Category: flash fiction

Mara arrived in January, as regal as a beech tree, and planted herself in the yellow house across the street. From my bedroom window, I watched her skip rope like she was training for a NASA mission. She was like that from the start: formidable. By the first week she had made friends with almost everybody but me.

I still wore corduroy skirts and tall socks embroidered with apples. I was picked last for kickball. I had straight Bs. “You have such promise,” my teachers said. All around me people were blossoming, but any flowers I could muster yielded only hard, sour fruit. “Crabapple,” my mother called me affectionately, instead of honey, and I hated how well it fit.

In February, our science teacher paired Mara and me for a project. She thought Mara would rub off on me. Make me braver, maybe, less prone to sputter in class. But every time Mara got another answer right, anger fermented in my chest. When she raised her hand, the skin on her forearm was so thin I could see the blood moving. I dismantled a paper clip beneath my desk and daydreamed about etching my initials onto her skin.

I ran hot in those days: my temperature, my temper. I sweated in T-shirts on days Mara wore thick wool sweaters. She shed fibers every time she moved. Her scratchy sleeves rubbed against my skin. When I scooted away from her, her gray eyes pooled. The next day, her smile was even wider. Her niceness was one more thing I coveted but couldn’t reach.

“You should walk to school with her,” Mom said. “She’s new. She could use a friend.”

“She has more friends than I do.”

Mom laughed and told me that was all the more reason to be nice to her. Still, I scuttled away when she approached me in the hall. I side-stepped her smiles.

But something was changing. The trees in front of our houses draped their arms around each others’ shoulders. In March, we learned about inosculation: what happened when different trees chafed against each other. Their bark wore thin. Their cells merged. The trees grew conjoined. “Husband and wife trees,” our teacher called them. Mara shifted beside me, and I felt flayed. “That’s what we should do our project about,” she whispered.

In April she started waiting in front of my house in the mornings, underneath the kissing, sighing trees. She walked beside me in silence. It’s OK, I told myself. We’re not friends. We’re something else. Neighbors. At the end of the week, she held out her hand, her face serious. “Friends?” she said. I took her hand.

We started studying together, stretched out in her bed or mine. She swapped the story of her parents’ divorce for the location of my brother’s weed stash. We smoked by my open window, giggling against each other’s shoulders. We collapsed in my bed, our arms indistinguishable. We dared each other to become a dolphin, a boat, a rocket, a centipede. We squeezed our eyes shut and contorted our bodies into new shapes. With my eyes closed and hers on me I could be anything. Steel, bark, honey.

From then on, we linked arms in the hallway and split our sentences so we could share them. We made a new kind of fruit: bristly, nutty apples. “We’re going to be this close forever,” I told her. I hadn’t been the kind of person who thought about forever before, but now I was. She rolled her eyes at me, and I rubbed my shoulder against hers. “I mean it,” I swore.

I meant it the day she painted GO on my exposed stomach with pasty blue paint before her sister’s swim meet, and my skin prickled even in the places she didn’t touch. I meant it when we started high school and I memorized the 63 steps between her locker and mine. I meant it right up until the day in 10th grade when we were tangled in her bed, tickling each other senseless, and the joke in her eyes softened. I started to feel light-headed, exuberant, afraid. Her lips against mine were tentative, as if she were the one who didn’t know what to do.

I flinched. She didn’t. I started dating boys. She shaved the left side of her head and brought a girl to prom. I applied for college out-of-state. She stayed and made our town change around her. I told myself I’d never had her certainty anyway.

Still, I tracked her life on Facebook. I marveled at the dizzying shapes of her new friends’ hair. I tried to squelch my jealousy, that old prickly anger at how easily she reached for what I lacked. I closed my laptop and splashed cold water on my face. In the mirror my hair was flat, my eyes sad. Turning away was a habit. It was the only thing I was better at than her.

