendships. I think you should know that when we met, I was still tender from my first significant loss—friendship death by geography. It was a slow, trickling death, like bleeding out internally from an ulcer. Back then, I didn’t know that people generally don’t die of ulcers.

Perhaps we will speak about this one day.

If we don’t, then do me one favor. I hope you invent a method for selective auto mind-control. An invention that allows us to choose which of our memories to frame and hang in the hallways of our minds, and which ones to drop in the trash icon, say “yes” to deleting forever. How difficult can it be? We do it all the time, often by accident. After everything, it’s the least you could do, to help me find a way to unclench my jaw, to pry my teeth from your flesh.

---

Lu Han is a Chinese-American writer based in New York, NY. Lu highlights the undervoiced and displaced through fiction and nonfiction. Her work is published or forthcoming in The Margins, The Jarnal, Overachiever Magazine, Inheritance Magazine, and elsewhere. Find more at www.helloluhan.com

We are at a funeral, because her grandfather died last month. We find her mother in a pew, looking like all sorts of a mess, and her father is on the other side of the room, mumbling to her uncle about football in a way that was meant to not look obvious. Her mother greets me, distant and cool. I am the girlfriend, and she is the daughter, and there is her mother, and we are three women together in a room full of grief.

At the gathering after the service, at her childhood home that her parents still live in, we sit in a corner of the study while people mill about with glasses of wine and tumblers of whiskey. Her father’s desk is neat and organized, and the leather chairs have a deep wooden cigar smell that makes me want to hide my face in them. We are joined by her cousin, ten years older than us, who also lives his life on the outside of acceptance. He is restless in the way that former druggies are, his knee bouncing, jangling the keys in his pocket. His face is worn and tired, and he looks older than he is.

It’s a shame, he says, but I guess that’s life. We live the best we can, and then they put us in a box. He pauses and sips his soda water, the glass sweating underneath his large fingers. I’ll tell you though. I’ve been in that box too many damn times already, and I got lucky enough to climb out of it before I was dropped into the ground.

She looks at her cousin, her face smooth and expressionless. She watches his nose as it twitches in thought. I know she is thinking about the repeated cliches of addicts, and the perpetual cycle of debasement and self critique and upward motivation that stimulates the economy of recovery because we have had those conversations about her cousin before. But she doesn’t say anything to him, only pats his hand, looks back out across the room.

People shove plates of food at her that she piles up on the end table. No one seems to notice the small servings of stuffed mushrooms, shrimp, cheese and olives that she has made a mountain of. I nudge her to eat. She ignores me. Her family ignores me, except for her cousin, and his family ignores him.

She takes leave of me and begins her dance around the rooms of the house, giving polite greetings to ancient family members and long forgotten neighbors. I watch her body move underneath the black dress she is wearing, and wonder when the last time was that I saw her naked. Not naked in mere circumstance, like getting changed or jumping into the shower, but naked with intention, with desire. She has been oscillating between chaste clinginess and repulsion of my touch for weeks. She is a dazzling actress. I even see a few tears when her prim aunt cups her face in a long fingered hand.

She hated her grandfather, but he hated her first. When he died she didn’t cry, but she was angry.
He never got to meet you, she fumed. He would have fucking hated you.

Well, I’m sure you disappointed him enough for one lifetime, I assured her. Being a dyke and all.

We leave before the gathering becomes too sparse, in order to hide our sudden disappearance. She pulls the velvet headband through her hair and throws it on the passenger floor of my car, slams the door after she climbs in. Her body is turned away from me, head against the cool window. I try to hold her hand but it goes limp at my touch.

She gets out at the supermarket to run in and grab cat food. I pick up her phone to change the music, and I see a text from someone: i miss you so much, please come over and… When I open it, there is a picture attached of a woman with breasts that are small enough to hold in one hand but full enough to still enjoy. Her body is all angles and steep slopes, dainty but forceful. It is not the only photo, but it is the first sent today. The text thread goes back six months.

