Author: Chelsea

Blood stains come out easily, but the water must be icy. Too warm, and the blood bonds with the fabric, never leaving, like a terminal stage of cancer, each cell contaminated. Wring the garment. If the stream still runs pink, red, or brown, squeeze lemon juice on the stain, how you would lighten your hair. Sprinkle a teaspoon of baking soda. Or substitute with salt, crushed aspirin. Combine water with meat tenderizer, and apply the slurry.

My daughter crouches on top of the toilet, her knees encasing her head. Her thin pajamas reveal the bumps of her spine, like door knobs. I imagine rotating one, opening my daughter, peering inside. Learning why her body has only just begun to shed, at sixteen years old. I tell myself not to worry, it has started now, a good sign. She looks away from the sink, the streaky water swirling around islands of dried toothpaste. I want to do everything for her.

Whenever we cross the street, I grab her wrist, testing how easily my thumb and index finger connect. “Mom,” she says, breaking free. It is unclear which worry of mine she is rebuking.

I pick small, burgundy particles from her underwear. The openings for her legs are so small. I turn around, and my husband is in the doorway, watching me. His rectangular shape, and flat, stony face, like a bas-relief. I scrub harder, my hands tingling from the repeated motion.

That night, he chastises me for still doing her laundry. His bright teeth float in the dark, everything else invisible, like the Cheshire Cat’s smile. “She is too old to be this dependent,” he says. He expects me to break the news. I am often the osmotic membrane between my husband and my daughter, allowing them to communicate without speaking. Showing him a photo where she is scary-thin. Reminding her that he is working the night shift. My watery body, and their hard, linear ones.

I balance the laundry basket at my hip, full of snowy whites. My daughter is organizing a pile of Penguin Classics with acid orange lettering. Only my side profile is visible to my husband, watching from our bedroom. “When you were younger,” I say. “We pressed our noses to the washing machine. We wanted to shrink, so we could fly around the drum, tumble with the clothes. Do you remember?” `

“No,” she says.

“Well, it’s your turn now.” I place the basket next to her bookshelf, her lacy A-cup bra folded on top. Then I wink at her, using the eye that my husband can’t see. She nods slowly.

She washes her own clothes now, with the exception of anything blood-stained. These, she leaves outside my door. They remind me of the pools of fabric abandoned after transformations, when a movie character becomes a rodent, or suddenly tiny, no longer fitting into their clothes.

When I watch her loads thump against the machine, it feels like I have water in my ears. My husband says something to me that I can’t make out, but think is gracious. “It looks violent, right? The clothes chasing each other?” I say. He responds with nothing. Or I miss it. My back is to him, so I can’t tell.

Nora Esme Wagner is a rising sophomore at Wellesley College. She lives in San Francisco, California. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in JMWW, Litbreak Magazine, Milk Candy Review, Flash Boulevard, Eunoia Review, and elsewhere. She is an assistant fiction editor at Pithead Chapel.

Devon Mahew knew how to get girls off. Nobody in their small town of Bradford had
fingered as many girls to orgasm as he had—feeding the pony, he called it. It was the
only thing he enjoyed more than minor vandalism and whippets. He liked pranks too.
One time, he emptied a whole thing of Dawn dish soap into the fountain on Main,
creating tidal clouds of suds that stopped traffic—that was back when Bradford still had
traffic, before they built the highway. He was known locally as the black sheep, a bad
seed, trouble, at least until the night he wrapped his truck around a telephone pole and
died. Nobody said a bad word about him again after that. Suddenly, by all accounts,
Devon had been a bright and promising young man and not just a horny miscreant who
could hotwire old cars.

“What a shame,” Jenna’s mother said over breakfast the morning the news broke. “That
poor family. I can’t even imagine. You didn’t know him well?”

“No, not really.” Jenna stared into her Cheerios, and thought back to the one night in
May, behind the baseball diamond when Devon had slid his hand down her jeans and
brought her to a trembling mess.

The accident was big news for a small town and yet people didn’t talk about what
actually happened. Nobody mentioned the speed he’d been driving or how many empty
Fireball bottles were found in the wreck. No one seemed to remember the boy with the
devilish grin who’d do anything for a rush or a reaction. Instead, people said things like
he really had so much potential and he had a real shot at making state next year and it
could have just been a popped tire, the asphalt out that way is rough. Jenna was
grossed out by it, the way it felt folks were wiping the whole thing down with Clorox. It
was like nobody really knew him, or nobody would admit to really knowing him, and she
wasn’t sure which was worse.