Then I stopped. I closed my eyes and tried to believe that I could remake myself the way she’d once reshaped me. That I could be anything: a girl, a tree, a rocket, all at the same time. My fingertips prickled, and I tasted apple-crisp beechnuts on my tongue. I turned back to the mirror and searched my eyes for the first flicker of something new.

---

 

Pauline Holdsworth is a writer and public radio producer who grew up in central Pennsylvania and now lives in Toronto, Canada. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Bat City Review, Necessary Fiction, Pithead Chapel, JMWW, and elsewhere. Her work has been shortlisted for The Masters Review 2021 Summer Short Story Award for New Writers and longlisted for the Wigleaf Top 50.

 

 

 

 Three days after Eli stopped living, Talia saw him in a dream, wearing his old black hoodie and jeans and Converse sneakers, walking slowly toward her through the glass graveyard along the Rio Grande Bosque with a sea of shattered glass glinting at his feet, like Jesus walking on water. She wanted him to tell her to not be afraid, but he said nothing, his eyes fixed on the horizon, unaware of—or indifferent to—her presence.

As teenagers, she and Eli would get stoned there, wandering through the acres of dirt-encrusted glass to unearth old medicine bottles that survived the decades and weather and wildlife. It was a century-old landfill, but “graveyard” suited it better. Where glass goes to die, serene in its brokenness. There was a holiness to it, the garbage made beautiful in that fleeting golden light.

It was monsoon season, when the desert came alive from the violence of extreme heat, downburst winds, lightning, thunderstorms, flash floods. When she woke from her nap, she waited till the afternoon downpour subsided before driving to the South Valley. In the glass graveyard, the air bloomed, breathing out the fresh memory of rain-soaked earth—the scent of thirst quenched, dryness replenished, pungent with resinous creosote displaced by heavy droplets.

And she saw that, no, Eli was not there, of course, he was still dead, her brother as ephemeral as the petrichor that emanated from the soil, and Talia was alone, kneeling in the glass shards, dull now in the fading light of dusk, her hands burrowing in the ground like she might find his bones there among the weeds and broken bottles.

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Jessie Carver is a queer writer and editor who grew up on a farm in the borderlands of New Mexico. Her short stories and poems have appeared in journals that include Entropy, Barren, The Normal School, HAD, and Watershed Review, and in the anthology Love Is the Drug & Other Dark Poems. She also co-authored the book Rethinking Paper & Ink: The Sustainable Publishing Revolution. You can find her online at www.jessiecarver.com.

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Jessie Carver is a queer writer and editor who grew up on a farm in the borderlands of New Mexico. Her short stories and poems have appeared in journals that include Entropy, Barren, The Normal School, HAD, and Watershed Review, and in the anthology Love Is the Drug & Other Dark Poems. She also co-authored the book Rethinking Paper & Ink: The Sustainable Publishing Revolution. You can find her online at www.jessiecarver.com.

The American pawpaw takes six or seven years to produce fruit. You may wait for the fruit to fall, or you can shake the tree if you’re impatient, or if you doubt the tree’s ability to know when it’s time, which must be the case sometimes since everything is so deeply confused what with the scorching summers, the smashing records. So, you shake and shake because it’s his favorite fruit and the dumb tree is finally ready and how much time does anyone really have, anyway? You hear the backdoor whine open and slam shut but all the pawpaws are down, so you are too busy to acknowledge. Pawpaws taste a little like mango and have small, shiny black pits inside of them. The fruit is so malleable, you can scoop out the meat with a spoon. You hear her calling you but you are gathering them in your shirt and oh my god it’s going to be so amazing when you bring them inside and scoop out the meat and you wonder if you could make pawpaw ice cream out of this and feel super earthy, like you’ve got everything by the balls for once and you’re the one driving. You hear it in her voice, the phone call. The prognosis. A pawpaw slips out of its shirt hammock, and you revel in the act of picking it back up, this little green bomb, about as big as a grenade. But she has the real grenade, doesn’t she? No matter how much life you bring into the house, the call came through, and now she knows. But you know too by the crumbling structure of her voice, the quiet care when she says, What are you doing? And you hold the pawpaws so tightly in their hammock, so safe. The American pawpaw is rich in vitamins A, C, P, K—basically all the letters. The pawpaw is life. If you could just bring them into the house…. It isn’t good. It isn’t good. You knew this wouldn’t be good. You hold them so tightly they all fall out but one, which remains stuck and squished against your rib cage and wrist. You will lose him. Soon, you will lose him. The American pawpaw produces the largest native edible fruit in North America. You let her hug you, and even though the fruit is smashed, you can’t let go of it. It remains between you, permeating your t-shirt, your hands, your fingernails until you don’t know where you end, and it begins.