I look up and see her crossing the parking lot. I toss the phone back down. She opens the car door and gets back in, and as she sets the bag of cat food in the backseat, I wonder if it is time for me to finally get out of the box.

---

Belle Gearhart is an emerging writer with forthcoming work in Bullshit Lit, Flash Frog Lit, and the Longleaf Review. A displaced New Yorker, she lives in Southern California with her partner, child, and many, many cats.

You won’t answer your phone the first time it rings, but you’ll know it’s me. I’m still in your contact list. You’ll tell me so on the fifth call, the one you finally answer. “Entropy,” you’ll say. “Laziness. Don’t read anything into it.”

I’ll let you have this one.

I’ll get to the point: in two days, a total solar eclipse will darken our hometown. I’ll remind you of a sixteen-year-old promise to watch it together. “When did we say that?” you’ll ask, and my words will conjure the living room of your college apartment: me on the couch in a pair of your boxers, astronomy textbook in my lap, you naked in the armchair smashing the Xbox controller, half-listening as I explain Gamma and Umbra and the Diamond Ring Effect. I find a page listing dates of eclipses for the next century and where best to view them. I see, printed there, the name of a place we avoid saying aloud, like the name of a demon or a ghost. “We could go back for that,” I say. “Only for that,” you say.

On your end of the line, a baby will cry. You’ll keep your word. I won’t ask what compels you.

We’ll meet at the motel and fuck before we even say hello. The sounds you make will sound like curses in a foreign language, harsh and a little silly, but your body will feel familiar. Sometimes I search out new photos of you just to look at your hands, to keep their shape committed to memory, to ensure that whatever else time alters your hands remain the hands I knew before. “The very same,” I’ll say aloud when I kiss your left palm, and you’ll be too far gone to ask what the hell I’m talking about.

We won’t linger. We’ll get in my car and drive around town. We’ll pretend our memories are fuzzier than they are – “Isn’t that where?” “Didn’t we there?” – like we don’t travel these roads every night in our minds to lull ourselves to sleep.

I won’t need GPS to find the barn where we used to get high and fool around. There are dozens like it scattered across the South, the words SEE RUBY FALLS emblazoned on the side facing the highway. This town sits three hundred miles from Ruby Falls. I’ve never been there, don’t even know what I’d find if I went, though as we make the old climb up to the roof of the barn, I’ll remind you of something I told you long ago: when I was a kid, I imagined Ruby Falls as a hail of gemstones tumbling over a glittering rock wall. I’ll recount how you rolled your eyes and said it was the goofiest thing you’d ever heard and how after, we split a forty and made out until the streetlights flickered on.

You’ll lay your head against my chest and call me your time capsule. I won’t explain how I hold onto these things hoping one day you’ll come to claim them.

The sky will dim. The air will cool. I’ll produce the special glasses I bought to protect our eyes, knowing you won’t have thought to bring your own, and we’ll laugh about how silly we look in them. Soon after, a car will pull onto the shoulder of the road. Its passengers will disembark – a mother, two boys. They won’t notice us at all. The mother will tell her sons how you don’t get many opportunities like this, not in one brief little lifetime.

Soon the moon will come, crescenting the sun. I’ll swear I feel the moment hum through me, through us both, through every atom on the planet, a buzzing promise. Cows in a nearby field will low in chorus. Coyotes will bark in the woods back towards town. The crescent will stretch into a corona then – “The Diamond Ring,” I’ll say, finger pointing heavenward. “Not diamond,” you’ll answer, and when I look again, I’ll see what you mean.

Light will pulse behind the moon, shifting first to orange then deepest red before it melts around the shadow, drips down from the sky.

Red rain will fall around us.

Not rain, hail.

Not hail, rubies.

Shrieking, hand in hand, we’ll leap from the roof and race away, past the mother and sons catching gems in their open shirts, marveling at the unexpected bounty. We’ll slide into the backseat of my car, reach again for one another as the rubies dent the hood and crack the windshield. A red rivulet will trickle from your head where a stone struck you, and when I kiss the wound, my lips will come away bloodied. “I told you so,” I’ll say, and you’ll holler, “You were right! Goddammit, you were right!” You’ll kiss me hard, and with your own bloodstained mouth you’ll proclaim the miracle, and I’ll believe at last we’re getting somewhere.