She and Hailey sat cross-legged on the large ice box outside Joe’s Garage & Gas eating
Otter Pops, which was how they spent most of their summers. Lucas who worked behind
the counter would knock on the glass behind them and point to the No Loitering sign,
and the girls would roll their eyes or stick out their tongues, all red and blue. Back when
the busses passed through, they used to come here to watch folks pile out for pee breaks,
the tourists, they called them, not that Bradford was ever the final destination. Who’d
want to end up here? The highway was the end of all that, but the girls still hung out and
annoyed Lucas and occasionally convinced him to sell them a scratcher. There wasn’t
much else to do.

Hailey had brought the death notice with her today, torn from a local paper.
In memory of Devon Mahew.

It was jarring to see it in print. He finally had a permanent record.

The girls recognized the accompanying picture as a crop from his prom photo. That was
the night he’d brought Megan Archer as his date, and she later found him out back with
his hand up Megan Miller’s dress.

The notice read generic. It could have been about anyone, anywhere.
A shining star, taken from us too soon… Beloved son, brother, and classmate…
Eternally missed… Now reunited with his heavenly father.

It struck Jenna as bleak, how you could seemingly bury an entire life in under a hundred
words, and that would go down in history, how something so far removed from a real
person could persist over time.Hailey shrugged. “What do you expect them to say, Jenna? In memory of our dear Devon. He loved petty crime and heavy petting. He once ate a banana, skin-and-all,
for a five-buck bet. May he rest in peace. I mean, come on.”

Jenna chewed on the freeze pop’s plastic and said nothing. She wondered what
revisionist drivel they’d write about her.

When summer break was over, Principal Heller held a school assembly. He said nice,
bland things about Devon that weren’t true. Then Coach Filmore got up and did the
same. They both insisted he’d had a bright future ahead of him. There was a minute’s
silence. Boys who Devon had raced dirt bikes and tagged buildings with stood squarely,
hands in pockets. Girls who’d had the pleasure of his acquaintance dabbed at their eyes
with Kleenex. Megan and Megan exchanged somber nods.

She woke at five thirty am, dressed quietly and made her way down to Main while the
streets were still dark and nobody was around. Just before sunrise, she pulled a half-full
bottle of Dawn from her backpack and emptied it into the fountain, then stood back, out
of view for a bit and watched the bubbles start to form, and froth up and overflow and
billow down the empty streets of a town that was slowly fading from the map.

Amanda King lives and writes in Berlin. Her work has appeared locally in Berlin Flash Fiction.

Teri gave Amy the worst advice.
If you want Joel to notice you, crash your car in front of his house.
Now, a Dodge cruises slowly down St. Ann’s Avenue.

***

I take a black car uptown. I sit on an examination table and listen to the best fertility doctor in Manhattan say crazy things like the tests are normal and you should be able to get pregnant.

***

1988 just looks like bad luck. Double eights, twin infinities standing back to back like fat little snowmen. 1988 is also when we got into the dark arts, ordering supplies from the back pages of comic books, next to ads for x-ray glasses and black soap, where the print is small and smudged, stuff like horoscope scrolls and love wheels, fortune dice and curse books. We stuff Snoopy envelopes with babysitting money, sending it off to small town PO boxes, waiting 6 to 8 weeks for a response. I whisper these addresses out loud, at night, in the dark, before I fall asleep. Pueblo, Colorado is my favorite incantation. It feels like a smooth grey stone on my tongue. I am 17 years old and I have never left Bloomington. While we wait, here is what we do: visit graveyards. Pour salt circles. Fall asleep with our radios on, tuned to ghost stations.

***

One test involves injecting my stomach with dye and crawling into a machine that looks like a convection oven. This experience had been described by someone in my online support group as “a pain worse than childbirth.” I replied this was a cruel analogy to use with a group of infertile women who had no idea what childbirth felt like and would’ve given anything to experience it. I received 275 likes and a gold coin.