---

EJ Green’s short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Hobart, HAD, Wigleaf, Juked, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and others. They live just outside of Philadelphia with their partner and two cats where they read for Philadelphia Stories, practice martial arts, and try not to kill everything in their veggie garden.

Let me introduce you to a woman you’ve been sleeping with. Every so often for the last nine months. I wish I could say she’s pretty like she has soft lips, large, limpid eyes, or that she sways gently when she walks. Say some detail like that her nose crinkles when she smiles. But she’s not like that. It’s okay if you don’t know if you like her right away.

She’s sleeping now, lying on a thin gray pillow, cradling one wrist with the other palm. The light is early morning muddy. Her neck is long and rises far over her shoulders, her chin is fleshy underneath. You can see her collarbones and shoulder nubs and other parts you cannot name under the skin. At rest her mouth curves down like a rainbow, her eyes curve down, too. Inside she has a hollow space under her ribs, the pit of her, an empty-feeling crevice.

She’s waking up.

The mattress is swaying beneath you both as she shifts. She bows her head to your shoulder, so the fly-away hairs stand up, making your nostrils twitch. Your cat will probably start screaming for breakfast in two more minutes.

This woman starts scratching her cheek in a way that makes a soft rasping that is kind of irritating and kind of sweet. She lifts her face to you (someone she’s been fucking and just recently fucked) says good morning. Nudges your cheek with her nose.

After a pause, she tucks her chin in, scrunches her nose, draws down her eyebrows. Nudges you again and speaks from the side of her mouth saying, would you still be with me if my face looked like this?

Listen very carefully. What she means is will you stay with her even if her face gets chewed off by a dog, or she gains two hundred pounds, or her vagina gets stretched out from having four babies.

I know. What’s inside is what counts; but that’s more of her body. The slick organs pumping, that would come slithering out like a long live snake if a slit were made in the wrong place. Her body, the shape of her face, her bones, are who she is. Her brain and her face are wired together with an intricate system of the same nerves and blood vessels. Her sense of humor is the way her eyebrows rise, or how her face stretches when she laughs. She is in her eyeballs and how the lashes move and how her spine bends and how her breathing sounds. I know.

Turn toward the body in your bed, grab her padded hip bone, kiss her spiky shoulder.

Tell her you’ll love her no matter what.

---

Madeline Graham is a writer and Minnesotan. Her work is available or forthcoming in HAD, Southern Humanities Review, Redivider, Forge Literary Magazine, and Ghost Parachute, among others. Find her on Twitter @madelineRgraham.

The dead horse has more strength today. It can usually only muster enough energy to lift its head, from where it was euthanized, in the Campo, thirty years ago. But now, no invisible pressure stops it from contracting its throat muscles. No one can see the relief it feels, stretching, fully, after all this time. Even though it cannot breathe.

It’s just as well. The air quality is bad. Wildfires surround the town. The famous race, scheduled for the weekend, has just been cancelled. Everyone alive is upset, everyone dead has their own problems.

For example, how to make it over to the jockey, sitting in front of one of the cafes. He doesn’t look like a jockey, currently, but the dead horse instantly recognizes him as the man it threw off its back, decades ago, during the last Palio it ever ran.