---

Sutton Strother is a writer and instructor living in New York. Their work has been featured in several publications including, most recently, Uncharted, Janus Literary, and HAD. You can find them tweeting @suttonstrother and read more of their work at suttonstrother.wordpress.com.

Fun fact: Black women are ranked the least desirable demographic in online dating. It’s amazing what you overlook when you want someone to find you attractive. In a world where Black isn’t always beautiful you do what you must to work through the feeling of being unlovable.

I open the door to a thin weasel-like man who resembles a side-character from Seinfeld. Standing on tippy toes, he reaches up to hug me, “You look like your photos.” He smells of day-old Axe body spray and coconut oil. His receding hairline is accentuated by long flowing and curly hair. Skeletal fingers jab the sides of my rib cage, “Coochie coochie coo.”

Is he tickling me? I giggle as if the act is funny. This isn’t about love. This is about getting over. This is about me. I gesture towards the couch. “Would you like to watch a movie?” Michael nods and jumps hard on the sofa. He grabs the TV remote and turns on Netflix.

“Let’s watch my favorite show,” he says, landing on Dark Tourist. I sit beside him and open up my robe.

“So…are you from this city?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Born and raised. You?”

“No. My mom is though. How about a job. What do you do for work?”

“I’m a mortician’s assistant.”

“Oh. That’s cool. So you’re in mortuary school?”

“No. I just love being around dead bodies.”

The TV host is touring Fukushima, the core site of a nuclear reaction. People on the bus take selfies. “Didn’t a lot of people die here?” I ask, trying to make sense of what I’m watching.“Yeah. They even go to Chernobyl in this one. Sick right?”

Sick. The red flags on this guy continue to accumulate. Mortician. Necrophilia. Dark tourism. I remind myself again. This is about me. I want to have sex. I want a win. Maybe there is a way to redeem this. Maybe he’ll have a big dick. I remove my robe, letting it hang around my shoulders.

He leans in to kiss me. His thin dry, chapped lips, slice against mine. His hands make their way towards the sides of my waist. He whispers in my ear, “Coochie coochie coo.” I push his hands towards my breast to grope me. He flicks the tip of my nipple. Grinning, he echoes, “coochie coochie coo.”

I try to direct his hands in the ways I want to be touched. He grabs mine and locks them behind my head. He looks into my eyes as if he wants to devour my face. “I want to tie you up. If you wait here I have five pairs of handcuffs in my car.”

Five? What is the fifth pair for? Now, I’m uncomfortable. Something about his insistence, his gaze is unsettling. I want to be desired, not consumed.

“Um…” I pull my hand from his grasp. “Maybe next time? I figured we could just have some traditional fun. Get to know each other before we do anything experimental.”

His face sobers. “Oh, ok.” He pulled my underwear aside and tried again, scratching the sides of my labia. “Coochie, coochie, coo.” This isn’t about him, this is about me. I want to be wanted. I want to be in control. I lean up staring at Michael between my legs.

“That isn’t turning me on. Can we switch it up?”

He sighs and leans back, “Yeah, I guess. Women usually love that move.”

Perhaps he had found the magical oasis of females who desired to have their vaginas tickled. I gesture to the bedroom. “Maybe we just need more space.” This isn’t about him. This is about me. This is my chance to reclaim my body. I grab his hand and lead him to the bed. This is a chance to declare if not to others but myself that I am sexy. I am someone to be desired. I climb on top of him and lean in to kiss him. This isn’t about him. I close my eyes. I feel two hard fists slam into my thighs.

Blow by blow he pounds my flesh into tenderized dark meat. The look in his eye returns. Spit foams at the side of his lips.

“Tell me you’re a filthy slut.”

“No.”

He banged his fist into my thigh.

“You want this cock,” he whined. “Don’t you?” He grabs my hand and shoves it down his pants. “You like that don’t you, you naughty bitch.”

