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I spend about $50. Two pairs of golden tights, the first of which are too matte. Two pairs of angel wings: first children’s size, then what I believe are adults, but are actually smaller in person. A bow and arrow which went unused beyond selfies. Two hooded, sleeveless tops, one pink and one red; the latter works. Boyfriend buys me the wig, a yellowy blonde cosplay one. The gold shoelaces never arrive in the mail and I swap them for magenta.

I fantasize. I imagine a piece of performance art where I go around as Cupid, shooting Trump for President signs with a bow and arrow.

I have to catch the train. I throw the majority of the costume in a plastic grocery bag and put on the wig. I carry the angel wings and hold them tenderly to my chest, so the wind won’t hurt them. I sprint the the sidewalks near the pizza place in a pair of cotton gym shorts. I’m wearing the red top, and a pink Jigglypuff crop-top underneath, but not the gold tights even though it’s almost Halloween. I live in a quiet place but some people really hate gay guys, you know? Especially cute ones who like to be shiny sometimes.

I get to the train platform. “We could use an angel,” says a woman waiting. I laugh and as I get closer she adds, “Aw the little angel’s freezing.” I’m relieved when I finally board the commuter rail and sit on the familiar red of the seat cushions.

I am even happier when I emerge from the bathroom in my friend’s apartment fully costumed. Legs encased in cheap liquid gold. Skinny arms adorned with Valentine’s Day tattoos. Cheap party wings strapped in at the armpits. A few glasses of white wine. Bacchus swished and swallowed and an Uber called. Then we’re at the disco.

Here is a me I haven’t met before. The one wearing a cute gay costume in a crowd. My crack of smile a fissure in the dark.

I suddenly feel self-conscious as I near the front of the dance floor. I start to retreat but a twentysomething and I start dancing. Not touching, just sort of swaying. Together. As night deepens, she removes her sash and gifts it to me. It reads DEBUTANTE BRAWL. I awkwardly accept.

“I have to confess something,” she says. “I’m wearing a wig,” and she pulls it off. 
“That’s fine,” I say. “I am too.”

 

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Alexander Castro (b. 1992) is a writer and journalist based in Massachusetts. He regularly contributes reporting and criticism to Big Red & Shiny, Mercury, and GLASS Quarterly. His writing has also appeared or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, untethered, Don’t Take Pictures, and SUSAN. He is currently working on a collection of essays that combine research, memoir and criticism. OhNoCastro.com

 

There’s a street without a name on an estate without any lights where, in a house without any rules, God talks to me. He says, Robbie, why you thinking about Paul, and not the football?

But I don’t want to hear it, so I grab my coat from the banister at the bottom of the stairs and go out. A piece of fiber-board is nailed to the bottom half of the door, where some git kicked it in. I take out my cigarettes. Blue smoke billows from my mouth, making me look hard. I use my thumb and first finger to hold the cigarette butt, because that’s how proper lads are meant to do it.

Because I’ve no money in my pocket, me and Paul are pissing about on the riverbank. Paul has my rolled-up coat under his head. He’s wearing a yellow t-shirt that makes his skin look nice. We’re watching the lines aeroplanes draw across the pink sky, guessing where they’re going. “Spain?” he says.

“Wrong way,” I say.

“How d’you know, mate?”

“Just do.”

Every now and again his arm pushes up against mine. I like it so much it hurts. Feels like if I stay right by his side I’ll throw-up. That’s when I roll away and say, “We should go to Spain.”

Paul hops up off the grass. “You wanna go swimming?” He hustles to the water’s edge.

“Nah,” I say, watching him strip off. His arse is moon white. I close my eyes when he turns around. The colours on my eyelids change from red to blue and back again. When I open my eyes, he’s gone.

“Stop messing about.” I light another cigarette. “Paul—”

There’s a ripple in the muddy black water where he was a few seconds ago. I’m waiting, begging for him to come back up. But it’s useless. God hates me.

 

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Jon Ransom is a queer writer living in Cambridge.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Holding both of my hands in his, I could feel my calluses against the ones in Justin’s palms, the ones that protect him from kitty-litter granite, the ones that keep his bones from being bothered by the cold. He looked me in my face and said “The timing is just bad, that’s all.”