While the dead horse tries to stand, the former jockey looks around the square, trying to identify which of the thirtyish year-old women sipping coffee, alone, could be his daughter. It may be none of them. He was supposed to meet her, Angie, yesterday. But he didn’t leave the mattress. He thought, if I don’t get out of bed, for real, then I can later say, I’m so sorry, I honestly stayed horizontal. He wasn’t sure he could do it. He had to pee, early. Luckily he had some dishware on the nightstand, which he could reach, and did reach, without touching the floor.

He changes his mind, often. He’s aware of this. He enjoys making plans, only to break them, and, conversely, likes showing up unannounced, creating spontaneous plans, where others must change their schedule to accommodate him. And people often do, accommodate him, because when he is not depressed and lying next to cappuccino cups filled with his own urine, he is charming.

In fact, he’s charming the waitstaff, currently. Minutes earlier they were moping around, coughing, complaining about the smoke. But now, they are laughing. He’s making a big enough scene that Angie, sitting across the plaza, notices him, and wonders if he is her father. It was a relief, his absence, growing up. The fathers of all her friends were either too nice or too mean. She didn’t have to deal with any of that. Her mother dated, but none of them lasted. They all looked like tofu. The ones that worked inside, at desks, were soft and deformed. The ones that labored outside were gritty and burned. They all reeked entirely of their surroundings. Were, actually, nothing, inside. They all crumbled before she learned their names.

The dead horse hobbles toward the former jockey. Antonio, Angelo? Something like that. What it remembers is how great it felt, to whip the idiot to the ground. It fell, too. But it was worth it, to see him, in pain, before someone called for the needle. It wanted the earth to swallow him. But the guy landed near the edge of the crowd, and a woman pulled him out of the way. Oh well, at least the man’s legs were twisted, surely broken, thought the horse, just before it died.

Something jostles the former jockey’s table. He shrugs, and continues talking to the waitstaff about the benefits of his tofu scramble. He’s espousing its flexibility, how it takes on the taste of everything around it. How that’s exactly what life should be. That we don’t need keys. We need bendiness. That the spatula to happiness is rubber, not metal.

As she orders another coffee, Angie sees the man, across the plaza, become confused. Waving his hands while his chair, with him in it, scoots around the Campo. He must be her father. He looks exactly how he sounded, on the phone, outwardly jovial, but totally vacuous. Not just lacking any depth but completely unaware there could be depth, that there could be something other than the present moment. Exactly the kind of person that would get thrown off a horse, and have sex with the tourist who pulled him out of harm’s way, and then disappear. Angie had tracked him down, and contacted him, this past Christmas. Not because she wanted a relationship, but money. She had just had a child, her husband was out of work. She thought, why not? The worst he can say is no, and, if so, nothing changes.

When the chair topples over, the former jockey goes with it. He stands up, but continues moving forward. If he had any interiority, Angie thinks, she would call it “against his will.” But he goes with it, propelled by some force, which everyone around the Campo is commenting about, but which nobody intervenes in.

What made her mother, thirty years ago, intervene? Angie imagines her father, back then, falling, and looking placid, on the dirt. No, whatever caused her mother to rescue her father came from her, not him.

Its undetectable bones don’t ache. The dead horse pushes, and keeps pushing the man with its ghost muzzle. It doesn’t think about where it’s pushing, only that it wants to move the former jockey till it can’t anymore, till whatever well of disembodied energy runs dry.

Angie stays where she is. She puts a ceramic mug to her lips, but doesn’t drink. On the cup is a detailed representation of flames. Her flight has been delayed. Her father arrives, at her table, just as ash begins to fall upon the square. Just as the dead horse stumbles. It slips through the cracks between cobblestones, into the center of the planet, where it, at last, inhales. Its lungs are full of liquid iron. It gallops in place. It wins the race.