***

Amy circles the block in her dad’s car, a green Dodge sedan that seats 9. I can’t do this, she says, panicking. Winners make bold moves, Teri says. Goddamn Teri! When Amy hits that pole, the windows and mirrors shatter, spraying the sidewalk in front of Joel’s house with tiny blades and suddenly he emerges into the fog wearing a slouchy trenchcoat. His hair is spiked. The rain mists his face like a special effect. He lives inside a music video and we wilt in his presence. Teri jumps out of the car and lies on top of the broken glass on the sidewalk and asks Joel to take pictures with her new Canon. He does. Then he starts messing with her hair and arranging the glass shards around her face and Amy gets out and leans against her car and just stares at them. After a while we all leave, except for Teri who stays with Joel. Amy drives to this empty lot behind the school and we sit in the backseat with the doors open eating Little Debbies because they’re 99 cents a box and Amy’s crying saying her dad’s going to kill her and she destroyed his car for nothing and she’s going to curse Teri tonight at midnight. What kinda curse, I ask. Acne, she says, pulling out her little spiral curse book, the new expanded edition with the baby blue cover. I have the pink one, it’s older. She goes to the index and runs her finger down the list. Acne. Agitation. Barren. Boils. Cancer. Colitis. Death. Gas. Hirsute. Hives. We all agree that Acne sounds perfect. Then we do some fortunes.

 ***

I go to another specialist, Dr. Faron. I like her right away. She has blue glasses and a bunch of tattoos under her lab coat. When she holds my hand and says we’re going to sort this whole thing out I actually start crying, which I’ve never done in a doctor’s office, not once during all these years. I cry for a long time. She brings me Kleenex and water. Then she asks me the strangest question. Did you, or anyone you know, purchase a “curse book” from the back of Archie’s Pals ’N’ Gals in 1988? When I say yes, she nods and writes me a prescription. Eight pills, twice daily, for two weeks.

***

Brushing glass off the dash, Amy throws her fortune-telling dice and gets world travel. Tracey gets rich. Didi gets famous. I get…many children. This fortune is a horrible trick and Amy knows it. She knows I would die before ending up like my mother. She knows I’m leaving the day after graduation. And she sure as hell knows I’m never having kids because I’ve only said it about ten million times. I try to explain all of this but everyone’s laughing and finally I get out of the car and walk home in the rain. Amy yells you know those fortunes are bullshit but I just keep walking, singing a song that goes fuck you Amy fuck you.

***

Almost midnight and the kitchen phone rings. It’s Amy, apologizing and offering to do a special curse, just for me. The one that makes it so you never have kids, she says. I say sure, why not, and then she throws in a second one. “A bonus,” she calls it. A curse so I never forget her. This makes me laugh. I wasn’t going to forget her, even if I wanted to.

 ***

The day after graduation, I leave, just like I said I would. I travel the world. Barcelona, Mexico City, London, Paris. I adopt a new name. I cut off all my hair. I even lose my Midwestern accent. But pregnancy’s a funny thing. The dreams are so real, and they’re always the same: I’m back in Bloomington, riding in Amy’s green Dodge. We’re usually having what feels like an important conversation, too, one of those long, intense sessions that seems like it holds the key to life or the secret of the universe or something. When I wake up, I can’t remember a single word.

DJ Wolfinsohn’s first published work was a riot grrrl ‘zine. Her fiction and poetry can be found in Gone Lawn, HAD, Variant Lit, Hog River Press, Vestal Review, and on her website, debbywolfinsohn.com. Her ‘zine can be found in the rock ‘n roll hall of fame in Cleveland, where it is part of the permanent collection. She lives in Austin, Texas, with her family.

It’s her job to keep vigil of the small pad of paper next to the overpriced pens, to make sure there is enough space for doodling, signatures, and the occasional confession. Her job until she finds a better job, a real job, but she’s been out of work for too long, and now marketing copy is written by robots and she has never been strong at bookkeeping, even her own.

Some customers draw squiggles or three-dimensional boxes. She finds spirals and infinity signs. An elderly man boasts that he can draw a perfectly straight arrow. Occasionally a profanity.

Eat me. Bite me, written with a garden party gel pen.

Three weeks before her husband killed himself, a stranger at the grocery store told her that she was blessed. Her toddler sat in the shopping cart with a smile and a wave for everyone. Her baby slept against her chest in the carrier—his soft cheek glued to her skin with his drool. After the meals and groceries stopped crowding her front steps and freezer, she was responsible for feeding her children again. They never cared for the lasagna or Shepard’s pie—meals convenient for freezing but unsuitable for toddler and baby taste buds.