He talks with his hands cupped, his fingers never separating, in a way that looks like paws. He uses them to flip pancakes. He doesn’t need a spatula. When he wakes up early, before his voice is working, he grunts like a pup in my hair.

At work, a Veteran brought in his grandson and told me about his time in Vietnam. He runs 11 miles a day, but still, last month he had a heart attack. Behind him, his grandson was having a nerf gun war with another customer’s kid. “I pulled out my wallet. That’s the last thing I remember before I dropped,” said the Veteran. As he talked, his grandson took a foam dart to the gut, and crumpled.

Justin told me his life has amounted to many things, but a recurring theme is convincing women not to commit suicide; his mother the first in the series. Later, it was a girlfriend. That was the first time I saw him cry: his head on my shoulder late one night, downtown, beside my car. He picked his head up, and pulled his collar up around his muzzle.

“Bad timing,” he said, and he shook his head. In the distance, the sound of a dog chain.

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Katie Quinnelly is a climbing instructor in West Virginia. Her work has appeared in Occulum, Moonchild Magazine, The Ginger Collect, and b(OINK), among others.

Marcia Bain on her way to school stamping her shiny red boots in the snow. Blowing clouds in the frozen air. Catching snowflakes on her tongue. Cracking frozen puddles with her heels, Holding up slices of ice, creating flashes of light in the pale sun. Not noticing her hands turning blue. Pretending she’s a fairy making magic in a pure white world. Shaking diamonds from the branches of the white-coated trees.

Harry Greaves in the playground sliding in the ice, not letting anyone else have a turn. Harry who beats up the smaller boys. Harry who pulls the girls pants down. Harry who keeps running away from home and sometimes comes to school with a black eye. Harry whose father grows giant leeks in trenches of guts from the slaughterhouse. Harry whose father stays up at night guarding his leeks with a crowbar.

Tommy Monks building a snowman bigger than himself, arranging leaves on the head, calling it a coiffure, dancing back and forth pretending he’s a famous hairdresser. Marcia pressing in coal eyes, carrot nose, twiggy arms, brick feet and woollen scarf with red and white stripes. Tommy and Marcia with their shining eyes and rosy cheeks and soft curling mouths, hoping with every heartbeat they’ll win the competition.

Harry charging like a bull from behind, toppling the snowman, jumping on its head with his oversize shoes, laughing at Tommy’s tears before tripping and slipping and landing spread-eagled on the ground. Marcia’s fingers gripping a brick. The crack of bone. A skull unzipped. Red roses blooming in the snow.

Harry’s father’s photo in the paper holding his silver cup and cash prize, telling reporters the secret is blood and bone.

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Sandra Arnold is an award-winning writer who lives in New Zealand. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from CQ University, Australia. Her flash fiction and short stories appear or are forthcoming in numerous journals including Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine and New Flash Fiction Review, and in the  anthologies, Sleep is a Beautiful Colour  (National Flash Fiction Day, UK, 2017),  Fresh Ink (Cloud Ink Press, NZ, 2017)  and Bonsai: The Big Book of Small Stories (Canterbury University Press, NZ, 2018). Her work has been nominated for the 2018 Pushcart Prize. www.sandraarnold.co.nz

Nualla⁰

Nualla was the first of herself.

She lived in a trailer at the local swap meet, at the whim of her parents who demanded she stay nearby and silent in order to attract customers with her perfect being. Nualla spent her time under the musty canvas tents, wiping off books long out of print, and searching through glassware for imperfections. Sometimes, she’d tuck something small, maybe an ashtray or a tumbler, into the folds of her batik skirt. Then she’d steal into the desert and bury her treasure in the scorching sand.

Nualla’s boredom always got the better of her, and one day she snatched a miniature hand-blown frog from a tent in the far corner. The piece of glass swirled green and gold and red inside, and it fit perfectly inside the palm of Nualla’s grubby hand.

Nualla looked at the frog and said, “Ribbit.”

“Ribbit,” responded the frog.

Nualla smiled. “I’ll give you some of my treasure if you help me get out of here.”

“Why would you want to do that?” asked the frog.

“My parents won’t let me leave, and I want to see what else is out there.”

“I can help you leave,” said the frog, pulling a blowpipe from his overcoat, “but you have to take me with you.”

Nualla²

Nualla² arrived with two hearts of molten glass, their arteries and veins braided together, their beats thumping in unison.