---

Thomas Mixon is a Kenyon Review workshop alum, and a Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee. He has poetry and fiction in miniskirt magazine, Radon Journal, Maudlin House, and elsewhere. He’s trying to write a few books.

In these last dregs of winter, day and night hold each other close. Dusk lasts for hours as light brushes cool against darkness, and sunrise clings to the last sprinkling of stars. The cold brings with it its own silence, a silence that defies even the wind, raw and damp and searching, sinking so deep into the landscape that it ceases to shiver. Sometimes it’s impossible to believe that there’s anything other than this heavy quiet, but when she looks out to the lake, she hears things. The prickle of ice against water. The hushed lick of water against rushes. The glide of feathers.

The swans always come at this time of year, when it seems impossible that winter will ever end. Only then will she see them, slow white streaks against the bone-grey of the sky. They fly low and land on the lake, its water still pewter, its breath still mist that curls and condenses in the chill. Two of them, the same pair every year, defying her expectation that they will have forgotten her.

Her mother’s shadow also flies low. Unmoored by thin, barely-there days, it stretches over the kitchen and out into the garden, across the living room and up the stairs. It quivers in the wind but never disintegrates, its edges bolstered by the wan sunlight that trickles in through the windows and pools on the floors. Her mother’s shadow, a body swimming. She’s tried telling her mother about the swans, but her mother and the shadow both tell her that she’s making it up. How can she be, how can her mother not have seen them? But her mother will say that she reads too much and has too vivid an imagination, and the shadow will nod in agreement and the whole house will ripple with it. Look out of the window, her mother will say. There’s not even a lake.

But there is a lake, and she’s seen them building their nest in a clump of reeds, the same spot every year. She can hear that too. The thick rustle of twig against twig, a huge mound of them matted together until nothing can get in or out. She’s seen them with the eggs. How protective they are, how they nurture them through the spring storms that are fiercer than winter. What would it be like, to be held so safely? She doesn’t know. She doesn’t think her mother has ever held her at all.

There are lots of things her mother doesn’t seem to do or to see, things that glimmer at the edges of vision like dust motes caught in a strand of light. Things that are just as easy as dust for her mother to sweep away. She’s given up asking her mother to look properly. Can’t you see them? she used to say, pointing to the lake and the swans. You must be able to see them, holding out her arm, her cheek, her heart, still bruised with her mother’s fingers even after so many years, still beating like the steady drip of water from a tap. Drip, drip. Her own body, finally thawing into spring. But her mother says it’s still winter. Her mother says that the bruises aren’t bruises at all. How could they be? she’ll ask, and the shadow will shake its head in puzzlement and the foundations of the house will feel like they’re shifting.

But each year there’s one less egg. Each year there is one less cygnet gliding in their wake. There is a gap in the nest that swells larger each year, but it’s not a quiet gap. There, too, she can hear things. A feather-touch of body against air. A whispering that she thinks must come from the swans. Each year it draws her closer, and last year, she knows, there was only one egg. This year there are none, and the noises from the nest are louder than ever.

She makes her way out to the lake. There is blue in the sky today. There is blue in the water too, pale shimmers of it that drift between the greys. She walks along the path that slides between ice and mud, and she feels her mother’s eyes on her back, feels the lingering fingers of her mother’s shadow. She ignores them. Out here, she is no longer her mother’s daughter. She is swan-call, lake-rustle, a soft feathery shade of grey, and she can hear the singing as she wades through the reeds, water falling away from her body and her feet webbing against the silt. She curls up inside the nest, cocooned suddenly from everything except the sky. The feathers that cover her are breast-warm and damp. She forgets her mother, forgets the bruises, forgets that the lake isn’t supposed to be there at all.

She closes her eyes. The nest, now, is silent.

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Elodie Barnes is a writer and editor. Her writing is born at the edges
of nature, memory, trauma and the body, and is published regularly in
online and print journals including the Best Small Fictions anthology of
2022. Find her online at elodierosebarnes.weebly.com.