Sometimes she wonders about her bad luck. Maybe it was the test paper she stole off the History teacher’s desk in 8^th grade, and how she lied about it when they questioned her. Not me, she said. Someone else.

I have lice, someone writes in green cursive.

Let me get a different pen, the pediatrician said when she was fourteen, leaving her topless and cold on the examining table, wondering why.

Don’t tell her, in opaque ink.

When her son’s fever doesn’t drop by Monday, she decides he’s just about old enough to stay home alone. He can call her at work in case of an emergency. The $85 she’ll make during these six hours will fill the gas tank and pay for the children’s Motrin if she can find any on her way home.

At the end of the shift, she tears off the sheet and smiles when she sees her name. She looks around. She’s never met another one. Is this customer also named after the dad she never met?

Maybe it’s because she’s never been caught stealing one of the Positive Pens ($15.95) – the gray one that nobody every buys, with the mantra: Today is a Good Day. 

A smooshed stink bug lies besides the pens, and she uses a blank page to scoop and discard the carcass.

I love you. I love you. I love you, written with the iridescent fur pom pen.

This time she pulls the paper off carefully. Before she leaves, she folds her love message, careful not to crease the edges, and drops it inside her coat pocket next to her heart.

Liz Matthews holds a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a Master of Arts in English Education from Teachers College, Columbia University. Liz is the the Program Director of the Westport Writers’ Workshop, a nonprofit literary organization based in Westport, Connecticut where she also teaches creative writing workshops. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in Milk Candy Review, The Tishman Review, The Rumpus, and Brevity among other places.

My husband and I have not spoken for many years.

We’re not estranged or anything. We live together—happily I might add—but at a certain point silence just became easier than talking.

I could never have imagined this silence when we were first together. Back then it seemed like we could talk for a millennium and never run out of things to say. We used to drive way out past the outskirts of our little college town, talking, talking. I would have listened to him describe every blade of grass. That town was the first place I ever lived where you had to use the high beams at night. One night when I was behind the wheel, Bill—my husband, Bill—laughed as he explained to me that you have to turn lights on and off for other cars. Maybe that’s why talking felt so much easier when we were young. We had so much to learn, so much to teach each other. So much to argue about. So much to resolve.

Yesterday, while I was brushing out my hair in the bathroom, I heard a crash come from the kitchen. When I went downstairs, Bill was kneeling over a broken white porcelain serving tray. I couldn’t recall ever using that tray, even though I knew we had had it forever. Why did he have the serving tray out? Where had we stored it, where had it even come from?

I looked down at Bill looking up at me. I swept my hands around in front of me. Everything all right?

Bill’s shoulders moved just barely up and down. His upward-looking eyes seemed pleading. I dropped it. I don’t know how it happened.

I knelt down across from him and picked up a piece of porcelain. The edge was sharp. My finger bled.

I went to the sink to wash out the cut while Bill swept up the mess and threw it in the trash. The water rushed. The broken pieces went chunk chunk chunk. My finger stung under the cool water. I racked my brain: Who had given us that serving tray? Who would be fool enough to give us a thing like that? And why had we kept it, all these many years—through moves across the country, births and deaths—just to break it now, untouched, pristine, and never used?

That night with a Band-Aid on my finger I went down and searched the kitchen like a jewel thief, looking for things to throw away.

Susan Holcomb holds an MFA in writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and studied for a PhD in physics at Cornell. Her writing has been published in the Southern Indiana Review, The Boston Globe, Epiphany, and elsewhere. Her chapbook WOLFBABY, a collection of flash fiction, won the 2023 Cupboard Pamphlet chapbook contest and will be published this year.

I was the Sheriff.

I saw the kids in my back seat, leaning on each other, and knew that when people found out that I didn’t arrest them, they would say it was because I was soft. Not that I had gone soft – was replaced gone. Because I was a woman.

Gender would come into play again as soon as they discovered that the kids were in love. The girl rested her head on the boy’s chest and her eyes, though fixed on me, had a wide, glassy full-moon quality to them. She looked tired and scared. They both looked scared.

Of course, it would be as if they had forgotten I was a woman when they had elected me Sheriff – and for the past six months that I had been Sheriff, too. There I was a sexless thing…until I made a mistake.