A girl with uncombed hair and sunburned skin greeted Nualla² with a pipe between her puckered lips. With each breath the girl blew, Nualla² unfurled, her core filling with air and her limbs stretching out and becoming taut. She detached from the pipe with a snap, fiery red streaks pooling in the base of her toes.

“Who are you?” Nualla² asked the girl standing in front of her.

“I’m the first Nualla.”

“Why am I here?” Nualla² asked.

“So I can leave.”

Nualla² looked at the rolling dunes, at the faded tops of the tents in the distance. She felt the pulse of the sand inside her, the warmth of the sun heating her twisted hearts.

It wasn’t clear to her why anyone would want to leave a place like this. She certainly didn’t want to.

The girl handed Nualla² her blowpipe and said, “It can get lonely around here.”

Nualla² turned the hollow tube between her translucent fingers, its steel cooling her burning skin. “What’s this for?”

“In case you ever want to leave, too,” the girl said, tucking a frog into the pocket of her skirt, and piling her hair on top of her head. “The sand’s at its best in the late afternoon.”

Nualla² watched the girl and her frog walk away, the warm wind covering their footsteps as they disappeared into the distance.

Nualla⁴

Nualla⁴ emerged from the pipe as conjoined quadruplets, their hands fused together like paper dolls, their voices a single sound. They watched the girl with the double heart blow wobbly orbs, her touch filling the spheres with a burst of vibrant color. The girl sat on a patchwork quilt stretched across the single bunk of a trailer, the light from a desk lamp refracting rainbows off her crystalline skin.

An urgent knock sounded at the door. “How many pieces do you have for tomorrow?” came a voice.

The girl grimaced, her latest creation falling to the floor and smashing into a thousand shards.

“Leave me alone,” she yelled, standing on the glass and absorbing the pieces back into her body. “Nualla didn’t make me so I could be your slave.”

“All you have to do is give me something as perfect as she was, and you’re free to leave,” said the voice.

The girl picked up an ornament from her bedside table and threw it against her door. It fell like rain onto the dirt-stained carpet.

Nualla⁴ looked on in amazement. “Where are we?”

“Hell,” said the girl, her face pulling in frustration. “And there’s no getting out of it.”

“What do you mean?” Nualla⁴ asked.

“I’m an object. A flawed piece of glass. And so are you.”

Nualla¹⁶

The girl appeared red-faced and panting when Nualla¹⁶ spun from the end of her pipe.

She sighed as she placed the hexadecagon-shaped body next to Nualla⁴ who sat huddled together in fear. The windows were open, a bucket jammed with ice in the middle of the floor. Along the sill were dozens of misshapen girls; their necks too long, their eyes too sunken, their hearts not full.

Nualla¹⁶ opened her mouth to speak, but Nualla⁴ shook their heads in warning.

“Not now,” they mouthed.

Nualla²⁵⁶

Nualla²⁵⁶ was born into the sand. Each of her embers fell down the steep side of the rolling dunes, collecting minerals that changed color as the sun hit their skin. She was an endless flood from the end of a pipe that was clenched between the calloused fingers of the girl with the double heart.

Nualla²⁵⁶ stood one by one, a glassen army perfectly poised, perfectly square in rows sixteen by sixteen.

“Why are we here?” she asked.

“Because they want us to be perfect,” answered the girl with the double heart, flanked by two likenesses of her being. “And we don’t want to be.”

Nuallaⁿ

Nuallaⁿ spends her time digging up artifacts in the endless desert. She eats the glassware that Nualla⁰ buried before leaving, and it crunches between her blunt teeth.

She dies.

She is born again.

Her hands have been cut by fragments of herself, her body melts every day under the constant watch of the sun. She will not stop until she finds Nualla⁰ and her frog. Until she finds her freedom.

She does not care for her parents, and they do not care for her.

Nuallaⁿ lays her blowpipe to her side, a thin stream of sand leaking from its end, and she waits.

---

 

 

Jennifer Todhunter’s stories have appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Necessary Fiction,CHEAP POP, and elsewhere. She is the managing editor of Pidgeonholes. Find her at www.foxbane.ca or @JenTod_.