The girl, undeterred by my watching, adds raspberry-frosted Pop-Tarts to a shopping cart. An aisle later, her mom finds the box, grabs her daughter by the arm, grumbles something in her ear, and places the Pop-Tarts on a shelf next to a box of gluten-free crackers. The girl, whose name I discovered on social media is Sophie, turns to me, crosses her eyes, and sticks out her tongue.

I watch as the white fingermarks on Sophie’s arm pink up, and I see her mother, my lover’s wife, the wife he never told me about, the wife who appeared one morning as a blue bubble of text on his phone, pick out his favorite 82% dark chocolate bar, the one that donates to endangered species, the same one I buy for him. The wife is wearing Lululemon leggings that accentuate her lithe frame and has her blonde hair pulled back into a careless ponytail. He told me he loved me for my curves and raven hair and the laugh lines around my eyes.

When I turn the corner in the dairy aisle, Sophie is opening a single-serving size of Organic Valley chocolate milk. She drains it and drops the empty carton next to a selection of organic, free-range eggs while my lover’s wife—I refuse to learn her name—reads the ingredients on a tub of Greek yogurt. Sophie flies me the bird and turns with a saucy flair of her private school skirt. When I told him I couldn’t have kids, he said he didn’t want any.

In the produce department, my lover’s wife gushes over the selection of kale—curly kale, dinosaur kale. The red Russian kale gets her hands flapping and her mouth orgasming. She chats with another yoga-clad shopper, discussing how sweet and tender the red Russian is, how beautiful its oak-shaped leaves, its colors ranging from blue-green to purple-red.

Meanwhile, Sophie switches the price tags of sweet potatoes and Okinawan sweet potatoes. Cucumbers and zucchini. She sidles up to me behind the pyramid of apples, and I can’t resist leaning in to catch a whiff of young adolescence-like onion wafting off her. She takes a bite out of a Honeycrisp and hisses, “Don’t think I won’t tell on you.”

But she won’t. She likes the game too much. This isn’t the first time I’ve followed Sophie and my lover’s wife around the grocery store and Sophie knows it. She’s getting more daring, more sassy with each visit and, still, I cannot stop imagining her as mine. My life as her mother. I imagine us going to the contemporary art museum. Playing tennis. Training a puppy to walk on a leash in the park. I’d be a good mother, I think, and she’d be a good daughter.

In line, eyes on mine, Sophie snags a Snickers off the rack at checkout and slides it onto the belt under a bunch of red Russian kale. I watch as my lover’s wife runs her credit card, smiles as the cashier hands her the receipt, and I see a woman, a wife, a mother. The Snickers is bagged without my lover’s wife seeing it, and, for a second, I think about ratting out Sophie. But I don’t, and Sophie smirks as she grabs the paper bag. When she gets to the door at the front of the store, Sophie turns to me and mouths, Perv.

The cashier has to call next twice before I place Lay’s potato chips, Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Therapy, and Hostess Donettes on the belt. At the last go, I add a Snickers bar. When the cashier asks for a phone number to qualify for Safeway Club discounts, I give his—my soon-to-be ex-lover’s.

The cashier looks at the readout on her register and says, “Thank you, Mrs. Wilcox.”

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Kim Steutermann Rogers lives with her husband and 16-year-old dog Lulu in Hawaii. Her essay, “Following the Albatross Home” was recognized as notable in Best American Travel Writing. Her journalism has published in National Geographic, Audubon, and Smithsonian; and her prose in Gone Lawn, The Citron Review, Atticus Review, CHEAP POP, Hippocampus, and elsewhere. She was awarded residencies at Storyknife Writers Retreat in Alaska in 2016 and 2021 and Dorland Mountain Arts in 2022. Find her @kimsrogers.