I wasn’t exactly sure it was a mistake. These were good kids. I knew their parents, their teachers; they got A’s. They didn’t ‘liase’ around as the housewives around these parts liked to say. Teenagers eventually did questionable things; it came from the fact that at some point, at that age, you either thought you were or didn’t want to turn into: a popular person, a witch, Juliet, your mother or crucially, your true self. And that was only the half of it – I only knew what it was like to be a girl. The boy was lying back there almost as dead as Romeo. And the way they held hands: they were on the precipice, the cruel world on their heels, with nowhere to go but down, clutching to one another, the last thing they would ever do.

My deputy – he has a face as pretty as the boy’s impossibly long fine eyelashes – calls me ‘Ma’am’. The same thing I called my mother since I was three – especially when I was three. This deputy has been nothing less than expressly polite and efficient and eager to do a good job and I want to trust him like I want a hole in my chest so that my pudding heart can leak out. Not that I would trust him more if he was a woman but still; I feel surrounded by men who want to get me like single women vying for the flying bouquet. The boy was beautiful enough to be a bride and the girl didn’t know the toll of what being a woman was…at least, not yet.

Even I was making this about sex, I hated that. I was the Sheriff. I saw things, not just for what they appeared to be but for what they were, and not just because I was paid to do that, either. Shouldn’t I have been above that?

The boy spoke and I saw myself in his eyes: a dangerous thing incapable of mercy. And yet, in the eyes of the people of this little town, incapable of anything but mercy. Because I was a woman. I could be both and neither.

I told them what I was prepared to do. The girl cried. The boy called me “Ma’am.”

Ena Kaitch started writing proper stories when she was seventeen but has been writing practically every day since she was nine, when she still lived in the country she was born in, South Africa. She never thought she would be a writer but hopes to be worthy of the title one day. “pudding heart” is the first of her stories to be published.

The theme of the class this semester is love, and the kids have been – most of the kids have been – diligently studying philosophy and law and sociology in order to write their research papers, but there’s a story I always have to tell toward the end of the year. It’s a true story, which means the kids tend to buy it, or I tend to trust it more, but I like to trot it out when students start looking for shortcuts, or start trying to do calculus with their grade percentage, or start trying to find the easy way out. The story goes like this.

When I was a boy I hated to brush my teeth. My mother would tell me to brush my teeth and I would walk into the bathroom and walk back out again. You weren’t in there long enough, my mother would say, so I would walk into the bathroom and count to 100, and walk back out again. I didn’t hear the water, my mother would say, so I would walk into the bathroom and turn on the water and count to 100 and turn off the water and walk back out again. The toothbrush isn’t wet, she’d say. So I’d walk into the bathroom and turn on the water and put the toothbrush under the water and count to 100–

“When you were a kid you didn’t brush your teeth?” says one guy in the back. Kaden. I could murder Kaden, not just today but most days. “Shut up, Kaden,” says Tina, and I try not to smile. Tina’s my barometer. Big and beautiful, she sits right up front and has the remarkable ability to allow every emotion she’s ever had to pass completely across her face. If something lands, Tina’s expression lets me know. And if it doesn’t, her scrunched up nose tells me I’ve got to go back, or run ahead, but for god’s sake don’t stay where I am.

Tina gives Kaden the stinkface and turns back around to me and waits for the coupe de grâce. The moral of my toothbrushing story. So, I give it.

After I’m done grading what I’m sure will be Tina’s just fine paper about the five love languages and Kaden’s profoundly incompetent paper about the benefits of polyamory, I’ll have the summer to finish my book. I plan on calling it Prostate Meridian, or something like that, and I won’t bore you with all the details, but suffice to say it’s about a man whose wife has left him for some schmo and he chases them both into Mexico. The guy spends the entire story trying to find his wife and when he does, at the end, it’s obvious that her life has fallen apart. The man she ran away with has left her. She’s broke, she’s homeless, and she’s sick with malaria. Our protagonist finally catches up with her in a hospital in Oaxaca, and when he walks into her room she, with obvious effort, rolls over in her bed, and shows him her back.

I told this story to my now ex-wife and she nodded, which surprised me, but shouldn’t have, I suppose. Anyway, at the very end of the book, in the final pages, as the protagonist takes his quiet wife home to Arkansas or wherever it is they’re from (I haven’t decided), they stop for the night and sit on the beach, and they find themselves talking about love.