 

The showers by the filthy restrooms don’t work, but she presses the metal button and closes her eyes, remembering fresh water. She runs her fingers through her hair and pisses on the sand. Then she begins the long walk to the pier, which still bustles, but with a different kind of activity, the pushers and prostitutes having taken over. They give her weird looks when they see her baby bump. She smiles and explains that she is looking for the old aquarium. A woman with perfect eyeliner and no front teeth points north but warns her that all the fish are dead.

She walks on, past the old carousel and the now empty vintage candy stand. It is coming back to her. She remembers this place. She goes down the stairs to the aquarium and is reassured by a tattered banner announcing feeding times for the seahorse family. Yes, this is definitely the right place. She pushes open a cracked glass door and proceeds, waddling a little, down a ramp into humid darkness laced with decay.

A woman sits in an algae-lined touch tank that was once filled with pastel sea stars and squishy sea cucumbers, creatures that made little kids squeal. The woman is naked except for a halter top covered in little shells and anchor charms. She seems confused when she sees the baby bump but then she says, Ten bucks. Or any food you have.

I don’t have any food. And I haven’t seen a ten-dollar bill in forever.

Then I can’t help you.

Are you the mermaid?

Ha. Not exactly. Or I could be. But you need to pay.

There used to be a mermaid around here when I was a little girl. You could get a picture with her.

Nice. Listen, sweetie, you’re in the way. I might have a customer.

There’s nobody outside.

The woman sighs. This is no place for a pregnant lady.

But I’m going to have a seahorse.

Congratulations. Now get out of here.

Fine, but I’m coming back for this tank. I need it. The ocean is going to turn me inside out. Soon.

She goes back outside and sits down in the sun. Her back is aching. There is no way she can keep walking.

She wakes with a start after an unintended nap, but when she thinks of opening that glass door again, she feels like a little kid pestering her parents in the middle of the night. This is something she barely remembers, but there was a time when she lived in a house and had two parents who slept in a bed. Then there was the mobile home, but, as her mother insisted, it was in the classiest location ever, near Paradise Cove in Malibu, with a man who was not her father. Still, no matter where she lived, she always felt like she was on the outside. The kid who could never get her teacher’s attention. The tag-along who was invisible to the other little girls, even when she was invited to the party.

Her mother had warned her about everything. No mushroom clouds, no secret concentration camps, but they’ll keep pushing you further to the edge until you’ve lost all ground. It’s easy to be forgotten.

She opens the door and slips back into the warm darkness of the aquarium.

Little has changed. The mermaid looks at her in surprise, then recognition, then annoyance. There is a man with her now. He is wearing a sailor suit, but it’s impossible to tell if he’s really in the navy or if this is his fetish.

You, get out. Now.

The sailor turns and frightens her with his glare. Her dry lips quiver but form no words. She spends the rest of the day wandering around the pier until she settles, once again, on the aquarium steps. Late in the afternoon the touch-tank mermaid appears, no longer angry, and shakes out an old sheet.

Do you want me to help you take care of it? Is that it? Because I don’t do that anymore, honey. It’s too dangerous and you’re definitely too far along.

No. It’s not that. I’m not worried about that.

You’re not?

No.

She doesn’t know how to explain herself. She imagines a sea creature inside of her, never a baby, and when it comes out, she will give it to the ocean. If it’s even breathing. She knows nobody, nothing, lives long in this world. All she wants is soft fingers on her flesh, a warm palm, the sensation of another human body near hers. She has an idea.

Do you give massages?

Who told you that?

Someone on the pier, she lies. A woman.

The mermaid tosses her head, and then her expression changes so that it almost looks like she’s consenting. Is it your back? Is your lower back bothering you?

Yes. It’s my back.

I guess I could do that for you. Massage your lower back. But you’ve got nothing to trade?

Maybe we could trade massages.

The mermaid smirks but they end up walking into the dark aquarium together. They find an empty tank and climb in, pressing their bodies against tiny grains of sand as the salty dust kicks up around them.

What happens next is like drifting. She grows so warm that she could easily fall asleep, or better yet, drop endlessly through space. It’s pleasant yet disorienting to surrender to someone else, to lose consciousness knowing that another living person will stay awake. She wishes she could fall asleep forever.

As she nods off she is already starting to dream. She’s down at the sea with the mermaid, but they are both young girls and the world is back to the way it used to be. She feels hopeful. Even the light is different. The mermaid kisses her forehead and tucks her into the blanket of sand.