Aaron Sandberg has appeared or is forthcoming in Flash Frog, Phantom Kangaroo, Qu, Asimov’s, No Contact, Alien Magazine, The Shore, The Offing, Sporklet, Crow & Cross Keys, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere. A multiple Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, you can see him—and his writing—on Instagram @aarondsandberg.

The highway was slick and iridescent, bleeding red from brake lights scattered on either side of our car. Mac had hit something small, a raccoon or maybe a possum. I squeezed my eyes shut and turned my head. But when a voice shot out of our radio—a voice that sounded like a jumble of sentient vibrations—I winked one eye open in case a claw pushed through our janky AM radio and grabbed Mac by the throat.

“Hello? Anybody there?” Mac asked.

A muffled echo on the other side of the air waves mumbled a reply, which Mac treated like a friendly greeting.

“Could be some trucker on a CB radio,” I suggested.

“Going north?” Mac asked.

The response was a staccato of static and dead space before one of our fan belts drowned out all other sound with whirs and thudding.

Mac balled up his right fist and pounded the dashboard.

“Goddamn’t I told you to get that fixed, didn’t I?”

I stared out the window and drew imaginary lines between droplets and runnels. Mac’s question was for me.

The last twenty miles had felt like a painful endurance test: the murderous thump, the squeak of the wipers, scattered riffs of dance music by artists we were too old to recognize. Flood season had come early. Rain beat against the windshield, leaving a wet curtain the wipers try in vain to beat away.

By the time Mac killed something small and nocturnal, we were two hours away from his parents’ house and his brother’s house and a river that left most of the backyards and driveways ankle-deep in water. Mac wanted to move back home.  He spent our first hour on the road telling me why we needed to live near family—which meant his family. I spent the last forty minutes telling him why I didn’t want to buy a two-flat with his fifty-something uncle who smelled like weed but knew how to “fix things.” After our last stop for gas about twenty miles ago, we’d settled into stubborn silence. Then a stranger crackled through the air waves.

“Hello? Hello?”  The voice on the other side of the radio was clear, curious, feminine.

“Holy crap!  You can hear me?” Mac slapped the steering wheel and scooted higher in his seat the way he did whenever he got to the good part in a story.

“Yes,” she answered. She sounded impatient.

Mac wiggled his eyebrows and grinned at me like we were in cahoots, like hearing some stranger acknowledge us over a car radio on a rainy stretch of highway was some big victory. I uncrossed my arms.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

The reply was a distorted collection of syllables.

Mac shouted the question a second time. I fiddled with the radio, but he pushed my hand away and adjusted the knobs himself.

“Help…Help.”

“Help? Do you need help?” Mac shouted.

“Maybe she thinks we need help,” I offered. Mac shushed me and fiddled with the knobs again.

“How can we help?” By then Mac had resorted to a kind of slow yelling like he was translating his thoughts for someone who was hard of hearing.

The response was a crackle that could’ve been sailboat or salesman. Mac persisted, determined to let this faceless, disembodied stranger know we were there to provide whatever assistance she required. I pressed my eyes closed. The darkness only magnified the hiss of the radio static and the sound of the rain pounding the windshield and the roof.

My eyes opened in time to see a vanload of college kids speed past us fast enough to hydroplane. Their tires spit an angry torrent of water across the driver’s side of the Camry. Mac swore at them before apologizing to the voice from the radio. She repeated a word that sounded like a question—who? through?—while I watched the van fishtail across the road, narrowly missing a Cadillac and a truck hauling gasoline. I mourned all the creatures they must’ve crushed beneath their wheels that night. Mac wouldn’t stop talking. He clutched the steering wheel with both hands and went on about the rain and the flood and the long drive home from St. Charles. His cheeks were frozen in the perma-grin he plastered across his face for family get-togethers and work events. He complained about gas prices and loneliness and settling.

“I think we missed our last turn,” he said.

“Yes,” she answered.