“Love,” the man says, “is a decision you make every day to live that day in accordance with someone else. The infinite pieces of that day derive their meaning from that decision, and that meaning is agreed upon, and is therefore identical for both parties involved.”

“Love,” the woman says, “is the fire you can’t put out. It’s the pressure in your chest that keeps you awake. It’s what makes you cry when you’re driving to work. It’s the taste in your mouth when you look at the leaves.”

The man doesn’t say anything for a minute. He looks out at the stars and he listens to the waves and then he turns to his wife and he says, “But they can be the same thing. Don’t you see that if we just work hard every day we can make it the same thing?” “But that’s just it,” the woman says back to him. “It’s not supposed to be work. Or rather,” she says, “it’s work not to do it. What’s really hard work,” she says, “what’s really hard work,” I would have her say, “is to do absolutely nothing at all.”

And then the man would pick up the woman’s hand from where it was lying next to him in the sand. He would reach for it suddenly, as though he were drowning, or were suddenly aware he was drowning and had in fact been drowning for quite some time, and he’d look at that hand, a hand that he knows better than his own, just as much as he knows her eyes better than he knows his own, and he’d raise the hand to his mouth, and as he did so the woman would turn those eyes away, and drop that hand back to the sand.

Cameron MacKenzie’s work has appeared in Plume, Salmagundi, and The Michigan Quarterly Review, among other places. His novel The Beginning of His Excellent and Eventful Career, about the Mexican Revolution, was published in 2018. His collection of short fiction, River Weather, appeared in 2021. His flash fiction collection Theories of Love is forthcoming from Alternating Current Press.

Mrs. Hatch is a slouch-shouldered, boulder-footed ogre. When she writes on the board, chalk shrieks and crumbles. Her voice is deep and moist, sonorous, an abandoned, slime-slick well with something unspeakable at the bottom. If there even is a bottom. Not a well you’d entrust with your precious coin, your secret wish. Dead flies pepper her windowsills.

At recess, Angela and I sit in the forked maple, knees touching, hers immaculate in white tights and mine mottled with scabbing scrapes and Band-Aid residue, whispering what we know about Mrs. Hatch. Her feet are toeless slabs of putrid flesh; her shoes are stuffed with dirt and earthworms. She keeps a human heart in a Baggie inside her purse, gnawing at it in the teacher’s lounge to maintain her (barely) human form. She lumbers through the halls at night, rattling doors, searching for unlocked classrooms with hamsters or guinea pigs, and when she finds one, she chomps off its head, slurps its innards, crunches its tiny, brittle bones between her yellowed teeth. Sometimes she makes do with goldfish. She doesn’t like iguanas: too dry, too green.

Angela supplies the bloodiest details – she has older brothers and knows things – but after recess, I’m the one who creeps back to Mrs. Hatch’s shady lair, while Angela skips across the hall to the other third-grade class. Her classroom is bright and warm, windows open to the smile of spring breezes. A plant twirls in the corner, flowers like bell-skirted fairies cascading over the edge of the pot.

Karen M, who lives on Angela’s street, waits by their classroom door. She doesn’t say hi to me, just grabs Angela’s hand and pulls her inside. They wear the same sparkly nail polish. Both have charm bracelets, tiny talismans tinkling on their wrists: ballet slippers, hearts, crowns. Both bring food from home, packed in rainbow unicorn lunch boxes, while I wait in line with the other free-lunch kids. Both have the long, shiny hair I crave, sometimes in intricate French braids with ribbons. My mom doesn’t have time for that and chops at mine with kitchen shears. Pixie cut, she calls it, but I look more like a lost boy.

Standing outside after school, last as always to be picked up. Mrs. Hatch on duty, prowling by the door. Angela waving, low and quick, as she climbs into Karen M’s mom’s car. Karen M thinks she’s Angela’s best friend but she can’t be because I am, at least this year, even when we’re separated by that hallway between light and dark, even when Angela’s nibbling a still-warm cookie handed over the back seat by Karen M’s mom and I’m out here with Mrs. Hatch and the sinking sun.

Even though everyone seems to know we’re destined for different stories.

Mrs. Hatch rummages in her handbag. Her stomach must be growling. I hope there’s enough heart left.