---

 

Jan Stinchcomb’s stories have appeared most recently in Whiskey Paper, Atticus Review, Five:2:One andGamut Magazine. She is the author of Find the Girl (Main Street Rag, 2015) and she reviews fairy tale-inspired works in Notes From Rapunzel’s Tower, her column for Luna Station Quarterly. She lives in Southern California with her husband and children. Find her at http://www.janstinchcomb.com or on Twitter @janstinchcomb.

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When autumn came, the professor’s drought ended. He was offered a new office, and having curated things all his season, now brought with him an armada. Like the sequoia desk, which faced due north after much grunting. The hawk skull, placed gingerly on the lip of the wood, milk-colored and dry. And his two mismatched wingbacks, one green and patterned in sunflowers, the other slate. Last, the portrait of an indian blackbuck fixed to the eastern wall. But after arranging the collection with care, he heard chirping from the window pane and looked. There was a grasshopper on the other side. Later, he put his nose between two pages in a book of shinto. He had pressed there a cherry blossom, but hadn’t remembered it to smell so much like moths.

 

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Evan Nicholls attends James Madison University (‘20) and is from Fauquier County, Virginia. He is involved with JMU’s literary magazine, Gardy Loo, and has work appearing in CHEAP POP, Penny, and formercactus, as well as forthcoming in The Jellyfish Review. Follow him on Twitter @nicholls_evan .

Callie once told me she felt like dying all the time. She couldn’t envision herself living past twenty-one. Said when she dreamt, she was always in her twenties. Never older.

“That means I’ll die young. My dreams always come true.”

All the best people died young, she said. Poets, musicians, actors. Artists struggled. She considered herself an artist in the making.

I liked lying in her bed and listening to British rock bands. She hardly ever stood still, so while I would lie there, letting Morrissey fill the air around me, she would pace her room, trying on random tops that littered the floor or grabbing at odd books, flipping through them briefly before tossing them back to the ground, as if she could never quite find what she was looking for.

Every day after school we’d either drive to my house, where we’d eat Oreos and watch Dr. Phil and Maury until my Mom got home, or we’d go to her house, where her parents were never home. She’d make us banana pancakes, and we’d eat them on the deck, overlooking the lake. Sometimes she’d smoke a cigarette, relics from her last relationship.

“Matt Davies?” I’d asked her when she told me they were official.

“He’s eighteen,” she said, sweeping her lake-soaked hair into a high ponytail. Then, “He can buy us cigarettes, LeAnn.”

Callie lived fast. Walked fast, talked fast, drank faster, smoked faster. It was as if she thought someone was about to take it all away—just like that. When her dad actually did take away her cigarettes, angry tears ran down her face, and she told me, “I can’t wait to fucking move away from here.”

It was assumed I’d just go with her. Like I’d follow her until she died young. I never asked what I was supposed to do after that.

On the weekends we’d steal money from her dad’s sock drawer and take mini road trips. Usually we drove down into Ohio, and we’d laugh at how bare it was. Like life didn’t exist there.

“At least we don’t live here,” she’d tell me, hand out the window, two-dollar sunglasses on, one cigarette in her lip and another tucked behind her ear. I could barely hear her over the roar of the radio and wind.

Callie wanted out of Michigan. She needed out. We lived in the Irish Hills, practically a ghost town, full of run down Wild West theme parks, haunted lighthouses, and men in wife beaters who spit tobacco outside gas stations. They’d whoop and holler whenever we’d stop to fill the car with gas. Callie didn’t care. She’d lean against the car, long legs gleaming in the sun. I’d hunch next to her—wearing all black because she thought it was cool—and scowl at them.

“Men like that don’t deserve your time,” she’d say. “I bet they have daughters our age.”

Callie had daddy issues. That’s what the other kids in class told me.

“Why do you hang out with her?” they’d ask. “She’s a bitch. And she has daddy issues.”

I often wondered if I really loved her. Or if I was just going along with it until something better came along.

One night, she wanted to become blood sisters, so we sliced into our palms and held hands until it ran red down our arms. When we let go, you couldn’t tell which blood was whose, and Callie said this was the whole point.

“Now I’ll be with you always,” she said. “And when I die, I won’t really die, because my blood will flow through your veins.”