“No.”

“No?”

“No.” My thighs and back ache. His penis, his small limp penis, is the final straw. This man is useless. I pull away. “I think you should leave.”

“But, I’m not finished.”

“And neither did I.”

He lunges towards me. I back away and he falls onto the floor, his legs still tangled by the pants hanging around his ankles. I grab his shoes and throw them at him. “Leave. Now. Or we’re going to have problems.” He shuffles his pants back up around his waist. He slides each shoe over his foot in silence. He leaves, I lock the door, and cry.

On Instagram I come across a story of a Black woman who went missing after going on a first date with a white man. They find her corpse days later on the riverbank. It had been months since I thought about that night with Michael. If I had let that man stay would I be here to tell the story?

Everyone has an online dating horror story. We laugh at their outrageousness. When I tell the story to others, the story’s frame becomes a funny anecdote, a quirky mishap over superficial banter and beers. Nothing about that narrative is scary. Nothing about that story is dangerous. My foremothers taught me that if you don’t name those shortcomings as trauma, then they never happened. Not really. It’s easier for me to call what happened a dating bumble. It’s easier to deny my survivor’s guilt.

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Caitlyn Hunter was the inaugural Emerging Black Artist in Residence at Chatham University (2021-2022). She is a doctoral candidate at Duquesne University where she researches African American literature and Black Food studies. Her debut book, Power in the Tongue was published in 2022 through Tolsun Books. She currently teaches and resides in Southern Maryland.

The panda was in the dairy aisle again, fur damp from the milk bottle condensation. Every Friday night since I’ve worked the late shift, I’ve watched this familiar stranger circle the store to the Best of the 80s soundtrack that plays on loop. I’ve witnessed him linger in the cereal section, weighing up the advantages of Coco-Pops vs Sugar Puffs. Occasionally a paw hesitates over muesli before swaying back to the comfort of sugar. Sometimes I consider looking him up online, discovering which team he mascots for. Which sport, even. I imagine scrolling through a squad’s headshots like Who’s Who, before finally my finger hovers over him, the face beneath the costume. But I don’t. Partly, for the same reason I didn’t ask questions of the woman who lives upstairs. When she appeared last weekend in her dressing gown, placing a tub of Ben and Jerry’s and a pregnancy test on the counter between us. They’re only passing through and some things are best left unknown.

When I was nine there was a lion outside the ice cream parlour in town, giving away balloons. Mum would take me there most Saturdays after Dad left, hoping to heal a child’s grief with bubblegum ice cream and sprinkles. I only wanted to see the lion. He smelt of Dad, the same concoction of cigarette smoke, Old Spice and mint shampoo. I believed it was him underneath the mane and plastic toothed grin, with pure childhood indifference as to why he would choose this disguise. It was his arms that hugged me and his felt paw that pushed a balloon ribbon into my hand. I kept every one he gave me, even when they shrunk and withered like old grapes. I stored each wrinkled carcass in a shoebox under my bed. Then one day we drove past the parlour when the lion was on his break. I saw him by the bins, decapitated, holding the maned head under one arm as he rolled a cigarette. He was a pale teenager with a face rouged in acne. For once, I didn’t beg Mum to stop.

The panda brings his purchases to my counter. I wonder sometimes if the panda has someone at home who takes off his head, kisses him and asks about his day. Or if he’s single, roaming bars and apps for connections. I wonder if the women he meets ask him to stay in costume, revealing late-night fetishes for a man in a mask and polyester fur. That, like me, they prefer an illusion. I scan his discounted steak pie and a four-pack of lager. As I pass him the receipt, his fur briefly grazes my palm and I envision another night, when I’ll put my arms around him, my name badge pressed into his chest, when I’ll stare into his glass eyes and hear him say,
“I promise I will never leave.”

---

 

Iona Rule has always had a fear of people in mascot costumes. She recently came second in the Bath Flash Fiction competition and has been shortlisted in Retreat West, Fractured Lit, and TSS Publishing. Her work can be found in a few places including The Phare, Epoch Press, and Sans Press.