Mac told her about the car he wanted and the house he planned to buy two hundred miles away from the house we already owned. I wanted to talk to the voice too, but there was no room. I wanted to tell her that Mac is the kind of man who eats out of boxes and cans instead of dinner plates and serving bowls. That Mac sits in the same chair every Sunday; that he doesn’t look at me when I walk in a room. That he only says my name when he needs something, and he drags out the second syllable for too long. 

“Help is on the way,” the voice said, only this time she spoke with robotic clarity.

The steering locked. Mac was hairy elbows, clawing fingers, a string of strangled profanities. Our car skidded off the road, and we flipped over into a sloppy ravine. The chassis cracked with painful violence.

“Hello?” I ask. Between the angry hum of the busted windshield wipers, the car draws in tiny, ragged breaths. A fresh pressure throbs through the narrow folds in my brain. I want to reach over and feel his face with my fingers, but I can’t move. My chest and neck are a shimmering mosaic of shattered glass.

“Mac?” I whisper. His reply is a garbled groan, and I know it’s too late. I know that whichever way we turn, we won’t see what’s headed our direction until it runs us over and leaves us both broken and grieving.

---

 

Martha (Marty) Keller’s short stories have appeared in Cagibi, Midway Journal, Roanoke Review, Bridge Eight Literary Magazine, Brilliant Flash Fiction, and elsewhere. She is also a reader for Flash Fiction Magazine. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart and Best Short Fiction anthologies. Over the years, she’s worked in strip malls, skyscrapers, and high school classrooms. She lives with her family at the end of a long trail somewhere outside of Chicago.

 

I was our city-island’s 303rd Atlas, I tell my Tinder date on our first outing at a seaside tavern. I expect him to look suitably impressed at me for holding up our whole town, our whole world for a full year. Never once faltering, nor dropping all its citizens to their watery waste.

Do you have a shellfish allergy? he asks as he peruses the salt-laminated menu.

No, I reply. When I held our city up on my shoulders, the seagulls would often deposit little morsels of mussels in my waiting mouth. The guards administered a new saline injection into my veins every night but the birds, oh the birds wanted me to have the first catch of the day, to not subsist on bare sustenance, but savor the salt of the living.

What was your first kiss like? he asks once our food arrives, and I tell him how my former classmates—they in high school, me randomly chosen to hold the groaning city on my growing shoulders—would slip past the guards after class. They would take turns kissing me—free practice for their older crushes—and I could not let go of the world long enough to push them away. Only once did I resist: my bite led to a slap, which caused a minor earthquake across the city’s lower tiers.

Did you ever want to let the city go? he asks next, sky-eyes clouded as they look out to sea. Did you wish to let us fall and sink in the water forever? His mouth twists, an unspoken “after everything, I would” in the furrow of his brow. I don’t reply, instead asking a question of my own.

Did you know I carried you too?

He makes a sound, questioning, like the boy he once was. I tell him I remember the exact frequency of his pulse, and all the times he almost succeeded in snuffing it out. His heart used to be the heaviest of them all.

In the intruding years, I have ceased to intuit the intricate mechanics of my city. I don’t know who the 313^th Atlas is, what they look like, if the seagulls favor them with treats and secrets the way they once favored me. I have long since fulfilled my duty to my cursed city-island. But my arms are still corded with muscles like twisted tree limbs. When I sleep, I don’t dream in words, but in heartbeats.

I reach across the white-clad table and put his scarred hands on my shoulders. Let him feel along adamantine muscles, under a button-down shirt that can never close all the way. His touch slides down until he takes my hand and I let him lead me down to the waterfront, shellfish lunch a long-overdue offering to the seagulls flying watch overhead.

We enter the sea in our first-date clothes, and he lays me out in the cool water. Warm palms under my muscle-roped back, holding me up, up, up until I am one with sea and sky, buoyed by saltwater.

---

Avra Margariti is a queer author and poet from Greece. Avra’s work haunts publications such as SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Best Microfiction, and Best Small Fictions. You can find Avra on twitter (@avramargariti).