She didn’t die young, though. A few years later, she got married. Has a second kid on the way now. I went to the wedding, but I sat in the back, and when it came my turn to congratulate her in the processional, I told her she did it: she made it past twenty-one.

“What?” she said.

“You always used to say—”

“—I was a dumb kid. It’s so good to see you.” She squeezed my hand tightly, and I wanted so badly to check if the scar was still there. I didn’t, though, and just like that, she moved the line along.

One night during junior year, we snuck out of her house and rolled my car to the street, a bottle of jagermeister in her purse. We met up with two of the guys from school and drank the whole bottle that night.

I woke up the next morning to her lips against my ear. “LeAnn. Let’s go.”

The sun was just beginning to rise over the hills, illuminating all the skeletal buildings, empty for twenty years now. Everyone always said how great the Irish Hills were in the eighties. So full of promise. And then it all crashed down.

We crawled in through her basement bedroom window, into bed, dirty clothes still on. The following week, the boy’s mom found a bracelet in the house. That’s how she knew we were there. Callie took the fall, though. Swore to her parents it was just her.

“You didn’t have to do that,” I told her.

“Yeah I did,” she said. “You’d do the same.”

I really didn’t know if I would.

“Hey,” I said that morning in bed.

“What?” she asked, her licorice breath washing over my face.

“Do I look like a movie star when I kiss?” I asked, thinking back to the previous night, how we all kissed each other in the kitchen, laughing at how funny it all seemed.

“No, you look like you,” she responded. But it didn’t sound like a bad thing.

I awoke sometime later. The sun was low, so I assumed it was mid-afternoon. Callie was still asleep next to me, her hand extended across the bed, a jagged scar on her palm, her fingers tangled up in my hair, like she’d been reaching for me.

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Hannah Gordon is a Detroit-based writer, coffee addict, and amateur baker. She is the managing editor of CHEAP POP. Her work can be found in Ellipsis Zine, Maudlin House, WhiskeyPaper, Synaesthesia Magazine, and more. When she’s not writing, she’s hanging out with her cat and watching cooking competitions or TV shows about vampires. You can follow her on Twitter at @_hannahnicole.

 

Jim and Cheryl are not in agreement about the arms. Cheryl spotted them right away: two shiny plastic hands reaching up from the pile of junk on the flea market table, tagged $5 for the mismatched pair. She wants them for the shop displays, but Jim has his eye on a grab-bag of retro pinback buttons instead. That’s inventory he can move, a shoebox-full in one Saturday, if the right group of teens wanders into the shop. But Harmony Street Vintage is nothing without Cheryl’s eye for design, so he relents. She smiles and kisses his cheek, but something about the way she carries the arms, how the fingers tangle in her hair, makes Jim doubt himself.

<>

He has underestimated the hands, it turns out. Cheryl creates little vignettes around the store, rotating stock every time they go out picking or come across something special at an estate liquidation or tag sale. The hands hold silk scarves in polka dots and paisleys, women’s watches with delicate bands and locked-up gear trains, the occasional small kiss-lock wallet; they peek up through stacks of orange and yellow Bakelite bangles. Cheryl whistles Celine Dion while she works. It is quite a thing to see.

<>

When Cheryl quits, she tells Jim she’s taken a job as Manager at the big antique store up in Arcadia, effective immediately. That is half the truth. She’s also taken a position as the owner’s new girlfriend. She leaves the hands.

<>

Jim keeps up the front of the shop, makes sure the stoop is swept and the windows are clean. Two years after Cheryl moves, he uses his pocketknife to peel off the vinyl list of store hours and tapes up a sign that says By Appointment Only in boxy uppercase. The sun quickly fades the black marker, but the sign stays.

<>

There is one window in the back of the shop, next to the employee entry. The wood trim outside is rotted and when it rains, the paint sloughs off in thick flakes. The glass looks in on the small storage room, the shelves of untagged finds and unsold pieces of one man’s trash. Jim’s desk sits just under the window. The hands sit in the sill and in mid-afternoon, he can feel their shadows cast across his shoulders and face. He knows it’s unlikely that Cheryl will ever come back, but he leaves them there, reaching, waiting, just in case.

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Brandy Wilkinson lives in Indiana. Her flash fiction has appeared in Ellipsis Zine, The Nottingham Review, and Halo Lit Mag. She reads and writes at brandywilkinson.com and tweets @brandy_wilk.