I’m an iguana. I stare at the street, shivering, willing my mom to appear. Too dry, too green. It’s the next car, I tell myself. Okay, the next one. The one after that. If I hold my breath. If I close my eyes. If I don’t cry. If I stop crying. One of these times I have to be right.

Didi Wood’s stories appear in SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Fractured Lit, Okay Donkey, and elsewhere. Her work has been chosen for the Wigleaf Top 50 and nominated for Best Small Fictions. Often she is festooned with cats. More at didiwood.com.

Drugged and dying, Bigby thinks about dreams. How, long ago, maybe two or three beers in, he told his roommate he wanted to be an umpire. He was going to drop out of school. He was going to spend years in places like Topeka or Huntsville, Des Moines if he got lucky, and, one day, he was going to be behind home plate in the World Series. He was going to wait until things got real high-leverage. Full count, runners on, etc. There was going to be a close pitch, and he was going to call it a nothing. He’d make a small noise. Put his arm one-tenth of the way up. He’d flinch, basically, and there wouldn’t be so much to it that it could be clearly labeled a strike. There’d be too much for it to be clearly called a ball. He told his roommate (poetically, he thought) that he was going to be “an absent God out there, and the cameras will catch the frenzy that ensues, the terrified chaos of attempted coping.”

Maybe it goes without saying that he never made it to the World Series. He never even dropped out of school. He did umpire as a side hustle (is that what they’d call it, these nurses with the dark hair and eyes so tired they seem authentically kind?). Weekend tournaments across the river in Davenport, or at that complex in the mud down on the Rock River, and one time he was behind the plate for a U-12 championship in Burlington. Late innings. Fifth or sixth, probably, and it’s tied at seven. Bases loaded. It’s a 2-2 count, and the pitch is outside, but by a margin even Major-League pitchers sometimes get (and without stopping the narrative of his thoughts there’s here a series of images and graphs, lines of all the text he’s read about the philosophy of the strike zone, about borders and particle physics and the many ocular biases, the barriers to definitive categorization), and Bigby goes into action. He has a whole complex array of thoughts, weighing pros and cons and thinking how at 3-2 the hitter might well swing, and so it’s now or never basically, isn’t it? It is. So, he does exactly what told his roommate he’d do.

The batter stares at him. The crowd starts to yell. The pitcher shrugs and then (with a touch of devious brilliance, one could argue) starts walking off the mound, trying to play it off like he heard the call loud and clear, and the base umpire comes jogging in.

“Hey, buddy, you alright?” he says.

But Bigby’s catatonic. Performing frozen. There is language everywhere. The three most common words are fuck, Jesus, and Blue, and the crowd is milling. Fathers are tapping their feet. Some of them are standing. Somebody’s going to run onto the field at any second, and a mother is wondering if maybe the umpire is having a heart attack, and he chooses that moment to turn and bolt away. He darts off like a deer or trout or something, and Bigby, he could always fucking run. He still could, he thinks. He could get up from this place and focus on every step until nothing worked anymore, until physical failure, and how far do you think he could get? He’s heard of people running a hundred miles at a shot. Younger people, though. In much better aerobic shape than he is now, but maybe back then he could have held his own. Darting to the parking lot. Driving away clad in full gear with the face mask and the chest protector, and, in the rear view, a few people giving futile chase. Kids kneeling, gloves on their heads. The base umpire trying to get in between punches and getting himself clocked, though maybe that’s an embellishment. Memory. Maybe it’s the morphine, and Bigby’s never told anybody about that day. He’s never gone back to Burlington, never even looked for notes in the newspaper or been tempted to check the internet. For him, it was enough just to do it, and now he’s watching it all unspool on loop in his mind, and it’s playing to an empty multiplex. The whole place has that cleaned-up butter smell. Dust in the projector. The film is silent, and the non-existent audience is nonetheless alive, and there must be bacteria in there waiting. Witnessing. Moths curl in the corners. Thoraxes rub against the floor. Bigby’s a disembodied eye, and in front of each fat recliner he sees these little collections of molecules. They float in the strobing light, these foggy ghosts, these piecemeal fossils of all our bated breath.

Brett Biebel is the author of three collections of flash fiction,48 Blitz, Winter Dance Party, and Gridlock; and A Mason & Dixon Companion. His work has appeared in many magazines and been selected for Best Small Fictions and Best Microfiction. He lives, writes, and teaches in Illinois.